The question is whether some of the people making these critiques actually care about education, about changing people. I think part of the reason that misogyny has become the term of choice is precisely because it is more inflammatory. As I will continue to point out, political critiques are subject to competitive social behaviors, and in the social networks where so much political critique happens– Tumblr, Twitter– what is rewarded is the critique that is most brutal, not the critique which is most effective for creating change. In that context, the word misogyny is a better tool than the word sexism; if sexism is X bad, then misogyny is X+1 bad, and so that term gets used, regardless of whether the situation described actually involves the hatred of women. I find this, frankly, a deeply misguided way to conduct a movement for social justice, and I think the people who take part in this kind of critique– many or most of whom are white and affluent, given the demographic nature of social networking– are ultimately privileging what makes them feel good over what is effective, even if they are completely sincere in their efforts. And this is very challenging for a lot of people who engage this way online, because they are deeply invested in a vision of politics in which there is no space whatsoever between the nobility of their intent, the purity of their politics, and the value of what they say. For me, the most important political lesson of my adulthood has been the sobering knowledge that I can be entirely noble in my intent and entirely destructive in my effects.
conspicuous crusading
Silent Right
Over the last few days, poster JacquesCuze at the Slymepit has made several good points on an important theme. One:
I think that if constant internet mob actions results in constant deplorable disproportionate witch hunts that destroy people’s lives in real space, that it’s time to think again if free speech is truly only something between man and government and not something between man and man.
“The marketplace of ideas” does not conduct business solely in a Government Warehouse. A rich marketplace of ideas should then be able to counter ugly speech with more speech, not counter ugly speech with real world firings, career and personal destruction.
My education was horribly lacking and I don’t have a great response to Popehat’s and others when they cry #FREEZEPEACH to say that the First Amendment does not apply to non governmental acts of censorship.
On the one hand they are right, and on the other hand it seems to go against the grain of everything I was brought up to believe, namely that citizens supporting the speech and freedom of expression of others, including unpopular views, were the marks of a 20th century, “progressive” society.
Are there any great philosophers, lawyers, essays, videos that directly refute Popehat and the FREEZEPEACHER’s claims that it’s fine to counter ugly speech with calls for censorship and real world destruction?
My point with White is that when these Internet blow ups over speech flare up and result in firings and the destruction of personal lives and careers, Ken can be counted on to say:
1. It’s not a first amendment issue
2. Those of you saying, duh, we know, but the real issue is … are still wrong because there are other people who say it’s a first amendment issue
3. Their ugly speech was met on the net with more speech! That’s all good!
4. Yes, people were fired, careers lost, lives ruined, and yeah, the people that did that were deplorable and responses should be proportionateBut he is never able to connect 3 & 4 and realize that his 1 is used by the people in 4 to justify their bullshit and then realize the answer is that ugly speech should be met with more speech and his theory of proportionality is bullshit not because its false but because none of the incidents he writes about have ever shown any amount of proportionality and yet his hobby horse is still his 1 and 3, screaming it’s not a first amendment issue and the social hate is just more speech.
Back in my days of reading progressive blogs, I was frequently dismayed by how often such narrow legalistic definitions of free speech were used to justify actions which clearly violated the spirit of the concept. I’m sure you’ve heard some version of it before: “Yeah, well, Thoughtcrime Jones doesn’t have a Constitutional right to a career/TV show/radio show, so, too fucking bad.” Technically true, but it would nonetheless be a pretty piss-poor society in which anything not specifically protected by the Constitution was subject to revocation at the hands of a vigilante mob. As Chomsky has succinctly said, even Hitler and Stalin were in favor of free speech for ideas they liked. One of the most disgusting things about the social justards — and Lord, how many things there are to choose from — is the way they’ve made “freezepeach” a trendy, snarky meme to justify the way they behave towards members of the out-group and the way they police their own communities for dissent. Those loopholes you gleefully exploit for temporary partisan advantage now will be used against you eventually as well; you can count on that. This Prisoner’s Carnival atmosphere that has been created through social media is far more threatening to a healthy society than any stupid joke or ignorant remark made by some viral insta-celebrity.
