What Did You Do in the Woke Wars, Grampa?

This is another post I should have written long ago, but unfortunately it's still timely.

The derogatory use of "woke" in our public discourse shows no sign of abating, and Trump's victory probably ensures that it will be with us for a long time to come.  It's another depressing example of the Right's dexterity in seizing on liberal / left slogans and using them more effectively than their predecessors ever managed to do.

Remember "fake news"?  That one came from liberals and the Hillary Clinton campaign, and it was bogus at the time, for reasons the blogger emptywheel explained early on.  Used with some care, the concept might have had some use, but few people (especially in the media) use terms with any care, and it was really just an emotive slogan anyway.  The nominally liberal media that pushed it were in no position to cast the first stone.  Then Donald Trump and MAGA picked it up and ran with it, and here we are.

As for "woke," I always took it for another case of white hipsters adopting (or appropriating) African-American vernacular to feel cool.  When the Right adopted it, liberals and leftists delighted in showing that they couldn't define it, as if that mattered to the Right.  As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of anti-Semites (quoted here), the Right "know that their statements are empty and contestable; but it amuses them to make such statements: it is their adversary whose duty it is to choose his words seriously because he believes in words."  The fun part was that liberals and leftists couldn't define it either.  They differed widely on where it came from: this writer who dated it to a 2008 Erykah Badu track was typical, but it was soon established that it was a lot older than that.  

Even then, few if any noticed that two meanings of the word were being confused.  The older one, exemplified by the blue singer/songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, who in a 1938 song warned "of the dangers of a racially prejudiced justice system and conclude[d] ‘best stay woke’."  In context, he was close to the literal meaning of the word: you're in a dangerous place, so stay alert.  That sense quickly expanded to the more metaphorical one of "awakened" or "enlightened," as in the Guardian article I linked to before:

But woke is at its most powerful, and valuable, when it is lived and not mentioned. When it’s not viewed as a quality to be smug about. Martin Luther King Jr, Steve Biko and Angela Davis didn’t declare themselves activists – they didn’t have to, their actions defined them. Woke people know not to, and need not, describe themselves as woke.

I noticed that most quotations from people like King didn't use the vernacular "woke," but "awake," and that makes a difference.  If white progressives used "awake," they wouldn't be allusively tying themselves to the Civil Rights movement, which I presume is the reason they use "woke" instead.  No matter who uses it, I object to the stance that someone is awake or enlightened, because it postulates that once you've awakened, opened your eyes, etc., you don't need to learn or think any more, and nobody can make such a claim. Right-wingers are also fond of this conceit, by the way: many social-media posts begin with the exhortation to WAKE UP, AMERICA! regardless of the political position of the poster.

In a fair-to-middling essay on the pejorative use of "woke," Nathan Robinson wrote:

If we are to make progress in having sensible discussions about the problems with contemporary social justice activism, we’re not going to get there with an imprecise “boo word” like woke. That leads in the direction of absurdity, like Tucker Carlson’s condemnation of “woke M&M’s” and a Wall Street Journal columnist suggesting that Silicon Valley Bank had “gone woke” by having a Black board member. I cannot imagine any sensible discussion in which the pejorative use of woke plays any constructive role. 

I largely agree, but I would add that the positive use of "woke" doesn't play any constructive role in sensible discussions of important issues either.  It's demagogic in the way Patricia Miller-Roberts warned against: it postulates an Us/Them division between people, based on the assumption that We are enlightened and have the answers.  This sort of self-stroking gets a discussion off on the wrong foot from the beginning.  True, people have epiphanic experiences that affect how they see conflicts and controversies, but such experiences should mean the beginning of hard rethinking, rather than its end. To quote Sartre again:

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; he never knows too well where he's going, he is "open," he may even appear hesitant But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth.  And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not suspect but the very form of the true -- that hinge of indefinite approximation.  It is as if their very existence were perpetually in suspension. They want to exist all at once and right away.  They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found, in which one never becomes other than what one originally was ...

Much of what passes for public discussion involves trying to "own" the other side: saying or writing something that definitively schools, owns, destroys, shuts down the opposition.  Owning makes for catchy memes, but it usually turns out that the opposition, like a monster in a horror movie, is not actually destroyed but, now that your back is turned, is on its feet for another shot at you. People are always surprised by that, for some reason.

A better way (not the best, I'm open to suggestions) to deal with accusations of wokeness is to ignore them and move on to addressing substance.  I try not to be too attached to particular words, especially slogan-words.  The trouble with Nathan Robinson's call to stop using "woke" as a pejorative is that he issued it in his own avowedly left-wing magazine, Current Affairs.  That's like denouncing atheism in the pages of Christianity Today.  True, some on the left use "woke" as a pejorative, but if they all stopped today, the Right (and not only the MAGA Right) would continue to use it, happily confident that they were owning the libs.  As I've said before, fussing about the Right's provocations only tells them that they've hit their target; it's worse than ineffective, it's encouragement.

P.S. For more on "woke," see this, written several days later.

"Oh, Didn't You Know I'd Been Cancelled?" Said She

Corey Robin linked to and praised this recent New York Times piece.  While it sounds interesting, it's behind a paywall, so I don't know if I'll read it.  It's evidently an attack on what the author calls Diet Culture and its harmful effects.  I'm sympathetic to that stance, but what concerns me right now is a symptomatic exchange in the comments under the author's tweet about the essay.

Someone called Satori posted a comment occupying what they presumably thought was a middle ground: "The key is to slowly, gently change your lifestyle, forever. No need to be chronically hungry, cranky & write soppy op-eds," followed by specific recommendations. Someone appropriately called Smartipants, retorted, "what part of her essay made you think she wanted your advice on weight loss? Keep it to yourself."

