Cruelty of Call-Out Culture
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> I’d say civilization moves forward when we embrace rule of law, not when we abandon it.
What Emily did that got called out (cyber-bullying) isn't against the law, nor do I think we want it to be (for freedom-of-speech reasons). Shaming Emily for her prior abuse isn't necessarily a problem but social media knows no bounds and takes it way too far. Destroying Emily's life is probably not justice.
Bring that to the scale of social media and it's a disaster. Suddenly thousands of anonymous strangers are piling on them and they're ostracized from their social group, out of a job, a home, etc.
Granted that's not to say you have to form up a judge and jury at home every time you tweet, but perhaps think twice about what we really know before we act.
People who destroy lives for political gain are not the people I think of as heroes in history. We need more discourse and more open discourse. We need less hysteria, shaming, and fear.
The Harvey Weinsteins among us could go merrily through life abusing dozens of women, and those women had no legal, social or cultural channels open to them to seek redress. All those channels were in fact lined up against them -- coming forward in such cases would just mean that the woman would be put on trial, both figuratively in the court of public opinion and sometimes even literally, as the abuser's lawyers could drag them into court for defamation or libel/slander. Not to mention that the victim would frequently become unemployable as other powerful people closed ranks to defend their friend, the abuser.
I don't disagree with Brooks that what has emerged is basically vigilante justice, and vigilante justice is by its nature coarse and indiscriminate. We don't want a society where vigilantes are roaming around dispensing justice. But when large numbers of people who have suffered wrongs have no institutional channels through which they can seek justice, the emergence of those vigilantes is inevitable. People will only suffer in silence for so long.
Brooks' solution is that we should "embrace rule of law," but by that he seems to mean the laws as they stand today, and what that misses is that those laws are not protecting half the population from systemic abuse. If he wants people to respect the laws, the laws need to change so that people who don't have a way to seek justice in our system today can have one tomorrow. That would be good for everybody (except the abusers, at least).
But here, Brooks is conspicuously silent. He has lots of things to say about how we should all respect the law, but offers no suggestions on how to make the law worthy of respect. So for the abused, his "solution" boils down to: accept your fate. The problem isn't that you were abused, it's that you spoke up about it. Be quiet, sit down, shut up and contemplate the Majesty of the Law.
The irony of which is that Brooks' approach only guarantees the further flourishing of the vigilantes. When people can't look to the law to protect them, they inevitably look elsewhere. By his own logic, he, of all people, should be clamoring for the system to change so it protects those who are not protected today. That would be an actual effective way to foster respect for the law. Otherwise you're just telling the prey to have more respect for their predators.
This is one of those situations that observing the cruelty of call out culture doesn't have to mean you support Weinstein or the systems that allow for it.
I feel like your approach here is way too binary.
If only he had a column in the New York Times where he could tell us what he thinks on the subject!
It's never made clear, however, if the first guy was actually guilty of what he was accused of. I think that's more of a witch hunt, because we're vilifying people based on a single accusation - without proof or corroboration. Of course there may be more to the story here, it just hasn't been told in this particular article.
I always assumed a witch hunt was just it's own thing, it might get someone who is "guilty" or might not, it doesn't care / matter either way.
This is a puzzling position to take given that the primary tool of the "rule of law" is cycles of cruelty - prison, policing, and war. Compared to those, making Emily feel bad (and making her feel bad in a way she's okay with!) isn't cruel at all.
They see the Mexicans working at Tyson, not the corruption that turned Iowa's animal feeders into Tyson's bitches.
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
>The guy who called out Emily is named Herbert.
Ditto. Judge not, or be judged. I won't cry on the day the mob rips Herbert apart.
And the cycle will continue until everyone's broken or tired of breaking people.
It's a case of "play stupid games win stupid prizes".
But maybe the "push-button" denunciation culture has an agenda. We could be approaching a time where certain things we still take for granted today - e.g. good jobs - will become a lot scarcer. And how would one gain an edge? By destroying the competition by any means necessary.
Or so Peter Turchin and those who follow Structural-Demographic Theory seem to think.
NYT, if you want credibility on the issue of "call-out culture" and "social justice", for God's sakes, don't have a Republican columnist write the piece. I know David Brooks is a genteel Never Trumper. It doesn't matter. You don't build credibility to talk about an issue by speaking as the enemy.
An ad hominem is fallacious because it is irrelevant to the argument - an argument is not irrelevant merely because it is about the speaker. If the speaker's stated political goals are to oppose a political movement, arguments about how that political movement is actually bad should be treated with suspicion.
