revillaging
They See Your Every Move
I set it down as a fact that if all men knew what each said of the other, there would not be four friends in the world.
— Pascal, Pensées
Holmes is referring to the recent reporting on Anthropic’s Claude Mythos Preview, an AI model it says is unusually strong at cybersecurity tasks — i.e. it can hack into almost anything. Anthropic says it is limiting access for now rather than releasing it broadly, though I think we’ve all seen enough movies to guess how that’s gonna go. Anyway, her tweet is melodramatic, but everyone instantly understands the horror it suggests: search history, cloud photos, private messages, old usernames, medical records, bookmarks, drafts, forgotten accounts — all the digital sediment of a life suddenly dredged up and dragged into public view. We have already seen lesser versions of this often enough. A stray remark from years ago is dug up and treated as a character indictment. One offensive post becomes the loose thread that unravels a person’s name, job, location, hobbies, and history before a jeering crowd. Real life used to let most foolishness die where it was spoken. The internet stores it, indexes it, and waits.
A recent Substack post about a woman reading her boyfriend’s ChatGPT logs shows the same problem from the other side. There the threat was not some AI super-sleuth prying open the vault. It was plain old human suspicion. She went looking and found what she was never meant to read: not a record of prostitutes buried in the backyard, but his private ambivalence toward her. Many people in relationships have silently pondered the Kinks’ eternal question of whether to stay or to go. In this instance, his fatal mistake was to commit these doubts to digital text, rather than let them remain inchoate thoughts in the privacy of his own skull. Naturally, the relationship was ruined. This is what snooping does. It takes passing thoughts, bad moods, ugly drafts, and momentary resentments and preserves them like fossils. We talk as though the great danger is that machines may someday expose all our secrets against our will. But there is a demand side to this too. More and more, people want that power over others. They want to inspect first and trust later. They want reassurance by surveillance. And once you start down that road, nothing will ever be enough.
The old dystopias understood the point without any help from Silicon Valley. Bentham’s Panopticon and Orwell’s 1984 both take for granted that a world without privacy would be hellish. Human beings need locked doors, unsent letters, private notebooks, tact, silence, and the mercy of forgetting. They need room for thoughts that are not yet judgments, moods that pass, stupidity that can be outgrown. So yes, let’s be wary of building tools that can hang all of our dirty laundry in the public square. But let’s also be wary of the part of ourselves that longs to peek through the keyhole. Not everything that can be known should be known.
The Descent of Manners
To point out the obvious, the bystander isn’t witnessing a moral collapse; he’s noticing a new rule of attention: access is negotiated. People reading a book or a phone aren’t necessarily refusing to engage; they’re engaged already. What he wants is ambient availability — others to idle in neutral until he arrives, ready to drop everything and pay attention to him. If he truly values conversation, there’s a grown-up remedy that predates smartphones: be forthright and tell people that you want to set aside time for each other’s undivided attention. If you want to be unkind, you could say that his attitude is just narcissism dressed up as social critique.
There’s also a rhetorical sleight-of-hand here. Wanye’s framing invites us to see an inevitable connection in the evolution of private time from one stage to the next. What it ignores is is that each stage of the progression also brought new ways of interacting, not simply an inexorable decline from sociable creatures reciting family lore around the hearth to mute recluses grunting while pawing at their glowing screens.
Let’s start at the supposed root of decline: books. Far from turning readers into hermits, print built rooms — literal ones. Carnegie libraries put free civic space on Main Street where strangers mixed and clubs met; lyceum halls and Chautauqua tents turned reading into lectures, debates, and summer festivals; serialization synchronized strangers around the next chapter; and literary societies — from Baker Street Irregulars onward — gave readers rituals, calendars, and friends. Even the frequent claims about fiction sharpening our perspective-taking, while weak in reality, point the same way: text can widen the circle we can imagine. Even the first rung in Wanye’s ladder to the abyss doesn’t subtract sociability; it manufactures it. The same holds for the other stages. The penny press turned news into a shared daily event; general-interest magazines shaped national debates and helped create the middlebrow intellectual milieu; television and film created shared events and stories that “everyone” saw and talked about; and even the Pandora’s jar we call the Internet has facilitated real connections underneath all the superficial versions. Not every stage is a perfect balance of pluses and minuses — personally, I think that “news as a shared daily event” has been a disaster. But the point is, all of these developments bring us together in new ways even as they force us apart in others.
