I'm sorry, but you have been cancelled

There is a common misconception in recent times that people have to be good people to be good at what they do, but nothing is furthest from reality. Indeed, you can be an excellent mechanic at the same time that you are an absolutely despicable person, fast to rage, abusive, disrespectful, you name it. Still, if you are technically good and are able to hold a conversation with me for the duration it takes to make my problems clear to you, I will certainly bring my car to you without and even recommend your services to my friends. If you do the work, I do not care what is running inside your head or happening in your home: that is your business and, if things get ugly, eventually the business of the police and the courts, but certainly not mine.

However, it becoming sadly common these days to judge public figures not by their past works or even their ongoing works, but by their attitudes and opinions: the so-called "cancel culture". A very salient example of this tendency is the case of Scottish writer J. K. Rowling, author among others of the Harry Potter saga, who, very worried about a gender self-determination bill that the Scottish parliament was debating wrote some tweets that caused an enormous turmoil. In her opinion (which I share) it is not enough to think of yourself as a woman to be considered as one, particularly from the administrative point of view. Transsexualism is an undeniable reality and for years there has been a number of treatments to assess the convenience of the patient undergoing a sex transition and to make it a reality, and in many countries this is covered under the usual health procurement provisions. But until now the process has established a set or prerequisites for males to be recognize as female and vice versa, it was never at the discretion of the patients themselves to make such a call, and Rowling admits to having transgender friends whom she has supported wholeheartedly as they were undergoing the process, but the current proposal is inadequate.

Photo: Marc Pascual on Pixabay

One might agree with her view or not, one might even call her position trans-phobic (although I disagree), but one should not advocate for people to stop buying her books just because of a statement of her opinion. It is, as a crowd-sourcing of the punishment, a modern-day lynching through the most basic appeal to the gut feeling and common outrage, lacking any kind of procedural guarantees, presentation of the facts or impartial judgement. And the problem is that social media are the perfect breeding ground for this kind of effect: the negative publicity can be so strong that even companies invested in an artist might feel compelled to detach themselves (usually with a significant gain loss) to avoid even bigger losses, what linguist Noam Chomsky names "flak".

Another very recent case of cancellation culture was the withdrawal of the offer by the publishing firm Simon & Schuster to US Senator Josh Hawley because of his continued support to the cause of overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election. I do not think that there were any grounds to support Trump's claim that the election had been stolen, but that does not mean that Hawley's book deal should be cancelled.

The final case, that cause me to write this piece today, was the firing of actor Gina Carano, who played Cara Dune in the popular Disney series The Mandalorian, due to a series of controversial tweets. Once again, I do not share here opinions, but I do not think that she should be removed from the series because of them. 

Probably the best approach for both the publisher of the book and the producer of the series to just remain silence and let it through, but if things got ugly they could always have argued that their clients' opinion were not those of the company but they still believed in the quality of the works, which do not reflect the opinions either.

In fact, history is full of people who were horrible persons but whose productions are still consider masterpieces: think of Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Bertolt Brecht, Johnny Cash, Michael Jackson, and many others. History has been able to get around the personality of the authors and admire their works with a certain amount of distance. In the same line, I have no reason to doubt that Harvey Weinstein committed the sexual abuses he has been condemned for (and probably many more), and I do not have the data to judge in cases like the one of Kevin Spacey, but one has to admit that, in spite of their criminal (or near criminal) personal behavior they both showed great talent at the jobs they were performing. I would certainly not invite any of them for dinner at my place, and probably would not even attend the same party if invited, but that does not prevent me from appreciating the quality of their work.

So next time you receive a tweet or a WhatsApp about the terrible things that someone has said or texted, try to keep an open mind and assess, on the one, hand how punishable the offense is, and on the other if the offense is worth the boycott of othewise wonderful works of art. Have a nice evening.