you'd change your mind if you were worried about getting a job or losing one. also, corporations are heavily influenced by government and vice versa imo. power is power
Many people have financial independence because of things like rich parents, and as a hobby to stay busy spend their time online harassing people who aren't independently wealthy out of their jobs.
This isn't surprising. I knew rich kids in high school who did the same sort of asymmetric warfare on the not-as-wealth kids as a power play. I have two examples of them deliberately trying to cause car crashes (no collision or injuries occurred, thankfully) because their parents could easily afford new cars while a car crash would be economically devastating to the other kid.
So, like I said, it's not surprising to see people still doing it.
It *is* surprising to see someone think that this is a benevolent state of affairs.
This does actually seem to point to a fairly important difference between what most people regard as acceptable boycotts and unacceptable cancellation - boycotts are generally an attempt to change or influence ongoing behavior by an organization. The success criteria, such as it is, is the behavior changing, not e.g. specific named executives being fired (though I'm sure among all the boycotters you'll find some calling for that too). Cancellation seems to not care that some tweets you made 10 years ago aren't representative of your current views or behavior in either a personal or professional capacity; it's not calling for a change in your behavior at all. It's calling for you to be fired (or deplatformed, or whatever). Even in those cases where it's triggered by new/ongoing behavior, the goal never seems to be to "change the behavior" per se.
Yeah, the goal of cancelling is to pick a random example and publicly destroy them "pour encourager les autres". To be an effective deterrent, either the chance of getting caught must be very high, or the punishment must be grossly disproportionate to the crime, and cancellation is all about the latter.
It follows that:
a) Once you've been picked for cancellation, nothing you say or do can stop it anymore. That would defeat the purpose: we don't want people to think that they can engage in the bad behavior for a while and then just repent at the last moment.
b) The people chosen for cancellation won't necessarily be the most egregrious examples. You don't want to draw a bright line and tell people that they are safe as long as they don't cross that line; you want them to be afraid of even coming within a mile of the line, and to be at least a little bit nervous even when they are nowhere near it.
One of the things that came out of the discussion after the release of the Harper's Letter, was that for a bunch of people who signed it, and people who supported it, it turned out that there was a C as well, and is actually one of the big concerns, and that's not being even a mile of that bright line, and being thrown over it anyway. Having your ideas misrepresented or just straight-up lied about and then being cancelled based on that.
I think that one thing that's often missed is that being "Liberal" on these issues is often seen as being just as bad as being "Conservative". Of course that's not how it's framed....that framing would tear down the entire structure, but that's how it's coming across. Personally, I see the issue as one of kayfabe, where the Progressives are seen as the babyfaces, even if they're annoyingly so sometimes, and everybody else is the heel. If that dynamic gets broken, if it could be acknowledged that sometimes Progressives ARE the heels...either dealing with their own forms of racism/sexism/etc. or have different, more self-serving motives at play, then we can get some reciprocity into the system, which I think will set a more healthy set of norms.
That leads me to an empirical hypothesis: there is a pretty high correlation between how cogent a comment is and whether it includes the phrase ""pour encourager les autres."
I wouldn't consider this the most important difference that makes boycotting OK in some situations: if they just threatened to fire someone unless he shuts up, we'd still consider that wrong. To me, the line is that I oppose punishing people over speech, specifically where the person isn't employed for his opinions (as an opinion journalist or a politician is), and where the speech in question is off the job, or at a workplace where the expression of other political opinions is generally accepted.
This is a bit of a motte and bailey (or perhaps a weakman, depending on which side you're on), because "cancel culture" has been used to describe basically any form of attack on the right wing. Digging up old tweets to get someone fired? Cancel culture. Calling to vote out a senator in November? Cancel culture. Saying that a book is problematic without in any way suggesting that people should be fired for writing or publishing it? Cancel culture. Disqualifying a horse from the Kentucky Derby? Cancel culture.
(Calling for NFL players to get fired if they kneel during the anthem? Not cancel culture, apparently.)
It's easy to find examples of cancel culture gone too far, but it's also easy to find examples of "any speech I don't like is cancel culture."
There's a recent example of a Republican congressman recently whining about being cancelled in his book about being cancelled (Hawley I think?). What was funny was his (paraphrase) - "Go get my book about being cancelled, which they don't want you to read, available on Amazon Prime!"
Puritans were vastly fertile. 17th Century Waltham, MA had a total fertility rate of 9 per woman according to Harvard economic historian David Landes, one of the highest figures in history. There are a huge number of descendants of the Puritans spread across the northern half of the United States today.
A bunch of weird unstable repressive cult members, "super isolated" sounds like a few online communities I've had the misfortune of encountering. Just sayin'....
Couple of things. There is a difference between puritans and pilgrims. The pilgrims are the ones that sailed to America initially (in 1620). They left England (technically Holland) in pursuit of religious freedom. You have to respect that.
The Puritans came to America later on. They were called the "puritans" because they tried to stay in England and purify the state church. That didn't work, so they eventually headed to America as it started to become more settled.
They left England in pursuit of religious freedom, and found it in Holland. They left Holland, in part, because they realized that religious freedom meant their kids might join the wrong church.
The whole Reformation was mostly like that: Breaking away from an oppressive orthodoxy so that you could start your own, different oppressive orthodoxy.
The Puritans opposed a proposal of religious freedom in England, because that would mean the freedom to be Catholic. In that case, they would rather not have it at all.
> They left England (technically Holland) in pursuit of religious freedom. You have to respect that.
But not to respect it too much if "religious freedom" just meant "freedom for our kooky brand of religion and for building intolerable cities based on our creed".
I've seen arguments that Social Justice is a religion-- irritable comments from Jews that it's just Original Sin, and an extended analysis from John McWhorter that Social Justice is a religion, but it's worth seeing an analysis of *which* religion is being replayed,.
The argument is that it's faith-based Protestantism, which I think (possibly after it's over-simplified from its more sophisticated versions) is the essential thing is to have the right mental states and to prove them by one's public behavior.
The mental state standard can take a surprising variety of forms-- grim, misery-inducing religion, New Thought (the mind creates reality, if anything goes wrong in your life, it's because you were thinking wrong), and now Social Justice, where the tiniest vestige of possible racism must be eliminated.
I can't make sense of the claim in the article that Social Justice is nativist.
Thank you for sharing this. I was wondering why self-described "leftists" would ally themselves with religious conservatives (or would that be religious reactionaries ?). Now it makes perfect sense !
This is terrifying. I might need to prepare for emigration as an option...
McWhorter's comments elsewhere on his blog about his choice of name for the book were disappointing. Punching up, punching down, it's less bad to be awful to someone if they don't have enough melanin. I thought the point of learning from the 60s and before was that it was the mindset that was the awful thing, not the choice of target. But alas, a targetist our John is.
I'm not particularly convinced, however this part :
"scientifically speaking, “race” is a fiction. It is a made-up category derived from 19th-century pseudoscience, which has been discredited by pretty much the whole of the 20th-century biological sciences—so the sooner we stop reifying it, the better."
I was tempted to answer "Amen to that !", which, considering this (Jewish ?) source and John McWhorter's blogbook would be doubly ironic !
I came to the same conclusion a few weeks ago, better late than never I guess :
At the core this is about different cultures, or as the anthropologists call them, ethnic groups. See how the term "racism" is often improperly used for group hatreds which AFAIK (?) are genetically very similar, like Irish and English (?) or (Sephardi-only ?) Jews and Arabs (both "Semites" ?)
We now know that languages spread in a way quite different from genes, and so does culture in general (memes).
(Note that the common meaning of the term ethnicity seems to have been corrupted into a synonym for "race" by racists in the mid-20th century, when the term "race" itself became unfashionable.)
A tribe is an ethnic group that is smaller than Dunbar's number.
A Nation is an ethnic group which manages to keep together thanks to (post)modern inventions like the printing press and mandatory schooling, which allows millions to share the same symbols and values.
(The German style of nationalism went deep into essentialism, and combined with the (misuse of the) new science of biology and the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles has spawned Nazism.)
An Empire is yet another kind of political entity (a much older one than a Nation), under which there are "non-core" ethnic groups that are more or less persecuted, more or less free to live their separate lives (as long as they pay taxes).
> "scientifically speaking, “race” is a fiction. It is a made-up category derived from 19th-century pseudoscience, which has been discredited by pretty much the whole of the 20th-century biological sciences—so the sooner we stop reifying it, the better."
"Country" is also a fiction. A person's country still has plenty of real associations with their health, wealth, life span, education, and more. Should we stop trying to analyze different population outcomes according to the country? Of course not, and I don't see why "race" would be any different.
Certainly race isn't very precise or directly causal, but race-based research has its place, particularly when you don't have the funds for more precise data gathering to tease out ethnicities or other factors that go into "race".
The point is, "better fiction" depends on what you're measuring and the resource cost to achieve a certain precision (time, money, etc.). You just can't make a universal claim like "nation is a better fiction than country", because other factors matter.
Finally, whether race goes into ethnicity or vice versa is a semantic game on the one hand. You could define the Scandinavian ethnicity by starting with the set of white people intersected with the the subset of people from a certain geographic area intersected with... Or, you could define the "white race" as the union of Scandinavians and Anglo-saxons and ...
Only one of these seems truly well-defined though. As you yourself have asserted, race is a poorly defined pseudoscientific category, where ethnicity actually has more precise scientific meaning. I don't see how ethnicity can be scientific if it depends upon a vague and unscientific clause. It simply must be the other way around, ie. pseudoscientific terms must start with the scientific basis and add bullshit, you don't start with bullshit and remove anything unscientific.
>If we zoom out a little, we find that most of human history involved enforced ideological conformity, censorship, and repression. Maybe the most available reference point for this sort of thing is the US in the 1950s. There were certain ideas everyone knew were off limits - atheism, communism, marijuana legalization, gay rights. If you supported those things, you might not go to jail, but you'd be excluded from most good careers and most of polite society. This system was very stable - everyone knew the limits, and people generally didn't push against them unless they really wanted to and knew what they were getting into.
No. In reality, communism was 100% cool among cool elites and the "Red Scare" was a short-lived reactionary populist movement among uncool peasants.
IIRC there was terrible oppression in Hollywood that made some communist writers write under assumed names (while getting the same checks) - and as I understand pretty much everybody knew that, but pretended those people are terribly oppressed.
Exactly. Scott -- you have a reasonable grasp of the present, but your past is "a piece of cardboard you downloaded from the New Yorker", to borrow a phrase from Moldbug.
I’ve always liked SA’s blog, but his perspective is narrow both in time and in space. Often, spending some years abroad creates a wider perspective, but it seems Ireland was insufficiently foreign to make much of a difference for him. The recent review of the book about Erdogan was unusual, and writing another ten pieces like that would presumably do him a lot of good.
To be fair, he was in med school in Ireland, and med school kinda just sucks one's life force away for 4 years. I'm from NY and went to med school in Dallas and was hoping to use it as a way to gain real insight into Southern culture, but... nope.
But Scott already knew that (per test's comment) "communism was 100% cool among cool elites" -- see e.g. his 2015 book review of the autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge, "Chronicles of Wasted Time", in particular why Muggeridge's journalistic coverage of the Soviet Union was rejected by the progressive elites of his day: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/
The fashionability of Soviet Communism in the US was confined to the years from roughly the stock market crash of 1929 to the Truman administration turning decisively against Communists in the later 1940s. That's by no means an insignificant expanse of time, but not a huge one either.
But does 'Communism' refers to the soviet union in particular or the idea of communism in general.
It's not as if geopolitics didn't exist back when most all of europe were monarchies, if the United States was made a communist country in, say, 1930, Two powerful independent states will have rivalries even if they share modes/uses of power.
I bet there were social circles where communism was hella cool. just ase there are plenty of social circles where politically incorrect thought is still hella cool. but what we're talking about is the metasociety. commynusm wasnt cool at all in the meta society. if you went on television to talk about how great marx was you would find little applause.
I think part of my point is that "elite" is just a word people like OP throw around to mean something like "outgroup member". But the nice thing for my side is: however loosely OP wants to define "elite", there are just objectively a lot more non-communists than communists in that grouping.
That depends on your definition of "communist". Open communism became pretty rare after the Cold War began, but until enough information leaked through the Iron Curtain for people to realise how terrible Stalin had been (which would have been late 50s to 60s), intellectuals quite widely held communist sympathies (this was very helpful to Soviet intelligence services). This is, I think, what test is getting at (although I don't think it's a very good point to make to Scott - Scott is well-aware of this already, as can be seen in his review of Muggeridge's autobiography).
The problem is that almost by definition any names given in that category are subject to dispute. It's not like everyone gave a deathbed confession of communism.
The Communist Party USA was riding high from June 22, 1941 to roughly 1946, but then was neutered by the Truman Administration. For example, the Soviet spymaster in NYC, Rudolf Abel (portrayed in Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies"), looked like a genius to his bosses in the mid-1940s because the CPUSA kept funneling to him valuable traitors like the teenage Los Alamos A-bomb physicist Ted Hall. But by the 1950s, with the destruction of the CPUSA, treason had trickled to a halt and Abel devoted most of each day to his painting hobby before he was arrested and exchanged for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Power.
Depends on the definition of "elite". In the '50s and '60s, business elites were more culturally and politically influential than they are now, and were universally anti-communist (except Armand Hammer). Intellectual elites - authors, prominent scientists, etc. (frex Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead) were generally non-Communist but not many were explicitly anti-communist.
What you do to avoid bias in assessing hypotheses is you pick lists that other people chose for other purposes than your own. Ideally, you pick either lists that multiple experts worked on or multiple lists.
For example, I just now googled Most Influential Books of the 1950s and the first choice offered by Google is this list by somebody named Emily Temple:
One list by one person isn't enough, but it's a start. Here are her ten authors of the most influential novels of the 1950s: J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Leon Uris, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ayn Rand, Chinua Achebe (non-American).
I could argue with those choices, but they aren't at all bad, suggesting Ms. Temple's list isn't contrived.
And here are her runners-up:
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950), Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950), C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (first English translation, 1951), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1951), Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951), Isaac Asimov, the Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953), Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (first English translation, 1952), Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952), Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952), Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952), Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952), John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), Kurt Vonnegut, Piano Player (1952), E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952), Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953), James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953), Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953), Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953), William S. Burroughs, Junky (1953), Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953), J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (1953), Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954), William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (1954), Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954), Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (1955), Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955), The Guinness Book of Records (1955), Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (first English translation 1955), Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), John Ashbery, Some Trees (1956), Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (1956), Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956), Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956), John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (1957), Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Towards Freedom (1957), Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957), Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957), Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957), Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (first English translation 1958), Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958), Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958), Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (first English translation, 1958), Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1958), Robert Bloch, Psycho (1959), Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959), Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959), Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959), Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (1959), D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (unexpurgated U.S. version released 1959)
I suspect this guy leans slightly right (he's diligent about finding conservative authors of high merit, such as Barbara Pym), but it's not a bad list.
On his list, Hemingway sided with the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War. Arthur Miller belonged to a Communist Front in the late 1930s, as did John Steinbeck (but he offered his services to the CIA in 1952), and Allen Ginsberg's mother was a Communist. Lorraine Hansberry had been a Communist. I presume from reading "Invisible Man" that Ralph Ellison had once been influenced by the Communist Party as a young man, but his "Invisible Man" is clearly against the Party. James Baldwin had had a flirtation with the Communist Party when young. The Irishman Samuel Becket was a hero of the French Resistance, which was heavily Communist, but I don't see much evidence that that refractory personality submitted to the Party. Graham Greene was a pro-Third World anti-American Catholic, but I don't think he was ever Communist.
I could go on testing my impressions of each author, but my impression of the most influential books of the 1950s is that the Communist Party was more or less defeated in the U.S. among the most influential writers.
I just read the new (and already canceled!) biography of novelist Philip Roth, who was born in 1933 and won the National Book Award for "Goodbye, Columbus" at the end of the 1950s. Roth was a liberal Jewish Democrat, very pro-civil rights and anti-Vietnam War, but as far as I can tell he despised the Soviet Union from the later 1940s onward, and did a lot to publicize Eastern European dissident writers like Milan Kundera in the 1970s.
Perhaps if Roth had been born in 1913, he'd have been a Communist in 1938. Or, if a 1913-born Roth, a naturally skeptical personality, had been anti-Communist in the 1930s, he would have had his career hindered by Communist power in the American cultural sphere.
But after the Red Scare of 1947-1954, the power of Communists in America to hinder the careers of non-Communists had been shattered, so Philip Roth's rise in the second half of the 1950s was spectacular.
One interesting, albeit global, perspective is that Communism is still alive and strong in several places, and not just the repressive variety. For instance, Kerala, a state of 35 million people in India, just re-elected the Communist Party for a consecutive term. Fully fleshed out here -
A lot of the off-limits ideas were also circumscribed in time and space, and long as there is free movement of ideas across borders the idea that it's a sort of equilibrium is an assertion also.
Interesting, but what's described in that article sounds more like socialism supported by foreign worker remittances than communism. I know that's treading into no-true scotsman territory, but from the article it didn't sound like capitalism/private enterprise wasn't allowed, it's just difficult due to strong unionization.
They're called the Communist Party of India (Marxists), and definitely have very strong affiliations to the original roots, so think there's a bit of that no true Scotsman there. Several of my family are staunch Leninists or Marxists etc, and original flavour too. However because the party were never the sole power (unlike West Bengal which had a 30yr rule and looks as you'd imagine) and had to compete democratically to gain votes, the ultimate impact is more measured.
Either the timing is an amazing coincidence, or someone saw this link and shared it on the subreddit. I found this comment particularly interesting, which touches on a few factors separate from the politics:
The southern Indian state of Kerala is far leftist while its neighboring state of Karnataka that includes the tech capital of Bangalore is enthusiastically capitalist. Both are doing better, in their different ways, than northern states like Uttar Pradesh. India seems to benefit from its federalism that allows its states, which are the size of typical European countries, to try different policies that suit the local populations.
Yeah, but there were cases like Irving Peress of ordinary people having their lives wrecked for supporting Communism, or ordinary people being fired for being gay (e.g. Frank Kameny). And you don't need many cases like that to create a climate of fear.
It's a similar dynamic today where some people can making a living as anti-SJW personalities, but Kieran Bhattacharya points out a contradiction at a diversity workshop and is kicked out of medical school. A few people can survive as counterculture figures but ordinary middle class people know there are certain views they can't espouse if they want to remain ordinary middle class people.
Yeah...try to find a Hollywood movie from the 1940s and 50s that portrays capitalism positively in any way. They're all Old Man Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" - irredeemable, with no good qualities whatsoever. Turns out, a lot of those Hollywood people really were communists, or at least communist-adjacent.
>It also reminded me of an old story we tell in Central Europe of a Czech professor who returned to Prague in the 1970s after two years in the Netherlands because – as he said – ‘there were way too many Communists over there. At least in Prague, I won’t have to meet any’.
> They're all Old Man Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" - irredeemable, with no good qualities whatsoever.
George Bailey was also a capitalist. "It's a Wonderful Life" may be the most pro-banking movie ever written. It's about how banks can build communities by helping people own homes.
Frank Capra is usually assumed to have been a New Deal Democrat, but he was actually an anti-FDR Republican, as he makes clear in his autobiography "Name Above the Title."
"Sabrina" was directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, who held the record for most Oscar nominations in above the line jobs until the not all that dissimilar Woody Allen bested him.
My impression is that Wilder, a Jewish refugee from Vienna and Berlin, was a pro-American anti-Communist. One of his earlier American credits was 1939's "Ninotchka," in which Greta Garbo plays a stern Soviet commissar sent to reform the Paris embassy, where the diplomats have been corrupted by French decadence. The hapless diplomats ask her upon her arrival, "How are things in Moscow?"
She answers, "Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians."
I don't know for sure that Wilder wrote that line (he was a collaborator rather than an auteur), but it sure sounds like him.
The Old Hollywood featured more political diversity than the New Hollywood. For example, the 1939 movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" starred Jimmy Stewart, was directed by Frank Capra, and Columbia Pictures was run by Harry Cohn: all Republicans. It was written by Sidney Buchman, a Stalinist Communist.
Nowadays, all four roles would be filled by Democrats.
Partisan diversity isn't ideological diversity. 1950s Republicans could be liberals or occasionally conservatives. 1950s Democrats could be liberals or conservatives or social democrats. 2020s Republicans can only be conservatives while 2020s Democrats can be liberals or social democrats.
Herman Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman in 2020's "Mank," who sobered up to write the screenplay for 1941's "Citizen Kane," was a Jewish-American antiwar isolationist supporter of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin. He'd fought in WWI and was an admirer of German culture, so he didn't want to do it all over again. (But after Pearl Harbor he tried to re-enlist in the Marines, although he was turned down for being a practically moribund middle-aged alcoholic.)
Pauline Kael's famous "New Yorker" essay about Mankiewicz's sizable role in "Citizen Kane" laments the rise of unfunny leftist political correctness among screenwriters during WWII in contrast to the hilarious dialogue written by drunken reprobates like Mankiewicz in the early talkies era.
Apart from being rejected by both of America's major political parties, all it's business class, conservative intellectuals like Buckley, liberal intellectuals like Schlessinger, former fellow travelers like FDR vice-president Henry Wallace (who switched from sympathetic to the Soviets to cold warrior after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia) and even arguably some anti-Soviet socialists like Chomsky (depending on what you count as "communism"), and all the major trade union leaders, yes the elite all thought communism was great.
The Red Scare was run by a Senator, and was famously influential within Hollywood. No doubt it was *most* popular in rural areas (right-wing idea less popular in cities shock!), but the idea that it had no power any else is bullshit.
lol explain the nightmarish statutes and kafkaesque trials with professional government witnesses. today's libs would drool over the prospect of hunting MAGA the same way. however, you can't mount this repression with mere "peasant" buy-in.
The whole 50s analogy is a pretty bad one. Atheism and gay rights were things that continued to be taboo as they had been for centuries upon centuries. Communism was complicated as you mention. And marijuana was not widely available and not of interest to most people. So none of these things has much in common with now, when woke elites attempt to enforce brand new orthodoxies at variance with what millions of people believe, concerning every fundamental aspect of our society.
"Get in a discussion with a real Defund The Police supporter you know and like, and see if one of you can change the other one's mind. Sign a petition or something. Campaign for a politician whose policies you agree with. Just do anything, anything at all, other than tweet."
Hey Scott, I've been pointing out your extremely obvious mistakes regarding the basics of Marxist theory for a long time. Yet you've never acknowledged them or fixed any of your mistakes. Why is that?
I second the proposal, as long as @marxbro1917 spends at least a few blog posts on outlining his views in plain English, without too much political science jargon -- for those of us like myself, who are not well-versed in political science or history.
I would love this and I think SA would too, as would everyone else in the rationalist community. I don't know a thing about Marxism except that the labor theory of value has some issues and would love to be tutelaged on that.
The Revolutions podcast on the Russian revolution spends quite a few episodes on the history of Marxisim. Enlightening as well as entertaining. It is not over yet (think the year is 1912) so I am very excited to learn how it ends.
Good call. If they apparently don't want to see your comments, uh, "tutelaging" them here (as Belisarius Cawl so aptly puts it), why would they then "love" and join an entire Substack (and perhaps by "join" these fellows mean "actually pay for", even) by you?
Now, if Scott Alexander is (apparently) incapable of discussing things rationally and fixing his mistakes, by what process do we expect other people to do the same?
No, I'm making the point that "discussions" do very little when the person having the discussions is irrational and not prepared to have any sort of long-form discussion of the facts. It's hard to see how twitter is the culprit here ; Scott Alexander often writes 1000s of words and still gets the basics wrong. I don't think word count is the problem.
Well, in this case I would say a rational person would correct their mistakes. I have pointed out many times to Scott his incorrect takes on Marxism; yet I never see a correction. I have often merely asked him for a citation so that I at least know where he's getting his incorrect ideas from - but he doesn't even engage with these posts.
Now I think there's a very good point to be made about what is the Rational thing to do when people are paying you to hear a particular point of view. Is it rational to abandon the opinions that you were getting paid for? I dislike a lot of things about my job, but I still do them because I know that I can just coast and not make a fuss and continue to get paid. Is this Scott's position and why he is unable to enter into discussions with leftists about the basics of Marx? Perhaps. It's one possible answer I think.
I'm still not clear on your working definition of rational in this context. It sounds like at least part of what you're saying is that rationality is related to making decisions that are aligned with your goals. Is that a fair interpretation?
I think there are multiple aspects to Rationality that often clash with each other. Is a person pursuing an objective truth, or is a person pursuing a personal gain. These are two rationalities than can come into conflict.
Marxbro, have you considered the possibility that you and Scott simply have different interpretations of Marxism? If so, this might explain why he does not "correct his mistakes", because he does not believe they are mistakes.
Perhaps instead of asking someone you disagree with to "correct his mistakes", it would be more productive to ask yourself "how might someone make this interpretation of Marxism I disagree with?"
Another fruitful way to think about this is, how certain are you that your interpretation is correct? if your interpretation were wrong in some way (and I am not saying it is), how would you find out? What evidence would you need to see?
it would be more productive to ask yourself "how might someone make this interpretation of Marxism I disagree with?"
Someone could make this interpretation of Marxism if they were just listening to conservatives regarding Marx and not really reading the text charitably.
Marxbro is annoying, but I would generally trust an obsessive Marxist more than a Marx-hostile American libertarian on the topic of what Marx actually said. One of them is likely to have read a lot more Marx after all, and whilst the Marxist is no doubt biased so if the libertarian!
You mentioned in our last exchange that the reason you took Marx seriously was because of his prophesies about national communist revolutions. Could you give me a citation for where Marx predicts the occurrence of these as opposed to an international revolution after capitalism divides the globe into two classes of workers v. capitalists?
I thought I already replied to you on this? Maybe the comment got lost somehow, substack commenting I find a little clunky. Marx talks about the potential for national revolutions in some of his most famous works, including in the prefaces to the Communist Manifesto;
"But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
In general Scott rarely provides citations for his statements regarding Marx and never engages with any of my criticisms. So all these lamentations about twitter and the inability to have a discussion ring hollow. I'm right here and I'm willing to have a discussion about this. Why isn't Scott able to correct his own mistaken thinking?
It is quite possible that he is not persuaded by your comments.
In any case, I think it might be a good idea for you to write a summary of what Marxism mean -- or maybe even marxbro1917-ism, if your vision differs substantially from Marx's original. Then, in a subsequent post, you could say, "as you can see, I believe X, and I have supplied solid evidence for X, and yet Scott persists in saying not-X, so he's wrong". Right now, it's hard for me to follow your objections, because I am missing a lot of context.
You are also fighting an uphill battle, because the poster children for Marxism are places like USSR/Maoist China/North Korea. You may argue that it is unfair or that they are doing Marxism wrong, but when you mention Marxism, that's what pops into people's heads. Again, writing an explanatory post might help with that.
I'm unsure how he wouldn't be persuaded by the comments about "completely malleable". I laid it out as simply as possible. I'd prefer if people read my really basic comments about Marx's literal writings. If people can't read short posts, why should I expect them to read long ones?
Damn, I finally found a place where you argue for what you believe in instead of just asserting it, and I have to say it's pretty disappointing. Both of your concrete disagreements, at best, seem to be pointless, contentless semantic quibbles.
Marx says there is no essence to man inherent in every individual, only the social relations between people; Scott summarizes that as saying Marx did not believe in human nature. You say the summary is wrong because... I'm not sure? "Human nature" is different from "inherent essence of man" under the way you're using words, so Scott must have misunderstood Marx? Huh? Obviously Scott is using "human nature" to refer to the inborn essence present in ~every person on account of our genes, which sure does sound incompatible with "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual".
And then you complain about the "completely malleable" part, where I again can't even follow your argument. I'm going to expand on Scott's two words here in a way I think Scott would agree with, hopefully that will make it clearer. Marx says that social relations are all there is to the essence of man. Scott says that Marx believes humans are entirely shaped by their social relations, and that there's no unmalleable iron rod born within them that keeps its shape in the face of society. Sounds like a fair summary to me.
I legitimately can't even follow your arguments for why That's Not What Marx *Really* Meant. Disappointing.
"No such thing as human nature" is a very different thing to say compared to saying that the concept of a human nature is an ensemble. This is so obvious that I'm not really sure what you could misunderstand about it.
Having read your comment about how ‘Scott’s reading of Marx is wrong in plain English,’ the basic drift is that you come across as rude, dismissive, and not at all persuasive. Just addressing the latter, it doesn’t seem coherent that an ‘essence of man’ exists, but that that essence isn’t ‘inherent,’ because that implies an essence isn’t essential. You say that this is wrong in plain English, but when we boil your argument down into a very plain-spoken style it seems a good deal worse. I would think you would get a better response on this if you would engage more charitably and make positive claims of your own about how Marx should be interpreted that can be challenged textually. You also say that ‘if people can’t read my short comments, why should I write long ones?’ but that’s the crux of Scott’s objection to tweeting: an awful lot of short low-quality snipes doesn’t equal one quality long-form objection.
Marx argues that the essence of man is not an "abstraction inherent in each individual" but is "the ensemble of the social relations". Let's take religion for an example (since it was the example Marx was specifically talking about here).
One could say that it is in human nature to be religious (you could especially say that in the 19th century when Marx was writing). But what does that actually mean? Is there something inherent about religious sentiment that we all carry around inside us? Marx argues that, no there isn't, and we can see now it's actually pretty easy to find examples of people who aren't religious at all. Are we saying that "everything is completely malleable" here? I don't think so.
You refer to "many" basic posts. Can you provide a list of, say, top three or top five? If at all possible, I would appreciate if they said something other than "you're wrong", "Scott, you're still wrong," or "Scott, how could you possibly be this wrong?!" Examples from the old blog would be welcome in this list of top five -- you've been a commenter for years, there's no reason that your best posts should have happened since the replatforming.
I think it is notable that even when you quote the bit from Scott that you say is an awful error, Scott has caveated his interpretation of Marx with 'as far I as I can tell'. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Not to mention that the passage you're complaining about him misunderstanding is *super* opaque, so that if Marx is misunderstood it's kind of his own fault. He also admits that the interpretation he's giving is probably controversial!
I don't actually particularly trust Scott's ability to treat Marx, leftism, or (*especially*) feminism fairly, let alone the community's ability to do so, but I don't think the comment is the gotcha you think it is.
He says 'as far as I can tell' and then proceeds to quote two passages that do not prove his interpretation correct at all. So what was 'telling' here?
I do not think that either passage is particularly opaque and they're even clearer when read in context (something Scott should have done if he was serious about treating Marx charitably).
I'll also note that in all the arguments I've had about this, everyone always picks up on the 'ensemble' quote which is less opaque without the surrounding context. Nobody ever argues "economics establishes an alienated form of social intercourse as the essential, original, and natural form" quote because it very straightforwardly does not prove what Scott Alexander claims it proves. So why did he use it as evidence?
That is because you comments are of extremely low quality, to the point that I suspect that you are trolling. For example defending famines in North Korea as acceptable like you did recently.
I hope that you will be banned from commenting, you are one of reasons why I quite rarely read comments here.
To be clear: I know that it was very unkind, but I consider it as true and necessary.
Repeated baseless insults, presenting far leftists as utter idiots, tankiest takes that I have ever seen are something that makes discussion worse.
Please take your lame apologia for totalitarian states and failed ideologies that murdered millions, for no gain at all, to Facebook/Twitter/Stormfront.
This is not the kind of entertainment I come here for. If anything, I consider the temptation to respond to him at all to be a manifestation of the imp of the perverse, and having to fight against it (and recently, failing,) is a source of irritation practically every time I read the comments.
It's an interesting conundrum: at what point does a person cross the line between reasonable interlocutor you disagree with and fool who should be ignored? Most people would acknowledge that there are some opinions that simply don't merit a reasoned response, but we never think we're on the wrong side of that line.
I'd say that what defines a fool are not opinions by themselves, but rather the manner in which he asserts them and his general disregard for accepted norms of communication. Also, ignoring them isn't really an option in the long run if you want to preserve those norms.
No, your politics are fine. It's your habit of interjecting in incredibly aggressive ways that people (including me) have a problem with. "Your extremely obvious mistakes" and "this [your post] is a good example of [bad things]" are examples in this thread of phrasings that will not lead anywhere positive; I could provide a hundred more examples if you're genuinely unsure what I'm talking about.
Unlike TTT, I happen to think you post some genuinely interesting stuff from time to time. If you merely stop coming at everyone guns blazing and teeth bared, you'll be a great part of the community and I'll be happy to defend you.
Censorship perhaps, but not cancelling. Cancelling would be if we attempted to find out your real-world identity and tried to get you fired from your job, get people around you in trouble for associating with you, follow you around to other internet fora to harass you there, drag up anything you've written many years ago that can be taken out of context to make you look like a monster, etc.
I was being somewhat facetious because it very obvious how quickly this comments section turns from 'civil discussion' to 'try to get him banned' when someone posts even the mildest Marxist analysis.
I think the above commenter wants you banned because you seem to prefer to in a rather harassing way appeal to authority rather than make civil and well-thought out arguments. I agree with him that you don't seem to be into making good arguments but I don't want you banned I think you're funny and write engagingly and I'm still hoping for a good rundown of marxism from you one day.
I operate from the Hitchen's principle "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.". That's why a lot of my posts are just asking for citations and such.
No, I am willing to discuss things with communists, nazis, racists, supporters of automobile and heretics. And I did on SSC (under a different username).
That's not a lie and I don't know why you accuse me of lying. All countries have their problems but Cuba, NK and Venezuela are not in civil wars or anything like that. Seems like people are basically supportive of the various socialist political parties that lead the respective countries.
Are you actually claiming that people of North Korea are not oppressed, are not victims of famines caused by predictably failing economy and that regime there is not oppressive?
Because I consider
- North Korean regime is far more oppressive than typical country
- standard of living in North Korea is lower than in a typical country
- South Korea is far better place to live than North Korea by nearly all metrics
- many people want to escape North Korea, basically noone want to emigrate there
as facts and claiming otherwise seems to me a sign of being divorced from reality and unwilling to admit that communism and communism-adjacent things were a massive failure when implement on state level and caused deaths of millions.
I mean, my understanding is that Cuba is legitimately not a terrible place to live, so I'll agree on that one.
However, Venezuela has had two people both claiming to be President for the last two years; this falls under the heading of "anything like that" from where I sit (it's not a hot civil war, but it's definitely not an uncontested government either).
I don't think any member of the international public (as opposed to intelligence agencies or the DPRK government) really has a good idea of Kim Jong-un's approval rating; NK is too secretive. Obviously he gets ~100% of the vote with ~100% turnout in elections, but that probably has something to do with the fact that failing to vote and voting for someone else are both illegal.
I won't rule out that his approval rating could legitimately be high, but the lack of civil war only really proves that it's at least 5% (the proportion of North Koreans in the military, which is pretty rigorously checked for loyalty) and probably not below 20% (given the extensive paramilitary forces).
"However, Venezuela has had two people both claiming to be President for the last two years; this falls under the heading of "anything like that" from where I sit (it's not a hot civil war, but it's definitely not an uncontested government either)."
Guaido is a complete joke and only has any sort of recognition because the US recognized him in order to try to stir shit up. Nothing really happened though.
"I mean, my understanding is that Cuba is legitimately not a terrible place to live, so I'll agree on that one."
Any country that has people desperately risking their lives to leave has a problem. Any country where attempting to leave the country is met with deadly force has a bigger problem.
That the trigger for the collapse of the communist states of Eastern Europe was the opening of the border of one of the states allowing people to leave should make this obvious.
The only reason Venezuela has two people claiming to be president simultaneously is because one of them is promoted by the United States in a regime change effort.
>All countries have their problems but Cuba, NK and Venezuela are not in civil wars or anything like that
Have you ever left the United States to go and see for yourself how any of the socialist countries are doing? Why don't you spend a year in one of them to a have breath of fresh air from this bourgeoisie oppression we all have to endure here? For extra freshness, I highly recommend living on the local median wage. Or you might even test how these nice socialist governments are taking care of their people and try living on the amount equal to the minimum wage or unemployment check.
I don't speak the local languages and I can't leave my job here right now. Plus I would miss my friends here. Maybe in the future, or if an English-speaking country has a revolution.
It's 1000% not because you have politics that we disagree with.
You complain how you constantly tell Scott he's wrong about Marxism and he doesn't listen to you.
Meanwhile, people *constantly* tell you that the way you behave in these comments is inappropriate and frustrating and that it has nothing to do with the policies you support, and yet you somehow keep believing that there's nothing wrong with your behavior and that you're being censored for your views.
no offense, but this is your worst segue yet, marxbro, haha
Overall I'm not so much a fan of the whole "you're a sea lion!!" thing — I say you're perfectly entitled to pop in here and disagree with people about whatever. But this is just an attempt to completely derail a conversation about something completely different into the only thing you are interested in talking about.
you gotta open your mind to the wonders of discourse outside Marx!
Presumably denying the incredibly oppressive environments found in totalitarian states (e.g. North Korea) is at least equally productive. Those conversations really help open people's hearts to the true Word of our Lord.
Here's a primer on what Marx thought. Trigger warning: Marxists aren't going to like it, and anti-Marxists will want to share it on their social media far and wide, and quote from it frequently.
I earnestly, seriously mean this. Please get your own substack, let us know here (because I would actually love to subscribe), and dial down the antagonism in your comments here. I tend toward agreeing with you, but you're not doing your points any favors by how you make them here.
Yes! I second this and have suggested it before. Marxbro, I bet you've accidentally built an audience that would gladly engage with you for days, but here in the comments of someone else's substack is really not the place for it so you're going to draw a lot of criticism on that point.
Ah. a true believer. who wants agreement because he is "correct" not because he has a good argument. what happens when such people gain power? (this is an easy one). bro has assumptions he doesn't want challenged. the whole argument above IMO is about the blank slate hypothesis. Lefties seem to think we inherit nothing from thousands of years of biology, therefore they can mold the world into a more "correct" form in a generation or two. When that doesn't work, why, the "incorrect" ones who are spoiling things must be dealt with. killing becomes necessary. this also happens in righty authoritarian regimes. they need everyone on board to make it work. but human nature: there is some good research that I'm too lazy to look for now that humans have a strong tendency to ostracize out groups. Perhaps it's a function of trust and the need to have a heuristic for it. We do feel more comfortable with people who are like us. I think it would be fruitful to engage with this reality if we want to move toward an inclusive world - or you just end up killing those you don't want around. (but for really, really good reasons) imo bro wants agreement, not engagement. His Marxism is faith-based, and therefore cannot be dislodged with mere words.
Isn't Scott trying to mold people into having more "correct" forms of discussions in this very article? I think it is in our human nature to tweet (or at least have twitter-level discussions). So actually it is Scott who has a blank slate hypothesis here.
Your commentary always boils down to "you misunderstand Marx". It rarely contains any interesting ideas to engage with. The desire to tell people RTFM is understandable, but please make an effort to meet Scott halfway. I (like Scott, I think) have little desire to go read Das Kapital right now but would like to actually have an informative conversation about how Marxism could apply to the topics under discussion.
Are you really a marxist or do you secretly hate communism and want to be very sure nobody on SSC/ASC ever takes it seriously? Because my impression is you're doing so good a job on the latter it almost can't be accidental.
Assuming you're serious, imagine that on your favorite ultra-left forum whatever that is comes up a guy with a nickname like "SocialDarwinistBro" and starts argue hardcore anarcho-capitalism in the most straw-manned variety. He bytes every bullet offered, saying that poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy and stupid, that free market is effective and therefore its outcomes cannot be bad by definition, etc. Whenever someone suggests that you know, it may be a little bit uncharitable and over the top what you're saying here, he says they're just not familiar with the history of great depression and works of Adam Smith, or reading them incorrectly. He's also by far the most obnoxious commentator and most of his comments bear at most tangential relationship to the post and hand and largely amount to "Also, an-cap is really cool!" And he constantly accuses all around that they fail to adhere to the principles of dialectical materialism by not engaging with him.
Would this guy have any chances of converting anyone at all? Would there be any more effective way to make people think "Holy Lenin those libertarians really are massive jerks, I'll surely stick with marxism!"
I see what you mean, thank you for clearing my doubts. Please keep on doing what you're doing comrade, in the name of Stalin we'll reeducate these kulaks.
Hopefully this isn't countersignalling my fellow readers too much, but your posts always make me laff (this one particular) and I hope you keep at it. Shine on...
It's kind of funny, but not the kind of humor I'd want to come here for. It's a legit instance of Poe's Law, where I'm genuinely uncertain whether he's being dense or trolling, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the sort of interaction I look for at ACX.
After reviewing more of marxbro1917's participation, my take now leans more in the direction that he's actually a conscious and deliberate troll. While he's extremely prolific in responding to object and meta level disagreements, as far as I can tell he never actually engages with allegations that he's trolling, either from commenters on the conversations, or from his interlocutors embedded in those conversations.
Non-trolling people tend to be pretty touchy about allegations that they're trolling, and trolls will often imitate that to appear like non-trolls, but in my experience actual trolls are much more likely than non-trolls to ignore them, because badly defending argumentative positions is conducive to the purposes of trolling, but badly defending the position that one isn't a troll isn't. It's hard to offer strong evidence that you're not a troll when you are, and rather than calling attention to that, it's easier just to avoid the subject.
Thank you. The ACX commenter mob is currently going after me, but I will continue using my freedom of speech in the marketplace of ideas. I'm always happy to see support.
I will read up to three books of your choice, up to 300,000 words total, that are in the public domain or which I can get in ebook form cheaply, and then you and I will engage in an asynchronous back-and-forth discussion of the merits of marxism. Scott can choose to publish it on this site, or we can upload it separately and link it in the subreddit or discord.
I feel like you do the same thing! You told me last time that Marx prophesied the occurence of national communistic revolutions, when he actually prophesied the occurence of a global communistic revolution after capitalism has taken over the entire earth and divided everybody into solely two classes, the workers and the capitalists. I honestly started to engage with you because I thought you were a genuine marxist and I thought you would have an interesting take but now it feels like you haven't even read the works of Marx you keep linking to, nor have you read the works of those who lived through communistic revolutions. I don't really care that much about getting you to acknowledge any of this because whatever we are both internet strangers but I have to say I am disappointed and have updated to be slightly more against Marxism because of your responses.
I'm genuinely shocked more commenters from the SSC days haven't spoken up here or on the subreddit about how much the quality of the comments has declined since the move to substack. It's not just Marxbro, but a whole legion of people leaving reddit/twitter style dunk comments, rather than the essay length and blog post quality ones that were once the norm.
I hate to sound like a cranky SSC old timer, but at this point I feel like it's merited. 2015-2017 it was genuinely difficult to find a rude or bad-faith comment on any of Scott's essays. Now I'd say the balance is at the level of the average science/philosophy/history adjacent subreddit.
It's likely a combination of the new format subtly encouraging short comments, an influx of new readers from the NYT debacle, as well as a new laxity in regards to banning.
Another reason may be the diaspora. A lot of the more prolific posters of old started commenting in places like Data Secrets Lox, which they kept doing when Scott started his substack.
It isn't "laxity in regards to banning" which makes it sound as though it's Scott's choice. Substack doesn't offer the ability to ban.
I don't know whether there's a better choice available than substack presently, but I'm wondering what happens to everything that was posted here if Scott leaves.
What you think are "extremely obvious mistakes" appear to me to be nothing of the sort, if this post of yours (that you linked below as an exemplar of the category) is anything to go by:
You also present this below: "I thought I already replied to you on this? Maybe the comment got lost somehow, substack commenting I find a little clunky. Marx talks about the potential for national revolutions in some of his most famous works, including in the prefaces to the Communist Manifesto;
"But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development." "
This falsifies Marx much more than it marks him a prophet, since he's positing that a Russia Revolution may "pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership" presumably skipping the "dictatorship of the proletariat." In actual history the Bolshevik revolution was an urban affair, not a rural one, and the Soviet system got stuck in the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (as all Marxist nations have). There were in fact large peasant rebellions against the Bolsheviks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambov_Rebellion)
I feel the claim that it's harmful when liberal talk about how bad and horrible situation with academic freedom misses the benefits of forming a tribe around it. I mean there are lots of harms too which is one reason I try to avoid this but look at Fox news or even your remarks about the power of the term sjw. Surely, part of getting people to form a useful coalition is to encourage them to all be mad and hyperbolic at some common target of anger.
I mean I'm ultimately unsure of what is best here but (unlike scaring women out of stem with exaggerations about relative level of discrimination) there are considerations on both sides. I mean your blog is closest thing I've seen to a movement that coalesced around reasonable claims with admissions of uncertainty. No war is ever fought or populace inspired with "they do lots of bad things but sometimes it's complicated but on balance they bad" so I fear it's not obvious how it falls out.
A bit of a nonsequitur, but it's kinda amazing how the CHAZ security guy assassinating a random joyriding black guy got rapidly memoryholed. What happened to that guy? Did it even make front page news outside of Seattle? Was it one guy he killed, or two? The fact that no one knows anything about this is pretty crazy.
Why is it crazy? In "bad neighborhoods" murders happen all the time, and unless they could be used for political purposes, nobody ever hears about them. There's even more striking case - when a young black woman were murdered at the traffic light stop, and it was briefly thought that the murderer was white. There were marches, a bit of rioting, a wave of condemnation from prominent politicians, a prominent civil rights lawyer Ben Crump announced he will take her case and bring the justice to the victim. Then in a couple of days it was revealed the murderer is actually black. The tweets stopped immediately. The politicians went silent. The civil rights lawyer realized he is much more busy than he previously realized, and had to drop the case. The murderer, as I understand, is still at large. You probably don't remember the victim's name. Her name is Na'kia Crawford.
There are probably dozens, maybe hundreds cases like this - only neither I nor you heard about them because there was no political reason to hype them up. This one is different because the reason was briefly there, so we can see the contrast.
There are black intellectuals like Glenn Loury who are furious that black people killing other black people gets ignored in favor of the relatively rare cases of police arbitrarily killing black people.
I think murderous police are an actual problem, but he has a point about the murders that get ignored.
I want to recommend the Sam Harris podcast with Rener Gracie. Their ideas make sense to me and I think police would welcome more training (At least that is the story Rener tells... he's involved in training cops in Brazilian Jujitsu.)
You make a good point, and you make it well in a funny way, but I will say that the stereotypes are quite annoying to deal with. I have a male relative who is black and he regularly "censors" his location and mannerisms in order to avoid appearing as a threat, e.g. at night he will take an extremely long path around, for example, elderly white people walking up ahead of him because he does not want to appear to be a black man sneaking up on them as he doesn't want them to freak out and call the police or shoot him or whatever they might do out of fear. It's annoying to have to keep other people's perception of you in your head all the time and work around accommodating them although he's done it for so long that he's more or less used to it.
I feel for your relative, I really do. I agree that we should strive to get rid of those stereotypes that cause problems and distress for people like your relative. But do you not agree that those very bullets that we keep ignoring in favour of trying to change public perceptions directly is one of the key contributors to the longevity of this particular stereotype?
I think it's more amazing how they suddenly turn their coats and become pro-gun and pro-borders. I used to wonder how they could do that without encountering crippling cognitive dissonance, but then I read this essay and at the end of it I was enlightened. https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/
I remember being naive enough to think that because white men murdered two black teenagers in CHAZ it would be taken seriously. Of course I was disabused of that quickly. I will try to keep this to a minimum, but here its well-earned: ‘the outgroup is sure is horrible and evil.’
> There's an oversupply of tweeting and an undersupply of everything else
I wonder if by some act of God or awful terrible terrorists or any other way, Twitter just disappeared - I mean, completely, the site stopped resolving, the app stopped working, etc. etc. - would the society be better off overall? I know there is some good content there - but good content existed way before it, and so did people producing this content, and communicating, and having discussions and so on. And I wonder if the answer is "yes", what we as a society should be doing about it? Because I suspect the answer is "yes". I stopped using Twitter as soon as I arrived to this conclusion, but obviously that changes nothing. Can anything help there?
Yes and no. Yes, things will get better temporarily. No, some new social app will become Twitter 2.0 pretty swiftly. Twitter exists because there's real demand for it, not because someone made a monkey's paw bargain with a genie at midnight on Friday the 13th.
Well, there's also real demand for heroin and murder and sex slavery - otherwise these things wouldn't exist, right? But as a society we manage to frown on those things and try to minimize their occurrence.
I think there's a broad consensus that Twitter deranges public discussion by design - even if that outcome was accidental - and yet it's the best aggregation of elite sentiment and trends that exists, which is valuable information. We were never meant to all be in a vast room without boundaries or distance from people who annoy and enrage us. It also just so happens that inflammatory and provocative statements tend to generate the most attention and engagement, which the system then selects for and amplifies the personality types most likely to contribute to it. It's an extractor of the worst human impulses. People who defend Twitter's "good" parts generally use a lot of advanced settings to curate their experience.
There's a hypothetical version of Twitter that doesn't create these incentives, but that's in direct conflict with its current business model.
I understand why twitter as business exists. But there are many business models that are destructive to the society, and I think the society has some tools that can be applied to those to reduce their incidence and harm. The question is, why we are not applying those tools to twitter?
Well the US govt can't regulate speech that's merely provocative, offensive, and unproductive. There would have to be some novel set of regulations that prohibits the current algorithms and product design of a platform like Twitter without actually dictating what individuals on the platform can and can't say.
Maybe we are about to, slowly. There is some commotion on at least two fronts that, if somehow merged, could get closer to this issue:
1. Although fueled mainly by (political) worries about misinfo and echo chambers, the effects of social media algorithms are getting, for now at least superficial, scrutiny. It seems that there is a common mechanism feeding the forming of echo chambers and feeding the terribleness of twitter: optimizing for engagement. Curbing that is in stark contrast to the business models, so it's hard to imagine any more than half-arsed effort and political limbo.
2. Regulating [Dark Patterns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern). Although business-as-usual is in the self-interest of the industry here as well, the contra-side here has some good ammo: regulating them is pro-consumer, and speaking from an European perspective, that can go far. This could also be framed as maximising *freedom of individuals* or something, but I guess the industry might as well claim freedom to dupe, as seems to happen when money talks.
In Europe at least, there could be more focus on the health harms of being exposed to these algorithms. We usually like to tax harmful things and that sometimes incentivizes making less harmful things. (Of course it might also incentivize making the addictive product even more addictive and terrible, compensating for the lower consumption, but you could argue that is already happening.)
Considering health harm from internet products seems a bit far off, but given the ever-increasing time of our lives spent online, there ought to come a time when that is a considered a legitimate worry enough to prompt some kind of response. Also there is long trend still going strong of giving due weight on mental health and recognizing the connectedness of that to physical well-being.
There is of course the great schism of not enough / too much babysitting. Daniel Kahneman points out that some of that can be cut through by opt-out policies and framing the thing as more options for consumers. You'd still have the god-given freedom to consume more harmful things: if you don't like the default prosocial babysitting thing, you can opt-out of it.
There has been some prototype ideas of social media, where you could choose your algorithm on what you want to optimize for. That seems wild and utopian for now, looking at it from this hellhole, but I would like that so much.
I don't know how the companies could be forced to adopt something like that, and I think they'd have to, as all "facebook-killers" seem to just die. Maybe by making it so that third-party apps could parse the feed, but undoubtedly that wouldn't happen willingly.
Even then, if that would be made possible and widely available, I wonder how successful that might be, when that optimizing-for-outrage dopamine-kick feedback loop algorithm is apparently so engaging. If creating a new market for the algorithms separate from the platforms were to work, would that just create even more terrible, more terrible'er algorithms that more effectively tap into our outdated homo sapiens instincts? I don't know.
I'm not so sure. Everyone knows Twitter is awful, it's entirely possible no-one with the skills to pull it off would try to build another one. Even if they did, it wouldn't replicate the features that make Twitter so terrible, at least not right away. You know the whole reason Twitter exists in the format it does is because it was supposed to work over text messages, right?
Hell - I wouldn't be surprised if a two-week outage was enough to kill Twitter for good, just break everyone's addiction to it.
The amount of people who are Twitter-level terrible without Twitter is small, but they do exist and they are very loud. Also, you may be overestimating people's consciousness of and ability to break the addiction.
Of course, it won't solve the problem of awful people in general. But at least we could solve the problem of mass Twitter-level terribleness and reduce the cultural damage that is happening.
I should probably have been more clear. The loud people who are going to be Twitter-level terrible anyway are going to loudly demand Twitter back, because it makes their lifestyle easier.
> some new social app will become Twitter 2.0 pretty swiftly. Twitter exists because there's real demand for it, not because someone made a monkey's paw bargain with a genie at midnight on Friday the 13th.
This doesn't seem quite right. There's real demand for social media platforms, but it's not obvious that there's real demand for one with the precise characteristics of Twitter that make it awful in its distinctive way. Everyone agrees that Facebook and Reddit and TikTok are awful, but also everyone agrees that they're much less awful than Twitter (at least in the particular way being discussed here).
Now if Twitter got replaced by something like Parler, that seemed to have reproduced the formal structures of Twitter, that would be bad. But even Mastodon might be different enough to make a real benefit to the world if it replaced Twitter.
I derive considerable value from finance twitter, and have learned much via access to the professionals who share how they think about markets there. Outside of fintwit, it can be disheartening to see certain views expressed, but gradually I've come to realize it's not worth engaging/arguing. I wonder if over time most of society will come to coexist with it rather than argue unendingly.
I am always astonished why otherwise smart people would put their smart and informative writings into a format that is minimally suitable for it, never has been meant for it and everything on the platform is built to prevent it from happening. Why not just make a blog or use a forum or a mailing list or another of a dozen solutions that exist?
My impression is the business model of twitter is moving in that direction. It's an outlet for creators to promote work like podcasts, newsletters, blogs, and similar.
If twitter was that, I'd probably use it. But it's like building a community library in the center of a huge toxic dump infested by cannibalistic zombies.
I feel like I'm defending twitter and that's not my intention - I get that a lot of folks don't like it - but I guess I find it far more valuable than any other social media. imho twitter is very much who the user follows, and how the user manages follows. It probably requires a lot of setup discipline and willingness to ruthlessly prune over time and seek out good content to customize the experience.
For non-political content, Twitter is actually really good. You can follow people you like or are interested in, you find out what's happening way before they post it to their website or make a video about it, and generally stay abreast of what's going on.
The problem is that too many Twitter users think that being non-political is in itself a political statement, in favor of racism. Remember how we ridiculed George Bush for his simple-minded "You're either with us or with the terrorists" line and that was proof positive of poor education and possibly brain damage from decades of cocaine use.
My take is that it is wrong to organize boycott campaigns against Coca Cola for child labor.
Which sounds monstrous! But I think what's going on is mostly just that our state power and our morality are so misaligned that we have to do these weird manual end runs when what should be happening is that child labor should just be reliably illegal, and the CEO of Coca Cola should be in prison. "But how does that work if a small group of people are against child labor but they can't form a societal consensus?" Well, first of all in a democracy, small groups of people can effect legislative change as long as the broad masses aren't *against* the thing they're pushing. But second, I'd say they should just all move to the same area and enforce taxes against Coca Cola imports. "But that breaks free trade!" Yes, and you're beginning to see what I mean by all of our state being misaligned with morality. A boycott is effectively equivalent to a local import tax, except it uses a weird ad-hoc enforcement mechanism that relies on people's novelty seeking and temporary outrage. We *have* systems for this already. They're just bad. If we just make new systems (but this time without the monopoly on force and institutional experience that the state has) I see no reason to expect why they should be better. We should fix our model of federalism and get better at border enforcement of morality instead.
In a totally unrelated point, it seems your point 3 relies on allowing people to suffer huge reputational damage by not warning them about risk points so that their suffering can be used as a cudgel in the culture war. I don't think this is necessarily *wrong*, but I think it's at least a harsh moral sacrifice to ask.
The people who actually talk about rampant corporate power and the way corporations move bad practices out of sight to other countries are pushing for exactly this. (Look up Erik Loomis)
He doesn't share your idea that boycotts are bad... but he does say that they are a very, very poor substitute for what should be a global body of law that can make sure that policing supply chains doesn't rely on randomly upset people in rich countries.
Let's say I'm a vegan (or at least I agree with them morally). Are you saying that should eat meat even though i find doing so repugnant? Should I not choose a green energy provider to help the enviroment and buy coallight™ energy instead? I agree that bad things should be illegal. I agree that your primary way of stopping corporation.s But as long as they aren't stopped by law i should be allowed to not pay them to do bad things.
I think there's a difference between, for instance, personally not buying meat, and not buying furniture from stores that hire employees that eat meat. Even though the consequences may be similar! And I don't think you in particular should not choose green energy, for instance, but I think it's a sign of a fundamentally broken system that you have to make that individual choice. I think the farther people backpropagate effects of purchase decisions through the economy, generally the less efficient the economy will operate, because it creates a collection of not just submarkets but sub-economies.
What kind of efficiency are we talking about losing here. the hours worked to human happiness efficiency? hopefully reducing child labour should increase that efficiency if anything.
Yeah, hours worked to human happiness. Companies rely on price as a signal. But if your product sales price depends on deep details of your supply chain, then price is *actually* an n-dimensional vector of invisible moral currency (as opposed to the existing smaller vector of price, availability, reliability, quality...), of which dollars are only one component, and you don't just have to predict pricing of goods but all those invisible prices throughout your supply chain and multiply them with the purchaser preference matrix as well. This effectively forms a tax on depth of production chain, which is an issue because vertical integration (shortening production chains) fosters monopolization. The competing proposal is to define a sort of official state utility function and price it in at the point of moral violation or the closest economic boundary. (Compare the carbon tax for a similar proposal.) That way, the n-vector only has to be fully evaluated once or twice.
I agree with your main point: campaigns against Coca-Cola (or any company) should totally be legal.
I just want to comment on something here that keeps popping up. The word boycott is used for two different concepts that shouldn't be mixed up:
1. refraining from buying products from a company in order to pressure said company into changing their practices;
2. refraining from buying a product to avoid the consequences of its production.
I'm a vegan. I don't buy animal products because that reduces the number of animals bred and tortured. But I don't boycott meat companies! I buy vegan burgers from fast-food chains that primarily sell meat, for example. I generally think 2 is way more effective than 1 because it directly uses supply and demand mechanics. It doesn't require the CEO of the affected company to understand that the decrease in sales is due to their practices, or to decide that it is worth changing them.
I think this is generally a good idea. Imagine if you did 2. You wouldn't be able to to buy any Pepsico product just because they own KFC! Look up what pepsico owns if you don't think this is a big deal.
But with the cocoa beans coca cola example i kinda assumed the idea is that those cocoa beans are the ones being used to make coca cola. making the example pretty analogous to veganism.
what would be the analogy in case of cancel culture? maybe not watching (or at least not buying) a film directed by someone you find morally repugnant. Is this the same as well? maybe?.But what if you didn't use windows because you dislike one of the programmers that worked on it? lot harder suddenly.
Why do you think child labor should be “reliably illegal”? Isn’t it more the case that you want SOME child labor to be illegal in SOME places and your intuitions about which labor (and where) is bad are driven by sob stories that percolate to the top of the media cycle via toxoplasmosis and never explore arguments for the other side?
When the US was a lower-productivity country, kids worked backbreaking hours on farms, often but not always farms their own family owned - should that have been illegal? Young boys in big cities used to sell newspapers on street corners or deliver newspapers by bicycle and young girls used to make money babysitting - should that have been illegal? In recent memory kids have made money running a lemonade stand or mowing lawns or working in their parents’ business or doing chores at home - should that be illegal?
Suppose you happen to live in a low-productivity country/state/town where MOST kids help their families survive - as in, “not starve” - via backbreaking low-productivity farm work (or worse, like picking through trash heaps to find recyclable material) and a company like Coke or Nike comes along and builds a plant where kids who (for whatever reason) NEED to work can make MORE money in BETTER working conditions than they did before - which is something the companies in fact HAVE to do to make the job attract workers in an open market. Hasn’t the new company improved those kids’ lives by giving them and their families a new option they didn’t previously have?
In short: It seems to me that where non-compulsory child labor exists it is a GOOD thing - not good on some absolute scale but better than the alternatives, which means laws against it AND boycotts against it tend to make the world a worse place.
The problem with this approach is that it requires an overriding consensus about what is and isn't okay, such that the government can impose control over all relevant examples of the disapproved behavior. As you are seeing in some of the responses, not even child labor is a strong enough example to make this work. Similarly for green energy, veganism, voting rules, and most issues in society, the government is going to be unable to determine a consensus opinion. So the government either cannot affect change (and we're back to finding alternative means like boycotts) or the government becomes totalitarian and picks which side of a debate to summarily enforce.
Could it be that a social change is an inevitable effect that accumulates over multiple generations ? There's always some percentage of rebellious teens who rail against the zeitgeist. In the first generation, their numbers will be few, but nonzero. In the next generation, the next wave of rebellious teens would be able to find some adult sympathizers. Fast-forward a few generations, and the zeitgeist changes to the opposite of what it was, and the pendulum begins its swing in the opposite direction.
That is to say, I think that all those brilliant non-conformist artists, intellectuals, etc., are a symptom of social change rather than its cause.
This seems intueitively wrong. In the early 20th century you were either a child which went to school for maybe six years and then you started working and in three years you were a man fit for dying for your country. There were no youth culture and the concept of a teen was insignificant if not competely irrelevant. The amount of people who had further education, ie more than six years, usually only attended educational activities for less than ten years. The amount of people who attended university was so small so there could be no youth culture that had any big impact on society..
Children didn't really rebel against their parents and culture was stable or changing organically and very slowly, as it had been doing for hundreds of years.
Teens were something that were in a sense socially constructed in the sixties when corporations noticed that they could market products such as music and magazines and celebrity culture related stuff towards a new group of willing and uncritical consumers that had come into existence because of a new abundance of wealth and a mass attendence of education for up to fifteen years well into when people used to be considered a fully grown man who should have had children or a woman who should have married.
Radio and TV played no small part in this and the first megabands started appearing such as the Beatles thanks in no small part to this, while at the same time driving the phenomenon fo youth culture where children (teens) were brought into a cultural context that was completely alien to their parents.
At the same time college attendence grew by a big proportion and by chance this intersected in time with the Vietnam war which was used by subversive marxists such as Hermann Marcuse and Allen Ginsberg and others to create a counterculture of rebellion against the authoritarianism of their parents (Which was just healthy order and respect for hierarchy and authority, in my opinion) among those still in attendece ateducationa institutions and particularly university students who were middle or upper class and who were less than happy at the thought of having to go fight a war in the djungles of south east asia rather than living a comfortable life in a well-developed country, and in the worst cases engaging in pure nihilistic hedonism by using drugs and having casual sexual relations.
Of course this counterculture, which broke all societal norms about decency were opposed by adults, while young people were egged on by the authority figures on television and on radio and on their vinyl players who admonished them to not give a fuck about tradtion, hierarchy, and pro-social and pro-survival norms which led to a conflict between the generations and thus we get the concept of the rebellious teen.
It has been noted at other times in history that the children become rebllious, often at the peak of a civilization which is just on the cusp of decline, and I think there seems to be something to his. Now we can clearly see the results of the seed that were sown in the late 60s and there is no doubt that if nothing changes European civilization and anything like it, even this clownworld version of it we live in now, will be gone in a century.
Also I'd just like to raise the general methodological question of how do you figure out what counts as more or less conformity/repression. All societies have lines which you get punished for crossing and other areas you have certain latitudes.
I think we can look and see how much the societal rules *feel* oppressive to those in the society but if you want an absolute measure it's hard to imagine how that could work. I mean are we more or less repressed than Italy in the Renaissance? Women have jobs and freedoms now but we wouldn't tolerate someone pushing Renaissance era moral and legal norms for sex discrimination. either.
I don't see how you disentangle things like the fact that our wealth and healthcare enable different lifestyle models from changes in repression or count up the number of off limits and on limits topics without assuming our sensibilities about what kinds of views are important and which are silly (but that kinda just assumes the new consensus when saying gender identity isn't silly).
Well, one possible metric could be restrictions on speech. How many things are you not allowed to say; how many valid opinions are allowed to exist on hot topics; and what happens to someone who violates these boundaries ?
On one end of this spectrum, you have something like the US circa 1960s (and/or the early Internet): all kinds of people express all kinds of weird ideas, and expressing the wrong opinion might make you unpopular, but that's about it. On the other end, we have North Korea, where there's exactly one valid viewpoint on everything, and you are compelled to recite it every day on pain of death. The current US social climate is somewhere in the middle.
There were peaceful protestors getting beaten and shot by police in the 1960s. I'm not sure I would use that as the exemplar of an age of a tolerant, liberal discourse.
I think the real answer is that unless you are talking about a centralized form of authoritarian repression, speech norms are going to be very heterogeneous across different domains and social circles. The norms and enforcement mechanisms at play are going to look very different if you are, say, a Biden voter in a deep red rural county vs. a social conservative working as an adjunct lecturer at a small liberal arts college.
What actually, in practice, is the difference between US in the 1960s and US today? What is "unpopular, but that's about it"? Maybe now you get fired for expressing a racist thought while then you got fired for expressing a communist thought or being gay, and now you can get a million people momentarily angry at you rather than a few dozen.
My understanding is that, in the 1960s, it was much harder to cancel a person to the point where he can never get another job, and is driven to suicide. Today, a small dedicated team of Twitter agents can accomplish this with ease.
I've heard people make a claim that some people can never get another job. But I haven't seen evidence that this has happened to anyone whose prior jobs weren't based on a positive public reputation.
(Driving to suicide has always been easy when the target is gay.)
The problem is that most white-collar jobs are based on a positive public reputation; the second problem is that all of us *have* a public reputation via social media. Today, employers routinely scan social media accounts of every prospective employee (under a certain age); lacking a social media presence is seen as suspicious -- after all, what are you trying to hide ?
On conformity — something like “standard deviation of political/cultural beliefs”? I’m thinking of things like the ideology scores used to rank congress members. It’s hard to measure this over time, but I’d say the fact that now the most right-leaning Democratic representative is to the left of the most left-leaning Republican, where there used to be overlap, is the kind of empirical observation that we’d want to make.
Of course, parties don’t necessarily represent everyone, so this precise metric isn’t optimal, but I think this class of measurement is viable.
There were shootings in CHAZ that killed two people. This in an ordinarily safe part of Seattle (especially given that the police station is right there).
I live a few blocks from former CHAZ and want to point out that "ordinarily safe part" is false, people are shot/killed at Cal Anderson park relatively frequently. As far as Seattle & Capitol Hill go, it is one of the least safe areas. Searching for news articles has become more difficult since the majority of the results are now related to CHAZ, but you can still find them.
I used to live there, in that very neighborhood. That was my favorite park/public space, on the entire planet. I used to do exactly that, walk across it late at night. As soon as it started getting unsafe to do that again, my rage began. Seattle used to be my favorite city, I loved living there. After it literally actually literally went to shit, I finally voted in the only way that actually matters to the grandstanding morons on the city counsel and their sewage-loving progressive-zombie brain-cored cheering electorate: I left.
Fuck Seattle, and fuck the people who did that to it.
For one thing, it sounds like it was a right-wing totalitarian time, rather than the current left-wing totalitarian time.
For the other, currently totalitarians are in near complete control of media and higher education. Was that the case in 1950s?
I'm worried that you might be comparing two different situations, and that we might be looking at a state that can last for a very long time. I have two white male kids growing up, and I have no idea what I'm going to tell them about how not to get their lives ruined in the next witch hunt over something we cannot now predict.
Using the brief and doomed Red Scare to pretend that the 1950's were "right-wing totalitarian" is about as plausible as using the election of Donald Trump to pretend that 2021 America is a "right-wing totalitarian" society. Yes, there were totalitarian elements to both the Red Scare and Trump's election, but in both cases all the "good and proper" people and elite institutions were firmly arrayed against them, and they *lost*.
One thing I learned about populism (and this was way before Trump) was that populism arises when elites are harming the people. Whenever the people vote and populists actually win, elites show astounding class solidarity and unite to stop the populists from doing anything positive. They use every dirty trick in the book, character assassination one of the chief weapons, with actual assassination not out of play.
The classic response to populism was to steal their positions and thus rob them of their grievances. Sadly, this hasn't happened - our elites and journalists would rather eat broken glass than admit that the American people had any legitimate problems. Instead, they're uniting against us to make sure we can never threaten them again, as pointed out here: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy-a32
The 1950s Red Scare was a bipartisan thing. Note that Sts. JFK and RFK were allies of McCarthy, although they did break with the Senator from Wisconsin when it was clear that his star was starting to wane.
For that matter, many forget that JFK ran for president in 1960 on the so-called "missile gap" and claims that *Nixon* was soft on Communism. That last one took some chutzpah, just sayin'.
The "Red Scare" was bipartisan because it was correct. The only thing they did wrong was letting McCarthy be in charge because he was an alcoholic moron.
I'm the straw man libertarian with black wife and kids who thinks that the government motion to ban discrimination was stupid and ill-advised.
We already have moderate evidence that the economic costs of discrimination are pretty darn high on the discriminator, given markets that are open. We also have moderate evidence that it required government action to get strong discrimination to happen. Economic discrimination is pretty hard to find without active government intervention in favor of the discrimination. And the costs of compliance are moderately high.
Markets weren't open in 1960's Mississippi. Any merchant who didn't enforce the unwritten norms of Jim Crow was likely to receive the gentle ministrations of the Ku Klux Klan.
The norms of Jim Crow were most definitely written -- in fact they were a matter of law. As one tiny example of Jim Crow in action, I remember the description in _The Warmth of Other Suns_ of train employees either setting up or taking down the "colored section" signs in the cars, depending on which direction the train was passing El Paso, Texas. Redlining, as another example, was a matter of federal law.
Racial discrimination post-reconstruction would undoubtedly have existed in the US without legal support, but government action made it worse.
The recent book "The Color of Law" provides lavishly documented examples of how markets weren't just not open in the Jim Crow South, but often as a matter of federal law as well.
I saw a libelibertarian-ish article talking about how the civil rights acts devoured the constitution. Basically that any abrogation of rights is justified if you can invoke a civil rights act. It was pretty convincing.
"Massachussetts in 1692 may have been one of the most repressive societies ever to exist. Anyone who spoke out against it was burned as a witch or exiled. Fine, okay, point taken, don't speak out against Puritanism. But by the 1820s, Massachussetts was one of the most open societies in the world. The Puritan Church turned into the Unitarian Church (I swear this is true, the Unitarian Universalists are the direct descendants of the 1600 Puritans)."
Any proof that by the 1820's Massachussetts was one of the most open societies in the world? In 1692 there were *many* things you couldn't say in Massachussetts about religious matters. In 1820 you could say anything you want about religion, but you had to subscribe to certain rigid theories about politics, culture and society (for example, the Romance / Victorian era belief that women were chaste angels only tempted into sin by lecherous men.)
"In 1820 you could say anything you want about religion, but you had to subscribe to certain rigid theories about politics, culture and society (for example, the Romance / Victorian era belief that women were chaste angels only tempted into sin by lecherous men.)"
If you said, for example, that women were actually the originator and embodiment of evil because it was Eve who first ate the forbidden fruit and tempted Adam into doing it, would you get cancelled for that in 1820 Massachussetts? How do you know, one way or the other?
Not so sure about 1820s Massachussetts, I think the hey-day of the Victorian ideal of perfect femininity came with Coventry Patmore and his poem "The Angel in the House", about an idealised account of his first marriage, and that was in the 1850s.
"The Angel in the House is a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854 and expanded until 1862. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular in the United States during the later 19th century and then in Britain, and its influence continued well into the twentieth century as it became part of many English Literature courses once adopted by W. W. Norton & Company into The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The poem was an idealized account of Patmore's courtship of his first wife, Emily Augusta Andrews (1824–1862), whom he married in 1847 and believed to be the perfect woman."
The Victorians are an interesting comparison to the Great Awokening. Between the early 19th Century Regency, when the greatest celebrity was the highly sexual Lord Byron, and the High Victorian second half of the 19th Century, English society became much more Christian and prudish.
On the other hand, England also became much more prosperous, efficient, and benevolent.
I suspect that the Great Awokening will see America become much prudish, but also less prosperous, efficient, and benevolent.
The change in English society was deliberately engineered, which is quite interesting. It seems to have come from both the top down - the Queen and the Prince Consort - and the bottom-up; you expect a coterie of middle-class do-gooders (though that is rather too dismissive, as many of them did good work that was sorely needed), but there does seem to have been a current of 'moral uplift' amongst the working class as well.
Victoria is fascinating, because the background to her life is that due to the troubles of George III, the extravagances of his son and successor as Prince Regent, and the rake of unmarried brothers who were all leading similarly dissolute lives, plus all the legitimate children dying early, meant that the monarchy was not well-regarded.
Victoria's uncle - who succeeded to the throne after his brother's death as George IV had no surviving legitimate issue - had ten illegitimate children, pretty much had to be bribed into getting married, and his legitimate children died young or were stillborn.
This left Victoria as the heir(ess) presumptive, and her mother (who seems to have been a little odd) brought her up under a terribly rigid system. Partly because she was genuinely shocked by the state of the royal court and wanted to keep her daughter away from bad influences, and partly so that she and her comptroller (hem hem) could keep Victoria dependent on them, so that when she eventually succeeded to the throne, they would be ruling by proxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_System
That didn't turn out so, since Victoria reacted so badly to the strictures of her childhood that once she became queen, she gave Sir John the boot and cut herself free from her mother's domination. But she wasn't unscathed herself, and the scandal around Lady Flora Hasting's death and the public perception that Victoria was too much under the influence of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, caused her to suffer public criticism and protests. This probably all contributed to her wanting to reform the public image of the monarchy.
Her marriage with Albert was, of course, an arranged one but it also seems to have been a genuine love match, and she was very much influenced by him:
"Albert and Victoria felt mutual affection and the Queen proposed to him on 15 October 1839, just five days after he had arrived at Windsor.[55] They were married on 10 February 1840, in the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace, London. Victoria was love-struck. She spent the evening after their wedding lying down with a headache, but wrote ecstatically in her diary:
I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert ... his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, & we kissed each other again & again! His beauty, his sweetness & gentleness – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband! ... to be called by names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!"
They did work to make the monarchy respectable and to inculcate "middle class virtues", so to speak, after the adventures of the Regency period and the preceding reign.
The crises in English society, for example from such things as "the Gin Craze" and the perception of widespread alcohol addiction leading to misery and poverty, did encourage "do-gooders" but also grassroots movements. It was natural that religion should get involved and be invoked as a means of improving morals and encouraging virtue, and reformists such as Wesley who founded Methodism, as well as movements within the Church of England, did as you say shift towards "more Christian and prudish" but also "more prosperous, efficient, and benevolent".
And the prudishness is maybe more our perception looking back, and coloured by the attitudes of the immediately succeeding generations to their parents and grand-parents - Lytton Strachey's hatchet-job "Eminent Victorians" being very influential as one example of such. (Victorian porn was available and spicy enough, for one thing!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_Victorians
Chesterton in 1913 wrote on behalf of "The Victorian Age in Literature" (and I wonder how much Strachey's 1918 book was intended as a riposte to that, though he seems to have conceived the notion of writing it in 1912 or so):
"It only remains for me, therefore, to take the more delicate and entangled task; and deal with the great Victorians, not only by dates and names, but rather by schools and streams of thought. It is a task for which I feel myself wholly incompetent; but as that applies to every other literary enterprise I ever went in for, the sensation is not wholly novel: indeed, it is rather reassuring than otherwise to realise that I am now doing something that nobody could do properly. The chief peril of the process, however, will be an inevitable tendency to make the spiritual landscape too large for the figures. I must ask for indulgence if such criticism traces too far back into politics or ethics the roots of which great books were the blossoms; makes Utilitarianism more important than Liberty or talks more of the Oxford Movement than of The Christian Year. I can only answer in the very temper of the age of which I write: for I also was born a Victorian; and sympathise not a little with the serious Victorian spirit. I can only answer, I shall not make religion more important than it was to Keble, or politics more sacred than they were to Mill."
So let's get some quotes about Utilitarianism going!
"The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of its being, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that it differed sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault."
"[Carlyle's] great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism: which did real good, though there was much that was muddled and dangerous in the historical philosophy which he preached as an alternative. It is his real glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the great truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not the prosperity of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular run of the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester was getting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress. Carlyle pointed out (with stronger sagacity and humour than he showed on any other question) that it was just as true to say that Manchester was getting poorer as that it was getting richer: or, in other words, that Manchester was not getting richer at all, but only some of the less pleasing people in Manchester. In this matter he is to be noted in connection with national developments much later; for he thus became the first prophet of the Socialists. Sartor Resartus is an admirable fantasia; The French Revolution is, with all its faults, a really fine piece of history; the lectures on Heroes contain some masterly sketches of personalities. But I think it is in Past and Present, and the essay on Chartism, that Carlyle achieves the work he was chosen by gods and men to achieve; which possibly might not have been achieved by a happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly irony than in such macabre descriptions as that of the poor woman proving her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or that perfect piece of badinage about "Overproduction of Shirts"; in which he imagines the aristocrats claiming to be quite clear of this offence. "Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of overproduction? We take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing at all.... He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let him say what and when." And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when he compared the "divine sorrow" of Dante with the "undivine sorrow" of Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached its highest point in Mill, it certainly reached its lowest point in Malthus."
