Cancel culture in the moral maze

How worried should we be by attempts to silence people on campus?

The address to the Oxford Union this week by the feminist philosopher Kathleen Stock, who resigned from her academic position at the University of Sussex in 2021 following criticism of her views on gender, produced predictable protests and threats, causing Stock to need security protection as she arrived.

One group at the university said opposition to her invitation went against free speech. A second group claimed that revoking an invitation wasn’t the same as preventing someone from speaking. So what does “cancel culture” mean?

Those who view it as a threat to western liberal democracy see historic parallels with witch-hunts, inquisitions and book bans. Others think that ostracisation and social shunning have always existed as a form of accountability for an individual’s actions.

Should we understand cancel culture as a deterioration of the public sphere and symptomatic of a growing illiberalism? Or does it reflect the convulsions and evolution of a free society?

My fellow panellists were Inaya Folarin Iman, Matthew Taylor and Mona Siddiqui. Our witnesses were Professor Kathleen Stock; Dr Clara Barker, a materials scientist, trans individual and dean for equality and diversity at Linacre College, Oxford; Professor Lawrence Goldman, Emeritus Fellow in History at St Peter’s College, Oxford; and Dr Lorna Finlayson, lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex.

You can listen to the programme on BBC Sounds here.

Recent posts

My most recent exclusive post for my premium subscribers argues that the bullying of those who dissent from transgender dogma is out of control. This is how the piece begins:

News from Salem

MELANIE PHILLIPS

23 MAY

Two stories from Britain over the last day or so provide more graphic evidence than ever of the terrifying drift into ideological witch-hunting by the nation that once gave political liberty and liberal tolerance to the world. A Christian mathematics teacher, Joshua Sutcliffe, has been banned indefinitely from the teaching profession for calling girls girls, and for refusing to use the preferred pronoun of a transgender pupil who identified as a boy but to whom he referred as “she” and “her”.

Read full story

And you can read my most recent post that’s available to everyone, arguing that the obscene spectacle staged by rock guitarist Roger Waters in Berlin exposes the moral vacuum in Holocaust memorialising, by clicking here.

One more thing…

This is how my email posts work.

There are two subscription levels: my free service and my premium service.

Anyone can sign up to the free service on this website. You can of course unsubscribe at any time by clicking “unsubscribe” at the foot of each email.

Everyone on the free list will receive the full text of pieces I write for outlets such as the Jewish News Syndicate and the Jewish Chronicle, as well as other posts and links to my broadcasting and video work.

But why not subscribe to my premium service? For that you’ll also receive pieces that I write specially for my premium subscribers. Those articles will not be published elsewhere. They’ll arrive in your inbox as soon as I have written them.

There is a monthly fee of $6.99 for the premium service, or $70 for an annual subscription. Although the fee is charged in US dollars, you can sign up with any credit card. Just click on the “subscribe now” button below to see the available options for subscribing either to the premium or the free service.

And you can always access the links to all my work by visiting my website at melaniephillips.substack.com .

A note on subscriptions

If you purchase a subscription to my site, you will be authorising a payment to my company Dirah Associates. In the past, that is the name that may have appeared on your credit card statement. In future, though, the charge should appear instead as Melanie Phillips.

And thank you for following my work.