If there were no excommunications or fear of potential excommunications, then people could resume the more open norms around discourse that prevailed a generation ago, and assume that there are plenty of people of good will and good faith on the other side who have good arguments that are worth trying to understand, and whose lives and situations are also important to know about so that one can empathize, mentally walk a mile in their shoes, and see where they are coming from.
. . . the only situation that allows for civil, quality discourse is when all other avenues and channels for coalition-struggle are *blocked off by Power* as costly and unprofitable. If good arguments are the only way to move the ball forward, as with lawyers in a fair trial constrained by the power of the judge and the court and the bar over them, insisting they behave, play fair, and play by the rules, then you will invest your effort in making good arguments. And so will the other guy.
Read the whole thing. It’s not actually a comment on the Harper’s letter, but I think it applies.
The point that I would make is that Demonization and Persuasion are mutually exclusive rhetorical modes. The former is dehumanizing and the latter is humane. The young social justice activists employ Demonization with pride. Again, think of them as adherents of a religion that seeks to identify and persecute heretics.
Thanks, Arnold. Handle’s comment reminds me of the dialogue between Wonder Woman (Zeus’ daughter) and her paternal half-brother Ares at the beginning of their final battle. After Ares attempts to persuade WW to join him in terminating humanity, WW concludes:
“You are wrong about them. They are everything you say [about humans’ dark side] but so much more [their bright side].”
I like WW’s conclusion because I have been working on a theory of social history based on the idea that “our success” is based on progress in containing our dark side.
Ay, my good neighbors! we at least today
are Frenchmen still, free citizens and lords
of the old soil which our fathers tilled.
Whom knows whom we tomorrow must obey?
-Friedrich Schiller from Maid of Orleans
Although Handle and the good Dr must be admired for their aspirations and advocacy of decency, history does not console. Regression to the mean would imply that we may face many more burnings at the stake.
“The point that I would make is that Demonization and Persuasion are mutually exclusive rhetorical modes.”
You’re missing something. The demonizer usually is not trying to persuade the person being demonized. He is trying to persuade the viewing audience.
Browbeating and demonizing can be very “persuasive.” The point is not to get the audience to genuinely believe what you’re saying, but to intimidate them into verbal assent or at least passive acceptance. Once the assent and acceptance become sufficiently routine and automatic, most people will start thinking of the ideology as true.
The persecution of the heretic is not for the heretic’s benefit, but a lesson to onlookers.
Read this tweet from Bari Weiss. Is this demonization or persuasion?
https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/797952287591243776
How do you all feel about being a sports fan? Is it a terrifying experience for you? Occasionally, emotions do boil over in some ugly ways. You can go out and read about lots of these sorts of scenes if you choose to, but when the virus fades, would you go to a game, knowing that once in a while it can be risky?
Would you go to a Who concert or a Stones concert? That can get sometimes scary too. These are the risks of being a human being. It is much safer to be a canary in a cage, but who would choose that? I think we know the answer.
I would have more sympathy for Handle’s point of view if he hadn’t reached for the Trump hatchet so very, very quickly.
Its obvious that two states exist in human land. We can have long stints of civility. We can cut each others heads off. We’ve done both in large amounts over the years. What exactly makes a society switch modalities?
It sure seems to me that ideas like Handle’s are the most dangerous of all. He wants a life *blocked off by Power*. That creeps me out more than almost anything.
What an unsurprising misreading, Tom.
“Blocked of by Power” is “blocked of by law”. The law says I can’t go shoot my political opponents. It also says I can’t go damage their property. It also says I can’t extort them. The third of these is no longer operative- basically anyone running afoul of progressive PC culture can be fired at at will by any employer in the country. The second is rapidly being undone, too. How much longer before the first one starts to happen?
Anyone has always been able to be fired at at will by any employer in the country. You are unsettled by the visible link to influences that scare you. The hidden reasons that we didn’t see were sometimes just as petty. Twitter didn’t fire James Bennet. A.G. Sulzberger did.
Is it your contention that laws should define who a publisher can and cannot be influenced by? What is and isn’t a legitimate business concern? Should Mr. Sulzberger be removed by the “law”, or should we squash his ability to hear populist feedback by force?