Substack pleaded with me to PLEASE TYPE A SHORTER COMMENT so here's the ending of the above that broke the limits 😁
Chesterton's view of the Victorian "compromise":
"For the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian "prudery" began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade. These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; and Macaulay is typical of them; he is the bourgeois in Belgravia. The alliance is marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey's Reform Bill: it is marked even more significantly in his speech against the Chartists. Cobbett was dead."
(On the break-up of the "compromise" Victorian society had achieved)
"Nonsense not yet quite dead about the folly of allowing the unfit to survive began to be more and more wildly whispered. Such helpless specimens of "advanced thought" are, of course, quite as inconsistent with Darwinism as they are with democracy or with any other intelligent proposition ever offered. But these unintelligent propositions were offered; and the ultimate result was this rather important one: that the harshness of Utilitarianism began to turn into downright tyranny. That beautiful faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay—all that seemed slowly and sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was bad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipation evaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate in clear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. One must not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask how they died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruled out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including the debating club at Westminster."
I'm not sure of the exact geography and whether Boston had become more liberal, but the one datapoint I know of, which is Benjamin Franklin is a good indicator. Ben ran away from Boston and to Philadelphia after both experiencing censorship, and advocating against it (he was younger than 17 at the time, but I think it had a strong influence on him). By the end of the revolution, a free press was at least widely held to be a positive value in the newly formed states. It had some serious setbacks in the 1790s-1810 period, but I believe by 1820, it had stabilised as being much better than in Franklin's childhood. Remember that Ben and noted Puritan preacher Cotton Mather not only overlapped in life and geography, they met: https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/benjamin-franklin-has-teachable-moment-cotton-mather/ . Also Ben's Boston printed home, the Courant newspaper, while fighting off censorship, had also taken a fine antivaxxer line against Mather for his advocacy of smallpox innoculation, something Ben later recanted and regretted. Everyone can change their mind when faced with the facts, the facts sometimes come from conservative establishment voices, and there is nothing new under the sun!
Massachusetts of course still had highly restrictive laws on alcohol and store openings on Sunday and sodomy until after 2000, if I recall correctly. But it was still a much more liberal society than many parts of the country that didn't have these laws.
> In 1820 you could say anything you want about religion, but you had to subscribe to certain rigid theories about politics, culture and society (for example, the Romance / Victorian era belief that women were chaste angels only tempted into sin by lecherous men.)
This doesn't seem to be evidence against the claim that 1820's Massachusetts was the most open society in the world, unless you can point to at least one other 1820's society where this (or something equivalent) didn't apply.
To me, the line between cancel culture and things like boycotting a company for child labor is that the point of traditional boycotts is to pressure a person or company to change policies or apologize, whereas the purpose of cancel culture is to destroy someone's life to set an example. I think it's pretty clearly wrong to deliberately destroy someone's life outside of punishment through a fair legal system. I might make an exception for someone who has done something so bad they clearly should be in jail for the rest of their life, but for some reason they got away with it.
This rests upon the assumption that the legal system works and encapsulates all kinds of wrongdoings. I unterstand the thought but find it concerning.
I say this as someone who is against cancel culture but only because I value free speech and hearing things I don't like to hear, not because I believe formal state systems are the best way to do anything.
I'm not endorsing any legal system per se. I just think that any ethical form of collective punishment needs to adhere to principles like due process and proportionality that we associate with the legal system. If, hypothetically, cancel culture did consistently adhere to these principles, it would be fine.
A good example of someone who was cancelled is OJ Simpson. He went from being in popular movies and doing lots of TV ads to, well, being OJ Simpson.
Now, the bad things that OJ Simpson did are so well-known that if any company was thinking of hiring him to do an ad, they'd immediately know about them. But there are other people who are famous but whose controversies are less well-known. The result is that a company may hire them without knowing about the controversy. Take, say, Boy George. He was imprisoned for kidnapping a (male) prostitute. This is on his wikipedia page, but it's not part of the cultural memory of him the way that the OJ Simpson trial is part of his cultural memory. If an ad agency wants to hire him to do ads as part of his rehabilitation from his crimes, then that's up to them. But if they hire him without knowing that about him and then, when it's pointed out, they decide to drop him, is that cancel culture?
There's a line somewhere between informing an employer of someone's wrongdoings and then letting them decide whether they want to continue to employ them and so many people making noise that the employer feels obliged to sack them because of the pressure. The second may well be legit in some cases, but I sometimes wonder how many 'cancel culture' cases are actually the first.
OJ Simpson only got acquitted from his murder charges because of jury nullification. It was revenge for Rodney King: no more, no less. The evidence against him was pretty clear-cut, but none of it mattered. His wife was cheating on him with a young waiter at a restaurant she frequented, and he discovered them and murdered them both with a knife in an explosion of rage.
Boy George also was arrested for having sex with other men in a restroom at a public park.
Interesting. I've refrained from recommending Karma Chameleon (a delightful song), but it was because the video has Civil War cosplay which would be considered in poor taste these days.
"Rodney King's assailants got off (on the local level) with beating him by an all-white jury. Therefore, the black members of OJ's trial decided to let OJ get away with it to balance the scales."
The best attempt I've seen at drawing lines around what is or isn't cancel culture is that it moves from normal consumer behaviour to cancel culture when you petition a third party to enforce consequences. Not going to Louis C.K. shows because you're mad about him masturbating in front of people is normal consumer behaviour, calling the venue that booked him and yelling at them to schedule someone else is cancel culture. It's not entirely clear where mass boycotts fall under this definition: if I mention the Coca Cola death squads, is that cancel culture? Do I have to conclude with "therefore you should maybe not buy coke"? But this at least provides a definition which matches the common intuition that "I don't buy coke because they're evil" is not cancel culture but "Milo shouldn't be allowed on college campuses" is.
Thinking on the above, the principle might be "Do you want to convince everyone not to buy coke, or do you want to take away the option to buy coke?" Taking away people's options seems to track pretty well with what does or doesn't get called cancel culture, and it gives us a clear answer to the mass boycott question: not cancel culture because the company can still sell to anyone not in on the boycott.
That, at least, gets towards a line that makes sense. Like most terms that are used by a community, the community usage is a motte-and-bailey, because some members use the term narrowly and others use it broadly. This is a middling definition; there's a narrow one where cancelling is "this person's entire career is over" (ie losing a job isn't enough; if they can go to a competitor after a year or two, then they weren't cancelled) and a broad one where cancelling is "this person is widely criticised by SJWs for what they said" (or the super-broad definition used by SJWs who only see the most ridiculous claimed cancellations that is "any person said or did anything negative about this person", which results in claims that voting Republican was cancelling Joe Biden).
Just like "woke", "cancel" originally meant something different - it was an expression of frustration; the entire point of saying "Johnny Depp is cancelled" (one of the early examples because of alleged domestic violence) was that the people saying it couldn't do anything that actually affected Johnny Depp or his career. No-one uses it like that now, in part because some people did lose jobs, so "cancelling" came to look like more of a realistic threat and less like some steam being blown off.
I think there's also a difference between "I think no-one should be able to host this person" and "I don't think my organisation should host them". If you had some sort of relationship with the venue (ie more than just buying an occasional ticket - anything from being a regular, to holding a season ticket, to being a donor or shareholder or bondholder) then I can see a legitimate case where you care a lot more about that specific venue hosting Louis CK and not being bothered at all if he goes to the other club in your town. And I don't think that's "no one should be able to buy coke"; it's "we shouldn't sell coke" - where the "we" is perhaps an emotional relationship rather than necessarily a legal contractual one.
From what I can tell, the Milo-on-campus thing is often students at a particular college saying "we, ie this college, shouldn't be hosting events starring Milo", which is different from "no college should be hosting Milo". Of course, in that case you get the net effect that almost every college has similar students and similar opinions on Milo and the combined effect of lots of small bans is one big one. That, for me, is where the "culture" bit of cancel culture kicks in - if 50% of colleges were fine with Milo and 50% didn't want him, then he gets to say what he likes and they get to freely choose whether to host him or not. But when 99% block him, then that's not so good.
I'd like if we could start with a norm that distinguishes between individuals and corporations. I think there's a fundamental ethical difference between going on a personal crusade against a company or a product, versus going on a personal crusade against a person.
For example, I might decide tobacco products are evil and that tobacco companies have used deceptive practices to market their products. Maybe I have friends who were directly harmed by all this, and I want the company responsible to go under. My ethics may direct me toward the belief that a world without tobacco companies - or at least without Big Tobacco ('artisan' products aren't the same kind of threat, maybe?) - would be a better place.
Moving the shoe to the other foot, if my company were the target of that kind of campaign I might disagree. I don't work for Big Tobacco, but if the mob came after the company I do work for I might take umbrage. Still, I can't fault those people for following their conscience. If my company goes under it will be difficult on me and my family, but I'll get another job somewhere else.
That's different from trying to cancel people. People change. Or they don't. But the difference is that they're still alive after the mob is done with them. A company might die, but a person will live on. Even if they change their ways they're still cancelled.
What's the difference between cancelling someone and jailing them? When we put someone in jail, the state takes on the responsibility of caring for that person. Too often, this isn't done well, but at least there's an entity that has to answer for whether they're caring for the person who is being punished. This is absent for people being cancelled. If you cancel some work-a-day Joe and they can't get a job or feed their family, you're punishing them the same as if they'd received an injunction from a court of law. Except there's no accountability and no appeal. Maybe that person can no longer feed their family. What does the mob care?
So if you really believe some conduct should be cancelled on a personal (not corporate) level, the right recourse would be to make it illegal. That's tantamount to saying, "If you do this, you will be punished," but in a way that's responsible and accountable. Not perfect, of course. It's only as perfect as the criminal justice system. But relying on mob justice is vigilantism.
Interesting point about jail and responsibility. Contrapoints has said that twitter mobs don't have any prodedures for determining whether a person is guilty or what punishment might be proportional.
I think the second part of that is at least as important as the first. It's one thing to lack due process in the trial phase. It's another level of irresponsibility entirely to lack due process in the sentencing phase.
If we view cancellation as a form of mob justice, it makes the case in favor of cancellation difficult to make. The line between "private opinion I shared online" and "viral post that destroys a company/livelihood" is poorly defined.
I think the biggest problem with cancel culture is not that it can destroy people's lives for murder and kidnapping. It's that it can also destroy lives for minor things like being a bit of a jerk or doing stupid things while you're teenager, or even for completely innocent things like stating an honest opinion on a factual question.
One problem with this is that it's disproportionate, and another is that very few people do anything that may remotely resemble murder or kidnapping, but everyone behaves as a jerk sometimes or have done stupid embarrassing things as a teenager. So the line you're looking for might be somewhere between "most offenses get punished more or less proportionately" and "most offenses go unnoticed but a few get punished with completely disproportionate brutality, when someone causes troubles to the powers that be or sometimes at random"
Also, world with no murders is most likely net better and world with no controversial opinions or bad jokes is most likely new worse. So another potential line might be "does it punish for things everyone agrees are awful, or just for things some people think are awful"?
Excellent way of defining the issues. The problem seems to be where one ideology takes over institutions (unrelated in scope to that ideology) and then attempts to force their ideology by cancelling anyone not conforming. A gay actor in 60s Hollywood, or James Damore at Google. It isn’t healthy.
I am in no ways a conservative, but if current trends continue (a big if) conservatives will soon be unemployable at many or most major institutions. That won’t end well.
>conservatives will soon be unemployable at many or most major institutions
Honestly, I don't think it's likely to happen exactly because it is unsustainable. Also, not being a conservative doesn't seem to protect you, even if you're on the left you can be canceled for not being left enough or the right variety of left or whatever. And that's what worries me the most, situation where nearly everyone has something to be punished for, but you only really get punished if you cause troubles to those dealing out the punishment (or if you're unlucky enough to be chosen for an occasional exemplary execution). That one is pretty sustainable and similar principles have been used by oppressive states and societies all over the world and history.
Seriously, what do young people actually imagine about the past these days? That there were no powerful gay men pulling strings in old time Hollywood to help the careers of macho actors who played along with their demands and hurt the careers of pretty boys who wouldn't submit?
What young people get taught about gay history is carefully sanitised so that the rewritten narrative (e.g. the AIDs era being the equivalent of genocide by the Reagan government because they hated gays and so withheld medical treatment so that they would die, plus scapegoated gays) can present the "respectability cascade" narrative of martyrs and unjustly persecuted. I didn't think this before (yeah, I'm gonna mention the site) a Tumblr post where someone who had been at their local LGBTQ+ centre with other baby LGBT people, learning about the history during the 80s, recounted breathlessly how they had learned that the vile and completely baseless rumour about gay promiscuity had been promulgated so that gays could be victim blamed! And here was me going "Kid, do you know nothing about queer activism of the 70s where it was very much politicised that gay sexuality should not be the same as straight sexuality, and for instance things like bathhouses were around and were part of the reason for the initial spread of the disease?" Since it was the 70s/80s and hedonistic sex was the presumed new norm - STDs were now just another commonplace since medicine had antibiotics to cure them, so they should be treated as more like getting a cold than anything to worry seriously about.
That is not to say that the AIDs epidemic was not handled badly at the start, or that gay people should be scapegoated, but the revision of history so that it was always nice respectable couples who only wanted the chance to marry, and were certainly not out there having as much anonymous sex as they could - in certain centres - did strike me. So the idea of 30s/40s/50s gay movie stars whose public images were carefully managed while the insiders knew the truth, or gay people in positions of power in movie studios, isn't something that they are very aware of, other than in the narrative of "persecution and censorship".
I was just trying to come up with an example of something once aimed at the left to offset the example of Damore and all the blatant discrimination against non far leftists today. Rock Hudson came to mind, about having to hide his homosexuality as an actor to get roles. Perhaps it wasn’t a great example.
It was irrelevant to my intended point though, which is that those not of the far left are soon going to be unable to discuss their opinions within most institutions noses this trend is reversed.
I'm never sure how much this is new. I think it's always been the case that disagreeing with your bosses' opinions endangers your job. This is one of the main reasons why we have a secret ballot in elections - so you don't get fired for voting for the wrong party.
It's also why there are specific legal protections for religion and for union organising - because employers fired people for those things anyway.
Obviously, people are fired for different things now because employers have different opinions. Socialists used to have to be very quiet about their politics so they didn't get fired for them. That used to be normal, and I do wonder to what extent it's just that the weird minority opinion you have to either shut up about or live on the fringes of society is one that used to be more popular (and I don't mean "conservatism", but "women are inferior").
Damore's problem was more that he argued with HR policy than that he was cancelled publicly; if the public cancellation had been for something that Google were OK with (like the various people who were cancelled for doing military contracts) then Google would have had no problem standing up for him.
I think there are several different phenomena being conflated together as "cancel culture" and I'm not sure how linked they are.
One is people getting fired for arguing with corporate policy. I think the only difference here is that corporate policies are more inclined to be "woke" (for want of a better word) than in the past, so if there's policy that says "we should strive to have 50-50 male-female programmers" is going to get a James Damore fired for arguing with it.
Another is people getting fired because companies bow to public pressure (which is what I thought was the central meaning of "cancel culture"). That's always been true, though the things that public pressure get applied over have changed and social media has made applying pressure easier. I think the "it's easier to push a company into firing someone because social media makes it easier to make a big deal out of things" is both true and concerning. That's where I would want to direct anti-cancel culture effort, into making employers more cautious about responding to social media pressure.
Another is people being harassed or swatted or whatever over their opinions. This is mostly public figures who repeatedly discuss something that a lot of people disagree with. If you're famous enough, anything you say that's remotely controversial is going to generate a lot of blowback. It's necessary to distinguish between lots of people disagreeing with you and harassment, and then I think the right solution for the actual harassers is criminal sanctions - if we're getting to the point of death/rape threats or doxxing, then yeah, those people need to have the police at their door. If it's just people disagreeing with you and making twitter unusable because it's full of notifications, then suck it up buttercup, or change your notification settings.
Then there's a separate question about "at what point should people be forgiven?" For an opinion, you clearly would have to change that opinion. If you got fired for believing X, then you can't get the job back until you change your mind. In practice, you get fired for expressing an opinion, not for holding one, and if you'd just kept your mouth shut, you'd have been fine. But you can't unsay things, so you'd have to recant in public, even if you maintain the position in private [for people who think this is ridiculous, remember this could apply for, say, Holocaust denial, or for holding that Stalin's mass murders were necessary and good, or for wanting to reinstate slavery, or for supporting the gunning down of the police; there's a separate argument about what opinions people should be fired for]. But if you actually did something, you can't undo it. If you sexually harassed someone and got fired for it, at what point should you be rehireable? I think that's a hard question in general; in the past it used to be that you got far enough away in space and time that your new employer just wouldn't know, but social media and cancellation makes that impossible.
In the UK we have a law called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, which says that after a period of time after being released from prison, your conviction is "spent", and you can say "I never went to prison" if asked by an employer;(with a few exceptions for certain types of employer). If they ask the police/courts/prison service (a "DBS check") then it will tell them that you've never been to prison. But if there's social media coverage, then your conviction is never effectively spent. That does seem to be a problem. When can Louis CK have a comeback? Can Justine Sacco get a job again?
I don't think Damore was fired for arguing with HR. Plenty of people have argued against various policies intended to achieve gender parity without getting fired. I think he was fired because he caused drama; it was a huge distraction.
Nominally he was fired for something like suggesting that women aren't as good at programming, but he never said that and others have said that without getting fired, so I like my theory better.
The alternative theory for why he was fired for something he hadn't actually said is that which person the mob comes after is partly random.
I'm sure that there are people who said what Damore did and weren't fired, but I'm also sure that there were black people who kissed white people in the 50's and weren't lynched. That doesn't mean that the black people who were lynched were really lynched because they caused drama.
My understanding on Damore is that he gave an opinion on a sensitive topic that they found unacceptable, even though it was clearly scientifically legitimate. The net effect is that any conservatives (actually non far-leftists) I know in Silicon Valley took it as a warning that they better keep their opinions to themselves. In other words, don’t question the woke consensus that women and men all want the same types of jobs, or that BLM has been a force for good and so on.
I believe that firing employees for political or scientific opinions unrelated to the mission of the business used to be extremely rare in the US, and certainly has never been considered acceptable. AT&T didn’t fire telephone repairmen for their political opinions.
If this trend continues (and it probably can’t), then the vast majority of Americans will not be able to express their opinions freely on social media, on the mainstream media, on their job, at school, and so forth. They will become social pariahs for not preaching the woke mantra. This is decentralized, mass propaganda.
I suggest the healthy way to address the Damore issue was to have an open dialogue on the issue, and sincerely thank him for bringing it to everyones' attention.
> "Liberals lose the culture war if there's ever such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any unpopular opinion, publish any heterodox research, or stand up for anybody who's gone against the mob...So all else being equal, liberals' goal should be to prevent a culture of fear. Partly this is an actual battle, one where we try to protect people and stand up against the forces of authoritarianism."
Couldn't agree more. As a liberal, this is one big reason why I'm building https://spartacus.app/
It’s an online platform for creating or joining campaigns for collective action in adversarial situations - using the concept of Assurance Contracts to solve game-theoretic coordination problems.
Think “Kickstarter,” but instead of crowdfunding, it’s for de-risking the process of recruiting and organizing participants for any project/campaign that can only make a difference with a group effort, like workplace organizing, whistleblowing, open letters, direct action, event attendance, coming to the defense of someone being "canceled", formation of clubs or affinity groups, etc.
"I'm Spartacus!" "No, I'm Spartacus!" "I'm Spartacus!" "I'm Spartacus!" (I think you get the drift)
I know this is not an entirely novel concept - many of the underlying principles have been validated by other successful platforms like GoFundMe, Change.org, and The Point, (before it pivoted to become Groupon).
Unlike those other platforms, the focus of Spartacus will not be fundraising or social signaling, but the formation and enablement of group solidarity for specific collective actions in the real world. The aim is to increase the expected value of organizing around concealed preferences by lowering the courage requirements for taking action (from heroic to average) and reducing individual actors’ risks (from potentially catastrophic to marginal).
I'll preemptively address some common points of feedback:
- Spartacus will prohibit any campaign encouraging illegal actions or violence of any kind.
- The app will have several mechanisms built in to abate the risk of trolls, spammers, or bad faith actors sabotaging or gaming the system, such as requiring a small financial stake to join a campaign.
- The explicit political position of the app is one of J.S Mill-style liberal pluralism, and it will be defended as such. Use cases will be ideologically agnostic. There will be no partisan bent, and both “blue” and “red” campaigns will be equally welcome, regardless of who it pisses off. Campaign curation will strike for balance to try to avoid the app taking on a partisan valence.
How the app is gong to work when both Apple and Google ban it because someone tries to organize e.g. a (very peaceful and legal) "all lives matter" rally there?
It's web-based. It won't be on Apple's app store or Google Play, at least not anytime soon. Plus, I doubt the "All Lives Matter" people need something like this to find each other online and organize.
Spartacus might be more useful to friends of Bob - Bob who went to an "All Lives Matter" rally, got targeted for cancellation, and now needs a social counterweight to the online pressure his employer is under to fire him. Maybe a petition like "Bob's a good upstanding citizen and shouldn't be fired".
Spartacus can work for friends of "All lives Matter" Bob, and "Israel is an Apartheid State" Stephanie in equal measure.
Whether they have enough genuine supporters to make a difference is a separate question.
Allow me to the the annoying Objectivist know-it-all and flesh "Don't Cancel People" out. It's really simple, and it's one word:
Justice.
Not "social justice". Actual justice.
There's a reason she carries scales: justice requires proportionality and that the punishment fits the crime. Now, funnily enough, everyone gets this when they want to: the same people who think one tweet should be enough to ruin someone's life, are aghast when someone is shot in the back for running from the police. Again, justice requires proportionality.
So, in this context:
Words get words.
Deeds get deeds.
Let's take white nationalism. If someone doesn't bring that to work, and confines themselves to arguing the case for white nationalism on the internet, then the response should be to answer him with words on the internet, not to get him fired. And, yes, I'll happily prove that I can take it the other way: the same should be true for any non-violent Islamist. Say a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir who argues for the caliphate, but has no connection to violence and does not cause problems for his fellow workers.
On the other hand, it is very easy to find WN types bragging about how they are deliberately cruel to brown and black people (denying them raises, getting them fired etc.). Similarly, it's easy to find technically non-violent Islamists talking about ways to be cruel to Infidels, gays etc. Such people should be "canceled" with maximum prejudice.
Words get words. Deeds get deeds.
Notice that this is not just moral but practical. If you keep your response to the (currently) peaceful WN to arguments, you have a chance of changing his mind. Wreck his life, and what incentive does he have not to go full Combat-18? Same thing with the Hizb ut-Tahrir member.
(And, oh yes, I am totally behind building a "Too Woke To Hire" database, listing everyone who has ever gotten someone fired or blacklisted for nothing more than an opinion - and then sharing that database with all future employers. I assure you, that'll end cancel culture and right quick).
"Similarly, it's easy to find technically non-violent Islamists talking about ways to be cruel to Infidels, gays etc. Such people should be "canceled" with maximum prejudice."
Assuming "canceled" means being fired, how is this answering words with words and deeds with deeds? Talking about ways to be cruel to infidels, gays, etc. isn't the same as actually being cruel. And even actually being cruel usually involves words, not deeds like denying them raises, getting them fired, etc.
That's sophistry. If you say homosexuality is sinful that is different from saying that people should, if they're dentists, go out of their way to cause maximum pain to gay patients (yes, this does happen, go look at "Undercover Mosque").
As to the last sentence of this - if you can't see the difference between someone writing a post online that you disagree with, and someone getting you fired, then I don't really know what I could write that could convince you otherwise.
I'm just trying to understand what "words get words, deeds get deeds" means in practice. SJWs would say that words can in many instances be more harmful than deeds. This isn't a minor point, but the main premise of their argument on which everything else rests. You seem to agree with the premise. In your example, saying that people should go out of their way to cause maximum pain to gay patients is a cancellable offense, even though they're saying words and not doing deeds. Presumably you think these words are worse than some deeds, for example donating to an anti-gay-marriage group. If that's the case, we're back at square one, and still have no criterion for distinguishing between cancellable vs. non-cancellable words.
"SJWs would say that words can in many instances be more harmful than deeds"
They're wrong. It really is that simple.
If you don't see the difference between boasting of action or inciting to action on the one hand, and not doing so on the other - well, there really isn't any way for me to make it plainer.
Someone writes something vile online - get's other writings in response online. Someone fires people or ruins their lives based on skin color - gets fired himself. Let's be clear that the latter example isn't "just words", it's a confession of guilt.
If you are this lost in rationalism, then there is little I can say. The only thing that might change your mind is direct experience of all of the above - and I don't wish that on you.
If we already agree that saying things like "be cruel to black people" is an offence that merits potential deed retalitation what about "america should be a white ethnostate"? you can't accomplish the latter without the former.
this argument can be extended to include a lot of opinions.
They are completely different. The former are boasts of actions taken by the individual himself, or direct incitements to action. The latter are not. It's the difference between saying "Go out and rob, and if necessary kill, people to get what you need" and "There should be communal ownership of property". I really don't see how I can make this any clearer.
You're treating words as deeds for the purposes of retaliation if those words are presumably linked to deeds. If that's the metric, then who exactly gets to do that presuming matters.
You really don't see the difference between incitement to violence and advancing a theoretical argument? So If I write an essay saying, "The political/religious opinions of Dan L are absolutely awful" that's the same thing as telling people: "Go, find Dan L, kill him and his entire family"?
If you don't see that difference, you don't see that difference. This is rationalism at its absolute worst.
Boasting of the action then, is not a deed, but evidence of one. And it should be investigated before punishment is issued.
Exhortation to a deed is not at all clear cut as a deed. Technically, "If you murder so and so, I'll pay you," is, at the moment, just words, but it's obviously more than that.
But it's a pretty smooth gradient between that and something that is equally obviously unobjectionable.
maybe what's happening is that SJWs are trying to coordinate society around being mean to white nationalists (as well as a lot of other people). So at least they comply to scott's heuristic. whether any specific group should beget meanness is another discussion though.
No, they're doing exactly what he complains about. They are not "being nice" until they achieved coordination of the rest of society. They are individually acting as entrepreneurs of outrage.
We're commenting on Substack, which was come in the crosshairs of some SJW types for hosting anti-SJ people. One of the hated writers I read is Jesse Singal, a relatively normal progressive liberal who supported Warren in the Dem primary. Precisely because he's so normie, it's hard for his enemies to attack his (normie) ideas rather than him as a person. So there's basically a huge amount of lies written about him in order to defame him so he can no longer work for left-of-center publications (his natural home). The end-goal is to prevent anyone from covering certain topics as a journalist rather than as a mouthpiece for activists.
This sounds good in general, but the most obvious (to me) edge case is speech acts. If you call someone a white supremacist or a homophobe, you're expressing an idea, but because of the known willingness of many influential people to punish those opinions, you're also increasing the chance of someone else harming that person. If a neo-Nazi emphatically expresses their desire to attack or discriminate against nonwhite people, even if they don't actually do it, that by itself makes nonwhite people less comfortable & more anxious. (The latter argument is greatly overused now, but I think it is valid in particularly egregious cases.) Of course, whether something causes harm or suffering is distinct from whether it should be generally punished & a social norm formed against it, & it could be useful for some purposes to follow a "Words get words, deeds get deeds" policy strictly, but that also leaves you vulnerable to bad-faith use of this defense & to attracting witches & thereby repelling normal people.
I have to say, if someone emphatically expresses their desire to behave in such a way, then too bad. That's a clear expression of intent to behave in a certain way.
In any case, a lot will need to change before such distinctions need trouble us.
I think some of the disagreement and talking-past-one-another on this subject stems from a certain bit of fiction of play-acting that is central to a culture of "free speech": while we know that people can and often do get their feelings hurt by the words of others -- and that, from a utility standpoint, that harm may actually exceed harm caused by certain physical injuries -- *we need to pretend that isn't true*. Why would we do this? The usual liberal arguments for free speech kick in here -- we'll collectively arrive at the truth that way, which is more important in the long term, etc. And of course if we are too lenient and open-minded about hearing appeals of the form "your mere words 'harmed' me, so I demand redress," we will incentivize all manner of dishonest and trumped-up claims and end up litigating them forever. There will always be edge cases, but the core idea of free-speech culture is create an intentionally very high bar for responding to words with deeds, a (rebuttable) presumption against it. Like maybe don't do it unless a supermajority of impartial observers votes via secret ballot to do it -- something like that.
By design, this means we are going to be acting like hurt feelings don't count, don't exist, are exaggerated, etc. At times this can verge on gaslighting. And then people who notice the gaslighting emerge, point it out, and say, screw this -- I'm going to respond to words with deeds sometimes, on a case-by-case basis, instead of adopting this weird fiction. Personally, I can see why this is appealing and in some sense more "authentic." The problem is it probably destroys the possibility of a very large free-speech culture. Until recently, free-speech culture was kind of the default approach to the public sphere for an educated or curious American, and it's jarring for a lot of us to see how it's being abandoned by our peers.
Nazzim, I think you'll see that I didn't mention free speech at all. I discussed _Justice_.
Again, not "social justice". Actual Justice.
The SJWs attempt to elide the difference between speech and action, between words and violence, is there to justify their actions. To rationalise their abandoning Justice. To justify to themselves: "I don't like what this person said, so I'll get him fired, reduce him and his family to poverty for the rest of his life, and drive him to suicide - or even assault him, or pass the info on to those who might well kill him."
I notice not one person disagreeing with me above has used the word Justice. I'm not surprised.
"By design, this means we are going to be acting like hurt feelings don't count, don't exist, are exaggerated, etc."
Well, they exist - but they aren't the same thing as violence or having your life wrecked. For example, I find tirades against "whiteness" absolutely vile, as they are a dehumanisation of me, my family, and many of my dearest friends. I don't try to get people who write this crap fired, I try to respond in kind, to show them how unpleasant that is. Or I would, if that weren't a firing offence these days.
But, again, can we please have a little empiricism against all this rationalism? Try imagine reading something you violently dislike online: picture the hurt feelings, the anger, the gnawing outrage etc.
Now imagine someone getting you fired and blacklisted. Imagine the horror you feel as all of your dreams and plans come crashing down. Imagine the fear of how you will support your family. Imagine having to get by on minimum wage by minimum wage job. Imagine all the stresses and troubles that lifelong poverty will bring.
Imagine reading every single person you respect saying that you are a bad person.
Now imagine someone pouring raspberry jelly on you.
The former is obviously much worse, but it is only "words", while the latter is "deeds". The former is far more life-wrecking *even if* you still keep getting paid and keep your job, and *even though* the latter may well cause you a little physical pain as the jelly stings when it gets in your eyes.
No, not really. Maybe you waved at someone in traffic, or explained someone's academic paper, or your child got in a Twitter fight, or someone who looks like you said something mean on camera.
One reason why they're not easy to find is because, as Scott noted, there just aren't that many of them. But if you know of such examples, you could link them here.
Police have authority over everyone whether they work with them or not, but in at least some cases, the police leadership is also infiltrated.
According to the FBI, these people call themselves "ghost skins," as in skinheads, but they're intentionally hiding that fact to remain accepted in polite society.
Perhaps because that document was heavily redacted it didn't contain any examples of people in managerial positions. Actually, the document talks about "interest" and "attempts" to infiltrate law enforcement rather than actual examples of it happening. Maybe that would be too embarrassing for law enforcement to discuss.
Interestingly, Elliot Kline seems to have been lying about what he actually did. But I do think it would be fair to fire him for claiming (regardless of how true it is) that he had done so.
"This person is a white nationalist with terrible opinions" is words, not deeds. Why blame the people who "got them fired" with mere words, rather than the company that actually did the firing?
I've long thought that a specific piece of legislation is needed. It would essentially state that it is only legal to fire someone for reasons that have at least one of the following charateristics:
-is a crime
-occured at work or is related to the performance of work duties
-directly involved other members of the work organization
That would shut down the problem pretty quickly in my opinion, and would be a pretty good thing in general-- it's pretty absurd to fire someone for reasons that are none of those three.
You talk about proportionality, but you only have two responses--words, and firing. We should consider that some "offenses" are well above or below those levels even within the respective categories of the word/deed dichotomy.
That's true, but this is a comment's thread, referring to a single point in the above essay. I don't have the space - or the time - to fully develop the theme of justice, to explain what merits what, and why. I only have the time an space to sketch out the principle of proportionality, give it its name - justice - and hope that those of an active mind take that as a point to think further.
I disagree with this idea of justice, for one simple reason: we are never working from a position of perfect information - what is considered just one day can very well become unjust the next based on what the human species presumes its needs to be - correct proportionality is inherently nebulous, its not a solvable thing. To get a more practical idea of what you're talking about - if someone in real life gets all up in your face and yells at you but doesn't actually touch you, what is the appropriate proportionate response? Do you have to leave? Do you have to yell back? Can you punch them? What if they seem frail or like they might be having a temporary psychotic episode?
This is the argument that because reason is fallible, we would know more without reason - and that because our sight is limited we would see more without eyes.
Yes, we are limited, yes, we are fallible, yes, a commitment to justice does not mean we will not err, and yes, it is easier to correct errors of mercy than severity, so we should lean towards the former - but while a commitment to justice will not make you perfectly just, it is the precondition for _any_ justice.
I've lived through your practical example, at work. I knew the people involved. They are good people, though their actions were wrong, so I told let them rave, waited until it was over, told them I did not appreciate such treatment, and let it go and forgave them. To do otherwise would have been unjust.
What about a stranger doing so on the street? Again, justice and knowledge of human beings suggests that this is a good person going through some unknown trouble, so I will walk away. If they are having a temporary psychotic episode, I should see if they can get help - but I am not obliged to risk myself in that.
"Not obliged to risk myself in that", for some people, would translate to physically pushing the person away from them, and it'd be hard to call that unjust if we look at the situations where 2 seconds later the psychotic person pulls out a gun. You obviously don't think it's /always/ the right course of action to walk away, that would just make you a door-mat. If the same situation can lead to either "see if they can get help/walk away" or "push them away physically", those two outcomes seem pretty different to me.
"for some people" - well, those people are wrong, since touching someone else is a guaranteed way to escalate a situation. I'm really not sure what point you are trying to make here.
As to the rest of this - I specifically gave different contexts in which one would behave in different ways. Again, I don't know what you're trying to say here.
My point was that your system is naïve and falls apart when you attempt to apply it to the real world. "touching someone else is a guaranteed way to escalate a situation" is not fact, it is a maxim, and often a necessity in order to avoid that person harming you or forcing you to leave.
We have gone from discussing whether calling for someone to be fired - or killed - is the same thing as writing something someone disagrees with on the internet.
And people seriously ask why I say this is lousy with rationalism?
Your Point 3 implies that discussing cancel culture based on specific cases thereof is harmful when those cases are unrepresentative, because it does censors' work for them by creating a culture of fear; however, if such cases *are* representative, then it doesn't matter, because anyone who ignored them & spoke freely would soon be pressured to stop. This indicates that this sort of chilling effect could be counteracted to some extent just by somehow credibly estimating the chances of being fired, having your reputation damaged, &c. for expressing some heterodox opinion in some social context, so that people in that context worrying about unrepresentative cases of cancel culture will know that they're unrepresentative. I'm not sure how to do this, but one way might be through polling; e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202005/political-biases-in-academia shows that the problems he discusses *are* typical in social psychology by citing polls showing that a majority of people in the field do discriminate against politically opposed researchers & politically inconvenient ideas.
There's plenty of good things on Twitter. Just follow the right people. People who hate Twitter are people who don't know how to use it. Twitter is good for this: jokes. That's what I tweet: jokes. Who do I follow? People who tweet funny jokes.
Well, I got kicked off Twitter permanently for calling Trump a retard. So maybe I'm biased. But you're right Bullseye. I still scroll twitter occasionally but as a viewer not a member. So I can't respond and I don't really get a "feed". I just look up people I'm interested in and read what they post. It's a much better experience.
I'm being hyperbolic of course, but even if you're right I still think Twitter is a net negative. Wether it's the algorithm or something else about the form, it seems to bring out the worst in most people.
Um, no - as someone who has used Twitter plenty and isn't suffering from stockholm syndrome, knowing how to use Twitter is a battle against its inherently awful design and there are not "plenty" of good things on Twitter.
1. Trying to keep track of response chains is not intuitive (contrast, say, the comments here)
2. the character limit warps all regular conversation beyond belief
3. the private message system LOCKS YOU OUT if you message someone too much (i.e. having a conversation) because it thinks you're spamming.
4. Twitter bombards you with notifications if you don't use it regularly, and when you check them the notifications are just "reminders" of tweets you might have missed chosen what seems to be randomly, not even algorithmically. Pure manipulative skinner-box design.
Jokes are something you can find anywhere, and in other places much more readily. The majority of the jokes on Twitter are memes made by literal children.
I use Twitter as an FTP server to move screenshots from my video game consoles to my PC. A short Python script pulls the images with no need for me to ever look at twitter.com.
Regarding respectability cascades, how do the hippies fit into it? Many would argue that what broke the stifling world of the 50s was the counterculture movement of the 60s, and it was far from respectable. It wasn't even half concerned with being respectable, it was all about "f you and your idea of society, we're doing what we want". And yet, after the 60s were done, so was the stifling atmosphere.
Or are you saying that in the respectability cascades, first came respectsble people and the hippies only followed-suit because of them? That doesn't sound like the hippie movement I grew up hearing about, because once again, they didn't sound like they gave a crap about what any respectsble people thought.
I don't know if this is a respectability cascade, it could just be the young hippies growing up and not enforcing the culture of fear after becoming adults. If you were a hippie, or if you knew a former hippie sufficiently well to know they were not crazy, then the idea of enforcing a culture that forbids hippie-ism probably seems unthinkable in your later life.
I think that the idea is hippies are an early to mid stage in the respectability cascade. They're a large group of people openly defying the establishment and not getting punished harshly enough to completely destroy them, which makes increasing numbers of increasingly respectable people feel safer defying the establishment in other ways.
Maybe I'm just drunk (I am), but I get the vibe that you think our culture is going through a bad time. Other than the pandemic, I don't see that at all. I feel like we are going through very normal times for America. When Carter gave his malaise speech, it bummed everyone out. Nobody knew they were suffering from a malaise, and then Carter said they were.
Your last post was great. What you experienced was what I experienced. A lot of us minor ex-bloggers probably related, maybe even felt some nostalgia for those times. Not to mention the fact we are all now gathered here, because the blogosphere is dead and this is all that remains.
Anyway, I'm drunk. I think I said that at the beginning.
I'm pretty sure everyone in the 70s was bummed out - inflation, unemployment, gas lines, gas stations being closed, the price of everything going up except wages, and Carter just pointed it out and called for hope.
Maybe Western liberalism, in the sense of freedom, democracy, and equality, is possible only for a fleeting moment in human history. Once upon a time all the stars aligned; now that the moment is coming to an end, never to return. Very few societies in all of history were representative democracies with universal suffrage. Almost none had no unquestionable dogmas. Maybe liberal democracy requires an industrial society with high unionization rates, a large middle class, a relatively homogenous population, and an existential external threat to unite the ingroup. Now that the economy is service based, unions are declining, the middle class is shrinking due to skyrocketing inequality (at least in the US and UK), the population is becoming more and more diverse, and WWII and the Cold War are distant memories, democracy might not be stable anymore. We might return to the representative oligarchy of early America or pre-industrial Britain, or become an authoritarian autocracy like Russia or Syria. In the worst case scenario, ethnic tension explodes into civil war and we get a Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Congo, or modern Ethiopia.
I agree. The natural state of human society is conformity and repression; Enlightenment values and liberal democracy were aberrations that arose out of some very peculiar circumstances. That is not to say that such circumstances cannot arise again, but I doubt we'll get another long-lasting period of liberalism for quite some time; certainly not in our lifetimes.
A society in which the only acceptable political and moral values are those of Enlighenment Liberalism does not strike me as anti-conformist or non-repressive. But that's because I'm not an Enlightenment Liberal.
Well, perhaps paradoxically, the ideal of Liberalism is that everyone is allowed to have his own beliefs. Thus, if you wanted to set up an Amish commune, ban all technology, and mandate your version of Christianity, under Liberalism you would absolutely be able to do that -- as long as a). people can safely leave your paradise whenever they want, and b). you're not coercing anyone into joining.
<i>Maybe Western liberalism, in the sense of freedom, democracy, and equality, is possible only for a fleeting moment in human history.</i>
I suspect that Western liberalism is only possible in situation where there are multiple religious (interpreted broadly) groups which are both too strong to be pushed around but too weak to push others around. Obviously this is an unstable situation, and hence so is Western liberalism.
Freedom, democracy, and equality aren't even a trilemma; you can only have one. Personally, I see freedom as a terminal value, democracy as an instrumental value, and equality as a distraction.
"Equality" in the sense of "let's all pretend that these two unequal things are equal" can only last so long before mathematical errors cause bridges to collapse. We are working as hard as we can to hasten this outcome, as we argue with a straight face that 2 + 2 = Something Other Than Four.
having lived through 50s I wish to correct some of your generalizations. first, in your list of forbiddens - atheists, gays - you forgot the most important one: being black. the derogation of Blacks was an absolute right, and it was on the back of this that most repression found its footing. (in the South cities weren't known as cosmopolitan in the modern sense, but where all those uppity ni**ers lived. marijuana was a ni**er drug.) second, the fall of the general repression: beatniks were the wedge, hippies were the floodgates. as a youngster in a conservative community you'd see beatniks then hippies and it was literally like being flooded by sunshine. it helped that TV advertisers were going after the "youth market" and there was no Fox News to put up a unified field theory of resistance.
you were also wrong about the violence. the police force main job was to keep the ni**ers in their place. my football team in highschool would go ni**er knocking on Saturday night. anyone suspected of being gay had the shit beat out of them. if you even acted like you were an atheist you were literally run out of town. all the cops carried blackjacks and if you didn't look middle class or above they wouldn't hesitate to use it. *and* organized crime was everywhere, carrying along it's violence, but nobody reading the paper would be aware - it simply wasn't reported.
+1 "with a minimum of Red Guards breaking people's kneecaps" seems like a very incorrect way to describe the 1950s unless some types of violence count more than others
I would guess that the actual amount of violence was lower in 1950s America compared to China during the Cultural Revolution. Partly it's because revolutionary regimes are inherently unstable and need violence to enforce their new order. But you can see how far the decline in racial violence was in the US by the 50s: https://inductivist.blogspot.com/2006/11/lynching-is-ancient-history.html
oh yeah definitely. I thought we were comparing 1950s America to 2020 America. If the intended comparison was to China then I have no quarrel (except maybe to suggest that China was probably also correspondingly more conformist)
You sure you know what ni**er knocking was? It was knocking at someone's door then running away and giggling as they came to the door and nobody was there. The rest of your post is an absurd absolute.
you might be right, but that's what the football players called it when they drove around on the other side of the tracks leaning out the windows and swinging ax handles. I agree with the absurdity of the rest of the post, but I'm pretty damned sure that's what I lived through.
"Knocking on the door and running away giggling" is Knock Down Ginger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock,_Knock,_Ginger (amongst other names) over here. I certainly never heard it described by that term, and I've read an amount of fiction (including Agatha Christie's first ever Poirot novel) that used the n-word casually.
I was horrified to realize as an adult (~30) the nature of this phrase from my childhood. I'd only ever encountered ni**er as a nonsense part of what, to child me, was this fixed phrase.
Marijuana, or "sticks of tea", seemed to be associated a lot with musicians (if I go by pulp detective fiction) and of course many jazz musicians and big band musicians were African-American, so "marijuana use = African-American use" might be something that was an easy stereotype.
Thanks for saying this. I too wanted to say something about the violence that upheld the dominant culture views of the entire 20th century (and before). The stable order of that era was maintained through violence, threats of violence, job loss, threats of job loss, as well as social shunning and so on. The OP comes across to me as a bit tone deaf in the lack of recognition of that. It was long-term and the consequences went well beyond job/career loss and social shaming for those groups and individuals who were targeted.
> Still, it might be worth having coherent principles, at least in order to assuage our own consciences. Are we actually committing to never exerting social pressure on anybody in any way?
While I'm all in favor of having coherent principles, I think it's more important to start by establishing a baseline here, rather than immediately jumping to making sure we can handle all the harder cases. Your Coca-Cola case is, at best, a noncentral example and I don't think it's the right thing to start with.
As for that baseline -- well, ThePrussian already remarked below "words get words, deeds get deeds", but I don't think that goes far enough. After all, "cancelling" *is* words. A baseline standard we should seek to establish, IMO, is "arguments get arguments". (Where -- to be clear -- ad hominem, Bulverism, and other similar forms of the genetic fallacy don't count as arguments. A key part of "cancelling" is that once you're declared to be bad, that alone counts as a rebuttal to any of your arguments. That can't stand.) Non-value statements are to be evaluated for truth or falsity, not moral rightness or wrongness.
That's the baseline I'd seek to establish -- freedom to argue.
And, yes, OK, you're not going to apply that in literally *every* case; as you discussed[0], you're still going to ignore the worst of the worst (neo-Nazis and such). But the garden needs to be retaken. (This may require establishing that just because you don't agree with the SJers, this does not, in fact, make you a "Nazi"...)
> And, yes, OK, you're not going to apply that in literally *every* case; as you discussed[0], you're still going to ignore the worst of the worst (neo-Nazis and such). But the garden needs to be retaken.
Who this does or does not include may need to be made a coherent, specific, agreed-upon principle, precisely because a common tactic of censorious SJ people &c. is to argue that their opponents are equivalent to the agreed-to-be-intolerable bigots & should be treated the same way.
I don't think this is the case with the typical usage of the word (although I've never liked the term "cancelling" as it's used in a novel sense, without an agreed-upon definition, leading to ambiguity). Typically we are talking at least about efforts to prevent someone from speaking and reaching an audience, and often about materially punishing the speaker in other ways (such as firing).
But those efforts consist almost entirely of words.
If your position is that it's OK to call for someone to be fired (because that's just words) but not OK to actually fire them (because that's an act) then that's a perfectly plausible position, but I don't think it's the one you actually hold.
My position is that calling for someone to be fired is wrong, but it should only get counter-arguments, not material punishment. (Words get words.) Only actually firing someone should get material punishment such as boycotts. (Deeds get deeds.)
The idea is not that words are always OK. It's that even if you say words that aren't OK, you should only get words in response, not punishment.
I endorse neo-Nazis getting arguments. Not everyone needs to spend their time doing that, but there's a large enough ratio of anti-Nazis to Nazis that I expect some will.
"First a few mad geniuses, then the coolest artists and writers, then the brightest academics, then journalists, then well-educated people in general, then the population in general, and the last step was reaching the government (still not really complete; marijuana remains illegal at the federal level)."
Well then, lump me in with the non-geniuses (sane or otherwise), the dull, the non-academic, the ill-educated, because I don't happen to think that marijuana legalisation is the most pressing issue and a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance that it is illegal either in your country or my own.
I suppose it really does depend on one's experience of its use and those who use it. I wonder how it is used among the "weird Bay Area intellectuals and creative types who are really into sex and drugs"? What is their attitude to drinking alcohol? How would they regard someone who liked, and claimed to need, to drink a six-pack of cheap beer every day, and showed not a whole heap of ambition other than somehow managing to scrape together enough money for that six-pack? Because down among the lower-class types where I am, that's the level of marijuana usage. This site is probably not too pro-alcohol, and they measure the relative harms of marijuana and alcohol: https://arg.org/news/cannabis-causes-fewer-harms-to-others-than-alcohol/
So if we're talking about "legal drugs, the consumption of which makes you a waster", then marijuana is probably better than booze. But it still causes harm, and what I'm getting at is that yes humans have always found ways to get off their faces, but to understand where some of us anti-reefer madness types are coming from, flip it around: do you really think that "yeah, sitting around skulling beer all day is just the thing?"
"From an analysis of a representative survey series focused on alcohol and marijuana use and related topics among Washington adults, 8.4% of respondents reported experiencing harm because of someone else’s marijuana use compared to 21.5% from alcohol use in the past 12 months. The types of harms reported included threats or harassment, vandalism, physical harm, harms related to driving, or financial or family problems. Similar to alcohol use, the most common harms from someone else’s marijuana use was harassment, vandalism, or family problems. However, these harms, while substantial, were three times more likely to occur from drinking than marijuana.
Women experienced more harms from others’ use of either alcohol or marijuana than men, and for alcohol, the people harmed differed by age. Alcohol’s harms from others was highest among people under 40 then declined with those 60 and older reporting the lowest rate. Marijuana harms did not vary significantly by age."
"But by the 1820s, Massachussetts was one of the most open societies in the world. The Puritan Church turned into the Unitarian Church"
If you want to hear griping about Unitarians, here's some quotes from William Cobbett writing in 1821 in his "Rural Rides" (and he's none too happy about Catholics and Jews either being loosed from the legal religious restrictions of the day):
"Ah! say the Dissenters, and particularly the Unitarians; that queer sect, who will have all the wisdom in the world to themselves; who will believe and won’t believe; who will be Christians and who won’t have a Christ; who will laugh at you, if you believe in the Trinity, and who would (if they could) boil you in oil if you do not believe in the Resurrection: “Oh!” say the Dissenters, “we know very well, that your Church Parsons are[Pg 250] commanded to get, if they can, dying people to give their money and estates to the Church and the poor, as they call the concern, though the poor, we believe, come in for very little which is got in this way. But what is your Church? We are the real Christians; and we, upon our souls, never play such tricks; never, no never, terrify old women out of their stockings full of guineas.” “And, as to us,” say the Unitarians, “we, the most liberal creatures upon earth; we, whose virtue is indignant at the tricks by which the Monks and Nuns got legacies from dying people to the injury of heirs and other relations; we, who are the really enlightened, the truly consistent, the benevolent, the disinterested, the exclusive patentees of the salt of the earth, which is sold only at, or by express permission from our old and original warehouse and manufactory, Essex-street, in the Strand, first street on the left, going from Temple Bar towards Charing Cross; we defy you to show that Unitarian Parsons....”
"However, the Baron was a staunch churchman as this fact clearly proves: several years he had become what they call an Unitarian. The first time (I think) that I perceived this, was in 1812. He came to see me in Newgate, and he soon began to talk about religion, which had not been much his habit. He went on at a great rate, laughing about the Trinity; and I remember that he repeated the Unitarian distich, which makes a joke of the idea of there being a devil, and which they all repeat to you, and at the same time laugh and look as cunning and as priggish as Jack-daws; just as if they were wiser than all the rest of the world! I hate to hear the conceited and disgusting prigs, seeming to take it for granted, that they only are wise, because others believe in the incarnation, without being able to reconcile it to reason. The prigs don’t consider, that there is no more reason for the resurrection than for the incarnation; and yet having taken it into their heads to come up again, they would murder you, if they dared, if you were to deny the resurrection."
So if I believe Cobbett, and that's a large "if", even the Unitarians had doctrines they were very insistent upon were correct and must be held.
"What about the gradual secularization of Ireland during the end of the 20th century? There are so many interesting stories of societies going from more to less repressive without obvious outside intervention."
"Money" is the short answer. Your weird Bay Area intellectuals and creatives who are really into sex and drugs get to be that way because of money. Lower down the scale where there's less money or none at all, there is the same interest in sex and drugs, but it's serial monogamy or several baby mommas on the go at once instead of polyamory and compersion, and opiods instead of nootropics. Money dissolves a lot of old restrictions, as we see by the idea that once women in Third World countries get access to education, then birth rates go down, as mentioned here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/women-are-the-key-to-economic-development-in-third-world-countries
"Providing women and girls with more educational opportunities contributes to: "reductions in fertility rates and increases in labour force participation rates, and in which thereby better quality of human capital of the future economy and generations."
Once you have more money sloshing around the economy, and people can get richer, then they have options. There are more choices, and consequences of those choices are lessened or can be avoided. 50s America became less repressive and more open as the economic situation improved and the post-war boom kicked in. If you have the choice between going to church on Sunday or access to some form of amusement, be that a golf course or shopping or just going for a drive in the country, then church often loses out. There's more to it than that, of course, but to pick Ireland, society loosened up as our economy improved and no longer were we exporting people to other nations but could give them jobs at home. There's even a book about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pope's_Children
It pays to distinguish the Unitarians (those people Cobbett described here, who chiefly believed in a simplified one God) from the Unitarian Universalists (who believed, at minimum, that everyone is saved, and at maximum, something flirting with humanism or pantheism), and Cobbett's 1821 from the post-Emerson 1880s or even the 1960s that Scott maybe should have picked.
The Unitarians of 1821 had doctrines they were very insistent upon, but, by very very very very gradual process, the Unitarian Universalists of 1961 did not.
And I suppose it demonstrates Scott's point, that the gradual softening of doctrines went on from strict Puritans to "no Incarnation" Unitarians to amalgamation with Universalists to the much more "eh, God, who knows, who cares, if it floats your boat sure" UUs of today.
obviously it's not the most pressuring issue of any era. but marijuana still be legal. even if there are adicts among its users. possibly these bay area people wouldn't like six pack man. but i bet they dont suport prohibition.
It's "our favourite vices" playing out. Bay Area people may not know/be the types to sit around drinking cheap beer to get their buzz on, and can see the downsides of that in others of the lower/underclass. By comparison, they are and know the people who use weed in a sensible manner that doesn't interfere with earning a living and not being a pest. They thus argue for legalised marijuana because their mental model of users is "people like us" not the guys who sit around drinking beer *and* using weed and being losers and pests.
On the other hand, back in the days of "reefer madness", the people who drank alcohol were thinking of "people like us" as drinkers, judged the habitual drunkards harshly, and lumped in marijuana users with the habitual drunkards, layabouts, and no-goods.
That's why I disagree with Scott's "It was an ethical disaster that their progress was held back for decades, and immensely unjust that the few people who spoke out for them got punished" when it comes to legalising marijuana; you can argue that if you permit alcohol and tobacco to be legal, it's unfair to discriminate against marijuana, but I certainly don't think it's *unethical* unless you mean "any prohibition on what mentally competent and informed adults do to their bodies is unethical".
Is it unethical for vegans to push for reductions in meat-eating, possibly including making meat so expensive or difficult to obtain that giving it up will be a choice forced upon people? Discuss! (including taking into account that militant animal rights activists exist, that vegans often use moral arguments about the evils of meat eating including its deleterious effects in regard to climate change, and that people can be passionately convinced that their view is not alone correct but beneficial and good for others). Are you willing to lump the Bay Area vegan who pushes for Meatless Monday at their work place in with the anti-marijuana crusaders of the 50s who were "ethical disasters" and "immensely unjust"? The view from today may have more than is comfortable with the view from the past, and in fifty years time a prohibition we consider commonplace may be excoriated as a moral disaster by the future generation.
That should read "more than is comfortable in common with the view from the past", dear Substack please get on that edit button quickly, it is an ethical disaster and immensely unjust that progress is held back for ages on this!
Edit 2: Also, the point about vegans using moral, medical and pragmatic (it's bad for the environment) arguments about reducing or banning meat eating is that the anti-marijuana people were also using moral, medical and pragmatic arguments for banning it based on the same convictions of "banning this bad thing is a good thing for society as a whole and for individuals who would suffer from it".
If vegans put people in prison for eating meat, it would be an ethical disaster. If vegan policies created a black market for meat, thereby creating violent meat cartels, it would be an ethical disaster.
Marijuana has been legal for recreational use in California since 2016 and medical use since 1996. If the people there are arguing it should be legal everywhere, it's probably because they watched it happen and witnessed society not collapse.
"Money dissolves a lot of old restrictions, as we see by the idea that once women in Third World countries get access to education"
Education is not money. Lots of third world countries increased education by a lot without getting much economic benefit (that's one of Caplan's arguments against there being social returns in "The Case Against Education"). And Africa didn't see the same fertility declines as other regions when women entered the workforce, as they took jobs compatible with high fertility.
> Well then, lump me in with the non-geniuses (sane or otherwise), the dull, the non-academic, the ill-educated, because I don't happen to think that marijuana legalisation is the most pressing issue and a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance that it is illegal either in your country or my own.
I'd invite you to look into the statistics of how many people are jailed for non-violent possession of marijuana. I'd then suggest reviewing the statistics of people using it for pain relief, some of whom are getting off of opiates.
It's pretty clear that whatever harm is caused by legalizing it would be by far be outweighed by the decrease in harm. Speaking as a Canadian where we just went through the legalization process.
Feel like while you are talking about internet culture you should point out what a negative thing Steve Sailer has been. He puts up a civil front, but his comment section is racist as shit and has been for years and has probably been the biggest alt-right blog.
I still read read him because he is funny but if you are going to call out the feminists by name you should call out Sailer.
OTOH, i don't judge you by your comment section. Wait a minute. I absolutely do. There are a few, very few, bald faced racists here. They are the exception not the rule.
Who? The man has no reach, nobody who matters listens to him. Feminists, on the other hand, have a death grip on our universities and are teaching generations of otherwise normal women to hate men. *That's* reach. Imagine him holding a conference at an airport Hilton vs. feminists doing so, and imagine how each event would go over.
One obvious difference is punching up (against Coca Cola) instead of punching down while pretending to punch up (against SV nerds).
A grassroots movement starts by punching up, speaking truth to power and all that. While still weak, it does not have to pull its punches, either, they do not destroy the fabric of the society. In contrast, the powers that be know they can't punch too hard, or else they risk self-destruction, their predecessors learned it the hard way, and proportionate response became a part of the culture.
The rising powers, like SJWs-turned-Cancelists (I don't dare to mention the other groups), do not have this built-in restraint because they never needed it, not being a strong enough destructive force. After all, they are punching up, right? But with time, if they get stronger and stronger, so do their punches, and yet they still have the self-identity of the oppressed sticking it to the man, long after they, inevitably, became the man. And so they end up punching down while believing they are punching up, and don't bother holding back to keep the society functioning.
As a result, "the cancer gets its own cancer", the revolution eats its own children, and this continues until the new group at the top realizes where they are and starts behaving like one, holding back to avoid breaking the structure that let them rise to the top. And so they learn proportionate response and the society stabilizes, once again (hello, Hegel, Marx and Engels) in another cycle of dialectics/dialectical/historical materialism (that ought to appease one rather vocal commenter here).
It may well be that, once the current vicious attackers realize that they have gained the upper hand, they will evolve into a more mellow version of power, one that doesn't tear itself apart with its own unrestrained force. Or it might be that they will go as fast as they came, and someone else will emerge in their ruins, a group that can realize that being in power means being selective, proportionate and forgiving, everything the currently dominating groups are not. One can hope.
The only "other group" I can think of that both is a move-fast-and-break-things rising power *and* might enact terrible vengeance on you for a mild criticism is the PRC government. Putin and the various US TLAs are both very much old power, and even if you take the reactionaries seriously they don't seem uptight enough (or to have enough manpower) to bother with some random on the Internet.
Somebody with better lateral thinking and who isn't so scared feel like cluing me in?
I am not sure if they are just LARPing, but the Internet is full of people who say "no, we are real fascists, we want to implement fascism in the truest sense of the word and plan on killing everyone who disagrees". For example, the 3%-Movement has its name from the saying "it only takes about 3% of the population for an armed revolution".
Surely these people have better targets than someone on a random cubbyhole of the Internet (i.e. *not* going into their own spaces) saying "I hope you calm down once you take power". That's pretty milquetoast - presumably the 3%ers would even say "don't worry, we will"! - and meanwhile there are hundreds if not thousands of card-carrying anti-fascists who call for these groups' suppression on a regular basis and actively come looking for them IRL.
I wouldn't advise walking up to a 3%er and yelling at him that he's the second coming of Adolf Hitler - actually, I wouldn't advise doing that to anyone - but I'm not seeing the danger from this.
Sure - but unfortunately we are building the infrastructure to punish perceived enemies both accurately and at scale. Pipe social media into a classifier into an autonomous drone swarm, or more boringly, a recommendation engine for HR. So I rather not get the Adolf version of the social credit system.
"Instead of thinking of ourselves in the middle of a new Salem Witch Hunt, we should think of ourselves as just coming out of a rare period of unusually high freedom of thought - a weird 1990s moment that gave us South Park, the phrase "if you don't like it then don't watch it", and most of the early Internet. That period wasn't part of an inexorable trend toward rising freedom, it was a weird anomaly that has to be actively defended lest we sink back into the normal regime that typified the 1950s and pretty much every other time period ever."
...I'd like to suggest instead that these socio-cultural phenomena move in approx. 30 years cycles. You get intense periods of cultural-political strife roughly every 30 years of so, with periods of relative calm in-between.
The underlying force behind this cycle is the generational transition. A new generation must grow up that has no clear recollection of the previous intense period. They raise hell in their own particular way, gets burned, calms down, and the world moves on until a new generation which has no recollection of what went on, comes on to the scene. Mixed up with this is an element of ritual father-killing, i.e. getting even with your parents' generation by discarding what they stood for.
If we limit the geographical scope to Europe/the Americas/Oceania, after the intense cultural/political events of 1934/45 you had - as a reaction - the extreme conformity of the late 1940s, 1950s/1960s; till 1968(Paris)/1969(San Francisco) triggered ten years of turbulence (the 1970s), followed by the calm of the 1980s, until 1989/92 (fall of European Communism) with its ten-year fallout; and then the relatively uneventful 2000s/2010s. We were overdue for a new cycle, hence the woke-period we experience now is on target.
"It seems intuitively obvious that if Coca-Cola is using child slaves to pick cocoa beans or something, boycotting them until they stop is a perfectly acceptable and even commendable thing to do."
You know coca leaves and cocoa beans aren't the same thing, right...?
I'm pretty sure it was a deliberately mixed-up example in order to make it obvious that it was an example and not a specific accusation. "Coca-Cola using enslaved fluffy bunnies to pick cocoa beans" would have been a more extreme example of the trope.
"If someone were to write this all up into a 2000 word blog post "Here's Why Defund The Police Probably Won't Work" which is sober and friendly and decent enough to send to your leftist aunt, then you could send it to your leftist aunt and maybe convince her."
This is what Matt Yglesias is doing at Slow Boring and if people want to learn about how to rein in their sides excesses they should read what he's done. A big part of it is not going all Yascha Monk and being a full-time "rein in my sides excesses" guy, but instead writing mostly stuff that's about getting the details of progressive policy right, how Republicans are bad, and then every now and then dropping in a hot take about how refund the police is bad.
Is Yglesias going to de-radicalize the most committed, of course not. But he does provide argumentation and a permission structure for dissenting while retaining progressive credentials for normie blue tribers.
I don't think Scott or other Grey Tribe people could accomplish something similar because they simply do not write enough about how the red tribe is bad to have credibility with blue tribe.
Also I get a sense that a substantial portion of mainstream democratic politicians and pundits are really pissed about defund the police and feel it really cost them in the 2020 election, but are concerned about saying it too openly. We'll see how well they're able to coordinate to supress their fringe behind the scenes, and I think they'll get a boost when the pandemic ends and there are things to do other than sit on a computer inside. In terms of who has power and sets policy the center left has consistently been able to restrain the left fringe, but we'll see if that has any spillover into the online culture war arena and speech norms in white collar social circles... which seems to be vastly more interesting to grey tribe/rationalist discussion forums than the distribution of resources at stake in federal spending.
Sorry Scott, but I'm still not over your description of the democratic coalition functioning by primarily giving minorities token cultural representation immediately after the most recent stimulus act which was a massive boost to low income people.
Biden had already won the primary by the time defund the police became big. There was a hope that with Corona and Biden's big polling lead Dem's could win large majorities and pass substantial legislation. Remember all the discussion about packing the court prior to the election?
Then Biden won narrowly, D's got the senate by a tiny margin and Joe Manchin determines what legislation gets passed. This means that the most important parts of the progressive agenda are dead on arrival (making Puerto Rico a state, redistricting reform). Normie Dems are kind of coping by pretending that the relief bills make Biden FDR, but the really dialed in people realize that they've lost the Senate for probably the next decade without HR1. "Defund the Police" and the far left parts of the democratic primary are the natural scapegoats
second this post wholeheartedly. For those interested in some of the studies that Matt Y cites for why "policing decreases crime a lot, that decreasing policing increases crime, that the alternatives to policing that CHAZ etc propose don't work very well, that increasing crime hurts minorities the most, and that minorities are generally against this kind of thing," check out the links below.
Again, I think people are way overblowing the actual intended force of that Cade Metz article. It wasn't good, but it wasn't the kind of personal attack that many in this community seem to think it was. This is just how big organizations treat interesting curiosities that they don't quite understand.
Regarding the waxing and waning of the respectable versus the liberated, I think this really does come in cycles. If we take the current cycle of "cancel culture" and all the rest of it, it's a reaction to the (relative, looking back) Wild West free and open range of the 90s.
Invoking the Victorians as in the last paragraph of the essay, before Victoria came to the throne, the monarchy was not well-regarded; her uncle the king was "Silly Billy" https://www.regencyhistory.net/2012/01/who-was-silly-billy.html and matters had come to such a pitch that royal carriages were pelted by the public. Victoria's mother brought her up under a *very* rigid system precisely to avoid the ill-repute of the monarchy, and when Victoria married Albert they deliberately set out on a campaign to raise the status of the monarchy in the eyes of the public, and to inculcate 'respectable' values in society as a whole.
The Gin Craze led to the Temperance movement. Public immorality led to the Great Awakenings in Britain and the US; the Methodists were an alternative (set up as an internal reform movement by Wesley) to the rather moribund Church of England. This is why the joke/pun about "the Great Awokening" works, because now we're back in the "respectability" arc of the cycle.
There have always been, and will always be, public and social pieties to observe. Perhaps before it was "Mom and apple pie" while today it is "birthing parent and veganism", but the same forces are at work. Yes you can have sex'n'drugs'n'rock-and-roll as much as you want in the varieties that you want - so long as you adhere to the list of options of the most scrupulously correct around what is the proper description of your orientation and gender status (I think I now understand why young people are allegedly having less sex; by the time all parties concerned have negotiated the entire list of options, everyone is too exhausted to actually do anything). Picking up from the comment thread on the previous post, I have seen people clawing at one another over what is the difference, if any, between being bisexual and being pansexual (for one thing).
Greater and greater liberalisation leads to the reaction towards respectability which then becomes ossified and perceived as repressive by the rising generation which then loosens things up once they get their hands on influence and/or power, and so on and so forth.
Trump's infamous taped remarks about "grab 'em by the pussy" was representative of that particular era, of Howard Stern and the shockjocks and cock rock, where that kind of strutting, exhibitionist cocksmanship was seen as cool and upfront and sticking it to The Man who was the repressed prudes and squares, like Stern's battles with the FCC where Stern's juvenile fart humour was perceived as the heroic side.
The reaction to that was probably at its crescendo in the MeToo movement, and we're still feeling the effects of that wave even as it recedes with the ebbing tide. But the manner in which Title IX morphed from "colleges must fund women's sports equally to men's sports" to "sexual harassment/assault policies" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-defense-of-the-title-ix-dear-colleague-letter_b_59bddb9ae4b06b71800c3a2f is one example of the reaction in action.
We're in the Moral Rearmament phase of the cycle right now, in another five years or so we may be starting to swing to the "New 70s" (God help us all, say I, having lived through the 70s first time round).
Mrs. if she's married, Miss if she isn't. Men get the same title regardless of whether they're married, which implies marriage is more important for women than for men.
...FFS. Scott, I know I should be focusing on the meta-level points, fighting the culture war here defeats the whole idea, and ultimately I disagree with point (2) more generally - that is, I don't think long blog posts are inherently better than Twitter, en masse. Twitter is terrible, yes, but that's because social media is terrible (although still far better than legacy media alone would be), and I don't think its character limit is actually the cause for its dysfunction. At least most of the people arguing about a tweet have actually read that tweet....
But your comments on (2) just utterly break my mental model of you. That is: you, apparently, support police officers in any and all brutality, up to an including choking a man to death for nine minutes *while being aware of being filmed*, and your proposal for improvement is more police. Similarly, CHAZ's interesting part was an attempt at ~anarchist commune, and like any anarchist experiment it got suppressed by the government, as was obviously going to happen from day 1, but the very concept of which not happening terrified Fox News; if you ignore that and just treat it as a riot, it doesn't really stand out in summer 2020 America. And, I mean, I'd understand if there was a tribal bubble, but I know you're not in that bubble. Eliezer Yudkowsky was tweeting suggestions for comprehensive police reform, FFS. You know full well that "defund the police" was supposed to be an alternative to "abolish the police", not a rephrasing of the same statement, referring to cutting police budgets - obviously the slogan was a terrible one, and its amplification was probably because it was *selected* for terribleness by social media, but I know you're aware of that.
(And yes, I already know most of the commenters here support authoritarianism, no need to confirm that.)
BLM-2020 was the first time in a while that the left side of the culture war centered itself around a real and blatant injustice, namely the lack of police accountability (specifically about black people, yes, but if you're going to play identity politics it's worlds ahead of the norm, since it's actually dealing with real harm being caused to real people and disproportionately affecting the group in question). Certainly there were issues with i.e. the extent to which it was made about race, or the way that the discourse was taken to other countries in ways that's likely to make their police forces worse; but on the basic level, police officers kill more people in the US than other Western countries, and the absolute shamelessness in covering the brutality up in basically every incident is something that's... I mean, I guess if you're literally incapable of anger, it might not enrage you.
And this is also kind of blatantly opposed to the civil libertarianism and freedom of speech you're talking about. Empowering police to do anything in the name of stopping violent crime will not lead to them stopping at violent crime - maybe they'll stop at black people, but there's enough pressure on that point nowadays that I'm doubtful. It's this level of hand-wringing about riots that - yes, obviously riots are bad. They are also an inevitable side effect of social change. But the threat gets amplified, especially now with global media, to create fear that's entirely out of proportion to the actual danger. The left had its own version with the Capital riot. Frankly, when a national legislature has less than 20% approval, they shouldn't be too surprised to see an angry mob show up. And then you have the people paranoid about crime rates that do 100mph during their daily commute, to say nothing of the 92% of US deaths that come about due to disease of some sort.
I know you tend to do the thing - which is a natural human impulse, and which I've certainly been guilty of myself - where you try to demonstrate those of your beliefs that fit the in-group, such as citing Alex Jones and global warming in "If You Can Be Bad, You Can Also Be Good". This tends to backfire because people see the tribal signal is being faked, but human nature is what it is. But still, if that's what you're doing here, those signals are fundamentally true beliefs - I'm sure you really do believe Alex Jones is insane, and that oil companies are funding bunk global cooling "science". And there's definitely been a lot of people in rationalist-adjacent Twitter, at least, that have been authoritarian in the name of Safety for a long time, and maybe this has been getting worse as the founders age into believing that any change will probably harm them (not only financially but physically, financially, emotionally, financially, spiritually, and financially). And yes, getting murdered is a primal fear, and for a number of low-openness people that's more important than any claimed rationalist principle; and in the end it's a spectrum. But I did have you at a different position on that spectrum, and it's disappointing to learn otherwise.
(For what it's worth, as ever, I'm posting this because I do think your posts are usually amazing. This includes the previous post on the Culture War's history - certainly I hadn't realized the ebb of Internet feminism, but it's definitely real now that you mention it. And the basic question of when cancel culture becomes a problem is also valid, though I feel like there's a simple solution to at least most of the question that reduces it to a similarly where-do-you-draw-the-line but more familiar question.)
I suppose this post has wound up becoming, in itself, a test of the theory that longform anger is just as bad as shortform. I'll reread it in the morning and think about whether I agree.
As someone who has seen the film and ready the autopsy report, this still seems to be what actually happened. What, exactly, do you think is inaccurate about that summary?
Some people pretend to think that choking to death is only possible if your neck is broken. Relatedly, some people actually do seem to think police officers are entitled by papal infallibility.
To be more precise: asphyxiation does not require any blunt-force trauma, saying so is just entirely backwards. It's just being unable to get oxygen in sufficient quantity into your lungs, which can be caused by various factors such as breathing a nitrogen-only atmosphere, smothering someone by blocking their nose&mouth, or, yes, putting enough weight on their body to close their airways (but not so much as to break their bones).
Yeah, very little of the energy in recent protests seemed to be directed toward things like qualified immunity. As Yglesias pointed out, better policing would probably require us to INCREASE funding.
It's true that most of the discourse was unproductive, but that's more about the media in general. Certainly I saw qualified immunity being talked about, for instance, and people discussing what "abolish the police" could actually look like; I guess some of this is baselines (i.e. I find Twitter being even slightly reasonable a pleasant surprise). The paragraph in question reads, to me, less like "police reform will ultimately require spending a lot of money" and more like the standard Fox talking points, just phrased civilly.
There were places whose city councils reduced funding for police (although some of them reversed course later). And the outcomes from police reforms in the wake of viral incidents tend to be much worse than reforms absent such incidents.
Generally, I guess there's a common thread here, which is an aura of fear. Being afraid of Internet feminism even when Internet feminism has been greatly diminished; fear of crime disproportionate to its actual frequency; police maintaining authority through fear. And the way that disproportionate fear makes things worse, even though it's not necessarily irrational.
What stands out to me is I would expect that after living through a live cancellation attempt by no less than the New York Times, only to come out with the broad support of whatever part of the general public cared enough to read the story, plus a new six figure offer to finally become a paid professional writer, you'd think he might do the Bayesian thing and update away from being so afraid of the Internet, but instead he doubles down. He's great at telling other people that they're overreacting (when they usually actually are), but can't get out of his own insecurities and encourages the absolute worst catastrophizing in his commenters that seem to think they're going to be lined up against the wall any year now.
No, I don't think it is. I'm sorry but I'm absolutely sick of the woe is me I'm so damn terrified all the time tone of the commenters here. And it's the same blog that with cold statistical detachment will point out that black people aren't really in much danger when facing the police. Which is probably completely true! But it's just as true of the ridiculous crippling mostly unfounded fears that you have, too. A lot of people have perfectly understandable catastrophic fears that are well out of proportion to the actual magnitude of harm they are likely to ever face, and the rational thing to do is to temper that fear, not stoke it.
I'm absolutely sick of all the people who say it's perfectly fine to get someone fired from their job, because they'll probably get another job and look here's some cases where somebody got fired from their job and got another job. By this argument, any assault that doesn't literally kill or maim is no big deal, because the victim gets better. Rape is usually no big deal because hey, no lasting harm except for some trauma that's all in their head and they shouldn't let it bother them like that.
"You, apparently, support police officers in any and all brutality, up to an including choking a man to death for nine minutes *while being aware of being filmed*, and your proposal for improvement is more police."
I don't support this and it's hard for me to understand why you think I do. If you quote the part that made you think I think this, I can try to tell you what I really mean.
By analogy, you can find examples of doctors doing incredibly terrible things, but still support more health care overall, and oppose a movement to un-nuanced-ly demonize doctors. My understanding is that minorities and poor people support more policing in their neighborhoods, to a higher degree than white people and rich people do, and this seems reasonable to me. My understanding is also that the recent rollback of policing caused a few hundred to a few thousand extra normal murders, while decreasing the killed-by-police murder rate by only single or double-digits if at all. This seems bad for the sort of people who get normal-murdered, who are usually black and poor.
I support some police accountability measures, though I'm also concerned about people wanting to lock up officers and throw away the key for what are obvious mistakes. I am a doctor and I sometimes make mistakes, and if I made somewhat worse mistakes and also had extremely bad luck, I could end up killing someone. I don't know what the right balance between compassion and take-away-their-license is for eg overworked surgeons whose hands slip and accidentally nick an artery and kill someone, but I think locking them up for the rest of their lives, turning them into a national villain, and telling everyone that they did it on purpose because they're a Nazi isn't it. So it concerns me when this is the standard that gets applied to eg cops who confuse their real guns with their tasers. Obviously when someone is deliberately and premeditatedly brutal this doesn't apply.
I know you're not trying to draw a perfect equivalency here, but it's worth thinking about the comparison between doctors and police a little more carefully. Doctors go through extensive schooling and can't practice without licenses that are (in theory at least) carefully regulated. Police typically have three or four months of academy training, then become members of a union that rabidly defends them more or less regardless of what they do. In most places, no licensure of any kind exists; if a cop somehow does manage to do something so egregiously wrong that even the union arbitration process can't protect their job, they typically just go get a new job in the police department the next town over. Also, the person that a doctor accidentally kills has given informed consent to a medical procedure aware of the potential risks, and often has made a deliberate decision about which doctor to trust with their care. The difference from the typical interaction with a police officer is, I think, self-evident. Also, if anything, in the world we currently live in a doctor is probably MORE likely to get criminally prosecuted for on-the-job misconduct than a police officer.
Ha! Well, if you are going to talk more about this in the future, it's worth also mentioning the last piece, which is the availability (or lack thereof) of monetary compensation -- the only kind of amends the US legal system really recognizes -- for injuries caused by irresponsible on-the-job conduct. Doctors are required to carry medical insurance, and malpractice suits typically result in recoveries for plaintiffs if the doctor genuinely fucked up. Police, on the other hand, are protected by qualified immunity and it's nearly impossible to win a civil suit against them. Just yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted QI to cops who tackled an unresisting man who was pulled over a broken taillight, then repeatedly punched and kicked him while he was on the ground: https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/19/19-30247-CV0.pdf
So I was being hyperbolic due to being angry, and I apologize for that. But:
I've seen similar sentiments in more detail from other centrists (i.e. Yglesias) - "sure, police killing people isn't ideal, and I'm not opposed to fixing that, but the priority has to be stopping crime." Now, I'm probably pattern-matching somewhat, but that's the sentiment you seem to be mostly agreeing with, and part of that is what you said about the doctor comparison, and acknowledging that even a police department that does its best to avoid killing people will at some point have to.
