I think the disagreement between you and leftists is not over whether or not to cut someone off for minor disagreements. The leftists just think that the disagreements are not minor at all (which is their mistake). You would probably agree that there exists some line; I doubt you'd become close friends with a member of the KKK (and that you would have SOME motivation to do this outside of self-interest/fear of being cut off).
I think I'll go further and say that we *should* stigmatize and cut off some of the really bad stuff. This premise seems defensible; the fact that there's a social pressure to not hold certain beliefs is probably good. We wouldn't want every person to individually come to their own conclusions about slavery, the really smart people already did that! If everyone came to their beliefs rationally, it would be hard to make much social or political progress. There is a sense in which we should be able to disregard certain things, or atleast have the average person be able to do this. If everyone seriously considered every argument from flat-earthers, or from 9/11 deniers, surely more people would believe that stuff, and it seems to be justified to disregard it without rigorously thinking about whether or not its plausible.
The fact that most people can just defer to the dominant culture's view of most things is fine, since the dominant culture in the west is mostly right (factory farming and animal stuff maybe being the biggest exceptions)
If transphobia, misogyny, or racism are "minor disagreements", why isn't cancellation a minor penalty? What makes cutting off contact an excessive response to someone's fundamental disrespect for whole categories of humans?
I think this misidentifies the reason we “cancel” people. I really just don’t think that we “cancel” anyone out of self preservation, the motivations are clearly much more complicated.
I don’t think we cancel out of compassion for the oppressed, it does seem to me like some collective virtue signal.
In my comment I agreed that we should exclude certain viewpoints from the range of acceptable opinions. If someone thinks slavery is good, they should be shamed, and the fact that this threat exists is good.
We’re also way too quick to cut people off. The bigotry you listed is bad in the abstract, but when someone is accused of being a bigot, the accusation is often really bad and requires some collective gut instinct of disgust. There are obviously degrees to bigotry as well; if someone says that they think DEI is bad, that might get them cancelled for being racist, despite the position not being obviously racist and clearly being defensible.
Yeah to both. I think my phrasing might have been off, it’s probably not the case that we *never* cancel anyone out of compassion. But generally, compassion or self preservation is not the primary motivating factor. I think this is kind of obvious if you look at online discourse. Someone will say “is it just me or did it rub anyone else the wrong way when this person said X?” and the comments will be “yeah I never liked that person anyway”. It’s almost like weird highschool shit-talking where we indulge in a shared reaction of disgust.
Different people "cancel" for different reasons. Certainly some do "cancel" out of self preservation, or protecting others. Some certainly do "cancel" out of compassion for the oppressed. Whether that is "virtue signaling" or acting on principle is impossible to certain of.
Are "we" too quick to cut people off? Who is "we"? Unless you know someone's story, "we" are too quick to judge.
If opposing DEI is defensible, I'd love to hear how. I promise not to judge you.
Part of what a "minor disagreement" is also depends on who you are. While plenty of cancellations are obviously dumb, when my trans friend decides she doesn't want to be friends with people who don't respect trans rights, I think that is completely valid. When a whole group collectively decides to start making agreements with each other to continue those trends amongst each other, you start to get something resembling cancel culture.
I don't think that's a valid reason at all. It's a political disagreement, they're not actually infringing on their rights. Disagreement isn't oppression. The problem with viewpoint suppression is that it makes very strong claims about belief certainty that I don't think are ever justified from a straightforward Bayesian perspective. Only complete certainty can justify ideological shunning and no belief should ever have 100% certainty. None.
There are two categories where failure to abide by this kind of good epistemic hygiene creates a risk for concrete harm. 1) Say a friend of mine falls into a cult that is obviously false, some doomsday cult or something. As long as they pose no physical threat then it costs me nothing to maintain contact with them (so long as they don't become socially unbearable, anyway). If you care for the person AT ALL then I think you owe it to them, as a friend, to be a voice of reason for them. You might change their mind! This applies doubly to political differences: if they believe something that's so obviously bad that you're willing to shun them *just for believing it* then you have an incentive both as a friend and as someone who wants to win converts for your side. 2) What if you're wrong? I've been wrong about a great many things in life, even on issues on which I had high certainty. What if *you're* the one in the cult? There is no foolproof cognitive recipe for determining that you're 100% not the Scientologist or whatever. If nothing else I think you should think of ideological tolerance as a form of self-serving cognitive insurance. Sometimes your enemies are the only ones who can save you from a mistake and you shouldn't cut yourself off from that potential lifeline.
In my view ideologically-motivated shunning is always an admission of weakness. If their views are so obviously wrong then you should be able to easily defeat them. If you can't then you should really reconsider your certainty. Are you really shunning out of certitude or is it just that you're subconsciously afraid that they might be right? If it's the former, are you really willing to terminate friendships out of pure intellectual laziness? If so then you really have to ask yourself if you're mature enough to be making socially-irreversible decisions in the first place.
Omg it's you again, from the bug post! How's it going?
I think your argument is theoretically okay, but it lacks a lot of much-needed moral imagination to make it practical for real-life use. Let's say you were a trans person who has yet to come out of the closet. You've been researching this topic extensively: you understand all the ins and outs of gender dysphoria, transition procedures, and how to get hormones, and you are fully certain that that is what you need. You finally work up the courage to come out to your conservative parents, and they respond by screaming, crying, locking you in your room, and forcing you to read Bible passages for hours until you're "better." They refuse to listen to anything more you say on the subject, they just think you're "talking back" to them, so they refuse to listen When you eventually manage to start leaving the house again, you find that most of the people who disagree with you (and by "disagree," I don't mean just having a respectful political debate. I mean verbal harassment, misgendering, discrimination from your boss and teachers, and loss of a whole bunch of friends who now suddenly think you're disgusting and refuse to associate with you.) don't understand what it even means to be trans in the slightest. Their whole opinion has been formed by Fox News commentators who talk about trans women in sports as the biggest threat to Western civilization, TERFs who think that pronouns are rohypnol, evangelicals who think that LGBTQ existence is a perversion that needs to be stamped out through the process of conversion therapy (which almost always ends in PTSD, depression, addictions, and suicide), and the movie Psycho. This person is not going to have a rational debate with you; they throw phrases like "facts don't care about your feelings" at you while refusing actually to engage in a metaphysical debate about gender. It's obviously anti-thought, and it's a waste of time to try to engage with. But let's say that you try anyway. You start debating with half the people in your life about your right to exist. Maybe you get through to the smartest ones, the ones who might actually listen, the "Richard Hananias" of the world, you could say. It's tough, but they eventually decide not to constantly insult and dehumanize you in every conversation. With other people, you're not so lucky. You learned about all the arguments they make well before coming out to your parents, what obvious mistakes they make, and how to counter them. It's clear that the people you're arguing with fundamentally just don't understand what you're trying to say. While this is happening, you still find yourself constantly feeling demeaned and dehumanized. Eventually, you realize that you can't just debate everyone in your life, and you learn that it might just be better to cut people out. It makes you so much happier, it makes your life so much easier, and while you lose a lot of friends, this is the only way to move on.