The principle, at least in its ideal form, is intended to make sure that ideas stand or fall on their own reasonable merit, not due to the cunning and guile of political machinations. Yet it’s exceedingly rare to find anyone with enough integrity to place that principle ahead of tribal loyalties. Same as it ever was, I suppose. It’s too abstract of a notion for most people. Humans are social creatures with a deeply embedded instinct to monitor and regulate the behavior of others in the group. Still, it’s heartening to see the occasional instance of someone rising above those censorious urges.
There Were Things, Your Own Acts, from Which You Could Never Recover
Lex:
The Internet is simultaneously perfect for both vile comments and for people who insist on having their outrage over those comments acknowledged. When IAC PR Chief Justin Sacco’s racist tweet about The AIDS hit the Internet last Friday, it only took minutes before she was shredded around the world, a few more minutes for the obligatory defenders of amorphous free speech concepts to counter, then maybe a half-hour before the English majors started penning essays about what this all meant to us as a people.
And thus it was that racism and the scourge of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa were abolished once and for all. Hurrah!
Everybody Wants to Rule the World
I’m sure anyone reading this is aware of the rise, in the last several years, of a certain kind of politics, or “politics,” that is primarily waged on social platforms like Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter. It is informed by critical theory, cultural studies, and postcolonialism. It operates primarily through argument to incredulity, arguing not the correctness of its opinions but the disbelief that there is anyone who could not already see that correctness. It is brutally waged, constantly mistaking the virulence of an argument for its actual capacity to create change. It is emotive and individual; while it speaks in the language of structural critique and material oppression, its intent is inevitably to make others feel bad and to make the person critiquing feel good. It entails listing the privileges and bad attitudes of the person making the critique, but only insofar as that gets them to “and this is why this other person is worse.” More than anything: while it styles itself as ultra-aggressive, and while it takes the form of a righteous offensive, this brand of politics is fundamentally self-defensive. It is a fortress, a rhetorical structure built on the idea that the best defense is a good offense. Its fundamental dictate is not “change the world for the better” but “get there first.”
Freddie is as perceptive and eloquent as always, but due credit requires me to note that before social media, even before the mainstreaming of the world wide web itself, the famous psychologist, social scientist and troubadour Mike Muir expressed much the same perspective in his distinctively unadorned rhetorical style:
Everybody’s always talking about these things to change the world, to make the world a better place. It’s always, “you and you and you gotta change, because I know what’s up.” And quite frankly, I’m tired of little fuckin’ rich kids telling me what’s up. It’s inherently insulting to tell people what they should be, how they should be. Someone who doesn’t know me, who is not very smart, don’t tell me how I should think.
All the Men and Women Merely Players (Slight Return)
A year ago, I referred publicly to a woman’s blog post as “hysterical,” and was shouted down by a few people for using a misogynist term. I wasn’t being flip, I tried to explain. To me, being hysterical online is a very specific thing, when you don’t really read the piece you are responding to, and are instead responding to some perceived insult that may or may not truly exist, and then you inflate your own sense of hurt and wear your injuries around in order to protect yourself from any sort of logical response. Taking an argument out of the realm of logic and taking it to this heightened, and personal, emotional state and deliberately blocking a person’s ability to argue.
…Take the 19th century French hysterics at Salpêtrière. They had obvious problems, all of them. Abusive families, rapes and assaults, emotional disorders, PTSD, etc. And that caused physical symptoms, as it tends to do. So off to the asylum they went. Where they were responded to if their physical symptoms lined up with the expectations of the doctors. If they convulsed, they were rewarded with attention. If they contorted, they were asked to perform and found a level of fame. Soon their physical symptoms, which had been chaotic and very wide-ranging, aligned with what the doctors believed about hysteria.
