
Auden on No-Platforming Pound (2019) - hodgesrm
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/02/27/auden-on-no-platforming-pound/
======
tunesmith
This is such a fabulous retelling. I don't know much about Auden other than a
general sense that he is very well respected. What is hard about these days is
that most of the visible voices arguing for the same POV as Auden's appear to
have more in common with Pound than Auden (if my impression of Auden is
correct). Are there any visible examples of people well-respected by
progressives that would be on Auden's side of the argument?

The other thing that struck me is that the letter exchange between Cerf and
Auden came pretty close to wrestling with the paradox of tolerance. Like, if
one's work can be separated from their belief, then why would Auden refuse to
work with Cerf? I'm sure Auden would have had a distinction to bring up on
that matter, though. I guess Auden wasn't arguing that Random House should be
shut down.

Was the most recent US conviction for treason really in 1952 (wikipedia)?
That's really something.

~~~
labster
Treason is defined in the US Constitution: "Treason against the United States,
shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their
Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

The United States has not been in a state of war since 1945, so very few
people alive could have possibly committed treason, unless they did so as a
child. No person under the age of 75 could have committed treason.

~~~
tunesmith
I think your definition implies that the only way to be an Enemy of the United
States is if the United States is in a state of war (which we can stipulate we
haven't been stated as an official declaration of war since 1945).

Is that reading backed up anywhere legally, that the definition of an Enemy
only applies during a state of war from an official declaration of war?

~~~
labster
Well, if we prosecuted treason against a person for acting on behalf of a
foreign power -- naming them as an Enemy of the United States -- it would be
trivial for that power to interpret the prosecution itself as declaration of
war. So be careful what you wish for.

Here, here's a related article by a law professor at my alma mater:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-
tre...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-
treason/2017/02/17/8b9eb3a8-f460-11e6-a9b0-ecee7ce475fc_story.html)

~~~
tunesmith
Thanks, that is a convincing article.

------
renewiltord
The greatest beauty of this exchange is the degree to which each exercised
free association. Cerf did not wish to associate with Pound, and Auden felt
that this wish was insufficiently justified and, in turn, chose not to
associate with Cerf, causing him to have to go back on his actions.

Ultimately, I see most modern de-platforming as being very similar, with the
significant difference that it is not at all civil (which is ultimately easy
to factor out for me).

For what it's worth, I may well choose to not use some piece of software
because I dislike the leadership. That is a free choice. I may well tell my
friends why I made this choice and they may well go along with me. The company
may then choose to fire the leadership and alienate those who like them, or
choose not to and alienate me and my friends. It's all free choice.

So, overall, I'm not too upset about cancel culture. It's for those of us who
sympathize with the cancelled to create spaces where they can continue to
thrive. And if we do it right, and if we are right that they are unfairly
cancelled, then we will have a weapon that will beat the uninformed in the
market. If not, we fail, and the rest of humanity thrives.

Ultimately, the Brendan Eich situation is like this. I don't like that he
donated against gay marriage. I didn't stop using Firefox over it. I didn't
start using Firefox over it. But by my principles of liberty, I could
reasonably have said "I will not work at Mozilla or use Firefox so long as
they permit this unless they end their association with him" and they can
reasonably have said "Okay, don't. Your loss." or "Okay, we fired him". After
all, we are just free people choosing whom we would like to associate with.

~~~
bernie_simon
A number of people have been fired from their jobs because of the cancel
culture. It's that "de-platforming" that most concerns me.

While people have the right of free association, that right needs to be
exercised responsibly. Is refusing to work with a man who apposes gay marriage
is responsible? How about refusing to work with a Trump supporter, or
evangelical Christian?

~~~
renewiltord
These are reasonable questions. I find myself aligned more with Federal rules
here than the rules of my state, California. I believe that the things about
oneself that are generally immutable should be out of scope (the Veil of
Ignorance trumps the Free Association). Examples are: racial identity (and
however this manifests - skin colour, hair, whatever), biological sex, age,
disabilities, genetics.

Things that I think are borderline but should be protected are stuff like
religion. This is a tough place for me because I know that because of
correlation in ethnicity and religion you can proxy discrimination for race
through these so I take the L on the fact that I don't want them protected but
I don't have a way to reasonably differentiate them from race-discrimination.

