Guest post: Empathy cannot fix a cry bully
Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on More emp and und.
There was an essay on Forbes the other day about gatekeeping in fandoms, which I actually think is kind of relevant.
…the accusations of gatekeeping are being used to leverage access to effectively run each fandom and acquire power as a result.
I think there is a lot of truth in the complaints fans of various properties have about “wokeness” invading their spaces. A lot of the time, the issue keeping people out of specific hobbies isn’t that the hobbyists are saying “This isn’t for you” – it’s that the hobby just isn’t the “excluded” person’s bag.
Which is fine. You’re not being excluded if the thing isn’t to your taste, to a large extent you decide what those tastes are. A piece of bad media isn’t an exclusive club, its a failed one.
Now, if we look at womanhood as a fandom – it sort of fits the pattern of dictatorial types demanding to be included in it, only to then start kicking the people who were already there out of it.
“White feminism”, “Terfs” and the focus on an “intersectionalist” feminism that represents everyone except those women convicted of having privilege, which seems to be all of them.
I’ve long been an advocate for the idea that social progress benefits everyone, not just the group that gets progressed. That said, in order to be able to function, a social justice movement has to be about its core issue – so feminism may benefit men in various ways, but it cannot be about men’s rights.
The drive for a peculiar inclusivity in which there are large parts of the movement you won’t march with because they’re not “intersectionalist” enough, sounds like the old princess bride meme. “You keep using that word…”
So we get to “More empathy and understanding” – I can see what Streeting is trying to do. I really can. He’s doing the both sides thing, in order to try and avoid antagonizing one side, to bring people to the table.
The trouble is – one side’s been flipping tables for a few years now, has been actively working to exclude voices from the other side, has sent death and rape threats to the other side, has tried to ruin the other side’s careers and in some cases succeeded in doing precisely that.
And it isn’t simply a matter of TRAs doing this – but a broader movement of social justice nitpickers.
In December, Lindsay Ellis quit YouTube due to the harassment she’d been receiving from about March, when she was declared a villain for saying a movie looked a lot like Avatar the Last Airbender. The creators of the movie credited Avatar as one of their inspirations, but somehow Lindsay saying it was similar, was racist against Asian people. It wasn’t even a particularly well regarded movie.
Ellis is not on team TERF, but the harassment was bad enough to just destroy her. Her career as a critic started at Channel Awesome, a clusterfuck of sexual harassment, at least one pedophile, egotistical wankery and general unpleasantness, and it was the social justice crowd that did her in.
How can one have understanding and empathy with sociopaths? With people who behave in ways that are utterly monstrous, while loudly proclaiming that they’re advocating for victims?
A few years ago, I would have decried this as respectability politics, but I’ve since come around on that. There is a degree of respectability that is a necessity for conversation to even be possible.
And the problem is not a “both sides” issue. Kathleen Stock isn’t trying to get book shops to stop stocking her opponents’ books.
One side’s “empathy and understanding” is being exploited by a side that shows no intention of showing either trait, that has a long history of exploiting “empathy and understanding” to get away with being vile tin-pot dictators.
And yes, I get the argument that “Freedom of speech only applies to government” – and I utterly disagree. I think civil rights can be violated by individuals and organizations that are not the government. This is why I’m a liberal, and not a libertarian.
The harassment campaigns we’ve seen over the past few years are vigilantism, which is the alt med of government. Much like the medical establishment, we know that government has a lot of problems – it is a corrupt, inefficient mess that quite frequently goes badly wrong.
This is why we regulate the government. The solution proposed by vigilantes is the same solution proposed by alt med, to turn to a parallel system that has none of the safeguards we put in place to do the same job, in the blind belief that this will not result in the same problems only worse.
The restrictions we place on government are things we’ve more or less agreed that we shouldn’t do – trying to get around those restrictions by proclaiming it isn’t government, doesn’t get around why we put those restrictions on the government in the first place.
Saying it is not government doing these things does not mean it is fine to have people arbitrarily dishing out punishments for what they consider wrongthink.
The solution here isn’t “empathy and understanding” on both sides, it is an enforcement of basic standards. Standards which should be aside from ideology. “Don’t harass people”, “don’t try and get people fired”, “don’t send death threats” etc…
These are basics.
Doing all of that stuff “for a good cause” doesn’t excuse any of it. If you stalk someone in the name of social justice, do you know what that makes you? A stalker.
The social contract by which discussion is made possible has been systematically violated at every turn, and it is not going to be fixed until we recognize who exactly has been violating it. I was recently introduced to the term “‘cry bully” – and empathy cannot fix a cry bully. Empathy is the cry bully’s weapon of choice.