The problem was, the emotional problems and past traumas were never addressed and dealt with. The physical symptoms were all anybody saw. Most of the women were lifelong inpatients. The performance becomes a distraction, a way to keep the conversation or our train of thought or psychotherapy sessions from hitting the real source. It allows us to “win,” an argument or a belief or whatever our rewards are, and that is often times the only thing we want.
Reading André Comte-Sponville’s book, I came across this related passage:
All too often we confuse femininity with hysteria, which is merely (in men and women alike) a pathological caricature of femininity. The hysteric wants to seduce, to be loved, to attract attention. This is not gentleness or love; it is narcissism, trickery, thwarted aggressiveness, control (“The hysteric,” Lacan says, “seeks a master to rule over”), and certainly seduction, but in the sense that seduction exploits or (as its etymology suggests) misleads.
I Think I’m Dumb, Maybe Just Happy
Gram Parsons, who had a greater claim than Michael Nesmith to being the real pioneer of country-rock, once described his musical inheritors, the Eagles, as “bubblegum,” saying that their music had “too much sugar in it. Life is tougher than they make it out to be.” While the Eagles may have deserved his derision, his words could be taken to imply that great music should be difficult and harsh rather than sweet or consoling. Early country and folk music had in fact always mixed up tragedy with comedy, murder ballads with dancing songs and absurd entertainments. Music in hard times often plays the role of allowing mental escape and momentary joy as well as reflecting the people’s suffering. Gram Parsons clearly knew this — even the heartrending, brilliant Grievous Angel album is a bravura mixture of tragedy and wry comedy. What he was really objecting to in the Eagles, apart from their imitation of his own sound, was that they were too smooth and flawless to be genuine country. But in looking for the words to attack their music, he took the easy path of attacking them for not being serious enough, echoing the Lennonesque idea that being purely popular or entertaining was in some way dirty or wrong. Perhaps it is the luxury of a more affluent age to see suffering and misery as glamorous or authentic attributes. Whatever the reasons, from the 1960s onward the retrospective quest for authenticity tended to disregard the light and frothy aspects of earlier music, focusing only on the serious, tragic or intense.
But pop songs don’t exist only to change people’s lives or to change the world. They can also convey simple, banal emotion, and a stupid song like “Sugar Sugar” can sometimes light up the day like a moment of condensed happiness and light, without our needing to think any further about where this song comes from or why it makes us happy. There is no good reason to despise the song for making no attempt to do anything other than this.
This was a good read. Very similar to Carl Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love and R. Jay Magill’s Sincerity.
If You’re Not Outraged, You’re Not Paying Our Hosting Bill
This parasitic profiting from and promotion of offensive content is hypocritical, to be sure. But what’s even more convoluted than how the offense industry earns its living are what its criticisms imply about our relationship with art and our beliefs about its influence on society. Clearly, underlying criticisms of Cyrus, Lorde, Thicke, Allen, et al. was the assumption that offensive art is somehow connected to real-life prejudices and inequalities. But the line connecting art and life seemed too blurred to follow.
Do we believe that exposure to offensive art actually breeds prejudice in easily-influenced viewers? If so, wouldn’t The Atlantic and Flavorwire actually have created a bunch of racists by increasing the exposure of Miley Cyrus’s twerking? Put differently: if someone made an unintentionally racist music video and nobody saw it, would it actually harm anyone?
…My school’s obsession with hermeneutics — the science of interpreting texts, which began with ancient scholars of the Bible — was laughably similar to this year’s proliferation of offense criticism. Both believe that art holds great power, but that the mechanisms through which this power can impact audiences are only visible to a select group of scholars: in one case Biblical, in another case secular. But whether following in the footsteps of pastor James Dobson or critical theorists from the 1970s, claims to interpretive authority in both cases are based on a knowledge of something far removed from either art itself or the people who enjoy it.
