If not a Russian bot, might as well be
Three days ago Mary Beard mused aloud on Twitter.
Of course one can’t condone the (alleged) behaviour of Oxfam staff in Haiti and elsewhere. But I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain “civilised” values in a disaster zone. And overall I still respect those who go in to help out, where most of us wd not tread.
— mary beard (@wmarybeard) February 16, 2018
And lo, there was a pile-on. (I read Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed a couple of months ago. I recommend it.) There are currently 828 replies.
She attempted to clarify her point many times but most of the pilers weren’t listening.
Goodnight all. I am amazed that after decades of Lord of the Flies being a gcse English set book we haven’t got the point about the breakdown of morality in danger zones!! Just saying and this is NOT to condone the actions of a few aid workers.
— mary beard (@wmarybeard) February 16, 2018
It’s surely a genuine issue. In one reply she said: “I do not like the tone of some of the criticism here which suggests an overwhelming confidence that our own morality would survive through thick and thin.” Her point was about what happens to people in desperate situations, and about judging such people from a safe and comfortable distance. It’s the kind of issue Orwell liked to take on. But it was taken as something much cruder, something that could be summed up with lashings of “white feminist” and “colonialism.”
Later she tried again.
Let me give a less fraught example. I once asked a class of students what they wd have done if they had lived in occupied France. They all said they wd have joined the Resistance. The logic of statistics suggests the majority wd have been collaborators or kept their heads down.
— mary beard (@wmarybeard) February 17, 2018
Ah yes, just as students asked about the Milgram experiment all confidently say they would have stopped pushing the button, when in fact only a minority did stop. The students can’t all be right.
The truth is we don’t know how we would behave in emergencies we’ve never had to deal with. Judging harshly from a very great distance is easy but not all that fair.
Some got it, which is reassuring.
I've thought about that in a similar context: what would I have done to fight against slavery if I lived in pre-Civil War USA? Well, there's still slavery now, so presumably what I'm doing now.
— Graeme Edgeler (@GraemeEdgeler) February 17, 2018
Primo Levi in The Drowned & the Saved is v good on distance between modern well-fed, clothed & unfrightened students accustomed to democracy & people dismantled in the past by accretion via law & fear.
— Professor Amanda Vickery (@Amanda_Vickery) February 17, 2018
But many simply put the boot in, and one of the bootiest was another (less well-known) Cambridge academic, Priyamvada Gopal. She created a pretty intense pile-on all by herself, with lashings of extra venom.
Predictably enough, now we have the Innocent White Feminist Trying Hard to be Nuanced and Reasonable only to be Shut Down by Foaming Snowflake Unreasonable Crude People of Colour and Allies who are All About Howwid Howwid Rectitude. @wmarybeard thanks. I'll respond in due course.
— Priyamvada Gopal © (@PriyamvadaGopal) February 17, 2018
I’ve written a few posts about Gopal over the years, starting all the way back in 2007, when she was sticking the boot in Salman Rushdie, with equal venom and lack of accuracy. June 18th 2007:
Sir Salman, on the other hand, is partly the creation of the fatwa…The Sir Salman recognised for his services to literature is certainly no neocon but is iconic of a more pernicous trend: liberal literati who have assented to the notion that humane values, tolerance and freedom are fundamentally western ideas that have to be defended as such.
No he isn’t, no he doesn’t, no they haven’t. That’s crap. What they’ve assented to (the liberal ones – if they haven’t they’re not liberal) is the opposite: that humane values, tolerance and freedom are universal ideas that have to be defended as such, and that claiming they are a monopoly of any one region or nation or ethnic group is highly illiberal as well as dangerous.
Lisa Appignanesi gives Priyamvada Gopal one in the eye though.
During the dark years of the Fatwa, Rushdie lent his fame to help less well-known writers around the world who suffered similar fates or found themselves persecuted either by states or religious hierarchies for their work. As a vice-president of English Pen, the world association of writers, and for some years president of American Pen, he worked indefatigably for the cause of free expression, joining with us here to combat the worst excesses of the government’s “religious hatred” legislation. Perhaps in awarding him this honour, the government has also come to recognise the crucial importance of a freedom which underpins so many others. Rushdie’s “services to literature” also extend to a singular generosity in helping young, and particularly Asian, writers make their way in what is often a difficult literary marketplace.
Universal values, universal liberal values, not western, not European, not white. Universal. Think about it, Priyamvada Gopal.
Nearly 11 years later she’s still not thinking about it.
