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In the last few weeks, the term "cancel culture" suddenly entered our public lexicon. I suspect for many of us it was a recent New York Times op-ed that crystalized the notion -- here, as in so many other cases, NYT proving a solid barometer for telling when an idea has departed the digital cutting-edge and entered the frumpy mainstream -- thus becoming accessible to the likes of me. In any case, I found it to be a solid piece of work. Taking as its example a number of YA novels that have been yanked from the publishing queue in recent months because of negative reaction on social media to advance copies, it makes several points about our present cultural moment that needed saying.

It argues for one that books should be allowed to live or die by the interest and readership they generate among the public, not by publishing houses' advance notion of political propriety. It takes on a memetic idea increasingly prevalent at the moment in progressive circles, and which was used in part to take down these YA novels: namely, the notion that people can only be trusted to write about their own direct experience. U.S. citizens cannot write about recent immigrants, heterosexuals cannot write about gay and lesbian people, etc. The piece argues that such a rule denies the very basis and possibility of imaginative fiction.

She might have added that it also partakes of a dangerous scarcity mentality, in which the mere fact of one person's using their voice is seen as implicitly "silencing" another.

All of this is more than compatible with the recognition that the publishing houses involved in these cases may have erred in slating some of these books for print in the first place. The columnist holds no brief for the literary merits of the canceled material. Nor is it wrong in my view for people to express their opinions -- on social media or elsewhere -- in harsh, vituperative language. Writers have been doing so for centuries, often in juvenile and incendiary ways -- Fielding parodied Richardson in Shamela, Hemingway attacked Sherwood Anderson in The Torrents of Spring, and so forth.

The ability of the public to debate the merits of a book -- whether literary, political, moral, etc. -- is the essence of criticism. To argue that it should cease to do so, or that its manner of doing so should be toned down, is as much a defense of creeping censorship as the publishers' "cancel culture" itself.

What's disturbing in these cases, rather, is that the publishing companies made an editorial decision, and then reversed it purely because of the outrage of a large number of anonymous strangers on the internet. Rather than standing by their own author and their own material, they bowed to outrage before even giving the books a chance to plead their own case in print -- pulling them from publication before the public could read them to make up their own minds one way or the other.

The problem, here as elsewhere, then, is not the fact that people speak their minds on the internet and other media -- they should. Vocal outrage is more often a sign of a lively and open public culture than a closed and censorious one. The problem comes when publishing companies and other gatekeepers grant this outrage power to silence other voices. "Internet mobs" take a lot of blame in our society at the moment -- but I tend to feel the true villain is more often institutional cravenness in the face of them. That is where the censorship takes place.

There's something else that the NYT op-ed draws out, however, that relates to this indirectly, and yet seems to epitomize a great deal about our present cultural moment. The author points out that the writer being cancelled in this case was himself an erstwhile canceller -- someone who worked for publishing houses as a sensitivity reader and enunciated the same absolutist principles that led to his own book being pulled. "He was Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine," writes our columnist -- deciding to go for the vivid analogy at the expense of perfect fairness (much as people generally do on the internet, which is how we got here in the first place).

If this is true of the fate of the author in question, however, he is not alone.

It is an old but perennially valid insight that political factions seem to expend more vitriol against their own members than against their adversaries. It appears to hold true as much here as elsewhere. The targets of contemporary "cancel culture" seem by and large to be fellow progressives. The offenses for which they are castigated are not radical departures from the values of progressive movements, but grey areas that one would think could be debated on both sides with some give-and-take.

The YA author mentioned in the op-ed, for example, did not include obviously offensive language or material or stereotypes in his book. He did write about a subject outside his personal experience, and included an unsympathetic Muslim character -- was doing this so obviously out of the question? So too, a denominational periodical recently ran an article written by a cisgender mother describing her journey toward understanding the transgender identity of her daughter's significant other. The piece was a bit dated. It wasn't what the world needed in 2019. It was probably a poor editorial choice to run it. But its heart was plainly in the right place. Yet the journal that published it offered to take it down, after it aroused controversy and anger on the internet.

