Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This video, published two days ago, features Sam Harris on Bill Maher’s “Real Time.” The conversation, about Islam and Trump’s orders on immigration, is wide ranging, centering on the need for moderate and ex-Muslims to help effect the taming of invidious Islamic theology. For those who call Sam an “Islamophobe,” this video is required viewing; but of course nothing Sam says will dispel that smear.
Sam also lauds Asra Nomani, a moderate Muslim who’s fought tirelessly for women’s rights under Islam. I used to admire her greatly, and still do in some ways, but I was distressed to see Asra announce her vote for Donald Trump. I cut her some slack because I attributed that to my notion that she was a one-issue voter and was thinking that Trump would deal with Muslim extremism more effectively than would Clinton. However, she also said this:
But I am a single mother who can’t afford health insurance under Obamacare. The president’s mortgage-loan modification program, “HOPE NOW,” didn’t help me. Tuesday, I drove into Virginia from my hometown of Morgantown, W.Va., where I see rural America and ordinary Americans, like me, still struggling to make ends meet, after eight years of the Obama administration.
If she thinks she’s going to get a better healthcare deal under Trump, or that ordinary Americans will be better off under Trump, I have a wall on the border I want to sell her. Nomani also came out in favor of Trump’s executive orders banning immigration. Yet she still describes herself as a “liberal,” which stymies me.
Writing at The Hill, in a piece denouncing the alt-left, with which I largely agree, she nevertheless said this (my emphasis):
In fact, while the Trump administration must of, course, lead from a place of compassion and moderation, intolerant tolerance-loving people are threatening the very safety of Americans, fomented by irresponsible Democratic Party leaders who refuse to accept the election results of 2016, fear-mongering “social justice warriors” who behave as if they are on the set of the “Hunger Games,” the movie about a “resistance” against a tyrannical dictator, and reckless social media outlets, media companies and alt-left “fake news” sites that amplify the “agit prop,” or agitation propaganda, of these political leaders and activists.
. . . Appropriately, Trump responded this morning with the following tweet: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view – NO FEDERAL FUNDS?”
If she thinks the Trump administration is going to lead from a place of compassion and moderation, she’s sorely misguided. As is her claim that Trump’s threat to withhold money from Berkeley because of violence caused by non-student agitators is “appropiate”. Taking federal money from UC Berkeley for something they didn’t do (their Chancellor supported Milo’s right to talk, a talk led to the violence) is wrong: that money goes not only to support indigent and foreign students, but also to support scientific research. It’s not Berkeley’s fault, for their police tried to keep things peaceful.
As for Linda Sarsour, one of the leaders of the recent Women’s March, she’s beyond the pale. A hijabi who promotes sharia law, supports the BDS movement, and touts the repressive regimes of the Middle East, she also emitted a disgusting tw**t saying that she wished the vaginas of Brigette Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali should be “taken away” (see below) I presume Sarsour’s aware that, having experienced female genital mutilation, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has already lost part of her genitals. Sarsour later removed that tweet, but it gives you an idea of where she’s coming from. Beware of her: she’s admired by the regressive left simply because she’s a hijabi. Her values certainly aren’t progressive!
Even though all rational people know that determinism rules human behavior, and in that sense there is no possibility of “choosing otherwise” at a moment of decision—absent quantum effects, which don’t in any way give us “free will”—this conclusion disturbs some people. Our sense of agency is so strong that it’s impossible for many of us to accept determinism of our behavior, or, if we do, to fully grasp its implications. Others, while accepting determinism, nevertheless confect other forms of “free will” that are compatible with determinism. I won’t go into the arguments for “compatibilism”, which I uniformly reject as simply semantic arguments designed to fool people into thinking that they’re free agents. Finally, a lot of compatibilists tout alternative forms of non-dualistic free will by the “Little People” argument: that if regular folks truly grasped determinism, with no loopholes, they’d become nihilistic, apathetic, or even immoral. In this way, belief in free will resembles belief in God, as many atheists are nevertheless pro-religion because they think that without faith society will fall apart. (That of course is wrong, as we know from seeing the godless countries of Europe.)