The thing is, debates over strategy (because mass movements tend to make idiotic strategic mistakes basically always) aside, there's an intuition - and I too used to share this intuition - that most police departments in the US are that way, much like that's the intuition for hospitals. And it's become increasingly clear to me, even before George Floyd's death, that it's the opposite: police departments with human-aligned values are the exception, not the rule (at least in big cities). The rest have a culture of shooting first and covering it up, and more generally rule by terror. They're systemically broken, it's not a question of individual blame. (And, indeed, police in Western European countries kill several times fewer people.)
This matters on the level of individual interaction, i.e. treating calling the police as a Godzilla Threshold. Some people (usually well-off women who have never had the police called on them) will call the police over trifles, and this can kill people.
And a huge part of the problem is lack of accountability. Like, what you said - "locking them up for the rest of their lives" is something that practically never happens even in cases of blatant cruelty. Chauvin's conviction is exceptional, and even his sentence isn't life. In most cases of deliberate brutality, there's no punishment at all. As to the press turning people into a national villain and calling them a Nazi for accidentally killing someone - well, yes, but the threshold for that is very low nowadays. You have, after all, been made a national villain and called a Nazi for writing SSC.
Scott, I know you don't actually support police brutality, because you are a pretty empathetic person. I think my confusion comes in because you seem pretty uncritical of policing compared to basically every other American institution. I've seen you criticize the American healthcare system, mainstream science, and most recently, you seemed to imply that maybe we should at least give some thought to abolishing mandatory education, but when it comes to an institution that functions mainly by putting lots of people with guns on the street and giving them permission to shoot people when they feel threatened the only writing I can recall you doing seems to be about how critics get their statistics wrong, or their arguments are grossly unrealistic, or (in the above case) we need to empathize more with individual police officers who are put in tough situations. And the things is, all three of those things can be true without me feeling like there's not a LOT more a reasonable person could say on this issue. You are allowed to be neutral, or skeptical, or agnostic, but you give the appearance of someone who thinks policing basically works as an institution and the may problem is that its over-politicized. So either there's a vast swath of reform-based arguments that you actually agree with and consider so common-sense you've never bothered to spell them out (which your comment above kind of implies), or you are basically okay with a modern institution that's only really one step up the ladder from having samurai running around on horseback lopping the limbs off anyone they consider an affront to justice. Which...seems out of character for you? In every other domain where it looks like people are being crushed by a failure to speculate about possible technocratic, libertarian solutions, you are usually the first cheerleader, but the second someone says "maybe the institution of policing is a barbaric holdover from a more primitive state of society" you don't have anything to say. And again, I don't think that makes you evil, I just think its an odd look for you. Unless I've missed something really important, always a possibility.
Also, from the police reformists I listen to, the communities who say they want more policing are usually talking about wanting crimes to be investigated more efficiently and promptly, and wanting people to show up faster when you dial 911 in an emergency. Both of which are important! Neither of which are the same thing as having more officers driving around in circles pulling over anyone with a broken taillight to drive up tax revenue, which I think is usually what you actually get whenever you increase policing budgets and police presence. I wonder if a lot of the communities asking for more policing really want "better" policing of a type that people in richer communities take for granted.
"That is: you, apparently, support police officers in any and all brutality, up to an including choking a man to death for nine minutes *while being aware of being filmed*, and your proposal for improvement is more police."
Even assuming this to be the case (I am not convinced - it is possible that Chauvin callously choked Floyd to death, but it is also entirely possible that Floyd was a dead man walking by that point and was going to suffer a fatal overdose anyway, and that Chauvin was making what appeared to him to be a reasonable trade-off between alertly monitoring the health of a large, muscular and potentially dangerous arrestee vs risking him causing a danger to the public) ... even if we accept the premise that Chauvin is a murderer, the solution is still not going to be *less* police, it's going to be *better* police. You can reduce police brutality by, e.g. training police properly in violence-minimising restraint techniques - see https://samharris.org/podcasts/246-police-training-police-misconduct/ for a good discussion on this - or by increasing the number of cops on the beat so that a) arrestees are more likely to have a visceral sense of being outnumbered and less likely to think they can win a fight with the cops, and b) the larger number of cops can collectively restrain an arrestee more easily without needing to inflict unnecessary violence.
Reducing the number of cops means that such cops as you still have are more likely to feel outnumbered and panicky and resort to violence, *and* more violent crime goes unsolved, which, if you are worried about *overall* risks to people's lives and wellbeing, is still a larger problem than the real but relatively smaller problem of abuses being committed by cops.
"the lack of police accountability (specifically about black people, yes, but if you're going to play identity politics it's worlds ahead of the norm, since it's actually dealing with real harm being caused to real people and disproportionately affecting the group in question)."
Are you sure about this? Scott wrote about this back in 2014 - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ - as far as anyone can work out, although the police do appear to carry out non-lethal violence and harassment against black people at disproportionate rates, they do *not* appear to actually kill black people disproportionately, when controlled against the proper baseline of percentage of each racial group who are committing the sort of crimes that bring them to the attention of the police (as opposed to a crude population headcount). Yes, of course, racial bias in non-lethal harassment is still worth reducing, but to the degree that the Black *Lives* Matter movement is concerned about police *killings*, their central claim appears to be probably false.
Does it make sense to think of societies as generally more closed or open?
Let's take fundamentalist Christianity. From my point of view, their society is closed. But from their point of view, they're creating space for celebrating a Christian viewpoint, and giving all the corners of fundamentalist Christian thought room to breathe. If I wanted to become a Catholic priest and hear people's confessions, I can't do that unless I'm in a Catholic society. If I'm a mystic who has religious visions, I lose that role in a secular society and just seem crazy.
Alternatively, consider the military, another stereotypically closed society. But I expect that, if I wanted it, I'd find more tolerance for machismo, aggression, and uniformity than I have access to in civilian life.
What are the enthusiasms, eccentricities, and quirks that we'd find tolerated and appreciated in an apparently "closed" society, that would simply disappear in an "open" society where the defining paradigm of the "closed" society was no longer in control?
Rather than asking if a society is "more open" or "more closed," we should specify: "open/closed to what?"
What, specifically, would we like American society in 2021 to be more open about, and in what ways?
We live in a period of high polarization, not enforced conformity. This is very different from the 1950s! In the 1950s there was an broad society-wide consensus on a large range of issues. Extreme polarization can feel like forced conformity if all the people you're interested in interacting with belong to one of the poles, but structurally they seem very different. For example, "such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any unpopular opinion" does not seem like a real risk. Almost any opinion that is suppressed by one side will have an audience on the other. No idea can be made off-limits because if you're interested the other side will be happy to tell you about it.
Conformity is enforced through unavoidable institutions. E.g. my coworkers are probably evenly distributed politically, but we all have to check the box that we agree to HR/DIE policies, and this can't be escaped by going to a different firm - any businesses can have its license to operate revoked by not complying with state mandates.
Just a bit of clarification, the Puritan Church split roughly geographically. Eastern New England churches became Unitarian churches under the influence of Harvard, while Western New England churches remained Puritan, now called Congregational, under the influence of Yale.
This might already be buried under a number of comments, but there's been a lot of work done on Quebec's 'quiet revolution', in which Quebec went from the most conservative and religious province in Canada to one of the the most liberal and secular within a decade. The wikipedia page is actually a pretty good summary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Revolution, it's better in French if you can read it!)
The overall culture changed dramatically from 1960-1970: "The lifetime average number of live births per woman of child-bearing age) falling from 3.8 in 1960 to 1.9 in 1970.", expectations for staying in education changed dramatically in response to falling behind English Canada (with economic support in the form of heavily subsidised university education and a sort of pre-college prep school), and although a number of schools were (and are) still technically Catholic, the education became effectively secular.
There's a lot of debate as to exactly why it happened (beyond the proximate causes of a Liberal government coming into place), but the one I find the most compelling is simply a fear of falling behind the rest of Canada which overcame the broader cultural inertia.
Point of clarity: I initially read "concerned about social justice" as meaning "caring about social justice; part of the social justice movement", got confused by the rest of the paragraph, and had to go back and re-parse it as "worried about the overreach of the social justice movement".
I think a lot of people will read it the first way, especially if they're coming from outside the context of the movement being dangerously overreaching and just think of "social justice" (lower case, compositional) as an obviously good thing.
Also: really good article; I found the bit about not contributing to the culture of fear especially thought-provoking.
Why it changed is a different matter. In some sense Victorian England was indeed quite repressive - enough for John Stuart Mill to worry about it:
"it is the opinions men entertain, and the feelings they cherish, respecting those who disown the beliefs they deem important, which makes this country not a place of mental freedom. For a long time past, the chief mischief of the legal penalties is that they strengthen the social stigma. It is that stigma which is really effective, and so effective is it, that the profession of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in England, than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those which incur risk of judicial punishment."
At the same time, it was one of the freest countries in the world in terms of what you could publish – arguably freer than we are now. You could call for the violent overthrow of all existing governments. You could scandalize society with your sceptical poetry (http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html). You could imply that humans were descended from apes.
I think "Victorian repression" does not look very like the modern version. It was more localized, and had more holes in it. Aristocratic eccentrics could do what they liked (Mill again: "Those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no favours from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill-thought of and ill-spoken of...") It was also more focused on behaviour than opinions.
We have the opposite situation. We have a huge focus on what you can say, but few sanctions on behaviour. I think the reason is that what people or corporations say in public is easy to check from behind a keyboard. Checking real behaviour isn't. So our norms focus on things that you can find out and get angry about with little effort.
The last two posts have struck me as such a healthier outlook to CW stuff than I usually see from either side.
One thing I want to focus on is what Scott only briefly mentioned, which is working on better cultural, social norms as a replacement.
I also don't have the full answer to this, but in my opinion, we need to be pushing super hard on two specific values: Charity and Gratitude.
Charity:
This is a natural one for Rationalists and so sorely lacking in CW discussions. Even if you're totally sure your opponent is "bad-faith" treating them that way only makes things worse. We need to be patient, understanding that we're all only humans, and work as hard as possible to respect the other side's views and intentions. The truth is that the vast majority of humanity really does have good intentions and I honestly believe that the more we treat this as a given the more it will become manifest in our discourse.
How does having charitable social norms look like?
It should be awkward and embarrassing when someone on our side is mean and uncharitable to the other side. Assuming good faith should be rewarded always! Even if the assumption is wrong!
What's the opposite of this? Searching for "dog-whistles" or "trojan horse agendas".
Gratitude:
My biggest issue with obsessing over who's more or less "privileged" is that this heavily incentives people to look for reasons they're suffering or more disadvantaged than others. We've already had tons of research into how to live happier lives and the answer to the best of my knowledge is a gratitude journal, ie listing every day or week the number of reasons to be grateful (please don't get replication crisis-ed!).
Lets all be proud of the blessings in our lives and share them publically. Let's all be thankful that the lives of women and minorities have been steadily improving instead of using this as a weapon to prove a point.
So on one level, we should practice Gratitude simply to be happier, and obsessing over categorising the privileged and oppressors makes as all sadder.
But I'm actually pushing Gratitude for a higher purpose. The best defence of Liberal Values is their huge success story. We need cultural norms that celebrate humanity's success just as much as pointing out our failures. Now you can (and maybe should) shove Steven Pinker's books down people's throats all you want, but this needs to be coupled with a social norm that looks down on people complaining all the time. And we need to reward the optimists and cheerful among us much more.
I think this is something Rationalists are a bit weaker about than with Charity.
We absolutely need people screaming to high heavens at how terrible our system is/was at reacting to Covid. But we equally need those same people giving humanity a pat on the back for using cutting edge technology to churn out a bunch of highly effective vaccines within a year.
We need to be immensely grateful for the world we find ourselves living in. This is how we keep the shortsighted revolutionaries at bay.
Society isn't so bad. The standard of living is greater than ever before, in the USA and globally. All the complaints about today seem localized. Like, who gives a fuck about what people are talking about on the Internet? I don't like people getting cancelled but that's about 0% of the population, and even those are kinda assholes.
The world is better off. Who gives a fuck about internet culture?
I feel like the key difference between the current moment and most other moments of repressiveness is that usually the ideas getting repressed are unpopular new ones, whereas right now we're repressing mainstream and well-established ideas. Some of the ideas that will get you fired if you say them out loud are ideas which are believed by at least 40%+ and possibly 50%+ of the population.
This isn't unprecedented I'm sure; ideas like "Boy, the ruling party sure are a bunch of moronic jerks" would get you in serious trouble in 1980s Poland or 2020s Iran despite being quietly believed by (I'm guessing) most of the population. But I do think it _might_ be unprecedented within the context of a modern western democracy.
I think this assessment is biased by the fact that the people doing the repressing are the ones that tend to get their ideas written down in the history books, which makes them more popular.
Does the Jim Crow south count as a "modern western democracy"? Because Timur Kuran used that as an example (alongside communist countries) of preference falsification in "Private Truths, Public Lies". Admittedly, it's been years since I read it and the details of private vs public opinions there might not fit your criteria.
I think one underlying assumption is unfortunately kind of a stretch - that we are all in the same boat trying to find an equilibrium. I think at least a big chunk of people will always tend to fend in their own interests - just because you are unfairly disadvantaged does not mean you are not a power-hungry ass-wad who will ride the moral backwind as far as it will take them. And they will in the right too while doing this; the ability to lie to yourself in order to lie better to others is a crucial feature of a social being.
So those types will use all kinds of sucker-punches and pocket sands to shut down any rational recognition that their movement might have reached its goal. On the flip-side of course the establishment will try to downplay them right away, because they really don't want to suffer the virtually insurmountable pain of changing their language or uninstalling WhatsApp.
I think the line of cancel-culture should be drawn at things that directly influence the real world - I get the urge to cancel people who say awful things, have it myself. But in the end it is a difference if someone just declares themselves a fan of police states (which I abhor) or actually demands the firing of some guy at Mozilla because he tweeted something a few years ago. The latter types are definitely evil, power-drunk self-righteous bastards who deserve being canceled themselves for their crimes. The former just needs someone talking to them.
>My point is that the 1950s cultural regime was good at censoring things quietly and through general social pressure, with a minimum of Red Guards breaking people's kneecaps.
Also a gratifying lack of Homosexual Liver being served at parties. Credit where it's due.
I think the reason people are worried about Red Guards is that they were a student-led attempt to change wider culture, and one of the very few examples of such. That said, without Mao/Jiang Qing and with millennial violence-aversion we can hope this isn't going down the same road.
>Cancel culture itself has shown us how wrong that is - when the culture is pressuring companies to behave a certain way, they'll all cave in together, and nobody will dare try profiting off bucking the trend.
I mean, you are writing this on the website of a company that dared and profits immensely. I'm not saying segregation like this is not itself a problem, but to force outright cutting of service takes some serious hurdles to entry.
(That said, I haven't seen a competitor to PayPal/VISA/Mastercard pop up the way they have for most things. Financial accreditation seems to be a pretty big bottleneck for entrepreneurs.)
Surely the relevant part about cancel culture isn't whether you can refuse to go, or whether you can encourage others to refuse to go, but whether you can STOP others from going even though they want to, either by sabotaging the event or applying pressure on the organizers?
Weird experience for me to read this coming from my own perspective where liberalism is important but I'm primarily a leftie, and fixing the cost of living seems like so much more of an urgent and more logically prior problem than does solving cancel culture does. Probably also a reflection of the different realities of where you and I live. But yeah, like I want a liberal society where people are free to express different views and live in different ways but there's too many people in New Zealand spending way too much just in order to live. That doesn't allow time to think about ethics or governance, or invest in communities. I don't know how one could make a serious attempt at communicating with people of diverse opinions and trying to find points of agreement on which to build greater movements under these conditions.
I think (and benwave can correct me if I'm wrong) that:
> there's too many people in New Zealand spending way too much just in order to live.
Should be:
> there's too many people in New Zealand spending way too much ->TIME<- just in order to live.
The implication being that for many (at least in the US), the 8x5 work week has already inched closer to a 12x5 when one factors in commute time, and minus an additional eight hours for {sleep / lying in bed at night trying to get to sleep / lying in bed in the morning trying to wake up} leaves people with four hours per workday with which to cram all their personal errands, downtime, hobbies, and general self-enrichment - assuming they don't have kids, because in that case it becomes negative numbers!
You can see consequences from this in many places - whether it's the rise of delivery services (say what you will about Amazon, but being able to have stuff like aspirin and lightbulbs delivered to your doorstep within a day or so, minimizing the foresight traditionally required of delivery services, can be an absolute godsend), or the cultural shift from prime-time TV to binge-watching entire seasons on the weekends.
I think spending too much time is a very different problem from spending too much money. The former can be ameliorated by spending more money and the latter by spending less money.
I believe "they are spending too much" in this case is a judgment on the costs of the basic necessities for existence, not a judgement on people's spending habits. So, people *need* to spend more than they can afford to spend just to keep surviving, because basic costs are too high.
I can see how one could make such an argument in say Somalia, with a GDP/capita of less than a dollar a day, buy it strikes me as absurd in NZ, where incomes are a hundred times higher and even the poorest live a life that those on the Malthusian limit could scarcely even dream of.
I don't want them to spend less money, I just want less of their money to be spent on things over which they have no realistic choice. Rent, being the colossal one in the New Zealand context. Rents are high across the board in New Zealand, and even increasingly in small towns in the middle of nowhere - where there aren't even jobs. This is because the housing market is hugely dysfunctional. Land, consents, building materials are all artificially constrained and demand is artificially stoked due to the taxation regime almost entirely ignoring land
I view liberalism as something which has a cost to maintain (or defend). I'm not optimistic that it can be 'solved' and then is 'safe' and we can stop paying attention to it. The cost of living is a threat to our collective ability to defend liberalism - if enough people aren't really able to pay that cost we will lose it. And I can't quite find it in me to blame anybody for dropping their defense of liberalism if the security of their future was threatened. So I see it as a priority to ensure society is providing for the needs of people And is giving them some slack left over for things like defending (or increasing) liberalism.
Possibly me seeing this as more important/foundational than direct campaigning for liberalism right now is wrong, I don't discount that. Obviously both are needed. But I've never been able to convince myself otherwise.
I feel like I owe you a better explanation, but I haven't had the time to really gather my thoughts together properly on this.
> And if it's okay to boycott them yourself, surely it's also okay to use social media as a platform to ask other people to join your boycott.
For what it's worth, that is where I answer "no" and make that my line in the sand. If you quietly and politely refuse to do business with people who you despise, then that is your own affair, and if people make themselves despicable they therefore run the risk of ruin when large numbers of people decide, independently of each other, to not do business with those despicable people. However, telling others that they must not do business with people that you find despicable or else they're not good people is spreading hate and should not be allowed.
I could see some edge cases wherein someone might say, "hey, did you hear about this bad thing that such-and-such company is doing?" without making an overt calls for boycots, but I think that by and large I'd be okay with that. There is only so much you can do by hinting and passive-aggressiveness.
> if people make themselves despicable they therefore run the risk of ruin when large numbers of people decide, independently of each other, to not do business with those despicable people
In theory, this is an excellent self-regulating solution.
In practice... when has it ever actually happened?
We can assume that Strawman Despicable MegaCo won't actually run advertisements saying "our product development is overseen by our Youth Manager in Omelas; everything in the line is also shoddily-constructed and will injure you after two years of use; we will sue you for discussing your injury and also for getting injured in the first place; and we also personally enjoy mutilating fluffy bunnies", so even as educated and enlightened consumers realize the seedy underbelly and quietly start shopping elsewhere, the Barnum Theorem ensures that many minutes' worth of fresh suckers has arisen to take their place. Even if Baeraad & Biff's Educated Consumer Blog decides to run an expose, any lasting impact is contingent on people continuing to link to that expose months and years after the fact.
This post would benefit from some context and examples of what you think "the current moment" is and what you think is bad about it. Terms like wokeness don't really have agreed definitions, and depending on who you ask are either tautologically good or bad things. Which means that the applicability of the various responses is hard to assess
"6. Somebody should explore the fall of Puritanism in Massachussetts
Massachussetts in 1692 may have been one of the most repressive societies ever to exist. Anyone who spoke out against it was burned as a witch or exiled. Fine, okay, point taken, don't speak out against Puritanism. But by the 1820s, Massachussetts was one of the most open societies in the world. The Puritan Church turned into the Unitarian Church (I swear this is true, the Unitarian Universalists are the direct descendants of the 1600 Puritans). "
Cotton Mather (of salem infamy) is my great great great ?x grandfather. It's a bit unfortunate that the trials are the one thing he is known for (he did eventually come around to opposing them) because it overshadows the rest of his accomplishments.
"Among the most significant chapters in his life are his role in the Glorious Revolution in New England (April 1689); his involvement in the Salem witchcraft debacle (1691–1693); his Pietist ecumenism; his millennialism; his promotion of reform societies (1700–1728); his advocacy of smallpox inoculation (1721–1723); and his numerous writings on history, biography, natural science, medicine, theology, and biblical criticism. In all, Cotton Mather published more than 450 titles on virtually every subject of significance at the time. He owned the largest private library in the English colonies of North America and left behind in manuscript form several major works that only recently have begun to appear in print. Most important, he was at the forefront of the scientific and hermeneutic debate (early Enlightenment) and tried to reconcile the old with the new cosmologies in the first American Bible commentary, his Biblia Americana. In light of his numerous publications, only a selection of some of his most important and thematically linked publications can be treated in this bibliography."
And if you are more interested in the religious evolution than there is this one:
"The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728"
Writing from the UK context here, if you care about academic freedom of speech then the number 1 issue you should care about is employment conditions for researchers. 1/3 of academic staff here are on fixed term contracts so have very high incentive to self censor in order to get another job. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10899/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-May-20/pdf/ucu_he-precarity-report_may20.pdf (this is a union report so take as you will). The number of departments having their funding squeezed doesn't help, you don't want to be known for being awkward and having dissenting views when inevitable redundancies come to your department.
On the other hand the number of researchers who've been cancelled and lost their careers for it is very small. Not accusing SA of this, but there are a large number of authors who say they want to protect academic freedom, but talk about students trying to deplatform external speakers from time to time, which I see as a total fringe issue.
What I'm saying is that I find a lot of the discourse around academic freedom to be pretty disingenuous, although I don't deny it's an important issue
Apparently academic free speech turned up as an issue in the latest queen's speech. No idea how it's going to be implemented and whether it's going to be unbiased (for some definition of unbiased).
It'd be very easy for the government to courageously defend academics' inalienable right to say nice things about the government.
If you're interested. Make your own mind up as I'm hardly unbiased on this.
For some context though, this government certainly aren't free speech fundamentalists. (Universities are required to monitor students and staff under counter terrorism law, which turns out to be a nightmare for anyone doing research in the middle east). https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38209567
I agree. There's an argument to be made that "cancel" behavior is a side effect of economic insecurity, people scrambling for scraps in conditions of greater precariousness. I don't think it can be reduced entirely to that since mob punishing of non-conformity is probably as old as humanity while social media has made new punishments possible, but there is an aspect of cancel behavior that seems to me to be about economic fear driving more and more paranoid social behavior.
I get the impression that in 1950s America, journalism and academia already had significant far left (cultural and economic) sympathies which kept the torch alive. I don't believe an imagined return to sanity can or will occur by that process simply applying in reverse.
Even if they act neurotic at times the people who responsible for bringing us to our current situation are extremely brilliant political operators. They can smell dissidents a mile away and they're not going to allow the institutions they worked tirelessly to transform to pass into anyone elses hands.
>But keep in mind that if you tell people "the enemy is all-powerful and omnipresent and if you make the slightest effort to fight back he will destroy you", most of them will answer "wow, thanks for the tip, I'll make sure not to fight that guy". If you're too good at conveying the magnitude of the threat, you risk doing authoritarians' work for them, creating exactly the culture of fear you hoped to prevent.
Henry VIII would be fine with people thinking he was all powerful and to never mess with him, but the system would not. The system would prefer people to think of it as the underdog, fighting against the all powerful bigotries of reactionary society.
Re: 5., "straw" libertarians and government interventions:
I wonder how much of an elephant in the room are hostile workplace environment law, and perhaps guilt-presuming anti-discrimination laws in explaining the ubiquity of corporate "wokeness". It's not just that companies have an incentive to fire any employee who might pose a harassment liability (e.g. Damore, according to many commentators and the EEOC) and push anti-harassment propaganda. The farther-reaching indirect effect is that it's too much of a liability risk to hire an outspoken opponent of SJWism as a manager; so managers are either true-believer SJWs who push it far beyond what the law requires, or else they stay quiet and don't speak up against it. The dictatorless dystopia effect may be present as well—any entity that goes against the stream gets boycotted, because any entity that doesn't boycott it would get boycotted itself—, but the laws are needed to keep the equilibrium stable. (Btw wasn't Jim Crow to a large extent government-mandated too?)
As I'm more interested in practical matters, like laws, than people yelling at each other, I'm not sure how much I agree with your timeline. To me, the main phenomenon is the ideology whose implicit assumptions are (1) racism/sexism etc. are the most evil thought possible; (2) in any debate between a more anti-racist (etc.) and a less anti-racist position, the former is right, and the latter is racist; (3) if a phenomenon *may* be explained by racism (etc.), it definitely *is*; and (4) anyone who associates with a racist is racist (sexist etc). This inevitably leads to a relentless ratchet of anti-racism, and overreach within decades. (The original inception among intellectuals was perhaps in the 1960s?) The 2010s social justice movement is just another quantitative escalation, not a qualitative novelty. The main milestones include when the courts first decided that companies could be held responsible for discrimination with little evidence of discriminatory intent (1970s?), and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which codified hostile workplace environment. Speech policing by employers didn't start in 2020, and overbearing enforcement against sexual harassment didn't start in 2017; they started in the early 1990s. People yelling on the internet wouldn't be interesting if one side didn't have the power of law behind it.
I have a hunch that if hostile workplace environment law were repealed, and anti-discrimination laws were amended such that the plaintiff must prove discriminatory intent, the whole edifice would quickly collapse; or at least there would be much more diversity in the stances companies adopt. Of course that won't happen as long as repealing these laws is far to the right of even the Republican side of the Overton window, and people like Scott keep voting Democratic. If repealing these laws is not on the table, making new laws against hiring or firing for political views might be an improvement, even though I'd prefer to have neither those, neither the current laws.
This is the fundamental issue, a group has the unassailable power of law. Nobody is willing to not-vote for a Democrat that supports such things because they might be voting for a Racist.
To quote another internet subculture that's fallen in the meantime, Cthulu may swim slowly, but he always swims left. Notice: not liberal, left. All your examples are of oppressive right-wing orthodoxies; do we have examples of oppressive left-wing orthodoxies falling as described?
The USSR is certainly a good example of a planned economy failing. But what is left-wing orthodoxy in this sense? The early Bolsheviks forcefully redistributed wealth and status and violently suppressed social and religious traditions. The most radical social experiments, with official toleration of promiscuity and homosexuality and the centralization of child-rearing, ended with the ascendency of Stalin, and after his purges some kind of stable social hierarchy was established, with a new normal forming under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. From what I can tell talking to people who grew up at the time, social norms in those times look decidedly conservative by contemporary standards, though rather liberal by historical standards.
Orthodoxy with a big O now suggests that we are talking about Christianity, not Leftism, in which case yes, certainly, Orthodox Christianity is bigger in Russian now than under Gorbachev, though only about 2% of Russians are observant.
The use of the 1950s for a catch-all for a period of repressive conformity in the United States needs some pushback.
Civil rights: Two landmark episodes occurred--the 1954 Supreme Court decision on Brown v Topeka Board of Education, and the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, thus kicking off the Montgomery bus boycott.
Literature: Scott alludes to the Bay area beat culture of Kerouac and Ginsberg, but there was much more, including Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin (black AND gay), and many more.
Art: Abstract Expressionism... de Kooning, Pollock, Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns and many more.
Film: Masterpieces by aging auteurs like HItchcock, Ford, Hawks, Welles. Edgy films by Kubrick, Lumet, Preminger, Ray, Fuller, Lupino.
Theater: the 1950s were truly the high-water mark, with Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Arthur Miller exploring America's dark heart on Broadway stages (and Miller is the reason we think so much about the Salem witch trials)
Music: This rebellion against convention speaks for itself: rock and roll (Presley, et al), jazz (Miles Davis, Coltrane, et al), classical (John Cage)
For the avant-garde, like Cage, Merce Cunningham and their acolytes, there was the existence of Black Mountain College.
I'm sure the 1950s sucked if you were subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but in many other ways, I think this was a pretty good time to be an American. Aside from the robust cultural achievements noted above, there were the material achievements, including the investment in rocketry and the space program that would be poised to rival the Soviet Union in the 1960s, the polio vaccine, the creation of the interstate highway system, and much more.
* ABOVE ALL ELSE: Have faith that reason can sway people. If you imagine living in the 1950's, you can't be an asshole when you try to persuade people about gay rights. You need to be calm and reasonable, above all else. If you think everyone is being narrow minded assholes, you definitely can't say this - which means you probably should stop thinking it. Say your piece, calmly and succinctly, and don't push people. Tweets don't persuade people. Neither does anger. You can persuade people with reasoning, but you have to be calm, patient, and think through this stuff in advance. Ideally, focus on _one_ single fact or instance. You can't make them see the forest ,but you can zoom in on one tree, and for a lot of these people, they don't want to see a singel tree. The pattern is just too obvious once you're open to it.
* Let minorities do the work. The rule that says 'white men shouldn't have opinions on this stuff' is stupid, but you aren't going to challenge it - just link to the plenty of minorities who have called bullshit ask, 'how should i respond to this' :
The only 'legal' challenge to the rule is to point. out that this rule makes minorities responsible for persuading large groups of white people they are wrong, if that ever happen. If white people wont' listen to other white people on the topic of racism, this means that either a) large groups of white people will never be wrong about racism, or b) minorities will be solely responsible for talking large groups of white people out of their bad ideas on racism.
* Cancel companies, not people: This one is straightforward. We should all vote with our wallets and avoid giving money (or our attention!) to businesses that have shitty principles. People should all be off limits, with the _possible_ exception of journalists.
* Replace opinion polls with something that doesn't suck. All you'd have to do is argue "black americans dont' want fewer police", and you can just stick with this, if there's a credibel place where this information lives. Here's a FREE BUSINESS IDEA: create a system to replace polling with something like a national election, every week, where people vote on 'ideas' or 'principles' . People can provide as much or as little PII as they want. The aggregated information is available to the public, and you can charge for access to much more detailed information such as zip code-level breakdowns of support for different ideas or principles.
The standard response to members of minorities who disagree with SJW dogma is to call them "inauthentic". It's like: yeah, in general we are supposed to listen and believe, but this specific person was brainwashed by the dark side, therefore the rule does not apply to him or her. They will be cancelled, too.
As an example, consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A woman of color, born in Somalia, ex-Muslim. A naive person might believe that she is allowed to publicly oppose female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and "honor" violence. But my woke friends just call her a right-wing islamophobe, which implies that people should not listen to her.
great example. some woke women out there would be horrified to put up with what this "islamophobe" is objecting to. I'm mystified how these repressive cultures are defended by the so-called woke. it doesn't make sense, and my only conclusion so far is that they don't actually think about these things. also how you can be islamophobic, but not a christian-phobe? plenty of those around, but it's cool
White men are most certainly allowed to have and express opinions, as long as they're the correct opinions. This "rule" only comes up to shut down incorrect opinions.
More to the point, my SJW friends actually *encourage* men to challenge sexism, because sexists will take it more seriously coming from another man than from a woman.
Re #2: One useful distinction between "classic boycotts" and "cancel culture" would be that the former is aimed at causes (tell everyone to drink Pepsi until Coca-Cola stops their hypothetical child slavery), whereas the latter is aimed at individuals (tell everyone to drink Pepsi until Coca-Cola *fires the person we don't like*).
The cancel culture boycott tends to be much more effective. It's cheap and easy for Coca-Cola to fire almost any employee, and if they can avert a boycott that way they will. It's much harder for them to change how they do business, so they'll often try to weather the storm.
Also, targeting individuals creates exactly the climate of fear you mention, which I guess is a bonus in a cynical way!
"Liberals lose the culture war if there's ever such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any unpopular opinion, publish any heterodox research, or stand up for anybody who's gone against the mob."
Liberals lost the culture war long ago. It was their job to stand up and defend Western values, and instead they folded faster than Superman on laundry day. *Leftists* are the ones dynamiting our culture with Critical Theory. How do you tell the difference between liberals and leftists? Easy. Liberals believe in freedom of speech. They might disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.
Leftists, on the other hand, freely use censorship as a weapon of first resort. Their own positions are so weak that if people are allowed to point out the many problems, they would collapse.
Here's a quick two-page rundown on Critical Theory, in case anyone needs a link to share with that aunt of yours.
“Unlike traditional approaches to civil rights, which favor incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 3.
“Crits [Critical Race Theorists] are highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 23.
"If we had a general theory for how repressive societies transitioned into open ones, we would have a better idea which levers to push." I urge you to consider parliamentarism before dismissing that we do not have such a theory. The people in Victorian England definitely thought that it was such a theory.
From Selinger's "Parliamentarism":
"In the introduction to his now classic book, After Virtue, Aladair MacIntyre proposed a striking thought experiment. Suppose that the study of the natural sciences is prohibited. Then, generations later, a movement emerges with the aim of reviving them—but by this point nobody has any scientific training, and “fragments” of books and articles are all that remain. What would happen next? According to MacIntyre, many people would begin using scientific terms and ideas in conversation. They would argue over “the respective merits of relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and phlogiston theory.” But what it actually meant to do scientific research would remain ungraspable. “Almost nobody” would realize “that what they are doing is not natural science […] at all.”
This book is motivated by the following conviction: we have failed to understand much of European political thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the same way that MacIntyre’s imaginary individuals failed to understand natural science. We read authors such as Edmund Burke, Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël, François Guizot, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. We argue about how to properly interpret their texts and over the meaning of “liberalism.” But we have forgotten the concrete, overarching project in which these figures all were involved, the one that made their thought intelligible. That project was parliamentarism.
For each of the authors just named above, the defining feature of a free state was that it contained a space for parliamentary politics—an assembly in which political actions were discussed and deliberated and in which executive officials were held responsible." (Selinger, 2019)
> Maybe the most available reference point for this sort of thing is the US in the 1950s. There were certain ideas everyone knew were off limits - atheism, communism, marijuana legalization, gay rights.
Did every facet of society, even those not really involved, constantly have pressure on it to affirmatively support these things? Or was it acceptable to remain silent? What makes today seem different is that everything is beginning to have to justify itself in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, in many universities, job applications require "diversity statements" and all classes must prove to the administration they are promoting social justice before they are approved. Was this ever the case with anti-communism? Did professors have to write an "anti-communist statement" before being allowed to teach?
This sounds strange, but the period today most reminds me of is the revival of scholarship in Europe in the Late Middle Ages. Classical scholarship was about all sorts of things. Medieval scholarship is also about all sorts of things, but at the beginning and end of every chapter, the author had to write, "which proves the glory of God and our Lord Jesus Christ" or something similar.
If things today go a similar direction, we might still have all the same science and scholarship, except that, instead of an article titled "Cancer Biomarkers and DNA Mutagenesis", we'll have "Cancer Biomarkers and DNA Mutagenesis: its Importance for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion".
here's the thing about the 50s. there was privacy, and there were alternative cultures (beat culture was a pretty big thing) you could choose not to conform. but you did so knowing that you were not acceptable to the mainstream. maybe you didn't care, but there was a price. still, it was possible to do. what bothers me about today is that it's increasingly difficult to find those zones where you can pretend they don't exist, and they can ignore you. the current sjw's seem to want the power to wipe out all opposition. it's a totalitarian ideology. they are uncomfortable just letting people be wrong, be assholes, be different. it's amazing to me to see the cool lefties and liberal types support censorship, repression of ideas, and rule by big business.
That reminds me of the period starting in the 1990s when if you wanted to get a scientific article published you had to tack on a few claims to the effect that <science finding> proves global warming is worse than we thought or that <trend> will likely worsen due to global warming.
Yeah. And they wanted to create a society without struggle, so that nobody else would have to go through what they did. Turns out, that was a huge mistake. People need to struggle for what they have, otherwise they don't appreciate it. They raised a self-centered generation that wreaked havoc on American culture. You name a trend tearing apart America today, and it got its start with 60s radicals.
In the past, very few people had voices. Communication came from the top-down and was determined/controlled by a very small number of choke points.
Today, there are millions of voices out there and everyone can have a platform. Peers talk to peers and build on each other's points rather than serve as passive participants in a top-down information flow.
In 2021, all the young/trendy people are able to share their own opinions and create "common knowledge" of what other young/trendy people think in a way that was not possible in the past.
If this information dynamic existed in the 1950s, the zeitgeist would have been very different.
disagree. every generation has "common knowledge" of what other young people think. you didn't need the internet to understand your cohort and know what is currently "the thing"
This: https://uudb.org/articles/unitariancontroversy.html is a semi-official history of how the modern Unitarian church came to be. The short answer for how the puritans liberalized is that the kids pushed the church to the left, and occasionally it's most conservative elements would schism away from it. In the early days, moving to the left meant "okay, so you don't have to be born again twice to be a full member of the church, it's sufficient that you kept all of the ways of the church since childhood" The leaders of the church continued to make intentional pushes towards greater diversity of ideas in order to keep as many of the kids as possible coming every Sunday.
Don't you think "Defund the Police" is essentially shorthand for "Demilitarize the Police" and retrain? And if so, how would that be a bad thing? (cf. UK, etc...)
That would be a really poor shorthand. For starters, "defund" is only a few letters shorter than "demilitarize". And "defund" is a word with a clear meaning of its own, so people are going to naturally assume that you mean what you say and something completely different.
Ok, as I've read about this, most people who seem to be vocal about it speak of utilizing mental health care workers and such in situations where the police seem to just shoot. Granted, I haven't lived in the US for a decade—I moved from Oakland, CA to Stockholm SE, but had witnessed the growing military spending by the city of Oakland over the first decade of "Homeland Security" to the point of ridiculousness both economically and provisionally—so my info isn't street-level anymore I guess, just what I read on, say, FB, where my peer group in the US have seemed to be fairly reasonable.
Not sure what 'Demilitarize' means in this case. Police need to use violence. I just listened to a nice Sam Harris podcast with Rener Gracie about this. They think police need more training.
I woudl say, less civic spending on armored vehicles, tactical weaponry, body armor etc. Gracie is about Jiu Jitsu (right?) and I would HIGHLY recommend Aikido as well/instead, especially w/r/t defusing situations. Yes more training, no to more weapons. That's what I mean.
OK I don't know the various types of marshal arts. Rener Gracie is the grandson of the guy who developed Brazilian jujitsu. The type of training may not matter. These days (according to SH podcast) police get 1-2 hours a year in marshal arts training and they would like to see a minimum of 1 hour a week.
I have to ask, though, why do police "need to use violence"? To restrain violent people? Restraint is not necessarily violent. I think that's why the idea is circulating to engage mental health professionals to defuse violent situations, ...to say nothing of regulating guns. ( I mean, I personally know families from Oakland with dead bystanders *and* dead police officers, none of which was necessary in any of the situations. )
I did get the email notice about that Harris podcast, but I hadn't listened. I'm not certain I trust his worldview; when I was listening to his stuff, he often came off as naive in so many things while touting things that he should have known better about.
The police absolutely need to have the ability to use violence to do their jobs.
This is distinct from "each interaction requires violence." But if you need to take someone downtown, and they don't want to go, you need, at the very least, the threat of violence to make them comply.
Using violence is addictive and pleasing to our lizard brains, so I'm not surprised that cops abuse this power. But we can't just simply have them not have that power.
Nope, that's a motte and bailey argument. It means what it means. It's not shorthand for something else.
"This [motte and bailey] is a tactic where the CSJ advocate will make some very bold, controversial claim and when they are challenged on it, they will claim they were actually arguing for some simple, obvious, uncontroversial claim."
Some (I think most, but can't be sure) of the people saying "defund the police" mean some actual 500 word thesis that doesn't mean getting rid of cops.
But there are people who get air time saying "no, really, ignore those 500 words of bullshit, here are my credentials and believe me that when we say defund the police, we mean literally defund all the police." Check out this opinion piece in some newspaper called the New York Tims https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
I mean, I have a lot more respect for them than I do for the people saying "no, no, the word defund doesn't mean what it means, it means something else."
That's my take as well, although I assume they may even mean it more radically, ie, get rid of what we would recognize as policing and replace it with something (or more likely, a plurality of things) that fulfills many of the same civic functions but has an entirely different ethos. That's why I prefer "abolish the police," because in mind mind to abolish an institution means leaving a vacancy for something else to take its place, whereas "defund" the police means you are left with less well-funded people doing the same job.
That still implies that what you are left with at the end is police. I thought about it over the weekend and the slogan I came up with is "replace the police."
Specifically, in the context of dealing with murders, rapists, bank robbers, and criminal gangs trying to claim de facto control of urban territory, what are you going to replace the police with that isn't just more police with a new name? Because that's a function that *will* be filled. If it's not filled by a government agency, it's going to be filled by vigilante groups because there's going to be enormous public demand and you've just defined away the existence of any government agency that can stop a group of vigilantes from taking up the task (and then probably becoming a criminal gang).
I get that everyone wants there to be a nice talky social worker instead of a gun-toting policeman that shows up whenever a mentally disturbed (black) man starts behaving erratically and commits a petty crime or two, but A: that's not all of what police do and B: after a few nice talky social workers get stabbed to death, the rest are going to be "oh hell no" and call the whoever-it-is-that-deals-with-murderers every time they are called to deal with a mentally disturbed person they think might escalate to murder. So what are you going to replace the police with for dealing with the murderers?
If you were going to design, from scratch, institutions to deal with the concerns of modern municipalities, I don't think your solution would be a sprawling paramilitary organization with funding and dispensation to deal with every disturbance of the piece from people going through trashcans to armed robbery.
Yes, if the Joker or the Sinaloa cartel is robbing a bank, there should be an emergency response team you can call that will show up with the sniper rifles. There should also be trained criminal investigators and probably bodymen to show up alongside the nice talky social workers to keep them from getting stabbed. But I doubt all of these functions need to be rolled into the same organization, I doubt they need to be funded as part of a single city budget item (that eats away at funding designated for things like mental health services, which might ALSO keep crazy people with knives off the streets), and I doubt every single one of those roles requires the same level of "carry a gun at all times and shoot at the first sign of trouble" legal indemnification. But that's what we currently have.
The thing that I expect more rationalists to balk at with the police isn't the appalling lack of institutional empathy (which is apparently a lot to ask), its the shocking inefficiency and borderline medievality of the system. So yes, I think that should be replaced with a new system or systems and I don't understand why that is treated like a call for anarchy. Because all these borderline Hobbesian arguments about criminal gangs and murderers running amok? Presumably we could do MORE to cut down on crime with a vast system of martial law, maybe with a little summary capital punishment thrown in for anyone caught outside after dark, that would presumably REALLY disincentivize crime. But it seems like we all understand that on some level the end goal isn't stopping crime at the cost of every other measure of happiness or freedom. So I see these criticisms of the police (my own included) as calls to renegotiate the current arrangement to see if we can't optimize a little better for all our goals. Isn't that something we can all get behind?
I now semi-routinely observe people unironically saying publicly how dangerous it is to criticize some of these movements publicly. This pretty much sums it up.
I've been noticing some of that too. I wonder if it's not as silly as it looks, though. Maybe people are being better sorted into factions and the anti-movement factions are getting stronger. In my experience, it's still risky to criticise the movements if you don't know who you're talking to very well, because they just might hate you for some relatively innocuous statement. But enough people are agreeably anti-movement that if you can criticize publicly when you're with those people.
It isn't entirely as silly as it looks, no. Part of what makes it not-dangerous to criticize the movement is that it is increasingly popular to do so. And part of why people are doing so is because the movement would prefer it be dangerous to criticize the movement, and has acted so in the past, and still has the power to do so in some contexts.
That is, the public willingness to say those things is exactly what makes it possible to say those things.
But the people who were taking serious risks in doing so were doing so several years ago. So it's a bit of a weird situation. In a sense, saying these things ironically is the most honest way to go about it, but I think public irony in that sense is somewhat out of fashion.
Activists are a very crafty sort and they'll keep pounding at the perimeter of what is de jure or even de facto legal until they find a way to exert leverage over everyone else. To say that this isn't conspiratorial, that there are no ulterior motives, and that the people who do this are sincerely convinced that they are doing the right thing (which I think is mostly correct) only makes this phenomenon scarier IMO.
Getting people fired for crime-think, or holding them accountable, or cancelling them, is essentially a risk free strategy to enforce an orthodoxy. The worst case scenario for someone who tries to cancel another person is that nothing happens. There's no reason not to try cancelling someone if they can't reciprocate the financial harm.
Suppose there is a credible threat that individuals who engage in cancellation will criminal charges, or a civil tort. Also, will businesses who participate in cancellation will also potentially face harsh fines. I'm guessing that most people who engage in the behavior will cease engaging in it. Businesses don't need to risk being accused of various isms to retain their employees, they simply need to point out that complying with the demands of activists would put them in violation of the law.
There are practical problems with enforcing this: 1.) There are legitimate reasons to fire employees, even for things related to speech 2) There are legitimate reasons to boycott businesses.
However, I don't think this kind of law needs, or should have, significant and frequent enforcement mechanisms. One or two high profile cases of people/companies paying massive fines
In practice though:
1) You need a strong infrastructure of people willing and enthusiastic about enforcing this rule
2) You haven't done anything about the activists, and they'll go back to pounding at the perimeter to find new weak spots to exploit.
3) You still need a general social conception of acceptable and unacceptable forms of speech, and the aforementioned activists will be ten times as motivated as any regular person to see their conception of acceptable speech made canon.
I think thats a bad idea in principle and in practice. In principle because the way to fight bad ideas is with good ideas, in practice because any such law will creep in scope and be abused.
Re: point 6: Not Massachusetts, and it doesn't go all the way up to 1820, but there is a classic history book on this topic for Connecticut: Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (1967). I read it two decades ago so my memory isn't fresh, but I recall it being a superb book. It doesn't, however, give you "buttons to push"; rather, history happens, in the sense of religious change, economic change, social change, in lots of complex & interacting ways. But it's not something to just enact because it's not a simple process. (If it weren't too late this would be a great book for the book review contest...) I'm sure there are more recent ones on the topic too. Similarly, as far as the other cases Scott mentions, the sort of liberalization processes that Scott refers (and all the parallel ones elsewhere) are the bread & butter of social history, the backbone of the field for decades from the 60s until it's-complicated. There's books on all these things; dig around.
And since a lot of people in this thread are saying dismissive (and ill-informed) things about the impact of McCarthyism in the US, let me also recommend Ellen Schrecker's Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998). It was not, of course, anything like e.g. the cultural revolution in its violence and disruption; but "not as bad as other terrible things" doesn't mean it wasn't repressive. It was, in fact, a pretty good parallel to cancel culture in a lot of ways: job losses & social ostracization were central, a lot of it was done by private organizations, and there was a real fear of overstepping boundaries leading to some poorly-thought-out conformity such that some true things which needed saying were not said, while at the same time the core of the thing being repressed (communism, racism) were, in fact, actually bad things, even if the targeting by the repressive social movements was wildly over-broad. If you think actual racism is bad but the left tends to think everything is racist, then you should have a good sense of what went wrong in the 50s, substituting "communism" for "racism" and the right for the left. By the way, as to how *that* ended, another historian has a good metaphor, different from Scott's barber pole: Stephen J. Whitfield calls it a "thaw": no dramatic turn-around, just a gradual lessening of intensity until one day it's mostly gone (even if people tried to pull it back for years—hell, some still are). I bet that's how cancel culture will end, too.
interesting. "If you think actual racism is bad but the left tends to think everything is racist, then you should have a good sense of what went wrong in the 50s, substituting "communism" for "racism" and the right for the left."
The thing is, we know today that there really were a lot of communists and their fellow travelers in Hollywood and the State Department. The man who negotiated the Bretton Woods Agreement was a communist spy, and the Manhattan Project was full of them.
And we know that there are racists in America today. Therefore anybody who goes up against the racists is a Certified Good Guy, even if it turns out they don't care whether their specific targets are the ones who are actually the racists. Right? That's how it works? If Joe McCarthy was a Good Guy because communists were real, then the Wokest of the Woke are Good Guys because racists are real.
Or, maybe, you could give up on Joe McCarthy having been one of the Good Guys. Because he wasn't. He was as vile and as despicable as his enemies were then, and as you imagine your enemies are now. Communists were real, and they were made more powerful and secure by the misdeeds of Tailgunner Joe.
The recently-reviewed A Brief History of Neoliberalism by Harvey seemed to suggest that the 1950s conformity was eroded by a process like like "your economy collapses; you now need a new economy; the new economy you get is also tied up with an ideology of personal freedom; you end up on a personal freedom crusade". Granted, the book suggests that the ideology dragged the economics in tow, not the other way around; I'm not sure whether I believe the causality either way, but it seems plausible that "free markets" (=less government interference in markets) and "personal freedom" (=less societal interference in lifestyle choices) would form a good synergy, so that once they got started simultaneously, they'd reinforce each other.
I'd say that your thesis is interesting, but flawed in that the past culture wars were largely about personal prestige vs. the present culture wars being about Studebakerian Song Dynasty excess/wannabe imperial mandarins.
Nor were there social media companies using their market presence. Broadcast TV and radio are certainly more centralized but are push media whereas social media companies re pull media. Or in other words: Cronkite had to speak to all Americans but Facebook and Twitter enable the stasi-esque deployment of the masses to diktat ideological conformity.
My personal strategy is to wait a week before canceling anything. I think if that was normalized we'd be in a better spot. I developed this as a teenager. I noticed lots of controversies had the 'bad' and 'good' side change around. (i.e that python developer conference fiasco) By committing to waiting a week your own emotions cool down and you have time to understand what behavior they were actually charged with and if you even care. My personal experience is that in the past five years or so I haven't cared that much about anything. Not enough to cancel it anyway.
This makes me curious about what the impulse to cancel is about. I've made it to my late 50s without canceling anything. Is it like a blood sport? What makes a person feel drawn to cancel something? Is it to get an adrenaline or dopamine hit? Is it to feel relevant? Does it give one a sense of purpose that doesn't seem to exist elsewhere? What is it about?
"Liberals lose the culture war if there's ever such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any unpopular opinion, publish any heterodox research, or stand up for anybody who's gone against the mob."
Liberals *win* the culture war if there's ever such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any illiberal opinion, publish any illiberal research, or stand up for anybody who's gone against the liberal mob.
OK, maybe you're saying that's oxymoronic because that's a fundamentally illiberal outcome and so not a victory for liberals
"This isn't how I see real liberals behaving."
Yeah, the "real" in "real liberals" is doing the heavy lifting here. I think you need a better word here, because the liberals you would classify as "not real" are the majority, and the majority defines the usage. All I've got to offer is "libertarian", which I gather doesn't sit well with you. But find something, please.
Because at this point, between the woke liberals wanting to suppress unwoke thought, the anti-Trump liberals wanting to silence those damn Trumpists who won't shut up about e.g. election fraud, and the mainstream center-left position that COVID misinformation needs to be suppressed in for the public good, I'm pretty sure that a large majority of the people who self-identify as "liberal" would be quite happy with an outcome where all their "illiberal" enemies are afraid to speak or publish or stand against the mob. And that they believe this sort of victory is within their reach, and to the extent that they engage in political behavior, are in fact behaving this way.
Saying that these people aren't "real liberals", is mostly just confusing and unhelpful. Whatever they are, they are a powerful and dangerous thing and they will use some of that power to make sure the word "liberal" points to them.
And I'm not convinced that simply relaxing and having rational long-form discussions with the people who are willing to listen, expecting that the "real liberals" will defect from the censorious mob Real Soon Now because of that mob's inherent illiberalism, is going to be an effective strategy. We need not just a new word for what liberalism used to point to, but a new strategy to defend that valuable thing. I wish I knew what that was.
i see your point and concur. as a real liberal who now identifies as a libertarian, what I see is other well-meaning "real liberal" types just ignoring the danger from their left flank because they assume that 1) the sjw means well too 2) the sjw's care about others as they claim (instead of their own power) What the "real liberals" don't get is that it'll be too far along before they stir themselves to object. See prohibition, or Nassim Taleb about how a small group can impose its will on a far larger one. TLDR: they just don't give up
To elaborate on what Taleb said: an intolerant minority wins against a tolerant majority, because the tolerant majority will accommodate the intolerant minority until its too late. Taleb describes well the general phenomenon. The specific example of this phenomenon as a failure mode of liberal democracy was described by Popper.
I find these posts interesting, but feel a little disconnected from them. Where I'm currently living (S.E. USA) certainly the ideas of social justice are present, but they don't feel suffocating or unduly restrictive in the same way that this post seems to make them out. In all honesty, most of my exposure to "cancel culture" have been Fox anchors complaining about it, which I've usually dismissed as neo-reactionary kvetching.
Maybe I'm unusual in the sense that I don't have a Twitter and haven't ever used it, or maybe the social dynamics of the southeast are just very different. Either way, I wonder if this analysis is actually reflective of "wider culture" or just Scott over-extrapolating based off his experiences on Twitter and people from the Bay Area (a region stereotypically known for having crazy off the wall politics compared to the rest of the country)
I generally avoid politics of all kinds while at work, but I don't get the impression that I'd get in particularly hot water if I happened to respectfully voice some type of disagreement. I almost feel more hesitant about voicing a negative opinion online, not because I've ever personally encountered canceling or known someone who has, but because posts like this one keep telling me I should be worried about it. I guess that's part of the point I was making earlier, that there seems to be a big disconnect between what Scott's worried about and what I see in real life, beyond some isolated internet crazy people on Twitter.
Most terror campaigns are based on very few actual bad events happening, with no fair set of rules on how to avoid it. The KKK didn't need to lynch thousands of people a year. Just a few dozen will do it.
The randomness is part of the punishment.
(I'm not really sure it's even intended to terrorize. I think people just like destroying someone's life work while they sit there and cry, unable to stop you. It's important to socialize this base instinct out of people.)
> I don’t see anyone putting out videos saying “and you’re next”
It was a parenthetical in my comment, but my null hypothesis is that people doing this just like smashing other's stuff. I think that's their intent.
The effect on the the victims can be the same, though.
> maybe it is because right-wing folks blow it up
It was all the way at the end of my comment, but I linked to an article in The Atlantic.
I think your comparison to police killings is very on-point. One thing that makes police killing someone scary is that they seem to get away with it. "I can harm you and nothing bad happens to me if I do" is a scary dynamic. Maybe that's changing now.
There are a number of empirical questions that are impossible to raise in my field without at least some level of getting cancelled— at least shunned, probably denied fellowships and invitations. The most relevant is the question of why there are so few women in the field. Less relevant and still very controversial would be why there are almost no blacks in my field and what is the cause of homosexuality. To be clear, I’m not saying just that one can’t propose controversial answers to these questions, but that one can’t even start a “let’s weight evidence for various hypotheses” conversation about these questions.
ask someone who works for a university in your area what ideas they are not allowed to express. the high profile cases may not happen to them, but self-censorship could still be in operation. you don't see it because no one is challenging "the way things are" for their own safety. how many people had a gay neighbor in the 50s, and either didn't know or just didn't mention it in polite company?
"Maybe I'm unusual in the sense that I don't have a Twitter and haven't ever used it, or maybe the social dynamics of the southeast are just very different."
Recently got a Twitter account purely to follow fandom stuff, and my God the amount of drama just in that tiny corner! I'd be a totally crazed loon running screaming naked through the streets if I followed the political/culture war stuff on Twitter with the floods and oceans of drama *there*.
The rise of Abolitionism in England in the second half of the 18th century was, it seems to me, the rise of a new religious dogma, promoted mainly by Quakers and Evangelical Anglicans. But, by golly, it was a pro-freedom dogma. And it won: first the English courts agreed that there could be no slaves in England (a finding quickly echoed in the Scottish courts); then the slave trade was banned; then slavery itself was prohibited in the British Empire, and the Royal Navy was set the entirely improper task of suppressing other nations' slave trades.
Looking back it seems to have been the first part of a wave of liberalism - absurdly oppressive old laws repealed; the vote restored to Roman Catholics; the union of Ireland with Great Britain, with Ireland over-represented in the House of Commons; the great Reform Act; the Second Reform Act; Darwinism, ...
But you could look back further to the 17th century to the Glorious Revolution and the end of the Divine Right of Kings. Look at the English Parliament's Bill of Rights or the Scottish Parliament's Claim of Right. Part of the latter seems to me just wonderful: the complaint that James VII had
changed “the fundamentall Constitution of this Kingdome ... from a legall limited monarchy to ane Arbitrary Despotick power”.
Americans might reasonably wonder whether their elected monarchy has undergone, or is undergoing, a similar transition.
You are aware that, historically, many if not most monarchs were elected, right? It's mostly late-period monarchy where the institutions of the state are powerful enough to survive an inept monarch where people would settle for whichever warm body was first out of the last queen's womb.
Are you thinking of France? That's the only example I can find of an elected monarchy becoming hereditary. Also I don't think elected monarchies were ever all that common.
The Kingdom of Denmark was explicitly an elective monarchy until 1660, when it became explicitly hereditary. I think the same is true of Norway and Sweden, though less explicitly. The Holy Roman Empire is the classic example of an elective monarchy; its successor state the Austrian Empire was I believe legally as well as de facto hereditary.
More generally, last time I looked into this, about half the monarchies I checked had the monarch either elected or appointed by an elective body. But that was a Eurocentric list, in part because of data availability, so I'm not going to go with an absolute "most". Mind you, even in an elective monarchy, Nate Silver is going to be giving strong odds on "King's firstborn son wins the election", because the most powerful man in the realm has been campaigning for him all his life and they didn't have an FEC to make everybody play nice about that. But if the king's firstborn son was a nitwit, there was often a legitimate way for the other powerful people to say "no, we're going with a different candidate this time".
"the union of Ireland with Great Britain, with Ireland over-represented in the House of Commons"
There's... variable ...opinion on whether this was liberalism or a great thing for Ireland and how it was achieved (the popular view being "wholesale bribery") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Grattan
I agree with the point that the historical irony was that the Anglo-Irish were the ones most zealous for the independent Irish parliament, and the native Irish mostly pro-Union, because of the fears of Catholic emancipation (which, like many British promises to Ireland, then became "sorry, what? never heard of it" once the deed was done):
"It was from the Anglican established church, and particularly from the Orangemen, that the bitterest opposition to the union proceeded. The proposal found support among the Roman Catholic clergy and especially the bishops, while in no part of Ireland was it received with more favour than in the city of Cork. This attitude of the Catholics was caused by Pitt's encouragement of the expectation that Catholic emancipation, the commutation of tithes, and the endowment of the Catholic priesthood, would accompany or quickly follow the passing of the measure."
"The Parliament of Ireland had recently gained a large measure of legislative independence under the Constitution of 1782. Many members of the Irish Parliament jealously guarded that autonomy (notably Henry Grattan), and a motion for union was legally rejected in 1799.
Only Anglicans were permitted to become members of the Parliament of Ireland though the great majority of the Irish population were Roman Catholic, with many Presbyterians in Ulster. In 1793 Roman Catholics regained the right to vote if they owned or rented property worth £2 annually. The Catholic hierarchy was strongly in favour of union in the hope for rapid emancipation and the right to sit as MPs, but it was delayed after the passage of the acts until the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.
From the perspective of Great Britain, the union was desirable because of the uncertainty that followed the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the French Revolution of 1789; if Ireland adopted Catholic emancipation willingly or not, a Roman Catholic Parliament could break away from Britain and ally with the French, but the same measure within the United Kingdom would exclude that possibility. Also the Irish and British Parliaments in creating a regency during King George III's "madness", gave the Prince Regent different powers. These considerations led Great Britain to decide to attempt the merger of both kingdoms and Parliaments.
The final passage of the Act in the Irish Parliament was achieved with substantial majorities, in part according to contemporary documents through bribery with the awarding of peerages and honours to critics to get their votes."
One of the major events that lead to the drastic changes in the Puritan church was the "Halfway Coventant" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Half-Way-Covenant). Basically they gave up one of the core tenants of the church and allowed everyone to be baptized (and therefore a member of the church). This lead to an influx of unconverted individuals in the church, who over time started to change church government.
> It seems intuitively obvious that if Coca-Cola is using child slaves to pick cocoa beans or something, boycotting them until they stop is a perfectly acceptable and even commendable thing to do.
It's not obvious that this is acceptable at all
The same reason that pretty much every thing asserted as an 'obvious' human universal isn't: you could be wrong.
It might be all fine and good if a dude walks up to you and says "hey give me some money and I'll enslave this orphan" and you say "uh, no thank you". But the real-world situations are never like this.
To use the instant example, just based on the one sentence presented, I have the following concerns:
1) What is a 'child'?
2) What is a 'slave'?
3) What is a 'boycott'?
4) How do you know that coca cola is doing this?
5) How do you know that you can trust the entity telling you that coca cola is doing this?
6) How do you know that your actions will meaningfully influence coca cola?
7) What is coca cola's professed reason for doing this?
8) What is coca cola's internal reason for doing this?
9) Who benefits from me attempting to harm coca cola?
The reason we want to avoid universalizing morality, _**even when it seems "intuitively obvious"**_, is because sometimes our intuitions are wrong, and if you have universalized your morality and imposed it by force or coercion on millions of people before you figure out your error, that's bad. That's why everyone with reasonable perspectives makes a healthy allowance for this.
If conformity briefly lost its hold following the 1950s, well, there was the most massive spike in young people ever in the history of the United States and young people tend to be nonconformist compared to older people.
As other have pointed out, though, I think you're ignoring Jim Crow. A lot more of American society, leadership, advertising and studio execs, had absolutely no clue what was going on. When they learned, largely due to the curiosity and agitation of those young folks, they were appalled. The natural reaction to learning that real world people were being strung up in trees and having their scrotums cut off for looking at the wrong woman, while 8 year-old children watched and laughed at them and police either ignored it or joined in, was a severe correction in the other direction of maybe not so strictly enforcing norms about what counts as deviants, especially with respect to immutable characteristics a person has no control over.
But I think the younger generation at that time became more open than usual to countercultural ideas in general when they discovered the dominant culture had elements to it so clearly repugnant. Most people eventually adopt roughly the same values as their parents, but it might hopefully work in the opposite direction when the parent's values are rotten and hateful. For instance, my grandparents disowned my mother, took away her car, and kicked her out of the house for dating a nearly pure-blooded Native Mexican man with dark skin. That was still late 70s. Thankfully, by the time I was born or at least old enough to form memories, they seem to have gotten it over and I still got to know my grandparents, who died with better values than they were born with.
It's not like this changed overnight. The Mathew Shepards, Brandon Teenas, and James Byrds of the world were still being shot, beaten to death with tire irons, and dragged behind trucks until all their skin burned off in the 1990s.
But those days are mostly behind us, so I suspect people today aren't nearly as suspicious of conformity and strict norm enforcement when "cancel" means get a person fired and not brutally and publicly murder them.
> real world people were being strung up in trees and having their scrotums cut off for looking at the wrong woman, while 8 year-old children watched and laughed at them and police either ignored it or joined in
Is this true? I've recently been finding out that a lot of what I know about the "Jim Crow South" is completely made up, so I'm now super-curious about outlandish claims.
See this is the kind of thing I'm talking about, people make lurid claims like "real world people were being strung up in trees and having their scrotums cut off for looking at the wrong woman" but when you dig into it, it turns out that the most lurid actual example anyone can come up with is the guy who got lynched after being convicted for rape and murder.
Pretty sure that "they wiped out entire cities", being backed up by one race riot with a death toll of 39 (26 black, 13 white) and another with a death toll of eight (six black, two white) is also... a bit on the exaggerated side.
Regarding point #5, here are some general principles
0) Speech is not violence, because you can control how you respond and react to speech. If someone punches or shoots me, I can't choose to not experience physical trauma. But if someone says something hateful, I can choose to react with something other than emotional trauma, like a sense of righteous pity. It may take practice, but it *is* possible.
1) Since the free exchange of ideas is essential to the discovery of truth and human progress, it's better that "bad" (hateful, hurtful, etc) speech go unpunished than "good" (respectful disagreement, etc) speech be silenced. That doesn't preclude shunning, but it does mean one should proceed with caution and forethought to the chilling effect it might have.
2) If one is going to shun people based on their speech, then the response should be proportional to the level of offense.
3) The level of offense depends on more than just the subjective reaction of the audience. The intent of the speaker, social and historical context, and recency all matter.
4) Always seek to act with grace and forgiveness. (Almost?) everyone can change.
5) Be humble. Don't assume your norms and values are perfect and beyond question.
"Cancel culture" (as that terms is currently understood) seems to violate all of these.
In the spirit of my point #5, I'm quite happy for people to challenge any of these.
I would actually challenge your point #0. Speech which can reasonably be expected to signal future violence, and speech which can reasonably be expected to incite violence, are both functionally violence. A clear example would be the mobster saying "nice shop here, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Once you acknowledge that speech can effectively be violent, a lot of other "offensive" speech can be placed on this spectrum. For instance, calling a gay person a "f*ggot" may not be an explicit threat of violence, but it is strongly enough associated with violence that a person could reasonably interpret it as a threat (or at least as an attempt to use the association to violence to demean and silence).
Obviously there are clear examples at the other end of the spectrum, like the idea that advocating for market-based solutions is violence against the poor. Sometimes it's obvious that the potential validity of the underlying idea trumps the harm caused by the speech, but I don't have a great sense of where to draw the line beyond that.
i think you are wrong. even the mobster's speech is not violence, and does no harm by itself. It is the action that is taken in response that MAY be violent. Maybe nothing happens. It's absurd to extrapolate violence based on what might happen. You are shifting responsibility from the speaker to the interpreter. If it's the act of violence that is wrong, then it's not the speech but the (assumed to be violent) response that is wrong. Actors and action create violence. Speech may be offensive, but it's not violent. To say otherwise is just engaging in redefinition.
By your logic robbing someone at gunpoint should not be considered a violent crime, right? As long as you don't actually pull the trigger it's not an act of violence?
No, it's a threat to use a gun, which is a form of speech. You can similarly imagine someone walking up to you with their hand in their jacket and saying "I have a gun; give me your wallet," which I hope you'll agree is a violent crime even if they don't actually have a gun.
no. the demand "give me all your money" without the gun does not have the same effect. it's the action of using a gun that is crucial. the second example is exactly the same. it's still not the words but the implied action that causes compliance. try it both ways yourself. speech is not action.
I've been trying for a long time to come up with the line between speech and acts. It usually doesn't matter because most things clearly fall on one side or the other.
But this point might help me either draw the line or otherwise deal with the fuzziness. Thanks.
Unless you are saying that a target of coercion can simply choose to ignore the coercion, this is a mostly semantic objection, correct? The spirit of your point #0 seems to be that the target of speech has considerable power over whether they are harmed by the speech. I would argue that the target of a threat has relatively little power to avoid some degree of harm from that threat.
I think you're wrong. the target has most of the power. they can ignore speech. they might not like it, but is that harm? is a fleeting bad feeling really worth defining as harm? because I don't think you should be on the internet at all if so. there are some ideas out there which could cause discomfort.
Sure, and I think the main thrust of my point is that there's a continuous spectrum between "directly threatened physical consequences to be applied by me, immediately" and "implicit physical consequences to be applied stochastically by others." For example, I would put "we should go raid the statehouse and execute the governor" towards the left of that spectrum, and "trans-women are just perverts, and shouldn't be allowed in women's bathrooms" towards the right, but would say that both exist on a spectrum of coercion.
Grape Soda gives a good response below. I'll add that I think it's more than a semantic objection because it influences what counts as a justifiable response. If someone punches me or shoots at me, I'm justified in responding in-kind, at least up to the point that I'm no longer in danger. If someone walks into my store and extorts me through the threat of future action, I'm not justified in beating them or shooting them.
Regarding your point up above about whether pulling a gun on someone constitutes a threat or actual violence as I've used the term, I'd categorize that as a threat, but a qualitatively different one than the extortionist threat I just mentioned because of its immediacy and tangibility.
At any rate, while these are interesting things to explore, I think we are veering away from the "speech is violence" slogan as it's used by some social justice activists. I see that applied to hate speech which is clearly not part of a specific threat.
> But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"?
One is boycotting a corporation until they make a policy change (at which point you stop). The other is targeting rando individuals over speech rather than action or for past rather than ongoing action.
> were those people morally obligated to continue giving Gawker money anyway?
A defining characteristic of cancel culture is the campaign to exert social pressure on everyone else to not patronize the target, not just yourself.
It's the difference between saying that Alex Jones is full of it and not listening to him, and saying that Alex Jones is full of it and organizing a boycott of anyone who doesn't censor him.
> Cancel culture has proven that one wrong too - a small minority of very dedicated people can impose a heckler's veto on the entire rest of the culture, and nobody else will stand up to them.
There is a specific reason for this though, and it's corporate consolidation. The hecklers can get you booted off of Twitter and Facebook because they're both culturally aligned with the hecklers. It's sort of the corporate equivalent of regulatory capture.
The market solution to this is supposed to be that another competitor appears to serve the demand not satisfied by the incumbents. Except that anybody who tries to do this then gets booted off of both major app stores.
It's too easy for the hecklers to capture the whole market when there are such a small number of participants.
In retrospect the 2000s were a very weird time. The Christian Right, seemingly in decline in the '90s, came roaring back into power, and immediately set the FCC on punishing trivial offenses that were seen as "harmful to the children," most famously a few seconds of Janet Jackson's nipple. There was also a good deal of self-censorship to avoid offending the right wing: look up the changes to the poster for the movie "What a Girl Wants" for a particularly silly example. To go from that to having Howard Zinn and Peggy McIntosh as our holy texts in little over a decade's time, with only a brief moment of relief around 2010, still gives me whiplash with how fast it happened.
Alternative theory of the 2000s: Cthulhu's bulldozer continued to push inexorably left, flattening a few more of the institutions that it hadn't previously been able to control such as the FCC. Every time the bulldozer reaches the least bit of resistance it cries out "Help help, I'm being oppresssed" but that should not be confused for an _actual_ pushback by the right, which never happens.
Incidents like bizarre exposure of Janet Jackson's saggy fiftyish breast-but-not-nipple, which absolutely nobody wanted to see, at the Superbowl were a carefully engineered part of this institutional capture effort, designed to make the FCC look like a bunch of fuddy duddies who need to be replaced.
' saggy fiftyish breast-but-not-nipple' Seriously, why is this relevant?
Scott, next time you want to write something about how incredibly nasty feminist spaces are (and I agree that some of the stuff about nerds *is* fairly disgusting), I recommend thinking back to this comment, and the many similar ones left by the hard right element you attracted to this blog with your semi-sympathetic coverage of fascists like Moldbug.
It's extremely relevant in the context of the discussion of the motivations of the motivations of the producers in showing the breast-but-not-nipple.
If it had been, say, Britney Spears or Shakira then there'd be no question about the motivations, it's obviously just plain old prurient interest. But a wrinkly breast of an older and not-very-attractive woman seems more like a deliberate attempt to tweak the nose of the FCC.
It's just worth remembering that the reaction of most people watching was not an "ooh" but an "eww". I don't think you need to be "hard right" to believe that, just go back to the reddit discussions at the time.
1. The most effective censorship is when we censor ourselves. In fact, censorship is I think most effective, the less it relies upon overt repression. Making martyrs and all that.
2. The fall of Puritanism may be interesting, but for an example closer in time to our own, you could look at the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. In the space of fifteen years or so (1960-1976), Quebec went from a poor, priest-ridden province dominated politically and culturally by the Catholic Church, to the Quebec we all know and love today. And it all happened pretty much without a fight.
Very nice as always. A few thoughts. 1.) I wish I could write good. 2.) When I was reading your SSC post recently, https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/ I realized that it's tribes all the way down. And tribes are not by themselves bad. Tribes include; my family, my church, my community, my sports teams, etc. And that humans like and need tribes. We want to be part of them. (I think it would be pretty easy to make an evolutionary case for tribal formation.) This makes all sorts of stuff easier for me to understand. There is lots of tribal signaling, letting others know your tribe. Perhaps the worst thing you can do is go against your tribe. To say something not of the tribal canon, is to call for you to be shammed by your tribe. And you either apologize profusely, or maybe consider leaving that tribe. (Hard to do since we all want to belong to a tribe.) So having one neo-nazi on the redit SSC/ CW thing means that a true blue blue triber should do his best to get you cancelled. It doesn't excuse the behavior, but maybe helps explain it. Way too many other examples of people being cancelled for not staying in their tribal lane.
I like your idea of the barber pole of fashion. But applying it to tribes, seems harder. The blue tribe has to stay within the blue tribe canon. It can move 'upwards' Atheism to SJW. But it's hard for me to see how it jumps to the other side. Still I can see much merit in the barber pole idea. I remember in grade school there would be some certain 'craze' that would take over your grade. And suddenly everyone wanted to have a troll doll. And then something new next year/ term.
Re UU's origin. As a (mostly former) UU I don't doubt that it grew out of the puritan church. But the ideology is not the movement :^) And as a UU I mostly learned to claim Joseph Priestely, as a founding father. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Priestley. A pretty cool dude!
An argument on the topic of "banning universities from issuing ideological diversity statements" - the University gets many protections from the state in regards to the freedom of their speech that don't apply to normal government employee, they also get much in the way of state subsidies in terms of both the real value of land, tax dollars, and subsidized tuition.
The argument for maintaining these institutions is that a rich and vibrant intellectual community is the source of great societal advancements, and proper intellectual communities need to have the ability to discuss ideas freely , without fear of persecution by their host state.
However, I would argue that ideological litmus testing is a violation of that contract, as are field of inquiry and study with an explicitly activist mission. You could justify these things purely on the basis of "the institutions who we trusted in this regard have been consistently failing to keep up their end of the bargain, and thus deserve no such special treatment.
The reason why liberals are constantly shouting about the enemies at the gates - is that Normal, Nice, Liberal people still have yet to be convinced that this is a problem on par with the Alt Right, let alone the Religious Right (which was much more powerful and influential). I still have to deal with people who are In Intellectual Spaces saying things like: "(I haven't written the blog post because I have only a limited amount of involvement in the culture wars before people write me off as a culture warrior and stop listening to me, and I try to ration this pretty heavily. But if I was going to get involved by making 100 tweets about it, I would decide not to make those 100 tweets, and write the blog post.)". Why is this true of your writing about the culture war, but not of the entire media culture deciding that Trump Must Be Stopped, Truth Be Damned?
The Nice, Liberal, Intellectual grouping that you happen to inhabit has a decades-long engineered blind spot to leftist excesses, and are now quietly watching as more and more of their colleagues get taken out behind the chemical sheds to be replaced by the new, Woker candidates. The reason that there's an importance to sounding the alarm is that your average upper-middle-class college student who is in the thick of it in these terms has not yet understood the gravity of these problems and is totally ok with the ACLU despite the fact that it's filing legal briefs defending racism.
I know that you're a fan of Mistake Theory - but the people who want to Defund The Police do not hold to your views, and have absolutely no interest in analyzing the costs or benefits of defunding the police. Their view is rooted in the idea that the institution of "having police" is inherently racist and needs to be destroyed - despite the fact that every successful society of any cultural majority has had a police force, with some doing worse than others (and by those standards - our police are *phenomenally* laid back). In addition, by even suggesting "actually, if you want better police, you have to pay them" - you are taking a fundamental risk to your status as a Nice, Liberal, Intellectual.
You do not have to be Arthur Chu to be willing to stand up for yourself once in a while, and the alarm-sounding is necessary to convince the grouping you happen to inhabit that they actually must fight, lest they be destroyed either today by the rise of illiberal Wokeism - or a further defeat later when all the cool kids decide that the Alt-Right is the new thing (which may still happen - internet censorship stemmed the tide, but all of the sources of new, viral internet content that sticks are all still profoundly right wing).
I have a feeling the changes in Puritanism were a lot like the atomic bomb being a Budapest high school project: there was some property that was inherent to their culture all along. Atomic bomb physicists from Budapest tended to be Ashkenazi Jews. Likewise, Puritans probably had something that was unique all along - a good guess would be a culture of being educated and questioning. Once you have that, a society is just a feedback loop away from giving up the repressive parts.
Or to put it a bit differently, Puritans already "had what it took", so they just needed to set some things up differently. Trying to liberalize a tribal culture would involve overcoming entropy. There's work in building up concepts and cultural institutions that can't be done easily.
