SELF-CANCELLATION, DEPLATFORMING, AND CENSORSHIP
IN AN AGE of cancel culture, it’s perhaps fitting that the death of a free speech hero would receive little fanfare. So when the poet, publisher, and provocateur Lawrence Ferlinghetti shuffled off this mortal coil in February at the grand old age of 101, there were dutiful obituaries in The New York Times and elsewhere but the respects were hardly commensurate with the debt owed the man. By publishing Allen Ginsberg’s fuck-filled poem Howl in 1956, Ferlinghetti risked jail and financial ruin—and did as much as any single individual to end not just government censorship but a stultifyingly repressive American intellectual culture. When Ferlinghetti was hauled into court, legitimate U.S. publishers wouldn’t touch books such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer for fear of being charged with obscenity. He helped create the period of increasingly free and open expression that moral scolds, increasingly in the name of progressive visions of “anti-racism,” are challenging today.
The obits reported that Ferlinghetti, who skippered a submarine chaser during World War II and returned from service an ardent pacifist, died of interstitial lung disease. But on a mythopoetic level, I prefer to think that he gave up the ghost because he knew his brand of free expression was no longer welcome in the country for which he fought so bravely in wartime and peacetime. “I am signaling you through the flames,” he wrote in “Poetry as Insurgent Art,” one of his later works. “You can conquer the conquerors with words.” Not if words themselves are the problem.
How should defenders of free speech think about “cancel culture,” that hotly contested yet vague concept that defines the current moment like flappers and bathtub gin defined the 1920s, communist scares and juvenile delinquency defined the 1950s, and leisure suits and encounter groups defined the 1970s? Author Jonathan Rauch distinguishes canceling from mere criticism in that its practitioners seek “to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents.” Cancel culture isn’t about seeking truth, he writes; it’s “about shaping the information battlefield” in order to “coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.”
Somebody calling you a jackass on Twitter is criticism. Somebody organizing a mob to get you kicked off of Twitter, fired from your job, and put out on a figurative ice floe is cancel culture. Former President Donald Trump, himself a target of social media cancellation, exemplified cancel culture in 2018 when he called on the NFL to fire players who took a knee during the playing of the national anthem and mused aloud about deporting truculent athletes too. “You have to stand proudly for the national anthem, or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there,” he told Fox & Friends. “Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country.” At a 2017 rally, he told a crowd that he’d “love to see one of these NFL owners, when someone disrespects our flag to say, ‘get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired.’”
Cancel culture operates on at least three different levels: the personal, the corporate, and the political. Each is more troubling than the next, because each casts a broader net and eliminates more and more options. It’s one thing for me to cancel my Twitter account after being attacked as morally obtuse, worse to be permanently kicked off the site because its moderators have decided I am beyond redemption, and more troubling still to have the government shut down Twitter because it allowed my awful speech.
It’s tempting to single out that last level because the other two involve individuals or private entities who ultimately should be free to do whatever they want. Only the government can engage in true censorship, surely. But the three layers work
