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my issues with anti sj let me show you them, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post
[content warning: Nazis]
This is my position on who gets a say in whom people are friends with:
- That person.
- Not other people.
Many people seem to disagree with me on this point. I will take it first from a social-justice side and then next from the anti-social-justice side.
From the social justice side: I see people claiming that it is morally wrong to be friends with people who have sufficiently abhorrent beliefs, such as Nazis, trans-exclusive radical feminists, neoreactionaries, and so on.
I am not entirely sure what the goal of this ethical injunction is. If everyone followed it, then no one would hang out with Nazis except other Nazis, and they would form this little group of Nazis together, stewing in how persecuted they are by Jewish people, and gradually shifting their own Overton windows until “I don’t think murdering every person who likes a Jewish person is a good idea” becomes an extremist viewpoint. If they ever decide they might want to stop being Nazis, they’d have to give up everyone they’re friends with; some people might be brave enough to face complete social isolation for their beliefs, but most people aren’t. Conversely, being friends with Nazis exposes them to non-Nazi beliefs, creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, and gives them someone to turn to in case they want to stop being Nazis.
As it happens, at my college there was a kid who was the son of one of the founders of Stormfront. When it was found out who his father was, some people tried to get him expelled from school. (They did not succeed, because you can’t actually expel someone from school just for being a white nationalist if they never say anything racist to anyone.) Once he graduated, he said that he had become anti-racist. The people who tried to get him expelled from school did not cause this shift. Instead, what caused it was the slow accretion of cognitive dissonance: becoming friends with people of color or people in interracial relationships and realizing that his beliefs were hurting people he knew and cared about. If everyone had decided it was morally wrong to befriend white nationalists, he would probably still be a white nationalist today.
To be clear, I’m not saying you should go around befriending Nazis in the hopes of stopping them from being Nazis. That’s condescending as fuck. I am saying that if you happen to want to be friends with a Nazi anyway, there is not actually a plausible argument that this will cause more Nazis to be in the world.
You might argue that being friends with a Nazi makes you more likely to be a Nazi. I suggest that the correct solution to this problem is not becoming a Nazi in the first place. Do you cherish some deeply-held desire to become a Nazi?
You might argue that whom I’m friends with doesn’t just affect me; if I invite Nazis and you to my Christmas dinner party, then you will have to interact with Nazis. However, this is a problem faced in a lot of circumstances, such as anyone who is friends with multiple parties involved in an extremely nasty breakup. The solutions those people come up with– such as organizing multiple dinner parties or only inviting one side to the party– also generalize to Nazis and people who don’t want to talk to Nazis.
From the anti-social-justice side: I see a lot of people claiming that ideological diversity is very important, and people who don’t want to be friends with people who share certain disagreements with them are just making excuses for living in a bubble. I think this is absolutely absurd.
First, people’s factual beliefs about the world affect their behavior. For instance, I don’t want to be friends with someone who believes that gender pronouns should be used in accordance with the sex one was assigned at birth, because they are going to use pronouns for me that hurt me. I don’t want to be friends with someone who believes it would be morally right to coerce me into having an abortion or deceive me into eating meat, because that increases the chance that they’ll violate my bodily autonomy. I don’t want to be friends with someone who thinks that borderlines are inherently abusive and evil, because that thought process seems like it would lead to mistreating me.
Do these preferences apply to everyone? Of course not! Some trans people are willing to accept being referred to with the wrong pronouns; some people who don’t want to get abortions don’t mind people who might be pressurey about them getting one; some vegetarians are okay with people who might deceive them into eating meat; some borderlines are okay with being friends with people who think they’re evil. I think they’re quite strange, but other people might think it’s strange that I count a trans-exclusive radical feminist and a neoreactionary among my friends. What matters is what makes you feel safe and comfortable in your friendship. Personally, I object to people who mispronoun me, but I don’t mind the belief that I’m an autoandrophile transitioning out of a sexual fetish. Others might have different preferences, because they’re different people.
Second, preference drift exists. For many people, their friends have an effect on their values. The thing that made me an effective altruist was not reading books or blogs about effective altruism; it was joining a community in which it was routine and accepted that everyone was donating ten percent of their income to the charities they believed were most effective, and a lot of people had specifically chosen their career to help do good. And, frankly, it’s a lot easier to be vegetarian when I don’t have to constantly defend my vegetarianism to others.