Some thoughts on what I've encountered exploring the question of Puritan slide to unitarianism
1. puritans largely believed you had to have a conversion experience to be a Christian. Their kids didn't have one, and they wanted their kids baptized, so they came up with the half-way covenant to baptize their grandkids when the parents weren't really sure they were converted.
2. puritans were anti-tradition, and were open to education and learning. This led to people learning new ideas and being crypto unitarian (Isaac Newton, not a puritan, was an example). Education was in the classical greeks, neoplatonists, etc. Theology was by Ramist Rationalism, where everything is a binary. Trinitarianism seems less "rational" to the crypto-enlightnment mind, and perhaps is an invention of popery like Christmas and Easter.
3. Newtonianism was the hotness, and showed a world that seemed wound up and didn't need interventions, which is somewhat determinist and seems Calvinistic. You can encounter God through study of the natural order: why need divine revelation? Educated people in close communities like Harvard and Yale were independent of church control and could think this in cabals
4. Puritans were congregational. If your pastor became a unitarian heretic, there wasn't a heirarchy to sus out the heresy and punish it.
I think the influence of Congregationalism is important here; I was always seeing references to "Congregational churches" in things about New England and not having a clue what was meant; they certainly weren't Anglican, but they didn't seem to be Presbyterian either. New England Puritanism seems to have wholeheartedly adopted the Congregational model where each local church is absolutely independent and master of its own destiny, and there isn't the hierarchical model as in liturgical churches where the bishop can come round and give you a good whack of the crozier to keep you in line. Even very early, the New England Puritans were setting out their stall on this, and this naturally led to "don't like/got booted out of your strict Puritan church in the village? well you can move down the road to the slightly/very more liberal church because we're all Congregationalists, baby!" and so in time to "hey now we're all plain living and high thinking Transcendentalists and Unitarians".
"Congregationalist polity, or congregational polity, often known as congregationalism, is a system of ecclesiastical polity in which every local church congregation is independent, ecclesiastically sovereign, or "autonomous". Its first articulation in writing is the Cambridge Platform of 1648 in New England."
"The Cambridge Platform is a statement describing the system of church government in the Congregational churches of colonial New England. It was written in 1648 in response to Presbyterian criticism and in time became regarded as the religious constitution of Massachusetts. The platform explained and defended congregational polity as practiced in New England and also endorsed most of the Westminster Confession of Faith. The document was shaped most directly by the thinking of Puritan ministers Richard Mather and John Cotton.
The Puritans who settled colonial New England were Calvinists who believed in congregational church government and that the church should include only regenerated persons as full members. Because of this, they became known as Congregationalists and their churches became known as Congregational churches. In New England, Congregationalism was the established religion—Congregational churches were supported financially by taxation and, in Massachusetts, only Congregational church members could vote.
In the 1640s, Congregationalism came under increased scrutiny from English Presbyterians, who were gaining power as a result of the English Civil War. As Calvinists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians were nearly identical in their beliefs with the exception of church government. Presbyterian polity gave authority to elders rather than to church members. In addition, Presbyterians did not insist upon a regenerate church membership and allowed all "non-scandalous" churchgoers to receive the Lord's Supper.
In 1645, local Presbyterians led by William Vassal and Robert Child led a protest against Massachusetts' policies on church membership and voting. Child threatened to take his complaints to Parliament, provoking fear among colonial leaders that the English government might intervene to force Presbyterianism on New England. The Cambridge Synod was called in response to these attacks on Congregationalism."
So a combination of being very staunch on "every church is its own government" and, ironically, competition from the Presbyterians which meant that Congregationalist Puritans were not able to maintain their monopoly as a de facto state church, resulted in "don't like these doctrines or how they are applied here? then you have a choice of that church there!" and naturally this leads to fissiparity, which opens the door to liberalising doctrines, which tends towards "we're dumping all those old doctrines and hey, how about some trendy Hinduism/Buddhism/Ancient Eastern Wisdom instead?"
Thanks for making such an interesting point! I wonder to what degree some ideas are more receptive for groups where they are one competitor in a field of similar peers versus one where there's a clearly dominant subset of winners or even a single monopolist.
There's a line of argument I hear tossed around that liberalism is a byproduct of city states - the Greek Polis and the Italian City states of the renaissance, Amsterdam in the early Modern period. This would seem to support that thesis but I imagine the dynamics are different in a purely religious competition rather than a broader set.
>Somebody should explore the fall of Puritanism in Massachusetts
Scott, you might want to check out From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765, by Richard Bushman. Different state, but very relevant to what you're interested in.
> Is it just because child slavery is actually bad but the occasional offensive tweet isn't?
Basically, yes. Also, Gawker was a company whose business model was to make money from the (shitty) content they posted, so boycotting/canceling/whatevering them over that content seems justifiable. Individuals who post dumb tweets generally aren't profiting from those dumb tweets; they're usually earning a wage for something unrelated.
One could also take the consequentialist viewpoint that canceling people over dumb tweets doesn't actually advance the cause of social justice, which is supposed to mean helping minority and disadvantaged groups. Instead, it just incentivizes a lot of energy to go toward performative acts that help no one, and creates a chilling effect that also helps no one.
To take a wild view - maybe it's important to cancel people!
If you have a culture that you're absolutely certain is correct and right, and that anybody who isn't an adherent to that culture is not only wrong - but actively contributing to the greatest evils in the world, it may be important both to signal "I'm elite and high status because I hold these opinions and thus get to grind my boots on random people for their incorrect opinions" - but also to create that chilling effect. Nobody likes evil ideas being popular, and if your point of view is that all ideas that don't fit inside the framework of intersectional social justice are evil - cancelling may be *more* important, because it increases the overall alignment of society to social justice.
Yes, that's the obvious object-level view. Religious zealots are in favor of the exact same behavior, except their categorization of ideas into "good" or "evil" is very different. The problem with the chilling effect is on the meta level, not the object level. Historically, popular categorizations of ideas have not been very stable; therefore, free discussion of ideas is preferable to enforcing particular orthodoxies.
Was the amount of Per Capita Happiness lower in the 1955 US than it is in the modern US? And is that an appropriate metric for determining whether the 1955 US is "good", in political/cultural terms, compared to the modern US? If not, what's a better metric?
> But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"?
Convincing 100,000 people to boycott Coca-Cola is not remotely the same as having 100,000 people direct hate mail at Miriam K. Blogspot and then call her employer to demand she be fired.
How did you not spot the difference?
Corporations aren't people, and big corporations can take a bigger beating than, say, Dr. Leslie Neal-Boylan, who was fired for saying "BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS".
Edit: although she was fired right after certain people complained to the university about her saying this, the university said in a statement that "we are not able to discuss specifics of a personnel matter, it would be incorrect to assume any statement by Dr. Neal-Boylan was the cause of that decision." Leslie seemed to believe this was the reason she was fired, though, and the statement doesn't clearly state that this wasn't the reason ("incorrect to assume" might be a way to scold people for making assumptions, without actually saying that the assumption is false.)
the problem of cancel culture is not cultural but systemic
by now every government in the west (and every *private* institution that is strongly connected to the gov like finance, education or health) has DIE officers in every department
even at the height of the red scare there wasn't an anti communist commissar at your local bank
I'll bet everyone of you who is living in the USA , Canada or the "old" EU that if you asked your bank manager she will point you to the person responsible for Diversity Inclusion and Equity at your local branch
"Haha, you can still post in the gutters of the internet" is not a defense.
YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter (the four "main" pages of the internet, as far as anyone can tell) all actively censor anti-Woke views, and Google has explicitly stated that they will make their algorithms lie to you if it risks creating a bad impression about a marginalized group.
This is the gutters of the Internet? I don't think so. It baffles me that people think they have a right to a specific platform and that it is wrong for platforms to set norms of behavior. If the norms of behavior of your political tribe are not acceptable to a platform, then you are demanding that the platform adopt these norms against their wishes. How is this different from claiming the platform is forcing you to adopt their norms if you wish to use their services?
"Just build your own platform" has been refuted clearly by the booting off of the internet of StormFront and Parler. We are no longer in the era where any random human being can run a website.
"you can have views and post them if you want, but. they won't get any reach because they're censored by a giant monopoly on who sees what on the internet" is not, to me - functionally a refutation of the point.
I don't know about Stormfront, but Parler is still up and running. And the reason Parler got booted from some hosting services was because it was used to coordinate the storming of the Capitol. That was a pretty egregious thing and the hosting services were within their rights to refuse them service. Don't you think there are limits as to what what a company should tolerate with respect to their customers?
Just so you know, this is part of a long ongoing discussion. Not that you're wrong to not have encountered it before, but there's a lot that's already been discussed here and on the old blog, and people may be using a shorthand to express arguments we've absorbed (even if not necessarily agreeing with them).
> "People can just build their own" -> "Not if they're kicked off everything" -> "People have the right to kick others out."
You've stopped arguing that people are being de-platformed, and switched to arguing that the deplatformers have a legal right to do so. The people you argue with largely agree that the deplatformers currently do have that right. The argument is elsewhere.
"Was used to coordinate the storming of the capitol" an interesting piece, because I can find calls for direct left wing political violence on every major social media site, quite easily.
Any claim that this was about egregious support or failure to moderate people doing crimes and not a politically motivated destruction of those who disagree feels weird in am age when the Portland Youth Liberation Front has active Twitter.
Substack is where writers flee who were banned from everywhere else. No less than the New York Times doxxed the writer of this blog and punched down and bullied him. The rest of the media regularly calls for Substack to be cancelled, most recently in The Atlantic.
<i>If someone were to write this all up into a 2000 word blog post "Here's Why Defund The Police Probably Won't Work" which is sober and friendly and decent enough to send to your leftist aunt, then you could send it to your leftist aunt and maybe convince her. Instead we have 10,000,000 people dunking on some stupid thing someone in CHAZ did which may or may not even turn out to be real, and zero people writing the blog post. The tweets preach to the choir and make angry people angrier; the blog post might make a real difference.</i>
Reminds me of a recent report which the British government commissioned into the prevalence and impact of racism in the United Kingdom. The report found that, whilst there was some racism, it didn't appear to play a major impact in differential outcomes for various subsections of the population, and that Britain was, in comparison with virtually any other country, very accepting of racial minorities. And, to their credit, all my woke friends engaged seriously with the report, accepting it as a powerful counter-argument to their beliefs, and re-evaluating what they thought they knew about the state of British society.
Lol jk, they didn't do that at all, instead they instantly dismissed it, cast aspersions upon the people writing it, accused the government of engineering a cover-up, and shamelessly misrepresented the report's conclusions and methodology in order to ridicule it.
Which is to say, I think you're being unusually naïve here. Writing a polite, evidence-based blog post might work with people like you, but most people -- including most intellectuals -- aren't like you, and won't be convinced using the same sort of methods that work for convincing you and your friends.
Exactly. In the earlier days of the internet we assumed we could engage in open reasoned dialogue and change each other's minds, narrowing in on the truth with facts and logic. It quickly became obvious that what most people want is not enlightenment but confirmation of their beliefs and status within one's preferred ideological tribe. This study by Sperber and Mercier summarizes the issue nicely.
The value of non (less?) ideologue sites like this one is that there are still some people more interested in truth than confirmation and tribal prestige.
I’ve read plenty of excellent explanations why defunding the police would likely be counterproductive, and any open minded person could easily find said articles. The point is that almost everyone doesn’t want to read the pros and cons. They want to validate what they already believe and/or gain brownie points with their ideological/political allies.
I've no idea of the quality of the report, but another way to frame what happened with the racism report was 'a conservative government appointed a conservative academic who they knew was skeptical that racism is important to do a report on racism, amazingly given the well-known (all be it perhaps exaggerated) ability of social scientists to find whatever they want, he found there wasn't that much racism; people who thought there was racism heard about this and were not convinced.'
I do agree though that people should have engaged with the report before slagging it off.
So basically like I said, most people won't be changed by polite, evidence-based posts, because you can always frame them in such a way as to give yourself an excuse to ignore them.
1600s Massachusetts or 1950s America, were flawed and those flaws had consequences, but they weren't objectively wrong.
SJWs make statements and hold beliefs that are factually incorrect and easily testable and plenty of scientists and layman know that.
The obvious similar case is Lysenkoism.
I think your article on Kolmogrov captured a lot of what happens in this kind of situation. I also suspect their ideology is very fragile in the Taleb sense. They can't co-exist with modern genetics, IQ tests, twin studies, any violation of the Tabula Rasa model, they need to invent crystal spheres like kids being influenced by how many books were in their house when they were three.
I am not sure how it ends, but there are clear contradictions. SJW leading figures are becoming less intelligent, more unpleasant and less healthy as this disregard merit and emphasize lived experience and encourage social media abuse. Teachers are realizing that some of the things they are meant to believe aren't possibly true I don't know how widespread it is and SJW principles in medicine, policing etc are causing disasters that are hard to hide.
Eventually I suspect people will speak out and the system will rapidly collapse but not sure when and how, I don't think 1990s liberalism was rare, most recent western societies have had freeish speech as long as you didn't attack the ruler or the church directly, in 1950s it was perfectly acceptable to call for homosexuality to be legalised and leftism was fine unless people suspected you of wanting to overthrow the country.
Which is why the idea of witch hunting collapsed within a year, the jurors, judges and witnesses asked to be forgiven or claimed to have be tricked by Satan, the judgement was reversed and compensation paid.
I don't want to dwell on it, but the witch trial is a clear example of society correcting to an obviously wrong situation.
I agree with this assessment. To my mind the big problem of the woke isn't that they're strident *per se*, it's that they're wrong about every single one of their beliefs. Yes, it's worse when a very wrong person is strident and powerful, a nut who just believes crazy shit is much less bad than one who can force you to pay lip service to the crazy shit and never reveal that you know the truth, but the fundamental issue isn't stridency or power, it's the insistence on believing pious lies. I would be pretty okay with a vocal, mighty Galileo.
This is more of a vague reply to the whole thread, but you raised it when I was ready to post it so you get the reply:
I'm not sure they necessarily want to enforce any new social rules. I think they just enjoy ruining other people's lives. It's built into our lizard brains to enjoy it. Smashing someone else's shit while they can't do anything about it is *fun*. Kids do it all the time.
This needs to be socialized out of people, the same way other things need to be.
I feel the opposite way. I think SJWs make a great contribution to the marketplace of ideas, that their paradigms are both fascinating and useful. I don't like how they seem to want to also abolish the marketplace of ideas and replace it with a monument to their single one idea.
They have been to me. One idea I found very interesting and useful is that of social modality v. biological modality for disabled people, the idea that the focus shouldn't be on seeking an unlikely cure for, say, someone in a wheelchair, and instead to focus on making sure curb cuts exist so that a person in a wheelchair is not homebound and can participate in society and go outside. I'm not in a wheelchair but I've pushed a stroller around enough to understand viscerally how frustrating it can be to not be able to cross the street or get up out of the street because there isn't a damn curb cut in the sidewalk.
His primary question is "how come all these conservatives who watch Fox News are getting vaccinated when we know they hate vaccines" and it never seems to be that he thought the problem was that the thing he knew ("Fox News conservatives hate vaccines") was never true in the first place.
That's the starting point, but I read most of the thread as being about the general question of how totalizing ideologies lose power, with several different examples given, and you can recognize the general insights even if you think conservative vaccine hesitancy is a bad example.
"it never seems to be that he thought the problem was that the thing he knew ("Fox News conservatives hate vaccines") was never true in the first place."
It's true. Louisiana's vaccination rate will stall at around 35% of the total population.
Remember when The Rolling Stones thought it was a good idea to The Hell's Angels provide security for Altamont? Defunding the police will probably work out about as well.
I've always thought that having police administrated at the local government level, rather than the state level, was one of the oddest things in the US. Tiny police forces have no economies of scale, can't shift resources around properly, and suffer from limited government oversight, and often a damnable lack of talent in the senior ranks. It seems like one sensible sort of police reform would be to shift responsibility for policing to the state level, but I haven't heard of any efforts to make this happen.
I live in a Twin Cities home that was on the fringe of angry crowd. At one point we were instructed to pack ‘Go bags’. No one in my neighborhood went to bed that night.
"The Puritan Church turned into the Unitarian Church (I swear this is true, the Unitarian Universalists are the direct descendants of the 1600 Puritans). "
Sort of. It is kind of The Ship of Theseus. There was no organizational entity that ran the Puritan Churches. Individual congregations governed each church. They had the power to hire and fire clergy and to determine doctrine for the congregation.
The original 17th Century Puritan emigres from England were hard line Calvinists. They believed in predestination and a strict code of morality. By the 18th Century the doctrines of Arminianism became popular and the congregations fell away from the hard line. In the 1730's Jonathan Edwards preached the Great Awakening at Northampton MA to stem the Arminian tide. In 1750 the congregants of Northampton had had enough and they terminated Edwards pulpit.
(Little known fact about Edwards. He was the grandfather of Aaron Burr)
Also at the middle of the 18th Century, Jonathan Mayhew became the minister of the Old West Church in Boston. He preached a Unitarian doctrine. He was also a political radical who opposed the Stamp Act and preached the cause of liberty and the right and duty to resist tyranny.
In 1782, King's Chapel in Boston became the first congregation to officially accept Unitarianism and hire a Unitarian Minister. By 1785 they adopted a Unitarian liturgy. By the first quarter of the 19th Century, most of the congregations in Massachusetts were Unitarian.
In the middle of 19th Century the energies of New England focused politically on Abolitionism, and intellectually on Transcendentalism, (Emerson and Thoreau referenced above).
The development of religion in New England was not an inevitable progression. The Dutch Calvinists who settled in the US in places like western Michigan have retained much more of the old faith.
> ive or ten years ago, it felt like 5% of my social circle was openly concerned about social justice. Now it's more like 50% or 60%, including a lot of the brightest people who I respect most (I don't think this is because I've changed my social circle - it's stayed pretty constant over that period).
How do we distinguish between a respectability cascade and what seems to me as equally plausible: as social justice became more powerful, then it tripped more and more people's this-is-not-ok circuit breaker.
In other words, couldn't it be that if social justice's effects and power and spread stayed at the level of five or ten years ago, then it'd still be only 5% of people in your social circle who were concerned about it today?
1. The law initially bans conscious decisions by employers to base hiring, promotion, or compensation on race or gender.
2. Discrimination gradually gets reinterpreted to include “unconscious” behavior with similar effects.
3. The next step is to blame employers for saying “the wrong thing,” even if there’s no discernable effect on workers’ objective career outcomes.
4. Then you blame employers for failing to deter their employees from saying “the wrong thing” to each other. This is when workers go from looking over their shoulder before they say something negative about a specific person, to looking over their shoulder before they say anything that would upset their most hypersensitive colleague.
5. Finally, you blame employers for failing to induce employees to say “the right thing” loudly and often. In other words, for failing to build a “culture of inclusion.”"
To the extent the current environment is driven by a dynamic like this, working to interrupt that slope is a coherent, principled project that doesn't require asking for government intervention.
I've been struggling how to parse the last post for a while, and now this one. It might just be that the implicit context I need was provided elsewhere, but I think I get hung up on the idea that the dominant culture has shifted so demonstrably that cancel culture now embodies this obvious and undeniable threat to all free speech norms. Its not that I'm not aware of examples, but those examples seem confined mostly to online forums like Twitter, and to college campuses, which are basically the closest real world equivalent of online forums like Twitter. And I agree that those places should have more ideological freedom! But as an accountant who does not have a famous blog or teach college classes....I don't know...I don't live my life in fear of getting canceled?
I get why its important to Scott, he has a very high-profile online presence, one that bled over into his personal life in ways that he documented the stress of (and its possible it was even more stressful than he disclosed), but again, a similiar scenario impacting my happiness or well-being seems...well pretty unlikely.
Is this the privilege of mediocrity? That no one cares? In the context of the 50s metaphor should I think of myself as similiar to the average....I guess accountant still works just fine, who went to work every day and no one ever asked if he was a communist or homosexual, because why would you demand a special pledge of allegiance or heterosexuality from Joe the accountant, that's reserved for people in Hollywood and high-ranking politicians. I know normal people CAN get swept up in things like this, like the lady who tweeted about Africa and it caused all sorts of problems for her but, I mean, it still happens less than getting struck by lightning, something I do not alter my whole behavior around avoiding.
So how am I supposed to think about this? Is it just supposed to be one of those things where if intellectuals and celebrities are afraid, it means we are being deprived of fresh ideas and perspective in ways that will damage us long-term (I think that was the point of the "Against Lysenkoism post on the old blog)? Or is this also a "First they came for the X" type thing, where I'm supposed to be worried that if today people on Twitter are being mobbed, then tomorrow it could spread so that I, walking down the street, might be assailed by a mob of rabid feminists and antiracists unless I'm wearing a BLM t-shirt? Because I'm just not sold that that is what is happening, or at least, not happening more often than people are getting struck by lightening.
I was tempted to call this post histrionic, but I guess it isn't really. Its deliberately trying to avoid being that, and doing a pretty good job of it. But the downside is that now I'm not certain why I should care. I think I'm supposed to feel like some walled garden is under siege but...I never felt like I had a walled garden in the first place. This is going on a slight tangent, but I grew up in Georgia, and I remember going to a special summer educational program where one of the teachers was gay, and I remember him telling the kids "if you feel like coming out to your parents...don't do it until you have some place you can go safely if they kick you out." That wasn't in 1950, that was in 2008. Now again, that guy was a teacher, an award winning one who was allowed to teach at high-prestige special summer education programs, so obviously the culture wasn't universally repressive to gay rights. But it was repressive enough that he felt like he had to warn kids that being open in their identity might cost them shelter in their own communities. So when Scott talks about the "high-freedom water mark" of the 90s...I guess he means freedom to be blogging on the internet, not freedom to be a gay teen in a small town in the deep South.
I don't mean to be uncharitable. I know the two aren't mutually exclusive, and a lot of people on the internet were fleeing the persecution in their communities, which probably made that internet freedom all the more intoxicating. But now gay marriage is legal, the government is at least making gestures towards fighting for transgendered rights. Its not that Scott is against any of these things, obviously, but saying that somehow things are worse now...I feel the dissonance of that.
I guess part of me does feel like whatever this current moment of "wokism" we are experiencing is, it feels like a small price to pay for what feels to me at least like obvious social progress. Unless you are saying we never had to pay it, or that the two aren't really related to each other. Which I would like to see someone argue. Because on the surface the way that progress has looked is that people blog about their experience being marginalized online, sometimes this takes the form of calling out people (fairly or unfairly) for not acknowledging their plight, eventually this discourse snowballs until suddenly people like me (who wasn't aware that transgenderism was even a thing until a few years ago) suddenly realize that there's a whole marginalized community out there I was ignoring and start to advocate for their rights, and eventually at least some portion of politicians want in on the action by doing things like setting policies allowing, for example, transgenderism in the military. Which, yeah, I think the military is a dumb institution, but if I were stuck in it, and realized I was transgendered, I would rather be allowed to continue to serve than feel like I had to hide it or risk getting kicked out with some sort of blight on my record.
So in conclusion, maybe its unfair of me, a person who doesn't feel like they have to worry about stuff like cancel culture to say to Scott, who obviously does, "hey stop making such a big deal out of cancel culture." Put in those terms, it might be the definition of entitlement. But Scott wasn't really framing it as something that's bad for him personally, it was something he was framing as obviously, universally bad for all of us. And I think in other posts he has made a pretty good case why that might be, but those arguments always come down to "free speech is a really good thing," and I agree! But I'm not actually sure there's less of it now than there was before. Maybe on the internet. Maybe even on college campuses. And that's obviously a loss, but it feels like a more specific loss than the tone of posts like these imply.
I mean, again, in my parents hometown, you can walk into any bar and hear people talk like that. I was getting lunch with my folks over Christmas break and two old guys were lamenting how no one understands the nobility of the confederacy anymore (I'm probably exaggerating, but they really were bemoaning how liberals don't understand history). Nobody asked them to leave. If they had done that in a bar in Berkeley it would have been different maybe, but also if I was in that same south GA bar advocating BLM I might have some trouble. So that sounds like speech norms are always highly localized, which means business as usual, doesn't it? When was this magical time when you were allowed to have any opinion, in front of any group of people, anywhere you wanted?
I was in the military only a few years ago, transitioned out right as women were first being allowed into combat arms positions. I was in one of the last positioned ever that a woman couldn't legally hold. We debated that openly and honestly quite often, in our own training, at military schools, in the units, at public forums. Same thing with gays. Same thing with transgenders. Plenty of people argued both sides. Hell, plenty of Senators in charge of making laws right now are arguably quite loudly that transgendered people should not serve in the military. These aren't marginalized outcasts.
Like Kamateur, I was refreshed as heck to hang out with my dad and uncle when they came to visit me finally a few weeks back, at the local bars near me (Dallas, TX). I haven't been out much thanks to Covid, but it was nice to be off the Internet and see people doing and talking about exactly the same thing they did and talked about 30 years ago, hitting on each other, saying racially offensive shit and brushing it off (dad and uncle are very dark Mexicans who quite a lot of attention and didn't give a shit). Fuck, my neighbor at this same bar just a few years back told my wife, who was annoyed at all the stray dogs roaming the town at the time, that he didn't mind because they only attacked Mexicans. Stupid though he felt when he was realized he was talking to a woman whose husband is Mexican, he still goes to that bar. I still see him. No hard feelings.
Fuck, I still had coworkers before I started working at home wearing their MAGA hats and "Obama is a Muslim terrorist" bumper stickers quite proudly.
I'm not seeing this rabid fear anywhere in real life.
Also, Black Lives Matter marched near me quite a few times over the past seven years since I live downtown. It's been quite common to see people line the streets, heckling them, sometimes throwing beer bottles at them, apparently quite at ease with loudly and publicly not agreeing with Black Lives Matter.
I agree with a lot of this. Also being from GA, I don't really feel the overarching threat of cancel culture at all in my daily life. Usually, it feels like all these issues related to "wokeness" or "SJWs" are things reserved to online crazy people and those working at Berkley, but never something that actually matters in Real Life.
Like you said, maybe feeling like this is its own type of privelege. Although I do wonder if maybe instead that the phenomenon that Scott's describing is just something that doesn't really occur within my section of the world? If "cancel culture" is a real phenomenon on Twitter and the west coast, and if someone lives in the affected areas / goes on Twitter a lot, then yeah I guess it makes sense to be worried about the phenomenon. But for me, where neither of these things apply, the concerns aren't very resonate and come accross as a little hyperbolic.
I strongly agree with this, especially with the feeling of reading these last two posts and wondering what exactly I missed. I don't really have anything to add here expect to emphasize how well this comment sums up my reaction to these last two pieces.
It sounds like all your opinions are orthodox ones (I might say unironically that they are politcally correct) and so that's why you don't feel worried.
That's probably fair, but also no one has ever asked me about them. Scott's views are politically correct on 90% of things, and the couple of things he maybe radically disagrees on, like gender in programming or race and IQ would never come up in a water cooler conversation. They only came up for him because he started a blog for the express purpose of expressing his opinion and it caught wildfire. If he were either less successful or felt less of a need to write on every controversial topic that comes his way, would anyone care? I don't mean to blame him for his own harassment, I am just saying that I think most people are less likely to find themselves in his situation, and I include myself in that category.
It means something that you could have an openly gay teacher in your community, even though gay kids couldn't rely on their families not to throw them out.
He was a teacher in the affluent Atlanta suburbs area (I think, it was a long time ago). But we were from all over GA, including the far more rural, less liberal parts. I doubt he would have been welcome in my school district at the time, although I could be wrong.
I think one point Scott overlooks is the previously compartmentalized nature of speech in the pre-internet age.
The moral and political guardians only really cared out about the consensus in the mass culture, because that's where changes would be destabilizing to the social status quo. But in the old days, radical ideas could still seep into the mainstream slowly from above and below. For example, French philosophes or Bertrand Russell-type English intellectuals could freely write and debate about Marxism or free-love, or whatever. But I think that highbrow philosophizing was understood to be broadcast on a whole different channel that was not part of the mass culture. So that made it a fairly tolerable safe space.
Likewise, there were always guys with the equivalent of the kooky "underground" newsletter pushing their pet radical ideas. But these fringe ideas were so obscure that they were also unthreatening.
But the internet has jumbled all the channels together in a chaotic information soup. All of the speech and all of the the reactionary backlash are constantly occurring in real time on the same channel open to the masses. On balance it's probably good for free speech and inquiry, but it's like a non-stop Hegelian dialectic running at 10ghz.
"If we can draw some kind of general principle from that, then I like where this is going. Five or ten years ago, it felt like 5% of my social circle was openly concerned about social justice. Now it's more like 50% or 60%, including a lot of the brightest people who I respect most (I don't think this is because I've changed my social circle - it's stayed pretty constant over that period)."
This corresponds to... the dramatic rise of "social justice" among people with similar demographics as your social circle. What % of your social circle thought Black-White gaps in various outcomes were primarily due to discrimination ten years ago? Now five years ago? And now?
I needed this. Thanks for writing it. I'll be reading it a few times, I think, to try and work out what I should be doing. I've had the good sense to stay away from Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, but the phenomenon is encroaching on other online spaces I'm in and there are faint traces of it in my workplace (harmless at the moment, but I have no idea if that's a stable constellation). Your point #4 is really important to my sanity; I am way to skittish at the moment.
For what it's worth, I tried to hammer out some of the nuances of what I mean when I say "don't cancel people" in a private conversation with some people recently. A situation had happened where someone who had previously been on-staff of a site (but inactive for nearly a decade) was kicked out and all of their contributions to the site purged. The announcement thread was very generic and vague about what happened (did not even name the person, ostensibly because they did not deserve "the attention"), delivered a "we have zero tolerance for racism, sexism, etc and anyone who espouses such views is not welcome on this site" punchline, was instra-locked before anyone could respond to it, and all discussion of the topic elsewhere was aggressively shut down by the remaining staff. Now, from what I know about the ex-staff person, they were not the sort that one ought to defend, but I still think a lot of things could have gone better, and I've been trying to explain to people why (elsewhere, obviously).
I think I would have reacted with a lot less terror if (1) the announcement thread had included a line along the lines of "we thought long and hard about this and while we regret having to do this and think this sort of thing should be the absolute last resort, in this case the situation had been technically intolerable for several years already", (2) the person's contributions (completely unrelated to their political views) had not been purged, (3) discussion about it in any shape or form was not verboten, if necessary with some clear rules laid out about what kind of conversation would be allowed or not (e.g. "no discussion of [political topic] is allowed at all, not to defend it, and not to denounce it"), (4) some kind of warning would have been nice for the purging of the content.
The part in that list that I think is the most important is #1. Yes, there's a degree of "vapid disclaimer" to it, but it wouldn't be important to me that the staff members necessarily *mean* it. But a disclaimer like that would help to slow the spread of a meme I find problematic - that it's okay to react with righteous vengeance to burn someone's life down to the degree it happens to be in your hands. Combined with the lack of any open discussion about it, the kids playing this game (because of course there are kids) now get to update their worldview a very slight bit toward "This is how you should deal with people whose views you find reprehensible. It's socially acceptable to do it, and it has results. If I ever run a popular site, I can do this and improve the world with it."
In other words, I think this is one of those cases where society should teach the rule "don't do this", and occasionally, after thinking long and hard about it, there are exceptions, because there are exceptions to most rules (e.g. "don't kill" typically having a self-defence exception).
Nothing in this instance gave me an impression that anyone thought long and hard about whether it was the right thing to do. I *did* get the impression of a flash fire and the distinct additional impression that it would be directed at anyone who didn't sufficiently distance themselves from the -ism definition du jour. Which, all right, the solution here is to stop frequenting this site, obviously. But I do find the spread of the aforementioned meme troublesome.
I'm sure this entire point could be made in a more coherent fashion, and equally sure a much better point could be made - this was literally my first attempt at engaging with people who didn't understand why I could possibly object to someone that obnoxious getting kicked out in this particular way. But it's the tentative beginnings of a direction I'm forming for my cancel culture thoughts.
Anyway, as always, thank you for sharing your thoughts with the world. I really appreciate it. I know I don't comment much, but I read all your articles. (Same for the commenters, really. I definitely don't read all comments, but even skimming them is often enlightening.)
Also, your section about trying to differentiate between changing social norms, and "cancelling", is something Wil Wilkinson has been trying to articulate for a while:
I'd say that Jon Ronson (in "So You've Been Publicly Shamed"), and Natalie Wynn (in her Contrapoints video on the topic), are the two commentators who've come closest to defining Cancel Culture clearly. Ezra Klein did a podcast with Wynn and Wilkinson a few weeks back which was pretty good.
"I still don't have a great sense for how 1950s-era conformity and repression failed"
"I admit that my social circle is tiny and highly atypical. It's just a bunch of weird Bay Area intellectuals and creative types who are really into sex and drugs."
What's obviously missing today is rock-n-roll. I'm not joking. It was a real thing that seems to have been forgotten.
One thing rock-n-roll meant in cultural terms was young people living for the moment and not giving a shit about the future. If you don't give a shit about the future, it is really easy to flout conventions. I'm shocked by how much young people today care so much more about their careers than their freedoms. You are the greengrocers with the signs about socialism in the window.
Scott, cancel culture is not boycotting! These are equated often by proponents of cancel culture to make it seem much more innocent than it is.
Boycotting is the act of persuading people to voluntarily abstain from engaging with a company/person/etc. Cancel culture typically involves the opposite: making it impossible for people to engage.
This is a boycott: sending out a mail to all students explaining why they should not go to an event with X.
This is cancel culture: appealing to the university leadership to get the event cancelled.
This is a boycott: holding a demonstration against the event, while letting people past.
This is cancel culture: interfering with the event so it can't go forward or people can't get to it.
This is a boycott: asking people to not take the classes by a professor
This is cancel culture: asking for the professor to be fired
This is a boycott: trying to persuade people with arguments
This is cancel culture: creating lists of those who engage and harassing them
This is a boycott: telling potential buyers that a certain book is problematic
This is cancel culture: demanding that publishers censor all their books (for example, with 'sensitivity readers')
Again, the key distinction is that boycotting is about people having a choice and cancel culture about taking that choice away. It's the difference between choosing to not vote and not being allowed to vote and between choosing S&M and being in an abusive relationship. From a certain perspective, these look very similar, but from the perspective of freedom, they are very different.
Also cancel culture is asymmetric. Instead of responding to speech with speech, they try to affect your ability to live in the world. It’s not quite killing you, but that’s where it’s going. It a short leap from you have no right to make a living to you have no right to living.
"Tweeting" is the current manifestation of the capability of broadcasting your thoughts with minimal effort. Before, everyone thought their thoughts, and only some people wrote or spoke widely about them. Now instead of just thinking thoughts, mass quantities of people also have those thoughts broadcast online.
To be irritated at vast quantities of the public tweeting dumb things is to be irritated at vast quantities of the public *thinking* dumb things. People verbalize the idea that it's pointless to get worked up over dumb tweets from 0-follower randos, but the sheer bug-in-the-human-mind irrationality of it doesn't seem to easily set in at the emotional level, for some reason. Imagine if you got annoyed every time someone anywhere in the country thought something bad about you; this is nearly what happens when you get annoyed at a tweet.
To pull this tangent back to the topic of the post: Advising people to do something impactful instead of tweeting is to advise people to do something impactful instead of doing *nothing*. While it may be fair to call out to those doing nothing to do something instead, I think the superficial appearance of a tweet as being something more concrete than it really is, is probably having an effect here.
> 6. Somebody should explore the fall of Puritanism in Massachussetts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Puritans_in_North_America says that the Puritans fragmented into sects, spinning off Quakers, Baptists, and others. Another key divide was over the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Way_Covenant, which was so divisive because the Puritans at that point had choose whether to maintain their control over civil life (via the Halfway Covenant), or the purity of the congregation (no Halfway: keep the non-elect out of the congregation).
(Kidd 2005 p. 32) says that "once the Glorious Revolution [1689; replaced the Catholic king with a Protestant] was embraced by New Englanders, their religious and political agenda had so fundamentally changed that it doesn't make sense to call them Puritans any longer." Also, "The new Massachusetts charter of 1692… required the former Puritans to tolerate all Protestants, even Anglicans", and, "New Englanders became intensely devoted to the British nation, empire, and monarchy, especially as Britain fought perceived Catholic enemies… They came to see the new British government as the leader in the fight against world Catholicism, and thought it foolhardy to undermine the power of the monarchy or the empire in the name of intra-Protestant squabbles."
(Noll 2002 p. 21) says, "By the 1740s Puritan theology was indeed breaking apart into different strands of pietists, rationalists, and conservatives."
But none of these answers are what you want, because today we don't care as much about whether or not someone believes you must recount a personal conversion experience to have the right to vote, or their exact understanding of original sin and predestination, as whether they're down with having the Church rule the State, enforce a strict puritanical moral code, and be allowed to execute people for religious dissent. That stuff didn't go away in 1740; in fact, it came back with a vengeance in the Great Awakening of 1740, whose "New England theology" was a reactionary movement to return to a more-puritanical Christianity. IIRC, most New England states interpreted the US Constitution's "freedom of religion" as "freedom to be some kind of Protestant" until something like 1830 (and we still have laws against prostitution today).
A better answer is to check "God" and "Christian" (separately) on Google n-grams. Both dropped sharply around the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution. These two revolutions both took the wind out of Christian fanaticism. Then the US Constitution separated Church and State, maybe because otherwise none of the colonies would have joined in a union with New England, which was still infamous for its crusading, intolerant Calvinism.
(In retrospect, perhaps they still shouldn't have.)
William Adams Brown, 1902. The Essence of Christianity: A study in the history of definition. NYC: Charles Scribner's Sons.
James S. Dennis, Harlan Beach, Charles Fahs, & John G. Bartholomew, 1911. World Atlas of Christian Missions (https://archive.org/details/MN41422ucmf_2). NYC: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions.
William Hutchinson, 1976. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. NYC: Oxford U Press.
Thomas S. Kidd, 2005. What Happened to the Puritans? Historically Speaking 7(1):32-34.
J. H. Muirhead, 1928. How Hegel Came to America. The Philosophical Review 37(3):226-240.
Mark A. Noll, 2002. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford U Press.
I think the more-interesting half of Scott's question 6 is, How did the formerly-Puritan Yankee elite, while living in the same places and controlling the same institutions, change from fanatical "right-wing" Christians in 1830 to fanatical "left wing" progressives and Unitarian Universalists by 1900?
The best book I know on this is (Hutchinson 1976), The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. It only outlines the period before 1860, and doesn't talk about Puritans at; but it covers the more-inflectional part of the transition of New England's elite from radical Puritans to radical progressives: the period from 1860-1900, when liberal theologians (Unitarians, Universalists, Hegelians, Social Gospel, & New Theology) struggled with old-school Calvinists for control of universities, theological seminaries, and congregations, notably in NYC and Chicago. (San Francisco could be on that list, but Hutchinson ignored the west coast.) It also names some of the important earlier links, like Hegel, Schleiermacher, & the Concord Transcendentalists.
The book is quite boring, and not very illuminating without some additional context. Many important connections are unstated. For instance:
- The University of Chicago was founded in 1856 as a Baptist school (Wikipedia, "Old University of Chicago"), despite the fact that, to avoid honoring its 1886 bankruptcy debts, it now claims to have been founded in 1890 with Rockefeller money.
- Baptists, along with Pilgrims, Puritans, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, are Calvinists.
- Most colleges in New England before perhaps 1850 were in effect seminaries, founded and directed mostly by ministers, primarily to teach the next generation of ministers, who were the true leaders of most New England communities.
- The doctrine of "living moral experience" (p. 127), derived from writings of Rudolf Lotze and Albrecht Ritschl by at latest (Brown 1902), seems identical to the Nazi doctrine of Erlebnis (from Heidegger) and the Woke doctrine of "lived experience". All three fight science's claim on epistemology by arguing that personal experience and feelings are more foundational than data or logic.
- The close ties between the key liberal theology reformers, who are very often from Harvard, Yale, or the U. of Chicago, are never pursued, and sometimes unclear (e.g., some ministers are "from New Haven"; does that mean they were from Yale?)
- As often happens, some of the dominant ideas driving the change of that period are left unmentioned, probably because everybody at the time thought they were too obvious to mention. The most-disruptive influences on American Protestantism in the 19th century were Hegel and a revival of Plato. Doctrines of Plato (e.g., p. 11, 79, 125) and Hegel (p. 2, 5, 16-18, 92, 121, 123-126) are scattered throughout (Hutchinson 1976), but unmarked as such; Hutchinson says "Plato" and "Hegel" only once or twice each.
Ivy Calvinism became secular in the 19th century much like how Marx became secular: Begin as Christian; try to reconcile Christianity with the Enlightenment and Romanticism using Hegel; give up, rip out some sentences from Hegel that you think you understand, and construct your own theory around them.
Starting with Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hegel (both Platonists), theologians throughout the 19th century struggled to reconcile Christianity with both Romanticism, which taught love of nature, liberalism, and a non-theological morality; and the Enlightenment, Newton, and empirical science in general. They came up with many bizarre rationalizations to let them call themselves Christans without taking the Bible seriously. See (Hutchinson 1976; Wikipedia, History of Harvard University: Science; Muirhead 1928) for three almost entirely disjoint threads of how 19th-century theologians tried to use Plato and Hegel to unify Christianity with science.
Some Hegelians picked up the mostly-empirical tradition of Biblical criticism, which we can trace back to Spinoza and Erasmus, trying to explicate Hegel's claim that (my paraphrase) the Bible was entirely false, but essentially true. This led American ministers liberalized by Unitarianism and Romanticism to see if adding Hegel to the mix could clarify things. According to (Muirhead 1928), they didn't understand Kant or Hegel at all, and became Transcendentalists, claiming they could reach the ding an sich via divine inspiration.
This inspired further bizarre Hegelian rationalizations for how people could be Christans without taking the Bible seriously, none of which worked. See (Hutchinson 1976; Wikipedia, History of Harvard University: Science; Muirhead 1928) for three disjoint threads of the influence of Plato and Hegel on 19th-century American theology. What came out at the end of the 19th century was an American Calvinist church split in two: one half which had given up on the Enlightenment; and another half, including the elite colleges except for Princeton, which had replaced the Bible with Hegel to produce some "essence" of Christianity with all the irrelevant bits like sin, the crucifixion, and the historical existence of Jesus stripped away.
(Witness this 2018 advertisement for a lecture series on Hegel, quoting a recommendation by Marcuse, given by a Unitarian Universalist church: https://lcuuc.weebly.com/hegel-hegel-hegel.html)
Chapter 5 hints that this new, secular yet still evangelical Christianity motivated and eased colonialism, because a "Christianity" stripped of its Western cultural baggage was easier to foist onto strange cultures. It would be a delicious irony if we could show that the same Ivy League institutions leading our "anti-colonialist" movement today had in fact been responsible for colonialism. I have some evidence from (Dennis..Bartholomew 1911) that this was the case by 1911, when on the order of 1/3 of the world's funding for Protestant missions to non-Western nations was given to missionary organizations based in Boston and NYC.
I think a larger lesson here is that right-wing and left-wing are closer to each other than to the center. The more-constant dimension is "moderate and pragmatic" vs. "fanatic radical".
(Actually, I don't know if Marx became an atheist before or after he began studying Hegel. That bit about Marx is sloppy. I wanted to note the affinity between Marxism and liberal theology, due to their both starting by trying to get Hegel's system to work, then giving up, salvaging what they could from it, and trying to cobble these bits and pieces of Hegel together somehow.)
"It would be a delicious irony if we could show that the same Ivy League institutions leading our "anti-colonialist" movement today had in fact been responsible for colonialism."
What would that achieve? It's not like white support for decolonization isn't saturated with white guilt.
As far as I can tell, the best way to word the opposition to canceling is: If you don't have any social power but need it, a boycott is a way of transmuting economic power into social power. It becomes immoral when you already have all the social power and are using boycotts to keep it that way.
It's also worth mentioning that canceling individuals is very different from canceling institutions. *That* opposition is very easy to put into simple words: what happens outside the workplace stays outside the workplace.
The Puritans became the Unitarians? A small splinter faction of dissenters did. Not the religion as a whole. Seriously, religious history is so often neglected because our academics lean so atheist. But it's really vital to understanding anything resembling cultural movements. It's only maybe in the last fifty years that culture war didn't mean religious war.
Anyway, the Unitarians are their own branch with a direct lineage to the 16th century. They united with the most liberal of the Puritans over opposition to the Congregationalist structure of more traditional Puritanism. This conservative branch remained more in line with Calvinist principles and Congregational government but has at least an equal claim to descent from the Puritans. The conservatives eventually became the United Church of Christ, which is about ten times bigger than the Unitarians. It's still liberal, though less so than the Unitarians.
Perhaps more importantly, they're far less cuddly about their liberalism. Hellfire, sin, and damnation is still very much a thing. They've just changed their view of their city on a hill to something much more liberal. Considering liberalism is dominant in New England, I'm not sure that's too much of a change from even the historical status quo. After all, they were Parliamentarians back in the day. They were drawn from the political ancestors of the British left and their opponents were the Tories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's family was Unitarian and his father was a forerunner of that liberal splinter group. In fact, his father's specific church would be a center of the splinter in time. And he was very much within that tradition. So he is less of a comment on the transformation of the Puritans as from an unrepresentative family that heralded the change. A change that would be rejected by the majority, both for reasons of conservatism and because of theological reasons I can get into. But pointing out that Unitarians are like Unitarians is tautological. I've met a few that have their own headcanons of Hinduism living in Boston.
Henry David Thoreau's parents were also part of a reformist splinter group and left the Unitarian Church. Thoreau was so disgusted by the purity tests, group think, and pointless drama over small stakes (sound familiar?) that he basically abandoned organized religion altogether.
Victorian morality has been greatly exaggerated. I'm straining to think of any moral laws that passed unless you want to count things like ending slavery or the ten hour workday. Persecution of homosexuality and prostitution was not new: the police simply got better funded and more efficient and so were able to enforce those laws more efficiently. Meanwhile, the Victorian era saw the birth of the porn industry and huge booms in sex toys, condoms, etc. The "censorship" of books was mostly just offering a censored version. And the rapid advance of literacy and wealth meant new people were reading who may well have been just as big prudes the previous century.
You start seeing extensive regulation of such behavior, socially and legally, mostly towards the end of the century. The Progressive Era. That's when a group of radical progressives began to push for things like banning condoms and porn, organizing boycotts, producing restrictive ideas of politeness, having linguistic shibboleths, etc. I think a lot of the cultural image of the period is actually towards it's end. That's why Queen Victoria is almost always portrayed as old. Which means they're remembering the moral puritanism of the Progressive Era, not the entire period.
And while modern Progressives share only some direct policy positions with 19th century Progressives, they both are animated by the same fundamental belief. That the improvement of society, its progress, towards an ideal state must be driven through their actions politically and socially. If they've changed, it's only in what that ideal state is, just as the more traditionalist Puritans remained brimstone and hellfire and only changed what they considered a sin.
I can't comment as intelligently on Ireland. But social patterns are far, far more durable than most people realize.
(Also, secondary point: extreme religiosity is a sign of conservatism today, especially in the US. This was not the case historically but we project that belief backward. There are plenty of examples where the less religious faction was the more conservative.)
"The Puritans became the Unitarians? A small splinter faction of dissenters did. Not the religion as a whole."
You seem to be much more familiar with the history of the UCC than I am, and you've made me more aware of a division that I'd been treating as unimportant, so thank you.
But on re-inspecting the matter, I think it's more useful to describe the split among Puritans this way: As the New England colonies grew, the Puritan churches increasingly de-emphasized their traditional congregational independence, in favor of political and theological unity and oppression of dissent. Some Puritans, smaller in number, but more true to the principles of the Reformation, splintered off to form non-denominational churches, most of which eventually formed an alliance with a non-Puritan Reformed group, which eventually formed an alliance with two other non-Puritan Reformed groups, to form the UCC.
2. The Prussian government merged Prussian Lutheran and Calvinist denominations in 1817. Immigrants to America from those churches were eventually called the Evangelical Synod of the West, which later merged with the Reformed Church in the United States to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church. Turning back to the Puritans, the National Council of the Congregational Churches of the United States and the General Convention of the Christian Church merged in 1937 to form the Congregational Christian Churches, most of whom merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church in 1957 to form the UCC. Of the 5 groups identified in this lineage above, only one was formerly Puritan. So the number of UCC members today tells us very little about how many Puritan churches eventually became UCC.
3. I've been going thru lists of famous people's religious affiliations as provided by both UCC, UU, and unbiased sites. When someone is officially in the UCC, they usually give their denomination as that of some church which at some point formally merged with somebody who merged with the UCC, e.g., "Lutheran", "Presbyterian", or else just "nondenominational". So "UCC" seems to be more of a formal alliance than a religious identity. Whereas Unitarians and UUs give their denomination as Unitarian or UU.
The Second Church of Plymouth, which split off from First Church in 1738, is now officially UCC, but doesn't mention that anywhere in its website's description of its beliefs. It's only found buried in their history: https://www.secondchurchofplymouth.org/our-history
Second Church Boston, also called Old South Church in Boston (est. 1669), split off from First Church Boston in 1669, and called "Schismatics" for accepting the liberal half-way covenant: https://www.oldsouth.org/history
6. The Wikipedia page on the Andover Theological Seminary describes the split of Congregationalism into Unitarians vs. more orthodox Calvinists (who eventually joined the UCC) as taking place in 1807, when the orthodox split off from the Unitarians, who had taken control of Harvard, to found Andover Seminary.
7. The UCC seems to describe itself (https://www.ucc.org/who-we-are/about/history/) as descended from dissenters from the American Puritan churches, and seems to emphasize not any particular theology, but a distaste for denominationalism unity in favor of congregational independence. (I didn't have the patience to read past about1850. It's LONG.)
"extreme religiosity is a sign of conservatism today, especially in the US. This was not the case historically but we project that belief backward. There are plenty of examples where the less religious faction was the more conservative."
I know this is not your main point, and therefore isn't as developed. But it does seem highly dependent on the metrics we choose for religiosity and the definition we choose for "conservative." Jonathan Edwards may look hyper-religious to us today, but I'm sure the average Quaker in Pennsylvania or the average Catholic in Maryland in 1741 regarded themselves as no less "religious" than a scary Massachusetts Calvinist.
Maybe I am missing the point, but isn't the core policy prescription to make in the midst of the cycles, trends, and fashions of the day to focus one's attention on things that will still matter in 100 years? The higher things - as they say. Trends are like winds. Sometimes the winds are good and one can harness them, sometimes bad and one should tack against them. But they are winds... prophecy to the wind, Scott, only the wind will listen.
Apologies if someone has already said this, but I don't think that the situation for anti-woke views in the US is much like the situation for gays in the 1950s (probably marajuana too, but I have less sense what people thought about it in the 50s.)
In the 1950s, there was pretty much no segment of mainstream society anywhere in the United States that was accepting of gays. It wasn't just like it was uncool but large parts of society that were accepting while upper-middle class dinner parties were filled with homophobia. The gay rights movement was a tiny marginalize group largely ignore. Scott himself has mentioned that the NYT ran nasty anti-gay stuff (actually, not 100% sure if this is 40s, 50s or 60s)(See Section 3.2.2 of the Anti-Reactionary FAQ: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/) The public generally rejected gay rights.
Meanwhile with wokeness:
1) As non-woke liberals often point out (especially when discussing optimal Democrat message strategy), one of the most important things to realize about the kind of hyper-wokeness that shows up in for example, some parts of academia, or some feminist blogs, is that it's *widely disliked* by the American populace, including the young and the non-white: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/
'Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.
Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either.
Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness. ' Yes, people mean different things by "political correctness", but this hardly suggests a hegemonic ideology. Furthermore, these stats are consistent with the general useful rule of thumb that the general public is more socially conservative than the elite in the vast majority of Western democracies. (No source for this one to be fair, but I doubt many disagree.)
2) There's a massively popular conservative media system where wokeness is the subject of withering scorn. I know some people will argue this doesn't count because it's "low status", but whilst that might be true, gays had nothing like this in the 50s at all. Better a working-class coded, uncool, but massively popular, widely consumed media system backing you up than nothing at all.
3) Even outside of that conservative media system, there are plenty of successful elite media writers who's selling point is partly that they are anti-woke. That's what the recent twitter moral panic about substack was about: people were upset because anti- or non-woke liberals, socialists and libertarians and heretic moderate conservatives like Jesse Singal, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, Freddie deBoer, Andrew Sullivan, Scott himself, were making loads of money off substack. There was no gay rights equivalent to these people in the 50s.
I'm not saying that this means there is nothing to worry about here on anything, obviously it would take far more argument to establish that, and I'm not really sure I agree with it anyway. There is, for example a lot of woke and leftish dogmatism in academia, and insofar as academia a) is influential and b) has an important function that should be performed well, that is plausibly bad. But even there it doesn't reign unchallenged in the way that some people seem to think. My experience in philosophy-admittedly, probably the least woke humanity-is that most people hate the stuff. The popular philosophy blog Daily Nous got rid of the like button on it's comments a few months back, and it was widely, and I think somewhat plausibly believed that it did so precisely because anti-woke comments always got massive numbers of likes. Go on philosophy twitter and you'll find it's the people who comment sneeringly about "cis white males" who tend to regard themselves as the embattled minority.
American Indians most likely to oppose political correctness? The most damaging proposals in the culture war have all been fired by or in the name of Native Americans.
> For example, if I remember correctly, there's actually a huge amount of formal academic evidence showing that policing decreases crime a lot, that decreasing policing increases crime, that the alternatives to policing that CHAZ etc propose don't work very well, that increasing crime hurts minorities the most, and that minorities are generally against this kind of thing.
My question is, where are the researchers who presumably have studied these things and why aren't they speaking up? Presumably, if CHAZ or defunding worked they would be speaking up because it's the fashionable sentiment at the moment, so are they staying silent for fear of censure and harassment? That's the chilling possibility.
> Still, we had exactly that same fight in the 50s, and the weird Bay Area drug users won completely and overwhelmingly.
Sure, after the old guard died off. We can do better than progress one funeral at a time.
> But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"?
If a mob is piling on a single person trying to get them cancelled, that's punching "down" and is wrong. It's wrong even if that person is a celebrity, because you're not really going to hurt that celebrity by "cancelling" them, but you are going to hurt everyone who they employ and all of the people who enjoy their content. This just sows dissent and a counter culture to this sort of protest.
If a mob is piling on a faceless corporation, that's punching up. Those are legitimate boycotts like you describe.
There many be a few exceptions to the above rules, but I think they hold as general principles.
Re. "where are the researchers who presumably have studied these things and why aren't they speaking up?" Perhaps they try to speak up--but how would you hear them? Probably you'd have to watch FOX News, or read an alt-right news source.
It occurs to me that even if woke terms are being used less now than they were at their peak, this doesn't prove that wokeism (possibly with different terminology) couldn't rev up again.
I am duly chastened for spending too much time tweeting and not enough time on real work.
As for the puritans, a very similar thing happened in france in a similar time frame. It went from Louis XIV suppressing non-catholics to widespread atheism among the elites. So it might be a mistake to focus on local history instead of the history of memes. The enlightenment happened. I should read Pinker's latest book.
Additionally, perhaps the same psychological traits that led to joining a nonconformist sect that took ideas seriously also led to faster-updating when better arguments for atheism etc came out.
<i> But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"?</I>
It is, which is why we need a different term for what most people are actually objecting to when they use the term. The hallmarks of the worst form of Cancel Culture include:
(1) A transgression that exists because of rapidly shifting rules. E.g., Barack Obama was still officially opposed to gay marriage through April of 2012 (he was lying, of course). His official position was still not a firing offense. But if you still have tweets up from that period where you take the same position... watch out. Related prediction: within five years, it will be a transgression in a small but noisy cohort to use certain euphamisms for slurs. Saying "he used the n-word" will be a transgression.
(2) The "Has Justine Landed Yet?" phenomenon, where absolute nobodies can be shamed into oblivion by Twitter mobs (and New York Times mobs) for their minor transgressions. While you can reduce your risk of this by going anonymous online, you never know if this is going to be the day when you stumble into a Covington Catholic situation and your behavior is filmed and broadcast to Twitter.
(3) Disproportionate consequences: Coca-Cola isn't going bankrupt because conservatives get upset about Critical Race Theory. Any decline in sales or stock price isn't going to have first-order effects on anyone. Even if sales drop enough that some employees need to be laid off, they haven't been rendered unemployable. The same cannot be said for a pizza parlor in the middle of nowhere. The Memories Pizza incident was personally harmful to the owners and people who worked there, and the owner's name will always be connected to that incident.
(4) Dopamine hits from ruining someone's life. Shaming the outgroup is FUN, especially when we can gather in a circle around a dispicable member of the outgroup and throw stones. Those of us who can throw the heaviest stone earliest get bonus Status Points in the ingroup.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but I think it covers the main problems with "Cancel Culture." I tend to use "Twitter mobs" (or some variant) because Twitter seems to be the common denominator in harmful Cancel Culture, but I don't think it's the best term.
"We all agree government authoritarianism is bad. But is banning guns the bad type of government authoritarianism? Nationalizing industries? Banning gender transition? Forcing everyone to wear a microchip so the police can track them at all times? There will always be debate about the exact limits of what's unacceptable, but our lack of coherent principles doesn't mean we're not allowed to object to specific acts of government authoritarianism in the meantime."
This could not be more wrong: we all (except for anarchists, maybe) agree that government authoritarianism is *good*.
Everyone agrees that the government should ban Really Bad Things once we determine that these things are sufficiently harmful. If you believe that words (e.g., certain ethnic slurs) can cause actual "trauma," then of course you want them banned, just as you want punching people in the nose to be banned. If you think that only sticks and stones can break your bones, then you don't want speech to be banned. Everyone is pro-"free speech" to the extent that they believe the speech is harmless or low-harm. What we call a "Libertarian" is someone who thinks that a relatively great proportion of activities that one person can engage in don't harm others all that much. That's not a principled commitment to "free speech"; that's a moral and ontological claim about "harm."
Boycotting Coca-Cola if they use slaves is not cancel culture because they're using the slaves to *make the Coca-Cola that you're boycotting*.
And it's hard to fix the example to actually be cancel culture because Coca-Cola doesn't have a private life. If you change it to the president of Coca-Cola, it would be a lot closer to cancel culture if the president of Coca-Cola owned Apple stock, Apple was accused of using slaves, and you and your friends boycotted Coca-Cola until they fired the president for supporting slavery in his spare time by owning Apple stock.
Even that isn't a good example because it's really hard to exert pressure on a president of a company this way, so it would be ineffective cancel culture and we don't see much like it
In terms of "every study says increasing policing decreases crime"- well, no. I feel like you may have read certain studies, but it depends on different circumstances, what type of crime, etc. The source of the study is also relevant, as well as the sources of data used.
Frankly, this entire post was a little short on data and pretty big on emotional reaction.
Everyone loves to hate the Puritans, but were they wrong? Intent to do good in the world really is the most important thing you have personal control over. It is the heart of what makes a good person. Yes, there are problems with organizing a society around purity tests of good-heartedness, but it's also kind of works wonders. The Puritans and their heirs won the American Civil War, two World Wars, the Cold War, and now they're winning the Culture Wars.
As for legislating morality, having society or government enforce standards is worth it in some cases but not all obviously. The trick is figuring out which cases are which. Given how much people argue about this very question my own take away is that most people should be much less confident about enforcement of their preferred moral system. And if that self-blindness applies to other people it probably applies to me also. I guess another takeaway is that we should have priors against government intervention, but we should try to test small enforcement programs in various ways to see which ones work. This testing regime should apply to existing programs which seek to maintain a mandate every bit as much as new programs. Doubt but verify.
5. 'Cancel culture' is a non-formalized rule enforcement procedure. As such, it is liable to excessive zeal, selective enforcement, arbitrariness, etc. The alternative to cancel culture is simply to have clear rules and enforce them accurately. If any mobs (twitter or otherwise) try to enforce their own rules, we simply ignore them, or if the problem is bad we make a rule against doing so and enforce that accurately.
6. The Puritans did not die. They rule the world now. Remember that the Civil War was the conquest of America by Massachusetts, and the World Wars were the conquest of Europe.
People have started creating "solidarity lists", which are basically lists of problematic individuals that one should avoid doing business with. We can financialize these, facilitating bets like "Will Scott Alexander appear on the ACLU's solidarity list?". Here are the benefits:
- We can be precise about what cancellation means
- There is an incentive to be the canonical solidarity list, which requires temperance
- People can hedge their cancellation risk
- You can get real-time feedback on how close you are to cancellation
- Moloch smiles down upon you (A C C E L E R A T E)
- The flood of resources into predicting cancellation may make it unfashionable or collapse under the weight of its own absurdity
- There will be right and left solidarity lists, which will polarize the issue on an authoritarian-liberal axis instead of a left-right axis
My experience is that societies get less repressive because they contain within themselves the seeds of less repression.
Puritanism, for all the hate it gets, was fundamentally a utopian project. The authoritarianism wasn't the point; the point was to create God's Kingdom On Earth, and the New World seemed as natural and free and pure a place as any to get that project started. Puritans were overwhelmingly well-educated and used social control as a means of enforcing a (contemporaneously) progressive public morality: the town drunk wasn't allowed to stay a drunk for long, but rounded up and basically forced to either make a productive member of society out of himself, or be banished.
Now, along the way, there were the witch hunts and the scarlet A's and all that oppressive stuff. But that stuff doesn't hold up very long against a deep-seated cultural value of education and utopianism. And because the point of the oppression wasn't oppression itself, but the utopianism, the utopianism eventually won out. Insularity and congregationalist theology also led to experimentation: every congregation was profoundly independent and somewhat democratic, so they could come up with wierd ideas; and those ideas wouldn't necessarily be impinged upon or even make it to the ears of the next congregation over, so there was a broad latitude for experimentation. Although the narratives always make a big deal about the Puritan obsession with rooting out heresy, the reality is that it was so visible precisely because they had such a thin line between heresy and theological innovation. It really was just a crap shoot as to whether a new idea would get banned or celebrated, so innovators saw reward in trying new things - bringing their brethren closer to God! - but could not accurately pre-assess whether they'd cross any lines, thus leading to the famously frequent backlashes.
The other half of the story is economic integration with their liberal/libertarian-minded Dutch neighbors in New Amsterdam. In 1692, NYC had only been an English holding for 30 years. It was still a tiny trading post. By the 1820s, NYC was a burgeoning metropolis with well-established trade links with Boston. The Puritans living mostly between those two cities benefited from all of this. By 1820, they'd had the benefit of over a century of cultural exchange with the Dutch, whose mercantilist and secular attitudes were legible to their fellow mercantilist Puritans.
The Dutch had a custom of tolerance through segregation - preventing conflict between groups by siloing them away from each other and having them negotiate with the central authority. To them, the Puritans were merely another group to deal with. Conversely, the Puritans' isolationism and sense of superiority meant that they saw little threat from the Dutch's secularism. The Dutch were "heathens" anyways, and their society would presumably fail without Puritan ways. Trading with them kept Puritans strong, and although Puritans would be on the lookout for assimilationism, it's impossible to keep out all assimilationism
The last part of it is also the big, dumb, obvious elephant in the room... "it's the American Revolution, stupid". Gee... the region we're talking about starts out with widespread oppressive religious utopianism led by a highly educated professional class... then spawns a successful civil-libertarian tax revolt led by that same professional class... and then 40 years later the professional class are all hippy-dippy religiously tolerant liberals? What a surprise.
The problem as I see it is not that *cancelation* is wrong inherently, at least not for obviously bad examples like the child slave one, but rather that this amorphous neo social-justice/D'Angelo-ism/intersectionality ideology is wrong. But the fact that it's so difficult to pin down and name is part of its memetic defense, and deflects critique of it towards its *methods* instead.
It is time for the federal government to rethink its approach to northern development in light of recent events, including the change in government, the slowdown in the economy due to falling global commodity prices, the urgent need to address climate change, and the emergence of a new generation of leaders and engaged citizens in the region. Dissertation writers can and should rewrite their work. <a href="https://nursingstudybay.com/">Health Care assignment and Life Sciences paper writers</a> In the past, the federal function was based on studies and assumptions that have been around for a long time and have been proven to be true. As the country gets ready for the challenges that climate change and huge changes in the global organization of production will bring, new plan to deal with these problems that takes advantage of the North's current strengths and assets as well as any new strengths and assets that may come up in the future.
you'd change your mind if you were worried about getting a job or losing one. also, corporations are heavily influenced by government and vice versa imo. power is power
Many people have financial independence because of things like rich parents, and as a hobby to stay busy spend their time online harassing people who aren't independently wealthy out of their jobs.
This isn't surprising. I knew rich kids in high school who did the same sort of asymmetric warfare on the not-as-wealth kids as a power play. I have two examples of them deliberately trying to cause car crashes (no collision or injuries occurred, thankfully) because their parents could easily afford new cars while a car crash would be economically devastating to the other kid.
So, like I said, it's not surprising to see people still doing it.
It *is* surprising to see someone think that this is a benevolent state of affairs.
This does actually seem to point to a fairly important difference between what most people regard as acceptable boycotts and unacceptable cancellation - boycotts are generally an attempt to change or influence ongoing behavior by an organization. The success criteria, such as it is, is the behavior changing, not e.g. specific named executives being fired (though I'm sure among all the boycotters you'll find some calling for that too). Cancellation seems to not care that some tweets you made 10 years ago aren't representative of your current views or behavior in either a personal or professional capacity; it's not calling for a change in your behavior at all. It's calling for you to be fired (or deplatformed, or whatever). Even in those cases where it's triggered by new/ongoing behavior, the goal never seems to be to "change the behavior" per se.
Yeah, the goal of cancelling is to pick a random example and publicly destroy them "pour encourager les autres". To be an effective deterrent, either the chance of getting caught must be very high, or the punishment must be grossly disproportionate to the crime, and cancellation is all about the latter.
It follows that:
a) Once you've been picked for cancellation, nothing you say or do can stop it anymore. That would defeat the purpose: we don't want people to think that they can engage in the bad behavior for a while and then just repent at the last moment.
b) The people chosen for cancellation won't necessarily be the most egregrious examples. You don't want to draw a bright line and tell people that they are safe as long as they don't cross that line; you want them to be afraid of even coming within a mile of the line, and to be at least a little bit nervous even when they are nowhere near it.
One of the things that came out of the discussion after the release of the Harper's Letter, was that for a bunch of people who signed it, and people who supported it, it turned out that there was a C as well, and is actually one of the big concerns, and that's not being even a mile of that bright line, and being thrown over it anyway. Having your ideas misrepresented or just straight-up lied about and then being cancelled based on that.
I think that one thing that's often missed is that being "Liberal" on these issues is often seen as being just as bad as being "Conservative". Of course that's not how it's framed....that framing would tear down the entire structure, but that's how it's coming across. Personally, I see the issue as one of kayfabe, where the Progressives are seen as the babyfaces, even if they're annoyingly so sometimes, and everybody else is the heel. If that dynamic gets broken, if it could be acknowledged that sometimes Progressives ARE the heels...either dealing with their own forms of racism/sexism/etc. or have different, more self-serving motives at play, then we can get some reciprocity into the system, which I think will set a more healthy set of norms.
"sometimes"
Excellent points.
That leads me to an empirical hypothesis: there is a pretty high correlation between how cogent a comment is and whether it includes the phrase ""pour encourager les autres."
I wouldn't consider this the most important difference that makes boycotting OK in some situations: if they just threatened to fire someone unless he shuts up, we'd still consider that wrong. To me, the line is that I oppose punishing people over speech, specifically where the person isn't employed for his opinions (as an opinion journalist or a politician is), and where the speech in question is off the job, or at a workplace where the expression of other political opinions is generally accepted.
This is a bit of a motte and bailey (or perhaps a weakman, depending on which side you're on), because "cancel culture" has been used to describe basically any form of attack on the right wing. Digging up old tweets to get someone fired? Cancel culture. Calling to vote out a senator in November? Cancel culture. Saying that a book is problematic without in any way suggesting that people should be fired for writing or publishing it? Cancel culture. Disqualifying a horse from the Kentucky Derby? Cancel culture.
(Calling for NFL players to get fired if they kneel during the anthem? Not cancel culture, apparently.)
It's easy to find examples of cancel culture gone too far, but it's also easy to find examples of "any speech I don't like is cancel culture."
There's a recent example of a Republican congressman recently whining about being cancelled in his book about being cancelled (Hawley I think?). What was funny was his (paraphrase) - "Go get my book about being cancelled, which they don't want you to read, available on Amazon Prime!"
Puritan villages didn't "self destruct after a generation or two".
Puritans were vastly fertile. 17th Century Waltham, MA had a total fertility rate of 9 per woman according to Harvard economic historian David Landes, one of the highest figures in history. There are a huge number of descendants of the Puritans spread across the northern half of the United States today.
A bunch of weird unstable repressive cult members, "super isolated" sounds like a few online communities I've had the misfortune of encountering. Just sayin'....
Couple of things. There is a difference between puritans and pilgrims. The pilgrims are the ones that sailed to America initially (in 1620). They left England (technically Holland) in pursuit of religious freedom. You have to respect that.
The Puritans came to America later on. They were called the "puritans" because they tried to stay in England and purify the state church. That didn't work, so they eventually headed to America as it started to become more settled.
They left England in pursuit of religious freedom, and found it in Holland. They left Holland, in part, because they realized that religious freedom meant their kids might join the wrong church.
The whole Reformation was mostly like that: Breaking away from an oppressive orthodoxy so that you could start your own, different oppressive orthodoxy.
The Puritans opposed a proposal of religious freedom in England, because that would mean the freedom to be Catholic. In that case, they would rather not have it at all.
> They left England (technically Holland) in pursuit of religious freedom. You have to respect that.
But not to respect it too much if "religious freedom" just meant "freedom for our kooky brand of religion and for building intolerable cities based on our creed".
I think the country they ended up birthing turned out ok.
New England is not the whole country.
Financially yes. Culture and lifestyle wise could do much better...
Very interesting article, thanks.
I've seen arguments that Social Justice is a religion-- irritable comments from Jews that it's just Original Sin, and an extended analysis from John McWhorter that Social Justice is a religion, but it's worth seeing an analysis of *which* religion is being replayed,.
The argument is that it's faith-based Protestantism, which I think (possibly after it's over-simplified from its more sophisticated versions) is the essential thing is to have the right mental states and to prove them by one's public behavior.
The mental state standard can take a surprising variety of forms-- grim, misery-inducing religion, New Thought (the mind creates reality, if anything goes wrong in your life, it's because you were thinking wrong), and now Social Justice, where the tiniest vestige of possible racism must be eliminated.
I can't make sense of the claim in the article that Social Justice is nativist.
Do you have a link to McWhorter's commentary?
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/the-elect-neoracists-posing-as-antiracists
Thank you for sharing this. I was wondering why self-described "leftists" would ally themselves with religious conservatives (or would that be religious reactionaries ?). Now it makes perfect sense !
This is terrifying. I might need to prepare for emigration as an option...
McWhorter's comments elsewhere on his blog about his choice of name for the book were disappointing. Punching up, punching down, it's less bad to be awful to someone if they don't have enough melanin. I thought the point of learning from the 60s and before was that it was the mindset that was the awful thing, not the choice of target. But alas, a targetist our John is.
I'm not particularly convinced, however this part :
"scientifically speaking, “race” is a fiction. It is a made-up category derived from 19th-century pseudoscience, which has been discredited by pretty much the whole of the 20th-century biological sciences—so the sooner we stop reifying it, the better."
I was tempted to answer "Amen to that !", which, considering this (Jewish ?) source and John McWhorter's blogbook would be doubly ironic !
I came to the same conclusion a few weeks ago, better late than never I guess :
At the core this is about different cultures, or as the anthropologists call them, ethnic groups. See how the term "racism" is often improperly used for group hatreds which AFAIK (?) are genetically very similar, like Irish and English (?) or (Sephardi-only ?) Jews and Arabs (both "Semites" ?)
We now know that languages spread in a way quite different from genes, and so does culture in general (memes).
(Note that the common meaning of the term ethnicity seems to have been corrupted into a synonym for "race" by racists in the mid-20th century, when the term "race" itself became unfashionable.)
A tribe is an ethnic group that is smaller than Dunbar's number.
A Nation is an ethnic group which manages to keep together thanks to (post)modern inventions like the printing press and mandatory schooling, which allows millions to share the same symbols and values.
(The German style of nationalism went deep into essentialism, and combined with the (misuse of the) new science of biology and the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles has spawned Nazism.)
An Empire is yet another kind of political entity (a much older one than a Nation), under which there are "non-core" ethnic groups that are more or less persecuted, more or less free to live their separate lives (as long as they pay taxes).
> "scientifically speaking, “race” is a fiction. It is a made-up category derived from 19th-century pseudoscience, which has been discredited by pretty much the whole of the 20th-century biological sciences—so the sooner we stop reifying it, the better."
"Country" is also a fiction. A person's country still has plenty of real associations with their health, wealth, life span, education, and more. Should we stop trying to analyze different population outcomes according to the country? Of course not, and I don't see why "race" would be any different.
Certainly race isn't very precise or directly causal, but race-based research has its place, particularly when you don't have the funds for more precise data gathering to tease out ethnicities or other factors that go into "race".
Some fictions are better than others. "Race" seems to be both misleading and harmful, especially to civic Nations.
(And Nation is also probably a better fiction than Country, which is a bit too much tied to geography.)
(Also if anything it's "race" that goes into ethnicity, not the other way around.)
The point is, "better fiction" depends on what you're measuring and the resource cost to achieve a certain precision (time, money, etc.). You just can't make a universal claim like "nation is a better fiction than country", because other factors matter.
Finally, whether race goes into ethnicity or vice versa is a semantic game on the one hand. You could define the Scandinavian ethnicity by starting with the set of white people intersected with the the subset of people from a certain geographic area intersected with... Or, you could define the "white race" as the union of Scandinavians and Anglo-saxons and ...
Only one of these seems truly well-defined though. As you yourself have asserted, race is a poorly defined pseudoscientific category, where ethnicity actually has more precise scientific meaning. I don't see how ethnicity can be scientific if it depends upon a vague and unscientific clause. It simply must be the other way around, ie. pseudoscientific terms must start with the scientific basis and add bullshit, you don't start with bullshit and remove anything unscientific.
>If we zoom out a little, we find that most of human history involved enforced ideological conformity, censorship, and repression. Maybe the most available reference point for this sort of thing is the US in the 1950s. There were certain ideas everyone knew were off limits - atheism, communism, marijuana legalization, gay rights. If you supported those things, you might not go to jail, but you'd be excluded from most good careers and most of polite society. This system was very stable - everyone knew the limits, and people generally didn't push against them unless they really wanted to and knew what they were getting into.
No. In reality, communism was 100% cool among cool elites and the "Red Scare" was a short-lived reactionary populist movement among uncool peasants.
IIRC there was terrible oppression in Hollywood that made some communist writers write under assumed names (while getting the same checks) - and as I understand pretty much everybody knew that, but pretended those people are terribly oppressed.
Exactly. Scott -- you have a reasonable grasp of the present, but your past is "a piece of cardboard you downloaded from the New Yorker", to borrow a phrase from Moldbug.
I’ve always liked SA’s blog, but his perspective is narrow both in time and in space. Often, spending some years abroad creates a wider perspective, but it seems Ireland was insufficiently foreign to make much of a difference for him. The recent review of the book about Erdogan was unusual, and writing another ten pieces like that would presumably do him a lot of good.
To be fair, he was in med school in Ireland, and med school kinda just sucks one's life force away for 4 years. I'm from NY and went to med school in Dallas and was hoping to use it as a way to gain real insight into Southern culture, but... nope.
But Scott already knew that (per test's comment) "communism was 100% cool among cool elites" -- see e.g. his 2015 book review of the autobiography of Malcolm Muggeridge, "Chronicles of Wasted Time", in particular why Muggeridge's journalistic coverage of the Soviet Union was rejected by the progressive elites of his day: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-of-wasted-time/
The fashionability of Soviet Communism in the US was confined to the years from roughly the stock market crash of 1929 to the Truman administration turning decisively against Communists in the later 1940s. That's by no means an insignificant expanse of time, but not a huge one either.
But does 'Communism' refers to the soviet union in particular or the idea of communism in general.
It's not as if geopolitics didn't exist back when most all of europe were monarchies, if the United States was made a communist country in, say, 1930, Two powerful independent states will have rivalries even if they share modes/uses of power.
I bet there were social circles where communism was hella cool. just ase there are plenty of social circles where politically incorrect thought is still hella cool. but what we're talking about is the metasociety. commynusm wasnt cool at all in the meta society. if you went on television to talk about how great marx was you would find little applause.
I bet I can name more "elites" in the 1950s that thought communism is uncool than you can name "elites" who thought it was cool.
Care to wager?
I foresee difficulties with resolving that bet; you will probably dispute a lot of test's names.
Yes and no.
I think part of my point is that "elite" is just a word people like OP throw around to mean something like "outgroup member". But the nice thing for my side is: however loosely OP wants to define "elite", there are just objectively a lot more non-communists than communists in that grouping.
That depends on your definition of "communist". Open communism became pretty rare after the Cold War began, but until enough information leaked through the Iron Curtain for people to realise how terrible Stalin had been (which would have been late 50s to 60s), intellectuals quite widely held communist sympathies (this was very helpful to Soviet intelligence services). This is, I think, what test is getting at (although I don't think it's a very good point to make to Scott - Scott is well-aware of this already, as can be seen in his review of Muggeridge's autobiography).
