Why can't we say, "hey, no slurs please" without civilization collapsing into a communist authoritarian nightmare? It works in basically all aspects of public life and things seem (more or less) alright.
That all depends on the majority social opinion of what defines a slur.
The problem arising at the moment is aggression. Social opinions are being divided from every angle, almost systematically, categorizing and sorting the world's thoughts, behaviors, and opinions. And we can think of these categories as tribes, and we see a sort of competition. Since each person belonging to a subset necessarily feels a connection to their category, they seek validation. Since these categories are highly specific there will inevitably be conflict between them, differences in definition, and the seeking of validation paired with such differences will arise in aggression when confronted with another "tribe".
This is not about social courtesy at all. It is a sort of social warfare that would not exist if it weren't for the very specific divisions.
A group of 100 people can get along just fine with a certain mindset-- that is, each person sees everyone else as individuals, unique and variable. To keep the peace in such a situation, each person must understand they do not hold the truth for anybody but themselves, and they also must be willing to listen to others when they speak. But a group of 10 philosophers from differing schools of thought will likely be in for many heated arguments. Our social atmosphere at this period of time is like the latter case, and there is no agreement or moderation to be had. Each "school of thought" has its axioms, which cannot be violated if one is an adherent.
I think this is fundamentally wrong. I think we haven't placed enough emphasis on understanding other people, histories, experiences, and cultures, and at this point in our history we're being forced to confront that fact. For example, when women say, "hey we're sexually harassed basically all the time", or when Black people say, "hey racism is insidiously intertwined in our culture", and we ignore them, we're failing to respect their experiences.
This isn't warfare at all. It's just hard for us to understand an experience that's so different from our own. I had a girlfriend once who used to walk to work and she'd get catcalled basically every time she did it. She told me about this and at first I didn't believe her because it was so outside my experience. No one catcalls me! And no one catcalled her when we were together.
People just want to be respected. They want to be believed. They aren't waging class warfare or social warfare. They basically just don't want to catch shit all the time.
We'll (probably?) get past this. We just have to work a lot harder at listening and respecting other people.
Everyone deserves respect. But not everyone can be accommodated in speech. As a woman, I understand the cat-calling issue. It's annoying, and is often disrespectful and uncomfortable. I do often feel unsafe. However, I do not vilify men, and I do not try to pose this issue as a "man's problem". This, for me, is not a men vs women issue, it is cultural and often personal and individual. Some women like being catcalled, most men do not catcall. So, I deal with it on a personal level with my peers.
I specify these points because I do see an "us vs them" mentality in our current social atmosphere, and this is why my comment above illustrated competitive groups.
However, going back to my anecdote above, safety is important in society and we should all work towards allowing others to feel safe. However, when it comes to speech everything goes gray. So, necessarily, some people wish to sort it and make speech black and white. But it's not so. If a man yelled to me on the street, "Hey, beautiful!" I don't feel unsafe, but I will ignore it because I'm not interested and the dude will probably get the hint. If a man comes up close to me at night and says, "hey, you're sexy, where you going?" that man has something else going on and he probably can't be fixed by society screaming at him that he sucks for being a man. But then there's the in-between-- broad daylight, walking down the street, bro yells, "Nice ass kiddo what's your name, where you going?" I'll probably feel uncomfortable (the statement is too sexual and probing), maybe I'll go to the other side of the street. BUT I'm not going to insist that men stop vocally noticing attractive women! Societies always have a sexual component, people will always express sexuality. So it's case by case.
I find your concluding statements intriguing, and suspect I'm missing part of your point.
From my interpretation, your initial thesis is that speech should, for valid reasons, be curtailed so as to spare certain groups the very real trouble of dealing with, say, racism. Seems reasonable - my main disagreement would be that such a protection would be better applied universally (apologies if I have misunderstood, and you do too).
In your closing statement, you highlight that people just want to be respected and believed. I think most people would agree that's fairly accurate.
Unfortunately, the second point often intersects the first. In that often people will seek to silence others, usually with honest intentions. This part, the idea of good intentions, is where the wheels come off. By way of analogy, look at something like religion. How many arguments and wars, personal and multinational, have, if nothing else, used differing opinions to promulgate hate?
