Do you remember the first time you self-censored?
Did it feel good or bad? And how does it feel now?
Note: I’ll get back to writing here but I’ve paused billing on this newsletter.
I don’t know when I first censored myself in conversation. I think any of us with any social skills have done so, to some degree, since childhood. It makes interactions smoother and more agreeable, it puts people at ease, it obscures personal shame or guilt. We learn it early. But that’s not the kind of thing I want to write about here.
I want to ask you about the path you took toward bending to the political correctness we live with now. It probably started when you realized you were censoring very mild un-PC speech, but not thought; then it moved into censoring thought, which means interior language, which atrophies that interior language, which in turn leads to not saying things because your ideas are drying up — including just discussing things we really want to discuss or that need to be discussed in order to remain sane… . I mean when did you start surrendering to the forces that have led to the headspace and public space we live in now?
I remember my moment. I’ll tell you about it. But first:
Do you remember a moment when you realized you couldn’t say something that you could have said three years earlier?
How about three months earlier?
Do you remember no longer debating ideas, in good faith, with other people who would take you on in that same good faith? Do you remember when you stopped saying things that felt true, or calling it like you see it, or pointing out fallacies and flaws in your own or others’ viewpoints, so you could hash it all out even though it was sometimes awkward or heated, and then feel like you’d gained an IQ point or two in the process?
When did speaking only in orthodoxies, just in case, turn into a full-time performance, that then turned into who you are now? When did you become a saint?
I spend most of my time thinking, analyzing, turning over ideas in my head and shining little pen lights into the grooves to see what’s what and how it all holds up. If you’re the kind of person who reads a thing like this, you are too. On my part: thinking feels like language, like a vast oceanscape of undulating, interwoven thoughts that take shape and fall apart and regroup in another form, etc., as I apply a mind’s-eye version of language to what I observe. It may be a weird form of synesthesia, I don’t know. It may be a writer thing. Language and thought are inextricable. Totalitarians have always known this.
Nonetheless, I know that I was stepping into the shower in 2008 when I started to have an un-PC thought, and then it just sort of shorted out. Bzzzt. It’s like the hand of God came into my brain and snuffed it out, like it was an unwanted little candle flame. I don’t know what the thought was. I honestly don’t remember if it was about merit, or men and women, or race, or class, or crime, or addiction, or what. I just know it was gone before it really formed, and I immediately thought: Wow, cool! I’m becoming a better human being! I thought: My environment is eradicating my Bad Thoughts. Maybe I am going to be a Good Person after all.
I honestly felt proud of having cut off, at the root, a potential line of inquiry, as though it were a moral accomplishment, and I also 100% credited it with having been steeped in journalism and the art world for years. It felt a little like I had been trained like a dog, already in those days, by NPR and the NYT and the New Yorker, and some prestige TV — those kinds of things. It was subtle, but I really felt it.
It’s odd, too, because it’s not as though I wasn’t still reading Martin Amis novels and watching South Park and loving Picasso’s work and listening to Lou Reed. But the mainstream press and the art-related press and what was getting heated in the liberal-lefty world had been eating away at the edges of my imagination nonetheless, had been signaling to me for years that there was something bad about men, bad about beauty for beauty’s sake, bad about art for art’s sake, something incorrect about believing in human nature, and the power of sex and the legitimacy of the disgust impulse and having boundaries. It had been signaling that there was something bad about liking transgression in art, to see where it leads and what it tells us about ourselves and our outer limits. There were intimations of oppression everywhere even in 2008, and nods to the “unfairness” of hard-earned consensus, suspicions about objectivity, suspicions about the “tyranny” of deeply experienced and skilled and invested people. Bzzzt. Evil thought: Begone.
I guess I look back on that self-righteous moment in that yellow-tiled shower in East Dallas and the only expression that comes to mind now looks like a direction for a line of dialogue in a play: rueful laugh. What a sucker I was, to play right into this self-imposed language-thought snuff job. This really is how totalitarianism works, you know. That a person who loves language would celebrate its curtailment because it curtailed a Bad Thought, even if just for that one fleeting moment, is mind-boggling to me. But it happened.