The eulogies for village hearth talk forget the cost of living in the village. Not everyone belonged. Many people had to flee to become themselves. Meanwhile, modernity invented new communal rituals that critics pretend don’t count. Sports fandom, for example, is a standing, rule-bound festival: seasons, epics, numerical folklore, a calendar of shared rites. Is it less “real” community than the harvest dance because jerseys come from a corporate pro shop? Tell that to the thousands who gather again when a certain game comes on, or the strangers who become friends by arguing about the same running back for ten years.
Likewise, the ability to make friends by interest rather than proximity is not a trivial gain. It redeemed entire lives. The bright kid alone in a small town could find a teacher, a collaborator, a bandmate, a spouse. The awkward adult could keep a craft alive by joining ten others on the Internet keeping it alive. How many people today would be merely tolerated eccentrics without the option of being fully themselves inside a niche? The map got bigger; the village got weirder; a lot of us survived because of it.
And yes, we lost things. We lost the steady rehearsal of family lore. We lost some of the built-in rhythm; we have to invent it now. We lost shared silence — being together without performance. We outsourced more of our attention to machines that will gladly sell it back to us at markup. But calling these changes a moral degradation is like scolding birds for not being tyrannosaurs. History isn’t a fall from grace; it’s a series of habitat changes. The climate shifted; small bodies with feathers were a better bet. Evolution, if not natural selection, applies to human societies as well. Human sociability isn’t decaying or perfecting; it’s adapting — new habitats select for different mixes of depth, reach, rhythm, and cost, producing trade-offs rather than moral victories or defeats. The only thing that remains constant is our conviction that we live in a fallen age.
Mobscene
My recommendation: Never, ever use the term “cancel culture.” Speak instead about the specific behavior you either want to reject or endorse.
OK, then. I reject progressive political orthodoxy. I reject the attempts to enforce progressive political orthodoxy by harnessing the power of social media to carry out organized campaigns of aggressive harassment, intimidation, and threats, usually directed at the target’s reputation, employment, or both. I reject the spirit of petty vindictiveness that motivates these crusaders. I reject the disingenuous arguments that “censorship” per se can only be carried out by a government, or that groups of fanatical activists preventing the willing exchange of goods and services is actually “the market” at work. I reject the insulting, legalistic, hair-splitting attempts by both cynical progressives and fatuous academics to simply define the entire phenomenon out of existence (see also, “critical race theory”). Most of all, I reject one of the oldest delusions in the history of this ridiculous species which steadfastly refuses to learn anything from its countless mistakes; namely, that the best of all worlds will come by giving in to our worst impulses.
Or, you know, you could just use a convenient shorthand term like “cancel culture” despite its unavoidable lack of precision and trust that those who aren’t being willfully obtuse will get your meaning.
Let Us Not Become Darker Ourselves On Their Account
It’s true that the Overton window among Western elites is contracting like the trash compactor in the Death Star not only upon morally acceptable positions, but also on morally edifying ones. But the response of conservatives cannot be to lament the existence of this cultural regulation, or to pretend that there was a time when it didn’t exist. Instead, they have to defend the moral merits of their positions and argue that others (like the reverse-racism of intersectional politics and the mutilation of children by transgender activists) should be cancelled with unapologetic fervor. Our civilization cannot hide behind procedural liberalism when it comes to first principles, and it’s folly to pretend we can. Genuinely moral and political conflicts are, in some cases, unavoidable. Cancellation is the price we pay for civilization.
Hilditch’s point is one I worried about years ago — social norms have never resulted from opposing sides engaging in rational debate until consensus was achieved. At some point, the losing side surrenders or is beaten into sullen submission. The majority of people who don’t much care either way will go along with the new regime. Procedural liberalism, as wonderful as it is, is an anomaly. Tribal warfare is the norm. Without mutual trust and respect for the institutions in which proceduralism is embedded, tribalism will always take over. The fact that people on the left are so dismissive of concerns over cancel culture, if not positively supportive of it, is one of those revealed preferences indicating that they feel confident of controlling and directing it, not suffering from it. Most people are fine with tyrannical power as long as it’s assumed that they and their tribe will always be the ones wielding it.
Anyway, it’s true but trite that civilization has always depended on social sanctions as much as the rule of law. Cancel culture per se is a phenomenon of the late twenty-teens and early twenty-twenties, in which progressives harness the power of social media to punish and ostracize both enemies and erstwhile comrades for offenses both real and hallucinatory; petty vindictiveness in general has been around forever. Perhaps we can at least be thankful, as we watch the progressive ouroboros predictably continue to devour its tail in pursuit of perfect virtue, that we’re using tweets instead of guillotines this time around. Still, it saddens me to think that a charitable spirit of free speech, fair play and tolerance is one more thing we’ll have to pack up and take with us to the monastery, along with our books.
