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Civil Discourse
Some of us are used to having slower conversations in the academy on difficult questions like how do we think about gender and how do we think about racial justice and gender justice, and what’s the relationship between them? The seminar is generally speaking a place for a slower kind of thoughtfulness. We read books. We each have opinions on what goes on there. We come up with judgments. We try as much as we can to respect each other’s views, although it’s not always possible. But we work at it.
But in the public domain it tends to be different. We don’t have the kind of public humanities fora that allows us to conduct public debate in a slow and careful way. And sometimes even within the academy, people are really quick to condemn each other for not having a certain kind of view, and then the conversation stops. But I think the university needs to open more to public life and to various ways of engaging communities so that we can have conversations among those who are in the university and outside the university about the world that we share, public conversations that help us understand what conversations can be.
Managing Our Vitriol
Sometimes we can all be vitriolic, right? Some certain statements will set me off, and I will scream, or I will say all kinds of things to make it known that I disagree, and I’m not going to be silent in the face of an utterance like that. I do that. Sure, I do that. But if I only were to do that, then I would never be having a conversation with anyone. So, you know, at what point do you just say, “You’re racist and you should be shut down?” And at what point do you say, “What you’re saying is really disturbing to me, but I want to understand it better?”
I think it’s really important to live with what is disturbing before shutting it down. It may be that I hear somebody say something that I know I’m going to object to, but I don’t let them quite finish, or I don’t come back with a question because I want to shut it down. But what if, even as it disturbs me and I’m pretty sure I’m going to disagree, I start to ask some questions instead and turn over whatever that point of view is and see whether a conversation with this person is possible?
On the Origins of Cancel Culture
I think we all want to be the moral center of our universe and know what’s right and wrong and make a firm judgment, like, that’s right, that’s wrong. You’re canceled, you’re not. You’re with me. You’re against me. It’s a way of ordering the world and of being our own moral center because why?
It’s almost as if we’ve all become judges because we can’t find any reliable judge outside of ourselves. And that makes so much of our discourse judgmental and quick because we want to reestablish order and moral clarity in a world where there is not enough and where we are frightened by the loss of moral clarity. It’s like a micropolitical solution to, you know, if I censor you and you censor me, then we’re involved in a micropolitical exercise because we’ve lost faith in changing the larger world, and our only form of power is right here and now in relationship to each other.