This next question, or really this whole column, is not really for the kids, is it? I mean younger adults and kids. It’s for the people born before 1980, who remember what it was like to have free-wheeling debates in dorm rooms and sitting on kitchen floors at house parties, what it was like to raise really uncomfortable questions in the classroom, around a dinner table with people you don’t even know very well, in the back of dank rock clubs and in the sticky lobbies of art-house theaters. We used to talk. Do you remember? I remember being the only girl in my blank-slate-obsessed gender studies class (1991) who came out swinging, like Germaine Greer had fused with Camille Paglia, arguing that we can ask drunk predatory guys not to assault underage drunk coeds, sure, but we sure as hell can’t expect them to not continue to do so, Jesus, get real, people, and maybe that girl shouldn't go to that party alone to pound Everclear while wearing dental floss as a skirt and I also remember my classmates shouting me down, and the professor smiling on benignly, and then class let out and we all just went back to our regular lives, and next time I came to class everything was totally fine. We all got along. Do you remember that kind of thing? When we could say things we believed, talk about things we actually observed in the world? When we could disagree about stuff like religion and sex and gender and capitalism and genius and still be friends? I remember that.
If you think the world is a markedly better place now that none of us feel free to actually speak to each other about everything that’s happening these days — when every time you meet a new person you have to do some kind of elaborate tentative dance around eight out of ten possible subjects just to make sure you’re not going to scare or anger or insult or offend or get yourself fired or exiled or yelled at or ghosted — then I have some questions for you. If you believe that you have never self censored, in thought or speech, because you are a Very Good Person and the moral arbiter of our times and everything you think and believe is righteous and completely true, then I have some questions for you. If you think “no debate” is a good way to get people to trust each other and come up with real solutions to what is clearly a lot of confusion and suffering and mistrust that’s taken over in recent years, then I have quite a few questions for you. Especially if you are someone who has been instrumental in shaping this new place. I mean especially if you are a journalist, or a professor, or a non-profit administrator, or you work anywhere in the arts or in entertainment and you think this new environment is healthy and lovingly evolved. When did you decide that shutting down dialogue is better than talking about things that upset us, or inspire us, or that we can see with our own eyes? I know that trying to get at some kind of thing that feels like the truth, like honesty, is work, and it can be mentally and even emotionally exhausting (sorry but that’s true), and that having complicated conversations about complex things is hard, especially when you are discussing these complex things with complicated people. But I know a ton of smart, thoughtful people who are not speaking anymore, and some of them seem pretty afraid to think, too. Their light is fading out.
But I remember doing these things, the hashing things out via disagreements and epiphanies and revelations. I remember being enlightened by brave and interesting and strange and unorthodox people every day. Nearly every day in my professional and personal life, for years. Up until 2008, or 2012, or 2016. Or maybe when the rueful laugh track kicked in hardcore: That was 2020.
Certainly I’ve realized (I’m guessing like a lot of you) that keeping our mouths shut and our ideas snuffed out hasn’t made anything better. This is not good, this not-speaking-and-thinking thing. Our imaginations and humanity are withering away.
Remember remember remember. It was not always like this.
Call me overly optimistic or naïve, but I don’t think this censorship is a symptom of totalitarianism. Instead I think it’s indicative of a paradigmatic adolescence. Being firmly out of postmodernism (at least for the left…that’s for a different discussion), we exist in some kind of a reconstitutionalist era, mining through archives, rethinking history, etc. And as we build the plane as we are trying to fly it so to speak, we have become hyper-vigilant about inclusivity and mutual understanding and respect. Has this hyper-vigilance gone too far? Hell yes. I just disagree with you in what it means, that it’s indicative of a slip into a 1984 dystopia. I think it’s more of a passing wave than a permanence. But I absolutely agree it’s a problem, not to mention barfy. I also think this is behavior that exists online waaay more than in person. Final thought: the most subversive politics we can engage in is the insistence upon nuance, which is also largely lost online.
Yours is among those voices that could save the world. Thanks.