It’s Not the Way It Used to Be. People Ain’t the Way They Used to Be
Many moons ago, I realized that by the time I learn enough about a big “news” story to realize I don’t care, the story turns out to be BS anyway. And so it is with the tale of Ellie Kemper, the actress and comedian from The Office and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, who was branded a “KKK Queen” this week.
Why? Because people started tweeting a rumor, based on a misunderstanding about some debutante ball in St. Louis that Kemper attended as a teenager over 20 years ago, and Twitter put it on their “What’s happening” sidebar of trending topics. It turns out that the claim is complete garbage and Kemper has never had anything to do with the Klan, but mere facts won’t do her or anyone else much good in 2021 America. The mob is always hungry for blood, and Kemper is this week’s special.
Once somebody decides to go after you on social media, there’s nothing you can do to defend yourself. Defying the mob is framed in the press as “doubling down,” and groveling for forgiveness just emboldens your tormentors. Kafka was an amateur, man.
There’s an entire media ecosystem devoted to whipping up these fake outrages for clicks. Why go after Ellie Kemper? Why not go after Ellie Kemper. Or you, or me, or anybody. We can be cancelled at any moment, for any reason or no reason at all.
If you’ve got enough money, all you can do is hide out until the mob moves on to another target. But if you can’t afford to just disappear for days or weeks or months… shrug emoji!
This sort of crap generates traffic for Twitter, which is why they amplify it. They know there’s a mob with torches and pitchforks at the ready, just waiting to be pointed toward the next victim. And Jack Dorsey sits on his billions and watches what he’s done.
With great power comes great irresponsibility.
****
Although the villagers had forgotten the ritual and lost the original black box, they still remembered to use stones. The pile of stones the boys had made earlier was ready; there were stones on the ground with the blowing scraps of paper that had come out of the box. Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands and turned to Mrs. Dunbar. “Come on,” she said. “Hurry up.”
Mrs. Dunbar had small stones in both hands, and she said, gasping for breath. “I can’t run at all. You’ll have to go ahead and I’ll catch up with you.”
The children had stones already, and someone gave little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles.
Tessie Hutchinson was in the center of a cleared space by now, and she held her hands out desperately as the villagers moved in on her. “It isn’t fair,” she said. A stone hit her on the side of the head.
Old Man Warner was saying, “Come on, come on, everyone.” Steve Adams was in the front of the crowd of villagers, with Mrs. Graves beside him.
“It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,” Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.
— Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery“
We Are the Thing of Shapes to Come
The imbeciles on Twitter are unserious people, but unserious people can produce serious problems. There is a word for the situation in which there is no room for disagreement. The word is not “justice.” It is “totalitarianism.” That is what cancel culture is, and we have seen it in highly developed form in such places as East Germany under Honecker and China under Mao and the Cultural Revolution.
A couple days later, Williamson linked to an interview with the high priestess of the state religion of anti-racism, Robin DiAngelo, in which she informed us:
Racism is the foundation of the society we are in. And to simply carry on with absolutely no active interruption of that system is to be complicit with it. And in that way, we can say that nice, white people who really aren’t doing anything other than being nice people are racist. We are complicit with that system. There is no neutral place.
Ah, yes, “Everything within the cause, nothing outside the cause, nothing against the cause,” as Mussolini might have said, had he been willing to interrogate his own whiteness. I’ll bet you that DiAngelo has one of those motivational office posters hanging up in her workspace emblazoned with O’Brien’s promise from 1984: “We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.” However, things aren’t as harsh as they seem. They’re at least willing to pay for our therapy and retraining:
Look at it this way: this might be the only way we’re allowed to go to summer camp anytime soon. If any of you get assigned to my cabin, let’s start a clandestine reading group.
I had managed to make it this far in life without ever hearing of this carpet-chewing lunatic, which I take to be a healthy sign for both me and society in general. I think it’s noteworthy, however, that he has 331,000 followers. It gives slight pause to consider that the population of a fair-sized city could encounter a Streicher-like screed like this and say, “Now, there’s a fellow making good sense. I’d like to be kept abreast of all his further thoughts, please.” Signal? Noise? Who can tell anymore? Is this feverish sentiment a meaningless outlier, or an ominous harbinger?
