Boaventura's new article "Cancellation, Inquisition, and Fatwa"

Existential and conceptual precisions

I am a social scientist and, as such, I feel obliged to treat the topics I address objectively, though not neutrally. I am against the control of ideas and behaviors through the devices I analyze in this text, and I will try to explain why. It turns out that, in this specific case, there is a special reason for my lack of neutrality. For three years now, I have been the victim of a cancellation stemming from an infamous slander based on a sordid chain of false accusations against which I have been unable to defend myself because I have not found a forum in which to prove the falsity of said slander. The damage to my reputation and my health is enormous. Therefore, I cannot remain neutral when analyzing this topic. Even so, I will try to do so as objectively as possible.

I understand cancellation as the formal or informal prohibition or silencing of a thought or a thinker for reasons of nonconformity with the dominant political or cultural orthodoxy, reasons that are generally hidden and replaced by others of a non-political and non-cultural nature. This type of social control of thought and thinkers has a long history; it was declared eliminated or restricted by the rise of liberal democracy and its principle of freedom of expression, but it has recently gained intensity with the so-called "cancel culture."

It involves the summary exclusion of anything considered controversial, heterodox, or simply dangerous. The cancellations of Socrates, Giordano Bruno, Baruch Espinosa, Damião de Gois, Nikolai Buhkarin, and Rosa Luxemburg—intellectuals opposed to civilian and military dictatorships of all kinds—are well known during the McCarthyist period in the United States and, more recently, during the so-called woke culture and some of the reactions against it. In democratic societies, whose essential political characteristic is that controversial or heterodox ideas are not dangerous as long as they do not involve insults, slander, or incitement to anti-democratic insurrection, cancellation must operate through ideological devices considered apolitical. The most common in the recent period have to do with ethnocultural diversity, sexuality, and corruption.

Cancellation is the opposite of accountability. Accountability implies argumentation, contradiction, proportionality, and respect for the law, as well as the possibility of appeal and redress. Cancellation, on the other hand, implies condemnation without credible contradiction, silencing, boycotting, torturing, exiling, banishing, killing, civil or even physical, with disregard for the law, or outright manipulation of the law. In the face of this, resistance or opposition in the process of accountability is incomparably easier than in the process of cancellation.

Erasure is the product of a certain Zeitgeist , a broad cultural, social, political, and legal environment that leaves deep and lasting marks on society, even after it has formally ceased to exist. Erasure is never legitimate. On the contrary, accountability becomes all the more urgent the more prevalent racism, sexism, intolerance, hatred, the spread of fake ideas and news, and practices that suppress democratic rights (such as the right to vote and freely choose who to vote for) are.

Cancellation today

Cancellation is now associated with the dominance of social media as a form of popular digital culture that aims to publicly shame an influential public figure through allegations of unproven violations of norms of acceptability, morality, or legality, with the goal of silencing or erasing the influence of the public figure in question. The prevalence of social media is such that the distinction between real and virtual life is disappearing, especially among young people. A new form of sociability is emerging, centered on a narcissistic individualism mirrored by the network (or networks) in which the individual is integrated. This involves the ultra-rapid fabrication of prisms of information and evaluation based on a participatory trust whose roots are no deeper than the superficiality of virtual relationships.

Cancel culture has four specific characteristics:

• The first characteristic is the hyperbolization of the allegation to turn it into a public scandal, a scandal that is all the greater the public knowledge and influence of the person concerned, be it an intellectual, a political leader, a celebrity, or an influencer . The allegation itself does not constitute a scandal. In fact, it may be received with indifference or merely resentment. To become a scandal, it must be processed by social media and media amplifiers, who may have vested interests in amplifying it. In the current case, the amplifiers predominantly belong to right-wing and far-right political forces, and also to some left-wing and far-left forces whose only aspiration is to be recognized by the right.

• The second characteristic is demanding uncritical participation and turning any criticism into sufficient reason to cancel the critic. The fear this generates is the main driver of cancel culture's feedback loop. The floodgates of user hate and social media amplifiers open and instantly flood the digital space.

