The Good Death—Cancel Culture and the Logic of Torture
"Cancellation is a public execution, during which a person is pilloried and destroyed. But while we have become used to the cycle of manufactured outrage that preludes every cancellation, the desperate public apologies, and the devastating consequences for the people whose lives are ruined, we are often at a loss to know what we could do to stop this type of serial assault. Part of the solution is to gain as clear an understanding of the phenomenon as possible by probing its structure. Philosophical and historical scholarship on public executions and torture can help to illuminate the moral logic that drives the cycle of abuse. For both public shaming and cancellation are structured like public acts of torture, and their aims are disturbingly similar means of enforcing political or cultural conformity.
In The Spectacle of Suffering, a wide-ranging study of public executions in preindustrial Europe, Pieter Spierenburg points out that “execution originally meant the carrying out of any sentence, not only death sentences.” What emerges from Spierenburg’s discussion is that public executions were to some extent scripted and required the convicted or condemned to play a part. This was connected to the exemplary function of the execution as a deterrent: “The edifying aspect then lies in a punishment suffered humbly and dutifully. All this of course presupposes a society which tolerates the open infliction of pain. Only then can the authorities hope that the example will be effective.”
It is unsettling to consider how similar today’s public cancellations are to those public executions. Of the three elements listed by Spierenburg, the complicity of the condemned is the most fascinating. As Spierenburg argues, “In the eyes of the authorities the staging of executions achieved its most beautiful form of ultimate success” when the criminal repented and embraced his punishment. “For this his co-operation was required. He had to be convinced of the righteousness of his punishment … Notably those who were going to die were expected to be penitent and convinced of the wrongness of their own acts and the righteousness of their death.” The absence of such co-operation not only made the execution less perfect, but it also rendered it potentially counter-productive: a condemned man who refused to play the role of penitent might engage the sympathy of the public, especially if there were doubts surrounding their alleged guilt, and the whole spectacle might then turn against the executioners and the authorities, and trigger riots, as sometimes happened.
In our current climate of cancellation, the submissive assumption of guilt is performed through the humiliation of the public apology. This is not a coincidence: an apology functions like a confession—it implies acknowledgement of wrongdoing. Even (and especially) if the shamed or cancelled person is innocent of any wrongdoing, the apology is the sacrament that makes the accusation real after the fact. It is the seal that retrospectively authenticates the righteousness of the punitive process. It is the moment when the victim of the cancellation plays his part and willingly goes to his death. To apologize is to die the good death—the accused gives his persecutors the performance they want and need, and validates their worldview.
Yet the display of voluntary humiliation is not enough to make a good execution. The public spectacle of pain (which in cancellations is primarily the psychological pain of humiliation and ostracization), its toleration by society (indicated by the gleeful dissemination of the images of public humiliation), and the exemplary nature of the execution also play their part. To understand the full scope of the impact, we need to expand our frame of reference and approach cancellations as public executions of a very specific kind—they are a public form of torture. It is only when we look at cancellation as a form of torture that the full force of its violence becomes apparent.
In The Body in Pain, an investigation of pain as a destructive force in human experience, Elaine Scarry argues that “torture consists of a primary physical act, the infliction of pain, and a primary verbal act, the interrogation. The first rarely occurs without the second.” This means that in torture, pain is typically inflicted with the aim of extorting information from the victim, who is made to say things he does not want to say, whether it is a confession of guilt or intelligence that the torturers wish to obtain. On the one hand, the physical body is made to suffer. But torture also attacks the mind. Because thoughts cannot be grasped or put to the rack, physical pain is used to coerce the spirit of the victim. The body is the means to get to the soul...
Victims of torture are typically deprived of basic comfort. They must sleep on dirty floors or on dirty mattresses. They are given spoiled food to eat or dirty water to drink, which causes them to be sick. During interrogation, their chair is kicked out from under them. In this way, elements of the world that are usually familiar, intimate, and comforting are made unreliable and hostile. This has the effect of reducing the victim’s world to their own physical body. The longer and the more extensively this process is sustained, the more the torture victim will find their world shrinking.
But the infliction of physical pain also alienates the victim from their own body, which is equally turned into an enemy. As Scarry puts it, “The prisoner’s body [is made into] an active agent, an actual cause of his pain.”...