It is a truth universally acknowledged that there is no such thing as a happy political junkie. I have never once encountered a person intimately familiar with everything from palace intrigue to policy minutiae who could be described as well-rounded, genial, or content. Political obsession invariably deforms its victims. They can’t change their minds and they won’t change the subject. A healthy person would be indulging in a hobby, or enjoying time spent with loved ones, not fantasizing about throwing political opponents in re-education camps, or preaching the good word of anti-racism to people who are inching the door closed in your face. The fanatic is convinced that his monomaniacal political awareness is the gravitational force keeping the world from falling apart. In reality, it’s more like a magnifying glass being used to burn a hole through the delicate bonds of “sympathy” as described by thinkers like Adam Smith, the fellow-feeling which makes life tolerable despite its countless imperfections.
Like Bartleby, I look at most of the activities that society offers me and offer a polite demurral. I would be happy to leave it at that, but apparently my attitude is increasingly unacceptable. I’m tired of being pursued by zealots who want to paw me with their dirty institutions and constrain me to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. I will vote for whoever promises to build a wall between me and fanatics like DiAngelo and Palmer, a wall topped with razor wire and machine-gun turrets. We used to be able to depend on the much-more aesthetically-pleasing bulwark of manners, mores, civil society, or whatever else you want to call it, but the religious vacuum in society has been filled by politics-as-religion, so here we are.
I Do Not Want to Remain Silent About My Morality
And while I shall keep silent about some points, I do not want to remain silent about my morality which says to me: Live in seclusion so that you can live for yourself. Live in ignorance about what seems most important to your age. Between yourself and today lay the skin of at least three centuries. And the clamor of today, the noise of wars and revolutions should be a mere murmur for you. You will also wish to help – but only those whose distress you understand entirely because they share with you one suffering and one hope – your friends – and only in the manner in which you help yourself. I want to make them bolder, more persevering, simpler, gayer. I want to teach them what is understood by so few today, least of all by these preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science
We would prefer that people be treated with grace rather than opportunistic cruelty and with charity rather than pettiness. We would prefer that employers not appoint themselves the moral guardians of every employee and the censor of every employee’s every utterance in his private life. And here is something close to the fundamental issue: We believe in private life, that people are entitled to their own associations and opinions (even bad ones!), and entitled to make their own mistakes, too — and that, barring some direct connection to work life or extraordinary circumstance, that none of this is the concern of the little platoons of finks lurking down in human resources.
We worry about the consequences of cancel culture. But we are much more intensely ashamed of it and what it says about the current state of the American heart.
The Mighty Boosh? Seriously? Good thing I already have the DVD collection. This is partially why I still prefer to own physical copies of media rather than trust the cloud to always have it.
Let me state some basic principles. I assume, in keeping with my Taoist influences, that anyone who seeks political power is probably a budding sociopath who ought not be trusted with it, and that if they manage to do something good while in power, it’s probably by accident. I think that politics is a necessary evil, emphasis on the evil, one of the most unsatisfying and soul-destroying activities in human existence, and that only defective people pay more than the bare minimum of attention to it. I think that the desire to leave and be left alone is the mark of a healthy mind, and I think that the entire spectrum of authoritarians, from neighborhood busybodies to cultural commissars, should be energetically abused with the most hair-curling, obscene invective possible. I try, to the best of my abilities, to do what the man said with my limited influence and share not suffering but joy: the books I appreciate, the music I love, and the most interesting thoughts I can muster up. It’s saddening and worrisome that so many people can think of nothing better to do with their time and energy than act like vengeful petty tyrants, haunted by the fear that someone, somewhere, is having an unapproved good time without their supervision. The Venn diagram between people who want to abolish/defund/etc. the police and people who pleasure themselves to the thought of having police-like powers to arrest and punish others for thoughtcrimes is a circle.
I’m reminded of an interview with Michael Ignatieff about Isaiah Berlin, one of my intellectual heroes:
IL: Yes, they are. But back to Berlin. You say that he was highly sceptical about the Aristotelian idea that people are “political animals”. Is it possible nowadays not to be a political animal? How possible is it to stay out of it all?
MI: One of the freedoms that Isaiah valued, which is not very popular, was the freedom not to be a political animal. The luxury of a truly free society is that political involvement is a choice, not an obligation.
