There’s a truly great insult that appears toward the end of Stephen Sondheim’s fairy-tale musical, “Into the Woods.” Frustrated with a passel of characters who are fighting over who is to blame for a catastrophe rather than doing anything to stop it, a witch delivers a stinging condemnation. “You’re so nice,” she sings. “You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re just nice. I’m not good, I’m not nice, I’m just right.” At a dinner party, niceness might be a virtue. But in the woods, with disaster stalking them, the characters’ desperate focus on whether everyone else admires them looks foolish. The witch may have made bad decisions and hurt people’s feelings. But she’s also the only person who can set aside her concerns for her own reputation long enough to try to make sure everyone survives.
Daniel Handler attends the 2014 National Book Awards last year in New York. (Robin Marchant/Getty Images) I’ve thought of the witch’s barbs a great deal in the week since New York magazine published a long piece by Jonathan Chait. The piece’s basic contention is that the 1990s are back, and that campus conflicts over things such as hate-speech codes and conservative writings in campus newspapers have spread to the outside world, creating an environment that is less tolerant of political dissent and debate. The result, Chait thinks, is that some people on the left have become unwilling to engage in real conversations and are launching highly damaging accusations without giving their targets a chance to respond. At the very conclusion of the piece, it becomes clear that Chait is concerned about this environment in part because he believes that patient reasoning and open debate are more effective tools to bring about social change than more radical actions and stances. But by tossing that assumption off at the end of the story, rather than making a historical argument for it that acknowledges the roles of radicals in all sorts of civil rights movements, the overall impression the piece left was that Chait was more concerned with what’s nice than what’s right, and what works.
The vigorous responses to Chait’s essay have begun to circle around a more productive set of questions about what roles radicalism and moderation play in movements for civil rights. We should debate the effectiveness of the rhetorical norms that are emerging from online political conversations. But we also ought to be clear about the limits of these raucous discussions, even when they veer into actual suppression of speech. The current political environment only looks like a victory for the left if you have an exceptionally modest vision for what social change might look like, and a rather narrow sense of the forces that have historically combined to make it happen.
Commentators on both the left and right have correctly pointed out that Chait’s praise for reasoned debate fails to acknowledge the ways in which political radicals, immoderate speech and dogmatism have contributed to major movements for social reform. Extreme phrasing can help draw attention to otherwise-modest requests. Given this long and nuanced historical record, Chait might have profited from looking at the ways in which technological and social developments have changed the pace at which movements proceed and shifted the balance of power between moderates and more radical figures within them.
One of the great gifts of the social media era is that it has helped people find communities that might previously have been inaccessible to them because of geography, age or class. But finding a community online doesn’t mean the rest of the world shares that community’s norms. Dip into Twitter at any moment, and you’ll find painful disputes between people who are at odds over respectful ways to refer to transgender people, or what journalists are allowed to publish.
These disputes often seem less driven by substantive political disagreement than a kind of political relativity, where one person assumes that another is deliberately violating norms of which the other is not even aware. If one person sees a norm for pronoun use spreading quickly, or believes that reporters can’t publish leaked material, it’s understandable that he or she might assume that there is consensus on the issue. But for a person these shifts in norms haven’t reached, it can absolutely be vertiginous to be informed that he or she is not just out of step, but dramatically and maliciously behind the times.
FILE – In this Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2012 photo, Paula Deen poses for a portrait in New York.(AP Photo/Carlo Allegri, File) Similarly, technology has given us immensely powerful punitive tools as well as decentralized access to them. You don’t have to consult the Human Rights Campaign to start a petition calling for Brendan Eich’s ouster, and you don’t have to work through a layer of functionaries to make it clear to the Food Network that you think Paula Deen is racist (and bad for America’s arteries). But as often is the case with new technology, the proliferation of these tools has outstripped the development of norms that govern their use. If we’re all cops on the Internet, we’re operating without at least a rough consensus on what sentencing guidelines ought to look like.
In discussing certain rhetorical gambits that have become common online, Chait complains that “If a person who is accused of bias attempts to defend his intentions, he merely compounds his own guilt.” It’s true that a person’s intentions don’t necessarily matter in measuring out the harm that his or her words or actions have done. Nevertheless, as a matter of organizing, mapping the steps that lead to a person giving offense or causing hurt is critically important to determine the most effective response to these incidents.
