From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Subject: Re: Making a virtue of complacency
Organization: University of Waterloo
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1992 02:56:13 GMT

  
                                   Sunday, the 13th of December, 1992

[My response to Gene's last follows. He gets a copy via email.]

Gene Ward Smith wrote:
    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?
  
I began my response:
  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.
  
He responds:
  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?

Huh? Isn't it plain that you do think this, and, rightly so, because it's
true after all that Mikhail argues this kind of denigration is morally
correct? I was objecting to your turning this into ``explicit support
for cruelty and denigration of minorities''. So much broader a brush stroke,
so much more sinister a way to characterize him. Can you not at the very least
confine your ad hominem to the issue at hand?

I said:  
  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.
  
Gene responds:
  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.

No. My point was precisely that there is a vast difference between
supporting the denigration of some minorities insofar as it might
be morally right to do so, and supporting the denigration of
minorities in general, or all minorities, or minorities
just because they are minorities.  Besides, I thought you have already
agreed with me that the *moral* denigration of some minorities (such as
Republicans or fundamentalists) is moral, and I also thought you were
*only* interested in arguing against *hate speech-(GWS definition, see
below)*, and *not* the moral denigration of some minorities. Finally your
linkage to Hitler is, per usual, utterly disgusting. Hitler did a whole
lot more than denigrate, pardner.
  
Gene had said:
  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.

I said:
  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.
  
Gene concludes:
  Well, then Mikhail is being a bigot, and that is what I was saying,
  and therefore what is your complaint?

No, this does not follow, unless you succeed in demonstrating
against Mikhail that what homosexuals do is not bad. I was
attempting such a demonstration when I was so rudely interrupted.

My original complaint wasn't much of a complaint, more of a kind of
laughter, really, at the excess of *your* outrage, the way your
outrage has thrown you into such a tizzy, that Mikhail, for all
his moral misjudgment, comes across as much less morally compromised
than you are.

Of course, when you singled me out for denigration, my complaints
began to multiply. At the moment, my complaints are legion.
  
  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?

Because, the leaflets are only *speech*, the forcible prevention is
*deadly force*. You're in a real muddle about ``moral right'',
using it sometimes as a noun, sometimes adjectivally.
Distributing the hate leaflets is morally wrong, yes. It is not
morally right. But that doesn't mean one ought to be prevented
from distributing them. One has a right, a natural right, to speak,
or to print up leaflets and distribute them to people who might want
to read them. It doesn't mean that the speech is morally right, it
just means that the prevention of the speech is criminally wrong.
It has nothing to do with whether the speech itself is morally
right or morally wrong.
  
  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.

Is this what they teach in the schools nowadays about free speech?
God save the republic! No, it is not just that there's a slippery
slope, and that it's hard to draw the line in such a way as to
punish only morally bad speech and not hurt anyone whose speech is
morally good. If that were the case, then it'd be pretty clear that
Canada's anti-hate-speech laws are aimed at only morally bad speech,
and are not likely to be abused in the near future. The problem is that
it is criminal to punish *even the morally bad speech*. Please
go and read Milton's _Areopagitica_. He goes on and on
about the potency of the press, but he demonstrates amply
its impotency in one crucial respect: Speech cannot make us do a
damn thing we do not otherwise choose to do. Morally evil speech
could just as well lead us to moral good as to evil, depending on what
we choose to do after we hear it.
  
This is because people have minds with which to choose, and the
consequent responsibility to choose aright. Anything less, any
censoring of even speech that 100% of the people are agreed is immoral,
is to usurp the primary moral function of the human mind away from
its rightful ruler---the individual human being himself. That is the
moral repugnance to which I am objecting.

I said, some posts ago I think:
    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.

Gene responds now:
  No I did not.  You are really around the bend.

I'm sorry, but you linked murder and assault to the pronouncements
of Baptist ministers and Mikhail and Hitler and Pol Pot, and you dumped
it all on my lap as ``Making a Virtue of Complacency''. As far as I
am aware, you persist in this kind of linkage even now.
  
I said:
  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.
  
Gene responds:
  So what?  If he denigrates homosexuals, it is the very same moral
  evil.

