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.
no subject
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.