Yes, Cancel Culture is About Accountability.

That's the problem.

Twitter has been full of people tweeting about Graham Norton’s comment that “Cancel Culture” is the wrong word and that it should really be called “accountability.” Most of the critics seem to be focused on denying that what we are seeing is best understood as accountability. This seems to me to sidestep the core issue that should be of most concern to those who defend viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech as both an individual liberty and a mechanism for social progress.

The issue is not whether Cancel Culture can be understood as holding people accountable for their beliefs, speech and actions. Of course it can. That’s exactly what it is. The issue is whether it is acceptable to hold people accountable for believing, saying or doing the things that the Critical Social Justice ideology underlying Cancel Culture wants them to.

Accountable means obligated to explain, justify, and take responsibility for one's actions, and to answer to someone, such as a person with more authority.

The state of being accountable is accountability.

The term “accountability” is neutral in itself. Whether it is a good or bad thing entirely depends on what people are being held accountable for. Whether or not it is acceptable to hold people accountable for adhering to specific beliefs, speech or actions is something we have to argue for and form a cultural consensus around, as well as laws.

Every authoritarian regime has functioned by holding people accountable to an ideology, and we generally regard it as an authoritarian regime when we do not believe they should have had to be accountable to it. There is a general consensus that things like the Inquisition and Maoism were authoritarian regimes because there is a general consensus that no-one should have to be a Catholic or a Maoist. The current protests in Iran are against women being held accountable to the Morality Police for what they wear on their heads. Again, there is a general consensus among people who live in countries reporting problems with “Cancel Culture” that women should not be “obligated to explain, justify, and take responsibility for one's actions, and to answer to someone” if they prefer not to cover their hair. Saying “This is just accountability” doesn’t cut it because the clear response to that is “But how do you justify making women accountable to anybody else about what they do with their hair in the first place?”

Yet a society cannot function if it does not hold people accountable for anything to anyone. We do have to have some rules. There are few people who would find it authoritarian to hold people who commit violent crime to account for this and enact penalties against them. Nor would many people think it unjust to consider people to have certain responsibilities that go with their circumstances. If you have a child, you are accountable for looking after it. If you have a car, you are accountable for maintaining it and driving it sober and with care. Your employer may reasonably hold you accountable for doing the work they are paying you to do and citizens can hold politicians accountable for keeping their campaign promises. If somebody asks you how you justify holding people accountable to those things in the first place, it is generally very easy to tell them.

This is what Graham Norton seems to have jumped over when he spoke of Cancel Culture being better described as “accountability.” He provided no justification for holding people accountable to the Critical Social Justice worldview in the first place. He just seemed to think it perfectly reasonable and widely accepted that this one particular ideological stance is the authority to which everybody is accountable.

When addressing this stance taken by Norton, the important question to ask is not whether the phenomenon we refer to as “Cancel Culture” is about accountability, because it clearly is, but whether or not it is a problem that people keep being held accountable to the phenomenon. Are the things people keep getting cancelled or “held accountable for” things we genuinely should not accept in a liberal society? Does Cancel Culture refer to people being penalised for doing things like driving whilst drunk? Or does it refer to people being penalised for things we should expect a liberal society to accept - like being openly Jewish in a predominantly Christian country?

I think it is clear that when people refer to “Cancel Culture,” they are not generally referring to people being prosecuted for violent crime, having their driving licenses taken away for drink driving or losing their job because they didn’t turn up to it. Instead, they are referring to people being visited by the police because they have said they believe “woman” to be a biological category, being no-platformed at universities for being critical of CSJ approaches to anti-racism, losing their job because they have presented evidence that men and women are not psychologically identical and being vilified on social media because they once used a term which is now considered problematic. In short, “Cancel Culture” refers to penalising, intimidating or ostracising people for the expression of ideas they should be able to discuss without fear in a liberal democracy or for simply not keeping up with the changing connotations of words, phrasing things badly or being an insensitive idiot as a teenager.

Mr Norton was quite clear that he was speaking of the expression of words and ideas when he spoke of John Cleese’s comments about no longer being able to make social critiques on mainstream television,

“It must be very hard to be a man of a certain age who’s been able to say whatever he likes for years, and now suddenly there’s some accountability,” Norton said after naming Cleese. “It’s free speech, but not consequence-free.”

This is a strange comment that supports Cleese’s point which is that it has become harder again to criticise or make fun of dominant ideologies in recent years. It wasn’t as if no Christians or Jews were deeply hurt and offended when Life of Brian came out in 1979 or that none of them tried to cancel it (as well as Monty Python) forever. Some countries and several councils in the UK banned its showing. In the US, there were protests outside cinemas. It almost never got finished at all because the funder backed out for fear of backlash. Although the institutional power of Christianity was waning in the UK by this point and Life of Brian made it, I think it is safe to say that this is not the first time Cleese has experienced attempts to prevent him from kicking sacred cows. Norton may not be aware of this as Ireland was one of the countries that banned the film (and he was only 14 at the time). Nevertheless, it is disappointing to see him appearing to approve of holding people accountable to any ideology, especially as he has spoken of the difficulty of being a gay Protestant in Catholic Ireland and can be assumed not to wish to be accountable to the Catholic Church.

Graham Norton now appears to have deleted his Twitter account following the backlash to these comments and even more to his implied criticism of J.K. Rowling as lacking the expertise to address trans issues due to not being trans. This criticism infuriated many gender critical feminists with its very limited one-sided view of the topic as only of relevance to trans people and not including any issues of legitimate concern to women. Norton’s deeply unpleasant 20-year-old caricature of a young working class woman which included a fat suit and semen dribbles is now being invoked and spread around Twitter, to which other people are responding with evidence that the woman had herself expressed strongly racist views. This resulted in circular arguments about who really needs to be held more accountable and for what. None of this is particularly helpful in getting at the problem of redefining Cancel Culture as “accountability.”

Absolutely central to the thriving of a liberal democracy is the understanding that no ideological group has the right to call other people to account for not believing what they do. That people are increasingly saying things like, “You are being held accountable for your ideas” should give us serious cause for concern. This certainty that one moral framework is so absolutely right that society has the right to hold everybody accountable to it has been pervasive throughout human history but it has not produced any societies that most of us would like to live in. Even if you think you would like a morality police if it holds people accountable to the values you have, bear in mind that you too are likely to fail its purity tests at some point. Even if you don’t, your preferred form of authoritarianism is likely to get taken over by another that you did not choose sooner or later, and you cannot know what values you will then be held accountable to.

Instead, protect other people’s rights to believe things you wish they didn’t and say things you wish they wouldn’t and assert your own right to do the same. Better still, see the existence of people with different ideas as a positive good for society. The evidence that societies in which people have been able to have a variety of ideas and criticise each others’ have done better in advancing scientific knowledge and human rights than societies in which everybody has been held accountable to one ideology is overwhelming.

Accountability should be reserved for the keeping of (reasonable) laws and fulfilling of (reasonable) responsibilities. You can also be accountable to your family, friends, neighbours and society in ways you have agreed upon. Nobody should ever be required to account for not believing in somebody else’s ideological framework or for having their own value system. If anybody tells you they are “only” holding you accountable for your ideas and you are not in a situation where your ideas are any their business, do not quibble about whether or not this is really about accountability. Instead, get straight to the crux of the matter and say, “I am not accountable to you.”