A Paranoid Delight in Persecution

(Another post from the Drafts folder.)

It just occurred to me that, thanks to xkcd, I've used more expletives than usual in the past two posts, possibly more than I've used in the past run of this blog put together.  That trend will continue in this one.  Onward!

I learned here about Candida Moss's 2013 book The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, so I went to the library, found a copy on the shelf, and read it within a day.  It's fascinating, and persuasive on the whole.  Moss is a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame University, and she isn't arguing that early Christians were never persecuted: she's arguing that when it did happen, persecution was sporadic and usually local, and that most of the time Christians flourished in the Roman Empire in the days before Christianity became the official Imperial brand.  The "myth" she's talking about is that of ongoing, universal official persecution of Christians throughout the first four Christian centuries.  (Compare Robert Wilken's The Myth of Christian Beginnings, which acknowledges that Christianity had a beginning but criticizes the official story about that beginning.)  She supports her claims by analysis of early stories of Christian martyrdom, which she shows to be flawed as historical accounts.

One of the most interesting points she makes, to my mind, is that the archetypal stories of martyrdom, laden with gory details and sexual overtones, were mostly written (and especially popular) after Constantine established official toleration of Christianity and what persecution there was, had ended.  Moss compares the popularity of these stories to that of modern slasher films.  They were often completely invented, and some were borrowed from other religious or cultural traditions.  This was established not by Moss but by a centuries-long research project on the lives of the saints initiated in the 1600s by a Dutch Jesuit named Heribert Rosweyde, and taken up after his death by Father Jean Bolland, under whose name the work continued into the 1800s.  It was the Bollandists who found how inaccurate the martyrologies often were, and how many of the saints had never existed.  This wasn't, apparently, their original intention but a conclusion that emerged as their study proceeded.

A better analogy than slasher films might be certain contemporary urban legends.  A good many people clearly want to believe that thousands of children are abducted in shopping malls to be sold into sexual slavery; that thousands of women are killed in front of cameras to make snuff films, which are available under-the-counter at your family video store; and so on.   In the same way, many Christians like to believe that -- in a country which not only has Constitutionally-mandated freedom of religion, but in which they are the overwhelming majority of citizens -- they are persecuted, fearful of confessing their faith in public, hiding in the catacombs from gay secularists who hate God.  Being called a bigot, or even a Bible-thumper, is exactly like being thrown to the lions.  There are other parallels, such as the many people who believe (without very good evidence) that America's schools in general are failing, though they think their local public schools are doing a fine job.  Or the way that even right-wing jingoist Americans romanticize the American Indian and like memes that depict Columbus, the Pilgrims, George Armstrong Custer, or other European invaders as illegal immigrants: it's safe to do that now that the Indians are no longer raiding our settlements.  In a familiar pattern, the great Christian mystic St. Teresa de Ávila wrote in her autobiography that as a child, she and her brother were "seized by a passionate desire for martyrdom, and they planned to run away to North Africa, preach the Gospel, and be beheaded by the Muslims – but their parents would not allow it."   Held back from their holy vocation by these enemies of Christ, "we decided to become hermits; and we used to try very hard to build hermits' cells in an orchard belonging to the house".  Centuries later, after the danger is past, children play Cowboys and Indians.

Huh.  How about that?  I didn't use any expletives in this post after all.  The Xkcd Effect must have worn off.

Extremism in Defense of Liberty Is No Vice, Unless It's the Wrong Liberty

Where Christian martyrs were in fact driven to disobedience by sincere religious objections to the actions demanded of them, pagan authorities could see only contumacia, a stubborn and treasonous contempt for the emperor’s lawful command.  Ironically, as we shall see, the same disconnect would prevail under the Christian empire when secular authorities and establishment bishops looked at those they called “heretics” or “schismatics.”  They, likewise, preferred to characterize religious dissidence as a result of pride, obstinacy, or philoneikia (“quarrelsomeness” or “love of controversy”) rather than sincere belief.*

I've been trying to figure out what principles, if any, are involved in the matter of Brendan Eich and other right-wingers who've taken heat for their political beliefs lately.  I must say that the Right is tenacious: they're still yowling about the unfairness of it all, three weeks later, with no signs of fatigue.  I don't think the Left, let alone liberals, would still be setting the airwaves aflame with their indignation for such a long time, though in fairness the Left doesn't have the corporate-media access the Right has.