No teacher at my school would have understood what I took away from Marilyn Manson or Tori Amos (I mean, looking back, I barely do, either). Their understanding of it boiled down to just, “Satan!” Offense criticism today is just as much of a hammer, seeing everything as a nail. And such a reductive and suspicious hermeneutics might be harming the admirably-egalitarian causes sites like Jezebel and The Atlantic espouse, as much as my school ruined the chances of anybody who attended it devoting their life to Christianity. Nobody understands what art means to people more than the people it is meaningful to; by pretending otherwise, offense criticism risks alienating the everyday audiences who listen to songs, watch TV, and go to movies, turning them off from giving a shit about real-life prejudice and inequality.
The Crooked Timber of Humanity
For centuries now, conservative thinkers have argued that significant social reform is impossible, because human nature is inherently limited. The argument goes something like this: sure, it would be great to change the world, but it will never work, because people are too flawed, lacking the ability to see beyond their own interests and those of the groups to which they belong. They have permanent cognitive, motivational and emotional deficits that make any deliberate, systematic attempt to improve human society futile at best. Efforts to bring about social or moral progress are naive about the natural limits of the human animal and tend to have unintended consequences. They are likely to make things worse rather than better.
It’s tempting to nod along at this, and think humans are irredeemable, or at best, permanently flawed. But it’s not clear that such a view stands up to empirical scrutiny. For the conservative argument to prevail, it is not enough that humans exhibit tendencies toward selfishness, group-mindedness, partiality toward kin and kith, apathy toward strangers, and the like. It must also be the case that these tendencies are unalterable, either due to the inherent constraints of human psychology or to our inability to figure out how to modify these constraints without causing greater harms.
Must it be? If it’s not absolutely true, it can’t be provisionally true? Sounds fallacious to me. And isn’t this a question that could only truly be answered in hindsight, looking back on the human experiment from its endpoint? Speaking of which: as we were just discussing, it could very well be that the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism of which the authors make so much in this article is itself dependent on unavoidable material limitations. “The mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use.”
A Public Square and Little Else
Certainly, Liberal Puritans understand on some level that things like mass incarceration are bigger problems for African Americans than the way Ted Rall draws Obama’s nose. Rather than simply making that point, I want to discover why we have so many people who know and care far more about a faux pas on race by public figures than they know or care about the war on drugs. What is so appealing about combing through the public sphere, looking for something to be offended by? What I’m trying to identify is a kind of false morality. A morality which is driven by heavily adolescent impulses, like the desire to elevate oneself by tearing down others and setting parameters for a kind of coolness that allows you to be “in,” while excluding others.
…But what the Puritan really desires of their target is capitulation. For the witch to confess to having sex with the devil. For the racist witch to issue a maudlin apology. Jesus Christ, do we love apologies these days. There’s always a great emphasis on forcing the target to speak certain words, because this is a power trip. The target must allow the Puritans to control them. Even if only for a moment, the target must be their puppet. This is an even greater power rush for them than it might seem, because Puritans have faith in a world where saying is more important than doing. So to force a person to speak their words is a huge power boner.
…And what exactly is the fear, here? It seems like the Atlantic argument, which is the most reasonable of the anti-Rall stuff, begins and ends with, “these drawings superficially resemble racist drawings from 1930 and someone might conceivably find that unpleasant.” There’s no “and…” there. What is the bad thing that this is going to lead to, other than offending people who want to be offended?
Well, I guess the implied consequence is that Rall might accidentally revive the depiction of blacks as subhuman. Then a large number of people might revert to the views that those old caricatures represented. We might see a return to slavery.
But seriously…
Well, our mission is to understand here. And no, the Liberal Puritan doesn’t think slavery will return any more than they think we might see a bunch of holocaust denying history professors at universities. However, we should understand that they live in the world of saying, not in the world of doing. They don’t really care about the prison industrial complex all that much. They’re passionate about whether or not Katy Perry conforms to their rules. These are people who live in and for the public square. They’re much less concerned about what happens in the home, the town hall or the battlefield.
