
Cruelty of Call-Out Culture - Reedx
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/opinion/call-out-social-justice.html
======
deeg
It's a good op-ed and I largely agree with Brooks but I find this point
interesting:

> I’d say civilization moves forward when we embrace rule of law, not when we
> abandon it.

What Emily did that got called out (cyber-bullying) isn't against the law, nor
do I think we want it to be (for freedom-of-speech reasons). Shaming Emily for
her prior abuse isn't necessarily a problem but social media knows no bounds
and takes it way too far. Destroying Emily's life is probably not justice.

~~~
MrMember
It's an issue of scale. If someone acts against societal norms and is "called
out" for it from within their social group, that can be a good thing. We all
sometimes need a reminder that we're acting like a dick.

Bring that to the scale of social media and it's a disaster. Suddenly
thousands of anonymous strangers are piling on them and they're ostracized
from their social group, out of a job, a home, etc.

~~~
duxup
It is scary. I probabbly have done many things that someone could
misunderstand or misrepresent and .... probabbly could get a lot of people
angry at me. Not that I did it, but then once the wave starts I don't think it
matters.

------
smacktoward
The problem with this essay is a fact that Brooks completely elides, namely
that "call-out culture" only exists because the existing institutions that
were supposed to be dispensing justice were _completely failing to do so_ for
this category of offenses.

The Harvey Weinsteins among us could go merrily through life abusing dozens of
women, and those women had no legal, social or cultural channels open to them
to seek redress. All those channels were in fact lined up _against_ them --
coming forward in such cases would just mean that the _woman_ would be put on
trial, both figuratively in the court of public opinion and sometimes even
literally, as the abuser's lawyers could drag them into court for defamation
or libel/slander. Not to mention that the victim would frequently become
unemployable as other powerful people closed ranks to defend their friend, the
abuser.

I don't disagree with Brooks that what has emerged is basically vigilante
justice, and vigilante justice is by its nature coarse and indiscriminate. We
don't want a society where vigilantes are roaming around dispensing justice.
But when large numbers of people who have suffered wrongs have no
institutional channels through which they can seek justice, the emergence of
those vigilantes is inevitable. People will only suffer in silence for so
long.

Brooks' solution is that we should "embrace rule of law," but by that he seems
to mean the laws as they stand today, and what that misses is that those laws
are not protecting half the population from systemic abuse. If he wants people
to respect the laws, _the laws need to change_ so that people who don't have a
way to seek justice in our system today can have one tomorrow. That would be
good for everybody (except the abusers, at least).

But here, Brooks is conspicuously silent. He has lots of things to say about
how we should all respect the law, but offers no suggestions on how to make
the law _worthy of respect_. So for the abused, his "solution" boils down to:
accept your fate. The problem isn't that you were abused, it's that you spoke
up about it. Be quiet, sit down, shut up and contemplate the Majesty of the
Law.

The irony of which is that _Brooks ' approach only guarantees the further
flourishing of the vigilantes._ When people can't look to the law to protect
them, they inevitably look elsewhere. By his own logic, he, of all people,
should be clamoring for the system to change so it protects those who are not
protected today. That would be an actual effective way to foster respect for
the law. Otherwise you're just telling the prey to have more respect for their
predators.

~~~
duxup
I find it unlikely that Brooks would only support the law as it stands today.
I think it is a bit much to just assume he supports just that.

This is one of those situations that observing the cruelty of call out culture
doesn't have to mean you support Weinstein or the systems that allow for it.

I feel like your approach here is way too binary.

~~~
smacktoward
_> I find it unlikely that Brooks would only support the law as it stands
today. I think it is a bit much to just assume he supports just that._

If only he had a column in the _New York Times_ where he could tell us what he
thinks on the subject!

~~~
duxup
I don't think it is fair to assume that because he didn't say what you wanted
him to that he must support something else.

------
eanzenberg
Witch hunts by another name.

~~~
joekrill
Not quite. In this case she was, in fact, a "witch". She did the
cyberbullying.

It's never made clear, however, if the first guy was actually guilty of what
he was accused of. I think that's more of a witch hunt, because we're
vilifying people based on a single accusation - without proof or
corroboration. Of course there may be more to the story here, it just hasn't
been told in this particular article.

~~~
eanzenberg
Does cruel and unusual punishment mean anything to you? An emoji a teenager
sends should not ruin their adult life.

~~~
joekrill
I never suggested it should. I was simply commenting on calling this a "witch
hunt" \- I offered no opinion on how fair or just any of this stuff is.

------
geofft
> _Really? Do we really think cycles of cruelty do more to advance
> civilization than cycles of wisdom and empathy? I’d say civilization moves
> forward when we embrace rule of law, not when we abandon it._

This is a puzzling position to take given that the primary tool of the "rule
of law" is cycles of cruelty - prison, policing, and war. Compared to those,
making Emily feel bad (and making her feel bad in a way she's okay with!)
isn't cruel at all.

~~~
dang
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone
says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
crb002
Steve King is the symptom of NW Iowa not being heard. Tyson with help from the
Obama USDA killed off all local meat processing by enforcing even small town
meat processors to have a _full time USDA inspector_.

They see the Mexicans working at Tyson, not the corruption that turned Iowa's
animal feeders into Tyson's bitches.

------
squozzer
>A post denouncing Emily also went viral. She, too, was the object of
nationwide group hate.

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

>The guy who called out Emily is named Herbert.

Ditto. Judge not, or be judged. I won't cry on the day the mob rips Herbert
apart.

And the cycle will continue until everyone's broken or tired of breaking
people.

