Editor’s note: This is the second article we’ve published recently on the phenomenon of “cancel culture,” which increasingly characterizes liberal, progressive, and left movements in the United States and overseas.
Leftists often see censorship and authoritarianism as hallmarks of conservative, right-wing, and fascist governments and organizations. But throughout history, there is an equally troubling trend of left-wing authoritarianism.
Today, this strain of politics is ascendant, and the use of censorship and violence to curtail political speech has become increasingly accepted and mainstream both among Democratic-party ideologues, media and tech elites, and the professional managerial class, and among college-educated “radical” leftists.
Does the US Left have a “cancel culture” problem? Or is ‘cancel culture’ just a cynical right-wing bogeyman aimed at disparaging leftists, Millennials, and academia?
Perhaps cancel culture is mostly mirage: the social media shadow of American celebrity obsession, distracting us from the overall healthy left culture on the ground?
Maybe left-wing cancel culture is real, but marginal. Just a crazy niche of fringe folks—better to ignore?
Or is there a genuine ‘there’ there—a problem with significant reach and influence—and if so, what does it consist of?
While we’re by no means settled on the term “cancel culture” and remain open to other possible names for ‘it,’[1] experience and investigation over the past decade have led us to the conclusion that, yes, indeed, there is a ‘there’ there: whatever we call it, ‘cancel culture’ indexes a real problem on the Left. And it is no minor matter, of interest only to the ‘cancelled’; it hinders whole sectors of the organized and movement Left—intellectually, socially, morally, and politically.[2]
How might we define this left cancel culture? It is undoubtedly a tall task, and we do not mean to offer here a monolithic or final definition. Nonetheless, for now, we offer this: that cancel culture on the left can be understood as a bundle of distinct yet interlocking methods that mishandleproblems among regular and working people, as if some regular people are—or are always on the verge of becoming—the enemy (and others, their fragile and helpless victims).[3] This blunt projection of demonization (and blanket victimhood) leads to treating differences, complexities, and conflicts that could and should be approached through reasoned discussion and principled struggle instead as melodramatic antagonisms that demand one or another form of coercion—whether by relying on existing institutional power, or the moral panic of ‘mob rule’.
We might grasp cancel culture here as an expression of punitive (or carceral) thinking within our own social movements, whereby the punishment and purge of individuals comes to symbolically substitute for the collective structural and cultural transformations that liberation ultimately requires. In this sense, cancel culture represents a seeping of ruling class methods of punishment and ‘divide and rule’ into the emancipatory movement, but without access to the resources of the ruling apparatus—a fact which makes cancel culture’s maneuverings in some respects even cruder, more erratic, and less discerning than the more sophisticated attacks of established state power. However genuine the concerns that may animate it, cancel culture remains a grossly inadequate salve for real world injuries and actual domination.
Let us be clear, we are not here making a ‘liberal’ argument: We concede that there are antagonisms in the current capitalist-imperialist world system that are so deeply entrenched that they may indeed require the use of force to overcome and transform them. This is, in other words, not a ‘defense’ of the economic and political Bosses who are positioned to force underlings to endure indignity, exploitation, and abuse—and then to deny them access to institutional recourse. But cancel culture trains us to see virtually all social conflicts, even those among our own comrades, allies, and regular people, through this harshly antagonistic lens. And that’s a problem. Leaping to treat even what may be fleeting (or unsubstantiated) offenses as unquestionable mortal injuries, cancel culture can quarantine and ostracize, but can it understand, let alone heal or transform, the underlying problems to which it responds? Can it attract and sustain the kind of broad mass involvement we need if we are ever to win the deep social transformation our times demand?
The list of fallacies below is an attempt to clarify and compile some of the false assumptions and wrong methods—sometimes held consciously, often unconsciously embedded in existing practices and organizations—that enable ‘cancel culture’ (hereafter CC) and more generally perpetuate the marginalization, divisiveness, and even self-destruction of the contemporary Left. While we’ve tried to represent the operative notions here in a way that shows their serious problems—and with a hefty dose of sarcasm—we’ve also tried to do so in good faith, using language not too far from what perpetuators and participants of CC might recognize as their own, even as the ideological undercurrents we bring out for each are seldom brought to the surface so explicitly.
One last note: It could be pointed out that many of the problematic ideas and practices below are themselves symptoms of deeper issues—from the logistical limitations of contemporary left organizations, to the weakening of the labor movement and other forms of progressive politics based in democratic accountability, to the distortions of corporate social media algorithms, to a sense of despair and suspicion that pervades society generally in this age of compound crises, when an emancipatory path forward may seem in doubt.[4] Nonetheless, though the notions enumerated below can indeed be seen as the symptomatic effects of more fundamental causes, we believe that ideas and methods that take hold of the minds of millions can become causes in their own right—and that many of these fallacies have taken on a life of their own.[5]
And so, we present: 21 Fallacies that Fuel Cancel Culture.
1) Optics are more important than Substance.
Worry more about how things look from the outside, and less about what’s happening on the inside—be it a meeting, an organization, an event, a relationship, or an artwork. External appearances are not even ‘external’ anymore, since such optics, with the help of social media, quickly become internal factors as well. A tweet from a private meeting can start a public firestorm that will consume an organization even before said meeting is completed. Whereas it might have once been possible to explore the nuances of complex matters internally, admitting rough edges and testing unorthodox interpretations in private before deciding on public positions or precise language for broader consumption, this line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ has collapsed. Anyone attending a meeting might shave a sharp splinter from the draft party platform and send it flying as a deadly public blow dart in an instant. Therefore, we must now hold every ‘private’ gathering—every meeting or seminar, every moment, each sentence—to the same public optical standard we would use for an official press conference. No word, phrase, or idea that can be decontextualized or excerpted—tik tok-ed or tweeted—to imply something ‘offensive’ or ‘problematic’ should be allowed, even in private. The enforced loss of spontaneity (and honesty) is a small price to play for making sure we aren’t made to look like fools or bigots. Better to strangle internal discussion than to take a public dart in the neck.
2) Engagement equals endorsement; Association is complicity.
To engage someone in public conversation means you are endorsing all their (potentially problematic) ideas or associations, or at least making light of them—even those ideas that are not part of whatever conversation occurs. Thus, an interlocutor must be deemed ‘safe’ of compromising statements or associations prior to such engagement. If you or your organization don’t have the time or resources to research all the ideas and statements of a potentially ‘controversial’ person ahead of time, well, then maybe you should just not bother engaging them at all. After all, merely being associated (even privately) with a person deemed problematic is enough to compromise you. It is thus better to cut ties with problem people than to sustain contact with them, since the influence of association can only pull in one direction: the ‘bad’ one. The idea that your engagement might encourage positive change in the person deemed problematic, or at least help keep that person from further sliding in the problematic direction, is naïve, at best. Worse, the idea that such association might help the rest of us better understand the context or incorrect ideas that gave rise to the problem in the first place insultingly implies we don’t already know enough to pass judgment. In short: it’s just not possible to do something good with someone bad. Cut ‘em loose.
3) Conversations can’t change problematic people; Political opponents can’t be won over.
If a person opposes us now, they’ll most likely oppose us forever. It’s not possible that discussion with ‘problematic’ figures might give the person in question a chance to clarify, correct, contextualize, qualify, or walk back troubling ideas. Bad ideas can’t be deflated or improved through engagement or ideological struggle; they must be de-platformed. It’s not possible—or not worth taking seriously as possibility—that such people could have, even at one and the same time, multiple views, values, interests, priorities, associations, or commitments that conflict with one another, with some pointing towards a better way forward, others holding such progress back, or with some ideas being residual remnants reflecting that person’s history, but not necessarily their future. People don’t change. They are static and self-identical. Disregard that dialectical bullshit about people as constantly BECOMING relative to what they HAVE BEEN and what they MIGHT BE. People just are what they ARE. Those the enemy has persuaded are lost to us forevermore. Say goodbye to your Trumpy uncle.
4) Problematic views and acts flow from malice or monstrosity, not mere error.
Why give a person the benefit of the doubt when you can cast them as your conscious and mortal enemy, a living embodiment of all you seek to oppose and destroy? Forget that quaint notion that we should “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.” It’s best to assume that the do-er of a problematic thing was, at the time of said offense, in possession of all relevant information, the full range of opinion, and had their senses about them, and yet still—even after all of that—pursued this bad idea or act as the one that they still wanted or needed to take. Circumstances don’t mitigate wrongdoing.In the off chance that an offending person was not in sound mind or body at the time of an act in question, well, that’s tough shit: they should have known better than to put themselves in a position where they would be likely to fuck up. If their sources of information, opinion, or logic are flawed, well, that’s their fault too. There is no need to factor where someone has come from into our judgment of them today. Good People don’t make Bad Mistakes, therefore, making an error deemed Bad is proof of being a Bad Person. Talk of mitigation is liberal bullshit that upholds an oppressive order of privilege.
5) People can be reduced to their worst action or idea, without doing them an injustice.
Why assume that something bad someone has said or done was an outlying mistake when it can be seen instead as the expression of their essential being? People’s worst moments express their truest selves. (Indeed, for every shitty thing they’ve done that we’re aware of, there are probably a dozen shittier things still unknown to us—we need to factor in these ‘unknown knowns’ as well.) Further, to call attention to the good work that people have done (or might do in the future) as a matter of contextualizing a misstep is to make light of their shittiness. The aftermath of harm is not a time for ‘balance’ or ‘perspective’—and, let’s face it, these days we are always in the aftermath of harm. The only thing that ought to be discussed once a wrong is reported is that wrong; any other element of a person’s work, character, or history is at best irrelevant. Worse, mentioning the ‘other side’ is insulting and insensitive to those who feel they have been harmed and understandably want ‘justice’. It is fine and just to essentialize those you oppose.
6) The passage of time is irrelevant.
A wrong committed decades ago is just as relevant as one that happened last week. There is no reason to assume that someone who did something shitty years back (be it donning an insensitive Halloween costume or acting like an asshole at a party) has taken time to think about it, or to improve their conduct or philosophy in the interim. Certainly, there is no obligation to investigate whether someone has made steps to improve since those events years ago; it’s perfectly ok to treat them now as if they are the person they were then—or that someone told you they were then, since maybe you weren’t around when whatever went down went down. Since our movement seldom seeks to put people in actual prison—that would mean cooperating with the police state—formal sentencing never occurs…but also must never end. People can and should be banished and branded for life, regardless of what they have done to improve themselves or address the relevant issues. We must assume the worst if we are to keep our spaces safe. People don’t change, so there’s no need to give them a chance to. Debts to victims or to society can never be repaid. But a culture of permanent excommunication will prevent harmful future behavior and help past victims heal.
7) A threat to ideological comfort is a threat to safety.
