Guilt and Forgiveness in the age of Cancel Culture

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I perhaps like you, suffer from foot-in-mouth disease. Too often, I say or hear something that is totally inane or asinine, which is why I prefer writing to chattering, prattling and jabbering.

Recent news reports say that one of the founding mothers of American women’s history said something ludicrous at best and profoundly offensive at worst.

I know no more about this incident than what I have read, which isn’t much. The news coverage has been pretty thin. I’ve yet to read an account that offers much context for the reported remark or any response from the scholar at the center of the controversy.

I know full well about the dangers of speaking out before all the facts are in. Yet I do hope that this incident might prompt some serious reflections about aging, academic civility and the debt junior scholars owe to their more senior colleagues—and vice versa.

In a civil society, someone would have taken the senior scholar aside, said she had spoken obtusely and urged her to apologize. Then, the apology, once voiced, would be accepted and we’d all move on. The advice offered in the Sermon on the Mount, recounted in Matthew 7:5-7—“Judge not, lest ye be judged”—strikes me as wise. In circumstances like this one, judgment and punishment are God’s to mete, not ours.

But that’s not the society we live in. These days, we don’t cut each other much slack, not even to those who are old enough to be our grandparents. A self-righteous moralism infects this society and has, I fear, become an instrument of power. It serves to silence and chastise those who fail to conform to the current orthodoxies. In some instances, it’s a thinly veiled form of generational warfare, rooted in a sense that the baby boomers have remained ascendant for far too long, empathy be damned.

Let me now turn to a recent book by Claire Dederer. This is the author’s attempt to ask and answer a series of very tough and timely questions that go well beyond the blow-up that took just place in Stockbridge, Mass.:

How should we treat a single lapse in judgment in the context of an entire life’s work?

Can we love the work of artists who are monsters in their personal life?

Do geniuses deserve special dispensation?

Is there a link between genius and monstrosity? Do those who stare into the bleaker side of the psyche or of society inevitably become monstrous themselves? What if an artist’s monstrosity is a product of inner demons that are themselves consequences of abuse?
Is male monstrosity different from female monstrosity?

When we consume a monster’s work, are we endorsing that person’s character? Or are we, instead, signaling our moral superiority and denying our own monstrosity?

In our age of moral policing, what do we do with figures like Caravaggio, a murderer, or Gauguin, who fathered children with at least three different girls between the ages of 13 and 15 and then abandoned them? Or how about more recent figures, not just Picasso or Heidegger or Hemingway or Faulkner or Hans Asperger or Roman Polanski or Woody Allen, but Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, Anne Sexton, J. K. Rowling, Doris Lessing and Joni Mitchell?

More than one critic has written that Dederer “has nothing original to offer on the quandary of how the public should reconcile the Janus-faced artist’s public and indeed private, reprehensible conduct with the merit of his/her oeuvre.” Indeed, The New Statesman called her book “An idiot’s guide to cancel culture.”

Whatever her book’s weaknesses, it does invite us to think long and hard about issues of guilt and forgiveness in this age of cancel culture.

No one should defend the indefensible, nor should we let offensive words go uncorrected. But we should also strive, to the best of our ability, to separate odious words from nasty deeds and character flaws from rigorous scholarship. We shouldn’t treat works of art or scholarship as a reflection of the moral character of their creator. We should also remember: soon enough we too will be old.

To be human is to be flawed. In Kant’s famous phrase, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Flaws connect us, and flaws can make us better. A tweet got this right: “Flaws are what make us human[;] they cause us to learn, grow and find ourselves.”

With those thoughts in mind, we’d do well to recall the words attributed to Jesus in John 8:7: “let him that is among you without sin, cast the first stone.”