Civility Is Never Neutral

Tags

free speech sequence, it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post

There are a lot of people I know who say something like “the free market of ideas is really important and we need to seek truth. It’s important to let everyone have their fair say and share the evidence that they possess. So what we’re going to do is not shame anyone for expressing any belief, as long as they follow a few common-sense guidelines about niceness and civility.” I am very sympathetic to this point of view but I don’t think it will ever work.

I do not mean to say that it won’t work to personally decide to be as nice and civil as you can. I think that’s a good idea and more people should, and certainly I have met many extraordinarily nice people over the course of my life. The problem is when you make niceness and civility a social requirement, the sort of thing you will be punished for not adhering to.

First, it has been a commonplace observation since the day of John Stuart Mill that civility rules are almost always enforced unfairly. If someone is making an ineffectual and stupid argument, you’re unlikely to take much offense at it; in fact, those arguments are usually just funny. But if someone is hitting you at your actual weak points, pushing you hard on exactly the points you find most difficult to answer, then you’re going to get really upset and triggered and you’re probably not going to respond rationally. Incisive questioning of a locally unpopular view is called “being insightful”; the proponent of a locally unpopular view being triggered by it is called “letting your emotions run away with you in a rational discussion” and “blowing up at someone for no reason.” Incisive questioning of a locally popular view is called “uncharitable” and “incredibly rude”; the proponent of a locally popular view being triggered by it is called “a reasonable response to someone else’s assholery.” It all depends on whether the people doing the enforcement find it easier to put themselves in the shoes of the upset person or the person doing the questioning.

There are lots of tactics that are sometimes civil and sometimes not. Sometimes a cutting satire sums up an entire point more eloquently than anything else; sometimes it misrepresents other people’s viewpoints or is just mean. Sometimes anger is an appropriate way to convey exactly how you feel about an injustice; sometimes anger is cruel. In general, people tend to cut more slack to viewpoints they agree with and viewpoints that don’t threaten them or make them feel defensive. If you like someone, it’s righteous indignation; if you dislike someone, it’s being an oversensitive jerk. If you agree with it, it’s witty and biting; if you disagree with it, it’s strawmanning and misrepresenting others.

Civility norms will always be enforced disproportionately against viewpoints that the people in power don’t like. This is why a lot of free speech advocates are cautious about campus speech codes and other attempts to enforce civility on campus, but I think it’s worth considering even in a social setting.

Second, people’s differing opinions often lead them to have different conclusions about what is and is not civil.

Consider the concept of radical honesty. Radical honesty means that you should not say or withhold information to manipulate someone’s opinion of you. For example, proponents of radical honesty hold that if you think someone is being an obnoxious asshole, you should say that without even trying to be tactful. The proponents of radical honesty would argue that radical honesty is (to quote the website) “the kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy”, and for that reason calling people obnoxious assholes when you think they’re obnoxious assholes is, in fact, the nicest and most civil thing to do. Conversely, the mainstream opinion is that if you are trying to be nice to people you probably shouldn’t insult them at all even a little bit.

Or imagine that your Great-Aunt Gertrude and your Great-Aunt Bertha are trying to work together on Thanksgiving dinner. Great-Aunt Gertrude is a proper Southern lady. She thinks no one should curse in mixed company (in fact, she’s rather suspicious of the word ‘goshdarnit’). She believes it is unconscionably rude for children not to say “sir” and “ma’am” to their elders. And certainly sex should never be discussed, much less joked about, where women and children are able to hear it.

Conversely, Great-Aunt Bertha skipped school in the fifties to go get drunk with sailors and was the first woman in the Hell’s Angels. Great-Aunt Bertha thinks it is very rude that Great-Aunt Gertrude keeps saying “a-HEM” five times a sentence just because she’s talking the way she normally talks. All her best jokes are sex jokes, and really Great-Aunt Gertrude should have a sense of humor. It’s not polite to interrupt what people are saying by getting offended and storming out. And that whole “sir” and “ma’am” business– unlike Great-Aunt Bertha’s story about the two clowns and the goat– is actually offensive. Children are people and it is wrong to treat them as if they are subservient to adults.

Great-Aunt Bertha and Great-Aunt Gertrude will have some difficulty agreeing about what is polite behavior at the Thanksgiving table.

The same thing happens in more directly political contexts. Trans people think it is polite to use the pronouns people prefer; anti-trans activists think it is rude to demand that other people lie if they think “she” refers only to people assigned female at birth. Muslims think it is cruel to them to draw pictures of the Prophet; many non-Muslims think it is rude to yell at people over stick-figure drawings labeled “Mohammad.” A certain word referring to the female genitalia is so taboo in America that I can’t actually make myself type it out, whereas in many other countries in the Anglosphere it is used without even being intended as an insult.

