Steven Moffat and "Cancel Culture"

or, How a Conformist Thinks About Orthodoxy

Steven Moffat is a Scottish TV writer and producer, responsible for the hit series Press Gang, Coupling, Jekyll, Sherlock and 2010s Doctor Who. He is a very talented man and I would never wish to deny that; he is responsible for some of my favourite episodes of the revived Doctor Who. I also think that, in real life, Moffat will not only be friendly and personable, but probably very sensible too. All the more interesting, then, that his worldview is retarded.

In a recent interview, he talked about “cancel culture”, or “cancellation”. This was part of promoting his new drama, Douglas Is Cancelled, which meditates on the topic.

Let me put in the caveat that, as a leftie liberal, Moffat is doing well just to admit that “cancel culture” exists. Most of them are still using the strategy of outright Cancel Denial. But those are the younger ones, more fervent and ideological and more precariously positioned in their careers. Moffat is older and thus somewhat removed from the fashionable fray. He is allowed to be a bit detached and befuddled, though he is still ultimately bound up in the ideas of his time.

Having acknowledged “cancel culture”, he voices skepticism about it - not because he has any actual disagreement with the ideas which cause someone to be “cancelled”, but because he fears that hysteria drives people to “cancel” undeserving targets. He also has a second objection, which we will get to later, but it is premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of what “cancellation” is.

That misunderstanding is shared by the woman who interviewed him, Guardian journalist Ellie Muir. She defines “cancellation” as:

when a public figure is boycotted by fans and, sometimes, societally shunned

This definition is inaccurate and very misleading. The public figure is not boycotted by his fans, but by his employers and peers. Indeed, except in the case of e-celebrity, a public figure’s fans are not able to cancel him. They could stop buying his books, albums, etc. but that would affect him only financially, and barely at all, since many more people would ignore the “cancellation” and continue giving him their money.

Cancellation is something enforced oligarchically from above, not performed democratically from below. It is, in effect, to oust you from an elite club. Usually, the general public do not care about the evil thing you have supposedly done - they are apolitical and just want to continue buying your stuff - but they don’t get the chance to, because they are over-ruled by an elite who have decided that your stuff is no longer to be sold or promoted, and that you are not to be allowed to produce more of it.

Muir could know this, but she chooses not to. She engages in self-delusion, then lies to her readers. Perhaps they won’t resent her for this since, as leftie liberals, they too benefit from the delusion that cancellation is democratic, not elitist. This is the leftie’s eternal need to see himself as the underdog, never the powerful. Part of that is seeing leftist ideology as decency, not doctrine; emergent and self-evident, not imposed and artificial.

Now we will look at what Moffat himself said about cancellation:

[It only works on people] who are capable of shame and wish to be well thought of. In other words, it only really works on quite good people.

It’s a smart bomb that can only take out people who at least aspire to virtue: you can’t cancel Hitler, you can’t cancel Donald Trump – you can’t, and they won’t care.

What is the point in a smart bomb that only afflicts and affects the civilised? As Aristotle points out, shame is a quasi-virtue. If you’re capable of shame, then by the inverse you aspire to decency, even if you don’t attain it all the time.

I will go through each of his statements individually.

[people] who are capable of shame and wish to be well thought of

That is two different things. Someone can be incapable of feeling shame but wish to be well thought of by other people. (In fact, some of those most obsessed with how other people think of them are the least capable of feeling shame.) Moffat’s conflation of these two things is significant, as it enables him to make a second conflation.

It’s a smart bomb that can only take out people who at least aspire to virtue: you can’t cancel Hitler, you can’t cancel Donald Trump – you can’t, and they won’t care.

Let us overlook the sort-of likening of Trump with Hitler. We will take Moffat on his own terms. Even then, he is simply wrong.

Moffat’s analysis:

To “cancel” someone is to make everyone think badly of him and thereby induce him to feel shame.
If he is incapable of feeling shame, then, no matter how badly he is thought of by other people, he will never feel shame, and therefore will never be “cancelled”.
It is impossible to cancel someone who cannot feel shame.

