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Culture
Digital
4 min read

What's good – and bad – about cancel culture?

An ancient story of compassion inspires an ethical response to social censure.

Erin studies and explains modern churches. She is an Adjunct Professor of Biblical Studies at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.

Torn fly posters layered under graffiti on a wall.
Ripped-off posters and graffiti.
Jazmin Quaynor, via Unsplash.

You cannot ignore cancel culture today.  In her 2022 BBC Reith Lecture, the writer Chiamanda Ngoni Adichie called it “social censure”.  Even beyond universities and other public forums, many of us worry about the effects of cancel culture in everyday social settings.  Saying the wrong thing, or trying to respond well when someone else does, can quickly lead to awkward family gatherings, strained meetings, and broken friendships, or awaken the ever-present social media trolls.  In a post-pandemic moment, when people are already struggling to re-establish healthy human interactions, cancel culture can make social engagement seem even more challenging.  How can we navigate this moment well? 

Behind the fraught discussions and growing angst around cancel culture, we can perhaps detect something well worth preserving: compassion.  Some of the most heated controversies today involve language concerning people who have been historically disadvantaged.  Genuine compassion motivates many who want society to speak more kindly, with more understanding, in order to avoid perpetuating harm to people who have already suffered.  People who have been hurt deserve to be acknowledged, and that means taking their pain seriously.  This compassion is an important and noble instinct.  Many faith traditions call us to honor the vulnerable and pursue justice.  

'Silence out of fear of ending a relationship itself ends the relationship.'

At the same time, resistance to cancel culture also includes an element of compassion.  Within the voices expressing concern about cancel culture can often be heard a humble awareness that we all are prone to say the wrong thing at times.  We cannot hope to learn or grow without honest risk and mutual, human grace.  A brief period of silence to let emotions cool can be helpful; ending a relationship permanently seems less helpful.  It might seem easier to say nothing than to risk offence, but silence out of fear of ending a relationship itself ends the relationship.  Seeking to continue a difficult but important conversation can also be an important and noble instinct.  Many faith traditions also encourage humble self-assessment and generous engagement with others.  As the Bible records Jesus saying, “Let the one among you who is without sin cast the first stone.”  None of us is wholly above reproach, and we all need a bit of compassionate grace.   

So how do we balance these conflicting calls of justice and grace?   

This conflict might seem peculiarly modern, but in the story we re-tell every Christmas, we see a young man named Joseph wondering how to balance justice with gracious concern for someone who had deeply disappointed him.  Joseph is engaged to Mary, but she has been found to be pregnant.  Joseph is sure the baby isn’t his.  In their culture, a woman who was pregnant outside of marriage brought shame to her fiancé, her family, and the whole community.  Matthew’s gospel tells us that Joseph was “a righteous man,” which means that he appreciated the demands of justice.  Ignoring her situation meant ignoring the pain they all felt, papering over a grave offense which they wanted no part of.  At the same time, though, the text also tells us that Joseph was “unwilling to put her to shame.”  Like many people today, Joseph wanted to leave Mary some way to move forward with her life, but their culture did not provide people much opportunity to learn from tragic mistakes.  Sometimes, it can feel as if ours doesn’t, either.  If you’re familiar with the story, you already know how it ends, but it’s important not to skip too quickly past Joseph’s dilemma.  It feels strangely modern, Joseph’s desire for justice coupled with his equally strong desire not to see someone condemned because of a single mistake. 

'Courageous compassion creates much needed opportunities to heal, learn, and grow.'

Thankfully, the story also describes a way forward from Joseph’s dilemma: the baby in Mary’s womb, Jesus.  In Jesus, we see the depth of God’s compassion for all who suffer.  Jesus never ignored the painful consequences evil can create. Indeed, he allowed himself to experience the absolute worst of humanity.  As an adult, Jesus was thrown out of his home village and religious community. According to the gospels, he endured one of the most unjust trials ever recorded.  Jesus was tortured, beaten, and sentenced to a cruel death.  When we suffer injustice, we are not experiencing something alien to Jesus, and therefore, alien to God.   

But there is another side to Jesus’ suffering that is equally important: Jesus also demonstrates profound compassion for people have made terrible mistakes.  Jesus never mis-stepped or said a single cruel word, but he allowed himself to experience the full shame and isolation of being cast out of society. Crucifixion was the ultimate censure, being publicly put to death outside of the walls of the city.  Yet even in this moment, Jesus demonstrated compassion for people who had harmed him.  While on the cross, he forgave those who put him there.  Jesus offered forgiveness to the man dying on the next cross to his own, who by his own admission deserved his fate.  In contrast to aspects of cancel culture, Jesus’ actions at that moment of extreme injustice tell us that human redemption is always possible.  Jesus created a compassionate way forward from guilt and shame.  Whatever our situation, we can find life-giving grace and healing in Christ. 