Being subjected to challenging, provocative, offensive, or incorrect ideas puts the person hearing them in jeopardy. Intellectual discomfort causes harm. Therefore, it is ok—even imperative—to exert prior restraint, up to and including prohibition and exclusion of discomfiting ideas or words (or the people seen as likely to express them). People have a right not to be offended—not just a right to respond reasonably to what offends. Moments of intellectual provocation are not ‘teachable moments’; they are triggers for trauma. Making people think too hard about difficult subjects becomes a kind of violence. In particular, people’s ideas about their own perceived identity or oppression must not be challenged. People from historically oppressed groups especially cannot and ought not be subjected to arguments or debates about such topics, in print or in-person, regardless of the merit or content of the criticism expressed. Ideas that people have grown attached to should be viewed as parts of their physical or spiritual being. For someone to abstract and criticize said ideas—even for purposes of temporary analysis—amounts to a kind of ‘attack.’ Therefore, it is the job of good ‘allies’ to protect oppressed or traumatized people, not only from clear and present physical or institutional attacks, but from intellectual or ‘existential’ ones as well, like, say, someone asking a critical question about a concept or term with which they presently identify. Most certainly, it’s not possible for someone outside of this social group to offer helpful insight on matters pertaining to that group’s current situation, no matter how much genuine study or listening on the topic they’ve done. Immediate experience trumps outside knowledge, period. (Never mind that what counts as ‘experience’ may be at least in part the product of the ideological lenses through which a person has been taught to look.) A corollary: oppressed groups are monolithic, without significant ideological, intellectual, political, or methodological conflicts withintheir own ranks. So, it’s ok for one spokesperson of said group to give voice to the entire group’s will or interest. Anyone who contradicts such a spokesperson—especially if they do not personally belong to the category in question—is disrespecting or harming the group and needs to shut the fuck up.
8) Complicated things (and people) are compromised and not worth engaging.
How can we learn from people or things (including artworks) that are themselves ‘problematic’? Why not just move on and replace the shitty with something safer? Sure, there may be artworks (or people) that now stand for something offensive but have been deemed ‘brilliant’ in the past. But what does it say about you if you overlook the offensiveness in favor of the brilliance by promoting such content? Are you saying that aesthetic beauty or intellectual rigor or historical influence is more important than keeping our spaces safe and inclusive? How can we reduce the influence of problematic works or people if we keep giving them airtime? If someone is seen to be seriously wrong on 1 out of 10 issues, then their insight on the other 9 things is compromised, if not altogether invalidated by their hypocrisy. Hearing them out on those other 9 issues would only be providing cover for the problematic 10th. You can’t just bracket off the bad parts; they bleed into everything. The bad gobbles up the good. It’s thus not conceivable that a person or group with 9 incorrect ideas might nonetheless have something crucial to teach us regarding the 10th. Wokeness comes in batches—no sense distinguishing all these different aspects. As a corollary, wherever possible, people should declare themselves with clear and easy-to-read labels and signs. If the expressions of such a person appears to be complicated, or not immediately ‘clear’ and on the ‘correct’ side in a way that can fit into, say, a series of rapid-fire tweets, then that person bears the responsibility for any confusion that results. The responsibility certainly does not fall on the viewer or reader to investigate such complexities. Who has time to do close readings these days?
9)To entertain a ‘problematic’ joke or cultural product is never innocent.
Laugh at impure humor and you open your belly to the abyss. To listen to a comedian or other cultural content creator who is pushing values deemed bad is to risk being influenced by that content—how can one be exposed to bad content and not be marked? Even worse, it is to give the impression to those who have already made up their mind about the comedian or cultural producer that you have not made up yourmind. Such indecisiveness on your part throws the settled judgements of the offended into doubt—an existential insult. After all, if you trusted and believed in them properly then why couldn’t you take their word for it? Why did you need to go and explore it for yourself? What, do you think that you’re smarter than the rest of us? That your curiosity or ‘complicated’ enjoyment is more important than other people’s right to have their grief-laden verdicts accepted without question? The death of comedy and entertainment is a small price to pay to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt.
10)Every “micro”-aggression is just the toxic tip of a macro-iceberg.
There are no innocent errors, just instances that have yet to be analyzed and traced down to the deeper danger beneath. The difference between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ aggressions is a microscope; little annoyances or snubs are made of the same stuff as life-threatening mortal violations. It is thus correct to react to a minor offense as if it were a major one—especially if a patternof minor problems has been alleged. In the latter case, one need not give the offender a chance to correct their behavior before bringing out the big guns: they already have a ‘history of misbehavior,’ after all, and must be condemned for it. Their chance for rectification and improvement has passed (even if this is the first time we’ve communicated our concerns to them). The fact that existing law makes qualitative distinctions between different categories of acts—and that the alleged behavior may not have crossed any legal line—is yet more proof that the Law is a relic of an oppressive order that doesn’t take oppressed people’s wounds seriously. By amplifying and harshly punishing examples of even low-level alleged misbehavior, we amplify the safety of our special spaces (at least for all who have not been flayed alive for past missteps). Fuck fine distinctions and fuck due process.
11)The moral imperative is to eliminate (what might be) evil, even if it means wrecking good work.
Political progress is to be understood not as a complex positive project of building something Good from the mixed materials that now exist, but rather, negatively, as the elimination or exposure of those elements deemed Evil. Better a pure Nothing than a compromised Something. Radical political intervention is best understood as a solvent to burn away the bad rather than as an adhesive or mixing agent that holds things together so that the better can be built. Isn’t it best to purify oneself and others of sympathy for the devil rather than to burden one’s brain or one’s organization with the messiness of sifting through more mixed elements? Tear that shit down. We’ll worry about building things later (maybe).
12) If we deprive badness of a platform, it will lose its platform elsewhere, too.
If we can prevent bad or backward ideas from getting a hearing in ‘progressive’ or ‘left’ platforms, this will prevent their circulation elsewhere. We can meaningfully reduce the circulation and impact of ideas in the ‘mainstream’ by denying them the ‘legitimacy’ provided by left spaces and engagement, however small and isolated the Left may be at present. The possibility that such an approach might rather enable the Left’s own blindness and disconnection from the actual state of ‘controversial’ debates, and thus perpetuate or expand our isolation from people who are already influenced by that ‘mainstream,’ is a secondary or tertiary concern. The further possibility that spending time with someone or something deemed objectionable might actually help us better relate to our neighbor or coworker or family member who has also been exposed to that person or thing, is swallowed up by the danger that such exposure will merely drag us into being ‘like them,’ or else give comfort to the enemy. The related likelihood, that I can only criticize something accurately if I know the object of critique intimately, is eclipsed by the danger that, in giving stuff deemed bad such close attention, you impart the impression that you secretly or not-so-secretly actually like that garbage. Can’t have that. Sure, right now the millions of people watching so-and-so’s podcast or cable show may not be waiting for our permission to do so—or even know that we exist!—but unless we model what a principled refusal to look or listen looks like, how will said millions ever learn to do likewise? If enough of us just close our eyes and block our ears really tight then it will almost be like the big bad wolf outside the door isn’t there anymore.
13) We can win social change without winning over the millions who currently disagree with us.
After all, isn’t righteousness on our side? Aren’t we fighting for the good of the entire planet? Who needs to win over the conservative hicks (or centrist fence-sitters) in a backward country like this one? Or heck, even in our own households, communities, or classrooms? It’s not like revolutions require super-majorities, do they? Can’t a militant minority do the job? It’s not like radical change means you need to win masses of people over.Those who disagree with us are probably stupid and hopeless. (The masses, alas, turned out to be asses.) Best to protect our spaces from such “deplorables.” Wouldn’t building an expanded base end up watering down the purity of our correct politics anyway? Why take the risk that our ever-so-precious conversation or community could be mired with their mess?
14) ‘Digging in’ in the face of CC critique is proof of privileged arrogance and domination.
If someone refuses to give in to criticism and public pressure to retract or apologize, no matter how small the issue was to begin with, their resistance to recanting itself reveals a bigger issue, which may require more extreme response. In particular, for a person associated with a historically dominant group to refuse to admit the validity of criticisms coming from someone associated with a historically dominated group is to engage in an arrogant abuse of privilege, regardless of the merits of the criticism expressed. Such resistance suggests that the refuser disrespects not just their immediate critic, but the group that critic is speaking for and the entire historical experience of collective oppression that has led up to this point. Someone who refuses to give in to group pressure could not possibly be a person committed to the facts as they understand them, nor could they be expressing honest concerns out of their love for the cause; they are merely providing new evidence of how insensitive and domineering they are, a fact which then in turn pretty much settles the question of whether or not they were actually guilty of the precipitating offense in the first place (as if it were in doubt!). Although there may not have been clear evidence for that first catalyzing event (ok, now we’ll admit it!), the evidence we gather from the accused’s resistance itself is retroactive, since resistance to the group itself proves that the person is the type to commit those other egregious errors as well. (Never mind that the extreme group response itself may be what pushed the targeted person to double-down in self-defense in the first place.) Corollary: Even a false accusation can be of use; it helps us see who is willing to go along with the group, and who is not. If someone ‘digs in’ and disputes the nature a ‘minor’ offense, they are merely revealing that the problem goes deeper, as we predicted. A micro-violator who is stubborn about their problematic millimeter might as well be demanding our most precious mile.
15) The open exchange of ideas is not to be trusted.
“Free speech” is an oppressive concept, a chimera that elides the actual-existing power dynamics that rule our world. Face it: beneath every invocation of “freedom” is the reality of power. Considering the compromised nature of discourse, then, it’s preferable to use force to shut down purveyors of bad ideas, if we can, rather than to use reason, argument, or evidence to refute the ideas themselves. Why debate when you can de-platform! The fewer people are exposed to those bad ideas, the better. Let’s be honest: We don’t trust people to sort truth from lies, even with our help. And if we’re really being honest, we’re not sure we can unpack and criticize the specific ideas of our enemies effectively anymore, anyway, since we’ve pretty much limited our intake of them to second-hand snippets and soundbites for years. (Not everyone has the luxury of spending endless hours in the library, dude.) Therefore, we’re justified shutting down misleaders in advance to protect the herd. Why initiate or allow complex debate and discussion that is just likely to confuse people? Or even worse, to lead our group to lose its clarity, unity, and focus? If our organization admitted that it didn’t yet have a clear, single, united view on something important, well, wouldn’t that make us seem indecisive and weak? How can we be the vanguard of the revolution if we admit we’re still thinking things through? Airing important differences aloud impairs our movement.
16) Opinion and rumor about certain things must be accepted as fact.
The statement of a strongly held feeling about another’s wretchedness, even if lacking substantiation, can be enough to decide the truth of a matter—at least for now. And since there is no obligation on the rest of us to investigate said ‘truth of the matter’ –since we’re all busy and life is hard, and investigations are difficult, and our activist organizations don’t have the resources of the state to call upon—it’s fine to let such strongly stated assertions stand as accepted truth…pretty much indefinitely. Furthermore, it’s improper to point out that a second-hand (or third- or fourth-hand) account is not a first-hand one. This is not the time to distinguish between hearsay and solid evidence! Similarly, it’s not ok to ask for evidence or substantiation in the wake of an unproven claim on a sensitive topic. What’s wrong with you, do you not believe INSERT SPECIAL CATEGORY OF PERSON HERE? It’s better to uncritically accept and quickly act upon serious but unsubstantiated rumor than to subject oneself or one’s organization to the messiness, discomfort, uncertainty, or complexity of pursuing an actual investigation.
17)Accusers (even third-party ones) are always reliable—so due process need not apply.