Surely you've had arguments before where the other person won't listen. I mean, you're leaving a comment on the internet, so it must have happened at some point. Even if your arguments easily win, it doesn't help if the other people refuse to listen. The fact that people out there are still using the naturalistic fallacy is evidence enough that there are people who will not listen to reason. There doesn't exist a trans person who has never tried to argue about their right to exist before, who simply shuns absolutely everyone without ever having made an attempt. But sometimes, after a while, shunning someone is just the best thing to do, and I think that decision should be respected. To call it "pure intellectual laziness" is to make an argument without thinking about the person you're talking about. You would not say that someone who has just run a marathon is lazy for not wanting to move around pieces of furniture. You would not call a child emotionally abused by a parent "lazy" for refusing to intellectually debate against them about their self-worth. You should not call a trans person "lazy" for cutting off some acquaintanceships that are more likely to end with suffering and pain than actual understanding and agreement.
Outside of that, it's still dehumanizing for you to constantly need to debate your ability to exist. To a gay person, it feels incredibly unfair that they have to debate their right to love another person while straight people go by unquestioned. To a trans person, it's even worse. To reduce someone's gender identity to an "ideological disagreement" fundamentally disrespects their right to live and be happy. It really sucks to be put in that position. "Can't we just have a rational debate about whether or not trans people are sex demons?" Like, come on.
Pure, intellectual disagreement might not be oppression, but lifelong harassment, employment discrimination, and dehumanization literally is. The issue is not that someone stops being friends with someone else because one of them likes a minimum wage policy and the other likes a universal basic income policy. That is an ideological disagreement. It's not a matter of respecting the other person's right to live.
You say that you shouldn't cut out your enemies because you're cutting yourself off from a potential lifeline, but you have to remember that maintaining this "lifeline" also comes with a large cost, a cost that is not the same for every person. It's much easier for a scientologist to be friends with an atheist than it is for a trans person to be friends with someone who thinks they shouldn't exist, so I think that's a bad analogy.
Anticipating a type of counterargument: "But what if I sexually identify as an alcoholic? Wouldn't it then be wrong for someone to stop me from drinking, even though it's ruining my life? I should still debate with other people so that I may improve my own life."
Response: Alcoholism is not similar to LGBTQ identity at all, and it's honestly a disgusting metaphor to use. A trans person doesn't accidentally become hooked on hormones one day; there's a long process of research that goes into being trans, and it's also incredibly difficult to deal with the medical system behind receiving gender-affirming care, especially if you live outside of the United States or Europe. Gay love is not an urge that one indulges in like alcoholism, it's a fundamental part of one's identity. It's who they love. It stays with that person far beyond just the bedroom. Being able to live successfully while embracing one's true self always makes one happier. If a person keeps arguing with you beyond this point, you're probably never going to reach them, so it's not worth the effort of trying to persuade them. You might as well stop being friends with them, if you ever were.
I hope this argument makes sense. I don't mean to come off as hostile, but I think that the choice not to be friends with someone should be respected. Not everyone is willing to debate their right to exist every moment of their life, and it's not intellectually lazy to not want to do that.
My counterexample is this: what if someone is not really trans but has a psychiatric condition like depression and that person views a gender transition as a "way out" of their psychological reality. Such a person would only be doing harm to themselves and I think it would be the moral duty of those who cared about them to rigorously question that decision. Having norms like "if you don't support me then I cut you off" dangerously eliminates that sort of intervention. That's what I mean about "what if you're wrong".
And to make a broader social metaphor, imagine a world in which pedophilia gained political currency: they managed to frame themselves as a persecuted minority being forced to suppress their inner truths. Say it became socially trendy and 10% of all relationships became adult-child - this led to the obvious harms but studies which demonstrated those harms were all shouted down as bigoted anti-pedo hate. Don't you think that your approach of advising pedophiles to cut off people who disagreed with them would lead to more harm in the long run? Don't you think it would be better to advocate for social norms which legitimized criticism of a social trend gone awry, even when the politically-savvy pedophiles were adamant that you were infringing on their basic human rights?
1. Your counterexample could still happen between two people who believe in trans rights. The issue here is not whether or not trans people exist, it’s whether or not the depressed person in question is trans, and I don’t know that that could necessarily be really solved by any amount of debate. Realistically, what might happen is person A (the depressed person) goes to person B (probably a trans person, if we’re being realistic about how person A would act) and says “I think I might be trans,” and they have a conversation exploring that idea. If person B decides that the person is not trans, and person A decides not to listen to them about it (for some reason), and person B persists, it still seems unrealistic that a person A would cut them off. However, at this point I think we’re really far removed from the motivation behind cancel culture, so I don’t know how helpful this is to speculate.
2. The person transitioning might not decide to go through medical transition. Even if they got hormones for a while, the effects are largely reversible. If they ended up getting surgery, that’s a bigger deal, but it’s also a really time consuming process and unlikely to happen anyway.
3. Some people go through this all and later end up detransitioning, and a lot of them say that they don’t really regret their time transitioning. For example, Lucy Kartikasari transitioned ftm and back, but she says that her time as a trans man greatly helped her through a lot of her other issues because of the community she had access to.
I think your counterexample is kinda just a different scenario than the one I’m describing, and its potential existence doesn’t actually refute the validity of someone’s decision to disconnect from friends that think they shouldn’t exist.
"it costs me nothing to maintain contact with them (so long as they don't become socially unbearable, anyway)"
Exactly! And that decision is one everyone has to make for themselves. If someone's disrespect becomes unbearable, you can choose to break all contact. That does not make you a bad person.
Being the "voice of reason" for someone who doesn't believe in reason is a particularly fraught effort.
But if Bob is nice to Alice, but actively disrespectful to Alice's trans or black friends, then Alice would be blameless if she cut off contact with Bob.
Oh of course. Ideology must always take a back seat to simple politeness, and of course that runs both ways. If the trans person was aggressively intolerant of Bob's honest disbelief in their personal gender ontology, for example, then Alice would be equally justified in cutting off contact with that person.
“Hanania might not be the loveable anti-MAGA libertarian that he is today if not for finding people who didn’t villainize him.”
Hanania banned me from his substack for suggesting he might have had financial reasons for supporting Trump. Hanania had changed his tune on Trump and I’m still banned. And the dude is eager enough to monetize his thoughts that my hunch was reasonable and, I suspect, probably true.
The essay at hand describes it as exactly this: the termination of personal relationships, the unwillingness to "befriend people who think bad things."
This is a major misunderstanding of the social and emotional factors that underlie these dynamics.
First, this pertains to core moral propositions that people use to define good and bad. You may strongly disagree with how they define things or where the lines are drawn, but they have a preexisting framework, and they're probably not going to be welcoming or trusting of outsiders questioning or undermining that framework.
Second, most people are not interested in participating in an intellectual salon where vigorous debate may destabilize some of their core moral assumptions. They don't want to do that, and you can't force it on unwilling participants. If you bring that intention to a social context meant to be a safe space of emotional support and mutual validation, they will attack you as predictably as an immune system attacks a foreign pathogen.
Third, the reason for this reflexive boundary enforcement is that most people do not enjoy or desire the emotional discomfort, anger, indignation, and outrage that comes from being forced to treat people who offend, threaten, or scare them with civility and respect. Asking someone to be tolerant and civil to someone who, for example, doesn't believe their identity is socially permissible, or doesn't think they deserve equal rights, is a demand for tolerance that borders on self-abnegation.
At certain points, there is insufficient common ground to form the minimum level of mutual respect for any positive relationship. So what's the incentive?
When each moral subculture thinks it's entitled to annex the entire commons and hegemonically impose its sensibilities on everyone else, all it leads to is interminable conflict.
Instead, good liberals should take the position that everyone should stop attempting to dictate a single set of standards if compartmentalization is feasible. Like individuals, many subcultures have incompatible values, and forcing them to intermingle will only result in conflict and negative emotions.
