the crucible cancel culture essay

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The Form of Cancel Culture in Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible'

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Published: Dec 16, 2021

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Arthur Miller Had it Right: The Crucible and Cancel Culture

By Kathleen Hylen

In 1996   The New York Times  interviewed Arthur Miller about the release of the newest film version of  The Crucible . During the interview he stated, “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America,  The Crucible  starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent, or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown." Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953, in response to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House of Unamerican Activities Committee (HUAC), an initiative designed to investigate individuals suspected of spreading communist ideology.  

The Crucible is set in Salem, MA, during the 17th century witch trials. A group of young girls are caught dancing by the local preacher, after which, rumors of witchery are spread. The girls accuse each other and other townspeople in an attempt to defend themselves. The choice for the girls is to confess and destroy their reputations, in a place where reputations are important, or refuse and be hanged. 

In 1987 while I was studying at UC Santa Cruz,  The Crucible  was put on. It was very apropos as, during that time, there was a lot of stigma against the gay community and HIV/AIDS was widely perceived to be a “gay disease.” Many termed it “God’s punishment on the gay community” and expressed sorrow for the innocent women and children who got the disease through “no fault of their own.” Celebrities and politicians did the  same .  Larry Speakes, President Regan’s Press Secretary, deflected questions about AIDS during a press conference with jokes about “fairies.” The roomful of reporters laughed at the term “gay plague.” 

After the killing of George Floyd, I joined a Middlebury Institute of International Studies (MIIS) alumni group where our discussions on anti-racism and social justice issues often turned to the topic of Cancel Culture, which was being used by the left and right. We noticed there was no discussion happening – just a swift and public cancellation. Again it hit me, that connection between the finger-pointing demonstrated in the play and current events.  

I wasn’t alone in associating Cancel Culture with  The Crucible . I conducted a Google search of those words and found pages of opinion pieces. Each author focused on one celebrity or one reason - everyone who’s appeared in  blackface ,  JK Rowling ’ comments on transgender people and bathroom laws, a few talked about the role of  power and celebrity status  status in Cancel Culture and who actually gets canceled and who doesn’t, and why.  

The questions that kept creeping up in those MIIS Alum talks, which have morphed into this Compassionate Courage group, were – Where is the forgiveness? Where is the compassion? Where is the dialogue? I’m emphatically not excusing racism or even bad behavior but, can we try to understand where people are coming from? And how do we have this dialogue? A particular focus was on cyberbullying as we were noticing more and more of it.   

I decided to conduct another search, this time for “ The Crucible  and cyberbullying” and came upon a revision of the play, which adroitly demonstrates the connection between the finger-pointing of The Crucible and the naming and shaming of cyberbullying.  The Burn , set in high school with a cast rehearsing  The Crucible,  centers around the bullying of a new girl in the school.  

In that same article, Miller went on to say, “the play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded (sic) in the brain of social man.” That term “social man” struck me since social media holds the biggest sway in Cancel Culture. Our need to connect is actually polarizing us. Several of these authors mentioned that Cancel Culture has been going on since time immemorial and I agree, but I also believe that social media has unleashed our tendency to point fingers, because we can now do so anonymously.  

Until recently, when you responded to an article you wrote a letter to the editor including your name, city and maybe job. Now, anyone can simply click at the bottom of an article and comment with instant publication. We create pseudonyms so that no one can identify us. We badger and bully.   

The difference between The Crucible and Cancel Culture is that Miller wrote his play as a salvo against those with power who were trying to subjugate ordinary citizens. At the time the strongest union was in Hollywood, hence McCarthy attacked writers, celebrities, directors, etc. Now it seems that we ordinary citizens (and ironically celebrities) are calling out those who hold power or at least are perceived to, but the focus remains the same. It is on reputation and morality. Whether or not we agree on what “morality” is, we may be heading in the same direction as HUAC. Witch-hunting has become the norm. 

Miller himself refused to name names when he appeared before the HUAC. I think we need to follow Miller’s example. Let’s stop naming and shaming and start dialoguing instead. This requires a lot of courage and compassion. I’d love to see someone respond to a Twitter post with a question, maybe one as simple as “what did you mean by that?” 

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Cancel Culture and The Crucible Essay Example

The Crucible was written not just as a story of the Salem witch trials, but also to show Arthur Miller's opinions on the red scare. The scathing opinion comes from Miller himself being falsely accused of being a communist. The second red scare was thought of in such a way due to the ridiculous ways that the government used to determine who is a communist. Due to the way the second red scare panned out, it remains as a warning to groupthink, as it exemplifies the ways that using groupthink can cause not only errors in judgement but also amplify said errors. Another example of groupthink is not historic, however it is relevant in today’s society. I believe that cancel culture is an example of groupthink and clearly shows its harmful effects and why it can so easily cause harm.

Cancel culture is the act of a large group of people “canceling” a specific group/person who had done something that they deemed offensive in order to mitigate the harm spread by the individual, whether real or imagined. This cancellation can take place through direct messaging, posts, and other methods generally utilizing social media. This relates back to The Crucible as it demonstrates a similar mob mentality, polarizing people’s ideologies and harshly punishing/criticizing those who don’t follow said ideals. An example from the Crucible would be  Martha Corey. Martha did not believe in and did  not know much about witches, and because of her ignorance it made her seem more suspicious as everyone around her seemed to believe in witches. Another similarity between the two is their lasting effects on its victims; in The Crucible, the accused’s reputation is destroyed, with them being thought of as consorting with the devil because of false accusations. In the example of cancel culture, those who have said things many years ago have their old tweets or messages dug up, or possibly even have false accusations made by others in order to “kick them when they are down”. This kind of attack is an example of mob mentality and can unjustifiably damage or destroy the careers of those who do not deserve it.

To summarize, the behaviors and mindset seen in The Crucible and cancel culture are very similar, with groupthink being used widely in both. Cancel culture’s amplification of people’s past wrongdoings and oversensitivity to others opinions and beliefs as well as the similarities between The Crucible’s mass hysteria and accusations of witchcraft, along with cancel culture’s calling for the firing of others or the ruining of their reputations and careers.

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How the Crucible is Relevant to Today’s Society

Written by Arthur Miller, The Crucible is one of the most popular historical dramas — and recent movie– the world has ever seen. The award-winning movie teaches modern high school students invaluable morals and emphasizes sensitive issues of the the past — such as the role of religion and politics — that are still relevant to the present society.

The Crucible takes place in Salem, Massachusetts, and focuses on the mass hysteria surrounding the Salem Witch Trials. Set in the 17th Century, the play allows audiences of all ages to step into a strict Puritan world and experience firsthand the love, hate, deceit, and jealousy that was behind the ordeal. The movie begins when the town minister Reverend Parris discovers his daughter Betty and his niece Abigail dancing in the woods with his slave, Tituba. Knowing that they have commited a sin, the girls say that they were bewitched by Tituba. Rumors of witchcraft quickly engulf the town as the townspeople gather around the Parris home. Reverend Hale, an expert on witchcraft, is quickly sent for, as Abigail tells the rest of the girls not to say anything.

In that time, Abigail ends up alone with John Proctor, a farmer in the town of Salem, and the man Abigail is rumored to have an affair with. Abigail confides in Proctor and tells him that the girls were just dancing. Under threat of punishment if she refuses to confess, Tituba admits to being friendly with the devil and  begins to name other witches in the town. Abigail, seeing this as her way out, begins naming names as well, and the rest of the girls join in. As the lies spiral, a fallacious story is birthed and leads to the heartbreaking death of 20 innocent people, including that of John Proctor.

