Amid the various fronts in contemporary culture wars, one of the most notable in recent times has been over “cancel culture.” The term “cancel culture” is relatively new and conservatives and liberals have drawn up predictable battle lines around it, with conservatives decrying it as a tool of the left and liberals championing it as a long-overdue social correction. This isn’t surprising as everyone recognizes who has typically wielded “cancel culture,” and against whom, in the past decade or so.

If we stop and think for a couple of seconds, though, we quickly realize that while the term “cancel culture” may be new, the concept it represents is anything but. Wikipedia defines it as follows: “Cancel culture is a phrase contemporary to the late 2010s and early 2020s used to refer to a culture in which those who are deemed to have acted or spoken in an unacceptable manner are ostracized, boycotted, or shunned.” This definition notes that the phrase has only come into common use in the past 5-10 years, but of course people have been ostracizing and shunning each other for as long as there have been people.

If we look back into history, the “cancellations” of today may seem rather tame by comparison. In the past, those who were deemed guilty of practicing witchcraft, for example, might be burned at the stake or executed in other unspeakable manners. One could perhaps even say that the most famous cancellation of all time was that of Jesus Christ himself; after all, Pontius Pilate didn’t see that He had done anything wrong, and only went forward with His crucifixion due to overwhelming public pressure. This may not entirely fit within the definition of “cancel culture” as given above, since it involves action that goes above and beyond mere social shunning, but there is plenty of “mere” shunning to be found as well.

Among the most striking examples of this is the long history of the “untouchables” within India’s hierarchical caste system. Dating back well over a thousand years, this situation represents “cancel culture” baked into the rules of Indian society on a fundamental level. These “Dalits” are only allowed to work their traditionally “impure” jobs in areas like sanitation and the disposal of dead animals, with obvious parallels to racial discrimination in English-speaking nations. They are permanently canceled from birth, due merely to the circumstances of their birth.

An example closer to home is the practice of shunning among the Amish:

“Shunning involves a painful separation of a person from their community. A person is no longer allowed to eat or take rides with the other community members. They’re not even allowed to give people gifts anymore.

Generally speaking, they’re not included in any community activities.

Despite popular belief, the person isn’t cut off entirely. The community will still converse with them and give help where absolutely necessary.

Although the exact procedures vary amongst different Amish sects, shunning is widely considered key to maintaining the integrity of the Amish church.

The Amish live in close-knit communities where each member relies heavily on social support from its members.

Because of this, being shunned can take a massive toll on a person. It’s difficult for someone to survive without the support they’ve grown accustomed to, and shunning can also make it nearly impossible for a person to earn a living.”

While these are examples from foreign cultures, similar dynamics obviously exist in any human community, to one degree or another. The term “cancel culture” likely brings to mind dramatic, highly-publicized incidents such as the woman who lost her job for tweeting out an AIDS joke before boarding a flight to Africa. But we’re probably more personally familiar with the common phenomenon of family or friends who have a rift driven between them by political differences, usually due to liberals taking offense. This is a more muted form of shunning, but it is shunning nonetheless—deliberate disassociation due to perceived moral offense.

It is thus undeniable that cancel culture has been with us for a long time and is mostly just shorthand for what naturally happens when broadly shared moral standards are transgressed. What has changed is exactly who is being cancelled, and for what. This is what people really mean when they use the term “cancel culture”—they are expressing outrage or frustration at the changing standards of what exactly will get you “cancelled,” and the perceived ease with which it can happen. People remember a time when making a politically insensitive joke wouldn’t destroy your life. They also remember a time in which voting for a different party didn’t end friendships and sever family bonds.

People aren’t just imagining this shift. They’re correctly perceiving these changes in the culture around them. Politics have gotten more polarized by every conceivable measure. People now are far more likely to say that they wouldn’t want their child to marry someone of the wrong party rather than someone of the wrong race.