It’s not necessary to hear ‘both sides;’ when we’re dealing with an iteration of systemic oppression, one side is more than enough. Aggrieved people don’t lie, dissemble, or exaggerate. In fact, the experience of being aggrieved necessarily improves moral character. All that violence and systemic injustice and desperation a person may have been exposed to doesn’t leave any compromising psychic wounds. Aggrievement and oppression, however, do make people more vulnerable to harm, especially when others doubt or question their honesty or reliability. Thus, denying aggrieved people the fullness of human complexity, including the potential to be dishonest or just confused, is less bad than making it seem like you don’t take their every word for gospel. It follows that accusers or allegers need not—indeed, shouldnot—be made to go on the record in detail. (We must ‘believe survivors,’ yes, but without requiring them to be specific about what exactly we’re being asked to believe.) It goes without saying that the accused need not have the right to confront their accusers, or even to know the specifics of what they are being accused of. (Habeas corpus is so 20th century and so ‘bourgeois state-y’—forget that liberal crap about it being a product of historical struggles against state repression.) It’s more important to protect the anonymity of accusers, and even 3rd or 4thhand rumor-ists and gossips, than it is to provide the accused a fair chance to address what’s been said about them. Transparency just doesn’t apply to those who circulate charges—that would put them at risk, since, after all, we must assume that all who have been alleged to have caused harm in the past are out to perpetrate even greater harm in the future. The sheer possibility of retaliation, which can never be fully ruled out, means that we must not demand accountability from accusers, or from those who speak in their name. Thus, it’s perfectly ok to weaponize defamatory gossip behind the back of the accused, to work to exclude them from spaces (including online ones), or even to go after their livelihoods, rather than to try and clear things up through more direct two-way communication. Further, since we cannot expect the actual victim to take on the burden of speaking up, anyone speaking in their name or on their unconfirmed behalf must be treated with all the deference owed to the actual alleged victim. The fact that some who speak in the victim’s name may not be authorized to do so and may even be weaponizing the situation for their own ends is outweighed by our belief that Excommunicating Perpetrators objectively helps Victims In General to heal and feel safe. Forget the lessons of the ‘telephone game’ we learned in kindergarten; second- or third- or fourth-hand allegers should be treated as if they are giving reliable first-hand accounts. There are no misunderstandings, only survivors and perpetrators: Which side are you on?
18) Exaggeration in the cause of social justice is necessary.
Emotional amplification, public dramatization, or even deliberate exaggeration is justified in cases where someone is speaking out against injustice or alleged wrongdoing. Feelings of aggrievement are to be validated, not questioned or fact checked. The more passionate someone is in denunciation, the more trustworthy they become. No Investigation? No Problem! Amplifying what might have occurred is more important than figuring out what actually did. (Never mind that mounting evidence shows that mental health problems in this country are at an all-time high. And never mind that COINTELPRO in the 60s and 70s routinely organized campaigns of false accusation to wreck radical organizations and defame left leaders.) Let’s face it: in these crazy media days, one needs a bullhorn to break through the noise, a sledgehammer to knock down the wall of indifference. Nuanced accounts of complex interactions won’t cut it. We need to Go Big to grab people’s attention and make things stick. Therefore, rounding up the rhetoric regarding particulars is not only permissible; it is necessary. We must cherry-pick the statistics and images that best fit our worldview, even if they bestow a misleading picture of the whole: how else to dramatize the essence of evil and get people caring about a system of oppression whose effects are often diffuse, subtle, and uneven? Sure, our exaggerations may lead to the proliferation of factual inaccuracies in the short term—maybe even a simplistic sense of the overall situation—but, in the long term, the heat and attention created by our maximalist presentation will lead to more people getting involved, therefore illuminating other abuses elsewhere. (Those who burn out on the melodramatic framing weren’t really committed to the cause in the first place.) Whatever harm is done to people who are tarnished, indeed slandered and defamed, by broadcast falsehoods in the process, is not our concern. It will be worth it in the long run. Can the harm done to an accused wrong-doer ever really be compared to that of the harm-sufferer, even if the harm in question remains unsubstantiated? In contrast to the longstanding judicial principle that “Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent be convicted,” we affirm that “Better 10 men ruined by false accusations than one victim be doubted.” (No men in this society are “innocent,” anyway.)
19)Vengeance arcs toward justice.
Sure, we might be a little rough or excessive sometimes, but the arc of retaliation bends towards righteousness. (Or at least towards what feels righteous.) When in history have regular people’s urge to vengeance led them astray? It’s wrong to tell those who are feeling the need to strike back or destroy that they should channel that rage in a more constructive, reasonable, strategic, or fair manner. That’s tone-policing. Better to encourage righteous rage and fan the flames, wherever they lead. Tailing spontaneity and immediate emotion is the way of the future: as evidenced by what goes viral on our corporate-owned social media feeds. In times of big changes and sweeping historical crisis, it’s bourgeois and oppressive to be worried about the fate of just one individual (or other individuals who happen to be connected personally to that one individual). If we need to go a bit overboard in punishing a particular person in order to send a message to others and make our group’s militant morality absolutely clear, so be it. We were never going to win over everyone anyways. And you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Individuals are disposable.
20) Hyper-sensitizing individuals will lead to collective liberation.
In the struggle to radically uproot vast systems of oppression, we prioritize tenderizing individuals, one by one. If some people must be broken like eggs, others must be taught to think of themselves as fragile eggshells. Our goal is to make as many people as we can as sensitive as possible to the myriad offenses that exist in the world today—especially those ‘small’ offenses they experience directly, at the hands of other regular individuals on a day-to-day basis or on social media. As ‘micro’ offenses rather than macro- ones—papercuts not limb loss, bad word choices more than cluster bombs—such offenses may not be immediately obvious. Training people to see how small affronts and slights are actually BIG ones is thus crucial work, much more important than training people to work through the smaller stuff charitably, in light of the truly humongous threats all poor and working people now face. Similarly, training people to focus primarily on the offenses that affect them personally is more important than encouraging them to struggle in solidarity against the oppression of others, let alone spending time studying more abstract things like History or Social Theory that may take them away from their immediate self-interests. Focusing on other people’s oppression leads to ‘savior’ complexes, but teaching people to amplify all the many small slights they themselves experience personally: that’s the road to liberation. Each molehill, when inspected properly, reveals a mountain. Who is to say that the Big Crises we all share are more important than the millions of tiny ones that divide us and make us unique?
21) Fuck it, let’s be honest: Radical change ain’t happening in the USA (unless built upon its smoldering ashes).
Contrary to our at times ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, we don’t really feel it is possible to change this country in a deep or transformative way. So, let’s just enjoy our moral superiority, our exclusive ‘movement’ spaces, and our curated media feed until the ship goes down or the smoke of the last forest fire consumes us. In the meantime, the best we can probably do is kneecap every ‘privileged’ or ‘problematic’ person, project, or institution we can reach. Sadly, the real big oppressors—the Dick Cheneys of the world—are generally protected behind bunkers of money and armed security: the best we can do is to take aim at whatever dick we can reach. All we’re really good for, here and now, is to fuck this bad shit up, while keeping enclaves of righteousness alive—maybe for after the fires burn out and we re-emerge from this cave. Most Americans are so complicit (settler colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, etc.) that they can’t really be part of any positive solution, anyways. So, if we end up tearing down our former comrades and driving away potential recruits or allies…No. Big. Deal. (Never mind the fact that capitalism is increasingly wrecking their lives and futures, too.) Let’s be clear: We didn’t start this fire. So, is it really fair to expect us to take responsibility for putting it out? Such a responsibility is a burden that oppressed and aggrieved people especially should not have to bear (even if there is no one else to bear it). Who the fuck are you to suggest otherwise?
IN CONCLUSION
‘Cancel culture’ teaches its adherents to focus on weaknesses of people in order to tear down their strengths, rather than uniting with people’s strengths to overcome those weaknesses, in light of the common threats we all face. It trains people in suspicion, fear, hyper-sensitivity, and overreaction, and thrives on decontextualization and sensationalism. It teaches people to weaponize vulnerabilities and to instrumentalize others as means to an end, rather than treating them as human ends in themselves. It traffics in moral posturing more than political strategy, expressing a burning impatience with wrongdoing in the world—this is its positive aspect—but too-often directing that impatience against regular people, against comrades, and often against intellectual discussion or due process itself: all things we need if we are to change the world for the better. Unable to strike meaningfully at the heights of the system, CC tends towards ‘horizontal violence,’ with callous disregard for those it harms or the work it wrecks.
To be sure, cancel culture did not come out of nowhere. It is inseparable from the habits encouraged and enabled by corporate social media: Hasty generalization, reduction of complexity, public virtue signaling, echo chambers discouraging dissent, the fear of false ‘friends,’ and the rapid dissemination of unreliable information are all key features of its function. It takes advantage of the impunity of the online troll and the connectivity of social networks to pursue all-spectrum bullying. At the same time, CC reflects the sad sobering reality that in the contemporary USA, the ‘muck of the ages,’ the impurities and damage of capitalism, empire, male-domination, racism, narrow individualism, etc. have indeed marked us all, in one way or another. But rather than finding in this common state of imperfection a basis for humility, compassion, and mutual improvement, CC seizes upon the faults of others as if those who have strayed thereby become irredeemable monsters—infiltrators to be purged, punished, or eliminated from pristine existing spaces. Faced with a complex world of developing human beings, always operating in conditions not entirely of their own choosing, cancel culture insists on Angels and Demons. It thereby discourages genuine openness, intimacy, trust, friendship and understanding, while silencing those who don’t abide its wild swings of judgment.
As we’ve seen above, cancel culture traffics in guilt by association, expresses cynicism about people & their potential to change, and embodies an anti-intellectualism mired in narrow identitarianism, as well as deeply problematic notions of evidence & epistemology. It also evinces a profound lack of strategy, for which it substitutes performative moral panic and self-righteousness. At times, to be sure, cancel culture is instrumentalized deliberately to forward individual careers, or to deliberately destroy movement-organizations, whether by those with personal vendettas or in the employ of the enemy state (see COINTELPRO). Such deliberately destructive actors, however, could not succeed without the help of many well-intentioned people, who, nonetheless, tacitly enable cancel culture’s destructive practices. Even as, on some level, they may know better.
By helping to surface left cancel culture’s fallacious methods here, we hope to contribute to an increasingly conscious and collective process of thinking through and beyond the present impasse. Together we can and must develop the theory, the practice, and the sustaining infrastructure that can move beyond cancel culture, re-ground left movements and organizations, and thereby give us a fighting chance to build the culture of respect, debate, and comradeship we will surely need for the struggles to come. We need movements that can build effective resistance to the current unjust and unsustainable world system, that can shepherd broad popular forces capable of defeating the ruling-class agenda, that can help people to grasp the world’s problems in their genuine complexity, and that can nurture into existence a new world that will be more reasonable, just, and free than the one we have now.
In that spirit, the Red Goat Collective welcomes all manner of thoughtful responses to this polemic, at the email address below (or elsewhere). We also welcome stories of how ‘cancel culture’ has played out in readers’ own circles, as well as resources and reflections to help our movements and organizations develop alternative methods for dealing with the challenges we face. Thank you for reading. And for continuing the discussion.
Notes.
1) Other candidates include: culture of disposability, culture of excommunication, carceral culture, leftist purge culture, call-out culture, the neoliberal personalization of politics, left authoritarianism, cannibal leftism, culture of shame or disgrace, culture of suspicion, sectarianism, “woke” mob rule, moral panic, culture of escalation, de-platform culture, the proverbial “circular firing squad,” and good ol’ fashioned Calvinist Puritanism.
