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I wish I agreed with your take here, since I’ve pretty much agreed with all of the others. But I fear you’re missing the point. It isn’t that botched ideas and conspiracies get wonderfully drowned out by the “marketplace of ideas”. Just imagine a liberal - for the sake of argument, let’s call this person “me” - arguing in public spaces during the summer of 2020, trying to call attention to riots and property damage and “defund the police” as, perhaps, being counterproductive and antithetical to the greater good.

Would I have wanted to voice said opinion anywhere at that time - in my workplace, on social media, in an educational setting? Would my “bad speech” have been corrected by a slew of “good speech”, teaching me a valuable lesson? No, everybody I fucking know would have called me a racist Trumpy mouth-breathing asshole. I, like many good liberals, kept my mouth shut. I’ve been doing the same about several other issues as well; issues that at one point I would have been very comfortable venturing a public opinion on. In my younger life - the 70s, 80s, 90s - there was a far higher respect for the unconventional opinion than there is today; today even a mainstream-ish opinion about trans issues or the state of Israel or whatever is enough to be blackballed. Someone like JK Rowling or Kyrie Irving with money and fame can probably take it; the rest of us pick our public battles very wisely.

THAT was the gist of The NY Times editorial, and it is a position I couldn’t agree with more. Respectfully, the last two lines of your piece, which I keep looking at in disbelief as I type my comment, don’t have a whole lot of grounding in the reality of both the unjustly “cancelled” and the many who keep their yaps closed publicly for fear of personal repercussions.

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Last point, I think...

You point to a magical time – the 70s, 80s, 90s – where you say there was higher respect for the unconventional opinion. How do you assess that? I can't speak to it objectively, but subjectively, my "audience" back then was limited to my IRL social network. I felt safe to express unconventional opinions around them because they knew me, or knew people who could vouch for me. I have no idea how my unconventional opinions would have gone over with random strangers, which is the dynamic we have today.

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May 7, 2022Liked by Shawn

As someone else who longingly looks back on those times across the distant shore: Calling your employer to discipline you for wrongthink was inconceivable back then.

And technologically unfeasible, at least at the scale that exists now. Yet there was a time when even after social media came to be that the reaction would be “Wait, what? No, don’t bring their boss into it, what are you, a fucking narc?” Something changed in the zeitgeist, which now gives us scare quotes for the idea of free speech that used to be lauded in TV spots by People For The American Way as the simple right to speak your opinion (i.e., *not* strictly the First Amendment, the broader concept that Times Editorial defended).

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May 27, 2022·edited May 27, 2022Author

What I think this misses though is that many people back in those times felt anything but free to voice their opinions. We didn't hear a lot of marginalized voices and their marginalized ideas back in the times you longingly look back on. We weren't aware of their pain, sense of their own invalidity, etc. We may be overcorrecting to some extent now, but we shouldn't romanticize the days of yore just because things felt more comfortable from our particular seats.

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I was born in 1971. By that time all *sorts* of opinions were being spoken and amplified. Was Gil Scott Heron some unknown crank? Or Susan Sontag? Or Ronald Reagan? Or Phyllis Schalfly? Some of it was met with mockery, it’s true, and some of it was deserved, but again, mockery and “discomfort”, whether from the fringe speaker or directed at them, isn’t the same as what’s done today, which is to *fire* someone who’s opinion you don’t like. That’s the cultural norm that’s now being set, and it’s outside of the 1st Amendment if you’re not a public employee.

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Compare the reaction by the intelligentsia between the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the sympathy towards the murderers of the Charlie Hebdo staff. That’s even beyond firing; it’s sanctioning murder for drawing a cartoon.

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One more thing, on this bit...

"I would have been very comfortable venturing a public opinion on. In my younger life - the 70s, 80s, 90s - there was a far higher respect for the unconventional opinion than there is today; today even a mainstream-ish opinion about trans issues or the state of Israel or whatever is enough to be blackballed."

What does it mean to be blackballed, in concrete terms? It's true that holding what I referred to as a "marginal" idea about something can get you something like blackballed in a narrow context (e.g. uninvited from a speaking appearance) or by a narrow slice of the public (Chappelle and Rowling have lost some fans, but it's hardly career-threatening). I think the response to Chappelle, for example, is an ignorant over-reaction, but it seems to be pretty limited in size/impact. Blackballing seems like too big a word for it – i.e. there's no such thing as blackballing in a narrow context.

On a personal level, the equivalent kind of ignorant over-reaction is to lose a friendship over differing views on something. But this is where the "good faith" stuff comes in. If the friend is worth having, and you are willing to do the work, then it's recoverable.

Anyway, I can't think of an example where someone was unjustly blackballed, actually blackballed, where they could not have done better themselves to prevent it (while still maintaining their dignity / integrity). Maybe you can point to one, or posit a hypothetical.

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Mar 22, 2022·edited Mar 22, 2022Author

I admit I lost the thread a bit as I reached the end of this post. But I guess my point is so what? So what if the net is that you decide not to broadcast your opinion about property damage or whatever, because you don't want to deal with the dumb pile-on that ensues. Do you have "an affirmative right" to express that opinion without fear of the dumb pile-on?

By the way, I am not defending the dumb pile-on or claiming that it does not suck. But we have always lived in a world where we had to think about our audience, and about context before expressing ourselves. I grew up somewhat liberal in a very conservative town, and I didn't express my opinions a whole lot. Big deal. What has changed is that we can all now broadcast our opinions to the world, and it's easy to imagine we're just preaching to the choir until a bunch of people flame us in comments.

The points I was trying to get to in this post is that what this all means is:

1. We have to be more rigorous than ever about the arguments we attempt. If we argue well, then it's like a shield against the dumb backlash. The backlash will come nonetheless, but it won't "stick" as well.

2. We have to own mistakes that we make and apologize well (think Whoopie Goldberg saying something dumb about the Holocaust, and her recovery from that).

3. We have to be resilient enough to stand alone sometimes. If you hold a view that's marginal, then it is what it is, and maybe it means you don't feel welcome as faculty at X university. But this is not some novel problem. Once it was radical to imagine women should be allowed to vote.

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