This is the bit that could have been handled much better:
I get the point she was attempting to make, but she made it poorly. Yes, when there’s an enormous power differential, there’s a correspondingly larger temptation to use it. And when societal breakdown creates impunity for offenders, the temptation increases some more. These people have the means (food supplies in a starving populace) and can fully expect to get away with abuses, and that would bring out the worst in many of us.
Add in the fact that these people are far from home, making them more or less anonymous, and they’re surrounded by “others” — French-speaking black people who are very different from their friends, family, and neighbors back home. Conditions are ripe for devaluing the victims, and doing to these starving French-speaking black children things they would never do to nice white Dutch-speaking children back home, much the way soldiers are capable of massacres, rape, and torture that they would never do at home as civilians.
It’s worth thinking hard about this. How can humanitarian efforts be run so as to minimize these risks, for example?
But you know what’s amazing? I had no difficulty raising these points without at any point even vaguely sounding like an apology for child rape, and without saying anything the could be mistaken for a tu quoque. It would be equally straightforward to do it in 280 characters.
What’s odd is that Mary Beard, a published author (whose books I’ve purchased at full price) had trouble doing so after three tries — and moreover, has had similar difficulties more than once in the past. I make NO conjectures about why she has this difficulty. I note only that it’s weird.
The whole sorry episode does raise questions about government, UN and NGO organisations in general. How well, if at all, do they vet the people they send to these places? Are they users of prostitutes and porn? Have they ever come to police notice or had (in)formal complaints laid against them. How secure is their mental state? Does the field office at which they are based have dedicated support staff observing them and looking after their mental and physical health? How often are they rotated out of zone and for how log? During the period of assignment are they re-evaluated both for behaviour and mental/emotional state and removed if this shows deterioration?
Given the cost, I suspect that there is only a nod to this at best. It seems likely that the Oxfam case is but the tip of the iceberg, which is a real shame given all the good done by NGO’s.
As for Mary Beard, I totally get her point.
I can’t imagine that Asma Jahangir worked so long and hard for human rights as some besotted self-hating lover of Western values. Nor do I suppose someone standing up to a tank column in Tiananmen Square was any more “one of ours” in some provincial sense. “Being human, nothing human is foreign to me” – this is not a sentiment on which any of us has some monopoly and others have mere franchise rights.
If it helps them any, universal human rights and respect for human beings as such isn’t something we’re perfect about in the West, either. Obviously we’re not in practice – from Oxfam sex offenders to the Trump Administration – and we’re not in theory, either, given all the tribalists on the right and left. They’re values we’re all called to live up to, and any of us anywhere are morally fit to make that call. (Mind you, you bring it up, people are going to look right at you first and hard, so get your house in order!)
What ought to be stressed – what Beard had in mind, I think, and may not have hit ideally well – is that consistently keeping us all from being rights-violators is and will always be a lot more than merely our own conscience doing lonely sentry duty. It needs the backing of the rule of law, of provisions for basic needs, and of a certain threshold of safety. We’re not off the hook when we do commit crimes under the worst conditions for law-abiding, but we shouldn’t pretend we’re all certainly a better class of people than those who do go wrong when nothing is stopping them and everything is pushing them to.
Mary Beard’s reference to the French Resistance is accurate. The proportion of the population that actively resisted the Nazis was very small. After the war of course, many prominent French men and women claimed to have been active members of the organization.
I can remember a conversation, years ago, with a former member of the Nazi war machine, he claimed that the French were ‘friendly’ until the tide of war turned. The majority of the population kept a low profile and survived. The disturbing reality is that most people accept the culture of the organization that employs them, which is Mary Beard’s point.
A Masked Avenger
You also took a lot more than 140 characters to do it. Beard was using Twitter.
It really doesn’t take much charity to see what Beard meant, but Gopal and her like are not interested in honest discussion, let alone charity.
And my experience, as someone currently bucking the culture of my employer, is that there are few supporters. Most people are like, don’t rock the boat, don’t cause trouble, it could be worse, it’s worse somewhere else, I don’t want to get involved, I’ve been here too long to get involved, I haven’t been here long enough to get involved, I just want to get my work done…there are more.
That’s also what allows the bad sexual cultures of so many colleges and universities, the military, the church, the sports leagues, Hollywood – there is pain in resistance. There is punishment for resistance.
Still, the stuff happening in these places is so egregious, it’s difficult to see it and not think it relates at least somewhat to the overall culture here, as well. If we were living in a culture that valued women in the first place, that saw them all as fully human and autonomous, as having rights that equalled those of men, it might go at least a ways toward diminishing some of this. In a culture that sees women as sex toys and non-whites as less in some subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways, they’ve already been primed for what their misbehavior is likely to be when they get into the stress of a hazard zone.
