30 November 2024. Universities | COP29, again
The construction of ‘cancel culture’ // There’s also a ‘glass half full’ version of what happened at COP29. [#620]
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1: The construction of ‘cancel culture’
I’ve stayed away from writing about ‘cancel culture’ here because it always generates more heat than light, more noise than signal. But there’s a good article on it in The New Republic (limited paywall) by Samuel P. Catlin that bucks this trend.
It’s basically a feature review of a book by a Stanford professor, Adrian Daub, called The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global, which starts from the premise that
we don’t really know what “cancel culture” is. Moreover, the very fact that we think we do sustains it. Like every moral panic, cancel culture skirmishes thrive on contradictory impulses: incuriosity regarding accuracy coupled with intense, even prurient interest in perceived violations of norms; presumptive familiarity cut with historical amnesia.
Daub tries to clarify some of this, by teasing out the multiple strands of ‘cancel culture’. He proposes this as a working definition:
(1) the actual existence of new social practices, especially online, that some commentators find scary or confusing;
(2) the claim that these practices are “part of a broad cultural shift”;
(3) the notion that a “culture of left-wing censoriousness actively drives social fracture.”
Of course, what happens in the discourse about ‘cancel culture’ is that these three get tangled up in each other, even though they are three different things.
The first one is about culture, in the sense of being about a set of social practices. The second one is about discourse. And the third one is a form of panic, in the same sense, maybe, that the sociologist Stanley Cohen once coined the term “moral panic”, as a way that mainstream and dominant voices in society defend themselves against difference by marginalising the different.
The article starts with a story about a sandwich at the liberal arts Oberlin College. In the autumn of 2015, students complained in their student newspaper that the college canteen had been passing off a pulled pork sandwich as Vietnamese banh mi.
By all accounts this was a reasonable complaint—really just a consumer moan. But by the time it reached the mainstream US newspapers six weeks later, it had become a story about the college being
engulfed in an uproar over the dining hall’s “racist” and “culturally appropriative” practices.
And it turned into the pulled pork sandwich that was heard around the world. Almost immediately the story popped up in British newspapers. The Independent headline ran:
US university accused of cultural appropriation over 'undercooked' sushi rice.
Five years later, the Oberlin sandwich popped up in a French book:
Caroline Fourest sneered that the Oberlin students had made the not-banh mi “their 1968” in her 2020 book Génération offensée: De la police de la culture à la police de la pensée.
A rough translation: ‘The offended generation: from the culture police to the thought police’.
To make sense of what’s going on here, Daub reads widely and goes back a long way.
The Cancel Culture Panic trawls a vast archive of such artifacts, dating back as far as William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) and spanning a range of media, genres, and forms: from polemics like Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991) to campus fictions like Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2000), and from the feuilleton sections of German newspapers to individual tweets.
A lot of this material, perhaps inevitably, is anecdotal. Daub describes the anecdote as the default literary genre of the ‘cancel culture’ discourse. There’s also a lot of it out there.
The genius of the cancel culture anecdote—say, “the one about the sandwich at Oberlin”—is its peculiar capacity for inverting an “economy of attention”: Stripped of context, with its stakes inflated and its complexities sanded down through repetition, compression, and sometimes outright distortion, the anecdote makes the minor seem major and the individual seem general.
One of the effects of this is that in the ‘cancel culture’ discourse, perceptions of social status and social power are turned on their head:
For instance, in many cancel culture panics, “transgender students who are rarely interviewed in the media suddenly appear as a dominant group, while members of Congress, presidents, eccentric billionaires, and the entire Russian Federation are seen as their powerless victims.”
But while ‘cancel culture’ is clearly the product of the age of social media, in which brevity strips away meaning and context, and outrage is easy to generate, Daub seeks to trace its lineage.
Part of this goes back to William Buckley in the 50s—whose book was about Yale, one of the most privileged universities in the world—and Ronald Reagan (while running for Governor of California), whose ‘morality gap’ speech, in 1966, positioned students as different from the rest of society, even at odds with mainstream social values.1
In the 1990s, American conservatives amplified this by creating the notion of ‘political correctness’ as some kind of campus problem:
Daub makes a persuasive case that cancel culture panic is political correctness (“P.C.”) panic, updated for the media technologies of the 2010s and ’20s. As Daub shrewdly observes, the two discourses even share certain canonical anecdotes—formulaic tales, similar both in their content and in their strategic narrative elisions, which get framed repeatedly over the decades as evidence of a new, troubling cultural tendency.
The third stepping stone is as a form of media export:
There is, it turns out, a worldwide appetite for cancel culture discourse—which is always a discourse about (and against) the United States, even in the discourse’s British, German, French, Brazilian, Russian, Italian, Turkish, and Spanish iterations.
One of the features of this is that people in other countries who are expressing progressive views get labelled—tarnished—with this American label. In France, for example, those who critique right-wing discourses about French citizens with a North African heritage as racist or Islamophobic are accused of “le wokism”:
Thus, cancel culture discourse serves a distinctively French political project by yoking one French majoritarian panic (about Muslims) to a separate claim that French debate is being distorted by socially “fractious” ideas about race and colonialism from without.
(Source: Creazilla)
There’s no happy ending here, and—judging from the article—Daub doesn’t have views on what to do about ‘cancel culture’. But the connection he makes between the ‘political correctness’ panic and ‘cancel culture’ locates it firmly in a story about the place of the university in our societies.
As neoliberalism has continued, the university has becoming an increasingly contested place—one that, at least in English-speaking countries, remains a centre of critique even despite being subjected to increasing market-driven disciplines.