"But even those who criticize the excesses of cancellation tend to accept the legitimacy of the underlying framing, thinking that people who believe bad things should be cut off."
Being a 70+ white guy I am familiar with this, and yet ...
If Alice is a friend of Bob, and Bob is a transphobe, how does Alice remain friends with Charlize who is a transwoman? What if Bob is also a misogynist? How does Alice maintain a friendship with someone who doubts her worth as a person?
What if Bob is not really a transphobe nor misogynist, but he "can understand" why others could rightly be one or both? "I don't hate you, but I can understand why others might." Where does that lead to?
Having friends who believe "bad things" is one thing; having friends who harbor animosity to yourself or your friends is another matter.
"Richard Hanania ... changed his mind in large part because he found reasonable people who made good arguments."
Discussing these topics across an ideological divide is difficult; not everyone can do it. If one has any doubt, one should not even try. However, discussing things and having a friendship are very different things.
There's no doubt cancel culture goes too far sometimes, but so do its critics. Sometimes.
>How does Alice maintain a friendship with someone who doubts her worth as a person?
Quite easily: "it disappoints me that you have irrational views about women, watch me change your mind by acting as a constructive disproof of your axioms." If someone's self-esteem is so low that they can't tolerate reasonable criticism from a trusted friend then I would suggest that that person needs to grow up.
>Where does that lead to?
It leads to self-reflection and personal strength. Again, if you can't stand up to good-faith criticism then you have no right to demand respect. Now if someone is actively mean to you that's another thing entirely. But shunning someone for having an honest ideological difference is just poor epistemic hygiene. Plus it's just boring. Why would you want to live in an ideological bubble?
"If someone's self-esteem is so low that they can't tolerate reasonable criticism from a trusted friend then I would suggest that that person needs to grow up."
And how well do you think that will go with someone who doubts your worth as a person? I suspect "Grow Up!" is in the same futile category as "Calm down."
"It leads to self-reflection and personal strength."
It might, it might not. If it works, great!
And if not?
Please notice that I did not say friendship across an ideological divide is impossible; I called it difficult. I think the question here is NOT "how to respond to bigoted friends"; I think the question is "what should you do if nothing works?"
Alice can (and should) try to reach Bob. But if Bob is resistant, it might be better for Alice to walk away.
"But shunning someone for having an honest ideological difference is just poor epistemic hygiene."
Agreed, but I didn't suggest that, so that's that.
Oh sure, there are some people you just can't get along with. I get that. But in my view people err far too much on the side of "you said something I don't like therefore you're oppressing me". That leads to communication breakdown and ultimately in my view is largely what's responsible for the current political polarization. We are very quick to demonize people who disagree with us. Part of the reason for that is we've lost the ability to transcend our immediate emotional reactions and to engage in productive debate. Being against feminist political goals does not make someone a misogynist, for example. They may have very good pragmatic reasons for their opposition and they may be objectively right. Encouraging the use of simple categorical ideological dysphemisms as a substitute for rigorous thought causes real social harm in the long run.
I think you ought to give the same consideration to the cancelled as to cancellee. Unless you know Alice's story, you cannot fairly judge whether she cancelled Bob too soon.
If Alice "cancels" Bob, we should be as careful judging Alice as we think Alice is supposed to be.
If all this was about was disagreement, I doubt it would be the issue it is. But bigotry is not really a disagreement. Bigotry has tangible consequences. So does the failure to oppose it.
My point is that 'bigotry' is frequently used a dishonestly-applied label in an attempt to avoid confronting an uncomfortable truth. This is parallel to Scientology's use of the term Suppressive Person. Much of the progressive far-left has strong cult-like overtones (as does the far-right, but the left has much more cultural currency). The issue I have with reasonable-seeming principles like the ones you're advocating here is that they can easily be twisted into defending cultlike ideological conformity. I think the cultural safeguard against that is to advocate for norms whereby people are expected to tolerate a good deal more psychological discomfort than they currently do. That discomfort can be a symptom of incoming bigotry, but it can also be a symptom of incoming truth. Sometimes that distinction is difficult to make and so it behooves us to learn to tolerate that feeling long enough to make a sufficiently thorough intellectual investigation.
I am rather doubtful that incentives supposedly have no effect on your beliefs. But even if you assume this is true, they absolutely affect what beliefs you are willing to express. For example, it is difficult for Nazis to organise, coordinate, or even advocate for their preferred policies because even admitting to their beliefs will destroy them socially. Similarly, the fact that advocating for homoeopathy and other alternative medicine will cost a doctor all his social standing among his fellow doctors is a big part of why few professional doctors do this.
The problem with cancel culture is that it goes too far and often cancels people for actively desirable speech, such as arguing for plausible and often outright true view points. also in practice, the people pushing for cancel culture are mistaken about the right policies or at least way more confident than they should be so while making academia a monoculture on their pet issues does substantially advance their agenda. Their agenda is actively wrong, so it’s actually harmful.
The idea that punishing people for bad behaviour, including speech has no beneficial effects is preposterous and ignores one of the most ancient and successful social technologies for controlling bad behaviour. part of the reason, people do not do obviously bad things like lie, falsely promise, start civil wars and rebellions or indulging unethical business practice is because of social punishments. There is no reason to think that social issues are a magical exception to this where punishments have no effect when it comes to controlling behaviour. In fact, one of the biggest problems with cancel culture is that it controls behaviour, which is why we see some view points get an insufficient hearing in academia. You can’t both complain about cancel culture, preventing some types of research, and then pretend that it can’t be used to control behaviour. And if it can be used to control behaviour, obviously it can be used to reduce bad behaviour just as it can be used to restrict good behaviour. In fact, most people would agree that certain view points should face social punishments. It’s just that cancel culture goes way too far. Do you seriously think that the fact that openly admiring Hitler will get you socially destroyed has nothing to do with why support for him was so fringe and uncommon for eighty years? Theres a reason we have laws against things like defamation and fraud because for all the talk of censorship being ineffective, making speech costly does make people reluctant to indulge in those types of speech.
Also to add to the problems with cancel culture, it generally only focuses on punishing bad behaviour and not rewarding good behaviour and this asymmetry leads to bad incentives. unless you at least let great contributions in other ways, cancel out bad behaviour, it will inevitably lead to effectively punishing anybody who thinks independently.
What speech you personally think is moral and true is not what other people will agree with. If you can dominate politically, guaranteeing the censors are always on your side, that's ok for you. But what if you can't? Now the institutions, processes, and cultures are in place to censor, and the other side controls it. Thats why free speech exists alongside defamation and fraud. Almost everyone doesn't like defamation and fraud, so it's sustainable politically. Any censorship where there's even a small vocal minority becomes a risk. Hitler is a good example- the same censorship techniques used against fascists (which included things like mail interception, agent infiltration, etc) can now be used against university students. Amazing, right? Who could have predicted it...