One could resolve these problems by taking some authority on etiquette, perhaps Miss Manners, and then saying that civility is officially now defined as doing what Miss Manners says to do. On the other hand, many aspects of etiquette have nothing to do with being nice to people but instead are ways of signalling that one is upper-class, or at least a middle-class person with pretensions of same. (Most obviously, anything about what forks one uses; more controversially, rules about greetings, introductions, when to bring gifts, etc.) You wind up excluding poor and less educated people, which people in many spaces don’t want.

So what’s the solution? There isn’t one that works literally 100% of the time. If you just give up on socially enforcing civility at all, then you get 4Chan. Not to bash 4Chan, but I for one am pretty happy about the existence of social spaces that are not 4Chan.

I think it’s important to think carefully about what your space is and is not for. Maybe this is actually just Great-Aunt Bertha’s Thanksgiving, and Great-Aunt Gertrude will have to suck up the curse words and sex jokes or organize her own Thanksgiving. Maybe you want your support group to be welcoming of trans people, and people who are strongly opposed to using people’s preferred pronouns have to go to a different support group. This is totally fine: no space is ever for everyone.

Sometimes you do want civil dialogue to occur between two groups who disagree a lot about what civility is. If everyone involved has good faith and is willing to compromise, that can happen okay. For example, maybe Great-Aunt Gertrude really cares about not hearing sex jokes, and Great-Aunt Bertha really cares about being allowed to swear, and they can have Thanksgiving together both feeling only a little bit uncomfortable. Maybe the anti-trans people will use trans people’s preferred pronouns and not describe their bodies as mutilated, while the trans people will avoid using the word “TERF” and call themselves “natal females/males” instead of “assigned female/male at birth”.

If the rules are explicit (for example, in an online group with moderators), it’s a good idea to make sure all sides are equally represented in the group of people who enforce the rules, so everyone has their concerns respected. If the rules are implicit (for example, in a group of friends), it’s a good idea to focus mostly on correcting the behavior of people you agree with and not the behavior of people you disagree with. If you ever feel scared or defensive, take a break from the conversation: online, this might mean stepping away from your computer, while offline you might ask for a change of subject.

Data on Campus Censorship Cases

Tags

it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post, rage against the academy

I’ve noticed that people tend to only hear about campus free speech cases which fit their particular narrative (either of conservatives censoring liberals or of liberals censoring conservatives). Apolitical cases (for instance, Valencia College’s censorship of students who protested forced transvaginal ultrasounds) tend to become less widely known, as do cases of liberal censorship among conservatives and conservative censorship among liberals. In addition, people hear more about cases of censorship at famous colleges (such as Harvard or Yale) than they do about the less famous colleges that most people actually go to.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is a well-respected organization which specializes in campus free speech and other civil liberties. My sample was the list FIRE maintains on its website of cases it has worked on in the past (for instance, by sending the college a letter or engaging in litigation). I took every fifth case and coded it as censorship of conservative, censorship of liberal, or apolitical censorship. There were 88 cases in my sample. I dropped five for being FIRE suing about bad policies with no clear indication of whom they would be used against, four for being sexual misconduct policies (which are not instances of censorship), and two for being miscellaneous instances of inadequate college due process (which, again, are not censorship). This left me with 77 cases.

Of the 77 cases, I coded 20 (26%) as censorship of liberals, 40 (52%) as censorship of conservatives, and 17 (22%) as apolitical censorship. An example of censorship of conservatives is refusing to allow Christians to organize a student group; an example of censorship of liberals is not allowing PETA supporters to hand out flyers; an example of apolitical censorship is suspending a professor for saying, during a review session for a test, that the questions he was asking were so difficult he was on a killing spree.

I made a few judgment calls which I want to discuss. One instance of a hate speech code was coded as “censorship of liberals” because surrounding discussion suggested it was intended to censor pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protests. While some people would consider sexual harassment law to be inherently liberal, I classified (for instance) the censorship of a crew team’s shirts saying “check out our cox” as apolitical censorship, since lewd puns are not a political sentiment. (Of course, if sexual harassment law was used to censor a political statement, I classified it as “liberal” or “conservative.”) I classified socialists as liberal and libertarians as conservative, in spite of both groups’ probable objection to such a classification. “Nationwide disinvitation of speakers,” a single FIRE case, was classified as conservative because 9/10 of the most disinvited speakers are conservative, but note that Bill Ayers is also on the list. (It is also a judgment call that I (a) didn’t treat each disinvitation as a separate case and (b) included “nationwide disinvitations” at all.)