The problem is that almost by definition any names given in that category are subject to dispute. It's not like everyone gave a deathbed confession of communism.
A great advantage to betting against silly claims is that you don't have to be perfectly accurate -- only more accurate that the other guy.
I'm happy to use whatever definition of communism OP was basing his claim upon -- assuming they can state it clearly and with a straight face.
The Communist Party USA was riding high from June 22, 1941 to roughly 1946, but then was neutered by the Truman Administration. For example, the Soviet spymaster in NYC, Rudolf Abel (portrayed in Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies"), looked like a genius to his bosses in the mid-1940s because the CPUSA kept funneling to him valuable traitors like the teenage Los Alamos A-bomb physicist Ted Hall. But by the 1950s, with the destruction of the CPUSA, treason had trickled to a halt and Abel devoted most of each day to his painting hobby before he was arrested and exchanged for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Power.
Depends on the definition of "elite". In the '50s and '60s, business elites were more culturally and politically influential than they are now, and were universally anti-communist (except Armand Hammer). Intellectual elites - authors, prominent scientists, etc. (frex Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead) were generally non-Communist but not many were explicitly anti-communist.
What you do to avoid bias in assessing hypotheses is you pick lists that other people chose for other purposes than your own. Ideally, you pick either lists that multiple experts worked on or multiple lists.
For example, I just now googled Most Influential Books of the 1950s and the first choice offered by Google is this list by somebody named Emily Temple:
https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1950s/
One list by one person isn't enough, but it's a start. Here are her ten authors of the most influential novels of the 1950s: J.D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Ray Bradbury, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Vladimir Nabokov, Leon Uris, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ayn Rand, Chinua Achebe (non-American).
I could argue with those choices, but they aren't at all bad, suggesting Ms. Temple's list isn't contrived.
And here are her runners-up:
Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950), Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950), Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train (1950), C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950), Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha (first English translation, 1951), Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (1951), Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951), Isaac Asimov, the Foundation Trilogy (1951-1953), Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl (first English translation, 1952), Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt (1952), Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952), Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood (1952), Barbara Pym, Excellent Women (1952), John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952), Kurt Vonnegut, Piano Player (1952), E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952), Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (1953), James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), Alfred Kinsey, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953), Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1953), Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha (1953), William S. Burroughs, Junky (1953), Arthur Miller, The Crucible (1953), J. D. Salinger, Nine Stories (1953), Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (1954), William Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954), Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems (1954), Richard Matheson, I Am Legend (1954), Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), J. P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man (1955), Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955), The Guinness Book of Records (1955), Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse (first English translation 1955), Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories (1955), John Ashbery, Some Trees (1956), Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals (1956), Dodie Smith, The Hundred and One Dalmatians (1956), James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956), Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (1956), John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicle (1957), Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957), Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat (1957), Martin Luther King, Jr., Stride Towards Freedom (1957), Bernard Malamud, The Assistant (1957), Nevil Shute, On the Beach (1957), Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957), Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (first English translation 1958), Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), Graham Greene, Our Man in Havana (1958), Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums (1958), Yukio Mishima, Confessions of a Mask (first English translation, 1958), Americo Paredes, With His Pistol in His Hand (1958), T. H. White, The Once and Future King (1958), Robert Bloch, Psycho (1959), Günter Grass, The Tin Drum (1959), Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959), William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959), Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House (1959), John Knowles, A Separate Peace (1959), Strunk & White, The Elements of Style (1959), D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (unexpurgated U.S. version released 1959)
I suspect this guy leans slightly right (he's diligent about finding conservative authors of high merit, such as Barbara Pym), but it's not a bad list.
On his list, Hemingway sided with the Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War. Arthur Miller belonged to a Communist Front in the late 1930s, as did John Steinbeck (but he offered his services to the CIA in 1952), and Allen Ginsberg's mother was a Communist. Lorraine Hansberry had been a Communist. I presume from reading "Invisible Man" that Ralph Ellison had once been influenced by the Communist Party as a young man, but his "Invisible Man" is clearly against the Party. James Baldwin had had a flirtation with the Communist Party when young. The Irishman Samuel Becket was a hero of the French Resistance, which was heavily Communist, but I don't see much evidence that that refractory personality submitted to the Party. Graham Greene was a pro-Third World anti-American Catholic, but I don't think he was ever Communist.
I could go on testing my impressions of each author, but my impression of the most influential books of the 1950s is that the Communist Party was more or less defeated in the U.S. among the most influential writers.
I just read the new (and already canceled!) biography of novelist Philip Roth, who was born in 1933 and won the National Book Award for "Goodbye, Columbus" at the end of the 1950s. Roth was a liberal Jewish Democrat, very pro-civil rights and anti-Vietnam War, but as far as I can tell he despised the Soviet Union from the later 1940s onward, and did a lot to publicize Eastern European dissident writers like Milan Kundera in the 1970s.
Perhaps if Roth had been born in 1913, he'd have been a Communist in 1938. Or, if a 1913-born Roth, a naturally skeptical personality, had been anti-Communist in the 1930s, he would have had his career hindered by Communist power in the American cultural sphere.
But after the Red Scare of 1947-1954, the power of Communists in America to hinder the careers of non-Communists had been shattered, so Philip Roth's rise in the second half of the 1950s was spectacular.
Never heard of it, but why do you say it was canceled?
See here:
https://www.takimag.com/article/roth-vs-updike/
One interesting, albeit global, perspective is that Communism is still alive and strong in several places, and not just the repressive variety. For instance, Kerala, a state of 35 million people in India, just re-elected the Communist Party for a consecutive term. Fully fleshed out here -
https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/a-communist-success-story
A lot of the off-limits ideas were also circumscribed in time and space, and long as there is free movement of ideas across borders the idea that it's a sort of equilibrium is an assertion also.
Interesting, but what's described in that article sounds more like socialism supported by foreign worker remittances than communism. I know that's treading into no-true scotsman territory, but from the article it didn't sound like capitalism/private enterprise wasn't allowed, it's just difficult due to strong unionization.
They're called the Communist Party of India (Marxists), and definitely have very strong affiliations to the original roots, so think there's a bit of that no true Scotsman there. Several of my family are staunch Leninists or Marxists etc, and original flavour too. However because the party were never the sole power (unlike West Bengal which had a 30yr rule and looks as you'd imagine) and had to compete democratically to gain votes, the ultimate impact is more measured.
Either the timing is an amazing coincidence, or someone saw this link and shared it on the subreddit. I found this comment particularly interesting, which touches on a few factors separate from the politics:
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/naqacu/a_communist_success_story/gxvrro4/
The southern Indian state of Kerala is far leftist while its neighboring state of Karnataka that includes the tech capital of Bangalore is enthusiastically capitalist. Both are doing better, in their different ways, than northern states like Uttar Pradesh. India seems to benefit from its federalism that allows its states, which are the size of typical European countries, to try different policies that suit the local populations.
Yeah, but there were cases like Irving Peress of ordinary people having their lives wrecked for supporting Communism, or ordinary people being fired for being gay (e.g. Frank Kameny). And you don't need many cases like that to create a climate of fear.
It's a similar dynamic today where some people can making a living as anti-SJW personalities, but Kieran Bhattacharya points out a contradiction at a diversity workshop and is kicked out of medical school. A few people can survive as counterculture figures but ordinary middle class people know there are certain views they can't espouse if they want to remain ordinary middle class people.
Scott wrote a whole piece about this idea back on SSC:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
(This was also mentioned elsewhere in the comments to this post.)
Yeah...try to find a Hollywood movie from the 1940s and 50s that portrays capitalism positively in any way. They're all Old Man Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" - irredeemable, with no good qualities whatsoever. Turns out, a lot of those Hollywood people really were communists, or at least communist-adjacent.
>It also reminded me of an old story we tell in Central Europe of a Czech professor who returned to Prague in the 1970s after two years in the Netherlands because – as he said – ‘there were way too many Communists over there. At least in Prague, I won’t have to meet any’.
https://wolvesofwestminster.co.uk/the-government-ought-to-do-more-against-marxist-sentiments-lili-zemplenyi
> They're all Old Man Potter from "It's a Wonderful Life" - irredeemable, with no good qualities whatsoever.
George Bailey was also a capitalist. "It's a Wonderful Life" may be the most pro-banking movie ever written. It's about how banks can build communities by helping people own homes.
Frank Capra is usually assumed to have been a New Deal Democrat, but he was actually an anti-FDR Republican, as he makes clear in his autobiography "Name Above the Title."
Sabrina (1954) literally has a one minute rant in which the romantic lead espouses the wonders of neoliberalism.
"Sabrina" was directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, who held the record for most Oscar nominations in above the line jobs until the not all that dissimilar Woody Allen bested him.
My impression is that Wilder, a Jewish refugee from Vienna and Berlin, was a pro-American anti-Communist. One of his earlier American credits was 1939's "Ninotchka," in which Greta Garbo plays a stern Soviet commissar sent to reform the Paris embassy, where the diplomats have been corrupted by French decadence. The hapless diplomats ask her upon her arrival, "How are things in Moscow?"
She answers, "Very good. The last mass trials were a great success. There are going to be fewer but better Russians."
I don't know for sure that Wilder wrote that line (he was a collaborator rather than an auteur), but it sure sounds like him.
The Old Hollywood featured more political diversity than the New Hollywood. For example, the 1939 movie "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" starred Jimmy Stewart, was directed by Frank Capra, and Columbia Pictures was run by Harry Cohn: all Republicans. It was written by Sidney Buchman, a Stalinist Communist.
Nowadays, all four roles would be filled by Democrats.
Partisan diversity isn't ideological diversity. 1950s Republicans could be liberals or occasionally conservatives. 1950s Democrats could be liberals or conservatives or social democrats. 2020s Republicans can only be conservatives while 2020s Democrats can be liberals or social democrats.
Herman Mankiewicz (played by Gary Oldman in 2020's "Mank," who sobered up to write the screenplay for 1941's "Citizen Kane," was a Jewish-American antiwar isolationist supporter of Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin. He'd fought in WWI and was an admirer of German culture, so he didn't want to do it all over again. (But after Pearl Harbor he tried to re-enlist in the Marines, although he was turned down for being a practically moribund middle-aged alcoholic.)
Pauline Kael's famous "New Yorker" essay about Mankiewicz's sizable role in "Citizen Kane" laments the rise of unfunny leftist political correctness among screenwriters during WWII in contrast to the hilarious dialogue written by drunken reprobates like Mankiewicz in the early talkies era.
Apart from being rejected by both of America's major political parties, all it's business class, conservative intellectuals like Buckley, liberal intellectuals like Schlessinger, former fellow travelers like FDR vice-president Henry Wallace (who switched from sympathetic to the Soviets to cold warrior after the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia) and even arguably some anti-Soviet socialists like Chomsky (depending on what you count as "communism"), and all the major trade union leaders, yes the elite all thought communism was great.
The Red Scare was run by a Senator, and was famously influential within Hollywood. No doubt it was *most* popular in rural areas (right-wing idea less popular in cities shock!), but the idea that it had no power any else is bullshit.
lol explain the nightmarish statutes and kafkaesque trials with professional government witnesses. today's libs would drool over the prospect of hunting MAGA the same way. however, you can't mount this repression with mere "peasant" buy-in.
The whole 50s analogy is a pretty bad one. Atheism and gay rights were things that continued to be taboo as they had been for centuries upon centuries. Communism was complicated as you mention. And marijuana was not widely available and not of interest to most people. So none of these things has much in common with now, when woke elites attempt to enforce brand new orthodoxies at variance with what millions of people believe, concerning every fundamental aspect of our society.
"Get in a discussion with a real Defund The Police supporter you know and like, and see if one of you can change the other one's mind. Sign a petition or something. Campaign for a politician whose policies you agree with. Just do anything, anything at all, other than tweet."
Hey Scott, I've been pointing out your extremely obvious mistakes regarding the basics of Marxist theory for a long time. Yet you've never acknowledged them or fixed any of your mistakes. Why is that?
I second the proposal, as long as @marxbro1917 spends at least a few blog posts on outlining his views in plain English, without too much political science jargon -- for those of us like myself, who are not well-versed in political science or history.
Nice idea.
I would love this and I think SA would too, as would everyone else in the rationalist community. I don't know a thing about Marxism except that the labor theory of value has some issues and would love to be tutelaged on that.
The Revolutions podcast on the Russian revolution spends quite a few episodes on the history of Marxisim. Enlightening as well as entertaining. It is not over yet (think the year is 1912) so I am very excited to learn how it ends.
Neat, thanks! Hope it ends well for everyone involved :)
UPDATE: A world war just broke out. Damn.
Fuck me. Well, at least humanity got it out of its system now. Looking forward to a future of international friendship and harmony!
But I can comment here for free.
Good call. If they apparently don't want to see your comments, uh, "tutelaging" them here (as Belisarius Cawl so aptly puts it), why would they then "love" and join an entire Substack (and perhaps by "join" these fellows mean "actually pay for", even) by you?
More people discuss things with me here. I make money at my job, I'm here just to have rational discussions.
I was not being sarcastic...
I pre-committed to not replying to you, but I can't resist the temptation. You can write at substack for free if you don't charge your readers.
https://becomeawritertoday.com/best-substack-newsletters/
(There's a list of recommended substacks, but there's also a faq.)
I prefer commenting.
In case this sounds confrontational - it's really not.
Could you give a very fast rundown on what people misunderstand about Marxism? You could also just dump some links on me.
Sorry that the Internet has become such an anal space.
Lots of people prefer angry tweeting, but there are reasons to think that might not be the most effective way to change minds.
Well at least not in the direction intended.
Surely the most effective way to change someone's mind is to point out their mistakes and offer to discuss it with them? That's what I'm doing here.
Marx wrote some rather bigoted things, so I wouldn't necessarily expect the noble sealion to get a fair shake.
Now, if Scott Alexander is (apparently) incapable of discussing things rationally and fixing his mistakes, by what process do we expect other people to do the same?
Is it right to understand this comment as an statement that Defund the Police is essentially a Marxist movement?
No, I'm making the point that "discussions" do very little when the person having the discussions is irrational and not prepared to have any sort of long-form discussion of the facts. It's hard to see how twitter is the culprit here ; Scott Alexander often writes 1000s of words and still gets the basics wrong. I don't think word count is the problem.
What is your definition of rational in the context of this comment?
Well, in this case I would say a rational person would correct their mistakes. I have pointed out many times to Scott his incorrect takes on Marxism; yet I never see a correction. I have often merely asked him for a citation so that I at least know where he's getting his incorrect ideas from - but he doesn't even engage with these posts.
Now I think there's a very good point to be made about what is the Rational thing to do when people are paying you to hear a particular point of view. Is it rational to abandon the opinions that you were getting paid for? I dislike a lot of things about my job, but I still do them because I know that I can just coast and not make a fuss and continue to get paid. Is this Scott's position and why he is unable to enter into discussions with leftists about the basics of Marx? Perhaps. It's one possible answer I think.
This post seems a bit rude.
This comment is probably a bit over the top but your display name is fantastic
I'm still not clear on your working definition of rational in this context. It sounds like at least part of what you're saying is that rationality is related to making decisions that are aligned with your goals. Is that a fair interpretation?
I think there are multiple aspects to Rationality that often clash with each other. Is a person pursuing an objective truth, or is a person pursuing a personal gain. These are two rationalities than can come into conflict.
Marxbro, have you considered the possibility that you and Scott simply have different interpretations of Marxism? If so, this might explain why he does not "correct his mistakes", because he does not believe they are mistakes.
Perhaps instead of asking someone you disagree with to "correct his mistakes", it would be more productive to ask yourself "how might someone make this interpretation of Marxism I disagree with?"
Another fruitful way to think about this is, how certain are you that your interpretation is correct? if your interpretation were wrong in some way (and I am not saying it is), how would you find out? What evidence would you need to see?
it would be more productive to ask yourself "how might someone make this interpretation of Marxism I disagree with?"
Someone could make this interpretation of Marxism if they were just listening to conservatives regarding Marx and not really reading the text charitably.
Marxbro is annoying, but I would generally trust an obsessive Marxist more than a Marx-hostile American libertarian on the topic of what Marx actually said. One of them is likely to have read a lot more Marx after all, and whilst the Marxist is no doubt biased so if the libertarian!
You mentioned in our last exchange that the reason you took Marx seriously was because of his prophesies about national communist revolutions. Could you give me a citation for where Marx predicts the occurrence of these as opposed to an international revolution after capitalism divides the globe into two classes of workers v. capitalists?
I thought I already replied to you on this? Maybe the comment got lost somehow, substack commenting I find a little clunky. Marx talks about the potential for national revolutions in some of his most famous works, including in the prefaces to the Communist Manifesto;
"But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
"
Does disagreeing with you automatically make him wrong ?
In this case yes, I've written many basic posts on how he is getting leftist politics incorrect. Here's a good one:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
In general Scott rarely provides citations for his statements regarding Marx and never engages with any of my criticisms. So all these lamentations about twitter and the inability to have a discussion ring hollow. I'm right here and I'm willing to have a discussion about this. Why isn't Scott able to correct his own mistaken thinking?
It is quite possible that he is not persuaded by your comments.
In any case, I think it might be a good idea for you to write a summary of what Marxism mean -- or maybe even marxbro1917-ism, if your vision differs substantially from Marx's original. Then, in a subsequent post, you could say, "as you can see, I believe X, and I have supplied solid evidence for X, and yet Scott persists in saying not-X, so he's wrong". Right now, it's hard for me to follow your objections, because I am missing a lot of context.
You are also fighting an uphill battle, because the poster children for Marxism are places like USSR/Maoist China/North Korea. You may argue that it is unfair or that they are doing Marxism wrong, but when you mention Marxism, that's what pops into people's heads. Again, writing an explanatory post might help with that.
I'm unsure how he wouldn't be persuaded by the comments about "completely malleable". I laid it out as simply as possible. I'd prefer if people read my really basic comments about Marx's literal writings. If people can't read short posts, why should I expect them to read long ones?
Damn, I finally found a place where you argue for what you believe in instead of just asserting it, and I have to say it's pretty disappointing. Both of your concrete disagreements, at best, seem to be pointless, contentless semantic quibbles.
Marx says there is no essence to man inherent in every individual, only the social relations between people; Scott summarizes that as saying Marx did not believe in human nature. You say the summary is wrong because... I'm not sure? "Human nature" is different from "inherent essence of man" under the way you're using words, so Scott must have misunderstood Marx? Huh? Obviously Scott is using "human nature" to refer to the inborn essence present in ~every person on account of our genes, which sure does sound incompatible with "the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual".
And then you complain about the "completely malleable" part, where I again can't even follow your argument. I'm going to expand on Scott's two words here in a way I think Scott would agree with, hopefully that will make it clearer. Marx says that social relations are all there is to the essence of man. Scott says that Marx believes humans are entirely shaped by their social relations, and that there's no unmalleable iron rod born within them that keeps its shape in the face of society. Sounds like a fair summary to me.
I legitimately can't even follow your arguments for why That's Not What Marx *Really* Meant. Disappointing.
"No such thing as human nature" is a very different thing to say compared to saying that the concept of a human nature is an ensemble. This is so obvious that I'm not really sure what you could misunderstand about it.
Having read your comment about how ‘Scott’s reading of Marx is wrong in plain English,’ the basic drift is that you come across as rude, dismissive, and not at all persuasive. Just addressing the latter, it doesn’t seem coherent that an ‘essence of man’ exists, but that that essence isn’t ‘inherent,’ because that implies an essence isn’t essential. You say that this is wrong in plain English, but when we boil your argument down into a very plain-spoken style it seems a good deal worse. I would think you would get a better response on this if you would engage more charitably and make positive claims of your own about how Marx should be interpreted that can be challenged textually. You also say that ‘if people can’t read my short comments, why should I write long ones?’ but that’s the crux of Scott’s objection to tweeting: an awful lot of short low-quality snipes doesn’t equal one quality long-form objection.
Marx argues that the essence of man is not an "abstraction inherent in each individual" but is "the ensemble of the social relations". Let's take religion for an example (since it was the example Marx was specifically talking about here).
One could say that it is in human nature to be religious (you could especially say that in the 19th century when Marx was writing). But what does that actually mean? Is there something inherent about religious sentiment that we all carry around inside us? Marx argues that, no there isn't, and we can see now it's actually pretty easy to find examples of people who aren't religious at all. Are we saying that "everything is completely malleable" here? I don't think so.
> I'm right here and I'm willing to have a discussion about this. Why isn't Scott able to correct his own mistaken thinking?
I assume then that you agree with everything Pete put in his reply to your link? You've had plenty of time to respond, after all.
I hadn't seen that but I replied now.
You refer to "many" basic posts. Can you provide a list of, say, top three or top five? If at all possible, I would appreciate if they said something other than "you're wrong", "Scott, you're still wrong," or "Scott, how could you possibly be this wrong?!" Examples from the old blog would be welcome in this list of top five -- you've been a commenter for years, there's no reason that your best posts should have happened since the replatforming.
I think it is notable that even when you quote the bit from Scott that you say is an awful error, Scott has caveated his interpretation of Marx with 'as far I as I can tell'. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Not to mention that the passage you're complaining about him misunderstanding is *super* opaque, so that if Marx is misunderstood it's kind of his own fault. He also admits that the interpretation he's giving is probably controversial!
I don't actually particularly trust Scott's ability to treat Marx, leftism, or (*especially*) feminism fairly, let alone the community's ability to do so, but I don't think the comment is the gotcha you think it is.
He says 'as far as I can tell' and then proceeds to quote two passages that do not prove his interpretation correct at all. So what was 'telling' here?
I do not think that either passage is particularly opaque and they're even clearer when read in context (something Scott should have done if he was serious about treating Marx charitably).
I'll also note that in all the arguments I've had about this, everyone always picks up on the 'ensemble' quote which is less opaque without the surrounding context. Nobody ever argues "economics establishes an alienated form of social intercourse as the essential, original, and natural form" quote because it very straightforwardly does not prove what Scott Alexander claims it proves. So why did he use it as evidence?
That is because you comments are of extremely low quality, to the point that I suspect that you are trolling. For example defending famines in North Korea as acceptable like you did recently.
I hope that you will be banned from commenting, you are one of reasons why I quite rarely read comments here.
In short, please go away.
To be clear: I know that it was very unkind, but I consider it as true and necessary.
Repeated baseless insults, presenting far leftists as utter idiots, tankiest takes that I have ever seen are something that makes discussion worse.
Please take your lame apologia for totalitarian states and failed ideologies that murdered millions, for no gain at all, to Facebook/Twitter/Stormfront.
Sorry if that is an unwanted backseat moderation.
I second this.
👍
He's pretty funny though. and the drama around his posts are entertaining.
This is not the kind of entertainment I come here for. If anything, I consider the temptation to respond to him at all to be a manifestation of the imp of the perverse, and having to fight against it (and recently, failing,) is a source of irritation practically every time I read the comments.
💯
This is a good example of attempted censorship and cancelling just because I have politics that you disagree with.
It's an interesting conundrum: at what point does a person cross the line between reasonable interlocutor you disagree with and fool who should be ignored? Most people would acknowledge that there are some opinions that simply don't merit a reasoned response, but we never think we're on the wrong side of that line.
Yeah, so I've made my reasoned points very clear in posts like this:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
This is a very straightforward matter. I don't think pointing out that Scott is reading something incorrectly makes me a "fool".
People ignoring a commenter is not censorship. I'm fine with the lack of any ban, but people are also free to tell him to go away.
I'd say that what defines a fool are not opinions by themselves, but rather the manner in which he asserts them and his general disregard for accepted norms of communication. Also, ignoring them isn't really an option in the long run if you want to preserve those norms.
No, your politics are fine. It's your habit of interjecting in incredibly aggressive ways that people (including me) have a problem with. "Your extremely obvious mistakes" and "this [your post] is a good example of [bad things]" are examples in this thread of phrasings that will not lead anywhere positive; I could provide a hundred more examples if you're genuinely unsure what I'm talking about.
Unlike TTT, I happen to think you post some genuinely interesting stuff from time to time. If you merely stop coming at everyone guns blazing and teeth bared, you'll be a great part of the community and I'll be happy to defend you.
Censorship perhaps, but not cancelling. Cancelling would be if we attempted to find out your real-world identity and tried to get you fired from your job, get people around you in trouble for associating with you, follow you around to other internet fora to harass you there, drag up anything you've written many years ago that can be taken out of context to make you look like a monster, etc.
I was being somewhat facetious because it very obvious how quickly this comments section turns from 'civil discussion' to 'try to get him banned' when someone posts even the mildest Marxist analysis.
I think the above commenter wants you banned because you seem to prefer to in a rather harassing way appeal to authority rather than make civil and well-thought out arguments. I agree with him that you don't seem to be into making good arguments but I don't want you banned I think you're funny and write engagingly and I'm still hoping for a good rundown of marxism from you one day.
I operate from the Hitchen's principle "That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.". That's why a lot of my posts are just asking for citations and such.
No, I am willing to discuss things with communists, nazis, racists, supporters of automobile and heretics. And I did on SSC (under a different username).
As long as it is based on facts.
Things like https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-170#comment-1879701
> The people of Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela all seem to be doing fine and support their government.
are demonstration that you lie/troll/hallucinate and discussion with you is a waste of time and you are harmful to discussion.
I want to get rid of you not because I disagree with you but because you are parody of people disagreeing with me.
That's not a lie and I don't know why you accuse me of lying. All countries have their problems but Cuba, NK and Venezuela are not in civil wars or anything like that. Seems like people are basically supportive of the various socialist political parties that lead the respective countries.
Are you actually claiming that people of North Korea are not oppressed, are not victims of famines caused by predictably failing economy and that regime there is not oppressive?
Because I consider
- North Korean regime is far more oppressive than typical country
- standard of living in North Korea is lower than in a typical country
- South Korea is far better place to live than North Korea by nearly all metrics
- many people want to escape North Korea, basically noone want to emigrate there
as facts and claiming otherwise seems to me a sign of being divorced from reality and unwilling to admit that communism and communism-adjacent things were a massive failure when implement on state level and caused deaths of millions.
If the economy is failing can you give me a prediction on when the country will collapse?
I mean, my understanding is that Cuba is legitimately not a terrible place to live, so I'll agree on that one.
However, Venezuela has had two people both claiming to be President for the last two years; this falls under the heading of "anything like that" from where I sit (it's not a hot civil war, but it's definitely not an uncontested government either).
I don't think any member of the international public (as opposed to intelligence agencies or the DPRK government) really has a good idea of Kim Jong-un's approval rating; NK is too secretive. Obviously he gets ~100% of the vote with ~100% turnout in elections, but that probably has something to do with the fact that failing to vote and voting for someone else are both illegal.
I won't rule out that his approval rating could legitimately be high, but the lack of civil war only really proves that it's at least 5% (the proportion of North Koreans in the military, which is pretty rigorously checked for loyalty) and probably not below 20% (given the extensive paramilitary forces).
"However, Venezuela has had two people both claiming to be President for the last two years; this falls under the heading of "anything like that" from where I sit (it's not a hot civil war, but it's definitely not an uncontested government either)."
Guaido is a complete joke and only has any sort of recognition because the US recognized him in order to try to stir shit up. Nothing really happened though.
"I mean, my understanding is that Cuba is legitimately not a terrible place to live, so I'll agree on that one."
Any country that has people desperately risking their lives to leave has a problem. Any country where attempting to leave the country is met with deadly force has a bigger problem.
That the trigger for the collapse of the communist states of Eastern Europe was the opening of the border of one of the states allowing people to leave should make this obvious.
The only reason Venezuela has two people claiming to be president simultaneously is because one of them is promoted by the United States in a regime change effort.
>All countries have their problems but Cuba, NK and Venezuela are not in civil wars or anything like that
Have you ever left the United States to go and see for yourself how any of the socialist countries are doing? Why don't you spend a year in one of them to a have breath of fresh air from this bourgeoisie oppression we all have to endure here? For extra freshness, I highly recommend living on the local median wage. Or you might even test how these nice socialist governments are taking care of their people and try living on the amount equal to the minimum wage or unemployment check.
I don't speak the local languages and I can't leave my job here right now. Plus I would miss my friends here. Maybe in the future, or if an English-speaking country has a revolution.
It's 1000% not because you have politics that we disagree with.
You complain how you constantly tell Scott he's wrong about Marxism and he doesn't listen to you.
Meanwhile, people *constantly* tell you that the way you behave in these comments is inappropriate and frustrating and that it has nothing to do with the policies you support, and yet you somehow keep believing that there's nothing wrong with your behavior and that you're being censored for your views.
LMAO
no offense, but this is your worst segue yet, marxbro, haha
Overall I'm not so much a fan of the whole "you're a sea lion!!" thing — I say you're perfectly entitled to pop in here and disagree with people about whatever. But this is just an attempt to completely derail a conversation about something completely different into the only thing you are interested in talking about.
you gotta open your mind to the wonders of discourse outside Marx!
I'm not derailing the conversation. Moving it into a more productive direction, perhaps.
this is honestly amazing
i wonder, does there exist a conversation topic that can't be moved in a more productive conversation by switching to talking about marxism?
Presumably denying the incredibly oppressive environments found in totalitarian states (e.g. North Korea) is at least equally productive. Those conversations really help open people's hearts to the true Word of our Lord.
I would like to know exactly which part of this conversation you consider productive.
* facepalm *
'you know and *like*'
This suggests a new tactic, try very hard to become Scotts friend, then teach him the truth about Marx.
Here's a primer on what Marx thought. Trigger warning: Marxists aren't going to like it, and anti-Marxists will want to share it on their social media far and wide, and quote from it frequently.
https://archive.org/details/karlmarxracistfullcopyi/page/n19/mode/2up
I earnestly, seriously mean this. Please get your own substack, let us know here (because I would actually love to subscribe), and dial down the antagonism in your comments here. I tend toward agreeing with you, but you're not doing your points any favors by how you make them here.
Yes! I second this and have suggested it before. Marxbro, I bet you've accidentally built an audience that would gladly engage with you for days, but here in the comments of someone else's substack is really not the place for it so you're going to draw a lot of criticism on that point.
I don't really have much interest in writing long-form articles or anything like that.
Typical Marxist, allergic to doing any real work!
I'm commenting here which is plenty of work and I have a job.
A job? Don't over-exert yourself, man.
Ah. a true believer. who wants agreement because he is "correct" not because he has a good argument. what happens when such people gain power? (this is an easy one). bro has assumptions he doesn't want challenged. the whole argument above IMO is about the blank slate hypothesis. Lefties seem to think we inherit nothing from thousands of years of biology, therefore they can mold the world into a more "correct" form in a generation or two. When that doesn't work, why, the "incorrect" ones who are spoiling things must be dealt with. killing becomes necessary. this also happens in righty authoritarian regimes. they need everyone on board to make it work. but human nature: there is some good research that I'm too lazy to look for now that humans have a strong tendency to ostracize out groups. Perhaps it's a function of trust and the need to have a heuristic for it. We do feel more comfortable with people who are like us. I think it would be fruitful to engage with this reality if we want to move toward an inclusive world - or you just end up killing those you don't want around. (but for really, really good reasons) imo bro wants agreement, not engagement. His Marxism is faith-based, and therefore cannot be dislodged with mere words.
Isn't Scott trying to mold people into having more "correct" forms of discussions in this very article? I think it is in our human nature to tweet (or at least have twitter-level discussions). So actually it is Scott who has a blank slate hypothesis here.
Your commentary always boils down to "you misunderstand Marx". It rarely contains any interesting ideas to engage with. The desire to tell people RTFM is understandable, but please make an effort to meet Scott halfway. I (like Scott, I think) have little desire to go read Das Kapital right now but would like to actually have an informative conversation about how Marxism could apply to the topics under discussion.
Are you really a marxist or do you secretly hate communism and want to be very sure nobody on SSC/ASC ever takes it seriously? Because my impression is you're doing so good a job on the latter it almost can't be accidental.
Assuming you're serious, imagine that on your favorite ultra-left forum whatever that is comes up a guy with a nickname like "SocialDarwinistBro" and starts argue hardcore anarcho-capitalism in the most straw-manned variety. He bytes every bullet offered, saying that poor people deserve to be poor because they're lazy and stupid, that free market is effective and therefore its outcomes cannot be bad by definition, etc. Whenever someone suggests that you know, it may be a little bit uncharitable and over the top what you're saying here, he says they're just not familiar with the history of great depression and works of Adam Smith, or reading them incorrectly. He's also by far the most obnoxious commentator and most of his comments bear at most tangential relationship to the post and hand and largely amount to "Also, an-cap is really cool!" And he constantly accuses all around that they fail to adhere to the principles of dialectical materialism by not engaging with him.
Would this guy have any chances of converting anyone at all? Would there be any more effective way to make people think "Holy Lenin those libertarians really are massive jerks, I'll surely stick with marxism!"
I think that would be a different case since his arguments would be wrong and mine are correct.
I see what you mean, thank you for clearing my doubts. Please keep on doing what you're doing comrade, in the name of Stalin we'll reeducate these kulaks.
Hopefully this isn't countersignalling my fellow readers too much, but your posts always make me laff (this one particular) and I hope you keep at it. Shine on...
It's kind of funny, but not the kind of humor I'd want to come here for. It's a legit instance of Poe's Law, where I'm genuinely uncertain whether he's being dense or trolling, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the sort of interaction I look for at ACX.
After reviewing more of marxbro1917's participation, my take now leans more in the direction that he's actually a conscious and deliberate troll. While he's extremely prolific in responding to object and meta level disagreements, as far as I can tell he never actually engages with allegations that he's trolling, either from commenters on the conversations, or from his interlocutors embedded in those conversations.
Non-trolling people tend to be pretty touchy about allegations that they're trolling, and trolls will often imitate that to appear like non-trolls, but in my experience actual trolls are much more likely than non-trolls to ignore them, because badly defending argumentative positions is conducive to the purposes of trolling, but badly defending the position that one isn't a troll isn't. It's hard to offer strong evidence that you're not a troll when you are, and rather than calling attention to that, it's easier just to avoid the subject.
The people accusing me of being a troll are acting in bad faith and are attempting to poison the well, so I mostly choose not to engage with them.
Thank you. The ACX commenter mob is currently going after me, but I will continue using my freedom of speech in the marketplace of ideas. I'm always happy to see support.
I will read up to three books of your choice, up to 300,000 words total, that are in the public domain or which I can get in ebook form cheaply, and then you and I will engage in an asynchronous back-and-forth discussion of the merits of marxism. Scott can choose to publish it on this site, or we can upload it separately and link it in the subreddit or discord.
I'd like to read the resulting discussion.
I feel like you do the same thing! You told me last time that Marx prophesied the occurence of national communistic revolutions, when he actually prophesied the occurence of a global communistic revolution after capitalism has taken over the entire earth and divided everybody into solely two classes, the workers and the capitalists. I honestly started to engage with you because I thought you were a genuine marxist and I thought you would have an interesting take but now it feels like you haven't even read the works of Marx you keep linking to, nor have you read the works of those who lived through communistic revolutions. I don't really care that much about getting you to acknowledge any of this because whatever we are both internet strangers but I have to say I am disappointed and have updated to be slightly more against Marxism because of your responses.
This kind of behavior very much deserves a ban.
+1
I believe the problem is that substack doesn't give its bloggers the ability to ban commenters.
I'm genuinely shocked more commenters from the SSC days haven't spoken up here or on the subreddit about how much the quality of the comments has declined since the move to substack. It's not just Marxbro, but a whole legion of people leaving reddit/twitter style dunk comments, rather than the essay length and blog post quality ones that were once the norm.
I hate to sound like a cranky SSC old timer, but at this point I feel like it's merited. 2015-2017 it was genuinely difficult to find a rude or bad-faith comment on any of Scott's essays. Now I'd say the balance is at the level of the average science/philosophy/history adjacent subreddit.
It's likely a combination of the new format subtly encouraging short comments, an influx of new readers from the NYT debacle, as well as a new laxity in regards to banning.
Another reason may be the diaspora. A lot of the more prolific posters of old started commenting in places like Data Secrets Lox, which they kept doing when Scott started his substack.
It isn't "laxity in regards to banning" which makes it sound as though it's Scott's choice. Substack doesn't offer the ability to ban.
I don't know whether there's a better choice available than substack presently, but I'm wondering what happens to everything that was posted here if Scott leaves.
What you think are "extremely obvious mistakes" appear to me to be nothing of the sort, if this post of yours (that you linked below as an exemplar of the category) is anything to go by:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
I suspect Scott doesn't get around to replying to you because you present as an obsessive without a clear argument.
You also present this below: "I thought I already replied to you on this? Maybe the comment got lost somehow, substack commenting I find a little clunky. Marx talks about the potential for national revolutions in some of his most famous works, including in the prefaces to the Communist Manifesto;
"But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development." "
This falsifies Marx much more than it marks him a prophet, since he's positing that a Russia Revolution may "pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership" presumably skipping the "dictatorship of the proletariat." In actual history the Bolshevik revolution was an urban affair, not a rural one, and the Soviet system got stuck in the "dictatorship of the proletariat" (as all Marxist nations have). There were in fact large peasant rebellions against the Bolsheviks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambov_Rebellion)
I feel the claim that it's harmful when liberal talk about how bad and horrible situation with academic freedom misses the benefits of forming a tribe around it. I mean there are lots of harms too which is one reason I try to avoid this but look at Fox news or even your remarks about the power of the term sjw. Surely, part of getting people to form a useful coalition is to encourage them to all be mad and hyperbolic at some common target of anger.
I mean I'm ultimately unsure of what is best here but (unlike scaring women out of stem with exaggerations about relative level of discrimination) there are considerations on both sides. I mean your blog is closest thing I've seen to a movement that coalesced around reasonable claims with admissions of uncertainty. No war is ever fought or populace inspired with "they do lots of bad things but sometimes it's complicated but on balance they bad" so I fear it's not obvious how it falls out.
Though note that there are huge gaping downsides with forming a tribe around a situation being bad.
A bit of a nonsequitur, but it's kinda amazing how the CHAZ security guy assassinating a random joyriding black guy got rapidly memoryholed. What happened to that guy? Did it even make front page news outside of Seattle? Was it one guy he killed, or two? The fact that no one knows anything about this is pretty crazy.
It definitely appeared on non-local news, e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/29/chop-chaz-shooting-seattle-police-free-zone & https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/us/seattle-protests-CHOP-CHAZ-autonomous-zone.html . I'm not sure how much attention was paid to it at the time by the media because I wasn't paying attention to it then.
Why is it crazy? In "bad neighborhoods" murders happen all the time, and unless they could be used for political purposes, nobody ever hears about them. There's even more striking case - when a young black woman were murdered at the traffic light stop, and it was briefly thought that the murderer was white. There were marches, a bit of rioting, a wave of condemnation from prominent politicians, a prominent civil rights lawyer Ben Crump announced he will take her case and bring the justice to the victim. Then in a couple of days it was revealed the murderer is actually black. The tweets stopped immediately. The politicians went silent. The civil rights lawyer realized he is much more busy than he previously realized, and had to drop the case. The murderer, as I understand, is still at large. You probably don't remember the victim's name. Her name is Na'kia Crawford.
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/crime/2021/03/24/nakia-crawford-shooting-charges-dismissed-adarus-black-still-at-large-akron/6983201002/
There are probably dozens, maybe hundreds cases like this - only neither I nor you heard about them because there was no political reason to hype them up. This one is different because the reason was briefly there, so we can see the contrast.
There are black intellectuals like Glenn Loury who are furious that black people killing other black people gets ignored in favor of the relatively rare cases of police arbitrarily killing black people.
I think murderous police are an actual problem, but he has a point about the murders that get ignored.
Yes. I see white liberals living in safe neighborhoods shouting Defund the Police! And blacks living in bad neighborhoods saying Arrest the Criminals!
I want to recommend the Sam Harris podcast with Rener Gracie. Their ideas make sense to me and I think police would welcome more training (At least that is the story Rener tells... he's involved in training cops in Brazilian Jujitsu.)
These types of murders are intentionally downplayed, I believe, so as to avoid the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes.
That's true, but it also means that the murders (a serious problem) don't get addressed.
Yeah, agreed. It's a bit of a Catch 22, I would say.
Stereotypes, bullets... they're both harmful things, ya know?
You make a good point, and you make it well in a funny way, but I will say that the stereotypes are quite annoying to deal with. I have a male relative who is black and he regularly "censors" his location and mannerisms in order to avoid appearing as a threat, e.g. at night he will take an extremely long path around, for example, elderly white people walking up ahead of him because he does not want to appear to be a black man sneaking up on them as he doesn't want them to freak out and call the police or shoot him or whatever they might do out of fear. It's annoying to have to keep other people's perception of you in your head all the time and work around accommodating them although he's done it for so long that he's more or less used to it.
I feel for your relative, I really do. I agree that we should strive to get rid of those stereotypes that cause problems and distress for people like your relative. But do you not agree that those very bullets that we keep ignoring in favour of trying to change public perceptions directly is one of the key contributors to the longevity of this particular stereotype?
I think it's more amazing how they suddenly turn their coats and become pro-gun and pro-borders. I used to wonder how they could do that without encountering crippling cognitive dissonance, but then I read this essay and at the end of it I was enlightened. https://newdiscourses.com/2020/07/woke-wont-debate-you-heres-why/
I remember being naive enough to think that because white men murdered two black teenagers in CHAZ it would be taken seriously. Of course I was disabused of that quickly. I will try to keep this to a minimum, but here its well-earned: ‘the outgroup is sure is horrible and evil.’
> There's an oversupply of tweeting and an undersupply of everything else
I wonder if by some act of God or awful terrible terrorists or any other way, Twitter just disappeared - I mean, completely, the site stopped resolving, the app stopped working, etc. etc. - would the society be better off overall? I know there is some good content there - but good content existed way before it, and so did people producing this content, and communicating, and having discussions and so on. And I wonder if the answer is "yes", what we as a society should be doing about it? Because I suspect the answer is "yes". I stopped using Twitter as soon as I arrived to this conclusion, but obviously that changes nothing. Can anything help there?
Yes and no. Yes, things will get better temporarily. No, some new social app will become Twitter 2.0 pretty swiftly. Twitter exists because there's real demand for it, not because someone made a monkey's paw bargain with a genie at midnight on Friday the 13th.
Well, there's also real demand for heroin and murder and sex slavery - otherwise these things wouldn't exist, right? But as a society we manage to frown on those things and try to minimize their occurrence.
I think there's a broad consensus that Twitter deranges public discussion by design - even if that outcome was accidental - and yet it's the best aggregation of elite sentiment and trends that exists, which is valuable information. We were never meant to all be in a vast room without boundaries or distance from people who annoy and enrage us. It also just so happens that inflammatory and provocative statements tend to generate the most attention and engagement, which the system then selects for and amplifies the personality types most likely to contribute to it. It's an extractor of the worst human impulses. People who defend Twitter's "good" parts generally use a lot of advanced settings to curate their experience.
There's a hypothetical version of Twitter that doesn't create these incentives, but that's in direct conflict with its current business model.
I understand why twitter as business exists. But there are many business models that are destructive to the society, and I think the society has some tools that can be applied to those to reduce their incidence and harm. The question is, why we are not applying those tools to twitter?
Well the US govt can't regulate speech that's merely provocative, offensive, and unproductive. There would have to be some novel set of regulations that prohibits the current algorithms and product design of a platform like Twitter without actually dictating what individuals on the platform can and can't say.
I'm not talking about the government, I am talking about the society first.
Maybe we are about to, slowly. There is some commotion on at least two fronts that, if somehow merged, could get closer to this issue:
1. Although fueled mainly by (political) worries about misinfo and echo chambers, the effects of social media algorithms are getting, for now at least superficial, scrutiny. It seems that there is a common mechanism feeding the forming of echo chambers and feeding the terribleness of twitter: optimizing for engagement. Curbing that is in stark contrast to the business models, so it's hard to imagine any more than half-arsed effort and political limbo.
2. Regulating [Dark Patterns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern). Although business-as-usual is in the self-interest of the industry here as well, the contra-side here has some good ammo: regulating them is pro-consumer, and speaking from an European perspective, that can go far. This could also be framed as maximising *freedom of individuals* or something, but I guess the industry might as well claim freedom to dupe, as seems to happen when money talks.
In Europe at least, there could be more focus on the health harms of being exposed to these algorithms. We usually like to tax harmful things and that sometimes incentivizes making less harmful things. (Of course it might also incentivize making the addictive product even more addictive and terrible, compensating for the lower consumption, but you could argue that is already happening.)
Considering health harm from internet products seems a bit far off, but given the ever-increasing time of our lives spent online, there ought to come a time when that is a considered a legitimate worry enough to prompt some kind of response. Also there is long trend still going strong of giving due weight on mental health and recognizing the connectedness of that to physical well-being.
There is of course the great schism of not enough / too much babysitting. Daniel Kahneman points out that some of that can be cut through by opt-out policies and framing the thing as more options for consumers. You'd still have the god-given freedom to consume more harmful things: if you don't like the default prosocial babysitting thing, you can opt-out of it.
There has been some prototype ideas of social media, where you could choose your algorithm on what you want to optimize for. That seems wild and utopian for now, looking at it from this hellhole, but I would like that so much.
I don't know how the companies could be forced to adopt something like that, and I think they'd have to, as all "facebook-killers" seem to just die. Maybe by making it so that third-party apps could parse the feed, but undoubtedly that wouldn't happen willingly.
Even then, if that would be made possible and widely available, I wonder how successful that might be, when that optimizing-for-outrage dopamine-kick feedback loop algorithm is apparently so engaging. If creating a new market for the algorithms separate from the platforms were to work, would that just create even more terrible, more terrible'er algorithms that more effectively tap into our outdated homo sapiens instincts? I don't know.
I'm not so sure. Everyone knows Twitter is awful, it's entirely possible no-one with the skills to pull it off would try to build another one. Even if they did, it wouldn't replicate the features that make Twitter so terrible, at least not right away. You know the whole reason Twitter exists in the format it does is because it was supposed to work over text messages, right?
Hell - I wouldn't be surprised if a two-week outage was enough to kill Twitter for good, just break everyone's addiction to it.
The amount of people who are Twitter-level terrible without Twitter is small, but they do exist and they are very loud. Also, you may be overestimating people's consciousness of and ability to break the addiction.
Of course, it won't solve the problem of awful people in general. But at least we could solve the problem of mass Twitter-level terribleness and reduce the cultural damage that is happening.
I should probably have been more clear. The loud people who are going to be Twitter-level terrible anyway are going to loudly demand Twitter back, because it makes their lifestyle easier.
> some new social app will become Twitter 2.0 pretty swiftly. Twitter exists because there's real demand for it, not because someone made a monkey's paw bargain with a genie at midnight on Friday the 13th.
This doesn't seem quite right. There's real demand for social media platforms, but it's not obvious that there's real demand for one with the precise characteristics of Twitter that make it awful in its distinctive way. Everyone agrees that Facebook and Reddit and TikTok are awful, but also everyone agrees that they're much less awful than Twitter (at least in the particular way being discussed here).
Now if Twitter got replaced by something like Parler, that seemed to have reproduced the formal structures of Twitter, that would be bad. But even Mastodon might be different enough to make a real benefit to the world if it replaced Twitter.
I derive considerable value from finance twitter, and have learned much via access to the professionals who share how they think about markets there. Outside of fintwit, it can be disheartening to see certain views expressed, but gradually I've come to realize it's not worth engaging/arguing. I wonder if over time most of society will come to coexist with it rather than argue unendingly.
Who are some of the financial twitter users you follow? I’m looking to expand my
Financial knowledge....
There are many, but maybe check out @GavinSBaker, @patrick_oshag, @foolallthetime, @benthompson, @CiovaccoCapital, @modestproposal1 .
Thanks!
I am always astonished why otherwise smart people would put their smart and informative writings into a format that is minimally suitable for it, never has been meant for it and everything on the platform is built to prevent it from happening. Why not just make a blog or use a forum or a mailing list or another of a dozen solutions that exist?
My impression is the business model of twitter is moving in that direction. It's an outlet for creators to promote work like podcasts, newsletters, blogs, and similar.
If twitter was that, I'd probably use it. But it's like building a community library in the center of a huge toxic dump infested by cannibalistic zombies.
I feel like I'm defending twitter and that's not my intention - I get that a lot of folks don't like it - but I guess I find it far more valuable than any other social media. imho twitter is very much who the user follows, and how the user manages follows. It probably requires a lot of setup discipline and willingness to ruthlessly prune over time and seek out good content to customize the experience.
For non-political content, Twitter is actually really good. You can follow people you like or are interested in, you find out what's happening way before they post it to their website or make a video about it, and generally stay abreast of what's going on.
The problem is that too many Twitter users think that being non-political is in itself a political statement, in favor of racism. Remember how we ridiculed George Bush for his simple-minded "You're either with us or with the terrorists" line and that was proof positive of poor education and possibly brain damage from decades of cocaine use.
One post, three different useful things (parts 2, 3 and 6) I hadn't thought about. You deserve fair value; I have become a payin' subscriber. Thx.
Thank you!
My take is that it is wrong to organize boycott campaigns against Coca Cola for child labor.
Which sounds monstrous! But I think what's going on is mostly just that our state power and our morality are so misaligned that we have to do these weird manual end runs when what should be happening is that child labor should just be reliably illegal, and the CEO of Coca Cola should be in prison. "But how does that work if a small group of people are against child labor but they can't form a societal consensus?" Well, first of all in a democracy, small groups of people can effect legislative change as long as the broad masses aren't *against* the thing they're pushing. But second, I'd say they should just all move to the same area and enforce taxes against Coca Cola imports. "But that breaks free trade!" Yes, and you're beginning to see what I mean by all of our state being misaligned with morality. A boycott is effectively equivalent to a local import tax, except it uses a weird ad-hoc enforcement mechanism that relies on people's novelty seeking and temporary outrage. We *have* systems for this already. They're just bad. If we just make new systems (but this time without the monopoly on force and institutional experience that the state has) I see no reason to expect why they should be better. We should fix our model of federalism and get better at border enforcement of morality instead.
In a totally unrelated point, it seems your point 3 relies on allowing people to suffer huge reputational damage by not warning them about risk points so that their suffering can be used as a cudgel in the culture war. I don't think this is necessarily *wrong*, but I think it's at least a harsh moral sacrifice to ask.
The people who actually talk about rampant corporate power and the way corporations move bad practices out of sight to other countries are pushing for exactly this. (Look up Erik Loomis)
He doesn't share your idea that boycotts are bad... but he does say that they are a very, very poor substitute for what should be a global body of law that can make sure that policing supply chains doesn't rely on randomly upset people in rich countries.
Let's say I'm a vegan (or at least I agree with them morally). Are you saying that should eat meat even though i find doing so repugnant? Should I not choose a green energy provider to help the enviroment and buy coallight™ energy instead? I agree that bad things should be illegal. I agree that your primary way of stopping corporation.s But as long as they aren't stopped by law i should be allowed to not pay them to do bad things.
I think there's a difference between, for instance, personally not buying meat, and not buying furniture from stores that hire employees that eat meat. Even though the consequences may be similar! And I don't think you in particular should not choose green energy, for instance, but I think it's a sign of a fundamentally broken system that you have to make that individual choice. I think the farther people backpropagate effects of purchase decisions through the economy, generally the less efficient the economy will operate, because it creates a collection of not just submarkets but sub-economies.
What kind of efficiency are we talking about losing here. the hours worked to human happiness efficiency? hopefully reducing child labour should increase that efficiency if anything.
Yeah, hours worked to human happiness. Companies rely on price as a signal. But if your product sales price depends on deep details of your supply chain, then price is *actually* an n-dimensional vector of invisible moral currency (as opposed to the existing smaller vector of price, availability, reliability, quality...), of which dollars are only one component, and you don't just have to predict pricing of goods but all those invisible prices throughout your supply chain and multiply them with the purchaser preference matrix as well. This effectively forms a tax on depth of production chain, which is an issue because vertical integration (shortening production chains) fosters monopolization. The competing proposal is to define a sort of official state utility function and price it in at the point of moral violation or the closest economic boundary. (Compare the carbon tax for a similar proposal.) That way, the n-vector only has to be fully evaluated once or twice.
I agree with your main point: campaigns against Coca-Cola (or any company) should totally be legal.
I just want to comment on something here that keeps popping up. The word boycott is used for two different concepts that shouldn't be mixed up:
1. refraining from buying products from a company in order to pressure said company into changing their practices;
2. refraining from buying a product to avoid the consequences of its production.
I'm a vegan. I don't buy animal products because that reduces the number of animals bred and tortured. But I don't boycott meat companies! I buy vegan burgers from fast-food chains that primarily sell meat, for example. I generally think 2 is way more effective than 1 because it directly uses supply and demand mechanics. It doesn't require the CEO of the affected company to understand that the decrease in sales is due to their practices, or to decide that it is worth changing them.
I think this is generally a good idea. Imagine if you did 2. You wouldn't be able to to buy any Pepsico product just because they own KFC! Look up what pepsico owns if you don't think this is a big deal.
But with the cocoa beans coca cola example i kinda assumed the idea is that those cocoa beans are the ones being used to make coca cola. making the example pretty analogous to veganism.
what would be the analogy in case of cancel culture? maybe not watching (or at least not buying) a film directed by someone you find morally repugnant. Is this the same as well? maybe?.But what if you didn't use windows because you dislike one of the programmers that worked on it? lot harder suddenly.
Why do you think child labor should be “reliably illegal”? Isn’t it more the case that you want SOME child labor to be illegal in SOME places and your intuitions about which labor (and where) is bad are driven by sob stories that percolate to the top of the media cycle via toxoplasmosis and never explore arguments for the other side?
When the US was a lower-productivity country, kids worked backbreaking hours on farms, often but not always farms their own family owned - should that have been illegal? Young boys in big cities used to sell newspapers on street corners or deliver newspapers by bicycle and young girls used to make money babysitting - should that have been illegal? In recent memory kids have made money running a lemonade stand or mowing lawns or working in their parents’ business or doing chores at home - should that be illegal?
Suppose you happen to live in a low-productivity country/state/town where MOST kids help their families survive - as in, “not starve” - via backbreaking low-productivity farm work (or worse, like picking through trash heaps to find recyclable material) and a company like Coke or Nike comes along and builds a plant where kids who (for whatever reason) NEED to work can make MORE money in BETTER working conditions than they did before - which is something the companies in fact HAVE to do to make the job attract workers in an open market. Hasn’t the new company improved those kids’ lives by giving them and their families a new option they didn’t previously have?
In short: It seems to me that where non-compulsory child labor exists it is a GOOD thing - not good on some absolute scale but better than the alternatives, which means laws against it AND boycotts against it tend to make the world a worse place.
This is a broad overview, but at least in the United State, agricultural work is exempted from many child labor laws in a lot of states: https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/child-labor/agriculture
The problem with this approach is that it requires an overriding consensus about what is and isn't okay, such that the government can impose control over all relevant examples of the disapproved behavior. As you are seeing in some of the responses, not even child labor is a strong enough example to make this work. Similarly for green energy, veganism, voting rules, and most issues in society, the government is going to be unable to determine a consensus opinion. So the government either cannot affect change (and we're back to finding alternative means like boycotts) or the government becomes totalitarian and picks which side of a debate to summarily enforce.
Sam Biddle was a staff writer for Gawker. Nick Denton was the CEO.
Could it be that a social change is an inevitable effect that accumulates over multiple generations ? There's always some percentage of rebellious teens who rail against the zeitgeist. In the first generation, their numbers will be few, but nonzero. In the next generation, the next wave of rebellious teens would be able to find some adult sympathizers. Fast-forward a few generations, and the zeitgeist changes to the opposite of what it was, and the pendulum begins its swing in the opposite direction.
That is to say, I think that all those brilliant non-conformist artists, intellectuals, etc., are a symptom of social change rather than its cause.
This seems intueitively wrong. In the early 20th century you were either a child which went to school for maybe six years and then you started working and in three years you were a man fit for dying for your country. There were no youth culture and the concept of a teen was insignificant if not competely irrelevant. The amount of people who had further education, ie more than six years, usually only attended educational activities for less than ten years. The amount of people who attended university was so small so there could be no youth culture that had any big impact on society..
Children didn't really rebel against their parents and culture was stable or changing organically and very slowly, as it had been doing for hundreds of years.
Teens were something that were in a sense socially constructed in the sixties when corporations noticed that they could market products such as music and magazines and celebrity culture related stuff towards a new group of willing and uncritical consumers that had come into existence because of a new abundance of wealth and a mass attendence of education for up to fifteen years well into when people used to be considered a fully grown man who should have had children or a woman who should have married.
Radio and TV played no small part in this and the first megabands started appearing such as the Beatles thanks in no small part to this, while at the same time driving the phenomenon fo youth culture where children (teens) were brought into a cultural context that was completely alien to their parents.
At the same time college attendence grew by a big proportion and by chance this intersected in time with the Vietnam war which was used by subversive marxists such as Hermann Marcuse and Allen Ginsberg and others to create a counterculture of rebellion against the authoritarianism of their parents (Which was just healthy order and respect for hierarchy and authority, in my opinion) among those still in attendece ateducationa institutions and particularly university students who were middle or upper class and who were less than happy at the thought of having to go fight a war in the djungles of south east asia rather than living a comfortable life in a well-developed country, and in the worst cases engaging in pure nihilistic hedonism by using drugs and having casual sexual relations.
Of course this counterculture, which broke all societal norms about decency were opposed by adults, while young people were egged on by the authority figures on television and on radio and on their vinyl players who admonished them to not give a fuck about tradtion, hierarchy, and pro-social and pro-survival norms which led to a conflict between the generations and thus we get the concept of the rebellious teen.
It has been noted at other times in history that the children become rebllious, often at the peak of a civilization which is just on the cusp of decline, and I think there seems to be something to his. Now we can clearly see the results of the seed that were sown in the late 60s and there is no doubt that if nothing changes European civilization and anything like it, even this clownworld version of it we live in now, will be gone in a century.
Also I'd just like to raise the general methodological question of how do you figure out what counts as more or less conformity/repression. All societies have lines which you get punished for crossing and other areas you have certain latitudes.
I think we can look and see how much the societal rules *feel* oppressive to those in the society but if you want an absolute measure it's hard to imagine how that could work. I mean are we more or less repressed than Italy in the Renaissance? Women have jobs and freedoms now but we wouldn't tolerate someone pushing Renaissance era moral and legal norms for sex discrimination. either.
I don't see how you disentangle things like the fact that our wealth and healthcare enable different lifestyle models from changes in repression or count up the number of off limits and on limits topics without assuming our sensibilities about what kinds of views are important and which are silly (but that kinda just assumes the new consensus when saying gender identity isn't silly).
Well, one possible metric could be restrictions on speech. How many things are you not allowed to say; how many valid opinions are allowed to exist on hot topics; and what happens to someone who violates these boundaries ?
On one end of this spectrum, you have something like the US circa 1960s (and/or the early Internet): all kinds of people express all kinds of weird ideas, and expressing the wrong opinion might make you unpopular, but that's about it. On the other end, we have North Korea, where there's exactly one valid viewpoint on everything, and you are compelled to recite it every day on pain of death. The current US social climate is somewhere in the middle.
There were peaceful protestors getting beaten and shot by police in the 1960s. I'm not sure I would use that as the exemplar of an age of a tolerant, liberal discourse.
I think the real answer is that unless you are talking about a centralized form of authoritarian repression, speech norms are going to be very heterogeneous across different domains and social circles. The norms and enforcement mechanisms at play are going to look very different if you are, say, a Biden voter in a deep red rural county vs. a social conservative working as an adjunct lecturer at a small liberal arts college.
What actually, in practice, is the difference between US in the 1960s and US today? What is "unpopular, but that's about it"? Maybe now you get fired for expressing a racist thought while then you got fired for expressing a communist thought or being gay, and now you can get a million people momentarily angry at you rather than a few dozen.
My understanding is that, in the 1960s, it was much harder to cancel a person to the point where he can never get another job, and is driven to suicide. Today, a small dedicated team of Twitter agents can accomplish this with ease.
I've heard people make a claim that some people can never get another job. But I haven't seen evidence that this has happened to anyone whose prior jobs weren't based on a positive public reputation.
(Driving to suicide has always been easy when the target is gay.)
The problem is that most white-collar jobs are based on a positive public reputation; the second problem is that all of us *have* a public reputation via social media. Today, employers routinely scan social media accounts of every prospective employee (under a certain age); lacking a social media presence is seen as suspicious -- after all, what are you trying to hide ?
> after all, what are you trying to hide ?
"I don't want Facebook tracking me."
Also, driving someone to suicide is even easier if one is a straight white male with depression:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Holowka
I'd highly recommend reading this to get the other side of the story. https://medium.com/@bombsfall/alec-2618dc1e23e
Halve the country is conservative. At worst you'll be forced to move to somewhere rural.
On conformity — something like “standard deviation of political/cultural beliefs”? I’m thinking of things like the ideology scores used to rank congress members. It’s hard to measure this over time, but I’d say the fact that now the most right-leaning Democratic representative is to the left of the most left-leaning Republican, where there used to be overlap, is the kind of empirical observation that we’d want to make.
Of course, parties don’t necessarily represent everyone, so this precise metric isn’t optimal, but I think this class of measurement is viable.
There were shootings in CHAZ that killed two people. This in an ordinarily safe part of Seattle (especially given that the police station is right there).
I live a few blocks from former CHAZ and want to point out that "ordinarily safe part" is false, people are shot/killed at Cal Anderson park relatively frequently. As far as Seattle & Capitol Hill go, it is one of the least safe areas. Searching for news articles has become more difficult since the majority of the results are now related to CHAZ, but you can still find them.
Samples:
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2019/03/hakeem-remembered-family-identifies-21-year-old-gunned-down-in-cal-anderson/
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-police-investigating-death-in-cal-anderson-park/
https://komonews.com/news/local/seattle-police-investigating-early-morning-homicide-near-cal-anderson-park
I used to live there, in that very neighborhood. That was my favorite park/public space, on the entire planet. I used to do exactly that, walk across it late at night. As soon as it started getting unsafe to do that again, my rage began. Seattle used to be my favorite city, I loved living there. After it literally actually literally went to shit, I finally voted in the only way that actually matters to the grandstanding morons on the city counsel and their sewage-loving progressive-zombie brain-cored cheering electorate: I left.
Fuck Seattle, and fuck the people who did that to it.
Is 1950s actually a good comparison?
For one thing, it sounds like it was a right-wing totalitarian time, rather than the current left-wing totalitarian time.
For the other, currently totalitarians are in near complete control of media and higher education. Was that the case in 1950s?
I'm worried that you might be comparing two different situations, and that we might be looking at a state that can last for a very long time. I have two white male kids growing up, and I have no idea what I'm going to tell them about how not to get their lives ruined in the next witch hunt over something we cannot now predict.
The Soviet Union lasted for about 75 years, so you can probably take that as your upper bound. My advice is, encourage your kids to emigrate...
Using the brief and doomed Red Scare to pretend that the 1950's were "right-wing totalitarian" is about as plausible as using the election of Donald Trump to pretend that 2021 America is a "right-wing totalitarian" society. Yes, there were totalitarian elements to both the Red Scare and Trump's election, but in both cases all the "good and proper" people and elite institutions were firmly arrayed against them, and they *lost*.
One thing I learned about populism (and this was way before Trump) was that populism arises when elites are harming the people. Whenever the people vote and populists actually win, elites show astounding class solidarity and unite to stop the populists from doing anything positive. They use every dirty trick in the book, character assassination one of the chief weapons, with actual assassination not out of play.
The classic response to populism was to steal their positions and thus rob them of their grievances. Sadly, this hasn't happened - our elites and journalists would rather eat broken glass than admit that the American people had any legitimate problems. Instead, they're uniting against us to make sure we can never threaten them again, as pointed out here: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy-a32
And those current elites have plenty of sympathizers and fellow-travelers in this very commentariat.
The 1950s Red Scare was a bipartisan thing. Note that Sts. JFK and RFK were allies of McCarthy, although they did break with the Senator from Wisconsin when it was clear that his star was starting to wane.
For that matter, many forget that JFK ran for president in 1960 on the so-called "missile gap" and claims that *Nixon* was soft on Communism. That last one took some chutzpah, just sayin'.
The "Red Scare" was bipartisan because it was correct. The only thing they did wrong was letting McCarthy be in charge because he was an alcoholic moron.
I'm the straw man libertarian with black wife and kids who thinks that the government motion to ban discrimination was stupid and ill-advised.
We already have moderate evidence that the economic costs of discrimination are pretty darn high on the discriminator, given markets that are open. We also have moderate evidence that it required government action to get strong discrimination to happen. Economic discrimination is pretty hard to find without active government intervention in favor of the discrimination. And the costs of compliance are moderately high.
Markets weren't open in 1960's Mississippi. Any merchant who didn't enforce the unwritten norms of Jim Crow was likely to receive the gentle ministrations of the Ku Klux Klan.
That's the best argument I've heard in favor of such laws, one David Bernstein made here: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2010/06/16/david-e-bernstein/context-matters-better-libertarian-approach-antidiscrimination-law
The norms of Jim Crow were most definitely written -- in fact they were a matter of law. As one tiny example of Jim Crow in action, I remember the description in _The Warmth of Other Suns_ of train employees either setting up or taking down the "colored section" signs in the cars, depending on which direction the train was passing El Paso, Texas. Redlining, as another example, was a matter of federal law.
Racial discrimination post-reconstruction would undoubtedly have existed in the US without legal support, but government action made it worse.
The recent book "The Color of Law" provides lavishly documented examples of how markets weren't just not open in the Jim Crow South, but often as a matter of federal law as well.
I saw a libelibertarian-ish article talking about how the civil rights acts devoured the constitution. Basically that any abrogation of rights is justified if you can invoke a civil rights act. It was pretty convincing.
"Massachussetts in 1692 may have been one of the most repressive societies ever to exist. Anyone who spoke out against it was burned as a witch or exiled. Fine, okay, point taken, don't speak out against Puritanism. But by the 1820s, Massachussetts was one of the most open societies in the world. The Puritan Church turned into the Unitarian Church (I swear this is true, the Unitarian Universalists are the direct descendants of the 1600 Puritans)."
Any proof that by the 1820's Massachussetts was one of the most open societies in the world? In 1692 there were *many* things you couldn't say in Massachussetts about religious matters. In 1820 you could say anything you want about religion, but you had to subscribe to certain rigid theories about politics, culture and society (for example, the Romance / Victorian era belief that women were chaste angels only tempted into sin by lecherous men.)
"In 1820 you could say anything you want about religion, but you had to subscribe to certain rigid theories about politics, culture and society (for example, the Romance / Victorian era belief that women were chaste angels only tempted into sin by lecherous men.)"
If you said, for example, that women were actually the originator and embodiment of evil because it was Eve who first ate the forbidden fruit and tempted Adam into doing it, would you get cancelled for that in 1820 Massachussetts? How do you know, one way or the other?
Not so sure about 1820s Massachussetts, I think the hey-day of the Victorian ideal of perfect femininity came with Coventry Patmore and his poem "The Angel in the House", about an idealised account of his first marriage, and that was in the 1850s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coventry_Patmore
"The Angel in the House is a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854 and expanded until 1862. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular in the United States during the later 19th century and then in Britain, and its influence continued well into the twentieth century as it became part of many English Literature courses once adopted by W. W. Norton & Company into The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The poem was an idealized account of Patmore's courtship of his first wife, Emily Augusta Andrews (1824–1862), whom he married in 1847 and believed to be the perfect woman."
The Victorians are an interesting comparison to the Great Awokening. Between the early 19th Century Regency, when the greatest celebrity was the highly sexual Lord Byron, and the High Victorian second half of the 19th Century, English society became much more Christian and prudish.
On the other hand, England also became much more prosperous, efficient, and benevolent.
I suspect that the Great Awokening will see America become much prudish, but also less prosperous, efficient, and benevolent.
The change in English society was deliberately engineered, which is quite interesting. It seems to have come from both the top down - the Queen and the Prince Consort - and the bottom-up; you expect a coterie of middle-class do-gooders (though that is rather too dismissive, as many of them did good work that was sorely needed), but there does seem to have been a current of 'moral uplift' amongst the working class as well.
Victoria is fascinating, because the background to her life is that due to the troubles of George III, the extravagances of his son and successor as Prince Regent, and the rake of unmarried brothers who were all leading similarly dissolute lives, plus all the legitimate children dying early, meant that the monarchy was not well-regarded.
Victoria's uncle - who succeeded to the throne after his brother's death as George IV had no surviving legitimate issue - had ten illegitimate children, pretty much had to be bribed into getting married, and his legitimate children died young or were stillborn.
This left Victoria as the heir(ess) presumptive, and her mother (who seems to have been a little odd) brought her up under a terribly rigid system. Partly because she was genuinely shocked by the state of the royal court and wanted to keep her daughter away from bad influences, and partly so that she and her comptroller (hem hem) could keep Victoria dependent on them, so that when she eventually succeeded to the throne, they would be ruling by proxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_System
That didn't turn out so, since Victoria reacted so badly to the strictures of her childhood that once she became queen, she gave Sir John the boot and cut herself free from her mother's domination. But she wasn't unscathed herself, and the scandal around Lady Flora Hasting's death and the public perception that Victoria was too much under the influence of the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, caused her to suffer public criticism and protests. This probably all contributed to her wanting to reform the public image of the monarchy.
Her marriage with Albert was, of course, an arranged one but it also seems to have been a genuine love match, and she was very much influenced by him:
"Albert and Victoria felt mutual affection and the Queen proposed to him on 15 October 1839, just five days after he had arrived at Windsor.[55] They were married on 10 February 1840, in the Chapel Royal of St James's Palace, London. Victoria was love-struck. She spent the evening after their wedding lying down with a headache, but wrote ecstatically in her diary:
I NEVER, NEVER spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert ... his excessive love & affection gave me feelings of heavenly love & happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before! He clasped me in his arms, & we kissed each other again & again! His beauty, his sweetness & gentleness – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband! ... to be called by names of tenderness, I have never yet heard used to me before – was bliss beyond belief! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!"
They did work to make the monarchy respectable and to inculcate "middle class virtues", so to speak, after the adventures of the Regency period and the preceding reign.
The crises in English society, for example from such things as "the Gin Craze" and the perception of widespread alcohol addiction leading to misery and poverty, did encourage "do-gooders" but also grassroots movements. It was natural that religion should get involved and be invoked as a means of improving morals and encouraging virtue, and reformists such as Wesley who founded Methodism, as well as movements within the Church of England, did as you say shift towards "more Christian and prudish" but also "more prosperous, efficient, and benevolent".
And the prudishness is maybe more our perception looking back, and coloured by the attitudes of the immediately succeeding generations to their parents and grand-parents - Lytton Strachey's hatchet-job "Eminent Victorians" being very influential as one example of such. (Victorian porn was available and spicy enough, for one thing!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_Victorians
Chesterton in 1913 wrote on behalf of "The Victorian Age in Literature" (and I wonder how much Strachey's 1918 book was intended as a riposte to that, though he seems to have conceived the notion of writing it in 1912 or so):
"It only remains for me, therefore, to take the more delicate and entangled task; and deal with the great Victorians, not only by dates and names, but rather by schools and streams of thought. It is a task for which I feel myself wholly incompetent; but as that applies to every other literary enterprise I ever went in for, the sensation is not wholly novel: indeed, it is rather reassuring than otherwise to realise that I am now doing something that nobody could do properly. The chief peril of the process, however, will be an inevitable tendency to make the spiritual landscape too large for the figures. I must ask for indulgence if such criticism traces too far back into politics or ethics the roots of which great books were the blossoms; makes Utilitarianism more important than Liberty or talks more of the Oxford Movement than of The Christian Year. I can only answer in the very temper of the age of which I write: for I also was born a Victorian; and sympathise not a little with the serious Victorian spirit. I can only answer, I shall not make religion more important than it was to Keble, or politics more sacred than they were to Mill."
So let's get some quotes about Utilitarianism going!
"The Oxford Movement was, out of the very roots of its being, a rational movement; almost a rationalist movement. In that it differed sharply from the other reactions that shook the Utilitarian compromise; the blinding mysticism of Carlyle, the mere manly emotionalism of Dickens. It was an appeal to reason: reason said that if a Christian had a feast day he must have a fast day too. Otherwise, all days ought to be alike; and this was that very Utilitarianism against which their Oxford Movement was the first and most rational assault."
"[Carlyle's] great and real work was the attack on Utilitarianism: which did real good, though there was much that was muddled and dangerous in the historical philosophy which he preached as an alternative. It is his real glory that he was the first to see clearly and say plainly the great truth of our time; that the wealth of the state is not the prosperity of the people. Macaulay and the Mills and all the regular run of the Early Victorians, took it for granted that if Manchester was getting richer, we had got hold of the key to comfort and progress. Carlyle pointed out (with stronger sagacity and humour than he showed on any other question) that it was just as true to say that Manchester was getting poorer as that it was getting richer: or, in other words, that Manchester was not getting richer at all, but only some of the less pleasing people in Manchester. In this matter he is to be noted in connection with national developments much later; for he thus became the first prophet of the Socialists. Sartor Resartus is an admirable fantasia; The French Revolution is, with all its faults, a really fine piece of history; the lectures on Heroes contain some masterly sketches of personalities. But I think it is in Past and Present, and the essay on Chartism, that Carlyle achieves the work he was chosen by gods and men to achieve; which possibly might not have been achieved by a happier or more healthy-minded man. He never rose to more deadly irony than in such macabre descriptions as that of the poor woman proving her sisterhood with the rich by giving them all typhoid fever; or that perfect piece of badinage about "Overproduction of Shirts"; in which he imagines the aristocrats claiming to be quite clear of this offence. "Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of overproduction? We take the Heavens and the Earth to witness that we have produced nothing at all.... He that accuses us of producing, let him show himself. Let him say what and when." And he never wrote so sternly and justly as when he compared the "divine sorrow" of Dante with the "undivine sorrow" of Utilitarianism, which had already come down to talking about the breeding of the poor and to hinting at infanticide. This is a representative quarrel; for if the Utilitarian spirit reached its highest point in Mill, it certainly reached its lowest point in Malthus."
Substack pleaded with me to PLEASE TYPE A SHORTER COMMENT so here's the ending of the above that broke the limits 😁
Chesterton's view of the Victorian "compromise":
"For the fundamental fact of early Victorian history was this: the decision of the middle classes to employ their new wealth in backing up a sort of aristocratical compromise, and not (like the middle class in the French Revolution) insisting on a clean sweep and a clear democratic programme. It went along with the decision of the aristocracy to recruit itself more freely from the middle class. It was then also that Victorian "prudery" began: the great lords yielded on this as on Free Trade. These two decisions have made the doubtful England of to-day; and Macaulay is typical of them; he is the bourgeois in Belgravia. The alliance is marked by his great speeches for Lord Grey's Reform Bill: it is marked even more significantly in his speech against the Chartists. Cobbett was dead."
(On the break-up of the "compromise" Victorian society had achieved)
"Nonsense not yet quite dead about the folly of allowing the unfit to survive began to be more and more wildly whispered. Such helpless specimens of "advanced thought" are, of course, quite as inconsistent with Darwinism as they are with democracy or with any other intelligent proposition ever offered. But these unintelligent propositions were offered; and the ultimate result was this rather important one: that the harshness of Utilitarianism began to turn into downright tyranny. That beautiful faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay—all that seemed slowly and sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was bad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipation evaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate in clear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. One must not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask how they died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruled out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including the debating club at Westminster."
I'm not sure of the exact geography and whether Boston had become more liberal, but the one datapoint I know of, which is Benjamin Franklin is a good indicator. Ben ran away from Boston and to Philadelphia after both experiencing censorship, and advocating against it (he was younger than 17 at the time, but I think it had a strong influence on him). By the end of the revolution, a free press was at least widely held to be a positive value in the newly formed states. It had some serious setbacks in the 1790s-1810 period, but I believe by 1820, it had stabilised as being much better than in Franklin's childhood. Remember that Ben and noted Puritan preacher Cotton Mather not only overlapped in life and geography, they met: https://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/benjamin-franklin-has-teachable-moment-cotton-mather/ . Also Ben's Boston printed home, the Courant newspaper, while fighting off censorship, had also taken a fine antivaxxer line against Mather for his advocacy of smallpox innoculation, something Ben later recanted and regretted. Everyone can change their mind when faced with the facts, the facts sometimes come from conservative establishment voices, and there is nothing new under the sun!
"Banned in Boston" dates to the 19th century, so it was still considered repressive.
Massachusetts of course still had highly restrictive laws on alcohol and store openings on Sunday and sodomy until after 2000, if I recall correctly. But it was still a much more liberal society than many parts of the country that didn't have these laws.
> In 1820 you could say anything you want about religion, but you had to subscribe to certain rigid theories about politics, culture and society (for example, the Romance / Victorian era belief that women were chaste angels only tempted into sin by lecherous men.)
This doesn't seem to be evidence against the claim that 1820's Massachusetts was the most open society in the world, unless you can point to at least one other 1820's society where this (or something equivalent) didn't apply.