Nonsense. I think it is morally evil, yes. But, it is far from
the same. He is denigrating homosexuals for a *behaviour*. Even if
the desire for this behaviour were genetically determined, homosexual
intercourse is still a free act, *therefore* morally judgeable. Got it?
This is not the same thing as saying it has to be condemned in the
sort of traditionally stupid way it has been condemned, or that
I agree in the slightest with Mikhail's condemnation of it.
  
I asked, regarding Mikhail:
  Why do you persist in accusing him of complicity in more than he is
  guilty of?
  
Gene responds:
  By spreading hate, he assumes responsibility for the consequences of
  hate.

I see. ``Consequences of hate'' again. Again this sociologically
deterministic model of human behaviour. Again the same moral repugnance.
  
I asked:
  Why did you link *my* laughter (at your outrage) with gay-bashers and
  Southern Baptists in the first place?
  
Gene responded:
  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.

Do you not understand that, besides being quite inaccurate, this
sentence undermines any pronouncement on the subject of bigotry you
might now wish to make?
  
Gene had asked:
    If I thought we should refrain from discussion, why am I myself
    indulging?
  
I responded:
  It would seem to me to be in order to denigrate me because I have been
  insufficently outraged at Mikhail.
  
To which Gene responds:
  No, because you think that bigotry is unimportant, and outrage at it a
  good reason for a big, smug, complacent belly laugh.

No, you are demonstrably clueless as to what bigotry is, as well as
to its importance, and to what is outrageous and what is not outrageous.
I did think it funny, yes, that your outrage was so misdirected. Now
I'm beginning to think I shouldn't have laughed at all. Cried, rather.

GWS:
  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.

Why should I be getting outraged, Gene? Annoyed, yes. Fearful
as a republican citizen that your kind of thinking might be all
too common, yes. Outraged, no. Except perhaps at the school system.

GWS:
  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.

Ideas? More sociology, Gene?
  
GWS: 
  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.

But, you didn't say people should not be despised because they
belong to some irrationally despised minority group, did you,
Gene? Nor did you worry about people being assaulted and murdered.
I mean, that would have been a little trite, and perhaps funny
for that reason, but you were right out there *equating Mikhail
with gay-bashers and Nazis and God knows what else*. You no doubt
think that you were being all righteous and proactive and
helpful, downright Christian even, but that isn't what you were doing
really. What you were doing really was *telling lies*, and using them
to attack Mikhail. If your rage had some rational moral control
over it, then perhaps it'd be possible for me to respect your position,
but the rationality is not manifest, and until it is, the respect ain't
about to be forthcoming just because you claim some sort of special
victim status.

Gene had said:
    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?

I responded:
  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.

And Gene says:
  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.

Once again, you get it wrong. And morally repugnantly wrong.
I think that some hate is bad. But, even for the bad kind
of hate, I think *making* it go away is bad, nay, not bad merely,
but criminal. I also think that the badness of the bad kind of hate
resides with the hater, has precisely ZERO effect upon the hated
that the hated does not choose it to have. (Betcha we're not agreed
about that one.)

And it is not that I want to deny it has any effects. It's that
it doesn't have any effects that people don't choose it to have.
It's that people *can* choose differently. And life is like this.
People publish papers in sociology noting correlations in human
behaviour and suggesting causal reasons for these correlations.
Exactly like other people do in physics. The difference is, the physics
often works to ten decimal places. The sociology doesn't. You obviously
haven't considered recently why this is so. Let me offer you again:
  
             Morris' Rule
   To any causal hypothesis purporting
   to explain an observed correlation
   in human behaviour can be opposed
   at least one ideologically opposite
   hypothesis fitting the correlated
   observation equally well.

Which has a corollary, stated thus:

            Morris' Ax
   In the human sciences, entities cannot
   be kept from multiplying, except by
   party discipline.

