This is not the house that pain built

Posted by Gary McGath

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The essay “Surround Yourself With Those Who Are Admirable, and Distance Yourself From Those Who Aren’t,” by Aaron Ross Powell, has me feeling ambivalent. Each time he links to it on Bluesky (and he’s linked to it a lot), I want to say something, but I couldn’t put my concern in a few words. It isn’t obviously wrong, but its focus could encourage readers to cut themselves off from all who disagree with them. In general, I should add, his newsletter is definitely worth reading, and even this piece helped me to clarify my thinking.

The biggest problem in the United States today isn’t bigotry but tribalism. Bigotry is a form of tribalism, of course, but another form is more rampant these days. Disagreement on anything makes someone an enemy. Not just an enemy, but a “Nazi,” a “racist,” a “fascist.” Or a “woke” “traitor.” Such phony accusations come from both left and right, but they’ve become common currency on the left. A certain person on the Boskone program staff tried to win an argument by claiming I’d be deemed racist if I didn’t shut up, even though she admitted that the accusation would be false. A comment on one of my posts in this blog waved vague insinuations of racism at me. The commenter didn’t respond to my request for clarification. In this cultural environment, avoiding the company of “bad” people can easily turn into denouncing anyone who disagrees.

We’re urged from childhood to avoid bad company, and it’s wise advice. Having dishonest or violent people for friends is a bad influence. But Powell’s essay is more about people with bad ideas, as this excerpt shows:

Further complicating matters is the growing belief that disassociation is censorship, that it’s cancel culture to tell someone you wont associate with them anymore, not give them a platform, not make them part of your intellectual or emotional life. It’s not freedom of association you’re exercising, this narrative suggests, but instead opposition to freedom of expression. That’s, of course, nonsense. … It’s why so many people who claim to be the targets of cancel culture are instead just upset that others are criticizing them.

Certainly I find it more comfortable to associate with people who hold the right ideas, and my choice isn’t censorship. Since I think that the ideas I hold are the right ones, in practice that means associating with people who agree with me. But it isn’t good to get too comfortable. If I never hear people argue for their “wrong” ideas, I’m not in a good position to decide if they’re wrong. I know about them only second-hand, perhaps in a distorted form.

What’s more important is how people argue for their ideas. If they give honest reasons, which they consider valid, they may be worth a listen. I’ll learn how better to argue against their views, and it’s possible I’ll discover I’m wrong. If they use lies, insults, and distortions, they aren’t worth spending time on, even if they agree with me. If they spew nonsense with overbearing certainty, they’re just annoying and aren’t worth more of my time than I can help.

Some positions are inherently contemptible. Can there even be an honest Nazi or Communist in a country with free discourse? I wouldn’t want to spend time with someone who cheers the January 6 riot or the October 7 massacre, but it’s a bad idea to wall off all ideas that seem offensive.

Some people are crazy in certain areas but otherwise have a lot to offer. It may be possible to stay clear of their offensive ideas and keep them as friends. At the same time, unchecked irrationality tends to spread, so be careful.

Some traits are more important than others in judging a person. Here’s a rough hierarchy, starting with the worst:

• • Violent and vicious people. Being around them could put you, your friends, or your family at risk.
• • Dishonest people. I’m not talking just about those who cheat people, but ones who knowingly make false claims. People who spew made-up accusations are poison.
• • People who are unnecessarily nasty. This includes run-of-the-mill bigots, ones who don’t join the Klan but are persistently hostile to certain categories of people.
• • Obsessively irrational people. An “idée fixe” in an otherwise normal person can lead to trouble.
• • Sloppy thinkers. That describes a lot of people.
• • People with terrible social skills. That describes me.

My point is that there’s a difference between a person with bad ideas and a bad person. Powell’s insistence that dissociation is not censorship or cancel culture, while certainly a true point, is an odd one to make when talking about people’s character. Cancel culture exists. An individual cutting off a former friend doesn’t rise to that level, and I haven’t heard any claims that it does. A club expelling or censuring a member for deviant opinions, or a convention kicking out a participant for unnamed violations of an absurdly broad rule, can count as cancel culture. An employer making hiring decisions based on the applicant’s ideology is still worse. But claiming anyone calls ending a friendship “censorship” is a straw man argument.