So, for example, the right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer just published a piece, "The Zealots Win Again," calling for an end to transparency in political donations.  (It was Brendan Eich's $1000 donation to the Proposition 8 campaign, you'll recall, that led to his removal as CEO of Mozilla.) Conor Friedersdorf discussed it at TheAtlantic.com, quoting Krauthammer's conclusion:

If revealing your views opens you to the politics of personal destruction, then transparency, however valuable, must give way to the ultimate core political good, free expression. Our collective loss. Coupling unlimited donations and full disclosure was a reasonable way to reconcile the irreconcilables of campaign finance. Like so much else in our politics, however, it has been ruined by zealots.

What a pity.

You see, this is why we can't have nice things: the zealots ruin them.  Something's wrong here, though.  First, when did the Right begin to object to "the politics of personal destruction"?  Only when it began to hurt them, apparently: the Right has a long history of trying to destroy their political opponents.  (Analogously, liberals only object to it when it hurts them.)  Often they have relied on fabrications to do so, and professional liars who build careers on false accusations against their political enemies are considered heroes, not embarrassments to the faction.

Second, Krauthammer's argument makes no sense, because "free expression" means little if you have to hide your identity to express your views.  This makes me skeptical about the notion that campaign donations should count as free, protected "speech" in the first place, but even if they should, people should take responsibility for their speech and expect to be accountable for it.  By "accountable" I mean willing to give an account of the belief and their reasons for it, not that they should be fired.

I should acknowledge that I began writing this blog under a pseudonym (connected to my persona as a book reviewer for the gay press), partly because of concerns about repercussions against me in my workplace from other gay people.  There had been several attempts by gay managers and administrators in the University to shut me up around campus, though I had numerous allies as well, so those attempts came to nothing.  What worried me was that I might not be allowed to talk back to my critics.  But I soon put my real name on the blog.  (Or I thought I had; I must have changed it back.  My name is connected to the blog in many places on the Internet.  I've just edited my profile to put my real name back on it.)  Which feels odd, I admit, because before the Internet I wrote for the radical gay press under my own name, posted on listservs, Usenet, and electronic bulletin boards under my own name, and wrote opinion columns for the student newspaper under my own name.  I also spoke publicly to classes on GLB panels under my own name.  I knew that anyone who wanted to could track down my identity as a blogger; I just thought I'd put a small barrier up, which would only confound those who weren't determined.  And I do see it as a contradiction in my practice, and a failure of nerve.

Still, when you (or I) make a campaign donation under a regime of transparency, your name is on it, and you should be ready to stand by it.  Eich apparently was not.  When the controversy arose he issued a typical non-apology apology promising, or "committing," to continue the same Mozilla inclusivity you all know and love.  He preferred not to defend his support of a referendum initiative intended to attack the civil rights of same-sex couples, who already were marrying legally in California.  Just out of personal curiosity, I'd like to know how he justifies that in his own mind.

And here's a curious declaration in Eich's post: "And I will not tolerate behavior among community members that violates our Community Participation Guidelines or (for employees) our inclusive and non-discriminatory employment policies."  Oh, really?  So Brendan Eich himself is intolerant of intolerance, and is prepared to impose Touchy-Feely, Politically Correct standards of behavior on Mozilla "community members" and employees?  Compare the current backtracking in some prominent sectors of the Right from support of the rancher and welfare moocher Cleven Bundy, now that he's made some classically racist remarks.  Conor Friedersdorf wrote a post explaining why opponents of same-sex marriage should not be treated like racists.  But why should even racists be "treated like racists"?  Why is it okay to stigmatize and penalize one set of political beliefs but not others?  There has, after all, been a lot of fussing when white racists got into trouble for expressing their views.  Even debating the issues is considered unfair by many.  Okay, maybe these people shouldn't have been "stigmatized," to use Friedersdorf's term, but this is why I find a lot of the defense of Eich problematic: the goalposts keep moving.  First we shouldn't pick on racists, then we should or at least we may pick on racists, but not on antigay bigots.

So it appears that even defenders of Brendan Eich (and of Paula Deen, Alec Baldwin, Phil Robertson, and others) think it's okay under some circumstances to penalize someone for his or her political views and actions.  I'm having a hard time sorting out what those circumstances are, however, and I think they need to be defined.  In practice it appears, as I suggested before, that the exact circumstances are defined by the partisan position of the critic: freedom of political views for me, but not for thee.  Which is certainly a familiar stance, but it's not a principle.


*Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (California, 2005), 34.

Toleration for Me, But Not for Thee!

