You must understand that our civilization is so vast that we can’t have our minorities upset and stirred. Ask yourself, What do we want in this country above all? People want to be happy, isn’t that right?…Colored people don’t like Little Black Sambo. Burn it. White people don’t feel good about Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Burn it. Someone’s written a book on tobacco and cancer of the lungs? The cigarette people are weeping? Burn the book. Serenity, Montag. Peace, Montag. Take your fight outside. Better yet, to the incinerator. – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Though Ray Bradbury was much more a fantasist than a writer of science fiction, in many ways his predictions about the society of the future have proven far more prescient than those of his contemporaries whose writings are more grounded in hard science. One striking example is his depiction of future homes and cities as being constantly inundated by music, synthetic voices and fast-changing video images from huge screens and loud speakers in every conceivable location; the TV screens which start playing commercials when one passes them in a store are straight out of Bradbury, as are the video players we carry in our pockets and the earbuds and bluetooth sets in our ears. Most science fiction writers depicted future people as being better-informed and more scientifically literate; Bradbury realized they would, if anything, be less so. And while typical 20th-century literary dystopias featured top-down censorship by totalitarian governments who wanted to wanted to keep their citizens in the dark for political reasons, Bradbury alone understood that the censorship of the future would be lateral, grass-roots efforts pushed by ignorant citizens who wanted to remain ignorant and unchallenged by ideas which unsettled them.
We are living in the past of Fahrenheit 451, the early stages of a culture which values feelings above thought, the history of a world in which the solution to any troubling idea is to eradicate it. Right now it’s going on in the universities, where sheltered young people who have been coddled by overprotective parents for two decades are declaring themselves to be “triggered” or “offended” or even “violated” by ideas – whether spoken or in print – that they haven’t encountered before, or that contradict their opinions, or that they find unpleasant, or that bear some superficial resemblance to any of the preceding. Just as their parents “protected” them from these unpleasant thoughts by banning them from their homes with internet filters or “parental controls”, so they feel entitled to “protect” themselves – and every other person within their sphere of influence – from those bad, icky ideas by banning them. And just as they may have been shamed as children for “bad” thoughts, so they seek to shame others who originate such thoughts; sometimes these censors go beyond mere shaming to the desire to punish the Bad People, and often that punishment can be career-destroying or even life-wrecking.
But it’s not completely limited to universities, nor to insular corners of social media; as I wrote in last year’s essay for Banned Books Week (which in case you hadn’t figured it out from the topic, starts today):
…the urge to censor actually is [not]…limited to those traditionally labeled “social conservatives”…nowadays, the most belligerent, aggressive and effective proponents of censorship are those who…describe their targets with words like “sexist”, “racist”, “homophobic”, “objectifying”, etc…promoters of this chic form of censorship very often don’t call for the direct government suppression of their targets; that would, after all, be censorship, and every thinking person knows censorship is bad. So instead, they just “critique” the things they want banned and sling ad hominems like “misogynistic” at their targets’ creators, hoping to make them so radioactive in the public mind that risk-averse corporations will refuse to fund them…this isn’t technically censorship in the strictest traditional sense of the word, because it isn’t being forcibly executed by a political authority. Neither is Operation Choke Point direct criminalization of the businesses it targets; that doesn’t change the fact that those businesses are as effectively suppressed as if they had been criminalized…while [such methods] lack the violence associated with actual criminalization of forbidden ideas, they are still very effective in creating an intellectual soil highly toxic to free expression…
It doesn’t matter whether the excuse is “sin” or “feelings”, or the injured party is conceived of as an individual or collective, or the suppression comes from above or below, or the method is violence or economics; the suppression of thought and speech is evil, tyrannical and socially self-lobotomizing. As Ryan Holiday wrote in The Observer,
Your feelings are your problem, not mine—and vice versa. Real empowerment and respect is to see our fellow citizens…as adults. Human beings are not automatons—ruled by drives and triggers they cannot control. On the contrary, we have the ability to decide not to be offended. We have the ability to discern intent. We have the ability to separate someone else’s actions or provocation or ignorance from our own. This is the great evolution of consciousness—it’s what separates us from the animals…
Up until recently, Western society was built upon the premise that citizens were self-owning adults capable of self-determination and self-regulation, but as citizenship has been expanded over the last century and a half, the rights associated with it have been dramatically curtailed. As detailed exhaustively in this blog, modern governments believe they own citizens’ bodies and can control what we do with them to a terrifying degree; now our fellow citizens are trying to control what we can do with our minds. That is a two-pronged recipe for cultural suicide, and though it may be much too late to avert that, I consider it the duty of every freethinking, self-owning individual to do his or her best to at least go down fighting.
