If this premise isn’t especially sexy to you, I commend the many Netflix films about religion where you can watch charismatic figures lull followers with promises of new dawns and off-the-grid togetherness. The history of religions is a history of organizing power relations. Thinking about this requires thinking a little about religion, and a lot about what hurts people most. The question is what mystery cancel culture’s mythology explains. Depending on your political inclinations, the cast of gods and heroes alters considerably. Their explanation is: “Something more powerful than us did something to make this happen.”Ĭancel culture produces a collection of myths within a particular tradition or a mythology. Myths occur when human beings want to explain how mysterious things come to pass. A superhuman force could be a god it could be meteorology it could be a corporation or a foreign state. In the history of religion, myths are stories people tell about forces more powerful than them described as superhuman. This is a relatively recent connotation of myth. Myth used this way refers to an idea people believe that is not true. Ten mega myths about sex, beckons another.
Seven myths about COVID-19 vaccines, yells one headline. Taking myths as real requires resistance to conventional usage. There is no question that cancel culture is real. Cancel culture is not a myth, Norris decides, because, in silencing people, it does something real. In a 2023 paper published in Political Studies, Pippa Norris poses the question this way: “Do claims about a growing ‘cancel culture’ curtailing free speech on college campuses reflect a pervasive myth, fueled by angry partisan rhetoric, or do these arguments reflect social reality?” 1 Norris finds that contemporary academics may be less willing to speak up due to a fear of cancel culture. I gather these instances and wonder whether cancel culture is an encroaching menace against which everyone must defend or a moral panic that inflates the problem. A student tells me her grandparents complain, “It’s Salem all over again.” A friend tells me of a colleague who got fired for something they said on Slack. I begin to ask everyone I meet what they think of when they think of cancel culture. The stakes of canceling are such that disbelievers reach for higher powers when spared. “You see, you weren’t canceled!” “Thank god,” they both reply, an oddly unifying utterance for two professed nontheists. When their work occurs without incident, I return to the terror that preceded their success. She is paralyzingly nervous: “I don’t want to get canceled.” A colleague who is about to have an editorial published asks me to make sure there is nothing cancelable in it. A friend is about to give a guest lecture.
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