I taught history for thirty-six years. One of the real challenges was to both teach history as it really happened and to combat “presentism” simultaneously. Presentism is the practice of judging the past based on the values and attitudes of the present.
For example, slavery was forever awful and unjust. It just wasn’t always recognized as such. At one time owning slaves was an acceptable way to organize society. When George Washington fell into his last illness the physicians attending him bled him. They opened his veins and allowed him to bleed freely under the assumption that what ailed him would escape his body via his open veins and that would speed his recovery. Of course this is ridiculous and malpractice based on what we know today. That’s the point, one can’t judge the past based on the present because what is known and socially acceptable now wasn’t then.
Cancel Culture is a slippery slope where crusaders campaigning for justice very quickly descend into vengeful witch-hunters imposing a societal death penalty for every perceived infraction no matter how large or small. There is a concept in the law known as “ex post facto”. Ex post facto states authorities may change the law at any time and apply penalties but not retroactively. The government can’t go back and criminalize your past behavior at some time in the future when those actions were legal when you did them in the past.
Times do change and so does what’s “normal” and “acceptable”. Much of cancel culture is ex post facto in action. Things that people did in the past may have been normal and acceptable then but look dodgy and suspect today. When I was a kid, homosexuality was a mental disorder and gays were considered to be sexual deviants. Homosexuality was actually listed as a mental illness up through the early 1970’s; so to castigate people as homophobes etc. based on how they treated gays in the 1960’s is presentism and ignores the realities of social mores that existed at the time. Some of the behaviors that the Me Too movement is exposing are egregious at all times (Harvey Weinstein forcing sex on women in exchange for job opportunities and Bill Cosby drugging women so he could rape them are examples). Other behavior, although boorish, isn’t in the same category especially considering the context of the era the behavior took place. Presentism also ignores the personal growth and change a person goes through during the course of their lives. If a person were uncouth or stupid when young, should that derail a career and life thirty years later – assuming the offending behavior neither persisted nor was a pattern? I would argue “no” but cancel culture says, “Yes, there is no statute of limitations.” I would challenge you the reader, have you led a blameless life? I would guess the answer is “no” but how do you know? How do you know your behavior, which is now normal and acceptable so routine and uncontroversial, won’t be cancel culture worthy in the future?
Forty years after homosexuality was removed from the American Psychiatric Associations Manual of Mental Disorders, it is now considered a normal behavior with gays employed in all walks of life, including the National Football League, and many gays are now married with families, something that would have been laughable and unthinkable when I was a wee lad. How do you know you won’t be cancelled forty years from now for once having eaten meat or owned animals or for something else no one considers scandalous now? That’s the problem with presentism, it makes “proper behavior” impossible because one can’t know what will be considered forbidden and beyond the pale somewhere in the future.
There are behaviors that need to be called out and injustices that must be rectified but not all infractions are equal and not all are worthy of the person being totally “cancelled”. In comedy, someone’s ox has got to get gored or it isn’t funny. New information comes to light, more research is done, things and society change so people should be judged by the standards and the morals of the time when they behaved the way they did instead of the values of the present.
Monuments to the Founding Fathers should not come down because they once owned slaves during a period when owning slaves was legal and socially acceptable. The fact that they owned slaves shouldn’t be glossed over or ignored but it also shouldn’t cancel a lifetime of achievement. We should learn from history, not judge it. We should realize people lived during the era they did, with the understandings of society and the laws they had then rather than punish or erase them later for not being clairvoyant about what folks in the future might think about their actions. That doesn’t mean we should continue the injustices of the past or condone them. Cancel culture is a cancer that threatens individuality and creativity in the name of remorseless conformity and in an attempt to achieve the goal of never offending anyone, anywhere at anytime in the present or in the future. It’s time to cancel Cancel Culture.