To me, the line between cancel culture and things like boycotting a company for child labor is that the point of traditional boycotts is to pressure a person or company to change policies or apologize, whereas the purpose of cancel culture is to destroy someone's life to set an example. I think it's pretty clearly wrong to deliberately destroy someone's life outside of punishment through a fair legal system. I might make an exception for someone who has done something so bad they clearly should be in jail for the rest of their life, but for some reason they got away with it.
This rests upon the assumption that the legal system works and encapsulates all kinds of wrongdoings. I unterstand the thought but find it concerning.
I say this as someone who is against cancel culture but only because I value free speech and hearing things I don't like to hear, not because I believe formal state systems are the best way to do anything.
I'm not endorsing any legal system per se. I just think that any ethical form of collective punishment needs to adhere to principles like due process and proportionality that we associate with the legal system. If, hypothetically, cancel culture did consistently adhere to these principles, it would be fine.
Fully agreed.
A good example of someone who was cancelled is OJ Simpson. He went from being in popular movies and doing lots of TV ads to, well, being OJ Simpson.
Now, the bad things that OJ Simpson did are so well-known that if any company was thinking of hiring him to do an ad, they'd immediately know about them. But there are other people who are famous but whose controversies are less well-known. The result is that a company may hire them without knowing about the controversy. Take, say, Boy George. He was imprisoned for kidnapping a (male) prostitute. This is on his wikipedia page, but it's not part of the cultural memory of him the way that the OJ Simpson trial is part of his cultural memory. If an ad agency wants to hire him to do ads as part of his rehabilitation from his crimes, then that's up to them. But if they hire him without knowing that about him and then, when it's pointed out, they decide to drop him, is that cancel culture?
There's a line somewhere between informing an employer of someone's wrongdoings and then letting them decide whether they want to continue to employ them and so many people making noise that the employer feels obliged to sack them because of the pressure. The second may well be legit in some cases, but I sometimes wonder how many 'cancel culture' cases are actually the first.
OJ Simpson only got acquitted from his murder charges because of jury nullification. It was revenge for Rodney King: no more, no less. The evidence against him was pretty clear-cut, but none of it mattered. His wife was cheating on him with a young waiter at a restaurant she frequented, and he discovered them and murdered them both with a knife in an explosion of rage.
Boy George also was arrested for having sex with other men in a restroom at a public park.
Interesting. I've refrained from recommending Karma Chameleon (a delightful song), but it was because the video has Civil War cosplay which would be considered in poor taste these days.
Revenge for Rodney King?
"Rodney King's assailants got off (on the local level) with beating him by an all-white jury. Therefore, the black members of OJ's trial decided to let OJ get away with it to balance the scales."
That's the argument.
The best attempt I've seen at drawing lines around what is or isn't cancel culture is that it moves from normal consumer behaviour to cancel culture when you petition a third party to enforce consequences. Not going to Louis C.K. shows because you're mad about him masturbating in front of people is normal consumer behaviour, calling the venue that booked him and yelling at them to schedule someone else is cancel culture. It's not entirely clear where mass boycotts fall under this definition: if I mention the Coca Cola death squads, is that cancel culture? Do I have to conclude with "therefore you should maybe not buy coke"? But this at least provides a definition which matches the common intuition that "I don't buy coke because they're evil" is not cancel culture but "Milo shouldn't be allowed on college campuses" is.
Thinking on the above, the principle might be "Do you want to convince everyone not to buy coke, or do you want to take away the option to buy coke?" Taking away people's options seems to track pretty well with what does or doesn't get called cancel culture, and it gives us a clear answer to the mass boycott question: not cancel culture because the company can still sell to anyone not in on the boycott.
That, at least, gets towards a line that makes sense. Like most terms that are used by a community, the community usage is a motte-and-bailey, because some members use the term narrowly and others use it broadly. This is a middling definition; there's a narrow one where cancelling is "this person's entire career is over" (ie losing a job isn't enough; if they can go to a competitor after a year or two, then they weren't cancelled) and a broad one where cancelling is "this person is widely criticised by SJWs for what they said" (or the super-broad definition used by SJWs who only see the most ridiculous claimed cancellations that is "any person said or did anything negative about this person", which results in claims that voting Republican was cancelling Joe Biden).
Just like "woke", "cancel" originally meant something different - it was an expression of frustration; the entire point of saying "Johnny Depp is cancelled" (one of the early examples because of alleged domestic violence) was that the people saying it couldn't do anything that actually affected Johnny Depp or his career. No-one uses it like that now, in part because some people did lose jobs, so "cancelling" came to look like more of a realistic threat and less like some steam being blown off.
I think there's also a difference between "I think no-one should be able to host this person" and "I don't think my organisation should host them". If you had some sort of relationship with the venue (ie more than just buying an occasional ticket - anything from being a regular, to holding a season ticket, to being a donor or shareholder or bondholder) then I can see a legitimate case where you care a lot more about that specific venue hosting Louis CK and not being bothered at all if he goes to the other club in your town. And I don't think that's "no one should be able to buy coke"; it's "we shouldn't sell coke" - where the "we" is perhaps an emotional relationship rather than necessarily a legal contractual one.
From what I can tell, the Milo-on-campus thing is often students at a particular college saying "we, ie this college, shouldn't be hosting events starring Milo", which is different from "no college should be hosting Milo". Of course, in that case you get the net effect that almost every college has similar students and similar opinions on Milo and the combined effect of lots of small bans is one big one. That, for me, is where the "culture" bit of cancel culture kicks in - if 50% of colleges were fine with Milo and 50% didn't want him, then he gets to say what he likes and they get to freely choose whether to host him or not. But when 99% block him, then that's not so good.
I'd like if we could start with a norm that distinguishes between individuals and corporations. I think there's a fundamental ethical difference between going on a personal crusade against a company or a product, versus going on a personal crusade against a person.
For example, I might decide tobacco products are evil and that tobacco companies have used deceptive practices to market their products. Maybe I have friends who were directly harmed by all this, and I want the company responsible to go under. My ethics may direct me toward the belief that a world without tobacco companies - or at least without Big Tobacco ('artisan' products aren't the same kind of threat, maybe?) - would be a better place.
Moving the shoe to the other foot, if my company were the target of that kind of campaign I might disagree. I don't work for Big Tobacco, but if the mob came after the company I do work for I might take umbrage. Still, I can't fault those people for following their conscience. If my company goes under it will be difficult on me and my family, but I'll get another job somewhere else.
That's different from trying to cancel people. People change. Or they don't. But the difference is that they're still alive after the mob is done with them. A company might die, but a person will live on. Even if they change their ways they're still cancelled.
What's the difference between cancelling someone and jailing them? When we put someone in jail, the state takes on the responsibility of caring for that person. Too often, this isn't done well, but at least there's an entity that has to answer for whether they're caring for the person who is being punished. This is absent for people being cancelled. If you cancel some work-a-day Joe and they can't get a job or feed their family, you're punishing them the same as if they'd received an injunction from a court of law. Except there's no accountability and no appeal. Maybe that person can no longer feed their family. What does the mob care?
So if you really believe some conduct should be cancelled on a personal (not corporate) level, the right recourse would be to make it illegal. That's tantamount to saying, "If you do this, you will be punished," but in a way that's responsible and accountable. Not perfect, of course. It's only as perfect as the criminal justice system. But relying on mob justice is vigilantism.
Interesting point about jail and responsibility. Contrapoints has said that twitter mobs don't have any prodedures for determining whether a person is guilty or what punishment might be proportional.
I think the second part of that is at least as important as the first. It's one thing to lack due process in the trial phase. It's another level of irresponsibility entirely to lack due process in the sentencing phase.
If we view cancellation as a form of mob justice, it makes the case in favor of cancellation difficult to make. The line between "private opinion I shared online" and "viral post that destroys a company/livelihood" is poorly defined.
I think the biggest problem with cancel culture is not that it can destroy people's lives for murder and kidnapping. It's that it can also destroy lives for minor things like being a bit of a jerk or doing stupid things while you're teenager, or even for completely innocent things like stating an honest opinion on a factual question.
One problem with this is that it's disproportionate, and another is that very few people do anything that may remotely resemble murder or kidnapping, but everyone behaves as a jerk sometimes or have done stupid embarrassing things as a teenager. So the line you're looking for might be somewhere between "most offenses get punished more or less proportionately" and "most offenses go unnoticed but a few get punished with completely disproportionate brutality, when someone causes troubles to the powers that be or sometimes at random"
Also, world with no murders is most likely net better and world with no controversial opinions or bad jokes is most likely new worse. So another potential line might be "does it punish for things everyone agrees are awful, or just for things some people think are awful"?
Excellent way of defining the issues. The problem seems to be where one ideology takes over institutions (unrelated in scope to that ideology) and then attempts to force their ideology by cancelling anyone not conforming. A gay actor in 60s Hollywood, or James Damore at Google. It isn’t healthy.
I am in no ways a conservative, but if current trends continue (a big if) conservatives will soon be unemployable at many or most major institutions. That won’t end well.
>conservatives will soon be unemployable at many or most major institutions
Honestly, I don't think it's likely to happen exactly because it is unsustainable. Also, not being a conservative doesn't seem to protect you, even if you're on the left you can be canceled for not being left enough or the right variety of left or whatever. And that's what worries me the most, situation where nearly everyone has something to be punished for, but you only really get punished if you cause troubles to those dealing out the punishment (or if you're unlucky enough to be chosen for an occasional exemplary execution). That one is pretty sustainable and similar principles have been used by oppressive states and societies all over the world and history.
I agree on all points. It isn’t sustainable, and something has to give. Not sure what.
"A gay actor in 60s Hollywood, or James Damore at Google."
There were no gays in positions of power in 60s Hollywood?
Seriously, what do young people actually imagine about the past these days? That there were no powerful gay men pulling strings in old time Hollywood to help the careers of macho actors who played along with their demands and hurt the careers of pretty boys who wouldn't submit?
What young people get taught about gay history is carefully sanitised so that the rewritten narrative (e.g. the AIDs era being the equivalent of genocide by the Reagan government because they hated gays and so withheld medical treatment so that they would die, plus scapegoated gays) can present the "respectability cascade" narrative of martyrs and unjustly persecuted. I didn't think this before (yeah, I'm gonna mention the site) a Tumblr post where someone who had been at their local LGBTQ+ centre with other baby LGBT people, learning about the history during the 80s, recounted breathlessly how they had learned that the vile and completely baseless rumour about gay promiscuity had been promulgated so that gays could be victim blamed! And here was me going "Kid, do you know nothing about queer activism of the 70s where it was very much politicised that gay sexuality should not be the same as straight sexuality, and for instance things like bathhouses were around and were part of the reason for the initial spread of the disease?" Since it was the 70s/80s and hedonistic sex was the presumed new norm - STDs were now just another commonplace since medicine had antibiotics to cure them, so they should be treated as more like getting a cold than anything to worry seriously about.
That is not to say that the AIDs epidemic was not handled badly at the start, or that gay people should be scapegoated, but the revision of history so that it was always nice respectable couples who only wanted the chance to marry, and were certainly not out there having as much anonymous sex as they could - in certain centres - did strike me. So the idea of 30s/40s/50s gay movie stars whose public images were carefully managed while the insiders knew the truth, or gay people in positions of power in movie studios, isn't something that they are very aware of, other than in the narrative of "persecution and censorship".
I was just trying to come up with an example of something once aimed at the left to offset the example of Damore and all the blatant discrimination against non far leftists today. Rock Hudson came to mind, about having to hide his homosexuality as an actor to get roles. Perhaps it wasn’t a great example.
It was irrelevant to my intended point though, which is that those not of the far left are soon going to be unable to discuss their opinions within most institutions noses this trend is reversed.
I'm never sure how much this is new. I think it's always been the case that disagreeing with your bosses' opinions endangers your job. This is one of the main reasons why we have a secret ballot in elections - so you don't get fired for voting for the wrong party.
It's also why there are specific legal protections for religion and for union organising - because employers fired people for those things anyway.
Obviously, people are fired for different things now because employers have different opinions. Socialists used to have to be very quiet about their politics so they didn't get fired for them. That used to be normal, and I do wonder to what extent it's just that the weird minority opinion you have to either shut up about or live on the fringes of society is one that used to be more popular (and I don't mean "conservatism", but "women are inferior").
Damore's problem was more that he argued with HR policy than that he was cancelled publicly; if the public cancellation had been for something that Google were OK with (like the various people who were cancelled for doing military contracts) then Google would have had no problem standing up for him.
I think there are several different phenomena being conflated together as "cancel culture" and I'm not sure how linked they are.
One is people getting fired for arguing with corporate policy. I think the only difference here is that corporate policies are more inclined to be "woke" (for want of a better word) than in the past, so if there's policy that says "we should strive to have 50-50 male-female programmers" is going to get a James Damore fired for arguing with it.
Another is people getting fired because companies bow to public pressure (which is what I thought was the central meaning of "cancel culture"). That's always been true, though the things that public pressure get applied over have changed and social media has made applying pressure easier. I think the "it's easier to push a company into firing someone because social media makes it easier to make a big deal out of things" is both true and concerning. That's where I would want to direct anti-cancel culture effort, into making employers more cautious about responding to social media pressure.
Another is people being harassed or swatted or whatever over their opinions. This is mostly public figures who repeatedly discuss something that a lot of people disagree with. If you're famous enough, anything you say that's remotely controversial is going to generate a lot of blowback. It's necessary to distinguish between lots of people disagreeing with you and harassment, and then I think the right solution for the actual harassers is criminal sanctions - if we're getting to the point of death/rape threats or doxxing, then yeah, those people need to have the police at their door. If it's just people disagreeing with you and making twitter unusable because it's full of notifications, then suck it up buttercup, or change your notification settings.
Then there's a separate question about "at what point should people be forgiven?" For an opinion, you clearly would have to change that opinion. If you got fired for believing X, then you can't get the job back until you change your mind. In practice, you get fired for expressing an opinion, not for holding one, and if you'd just kept your mouth shut, you'd have been fine. But you can't unsay things, so you'd have to recant in public, even if you maintain the position in private [for people who think this is ridiculous, remember this could apply for, say, Holocaust denial, or for holding that Stalin's mass murders were necessary and good, or for wanting to reinstate slavery, or for supporting the gunning down of the police; there's a separate argument about what opinions people should be fired for]. But if you actually did something, you can't undo it. If you sexually harassed someone and got fired for it, at what point should you be rehireable? I think that's a hard question in general; in the past it used to be that you got far enough away in space and time that your new employer just wouldn't know, but social media and cancellation makes that impossible.
In the UK we have a law called the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, which says that after a period of time after being released from prison, your conviction is "spent", and you can say "I never went to prison" if asked by an employer;(with a few exceptions for certain types of employer). If they ask the police/courts/prison service (a "DBS check") then it will tell them that you've never been to prison. But if there's social media coverage, then your conviction is never effectively spent. That does seem to be a problem. When can Louis CK have a comeback? Can Justine Sacco get a job again?
Isn't Justine Sacco back at her old company?
I don't think Damore was fired for arguing with HR. Plenty of people have argued against various policies intended to achieve gender parity without getting fired. I think he was fired because he caused drama; it was a huge distraction.
Nominally he was fired for something like suggesting that women aren't as good at programming, but he never said that and others have said that without getting fired, so I like my theory better.
The alternative theory for why he was fired for something he hadn't actually said is that which person the mob comes after is partly random.
I'm sure that there are people who said what Damore did and weren't fired, but I'm also sure that there were black people who kissed white people in the 50's and weren't lynched. That doesn't mean that the black people who were lynched were really lynched because they caused drama.
My understanding on Damore is that he gave an opinion on a sensitive topic that they found unacceptable, even though it was clearly scientifically legitimate. The net effect is that any conservatives (actually non far-leftists) I know in Silicon Valley took it as a warning that they better keep their opinions to themselves. In other words, don’t question the woke consensus that women and men all want the same types of jobs, or that BLM has been a force for good and so on.
I believe that firing employees for political or scientific opinions unrelated to the mission of the business used to be extremely rare in the US, and certainly has never been considered acceptable. AT&T didn’t fire telephone repairmen for their political opinions.
If this trend continues (and it probably can’t), then the vast majority of Americans will not be able to express their opinions freely on social media, on the mainstream media, on their job, at school, and so forth. They will become social pariahs for not preaching the woke mantra. This is decentralized, mass propaganda.
I suggest the healthy way to address the Damore issue was to have an open dialogue on the issue, and sincerely thank him for bringing it to everyones' attention.
> "Liberals lose the culture war if there's ever such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any unpopular opinion, publish any heterodox research, or stand up for anybody who's gone against the mob...So all else being equal, liberals' goal should be to prevent a culture of fear. Partly this is an actual battle, one where we try to protect people and stand up against the forces of authoritarianism."
Couldn't agree more. As a liberal, this is one big reason why I'm building https://spartacus.app/
It’s an online platform for creating or joining campaigns for collective action in adversarial situations - using the concept of Assurance Contracts to solve game-theoretic coordination problems.
Think “Kickstarter,” but instead of crowdfunding, it’s for de-risking the process of recruiting and organizing participants for any project/campaign that can only make a difference with a group effort, like workplace organizing, whistleblowing, open letters, direct action, event attendance, coming to the defense of someone being "canceled", formation of clubs or affinity groups, etc.
"I'm Spartacus!" "No, I'm Spartacus!" "I'm Spartacus!" "I'm Spartacus!" (I think you get the drift)
I know this is not an entirely novel concept - many of the underlying principles have been validated by other successful platforms like GoFundMe, Change.org, and The Point, (before it pivoted to become Groupon).
Unlike those other platforms, the focus of Spartacus will not be fundraising or social signaling, but the formation and enablement of group solidarity for specific collective actions in the real world. The aim is to increase the expected value of organizing around concealed preferences by lowering the courage requirements for taking action (from heroic to average) and reducing individual actors’ risks (from potentially catastrophic to marginal).
I'll preemptively address some common points of feedback:
- Spartacus will prohibit any campaign encouraging illegal actions or violence of any kind.
- The app will have several mechanisms built in to abate the risk of trolls, spammers, or bad faith actors sabotaging or gaming the system, such as requiring a small financial stake to join a campaign.
- The explicit political position of the app is one of J.S Mill-style liberal pluralism, and it will be defended as such. Use cases will be ideologically agnostic. There will be no partisan bent, and both “blue” and “red” campaigns will be equally welcome, regardless of who it pisses off. Campaign curation will strike for balance to try to avoid the app taking on a partisan valence.
If you'd like to get involved or have questions, you can DM me at https://twitter.com/AppSpartacus.
I’m currently looking for volunteers for proof of concept and beta testing.
How the app is gong to work when both Apple and Google ban it because someone tries to organize e.g. a (very peaceful and legal) "all lives matter" rally there?
It's web-based. It won't be on Apple's app store or Google Play, at least not anytime soon. Plus, I doubt the "All Lives Matter" people need something like this to find each other online and organize.
Spartacus might be more useful to friends of Bob - Bob who went to an "All Lives Matter" rally, got targeted for cancellation, and now needs a social counterweight to the online pressure his employer is under to fire him. Maybe a petition like "Bob's a good upstanding citizen and shouldn't be fired".
Spartacus can work for friends of "All lives Matter" Bob, and "Israel is an Apartheid State" Stephanie in equal measure.
Whether they have enough genuine supporters to make a difference is a separate question.
Allow me to the the annoying Objectivist know-it-all and flesh "Don't Cancel People" out. It's really simple, and it's one word:
Justice.
Not "social justice". Actual justice.
There's a reason she carries scales: justice requires proportionality and that the punishment fits the crime. Now, funnily enough, everyone gets this when they want to: the same people who think one tweet should be enough to ruin someone's life, are aghast when someone is shot in the back for running from the police. Again, justice requires proportionality.
So, in this context:
Words get words.
Deeds get deeds.
Let's take white nationalism. If someone doesn't bring that to work, and confines themselves to arguing the case for white nationalism on the internet, then the response should be to answer him with words on the internet, not to get him fired. And, yes, I'll happily prove that I can take it the other way: the same should be true for any non-violent Islamist. Say a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir who argues for the caliphate, but has no connection to violence and does not cause problems for his fellow workers.
On the other hand, it is very easy to find WN types bragging about how they are deliberately cruel to brown and black people (denying them raises, getting them fired etc.). Similarly, it's easy to find technically non-violent Islamists talking about ways to be cruel to Infidels, gays etc. Such people should be "canceled" with maximum prejudice.
Words get words. Deeds get deeds.
Notice that this is not just moral but practical. If you keep your response to the (currently) peaceful WN to arguments, you have a chance of changing his mind. Wreck his life, and what incentive does he have not to go full Combat-18? Same thing with the Hizb ut-Tahrir member.
(And, oh yes, I am totally behind building a "Too Woke To Hire" database, listing everyone who has ever gotten someone fired or blacklisted for nothing more than an opinion - and then sharing that database with all future employers. I assure you, that'll end cancel culture and right quick).
"Similarly, it's easy to find technically non-violent Islamists talking about ways to be cruel to Infidels, gays etc. Such people should be "canceled" with maximum prejudice."
Assuming "canceled" means being fired, how is this answering words with words and deeds with deeds? Talking about ways to be cruel to infidels, gays, etc. isn't the same as actually being cruel. And even actually being cruel usually involves words, not deeds like denying them raises, getting them fired, etc.
That's sophistry. If you say homosexuality is sinful that is different from saying that people should, if they're dentists, go out of their way to cause maximum pain to gay patients (yes, this does happen, go look at "Undercover Mosque").
As to the last sentence of this - if you can't see the difference between someone writing a post online that you disagree with, and someone getting you fired, then I don't really know what I could write that could convince you otherwise.
I'm just trying to understand what "words get words, deeds get deeds" means in practice. SJWs would say that words can in many instances be more harmful than deeds. This isn't a minor point, but the main premise of their argument on which everything else rests. You seem to agree with the premise. In your example, saying that people should go out of their way to cause maximum pain to gay patients is a cancellable offense, even though they're saying words and not doing deeds. Presumably you think these words are worse than some deeds, for example donating to an anti-gay-marriage group. If that's the case, we're back at square one, and still have no criterion for distinguishing between cancellable vs. non-cancellable words.
"SJWs would say that words can in many instances be more harmful than deeds"
They're wrong. It really is that simple.
If you don't see the difference between boasting of action or inciting to action on the one hand, and not doing so on the other - well, there really isn't any way for me to make it plainer.
Someone writes something vile online - get's other writings in response online. Someone fires people or ruins their lives based on skin color - gets fired himself. Let's be clear that the latter example isn't "just words", it's a confession of guilt.
Inciting to action is words. Asking for someone to be fired is words. Telling people to torture gays is words.
Stubbing someone's toe is deeds.
I don't understand how you are going to get past this if you're using a sharp dichotomy.
If you are this lost in rationalism, then there is little I can say. The only thing that might change your mind is direct experience of all of the above - and I don't wish that on you.
You realize playing with symbols doesn't change anything, right?
Even granting this sophistry, it changes nothing. All it does is reset it to:
Words that argue a case online get words that argue a case online
Words that call for firing get words that call for firing
Words that call for violence get - well, they get prosecuted for incitement to violence, because, fortunately, the law isn't that rationalist.
What dionsysus said +
If we already agree that saying things like "be cruel to black people" is an offence that merits potential deed retalitation what about "america should be a white ethnostate"? you can't accomplish the latter without the former.
this argument can be extended to include a lot of opinions.
True , and likewise for calls to violence. which ThePrussian nevertheless lists as deeds.
They are completely different. The former are boasts of actions taken by the individual himself, or direct incitements to action. The latter are not. It's the difference between saying "Go out and rob, and if necessary kill, people to get what you need" and "There should be communal ownership of property". I really don't see how I can make this any clearer.
You're treating words as deeds for the purposes of retaliation if those words are presumably linked to deeds. If that's the metric, then who exactly gets to do that presuming matters.
You really don't see the difference between incitement to violence and advancing a theoretical argument? So If I write an essay saying, "The political/religious opinions of Dan L are absolutely awful" that's the same thing as telling people: "Go, find Dan L, kill him and his entire family"?
If you don't see that difference, you don't see that difference. This is rationalism at its absolute worst.
Boasting of the action then, is not a deed, but evidence of one. And it should be investigated before punishment is issued.
Exhortation to a deed is not at all clear cut as a deed. Technically, "If you murder so and so, I'll pay you," is, at the moment, just words, but it's obviously more than that.
But it's a pretty smooth gradient between that and something that is equally obviously unobjectionable.
The latter sounds a bit like Scott's old example of skinheads circulating a petition:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/02/be-nice-at-least-until-you-can-coordinate-meanness/
maybe what's happening is that SJWs are trying to coordinate society around being mean to white nationalists (as well as a lot of other people). So at least they comply to scott's heuristic. whether any specific group should beget meanness is another discussion though.
No, they're doing exactly what he complains about. They are not "being nice" until they achieved coordination of the rest of society. They are individually acting as entrepreneurs of outrage.
We're commenting on Substack, which was come in the crosshairs of some SJW types for hosting anti-SJ people. One of the hated writers I read is Jesse Singal, a relatively normal progressive liberal who supported Warren in the Dem primary. Precisely because he's so normie, it's hard for his enemies to attack his (normie) ideas rather than him as a person. So there's basically a huge amount of lies written about him in order to defame him so he can no longer work for left-of-center publications (his natural home). The end-goal is to prevent anyone from covering certain topics as a journalist rather than as a mouthpiece for activists.
https://quillette.com/2021/03/18/the-campaign-of-lies-against-journalist-jesse-singal-and-why-it-matters/
https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/check-out-how-much-effort-it-takes
This sounds good in general, but the most obvious (to me) edge case is speech acts. If you call someone a white supremacist or a homophobe, you're expressing an idea, but because of the known willingness of many influential people to punish those opinions, you're also increasing the chance of someone else harming that person. If a neo-Nazi emphatically expresses their desire to attack or discriminate against nonwhite people, even if they don't actually do it, that by itself makes nonwhite people less comfortable & more anxious. (The latter argument is greatly overused now, but I think it is valid in particularly egregious cases.) Of course, whether something causes harm or suffering is distinct from whether it should be generally punished & a social norm formed against it, & it could be useful for some purposes to follow a "Words get words, deeds get deeds" policy strictly, but that also leaves you vulnerable to bad-faith use of this defense & to attracting witches & thereby repelling normal people.
I have to say, if someone emphatically expresses their desire to behave in such a way, then too bad. That's a clear expression of intent to behave in a certain way.
In any case, a lot will need to change before such distinctions need trouble us.
I think some of the disagreement and talking-past-one-another on this subject stems from a certain bit of fiction of play-acting that is central to a culture of "free speech": while we know that people can and often do get their feelings hurt by the words of others -- and that, from a utility standpoint, that harm may actually exceed harm caused by certain physical injuries -- *we need to pretend that isn't true*. Why would we do this? The usual liberal arguments for free speech kick in here -- we'll collectively arrive at the truth that way, which is more important in the long term, etc. And of course if we are too lenient and open-minded about hearing appeals of the form "your mere words 'harmed' me, so I demand redress," we will incentivize all manner of dishonest and trumped-up claims and end up litigating them forever. There will always be edge cases, but the core idea of free-speech culture is create an intentionally very high bar for responding to words with deeds, a (rebuttable) presumption against it. Like maybe don't do it unless a supermajority of impartial observers votes via secret ballot to do it -- something like that.
By design, this means we are going to be acting like hurt feelings don't count, don't exist, are exaggerated, etc. At times this can verge on gaslighting. And then people who notice the gaslighting emerge, point it out, and say, screw this -- I'm going to respond to words with deeds sometimes, on a case-by-case basis, instead of adopting this weird fiction. Personally, I can see why this is appealing and in some sense more "authentic." The problem is it probably destroys the possibility of a very large free-speech culture. Until recently, free-speech culture was kind of the default approach to the public sphere for an educated or curious American, and it's jarring for a lot of us to see how it's being abandoned by our peers.
Nazzim, I think you'll see that I didn't mention free speech at all. I discussed _Justice_.
Again, not "social justice". Actual Justice.
The SJWs attempt to elide the difference between speech and action, between words and violence, is there to justify their actions. To rationalise their abandoning Justice. To justify to themselves: "I don't like what this person said, so I'll get him fired, reduce him and his family to poverty for the rest of his life, and drive him to suicide - or even assault him, or pass the info on to those who might well kill him."
I notice not one person disagreeing with me above has used the word Justice. I'm not surprised.
"By design, this means we are going to be acting like hurt feelings don't count, don't exist, are exaggerated, etc."
Well, they exist - but they aren't the same thing as violence or having your life wrecked. For example, I find tirades against "whiteness" absolutely vile, as they are a dehumanisation of me, my family, and many of my dearest friends. I don't try to get people who write this crap fired, I try to respond in kind, to show them how unpleasant that is. Or I would, if that weren't a firing offence these days.
But, again, can we please have a little empiricism against all this rationalism? Try imagine reading something you violently dislike online: picture the hurt feelings, the anger, the gnawing outrage etc.
Now imagine someone getting you fired and blacklisted. Imagine the horror you feel as all of your dreams and plans come crashing down. Imagine the fear of how you will support your family. Imagine having to get by on minimum wage by minimum wage job. Imagine all the stresses and troubles that lifelong poverty will bring.
See the difference?
Imagine reading every single person you respect saying that you are a bad person.
Now imagine someone pouring raspberry jelly on you.
The former is obviously much worse, but it is only "words", while the latter is "deeds". The former is far more life-wrecking *even if* you still keep getting paid and keep your job, and *even though* the latter may well cause you a little physical pain as the jelly stings when it gets in your eyes.
"Imagine reading every single person you respect saying that you are a bad person."
I'd have had to do something pretty terrible for that to happen, wouldn't I?
No, not really. Maybe you waved at someone in traffic, or explained someone's academic paper, or your child got in a Twitter fight, or someone who looks like you said something mean on camera.
I don't think it's easy to find WNs in managerial positions over any minorities.
I think you're mistaken. Some of them have decent jobs.
One reason why they're not easy to find is because, as Scott noted, there just aren't that many of them. But if you know of such examples, you could link them here.
Another reason they're hard to find is they're not very open about it. Most obvious known example seems to be KKK infiltration of local police departments: https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf
Police have authority over everyone whether they work with them or not, but in at least some cases, the police leadership is also infiltrated.
According to the FBI, these people call themselves "ghost skins," as in skinheads, but they're intentionally hiding that fact to remain accepted in polite society.
Perhaps because that document was heavily redacted it didn't contain any examples of people in managerial positions. Actually, the document talks about "interest" and "attempts" to infiltrate law enforcement rather than actual examples of it happening. Maybe that would be too embarrassing for law enforcement to discuss.
True, but only because there aren't that many of them. Though check the SPLC page on Identiy Europa below (scroll to Eli Mosely)
But my point was to illustrate a distinction.
https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/identity-evropaamerican-identity-movement
Interestingly, Elliot Kline seems to have been lying about what he actually did. But I do think it would be fair to fire him for claiming (regardless of how true it is) that he had done so.
Agreed. I do think that in that case it is just too bad for this Eli person.
"This person is a white nationalist with terrible opinions" is words, not deeds. Why blame the people who "got them fired" with mere words, rather than the company that actually did the firing?
Union organizing.
Evidence for this please?
I've long thought that a specific piece of legislation is needed. It would essentially state that it is only legal to fire someone for reasons that have at least one of the following charateristics:
-is a crime
-occured at work or is related to the performance of work duties
-directly involved other members of the work organization
That would shut down the problem pretty quickly in my opinion, and would be a pretty good thing in general-- it's pretty absurd to fire someone for reasons that are none of those three.
You talk about proportionality, but you only have two responses--words, and firing. We should consider that some "offenses" are well above or below those levels even within the respective categories of the word/deed dichotomy.
That's true, but this is a comment's thread, referring to a single point in the above essay. I don't have the space - or the time - to fully develop the theme of justice, to explain what merits what, and why. I only have the time an space to sketch out the principle of proportionality, give it its name - justice - and hope that those of an active mind take that as a point to think further.
I disagree with this idea of justice, for one simple reason: we are never working from a position of perfect information - what is considered just one day can very well become unjust the next based on what the human species presumes its needs to be - correct proportionality is inherently nebulous, its not a solvable thing. To get a more practical idea of what you're talking about - if someone in real life gets all up in your face and yells at you but doesn't actually touch you, what is the appropriate proportionate response? Do you have to leave? Do you have to yell back? Can you punch them? What if they seem frail or like they might be having a temporary psychotic episode?
This is the argument that because reason is fallible, we would know more without reason - and that because our sight is limited we would see more without eyes.
Yes, we are limited, yes, we are fallible, yes, a commitment to justice does not mean we will not err, and yes, it is easier to correct errors of mercy than severity, so we should lean towards the former - but while a commitment to justice will not make you perfectly just, it is the precondition for _any_ justice.
I've lived through your practical example, at work. I knew the people involved. They are good people, though their actions were wrong, so I told let them rave, waited until it was over, told them I did not appreciate such treatment, and let it go and forgave them. To do otherwise would have been unjust.
What about a stranger doing so on the street? Again, justice and knowledge of human beings suggests that this is a good person going through some unknown trouble, so I will walk away. If they are having a temporary psychotic episode, I should see if they can get help - but I am not obliged to risk myself in that.
"Not obliged to risk myself in that", for some people, would translate to physically pushing the person away from them, and it'd be hard to call that unjust if we look at the situations where 2 seconds later the psychotic person pulls out a gun. You obviously don't think it's /always/ the right course of action to walk away, that would just make you a door-mat. If the same situation can lead to either "see if they can get help/walk away" or "push them away physically", those two outcomes seem pretty different to me.
"for some people" - well, those people are wrong, since touching someone else is a guaranteed way to escalate a situation. I'm really not sure what point you are trying to make here.
As to the rest of this - I specifically gave different contexts in which one would behave in different ways. Again, I don't know what you're trying to say here.
My point was that your system is naïve and falls apart when you attempt to apply it to the real world. "touching someone else is a guaranteed way to escalate a situation" is not fact, it is a maxim, and often a necessity in order to avoid that person harming you or forcing you to leave.
We have gone from discussing whether calling for someone to be fired - or killed - is the same thing as writing something someone disagrees with on the internet.
And people seriously ask why I say this is lousy with rationalism?
Your Point 3 implies that discussing cancel culture based on specific cases thereof is harmful when those cases are unrepresentative, because it does censors' work for them by creating a culture of fear; however, if such cases *are* representative, then it doesn't matter, because anyone who ignored them & spoke freely would soon be pressured to stop. This indicates that this sort of chilling effect could be counteracted to some extent just by somehow credibly estimating the chances of being fired, having your reputation damaged, &c. for expressing some heterodox opinion in some social context, so that people in that context worrying about unrepresentative cases of cancel culture will know that they're unrepresentative. I'm not sure how to do this, but one way might be through polling; e.g. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202005/political-biases-in-academia shows that the problems he discusses *are* typical in social psychology by citing polls showing that a majority of people in the field do discriminate against politically opposed researchers & politically inconvenient ideas.
Best point here? "Stop Tweeting!" Agreed. Twitter is literally the Devil. Change my mind.
There's plenty of good things on Twitter. Just follow the right people. People who hate Twitter are people who don't know how to use it. Twitter is good for this: jokes. That's what I tweet: jokes. Who do I follow? People who tweet funny jokes.
This includes a willingness to unfollow friends. I cleared a lot of garbage off of my feed by unfollowing one person.
Well, I got kicked off Twitter permanently for calling Trump a retard. So maybe I'm biased. But you're right Bullseye. I still scroll twitter occasionally but as a viewer not a member. So I can't respond and I don't really get a "feed". I just look up people I'm interested in and read what they post. It's a much better experience.
I'm being hyperbolic of course, but even if you're right I still think Twitter is a net negative. Wether it's the algorithm or something else about the form, it seems to bring out the worst in most people.
Um, no - as someone who has used Twitter plenty and isn't suffering from stockholm syndrome, knowing how to use Twitter is a battle against its inherently awful design and there are not "plenty" of good things on Twitter.
1. Trying to keep track of response chains is not intuitive (contrast, say, the comments here)
2. the character limit warps all regular conversation beyond belief
3. the private message system LOCKS YOU OUT if you message someone too much (i.e. having a conversation) because it thinks you're spamming.
4. Twitter bombards you with notifications if you don't use it regularly, and when you check them the notifications are just "reminders" of tweets you might have missed chosen what seems to be randomly, not even algorithmically. Pure manipulative skinner-box design.
Jokes are something you can find anywhere, and in other places much more readily. The majority of the jokes on Twitter are memes made by literal children.
Oh can't believe I forgot, following someone means following every dumb thing they do, not just their posts.
I use Twitter as an FTP server to move screenshots from my video game consoles to my PC. A short Python script pulls the images with no need for me to ever look at twitter.com.
Regarding respectability cascades, how do the hippies fit into it? Many would argue that what broke the stifling world of the 50s was the counterculture movement of the 60s, and it was far from respectable. It wasn't even half concerned with being respectable, it was all about "f you and your idea of society, we're doing what we want". And yet, after the 60s were done, so was the stifling atmosphere.
Or are you saying that in the respectability cascades, first came respectsble people and the hippies only followed-suit because of them? That doesn't sound like the hippie movement I grew up hearing about, because once again, they didn't sound like they gave a crap about what any respectsble people thought.
I don't know if this is a respectability cascade, it could just be the young hippies growing up and not enforcing the culture of fear after becoming adults. If you were a hippie, or if you knew a former hippie sufficiently well to know they were not crazy, then the idea of enforcing a culture that forbids hippie-ism probably seems unthinkable in your later life.
I think that the idea is hippies are an early to mid stage in the respectability cascade. They're a large group of people openly defying the establishment and not getting punished harshly enough to completely destroy them, which makes increasing numbers of increasingly respectable people feel safer defying the establishment in other ways.
Maybe I'm just drunk (I am), but I get the vibe that you think our culture is going through a bad time. Other than the pandemic, I don't see that at all. I feel like we are going through very normal times for America. When Carter gave his malaise speech, it bummed everyone out. Nobody knew they were suffering from a malaise, and then Carter said they were.
Your last post was great. What you experienced was what I experienced. A lot of us minor ex-bloggers probably related, maybe even felt some nostalgia for those times. Not to mention the fact we are all now gathered here, because the blogosphere is dead and this is all that remains.
Anyway, I'm drunk. I think I said that at the beginning.
I'm pretty sure everyone in the 70s was bummed out - inflation, unemployment, gas lines, gas stations being closed, the price of everything going up except wages, and Carter just pointed it out and called for hope.
> gas lines, gas stations being closed,
:(
Maybe Western liberalism, in the sense of freedom, democracy, and equality, is possible only for a fleeting moment in human history. Once upon a time all the stars aligned; now that the moment is coming to an end, never to return. Very few societies in all of history were representative democracies with universal suffrage. Almost none had no unquestionable dogmas. Maybe liberal democracy requires an industrial society with high unionization rates, a large middle class, a relatively homogenous population, and an existential external threat to unite the ingroup. Now that the economy is service based, unions are declining, the middle class is shrinking due to skyrocketing inequality (at least in the US and UK), the population is becoming more and more diverse, and WWII and the Cold War are distant memories, democracy might not be stable anymore. We might return to the representative oligarchy of early America or pre-industrial Britain, or become an authoritarian autocracy like Russia or Syria. In the worst case scenario, ethnic tension explodes into civil war and we get a Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Congo, or modern Ethiopia.
I agree. The natural state of human society is conformity and repression; Enlightenment values and liberal democracy were aberrations that arose out of some very peculiar circumstances. That is not to say that such circumstances cannot arise again, but I doubt we'll get another long-lasting period of liberalism for quite some time; certainly not in our lifetimes.
A society in which the only acceptable political and moral values are those of Enlighenment Liberalism does not strike me as anti-conformist or non-repressive. But that's because I'm not an Enlightenment Liberal.
Well, perhaps paradoxically, the ideal of Liberalism is that everyone is allowed to have his own beliefs. Thus, if you wanted to set up an Amish commune, ban all technology, and mandate your version of Christianity, under Liberalism you would absolutely be able to do that -- as long as a). people can safely leave your paradise whenever they want, and b). you're not coercing anyone into joining.
"Never to return" is more certainty than I recommend. It could come around again in some other form, but it might still be temporary.
<i>Maybe Western liberalism, in the sense of freedom, democracy, and equality, is possible only for a fleeting moment in human history.</i>
I suspect that Western liberalism is only possible in situation where there are multiple religious (interpreted broadly) groups which are both too strong to be pushed around but too weak to push others around. Obviously this is an unstable situation, and hence so is Western liberalism.
Freedom, democracy, and equality aren't even a trilemma; you can only have one. Personally, I see freedom as a terminal value, democracy as an instrumental value, and equality as a distraction.
"Equality" in the sense of "let's all pretend that these two unequal things are equal" can only last so long before mathematical errors cause bridges to collapse. We are working as hard as we can to hasten this outcome, as we argue with a straight face that 2 + 2 = Something Other Than Four.
having lived through 50s I wish to correct some of your generalizations. first, in your list of forbiddens - atheists, gays - you forgot the most important one: being black. the derogation of Blacks was an absolute right, and it was on the back of this that most repression found its footing. (in the South cities weren't known as cosmopolitan in the modern sense, but where all those uppity ni**ers lived. marijuana was a ni**er drug.) second, the fall of the general repression: beatniks were the wedge, hippies were the floodgates. as a youngster in a conservative community you'd see beatniks then hippies and it was literally like being flooded by sunshine. it helped that TV advertisers were going after the "youth market" and there was no Fox News to put up a unified field theory of resistance.
you were also wrong about the violence. the police force main job was to keep the ni**ers in their place. my football team in highschool would go ni**er knocking on Saturday night. anyone suspected of being gay had the shit beat out of them. if you even acted like you were an atheist you were literally run out of town. all the cops carried blackjacks and if you didn't look middle class or above they wouldn't hesitate to use it. *and* organized crime was everywhere, carrying along it's violence, but nobody reading the paper would be aware - it simply wasn't reported.
+1 "with a minimum of Red Guards breaking people's kneecaps" seems like a very incorrect way to describe the 1950s unless some types of violence count more than others
I would guess that the actual amount of violence was lower in 1950s America compared to China during the Cultural Revolution. Partly it's because revolutionary regimes are inherently unstable and need violence to enforce their new order. But you can see how far the decline in racial violence was in the US by the 50s: https://inductivist.blogspot.com/2006/11/lynching-is-ancient-history.html
oh yeah definitely. I thought we were comparing 1950s America to 2020 America. If the intended comparison was to China then I have no quarrel (except maybe to suggest that China was probably also correspondingly more conformist)
I think a lot more African Americans were murdered in 2020 than 1950.
You sure you know what ni**er knocking was? It was knocking at someone's door then running away and giggling as they came to the door and nobody was there. The rest of your post is an absurd absolute.
That's what it meant in the 90s, but I'm not surprised to hear it meant something else forty years earlier.
Nope, this was the 70s. In the south.
Ok, so it meant the same thing in the 70s and 90s. Doesn't mean it meant that in the 50s.
My experience was also in the south.
I can believe there was regional variation-- what parts of the south for each version?
you might be right, but that's what the football players called it when they drove around on the other side of the tracks leaning out the windows and swinging ax handles. I agree with the absurdity of the rest of the post, but I'm pretty damned sure that's what I lived through.
Uh-huh, football players. Ax handles. Did they get them with the boarding cutlasses from the Royal Navy lockers?
I apologize for growing up in Texas in the fifties and being outside your realm of comprehension.
"Knocking on the door and running away giggling" is Knock Down Ginger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knock,_Knock,_Ginger (amongst other names) over here. I certainly never heard it described by that term, and I've read an amount of fiction (including Agatha Christie's first ever Poirot novel) that used the n-word casually.
I knew this as "Ding Dong Dash."
I was horrified to realize as an adult (~30) the nature of this phrase from my childhood. I'd only ever encountered ni**er as a nonsense part of what, to child me, was this fixed phrase.
Marijuana, or "sticks of tea", seemed to be associated a lot with musicians (if I go by pulp detective fiction) and of course many jazz musicians and big band musicians were African-American, so "marijuana use = African-American use" might be something that was an easy stereotype.
yes, and Nixon focused the "anti-drug" campaign on marijuana bc it would attack "the hippies and the ni**ers".
"the derogation of Blacks was an absolute right"
Why was Brown v. Board unanimous?
Thanks for saying this. I too wanted to say something about the violence that upheld the dominant culture views of the entire 20th century (and before). The stable order of that era was maintained through violence, threats of violence, job loss, threats of job loss, as well as social shunning and so on. The OP comes across to me as a bit tone deaf in the lack of recognition of that. It was long-term and the consequences went well beyond job/career loss and social shaming for those groups and individuals who were targeted.
> Still, it might be worth having coherent principles, at least in order to assuage our own consciences. Are we actually committing to never exerting social pressure on anybody in any way?
While I'm all in favor of having coherent principles, I think it's more important to start by establishing a baseline here, rather than immediately jumping to making sure we can handle all the harder cases. Your Coca-Cola case is, at best, a noncentral example and I don't think it's the right thing to start with.
As for that baseline -- well, ThePrussian already remarked below "words get words, deeds get deeds", but I don't think that goes far enough. After all, "cancelling" *is* words. A baseline standard we should seek to establish, IMO, is "arguments get arguments". (Where -- to be clear -- ad hominem, Bulverism, and other similar forms of the genetic fallacy don't count as arguments. A key part of "cancelling" is that once you're declared to be bad, that alone counts as a rebuttal to any of your arguments. That can't stand.) Non-value statements are to be evaluated for truth or falsity, not moral rightness or wrongness.
That's the baseline I'd seek to establish -- freedom to argue.
And, yes, OK, you're not going to apply that in literally *every* case; as you discussed[0], you're still going to ignore the worst of the worst (neo-Nazis and such). But the garden needs to be retaken. (This may require establishing that just because you don't agree with the SJers, this does not, in fact, make you a "Nazi"...)
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/
> And, yes, OK, you're not going to apply that in literally *every* case; as you discussed[0], you're still going to ignore the worst of the worst (neo-Nazis and such). But the garden needs to be retaken.
Who this does or does not include may need to be made a coherent, specific, agreed-upon principle, precisely because a common tactic of censorious SJ people &c. is to argue that their opponents are equivalent to the agreed-to-be-intolerable bigots & should be treated the same way.
Yeah, you're right; I'm not sure what to do about that problem. I guess something is needed.
> After all, "cancelling" is words.
I don't think this is the case with the typical usage of the word (although I've never liked the term "cancelling" as it's used in a novel sense, without an agreed-upon definition, leading to ambiguity). Typically we are talking at least about efforts to prevent someone from speaking and reaching an audience, and often about materially punishing the speaker in other ways (such as firing).
But those efforts consist almost entirely of words.
If your position is that it's OK to call for someone to be fired (because that's just words) but not OK to actually fire them (because that's an act) then that's a perfectly plausible position, but I don't think it's the one you actually hold.
My position is that calling for someone to be fired is wrong, but it should only get counter-arguments, not material punishment. (Words get words.) Only actually firing someone should get material punishment such as boycotts. (Deeds get deeds.)
The idea is not that words are always OK. It's that even if you say words that aren't OK, you should only get words in response, not punishment.
I endorse neo-Nazis getting arguments. Not everyone needs to spend their time doing that, but there's a large enough ratio of anti-Nazis to Nazis that I expect some will.
"First a few mad geniuses, then the coolest artists and writers, then the brightest academics, then journalists, then well-educated people in general, then the population in general, and the last step was reaching the government (still not really complete; marijuana remains illegal at the federal level)."
Well then, lump me in with the non-geniuses (sane or otherwise), the dull, the non-academic, the ill-educated, because I don't happen to think that marijuana legalisation is the most pressing issue and a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance that it is illegal either in your country or my own.
I suppose it really does depend on one's experience of its use and those who use it. I wonder how it is used among the "weird Bay Area intellectuals and creative types who are really into sex and drugs"? What is their attitude to drinking alcohol? How would they regard someone who liked, and claimed to need, to drink a six-pack of cheap beer every day, and showed not a whole heap of ambition other than somehow managing to scrape together enough money for that six-pack? Because down among the lower-class types where I am, that's the level of marijuana usage. This site is probably not too pro-alcohol, and they measure the relative harms of marijuana and alcohol: https://arg.org/news/cannabis-causes-fewer-harms-to-others-than-alcohol/
So if we're talking about "legal drugs, the consumption of which makes you a waster", then marijuana is probably better than booze. But it still causes harm, and what I'm getting at is that yes humans have always found ways to get off their faces, but to understand where some of us anti-reefer madness types are coming from, flip it around: do you really think that "yeah, sitting around skulling beer all day is just the thing?"
"From an analysis of a representative survey series focused on alcohol and marijuana use and related topics among Washington adults, 8.4% of respondents reported experiencing harm because of someone else’s marijuana use compared to 21.5% from alcohol use in the past 12 months. The types of harms reported included threats or harassment, vandalism, physical harm, harms related to driving, or financial or family problems. Similar to alcohol use, the most common harms from someone else’s marijuana use was harassment, vandalism, or family problems. However, these harms, while substantial, were three times more likely to occur from drinking than marijuana.
Women experienced more harms from others’ use of either alcohol or marijuana than men, and for alcohol, the people harmed differed by age. Alcohol’s harms from others was highest among people under 40 then declined with those 60 and older reporting the lowest rate. Marijuana harms did not vary significantly by age."
"But by the 1820s, Massachussetts was one of the most open societies in the world. The Puritan Church turned into the Unitarian Church"
If you want to hear griping about Unitarians, here's some quotes from William Cobbett writing in 1821 in his "Rural Rides" (and he's none too happy about Catholics and Jews either being loosed from the legal religious restrictions of the day):
"Ah! say the Dissenters, and particularly the Unitarians; that queer sect, who will have all the wisdom in the world to themselves; who will believe and won’t believe; who will be Christians and who won’t have a Christ; who will laugh at you, if you believe in the Trinity, and who would (if they could) boil you in oil if you do not believe in the Resurrection: “Oh!” say the Dissenters, “we know very well, that your Church Parsons are[Pg 250] commanded to get, if they can, dying people to give their money and estates to the Church and the poor, as they call the concern, though the poor, we believe, come in for very little which is got in this way. But what is your Church? We are the real Christians; and we, upon our souls, never play such tricks; never, no never, terrify old women out of their stockings full of guineas.” “And, as to us,” say the Unitarians, “we, the most liberal creatures upon earth; we, whose virtue is indignant at the tricks by which the Monks and Nuns got legacies from dying people to the injury of heirs and other relations; we, who are the really enlightened, the truly consistent, the benevolent, the disinterested, the exclusive patentees of the salt of the earth, which is sold only at, or by express permission from our old and original warehouse and manufactory, Essex-street, in the Strand, first street on the left, going from Temple Bar towards Charing Cross; we defy you to show that Unitarian Parsons....”
"However, the Baron was a staunch churchman as this fact clearly proves: several years he had become what they call an Unitarian. The first time (I think) that I perceived this, was in 1812. He came to see me in Newgate, and he soon began to talk about religion, which had not been much his habit. He went on at a great rate, laughing about the Trinity; and I remember that he repeated the Unitarian distich, which makes a joke of the idea of there being a devil, and which they all repeat to you, and at the same time laugh and look as cunning and as priggish as Jack-daws; just as if they were wiser than all the rest of the world! I hate to hear the conceited and disgusting prigs, seeming to take it for granted, that they only are wise, because others believe in the incarnation, without being able to reconcile it to reason. The prigs don’t consider, that there is no more reason for the resurrection than for the incarnation; and yet having taken it into their heads to come up again, they would murder you, if they dared, if you were to deny the resurrection."
So if I believe Cobbett, and that's a large "if", even the Unitarians had doctrines they were very insistent upon were correct and must be held.
"What about the gradual secularization of Ireland during the end of the 20th century? There are so many interesting stories of societies going from more to less repressive without obvious outside intervention."
"Money" is the short answer. Your weird Bay Area intellectuals and creatives who are really into sex and drugs get to be that way because of money. Lower down the scale where there's less money or none at all, there is the same interest in sex and drugs, but it's serial monogamy or several baby mommas on the go at once instead of polyamory and compersion, and opiods instead of nootropics. Money dissolves a lot of old restrictions, as we see by the idea that once women in Third World countries get access to education, then birth rates go down, as mentioned here: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/news/women-are-the-key-to-economic-development-in-third-world-countries
"Providing women and girls with more educational opportunities contributes to: "reductions in fertility rates and increases in labour force participation rates, and in which thereby better quality of human capital of the future economy and generations."
Once you have more money sloshing around the economy, and people can get richer, then they have options. There are more choices, and consequences of those choices are lessened or can be avoided. 50s America became less repressive and more open as the economic situation improved and the post-war boom kicked in. If you have the choice between going to church on Sunday or access to some form of amusement, be that a golf course or shopping or just going for a drive in the country, then church often loses out. There's more to it than that, of course, but to pick Ireland, society loosened up as our economy improved and no longer were we exporting people to other nations but could give them jobs at home. There's even a book about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pope's_Children
It pays to distinguish the Unitarians (those people Cobbett described here, who chiefly believed in a simplified one God) from the Unitarian Universalists (who believed, at minimum, that everyone is saved, and at maximum, something flirting with humanism or pantheism), and Cobbett's 1821 from the post-Emerson 1880s or even the 1960s that Scott maybe should have picked.
The Unitarians of 1821 had doctrines they were very insistent upon, but, by very very very very gradual process, the Unitarian Universalists of 1961 did not.
Edit: "from the Universalists".
And I suppose it demonstrates Scott's point, that the gradual softening of doctrines went on from strict Puritans to "no Incarnation" Unitarians to amalgamation with Universalists to the much more "eh, God, who knows, who cares, if it floats your boat sure" UUs of today.
obviously it's not the most pressuring issue of any era. but marijuana still be legal. even if there are adicts among its users. possibly these bay area people wouldn't like six pack man. but i bet they dont suport prohibition.
It's "our favourite vices" playing out. Bay Area people may not know/be the types to sit around drinking cheap beer to get their buzz on, and can see the downsides of that in others of the lower/underclass. By comparison, they are and know the people who use weed in a sensible manner that doesn't interfere with earning a living and not being a pest. They thus argue for legalised marijuana because their mental model of users is "people like us" not the guys who sit around drinking beer *and* using weed and being losers and pests.
On the other hand, back in the days of "reefer madness", the people who drank alcohol were thinking of "people like us" as drinkers, judged the habitual drunkards harshly, and lumped in marijuana users with the habitual drunkards, layabouts, and no-goods.
That's why I disagree with Scott's "It was an ethical disaster that their progress was held back for decades, and immensely unjust that the few people who spoke out for them got punished" when it comes to legalising marijuana; you can argue that if you permit alcohol and tobacco to be legal, it's unfair to discriminate against marijuana, but I certainly don't think it's *unethical* unless you mean "any prohibition on what mentally competent and informed adults do to their bodies is unethical".
Is it unethical for vegans to push for reductions in meat-eating, possibly including making meat so expensive or difficult to obtain that giving it up will be a choice forced upon people? Discuss! (including taking into account that militant animal rights activists exist, that vegans often use moral arguments about the evils of meat eating including its deleterious effects in regard to climate change, and that people can be passionately convinced that their view is not alone correct but beneficial and good for others). Are you willing to lump the Bay Area vegan who pushes for Meatless Monday at their work place in with the anti-marijuana crusaders of the 50s who were "ethical disasters" and "immensely unjust"? The view from today may have more than is comfortable with the view from the past, and in fifty years time a prohibition we consider commonplace may be excoriated as a moral disaster by the future generation.
That should read "more than is comfortable in common with the view from the past", dear Substack please get on that edit button quickly, it is an ethical disaster and immensely unjust that progress is held back for ages on this!
Edit 2: Also, the point about vegans using moral, medical and pragmatic (it's bad for the environment) arguments about reducing or banning meat eating is that the anti-marijuana people were also using moral, medical and pragmatic arguments for banning it based on the same convictions of "banning this bad thing is a good thing for society as a whole and for individuals who would suffer from it".
If vegans put people in prison for eating meat, it would be an ethical disaster. If vegan policies created a black market for meat, thereby creating violent meat cartels, it would be an ethical disaster.
Marijuana has been legal for recreational use in California since 2016 and medical use since 1996. If the people there are arguing it should be legal everywhere, it's probably because they watched it happen and witnessed society not collapse.
"Money dissolves a lot of old restrictions, as we see by the idea that once women in Third World countries get access to education"
Education is not money. Lots of third world countries increased education by a lot without getting much economic benefit (that's one of Caplan's arguments against there being social returns in "The Case Against Education"). And Africa didn't see the same fertility declines as other regions when women entered the workforce, as they took jobs compatible with high fertility.
> Well then, lump me in with the non-geniuses (sane or otherwise), the dull, the non-academic, the ill-educated, because I don't happen to think that marijuana legalisation is the most pressing issue and a sin crying out to Heaven for vengeance that it is illegal either in your country or my own.
I'd invite you to look into the statistics of how many people are jailed for non-violent possession of marijuana. I'd then suggest reviewing the statistics of people using it for pain relief, some of whom are getting off of opiates.
It's pretty clear that whatever harm is caused by legalizing it would be by far be outweighed by the decrease in harm. Speaking as a Canadian where we just went through the legalization process.
Feel like while you are talking about internet culture you should point out what a negative thing Steve Sailer has been. He puts up a civil front, but his comment section is racist as shit and has been for years and has probably been the biggest alt-right blog.
I still read read him because he is funny but if you are going to call out the feminists by name you should call out Sailer.
OTOH, i don't judge you by your comment section. Wait a minute. I absolutely do. There are a few, very few, bald faced racists here. They are the exception not the rule.
Who? The man has no reach, nobody who matters listens to him. Feminists, on the other hand, have a death grip on our universities and are teaching generations of otherwise normal women to hate men. *That's* reach. Imagine him holding a conference at an airport Hilton vs. feminists doing so, and imagine how each event would go over.
You say that, but if *you* were a person-who-matters who reads him, would you make that fact known?
That's true, but by the same token Harland's claim is unverifiable :-)
Tyler Cowen occasionally acknowledges that Steve Sailer exists, although TC is in some other ways given to cowardly demonstrations of woke virtue.
One obvious difference is punching up (against Coca Cola) instead of punching down while pretending to punch up (against SV nerds).
A grassroots movement starts by punching up, speaking truth to power and all that. While still weak, it does not have to pull its punches, either, they do not destroy the fabric of the society. In contrast, the powers that be know they can't punch too hard, or else they risk self-destruction, their predecessors learned it the hard way, and proportionate response became a part of the culture.
The rising powers, like SJWs-turned-Cancelists (I don't dare to mention the other groups), do not have this built-in restraint because they never needed it, not being a strong enough destructive force. After all, they are punching up, right? But with time, if they get stronger and stronger, so do their punches, and yet they still have the self-identity of the oppressed sticking it to the man, long after they, inevitably, became the man. And so they end up punching down while believing they are punching up, and don't bother holding back to keep the society functioning.
As a result, "the cancer gets its own cancer", the revolution eats its own children, and this continues until the new group at the top realizes where they are and starts behaving like one, holding back to avoid breaking the structure that let them rise to the top. And so they learn proportionate response and the society stabilizes, once again (hello, Hegel, Marx and Engels) in another cycle of dialectics/dialectical/historical materialism (that ought to appease one rather vocal commenter here).
It may well be that, once the current vicious attackers realize that they have gained the upper hand, they will evolve into a more mellow version of power, one that doesn't tear itself apart with its own unrestrained force. Or it might be that they will go as fast as they came, and someone else will emerge in their ruins, a group that can realize that being in power means being selective, proportionate and forgiving, everything the currently dominating groups are not. One can hope.
The only "other group" I can think of that both is a move-fast-and-break-things rising power *and* might enact terrible vengeance on you for a mild criticism is the PRC government. Putin and the various US TLAs are both very much old power, and even if you take the reactionaries seriously they don't seem uptight enough (or to have enough manpower) to bother with some random on the Internet.
Somebody with better lateral thinking and who isn't so scared feel like cluing me in?
Real Fascists.
You mean, recently-installed fascist regimes in developing countries, to people within their own borders? Or someone else?
I am not sure if they are just LARPing, but the Internet is full of people who say "no, we are real fascists, we want to implement fascism in the truest sense of the word and plan on killing everyone who disagrees". For example, the 3%-Movement has its name from the saying "it only takes about 3% of the population for an armed revolution".
Surely these people have better targets than someone on a random cubbyhole of the Internet (i.e. *not* going into their own spaces) saying "I hope you calm down once you take power". That's pretty milquetoast - presumably the 3%ers would even say "don't worry, we will"! - and meanwhile there are hundreds if not thousands of card-carrying anti-fascists who call for these groups' suppression on a regular basis and actively come looking for them IRL.
I wouldn't advise walking up to a 3%er and yelling at him that he's the second coming of Adolf Hitler - actually, I wouldn't advise doing that to anyone - but I'm not seeing the danger from this.
Sure - but unfortunately we are building the infrastructure to punish perceived enemies both accurately and at scale. Pipe social media into a classifier into an autonomous drone swarm, or more boringly, a recommendation engine for HR. So I rather not get the Adolf version of the social credit system.
"Instead of thinking of ourselves in the middle of a new Salem Witch Hunt, we should think of ourselves as just coming out of a rare period of unusually high freedom of thought - a weird 1990s moment that gave us South Park, the phrase "if you don't like it then don't watch it", and most of the early Internet. That period wasn't part of an inexorable trend toward rising freedom, it was a weird anomaly that has to be actively defended lest we sink back into the normal regime that typified the 1950s and pretty much every other time period ever."
...I'd like to suggest instead that these socio-cultural phenomena move in approx. 30 years cycles. You get intense periods of cultural-political strife roughly every 30 years of so, with periods of relative calm in-between.
The underlying force behind this cycle is the generational transition. A new generation must grow up that has no clear recollection of the previous intense period. They raise hell in their own particular way, gets burned, calms down, and the world moves on until a new generation which has no recollection of what went on, comes on to the scene. Mixed up with this is an element of ritual father-killing, i.e. getting even with your parents' generation by discarding what they stood for.
If we limit the geographical scope to Europe/the Americas/Oceania, after the intense cultural/political events of 1934/45 you had - as a reaction - the extreme conformity of the late 1940s, 1950s/1960s; till 1968(Paris)/1969(San Francisco) triggered ten years of turbulence (the 1970s), followed by the calm of the 1980s, until 1989/92 (fall of European Communism) with its ten-year fallout; and then the relatively uneventful 2000s/2010s. We were overdue for a new cycle, hence the woke-period we experience now is on target.
"It seems intuitively obvious that if Coca-Cola is using child slaves to pick cocoa beans or something, boycotting them until they stop is a perfectly acceptable and even commendable thing to do."
You know coca leaves and cocoa beans aren't the same thing, right...?
I'm pretty sure it was a deliberately mixed-up example in order to make it obvious that it was an example and not a specific accusation. "Coca-Cola using enslaved fluffy bunnies to pick cocoa beans" would have been a more extreme example of the trope.
"If someone were to write this all up into a 2000 word blog post "Here's Why Defund The Police Probably Won't Work" which is sober and friendly and decent enough to send to your leftist aunt, then you could send it to your leftist aunt and maybe convince her."
This is what Matt Yglesias is doing at Slow Boring and if people want to learn about how to rein in their sides excesses they should read what he's done. A big part of it is not going all Yascha Monk and being a full-time "rein in my sides excesses" guy, but instead writing mostly stuff that's about getting the details of progressive policy right, how Republicans are bad, and then every now and then dropping in a hot take about how refund the police is bad.
Is Yglesias going to de-radicalize the most committed, of course not. But he does provide argumentation and a permission structure for dissenting while retaining progressive credentials for normie blue tribers.
I don't think Scott or other Grey Tribe people could accomplish something similar because they simply do not write enough about how the red tribe is bad to have credibility with blue tribe.
Also I get a sense that a substantial portion of mainstream democratic politicians and pundits are really pissed about defund the police and feel it really cost them in the 2020 election, but are concerned about saying it too openly. We'll see how well they're able to coordinate to supress their fringe behind the scenes, and I think they'll get a boost when the pandemic ends and there are things to do other than sit on a computer inside. In terms of who has power and sets policy the center left has consistently been able to restrain the left fringe, but we'll see if that has any spillover into the online culture war arena and speech norms in white collar social circles... which seems to be vastly more interesting to grey tribe/rationalist discussion forums than the distribution of resources at stake in federal spending.
Sorry Scott, but I'm still not over your description of the democratic coalition functioning by primarily giving minorities token cultural representation immediately after the most recent stimulus act which was a massive boost to low income people.
Re: "pissed about defund the police"
I don't quite follow, were they pissed because it meant they got Biden the moderate vs. someone more socially progressive?
Biden had already won the primary by the time defund the police became big. There was a hope that with Corona and Biden's big polling lead Dem's could win large majorities and pass substantial legislation. Remember all the discussion about packing the court prior to the election?
Then Biden won narrowly, D's got the senate by a tiny margin and Joe Manchin determines what legislation gets passed. This means that the most important parts of the progressive agenda are dead on arrival (making Puerto Rico a state, redistricting reform). Normie Dems are kind of coping by pretending that the relief bills make Biden FDR, but the really dialed in people realize that they've lost the Senate for probably the next decade without HR1. "Defund the Police" and the far left parts of the democratic primary are the natural scapegoats
second this post wholeheartedly. For those interested in some of the studies that Matt Y cites for why "policing decreases crime a lot, that decreasing policing increases crime, that the alternatives to policing that CHAZ etc propose don't work very well, that increasing crime hurts minorities the most, and that minorities are generally against this kind of thing," check out the links below.
More cops on the street deters crime:
https://www.princeton.edu/~smello/papers/cops.pdf
https://www.vox.com/2020/6/18/21293784/alex-vitale-end-of-policing-review
More hours of investigation is correlated with more crimes solved: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-08/du-spe072519.php
Abolition and defunding are unpopular, including (and perhaps especially) among African Americans:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/315962/americans-say-policing-needs-major-changes.aspx
https://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/08/15/poll-mpls-residents-dont-like-police-department-but-still-want-to-fund-it
You sound depressed. I don't think that has anything to do with what is actually going on.
I would also be depressed if culture commissar Cade Metz wrote a hit piece on my for the Holy Inquis... I mean NYT.
I personally would have hoped for SA not to tell us to stand down.
Again, I think people are way overblowing the actual intended force of that Cade Metz article. It wasn't good, but it wasn't the kind of personal attack that many in this community seem to think it was. This is just how big organizations treat interesting curiosities that they don't quite understand.
Regarding the waxing and waning of the respectable versus the liberated, I think this really does come in cycles. If we take the current cycle of "cancel culture" and all the rest of it, it's a reaction to the (relative, looking back) Wild West free and open range of the 90s.
Invoking the Victorians as in the last paragraph of the essay, before Victoria came to the throne, the monarchy was not well-regarded; her uncle the king was "Silly Billy" https://www.regencyhistory.net/2012/01/who-was-silly-billy.html and matters had come to such a pitch that royal carriages were pelted by the public. Victoria's mother brought her up under a *very* rigid system precisely to avoid the ill-repute of the monarchy, and when Victoria married Albert they deliberately set out on a campaign to raise the status of the monarchy in the eyes of the public, and to inculcate 'respectable' values in society as a whole.
The Gin Craze led to the Temperance movement. Public immorality led to the Great Awakenings in Britain and the US; the Methodists were an alternative (set up as an internal reform movement by Wesley) to the rather moribund Church of England. This is why the joke/pun about "the Great Awokening" works, because now we're back in the "respectability" arc of the cycle.
There have always been, and will always be, public and social pieties to observe. Perhaps before it was "Mom and apple pie" while today it is "birthing parent and veganism", but the same forces are at work. Yes you can have sex'n'drugs'n'rock-and-roll as much as you want in the varieties that you want - so long as you adhere to the list of options of the most scrupulously correct around what is the proper description of your orientation and gender status (I think I now understand why young people are allegedly having less sex; by the time all parties concerned have negotiated the entire list of options, everyone is too exhausted to actually do anything). Picking up from the comment thread on the previous post, I have seen people clawing at one another over what is the difference, if any, between being bisexual and being pansexual (for one thing).
Greater and greater liberalisation leads to the reaction towards respectability which then becomes ossified and perceived as repressive by the rising generation which then loosens things up once they get their hands on influence and/or power, and so on and so forth.
Trump's infamous taped remarks about "grab 'em by the pussy" was representative of that particular era, of Howard Stern and the shockjocks and cock rock, where that kind of strutting, exhibitionist cocksmanship was seen as cool and upfront and sticking it to The Man who was the repressed prudes and squares, like Stern's battles with the FCC where Stern's juvenile fart humour was perceived as the heroic side.
The reaction to that was probably at its crescendo in the MeToo movement, and we're still feeling the effects of that wave even as it recedes with the ebbing tide. But the manner in which Title IX morphed from "colleges must fund women's sports equally to men's sports" to "sexual harassment/assault policies" https://www.huffpost.com/entry/in-defense-of-the-title-ix-dear-colleague-letter_b_59bddb9ae4b06b71800c3a2f is one example of the reaction in action.
We're in the Moral Rearmament phase of the cycle right now, in another five years or so we may be starting to swing to the "New 70s" (God help us all, say I, having lived through the 70s first time round).
I seem to remember that the late '80s/early '90s was all about how "political correctness" had run amok and now they've forced us to call women "Ms.".
what did they used to call them? Mr?
Mrs. if she's married, Miss if she isn't. Men get the same title regardless of whether they're married, which implies marriage is more important for women than for men.
This article about the history of "Ms." in the New York Times is eye-opening: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/insider/1986-ms-joins-the-timess-vocabulary.html
...FFS. Scott, I know I should be focusing on the meta-level points, fighting the culture war here defeats the whole idea, and ultimately I disagree with point (2) more generally - that is, I don't think long blog posts are inherently better than Twitter, en masse. Twitter is terrible, yes, but that's because social media is terrible (although still far better than legacy media alone would be), and I don't think its character limit is actually the cause for its dysfunction. At least most of the people arguing about a tweet have actually read that tweet....
But your comments on (2) just utterly break my mental model of you. That is: you, apparently, support police officers in any and all brutality, up to an including choking a man to death for nine minutes *while being aware of being filmed*, and your proposal for improvement is more police. Similarly, CHAZ's interesting part was an attempt at ~anarchist commune, and like any anarchist experiment it got suppressed by the government, as was obviously going to happen from day 1, but the very concept of which not happening terrified Fox News; if you ignore that and just treat it as a riot, it doesn't really stand out in summer 2020 America. And, I mean, I'd understand if there was a tribal bubble, but I know you're not in that bubble. Eliezer Yudkowsky was tweeting suggestions for comprehensive police reform, FFS. You know full well that "defund the police" was supposed to be an alternative to "abolish the police", not a rephrasing of the same statement, referring to cutting police budgets - obviously the slogan was a terrible one, and its amplification was probably because it was *selected* for terribleness by social media, but I know you're aware of that.
(And yes, I already know most of the commenters here support authoritarianism, no need to confirm that.)
BLM-2020 was the first time in a while that the left side of the culture war centered itself around a real and blatant injustice, namely the lack of police accountability (specifically about black people, yes, but if you're going to play identity politics it's worlds ahead of the norm, since it's actually dealing with real harm being caused to real people and disproportionately affecting the group in question). Certainly there were issues with i.e. the extent to which it was made about race, or the way that the discourse was taken to other countries in ways that's likely to make their police forces worse; but on the basic level, police officers kill more people in the US than other Western countries, and the absolute shamelessness in covering the brutality up in basically every incident is something that's... I mean, I guess if you're literally incapable of anger, it might not enrage you.
And this is also kind of blatantly opposed to the civil libertarianism and freedom of speech you're talking about. Empowering police to do anything in the name of stopping violent crime will not lead to them stopping at violent crime - maybe they'll stop at black people, but there's enough pressure on that point nowadays that I'm doubtful. It's this level of hand-wringing about riots that - yes, obviously riots are bad. They are also an inevitable side effect of social change. But the threat gets amplified, especially now with global media, to create fear that's entirely out of proportion to the actual danger. The left had its own version with the Capital riot. Frankly, when a national legislature has less than 20% approval, they shouldn't be too surprised to see an angry mob show up. And then you have the people paranoid about crime rates that do 100mph during their daily commute, to say nothing of the 92% of US deaths that come about due to disease of some sort.
I know you tend to do the thing - which is a natural human impulse, and which I've certainly been guilty of myself - where you try to demonstrate those of your beliefs that fit the in-group, such as citing Alex Jones and global warming in "If You Can Be Bad, You Can Also Be Good". This tends to backfire because people see the tribal signal is being faked, but human nature is what it is. But still, if that's what you're doing here, those signals are fundamentally true beliefs - I'm sure you really do believe Alex Jones is insane, and that oil companies are funding bunk global cooling "science". And there's definitely been a lot of people in rationalist-adjacent Twitter, at least, that have been authoritarian in the name of Safety for a long time, and maybe this has been getting worse as the founders age into believing that any change will probably harm them (not only financially but physically, financially, emotionally, financially, spiritually, and financially). And yes, getting murdered is a primal fear, and for a number of low-openness people that's more important than any claimed rationalist principle; and in the end it's a spectrum. But I did have you at a different position on that spectrum, and it's disappointing to learn otherwise.
(For what it's worth, as ever, I'm posting this because I do think your posts are usually amazing. This includes the previous post on the Culture War's history - certainly I hadn't realized the ebb of Internet feminism, but it's definitely real now that you mention it. And the basic question of when cancel culture becomes a problem is also valid, though I feel like there's a simple solution to at least most of the question that reduces it to a similarly where-do-you-draw-the-line but more familiar question.)
I suppose this post has wound up becoming, in itself, a test of the theory that longform anger is just as bad as shortform. I'll reread it in the morning and think about whether I agree.
As someone who has seen the film and ready the autopsy report, this still seems to be what actually happened. What, exactly, do you think is inaccurate about that summary?
Some people pretend to think that choking to death is only possible if your neck is broken. Relatedly, some people actually do seem to think police officers are entitled by papal infallibility.
The autopsy report literally mentions neck compression, and concludes that he died of asphyxiation.
He wasn't choked to death. His chest was compressed enough that he couldn't get enough air.
To be more precise: asphyxiation does not require any blunt-force trauma, saying so is just entirely backwards. It's just being unable to get oxygen in sufficient quantity into your lungs, which can be caused by various factors such as breathing a nitrogen-only atmosphere, smothering someone by blocking their nose&mouth, or, yes, putting enough weight on their body to close their airways (but not so much as to break their bones).
I think longform anger is better than shortform since it is more detailed and can thusly be addressed better.
I'm also not sure he is against police reform, just the defunding. Maybe he is wrong, which is why someone should just tell him why he is wrong.
Yeah, very little of the energy in recent protests seemed to be directed toward things like qualified immunity. As Yglesias pointed out, better policing would probably require us to INCREASE funding.
It's true that most of the discourse was unproductive, but that's more about the media in general. Certainly I saw qualified immunity being talked about, for instance, and people discussing what "abolish the police" could actually look like; I guess some of this is baselines (i.e. I find Twitter being even slightly reasonable a pleasant surprise). The paragraph in question reads, to me, less like "police reform will ultimately require spending a lot of money" and more like the standard Fox talking points, just phrased civilly.
There were places whose city councils reduced funding for police (although some of them reversed course later). And the outcomes from police reforms in the wake of viral incidents tend to be much worse than reforms absent such incidents.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/06/policing-the-police.html
Generally, I guess there's a common thread here, which is an aura of fear. Being afraid of Internet feminism even when Internet feminism has been greatly diminished; fear of crime disproportionate to its actual frequency; police maintaining authority through fear. And the way that disproportionate fear makes things worse, even though it's not necessarily irrational.
What stands out to me is I would expect that after living through a live cancellation attempt by no less than the New York Times, only to come out with the broad support of whatever part of the general public cared enough to read the story, plus a new six figure offer to finally become a paid professional writer, you'd think he might do the Bayesian thing and update away from being so afraid of the Internet, but instead he doubles down. He's great at telling other people that they're overreacting (when they usually actually are), but can't get out of his own insecurities and encourages the absolute worst catastrophizing in his commenters that seem to think they're going to be lined up against the wall any year now.
By the way, James Damore was apparently unemployed for ten months, about the same length of time Scott stopped blogging: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-damore-b277b62b/
What a death sentence.
No, I don't think it is. I'm sorry but I'm absolutely sick of the woe is me I'm so damn terrified all the time tone of the commenters here. And it's the same blog that with cold statistical detachment will point out that black people aren't really in much danger when facing the police. Which is probably completely true! But it's just as true of the ridiculous crippling mostly unfounded fears that you have, too. A lot of people have perfectly understandable catastrophic fears that are well out of proportion to the actual magnitude of harm they are likely to ever face, and the rational thing to do is to temper that fear, not stoke it.
I'm absolutely sick of all the people who say it's perfectly fine to get someone fired from their job, because they'll probably get another job and look here's some cases where somebody got fired from their job and got another job. By this argument, any assault that doesn't literally kill or maim is no big deal, because the victim gets better. Rape is usually no big deal because hey, no lasting harm except for some trauma that's all in their head and they shouldn't let it bother them like that.
