I've made the bolded point repeatedly.
There was a time not so long ago when if you wanted to hear the world’s dumbest sentiments on race or ethnicity, you had to at least put on a coat and go down to the neighborhood bar.
What we did not do back then, by the way, was storm into those bars, haul out the loudest blowhards and publicly shame them at the top of every homepage and cable show in America.
That’s pretty much where we are now, when displays of basic idiocy dominate the headlines, mostly because denouncing them makes the rest of us feel more virtuous, or maybe because they seem to validate our sense that the culture is unraveling.
Exhibit A involves Ye, who used to be a big-time rapper named Kanye West but is now the society’s best-known Hitler admirer.
Then we have the international flare-up over the British Baroness Susan Hussey, who I had thought was just a character in “The Crown,” but who turns out to be the all-too-real kind of White person who thinks that non-White people must be from somewhere else.
And both of these incidents battled for attention with the ongoing uproar over Twitter, where the New York Times reported that slurs against Black Americans and gay men have risen sharply since Elon Musk took over the company and relaxed its moderation standards.
Just to be kindergarten-level clear about this, because these days you have to be: I do not condone any of these behaviors. In each instance, I find them appalling.
But it’s also true that each of these controversies, lumped together as damning evidence of the rising hate in our public discourse, are inflated beyond all proportion.
Ye (do I really have to call him that?) is pretty clearly struggling with mental illness, as his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, has been telling us for years. I’m sure there is a whole list of ways to know whether you’re suffering from serious delusion, but when you make Alex Jones look like the reasonable party in a conversation, you can probably skip the rest of it.
Is the moral thing here really to give Ye more of a platform to debase himself than he already has? Just because Donald Trump takes Ye seriously doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.
Lady Hussey is 83, born in the waning days of the British Empire. Show of hands: How many of you have grandparents who would say something racially insensitive without being cognizant of why?
That Hussey was clearly rude and insistent about it probably justifies the way she was immediately cast out of the castle — a punishment that might also hint at the Crown’s defensiveness in this new, post-Elizabethan era. But I think we can all agree that she wasn’t trying to ignite a transcontinental race war.
As for the growing alarm over Twitter, let’s just grasp for a modicum of context. According to the Times, slurs against Black Americans have lately risen from 1,282 a day to more like 3,876. Insults of gay men are up to a daily average of almost 4,000.
Thousands of slurs are thousands too many, but consider that Twitter has something like 41 million daily active users in the United States alone. We’re not talking about a remotely significant percentage of tweets, and we don’t know whether they come from users who have any actual followers. I’m reminded of a line from a clever insurance commercial I saw recently: “This is going to get tens and tens of views!”
Bigotry ought to be condemned even if it’s not especially pervasive — we should all be able to agree on that. Even as something close to a free speech absolutist, I can accept that some speech ought not to be tolerated, namely in cases where it’s intended to misinform or harm people.
But the total lack of perspective in the conversation about hate speech — this impression that somehow these controversies are the most important things happening in the universe right now — can lead us down a couple of perilous paths.
First, it lends credence and momentum to those on the left who would jettison the concept of free speech entirely. There’s a popular — and very misguided — argument among leftists, particularly younger ones, that free expression is a weapon wielded by the capitalist and colonialist elite, and that no one should enjoy the right to make others uncomfortable because of their race or identity. They would turn the entire country into a college campus.
Real liberals know that the freedom of speech includes the right to be stupid, hurtful and wrong. In fact, that’s generally when it matters most. We’re a stronger and more admired country not when we protect the ideas everybody loves, but when we tolerate the ones that make us sick. To argue otherwise is plainly un-American, and it’s antithetical to an enlightened society.
Second, all this mindless amplification of run-of-the-mill bigotry adds to the perception that history is moving in the wrong direction when it comes to inclusivity and tolerance. That’s just not true.
I’ve used this metaphor before, but I think it’s apt. When you’re riding on a train, and another train suddenly blazes past you, it creates the sensory illusion that you are moving backward, when really you’re forging steadily ahead the whole time.
Our culture is like that, too. Ugly strains of hatred have become louder and more visible since the onset of the Trump era, but that doesn’t mean we’re going backward. In fact, by any obvious measure of progress, we are a vastly more enlightened society than we were 50 years ago, or even 25 years ago.
The shouts and slurs you hear online aren’t the sounds of an ascendant ideology, but rather the shrill echoes of a dying one. Which is why Trump, despite having lucked into the presidency without winning the 2016 popular vote, has now led his party to rejection in three successive elections.
If you want to worry about the state of civil society, then worry about Trump’s call this week to suspend the Constitution so he can be enshrined in power — and the deafening Republican silence that followed it. Or worry about the case that just reached the Supreme Court, in which a Colorado website designer says she shouldn’t have to make wedding pages for gay couples.
But let’s all spend less time obsessing over the ramblings of an imbalanced rap artist, or the tweets of a few thousand nobodies, or the clueless clucking of some cosseted old woman halfway across the world.
They’re really no different from that guy in the bar. And we’re no better for having flogged them in the street.
