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What is the origin of “cancel culture”? Who created this Frankenstein monster?
I recently realized that key authors of this idea in its modern form were conservatives, who set all the important precedents and underlying principles in their eagerness to justify the regulation of our personal morality. It’s just that they weren’t the ones who ended up getting to do the regulation—at least, not yet.
These ideas were launched by conservatives but put into practice by the left, and in a supreme irony, the same ideas are now coming full circle to be used to support a different kind of religious conservatism.
The craziest thing is how I figured this out: by reading an Ayn Rand article from 50 years ago.
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“Censorship: Local and Express” was originally delivered as a talk at Boston’s Ford Hall Forum in 1973 and eventually included in a posthumous collection of her essays, Philosophy: Who Needs It. This was Ayn Rand’s response to a series of Supreme Court rulings on “obscenity,” in which a narrow majority led by the court’s conservative bloc upheld laws used to ban pornographic films.
Rand firmly disapproved of these rulings. It’s not that she was a fan of the “hard core” genre. While her own novels are known for their steamy sex scenes, they are more notable for their passionate intensity than for their anatomical detail and would be considered relatively tame by today’s standards.
Her objection was to the precedent that banning pornography would set and the specific reasoning used in these rulings. She argued that they laid down precedents and principles that are hostile to freedom of speech and would reach well beyond the issue of dirty movies, “establishing the legal and intellectual base of censorship.”
And she was right.
First, let’s talk about these rulings. In 1973, the Supreme Court produced a cluster of five rulings on obscenity, of which Rand mentions four by name: Miller v. California, Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton, US v. Orito, and the hilariously named United States v. 12 200-ft. Reels of Film. Their upshot was to create the standard that a book or film can be banned if it is found to be “offensive” by “local community standards.”
You can see how an advocate of reason and individualism would object. “Community standards,” Rand pointed out, is a collectivist criterion. “The intellectual standard which is here set up to rule an individual’s mind—to prescribe what an individual may write, publish, read, or see—is the judgment of an average person applying community standards… [T]he will of the collective is here taken for granted as the source, justification, and criterion of value judgments.” This standard gives the average person—or more preposterously, she observes, the “sexually average person”—the power to dictate terms to everyone else, including those who are intellectually and spiritually above the average.
Moreover, what is “offensive” is defined emotionally and arbitrarily. Rand approvingly quotes a dissenting opinion from the Court’s arch-liberal of the time, Justice William O. Douglas: “Obscenity—which even we cannot define with precision—is a hodge-podge. To send men to jail for violating standards they cannot understand, construe, and apply is a monstrous thing to do in a nation dedication to fair trials and due process.”
In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Warren Burger went so far as to defend the authority of the state to pass laws based on “unprovable assumptions about what is good for the people, including imponderable esthetic assumptions.” In this case, the unprovable assumption is the deleterious effects of consenting adults viewing pornography—but really, it could be anything.
So far as I know, while the scope of some of these rulings has been narrowed, the basic principles have never been overturned. If conservatives have lost the war on pornography, which they have, it is because the war was abandoned, not because the law changed.
This is partly because there is no longer much cultural enthusiasm for that particular crusade, but also for technological reasons. One of the 1973 cases, for example, involved a ban on pornography in local movie theaters. Those who have seen the 1986 time-travel film Back to the Future may recall that one of the film’s wry commentaries on the then-contemporary world was that the downtown movie theater which in 1955 was playing a Ronald Reagan film by 1985 has ”XXX Rated” on its marquee.
You can see how local officials might regard this as a blight on their communities, and it was common enough to be legislated against. That is the kind of legislation that was upheld by the Supreme Court. But by the 1980s, the seedy downtown XXX theater was already being replaced by smut shipped directly to your own home, to be viewed on your VCR. Another decade or so later, pornographic images and films migrated to the internet, outside the bounds of local and even national laws.