I don't think the NYT article can reasonably be described as a "cancellation attempt" in the first place.
"You, apparently, support police officers in any and all brutality, up to an including choking a man to death for nine minutes *while being aware of being filmed*, and your proposal for improvement is more police."
I don't support this and it's hard for me to understand why you think I do. If you quote the part that made you think I think this, I can try to tell you what I really mean.
By analogy, you can find examples of doctors doing incredibly terrible things, but still support more health care overall, and oppose a movement to un-nuanced-ly demonize doctors. My understanding is that minorities and poor people support more policing in their neighborhoods, to a higher degree than white people and rich people do, and this seems reasonable to me. My understanding is also that the recent rollback of policing caused a few hundred to a few thousand extra normal murders, while decreasing the killed-by-police murder rate by only single or double-digits if at all. This seems bad for the sort of people who get normal-murdered, who are usually black and poor.
I support some police accountability measures, though I'm also concerned about people wanting to lock up officers and throw away the key for what are obvious mistakes. I am a doctor and I sometimes make mistakes, and if I made somewhat worse mistakes and also had extremely bad luck, I could end up killing someone. I don't know what the right balance between compassion and take-away-their-license is for eg overworked surgeons whose hands slip and accidentally nick an artery and kill someone, but I think locking them up for the rest of their lives, turning them into a national villain, and telling everyone that they did it on purpose because they're a Nazi isn't it. So it concerns me when this is the standard that gets applied to eg cops who confuse their real guns with their tasers. Obviously when someone is deliberately and premeditatedly brutal this doesn't apply.
I know you're not trying to draw a perfect equivalency here, but it's worth thinking about the comparison between doctors and police a little more carefully. Doctors go through extensive schooling and can't practice without licenses that are (in theory at least) carefully regulated. Police typically have three or four months of academy training, then become members of a union that rabidly defends them more or less regardless of what they do. In most places, no licensure of any kind exists; if a cop somehow does manage to do something so egregiously wrong that even the union arbitration process can't protect their job, they typically just go get a new job in the police department the next town over. Also, the person that a doctor accidentally kills has given informed consent to a medical procedure aware of the potential risks, and often has made a deliberate decision about which doctor to trust with their care. The difference from the typical interaction with a police officer is, I think, self-evident. Also, if anything, in the world we currently live in a doctor is probably MORE likely to get criminally prosecuted for on-the-job misconduct than a police officer.
That is a lovely example which I will be stealing.
Ha! Well, if you are going to talk more about this in the future, it's worth also mentioning the last piece, which is the availability (or lack thereof) of monetary compensation -- the only kind of amends the US legal system really recognizes -- for injuries caused by irresponsible on-the-job conduct. Doctors are required to carry medical insurance, and malpractice suits typically result in recoveries for plaintiffs if the doctor genuinely fucked up. Police, on the other hand, are protected by qualified immunity and it's nearly impossible to win a civil suit against them. Just yesterday the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted QI to cops who tackled an unresisting man who was pulled over a broken taillight, then repeatedly punched and kicked him while he was on the ground: https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/19/19-30247-CV0.pdf
So I was being hyperbolic due to being angry, and I apologize for that. But:
I've seen similar sentiments in more detail from other centrists (i.e. Yglesias) - "sure, police killing people isn't ideal, and I'm not opposed to fixing that, but the priority has to be stopping crime." Now, I'm probably pattern-matching somewhat, but that's the sentiment you seem to be mostly agreeing with, and part of that is what you said about the doctor comparison, and acknowledging that even a police department that does its best to avoid killing people will at some point have to.
The thing is, debates over strategy (because mass movements tend to make idiotic strategic mistakes basically always) aside, there's an intuition - and I too used to share this intuition - that most police departments in the US are that way, much like that's the intuition for hospitals. And it's become increasingly clear to me, even before George Floyd's death, that it's the opposite: police departments with human-aligned values are the exception, not the rule (at least in big cities). The rest have a culture of shooting first and covering it up, and more generally rule by terror. They're systemically broken, it's not a question of individual blame. (And, indeed, police in Western European countries kill several times fewer people.)
This matters on the level of individual interaction, i.e. treating calling the police as a Godzilla Threshold. Some people (usually well-off women who have never had the police called on them) will call the police over trifles, and this can kill people.
And a huge part of the problem is lack of accountability. Like, what you said - "locking them up for the rest of their lives" is something that practically never happens even in cases of blatant cruelty. Chauvin's conviction is exceptional, and even his sentence isn't life. In most cases of deliberate brutality, there's no punishment at all. As to the press turning people into a national villain and calling them a Nazi for accidentally killing someone - well, yes, but the threshold for that is very low nowadays. You have, after all, been made a national villain and called a Nazi for writing SSC.
Scott, I know you don't actually support police brutality, because you are a pretty empathetic person. I think my confusion comes in because you seem pretty uncritical of policing compared to basically every other American institution. I've seen you criticize the American healthcare system, mainstream science, and most recently, you seemed to imply that maybe we should at least give some thought to abolishing mandatory education, but when it comes to an institution that functions mainly by putting lots of people with guns on the street and giving them permission to shoot people when they feel threatened the only writing I can recall you doing seems to be about how critics get their statistics wrong, or their arguments are grossly unrealistic, or (in the above case) we need to empathize more with individual police officers who are put in tough situations. And the things is, all three of those things can be true without me feeling like there's not a LOT more a reasonable person could say on this issue. You are allowed to be neutral, or skeptical, or agnostic, but you give the appearance of someone who thinks policing basically works as an institution and the may problem is that its over-politicized. So either there's a vast swath of reform-based arguments that you actually agree with and consider so common-sense you've never bothered to spell them out (which your comment above kind of implies), or you are basically okay with a modern institution that's only really one step up the ladder from having samurai running around on horseback lopping the limbs off anyone they consider an affront to justice. Which...seems out of character for you? In every other domain where it looks like people are being crushed by a failure to speculate about possible technocratic, libertarian solutions, you are usually the first cheerleader, but the second someone says "maybe the institution of policing is a barbaric holdover from a more primitive state of society" you don't have anything to say. And again, I don't think that makes you evil, I just think its an odd look for you. Unless I've missed something really important, always a possibility.
Also, from the police reformists I listen to, the communities who say they want more policing are usually talking about wanting crimes to be investigated more efficiently and promptly, and wanting people to show up faster when you dial 911 in an emergency. Both of which are important! Neither of which are the same thing as having more officers driving around in circles pulling over anyone with a broken taillight to drive up tax revenue, which I think is usually what you actually get whenever you increase policing budgets and police presence. I wonder if a lot of the communities asking for more policing really want "better" policing of a type that people in richer communities take for granted.
"That is: you, apparently, support police officers in any and all brutality, up to an including choking a man to death for nine minutes *while being aware of being filmed*, and your proposal for improvement is more police."
Even assuming this to be the case (I am not convinced - it is possible that Chauvin callously choked Floyd to death, but it is also entirely possible that Floyd was a dead man walking by that point and was going to suffer a fatal overdose anyway, and that Chauvin was making what appeared to him to be a reasonable trade-off between alertly monitoring the health of a large, muscular and potentially dangerous arrestee vs risking him causing a danger to the public) ... even if we accept the premise that Chauvin is a murderer, the solution is still not going to be *less* police, it's going to be *better* police. You can reduce police brutality by, e.g. training police properly in violence-minimising restraint techniques - see https://samharris.org/podcasts/246-police-training-police-misconduct/ for a good discussion on this - or by increasing the number of cops on the beat so that a) arrestees are more likely to have a visceral sense of being outnumbered and less likely to think they can win a fight with the cops, and b) the larger number of cops can collectively restrain an arrestee more easily without needing to inflict unnecessary violence.
Reducing the number of cops means that such cops as you still have are more likely to feel outnumbered and panicky and resort to violence, *and* more violent crime goes unsolved, which, if you are worried about *overall* risks to people's lives and wellbeing, is still a larger problem than the real but relatively smaller problem of abuses being committed by cops.
"the lack of police accountability (specifically about black people, yes, but if you're going to play identity politics it's worlds ahead of the norm, since it's actually dealing with real harm being caused to real people and disproportionately affecting the group in question)."
Are you sure about this? Scott wrote about this back in 2014 - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/25/race-and-justice-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ - as far as anyone can work out, although the police do appear to carry out non-lethal violence and harassment against black people at disproportionate rates, they do *not* appear to actually kill black people disproportionately, when controlled against the proper baseline of percentage of each racial group who are committing the sort of crimes that bring them to the attention of the police (as opposed to a crude population headcount). Yes, of course, racial bias in non-lethal harassment is still worth reducing, but to the degree that the Black *Lives* Matter movement is concerned about police *killings*, their central claim appears to be probably false.
Does it make sense to think of societies as generally more closed or open?
Let's take fundamentalist Christianity. From my point of view, their society is closed. But from their point of view, they're creating space for celebrating a Christian viewpoint, and giving all the corners of fundamentalist Christian thought room to breathe. If I wanted to become a Catholic priest and hear people's confessions, I can't do that unless I'm in a Catholic society. If I'm a mystic who has religious visions, I lose that role in a secular society and just seem crazy.
Alternatively, consider the military, another stereotypically closed society. But I expect that, if I wanted it, I'd find more tolerance for machismo, aggression, and uniformity than I have access to in civilian life.
What are the enthusiasms, eccentricities, and quirks that we'd find tolerated and appreciated in an apparently "closed" society, that would simply disappear in an "open" society where the defining paradigm of the "closed" society was no longer in control?
Rather than asking if a society is "more open" or "more closed," we should specify: "open/closed to what?"
What, specifically, would we like American society in 2021 to be more open about, and in what ways?
I don't think the military permits you to act aggressive toward your superior officer.
We live in a period of high polarization, not enforced conformity. This is very different from the 1950s! In the 1950s there was an broad society-wide consensus on a large range of issues. Extreme polarization can feel like forced conformity if all the people you're interested in interacting with belong to one of the poles, but structurally they seem very different. For example, "such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any unpopular opinion" does not seem like a real risk. Almost any opinion that is suppressed by one side will have an audience on the other. No idea can be made off-limits because if you're interested the other side will be happy to tell you about it.
Conformity is enforced through unavoidable institutions. E.g. my coworkers are probably evenly distributed politically, but we all have to check the box that we agree to HR/DIE policies, and this can't be escaped by going to a different firm - any businesses can have its license to operate revoked by not complying with state mandates.
Just a bit of clarification, the Puritan Church split roughly geographically. Eastern New England churches became Unitarian churches under the influence of Harvard, while Western New England churches remained Puritan, now called Congregational, under the influence of Yale.
This might already be buried under a number of comments, but there's been a lot of work done on Quebec's 'quiet revolution', in which Quebec went from the most conservative and religious province in Canada to one of the the most liberal and secular within a decade. The wikipedia page is actually a pretty good summary (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Revolution, it's better in French if you can read it!)
The overall culture changed dramatically from 1960-1970: "The lifetime average number of live births per woman of child-bearing age) falling from 3.8 in 1960 to 1.9 in 1970.", expectations for staying in education changed dramatically in response to falling behind English Canada (with economic support in the form of heavily subsidised university education and a sort of pre-college prep school), and although a number of schools were (and are) still technically Catholic, the education became effectively secular.
There's a lot of debate as to exactly why it happened (beyond the proximate causes of a Liberal government coming into place), but the one I find the most compelling is simply a fear of falling behind the rest of Canada which overcame the broader cultural inertia.
Point of clarity: I initially read "concerned about social justice" as meaning "caring about social justice; part of the social justice movement", got confused by the rest of the paragraph, and had to go back and re-parse it as "worried about the overreach of the social justice movement".
I think a lot of people will read it the first way, especially if they're coming from outside the context of the movement being dangerously overreaching and just think of "social justice" (lower case, compositional) as an obviously good thing.
Also: really good article; I found the bit about not contributing to the culture of fear especially thought-provoking.
Yeah same
>And what about the Victorians in England? What about the gradual secularization of Ireland during the end of the 20th century?
This isn't quite what you asked for, but I wrote something about how Victorian Britain maintained its social norms here (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/victorian-values-a-practical-guide), here (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/a-practical-guide-to-victorian-values) and here (https://wyclif.substack.com/p/victorian-values-conclusions).
Why it changed is a different matter. In some sense Victorian England was indeed quite repressive - enough for John Stuart Mill to worry about it:
"it is the opinions men entertain, and the feelings they cherish, respecting those who disown the beliefs they deem important, which makes this country not a place of mental freedom. For a long time past, the chief mischief of the legal penalties is that they strengthen the social stigma. It is that stigma which is really effective, and so effective is it, that the profession of opinions which are under the ban of society is much less common in England, than is, in many other countries, the avowal of those which incur risk of judicial punishment."
At the same time, it was one of the freest countries in the world in terms of what you could publish – arguably freer than we are now. You could call for the violent overthrow of all existing governments. You could scandalize society with your sceptical poetry (http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html). You could imply that humans were descended from apes.
I think "Victorian repression" does not look very like the modern version. It was more localized, and had more holes in it. Aristocratic eccentrics could do what they liked (Mill again: "Those whose bread is already secured, and who desire no favours from men in power, or from bodies of men, or from the public, have nothing to fear from the open avowal of any opinions, but to be ill-thought of and ill-spoken of...") It was also more focused on behaviour than opinions.
We have the opposite situation. We have a huge focus on what you can say, but few sanctions on behaviour. I think the reason is that what people or corporations say in public is easy to check from behind a keyboard. Checking real behaviour isn't. So our norms focus on things that you can find out and get angry about with little effort.
Great stuff!
The last two posts have struck me as such a healthier outlook to CW stuff than I usually see from either side.
One thing I want to focus on is what Scott only briefly mentioned, which is working on better cultural, social norms as a replacement.
I also don't have the full answer to this, but in my opinion, we need to be pushing super hard on two specific values: Charity and Gratitude.
Charity:
This is a natural one for Rationalists and so sorely lacking in CW discussions. Even if you're totally sure your opponent is "bad-faith" treating them that way only makes things worse. We need to be patient, understanding that we're all only humans, and work as hard as possible to respect the other side's views and intentions. The truth is that the vast majority of humanity really does have good intentions and I honestly believe that the more we treat this as a given the more it will become manifest in our discourse.
How does having charitable social norms look like?
It should be awkward and embarrassing when someone on our side is mean and uncharitable to the other side. Assuming good faith should be rewarded always! Even if the assumption is wrong!
What's the opposite of this? Searching for "dog-whistles" or "trojan horse agendas".
Gratitude:
My biggest issue with obsessing over who's more or less "privileged" is that this heavily incentives people to look for reasons they're suffering or more disadvantaged than others. We've already had tons of research into how to live happier lives and the answer to the best of my knowledge is a gratitude journal, ie listing every day or week the number of reasons to be grateful (please don't get replication crisis-ed!).
Lets all be proud of the blessings in our lives and share them publically. Let's all be thankful that the lives of women and minorities have been steadily improving instead of using this as a weapon to prove a point.
So on one level, we should practice Gratitude simply to be happier, and obsessing over categorising the privileged and oppressors makes as all sadder.
But I'm actually pushing Gratitude for a higher purpose. The best defence of Liberal Values is their huge success story. We need cultural norms that celebrate humanity's success just as much as pointing out our failures. Now you can (and maybe should) shove Steven Pinker's books down people's throats all you want, but this needs to be coupled with a social norm that looks down on people complaining all the time. And we need to reward the optimists and cheerful among us much more.
I think this is something Rationalists are a bit weaker about than with Charity.
We absolutely need people screaming to high heavens at how terrible our system is/was at reacting to Covid. But we equally need those same people giving humanity a pat on the back for using cutting edge technology to churn out a bunch of highly effective vaccines within a year.
We need to be immensely grateful for the world we find ourselves living in. This is how we keep the shortsighted revolutionaries at bay.
I know Scott does this (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/) of course, so um, more of that.
Bonus third social norm to be pushing: Julia Galef's Scout Mindset.
We need to actively be thinking about these norms when arguing on Reddit or whatever and reward and look down on actors based on this.
Society isn't so bad. The standard of living is greater than ever before, in the USA and globally. All the complaints about today seem localized. Like, who gives a fuck about what people are talking about on the Internet? I don't like people getting cancelled but that's about 0% of the population, and even those are kinda assholes.
The world is better off. Who gives a fuck about internet culture?
Internet culture influences real culture.
I feel like the key difference between the current moment and most other moments of repressiveness is that usually the ideas getting repressed are unpopular new ones, whereas right now we're repressing mainstream and well-established ideas. Some of the ideas that will get you fired if you say them out loud are ideas which are believed by at least 40%+ and possibly 50%+ of the population.
This isn't unprecedented I'm sure; ideas like "Boy, the ruling party sure are a bunch of moronic jerks" would get you in serious trouble in 1980s Poland or 2020s Iran despite being quietly believed by (I'm guessing) most of the population. But I do think it _might_ be unprecedented within the context of a modern western democracy.
I think this assessment is biased by the fact that the people doing the repressing are the ones that tend to get their ideas written down in the history books, which makes them more popular.
Does the Jim Crow south count as a "modern western democracy"? Because Timur Kuran used that as an example (alongside communist countries) of preference falsification in "Private Truths, Public Lies". Admittedly, it's been years since I read it and the details of private vs public opinions there might not fit your criteria.
I think one underlying assumption is unfortunately kind of a stretch - that we are all in the same boat trying to find an equilibrium. I think at least a big chunk of people will always tend to fend in their own interests - just because you are unfairly disadvantaged does not mean you are not a power-hungry ass-wad who will ride the moral backwind as far as it will take them. And they will in the right too while doing this; the ability to lie to yourself in order to lie better to others is a crucial feature of a social being.
So those types will use all kinds of sucker-punches and pocket sands to shut down any rational recognition that their movement might have reached its goal. On the flip-side of course the establishment will try to downplay them right away, because they really don't want to suffer the virtually insurmountable pain of changing their language or uninstalling WhatsApp.
I think the line of cancel-culture should be drawn at things that directly influence the real world - I get the urge to cancel people who say awful things, have it myself. But in the end it is a difference if someone just declares themselves a fan of police states (which I abhor) or actually demands the firing of some guy at Mozilla because he tweeted something a few years ago. The latter types are definitely evil, power-drunk self-righteous bastards who deserve being canceled themselves for their crimes. The former just needs someone talking to them.
>My point is that the 1950s cultural regime was good at censoring things quietly and through general social pressure, with a minimum of Red Guards breaking people's kneecaps.
Also a gratifying lack of Homosexual Liver being served at parties. Credit where it's due.
I think the reason people are worried about Red Guards is that they were a student-led attempt to change wider culture, and one of the very few examples of such. That said, without Mao/Jiang Qing and with millennial violence-aversion we can hope this isn't going down the same road.
>Cancel culture itself has shown us how wrong that is - when the culture is pressuring companies to behave a certain way, they'll all cave in together, and nobody will dare try profiting off bucking the trend.
I mean, you are writing this on the website of a company that dared and profits immensely. I'm not saying segregation like this is not itself a problem, but to force outright cutting of service takes some serious hurdles to entry.
(That said, I haven't seen a competitor to PayPal/VISA/Mastercard pop up the way they have for most things. Financial accreditation seems to be a pretty big bottleneck for entrepreneurs.)
>Good thing everyone agrees on objective standards for badness!
LOL!
Surely the relevant part about cancel culture isn't whether you can refuse to go, or whether you can encourage others to refuse to go, but whether you can STOP others from going even though they want to, either by sabotaging the event or applying pressure on the organizers?
Weird experience for me to read this coming from my own perspective where liberalism is important but I'm primarily a leftie, and fixing the cost of living seems like so much more of an urgent and more logically prior problem than does solving cancel culture does. Probably also a reflection of the different realities of where you and I live. But yeah, like I want a liberal society where people are free to express different views and live in different ways but there's too many people in New Zealand spending way too much just in order to live. That doesn't allow time to think about ethics or governance, or invest in communities. I don't know how one could make a serious attempt at communicating with people of diverse opinions and trying to find points of agreement on which to build greater movements under these conditions.
How do you intend to convince people to spend less money?
I think (and benwave can correct me if I'm wrong) that:
> there's too many people in New Zealand spending way too much just in order to live.
Should be:
> there's too many people in New Zealand spending way too much ->TIME<- just in order to live.
The implication being that for many (at least in the US), the 8x5 work week has already inched closer to a 12x5 when one factors in commute time, and minus an additional eight hours for {sleep / lying in bed at night trying to get to sleep / lying in bed in the morning trying to wake up} leaves people with four hours per workday with which to cram all their personal errands, downtime, hobbies, and general self-enrichment - assuming they don't have kids, because in that case it becomes negative numbers!
You can see consequences from this in many places - whether it's the rise of delivery services (say what you will about Amazon, but being able to have stuff like aspirin and lightbulbs delivered to your doorstep within a day or so, minimizing the foresight traditionally required of delivery services, can be an absolute godsend), or the cultural shift from prime-time TV to binge-watching entire seasons on the weekends.
I think spending too much time is a very different problem from spending too much money. The former can be ameliorated by spending more money and the latter by spending less money.
I believe "they are spending too much" in this case is a judgment on the costs of the basic necessities for existence, not a judgement on people's spending habits. So, people *need* to spend more than they can afford to spend just to keep surviving, because basic costs are too high.
I can see how one could make such an argument in say Somalia, with a GDP/capita of less than a dollar a day, buy it strikes me as absurd in NZ, where incomes are a hundred times higher and even the poorest live a life that those on the Malthusian limit could scarcely even dream of.
I don't want them to spend less money, I just want less of their money to be spent on things over which they have no realistic choice. Rent, being the colossal one in the New Zealand context. Rents are high across the board in New Zealand, and even increasingly in small towns in the middle of nowhere - where there aren't even jobs. This is because the housing market is hugely dysfunctional. Land, consents, building materials are all artificially constrained and demand is artificially stoked due to the taxation regime almost entirely ignoring land
I'm in favor of fighting the increasing cost of living, but I'm having trouble seeing how these are connected.
I view liberalism as something which has a cost to maintain (or defend). I'm not optimistic that it can be 'solved' and then is 'safe' and we can stop paying attention to it. The cost of living is a threat to our collective ability to defend liberalism - if enough people aren't really able to pay that cost we will lose it. And I can't quite find it in me to blame anybody for dropping their defense of liberalism if the security of their future was threatened. So I see it as a priority to ensure society is providing for the needs of people And is giving them some slack left over for things like defending (or increasing) liberalism.
Possibly me seeing this as more important/foundational than direct campaigning for liberalism right now is wrong, I don't discount that. Obviously both are needed. But I've never been able to convince myself otherwise.
I feel like I owe you a better explanation, but I haven't had the time to really gather my thoughts together properly on this.
> And if it's okay to boycott them yourself, surely it's also okay to use social media as a platform to ask other people to join your boycott.
For what it's worth, that is where I answer "no" and make that my line in the sand. If you quietly and politely refuse to do business with people who you despise, then that is your own affair, and if people make themselves despicable they therefore run the risk of ruin when large numbers of people decide, independently of each other, to not do business with those despicable people. However, telling others that they must not do business with people that you find despicable or else they're not good people is spreading hate and should not be allowed.
I could see some edge cases wherein someone might say, "hey, did you hear about this bad thing that such-and-such company is doing?" without making an overt calls for boycots, but I think that by and large I'd be okay with that. There is only so much you can do by hinting and passive-aggressiveness.
> if people make themselves despicable they therefore run the risk of ruin when large numbers of people decide, independently of each other, to not do business with those despicable people
In theory, this is an excellent self-regulating solution.
In practice... when has it ever actually happened?
We can assume that Strawman Despicable MegaCo won't actually run advertisements saying "our product development is overseen by our Youth Manager in Omelas; everything in the line is also shoddily-constructed and will injure you after two years of use; we will sue you for discussing your injury and also for getting injured in the first place; and we also personally enjoy mutilating fluffy bunnies", so even as educated and enlightened consumers realize the seedy underbelly and quietly start shopping elsewhere, the Barnum Theorem ensures that many minutes' worth of fresh suckers has arisen to take their place. Even if Baeraad & Biff's Educated Consumer Blog decides to run an expose, any lasting impact is contingent on people continuing to link to that expose months and years after the fact.
This post would benefit from some context and examples of what you think "the current moment" is and what you think is bad about it. Terms like wokeness don't really have agreed definitions, and depending on who you ask are either tautologically good or bad things. Which means that the applicability of the various responses is hard to assess
"6. Somebody should explore the fall of Puritanism in Massachussetts
Massachussetts in 1692 may have been one of the most repressive societies ever to exist. Anyone who spoke out against it was burned as a witch or exiled. Fine, okay, point taken, don't speak out against Puritanism. But by the 1820s, Massachussetts was one of the most open societies in the world. The Puritan Church turned into the Unitarian Church (I swear this is true, the Unitarian Universalists are the direct descendants of the 1600 Puritans). "
Cotton Mather (of salem infamy) is my great great great ?x grandfather. It's a bit unfortunate that the trials are the one thing he is known for (he did eventually come around to opposing them) because it overshadows the rest of his accomplishments.
https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199827251/obo-9780199827251-0039.xml
"Among the most significant chapters in his life are his role in the Glorious Revolution in New England (April 1689); his involvement in the Salem witchcraft debacle (1691–1693); his Pietist ecumenism; his millennialism; his promotion of reform societies (1700–1728); his advocacy of smallpox inoculation (1721–1723); and his numerous writings on history, biography, natural science, medicine, theology, and biblical criticism. In all, Cotton Mather published more than 450 titles on virtually every subject of significance at the time. He owned the largest private library in the English colonies of North America and left behind in manuscript form several major works that only recently have begun to appear in print. Most important, he was at the forefront of the scientific and hermeneutic debate (early Enlightenment) and tried to reconcile the old with the new cosmologies in the first American Bible commentary, his Biblia Americana. In light of his numerous publications, only a selection of some of his most important and thematically linked publications can be treated in this bibliography."
And if you are more interested in the religious evolution than there is this one:
"The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728"
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/j.ctt1pn847
Writing from the UK context here, if you care about academic freedom of speech then the number 1 issue you should care about is employment conditions for researchers. 1/3 of academic staff here are on fixed term contracts so have very high incentive to self censor in order to get another job. https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/10899/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-May-20/pdf/ucu_he-precarity-report_may20.pdf (this is a union report so take as you will). The number of departments having their funding squeezed doesn't help, you don't want to be known for being awkward and having dissenting views when inevitable redundancies come to your department.
On the other hand the number of researchers who've been cancelled and lost their careers for it is very small. Not accusing SA of this, but there are a large number of authors who say they want to protect academic freedom, but talk about students trying to deplatform external speakers from time to time, which I see as a total fringe issue.
What I'm saying is that I find a lot of the discourse around academic freedom to be pretty disingenuous, although I don't deny it's an important issue
Apparently academic free speech turned up as an issue in the latest queen's speech. No idea how it's going to be implemented and whether it's going to be unbiased (for some definition of unbiased).
It'd be very easy for the government to courageously defend academics' inalienable right to say nice things about the government.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-57076093
If you're interested. Make your own mind up as I'm hardly unbiased on this.
For some context though, this government certainly aren't free speech fundamentalists. (Universities are required to monitor students and staff under counter terrorism law, which turns out to be a nightmare for anyone doing research in the middle east). https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-38209567
I agree. There's an argument to be made that "cancel" behavior is a side effect of economic insecurity, people scrambling for scraps in conditions of greater precariousness. I don't think it can be reduced entirely to that since mob punishing of non-conformity is probably as old as humanity while social media has made new punishments possible, but there is an aspect of cancel behavior that seems to me to be about economic fear driving more and more paranoid social behavior.
Consolidation and job loss in journalism in the US and the concurrent intensity of the conformity enforcement there seems like a prime example.
I get the impression that in 1950s America, journalism and academia already had significant far left (cultural and economic) sympathies which kept the torch alive. I don't believe an imagined return to sanity can or will occur by that process simply applying in reverse.
Even if they act neurotic at times the people who responsible for bringing us to our current situation are extremely brilliant political operators. They can smell dissidents a mile away and they're not going to allow the institutions they worked tirelessly to transform to pass into anyone elses hands.
>But keep in mind that if you tell people "the enemy is all-powerful and omnipresent and if you make the slightest effort to fight back he will destroy you", most of them will answer "wow, thanks for the tip, I'll make sure not to fight that guy". If you're too good at conveying the magnitude of the threat, you risk doing authoritarians' work for them, creating exactly the culture of fear you hoped to prevent.
Henry VIII would be fine with people thinking he was all powerful and to never mess with him, but the system would not. The system would prefer people to think of it as the underdog, fighting against the all powerful bigotries of reactionary society.
Re: 5., "straw" libertarians and government interventions:
I wonder how much of an elephant in the room are hostile workplace environment law, and perhaps guilt-presuming anti-discrimination laws in explaining the ubiquity of corporate "wokeness". It's not just that companies have an incentive to fire any employee who might pose a harassment liability (e.g. Damore, according to many commentators and the EEOC) and push anti-harassment propaganda. The farther-reaching indirect effect is that it's too much of a liability risk to hire an outspoken opponent of SJWism as a manager; so managers are either true-believer SJWs who push it far beyond what the law requires, or else they stay quiet and don't speak up against it. The dictatorless dystopia effect may be present as well—any entity that goes against the stream gets boycotted, because any entity that doesn't boycott it would get boycotted itself—, but the laws are needed to keep the equilibrium stable. (Btw wasn't Jim Crow to a large extent government-mandated too?)
As I'm more interested in practical matters, like laws, than people yelling at each other, I'm not sure how much I agree with your timeline. To me, the main phenomenon is the ideology whose implicit assumptions are (1) racism/sexism etc. are the most evil thought possible; (2) in any debate between a more anti-racist (etc.) and a less anti-racist position, the former is right, and the latter is racist; (3) if a phenomenon *may* be explained by racism (etc.), it definitely *is*; and (4) anyone who associates with a racist is racist (sexist etc). This inevitably leads to a relentless ratchet of anti-racism, and overreach within decades. (The original inception among intellectuals was perhaps in the 1960s?) The 2010s social justice movement is just another quantitative escalation, not a qualitative novelty. The main milestones include when the courts first decided that companies could be held responsible for discrimination with little evidence of discriminatory intent (1970s?), and the Civil Rights Act of 1991, which codified hostile workplace environment. Speech policing by employers didn't start in 2020, and overbearing enforcement against sexual harassment didn't start in 2017; they started in the early 1990s. People yelling on the internet wouldn't be interesting if one side didn't have the power of law behind it.
I have a hunch that if hostile workplace environment law were repealed, and anti-discrimination laws were amended such that the plaintiff must prove discriminatory intent, the whole edifice would quickly collapse; or at least there would be much more diversity in the stances companies adopt. Of course that won't happen as long as repealing these laws is far to the right of even the Republican side of the Overton window, and people like Scott keep voting Democratic. If repealing these laws is not on the table, making new laws against hiring or firing for political views might be an improvement, even though I'd prefer to have neither those, neither the current laws.
Bryan Caplan made a similar argument:
https://www.econlib.org/repealing-political-discrimination/
This is the fundamental issue, a group has the unassailable power of law. Nobody is willing to not-vote for a Democrat that supports such things because they might be voting for a Racist.
To quote another internet subculture that's fallen in the meantime, Cthulu may swim slowly, but he always swims left. Notice: not liberal, left. All your examples are of oppressive right-wing orthodoxies; do we have examples of oppressive left-wing orthodoxies falling as described?
The USSR.
The USSR is certainly a good example of a planned economy failing. But what is left-wing orthodoxy in this sense? The early Bolsheviks forcefully redistributed wealth and status and violently suppressed social and religious traditions. The most radical social experiments, with official toleration of promiscuity and homosexuality and the centralization of child-rearing, ended with the ascendency of Stalin, and after his purges some kind of stable social hierarchy was established, with a new normal forming under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. From what I can tell talking to people who grew up at the time, social norms in those times look decidedly conservative by contemporary standards, though rather liberal by historical standards.
My understanding is that Orthodoxy is bigger in Russia now than it was under Gorbachev.
Orthodoxy with a big O now suggests that we are talking about Christianity, not Leftism, in which case yes, certainly, Orthodox Christianity is bigger in Russian now than under Gorbachev, though only about 2% of Russians are observant.
The use of the 1950s for a catch-all for a period of repressive conformity in the United States needs some pushback.
Civil rights: Two landmark episodes occurred--the 1954 Supreme Court decision on Brown v Topeka Board of Education, and the day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, thus kicking off the Montgomery bus boycott.
Literature: Scott alludes to the Bay area beat culture of Kerouac and Ginsberg, but there was much more, including Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin (black AND gay), and many more.
Art: Abstract Expressionism... de Kooning, Pollock, Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns and many more.
Film: Masterpieces by aging auteurs like HItchcock, Ford, Hawks, Welles. Edgy films by Kubrick, Lumet, Preminger, Ray, Fuller, Lupino.
Theater: the 1950s were truly the high-water mark, with Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and Arthur Miller exploring America's dark heart on Broadway stages (and Miller is the reason we think so much about the Salem witch trials)
Music: This rebellion against convention speaks for itself: rock and roll (Presley, et al), jazz (Miles Davis, Coltrane, et al), classical (John Cage)
For the avant-garde, like Cage, Merce Cunningham and their acolytes, there was the existence of Black Mountain College.
I'm sure the 1950s sucked if you were subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but in many other ways, I think this was a pretty good time to be an American. Aside from the robust cultural achievements noted above, there were the material achievements, including the investment in rocketry and the space program that would be poised to rival the Soviet Union in the 1960s, the polio vaccine, the creation of the interstate highway system, and much more.
Fuck, is this just a deja-vu or did they change something? (pointing out the double post ;))
Yes, after I posted the first time, I noticed a subject-verb disagreement in the last paragraph, so I deleted and re-posted.
Ok but this does not explain the brickwalls in front of my windows
Nvm, wrong house
Here are some ideas:
* ABOVE ALL ELSE: Have faith that reason can sway people. If you imagine living in the 1950's, you can't be an asshole when you try to persuade people about gay rights. You need to be calm and reasonable, above all else. If you think everyone is being narrow minded assholes, you definitely can't say this - which means you probably should stop thinking it. Say your piece, calmly and succinctly, and don't push people. Tweets don't persuade people. Neither does anger. You can persuade people with reasoning, but you have to be calm, patient, and think through this stuff in advance. Ideally, focus on _one_ single fact or instance. You can't make them see the forest ,but you can zoom in on one tree, and for a lot of these people, they don't want to see a singel tree. The pattern is just too obvious once you're open to it.
* Let minorities do the work. The rule that says 'white men shouldn't have opinions on this stuff' is stupid, but you aren't going to challenge it - just link to the plenty of minorities who have called bullshit ask, 'how should i respond to this' :
- This essay by John McWhorter: https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists
- This interview with Van Jones: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/28/magazine/van-jones-can-empathize-with-trump-voters.htm
The only 'legal' challenge to the rule is to point. out that this rule makes minorities responsible for persuading large groups of white people they are wrong, if that ever happen. If white people wont' listen to other white people on the topic of racism, this means that either a) large groups of white people will never be wrong about racism, or b) minorities will be solely responsible for talking large groups of white people out of their bad ideas on racism.
* Cancel companies, not people: This one is straightforward. We should all vote with our wallets and avoid giving money (or our attention!) to businesses that have shitty principles. People should all be off limits, with the _possible_ exception of journalists.
* Replace opinion polls with something that doesn't suck. All you'd have to do is argue "black americans dont' want fewer police", and you can just stick with this, if there's a credibel place where this information lives. Here's a FREE BUSINESS IDEA: create a system to replace polling with something like a national election, every week, where people vote on 'ideas' or 'principles' . People can provide as much or as little PII as they want. The aggregated information is available to the public, and you can charge for access to much more detailed information such as zip code-level breakdowns of support for different ideas or principles.
What if there's mobilization against a company BECAUSE it employs certain people?
The standard response to members of minorities who disagree with SJW dogma is to call them "inauthentic". It's like: yeah, in general we are supposed to listen and believe, but this specific person was brainwashed by the dark side, therefore the rule does not apply to him or her. They will be cancelled, too.
As an example, consider Ayaan Hirsi Ali. A woman of color, born in Somalia, ex-Muslim. A naive person might believe that she is allowed to publicly oppose female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and "honor" violence. But my woke friends just call her a right-wing islamophobe, which implies that people should not listen to her.
great example. some woke women out there would be horrified to put up with what this "islamophobe" is objecting to. I'm mystified how these repressive cultures are defended by the so-called woke. it doesn't make sense, and my only conclusion so far is that they don't actually think about these things. also how you can be islamophobic, but not a christian-phobe? plenty of those around, but it's cool
'white men shouldn't have opinions on this stuff'
White men are most certainly allowed to have and express opinions, as long as they're the correct opinions. This "rule" only comes up to shut down incorrect opinions.
More to the point, my SJW friends actually *encourage* men to challenge sexism, because sexists will take it more seriously coming from another man than from a woman.
Minorities who deviate from the orthodoxy are dismissed as suffering internalized hatred. Lived experience matters but not theirs.
Re #2: One useful distinction between "classic boycotts" and "cancel culture" would be that the former is aimed at causes (tell everyone to drink Pepsi until Coca-Cola stops their hypothetical child slavery), whereas the latter is aimed at individuals (tell everyone to drink Pepsi until Coca-Cola *fires the person we don't like*).
The cancel culture boycott tends to be much more effective. It's cheap and easy for Coca-Cola to fire almost any employee, and if they can avert a boycott that way they will. It's much harder for them to change how they do business, so they'll often try to weather the storm.
Also, targeting individuals creates exactly the climate of fear you mention, which I guess is a bonus in a cynical way!
I meant re #5..
not a bonus. it's the main feature. silence equals consent
"Liberals lose the culture war if there's ever such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any unpopular opinion, publish any heterodox research, or stand up for anybody who's gone against the mob."
Liberals lost the culture war long ago. It was their job to stand up and defend Western values, and instead they folded faster than Superman on laundry day. *Leftists* are the ones dynamiting our culture with Critical Theory. How do you tell the difference between liberals and leftists? Easy. Liberals believe in freedom of speech. They might disagree with what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it.
Leftists, on the other hand, freely use censorship as a weapon of first resort. Their own positions are so weak that if people are allowed to point out the many problems, they would collapse.
Here's a quick two-page rundown on Critical Theory, in case anyone needs a link to share with that aunt of yours.
https://newdiscourses.com/2021/04/critical-race-theory-two-page-overview/
“Unlike traditional approaches to civil rights, which favor incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory calls into question the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and the neutral principles of constitutional law.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 3.
“Crits [Critical Race Theorists] are highly suspicious of another liberal mainstay, namely, rights.”
From Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, first edition (2001), by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, p. 23.
"If we had a general theory for how repressive societies transitioned into open ones, we would have a better idea which levers to push." I urge you to consider parliamentarism before dismissing that we do not have such a theory. The people in Victorian England definitely thought that it was such a theory.
From Selinger's "Parliamentarism":
"In the introduction to his now classic book, After Virtue, Aladair MacIntyre proposed a striking thought experiment. Suppose that the study of the natural sciences is prohibited. Then, generations later, a movement emerges with the aim of reviving them—but by this point nobody has any scientific training, and “fragments” of books and articles are all that remain. What would happen next? According to MacIntyre, many people would begin using scientific terms and ideas in conversation. They would argue over “the respective merits of relativity theory, evolutionary theory, and phlogiston theory.” But what it actually meant to do scientific research would remain ungraspable. “Almost nobody” would realize “that what they are doing is not natural science […] at all.”
This book is motivated by the following conviction: we have failed to understand much of European political thought during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the same way that MacIntyre’s imaginary individuals failed to understand natural science. We read authors such as Edmund Burke, Benjamin Constant, Germaine de Staël, François Guizot, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill. We argue about how to properly interpret their texts and over the meaning of “liberalism.” But we have forgotten the concrete, overarching project in which these figures all were involved, the one that made their thought intelligible. That project was parliamentarism.
For each of the authors just named above, the defining feature of a free state was that it contained a space for parliamentary politics—an assembly in which political actions were discussed and deliberated and in which executive officials were held responsible." (Selinger, 2019)
> Maybe the most available reference point for this sort of thing is the US in the 1950s. There were certain ideas everyone knew were off limits - atheism, communism, marijuana legalization, gay rights.
Did every facet of society, even those not really involved, constantly have pressure on it to affirmatively support these things? Or was it acceptable to remain silent? What makes today seem different is that everything is beginning to have to justify itself in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion. For example, in many universities, job applications require "diversity statements" and all classes must prove to the administration they are promoting social justice before they are approved. Was this ever the case with anti-communism? Did professors have to write an "anti-communist statement" before being allowed to teach?
This sounds strange, but the period today most reminds me of is the revival of scholarship in Europe in the Late Middle Ages. Classical scholarship was about all sorts of things. Medieval scholarship is also about all sorts of things, but at the beginning and end of every chapter, the author had to write, "which proves the glory of God and our Lord Jesus Christ" or something similar.
If things today go a similar direction, we might still have all the same science and scholarship, except that, instead of an article titled "Cancer Biomarkers and DNA Mutagenesis", we'll have "Cancer Biomarkers and DNA Mutagenesis: its Importance for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion".
here's the thing about the 50s. there was privacy, and there were alternative cultures (beat culture was a pretty big thing) you could choose not to conform. but you did so knowing that you were not acceptable to the mainstream. maybe you didn't care, but there was a price. still, it was possible to do. what bothers me about today is that it's increasingly difficult to find those zones where you can pretend they don't exist, and they can ignore you. the current sjw's seem to want the power to wipe out all opposition. it's a totalitarian ideology. they are uncomfortable just letting people be wrong, be assholes, be different. it's amazing to me to see the cool lefties and liberal types support censorship, repression of ideas, and rule by big business.
That reminds me of the period starting in the 1990s when if you wanted to get a scientific article published you had to tack on a few claims to the effect that <science finding> proves global warming is worse than we thought or that <trend> will likely worsen due to global warming.
Boomers look back at the 1950's as a period when squares pushed "normal" above anything else. Everyone else just takes the Boomer's word for it.
However, the people pushing "normal" in the 1950s still had the open wounds and PTSD from WW2 and The Great Depression.
They didn't want "normal" because they were squares - they wanted "normal" because they had just left hell.
Yeah. And they wanted to create a society without struggle, so that nobody else would have to go through what they did. Turns out, that was a huge mistake. People need to struggle for what they have, otherwise they don't appreciate it. They raised a self-centered generation that wreaked havoc on American culture. You name a trend tearing apart America today, and it got its start with 60s radicals.
In the past, very few people had voices. Communication came from the top-down and was determined/controlled by a very small number of choke points.
Today, there are millions of voices out there and everyone can have a platform. Peers talk to peers and build on each other's points rather than serve as passive participants in a top-down information flow.
In 2021, all the young/trendy people are able to share their own opinions and create "common knowledge" of what other young/trendy people think in a way that was not possible in the past.
If this information dynamic existed in the 1950s, the zeitgeist would have been very different.
disagree. every generation has "common knowledge" of what other young people think. you didn't need the internet to understand your cohort and know what is currently "the thing"
This: https://uudb.org/articles/unitariancontroversy.html is a semi-official history of how the modern Unitarian church came to be. The short answer for how the puritans liberalized is that the kids pushed the church to the left, and occasionally it's most conservative elements would schism away from it. In the early days, moving to the left meant "okay, so you don't have to be born again twice to be a full member of the church, it's sufficient that you kept all of the ways of the church since childhood" The leaders of the church continued to make intentional pushes towards greater diversity of ideas in order to keep as many of the kids as possible coming every Sunday.
Don't you think "Defund the Police" is essentially shorthand for "Demilitarize the Police" and retrain? And if so, how would that be a bad thing? (cf. UK, etc...)
Ok then. Well, that's stupid, obviously. I guess we need marketers who can say something realistic.
That would be a really poor shorthand. For starters, "defund" is only a few letters shorter than "demilitarize". And "defund" is a word with a clear meaning of its own, so people are going to naturally assume that you mean what you say and something completely different.
... and *not* something completely different
Ok, as I've read about this, most people who seem to be vocal about it speak of utilizing mental health care workers and such in situations where the police seem to just shoot. Granted, I haven't lived in the US for a decade—I moved from Oakland, CA to Stockholm SE, but had witnessed the growing military spending by the city of Oakland over the first decade of "Homeland Security" to the point of ridiculousness both economically and provisionally—so my info isn't street-level anymore I guess, just what I read on, say, FB, where my peer group in the US have seemed to be fairly reasonable.
Not sure what 'Demilitarize' means in this case. Police need to use violence. I just listened to a nice Sam Harris podcast with Rener Gracie about this. They think police need more training.
I woudl say, less civic spending on armored vehicles, tactical weaponry, body armor etc. Gracie is about Jiu Jitsu (right?) and I would HIGHLY recommend Aikido as well/instead, especially w/r/t defusing situations. Yes more training, no to more weapons. That's what I mean.
OK I don't know the various types of marshal arts. Rener Gracie is the grandson of the guy who developed Brazilian jujitsu. The type of training may not matter. These days (according to SH podcast) police get 1-2 hours a year in marshal arts training and they would like to see a minimum of 1 hour a week.
There are situations where push literally comes to shove, but it's also frequently possible to talk people down, and that should also be trained.
I have to ask, though, why do police "need to use violence"? To restrain violent people? Restraint is not necessarily violent. I think that's why the idea is circulating to engage mental health professionals to defuse violent situations, ...to say nothing of regulating guns. ( I mean, I personally know families from Oakland with dead bystanders *and* dead police officers, none of which was necessary in any of the situations. )
I did get the email notice about that Harris podcast, but I hadn't listened. I'm not certain I trust his worldview; when I was listening to his stuff, he often came off as naive in so many things while touting things that he should have known better about.
The police absolutely need to have the ability to use violence to do their jobs.
This is distinct from "each interaction requires violence." But if you need to take someone downtown, and they don't want to go, you need, at the very least, the threat of violence to make them comply.
Using violence is addictive and pleasing to our lizard brains, so I'm not surprised that cops abuse this power. But we can't just simply have them not have that power.
Again, Aikido. Use the attacker's own force to show them the error of their ways.
Nope, that's a motte and bailey argument. It means what it means. It's not shorthand for something else.
"This [motte and bailey] is a tactic where the CSJ advocate will make some very bold, controversial claim and when they are challenged on it, they will claim they were actually arguing for some simple, obvious, uncontroversial claim."
For a longer discussion on this topic, please see: https://counterweightsupport.com/2021/05/01/how-to-play-games-with-words-part-1-the-tactics-of-the-woke-critical-social-justice-activist/
Gotcha. Good thing I've never rallied behind the "Defund" slogan...
wait, so they really literally mean entirely defund the entire organization of police? That can't be true.
Some (I think most, but can't be sure) of the people saying "defund the police" mean some actual 500 word thesis that doesn't mean getting rid of cops.
But there are people who get air time saying "no, really, ignore those 500 words of bullshit, here are my credentials and believe me that when we say defund the police, we mean literally defund all the police." Check out this opinion piece in some newspaper called the New York Tims https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
Dang.
I mean, I have a lot more respect for them than I do for the people saying "no, no, the word defund doesn't mean what it means, it means something else."
That's my take as well, although I assume they may even mean it more radically, ie, get rid of what we would recognize as policing and replace it with something (or more likely, a plurality of things) that fulfills many of the same civic functions but has an entirely different ethos. That's why I prefer "abolish the police," because in mind mind to abolish an institution means leaving a vacancy for something else to take its place, whereas "defund" the police means you are left with less well-funded people doing the same job.
The word people are looking for is "reform." Jesus.
And the abolition of slavery will be what most people compare it to. So that's a poor choice of term.
That still implies that what you are left with at the end is police. I thought about it over the weekend and the slogan I came up with is "replace the police."
Replace them with what?
Specifically, in the context of dealing with murders, rapists, bank robbers, and criminal gangs trying to claim de facto control of urban territory, what are you going to replace the police with that isn't just more police with a new name? Because that's a function that *will* be filled. If it's not filled by a government agency, it's going to be filled by vigilante groups because there's going to be enormous public demand and you've just defined away the existence of any government agency that can stop a group of vigilantes from taking up the task (and then probably becoming a criminal gang).
I get that everyone wants there to be a nice talky social worker instead of a gun-toting policeman that shows up whenever a mentally disturbed (black) man starts behaving erratically and commits a petty crime or two, but A: that's not all of what police do and B: after a few nice talky social workers get stabbed to death, the rest are going to be "oh hell no" and call the whoever-it-is-that-deals-with-murderers every time they are called to deal with a mentally disturbed person they think might escalate to murder. So what are you going to replace the police with for dealing with the murderers?
If you were going to design, from scratch, institutions to deal with the concerns of modern municipalities, I don't think your solution would be a sprawling paramilitary organization with funding and dispensation to deal with every disturbance of the piece from people going through trashcans to armed robbery.
Yes, if the Joker or the Sinaloa cartel is robbing a bank, there should be an emergency response team you can call that will show up with the sniper rifles. There should also be trained criminal investigators and probably bodymen to show up alongside the nice talky social workers to keep them from getting stabbed. But I doubt all of these functions need to be rolled into the same organization, I doubt they need to be funded as part of a single city budget item (that eats away at funding designated for things like mental health services, which might ALSO keep crazy people with knives off the streets), and I doubt every single one of those roles requires the same level of "carry a gun at all times and shoot at the first sign of trouble" legal indemnification. But that's what we currently have.
The thing that I expect more rationalists to balk at with the police isn't the appalling lack of institutional empathy (which is apparently a lot to ask), its the shocking inefficiency and borderline medievality of the system. So yes, I think that should be replaced with a new system or systems and I don't understand why that is treated like a call for anarchy. Because all these borderline Hobbesian arguments about criminal gangs and murderers running amok? Presumably we could do MORE to cut down on crime with a vast system of martial law, maybe with a little summary capital punishment thrown in for anyone caught outside after dark, that would presumably REALLY disincentivize crime. But it seems like we all understand that on some level the end goal isn't stopping crime at the cost of every other measure of happiness or freedom. So I see these criticisms of the police (my own included) as calls to renegotiate the current arrangement to see if we can't optimize a little better for all our goals. Isn't that something we can all get behind?
I now semi-routinely observe people unironically saying publicly how dangerous it is to criticize some of these movements publicly. This pretty much sums it up.
I've been noticing some of that too. I wonder if it's not as silly as it looks, though. Maybe people are being better sorted into factions and the anti-movement factions are getting stronger. In my experience, it's still risky to criticise the movements if you don't know who you're talking to very well, because they just might hate you for some relatively innocuous statement. But enough people are agreeably anti-movement that if you can criticize publicly when you're with those people.
It isn't entirely as silly as it looks, no. Part of what makes it not-dangerous to criticize the movement is that it is increasingly popular to do so. And part of why people are doing so is because the movement would prefer it be dangerous to criticize the movement, and has acted so in the past, and still has the power to do so in some contexts.
That is, the public willingness to say those things is exactly what makes it possible to say those things.
But the people who were taking serious risks in doing so were doing so several years ago. So it's a bit of a weird situation. In a sense, saying these things ironically is the most honest way to go about it, but I think public irony in that sense is somewhat out of fashion.
Concerning cancel culture:
Activists are a very crafty sort and they'll keep pounding at the perimeter of what is de jure or even de facto legal until they find a way to exert leverage over everyone else. To say that this isn't conspiratorial, that there are no ulterior motives, and that the people who do this are sincerely convinced that they are doing the right thing (which I think is mostly correct) only makes this phenomenon scarier IMO.
Getting people fired for crime-think, or holding them accountable, or cancelling them, is essentially a risk free strategy to enforce an orthodoxy. The worst case scenario for someone who tries to cancel another person is that nothing happens. There's no reason not to try cancelling someone if they can't reciprocate the financial harm.
Suppose there is a credible threat that individuals who engage in cancellation will criminal charges, or a civil tort. Also, will businesses who participate in cancellation will also potentially face harsh fines. I'm guessing that most people who engage in the behavior will cease engaging in it. Businesses don't need to risk being accused of various isms to retain their employees, they simply need to point out that complying with the demands of activists would put them in violation of the law.
There are practical problems with enforcing this: 1.) There are legitimate reasons to fire employees, even for things related to speech 2) There are legitimate reasons to boycott businesses.
However, I don't think this kind of law needs, or should have, significant and frequent enforcement mechanisms. One or two high profile cases of people/companies paying massive fines
In practice though:
1) You need a strong infrastructure of people willing and enthusiastic about enforcing this rule
2) You haven't done anything about the activists, and they'll go back to pounding at the perimeter to find new weak spots to exploit.
3) You still need a general social conception of acceptable and unacceptable forms of speech, and the aforementioned activists will be ten times as motivated as any regular person to see their conception of acceptable speech made canon.
See "You need a strong infrastructure of people willing and enthusiastic about enforcing this rule"
nope. the cure for bad speech is more speech. by definition, if you are online the only thing you are pounding is the keyboard.
I think thats a bad idea in principle and in practice. In principle because the way to fight bad ideas is with good ideas, in practice because any such law will creep in scope and be abused.
The threat to deprive someone of their job for something they said or believe isn't an idea, it's a tactic.
Re: point 6: Not Massachusetts, and it doesn't go all the way up to 1820, but there is a classic history book on this topic for Connecticut: Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (1967). I read it two decades ago so my memory isn't fresh, but I recall it being a superb book. It doesn't, however, give you "buttons to push"; rather, history happens, in the sense of religious change, economic change, social change, in lots of complex & interacting ways. But it's not something to just enact because it's not a simple process. (If it weren't too late this would be a great book for the book review contest...) I'm sure there are more recent ones on the topic too. Similarly, as far as the other cases Scott mentions, the sort of liberalization processes that Scott refers (and all the parallel ones elsewhere) are the bread & butter of social history, the backbone of the field for decades from the 60s until it's-complicated. There's books on all these things; dig around.
And since a lot of people in this thread are saying dismissive (and ill-informed) things about the impact of McCarthyism in the US, let me also recommend Ellen Schrecker's Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998). It was not, of course, anything like e.g. the cultural revolution in its violence and disruption; but "not as bad as other terrible things" doesn't mean it wasn't repressive. It was, in fact, a pretty good parallel to cancel culture in a lot of ways: job losses & social ostracization were central, a lot of it was done by private organizations, and there was a real fear of overstepping boundaries leading to some poorly-thought-out conformity such that some true things which needed saying were not said, while at the same time the core of the thing being repressed (communism, racism) were, in fact, actually bad things, even if the targeting by the repressive social movements was wildly over-broad. If you think actual racism is bad but the left tends to think everything is racist, then you should have a good sense of what went wrong in the 50s, substituting "communism" for "racism" and the right for the left. By the way, as to how *that* ended, another historian has a good metaphor, different from Scott's barber pole: Stephen J. Whitfield calls it a "thaw": no dramatic turn-around, just a gradual lessening of intensity until one day it's mostly gone (even if people tried to pull it back for years—hell, some still are). I bet that's how cancel culture will end, too.
interesting. "If you think actual racism is bad but the left tends to think everything is racist, then you should have a good sense of what went wrong in the 50s, substituting "communism" for "racism" and the right for the left."
The thing is, we know today that there really were a lot of communists and their fellow travelers in Hollywood and the State Department. The man who negotiated the Bretton Woods Agreement was a communist spy, and the Manhattan Project was full of them.
And we know that there are racists in America today. Therefore anybody who goes up against the racists is a Certified Good Guy, even if it turns out they don't care whether their specific targets are the ones who are actually the racists. Right? That's how it works? If Joe McCarthy was a Good Guy because communists were real, then the Wokest of the Woke are Good Guys because racists are real.
Or, maybe, you could give up on Joe McCarthy having been one of the Good Guys. Because he wasn't. He was as vile and as despicable as his enemies were then, and as you imagine your enemies are now. Communists were real, and they were made more powerful and secure by the misdeeds of Tailgunner Joe.
Bringing up Joe McCarthy is a bit of a strawman when it comes to fifties anticommunism though, isn't it? No one's willing to defend McCarthy.
Lisp isn't that bad?
The recently-reviewed A Brief History of Neoliberalism by Harvey seemed to suggest that the 1950s conformity was eroded by a process like like "your economy collapses; you now need a new economy; the new economy you get is also tied up with an ideology of personal freedom; you end up on a personal freedom crusade". Granted, the book suggests that the ideology dragged the economics in tow, not the other way around; I'm not sure whether I believe the causality either way, but it seems plausible that "free markets" (=less government interference in markets) and "personal freedom" (=less societal interference in lifestyle choices) would form a good synergy, so that once they got started simultaneously, they'd reinforce each other.
I'd say that your thesis is interesting, but flawed in that the past culture wars were largely about personal prestige vs. the present culture wars being about Studebakerian Song Dynasty excess/wannabe imperial mandarins.
Nor were there social media companies using their market presence. Broadcast TV and radio are certainly more centralized but are push media whereas social media companies re pull media. Or in other words: Cronkite had to speak to all Americans but Facebook and Twitter enable the stasi-esque deployment of the masses to diktat ideological conformity.
My personal strategy is to wait a week before canceling anything. I think if that was normalized we'd be in a better spot. I developed this as a teenager. I noticed lots of controversies had the 'bad' and 'good' side change around. (i.e that python developer conference fiasco) By committing to waiting a week your own emotions cool down and you have time to understand what behavior they were actually charged with and if you even care. My personal experience is that in the past five years or so I haven't cared that much about anything. Not enough to cancel it anyway.
This makes me curious about what the impulse to cancel is about. I've made it to my late 50s without canceling anything. Is it like a blood sport? What makes a person feel drawn to cancel something? Is it to get an adrenaline or dopamine hit? Is it to feel relevant? Does it give one a sense of purpose that doesn't seem to exist elsewhere? What is it about?
You should read Jon Ronson's _So You've Been Publicly Shamed_-- part of his point is that being in a cancel mob is fun, not justice.
"Liberals lose the culture war if there's ever such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any unpopular opinion, publish any heterodox research, or stand up for anybody who's gone against the mob."
Liberals *win* the culture war if there's ever such a strong culture of fear that nobody is willing to assert any illiberal opinion, publish any illiberal research, or stand up for anybody who's gone against the liberal mob.
OK, maybe you're saying that's oxymoronic because that's a fundamentally illiberal outcome and so not a victory for liberals
"This isn't how I see real liberals behaving."
Yeah, the "real" in "real liberals" is doing the heavy lifting here. I think you need a better word here, because the liberals you would classify as "not real" are the majority, and the majority defines the usage. All I've got to offer is "libertarian", which I gather doesn't sit well with you. But find something, please.
Because at this point, between the woke liberals wanting to suppress unwoke thought, the anti-Trump liberals wanting to silence those damn Trumpists who won't shut up about e.g. election fraud, and the mainstream center-left position that COVID misinformation needs to be suppressed in for the public good, I'm pretty sure that a large majority of the people who self-identify as "liberal" would be quite happy with an outcome where all their "illiberal" enemies are afraid to speak or publish or stand against the mob. And that they believe this sort of victory is within their reach, and to the extent that they engage in political behavior, are in fact behaving this way.
Saying that these people aren't "real liberals", is mostly just confusing and unhelpful. Whatever they are, they are a powerful and dangerous thing and they will use some of that power to make sure the word "liberal" points to them.
And I'm not convinced that simply relaxing and having rational long-form discussions with the people who are willing to listen, expecting that the "real liberals" will defect from the censorious mob Real Soon Now because of that mob's inherent illiberalism, is going to be an effective strategy. We need not just a new word for what liberalism used to point to, but a new strategy to defend that valuable thing. I wish I knew what that was.
i see your point and concur. as a real liberal who now identifies as a libertarian, what I see is other well-meaning "real liberal" types just ignoring the danger from their left flank because they assume that 1) the sjw means well too 2) the sjw's care about others as they claim (instead of their own power) What the "real liberals" don't get is that it'll be too far along before they stir themselves to object. See prohibition, or Nassim Taleb about how a small group can impose its will on a far larger one. TLDR: they just don't give up
To elaborate on what Taleb said: an intolerant minority wins against a tolerant majority, because the tolerant majority will accommodate the intolerant minority until its too late. Taleb describes well the general phenomenon. The specific example of this phenomenon as a failure mode of liberal democracy was described by Popper.
I find these posts interesting, but feel a little disconnected from them. Where I'm currently living (S.E. USA) certainly the ideas of social justice are present, but they don't feel suffocating or unduly restrictive in the same way that this post seems to make them out. In all honesty, most of my exposure to "cancel culture" have been Fox anchors complaining about it, which I've usually dismissed as neo-reactionary kvetching.
Maybe I'm unusual in the sense that I don't have a Twitter and haven't ever used it, or maybe the social dynamics of the southeast are just very different. Either way, I wonder if this analysis is actually reflective of "wider culture" or just Scott over-extrapolating based off his experiences on Twitter and people from the Bay Area (a region stereotypically known for having crazy off the wall politics compared to the rest of the country)
I generally avoid politics of all kinds while at work, but I don't get the impression that I'd get in particularly hot water if I happened to respectfully voice some type of disagreement. I almost feel more hesitant about voicing a negative opinion online, not because I've ever personally encountered canceling or known someone who has, but because posts like this one keep telling me I should be worried about it. I guess that's part of the point I was making earlier, that there seems to be a big disconnect between what Scott's worried about and what I see in real life, beyond some isolated internet crazy people on Twitter.
Most terror campaigns are based on very few actual bad events happening, with no fair set of rules on how to avoid it. The KKK didn't need to lynch thousands of people a year. Just a few dozen will do it.
The randomness is part of the punishment.
(I'm not really sure it's even intended to terrorize. I think people just like destroying someone's life work while they sit there and cry, unable to stop you. It's important to socialize this base instinct out of people.)
And you don't have to be right-wing to think it's bad: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firing-innocent/613615/
> I don’t see anyone putting out videos saying “and you’re next”
It was a parenthetical in my comment, but my null hypothesis is that people doing this just like smashing other's stuff. I think that's their intent.
The effect on the the victims can be the same, though.
> maybe it is because right-wing folks blow it up
It was all the way at the end of my comment, but I linked to an article in The Atlantic.
I think your comparison to police killings is very on-point. One thing that makes police killing someone scary is that they seem to get away with it. "I can harm you and nothing bad happens to me if I do" is a scary dynamic. Maybe that's changing now.
There are a number of empirical questions that are impossible to raise in my field without at least some level of getting cancelled— at least shunned, probably denied fellowships and invitations. The most relevant is the question of why there are so few women in the field. Less relevant and still very controversial would be why there are almost no blacks in my field and what is the cause of homosexuality. To be clear, I’m not saying just that one can’t propose controversial answers to these questions, but that one can’t even start a “let’s weight evidence for various hypotheses” conversation about these questions.
ask someone who works for a university in your area what ideas they are not allowed to express. the high profile cases may not happen to them, but self-censorship could still be in operation. you don't see it because no one is challenging "the way things are" for their own safety. how many people had a gay neighbor in the 50s, and either didn't know or just didn't mention it in polite company?
"Maybe I'm unusual in the sense that I don't have a Twitter and haven't ever used it, or maybe the social dynamics of the southeast are just very different."
Recently got a Twitter account purely to follow fandom stuff, and my God the amount of drama just in that tiny corner! I'd be a totally crazed loon running screaming naked through the streets if I followed the political/culture war stuff on Twitter with the floods and oceans of drama *there*.
The rise of Abolitionism in England in the second half of the 18th century was, it seems to me, the rise of a new religious dogma, promoted mainly by Quakers and Evangelical Anglicans. But, by golly, it was a pro-freedom dogma. And it won: first the English courts agreed that there could be no slaves in England (a finding quickly echoed in the Scottish courts); then the slave trade was banned; then slavery itself was prohibited in the British Empire, and the Royal Navy was set the entirely improper task of suppressing other nations' slave trades.
Looking back it seems to have been the first part of a wave of liberalism - absurdly oppressive old laws repealed; the vote restored to Roman Catholics; the union of Ireland with Great Britain, with Ireland over-represented in the House of Commons; the great Reform Act; the Second Reform Act; Darwinism, ...
But you could look back further to the 17th century to the Glorious Revolution and the end of the Divine Right of Kings. Look at the English Parliament's Bill of Rights or the Scottish Parliament's Claim of Right. Part of the latter seems to me just wonderful: the complaint that James VII had
changed “the fundamentall Constitution of this Kingdome ... from a legall limited monarchy to ane Arbitrary Despotick power”.
Americans might reasonably wonder whether their elected monarchy has undergone, or is undergoing, a similar transition.
love it: "elected monarchy"
You are aware that, historically, many if not most monarchs were elected, right? It's mostly late-period monarchy where the institutions of the state are powerful enough to survive an inept monarch where people would settle for whichever warm body was first out of the last queen's womb.
Are you thinking of France? That's the only example I can find of an elected monarchy becoming hereditary. Also I don't think elected monarchies were ever all that common.
The Kingdom of Denmark was explicitly an elective monarchy until 1660, when it became explicitly hereditary. I think the same is true of Norway and Sweden, though less explicitly. The Holy Roman Empire is the classic example of an elective monarchy; its successor state the Austrian Empire was I believe legally as well as de facto hereditary.
More generally, last time I looked into this, about half the monarchies I checked had the monarch either elected or appointed by an elective body. But that was a Eurocentric list, in part because of data availability, so I'm not going to go with an absolute "most". Mind you, even in an elective monarchy, Nate Silver is going to be giving strong odds on "King's firstborn son wins the election", because the most powerful man in the realm has been campaigning for him all his life and they didn't have an FEC to make everybody play nice about that. But if the king's firstborn son was a nitwit, there was often a legitimate way for the other powerful people to say "no, we're going with a different candidate this time".
"the union of Ireland with Great Britain, with Ireland over-represented in the House of Commons"
There's... variable ...opinion on whether this was liberalism or a great thing for Ireland and how it was achieved (the popular view being "wholesale bribery") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Grattan
I agree with the point that the historical irony was that the Anglo-Irish were the ones most zealous for the independent Irish parliament, and the native Irish mostly pro-Union, because of the fears of Catholic emancipation (which, like many British promises to Ireland, then became "sorry, what? never heard of it" once the deed was done):
"It was from the Anglican established church, and particularly from the Orangemen, that the bitterest opposition to the union proceeded. The proposal found support among the Roman Catholic clergy and especially the bishops, while in no part of Ireland was it received with more favour than in the city of Cork. This attitude of the Catholics was caused by Pitt's encouragement of the expectation that Catholic emancipation, the commutation of tithes, and the endowment of the Catholic priesthood, would accompany or quickly follow the passing of the measure."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_Union_1800
"The Parliament of Ireland had recently gained a large measure of legislative independence under the Constitution of 1782. Many members of the Irish Parliament jealously guarded that autonomy (notably Henry Grattan), and a motion for union was legally rejected in 1799.
Only Anglicans were permitted to become members of the Parliament of Ireland though the great majority of the Irish population were Roman Catholic, with many Presbyterians in Ulster. In 1793 Roman Catholics regained the right to vote if they owned or rented property worth £2 annually. The Catholic hierarchy was strongly in favour of union in the hope for rapid emancipation and the right to sit as MPs, but it was delayed after the passage of the acts until the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.
From the perspective of Great Britain, the union was desirable because of the uncertainty that followed the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the French Revolution of 1789; if Ireland adopted Catholic emancipation willingly or not, a Roman Catholic Parliament could break away from Britain and ally with the French, but the same measure within the United Kingdom would exclude that possibility. Also the Irish and British Parliaments in creating a regency during King George III's "madness", gave the Prince Regent different powers. These considerations led Great Britain to decide to attempt the merger of both kingdoms and Parliaments.
The final passage of the Act in the Irish Parliament was achieved with substantial majorities, in part according to contemporary documents through bribery with the awarding of peerages and honours to critics to get their votes."
One of the major events that lead to the drastic changes in the Puritan church was the "Halfway Coventant" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Half-Way-Covenant). Basically they gave up one of the core tenants of the church and allowed everyone to be baptized (and therefore a member of the church). This lead to an influx of unconverted individuals in the church, who over time started to change church government.
> It seems intuitively obvious that if Coca-Cola is using child slaves to pick cocoa beans or something, boycotting them until they stop is a perfectly acceptable and even commendable thing to do.
It's not obvious that this is acceptable at all
The same reason that pretty much every thing asserted as an 'obvious' human universal isn't: you could be wrong.
It might be all fine and good if a dude walks up to you and says "hey give me some money and I'll enslave this orphan" and you say "uh, no thank you". But the real-world situations are never like this.
To use the instant example, just based on the one sentence presented, I have the following concerns:
1) What is a 'child'?
2) What is a 'slave'?
3) What is a 'boycott'?
4) How do you know that coca cola is doing this?
5) How do you know that you can trust the entity telling you that coca cola is doing this?
6) How do you know that your actions will meaningfully influence coca cola?
7) What is coca cola's professed reason for doing this?
8) What is coca cola's internal reason for doing this?
9) Who benefits from me attempting to harm coca cola?
The reason we want to avoid universalizing morality, _**even when it seems "intuitively obvious"**_, is because sometimes our intuitions are wrong, and if you have universalized your morality and imposed it by force or coercion on millions of people before you figure out your error, that's bad. That's why everyone with reasonable perspectives makes a healthy allowance for this.
great points. sometimes what we think is going on isn't what is happening at all
I posted this same link yesterday in another context: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-us-1800-2020/
If conformity briefly lost its hold following the 1950s, well, there was the most massive spike in young people ever in the history of the United States and young people tend to be nonconformist compared to older people.
As other have pointed out, though, I think you're ignoring Jim Crow. A lot more of American society, leadership, advertising and studio execs, had absolutely no clue what was going on. When they learned, largely due to the curiosity and agitation of those young folks, they were appalled. The natural reaction to learning that real world people were being strung up in trees and having their scrotums cut off for looking at the wrong woman, while 8 year-old children watched and laughed at them and police either ignored it or joined in, was a severe correction in the other direction of maybe not so strictly enforcing norms about what counts as deviants, especially with respect to immutable characteristics a person has no control over.
But I think the younger generation at that time became more open than usual to countercultural ideas in general when they discovered the dominant culture had elements to it so clearly repugnant. Most people eventually adopt roughly the same values as their parents, but it might hopefully work in the opposite direction when the parent's values are rotten and hateful. For instance, my grandparents disowned my mother, took away her car, and kicked her out of the house for dating a nearly pure-blooded Native Mexican man with dark skin. That was still late 70s. Thankfully, by the time I was born or at least old enough to form memories, they seem to have gotten it over and I still got to know my grandparents, who died with better values than they were born with.
It's not like this changed overnight. The Mathew Shepards, Brandon Teenas, and James Byrds of the world were still being shot, beaten to death with tire irons, and dragged behind trucks until all their skin burned off in the 1990s.
But those days are mostly behind us, so I suspect people today aren't nearly as suspicious of conformity and strict norm enforcement when "cancel" means get a person fired and not brutally and publicly murder them.
> real world people were being strung up in trees and having their scrotums cut off for looking at the wrong woman, while 8 year-old children watched and laughed at them and police either ignored it or joined in
Is this true? I've recently been finding out that a lot of what I know about the "Jim Crow South" is completely made up, so I'm now super-curious about outlandish claims.
https://blackyouthproject.com/the-rubin-stacy-story-a-meditation-on-lynching-in-a-post-racial-america/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Jesse_Washington
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/story-deadliest-massacre-reconstruction-era-louisiana-180970420/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre
They wiped out entire cities, bombed some from the sky. Nobody ever went to prison for any of this.
See this is the kind of thing I'm talking about, people make lurid claims like "real world people were being strung up in trees and having their scrotums cut off for looking at the wrong woman" but when you dig into it, it turns out that the most lurid actual example anyone can come up with is the guy who got lynched after being convicted for rape and murder.
Pretty sure that "they wiped out entire cities", being backed up by one race riot with a death toll of 39 (26 black, 13 white) and another with a death toll of eight (six black, two white) is also... a bit on the exaggerated side.
The Matthew Shepard part turns out to have been at least partly made up.
Regarding point #5, here are some general principles
0) Speech is not violence, because you can control how you respond and react to speech. If someone punches or shoots me, I can't choose to not experience physical trauma. But if someone says something hateful, I can choose to react with something other than emotional trauma, like a sense of righteous pity. It may take practice, but it *is* possible.
1) Since the free exchange of ideas is essential to the discovery of truth and human progress, it's better that "bad" (hateful, hurtful, etc) speech go unpunished than "good" (respectful disagreement, etc) speech be silenced. That doesn't preclude shunning, but it does mean one should proceed with caution and forethought to the chilling effect it might have.
2) If one is going to shun people based on their speech, then the response should be proportional to the level of offense.
3) The level of offense depends on more than just the subjective reaction of the audience. The intent of the speaker, social and historical context, and recency all matter.
4) Always seek to act with grace and forgiveness. (Almost?) everyone can change.
5) Be humble. Don't assume your norms and values are perfect and beyond question.
"Cancel culture" (as that terms is currently understood) seems to violate all of these.
In the spirit of my point #5, I'm quite happy for people to challenge any of these.
I would actually challenge your point #0. Speech which can reasonably be expected to signal future violence, and speech which can reasonably be expected to incite violence, are both functionally violence. A clear example would be the mobster saying "nice shop here, it'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."
Once you acknowledge that speech can effectively be violent, a lot of other "offensive" speech can be placed on this spectrum. For instance, calling a gay person a "f*ggot" may not be an explicit threat of violence, but it is strongly enough associated with violence that a person could reasonably interpret it as a threat (or at least as an attempt to use the association to violence to demean and silence).
Obviously there are clear examples at the other end of the spectrum, like the idea that advocating for market-based solutions is violence against the poor. Sometimes it's obvious that the potential validity of the underlying idea trumps the harm caused by the speech, but I don't have a great sense of where to draw the line beyond that.
i think you are wrong. even the mobster's speech is not violence, and does no harm by itself. It is the action that is taken in response that MAY be violent. Maybe nothing happens. It's absurd to extrapolate violence based on what might happen. You are shifting responsibility from the speaker to the interpreter. If it's the act of violence that is wrong, then it's not the speech but the (assumed to be violent) response that is wrong. Actors and action create violence. Speech may be offensive, but it's not violent. To say otherwise is just engaging in redefinition.
By your logic robbing someone at gunpoint should not be considered a violent crime, right? As long as you don't actually pull the trigger it's not an act of violence?
using a gun, even without pulling the trigger, is an action. it is not speech.
No, it's a threat to use a gun, which is a form of speech. You can similarly imagine someone walking up to you with their hand in their jacket and saying "I have a gun; give me your wallet," which I hope you'll agree is a violent crime even if they don't actually have a gun.
no. the demand "give me all your money" without the gun does not have the same effect. it's the action of using a gun that is crucial. the second example is exactly the same. it's still not the words but the implied action that causes compliance. try it both ways yourself. speech is not action.
You seem to be describing threats, which I think are distinct from an act of violence. Both can be coercive, but violence is actually destructive.
I've been trying for a long time to come up with the line between speech and acts. It usually doesn't matter because most things clearly fall on one side or the other.
But this point might help me either draw the line or otherwise deal with the fuzziness. Thanks.
Unless you are saying that a target of coercion can simply choose to ignore the coercion, this is a mostly semantic objection, correct? The spirit of your point #0 seems to be that the target of speech has considerable power over whether they are harmed by the speech. I would argue that the target of a threat has relatively little power to avoid some degree of harm from that threat.
I think you're wrong. the target has most of the power. they can ignore speech. they might not like it, but is that harm? is a fleeting bad feeling really worth defining as harm? because I don't think you should be on the internet at all if so. there are some ideas out there which could cause discomfort.
coercion (sorry i cant spell either) has to be backed up by physical consequences. otherwise its just a suggestion
Sure, and I think the main thrust of my point is that there's a continuous spectrum between "directly threatened physical consequences to be applied by me, immediately" and "implicit physical consequences to be applied stochastically by others." For example, I would put "we should go raid the statehouse and execute the governor" towards the left of that spectrum, and "trans-women are just perverts, and shouldn't be allowed in women's bathrooms" towards the right, but would say that both exist on a spectrum of coercion.
Grape Soda gives a good response below. I'll add that I think it's more than a semantic objection because it influences what counts as a justifiable response. If someone punches me or shoots at me, I'm justified in responding in-kind, at least up to the point that I'm no longer in danger. If someone walks into my store and extorts me through the threat of future action, I'm not justified in beating them or shooting them.
Regarding your point up above about whether pulling a gun on someone constitutes a threat or actual violence as I've used the term, I'd categorize that as a threat, but a qualitatively different one than the extortionist threat I just mentioned because of its immediacy and tangibility.
At any rate, while these are interesting things to explore, I think we are veering away from the "speech is violence" slogan as it's used by some social justice activists. I see that applied to hate speech which is clearly not part of a specific threat.
speech is only coercive if action is promised
> But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"?
One is boycotting a corporation until they make a policy change (at which point you stop). The other is targeting rando individuals over speech rather than action or for past rather than ongoing action.
> were those people morally obligated to continue giving Gawker money anyway?
