Name: A Taxonomy of Fear
Brand: persuasion.community
SKU: persuasion-community-1
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

A Taxonomy of Fear

preview

SubscribeSign inShare this postA Taxonomy of Fearwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailJul 21, 2020Share this postA Taxonomy of Fearwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailWe live in a time of personal timorousness and collective mercilessness. There might seem to be a contradiction between being fearful and fearless, between weighing every word you say and attacking others with abandon. But as more and more topics become too risky to discuss outside of the prevailing orthodoxies, it makes sense to constantly self-censor, feeling unbound only when part of a denunciatory pack. Institutions that are supposed to be guardians of free expression—academia and journalism in particular—are becoming enforcers of conformity. Campuses have bureaucracies that routinely undermine free speech and due process. Now, these practices are breaching the ivy wall. They are coming to a high school or corporate HR office near you.The cultural rules around hot button issues are ever-expanding. It’s as if a daily script went out describing what’s acceptable, and those who flub a line—or don’t even know a script exists—are rarely given the benefit of the doubt, no matter how benign their intent. Naturally, people are deciding the best course is to shut up. It makes sense to be part of the silenced majority when the price you pay for an errant tweet or remark can be the end of your livelihood. Do these problems really matter so long as we have a president who daily tramples on rights, civil discourse, and the rule of law? They do. Of course, we must keep our focus on the danger this administration presents. But it is also our moral and strategic obligation to vigorously defend the principles of a free society. Upholding these values will help us defeat Trumpism. The process by which sinners are punished and apostates expelled can seem random. But there are rules and patterns to the ways in which speech is being silenced. Analyzing and understanding these can help us stand up to the illiberalism of this moment, whether it comes from the left or the right. To that end, here is my taxonomy of fear. The Perils of Safety New York TimesTimesTimes Confronted with words, ideas, or decisions they dislike, a growing number of people are asserting that they are in danger of suffering psychological or even bodily harm. But when one party asserts that a debate threatens their very well-being, it is hard to deliberate on policy—or topics such as race and gender. The result is a narrowing of the space for public discussion and an inability to teach ever more ideas and books. New YorkerBut, as Suk Gersen has pointed out, it was feminists who fought for the overhaul of deeply sexist rape laws, and it is sexual assault victims who will be hurt if lawyers do not learn about the subject. In practice, safetyism will make some of the most vulnerable people in our society less safe.Contamination by AssociationVoxVox’sHow could signing a letter decrying the intolerant atmosphere on the left render a colleague less safe? Because, VanDerWerff argues, the letter was also signed by people she characterized as “prominent anti-trans voices.” Though the letter itself made no mention of trans issues, and VanDerWerff has never accused Yglesias himself of expressing objectionable views on the subject, this, she claims, was enough to harm her.VanDerWerff’s note certainly illustrates safetyism. Going one step further, it also assumes the truth of a principle of “contamination by association.” People, the logic goes, cannot only be made unsafe by the beliefs or statements of their colleagues but also by those with whom their colleagues associate. she herself Even for Hamid, there are some red lines: He will not appear alongside white supremacists or those representing designated terror groups. But he insists that it is important to draw those lines as widely as possible: “If we said we couldn’t do research or couldn’t interview people who had bad views—how would we study things?” Hamid asked me. “It’s a very limited way of looking at the world, one that’s dangerous for democracy.”&nbsp;Hamid is right. If we accept the logic of contamination by association, this requirement will quickly come to suppress the exchange of ideas—or even exposure to ideas which we need to interrogate precisely because we hate them. Tackling views we disagree with is a basic obligation of journalism, especially when they are held by people with the power to put them into effect. New YorkerNew YorkerBut Remnick was not able to put this pressure on Bannon because the pressure on Remnick to rescind Bannon’s invitation was so great that he canceled the interview. they Intent Is IrrelevantLast month, Libby Schaaf, the white mayor of Oakland, California, announced that ropes had been found hanging from trees around a local lake. “These incidents will be investigated as a hate crime,” she said at a press conference. “I want to be clear, regardless of the intentions of whoever put those nooses in our public trees, in our sacred public space here in Oakland, intentions don’t matter.”An investigation revealed that the five ropes had nothing to do with lynching: They were homemade exercise equipment, used by adults and children, put up months earlier by a black resident, Victor Sengbe. He explained his intent at a press conference: “It was really a fun addition to the park.” ReasonWhether or not the accused had an intent to commit wrong-doing is a central question in many criminal prosecutions. Though it might be less obvious, understanding someone’s intent is just as crucial to our social functioning. If we decline to understand why others acted the way they did, or to take into account whether they intended any harm, we multiply the number of violations we perceive—and often end up treating benign people as moral wrongdoers. But the stuff of social and economic life—cooperation, creativity, innovation—requires both risk and trust. For our institutions to function well, we must believe that the people working or learning alongside us are generally decent (until shown otherwise). If wariness and suspicion are our default attitudes, and if each of us knows that one misunderstood word or action might be used against us even if it was motivated by the best of intentions, then we won’t need a virus to keep us socially distanced. Report to the AuthoritiesMore and more things are now perceived as a threat to safety. We are responsible not only for our own ideas but also for the ideas of those with whom we share some tenuous association. When we say or do something that causes offense, the nature of our intentions no longer matter. And what happens when a statement is deemed worthy of criticism in one of these myriad ways? The authorities get involved.The push to turn uncomfortable personal interactions into officially reportable incidents began on campus. Universities have long been the laboratory for creating cadres of bureaucrats who write rules governing social and sexual interactions of all kinds—and then monitor compliance with them, investigate alleged breaches and mete out punishments to perceived culprits. Young people are now routinely told that dealing with conflict is what the professionals are for, and students are encouraged to report all transgressions. The slogan of Drexel University’s Office of Equality and Diversity, for example, echoes the admonitions of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11: “See something, hear something, know something, say something!” New York Times’Of course, some things do need to be reported. But when you live in a society in which people are primed to disclose all discomfort to authority figures, trust and goodwill quickly erode. It also means being aware that you yourself might end up as the subject of a complaint. As Lukianoff and Haidt write, “life in call-out culture requires constant vigilance, fear, and self-censorship.” But shaming someone, especially when done publicly as part of a group, “can award status.” Over the past thirty years, America has become a hyper-punitive society, and our zero-tolerance mindset has led to an addiction to punishment. This has resulted in mass incarceration, causing the destruction of millions of lives and of entire communities. But many of the same people who abhor the excesses of our criminal justice system applaud this new form of social ruin.To be sure, being shunned by your peers or having your admission to college rescinded is not the same as going to jail. But in the age of the internet, social censure can, much like a criminal record, mark someone for life. Do we really want a world in which someone’s educational and professional prospects are diminished because of something they said—genuinely stupid or offensive though it may have been—when they were fifteen? A Chilling EffectSome on the left still claim cancel culture doesn’t exist. Mass firings, they say, are not taking place.&nbsp;Only a few people—who probably deserved it!—have lost their jobs.New York TimesAnd so dread settles in. Challenging books go untaught. Deep conversations are not had. Friendships are not formed. Classmates and colleagues eye each other with suspicion.Lolita Reading Lolita in TehranLolita. Many people ask why any of this should matter in the age of Donald Trump—a president who attacks free speech, stokes bigotry and division, and believes he is above the law. It matters because we have seen what happened when his enablers on the right failed to stand up to the worst impulses of their leader. These enablers are now morally responsible for the tragic consequences of their inaction. We better make sure that we don’t end up committing the same sin. For as Thomas Chatterton Williams writes, “ a generation unable or disinclined to engage with ideas and interlocutors that make them uncomfortable … open[s] the door—accessible from both the left and the right—to various forms of authoritarianism.”Emily Yoffe is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a member of Persuasion’s Board of Advisors.Like this postShare this postA Taxonomy of Fearwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmail42 CommentsFor your security, we need to re-authenticate you.Click the link we sent to , or .Expand full commentExpand full commentNo posts© 2022 Persuasion ∙ ∙ &nbsp;is the home for great writingThis site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please or unblock scripts