Several previous studies have buttressed the Little People’s argument for free will, including an oft-cited paper by Vohs and Schooler published in 2008, which showed that subjects “primed” by reading a passage by Francis Crick promoting determinism tended to cheat more in subsequent tests than those primed by reading an innocuous passage on consciousness. This paper has been used to show that it’s important to let people think they have free will, for they’ll behave badly if they don’t.
Unfortunately, the Vohs and Schooler paper, which has its own flaws (e.g., not a whit of evidence that the readings affected real-life cheating or lasted more than a day), was not replicated in two subsequent studies (see here and here). Nevertheless, new papers continue to come out with mixed results: some show that belief in free will promotes good behavior, others that it promotes bad behavior, and still others give mixed results. They all have their problems, including the article discussed here, a new paper by Emilie Caspar et al. in Frontiers in Psychology (free link; reference below). And by “problems”, I mean that these are all lab studies that give no conclusion about how one’s belief in free will or lack thereof affects regular quotidian behavior.
Nevertheless, I’ll summarize it briefly.
First, subjects (40 of them, recruited and tested in pairs) were “primed” by reading one of two passages written by Francis Crick: one attacking free will and promoting determinism, the other a neutral passage on consciousness (this resembles Vohs and Schooler’s method). But the psychologists also assessed participants’ “core beliefs” in (dualistic) free will versus determinism in psychological tests administered before the experiment.
Then the experiments. There were two that were relevant.
1.)Empathy. The first involved one member of a pair giving an electric shock to the other, and under two conditions: “coercive,” in which an experimenter sat next to the “shocker” and told him/her whether or not to administer a shock (a real one!) to a “shockee”. There was also a “free will” condition in which participants could decide on their own whether or not to administer a shock, earning € 0.05 for each shock they gave (they were already paid € 12 for participating). At the end, all participants reread the priming text they’d read before starting. After one bout, the positions were reversed so the “shocker” became the “shockee” (see point 2).
Results: They’re shown in the figure below, giving the number of shocks given in the “free will” condition (i.e., no hectoring experimenter telling you what to do). The data are divided into those primed by an innocuous passage (left two bars) and the “deterministic” passage (right two bars). The graph shows that overall, those primed with determinism showed significantly fewer shocks administered, but that is due to a huge reduction in the number of shocks administered by women who were primed with determinism. Men primed with determinism showed a nonsignificant increase in number of shocks administered, but the effect of female “empathy” outweighed that so there was an overall effect of priming. In fact, one can conclude that there’s a sex-by-priming interaction effect here, and that priming with determinism made females—but not males—more empathic. The authors, however, concentrate on the overall effect, which I think is misguided given the effect of sex (which they do, in fairness, mention).
When participants were told to shock or not shock others (data not shown), the results were pretty much the same, although participants who were coerced estimated longer interval estimates between their actions and the outcome, which, say the authors, is more characteristic of an involuntary than a voluntary action.
Finally, the “core beliefs” of participants in free will vs. determinism assessed before the experiment had no effect on the results. That is, these results appear to be due solely to the effect of priming.
Graphical representation of the number of shocks freely delivered All tests were two-tailed. ∗∗∗ indicates a p-value ≤ 0.001 and ∗ indicates a p-value between 0.01 and 0.05.
2. Vindictiveness. The authors also estimated the degree of “vindictiveness” of participants: that is, the correlation between the number of shocks you got from your partner and those that you then gave to your partner. Here are those data from the groups primed for “no free will” and the controls. In both control and experimental groups, there was a correlation, i.e., evidence of vindictiveness, but that correlation wasn’t significant for females in the “no free will” group. In other words, priming females, but not males, with determinism made them more empathic—less likely to be vindictive. In this case, core beliefs did affect behavior for males but not females, but the effect was small. The main effect again was that induced by the priming.
