But dig into the story of anyone who has been a genuine victim of modern mob justice and you will often find not an obvious argument between “woke” and “anti-woke” perspectives but rather incidents that are interpreted, described, or remembered by different people in different ways, even leaving aside whatever political or intellectual issue might be at stake. Partisans, especially on the right, now toss around the phrase cancel culture when they want to defend themselves from criticism, however legitimate. Yet despite the disputed nature of these cases, it has become both easy and useful for some people to put them into larger narratives. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything-jobs, money, friends, colleagues-after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Scarlet letters are a thing of the past.Įxcept, of course, they aren’t. And today we are not just hip and modern we live in a land governed by the rule of law we have procedures designed to prevent the meting-out of unfair punishment. We read that story with a certain self-satisfaction: Such an old-fashioned tale! Even Hawthorne sneered at the Puritans, with their “sad-colored garments and grey steeple-crowned hats,” their strict conformism, their narrow minds and their hypocrisy. The scarlet letter has “the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.” No one will socialize with her-not even those who have quietly committed similar sins, among them the father of her child, the saintly village preacher. On the outskirts of Boston, she lives in exile. As a result, she is sentenced to be mocked by a jeering crowd, undergoing “an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.” After that, she must wear a scarlet A-for adulterer-pinned to her dress for the rest of her life. As readers of this classic American text know, the story begins after Hester gives birth to a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. So begins the tale of Hester Prynne, as recounted in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however, it might be reckoned a journey of some length.” “I t was no great distance, in those days, from the prison-door to the market-place.
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