You need to control the institutions if you insist on your own personal vision for what speech should be regulated and what speech should not be regulated, but that’s equally true for people who believe in absolute free speech. And frankly, literally no one believes in absolute free speech, at least if you restrict yourself to people with substantial influence because even the likes of justice black or justice Douglas were willing to regulate some speech by declaring them unprotected by the first amendment. You are correct that in practice, defamation seems to be abused a lot less than for example, hait speech laws across the world, probably because it’s just much harder to come up with a precise enough definition for hate speech, that can’t be trivially abused to punish anybody the government doesn’t like. That said I think Hitler like defamation is one of those cases where the overwhelming majority of people disapprove of supporting him and I was primarily thinking of cancel culture as a social phenomenon where people use free speech and association to punish you for speech, they don’t like. Regarding the Legal question, I actually am sympathetic to your conclusion that perhaps things like male interception by the government should be more tightly regulated. Although I think your argument is a pretty bad one since pretty much any regulation will have some false positives. The existence of false positives by itself doesn’t prove that the regulation should not exist. You have to actually do a cost benefit analysis before saying that. Although it’s possible that a more categorical approach to free speech would give better results in cost benefit terms. Mind you while people talk of free speech as a bright line rule in practice. It’s mostly an area of law govern by standards since there are no precise definitions of even basic things like what speech is protected by the first amendment that can be mechanically applyed to a situation. The American Supreme Court has tried to create such definitions, but all of the ones I’ve seen are clearly not the ones employed in practice because they would protect a great deal of speech that the court does not in fact consider protected.
A lack of restrictions doesn't require the same amount of political action as restrictions do. Freedom of expression doesn't require building robust institutions in the way censorship does. As soon as systems are put in place designed to repress minority speech, all that the minority has to do to flip the table is to change the people in charge. This isn't theoretical; leftist institutions involved in speech censorship and suppression such as Twitter, FBI, and universities have suddenly flipped with the new administration.
I don't know what you mean by Hitler like defamation, because non violent fascists are engaged in political speech not defamation.
On law, No matter what we imagine our good guys doing when in power, factually to gain and maintain power actors must act selfishly and not in our interests.
We all need to grow up and stop worshipping political actors as good or evil deities, instead recognizing they are just flawed individuals like all of us.
I think actually, implementing absolute free speech would require more political action, then most proposals for regulation simply because it’s way more unpopular in practice, so theres basically no constituency for it. It’s a bit like libertarians who argue that implementing an absolutely free market is better than trying to correct for things like externalities because of the difficulty in judging the exact amount to correct for. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not actually a realistic political proposal, so there’s not much point thinking on it. My point was that just because a regulation can be used by the other side doesn’t mean it’s a bad regulation. You have to actually do a cost benefit analysis just arguing that there will be false positives and that’s unacceptable is a ridiculous standard.
Sorry for being unclear. I meant that Hitler is about as popular as defamation, and so like defamation, speech supporting him is almost universally going to be condemned by the culture, even if you don’t have such unanimous support for state persecution.
I agree, we should not assume political actors are good or evil and should instead try to predict them like normal individuals, but I’m unsure why you think this is relevant to the discussion. I certainly wasn’t suggesting that we assume institutions are good. Just pointing out that for all the arguments that free speech should be treated as a bright line in practice, it’s impossible to articulate a doctrine of permissible regulations on free speech that’s not effectively a standard. Perhaps a categorical approach to free speech using bright line rules more frequently would be better, but that’s not the approach any country uses right now. Use of somewhat imprecise standards that can be deliberately misapplied or misunderstood is a universal feature of free speech law across the globe simply because of the difficulty of developing workable bright line rules that don’t have to be bent in practice.
Enabling free speech doesn't take much political energy. Just fire the people doing the censorship. Censorship requires constant positive political pressure to continue to exist, it falls apart as soon as the funding is gone. Proof? Decentralized censorship resistant communication apps. Same thing with a free market, lots of them exist now due to blockchain technology and work fine. Facts have proven the interventionists wrong.
Hitler might not be popular, but political speech is popular. People love expressing their viewpoints. Then other people claim those People love Hitler and should be censored. So, guess what? The People now support free political speech.
Law doesn't mean much in the face of decentralized self governed applications. The US government claimed tornado cash wasn't protected under freedom of speech, yet they were unable to stop it from operating and it continues to operate to this day. Thats why I'm talking about waking up; the future is already here, but people are still worshipping political actors instead of observing the changes that have occurred over the last few years.
There's a feedback loop between behaviour and belief. There has to be, otherwise people would go absolutely insane at far higher rates. The nature of their behaviour, and regular behaviour at that serves as a mental roadblock, without which most people are not capable of seriously holding a belief.
So controlling their behavior, works to limit the strength of belief.
This is trivially true, and if you are going to oppose woke censorship you either need to stand on the falseness of woke ideas, or just say "it's in my nature to enjoy debate, and I have the right to be myself whatever it's consequences to society at large". Might makes Right Bentham if you'll forgive the image.
A small thing, but the colon in the title of your article threw me off. Did you mean to say that the core error is thinking you *can’t* befriend people with bad ideas?
Communists in my native country a few decades ago were among the most friendly people. They would invite everyone at their official parties and events, even neonazis as long as they didn’t cause trouble. Once you joined them however, they would enforce ideological conformity at an exceptional degree. The modern left skipped the first part and it treats everyone as party members. You can only do this once you have the power.
It seems many here support an incoherent ideal: that those on the "left" must respect the human dignity of those who disrespect others. This seems to be an instance of the Paradox of Toleration.
That paradox is an illusion. The intolerant demand toleration for themselves while refusing to be tolerant of others. They want respect that they refuse to give. And they regard being called out on their incoherence as just more intolerance when, in fact they are being called out honestly.
You can choose to befriend people who think bad things. And you can choose not to.
One reason medieval doctors failed to understand human physiology is that the Church often opposed the dissection of cadavers. That left them working with weak empirical knowledge and speculative theories. Woke activists face a similar issue. They often fail to identify real social problems or effective solutions by shutting down free thought and restricting open investigation.
Convincing people who disagree with you to respect your position is great and all, especially when you can convince people to respect minority rights. To be honest, though, I don't know that telling people to constantly be arguing for their rights on the internet is the best thing to do. It convinced Hanania, sure, but the other day you also posted a note talking about how some people on the internet don't listen to reason anyway, so it's not like this is the greatest alternative. Sometimes it's just easier to cut the people out of your life who hurt you. Maybe you don't win over people that way, but at least you don't have to suffer through even more arguing and harassment. The "cancel culture philosophy" probably looks insane from the outside, and is in plenty of cases, but in reality, a lot of people are just tired and hurting.
Be honest: have you ever truly had a friend reject you because they sincerely wished that you didn't exist? What if half the people in your life were like that? Is it really worth it to argue with all of them, physically or emotionally?
Some people fundamentally cannot befriend people who think bad things.
I think the primary error here is that you are looking through this with a logical lens when in actuality this is a religious issue. The moral lines of the woke left are not based in logic but are occupying the same brainspace that religious taboos once held in the past. If one holds the wrong belief he or she is an apostate and the religion must continue.
"But he changed his mind in large part because he found reasonable people who made good arguments."
Everything that can be gleaned about Hanania's character suggests that he formed his beliefs around how to market his public persona rather than anything persuasive.
I think the disagreement between you and leftists is not over whether or not to cut someone off for minor disagreements. The leftists just think that the disagreements are not minor at all (which is their mistake). You would probably agree that there exists some line; I doubt you'd become close friends with a member of the KKK (and that you would have SOME motivation to do this outside of self-interest/fear of being cut off).
I think I'll go further and say that we *should* stigmatize and cut off some of the really bad stuff. This premise seems defensible; the fact that there's a social pressure to not hold certain beliefs is probably good. We wouldn't want every person to individually come to their own conclusions about slavery, the really smart people already did that! If everyone came to their beliefs rationally, it would be hard to make much social or political progress. There is a sense in which we should be able to disregard certain things, or atleast have the average person be able to do this. If everyone seriously considered every argument from flat-earthers, or from 9/11 deniers, surely more people would believe that stuff, and it seems to be justified to disregard it without rigorously thinking about whether or not its plausible.