All of this is multiplied on the internet, where what is said pretty much is all of reality. The prison industrial complex doesn’t really exist on the internet. Its victims are nowhere to be found. Katy Perry is all over the place. Also, remember that the underlying motivation for all of this is to feel powerful and important and to do so easily. Thinking about the prison industrial complex is depressing and makes you feel impotent and marginalized. Because even if you elect a black Democrat who rides a wave of populist liberalism, that sort of thing won’t change a bit.
So all of this stuff seems to be greatly magnified online.
Yeah, the internet is paradise for Puritans, liberal or otherwise. Some of the reasons we’ve already touched on.
It’s a world where all that exists, is what is said. It’s a town with a public square and little else.
Right, and this is the preferred mode of existence for the Puritan anyway. Gossip, accusations, naked assertions of their own moral superiority. Rules. Narratives about who is breaking the rules and who is obeying the rules. Stories about who is a hero (them) and who is a villain (whoever they say). Identifying and persecuting, or at least harassing people who defy the rules and refuse to accept the power of the Puritan group. Sitting in judgement as part of that group and feeling powerful and superior.
These activities can comprise the bulk of the existence of an online persona. If you want to, you can do nothing but accuse people of being racist witches without ever having to face them and rarely, if ever, facing any repercussions when you’re wrong. Which is great, since right and wrong aren’t the point.
Mobile ice sheds, piranhas, Puritans, combinations of all three — I haven’t seen such a Frankenstein’s monster of metaphors since this memorable instance. Nonetheless, I appreciate the points about implied consequences and the game show-like unreality of the twitosphere, where people sit around all day with their hand above a buzzer, ready to shout out Racist! or Misogynist! to earn useless Internet virtue points. Whoa, now my metaphors are running wild.
…Meant to say earlier: seeing the picture of Rall wearing a hammer-and-sickle t-shirt makes me think yeah, I see your point.
Vampire Weakened
The first configuration is what I came to call the Vampires’ Castle. The Vampires’ Castle specialises in propagating guilt. It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements. The Vampires’ Castle was born the moment when the struggle not to be defined by identitarian categories became the quest to have ‘identities’ recognised by a bourgeois big Other.
The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group.
…The Vampires’ Castle feeds on the energy and anxieties and vulnerabilities of young students, but most of all it lives by converting the suffering of particular groups – the more ‘marginal’ the better – into academic capital. The most lauded figures in the Vampires’ Castle are those who have spotted a new market in suffering – those who can find a group more oppressed and subjugated than any previously exploited will find themselves promoted through the ranks very quickly.
…While fluidity of identity, pluarity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized. Since the desires animating the VC are in large part priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there has to be a strong distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark/ has behaved in a particular way – these remarks/ this behaviour might be construed as transphobic/ sexist etc. So far, OK. But it’s the next move which is the kicker. X then becomes defined as a transphobe/ sexist etc. Their whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged remark or behavioural slip. Once the VC has mustered its witch-hunt, the victim (often from a working class background, and not schooled in the passive aggressive etiquette of the bourgeoisie) can reliably be goaded into losing their temper, further securing their position as pariah/ latest to be consumed in feeding frenzy.
…It might have been possible to ignore the Vampires’ Castle and the neo-anarchists if it weren’t for capitalist cyberspace. The VC’s pious moralising has been a feature of a certain ‘left’ for many years – but, if one wasn’t a member of this particular church, its sermons could be avoided. Social media means that this is no longer the case, and there is little protection from the psychic pathologies propagated by these discourses.
See, because these vampires are “weakened” by exposure to the clear, bright light of reason. And then there’s that indie rock band…ahh, fuck you, it is so funny. Anyway, yes, even a Marx-blinded squirrel can sometimes find a tasty nut. That first part sounds like the setup to a joke: “A priest, an academic-pedant and a hipster walk into a bar…”
And as long as I’m stealing material from Shetterly, yes, this Key and Peele skit was especially amusing.
