Cancel culture is seemingly a way of life in 2024, where the public ostracizes and shuns an individual and the entities with which they're associated—from business owners and CEOs to athletes and artists—for acting in ways or expressing opinions deemed unacceptable. But the Chief Executive Officer of America’s oldest anti-hate group would like to see the notion of cancel culture replaced by what he calls “counsel culture.”
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League and author of a book titled “It Could Happen Here,” recently spoke with Business Daily and elaborated on his concept.
“Basically what cancel culture tells us is when someone makes a mistake, you push them away. What counsel culture says, when someone makes a mistake, you actually pull them in. Cancel culture says, when someone makes a mistake, you reject them. Cancel culture says, when someone makes a mistake, you embrace and educate them. Cancel culture dismisses the people around us. And counsel culture says everyone has an inherent degree of dignity. And it’s our goal, our responsibility to try to recognize that and lift that up in people,” Greenblatt said.
“My goal is to make it clear that anti-Semitism and bigotry of any form is unacceptable. The way that we do that is through conversations, through education, and ultimately working with people rather than working against them. A part of our job is certainly fighting hate, but a lot of it is also about finding hope. We find hope by counseling, not by canceling.”
Greenblatt stated the goal should be to help those individuals who would ordinarily be subjected to cancel culture to “redeem themselves by acknowledging their agency and by educating them as best we can and allowing them to access the intrinsic tools that we all have inside of us.”
“So it’s very important. I just want to lay it out. Because for me, forgiveness is not about compromise. It’s not about condoning harmful behavior. It’s again, it’s about converting a negative into a positive. It’s about holding people responsible for what they’ve done and helping them to find some measure of redemption,” Greenblatt told Business Daily.
When a company founder or CEO makes a mistake, Greenblatt added that he doesn’t believe canceling is necessary.
“Someone can make a mistake, and if they are unwilling to acknowledge the mistake, if they are a serial offender, then there should be consequences. Hopefully, it doesn’t get to that point. I believe in the inherent goodness of people. And in the Jewish faith, we have this concept called Teshuvah, or repentance. Every year when Jews sort of commemorate the holiday of Yom Kippur, it’s about repentance. It’s about recognizing it. And I think the Catholic faith has this tradition too, of recognizing that we all sin, that we’re all imperfect, and it’s up to us to try to do better,” Greenblatt stated.
“So I think it’s tempting to want to cancel people that you don’t agree with. Moral censure can be valuable when applied appropriately, but it’s just an easy way out. To say, ‘Okay, I’m done with you.’ You have to reserve censure for the worst culprits and instead try to approach a more constructive posture of working with people, especially if someone has a single example of poor judgment or a few errant posts on social media or even a material transgression in their youth like Damien, the guy who I wrote about in the op-ed essay for Time. I’m not excusing what he did or what anyone does, but I just think we have to try to work with those people rather than just sit in judgment of them.”
Greenblatt refers to Damien Patton, the former CEO of Banjo, a company founded in 2010 which pioneered the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for public safety, in its creation of an event detection engine through the geo-location of social media posts.
Patton resigned as his company’s CEO in 2020, when his past ties to a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan were discovered. Rather than ostracize or deride Patton, Greenblatt instead engaged with him in an attempt to understand his history and his desire to make amends for his actions.
Greenblatt soon found Patton’s remorse was genuine, and worked with him to not only mend fences with those whom he had injured in his past, but also reconnect Patton with his Jewish heritage, which the two men share in common.
“As I said before, I don’t think it’s a compromise at all. I just think there is black and white, but far more often we find ourselves living in the gray. And so acknowledging that we’re all human, that we’re all flawed, and that it’s incumbent upon us to walk humbly and not think any of us are better than, inherently better than anyone else,” Greenblatt said.
“That means, again, an approach of forgiveness. If we have this covenantal relationship with a higher power, or we don’t believe in that, instead we think about just atheists who believe purely in science. But from both of those polls, there is a common denominator of recognizing the inherent decency or the equality of every individual. And so I think forgiveness is about an admission of that and trying to find people and recognize that shared humanity.”
Greenblatt concluded that “compromise is not the issue, the issue is how do we acknowledge the inherent dignity and the humanity of our fellow human beings and start from there.”
“So let me be clear. One of the things I should say about all of this, when we talk about this process, forgiveness is not just the responsibility of the forgiver, if you will. The forgiven also needs to show up. It’s not a one-sided process. Like for a real, for true redemption, both parties need to be participating. It can’t just be a monologue. It’s truly got to be a dialogue, but ultimately I think that’s the only way that we move forward as a society, so this is what I think matters,” Greenblatt told Business Daily.