Cancel crowd were actually green with envy
Anatomy of a Cancellation, the BBC’s scrupulous new radio documentary about the Soviet-style denunciation of the writer Kate Clanchy back in 2021, holds the affair diamond-like up to the light and inspects almost every conceivable glint and refraction.
Readers may remember that Clanchy’s Orwell prize-winning memoir of her time working with refugee children, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, was condemned for its offensive use of language, including descriptions of one child’s “chocolate-coloured skin” and another’s “almond-shaped eyes”.
Clanchy was branded “KKKClanchy” on Twitter and watched as her reputation was shredded. She parted ways with her publisher and (unsurprisingly) became suicidal. The BBC assembles the protagonists and spectators of the incident to puzzle cleverly over what the furore tells us about racism, free speech, publishing and the future of literature.
Another, shorter programme might have told a more mundane story. A writer becomes very successful in midlife: her book is a bestseller, she wins an important prize and begins to appear regularly on television. At about this time, other writers of a similar age mysteriously develop a profound dislike of her.
Increasingly, I wonder if Clanchy’s cancellation was hardly “a story of our times” at all and has little to tell us about social justice or “the battle of ideas”. Rather — and I suppose this idea cannot be very consoling for her — it was a predictable story of envy, that eternal motive force in human affairs. For all the talk of a “cultural revolution” and a “generational moral shift” that floated about in the highly charged air of 2021, I think much of “cancel culture” can be traced to the same tawdry source.
The principal crime of many highprofile victims of social media hate campaigns was to be too successful. It was a dangerous time for your career to take off. The New York Times columnist and founder of the Free Press Bari Weiss just so happened to become public enemy number one among other journalists at about the time she became a household name in her early thirties; around the same time the internationally bestselling novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was denounced for transphobia by younger, less successful writers. The world of young adult fiction (which became a byword for savagery) virtually made a ritual of destroying the career of any writer who looked set for breakout success. “The latest YA Twitter Pile On Forces a Rising Star to Self-Cancel” runs a characteristic headline from this era.
Similar dynamics underpinned attacks on senior figures in academia and the media by resentful juniors.
Among them were Ian Buruma at the New York Review of Books the New York Times opinion editor James Bennet and Alexi McCammond, the precociously promoted editor of Teen Vogue.
Dynamics of social media are those of the canteen in Mean Girls
You don’t have to believe all the victims of cancel culture were moral paragons to suspect that the unreasoning vengeance visited on them must be explained with reference to human as well as political factors.
In its heyday social media was hailed as a “digital town square”. It’s clear now its dynamics are not those of the Athenian agora in the age of Socrates but the high-school canteen in Mean Girls. Cliques, rivalries and a keen sense of who is “cool” matter more than rational debate. Envy does not explain the whole of cancel culture but very often moral principle provided attractive clothing for less-exalted impulses. It is much easier to decide someone’s career makes you feel bad because they are morally reprehensible than because you envy their success.
The impulse to punish and exclude overweeningly successful individuals appears to be deeply rooted in human psychology. In his fascinating book The Status Game, the writer Will Storr reports that when neuroscientists got participants in a study to read about the life of a “popular, rich and smart” person “brain regions involved in the perception of pain [were] activated”. But “when they read of this invented person suffering a demotion, their pleasure systems flared up”. The effect was more pronounced when the high-achieving individual was successful in a domain similar to the participant’s own, for instance “academic achievement among students”.
Similarly, Storr writes, huntergatherer societies adhere to a culture of “militant egalitarianism”.
A successful hunter — the man who killed the biggest buffalo, say — must “minimise or speak lightly of his own accomplishments” or risk public ridicule and shaming. “Norm violations by high-status individuals” are a perennial theme of hunter- gatherer gossip and some Inuit groups apparently punish boastful members of the community by gathering around them to “sing a ‘song of derision’.”
Social media aggravated these dynamics by providing both a strong incentive for boasting — Twitter is a useful way of drawing attention to your career achievements — and a highly effective mechanism for punishing boasters.
It is an underrated achievement of our civilised culture that it has managed to limit the destruction the dark forces of envy can wreak on society. An advanced civilisation simply can’t afford to suppress the achievements of its most talented members. “Militant egalitarianism” may help stabilise a hunter-gatherer band but it is a poor formula for a dynamic meritocratic culture that needs successful startups, great writers and daring inventors to rush ahead of everyone else.
In 2021, concern about social justice issues opened up a useful loophole through which dangerous resentments could surge back into our culture. Anyone who nurtured an ache of professional jealousy suddenly had a powerful lever to pull. Many chose to pull it. A time that struck many as exciting and revolutionary looks rather grubby and depressing in hindsight. Let’s try not to go there again.
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