i was glancing through the Times Literary Supplement when I saw a commentary that basically laid out Cancel Culture as bitched about by fans of Prince Harry and fans of the Traditional Experience. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex were accused of being denizens of Cancel Culture, attempting to cancel the monarchy be saying it didn't matter anymore to them. That anyway seemed to be the way the Dons and Doyens we Yanks imagine wandering through the House of Lords. The Joe Strummer wannabe's found the bitching about the Sussexes be tossed in the maw of the great Kraken of Tory Cancel Culture...
My own thought is that Cancel Culture is a way for Right Wing twits to bitch about encroaching realities. Might be working against them -- when was the last time anyone mentioned Ayn Rand in normal conversation. Encroaching reality might be doing us a favor if it keeps forcing these folks into a smaller and smaller corner.
However, through no real fault of the universe, I was presented with a couple of articles that addressed in different ways the actual role of Cancel Culture...one that has been around for a long time, since literacy and probably before that.
The morning began with a tag from Downeaster Jeff Thompson, who is one of the more genuine and grounded of the former blogger occasionally stepping out but usually hanging out dropping logic and decency bombs in the role Facebook Malcontent Primo. Jeff was posting an article by Jacob Bacharach, a NGO manager probably because of the hours, a novelist and essayist of some merit, and most germane, a blogger that would get Swift to come down from heaven or up from hell to make an appearance. This was an appearance not of IOZ but of Jake, but it was absolutely great.
The article appeared in The New Republic, to which I have now subscribed. What the hell, just something else I will probably not read all that much. The GEN X Cancel Culture Warriors Who Never Grew Up is well written and is worth reading just as an exercise in criticism. It also has some excellent points. I could fill a longer article than Crispin wants me to with just pieces of the work. This is one example that made me understand a bit...
There is also something regressive and a bit adolescent about this sort of thinking, as though all the cancel culture complainers long for are evenings at the debate club and late-night rap sessions full of grand philosophical gestures and free from the grotty pressures of real life. It may be why so many cancel culture critics are fixated on the college campuses they themselves have long since left. The concession and compromises of adulthood are rarely as fun or as heroic as the caffeinated debates of their youth, when they could say and do almost anything, parked in a beanbag chair in a red-brick dorm.These thinkers are unwilling or unable to grasp that debate alone cannot resolve many of the problems we face—climate, inequality, poverty, disease. They are not mere exercises. They are material and real, and they are immune to cleverness and outrageousness. They require solidarity and collective action as much as they require argument...
One of the other things that I read in passing usually is AEON which is a bit more intellectual and usually has an article about some philosophical issue, another about some aspect of social science or it's intersection with SCIENCE, which can be interesting as well as scary at times. Recently, Aeon began adding articles from PSYCHE which is oriented toward looking at just about anything from a psychological point of view -- scientific, social science, speculatory, historical or philosophical.
This article dealt with the forbidden books and texts that are starting to come out the woodwork of academe.
Laursen says that it's difficult to call the Clandestine Writings "Philosophy" because that requires some degree of structure, logic and organization. No guarantees here -- the stuff is all over the place. Some patrons of this stuff included censors and royalty -- the royalty for whatever reason those people ever do anything and the censors because they saw it as a steam valve that was less painful than a boiler burst. So, perhaps the inner circles at CPAC and the Federalist Society share a historical space with the Rosicurians and the Illuminati. Or, perhaps and probably, not.
"Letting off steam might be more important in social life than we’ve recognised. Suppressing what we really think is widely understood to be bad for our emotional health. People who have had to hide their thoughts in order to appear as conformists to the prevailing orthodoxies have often developed deep psychological problems, which in turn can lead to ‘explosions’. Meanwhile, if people can express themselves, even only clandestinely, they might be relieved of this pressure."
One thing that makes me think this entire issue may be as moot as a Ted Cruz flight itinerary is fairly simple. There is so much media, bouncing around off our ears and eyes and screens and loudspeakers that Cancel Culture is basically overtaken by events. Stuff comes at you so fast that you have to struggle to stay afloat. About the time folks get the idea of what you're saying, it's neither relevant nor interesting.
Chuck Prophet is a musician, something of an auteur and band doctor. He joined his buddy Alejandro Escovedo's backing group The Sensitive Boys for a couple of years to just help with the sound. The sound after he left got a bit darker, but still had the positive sort of energy.
So, for homework, listen to Chuck Prophet's The Land that Time Forgot, read one of Bacharach's novels and read Terry Southern's Candy. Compare and contrast in 500 words or less.