Is there too much public shaming? For example, has #MeToo gone too far, or not far enough?
There's a large category of behavior which should be discouraged but not criminalized, and in most case the discouragement can only take the form of public shaming. This ought to (but doesn't) appeal particularly to libertarians who favour non-state, non-coercive approaches to social order.
Like any form of punishment, public shaming can be misdirected. But it seems to me much more resented precisely when it is warranted. Most obviously, lots of people resented shaming over alleged racism far more than racism itself. Once they got the chance, they voted for racists and came out as racist themselves.
Too much is perhaps not the best terminology. There's an enormous amount of shaming that happens, which shouldn't, and there's an enormous amount of shaming that doesn't happen, which should. It was good when Neil Gaiman was exposed, but a lot of stuff described in So You've Been Publicly Shamed is bad.
I would like people to continue public shaming, where appropriate (fairly common!), but to do so in the full knowledge that public shaming is a grave matter and should only be done if:
1. The evidence is strong
2. And shows the person engaged in a behaviour not just wrong, but well outside the normal bounds of decency, taking into account both the subjective and objective circumstances (just for a start: knowledge, harm, age, context, recklessness v malice, power dynamics, mental illness, moral luck, history)- both what is known about such circumstances and crucially taking caution about what is not known
3. And taking into account all the circumstances, the shaming is likely to do more good than harm.
This last point is a grab bag, including everything from proportionality to current circumstances, the profile and power of the would-be shamer, time elapsed, collateral damage (e.g., family members), wishes of the victim, how much shame they've already gotten, whether they're still in public life or have retreated, etc.
People thinking like that is probably utopian, but I think we can do better than we do now.
I agree with all this, which applies to any form of punishment. But important to consider the opposite problem of impunity - the fact that Andrew Cuomo could assume he had it is an illustration.
Excellent point re libertarians in fact, haven't thought about this in years but the standard answer they advocated for "what should we have instead of civil rights laws" in the 2000s was effectively "cancel culture"
> For example, has #MeToo gone too far, or not far enough?
Both, as per usual for principally cultural "reckonings". Too far against the easy targets ("men" in the abstract being the easiest target of all); not far enough against the well-connected. At the extreme upper end, you have Bill Clinton: allegedly (definitely) a rapist, also completely untouchable. But even the handsome charismatic grad student gets away with an awful lot for an awful long time; certainly the one I have in mind did.
Meanwhile we had liberal media outlets writing lurid fantasies about the pink guards on the way, writing far better right-wing propaganda than the right ever could.
Which is to say - they were being liberals. Say what you will about the tenets of radical feminism; at least it's an ethos.
I find it interesting that the notification in my email subscription to this blog was sent to “promotions” by gmail and that the post on the 26th went straight into my general email.
Anyway.
I can empathize with Jamie. I can also feel empathy for oppressed people in the world, their oppression I am regrettably awake to.
I am in my mid forties with no children, recently divorced with an attractive girlfriend who is much younger than me and wants to produce some. I am safe and financially secure, for now, and grateful for that happenstance and all who helped me bring it about.
I too had a lack of father in my young male life and was bullied. Though never short I was certainly obnoxious. Whatever the case, I am in a protracted legal battle with a former employer in the trades regarding a frighteningly bad work injury, which feels more like punching back at a bully than literally doing so ever did.
I have recently used my long time affiliation with a service organization to find care for my aged, infirm and never quite sane, but not dementia prone mother. I am fortunate I do not pay for it. I hear the cost of my grandmother’s care, who has Alzheimer’s and is no longer in her own home, runs something like ten thousand American dollars a month. She is arguably not in her own form or pattern either but that’s a different subject possibly.
I’d like to believe in a moral arc of the universe, but see little evidence for one. I’d like to see any teleos, at all, but god works in mysterious ways and I am just a little man who could not finish high school. I’d like to be Christian but I feel that Jesus would be rather inclined to flip the tables of money lenders at the moment, rather than wash the feet of lepers.
I don’t like people telling me what to believe any more than the idea of an internet commenter telling a very gay man that he is interested in the rape of women. As a very heterosexual man, I find it interesting that all of my male friends are gay or bi, and the majority of my friends are women. Sometimes I feel that the “woke mob” is made up in part, by people who would like to lash out at those who’ve oppressed them and are cursed with blurry aim.
