That Times Piece
It overlooks the uses of shame
I really didn’t want to write about this.
If you’re even Mildly Online, you no doubt noticed the uproar over The New York Times’ unsigned editorial published March 18, America Has a Free Speech Problem. In it, the Editorial Board considers the results of a poll it commissioned and previewed plans for continuing the discussion in its pages over the next few months.
I didn’t want to write about this because a) I think the piece is fatally flawed and b) I am friends with three members of the Times’ board — one of whom subscribes to this newsletter — though I don’t know how much any of them had a hand in writing it. (Unsigned editorials are unsigned because they are the stated position of the paper as an institution.)
But it kept bothering me, this bad position staked out by the best paper, so much so that I tried to figure out what I thought, and then thought I might share that here.
The editorial uses a poll it commissioned about “cancel culture” and its perceived chilling effects on all kinds of discourse — public, professional, interpersonal. But in trying to say something important about the Way We Talk Now, the editorial pits a concerted, conservative legislative effort to ban certain books, topics and speech acts against a perceived negative shifting in that discourse. That shift — which involves the fierce, loud, and sometimes rude policing of rapidly-changing social mores — can and probably does influence what people decide to say when, and to whom.
This has … always been true? Grandma’s “if you can’t say anything nice…” still holds1. It’s just that the number of people weighing in on what counts as “nice” is larger, more diverse, and — via that awful, coarsening social media — louder than ever before.
But first, the editorial. Right away, we’re off on the wrong foot:
For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.
As many (many, many) people pointed out, this sentence is seven words too long. The American citizens (ostensible) right is to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public, period. There is no freedom from shaming, shunning, or suffering other consequences of your words.
“However you define cancel culture,” the editorial continues. “Americans know it exists, and feel its burden.”
But, as The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah points out above, “however you define” cancel culture determines the extent to which you “know it exists,” not to mention the extent to which you “feel its burden.” To wit:
This, to me, seems like something we might call “cancel culture”:
all Americans should be deeply concerned about an avalanche of legislation passed by Republican-controlled legislatures around the country that gag discussion of certain topics and clearly violate the spirit of the First Amendment, if not the letter of the law.
The next paragraph goes on to list hundreds of examples of conservative attempts to outlaw books, or criminalize teachers for broaching certain topics.
Here comes the other side, though: “But legal limits are not the only constraints on Americans’ freedom of speech,” the paper continues.
On college campuses and in many workplaces, speech that others find harmful or offensive can result not only in online shaming but also in the loss of livelihood.
Are we talking here about people getting fired from jobs (which has probably happened), or are we talking about Middlebury students protesting the invitation of Charles Murray to their campus? (The protests of Murray were also speech, and in fact — because, pace the Supreme Court, “money is speech” — the students could be said to be protesting the expenditure of campus funds on someone whose opinions they found loathsome. They may have been mistaken, but they were within their rights).
Equating the “avalanche of laws” targeting teachers and libraries with the chilling effect on speech caused by a fear of facing online opprobrium is asymmetrical, at best. And yet, the conservatives learned it by watching us, apparently.
In passing laws that restrict speech, conservatives have adopted the language of harm that some liberals have used in the past to restrict speech — the idea that speech itself can cause an unacceptable harm, which has led to a proliferation of campus speech codes and the use of trigger warnings in college classrooms.
I submit a different reading, with some help from Jennifer Szalai’s “Critic’s Notebook,” also published on March 18. In The Many Uses (and Abuses) of Shame, Szalai uses the publication of Cathy O’Neil’s The Shame Machine to look at several books and what they have to say about that Thing We Are Supposed to Be Free From whenever we voice our opinions.
Shame, Szalai says, “requires an awareness of others and their disapproval, and it has to be learned.”
The Times editorial, in its section on conservative cancel culture efforts (you know, the ones with legislative teeth), notes that the explicit goal in some of these anti-CRT bills is the avoidance of shame:
An anti-critical-race-theory law in Tennessee passed last year, for instance, makes lesson plans illegal if any students “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress.” (Unmentioned, of course, is the potential discomfort felt by students who are fed a whitewashed version of American history.)
The aim of that “Overzealous/Woke Left/BLM/Marxist/MeToo mob” version of cancel culture, the one that consists mostly of yelling online, and possibly passing institutional — not governmental — speech restrictions, trying to increase levels of “discomfort, guilt, anguish” etc. among those in power, in the hopes that some things might change.
In that light, then, this result from the Times poll signals the effectiveness of that shaming effort. (As a writing teacher, I wonder if we might also consider it a signficant increase in audience awareness?)
Some of the great thinkers thought shame was good, actually: “Aristotle thought of it as fundamental to ethical behavior; Confucius saw it as essential to social order.”
Michael Hobbes, a writer who has made a name for himself debunking moral panics old and new, has on more than one occasion said something to this effect: so often the things we call cancel culture are just … culture.
That is, the culture is always talking to itself, always negotiating and renegotiating the boundaries of acceptability. And yes — the right to say whatever hell you want is sacrosanct. But the right to say whatever the hell you want and remain in polite society has never existed. The contours of “what is acceptable in polite society” are ever shifting (and, as Szalai notes, the permission to no longer worry about those boundaries was a significant number of people found (and find) invigorating about Trump.)
Shame, in this context, is a tool of the underdog. “In some cases, shaming is all we have,” Szalai quotes from Jennifer Jacquet’s 2015 book Is Shame Necessary? (The subtitle of which, I note, is “New Uses for an Old Tool”).
Frederick Douglass used it, in his crusade for abolition: “Douglass couldn’t appeal to government authority, but he could appeal to its ostensible ideals,” Szalai writes.
But, as Szalai and Jacquet go on to point out: “Overzealous deployment can backfire, making the target feel victimized and even more isolated. ‘As with antibiotics, if shaming is abused, we might all end up as victims,’ [Jacquet] writes.”
The targets of shaming these days certainly feel victimized. Consider all the “cancelled” writers banished to lucrative self-employment on this very platform.
Even so, the more marginalized among us are still more afraid than others. The real disservice in this Times editorial, the thing that ate at me all day, is the conflation of elite self-censorship with legislative action aimed at banning specific books or words or speech acts.
Or:
Or, as Szalai says:
O’Neil herself allows that a person with plenty of status and influence in real life can feel victimized when shamed by a crowd of nobodies online, but she says that any attempt to lash out and turn the tables will just amount to punching down; such elite shamees are ignoring their own “power and privilege” and need to get a grip.
Or, as I say: Wanting things to get better doesn’t mean we get a pass on feeling bad about the way things were.
Not my Grandma, she loved gossip.
Long time listener, first time caller (commenter)... thanks for writing this! I am a digital subscriber to the NYT and I had not seen or heard about the piece (clearly I am insufficiently active on social media). I agree with you on the failed juxtaposition of "cancel culture" and active legislative attempts to invalidate and criminalize speech, but I'm in more violent agreement with the revelation (which should not be revelatory to the NYT editorial board) that free speech is not now (nor has it ever been) free of social consequences. Ever since I found my voice I have always been an outspoken person and I have taken a ton of grief for it over the years. In other words, I've never operated under the notion that the constitution should protect me from the fallout of my words.
Also, my grandma never told me that bull$h!t about not saying something nice, either. They were two peas in a pod those two...
Shaming may be fundamentally communitarian, not divisive. The one who shames accuses the shamed of hypocrisy in light of their presumed shared values.