The fact that most people can just defer to the dominant culture's view of most things is fine, since the dominant culture in the west is mostly right (factory farming and animal stuff maybe being the biggest exceptions)
If transphobia, misogyny, or racism are "minor disagreements", why isn't cancellation a minor penalty? What makes cutting off contact an excessive response to someone's fundamental disrespect for whole categories of humans?
I think this misidentifies the reason we “cancel” people. I really just don’t think that we “cancel” anyone out of self preservation, the motivations are clearly much more complicated.
I don’t think we cancel out of compassion for the oppressed, it does seem to me like some collective virtue signal.
In my comment I agreed that we should exclude certain viewpoints from the range of acceptable opinions. If someone thinks slavery is good, they should be shamed, and the fact that this threat exists is good.
We’re also way too quick to cut people off. The bigotry you listed is bad in the abstract, but when someone is accused of being a bigot, the accusation is often really bad and requires some collective gut instinct of disgust. There are obviously degrees to bigotry as well; if someone says that they think DEI is bad, that might get them cancelled for being racist, despite the position not being obviously racist and clearly being defensible.
"I really just don’t think that we 'cancel' anyone out of self preservation"
Are you, or a beloved family member, a member of any despised class? Do you find any type of bigotry viscerally disgusting?
Yeah to both. I think my phrasing might have been off, it’s probably not the case that we *never* cancel anyone out of compassion. But generally, compassion or self preservation is not the primary motivating factor. I think this is kind of obvious if you look at online discourse. Someone will say “is it just me or did it rub anyone else the wrong way when this person said X?” and the comments will be “yeah I never liked that person anyway”. It’s almost like weird highschool shit-talking where we indulge in a shared reaction of disgust.
Different people "cancel" for different reasons. Certainly some do "cancel" out of self preservation, or protecting others. Some certainly do "cancel" out of compassion for the oppressed. Whether that is "virtue signaling" or acting on principle is impossible to certain of.
Are "we" too quick to cut people off? Who is "we"? Unless you know someone's story, "we" are too quick to judge.
If opposing DEI is defensible, I'd love to hear how. I promise not to judge you.
Part of what a "minor disagreement" is also depends on who you are. While plenty of cancellations are obviously dumb, when my trans friend decides she doesn't want to be friends with people who don't respect trans rights, I think that is completely valid. When a whole group collectively decides to start making agreements with each other to continue those trends amongst each other, you start to get something resembling cancel culture.
I don't think that's a valid reason at all. It's a political disagreement, they're not actually infringing on their rights. Disagreement isn't oppression. The problem with viewpoint suppression is that it makes very strong claims about belief certainty that I don't think are ever justified from a straightforward Bayesian perspective. Only complete certainty can justify ideological shunning and no belief should ever have 100% certainty. None.
There are two categories where failure to abide by this kind of good epistemic hygiene creates a risk for concrete harm. 1) Say a friend of mine falls into a cult that is obviously false, some doomsday cult or something. As long as they pose no physical threat then it costs me nothing to maintain contact with them (so long as they don't become socially unbearable, anyway). If you care for the person AT ALL then I think you owe it to them, as a friend, to be a voice of reason for them. You might change their mind! This applies doubly to political differences: if they believe something that's so obviously bad that you're willing to shun them *just for believing it* then you have an incentive both as a friend and as someone who wants to win converts for your side. 2) What if you're wrong? I've been wrong about a great many things in life, even on issues on which I had high certainty. What if *you're* the one in the cult? There is no foolproof cognitive recipe for determining that you're 100% not the Scientologist or whatever. If nothing else I think you should think of ideological tolerance as a form of self-serving cognitive insurance. Sometimes your enemies are the only ones who can save you from a mistake and you shouldn't cut yourself off from that potential lifeline.
In my view ideologically-motivated shunning is always an admission of weakness. If their views are so obviously wrong then you should be able to easily defeat them. If you can't then you should really reconsider your certainty. Are you really shunning out of certitude or is it just that you're subconsciously afraid that they might be right? If it's the former, are you really willing to terminate friendships out of pure intellectual laziness? If so then you really have to ask yourself if you're mature enough to be making socially-irreversible decisions in the first place.
Omg it's you again, from the bug post! How's it going?
I think your argument is theoretically okay, but it lacks a lot of much-needed moral imagination to make it practical for real-life use. Let's say you were a trans person who has yet to come out of the closet. You've been researching this topic extensively: you understand all the ins and outs of gender dysphoria, transition procedures, and how to get hormones, and you are fully certain that that is what you need. You finally work up the courage to come out to your conservative parents, and they respond by screaming, crying, locking you in your room, and forcing you to read Bible passages for hours until you're "better." They refuse to listen to anything more you say on the subject, they just think you're "talking back" to them, so they refuse to listen When you eventually manage to start leaving the house again, you find that most of the people who disagree with you (and by "disagree," I don't mean just having a respectful political debate. I mean verbal harassment, misgendering, discrimination from your boss and teachers, and loss of a whole bunch of friends who now suddenly think you're disgusting and refuse to associate with you.) don't understand what it even means to be trans in the slightest. Their whole opinion has been formed by Fox News commentators who talk about trans women in sports as the biggest threat to Western civilization, TERFs who think that pronouns are rohypnol, evangelicals who think that LGBTQ existence is a perversion that needs to be stamped out through the process of conversion therapy (which almost always ends in PTSD, depression, addictions, and suicide), and the movie Psycho. This person is not going to have a rational debate with you; they throw phrases like "facts don't care about your feelings" at you while refusing actually to engage in a metaphysical debate about gender. It's obviously anti-thought, and it's a waste of time to try to engage with. But let's say that you try anyway. You start debating with half the people in your life about your right to exist. Maybe you get through to the smartest ones, the ones who might actually listen, the "Richard Hananias" of the world, you could say. It's tough, but they eventually decide not to constantly insult and dehumanize you in every conversation. With other people, you're not so lucky. You learned about all the arguments they make well before coming out to your parents, what obvious mistakes they make, and how to counter them. It's clear that the people you're arguing with fundamentally just don't understand what you're trying to say. While this is happening, you still find yourself constantly feeling demeaned and dehumanized. Eventually, you realize that you can't just debate everyone in your life, and you learn that it might just be better to cut people out. It makes you so much happier, it makes your life so much easier, and while you lose a lot of friends, this is the only way to move on.
Surely you've had arguments before where the other person won't listen. I mean, you're leaving a comment on the internet, so it must have happened at some point. Even if your arguments easily win, it doesn't help if the other people refuse to listen. The fact that people out there are still using the naturalistic fallacy is evidence enough that there are people who will not listen to reason. There doesn't exist a trans person who has never tried to argue about their right to exist before, who simply shuns absolutely everyone without ever having made an attempt. But sometimes, after a while, shunning someone is just the best thing to do, and I think that decision should be respected. To call it "pure intellectual laziness" is to make an argument without thinking about the person you're talking about. You would not say that someone who has just run a marathon is lazy for not wanting to move around pieces of furniture. You would not call a child emotionally abused by a parent "lazy" for refusing to intellectually debate against them about their self-worth. You should not call a trans person "lazy" for cutting off some acquaintanceships that are more likely to end with suffering and pain than actual understanding and agreement.
Outside of that, it's still dehumanizing for you to constantly need to debate your ability to exist. To a gay person, it feels incredibly unfair that they have to debate their right to love another person while straight people go by unquestioned. To a trans person, it's even worse. To reduce someone's gender identity to an "ideological disagreement" fundamentally disrespects their right to live and be happy. It really sucks to be put in that position. "Can't we just have a rational debate about whether or not trans people are sex demons?" Like, come on.
