Imagining Justice and Cancel Culture Through Iris Murdoch’s “enchanter” Characters

The obvious connections between the legal system and the “arts of language” date as far back to the beginnings of law in European history. ⁽²⁾ The modern Law and Literature movement, however, is widely thought to have had its origins in the 1973 publication of The Legal Imagination by James Boyd White, “who took seriously the possibility that legal rhetoric had something to learn from the language of fiction.” ⁽³⁾ In a 1986 law review article examining the interdisciplinarity of the then-bourgeoning movement, Jane B. Baron reflects on the role of literature as contributing to the understanding of law:

Literature, it is said, sheds light on law’s gaps, rhetoric, and moral stance. It elucidates law’s limits and highlight law’s exclusions. Interpretive methods conventionally applied to fictional texts can be applied productively to legal texts, and narrative techniques that draw readers into novels and plays can be employed in the service of legal arguments. ⁽⁴⁾

Almost a decade later, in her article Outside the Tradition: Literature as Legal Scholarship, Nancy L. Cook wrote to:

encourage legal theorists and practitioners . . . whose struggles within the profession have drawn them, both forward and back, into other worlds of experience, to listen to the voices coming from all of those worlds, to experiment with speaking the languages that they hear, and to share with others the evolving products of their experimentation. ⁽⁵⁾

In that same period, Law and Philosophy Professor Martha Nussbaum—known for her insightful and relevant interdisciplinary works—maintained that the novel constructs “potentially universalizable concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through the imagination.” ⁽⁶⁾

Duly encouraged by these integrative approaches to legal justice, I will attempt in this piece—as a lawyer and legal scholar—to apply what I have learned from my recent formal studies in literature ⁽⁷⁾ to the concrete, contemporary problem of ‘cancel culture,’ an extra-juridical form of social justice aimed at correcting the moral wrongs of its perpetrators. In the traditional spirit of the increasingly unpopular Law and Literature movement, ⁽⁸⁾ I will show how a close examination of the works of twentieth-century British author, Dame Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) in conjunction with various core legal tenets may shed light on the demoralizing practice of cancel culture. Exploring how Murdoch’s works of both fiction and metaphysics reveal her unique prescription for achieving moral good after the unprecedented human evils that had been committed across the globe in the twentieth century, I posit that her original theories can also be utilized today as tools to expose both the practical and moral inefficacies of cancel culture to achieve its supposed purpose.

To assist in this endeavor, I will draw heavily from Lyndsey Stonebridge’s book The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg, which provides a comprehensive examination of how Murdoch and other influential female authors attempted to find a way of writing that was “capable of rescuing political and juridical life from the abyss into which it had been thrown” after the war, ⁽⁹⁾ from within what has been termed “the morbid age” or “nighttime of civilization.” ⁽¹⁰⁾ According to Stonebridge, having witnessed the Nazi trials’ attempts at administering a form of justice appropriate for the unprecedented brand of crimes committed against humanity, Murdoch and other authors of her time such as Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, and Muriel Spark understood that “[i]t was not simply a return to the law that was so desperately needed in the wake of Nazi lawlessness, but a way of imagining how what had happened profoundly changed the ways in which it was possible to think about justice and judgment in the first place.” ⁽¹¹⁾

Thus, my aim in this article is to demonstrate that Murdoch imagined a modern theory of justice by illuminating how she uniquely perceived what Stonebridge calls a “new kind of evil” ⁽¹²⁾ on the rise after the world wars. This “banal” type of evil, rather than presenting itself in the colossal figure of a tyrannic world ruler having supernal demonic traits, is subtly existent in the shallow, insidious personality traits in everyday humans, as Hannah Arendt famously observed in Adolf Eichmann’s mannerisms as he stood trial. ⁽¹³⁾ Ironically, while cancel culture purports to be today’s social cure-all for the perceived immoral acts of its perpetrators, I will reveal that, in actuality, the banality of evil is evident in a widespread proclivity to support and participate in this insidious movement.

To demonstrate in this article Murdoch’s imaginings of a modern theory of justice for evil acts and how this specifically relates to cancel culture, I will proceed in several movements. In Section I, I will first briefly summarize cancel culture and explain why the legal community in particular should closely scrutinize its practices, which are dangerous to the core principles of First and Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence. In Section II, I will provide a fulsome background of the post-war rise of Stonebridge’s concept of ‘modern evil’ and discuss how literary and other authors of the time generally responded to this novel brand of immorality.

The next two sections will demonstrate how Murdoch herself contributed to that modern conversation regarding evil. More specifically, in Section III, I will examine how the evil figures in several of her novels known as her ‘enchanter’ characters epitomize the banality of evil that contributed to the rise of the highly destructive twentieth-century political regimes. In Section IV, I will turn to Murdoch’s non-fiction writings on metaphysics, primarily interpreting her 1961 essay, Against Dryness, a robust critique of the inability of modern authors to appreciate and account for the moral conundrums that individuals experience in a post-war world that has lost its transcendent and religious values which had guided humanity towards the ‘good’ in previous centuries. Due to this conundrum of ‘dryness’, we have been left in the twentieth century with a dangerous, egoistic fantasy that humans are “totally free and responsible, knowing everything we need to know for the important purposes of life,” ⁽¹⁴⁾ which is a ‘dry’ view according to Murdoch because it fails to consider that humans are complex, contingent, and morally muddled.

Section V will consist of an original analysis and solution to Murdoch’s problem of dryness, or our modern inability to look at and attend to the proclivities of evil that exist in everyday man, which I argue has grown even deeper and more palpable within today’s societal framework. By uncovering the manifest traits of modern banal evil exemplified by Murdoch’s individual characters and their complex relationships to one another, primarily in her novels The Flight from the Enchanter (1956) (“Flight”) and A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970) (“Defeat”), I will argue that Murdoch’s sense of dryness portended dangerous mainstream ideological movements such as cancel culture, which can only be tempered by embracing and understanding the full particulars of individual experience. This intervention will be achieved by studying and scrutinizing cancel culture from Murdoch’s lens of dryness, which illustrates how egoistic inattention and fantasy has become our modern brand of post-war evil, and how to combat it by paying attention to and loving even the most fallen of our fellow individuals.

In Section VII, I will propose that the solutions to dryness intimated by Murdoch’s philosophy are twofold: on the moral side, we must first recognize the egoism that invariably clouds our ability to see others as complex human beings and instead imagine a goodness that emerges from approaching others (and their particular circumstances) with a just and loving gaze. On the literary side, I will explain my own interpretation of her moral tenets by asserting that dryness is also the unfortunate result of our postmodern academic proclivity to shun the extremely difficult and often “messy” responsibility of truth-seeking that is achieved only by attending to and unpacking the full background of the individual.

I conclude the article by alleging that Murdoch would rather support a metaphysical-literary discourse that is predicated not upon the depersonalization and reduction of the individual and/or the text in favor of group-identity theorizing that today prevails in both cancel culture and literary critique, but rather upon the liberal values of viewpoint diversity and robust yet honest debate in the search for truth and the good and within the ability to understand, forgive, and even love those who are morally flawed within a Murdochian model of modern justice.

Many people perceive the cancel culture movement ⁽¹⁵⁾ as an innocuous (and even beneficial) extra-judicial mechanism of accountability that is used to judge the misdeeds of an allegedly morally errant person. Contrarily, I submit that the disproportionate emphasis it places on the acts of the cancelled individual obscures an equally important moral problem that directly betrays several of Murdoch’s metaphysical premises: the human proclivity to summarily reject and publicly castigate others for their past moral indiscretions.

Engaging in a systematic unpacking of Murdoch’s literary and metaphysical writings as will be provided in this article will help to demonstrate that cancel culture acutely fails to acknowledge and attend properly to the uniquely obscure issue of postmodern evil. Such a conundrum inevitably leads to a skewed sense of both human volition and justice because it displaces the source of malice and immorality solely upon the bad deeds of the cancelled, yet abjectly fails to acknowledge its own moral problem: the inattentive and often self-righteous act of cancelling in its own right.

Since cancel culture unrealistically views humanity as basically good—as judged purely by its own, often illogically, ideologically, and politically motivated, standards—it is unable to imagine, tolerate, or understand any moral transgression within individual behavior. Nor can it account for or remedy the reality of the existence of evil on any level, unlike Christianity or other formal religious systems that preceded it. Like Murdoch’s famous criticism of the modern novel of the twentieth century in which she stated that the inner lives of its characters are identifiable only by “dryly” applying public concepts to their morals, “which can only be constructed on the basis of overt behaviour,” ⁽¹⁶⁾ cancel culture creates a non-fictional, real-life social climate that is outward-looking because it manifestly rejects the slow, difficult, and messy process of inner moral growth, as it concomitantly dispenses with the reality of human imperfection and redemption.

Although cancel culture is a cultural/societal—rather than legal—form of justice, it directly implicates a bedrock principle of the U.S. Constitution: the First Amendment guarantee of free speech. From the time that human beings have cultivated the skill of language, they have debated and challenged each other’s commonly held values and belief systems. As a democratic principle, the notion of ‘free speech’—or the right to express one’s opinions candidly without government restraint—dates back to the end of the fifth-century B.C. when it first appeared in Greek literature. ⁽¹⁷⁾ The Greek term for free speech, parrhesia, means “all saying” and encompasses the idea of speaking freely or frankly, which “implied openness, honesty, and the courage to tell the truth, even when it meant causing offense.” ⁽¹⁸⁾

Indeed, both throughout her history and today “America has uniquely expansive free speech protections, even for the most intolerant, offensive speech.” ⁽¹⁹⁾ The traditional legal rationale for the protection of free speech in a democratic society has been advanced by the “marketplace of ideas” model first espoused by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, which maintains that “speech must be protected because it brings diversity, competition and efficiency to the collective search for truth.” ⁽²⁰⁾

Notwithstanding the fact that the concept of free speech has been a bedrock principle in America since it was established in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution in 1791—along with freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the right to assemble—it is currently undergoing an unprecedented attack by the rampant social media phenomenon of cancel culture. A form of online boycotting, cancel culture originated rather innocuously on Black Twitter in 2014 “as a way to show disapproval for a person’s actions as a joke or lighthearted criticism.” ⁽²¹⁾

Certainly, the practice of boycotting public figures, corporate brands, or media outlets that advocate morally objectionable practices or opinions contrary to one’s own has long been a tool to not only express widespread discontent but also to hold people responsible for their actions and policies, thus serving to help effectuate social change. Today’s cancel culture, however, proceeds with an altogether different collective spirit and intent, as it has detrimentally intervened in the lives and livelihoods of regular, non-public individuals who have had their college applications rejected due to social media tweets they made in high school and their jobs lost after making legitimate and often only “mildly offensive” comments. ⁽²²⁾ In the wake of COVID-19, cancel culture has escalated from a relatively innocent practice of openly disagreeing with a person’s actions or their cultural or political beliefs into a mal-intended form of scathing public punishment “that can turn a person or a brand into a pariah in a matter of tweets.” ⁽²³⁾

Indeed, “the idea that a person can be ‘cancelled’—in other words, culturally blocked from having a prominent public platform or career—has become a polarizing topic of debate.” ⁽²⁴⁾ While some believe that cancel culture is a method for holding people accountable for their actions and achieving social justice, others contend that it has become “a senseless form of social media mob rule” that encourages lawlessness, mutes voices, and violates the core principles of free speech. ⁽²⁵⁾ Within the spirit and original intent of the First Amendment, Salman Rushdie candidly shared in a recent interview that he is not a fan of cancel culture, in part because “there is no right not to be offended” and more importantly, “you don’t change unpleasant beliefs by suppressing them”; according to him, it is better to know where those unpleasant truths lie and where the enemy is, rather than having him “skulking in the shadows.” ⁽²⁶⁾ Philosopher and historian Christophe Van Eecke has observed a structural similarity between today’s cancellations and the public executions and acts of torture that occurred in pre-industrial Europe, claiming that “their aims are disturbingly similar means of enforcing political or cultural conformity.” ⁽²⁷⁾

Despite its vehement critics, however, the cancel culture movement is not without an army of staunch supporters who view it “as a way of defending the weak against higher powers” and providing the marginalized with “an amplified voice and a way to challenge damaging narratives promoted by the status quo.” ⁽²⁸⁾ In a world in which minority voices are routinely stifled and the underprivileged are denied access to political platforms on which to effectuate change, cancel culture is viewed as a mechanism to show that they are no longer participating in the social status quo. ⁽²⁹⁾

Moreover, according to the proponents of cancel culture, the right to free speech does not provide one with an entitlement to engage in hate speech. ⁽³⁰⁾ Viewed in this context, cancel culture serves as an important social tool for those who have been perpetually victimized by bigotry, hatred, and racism, and who have no other political or social platform on which to counter such personal attacks. In other words, “‘Cancel culture’ forces people to recognize that their words and actions have consequences. There are no laws against you openly speaking your mind, but there are also no laws protecting you from being held personally accountable for the views you express.” ⁽³¹⁾

Many have also observed that relatively often the person who was supposed to be cancelled ironically winds up enjoying more media airtime and success from unduly and often irrationally sympathetic fans and observers. ⁽³²⁾ On the other hand, as Aja Romano observes, “[e]ven though cancel culture seems to generate few lasting consequences for celebrities and their careers, some people view it as part of a broader trend they find deeply disturbing: an inability to forgive and move on.” ⁽³³⁾ Without doubt, cancel culture as holistically viewed from the perspectives of both the cancellers and the cancelled is, in itself, a complex and muddled form of discourse, the serious study of which should concomitantly consider and scrutinize both sides of the problem.