While I agree wholeheartedly with the thrust of your argument I’ve gotta disagree with some of the details.
First, I think we agree Bradbury was a master. But while his refusal to embrace transhuman utopianism was a bit out of step with the Golden Age of US science-fiction I think he fell squarely within a long tradition of quality SF from Wells to Lang & von Harbou to Orwell to Huxley to the bulk of New Wave authors who followed – notably Dick. Good sci-fi isn’t really about trying to extrapolate technological advances to predict the future but more often it uses fictional social settings to highlight current conditions within the assumption that however exotic the milieu, people will still be people. And because of that it still rings true long after most technology based futurism has revealed itself as hopelessly misguided.
Secondly, I don’t really think the urge to censorship is a rising trend, rather it’s adapted to changing conditions such as increased education and new communication media. You can’t burn books in cyberspace and you can no longer regulate what people see and hear through centralised distributors such as bookshops and cinemas so thought-crime is becoming more prominent and the locus of moral control is moving away from regulators and twitching suburban curtains to academia. When I was a kid it was almost impossible (and illegal) to get a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Australia and a Danish textbook aimed at secondary students (The Little Red School Book) was also banned and virtually unobtainable, despite the fact many academics championed them. But recently when Christian fundamentalists in New Zealand had The River banned from bookshops Ted Dawe saw his online sales go through the roof and it’s doubtless reaching far more of its target audience than it would otherwise have done.
And while I agree that the psychologising of censorship via the appropriation of mental health terminology such as ‘triggering’ is an appalling trend I think ideas outside the mainstream have always been considered potential ‘violations’ or ‘corruptions’ of the pristine minds of ‘the nice people’. I should know. I copped a heck of a lot of that sort of thing from even before adolescence whenever I tried to discuss or disseminate ‘dangerous’ ideas. If I’d been born 30 years later instead of being overtly punished I would have been drugged into submission ‘for the sake of my mental health’.
Western society has never subscribed to the idea that citizens were capable of self-regulation. To an outsider, US society in particular seems a place where you can say what you think but must think what is ‘appropriate’ (again, see Chomsky and Hermann’s Manufacturing Consent). It’s just that previous generations could rely on churches, governments and small town moralists to keep things in check. These days it’s secular sociologists and mind ‘scientists’ who carry the moral clout so they’re the ones conscripted to police what we see, hear, say and think.
You sort of beat me to the punch with your last paragraph, Cabrogal. A co-worker of mine recently pulled the “we’re starting to base rules on *feelings*” card during a conversation we were having. After the conversation ended, I thought about it and realized I should have said, “where have you been? We’ve always done that!”
One can look no further than Prohibition for one of the most egregious example of a law based on feelings (Alcohol is evil!) than on any sort of demonstrable fact, but almost every law that has ever been enacted is based on someone, somewhere saying “XYZ makes me/my constituents/the king feel sad/angry/proud/etc. Therefore, we need this law to change that.”
That quote from Ryan Holiday? It seems to me this blog has amply demonstrated that we are not really separate from animals at all. We just use weapons other than claws or venom.
And as for Maggie’s last paragraph, whether a culture dies by suicide or homicide, to me the idea it can ever be averted is laughable. Everything begins, everything ends. The only question that matters is how, and whether the cycle is capable of repeating itself.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. — Mark Twain
There is, for most if not all of us a line we won’t cross. Videos of beheadings, real rape of adults and children, real torture, are things I don’t want to see. I censor them by not watching them, even when they show up on Youtube. I met someone once who was an intern at the Kinsey Institute. The job they had was to catalog child pornography. I don’t think I could have done that, but I recognize child pornography needs to be documented, in the same way as holocausts need to be documented.
I can’t conceive of a time when sex with children will be acceptable in any way. Yet I need to live with the fact that 100 years ago my own marriage was similarly reviled and illegal. No, not gay, just interracial. There is a line, but we need to give it real thought, and a lot of public discourse. This means we need to be able to examine and discuss the most abhorrent, to us, behavior.