The point I was driving at in yesterday's post was not only that anyone who tries to silence someone else on the grounds that the latter is an "asshole" who utters "bullshit" has discredited him or herself as a rational person, but that allowing such complaints to affect public discussions (whether in "private" or "public" environments) will severely limit, if not destroy, free speech in our society.  You don't like what I say?  Complain to my employer or to my web host that I'm an asshole!  If enough people complain, I'll be fired and my blog deleted.  Social conservatives won't be the only ones who will be silenced; anyone who offends enough people will also be removed from the public eye, because private employers and companies aren't required to protect freedom of expression except their own, not that of their employees -- and a newscaster or a columnist or a variety show host is an employee, who's employed at the will and pleasure of his or her employer.

This evidently doesn't worry the people who try to silence others, either because they believe they have the power to protect themselves or because they don't realize that their blogs, their tumblrs, their Twitter feeds, their Facebook accounts, are private rather than "public" media -- until they run up against the limits of corporate tolerance.  Corporate tolerance is limited by public pressure, and you never know when your boss or web host will decide you're more trouble than you're worth.  (Not that it's very different in the increasingly corporate world of government: just ask Shirley Sherrod, for one.)  And it's not even necessary to construct an argument: according to that xkcd cartoon and the liberals who spread it around the Internet, it's enough that someone thinks you're an asshole and your opinions are bullshit.  Your (and my) freedom of expression consists of freedom from government action against you, limited though that is by legal restrictions but also because there are fewer and fewer venues not under corporate ownership and control nowadays.  Public sites like parks are increasingly privatized, so you have no guarantee of freedom of assembly or expression there.  The police will silence you, not because the government doesn't like you, but because the owner of the site doesn't like you; besides, you're only an asshole.

Now, granted that there is a rational case to be made against Brendan Eich as CEO of Mozilla; in yesterday's post I linked to some people who attempted to make one.  Because Eich participated by donation in the Proposition 8 campaign against same-sex marriage in California, he arguably took a step beyond speech into action against the rights of other citizens -- though as I argued, such action is and should be protected by law to some extent, an extent which can be debated but isn't clearly marked out anywhere.  And as CEO he does have a representative function where his political opinions and actions might be the concern of Mozilla.

It occurs to me, though, that the same "employees have no rights" line was used by the critics of Phil Robertson, Paula Deen, and others, though their offense was limited to speech.  Stupid, bigoted speech, true, but speech nonetheless, and it's one of the pillars of free speech doctrine that speech is not (necessarily) action.  It also occurs to me that the idea that every performer in corporate media represents the corporate owner, who is therefore responsible for their every word and thought, is very similar to the claim advanced by religious opponents of same-sex marriage, who claim that taking money to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple amounts to endorsement and acceptance, even celebration of their marriage.  Some writers pointed out quite simply that no, baking a cake for a wedding doesn't constitute endorsement of the coupling.  In the same way, my buying used books from the shop of a right-wing acquaintance of mine doesn't constitute endorsement of or agreement with his often fascist opinions -- just as his occasional part-time employment of me doesn't constitute agreement with or endorsement of my America-hating, Communist opinions.  I pick on him constantly, but I still do business with him.  I might consider changing that policy if he crossed some line or other, but I can't think at the moment of what the line would be.

A writer at Slate asked, rhetorically but seriously, why, if conservatives are so upset by the plight of Brendan Eich, they don't also concern themselves with ordinary Americans.  It's a good article.  But it works both ways.  The liberals who howled for Eich's removal, justifying it because he works for a private company, must also explain why they think lower-profile employees shouldn't be subject to the discretion of their private employers.  If customers complain about a salesperson's visible tattoos or piercings, for example, shouldn't that be grounds for firing her?  After all, it's not like the government is picking on her.  Or if a business loses customers (or is afraid it will lose customers) who don't want to deal with a black clerk, or a female doctor, it's not the business's fault; shouldn't employers be allowed to comply with (their fantasies about) public opinion?

As the Slate writer points out, in most of the US a private employer can discriminate in employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender "identity."  Instead of acknowledging that private employees have no freedom in such areas, many people are working to limit the rights of private employers by passing a law forbidding such discrimination.  The excuse is largely that sexual orientation or gender identity is not a "choice" but something innate and therefore should be protected against discrimination, an excuse which is doubtful for various reasons; but the key point is that private employers do not have total license to cave in to public complaints about what the public considers unacceptable employees, and their freedom to do so is not written in stone but can change.  Where to draw the line is not clear either; it is a matter of judgment, and as such needs to be debated as rationally as possible.  That's not going to be easy, but it's necessary.  And it's odd to see many liberals and progressives suddenly so solicitous about the power businesses have over their employees.

