I have a note in my phone titled “icebreakers” that contains a list of fun, quirky get-to-know-you questions I’ve collected over the years that I find far more interesting than “how many siblings do you have?” and “what’s your favorite flavor of ice cream?” Among these questions are:
What’s your most useless talent?
What’s your least favorite color?
What’s a compliment you’ve never forgotten?
All fun, harmless, unexpected, easy-to-answer questions that have a high probability of actually leading to a real or interesting conversation. Recently, I added a question to what I’m calling “level two”—not quite as harmless but arguably more interesting:
If you were famous, what would you most likely be canceled for?
Cancel culture intrigues me. It’s not particularly consistent; there’s no threshold of “badness” that gets people sent over the edge. Sometimes a lifetime of goodwill saves someone, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes (oftentimes), scandals get swept under the rug or forgotten if there’s enough charisma or talent involved.
A societal lack of shared objective morality has led cancel culture to a somewhat entropic state: its next victim seemingly random, its aim not necessarily justice but leveling, its proponents whoever can shout the loudest, provided they’re not distracted by something else.
I think the initial impulse was to call out bad behavior in public figures so that the bad behavior could be expunged from lesser society as well; a noble cause, and a worthy one. But because people are problematic, it has largely become a way to knock icons off of the pedestals on which we placed them, or to kick people already falling out of public favor.
The most insidious (and curious) effect I’ve noticed, though, is an all-or-nothing, black-and-white approach to a canceled figure’s oeuvre.
Through my quest to find books outside of the sphere of popular culture, I came across a book of feminist essays from WWI that I actually kind of love. The voice is fresh, the points are salient and still relevant, the essays are deep and thoughtful and humorous, and it’s a great read. I did more research into the author, wondering why I had never heard of her, and discovered that she was a prominent suffragist, a pioneering first-wave feminist, a bestselling author and public speaker…and an advocate of a eugenics movement that forcibly sterilized over two thousand people.
My first thought upon reading this—well, second, after the horror—was disappointment that I couldn’t recommend this book to people because the author had been a proponent of such a heinous act. I don’t agree with every opinion in the essays, either: the author believed that women were superior to men and alcohol was at the root of most of society’s evils. But she makes a lot of good points, too: resignation is a cheap excuse to avoid doing the hard work of bettering society, inequality was never part of the divine plan and is a solely human creation, and of course, women are people, too. To throw out these good points—and all her valuable contributions toward women’s rights—because some of what she did was wrong would be foolish. Her valuable contributions to society don’t make her crimes any less abhorrent, but her crimes don’t make her contributions any less valuable, either.
This is, of course, the paradox of humanity. Everyone is good and bad, boring and interesting, hurtful and helpful, the best and worst of their key character traits. That’s what makes people, well, people.
So how then do we ultimately judge someone? Weigh their faults against their strengths? Keep adjusting the slider of good and bad acts until they die? Stack guilt and accreditation according to influence and severity and see which is higher? Forgive their follies if they’re charismatic and interesting enough and ignore their virtues if we don’t like them? Follow the public opinion of someone who cares more than you do?
All of these tactics repeatedly pop up in news articles and social media posts and opinion pieces, because we’re a world obsessed with weighing and measuring and ranking and classifying. We’re a society hellbent on creating gods and then killing them and displaying their corpses in the streets.
I started writing this essay at the height of the Neil Gaiman scandal, which has since mostly passed over and fallen out of the public eye, a poignant proof of the ephemerality of cancel culture; though the three shelves of his books I saw at a used bookstore the other day is perhaps a more lasting testament. Whether he did what he was accused of is uninteresting to me. I’ve never much liked him as a writer, and it’s genuinely funny to me that anyone who has read his books is surprised by the fact that he’s a strange, dark, deviant man. What was more interesting to me was the public discourse around it all. The internet is built on extremity, but I was still surprised by the sheer number of people claiming to feel grief and betrayal and outrage over the actions of a man they had never met, save maybe in an impersonal book signing line at a convention.
There were articles and videos everywhere on whether we were “allowed” to read his books anymore, calls for book burnings and boycotts, tearful Oscar-worthy performances of someone shutting his books and comics away in a box in the attic, discussions laced with therapy buzzwords on how to process your grief and move past the shameful fall from grace of your favorite author and personal idol.
And herein lies the problem for me: why are we holding up entertainers as paragons of morality and treating them as our own personal guiding stars?