On October 21, 1996, Arthur Miller wrote Why I Wrote The Crucible: An Artist’s Answer to Politics for The New Yorker, in which he compares the events of Salem Witch Trials to the Red Scare and the similar hysteria that both of these events created. As someone who lived through the Red Scare, Miller was able to write a piece that compared it with the Salem Witch Trials in 1953.The article highlights the paranoia that filled the hearts of Americans in 1949 when Mao Zedong took power in China, and how the Communist Party continued to grow in Western Europe in the 1950’s. Miller also compares details of his play and the events that unfolded in this time period such as “… how the State Department proceeded to hound and fire officers who knew China, its language and it’s opaque culture,” to the trial and prosecution of the women who simply knew the ‘bewitched’ girls.

Miller compared The Crucible to events that were relevant in his lifetime, like the Red Scare. In the 21st century, Americans can still relate to the fear that the town of Salem felt. America is a country consumed with fear: all you need to do is turn on the news channel or check social media to see any number of horrifying stories and the inherent need to find someone to blame for them. Just a few days ago, a video of a police officer using excessive force in an attempt to arrest a 14-year-old girl surfaced. In this case, the police department released a statement that shifted the blame onto the teenage girl. This is just one example of the headlines Americans see everyday. This fear – just like the fear in Salem – creates critical issues in our society, such as transphobia, racism and islamophobia. Fear is a powerful feeling that can immensely affect our actions, and often those actions are made without a second thought, therefore it can lead to violent actions and issues. Puritan values are the stimulation for the destruction of Salem as the urge to expose and destroy the evil creates a much deeper loss of morality then any case of witchcraft. At one point, Deputy Governor Danforth (leading judicial figure overseeing the Salem trials) states in the play, “I should hang ten thousand that dared to rise against the law…” which could easily come from a number of global community leaders today.

Traumatic events in today’s day and age, like those in Salem, allow for false claims to hinder the truth. Mary Warren (who was part of the bewitched girls, but eventually comes clean), states at one point of the play, “… and you, Your Honor, you seemed to believe them, and I– it were only a sport in the beginning, sir, but then the whole world cried spirit,” which can only highlight how easily the opinions of the people can shift in the weight of hysteria. It is argued that one of the most recent cases of mass hysteria was the Ebola crisis, and the resulting shift of opinions on modern medicine, especially regarding the effectiveness.    

The Crucible is a play based off historical events that unfolded in the town of Salem that highlights the effects of hysteria and explores the fear that can create critical issues in a society.  Examples of this include the Ebola outbreak, the West Bank Fainting Epidemic and the Borneo Kidnapping Scare. Due to events similar to the ones mentioned before, The Crucible is one of the few period plays that still feels contemporary on a global scale.

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Half of this is literally taken from lit reactor.com

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Shaming Culture In The Crucible

Cancel culture is a heavily discussed topic in today’s world. Some see it as one of the most toxic things that is happening in the world, while others think that it is a good tool to use to help hold people accountable. There are even some who think that cancel culture itself does not exist. While most see it as a pointless tool, cancelling culture is a necessary evil. It is a way to hold people accountable for their actions, but with how people are in the media, it can go to the extreme. While reading The Crucible, the girls in the book took the idea of canceling someone too far. The girls insisted on “canceling” or telling the judges that these certain people were witches just to get them out of the community. By doing this, Abigail was able to get the girl she disliked out of town, …show more content…

Social media has given a voice to so many people that may have not had a say in the past. With the amount of people who have access to the internet, cancel culture has taken form into this type of public shaming. Public shaming has been used throughout history. From public executions to tarring and feathering, this is a method that was seen as a way for the community to rally together to make sure that everyone understands what the community stands for. These methods were seen as ways to hold people accountable for their actions in the same way that a cancel culture should be doing. As the world advances technologically, more and more things are online. By using cancel culture as it is intended to, people will be able to have a more safe environment on the internet away from any hatred or harmful remarks that are posted. Understanding that humans are capable of making mistakes and using those mistakes to learn will help everyone understand that cancel culture is not just a way to silence someone, but a way to actually teach them to understand what they said was wrong and

Identity In The Crucible

“The Crucible” was about a period in time where religion was overriding. Reverend Samuel Parris was very strict about keeping his village and church steady, rumors of witchcraft went around his village and he was put in between making the decision of protecting his villages and churchś reputation or their integrity. The Scarlet Letter happened in the 17th century in New England when punishment was very different and public shaming was conventional. In “Scarlet Letter”, the period of public shaming

Cancel Culture Crucible

"Cancel Culture" has the potential to be a force for good, yet it shares similarities with The Crucible by Arthur Miller, where innocent people were wrongly accused of witchcraft out of personal vendettas. Primarily seen in the 21st Century, countless individuals experience "cancellation" without any valid justifications, often arising from superficial differences of opinion. The accusations of witchcraft in The Crucible were utterly unfounded and built solely on suspicion. Acknowledging that "Cancel

The Intolerance Of Feminism And Puritanism In The Crucible

views for issues regarding the gender wage gap, police shootings, etc.; their intolerance for other arguments as well as the use of their cause as an excuse to harass a specific person or group replicates the behaviour of the Puritans in The Crucible. In The Crucible, Abigail Williams, the niece of the town priest, lies that she and her group were possessed by witches in order to get out of trouble for performing a non-Christian ritual; Abigail soon realizes the amount of power these accusations hold

The Truman Administration 's Loyalty Order

“When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without but rather because of enemies from within” said Joseph McCarthy, on February 9, 1950 (Enemies from Within). McCarthy may have missed the mark in claiming that communist infiltration was the enemy from within, but his statement was accurate: the rise of demagogues can erode the rights and freedoms upon which democracy is built and without which they could not gain power. From the 1920’s on, ‘red baiting’ had produced

CRM 1301 Midterm uOttawa Carolyn Gordon Essay

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Perspective Trephining Individual who were having illusions or were delusional had a hole drilled in their skull in order to get rid of the spirits. If that person was still alive, the procedure was successful Witchcraft Correlated with ‘The Crucible’ where Tituba, Sarah Good & Sarah Osborne are accused of witchcraft in Salem, 1692 What to do with the witches?! Exodus 22:18- Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live Leviticus  20:27- A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is

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Why I Wrote “The Crucible”

By Arthur Miller

As I watched “The Crucible” taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time that it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly fifty years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly. In a way, there is a biting irony in this film’s having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the fifties. But there they are—Daniel Day-Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea-bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister-uncle’s money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil-possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain.

I remember those years—they formed “The Crucible” ’s skeleton—but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn’t travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory’s truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only twenty years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of “Incident at Vichy,” showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self-gratified grin on his face, his body swivelling rather cutely, and they giggled at his overacting.

Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling—if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler’s snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat’s eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self-aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat-shtick.

McCarthy’s power to stir fears of creeping Communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red—especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German Fascism. McCarthy—brash and ill-mannered but to many authentic and true—boiled it all down to what anyone could understand: we had “lost China” and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department—staffed, of course, under Democratic Presidents—was full of treasonous pro-Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.

If our losing China seemed the equivalent of a flea’s losing an elephant, it was still a phrase—and a conviction—that one did not dare to question; to do so was to risk drawing suspicion on oneself. Indeed, the State Department proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its opaque culture—a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy’s head drop off. There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue. How could one deal with such enormities in a play?

“The Crucible” was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched out, I suppose, from a typical Depression-era trauma—the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European Fascism and the brutal anti-Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America, I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors’ violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists if they should protest too strongly.

In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore. The left could not look straight at the Soviet Union’s abrogations of human rights. The anti-Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional committees. The far right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. The days of “ J’accuse ” were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.