I don’t know and I have trouble sleeping, therefore I like philosophy.
Tell Jamie I said hi and wish him the best of luck with his novels, I’d like to write them too.
As soon as anyone uses the word 'woke' now, my eyes glaze over. It's simply become a term of abuse by the far right for anything they don't like. It's thus been drained of all its original meaning, and people who use it seem incapable of defining it.
>He represents getting something done in the physical world
When I was new to the Internet, someone told me people who work with words are liberals, people who work with things, such as mechanical engineers are conservatives.
It struck me as profound until I figured it is not. The implication was, that the mechanical engineer types are more realistic. OK but writing a law is closer to working with words than working with things. Perhaps people working with words, while certainly more flexible with what is practical and what is not, than mechanical engineers, actually do know how much flexibility is acceptable when writing laws.
On the personal level, I understand the fascination with working with objects, because it is just so super male. But why would the mechanical engineer be so good at governing people? Shouldn't we elect a teacher, who has experience with when to be tough with rules and when to relax them? Aren't teachers usually liberal?
Or if to be conservative is liking old things, was a medieval king really like a mechanical engineer? I would not say so - they had an education of words and human interactions.
>Likewise, what of Jamie’s anger at the woke scepticism about reason and empiricism?
Wise people today understand that they have no power. What difference does it make when one utters Harsh Truths using reason and empiricism? The people with real power do not listen. Being kind and untrue might cheer up someone for five minutes.
This was a great essay; I kept copying sentences into my commonplace book, producing a really embarrassingly long string of "ibid"s. I didn't come across it on my random selection of entries to try, or I would have voted it up—but despite that, I see why it didn't get to the finalist round, because it isn't really a *review* in any sense; it's a profile merging into a philosophical discussion. So a great essay, but not a great review, simply because it's not a review at all.
I see more virtue in anti-wokeness politics than you (or, if the few on this essay are representative, than many of your readers), while seeing an enormous amount of harm in anti-wokeness politics too; I don't think these positions contradict, personally, although there are few people who feel both and they are mostly scorned by both sides. So from that perspective, let me reply to one small slice of this, the section headed "I still don't get it".
Your point in that section, if I read you correctly, might be summarized: yeah, wokeness does some bad things, but those bad things are always around, they just find different excuses, so why is Jamie so excised about *this* one? (The part about how a lot of it is right comes later, and is important, but is a different argument, so let me try the free-standing part paraphrased.) I think this is both correct and deeply missing the point. Yes, these phenomena are eternal; yes, if Jamie lived in the 50s it would be put in terms of psychoanalytic conformity culture and in Sumer in terms of the neglected rituals of Lamashtu. But in both of those cases, as in all the past examples, these provoked *fierce* resentment and opposition (certainly 50s conformity did, as well as many other recent examples; I know nothing about ancient Sumer and so just presume it holds based on later patterns). Why should wokeness's tyranny (to the degree you think there is such) then not provoke it? The fact that it's recurring does not indicate at all that any given instance shouldn't be fought; arguably it indicates the contrary. To say "yeah, wokeness has bad aspects, but that sort of thing always happens" is like saying regarding Trump "yeah, undemocratic authoritarianism has bad aspects, but that sort of thing always happens": yes, and *every single time* you must fight it. Trump is the latest, not the only, anti-democratic authoritarian; but as such he represents and evil which we know and know will spread, and so must be stopped. And people are excised about the current fight—of course they are, and they're right to be. Well, assuming arguendo that wokeness has bad aspects, the same holds. Yes, the fight is eternal: and this version of it is here, and must be fought now. So on this, at least, I am much more sympathetic to Jamie than you—or maybe I just mean, I get it. That a horror is familiar and recurring does not mean it is not horrifying and that we ought not be horrified.
Thanks again for this essay. The sentences "The cruelty wears varied garments, but they always clothe the same terrible body" and "How many of your beliefs are the scar tissue of old wounds?" are definitely keepers, for me—the first is just nicely put, and the second is not only nicely put, but a thought I hadn't ever seen expressed before, at least quite that way, but one I think is clearly right.