This brings us to a timely topic, something which makes the subject of “cancellation” particularly relevant to write about right now. That is the current war between Israel and Hamas, triggered by the massive Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7. The Israel-Palestine conflict brings together a unique blend of biases to create an oftentimes baffling whirlpool of different factions and players all trying to one-up each other in moral outrage on behalf of one side or the other. It is possibly the only subject on which you will find white nationalists agreeing with people like Ilhan Omar.

My purpose here is not to take any particular side or the other in this conflict, but rather to note that all actors in this ideological trashfire tend to try and wield “cancel culture” against each other. On the Palestinian side, there is an entire movement of morally motivated disassociation aiming to globally shun Israel, along with all of the usual left-wing un-personing tendencies. On the Israeli side, likewise, calls for Hamas supporters to lose their jobs are routine, with the claim that supporting Hamas is tantamount to supporting Nazis and the like.

There don’t seem to be very many conservatives going around claiming that we must be careful not to cancel people for their opinions on the subject, regardless of whether they personally favor Israel or Palestine. On the surface, you might say this reveals conservative crying over cancel culture as opportunistic and not an expression of a genuine principle. I’d say that’s true to a large extent, and take it one step further; not only is it not wrong to cancel people as a general principle, any halfway decent society should have lines that will get you canceled if you cross them. The problem is not the lines themselves, the problem is where they are drawn.

Everyone understands this in the Israel-Palestine conflict, because we are still allowed to take unapologetic moral stands when it comes to Jews (if you like Israel) or supporting supposedly oppressed brown people in the name of intersectionality (if you like Palestine). Both sides view the other as Always Chaotic Evil terrorists that essentially rape and murder for fun. If we take that view at face value, should someone lose their job for standing with, effectively, real-life Orcs from Middle-Earth? I’d say they probably should. It would be hard to feel bad for them losing it, at the very least.

We are allowed to recognize this when it comes to topics deemed sufficiently important to the ruling class, such as Israel and Ukraine. But on other topics, our attempts to draw basic moral lines are managed by appeals to “free speech,” or “free expression,” and other such wonderful American values.

One of the easiest examples here is homosexuality. If I state that homosexuality is wrong and should be discouraged, I am likely to be told that it’s all well and good for me to believe that, as long as I don’t “force my belief on other people.” Well, that’s fine, but what about them “forcing” their homo-positive beliefs on me? What if I say that I don’t want to be around homosexuals, and would prefer not to associate with them? Let’s say, for instance, that I run a cake shop, and I refuse to bake cakes for homosexuals.

Now I will face the claim that I am discriminating against the gays. It is true that in my own small way, I am “canceling” them. In this hypothetical example, I do not want to speak to them, I do not want to hang out with them, I do not want to sell them cakes. This is textbook shunning behavior. It is typically not that consequential if it is only practiced by a single individual, but on sensitive topics like this one, even a single person can and will be singled out for even daring to try.

The narrative will now be that I am infringing upon the free expression of The Gays, because if they express their gayness, I will deny them company and cakes. By threatening to impose the consequences of my social disassociation upon them, I am influencing their behavior and speech, or at least creating incentives for them to speak and behave as I wish for them to. And again, all of this is more or less true.

However, the remedy that our society defaults to turns the issue back around and now infringes upon *my* rights to speech, expression, and general association. People will use whatever means are at their disposal, up to and including the law itself, to try and force me to associate with homosexuals against my will, and indeed to compel me to pretend that I do not hold the anti-homosexual preferences that I actually do. In the same way that shunning gay people limits their free expression, forcing people to associate with them involuntarily likewise violates freedom of association (and in the process usually imposes upon ideals of free speech, free expression, etc.).

We are indoctrinated to believe that gay people should be able to live in a world where they can be as fully gay as they want to be without facing any social consequences, in the name of their “free expression.” Yet to actually create this world necessarily destroys the freedom of many others, whose own rights to things like free speech, free association, etc., must be trampled in order to protect the so-called “free expression” of this protected class. When people hold incompatible preferences, there is no clean solution that somehow allows all of them to live in a perfect world where no one ever has to face any uncomfortable social consequences for anything.

