The topic of the so-called cancel culture trend is apparently at a crescendo in various pockets of the US media especially with the sickening tendency to align it with political partisanship, and bad faith arguments rather than any substantial discussion of what is at its heart. However, the term has no lack of currency in New Zealand. You can read tweets from Pākehā men afraid to be cancelled because they can't say te reo Māori names correctly. Meanwhile there has been a kerfuffle in Māori twitter whether tangata whenua can use the N word. Without a heavy reading of all that others have opined, I would like to say my own not-so-hot take of this rather lazy catch-all term of "cancellation".
I recall back to the staff Christmas party of 2020 when I was talking to a Chinese colleague about the song that was playing from the organiser's playlist, a Michael Jackson song, which for the life of me I cannot remember which. A member of the organising committee listened in and once I turned to them they had mentioned that it was a huge discussion about MJ and whether to include him. It was only at that prompting that I did remember that people do talk about whether to "cancel" a person's body of work and legacy, which in its most extreme conceptions we collectively stop playing his songs, remove his songs from sale, remove his winning of awards, deny his cultural significance and stop doing the moonwalk for the likely true allegations that he molested children. (Actually more extreme is the Stalineque removal of someone from all photos as well, I guess.) Or on the other hand can we just acknowledge the allegations but separate the man from his art? Back in 2009 at the time of his passing, I was about to head of overseas, and did not note my thoughts at the time but I think my view was more for the latter - let his name be associated for what he did both good or bad, as a human, but let his art live on as one of the positive things he did. Back then there was no "cancel culture" just "political correctness" idiomatically running amok.
Since then though #MeToo (Crypticity's abound: A touchy subject) and the arrival of things labelled as "cancellation" have begun a thing. I generally believe it is widely misused term because what is cancellation in what it would be in the extreme case of MJ, is not what is happening for most people. It is just criticism for unfavoured views. For an exploration of where the term emerged from and how it manifests itself now, On The Media podcast did a great investigation:
The general opinion aligns with mine. I would go further that if we retrospectively apply the cancel culture concept into the past, it is easy to think of lots of examples of the overwhelming cancellation of people, ideas and culture. Those that feel now experiencing social consequences for mocking Nanaia Mahuta's moko kauae do not think about the long term consequences experienced by those with moko of various forms until very recently. You can imagine a conservative of twenty years ago saying that if someone wanted a job they should have never had a moko tattooed, because who would employ them? If people experience social approbrium (AKA cancellation) after criticising homosexuality for religious reasons, they might realise that there was no freedom to express one's homosexuality in public until recent decades, and even when it wasn't illegal, it still faces social consequences in some contexts. And if those who voted to keep conversion therapy experience criticism and feel like they are experiencing cancellation now, they can read about how Alan Turing, the genius who cracked the German Enigma code in WW2 and was key to the development of computers, was cancelled for his homosexuality and then crippled by conversion therapy before taking his life.
The New Zealand based voices that there is a cancel culture in New Zealand academia are interesting to look at: Academics Divided On Their Own Freedoms | Newsroom. The low number of respondents who felt free to discuss issues relating to te Tiriti and gender issues is a concern, the former perhaps a result of the furore caused by two prominent professors saying that mātauranga Māori was not science (Crypticity's abound: Whaowhia te kete mātauranga - Fill your baskets of knowledge). The latter issue of gender and sex issues has become quite politicised, especially around the rights around transition treatments, transpeople in sport and equitable access to facilities and its presentation in public education. It makes sense that anything where there is high political tension that there is less freedom to speak. Only the fool-hardy or the hard-headed charge out of the trenches in a culture war, let alone peek over the parapet from an ivory tower.
On both te Tiriti and gender issues, there is a reluctance on the part of "the cancelled" to consider changing views that, I would dare to presume, are unchanged from the early formation of their ideas on those topics. And there is a lack of willingness to engage with how to think about this beyond their own assumptions. And those who are aggrieved when authorative figures again state the dogma around te Tiriti or gender issues tend to respond in a way that does not offer paths to any form of learning or redemption, but rather doubling down and digging heels in, which serves no-one.
Some of their concerns you could reconcile easily with the Americanism: You can have freedom of speech, but not freedom of consequence, something I talked about and still agree with after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France after cartoonists drew the Prophet Mohammed (Crypticity's abound: Get outta the house!). You can have a view and voice it but private individuals, the groups you are a member to or the authorities that oversee your professional or public life may provide some form of consequence against you. But these tend to be nothing compared to the unrecognised cancelled of the past. People might criticise you for supporting Russia's right to militarily engage with Ukraine but what happens is nothing compared to what pacifists were exposed to in the past. The anecdotal cases of people losing jobs for tweets or Facebook posts for their views on race, gender, etc. are nothing compared to the legions of people who have lost opportunities for jobs for having a race or gender.
Back to the MJ episode, which is a truer question of to cancel or not to cancel, I'm not sure my mind is changed, but watching the Netflix documentary on Jimmy Savile is surely the greatest food for thought, because by the end you'd like the BBC to destroy every video ever made with him in it. Frankly put, past Jimmy Savile content can barely be watched without recalling what he was doing at the time off camera. His whole body of work and especially his philanthropy seemed not just a way for him to perform some form of moral licensing to harm others, but was also a method to indulge in more molestation. While the editing of select moments from a lot of footage makes it look like he was doing it in broad daylight, you wonder whether it was that apparent to a producer, let alone a member of the public it all was. Since his death came too soon, and the authorities and media acted too late, I would say that his name living in infamy and some restitution for those affected is in order. He was a manipulator so while I wouldn't say the Monarchy, his professional collaborators nor other high profile friends should bear much scorn for their association, the police and BBC should have had more consequences for their part in delaying and protecting.
Anyway. There has been over two months here without a blog, which in my whole blogging life is a chasm. The last blog was in early February which unsurprisingly came just before my formal appointment as a Head of School, while my previous position of Director of Studies was still being recruited for. Over two months on the position is yet to be filled, I have had to caretake that previous position while also adapt and craft the new one, which has been very challenging as both positions were only getting more heavy and complicated. That explains my lack of blogging to an extent, and a lack of push to get my Achilles right and have me back running.