President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving it—of having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the right—turned out to be momentous. At first, he was outraged at the allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called the charge of “coddling Communists” a red herring dragged in by the Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own.

The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit artists’ names to the House Committee for “clearing” before employing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from Party members to those who had had the merest brush with a front organization.

The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation; the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires. Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us—indeed, from me. In “Timebends,” my autobiography, I recalled the time I’d written a screenplay (“The Hook”) about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen’s union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, “The minute we try to make the script pro-American you pull out.” By then—it was 1951—I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvellous in it which I longed to put on the stage.

In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one’s teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being drawn back to it.

I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867—a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem—that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem’s past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.

I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch-hunt. “During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam”—the two were “afflicted” teen-age accusers, and Abigail was Parris’s niece—“both made offer to strike at said Procter; but when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up into a fist before, and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter’s hood very lightly. Immediately Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. . . .”

In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail’s mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human center of all this turmoil.

All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere, or from purely social and political considerations. My own marriage of twelve years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul. Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed that I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.

But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar to those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused of skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious—that there never were any witches but there certainly are Communists. In the seventeenth century, however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America; and even lawyers of the highest eminence, like Sir Edward Coke, a veritable hero of liberty for defending the common law against the king’s arbitrary power, believed that witches had to be prosecuted mercilessly. Of course, there were no Communists in 1692, but it was literally worth your life to deny witches or their powers, given the exhortation in the Bible, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied. Indeed, the very structure of evil depended on Lucifer’s plotting against God. (And the irony is that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today; there may even be more of them now than there are Communists.)

As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul. When I walked at night along the empty, wet streets of Salem in the week that I spent there, I could easily work myself into imagining my terror before a gaggle of young girls flying down the road screaming that somebody’s “familiar spirit” was chasing them. This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped along by a particular Upham footnote. At a certain point, the high court of the province made the fatal decision to admit, for the first time, the use of “spectral evidence” as proof of guilt. Spectral evidence, so aptly named, meant that if I swore that you had sent out your “familiar spirit” to choke, tickle, or poison me or my cattle, or to control my thoughts and actions, I could get you hanged unless you confessed to having had contact with the Devil. After all, only the Devil could lend such powers of invisible transport to confederates, in his everlasting plot to bring down Christianity.

Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming others whom you had seen in the Devil’s company—an invitation to private vengeance, but made official by the seal of the theocratic state. It was as though the court had grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence—that poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy—made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it did in plot-ridden 1952, when so often the question was not the acts of an accused but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind.

The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were . By denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are implying, by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked you out, which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the village or, God forbid, even exist. Therefore, the investigation itself is either mistaken or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that—not a great idea if you wanted to go back to your farm.

The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding images of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing the street to avoid being seen talking to him; the overnight conversions of former leftists into born-again patriots; and so on. Apparently, certain processes are universal. When Gentiles in Hitler’s Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors being trucked off, or farmers in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks vanishing before their eyes, the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however, there was often a despairing pity mixed with “Well, they must have done something .” Few of us can easily surrender our belief that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable And so the evidence has to be internally denied.

I was also drawn into writing “The Crucible” by the chance it gave me to use a new language—that of seventeenth-century New England. That plain, craggy English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness. “The Lord doth terrible things amongst us, by lengthening the chain of the roaring lion in an extraordinary manner, so that the Devil is come down in great wrath,” Deodat Lawson, one of the great witch-hunting preachers, said in a sermon. Lawson rallied his congregation for what was to be nothing less than a religious war against the Evil One—“Arm, arm, arm!”—and his concealed anti-Christian accomplices.

But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I enlisted the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-American scholar and poet Kimon Friar. (He later translated Kazantzakis.) The problem was not to imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it which would flow freely off American actors’ tongues. As in the film, nearly fifty years later, the actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran with it as happily as if it were their customary speech.

“The Crucible” took me about a year to write. With its five sets and a cast of twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit Bloomgarden never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension had begun to build. Only two years earlier, the “Death of a Salesman” touring company had played to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted nearly to death by the American Legion and the Jaycees. Before that, the Catholic War Veterans had prevailed upon the Army not to allow its theatrical groups to perform, first, “All My Sons,” and then any play of mine, in occupied Europe. The Dramatists Guild refused to protest attacks on a new play by Sean O’Casey, a self-declared Communist, which forced its producer to cancel his option. I knew of two suicides by actors depressed by upcoming investigation, and every day seemed to bring news of people exiling themselves to Europe: Charlie Chaplin, the director Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler, Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the most sought-after screenwriters in Hollywood, and Sam Wanamaker, who would lead the successful campaign to rebuild the Old Globe Theatre on the Thames.

On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile. The coldness of the crowd was not a surprise; Broadway audiences were not famous for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play. It seems to me entirely appropriate that on the day the play opened, a newspaper headline read “ALL THIRTEEN REDS GUILTY” —a story about American Communists who faced prison for “conspiring to teach and advocate the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow of government.” Meanwhile, the remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director, Jed Harris, who insisted that this was a classic requiring the actors to face front, never each other. The critics were not swept away. “Arthur Miller is a problem playwright in both senses of the word,” wrote Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune , who called the play “a step backward into mechanical parable.” The Times was not much kinder, saying, “There is too much excitement and not enough emotion in ‘The Crucible.’ ” But the play’s future would turn out quite differently.

About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less accomplished actors, working in the Martinique Hotel ballroom, played with the fervor that the script and the times required, and “The Crucible” became a hit. The play stumbled into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily demanded trade-fiction paperbacks in this country; the Bantam and Penguin editions have sold more than six million copies. I don’t think there has been a week in the past forty-odd years when it hasn’t been on a stage somewhere in the world. Nor is the new screen version the first. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Marxist phase, wrote a French film adaptation that blamed the tragedy on the rich landowners conspiring to persecute the poor. (In truth, most of those who were hanged in Salem were people of substance, and two or three were very large landowners.)

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America, “The Crucible” starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent, or a dictatorial regime has just been overthrown. From Argentina to Chile to Greece, Czechoslovakia, China, and a dozen other places, the play seems to present the same primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.

I am not sure what “The Crucible” is telling people now, but I know that its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the fifties. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I’d not have dreamed of forty years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play—the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness. Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in Stalin’s Russia, Pinochet’s Chile, Mao’s China, and other regimes. (Nien Cheng, the author of “Life and Death in Shanghai,” has told me that she could hardly believe that a non-Chinese—someone who had not experienced the Cultural Revolution—had written the play.) But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew of illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days. The film, by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can, may well unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem first announced on this continent.

One thing more—something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions, and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one’s name in “the Devil’s book.” This Faustian agreement to hand over one’s soul to the dreaded Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees supposed to have done once they’d signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars as they are in nightmares. The thing at issue is buried intentions—the secret allegiances of the alienated heart, always the main threat to the theocratic mind, as well as its immemorial quarry. ♦

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The play about the Salem witch trials presents a moral dilemma, but it's another canonical work centering the white, Christian, male perspective. Here are suggestions for discussion and alternate works.

Miller’s play about the Salem witch trials of 1692-3 was conceived as an allegory for McCarthyism in the United States. Teachers often include the work on syllabi for courses because it parallels studies of American history, which is taught in 10th or 11th grade. The internet is full of lessons about the play’s central themes and its historical connections to McCarthyism, mass hysteria, religious persecution, scapegoating, and the ills of living in a patriarchal society.

