VOGUE VOICE

With the emergence of a new ‘woke’ generation comes a tendency to cancel people out if they express a difference of opinion. But, as Elizabeth Colman explores, creating meaningful change is achieved through respectful debate, not shutting others down.

I MET DAN at university. I was mesmerised by his raw talent as a law student and grew to love his sharp wit and sweet vulnerability. He’d recently come out as a young gay man and seemed unsure of himself. Over that summer I introduced him to my friends, who embraced him. In our little gang, he blossomed into a gorgeous, confident law graduate, later becoming a barrister. After uni I went off to live overseas. When I returned home I was soon back doing karaoke in Dan’s living room.

Then one day, after 16 years of friendship, Dan cancelled me. I suppose it was the friendship he cancelled. But it felt so damn personal, so one-sided and so final (he didn’t respond to my initial peace offerings – we never spoke again) that I felt myself cancelled out of his existence. Which, of course, I had been.

Everyone’s talking about ‘cancel culture’ nowadays.

The term was coined around the time Kevin Hart was sacked from hosting the Oscars, and Saturday Night

Live cancelled its contract with Shane Gillis on the grounds he’d once used racist and homophobic language in a podcast. That incident divided US comedians into those who championed Gillis’s right to bad comedy and those who believed he should be deplatformed (for the prevalence of that word you can thank 2019).

Let’s park the gargantuan topic of hate speech versus free speech for a moment. Instead, these high profile cases have brought to light the ‘cancellations’ happening every day, on and offline. It’s what happens when we demean another’s views or disengage altogether from conversation with those who think differently. It poses a real threat to democracy and our very social fabric.

But first you want to hear what happened between me and Dan, right?

We fell out over – can you believe – the sudden passing of a newspaper cartoonist.

Bill Leak was the chief cartoonist on The Australian newspaper. I’d known him since I started my career. Bill was a provocative and controversial artist. He offended all sorts of people, including people from the LGBT community. When Bill died suddenly in 2017, breaking the hearts of his family and friends, Dan announced on Facebook that he was happy Bill Leak was dead.

The words cut deep. Dan could be acerbic for sure, but this felt different. On Dan’s post, I pointed out that Bill skewered everyone: all sides of politics, various minority groups and subcultures when he detected overtones of authoritarianism. I said the Bill I knew wasn’t a homophobe.

In response, Dan unfollowed me from all social platforms. (A while later we found ourselves in the same room at a mutual friend’s birthday gathering and he ignored me. So our friendship is definitely over IRL, too).

Why? What could a difference of opinion over a newspaper satirist have to do, fundamentally, with me, Dan and 16 happy years?

Human beings are tribal creatures. And that tribal instinct is playing out hard on social media (mostly Facebook and Twitter). Behold the irony: with the coming of the internet, one of the biggest technological advancements in human history, we retreat to our most primitive selves.

Inside the tribe we are safe. Outside, we are at risk of being eaten by predators. That’s how it went down a few million years ago, and don’t old habits die hard?

Today, we fall into tribes according to where we stand on largely esoteric issues. It feels safe in the tribe, reading and following others only to confirm our own prejudices. We’re encouraged by memes: Find your tribe. Love them hard.

Dan had an emotional response to Bill Leak and to my defence of Bill – but it was more than that. Bill had attacked his tribe, or so Dan must have felt. On a neurological level he sensed real danger. And perhaps it provoked a legitimate fight-or-flight instinct.

In the West, we’re getting married and/or starting families later (if we choose to do either of those things at all), and in the absence of previous generations. Traditional signposts of identity – culture, ethnicity, religion, family – are falling away. These days we’re more often defined by our level of outrage.

In the US, researchers conducted an experiment on citizens in Colorado for a paper called ‘What happened on deliberation day?’ Participants in the experiment were grouped according to their political views and separated for a period of time to discuss their shared outlook. Guess what happened? Their homogenous views hardened and became more entrenched.

