How Do We Handle Cancel Culture?

At first glance, cancel culture appears straightforward: A person thought to have acted or spoken in an unacceptable manner is ostracized, boycotted, shunned or fired — and often thoroughly renounced on social media. 

But it’s not always so simple.

“Bill Cosby or Michael Jackson, these people had tremendous impact on their fields. I can say I’ll never again watch 'The Cosby Show' or listen to Jackson’s music, but that doesn’t change the impact they have already had on me, their fields, and the culture at large,” said Karen Guth, associate professor of religious studies at Holy Cross.

Over the past few years, the public worldwide has had to reckon with this phenomenon on a larger scale, as new information emerges putting famous and often well-regarded people, traditions and institutions in a new light. Acknowledging their contributions without endorsing their wrongdoing is tricky territory to navigate — and there’s no map, Guth said.

Most often, the average person will encounter this dilemma concerning celebrities. “It’s such a pervasive question, but at the time I wrote the book there was no literature that engaged with these questions across contexts to think about what the problem was and how to go about addressing it,” she said. 

Her latest book, “The Ethics of Tainted Legacies: Human Flourishing after Traumatic Pasts,” explores the issue as an ethical dilemma. Guth’s work resonated and was a large part of why she received the College’s Marfuggi Faculty Award for Outstanding Scholarship in May 2024. The award recognizes outstanding achievement in the creation of original work in the arts and sciences over an 18-month period.

Finding the right question

Rather than trying to provide an answer, Guth’s book aims to help readers ask the right questions. 

“‘Can we still engage with artists’ work?’ That’s an important question, but not the only or even most significant one to be asking,” Guth said. Canceling, as the practice has come to be known, is not without certain merits but is most effective as a short-term response, she noted, especially in relation to industry giants and household names, whose legacy of influence can extend beyond their work.  

Guth has had experience with this in her field of religious studies. Mennonite theologian and ethicist John Howard Yoder was widely recognized as the greatest pacifist of the 20th century but was later revealed to be a serial perpetrator of sexual violence.

“This was a major question for my field,” she said. 

Refraining from teaching Yoder’s work is one potential response, she said, but it doesn’t address his legacy of influence on the field, on generations of academics, and on academic and church-related institutions. 

Confronting complexity

“There’s not one right answer” runs contrary to most people’s first instinct to find a clear right and wrong approach when they encounter complex ethical problems, Guth conceded. 

As an ethicist, she finds this binary approach disturbing: “Because if you can’t confront the complexity of problems, you are less likely to address them well.”

Instead, she offers a typology of responses, analyzing the advantages and disadvantages of each, some more suited to certain situations.

Her preferred approach is the “reformer,” which “looks at the institutional structures that gave rise to the abuse perpetrated in the first place.” Canceling would fall under what she calls the “abolitionist” response.

For example, with Yoder’s work, Guth acknowledges his legacy through his contributions to ethics but “also the legacy of violence that contributed to a missing generation of female Mennonite leaders.” For Guth, engaging with Yoder’s tainted legacy is not ultimately about Yoder’s work but how to repair the harm he caused and better address the problem of sexual violence moving forward.

Life of the mind

From a young age, Guth said she was always interested in the big questions: What is the meaning of life? How does one live a good life? What are my obligations to others?

“It always animated me as a person,” she said.

As the daughter of a professor at a small liberal arts college and a public school teacher in South Carolina, this was encouraged, but it wasn’t until college and her first religious studies course that it became a full-fledged passion. 

“I learned there are entire academic disciplines devoted to these kinds of questions,” she said “Through my education, I began to realize that these are thousands-years-long conversations about what it means to live a good life, and it just pulled me in.”

Guth embraces “The life of the mind,” or a love of learning in general, and the joys of being a part of an intellectual community interested in these questions. It’s an environment she found in abundance at Holy Cross with peers and students when she joined the faculty in 2016, she said.

But “life of the mind” may be something of a “misnomer,” she added. No matter how much someone contemplates issues such as the ethics of tainted legacies, it cannot remain in the realm of the theoretical. “It’s not all happening up here,” Guth said, tapping her head. “It has to show itself in an embodied form in the world, in practice, and how you live your life.”

While working on her book, Guth taught a 2018 senior honors program seminar and said she was amazed by the students, describing them as “Undergraduates operating at a graduate seminar level. I ended up citing three or four of them for the contributions they made [to the book]. They were really helping me think through problems and various responses.”