CANCELLED!

The emotional response to systemic racism and sexism and a range of other deplorable wrongs is understandable, healthy, and necessary. Injustices and inaccuracies deserve corrections.

But how far is too far? When does the desire to erase, forget and eliminate history because it doesn’t fit contemporary norms go too far? When does cancelling historic facts and artistic creation become whitewashing? Who should decide who the arbiters of truth, of culture, of history, of right and wrong should be? And how far will these arbiters go to alter reality? When does it go from being a correction to becoming the very kind of act it set out to correct?

Incest is deplorable. But what will our children’s and grandchildren’s lives be like when they will have never heard of nor will have had the chance to read Hamlet, The Tempest, King Lear, Cymbeline or Measure for Measure? Certainly, those works should be CANCELLED. They all deal with incest, and some of those masterpieces very directly.

Should Hieronymus Bosch’s famous masterpiece Garden of Earthly Delights be destroyed, along with all records, analyses and other references to this remarkable work of art? Certainly, it must be a candidate for CANCELLATION. After all, misogyny is clearly depicted. Any written or visual work portraying Adam and Eve, for that matter, should be CANCELLED. 

It shouldn’t matter that hundreds or thousands of years ago most cultures lacked the awareness and sensitivity to rethink their pronouns. They were not as evolved as we are today. One could only hope our children’s children will not judge us so harshly just because we didn’t know today what they will come to learn tomorrow.

Religious references and books of worship in many religions and cultures got it wrong. Had the authors of these texts only written their bodies of work with the 21st century in mind, we could have kept their bibles and stories, paintings and sculptures. So much historic, philosophical, scientific, medical, and artistic work must now go into the trash, into the collective recycle bin, and be deleted because none of it, really, meets our current standards and vision for our society. 

How na?ve of those artists, philosophers and scientists! Totally lacking in prescience. We should expect better of producers of creative and intellectual works. They may have done their best and represented truths as they existed in their day and age and inside their psyches, but come on—that’s not good enough, is it? It just doesn’t align with our thinking today. We should cancel all of those written records, religious texts, creative works . . . surely the entire Renaissance collection should go, for that matter! 

When it’s all finally cancelled, what should we be thinking? What should we be reading? What should we feel about art? What art will we be looking at? 

With all this cancelling going on, today’s thinkers and artists and academics must work quickly and fastidiously to produce enough work, and to produce it fast enough, to replace our soon-to-be depleted reserves of works created by people who lived (what today one might consider) less than exemplary lives. Today's artists and thinkers must fit a precise range of thought, language, content and intent prescribed by . . .  By whom?  

If we are to cancel everything that now offends us or is not in line with general acceptable principles, who must preside over those rulings? Who should be given that immense power? Who should be the arbiters of truth, of culture, of historical depiction and historical record-keeping?

A Zen Buddhist proverb states: “If you understand, things are just as they are; if you do not understand, things are just as they are.” If this proverb can be attributed to the Buddha, certainly the Buddha would make a lousy arbiter for today’s Cancel Culture. 

And while we set about cancelling a literary giant like Philip Roth, let us ask ourselves why are we comfortable considering eliminating his body of work (just because as a person he was flawed and lived too similarly to his characters) while we continue airing re-runs of Baywatch?