Who will save us from the zealotry of the young? The even younger, perhaps?
Many of today’s teenagers are – according to Vicky Bingham, headteacher of a leading girls’ school – fed up with “cancel culture”, which they regard as “performative, virtue-signalling and frightening”. Although they feel strongly about issues such as racism and climate change, they “roll their eyes” at the fanatics who want to punish wrong-think. In fact, says Bingham, her pupils are so concerned about the erosion of free speech that they have requested more classroom discussion of controversial issues, such as trans rights or critical race theory. “They told us that they did not want to grow up in an echo chamber.”
How wise! How brave! Does this mean the madness is finally coming to an end? Alas, I rather doubt it.
It’s certainly true that modern teenagers, growing up online, have particular reasons to dislike cancel culture. For them, it doesn’t just mean the no-platforming and public shaming of celebrities or academics who say the wrong thing. It’s something that could happen to anyone. If you offend one of your peers through word or deed, even accidentally, you could be “cancelled”.
This is like being sent to Coventry, except that social media magnifies the banishment a thousandfold. You may be denounced and shunned, online and in real life, by everyone you know and many you don’t. It is about the cruellest punishment you could inflict on a teenager – administered, like an old-fashioned beating, in the name of virtue.
From what I can tell, this happens more in America than over here. But since our children now imbibe their culture straight from the teat of American social media, the fear has entered their bloodstream. For my children and their friends, the phrase “You’re cancelled!” has become a running joke – but the kind of joke that arises from a shared dread.
Joking is an act of rebellion in itself, of course. Social media – the source of the problem, but also a place where its victims can rage and retaliate anonymously – is dense with memes poking fun at the priggishness and hypocrisy of cancel culture. Many seem to be made by, or for, children. “If only there was a way to ruin innocent lives and not be held accountable for it,” cackles Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, in a mocked-up comic strip, before tweeting in favour of cancel culture.
They might be funnier, these memes, if they didn’t feel so like recruitment posters for the culture wars. Glad though I am to see the young bestirring themselves in defence of free speech, I wonder how, in these binary times, they will avoid simply being conscripted by the other side. Having to be one thing or the other – a woke libtard or an anti-woke Right-winger – is not intellectual freedom.
It’s just a choice between two sets of angry, preordained opinions.
Many teenagers are alert to these dangers. They are justly afraid of society’s polarisation, and of their own growing self-censorship. But resisting tribalism and peer pressure isn’t exactly what teenagers are built for. They need adult help. That is why Bingham’s pupils want to have these conversations in school. “Some of our pupils,” she says (and I find this both wise and chilling), “told us that if we did not start holding debates like this soon, we might miss our chance”.