SubscribeSign inShare this postA Taxonomy of Fearwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailJul 21, 2020Share this postA Taxonomy of Fearwww.persuasion.communityCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailWe live in a time of personal timorousness and collective mercilessness. There might seem to be a contradiction between being fearful and fearless, between weighing every word you say and attacking others with abandon. But as more and more topics become too risky to discuss outside of the prevailing orthodoxies, it makes sense to constantly self-censor, feeling unbound only when part of a...

public

emilyyoffe123@gmail.com Contributing writer @TheAtlantic

Emily Yoffe

The community for those who believe that a free society is worth fighting for.

persuasion.community

Credible

Speculation

Anecdotal Evidence

Generalization

Stacking the Deck

Appeal to Authority

Straw Man

Slippery Slope

Emotional Appeal

Red Herring

False Dilemma

Illogical

Moral Equivalency

Ad Hominem

Correlation w/o Causation

Semantics

Begging the Question

Faulty Analogy

Non Sequitur

Bandwagon

Dogmatism

Failing Occam's Razor

Biased

Pure Opinion

Hit Piece

Racial Bias

National Bias

Religious Bias

Financial Incentive

Political Agenda

Gender Bias

Misused Image/Video

Study Misinterpreted

Mistake

Misused Term

Science Misrepresented

Factual Error

Satire

Surface Level

Lack of Reliable Sources

Sensational

Not Credible

Investigative

Balanced

Well Sourced

Great Context

sports

entertainment

U.S.

international

business

technology

science

culture

politics

media

health

A Taxonomy of Fear

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS