The Madness of Cancel Culture. By Maestro Aurelio Porfiri

Everyone is now aware of the so-called "cancel culture" which claims that history must be rewritten to suit the narrative of "the present." There is no doubt that this is sheer madness, and for various reasons.

First, history, at least in its intentions, is a reconstruction of “what really was” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”), as the influential German historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886)

said.

Apart from the dreams of some historians, we know that we may never know what happened, as we have only fragments and pieces are always missing, but we can at least give a plausible outline of the historical course.

We undertake a journey into a past which may be distorted by the preconceptions of our present. Therefore, we must always be careful about the perspective we adopt in our research, or at least acknowledge this perspective.

Cancel culture eliminates this problem by reading all history according to an ideology of a “present" which they make up with "gender studies," feminism, equalitarianism, democraticism, liberalism and so on.

We Christians are apparently masters at this, as the history of salvation is always interpreted to instruct us in our present. But this is history that informs the present, whereas in the case of Cancel Culture, it is “a present” (of a certain kind) that informs history.

When we tear down statues or erase certain authors, this is not a fight against the absolutisms of the past, be they religious, political, or cultural, but the establishment of a new absolutism that is very dangerous. This is the enthronement of a multifaceted ideology that those who invented it believe to control while in fact it controls them and is deeply opposed to freedom.

It is odd that a culture that has accused the Church of “sexophobia” and has boasted of a “sexual revolution” and a “liberation” of all instincts, goes on hitting people for behaviour that often simply consists in human attempts to resolve problems in an imperfect – what else? - way.

Cancel culture, for instance, considers almost all male behaviour “harassment,” and turns man into “a bastard” who is guilty no matter what.

This is a hypocritical scheme used to feel good and moral after Jesus let out the door. It is a means by which a woke society continues to hammer itself on the head wondering why this causes pain.