It is important for shaming and cancellation to be public events—they
are meant to isolate the accused from the community. This isolation is
experienced as physical as much as spiritual. The destruction of the
world that is achieved in torture by the destruction of the body and its
relationship to its immediate physical surroundings is achieved in
cancel culture by the infliction of an abject state of loneliness, which
equally cuts the victim off from the world.
This experience has been most eloquently described by Hannah Arendt in her analysis of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt argues that inducing a state of loneliness in people has the effect of destroying all sense of community, reducing individuals to isolated atoms, and thereby preparing them, through abject fear, for totalitarian rule...
The function of public shaming and cancellation is to inflict loneliness—it cuts the victim off from the family of man. It makes him an abject untouchable and has as its only aim his total removal from society. This is achieved by publicizing the cancellation, which ensures that this person will lose his job, his livelihood, his social circle, and will almost certainly not find another job in the foreseeable future. In close analogy to physical torture, where everyday objects (a chair, the food one eats) and even the body itself are turned into hostile weapons, the shared world is turned into a hostile environment for the publicly shamed person, who is now shunned by everyone. The very people who were only recently friends and colleagues are now the weapons that inflict pain through their absence, confirming the victim’s isolation...
The voice of the torture victim is present in screams of pain and in coerced speech. In torture, the victim’s screams are “made the property of the torturers in one of two ways. They will, first of all, be used as the occasion for … another act of punishment. As the torturer displays his control of the other’s voice by first inducing screams, he now displays that same control by stopping them: a pillow or a pistol or an iron ball or a soiled rag or a paper packet of excrement is shoved into the person’s mouth … Secondly, in many countries these screams are, like the words of the confession, tape-recorded and then played where they can be heard by fellow prisoners, close friends, and relatives.”
Like torture, public shaming and cancellation also appropriate the voice of their victim. Once accused, the victim has no verbal recourse. Any denial of the charge is perceived as further evidence of intransigence—all protest becomes a case of protesting too much. Only confession and contrition will do. Here, the victim’s voice, and their very words, are used against them as weapons. To speak at all is to be guilty, unless one agrees to speak as a ventriloquist’s dummy, proclaiming the confession that one’s torturers (or one’s employer, eager to please the mob) have drafted.
This is why, in cases of cancellation, it is not the initial accusation or calling-out but the apology (which amounts to an admission of moral guilt) that is lethal...
There is a bitter but valuable lesson here for those who face public shaming or cancellation. Whatever you do, and however tempting it may be, you should never, ever apologize. The only sensible response is defiance. This takes courage, and it may seem painful and torturous, but the situation is already painful and torturous, and apologies are unlikely to change that. The victim can at least reclaim or maintain some self-worth by biting back.
Of course, it makes perfect sense to apologize if you have committed an actual crime or offence. But in that case, a sincere apology almost always has restorative force...
But in cases of shaming and cancellation, the apology never makes any difference at all: it is simply part of the punishment. Where restorative justice sees apologies as part of a constructive process towards rehabilitation, mobs use apologies as an instrument with which to inflict more pain. There is absolutely no sense of reciprocity, forgiveness, or closure...
A significant consequence of these torture tactics is their contribution to the destruction of truth, which is part and parcel of the destruction of the social world, and which is to a considerable extent achieved by robbing victims of their voice. One of the reasons shamed victims are coerced into false or self-incriminating speech is that the mob needs to maintain a view of reality that is impervious to empirical testing. Reality and truth are decreed by ideology rather than established through the conventions of empirical research and a rational exchange of views. This is nowhere clearer than in debates about race (where the new-fangled and luridly racist concepts of “white supremacy” and “structural racism” trump all empirical evidence about the true and complex causes of racial inequality) and gender (where the concept of gender has swallowed up biological sex to the extent that even sexual dimorphism in humans is now dismissed as a mere social construct rather than a basic empirical fact).
This process has been successful at universities, where even tenured professors are now sufficiently scared of saying anything that might offend, even if it is established science or demonstrable fact. But when the voices of science and reason are silenced, totalitarian rule is in the ascendant. As Arendt explains, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” Even those who privately know that they are professing ideological untruths also know that they ought not to say so out of fear for their livelihoods. It is not even clear anymore whom amongst one’s colleagues and friends one can trust. The new truths are centrally dictated and the options are: conform or perish...