Graphical representation of the vindictive behavior (B). All tests were two-tailed. ∗∗∗ indicates a p-value ≤ 0.001 and ∗ indicates a p-value between 0.01 and 0.05.
What’s the upshot? The results are a bit complicated, for while there’s evidence that being primed with determinism makes you more empathic and less vindictive, this effect appears to hold for females but not males. The authors conclude that this runs counter to previous studies:
Moreover, we observed that the core beliefs of participants did not differ in these groups, and neither did their scores on empathy. Taken together, this suggests that the reduction of immoral behavior in the no free will group for female participants stems from the induced beliefs. The observed prosocial benefits of disbelief in free will may appear to go against the mainstream, since the literature mainly converged toward the prosocial benefits of believing in free will (e.g., Vohs and Schooler, 2008; Baumeister et al., 2009). However, numerous factors differed in our study, notably the social aspects associated with the presence of two co-participants who were aware that roles would be reversed at the middle of the experiment. Future work is required to explore this question more thoroughly.
and about vindictiveness:
Additionally, we observed that vindictive behavior was reduced for female participants in the no free will group compared to other sub-groups, and that the higher female participants scored on free will, the more vindictive they were. Importantly, our paradigm made it possible to investigate whether disbelief in free will influences the occurrence of vindictive behavior without the need to mention the notion of punishment to our participant, such as in previous studies. This tendency to behave vindictively is consistent with previous studies that showed that people who believe in determinism are less punitive and have reduced retributive attitudes toward others (e.g., Westlake and Paulhus, 2007; Krueger et al., 2014; Shariff et al., 2014). When people have to express a judgment about the morality of someone else’s behavior, their beliefs about the cause of these behaviors may greatly influence how they judge the severity of the act. Reducing people’s beliefs in free will might make them consider that individual responsibility is reduced, thus making them less retributive toward others.
Overall, the authors say that “we observed that a disbelief in free will had a positive impact on the morality of decisions toward others” and that this “challenges current thinking.” Well, that holds only for women and not men, and I won’t speculate why.
The study is of course flawed because it assesses only short-term behavior in the lab and not the long-term effect of belief in determinism on empathy and vindictiveness, which is what we really want to know. Of course, all such studies are flawed in this way. But this new one suggests that previous studies showing an increase in bad behaviors caused by priming with determinism must be taken with a grain of salt. Reviewing the literature, the authors note that among all studies there’s simply no consensus on this issue, and nearly all those studies are of this short-term nature.
But in the end, are such studies necessary? I’m not sure. The first thing we need to do is figure out what the truth is, and we already know that: human behavior is ruled by the laws of physics, and, save any effect of quantum indeterminacy, that leaves us no room for dualistic free will. Then we need to deal with that truth, just as we need to deal with the even more unpleasant truth of our own mortality. For this secondary program it might be useful to have studies such as these, but I don’t think they’re necessary, especially because of their flaws. What’s important about grasping determinism is, as I’ve always said, is to apply it to our system of reward and punishment, being mindful that nobody has a choice about whether to act good or badly. To claim, as some readers have, that determinism has no effect on such judgments is a claim I don’t accept (and neither do Caspar et al.). A full grasp of determinism would have a marked effect on how our legal system deals with criminals, or even how we deal with our own lives vis-a-vis empathy, forgiveness, and our attitude towards those who are at the bottom of society.
I’ll be brief; we have two items, one good and one bad. Good one first.
1.) After a federal judge struck down two provisions of Trump’s anti-immigration bill, the Department of Justice appealed the decision. They lost, so the travel bans are still blocked. The upholding was done by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, which added that a response from the Trump administration was due tomorrow. (The provisions struck down included the 7-nation “Muslim ban” and the new limits on overall immigration.) This one may go all the way to the Supreme Court, which, in the absence of Trump’s nominee, is in a 4-4 liberal/conservative split. The New York Times reports that the new judicial decisions are nebulous:
Judge Robart’s order left many questions, said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston.