I hear regular calls for people to educate themselves, rather than asking marginalized people to spend the time and energy explaining their experiences of the world. I’m sympathetic to that exhaustion. But it ought to be someone‘s job to help curious people of good will (or even just ignorant people) learn things, whether parts of the burdens are picked up by public intellectuals like Ta-Nehisi Coates, or pop culture like the oft-cited sitcom “Will and Grace.”
Recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Scott Aaronson attracted widespread attention for a long blog comment about his experiences growing up as a nerdy man, and the ways in which he did not feel as though male privilege applied to him. The post was widely mocked. But as a chronicle of self-education gone awry, it’s a sobering read. Aaronson explained that he sought out all sorts of feminist writing on his own, some of which contributed to his anxieties about sex and dating.
Though he is careful to note that “I do not mean to suggest here that anti-harassment workshops or reading feminist literature were the sole or even primary cause of my problems,” it seems clear that Aaronson might have been better off if there was someone around to put Andrea Dworkin into context for him. That requires work. But it reaps dividends, too, in the form of someone who has a more balanced view of feminism.
Of course, people who have already been educated can step wrong, too. At the National Book Awards last year, Daniel Handler presented the award for Young People’s Literature to the author Jacqueline Woodson, who is African American. While doing so, Handler told a story about how he would never tell a watermelon joke that required him to tell that very joke to make his point. It didn’t take a major campaign to make him see what he’d done. He apologized and made material recompense, donating $100,000 to We Need Diverse Books, which champions new voices in publishing.
Causing someone such as former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling pain (in this case, by forcing him to sell his team) may be the most effective way to bring about change. But that tactic is not always necessary, nor always the most effective long-term choice when it comes to ignorance or to bungling progressive allies, like Handler.
For all the incidents both Chait and I cite, I think America’s public sphere will remain vibrant and fractious. What does worry me about these debates over speech is the possibility that they signal not an imminent takeover by the shadowy speech police, but a real and demoralizing sense of defeat on the left.
It’s easy, for example, to mock trigger warnings as a sign of what Chait calls “a central tenet of the first p.c. movement: that people should be expected to treat even faintly unpleasant ideas or behaviors as full-scale offenses.” But in a world where members of marginalized communities do experience regular slights and hostilities, there is really something quite modest about the hope that a few spaces can be made to feel predictable. What should make us anxious about the proliferation of requests for trigger warnings is the possibility that these requests signal a deep pessimism about the prospect of making the rest of the world a kinder and more just place.
I feel the same way about calls to believe the testimony of rape victims, no matter what the evidence might suggest. That idea cropped up after reporters at The Washington Post cast doubt on a Rolling Stone story about an alleged rape at the University of Virginia. This stance seems to open feminists to attack and embarrassment. More worrisome, though, is the sense that we’re offering up faith in survivor’s stories because it’s so difficult to promise them anything else. If we don’t have much hope that we can convince the police to treat victims with more sympathy, or that we can eliminate the rape kit backlog, or that we can reach consensus on how private institutions such as colleges and universities should respond to failures of the criminal justice system, then all we can give victims is emotional support.
None of this is to say that people who are fighting hard to change the terms of discourse aren’t also doing meaningful work to remedy material inequality. You can call for the cancellation of a performance of “The Vagina Monologues” or suggest that abortion advocates shouldn’t use the word “vagina” in a fundraiser — both positions I disagree with — while also working to improve health-care access for transgender people.
And shifting the language people use to refer to native Americans, LGBT people or African Americans certainly can help shift norms in ways that make it easier to accomplish policy victories. It may be some time before we can see whether these debates about language and safe spaces result in effective pushes for equality, or whether they are terms of a negotiated surrender in the face of Republican domination of state legislatures and a deadlocked Congress. But while we wait to find out, Chait and those who agree with him might do well to acknowledge that these are fairly moderate requests — no matter the terms in which they’re stated — rather than radical ones.
For all I tend to find Chait’s vision of liberalism rather crabbed, there’s something idealistic about his conviction that reasonable debate will prevail promptly against the intransigence of history, without the added spurs of radicalism and intemperate language and positions. The current battles in certain sectors of the left have real costs in burned-out activists and alienated potential allies. But Chait is going to need better evidence if he wants to argue that what’s nice is a better, faster route to what’s right.
