The Weinstein Effect, and Its Limits

When Donald Trump said “You can do anything if you’re a star,” he defined the privilege of powerful white men in a way that was so clear that everyone got it. While there were academics who had been stumbling around this point for a while, a combination of bad writing, dubious claims, and the perception of political bias on their part prevented anyone from paying too much attention to them; yet another good reason that post-modern verbosity is to be avoided. But when the senile man-baby let it all hang out in the Access Hollywood tape, he stated the idea in terms so simple a child could understand it. And when a huge mass of white men gave him a resounding cheer, in the form of an electoral victory, we all realized that it wasn’t just a few bad apples. They outed themselves, and they deserve all the political correctness they’re going to get. And they’re going to get a lot of it. The sheer blinkered ineptitude of it all is hilarious.

So the trap was set, and though Harvey Weinstein was the first to step into it, he wasn’t the one who created it. This is not the Weinstein effect, but the Trump effect. Weinstein was just the perfect example of what the trap was set for; like Trump, he is a serial predator, a monster who exploits his power to take advantage of women, and indeed, anyone less powerful than himself. Trump himself should have been caught by the trap, but it really wasn’t complete until he was elected—that was the last straw. It hasn’t caught him…yet, but it has caught others, like Roy Moore and Kevin Spacey. Cosby, of course, had already been caught—and he might be the worst of all.

It has also caught Louis C. K. and, just yesterday, Al Franken. This is where I start to have a doubt about this. It isn’t that they deserve special treatment, but their behaviour and situations are different from the others. This is in large part about the abuse of power, but what is different about C.K. and Franken is that it is not clear that they were aware that they had power, not in the same obvious way that any of the others did. C.K. had a successful career, but in the neurotic fashion of most comedians he may not have equated this with power. Trump, Weinstein, Moore, and Spacey were aware of their power and used it to threaten people’s reputations and livelihoods, and to silence them; anything rather than change. They followed up assaults with lies, threats and legal action. This is their character. This is evil without remorse, a level of viciousness which is not apparent in the case of C. K. or Franken. Of course, Louis C. K. repeated this behaviour. It’s a strange kink, and it was a pattern of gross stupidity. But I don’t yet see evidence of evil.

Franken’s crime is even weaker; the fact that he did these actions on stage and before a camera (and if you look at the picture, he’s not even touching her) indicates that he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. Predators know they’re doing something wrong, they just don’t care. That he did it once indicates that this was not a habit. A lot of comedy is improv, which is funny maybe a third of the time, offensive about half of the time, and stupid most of the time. It’s about turning off your filters and doing whatever comes into your head. The woman in question didn’t get this because she was a radio personality, not a comedian.

In other words, it’s a mistake. We do not condemn people for making mistakes, especially when they recognize them and are willing to make amends. Mistakes are how you learn, and to condemn them is to damn us all to ignorance. While we want to remove people from power who deliberately and repeatedly employ their power to abuse others, we do not want to live in a world where mistakes can ruin your life. If you think otherwise, be careful of what you wish for.

There is one last element in this: presentism, which is the practice of applying current standards to the past. The Trump/Weinstein effect is only a year old, but it has managed to usher in a whole new standard for relations between the sexes. This is progress, but progress comes at a price: the past, and many of the people in it, suddenly becomes a disappointment. It is the job of liberals to advance progress, but it is the job of conservatives to slow it down so everyone can catch up, and to stop the bad ideas of liberals. Our enthusiasm must be held in check. We have just had a major cultural advance, and it can be hard to get our bearings in these circumstances. The question is, did the person accused know that what they were doing was wrong when they did it, or is it wrong in retrospect?

It is not the job of conservatives to defend the obviously guilty. The predators on our list knew that what they were doing was wrong at the time, and so did everyone else. Someone at the mall Moore hung around said everyone knew what he was up to. He was hunting underage girls, which was illegal then as it is now. Trump and Weinstein paid hush money. Louis C. K. said he didn’t want to talk about it, but admitted it all when it came out. He seemed to think at the time that it was okay if he asked the women beforehand and didn't touch them. Franken was caught like a deer in the headlights, and denied nothing. Again, there is an essential difference here. The predators did things in the past that were wrong at the time. The others did things in the past that in retrospect, have only become wrong in the present.

We are walking a line here, and that line divides the space between propriety and puritanism. I first noticed this in university in the early 80’s, when I said that the politics of feminism at the time resembled nothing so much as the anti-sex league of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sex is a complicated and awkward business, and most people don’t know their way around it, especially the young. People are going to get signals wrong, be too aggressive or too passive, they’re going to get drunk, they’re going to make decisions they later regret. Mistakes will be made, and again, we do not condemn people for making mistakes. The accused must always be innocent until proven guilty, and if there is only one witness for the prosecution, the integrity of that witness is of primary concern. No one can ever be granted to power to ruin another with mere words. 

