+1 for using “hogwash” in a piece of analytical writing.
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this is why heroes are fraught, and why presenting individuals as unblemished paragons is problematic. ( hello statues of white men. )
george washington was the first president. he enslaved other human beings. it’s fine to talk about his accomplishments, the battles he won, and most importantly the fact that he stepped down as president after serving his term – but the typical american attitude is that all of the founding fathers were perfect men.
it doesn’t serve anybody to pretend that any person is flawless. let alone any country ( re: american exceptionalism. ) it’s important to talk about both the good and the bad behaviors, and how a person’s views influenced their life story.
history is messy. and that’s okay.
i’d like to think that darwin himself would be okay with the mess.
it almost seems to me that more than anything else being against nuance is the modern definition of conservatism. maybe simply because nuance is sometimes uncomfortable and people tend to hate being discomforted.
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Nuance is fine. I just worry that this will end up with the UK Natural History Museum deleting its named connection to Darwin and having Darwin eliminated from school textbooks.
That’s not likely to happen. Do you have any idea how many people have been erased from history… Darwin is not one of them.
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Maybe. We’ll see how this latest round goes. Where apparently even Ulysses S. Grant is worthy of having his statues toppled.
Do you think a dead man cares?
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No, but the concept of history is distorted by this. Even though I’m a biologist by training and profession, I’m interested in ancient history and have a decent knowledge of Latin and Greek and even Middle Egyptian. Obviously nearly all people from these periods held views unacceptable from the modern perspective. That doesn’t mean that that you can’t consider various people from their times as being heroes. You have to take into account their culture at the time, which seems to be eliminated in this rash of “presentism”.
Darwin vanishing from the school textbooks is not really relevant here, in that the people who want to make it happen will campaign for the same regardless of whether Ulysses S. Grant statues stay up or not, so what does one have to do with the other?
But you know, if Darwin were taken out of the curriculum for being kind of racist, the books would be weaker on science history but exactly as strong on biology. Evolution doesn’t depend on naming Darwin any more than atomic theory depends on naming Leucippus, as much as creationists try to portray it otherwise.
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the letter is especially dumb when you consider that one of the signers – Jesse Singal – has refused to engage in discussions and has repeatedly attempted to intimidate critics (via lawyers) and intimidate trans folks (by badgering their bosses and editors).
but the letter is only dumb if you take it at face value.
when you consider that the letter is just another entry in a long history of attempts by Singal’s fellow TERFs and Pinker’s fellow intellectual racists, the letter is smart because it’s a plausibly deniable attempt to silence critics.
and that’s all i have to say on the matter.
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sure it does.
And that’s just one journal.
If you give an undergraduate student a recent letter from nature to read, they might have trouble completely understanding it.
Give that same student
WATSON, J., CRICK, F. Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid. Nature 171, 737–738 (1953). Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid | Nature
and it’s completely comprehensible (even though at least one of the authors is racist, and at least one is missing.) Science depends on citations, and science education is greatly aided by teaching students to read those cited papers
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Three things that were completely misrepresented by the “church ladies” and society. If you want to make a good example, talk about how “cancel culture” made it almost impossible for anyone who wasn’t white, Christian, and straight (not to mention male) get elected to Congress or the Presidency. You had to hide what you were to get elected in this country. Now THAT is fucking cancel culture.
But no one talks about that. No, it’s about how people get “canceled” for: sexual harassment; promoting violence; racism; transphobia and TERFing; etc. You know… shitty views that say “the people I disagree with should be silence and/or potentially killed.” Now THAT’s fucking cancel culture. Calling them out on that isn’t “canceling them,” it’s holding them responsible for the harm they are doing to real, living, breathing people.
Fuck that noise. We, the people, will now hold them responsible for their words. If that frightens them, it’s because THEY KNOW THEIR WORDS ARE ABHORRENT. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t give a shit. I couldn’t care less if a bunch of racist jack offs refused to buy my stories. I don’t write for them anyway. They can go right ahead and boycott me. If JKR really believed in the power of the free market of ideas, she’d say the same thing. Instead, we get a whinging letter about poor rich her being outed as a transphobe and TERF and how terrible her life is. Meanwhile, let me tell the story of a hundred plus transwomen threatened, beaten, and even killed for being who they are.
Now that’s cancel culture.
It’s all about money and power. The folks with it want to keep it. The folks without it are now shifting the power back into their hands. And heaven help those rich schmucks when we do, because we’re not putting up with this nonsense any more.
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That’s a concern that’s not worth spending a lot of time on, especially in the context of this letter (which is discussing contemporary figures who hold and promote hateful views grounded in ignorance).
As for historic figures, the statues that are being toppled and the names that are being removed are those of people who did not just hold now-outmoded attitudes of their times but who actively enabled white supremacy – Confederate soldiers and politicians, slave traders, conquistadors, colonial oppressors. They, too, had mixed legacies, but unlike Darwin they are famous for the awful things they did, not the good ones.
There are compromise paths available that don’t involve meeting racist ideas halfway. The American Museum of Natural History has so far handled the situation of Teddy Roosevelt’s 19th-century racism (similar to Darwin’s) well in that regard: acknowledging it and deploring it; removing a monument that explicitly glorifies it; but continuing to honour his role in founding the museum and in founding its mission to try to educate the American public about (as one aspect) people he regarded as “savages” but whom his successors regard as fully human and worthy of respect.
That kind of nuanced but not esoteric approach has allowed the American right wing little room for their usual bad-faith arguments, forcing them to continue to concentrate on their real priority: the preservation of monuments to people whose fame rests primarily or only on their promotion of white supremacy.
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There’s a difference between naming museums after people and taking them out of textbooks. Racists are the ones who want to erase history to pretend racism didn’t happen. Anti-racists want to illuminate actual history instead of the myths of history represented by monuments.
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Slippery slope arguments almost never are
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Usually the person making that kind of argument is pouring a whole lot of rancid cooking grease down the slope.
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Billy Bragg’s take on The Letter and its topic.
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A really excellent and concise piece that gets to the heart of what this letter is really about. This small part connects to something I noted earlier in the topic:
Boris Johnson’s supporters, when faced with examples of his lack of responsibility, shrug and say it’s just “Boris being Boris”.
The clubby attitude expressed by the piece not only preserves the “glass floor” for the serial screw-ups and liars they’ve invested themselves in (as prelude to welcoming into the elite), but also enables the presence and tolerance of “missing stairs” in elite circles. I really have to wonder how many of the signatories – including those I admire – at one time or another socialised with the likes of Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein, knowing full well about the open secrets of their “quirks” or “pecadilloes” but choosing to laugh it off as “Harvey being Harvey” or “Jeffrey being Jeffrey”. There is deep, deep dysfunction represented by this open letter.
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Would you make a distinction between what you (and me, and everyone else) are doing here in this comment thread and engaging in a “marketplace of ideas”?
I want to be careful here, because I don’t intend this to come off as a “gotcha…you loved debate the whole time!” and I also am trying not to get overly hung up on semantics, but I do want to understand what you (and a few others) are getting at in some of your seeming rejection of the “marketplace” as a concept.
Because when I use that concept and argue that it’s the best (or, to be FAIR, the least bad) solution to many if not most bad ideas, I think there may be a disconnect between how I may be using the concept and how you may be doing so.
Public shaming and ostracism are the consequences of speech that a group feels is ridiculous, problematic, dangerous or otherwise not worth spreading widely.
Here’s some public shaming and ostracism which happened in our recent past. Can anyone explain why this:
was different, and bad, without invoking tribal loyalties?
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They were powerless compared to their oppressors. These people have a huge power differential over trans people.
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