Tag: ostracism

Cancel culture is slippery in the taxonomist’s hands, but I think something like columnist Ross Douthat’s definition is about right: “Cancellation, properly understood, refers to an attack on someone’s employment and reputation by a determined collective of critics, based on an opinion or an action that is alleged to be disgraceful and disqualifying.”

This description highlights the differences of function between medieval outlawry and cancel culture today: Outlawry was a formal, legal punishment backed by the threat of violence and usually intended to punish people accused of felony crimes like murder, arson, or conspiracy. Cancel culture has no such legal force. It’s a movement of social censure, and in its quintessential cases—e.g., Justine Sacco or, more recently, David Shor or the woman from The Washington Post Halloween party story—there’s no criminal allegation or, many times, even a lean outside the Overton Window. (The “Central Park Karen,” somewhat unusually among high-profile cancellation stories, is being prosecuted.)

Beyond these distinctions, however, outlawry and cancel culture have much in common: They grow out of the same human impulse of ostracism, the desire to exclude offenders from “respectable” society. They give the broader community permission to attack their targets, whether with physical violence (as in outlawry) or via verbal abuse, doxxing, or threats (as in cancel culture). They oust offenders from their social class (today, typically the professional-managerial class) and deprive them of their normal means of livelihood.

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