When analyzing the phenomenon of cancel culture from a Murdochian perspective as will be further accomplished in this article, it becomes apparent that neither the cancellers nor the cancelled are paying sufficient attention to the backgrounds and contingencies of their fellow human beings. To the extent that a cancelled person has truly engaged in race, sex, culture, religious, or gender discrimination, those inattentive acts serve to reduce the targets of their discrimination to harmful stereotypes. By the same token, when cancellers irresponsibly use the movement as an ideological tool not only to chill free speech and eviscerate valid viewpoints that run counter to the current moral majority, they also fail to conceive of their targets as fallible, imperfect persons who make mistakes along their arduous paths of cognitive and behavioral development. Moreover, the shutdown in communication that ensues from the acts of cancellers serves to weaken the democratic foundations upon which our free republic stands.

Either way, when taken to the extreme by either the canceller and/or the cancelled in this reductive and depthless manner, cancel culture negatively contributes to a society that: (1) is far too optimistic regarding the human propensity to consciously or subconsciously engage in thoughtless or even evil behavior; and (2) given the inevitable human propensity for evil, fails to provide any imaginative space for acceptance, love, or goodness to intervene and counter it. In this sense, I contend that cancel culture represents a contemporary, technologically enabled form of the postmodern brand of inattentive evil that concerned Murdoch in the twentieth century.

Even more profound, some experts in psychology contend that applying cancel culture to complicated human personality and behavioral traits is a “toxic way of simplifying complex issues and encouraging snap judgments that can easily result in overly harsh consequences in less offensive situations.” ⁽³⁴⁾ It can even be viewed as a result of psychological “splitting,” which occurs primarily when young children separate the world into either good or bad and are not able to integrate or tolerate the two sides of someone or something. ⁽³⁵⁾ Whereas grownups should ideally be “able to hold in our hearts the idea that someone can have different views from us and still be a good or decent person,” cancel culture will not allow for such nuances. ⁽³⁶⁾

From a Christian perspective, cancel culture is particularly inimical because it fosters an unrealistic society in which humans should be flawless and atonement for sin is impossible—and worse, undesired. By the standards of cancel culture, “who you were in the past is who you are in the future,” creating a hopeless society where there is no grace or forgiveness and no room for redemption or change. ⁽³⁷⁾

Most importantly with respect to this article, from a juridical perspective, cancel culture does not depend upon fact checking and truth-seeking, neither does it afford the cancelled individual an opportunity to be heard or a chance to publicly defend the assertions made against him/her. In her recent book, Citadels of Pride: Sexual Assault, Accountability, and Reconciliation, Martha Nussbaum describes a nuanced, forward-looking type of justice that she envisions with respect to the #MeToo movement, and which can equally be applied to cancel culture:

Punishment is useful, and often necessary, to deter the offender, to deter others from offending, to express society’s most important norms, and to educate society as a whole about the importance of good behavior. But punishment accomplishes its legitimate goals only if it is law-based, fair and nuanced, calibrated to the severity of the offense. Our #MeToo moment has seen its share of cases in which punishment has not been nuanced or calibrated, in which mass shaming takes the place of procedural justice. It has also spawned narratives in which reconciliation is dismissed in favor of retributive triumphalism. ⁽³⁸⁾

Like Nussbaum’s observation of #MeToo, in which some women “prefer an apocalyptic vision in which the former oppressor is brought low,” ⁽³⁹⁾ some cancellers are similarly bent upon this type of vision that Nussbaum believes merely “parades as justice.” ⁽⁴⁰⁾ Similar to Murdoch, however, Nussbaum envisions for #MeToo an altogether different brand of justice “that seeks reconciliation and a shared future,” ⁽⁴¹⁾ and this is the justice that should also be applied to both sides of the cancel culture spectrum.

Moreover, while it may be true that in some cases the accusations made against the cancelled person are true and warranted, “increasingly often, the accusation is highly interpretive and its reasoning tortuous.” ⁽⁴²⁾ And although it is a difficult enough process to understand a person whom we know well, it is practically impossible to realize and appreciate the actions of strangers based on limited and subjective information we receive via the ethernet that is often not vetted for accuracy. Contrarily, “Murdoch’s ideal is a person who refuses to judge others, and who realises it is never possible to know other persons well enough to judge them.” ⁽⁴³⁾ This rings particularly true on the social media platforms where today cancel culture judges harshly, but safely from afar.

As further discussed in the next section, our contemporary penchant to flatten out, reduce, and dismiss the fulsome and complex life of another individual—whether that is accomplished by engaging in a cancellable act or actively cancelling someone based on such an act—is a unique brand of modern behavior bred out of our post-war culture which Iris Murdoch widely criticized for a variety of reasons related to her lifelong metaphysical journey to find good in what she perceived as a muddled world.

In her 2002 book, Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman writes that the problem of evil is both “the guiding force of modern thought” ⁽⁴⁴⁾ and “the root from which modern philosophy springs.” ⁽⁴⁵⁾ Ironically, she also observes that after the world witnessed the unspeakable and unprecedented acts of human evil that shaped the events of World War II, Hannah Arendt remained for quite some time the only major philosopher who reflected conceptually upon the subject—as opposed to others who offered mere historical and eyewitness reports of the atrocities committed across the globe—and that this was likely due to “the magnitude of the task” of attempting to unravel and understand the atrocities that occurred in the Nazi and Gulag death camps and, more urgently, how and why they manifested on such a global scale. ⁽⁴⁶⁾

Stonebridge observes Arendt’s tenacity in recounting the “real story of the Nazi-constructed Hell,” as she professed that “[h]uman history has known no story more difficult to tell.” ⁽⁴⁷⁾ Stonebridge, however, provides a compelling picture of how Murdoch and other twentieth-century British novelists—among them, Muriel Spark and Rebecca West—also attempted to reimagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg. Murdoch, she claims, spent her literary life attempting to discover what kind of love is possible in our post-war world in which there exist “moral monsters” and “man is fox to man.” ⁽⁴⁸⁾

Roula Ikonomakis similarly explains this point in time as “the dawn of a new, disquieting age where man, irrevocably disconnected from God and made mute by the horrors he himself begot has to redefine his world and his position in it by means he has not yet recognized.” ⁽⁴⁹⁾ Nonetheless, she (like Neiman) believes this task remains important because even though World War II is over, in many ways it refuses to end since its after-effects are still felt today and it continues to provide psychological explanations for the evil ways in which we remain prone to behave towards one another. ⁽⁵⁰⁾

Observing that “[o]ur understanding of evil has changed sharply over time,” ⁽⁵¹⁾ Neiman states that her goal in writing the book is “to use different responses to the problem of evil as a means of understanding who we have become in the three centuries that separate us from the early Enlightenment” ⁽⁵²⁾ and “to explore what changes in our understanding of the problem of evil reveal about changes in our understanding of ourselves, and of our place in the world.” ⁽⁵³⁾ To achieve this goal, Neiman provides a provocatively original narrative describing how numerous authors throughout modern history have reflected upon the problem of evil through their works, claiming that “[s]eeing how earlier thinkers developed their views in response to real, historical problems makes it easier to see how contemporary thinkers might do the same.” ⁽⁵⁴⁾

Neiman acknowledges that the map of modern evil she sketches in her book is not complete; therefore, she encourages her readers to expand upon the framework she offers with respect to the numerous “essential” authors she was unable to consider, but who may nonetheless vastly contribute to advancing the conversation. ⁽⁵⁵⁾ In the following sections of this piece, I will answer Neiman’s call by providing an analysis of Murdoch’s unique picture of modern evil as shaped by her own experiences living in post-World War II England, and as imagined in her literary and metaphysical works of authorship. By pondering the subtle and often profoundly Gothic-themed images of human wickedness that Murdoch develops in her novels, I will offer an analysis of how she perceived the age-old problem of evil as it inevitably continued to persist in the modern and postmodern human consciousness, despite all of our Western attempts at civilization. ⁽⁵⁶⁾

During the twentieth century Murdoch experienced the burgeoning advances in innovative technology and communication, as well as the pivotal developments in philosophy, psychology, and spiritualism that arose after the decline of Christianity and the secularization of British society that had begun in the late eighteenth century with industrialism and the growth of large cities. ⁽⁵⁷⁾ The then-nascent study of psychology by pioneers, Abraham Maslow, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung (who also incorporated alchemy and mysticism in his work) also found influence by theosophists and spiritualists such as Aleister Crowley, Annie Besant, and Dion Fortune, each of whom proscribed an amalgam of moral philosophies never before witnessed by mass audiences in the past.

These and other figures of the twentieth century had inevitable influence on Murdoch’s development of her own philosophy, as she directly or indirectly touched on many of their ideas in her works. Thus, reading Murdoch’s novels from within the context of these unorthodox perspectives offers an uncommon backdrop that takes into consideration some of the more obscure, fascinating and—often terrifying—aspects of our modern human condition and universal quest for wisdom, as well as an all-encompassing picture of how and why evil exists, even within the consciousness of ordinary individuals who strive for goodness, yet often fail.

One of Murdoch’s attributes as a writer is that she was on a deliberate and continuous journey towards insight and wisdom of the self and others in relation to the intricate universe of origin and being, which is often messy and always teetering upon the narrow plane that lies between the realms of good and evil. Murdoch, who openly did not believe in God, utilized in her novels an “apocalyptic vocabulary” that is “the essence of Gothic, which has classically equivocated about the natural/supernatural status of its data.” ⁽⁵⁸⁾

Conradi observes that, “for [Murdoch] the supernatural has been internalised; we carry it, and the demonic around inside us, in the form of those secret imaginative lives in which we are always immersed, and which colour all we perceive.” ⁽⁵⁹⁾ In this manner, Murdoch often presents unconventional characters, situations, settings, and themes in her novels that defy the rigid and dogmatic depictions of good and evil that had been characteristic of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century novel. In her uniquely instructive style, Murdoch—along with other British authors of her age—offered transmundane and often mystically anagogical observations of the human condition that had not been previously portrayed in literature.