Pure, intellectual disagreement might not be oppression, but lifelong harassment, employment discrimination, and dehumanization literally is. The issue is not that someone stops being friends with someone else because one of them likes a minimum wage policy and the other likes a universal basic income policy. That is an ideological disagreement. It's not a matter of respecting the other person's right to live.
You say that you shouldn't cut out your enemies because you're cutting yourself off from a potential lifeline, but you have to remember that maintaining this "lifeline" also comes with a large cost, a cost that is not the same for every person. It's much easier for a scientologist to be friends with an atheist than it is for a trans person to be friends with someone who thinks they shouldn't exist, so I think that's a bad analogy.
Anticipating a type of counterargument: "But what if I sexually identify as an alcoholic? Wouldn't it then be wrong for someone to stop me from drinking, even though it's ruining my life? I should still debate with other people so that I may improve my own life."
Response: Alcoholism is not similar to LGBTQ identity at all, and it's honestly a disgusting metaphor to use. A trans person doesn't accidentally become hooked on hormones one day; there's a long process of research that goes into being trans, and it's also incredibly difficult to deal with the medical system behind receiving gender-affirming care, especially if you live outside of the United States or Europe. Gay love is not an urge that one indulges in like alcoholism, it's a fundamental part of one's identity. It's who they love. It stays with that person far beyond just the bedroom. Being able to live successfully while embracing one's true self always makes one happier. If a person keeps arguing with you beyond this point, you're probably never going to reach them, so it's not worth the effort of trying to persuade them. You might as well stop being friends with them, if you ever were.
I hope this argument makes sense. I don't mean to come off as hostile, but I think that the choice not to be friends with someone should be respected. Not everyone is willing to debate their right to exist every moment of their life, and it's not intellectually lazy to not want to do that.
My counterexample is this: what if someone is not really trans but has a psychiatric condition like depression and that person views a gender transition as a "way out" of their psychological reality. Such a person would only be doing harm to themselves and I think it would be the moral duty of those who cared about them to rigorously question that decision. Having norms like "if you don't support me then I cut you off" dangerously eliminates that sort of intervention. That's what I mean about "what if you're wrong".
And to make a broader social metaphor, imagine a world in which pedophilia gained political currency: they managed to frame themselves as a persecuted minority being forced to suppress their inner truths. Say it became socially trendy and 10% of all relationships became adult-child - this led to the obvious harms but studies which demonstrated those harms were all shouted down as bigoted anti-pedo hate. Don't you think that your approach of advising pedophiles to cut off people who disagreed with them would lead to more harm in the long run? Don't you think it would be better to advocate for social norms which legitimized criticism of a social trend gone awry, even when the politically-savvy pedophiles were adamant that you were infringing on their basic human rights?
1. Your counterexample could still happen between two people who believe in trans rights. The issue here is not whether or not trans people exist, it’s whether or not the depressed person in question is trans, and I don’t know that that could necessarily be really solved by any amount of debate. Realistically, what might happen is person A (the depressed person) goes to person B (probably a trans person, if we’re being realistic about how person A would act) and says “I think I might be trans,” and they have a conversation exploring that idea. If person B decides that the person is not trans, and person A decides not to listen to them about it (for some reason), and person B persists, it still seems unrealistic that a person A would cut them off. However, at this point I think we’re really far removed from the motivation behind cancel culture, so I don’t know how helpful this is to speculate.
2. The person transitioning might not decide to go through medical transition. Even if they got hormones for a while, the effects are largely reversible. If they ended up getting surgery, that’s a bigger deal, but it’s also a really time consuming process and unlikely to happen anyway.
3. Some people go through this all and later end up detransitioning, and a lot of them say that they don’t really regret their time transitioning. For example, Lucy Kartikasari transitioned ftm and back, but she says that her time as a trans man greatly helped her through a lot of her other issues because of the community she had access to.
I think your counterexample is kinda just a different scenario than the one I’m describing, and its potential existence doesn’t actually refute the validity of someone’s decision to disconnect from friends that think they shouldn’t exist.
Ok. I edited in a second hypothetical that I don't know if you read before you replied. Any thoughts about that one?
>3. Some people go through this all and later end up detransitioning, and a lot of them say that they don’t really regret their time transitioning.
I think those people are heavily outnumbered by those who have the opposite view. This stuff really does have the potential to ruin lives.
"it costs me nothing to maintain contact with them (so long as they don't become socially unbearable, anyway)"
Exactly! And that decision is one everyone has to make for themselves. If someone's disrespect becomes unbearable, you can choose to break all contact. That does not make you a bad person.
Being the "voice of reason" for someone who doesn't believe in reason is a particularly fraught effort.
Oh sure if they're actively disrespectful to you then that's another issue. Having an ideological difference is, itself, not disrespectful.
As far as that goes, I agree.
But if Bob is nice to Alice, but actively disrespectful to Alice's trans or black friends, then Alice would be blameless if she cut off contact with Bob.
Oh of course. Ideology must always take a back seat to simple politeness, and of course that runs both ways. If the trans person was aggressively intolerant of Bob's honest disbelief in their personal gender ontology, for example, then Alice would be equally justified in cutting off contact with that person.
“Hanania might not be the loveable anti-MAGA libertarian that he is today if not for finding people who didn’t villainize him.”
Hanania banned me from his substack for suggesting he might have had financial reasons for supporting Trump. Hanania had changed his tune on Trump and I’m still banned. And the dude is eager enough to monetize his thoughts that my hunch was reasonable and, I suspect, probably true.
He should uncancel me right now.
Well, that Hanania changed his tune on Trump doesn't necessarily mean he started agreeing w/ your characterization of his initial support.
fair, but he did support someone he later repudiated, and was getting money to study politics from conservatives……
I don’t think personally banning someone is the same as “canceling” them. Canceling aims at something broader. A multi-front banning.
The essay at hand describes it as exactly this: the termination of personal relationships, the unwillingness to "befriend people who think bad things."
Good point, but he also describes it as “stamping out,” which suggests not just privately breaking things off.
This is a major misunderstanding of the social and emotional factors that underlie these dynamics.
First, this pertains to core moral propositions that people use to define good and bad. You may strongly disagree with how they define things or where the lines are drawn, but they have a preexisting framework, and they're probably not going to be welcoming or trusting of outsiders questioning or undermining that framework.
Second, most people are not interested in participating in an intellectual salon where vigorous debate may destabilize some of their core moral assumptions. They don't want to do that, and you can't force it on unwilling participants. If you bring that intention to a social context meant to be a safe space of emotional support and mutual validation, they will attack you as predictably as an immune system attacks a foreign pathogen.
Third, the reason for this reflexive boundary enforcement is that most people do not enjoy or desire the emotional discomfort, anger, indignation, and outrage that comes from being forced to treat people who offend, threaten, or scare them with civility and respect. Asking someone to be tolerant and civil to someone who, for example, doesn't believe their identity is socially permissible, or doesn't think they deserve equal rights, is a demand for tolerance that borders on self-abnegation.
At certain points, there is insufficient common ground to form the minimum level of mutual respect for any positive relationship. So what's the incentive?
When each moral subculture thinks it's entitled to annex the entire commons and hegemonically impose its sensibilities on everyone else, all it leads to is interminable conflict.
Instead, good liberals should take the position that everyone should stop attempting to dictate a single set of standards if compartmentalization is feasible. Like individuals, many subcultures have incompatible values, and forcing them to intermingle will only result in conflict and negative emotions.
