Cancel Culture and the Long Moral Arc of the Universe

Things get better, things get worse, things get better, things get worse, that's how it works.

In keeping with the theme of my last post, I’m trying to zoom out our cultural timeline so that our anxiety with the state of affairs can be seen in context of how long meaningful change actually takes. This post is about over-correction, its importance, and its transience. For further reading, Rebecca Solnit’s book Hope in the Dark is a great primer on this way of understanding social change.

While Cancel Culture sometimes goes too far to ruin the lives of anyone even remotely racist or sexist, it’s also attempting to counterbalance centuries of rampant, unrestrained, often exuberant racism and sexism. “The movement” seems intense because it’s in the age of high-speed internet and not the creeping crawl of civil rights bills and popular sentiment. Things are happening fast. Chris Rock might be right that Cancel Culture is making comedy boring, but he is wrong to take it so seriously. Cancel Culture and Wokeness is already calming down, finding equilibrium, and hopefully returning us to a slightly more just world because of the work it has done.

Cancel Culture is an over-correction, and I think it is vital. An overcorrection is simply making things worse in order to make them better. It’s a healthy, logical, and often necessary tactic. Importantly for my “We-Should-Cancel-Cancel-Culture” friends, over-correction is almost always temporary.

When driving a car, if you’re trying to avoid an obstacle, overcorrection can lead you into a ditch if you jerk the wheel too far in one direction. And I think, perhaps, the fear on both the American Left and the Right is that the whole country will end up in the ditch if the other side is in control of the wheel. They’re both right.

The best strategy is to quickly and accurately correct the course the perfect amount to stay on the road, but this isn't easy, especially when we are a conflicted people.

What’s most likely to happen—and what I believe is happening in our country and has been for decades— is we spin the wheel too far right, then we spin the wheel too far left, then we spin the wheel too far right, then we spin the wheel too far left, and the car swerves violently back and forth, and then, magically, we (all together) will regain control. While a crash is possible, whether it’s on the Left side of the road or the Right side of the road, it won’t be anyone in particular’s fault; it will just be how it unfolded cause we are crappy drivers. And if that happens, I’m not saying there isn’t a “right side of history,” but I am saying the road might be safer without us.

The civil rights movements of the past, up until today with Wokeness and Cancel Culture, are all an attempt to regain control of the vehicle. Or rather, wrestle the steering wheel from some old white guy who is desperately clinging on to it even though everyone knows he probably isn’t fit to drive anymore since he keeps hitting dogs and flicking everyone off. Unlike over-correction in a car, which might happen in a couple of seconds, when it comes to culture, it happens almost imperceptibly slowly—remember, “the arc of the moral universe is long.” In writing this post, it’s probably the first time I’ve stopped to understand what MLK was saying with these words. It wasn’t just “Damn, this is going to take a long time,” though that was definitely part of it. It was also, “Trust the process.”

The Joe Rogans, Tucker Carlsons, Dave Chappelles, and Bill Burrs of the world are correct to rage on that some comedy—even some freedom and tolerance—is dead because Cancel Culture seems to get out of hand from time to time. But don’t get wound up in their back-and-forths, don’t get wound up in the Instagram comments; zoom out and try to understand what a long arc bending toward justice might look like in real-time. Here’s a hint: It will not look like justice, it will often look like injustice, and that is because we aren’t at the end of the arc yet and we can’t magically teleport there.

I believe that things are bending toward justice, but nobody alive today actually knows what that justice will actually look like. I do know it won’t look like Cancel Culture, but I also fully accept Cancel Culture’s importance and its transience simultaneously. It’s an over-correction so we don’t end up in a ditch on the Right side of the road. I guess Tucker Carlson’s trying to make sure we don’t end up in a ditch on the Left side of the road? (I’m being generous here). I feel myself disassociating from it all, but it seems like the healthy kind of disassociation. As much as I want to and do jump in the brawl from time to time, I see it all ending, I see it fading out and morphing into something else. But for now, Cancel Culture exists because our country really needs it. We are watching value systems change in front of our eyes—it’s sad in a beautiful kind of way and beautiful in a sad kind of way.

Much like our place in the universe, we’re all just some dots on a moral arc bending toward a destination that we won’t be around to see, and until then, we’ve got to admit we don’t even know what the destination looks like or if it even exists in the way we hope it does. Happy bending.

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I end every post with a picture of my breakfast and a picture of my son:

Spinach, bread, eggs, goat cheese, a sprinkling of bee pollen that I found in the fridge and I guess tasted okay but probably not the best to garnish eggs.

Taking him for a walk by the ocean.