I have no interest in weighing in on the moisture content of an op-ed I haven't read, or on Satori's intervention. (I bet Satori hasn't read it either.)  I just want to make a general point: If you publish something in the New York Times (!) or other elite media, if you promote it on Twitter or other social media, then you are inviting comment and even advice.  You don't have to follow it, you don't have to like it, you can certainly ignore it, but if you don't want it, don't publish or post in the first place.  Publication, to say nothing of posting on Twitter, amounts to throwing red meat into a pit of starving feral dogs.

If you're lucky.  As someone once said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about; and following Sturgeon's Law, ninety percent of all public discourse is crap.  (That includes Smartipants's comment.)  Then it occurred to me that Smartipants's remark is related to the ongoing performances of those who, from the well-lit vantage point of an elite media platform, wail that they're being silenced and nobody can say anything in public anymore because they'll be cancelled by the Woke Mob.

How many times I've encountered people like Smartipants on Facebook!  They believe that what they or their friends post publicly there is private, and that any disagreement or criticism of what they've written violates their freedom of speech. As I tell them, if you don't want your posts to be public, change your security settings so that only your bubble of friends will see them.  Once it turns up in my feed, it's my business, as well as the business of anyone else who can see it. 

I May Not Know Cancel Culture, But I Know What I Like

The gay men's discussion group I attend (virtually nowadays) took up the subject of "cancel culture" this month.  I considered passing on this one, but it turned out not to be as bad as I'd feared.  It was pretty bad, but I learned something from it.

The organizer/moderator began by sketching out the media flurry over "cancel culture," referring to Dr. Seuss, J. K. Rowling, Potato Head, and some other high-profile examples.  He immediately disavowed any knowledge about any of them, declaring that he was just going by the headlines he'd seen.  Well, great: that discredited him totally - which upset me, since we're personal friends. 

The rest of the group accepted his account, which could be called the official account as framed by the corporate media.  It quickly emerged that all they knew was what they'd picked up on the fly from headlines.  That was significant, but it's notoriously Donald Trump's approach to the news; and ironic, because some of them lamented that other people never read past the headlines of news stories.  These men ranged from about 40 to 70 in age, all are articulate and educated, some are professionals  (The two non-whites in the group were Asian.)  But though all of them agreed that "cancel culture" (or CC) was a big problem, none of them knew much about it -- and I'm being generous there.  They agreed that CC is an existential threat to American society, to democracy, to freedom of speech.

I waded in recklessly, arguing that none of the victims they were concerned about had actually been cancelled, if that means losing their jobs because the Twitter mob had jumped on them.  J. K. Rowling is still rich, still has her social media accounts (in fact she's part of a Twitter mob, labeled TERFs, trying to cancel transgender people), her books are still in print without let or hindrance.  Dr. Seuss is dead, but not because of cancel culture; his estate decided not to keep six of his forty-odd books in print, but they are still in libraries and private collections, no one is breaking down doors to keep these men from reading If I Ran the Zoo to their nephews and nieces.  In fact, the most prominent victim of cancel culture is Donald Trump, who lost his job and his social media accounts as a result of it.  Several of the other men protested at this, but they made no arguments against it.

Some men bravely acknowledged that CC is not a totally new phenomenon; some were aware of "political correctness," though they accepted the prevailing media account of PC as well.  I was increasingly baffled that these intelligent guys knew virtually nothing about the society they live in, including its history, that they didn't get from scanning headlines and listening half-attentively to the TV.  Maybe "baffled" is the wrong word, though.  "Frustrated" is more like it; it was like trying to reason with Trump supporters.

I mentioned the House American Activities Committee, which had cost people their jobs and fostered -- or benefited from -- a social hysteria about Communists and other dread perils.  Some of the others nodded, because everybody knows McCarthyism is bad and cancel culture, like political correctness, is the New McCarthyism.  One man protested that it wasn't the same, because HUAC was about politics and principles, about anti-Communism not cultural stuff.  I pointed out that among HUAC's targets were homosexuals and Soviet Jews who'd taken over Hollywood and were subverting the minds of the young.  I'd wanted to bring up how major newspapers used to print the names, addresses, and often the employers of gay men caught up in bar raids, but couldn't fit it in.  I should have mentioned the contemporaneous attacks on comic books and Negro music, both depicted as Communist plots to break down Christian morality and foster race-mixing and juvenile delinquency.

The moderator agreed, but declared that what was new was that this time the intolerance was coming from the left, instead of the right.  That is how it's being depicted, I agreed, but that was also true of Red Scares and Political Correctness: the Jewish Communists had taken over Hollywood and the media and wouldn't let Real Americans have a voice, they silenced everyone who tried to be patriotic. The same went for Political Correctness, which was denounced by liberals and the right alike as left-wing intolerance of normal American culture.

Another proposed difference, of course, is social media, and some of the participants were aware that it's been argued that CC represents a democratization of public pressure on certain people and institutions.  I agree with this take up to a point: certainly numerous Establishment media figures have been outraged that the rabble dare to disagree with them directly, in larger numbers than they're accustomed to.  But I think it's at most a difference of degree rather than kind.  Hate mail, including organized campaigns, has been around for a long time.  Think of the millions of postcards the FCC received, imploring them not to ban religious broadcasting as the notorious atheist Madelyn Murry O'Hair had petitioned them to do (except that she hadn't).  As I was mulling over this post, I also remembered the South African novelist Alan Paton's last novel, Ah, But Your Land Is Beautiful, which included a subplot about a South African anti-apartheid writer receiving a long series of racist hate mail.