“Traditional signposts of identity – culture, ethnicity, religion, family – are falling away. These days we’re more often defined by our level of outrage”

“When we fall out over political issues we can come to hate the very people who help us remember who we are, who can support us through moments that will really matter”

It’s worth noting that study was published in the California Law Review in 2007, back when Facebook and Twitter were in their infancy. Since then, social media has pushed this echo chamber phenomenon to the extreme.

Online, we are connected to some four billion people, but we are at risk of losing – cancelling – the people who matter most to us. Friendships fracture after differences of opinion – whether primaryschool kids should miss school to attend climate change rallies, or if trans kids should be treated before puberty; over Gaza, Brexit, negative gearing, Roxane Gay. Those opinions take on a nuclear charge when expressed in the toneless medium of a post or tweet.

Scrolling down my news feed the other day I saw a post by one of my most intelligent, articulate and sensitive friends. “Seriously … fuck this guy”, she had written above a picture of the prime minister. She was angry at the government over climate change and the prime minister’s stance on fossil fuels as bushfires ravaged the state.

The post made me shiver. Is this how we engage in political discourse nowadays?

I understand climate anxiety. Maybe she was gripped with hopelessness about the future of our planet. Maybe she’d had a glass of wine or two and then gone on Facebook.

But this was the prime minister and the leader of the government of the nation. Roughly six million adults voted for his party at the last election. What was her opinion of them? (I didn’t dare ask.) Would she disenfranchise them? (Again, I didn’t dare ask.) Perhaps we should tell them they don’t know what’s good for them, and how about they just hand over their vote? (I didn’t dare ask.)

We should get angry. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley conveys a dystopia where civilisation, high on the drug soma, is pacified out of resistance and it signals the end of humanity. We should be furious at injustice. Then parlay that fury into argument, not abuse. Engagement, not cancellation. We have much to learn from Mark Antony who, boiling with rage after his beloved Caesar’s death, got it together enough to address Rome. And what a speech it was: The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones.

In March 2018 I went to a talk by the American political philosopher Michael Sandel, Harvard’s ‘rock-star moralist’. During the event, he lobbed divisive questions to the audience. He asked us to ponder extreme situations where capital punishment might actually seem warranted. Then he called for volunteers to rise to their feet and debate each other, while he closely moderated the discussion.

It was awkward. These were disturbing and emotive questions. But at no time did anyone lose their temper. At no time did anyone say: “Seriously, fuck this guy!” Debate on the most inflammatory topics was possible – common ground could be found, Sandel had shown us – when the debate stayed civil. It didn’t matter if you were online or off. What mattered was respect.

Agreeing to disagree. Putting aside our differences. Finding common ground. Turning the other cheek. It all sounds like advice from a boring aunt (or your priest). But even Barack Obama, the ‘wokest’ president in the history of the US, is cautioning the next generation about writing each other off online.

“The world is messy. There are ambiguities. People who do really good stuff have flaws. People who you are fighting may love their kids and share certain things with you,” he told a summit for his Obama Foundation in Chicago late last year.

“I do get a sense sometimes now amongst certain young people – and this is accelerated by social media – that the way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people and that’s enough. Like if I tweet or hashtag about you didn’t do something right … I can sit back and feel pretty good about myself, because did you see how I woke I was? I called you out. That’s not activism,” he continued. “That’s not bringing about change.”

If you strive for true social change, if you have even a passing interest in democracy, you shouldn’t write off those who didn’t vote the way you did. This is not how you should treat strangers. But what of friends? What choice do we face when we disagree with them? Perhaps that meme should read: Find your friends: forgive their tweets.

Because, of course, we don’t live in tribes anymore. The wolf no longer stands at the door of our cave. We have evolved to live in complex social structures. We have book clubs and dinner parties and sleepovers and antenatal classes. We have anxiety and depression; existential and mid-life crises.

As children, we form friendships that have nothing to do with politics. When we become adults we have free choice over what we do with those friendships. And when we fall out over political issues we can – terrifyingly quickly – come to hate the very people who help us remember who we are, who can support us through the moments that will really matter in our lives.

It’s worth remembering friendship forms our identity as much as politics. And in choosing to overlook our common ground and instead to double down on our political differences, those connections will be lost to us, possibly forever.