People have been fired forever for disagreeing with senior management, for internecine political battles, for petty concerns, for clearing space for a friend.
A lot of the SJW argument is about how unfair this unregulated influence can all get at times. I take it you agree with them. I do not always like it either, but I fear the fix more.
I think Tom DeMeo has an interesting point. We used to have a non-legal norm that made life pleasant: it’s bad form to fire people for holding mainstream or even slightly-out-of-mainstream opinions. That non-legal norm is eroding, and Handle/Yancy Ward would have us reinforce that norm with the law.
Megan McArdle used to talk about a similar situation in a completely different arena: bankruptcy. There is a non-legal norm that people pay their debts if they can, even if they could legally declare bankruptcy. A consequence of this norm is that credit can be had at much lower interest rates, which makes life easier if you need to borrow money. And that if you actually need bankruptcy, it’s fairly easy to obtain. If that norm erodes, though, then lenders will charge higher interest, making borrowing more costly. Or people will pass laws to reduce the ability to declare bankruptcy, hurting those people who actually need to declare bankruptcy.
Basically either direction you, higher interest rates or harder legal bankruptcy, life is worse than when the norm held sway.
I think we see something similar. The norm about firing people for opinions is eroding, and both results (increased firings, or stronger legal interference in firing) are bad. The ideal would be to somehow convince people to maintain that norm with resorting to legalities. But I don’t see how to do that anymore.
It really is ironic. For decades, progressives have complained about such informal norms only working for white men. Some of them fought and won certain legal protections.
That didn’t satisfy anyone. The inequities persisted, and it insulted the liberty of those it was enforced on.
Both sides became deeply frustrated by the system. This eventually led to increasingly gaming the system instead of working with it. Eventually, this became so prevalent that we ended up with Trump and SJW as the poles. They both aren’t interested in norms, or in doing the work of respectful persuasion. No one wanted to reject their particular bully, but hated the other one.
And now here we are.
Have a nice day.
Norms? Employment actions do *not* run on norms, not in 2020 America, not in any state, not by a long-shot. In a commercial and government environments in which every little thing about what you produce and how you make it is regulated down to the finest detail, there is still perhaps no area in typical organizational life more saturated with literal volumes of laws, regulations, rules, directives, policies, guidelines, case law, and extensive, mandatory blocks of instruction than matters involving Human Resources and personnel relations.
Only in small, very sub-Dunbar, highly informal companies can things be done by feel and norm, and even then people still sue each other all the time and no matter what it is, the law is never silent on the subject. Some of those laws are pretty big deals, like the Civil Rights Act or the National Labor Relations Act.
You can try all you like to make an “at will” contract, but as any labor lawyer will tell you, even at the very maximum amount of flexibility the law will allow you to have, you are still effectively and substantially restricted in what you can do, for which reasons, to which people.
Given this state of affairs, and everyone’s intimate familiarity with it (my own HR training hours may be in the quadruple digits), it is frankly kind of bizarre to talk about “norms” of selection and termination of employees.
On the other hand, we have just gone through a long wave of gradually expanding the kinds of protected behaviors and people to whom the law afford protection against employment discrimination.
So simply mildly expanding the existing regime *just a little bit more* to protect people who are without doubt actually intimidated and terrified to exercise their other civil rights and solve a massive, pressing social problem at the same time, should not strike anyone as some kind of egregious violation of fundamental rights which have been altogether untrespassed in unbroken continuity since the reign of Henry the Second.
So, lets go back 75 years ago (which is I believe considerably after Henry II).
In our story, a man, of let’s just say a darker shade than you, was working at a local factory, and he decided to speak publicly and politically to a certain pattern of unfair treatment of his community, completely away from his work site.
A man like that would never have been fired, would he?
Perhaps your unbroken continuity since the reign of Henry the Second has some qualifiers.
I must not have been clear. Let me restate the idea.
1. We are very, very far from “freedom of association” or genuinely, “at will” employment. That situation would imply perfect to freedom to discriminate on any basis, at will, without any reaction from the state.
