Stoicism Offers an Antidote to Cancel Culture

“From a eudaimonic well-being perspective, the act of cancelling those we do not like—more often than not—leaves us worse off, precisely because it robs us of an opportunity to create the best version of ourselves.”

In July of 2020, 150 artists and writers signed an open letter in Harper’s Magazine decrying, “a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” The letter did not so much ignite a controversy over free speech, as fan the flames of an already-existing conflagration kindled by cancel culture.

The response from some quarters was to mock the concerns raised in the letter and dismiss them as “paranoid,” or as an attempt to dodge the more important issue at stake, which they held was to hold “privileged people accountable.” Moreover, while complaints against cancel culture frequently come from the right side of the political divide, charges also arise about the Right’s own cancellation efforts, via voter suppression laws, calls to ban The New York Times’  The 1619 Project from being taught in schools, and “cancelling NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick.”

Philosophy professor and political commentator Ben Burgis summed up the situation nicely when he tweeted earlier this month: “The apparent burning need by so many people on Left Twitter to sort every human being into the Good basket or the Bad basket is just pathological. You can agree with people on some stuff and disagree with them about other stuff.” He only needed to add that Right Twitter can be equally guilty.

The ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, would probably have viewed cancel culture as a form of exile.

Cancel culture, which we define as a spontaneous and collective push by social media mobs and/or custodians of high society to banish heterodox “undesirables” from the presence of polite society, is hardly new. The ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, would probably have viewed cancel culture as a form of exile. There are clear similarities between being blacklisted on social media or escorted off the premises of university campuses and being kicked off of one’s soapbox at the market square and thrown outside of the city gates.