It could be argued that the difference social media makes is that the mob can see each other at work, whereas the individual writers of hate mail couldn't see what their peers were writing.  (Except that often, as with the FCC matter, they were writing together, copying prescribed messages.)  That could be relevant, but it can be managed by blocking and reporting.  Discussion isn't really being suppressed in these cases; the targets usually are no more interested in real discussion than their critics are.

The real problem, and possibly the real difference, I argued, is not the Twitter mob but institutions: corporations and others that choose to deal with criticism and bad publicity by throwing those who excited the controversy under the bus.  I reminded the group of Shirley Sherrod and Van Jones, whom Barack Obama had ditched when right-wing media attacked them, even though the accusations were false.  As some in the group pointed out, it doesn't always work that way: the corporate media loved Donald Trump and gave him huge quantities of free airtime.  The CEO of CBS said that Trump had made the network millions of dollars.  Whatever else is going on, the power lies not with the Twitter mob but with the institutions, the elite few who decide who gets the lucrative platforms.  They're the ones who cancel, and they're the real threat to freedom of expression, because they are largely unaccountable.  I mentioned Noam Chomsky's famous remarks about concision in corporate media, and someone asked me to post a link to the video.

The discussion quieted down after the first half hour (the meetings last about an hour and a half).  Someone brought up Amy Cooper, the woman who lost her job after calling the police on a birdwatcher who'd asked her to put her dog on its leash in Central Park.  He was quietly irate that she'd been punished simply for being afraid.  I challenged this: I'd watched the video numerous times, including once in the past week when I happened on it again.  It's not possible to be absolutely sure, but I pointed out that she didn't retreat or cower, she stalked right up in his face, despite his request not to approach him; and she lied during the call, claiming that he was threatening her, though he was not.  Fear can make people behave oddly, but I don't believe she was afraid; she was the aggressor.

Should Cooper have been fired?  I don't have the answer, and that's exactly the trouble.  We don't have any consistent criteria for people losing their jobs for racism or other bigotry, and corporations (she worked for an "investment firm") can fire employees for bad reasons or no reason at all.

We didn't get around to discussing Dr. Seuss.  I'd looked forward to pointing out that children's books have always been heavily censored, with input not only from parents but from librarians and teachers.  Theodore Seuss Geisel worked with his publishers and with educational consultants as his books were in production: he was not a free-spirited artist following his Muse hither and yon.  You might think that the system of children's book production and publishing is a bad one, but you need to have some idea how it works.  It was not the Twitter mob but Geisel's estate, which manages his work, that decided to stop publishing six of his books, which are not only problematic in content but no longer sell very well.  The estate had consulted with numerous academics, psychologists, and child development experts before they concluded that racist caricatures of African tribesmen should be retired.  

There's a postscript to this discussion.  My friend the group moderator is Korean-American, and he posted on Facebook today about J. Mark Ramseyer, Harvard's Mitsubishi Professor of Japanese Legal Studies, who has come under fire for publishing his claims that Korean "comfort women" were not brutalized victims but prostitutes who had voluntarily contracted to supply sexual services to Japanese troops in the service of the Emperor.  My friend indignantly demanded accountability for Ramseyer. I pointed out, only partly tongue-in-cheek, that the attacks on Ramseyer were a clear example of cancel culture: a left-wing Twitter mob dogpiling a conservative academic because he expressed Politically Incorrect opinions.  My friend retorted that it was not, because the accusations against Ramseyer were backed with evidence.  I replied that the same is true of Dr. Seuss: the images in those books are racist, and were declared to be so by academic professionals after long study.  It's also true of Rowling, who is an anti-transgender bigot comparable in hatefulness to antigay bigots, whose bogus arguments she recycles for use against transpeople.

Personally, I'm wary of the professionals who vetted Seuss's work.  The New York Post article I just linked reports of their study of the books:

“Of the 45 characters of color, 43 are identified as having characteristics aligning with the definition of Orientalism,” the study stated, including 29 wearing turbans.

“Only two of the forty-five characters are identified in the text as ‘African’ and both align with the theme of anti-Blackness,” they wrote, adding that every character of color is also male.

And so on.  It's typical bad academic prose, with a dubious theoretical framework.  "The theme of anti-Blackness"?  I think we have to bear in mind that such professionals in past decades often blocked the publication of children's books that are now regarded as classics (E. B. White's Charlotte's Web is a famous case, but there are plenty of others), and today's academics are just as culture-bound as their predecessors.  Much of the academic work on "race" and "ethnicity" today is just as bad, just as distorted in its assumptions, as ordinary discourse on those subjects.  None of this means that I disagree with the decision to withdraw those six Seuss books, only that I might disagree with some of the reasoning behind it. 

I certainly agree that much public discourse is terrible: not only uninformed but hostile to factual accuracy, driven by emotion and personality cults rather than critical reason.  And I agree that freedom of expression is always under threat, often from those who claim to be its champions. That certainly describes my friend, alas, and most of the men in Sunday night's discussion: on the current controversy they haven't bothered to inform themselves beyond skimming headlines, and on the history of the problem they know very little except cliches.  (Democracy good, McCarthyism bad!)  In these respects they're typical of commercial media and the people who consume them without looking at alternative sources of information.  It's not necessarily dishonesty, it's more ordinary human laziness.  But once again I'm startled to learn that though I feel inadequately informed because I'm too lazy to read widely and deeply enough, I'm still much better informed than most people.

