From: gsmith@polyhymnia.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de (Gene W. Smith)
Subject: Re: Making a virtue of complacency
Organization: IWR, University of Heidelberg, Germany
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 92 17:13:55 GMT

In article <Bz41qF.F9y@watserv2.uwaterloo.ca>
msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris) writes:

>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.

Why does it provoke *you* to say that I think Mikhail believes that it
is the morally correct thing to do to denigrate gays and lesbians for
being gays and lesbians?

>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.

If he supports the moral denigration of some minorities, then he
supports the denigration of minorities.  If believing it is right to
do so makes such denigration moral, then Hitler (hi, Godwin) was moral.

>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.

Well, then Mikhail is being a bigot, and that is what I was saying,
and therefore what is your complaint?

>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'm not quite sure what you are saying.  You don't intend to tolerate
any attempt by the Weimar Republic to censor Nazi publications?
If they did, that would put a gun to your head?

Presumably, in Canada now you don't actually have a gun to your
head, because you don't actually want to put Klan leaflets on people's
cars.  Admittedly, some other people are being forcibly prevented from
doing so, but I wonder why you find this so much more morally repugnant
than the Klan leaflets themselves?

I always thought the morally bad aspect was the possibility of someone
being prevented from doing something which they did have a moral right
to do by such laws, and that a practical difficulty with such laws was
in the possible use of such laws to stifle dissenting opinion and thus
stultify democracy.  The usual argument is that Klan leaflets are a
price that we must pay, not that there is anything good about them
_per se_.  You almost sound like you regard them as an essential part
of the tapestry of life or something.

>  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.

No I did not.  You are really around the bend.

>  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.

So what?  If he denigrates homosexuals, it is the very same moral
evil.

>Why do you persist in accusing him of complicity in more than he is
>guilty of?

BY spreading hate, he assumes responsibility for the consequences of
hate.

>Why did you link *my* laughter (at your outrage) with gay-bashers and
>Southern Baptists in the first place?

Because your laughter was the laughter of a clueless straight white
man who has never been taunted, never been beaten up, never been
subject to any effect of discrimination.

>  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.

No, because you think that bigotry is unimportant, and outrage at it a
good reason for a big, smug, complacent belly laugh.

>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.

I don't know what "morally regulate" means.  If it means I think some
ideas are morally bad, then so do you--you appear to think the idea
that some ideas are morally bad is morally bad, and are getting
outraged at it.

>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.

The things which have caused the most harm in this century have been
ideas, such as Communism, Nazism, fanatical nationalism and so forth.
Ideas are dangerous things, and bad ideas need to be countered with
better ones.  If you aren't concerned about the potential violence
inherent in violent ideas, you are a fool.

>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 am going away, so I won't see the followup, which is too bad, as I
really wonder how you think that advocating that we should not despise
each other leads to assaults and murders.  If you teach irrational
ideas to the effect that certain people are worthless, that leads to
assaults and murders.  If you teach that people should not be despised
because they belong to some irrationally despised minority group, that
should be a preventative against assaults and murders.  If you say
that worrying about people being assaulted and murdered is a good
reason to laugh at someone, you are hardly being helpful.

>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.

Fine.  You think hate is good, but the effects of hate are bad.
Therefore, you want to deny it has any effects.  Life is not
like this, but you want it to be because hate amuses you.

If you don't see anything wrong with wanting to have lots of people
like Hitler around because you enjoy their oratory and don't think it
could have any bad consequences, you are nuts.
 
>What I do not want is assault and murder and war blamed on speech.
>Because they are simply not necessary consequences of the speech.

When you are talking of moral agents, damned little is a necessary
consequence.  

>By the way, what's even morally wrong with hate because of religion?
>Especially American fundies?

Right right.  The more hate the better.  Let's watch Pat Buchanan's
moral crusade and the hatred in generated on both sides just for the
fun of it.

>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.

Yes, but why did Hitler order it?  What gave him the idea in the
first place that gays and Jews and gypsies were bad and should
be rounded up?  He explains that his ideas came from sources,
read _Mein Kamph_.
 
>I think Hitler was criminal, and should have been stopped physically
>with death or imprisonment.

Great.  He should be put in prison by the state that he himself
controlled.  The only practical approach would be to oppose him before
he got to the point of having the power to do anything criminal, but
this would just cause you to have a great big belly laugh or get
morally indignant, so far as anything you've said so far goes.

>I think anyone stopping the Baptist ministers physically from
>pronouncing should in turn be stopped with death or imprisonment.

I'm not sure what the relevance of this is.  Anyway, death seems a
little strong for drowning someone out by loud chants or cutting the
cord to the microphone.

>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?

Hate speech is a particular kind of denigration, where some group is
singled out for irrational attacks, and this group is one which is
already irrationlly hated in the social group in question.  For
instance, if you say that Jews are miserly and evil, in a society
which is already prone to hate Jews, that is hate speech.  If someone
burns down a synagogue because their learned dislike of Jews has been
increased by this hate speech, that would be in part a consequence of
the hate speech.

For another example, if you say gay people are like murderers, that is
hate speech because it is irrational, society is already inclined to
despise gay people, eand it is an unmotivated attack on a group which
has not as a group done anything to deserve it.  If you could show
that *in fact* Jews were all miserly and evil or gays were like
murderers, it would not be hate speech.  So the people who do it never
admit that they do it, because they all claim to have a reason.

>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.

Well, from things you said such as those in this very article, as that
you don't want a society free from irrational hatred and hate speech.
In your own words, you "absolutely do not want" a society free from
hatred based on race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.

What am I supposed to think, when you say this?





-- 
     Gene Ward Smith/Brahms Gang/IWR/Ruprecht-Karls University 
               gsmith@kalliope.iwr.uni-heidelberg.de
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books