“Does the executive order violate the equal protection of the laws, amount to an establishment of religion, violate rights of free exercise, or deprive aliens of due process of law?” Professor Blackman asked. “Who knows? The analysis is bare bones, and leaves the court of appeals, as well as the Supreme Court, with no basis to determine whether the nationwide injunction was proper.”
Now the bad news, but I suspect it won’t come to fruition:
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) has drafted a bill to “completely abolish” the Environmental Protection Agency, according to an email obtained by The Huffington Post.
The freshman congressman sent the email on Tuesday morning to lawmakers who might co-sponsor the legislation, which would shutter the EPA by the end of next year.
“Our small businesses cannot afford to cover the costs associated with compliance, too often leading to closed doors and unemployed Americans,” Gaetz wrote. “It is time to take back our legislative power from the EPA and abolish it permanently.”
. . . For Gaetz, that wouldn’t go far enough. In his email to lawmakers, he cited a statistic from the American Action Forum, a conservative policy group launched in 2010 by Republican heavyweights, stating that “it would take more than 94,200 employees working full-time to complete one year of EPA paperwork.”
“Today, the American people are drowning in rules and regulations promulgated by unelected bureaucrats,” Gaetz said, “and the Environmental Protection Agency has become an extraordinary offender.”
Gaetz has a history of opposing environmental regulations. He began fighting to repeal a requirement that all gasoline in Florida contain ethanol when he first took office as a Florida state lawmaker in 2010. When his bill finally passed in 2013, he called it “one more mandate off the books.”
Here’s the entire text of the bill from Congress.gov. It’s short, and I’m betting it dies in committee. (Of course, I also bet that Trump would lose the election.):
Reader Kurt Andreas sent some lovely photos of insects, fungi and slime molds (for some reason we’ve gotten a lot of fungi lately after a long dry spell). His notes are indented.
I have a mixed bag for you today. I was inspired by Jim Stump’s wildlife contributions, as I have tons of fungi and slime mold pictures, and wanted to share a few. I was also hoping your kind readers might be able to ID some of them. Unfortunately many many mushrooms can only be IDed after taking spore prints or using histological or genetic studies.
Asian Tiger Mosquito (Aedes albopictus). These suckers seem to have displaced the Culex mosquitos I used to see far more often in Queens. Unfortunately they are vectors for Zika, dengue and yellow fever, and Queens sees a few spray trucks come by a year to inhibit their population size.
You previously posted a picture of my Maine coon kitten Kitten Mittens. Now he’s all grown up, but as gorgeous as ever. Here he is taking a walk in my back yard, and another picture of him getting ready to sneeze or yawn.
Good morning; it’s Sunday, February 5, 2017, and it’s World Nutella Day. If you eat it (or even if you don’t), PuffHo has obligingly compiled “11 things you really should know if you love Nutella.” Not all of these facts are palatable: for instance, 56% of the stuff is straight sugar, and the second ingredient isn’t hazelnuts, but not-that-good-for-you palm oil. I did try it out of curiosity a while back, and wasn’t impressed. But your mileage may differ.
LOL
In Mexico it’s Constitution Day, and the U.S. it’s National Weatherperson’s Day, celebrating our public meteorologists.
On this day in 1852, the Hermitage Museum opened in St. Petersburg. I’ve been there, and it is without doubt one of the three or four greatest art museums in the world, with the added perk of being in a royal palace. On February 5, 1869, the world’s largest alluvial gold nugget, the “Welcome Stranger Nugget”, was discovered by two prospectors at Moliagul, Victoria, Australia. Its refined weight was 3,123 oz (214.1 lbs or 97 kg), and the miners received £9381 for their find— about US $3-4 million in 2013 prices. Here’s a relative of one of the finders holding a replica of the nugget:
On this day in 1917, the current constitution of Mexico was adopted, which is why it’s Constitution Day there. In 1924, the Greenwich Observatory began broadcasting its famous time signals, and on February 5, 1939, Franco became the leader of Spain. Rumor has it that he died some time ago.
