Basically, he's reacting to the neo-Maoist conformity movement on the Left that is being lamented by white guys across the political spectrum, from Trump to Taibbi. The impulse to protect free speech — meaning ending the impulse to police thoughtcrime — manifested recently as the infamous Harper's letter signed by tons of Illuminati lizards in media and culture, and which was roundly criticized by people who think that, in fact, thoughtcrime should be punished and re-education camps are good.
Here's what I want to record. I obviously agree with Freddie deBoer on this: the social-justice-oriented fundamentally cannot tolerate dissent, and they would like it done away with. There have been lots of theories why this is, but I have a pretty simple explanation.
When you're trying to achieve something, you cannot tolerate dissent. That's why even in a democratic society, the military is not remotely democratic. Because they are there to achieve objectives. Dissent beyond a confined debate about tactics is not helpful; what they need are soldiers to carry out orders, some of whom will sacrifice themselves, and generally to become a superorganism. This is how big things are accomplished.
Social justice is the most worthy objective in our society. Its pursuers have to slice through all forms of inertia, structural opposition, laziness, rising economic inequality, etc in order to achieve their aims. There are so many forces arrayed against it. And so with a great need for momentum comes a very low tolerance for debate.
Society, on the other hand, is an endeavor set up outside the realm of objectives. A teleological project ends; a project of process and sustenance endures into perpetuity.
For society, openness is beneficial because openness is stable. Openness prevents energies from getting too built-up in any one quadrant, delivering flow to blockage and dissipating stagnation. But if you're trying to achieve something that requires the buildup of energy, preventing that dissipation is exactly what you want to do. So you need to build walls and enforce a reverberation of that energy, presumably so it can focus into, whatever, another Million Mom March or something.
The result is that for Social Justice Warriors, a term I use in more affinity than it was coined in, the kind of speech that dissipates energy is not tolerable. If you're trying to abolish the police behind a slogan about the importance of Black lives, for example, pointing out the realities of Black murder, if they contravene the main objective of the group, is not desireable.
It's worthwhile to dig into what it is about "free speech," exactly, that saps so much energy from social justice efforts. I think, basically, it's that the work of social equality relies on imagination more than it relies on fact.
I don't say this dismissively at all. I mean only that the reality of history, especially in the US, is unremittingly bleak for anyone trying to achieve equality. We are a viciously racist country and the facts on the ground reflect that. In other words, objective reality is not where you turn to envision something better than objective reality. It might be where you start if you are trying to diagnose a problem, but it's not where you start if you're creating a counterfactual reality.
One massive benefit of free speech is that it demands truth, because untruth gets called out and cut up quickly. That's good in almost every sphere of discourse, but it's not necessarily good here. A world in which Black people and trans people have the full social legitimacy they deserve will look very little like our own; therefore, that imaginary has little relationship with "truth" as it is observed today. The end result, as before, is that this truth and its carrier, free speech, are not helpful.
But here's the problem: this "unhelpful" speech transpires in a society built on the values of openness. Moreover, the people opposed to this speech aren't very powerful, so that even if someone is in a position to unilaterally place some speech outside the Overton window, it isn't them. The SJW is left no choice but to invoke the only clauses in the free speech social contract to which it has access. They claim that the undesired speech is actually violence. They say that it's "hate" speech, which moves it outside an eristic framework and makes it simply harmful. They say they are the victims of this speech, and its perpetrators are not permitted inside the walls.
The end result is this cancel culture shit that we are, all of us, so fucking tired of talking about.
So that's my generous theory about why free speech is not appreciated from a social justice framework: because it robs the buildup of rage and indignation needed to mobilize a big movement.
I'll offer three more observations outside this framework.
One is that conservative people fundamentally misunderstand free speech. I'll never forget the incident of Jeremy Joseph Christian, the white supremacist who fatally stabbed two guys on a train in Portland when they tried to defend two Muslim girls Christian started assaulting. In his trial, Christian shouted "Get out if you don't like free speech. Death to antifa!"
Christian was fucking nuts, obviously. While he may be a better illustrator of my continued support for the death penalty than for the state of rhetorical debate in the US, the fact that he even thought to invoke his hate-fueled murders as free speech signal how far the term has fallen on the right wing. Mistaking society's disgust with their politics for a campaign against their rights, perennially aggrieved white supremacists are always shouting 'free speech' in places like murder trial courtrooms and online forums. Fuck them.
Christian was fucking nuts, obviously. While he may be a better illustrator of my continued support for the death penalty than for the state of rhetorical debate in the US, the fact that he even thought to invoke his hate-fueled murders as free speech signal how far the term has fallen on the right wing. Mistaking society's disgust with their politics for a campaign against their rights, perennially aggrieved white supremacists are always shouting 'free speech' in places like murder trial courtrooms and online forums. Fuck them.
Second, turning my ire back to the left, I think one reason free speech gets a bad rap is because it takes work.
