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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.

Say, What Ever Happened to Languagehat?

If you’re reading this, you may well be wondering why I haven’t been commenting in recent years. It’s complicated (see below), but the short answer is that MeFi has changed enormously since I joined, and though it’s gone in a direction I heartily approve of, it’s wound up being a place where I no longer feel comfortable. I used to try to push back against things I thought were counterproductive (and in fact when I started meditating on this essay back in mid-2016, I thought of it as a possible MetaTalk post), but I’ve realized there’s no point: MeFi, like the world, is going where it’s going no matter what I have to say about it. My hope is that those who read this will either (if they already feel the same way) not feel so alone or (if not) think twice about how they comment, having seen things from a different perspective. Seeing things from a different perspective is basically what my intellectual life has been all about, and MeFi has been a great help in that. If you feel like discussing it with me, I still read and answer MeMail, and I would love to hear from you.

I’m going to start with the universe at large, continue to human nature and politics, then focus on progressives in general, and end up with MeFi. I know it’s long, but if you’re interested I hope you’ll stick with it. If not, see the tl;dr above. But please bear in mind that I’ve been a progressive for over half a century (I delivered a blistering attack on racism and the Vietnam War in my high school graduation speech in 1968) and have read MeFi almost since its beginning (I joined as soon as I could, in 2002), so this is coming from inside the tent.

The universe is (for all practical purposes) infinitely large and infinitely complex, so it is impossible, even theoretically, to know much about it. Even our planet is too large and complex for anyone to understand; even a single human mind is (for all practical purposes) infinitely complex -- you could spend your entire life studying one other person and never coming to the end. But we can’t go around constantly boggled by the unknowability of everything; to survive we have to pay attention to the environment and people around us, so we cut corners. As soon as we’re born we start filtering the world around us, discovering what we need to pay attention to and what can be ignored. We wind up ignoring almost everything, especially if life doesn’t afford us much leisure for random observation and speculation. The thing is that the stuff we ignore doesn’t go away; it’s just as much there, just as real as we are. And all those billions of people we don’t know are just as real as we are, and just as important to themselves. Unfortunately, we have a hard time dealing with that, because our minds are set up with filters evolution has found necessary to provide us with. We automatically treat our own experiences and values, plus those of our in-group, more seriously than those of outsiders, and it’s very hard to correct for that. And that in-group/out-group distinction is hugely important for us -- “we” are good and right, “they” are wrong and probably a threat to us and we need to be on our guard against them. And here’s the thing: all that is as true for progressives as it is for anyone else. Progressives may be right about a lot of things, but that doesn’t make them perfect, or even good. Lots of terrible people have had “good politics.” So for progressives, who are only human, those who disagree with them aren’t just wrong (and in need of education), they’re bad people -- “fascists” is the usual term of abuse. And that has consequences.

I once made what seemed an innocuous statement in a MeFi thread: that a Trump voter might save your life. I got immediate pushback, because I was breaking the unwritten rule that we can only say bad things about Trump supporters. And yet my statement is indisputably true. What would you do if you were drowning and the only person available to pull you out was wearing a MAGA hat? Choose to die? If you let them pull you out, would you then push them in? Walk away with a glare? I hope you’d thank them; I certainly would. Because there are other things in life besides politics, and that continues to be true even when we’re all obsessed with politics.

And when politics trumps everything else, people suffer. The whole history of the twentieth century shows the results of choosing future perfection at the price of massive present evil. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot – they were all happy to kill millions and destroy the lives of tens or hundreds of millions so that hypothetical denizens of the future could live in a hypothetical socialist paradise. And there are still people who admire them, including people on MeFi. I’m not red-baiting, I’m saying ideas have consequences, and if we’re going to build a better world we can’t do so on the bones of people who disagree with us. And lots of people do.

Let’s talk about Trump voters. The guy has a rock-solid 40% base of supporters; that means that many millions of Americans hold strongly to the views we despise and are happy to see any and all means used to keep him in power. Surely it’s important to try to understand them so as to better deal with them, and possibly persuade those who are persuadable, but any attempt at that on MeFi is invariably met with “I have no desire to understand fascists.” And what do you suggest we do about them if our side wins? They’re not going away. Should they be kept in camps, deprived of civil rights, or just kept down by other means? And what about people who are neither Trump voters nor progressives – people who just want things to keep going the way they used to, with no great upheavals? White people who haven’t educated themselves about black lives, men who haven’t learned what women go through, all those people who don’t get it, who aren’t woke? The general reaction to ignorant questions on MeFi is impatient hostility: educate yourself before you speak up! And many times it is stated that the input of people who aren’t part of the group that is the focus of the post shouldn’t speak up at all – their role is to be silent and listen. The idea of “privilege” is wielded as a weapon.

But privilege is best considered as part of one’s own baggage, not hurled as an insult. That goes even more for failings like racism and sexism. The idea used to be that we’re all racist, sexist, etc., and the point is to try to mitigate that as best we can; now, though, the implicit idea I get from MeFi threads is that we – the true progressives – are perfect, and everybody else is bad and should feel bad. That is not only a self-serving and inaccurate way of thinking, it is anti-democratic. The true progressives are going to be a small minority in the US for the foreseeable future, at least if we define “true progressives” as those who check off every box in the ever-growing list. It’s not enough to be against sexism, racism, and homophobia; you now have to have exactly the right position on trans issues, and be aware of the latest correct terminology. You can’t simply say “gay,” it has to be LGBTQ. If you slip up, you’re out of the tent.