It also should be said that many of the ideas examined below can be found in some form on the Right (or the Liberal-Center) as well. (See for instance the current reactionary campaigns to keep children ‘safe’ from “Critical Race Theory,” as well as the bipartisan Cold War history of anti-communist blacklisting.) To those who would dismiss our critique here as being ‘one-sided’ for bypassing the ’real threat’ from the Right, we point out the following: while some (but not all) the ideas criticized below may be found on the Right (or in the Center), those bad ideas are largely compatible with the Right and Center goals of maintaining or deepening the current unjust social order. Such ideas clash, however, with the Left’s historic mission of universal emancipation and global human flourishing; we thus direct our critique where prevalent ideas and practices stand in the way of our ostensible goals. We would further add that such obsessive fears of the Right, however understandable, at times work to suppress critical discussion on the Left about some of the fallacious methods we examine below—as if to engage in serious self-critique within our movements would be to give quarter or credence to right-wing attacks, rather than a way of inoculating against them. ↑
3) We should note here at the outset that we are thus notprimarily concerned with the ‘cancelling’ of those who truly do sit atop oppressive hierarchies, and who use the power and privilege of their position to take abusive advantage of those who have no choice but to suffer their domination. We are instead mainly concerned with the way in which methods that might be appropriate to conditions of truly systemic oppression and desperation—where people have next to no other options, where the stakes of inaction are high, and where the structurally exploitative commitments of the offenders are unapologetic and clear—have been taken up against our fellow working-class people, middle-class comrades, movement leaders and allies. Taken up: as if the things that divide us, despite our roughly common class position, are just as incommensurable and beyond reasoned resolution as those that stand between us and imperialist-capitalist class elites. Taken up: as if we could ever have a chance of overthrowing our true ruling-class enemies and transforming current oppressive social conditions, without learning somehow to live, grow, work, and struggle alongside other roughly regular people, people with whom we will undoubtedly have all manner of disagreements—some of them serious—but whose common interests and concerns nonetheless remain our best leverage for realizing serious social change of this world. ↑
4) Arguably, the entire phenomenon is shaped (albeit unconsciously in some cases) by the verdict that universal liberation, popular transformation, and social revolution beyond capitalism and its structuring inequalities are no longer possible. With the horizon of revolutionary abundance thus ruled out, all that remains for such a ‘Left’ are fights for small reforms, coupled with rhetorically inflated yet imaginatively impoverished, often inward-looking, competitive clashes over the scarce discursive space and social resources still allowed us by our capitalist overlords. ↑
5) Readers seeking a straightforward set of “alternative” methods or substitute approaches to the problems that ‘cancel culture’ mishandles will not find such a positive guidebook here, though we believe that better ways of handling genuine movement challenges are embedded throughout the critique. We certainly welcome the process of creating such alternative and improved methods in the days to come. In the meantime, we believe that clearly identifying, exploring, and establishing the validity of criticizing these problematic ideas and practices publicly and forcefully can be a key step in building the intellectual and social space within which new and better organizational and cultural approaches can incubate. The process of developing new methods of work must, in the end, be a collective and inclusive endeavor. (One such archive of methods is the work of Mariame Kaba, compiled in her 2021 book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice.
Editor’s note: Civilizations are defined by the growth of cities, vast acreages of agriculture, and hierarchical social systems—and after creating short term surpluses of energy and wealth at the expense of sustainability, they inevitably collapse.
Today, we live in the first global civilization. The harnessing of fossil fuels has brought unimaginable power, but also terrible destructiveness. No technological innovation or social organization will be a simple silver bullet to solve these issues.
Nevertheless, people around the world continue to experiment with alternative social arrangements. One is permaculture, which is often reduced to “gardening” but is actually a systems-thinking approach for deliberately designing human settlements, societies, and subsistence economies for sustainability and justice. In this era, systems-thinking around sustainability inevitably includes strategy and action to defend the planet, in addition to building alternative ways of living.
In this piece, Jennifer Murnan argues that permaculture practitioners, who often becomes insular “lifeboaters” or “survivalists,” should link their work to political resistance movements working to dismantle industrial civilization before it’s too late.
Currently, permaculture operates in the realm of bright green environmental activism and adherents seemingly believe that the current culture can be transformed. Why should permaculturalists choose to align themselves with the deep green environmentalists that support dismantling civilization?
It’s all about deep abiding love for the truth that requires brave resistance to untruth. It’s about following that love down the path of truth. That’s what resistance in the form of permaculture is. That’s what the allure of permaculture, a permanent, sustainable culture, is for me.
We are animals, terrestrial animals, whose primary needs are for clean water to drink, fresh air to breathe, healthy food to eat, and the security of community and relationship with each other and our fellow living creatures. Life for us is totally dependent on the health of the earth and our kin, human and non human. All that we create must serve this fundamental truth.
The Permaculture movement has always run counter to the beliefs and principles of global civilization. It views nature as a partner, a teacher, and a guide whom we honor and are completely dependent on. This is completely contrary to the cultural view of western civilization; that the natural world is here to serve us, to be used and abused at will, and that this abuse is justifiable.
Permaculture practice, by definition, is an attempt to depart from the model of exploitation and importation of resources necessitated by civilization. To live permanently in one place is the antithesis of the pattern exhibited repeatedly by civilizations. Civilizations cannot live in place. They violently import and exploit human and natural resources, exhaust their ecosystems, experience population overshoot, and collapse leaving an impoverished land base in their wake. Western industrial civilization is currently playing this scenario out on a global scale. Permaculture not only cannot exist within the confines of civilization, it also cannot coexist with a civilization that is devouring the world. It is neither ethical nor practical on the part of permaculturalists to attempt to do so.
Another reason lies in the common visions of the primacy of the earth shared by deep green and permaculture activists. The first ethic in permaculture is ’Care for the Earth’. Without this basis, the second and third ethics, ’Care for people’, and ‘Redistribute surplus to one’s needs’, are impossible. Healthy organisms produce a surplus to feed and enrich the ecosystem in which they exist. Simply put, there is no health unless Earth is cared for first.
“The Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything.”
— Derrick Jensen Endgame
There are attitudes shared by Permaculture and the Deep Green movement. Permaculturalists believe in working with nature and not against it. Fostering a respect for all life is inherent in permaculture practice. Valuing people and their skills creates more diversity, creativity and productivity in permaculture and deep green communities. Alignment between Deep Green and the Permaculture movements is especially apparent in two permaculture design principles.
Seeking to preserve, regenerate and extend all natural and traditional permanent landscapes is a goal of both communities. Preserving and increasing biodiversity of all types is recognized as beingessential for survival by both Deep Greens and Permaculturalists.
A primary reason for permaculture to become part of a culture of resistance is that permaculture’s two guiding principles logically mandate dismantling civilization. The precautionary principle states that we should take seriously and act on any serious or destructive diagnosis unless it is proven erroneous.
Civilization has proven itself to be destructive to ecosystems since its inception. Western industrial civilization is causing the wholesale destruction of every ecosystem on Earth.
Practicing permaculture individually can be construed to be a revolutionary act, capable of saving the planet. But individual acts can’t possibly do the trick. Like any other liberal act, it fails to recognize the systems that are destroying the planet and confront them. The most elegant and nurturing permaculture garden will not stop the operation of a single coal fired plant or deep sea oil drilling or fracking or the destruction of a rain forest.
“The dominant culture eats entire biomes. No, that is too generous, because eatingimplies a natural biological relationship; This culture doesn’t just consume ecosystems, it obliterates them, it murders them, one after another. This culture is an ecological serial killer, and it’s long past time we recognize the pattern.”
— Aric McBay
A large scale and effective response to this destruction is necessary. The tactics of the environmental movement up to this point have been insufficient. We are losing. It is time to change our strategy. Therefore, the Deep Green movement is advocating for all tactics to be considered to stop the murder of the Earth.This includes, but is not limited to, practicing permaculture, legislation, legal action, civil-disobedience, and industrial sabotage.
There are problems with holding the permaculture movement as the sole solution to global destruction. While transitioning to sustainability in our personal lives is important, even more important is confronting and dismantling the oppressive systems of power that promote unsustainability, exploitation, and injustice on a global scale. In fact, if these systems are left in place, the gains made by the practice of permaculture will be washed away in civilization’s tidal wave of destruction.
“Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral and stupid. Sustainability, morality and intelligence (as well as justice) require the dismantling of any such economic or social system or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.”
— Derrick Jensen
One of the necessary steps to restoring our relationships with each other and our planet is dismantling the current destructive systems of power through organized political resistance. We are in global ecological crisis, and the love and resistance inherent in permaculture can and frequently does ally with the victims of oppression, support and increase the health of natural systems, work to support and reclaim indigenous knowledge and greater than human wisdom and teaching.
The second guiding principle of permaculture, ‘intergenerational equity’, also necessitates immediate action in response to the destructive force of civilization.This principle states that future generations have the same rights as we do to food, clean air, water, and resources. This statement applies to all humans and non-humans equally. Daily, entire species are being eliminated from this planet as result of the activities of industrial civilization. ‘Intergenerational equity’ for them has ceased to exist and every day this destruction continues more species go extinct. Allowing this to continue is unconscionable.
Permaculture is based on close observation of the natural world, and I believe it can only realize its full potential in a human community that acknowledges the natural laws of its land base as primary. Practicing permaculture in any context other than this necessitates subverting our principles and betraying everything that nurtures and sustains us, all that is sacred, our living earth. We can only truly belong in a culture of resistance, and in communities of resistance.
Both permaculturalists and deep greens know that the earth is everything, that there is no greater good than this planet, than life itself. We owe her everything and without her, we die.
“The earth is our mother. We all come from our mother and to her we shall return. We are of the earth and it is absurd to imagine that we can “own” it, even in small pieces.
And yet the earth has been divvied up as private property. Property is a legal concept, a cultural production and not an intrinsic quality of land. Notions of what can be privatized seem to be infinitely expansive: land is privatized; seeds and genes are privatized; and even water is privatized.”
— Sandor Ellix Katz The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved
It is insane to “own” the land, the water, the air, yet this culture’s laws support and enforce that delusion. We design systems within boundaries and fail to challenge those boundaries, so our designs never truly integrate with their ecosystem, are defenseless against the onslaught of subsurface mineral rights which supersede surface rights and the resultant mining operations, the privatization and theft of water from the natural watershed that nourish the land, and rigidly enforced illusion of individual ownership over the concept of collective responsibility.
One of the necessary steps to restoring our relationships with each other and our planet is dismantling the current destructive systems of power through organized political resistance. We are in global ecological crisis, and the love and resistance inherent in permaculture can and frequently does ally with the victims of oppression, support and increase the health of natural systems, work to support and reclaim indigenous knowledge and greater than human wisdom and teaching.
This is it; we need each other, everyone, every tactic we can muster in defense of the earth.We have never been able to afford civilization.
“The task of an activist is not to navigate around systems of oppression with as much personal integrity as possible. It’s to bring those systems down.”
Editor’s note: Collapse is not just coming; it is already here. Wildlife populations are collapsing, from oceanic fish to birds to amphibians to plankton. The climate system is breaking down. Glaciers and ice sheets are collapsing. Dead zones are proliferating in the ocean. People in wealthy nations are only insulated from these realities because of massive energy inputs—mostly from fossil fuels.