But as I said at the beginning, the discussion helped clarify my own position.  Though many people on the left are as sloppy and (worse) impatient with, even hostile, to rational thought as the right or the center, I'm now sure that "cancel culture" isn't a phenomenon of the left.  The danger to freedom of thought and expression comes from centralized power in corporations, government, and other big institutions, who are hostile to the left but are perfectly happy to use us as an excuse to stifle freedom of thought.  "Cancel culture," like "political correctness," is a term used not to defend free discourse but to stifle it: once you say "cancel culture," no further argument is needed.  Ellen Willis explained it three decades ago, discussing CBS pundit Andy Rooney's dismissal for bigoted commentary:

Yet the real reason Rooney got into trouble was that he violated the media establishment's bland, centrist criteria for acceptable speech.  In demanding Rooney's removal, lesbian and gay activists appealed to precisely those standards of "civility" -- that is, niceness -- regularly used to marginalize their own speech ... Rather than pressuring CBS to throw Andy Rooney off the air, GLAAD should have demanded time on 60 Minutes to rebut him.  In choosing instead to define his speech as an intolerable threat, they merely reinforced the basic assumption of the dominant culture that we can't afford freedom, that all hell will break loose if we relax controls.

And as more recent commentators have argued, the Dr. Seuss fuss has enabled right-wing media to pretend that they care about freedom of expression while distracting attention from issues like Republican attempts to block important legislation in Congress, preserve the filibuster, and suppress voting rights at the state level.  It looks to me, happily, as their tactics aren't working as well as they used to, but it still bothers me that so many liberals and centrists find their siren song pretty effective.

Really Gives You Something to Think About

NPR's Weekend Edition did an item today on Fox News's cancellation of Lou Dobbs, which may or may not have something do with the $2.7 billion lawsuit SmartMatic filed against Fox. By way of illustration, the segment included a recording of Dobbs and Rudy Giuliani declaring that SmartMatic was founded by some Venezuelans seeking to undermine American democracy by tampering with our elections.

NPR's reporter declared that SmartMatic was not founded by Venezuelans, and that the company has nothing to do with Maduro or the late Venezuelan "dictator" Hugo Chavez.  I thought that the reporter hesitated very slightly before he bore down on the word "dictator," as though he might have been about to say "President" but remembered just in time that this is America.

Or maybe not, it might have been my imagination.  But Hugo Chavez was legally and democratically elected, and managed to stay in office until his premature death of cancer despite a US-supported military coup in 2002 and ongoing US monetary and other support for the Venezuelan opposition. The criteria for calling him a dictator are unclear, given the US' enthusiastic support for dictators elsewhere in the world, so I'll just assume that the reporter was conforming to American propaganda guidelines, as NPR and other corporate media normally do.

It's doubly ironic, because Chavez did not institute a reign of terror after the 2002 coup, which compares favorably with many US liberals' drive to pass new, draconian laws in the wake of our own January 6 insurrection. Democrats are now trying to claim that Russia and China were behind the insurrection.  Even now, the unelected US-designated leader of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, is still at large despite his calls for a US invasion to install him (Trump thought it would be "cool", Lindsey Graham said it was "too early"), for an uprising against the democratically elected President Maduro, and his utter lack of popular support.  That's what NPR considers "democracy" to be.

Cthulhu Loves Me, This I Know

 

A friend posted this story this morning: 

Deputies were called Sunday when a Christian prayer group and Native Americans faced off Sunday at the Great Serpent Mound, the Native American national historic site in southern Ohio.

The Native American leader who was there says they were trying to protect a sacred site that belonged to their ancestors.

The leader of the prayer group says the mound is a place where dark energy is released into the world.

"I'm not calling the Indians dark," Dave Daubenmire told The Enquirer. "This has nothing to do with the Indians."

It's shocking how much Daubenmire concedes to the Satanic forces of Political Correctness here. In the past Christians would not have hesitated to call the Indians "dark," and worse.  Denouncing pagans and calling their gods demons is an ancient Christian tradition.  Jesus even called his Jewish (that is, not pagan) opponents sons of the Devil.  At this rate, before you know it Daubermire will be saying that there are many religions but they all believe in the same God.

Spirituality is so beautiful.  Each man believes that the other has spiritual power that he has to cancel, and which his own god can protect him against, though Daubermire seems to feel more protected than Yenyo.  Are the Indians' gods so weak that the Christians can exorcise them?  Is "sacred space" so fragile?  These are serious questions.  I've often seen writings by adherents of the old religions complaining that they had their own earth-based gods of great power and holiness, but then the Christians came along and destroyed them.  Why didn't all the earth-based gods get together and give Jesus a wedgie?  Why did their power depend on the existence of their temples and shrines, even when their members were an overwhelming majority?  It's possible to give secular answers to such questions, but the non-Yahwists should answer them in their terms.  Mostly they just whine.  If I were a theist, I'd prefer gods who aren't losers; and make no mistake: these disputes are about power and winning, about honor and shame, not about "holiness" and "the sacred."

If a Christian prayer group is such a threat to the Indians' sacred site (owned by an unnamed "nonprofit"), why not counter them with the Indians' own rites -- dancing, chanting, burning sage?  Executive Director of the American Indian Movement Philip Yenyo told the Cincinnati Enquirer:

"It's a sacred site for us, but other people with other faith beliefs think they have the right to go there and do their ceremonies. In our opinion, they don't," Yenyo said. "It would be like me going into a church and doing my ceremonies in that church – disregarding and disrespecting their believes."