A defining characteristic of cancel culture is the campaign to exert social pressure on everyone else to not patronize the target, not just yourself.
It's the difference between saying that Alex Jones is full of it and not listening to him, and saying that Alex Jones is full of it and organizing a boycott of anyone who doesn't censor him.
> Cancel culture has proven that one wrong too - a small minority of very dedicated people can impose a heckler's veto on the entire rest of the culture, and nobody else will stand up to them.
There is a specific reason for this though, and it's corporate consolidation. The hecklers can get you booted off of Twitter and Facebook because they're both culturally aligned with the hecklers. It's sort of the corporate equivalent of regulatory capture.
The market solution to this is supposed to be that another competitor appears to serve the demand not satisfied by the incumbents. Except that anybody who tries to do this then gets booted off of both major app stores.
It's too easy for the hecklers to capture the whole market when there are such a small number of participants.
So this is really an antitrust problem.
In retrospect the 2000s were a very weird time. The Christian Right, seemingly in decline in the '90s, came roaring back into power, and immediately set the FCC on punishing trivial offenses that were seen as "harmful to the children," most famously a few seconds of Janet Jackson's nipple. There was also a good deal of self-censorship to avoid offending the right wing: look up the changes to the poster for the movie "What a Girl Wants" for a particularly silly example. To go from that to having Howard Zinn and Peggy McIntosh as our holy texts in little over a decade's time, with only a brief moment of relief around 2010, still gives me whiplash with how fast it happened.
Alternative theory of the 2000s: Cthulhu's bulldozer continued to push inexorably left, flattening a few more of the institutions that it hadn't previously been able to control such as the FCC. Every time the bulldozer reaches the least bit of resistance it cries out "Help help, I'm being oppresssed" but that should not be confused for an _actual_ pushback by the right, which never happens.
Incidents like bizarre exposure of Janet Jackson's saggy fiftyish breast-but-not-nipple, which absolutely nobody wanted to see, at the Superbowl were a carefully engineered part of this institutional capture effort, designed to make the FCC look like a bunch of fuddy duddies who need to be replaced.
' saggy fiftyish breast-but-not-nipple' Seriously, why is this relevant?
Scott, next time you want to write something about how incredibly nasty feminist spaces are (and I agree that some of the stuff about nerds *is* fairly disgusting), I recommend thinking back to this comment, and the many similar ones left by the hard right element you attracted to this blog with your semi-sympathetic coverage of fascists like Moldbug.
It's extremely relevant in the context of the discussion of the motivations of the motivations of the producers in showing the breast-but-not-nipple.
If it had been, say, Britney Spears or Shakira then there'd be no question about the motivations, it's obviously just plain old prurient interest. But a wrinkly breast of an older and not-very-attractive woman seems more like a deliberate attempt to tweak the nose of the FCC.
It's just worth remembering that the reaction of most people watching was not an "ooh" but an "eww". I don't think you need to be "hard right" to believe that, just go back to the reddit discussions at the time.
1. The most effective censorship is when we censor ourselves. In fact, censorship is I think most effective, the less it relies upon overt repression. Making martyrs and all that.
2. The fall of Puritanism may be interesting, but for an example closer in time to our own, you could look at the Quiet Revolution in Quebec. In the space of fifteen years or so (1960-1976), Quebec went from a poor, priest-ridden province dominated politically and culturally by the Catholic Church, to the Quebec we all know and love today. And it all happened pretty much without a fight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Revolution#:~:text=The%20Quiet%20Revolution%20(French%3A%20R%C3%A9volution,realignment%20of%20politics%20into%20federalist
Regarding "2. There's an oversupply of tweeting and an undersupply of everything else"
I think of this as communication pollution, modeled on light pollution.
Very nice as always. A few thoughts. 1.) I wish I could write good. 2.) When I was reading your SSC post recently, https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/ I realized that it's tribes all the way down. And tribes are not by themselves bad. Tribes include; my family, my church, my community, my sports teams, etc. And that humans like and need tribes. We want to be part of them. (I think it would be pretty easy to make an evolutionary case for tribal formation.) This makes all sorts of stuff easier for me to understand. There is lots of tribal signaling, letting others know your tribe. Perhaps the worst thing you can do is go against your tribe. To say something not of the tribal canon, is to call for you to be shammed by your tribe. And you either apologize profusely, or maybe consider leaving that tribe. (Hard to do since we all want to belong to a tribe.) So having one neo-nazi on the redit SSC/ CW thing means that a true blue blue triber should do his best to get you cancelled. It doesn't excuse the behavior, but maybe helps explain it. Way too many other examples of people being cancelled for not staying in their tribal lane.
I like your idea of the barber pole of fashion. But applying it to tribes, seems harder. The blue tribe has to stay within the blue tribe canon. It can move 'upwards' Atheism to SJW. But it's hard for me to see how it jumps to the other side. Still I can see much merit in the barber pole idea. I remember in grade school there would be some certain 'craze' that would take over your grade. And suddenly everyone wanted to have a troll doll. And then something new next year/ term.
Re UU's origin. As a (mostly former) UU I don't doubt that it grew out of the puritan church. But the ideology is not the movement :^) And as a UU I mostly learned to claim Joseph Priestely, as a founding father. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Priestley. A pretty cool dude!
An argument on the topic of "banning universities from issuing ideological diversity statements" - the University gets many protections from the state in regards to the freedom of their speech that don't apply to normal government employee, they also get much in the way of state subsidies in terms of both the real value of land, tax dollars, and subsidized tuition.
The argument for maintaining these institutions is that a rich and vibrant intellectual community is the source of great societal advancements, and proper intellectual communities need to have the ability to discuss ideas freely , without fear of persecution by their host state.
However, I would argue that ideological litmus testing is a violation of that contract, as are field of inquiry and study with an explicitly activist mission. You could justify these things purely on the basis of "the institutions who we trusted in this regard have been consistently failing to keep up their end of the bargain, and thus deserve no such special treatment.
The reason why liberals are constantly shouting about the enemies at the gates - is that Normal, Nice, Liberal people still have yet to be convinced that this is a problem on par with the Alt Right, let alone the Religious Right (which was much more powerful and influential). I still have to deal with people who are In Intellectual Spaces saying things like: "(I haven't written the blog post because I have only a limited amount of involvement in the culture wars before people write me off as a culture warrior and stop listening to me, and I try to ration this pretty heavily. But if I was going to get involved by making 100 tweets about it, I would decide not to make those 100 tweets, and write the blog post.)". Why is this true of your writing about the culture war, but not of the entire media culture deciding that Trump Must Be Stopped, Truth Be Damned?
The Nice, Liberal, Intellectual grouping that you happen to inhabit has a decades-long engineered blind spot to leftist excesses, and are now quietly watching as more and more of their colleagues get taken out behind the chemical sheds to be replaced by the new, Woker candidates. The reason that there's an importance to sounding the alarm is that your average upper-middle-class college student who is in the thick of it in these terms has not yet understood the gravity of these problems and is totally ok with the ACLU despite the fact that it's filing legal briefs defending racism.
I know that you're a fan of Mistake Theory - but the people who want to Defund The Police do not hold to your views, and have absolutely no interest in analyzing the costs or benefits of defunding the police. Their view is rooted in the idea that the institution of "having police" is inherently racist and needs to be destroyed - despite the fact that every successful society of any cultural majority has had a police force, with some doing worse than others (and by those standards - our police are *phenomenally* laid back). In addition, by even suggesting "actually, if you want better police, you have to pay them" - you are taking a fundamental risk to your status as a Nice, Liberal, Intellectual.
You do not have to be Arthur Chu to be willing to stand up for yourself once in a while, and the alarm-sounding is necessary to convince the grouping you happen to inhabit that they actually must fight, lest they be destroyed either today by the rise of illiberal Wokeism - or a further defeat later when all the cool kids decide that the Alt-Right is the new thing (which may still happen - internet censorship stemmed the tide, but all of the sources of new, viral internet content that sticks are all still profoundly right wing).
I have a feeling the changes in Puritanism were a lot like the atomic bomb being a Budapest high school project: there was some property that was inherent to their culture all along. Atomic bomb physicists from Budapest tended to be Ashkenazi Jews. Likewise, Puritans probably had something that was unique all along - a good guess would be a culture of being educated and questioning. Once you have that, a society is just a feedback loop away from giving up the repressive parts.
Or to put it a bit differently, Puritans already "had what it took", so they just needed to set some things up differently. Trying to liberalize a tribal culture would involve overcoming entropy. There's work in building up concepts and cultural institutions that can't be done easily.
Some thoughts on what I've encountered exploring the question of Puritan slide to unitarianism
1. puritans largely believed you had to have a conversion experience to be a Christian. Their kids didn't have one, and they wanted their kids baptized, so they came up with the half-way covenant to baptize their grandkids when the parents weren't really sure they were converted.
2. puritans were anti-tradition, and were open to education and learning. This led to people learning new ideas and being crypto unitarian (Isaac Newton, not a puritan, was an example). Education was in the classical greeks, neoplatonists, etc. Theology was by Ramist Rationalism, where everything is a binary. Trinitarianism seems less "rational" to the crypto-enlightnment mind, and perhaps is an invention of popery like Christmas and Easter.
3. Newtonianism was the hotness, and showed a world that seemed wound up and didn't need interventions, which is somewhat determinist and seems Calvinistic. You can encounter God through study of the natural order: why need divine revelation? Educated people in close communities like Harvard and Yale were independent of church control and could think this in cabals
4. Puritans were congregational. If your pastor became a unitarian heretic, there wasn't a heirarchy to sus out the heresy and punish it.
I think the influence of Congregationalism is important here; I was always seeing references to "Congregational churches" in things about New England and not having a clue what was meant; they certainly weren't Anglican, but they didn't seem to be Presbyterian either. New England Puritanism seems to have wholeheartedly adopted the Congregational model where each local church is absolutely independent and master of its own destiny, and there isn't the hierarchical model as in liturgical churches where the bishop can come round and give you a good whack of the crozier to keep you in line. Even very early, the New England Puritans were setting out their stall on this, and this naturally led to "don't like/got booted out of your strict Puritan church in the village? well you can move down the road to the slightly/very more liberal church because we're all Congregationalists, baby!" and so in time to "hey now we're all plain living and high thinking Transcendentalists and Unitarians".
"Congregationalist polity, or congregational polity, often known as congregationalism, is a system of ecclesiastical polity in which every local church congregation is independent, ecclesiastically sovereign, or "autonomous". Its first articulation in writing is the Cambridge Platform of 1648 in New England."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Platform
"The Cambridge Platform is a statement describing the system of church government in the Congregational churches of colonial New England. It was written in 1648 in response to Presbyterian criticism and in time became regarded as the religious constitution of Massachusetts. The platform explained and defended congregational polity as practiced in New England and also endorsed most of the Westminster Confession of Faith. The document was shaped most directly by the thinking of Puritan ministers Richard Mather and John Cotton.
The Puritans who settled colonial New England were Calvinists who believed in congregational church government and that the church should include only regenerated persons as full members. Because of this, they became known as Congregationalists and their churches became known as Congregational churches. In New England, Congregationalism was the established religion—Congregational churches were supported financially by taxation and, in Massachusetts, only Congregational church members could vote.
In the 1640s, Congregationalism came under increased scrutiny from English Presbyterians, who were gaining power as a result of the English Civil War. As Calvinists, Congregationalists and Presbyterians were nearly identical in their beliefs with the exception of church government. Presbyterian polity gave authority to elders rather than to church members. In addition, Presbyterians did not insist upon a regenerate church membership and allowed all "non-scandalous" churchgoers to receive the Lord's Supper.
In 1645, local Presbyterians led by William Vassal and Robert Child led a protest against Massachusetts' policies on church membership and voting. Child threatened to take his complaints to Parliament, provoking fear among colonial leaders that the English government might intervene to force Presbyterianism on New England. The Cambridge Synod was called in response to these attacks on Congregationalism."
So a combination of being very staunch on "every church is its own government" and, ironically, competition from the Presbyterians which meant that Congregationalist Puritans were not able to maintain their monopoly as a de facto state church, resulted in "don't like these doctrines or how they are applied here? then you have a choice of that church there!" and naturally this leads to fissiparity, which opens the door to liberalising doctrines, which tends towards "we're dumping all those old doctrines and hey, how about some trendy Hinduism/Buddhism/Ancient Eastern Wisdom instead?"
Thanks for making such an interesting point! I wonder to what degree some ideas are more receptive for groups where they are one competitor in a field of similar peers versus one where there's a clearly dominant subset of winners or even a single monopolist.
There's a line of argument I hear tossed around that liberalism is a byproduct of city states - the Greek Polis and the Italian City states of the renaissance, Amsterdam in the early Modern period. This would seem to support that thesis but I imagine the dynamics are different in a purely religious competition rather than a broader set.
>Somebody should explore the fall of Puritanism in Massachusetts
Scott, you might want to check out From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765, by Richard Bushman. Different state, but very relevant to what you're interested in.
Thanks for reminding us of having “compassion” for those we disagree with in hopes of having a discourse rather than a “conversation of rage”.
> Is it just because child slavery is actually bad but the occasional offensive tweet isn't?
Basically, yes. Also, Gawker was a company whose business model was to make money from the (shitty) content they posted, so boycotting/canceling/whatevering them over that content seems justifiable. Individuals who post dumb tweets generally aren't profiting from those dumb tweets; they're usually earning a wage for something unrelated.
The point about "misalignment of state power and morality" from https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theses-on-the-current-moment#comment-1947315 is also important here.
One could also take the consequentialist viewpoint that canceling people over dumb tweets doesn't actually advance the cause of social justice, which is supposed to mean helping minority and disadvantaged groups. Instead, it just incentivizes a lot of energy to go toward performative acts that help no one, and creates a chilling effect that also helps no one.
To take a wild view - maybe it's important to cancel people!
If you have a culture that you're absolutely certain is correct and right, and that anybody who isn't an adherent to that culture is not only wrong - but actively contributing to the greatest evils in the world, it may be important both to signal "I'm elite and high status because I hold these opinions and thus get to grind my boots on random people for their incorrect opinions" - but also to create that chilling effect. Nobody likes evil ideas being popular, and if your point of view is that all ideas that don't fit inside the framework of intersectional social justice are evil - cancelling may be *more* important, because it increases the overall alignment of society to social justice.
Yes, that's the obvious object-level view. Religious zealots are in favor of the exact same behavior, except their categorization of ideas into "good" or "evil" is very different. The problem with the chilling effect is on the meta level, not the object level. Historically, popular categorizations of ideas have not been very stable; therefore, free discussion of ideas is preferable to enforcing particular orthodoxies.
>This isn't to say the 1950s US was good!
Was the amount of Per Capita Happiness lower in the 1955 US than it is in the modern US? And is that an appropriate metric for determining whether the 1955 US is "good", in political/cultural terms, compared to the modern US? If not, what's a better metric?
I had the impression that per capita happiness in late 30s Germany was... ok, maybe not through the roof, but really high.
So I think the distribution needs to be taken into account somehow.
> But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"?
Convincing 100,000 people to boycott Coca-Cola is not remotely the same as having 100,000 people direct hate mail at Miriam K. Blogspot and then call her employer to demand she be fired.
How did you not spot the difference?
Corporations aren't people, and big corporations can take a bigger beating than, say, Dr. Leslie Neal-Boylan, who was fired for saying "BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS".
Edit: although she was fired right after certain people complained to the university about her saying this, the university said in a statement that "we are not able to discuss specifics of a personnel matter, it would be incorrect to assume any statement by Dr. Neal-Boylan was the cause of that decision." Leslie seemed to believe this was the reason she was fired, though, and the statement doesn't clearly state that this wasn't the reason ("incorrect to assume" might be a way to scold people for making assumptions, without actually saying that the assumption is false.)
the cancel is coming from inside the government
the problem of cancel culture is not cultural but systemic
by now every government in the west (and every *private* institution that is strongly connected to the gov like finance, education or health) has DIE officers in every department
even at the height of the red scare there wasn't an anti communist commissar at your local bank
I'll bet everyone of you who is living in the USA , Canada or the "old" EU that if you asked your bank manager she will point you to the person responsible for Diversity Inclusion and Equity at your local branch
Frightening. The magician flagrantly shows us "systemic racism" with his right hand while subtly installing "systemic neoracism" with his left.
Great article, but I think what you really need for greatness are 89 more theses
Isn't the very presence of this post proof that we aren't in some sort of suppressive authoritarian moment?
"Haha, you can still post in the gutters of the internet" is not a defense.
YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter (the four "main" pages of the internet, as far as anyone can tell) all actively censor anti-Woke views, and Google has explicitly stated that they will make their algorithms lie to you if it risks creating a bad impression about a marginalized group.
This is the gutters of the Internet? I don't think so. It baffles me that people think they have a right to a specific platform and that it is wrong for platforms to set norms of behavior. If the norms of behavior of your political tribe are not acceptable to a platform, then you are demanding that the platform adopt these norms against their wishes. How is this different from claiming the platform is forcing you to adopt their norms if you wish to use their services?
"Just build your own platform" has been refuted clearly by the booting off of the internet of StormFront and Parler. We are no longer in the era where any random human being can run a website.
"you can have views and post them if you want, but. they won't get any reach because they're censored by a giant monopoly on who sees what on the internet" is not, to me - functionally a refutation of the point.
At best, it's naivete.
I don't know about Stormfront, but Parler is still up and running. And the reason Parler got booted from some hosting services was because it was used to coordinate the storming of the Capitol. That was a pretty egregious thing and the hosting services were within their rights to refuse them service. Don't you think there are limits as to what what a company should tolerate with respect to their customers?
Just so you know, this is part of a long ongoing discussion. Not that you're wrong to not have encountered it before, but there's a lot that's already been discussed here and on the old blog, and people may be using a shorthand to express arguments we've absorbed (even if not necessarily agreeing with them).
> "People can just build their own" -> "Not if they're kicked off everything" -> "People have the right to kick others out."
You've stopped arguing that people are being de-platformed, and switched to arguing that the deplatformers have a legal right to do so. The people you argue with largely agree that the deplatformers currently do have that right. The argument is elsewhere.
"Was used to coordinate the storming of the capitol" an interesting piece, because I can find calls for direct left wing political violence on every major social media site, quite easily.
Any claim that this was about egregious support or failure to moderate people doing crimes and not a politically motivated destruction of those who disagree feels weird in am age when the Portland Youth Liberation Front has active Twitter.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
Substack is where writers flee who were banned from everywhere else. No less than the New York Times doxxed the writer of this blog and punched down and bullied him. The rest of the media regularly calls for Substack to be cancelled, most recently in The Atlantic.
It's evidence for it, but not proof of it. The proof of the opposite is that Substack bans White Nationalism.
<i>If someone were to write this all up into a 2000 word blog post "Here's Why Defund The Police Probably Won't Work" which is sober and friendly and decent enough to send to your leftist aunt, then you could send it to your leftist aunt and maybe convince her. Instead we have 10,000,000 people dunking on some stupid thing someone in CHAZ did which may or may not even turn out to be real, and zero people writing the blog post. The tweets preach to the choir and make angry people angrier; the blog post might make a real difference.</i>
Reminds me of a recent report which the British government commissioned into the prevalence and impact of racism in the United Kingdom. The report found that, whilst there was some racism, it didn't appear to play a major impact in differential outcomes for various subsections of the population, and that Britain was, in comparison with virtually any other country, very accepting of racial minorities. And, to their credit, all my woke friends engaged seriously with the report, accepting it as a powerful counter-argument to their beliefs, and re-evaluating what they thought they knew about the state of British society.
Lol jk, they didn't do that at all, instead they instantly dismissed it, cast aspersions upon the people writing it, accused the government of engineering a cover-up, and shamelessly misrepresented the report's conclusions and methodology in order to ridicule it.
Which is to say, I think you're being unusually naïve here. Writing a polite, evidence-based blog post might work with people like you, but most people -- including most intellectuals -- aren't like you, and won't be convinced using the same sort of methods that work for convincing you and your friends.
Would it have convinced more people on the left if the government had sent a bunch of tweets dunking on the protests in Bristol?
Exactly. In the earlier days of the internet we assumed we could engage in open reasoned dialogue and change each other's minds, narrowing in on the truth with facts and logic. It quickly became obvious that what most people want is not enlightenment but confirmation of their beliefs and status within one's preferred ideological tribe. This study by Sperber and Mercier summarizes the issue nicely.
http://www.dan.sperber.fr/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/MercierSperberWhydohumansreason.pdf
The value of non (less?) ideologue sites like this one is that there are still some people more interested in truth than confirmation and tribal prestige.
I’ve read plenty of excellent explanations why defunding the police would likely be counterproductive, and any open minded person could easily find said articles. The point is that almost everyone doesn’t want to read the pros and cons. They want to validate what they already believe and/or gain brownie points with their ideological/political allies.
Bingo.
I've no idea of the quality of the report, but another way to frame what happened with the racism report was 'a conservative government appointed a conservative academic who they knew was skeptical that racism is important to do a report on racism, amazingly given the well-known (all be it perhaps exaggerated) ability of social scientists to find whatever they want, he found there wasn't that much racism; people who thought there was racism heard about this and were not convinced.'
I do agree though that people should have engaged with the report before slagging it off.
So basically like I said, most people won't be changed by polite, evidence-based posts, because you can always frame them in such a way as to give yourself an excuse to ignore them.
Yeah, that is probably somewhat true. But presumably not *entirely*. Sometimes people form opinions for good reasons!
I think it is missing a core point.
1600s Massachusetts or 1950s America, were flawed and those flaws had consequences, but they weren't objectively wrong.
SJWs make statements and hold beliefs that are factually incorrect and easily testable and plenty of scientists and layman know that.
The obvious similar case is Lysenkoism.
I think your article on Kolmogrov captured a lot of what happens in this kind of situation. I also suspect their ideology is very fragile in the Taleb sense. They can't co-exist with modern genetics, IQ tests, twin studies, any violation of the Tabula Rasa model, they need to invent crystal spheres like kids being influenced by how many books were in their house when they were three.
I am not sure how it ends, but there are clear contradictions. SJW leading figures are becoming less intelligent, more unpleasant and less healthy as this disregard merit and emphasize lived experience and encourage social media abuse. Teachers are realizing that some of the things they are meant to believe aren't possibly true I don't know how widespread it is and SJW principles in medicine, policing etc are causing disasters that are hard to hide.
Eventually I suspect people will speak out and the system will rapidly collapse but not sure when and how, I don't think 1990s liberalism was rare, most recent western societies have had freeish speech as long as you didn't attack the ruler or the church directly, in 1950s it was perfectly acceptable to call for homosexuality to be legalised and leftism was fine unless people suspected you of wanting to overthrow the country.
Which is why the idea of witch hunting collapsed within a year, the jurors, judges and witnesses asked to be forgiven or claimed to have be tricked by Satan, the judgement was reversed and compensation paid.
I don't want to dwell on it, but the witch trial is a clear example of society correcting to an obviously wrong situation.
I agree with this assessment. To my mind the big problem of the woke isn't that they're strident *per se*, it's that they're wrong about every single one of their beliefs. Yes, it's worse when a very wrong person is strident and powerful, a nut who just believes crazy shit is much less bad than one who can force you to pay lip service to the crazy shit and never reveal that you know the truth, but the fundamental issue isn't stridency or power, it's the insistence on believing pious lies. I would be pretty okay with a vocal, mighty Galileo.
This is more of a vague reply to the whole thread, but you raised it when I was ready to post it so you get the reply:
I'm not sure they necessarily want to enforce any new social rules. I think they just enjoy ruining other people's lives. It's built into our lizard brains to enjoy it. Smashing someone else's shit while they can't do anything about it is *fun*. Kids do it all the time.
This needs to be socialized out of people, the same way other things need to be.
I feel the opposite way. I think SJWs make a great contribution to the marketplace of ideas, that their paradigms are both fascinating and useful. I don't like how they seem to want to also abolish the marketplace of ideas and replace it with a monument to their single one idea.
Are they useful?
Aside from where they overlap entirely with Liberals what paradigms have they provided that are useful ideas?
They have been to me. One idea I found very interesting and useful is that of social modality v. biological modality for disabled people, the idea that the focus shouldn't be on seeking an unlikely cure for, say, someone in a wheelchair, and instead to focus on making sure curb cuts exist so that a person in a wheelchair is not homebound and can participate in society and go outside. I'm not in a wheelchair but I've pushed a stroller around enough to understand viscerally how frustrating it can be to not be able to cross the street or get up out of the street because there isn't a damn curb cut in the sidewalk.
Relevant Henry Farrell twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/henryfarrell/status/1392172306810687492
His primary question is "how come all these conservatives who watch Fox News are getting vaccinated when we know they hate vaccines" and it never seems to be that he thought the problem was that the thing he knew ("Fox News conservatives hate vaccines") was never true in the first place.
That's the starting point, but I read most of the thread as being about the general question of how totalizing ideologies lose power, with several different examples given, and you can recognize the general insights even if you think conservative vaccine hesitancy is a bad example.
"it never seems to be that he thought the problem was that the thing he knew ("Fox News conservatives hate vaccines") was never true in the first place."
It's true. Louisiana's vaccination rate will stall at around 35% of the total population.
Dear Leftist Aunt,
How are you.
I am fine.
Remember when The Rolling Stones thought it was a good idea to The Hell's Angels provide security for Altamont? Defunding the police will probably work out about as well.
Love,
Your nephew Gunflint
Good thing local policing is handled by local politicians who have to get elected rather than shout slogans!
I've always thought that having police administrated at the local government level, rather than the state level, was one of the oddest things in the US. Tiny police forces have no economies of scale, can't shift resources around properly, and suffer from limited government oversight, and often a damnable lack of talent in the senior ranks. It seems like one sensible sort of police reform would be to shift responsibility for policing to the state level, but I haven't heard of any efforts to make this happen.
I live in a Twin Cities home that was on the fringe of angry crowd. At one point we were instructed to pack ‘Go bags’. No one in my neighborhood went to bed that night.
"The Puritan Church turned into the Unitarian Church (I swear this is true, the Unitarian Universalists are the direct descendants of the 1600 Puritans). "
Sort of. It is kind of The Ship of Theseus. There was no organizational entity that ran the Puritan Churches. Individual congregations governed each church. They had the power to hire and fire clergy and to determine doctrine for the congregation.
The original 17th Century Puritan emigres from England were hard line Calvinists. They believed in predestination and a strict code of morality. By the 18th Century the doctrines of Arminianism became popular and the congregations fell away from the hard line. In the 1730's Jonathan Edwards preached the Great Awakening at Northampton MA to stem the Arminian tide. In 1750 the congregants of Northampton had had enough and they terminated Edwards pulpit.
(Little known fact about Edwards. He was the grandfather of Aaron Burr)
Also at the middle of the 18th Century, Jonathan Mayhew became the minister of the Old West Church in Boston. He preached a Unitarian doctrine. He was also a political radical who opposed the Stamp Act and preached the cause of liberty and the right and duty to resist tyranny.
In 1782, King's Chapel in Boston became the first congregation to officially accept Unitarianism and hire a Unitarian Minister. By 1785 they adopted a Unitarian liturgy. By the first quarter of the 19th Century, most of the congregations in Massachusetts were Unitarian.
In the middle of 19th Century the energies of New England focused politically on Abolitionism, and intellectually on Transcendentalism, (Emerson and Thoreau referenced above).
The development of religion in New England was not an inevitable progression. The Dutch Calvinists who settled in the US in places like western Michigan have retained much more of the old faith.
> ive or ten years ago, it felt like 5% of my social circle was openly concerned about social justice. Now it's more like 50% or 60%, including a lot of the brightest people who I respect most (I don't think this is because I've changed my social circle - it's stayed pretty constant over that period).
How do we distinguish between a respectability cascade and what seems to me as equally plausible: as social justice became more powerful, then it tripped more and more people's this-is-not-ok circuit breaker.
In other words, couldn't it be that if social justice's effects and power and spread stayed at the level of five or ten years ago, then it'd still be only 5% of people in your social circle who were concerned about it today?
On the question of government intervention/not intervention, Bryan Caplan makes a really good point here:
https://www.econlib.org/repealing-political-discrimination/
"The slippery slope looks something like this:
1. The law initially bans conscious decisions by employers to base hiring, promotion, or compensation on race or gender.
2. Discrimination gradually gets reinterpreted to include “unconscious” behavior with similar effects.
3. The next step is to blame employers for saying “the wrong thing,” even if there’s no discernable effect on workers’ objective career outcomes.
4. Then you blame employers for failing to deter their employees from saying “the wrong thing” to each other. This is when workers go from looking over their shoulder before they say something negative about a specific person, to looking over their shoulder before they say anything that would upset their most hypersensitive colleague.
5. Finally, you blame employers for failing to induce employees to say “the right thing” loudly and often. In other words, for failing to build a “culture of inclusion.”"
To the extent the current environment is driven by a dynamic like this, working to interrupt that slope is a coherent, principled project that doesn't require asking for government intervention.
I've been struggling how to parse the last post for a while, and now this one. It might just be that the implicit context I need was provided elsewhere, but I think I get hung up on the idea that the dominant culture has shifted so demonstrably that cancel culture now embodies this obvious and undeniable threat to all free speech norms. Its not that I'm not aware of examples, but those examples seem confined mostly to online forums like Twitter, and to college campuses, which are basically the closest real world equivalent of online forums like Twitter. And I agree that those places should have more ideological freedom! But as an accountant who does not have a famous blog or teach college classes....I don't know...I don't live my life in fear of getting canceled?
I get why its important to Scott, he has a very high-profile online presence, one that bled over into his personal life in ways that he documented the stress of (and its possible it was even more stressful than he disclosed), but again, a similiar scenario impacting my happiness or well-being seems...well pretty unlikely.
Is this the privilege of mediocrity? That no one cares? In the context of the 50s metaphor should I think of myself as similiar to the average....I guess accountant still works just fine, who went to work every day and no one ever asked if he was a communist or homosexual, because why would you demand a special pledge of allegiance or heterosexuality from Joe the accountant, that's reserved for people in Hollywood and high-ranking politicians. I know normal people CAN get swept up in things like this, like the lady who tweeted about Africa and it caused all sorts of problems for her but, I mean, it still happens less than getting struck by lightning, something I do not alter my whole behavior around avoiding.
So how am I supposed to think about this? Is it just supposed to be one of those things where if intellectuals and celebrities are afraid, it means we are being deprived of fresh ideas and perspective in ways that will damage us long-term (I think that was the point of the "Against Lysenkoism post on the old blog)? Or is this also a "First they came for the X" type thing, where I'm supposed to be worried that if today people on Twitter are being mobbed, then tomorrow it could spread so that I, walking down the street, might be assailed by a mob of rabid feminists and antiracists unless I'm wearing a BLM t-shirt? Because I'm just not sold that that is what is happening, or at least, not happening more often than people are getting struck by lightening.
I was tempted to call this post histrionic, but I guess it isn't really. Its deliberately trying to avoid being that, and doing a pretty good job of it. But the downside is that now I'm not certain why I should care. I think I'm supposed to feel like some walled garden is under siege but...I never felt like I had a walled garden in the first place. This is going on a slight tangent, but I grew up in Georgia, and I remember going to a special summer educational program where one of the teachers was gay, and I remember him telling the kids "if you feel like coming out to your parents...don't do it until you have some place you can go safely if they kick you out." That wasn't in 1950, that was in 2008. Now again, that guy was a teacher, an award winning one who was allowed to teach at high-prestige special summer education programs, so obviously the culture wasn't universally repressive to gay rights. But it was repressive enough that he felt like he had to warn kids that being open in their identity might cost them shelter in their own communities. So when Scott talks about the "high-freedom water mark" of the 90s...I guess he means freedom to be blogging on the internet, not freedom to be a gay teen in a small town in the deep South.
I don't mean to be uncharitable. I know the two aren't mutually exclusive, and a lot of people on the internet were fleeing the persecution in their communities, which probably made that internet freedom all the more intoxicating. But now gay marriage is legal, the government is at least making gestures towards fighting for transgendered rights. Its not that Scott is against any of these things, obviously, but saying that somehow things are worse now...I feel the dissonance of that.
I guess part of me does feel like whatever this current moment of "wokism" we are experiencing is, it feels like a small price to pay for what feels to me at least like obvious social progress. Unless you are saying we never had to pay it, or that the two aren't really related to each other. Which I would like to see someone argue. Because on the surface the way that progress has looked is that people blog about their experience being marginalized online, sometimes this takes the form of calling out people (fairly or unfairly) for not acknowledging their plight, eventually this discourse snowballs until suddenly people like me (who wasn't aware that transgenderism was even a thing until a few years ago) suddenly realize that there's a whole marginalized community out there I was ignoring and start to advocate for their rights, and eventually at least some portion of politicians want in on the action by doing things like setting policies allowing, for example, transgenderism in the military. Which, yeah, I think the military is a dumb institution, but if I were stuck in it, and realized I was transgendered, I would rather be allowed to continue to serve than feel like I had to hide it or risk getting kicked out with some sort of blight on my record.
So in conclusion, maybe its unfair of me, a person who doesn't feel like they have to worry about stuff like cancel culture to say to Scott, who obviously does, "hey stop making such a big deal out of cancel culture." Put in those terms, it might be the definition of entitlement. But Scott wasn't really framing it as something that's bad for him personally, it was something he was framing as obviously, universally bad for all of us. And I think in other posts he has made a pretty good case why that might be, but those arguments always come down to "free speech is a really good thing," and I agree! But I'm not actually sure there's less of it now than there was before. Maybe on the internet. Maybe even on college campuses. And that's obviously a loss, but it feels like a more specific loss than the tone of posts like these imply.
I mean, again, in my parents hometown, you can walk into any bar and hear people talk like that. I was getting lunch with my folks over Christmas break and two old guys were lamenting how no one understands the nobility of the confederacy anymore (I'm probably exaggerating, but they really were bemoaning how liberals don't understand history). Nobody asked them to leave. If they had done that in a bar in Berkeley it would have been different maybe, but also if I was in that same south GA bar advocating BLM I might have some trouble. So that sounds like speech norms are always highly localized, which means business as usual, doesn't it? When was this magical time when you were allowed to have any opinion, in front of any group of people, anywhere you wanted?
I was in the military only a few years ago, transitioned out right as women were first being allowed into combat arms positions. I was in one of the last positioned ever that a woman couldn't legally hold. We debated that openly and honestly quite often, in our own training, at military schools, in the units, at public forums. Same thing with gays. Same thing with transgenders. Plenty of people argued both sides. Hell, plenty of Senators in charge of making laws right now are arguably quite loudly that transgendered people should not serve in the military. These aren't marginalized outcasts.
Like Kamateur, I was refreshed as heck to hang out with my dad and uncle when they came to visit me finally a few weeks back, at the local bars near me (Dallas, TX). I haven't been out much thanks to Covid, but it was nice to be off the Internet and see people doing and talking about exactly the same thing they did and talked about 30 years ago, hitting on each other, saying racially offensive shit and brushing it off (dad and uncle are very dark Mexicans who quite a lot of attention and didn't give a shit). Fuck, my neighbor at this same bar just a few years back told my wife, who was annoyed at all the stray dogs roaming the town at the time, that he didn't mind because they only attacked Mexicans. Stupid though he felt when he was realized he was talking to a woman whose husband is Mexican, he still goes to that bar. I still see him. No hard feelings.
Fuck, I still had coworkers before I started working at home wearing their MAGA hats and "Obama is a Muslim terrorist" bumper stickers quite proudly.
I'm not seeing this rabid fear anywhere in real life.
Also, Black Lives Matter marched near me quite a few times over the past seven years since I live downtown. It's been quite common to see people line the streets, heckling them, sometimes throwing beer bottles at them, apparently quite at ease with loudly and publicly not agreeing with Black Lives Matter.
I agree with a lot of this. Also being from GA, I don't really feel the overarching threat of cancel culture at all in my daily life. Usually, it feels like all these issues related to "wokeness" or "SJWs" are things reserved to online crazy people and those working at Berkley, but never something that actually matters in Real Life.
Like you said, maybe feeling like this is its own type of privelege. Although I do wonder if maybe instead that the phenomenon that Scott's describing is just something that doesn't really occur within my section of the world? If "cancel culture" is a real phenomenon on Twitter and the west coast, and if someone lives in the affected areas / goes on Twitter a lot, then yeah I guess it makes sense to be worried about the phenomenon. But for me, where neither of these things apply, the concerns aren't very resonate and come accross as a little hyperbolic.
I strongly agree with this, especially with the feeling of reading these last two posts and wondering what exactly I missed. I don't really have anything to add here expect to emphasize how well this comment sums up my reaction to these last two pieces.
It sounds like all your opinions are orthodox ones (I might say unironically that they are politcally correct) and so that's why you don't feel worried.
That's probably fair, but also no one has ever asked me about them. Scott's views are politically correct on 90% of things, and the couple of things he maybe radically disagrees on, like gender in programming or race and IQ would never come up in a water cooler conversation. They only came up for him because he started a blog for the express purpose of expressing his opinion and it caught wildfire. If he were either less successful or felt less of a need to write on every controversial topic that comes his way, would anyone care? I don't mean to blame him for his own harassment, I am just saying that I think most people are less likely to find themselves in his situation, and I include myself in that category.
It means something that you could have an openly gay teacher in your community, even though gay kids couldn't rely on their families not to throw them out.
He was a teacher in the affluent Atlanta suburbs area (I think, it was a long time ago). But we were from all over GA, including the far more rural, less liberal parts. I doubt he would have been welcome in my school district at the time, although I could be wrong.
I think one point Scott overlooks is the previously compartmentalized nature of speech in the pre-internet age.
The moral and political guardians only really cared out about the consensus in the mass culture, because that's where changes would be destabilizing to the social status quo. But in the old days, radical ideas could still seep into the mainstream slowly from above and below. For example, French philosophes or Bertrand Russell-type English intellectuals could freely write and debate about Marxism or free-love, or whatever. But I think that highbrow philosophizing was understood to be broadcast on a whole different channel that was not part of the mass culture. So that made it a fairly tolerable safe space.
Likewise, there were always guys with the equivalent of the kooky "underground" newsletter pushing their pet radical ideas. But these fringe ideas were so obscure that they were also unthreatening.
But the internet has jumbled all the channels together in a chaotic information soup. All of the speech and all of the the reactionary backlash are constantly occurring in real time on the same channel open to the masses. On balance it's probably good for free speech and inquiry, but it's like a non-stop Hegelian dialectic running at 10ghz.
"If we can draw some kind of general principle from that, then I like where this is going. Five or ten years ago, it felt like 5% of my social circle was openly concerned about social justice. Now it's more like 50% or 60%, including a lot of the brightest people who I respect most (I don't think this is because I've changed my social circle - it's stayed pretty constant over that period)."
This corresponds to... the dramatic rise of "social justice" among people with similar demographics as your social circle. What % of your social circle thought Black-White gaps in various outcomes were primarily due to discrimination ten years ago? Now five years ago? And now?
I needed this. Thanks for writing it. I'll be reading it a few times, I think, to try and work out what I should be doing. I've had the good sense to stay away from Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, but the phenomenon is encroaching on other online spaces I'm in and there are faint traces of it in my workplace (harmless at the moment, but I have no idea if that's a stable constellation). Your point #4 is really important to my sanity; I am way to skittish at the moment.
For what it's worth, I tried to hammer out some of the nuances of what I mean when I say "don't cancel people" in a private conversation with some people recently. A situation had happened where someone who had previously been on-staff of a site (but inactive for nearly a decade) was kicked out and all of their contributions to the site purged. The announcement thread was very generic and vague about what happened (did not even name the person, ostensibly because they did not deserve "the attention"), delivered a "we have zero tolerance for racism, sexism, etc and anyone who espouses such views is not welcome on this site" punchline, was instra-locked before anyone could respond to it, and all discussion of the topic elsewhere was aggressively shut down by the remaining staff. Now, from what I know about the ex-staff person, they were not the sort that one ought to defend, but I still think a lot of things could have gone better, and I've been trying to explain to people why (elsewhere, obviously).
I think I would have reacted with a lot less terror if (1) the announcement thread had included a line along the lines of "we thought long and hard about this and while we regret having to do this and think this sort of thing should be the absolute last resort, in this case the situation had been technically intolerable for several years already", (2) the person's contributions (completely unrelated to their political views) had not been purged, (3) discussion about it in any shape or form was not verboten, if necessary with some clear rules laid out about what kind of conversation would be allowed or not (e.g. "no discussion of [political topic] is allowed at all, not to defend it, and not to denounce it"), (4) some kind of warning would have been nice for the purging of the content.
The part in that list that I think is the most important is #1. Yes, there's a degree of "vapid disclaimer" to it, but it wouldn't be important to me that the staff members necessarily *mean* it. But a disclaimer like that would help to slow the spread of a meme I find problematic - that it's okay to react with righteous vengeance to burn someone's life down to the degree it happens to be in your hands. Combined with the lack of any open discussion about it, the kids playing this game (because of course there are kids) now get to update their worldview a very slight bit toward "This is how you should deal with people whose views you find reprehensible. It's socially acceptable to do it, and it has results. If I ever run a popular site, I can do this and improve the world with it."
In other words, I think this is one of those cases where society should teach the rule "don't do this", and occasionally, after thinking long and hard about it, there are exceptions, because there are exceptions to most rules (e.g. "don't kill" typically having a self-defence exception).
Nothing in this instance gave me an impression that anyone thought long and hard about whether it was the right thing to do. I *did* get the impression of a flash fire and the distinct additional impression that it would be directed at anyone who didn't sufficiently distance themselves from the -ism definition du jour. Which, all right, the solution here is to stop frequenting this site, obviously. But I do find the spread of the aforementioned meme troublesome.
I'm sure this entire point could be made in a more coherent fashion, and equally sure a much better point could be made - this was literally my first attempt at engaging with people who didn't understand why I could possibly object to someone that obnoxious getting kicked out in this particular way. But it's the tentative beginnings of a direction I'm forming for my cancel culture thoughts.
Anyway, as always, thank you for sharing your thoughts with the world. I really appreciate it. I know I don't comment much, but I read all your articles. (Same for the commenters, really. I definitely don't read all comments, but even skimming them is often enlightening.)
Here's the long post you didn't want to write, about "defund the police".
https://www.slowboring.com/p/defund-police-is-a-bad-idea-not-a
Also, your section about trying to differentiate between changing social norms, and "cancelling", is something Wil Wilkinson has been trying to articulate for a while:
https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/undefined-cancel-game
https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/the-boring-truth-vs-cancel-culture
I'd say that Jon Ronson (in "So You've Been Publicly Shamed"), and Natalie Wynn (in her Contrapoints video on the topic), are the two commentators who've come closest to defining Cancel Culture clearly. Ezra Klein did a podcast with Wynn and Wilkinson a few weeks back which was pretty good.
>Anyone who spoke out against it was burned as a witch or exiled
Surely you mean hanged as a witch; no one was ever burned in Salem.
"I still don't have a great sense for how 1950s-era conformity and repression failed"
"I admit that my social circle is tiny and highly atypical. It's just a bunch of weird Bay Area intellectuals and creative types who are really into sex and drugs."
What's obviously missing today is rock-n-roll. I'm not joking. It was a real thing that seems to have been forgotten.
One thing rock-n-roll meant in cultural terms was young people living for the moment and not giving a shit about the future. If you don't give a shit about the future, it is really easy to flout conventions. I'm shocked by how much young people today care so much more about their careers than their freedoms. You are the greengrocers with the signs about socialism in the window.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/defund-police-is-a-bad-idea-not-a
Ok but the blog post did get written
Scott, cancel culture is not boycotting! These are equated often by proponents of cancel culture to make it seem much more innocent than it is.
Boycotting is the act of persuading people to voluntarily abstain from engaging with a company/person/etc. Cancel culture typically involves the opposite: making it impossible for people to engage.
This is a boycott: sending out a mail to all students explaining why they should not go to an event with X.
This is cancel culture: appealing to the university leadership to get the event cancelled.
This is a boycott: holding a demonstration against the event, while letting people past.
This is cancel culture: interfering with the event so it can't go forward or people can't get to it.
This is a boycott: asking people to not take the classes by a professor
This is cancel culture: asking for the professor to be fired
This is a boycott: trying to persuade people with arguments
This is cancel culture: creating lists of those who engage and harassing them
This is a boycott: telling potential buyers that a certain book is problematic
This is cancel culture: demanding that publishers censor all their books (for example, with 'sensitivity readers')
Again, the key distinction is that boycotting is about people having a choice and cancel culture about taking that choice away. It's the difference between choosing to not vote and not being allowed to vote and between choosing S&M and being in an abusive relationship. From a certain perspective, these look very similar, but from the perspective of freedom, they are very different.
Agree.
Also cancel culture is asymmetric. Instead of responding to speech with speech, they try to affect your ability to live in the world. It’s not quite killing you, but that’s where it’s going. It a short leap from you have no right to make a living to you have no right to living.
"Tweeting" is the current manifestation of the capability of broadcasting your thoughts with minimal effort. Before, everyone thought their thoughts, and only some people wrote or spoke widely about them. Now instead of just thinking thoughts, mass quantities of people also have those thoughts broadcast online.
To be irritated at vast quantities of the public tweeting dumb things is to be irritated at vast quantities of the public *thinking* dumb things. People verbalize the idea that it's pointless to get worked up over dumb tweets from 0-follower randos, but the sheer bug-in-the-human-mind irrationality of it doesn't seem to easily set in at the emotional level, for some reason. Imagine if you got annoyed every time someone anywhere in the country thought something bad about you; this is nearly what happens when you get annoyed at a tweet.
To pull this tangent back to the topic of the post: Advising people to do something impactful instead of tweeting is to advise people to do something impactful instead of doing *nothing*. While it may be fair to call out to those doing nothing to do something instead, I think the superficial appearance of a tweet as being something more concrete than it really is, is probably having an effect here.
It's a little ironic that the Unitarian Church is showing it's own type of Puritanism again: https://www.gofundme.com/f/bring-civil-liberties-back-to-the-uuma?utm_campaign=p_cp_url&utm_medium=os&utm_source=customer
I’m not sure why, but this post doesn’t feel like it was written by Scott. Something in the tone and sentence structure.
> 6. Somebody should explore the fall of Puritanism in Massachussetts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Puritans_in_North_America says that the Puritans fragmented into sects, spinning off Quakers, Baptists, and others. Another key divide was over the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Way_Covenant, which was so divisive because the Puritans at that point had choose whether to maintain their control over civil life (via the Halfway Covenant), or the purity of the congregation (no Halfway: keep the non-elect out of the congregation).
(Kidd 2005 p. 32) says that "once the Glorious Revolution [1689; replaced the Catholic king with a Protestant] was embraced by New Englanders, their religious and political agenda had so fundamentally changed that it doesn't make sense to call them Puritans any longer." Also, "The new Massachusetts charter of 1692… required the former Puritans to tolerate all Protestants, even Anglicans", and, "New Englanders became intensely devoted to the British nation, empire, and monarchy, especially as Britain fought perceived Catholic enemies… They came to see the new British government as the leader in the fight against world Catholicism, and thought it foolhardy to undermine the power of the monarchy or the empire in the name of intra-Protestant squabbles."
(Noll 2002 p. 21) says, "By the 1740s Puritan theology was indeed breaking apart into different strands of pietists, rationalists, and conservatives."
But none of these answers are what you want, because today we don't care as much about whether or not someone believes you must recount a personal conversion experience to have the right to vote, or their exact understanding of original sin and predestination, as whether they're down with having the Church rule the State, enforce a strict puritanical moral code, and be allowed to execute people for religious dissent. That stuff didn't go away in 1740; in fact, it came back with a vengeance in the Great Awakening of 1740, whose "New England theology" was a reactionary movement to return to a more-puritanical Christianity. IIRC, most New England states interpreted the US Constitution's "freedom of religion" as "freedom to be some kind of Protestant" until something like 1830 (and we still have laws against prostitution today).
A better answer is to check "God" and "Christian" (separately) on Google n-grams. Both dropped sharply around the Glorious Revolution and the American Revolution. These two revolutions both took the wind out of Christian fanaticism. Then the US Constitution separated Church and State, maybe because otherwise none of the colonies would have joined in a union with New England, which was still infamous for its crusading, intolerant Calvinism.
(In retrospect, perhaps they still shouldn't have.)
Whoops.
References for the above comment:
William Adams Brown, 1902. The Essence of Christianity: A study in the history of definition. NYC: Charles Scribner's Sons.
James S. Dennis, Harlan Beach, Charles Fahs, & John G. Bartholomew, 1911. World Atlas of Christian Missions (https://archive.org/details/MN41422ucmf_2). NYC: Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions.
William Hutchinson, 1976. The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. NYC: Oxford U Press.
Thomas S. Kidd, 2005. What Happened to the Puritans? Historically Speaking 7(1):32-34.
J. H. Muirhead, 1928. How Hegel Came to America. The Philosophical Review 37(3):226-240.
Mark A. Noll, 2002. America's God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford U Press.
I think the more-interesting half of Scott's question 6 is, How did the formerly-Puritan Yankee elite, while living in the same places and controlling the same institutions, change from fanatical "right-wing" Christians in 1830 to fanatical "left wing" progressives and Unitarian Universalists by 1900?
The best book I know on this is (Hutchinson 1976), The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism. It only outlines the period before 1860, and doesn't talk about Puritans at; but it covers the more-inflectional part of the transition of New England's elite from radical Puritans to radical progressives: the period from 1860-1900, when liberal theologians (Unitarians, Universalists, Hegelians, Social Gospel, & New Theology) struggled with old-school Calvinists for control of universities, theological seminaries, and congregations, notably in NYC and Chicago. (San Francisco could be on that list, but Hutchinson ignored the west coast.) It also names some of the important earlier links, like Hegel, Schleiermacher, & the Concord Transcendentalists.
The book is quite boring, and not very illuminating without some additional context. Many important connections are unstated. For instance:
- The University of Chicago was founded in 1856 as a Baptist school (Wikipedia, "Old University of Chicago"), despite the fact that, to avoid honoring its 1886 bankruptcy debts, it now claims to have been founded in 1890 with Rockefeller money.
- Baptists, along with Pilgrims, Puritans, Congregationalists and Presbyterians, are Calvinists.
- Andover Seminary is now part of Yale.
- Princeton was founded by 7 ministers, all from Yale or Harvard, all radical Great Awakening preachers, to educate new ministers in reactionary theology (https://blogs.princeton.edu/mudd/2016/01/who-founded-princeton-university/).
- Most colleges in New England before perhaps 1850 were in effect seminaries, founded and directed mostly by ministers, primarily to teach the next generation of ministers, who were the true leaders of most New England communities.
- The doctrine of "living moral experience" (p. 127), derived from writings of Rudolf Lotze and Albrecht Ritschl by at latest (Brown 1902), seems identical to the Nazi doctrine of Erlebnis (from Heidegger) and the Woke doctrine of "lived experience". All three fight science's claim on epistemology by arguing that personal experience and feelings are more foundational than data or logic.
- The close ties between the key liberal theology reformers, who are very often from Harvard, Yale, or the U. of Chicago, are never pursued, and sometimes unclear (e.g., some ministers are "from New Haven"; does that mean they were from Yale?)
- As often happens, some of the dominant ideas driving the change of that period are left unmentioned, probably because everybody at the time thought they were too obvious to mention. The most-disruptive influences on American Protestantism in the 19th century were Hegel and a revival of Plato. Doctrines of Plato (e.g., p. 11, 79, 125) and Hegel (p. 2, 5, 16-18, 92, 121, 123-126) are scattered throughout (Hutchinson 1976), but unmarked as such; Hutchinson says "Plato" and "Hegel" only once or twice each.
Ivy Calvinism became secular in the 19th century much like how Marx became secular: Begin as Christian; try to reconcile Christianity with the Enlightenment and Romanticism using Hegel; give up, rip out some sentences from Hegel that you think you understand, and construct your own theory around them.
Starting with Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hegel (both Platonists), theologians throughout the 19th century struggled to reconcile Christianity with both Romanticism, which taught love of nature, liberalism, and a non-theological morality; and the Enlightenment, Newton, and empirical science in general. They came up with many bizarre rationalizations to let them call themselves Christans without taking the Bible seriously. See (Hutchinson 1976; Wikipedia, History of Harvard University: Science; Muirhead 1928) for three almost entirely disjoint threads of how 19th-century theologians tried to use Plato and Hegel to unify Christianity with science.
Some Hegelians picked up the mostly-empirical tradition of Biblical criticism, which we can trace back to Spinoza and Erasmus, trying to explicate Hegel's claim that (my paraphrase) the Bible was entirely false, but essentially true. This led American ministers liberalized by Unitarianism and Romanticism to see if adding Hegel to the mix could clarify things. According to (Muirhead 1928), they didn't understand Kant or Hegel at all, and became Transcendentalists, claiming they could reach the ding an sich via divine inspiration.
This inspired further bizarre Hegelian rationalizations for how people could be Christans without taking the Bible seriously, none of which worked. See (Hutchinson 1976; Wikipedia, History of Harvard University: Science; Muirhead 1928) for three disjoint threads of the influence of Plato and Hegel on 19th-century American theology. What came out at the end of the 19th century was an American Calvinist church split in two: one half which had given up on the Enlightenment; and another half, including the elite colleges except for Princeton, which had replaced the Bible with Hegel to produce some "essence" of Christianity with all the irrelevant bits like sin, the crucifixion, and the historical existence of Jesus stripped away.
(Witness this 2018 advertisement for a lecture series on Hegel, quoting a recommendation by Marcuse, given by a Unitarian Universalist church: https://lcuuc.weebly.com/hegel-hegel-hegel.html)
Chapter 5 hints that this new, secular yet still evangelical Christianity motivated and eased colonialism, because a "Christianity" stripped of its Western cultural baggage was easier to foist onto strange cultures. It would be a delicious irony if we could show that the same Ivy League institutions leading our "anti-colonialist" movement today had in fact been responsible for colonialism. I have some evidence from (Dennis..Bartholomew 1911) that this was the case by 1911, when on the order of 1/3 of the world's funding for Protestant missions to non-Western nations was given to missionary organizations based in Boston and NYC.
I think a larger lesson here is that right-wing and left-wing are closer to each other than to the center. The more-constant dimension is "moderate and pragmatic" vs. "fanatic radical".
Sorry about that duplicated half-a-paragraph. I forgot to delete one of them.
(Actually, I don't know if Marx became an atheist before or after he began studying Hegel. That bit about Marx is sloppy. I wanted to note the affinity between Marxism and liberal theology, due to their both starting by trying to get Hegel's system to work, then giving up, salvaging what they could from it, and trying to cobble these bits and pieces of Hegel together somehow.)
"It would be a delicious irony if we could show that the same Ivy League institutions leading our "anti-colonialist" movement today had in fact been responsible for colonialism."
What would that achieve? It's not like white support for decolonization isn't saturated with white guilt.
I just like irony.
As far as I can tell, the best way to word the opposition to canceling is: If you don't have any social power but need it, a boycott is a way of transmuting economic power into social power. It becomes immoral when you already have all the social power and are using boycotts to keep it that way.
It's also worth mentioning that canceling individuals is very different from canceling institutions. *That* opposition is very easy to put into simple words: what happens outside the workplace stays outside the workplace.
The Puritans became the Unitarians? A small splinter faction of dissenters did. Not the religion as a whole. Seriously, religious history is so often neglected because our academics lean so atheist. But it's really vital to understanding anything resembling cultural movements. It's only maybe in the last fifty years that culture war didn't mean religious war.
Anyway, the Unitarians are their own branch with a direct lineage to the 16th century. They united with the most liberal of the Puritans over opposition to the Congregationalist structure of more traditional Puritanism. This conservative branch remained more in line with Calvinist principles and Congregational government but has at least an equal claim to descent from the Puritans. The conservatives eventually became the United Church of Christ, which is about ten times bigger than the Unitarians. It's still liberal, though less so than the Unitarians.
Perhaps more importantly, they're far less cuddly about their liberalism. Hellfire, sin, and damnation is still very much a thing. They've just changed their view of their city on a hill to something much more liberal. Considering liberalism is dominant in New England, I'm not sure that's too much of a change from even the historical status quo. After all, they were Parliamentarians back in the day. They were drawn from the political ancestors of the British left and their opponents were the Tories.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's family was Unitarian and his father was a forerunner of that liberal splinter group. In fact, his father's specific church would be a center of the splinter in time. And he was very much within that tradition. So he is less of a comment on the transformation of the Puritans as from an unrepresentative family that heralded the change. A change that would be rejected by the majority, both for reasons of conservatism and because of theological reasons I can get into. But pointing out that Unitarians are like Unitarians is tautological. I've met a few that have their own headcanons of Hinduism living in Boston.
Henry David Thoreau's parents were also part of a reformist splinter group and left the Unitarian Church. Thoreau was so disgusted by the purity tests, group think, and pointless drama over small stakes (sound familiar?) that he basically abandoned organized religion altogether.
Victorian morality has been greatly exaggerated. I'm straining to think of any moral laws that passed unless you want to count things like ending slavery or the ten hour workday. Persecution of homosexuality and prostitution was not new: the police simply got better funded and more efficient and so were able to enforce those laws more efficiently. Meanwhile, the Victorian era saw the birth of the porn industry and huge booms in sex toys, condoms, etc. The "censorship" of books was mostly just offering a censored version. And the rapid advance of literacy and wealth meant new people were reading who may well have been just as big prudes the previous century.
You start seeing extensive regulation of such behavior, socially and legally, mostly towards the end of the century. The Progressive Era. That's when a group of radical progressives began to push for things like banning condoms and porn, organizing boycotts, producing restrictive ideas of politeness, having linguistic shibboleths, etc. I think a lot of the cultural image of the period is actually towards it's end. That's why Queen Victoria is almost always portrayed as old. Which means they're remembering the moral puritanism of the Progressive Era, not the entire period.
And while modern Progressives share only some direct policy positions with 19th century Progressives, they both are animated by the same fundamental belief. That the improvement of society, its progress, towards an ideal state must be driven through their actions politically and socially. If they've changed, it's only in what that ideal state is, just as the more traditionalist Puritans remained brimstone and hellfire and only changed what they considered a sin.
I can't comment as intelligently on Ireland. But social patterns are far, far more durable than most people realize.
(Also, secondary point: extreme religiosity is a sign of conservatism today, especially in the US. This was not the case historically but we project that belief backward. There are plenty of examples where the less religious faction was the more conservative.)
Great comment. Thanks.
"The Puritans became the Unitarians? A small splinter faction of dissenters did. Not the religion as a whole."
You seem to be much more familiar with the history of the UCC than I am, and you've made me more aware of a division that I'd been treating as unimportant, so thank you.
But on re-inspecting the matter, I think it's more useful to describe the split among Puritans this way: As the New England colonies grew, the Puritan churches increasingly de-emphasized their traditional congregational independence, in favor of political and theological unity and oppression of dissent. Some Puritans, smaller in number, but more true to the principles of the Reformation, splintered off to form non-denominational churches, most of which eventually formed an alliance with a non-Puritan Reformed group, which eventually formed an alliance with two other non-Puritan Reformed groups, to form the UCC.
Here are reasons to believe this view:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members claims there are now .8 million members of the UCC, and .6 million UUs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Church_of_Christ says there are 1 million UCCs.
2. The Prussian government merged Prussian Lutheran and Calvinist denominations in 1817. Immigrants to America from those churches were eventually called the Evangelical Synod of the West, which later merged with the Reformed Church in the United States to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church. Turning back to the Puritans, the National Council of the Congregational Churches of the United States and the General Convention of the Christian Church merged in 1937 to form the Congregational Christian Churches, most of whom merged with the Evangelical and Reformed Church in 1957 to form the UCC. Of the 5 groups identified in this lineage above, only one was formerly Puritan. So the number of UCC members today tells us very little about how many Puritan churches eventually became UCC.
3. I've been going thru lists of famous people's religious affiliations as provided by both UCC, UU, and unbiased sites. When someone is officially in the UCC, they usually give their denomination as that of some church which at some point formally merged with somebody who merged with the UCC, e.g., "Lutheran", "Presbyterian", or else just "nondenominational". So "UCC" seems to be more of a formal alliance than a religious identity. Whereas Unitarians and UUs give their denomination as Unitarian or UU.
4. The Unitarians have been and are more culturally important and powerful than the UCC. There have been 4 Unitarian US Presidents, and 0 UCC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_affiliations_of_presidents_of_the_United_States); 10 Unitarian Supreme Court justices and 0 UCC (https://www.infoplease.com/biographies/government-politics/supreme-court).
Harvard was controlled by Unitarians starting in 1806.
5. The most historically notable Puritan churches are Unitarian Universalist today. The churches that splintered off from them are UCC.
First Parish Church in Plymouth (est. 1620) is now UU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Parish_Church_in_Plymouth
The Second Church of Plymouth, which split off from First Church in 1738, is now officially UCC, but doesn't mention that anywhere in its website's description of its beliefs. It's only found buried in their history: https://www.secondchurchofplymouth.org/our-history
First Church Boston, est. 1630, is now UU: https://www.firstchurchboston.org/about
Second Church Boston, also called Old South Church in Boston (est. 1669), split off from First Church Boston in 1669, and called "Schismatics" for accepting the liberal half-way covenant: https://www.oldsouth.org/history
The First Church in Salem (est. 1629), the one that burned the "witches", is now UU: http://www.firstchurchinsalem.org/the-long-history
The Old Ship Meetinghouse (built 1681), the oldest Puritan church building still in existence, is now UU: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/what-would-it-have-been-like-to-attend-a-puritan-worship-service/
Federal Street Church in Boston (est. 1729), now called the Arlington Street Church, is now UU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Street_Church_(Boston)
6. The Wikipedia page on the Andover Theological Seminary describes the split of Congregationalism into Unitarians vs. more orthodox Calvinists (who eventually joined the UCC) as taking place in 1807, when the orthodox split off from the Unitarians, who had taken control of Harvard, to found Andover Seminary.
7. The UCC seems to describe itself (https://www.ucc.org/who-we-are/about/history/) as descended from dissenters from the American Puritan churches, and seems to emphasize not any particular theology, but a distaste for denominationalism unity in favor of congregational independence. (I didn't have the patience to read past about1850. It's LONG.)
Whoops; I accidentally cut out the statement that the Second Church Boston is now UCC.
"extreme religiosity is a sign of conservatism today, especially in the US. This was not the case historically but we project that belief backward. There are plenty of examples where the less religious faction was the more conservative."
I know this is not your main point, and therefore isn't as developed. But it does seem highly dependent on the metrics we choose for religiosity and the definition we choose for "conservative." Jonathan Edwards may look hyper-religious to us today, but I'm sure the average Quaker in Pennsylvania or the average Catholic in Maryland in 1741 regarded themselves as no less "religious" than a scary Massachusetts Calvinist.
Maybe I am missing the point, but isn't the core policy prescription to make in the midst of the cycles, trends, and fashions of the day to focus one's attention on things that will still matter in 100 years? The higher things - as they say. Trends are like winds. Sometimes the winds are good and one can harness them, sometimes bad and one should tack against them. But they are winds... prophecy to the wind, Scott, only the wind will listen.
Apologies if someone has already said this, but I don't think that the situation for anti-woke views in the US is much like the situation for gays in the 1950s (probably marajuana too, but I have less sense what people thought about it in the 50s.)
In the 1950s, there was pretty much no segment of mainstream society anywhere in the United States that was accepting of gays. It wasn't just like it was uncool but large parts of society that were accepting while upper-middle class dinner parties were filled with homophobia. The gay rights movement was a tiny marginalize group largely ignore. Scott himself has mentioned that the NYT ran nasty anti-gay stuff (actually, not 100% sure if this is 40s, 50s or 60s)(See Section 3.2.2 of the Anti-Reactionary FAQ: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/) The public generally rejected gay rights.
Meanwhile with wokeness:
1) As non-woke liberals often point out (especially when discussing optimal Democrat message strategy), one of the most important things to realize about the kind of hyper-wokeness that shows up in for example, some parts of academia, or some feminist blogs, is that it's *widely disliked* by the American populace, including the young and the non-white: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majorities-dislike-political-correctness/572581/
'Among the general population, a full 80 percent believe that “political correctness is a problem in our country.” Even young people are uncomfortable with it, including 74 percent ages 24 to 29, and 79 percent under age 24. On this particular issue, the woke are in a clear minority across all ages.
Youth isn’t a good proxy for support of political correctness—and it turns out race isn’t, either.
Whites are ever so slightly less likely than average to believe that political correctness is a problem in the country: 79 percent of them share this sentiment. Instead, it is Asians (82 percent), Hispanics (87 percent), and American Indians (88 percent) who are most likely to oppose political correctness. ' Yes, people mean different things by "political correctness", but this hardly suggests a hegemonic ideology. Furthermore, these stats are consistent with the general useful rule of thumb that the general public is more socially conservative than the elite in the vast majority of Western democracies. (No source for this one to be fair, but I doubt many disagree.)
2) There's a massively popular conservative media system where wokeness is the subject of withering scorn. I know some people will argue this doesn't count because it's "low status", but whilst that might be true, gays had nothing like this in the 50s at all. Better a working-class coded, uncool, but massively popular, widely consumed media system backing you up than nothing at all.
3) Even outside of that conservative media system, there are plenty of successful elite media writers who's selling point is partly that they are anti-woke. That's what the recent twitter moral panic about substack was about: people were upset because anti- or non-woke liberals, socialists and libertarians and heretic moderate conservatives like Jesse Singal, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, Freddie deBoer, Andrew Sullivan, Scott himself, were making loads of money off substack. There was no gay rights equivalent to these people in the 50s.
I'm not saying that this means there is nothing to worry about here on anything, obviously it would take far more argument to establish that, and I'm not really sure I agree with it anyway. There is, for example a lot of woke and leftish dogmatism in academia, and insofar as academia a) is influential and b) has an important function that should be performed well, that is plausibly bad. But even there it doesn't reign unchallenged in the way that some people seem to think. My experience in philosophy-admittedly, probably the least woke humanity-is that most people hate the stuff. The popular philosophy blog Daily Nous got rid of the like button on it's comments a few months back, and it was widely, and I think somewhat plausibly believed that it did so precisely because anti-woke comments always got massive numbers of likes. Go on philosophy twitter and you'll find it's the people who comment sneeringly about "cis white males" who tend to regard themselves as the embattled minority.
American Indians most likely to oppose political correctness? The most damaging proposals in the culture war have all been fired by or in the name of Native Americans.
> For example, if I remember correctly, there's actually a huge amount of formal academic evidence showing that policing decreases crime a lot, that decreasing policing increases crime, that the alternatives to policing that CHAZ etc propose don't work very well, that increasing crime hurts minorities the most, and that minorities are generally against this kind of thing.
My question is, where are the researchers who presumably have studied these things and why aren't they speaking up? Presumably, if CHAZ or defunding worked they would be speaking up because it's the fashionable sentiment at the moment, so are they staying silent for fear of censure and harassment? That's the chilling possibility.
> Still, we had exactly that same fight in the 50s, and the weird Bay Area drug users won completely and overwhelmingly.
Sure, after the old guard died off. We can do better than progress one funeral at a time.
> But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"?
If a mob is piling on a single person trying to get them cancelled, that's punching "down" and is wrong. It's wrong even if that person is a celebrity, because you're not really going to hurt that celebrity by "cancelling" them, but you are going to hurt everyone who they employ and all of the people who enjoy their content. This just sows dissent and a counter culture to this sort of protest.
If a mob is piling on a faceless corporation, that's punching up. Those are legitimate boycotts like you describe.
There many be a few exceptions to the above rules, but I think they hold as general principles.
Re. "where are the researchers who presumably have studied these things and why aren't they speaking up?" Perhaps they try to speak up--but how would you hear them? Probably you'd have to watch FOX News, or read an alt-right news source.
It occurs to me that even if woke terms are being used less now than they were at their peak, this doesn't prove that wokeism (possibly with different terminology) couldn't rev up again.
I am duly chastened for spending too much time tweeting and not enough time on real work.
As for the puritans, a very similar thing happened in france in a similar time frame. It went from Louis XIV suppressing non-catholics to widespread atheism among the elites. So it might be a mistake to focus on local history instead of the history of memes. The enlightenment happened. I should read Pinker's latest book.
Additionally, perhaps the same psychological traits that led to joining a nonconformist sect that took ideas seriously also led to faster-updating when better arguments for atheism etc came out.
<i> But once you're using social media to arrange boycotts of companies you don't like, how is that not "cancel culture"?</I>
It is, which is why we need a different term for what most people are actually objecting to when they use the term. The hallmarks of the worst form of Cancel Culture include:
(1) A transgression that exists because of rapidly shifting rules. E.g., Barack Obama was still officially opposed to gay marriage through April of 2012 (he was lying, of course). His official position was still not a firing offense. But if you still have tweets up from that period where you take the same position... watch out. Related prediction: within five years, it will be a transgression in a small but noisy cohort to use certain euphamisms for slurs. Saying "he used the n-word" will be a transgression.
(2) The "Has Justine Landed Yet?" phenomenon, where absolute nobodies can be shamed into oblivion by Twitter mobs (and New York Times mobs) for their minor transgressions. While you can reduce your risk of this by going anonymous online, you never know if this is going to be the day when you stumble into a Covington Catholic situation and your behavior is filmed and broadcast to Twitter.
(3) Disproportionate consequences: Coca-Cola isn't going bankrupt because conservatives get upset about Critical Race Theory. Any decline in sales or stock price isn't going to have first-order effects on anyone. Even if sales drop enough that some employees need to be laid off, they haven't been rendered unemployable. The same cannot be said for a pizza parlor in the middle of nowhere. The Memories Pizza incident was personally harmful to the owners and people who worked there, and the owner's name will always be connected to that incident.
(4) Dopamine hits from ruining someone's life. Shaming the outgroup is FUN, especially when we can gather in a circle around a dispicable member of the outgroup and throw stones. Those of us who can throw the heaviest stone earliest get bonus Status Points in the ingroup.
This isn't an exhaustive list, but I think it covers the main problems with "Cancel Culture." I tend to use "Twitter mobs" (or some variant) because Twitter seems to be the common denominator in harmful Cancel Culture, but I don't think it's the best term.
"We all agree government authoritarianism is bad. But is banning guns the bad type of government authoritarianism? Nationalizing industries? Banning gender transition? Forcing everyone to wear a microchip so the police can track them at all times? There will always be debate about the exact limits of what's unacceptable, but our lack of coherent principles doesn't mean we're not allowed to object to specific acts of government authoritarianism in the meantime."
This could not be more wrong: we all (except for anarchists, maybe) agree that government authoritarianism is *good*.
Everyone agrees that the government should ban Really Bad Things once we determine that these things are sufficiently harmful. If you believe that words (e.g., certain ethnic slurs) can cause actual "trauma," then of course you want them banned, just as you want punching people in the nose to be banned. If you think that only sticks and stones can break your bones, then you don't want speech to be banned. Everyone is pro-"free speech" to the extent that they believe the speech is harmless or low-harm. What we call a "Libertarian" is someone who thinks that a relatively great proportion of activities that one person can engage in don't harm others all that much. That's not a principled commitment to "free speech"; that's a moral and ontological claim about "harm."
Boycotting Coca-Cola if they use slaves is not cancel culture because they're using the slaves to *make the Coca-Cola that you're boycotting*.
And it's hard to fix the example to actually be cancel culture because Coca-Cola doesn't have a private life. If you change it to the president of Coca-Cola, it would be a lot closer to cancel culture if the president of Coca-Cola owned Apple stock, Apple was accused of using slaves, and you and your friends boycotted Coca-Cola until they fired the president for supporting slavery in his spare time by owning Apple stock.
Even that isn't a good example because it's really hard to exert pressure on a president of a company this way, so it would be ineffective cancel culture and we don't see much like it
In terms of "every study says increasing policing decreases crime"- well, no. I feel like you may have read certain studies, but it depends on different circumstances, what type of crime, etc. The source of the study is also relevant, as well as the sources of data used.
Frankly, this entire post was a little short on data and pretty big on emotional reaction.
Pretty much all of those studies use data provided by the police and local govenrments, which are obviously biased.
One issue for police reform activists is getting consistent data published on police actions. Crime data is notorious political.
Everyone loves to hate the Puritans, but were they wrong? Intent to do good in the world really is the most important thing you have personal control over. It is the heart of what makes a good person. Yes, there are problems with organizing a society around purity tests of good-heartedness, but it's also kind of works wonders. The Puritans and their heirs won the American Civil War, two World Wars, the Cold War, and now they're winning the Culture Wars.
As for legislating morality, having society or government enforce standards is worth it in some cases but not all obviously. The trick is figuring out which cases are which. Given how much people argue about this very question my own take away is that most people should be much less confident about enforcement of their preferred moral system. And if that self-blindness applies to other people it probably applies to me also. I guess another takeaway is that we should have priors against government intervention, but we should try to test small enforcement programs in various ways to see which ones work. This testing regime should apply to existing programs which seek to maintain a mandate every bit as much as new programs. Doubt but verify.
5. 'Cancel culture' is a non-formalized rule enforcement procedure. As such, it is liable to excessive zeal, selective enforcement, arbitrariness, etc. The alternative to cancel culture is simply to have clear rules and enforce them accurately. If any mobs (twitter or otherwise) try to enforce their own rules, we simply ignore them, or if the problem is bad we make a rule against doing so and enforce that accurately.
6. The Puritans did not die. They rule the world now. Remember that the Civil War was the conquest of America by Massachusetts, and the World Wars were the conquest of Europe.
People have started creating "solidarity lists", which are basically lists of problematic individuals that one should avoid doing business with. We can financialize these, facilitating bets like "Will Scott Alexander appear on the ACLU's solidarity list?". Here are the benefits:
- We can be precise about what cancellation means
- There is an incentive to be the canonical solidarity list, which requires temperance
- People can hedge their cancellation risk
- You can get real-time feedback on how close you are to cancellation
- Moloch smiles down upon you (A C C E L E R A T E)
- The flood of resources into predicting cancellation may make it unfashionable or collapse under the weight of its own absurdity
- There will be right and left solidarity lists, which will polarize the issue on an authoritarian-liberal axis instead of a left-right axis
My experience is that societies get less repressive because they contain within themselves the seeds of less repression.
Puritanism, for all the hate it gets, was fundamentally a utopian project. The authoritarianism wasn't the point; the point was to create God's Kingdom On Earth, and the New World seemed as natural and free and pure a place as any to get that project started. Puritans were overwhelmingly well-educated and used social control as a means of enforcing a (contemporaneously) progressive public morality: the town drunk wasn't allowed to stay a drunk for long, but rounded up and basically forced to either make a productive member of society out of himself, or be banished.
Now, along the way, there were the witch hunts and the scarlet A's and all that oppressive stuff. But that stuff doesn't hold up very long against a deep-seated cultural value of education and utopianism. And because the point of the oppression wasn't oppression itself, but the utopianism, the utopianism eventually won out. Insularity and congregationalist theology also led to experimentation: every congregation was profoundly independent and somewhat democratic, so they could come up with wierd ideas; and those ideas wouldn't necessarily be impinged upon or even make it to the ears of the next congregation over, so there was a broad latitude for experimentation. Although the narratives always make a big deal about the Puritan obsession with rooting out heresy, the reality is that it was so visible precisely because they had such a thin line between heresy and theological innovation. It really was just a crap shoot as to whether a new idea would get banned or celebrated, so innovators saw reward in trying new things - bringing their brethren closer to God! - but could not accurately pre-assess whether they'd cross any lines, thus leading to the famously frequent backlashes.
The other half of the story is economic integration with their liberal/libertarian-minded Dutch neighbors in New Amsterdam. In 1692, NYC had only been an English holding for 30 years. It was still a tiny trading post. By the 1820s, NYC was a burgeoning metropolis with well-established trade links with Boston. The Puritans living mostly between those two cities benefited from all of this. By 1820, they'd had the benefit of over a century of cultural exchange with the Dutch, whose mercantilist and secular attitudes were legible to their fellow mercantilist Puritans.
The Dutch had a custom of tolerance through segregation - preventing conflict between groups by siloing them away from each other and having them negotiate with the central authority. To them, the Puritans were merely another group to deal with. Conversely, the Puritans' isolationism and sense of superiority meant that they saw little threat from the Dutch's secularism. The Dutch were "heathens" anyways, and their society would presumably fail without Puritan ways. Trading with them kept Puritans strong, and although Puritans would be on the lookout for assimilationism, it's impossible to keep out all assimilationism
The last part of it is also the big, dumb, obvious elephant in the room... "it's the American Revolution, stupid". Gee... the region we're talking about starts out with widespread oppressive religious utopianism led by a highly educated professional class... then spawns a successful civil-libertarian tax revolt led by that same professional class... and then 40 years later the professional class are all hippy-dippy religiously tolerant liberals? What a surprise.
I'm sure this is just rhetorical hyperbole, but I don't think anyone was ever burned as a witch in Massachusetts.
The problem as I see it is not that *cancelation* is wrong inherently, at least not for obviously bad examples like the child slave one, but rather that this amorphous neo social-justice/D'Angelo-ism/intersectionality ideology is wrong. But the fact that it's so difficult to pin down and name is part of its memetic defense, and deflects critique of it towards its *methods* instead.
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