At the Risk of Sounding Crass I Would Like to Mention That I am Well Aware of Your Wack Intentions
Instead, however, GoldieBlox did exactly what you’d expect an entitled and well-lawyered Silicon Valley startup to do, which is pick a fight. It’s the way of the Valley — you can’t be winning unless some household-name dinosaur is losing. (The Beasties are actually the second big name to find themselves in the GoldieBlox crosshairs; the first was Toys R Us.) The real target of the GoldieBlox lawsuit, I’m quite sure, is not the Beastie Boys. Instead, it’s the set of investors who are currently being pitched to put money into a fast-growing, Stanford-incubated, web-native, viral, aggressive, disruptive company with massive room for future growth — a company which isn’t afraid to pick fights with any big name you care to mention.
Just when I think I’ve become jaded, something like this comes along to make me marvel at some people’s capacity for cynical manipulation. Gotta hand it to them, they had a plan and they executed it perfectly. If this had been the work of a true believer, it would have been merely laughable — really, like it’s somehow subversive and challenging to put a stereotypically “girly” gloss on children’s construction toys? And who honestly thinks that playing with pastel Tinkertoys will directly lead to more girls involved in STEM fields later on? Does your career have anything to do with the sorts of games and toys you played with as a kid? But of course, such superficial rah-rah-empowerment platitudes have an enormous, receptive audience in the twitosphere, and those fucking morons reacted exactly as GoldieBlox anticipated they would.
Sin of Omission
Red-cheeked, I have to admit that I went through my own phase of American Indian obsession as an adolescent, born out of, yes, noble savage romanticism. Oh, I was ridiculous. Bone jewelry. Long hair dyed raven-black. Books on everything from Indian languages, at the respectable end of the spectrum, to money-grubbing pseudo-mysticism written by pale people of dubious ancestry with names like Samuel Squatting Bear on the other. To be fair to myself, I outgrew it because even then, I was aware that such interests were widely seen as clichés. So I kept my eyes and ears open and eventually ended up paying more attention to the American Indian Movement than dreamcatchers and handcrafted medicine pouches. There’s no real moral to that story, though — you generally just come away subdued and depressed by the immensity of the hopelessness. I certainly realized in a hurry that I was not made of stern enough stuff for devoted activism. (I did meet Dennis Banks once, which was cool.) No, I just mention it to lay my cards on the table, to stress that I have more than a passing interest in the topic.
You’ve probably heard that the twitosphere is in the midst of another frenzied point-and-denounce episode, this time over the Alabama high school which mixed a reference to the Trail of Tears in with the usual pre-game trash-talking. “What? Too soon?” Yes, I’m afraid so. Bad taste indeed. Give it a few hundred years. By then, it should all be good, clean fun, just like how you don’t see any groups of indigenous Orcadian descendants today claiming to be triggered by the existence of a football team named in honor of the vicious, colonialist Norsemen who raped and pillaged the villages of their ancestors. You know what, I think I might just do that to entertain myself. Look for me crusading on behalf of the memory of my people on Twitter in the upcoming days! #IndigenousOrkneyNeverForget
But I digress. So, yeah, there are already a thousand unimaginative bloggers telling you what you already know like they think you’re a fucking moron or something — teenagers are impulsive and often stupid, racism is a Bad Thing, and hey, since this is not the first but the second American Indian issue to seize the public’s imagination in recent months (up from the usual number of “zero”), maybe we can have us one of them Teachable Moments. Oh, for the love of the Great Spirit, go jackhammer-fuck yourselves, you tedious bastards. Stating the bleeding obvious bores the fuck out of me. Instead, I will just point out that these kids likely thought the play on words was more clever than offensive because as far as they’re concerned, American Indians only exist as abstractions, barely more than an artifact of this nation’s collective mythology. I mean, how many do you know? How many reservations have you visited? How many popular movies, books and cable docudramas have been devoted to the reality of Indian life today as opposed to rehashing Dances With Wolves-territory? Hell, for all the link-aggregator-type sites I read each day, Metafilter provided the only instance in my recent memory of a link to a story about the grim reality of reservation life. It’s not exactly what they would call a trending topic.
