The problem of the preferred first speaker
More on the Harper’s Letter. From PrawfsBlog:
The authors claim to “uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters,” but to fear that “it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.” Ken White (Popehat to those on Twitter and KCRW) sees the letter as drawing an untenable (or at least elusive) distinction between “silencing” and “more/responsive/critical” counter-speech. White labels this the “problem of the preferred first speaker,” the “tendency to impose norms of civility, openness, productiveness, and dialogue-encouraging on a RESPONSE to expression that we do not impose on the expression itself.” In other words, the original speaker is free to say what she wants however she wants; the response must listen to, engage with, and respond to that speech. “Shut up” is not acceptable counter-speech.
That’s interesting; I hadn’t thought of it before. Lawyers can be very good at that.
Both situations create a puzzle . We do not want people to lose their livelihoods for their speech, nor do we want speakers chased off campus. But we also should not hamstring one side of the debate–to paraphrase Justice Scalia, we should not allow the original speaker “to fight freestyle,” while requiring counter-speakers “to follow Marquis of Queensberry rules.” I do not know the right answer or correct balance either to the recent online issues or to campus speech (the latter will not be an issue for awhile, unfortunately). But this letter does not provide it.
What I think is that it has to do with social media: it’s only recently(ish) that people have had to deal with hundreds or thousands of readers/listeners shouting at them all at once, as opposed to envelopes dropping decorously through the slot in the door or the phone ringing a little more often than usual.
I think you’re right that a lot of people just aren’t good at “weathering the storm” of an initial onslaught of social media attacks regarding their employee/business partner/whoever they’re being asked to disown. A lot of people don’t seem to grasp that in most situations, nobody can FORCE you to respond, and certainly not on their preferred timetable or in their preferred way. “Do nothing for now” is often the hardest advice to get people to take. Everyone is convinced that those emails/texts/tweet have to be responded to! We’ve GOT to call that reporter back and give him/her the quote they wanted! We’ve got to say SOMETHING! Never mind if we know what the right thing to say is.
One of the things that Trump stumbled into is that any scandal burns itself out if you don’t give the press a “second day/week story.” At a certain point, “Trump continues to refuse to apologize for X” ceases to be a headline you can run. Other politicians get sucked into an extended series of scandal responses, each one of which generates a new story. Not that Trump is the only one. Remember Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia? Once it became clear that he wasn’t going to resign over that blackface scandal, and the legislature wasn’t going to impeach him, it stopped being a national story, because you just can’t write up “Day 27: Northam Still Governor!”
Conversely, the coronavirus pandemic is a story that keeps going, and Trump’s stonewall technique doesn’t work, because the media can keep updating the death count and running new stories about new hotspots, equipment shortages, testing problems, etc.
Anyway, drifting a little off topic there, but all to say that I think if decision makers chilled out a little instead of looking to throw someone under the bus at the first sign of controversy, it would be helpful.
That is an interesting analysis, but…I think it falls apart with the trans issue. There, civil speech is met with calls for deplatforming, banning, and even dying in a grease fire. The first speaker is to be vilified, pilloried, and hung. Dragged behind horses if possible. I mean, seriously., what JKR said was hardly uncivil or anything goes, but the responses were, in many cases.
iknklast, I don’t think Ken White is saying that everyone follows this “preferred first speaker” approach. He’s saying that this is what the Harpers’ letter writers are (implicitly) calling for.
Michael Bailey was accused of molesting his children and their pictures were posted on social media by trans activist Andrea James. Maya Forstater’s expressed opinion cost her her job. JKR’s civil arguments were met with hundreds of calls for her to suck girldick, some of which were posted in reply to children sharing their drawings of the Ickabog.
Thses distinctions aren’t all that tough to make.
And I just found out that Matt Yglesias has been reported to his employer (Vox) for signing that letter.
I don’t know. “Shut up” seems a reasonable response. Or, if the forms of civility preclude that particular phrase, then, “Your ideas are rubbish, and you would do the world a service by remaining ailent,” should suffice.
After all, the ridiculous deserves ridicule.
While there is no general obligation to engage substantively with an argument, one can be aubject to the hypothetical imperative.
