From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Making a virtue of complacency
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Fri, 11 Dec 1992 19:49:27 GMT

                                 Friday, the 11th of December, 1992
  
I said:
  OK, so far so good. Clearly, I was taking you to mean Right of Man.
  (Also clearly, Mikhail was reading you in exactly the same way.) Anyway,
  my mistake.
  
Gene Ward Smith responds:
  What makes you think Mikhail was reading me the same way?  I thought
  he was claiming that being nasty and cruel was the correct *moral*
  attitude to adopt.  What else am I supposed to take his explicit
  support for cruelty and denigration of minorities to mean?

Now, you're smarter than this, Gene. You're doing an admirable job
matching Mikhail wit for wit, provocation for provocation, there
ain't no need to play the same game with me. Mikhail responded
to you, by stating that his right to denigrate was guaranteed by
the U.S. constitution. Ergo, I claim he was reading you to mean
natural right, not whether the denigration itself was morally correct.
Second, your claim here that Mikhail has explicitly supported cruelty
and the denigration of minorities is contextually absurd. You well
know that the cruelty refers to the verbal swordplay the two of you
both like to engage in, and the denigration of minorities refers to
the denigration of *some* minorities and only insofar as it might be
morally right to denigrate them.

Such as when I said:
  I think you have the *moral* right to some denigrations: fundamentalists,
  for example, or Republicans (sorry, Keith :-)). 
  
GWS:
  One may have a moral right if there is something universal in the
  group in question which is condemnable.  When you take a whole group
  like Bosnian Serbs and say they are *all* rotten and deserve the
  worst, you've crossed a line between denigrating people for what they
  believe (Bush is a good President, say) to denigrating them for who
  they are.  If you do that, who they are had better actually be
  something bad, or you are engaging in bigotry.

Yes, so what? Did you expect an argument from me about this?
I will mark it as agreed, though, that *some* denigrations are
morally right.
  
I said:
  But, over and above every consideration of moral right here, I think
  the Canadian proscription on Klan literature, for instance, is a
  criminality of the highest concern.
  
GWS:
  There are practical questions involved here as well.  Should the
  Weimar Republic have taken a harder line against the Nazis?  One might
  argue that the outcome of the policy they did adopt could hardly have
  been worse, and therefore there must have been something wrong with
  it.

You see, we *are* arguing about inalienable rights, not about
moral right. And I was exactly correct in stating that you are
the source of moral repugnance. These `practical questions'
end up (legitimized by `democratic' vote, no doubt) putting a policeman's
gun to *my* head. As I said, this is a crime and much worse than
the 400, it is a law which has been made into a crime, and I do
not intend to tolerate it.

I said:
  Yes, well, you are the one who characterized mine as the politics of
  complacency, and who painted the insufficiency of my zeal for your cause
  as tantamount to murder.
  
GWS:
  No, I said you were exhibiting the complacency of the unaffected
  in a situation where murder, among other things, is being done.
  This is not the same, and again you are reading things into what
  I wrote.

No, I don't think I was misreading. My laughter which started
this subthread was precisely directed at your outrage at
Mikhail, your linkage of his ``moral judgments'' with Nazis
and Pol Pot and every other evil under the sun. Mikhail has clearly
told you that his denigration of some homosexuals does not
mean that he denigrates Jews, blacks, Bosnians, star-bellied
sneetches, or anyone else. It's also quite clear the guy
doesn't go out and beat anyone's head in on a sidewalk. Why do
you persist in accusing him of complicity in more than he
is guilty of? Why did you link *my* laughter (at your outrage)
with gay-bashers and Southern Baptists in the first place?
Not to mention Hitler?
  
  If you mean that people are going to bash gays because they think Smith
  is obnoxious, that sounds ludicrous, and in any case is the
  old blame-the-victim routine.

Oh, nonsense, I explained what I meant in the body of the paragraph.
  
  I don't think you have ever thought at all about where prejudice comes
  from.  It isn't an instinct.  I think there is a trickle-down effect,
  so that religious leaders, for instance, are the source of ideas which
  in the end lead to violence and death.

Yes, because all of us out here have weak little minds. We can't make
moral judgments for our wee little selves and so need to be protected
from ideas which might trickle down and *cause* us to end up in
violence or in killing someone. We need to defer to your expertise,
and that of all the sociological studies which you can cite to
back you up. Where's the bonfire so I can bring out all of my dangerous
books?
  
  If I thought we should refrain from discussion, why am I myself
  indulging?