IL: That may be true regarding active political involvement, but there is also the argument that you may not be interested in politics…
MI: …but that politics may take an interest in you. Oh, sure, sure. And he understood that. He understood that the freedom to be disengaged was possible only in societies like the British one in which he lived in for most of his life. Whereas there are other societies where politics taps you on the shoulder or knocks on your door and can carry you away. In that case, involvement becomes compulsory, in the sense that it’s a matter of your survival and your dignity. He understood that. But a good society, I think, is a society where politics leaves you alone and where you choose to get involved or not. I think he was right to say that there are a lot of things that shouldn’t be politicized. Healthy societies are societies that don’t politicize everything. You choose the best judge, not the politically well-placed judge; you choose the best director of the orchestra, not the one with the best political friends; you choose the best editor for a magazine, not the one who has political connections. If everything is politicized, then everything becomes a zero sum game between those who are in and those who are out. Smart societies just don’t do that because it means you don’t get the best people.
I think it’s safe to say we are not a good or healthy society, and in the current climate, it’s only getting worse. The woke Maoists who are busy seizing everything from the opinion pages of the NYT to the downtown streets of Seattle have made clear that neutrality is not a valid option in their vision of class war. Sure, they’re just drunk with revolutionary fervor right now, but even in slightly-calmer times, the ratchet only seems to turn one way, in the direction of increased politicization. Social media has always brought out the worst “revillaging” aspects of people’s personalities, and organizing boycotts/cancellations has been a favorite sport of authoritarians for as long as I’ve been reading online. But if there’s any sign that the general public has lost its appetite for this madness, let alone become nauseated by it, I haven’t seen it yet.
Irony of ironies: I wish there were an actual “resistance” I could join in opposition to the hashtag version.
This Democratical Hurricane, Inundation, Earthquake, Pestilence, Call It What You Will
Count de Monet: It is said that the people are revolting.
King Louis XVI: You said it! They stink on ice!
This sentiment is more than just petty contrarianism. Apply it in the real world, and it becomes clear that contempt for cancel culture is little more than contempt for democracy.
After all, what is derided as “cancel culture” is nothing more than a large group of people choosing who and what they want to watch, read and listen to. Though “canceling” on its own suggests the work of the anonymous censor or autocratic TV exec, “cancel culture” reflects the opposite: the public and democratic engagement of ordinary people.
By the standards of sophistry, this is on the same low level as “political correctness just means being considerate and polite,” which is to say, hardly worth the strain of an eye-roll. But anyway, since we’re on the subject, ancient Athens used to practice a form of cancel culture. They called it ostracism. Many people might be familiar with Plutarch’s story of Aristides, who was approached by an illiterate voter looking to cast his vote for a candidate for ostracism and asked to write down the name…Aristides. Uh, what harm has Aristides done to you? he asked, understandably. None at all, replied the man of the people. I don’t even know him. I’m just sick of people always calling him “Aristides the Just.” Twenty-five hundred years later, and people’s careers and personal lives are ruined on social media for equally facile, spiteful reasons.
Safe to say Plutarch and Aristides were wiser men with a keener understanding of the nasty tendencies of human character than Mr. Freedman. And while I don’t want to be here all day naming other examples of men with more brains and psychological insight than some smug junior-varsity Jacobin writing opinion pieces in the Washington Post, John Adams deserves a mention. He also held ostracism in contempt. “History nowhere furnishes so frank a confession of the people themselves, of their own infirmities and unfitness for managing the executive branch of government, or an unbalanced share of the legislature, as this institution.” He wasn’t too enamored of “the public and democratic engagement of ordinary people” either:
Dear Sir
In your fifth page You Say “Mr. Adams calls our Attention to hundreds of wise and virtuous Patricians, mangled and bleeding Victims of popular Fury.” and gravely counts up several Victims of democratic Rage as proofs that Democracy is more pernicious than Monarchy or Aristocracy.” Is this fair, sir? Do you deny any one of my Facts? I do not say that Democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than Monarchy or Aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But while it lasts it is more bloody than either.…You Say I “might have exhibited millions of Plebians, sacrificed to the pride Folly and Ambition of Monarchy and Aristocracy.” This is very true. And I might hav[e] exhibited as many millions of Plebians sacrificed by the Pride Folly and Ambition of their fellow Plebians and their own, in proportion to the extent and duration of their power. Remember Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There never was a Democracy Yet, that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It is not true in Fact and no where appears in history. Those Passions are the same in all Men under all forms of Simple Government, and when unchecked, produce the same Effects of Fraud Violence and Cruelty. When clear Prospects are opened before Vanity, Pride, Avarice or Ambition, for their easy gratification, it is hard for the most considerate Phylosophers and the most conscientious Moralists to resist the temptation. Individuals have conquered themselves, Nations and large Bodies of Men, never.