Which brings us back to that other issue. And honestly, the only really interesting thing about all of this is the delightful coincidence of seeing the crusaders for changing the Redskins’ name simultaneously treating natives as equally abstract symbols.
Exhibit A: the article I linked to last month. This was so unbelievably “meta”, it just floored me. A bunch of white jerkoffs talking about their feelings about a satirical newspaper’s take on an abstract logo from the sports/entertainment world. “No Native Americans were affected, adversely or otherwise, during the making of this navel-gazing episode.” Except in the most generic, superficial way, they don’t care about the minorities on whose behalf they are so generously offended, any more than they deeply care about the few dozen other things they tweeted about that day. The most “problematic” aspect of this, to use that beloved buzzword of the social justards, is the fact that it impinged upon their ability to enjoy their entertainment with a clear conscience. As is so often the case, this was just another opportunity for typical guilt-ridden, Internet-savvy progressives, like modern-day Victorians, to project their neuroses and obsessions onto the backdrop of the wider world. These people are pathetic truffle pigs who squeal in delighted outrage whenever they root out another trivial instance of this-ism or that-phobia; once their flickering attention span is distracted by the next pseudo-issue, they’ll go right back to knowing and doing absolutely nothing about the lives of actual, living American Indians.
Don’t get me wrong — sure, the name is embarrassingly outdated, go ahead and change it, whatever. It very well could happen at some point, but likely not until after Daniel Snyder comes to an agreement with the NFL for tens of millions in compensation over the inconvenience of having to completely overhaul his franchise and rebrand it. Money talks, cheap outrage walks. I’m not sure how paying a rich guy tons of additional money in exchange for a feel-good victory would advance social justice, but sure, fine, should that be the case, give yourselves a congratulatory handjob and settle back for some guilt-free fun. Until the whole brain-injury issue starts to gain serious traction…
And Whoever Wanted to Sleep Well Still Talked of Good and Evil Before Going to Sleep
The great Princeton philosopher Michael Walzer, borrowing from Jean-Paul Sartre, describes the feeling of having dirty hands in politics as the guilty conscience that political actors must live with when they authorize acts that public necessity requires but private morality rejects. “Here is the moral politician,” Walzer says: “it is by his dirty hands that we know him.” Walzer thinks that we want our politicians to be suffering servants, lying awake at night, wrestling with the conflict between private morality and the public good.
Machiavelli simply didn’t believe that politicians should be bothered about their dirty hands. He didn’t believe they deserve praise for moral scruple or the pangs of conscience. He would have agreed with The Sopranos: sometimes you do what you have to do. But The Prince would hardly have survived this long if it was nothing more than an apologia for gangsters. With gangsters, gratuitous cruelty is often efficient, while in politics, Machiavelli clearly understood, it is worse than a crime. It is a mistake. Ragion di stato ought to discipline each politician’s descent into morally questionable realms. A leader guided by public necessity is less likely to be cruel and vicious than one guided by religious moralizing. Machiavelli’s ethics, it should be said, were scathingly indifferent to Christian principle, and for good reason. After all, someone who believes he has God on his side is capable of anything.
…What he refuses to praise is people who value their conscience and their soul more than the interests of the state. What he will not pardon is public displays of indecision. We should not choose leaders who agonize, worrying about the moral hazards of the power they exercise in the people’s name. We should choose leaders who sleep soundly after taking ultimate risks with their own virtue. They are doing what must be done.