This is as disingenuous as Daubermire's claim that he wasn't calling the Indians dark.  I hope that Yenyo does "disrespect" Christian beliefs; why the hell shouldn't he?  If he can't lead a purification ceremony in a Christian church, why not do it on the lawn, in the parking lot, even across the street if necessary?  No wonder the sacred sites are under attack: he doesn't care about them that much.

It's also great to see the tranquility and peace that Faith and Spirituality bring to both sides, as shown in the lovely photograph above. Thanks to Dave Daubermire and Philip Yenyo for strengthening my atheism on a cold morning.

O Fickle Democrats!

This just in: George W. Bush has endorsed Susan Collins, a Republican Senator from Maine, for re-election.  Collins has been a frequent target for Democratic ire, because despite the occasional lapse she has been a reliable supporter of Donald Trump's agenda.  This is, The Hill reports, Bush's "first endorsement of the 2020 cycle."  I presume this means there are more to come, and for the first time I'm genuinely curious to see what will happen next.

I'm also looking forward to reactions from the Democrats who've rehabilitated Dubya these past few years.  Already on Twitter there's been some consternation.  The word "disappointment" recurs.  So do versions of "I was just praising Ol' W. this morning. Well.... so much for that." Why were they praising a war criminal who killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, made refugees of millions more, crashed the world economy, and fiddled while New Orleans drowned?  You might well ask.  Of course, it's because he gave Michelle Obama a cough drop, she declared him her "partner in crime" who shares her values, and Ellen DeGeneres is his good friend and you don't have to agree with someone on every little thing to be their friend.  (They may have more in common than some of us thought.)  But never mind all that, they'll throw him under the bus now.  Cancel culture is real.

Another person remarked that Bush is "only reminding us what a disaster his presidency was."  Funny how many Democrats have forgotten.  But as I suggested recently, Democrats seem to have cheesecloth memories, and if you don't keep reminding them, they forget things.  I therefore have to hope that Bush will come up with more disappointing endorsements to keep their memories refreshed.

Ignorant Armies Clash

Over the weekend a young Asian-American man told me and some other white men about an experience he'd had in college -- graduate school, perhaps.  A paper he'd written was rejected by his professor because the professor considered its vocabulary too advanced or complex, so he assumed either that it was plagiarized or written by someone else.  (Compare his experience to that of the neurobiologist Ben Barres, who before transitioning to male in the 1990s was accused by an MIT professor of getting her boyfriend to solve a difficult test problem, because of course no woman could have done it.)  Luckily the young man had the courage to stand up for himself, and the professor wasn't so far gone as to refuse to let him prove his competence: which he did, and the professor changed his grade from F to A.

Now, the young man speaks English with a standard mid-American accent.  I don't know where he was born, but he was likely born in the US, or at the latest came here early enough to acquire English as fully as one would expect from a native speaker.  Maybe the professor hadn't heard him speak?  Or if he did, his preconceptions may have overlaid a Chinese accent in his mind's ear.  I don't know exactly what kind of racism drove him to this unfounded, unjustified conclusion, and it doesn't much matter, because my point is that this story gives me one more reason to cringe when someone speaks or racists or other bigots as "ignorant." 

Highly intelligent (for some sense of the word) and educated (for some sense of that one) people can harbor the most squalid prejudices and biases.  "Minority" people eager for status need to recognize, I think, that a doctorate isn't quite the crown of glory they take it for.  If you really mean that unschooled people can be, hell, are smarter than these pointy-headed professors with their diplomas and fancy words, then don't regard those diplomas and titles as signs of superiority.

It also occurred to me that this must have happened in this century.  The professor must have lived through the Civil Rights movement and other movements against entrenched attitudes; he could hardly claim to be too old to be aware of these matters, though as an academic who evidently was ready to harbor racist stereotypes, he no doubt chose not to learn from them.  Perhaps he was one of those academics who fumed against the culture wars of the 1990s, feeling embattled and persecuted for his attachment to traditional values.  Sometimes I think we need a little more cancel culture, not less.

"Cancel Culture": "Political Correctness" for 2020

And political extremists roam the land, abusing the privilege of free speech, setting citizens against one another on the basis of their class or race.

-- George H. W. Bush, commencement address at University of Michigan, May 4, 1991

The fussin' and fightin' over That Letter hasn't flamed out yet, days later.  A few intelligent contributions have been made, but on the whole the level of discussion remains embarrassingly low.

I'm not going to say that there's no such thing as cancel culture; that would be like claiming that there's no such thing as the "Democratic establishment"; or from another perspective, that there was no such thing as a "homosexual" before the word was invented in 1869.  What I want to challenge here is the common claim that the attempts to silence disliked opinions and people are new, a feature of the Age of Trump.  (Because, as we all know, history began on January 20, 2017 and nothing happened before that date.)  This is a false claim, and it baffles me that anyone over the age of ten can make it.  But we live in the United States of Amnesia, so of course they do.

I just found a good essay by Current Affairs editor Nathan J. Robinson, responding to an article by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi from almost a month before That Letter appeared.  Taibbi's examples of Political Correctness Run Amok are about the same as those That Letter, though it's impossible to be sure because That Letter is carefully unspecific about them.

Robinson dissects Taibbi's cases.  For example

Often, I’ve found that when you actually click the links on stories about how the “social justice warriors” or “wokescolds” or “cancel culture” doers are getting wildly out of control, you find that the facts are far more nuanced than critics want you to believe. For example, Taibbi cites an instance of “a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’ out loud.” This sounds so extreme that I doubted whether it was true, and indeed it isn’t. The students actually complained because when the (white) professor read “Letter from Birmingham Jail” aloud, he chose to say the n-word rather than censoring it. And when Black students told him they would have preferred if he’d omitted the word, he apparently doubled down and said being white didn’t mean he couldn’t say the n-word. (Students were apparently also upset that he had shown them a video containing the n-word and graphic pictures of lynchings, apparently without having had a conversation about it.)