These are predictable results. An unsustainable culture will destroy the planet, and then it will collapse. Each day, more forest is logged, more pollution emitted, and more water poisoned. It is a tautology, therefore, that the sooner collapse happens, the more of the natural world will remain.
Predictions of societal collapse have been made for decades, and while specifics often turn out to be wrong, the general trends are undeniable. Today’s article looks back at “Limits to Growth,” one of the first such studies.
Sometime in the 1960’s a group of prominent businessmen in Europe decided it was time to face up to the contradiction that lies at the heart of mode n capitalism: it is a system based on infinite growth in a world with finite limits to growth: in input (resources, including food), throughput (population), output (pollution), and a likely collapse if any one of these limits is exceeded. In 1968 they created an organization called the Club of Rom e , the task of which w as to examine what the prime leader of the group, veteran Italian businessman Aurelio Peccei, described quaintly in his 1970 book, The Predicament of Mankind: Quest for Structured Response to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties.
Fifty years ago this spring the Club published a book called The Limits to Growth, based on a study using complex computer models by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology led by Donnella Meadows and her husband Dennis, with a couple of MIT graduate students. It used advanced computers to chart out different scenarios, including one in which nothing is done and we continue heedless growth. Its conclusion was stark and simple:
If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity, causing “overshoot and collapse” with a tipping point around 2020-30.
The book was a worldwide best-seller, but its conclusions were widely challenged and, in centers of political and economic power, mostly ignored. Growth is, after all, the lifeblood and raison d’etre of capitalism and the idea that there should be limits to it was so repugnant as to be essentially incomprehensible. A lot of people are making a lot of money, and a very few a very lot, so what would be the point in imagining that there would ever be an end to it?
And so the whole point of the Club of Rome’s efforts was shunted aside. It had wanted people to start rethinking the assumptions of capitalism, questioning where untrammeled growth was taking us, and reflect upon the new kind of world that computer technology with its immense (and basically uncontrolled) power was leading us to. And so capitalism became global capitalism, and then added computer capitalism and internet capitalism, and it continued to grow exponentially with no thoughts whatsoever to limits. It seemed as if there were something inherent in the computerized culture that demanded the growth-lovers would win out over the limits-warners.
A second study in 2000 confirmed that the original analysis found that nothing in the original thirty years earlier could be invalidated. “To the contrary,” said international banker Matthew Simmons, “the chilling warnings of how powerful exponential growth can be are right on track.” Only four years later the Meadows themselves came out with “The 30-Year Update,” holding that the original may have overemphasized resource depletion (fearing a coming “peak oil”) but underplayed pollution and the impact of greenhouse gasses, and nothing had been done on our path to overshoot. The growthists still ignored it and added cellphone capitalism and central bank appeasement into the mix in such a way that democratic control or restraint proved impossible.
A fourth study came in 2014 at the end of the Great Recession from University of Melbourne scholar Graham Turner who came to the conclusion that resource depletion, overpopulation, economic decline, industrial slowdown, and environmental collapse were following almost exactly the lines of the 1972 forecast—and leading straight to “overshoot and collapse” in 2020-30.
The most recent reassessment was in 2021 in the Journal of Industrial Ecology by Yale scholar Gaya Harrington, who found that the original Limits to Growth scenarios, including the dangerous business-as-usual one, “aligned closely with observed global data,” and “this suggests that it’s almost, but not yet, too late for society to change its course.” As for business-as-usual, “Pursuing continuous growth is not possible.” She failed to add “without overshoot and collapse.”
And just a month ago Dennis Meadows, asked how he felt about his original work, said calmly that all analyses “have generally concluded that “the world is moving along what we termed the standard scenario” of growth. He was not sanguine about society doing anything about changing that and averting global tragedy. The human species, he said, puts a “high survival value in focusing on the short term nearby and not worrying about the long-term far away.” A few weeks after that the latest comprehensive UN climate change panel confirmed that, concluding that severe overheating of the world caused by greenhouse gases has already caused “widespread, pervasive impacts to ecosystems, people, settlements, and infrastructure.”
So all of the proposed reforms and remedies offered up in “green new deals” and renewable energy panaceas anywhere to date are completely useless because they are not aimed at capitalism’s fatal commitment to growth that the Club of Rome had wanted the world to reconsider. And there is no sign anywhere that the nations of the world are willing to confront this fact and head toward any policy or proposal that would acknowledge that, much less doing anything to reverse it.
The inevitable result: “overshoot and collapse,” and not far off, either.
Kirkpatrick Sale is the author of twelve books over fifty years and lives in Ithaca, New York.
Editor’s note: Writing from the mountains of Kerala, rewilder and restorationist Suprabha Seshan explores the pandemic and the war of patriarchy vs. the planet. “It is my sworn mission to salvage the ones burned, maimed, poisoned or reconstituted from the living earth by the fires of industrial civilisation,” she writes. This essay was first published in Turkish in Jineoloji magazine, a publication of the women’s movement of Kurdistan.
by Suprabha Seshan
The Covid-19 pandemic, lethal as it is, is instrumental to capital’s assault on the living world. Looming through the terrors unleashed by free-flying strands of DNA are gargantuan infrastructural projects, including medical, green and digital. These are intent on destroying the web of life. Out of this extermination project, will spew more illnesses, disorders, infections, infestations, and devastations.
I urge us to address the relation between the militarised-capitalist-supremacist mindset and the living body of the earth. The latter includes you and me, our beloved human families, friends, communities and peoples, and also our non-human kith and kin. In this essay, I refer to the former as The Patriarch.
~~~
An active extermination event is at large, distinct from previous mass deaths of species through passive geologic processes. The current event involves slavery, ecocide and genocide. To understand Covid-19 while this is going on, would be like trying to understand a friend or family member’s 0.05% chance of dying from a natural ailment, when there is a psychopath with a shotgun in the room.
Domination, disorder, disease, debilitation, torture, slavery, unhappiness, fear, addictions, death and decay are essential for The Patriarch. Assembled from the reconstituted bodies of the living world, with extermination intrinsic to his existence, he will not stop until he consumes all. Ecocide and genocide are his mission.
The fundamental driving force of capital, I believe, is the imperative to conquer all life (including human bodies, hearts and minds). Unless this is negated, we cannot nurture the more subtle aspects of the enduring relationships between humankind and other-than-humankind.
While The Patriarch reduces many persons to touchscreen modalities, he confines and debilitates others. He even suffocates entire populations in the gas chambers of modern civilisation – the polluted cities – and burns others in wastelands resulting from the furnaces of his industries.
This kind of extermination has been going on for a while, perhaps since about 1492 when Europeans gifted smallpox wrapped in blankets to native Americans. Some people think it began way before, during the birth of civilisations – of militarised-hierarchical-extractive entities distinct from the myriad small cultures growing slowly over millennia in sustaining land bases. I find the nature of capital, particularly technocratic-militarised capital, egregious to a new extreme. The Patriarch is insatiable. I also believe he is insane. He has begun to devour his own body.
~~~
I am a conservationist living in a community in the rainforests of the Western Ghat mountains in southern India. I protect endangered species, restore rainforest habitat, and educate youth. We are many women in this place. Together with the men who also live and work here, we have an intimate knowledge of the plants and animals who create this biome, who are all sovereign beings in their own right.
These non-humans – or other-than-humans – also give us our foods and medicines, our ecologies and cultures, our material and immaterial bases. In return we try to protect them, nurture them, and see them through these terrible apocalyptic times. Together we work on a collective ecology, acknowledging our inseparableness from each other in the web of life. We are deeply intertwined through our physical beings: our cells, juices and tissues, our senses, limbs and nerves, and every organ and follicle. Through our bodies we create cultures, biomes and ecospheres. All these are being exterminated by the toxic forces of technologised-capitalistic patriarchy.
It is indeed my deep and fervent wish to examine the work of an unsee-able, unknow-able micro-being on humans. But I believe this will never be wholly known, and certainly not in a reductive way. Reciprocal mutualistic relationships rooted in interbeing grow in intimacy while remaining free and wild. They are like a dance between creatures – between men, women and others; adults and children; humans and nonhumans; between plants, animals, fungi, clouds, winds, rain, rocks, mountains, algae, forests, grasslands and oceans. This mutualism includes viruses, and the SARS-CoV-2 virus, too.
However, I believe the pandemic needs to be examined in the infernal light of omnicide (planetary to cellular). We cannot afford to ignore the background to the viral outbreak. We cannot forget the various “cides” that are going on – ecocide, gynocide, bactericide, fungicide, vermicide, infanticide, weedicide, genocide, climate-cide – and even cosmocide, the destruction of a cosmic body, the planet.
We are not at the beginning of a catastrophe, as the climate-mongers will have us believe. Rather, we are already towards the end of an altogether incomprehensible horror. The orchestration of capital through this pandemic threatens further the direct perception of The Patriarch’s endgame. He wreaks further havoc on his hapless slaves through various fear tactics. He exerts his enormous machines on all his subjugates such as indigenous peoples, marginalised classes, races and castes, women and children. He deploys them on the last forests, waters, winds and habitats. All the above, human and non-human, are swept under the rubric of “resources to be managed”. He also invents new enemies from the very body of the earth which sustains him, like the SARS Corona Virus.
~~~
As an ecologist serving the rainforests of the Western Ghats, it has been my lifelong enquiry to look at how a biome can recover from assault – from colonial-neocolonial-capitalistic-civilisational assault. I know, and the biome knows, that it can heal from most travesties and injuries, and that it will do its utmost to replenish itself and the planet. But the opposing faction, which for the moment we are calling The Patriarch, is gathering momentum. For the arsenal he has accrued – an arsenal built and assembled from the living body of the planet – is in fact, simultaneously disassembling, as he is now also turning on himself. He is running out of other resources.
In this utter disconnect, a monstrous creature devouring himself, he further debilitates humans and non-humans and the living community of earthly existence. He is not open to reason, though he sounds like he is. Nor is he open to life, though he needs it and appropriates it, particularly its very metabolic and life-engendering powers. Saying he is allied to the natural world, he severs himself from it in manifold ways. It doesn’t take much to see that The Patriarch’s language alienates him from his own body, and the body of the earth and the people. His actions separate him more and more from humans and non-humans, without whom he would perish in an instant.
There is no doubt, for me, that The Patriarch’s machinery must stop. My sincere observation is that only non-humans will stop him. Humans are at a gun point more insidious than what non-humans face. Non-humans are not hooked as humans are to The Patriarch. None of the other species – the ones within us and the ones without, those who inhabit our human bodies (the micro-biomes and macro-biomes without whom we could not even have a so-called human existence), and those whose bodies within which we dwell – none are dependent on him. They don’t need him for anything.
~~~
As of this writing, 0.05% of the human population has died from Covid, according to the WHO. The BBC news earlier this week said another half-million people in Europe will die by next year, unless vaccinated. If the data are to be believed, and if the projections are to be trusted, perhaps 5 million people will die altogether from Covid-19. We must do everything to prevent such a terrible thing. Of course. But, critical to recovery of humankind from its various acute and chronic ailments is a return of habitat, of clean air, and clean water, and nature-based relationships for humans to dwell amongst. The cleansing of lungs and livers and other organs, the opening of the senses, and the revival of rivers and wetlands, oceans and aquifers, and the vast ancient forests and human-non-human relations requires The Patriarch to be stopped. Humans are more dependent on all these than we are on The Patriarch. Whom to choose? The Patriarch, or life?