It's hard to hear these stories and not be confronted by the bizarre disconnect between the cultural values they presuppose -- and the social milieus they describe -- and the fact that they are taking place in a country that has Donald Trump as its president. One can understand the case for why the novel and the article in question were not in the best possible taste (lord knows I've written plenty that could be even more strongly condemned). But why the people who wrote them should be subjected to so much personal ire is another question -- particularly when they are broadly trying to do the right thing. They are attempting, if occasionally in a clumsy way, to oppose bigotry against Muslims and LGBTQ people.

Meanwhile, the person occupying the most powerful office in our entire country is actively trying to do harm. He has openly called for a "total and complete shutdown on Muslims coming into this country," and then tried to implement this policy of racist exclusion through a travel ban that he described to his close associates as a would-be "legal" means to accomplish the same end. Likewise, he has implemented a blatantly discriminatory ban against Transgender service members in the military. The most powerful court in the country has allowed both of these policies to go into effect, moreover -- to our excruciating national shame in the eyes of history and the world.

How has all of this happened, if there is such an all-powerful swarm of social media outrage with the power to "cancel" minor ideological deviations from progressive principles? Why cannot all that pseudo-righteous anger be redirected into advocacy or nonviolent direct action to halt policies like the administration's Muslim ban, its Trans military service ban, its family separation and "Remain in Mexico" policies targeting asylum-seekers, etc.?

This too, of course, is a familiar query. The usual leftist response to it is that, when Islamophobia and Transphobia have plainly been empowered on the national stage, all the more reason why progressive circles need to be places where Muslim and Trans people are in leadership roles and their voices are emphasized.

A more generous version of this argument would even add that the outrage directed against progressive writers and institutions for their comparatively minor missteps are a sort of compliment in disguise. They signal that these individuals and institutions were expected to do the right thing. They had hopes attached to them. They had to, in order for these hopes to be disappointed. They had to have received the gift of trust in the first place, in order for others to feel that this trust had been violated.

A coworker of mine was recently making a similar case in an unrelated context. In arguing that management ought to be able to accept feedback from employees in good humor, she encouraged them to see criticism as indicating something positive, rather than negative, about their character. If people feel comfortable approaching you with something that concerns them, that is a good sign. It shows they regard you as someone capable of listening and doing the right thing.

I do sort of admire this advice, and aspire to live up to it. It is rather like the idea that Alexander Pope expressed in his "Essay on Criticism," in enumerating the traits of the ideal critic: "Those best can bear reproof," he writes, "who merit praise." On the face of it, it's a lovely notion.

The trouble is that it takes for granted a culture of the free exchange of ideas. One can only accept feedback in an open, non-defensive spirit, if one will be allowed in return to respond to that criticism by learning from mistakes, to correct errors, to grow. It only works, that is to say, if the outrage of a group pf anonymous strangers on the internet is taken for what it is -- the expression of the opinion of some people -- opinions that may be right or wrong, and have no more intrinsic claim to dictate the bounds of acceptable ideas than anyone else's opinions.

If we agree to live in a world without "cancel culture" -- if institutions stand by their words and the materials they publish, and simply allow the public to debate the merits of these materials in whatever strong language they choose -- then perhaps we can embrace a Popean ideal of bearing reproof because we accept it as a sort of backhanded tribute to our own capacity for doing better -- a signal of our trustworthiness.

At present, however, we do not live in such a world. We live in a world where internet outrage is permitted to dictate the words and policies of institutions. Thus, it can have real and grave consequences for the careers and futures of writers (and others) who run afoul of it. Before the left condemns the fragility of writers it subjects to this outrage, therefore -- before it suggests that these responses are mere defensiveness -- before it asks people to "bear reproof" in the spirit of Pope's ideal critic -- it should recognize the true and dangerous power that this outrage wields.

A great deal of progressive criticism against writers who err in sensitivity -- like the unfortunate YA author described in the NYT piece -- is directed against the idea that they are unaware of the impact of their words -- that they underestimate their own power and do not realize they have the capacity to inflict harm. This may be true of all of us, but when the argument is made by outraged people on social media, the best response to it is an old one indeed: "Physician, heal thyself!"