• The third characteristic is that the denunciation of unacceptable behavior or ideas can be carried out by any individual (real or virtual) who, in doing so, becomes the accuser, judge, and executor of the condemnatory sentence. As a product of cancel culture, wokeism is based on the idea that social reality is a construction dominated by power, oppression, and group identity. Those who rebel against this constructed reality are always considered the most vulnerable, the most at risk, and therefore the right. I call the David versus Goliath syndrome the envy, not necessarily conscious, that activates the difference in the scale of public humanity between the denouncer and the denounced, and aims to reverse it as proof that hierarchy is always unjust and that resignation is not destiny.

• The fourth characteristic is the fact that cancellation, like a forest fire, spreads uncontrollably. But, unlike a fire, no one mobilizes to put it out, and only a few wait for the scorched ground to grow again, after a long time, the fragile grass of truth that, incidentally, few will associate with the causes of the previous fire. The initial abrupt silencing of the affected person and the subsequent oblivion are the two hallmarks of cancel culture.

As it prevails unchecked, cancellation merges the inner world of each participant into a virtual community that operates with the logic of the crowd and acts as an echo chamber. Once participation begins, anything that questions it becomes undesirable. The rejection of diversity and complexity are essential to the growth of the canceling community. Divergence implies expulsion and cancellation. Silence in the face of denunciation or the loss of activism to spread it may be considered suspicious, but they do not call into question the dynamics of cancellation.

Cancellation in history: the Inquisition and fatwas

Cancellation is a punishment for ideas or behaviors deemed unacceptable, immoral, or illegal. All societies have had means, procedures, and institutions responsible for investigating the nature of ideas and behaviors and imposing appropriate punishments. Differences in means, procedures, and institutions are what distinguish societies. In this text, I limit myself to two types of censorious and punitive mechanisms that, although created in what we call the Middle Ages, continued to have significant influence throughout the modern period and up to the present day. These are mechanisms with strong ties to the modern state after its creation, but which have a certain formal autonomy from it. I am referring to the Inquisition courts in the Catholic Church and the issuance of fatwas in Islam, although the situation in the latter case varies greatly from one country to another. I do not intend to enter into the long historical debate about the origin, function, organization, and relationship with the state or civil authority of any of these mechanisms. I only intend to analyze the similarities and differences between the methods they use and the sanctions they apply.

The Inquisition

Although it existed since the 12th century, it was mainly from the 16th century onwards that the Inquisition assumed an important role in social control, particularly with regard to sexuality and heresy (apostasy, blasphemy, witchcraft), two themes that, in different forms, frequently appeared in cancellation proceedings. There were courts of the civil authority with similar functions, but the courts of the Holy Office of the Inquisition had a much greater ubiquity, territorial penetration and social capillarity ("familiars", clerics, itinerant judges). The relationship with the State was close. Those condemned to death for heresy were handed over to secular courts so that they could pronounce and execute the final sentence. The king frequently attended autos -da-fé , especially when the maximum penalty (death by burning or garroting) was imposed by the court of the Holy Office in collaboration with the civil court. The same close collaboration existed in the case of confiscation of goods and property.

The Inquisition Tribunal existed in Spain between 1478 and 1834 and in Portugal between 1536 and 1821. Relations between the two monarchies dictated the fate of the Jews and the Moors, who had freely practiced their religion for centuries. In Portugal, the persecution of converts (New Christians or Marranos) accused of continuing to practice their religion in secret was well-known, beginning in 1497. This persecution extended to the colonies of these countries. Examples include the Goa Inquisition and the Brazilian Inquisition in Portugal, and the Peruvian Inquisition and the Mexican Inquisition in Spain. Among the victims were also those accused of practicing African religions (witchcraft) and, in India, Hinduism.

The Holy Office tribunal began with the "edict of grace" (later, the "edict of faith"), in which it accepted anonymous denunciations of all kinds for thirty days, including rumors, hearsay, and suspicions. The trust the inquisitors placed in the denunciators was an incentive for opportunistic denunciation (motivated by revenge and rivalry or by the benefits that could be derived from the condemnation of the accused). Indictants who had a closer relationship with the accused were especially valued (business partners, workers in the same place, residents of the same house, relatives). The prestige derived from participating in the work of the Holy Office and the protection it afforded led people who later became famous to collaborate assiduously.

This was the case with the painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos, better known as El Greco, who, in addition to painting figures from the Toledo Inquisition, frequented the tribunal as an interpreter and witness. Complainants were not subject to any adversarial proceedings. The crime of heresy was considered so serious that even criminals, the excommunicated, and the insane could file complaints or testify. The most common complaints were crypto-Judaism or superstition, witchcraft, blasphemy, homosexuality, bigamy, Lutheranism, Freemasonry, and heresy (criticism of dogmas).