In The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern, Alex Owen explores the diverse role of fin-de-siècle or new occultism in British culture and writings that began in the late nineteenth century, which heralded an “acceptance of the idea that reality as we are taught to understand it accounts for only a fraction of the ultimate reality which lies just beyond our immediate senses.” ⁽⁶⁰⁾ According to Owen, this modern occultism became popular because it “offered a spiritual alternative to religious orthodoxy, but one that ostensibly operated without the requirement of faith.” ⁽⁶¹⁾

It is not surprising that Murdoch would be attracted to the new movement since her novels “serve as mirrors of what it means to live in a modern world in which individuals look for meaning in a world without a personal God.” ⁽⁶²⁾ Even though Charles Taylor famously stated that “[e]veryone can agree that one of the big differences between us and our ancestors of 500 years ago is that they lived in an ‘enchanted’ world and we do not,” ⁽⁶³⁾ Owen submits that modernists routinely utilized heterodox themes such as metaphysical quests and spiritual encounters in order to explore an innovative sense of self. ⁽⁶⁴⁾

Richard C. Kane further describes this “intriguing” phenomenon that emerged in several post-war British authors as an “odd combination of the moral and the macabre” in which authors like Murdoch who utilize their fiction to search for the good “within the realms of the grotesque” make significant moral statements by experimenting with a variety of demonic elements. ⁽⁶⁵⁾ Describing this brand of writing as “the new morality” or “a rediscovered morality,” Kane maintains that the “didactic intent of these more recent writers is to rout the demons—even though they use methods that themselves often seem diabolic.” ⁽⁶⁶⁾ Within this “gathering of devils” in modern British fiction, Kane observes how demonic imagery is often used by Murdoch and others to emphasize the dark powers of their exotic, charismatic figures, obviously believing that only such powerful compelling forces could “blast society out of its moral lethargy” ⁽⁶⁷⁾ that Murdoch laments in Against Dryness.

According to Ikonomakis, Murdoch thought that the goal of the novel is “to speak human, the true universal language of love and hatred, pain and joy, suffering and pleasure, misery and happiness, the language of diversified experience.” ⁽⁶⁸⁾ It “has to make us see the human scene in both its dark and light moments, because that is how it is in real life.” ⁽⁶⁹⁾ While Murdoch experiments with a myriad of profligate personalities on the fringes of the demonic, no other characters exemplify her ability to shock us back to our sense of evil than Mischa Fox and Julius King, the primary “enchanter” figures in Flight and Defeat, respectively.

The character of the enchanter is the literary mechanism by which Murdoch often presents her Gothic picture of modern evil as being alive and well in Great Britain in the wake of the two world wars. Within various settings, these strange and elusive figures surreptitiously float through the streets of London and the remote fringes of the British countryside and intentionally wreak havoc on the other characters in her novels, mainly from a psychological perspective. Within this theme in which the effects of diabolism are explored, there are characters who enchant and those who are enchanted “in an intricate network of flight and pursuit” from and to one another. ⁽⁷⁰⁾

The enchanter characters “are mysterious, magical figures who represent the forces at work in an ambiguous universe, while the enchanted suffer from ignorance and impotence and so regard these powerful beings with fascination and loathing.” ⁽⁷¹⁾ With no higher being or metaphysical philosophy to guide them, “dominant types will mold more formless beings into servile dependency, so too will those in need of a controlling power often enslave themselves to an enchanter figure.” ⁽⁷²⁾

Both Flight and Defeat are novels that explore the deadly dance that ensues among the enchanter and their enchanted. They are “open” novels in the sense that they contain a myriad of characters who interrelate through intertwined plots even though they are not integrated into a single system. ⁽⁷³⁾ However, they both are also centered around a primary enchanter figure who utilizes his power, secrecy, and evil brand of magic negatively to influence influence all the other characters, often to the point where the enchanted themselves become secondary enchanter figures to even weaker personalities than their own. Both stories also begin remarkably similarly in that the reader is introduced to the primary enchanter by way of the other characters’ anticipating and gossiping about his imminent return to London after an extended time overseas. The following sub-sections provide a brief introduction to the plots and characters in Murdoch’s major enchanter novels, Flight and Defeat, both of which will be more fully explained in Section IV in conjunction with a discussion of Murdoch’s metaphysics.

Murdoch approaches the study of metaphysics by a reading of its history and an insistence on individual experience with an understanding that “[m]erely logical reasoning cannot generate experiential truths; rather, experiential evidence allows for ways of reading experience as exhibiting truth, goodness, and unity.” ⁽⁸⁵⁾ Browning describes Murdoch’s brand of metaphysics as providing “an overall way of understanding experience, linking religion, art, personal development, morality and politics to one another and to an overall unity of experience that allows for difference and contingency.” ⁽⁸⁶⁾ He describes Murdoch’s novels as being

designed to comprehend experience. Characters are shown as seeking the good and straying from it in ways that show how the pilgrimage to goodness is a particular and arduous road. The novels disclose the singularities of roads to goodness and particular personifications of evil. ⁽⁸⁷⁾

By recognizing what Murdoch often refers to as the “messy” or “muddled” backgrounds that individuals bring to the table when confronted with making good (moral) or bad and sometimes evil (immoral) decisions when faced with situations that intertwine and affect themselves and others, she displays an appreciation of the myriad of complexities that are invariably embedded within the human psyche as a result of each person’s unique life experiences, which make up their whole person.

Indeed, in her 1961 essay, Against Dryness, which is a multi-level critique of the twentieth-century novel, Murdoch presents the key feature she believed distinguished the dilemma of the post-war, twentieth-century writer living in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age that has lost its religious backdrop: a “dramatic view of the individual as a solitary will” ⁽⁸⁸⁾ who is “seen as capable of self-knowledge by methods agreeable to science and common sense.” ⁽⁸⁹⁾ From the confines of our post-war age of tension, chaos, and confusion, “a naturally human will to power, order and control emerges, that overlooks the indispensable details of the world and the complexities of human experience.” ⁽⁹⁰⁾

This occurs because of our failure to “see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him” ⁽⁹¹⁾ which is due to the modern loss of the strength of society, the profound belief in God, and “a faith in the absolute significance and unity in the moral world.” ⁽⁹²⁾ Whereas our nineteenth and eighteenth-century ancestors lived during a time in which they experienced both confidence and consolation in the solidity of society, religion and reason, in the twentieth century “God, Reason, Society, Improvement and the Soul are being quietly wheeled off.” ⁽⁹³⁾

In this realm, twentieth-century man “finds his religious and metaphysical background so impoverished that he is in some danger of being left with nothing of inherent value except will-power itself.” ⁽⁹⁴⁾ Murdoch, however, is highly suspicious of the ability of this supposedly self-adjusting, independently brave literary hero to continue to impart a moral philosophy “which has been unobtrusively supported by religious belief and which is now with frightful rapidity disappearing.” ⁽⁹⁵⁾

Within this backdrop, Murdoch provides a critique of the modern existentialist novel, which “shows us freedom and virtue as the assertion of will.” ⁽⁹⁶⁾ It is “cheerfully Godless” and “obsessed with the powerful self-assertive figure of [the] hero” who exudes “Luciferian pride in the individual and in the achievements of science.” ⁽⁹⁷⁾ On account of the new values of science that modern man takes for granted, the twentieth-century novel has become either crystalline or journalistic; that is, it is either a small quasi-allegorical object portraying the human condition and not containing ‘characters’ in the nineteenth-century sense, or else it is a large shapeless quasi-object, the degenerate descendant of the nineteenth-century novel, telling, with pale conventional characters, some straightforward story enlivened with empirical facts. To continue to view man in this dry manner, Murdoch maintains will engender “a dangerous lack of curiosity about the real world, a failure to appreciate the difficulties of knowing it.” ⁽⁹⁸⁾

From this context, Murdoch laments in Against Dryness the continued insistence on a “simple-minded faith in science, together with the assumption that we are all rational and totally free.” ⁽⁹⁹⁾ In a world in which nothing transcends man, the concept of a “facile idea of sincerity” has replaced that of the “hard idea of truth,” leading us to suffer “a general loss of concepts” and “the loss of a moral and political vocabulary.” ⁽¹⁰⁰⁾ Murdoch blames this dilemma, in large part, on what she considered “[o]ur inability to imagine evil” ⁽¹⁰¹⁾ within the unjustifiably optimistic image in which modern man held of itself, especially in the wake of World War II and its horrors.

Indeed, Murdoch complained that one of the wrongs of our modern literature is that it morally envisions man as the “monarch of all he surveys” and thus “totally responsible for his actions” because he is imbued with a type of “utilitarian optimism” by virtue of which he is considered a free, rational actor and viewed as “eminently educable.” ⁽¹⁰²⁾ To disincentivize this far too sanguine picture of human nature, she utilized enchanter characters to employ “hellish imagery to jolt readers into an awareness of real evil” ⁽¹⁰³⁾ with the purpose of understanding how good and evil operate in a Godless world. ⁽¹⁰⁴⁾

Concomitantly, Murdoch believed that one of the consequences of post-Enlightenment philosophical thinking—or the phenomenon in which humans are viewed as free, solitary, and “surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world” ⁽¹⁰⁵⁾—is that after surviving two world wars, we now have such an optimistic picture of ourselves that we are unable to process the egoism that still persists within us, which she believed must be acknowledged, examined, and lessened in order to find true goodness. Murdoch blamed modern literature, in part, for this overly confident attitude, lamenting the irony that it is so concerned with violence, yet it contains few convincing ‘pictures of evil’ ⁽¹⁰⁶⁾ that would better assist us in perceiving and practically achieving the good.

In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch states that “we have to accept a darker, less fully conscious, less steadily rational image of the dynamics of the human personality.” ⁽¹⁰⁷⁾ In the worlds represented in Murdoch’s fiction, her troubled, failed, and often morally unscrupulous—if not, evil—characters provide the opportunity to present her readers with often uncomfortable portraits of the all-to-human, potentially evil traits that reside not only within the other, but also within ourselves. It is only by an uncompromising, often drastic, recognition of the depths of our own selfishness that true goodness may be discernable and achievable.

For example, in Defeat, one of Julius’s deviously intricate plots is to concoct a fantastical love affair between Rupert and his sister-in-law Morgan. By forging love letters to and from the unaware and naive duo, Julius manages to have each believe that the other has fallen hopelessly in love with them. Whereas Rupert is portrayed as a successful, content, and happily married man in the beginning of the novel, his character is easily manipulated as he egoistically engages with Morgan within his fantasy world concocted by Julius, fooling himself into believing that by reciprocating her love for him he is helping her:

It’s just a matter of steadying her through, he thought. In extremities human beings need love and nothing else will do. Morgan was hungry for a steady unviolent unpossessive love which neither Tallis nor Julius could give her. I cannot refuse this challenge, Rupert told himself. All my life as a thinking man has led me to believe in the power of love. Love really does solve problems. To adopt a mean safe casual solution here would be unjust to both myself and Morgan. She has called me wise; let me attempt to be so. ⁽¹⁰⁸⁾

Through this half-funny, half-tragic monologue in which Rupert pompously convinces himself to forge into new romantic grounds with Morgan (and deceive Hilda in the meanwhile), Murdoch exemplifies the central problem that defines dryness: it pretends that we are completely rational and self-transparent and that we should innately know to engage or not engage in certain acts. This fantasy inevitably leads us to be over-optimistic of our acts and intentions and those of others, as well as a failure of imagination regarding their likely outcomes.

As Conradi has astutely observed, Julius’s brand of evil “wisdom” is exactly what Rupert’s incomplete morality, which cannot correctly conceive of the nature of evil, “needs to accommodate if it is not to be vulnerable through its silly optimism.” ⁽¹⁰⁹⁾ Such optimism, along with Rupert’s jejune inability to calculate Julius’s mischief into the equation of his and Morgan’s sudden love affair, serve to mark his tragic demise at the end of Defeat. As Gillian Dooley claims, “Rupert thinks that he can keep his life orderly, bestow love where it is needed, and live the good life openly and honestly, but disorder – or reality – overcomes him.” ⁽¹¹⁰⁾

Morgan also suffers for her naivety and inattention to her dilemma with Rupert, as Murdoch informs her readers that Morgan “had a capacity for dealing with one thing at a time, and not worrying about, almost not seeing, other features of the situation.” ⁽¹¹¹⁾ Amos Elon similarly unpacks Hannah Arendt’s description of evil that corrupted the moral law under the Nazis: “it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth” and it “comes from a failure to think.” ⁽¹¹²⁾ In a similar fashion, Murdoch brilliantly employs her wicked enchanter characters who ironically evoke and then manipulate the less than overt—yet nonetheless evil—tendencies that exist just below the surface of the other characters.