~~~
I’ve heard it said that the virus has no moral brief, but the starker reality is that it carries with it a potent ecological brief, a message saying that unless the world is fecund again, pandemics will speed up the obliteration of the human species, itself a marvelous creation of nature, already weakened by war, by generations of slavery to capital, by poison and dead-numbing effects of digital weaponry, radiation, forced migration, wage slavery, mental anguish and terrible violence on women, children, people of colour and indigenous peoples – all required by The Patriarch as cogs in his capitalist-industrial-technocratic machine.
~~~
The virus, invented in a laboratory or not, is a biological entity that enters human bodies, causes symptoms as it goes about its own mission, propagating itself, tangling with host genomes, creating new conditions, challenging us in its own way, and like any infection, or deemed infection, it pushes our immune systems. Other viruses create other conditions, many of which are beneficial. Overall, the benefits outweigh the diseases.
The virome consists of vast assemblages of viruses in each and every body, habitat and biome. It surrounds us, fills and subsumes our every thought, breath and action. Viruses are the most abundant biological entities on earth. They make us who we are. Like with every aspect of the living cosmos, much of what happens is beneficial, and viral life seems to beget more life, creating our genetic identities. Evolutionary studies show that all life begets more life, despite the occasional disruption or cataclysmic event.
~~~
If invented, then the virus is not different from other invented beings, like dog breeds, plant breeds and even the eugenist caste creations, where, through exercise of a supremacist caste or class’s control, another caste or class or creature’s love, life and passions are harnessed, culled, consumed, engineered, enslaved, extorted, and artifacted to serve the supremacist project (factory farms, factory labour, pet industry, plant industry, monoculture agriculture, industrial fishery, dams-on-rivers, humans-in-slums, human trafficking, domestic labour, untouchable peoples and many more forms of subjugation).
~~~
Domesticated dogs go feral sometimes. They attack people sometimes. The dogs get impounded, spayed or killed, and there is a furor for a while. Domesticated plants go feral sometimes, usually after generations of breeding and enslavement, or after a natural disaster, like a volcanic explosion, or the desertification caused by modern civilisation. They, too, seem to invade territories controlled by humans for other purposes, including other plants deemed more useful. The new problem plants get weedicided, eradicated, and turned into biomass for some other project. This phenomenon gets new names, such as “the science and practice of invasion biology.”
Humans too, go feral, sometimes. They try to take back the control and agency they were systematically denied. They become targets of world leaders and other supremacists.
Now the virus is going feral. Viral. The solutions to this are confinements, containments, fear-mongering and authoritarian technics such as lockdowns and mandates regarding vaccines.
In all these instances, the aggressors, the hosts, the pathogens and the victims are actually contingent to the projects of The Patriarch. Besides, we all know that this virus and its quick evolving progeny can beat any vaccine. We all know The Patriarch needs the virus, the vaccines and human beings.
The Patriarch needs life for all his projects. It is his own dependency on human and non-human others, that he hates more than anything else. Would that we were all machines! He would not be so burdened, guilty, tormented. Machines can be turned on and off, in an instant.
~~~
During the lockdowns, the stopping of vehicles affected every human and non-human. A great number of humans were corralled in. There was no traffic. Other humans and non-humans surged onto streets. The exuberance of the latter offset the tragedy of the former (people desperate to get home). Many studies show that when air, water and land traffic stopped, biodiversity increased in most areas. This was true in our home in the Western Ghats too. Freshwater life had a reprieve from the pesticides washing into the streams and rivers. Insects bred unhindered by insecticides (momentarily unavailable because of the collapse of supply chains). Everywhere, people started gardening in balconies and yards, while others returned to hunting and foraging. Although this hurt some non-humans, overall, it was a return to another kind of life, and a far more direct existence. In the forest, friends reported seeing animals come closer, and they also reported some increase in illegal hunting. Men forced to take to the gun instead of the shopping bag. Men have always hunted for food. Now this ancient way of living is illegal only because The Patriarch legitimises another kind of degradation; the devouring of the land by his forces to feed his industrial systems and machines, including the slaves that work them and now wholly depend on them.
Actual human impact on this forest, man to tree, man to river, women to plants, people to the commons, is minimal compared to the post-Hiroshima assault on the whole biome. We cannot equate hand to hand combat to the unleashing of a nuclear or chemical arsenal, like Round up or Endosulfan or Agent Orange. Or the arsenal of earth-moving machinery.
~~~
I’ve heard that whales could once again hear each other sing underwater during the lockdowns, because of the reduction in ocean traffic. Friends say Olive Ridley turtles increased in certain coastal areas for a brief period, because of a near complete halt in trawling and netting. Air pollution dropped because of the grounding of aircraft, and great murmurations of birds could fly freely without hindrance from war planes and cargo planes and passenger planes. I know from my personal experience that I could walk through the streets of Bangalore without my eyes smarting from pollution, and I saw more birds and butterflies in the city than ever before. The resilience of life is obvious. It’s possible to see what it is capable of all the time.
I know the resilience of my own body, of human beings, non-human beings and of the great earth herself.
~~~
The increase in human numbers by over 4% in this same period overshadows the effect of one life form on another, but is not mentioned. However, human will is even more broken and hijacked by the Patriarch’s projects, by capitalism. Furthermore, the increase in other kinds of machines, industrial infrastructure and invasive medicine (all wreaking ecocide or genocide somewhere in the world) pales, in turn, the effect of the increase in human numbers, and even more the effect of one little, invisible life form on some of humankind.
I also heard that young people turned suicidal, and that mental illness rose during this great human confinement, another term for the lockdowns. Already estranged from the rest of the cosmos, modern humans are even more lonely. Indigenous people know the antidotes to loneliness and breakdown are communities of humans and non-humans. The Patriarch and his henchmen divide millions more from their loved ones while they live and also while they die. I cannot think of anything more terrifying than this.
~~~
As a rainforest activist, it is my daily work to find alliance amongst humans and non-humans to stop further assault. This is no simple task, as most humans see the so-called benefits of capitalism as great, and that life has never been so good. The assault on their bodies through the toxification of the environment, which has led to severely compromised immune systems – a necessary precondition for new diseases to run rife – is unperceivable, because of clever filters in place, addictions, and the numbing effects of petroleum-based lifestyles. Most people are hooked to modern capitalistic systems as providers of life, healers of disease and rescuers from death. A capitalist technocrat is like God. He is a life-giver and a death-controller. He can also assuage, deprive, save, confine and kill in the name of God, or science, for whatever he considers to be the greater common good. To which we are all subject. To which we cannot say no. This great hijacking of the human will is the horrific achievement of the pandemic.
So I seek alliance amongst those not yet wholly hijacked.
~~~
As a rewilder and restorationist, it is my sworn mission to salvage the ones burned, maimed, poisoned or reconstituted from the living earth by the fires of industrial civilisation. My friends, comrades and I run refuges for non-humans, and also humans. We see the need for safe houses, halfway homes, and intensive care units for our plant and animal kith and kin, and also for women, children, marginalised and indigenous peoples, and anyone wishing to break free from The Patriarch’s projects. We need every possibility to regroup and re-enter relationships where humans and non-humans can support each other, so that we may resist the last onslaughts. I find rewilding to be a worthy vocation.
As a member of the web of life, of the still substantial community of life, I try to unravel the effects of one member of this community, the virus, on another member of this same community, the human being. Unfortunately, without addressing the mission of The Patriarch, of omnicidal capital, we cannot examine our true relations with our non-human kith and kin.
~~~
Humans are slaves to The Patriarch. So is the great planet with its winds and lands and waters with trees and elephants and butterflies. So are the forests of my region. The Patriarch needs us alive and needs us dead for his project. It’s a real question how liberation will come. With a domination imperative unique in the entire life of the cosmos, he needs dead wood and living wood and feral wood (ecosystem services of forests). He needs dead water and living water and feral water (for irrigation, tidal and hydropower). He needs dead wind and living wind and feral wind (for air-conditioning, ventilators and turbines). He needs dead plants and animals and living plants and animals and feral plants and animals (for food and medicines and now for climate-saving biodiversity). Now he even needs dead fungi and living fungi and feral fungi (for more biodiversity). He needs dead viruses and living viruses and feral viruses (for evolution and now for vaccines and the great global reset). He needs dead humans, and living humans and feral humans (for research, trade, war and terrorism and slavery).
~~~
I see Covid-19 as a project of The Patriarch, of supremacist powers in the ruling class destroying people and saving people. Our lives are clenched in their hands. They have become the arbiters of human-non-human community, of the very web of existence. They give life, and they take away the foundation of life, through creating new hooks and needs. At the same time they destroy genuine relationships and our capacity to remember what the land was once like. However, because life is as powerful as it is, and because the forests are as resilient and fecund as they are, the world leaders and technocrats aim to harness life’s myriad powers for their projects. Where before they sought land, spices, plants, animals and slaves from the global South, and wood, water and minerals, now they hunt ecosystems and planetary forces (tides, sunshine, clouds, biomes (evolution itself) and slaves everywhere. It is the exuberance and wholeness of life that they seek to devour to fuel their existence.
~~~
I am witness to the land coming alive every moment of every day, so I know the full powers of life are still working. Life’s fecundity is unstoppable, it surges under every type of condition. Like the pigs in factory farms who have babies under impossible conditions, or men and women growing families during war, or forests having baby forests even when the whole climate is shifting, life creates life all the time and everywhere. The ever-entwining forests and winds and waters, with their immense creative forces, both tantalise and threaten The Patriarch, because life achieves with joy and felicity what he cannot ever do. He cannot create life yet, he can only try to force it to create itself. Whether under gun point or nuclear blasts, or dioxins in the cell of every creature, life is the regenerative force he wishes to tap into. Genetic and geologic engineering are only steps along the way.
~~~
I, too, am a creature of nature. Endowed with a particular passion, a wonderment of what this alive, half-alive, wild, half-wild, feral, domesticated, enslaved, tortured way of existence is. Aware that I am a part of all this through my body, my mind, my senses and other faculties, I experience inter-being in everything I do, everything I am, in every aspect of my body-being. I cannot even call it mine, as I feel the work of the forest through the lungs, and the skin and the gut and the mind of this body, itself a biome of sorts. This is the awakening from the nightmare that happened after some years of living here. I came alive to the undeniable truth that we are all inextricably intertwined. That ecology is the non-negotiable, ever-vital matrix in which I am completely held. That I also take part in it, through every action, and non-action, even in my sleep and dreams. As I awoke to The Patriarch’s shadow project, I awoke to the natural world’s life engendering service. Ecology makes more of itself and lives and thrives upon itself. Capitalism, the latest and most devastating avatar of patriarchy, and of ego, makes more of itself and lives and feeds upon its now disassembling self.
~~~
The Patriarch forms himself not in the image of some god; he tries to gain advantage to himself through the exuberance of life. His ego needs our eco.
However, he is a toxic mimic, imitating the form of creation but not its content. He is bent on destruction; total annihilation.
Unlike life. She lives and thrives through community and love and joy and play and inter-being and fecundity and beauty.
~~~
In solidarity with Kurdish women in their extraordinary mission, and through these thoughts, joining the clarion call for Life to overrun the patriarch wholly: to dismantle every cog and wheel of his stupendous machine. Let’s unhinge him. Let’s ally with eco, not his insufferable ego!
