On March 18th, 1968, following the 1965 riots in Watts and in numerous American cities in 1967, including the riot that began the destruction of Detroit, Robert F. Kennedy gave a speech to the students at Kansas State University. Kennedy quoted the words of early 20th century “Progressive” Kansan William Allen White, and eerily foreshadowed his own death just a few months later, when he said:
‘If our colleges and universities do not breed men who riot, who rebel, who attack life with all their youthful vision and vigor then there is something wrong with our colleges. The more riots that come on college campuses, the better the world for tomorrow.’ ” …
At first he seemed tentative and wooden, stammering and repeating himself, too nervous to punctuate his sentences with gestures. But with each round of applause he became more animated. Soon he was pounding the lectern with his right fist, and shouting out his words.
Rene Carpenter watched the students in the front rows. Their faces shone, and they opened their mouths in unison, shouting, “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”
Hays Gorey, of Time, called the electricity between Kennedy and the K.S.U. students “real and rare” and said that ” .. John Kennedy … himself couldn’t be so passionate, and couldn’t set off such sparks.”
Kevin Rochat was close to weeping because Kennedy was so direct and honest. He kept telling himself, My God! He’s saying exactly what I’ve been thinking! ..
Kennedy concluded by saying, “Our country is in danger: not just from foreign enemies; but above all, from our own misguided policies–and what they can do to the nation that Thomas Jefferson once said was the last, great hope of mankind. There is a contest on, not for the rule of America but for the heart of America. In these next eight months we are going to decide what this country will stand for–and what kind of men we are.”
He raised his fist in the air so it resembled the revolutionary symbol on posters hanging in student rooms that year, promised “a new America,” and the hall erupted in cheers and thunderous applause.
While last year we saw destructive riots ginned up by the media in Ferguson and rioting in New York, Twitter users witness a virtual riot about once a week it seems. And needless to say, sadly, many Twitter users also participate in the weekly Two-Minute Hate. In her review of Jon Ronson’s new book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, Megan McArdle writes at Bloomberg, “Social media is now producing what you might call ‘shame-storming,’ where some offense (real or imagined) is uncovered, and a horde of indignant tweeters quickly assembles to publicize the transgression and heap imprecations on its author”:
This sort of shaming has costs, however. If you haven’t changed someone’s mind, you haven’t changed their behavior, only what they say. If they do harbor the bad beliefs you accused them of, those beliefs are now festering in private rather than being open to persuasion. And you haven’t even necessarily changed what they say in a good direction, because people who are afraid of unjust attacks aren’t afraid of being punished for saying things they know they ought to be ashamed of, but of being punished for saying something they didn’t know would attract this kind of ire. So they’re afraid to say anything at all, or at least anything more interesting than “Woo, puppies!” That’s not norm enforcement; it’s blanket terror.
An even greater cost is that shame itself starts to lose its power. When outrage of the week becomes outrage of the hour, the audience starts to check out. Few people can sustain the emotional intensity needed to see cosmic injustice behind every badly phrased sentence or juvenile photo. Meanwhile, people in communities closer to the target start to respond with an outpouring of support, such that Memories Pizza ended up not by closing up shop and issuing a tearful apology, but trying to figure out what to do with the donations that poured in. The public shaming didn’t change anyone’s mind on gay marriage, or even make it extra-costly to operate an establishment that won’t cater gay weddings; it just hardened each side in their respective positions.
Riding out an online shame-storm isn’t much fun, but as Marc Fitch writes at the Federalist, in an article titled, “We Are Legion: Don’t Let Internet Culture Amplify Idiots,” “It is often quite easy to feel that you are greatly outnumbered and that the entire world is against you, particularly if you have the gall to air your beliefs in the public realm (or be caught in it, in [the Memories Pizza] situation)”:
Social media can seemingly explode with anger at your mention of a political or cultural position that goes against whatever the Video Music Awards are advocating this year. You are beset by Legion.
But are you, really? Two thousand people is a drop in the bucket of the overall population, but when they all turn and look at you it can feel overwhelming. While outrage is nothing new in cultural or political fights, the Internet’s ability to allow individuals to reach people they have never met or places they have never been perpetrates an illusion. Memories Pizza was deluged with one-star ratings by people who had never been to the establishment or sampled its pizza.
It was recently revealed that nearly 70 percent of the criticism lobbed at Rush Limbaugh (which is ample) comes from a small group of activists that have devoted their lives to attempting to make his miserable. However, to view coverage of Limbaugh in television and Internet media, you would think that the entire country is listening and vastly offended at everything he says. You would see and hear what appear to be great swaths of civilization amassing against this radio host. But this is an illusion born of spirit, not of substance, and it is meant to influence the spirit of others. It is necessary to separate the corporeal reality from the illusory zeitgeist.
