The Richard Wagner Fallacy Part 5
Richard Wagner's Fallacy
There’s no woke smoke without historical fire: the case of Michelle Obama
In this essay I have offered an explanation of the kind of error that The Richard Wagner Fallacy and the cancel culture that it underwrites represent. Cancel culture relies upon our ignoring the principle of strict separation, and in the process committing The Richard Wagner Fallacy, when we pass judgment on an individual’s suitability for, or the results of their participation in, an activity on the basis of personal traits that are not prerequisites for the activity in question. Thus, one’s gender, nationality, or sexuality is not a prerequisite for being an actor, and just as one’s conduct in private life, hobbies, and pastimes are not prerequisites for excellence in composition, or in any other artistic or intellectual endeavour.
Moreover, in Part 4 we dealt with an objection to our argument in the specific case of agency trait-based cancellation by looking at the controversy over the statue of Edward Colston. There the problem was that one’s undoubted excellence in one activity can be nevertheless tainted by participation in another. In response to this we developed a theory of “shaming and necessity” which, whilst accepting that in at least some of these cases cancellation may indeed be warranted, the activities concerned must relate to one another in a particular way in order for this to be so. (In brief, for cancellation to stick, the morally blameworthy activity needs to “stick” to the praiseworthy one.) Our argument therefore does not amount to an outright rejection of cancel culture, but rather to an account of when it is, and is not, admissible.
To conclude this enquiry I would like to consider one final aspect of cancel culture that has gone undiscussed in our enquiry thus far, and which emerges from an example that we briefly discussed to in Part 1: Michelle Obama’s video link speech to the Democrat National Convention in 2020.1
We will recall that one reading of the former First Lady’s speech was that it was an instance of cancel culture because it appealed to irrelevant identity traits - in this case, her own race and gender - to dismiss criticism of her views. “I understand that my message won’t be heard by some people,” Obama declared. But not because it may be unconvincing. Rather, it would not be heard because she is “a black woman speaking at the Democratic convention.”
The bushfire of wokeness and its manifold absurdities, it seems, had reached the highest echelons of society.
Richard Wagner’s Fallacy
Yet, Michelle Obama’s address can also be understood in an entirely different way;