To See Into Crevices, Add Light

We haven’t heard so much about cancel culture in MSM lately, but I assure you it is still going strong. And I think it will get much stronger if Trump is elected US president next year; they’ve backed off a bit while Biden is president. So let’s analyze the issue a bit here. 

People write and say words. Such words can have literal meanings that are relatively easy to discern from their exact order and context. But words can also have or convey less clear or literal meanings. Either meanings that the author intended, but didn’t say so clearly or directly, or meanings that reader/listeners tend to infer, even if the author didn’t intend them. 

While I might recommend that you try to not let words hurt you as much as sticks and stones, I accept that it can make sense to be upset by some things people say. Upset enough even to want to censure or punish them for it.  And while we might be reluctant to empower governments to do so punish, we may be less reluctant for private organizations to take on this role. We might even want people who say things we don’t like to be fired from certain jobs or other positions of prestige and responsibility. 

The main problem, in my view, is accurately judging the meaning, intended or not, of what was said. While sometimes meanings are quite clear, often there is substantial ambiguity. Especially re a supposedly offending tone or state of mind, and not an explicit claim. And while in criminal law most think we should let at least ten guilty go free for each innocent punished, re offensive words many seem to more fear a “dog-whistler” getting away with it than an innocent person railroaded. After all, the accused is typically known to come from the wrong political camp, and so seems likely guilty of something just as bad that was never caught. 

The main point I want to make in this post is that most who write and talk say a LOT of words in a lifetime. So there is little need to judge a person based on one particular sentence or paragraph. Sure, a single sentence might be clear enough that no other evidence is needed. But if there is any substantial ambiguity regarding the meaning of one sentence, the obvious solution is to consider a lot more sentences. Surely if the author has a habit of saying bad things, that would be revealed in examining one hundred similar sentences. And if this were the only time they’ve ever strayed, and ambiguously at that, I think you should let them get away with it for now. 

Of course when cancel accusations are handled by mobs, each individual mob member is reluctant to put in that much work. They’d rather just read the one offending sentence, out of context at that, and join a mob rush to judgement based on that alone. That is easy and even fun, after all. But this is exactly why we shouldn’t have mobs handle these things. As I’ve argued before, we should have court proceedings regarding such accusations. Either because we’ve made saying bad things illegal (via criminal or civil law), or because we make separate cancel courts to help us find the truth about legal but offensive behavior. (And if it is the expense of the judging process that is the problem, we could use conditional prediction markets or lawsuit lotteries.) 

People who write and talk in public tend to say a lot of public words. Enough that there’s no need to too much weight on any one thing said. Sure you might judge based on one clear sentence. But when individual words and sentences are not so clear, as is the usual case, then hundreds or thousands of them together should become a lot more clear. So judge people on that. And if it takes a court to look at enough evidence to judge well, then it is courts who should judge.