Auden on No-Platforming Pound (2019)
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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.
They exist, just like liberals existed post-9/11, they're just not quite as comfortable speaking up as the ones who speak up out of agreement, rather than on principle.
Because it was Cerf's work that was intolerant, not his belief.
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.
There has not been a formal declaration of war by Congress since WWII, but I believe there are plenty of court decisions holding that conflicts like Korea, Vietnam, the first and second Gulf wars, and what the US has been doing in Afghanistan since 2001 are wars in the sense that matters for treason, since Congress passed resolutions authorizing the use of US military force, even though they weren't called declarations of war.
Also, a person can "levy war" against the United States even if the United States does not formally recognize what is going on as a war. "Levying" war is broader than "fighting against in a formally declared war".
And, finally, the other clause in the definition can apply at any time, even if there is no US military action going on at all.
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?
Here, here's a related article by a law professor at my alma mater: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-tre...
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.
But what if cancel culture doesn't let you? What if the very act of having any sympathy at all with the cancelled, let alone creating spaces where they can continue to thrive, marks you out for cancellation as well?
To put this into the context of the Cerf-Auden exchange, what if Cerf, on finding that Auden "sympathized" with the cancelled Pound, had not responded as he did, but instead had tried to get other publishers to refuse to publish Auden's work? Or had hired some private investigators to get some dirt on Auden? Or had, by devious routes, gotten someone to form a mob of rioters and vandalize Auden's house? Those things seem a lot more like what "cancel culture" is these days.
The era of the Internet means that so many things are marginal cost. Now, refusal to carry just means they can go somewhere else. This is going to expand. Decentralization means power to the common man.
Actually the biggest problem with "polarization" in my book is that there are only two poles, at least in the US. And the only real reason for lamenting "echo chambers" is some sense that "we all" need to get along. But that's only because "we" are "all" cooped up together, forced to associate and to share large and insufficiently flexible political organizations -- whether it's the too-few nationally-viable political parties or the too-big nation itself. In other words maybe it's still just a problem of insufficiently-free association. If I could freely associate, at not too great a cost, with some political party or nation that aligned perfectly with my values, I would do it and probably should.
But then cynically I suppose those nations would then start warring with each other if you didn't separate them strongly like little kids on the fucking playground. Sigh, time to get drunk.
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?
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.
Someone that cannot be promoted to be in charge of other people (that they are most likely bigoted against) or even be trusted to give a fair accounting of who worked hard today and who didn't?
How would it be responsible whatsoever to hire that person to work alongside, much less promote, the diverse cultures that the United States is composed of?
This is a common sentiment, and it's easy to agree with it. But it doesn't really hold up with the idea of a right. If you're "irresponsible"--you exercise your right in a bad way that you shouldn't--should you face consequences? If so, and those consequences prevent you from exercising your right, then you don't really have a right, do you?
Cancel culture and deplatforming just are consequences for "bad" free speech, and the argument against cancel culture is very much "you should tolerate bad speech just because the actual right to freedom of speech is more important than your hurt feelings."
“ 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.”
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.
But I think there's also room to consider if the act of creating the work/art encompassed some of the abhorrence. Like, if a non-abhorrent movie had an abhorrent production. That has an extra wrinkle compared to Pound's poetry. Because then it could be argued that the abhorrence was instrumental in the art's creation, even if the art itself was ostensibly innocent.
True, but Auden wrote his paragraph in the context of a different information technology environment.
Today, say artist X puts out objectionable content Y and harmless content Z. You could argue that consuming Z is all fine and dandy (side-stepping questions of whether financially supporting X is a good idea) because you are not supporting Y.
But the giant AI neural net models around us aren't so smart. The more views Y gets, the more it starts suggesting Z to other people. In a world where simply consuming a work also literally boosts its signal and the signals of all other works by that artist, the question of whether a non-offense of work should be shunned takes on a very different character.
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.
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...
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.
Perhaps you can explain how a fascist propagandist was supposed to be involved in the "massive Soviet threat"?
As you say, the war is not over.
Do you also not believe in linear regression because it's a slope? Trend: not a thing.
> 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.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...