The Multi That Owns Us

So I guess I'd better write something about the Great Mozilla Flap of 2014.  In case you haven't heard, Brendan Eich, the recently-elevated CEO of Mozilla, which produces the Firefox browser, came under attack because in 2008 he donated a thousand dollars to support the anti-same-sex-marriage Proposition 8 in California.  After a little more than a week of controversy, including calls to boycott Mozilla products, Eich stepped down.  Which was a relief for me, because after checking the main alternatives, I wasn't sure I was willing to switch to another browser; I have some problems with Firefox, but I'm used to it and I don't much like Chrome or IE.

Conor Friedersdorf summed up the controversy reasonably well here; I also liked this post by Ampersand at Alas, a Blog, which helped me sort out my own position.  It reminded me that I'd written much the same things in this post right after the success of Prop 8 at the polls in 2008. Entertainingly, Andrew Sullivan got upset over Brendan Eich's departure, though he helped lead the attack on the liberal gay-marriage supporter Alec Baldwin for using homophobic language, even unto Baldwin's losing his TV program. (Maybe because Baldwin is a high-profile Hollywood liberal and Eich is a right-wing libertarian who supported Ron Paul?)  Baldwin singled out Sullivan for contumely as part of the "fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy." And the fuss hasn't died down yet, as shown by xkcd's latest cartoon, linked above, which has been getting shared widely on the Intertoobz, including sf writer John Scalzi's blog.

For a computer/math geek and science cultist, xkcd has wandered off into irrationality with this cartoon. Part of what he says is fair enough, I guess: I agree that the First Amendment only applies to government censorship, so being fired for your political or other views is not a violation of your First Amendment rights.  This has been brought home repeatedly in the controversies over Paula Deen, Juan Williams, Phil Robertson, and others lately.  (Oddly, when the racist writer John Derbyshire was fired from the National Review two years ago for his expressed views, few right-wingers came to his defense.)  Nor is it a violation of your freedom of speech to be kicked out of an Internet forum, or if your letter to the editor of a newspaper isn't published, or if you're attacked in the "mainstream media" for attacking your political opponents.  So far so good.

But xkcd made some odd statements, starting with "It doesn't mean that anyone else has to listen to your bullshit" and climaxing with "It's just that the people listening think you're an asshole, and they're showing you the door."  On a narrow literal level, the first statement is also true, but "bullshit" is perniciously irrelevant, as is "asshole."  It doesn't matter whether what you say or write is "bullshit," but the question arises: Who gets to decide that what you've said is bullshit, or that you're an asshole?  At Scalzi's blog I posted a comment, asking whether Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC in 2003 because he was an asshole?  And how many people who are grimly celebrating the fall of Brendan Eich now, threw hissyfits over Donahue's losing his TV show because he gave a forum to opponents of the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq?  Many liberals and progressives did at the time, and they're still upset a decade later; I'll cite Chris Hedges for special notice because of his overwrought claim that "TV news died" when Donahue was shown the door.  As if the corporate media had ever given a platform to critics of US wars; Hedges surely must know better.

Another commenter at Scalzi's blog bit.  They wrote:

@Duncan, more like MSNBC’s viewers were letting MSNBC know they thought he was an asshole, and MSNBC decided that it did not want to present programming by someone their viewers thought was an asshole. Unless you’re implying that he lost his show because the government applied pressure to MSNBC?

No, I wasn't implying anything of the kind; as far as I know, the government applied no pressure to MSNBC.  There was no need to.  The decision to get rid of Donahue seems not to have had anything to do with "viewers" thinking Donahue was an asshole; it came from the upper reaches of management, as revealed by a leaked internal memo which warned that Donahue presented a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."  The decision was framed in commercial terms, that at a time when MSNBC wanted to "reinvent itself", Donahue might put off an "anticipated larger audience who will tune in during a time of war" by linking pundits to war coverage, "particularly given his public stance on the advisability of the war effort."  So far I haven't seen any of Donahue's advocates acknowledging that a corporate network has the right to determine the face it shows to its audiences, and to dismiss employees like Donahue who don't fit its plans to reinvent itself.  But that was last year, after all.