Notables born on this day include Adlai Stevenson II (1900), Hank Aaron and Don Cherry (both 1934), Al Kooper (1944), Charlotte Rampling (1946), and Laura Linney (1964). Those who expired on this day include Marianne Moore (1972) and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (2008). Meanwhile Hili is being apocalyptic:
Hili: End of the world.
A: When?
Hili: A week from now.
A: So we still have plenty of time.
Hili: That’s true.
In Polish:
Hili: Koniec świata.
Ja: Kiedy?
Hili: Za tydzień.
Ja: To mamy jeszcze mnóstwo czasu.
Hili: To prawda.
Leon, on a hiking vacation to the mountains of southern Poland, seems reluctant to go outside. I can’t believe a cat can sleep on top of a stove like that, which is undoubtedly very hot!:
Leon: Mountains? Thank you, maybe another time.
And out in Winnipeg, Gus is passing the winter by playing indoors. We have a video:
Gus was a bit lukewarm about these feather sticks until they were combined with the tissue paper.
Dan Arel continues to defend the punching of Nazis (read: “any white supremacist”), tweeting a link to one of the most misguided articles I’ve seen in the past year:
Yes, go have a read at The Establishment of “Why punching Nazis is not only ethical, but imperative,” by Katherine Cross (identified as “Sociologist, Transfeminist, Gaming Critic, Opera-loving slug matron, itinerant Valkyrie, and @Feministing columnist.” She’s also a grad student in sociology at the City University of New York) Her argument, as the title states, is that it’s our moral duty to punch Nazis because of what they did during World War II, because they’re fundamentally antidemocratic, and because they would destroy this country if they were allowed to speak freely (which, she says, they shouldn’t be).
This is the scary kind of violent rhetoric that we predicted from Trump supporters, but is actually coming almost exclusively from the Regressive Left—that group of people who now think that civil disobedience should involve physical assault on people they disagree with. And this attitude appears to be spreading, as we see not only from Arel, who once was sane, but also from the Berkeley anarchists who shut down Milo Yiannopoulos’s talk. (There are more; just Google “punching Nazis,” and you’ll find other apologists like this one.)
Cross is of course referring to Richard Spencer, an odious white supremacist who, while giving an interview on January 20 in Washington (Inauguration Day), was punched in the face by what looks to be a hooded anarchist. Here’s the video:
First of all, is Spencer a Nazi? He denies it, and he’s not a member of the American Nazi Party, but he certain aligns with much of the ideology behind neo-Nazism. As Wikipedia notes:
Spencer has repeatedly quoted from Nazi propaganda and denounced Jews, and has on several occasions refused to denounce Adolf Hitler.
Spencer and his organization drew considerable media attention in the weeks following the 2016 presidential election, where, in response to his cry “Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!”, a number of his supporters gave the Nazi salute and chanted in a similar fashion to the Sieg heil chant used at the Nazis’ Nuremberg rallies. Spencer has defended their conduct, stating that the Nazi salute was given in a spirit of “irony and exuberance”.[14]
So he’s an anti-Semitic white supremacist who seems to knowingly co-opt aspects of Nazi behavior. But he’s not a Nazi per se, and we shouldn’t call all white supremacists Nazis, which immediately aligns them with the Hitlerian ideology that may not be appropriate.
Even so, did Spencer deserve to get punched? Cross says “yes,” and that it’s our obligation to punch him. Why? Cross gives several reasons (her words are indented):
1). Spencer should be punched because he conjures up the Holocaust. Cross says this:
For the mainline liberals and conservatives who lament the punching of Richard Spencer, the young white supremacist activist who coined the term “alt-right,” Nazism remains a theoretical construct, an “idea” that can be debated and defeated without a shot being fired in anger. For the rest of us — for many Jews, for ethnic and religious minorities, for queer people — Nazism is an empirical fact with the solidity of iron roads leading to walled death camps.
