Like fighting through molasses
the emotional swamp
We have privileged feelings and emotions to such a degree in this society that it is now difficult or impossible for people to separate how they feel about something from the bare fact of something.
It’s not just stupid people, or narcissistic people. It’s normal, smart, stable adults too.
Often, trying to discuss a legal fact as distinct from how people emote about that fact feels like trying to swim up to the surface in a pool of molasses (treacle if you’re British). Feminine molasses. No, it’s not all women, and yes, men do this too. But it is a female-style emphasis on emotion to the exclusion of even acknowledging that the discussion on the table is about a fact.
Specifically, I’m talking about a conversation I try to start on social media from time to time about “hate speech.” I recently posted on Twitter that we have forgotten that the U.S. does not recognize “hate speech.” There is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. This is a fact. Repeat: this is an objective fact.
Free speech exceptions include, as they should, libel, harassment, and incitement to violence.
But they do not include exceptions for subjectively defined “hate speech.”
I followed that up by saying that it is not illegal to have the emotion “hate.” One may feel it is unwise or immoral, but it is not illegal.
The sop
This conversation, and others similar to it, inevitably get responses that include what I think of as the “good girl sop.” Substitute “good boy sop” if you like. That is when a person seems to defend free speech, but undercuts her argument by slipping in obligatory phrases like:
”Of course, I try not to hate because I know it does harm”
”Of course, racism still exists and it must be fought”
”Of course, homophobia still exists and it must be fought”
Etc., etc. The sop is a self-defense mechanism. Translated into plain terms, it means, “I know that I’m going to be seen by some as a right wing freak because I’m tentatively defending free speech, so I’m going to signal that I’m not a Bad Troglodyte Fascist by repeating the obvious and irrelevant bromides that signify that I’m Not A Racist Sexist Misogynist Hater.”
The sop brings many problems.
It drags the conversation away from the main point. As a reminder, that main point is that it’s legal to feel hate and say hateful things, and that has nothing to do with how observers feel about that state of affairs. Guess who is happy that you have willingly deprived yourself of a conversation about your legal rights? The people who want to shut you up.
It shows the anti-free-speech side that one is socially biddable, and can be induced to shut up or back down with sufficient pressure. Such a person will stop vigorously defending his speech if enough black or queer or whatever people apply modern emotional guilt.
It gives the false impression that “racism”, for example, still exists in the extreme way that it existed 70 years ago. It privileges alleged “racist” behavior (substitute sexist or any other -ist) over all other legal or moral concerns. The net effect is to keep us mired in a false view of reality, and to make it unseemly or “mean” to prioritize anything other than “racism” or “misogyny” or “homophobia.”
The fact is that all of these prejudices are so successfully vanquished that it’s a perverse joke to pretend otherwise. The pendulum has swung so far away from casual bigotry that the former targets of bigotry—blacks, gays, trans, women, etc.—have vastly more cultural power than the average ordinary white American. Too many such people have social approval to bully and cancel with no moral or legal check on their behavior.
What I’m trying to do when I start these conversations is to remind people of what their legal rights are. I’m trying to convince people to resist the culture machine’s elision of thinking and emotion so that we can separate out what is factually true from what we feel about it. In short, I’m doing what courtroom lawyers do when they insist on a plain reading of the law as distinct from emotionally motivated reasoning about the law.
Yes, this is connected to Cluster B behaviors. No, I don’t mean that most of the people who engage in them are personality disordered. What I mean is that this social media interaction is a mirror of the private narcissistic interactions in the home. Take a narcissistic parent like my mother as an example. In my childhood home, facts were contested when mother didn’t like those facts. If I gave a factually correct answer that my mother did not like, I would be punished. More, if my displayed emotions were not consonant with her emotions, I would be punished. By this method, the existence of fact itself was destabilized for me from a young age. It’s why I react so vehemently to those who pretend facts aren’t real, or who try to cover them up by emotionally guilt-tripping me.
I think it’s easy to see how this dynamic has become normalized in social discourse.
We must be able to separate feeling from fact if we’re going to think. We must be able to do this if we’re going to preserve our freedom of speech and thought. And we don’t have to agree about the emotions associated with these facts. You can be on one side, and I can be on the other, but we both have an interest in being able to see and describe the facts. We both benefit from the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.
