I was fascinated by this column by Elahe Izadi in WaPo concerning the problems newspapers can face when out of bound views are expressed in Letters of Comment:
There was an awful lot to unpack in the letter-to-the-editor that leapt from the pages of South Carolina’s Spartanburg Herald-Journal one day last month. Writer Winston McCuen touched upon “Marxist mobs,” statue-toppling, “cloistered professors,” and the political philosophy of Andrew Jackson’s vice president, John C. Calhoun.
But one of his arguments came through loud and clear. When it came to slavery, McCuen declared, Calhoun and the Confederacy were dead right.
“God rewards goodness and intelligence; and that slavery is how He justly punishes ignorance, sloth and depravity,” he wrote.
Izadi was concerned about how editors select which letters should be published, but I must admit I headed down the dead-end street of this dude McCuen’s argument.
Let’s stipulate he’s not just some troll, but is in earnest. I’ll tell you what got my attention.
- It wasn’t his right-wing views concerning Marxist mobs, cloistered professors, etc, which are little more than right-wing trigger words.
- It wasn’t the depraved suggestion that slavery is ever moral or in the public interest.
- It wasn’t the lunatic suggestion that God, in his infinite wisdom, would take people who are, in McCuen’s view, ignorant, slothful, and depraved, and assign them to one of the hardest working “roles” in any society. The insipid insanity of that “logic” hides behind its initial outrageousness.
No, those I had to come up with after my first reaction, and that first one is this: the societal tolerance for magical thinking of the sort that originates from religion is what enables this remark to be made, read, and published. McCuen uses his private channel to the divine, unobservable and unarguable[1], to justify a view that is rightfully repugnant to society.
Notice how that magical thinking, still permitted by polite society, deforms the very societal reality in which we live. Much like a mass deforming the space-time continuum, the magical thinking exception to the rationality we generally employ lets retrograde dudes like McCuen impute attitudes to a divine being, for which we have no evidence and for which the religious explicitly declare they need no evidence thereof, that many others would still dispute. It all seems a bit insane.
And, to those that would claim the Bible exists as a pivot upon which such claims can be weighed, I need only reference the Fire-Eaters of the Civil War, who insistently used the Bible to justify the existence of slavery and the secession of the South from the Union. That many found that plausible suggests the Bible is not decisive when it comes to certain topics, while its divine origins remain doubtful.
This is why I insist on remaining agnostic. Even though I recognize that religion occasionally enables great leaps forward in terms of societal good, as I believe I mentioned here (you’ll have to really dig to find it, though), in general its “Get Out Of Jail Card” aspect makes it potentially a ruinous project when employed by the malicious with the help of the supine.
And there are echoes in this to the discussion about when currently out of bound views should be expressed, and how, in the realm of science, this will, eventually, self-correct. This reaction to McCuen paradoxically sustains the oppositional argument:
Another upset reader responded with his own letter, taking aim not just at the original letter-writer but the paper, arguing that such opinions “validated by publication, only stoke discord and further erode our already vulnerable democracy.”
If we cannot, individually and collectively, rebut repugnant views with calm logic and rationality, then there may be a reason to review those arguments in order to be certain that we are not holding arbitrary positions, only justified by our instincts, natural or religious in nature. Arbitrary positions, as comfortable as they may make those who hold them feel, can endanger other members of society in terms of prosperity or even physical safety. Sweeping those positions under the rug, as “upset reader” wishes to do, rather than safeguarding society, may further endanger society by permitting those views to fester and spread. Periodically exposing inferior views and then destroying them with logic, with reason, is probably the safest approach to disposing of them in a rational society.
But it’s magical thinking which undermines that rational society, and thus endangers it, because those who hold those damaging views can simply hide behind the magical thinking tree and never feel they have to reform, to acknowledge their mistaken thinking.
“God said it to me.”
1 I use the word unarguable, vs the more common inarguable. The latter suggests there is no effective riposte to the expressed argument or assertion, while the former suggests the argument is in a reserved category in which it cannot be inspected nor judged for reasons having nothing to do with intrinsic quality. In my view, these arguments are usually accorded respect not in accord with their worth.
