How Would Philip K. Dick Have Responded to “Cancel Culture?”

I’ve been re-reading Lawrence Sutin’s edited volume, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings (1996) and came across some passages that prompted me to wonder how Dick would have responded to today’s culture wars, especially what has been called “cancel culture.”  

In Sutin’s volume, one of the most interesting sections discusses how Dick viewed the Nazi legacy in the early 1960s – the time that he wrote The Man in the High Castle.  Notably enough, Dick cited comments by the famed German pacifist (and co-founder of The Society for the Prevention of World War III), Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster about there being multiple “Germanies” and whether Nazism was “the absolute culmination, the logical fulfillment, of all that is German.” 

Dick went on to argue that Germans were both responsible for, and the victims of, Nazism.  While he noted that Germans voted for Hitler and displayed a “subrational...psychological” hatred of Jews, he also pointed out that Germans were also the first inmates in Nazi concentration camps.   

Dick added that while Jews were obvious victims of the Nazis, they had their share of “nationalist fanatics” in Israel – for example, the person who broke a “Jewish violinist's hand [with]...a lead pipe because that violinist dared to play a Richard Strauss piece in concert in Israel.”  (This was a reference to Jascha Heifetz being attacked in 1953). For Dick, the fact that “many Jews today won't ride in a VW, and some won't even listen to the music of Beethoven” was just “as neurotic and "sick" as...the nineteenth-century ideologies of blood, race, and land being taught by...Germans.” 

These comments show how Dick embraced a universalized understanding of Nazism’s significance in the 1960s -- one that showed how all people, not just Germans, were susceptible to hateful behavior. 

As he noted: 

“We can no more hold a people responsible than we can hold any other mythical, semantic, nonactual entity responsible; German1 is not German2 and German2 is not German3, and so forth. Just as, in this country, you and I did not bomb those little Negro schoolchildren in that church Sunday school. . . you know goddamn well we did not, and if we, you and I, could catch the white bastards -- or rather just plain bastards -- who did it, we would work just as much and quick vengeance on them as any Negro mob would or could.)  Dick then went on to assert his most important point – that only individuals, not groups, should be judged for their behavior. 

As he put it (in terms that would resonate today): 

“I am not a ‘white man.’ My German friends are not ‘Germans,’ nor my Jewish friends ‘Jews.’ I am a nominalist. To me, there are only individual entities, not group entities such as race, blood, people, etc. For example, I am an Anglo-Catholic; yet my views differ from those of my vicar, and his do -- enormously -- from the bishop of the diocese -- whose views I happen to agree with, Bishop Pike. And so forth.  

“I will not walk out of a room when a German enters any more than I would have walked out of a room when a Jew entered. Nor will I allow myself to be a "gentile" -- i.e., a member of a race -- to my Jewish friends. If they don't like me, let them hit me, as an individual, one right in the eye; let's see them hit a race -- as the Nazis tried to do -- one right in the eye. It won't work; the Nazis failed: Israel exists, and Jews exist. And -- let us face it: Germany exists. Let's live in the present and for the future, not dwelling neurotically on the outrages of the past. Ludwig von Beethoven did not light the fires at Dachau. Leonard Bernstein did not hit that Jewish violinist on the hand with a piece of lead pipe. Okay? And salve, as the Romans used to say. Or, as we Anglo-Catholics say, may the peace and love of God be with you. Germans included. And, please, Jews, too.” 

These comments, especially Dick’s observation that he was a nominalist -- which is to say, someone who philosophically believes that reality is made up of specific physical particularities, like individual human beings, rather than universal, abstract concepts or ideal types, such as “society” -- suggest to me that Dick would have hated the broad-based generalizations that are often embraced by certain advocates of “cancel culture.”   

Whether or not such a thing actually exists as an organized phenomenon (and I leave it to others to litigate how the concept has been weaponized), there is little doubt that certain elements of the left and right (though not necessarily in equal measure) engage in sweeping generalizations about various groups.  On the left we often hear: “all men are...,” “all white men are...,” and “all of American history is....”  On the right we often hear:  “all liberals are...,” “all socialists are...,” “all Democrats are....”  These sweeping claims often provide the basis for subsequently “cancelling” individual members of such groups for their "innate" sins. 

To be sure, Dick was comparing apples and oranges when he likened the hatred of Nazi-era Germans towards “the Jews” to the behavior of postwar Jews who boycotted VWs or Strauss compositions as “German.”  But insofar as the latter gestures were early examples of what today is called “cancel culture,” Dick would likely have opposed its present-day versions. 

Given this stance, Dick may well have been a target for “cancellation” himself.  This is especially true given his penchant for embracing more than a few loopy views.  I’d like to think he would have resisted drinking the QAnon Kool-Aid, but his later paranoia and flirtation with conspiracy theories makes me unsure. 

Perhaps some work of fan fiction has already explored this premise....