On Canceling Authors and Such
Jul. 2nd, 2020 04:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI watched and enjoyed this video from Council of Geeks on how to respond to the work of authors who have problematic views. I also felt a need to comment on it, and as my comment became rather long, I'd thought I'd archive it here too:
I like a lot of the nuance in this video, the awareness of personal choice, the idea that there are different ways to thoughtfully process and respond. I want to add a further piece of nuance. I feel a tacit premise of the discussion is that the problematic creator must be repudiated as a person. That may or may not involve boycotting their works, but it necessarily involves repudiating them. (Ex. Reading HP becomes about relating to friends and family, not Rowling. Rowling is out.) I worry about repudiating people, as whole human beings, for having problematic views. Honestly, who doesn’t have problematic views about some issue at some point through some historical hindsight?
I’ll take Dickens as an example. Dickens had a lot of problems: he was a hypocrite about sex, who left his wife and carried on with his mistress while crusading to reform fallen women. I think his conservative economic politics were also damaging, for the same reasons they are today: a reliance on personal charity and refusal to fund decent safety nets with taxes will simply perpetuate squalor. That’s the reality. Charity doesn’t get the job done. But he was also an enormous advocate for the humanity of poor people and an astute student of the human soul. A work like “A Christmas Carol” puts his economic politics on full display: the nasty people like Scrooge are the ones who thinks taxes are the way to support the poor. Yet “A Christmas Carol” is a brilliant psychological sledgehammer, simultaneously blasting rich business people for using business as an excuse to let others suffer while also showing profound awareness of how personal pain and loss can transform good people into nasty people while planting the seeds for their further evolution into better, wiser people. I have no wish to repudiate Dickens as a human being, though I am quite willing repudiate some of his views and actions (even by the standards of his own time). Human beings are complex. So are their philosophies and works. If we exclude as simply “bad” anyone who holds a view we feel does harm—even if the harm is real and substantial—we will, sooner or later, have almost no one “acceptable” left, probably including ourselves.
I like a lot of the nuance in this video, the awareness of personal choice, the idea that there are different ways to thoughtfully process and respond. I want to add a further piece of nuance. I feel a tacit premise of the discussion is that the problematic creator must be repudiated as a person. That may or may not involve boycotting their works, but it necessarily involves repudiating them. (Ex. Reading HP becomes about relating to friends and family, not Rowling. Rowling is out.) I worry about repudiating people, as whole human beings, for having problematic views. Honestly, who doesn’t have problematic views about some issue at some point through some historical hindsight?
I’ll take Dickens as an example. Dickens had a lot of problems: he was a hypocrite about sex, who left his wife and carried on with his mistress while crusading to reform fallen women. I think his conservative economic politics were also damaging, for the same reasons they are today: a reliance on personal charity and refusal to fund decent safety nets with taxes will simply perpetuate squalor. That’s the reality. Charity doesn’t get the job done. But he was also an enormous advocate for the humanity of poor people and an astute student of the human soul. A work like “A Christmas Carol” puts his economic politics on full display: the nasty people like Scrooge are the ones who thinks taxes are the way to support the poor. Yet “A Christmas Carol” is a brilliant psychological sledgehammer, simultaneously blasting rich business people for using business as an excuse to let others suffer while also showing profound awareness of how personal pain and loss can transform good people into nasty people while planting the seeds for their further evolution into better, wiser people. I have no wish to repudiate Dickens as a human being, though I am quite willing repudiate some of his views and actions (even by the standards of his own time). Human beings are complex. So are their philosophies and works. If we exclude as simply “bad” anyone who holds a view we feel does harm—even if the harm is real and substantial—we will, sooner or later, have almost no one “acceptable” left, probably including ourselves.
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Date: 2020-07-03 01:22 pm (UTC)So it's up to the consumer to decide what level of problematic they're comfortable with. And that's going to be affected by all sorts of things. For example, I've come to terms with liking Lovecraft's work because he's dead and from my understanding, his estate doesn't get any money from his stuff because copyright things. But I wouldn't feel the same if he were alive. And some people just Cannot with him and 100% refuse to read his stories, even if he's dead.
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Date: 2020-07-03 04:55 pm (UTC)I agree it's personal, and that was the message of the Council of Geeks video. What I wanted to respond to is a certain cultural tendency, not foregrounded but implicitly present in the video, that the choice to condemn the person is NOT personal; condemning them is a necessary article of public virtue. What's personal in this reading (the video's, not yours) is HOW to condemn them: possibly by rejecting all their works, possibly by enjoying their works while rejecting them. But to say, for example, "Yep, they're a homophobe but in a lot of ways I think they're pretty cool [as a person]," in this view, is not okay; that's not construed as being in the realm of legitimate personal moral choice. It's construed as immoral and aligned with condoning bigotry.