Freedman makes it sound like a simple, rational process. Nothing but friendly persuasion and free choice involved, right? But as Adams would instantly recognize were he around today, the easy gratification of vanity, pride, avarice and ambition play a dominant role in determining who gets canceled, and the mob’s appetite is insatiable. Contempt for democracy? Damn straight. Have you ever met the demos? Wherever two or three people gather in its name, stupidity and mischief will be there with them.
Deep In Thought I Forgive Everyone
Before the advent of the internet, people’s mistakes could be remembered within their communities or circles. Then being able to start a new life somewhere else in the world was at least a possibility. Today, people may be followed by their doppelgänger wherever they go in the world. And even after death the excavation and tomb-raiding will go on, not in a spirit of enquiry or forgiveness but in one of retribution and vengeance. At the heart of which attitude lies the strange retributive instinct of our time towards the past which suggests that we know ourselves to be better than people in history because we know how they behaved and we know that we would have behaved better. There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here. For of course people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn’t — and don’t — have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with.
To view the past with some degree of forgiveness is among other things an early request to be forgiven — or at least understood — in turn. Because not everything we are doing or intend to do now will necessarily survive the whirlwind of retribution and judgment. Can such an attitude of forgiveness be applied to the personal as well as the historical? To the people going through history with us?
— Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity
There’s also a good interview with Murray here.
Out, Damn’d Spot!
That Neeson’s expression of regret for his past thoughts counts for nothing in the eyes of the new morality police is striking, and worrying. It points to a streak of very anti-human fatalism in the Twittermobbing phenomenon. The new witch-hunters are not in the business of forgiving people — even people who confess to their one-time horribleness — because they fundamentally believe that people cannot change. That if you once had a racist thought you will always be racist. That if you made a homophobic joke ten years ago, you will be a homophobe forever. This is why they engage in the low pursuit of ‘offense archaeology’, as the journalist Freddie de Boer described the trend for poring over public figures’ every past statement and deed in search of something nasty or embarrassing that might be used against said public figure today — because they think people do not change, that their wickedness is ingrained, that they suffer from original sin and it cannot be washed away.
Intellectuals will always, always overvalue the need for theory, but again, there’s no need to ferret out philosophical convictions which likely don’t even exist. The “new witch-hunters” don’t have a robust theory of human nature underlying their actions; they’re motivated by the same base incentives and cynical calculations as ever. Liam Neeson is more valuable to them as a target of their insatiable spite than he is as a political ally. Or, to put it another way, all he is to the Twittermob is an entertainer. The entertainment might entail watching him star in a movie, or it might entail trying to destroy his reputation and career just because they can. Social media is the insane, decadent emperor, and we’re all gladiators competing for its amusement. Apparently Neeson’s latest performance has gotten the thumbs-down. So it goes.
We’re living in an age of social norms being in flux. Many would say t’was ever thus, but I’m specifically talking about the sort of flux facilitated by the rapid expansion of personal technology. Let’s recall that smartphones and social media have only been ubiquitous for ten years, if even that long. The effects, however, have clearly been profound and widespread. For our narrow focus here — namely, the birth of a vanguard of Javerts who specialize in public shaming and mob behavior — it’s enough to note the leveling effect whereby a resentful nobody with too much spare time can now easily attack and humiliate a celebrity. Imagine what a rush it must be to see someone famous or powerful having to grovel and apologize because of something you found and publicized from their social media history. Imagine what a heady feeling it would be to be part of a news story, mentioned in the same sentence with your formerly-exalted victim. If Nietzsche were here, he would instantly recognize it for what it is — a flexing of muscles, a testing of strength, an indulgence of all sorts of normally-forbidden urges as people, free from the old norms and hierarchies, recognize a newly-opened path to status and influence and set about exploring the boundaries. New norms are still evolving, but it will be a while before there are any widely-accepted rules about how to behave on this electronic frontier. It’s a tale of two Williams — Golding was much more percipient than Godwin about what is likely to happen in the anarchic interlude between the decay of old mores and the birth of new ones.
Still, not all of the mob behavior is attributable to a new breed of resentful revolutionaries practicing the same old cutthroat political maneuvering. There’s also a different primal reaction that plays a significant role. Some of the critiques of social-justice fanaticism talk about the concept of moral pollution. The reaction to Neeson’s story of attempted vigilante vengeance was visceral, not philosophical. The absolute refusal to countenance any ambiguity resembles a moral germophobia, a reflexive desire to avoid contamination. The easiest way to stay safe is to culturally quarantine all the bad people with their bad thoughts so they can’t infect the rest of us. It would be useless to explain that you can’t catch racism by sympathizing with a man telling a story of being enraged beyond reason by the rape of his friend. They’re too busy frantically washing their hands for the hundredth time today to entertain any nuance.