I don’t think that’s just for altruistic endeavors, either. A musician who’s devoting her life to the pursuit of her art will probably do better with friends who are musicians than with friends who are constantly talking about their great vacation to Tahiti and their shiny new Ferrari; the latter may cause her to care more about money and less about the art. A devotedly child-free person may wish to have child-free friends, for fear that being left out of conversations about diapers and college funds will lead them to want children, in spite of their self-knowledge that they’re a shitty parent.
Again, this doesn’t apply to everyone! Some child-free people find that being around parents only increases their gratitude that they can sleep in until 1pm on Saturdays. Some people remain firm in their altruistic values even when they’re surrounded by the most selfish people imaginable. And a lot of people are more likely to drift with one value than with another: maybe your love of your music will never change, but you worry that being around people who mock vegetarians will make you start craving bacon.
A lot of people I know accept those two arguments, but they accept them in a sorrowful fashion. Of course, it would be best if everyone were able to be friends with everyone, but as a concession to human weakness and frailty we are grudgingly admitting that Ozy is allowed not to be friends with people who hate borderlines. I don’t actually think that is a useful attitude to take! The purpose of my friendships is to increase the joy, fulfillment, happiness, and virtue of myself and my friends. To the extent that diverse friends serves those goals, it is good; to the extent that non-diverse friends serves those goals, it is good. Ideological diversity is one way that my friendships can enrich my life by giving me access to new perspectives and changing my mind on issues. But it’s not inherently more important than helping me keep to my values even in stressful situations or not causing me pain. It’s just one way that enrichment can happen.
Thing of Things 
The goal of this ethical injunction is to reduce the amount of Nazism in the world by putting immense pressure on people not to be Nazis. The Nazis in your example are probably bitter and resentful and this may indeed radicalize them, but if they’re at all public about their views, no non-Nazis will be willing to associate with them for fear of the social consequences of being seen associating with Nazis. Furthermore, they’ll have a hard time finding employment because employing Nazis has economic and legal consequences. Unless they can get all their needs met from their Nazi circle, they’ll be forced to renounce Nazism or at least stop openly supporting it, and Nazism will be unable to gain any social or structural power again.
I think you could make a case that this is what happened to racial segregationism in America after the Civil Rights Movement.
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Or conversely, that it’s what happened to African-Americans before the civil rights movement. Marginalization is one of those tools that doesn’t really require you to be right.
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That’s might be the intention, but it doesn’t seem to work in a lot of cases. Marginalized people throughout history have managed to preserve their identities for centuries. Oftentimes what causes them to lose their identity is no longer being marginalized, as it allows them to leave their ingroup more easily.
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Cults deliberately isolate their members from outsiders. This may discourage people from joining, but it also massively discourages any members who have misgivings from leaving.
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So racism is no longer a problem in America? People never, say, quietly move to “nice” suburbs, “for the schools”?
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You do realize that a Nazi can avoid all the social consequences you listed by only being friends with other Nazi’s. Right? Which is what most bigots do in real life. Most people have no problem finding people with similar beliefs to interact with people with drastically different beliefs interacting with are the exception.
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“You might argue that being friends with a Nazi makes you more likely to be a Nazi. I suggest that the correct solution to this problem is not becoming a Nazi in the first place. Do you cherish some deeply-held desire to become a Nazi?”
Surely being friends with a Nazi makes you more likely to be a Nazi or to become a Nazi in the future by mechanisms discussed elsewhere in this post like preference drift and Overton window shifting.
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In principle, I can see the Murder Ghandi argument apply here. In practice, I have enough confidence in my judgment that I expect my views to be changed a lot more by exposure to arguments that are actually true. And in the hypothetical world in which Nazism was true, I’d even want my views to shift in that direction.
So befriending Nazis would only be a problem for anyone valuing a specific ideology over truth, and for people with Epistemic Learned Helplessness. Which, to be fair, is probably the majority of people.
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In general, while I agree with the ultimate conclusion — in a very pragmatic, micro-oriented, “it will be grossly painful AND inefficient to force either friendship or non-friendship on anyone” kind of way — I think Ozy’s arguments here don’t sufficiently acknowledge the power of social framing generally.
