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NOTE<\/strong>: This post is to introduce you to the 59th episode of Fran\u00e7ois Matarasso\u2019s and my monthly podcast, \u201cA Culture of Possibility.\u201d It will be available starting 19 December 2025. You can find it and all episodes at iTunes<\/a>, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net<\/a>\u2018s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud<\/a> and find links to accompany the podcasts. <\/em><\/p>\n This is one of those episodes in which Fran\u00e7ois and I discuss a topic between ourselves, without a guest<\/strong>. It\u2019s kind of a big one, operating on both political and interpersonal levels: the increasingly pervasive idea that mistakes and misdeeds can\u2019t be corrected, that there\u2019s no redemption, just punishment. As I explained, I keep encountering the idea that \u201cpeople who grow up in conditions of deprivation or some type of pressure, some type of exile from the mainstream of American society, some type of childhood trauma, that those circumstances overdetermine their future and they become disposable. I often hear people talk about this when someone does something that\u2019s very transgressive. A person will say, \u2018Well, have you read about his childhood?\u2019 I really don\u2019t like this, because my childhood wasn\u2019t exactly a bed of roses, and I managed to not grow up to be a serial killer. I like to think that everybody else has the same capacity for resilience and making the present and the future different from the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Cancel culture has a straightforward aim<\/strong>: people set out to \u201ccancel\u201d those whose behavior or opinions they dislike, hoping to see that their books don\u2019t get published, they don\u2019t have a platform to speak or perform, they lose their jobs, they lose respect. It\u2019s not new, as I explained:<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look back in American history, you see the witch hunts in the early days of the American colonies. That metaphor of a witch hunt was used, for example, by Arthur Miller in his play The Crucible, to portray the Red Scare of the early 1950s, spearheaded by the far-right fearmonger, Senator Joseph McCarthy. We first see that impulse coming from the right and then, starting 20 or 30 years later, we see it coming from the left: #MeToo campaigns which had a good aim\u2014exposing primarily men in high places who had used their own power to coerce or abuse women sexually\u2014but expanded into destroying someone for a dumb joke. We\u2019ve seen a lot of linguistic cancel culture around racial categories and racial descriptions and so forth. There\u2019s a famous case of a governor of a southern state who was exposed as having appeared in blackface at a Halloween party when he was a college student. So people tend to go way back and and pick something really egregious and stupid that someone did and tried to make them pay for it in the present and in the future. <\/p>\n \u201cAn interesting thing is happening now: the right has picked up the left\u2019s tactic and run with it.<\/strong> They\u2019ve become the primary cancel culture advocates. To cite one recent example, when the far right youth organizer Charlie Kirk was murdered, Vice President JD Vance encouraged people to name anybody who wasn\u2019t properly mourning and admiring him, anybody who made reference, for example, to his antisemitism and to his other invidious prejudices, to find out who those people were and do things like contact their employers to try to get them fired. So we\u2019re in an intense situation in which cancel culture is thriving, primarily coming from the right, and it\u2019s being used to put a pretty impressive block on freedom of speech.\u201d<\/p>\n How does this relate to community-based arts and cultural democracy?<\/strong> Fran\u00e7ois explains:<\/p>\n \u201cI have always believed that the the riches, the assets, the resources of culture and art should be open to everyone, but open to everyone on their own terms, to make of them what they they will. Intrinsic in this idea of culture is the idea of change, that we can change, that we will change, and that is also at the heart of community art. I\u2019ve done a lot of work researching and writing about the social outcomes of participation in the arts and culture. And I think all of those are very real and valid. <\/p>\n \u201cBut there are also, and perhaps more importantly, and primarily, the ways in that the experience and practice of art and culture allows us and helps us to change. I don\u2019t think today how I thought 10 years ago, 30 years ago, or when I was a child. My thinking has matured and developed through all that time. The whole notion of cancel culture, the whole notion that people are are somehow essentially one thing that is dictated by their biology or their demographic or their social, cultural, economic, political position is anathema to the principles of cultural democracy and community art, because those are all about how we use culture to change, to evolve, to go forward in our journey. So for me, everything that you\u2019ve just been talking about, Arlene, is a profound attack on the work that we do, on the work of of culture of all kinds, which is about saying we are not condemned to be just one thing.\u201d<\/p>\n I agreed. \u201cThis is very crucial, very central to community based arts practice, in part because a lot of the work that has been done by the people that we\u2019ve interviewed on these prior 58 episodes is about encouraging, enabling, and supporting people whose voices haven\u2019t really rung out in the larger society because they haven\u2019t had access to the major means of communication or because they just aren\u2019t being listened to. If I had to look at all the episodes and categorize them, I\u2019d say the majority of them are people working with somebody to make a safe space for those people to say what\u2019s true for them. I also support free speech, the right of other people to criticize and to disagree with what has been said, to put a different spin on it. I don\u2019t think that we can have cultural democracy without freedom of expression. The questions that we\u2019re talking about here arise in a situation where freedom of expression is operative, and there are consequences for expression on both sides of that equation.\u201d<\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois made a case for the importance of culture.