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January 2004  
  
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way
you looked? _Did we actually dress like that?_ We did. And we had no idea how
silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way
the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.  
  
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as
arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much more
dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for
good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you
fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.  
  
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true no matter
where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions we consider
harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've already said at least one
thing that would have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the
seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said it  that
the earth moves.   
  
It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people believed
things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so strongly that you would
have gotten in terrible trouble for saying otherwise.  
  
Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of history, the
answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours
were the first era to get everything just right.  
  
It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future will
find ridiculous. What _would_ someone coming back to visit us in a time
machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to study here. But I
want to do more than just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to
find general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.  
  
**The Conformist Test**  
  
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant
to express in front of a group of your peers?  
  
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If
everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could that
possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just think what
you're told.  
  
The other alternative would be that you independently considered every
question and came up with the exact same answers that are now considered
acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same
mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can
tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same mistake, that's
very convincing evidence.  
  
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly contains a few
mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes probably didn't do it by
accident. It would be like someone claiming they had independently decided in
1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.  
  
If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure you
wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if you had grown
up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in
the 1930s  or among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would
have.  
  
Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be that
there was something wrong with you if you thought things you didn't dare say
out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly, there is something wrong with
you if you _don't_ think things you don't dare say out loud.  
  
**Trouble**  
  
What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at things
people do say, and get in trouble for.   
  
Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for
things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being
true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get
in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold.
No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in
Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated
as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make
anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might
be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they
worry might be true.  
  
If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would have
been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited the sun was
another matter. The church knew this would set people thinking.  
  
Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works well. A lot
of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless now. So it's likely
that visitors from the future would agree with at least some of the statements
that get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not likely.  
  
To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and start
asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern
equivalent), but might it also be true?  
  
**Heresy**  
  
This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to have
gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea would be so
radioactively controversial that no one would dare express it in public? How
can we find these too?  
  
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of history,
there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them
down before anyone had a chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy",
"sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of western history,
as in more recent times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By
now these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly
used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.  
  
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political connotations
now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff in a purge of
those who favored a negotiated peace. At the start of World War II it was used
extensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In
1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was
it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.  
  
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the all-
purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period, it should be
easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call
ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent
is mistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a
statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's
false, we should start paying attention.  
  
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh
at is to start with the labels. Take a label  "sexist", for example  and try
to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might
this be true?  
  
Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be random.
The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible ones. They'll be
things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think.  
  
In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of radiologists as
they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer.  They found that even
when the radiologists missed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused
at the site of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it just
didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many
interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we
turn off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.  
  
**Time and Space**  
  
If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our taboos
they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we
can look into the past. Another way to figure out what we're getting wrong is
to look at what used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.  
  
Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent progress. In a
field like physics, if we disagree with past generations it's because we're
right and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away
from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get to social
questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like
hemlines.  
  
We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous than past
generations, but the more history you read, the less likely this seems. People
in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their
ideas were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.  
  
So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas against
those of various past cultures, and see what you get.  Some will be
shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might also be true?  
  
You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our own time,
different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't. So
you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way
to do that is to visit them.)  Any idea that's considered harmless in a
significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a
candidate for something we're mistaken about.  
  
For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the early
1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure saying, among
other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's
clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the
world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more where it's
considered especially polite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's
considered improper.  Odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of
the taboos a visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he
happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.   
  
**Prigs**  
  
Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably have a
separate reference manual just for Cambridge. This has always been a fussy
place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're liable to get both
your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that
suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see what's inside
their heads.  
  
Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to us that
kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give them of the world
is not merely simplified, to suit their developing minds, but sanitized as
well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to think.   
  
You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. A lot of my
friends are starting to have children now, and they're all trying not to use
words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing, lest baby start using
these words too. But these words are part of the language, and adults use them
all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the
language by not using them. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it's
fitting that kids should use the whole language. We like children to seem
innocent.   
  
Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading view of the world.
One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little
kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to
believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for their
sake, or for ours?  
  
I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably inevitable that
parents should want to dress up their kids' minds in cute little baby outfits.
I'll probably do it myself. The important thing for our purposes is that, as a
result, a well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete
collection of all our taboos  and in mint condition, because they're
untainted by experience. Whatever we think that will later turn out to be
ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside that head.  
  
How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment. Imagine a
kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a time as a mercenary
in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a
nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter  just someone who has seen a
lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside
the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does
he think that would shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least
embodies, present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what
we can't say.  
  
**Mechanism**  
  
I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look at how
taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are they adopted? If
we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own
time.  
  
Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions are.
Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone imitates the whim of
some influential person. The fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth
century Europe began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot.
The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the
name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be
created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often because
some group doesn't want us to.  
  
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The irony of
Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating Copernicus's
ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a
cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the
church was in the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more worried
about unorthodox ideas.  
  
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and
power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's not
considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans, or the
English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo.
Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough
to have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle.  
  
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power
struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where
you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need
them.  
  
Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as struggles
between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for
wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as a struggle to preserve the
souls of Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get
people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be
considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by
selecting that side as the victor.  
  
We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over
totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of
the winners.  
  