Indeed, there are more ways than one to to portray evil for Murdoch and so, unlike the psychologically powerful and bombastic enchanter figures, Murdoch’s everyday characters do not always engage in neatly conscious and intentional acts of evil, but rather—like Rupert and Morgan—they exemplify a subconscious solipsistic inattentiveness and thoughtlessness which, like Arendt, she equated to evil, or at least the precursor to evil.

For example, in Murdoch’s 1973 novel The Black Prince, the narrator and antagonist Bradley Pearson claims, when uncharacteristically reflecting on his “blameworthy” past deeds, “I daresay human wickedness is sometimes the product of a sort of conscious leeringly evil intent . . . But more usually it is the product of a semi-deliberate inattention, a sort of swooning relationship to time.” ⁽¹¹³⁾ Dean Cocking and Jeroen Van den Hoven describe Murdoch’s usage of the term “swooning relationship to time” here as an accrual of evil in which incremental harms accumulate over time, “in the everyday activities of life, which in itself, in moderation, is not so bad, but which may lead to loss of sight where one is headed, and of responsibility for one’s conduct and oneself over time.” ⁽¹¹⁴⁾

This notion of covert or cumulative wickedness is also implicated in Arendt’s famous term, “the banality of evil,” which she coined in her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, in order to describe former SS Officer Adolf Eichmann’s actions throughout the Holocaust as thoughtless, unmotivated evil that is banal because it is mundane and ordinary. ⁽¹¹⁵⁾ In the sense that Eichmann defended himself during his trial on the grounds that he was merely acting as a “law abiding citizen” by following Hitler’s orders that had “possessed the ‘force of law,’” ⁽¹¹⁶⁾ he was similar to a Murdochian character who becomes enraptured by the spell of a powerful enchanter and compelled under his magic to commit wicked acts. In the Postscript of her book, Arendt concludes that

Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. ⁽¹¹⁷⁾

Pendas further explains the foundation of Arendt’s insight on the notion of modern banal evil, maintaining it is not a claim that Eichmann was ignorant of the fate of the Jews he was deporting, in which case he would not have been criminally liable. Instead, what he failed to realize was the moral dimension of what he was doing. It was this that made his evil banal. The incapacity for judgment was no idiosyncratic glitch in Eichmann’s personality but an inherent potential within the moral structure of modern life itself. ⁽¹¹⁸⁾

Arendt further observes that Eichmann “was not stupid”; however, it was his “lack of imagination” and “sheer thoughtlessness” that “predisposed him to become one of greatest criminals of that period.” ⁽¹¹⁹⁾ It is precisely within this subtler—yet equally morally destructive—pattern of inattention and egoistic fantasy that Murdoch places her enchanted characters in order to show that, while they may not intentionally concoct acts of wickedness, they nonetheless contribute to our modern moral malaise because they cannot accurately see and attend to those overt purveyors of evil who repeatedly enchant them, let alone witness the enchantment-like qualities that manifest within their own behavior.

In addition to Rupert and Morgan in Defeat, Rosa Keepe is perhaps the character in Flight who best portrays this less intentional, yet still destructive, brand of inattention that begets evil. Rosa is so preoccupied with her own fantasy involving her misconceived relationship with Mischa that she utterly fails to notice the fact that other characters—her brother and Nina, both of whom were similarly under Mischa’s enchantment—are desperately reaching out to her for assistance, which she ignores on multiple occasions because she is too busy with her own dramas. It is not until the end of the novel when Calvin shakes Rosa out of her fantasy about Mischa that she realizes that she is likely responsible, at least indirectly, for Nina’s suicide, which could have easily been prevented with a few facts about the status of her immigration that a friend like Rosa could have provided.

Equivalently, those who today participate in calling out to the world the moral failures of others through cancel culture also tend to view the human condition with far too much optimism, not fully appreciating the dark and often unconscious aspects of the undeveloped personality that leads individuals to act in the nefarious ways they do, in addition to not recognizing their own murkiness, self-absorption, and lack of self-transparency. I assert that while the participants in cancel culture sincerely believe they are instruments of justice who are vindicating the evil acts of those they cancel, like Murdoch’s enchanters, they are so lost within their moral fantasy of picturing the evil of the cancelled that they cannot see that their own highly critical and one-sided actions may be equally destructive and, potentially, evil.

Instead of engaging in self-analysis or a deep analysis of the persons whom they cancel, they take the more comfortable route in reducing the complexity of the other to a flat stereotype which is buttressed by a single snapshot of the otherwise multitudinous life of the cancelled. Put differently, rather than acknowledging that: this is John, who is human and imperfect and so made some bad judgments in his past due in part to having grown up in a racist family and environment in the 1960s, cancellers reduce the individual complex life of John to a nameless, white, patriarchal racist who at age fifty deserves retribution rather than forgiveness, let alone a just, loving gaze. It is this banal and subconsciously covert evil that slowly swoons in time and sows the seeds for movements such as cancel culture.

While some cancellers—like those whom they cancel—may either engage in such evil acts intentionally (like Julius) or subconsciously (like Rupert, Morgan, Bradley and Rosa), a curious Murdochian journey unfolds before one who attempts to unravel and differentiate between the two. In fact, when applying Murdoch’s moral vision, the same problem exists on both sides of the cancel culture equation: both the cancellers and cancelled are working within the “individual will” conception of ethics that Murdoch criticizes because they are not looking at one another either lovingly or justly, or as whole persons.

Through her adroit understanding that modern evil resides not only in deliberate and intentionally malicious acts witnessed within the totalitarian and communist dictatorships that prevailed during the twentieth century, but also as a result of our general lack of attention and love in our mundane everyday affairs, Murdoch’s sense of historicity is illuminating even today. It can assist us in both naming and unraveling the postmodern malaise of inattention and fantasy which contributes to Arendt’s banality of evil, and discovering more benign and mutually effective tools to diminish human wickedness than what cancel culture currently provides.

Noting that Murdoch’s metaphysics is both dialectical and historical, Gary Browning pays homage to her contribution to the present from the past when he observes that, throughout her works, “she engages with the historicity of the present and reflects upon the past from which it has emerged.” ⁽¹²⁰⁾ In this tradition, “[t]he historicity of the present entails the time-bound operations of metaphysics, in that its questions arise out of reflection upon contemporary experience and its form develops historically by a critical engagement with past metaphysics.” ⁽¹²¹⁾ In addition to her notable capacity for understanding the present within the context of the past, Murdoch attempts to persuade her readers that our future depends upon the ability to connect morality with attention to human individuals who are flawed, fallen, and whose actions are not always preceded by “crystal-clear intentions.” ⁽¹²²⁾ Yet in our digitally-driven, post-pandemic world, we are resigned now more than ever to primary engagements with our fellow humans by way of monitor screens and so-called ‘smart’ phones.

In this mechanical and impersonal setting, cancel culture and other social media practices openly discourage individual contact, attention, relation, and love and—even worse—they encourage hatred, resentment, and bullying that thrives and grows within a perpetual vortex of continuously wicked acts. Since cancel culture is essentially a media and online-driven act, it serves as a convenient and dispassionate vehicle of attack by which targets are objectified and vilified by the masses via a vulgar crowd mentality. In short, the cancelling mob is not interested in seeing or treating the target as an individual who is invariably flawed and imperfect and, perhaps, in great need of redemption as opposed to abuse and public persecution.

Analogously, Julius’s actions in Defeat can be compared to the self-righteous, resentful mob that jumps on the cancel culture bandwagon. The two enchanted characters in the novel who are arguably the most psychologically challenged and, thus, engage in morally questionable behaviors—Morgan and Simon—are called out, taunted, and used by Julius in order to alleviate his own psychological traumas that played out during his life, most importantly his imprisonment in a concentration camp. The scene that exemplifies Julius’s misbehavior toward both Morgan and Simon is when they each at turns find themselves naked and alone in Julius’s apartment. Morgan first shows up to beg Julius to return to her, to which Julius responds with outright bitterness and contempt. Obviously in a state of psychological trauma—caused mostly by Julius after the abrupt and unexplainable ending of their relationship—Morgan undresses herself and lies naked on his bed.

In this vulnerable position in which she is desperately reaching out for closure and compassion, Julius cruelly responds to her assertion that he is still interested in her: “‘A youngish and moderately good-looking woman half undressed attracts the attention,’ said Julius. ‘Now put your dress on and get out.’” ⁽¹²³⁾ When Morgan refuses, Julius shreds her clothes, locks her naked in the apartment and leaves. After some time passes, Simon next arrives at Julius’s apartment and Morgan convinces him to give her his shirt and trousers so she can go home to get new clothes for herself. In the interim, Julius comes home to find not Morgan, but Simon naked in his apartment. When Morgan finally comes back fully dressed to find Simon extremely stressed and uncomfortable, she and Julius laugh at him and mock him for his nakedness (and naivety). Further playing on Simon’s fear of being continually dishonest with Axel at Julius’s and Morgan’s promptings, Julius commands him not to speak to Axel of the situation, claiming “Careless talk costs loves, my Simon” and “A necessary ingredient in a happy marriage is the ability to tell soothing lies to your partner.” ⁽¹²⁴⁾

Just like players in today’s cancel culture, Julius pays close attention to the naked vulnerabilities that are evident in the consciousnesses and actions of his psychologically challenged fellow human beings and instead of envisioning a loving solution that would obviate the misdeeds and attendant suffering of all involved, he perpetuates his own fantasy version of reality in order to manipulate flawed people like Rupert and Morgan, who similarly wish to submerge themselves in the illusion that there exist simple, clearly delineated acts of right versus wrong. Morgan is oddly consoled by Julius’s manipulations of herself and others; she is utterly inattentive to the fact that she is, in effect, enchanting Simon in the same way that Julius has enchanted her, thus perpetuating the cycle of suspicion and criticism that eminently characterizes our postmodern world. Contrarily, after the extremely difficult process of self-analysis and correction, Simon at least is eventually able to see Julius’s unworthy intentions with clarity and break (hopefully forever) the enchanter’s spell over him.

In comparing Julius to his foil Tallis, the saint figure who has also witnessed his share of evil and trauma early in life, David J. Fine observes that they do not differ in their experience of evil, “but in how they respond to it. Julius pays wickedness forward. He detaches from the masses and plays his games,” whereas Tallis keeps attempting to reattach to others despite all their messiness. ⁽¹²⁵⁾ Indeed, both Tallis and Simon, by not paying forward the evil that descends upon them to the others, are the two characters who emerge from the novel the least scathed. Between the two, Tallis is the saint in the novel because he is the single character who pays full attention to the genesis of Julius’s evil and openly discusses it with him, albeit briefly, whereas all the other characters run as far away from Julius as they possibly can. A close reading of the final exchange between Tallis and Julius, however, shows Murdoch’s conviction that even the evil enchanters need and deserve friendship and moral guidance to overcome the events that occurred in their lives that make them act the way they do.

According to Browning, Murdoch believed that “philosophy is to eschew general formulations for moral conduct that sideline the responsibilities of individuals to attend closely to other individuals and the particular circumstances in which they are situated.” ⁽¹²⁶⁾ Indeed, Murdoch opined that “[t]he more the separateness and differences of other people is realized, and the fact seen that another man has needs and wishes as demanding as one’s own, the harder it becomes to treat a person as a thing.” ⁽¹²⁷⁾ It is precisely this type of personal, empathic examination of human action—or love, for Murdoch—that is purposefully neglected by the enchanters and also when the mob rules to cancel individuals within today’s traditional and social media outlets. Doubtless, the tendency of cancel culture warriors is to make uninformed, snap judgments regarding the perceived immoral or unethical decisions made by people that they do not even know, or care to understand.

