JK

Well, my dear two listeners, if you haven't figured out my opinions on cancel culture by now, you're probably pretty dense - you also may be the kind of person who is so fearful of drawing conclusions about anyone until all the evidence is in and giving people every benefit of the doubt until the shoe drops that you probably believe in cancel culture because to so many people, everybody who isn't a villain deserves to be treated like a hero. 

What especially makes cancel culture a dangerous stupidity is that it so obviously has the opposite of the desired effect. It's like telling a person 'don't think about elephants.' The more problematic an artist is considered, the more they turn into forbidden fruit, and the more people not predisposed to an ideology that demands cancellation will want to see what the big deal is. 

So while cancel culture is tremendously ineffective on the one hand, what it inevitably provokes is a further impulse to censorship precisely because of its ineffectuality. I can almost give a 100% guarantee that if Democrats come back into power, and yes, in some ways it's still a big 'if', we will immediately start hearing from a call for government censorship from some left-wing circles, and I would imagine that before too long, it would gain traction, if not mainstream approval. But if that appeal to censorship doesn't work, and it's probably a 'when' rather than an 'if', how hard is it really to believe that by then, some vigilantes will be so worked into a lather of moral outrage that they'll try to silence artists they don't like through violence? 

So yes, for the few people who listen to this podcast, it should be incredibly unsurprising that I find cancel culture a totalitarian impulse. Cancel culture is not totalitarianism itself of course or anything close to it, but its a fabulously effective mortar that builds its structure. Once we all head down the path of believing that every piece of news is either a chance to re-affirm our solidarity and either keep quiet or employ an approved political reaction, then before long, we're building the structure of a totalitarian movement. If you want to know how the 20th century happened, look no further than the fin-de-siecle when no amount of solidarity on the left to class struggle and anti-imperialism was enough, and that provoked the right-wing into a reactive force that eventually turned into fascism. Yes, of course it's much more complicated than that, but this is a daily podcast now, and we will eventually do multi-part episodes, but for the moment we'll stay on that level of simplicity. 

So the reason we're dealing with this today is that I seem to have been blocked by a childhood friend who was always a devoted reader of mine, constantly commenting lauditorily on things I write, and whose presence in my childhood years I valued very much, and her obvious mind change about me makes me very sad. What seems to have provoked it was the recent veering by JK Rowling into transphobia, and I commented that I certainly think it disturbing and have no doubt what trans friends and acquaintances go through all the time is self-evidently terrible and sometimes even horrific, there's something about it which frankly I find hilarious about JK Rowling's position in this. This is a woman who literally has built an empire, has raised a whole generation of children on a liberal moral vision, and throws it all away because of her stance on the issue of whether transgender women are women, which she clearly cared not at all about until about two minutes ago and probably didn't even realize was an issue, and now she has thrown away the love of tens of millions of people by doubling down half a dozen times so that she can take a stance on the obviously false idea that transgender women are not women. Now she's even writing a book about how a cis-gender killer disguises as a woman. Part of the reason this is funny is that her turn into anti-trans agitprop is incredibly disturbing, and I would say precisely the same about when it's anti-Jewish propaganda on the docket like that, and whether people realize it, we Jews encounter anti-Jewish agitprop nearly every day if we read the papers and sometimes very much encounter it in person, and that's usually funny too....

But what got me blocked was my continuing insistence, one that I've soft-pedaled on social media for a while, that the current debate provoked by critical theory that the very building blocks of the world is almost invisibly structured to favor certain people, not through money or power in which that's obviously true, but through language, architecture, the structure of the humanities themselves. That strikes me as playing with the most dangerous fire. Once you see the most normal activities of discourse as irredeemably corupt and slated to favor certain people at the extent of others, then everything about the way people discourse has to be debated, and even if that true, if the debate is ever won by the prosecuting side, the debates will no longer be debates, and they will very easily turn into interrogations, ad result in nothing at all debated, because in the mind of the powerful, the question is now solved. I've seen a lot of people whose friendship I value very much go over to the other side of this issue, sometimes even in real time, and it worries me greatly, not because of its effect on my life, though that of course can't help but stay in my mind, but because historically, we've fallen down this kind of authoritarian rabbit hole so many times.  

The Harry Potter phenomenon is obviously deserving of many podcasts of their own, many more than the books do.... and the books are not terrible but... come on, they were never great. All sorts of people now say that Harry Potter has dated badly, but it didn't date badly, it was always kind of bad.... Dumbledore was always clearly a kind of cult leader. Harry and Ron were always little shits who relied on Hermione to do the work for them. The gnomic bankers at Gringots were always Jews. Elves were always people of color. There never were more than token minorities at Hogwarts. The wizards were always a metaphor to let people fantasize about having extraordinary abilities that let them look down on ordinary people. The books were so completely wall-to-wall laden with archetypes and even stereotypes that a reader should have only assumed that its writer believed in them and believes that people unchangingly are what they are. So I don't know how it could have been surprising to anyone that a person with a worldview that simple and unchanging has trouble understanding the fluidity of gender, but just as gender is fluid, so are the concerns of morality. Soon there will be another runaway phenomenon writer who is a perfect reflection of the values of this generation rather than the last one, and in twenty years, people will reexamine those books and find all sorts of new problems in them that we didn't see at the time, and people will yet again be shocked, shocked, that such a moral visionary is in fact just another human being who wrote a thoroughly OK series of books that were thoroughly overrated because they were a perfect reflection of their times and no other, and therefore got an undeserved billion dollars, and eventually therefore finds a way to blow all the moral credibility which they didn't deserve in the first place. 

Maybe Harold Bloom was right! Harry Potter is a period piece, and even if it's not forgotten the way bestsellers usually are, its very fans now seem to want to abandon it in despair because the moral vision they thought was so pure was in fact as flawed as nearly every moral vision turns out to be. So much about cancel culture, about 'problematics', even about 'me too', is a very weird revenge posterity and high art is having on popular culture. The very country who lauded popular culture for a century now seems to assassinate it because they suddenly realize that a frivolous view of art is in fact just as frivolous as it seems. There are all sorts of problems with the new morality too, just as dangerous if not even more, but at least it's a serious attempt to grapple with moral questions, and from that seriousness, 'if that seriousness is serious', we just might be able to build a better world.  

...Don't count on it though....