I do understand the argument that purchasing his work puts money into the pockets of a seemingly morally bankrupt human being, but this went beyond that, questioning whether reading a book you already owned was wrong, calling all of his work trash, and actually grieving…that a celebrity wasn’t who you thought he was?
This scandal of course brings to mind the slow, comedic descent of J.K. Rowling, another entertainer that people put on a pedestal and crafted their entire identity around and then were devastated to find out wasn’t who they thought she was, despite most of that information being readily available in her books. Again, I have no particular fondness for her writing, so her downward spiral was primarily a source of sociological interest to me.
Perhaps the decay of organized religion as a pillar of society has led us to canonize authors and entertainers in the place of altruists and evangelists: Rowling and Gaiman were, in function if not name, the patron saints of misfit teens everywhere.
But the process to become a true saint starts years after one’s death, when a person’s life and virtues can be weighed in whole by a specialized committee, with set qualifications that need to be met. Our mainstream media saints have been sanctified by mob rule on the sole basis of being relatable and kinda interesting. Is it any wonder most of their meteoric rises end in equally epic descents?
Or perhaps it’s a byproduct of our capitalistic society that prioritizes profit over art, over critical thinking. Passive consumption is the name of the game now. Carlee Gomes, in her essay “The Puritanical Eye: Hyper-mediation, Sex on Film, and the Disavowal of Desire,” writes:
The desire to exclusively engage with media and art made by “unproblematic” artists is a direct result of Americans viewing media consumption as an inherently political act because that is the supreme promise of Western prosperity and the religion of consumerism, and because it’s seemingly all that’s left. We’ve been stripped and socialized out of any real political energy and agency. Our ability to consume is the only thing remaining that’s “ours” in late capitalism, and as a result it’s become a stand-in for (or perhaps the sole defining quality of) every aspect of being alive today — consuming is activism, it’s love, it’s thinking, it’s sex, it’s fill in the blank. When the act of consuming is all you have left and indeed the only thing society tells you is valuable and meaningful, the act must necessarily be a moral one, which is why people send themselves down manic spirals deciding what, who is “problematic” or not, because for us the stakes are that high now.
I think that’s an ultimately pessimistic view—people have more agency than she implies and should rally to claim it rather than passively accepting our fate—but it’s an interesting and not altogether untrue take. Culture is a primary way we engage with society, so of course our choice of culture must reflect our individual ideals. And in a world that has lost the ability to recognize nuance and prioritizes memes and soundbites, your options for engaging with media have exclusively become “this is good” or “this is bad.”
I’d like to introduce a third option, though: “This was created by a human being, and I have the critical thinking skills to appreciate a piece of art without wholesale endorsing every decision the artist has ever made.”
Facetious? Maybe. But there’s power in reclaiming your agency as a consumer and resisting the insidious narrative that your opinions have to be simple, concise, and socially palatable to the lowest common denominators. Do you know who benefits most from that? People who want to control society and people who want to sell you things. When the masses can’t think critically or with nuance, the masses are ripe for influencing.
This third option goes both ways, though. If, given the relevant information, you decide you don’t want to welcome Gaiman’s energy into your life and you’re better off never laying eyes on his work again, that’s your right and I respect it. What I won’t respect is you then taking that personal moral judgment, foisting it upon everyone else, and using it as measuring stick by which to condemn other people.
It’s giving 80s Satanic Panic anathematizing metal music. It’s giving Oscar Wilde being sent to jail for “indecency.” It’s giving any of the myriad other movements demonizing someone or something based on mass hysteria and a very specific morality.
“But Neil Gaiman did a bad thing!” I hear you say.
Everyone does bad things. That’s part and parcel of being human.
Which brings us back to the question: If an entertainer’s morals matter, where is the line and who gets to draw it?
It’s an unpopular opinion, but I believe we all get to draw that line for ourselves. And, in an even more unpopular opinion, I don’t believe that liking The Sandman or Harry Potter makes you a bad person. Claiming either author as the best writer in the world and a paragon of morality makes you a bad person, but that doesn’t necessarily follow from liking their books. It’s possible to engage with an artist’s work without opening your soul like a snake unhinging its jaws and swallowing it whole. You won’t catch iniquity like the common cold by picking up American Gods.