Suspects were summoned before the inquisitors, and the terror was such that many confessed only for fear that their friends or neighbors would later accuse them. The accused were arrested and considered guilty unless they proved their innocence. Such proof was difficult, among other things because the accused did not know the details of the accusation, who had accused them, or the identity of any witnesses. Therefore, a common possibility of acquittal lay in the accused having denounced others. Confessions were obtained through threats of death, imprisonment, deprivation of food, and, above all, torture or the threat of torture, with the demonstration of the instruments of torture that would be used.

Over the centuries, the papacy developed several manuals on the authorization and use of torture. Torture could be applied both when the crime was unproven and when the confession was considered incomplete (basically due to a failure to accuse others, the so-called diminuto ). The presence of the lawyer appointed by the Holy Office was a farce with no purpose of defending the accused. In fact, this lawyer had no access to the proceedings and often became just another whistleblower.

Trials were secret and there was no appeal. Punishments were threefold: penance, reconciliation, and death. Penitents and those reconciled were required to wear the sambenito for months, a robe that stigmatized them as condemned men, a symbol of infamy. The most common punishments were exile, flagellation, forced labor (for example, on ships), confiscation of property, imprisonment, and death by burning at the stake or garroting. Exile served the purpose of excluding all undesirable individuals from society. The confiscation of property served not only to finance the Church (the inquisitors) and the State (to a lesser extent), but also to punish the condemned man's family, who were left at the mercy of public charity.

Las fatwas

Like the rulings of the Holy Office, fatwas serve the function of social control and correction within the realm of orthodoxy. But the similarities end there, as in Islam there is no centralized authority similar to the papacy in the Catholic Church. The history of the fatwa in Islam suggests that it can have three meanings:

• Authoritative information on the Islamic religion.

• An opinion or consultation for a court.

• An interpretation of Islamic law.

Fatwa is used in the Quran to mean "requesting a definitive answer" or "giving a definitive answer." Today, fatwa covers a wide field of legal theory, theology, philosophy, and orthodoxy, far beyond what is known as jurisprudence ( fiqh ). A fatwa is not a judicial decision and covers matters that go far beyond the jurisdiction of the courts. Unlike a judicial decision, a fatwa is not mandatory; its compliance is voluntary. Given the lack of centralization in Islam, fatwas can be issued by different schools, and their authority depends on the authority of the religious leaders who issue them (the muftis ). When issuing a particular fatwa , they must justify it in light of a particular tradition or doctrine.

The most highly qualified muftis are considered "absolute" or "independent" interpreters of Sharia , Islamic law. Throughout the history of Islam, there have been some very powerful muftis , even as political leaders. In more recent times, the fatwa has been considered a legal opinion issued by a specialist in Islamic law. In an attempt to harmonize and systematize fatwas , there are now three Councils of Islamic Ideology, one in Pakistan, one in Saudi Arabia, and one in Egypt, but their function is merely advisory and explanatory.

Fatwas are similar to the opinions of Roman jurists or the rabbinic responsa of Jewish scholars. They all have in common the fact that they consist of answers to questions, but the rhetorical style, conventional formulas, and the language itself vary greatly according to the local Islamic culture. There are large collections of fatwas from the time of the Ottoman Empire and from certain schools in India.

Fatwas are not based on testimonial evidence or the exercise of contradiction, but rather on the reading of textual sources and the interpretation given to them by the religious authority. The muftis do not examine the facts; they accept them as they are formulated in the questions of interpretation posed to them. Fatwas vary greatly in importance, not only according to the authority of the mufti, but also according to their content. Minor fatwas contribute to social stability and the organization of current affairs, while major fatwas constitute an important statement before the general public on unprecedented or particularly difficult issues concerning religious legitimacy, doctrinal disputes, political criticism, and political mobilization. Many anti-colonialist fatwas were issued during the period of historical European colonialism .

In the Ottoman Empire, a 1727 fatwa authorized the printing of non-religious books, and vaccination was deemed legitimate by an 1845 fatwa . A 1804 fatwa declared war on northern Nigeria, and fatwas in the early decades of the 19th century in India declared that country a land of infidels and urged Muslims to resist or emigrate. Contrary fatwas were later issued .