Suprabha Seshan is a rainforest conservationist. She lives and works at the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary, a forest garden and community-based conservation centre in the Western Ghat mountains of Kerala. Her essays can be found in The Indian Quarterly, The Indian Express, Scroll.in, Hard News, and Economic and Political Weekly. She is currently working on her book, Rainforest Etiquette in a World Gone Mad, forthcoming from Context, Westland Publishers. She is an environmental educator and restoration ecologist, an Ashoka Fellow, and winner of the 2006 Whitley Fund for Nature award.
Editor’s note: Leftists often see authoritarianism as a hallmark of conservative, right-wing, and fascist governments and organizations. But throughout history, there is an equally troubling trend of left-wing authoritarianism.
Today, this strain of politics is ascendant in the United States, where the use of censorship and violence to curtail political speech has become increasingly accepted and mainstream both among Democratic-party ideologues, media and tech elites, and the professional managerial class, and among college-educated “radical” leftists.
In today’s piece, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Chris Hedges discusses the normalization of “cancel culture” as a sign of increasing corporate control and the fading of liberal values that protected basic political expression. For a decade, Deep Green Resistance has been targeted by what Hedges describes as the “boutique activism of a liberal class that lacks the courage and the organizational skills to challenge the actual centers of power.” The footsoldiers of cancel culture are, Hedges writes, “the useful idiots of corporate power and the emerging police state.”
“Cancel culture is not the road to reform,” he concludes. “It is the road to tyranny.”
Elites and their courtiers who trumpet their moral superiority by damning and silencing those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech are the new Jacobins.
The Rev. Will Campbell was forced out of his position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in 1956 because of his calls for integration. He escorted Black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. He was the only white person that was invited to be part of the group that founded Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He helped integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and organize the Freedom Rides.
But Campbell was also, despite a slew of death threats he received from white segregationists, an unofficial chaplain to the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. He denounced and publicly fought the Klan’s racism, acts of terror and violence and marched with Black civil rights protestors in his native Mississippi, but he steadfastly refused to “cancel” white racists out of his life. He refused to demonize them as less than human. He insisted that this form of racism, while evil, was not as insidious as a capitalist system that perpetuated the economic misery and instability that pushed whites into the ranks of violent, racist organizations.
“During the civil rights movement, when we were developing strategies, someone usually said, ‘Call Will Campbell. Check with Will,’” Rep. John Lewis wrote in the introduction to the new edition of Campbell’s memoir “Brother to a Dragonfly,” one of the most important books I read as a seminarian. “Will knew that the tragedy of Southern history had fallen on our opponents as well as our allies … on George Wallace and Bull Connor as well as Rosa Parks and Fred Shuttlesworth. He saw that it had created the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. That insight led Will to see racial healing and equity, pursued through courage, love, and faith as the path to spiritual liberation for all.”
Jimmy Carter wrote of Campbell that he “tore down the walls that separated white and black Southerners.” And because the Black Panther organizer Fred Hampton was doing the same thing in Chicago, the FBI — which, along with the CIA, is the de facto ally of the liberal elites in their war against Trump and his supporters — assassinated him.
When the town Campbell lived in decided the Klan should not be permitted to have a float in the Fourth of July parade Campbell did not object, as long as the gas and electric company was also barred. It was not only white racists that inflicted suffering on the innocent and the vulnerable, but institutions that place the sanctity of profit before human life.
“People can’t pay their gas and electric bills, the heat gets turned off and they freeze and sometimes die, especially if they are elderly,” he said. “This, too, is an act of terrorism.”
“Theirs you could see and deal with, and if they broke the law, you could punish them,” he said of the Klan. “But the larger culture that was, and still is, racist to the core is much more difficult to deal with and has a more sinister influence.”
Campbell would have reminded us that the demonization of the Trump supporters who stormed the capital is a terrible mistake. He would have reminded us that racial injustice will only be solved with economic justice. He would have called on us to reach out to those who do not think like us, do not speak like us, are ridiculed by polite society, but who suffer the same economic marginalization. He knew that the disparities of wealth, loss of status and hope for the future, coupled with prolonged social dislocation, generated the poisoned solidarity that give rise to groups such as the Klan or the Proud Boys.
We cannot heal wounds we refuse to acknowledge.
The Washington Post, which analyzed the public records of 125 defendants charged with taking part in the storming of the Capital on January 6, found that “nearly 60 percent of the people facing charges related to the Capitol riot showed signs of prior money troubles, including bankruptcies, notices of eviction or foreclosure, bad debts, or unpaid taxes over the past two decades.”
“The group’s bankruptcy rate — 18 percent — was nearly twice as high as that of the American public,” the Post found. “A quarter of them had been sued for money owed to a creditor. And 1 in 5 of them faced losing their home at one point, according to court filings.”
“A California man filed for bankruptcy one week before allegedly joining the attack, according to public records,” the paper reported. “A Texas man was charged with entering the Capitol one month after his company was slapped with a nearly $2,000 state tax lien. Several young people charged in the attack came from families with histories of financial duress.”
We must acknowledge the tragedy of these lives, while at the same time condemning racism, hate and the lust for violence. We must grasp that our most perfidious enemy is not someone who is politically incorrect, even racist, but the corporations and a failed political and judicial system that callously sacrifices people, as well as the planet, on the altar of profit.
Like Campbell, much of my own family comes from the rural working class, many espousing prejudices my father, a Presbyterian minister, regularly condemned from the pulpit. Through a combination of luck and scholarships to elite schools, I got out. They never did. My grandfather, intellectually gifted, was forced to drop out of high school his senior year when his sister’s husband died. He had to work the farm to feed her children. If you are poor in America, you rarely get more than one chance. And many do not get one. He lost his.
The towns in Maine where my relatives come from have been devastated by the closures of mills and factories. There is little meaningful work. There is a smoldering anger caused by legitimate feelings of betrayal and entrapment. They live, like most working class Americans, lives of quiet desperation. This anger is often expressed in negative and destructive ways. But I have no right to dismiss them as irredeemable.
To understand is not to condone. But if the ruling elites, and their courtiers masquerading as journalists, continue to gleefully erase these people from the media landscape, to attack them as less than human, or as Hillary Clinton called them “deplorables,” while at the same time refusing to address the grotesque social inequality that has left them vulnerable and afraid, it will fuel ever greater levels of extremism and ever greater levels of state repression and censorship.
The cancel culture, a witch hunt by self-appointed moral arbiters of speech, has become the boutique activism of a liberal class that lacks the courage and the organizational skills to challenge the actual centers of power — the military-industrial complex, lethal militarized police, the prison system, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the intelligence agencies that make us the most spied upon, watched, photographed and monitored population in human history, the fossil fuel industry, and a political and economic system captured by oligarchic power.
It is much easier to turn from these overwhelming battles to take down hapless figures who make verbal gaffes, those who fail to speak in the approved language or embrace the approved attitudes of the liberal elites. These purity tests have reached absurd and self-defeating levels, including the inquisitional bloodlust by 150 staff members of The New York Times demanding that management, which had already investigated and dealt with what at most was poor judgment made by the veteran reporter Don McNeil when he repeated a racist slur in a discussion about race, force him out of the paper, which management reluctantly did.
Too often the targets of the cancel culture are radicals, such as the feminists who run the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter and who do not admit trans people because most of the girls and women in the shelter have been physically assaulted and traumatized by those with male bodies. None of the critics of these feminists spend ten or twelve hours a day in a shelter taking care of abused girls and women, many of whom were prostituted as children, but fire off screeds to attack them and cut their funding. The cancel culture, as the Canadian feminist Lee Lakeman says, is “the weaponization of ignorance.”
The cancel culture was pioneered by the red baiting of the capitalist elites and their shock troops in agencies such as the FBI to break, often through violence, radical movements and labor unions. Tens of thousands of people, in the name of anti-communism, were cancelled out of the culture. The well-financed Israel lobby is a master of the cancel culture, shutting down critics of the Israeli apartheid state and those of us who support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as anti-Semites. The cancel culture fueled the persecution of Julian Assange, the censorship of WikiLeaks and the Silicon Valley algorithms that steer readers away from content, including my content, critical of imperial and corporate power.
In the end, this bullying will be used by social media platforms, which are integrated into the state security and surveillance organs, not to promote, as its supporters argue, civility, but ruthlessly silence dissidents, intellectuals, artists and independent journalism. Once you control what people say you control what they think.
This cancel culture is embraced by corporate media platforms where, as Glenn Greenwald writes, “teams of journalists at three of the most influential corporate media outlets — CNN’s ‘media reporters’ (Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy), NBC’s ‘disinformation space unit’ (Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny), and the tech reporters of The New York Times (Mike Isaac, Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel) — devote the bulk of their ‘journalism’ to searching for online spaces where they believe speech and conduct rules are being violated, flagging them, and then pleading that punitive action be taken (banning, censorship, content regulation, after-school detention).”
Corporations know these moral purity tests are, for us, self-defeating. They know that by making the cancel culture legitimate — and for this reason I opposed locking Donald Trump out of his Twitter and other social media accounts — they can employ it to silence those who attack and expose the structures of corporate power and imperial crimes. The campaigns of moral absolutism widen the divides between liberals and the white working class, divisions that are crucial to maintaining the power of the corporate elites. The cancel culture is the fodder for the riveting and entertaining culture wars. It turns anti-politics into politics. Most importantly, the cancel culture deflects attention from the far more egregious institutionalized abuses of power. It is this smug, self-righteousness crusade that makes the liberal class so odious.
Doug Marlette, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist who created the comic strip “Kudzu,” which featured a Campbell-inspired character called Rev. Will B. Dunn, brought Campbell to speak at Harvard when I was there. Campbell’s message was met with a mixture of bewilderment and open hostility, which was fine with me as it meant the room swiftly emptied and the rest of the night Marlette, Campbell and I sat up late drinking whiskey and eating bologna sandwiches. Marlette was as iconoclastic and acerbically funny as Campbell. His cartoons, including one that showed Jesus on Good Friday carrying an electric chair instead of a cross and another that portrayed Jerry Falwell as the serpent in the Garden of Eden, provoked howls of protest from irate readers.
Campbell’s memoir, “Brother to a Dragonfly,” is not only beautifully written — Campbell was a close friend of Walker Percy, whose novels I also consumed — but filled with a humility and wisdom that liberals, who should spend less time in the self-referential rabbit hole of social media, have lost. He describes America, which routinely employs murder, torture, threats, blackmail and intimidation to crush all those who oppose it at home and abroad, as “a nation of Klansmen.” He refused to draw a moral line between the American empire, which many liberals defend, and the disenfranchised and angry whites that flock to racist groups such as the Klan or, years later, would support Trump. The architects of empire and the ruling capitalists who exploited workers, stymied democracy, orchestrated state repression, hoarded obscene levels of wealth and waged endless war were, he knew, the real enemy.
Campbell remembers watching a documentary by CBS called “The Ku Klux Klan: An Invisible Empire,” after which he was invited to address the audience. The film showed the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the castration of Judge Aaron in Alabama, and the deaths of the four young girls in the Birmingham Sunday school bombing. When the film showed a Klan recruit pivoting right when the drill master shouted, “Left face,” the audience erupted in “cheers, jeers, catcalls and guffaws.” Campbell writes that he “felt a sickening in my stomach.”