In June 2018, the DisruptTexts community, through the guidance of its four co-founders (Tricia Ebarvia, Lorena Germán, Dr. Kim Parker, and Julia E. Torres) engaged in a Twitter chat about The Crucible . Through the chat summary , educators can read about the way the community is using the text as an entry point to discuss prison reform, white feminism, and how the work is one of too many pieces of canonical literature that disproportionately center the white, Christian, male perspective. More critical discourse comes through discussing Arthur Miller’s caricature of Blackness with the character Tituba, an enslaved woman accused of witchcraft, and the problematic way in which Indigenous people on whose land the play’s action takes place, are essentially absent from the narrative.

Though the play presents a moral dilemma, it’s one that belongs to some cultural groups, not all, and the almost exclusively all-white cast of characters is strictly divided into men who are inherently good, even when they “exercise bad judgment,” and women who are inherently evil.

By teaching The Crucible , educators can introduce students to the McCarthy era and examine propaganda, hearsay, and fake news. However, the question we come back to often in discussion about canonical works and their place in modern society is: What could be used instead?

Creating an education system that reflects and responds to students’ needs requires educators to de-center and disrupt systems of power and oppression that place their worldview over those of the oppressed and marginalized. Even if a course includes the critical components of examining the racism, sexism, erasure of Native people and centering of a white, male, Christian, patriarchal society, the play is still a work written by a dead, white, male author.

So, what are some alternates and companion reads? Ntozake Shange’s play For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf allows plenty of space for students to talk about women, specifically Black women, living, loving, and trying to survive in a society that is fundamentally racist and sexist. Reading The Thanksgiving Play and What Would Crazy Horse Do by Larissa FastHorse, students can think about the idea of “wokeness” and how good intentions planted in the soil of ignorance can often grow strange and bitter fruit. Benjamin Benne’s Alma (or #nowall) is a commentary on the trials and tribulations that often come between the “American Dream” and those who seek it, as well as the divide between documented and undocumented citizens, especially when these labels are held by people in the same family. Furthermore, Benne’s play In His Hands; or the gay christian play explores the intersections of religion and identity. Read more at the New Play Exchange , “the world’s largest digital library of scripts by living writers.”

In addition, Claudia Rankine’s new play Help  looks at racial invisibility and white male privilege, and though it isn’t available yet for educators to read, the New York Times article, “ I Wanted To Know What White Men Thought About Their Privilege, So I Asked ,” is a fascinating introduction while we wait.

When educators are looking to evaluate the relevance of canonical works and their place in today’s classrooms, they can consider these questions:

• Whom does your curriculum center? What identities or voices are marginalized or erased altogether?
• What are the norms and values of your community? How can you problematize or push back against them in order to expand the worldview of students and young people within it?
• What new knowledge will teachers and students need to critically examine themselves and your chosen text?
• How will the text you’ve chosen amplify and center the work of living creators so that students can see themselves?
• What will you need to unlearn (what assumptions or understandings can you let go of) in order to make room for new knowledge?

Julia E. Torres is a cofounder of DisruptTexts and a librarian and ELA educator serving students and teachers in the Far Northeast region of Denver Public Schools.

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Emily Schneider

All of the works which you recommend to read alongside The Crucible are excellent choices. No work of literature stands alone; other perspectives enhance it. However, the suggestion to replace this brilliant work by one of our greatest authors because it is in some way limited is disturbing coming from educators and librarians. Which works of literature will survive your scrutiny, based on the identity of their authors? Are works by authors of color, women, and LGBTQ people exempt from your criteria? There are many ways to have fruitful, and critical, discussions of The Crucible. Rejecting it because “the play is still a work written by a dead, white, male author” is the antithesis of intellectual freedom and negates the right to read. What do you mean by asserting that the play’s moral dilemma belongs only to some cultural groups? Which cultural groups do you believe are immune to the type of mob reaction or mass hysteria which Miller depicts? Finally, since you have also emphasized the Christian component of the play, you might like to become more informed about how Miller’s Jewish identity impacted his work.

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The Crucible: the play that warned us about ‘cancel culture’

Arthur Miller’s dramatisation of the Salem witch trials serves as a chilling allegory for today’s Twitter storms

It was just a pointed allusion in a passing tweet, but this week J K Rowling set squarely in the public domain what has been in many people’s minds for some time.

“You’re still following me, Jennifer,” the author wrote on Wednesday, addressing fellow author (and one of her 14.3 million Twitter followers) Jennifer Finney Boylan, after the latter apologised for having signed an instantly controversial open letter (to be published in Harper’s Magazine), along with more than 150 other authors, attacking a liberty-curbing climate of intolerance, censoriousness, shaming and ostracism – so-called “cancel culture”.

“Be sure to publicly repent of your association with Goody Rowling before unfollowing and volunteer to operate the ducking stool next time, as penance,” the creator of Harry Potter jibed – an explicit reference to the Salem witch trials of 1692.

What happened in Salem constituted the deadliest witch hunt in American history. For a year, this God-fearing, Puritan-minded town in colonial New England succumbed to hysteria and havoc. Multiple accusations of witchery, detected in its citizens on negligible evidence, with suddenly empowered girls leading the denunciations, resulted in the merciless application of the law.

More than 200 were accused; 30 were found guilty, of whom 19 went to the gallows, the majority women. The court records confirm the use of “Goody” – a shortened version of Goodwife – to refer to the accused. When news broke that Elizabeth Proctor, who survived but whose husband John was hanged, was to be summoned for questioning, one accuser reportedly shouted: “There’s Goody Proctor! Old Witch! I’ll have her hung.”

It was Arthur Miller who made what happened in that suddenly benighted corner of Massachusetts a renewed cause célèbre with his 1953 play The Crucible. Miller conjured the past with poetic licence but much commendable fidelity, too. The object of the exercise, though, was to create an allegorical parallel. He had in his sights the mania for the denunciation, blacklisting and purging of Communists, former Communists and suspected Communists, in what became known as the McCarthy era (after the most zealous pursuer of this supposed fifth column, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy).

In Miller’s eyes, the political establishment had slipped its moorings with reality – and morality – bearing down on individuals for their perceived intellectual wrongdoing, most notably in the case of Elia Kazan, who had directed Death of a Salesman and who buckled under pressure, naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), in 1952, thereby causing a rift with Miller.

For Rowling, the parallels between Salem, McCarthyism and today are clear. On Twitter she has also quoted the playwright Lillian Hellman’s remark, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions”, made in a letter to HUAC in 1952.

We’re barely more than halfway through the year, the theatres have been closed for half that time and uncertainty remains as to whether we’ll see any activity in many for the remainder. Even before Rowling’s pronouncement, though, I’d have suggested that things have taken such an ominous turn that Miller’s canonical work feels like the most urgent, vital play of 2020.

In 1996, on the release of the film version starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder (directed by Nicholas Hytner), Miller suggested that The Crucible could be applicable “to almost any time… I wrote it blind to the world. The enemy is within, and stays within. It’s always on the edge of our minds that behind what we see is a nefarious plot.’’

In his biography of Miller, Christopher Bigsby outlined the correspondence between the Puritan “terror” and the Red Scare. Back then, “The accuser was innocent, the accused assumed to be guilty and stripped of social power. Judicial processes were perverted, a new language deployed. Survival depended on submission and an acceptance of the paranoid vision… the casting-out of devils was seen as a national responsibility, the penitent an image of reborn man.” Sound familiar?

Aside from the torrent of complaints – and more – directed at J K Rowling for her views on trans issues, the past few months have offered the repeated spectacle of people being dragged into the court of progressivist public opinion and denounced – their only hope of rehabilitation to recant and “work harder” for acceptance.