The same contradiction between fatwas on controversial political issues also occurred in Algeria during the 19th century. In 1904, the ulema of Fez issued a fatwa demanding the dismissal of all European civil servants employed by the sultan. The Ottoman sultan's November 14, 1914, fatwa declaring jihad marked the official entry of the Ottoman Empire into World War I. In 1933, the ulema of Iraq issued a fatwa demanding a boycott of Zionist products. During the 20th century, perhaps the most famous (and infamous) fatwa of recent times is that of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, condemning Salman Rushdie to death for the publication of the book The Satanic Verses and for the blasphemy, apostasy, and attacks on Islam contained in the book.

According to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, there have been significant developments recently concerning the character of the mufti , the medium through which fatwas are communicated , the types of questions asked, and the methodologies by which muftis arrive at their answers. In accordance with traditional principles of Islamic jurisprudence ( usūl al-fiqh ), a mufti must acquire a high level of specialized knowledge before issuing fatwas ; however, many militant and reformist movements have disseminated fatwas issued by non-specialists, which have been widely disseminated and followed. For example, in 1998, Osama bin Laden, along with four other associates calling themselves the World Islamic Front, issued a fatwa calling for a "jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders."

The fatwa proclaimed that it was the individual duty of all Muslims to kill as many Americans as possible, including civilians. In addition to denouncing the content of this and other fatwas attributed to bin Laden, many Muslim jurists pointed to bin Laden's lack of the necessary qualifications to issue fatwas or declare jihad. In recent times, fatwas by extremist militants (recommending suicide bombings and the indiscriminate killing of bystanders) have been seen as examples of failure to adhere to the classical jurisprudence on which fatwas should be based .

In July 2005, nearly two hundred prominent scholars gathered in Jordan to issue a decision recognizing the legitimacy of eight schools of Islamic law, prohibiting any member of those schools from being declared an apostate, and establishing that only scholars trained in accordance with the requirements of a recognized school of law could issue fatwas . One of the main objectives of the declaration, known as the "Haman Message," was to delegitimize fatwas issued by leaders of ^violent Islamist movements.

An estimated one-third of the world's Muslims currently live in non-Muslim-majority countries. The demand for fatwas on issues such as attending church weddings, responding to the French ban on the hijab in public schools, or purchasing homes with mortgages has led to the controversial development of what, since 1994, has been called fiqh al-aqallīyāt , or the jurisprudence of (Muslim) minorities. Organizations such as the Fiqh Council of North America, established in 1986, and the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR ⁾ , founded in 1997, have sought to provide authoritative rulings that address the concerns of Muslim minorities, facilitate their adherence to Islamic law, and highlight the compatibility of Islam with life in diverse modern contexts.

The international members of the ECFR have adopted an explicit methodology that draws on the four major schools of law, as well as a range of other legal concepts, in order to produce collective fatwas appropriate for European contexts. For example, an ECFR decision issued in 2001 allowed a woman who converted to Islam to remain married to her non-Muslim husband; the muftis justified this position in part based on existing European laws and customs that guarantee women religious freedom. While this type of decision was welcomed by many, others criticized it for creating a divisive system of exceptions. Indeed, one of the most significant developments has been the emergence of women as muftis and the subsequent request that the fatwa be issued by a male mufti or a female legal expert.

What has been called " fatwa wars " reflects the intensity of the political controversies that have worsened in the Islamic world in recent times. This type of polarization is not very different from the social polarization underlying the cancellation, where the concept of "culture war" has been invoked, or the "Vatican Wars," which, incidentally, have had very un-Christian consequences.

Cancellations, rulings of the Holy Office and fatwas

The Inquisition's judicial processes have been compared to the infamous Stalinist trials between 1936 and 1938, "the Moscow trials," but they could also be compared to the Volksgerichtshof , the Nazi tribunals of the same era. The Inquisition's denunciation processes have also been compared to those prevalent in Russia in the early years of the Romanov dynasty, at the beginning of the 17th century. There are also those who consider them to be real-life embodiments of Kafka's The Trial . My objective is more limited. It is to analyze the cancellation produced by cancel culture with two instruments of control of thought and behavior that, despite being very old, have persisted to this day, surviving several political regimes and the profound social and cultural transformations that have occurred in the meantime.