Those viewing the film were a group convened by the National Student Association and included New Left radicals of the sixties, representing Students for a Democratic Society, the Port Huron group, young white men and women who had led protests at campuses across the country, burned down buildings, coined the term “pigs” to refer to police. Many were from affluent families.
“They were students in or recent graduates of rich and leading colleges and universities,” he writes of the audience. “They were mean and tough but somehow, I sensed that there wasn’t a radical in the bunch. For if they were radical how could they laugh at a poor ignorant farmer who didn’t know his left hand from his right? If they had been radical they would have been weeping, asking what had produced him. And if they had been radical they would not have been sitting, soaking up a film produced for their edification and enjoyment by the Establishment of the establishment — CBS.”
Campbell, who was asked to address the group following the film, said: “My name is Will Campbell. I’m a Baptist preacher. I’m a native of Mississippi. And I’m pro-Klansman because I’m pro-human being.”
Pandemonium erupted in the hall. He was shouted down as a “fascist pig” and a “Mississippi redneck.” Most walked out.
“Just four words uttered — ‘pro-Klansman Mississippi Baptist preacher,’ coupled with one visual image, white, had turned them into everything they thought the Ku Klux Klan to be — hostile, frustrated, angry, violent and irrational,” he writes. “And I was never able to explain to them that pro-Klansman is not the same as pro-Klan. That the former has to do with a person, the other with an ideology.”
“The same social forces which produced the Klan’s violence also produced the violence in Watts, Rochester and Harlem, Cleveland, Chicago, Houston, Nashville, Atlanta and Dayton, because they are all pieces of the same garment — social isolation, deprivation, economic conditions, rejections, working mothers, poor schools, bad diets, and all the rest,” Campbell writes.
And these social forces produced the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests after the police murder of George Floyd and the storming of the Capitol by an enraged mob.
Campbell never asked any of the members of the Klan he knew to leave the organization for the same reason he never asked liberals to leave “the respectable and fashionable organizations or institutions of which they were a part and party, all of which, I was learning, were more truly racist than their Klan.”
This radical love was the core of Dr. Martin Luther King’s message. This love informed King’s steadfast nonviolence. It led him to denounce the Vietnam War and condemn the US government as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And it saw him assassinated in Memphis when he was supporting a strike by sanitation workers for economic justice.
Campbell lived by his oft-quoted creed, “If you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love ‘em all.” Like King, he believed in the redemptive and transformative power of forgiveness.
The ruling elites and the courtiers who trumpet their moral superiority by damning and silencing those who do not linguistically conform to politically correct speech are the new Jacobins. They wallow in a sanctimonious arrogance, one made possible by their privilege, which masks their subservience to corporate power and their amorality. They do not battle social and economic injustice. They silence, with the enthusiastic assistance of the digital platforms in Silicon Valley, those who are crushed and deformed by systems of oppression and those who lack their finely developed politesse and deference to linguistic fashion. They are the useful idiots of corporate power and the emerging police state. Cancel culture is not the road to reform. It is the road to tyranny.
Biocentrism (from Greek βίος bios, “life” and κέντρον kentron, “center”) is an ethical point of view that extends inherent value to all living things. It is an understanding of how the earth works, particularly as it relates to its biosphere or biodiversity, that stands in contrast to anthropocentrism, which centers on the value of humans.
The term biocentrism encompasses all environmental ethics that “extend the status of moral object from human beings to all living things in nature”. Biocentric ethics calls for a rethinking of the relationship between humans and nature. It states that nature does not exist simply to be used or consumed by humans, but that humans are simply one species amongst many, and that because we are part of an ecosystem, any actions which negatively affect the living systems of which we are a part adversely affect us as well, whether or not we maintain a biocentric worldview.
Biocentrists observe that all species have inherent value, and that humans are not “superior” to other species in a moral or ethical sense.
The four main pillars of a biocentric outlook are:
Humans and all other species are members of Earth’s community.
All species are part of a system of interdependence.
All living organisms pursue their own “good” in their own ways.
Human beings are not inherently superior to other living things.<
Three Perspectives on Biocentrism
Excerpted from the book Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It. This segment was written by Lierre Keith.
Moment to moment, the world is kept alive only by the bacteria doing the basic work of life, which no one else can do, and by maintaining relationships more complex than any we could ever understand. We are all here only because of other beings. Biologist Robert Rosen argues that the mechanistic paradigm of Western science cannot explain living communities, which are always built from relationship “between the part and the whole.” The word he uses to define living communities: nonfractionability.
The mechanistic mind is also wrong across geologic time. Scientists and lay people alike have tried to draw a line between life and inanimate matter. Chemists, for instance, divide their field into the organic and inorganic. Organic matter is that which is produced by the “vital chemistry” of living creatures. Inorganic refers to “forms of matter which exist independently of the operation of living beings.”11 Rocks, metals, minerals, and water, for instance, are considered inorganic. But given a few billion years, rock will become living creatures who will eventually get pressed back into rock. And with a few plate shifts, the sediment of the ocean floor, built from the bodies of sea creatures, will become dry land. That land—comprised of those compressed dead bodies—is once more taken up by living creatures. Hence Russian scientist V. I. Vernadsky called life on earth “a disperse of rock.” Writes evolutionary biologist and futurist Elizabet Sahtouris, “This view of living matter as continuous with, and as a chemical transformation of, nonliving planetary matter is very different from the view of life developing on the surface of a nonliving planet and adapting to it.” In Sahtouris’s words, it’s the difference between “a living planet” and a “planet with life on it.”
This is not just clever semantics. In one view the planet is inanimate habitat for humans and maybe a few other creatures. According to another, everything on earth is part of a process called life. As Sahtouris writes, “Planetary life is not something that happens here and there on a planet—it happens to the planet as a whole.” Life is not a kind of matter, but a process.
Derrick Jensen: “Pretend You Are a River”
Excerpted from the book Endgame: The Problem of Civilization.
Pretend you are a river. Pretend you are the mist who falls so fine—so gentle—that nothing separates water and air. You are the rain who falls in sheets, explodes onto the ground to leave pocks and puddles. You are the ground who receives this water, soaking it up, taking it in, carrying it deep inside. You are the cracks and fissures where the waters accumulate, flow, fall to join more water, and more, in pools and rivers who move slowly through cavities, crevices, pores. You are the sounds and silence of water seeping or staying still. You are the meeting of wet and dry, the union of liquid and solid, where solids dissolve and liquids solidify. You are the pressure who pushes water through seams. You are the rushing water who bubbles from the earth.
You are a tiny pool between rocks. You overflow, find your way to join others who like you are moving, moving. You are the air at the surface of the water, the joining of substantial and insubstantial, the union of under and over, weight and not-weight. You are the riffle, the rapid, the tiny waterfall who turns water to air and air to water. You are the mist who settles on the soil. You are the plants who drink the mist, and you are the sun who warms and feeds them.
You are the fish who feed on insects who feed on plants who feed on soils who feed on fish. You are the fish who become soils who become plants who become insects who become fish who flow down the river.
You are the river who joins other rivers to become a new river who is all of the rivers and something else.
You are the river. You do not stop at the banks, where liquid turns to solid. You reach into the sky and into the soil. Water moves through rocks, comes up to form pools far from the fast flow where the rivers move together, seeps down to join still waters deep below the surface, waters who sleep and wake and sleep and mingle with the stones who are the river, too.
You are the river, who is married to the mountains you have known since they were young, who have given themselves to you as you have given yourself to them. You are the canyons you nestle into, each year deeper than the year before. You are the forests who give you their fallen trees, and the meadows you flood and feed and who feed you back their fruits and fine insects who fly to your surface to be taken in by the fish who with their own bodies again feed the meadows.
You are the river who feeds the ocean, who feels the tides pushing and pulling against your mouth, the waves mixing fresh and salt. You are that intermingling. That is who you are. That is who you have always been.
You are the river. You have lived with volcanoes and glaciers. You have been dammed by lava and ice. You have carried log jams so large and so old they grow their own forests, with you running beneath. You have lived through droughts and floods.
You are the river. You miss the salmon. You miss the sturgeon. You miss the ocean. You miss the meadows. You miss the forests. You miss the beavers and otters and grizzly bears. You miss the human beings.
You are the river. You want them back. You want to feel the tickling of the sturgeon, the thrusting of the salmon. You want to carry food and soil to the ocean. You want to cover the meadows as you used to, and you want to give yourself to them and you want them to give themselves to you, as you have done forever, and as they have too.
Rachel Carson: “In Every Grain of Sand is The Story of the Earth”
Excerpted from the book Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson.
Along mile after mile of coastline, the land presents a changing face to the sea. Now it is a sheer rock cliff; now a smooth beach’ now the frayed edge of a mangrove swamp, dark and full of mystery. Each is the seacoast, yet each is itself, like no other in time or place. In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.
This coastline plays endless variations on the basic theme of sea and land. On the coastal rocks of northern New England the sea is an immediate presence, compelling, impossible to ignore. Its tides rise and fall on their appointed schedule, draining coves and refilling them, lifting boats or dropping away to leave them stranded. On the broad beaches of the South the feeling is different. As you stand at the edge of the dunes, when the tide is out, the ocean seems far away. Under the push of a rising tide it advances a little, reducing the width of the buffer strip of sand. Storms bring it still farther in. But compared with its overwhelming presence on Northern shores it seems remote, a shining immensity related to far horizons. The sound of the waves on such a day, when the heated air shimmers above the sand and the sky is without clouds, is a muted whisper. In this quiet there is a tentativeness that suggests that something is about to happen. And indeed we may be sure the present stand of the sea here is only temporary, for many times in the past million years or so it has risen and flowed across all of the coastal plain, paused for perhaps a few thousand years, and returned again to its basin.
For the shore is always changing, and today’s sand beach may become the sheer coast of a distant tomorrow. This is precisely what happened in northern New England, where, only a few thousands of years ago, the earth’s crust sank and the sea came in, covering the beaches and the plain, running up the river valleys and rising about the hills. So, on the young Maine coast today, evergreen forests meet the granite threshold of the sea.
Everywhere the wind and the sea have shaped the coast, sculpturing it into forms that are often beautiful, sometime bizarre. Along the Oregon coast the rocky cliffs and headlands speak of the age-long battle with the sea. Here and there a lonely tower of rock rises offshore, one of the formations known as stacks or needles. Each began as a narrow headland jutting out from the main body of coastal rock. Then a weak spot in its connection with the mainland was battered through.
Here and there the assaults of surf have blasted out caves in the sea cliffs. Anemone Cave in Acadia National Park is one. In the famous Sea Lion Caves on the central Oregon coast several hundred sea lions gather each autumn, living in the tumultuous surge of the surf, mingling their roars with the sound of the sea, still working to break through the roof of the cave.
Back from the surf line, the winds have piled up majestic dunes here and there. At Kitty Hawk in North Carolina perhaps the highest dunes of the American coast rise abruptly from the sea. I have stood on the summit of one of those dunes on a windy day when all the crest appears to be smoking, and the winds seemed bent on destroying the very dunes they had created. Clouds and streamers of sand grains were seized by the strong flow of air and carried away. Far below, in the surf line, I could see the source of the dune sand, where waves are forever cutting and grinding and polishing the fragments of rock and shell that compose the coastal sands.