The modern penalty for failing to move with the herd when it’s charging in one direction, or for being identified as antithetical to it, may not be as grave as swinging from the gallows. But as Douglas Murray , author of The Madness of Crowds – the bestselling critique of the rampancy (and tyranny) of groupthink in the age of identity politics – recently noted, “The stakes are quite high for most people”. Failure to comply with the avowed Left-liberal agenda (the opposite, but still analogous, situation to Fifties America) carries life-changing risks – the loss of work, demonisation.

To take one example this week, the sudden, furious attempt on social media to “cancel” Jodie Comer, the Killing Eve actress. The grounds? It was concluded, on the slenderest online evidence, that she was dating a Bostonian lacrosse player, James Burke, who was deduced to have voted Republican. That was enough to get #JodieComerIsOverParty “trending” on Twitter.

Re-watching Yaël Farber’s shiver-making production of The Crucible at the Old Vic in 2014, you get a visceral physical correlative to what might nowadays find expression as an online mob, as the girls of Salem twitch, convulse and finger-point as if surrendering to supernatural powers that carry the force of irresistible truth. Miller allows us to sit at one safe historical remove from the scene, but the “theatre” of it draws us in, implicates us in mass credulity.

He identified the private impulse behind the public act, the factionalism, self-interest and instability to which the majority of us are prone – detecting in the town’s runaway unreason the unleashing of repressed sexual urges. This finds its most pivotal expression in the figure of Abigail Williams, who incriminates Elizabeth Proctor because she hankers after the latter’s errant husband John, the play’s hero.

Proctor goes to his death having been offered the chance to live through accepting his guilt and naming others: “I speak my own sins, I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it.” In a remarkable case of life mirroring an author’s own art, when Miller was subpoenaed before the HUAC in Washington in 1956, he refused to name names, declaring: “I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him.”

He was charged with contempt, appealed and eventually won. The McCarthyist frenzy abated. He was vindicated in his opinion towards Kazan, as recorded in his memoir Timebends: “I could only say that I thought this would pass and that it had to pass because it would devour the glue that kept the country together if left to its own unobstructed course.”

Those fearing the worst ramifications of today’s culture wars can take some comfort from the fortitude, and wit that got Miller through that period (expressed through Proctor’s own dry eloquence: “This society will not be a bag to swing around your head,” he tells one adversary). But The Crucible still offers a timely, chilling warning from history that something deep, disturbing and very possibly ineradicable in our nature likes to march in step, crushing dissent, heedless of the destination.

Watch the Old Vic production of The Crucible at digitaltheatre.com

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Themes and Analysis

The crucible, by arthur miller.

Through 'The Crucible,' Miller explores several important themes, such as the power of fear and superstition and the dangers of religious extremism.

Article written by Emma Baldwin

B.A. in English, B.F.A. in Fine Art, and B.A. in Art Histories from East Carolina University.

Arthur Miller’s ‘ The Crucible ‘ is one of the most powerful and poignant plays ever written . Set in the Puritan town of Salem during the 1690s, the play focuses on a series of trials that ultimately reveal the dangers of fear and ignorance. The play is filled with important symbols and themes that drive the narrative, many of which are highly relatable, even today.

The Corruption of Power

In the story of ‘ The Crucible ,’ power corrupts absolutely. In the village of Salem, the court proceedings are directed by those in authority, such as Reverend Parris and Deputy Governor Danforth. They misuse their power to further their own personal agendas, leading to false accusations and wrongful executions. The corruption of power serves as a warning against allowing authority figures to control everyday life without consequence.

The Dangers of Hysteria

‘ The Crucible ‘ demonstrates how quickly hysteria can spread and affect a community. With the accusations of witchcraft, fear and paranoia spread like wildfire among the citizens of Salem. This leads to even more accusations and further isolation of those thought to be guilty. The play warns readers against succumbing to hysteria and shows the real danger it can pose when left unchecked; this relates directly to McCarthyism in the 1950s in the United States.

Ignorance and Intolerance

Many of the characters in ‘ The Crucible ‘ are ignorant and intolerant of others, especially those they view as outsiders. This is demonstrated through the character of Reverend Parris, who is deeply suspicious of anyone who is different or opposes him. Similarly, intolerance is shown when those accused of witchcraft are assumed to be guilty despite a lack of evidence. The play emphasizes the need for tolerance and understanding in order to prevent further strife.

Key Moments

• Reverend Parris discovers his daughter and niece dancing in the woods with Tituba, his slave, and other girls from the village. Betty falls into a coma.
• Parris questions the girls about witchcraft.
• It’s revealed that Abigail had an affair with her former employer John Proctor. She still wants to be with him.
• Betty wakes up screaming.
• Tituba confesses to witchcraft. Abigail joins her.
• Abigail and the other girls begin to accuse various citizens of Salem of witchcraft.
• Mary Warren, now a court official, testifies against John Proctor in court. 
• Elizabeth urges John to go to town and convince them that Abigail is not telling the truth. She is suspicious of their relationship.
• Mary gives Elizabeth a poppet.
• John is questioned by Reverend Hale.
• The town marshal arrests Elizabeth and finds the poppet, which has a needle in it.
• Mary admits she made the poppet in court, and Elizabeth claims she’s pregnant.
• The girls start screaming in court, saying that Mary is sending her spirit to them.
• Elizabeth convinces John to admit to witchcraft.
• John Proctor signs a confession but then rips it up before it can be used as evidence against him. 
• John Proctor is put to death after refusing to lie about being a witch.

Tone and Style

The tone of Arthur Miller’s ‘ The Crucible ‘ is serious and intense due to the subject matter of the Salem Witch Trials. Miller captures a sense of urgency and fear that pervaded the small town of Salem at the time, which amplifies the drama and tension between the characters. This serves as a reminder of the underlying paranoia that can quickly infect a community.

The writing style of Miller’s play is direct and succinct. Miller deliberately focuses on dialogue and action, allowing for a natural flow to the story as it unfolds. He also uses strong language to draw attention to the ways in which fear and paranoia can lead to injustice. Through this approach, Miller effectively conveys the consequences of these events. In part, this is due to the format of the story. It’s a drama, meaning that it is almost entirely composed of only dialogue.

Witchcraft is the most obvious symbol in ‘ The Crucible ‘, representing the fear and paranoia of the characters during the Salem Witch Trials. Miller uses it to reflect the rampant hysteria of the time and how quickly false accusations spread throughout Salem. Witchcraft can also be seen as a metaphor for the powerlessness of individuals in the face of a repressive and superstitious society. 

Proctor’s House

John Proctor’s house serves as a symbol of both the struggles and the strength of his marriage to Elizabeth. It is not only a physical representation of their relationship but also an example of their commitment to one another. As their relationship unravels, so does their home, until it is eventually burned down by the townspeople. This symbolizes the breakdown of their marriage and the ultimate downfall of their relationship. 

The forest is a symbol of freedom in ‘ The Crucible .’ It represents the escape from repression, control, and oppression in Salem. By venturing out into the woods, characters like Tituba, Abigail, and Parris are able to reject societal norms and restrictions, allowing them to find their own paths. It is also a sign of hope for those who are struggling against the unjust and oppressive nature of Salem society.

What is the most important theme in The Crucible by Arthur Miller?

The most important theme in “The Crucible” is the power of public opinion and hysteria. It demonstrates how an environment of fear and superstition can be manipulated to create a situation of paranoia and distrust. 

Why is The Crucible by Arthur Miller important?

‘ The Crucible ‘ is important because it explores themes of morality, justice, and personal responsibility. It also examines the effects of unchecked hysteria and paranoia on individuals and society as a whole.

Why did Arthur Miller write The Crucible ?