Many commentators have noted the apparently arbitrary selection of victims for cancellation and shaming. Why person X and not person Y? This, too, is a feature of the totalitarian moral logic at play. Like Kafka’s K, we all might wake up one morning and find that we have been accused without having done anything wrong. But when the victims are arbitrarily selected, loneliness becomes an everyday experience because we soon learn that we must be extremely careful about anything we say or do. We become each other’s gaolers even while we inflict the most stringent surveillance upon our own thoughts and speech. The walls have ears, and the social world is hostile. In this sense, arbitrariness is central to the tactic of destroying the social world. Everyone is a suspect and therefore a potential victim. Anyone could destroy anyone at any time with a tweet. Trust no one.
At the same time, however, the claim that cancel victims are arbitrarily selected is only partially true. There does seem to be a profile, or a set of profiles. Many victims of cancel culture were not known to the public at large before their public falls from grace. Their shame made them infamous. Furthermore, many victims have been well-meaning liberals who are targeted for what is often a very minor or insignificant pseudo-transgression: a joke that was ill-judged, a hasty tweet that turned out to be an unintended embarrassment, or the use of an innocuous word that only extremely sensitive people might construe as racist or sexist. In fact, many victims of cancellation have not done anything wrong at all.
Cancellation is a cowardly tactic. It is a form of mob justice that likes to prey on easy victims. In this respect, it again follows the structure of torture, which is equally cowardly. The power differential in torture is absolute. Torturers do not risk anything by inflicting torture. They run no risk of retaliation because the victim is helpless. The victims of cancellation and public shaming are similarly selected for their vulnerability. One reason why so few openly racist or sexist persons are ever shamed successfully by progressive mobs is because such people are simply not intimidated by their accusers and usually inhabit social circles beyond their reach. Confirmed white supremacists or Stalinists, for example, already tend to exist on the fringes of society and are hardly embraced by mainstream culture. Their convictions are so strong that, in a sense, they have been happy to cancel themselves and wall themselves up in the fortress of their own ideological bubble.
Mobs therefore select their victims carefully from the ranks of the impressionable—liberal-minded people who are already committed to progressive values, who are terrified of being called racist or sexist, and whose sense of identity to a considerable extent relies on their allegiance to inclusive and tolerant values. But these are the people least likely to be guilty of the moral crimes of which they stand accused. And this in turn explains why they so often have the perfectly understandable but wrong reflex of trying to apologize for any perceived wrongdoing. Even their moral goodness is cynically turned into a weapon of destruction. Being kind becomes painful...
When we act as if the mob is right, if we unconditionally affirm their description of the world, their description becomes real in its consequences. How could you deny its reality if you yourself act according to its principles? If you act as if your oppressor is righteous, you become complicit in your own bondage and effectively prove, through your own actions, that your oppressor is righteous. At which point, you die the good death. This is also why, as Susanne K. Langer wrote in Philosophy in a New Key, “Men fight passionately against being forced to do lip-service, because the enactment of a rite is always, in some measure, assent to its meaning … It is a breach of personality. To be obliged to confess, teach, or acclaim falsehood is always felt as an insult exceeding even ridicule and abuse.”
This, again, is why it is the apology that kills: it is an act of moral self-inscription and, thereby, self-debasement. Like the good convict sticking to the script in a preindustrial execution, the performance of confession and remorse gives those in power what they want and need most: acquiescence. After that, the victim disappears from the social world, used up and discarded while the mob moves on to its next victim. The ideological beast is like Mammon: it continually needs to be fed to sustain itself. And so, one soul at a time, we are to be turned into the armies of the undead...
They happily ignore the inconvenient fact that the cancelled and the shamed are also human beings with real lives, real feelings, and real families, who, like the rest of us, only have one shot at life and happiness before disappearing into the eternity of non-existence. What God-like hubris to assume for oneself the right, on the most specious of moral grounds, to cut such lives short...
The analysis of cancellation and public shaming as a form of public torture does provide at least three suggestions that might help disrupt its destructive force ...
Since public executions rely on the presence and support of an audience to be successful, a first way of resisting the lethal cultural logic of torture would be to refuse it an audience. Ignore cancellation or make a very public spectacle of your disdain for the process. There is an important role to play here for employers and administrations: do not give in to moral blackmail...
Since the participation of the victim is crucial to a good execution, we must also, as individuals, resist shame if we become the target of a mob...
Finally, we must all publicly speak up against mobbing. The key to breaking the stranglehold of ideological conformity is to keep dissenting speech alive. Raise your voice, for public speech is the power that allows one to break the bonds of loneliness. It tells others, and the victims of cancellation specifically, that they are not alone."