It’s all part of the same loop we are are all swinging in.
Your quote omitted the bit where I said, “It would be equally straightforward to do it in 280 characters.” It occurs immediately after the point where you terminated your quote, funnily enough. 280 characters is the length of a tweet now. They doubled it a few weeks ago. If you like, I could give you a half-dozen example tweets that manage to dodge the ambiguity that Prof. Beard kept stepping in.
If some man posted ambiguously misogynistic tweets, I think you’d immediately appreciate that it’s not women’s job to make charitable guesses about what he meant; it’s his job to communicate more clearly. Same principle applies here, with respect to people of color and victims of child sexual abuse.
Even if you’re right, is the putative ambiguity so horrific that it merited an avalanche of venom?
Ophelia, didn’t you get the memo? Anything a white woman, especially an “older feminist” says on the internet, no matter how mild or extreme, merits an avalanche of venom. You must have missed that part in your “how to be a Twitter troll” training.
Unfortunately, the above sarcastic comment is all too true anymore. Older (white, cis-) feminists must police their words so carefully that they basically police themselves off the internet so no one ever misunderstands their words or ideas, no one ever mistakes what they are saying for something that doesn’t even closely resemble what they are saying, and no one has to hear their old, disgusting, non-hot, non-hip, non-woke voice. In short, if you want to post on Twitter, that’s fine. Just don’t be a woman above the age of 35.
Iknklast, @6
When I’ve tried to ‘buck the culture” of my employer, I invariably lost, which usually resulted in getting a job with another company.
“…. they’ve already been primed…” Agreed, organisations can give individuals ‘permission’ to indulge in repugnant behavior.
iknklast @ 9
I doubt if older, white feminists can protect themselves from ad hominem attacks by policing what they write or say. They’re guilty of being older white feminists. Gopal’s attacks on Beard seem rather racist in my opinion.
A Masked Avenger,
OK. I apologize for not reading your comment more carefully.
Please don’t make guesses about what’s inside my head, or about what might be inside my head in some theoretical circumstance. Thanks.
Now. “Ambiguously misogynistic”? If by that you mean, the tweets could be interpreted as misogynist or as not-misogynist, I hope I would use the principle and the spirit of charity. I’m very far from perfect about it, but, more and more, I dislike online pile-ons.
By the way, I weary of the “it’s the writer’s job to communicate more clearly” deepity. I hear it a lot, used as an excuse for attacking someone for something they said that has been misinterpreted. (Sometimes people–dogwhistlers in particular–are interpreted correctly and try to weasel out of criticism by pretending they “didn’t mean THAT” . I’m not talking about them. I’m talking about honest communicators.)
Of course writers should try to communicate as clearly as they can, but once you’re expressing thoughts more complex than “the cat is sitting on the mat,” conveying meaning gets tricky. Readers have to do some of the work.
This whole thing has been bothering me, but I’m not willing to engage with Mary Beard directly so I’m just going to vent my feelings here. The thing that stands out most to me is Beard’s clear feelings of inadequacy about not having done aid work herself. I get that; I was in academia for a few years and ended up giving it up as full-time work partly because I felt like I wasn’t ‘doing anything’. But I actually have done this kind of work. It’s challenging, it’s painful, you have to learn to take care of yourself as well as others and it’s very difficult to draw that line, you end up doing things you never imagined you would or could–as I’ve often said under more benign circumstances, ‘it’s amazing what you can do if you have to.’ Plenty of things I would have considered ‘civilised’, like washing and sleeping and eating, had to fall by the wayside. But you know what, whatever weird and inconvenient coping methods I found myself developing, I don’t ever recall thinking to myself that I wasn’t going to manage to get through a day without raping a child. Or raping anyone. If you feel your job makes it necessary to commit felonies to protect your mental health, maybe you should think about getting another job.
I did have sex while on this assignment, with a local man doing a similar job to me. Looking back, I kind of wish I hadn’t, but it wasn’t that big a deal. (I may be forgetting, ignoring, or repressing feelings about this, but so be it.) Also looking back, I realise that I had sex with this man because I had the mindset that when a man tells you he wants to have sex with you ‘yes’ is the default answer; you can’t really say ‘no’ without a good reason (i.e. a reason that he will accept). I don’t know or remember now if I consciously thought at the time that consenting was better than taking the risk of bullying or worse if I didn’t.