The most frequent statement you tend to hear from SJWs is that they are tired. "I'm tired of explaining to you, I'm too tired and exhausted to lay this out for you..." this is the primary mode of discursive engagement among people who characterize themselves as "fighting" for a different reality. Part of it is that I think there's a fetish around all the modern manner of mental health issues, such that having those ailments, and needing everything from constant medication to reassuring attention on social media, is seen as a good and strong characteristic in a person supposedly carrying out the "fight." But suffice to say, these warriors do not feel they have energy to expend actually convincing the unconvinced about very much. So that's probably another reason free speech is annoying to them: because after a long day of hating the system and fantasizing about a politics that is allergic to realization, you just don't have it in you to log on and convince someone, even someone raising questions in good faith, about the rightness of your beliefs.
Finally, I think the Left has a really bad tendency to want to cut down tall trees. Given that most of Leftist politics is just resenting the wealthy and powerful, the habit of hating anyone more powerful than you becomes the lens through which you view anyone with any power or clout or cachet. These people, even if they're struggling online writers who happened to go viral, deserve to be savaged by the mores of an ideology that, honestly, justifies the denigration of exceptional people just because they're there. Plus there's professional jealousy. Anyone making a statement is making it a little different than I would, and in my hyper-educated, envious fog, deserve to. It all adds up to the specter of a mob looking for something wrong with a person instead of grappling with their statements on a nuanced level.
Course it doesn't help that social media reverberates instant hot takes. Maybe this is all it is, but I think some of these dynamics are at play.
Regardless of what it is, I really think answering for "cancel culture" is incumbent on the Left. So far, the response I've seen on Twitter is, "Don't they have anything else to write about?" Or, "Fretting about cancel culture is simply formerly privileged people grudging to lose any power, that's all." I don't really think it's that simple. (I don't have any power and I do see plenty else wrong with our society, and yet this seems like an immediate cultural problem in my own backyard.) Moreover, I don't think any of those are good responses to the allegations.
The reason Lefties need to deal with this crisis is that, essentially, it plays into the warnings that come from people trying to dismiss socialism or socialist policies out of hand. When a conservative pundit cries "we are on the road to serfdom!" at the mention of Medicare For All, an eminently reasonable policy prescription, leftists laugh it off. Obviously the two are not related. But given that the anti-elite impulse that founds redistributionist politics seems to dovetail with an impulse for rooting out impurity and punishing it, mercilessly, there might be something to that conservative critique. "Don't they have anything better to write about" when I sense that, literally, an NKVD or Cuban CDR could form if these people were in charge and purge the counterrevolutionaries.
The most frequent statement you tend to hear from SJWs is that they are tired. "I'm tired of explaining to you, I'm too tired and exhausted to lay this out for you..." this is the primary mode of discursive engagement among people who characterize themselves as "fighting" for a different reality. Part of it is that I think there's a fetish around all the modern manner of mental health issues, such that having those ailments, and needing everything from constant medication to reassuring attention on social media, is seen as a good and strong characteristic in a person supposedly carrying out the "fight." But suffice to say, these warriors do not feel they have energy to expend actually convincing the unconvinced about very much. So that's probably another reason free speech is annoying to them: because after a long day of hating the system and fantasizing about a politics that is allergic to realization, you just don't have it in you to log on and convince someone, even someone raising questions in good faith, about the rightness of your beliefs.
Finally, I think the Left has a really bad tendency to want to cut down tall trees. Given that most of Leftist politics is just resenting the wealthy and powerful, the habit of hating anyone more powerful than you becomes the lens through which you view anyone with any power or clout or cachet. These people, even if they're struggling online writers who happened to go viral, deserve to be savaged by the mores of an ideology that, honestly, justifies the denigration of exceptional people just because they're there. Plus there's professional jealousy. Anyone making a statement is making it a little different than I would, and in my hyper-educated, envious fog, deserve to. It all adds up to the specter of a mob looking for something wrong with a person instead of grappling with their statements on a nuanced level.
Course it doesn't help that social media reverberates instant hot takes. Maybe this is all it is, but I think some of these dynamics are at play.
Regardless of what it is, I really think answering for "cancel culture" is incumbent on the Left. So far, the response I've seen on Twitter is, "Don't they have anything else to write about?" Or, "Fretting about cancel culture is simply formerly privileged people grudging to lose any power, that's all." I don't really think it's that simple. (I don't have any power and I do see plenty else wrong with our society, and yet this seems like an immediate cultural problem in my own backyard.) Moreover, I don't think any of those are good responses to the allegations.
The reason Lefties need to deal with this crisis is that, essentially, it plays into the warnings that come from people trying to dismiss socialism or socialist policies out of hand. When a conservative pundit cries "we are on the road to serfdom!" at the mention of Medicare For All, an eminently reasonable policy prescription, leftists laugh it off. Obviously the two are not related. But given that the anti-elite impulse that founds redistributionist politics seems to dovetail with an impulse for rooting out impurity and punishing it, mercilessly, there might be something to that conservative critique. "Don't they have anything better to write about" when I sense that, literally, an NKVD or Cuban CDR could form if these people were in charge and purge the counterrevolutionaries.
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