The Tribunal of the Holy Office was abolished in the early 19th century and, as I mentioned, had long been declining in importance, but control of orthodoxy, now practically limited to members of the clergy, remains in the hands of the Holy See through a department of the Roman Curia, the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. This department is the direct successor to the department that regulated the Inquisition, the Supreme and Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office. It maintains the inquisitorial procedures of the Holy Office, relies on specialist interpretations of sacred texts (such as fatwas ), and the affected clerics have few rights of defense. Convictions result in various bans from clerical or theological ministry, ostracisms, and stigmatizations.

What the three devices for controlling thought and behavior have in common can be summarized as follows. All of these devices deny the principles of democratic argumentation, procedural guarantees, and fundamental rights of the constitutions following the American and French revolutions. None of them is based on the analysis of facts, but rather on the authoritarian interpretation of standards of acceptability, morality, or legality. All accept anonymous complaints to whose sources the accused have no access. In the case of fatwas , since they are responses to specific questions, the situation is different, although the identity of the person asking the question may remain secret.

In any case, the impact of the fatwa is equally beyond the control of those who may be affected by it, as is the case with rulings from the Holy Office and cancellations. Whether the accusations may be opportunistic or false is of no consequence, since, once made, the accused is declared guilty and the chances of proving his or her innocence are very limited or nonexistent. Given the prestige that comes with participating in a movement driven by central authority or the principle of the crowd, notorious figures of yesteryear, like the notorious figures of today (political commentators, journalists, and well-known influencers ), go to great lengths to amplify and confirm the accusations.

Rewards on social media are swift, reinforcing the system's structural narcissism. All three mechanisms reject the principle of the adversarial exercise. Victims of convictions are exposed to forms of public vulnerability against which they cannot defend themselves.

There are more affinities between cancellation and the Holy Office than between either of them and fatwas . Due to the decentralization of the Islamic religion, fatwas only exceptionally achieve the unanimity typical of both cancellation and the Inquisition. Although the exercise of true contradictory power does not exist in either of them, in Islam, the fact that there are contradictory fatwas creates a form of contradictory power that, without being democratic, allows a right of choice that contradicts the unanimity of the principle of the multitude that presides over cancellation or the Holy Office.

In the case of fatwas , only those issued by highly prestigious religious leaders achieve levels of consensus and unanimity similar to those of cancellation and the Inquisition. Women, intellectuals, artists, and filmmakers have been victims of more severe fatwas when they acquire the status of judicial rulings. In these cases, decentralization makes the punishments more chaotic and unpredictable, and include flogging, exile, and death (by stoning, for example).

There are further similarities between the cancellation mechanism and the Inquisition. Both mechanisms of social control are driven by a highly centralized power that allows for unanimous condemnation. In the Inquisition, centralization was institutionally guaranteed by the Holy See, while in the case of cancellation, centralization is guaranteed by the principle of the digital multitude and the instant consensus and unanimity it allows. The principle of the digital multitude, far from acting as an agent of democratization of opinion, closes down debate and shields the consensus obtained from any minimally divergent position. Anyone who disagrees is immediately considered suspect and, depending on the era, may themselves become a target of the Holy Office or of cancellation.

For this reason, reporting produces a syndrome of terror that extends to the accused's entire inner circle, whether family or workplace. In theory, the greatest solidarity the accused could aspire to would be silence, but in reality, silence itself becomes a tacit amplifier of the accusations: those who belong to the accused's inner circle have the obligation to know more than everyone else. And everyone knows it. Silence is complicity. That's why the workplace or community proximity are prime areas for opportunistic denunciations, which yield the dividends of envy, of social capital, for example, of the institutional power and prestige previously held by the accused.

What is formally required is confession, but confession is nothing more than confirmation, and therefore denunciation is simultaneously the point of departure and the point of arrival. In the Inquisition, torture was the great agent of confirmation. As Alexandre Herculano said, anyone subjected to the torture of the Inquisition could confess to having swallowed the moon. In cancellation, torture is the very silence imposed on the accused. Everything they say confirms both the denunciation and what they don't say. They may attempt an honest self-criticism, but it always functions like the Inquisition's diminutive . That is, whatever its length, it is always considered incomplete because denunciations, being vague and anonymous, have a elasticity and have amplifiers that allow them to expand to infinity.