I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they will
always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or not. And just as
there is nothing so unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there is
nothing so wrong as the principles of the most recently defeated opponent.
Representational art is only now recovering from the approval of both Hitler
and Stalin.   
  
Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than fashions in
clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the same. The early
adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to
distinguish themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes
established they'll be joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear.
 This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but
because they are afraid of standing out.  
  
So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery of
fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are
powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas
were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a
recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate
himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas
would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?  
  
This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think of some
that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted
deep in the past. But this approach, combined with the preceding four, will
turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas.  
  
**Why**  
  
Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go poking
around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?  
  
I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as a kid:
plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything that's forbidden.
Let me see and decide for myself.  
  
Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. If, like
other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I want to know
what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing them.  
  
Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you need a
brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that's in the
habit of going where it's not supposed to.  
  
Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea
is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural selection, for example.
It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too
obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the implications of his
theory. He wanted to spend his time thinking about biology, not arguing with
people who accused him of being an atheist.  
  
In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to question
assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good ones, is
precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is broken, and then
try to pry apart the cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new
theories come from.  
  
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom,
but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble.
This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing
to look under rocks.   
  
Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most physicists
could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in French literature, but
few professors of French literature could make it through a PhD program in
physics. Or it could be because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories
are true or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that,
because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you
have to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good
politician.)  
  
Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between intelligence and
willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't just because smart people
actively work to find holes in conventional thinking. I think conventions also
have less hold over them to start with. You can see that in the way they
dress.  
  
It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any competitive field,
you can win big by seeing things that others daren't. And in every field there
are probably heresies few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a
lot of hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause is so
obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make
bad cars. And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are
antibrands  something you'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac
stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one
dares say this.  Otherwise these companies would have tried to fix the
problem.  
  
Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the
thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch before running,
you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume
during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they'd make
people's hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips
outside the box that people call innovative.  
  
**_Pensieri Stretti_**  
  
When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My advice is,
don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.  
  
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow. Proposals
to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected
of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with
suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with yellow. If you go
around saying this, you'll be denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find
yourself having a lot of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life
is to rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if you're
mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just
be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.  
  
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to say what
you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you think, it may inhibit
you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the
opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your speech.
Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head I make a point of
encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret
society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders.
The first rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.  
  
When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had
been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be _"i pensieri stretti &
il viso sciolto."_ Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and
don't tell them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an
argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But
I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of
degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them
you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete
distraction.  
  
I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the harassment to
which the Scientologists subject their critics , or that pro-Israel groups
are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israeli human rights
abuses , or about people being sued for violating the DMCA , part of
me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there
are so many things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left
for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky.   
  
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the
advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the
optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can
speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good
rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to
without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.  
  
**_Viso Sciolto?_**  
  
I don't think we need the _viso sciolto_ so much as the _pensieri stretti._
Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't agree with whatever
zealotry is current in your time, but not to be too specific about what you
disagree with. Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer
them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their terms by asking
"are you with us or against us?" you can always just answer "neither".  
  
Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry Summers did when a
group tried to put him in this position. Explaining himself later, he said "I
don't do litmus tests."  A lot of the questions people get hot about are
actually quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer quickly.  
  
If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to fight
back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused of being a
yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want to avoid directly
engaging the main body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with
arrows from a distance.  
  
One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of abstraction. If
you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid being accused of
whatever heresy is contained in the book or film that someone is trying to
censor. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use
of labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term "political
correctness" meant the beginning of the end of political correctness, because
it enabled one to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of
any of the specific heresies it sought to suppress.  
  
Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the
House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, "The Crucible,"
about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and
so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch
trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the
activities of the committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."  
  
Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably
lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes. They're as unhappy
on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian
prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as
a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. "I am glad that I
managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I
have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is
what the situation deserved."   
  
**ABQ**  
  
A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society.
It's true they have a long tradition of comparative open-mindedness. For
centuries the low countries were the place to go to say things you couldn't
say anywhere else, and this helped to make the region a center of scholarship
and industry (which have been closely tied for longer than most people
realize). Descartes, though claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in
Holland.  
  
And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in
rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there; is there really
nothing you can't say?  
  
Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee. Who thinks
they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks
she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say
the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though they draw the line at
things that are really wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental,
and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or
"destructive".)  
  
When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong answers
on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they don't know it. In
fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to
be invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to
someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It's only
by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the
right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.  
  
Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of new fashions
makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so ridiculous by contrast.
From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other end seems especially far away.  
  
To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort. Without
time to give you distance, you have to create distance yourself. Instead of
being part of the mob, stand as far away from it as you can and watch what
it's doing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is being
suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban sites containing
pornography, violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and
violence? And what, exactly, is "hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out
of _1984._  
  
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is
false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You don't need to say that
it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you
see statements being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values
of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is
wrong. When you hear such labels being used, ask why.  
  
Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the mob you need to
learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch your own thoughts
from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the way; it's the main
difference between children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's
tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance himself enough
from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one
couldn't, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of
moral fashions.  
  
You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly. But it's
harder, because now you're working against social customs instead of with
them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount
your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can
discount society's bad moods.  
  
How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be questioning. That's
the only defence. What can't you say? And why?  
  
  
  
_**