Is there too much public shaming? For example, has #MeToo gone too far, or not far enough?
There's a large category of behavior which should be discouraged but not criminalized, and in most case the discouragement can only take the form of public shaming. This ought to (but doesn't) appeal particularly to libertarians who favour non-state, non-coercive approaches to social order.
Like any form of punishment, public shaming can be misdirected. But it seems to me much more resented precisely when it is warranted. Most obviously, lots of people resented shaming over alleged racism far more than racism itself. Once they got the chance, they voted for racists and came out as racist themselves.
Too much is perhaps not the best terminology. There's an enormous amount of shaming that happens, which shouldn't, and there's an enormous amount of shaming that doesn't happen, which should. It was good when Neil Gaiman was exposed, but a lot of stuff described in So You've Been Publicly Shamed is bad.
I would like people to continue public shaming, where appropriate (fairly common!), but to do so in the full knowledge that public shaming is a grave matter and should only be done if:
1. The evidence is strong
2. And shows the person engaged in a behaviour not just wrong, but well outside the normal bounds of decency, taking into account both the subjective and objective circumstances (just for a start: knowledge, harm, age, context, recklessness v malice, power dynamics, mental illness, moral luck, history)- both what is known about such circumstances and crucially taking caution about what is not known
3. And taking into account all the circumstances, the shaming is likely to do more good than harm.
This last point is a grab bag, including everything from proportionality to current circumstances, the profile and power of the would-be shamer, time elapsed, collateral damage (e.g., family members), wishes of the victim, how much shame they've already gotten, whether they're still in public life or have retreated, etc.
People thinking like that is probably utopian, but I think we can do better than we do now.
I agree with all this, which applies to any form of punishment. But important to consider the opposite problem of impunity - the fact that Andrew Cuomo could assume he had it is an illustration.
Excellent point re libertarians in fact, haven't thought about this in years but the standard answer they advocated for "what should we have instead of civil rights laws" in the 2000s was effectively "cancel culture"
> For example, has #MeToo gone too far, or not far enough?
Both, as per usual for principally cultural "reckonings". Too far against the easy targets ("men" in the abstract being the easiest target of all); not far enough against the well-connected. At the extreme upper end, you have Bill Clinton: allegedly (definitely) a rapist, also completely untouchable. But even the handsome charismatic grad student gets away with an awful lot for an awful long time; certainly the one I have in mind did.
Meanwhile we had liberal media outlets writing lurid fantasies about the pink guards on the way, writing far better right-wing propaganda than the right ever could.
Which is to say - they were being liberals. Say what you will about the tenets of radical feminism; at least it's an ethos.
I find it interesting that the notification in my email subscription to this blog was sent to “promotions” by gmail and that the post on the 26th went straight into my general email.
Anyway.
I can empathize with Jamie. I can also feel empathy for oppressed people in the world, their oppression I am regrettably awake to.
I am in my mid forties with no children, recently divorced with an attractive girlfriend who is much younger than me and wants to produce some. I am safe and financially secure, for now, and grateful for that happenstance and all who helped me bring it about.
I too had a lack of father in my young male life and was bullied. Though never short I was certainly obnoxious. Whatever the case, I am in a protracted legal battle with a former employer in the trades regarding a frighteningly bad work injury, which feels more like punching back at a bully than literally doing so ever did.
I have recently used my long time affiliation with a service organization to find care for my aged, infirm and never quite sane, but not dementia prone mother. I am fortunate I do not pay for it. I hear the cost of my grandmother’s care, who has Alzheimer’s and is no longer in her own home, runs something like ten thousand American dollars a month. She is arguably not in her own form or pattern either but that’s a different subject possibly.
I’d like to believe in a moral arc of the universe, but see little evidence for one. I’d like to see any teleos, at all, but god works in mysterious ways and I am just a little man who could not finish high school. I’d like to be Christian but I feel that Jesus would be rather inclined to flip the tables of money lenders at the moment, rather than wash the feet of lepers.
I don’t like people telling me what to believe any more than the idea of an internet commenter telling a very gay man that he is interested in the rape of women. As a very heterosexual man, I find it interesting that all of my male friends are gay or bi, and the majority of my friends are women. Sometimes I feel that the “woke mob” is made up in part, by people who would like to lash out at those who’ve oppressed them and are cursed with blurry aim.
