Physics Guy wrote: There's a right of free expression but no-one is entitled to a platform or an audience. Artists and entertainers earn money by pleasing their customers; the customers are under no obligation to support the entertainers. The customers can withhold their money for any reason they want.
Hold up here, cowboy. Is that all this is about? Maybe it ultimately boils down to that, but I thought the problem with the whole 'woke' thing is that it generates sub-quality entertainment that people don't necessarily like better, but executives and inner-circle elites (I have no idea who these people are) like it better. It's a few powerful self-loathing white people who (as I understand it) fall over themselves to turn movies into heavy-handed political sermons. Maybe this isn't the case. Maybe it's a representative situation where it's true that executives are the ones doing the canceling, but they are doing so out of guided research that shows this is in the best interest of their audience and entirely profit guided. I have a hard time believing that, but it's possible.
At any rate, my understanding of "cancel culture" is being cancelled by inner-circle players who don't represent the actual fan base. Even then, it's not a fully justified complaint, as one becomes a public figure to leverage the benefits, but leverage can work in both directions -- going viral isn't always good. But I do think there is a point worth considering if we're talking about a relative handful of executives who are wielding power in the direction of their own lofty political ideals rather than in the entertainment interests of the public.
Social distancing has likely already begun to flatten the curve...Continue to research good antivirals and vaccine candidates. Make everyone wear masks. -- J.D. Vance
I do think that academia is a more serious issue. Orthodoxy, and in particular political orthodoxy, should not keep a guy like Kish from publishing an interesting paper that may advance some understanding in history. What I have no feel for is whether the situation is substantively worse today or whether it is just more visible. Has this type of orthodoxy existed in the past but was was not visible to an outsider like me because it was enforced within the discipline itself?
This is what Kish's posting has got me thinking about too. I never really saw the similarity in the situations between entertainers and teachers before, and it seems vitally important to me to separate the two. A teacher's job is infinitely more important than an entertainer's.
I suspect the answer to your question is that our generation would have gotten just as annoyed about what teachers said, but didn't have the collective voice to do something about it that this generation has because of social media.
I also think that as a culture, we've started giving people's predilection to being offended way more weight than it deserves. This is the snowflake generation. It's the "get an award for showing up" generation. It's the "everyone is special" generation. It's the "I'm not sure why I'm entitled but goddammit I'm entitled" generation. If our parents were overly harsh, today's parents have over-corrected.
Religion is for people whose existential fear is greater than their common sense.
If the polloi want some kind of art or entertainment that the elite won't give them, that sounds like a free market problem to me. Somebody will come along and serve that underserved market and get rich. The defining feature of the polloi, after all, is that they are many. Together they have a lot of money.
It could perhaps be a non-free market problem because a cabal of elite monopolists controls all the entertainment channels. I don't think that's actually true today, though. The internet has lots of soapboxes. I think the barriers for access to audience have to be lower today than ever in history.
I don't really know much about current popular taste but I know that it can change quickly, and that something that was widely acceptable recently can suddenly become box office poison. Maybe some of the stuff that is getting cancelled really is offending significant fractions of the general public now, and not just falling victim to a few overpowered weirdos.
It might seem unfair that some product becomes wholly unacceptable to a significant fraction of the population, even though everyone agrees that most of the product is still good, just because of a few offensive phrases or something. It can be like finding a little bit of poop in the pool, though. Nobody's saying there's a lot of it there, but it's poop, and once someone points it out, everybody wants out of that pool.
I'm willing to argue that some things that people did in the past were great enough in many ways that we should pick out the poop, as it were, and still appreciate the rest of what they did. Not much that gets done at any time is that great, though. As far as I'm concerned we can just cancel all the old B movies. Nothing in them was great enough to make it worthwhile to screen out the contaminants.
How far did 'THEY' (who were they by the way) go? Was it OK to say (e.g.) that Roman policy in the Mediterranean tended to foreground the maintenance of grain shipments from Egypt, because Roman people had this biological characteristic of getting upset if they did not get anything to eat?
LOL! I think it was more the boundary between culture and biology they get concerned about. Certain facts of life like “Roman must eat” don’t bother them. It is more “Greek more smart by nature” that gets dangerous. My project would have been neither. It would have been about the interplay of biology and culture in mass hysteria, following on some comments of Burkert regarding primate behavior and human religion. I am very interested in the concept of cultural illness.
My professor was also interested in this stuff but wanted me to have a career.
Thanks for explaining! I take it that we agree that stuff along the lines of “Greek more smart by nature” is not so much wickedly politically incorrect as just plain dumb - quite apart from the fact that the people we refer to sloppily as "the Greeks" (from Mycenae to Alexandria) were defined not so much by genetic resemblance as by the fact that they all spoke (versions of) Greek. I suppose that THEY got alarmed when the saw the words "biology" and "culture" in the same paragraph.
Maksutov:
That's the problem with this supernatural stuff, it doesn't really solve anything. It's a placeholder for ignorance.
Mayan Elephant:
Not only have I denounced the Big Lie, I have denounced the Big lie big lie.
If an artist or entertainer loses a platform or an audience because they have somehow offended people, then that sucks for them, sure. I don't see that they have any actual right to complain, though. There's a right of free expression but no-one is entitled to a platform or an audience. Artists and entertainers earn money by pleasing their customers; the customers are under no obligation to support the entertainers. The customers can withhold their money for any reason they want.