From start to finish, that is a grievous mis-reading of reality. It is the kind of cuddly “just so” thinking that befits a clever 12 year-old trying to impress teacher, not a grown man contending with the real world. That Moffat can sustain such a belief in the face of reality is a testament to how cloistered and pampered the modern luvvie is.

To be “cancelled” is not to feel shame, but to lose power. Therefore you can cancel someone who feels no shame: you deprive him of power by forming a consensus that he must not have it. The example Moffat uses, of Hitler, is a ridiculous one, since Hitler was “cancelled”. His enemies launched a world war against him on two fronts with massive materiel that he could not withstand, and it worked. To this day, we can’t be sure whether Hitler cared about the Allies’ opinion of him, or whether he was capable of shame, or whether he aspired towards virtue, but we can be sure that he was “cancelled”.

It is not a question of virtue and shame, as Moffat likes to believe, but of raw, amoral, apolitical power. It is not tied to morality or virtue. Power can be possessed by the wicked and it will serve them just as readily as it will serve the good. To believe otherwise is to believe that the good guys won every war throughout history - infantile.

Likewise, Trump is also “cancellable”. It’s just a matter of whether you are able and willing to use the necessary weapons. In 2016, the powerful did not realise what weapons would be necessary to “cancel” him, and that is how he became POTUS. In 2020, the powerful knew the weapons necessary and were willing to use them, and they successfully “cancelled” him. In 2024, for whatever reason, the powerful are not willing. Rather, they now want him to be POTUS again. But Moffat doesn’t realise it is all about power, therefore he assumes that, because Trump is running for POTUS again, cancelling mustn’t work on him. Having made this false assumption, Moffat then has to come up with an explanation for it. He thinks it must be that Trump doesn’t care about virtue.

Moffat is correct in saying that Trump doesn’t care about being shamed. But that is because he doesn’t respect those attempting to shame him: weak, cosseted liberals like Steven Moffat.

But, contrary to Moffat’s belief, virtue is not the same thing as shame. Trump doesn’t care about his enemies’ shaming of him, but I believe he does care about virtue. If he didn’t, if all he cared about was personal advancement, then he could achieve that far more easily by going along with the status quo. He could be a firebrand Democrat figure, a demagogue spouting about the incompetence, irrelevance and bigotry of the Republican Party. He could be the darling of the centre-left, if he chose to. So why did he instead choose a much harder, more painful and costly path to power? I would say it’s because he has some concept of virtue and recognises that in order to pursue it he has to rebel against the status quo. Progressives like Steven Moffat would say he chose the harder path because, for him, the pain was worth it in order to be able to do evil. But that is another absurd notion. What evil did Trump do when he was POTUS? How many wars did he start, for example?

Moffat’s analysis does not align with the facts so it cannot explain reality. By his reasoning, Trump would have done the exact opposite of what he did do.

Now the final point that Moffat makes:

What is the point in a smart bomb that only afflicts and affects the civilised? As Aristotle points out, shame is a quasi-virtue. If you’re capable of shame, then by the inverse you aspire to decency, even if you don’t attain it all the time.

This again bears no relationship with reality. First he conflates being civilised with aspiring to virtue and being capable of shame, when it is not the same thing at all. Civilised people can be amoral; uncivilised people can be moral. Second he conflates being civilised with being “cancellable”, when again it is not the same thing. Cancellation happens both to people who are “civilised” (as he defines it) and to people who are not. There is no causal relationship.

We could examine the more glaring examples of people being “cancelled” - nationalists, Holocaust revisionists, fascists, etc. - but more helpful are examples that would give Moffat some qualms.