The camps are Nazism’s endpoint; it is what Nazism is for. Nazism serves as a refuge for whites dislocated by mass society and modernity, who seek someone to blame for their anomic dread. With that in mind, we must be very explicit about what Nazism’s relationship to democracy must be, and refuse dangerous, whitewashing euphemisms when discussing it (e.g. “you support punching someone who disagrees with you”).
Not all white supremacists are calling for concentration camps for Jews—in fact, I know of none who are. But even if they did, they have the right to say it under the First Amendment, for it doesn’t inspire immediate violence. Of course I’d oppose that call with every atom of my being, and I’m confident enough in today’s world that reminding people of the Holocaust is sufficient to ensure that rational people won’t fall under Spencer’s sway. As for that “whitewashing euphemism,” well, it’s not as euphemistic as you think given the recent political violence we’ve seen. Milo Yiannopoulos, for instance, is not a Nazi, regardless of what you think about him.
2.) Spencer should be punched because his words may actually create a Holocaust of either Jews or African-Americans.
Yes, it could be said that I “disagree” with Spencer that a genocide of Black Americans is desirable, but I believe he should be punched because of the very real risk that he could galvanize such an event into actually happening. This is a fear supported by the tremendous weight of our history, and by the fact that we had to fight the bloodiest war of our species’ existence the last time Nazism came into conflict with modern democracy. To call this a “disagreement” is an unspeakable slight against millions of dead.
First of all, punching people like Spencer merely gets them sympathy; it doesn’t stop them from promulgating their ideas. And to suppose that our country is on the verge of creating Auschwitz-like camps for anyone is simply unjustified hysteria. But of course the Regressive Left, of which Cross appears to be the type specimen, likes to whip up such hysteria by branding their opponents with the worst names possible: racist, misogynist, Nazi.
3.) Spencer should be punched because his views abuse democracy. We should not let these people speak, and we should beat them up, too.
Fascism is a cancer that turns democracy against itself unto death. There is no reasoning with it. It was specifically engineered to attack the weaknesses of democracy and use them to bring down the entire system, arrogating a right to free speech for itself just long enough to take power and wrench it away from everyone else. Simply allowing Nazis onto a stage, as the BBC did when it let British National Party leader Nick Griffin sit and debate with political luminaries on its Question Time program, is to give them an invaluable moral victory. Like creationists who debate evolutionary biologists, the former benefit mightily from the prestige of the latter.
In using this tactic, Nazis abuse the democratic forum to illegitimately lend credence to something that is otherwise indefensible, the equality of the stage giving the unforgivable appearance of “two sides” to a position that is anathema to public decency. This is not because Nazis love democracy or free speech, but because they know how to use this strategy to unravel them.
Yes, allowing odious speech is “abusing the democratic forum.” In other words, we can’t allow people like Spencer the rights of other citizens in a democracy, like free speech, because they will use those rights to destroy democracy. Now I don’t think Spencer has the inalienable right to a platform in a university, but if he’s legitimately invited, then yes, he should be allowed to speak. Opponents should be allowed to protest peacefully, ask questions in the Q&A session, and engage in counterspeech. And yes, Spencer should be allowed to get a permit to stand on a soapbox in the park and bawl his hatred out to high heaven.
In fact, people like Cross herself are the ones who endanger democracy. As far as I know, Spencer hasn’t called for censoring or physically assaulting anyone. In a country run by Cross, that would not only be legal, but encouraged, and people like Spencer wouldn’t be allowed to speak. (Presumably Cross would be The Decider.) Free speech? Only for those with acceptable views! Further, the “credibility” argument doesn’t hold for me. While I won’t myself debate creationists because that gives them the cachet of having a real scientist think they’re worth debating, I wouldn’t for a moment try to censor them in public talks simply because they’re wrong. (Public schools, of course, are a different matter: teaching creationism is teaching lies to children, and at the same time pushing unconstitutional religious views on them.)