Rallying for a “renewed attention” to Murdoch’s distinctive metaphysical philosophy in our tangled post-pandemic culture, Ruth Murphy observes that Murdoch is “unrelenting in [her] belief that the messy reality in which we live must inform our philosophy - in opposition to philosophy dictating truths that risk ringing hollow when confronted with the complexity of life.” ⁽¹²⁸⁾

By applying Murdoch’s philosophy regarding both the individual and collective task of achieving (or, more usually, failing to achieve) true moral growth—as exemplified by the intricate and complex plots, themes, and characters in her novels—to the trend of cancel culture, one can thus achieve an historical understanding of why, like Murdoch’s enchanters, the practice is both alluring yet ultimately dangerous to our contemporary society. As Ikonomakis observes, Murdoch’s novels are valuable as “great parables of human existence, from which new ethical frames of reference can be drawn” in our contemporary search for the “new tool of Good.” ⁽¹²⁹⁾ Without doubt, Murdoch’s attentive observations of the particular brand of human evil that persisted during the war-torn era in which she lived can help inform our even more complex world that has unfolded in the twenty-first century and assist us in understanding the particular brand of human perversity that lies within the heart of cancel culture: the elevation of a desire to be right over that of locating goodness and truth.

Murdoch describes this situation as “the disappearance of a permanent background to human activity: a permanent background, whether provided by God, by Reason, by History, or by the self,” in which she laments “that the idea of goodness (and of virtue) has been largely superseded in Western moral philosophy by the idea of rightness.” ⁽¹³⁰⁾ Commenting on the “unsatisfactory” nature of current moral philosophy, Murdoch regrets that “it ignores certain facts and at the same time imposes a single theory which admits of no communication with or escape into rival theories.” ⁽¹³¹⁾

Instead, Murdoch thought that “[t]he critical scrutiny of all claims to knowledge is to be embraced.” ⁽¹³²⁾ Thus, Murdoch lamented that modern philosophy has not been performing the task “of sorting and classifying fundamental moral issues; it has rather been imposing upon us a particular value judgment in the guise of a theory of human nature.” ⁽¹³³⁾ What has been forgotten or “theorized away,” according to Murdoch, is the fact that “[t]he definiteness of any thought process depends on the possibility of [its] being recognized, scrutinized and identified by observers from different points of view; this possibility is essential to any definite reality. ⁽¹³⁴⁾

In other words, “[w]hat is ‘real’ is open to different observers.” ⁽¹³⁵⁾ As such, Murdoch’s view of human development openly adopted Simone Weil’s philosophy that true morality depends upon a new vocabulary of attention to others that would go well beyond the base factual knowledge provided by a snapshot or tweet that captures a single moment of time in the fulsome, contingent, and often muddled life of an individual. Toril Moi explains that, “for Weil, to be attentif is to be waiting, watchful, open to what may arise”; most importantly, attention wishes to contemplate the truth and “[t]ries to understand, not destroy.” ⁽¹³⁶⁾

Contrarily, cancel culture operates from a closed, resentment-based, and self-fulfilling system of justice that is inherently suspicious, as it insists upon one-sided “rightness” in the rigid application of its ideologies based only upon a set of alleged facts. While cancellers de-platform anyone who acts less than perfectly, according to its own standards, such acts are far from accordance with Weil’s and Murdoch’s notion of watching and waiting to unravel the mystery of a person, to understand the full picture from where they sit.

Instead of relying on base facts that are viewed in a vacuum and often taken out of context to determine a person’s moral worth—for example, a photo of them on social media wearing a Halloween costume thirty years ago that is today considered objectionable to some—Murdoch believed that we need more and deeper concepts “in terms of which to picture the substance of our being.” ⁽¹³⁷⁾ She often acknowledged that humans are fallen, or at least have “an inevitable imperfection,” which we should acknowledge in our dealings with one another; thus, the real a priori truth to recognize is that “we are neither angels nor animals but human individuals.” ⁽¹³⁸⁾

Interestingly, a chillingly demonic scene in Flight, as noted by Kane, involves a dry or “crystalline” interpretation of the pornographic photograph surreptitiously taken by Calvin Blick of Rosa, who is “writhing in the arms of [two Polish immigrant] brothers.” ⁽¹³⁹⁾ After enticing Hunter to follow him from the streets of London down into the bowels of Mischa’s basement where he develops pictures in a dark room, Calvin “drew forth a large crystalline object. ‘This is my eye,’ he said to Hunter. ‘This is the truthful eye that sees and remembers. The lens of my camera.’” ⁽¹⁴⁰⁾ According to Kane

Calvin’s photographs parallel the crystalline aesthetic object Murdoch has written about in that they both attempt to impose rigid forms upon contingent reality. In its static display a photograph catches a segment of life but freezes it and thus reduces it, just as Calvin tried to reduce the complex personality of Rosa into an unchangeable sexual object in a dirty picture. As the photographer attempts to encase life in a type of permanent form, so does the demonic mind try to confine reality in a permanent form. ⁽¹⁴¹⁾

With his narcissistic, all-knowing, and judging eye, Calvin demonically “excludes the contingent aspect of [Rosa’s] personality just as the camera excludes fluid reality.” ⁽¹⁴²⁾ Calvin has yet another opportunity at the end of the novel to taunt Rosa herself with the same photograph, gleefully watching her react to it and justifying its existence by exclaiming that she should have, as far as possible, all the “facts” of the situation before her:

You will say,’ he went on, ‘quite rightly, that the problem is, what are all the facts? Let me reply at once that I do not presume to know, I am only concerned to help you on one or two very small points without in any way knowing what difference I shall be making to the whole picture as you see it. ⁽¹⁴³⁾

As suggested by his name, Calvin, like all of Murdoch’s enchanters, is ever-ready to harshly judge both Rosa’s past and be the author of her future based on a two-dimensional snapshot in time which, he admits, neither he nor Rosa fully understand. Sternly moralistic, he is not interested in her interpretation of the facts, nor does he care to understand the complex circumstances of her personal story. He merely puts her on trial according to his own smug and ill-intended rules of justice, acknowledging that he does not care about finding the truth: “‘You will never know the truth, and you will read the signs in accordance with your deepest wishes. That is what we humans always have to do. Reality is a cipher with many solutions, all of them right ones.’” ⁽¹⁴⁴⁾ Yet, unlike a real trial, and eerily similar to cancel culture, he tells Rosa he has “no wish to discuss or to persuade,” but “merely to bring one or two small facts to your notice.” ⁽¹⁴⁵⁾ Sadly, just as her brother crumbles under the influence of Calvin’s diabolical determinism, upon seeing the photo of herself, Rosa does not have either the acumen or ability to defend herself—similar to the common reaction of those who are cancelled today—and thus she flees from Mischa’s Italian villa before having any meaningful discussion of the situation with him, leaving herself (and the reader) with an inadequate denouement of the full story of both their past and potential future relationships.

A similar attempted blackmail situation also occurs in Defeat among Julius, Axel, and Simon. After placing the bet with Morgan that he could break up Simon and Axel’s relationship, Julius engages in sneaky and backhanded attempts to drive a wedge between the men and blackmail Simon from telling Axel the truth about their recent encounters. He does this by playing upon certain chinks in the armor of their marriage that he has paid attention to throughout the years of knowing them: the fact that Axel insists upon truthfulness and disdains any form of lie between them, as well as the differences between their sexual histories. Axel is described as “a naturally monogamous person,” whereas Simon “was by nature frivolous, inconstant, impulsive, irrational, shallow” ⁽¹⁴⁶⁾—in other words, promiscuous.

Like Calvin in Flight, Axel tends to view people in a static, crystalline manner. He unjustifiably confines Simon’s present persona within a past segment of his life as a single man and statically pictures him forever in that snapshot in his mind picking up men at gay bars or in the bathrooms at Piccadilly Circus, despite the fact that Simon is in love with Axel and is faithful to him. After their relationship begins to unravel as a consequence of Julius planting a seed in Axel’s mind that Simon made a pass at Julius, Axel refuses Simon’s pleas to discuss their problems, angrily exclaiming to him, “I imagined you would be capable of changing your habits for my sake. It was a pathetic error and most unfair to you.” ⁽¹⁴⁷⁾

Unlike Rosa in Flight, however, Simon diligently works through his own fears and is able to break the spell of his enchanter by insisting that Axel pull the car over and listen to him as he unfolds the full truth about all the secrets he had been keeping from him. It is during this exchange that Axel is finally able to forgive Simon and see him with a loving gaze as a contingent, complex, and whole person. He is even able to better reflect upon his own misgivings, confessing to Simon that “I was stupid too. And I blame myself. You oughtn’t to have been so afraid of me.” ⁽¹⁴⁸⁾ As a result of the difficult work of gaining a better understanding of themselves and each other, the two men experience a breakthrough in their relationship, which is strengthened as a result of their shattering the magical spell of the enchanter through love—a feat rarely achieved in Murdoch’s novels.

These poignant scenes from Flight and Defeat also perfectly exemplify how cancel culture is a dry, crystalline form of morality and critique of the human condition, which like Murdoch’s enchanters “attempt to contract the human personality into a knowable fixed object.” ⁽¹⁴⁹⁾ And often, as Nussbaum observes with respect to women who have been made into sexual objects, the cancellers are responding with a pay-it-forward reaction to having similar wicked acts done to them first, just like Julius responds as a survivor of a concentration camp.

Even though the photo of Rosa having sex with two men and Axel’s depiction of Simon in his campy younger days scouting out sexual partners in Piccadilly Circus are accurate and factual depictions of historical reality provided by Calvin and Axel (who can also be considered minor enchanter characters) they do not—in truth, cannot—account for the full background and complexity of either Rosa or Simon. Just as the demonic minds of Murdoch’s enchanters attempt to confine an individual’s reality within a permanent form, cancel culture also utilizes similar reductive tactics to determine the moral value of a person based upon a sole photo, text, or event and purposefully do not make any space to consider the entire—invariably muddled, flawed, and complex—picture of the life of the individual they contemptuously excoriate and seek to cancel.

Murdoch would not take issue with depictions of factual situations in and of themselves; however, her moral vision is one which requires a careful untangling and understanding of their complexities in the context of what she termed a “just and loving gaze” that we should cast upon our fellow humans as opposed to a mission of perpetual condemnation resulting from the fog of egoistic thinking and fantasy-laden living.