It feels almost impossible, in my eyes, to bridge that gap. One persons well meaning censorship, is another persons disrespect.
I likely have a coloured view of this, based on a few sour personal experiences, which I've seen mimicked elsewhere. For one example, I've been abruptly and sharply belittled for offering my thoughts on the impact of rape. I was told that I shouldn't comment, and it's not something that relates to me. I actually took it quietly at the time, but later, quietly, shares with the person that I have, in fact, been a victim of rape. Twice (over twenty years apart).
If we are talking about being believed and respected, I felt anything but. But simply because I didn't fit the stereotype, I was belittled and shamed. It was effectively discrimination, but noone found issue with it, because it was perpetrated by an acceptable person.
I guess the point I'm getting at is that it would be great if people could just not he assholes (sorry for the language) and forego the need for censorship at the same time. But reality, at least for me, seems to be the ideas are mutually exclusive to some extent
There's also a major difference between someone saying "hey, no slurs please in my house" and the gov't pointing a gun at you and saying "no slurs ever".
No one's going to jail for using slurs. The rhetoric around this has gotten really heated, especially given that we have many other actual problems (North Korea, global warming) we should be spending our energy on.
It isn't the government that is doing that. It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. If you want to use slurs, use them in a subgroup that for whatever reasons deem them acceptable. Don't use them around society as a whole as it has decided that there are social consequences for using them. Again, if you don't like it either campaign to change it or exclude yourself from society but don't conflate the social contract with government authoritarianism.
Right, separating the social contract from the gov't was what I was trying to point out.
"in my house" can be replaced with "on my website" or "in my restaurant" for most purposes. There's some stuff about monopolies and access guarantees to utilities.... but for most purposes the discussion is far from those cases I believe.
apcragg is probably referring to social mores and the social compact. Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.
> Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.
I agree, but as far as I know in the US the spirit behind such interactions is pretty much described in the constitution, and the first amendment makes it very clear that freedom of opinion/expression is paramount, no matter what.
If you mean Nazi Germany then your example is indeed quite interesting. Hitler did not come to power through mass consensus, or really any consensus. He came to power through political maneuvering. The Nazi's largest victory in anything like an open election was in mid 1932 [1] where they gained 37% of the vote. Failing to form a government, a new election was called in late 1932 [2] where the Nazis were down to 33% support.
In spite of the lack of support, Hitler gained the chancellorship through a series of fortunate (for him) events and backroom dealings. His supporters then escalated things they had already been doing which included disrupting meetings of opposition, preventing their speakers from speaking, engage in often violent conflict with supporters of other groups, and so on. This culminated then with the formal banning of speech that spoke negatively of their politics. The net effect of this was that in 1933 [3] the Nazis managed to get 44% of the vote.
After that, the ban on free speech and politics was escalated with him ultimately banning all political parties except the Nazi party. Had Germany had strong and real protections of free speech, it's very likely that the Nazis would never have been able to come to power. And they certainly would not have been able to hold onto it. And this is a recurring theme in nations that end up going down the path tyranny and oppression. The first thing to go is free speech, often started on the ground level by political supporters who work to stop people they disagree with from being able to speak.
It's easy to condemn things in hindsight and claim people should have seen what was coming. But that's disingenuous. People generally want to do the right thing, though we all disagree on what right is. Germany and the German people were struggling and felt they were being exploited by capitalism and certain unfairly privileged groups within society. Hitler used this to gain a minority support of people by with rousing talks against capitalism and against the privileged few. Few were thinking about the implications of such rhetoric -- the dangers of when groups become mobs.
I think the GP comment refered to current german policy.
In germany there is at the moment no free speech. There is however a freedom of opinion and preservation of human dignity. The NSDAP and other, similar organizations are banned as are their symbols (except in Science, Education and Arts, game publishers seem to be oblivious to the last one though)
However, as far as I can tell, the freedom of thought/opinion is valued greater in germany than on most American campuses these days.
First of all The Daily Caller is a conservative rag started by Tucker Carlson. Second the characterization of the bill comes from "critics"; it doesn't at all do what you say it does.
Stuff like this is designed to sound absurd. It's written to get people enraged so they worry that their fundamental rights are being abrogated. Conservative media is full of articles like this, and it's started a dangerous race to the bottom where now the right and the left are struggling to enrage their bases more than the other.