Political affiliation is a protected class in California, and I struggle with
this a little. It isn't hard to imagine that there is a world where some race,
let's say Centaurians, are generally discriminated against and they have a
party: The Equal Rights for Centaurians Party. Discrimination against ERC
affiliation is discrimination against Centaurians, just proxied through
political affiliation. I don't think that's good for our society.

Any way, my ultimate guide star is free individuals being able to achieve
their greatest freedoms without non-consensually intruding on others, so based
on how society is organized at any given moment, I think the practice might be
to protect political affiliation or to not do so. Ultimately, it may just be
the case that sufficient of us decide not to use your product because you're a
Trump supporter and then you die. That's life. You can't make me buy your
product. That's a much greater sin. Maybe the law constrains your employer to
not fire you and so we keep boycotting and you then die and are replaced by a
company that doesn't act like you. FWIW, if it were me, it would depend on the
situation.

Perhaps that's why it's good for CA to do so, because it is overwhelmingly
Democrat-voting. If there were many powerful parties, one could imagine it
would be less necessary.

------
dbt00
For everybody who is trying to relate this to current controversies, read W.
H. Auden’s letter of Feb 2nd.

“ I agree with you

“a) That Art and Politics (and Morals) are not unrelated, but the relation is
in the work itself. There are works of fairly high aesthetic value which
present attitudes which are poisonous, and they present a problem to a
publisher, and he has to decide whether the public are grown up enough to
enjoy the first without harm because they are sufficiently aware that the
second is poison.

“But this is not, I believe, the issue in the Pound case. E.g. The contents of
the poems in no way resemble the contents of the broadcasts. [That is, the
poems were lyrics that had nothing to do with fascism or the war.]

“b) An artist, or any other figure, who acquires some special status in the
community, has a special responsibility. But that, surely, only means, that if
he behaves badly or criminally, his act should be judged more severely. I get
very exasperated with the people who argue that Pound should be acquitted or
let down gently because he is a poet, which is obviously nonsense. The only
claim for leniency can be exactly what it would be for any other criminal, on
the grounds that he is mad, which is a matter for the court and the medical
experts, not the public.

“Actually—it is a very minor point—I have never met or heard of anyone who,
out of admiration for Pound’s work, embraced his political opinions though I
know, and I’m sure you do, of several who share his opinions but would
certainly be incapable of reading his poems.”

------
shard
In a similar vein, recently there is a trend of comedians making it very clear
at the beginning of their sets that their job is to tell jokes and push the
boundary of what is acceptable, as this is what the audience is explicitly
paying them to do, and that these jokes do not imply that they have the same
beliefs. They have to say this because people have complained and tried to de-
platform comedians for their jokes.

------
kelnos
Reading this gave me a lot to think about, and I'm definitely feeling
persuaded to be more sympathetic toward giving good artistic work a platform
even when the creator has views I find abhorrent.

But I think we need to carefully consider the scope here, as well. Auden was
so adamant about including Pound's work because he believed the work itself
had strong literary merit (even though he wasn't a huge fan on aesthetic
grounds), and did not advance or espouse Pound's fascist views. If Pound's
poems had been all about loving and spreading fascism, my reading of his
letters suggests Auden would have advocated for dropping them.

Certainly there are modern cases we debate here on HN where there are
parallels to the Pound situation, and I'm convinced we sometimes (often?) make
the wrong decision. But many of them involve deplatforming people who are
using that platform to spread racist, sexist views and/or spread lies and
misinformation. There is no artistic merit to that sort of thing, and being
tolerant of that is a threat to a just, equal, equitable society.

Regardless, we still must be cautious when giving a platform to a toxic person
who creates non-toxic art, because if we give that person fame, they will be
granted more reach and access to spread their toxic ideas as well as their
non-toxic art. For this reason, I generally won't come down too hard on an
organization for deplatforming someone whose work itself is seemingly
unobjectionable.