But the legal and philosophical precedents remained, and that’s what we want to trace. If we allow ourselves to be carried by the basic ideas behind these conservative rulings—whether we go “local” or “express,” as Ayn Rand put it—where do we end up?
Ayn Rand noted the irony of the left-wing and right-wing positions on these cases: “It is Justice Douglas, the arch-liberal, who defends individual rights. It is the conservatives who speak as if the individual did not exist.” I should note that she uses “liberal” in its narrow 20th-Century sense, meaning advocacy of Big Government and the welfare state. She acknowledges the imprecise nature of the term and goes on to observe the paradox that these contrasting positions on the “spiritual” issue of freedom of speech tended to be completely reversed on the “material” issues of economic regulation, where suddenly conservatives would discover individual rights and the 20th-Century “liberals” would forget about them.
(Incidentally, this article was one of the very first things I read from Ayn Rand, many years ago, and in explaining this paradox, she wrote a passage that really made me sit up and think this lady had something interesting to day: “Conservatives see man as a body freely roaming the earth, building sand piles or factories—with an electronic computer inside his skull, controlled from Washington. The liberals see man as a soul freewheeling to the farther reaches of the universe—but wearing chains from nose to toes when he crosses the street to buy a loaf of bread.”)
The lines each side tries to draw around the power of the state are not the kind that will hold. What we have discovered since is how fluid they are. Rand observed:
The Court’s decision asserts repeatedly—just asserts—that this ruling applies only to hard-core pornography…. [T]his distinction is contradicted and invalidated right in the text of the same decision: the trial judges and juries and empowered to determine whether a work that contains sexual elements “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”
This means—and can mean nothing else—that the government is empowered to judge literary, artistic, political, and scientific values, and to permit or suppress certain works accordingly.
You can see how this would be taken personally by the author of The Fountainhead, which I am frankly surprised has not been banned long ago by a coalition of opponents from the left and the right.
Rand begins her essay with the complaint that “today’s conservatives share all the fundamental premises of today’s liberals,” specifically the elevation of the collective over the individual. So she worries that the Supreme Court rulings “will serve as a precedent for the liberals, enabling them to determine which ideas they wish to suppress—in the name of the ‘public interest’—when their turn comes.”
“The law,” she warned, “functions by a process of deriving logical consequences from established precedents.” So long as a precedent is accepted, the rest is “only a matter of details—and of time.”
This is true in the courts—but it is also true, in the long run, in the culture.
Who do you think actually took these precedents seriously and put them into practice? Herein lies a big lesson about why we need liberal principles, because restrictions that sound like a good idea when you get to enforce them become precedent to be followed by someone else—and enforced against you.
The people who put the conservatives’ precedents into practice were the left. What else is “cancel culture” but the idea that it is acceptable to suppress speech that you find “offensive” by “local community standards”? The only difference is that the local community is not a small town in the conservative “heartland,” but a college campus—and its standards are communicated and enforced by way of social media.
“Cancel culture” has been discussed widely for years, so just one relatively recent example will suffice. A few years ago, University of Chicago Geophysicist Dorian Abbot was disinvited from a guest lecture at MIT because of his views on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and racial preferences in university hiring, which he complained “rises to the level of implicitly or explicitly excluding application from certain groups.” He advocates an alternative approach that one would think is not especially controversial: Applicants should be “treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.”
In response, a faction of graduate students coordinated on social media to blackball Professor Abbot within his profession, arguing that his mere appearance on a campus to talk about his scientific work would “threaten the safety and the belonging of all underrepresented groups within the department.”
Ayn Rand predicted that the left would suppress speech “in the name of the ‘public interest.’” They chose a peculiar variant on this justification: the sense of “belonging” on the part of “underrepresented groups.” But the result is the same.
There is a substantive difference between this and the 1973 obscenity cases. As with most examples of cancel culture, the Dorian Abbot affair involves decisions made by private institutions rather than the government. If MIT chooses to disinvite a speaker, it is not a violation of the First Amendment. If the government bans a book or film, it is.
