By Michael Brendan Dougherty
Friday, March 05, 2021
There was a time — a time not long ago — when I thought
all the talk about cancel culture and the climate of opinion on a handful of
college campuses was something like a moral panic.
A moral panic is a form of social hysteria, and it
usually involves our concern for young people — often children. A great evil
threatens society, and a handful of moral entrepreneurs oppose themselves to
it, often becoming semi-celebrities of righteousness. Moral panics are usually
rooted in a real social anxiety but attached to a conspiracy theory or morbid
pessimism. The satanic day-care controversies of the 1980s were rooted in the
very real fear and guilt of mothers of young children who had entered the
workforce and hired these institutions to watch their children. But they
produced paranoid and fantastical beliefs of hidden dungeons underneath
preschools.
I thought cancel culture was a little like that — maybe
that it was two moral panics joined to each other. The students themselves,
encountering challenging or just different ideas for the first time, reacted as
if encountering a threat, and called upon the authorities in their schools to
solve it, the way that parents and other authority figures had tried to mediate
for them in childhood. The parents of our young “cancelers” experienced real
shame about their helicopter-style of overparenting and felt real fear that
their college-aged children were overindulged and underprepared for real life
by their colleges.
Well, it turned out that cancel culture and the woke
revolution attached to it is a real problem, and not just among celebrities and
journalists. It is deforming institutions, poisoning social interactions, and
leading to waves of self-censorship and commercial censorship.
The story in the New
York Times of a
hyper-privileged Smith student wielding patently false and self-serving
accusations of racial bias against the working-class people who work as
janitors and waitresses on campus is illustrative of the problem as normal
people would experience it. What it illustrates, more than anything, is the way
a class of elites has internalized a perception of omnipresent threat, such
that its members experience the commonest interactions as oppressive. And their
reaction tends to be the opposite of noblesse
oblige — they lash out at their own servants. This pattern of cultural and
moral formation is intensely destructive of social relations in a democracy
that requires privileged people to wield their power and influence mildly.
And that really is the question: one of moral formation.
It occurred to me while reading the
testimony of Donald McNeil Jr., the veteran New York Times journalist who was hung out to dry in public and
pressured to resign because he used the n-word among prep-school students — not
as a slur, but merely referring to the word itself.
McNeil’s account reveals a man who reveled somewhat in
being a grizzled veteran journalist, possessed of a certain professional
haughtiness. But one thing that struck me is that when the Times’ Corporate Communications department instructs him to issue
an apology ahead of an upcoming expose in the Daily Beast — an apology for an event that an internal
investigation had cleared him on — McNeil balks. He writes back
Please say nothing from me. I may
still be a stubborn Catholic school boy. I will take the beating, but if I
didn’t commit the sin, I won’t ask for forgiveness.
Right there is the difference. Whatever McNeil’s current
theological convictions, he had the moral formation of a Catholic school and
sacramental preparation. This would have encouraged him at sensitive ages and
times in his life to seriously think about the distinctions between sins of
omission and sins of commission, between white lies and perjury, between venial
and mortal sins, and the relationship between knowledge, intention, and guilt.
If he practiced confession, he likely would have received further reminders
that certain thoughts and actions over which we might feel guilty are not, in
fact, sins at all. That is, it would have given him a sophisticated and supple
understanding of duty and conscience, as well as the personal and social need
for mercy. All this solid moral and philosophical formation will tend to
survive even the erosion or evolution of personal faith.
A communications department has a very different
understanding of these matters, informed by the practice of public relations,
which has a dim and ungenerous view of human nature and social relations — and
tends to view statements of guilt or remorse as political tools meant to shape
outcomes rather than as true or false statements about a living soul in
relationship to God and the world.
How many young reporters and students from elite schools
lack the kind of highly intentional moral formation McNeil had? Many of these
products fall into the “nones” and lack the kind of Sunday-school or
catechetical formation their parents had. That formation stiffened McNeil’s
spine in the face of a smear campaign and made him anxious to avoid telling any
further lies in the process.
I suspect few of them have had it. Their moral philosophy has been informed almost entirely by media controversies in which apologies are nothing more than a social lubricant — and assumed to be insincere. The formation of these media-relations fiascos tends to scar and scab over the conscience, to treat it as an irrelevance or, at best, a private problem to be overcome. It leaves them with guilt and no process of expiation. It makes them into manipulators, and urges them to be easily manipulated themselves. We’re in trouble.
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