Theater proprietors and web hosts can likewise decline to host people for any reason they want. They can lock you out if they just don't think you're going to pull in big enough crowds this year. They can lock you out if they're trying to re-brand their platform for a niche community of ostrich fanciers. They can lock you out if they feel you're insufficiently woke. They're the proprietors and they can do what they like with their property.
There's something repugnantly hypocritical, to me, about entertainers getting indignant about being "cancelled". There was never any reason for their success besides the public's whim. They were happy enough to profit from that whim when it favored them, but if the tide turns they suddenly want to pretend that not tossing coins in their particular hats is undermining civilization. Oh, please.
To the contrary, there is something delightful in the courage of artists who stand up and say what they want, including giving the audience the finger, in the name of humor, free expression, and exploring the boundaries when the righteous censors of society demand that they not say naughty words or observe the orthodoxies of the day. Censorship is creepy no matter who engages in it. It doesn’t suddenly become good because it is in line with our own values.
"I have learned with what evils tyranny infects a state. For it frustrates all the virtues, robs freedom of its lofty mood, and opens a school of fawning and terror, inasmuch as it leaves matters not to the wisdom of the laws, but to the angry whim of those who are in authority.”
Thanks for explaining! I take it that we agree that stuff along the lines of “Greek more smart by nature” is not so much wickedly politically incorrect as just plain dumb - quite apart from the fact that the people we refer to sloppily as "the Greeks" (from Mycenae to Alexandria) were defined not so much by genetic resemblance as by the fact that they all spoke (versions of) Greek. I suppose that THEY got alarmed when the saw the words "biology" and "culture" in the same paragraph.
I am not sure what it would mean to think of genetically superior Greeks being wickedly politically incorrect. That sounds completely outlandish to me. I am aware of no one who would take arguments of Greek genetic superiority seriously, or the genetic superiority of any other people for that matter. Certainly not among the ancient historians I know.
"I have learned with what evils tyranny infects a state. For it frustrates all the virtues, robs freedom of its lofty mood, and opens a school of fawning and terror, inasmuch as it leaves matters not to the wisdom of the laws, but to the angry whim of those who are in authority.”
You piqued my interest enough to look up and read a paper that applied Marx’s dialectical materialism to biology. From what I gathered, the paper you described would be right in line with a Marxist approach. So, I’m not understanding your reference to Marxism as something that would be in contrast to your paper.
Is your concern that this paper (which sounds pretty interesting to me) would offend the woke left or religious folks. Maybe both?
This was 20 years ago. The problem, as I recall it, was that scholars on the left, meaning the dominant faction, felt culture was entirely constructed and had no biologically determined aspects. Introducing human biology as any kind of possible structuring device in cultural production was a no no.
"I have learned with what evils tyranny infects a state. For it frustrates all the virtues, robs freedom of its lofty mood, and opens a school of fawning and terror, inasmuch as it leaves matters not to the wisdom of the laws, but to the angry whim of those who are in authority.”
So, being realistic, I may kvetch about this or that, but I understand that I am but one humble person of small consequence and that my role is really to teach some courses to young people in my state. I don’t seek to rile people up. I try to be very balanced in my approach.
Lately, though, the real lefty people in my field have been on a path of disciplinary suicide by decrying our field as irredeemably racist. The same thing is happening in medieval studies too. On the one hand, I am enthusiastic about cultivating interest in my topic among students of all kinds, and seeing some of them become the scholars of the future.
The people who argue that classics is over, however, because it is “too racist” are just wrong, in my opinion. I have very diverse classes when I teach the right subject. I would teach Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt every year if I could for that reason. I really think some SJW types go way overboard, and I find that distressing. Would they prefer that I had never had to teach those African American students I loved and nurtured who went on to be successful professionals? Is it really true that classics is racist?
I say BS.
"I have learned with what evils tyranny infects a state. For it frustrates all the virtues, robs freedom of its lofty mood, and opens a school of fawning and terror, inasmuch as it leaves matters not to the wisdom of the laws, but to the angry whim of those who are in authority.”
You piqued my interest enough to look up and read a paper that applied Marx’s dialectical materialism to biology. From what I gathered, the paper you described would be right in line with a Marxist approach. So, I’m not understanding your reference to Marxism as something that would be in contrast to your paper.
Is your concern that this paper (which sounds pretty interesting to me) would offend the woke left or religious folks. Maybe both?
This was 20 years ago. The problem, as I recall it, was that scholars on the left, meaning the dominant faction, felt culture was entirely constructed and had no biologically determined aspects. Introducing human biology as any kind of possible structuring device in cultural production was a no no.
Ah, thanks. So American left more than Marxist. Got it.
he/him we all just have to live through it,
holding each other’s hands.
My reserves of things to worry about is kinda tapped. Which aspects of cancel culture should I be most concerned about:
1. Terry Gilliam gets to put on his production at a different theater?
2. New state laws prohibiting the teaching of accurate U.S. history?
3. New wave of banning books from school libraries?
Cancel culture became a "thing" only when someone noticed that it was happening to a certain class of people.
I tried watching the Closer. I laughed at first. Then he said some things I considered ignorant and I turned it off. I didn't go online and rant about it. I only mention it to raise a point. Terry Gilliam watched it and saw something different. I wouldn't just shame him for having a different point of view, but see it as a chance for a discussion. Check out this TED Talk by Loretta J Ross where she suggests instead of calling people out we should call them in. Or don't watch it. It's only 14 minutes and she makes a lot of good points:
