Hero worship

Sometimes I get questioned on my decision to quote (or even mention in a non-negative light) individuals who are not good human beings.

It's a complex issue, sometimes.  When it comes to fiction, I draw the line at supporting writers who are horrible people and still stand to profit from my reading their work.  I won't read, watch, or recommend anything by Neil Gaiman, J. K. Rowling, and Marion Zimmer Bradley for that reason; in the case of Gaiman, I've loved a lot of his writing, but what he's been credibly accused of is so deeply reprehensible that I can no longer read his work without the nausea creeping in.  (Bradley is dead, but my purchase of her work would still profit her estate, so... nope.)

The line is even blurrier when it comes to scientists, whose work is usually not so entangled with who they are as a person.  Both Michael Shermer and Lawrence Krauss have been accused of serious sexual misconduct; while I apply the same rule to their writing (I will no longer purchase or read anything either man writes), does it invalidate their scientific achievements?  In fact, the topic comes up because a few days ago I mentioned Richard Dawkins and his observation that what religion a person belongs to has more to do with geography than with choice, and I had a reader write to me to ask why I'd quoted someone like Dawkins, whose anti-trans stance I find appalling.

It's a trenchant question.  My response is that my agreeing with Dawkins about some things doesn't mean I agree with him about everything.  I maintain that he is one of the most lucid and brilliant exponents of evolutionary biology I've come across, and has incisive (and insightful) things to say about religion, but when he strays out of those fields, well... not so much.  To go from "I agree with what X said about Y" to "I agree with what X says about everything" is to engage in hero worship.

And hero worship lands you in trouble just about every time, because we humans are all flawed.  We're all odd mixtures of good and bad, moral and immoral, reasonable and unreasonable, in different kinds and measures.  Writer John Scalzi wrote a brilliant piece when the allegations against Neil Gaiman came out last fall, in which he offered a plea to his readers not to put anyone -- very much including himself -- on a pedestal.  "People are complicated and contradictory and you don’t know everything about them," Scalzi wrote.  "You don’t know everything even about your parents or siblings or best friends or your partner.  People are hypocrites and liars and fail to live up to their own standards for themselves, much less yours.  Your version of them in your head will always be different than the version that actually exists in the world.  Because you’re not them.  Stop pretending people won’t be fuck ups.  They will.  Always."

To take a less emotionally-charged example, consider Isaac Newton.  The Father of Modern Physics was, beyond question, a brilliant scientific mind.  Not only did he for the first time come up with an analytical model for motion -- the basis of what we now call classical mechanics -- he invented calculus, the tool now universally used to study it.  His experiments in optics were groundbreaking; he was the first person to demonstrate that white light was a combination of the entire visible spectrum.

A portrait of Newton from 1689 [Image is in the Public Domain]

But.

He was, according to his contemporaries, a prickly, priggish, humorless man, narrow-minded, combative, and deeply misogynistic.  He never forgot a wrong; his vicious (and long-lived) quarrels with Robert Hooke, Samuel Pepys, and John Locke are the stuff of legend.  He was superstitious, and often seemed more interested in arguing matters of his rather peculiar take on theology than expanding knowledge of science.  A full one-tenth of his writings have to do with alchemy.  He wrote extensively about the mystical meanings of the proportions of the Temple of Solomon.  He was obsessed with the End Times, and did in-depth analyses of the Book of Revelation (he concluded that the world wasn't going to end until at least 2060, which is a relief).

He was not, honestly, someone most of us would care to spend much time with.

The contributions he made to physics and mathematics show signs of true genius.  At the same time, he seems to have been an ill-tempered and suspicious religious fanatic.  Why are we surprised by this, though?  As Scalzi points out forcefully, none of us are pure of heart, whatever we may accomplish, however far we rise in the public eye.

I'm not saying it's not disappointing when our heroes end up having feet of clay.  I was honestly devastated (not to mention repulsed) when I read the article that made public the allegations against Neil Gaiman.  (I won't link the article here, because it's frankly disturbing; if you're so inclined, a quick search will locate it for you.  Be forewarned, though, the whole thing is one big trigger warning.)   There will always be a measure of "Oh, no, not you too" we feel when someone we've looked up to doesn't live up to our good estimation -- or, in the case of Gaiman, falls way below it.