Sorry I'm not yelling at you but things like this are responsible for a lot of problems. Please read the bill and you'll see it's merely adding gender identification to the list of categories you can't discriminate on.
Except that is a non-issue. We're not actually heading into a "language certified by the party bureaucracy" situation, nowhere near it. It's a fallacious claim--heh heh, the slippery slope fallacy.
Again, we can look to Germany, and see how there's actually a totally thriving and healthy culture of free exchange of ideas, that also excludes naziism and nazi imagery; no one is suffering for that exclusion unless you're a nazi. (And, if I learned the lessons of WWII correctly, fuck nazis.)
Yeah Frondo has it right; it's a slippery slope argument. Your argument is essentially an argument against all laws like, "well we can't make everything bad illegal, so we shouldn't make anything bad illegal".
Furthermore it's important to say I'm not advocating for laws that dictate what you can and can't say. What I am saying is if you get on YouTube comments, HN forums, Twitter, whatever, and start tossing slurs you get bounced. It's a reasonable place to start I think.
That depends on what you mean by slur. If you just mean "bad word" then we can certainly replace some, but I am not convinced saying "John is feeble-minded" rather than "John is an idiot" is really different, although saying "John has a learning disability" may be more correct (and does offer the chance that is can either be worked around or fixed).
The world "nigger" is essentially completely banned from society, so much so that people call it the n-word, but has that changed attitudes? Or is the person just going to say racist stuff with African-American instead of Nigger?
Yes, the question is, why can't we? Becasue apparently we can't stop at that point. We've already gone so far past that that the slippery slope has been established in this case.
Yeah right, what's a bigger problem: not being able to say the N word or going to jail for no reason and feeling lucky that you weren't shot for no reason because you're Black?
Sure, if you force people to behave a certain way, the conflict can be avoided.
The problem stems from the fundamental fact that a very small percentage of people are assholes, a faction of people are intent on forcibly silencing and harming assholes for being assholes, and a faction of people are intent on not permitting that second group of people to do so.
That's the problem: two groups of people are prepared to use force to enact their contrary visions, while a third (relatively small group) is catalyzing the conflict.
Why can't we say, "hey, no slurs please" without civilization collapsing into a communist authoritarian nightmare?
Understanding that this proposal is clear, simple, and wrong is kinda the basis of reaching the Enlightenment. But because this is a bit subtle, many people -- too many people -- can't understand it. You have to think structurally, rather than emotionally.
1. Who do you think will be in charge of determining what is a "slur" and what is not? Is saying "It's OK to be white" a slur? How about "Women prefer to work with people, men prefer to work with things"? At the time of the Enlightenment, a slur was basically an insult to the King or Nobility. Which of course applied equally if you were criticizing their judgement/policies, which then grew some more. This was called "Lese Majeste" or violating the majesty of the Sovereign, and evolved into the hate speech laws, for example, in Weimar, that did absolutely nothing to prevent the rise anti-semitism in Europe. Banning hate speech has always failed to protect people against hatred. Now a lot of people think that only those who are oppressed will be protected by bans on slurs, but actually those who decide what is and is not a slur are not just going to be the oppressed. They will be also the ones who already have power, and they will use that ban as another lever to stifle dissent. So, that's one problem right there -- same problem as "Why can't we give this organization vague, broad powers and not have the powers be abused? What's so hard about that?" Well, it's not how life works, and we should know that by now. We should always think about policies with the view that untrustworthy people are in charge, rather than with a simplistic view.
2. In every society, there is an overton window of acceptable views. Society has many, many ways of punishing those who step outside of that window. Everything from social ostracism, to getting fired, to losing customers, etc. You don't really need to worry that society has no way of punishing those who offend them. In fact, it's really a silly thing to worry about. We don't need additional ways of enforcing thought-discipline and speech discipline beyond informal ostracism. Few can stand up to it, and when someone is saying something obviously hateful, those who disagree tend to be strengthened in their resolve against that view.
