Cancel culture is something YOU have, not something others suffer from
It is crazy how we repeat, celebrate, and consecrate, famous words and passages from the past, while proving entirely incapable of learning from them, or even of conceiving that they might in any way apply to us. It is almost as though the consecration of the truth someone once spoke is one and the same with its denial and ignoring in practice; that we have to celebrate and sympathize with the denunciations of stupidity and evil by people long since dead, just so that we can repeat the very same stupidity against people very much alive, while still celebrating our own righteousness and insight. Nearly 200 years ago, Thomas B.Macaulay wrote a famous and scathing sentence: "We know of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." This sentence is continuously repeated by everyone with a claim to like good English, and, as Chesterton said of another, it is "very true, though very Macalauyese" (as so many sentences are "very true, though very Chestertonese"). And yet we have not only repeated the follies of "the British public" (of the early nineteenth century) "in one of its periodical fits of morality", we have formalized and institutionalized it, and we repeat the performance daily, constantly, and with no notion of being either ridiculous or wrong, congratulating ourselves on our lofty morality.
Cancel culture is always stupider than I expect it to be; and while, at my age, I am nauseatingly familiar with that, I can still be astonished by the sheer stupidity of the STUFF - I want to use a much worse word - excreted about Neil Gaiman and Joss Whedon by people who, God help me, are on my f-list. "He was nasty to people, so I will throw away all my copies of his graphic novels." You illiterates, Richard Wagner, Benvenuto Cellini, Berthold Brecht and Percy B. Shelley all were worse than any of these people, and yet you would rightly be called barbarians if you refused to admire Cellini's Perseus or Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children. Caravaggio, a painter without whom the Western art of painting would be mutilated, one of the greatest who ever lived, whom anyone with pretensions to draw will be learning from as long as people still have eyes, was a murderer, and so was the little- known but astounding musical genius Gesualdo. And what shall we say about artists who supported vicious and evil political causes? I tell you that a majority, possibly a large majority, of artists in the twentieth century were Communists, Fascists or Nazis. Great art is made in despite of whatever personal failure or downright wickedness. Indeed, it may be made THROUGH whatever personal failure or downright wickedness. George Bernard Shaw supported terrible causes, and you cannot read his comedies and tragedies (except perhaps for the strange case of Saint Joan) without being faced by his intellectual and moral perverseness.
Indeed, the best interpretation of a great artist with a dark side cannot ignore their personal wickedness of the artist in contemplating the greatness of the work. The ferocity of Caravaggio's character, his familiarity with the lowest levels of society, with thugs and morons, can be seen in the faces he so stupendously depicts, in the fierceness of his light and the depth of his darkness, which no painter had ever even approched before, and which EVERYONE learned from afterwards. The manifestation of the violence of his character in his art is part of its greatness. Refuse to have anything to do with the one, and you will not learn something of immense importance from the other.
The most ridiculous manifestation of the inadequacy, indeed the mendaciousness, of present-day cancel culture, came from someone who insisted that Buffy was not the work of Joss Whedon, but of "many other excellent writers and of the actors" (I am not sure I am quoting word for word, and I do not intend to go back and check, but that was basically what was said.) So I suppose you can also dismiss Angel, and Firefly and Serenity, and all his other work? As a matter of fact, we can judge the relative value of Whedon's contribution to Buffy as compared to everyone else by looking at things in which he was not involved, such as the spin-off novels, and above all the recent attempt at a Buffy revival, in which Whedon's enemy Charisma Carpenter (who would have been nothing without him) played a prominent role, and which is already forgotten. We have seen this kind of nonsense when the mob was trying to cancel JK Rowling, who, thank God, is made of tougher stuff than Whedon, and who, quite rightly, did not feel she had anything to apologize for.
The puritanical instinct to hound, condemn, and execrate people who are reported by the media to have committed sins or crimes is in the end the same thing as the lynch mob impulse. And the mentally and morally disastrous results of its application to great artists shows that there is something essentially wrong with it. I do not say that bad behaviour should be ignored in great geniuses, or in great men of any kind; apart from anything else, this is just as much escapism, and fallacy, and moral cowardice, as its cancel culture twin. We should be able to understand the darkness in a great work of art, and the ways in which it has even tended to form it, without forgetting that it is itself dark. But to throw away a great work of art because you are told that the artist treated women or friends or strangers badly - that is mere escapism, refusing to deal with reality with its many sides.