Here’s the thing: I want a big tent, not a tiny one. I want a left that says Yes, not one that says No. I want the doorkeeper to say “You’re against the powerful dominating the weak and you want everybody to have the opportunity for a good life? Great, come on in, we can argue about the details over dinner!” I don’t want the doorkeeper to present a checklist and turn you away as soon as you get something wrong. If there’s to be a hope of progressives gaining power in a democracy, it has to be the big tent. If you don’t care about democracy and want to follow Lenin in taking power at the barrel of a gun and forcing everyone to follow the (ever-changing) Correct Path, I don’t want anything to do with you. I know those people are a small minority, but at MeFi people who sound like that have a greater presence than they deserve because of the “no enemies on the left” mentality that is sadly ubiquitous among progressives (and helped Lenin come to power in the first place). When we see alleged progressives talking like inquisitors and commissars, we should call them out, not sit silently and seethe. And referring to mainstream media as “fascist” (I’ve seen both the New York Times and the New Yorker described that way at MeFi) just makes you look like a loony who can’t be taken seriously.

I’m very glad MeFi has become so progressive. I have a “MeFi voice” in my head that automatically responds to bigoted views, whether I hear them from others or they arise in my own brain, and it helps me immensely. But the atmosphere has gotten so toxic that not only do I no longer feel like taking part in the discussions, but I can’t imagine introducing any of my friends and relatives to it (and I’m far from the only one – that comes up in a lot of MeTa threads about this).

Here are a few quotes I like:

I first started seeing this phrase, “smash the patriarchy”, in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election—on t-shirts, signs outside coffee shops, the status updates of Facebook friends. I found the phrase invigorating, not so much a literal call to arms as an insignia of recognition and belonging: yes, we are living in patriarchy and we will fight it together. I still smile whenever I see it. But now I’m also reminded of Audre Lorde’s famous warning: “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I wonder if the desire to “smash the patriarchy”—to destroy this beast in our midst—is a case in point. If patriarchy (or any hierarchy for that matter) rests on the violent destruction or exclusion of that which is deemed threatening or other, then any call for “smashing” as a solution (now the word kristallnacht—night of the broken glass—comes to mind) requires interrogation. What if, instead of relying on our “master’s tools”—hammers and baseball bats, the language of violence and destruction—we searched for new instruments and new metaphors, ones that do not assume violence or destruction as the path out of oppression and alienation. This is what challenging patriarchy looks like: it’s the questioning of narratives, the switching of metaphors and the shifting of frameworks. It’s trusting and giving voice to your own thoughts, feelings, experience and ways of seeing rather than trying to fit them into the dominant framework or mode of thinking.
--Naomi Snider, “Patriarchy’s Paradoxical Persistence: Berfrois Interviews Carol Gilligan and Naomi Snider” (Berfrois, July 5, 2019)
https://www.berfrois.com/2019/07/patriarchys-paradoxical-persistence-berfrois-interviews-carol-gilligan-and-naomi-snider/


If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

And it’s too easy, on this point, simply to accuse Hitler and say that the snake has been destroyed, the venom gone. Because we know perfectly well that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts.
Camus, “The Human Crisis”

And some links:

Masha Gessen:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscript/remembering-lorena-borjas-the-mother-of-a-trans-latinx-community
http://www.gaysonoma.com/2020/04/remembering-lorena-borjas-the-mother-of-a-trans-latinx-community/

Chase Strangio's Victories for Transgender Rights: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/19/chase-strangios-victories-for-transgender-rights

Finally, my statement on this from almost a decade ago:

> I would like to see the metafilter community on the whole be better than the best of reddit.

That's pretty much impossible, if (as I'm assuming from what I've read here—I don't hang out at Reddit) there are Reddit subsites that are moderated heavily with the idea of being "safe spaces" for one or another group of people. MetaFilter is not, nor should it be, such a site; it is, of course, important to have a site culture that speaks out against prejudiced comments, but it is impossible to draw a firm line between prejudice and cluelessness, and it is also important for people to be able to express prejudiced/clueless ideas and questions so they can be answered (and so clueless bystanders, like me, can be educated).
posted by languagehat at 3:41 PM on March 3, 2013
https://metatalk.metafilter.com/22456/Surely-This#1059246

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and I’ll be glad to discuss any of it via MeMail.

Update (Oct. 2023). This piece by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba, "How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth?," expresses much of what I have tried to say in a possibly more MeFi-acceptable form:
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/how-much-discomfort-is-the-whole-world-worth/

Update (Feb. 2024): "Strategy Is a Craft," an interview with Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce from Dissent (January 24, 2024), is also well worth reading:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/strategy-is-a-craft/

Here's a quote that seemed relevant to my MeFi complaint:

Maximalism is a notion that any deviation from a position of asking for the absolute, most progressive, furthest left position constitutes a kind of betrayal. It’s a widespread tendency that has its origins in fear: fear of having to take responsibility for making hard decisions, fear of having the responsibility to make compromises to keep a coalition together or to be in a fight for lasting power. It’s a longing for the security of a small but deeply aligned tribe, in which your identity and your beliefs are affirmed. That’s a really human desire; we all have to find that kind of affirmation. But it is not the work of social change, or politics.