2. Instead, the state now forbids and penalizes all sorts of discrimination in employment. This is nothing new in American law and goes back at least two centuries. Do a legal search for variants of “it shall be unlawful to discharge an employee because …”
3. Sure, it makes sense as a matter of principle and consistency to argue that all these state intervention are illegitimate and should go away. It also makes sense as a matter of principle to argue that these interventions are all of the same basic spirit – that an employer should not be able to take a negative employment action against anyone for any reason *except* those strictly related to their qualifications for and performance of of their professional duties – and thus that current protection do not go far *enough*. But it does *not* make sense to say that the line has been drawn in exactly right spot between those illegitimate, intolerable discriminations that must be prohibited and those bases on which every employer has a sacred, inviolable right to discriminate. A line which, as it happens, gets moved all the time, as it was again just last month. When is the argument that “the line is in the right place” correct? Was it correct last month, and now is wrong? Did it just now hit the sweet spot, and that argument would have been wrong last month? Is the line and thus the argument still wrong and we must go a little further but no further than that?
4. Given all that, it is again bizarre that people are arguing as if adding just one more protected category to over a dozen already established is an unthinkable escalation and sea change in the regime of employment regulation and labor law. It’s just not. In the whole scheme of those regulations, it is a minor change which thus should be assessed on its own independent merits, and not as if it would mean the end of a laissez faire order.
5. It’s not even a new idea. In the Reconstruction Era right after the Civil War, several southern states passed laws prohibited the discharge of employees on the basis of their votes or expressions of political opinion.
So, not radical, not new, consistent with the existing legal regime, narrowly tailored as the manner least invasive of rights to address a compelling government interest in putting a stop to a tremendous social problem, which involves conspiracies to interfere with private citizens’ exercise of their civil rights (i.e., their right to free expression), which is already reflected in various laws enforced in other circumstances, e.g., 42 USC 1985.
As far as I’m aware, current protections are afforded on the basis of discrimination due to immutable personal traits. And, as you were willing to admit, these laws are still problematic.
You are seeking protection from reactions to the expression of ideas. What a stupendous mess that would cause.
Its amazing how low the wattage of your insight gets when it suits you.
As far as I’m aware, current protections are afforded on the basis of discrimination due to immutable personal traits.
Religious belief is an immutable personal trait?
Yeah, I thought of that after I posted, too. Fair enough.
While not truly immutable, that is mostly a distinction without a difference. It is considered a deeply embedded part of a person’s identity and does require a demonstrable commitment over time. It is difficult to game through the courts.
Political expression is a whole other matter. If you spend just a few minutes thinking about the complexities and the potential for abuse, your head starts to hurt.
I think you are way off if you consider race, sexual orientation, etc. to be immutable personal traits in the current zeitgeist.
“I think you are way off if you consider race, sexual orientation, etc. to be immutable personal traits in the current zeitgeist.”
There is a difference between someone trying to pull of some discordant emotional affiliation socially and engineering such a trait in a court of law to save their job.
If the courts start getting bogged down in such basic distinctions having no meaning, that would probably put those protections into disarray.
Please try to remember I am not out to get into an argument defending edge cases for those laws. Quite the opposite. I am arguing that Handle’s assertion that his proposal was only an incremental step was inaccurate and self serving.
We never see arguments presented here that we should continue to add employment protections to our civil rights laws to prevent unfairness. Scorn for such things is the norm, until a white “gentleman” gets fired. Then we suddenly see support for it.
Good point Tom. Many commenters here are badly in need of a reality check. You would never guess from these comments that the Democrats had just nominated the most centrist candidate possible.
And that meanwhile Republicans who don’t fall in line with the Trump “I alone can fix it” authoritarian cult of personality are canceled routinely even if they are much more genuine conservatives. Trump is actually arguing that any investigation of him at all while he is a sitting President is illegal and treasonous.
What Trump supporters are really afraid of is having to live with the legal precedents he is trying to set after they are out of power.
“You would never guess from these comments that the Democrats had just nominated the most centrist candidate possible.”
His social policy is that he thinks transgender rights are the civil rights issue of our time, his economic policy is that he wants Obamacare 2.0, a $3T Heroes Act after passing the $2T Cares Act, wants to spend trillions on this own version of the Green New Deal, and to give citizenship to 11 million illegals.