I think Auden went a bit too far in hyperbole, at times: dropping a work from
further publishing runs is not remotely like burning books. In the first case
the original prints are still available. This is even more true nowadays when
so much is digitized, and copies of old works are essentially free.

~~~
tomohawk
It is one thing to support the literary works of someone who has views that
are disagreeable.

It is quite another to continue that support when the person takes actions
that are treasonous on the one hand, and supportive of murderous and barbaric
activities on the other.

The world was engaged in an existential fight for the very ability to speak
freely at the time. Many people lost loved ones in this fight, and the cost
was very high.

And Pound decides he's going to lend his talent to the people killing of Jews
and anyone else who got in the way of the fascists.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It's one thing to go after a possibly mad poet to make a point.

But while this was happening the US had shipped Von Braun and other Nazi
scientists over to the US, IBM's practical contribution to the Holocaust was
being quietly forgotten, the industrialist Thyssen - who provided substantial
funding to Hitler and could be argued to have made WWII possible - was being
allowed to live a very comfortable life having been punished with a fine of
just 15% of his net worth, and there appeared to be little interest in
investigating the role that US industrialists and bankers, including the
grandfather of George Bush, had played in association with Thyssen and other
industrialists. In fact many of their confiscated assets were quietly
returned.

Against this background Pound's actions had exactly zero influence on the
course of the war and the fate of the holocaust victims. The real causes were
elsewhere. And not only were the people responsible never deplatformed or
otherwise challenged, many never faced any significant criticism of their
actions.

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworl...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/25/usa.secondworldwar)

~~~
tomohawk
Nice whataboutisms.

What the people running the US government and other allied governments did
after the war in the face of the massive Soviet threat really has nothing to
do with this case.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
That's an interesting attempt at a whataboutism of your own.

Perhaps you can explain how a fascist propagandist was supposed to be involved
in the "massive Soviet threat"?

------
verylittlemeat
_The relation of an author to his work is only one out of many, and once you
accept the idea that one thing to which a man stands related shares in his
guilt, you will presently extend it to others; begin by banning his poems not
because you object to them but because you object to him, and you will end, as
the Nazis did, by slaughtering his wife and children.

As you say, the war is not over._

~~~
fatbird
The Slippery Slope was a fallacy back when Auden wrote this, too.

~~~
tarboreus
There should be a fallacy for just randomly talking about fallacies. The
Fallacy Fallacy.

Do you also not believe in linear regression because it's a slope? Trend: not
a thing.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
This isn't "randomly" talking about fallacies at all. The very definition of a
slippery slope argument is the assertion that a relatively small, perhaps not
so controversial, decision will lead inexorably to a horrifying conclusion:

> Begin by banning his poems not because you object to them but because you
> object to him, and you will end, as the nazis did, by slaughtering his wife
> and children.

That is absolutely a slippery slope argument, and I would argue it is, in this
case, also fallacious.

Auden's argument here is "the Nazis did thing X, you are doing thing X,
therefore you will commit horrifying atrocities the same way the Nazis did."
But when restated that way -- and I will absolutely argue that it is a fair
restatement, if much less poetic -- the argument's weaknesses become a bit
more evident. I'd also argue farther than Auden's argument is _unsound,_ in
that his first premise is extremely shaky: by saying "because you object to
[Pound]," he is rather explicitly drawing a comparison between objecting to
someone because of their _actions_ \-- e.g., supporting fascists who were
literally at war with America and its allies -- and objecting to someone
because of their _nature_ \-- e.g., because someone is Jewish.

I don't doubt Auden's earnestness and sincerity here, but I'm absolutely not
persuaded that a publisher dropping an author over outspoken political stances
they vehemently disagree with is a first step toward totalitarianism.

~~~
tunesmith
But maybe there's another Fallacy Fallacy here. I mean, we're all very good
these days at pointing out slippery slopes. But that doesn't necessarily mean
that all slippery slopes are invalid, does it? After all, isn't it _possible_
that there are some matters where giving that first inch thereby makes it
easier to give that second inch?

~~~
fatbird
The slippery slope fallacy isn't that the first inch makes the second easier;
it's that the first inch will unintentionally result in the second inch. It's
a fallacy of assuming that certain consequences _will_ result from that
initial step, contrary to the intentions behind the initial step. Auden isn't
claiming that Cerf _wants_ to slaughter Pound's wife and children. He's
claiming that the decision to ban Pound's poems will ultimately result in the
slaughter of Pound's wife and children at Cerf's hands; that's what happened
with the Nazis; _quod erat demonstratum_.

------
perl4ever
c.f. P.G. Wodehouse, defended by George Orwell.

[https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
foundation/orwel...](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-
foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/in-defence-of-p-g-wodehouse/)