4.) Spencer should be punched because hurting him reveals “the shared humanity that Nazis deny.” With this argument Cross takes herself to Cloud-Cuckoo Land, for in what sense is hurting people you don’t like a form of “shared humanity”? Perhaps in a just war, but surely not among citizens in a democratic land. But listen to Ms. Cross (my emphasis):
As I noted earlier, Nazism is democracy’s anti-matter; coming into contact with it is often destructive for our institutions because it is the personification of bad faith with malice aforethought. The only nonviolent solution is to marginalize Nazism from public life in our society — one may be free to hold these views, but not to try and spread them at the highest echelons of our public fora. When, however, someone like Spencer does come along and is being feted in the mainstream, there are no other options available to us.
The vulnerability of Nazis cannot be revealed through debate — many thinkers who lived through the Second World War, from Karl Popper, to Hannah Arendt, to Jean Paul Sartre, have been quite clear about why dispassionate discourse with men like Richard Spencer is not only pointless, but actively dangerous.
The use of force, by contrast, does reveal the shared humanity that Nazis deny. Our vulnerability is one of the things that links us all, seven billion strong, in a humane fragility. These are essential aspects of our humanity that both Nazi mythology and channer troll culture deny. Punching a Nazi, by contrast, reveals it. It reveals they are no masters, but quite eminently capable of fear, of pain, of vulnerability. And that takes the shine off; it eliminates their mystique, and it puts the lie to the idea that their ideology is an armor against the pains of modernity.
That alone justifies Richard Spencer being punched in the face on camera.
It is this kind of stuff that scares me about the Regressive Left. They not only twist language out of its normal meaning to justify violence—something that Orwell warned about repeatedly, but use their new language to justify hurting other human beings. Indeed, it’s not just ethical to hurt them, but required. You know what this leads to: people punching Muslims for their “noncompliance” with the tenets of Western society, Jews for being exponents of occupation and promoting an “apartheid” state, and people like Milo (not a Nazi!) being punched for promoting “hate speech.”
This is not a road that progressives want to travel. I’m far more scared of an authoritarian like Cross than of a white supremacist like Spencer. Spencer will never achieve anything, but Cross, along with Arel and others, is rapidly convincing many progressives that it’s okay to hurt the bodies of people who hurt your feelings. And that is fundamentally antidemocratic.
I don’t write much about “hate speech” laws in other countries, although many have them (even in Europe), for I simply don’t know much about their history, or how they’re enforced. But, as in the U.S., I don’t think that they’re justified in any democracy, for democracy depends vitally in freedom of speech. We know that it’s vile to kill cartoonists who offend people, but in France and Germany, it’s okay to prosecute people for verbal or written “offense”.
And in France right now, according to the Gatestone Institute and to the Israeli paper Haaretz, a respected French scholar of anti-Semitism is being prosecuted by the state for claiming that Arabs culturally promulgate anti-Semitism to their families. Well, that may be true for many French Arabs, but you can’t say it, for that constitutes “incitement to racial hatred”: a crime. (Yes, dismiss the news based on the sources, if you wish, but you can find the same reports elsewhere.)
The data: George Bensoussan, a French cultural historian specializing in anti-Semitism, Zionism, and related issues, is going on trial for the following statement made on a “France Culture” radio debate. Gatestone reports:
“An Algerian sociologist, Smaïn Laacher, with great courage, just said in a documentary aired on Channel 3: It is a shame to deny this taboo, namely that in the Arab families in France, and everyone knows it but nobody wants to say it, anti-Semitism is sucked with mother’s milk.”
The documentary that Bensoussan was referring to was called “Teachers in the Lost Territories of the Republic,” and was aired in October 2015, on Channel 3. In this documentary, Laacher, who is a French professor of Algerian origin, said:
“Antisemitism is already awash in the domestic space… It… rolls almost naturally off the tongue, awash in the language… It is an insult. When parents shout at their children, when they want to reprimand them, they call them Jews. Yes. All Arab families know this. It is monumental hypocrisy not to see that this anti-Semitism begins as a domestic one.”