But like I said, humans are complex and baffling creatures sometimes.  We're all amalgams.  I try to live up to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature," but like everyone, I fail way more often than I'd like.  There are parts of my past that I look back upon with deep shame, and there are a few incidents that I'd do almost anything to be able to go back and change.  And I guess that's the only answer, really; to keep in mind we're all fallible, to treat our fellow humans as well as we can, to make amends as well as we can when we do fail, and to make sure we don't keep making the same mistakes over and over.

To quote Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better.  Then when you know better, do better."

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Taking offense

A few days ago, Neil Gaiman wrote the following perceptive words:

I was reading a book (about interjections, oddly enough) yesterday which included the phrase “In these days of political correctness…” talking about no longer making jokes that denigrated people for their culture or for the colour of their skin.  And I thought, “That’s not actually anything to do with ‘political correctness’.  That’s just treating other people with respect.” 

Which made me oddly happy. I started imagining a world in which we replaced the phrase “politically correct” wherever we could with “treating other people with respect”, and it made me smile.

You should try it.  It’s peculiarly enlightening. 

I know what you’re thinking now.  You’re thinking “Oh my god, that’s treating other people with respect gone mad!”

Which I agree with, for the most part.  Gaiman is right that people often use "political correctness" as a catchall to cover their own asses, to excuse themselves for holding opinions that are bigoted or narrow-minded.  To me, the phrase has come to be almost as much of a red flag as when someone starts a conversation with, "I don't mean to sound racist/sexist/homophobic, but..."

On the other hand, there is an undeniable tendency in our culture to equate "offensiveness" with "having our opinions challenged."  Witness, for example, the professors at the University of Northern Colorado who are being investigated for offending their students -- by presenting, and asking students to consider, opposing viewpoints.

One professor was reported for asking students to think and write about conflicting views of homosexuality in our society.  As part of the assignment, the professor had asked students to consider the following:  "GodHatesFags.com: Is this harmful?  Is this acceptable?  Is it legal?  Is this Christianity?  And gay marriage: Should it be legal?  Is homosexuality immoral as Christians suggest?"

Note that the professor wasn't saying that homosexuality is immoral, or that the answer to any of the other questions posed above was "yes;" (s)he was asking the students to consider the claim, and creating an evidence-based argument for or against it.  The student filing the complaint didn't see it that way.

"I do not believe that students should be required to listen to their own rights and personhood debated," the student wrote.  "[This professor] should remove these topics from the list of debate topics.  Debating the personhood of an entire minority demographic should not be a classroom exercise, as the classroom should not be an actively hostile space for people with underprivileged identities."

Because learning how to counter fallacious arguments with facts, and answer loaded questions rationally, somehow creates an "actively hostile space."

[image courtesy of photographer Fredler Brave and the Wikimedia Commons]

The second professor's case is even more telling, as it came about because (s)he had assigned students to read the famous article by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt called "The Coddling of the American Mind," which addresses precisely the problem I'm writing about in this post.  After reading the paper, the professor asked the students to consider the questions raised by the article, specifically the issues of "trigger warnings" for minorities such as homosexuals and transgender individuals in reading controversial material.

"I would just like the professor to be educated about what trans is and how what he said is not okay because as someone who truly identifies as a transwomen [sic] I was very offended and hurt by this," one student wrote in the complaint.

The university complaints office backed the student.  The professor was instructed not to interject opinions into his/her lessons -- including those of the authors who wrote the article.

So there's something to be gained by having students avoid all opinions that they disagree with?  If they think they're not going to run into those once they leave college, they're fooling themselves -- and if they haven't been pushed into thinking through how to respond to bigots and people who are simply ignorant, they're basically choosing to be intellectually disarmed adults.

Students should be forced to consider all sorts of viewpoints.  Not to change their minds, necessarily, but to allow them to think through their own beliefs.  I tell my Critical Thinking students on the first day of class, "You might well leave this class at the end of the semester with your beliefs unchanged. You will not leave with your beliefs unchallenged."

Now, note that I am not in any way trying to excuse teachers (on any level) who try to use their classrooms as a field for proselytizing.  I only have the one source for the incidents at the University of Northern Colorado, and there might be more to the story than I've read.  If these professors were using their positions of authority to press their own bigoted viewpoints about gender and sexual identity on their students, they deserve censure.

But I suspect that's not what's going on, here.  We've become a polarized society, with half of us lambasting the political correctness movement and simultaneously feeling as if their right to free speech makes it acceptable to offend, and the other half afraid to voice an opinion for fear of treading on some hypersensitive individual's toes.  What's lost is the opportunity for civil discourse -- which, after all, is one of the best and most reliable pathways toward learning and understanding.