"But even those who criticize the excesses of cancellation tend to accept the legitimacy of the underlying framing, thinking that people who believe bad things should be cut off."
Being a 70+ white guy I am familiar with this, and yet ...
If Alice is a friend of Bob, and Bob is a transphobe, how does Alice remain friends with Charlize who is a transwoman? What if Bob is also a misogynist? How does Alice maintain a friendship with someone who doubts her worth as a person?
What if Bob is not really a transphobe nor misogynist, but he "can understand" why others could rightly be one or both? "I don't hate you, but I can understand why others might." Where does that lead to?
Having friends who believe "bad things" is one thing; having friends who harbor animosity to yourself or your friends is another matter.
"Richard Hanania ... changed his mind in large part because he found reasonable people who made good arguments."
Discussing these topics across an ideological divide is difficult; not everyone can do it. If one has any doubt, one should not even try. However, discussing things and having a friendship are very different things.
There's no doubt cancel culture goes too far sometimes, but so do its critics. Sometimes.
>How does Alice maintain a friendship with someone who doubts her worth as a person?
Quite easily: "it disappoints me that you have irrational views about women, watch me change your mind by acting as a constructive disproof of your axioms." If someone's self-esteem is so low that they can't tolerate reasonable criticism from a trusted friend then I would suggest that that person needs to grow up.
>Where does that lead to?
It leads to self-reflection and personal strength. Again, if you can't stand up to good-faith criticism then you have no right to demand respect. Now if someone is actively mean to you that's another thing entirely. But shunning someone for having an honest ideological difference is just poor epistemic hygiene. Plus it's just boring. Why would you want to live in an ideological bubble?
"If someone's self-esteem is so low that they can't tolerate reasonable criticism from a trusted friend then I would suggest that that person needs to grow up."
And how well do you think that will go with someone who doubts your worth as a person? I suspect "Grow Up!" is in the same futile category as "Calm down."
"It leads to self-reflection and personal strength."
It might, it might not. If it works, great!
And if not?
Please notice that I did not say friendship across an ideological divide is impossible; I called it difficult. I think the question here is NOT "how to respond to bigoted friends"; I think the question is "what should you do if nothing works?"
Alice can (and should) try to reach Bob. But if Bob is resistant, it might be better for Alice to walk away.
"But shunning someone for having an honest ideological difference is just poor epistemic hygiene."
Agreed, but I didn't suggest that, so that's that.
Oh sure, there are some people you just can't get along with. I get that. But in my view people err far too much on the side of "you said something I don't like therefore you're oppressing me". That leads to communication breakdown and ultimately in my view is largely what's responsible for the current political polarization. We are very quick to demonize people who disagree with us. Part of the reason for that is we've lost the ability to transcend our immediate emotional reactions and to engage in productive debate. Being against feminist political goals does not make someone a misogynist, for example. They may have very good pragmatic reasons for their opposition and they may be objectively right. Encouraging the use of simple categorical ideological dysphemisms as a substitute for rigorous thought causes real social harm in the long run.
I think you ought to give the same consideration to the cancelled as to cancellee. Unless you know Alice's story, you cannot fairly judge whether she cancelled Bob too soon.
If Alice "cancels" Bob, we should be as careful judging Alice as we think Alice is supposed to be.
If all this was about was disagreement, I doubt it would be the issue it is. But bigotry is not really a disagreement. Bigotry has tangible consequences. So does the failure to oppose it.
My point is that 'bigotry' is frequently used a dishonestly-applied label in an attempt to avoid confronting an uncomfortable truth. This is parallel to Scientology's use of the term Suppressive Person. Much of the progressive far-left has strong cult-like overtones (as does the far-right, but the left has much more cultural currency). The issue I have with reasonable-seeming principles like the ones you're advocating here is that they can easily be twisted into defending cultlike ideological conformity. I think the cultural safeguard against that is to advocate for norms whereby people are expected to tolerate a good deal more psychological discomfort than they currently do. That discomfort can be a symptom of incoming bigotry, but it can also be a symptom of incoming truth. Sometimes that distinction is difficult to make and so it behooves us to learn to tolerate that feeling long enough to make a sufficiently thorough intellectual investigation.
In general I agree with everything you just said. The problem is: who decides where the line is between "begrudgingly tolerable" and "too far"?
If "the left has much more cultural currency", doesn't that mean their notion of where that line should be is more accepted than the rights'?
If true, then your argument boils down to wanting greater patience from "the left". If I'm mistaken, please correct me.
But--Why should the left give an inch if the right just doubles down when challenged?
I am rather doubtful that incentives supposedly have no effect on your beliefs. But even if you assume this is true, they absolutely affect what beliefs you are willing to express. For example, it is difficult for Nazis to organise, coordinate, or even advocate for their preferred policies because even admitting to their beliefs will destroy them socially. Similarly, the fact that advocating for homoeopathy and other alternative medicine will cost a doctor all his social standing among his fellow doctors is a big part of why few professional doctors do this.
The problem with cancel culture is that it goes too far and often cancels people for actively desirable speech, such as arguing for plausible and often outright true view points. also in practice, the people pushing for cancel culture are mistaken about the right policies or at least way more confident than they should be so while making academia a monoculture on their pet issues does substantially advance their agenda. Their agenda is actively wrong, so it’s actually harmful.
The idea that punishing people for bad behaviour, including speech has no beneficial effects is preposterous and ignores one of the most ancient and successful social technologies for controlling bad behaviour. part of the reason, people do not do obviously bad things like lie, falsely promise, start civil wars and rebellions or indulging unethical business practice is because of social punishments. There is no reason to think that social issues are a magical exception to this where punishments have no effect when it comes to controlling behaviour. In fact, one of the biggest problems with cancel culture is that it controls behaviour, which is why we see some view points get an insufficient hearing in academia. You can’t both complain about cancel culture, preventing some types of research, and then pretend that it can’t be used to control behaviour. And if it can be used to control behaviour, obviously it can be used to reduce bad behaviour just as it can be used to restrict good behaviour. In fact, most people would agree that certain view points should face social punishments. It’s just that cancel culture goes way too far. Do you seriously think that the fact that openly admiring Hitler will get you socially destroyed has nothing to do with why support for him was so fringe and uncommon for eighty years? Theres a reason we have laws against things like defamation and fraud because for all the talk of censorship being ineffective, making speech costly does make people reluctant to indulge in those types of speech.
Also to add to the problems with cancel culture, it generally only focuses on punishing bad behaviour and not rewarding good behaviour and this asymmetry leads to bad incentives. unless you at least let great contributions in other ways, cancel out bad behaviour, it will inevitably lead to effectively punishing anybody who thinks independently.
What speech you personally think is moral and true is not what other people will agree with. If you can dominate politically, guaranteeing the censors are always on your side, that's ok for you. But what if you can't? Now the institutions, processes, and cultures are in place to censor, and the other side controls it. Thats why free speech exists alongside defamation and fraud. Almost everyone doesn't like defamation and fraud, so it's sustainable politically. Any censorship where there's even a small vocal minority becomes a risk. Hitler is a good example- the same censorship techniques used against fascists (which included things like mail interception, agent infiltration, etc) can now be used against university students. Amazing, right? Who could have predicted it...