My point is clear: If you insist that the 400 gay-bashers gay-bashed
because of some societal pathology, the question is whether it's
because of the pathology *you* have suggested, namely homophobia
as evinced by the moral pronouncements of Southern Baptist ministers,
or is it because of the pathology *I* suggested, namely the idea
having been oversold that personal crimes have societally pathological
causes. After all, the Southern Baptist's condemnation of gays
might be fairly common, but it's not *that* common, there being lots of
say, fairly liberal Christians for every fundamentalist thumper,
certainly it is not anywhere near as commonly held a belief as the
sociological determinism itself is. And, for a person to go out and beat up
on a gay person for being gay, he has to think *two* things at least: (1)
He has to buy into the homophobia (meaning here, I suppose, that gays
are inferior in some essential way); and (2) He has to think
that the homophobia legitimates his violent behaviour. Now,
maybe (1) trickles down from the Baptist ministers, but (2),
where in the heck does that one come from? My suggestion would be that
(2) comes exactly from linkages being drawn like you did draw between
the Southern Baptist ministers and the incarcerated 400. I know
perfectly well you do not *mean* to legitimize violence by saying
what you say, but the fact still may be that the publicity you give
to the idea that societal pathologies cause individual crimes may well
be seized upon by potential criminals to allow them to excuse themselves
of responsibility for the crimes they want to commit.

Now the question is: How in the heck are you ever going to distinguish
experimentally between these two ideologically opposite causal explanations?
Are you going to go out and interview, say, 400 incarcerated gay-bashers and
and ask them what they think? Are you going to believe what they tell
you when you do? Are you going to trust Bette Greene's interpretation,
as being ideologically unbiased as to which of the two causal explanations
is correct?

GWS:
  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.

And you are still fuzzing out the distinction, the *moral* distinction,
between people who promulgate hate literature and mass murderers.
   
GWS:
  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 Kampf_.

Ah, yes, you do seem to be awfully trusting of the excuses that
criminals give you for their crimes. I'm sure he just had a bad
childhood, too many politically incorrect influences, you know.
He wasn't a bad kid, just a little mixed up. Unfortunately, I
can't go look it up right now, since I carried my copy (the Ralph
Manheim translation) out to the bonfire after your last missive.
   
Regarding my assertion that Hitler was a criminal, Gene says:
  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.

Certainly, he should have been argued against when _Mein Kampf_
was published, though I doubt by now you are really the person to carry
out the argument. You certainly have a natural right to self defence, so
if he makes a *credible and immediate* threat, you have a right to
protect yourself, kill him if need be. My question for you is: When
do you think the threat becomes credible and immediate? If you would
advocate the death penalty for the Southern Baptist ministers, then I'd
say we disagree about `credible and immediate', too.
  
I said:
  I think anyone stopping the Baptist ministers physically from
  pronouncing should in turn be stopped with death or imprisonment.
  
Gene replied:
  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 thought you're supposed to be such a wiz at logic. Anyway, that's why
I used the word `or'. Someone gunning down the speaker might well
be covered by the alternative of death.
  
I said:
  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?
  
Gene responds:
  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, and 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.

Well, this is a little like Mikhail's definition of ``necessity'',
isn't it? OK, fine, ``hate speech (GWS)'' shall be defined as
``unreasonable denigration''. In that case, please understand that
I, being misled by you into thinking we were talking about denigration,
and a right to denigrate (funny how I could have gotten that idea),
including as you have agreed some perfectly moral and reasonable
denigrations, understood you previously to mean by ``hate speech''
only denigration, not anything so specific as hate
speech (GWS). And I herewith curl up and die, admitting the
profound insight of your moral vision, that hate speech (GWS) (=
unreasonable denigration, in case you've missed it) is morally wrong.
Hate speech (GWS) is bad.

Now, that leaves only the question to be answered: WHY DID YOU
SINGLE ME OUT FOR ATTACK IN THE FIRST PLACE? I mean, given that you
are only interested in arguing about hate speech (GWS) and not
denigration in general, and given that I never referred originally
to hate speech (either the GWS kind or else) at all, until you brought
it up?

I said:
  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.
  
Gene responded:
  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?

You're supposed to think you've contrived a very special definition
of hate speech (GWS), completely incompatible with the one I was using.
By the way, if you mean by ``hatred'' here only the unjust kind, then
it seems a little peculiar to me that ``hatred'' based on race, sex,
religion, or sexual orientation should be singled out for
special treatment. I mean, why not just ask about all hatred (GWS),
rather than these kinds? Or is an ``unreasonable desire to denigrate''
based on body fat, say, fundamentally different for you?

               Mike Morris
       (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books