Perhaps next time in amateur sociology hour, we’ll consider whether the dramatic increase in diagnoses of Asperger’s and autism has any correlation with this widespread social maladaptation and inability to process ambiguity. Also, Marie Kondo: symbol of the zeitgeist? Maybe the trend of denouncing and renouncing the Four Olds (or the Four Unwokes?) is just a political form of decluttering.
The New Manorialism
Now that we’ve opened the door for ordinary users, politicians, ex-security-state creeps, foreign governments and companies like Raytheon to influence the removal of content, the future is obvious: an endless merry-go-round of political tattling, in which each tribe will push for bans of political enemies.
In about 10 minutes, someone will start arguing that Alex Jones is not so different from, say, millennial conservative Ben Shapiro, and demand his removal. That will be followed by calls from furious conservatives to wipe out the Torch Network or Anti-Fascist News, with Jacobin on the way.
We’ve already seen Facebook overcompensate when faced with complaints of anti-conservative bias. Assuming this continues, “community standards” will turn into a ceaseless parody of Cold War spy trades: one of ours for one of yours.
This is the nuance people are missing. It’s not that people like Jones shouldn’t be punished; it’s the means of punishment that has changed radically.
Under the new manorialism of our age, it’s moral authority and consensus which have splintered and withered, rather than political authority. The centralized state grows ever larger and more invasive with the help of technology, but the ability of citizens to communicate and informally settle their disputes inversely shrinks. Through laziness, cowardice, and general stupidity, we’ve abdicated our responsibility to order ourselves from within our social relationships, and have thus resigned ourselves to being governed from without by employers, bureaucrats, and corporate moguls. We’re content to be granted a steady job and a small plot of social-media turf to tend; whatever useful data we produce there is handed over to our lords, and occasionally we may be called upon to march off to battle with petitions and disingenuous boycotts against hostile media territories. In contrast to the previous era of manorialism, though, our corporate lords are not bound by any restraints or obligations regarding us. Your service on behalf of your liege will not protect you should a mob target your job or public reputation. There is no manor court system to grant any rudimentary protection.
It’s further evidence, perhaps, of Campbell and Manning’s argument that we are transforming from a culture of dignity to a culture of victimhood, where pride in one’s self-sufficiency gives way to toadying and currying favor with powerful authorities in the hope of convincing them to extract petty vengeance on our behalf. Additionally, it’s also perhaps further confirmation of a related theme Philip K. Howard developed over a pair of books, that responsibility and judgment decay as a legalistic bureaucratic culture grows. As we focus increasingly on individual rights to the exclusion of questions of responsibility, the imperative becomes covering one’s ass and looking for any legal loophole that can be cynically exploited. Sure, you have the right to declare personal economic embargoes against anyone for whatever vindictive reason you wish. Certainly, when you’re determined to parse it closely enough, no one has a right to a particular job or platform. The question, as always, is whether or not the purported cure is worse than the disease, or, more importantly, whether empowering faceless corporate entities to exercise judgment on our behalf will turn out to be far more costly than we expected. In the new manorial landscape we’re cheerfully creating, where only the independently wealthy can speak their minds or act without fear of crippling social sanctions, whom do you expect to thrive? To ask the question is to answer it.
I’ve Done No Harm, I Keep to Myself
This kind of vicious, self-righteous hit piece is exactly why right-wing populists will keep winning victories. https://t.co/uNznfgZ2dT
— Russell Blackford (@Metamagician) January 24, 2017
this strikes me as quite a sinister development, pressuring businesses to take official views on political issues https://t.co/W4TuxKJOiT pic.twitter.com/GP9jN3IDit
— Ed West (@edwest) January 31, 2017
You’ve heard me say it before, and no doubt I will have to say it many more times: there’s no neutral ground in a holy war.
Lord knows that humans need no special incentive to indulge in tribalism. Protecting the in-group and attacking the out-group is one of the most deeply-engrained instincts in the species of chimpanzee that made good. As numerous experiments have shown, even the most trivial and nonsensical distinctions can turn formerly peaceable people into bloodthirsty enemies.
It’s easy enough to shrug off these latest exercises in public shaming and forced political awareness on the assumption that of course pop music superstars and Fortune 500 companies will attract this kind of unhinged, obsessive attention. But rest assured that the only thing preventing these righteous crusaders from reintroducing a modern version of impressment for the culture wars is the problem of logistics, not the lack of desire. They would gladly conscript nobodies like you or I as well if they could.
