Dec
5
Convincing Americans to Shut Up
Some years ago, I had a lengthy email exchange with an old friend, one who was now very much on the left side of the cultural and socio-political aisle. At one point, he said or implied that some position I held (or implicitly supported, based on someone I quoted) was “not nice”. Having already established that I am a conservative Christian (which he once identified as but is now apostate), I guess I was supposed to feel shamed by his remark. I didn’t, since I wasn’t actually mean in any normal sense. If I recall correctly, I had simply stated facts that argued against his chosen lifestyle. Thus, he took offense.
In any case, I thought his remark was a little odd, especially since we were both grown men and not grade-schoolers. But, I have seen more of this sort of thing over the past decade, and it relates to something I read in Ben Shapiro’s most recent book, The Authoritarian Moment (2021). I have reproduced a section from it below:
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“The Left has spent decades gradually suppressing most Americans — and encouraging conservatives to suppress themselves. The process began with an appeal to politeness; that appeal became a demand for silence; then the demand for silence became an order to comply, repeat, and believe.
This was a heavy lift, and it didn’t happen overnight. The Left began with a simple recognition that both conservative and liberal philosophies have soft underbellies. For conservatives, the soft underbelly is a militant insistence on cordiality. Conservatives were, until Donald Trump, deeply concerned with personal values in their politicians — but they were insistent on them in daily life. One of those virtues was peacefulness, affability, treating thy neighbor as thyself. As philosopher Russell Kirk suggested, conservatives believe in peace and stability, in human imperfectability and in community. If we believe in peace and stability, that requires tolerance; if we believe human beings are imperfectible, we shouldn’t be too quick to judge; if we believe in the value of community, we must be willing to forgive small slights. These are nuanced ideas, but all to often conservatives boil them down to being proper. And by being proper, conservatives all too often mean being inoffensive.
But being inoffensive is a bastardization of the call to decency. Conservatism doesn’t merely believe in anodyne cordiality — a cordiality that looks the other way at cruelty, or requires silence in the face of sin. Conservatism promotes certain values that come into conflict with leftist values. Conservatism relies on moral judgment, too. Conservatism believes that friendship relies on willingness to steer those we love away from sin: as the Bible states, ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart. You shall surely rebuke your fellow, but you shall not bear a sin on his account.’
Nonetheless, leftism identified in conservatives a fundamental willingness to go along to get along — to see cordiality as virtue itself. And it wasn’t difficult for leftists to transmute some conservatives’ desire to be cordial into a political principle: anything considered offensive ought to be barred. This principle — we can call it the Cordiality Principle — manifested in ways directly contrary to the conservative ability to speak freely. Conservatism believes in standards of right and wrong, of good and bad. Distinguishing between good and bad requires the exercise of judgment. The Left suggested that judgment was itself wrong, uncivilized, vulgar. Judgment was, of course, judgmental. And this was bad. To be judgmental was to offend someone, and thus to violate the Cordiality Principle.
“Equality” and “inclusion” and “diversity” and “multiculturalism” became the bywords of the day. As conservative philosopher Roger Scruton writes, “In place of the old beliefs of a civilization based on godliness, judgment and historical loyalty, young people are given the new beliefs of a society based on equality and inclusion, and are told that the judgment of other lifestyles is a crime…. The ‘non-judgmental’ attitude towards other cultures goes hand-in-hand with a fierce denunciation of the culture that might have been one’s own.”
This Cordiality Principle gained serious traction in arenas ranging from arguments over religion to pornography to abortion to same-sex marriage. Many conservatives became uncomfortable standing up for their own principles in polite company, or in moral terms — better not to be perceived as Not Very Nice. [Wow, that sounds familiar!]
The soft underbelly of liberalism to the Cordiality Principle was obvious. For liberals, compassion isn’t merely a principle: it is an ersatz religion. Where conservatives define virtue in accordance with religious precepts or natural law, liberals define virtue as empathy. Liberals see themselves as compassionate, at root; they see themselves through the lens of kindness. And it simply isn’t “nice” to quarrel with others, no matter how demanding. Niceness lies at the core of everything; better to bite one’s tongue than to start a fight, which might be seen as intolerant.
The Cordiality Principle was just the beginning. The second step came when leftists began to contend that judgmentalism wasn’t merely a violation of the Cordiality Principle, it was an actual harm. The argument shifted from “Just Be Nice” to “Silence Is Required.”
Now, traditionally, offense has not been considered a serious harm. J.S. Mill famously posited the so-called harm principle — the notion that activity that actually harms someone ought to be condemned, or even legally barred. But Mill himself rejected the conflation of harm and offense — just because someone found something offensive, Mill argued, didn’t mean that it ought to be regulated or socially banned….
The authoritarian Left has artificially [determined that] every offense to particularly “vulnerable groups” — meaning groups defined as vulnerable by the Left in a kaleidoscopically changing hierarchy of victimhood — represents the possibility of profound offense. Those who engage in such offense must be silenced.
Thus, the Left has posited that even minor offense amounts to profound damage — hence the language of “microaggressions,” which posit by their very nature that verbiage is an act of violence. Microaggressions range from the utterly anodyne (“Where are your from?” is apparently a brutal act, since it presupposes that the subject of the question is of foreign extraction) to the extraordinarily counterproductive (references to “meritocracy” are deeply wounding, since they presuppose that free systems reward hard work, thus condemning the unsuccessful by implication).
Microaggressions require no intent — intent is not an element of the crime, since we may not be aware, thanks to our “implicit bias,” of our own bigotry. They do not even require actual evidence of harm. Subjective perception of offense is quite enough. The culture of microaggression is about magnifying claims of harm in order to gain leverage. That leverage can grow to astonishing proportions: woke staffers got a reporter for The New York Times fired for using the n-word to explain why and when using the n-word was wrong. Times executive editor Dean Baquet even repeated the authoritarian Left’s favorite mantra: “We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent.” Regardless of intent. If you can be racist without intent, silence becomes the only protection for most Americans. After all, as Berkeley leftists chanted when I spoke there in 2017, “Speech is violence.”
But now the Left has gone further. Now, silence is violence. This idiotic, self-contradictory slogan has been picked up by a myriad of politicians and thoughtleaders. The idea is that if you remain silent in the face of an evil — an evil defined by the Left, naturally — then you are complicit in that evil. It’s no longer enough to oppose racism, for example; you must carry around a copy of Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, announce your white privilege for the world to hear, and prepare for your inevitable atonement. If you don’t, you will be deemed an enemy.
Now, don’t mistake the slogan “silence is violence” as a call for open speech. Far from it! “Silence is violence” means that you must remain silent, but only after “doing the work” — learning why your point of view is utterly irrelevant, ceding all ground to woke leftists, and becoming a crusader on behalf of their point of view. If you refuse, you will be targeted. Abject apologies will be demanded. The only way to escape the social media brute squads is to become a member, baying in unison.”
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If only we could all learn to be “nice” like the tolerant and non-judgmental Leftists….