(Also, it would make more sense to attack the argument on the merits if it contained merits beyond "It's bad, and I don't like it, and here's an anecdote.")
Yeah it does matter. Are you calling out Brooks and just dismissing anything else about him ... as a person so you can call him out?
Are you trying to illustrate the point of the article in a weird way?
We should be thankful that the people who use these smearing tactics are so lacking in self-awareness. This makes them easier to call out to people of good sense who can still recognize real intellectual discourse.
For instance:
>But the “Invisibilia" episode implicitly suggests that call-outs are how humanity moves forward. Society enforces norms by murdering the bullies who break them. When systems are broken, vigilante justice may be rough justice, but it gets the job done. Prominent anthropologist Richard Wrangham says this is the only way civilization advances that he’s witnessed.
>Really? Do we really think cycles of cruelty do more to advance civilization than cycles of wisdom and empathy? I’d say civilization moves forward when we embrace rule of law, not when we abandon it. I’d say we no longer gather in coliseums to watch people get eaten by lions because clergy members, philosophers and artists have made us less tolerant of cruelty, not more tolerant.
Here Brooks straw-mans Wrangham and Brooks' other ideological opponents. Many/most of us would not say that "clergy, philosophers, and artists have made us less tolerant of cruelty". We would say that, as a society, we no longer gather to watch people being fed to lions because the lowest sectors of society have gained enough power to prevent themselves being fed to lions.
This difference in lens derives directly from Brooks' being a Republican: he comes from what has traditionally been called an "idealist" tradition, and he illustrates that here. He thinks that ideas move history, so better ideas (from philosophers, artists, and clergy) make society better.
In other traditions, particularly the one he's attacking, the engine of moral progress is the gradual, halting, progressive balancing of power across individuals and groups.
To successfully attack the "balancing of power" model, you have to actually name that model, then show counter-evidence. Brooks has instead casually elided the model he hopes to attack in favor of pillorying his purported opponents as incompetent at applying his model.
If you have a severe fever, you might have mononucleosis, and you might have meningitis (this happened to someone I know). Or you might have the flu. If I think you have the flu, I can't label running a test for mono as incompetent treatment of the flu. It's testing an entirely different hypothesis which stands on its own.
This goes to the heart of Brooks' conclusion:
>The problem with the pseudo-realism of the call-out culture is that it is so naïve. Once you adopt binary thinking in which people are categorized as good or evil, once you give random people the power to destroy lives without any process, you have taken a step toward the Rwandan genocide.
If you think that ideas drive history, call-out culture is the first step to the Rwandan genocide. If you don't believe that in the first place, you have no reason to accept the conclusion: preventing an "American Rwandan genocide", in your view, might require something else entirely, or such a genocidal war may be a priori so unlikely that it's no more worth "preventing" it than spraying "tiger repellent" on oneself when going outside.
I don't think the article was written as some sort of Republican or any kind of attack on ... whatever it is you think it is.
I think this really is more about behavior and our choices and the consequences in this day and age. That's it.
In some strange way your post also seems a bit like how the call-out stuff happens. The context of some event is skewed and there's no way for some folks to see anything else.
I think that talking about behavior and choices gets to the heart of it: we can't try to convince people to adopt different ideas or different culture and expect behavior to change. We have to examine, empirically, what is actually driving call-out witch hunts -- which I very much agree with you and Brooks are a terrible, stupid pathology of our present (polite, urban) society.
To stop this, we need to ask: why is this happening?
In particular it's noteworthy that when the left calls itself out, it reacts as the left desires (see Emily in this article, or Al Franken, or John Conyers, or ...), and when the left calls the right out, the right attacks the legitimacy of even being called out in the first place and starts making arguments about the "rule of law" because the law tends to be on the conservative side (since conservatives are, somewhat by definition, those who are on the side of what the law presently says). It's not new, and it's absolutely relevant context for this article.
That seems absurd.
Happily, the GP's statement makes an empirical claim, so there's at least some hope of it being testable.
That said, since the GP is making a questionable generalization about two large populations, it would be helpful it he/she provided a larger body of supporting examples.
>starts making arguments about the "rule of law" because the law tends to be on the conservative side
I think that definition of "conservative" is too broad, since it encompasses left-liberal aspects of the law. For instance, Title IX is law, and means that universities (such as where I work) have strong codes of conduct and reporting for sexual harassment.
>(since conservatives are, somewhat by definition, those who are on the side of what the law presently says).
Again, being a conservative is a different thing from using the status-quo as a reference point, and in particular, the latter is a near-universal human trait across most behaviors.