Because of Bensoussan’s statement in bold, several French anti-racist orgniazations, including the the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France, SOS Racisme, Mouvement Contre le Racisme et Pour l’amitié Entre les Peuples, and even the Jewish LICRA (Ligue Internationale Contre le Racisme et l’Antisémitisme), which had an honorable history opposing anti-Semitism, joined in a complaint against Bensoussan.
But why was what he said so offensive, while what Laacher said was not? Gatestone reports:
No complaint was filed against Laacher. But as soon as Bensoussan, in the heat of a radio debate, referred to Arab anti-Semitism as “sucked in with mother’s milk”, CCIF, followed by all anti-racist associations, brought Bensoussan to supposed justice. Their accusation was simple: “mother’s milk” is not a metaphor for cultural anti-Semitism transmitted through education, but a genetic and “essentialist” accusation. It means: “all Arabs are anti-Semitic” — in other words, Bensoussan is a racist.
Well, to my understanding what’s “imbibed with mother’s milk” means something culturally inherited. (I once heard someone describe the late biologist and activist Richard Levins as having “gotten his Marxism with his mother’s milk.”) Perhaps that’s not what the phrase means in France, but I doubt it. Nourishment from the mother is a cultural benefit—food—and has nothing to do with the transfer of DNA, even though nursing is certainly a product of kin selection and other useful chemicals come with the milk.
Remember, too, that this isn’t the first time France has prosecuted “hate speech”:
With the leading Islamist CCIF stalking “Islamophobia”, intellectual intimidation is the rule. Complaints are filed against everyone not saying that Muslims are the main victim of racism in France.
In December 2016, Pascal Bruckner, a writer and philosopher, was also brought to court for saying in 2015, on Arte TV, “We need to make the record of collaborators of Charlie Hebdo’s murderers”. He named people in France who had instilled a climate of hatred against Charlie: the entertainer Guy Bedos, the rap singer Nekfeu, anti-racist organizations like The Indivisibles, or the journalist Rokhaya Diallo and the supremacist movement for “people of color” known as Les Indigènes de la République (“The Indigenous of the Republic”).
It was not the first time that Islamists filed complaints against people they dislike. Charlie Hebdo was twice brought to court by Islamist organizations. Twice, the accusations of Charlie’s Islamist accusers were dismissed.
But with the Bensoussan trial, we are entering in a new era. The most venerable, the most authentic anti-racist organizations — some of them are older than a century — are, shamefully, lining up with Islamist organizations.
In the U.S., the accusation of “hate speech” is used to intimidate people, but nobody can be prosecuted for it. Only hate crimes can be prosecuted: as add-ons to criminal acts, and I object to those, too. Of course it’s free speech to accuse people of “hate speech”, and you have every right to say that; but, as I always note, if you’re going to level such accusations, the onus is on you to define exactly what “hate speech” constitutes, and to stipulate who has the right to decide what constitutes “hate speech” and what constitutes merely strong criticism.
Nobody can make that distinction, because for me criticism of religions, including Islam, is valid speech, but to many Muslims it’s not only hate speech, but an offense punishable by death. When that kind of speech, including Bensoussan’s statement about the cultural inheritance of anti-Semitism, suddenly becomes a prosecutable offense, then the chilling effect is more than doubled. Who wants to spend money, time and energy defending themselves in court?
The recourse to what Bensoussan said is to use the press, not the courts. And if you’re going to maintain that no French Arabs teach their children hatred of Jews, well, you’re going to have a tough case to make.
Here’s The Donald’s response to Federal District Court judge James Robart’s ruling temporarily blocking, throughout the U.S., two provisions of the infamous “Muslim Ban” executive order:
The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned!
“So-called judge”? That’s an insult to the federal judiciary (Robart was appointed by George W. Bush). It’s unseemly for a President to use Twitter to pronounce on judicial decisions, it’s unseemly for a President to impugn a Federal judge in this way, and it’s unseemly for the President to get himself involved in a court battle on social media. What hath voters wrought?
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security is obeying the judge’s orders, ordering its agents to stop implementing the two affected parts of the ban.