We tend to think of apathy as a bad thing – but in this case, it really is necessary to apply it, because of the abuses of empathy that are rife in this debate. We need to stop acting like the would-be dictators’ sob stories are worth listening to, and start looking at what is actually being done.
“In December, Lindsay Ellis quit YouTube due to the harassment she’d been receiving from about March, when she was declared a villain for saying a movie looked a lot like Avatar the Last Airbender. The creators of the movie credited Avatar as one of their inspirations, but somehow Lindsay saying it was racist against Asian people. It wasn’t even a particularly well regarded movie.Ellis is not on team TERF, but the harassment was bad enough to just destroy her. ”
The irony is that Ellis herself had participated in the public shaming of another YT video maker, Tom Scott. Scott had worked with someone who had expressed “problematic” opinions in the past, and this was enough to get Ellis to go after him.
Now Ellis’ friends like Allison Pregler can’t defend Ellis effectively, because they spent *years* defending online shaming, public denunciation, and guilt by association.
If you expressed even the mildest opposition to this behaviour within the communities Ellis frequented; you were”toxic”, “bigoted”, “entitled”, a “TERF”, a “SWERF”, “fash-adjacent”, a “Trump supporter”, a “Farage supporter”.
https://twitter.com/AllisonPregler/status/1280809273757519872
https://twitter.com/AllisonPregler/status/1475653227031019522
Link to a thread about Lindsay Ellis and Tom Scott:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlockedAndReported/comments/rqj4e6/lindsay_ellis_tom_scott_and_cancel_culture_circa/
I guess New Model Army were right:
[i]”Purity is a virtue, purity is an angel,
Purity is for madmen to make fools of us all.”[/i]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd0RHvFNPqA
There are a lot of jokes about purity and puritanism in Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. They were not fans. (Small p puritanism because it hadn’t achieved big P status then.)
Kind of related:
I’m reading “Pure – inside the Evangelical Movement That Shamed a generation of Young Women..”
I just started Chapter 11 which starts with the interview of someone who was a girl in the evangelical subculture, noticed she had sexual feelings about other girls & as of the interview considers him/herself a trans-man.
Would she have gone for trans if she hadn’t bought the ‘this is what men do & like & that is what women do & like’ BS of the purity culture?
Time to finish the chapter & look for evidence for & against the idea that she wouldn’t.
What a great comment.
Lots of good insights here. One with which I particularly agree is: “I get the argument that “Freedom of speech only applies to government” – and I utterly disagree. I think civil rights can be violated by individuals and organizations that are not the government.”
Very much this. There’s the legal argument that only government is forbidden from blocking free speech in the public arena, and then there’a the moral argument that it’s wrong to shut someone down from speaking honestly held beliefs. This opens up all sorts of issues, and those too are worth talking about. How far is too far to bring a discussion, for example, in conversation over a friend’s dinner table? I have an opinion about that, of course, but it is not my main point, which is: is it morally correct to shut down, for example, Maya Forstater and to get her fired from her job for standing up for what she sees as her fundamental rights, no matter where she says it? I don’t see how any decent person could answer that in the affirmative.
This is a truly excellent comment, whole thing. Much to think about.
Bruce Gorton wrote:
I’ve recently been considering the concept of “concept creep,” the phenomenon of “the gradual semantic expansion of harm-related concepts such as bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma.” When I was a kid, station wagons were great because you could lie down and look out the back window. I could also roam the neighborhood and woods by myself when I was 6 or 7. Fewer children get crippled in crashes, but they now apparently call social services if you allow your 11 year old to go to the park.
That good vs. bad of two harm-related tropes seem to have gone particularly out of whack recently. First off: “Cut Toxic People Out of Your Life.” It was originally designed to counteract the popular bromides about family being family, always forgive, don’t let it bother you etc. which were thrown at people in really intolerable relationships: highly abusive parents, very controlling spouses, friendships which were nothing but manipulation and insults. Good advice — but as a last resort, and applied only to extreme cases. Needless to say, we’re watching it walk over reasonable boundaries. As BG points out, it turns into a purity spiral. The analogy to alt med applies here, too: get rid of (arbitrary, undefined, life-threatening) “toxins.”