And that's what I challenge. It's certainly a personal choice to say, "I can't stand this person; I detest them." But it should also, at least in most cases, be an acceptable personal choice to say, "I see the good in them too. I don't dislike them as a person, despite their harmful views/actions." Now, is there ever a line to draw? Maybe. Is it a bit suspect to say you kind of like Hitler, his problems notwithstanding? Yeah, I would say so. But Lovecraft, J. K. Rowling, Orson Scott Card (featured in the video), they're not Hitler. And there shouldn't be any requirement of proving public virtue by repudiating them as human beings, regardless of whether one continues to like their works.
And I want to be clear, I don't get the sense that Council of Geeks is prepared to die on the hill of "Uphold public virtue!" That wasn't the point of the video at all; it was just something that seemed to be a bit of an unexamined assumption. And it's an unexamined assumption I see too much of today, so I wanted to speak up about it.
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Date: 2020-07-03 08:05 pm (UTC)Oh! Thank you for wording this, this is an underlying thing that drives me crazy but I hadn't properly sort of pinpointed.
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Date: 2020-07-04 06:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-07-04 12:18 pm (UTC)I agree that people aren't required to announce that they're going to stop supporting JKR to publicly prove their virtue. And I'm personally iffy about assuming that someone who hasn't said anything in public does/doesn't support her. (Though, staying silent is also a sign of privilege.)
But at the same time, I would argue that it's actively harmful to publicly say that, "She has harmful views about trans women, but she's done so many good things too." At this point, the harm of that statement outweighs anything else. Because JKR has a lot of reach, audience-wise, and she's using her platform to say horrible things about a group that's in a dangerous position in society. The good things she has done are outweighed by the immediate increased danger she's created for trans women.
I feel like it would be more appropriate to say, "She has done so many good things, but she has harmful views about trans women." The framing acknowledges the good she has done but also brings the point back to the more immediate concerns of her transphobic views.
And honestly my first instinct would be to keep quiet if I'm not part of the group that's being negatively impacted. I'm not a trans woman so I would rather amplify the voices of trans women on the issue. If I had Thought on the topic, I would limit my sharing to Dreamwidth (since I treat my journal as more of a personal diary rather than a Platform for reaching out to a wider audience).
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Date: 2020-07-04 06:11 pm (UTC)Those are all really good points, and I agree with all of them overall. I think you and I are addressing two different time scales. And that might be part of the overall cognitive dissonance I feel about a lot in this age. It may be that I'm interpreting discussions about now as discussions about timeless ontological judgment. Thank you for that thought.
I totally agree that saying, "But JKR is awesome" in the context of an ongoing discussion about harm her transphobia is doing is problematic. I agree the dominant effect of such a move would be to derail a discussion about harm to trans people and, thus, perpetuate and deepen it. And I agree that in the context of that discussion, framing is very important: "She's transphobic but awesome" reads very differently from "She's awesome but transphobic." These are all things that matter a lot in the context of conversations on Twitter (and probably here as well--though only about 7 people read my DW) in response to her recent statements and their impact.
I wasn't intending, however, to talk about how to phrase things in a conversation about certain current issue. I was talking more broadly--across the course of a lifetime, say--about the question of whether there is a moral necessity of condemning a human being for having harmful views/actions, and I'd argue, at least in most cases, there's not. I was talking mostly about how one feels more than speaks, though the legitimacy of speaking one's feelings was implicit.
But if a piece of your point is that I should be more careful here (or commenting on YouTube) about not derailing equity conversations, I will gratefully take that onboard, though I think the issue is extremely complex. I think often it boils down to: what helps with one issue harms somewhere else and those helps and harms are entangled and tend to boomerang back on each other. Ex. Hard condemnation of JKR's attitudes supports trans people (helpful) but deepens our current tendency toward anger, judgment, and condemnation in general (harmful, in my view), and that heightened anger, in turn, deepens a transphobic backlash (harmful). But not condemning her views hard trivializes the oppression of trans people (harmful), while potentially promoting nuance and tolerance for humans in general (helpful), yet can be read (or meant) not as nuance but as supporting transphobia (harmful), and so on.
As to silence and privilege, I agree, but I'm not sure--I'm really not sure--how much speaking out about any given issue should be considered a civic/moral duty. There 500 billion issues in the world today. No one can speak to all of them. For myself, I'm not a Harry Potter fan. I don't really care about JKR, and I, thus, don't feel a need to wade into this particular discussion to show I support trans people. I would hope I can show that in other ways, like creating an inclusive environment for my trans students, striving to write good trans characters (as I hope to in the novel I'm working on now), etc. OTOH, I did/do feel a duty to address BLM: that seems such a huge, pervasive American thing. And then again, what do we mean by "speak out"? Does it mean everyone has a duty to be on social media or attend a demonstration? Is it enough to talk about with family and friends...?
In very broad strokes, I like the idea that in doing good in the world people should play to their strengths. I don't go to demonstrations because it would be a huge energy drain in exchange for my being mostly invisible. I try to do more with writing/reason, especially in my work environment these days, because writing and reason come easier to me. And if someone is a quiet, non-confrontational person whose main contribution is being kind to the people they meet, I'm inclined to think that's okay. It takes all kinds.
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Date: 2020-07-07 04:07 am (UTC)