<\/strong> \u201cAs a child reader, I started to learn unconsciously that other people had experiences that were not the same as mine, and that other people could believe things that were not the same as what I was brought up to believe. Through that exposure to culture, I started to acquire an awareness of the reality of diversity of human beings and their experiences. One of the things I\u2019ve had to think about a lot over the years is what does that mean? There is an argument that culture makes us better people, and I\u2019m absolutely not a believer in that idea. I don\u2019t believe we are improved by culture and the reason why not is because Germany, in many ways, the most cultured nation in Europe, became the most barbarian and cruel imaginable nation in a space of very few years. There were many examples of people who could express the greatest sensitivity to the lieder of Schubert or the poetry of Goethe whilst committing genocide. There is nothing automatic about art and culture improving us. We have to be open to that. It\u2019s an opportunity. If I learn about other people and other cultures and other worlds and other experiences in my reading and later in my listening to music, when I was growing up, it was because I was open to that.\u201d<\/p>\n Fran\u00e7ois brought up a specific instance of cancel culture in the UK<\/strong>. \u201cBBC radio have recently done a series<\/a> revisiting a very painful episode that happened two or three years ago. The writer and poet Kate Clanchy published a book called Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me<\/em><\/a>. I\u2019ve not read the book\u2014I\u2019m talking about the the series on BBC Radio. In the book she reflected on her long and in many ways admirable career working with with some often very disadvantaged children and young people, helping them to write and to appreciate poetry, some of which was published in a book which I have read called England: Poems from a School<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cSome Kids I Taught<\/em> was initially very well-received and it went on to win the Orwell prize, a prestigious prize for political writing in the UK. Then it got criticized by some fellow writers for some of the ways in which the author had written about some of her students, and she was accused of a very prejudicial perspective. This all happened, as far as I can see, largely online. It became a terrible row, and it led to Kate Clanchy being dropped by her publisher. It had pretty catastrophic consequences for her and indeed for some of her critics. What I was left with having listened to the radio broadcast was mostly a feeling of great sadness at what had happened, because I could see on all sides an inability to understand, to listen, a lack of awareness, and an immense defensiveness, all of which was exacerbated and maybe even created by the fact that people were talking online, rather than in the same room face-to-face. <\/p>\n \u201cI have certainly been in projects where there has been conflict, but because we were working together in the same space, because we knew each other, there was the possibility of talking things out and trying to understand why something had happened that caused upset or or distress to people, and then, precisely in the way that that we were talking about, to learn from one another, to ask ourselves a more constructive question, which is, \u2018Why does this person think the way they think, and why do I think the way that I think? And what can I learn from those those things?\u2019 That\u2019s what I felt was really made impossible in this online firestorm that descended on so many people and seems to have left them profoundly damaged as a result.\u201d<\/p>\n We had more to say on the podcast about why this cancel culture case blew up as it did, and how we had learned over time from being corrected (but happily. not canceled)<\/strong>. I think you\u2019ll find it interesting. <\/p>\n We went on to discuss a core question: do we really believe people can change?<\/strong> I cited a member of the US Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who\u2019s been a diehard QAnon and MAGA acolyte and recently spoke out against MAGA policies. I recounted that \u201cpeople are saying, \u2018Whoa. I\u2019m amazed to hear her say this, and I really hope she means it.\u2019 And also, \u2018Let\u2019s wait and see, because it\u2019s possible that this is some sort of political point of ploy to position herself to seek higher office in the future.\u2019 She\u2019s resigning from Congress in January, just when she gets vested in the lifetime retirement benefits. So there is that part too.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s hard to believe that somebody like that can change. I remember sitting around many, many dinner tables chatting with my friends about the MAGA regime coming into power and people wishing terrible fates on the people at the top of that yucky pyramid and and saying more than once, \u2018if you\u2019re going to be wishing for something, would it be good to wish that they wake up enlightened, that they see the error of their ways, and that they turn the power that they have control over to healing the damage that they\u2019ve done?\u2019 Without exception, that gets huge laughter because people are much more able to imagine a bolt of lightning striking Donald Trump than him waking up and repudiating his past. That may be correct, there may be more of a chance of being of him being hit by lightning. But the extent to which even the people on the progressive side, who claim humane values and so forth, would rather see people punished than believe that they can change, that\u2019s interesting.\u201d<\/p>\n We moved on to talking about how to be receptive to criticism and open to change, how to respectfully disagree. You might find a useful tip or two there. You\u2019ll definitely find an opportunity to explore your own relationship to error, harm, forgiveness, change, and all the ways they intersect with your work for cultural democracy. <\/p>\n Happy New Year from \u201cA Culture of Possibility!\u201d The next episode, which drops in January, will be our 60th, marking five years since we started the podcast. Thanks for sticking with us, and big blessings for a year of true dialogue, understanding, and growth!<\/p>\n Sting and Branford Marsalis, \u201cIf You Love Somebody Set Them Free<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n