An Open Letter to Bill Maher
Dear Bill,
I’d like to talk to you about your recent monologue concerning the Olympics and “cancel culture.” In keeping with Daniel Dennett’s four rules, let me just start by saying that I’m a fan; I watched Politically Incorrect back in the 90s; I really enjoyed your movie Religulous; and even in the monologue that I’m about to criticize, I actually agreed with most of what you had to say about cultural appropriation.
(While it is true that sometimes indigenous peoples have seen corporations monetize their art and artifacts even as they struggle to find funding for their schools and hospitals, most of what gets called “cultural appropriation” is really just the kind of beneficial cultural cross-pollination that has occurred throughout history, and serves to bring us closer together as a species. I think you’re spot on to complain that “we live in a world where straight actors are told they can’t play gay roles and a white novelists aren’t allowed to imagine what it’s like to be a Mexican immigrant.”)
But on the topic of “cancel culture,” I see two really big problems with your argument. The first is that the target of your criticisms is a straw man. The second is that you fail to acknowledge that this isn’t just a question of whether one supports free speech or not, but that in fact, in almost every single case of alleged “cancellation,” there have been conflicting free speech and free association interests at play.
Let’s talk about who you single out as bearing the blame for cancel culture. Immediately after your discussion of three Japanese officials who were fired from their positions with the Tokyo Olympics, you talk about “young people” who “flatter themselves that they’re Nostradamus and would have foreseen, had they been around then, everything that’s unacceptable now.”
The implication is that “cancel culture” is rooted in woke leftist activism on Twitter or college campuses or other spaces dominated by millennials and Gen-Zers. The image you call to mind is that of the crazy-eyed twenty-something protester in all those memes shared on Facebook. And when you further describe this cohort as “people who just want to bitch,” you are basically echoing the conceit of every right-wing talking head who claims that social justice protesters are really just a bunch of virtue-signalling malcontents, rather than individuals and groups with legitimate grievances.
But is that who’s really responsible for the firing of Kentaro Kobayashi, Keigo Omayada, and Yoshiro Mori? As in almost every single case of alleged “cancellation” that I can find, the answer is “No”. I could find no record of Twitter mobs calling for the resignation of Kobayashi, the official who made the anti-Semitic joke you compared to one of the songs in The Producers. But Kobayashi was criticized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group, and by Suga Yoshihide, the Prime Minister of Japan, who called his comments “inexcusable.”
You say that Keigo Omayada was fired because he admitted to “bullying” some kids when he was in school in the 1990s, as if he did nothing more than call people names or shoot spit wads at them. The reality is far darker. In fact, Omayada admitted “to forcing a boy with an intellectual disability to masturbate in front of other children and making the boy consume feces.” https://www.insider.com/show-director-tokyo-games-dismissed-day-before-olympics-opening-ceremony-2021-7. You talk about how “trying to inhabit the life of someone else is almost the definition of empathy, the bedrock of liberalism.” Well, put yourself in the shoes of Omayada’s employers. How should an organization that is associated with the Paralympics and Special Olympics protect its brand image from someone who admitted to torturing a disabled person, however long ago it was?
As in nearly every other case I’ve looked into, the pressure to terminate an employee for their speech comes most immediately and most forcefully, not from leftist activists, but from the respectable middle.
In other words, these and other alleged victims of cancel culture were ultimately fired by a corporation that was afraid of having its brand tarnished by association with them. I wonder, how many times have you used your monologue to blast the corporations who fired these and all the other people alleged to have been cancelled? How many times have you complained that they threw their own people under the bus, instead of standing up and saying, “you know, this person’s past behavior was wrong, but it was a long time ago, they’ve expressed remorse, and they’re not the same person anymore, so let’s all move on”? I promise you that however effective you think twitter mobs are at getting people fired (and I think there’s plenty of room for doubt on that score), they wouldn’t be effective at all if businesses weren’t so ready to sacrifice their own employees on the altar of their corporate image.
But that brings me to my second point. Yes freedom of speech is a value, but for every employee with a right to free speech, there is also an employer with a right not to be associated with speech they find repugnant. I’ve written about this topic at length elsewhere (https://dustinarand.medium.com/is-cancel-culture-a-threat-to-free-speech-or-a-form-of-it-3a73dec61cc5), but to summarize my views here I would simply say that any attempt to protect individuals’ rights to free speech from censorship by private actors (like their employers), as opposed to the government, is going to run up against a number of other considerations that will limit its effectiveness.
For one thing, employers generally can fire people for any reason or for no reason at all. Even if you amended every state’s labor laws to require terminations “for cause,” employers would find it quite easy to come up with a legitimate business-related concern for firing an employee who expressed “problematic” views. Business owners have to think about maintaining a healthy workplace for all their employees, good relationships with suppliers, and a strong brand image with consumers.
Putting in place even stronger protections for employee speech, in addition to possibly infringing on the free association rights legitimate business interests of private employers, could hardly be expected to solve the problem. Anxious employers would simply scour the social media accounts of job applicants, and refuse to tender offers of employment to anyone whose past comments portended future controversy.
I don’t know the best way to resolve these conflicting interests. But I do know that whining vaguely about “the left” and “woke mobs” isn’t helping anything. As far as I can see, what would help is to ask how we got to the point that businesses see no other option than cutting ties with employees whose past behavior or speech may prove a liability to them.
Maybe we could talk about political tribalism and polarization, for surely the more extreme these get, the greater the cost to corporations when they fail to pay lip service to the “correct” cultural values. Maybe we could talk about inequality, and the role it plays in fomenting tribalism and polarization. As Professor Richard Wilkinson of the University of Nottingham has written, “one of the most fundamental impacts of inequality is the damage it does to social relations. Community life weakens in more unequal societies, and people trust each other less. The differences are actually quite large. In more unequal developed countries, levels of trust fall to about 15 or 20 percent of people who feel that they can trust most other people. Whereas in the more equal of the rich developed societies, it rises to 60 and 65 percent. It makes a huge difference.”
In a subsequent article, I will discuss the rise of personalized marketing since the 1990s, and the impact that this has had on today’s debates about cancel culture. Specifically, I will defend the thesis that marketing and communications strategies designed around connecting products and services to people’s identities have made corporations much more sensitive to identity politics.
I would of course be delighted to discuss any of these topics with you further. I think you contribute a great deal to public debate, and I hope you keep it up. But in the future, at least with respect to this issue, do try to dig down a little deeper and address the full complexity of the various interests at stake. Shaking your head at the “young people” who weren’t even in the room when the decision was taken to fire Kobayashi, Omayada, or Mori isn’t just a missed opportunity to talk about what’s really at stake here. It also makes you look like one more “person who just wants to bitch,” and I know you don’t want that.