Update (September 29, 2023): Rosanne Barr today: https://x.com/therealroseanne/status/1707919748326207865?s=20. Cancelled but hardly broken.
Watching the culture of outrage that has unfolded over the last few yeas has made me even more dedicated to the principle of free speech and expression. Progressives are making me more liberal everyday. If they want the loyalty of working people, progressives need to dial back the outrage and focus on things that actually hurt people and stifle the movement for justice and equality, for example capitalism and the two-party system.
As a life-long atheist, I’ve had a lot of insults hurled my way. But I have never wanted those who insult me pay a price for it. I’ve always figured they’re ignoramuses and move on from there. I’ve also long recognized that people have the freedom to voice their opinion, whatever I think of it, without having to pay a price.
I remember in fourth grade classmates telling the teacher on me for words I used. I was scheduled for a paddling for saying “shit” and “ass.” Why did they want to hurt me for words? The teacher could have simply asked me to avoid using those words. I escaped that beating, but I was paddled in the ninth grade for making fun of the principal over the intercom. They were words that didn’t warrant being beaten. I didn’t actually hurt anybody. The principal could have laughed it off. But he was so angry he wanted to hurt me. And he did. A small person beat me for a stunt. I didn’t know the PA in the gymnasium was where he delivered announcements to the entire school. I bent over took my licks all while I looked into the blue eyes of Jesus (it was a Christian school in Murfreesboro, Tennessee).
But as bad as my beating was (four hard licks), Mr. Chaudoin didn’t try to ruin my life. He didn’t kick me out of school. Rosanne Barr was thrown off her own show in May of this year for making a joke on Twitter. The joke was about Obama Administration official Valarie Jarrett and the media said the joke was racist because Jarrett has black ancestry (a lot of us do, I suspect). Rosanne thought Jarrett was Jewish. But it doesn’t matter. Rosanne should not have lost her show over it. She shouldn’t have lost anything over it. They were just words.
Although I have always tried to not let words hurt me, I have not always been successful. But part of my strategy for getting through life was wanting to be better than those who insulted me or caused others to dislike me. If you don’t let people get to you, you possess a certain type of power.
A punch in the face is an objective event with an objective consequence. The causal connection is a physical thing. Like striking billiard balls. An utterance—a joke, for example—is a physical event (air is being moved) but with nonphysical content (an idea). The emotional response is also objective (electricity and chemistry are happening). But there is no physical thing that connects the phenomena. You cannot move billiard balls with words.
Ah, you say, but if billiard balls were sentient, then they might be moved by words. True. But, in that case, they could choose to move in any number of directions—or not move at all. I wouldn’t have control over the billiard balls if they were thinking for themselves, deciding how they were going to feel and respond.
It’s the meaning of words that’s shared. Meaning is negotiated. Meaning is variable. The listener can choose how he is going to let words affect him. He can decide how he will respond. Surely screaming in somebody’s face incessantly carries an unchosen effect. Other animals can be stressed in this way, too. But consider that the insult is somewhere where a person has to go find it, say by joining Twitter and looking up a thread and reading through it. People are looking to be offended. They could shrug off the insult. But they make a choice to find the insult, to be insulted, and make a scene.
There is a famous story about the famous lexicographer Samuel Johnson who compiled the first great dictionary of the English language. When it was complete, Dr. Johnson was congratulated by delegations of admirers and well wishers. Among them was a delegation of the respectable ladies of London. “Dr. Johnson,” they said, “We are delighted to find that you have not included any indecent or obscene words in your dictionary.” “Ladies,” he replied, “I congratulate you on trying to find them.” I don’t know if the story is true or apocryphal, but it makes the point.
Moreover, while some people experience hurt feelings by reading something on a Twitter feed, others feel nothing at all—including members of the same community, identity, or status. Some Muslims get upset over cartoons of their prophet and demand the cartoonist be censored and punished. Some Muslims even take matters into their own hands and murder cartoonists—and progressives respond by telling the “Islamophobes” to stop provoking Muslims! Of course, no Muslim is actually harmed by cartoons. Not all Muslims are even offended by them.
How quickly a great number of people read Rosanne’s words who would not otherwise have known about them. If there was offense to be taken, the media made sure to maximize the offense—not unlike the Imams taking the Danish cartoons on the road throughout the Islamic world. And pundits and progressives weren’t just content with letting people know what was tweeted. They told everybody how they were supposed to feel about it. You were supposed to look at this thing one way.
At a practical everyday level, we don’t help people deal with a world of many and varied people with different attitudes and opinions—i.e., a free, open, and diverse society— by telling them they’re supposed to be outraged by this or that word or phrase or joke. You help people by teaching them not to let other people control their feelings. That’s how to deal with offensive speech in a free society.
Speech is not violence. I’m not saying words don’t have effects. If this were true, I wouldn’t be typing this right now. I’m saying that there are no words that deserve punishment or deprivation. Words do not harm you unless you let them. People have control over their own feelings. If they don’t, they should learn to. People don’t own me with their words unless they cause somebody to punish me for them. Because if I control my feelings, others don’t control me.
Indeed, it’s a lot easier to control my feelings than to control somebody else’s speech. Moreover, if I control my feelings, I will be happier. If people get to speak their minds, they will be freer. And I will get to speak my mind and be freer, too. because what I defend for others I defend for myself. And people won’t lose their jobs, their careers, be ostracized, etc.
Am I saying that we shouldn’t be civil to one another? Of course not. I have no problem with civility. I recommend it in my classes. But we should never require civility. We should never punish somebody for an opinion or a joke. We should never make people pay for speech. Of course, a lot of the attack on Barr was virtue signaling. I get it. People want to tout their antiracism bona fides by piling on. Everybody is took their turn angrily decrying Rosanne Barr.
They did the same thing to Paula Deen. In 2013, I wrote, “Paula Deen is a scapegoat. Scapegoats appear in our society with regularity because, as a nation, we prefer to ritualize and rationalize unjust social relations rather than actually deal with them. We load our racist demons—which continue to exist because we haven’t done the hard work of eliminating racism—onto a single person and send that person packing. Deen now carries the stigma of racist. We can feel good about racism because he have formed it into a person and we can tell ourselves that we are not that person. We do the same thing with class (remember Leona Helmsley?). It’s nothing more than a symbolic purging of collective guilt, and since the conditions that make us guilty are and never can be addressed, we will soon have to symbolically purge again. Who’s next?” Certainly Roseanne Barr.
In the social media age, online outrage is a substitution for civil rights activism. It’s how people feel like they’re making a difference. If they can get somebody fired, then they can pump their fist in the air and congratulate themselves. “Here’s where the racist lives. Give his boss a call and see what he thinks about this!”
I must add that, with Barr in particular, this was at least as much about hitting Trump by proxy than taking out Rosanne. Both Trump and Rosanne are populists. Progressives loath populism.
freedom and reason 