And so on.  I suddenly experienced a dizzying moment of deja vu: I'd read essentially the same article many times during the 1990s, when a range of writers (some journalists, some scholars, and a vile hack named Dinesh D'Souza - you may have heard of him) were claiming that America's colleges and universities had been taken over by Communist deconstructionists who hated Western culture and were brainwashing our young people with their gay feminist multiculturalism; and a range of other writers, mostly scholars but some journalists carefully exposed the inaccuracy of their accusations in detail.*  Not all those who jumped on the Culture Wars bandwagon were right-wing; some were liberal and some were even some kind of leftist.

For example, the distinguished historian C. Vann Woodward gave D'Souza's mendacious book Illiberal Education (excerpted in the liberal magazine The Atlantic) a favorable review in The New York Review of Books.  NYRB has a long tradition of publishing letters, often very critical ones, addressing their articles, with responses by the reviewers.  Several critical letters were published, detailing errors by Woodward and D'Souza.  Interestingly, Woodward admitted that when he checked he found numerous falsehoods in D'Souza's account of the activist Rigoberta Menchu, but he doesn't seem to have done so with the book as a whole.  His patronizing sneer at the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin -- "John Hope Franklin must have got up on the wrong side of the bed the day he wrote his letter", and it gets worse as he proceeds -- wasn't a great example of serious discussion either.

What the accusers of PC had in common was not a political stance but a disregard for factual accuracy and reason, which they projected onto their targets.  One of my favorite falsehoods was the claim that Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple was being taught in college literature courses more than Shakespeare was.  John K. Wilson refuted the claim in The Myth of Political Correctness (Duke UP, 1995, pp. 84-5):

Perhaps the most famous inaccuracy was written by Christopher Clausen, chair of Penn State’s English department, when he said, “I would bet that The Color Purple is taught in more English courses today than all of Shakespeare’s plays combined.” Clausen’s statement is cited by NAS [National Association of Scholars] member Thomas Short, who agrees that “it is possible that Walker’s black lesbian saga is now assigned more often in college courses than all of Shakespeare’s plays combined.”

My own survey of reading lists for English classes at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) in 1991 found that Shakespeare was the most popular author by a wide margin. In addition to five sections of “Introduction to Shakespeare,” five sections of an advanced Shakespeare class, an honors seminar, and a graduate seminar, eight non-Shakespeare classes also included Shakespeare in their list of readings. Only one class read The Color Purple. Using a conservative estimate of eight plays assigned in each Shakespeare class, nearly one hundred Shakespeare plays were read for every copy of Alice Walker’s book.

Something to notice here: Clausen wrote "I would bet," and Short said "It is possible."  When I first encountered this claim it was from other people, mostly online, who simply declared it as fact.  That's how these things spread.  Someone might argue that Wilson only surveyed one university and things might be different elsewhere.  That's certainly possible, but neither Clausen nor Short bothered to look at even one school.  The burden of proof lies on the person who affirms: it was up to them to provide evidence, but phrasing it as they did allowed them to avoid that obligation.  They were just, y'know, having a good time, so chill!

Before D'Souza, the right-wing scholar Allan Bloom set off a similar shitstorm with his The Closing of the American Mind (Simon and Schuster, 1987), which claimed that American higher education had been taken over by leftist barbarians during the upheavals of the 1960s.  Bloom's claims also were dubious and refuted by many academics and other writers.**  The idea that American democracy is endangered by wild-eyed Reds, anarchists, women, and Negroes is much older, and generally expressed in similar terms, generation after generation.

The writers of That Letter chose not to specify actual cases to back up their complaint, which gave them similar plausible deniability.  When people have attempted to pin down specifics, there's been disagreement among their critics as to what is meant.  But one of the allusions seems to be reasonably clear: "Editors are fired for running controversial pieces".  This probably refers to Senator Tom Cotton's (R-Ark.) notorious op-ed piece for the New York Times which urged that the US military be used against "rioters" protesting police violence.  Calling such a stance "controversial" is the sort of thing that Noam Chomsky, among others, would ordinarily mock.  But on top of that, the Op-Ed page editor confessed that he had not read the piece before it was published; and that the board had solicited it from Cotton, though they would not have been obliged to run it if he'd simply submitted it on spec - corporate media apologists love to remind us that no one can demand to appear in their pages.  It should also be remembered that objections to the op-ed process came not just from the Twitter mob but from Times reporters and writers.  Whether editor James Bennet should have been made to resign can be debated, but his competence is certainly open to question; it wasn't just because he published something "controversial." So the clause in That Letter is highly dishonest, like much of the rest of it.  Which is not how you call for better, more open, more responsible debate.

Which takes me back to That Letter's claims that we (whoever 'we' are) are faced with a new problem: "a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity"; "The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted"; "it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought"; "it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought."

The author laments:

"While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters."

The irony here is that many of the signers (Chomsky, Katha Pollitt, Cary Nelson among them) have been attacked in just these terms themselves.  Maybe it's true that Today's Kids Are Going Too Far, but I could wish for more self-awareness from these sadder-but-wiser elder spokespeople, and in its absence it's hard for me to take them seriously, especially the bit about valuing "even caustic counter-speech."  It's exactly what this letter opposes: not from the signers, but from those who disagree with them.