Arthur Miller wrote ‘ The Crucible ‘ as a metaphor for McCarthyism, which was a period of intense anti-communist sentiment in the United States during the 1950s. He wanted to illustrate how similar events could happen again if unchecked fear and paranoia were allowed to spread.

Who are some of the main characters in The Crucible ?

Some of the main characters in The Crucible include John Proctor, Abigail Williams, Elizabeth Proctor, Reverend Parris, Reverend Hale, and Judge Danforth.

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About Emma Baldwin

Emma Baldwin, a graduate of East Carolina University, has a deep-rooted passion for literature. She serves as a key contributor to the Book Analysis team with years of experience.

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Notes on the Culture

The Long and Tortured History of Cancel Culture

The public shaming of those deemed moral transgressors has been around for ages. As practiced today, though, is the custom a radical form of citizen justice or merely a handmaiden to capitalism?

Francisco Goya’s “The Straw Manikin” (1791-92). Credit... Museo Del Prado, Madrid, Spain; Erich Lessing/Art Resource

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By Ligaya Mishan

• Dec. 3, 2020

IN THE EARLY 21st century — a decade into the experiment of the public internet, which was introduced in 1991, and with Facebook and Twitter not yet glimmers of data on the horizon — a new phrase slipped into Chinese slang: renrou sousuo , literally translated as “human flesh search.” The wording was meant to be whimsical, suggesting the human-powered equivalent of what were then fairly novel computer search engines. (In English, the nuances are lost; no zombie inflection was intended.) A request would go out for wangmin (web citizens), or in this case the more intimate wangyou (web friends, internet users sharing a common passion or cause), to come together as a kind of ad hoc detective agency in order to ferret out information about objects and figures of interest. It was just an outlet for fandom. But soon attention turned toward supposed wrongdoers, those thought to exhibit moral deficiency, from a low-level government official spotted flashing a designer watch far above his pay grade, hinting at corruption, to, more horrifically, a woman in a “crush video” — a fringe genre of erotica that traffics in animal cruelty — wielding stilettos to stomp a kitten to death. Once these offenders were identified and their personal details exposed online, they were hounded, verbally flogged and effectively expelled from the community.

To a Western observer, this was human flesh indeed: a pound of it, exacted. Media coverage in the West framed renrou sousuo as an exotic phenomenon, almost unheard-of outside China. It couldn’t happen here . When The New York Times ran a feature on it in 2010 , one commenter wrote, “I am surprised by the intensity of the searches and I think this is an Eastern trait. Most people in the West can’t be bothered, we are too individualistic and well served by existing mechanisms” — even though English already had its own word, “doxxing,” for such online revelations, with roots in 1990s computer hacker discussion boards. Weiwei Shen, a founding editor of the Tsinghua China Law Review, made a similar, if more subtle, argument in a 2016 essay , noting that the human flesh search was a “grass-roots” effort and thus far more likely to arise in “collectivist” China, as opposed to go-it-alone America.

But this is the American way now. We call it cancel culture.

So much has been written about cancel culture in the past year that weariness sets in just reading the words. What it is, what to call it and whether it even exists are all in dispute. The term is shambolically applied to incidents both online and off that range from vigilante justice to hostile debate to stalking, intimidation and harassment. Any of the following might qualify: outcries last summer over cellphone video footage of a white tech executive yelling expletives at a Filipino-American family at a restaurant in California (he reportedly resigned from his company); speculations that a pop star’s father was secretly a C.I.A. agent and thus an accomplice to colonialism and genocide; editors at The New York Times and The New York Review of Books stepping down after running controversial pieces that provoked dissent from their own staff; the suspension of a white professor who used a Chinese word in class that sounded like a racial slur in English ; a beauty YouTuber shedding close to three million subscribers in a single weekend after a colleague accused him of betrayal and emotional manipulation (he has since recouped these losses and currently claims an audience of more than 23 million); and far-right conspiracists dredging up an anti-Trump filmmaker’s old, puerilely offensive tweets (he was fired by Disney, then rehired eight months later).

Once we spoke of “call-out culture,” but the time for simply highlighting individual blunders for the edification of a wider audience, as in a medieval morality play, seems to have passed. Those who embrace the idea (if not the precise language) of canceling seek more than pat apologies and retractions, although it’s not always clear whether the goal is to right a specific wrong and redress a larger imbalance of power — to wreak vengeance as a way of rendering some justice, however imperfect; to speak out against those “existing mechanisms” that don’t serve us so well after all; to condemn an untrustworthy system and make a plea for a fairer one — or just the blood-sport thrill of humiliating a stranger as part of a gleeful, baying crowd. Some prefer the more sober term “accountability culture,” although this has its own complications, having been heretofore deployed in the corporate and public sector to support the need for a hierarchy or external authority to hold employees and institutions to their commitments, with an eye to boosting results: a measure of productivity, not behavior or values.

To say “cancel culture,” then, is already to express a point of view, implicitly negative. Although cancel culture is not a movement — it has neither leaders nor membership, and those who take part in it do so erratically, maybe only once, and share no coherent ideology — it’s persistently attributed to the extremes of a political left and a fear-mongering specter of wokeness, itself a freighted term, originally derived and then distorted from the Black vernacular “woke,” which invokes a spirit of vigilance to see the world as it really is. (The experimental novelist William Melvin Kelley may have been the first to introduce “woke” to the mainstream as an adjective, in his 1962 essay on Black idiom, “ If You’re Woke You Dig It, ” in which he noted how words change with the color of the people who use them: “At one time, the connotations of ‘jive’ were all good; now they are bad, or at least questionable.”) Yet cancellations come just as easily from those aligned in thinking with the far right: Recall how, in 2014, a group of video gamers pressured corporations — under the guise of championing ethics in journalism — to withdraw advertising dollars from media outlets that had criticized lack of diversity in the game industry, and at the same time terrorized female gamers and writers with rape and death threats.

To some, this very amorphousness is the danger, making cancel culture a culture in the microbial sense, of a controlling environment — a “stifling atmosphere,” in the words of “ A Letter on Justice and Open Debate ,” which appeared in Harper’s in July as a call to arms against the perceived new dogmatism (without ever naming it), signed by 153 academic and artistic luminaries, some of whom themselves had been mobilized against (i.e., canceled) for expressing what the letter characterized, somewhat abstractly, as “good-faith disagreement.” Many have dismissed this letter , mostly on the grounds of: It was ever thus. Cancel culture doesn’t exist because it has always existed, in rumors, whispers and smear campaigns, and censorship and retribution are far worse when sponsored or tacitly sanctioned by the state, as with the imprisonment and kangaroo-court convictions of those exercising free speech under totalitarianism, or the blacklisting and barring from employment of suspected Communists in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, a collaborative effort between the House Un-American Activities Committee and an eager-to-please private sector. The speed, sloppiness and relative anonymity of social media haven’t created a radically new strain of bullying; they just facilitate and exacerbate an old one. And some would argue that it’s not bullying at all, but the opposite: a means to combat abusive behavior and exploitation of power, and a necessary corrective to the failure of the state to protect its citizens.

Left unanswered is what explains the urgent need to not just call out but condemn — the resurgence of ancient beliefs in scapegoating and human sacrifice; the shift in American society from guilt to shame; the evolution of a digital form of carnival and misrule as a safety valve to let out all our pent-up rage — and why, even as pundits decry cancel culture as a mob running amok, the powers that be somehow remain in place, unchanged.

