Be grateful for the power of shame
There’s a Yiddish saying along the lines of, “It’s impossible to shame a fool,” which might explain why there are so many shameless people in America these days currently insisting on their right to say foolish things.
They’re legally entitled to speak their minds; they just might not be happy with the result. That’s a vital distinction lost on those anti-PC warriors who believe that censors are now roaming the land controlling speech.
Incidents of violence aside, what’s happening in America today — with odious expression being met with a broader backlash — is in many respects healthy: Shame speech is countering hate speech.
A 2016 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science found that shame is an emotion that protects us from social devaluation.
White supremacists can march in Charlottesville chanting, “Jews will not replace us,” but the anticipated negative judgment of others serves to regulate behavior. Widespread condemnation makes clear that no one wants to hear what they have to say — without anyone ever denying them the legal right to speak.
That’s the soft power of shame, and it works: Right-wing organizers last month voluntarily canceled 67 “America First” rallies in 36 states after seeing counterprotests in Boston.
College students should take note. Instead of demanding silence from conservative speakers, use shame to influence their choices. The problem is that some supposed First Amendment absolutists seem to think that asinine, disrespectful or discriminatory speech should be consequence-free as well.
Last month, Google fired James Damore, an engineer who circulated a memo to his colleagues that selectively cited research to argue that women are underrepresented in tech because they are, on average, more interested in people than things, less able to handle stress, and too agreeable and not assertive enough.
Perhaps the perks of working at a progressive tech company, such as high-quality health insurance, caused him to forget what the inside of an emergency room looks like. Women dominate the high-stress occupation of nursing, working with people (i.e., patients) and things (i.e., medications, syringes), while having to balance being both agreeable and assertive.
Even though most constitutional speech protections do not extend to workplaces, Damore has since reinvented himself as a martyr for the cause, preaching against a “monolithic culture where anyone with a dissenting view can’t even express themselves.”
Americans on the right have seconded that complaint, buying into the false notion that disapproval is censorship. Far from it. Damore has been expressing himself nonstop, including on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal.
But there’s a direct line from Damore wrapping himself in intellectual objectivity to defend his sexist views, to white supremacists proudly exercising their right to point out the racist “truth” about black people, Jews and Muslims. While there actually are many Jews who work in media and finance, and black people disproportionately occupy prisons, and Muslims flew planes into the World Trade Center, we reject the assumptions in these statements because they ignore more relevant and correlative data. Internet platforms such as Squarespace, Airbnb, GoDaddy and Facebook agree, using their powers to restrict access and shame white supremacists for violating their standards. In the U.S., government shall make no law prohibiting free speech — but private companies sure can set standards, and must.
Get used to it: The state of shame, made possible by thousands of people of different backgrounds finally having their voices heard, is a fair moral middle ground to the authoritarian state white supremacists and other supposedly silenced forces claim to live in.
There is no guaranteed freedom of expression in Germany, where you can wind up in jail for flying the Nazi flag. Germans aren’t in denial about their history, either — but it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.
People with racist and sexist positions should be grateful to live in a country where they have the right to speak. But the First Amendment only protects freedom of expression; there is no right to be heard, or respected.