The Richard Wagner Fallacy Part 1

What is cancel culture?

The music of Richard Wagner is widely regarded as amongst the greatest ever written. However, the composer’s antisemitic views, made explicit in his essay Jewishness in music, the esteem he was held in by Hitler, and the way in which his music was used by the Nazis for propaganda purposes, have meant that his oeuvre has had an asterisk placed against it.¹

Wagner’s music is, one may say, guilty by association.

In Israel this has led to controversy surrounding his compositions for as long as there has been a Jewish state, although their public performance and broadcast has never been forbidden by law. Nevertheless, and regardless either of how good Wagner’s music is, or of his lifelong relationships with Jewish friends and colleagues, in Israel public performance of the composer of The Ring’s works is to all intents and purposes forbidden.  It is, we may say, an example of cancel culture avant la lettre; a culture which, I will argue, is underwritten by a logically flawed form of ethical judgment, and which I will call, after this one of its most notable examples, The Richard Wagner Fallacy.

Cancel culture: a taxonomy

But what do we mean by cancel culture, and what, exactly, is The Richard Wagner Fallacy? Leaving our second question until later, the first thing to notice about this phenomenon is that whilst the quip about “cancelling” friends or acquaintances as if they were subscriptions goes back at least to the 1990s, the term “cancel culture” only began to be used in its contemporary and more public sense from the mid-2010s. As a phenomenon with its own label, therefore, cancel culture is of comparatively recent origin.²

To give a more fulsome answer to our question - one that takes us beyond matters of definition - let us look at some examples. Along with Israel’s long standing de facto ban, recent years have witnessed an ever-expanding list of considerations that may trigger this modern form of ostracism and of the forms that it may take. More specifically, we may identify two objects of cancellation and two grounds for cancellation. Taken together these parameters make logical space for four different types of cancellation which together comprise cancel culture.

Take as a starting point the airbrushing of actor Kevin Spacey’s performance from the film All the Money in the World, and the banning of the broadcast of the songs of Michael Jackson, in the light of allegations of sexual misconduct against both artists.³ Like Wagner’s music, these examples do not take the individual as their object (more on which shortly), but rather his works, or what we may call his creative product. Notably, the examples of Kevin Spacey and Michael Jackson also show that creative product may get cancelled not just on account of one’s views, as in the case of Wagner, and certainly not because of one’s abilities, but because of what one may have done. This difference notwithstanding, all three cases are examples of what may be called cancellation of creative product on the grounds of one’s agency traits.

It is not just creative product that may be the object of cancellation, whether this be operas, films, pop songs, or something else.  Cancellation also occurs with respect to the terms of creative production, and in such cases takes the person, rather than her or his works, as its object.  Like the examples above, this modern form of social death may occur on the basis of agency traits.  Thus, it is expected that all future film productions will not feature Kevin Spacey on account of his alleged misdeeds and, were they both alive today, the same would probably be demanded of Richard Wagner and Michael Jackson.⁴ Of course, in the case of deceased public figures such as Wagner and Jackson direct personal disqualification is no longer possible. Thus, and as we shall see later, in such cases cancellation takes place with regard to commemoration, whether this be in the form of statues, or the naming of buildings, ships, bridges and the like.⁵

These, then, are our first two types of cancellation. They occur when what one may have said, done, or written is invoked to justify the cancellation of either oneself or of the fruits of one’s efforts, and frequently both, in what in many respects is a secularized version of the ancient Greek crime of asebia.

Importantly, however, and to introduce a third, and to many particularly egregious, type of cancellation, one may also be personally cancelled because of one’s identity traits and, therefore, without having done anything at all. 

Offense, we may say, is not just in the doing, but in the being.