the banality of Controversial Ideas
Speaking of complaining, the Journal of Controversial Ideas, co-founded by controversial philosopher Peter Singer, published its first issue last week. A publication by and for academics against cancel culture, it consists of somewhat-well-reasoned but tone-deaf pieces. For instance, Bouke de Vries argues that blackface can be acceptable in some situations, arguing that “the use of black make-up in Spanish Epiphany parades when there are no (willing) black locals to perform the role of King Balthasar” is probably morally justified. Another piece is subtitled, “Defending the Defense of Stupid Ideas on University Campuses,” which is maybe too good a tagline for the journal itself. My favorite title is perhaps the least controversial: Rivka Weinberg’s “Ultimate Meaning: We Don’t Have It, We Can’t Get It, and We Should Be Very, Very Sad.”
Thomas Chatterton Williams, who spearheaded last year’s infamous, anti-cancel-culture Harper’s letter, is on the editorial board of the journal, and I ended up spending a long time scrolling through his Twitter feed. He is a biracial author worried about critical race theory and kids at liberal arts schools. He likes Hemingway and Moby-Dick. His nemesis is Ibram X. Kendi. His beat is eye-rolling and axe-grinding about the stupidities of social justice vocabulary. He is probably right about some things, but the vibe is less Lionel Trilling than Gretchen Carlson screaming about Festivus.
Identity politics discourse on social media is often dogmatic and inconsistent, but these dudes with tens of thousands of Twitter followers dying on the hill of How-Dare-You-Deplatform-Me has always struck me as just adding to the heap of misplaced righteousness. The tone is humorless, Reddit-cocksure, and Orwellian; the rhetoric is slippery-sloped; the book recs are predictable. It looks a lot like triggering the libs (CPAC this year was called “America Uncanceled”), except no one is having fun and everyone wishes David Foster Wallace were still around to join in. It looks a lot like successful people with large platforms blaming the culture for how boring and bitter they have become.
Cancel culture is about who gets a platform in an age where everyone has unprecedented access to one. Singer and Chatterton Williams want to give larger platforms to people with unfashionable, even offensive, ideas, which is fine. Maybe it’s even good. It’s definitely less complicated when it’s a small academic journal and not, say, the President. But woke-bashing on Twitter increasingly feels like a kind of self-generating paranoia that is ostensibly about the culture but really about people’s careers. Both cancel culture and the wild reactions to it seem more symptomatic of a public forum that is primarily a way of serving advertisements; a journalistic environment of media influencers, metajournalism, and industry round-ups; and a world in which nothing is more valuable than brand.
Ben Smith, the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed who now writes a media column for the Times, recently profiled the editor of Harper’s, John MacArthur, who later complained that Smith made him “look like an effete weirdo.” It’s reporting about reporting; it’s celebrity gossip; it’s rich people bickering. If you’re looking for “the culture,” this is it.
ben tapeworm