I don't deny that censoriousness, intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, etc. occur in American society and often inhibit free debate.  Certainly the Internet in general and social media in particular have enabled unprecedented numbers of people to show their asses to the world.  They were always there, however, as anyone familiar with US political and intellectual history should know.

One thing that may have changed is that cancel culture used to conduct its working behind closed doors: senior faculty deciding that they already had enough Jews or women or blacks in the department, upper management quietly pulling reporters off stories because, as George Orwell put it, "it wouldn't do" to put such things into print; troublesome athletes cut loose for being uppity; arrestees having mysterious fatal accidents in police custody.  While there isn't really much outside input in such matters now, there's a lot more than there used to be, and our self-styled meritocratic elites hate that.  Of course they yowl that they're being persecuted by the rabble.

Having said that, I think we need more openness and more rational debate.  Their lack is nothing new, which is not surprising: critical thinking and responsible debate are hard.  Because of this difficulty, neither is really very popular among the people who recommend it to others; scientists, for example, should be its most regular practitioners, but they evade it when they can.  Our celebrity scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Bill Nye, or Neil DeGrasse Tyson, are actually prominent in cancel culture: they prefer snarky comebacks, a victim's stance, or vitriolic abuse to reasoned debate.  (Of course they are cast by their fans as the victims of cancel culture.)

When you encounter something like That Letter, which proclaims a new problem, you know you're dealing with grifters.  Not everything in it is false: a smart hustler knows that the best way to lie is with half-truths.  Yes, there are immense pressures against free exchanges of ideas and opinion; yes, many people on the left are hostile to free exchanges; but the biggest pressures come from our big institutions.  Numerous people have pointed out that employment-at-will is a major factor: if your boss can fire you because you're inconvenient, you've given the company bad publicity, then of course you're vulnerable to abuse from the Twitterverse.

Remember how casually Barack Obama jettisoned Shirley Sherrod after a right-wing site released a doctored video that made her look bad.  He didn't even try to find out if the accusations had any validity.  (I suspect he wanted to get rid of Sherrod anyway for some reason, and the Breitbart video gave him an excuse.)  Investigating such questions isn't cost-effective, either financially or politically.  To see Obama now denouncing cancel culture just shows his ongoing dishonesty.  We know from history that false accusations and bad-faith arguments are ancient; they aren't going to go away because Barack Obama or Noam Chomsky or J. K. Rowling scolds them.  Investigating them before acting is not a luxury, it's a necessity; but I'm not going to hold my breath.

Ellen Willis addressed this B.I. (Before the Internet) in a discussion of the firing of the right-wing CBS commentator Andy Rooney, which I quoted at some length in a previous post:

This was seen in some quarters as a victory for the left.  Yet the real reason Rooney got into trouble was that he violated the media establishment's bland, centrist criteria for acceptable speech.  In demanding Rooney's removal, lesbian and gay activists appealed to precisely those standards of "civility" -- that is, niceness -- regularly used to marginalize their own speech.  While Rooney was slapped down for expressing bluntly illiberal views, it's hard to imagine anyone comparably left of the mainstream -- particularly in a libertarian direction -- ever having his job in the first place.  And suppose such a person did slip through and then wrote a letter to the editor defending illegal drug use or attacking organized religion as tyrannical -- can anyone doubt that he or she would have been not suspended but fired, and with little public protest at that?

This is relevant to the Tom Cotton op-ed.  It's hard to imagine anyone "comparably left of the mainstream" ever being invited to contribute to the Times Op-Ed page, though it is well-populated with regular columnists as far right as Cotton.  Yes, a lot of people on the left are hostile to open debate, and I attack them constantly; we all know about the right's hostility to open debate; but I say that the biggest, most intractable threat comes from the Center.  The Center silences you because you're uncivil, because what you're saying is just crazy, and the Center however it's constituted will have the most money and clout.  As Willis indicated, the Centrist media could sponsor and broadcast open, serious discussions; they know how to do it; but they almost never do, because they don't fit their business model.  But then, serious, open discussions aren't part of American culture in general either.

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*  Most accessible are Beyond PC: Towards a Politics of Understanding, ed. Patricia Aufterheide (Graywolf Press, 1992); Debating P.C.: The Controversy over Political Correctness on College Campuses (Delta, 1995).  For more academic discussions, see Higher Education Under Fire, ed. Michael Berube and Cary Nelson (Routledge, 1995); Michael Berube, Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994); PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy, ed. Jeffrey Williams (Routledge, 1995); After Political Correctness: The Humanities and Society in the 1990s, ed. Christopher Newfield and Ronald Strickland (Westview, 1995).

*** See Essays on The Closing of the American Mind, ed. Robert L. Stone, Chicago Review Press, 1989.

Circling the Wagons; or, All These People Who Aren't My Boss

I've been meaning to write about freedom of expression here for some time.  Several recent events pushed me - Trump claiming that Twitter or Facebook had censored him; my Twitter account locked for a few weeks; etc.  I'll try to return to these matters later, but today the Twitterverse is aflame over an open letter published by Harper's Magazine and signed by numerous celebrities, among them Noam Chomsky.

I probably shouldn't write about it, because I agree with those people who've declared the letter a distraction, like the Gravel Teens: "pretty incredible that amid mass joblessness and a deadly pandemic all our 'leading intellectuals' can talk about is the deadly threat of 'cancel culture'".  But one: this isn't entirely fair: many of the signatories, including Chomsky, are talking about joblessness, a deadly pandemic, climate change, war, and other important issues.  Many of us can multitask.  Two: it's clear that many of our random non-intellectuals are all too ready to be distracted by it.  Include me in that company if you wish.