There’s a short story I remember reading when I was younger which fits in with Maggie’s theme about censorship coming from the bottom up rather than by the top down. If this story was written by Ray Bradbury, it ties in with this piece about Bradybury’s foresightedness, but I think the story may have been written by Isaac Asimov.
In the story, there are scientists who have invented a time machine that can enable you to look into the past. You can’t actually GO into the past, but you can watch it on a video screen. They patent the technology and prepare to sell it to the public. One of the subplots involves one of the scientists whose daughter was killed in a fire ten years ago. He fears that the fire that took her life may have been started by a careless accident on his part, and the new invention will prove it. His grief-sticken wife wants to relive all the moments in her little girl’s brief young life. There’s an argument between them about whether this is the right thing or not.
And then, out of nowhere comes a big surprise at the end. One of the other scientists comes in and says that they have to stop production right away. Why? Never mind that this machine can only see twenty years or so into the past. It can see crystal clear five seconds or sooner into a past so recent that it become the present. In other words, this device will allow everyone who buys it to spy into the private lives of everyone around them and—BOOM!—we’re in the world of Big Brother, except that Big Brother isn’t the government but every fellow citizen. The story ends with the revelation that the time machine/spying device has already been sold in stores, and it’s too late to stop the technology.
Anybody know what story this is?
Sounds like simple technology to me. You’ve just got to get a long way away and look back with a powerful telescope. Of course if you want to see back in time further than the start of your project you have to travel faster than light, which makes it a bit trickier.
I don’t know any stories like the one you describe and I’m pretty sure I’ve read all the published Asimov and Bradbury sci-fi, but it sounds not dissimilar to some of Bob Shaw’s ‘slow glass’ stories.
Though your memory has distorted it a little, the story you’re describing is Asimov’s “The Dead Past”.
You’re right—it was “The Dead Past.” The plot summary on wikipedia jibes with my memory. Interestingly, wikipedia said the point of this story was that the powerful government was surprisingly not the bad guy, but I thought the punch line was that given the chance, the collective voyeurism of the public could create a greater tyranny than a centralized Big Brother, and THAT I was also was what Ray Bradbury was getting at, too.
Which is a very interesting idea, and unfortunately one that is realistic. In particular the recent invention of the “Internet shitstorm” has more than a few totalitarian characteristics and serves only to enforce conformance to some idea that the mass that perceives itself as powerful endorses, no rationality comes into it.
Of course, the historic predecessor of those people are informers and lynch-mobs, so that already gives a good estimate of the mind-set and moral values involved.
So while originally privacy was invented as a protection measure against those in power, with the powers of the individual to publish and organize fast and at basically no cost, privacy becomes even more important.
Excellent article. It seems the west is very seriously trying to undo the Enlightenment coming out of the French revolution. The leader in this is (no surprise) the US. The cretinization of academic education is just one symptom, but a strong one. Another is universal surveillance which in the end serves primarily to enforce extreme conformism, as anything “deviant” will be risky to do or think. (Incidentally, it looks like Chancellor Merkel is going to lose the third member of her Cabinet to PhD-fraud, which pretty clearly shows the rot is old and has set in deeply.)
This is of course also the beginning of the end of western civilization, except for a few pockets here and there that refuse to go down with the masses of idiots driving this movement.
The resistance movement exists, but is not yet well-organized or named. GamerGate and PuppyGate are parts of it, but I’m certain it is much broader than those groups or soon will be.
I hardly think Gamergate and the Sad Puppies constitute a resistance to anything. Just a pathetic reaction by a lot of obnoxious arseholes to criticism of their bullying idiocy and poor taste. Not so much revolution as tantrum.
I’m quite behind the curve when it comes to things like this. It’s only within the past year that I learned what a “trigger warning” even was and it took me even longer to find out what an “SJW” is.
Perhaps it’s a cycle within a larger cycle, but it seems like a backlash is forming already against the hijacking of the term ‘trigger’ and other coddling measures. Not so much in the form of “Gamergate” but at the moment it seems like every time I turn around I see another article bemoaning the current state of academia due to trumped-up hypersensitivity. Maggie’s is merely the latest I’ve seen. I’ve yet to see anyone actually defend it at length.
