Nobody Knows Whether Michael Jackson Is Canceled

Jaafar Jackson as Michael Jackson in a scene from “Michael.” Photo: Glen Wilson/Lionsgate/Associated Press

In a 1955 essay, the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin suggested that there are at least two ways of thinking about art and the people who make it.

There’s the “French” way, and the “Russian” way. These are only labels for the sake of brevity and convenience. Plenty of Russian writers, Berlin explained, held the “French” view and many French writers held the “Russian” one. These views originated in the nineteenth century.

Most French writers and artists in the 1800s thought of themselves as akin to craftsmen. An artist had a job to do, for himself and for the public. And that job was to produce the best thing he could. If you painted, you tried to paint a beautiful picture. If you wrote, you tried to write the best book you could.

In this “French” view, an artist’s private life was nobody’s business. Think about how you treat a carpenter. When you order a table, you don’t ask whether the guy who made it cheats on his wife or has noble reasons for sawing the wood. You just want a good table. And if someone told you the table must be bad because the carpenter is a bad man, you would think they were being absurd. What does his character have to do with the quality of his work?

Many important Russian writers of the nineteenth century hated this way of thinking. What they instead believed was that a person is one thing, not a collection of separate parts. According to the “Russian” view, it’s simply false to say a man is a citizen over here, a money-maker over there, and a husband somewhere else, with each part sealed from the others. A person is one self the whole time. So saying “as an artist I feel one way, but as a voter I feel another” is, in the Russian view, a lie. A novelist tells the truth by writing honest novels. A dancer tells the truth by dancing honestly.

Berlin writes:

“If someone had proved that Balzac was a spy in the service of the French Government, or that Stendhal conducted immoral operations on the Stock Exchange, it might have upset some of their friends, but it would not, on the whole, have been regarded as derogating from their status and genius as artists. But there is scarcely any Russian writer in the nineteenth century who, if something of the sort had been discovered about himself, would have doubted for an instant whether the charge was relevant to his activity as a writer.”

An artist who strayed from this path was engaging in a “heinous” transgression.” This interpretation of art “made a very violent impact upon the European conscience.”

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I was hanging out with some fellow graduate students at the University of Cambridge in 2019 when one suggested seeing the new Liam Neeson movie, “Cold Pursuit.” Another student, referring to an unflattering confession Mr. Neeson had recently made, replied, “No, he’s racist, remember?” The first student said, “I read online that people forgive him and he’s OK now.” He pulled out his phone to verify. A few minutes later we walked to the theater.

Nobody had reconsidered Mr. Neeson’s character or weighed the evidence against him. What they’d instead done was consult the social-media consensus to find out what they were permitted to enjoy.

Last month, many moviegoers did something similar. They packed theaters for “Michael,” the new Michael Jackson biopic, which took in $217 million worldwide in its opening weekend. That’s the biggest-ever U.S. and Canada opening for a biopic.

This is strange, because Jackson faced allegations of child sexual abuse for decades. Meantime, Kevin Spacey lost his career. Woody Allen’s films got pulled from streaming services. Bill Cosby went to prison and remains culturally radioactive after his release.

Why does Jackson get a pass when the others don’t?

The standard answers don’t quite add up. It isn’t the quality of the work. Many talented artists are canceled and remain so. It isn’t the gravity of the alleged crimes either. What Jackson allegedly did was at least as serious as anything Mr. Spacey or Mr. Allen has been accused of.

A new study in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts offers a clue. Psychologist Rebecka K. Hahnel-Peeters and her colleagues studied more than 1,500 Americans and found that people were far more likely to support censoring art when the artist was accused of sexual assault than when accused of vandalism, physical assault or even murder. This held for conservatives and liberals alike. It held even when participants rated murder as more morally wrong. Yet while support for censorship soared, actual enjoyment of the art barely changed. People still reported enjoying the music, paintings and films made by artists accused of sexual assault.

Most would-be cancelers, then, aren’t making aesthetic judgments. They’re making social ones. They still privately enjoy the art even as they publicly proclaim the artist should be banned. As the authors note, “consumption patterns will in part depend on whether one can, for example, listen to R. Kelly in the privacy of one’s room.”

The findings suggest that two different mental systems are running in parallel. The taste system is private and stable. A beautiful song remains beautiful. A brilliant novel remains brilliant. Human perception doesn’t change just because we learn something repugnant about the creator.

In contrast, the moral signaling system is public and reputational. The authors suggest that people may be “more censorious when censure (or lack thereof) can serve greater signaling functions.” This system tracks not the facts of a transgression but the social cost of being seen on the wrong side of it. People separate private pleasure from public norms. They calibrate their declared moral views, just as my grad school friends did before buying their tickets to “Cold Pursuit.”

Once you see the two systems, the Jackson puzzle resolves. The taste system is doing what it always does. It registered Jackson’s music as extraordinary in 1983 and today. The signaling system, though, requires social consensus that an artist is guilty. Jackson, for whatever reason, has never produced that unified verdict. His estate fights every accusation in court. His most devoted fans dispute the allegations against him. The case remains legibly contested in a way the others have not.

The modern cultural script for how to respond publicly to accusations against artists was largely written between 2017, when the Weinstein revelations launched #MeToo, and 2020, the year of the “racial reckoning.” Jackson died in 2009. His accusations have been presorted into an older category of celebrity scandal, which permitted ambiguity, before the newer category of cancellation, which doesn’t, came into being.

The implication is perhaps uncomfortable. Cancellation activates not when an artist’s behavior is bad but when the conditions for public sanctioning are favorable. People tell themselves they’re weighing the evidence and rendering judgment. In many cases, though, they’re doing something simpler: They’re reading the room.

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A version of this article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal under the title “Cancel Culture Can ‘Beat It.’”