The denounced-condemned person must be exposed to the entire society because the objective is not to correct the denounced-condemned person, but to instigate social terror that the same thing could happen to others. Hence the importance of sambenitos . But while in the Inquisition the sambenitos operated through overexposure, in cancellation they operate through over-concealment. The garments are now the garments of invisibility, which extend to the disappearance of the person from public space, the disappearance of their books from libraries and bookstores, their image as a media attraction, the elimination of their name from citations and bibliographies, the look of contempt or hatred if by chance they appear in public space, the whispering about who the denounced-condemned person is in case the passerby-fellow-in-waiting hasn't identified them.

As in the Inquisition, the punishment of cancellation begins with the denunciation. However, in cancellation, there is an informality created by the principle of the digital multitude that did not exist in the Inquisition. At that time, it was necessary to carefully measure the severity of the denunciations to calibrate the punishment, which could be lighter or more severe. The most severe were exile, confiscation, and death. In the case of cancellation, these three punishments can overlap without contradiction. Exile can be flight to another very distant place or to the same place where one has always lived. In the latter case, one's usual place (one's home) is the place of never, because, after the denunciation, one is there in a completely different way: not as a place of comfort and replenishment for new outings or journeys, but rather as a place of refuge, a safe hiding place. It is the new form of house arrest decreed by the digital multitude.

Exile means confiscation, not for what is stolen, but for what is prevented from being earned. If he was a carpenter, he no longer has commissions; if he was an actor, he no longer has contracts to act or film; if he was a writer, he no longer has the ability to publish or sell his books. Exile combined with confiscation leads cumulatively to the most severe penalty: death.

Death is considered civil when the body-spirit of the accused-condemned person is still alive, but life is secret, not because it is imprisoned somewhere, but because it is forgotten everywhere. Oblivion is the sentence of perpetual death.

Civil death slides into physical death, sometimes slowly, other times quickly, but in either case, no one notices. Only after it happens does anyone dare to remember it. But there is no resurrection because this was appropriated by a human being who committed the scandal of considering himself a child of God. More courageous was the slave Rosa Egipcíaca, who was born on the coast of Ajudá, today Benin, in 1719, and died in the dungeons (or perhaps working in the kitchens) of the Lisbon Inquisition in 1771, after writing the first book by a Black woman in Brazil, The Sacred Theology of the Divine Love of Pilgrim Souls . This resurrection, made of effort and sacrifice, is the only one worthy of the name, and for this reason, it is so rare.

Conclusion

To show the spread of cancel culture, Bromwich wrote in the New York Times in 2018 that:

Almost anyone worth knowing has already been canceled by someone ³ .

This is because, although the rules governing cancellation are ambiguous and vary depending on the specific social media climate at any given time, their effects are unequivocal: transforming inclusion into exclusion, an influential voice into a silenced one, a sought-after and welcomed presence into an avoided and marginalized one.

Cancellation is an instrument of ideological purging. While the right and far right have been more successful in using cancel culture to their advantage, the left and far left have also resorted to it, and if they do so with less intensity or less success, it is not due to political choices, but simply because they have less representation in the world of social media.

Cancel culture is not a social movement, nor does it contribute to the democratization of discourse. Social movements have historically been movements of inclusion, diversifying voices rather than silencing them. Whenever they have changed dominant discourses, they have done so through hard political struggles and investment in extensive argumentation. They have taken many risks rather than riding roughshod over impunity. They did not seek to replace those in power, but rather to transform power. The voice they obtained was hard-won and opposed by those silencing those in the service of dominant power and culture. They never sought the public humiliation of anyone, although they were often subjected to it. They always sought public debate and, therefore, the confrontation of ideas rather than the restriction of debate according to vague criteria of political correctness, acceptability, or legality.

Cancellation implies epistemicide, epistemic control over the epistemic diversity of society and the world. It creates abysmal lines that deprive those affected by them of the rights considered inalienable by human beings treated as fully human. It prevents recognition of the complexity of the issues and the rigorous debate it sparks. In doing so, it fosters a culture of mediocrity, dogmatism, mimicry, and dispersed and polarized unanimity. Education, democratic coexistence, and intersubjectivity are the greatest victims of cancellation. Cancellation is the breeding ground for new forms of social and political fascism.

Original article here