Among the many issues raised by the responses I'm seeing to this rather vacuous and dishonest document is the anger, even fury, over it.  There's a lot of babble about "thought control" and "manufacturing consent" on the Internet, and whatever else you can say, this open letter doesn't do either.  The signatories are a motley bunch, with a variety of complaints and motives, but the letter represents an Establishment that is crumbling under the weight of its own incompetence, so it's lashing out at its critics.  I can point and giggle and make rude noises at them, or I can ignore them; I don't think they will make anything happen by attaching their names to this complaint.  I think that many of their left critics have been echoing their position: these people are trying to silence me!  Perhaps they are, but I don't think they will succeed.

In particular many left-identified persons are attacking Chomsky for setting himself up as some kind of shining example of the Left, or anarchism, whatever, and this old guy who doesn't know anything about the Internet is telling them what to think!!!  Before this particular kerfluffle, Chomsky was getting heat for arguing that people should vote strategically, as if anyone had to do what he said.  I've written about this before, about people who say that Chomsky treats his opponents with contempt (oh noes!), or that he demands unquestioning obedience to his authoritarian declarations (false), that you can't disagree with him (also false).  Interestingly, these claims come from individuals on the right, the center, and the left. Whatever influence Chomsky has, he can't make you do anything: you don't have to listen to him, you don't have to read him, you certainly don't have to agree with him.  Yes, if you're on the left, you'll probably encounter people who will cite him as Scripture. which is probably annoying, but that just gives you an opportunity to refute him -- if you can; rational debate is hard work.  But I don't see how it could be more annoying than encountering people who attack him inaccurately and irrationally, and I run into a lot of people like that, in person or online.

I respect Chomsky, I honor his dedication and persistence, but he's not my boss and I don't always agree with him.  If I feel strongly enough, I write a critique of him. Therefore I don't feel threatened when he says something I disagree with.  Funny that so many bold free-thinkers have such a different reaction.

Inappropriate Appropriation

I'm not sure why this cheered me up, but it did.

It seems that Elizabeth Warren's campaign recently announced an "Interfaith Advisory Council" made up of religious leaders of various stripes, and almost immediately took it down.  Even the Wayback Machine can't seem to find the original tweet, but the press release yet lives.  It drew criticism and mockery because the list included fourteen Christian clergy, a rabbi, and a partridge in -- no, a Zen Buddhist teacher from North Carolina.

The thread I found on Twitter included a lot of boyish tittering because the Buddhist sensei is an apparently white American woman.

I don't know if that reply is accurate or just a snarky allusion to Warren's now-abandoned claim of Cherokee ancestry, but it doesn't matter, because Buddhism, like most religions, is not a race or even an ethnicity.  (Guess what, guys - Roman Catholics are not all, or even mostly, Roman!)  Buddhism isn't racially homogeneous even in Asia, and though it originally came to the United States with Asian immigrants in the 1800s, by the twentieth century Buddhist missionaries were coming here to bring enlightenment and salvation, yea, even to white people.  Before long they were ordaining clergy among the "natives."  (Just as Christian clergy in Asia are now usually Asian.)  The assumption that Buddhists aren't white is racist to the core.

This one too:

So, Matt, how about those Korean and Japanese Catholic bishops?  Are they "appropriating" Western culture?  (Of course not: they're just dupes of the imperialists!)  How about "Asian" Americans who speak English?  One person had the sense to point out: "I don't know who she is, but if she was legit ordained by a Zen master she has more right to wear those clothes than the average Japanese person."  This led to more discussion among people who don't know that "Christian name" used to, and sometimes still does refer to the new name converts adopted on baptism.

Or think of Malcolm Little, who first changed his surname to X when he joined the Nation of Islam, then adopted the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz after his pilgrimage to Mecca.  Adopting a new name for religious reasons is not exactly an obscure practice, even in the US.  Of course a atheist like Matt LP may not feel it important to know such superstitious drivel, but I think that an atheist who wants to comment on religion should be at least as knowledgeable as his targets - especially an atheist who claims that "Constructive criticism and knowledge is my forte. A better world is possible if we fight for it. #NotMeUs".  (Notice: not his aspiration, but his "forte.")  It would also be good not to be bluntly racist, but that's probably too much to ask of an American.

Yes, it is hilarious that Warren's campaign rolled out such a half-assed initiative.  One would think that a little more thought would have gone into a project by a well-funded, professional organization made up of educated people; I thought white liberals had tokenism down to a science.  Instead Warren got something like Pete Buttigieg's ill-starred attempt to inflate his support among African-Americans in North Carolina without bothering to consult the people whose names he, um, appropriated.  But then some of Warren's critics made equally big fools of themselves.

P.S. This was yesterday, but it fits:

As Jake and several commenters chortled, quite a few of those canonical Western artists were not straight.  (Many of the names named are 'known' to have been gay by gossip, not history, but never mind.)  Nor were the famous Eyetalians, at least, white by modern scientific-racist standards.  But aside from that, even as a canon-revisionist myself, it occurs to me that much of the attitude alluded to in that quotation is wrong-headed.  Yes, students should be exposed to and instructed about art from outside the Western traditions, and an introductory survey is one good place to do it.  But would they criticize, say, a class on Japanese art history for being overwhelmingly Japanese, let alone male?  As the Feminist Press found when they assembled textbooks on writing by women outside the West, they encountered not just resistance but outright denial that Chinese, Indian, or East Asian women had ever written anything.  And I don't think it was only because the indigenous academics involved had often been trained in the West.  A lot of culturally-sensitive discourse turns out to be as knee-jerk uninformed and blinkered as the traditions it opposes.