Reverence: The Cure for Cancel Culture

This will no doubt be one of my longer entries, and for purposeful reason…

What is cancel culture?

According to Wikipedia:

Cancel culture or call-out culture is a modern form of ostracism in which someone is thrust out of social or professional circles – whether it be online, on social media, or in person. Those subject to this ostracism are said to have been "cancelled".

My concern regarding this cancel culture is our freedom of interpretation. Interpretation is what we do every day as humans. With cancel culture, there’s no room for people to be what we call “wrong”. Thus, there’s no room for learning and growth.

I often hear, “They should just know better!” or “It’s not my job to teach people…!”

But it IS your job to “cancel” people? That’s incongruent. Moreover, how does anyone “just know” lessons they have not yet learned? How does anyone know what they don’t know? ALL of us have blind spots. Some more and varying degrees than others, but we ALL have them. Thus, we are ALL each other’s teachers.

My alternative resolution for cancel culture begins with REVERENCE.

I encountered a deeper delve into reverence in my recent reading of Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul. I forgot to highlight it in my last entry, but I think that brain fog omission further inspired this entry.

So…

What is reverence?

Zukav defines, “Reverence is engaging in a form and a depth of contact with Life that is well beyond the shell of form and into essence.”

It’s how we put into intentional practice the honoring of this thing we call life, in its fullest essence.

He also asserts:

Our behavior and values are so much shaped by perceptions that lack reverence that we do not know what it is like to be reverent. When we curse a competitor or strive to disempower another person, we absent ourselves from reverence. When we work to take instead of to give, we labor without reverence. When we strive for safety at the expense of another person’s safety, we deprive ourselves of the protection of reverence. When we judge one person as superior and another as inferior we depart from reverence. When we judge ourselves, we do the same thing. Business, politics, education, sex, raising families, and personal interactions without reverence all produce the same result: human beings using other human beings.

Having reverence, I believe, is a more holistic and dignified practice than cancel culture. Reverence for life to allow space and grace for people to be “wrong”—which we all are from time to time… for learning and growth rather than ostracizing… to correct rather than cancel… to evolve rather than exile.

For instance:

Whoopi Goldberg recently shared her interpretation of the Holocaust, stating, “The Holocaust isn’t about race… It’s man’s inhumanity to man.” When contextualized with race as it is defined in America, her statement was not completely wrong, it was at best incomplete. She later corrected herself on Twitter saying, “I should have said it was about both.”

The aftermath included Goldberg being suspended—in effect, temporarily “cancelled”.

I hear 2 distinct conversations being had… 1) What is a race? (And is “Jewish” considered a race?)… and 2) Was the Holocaust about race?

Rev Al Sharpton, in his recent interview on The Breakfast Club, shared, “There’s no doubt Hitler went after the Jews as a race. He went for the white supremacist, white Aryan. It was based on race.”

These are when REAL, AUTHENTIC, DEEPER conversations get to be had regarding the distinctions of racial constructs and the perceptions of race globally. Hitler perceived Jewish people as a race separate from his Aryan race and used that a justification for dehumanizing and murdering them. My assertion is that all manner of race is perceived, made up, reductive, divisive, and, in effect, dehumanizing. That’s my interpretation… And a much deeper conversation for another day, maybe…

My overarching point…

Cancel culture doesn’t allow for these types of conversations to be had. It rather shuts them down out of fear of making people uncomfortable. What’s more humanizing than allowing ourselves human dignity to feel human emotions and communicating about it?

In fact, when people feel discomfort, that’s exact the time to CONVERSE, not cancel. That’s the time to CORRECT, not cancel. That’s the time to COMPLETE incomplete narratives, not cancel them. That’s the time we all get to LEARN and EVOLVE together as a collective, HUMAN RACE. 

The irony that I write this on the day that we celebrate love. What greater expression of love than gratitude and reverence for life!