Also, it should be said: Unproblematic people don’t usually make good art. Throughout history most of the best artists have been the troubled ones, the tortured souls, the addicts, the rebels, the shall we say “personalities.” Am I recommending this lifestyle? Absolutely not. But in a discussion of cancel culture, it needs to be acknowledged.
Choosing to not monetarily support an artist or recommend their work to others or consume it yourself because of their choices is legitimate. It’s a good thing. It’s an act of agency, using your power as a consumer to shape culture and society in a way we can all benefit from. Getting on TikTok and tearfully telling other people to burn their Neil Gaiman books because he’s “bad” is the act of a child throwing a tantrum. And blindly listening to the influencer telling you to do that even while you still kinda like Gaiman’s books is an unforgivable act of passivity that is slowly ruining our society.
In the words of the problematic WWI-era feminist, “It is so much easier sometimes to sit down and be resigned than to rise up and be indignant.”
But your indignance should be your own, your opinions your own.
Like the art you want to like. Ignore the artists you want to ignore. Promote things and people that are good. Create an identity for yourself that’s not centered around fallible famous people or art you didn’t make. Quit using your taste (or lack thereof) to virtue signal, and quit fabricating incendiary opinions just to gain followers. Be an active participant in shaping culture and use your agency for good.
I don’t care if you hate Neil Gaiman and never read another thing he wrote. There are other good fantasy authors out there.
I care that cancel culture has become a stand-in for critical thinking and our morality manifests not in helping our neighbor and being kind to strangers, but in how loud we can shout about the mediocre media we’re consuming.
We’ve collectively lost the plot, fam.
Society is stronger when people are well-read and well-informed, when opinions are based on research and analysis as well as morality and a strong sense of self, and, most importantly, when those opinions are shared respectfully. Hearing someone out with an open mind doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to change your opinion or you have to eventually agree, it just means approaching a different opinion with the knowledge that other people have different values and experiences than you do, and unless it’s causing actual problems or harm, that’s usually okay.
Appreciating Stardust doesn’t mean you condone assault, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a moron. Conversely, not wanting to read Stardust is perfectly understandable and acceptable, but it also doesn’t automatically make you a good person. A single artist’s work does not make or break us as humans, and the human who created it is not a saint, or a demon, but a person, living their life, making mistakes, making choices.
And that’s all we can do, too: live our lives to the best of our abilities and make the best choices we can for where we are in life at any given moment, and let others do the same.
So let’s stop canonizing and idolizing entertainers, especially ones that are still living. And let’s start using our agency to promote the things we love instead of condemning the things we hate (and the people who don’t hate them quite as much as we do). Let’s make the world a better place in whatever small ways we can—listening to each other, supporting each other, being kind to each other. Making good art and good choices. Rising up and being indignant about the things we want to change and actively putting in the effort to change them, not just yelling about them online. Rejecting passivity. Forming nuanced opinions that can’t fit within the confines of a single TikTok. Being all-around good humans.
How we engage with media—with other people—matters. Just be thoughtful about it. Because when we’re not, humanity loses.
Stay excellent,
Kristen
As always, The Lit Nerds is my attempt to make the world of literature more positive, hopeful, and focused on quality. Check out some of the new work we’ve published!
In my last newsletter, I mentioned starting a page of book recommendations, and I’m happy to say it’s live now! I’m slowly building it up as I find free time and more good books, but I wanted to create a landing page of books I would unequivocally recommend to anyone because they’re the perfect mix of good story and good writing.
Most book reviewers I’ve found don’t select for the same things I do, so on the off chance there’s someone else out there that shares my taste and values in literature, this now exists.
I’ve been listening to Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang while I walk in the metroparks, and it’s so happy and so good. This podcast is the positivity the world needs.
Amy Poehler, if you ever read this, please be my best friend.
I recently made these margarita Jell-O shots for a party, and they were incredible. Highly recommend adding edible glitter on top for the vibes.
Also for that party, I used Stok Espresso Blend cold brew to make batch espresso martinis, and had multiple people tell me it was the best espresso martini they’d ever had. It’s not great to drink plain, but the hint of smokiness paired so well with the alcohol, and it’s easy on the budget. (I used a 2-1-1 ratio of cold brew, vodka, and Kahlúa.)
The other trick was mixing caramel vodka, vanilla vodka, and plain vodka in the martinis for a hint of sweet and flavor without overdoing it.
Go forth and impress your friends at your next dinner party!
Featured image by insung yoon on Unsplash
Earthbound, But Aspiring 