In today’s intellectual climate, it’s easy to drift from the sound advice “Don’t associate with bad people” to “Don’t associate with people outside your bubble of ideas.” I’m afraid that Powell’s article encourages that drift, even if it’s not what he intended.

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Posted by Gary McGath

https://garymcgath.com/wp/evaluating-charles-chaplin/

https://garymcgath.com/wp/?p=5643

Charles Chaplin was a complicated person, formerly accused for being a Communist. (I use “Charles” rather than “Charlie” because this article focuses on the man rather than his movie persona.) These accusations had no merit, but the Wikipedia article on Chaplin echoes some of the charges against him. It claims that “he feared that capitalism and machinery in the workplace would increase unemployment levels” and that this view influenced his film Modern Times. It asserts that his late film Monsieur Verdoux presented views “criticising capitalism and arguing that the world encourages mass killing through wars and weapons of mass destruction.” (Wikipedia articles regularly change, so you might see something different at a future date.)

However, I can’t find any evidence that Chaplin opposed capitalism, the political-economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately owned. It’s been estimated his fortune was about $100 million when he died in 1977. There have been very rich advocates of a state-controlled economy, but usually they aim for power or wealth for themselves through their connections with the system. Chaplin didn’t do that. He seems to have been more of a squishy leftist, the sort who thinks that heavy governmental control over a market economy will make people better off. In spite of trying very hard, the FBI never found any evidence that he belonged to or financially supported the Communist Party. He was prevented from entering the United States in 1952, apparently without legal justification.

I haven’t seen Monsieur Verdoux, but the most-discussed bit in the movie, Verdoux’s statement after being found guilty of murder, presents a view which is anti-war, not anti-capitalist. He says, “As for being a mass killer, does not the world encourage it? Is it not building weapons of destruction for the sole purpose of mass killing? Has it not blown unsuspecting women and little children to pieces and done it very scientifically? As a mass killer, I’m an amateur by comparison.”

His speech at the conclusion of The Great Dictator expresses some similar views and even ones that lean in a libertarian direction. At the start he says, “I don’t want to rule or conquer anyone.” There are a couple of references to “greed,” but it’s clearly referring to greed for acquisition by brute force, not for profits earned by free production and trade. He says, “Soldiers! Don’t give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you, who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel!”

The speech includes the unfortunate statement, “We think too much and feel too little.” That’s the opposite of the mechanically saluting, hatred-filled followers of Hitler whom he’s talking about. That line shows the squishiness of his philosophy, but it doesn’t make him an advocate of a command economy. Further on in the speech he refers to the Nazi rulers as “machine men with machine minds and machine hearts,” which certainly isn’t a description of thinkers. He says, “Don’t fight for slavery, fight for liberty!” Going even more in a pro-freedom direction, he urges the world “to do away with national barriers.” Chaplin was fiercely opposed to nationalism.

A criticism of The Great Dictator is that it portrays a concentration camp lightly. When the film was released in 1940, it wasn’t known in the West that these camps were brutal extermination centers. He later wrote, “Had I known the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator; I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.” There were already plenty of indications that the Nazis were homicidally insane, but some people didn’t understand till graphic evidence of genocide emerged in 1945.

He was especially squishy about Stalin, refusing to call him a dictator, but he wasn’t an explicit Stalinist like Pete Seeger. He expressed sympathy for the USSR when Germany invaded it in World War II, but he was hardly alone in that. See, for example, the 1944 Warner Brothers cartoon “Russian Rhapsody,” where “Gremlins from the Kremlin” scare Hitler with a Stalin mask.

The film Modern Times and the machine metaphors in the speech suggest he was highly distrustful of mechanization, perhaps in a way similar to J. R. R. Tolkien. That doesn’t make him pro- or anti-capitalist. State-run factories also rely heavily on automation and often treat workers miserably.

Honestly, playing it back just now, though I’d heard it before, I’m amazed at how radically pro-liberty that speech is. Chaplin wasn’t a clear political thinker, but he was no advocate of socialism, communism, or fascism.

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