Biden’s First Month, Trump’s Second Impeachment, and Cancelling Cancel Culture

I’m not a member and so couldn’t watch the full discussion. The short video available ended right before they got to talking about the political left. But I wonder about a historical approach. In the United States, there is so much historical disinfo, historical revisionism, and historical amnesia. I can’t speak for the experience of people in other countries. Still, there is some shared history to consider.

There is a long history of cancel culture in the West, but particularly in the United States: colonialism, slavery, genocide, patriarchy, theocracy, racism, Jim Crow, sundown towns, race wars, English only laws, internment camps, eugenics, McCarthyism, corporate blacklisting, COINTELPRO, torture prisons, class war, labor busting, book burnings, CIA coups, propaganda programs, voter suppression, militarized policing, mass incarceration, and on and on.

Also, it’s never acknowledged the mass cancelling of the political left. Most Americans are to the left not only of the Republicans but also of the DNC elite and corporate media. On top of that, there is actually more recent attacks on leftist academics that never gets acknowledged because it doesn’t fit mainstream frames of the ruling paradigm. Large swaths of the left are so canceled as to be treated as not existing.

Maybe even more I’d love to hear the part about privacy and its origins. In reading a book about the ancient world, Susan P. Mattern’s The Prince of Medicine, I was amazed by the description of Roman life. Everything they did was as a social activity, including going to the bathroom, but much else as well: eating, working, going to the doctor, etc. Privacy was almost entirely non-existent, even for the elite.

Then again, that has been true for most humans in most societies, even in the United States prior to the 20th century of mass urbanization followed by suburbanization. Stephanie Coontz talks about that in The Way We Never Were. There didn’t used to be much respect for personal space, to say the least. From historical accounts, I know that on the frontier this was partly influenced by Native American practice where walking in unannounced was considered normal practice among those on friendly terms.

This was also part of cultural and legal carryovers from feudalism. In early America, there was still protection of the commons. It didn’t matter what land someone owned on paper, they could only effectively control land by exlcuding others by fencing in property, which was difficult and expensive at the time. Any open land was available to the public for use. Private land was a limited concept. Even corporate charters were initially only given to public projects, not private businesses.

In some rural communities, a more communal way of living persisted even into the mid-20th century. Joe Bageant, in both Deer Hunting with Jesus and Rainbow Pie, discusses his childhood home in West Virginia that still had large kinship networks built on subsistence family farming and a barter economy. Bageant lived in a white community. But interestingly, the majority of blacks weren’t urbanized until the 1960s or 1970s.

While talking of weak and broken families, it’s typically used as rhetoric to dismiss poor rural whites and poor urban blacks. Yet this is largely the middle-to-upper class bias of those who have embraced hyper-individualistic society and so can’t perceive what older social networks look like. From Poor Reason, Stephen Steinberg wrote:

In her 1973 study All Our Kin, Carol Stack showed how poor single mothers develop a domestic network consisting of that indispensable grandmother, grandfathers, uncles, aunts, cousins, and a patchwork of neighbors and friends who provide mutual assistance with childrearing and the other exigencies of life. By comparison , the prototypical nuclear family, sequestered in a suburban house, surrounded by hedges and cut off from neighbors, removed from the pulsating vitality of poor urban neighborhoods, looks rather bleak. As a black friend once commented , “I didn’t know that blacks had weak families until I got to college.”

It’s strange how the nuclear family has become so normalized. Like Bageant, my mother grew up surrounded by kin, though not like his small rural community. But she left her family behind to raise her own kids in a nuclear family. This has much to do with the rise of private identity and private space.

It was the Quakers, in early America, who first pushed the more extreme version of each individual having a separate, personal, and private relationship with God. That led them to constuct the nuclear family as separate from the community where each family member was also considered separate in having their own private room (Barry Levy, Quakers and the American Family; & Arthur W. Calhoun, The American Family in the Colonial Period).

The very concept of ‘privacy’ is built on a view of mind, self, and personal space in terms of a metaphorical container with an inside and outside. Julian Jaynes argues that was a new social construct that emerged after the collapse of Bronze Age civilization, whereas prior to that the dominant view was of the bundled mind, extended self, and communal space. It was in the Axial Age when the first appears writings on privacy. So, the enclosure of identity preceded enclosure of the commons by a couple of millennia.

I’m more of a left-winger. I’m not much of a fan of either liberal identity politics or right-wing identity politics. Nor do I support “political correctness” and “cancel culture.” But let’s be realistic and let’s be informed. If we go back to the Cold War, we should remember that often the liberal class in the corporate media and corrporatist politics were among the most strident Cold Warriors in siding with the right and silencing the left. It’s never been easy to be on the left in Amerian society, not then and not now.

Cancel culture is Bill O’Reilly repeatedly calling Dr. George Tiller a “baby killer” until one of O’Reilly’s viewers acted by killing Dr. Tiller. Cancel culture is Alex Jones rantng about the Pizzagate conspiracy about a cabal of pedophiles until one of his listeners shows up at the Pizza restaurant wth a gun. Or when Jones used harassment in trying to silence the parents of the students killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Cancel culture is right-wingers driving vehicles into crowds of left-wingers. Cancel culture is the constant shootings, hate crimes, and terrorism mostly committed by the political right. And the political left is disproportiionately the target of violence. One study found that the police were more likely to use violence against peaceful leftist protesters than against peaceful rightist protesters.

Also, cancel culture is when Donald Trump, Fox News hacks, etc constantly go on about how anyone who disagrees with them should be fired. Cancel culture is Jordan Peterson’s habit of suing people who are critical of him. Cancel culture is when David Graeber couldn’t find work in any US university. Cancel culture is when professors are fired for supporting Palestinians or being critical of Israel.

Did you know there is still a US law on the book that makes belonging to the communist party illegal? It hasn’t been enforced in a long time, but Trump when president suggested it should be used again. Also, think of COINTELPRO that was used to destroy leftist groups in the past. Technically, COINTELPRO is illegal; and yet that hasn’t stopped the government from using COINTELPRO tactics since 9/11.

And corporate media supposedly as a left-wing bias. Really!?! Give me a break.

Using Free Speech Rhetoric to Silence Opponents
Right-Wing Political Correctness, Censorship, and Silencing
Framing Free Speech
Anarchists Not In Universities
Corporate-Ruled MSM & DNC Is Left-Wing, Says Corporatist Right-Wingers

In the last part of the episode Corey argues that the idea of free speech developed alongside the concept of privacy. And that the latter started only about 300 years ago when rich people started building private toilets. He also said things have been going downhill since we stopped looking each other in the eye when shitting together. This last was said half jokingly. I find his very interesting, just like the points you raise about he concepts of privacy and family in “non-western” cultures.

I see also a link between these 2 concepts and some aspects of reading and writing, like writing a diary or a novel. I see some connections with the orange meme as well. I could also see the need for privacy arise as a reaction to religious violence such as the inquisition and the canceling of other cultures and religions.