JK Rowling springs to mind. Is she civilised? Does she feel shame? Does she care about virtue? Presumably yes, otherwise there would be no point in her enemies trying to cancel her. But the fact that her cancellation hasn’t quite worked (because she has more power than her enemies) would suggest to Moffat that she is uncivilised, incapable of shame, indecent, and oblivious to virtue. That is quite an accusation, but let’s overlook it. What was it Rowling’s enemies attempted to “cancel” her for? Saying that trans-women aren’t women. Presumably, Moffat considers that position uncivilised, indecent and unvirtuous, but believes that Rowling could only be cancelled for holding it because she is civilised, decent and virtuous. (What utter nonsense…) Well, is it civilised to believe that a trans-woman is a woman? What if you desperately want to believe it, but just can’t, no matter how hard you try? Are you indecent then, unvirtuous, uncivilised? Is it civilised to subject women to a biological man in their sports team, in their changing room, in their prison cell? When he rapes them, and other women learn of this and object to being put in the same danger, are they unvirtuous? Are they uncivilised?

Moffat’s analysis crumbles against the facts in JK Rowling’s case. But it crumbles against the facts in any case you care to try. His worldview is not reality. He doesn’t live in reality. He lives in this world:

The above is a scene from Inside Man (2022), a TV drama written by Steven Moffat. A young White man sexually harasses a pudgy Black woman, in public and in broad daylight, on a train packed with on-lookers, then gets aggressive with other ethnic minority women. This is a total inversion of the reality of modern Britain, yet Moffat wrote it anyway. He did so for the same reason he advocates black-washing Britain’s history:

We’ve kind of got to tell a lie. We’ll go back into history and there will be Black people where, historically, there wouldn’t have been, and we won't dwell on that.

We’ll say, “To hell with it, this is the imaginary, better version of the world. By believing in it, we'll summon it forth.”

I can understand “fake it till you make it”, but Moffat is going further than that. He is advocating lying to the general public, feeding them a false version of their own history so that they will behave in a way more desirable (to him) in the present. This is INGSOC territory - the kind of systematic deceit and public manipulation that Moffat will certainly have spent his entire life deploring… until his career depended on supporting it. Then, he switched. Just like the crowd suddenly believed that Eastasia had always been the enemy, Moffat switched. Now to falsify the records so that everyone else will switch, and be unable to show that any switch occurred. Britain has always been multi-racial. This is known - because to know anything else is to commit social and professional suicide.

What we have, then, is a man who talks about virtue but in fact cares more about other people thinking him virtuous than actually being virtuous. After all, actually being virtuous might sometimes require violating social norms, going against the consensus, and losing his social status. That’s a punishing game - enjoyed by the mad, suffered by the good, avoided by the weak.

In conclusion, Moffat is a conformist justifying, not goodness, but conforming with the social consensus to which he conforms. He covers his tracks (especially from himself) by equating conformity with virtue. In this conception, “cancellation” is a corrective process to help a wayward good person realise their error and find their way back to goodness. “Cancellation” is only wrong when it is mistakenly applied to someone who was not straying. Otherwise it is good, because the mainstream it protects is good.

For the conformist, the mainstream has to be good, because his society can have only one mainstream, so if it is a bad one, he is in very serious trouble. He will cover up the contradictions, avoid the problems, simplify the complexities, make excuses for the hypocritical leaders, punish the whistleblowers and demonise the rebels… he will do anything rather than admit that his society is flawed - not just trivially, but fundamentally. In fact, the more fundamental the flaw, the more it threatens the mainstream so the more fervently he will rail against anyone who points it out. He needs social acceptance more than he needs truth, success, survival… or even his precious virtue.

He will support good. He will support evil. He will do, say, think and believe whatever is necessary to maintain his security.

In this essay I have resolved several of Steven Moffat’s delusions. However, if it were somehow to reach his attention, here is how he would respond to it: “This dirge comes from a social outcast, a disaffected, someone out of sync with society. Therefore, not only do I not need to take it seriously, but I would be a bad person if I did.”

They say life always finds a way. So does stupidity. Amidst fine education, amidst beautiful intelligence, amidst the highest peaks of civilisation, stupidity courses for survival like a virus. None of these are sufficient to thwart it; only virtue can do that. But virtue is expensive and painful, and it is beyond the weak scions of decadence. They can only dream of having the mettle to actually be virtuous. In the meantime they preen, as delusional about themselves as they are about the world.