It would seem to me to be in order to denigrate me because I have been
insufficently outraged at Mikhail.

I said:
  In other words, it seems to me that you are selling exactly the idea
  to the next 400 that any hate crimes they might commit are
  sociologically to be expected, not their fault, really, because what
  the Southern Baptists have pronounced has, more or less, alleviated
  them of the responsibility for assault or murder.
  
GWS:
  Completely absurd.  You keep assuming that being influenced by an idea
  is the same as being compelled by one.

No, sir. *You* are selling the idea---the same pop morality sold
on all the television sitcoms---that we have to regulate (you have
indicated both morally and, now above, possibly legally) ideas
*because* they may create a climate of opinion which *causes* violence.
Given that people who commit assault and murder might like to have
a ready-made excuse for doing so, the question is whether you, who
are advocating that we ought to be afraid and outraged at the ideas
themselves, are not legitimizing the excuse in the minds of the next
400 more than I, who refuse to be afraid or very outraged at the ideas,
and at the same time refuse any sort of necessary linkage between the
`dangerous ideas' and the crimes of assault and murder.

I said:
  I left ``Making a Virtue of Complacency'' alone precisely
  because I think it cuts both ways.
  
Gene asks:
  How?

Because you are being quite overconfident in thinking that
that *your* advocacy doesn't contribute causally to the assaults
and murders much more than Mikhail's.
  
I said:
  As far as I know, assault and murder are crimes in many countries.
  Most people also agree with the legislation. I agree with the
  legislation. What more exactly do you want?
  
Gene responds:
  I want a society in which people don't hate each other because of
  race, sex, religion or sexual orientation.  Don't you?  What do
  *you* want?

Absolutely I do *not* want this. And I especially fear any attempt beyond
advocacy to bring it about, because that would amount to mind control.
I want argument, I want discussion, I want lots of disagreement. What I
do not want is assault and murder and war blamed on speech. Because
they are simply not necessary consequences of the speech. I want no
alleviation of the moral responsibility for assault and murder to be
grounded in sociology. I simply want condign punishment for when the
assault and murder take place.

By the way, what's even morally wrong with hate because of religion?
Especially American fundies?
  
I said, regarding Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.:
  I'm sorry, but all of these men were heads of state, commanders-in-chief
  of armies and police forces. They ordered people killed, where
  the causality was quite direct from the order to its execution,
  where to disobey was to risk death or imprisonment. 
  
Gene responds:
  That is not a direct causal relation, because people can still decide
  if they would rather be killed.

Of course they could. But the question is whether Hitler's
command to his police forces to round up gays and put them into
concentration camps is causally comparable to, say, the
pronouncements of the Southern Baptist ministers on the
sinfulness of homosexual intercourse. I think clearly not.
And I really don't know what you think. When it is convenient
for you to denigrate me or Mikhail, you seem quite happy to
link the two tightly. At other times you deny
that you are making any simple causal link at all between
the Baptist ministers and the street violence. I think Hitler
was criminal, and should have been stopped physically with death or
imprisonment. I think anyone stopping the Baptist ministers
physically from pronouncing should in turn be stopped with death or
imprisonment.
  
  You can condemn the violence all you want, and still be an instigator
  of violence.

Only in the same sense that you yourself can be an instigator of the
same violence.
  
I said:
  Since nothing I had said before was meant to argue in favor of a moral
  duty to hate speech, I'm rather glad that I didn't do a good job of
  arguing it.
  
GWS:
  If you aren't arguing that there is a moral right to hate speech, what
  are you arguing?  That is all I disagree with, so if you disagree with
  me, disagree with that.  So far nothing you've said seems to make any
  kind of sense.

Yes, well, the last observation is mutual.

I'm sorry, though, but the question originally was not about a
moral right to hate speech, but about a right to denigrate.  And
you seem to be agreed with me that some denigrations can be morally right.
In other words, you do think there is a moral right to *some* hate speech,
simply because some hate speech is morally right. Other hate speech
is morally wrong. I agree. Or are you distinguishing between denigration
and hate speech, and if you are, why did you ever bring hate speech up
in the first place?

Above all else I asserted that it would be criminally wrong
not to allow people to denigrate *even if their resort to denigration
is morally wrong*. Which, as I said, is a real political question,
a legislative question, cropping up in many countries right now.
Since I have no idea how you could possibly have construed that
I support a *moral* right to *all* hate speech, I'm left clueless
as to why you singled me out for denigration for being complacent 
in the first place.

                     Mike Morris
             (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
  
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