Read on Twitter
Been thinking about cancel-culture and shame.
I think this thoughtful thread is the reason. https://twitter.com/willwilkinson/status/1356671499286044678?s=19
American culture has a complicated history/relationship with shame. "The Scarlet Letter" was required reading for 11th graders for years. That book, embodies the relationship. Shame is both widespread and officially sanctioned, but also unjust and illiberal.
Generally, shame and shaming have meant to serve conservative values and enforce conventional norms. And conservatives, historically, have embraced shame as both a tactic and a social mechanism.
Public shaming is a mechanism to enforce social norms and maintain hierarchies and authority. There was a time when conservatives loudly embraced public shaming as a way to establish "right and wrong" in a decadent society.
Conservative paragons of public virtue like Bill Bennett extolled the moral panic and issued books with "Virtue" in the title and chapters like "Ostracism and Disgrace in the Maintenance of a Precarious Social Order". How will society survive without public humiliation?
Public shaming is social and can operate without state-enforced sanctions, although that never kept conservatives from trying to legislate morality. Shaming was a majoritarian device that aimed to suppress minority views, behaviors, identities.
These days, the conservatives who once waxed poetically about virtue and embrace public shaming are screeching about "wokeness" and "cancel-culture." So what changed?
Well, for one thing America changed. Year by year, generation by generation, community by community, America is growing more diverse. It becomes harder to claim a unitary history, culture, or moral code. An old white guy yelling about virtue becomes irrelevant.
In fairness, shame has never been very effective in America, notwithstanding the Puritans and Bill Bennett. Bennett himself was shamed when it was revealed he was a high-stakes gambler and lost millions. But, he's still on tv, running his mouth.
America is the land of second-chances. Running away from your shameful past and reinventing yourself is as American as apple pie. People who were shamed where they were moved to the city and found community in New York, or San Francisco, or New Orleans.
Anyway, America is changing and the culture evolves as do social norms. And old-style shame-loving conservatives have become an historical relic. It's harder and harder to use these majoritarian social tools when you're not even close to a majority.
Conservatives complaining about cancel-culture are pretending to defend free speech and open debate. But what they really are defending are increasingly obsolete- archaic- norms and social values. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jim-jordan-cancel-culture-covid-19_n_601b1ef5c5b6c0af54d086ce?ncid=tweetlnkushpmg00000067
Being "cancelled" is the social sanction for violating newer norms and social values that conservatives don't understand or accept. They don't want to be publicly shamed about values and standards they don't agree with.
But that's not how shaming works. You will be held accountable to the norms whether you agree with them or not. And, as with the public shaming that conservatives endorsed in the past, violators can recover, re-invent themselves, carry on.
Blogged it: Conservatives used to love cancel-culture
They called it shame. https://niawag.medium.com/conservatives-used-to-love-cancel-culture-ac0452a96ad2
They called it shame. https://niawag.medium.com/conservatives-used-to-love-cancel-culture-ac0452a96ad2