There are other examples I could give.  Michael Moore, who is widely regarded as an asshole by conservatives and liberals alike, publicly opposed the Iraq war before it became safe to do so, and endured death threats, vandalism of his home, and (unsuccessful) physical attacks as a consequence.  (He was also harshly criticized by liberal heroes and Iraq war supporters Keith Olbermann and Al Franken, whom I consider assholes.)  But while I doubt that those who've justified the firing of various right-wing bigots would be comfortable defending the response Moore faced because of his 'bullshit,' I wonder how many of them are even aware of it?  And it's true, death threats and bomb plots go way beyond what xkcd is talking about.  But c'mon, the audience at the Academy Awards had every right to boo Moore because they didn't want to hear this asshole spout his bullshit, right?

I hope this points to the problem not only with xkcd's specific point about bullshit and assholes, but to the broader defense of private businesses demoting, firing, and otherwise showing the door to people whose opinions and political stances rile others.  After all, John Scalzi has been called an asshole often enough, and though he runs his own blog he doesn't own the Internet hardware that stores and transmits it -- it's in the hands of private companies, who then could reasonably give him the boot if enough people complained that he was an asshole and they didn't want to read his bullshit anymore.  A common argument used about Internet forums is that if your comments get deleted or you get banned from the comment section, you can always start your own blog.  And that's true, but what if you can't find a host for your bullshit?  This happened to Wikileaks a few years back, for example; and why not, since Julian Assange is widely considered an asshole by right-thinking people?  Why should they have to listen to his bullshit?  They were just showing him the door.

Throwing around words like "asshole" and "bullshit" in this situation is a rejection of rational debate.  I've pointed before to the way many people all over the political spectrum confuse a person's opinions with their style of presentation, which are separate issues.  And while it's convenient (which is to say, lazy) to dismiss free-speech issues by characterizing the offending speech as "bullshit," it's irrelevant.  It seems to me to echo the distaste for critical thinking I've seen exhibited by many good liberals and progressives, who want to impose, with varying degrees of force, their opinions on the benighted troglodytes who aren't as rational as they like to believe they are.  (And no, this has nothing to do with being "open-minded.") 

Many of Eich's critics argued that his offense went beyond speech into action: he donated a thousand dollars to support the campaign for Proposition 8 in 2008, to ban same-sex civil marriage in California.  I've seen quite a lot of GLBT people say that because he tried to take away their rights, he had no right to be CEO of Mozilla.  (I would agree that he doesn't have a right to be CEO of Mozilla, but that doesn't seem to be what these people meant -- I think it's more like the person who wanted Paula Deen to "lose everything.")  I suppose that case could be made, but matters of principle must apply across the board, not just to specific cases, so let's consider some analogous possibilities.  Can a company fire an employee who contributes to an organization seeking to raise taxes on businesses, or on the top income brackets?  Such an employee could reasonably be accused of trying to deprive businesses or rich individuals of their right to keep as much of their income as possible.  How about union organizers (to say nothing of strikers), who also seek to limit the power of business owners and management, thereby affecting them in their pocketbooks?  Though labor law has limited the freedom of workers to organize and strike, our society and the law recognizes at least in theory that people have the right to assert their rights at what may be the expense of their opponents.  Not all freedom is a zero-sum game, where one person gains only if another loses, but sometimes it is.  People have the right to advance themselves at others' expense in such situations.  It's certainly not true that a person who does so has automatically forfeited his freedom of speech or action.  And contrary to another liberal-left claim I've often seen, freedom of speech does extend to "hate speech" and advocating the diminution or removal of other people's rights.  Those others have the corresponding freedom to respond with more speech, including hateful speech as they often do.  That's part of the messiness of living in a free society.

I guess I should clarify that I'm not displeased that Brendan Eich stepped down; I think that the criticism of Mozilla and the pressure it produced were legitimate.  But I do think that some of those who agree with his demotion are not clear about what the issues are, what they were doing, or how the same tactics can and will legitimately be turned against people they support.

I don't think there's an easy answer to this problem, but I do think that the power corporations and other private, ostensibly non-government entities, can exercise over people's expression is a matter that ought to concern those who care about public debate.  It appears to me that many liberals and "progressives" and even leftists are all too accepting of corporate power over corporate employees, because it's not government power.  lt's just not possible to separate the public and the private that neatly.  And what these recent controversies -- not just Eich, but Deen and Robertson and others -- indicate to me is that for many if not people, their positions on any given case are determined by where they stand on the issue.  If they approve of the opinions of the person fired, they get indignant; if they don't, they celebrate and justify the firing.  Which is their right, of course; but it doesn't bespeak a principled commitment to freedom of expression.