Experiencing with curiosity

Diversity

Diversity importance for social growth

Few days ago, a video of Rowan Atkinson speaking about cancel culture popped up in my feed.

Cancel culture (or call-out culture) is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – either online on social media, in the real world, or both (source Wikipedia).

Now, why is someone ostracised in the XXI century? Usually because something he said or did was judged controverse by someone else and the latter gathers people in order to isolate and cancel the culprit.

I’d like to keep an easy as possible scenario not taking into account illegal actions (for them there is justice system and people should not act as subsitute), so actual ground is at ideology level and its instances: speech, writings, artworks, products, etc. In the end, ostracising is the act of ignoring and excluding someone because of his ideas and, off the many effects, one is that his ideas cannot be heard.

I can feel someone is happy about that and is listing all historic cases in which this particular action could have been positively used, often leveraging on Popper’s paradox of tolerance. Sorry, I do not agree: imo, the intolerance of intolerant is a limit to freedom of expression. Moreover, I’d rather deal with people with declared different ideologies than have them publicly canceled, letting the ideology spreading out of the radar.

Back on topic, I want to ask two questions, very simple ones:

  • can I judge someone for something he said specifically on a particular topic, even if it can be labeled as controversial?
  • am I entitled of boycotting a product because someone involved in its creation said something which can be labeled as controversial?

My answers are:

  1. No. I have ambiguities, I’m not congruent even to myself, my thoughts change from time to time and I arbitrarily defined many bounds (an harmless one is: “no cappuccino after 11 AM”). And this is just me, someone quite common. Quoting Obama, “People who do really good stuff have flaws“. On the other hand, I’d like to speak about ideologies and to understand rationals behind them without having the necessity of destroy my interlocutor nor his thoughts, I just explain mine (anyway, sometimes I got passionate). Evelyin Beatrice Hall wrote “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” in order to depict Voltaire’s beliefs.
  2. No, because a product is just a product, even if it is an artwork, a novel, a movie or anything else. As the spectator, I have to be critic on the product, not on the author, the director, the vocalist or anyone else. My responsibility is to try understanding what that product is moving in me at ideological and spiritual level and how it is doing so. Then, maybe, I can decide whether I like or dislike that particular product. Evaluating a product because of someone related to it has beliefs that can be labeled controversial is, actually, not evaluating the product. If those beliefs are totally unrelated to the product itself, it’s even despicable, imo.

Moving to the end, this generalization that spread one person’s belief to his evaluation as human being and further spreading it to his products leads directly to the standardization of thinking and down to its impoverishment. Diversity is something fundamental to social growth and it comes with the price of dealing with people who have different beliefs than mine, allowing them expose their thoughts and accepting them for who they are.

Few other interesting sources:

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