From the SJ side: basically what ameliaquining said. One person, conducting a shunning campaign, can’t accomplish much of anything. A large coordinated group of people, particularly a large coordinated group of elites, can accomplish a whole hell of a lot with a shunning campaign. Post-civil-rights anti-racism is a pretty good example, but contemporary anti-anti-gay-sentiment is an even better one. Over the course of my short lifetime, voicing explicit anti-gay beliefs went from “pretty normal” to “will cause you to lose all your friends and your job.” And this miraculous transformation took place because targeted campaigns of moral outrage pulled larger and larger circles of people on board the ideological bandwagon. It’s the darkest of dark arts, but it works — for good causes and bad alike — and that’s going to be hugely tempting to anyone with an agenda. This is often going to outweigh the very small-bore concern that is “ideological opposition will fester and grow in isolation.” If they can win over the mushy mainstream, most activists are willing to live with a hardcore radicalized rump enemy.
From the anti-SJ side: yes, it’s true that people will have their bright lines, and that you can’t (and shouldn’t!) try to push them into forging connections that they believe to be harmful to themselves. But there’s a lot of grey area…and ideological reflexes often determine how those grey-area situations get resolved…and, honestly, the resolution of those grey-area situations is probably something that can make or break an ideologically-diverse, discursively-open society.
Regardless of the specific issues you have that determine your friendship possibilities — “can’t deal with certain feelings about pronoun usage,” “can’t deal with certain stances on abortion,” whatever — there’s going to be, sitting on top of those things, some kind of meta-value regarding the interaction of friendship and ideology. One possible meta-value is “I care about cultivating friends who disagree with me on lots of issues, and to the extent that I can’t, it’s a shame.” Another is “being friends with Wrong People taints me with Wrongness.” A society where the first of those dominates will be very different from a society where the second dominates. It will be much better, in my view, at least on that one front.
The point isn’t (in my view) that “everyone would ideally be friends with everyone, and we make exceptions to that only as concessions to contemptible human frailty.” It’s more like “we really seriously do value Ideological Diversity and Open Discourse, and maybe that value conflicts with other values like Free Association, in which case we do what we always do and make a specific-case calculus…and maybe ID/OD loses out a lot when it comes right down to it…but we acknowledge the value as a value.”
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>Post-civil-rights anti-racism is a pretty good example, but contemporary anti-anti-gay-sentiment is an even better one. Over the course of my short lifetime, voicing explicit anti-gay beliefs went from “pretty normal” to “will cause you to lose all your friends and your job.”
Doesn’t that depend hugely on where you live? Maybe it’s different in the US, but here it heavily depends on which circles you move in. Sure, you will probably lose a lot of friends if you proclaim that queer people or (more important right now here) immigrants/asylum seekers are subhumans in urban high-education circles and the like, but if you move in other circles (countryside, low status workers, etc.) suddenly no one bats an eye on stuff like this. So while I agree that it probably works for some aspects of society, in a lot of other circles this shunning brings in a heavier “us vs. them”-mentality which becomes deeply entrenched in society. For context: “here” is Austria, we had an election recently which basically went 50-50 between liberal-left and far-right.
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Short answer: yes, you’re quite right, I was eliding that point (unfairly). The thing that holds true for elite urban culture is not true of every culture, in America or anywhere else, and there are plenty of more-traditionalist places out in the sticks where “fucking degenerate queers” is still a high-status-compatible position to hold.
Addendum making a slightly longer answer: …but elite urban culture punches way, way, WAY above its weight in terms of social impact. In particular, it makes all the media, which so many Americans consume for hours and hours every day. You have to work hard, and be actively culture-resistant, not to absorb the memes that your TV is feeding you. Traditionalist cultures in America mostly aren’t actually that strong.
[There’s a long complicated discussion to be had about why pro-gay memes of this kind are likely to be a lot stickier than, say, their anti-racist equivalents. But the general point still holds.]
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Can I just say that you said what I was going to, but much better.
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…thanks kindly.
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Mmmm… I think I know what feels wrong about the first part.
If I were to try to be friends with someone who has abhorrent (to me) beliefs, I don’t think I would actually be able to separate this knowledge about them from the actual interactions I would have with them. I would have a constant soundtrack in my head of “but they’re a horrible person!” Even if nothing they did in my presence was related to the reason they were a horrible person.