Compassion isn’t easy.  It cost Jesus dearly, and at times it will cost us, too.  Courageous compassion creates much needed opportunities to heal, learn, and grow.  When we suffer and when we err, cruelty and failure do not get the last word.  As it says in the last few pages of the Bible, Jesus is making all things new.  Cancel culture ends conversations and damages relationships, but a better balance between the righteous demands of justice and the need for redemptive grace remains possible.   

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Comment
Digital
Film & TV
Masculinity
4 min read

How our social media turns us against ourselves

We treat others differently when our eyes and hearts are forced inwards.
An unhappy father sits next to a scared son in a police interview room.
Stephen Graham and Owen Cooper star in Adolescence.
Netflix.

My wife turned to me this week whilst watching the compelling Netflix drama Adolescence and asked if it was based on a true story. That proves the quality of the acting, script, and storyline. But it also demonstrates the drama’s prophetic nature. Conceived two and a half years ago by Stephen Graham and Jack Thorne, the perversion of Jamie’s underdeveloped brain and developing masculinity by social media forces has come to reflect real-life extreme violence by young men. With the sentencings of murderers Axel Radakubana and Nicholas Prosper in recent weeks, Jamie’s actions resonate deeply. Adolescence isn’t based on a specific true story, but that doesn’t prevent it from being true. 

What about the role of social media in these narratives? Radakubana and Prosper were radicalised by violent content they had accessed online. With social media, extreme content does well, particularly on sites with no filters on pornography and violence like Reddit and X. We are beginning to discover that content algorithms are not neutral, instead siloing us into echo chambers that are deliberately forming us into better consumers of content, advertising, and objects. Social media harvests our data and sells it on- meaning it cultivates us as the product. 

Yet these manipulations cover over the deepest issue. Social media depersonalises us, preventing us from making genuine human connection and perverting our view of anybody but us. The German philosopher Martin Buber differentiated between two different ways for humans to exist in the world. One was I-It; in a person treats everyone and everything they come into contact with as an ‘It’- something to be used or taken advantage of. 

The other was I-Thou, in which humans approach every other person as a unique being, with resources to offer the I which ensures that a mutual, open, present connection ensues. For Buber, the ultimate ‘Thou’ was God, with whom humans can have the deepest and most transformative connection. 

Social media ensures we see life in ‘I/It’ mode by removing genuine contact with others and providing curated, fake, existences that can never be open to genuine connection with others. Love and affection become commodified; likes, follows, reactions. Our presentation of ourselves becomes more extreme, more perfect, more beautified, to keep mining the commodities. Our eyes and our hearts are forced inwards, and we lose any sense of encountering a ‘Thou’ on the way. We just keep encountering the I: our own thoughts, needs, desires, self-radicalised by our own insular minds. 

This can be our contribution to the conversation on the culture our young people, and particularly young men, are growing up in. To live I/Thou lives.

The great St Augustine back in the fourth century developed the idea of ‘original sin.’ All humans are prone to destruction: it’s in our DNA. The evidence for such an idea is found in every human experience, as the destructor and the one destructed. Left unchecked without genuine connections with others to challenge and expand our hearts, an I/It life digs deeper and deeper into these destructive impulses until our humanity is twisted into violent obsessions. 

The I/It life focuses completely on self-glorification through any means, something amplified by social media. What if we don’t get enough likes, follows, reactions? What if we cannot achieve self-glory through the more banal mediums of attraction, attention, popularity?  

Both Radakubana and Prosper said they wanted to be notorious, attempting to find the most extreme channel for their violence as possible to ensure they are never forgotten. They will not be the last. Jamie continues to deny his crime but in episode three of Adolescence he states that he could do whatever he wanted to Katie, the young girl he murdered. The same impulses come through; others as objects to take advantage of in achieving self-satisfaction. 

The good intentions for human connection that some of those early social media sites were set up for has been largely lost. But the good intention can remain in our own resolution to live an I/Thou life. Putting down social media and picking up connections with humans in the real world by seeing the other with curiosity and openness will ensure that we are constantly turning our heart outwards, embracing genuine relationships, and finding space in our heart to think of the other before ourselves. These are the relationships that will make us more human. 

Ultimately, Buber was right that the ultimate ‘Thou’ connection we can make is with God. The Christian story is full of God’s desire to seek out relationship with humanity, to allow us to find a connection with God that surpasses our own human experience and transforms us to be people that slowly grow away from our destructive instincts.  

What might Christian faith have to contribute to the conversation on the culture young men are growing up in? To live I/Thou lives that are curious, open, and seeking truest divine and human connection. Such a life might even touch those who have been ravaged by social media and ignored by other I/It lives. It might even inspire them to compassion and curiosity that look beyond the content that turns them inwards, to turn outwards and find a healthier future. 

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