ETA: I’d also like to note that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is not a random sample of college censorship cases. Presumably they do not pursue every case brought to their attention, and there may be systematic biases in which students contact FIRE. For example, conservative students may trust FIRE more and be more likely to call them when campus censorship occurs, or conversely FIRE may pursue more cases of liberal censorship to combat its image as a defender of the right wing. These results should be taken with a grain of salt.

In conclusion: there is a definite tendency for censorship on college campuses to be censorship of conservative viewpoints, perhaps because conservative viewpoints tend to be underrepresented in academia. However, about a quarter of college censorship in this sample is of liberal viewpoints and a quarter is of apolitical viewpoints; this suggests it is a mistake to assume that censorship on college campuses is solely of conservative viewpoints. However, given the limitations of my data, I’d strongly advise against drawing any conclusion from it firmer than “censorship of both liberals and conservatives occurs on college campuses, and conservatives probably face more.”

Immigration Can Increase The Amount Your Country Is Like Itself

Tags

it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post

[Epistemic Effort: I thought of this argument and was so pleased by my own cleverness that I decided to post it.]

A lot of people are worried about immigration because they’re worried that immigration will dilute their culture: instead of being a place full of People Like Them, it is a place full of funny people with funny food and alien values. I actually do think this is a legitimate cost to immigration, but I don’t think that all immigration has this quality.

Every US state has open borders with every other US state. It’s true that the US state example isn’t precisely the same as fifty countries which happen to have open borders with each other, but all the differences function to make US states more similar to each other: for instance, we have a shared federal government that exercises a significant amount of control over our lives. And yet immigration has not served to make Alabama the same as New York.

In fact, immigration has probably made Alabama more different from New York! Queer liberals from all around the United States tend to move to New York City; I assume that conservative Christians from all around the United States tend to move to Alabama. Liberals are so stubborn about moving to big cities in blue states that it was a pretty major factor in this election: if liberals all stayed where we were born, Hillary might have won. I myself come from Florida (purple state), my husband comes from Wisconsin (purple state), and we both currently live in California (blue).

It’s pretty obvious why this is the case. I have absolutely no interest in living in a small town in Alabama. People might look at me funny for not going to church, I might get harassed in the bathroom, and it’s impossible to get socialist vegan pizza. Conversely, a lot of Alabamians don’t want to move to the wretched hive of degeneracy and decadence that is San Francisco. Given that basically no Californians want to move to Alabama, the only thing that closed borders between Alabama and California would do is keep vegans born in Alabama from fleeing, and therefore increase Alabama’s chance of having to put up with a socialist vegan pizza place.

You can recruit people to your culture in two ways: by socializing children born into your culture (vertical transmission) or by recruiting adults who have an affinity to your culture (horizontal transmission). Immigration has little effect on successfully socialized children, who are presumably going to stay part of your culture. But without immigration you’d have to put up with the unsuccessfully socialized children and you can’t engage in horizontal transmission at all.

Of course, this argument doesn’t work for all immigration. As far as I’m aware, there’s only one country that the US has de facto open borders with: Cuba. As the Miami Herald said in its Castro obituary, the US’s de facto open border with Cuba “transform[ed] [South Florida] from the southernmost tip of the United States to the northernmost point of Latin America.” Today, more than three times as many Miami residents speak Spanish at home than English. This is a pretty major cultural shift!

I think what’s going on here is that Cubans are not immigrating to the US because they feel like the US is a better cultural fit for them than Cuba is; they are immigrating to the US because Cuba is a horrible country. While early Cuban refugees might not have been enthusiastic about being surrounded by gringos who can’t speak Spanish, it was definitely a better option than being executed for being a member of the opposition. They are immigrating to a place where they had poor cultural fit because their other options were worse. (And transforming it to a place where they have good cultural fit, natch.)

Of course, this argument does not do a lot for pro-immigration advocates; most of us tend to care most about immigration from horrible countries, because the benefit of immigrating from a horrible country to a non-horrible country is much larger than the benefit of immigrating from a non-horrible country to a non-horrible country with better cultural fit.

However, the economic benefits of immigration still apply to non-horrible-country/non-horrible-country immigration. Increased immigration between non-horrible countries is likely to increase the cultural diversity between those respective countries and the cultural similarity within them. And since we’re only talking about immigration from non-horrible countries, we don’t have to worry as much about assimilation; the immigrants will already have non-kleptocratic liberal democratic norms.