Now, it’s possible that not everyone feels this way, maybe even probable. But instinctively, if someone I like is friends with someone I despise, the first assumption is that, unlike me, they don’t actually think Terrible Belief X is all that bad. “Maybe they’re just better at compartmentalizing”… is really hard to actually believe.
Does that reasoning make sense? Or did I produce word salad?
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I would argue that the ability to have friendly seeming interations with people you that have abhorent traits is both super useful individually and for socity as a whole.
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Okay one thing that I think is making this whole conversation wierd is making friendship a binary thing of “not-friend” or “friend” which is just not a useful way of talking about this sort of thing, or of running your life.
I am friends with different people in different ways and intensities, and the amount of ideological variation I am okay with is very different for those different friendships.
Do I care if the woman I buy coffee from and have a short conversation with every few days is a Nazi, no. Do I care if my boss at work is a Nazi, somewhat. Do I care if my coworker is a Nazi, not really. Do I care if the guy I play cards with is a Nazi, more then my boss, but less then others. Do I care if my confidant is a Nazi, hell yes.
And I think that the original post that started this really miss read “white men” (by which they, (rather offensively) meant a certian high privalige american culture), by not seeing these gradations.
And they really seemed to be saying that there is no social benifit to interacting with people that you disagree with, wich is absud. Most interactions are going to be with people you disagree with about something, choosing some issues as bright lines, to keep out of your inner circles is fine if that helps you, but not everyone is so lucky, and being able to at least keep people in the outer circles is called being a member of socity.
Not sure I am making sense here…
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I think they were saying that some people need more “bright lines” than others (e.g., for reasons Ozy outlined in this post), and if you’re one of those people, you shouldn’t listen to anyone who judges or mocks you for being insufficiently open minded, because they just don’t get it.
If the other person is a Nazi and you’re a sufficiently “Aryan” non-Nazi, that’s one thing. If the other person is a Nazi and you’re Jewish, that’s a very different situation. Suddenly the disagreement is much more personal.
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Ooh, a new avatar. Nice. The spruce tree I used to get was wearing too much lipstick for my taste.
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I think that knowing how much mainstream people (by which I mean, the college educated young people I went to university with) disapproved of homophobia put pressure on me to re-examine my beliefs in my heteronormative-style conservative Christianity until I found good reasons to become an atheist. I was never out-and-out homophobic in affect, but I did feel compelled by my religious views to take positions like not endorsing gay marriage.
If everyone around me made it clear that “we personally don’t agree with your homophobic views but you’re cool and that doesn’t change how we see you at all” then I doubt I’d have had the same motivation to reconsider my beliefs.
On the other hand – I think in large part all those people around me probably *did* by and large accept me, while not having any tolerance for my heteronormative religious beliefs. So I suppose from that you can draw the conclusion that people who aren’t ridiculously malicious but just happen to hold mistaken viewpoints might be motivated to change them through the cognitive dissonance of having people accept them who also happen to dislike their beliefs.
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I noticed that I went through two phases when some of my friends started expressing political beliefs that offended me on Facebook. Phase 1 was disappointment, sometimes to the point that I was extremely upset that otherwise smart and likable people could believe X. Phase 2 was acceptance, where even if I thought that X was clearly wrong, it had moved into the set of “beliefs that reasonable people can have.”
Excluding Xers from your friend set has two effects: (1) It shames believing in X, particularly among your friend set, so that if someone wants to explore the arguments around X,* they will do so at risk of ostracism; and (2) it allows the set to continue to believe in X as outrageous conduct.
As long as no one in your set is, say pro-life or pro-trans rights, then it’s easy to think of those ideas as the product of sinister minds, and easier than it would otherwise be to encourage orthodoxy on those ideas. Once a few people are, then people in your set might move to the point where they thought at least that it was possible to have those ideas and still mean well.
If I’m right, then Nazis are sort of the easy case – it’s more likely that Nazis will be converted by exposure to you than the other way around. It might be much harder for a strongly pro-choice group to accept pro-life friends, or vice versa, where people are well known to convert both ways.
* (Possibly this exploration would occur through some sort of process where you construct and test the strongest arguments you can put together for X. ;-P )
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