Second, I’m going to argue that what constitutes a “phobia” leaped right over THE reasonable boundary when it stopped being clinical terminology in psychology and started being a way to describe ideological “hate and fear” coming from “hate groups” (definitions of both also running amok.) I get it. Gay rights found “homophobia” an effective tool for badly-needed extensions of civil rights. And LGBs certainly had reason to see those who wanted them prevented from getting married or even working with children as suffering from irrational hatred and fear.
But — with some notable exceptions of doctrine and individuals — homophobia isn’t actually a phobia. It isn’t preventing people from living acceptably normal and even happy lives as they try to prevent others from doing the same for reasons they’ve examined and accepted coming from within their culture. That’s critical. It means that, though the doctrine be monstrous, they themselves were not monsters. Thinking that the problem was some blameworthy sort of mental illness held by Bad Guys may have been politically useful, but it’s not that mentally healthy in the long run.
When I hung out in 2 popular atheist forums I ran into this attitude applied to religion. It was a mental illness; conservative Christians were toxic people; fundamentalists saw the world through a haze of hatred coming directly out of personalities which enjoyed it. I spent years arguing that no, the religious are normal people who, in a sense, love too much, having fallen under the spell of a moral doctrine which allows no debate. My voice wasn’t alone, of course, but seemed to have little effect on the general zeitgeist.
So I wasn’t then particularly surprised when the Trans Issue received the same treatment: those who disagreed were sick, sick people. The most popular transwoman commenter in the forum played up the “they’re sociopaths who enjoy watching suffering” to the max, receiving a mountain of upvotes. Transphobes were just like Homophobes who were usually the same folk who were phobic against atheists: all having the one mental illness which gathers no sympathy or accommodation. They were haters both phobic AND toxic, of course.
The basic standards of decent behavior were nibbled away by Concept Creep.
Sastra,
German has two suffixes for what has been elided to “-phobia” in English; the most obvious is, of course, “-phobie” (pronounced “fo-bee”), either brought in from English or taken from Greek after the concept crept into the German-speaking world.
The other suffix is “-feindlichkeit” (pronounced “find-lich-kite”, where the ‘ch’ is like a cat’s hiss). It is more “authentically” German, and — though not necessarily therefore — more apt at least as it applies to the concept of homophobia. As a base word, “Feindlichkeit” translates something like “enemy-ness”, or hostility. Hostility can be borne of fear and paranoia, it is true, but as you say, this is rarely true for the hostility shown to homosexuals.
I must admit, though, that I have only seen this suffix employed on Twitter in “Transfeindlichkeit” or “Queerfeindlichkeit”, which German TRAs and their allies happily apply to any opinion that does not defer to the woke consensus (which is at least as extreme as the same consensus on the other side of the Atlantic). A quick googling confirms that “Homofeindlichkeit” exists, however, so I am confident in this bit of analysis.
Again, I think the following quite by Ece Temelkuran (in another context) is apt (feel free to substitute “empathy and understanding” for “respect”):
Sastra #
That’s the problem. though, isn’t it. My main problem with faith-based religion (and it’s secular equivalents) has always been the part about leaving the most important questions in life up to blind faith in the first place. There are no brownie-points for doing the right thing “as one sees it” if the way one sees it is not based on any honest effort to find out what’s objectively true or false.
I increasingly see the world as populated by dangerous ticking time-bombs ready to explode at any moment (if they haven’t done so already). There’s a common movie trope in which an evil hypnotist has placed his victims under a latent hypnotic influence and only needs to provide the right external trigger to turn them into his personal army of zombies. That’s increasingly how I see the real world except that:
1. No evil hypnotist is required.
2. The predisposition to turn zombie was always there, ready to be activated at a moment’s notice by the right external trigger (something someone said on the internet, a new fad or craze going viral etc.)
It is my sad conviction that the only thing preventing most people (probably including myself) from turning zombie, is that the right bit of stupidity and evil simply hasn’t been introduced to them yet, and if* or when it does, their burden of proof for accepting it as true beyond any possible doubt will not just be at zero, but more like minus infinity. I.e. no amount of evidence is ever going to prevent them from embracing it with every fibre of their being, and if that means throwing old friends and allies under the bus, going out of their way to destroy other people’s lives, even turning violent, then so be it. No price is unacceptable, no evidence too weak, no argument too sloppy, no claim too dishonest. It’s tempting to think that our current friends and allies would never do anything like that, but I’m sure we can all think of people we used to think about in that way, who would now make the zombies of George A. Romero look like beacons of rationality and thoughtfulness.
* It like every human brain has a built-in lock keeping the monster inside, and somewhere out there is a key that unlocks it. Some may have the good fortune to get through their whole lives without ever encountering their key, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.