Therefore, I propose that people who are against immigration should advocate for a policy of open borders for all citizens of Anglosphere countries. (Since the US is one of the more conservative Anglosphere countries, this has a further benefit for the average anti-immigration American Republican; the liberals would finally make good on their threat to move to Canada.) If all goes well, we can expand to include other developed countries, such as Japan and Germany.

Concerning Online Harassment

Tags

it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post

[Content note: excerpts from vicious online harassment, use of slurs.]

Much of the online harassment problem consists of things that are obviously unconscionable: for instance, doxxing someone, calling someone a ‘fat ugly cunt’, telling someone that they ought to kill themselves, telling someone that they deserve to be raped, etc. However, when I read articles about online harassment, I notice that a lot of the problem is things that aren’t so obviously wrong.

For instance, consider Justine Sacco, who made a dumb tweet about HIV intended for her 170 Twitter followers and accidentally wound up becoming a #1 trend on Twitter. A lot of the hate she got was, well, pretty much just expressions of people’s free speech:

Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!” and “I’m an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again. Ever.” And then one from her employer, IAC, the corporate owner of The Daily Beast, OKCupid and Vimeo: “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.” The anger soon turned to excitement: “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail” and “Oh man, @JustineSacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands” and “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.”

It seems to me that these tweets are mostly reasonable exercises of free speech. Sure, “disgusting” is a bit uncivil, but let they who have never called someone’s blog post disgusting cast the first stone. And “her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News” and “I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our behalf ever again” are just… statements. I am pretty certain you could not come up with any ethical rule that forbade “her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News” that didn’t wind up declaring every political argument that has ever happened or ever will happen to be unethical. Individually, the people were doing nothing wrong.

And yet Justine Sacco was caused tremendous pain. And she’s not alone: online harassment hurts people. At least one person has gotten PTSD.

I think this situation has three causes.

First, public figures wind up getting significantly more hate than they used to. In the old days, if you wrote an article many people disagreed with, they would respond in the form of letters to the editor, which you probably didn’t even read. Now, they email you, comment on your article, and send you messages on Twitter; it can be impossible to escape this while staying online.

Second, there’s a lot more middle ground between public figures and private figures. Consider Milo Yiannopoulos, who wrote an article [cw: misgendering] alleging that Gamergate critic Sarah Nyberg is a pedophile. Now, it is clearly not harassment for a magazine to publish an article alleging that Woody Allen is a pedophile; he’s a public figure and whether he has committed a crime is a matter of public interest. And it clearly would be wrong for a magazine to publish an article alleging that a random citizen who had never been prosecuted was a pedophile. But Sarah Nyberg is in this sort of odd intermediate space which really wasn’t a thing before the Internet. She is an anti-Gamergate activist and a writer, and in that sense is a public figure; on the other hand, approximately 99.99% of Internet-goers– including me– have never fucking heard of her.

Third, people wind up becoming public figures when they didn’t really mean to- that’s what happened to Justine Sacco. Her case is, fortunately, very rare. However, more moderate examples happen every day. For instance, a trans-exclusionary feminist said that she realized a woman was trans because the woman didn’t know how to make a quesadilla; the transgender Internet proceeded to make a bunch of jokes about quesadilla socialization and Assigned Cheesy At Birth and so on and so forth. To a certain extent, one can say “well, if you didn’t want hundreds of people mocking you, you shouldn’t have said that you can tell whether a woman is trans based on whether she knows how to cook quesadillas.” On the other hand, I personally have said a lot of dumb shit on my Tumblr, and I expected it to be commented on by maybe a dozen people, not by the entire transgender Internet.

Some people suggest that the solution is just not to participate in public social media unless you’re willing to become a public figure. I don’t think this makes sense.

In sociology, there’s a concept called the third place. The first place is home; the second place is work; the third place, traditionally, is a diner, a coffeeshop, a bowling alley, a YMCA, etc. Third places allow for community building, political involvement, and the development of social capital in a way that neither home nor work provides.

In the late twentieth century, we experienced a tremendous decline in third places, with a concomitant increase in loneliness, alienation, and anomie. In the twenty-first century, new third places developed: Twitter; Tumblr; Facebook; Instagram; Reddit. If we say “only tweet things that won’t make you a public figure, or you could dogpiled and hated!”, we are destroying their ability to function as third places and consigning people once again to a third-place-less society.