But as you say, cabrogal, it’s not revolution so much as tantrum. I’ll admit my perspective is a limited one, but one thing I don’t see is much real fighting against it, despite miles of words written about the necessity for it. Writing blogs and speaking is all well and good, but when people choose not to listen, or seek to actually do you violence, what then?
Indeed, I’m not sure “Fahrenheit 451” is the most helpful parallel here. It’s been a long time since I read the book, but as I recall, Montag doesn’t fight to fix his culture. At the end he basically becomes a hobo, a hunted outcast, with only other hoboes and his memorized book. Is that what we want to see happen?
Celos, if I may quote you:
“This is of course also the beginning of the end of western civilization, except for a few pockets here and there that refuse to go down with the masses of idiots driving this movement.”
And what form is that refusal supposed to take? Saying to your mindless hordes, “you may enjoy your apocalypse, but kindly leave me out and leave me alone?” Where would you run to if you choose not to fight back, and I mean really fight? It put me in mind of the comment thread on the “Burn the ____ing System Down” article from Popehat where the article’s author described going into space as the last best hope for Libertarians to actually have the society they wish to see.
I suspect Libertarians aren’t the only people who’d like to see them launched into space. Ben Elton’s Stark is a pretty morbid dissection of the likely consequences of following that kind of isolationist-survivalist impulse.
A scenario I prefer is the one from Greg Egan’s Distress in which anarchists bio-engineer their own floating coral island in international waters where police, censorship and IP laws don’t exist. It’s not so much a renunciation of society as an attempt to grow a better one.
But I’ve gotta admit, I’m part of the backlash against trigger warnings and I’ve done very little apart from whinging about them on the internet.
When I think about it, the idea of finding utopia in space is really a secular technocratic version of the Christian fantasy of The Rapture. It probably speaks to a widespread fundamental myth of some kind.
While I am a gamer, Gamergate mostly went by me. I did see “obnoxious arseholes” and “bullying”, “idiocy” and “poor taste” aplenty on both sides. While the original accusations where in poor taste, disconnected from reality and entirely and obviously self-serving, the counter-reaction was mostly not much batter.
The one thing I took away from it is that for the SJWs it is about control and self-aggrandizement and that these characters have nothing worthwhile to contribute.
There’s another point we can agree on Celos. Except that I see SJWs more as isolated PC trolls trying to draw attention to themselves than as people with any real control driven agenda.
Dunno if you’re into sci-fi but the Sad Puppies (and more openly racist Rabid Puppies) are even more pathetic in that they’re trying to hijack the Hugo Award nomination process to ensure that only shallowly plotted and characterised, action-driven sci-fis written by white men for (very immature) white men will win. It’s like trying to take over the Michelin guide to ensure McDonalds outlets get five stars. Why they feel the need to have their own lousy taste legitimised with an award from a committee they clearly hate is beyond me, but there you go. Not that I think the Hugos have ever been a decent guide to good science fiction anyway. They’re like the Oscars that way.
Well, the attention-drawing is certainly a big part of it. It is possible that they are mostly isolated individuals that just use control-driven movements (such as neo-feminism) as tools.
As to sci-fi, yes, that is most of what I read for entertainment. I have never paid much attention to the Hugos though, besides once a few years back going though their list of winners and finding that my taste is obviously different from theirs. I have noticed that especially shallow characters seem to be on the rise again. Or maybe I just have higher standards these days. I also found that reading a few Amazon reviews (always high and low-ratings) provides pretty good results as to whether I will enjoy reading something or not.
I like your McDonalds comparison. It also illustrates the other effect: As soon as these people have taken over the Hugo, it loses all its value. I do not think they are smart enough to have that as their ultimate goal, so it is just senseless destruction.
Absolutely one of your best articles. Kudos!
Thank you, Maggie, for warning about the constant danger of all of us willfully giving up our minds, our intellects, to some other entity that has no interest in our well being. It is a real danger, the “dumbing down” of our lives.
The reason students protested “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” with it’s hero “Nigger Jim” is not that they were triggered. That was just an excuse. The real reason is that they simply didn’t want to do their reading homework. Reading? A whole book? FTS! Protesting is more fun, more social, and less intellectual work.