Mistakes will be made, and they must be forgiven. Young men must learn how to avoid these mistakes, but young women must also learn to navigate the terrain and take these mistakes less personally. Deliberate malfeasance, however, must be met with steel, and clarifying the roles of men and women will make the lines more obvious. This won’t be done in a day—or a year, as we have recently tried—but it can be done.

Update: Well, things move fast. It seems that Louis CK did take deliberate steps to suppress the story, including threats, so he gets what he gets. Franken now faces multiple accusations, including from someone who worked for him as a Senator. This seems unbelievably stupid for someone in politics, but hey, look at the rest of the politicians.

Further Update: And then there's this. I'm still not convinced that Franken should have stepped down.

Special Snowflakes

Kelly McParland at the National Post is quite upset that the new Governor General disagreed with some people’s deeply held opinions. Never mind that the opinions are nonsense and that mocking these beliefs is entirely appropriate. No, you can’t do this, because it hurts their feelings, and you must never hurt anyone’s feelings, even with the truth.

The irony lost on the right is that this appeal to sentiment is the chief defence of political correctness. Indeed, it is often the only defence. In the victimhood culture found in certain bastions of the academic fringe, the primary argument seems to be that certain ideas are offensive, insensitive, and even traumatic triggers. It does not matter whether those ideas are true, and that is what makes the position so hard to refute; evidence and reason no longer count. It is a post-truth argument.

But it is also what philosopher Stephen Law calls the nuclear option, because it destroys everything on the field, including the person making it. Once you take a post-truth position, there is nothing left to argue—indeed, argument itself becomes pointless. In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien begins by undermining Winston Smith’s moral position, but O’Brien’s main attack is to make the party the final arbiter of reality. Earlier in the novel Smith had written in his diary "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Objective reality is the foundation of independent thought. So O’Brien tortures Smith until he is willing to accept that two plus two equals five. Once he has broken Smith’s belief in independent truth, he is able to remould him to believe whatever the party wants. The Khmer Rouge put this in action in the real world: see the movie First they Killed my Father on Netflix.

Without truth, the future is, in O’Brien’s words, “a boot stamping on a human face forever.” There is no argument, no discussion, because all that becomes pointless. There is only the Triumph of the Will, brute force, because words don’t mean anything anymore. This could be Nazi thugs beating up on Jews, or Antifa thugs beating up people they disagree with (who are not always Nazis, but Antifa considers themselves to be judge and jury as well as executioner—as anarchists, they do not believe in the state monopoly of violence.) It could also be campus protesters who scream at students and professors for some nebulous offence, and will not even hear what they have to say, because what they have to say is no longer important. Or it could be internet trolls who threaten people based on some rumour; and of course, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true—it only matters that they don’t like the person.

But if there is no truth, there is also no good. Moral relativism is an inevitable consequence of epistemological relativism, and outright nihilism is a necessary result of a world without truth. Russian policy and propaganda under Putin reflects this belief. There is no truth, only conflicting narratives. There is no good, only competing interests. Everyone lies, everyone is dirty, and there is no standard by which anyone can be judged. 

This is an ideal state of affairs for a criminal state, because it encourages apathy and cynicism. But it is not in any way compatible with Western traditional values, which are founded upon the principles of objective truth and moral realism. Putin knows this and sells this to Russians as a sign of his strength and independence, but for people on the right to accept this deepens the irony of their position to outright doublethink.

To be a conservative is to conserve, but if you aren’t protecting these core traditions, you aren’t conserving anything. This is one of the reasons I believe actual conservatives are almost extinct, and the right is now populated by radical nihilists. 

The right also likes to pose as the defenders of the West, but the attack on objectivity and moral realism from within our culture is a far greater threat than anything we face from the Muslim world. Indeed, our entire response to 9/11 has been wrong. It is the goal of terrorists to fool their enemies into overreacting, and that has been precisely what we have been doing every since.

The populist disdain for elites is a page taken right out of the communist playbook. Communist regimes were infamous for their body counts, not just through deliberate malfeasance, but because they distrusted anyone who knew anything, and let starvation and disease run rampant because those in charge had no idea what they were doing. None of this is conservative; expertise is one of the essential things that must be conserved because to lose it is to risk the loss of civilization itself. 

But the peak absurdity is the right’s depiction of university and college students as “special snowflakes” who complain when their feelings are hurt, while the right pursues the same strategy. It seems everyone is a special snowflake now. Don’t dare tell the truth, because it might offend someone.

Two plus two equals five. Long live Big Brother!