Whereas the habit of attention is a task that requires conscious and continuous work, Murdoch did not believe that it was impossible to attain. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), she borrows from Plato to provide the tool to assist us in seeing our true selves (and others) more clearly, which is utilizing attention in order to distinguish between the act of engaging in egoistic fantasy as opposed to that of creative imagination:

For Plato the lower level [of imagination] . . . is seen in human terms as the production of base illusions, or perhaps simply of the ordinary unimaginative egoistic screen of our conceptualising. Plato, teaching by images and myths, also acknowledges high imagination as creative stirring spirit, attempting to express and embody what is perfectly good, but extremely remote, a picture which implicitly allows a redemption of art. ⁽¹⁵⁰⁾

Thus, the untrained mind is besieged by a selfish, fantastical, or illusory dream life, as expressed by Plato using the word eikasia, which for him indicates “the most benighted human state, the lowest condition in the Cave” as connected to a lack of moral sense and an inability to reflect. ⁽¹⁵¹⁾

Murdoch considered the dichotomy between fantasy and imagination along the lines of a spectrum. On the one side, fantasy is mechanical, egoistic, and untruthful; while on the other side, imagination is both truthful and free, culminating in forms of artistic genius in its highest form. ⁽¹⁵²⁾ Moral improvement, thus, is achieved by “a progressive destruction of false images,” which she considered an “imperfect activity” ⁽¹⁵³⁾ but from which the concept of human genius emerges and is possible. ⁽¹⁵⁴⁾ For Murdoch, coming out of fantasy and into imagination is a slow, lifelong process, as “[t]he Platonic soul, picturing the whole experience of a whole person, is a mixture of knowledge and illusion, immersed in a reality which transcends it, failing or succeeding to learn in innumerable ways, the difference between true and false, good and evil.” ⁽¹⁵⁵⁾

Yet due to the difficult process of self-examination, individuals tend to become self-deceptive and susceptible to egoism, fantasy, and neuroses, so they grasp at “principles deduced systematically by a watertight logical procedure” that depend not on the lived experience of real individuals, but rather “upon a set of rational deductions that are imported into experience from the outside.” ⁽¹⁵⁶⁾ In this regard, Murdoch recognized that the enemy of love is social convention and neurosis, or when we fail to see the individual either because (1) we see others as acting deterministically because “we are ourselves sunk in a social whole which we allow uncritically to determine our reactions” or (2) we are engaged within our own fantasy that makes the individual into a dream object of our own. ⁽¹⁵⁷⁾

It is as a result of this displacement of the transcendent and focus on the ego that systems like cancel culture operate. The suspicious, critical, and mean-spirited interpretations of individuals within cancel culture become the enemy of love because those who cancel desire to view the world of the other within a socially and philosophically deterministic lens that seeks fixity, clean facts, and easy answers to the otherwise opaque and complex problem of goodness and love. As such, Murdoch informs us that love is the proper utilization of imagination to overcome one’s self and banish both fantasy and convention; it is the extremely difficult and painful, yet “infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this otherness.” ⁽¹⁵⁸⁾

According to Nussbaum in the Introduction to The Black Prince, Murdoch herself struggled throughout her life to fight her own egoistic, fantastical tendencies and personally believed

that we would only get to the right choices if we understood better the inner forces militating against goodness. And in her view, the main such force was our inability to see other people correctly. We are always representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, she believed, ways that gratify our egos and serve our own ends. ⁽¹⁵⁹⁾

To understand this phenomenon, Nussbaum refers to what Dante’s “Inferno” tries to teach us about love and the lessons that the proud must learn in purgatory: the proud are like hoops, bent over on themselves so that they see only the self and not the outer world. This sense of pride, which represents a fundamental deformation of love, “has an edge of anxiety: any threat to the proud person’s superiority would definitely be felt as a painful wound.” ⁽¹⁶⁰⁾ Because all the dealings of the proud with the world are forms of instrumentalization, “they do not simply become objectifiers; they also become less than fully human” and they don’t even look like people. ⁽¹⁶¹⁾

In addition to being a dry and crystalline practice, cancel culture may also be scrutinized within the context of this solipsistic form of inattention, as it is also an enchanted, fantastical process in which both the canceller and the cancelled are engaged in inward-facing acts of anxious generalization regarding the mysterious other. Those cancelled people who commit overt and intentional acts of racism, sexism, and other objectional anti-social behaviors fail to pay attention to the targets of their behavior, resulting in reducing them to convenient stereotypes as opposed to taking into consideration the individual agents they are. The cancelled person who has intentionally engaged in immoral behavior fits within Dante’s definition of the prideful because, as Nussbaum points out, the prideful are compartmentalizers who justify their acts “with lots of arguments about the inferiority or even the bestial quality of those on whom they look down.” ⁽¹⁶²⁾

By the same token, cancellers, upon learning a “juicy” and culturally objectionable piece of information about the cancelled person, are often not compelled to vet or verify the situation, let alone understand the background or contingencies that surrounded the event and the cancelled person. Instead, cancellers, rushing to an ideologically based, pernicious determination, post the tidbit on social media sites, perpetuating the invidious cancel culture vortex. In this manner, cancellers similarly display resentment-oriented pride based on Dante’s definition because they are “obsessive about their own entitlements and who has slighted them”; in that state of anger, they also do not see other people. ⁽¹⁶³⁾ Like Murdoch’s enchanter Julius in Defeat, who has personally experienced the pain of being a direct victim of the Holocaust and who feels entitled to persist in forward-paying acts of justice, cancellers pay no attention to the realities and circumstances surrounding the bad acts of the cancelled and thus they perpetuate the inattentive and incremental accrual of everyday modern evil.

Concomitantly, once the cat is out of the bag on social media, just like Simon in Defeat, the cancelled person engages in a similar form of enchantment whereby, regardless of the truth, he is compelled by fear of outcome to bow down to his canceller and the angry mob who follows along. And the saddest thing about this phenomenon is that, unlike Axel’s eventual acceptance of Simon’s true, difficult, and heartfelt apology, cancel culture never forgives, no matter how or how often the cancelled person attempts to apologize and publicly cow tow to his accuser. As online commentator Tim O’Brien observes:

[F]rankly, a lot of demands for apologies we see online and in the media are not themselves genuine. The amount of faux anger driving so much of the discourse we see is incalculable. These dynamics, by design, lead to real, mass anger that only serve the purposes of those driving it. Some who demand an apology aren’t even self-aware enough to realize that they themselves won’t accept any apology. They expect contrition without a willingness on their part to forgive, and that presumes their ire is justified, which quite often it is not. ⁽¹⁶⁴⁾

In assessing whether a heartfelt apology will work, O’Brien further states that

As humans, we are conditioned to believe that a good apology’s goal is to seek forgiveness. This may be true in our personal lives. It may be true in our marriages. It may be true in our friendships. It may even be true in a one-on-one, offline customer service situation. But it is a myth when it comes to cancel culture and the current climate of mob aggression. The fact is, whether you are at fault or not, once the cancel mob decides to humble you or your organization, there is no such thing as forgiveness. If the mob decides you must pay, you will pay insofar as the cancel mob can help it. This theory that apologies do much to provide cover when under attack by cancel culture is often a fool’s errand. ⁽¹⁶⁵⁾

Nussbaum similarly understands the propensity for victims of wickedness to engage in acts of retributivism, or easily imagining “that a counterbalancing pain on the other side annuls or undoes their pain or wrong”; however, like Murdoch, she warns against this vice of pride, instead encouraging the spirit of Martin Luther King’s “type of inclusive love,” which

is closely connected to respect and involves the willingness to listen to the voices of others, rather than closing off those voices in lofty superiority . . . It involves seeing in all people a core of dignity and worth, and, further, a potential for change and growth, however obscured and blighted by the history of that person’s deeds. So it draws a very strong distinction between deeds and the underlying person. ⁽¹⁶⁶⁾

Like Murdoch’s enchanter characters, the canceller is only interested in administrating a one-sided and prideful form of justice based on surface facts rather than being open to interpretation of their individual contingencies or backgrounds, and of the possibilities of their redemption. Instead of focusing on a workable moral vision that sees the other realistically and fully—as an inevitably fallible human being in a contingent time and place—like Julius, they pay the evil of the cancelled forward even while they self-righteously convince themselves that their acts are fully just.

Murdoch’s characters, like the participants of cancel culture, often have an uncanny inability to forgive the past mistakes of others—even of those whom they claim to love. In the opening pages of Murdoch’s 1958 novel The Bell, Dora Greenfield is presented as an adulteress whose husband will not leave her, yet he will also never forgive her indiscretions. When she begrudgingly agrees to end her current affair and return to him, he exclaims upon her arrival:

Nor do I subscribe to the view . . . that the lost sheep is more to be rejoiced over. And if you are expecting me to rejoice you will be disappointed. Your escapades have diminished you permanently in my eyes. ⁽¹⁶⁷⁾

Dora’s reaction:

She was deeply wounded by what Paul had said. How could he assess her like this because of something which had happened in the past? The past was never real for Dora. The notion that Paul might keep her past alive to torment her with, now occurred to her for the first time. She stopped thinking so as not to cry and went to open the two tall windows as wide as they would go. ⁽¹⁶⁸⁾

Dora, however, has the last word on the matter, as she finally musters the nerve at the end of the novel to leave the narcissistic and unforgiving Paul, which can be interpreted as Murdoch’s admonishment of the dry and crystalline manner by which he coldly treats his wife and utterly fails to assess the roots of her unhappiness, because they invariably concern his failures.

This ending, as previously mentioned, is diametrically opposed to Axel’s outcome in Defeat after he is able to overcome his own dryness by forgiving Simon and finally paying attention to him and seeing him as a full person, which for Murdoch is the primary way to combat egoism and which can also be utilized to mitigate our anxious and resentment-based desire to cancel people. For all his failings and propensities to insist upon convention in his romantic relationships, by finally being able to see and pay attention to Axel’s reality, and truly look at him with a just and loving gaze, he overcomes his pride and has the opportunity for a renewed relationship with Simon.

In this section, I will proscribe my two-part Murdochian solution to combat the moral problems that are evident in the practice of cancel culture. The first solution is a moral one, effectuated by applying Murdoch’s philosophy of attention and love to solve messy and muddled complexities of modern life, such as attempting to understand the realities of the human personality that led to cancel culture in the first place. The second solution is a literary one, implicating the academic practice of critique, or the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that pervasively dictates how literature today is analyzed from a skeptical spirit of condemnation over one that holistically integrates the author, text, and reader.

Whereas our natural human tendency is to engage in fantasy and reflect inwardly and primarily upon the self, Murdoch believed that the direction of attention should instead be “outward, away from self . . . towards the great surprising variety of the world.” ⁽¹⁶⁹⁾ The only way this can occur is by turning away from what she considered the dry human symbol—the bogus individual or false whole—and towards the real impenetrable human person who, according to the fundamental tenets of liberalism, is substantial, individual, indefinable, and valuable. ⁽¹⁷⁰⁾ This may be achieved by paying close attention to the manner by which we interact with ourselves and others, by not engaging in imaginative tactics that reduce other persons to fantastical and unreal forms in order to suit our own solipsistic needs and agendas, and by not treating human beings as either objects or mere substitutes for one another.

In Sovereignty of the Good, Murdoch extrapolates upon Weil’s notion of attention “to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality,” which she believed “to be the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.” ⁽¹⁷¹⁾ It is the difficult habit of paying attention to the full backgrounds and varying complexities—or the “otherness”—of persons by which, according to Murdoch, one may achieve moral goodness.

Further expanding Weil’s notion of attention, Murdoch also uses the terms ‘attend’ and ‘see’ to describe patient, careful observation of other people’s reality. Her term ‘enchantment’—as epitomized by the actions of Julius King and Mischa Fox—characterizes the process whereby attention gives way to fantasy and preconceived forms are imposed upon contingent human beings. Fantasy becomes demonic when both people in a relationship give in to imaginary distortions. Servile creatures bow to their demonic masters, who reinforce the fantasies of their slaves. Murdoch often assumes the didactic task of demonstrating the illusory nature of this demonic power. ⁽¹⁷²⁾

Kane further observes that, for Murdoch, true evil is caused by a “deadly solipsistic process” in which “neurotic self-absorption . . . blurs the vision and prevents the individual from seeing the otherness of people who are not himself. As he fails to recognize their uniqueness, the self-absorbed individual imposes his private fantasies upon other real people.” ⁽¹⁷³⁾ Kane believes that this phenomenon is caused by a solipsism whereby “individuals act as if the existence of others depended upon a personal point of view: they transform real people into essentially imaginary characters for their own private fantasies ⁽¹⁷⁴⁾ and instead of looking at them objectively like real people, they become mere characters in their private dramas. ⁽¹⁷⁵⁾

In Murdoch’s novels, there are two different forms that inattention can take, each of which can lead to a fantastical mindset that invariably leads to a collapse of morality and the breakdown of self-growth: (1) one’s failure to pay attention to those who are harming them; and (2) one’s failure to pay attention to the backgrounds or inner lives of others. Both Defeat and Flight are instructional novels in the sense that Murdoch provides the reader with a host of characters who are wrapped up in their personal fantasies and who, thus, utterly fail to attend correctly to themselves or one another, and the devastating consequences that ensue as a result of such inattention.

