Diversity of Opinion: How to Escape the Denial of the Cancel Culture

2023-07-31 11:04:00

Cancel culture is an age-old phenomenon running through human cultural history: practices to silence those whose perceptions differ in disturbing ways from one’s own. Sometimes these practices are fatal, as in medieval and early modern heresy trials. In addition to the threat or execution of physical death, there is the practice of social death, permanent exclusion from the community.

In the Roman Empire, banishment, along with murder, was an instrument of cancel culture popular with emperors and other potentates. Social death was not only decreed from above, but also practiced from below.