Not so long ago, there was an American theologian (whose name I forget) who used to do rather well arguing against the theory of evolution in debate with biologists by employing the ‘Gish gallop’. Finally, the biologists realised that the best thing to do was to ignore the man and not join in debate with him. There is the naive assumption that because all human beings are, apparently, equipped with the power of reason, if you reason with them in a reasonable way, they will all somehow come round, almost miraculously, to your way of thinking. Very nice for you. But as we know it all too often doesn’t happen. It certainly didn’t happen in Nazi Germany, where an old friend of mine, the now long-dead poet and essayist C.H. Sisson, was studying and where he observed a Jewish professor calmly delivering his lecture as young Nazi students raged and stamped throughout rendering what he said inaudible. It doesn’t happen in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’, after Brutus, having delivered his eminently reasonable speech. allows Mark Antony to speak. (In which connexion, Cicely Berry, the great vocal coach, particularly for Shakespeare, remarks in one of her books that she found working-class young-people as well as prisoners grasped Shakespeare’s language much more immediately than nice, well brought up and well-educated young people from the middle and upper classes since their culture was fundamentally oral and they understood well that words are weapons and can be wielded to gain power and status – the classes that actually possess power and status within a society are mostly oblivious to this aspect of language – and of their language in particular; or too polite to notice it.)
I shan’t mention his name again, but a certain well-known biologist with a website is an ‘absolutist’ where ‘free speech’ is concerned (he believes in abiding by absolute principles), and some time ago he grew exercised over the cancellation of an American Christian homophobe’s attendance at some conference on homosexuality in Jamaica, where he was supposed to speak. I pointed out that there is huge homophobia in Jamaica and a great many murders of homosexual people (mostly male), and that this man was going to stir a stinking pot, and not to engage in some civilised academic debate, and that whatever the virtues of civilised academic debate, that is not how language functions in the real world – even among actual academics: Dr David Starkey, the echt-english historian, has just rightly lost two academic positions after telling an interviewer that slavery cannot be regarded as involving genocide because there are too many ‘damn blacks’ around now.
And what of the role of American Christian missionaries in encouraging the passage of homophobic laws in Uganda, among other places? Does free speech cover their activities?
Again, there is the question of Facebook, which has allowed itself to be used to encourage genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ (what a lovely euphemistic word) in Myanmar, with fake accounts used by the Mynmar army used to stir up hatred against the Rohingya.
Watch a speech by Hitler.
It seems there is an extraordinary naivetie involved in the idea that civilised, reasonable dialogue is the fundamental function of language, and anything other than that a sort of straying from this function. Not that I do not value reasonable dialogue, but the pretence that language does not involve power and strong emotion seems to me to be risible. Look about you. Read some history. Read Shakespeare.
This amounts to analysis of discussion on the basis of which side is setting the terms of it. Whoever is chairing the whole thing has a responsibility to set the terms for each speaker and then to keep the whole thing within the framework of those terms.
The ‘Gish Gallop’ strategy of saturation bombing and of snowing the opponent with a blizzard of side issues holds the danger for those inclined to employ it that their bluff will be called on just one of them, on the basis that if said employer is wrong on that one, he/she is possibly-to-likely wrong on the lot.
A variant on this is for the speaker in attack mode to ask a question of the opponent. A compliant chair will allow it, if not, then that becomes the issue. But the asking of a question in a debate always puts the asker (ie interrogator) in the power chair.
Trump in his debate with Hillary Clinton (probably knowing that rationality was not his long suit) would leave his podium and silently move to a position directly behind her, placing her between himself and the TV camera. She at no stage departed from normal rules.
It struck me at the time that what she should have immediately done would be turn and face him, and ask at the top of her voice: “who do you think you are stalking, Buster? Get back where you’re supposed to be..!!”
My guess is that it would have won her overwhelming support from female voters, and thus the election. The Golden Rule is OK, but such situations demand that you do as you are being done by, in spades. Two eyes for an eye; two teeth for a tooth. At least.
Tim Harris #7, if that certain somebody has initials of PZM, that would be very ironic, since he has informed everyone he will not tolerate the gender critical feminist position (which he refers to as anti-trans to get the maximum sympathy and support from those of us who believe in equal rights).
I don’t get the impression the letter writers were against the idea of speakers ever suffering consequences. I mean, it seems perfectly reasonable to remove James Watson from positions he held when he expressed a really nasty point of view re: blacks (though all his years of being misogynistic apparently were okay with his employers) or to kick Rush Limbaugh out of his sports-casting role for his racist comments. Things like Lawrence Krauss are easier, when you have an allegation of actual sexual misconduct, but there is still the reality that in certain positions, people do need to allow for the fact that the person speaking can make the workplace/school nearly impossible for those who are in subordinate positions, or in the case of players, they are spreading their garbage far and wide. With Limbaugh, it was easier because of his long history of obnoxious nonsense, including race-baiting and misogyny, and he shouldn’t have been hired in the first place. The odds that he would be able to fully differentiate between his own shock-jock show and the demands of a more civil workplace seemed low enough to make him too high risk. They suffered consequences for his hiring, too, as did Atlantic when they hired Kevin Williamson for a brief time.