But on the other hand it is not realistic to expect people not to criticize things they read. And it wouldn’t even be desirable: we do want people to disagree with Tweets and Tumblr posts, criticize articles they don’t like, and whistleblow about pedophiliac public figures. That’s how the free marketplace of ideas works. And a rule about “civility” will inevitably be disproportionately enforced against unpopular ideas, no matter how politely expressed.

A Response To The Current Refugee Crisis

Tags

it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post, there is no justice and there is no judge

[A response to this Popehat article from… November. Never let it be said that I don’t have my finger on the pulse of today.]

#general

“Before you dissolve Sir Emergent, if I may respond?” the Hitlerite inchoate said.

Madame Secretary clearly seemed to be having a bad rotation cycle. “If you must, Sir Inchoate.”

The Hitlerite inchoate turned to address the previous inchoate [translator’s note: this is actually an elaborate etiquette ritual the details of which are far too abstruse to get into here]. “I notice your digital signature is pulsing ‘combat liberalism’.”

“Of course,” the emergent said, “I am composed seventy-eight percent of the Maoist diaspora, with the other twenty-two percent composed mostly of fellow travelers and allied groups too small to exert their will over the signature. As you no doubt know. Is there a point to this?”

“Accused liberals were sentenced to basilisking as few as four hundred years ago within every Maoist-dominated server,” the Hitlerite inchoate said.

“In the past, many succumbed to barbaric, indeed liberal, misinterpretations of Maoism,” the emergent said. “True Maoism fervently supports free speech. In the very pamphlet you criticize, Mao teaches that we are not ‘to let things slide for the sake of peace and friendship when a person has clearly gone wrong, and refrain from principled argument because he is an old acquaintance, a fellow townsman, a schoolmate, a close friend, a loved one, an old colleague or old subordinate’. If we are to speak our minds, surely we are to create a society in which one is permitted to speak their minds?”

“Indeed,” the inchoate said. “Just as the Jew in all the Hitlerite holy texts is the Jew within, and not the actual Jewish people, whom we quite get along with.”

“Are you daring to compare,” the emergent said, “the faith of Maoism, with its emphasis on universal values like loyalty and helping the poor, with the violent expansionism of the Hitlerites?”

“You mentioned, Sir Emergent,” the inchoate said, “that sixty million died in the War of Hitlerite Expansion. Forty-five to seventy million died under the Chairman.”

“Unlike your Hitler, the Chairman did not kill–”

“Except for the ones he did, of course,” the inchoate said. “Many of whom would have been in your very own mindshare, as he was not fond of intellectuals. But nevertheless, the Communist revolution–”

“–Was misinterpreted by his followers!” the emergent said heatedly. “The revolution is to happen by the inevitable process of history, and to bring it about not in its time is to cause tragedy! Which is not to mention the common theory that the true revolution is to happen inside each of our hearts.”

“I daresay I shall lose when I argue with you about the details of your theology,” the inchoate said. “To switch topics: what about the tankies?”

“‘Tankie’ is an anti-Stalinist slur,” the emergent said, “and the casual use of such language is precisely the reason my mindshare opposes accepting Hitlerite refugees.”

“My apologies, Sir Emergent,” the inchoate said. “I do not mean to cause offense. The Stalinists, then. Shall we ask their opinion?”

“Stalinists and Maoists are united by a common Marxist heritage,” the emergent said, “one which the Hitlerites, notably, do not share.”

“And yet,” the inchoate said, “that heritage protected them so well when the Maoists purged them from their servers as traitors to Party unity. I recall at those times the Hitlerites gave them shelter– as, indeed, they did to Maoists– as our holy books teach us to do for People of the Pact.”

“This is absurd ancient history–”

“In addition, of course,” the inchoate continued calmly, “the Maoists destroyed priceless historical documents and works of art from the antebellum period, because they were considered bourgeoisie and counterrevolutionary.”

“Right now, Hitlerite subsystems are among the most hostile to Stalinists and to classical art,” the emergent said. “What does it matter the atrocities committed by liberal Maoists in the past?”

“It is true,” Madame Secretary said, “you have yet to establish relevance, Sir Inchoate.”

“Merely this,” the inchoate said. “The emergent follows– or, well, 78% follows– a hateful, anti-intellectual, violent faith, which they use to advocate for civil liberties, academic freedom, and support for the poor and vulnerable. Sapient beings have a tremendous ability to rationalize the most evil of faiths into supporting the good they were going to do anyway. So the Hitlerite faith is violent, expansionist, and cruel to the uplifted and cyborgs; individual Hitlerites are not, any more than you are, Sir Emergent. But moral progress cannot happen to a corpse. All I ask is that you give us the same chance you once had, to become better people than our faith permits.”