It’s increasingly difficult to have this conversation. Participants either ignore the distinction between is and ought entirely by ignoring the issue of legal fact and starting up about their feelings, or they respond with little more than the sop. That’s what I mean when I say it feels like trying to swim to the surface of a pool of emotional molasses.
Coda: I insist on trying to separate emotional discussions from factual discussions because I know what a mess is created when we don't. And it's personal.
I'm highly emotional compared to the average man. When I heard Jordan Peterson describe himself as having an emotional personality profile leaning toward female-typical (high negative emotionality), I thought, "Ah, yes. I'm that kind of man, too."
My emotions have caused me and others no end of trouble when I haven't kept them in their place. I try, and I often still fail. But I must try.
And I think others must try, too.
It's all so true; this gooey coating of every issue with a deep layer of emotion. Next to impossible to get past, a little bit like a tar baby.
As an attorney (guess I should add, as a white cis hetero fully-abled privileged woman), I was used to having vigorous debates and conversations with colleagues ever since law school. One professor from another college in the university dryly observed that he could always tell if he was in the elevator with students from the law school because they never shut up and were always in the middle of heated discussions. Anyway, I took for granted that I could get a fair back-and-forth with just about any issue of the day, legal or otherwise. That all began to change about fifteen years ago or so, when it became apparent that there were hidden third-rails that I suddenly wasn't supposed to touch upon.
I'm still upset at a reply I got to a Facebook post I did about six months ago. Although I avoid most political stuff on Facebook, I do post a few things that I think are well-sourced and important points. I linked to a long article about Dr. Jay Battacharya and his amazing efforts to determine what the actual Covid prevalence rate was in the local California population. He did this early in the pandemic, when such information was frustratingly missing from our public health authorities. Professor Jay knew that this info was vital and was always known to be Job #1 in standard pandemic response. The results of his study revealed several things, one of which was that the infection mortality rate was showing as an order of magnitude below what the CDC and other world health authorities were putting out there (about 3 in a thousand, instead of three in one hundred). But when he tried to get the results of his research published, he was censored and his research was ignored. I thought the story of his censoring, which happened at the beginning of the pandemic and was not tied in any way to any kind of political position at that time, was shocking and that it was something that no one could possibly be in favor of.
I was wrong. My post was mostly ignored, but one former colleague of mine replied: "How can you say the virus wasn't deadly when morgue trucks were stacked up in New York to handle all the dead?"
What I DID say in linking to the article was a brief summary of the facts and the censorship issue, including a mention of the fact that Dr. Jay's study showed that the actual IFR appeared to be much less deadly than originally feared.
Her response still shocks me because she has the exact background to NOT focus on irrelevant and misleading points. She was my immediate supervisor when I worked for years in the appeals division of the Philadelphia DA's office. Our job literally was to address convicted defendant's legal appeals, to take apart their legal arguments, research all of the facts in the case and all of the legal statutes and case law that would apply, and then write a legal brief in opposition (assuming that we opposed relief, which was usually the case). We would also appear in court to argue our positions before the judge and sometimes even have to hold a new evidentiary hearing. In other words, actual facts, actual law, to.the.letter., unaffected by emotional appeals or mis-direction. Her response to my Facebook post was the exact equivalent of an emotive defense-type of "argument" she routinely shut down at work; "How can you keep my client in jail when the police report had several typos?" Hmm, maybe because your client was caught on video robbing the store, and then caught five minutes later with a gun and the proceeds?? The case law is clear that this amount of quality evidence outweighs the weak evidence raised by the defense.
This brilliant woman, who I used to think of as a friend, is also married to a world-renown expert on infectious diseases. The go-to guy who was quoted in our major newspapers when Ebola became a concern, for instance. A power-couple who hosted Obama in their home for fundraisers.
So well written.
Hate speech is a concept that I am at odds with. How can I control someone else’s thought or even emotions? I cannot.
If someone says: I hate you. Does it do me harm? No. Do I like that someone hates me? Also no.
Emotions must be separated from any conversations around facts. Instead we are hearing this nonsense now that there are no ultimate truths and we need to respect other ways of knowing.
It is exactly as if most of us have become socially and politically illiterate. Individual’s feelings trump everything. Objective facts are irrelevant.
This is no basis for a society.
The only thing left is to live off the grid.
With a goat. And chickens.
Sorry, sick and in a bad mood today.