Morgan is the primary character in Flight who exhibits both of these traits in droves, as both her inattentive actions and inactions cause great harm both to herself as well as the other characters in the novel. Morgan, an academic who is engaged in writing a book on Glossematics, first meets Julius when she attends a conference in South Carolina and is immediately enraptured with him. Although she is married to Tallis Browne, Murdoch’s saintly character in the novel who represents the virtuous opposite of the enchanter figure, Morgan embarks upon a lengthy romantic relationship with Julius in America. While Murdoch does not state in detail the nature of the ending of their romantic fling, it is obvious that Julius ended it in a curiously devious way, as Morgan describes it: “Well, literally I left Julius, but spiritually he left me. It was complicated and—awful. Awful, awful, awful.” ⁽¹⁷⁶⁾ When Morgan and Julius coincidentally end up back in London at the same time, Morgan is drawn back into his spell as she desperately proceeds to rekindle their relationship by continuously hounding him down and quite literally begging for the return of his affection.

It is at the end of Part One of Defeat during one of his encounters with Morgan when Julius’s character is revealed as he spontaneously envisages a godgame in which he wages a bet with Morgan that in ten short days he would engineer a breakup between Simon and Axel. At this point, Julius reveals his dark, existentialist view of human relationships, which perfectly captures Murdoch’s moral problem of dryness and inattentiveness:

Human beings are roughly constructed entities full of indeterminacies and vaguenesses and empty spaces. Driven along by their own private needs they latch blindly onto each other, then pull away, then clutch again. Their little sadisms and their little masochisms are surface phenomena. Anyone will do to play the roles. They never really see each other at all. There is no relationship, dear Morgan, which cannot quite easily be broken and there is none the breaking of which is a matter of any genuine seriousness. Human beings are essentially finders of substitutes. ⁽¹⁷⁷⁾

It is this modern propensity of objectification—treating one person as a mere substitute for another—which is an abuse of power “by people encouraged to believe that they are above others and that others are not fully real” ⁽¹⁷⁸⁾. It is this insistence upon viewing the world within zero-sum-game, power-based hierarchies that has led to destructive postmodern movements such as cancel culture, which are exemplified by Julius’s nefarious thought processes:

I could divide anybody from anybody. Even you could. Play sufficiently on a person’s vanity, sow a little mistrust, hint at the contempt which every human being deeply, secretly feels for every other one. Every man loves himself so astronomically more than he loves his neighbour. Anyone can be made to drop anyone. ⁽¹⁷⁹⁾

Undoubtedly, Julius is paying very close attention to the misdeeds and vain proclivities of his fellow characters, but it is not the type of attention envisioned by either Weil or Murdoch. Like those who participate in cancel culture, Julius is looking so that he can manipulate, generalize, criticize, and theorize away all the inconvenient truths and muddlings of life that—while they may be frightening to look at and wait for—nonetheless make living a worthwhile and good experience.

Drawn fully into Julius’s charismatic charms, which are alluring because they serve to reduce, compartmentalize, and simplify real life and its vast complexity, Morgan’s initial reaction is laughingly, although somewhat nervously, to accept the bet; however, she briefly hesitates after learning that Julius has chosen Simon and Axel, claiming, “It seems so unkind now it’s real people.” ⁽¹⁸⁰⁾ Regardless, the bet is placed between the two, as Murdoch architects the subplot that will drive the second part of the novel, setting up the devastation that she believes will inevitably ensue as a result of Julius’ and Morgan’s godgames and their inability to see and attend to, much less love, those within their own circle of supposed friendship.

With this scene, Murdoch surreptitiously juxtaposes yet another layer of inattention that will play out in Part Two of the novel: both Simon’s and Morgan’s failure to pay closer attention to the motivations and consequences of Julius’s actions. Though Morgan feels a brief moral pang at Julius’ fiendish plot, and refers to him as a “monster,” “mischief-maker,” and “completely mad,” she remains so spellbound by her contorted memory of their romantic interlude in America that she is unable to discern the true nature of either his feelings for her or of his persona, exemplifying what Margaret L. Pachuau observes as “a gradual attraction towards evil in many of [Murdoch’s] protagonists.” ⁽¹⁸¹⁾ Despite the fact that Julius continues to treat Morgan as both a disposable object and a puppet to assist him with his malicious plan to destroy Axel’s and Simon’s relationship, her egoistic fantasy of what their relationship means to him prevents her from truly listening to the words of rejection and objectification that he speaks to her, such as: “I really do not want to see you anymore. The interest is gone” ⁽¹⁸²⁾ and “You remind me fruitlessly of things which are old and stale and dead.” ⁽¹⁸³⁾

While Julius allegedly told Morgan at the outset of their relationship that his feelings were probably temporary “and should not be called by serious names.” ⁽¹⁸⁴⁾ through her inattention to Julius, she nonetheless becomes enraptured within her own love fantasy, which is entirely out of step with Julius’s perception of their relationship:

Morgan had loved Julius with her whole nature and in the first shock of that love she had found it impossible not to believe that Julius loved her. Such is the natural illusion of a lover. She had heard Julius’s faintly accented, faintly stammering voice saying over and over again, ‘I am not in love with you. I have nothing to offer you except completely superficial emotions. Such emotions do not endure. These will not.’ But the sound throbbed in her ears like the ceaseless cooing of a dove which said, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you.’ ⁽¹⁸⁵⁾

It is also interesting to note that, while Morgan has had a two-year physical relationship with Julius, she never noticed the concentration camp tattoo on his arm, thus confirming how inattentive she is to mostly everything when it comes to Julius. Despite the fact that Morgan witnesses Julius as both capable of and willing to play such a nasty trick on Simon and Axel, she barely stops to ponder what similar evil tactics he may have played out in their own failed relationship, and what may he be continuing to contrive against her. If she had been more attentive, she may have been able to discern that Julius concocted the odd love affair that magically ensued between her and her brother-in-law Rupert, which ultimately leads to his tragic death.

Contrary to Morgan, Simon’s initial failure to attend properly to his relationship with Axel is rectified by his eventual ability to overcome Julius’s demonic stunt with goodness and love, which Murdoch believes is the anecdote to evil. In the beginning of the novel, Simon’s character is cast as an empath who is hopelessly reliant upon the crumbs of affection intermittently thrown to him by others—especially his narcissistic and obtuse partner Axel. Unlike Morgan and others, however, he senses from the beginning that something is not quite right about Julius. When discussing Julius’s arrival to England with Axel, Simon hesitatingly tells him: “I’ve always been a bit afraid of Julius really” and “He would not be a man to have as an enemy,” ⁽¹⁸⁶⁾ thus foreshadowing Julius’s menacing plot against them. At the end of the novel, Murdoch rewards Simon’s attentiveness, as his is the only relationship that survives Julius’s overt, malevolent attempts to destroy it. But, as previously discussed, that reward comes only after Simon has made some very painful observations about himself and has taken the monumentally difficult steps to stand up, not only to Julius, but also to Axel, whose love he is so afraid of losing.

By observing that human attachments such as Simon’s to Axel are both selfish and strong, Murdoch acknowledges that the transformation from selfishness to what she terms “unselfing” is often impossible to conceive, as our attention often surreptitiously returns back to ourselves “with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair.” ⁽¹⁸⁷⁾ Observing that the work of morality begins in the inner space of individual consciousness, Fine explains how the ego complicates the process:

The conscious mind does not, however, naturally envision the world with clarity and grace. On the contrary, human beings adopt self-protective illusions that block reality. Murdoch shows how effortlessly the egoism that arises from consciousness clouds awareness. Therefore, one must work to see clearly. This labour functions as the keystone of morality, since accurate perception depends on egoism’s reduction. One must cultivate habits of attention and look outside the ego-soaked morass. ⁽¹⁸⁸⁾

Indeed, Murdoch warned that “[i]t is a task to come to see the world as it is”; however, “[a] philosophy which leaves duty without a context and exalts the idea of freedom and power as a separate top level value ignores this task and obscures the relation between virtue and reality.” ⁽¹⁸⁹⁾ Whereas Simon proves to be up to this great task (and Axel eventually follows suit) Morgan, like most of the other characters in Defeat and Murdoch’s other novels, monumentally fail it, due primarily to their inabilities to conquer their own egos and personal anxieties. As has been discussed in detail above, cancel culture—within this similar spirit of postmodern anxiety—also fails in picturing and attending to the full, if messy, muddled and even wicked, background of the other whom it is swift to criticize and castigate.

In addition to Murdoch’s moral solution of attention and a loving gaze, I propose that a second literary solution may be applied from her philosophy in order to combat the ineffective practice of cancel culture: the movement by academics away from rigid forms of post-structuralist critique and toward a literary criticism that engages in “post-critique.” ⁽¹⁹⁰⁾ Despite the fact that Murdoch lived and wrote several years prior to the advent of social media platforms and cancel culture, a close exploration of her uncannily astute body of moral philosophy and fiction reveals that she actually predicted a future world in which, as a result of adhering to the structuralist precepts promulgated by Jacques Derrida and other postmodern theorists, “[w]e are being taught, in a new style . . . that the individual is a special kind of illusion,” which she believed could result in “a return to barbarism.” ⁽¹⁹¹⁾

In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch dedicates an entire chapter to Derrida, whom she considered the father of the postmodern structuralist movement. According to her, structuralism led to a demythologization and removal of the transcendent, ⁽¹⁹²⁾ as well as the rejection of the Cartesian mandate of knowing oneself, whether from a psychological or metaphysical perspective, which leads to a loss of our concept of the individual altogether. ⁽¹⁹³⁾ If this “new mood” is taken seriously, Murdoch maintained that all value, truth, and morality is removed and meaning becomes “an internally self-related movement or play of language.” ⁽¹⁹⁴⁾

Because the postmodernists questioned the legitimacy of liberal post-Enlightenment concepts such as truth, value, and rationality, Murdoch decried structuralism as a non-workable and non-moral system in which “we lose the ordinary fundamental sense of contingency and accident which belongs with the concept of the individual” as well as “the curious messy phenomena of our actual experience.” ⁽¹⁹⁵⁾ Describing deconstruction as “a sort of plausible amoralistic determinism,” ⁽¹⁹⁶⁾ she predicted that, as a political, literary, and metaphysical force, it “flies the flag of a new era” and is “disturbingly revolutionary,” ⁽¹⁹⁷⁾ warning that we “ought to be more alarmed” by prophets who accept this “new realism.” ⁽¹⁹⁸⁾ Debunking the “structuralist nightmare,” Murdoch forsakes moral relativism and claims we must seek the actual truth in order to live properly:

While our motives and abilities to grasp and express truth differ, the conception of true and false is essential to human life, which without it would perish and go to ruin. A radical separation of meaning from truth not only ‘removes’ morally responsible truth-seeking speech in particular situations, it also leaves our ordinary conduct inexplicable. ⁽¹⁹⁹⁾

Relatedly, Murdoch observes that, while structuralism stands ever ready to depart from traditional logocentric and linguistic ideals, it offers no new moral sense “in which we abandon one truth in order to find another, or abandon God in favour of a differently conceived moral and spiritual mode of understanding.” ⁽²⁰⁰⁾

This growing insistence upon critique as the sole and undeniably proper method of literary analysis to the exclusion of the tradition of ordinary language philosophy has metamorphosized into what is today labeled the “hermeneutics of suspicion” or the rigid reading of texts strictly with a spirit of suspicion, as opposed to picturing texts as “action and expression” and “reading as a practice of acknowledgment.” ⁽²⁰¹⁾ Quoting Rita Felski in Critique and Postcritique, Moi laments that most postmodern literary critics—deconstructionists or otherwise—share a singular attitude of suspicion, as they are: “knowing, self-conscious, hardheaded, tirelessly vigilant.” ⁽²⁰²⁾

In The Limits of Critique, Felski further outlines the key elements of the hermeneutics of suspicion that have resulted from structuralism:

a spirit of skeptical questioning or outright condemnation, an emphasis on its precarious position vis-à-vis overbearing and oppressive social forces, the claim to be engaged in some kind of radical intellectual and/or political work, and the assumption that whatever is not critical must therefore be uncritical. ⁽²⁰³⁾

By the very same token, cancel culture fits precisely within Felski’s description of theory since it is also keenly skeptical as it self-assuredly and radically condemns and censors the other in a ritualistic, social media frenzy that blindly refuses to acknowledge any background or moral theory other than its own.