Again, it’s incredibly easy for any human to reduce a complex issue to a Manichean battle between the saved and the damned. But this particular type of totalitarian impulse, to completely obliterate the idea that anything could be allowed to escape the gravitational pull of partisan politics, is especially appealing to left-wingers. It is axiomatic for conservative philosophy that there will always be a certain amount of imperfection and injustice in the world, and a sane response to this fact entails that people have to allow some sort of cultural or personal space to forget about crusading. At five o’clock, the whistle blows, and we set the bare-knuckle political brawling aside until the next day, like Sam and Ralph. There are more important things to concern ourselves with, better sources of solace like family and art to occupy ourselves with, and the fight will never be conclusively won anyway.
But to the progressive equivalent of theocracy, the idea of a “secular” space, free from political considerations, is heretical. Unsupervised free spaces like that are a breeding ground for subversive, reactionary ideas. For a political philosophy that accepts no inherent limits on mankind’s ability to perfect itself, the very existence of imperfection and injustice is an affront to its deepest identity. The grinding years of imperfect life cannot be forgiven. If something inherent in the world makes it incapable of being custom-fit to the Procrustean beds of reformers and revolutionaries, and provides no satisfying outlet for their utopian energies, they will eventually tire of vainly flinging themselves against the bars of their cage and start releasing their frustration on others unfortunate enough to be within reach. This is what we see here — in a world which, to them, seems to have gone completely insane, in opposition to all their wishes, they are reduced to lashing out against people guilty of standing by too innocently. In their desire to perfect the world through politics, they would destroy the oases of individual privacy and freedom that make this imperfect world bearable at all.
Fists, Fools, and Dollars
All supermarket products and TV shows should have labels listing the political views of all the people who make them because WE MUST KNOW
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 1, 2016
BuzzFeed decides to publish a casual smear of some celebrity couple, no doubt in hopes of costing them their TV show, or perhaps simply because it was more entertaining than churning out yet another listicle. Not to be outdone in the stupidity competition, Breitbart demands a boycott of Kellogg’s in response to the politically-motivated withdrawal of advertising. I have been hoping for years to see these culture-war border skirmishes and vindictive economic embargoes explode into all-out Götterdämmerung. I’m fairly sure it meets the standard of “just war” when both sides richly deserve as much suffering and destruction as they can possibly inflict on each other. By all means, keep up the relentless politicization of absolutely everything. Keep trying to create economic circles of moral purity, micro forms of crony capitalism, in which your money never passes into the hands of anyone who hasn’t passed a stringent ideological background check. When you’ve finally taken your petty point-scoring and scalp-taking to its logical conclusion, and you realize that you don’t like the sort of society you’ve created, perhaps then you might finally think about growing up.
Calling You Wrong, Calling You Out, Calling You Gone
This is a familiar argument: It’s really the critics of “political correctness” who want to suppress speech.
It’s also ridiculous. Of course Shriver doesn’t want to suppress negative reviews of her books. There’s a massive difference between criticism and “callouts.” Criticism is an individual opinion; callouts are groupthink. Criticism is a judgment primarily focused, in the case of art and literature, on artistic and intellectual merit. Callouts are an expression of offense, moral judgment and condemnation, delivered on behalf of a purported righteous community or collective. Criticism says, “This is bad.” The callout says, “This should not exist.” The response to “cultural appropriation” and other ideological offenses that has come to dominate much of the left-of-center media in the last few years is not criticism; it’s public shaming and pillorying. Its tone is scarily reminiscent of campaigns against ideological transgressors in the Soviet press.
Nothing needs to be added to that.
Why’s Everybody Always Pickin’ On Me?
All this week, the Guardian has been publishing research and op-eds about the ‘dark side’ of its own comments sections, which it has discovered are packed with ‘vile abuse’ aimed at its writers, and about the increasingly ugly nature of the internet more broadly, especially social media, which are apparently seething pits of mad trolls and misogynistic blowhards.
The web used to be ‘playful, creative and open’, says a wet-eyed Guardian editorial, but now it’s full of ‘bullying, shaming and intimidation’.
One of the web’s premier hubs of social justice fanaticism complaining about bullying, shaming, and intimidation: funny. In and of itself, not really funny enough to rate genuine laughter, or even a good smirk, but when you read another article less than five minutes later spelling out just how far the JV Jacobins would like to go to, uh, “prevent” bullying and harassment, well…