Hannah Arendt and Cancel Culture: Can We Learn to Forgive?

Hannah Arendt argued that in order to counteract the unpredictable nature of human actions, we must be able to forgive others in order to repair the injuries that may occur as a result of those actions. This presentation will thus investigate how far this Arendtian conception of forgiveness for genuine mistakes may be considered a prerequisite for the possibility of debate within digital communities online and how this might, in turn, affect our understanding of ‘cancel culture’ within these communities themselves. For Arendt, the act of forgiveness releases people from what she calls the 'predicament of irreversibility' and allows us to, in some sense, undo the past such that people are not wholly characterised by their previous mistakes. Approaching online spaces in this way might therefore be able to invite the transgressor into future debates as an important part of them, as an interlocutor rather than as an opponent. This presentation will assert that, in order to build a richer communal life online where real debate can occur, we must find a way of forgiving wrongs where we can and providing opportunities for learning and discussion instead. I will also consider what limitations might be placed on Arendt’s theory of forgiveness, specifically how and where we might draw the line in terms of what we are willing to forgive, and how well Arendt’s theory can deal with bad actors or issues like online hate speech within these digital communities.