Rather than confront this reality and try to navigate it, the state typically tells us who is supposed to “win” and who is supposed to “lose,” and we end up pretending that the association preferences of the losers either don’t exist or aren’t valid (for instance, the ease with which you will be canceled for expressing the evil “white nationalist” sentiment of simply not wanting live to near black people). Thus, appeals to “free speech,” “individual rights,” or any other such liberal notion is little more than a state-imposed delusion.

Of course, we can try to maximize these things, to a certain extent—but demographic realities, in combination with basic human nature, mean that it is quite impossible to ever live free of any social constraints, and attempts to remove social constraints from particular behaviors or groups inevitably require that said constraints be shifted onto someone else instead. This leads me back to my main point: Some degree of cancel culture is baked into the cake. Even if I hold no ill will towards anyone in particular, who I choose to associate or not associate with has unavoidable social ramifications. And I can’t associate with everyone equally; my time and attention are not infinite (much the opposite, they’re extremely limited).

This is a more coherent view than taking a narrow-minded insistence that “cancel culture” is bad in general in the name of “freeze peach absolootism” or some such. What about all those DEI jobs that conservatives believe shouldn’t exist? Would it be “cancel culture” if those jobs actually did go away due to social and political pressure from the right? I think you could reasonably say, yes, it would be. But it would be fine. It would be a good thing. Those jobs only exist to begin with because liberal “cancel culture” was successfully imposed upon the rest of us.

And we can easily imagine more offensive examples to further illustrate the point. If I do nothing but post on Twitter incessantly about how much I love animated child pornography, this is technically legal speech protected by the First Amendment. But if my employer were to fire me because he receives non-stop calls about employing a person who speaks and behaves as I do, would anyone really feel sorry for me? Would I get a wave of sympathy from conservatives decrying the injustice of “cancel culture?” No, certainly not—and I shouldn’t. Bragging about how much you love child pornography is deviant behavior that *should* be punished and socially dis-incentivized.

This general principle broadens out into nearly every facet of life. We can and should have debates about where the line should be, how strong the consequences for crossing it should be, et cetera. But it is normal and healthy and necessary to have these lines. It is important to recognize that we have been taught to ignore them only in a selective fashion, in the service of particular ideological goals, usually those forwarded by actors who have captured state power. This is how we’ve gotten to a topsy-turvy world where it is more socially acceptable to say that men are women than to say that OnlyFans is a bad idea (indeed, the existence of OnlyFans at all speaks volumes on this point).

Conservatives are operating within this enemy-defined frame when they make appeals only to things like “free speech absolutism” or “stopping cancel culture.” They try and hide behind a neutral principle in cases where no such thing as neutrality can really exist to begin with, thus forfeiting the opportunity to just defend their own moral convictions unapologetically. If you are someone of the right and you generally believe that today’s left are some combination of outright evil and dangerously stupid, you shouldn’t be sitting around making ineffectual complaints about “cancel culture.” No, in fact you should seek the cancellation of left-wing viewpoints in turn. This is the only way in which cultural standards will ever shift back towards relative sanity.

If we return to the example of the Amish, it seems apparent that their practice of social shunning plays an important role in preserving their way of life. If they allowed members of their community to violate the communally agreed-upon rules and norms free of any social consequence, they wouldn’t really even be Amish at all. The rules and lifestyle enforced by the practice define what it means to be Amish in the first place. And unlike some actors, the Amish do not seek to impose their preferences on others by force or coercion; those who do not wish to live by their standards are free to disassociate and find belonging elsewhere.

I do get a general sense that conservatives are learning this lesson the hard way as time goes on, though sometimes it does feel like it has to be beaten into them with a sledgehammer. Perhaps the current debacle over Israel will help to accelerate the learning process. One can only hope.