You need to control the institutions if you insist on your own personal vision for what speech should be regulated and what speech should not be regulated, but that’s equally true for people who believe in absolute free speech. And frankly, literally no one believes in absolute free speech, at least if you restrict yourself to people with substantial influence because even the likes of justice black or justice Douglas were willing to regulate some speech by declaring them unprotected by the first amendment. You are correct that in practice, defamation seems to be abused a lot less than for example, hait speech laws across the world, probably because it’s just much harder to come up with a precise enough definition for hate speech, that can’t be trivially abused to punish anybody the government doesn’t like. That said I think Hitler like defamation is one of those cases where the overwhelming majority of people disapprove of supporting him and I was primarily thinking of cancel culture as a social phenomenon where people use free speech and association to punish you for speech, they don’t like. Regarding the Legal question, I actually am sympathetic to your conclusion that perhaps things like male interception by the government should be more tightly regulated. Although I think your argument is a pretty bad one since pretty much any regulation will have some false positives. The existence of false positives by itself doesn’t prove that the regulation should not exist. You have to actually do a cost benefit analysis before saying that. Although it’s possible that a more categorical approach to free speech would give better results in cost benefit terms. Mind you while people talk of free speech as a bright line rule in practice. It’s mostly an area of law govern by standards since there are no precise definitions of even basic things like what speech is protected by the first amendment that can be mechanically applyed to a situation. The American Supreme Court has tried to create such definitions, but all of the ones I’ve seen are clearly not the ones employed in practice because they would protect a great deal of speech that the court does not in fact consider protected.
A lack of restrictions doesn't require the same amount of political action as restrictions do. Freedom of expression doesn't require building robust institutions in the way censorship does. As soon as systems are put in place designed to repress minority speech, all that the minority has to do to flip the table is to change the people in charge. This isn't theoretical; leftist institutions involved in speech censorship and suppression such as Twitter, FBI, and universities have suddenly flipped with the new administration.
I don't know what you mean by Hitler like defamation, because non violent fascists are engaged in political speech not defamation.
On law, No matter what we imagine our good guys doing when in power, factually to gain and maintain power actors must act selfishly and not in our interests.
We all need to grow up and stop worshipping political actors as good or evil deities, instead recognizing they are just flawed individuals like all of us.
I think actually, implementing absolute free speech would require more political action, then most proposals for regulation simply because it’s way more unpopular in practice, so theres basically no constituency for it. It’s a bit like libertarians who argue that implementing an absolutely free market is better than trying to correct for things like externalities because of the difficulty in judging the exact amount to correct for. Maybe that’s true, but it’s not actually a realistic political proposal, so there’s not much point thinking on it. My point was that just because a regulation can be used by the other side doesn’t mean it’s a bad regulation. You have to actually do a cost benefit analysis just arguing that there will be false positives and that’s unacceptable is a ridiculous standard.
Sorry for being unclear. I meant that Hitler is about as popular as defamation, and so like defamation, speech supporting him is almost universally going to be condemned by the culture, even if you don’t have such unanimous support for state persecution.
I agree, we should not assume political actors are good or evil and should instead try to predict them like normal individuals, but I’m unsure why you think this is relevant to the discussion. I certainly wasn’t suggesting that we assume institutions are good. Just pointing out that for all the arguments that free speech should be treated as a bright line in practice, it’s impossible to articulate a doctrine of permissible regulations on free speech that’s not effectively a standard. Perhaps a categorical approach to free speech using bright line rules more frequently would be better, but that’s not the approach any country uses right now. Use of somewhat imprecise standards that can be deliberately misapplied or misunderstood is a universal feature of free speech law across the globe simply because of the difficulty of developing workable bright line rules that don’t have to be bent in practice.
Enabling free speech doesn't take much political energy. Just fire the people doing the censorship. Censorship requires constant positive political pressure to continue to exist, it falls apart as soon as the funding is gone. Proof? Decentralized censorship resistant communication apps. Same thing with a free market, lots of them exist now due to blockchain technology and work fine. Facts have proven the interventionists wrong.
Hitler might not be popular, but political speech is popular. People love expressing their viewpoints. Then other people claim those People love Hitler and should be censored. So, guess what? The People now support free political speech.
Law doesn't mean much in the face of decentralized self governed applications. The US government claimed tornado cash wasn't protected under freedom of speech, yet they were unable to stop it from operating and it continues to operate to this day. Thats why I'm talking about waking up; the future is already here, but people are still worshipping political actors instead of observing the changes that have occurred over the last few years.
There's a feedback loop between behaviour and belief. There has to be, otherwise people would go absolutely insane at far higher rates. The nature of their behaviour, and regular behaviour at that serves as a mental roadblock, without which most people are not capable of seriously holding a belief.
So controlling their behavior, works to limit the strength of belief.
This is trivially true, and if you are going to oppose woke censorship you either need to stand on the falseness of woke ideas, or just say "it's in my nature to enjoy debate, and I have the right to be myself whatever it's consequences to society at large". Might makes Right Bentham if you'll forgive the image.
A small thing, but the colon in the title of your article threw me off. Did you mean to say that the core error is thinking you *can’t* befriend people with bad ideas?
Mean Girls™️
Communists in my native country a few decades ago were among the most friendly people. They would invite everyone at their official parties and events, even neonazis as long as they didn’t cause trouble. Once you joined them however, they would enforce ideological conformity at an exceptional degree. The modern left skipped the first part and it treats everyone as party members. You can only do this once you have the power.
It seems many here support an incoherent ideal: that those on the "left" must respect the human dignity of those who disrespect others. This seems to be an instance of the Paradox of Toleration.
That paradox is an illusion. The intolerant demand toleration for themselves while refusing to be tolerant of others. They want respect that they refuse to give. And they regard being called out on their incoherence as just more intolerance when, in fact they are being called out honestly.
You can choose to befriend people who think bad things. And you can choose not to.
A comment I heard: "I'd rather offend all my white friends than bury one of my black friends."
Excellent take, well done!
One reason medieval doctors failed to understand human physiology is that the Church often opposed the dissection of cadavers. That left them working with weak empirical knowledge and speculative theories. Woke activists face a similar issue. They often fail to identify real social problems or effective solutions by shutting down free thought and restricting open investigation.
Convincing people who disagree with you to respect your position is great and all, especially when you can convince people to respect minority rights. To be honest, though, I don't know that telling people to constantly be arguing for their rights on the internet is the best thing to do. It convinced Hanania, sure, but the other day you also posted a note talking about how some people on the internet don't listen to reason anyway, so it's not like this is the greatest alternative. Sometimes it's just easier to cut the people out of your life who hurt you. Maybe you don't win over people that way, but at least you don't have to suffer through even more arguing and harassment. The "cancel culture philosophy" probably looks insane from the outside, and is in plenty of cases, but in reality, a lot of people are just tired and hurting.
Be honest: have you ever truly had a friend reject you because they sincerely wished that you didn't exist? What if half the people in your life were like that? Is it really worth it to argue with all of them, physically or emotionally?
Some people fundamentally cannot befriend people who think bad things.
I think the primary error here is that you are looking through this with a logical lens when in actuality this is a religious issue. The moral lines of the woke left are not based in logic but are occupying the same brainspace that religious taboos once held in the past. If one holds the wrong belief he or she is an apostate and the religion must continue.
"But he changed his mind in large part because he found reasonable people who made good arguments."
Everything that can be gleaned about Hanania's character suggests that he formed his beliefs around how to market his public persona rather than anything persuasive.
ngl i think that if you went to the DSA and they found out about your blog, they would likely not care. at least IRL anarchists are much more chill
i feel like you're arguing with a strawman, i'll read the rest, but maybe you could center around an example that actually happened.