I don’t know and I have trouble sleeping, therefore I like philosophy.
Tell Jamie I said hi and wish him the best of luck with his novels, I’d like to write them too.
As soon as anyone uses the word 'woke' now, my eyes glaze over. It's simply become a term of abuse by the far right for anything they don't like. It's thus been drained of all its original meaning, and people who use it seem incapable of defining it.
>He represents getting something done in the physical world
When I was new to the Internet, someone told me people who work with words are liberals, people who work with things, such as mechanical engineers are conservatives.
It struck me as profound until I figured it is not. The implication was, that the mechanical engineer types are more realistic. OK but writing a law is closer to working with words than working with things. Perhaps people working with words, while certainly more flexible with what is practical and what is not, than mechanical engineers, actually do know how much flexibility is acceptable when writing laws.
On the personal level, I understand the fascination with working with objects, because it is just so super male. But why would the mechanical engineer be so good at governing people? Shouldn't we elect a teacher, who has experience with when to be tough with rules and when to relax them? Aren't teachers usually liberal?
Or if to be conservative is liking old things, was a medieval king really like a mechanical engineer? I would not say so - they had an education of words and human interactions.
>Likewise, what of Jamie’s anger at the woke scepticism about reason and empiricism?
Wise people today understand that they have no power. What difference does it make when one utters Harsh Truths using reason and empiricism? The people with real power do not listen. Being kind and untrue might cheer up someone for five minutes.
This was a great essay; I kept copying sentences into my commonplace book, producing a really embarrassingly long string of "ibid"s. I didn't come across it on my random selection of entries to try, or I would have voted it up—but despite that, I see why it didn't get to the finalist round, because it isn't really a *review* in any sense; it's a profile merging into a philosophical discussion. So a great essay, but not a great review, simply because it's not a review at all.
I see more virtue in anti-wokeness politics than you (or, if the few on this essay are representative, than many of your readers), while seeing an enormous amount of harm in anti-wokeness politics too; I don't think these positions contradict, personally, although there are few people who feel both and they are mostly scorned by both sides. So from that perspective, let me reply to one small slice of this, the section headed "I still don't get it".
Your point in that section, if I read you correctly, might be summarized: yeah, wokeness does some bad things, but those bad things are always around, they just find different excuses, so why is Jamie so excised about *this* one? (The part about how a lot of it is right comes later, and is important, but is a different argument, so let me try the free-standing part paraphrased.) I think this is both correct and deeply missing the point. Yes, these phenomena are eternal; yes, if Jamie lived in the 50s it would be put in terms of psychoanalytic conformity culture and in Sumer in terms of the neglected rituals of Lamashtu. But in both of those cases, as in all the past examples, these provoked *fierce* resentment and opposition (certainly 50s conformity did, as well as many other recent examples; I know nothing about ancient Sumer and so just presume it holds based on later patterns). Why should wokeness's tyranny (to the degree you think there is such) then not provoke it? The fact that it's recurring does not indicate at all that any given instance shouldn't be fought; arguably it indicates the contrary. To say "yeah, wokeness has bad aspects, but that sort of thing always happens" is like saying regarding Trump "yeah, undemocratic authoritarianism has bad aspects, but that sort of thing always happens": yes, and *every single time* you must fight it. Trump is the latest, not the only, anti-democratic authoritarian; but as such he represents and evil which we know and know will spread, and so must be stopped. And people are excised about the current fight—of course they are, and they're right to be. Well, assuming arguendo that wokeness has bad aspects, the same holds. Yes, the fight is eternal: and this version of it is here, and must be fought now. So on this, at least, I am much more sympathetic to Jamie than you—or maybe I just mean, I get it. That a horror is familiar and recurring does not mean it is not horrifying and that we ought not be horrified.
Thanks again for this essay. The sentences "The cruelty wears varied garments, but they always clothe the same terrible body" and "How many of your beliefs are the scar tissue of old wounds?" are definitely keepers, for me—the first is just nicely put, and the second is not only nicely put, but a thought I hadn't ever seen expressed before, at least quite that way, but one I think is clearly right.