“Centrist” doesn’t begin to describe Biden. Least crazy of the crazies? Far left compared to even Obama 2008.
See this is exactly what I mean asdf. Even your heart isn’t into trying to portray Biden as some kind of leftist bogeyman. If it was then it would be black and brown people rather than transgender people you were portraying as his main civil rights concern. You aren’t really even making an effort here to gin up your usual dystopian apocalyptic visions.
I am shocked, shocked that there are the usual platform sops available to the more radical parts of the party who suffered yet another humiliating Presidential Primary defeat.
Your real fear is one day having to live with a Democratic administration wielding the type of authoritarian power that you think government should have. It’s a kind of projection.
I think he’s a career politician who doesn’t care particularly much about anything and will ride any wave that gets him elected. I suspect the bills he passes, actions his administration takes, and actions they don’t take will make the country worse.
I believe he is to the left of Obama, who was to the left of Bill Clinton, and whoever follows Biden will be further still to the left than him. If you want me to concede that he is to the right of AOC, then I suppose. The AOCs keep gaining ground every election though.
That is a good point. Employment-at-will is still something of a default rule in some states. If a state has a speech or political public policy exception, the question becomes whether similarly situated people are treated the same.
With the “cancel culture mobs” that everyone talks about, if a group of outsiders can persuade an employer to terminate a worker should not rival groups similarly attempt to exercise similar powers? If A can push, shouldn’t B be allowed to push back?
Social media platforms have the right to censor and be censured publicly for it. The question is what special exemptions the law should provide for the platforms from campaign finance regulations and other measures for which they might otherwise be held liable.
But speaking of Henry II, the question of what speech the government can criminalize is a different one altogether. The UK has no speech rights and people can only open their mouths at the difference of the state: Article 10 of the Human Rights Act 1998 grants freedom of expression “subject to formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society”. And on average 9 people a day in the UK are arrested for things they did on social media.
What people in the USA have to decide is whether they will accept similar criminal penalties for expressions deemed to be “hate speech.” A lot of people in the USA think criminalizing speech is a nifty idea. The tyrannical courts in the USA are random and arbitrary and no protection whatsoever for those who believe the USA constitution protects free speech.
Reading the entrails, one might prophesy that the Roberts Court, with its high premium on winning public popularity, would be more than willing to let unpopular defendants be crucified for their speech.
Moreover in authentically democratic and populist Switzerland, in a popular referendum held in February, 63.1% of the voters approved jail sentences of up to 3 years for those convicted of a new crime to “publicly degrade or discriminate” with respect to sexual orientation. Standards are being set. And they won’t stop there.
Conformity is the new world order. Subversives will either find more creative ways to communicate or learn to live in silence. Opting off the grid into purer isolation may become more attractive, but the demand for loyalty oaths and heretic hunting is becoming an ever present threat.
It is 90% internet offenses, and a few lose their jobs now and then. But everyone is listening civil because all our posts are public and easily read. Most of it. A small percentage is brick and mortar falling on our heads.
When the white fragility training comes to you, you will have a choice.
You can accept the following:
1) Having to sit through humiliating struggle sessions were you confess all your “crimes”.
2) Being passed over for deserved responsibilities and compensation based on your skin color (being discriminated against).
3) Being forced to pass over others based on their skin color (to discriminate against others).
4) To assert #2 and #3 are right and just and deserved and good.
5) To do all of this enthusiastically, in fact more enthusiastically than anyone else.
A professor just got fired to appearing distracted during one of these struggle sessions, not even disagreeing with anything.
Remember, “Silence = Violence” is designed to go after people who think they can disengage from all this.
All of this still happen in brick and mortar boring corporate settings. You won’t have to be on social media. It will also happen in your kids school, and they will be asked to turn on their parents. I’ve seen it happen with my nephew.
Someone will be along shortly to claim that you are overreacting and your analogy is tenuous at best. I am not that person. Anyone with passing knowledge of the cultural revolution will see clear similarities with what is occurring in academia right now. It is spreading to the corporate sector.