There was a time not so long ago when if you wanted to hear the world’s dumbest sentiments on race or ethnicity, you had to at least put on a coat and go down to the neighborhood bar.
What we did not do back then, by the way, was storm into those bars, haul out the loudest blowhards and publicly shame them at the top of every homepage and cable show in America.
That’s pretty much where we are now, when displays of basic idiocy dominate the headlines, mostly because denouncing them makes the rest of us feel more virtuous, or maybe because they seem to validate our sense that the culture is unraveling.
Exhibit A involves Ye, who used to be a big-time rapper named Kanye West but is now the society’s best-known Hitler admirer.
Then we have the international flare-up over the British Baroness Susan Hussey, who I had thought was just a character in “The Crown,” but who turns out to be the all-too-real kind of White person who thinks that non-White people must be from somewhere else.
And both of these incidents battled for attention with the ongoing uproar over Twitter, where the New York Times reported that slurs against Black Americans and gay men have risen sharply since Elon Musk took over the company and relaxed its moderation standards.
Just to be kindergarten-level clear about this, because these days you have to be: I do not condone any of these behaviors. In each instance, I find them appalling.
But it’s also true that each of these controversies, lumped together as damning evidence of the rising hate in our public discourse, are inflated beyond all proportion.
Ye (do I really have to call him that?) is pretty clearly struggling with mental illness, as his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, has been telling us for years. I’m sure there is a whole list of ways to know whether you’re suffering from serious delusion, but when you make Alex Jones look like the reasonable party in a conversation, you can probably skip the rest of it.
Is the moral thing here really to give Ye more of a platform to debase himself than he already has? Just because Donald Trump takes Ye seriously doesn’t mean the rest of us have to.
Lady Hussey is 83, born in the waning days of the British Empire. Show of hands: How many of you have grandparents who would say something racially insensitive without being cognizant of why?
That Hussey was clearly rude and insistent about it probably justifies the way she was immediately cast out of the castle — a punishment that might also hint at the Crown’s defensiveness in this new, post-Elizabethan era. But I think we can all agree that she wasn’t trying to ignite a transcontinental race war.
As for the growing alarm over Twitter, let’s just grasp for a modicum of context. According to the Times, slurs against Black Americans have lately risen from 1,282 a day to more like 3,876. Insults of gay men are up to a daily average of almost 4,000.
Thousands of slurs are thousands too many, but consider that Twitter has something like 41 million daily active users in the United States alone. We’re not talking about a remotely significant percentage of tweets, and we don’t know whether they come from users who have any actual followers. I’m reminded of a line from a clever insurance commercial I saw recently: “This is going to get tens and tens of views!”
Bigotry ought to be condemned even if it’s not especially pervasive — we should all be able to agree on that. Even as something close to a free speech absolutist, I can accept that some speech ought not to be tolerated, namely in cases where it’s intended to misinform or harm people.
But the total lack of perspective in the conversation about hate speech — this impression that somehow these controversies are the most important things happening in the universe right now — can lead us down a couple of perilous paths.
First, it lends credence and momentum to those on the left who would jettison the concept of free speech entirely. There’s a popular — and very misguided — argument among leftists, particularly younger ones, that free expression is a weapon wielded by the capitalist and colonialist elite, and that no one should enjoy the right to make others uncomfortable because of their race or identity. They would turn the entire country into a college campus.
Real liberals know that the freedom of speech includes the right to be stupid, hurtful and wrong. In fact, that’s generally when it matters most. We’re a stronger and more admired country not when we protect the ideas everybody loves, but when we tolerate the ones that make us sick. To argue otherwise is plainly un-American, and it’s antithetical to an enlightened society.
Second, all this mindless amplification of run-of-the-mill bigotry adds to the perception that history is moving in the wrong direction when it comes to inclusivity and tolerance. That’s just not true.
I’ve used this metaphor before, but I think it’s apt. When you’re riding on a train, and another train suddenly blazes past you, it creates the sensory illusion that you are moving backward, when really you’re forging steadily ahead the whole time.
Our culture is like that, too. Ugly strains of hatred have become louder and more visible since the onset of the Trump era, but that doesn’t mean we’re going backward. In fact, by any obvious measure of progress, we are a vastly more enlightened society than we were 50 years ago, or even 25 years ago.
The shouts and slurs you hear online aren’t the sounds of an ascendant ideology, but rather the shrill echoes of a dying one. Which is why Trump, despite having lucked into the presidency without winning the 2016 popular vote, has now led his party to rejection in three successive elections.
If you want to worry about the state of civil society, then worry about Trump’s call this week to suspend the Constitution so he can be enshrined in power — and the deafening Republican silence that followed it. Or worry about the case that just reached the Supreme Court, in which a Colorado website designer says she shouldn’t have to make wedding pages for gay couples.
But let’s all spend less time obsessing over the ramblings of an imbalanced rap artist, or the tweets of a few thousand nobodies, or the clueless clucking of some cosseted old woman halfway across the world.
They’re really no different from that guy in the bar. And we’re no better for having flogged them in the street.