Few people have time to be so incensed, and those that do should not drive culture. Their offense is an illusion. Their feelings may matter to them, but need not drive discussions and certainly shouldn’t attain such grandiose proportions. Ideas can be debated and talked through, and individuals who maintain a decorum of objective detachment can often find common ground. But fight with a spirit, with irrational rage, and there is no way to find commonality.
The anonymity of the Internet allows this illusion to truly reach its greatest power as a single individual can assume any number of Internet personas that can spew any amount of nonsense and vitriol with no accountability or personal reflection whatsoever. The pseudo-anger and the Internet’s ability to instantaneously connect users can often give the impression of widespread outrage, when really hardly anyone has noticed.
And as Glenn Reynolds noted, perhaps the spectacular fundraising pushback to the left’s Frankenstein mob-style attack on Memories Pizza has created a potentially new dynamic to overcome the hatred of the mob, maybe even if they really do follow Spike Lee’s cinematic advice and wreck a beloved neighborhood hangout.
There has been one minor clarifying upside to the left’s weekly shame-storm, though: In The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand wrote:
It is only in today’s reign of amoral cynicism, subjectivism and hooliganism that men may imagine themselves free to utter any sort of irrational judgment and to suffer no consequences. But, in fact, a man is to be judged by the judgments he pronounces. The things which he condemns or extols exist in objective reality and are open to the independent appraisal of others. It is his own moral character and standards that he reveals, when he blames or praises. If he condemns America and extols Soviet Russia — or if he attacks businessmen and defends juvenile delinquents — or if he denounces a great work of art and praises trash — it is the nature of his own soul that he confesses.
It is their fear of this responsibility that prompts most people to adopt an attitude of indiscriminate moral neutrality. It is the fear best expressed in the precept: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” But that precept, in fact, is an abdication of moral responsibility: it is a moral blank check one gives to others in exchange for a moral blank check one expects for oneself.
There is no escape from the fact that men have to make choices; so long as men have to make choices, there is no escape from moral values; so long as moral values are at stake, no moral neutrality is possible. To abstain from condemning a torturer, is to become an accessory to the torture and murder of his victims.
The moral principle to adopt in this issue, is: “Judge, and be prepared to be judged.” The opposite of moral neutrality is not a blind, arbitrary, self-righteous condemnation of any idea, action or person that does not fit one’s mood, one’s memorized slogans or one’s snap judgment of the moment. Indiscriminate tolerance and indiscriminate condemnation are not two opposites: they are two variants of the same evasion. To declare that “everybody is white” or “everybody is black” or “everybody is neither white nor black, but gray,” is not a moral judgment, but an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment.
That was written in 1962, which means that for over half a century — and likely very much longer — the concept of being “nonjudgmental” has been a mantra among self-described “liberals.” Today, how much do you want to bet that the majority of the “Fire the CEO!”, “Has Justine Landed?” and “Destroy the Pizza Parlor!!!” leftwing crowd will casually claim that nonjudgmentalism is their personal credo, even as they remain increasingly on hair-trigger alert for new ways to be offended, followed by new targets to destroy?
Related: In “Free Speech in Peril: Trigger warning: may offend the illiberal or intolerant,” City Journal veteran editor (now editor-at-large) Myron Magnet explains how, as he moved from left to right in the late 1970s and early 1980s, within “a year or two,” he had “lost all my friends, for saying what I had recently come to believe,” culminating in this incident:
Later still, at Diana Trilling’s dinner table, I committed yet another of my irrepressible faux pas. Turning to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, then the august daily book reviewer of the then-august New York Times, I asked, in all seriousness, “Don’t you think the whole effort of modernism—in architecture, in literature, in music, in painting—might have been a huge dead end, from which Western culture will painfully have to extricate itself?” Shocked silence again, though all these decades later, the question still seems inexhaustibly interesting to me. But again, conversation resumed as if I hadn’t spoken and wasn’t there. As soon enough I wasn’t, for the invitations stopped.
Thus I learned the truth of Mill’s argument that social stigma can be as powerful as law in silencing heterodox opinion, except for people rich enough to be “independent of the good will of other people.” Everyone else who utters “opinions which are under the ban of society . . . might as well be imprisoned as excluded from the means of earning their bread.” No more academic career for me (fortunately, it turned out).
Read the whole thing.
Update:
Preach, @terryteachout. http://t.co/e5NqTmFU2X pic.twitter.com/lKYHYmJVaK
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) April 20, 2015
As Teachout writes, “Use [social media] prudently and they can be a source of enormous pleasure and profit, but never forget that the sharks of cyberspace lie in wait to bite your hand off. They don’t care about you. In fact, you don’t even exist to them, save as an abstract symbol of their preferred causes. What they want, ever and always, is power, and they’ll happily eat you in order to get more of it. If you’re not prepared to bite back—hard—then stay out of the deep end.”
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