3. If society already has informal ways of curtailing offensive speech, what is the harm of additionally formalizing more policies or laws that (according to 1.) will curtail speech that elites find offensive? And what is the benefit of not formalizing them? This is what the Enlightenment thinkers understood, but which many have now forgotten. The benefit is when the overton window as espoused by the elites doesn't match with the overton window of society as a whole: in normal situations (both overton windows are the same), you don't need to exert additional pressure on the person engaging in transgressive speech, because they wont find an audience. But what if they do find an audience? That's usually the "emperor has no clothes" scenario, where those in charge of the institution have an overton window that is different from members of the institution, or a sizeable minority of members. In that case, people will listen to the transgressor and say "hey, the emperor is naked!" while the emperor will accuse the transgressor of making slurs. That's the situation in which freedom of speech is so crucial -- when it will resonate and the normal social pressures don't quash the transgressor. This is the example of "It's OK to be white."
So freedom of speech serves as a safety valve from the elites enforcing their bubble. No one cares about actual slurs -- those that don't find an audience -- society will always punish those people. No one cares about freedom to remain within the overton window of the elites. Those aren't considered a slur. All that matters is the ability to mock someone for being naked, when many believe they are naked. But to protect this valuable corrective mechanism, we have to protect all slurs, knowing that what is outside both windows wont find an audience and so we don't care if it's spoken.
But what if a sizeable minority of people really are awful people -- e.g. racists? Wont silencing them teach them to not be racists? Can't the elites force a large chunk of the public into believing something they don't by banning the airing of opposing views? No, they can't.
Part of the reason the Weimar hate speech laws didn't work, although many Nazis were arrested for hate speech, was that seeing people arrested solely for expressing their views gave them sympathy with the public and promoted their cause. Just as the anti-fascist movement gave rise to the SS and strengthened fascism, so the anti-hate speech laws radicalized Germany towards hate. It's funny how well meaning things can backfire, but at some point we need to learn from history. So in that situation in which you have a sizeable minority that is racists, you have to deal with that head on, by letting people speak (and making a fool of themselves), and you have to debate them openly in a war of ideas, rather than by suppressing their speech (and making them appear as unjustly muzzled). If someone who says "It's OK to be white" is really a racist, and they have a podium, they will soon say things a lot less benign, and people will hear that and be disgusted. Others, who also have their own podium, will counter. But if the same person is punished merely for saying "It's OK to be white", then they will be viewed more favorably. So you have to let them speak. They have to be free to air all of their hate, so that it can be debated openly, so people can see it and reject it.
You can't discipline society to be more open minded than they are by policing speech. You can't give moral authority to the racists that they wouldn't otherwise have. No one has ever defeated (or even weakened) racism by banning racist speech.
But if you are only thinking emotively, rather than structurally, you don't see the role that free speech has to play in keeping foolishness in check, whether by letting extremists discredit themselves, or by showing the emperor that they have no clothes. You are thinking simplistically ("X offends me, so why can't I ban X") rather than structurally. And by doing so, you lose an important corrective mechanism and end up with a very sick society as a result. As well as a more racist society.
So the Enlightenment view is to let people speak, and not fret so much about slurs. The slurs will take care of themselves, and will also keep people honest. Society must be one in which there is an open exchange of ideas, especially ideas that many find offensive. It's just a shame that we are losing an appreciation for this view in our war against impoliteness and our forgetting of our history.
The problem arising at the moment is aggression. Social opinions are being divided from every angle, almost systematically, categorizing and sorting the world's thoughts, behaviors, and opinions. And we can think of these categories as tribes, and we see a sort of competition. Since each person belonging to a subset necessarily feels a connection to their category, they seek validation. Since these categories are highly specific there will inevitably be conflict between them, differences in definition, and the seeking of validation paired with such differences will arise in aggression when confronted with another "tribe".
This is not about social courtesy at all. It is a sort of social warfare that would not exist if it weren't for the very specific divisions.
A group of 100 people can get along just fine with a certain mindset-- that is, each person sees everyone else as individuals, unique and variable. To keep the peace in such a situation, each person must understand they do not hold the truth for anybody but themselves, and they also must be willing to listen to others when they speak. But a group of 10 philosophers from differing schools of thought will likely be in for many heated arguments. Our social atmosphere at this period of time is like the latter case, and there is no agreement or moderation to be had. Each "school of thought" has its axioms, which cannot be violated if one is an adherent.