~~~
chasd00
i don't know why the parent was voted down. The vast vast majority of humanity
understands people make mistakes, change, and grow over time. If you're going
to subscribe to a community where being excommunicated is as easy as in the
article then there's only so much sympathy you can expect.

It's a case of "play stupid games win stupid prizes".

~~~
squozzer
My guess - it was overloaded with homilies.

But maybe the "push-button" denunciation culture has an agenda. We could be
approaching a time where certain things we still take for granted today - e.g.
good jobs - will become a lot scarcer. And how would one gain an edge? By
destroying the competition by any means necessary.

Or so Peter Turchin and those who follow Structural-Demographic Theory seem to
think.

------
eli_gottlieb
/u/Reedx, this isn't addressed to you, but...

NYT, if you want credibility on the issue of "call-out culture" and "social
justice", for God's sakes, don't have a Republican columnist write the piece.
I know David Brooks is a genteel Never Trumper. It doesn't matter. You don't
build credibility to talk about an issue by speaking _as the enemy_.

~~~
duxup
> I know David Brooks is a genteel Never Trumper. It doesn't matter.

Yeah it does matter. Are you calling out Brooks and just dismissing anything
else about him ... as a person so you can call him out?

Are you trying to illustrate the point of the article in a weird way?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
I'm not calling him out. I'm saying that he has zero intellectual credibility
to describe these issues accurately.

For instance:

>But the “Invisibilia" episode implicitly suggests that call-outs are how
humanity moves forward. Society enforces norms by murdering the bullies who
break them. When systems are broken, vigilante justice may be rough justice,
but it gets the job done. Prominent anthropologist Richard Wrangham says this
is the only way civilization advances that he’s witnessed.

>Really? Do we really think cycles of cruelty do more to advance civilization
than cycles of wisdom and empathy? I’d say civilization moves forward when we
embrace rule of law, not when we abandon it. I’d say we no longer gather in
coliseums to watch people get eaten by lions because clergy members,
philosophers and artists have made us less tolerant of cruelty, not more
tolerant.

Here Brooks straw-mans Wrangham and Brooks' other ideological opponents.
Many/most of us would not say that "clergy, philosophers, and artists have
made us less tolerant of cruelty". We would say that, as a society, we no
longer gather to watch people being fed to lions because _the lowest sectors
of society have gained enough power to prevent themselves being fed to lions_.

This difference in lens derives directly from Brooks' being a Republican: he
comes from what has traditionally been called an "idealist" tradition, and he
illustrates that here. He thinks that _ideas move history_ , so better ideas
(from philosophers, artists, and clergy) make society better.

In other traditions, particularly the one he's attacking, the engine of moral
progress is the gradual, halting, progressive _balancing of power_ across
individuals and groups.

To successfully attack the "balancing of power" model, you have to actually
name that model, then show counter-evidence. Brooks has instead casually
elided the model he hopes to attack in favor of pillorying his purported
opponents as _incompetent_ at applying _his_ model.

If you have a severe fever, you might have mononucleosis, and you might have
meningitis (this happened to someone I know). Or you might have the flu. If I
think you have the flu, I can't label running a test for mono as _incompetent
treatment of the flu_. It's testing an entirely different hypothesis which
stands on its own.

This goes to the heart of Brooks' conclusion:

>The problem with the pseudo-realism of the call-out culture is that it is so
naïve. Once you adopt binary thinking in which people are categorized as good
or evil, once you give random people the power to destroy lives without any
process, you have taken a step toward the Rwandan genocide.

If you think that ideas drive history, call-out culture is the first step to
the Rwandan genocide. If you _don 't believe that in the first place_, you
have no reason to accept the conclusion: preventing an "American Rwandan
genocide", in your view, might require something else entirely, or such a
genocidal war may be _a priori_ so unlikely that it's no more worth
"preventing" it than spraying "tiger repellent" on oneself when going outside.

~~~
duxup
I really think that you're about 8 layers way deeper into a context that
simply isn't the case here.

I don't think the article was written as some sort of Republican or any kind
of attack on ... whatever it is you think it is.

I think this really is more about behavior and our choices and the
consequences in this day and age. That's it.

In some strange way your post also seems a bit like how the call-out stuff
happens. The context of some event is skewed and there's no way for some folks
to see anything else.

~~~
geofft
It's an attack on the people who think call-outs are appropriate, which is
overwhelmingly a left-leaning tool.

In particular it's noteworthy that when the left calls itself out, it reacts
as the left desires (see Emily in this article, or Al Franken, or John
Conyers, or ...), and when the left calls the right out, the right attacks the
legitimacy of even being called out in the first place and starts making
arguments about the "rule of law" because the law tends to be on the
conservative side (since conservatives are, somewhat by definition, those who
are on the side of what the law presently says). It's not new, and it's
absolutely relevant context for this article.

~~~
duxup
I mean by your description you can't call out call out culture without it
being some partisan thing?

That seems absurd.

~~~
DoofusOfDeath
> In particular it's noteworthy that when the left calls itself out ...

Happily, the GP's statement makes an empirical claim, so there's at least some
hope of it being testable.

That said, since the GP is making a questionable generalization about two
large populations, it would be helpful it he/she provided a larger body of
supporting examples.

------
stcredzero
TED Talk about this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAIP6fI0NAI)

