The cancel culture has now infected the democracies of the Western world.  The process itself works in a predictable way.  Denunciation alone is tantamount to a verdict of guilt.  Once a target is selected, a howling mob of supporters jumps on the bandwagon.  The result is that the target's credibility and reputation are ruined, and perhaps his career and entire life.

As the author J.K. Rowling discovered, even those with previously impeccable radical progressive liberal-left credentials are not immune.  If she is wise, she will think long and hard about what was done to her.  This is where a more philosophical approach to understanding the issues may help.

The first question that occurs to me — as a philosopher — is, "Why are these people so intent on destroying themselves?"  They seek to destroy others in the name of "social justice" in a way that undermines any moral authority they might claim to possess.  They have a faulty understanding of the cultural context within which they are operating. 

The cultural milieu in which we all live is a linguistic construction.  That much is today uncontroversial.  It's understanding what lies beneath the linguistic conventions that is the challenging part.

Radical progressivism now demands we believe that a man self-identifying as a woman is really a woman.  Yet in a prescient passage, Nietzsche mocks 'The ... name ... thrown over things like a dress and quite foreign to their nature[.]"  Nietzsche argues that language does not have determinative power over nature — only over how we perceive and understand it, which can involve linguistic self-deception.  He goes on: "What kind of a fool would believe that it is enough to point to this origin and this misty shroud of [linguistic] delusion in order to destroy the world that counts as 'real'[?] ... Only as creators can we destroy!" [1].

Today, if we do not agree that a man who self-identifies as a woman is really a woman, the cancel culture will cancel us.  All the participants are diminished as a result, because this pathological irrationality destroys any capacity to engage with the issues in honesty and truth.  This is nihilism.

Nietzsche set a limit to his own nihilism, and eventually — after many philosophical wanderings and false turns (the latter often misinterpreted as being his true philosophical message) — he believed he had found a way out of it.  Whether or not one agrees with him, the point is that he attempted to address the underlying fundamental issues by thinking deeply about what their significance is and what we might do about them.  Sometimes his advice is simply to get on with life and ignore what philosophers have to say...

Unfortunately for those of us who resist the insanity of identity politics, it is no longer possible to ignore the influence of a certain kind of postmodern philosophy that finds expression in radical progressivism.  This is epistemic and moral relativism: the idea that there is no knowledge or value system that is any better than any others, which is what multiculturalism and identity politics have as fundamental presuppositions.  And yet whenever anyone else claims to have a better way of looking at things, the radical progressivists instantly contradict themselves by insisting that their worldview is actually better than all others, which is an example of their pathological irrationality.

Nietzsche can again help us.  Ironically, he is a favorite philosopher of epistemic and moral relativists — but that's due to a misunderstanding on their part [3]. Nietzsche's central philosophical tenet is what he called Perspektivismus — usually translated as "perspectivism" or "perspectivalism" [4],[5].  He arrived at it by a very roundabout route, but in its final form, it amounts to a claim that we do not have direct perceptual contact with an external world.  Our understanding of it is mediated by our own uniquely personal engagement with it, through our acting upon it and responding to it to meet our needs (which provides us with our sense of value), and through meanings made available by language-use. 

This does not mean there is no external world independent of our will or capacity to represent it; what it means is that we can never know for sure exactly what underlies our experience, or representations, of it.  It's an appeal for intellectual modesty and evaluative caution, not a denial that there might be some ways of looking at the world and ourselves that are better than others.

In straightforward terms, perspectivism can be understood using the analogy of many different people looking at a complex building from many different angles (including from above) and from different distances, near to far.  No one person will can see the whole building from all possible angles at the same time, and down to the minutest detail.  This is not humanly possible.  All we can do is pool our representations and use inter-subjective agreement to decide on what the actual total reality of the building might look like.  There is no objective, perspective-neutral, instantaneous, comprehensive God's-eye view available to us.  Only an omniscient God would possess this, but this does not stop some humans from believing they do, too. 

So — if we are to be humble about our intellectual faculties — we can never be totally sure what actually in reality constitutes this building, not least because the concept itself is a human construct.  Examine the building in the minutest detail and the 'building' itself becomes simply (!) a collection of atoms and molecules. The individual parts do not themselves constitute the building, only their arrangement in this specific utilizable form, which we can conceive of as falling within the general category of 'building'.  And our conception of the category itself might change over time, and across cultures.  To a time-traveler from ten thousand years ago, a modern skyscraper might be perceived as a cliff, part of the natural landscape. 

Nietzsche viewed the first step to insight as being the facility to ask honest and truthful questions of one's own and others' worldview, in an exploratory process (he termed this 'intellectual conscience').

And that's precisely what we need to dismantle the cancel culture — and the pathological irrationality of radical progressivism.  We need to adopt a resolute insistence on intellectual honesty in our civic discourse and public debate, along with a commitment to seek the best candidates for truth. 

We should present this as a collaborative project conducted in good faith, with mutual respect, and every time the radical progressives depart from this approach, we should call them out on it.  It is they who act in bad faith, who do not observe mutual respect, and who abandon intellectual honesty when it suits them, thus showing no commitment to truth, only to their own ideology.

Sometimes philosophical insights come from surprising sources.  Rodney King (whose brutal beating at the hands of the police sparked the 1992 Los Angeles riots) is remembered for saying on the steps of the courthouse while the rioting was still continuing: 'Can't we all just get along?'  It doesn't matter much that he actually said, 'Can we all get along?' What matters is that he was asking the right question.

Why can't we all just get along? It's a question that the radical progressives need to be asked, at every opportunity, and we should challenge their attempts to turn the discussion around to reasons for being in conflict rather than reasons to get along.  Because it's only the latter that will enable us to move towards building a better society for all, without destroying ourselves in the process.

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References:

[1]

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff, §58,  Cambridge University Press, 2001

[3]

Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche, Life as Literature, pp. 36,49,84; Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1985

[4]

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §15, trans. Walter Kaufmann,  New York, Vintage Books, 1974

[5]

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §481, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York, Vintage Books, 1967

Wen Wryte is the pseudonym of a retired teacher of philosophy who likes a quiet life.