My Attempted Cancellation
A few weeks ago, I experienced a twitter-mobbing (‘X-mobbing’?) over the following response tweet:
It was retweeted over 400 times, garnered over 500 negative comments, and reached over 400,000 feeds, where it had nearly 25,000 engagements (reads, likes, comments).
I’ll say more in Part II about how the tweet went viral, who attacked it and what this tells us about radical activist networks. Those writing the obituary for cancel culture need to think again, as Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) data convincingly reveals. The aftermath of this affair involved activists bombarding my university’s twitter feed and making formal complaints to my employer. Their modus operandi is achingly familiar: I’ve been through it several times since 2018.
Part I The Point
The aim of my post was to argue – in the context of the Islamophobia debate - that some identities (complexes of particularistic myths, symbols and repertoires to which people are affectively attached) have live physical force traditions while others don’t. Basque and Irish nationalism do, Catalan and Scottish nationalism don’t. Muslim identity does, Amish identity doesn’t. Masculine culture does, feminine culture doesn’t.
Notice that the categories I used involved religion (Muslim, Amish), territorial-political beliefs (Irish and Scottish nationalist) and sex (male, female). I made no generalizations about either race or ethnicity, yet it’s revealing that my opponents instantly went there. This tells us a great deal about which categories are and are not sacred and powerful in our post-1960s left-liberal moral order.
The aim of my original tweet was, in the context of the Islamophobia question, to open up a discussion about the relationship between violent sub-traditions within a master identity narrative. On the one hand, I am claiming that the physical force traditions of certain identities are connected to the wider group’s myth-symbol complex, belief system or experience. On the other, I aver that violent traditions are typically only adhered to by a small minority, thus the mainstream should not be tarred by their violent extreme.
You can criticize violent Muslim traditions without criticizing Muslims as a whole. If you say ‘Muslims are violent’ that’s Islamophobic or anti-Muslim. If you say ‘there is a violent tradition among some Muslims but not among Amish,’ that is not Islamophobic. I made that clear in the original tweet when I said we should criticize extremists but not moderates.
I thought the tweet uncontroversial, but when I checked back several hours later, I found myself in a shitstorm. This prompted me to follow up with this clarification:
The second tweet had just 1/20th the level of engagement. In other words, it was largely ignored. That, too, is revealing. It seems my interlocutors were drawn to triggering text that could be contorted into the ‘racist’ category. They were considerably less interested in the finer point of whether cultural traditions matter for violence.
Note that I did not claim that physical force traditions are inherent in a religion or nationalist movement (much less a race!), only that they exist today in some but not others. The origin of the tradition may even have been valid, if the tradition arose in relation to resistance against a violent occupier. But the fact such traditions continue to exist in some identities means there is - in my view - a greater risk of violence. Studies of ethnic civil war, for instance, show that past conflict is a strong predictor of future conflict, while diasporas are connected with the likelihood of civil war. Citizens’ attitudes to violence also predicts its prevalence in insurgencies like Afghanistan. It’s plausible that memories of past grievances and a belief that resisting violently is legitimate are part of the reason future conflict becomes more likely.
I’m not the first to make these observations, but I wanted to juxtapose the categories of religion, nationalism and gender, where wildly differing theories hold sway. The idea that masculinity has violent traditions is arguably the dominant perspective in sociology and gender studies. Alternative views could point to evolutionary psychology or economic factors, but it seems the cultural explanation is preferred. Here are just a couple of examples plucked randomly from Google Scholar:
Gqola, P.D., 2007. How the ‘cult of femininity’and violent masculinities support endemic gender based violence in contemporary South Africa. African identities, 5(1), pp.111-124.
Carrington, K. and Scott, J., 2008. Masculinity, rurality and violence. The British Journal of Criminology, 48(5), pp.641-666.
Unsurprisingly, the crescendo of outrage I received didn’t include a single defender of male identity!
In nationalism studies, which is one of my core areas of expertise, there are plenty of papers which take culture and identity seriously as factors which explain why, for instance, Basque nationalism is more violent than Catalan, or why certain strands of Irish nationalism are violent (in a way Scottish nationalism currently is not). Of course one may argue that repression or deprivation or some other factor is what drives violence and culture doesn’t matter. Let’s have that discussion, by all means, rather than trying to shut down debate.
The idea that certain religious traditions are more violent is somewhat more contentious. Yet, even here, there in rigorous work on the religious sources of contemporary Salafi-Jihadism in Sunni Islam.
Naturally one should add that violent traditions have popped up in Judaism as well, notably among the Settler movement of religious Zionists. I’m reasonably moderate on the Israel-Palestine and Islam questions for someone who is both Jewish and conservative. My position has always been that Israel should be working toward a stable two-state solution based on the 1967 boundaries - and that ultra-Zionist elements inside and outside government have been an obstacle to that.