“CANCEL” IS A consumerist verb, almost always involving a commodity or transaction. Readers cancel magazine subscriptions; studio heads cancel TV shows; bank tellers cancel checks to show that they’ve been exhausted of value. The journalist Aja Romano, writing in Vox , tracked down what may be the first popular reference to canceling people instead of things in Mario van Peebles’s 1991 cult movie, “New Jack City,” when the crime boss Nino Brown slams his girlfriend down on a table — she’s protesting his fondness for murder — and sloshes champagne over her, saying, “Cancel that bitch. I’ll buy another one.” The rapper 50 Cent reprised Nino’s line in his 2005 hit “ Hustler’s Ambition ,” and Lil Wayne did the same five years later in “ I’m Single .” As this informal usage entered broader slang (again, like “woke” and much of contemporary American lexicon, taken from Black culture), it fused with the more common meaning of the verb and became an imperative to revoke allegiance. In perhaps the earliest instance of cancel culture to include the term, in 2014, the official Twitter account of the Comedy Central show “The Colbert Report” posted a joke that could be taken as a denigration of Asians, and the activist Suey Park responded with the hashtag #CancelColbert — only to end up getting doxxed and canceled herself, with so much vitriol directed her way that she fled her home and started communicating with burner phones.

In “ Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents ” (2020), the American journalist Isabel Wilkerson reaches back to the Book of Leviticus to examine one of the mechanisms underlying hierarchy and the insistence of exclusion: the scapegoat, or sa’ir la’aza’zel — a literal goat, ceremonially endowed by the high priest with “all the guilt and misdeeds” of the community and driven out into the wilderness. The Greeks practiced a kindred rite, using a human sacrifice, the pharmakos, who was beaten and promenaded in the streets before being exiled, which was considered a kind of death. (Some historians believe that executions took place as well, but others find the evidence inconclusive.) This was at once diversion and atonement, a way for a dominant group to label an “other” as evil and cast that evil out, as if it would then no longer abide within them and they could imagine themselves “free of blemish,” Wilkerson writes.

The modern scapegoat performs an equivalent function, uniting otherwise squabbling groups in enmity against a supposed transgressor who relieves the condemners of the burden of wrestling with their own wrongs. What is lost, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor argues in “ A Secular Age ” (2007), is the ambivalent, numinous duality of the sacrificial victim. (“Pharmakos” comes from “pharmakon,” which is both itself and its opposite: medicine and poison at once, healer and killer.) No longer is it acknowledged, however tacitly or subconsciously, that the scapegoat, whether guilty or not of a particular offense, is ultimately a mere stand-in for the true culprits responsible for a society gone askew (ourselves and the system we’re complicit in). Instead, the scapegoat is demonized, forced to bear and incarnate everyone’s guilt, on top of their own.

These expulsions are necessarily public, which is something of a historical regression: When the colonial theocracy of 17th-century America gave way to the Enlightenment and democracy, penalties as spectacle — whippings, arms and legs trapped in stockades and pillories, Hester Prynne’s scarlet A — fell out of fashion and, as the British journalist Jon Ronson notes in “ So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed ” (2015), were largely abandoned as a government-mandated punishment, although they continued in extrajudicial form in the lynchings of Black people, from Reconstruction through the 1960s. In keeping with the American ideal of self-reliance, citizens were expected to be attuned to their own sense of guilt. The 20th-century American anthropologist Ruth Benedict, writing about cultural differences between Japan and the West, distinguished guilt as a legacy of Judaism and Christianity, suffering from the internal knowledge of having failed to live “up to one’s own picture of oneself,” versus shame as the fear of external criticism and ridicule. Guilt guides conduct even in the absence of social sanctions, when nobody knows you’ve done anything wrong; shame “requires an audience,” a social network, to force you to change.

It’s instructive that, for all the fear that cancel culture elicits, it hasn’t succeeded in toppling any major figures — high-level politicians, corporate titans — let alone institutions.

But guilt still derives from communally agreed-upon standards, be they manifest as religion, ideology, a legal code or just the rudimentary ethics without which no group can survive. The increasing atomization of American society in the 21st century has brought an unmooring from such consensus. As standards have shifted, some have grasped for stone only to find a handful of dust. If you can’t trust others to follow their conscience or even have one, and you’ve lost faith in the ability or desire of institutions to uphold what is good — if you no longer believe that we live in a city upon a hill, that our society is just or even aspires to be — there may be no recourse (short of revolution) but to scold and menace, like modern-day Puritans. The act of shaming draws a neat line between good and bad, us and them. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the etymology of “cancel” leads to the Latin “cancelli,” derived from “cancri”/“cancer,” a lattice or grid of crossed bars: a barrier, in other words, linked by dissimilation to “carcer” (prison), and in its early adaptation to English taken literally, as a crossing out, lines drawn through words on paper.

THE SHEER ARBITRARINESS of some of the targets of cancel culture — singled out among many who might have committed comparable sins, often neither public figures nor possessors of institutional power but utterly ordinary people before their swift, simultaneous elevation-degradation to infamy — lends a ritualistic distance to the attacks, enabling a casual cruelty, as in the American writer Shirley Jackson’s infamous short story “ The Lottery ” (1948), when the villagers qualmlessly turn on one of their randomly selected own. The French philosopher René Girard, in “ Violence and the Sacred ” (1979), notes that “the very fact of choosing a victim bestows on him the aura of exteriority … the surrogate victim is not perceived as he really was — namely, as a member of the community like all the others.” To justify vindictiveness, you can’t recognize yourself in those you denounce; you have to believe, as Taylor writes, that they “really deserve it.”

Critics of cancel culture see parallels in the Jacobins of the French Revolution in the 18th century, the Red Guards of the Chinese Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 and the estimated 600,000 to 2 million private citizens — out of a population of around 17 million — who acted as part-time informants for the Stasi, the East German secret police, from 1950 to 1990. None are proper analogues, for all derived their punitive power from the state. Allusions are also made to the Spanish Inquisition, which persecuted heresy from the 15th century to the 19th, and the Salem witch trials in late 17th-century Massachusetts, both a joint effort of church and state, when there was little distinction between them. These examples are relevant only in showing how the archaic use of violence to affirm purity has evolved to serve latter-day ideologies. In France, the spree at the guillotine was rationalized as the pursuit of good: a Reign of Terror to yield a Republic of Virtue. (The revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, who famously declared in 1794 that without terror, “virtue is impotent,” supported the future elimination of the death penalty even as he ordered executions by the thousands.) Mao Zedong embroidered the same theme in a letter to his wife in 1966, invoking “great disorder under heaven” in order to achieve “great order.” And while some Stasi informants may have reported on their friends and neighbors out of fear, researchers have determined that most did so to safeguard the state’s righteousness and, by extension, their own.

Compared to these authoritarian regimes, however, cancel culture is rudderless, a series of spontaneous disruptions with no sequential logic, lacking any official apparatus to enact or enforce a policy or creed. If anything, it’s anti-authoritarian: Historically, Westerners do not approve of informing on behalf of the government and its enforcers, giving the act shaded names like “snitch” and “narc,” the latter explicitly defined in an 1859 British slang dictionary as someone who “breaks faith.” Children are advised not to be tattletales. (We’re more comfortable with whistle-blowers, who speak out against the powerful.)

What cancellations offer instead is a surrogate, warped-mirror version of the judicial process, at once chaotic yet ritualized. It’s a paradox reminiscent of the mayhem in medieval Catholic traditions of carnival and misrule, wherein the church and governing bodies were lampooned and hierarchy upended — all without actually threatening the prevailing hegemony, and even reaffirming it. “Misrule always implies the Rule that it parodies,” the American-Canadian anthropologist Natalie Zemon Davis has written ; the very excess and occasional destructiveness of the revelries gave testament to the wisdom of those normally in charge. Davis suggests that these festivals offered “alternatives to the existing order.” But why would the church, which presumably brooked no alternatives, condone such subversion? From its perspective, carnival was a convenient catharsis: a brief hiatus from the moral strictures of daily life, when the populace was allowed to indulge their mutinous impulses and expend their restive energies, the better to return to compliance on the morrow.