In the case of the university, “financial disinvestment and moral overinvestment” are connected: “Politicians … use tales of political correctness to justify budget cuts” to morally invested constituents, observes Daub, and those budget cuts produce workers and students who are increasingly, let’s say, cancelable.
This all creates a looking glass world in which it’s not politicians assaulting humanities and arts courses who are being illiberable, but students complaining about sandwiches. It is, perhaps, the oldest rhetorical trick in the world: Look over there.
2: COP29 revisited: there’s also a ‘glass half full’ story
Following on from my piece here this week on the climate finance talks at COP29, there’s a glass-half-empty/glass-half-full assessment by James Murray, the editor of Business Green, which for the moment is outside of the paywall.
I don’t often come back to the same topic here in the same week, but Murray goes into some of the nuance of the politics of the Baku climate accord, and it’s one of those times when the nuance really matters.
He starts with the glass half empty: “the case for declaring it a terrible deal is compelling.” The talks opened with a warning that we were currently on track to 3 degrees of warming—which is widely agreed to be catastrophic—and nothing that happened at COP29 would be likely to reduce this.
Developing nations reckon they need in the region of $6tr a year to decarbonise in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement and ruggedise their infrastructure in preparation for escalating climate impacts. They came to COP29 requesting $1.3tr from industrialised nations and would have privately hoped for $600-700bn a year through to 2035... They got a $1.3tr headline climate finance goal, but scant idea as to how it should be met. The core funding commitment from richer nations landed at just $300bn, which will not be met until 2035.
Saudi Arabia got a namecheck in the last piece for the way in which they had attempted to derail the talks, and Murray has the same view:
The promise to build on last year's UAE Consensus and its historic commitment to transition away from fossil fuels was steamrollered by Saudi wrecking tactics, which even seasoned COP observers described as some of the worst they had ever seen.
(Source: International Maritime Organization. CC BY 2.0)
He also notes that the talks were hampered by a Presidency that was inexperienced in dealing with complex international negotiations, and which let the talks drift rather than focussing from the beginning on a “credible compromise deal” that was visible from the beginning. In turn, this meant that the talks only got there late in the day, with the result that the only way to overcome stalling and wrecking tactics was to keep diluting the terms of the agreement:
The net result is a deal that condemns the most climate vulnerable nations to a world of still rising emissions, worsening climate impacts, and crippling debt. Richer nations will also face blowback from this failure, as extreme weather intensifies everywhere, climate migration increases, and geopolitical tensions between the Global North and South ratchet upwards.
That’s the bad news version.
So let’s try the glass-half-full version instead.
The first point here is that we now have a number on the table—$1.3 trillion—that indicates the size of the potential clean tech opportunity for businesses that might be interested. Similarly, $300 billion contribution is miserable in terms of the overall need, but it is an upgrade from the current even more miserable $100 billion contribution.
And although I was cynical about the ‘Baku to Belem Roadmap’ to $1.3 trillion earlier this week, because I thought it was another example of people kicking cans down the road rather than actually doing something, Murray thinks it could be a valuable forum,
to advance the various reforms to taxes and financial institutions that have been mooted for several years as part of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley's Bridgetown Agenda... There is growing momentum behind a raft of proposals to ramp up investment and push down the cost of capital for developing economies, ranging from aviation and financial transaction taxes to special drawing rights and carbon market mechanisms.
On carbon markets, there has also been progress on rules that might unlock some country to country trades, allowing for some scepticism in whether trading helps reach climate targets.
So, combining these two, Murray is confident that there will be significant increases in climate finance flows to the Global South over the next decade.
And, despite the frustration at Saudi Arabia’s blocking tactics, it’s also notable that its coalition does not include all the petro-states:
It remains surreal so few countries can stop the international community from explicitly naming the fossil fuels that are the primary driver of the climate crisis... But everyone knows next year the Brazilian Presidency will push even harder for bolder commitments on climate mitigation and will mobilise a huge coalition in support of its goals.
In other words, it feels like a rearguard action, even more so when you take into account the wider context, in which the cost of renewables is plummeting exponentially and investment is increasing dramatically.
According to a report earlier this week, clean energy investment is booming and half of countries are already past peak fossil fuel demand in their energy systems. It is these economic and technological realities—rather than the precise wording of any text agreed in Baku—that will ensure many countries will follow the lead of the UK, the UAE, and Brazil in submitting strengthened national climate action plans in the coming months.
The glass-half-full case is that even despite the thinness of the deal, and the stalling tactics of the Saudis, the steps that have been taken are still steps in the right direction. And they send a signal that climate action will continue:
Businesses understand climate finance is heading in the direction of trillions, not billions, and savvy companies will respond accordingly. The deal may feel like a failure, but much worst outcomes were available. The dramatic Baku breakthrough may yet have catalysing effects that prove more positive than its critics expect.
H/t to Ian Christie for the link
Other writing: music
It is St Andrew’s Day today, and with my folk music hat on I have co-compiled a jukebox of Scots folk music at the Salut! Live site. It is not an all time best or an attempt to be definitive, just things we happen to like or are listening to at the moment. It includes old favourites like Bert Jansch, Silly Wizard and Capercaillie, and younger artists such as Julie Fowlis and Kris Drever.
The best video in the post is from a younger band called Valtos, who are from Skye, and their video takes you there.
I also made a playlist of all 12 tracks, which is on Spotify. Enjoy!
j2t#620
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Which also seems to connect to the way in which Richard Nixon used the social imaginary that was the ‘Silent Majority’ in his Presidential campaign two years later.