Much more care for civilian lives should have been taken in Gaza even as Israel has the right to defend itself while Hamas is hiding among civilians and holding hostages. This said, the Palestinian side have often not been reasonable peace-seeking interlocutors, and Hamas is an especially destructive terrorist movement. Israel-Palestine is a tragic and multi-layered conflict that doesn’t fit a one-dimensional morality tale.
As far as Islamophobia goes, people can become too frightened of Islam given the miniscule statistical probability of coming to Islamist harm. People may be allergic to socially-conservative Muslims even as such people have as much of a right to express themselves and hold retrograde attitudes as conservative Christians and Jews. Thus ‘Islamophobia’ is a real thing even if this is exaggerated by activists.
On the other hand, it is equally important to recognize that violent Islamism is the most important terror threat in Britain and Europe despite Muslims forming small minorities in most countries (6.5 percent in Britain in 2021). Muslims as an identity group thus have a higher propensity for violence than many other religious groups in Britain, but it’s still statistically very small and confined to a narrow group of extremists.
Most men, Muslims and Irish nationalists are not acting out their violent tradition so we should be able to criticize those narrower traditions without smearing the entire identity. ‘All men are x’ is as invalid as ‘all Muslims are x’ or ‘all Irish nationalists are x.’ Since the first two are often linked to the left and the third to the right, this calls for people to oppose sweeping generalizations but also acknowledging the virulent nature of certain sub-traditions.
Ironically, this is actually a defense of the validity of stigmatized identities even if they have noxious fringe traditions. I was trying to get people to think outside their favoured identity box (‘men/Muslims/Irish nationalists are not evil’) and be consistent. Points expressed within X’s character limit necessarily strip out extraneous detail and qualification. Still, I think the platform is a valuable tool to advance new ideas - even though subsequent tweets may be required to qualify a point.
Part II Cancel Culture is not Dead
In this section, I ask what my latest experience reveals about the dynamics of cancel culture. The first point is that the original tweet served as a kind of political Rohrschach test, triggering a response from the woke side in the culture war. Almost every response I saw was a highly emotional retort from someone with a clear commitment in their Twitter bio to left-coded causes such as Palestine, LGBT or BLM.
In a high-trust resilient society where the principle of charity obtained, and with a more proportionate approach to race in relation to other categories of disadvantage, there would have been no pile-on. Instead, people would have contested the thesis or asked for points of clarification before jumping in feet first.
It seems the wave was not purely emergent, but required amplification from key influencers and their network. It took off after a tweet from Jonathan ‘gotcha’ Portes, a well-known British cultural-left academic. His stock-in-trade is to take the least charitable interpretation of a set of words (or text clipped out of context) and frame them in a negative light. Though I’ve blocked him for years he somehow manages to keenly follow my output!
Such ‘opprobrium entrepreneurs’, as Cass Sunstein calls them, function a bit like witchfinders in Puritan Massachusetts, triggering a cascade of people accusing a heretic of profaning the sacred. Sure enough, the minions were only too willing to fire each other up. Once the target is identified, it only remains for a follower to turn their brain off and vent 280 characters of hate against the blasphemer. Most of the rabble reacted to the Muslim strand, mindreading nefarious motives into it:
Others took the Irish route, or some combination thereof:
The fact the tweet mainly found favour among emoji-rich radicals meant that its pool of potential support soon flared out, reduced to a dribble within 24 hours. While some tried to get me cancelled by complaining to my university they seem to have forgotten that this hill is not an easy one: the University of Buckingham is far and away Britain’s leading free speech university.
Yet my experience tells me that despite Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Magill and cutbacks to DEI, rumours of the death of woke are greatly exaggerated.
Why? Because its seedbed of sacred values remains intact, ready for radicals to continually nourish their moral self-righteousness. As Shelby Steele, a black American who lived through the Civil Rights era masterfully argued in White Guilt (2008), anti-racism became polite society’s highest taboo in the mid-1960s, an immense source of cultural power for those who could wield it. A charge of racism amounts to ‘social death,’ observes John McWhorter wryly. No wonder woke radicals have a hair-trigger sensitivity for anything that might, no matter how fevered the claim, be squeezed into the ‘racist’ container: perhaps the English countryside or loose ropes found on a walking trail.
While we need a norm against racism, this should be proportional and graduated the way norms against religious, ethnic or class prejudice are. As I argue in my upcoming book Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (published June 6) or, in the US, The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism (May 14), once you make a category sacred, you key into our evolved disgust reflex. The result is ‘no debate’. There are no limits to its application and, like kryptonite, it empowers dishonest actors while laying waste to our classical liberal, truth-based order.