Regardless of where one lands with respect to the efficaciousness of applying cancel culture to create desired social change, its performativity shares a spirit of critique and suspicion germane to postmodernist beliefs and teachings. In analyzing the origins and purpose of the cancel culture movement, Pluckrose and Lindsay observe that, in the pursuit of eliminating “cultural appropriation,” it is the intent of postmodernist activists “to scrutinize texts, events, culture, activities, places, spaces, attitudes, mind-sets, phrasing, dress, and every other conceivable cultural artifact for hidden bigotry, then expose it and purge it and its sources from society—or at least access to the means of cultural production.” ⁽²⁰⁴⁾

The problem with suspicious reading (which leads invariably to the type of suspicious living that fuels cancel culture) is that, according to Moi, when we stop paying attention to the particulars and lose our sense of the meaning of words, we also lose our sense of reality, ⁽²⁰⁵⁾ which propels us into the type of illusory or crystalline fantasy renounced by Murdoch. Murdoch found structuralist utterances very disturbing; she thought them to have “a despairing prophetic tone,” which concerned “the nature of language, the future of books, the meaning of the word ‘writing.’ Traditional ideas of truth, freedom and personality are at stake, and we must remind ourselves that the frightening future is not yet with us and can be resisted.” ⁽²⁰⁶⁾

Murdoch would be glad to know that there is still hope. Despite the fact that the hermeneutics of suspicion has overwhelmingly taken over the literary academy, Moi notes that there is now a push for the return to ordinary language philosophy, which challenges the “theory project” that has dominated much of the humanities since the 1970s. In so doing it clears the ground for ways of thinking that are more attentive to particulars, to individual experience, more attuned to the ways we actually use language, more open to the questions thrown up by actual human lives, than the standard attempts to “do theory.” ⁽²⁰⁷⁾ Today, in the spirit of Murdoch’s deepening process, literary critics are beginning to question “the ease with which a certain style of reading has settled into the default option,” asking questions such as “[w]hy is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage” and, most importantly, “[w]hat are the costs of such ubiquitous criticality?” ⁽²⁰⁸⁾

Without doubt, cancel culture is just one of the myriad costs that our society is suffering from in the wake of this suspicious brand of postmodernist critique. Bred by radical postmodernist thinking, cancel culture is suspicious and critical of everything outside of itself. Although proclaiming to be humanly beneficent, like a horse with blinders on, neither structuralism nor cancel culture are truly concerned with real individuals and their complex and potentially informative stories. Rather than paying close attention to the diverse and comples backgrounds of individual people, structuralism imposes only the theory that it brings to the text and cancel culture follows suit by insisting on implementing its own set of social judgments. By mechanistically and coldly proceeding only to deconstruct actions as viewed within its limited set of ideologies, structuralism and cancel culture both purvey an ego-driven need to be right over any desire to do good. In this sense, Derrida can be viewed as the ultimate charismatic enchanter of literary theory, and all the academics who are charmingly drawn in and follow in his tradition are the enchanted Morgans and Ruperts of the real world.

Whereas literary theorists such as Moi, Felski, Fine, and others are today seriously taking notice of the deleterious effects of deconstruction and the hermeneutics of suspicion and, thus, are advocating a new form of “postcritique,” Murdoch’s philosophy actually predicted this refreshing contemporary trend in various ways, the most important of which for examining cancel culture is the observation that “she argues that theory’s specialized jargon and counterintuitive ethos distance critics from ordinary language and common worlds,” maintaining that “at worst, this distance leads critics to view, as Elizabeth Anker and Felski argue, ‘the thoughts and actions of ordinary social actors as insufficiently self-aware or critical.’” ⁽²⁰⁹⁾

While structuralism flattens out and reduces authors and their novels within solitary forms of suspicious theorization—teaching us to ignore the full picture of its creation and surface meaning—cancel culture is even more invidious because it freezes the actions of real, contingent, opaque, and complex persons in time and, like the enchanter figures, rigidly insists upon its own incomplete picture of the situation and of the entire cancelled person. In this sense, both structuralism and cancel culture can be viewed as forms of fantasy, which Murdoch believed merely console us with simple obtuse facts and further remove us from goodness and morality, as opposed to imagination, which she heralded as the correct process to achieve a proper sense of reality and enable moral growth.

Although Murdoch was not a Christian and she did not often discuss politics in either her philosophy or her fiction, her writings are nonetheless peppered with her concerns regarding the effects of structuralism on both religion and government. In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she warns us to beware of those “gleeful prophets” of structuralism “who lack energy to defend or re-examine the old idea of the self, the truth-seeking individual person, as a moral and spiritual centre”:

Structuralism and Marxist-structuralism . . . see here the end of the old (Greek, Cartesian, bourgeois, etc.) metaphysical era as also the end of the God era. The Christian God supports, by his attention, the reality of the solidary individual, of whom Christ is the guarantor, ideal image or alter ego. Modern totalitarian tyrants, rightly from their point of view, have wanted to destroy religion entirely. ⁽²¹⁰⁾

While Murdoch understood the desire of humanists to move past and even cast aside the sheer acts of evil witnessed in the twentieth century and, in the aftermath of the war, to focus optimistically on modern man “as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world,” ⁽²¹¹⁾ she was gravely concerned about the modern (and dry) propensity to forget that, regardless of whether we are religious, we are all invariably tinged with original sin.

The loss of the transcendent, in other words, has diminished our capacity to acknowledge the imperfect state of our humanity and because it replaced God with man as the ultimate judge, today we value cold facts, harsh judgment, and our own rightness over attention and love towards others. For example, with respect to Murdoch’s morally flawed characters as analyzed in this article, it is objectively true that: (1) Rosa actually engaged in the turbid sexual acts depicted in Calvin’s photo; (2) Simon had a promiscuous youth and told lies to his husband; and (3) Dora’s, Rupert’s, and Morgan’s egoistic acts led them to deceive their spouses and others and engage in dangerously selfish fantasies.

From the ubiquitous lens of the hermeneutics of suspicion in the literary academy, it is also a fact that several of the authors who have written the most prolific and sublime works that have made up our canon of great literature have nonetheless engaged in immoral and inhumane behaviors, as have those whose lives, opacities, and backgrounds have been reduced and ignored by the phenomenon of cancel culture by both the cancellers and cancelled. These contemporary realities reflect Murdoch’s picture of modern evil that has persisted and grown since she observed it and warned us against the risks of not attending to it in Against Dryness.

In A Catholic Modernity? Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor similarly asserts that “the denial of transcendence can put the most valuable gains of modernity in danger.” ⁽²¹²⁾ Like Murdoch, he warns against maintaining an overly optimistic picture of the modern world that safely locates “all evil outside of us” because it leads to motivations of justice over those of benevolence. ⁽²¹³⁾ Taylor observes that modern secular humanism “is tempted to congratulate itself” for elevating humanity by “replacing the low and demeaning picture of human beings as depraved, inveterate sinners [and] in articulating the potential of human beings for goodness and greatness.” ⁽²¹⁴⁾ However, Taylor notes the “tragic irony” that persists within this model: “the higher the sense of potential, the more grievously real people fall short, and the more severe the turn-around will be which is inspired by the disappointment.” ⁽²¹⁵⁾

Also like Murdoch, who was concerned about our overly optimistic sense of freedom gained by having jettisoned our pre-modern adherence to the spiritual and the transcendent, Taylor understands that

A lofty humanism posits high standards of self-worth, and a magnificent goal to strive towards. It inspires enterprises of great moment. But by this very token it encourages force, despotism, tutelage, ultimately contempt, and a certain ruthlessness is shaping refractory human material . . . Wherever action for high ideals is not tempered, controlled, ultimately engulfed in an unconditional love of the beneficiaries, this ugly dialectic risks repeating itself. ⁽²¹⁶⁾

Within this modern pattern in which we view ourselves good and “evil proves its exteriority to us,” our indignation and superiority blind us to “the havoc we wreak around us” and we are thus doomed to administer justice rather than benevolence. ⁽²¹⁷⁾

Instead of blithely casting the stone at the actions of the evil other and viewing ourselves as saints, Jordan B. Peterson when speaking of the atrocities committed in the twentieth century often and soberly reminds us that it was through the fault of people just like us that the Nazi and Soviet systems arose. ⁽²¹⁸⁾ He opines that the best pathway forward is for each person to be willing to take responsibility for the malevolence in their own heart that ultimately manifests within totalitarian and communist movements. ⁽²¹⁹⁾ Indeed, if there is anything that post-war authors such as Murdoch and Arendt have contributed to our modern understanding of good versus evil, it is that they cannot be neatly and comfortably separable, nor can one exist to the absolute exclusion of the other, at any given point in time or within any single person.

In his work that exposed the world to the horrors of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin’s communistic regime, The Gulag Archipelago, Russian philosopher and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn comments on the attempt to dichotomize good and evil as he describes the horrific acts of his captors in the Gulag concentration camp where was sentenced to eight years of hard labor for his private criticisms of Stalin and communism:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various stages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn’t change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil. ⁽²²⁰⁾

As Taylor also ironically notes, while we fight against the injustices of our time, in this battle toward goodness we are moved by a flaming indignation against wicked acts which, in itself, “comes to be fueled by hatred for those who support and convive with these injustices; and this in turn is fed by our sense of superiority that we are not like these instruments and accomplices of evil.” ⁽²²¹⁾ While Taylor recognizes that within this modern pattern of morality, we may start “with the most exquisite sense of wrong, the greatest passion for justice and equality and peace,” he astutely observes that we “become centers of hatred, generators of new modes of injustice on a greater scale.” ⁽²²²⁾

By confidently and arrogantly categorizing ‘good versus evil’ as ‘us versus them,’ the hermeneutics of suspicion and cancel culture are only two of these new modes of injustice that threaten to overtake our sense of goodness and love. It is within the confines of our modern conundrum of secular humanism that anti-humanist structuralist precepts are bred, and if left unchecked, they inevitably grow into dangerously solipsistic, resentment-based, and ideological movements like the hermeneutics of suspicion and cancel culture.

It is also from these convictions that Murdoch’s writings delicately discern the differences between love and forgiveness on the one hand versus justice and rightness on the other. At the end of Defeat, Julius is the only character who is nonplussed by the tragedy of Rupert’s death and the effect it has on the other characters, even proudly congratulating himself for the diabolical godgames that he played upon the other characters. In an attempt to justify the didactically inspired acts that he obtusely fails to perceive as immoral, Julius asks Tallis, “You concede that I am an instrument of justice?” to which Tallis responds only with a smile. ⁽²²³⁾ Conradi interprets Tallis’s response to mean that he “concurs in part with Julius’s diagnosis of human ills, but not with the pleasure Julius derives from showing that it is so.” ⁽²²⁴⁾ In this parting scene in Defeat pitting the evil enchanter against the saint, Murdoch quietly proclaims that she wants us to be instruments of love, not instruments of justice.

In conclusion, I assert that if we continue insisting on literary dryness (and its progeny, cancel culture) in law, literature, and in life, we risk at our peril the ability to attend to the whole person, resulting in our loss of the “deepening of concepts [in which] moral progress takes place.” ⁽²²⁵⁾ Contrarily, by willingly observing the realities of individual human beings and their unique situations within a loving and attention-oriented framework that defies a dichotomous choice between consolation and condemnation, we can strive towards Murdoch’s goal of achieving “a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons.” ⁽²²⁶⁾ It is by applying Murdoch’s historically practical and educative lessons for combating evil and achieving a moral sense of goodness that her metaphysical philosophy and fiction can help inform our own approach to today’s cancel culture-laden society.