I do think there need to be rules of engagement, but at some point, we must have the ability to engage with those who don’t follow the rules, as Omar so well noted in the discussion of the Clinton/Trump debates. Clinton followed the rules; the one time she departed from them (basket of deplorables) she got reamed by people who were cheering on the rule-breaking of the asshole on the other side of the stage.
I think the biologist in question is more likely to have initials of JC, but since we’re speaking ill of PZM anyway… (Oh, we weren’t? Well, I won’t let that stop me):
His take on the Harper’s letter is:
I…. did not get that impression. I’m fairly sure they’re talking about a general problem affecting people in general and felt that being too specific would derail the letter’s purpose. PZ’s conclusion – that they wrote the letter to justify their own speech and protect themselves specifically – is one hell of a reach.
I must have missed the part of the letter that’s about trying to silence anyone. I didn’t miss the part where it says “The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.” which seems, you know, kind of the opposite of that.
He then criticises the letter for not explaining exactly how to fix the problem and ends with:
I think he started at the bottom and didn’t read farther than the signatures.
Yes you can tell the biologist in question is Jerry Coyne because of the sly “has a website” – Coyne insists on calling his blog a website and bans the word “blog” altogether. Commenters correct other commenters if they ever dare call it a blog. It’s one of his sillier quirks.
I think the letter is more than a call for civility. As I tweeted at Ken White, it’s calling on publishers, universities, and the like to stop rolling over and asking the mob to tickle their bellies.
“Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”
That shit does have a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
Thanks, latsot and OB. I didn’t catch that because I don’t frequent Coyne’s blog…sorry, ‘website’…I have looked in on it sporadically, but apparently not at the right time to catch that. Silly.
There are some interesting comments on the letter in the Guardian: “‘Is free speech under threat from ‘cancel culture'”? Four writers respond’. Digby at Hullabaloo (whom I have great respect for) also has an interesting comment on the opinion piece by Tom Cotton that the NYT published..
Iknklast – I was certainly not denying that we should have the ability to engage with those who don’t follow what we regard as the rules (as those biologists did who simply stopped having debates with the ‘Gish gallop’ fellow by refusing to bother to engage with him); I was simply pointing out that language is a far more ambiguous & complicated thing than free-speech absolutists often seem to realise. Following the rules entails understanding and good faith on both sides, and if those are lacking on one side, then there needs to be some serious thought as to how to engage with them. (Omar’s suggestion was a good one.)
Regarding the abuse of ‘free speech’, one only has to watch Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity & ‘Fox & Friends’, a title which looks likes that of a particularly grimm fairy tale, wherein the animals provide a semblance of debate when there is in fact none. Not to mention the Daily Mail, the Telegraph & other Murdoch publications & outlets.
There is also a thought-provoking essay in the London Review of Books (available on their e-mail service) by Pankra Misha entitled ‘Flailing states: Pankra Mishra on Anglo-America’, in which he draws attention to the publication of Tom Cotton’s op-ed in the NYT and the subsequent resignation of James Bennett (a resignation that is clearly made reference to in that open letter):
‘Mainstream periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic quickly mobilised against a resurgent left by promoting intellectual grifters and stentorian culture warriors while doubling down on their default pro-establishment positions. “The New York Times is in favour of capitalism,’ James Bennet, the newspaper’s editorial page director, told his colleagues, because it is the ‘greatest anti-poverty programme and engine of progress that we’ve seen’. Bennet, who had given space to articles that denied climate change, promoted eugenics and recommended apartheid and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, was forced to resign last month over an op-ed calling for military force to be used against anti-racist protesters.”
There seems to me to be rather too much attention paid to ‘woke’ culture and its very real deficiencies and disgraceful activities than to the more dangerous drum-roll on the right.
Latsot@10: Ah, yes. “Never mind what they said. I know what they meant.”
The letter-signers might have said X, but we all know they really meant Y. Rowling claimed to believe X, but because she’s a bad person, we can be sure she actually believes Y.
Why do they bother parsing the words if they’re just going to disregard them?
Re #17
There was a “point-by-point rebuttal” of Rowling’s essay that was astoundingly awful. There were people assigning “meaning” to Rowling deleting a tweet of thanks to Stephen King, meaning beyond the realization he wasn’t actually being supportive. We want them to read the actual words, but even when they do so, they use malicious filters. Is that any better than making stuff up? I’m not expecting agreement, but good-faith understanding of what was actually said would be nice.