But there is a connection between government censorship and private cancel culture. The standards set in private institutions tend to set the tone for what we allow and eventually expect out of government. If people widely adopt the notion that dissenting views are dangerous and should not be tolerated, they are unlikely to object when those ideas are suppressed by government force—in much the same way that those with conservative religious views on sex were (and still are) very comfortable with Supreme Court rulings declaring an unlimited government power to regulate depictions of sexuality.
Private institutions always can and should set standards of tolerance that are narrower than those of the government, simply because the proper standards for government are so wide. Free speech obliges the government to tolerate absolutely everything, but there is no such obligation for private individuals. Yet the narrowing of standards of tolerance in private institutions tends to be a leading indicator for the expansion of our willingness to use government power to suppress ideas.
So it is an ominous sign when the “culture of free speech” is replaced in the private sphere by a culture of cancellation.
That’s why it’s important to ask where this ends up, because the joke just might be on the secular left.
I offer you this vignette from last year at Macalester College in Minnesota, which shows how the whole process is reaching its logical conclusion and making a round trip back to a new form of religious speech-policing.
At Macalester, students objected to images in an art exhibition by Taravat Talepasand, a contemporary, feminist Iranian American artist based in Oregon. Some sculptures and drawings in the exhibit depict exposed bodies of Muslim women wearing hijabs or niqabs. The college responded by closing the exhibit for a weekend; holding a community conversation; temporarily shrouding the gallery in black curtains; and then reopening the exhibit with a content warning and frosted glass on some of the gallery windows.
The best detail is the part about “temporarily shrouding the gallery in black curtains.” That’s right. They put a burqa over the anti-burqa exhibit.
What did bystanders need to be protected against?
Two drawings, titled Blasphemy X and Blasphemy IX, show a niqab-clad woman pulling up her robe to reveal lingerie underneath. A series of porcelain sculptures show women who are entirely covered with a niqab, except for exposed, exaggerated breasts.
This is, of course, precisely the kind of “obscenity” that the old liberals in those 1973 rulings sought to protect under the principle of freedom of speech. It’s grimly amusing that a contemporary artist making an exhibit for a campus art show would defiantly label her works as “blasphemy,” in the secure belief that this is a place where blasphemy is protected, only to have people take the label seriously.
But while the substance of this case is the enforcement of Muslim strictures against blasphemy, the means by which this is put over on a secular academic establishment is through the marshaling of left-wing terminology about “marginalized groups.”
The exhibition “just feels a bit targeting because there’s not that many Muslim students here,” Ikran said. “At a predominantly white institution, when I’m looking at who’s attending the school, who’s walking into this exhibit, without understanding and nuance, then it’s quite harmful.”…
Because there are so few hijabi women students on campus, she said, the artwork made her feel singled out. She worried about how other students would see the art, and in turn see her.
This is part of a broader pattern. Since Muslims have been sorted, in the calculus of the “anti-colonialist” left, into the status of a special class on whose behalf limits on campus speech are to be imposed, this is being used to punish people for violating restrictions demanded by the most fanatical religious believers—as in a case at Minnesota’s Hamline college, where an art historian was fired for showing her students a 14th-Century painting of the prophet Mohammed. (More recently, there was a similar case at San Francisco State University.)
Now ask yourself. Is this left-wing speech restriction, because it is done in the name of “marginalized people” and opposition to (supposed) racism? Or is it right-wing speech restriction, because it is done to enforce a code of conservative religious traditionalism—even if it’s on behalf of a different religion from that of most American conservatives?
Or does it matter?
What matters is what this shows about the basic principles. It shows where we end up when we make the issue of who is allowed to speak, and whose views can be suppressed, dependent on standards that are subjective and collective—rather than making it about the importance of rational debate and respect for the individual mind.
As Ayn Rand warned long ago, this is an express route to local censorship—and as recent events show, it can also take us on a round-trip journey from religious obscurantism to left-wing secular dogmatism and back again.
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