This argument reminds me a bit of how some people express their support of police officers who have shot unarmed black men–‘it was a dangerous and challenging situation, they were anxious and scared, you’d probably do the same’. Well let’s assume that’s true (it isn’t, but let’s go ahead and assume it). I haven’t been trained, I don’t have any institutional support, and I don’t have the legal and moral responsibility to protect and serve my community. If you, as a police officer, find it impossible to discharge your duties without murdering people, you might think about getting into another line of work.
@A Masked Avenger:
I’ll make one: perhaps the difficulty lies instead in people who chose to interpret her tweets uncharitably. Perhaps these weren’t (or at least weren’t all) examples of people honestly failing to understand what she was saying. Perhaps some of those people had poor opinions of Beard to begin with and chose – consciously or otherwise – to interpret what she said in the poorest possible light.
I tend to interpret people’s tweets in the light of what they’ve previously said and done. I’m admittedly biassed in favour of Beard but that’s not the only reason I chose the more positive interpretation of her tweet. Based on her past history I figured the most likely meaning was the charitable one. If it had been Trump, I’d have gone the other way.
My conjecture is that the meanings of Beard’s tweets weren’t really very difficult to understand (although the first was certainly poorly expressed). I don’t think her clarifications were poorly expressed and that at least some of the responses were gleeful dogpiling by people with another agenda altogether.
I second Ophelia’s recommendation of Jon Ronson’s book (and all his other books).
Well that’s not all that relevant, given you also took more than 280 to make the point.
It would certainly be nice if everyone’s communication skills were as flawless as yours… however, the fact of the matter is that people can miscommunicate sometimes. This includes authors and other skilled communicators, if rarely. Sometimes when it happens, we can afford a little charity in interpretation before jumping to / insinuating such conclusions as child rape apologetics, especially if the person does not have a history of suspect commentary of that nature.
Others may have used up that charity – Sam Harris and his history of ‘I’m not racist, you just misunderstood me’ comes to mind – but has she?
‘But I do wonder how hard it must be to sustain “civilised” values in a disaster zone.’
Well, it IS problematic. The Oxfam workers were not the direct victims of the disaster. They were there as the pointed end of the chain of assistance from the ‘civilized’ world. Their values were not at odds with their short-term survival. The women they exploited were the ones for whom the zone was a full-tilt disaster.
“It IS problematic” therefore it’s right and good to start and continue and encourage and enforce and promote a massive ragey pile-on?
Is it possible to take the position of, “The phrasing was poor, the wording and emphasis problematic, and the pile-on was absurd and excessive?”
Personally, I think Twitter ought to have a variable “reply lock”–you can prevent people from replying or retweeting you until they’ve actually Followed you for some period of time (say, from one month to one year). That would help cut down on dogpiling, simply because you couldn’t just jump into a conversation midstream with Dittohead-style repetition of someone who linked you here.
Did Beard ever acknowledge the error of wording in the original post? For folks I do follow who say something problematic, that’s usually when I nod and go, “Ah, right, fair enough, then.” But that acknowledgement IS important, because it stresses that you’re not just doubling down on a bad opinion, but rather, that the bad opinion being attributed to you is one you don’t actually hold.
@ Freemage, I’ll be frank and say that doesn’t go far enough. Mary Beard was, and as far as I can tell from my limited engagement still is, wrong about this. Wrong and surprisingly thoughtless (as I speculated, possibly letting her feelings of ‘not doing enough’ get in the way, as well as her familiarity with white literary tropes). In addition to what I’ve already written here (and I am still quite upset about the whole thing–serving overseas wasn’t the worst experience of my life, but it’s up there in the top five, and I wasn’t prepared to mentally and emotionally have to rehash this in a climate where people really ‘don’t get it’) she’s conflating aid workers and disaster victims. It may be slightly less wrong to cut victims the kind of slack she’s cutting aid workers, but it’s also wrong. She could read this book to get a sense of what being in a disaster is really like for the victims:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html
And now I have to go to work so will have to continue my emotional processing on the train…but will end with something possibly constructive. Some of the organisations working in Haiti know this, some other places have acknowledged this, but not enough–if you want to help in a disaster, instead of sending in a bunch of outsiders with expertise, support the locals. Provide as much money, infrastructure, logistical support and if necessary training (i.e. ‘capacity building’) as you can, but let local people, or at least people who have lived there for a while, get on with aid and rebuilding. There are problems with this approach (e.g. some people will use resources to enrich their own families, or settle old grudges), but if you’re aware of this you can put checks in place, monitor the situation, and make corrections if/when needed. But let people help themselves. This is a difficult lesson for us–we like to be saviours, and (some of us) love the drama–but it’s a better way to accomplish what we say are our objectives.