It’s instructive that, for all the fear that cancel culture elicits, it hasn’t succeeded in toppling any major figures — high-level politicians, corporate titans — let alone institutions. Those most vulnerable to harm tend to be individuals previously unknown to the public, like the communications director who was fired in 2013 after tweeting, from her personal account, an ill-thought-out joke about Africa, AIDS and her own white privilege (she landed another job six months later) or the data analyst who was fired last spring after tweeting, in the wake of protests against the death of George Floyd in police custody, a study that suggested that riots depressed rather than increased Democratic Party votes (his employer has denied that the tweet was the cause for his dismissal) — although both situations reveal less about the impact of cancel culture than the precariousness of at-will employment, in which one can be fired for any reason, whether legitimate or not. The more power someone has, the less affected they are: The British writer J.K. Rowling, one of the signatories of the Harper’s letter, has been publicly excoriated in the past year for expressing her views on gender identity and biological sex, but people continue to buy her books; disgraced high-profile comedians who’ve returned to the stand-up circuit, not always repentant, have been rewarded with sold-out shows. When the mighty do fall, it often takes years, coupled with behavior that’s not just immoral but illegal. The studio head Harvey Weinstein was indicted for crimes , not canceled.

In a 1972 conversation with the French theorist Michel Foucault, the French philosopher Benny Lévy (then using the nom de guerre Pierre Victor) pointed to the example, at the end of World War II, of “those young women whose heads were shaved because they had slept with the Germans” — while a number of those who had actively collaborated with the Nazis went unpunished: “So the enemy was allowed to exploit these acts of popular justice; not the old enemy — the Nazi occupation forces … but the new enemy, the French bourgeoisie.” In keeping a narrow focus on small-scale violations of the social contract, cancel culture has uncomfortable kinship, as the American essayist Meghan Daum has written, to the “broken windows” policing put into practice starting in the 1980s, based on a theory by the American criminologists George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson that posited that cracking down on minor crimes would prevent larger ones . Instead, it led to the scourge of stop-and-frisk, in which ordinary people, innocent of a crime and disproportionately of color, were routinely and repeatedly treated like suspects and searched, manhandled and interrogated as such.

The trespasses cited in cancel culture often do encapsulate and typify greater ills, as when a white woman called the police on a Black birder in Central Park last spring and falsely claimed that he was threatening her. Holding these acts up as evidence of the dailiness of inequity might be revelatory for some and even budge the needle on how people think of racism, misogyny and class oppression in America today. As the British sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote, when crowds muster against perceived threats to public mores — in what we call a moral panic — those threats, while exaggerated, are still potent as “warning signs of the real, much deeper and more prevalent condition.” But moral panics were traditionally engineered by those in power to reassert the need for modes of control, or by commercial interests to profit off the attention that comes via scandal. They were forms of manipulation, diverting public ire from structural injustice toward a specific ostracized group as an embodiment of evil, or folk devils, a coinage by Cohen in the late 1960s. (Fear of cancel culture is itself a moral panic — a moral panic over moral panics, one orchestrated on high over those generated extempore below.)

Although in cancel culture the moral panics are roving and unpremeditated, they can still be exploited for the benefit of the dominant class. So long as the folk devils of cancel culture are plucked from the masses or are merely artsy celebrities or subalterns of politics or industry, the world stays essentially the same.

CANCEL CULTURE MAY have reached its apotheosis this September when a professor of history and Africana studies at George Washington University admitted online that she was white, not Black, as she had been posing for her entire career . “You should absolutely cancel me, and I absolutely cancel myself,” she declared, but then added, “What does that mean? I don’t know,” nullifying the entire premise. Self-abasement was tendered, but no concrete action. She affirmed the importance of cancel culture as “a necessary and righteous tool for those with less structural power to wield against those with more power,” yet insisted, “I can’t fix this,” as if she could embrace accountability without actually doing anything to alter her actions; as if she had no power to remove herself from power. Only after the university began investigating her public statement did she resign from her tenured position, nearly a week later.

On Twitter, people speak scoffingly of canceling themselves, as a joke or a pre-emptive measure, since presumably any of us could be canceled at any time, living in our glass Instagrams, leaving a spoor of digitized gaffes behind us. (The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan eerily anticipated cancel culture in his 1967 book “ The Medium Is the Massage ” — the title was a typesetter’s error that McLuhan embraced — expressing concern, before the first resource-sharing computer network was even completed, about the “womb-to-tomb surveillance” made possible by “the electrically computerized dossier bank — that one big gossip column that is unforgiving, unforgetful and from which there is no redemption, no erasure of early ‘mistakes.’”) There’s the tacit hope that if we have the grace to cancel ourselves first, our ostracism will be temporary, a mere vacation from social media. Absolution is reduced to performance, a walk with bowed head through jeers and splattered mud. Instead of retreating into introspection and actually examining our behavior, we submit to punishment and imagine ourselves thereby purged of both sin and the need to do anything about it. We emerge clean, or so we let ourselves believe.

But what is the point of all this flagellation, of self and others, if meanwhile the structures that enable wrongdoing continue to creak and loom, doing business as usual? The scapegoat was not always a marginal figure. Consider Oedipus, the tyrannos-pharmakos of Thebes and unknowing sinner whose crimes brought great suffering to his people — blighted crops, plague — and who had to be sacrificed that they might live. This specter, of the sovereign laid low, appears to haunt the American entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who in his 2014 treatise-slash-self-help manual “ Zero to One ” (co-written with Blake Masters) casts a glance at the restive hordes below: “Perhaps every modern king is just a scapegoat who has managed to delay his own execution” — although it’s worth noting that today’s potentates rule unhindered by the bygone fetters of interfering gods and binding prophecies.

There was a time when we lived in a moral economy, which is to say, an economy that acknowledged, if not always observed, moral concerns. The British social historian E.P. Thompson used the term as a framework for understanding food riots in 18th-century England, when, in times of dearth, people set their sights on profiteers and organized what he described as “a kind of ritualized hooting or groaning” outside shops to make their displeasure known. Today we hoot and groan still, but seemingly everywhere and at everything, so that even the worthiest and most urgent causes get lost in the clamor. The many subcultures whose complaints buoy the larger, nebulous cancel culture tend to fixate on minutiae, which can distract from attempts to achieve broader change.

And this may be an intentional distraction. Every obsessive search on Google for proof of wrongdoing, every angry post on Twitter and Facebook to call the guilty to account, is a silent ka-ching in the great repositories of these corporations, which woo advertisers by pointing to the intensity of user engagement. “Despite the egalitarianism claimed for social media by capital’s libidinal engineers … this is currently an enemy territory, dedicated to the reproduction of capital,” the British cultural critic Mark Fisher wrote in his 2013 essay “ Exiting the Vampire’s Castle .” Twitter, cancel culture’s main arena, is not the digital equivalent of the public square, however touted as such. We think of it as an open space because we pay no admission, forgetting that it’s a commercial enterprise, committed to herding us in. We are customers but also uncredited workers, doing the free labor of making the platform more valuable.

For now, this is the circus that sates us, that keeps us from waking to the truth of our life and turning, glowering, toward the barred gates. We burn our effigies, forgetting that they’re actual people like us, as our overlords look on from afar, brows knitted but not quite worried, not yet. Still, these “modern kings” would do well to remember: In Sophocles’ telling, Oedipus doesn’t run from his fate. He begs for exile, to heal his people. He cancels himself.

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