We Can Act If We Want To. If We Don’t, Nobody Will. And You Can Act Real Rude, and Totally Removed, and I Can Act Like an Imbecile
You see, the point of shouting Ray Kelly off the dais isn’t to get rid of “stop-and-frisk,” which these students are sophisticated enough to understand as merely symptomatic of greater injustices and inequalities in American life. No, the point is to get rid of Ray Kelly, to make the point that he has nothing to say that’s deserving of public consumption, that he is a wicked fellow who ought to be drummed from public life, his opinions, like those of most of us, to be shared grumpily over beers with no one to listen but the other cranks and kooks drinking in the middle of the day. The point is to shame Brown University—admittedly, a difficult task, since the university in the form of its administration is, as noted, shameless—for inviting the weasely little fascist onto the stage in the first place.
The post would be otherwise forgettable were it not for the fact that Freddie deBoer shows up in the first comment to challenge the complacency of such would-be radicals. Jacob — in keeping with his “Great Refusal” ethos, borrowed directly from pseudo-philosopher Herbert Marcuse, consisting of gestures of futile defiance rooted in impractical moralism, where the impracticality is the entire point, indeed, a badge of honor — cheers the students for refusing to respect the bourgeois liberal aversion to unruly mobs shouting down public speakers. Freddie points out that such actions barely qualify as Pyrrhic victories, that they demonstrate impotence rather than power, and that much of what passes for leftism now is in fact a pathetic acquiescence to that reality — they’ve settled for taking pride in “winning” such meaningless skirmishes on campuses and in the twitosphere, winning like Charlie Sheen. Freddie is saying, essentially, that it shouldn’t be good enough to be satisfied with such a smug, nihilistic response to injustice. At Jacob’s former blog, this would have probably gotten Freddie mocked for being one of those naïve shmucks with lingering faith in the system who want to be told what to do to achieve this or that goal. Now, though, Jacob simply responds by saying “I think we agree.” Eh? No, I’m not sure you do.
Contrary Winds
Another one of Hoffer’s reflections:
Francis Bacon: “Does any man doubt that if there were taken out of men’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations and the like, but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor, shrunken things, full of melancholy and indispositions, and unpleasing to themselves?”
Hoffer: Can souls be purified? To Milton, “Good and evil we know in the world grow up together almost inseparably, and the knowledge of the good is so interwoven with the knowledge of evil that the two cannot be sorted apart.”
Montaigne saw “our being so cemented by sickly qualities that whoever should divest men of them would destroy the fundamental condition of human life.” Renan feared that we can get rid of the bad only at the sacrifice of what is excellent, remarkable and extraordinary.
Bizet believed that a purified soul cannot make music. Frederick Meinecke was so disconcerted by the dark and impure origins of great cultural values that it seemed to him as if “God needed the devil to realize himself.” The protagonists of reason, who set out to cleanse minds of the irrational, released demoniac forces beyond the control of reason.
Pascal, a scientist who saw it as his religious duty to study man, was staggered by the contrast between the simplicity of things and the fantastic complexity of man. He discovered that we do not remain virtuous by our own power, but by the counterpoise of two opposite vices: we remain standing as between two contrary winds. Take away one of these vices and we fall into the other. To Pascal, cleansing souls was, indeed, a risky undertaking.
Right for the Wrong Reasons
Speaking of moral tribes, Walter Laquer:
False optimism, then, can explain the Deutscher-Carr syndrome only in part, and their enduring reputation in some circles not at all. Similarly unhelpful are explanations that appeal to the perfectly natural reluctance of authors to admit mistakes—another hardwired tendency. In the end, the most crucial factor may be just this: being in tune with the right crowd.
As the leftist French journalist Jean Daniel once put it: better to be wrong with Jean-Paul Sartre than right with Raymond Aron. Sartre might have been consistently wrong in his political judgment and his intellectual opponent Aron almost always right. But Sartre, like Deutscher, was pro-Soviet during the cold war while Aron, like Isaiah Berlin, was pro-American (and also, like Berlin, pro-Israel). And that settled the matter.
This is how reputations quite often develop in the world of ideas, and how they endure—an interesting issue itself, and certainly one in need of further investigation.