A few years ago, at the height of the Social Justice movement, I saw some people attempt a self-improvement project: go a year without reading any books by straight cis white men. I had significant misgivings about that project: I’m not crazy about any project that one can succeed at by reading less. (After all, the majority of Americans would succeed in that project effortlessly, simply by virtue of reading no books at all.)
But I want to leave that critique aside here because of a different, and also important, response: if you were going to undertake that project, you could still read the ancient Greeks!
I appreciate looking back on my 19-year-old self’s piece in praise of negativity because it highlights most the ways my views have changed since then. It’s not that I assess that specific situation differently: the Vector Marketing (Cutco) approach of getting desperate youth to sell knives to their families is an exploitative business model; working that job was bad and I don’t miss it one bit. But what’s in question is the lessons we draw from that situation.
Yes, we should be clear-eyed enough about the badness of our situations that we have an eye to changing them where possible. But what I didn’t realize then is the lesson of the Serenity Prayer: we also have to accept, and even be positive about, the bad things we cannot change. If we don’t do that – if we decide to see every 50% cup as half-empty – then we are undercutting our own goals.
This post and the next one will form a “then and now” comparison series. I wrote this present post in the summer of 1995, at age nineteen, in the hope of publishing it on the Facts & Arguments op-ed page of the Globe & Mail. The Globe did not decide to publish the piece, but I remained fond of it for a long time. I still think it is a good piece, but I no longer stand by its claims – and I publish it here now, over thirty years later, for exactly that reason. The question it addresses, of positive and negative attitude, may well be the one on which my views have changed the most in the second half of my life to date – starting when I found Buddhism a few short years after this piece was written. Next time I will publish my current views on the same subject, with what I might hope is the wisdom of the years.
Freedom of speech and expression is essential to a good society, to protect both the search for truth and self-expression. The problem is that protecting freedom of expression is harder than it looks – because some speech interferes with other speech.
We need free speech both to search for truth, and to express ourselves. When free speech is silenced, it interferes with both of those core human goals.
And it therefore needs to be said loud and clear: silencing speech is a problem no matter who is doing the silencing.
Freedom of thought, belief, speech, and expression is a principle long cherished in the West. In recent years it has come under the most sustained attack I have seen in my lifetime, from multiple quarters. I believe it is worth defending, and it’s time to say more about why.
On Liberty, generally attributed to the English philosopher John Stuart Mill, is the most famous and widely cited defence of this principle, and for good reason. I had a low opinion of Mill for a while, as his Utilitarianism did a bad job, overall, of defending the utilitarianism I broke from – and that was one of the key reasons I broke from it. But On Liberty is an entirely different story. It provides a powerful and, I think, largely correct defence of free thought and speech on two grounds – neither of which is particularly utilitarian!
Portrait of Harriet Taylor Mill by unknown artist, in the London National Portrait Gallery.
Perhaps the difference is because it now seems likely the book was co-written with Harriet Taylor Mill, John Stuart’s wife – probably published without the woman’s name on it to make a Victorian audience to take it more seriously. (For that reason I’ll refer to On Liberty as written by “the Mills”.) It might be that Harriet was less of a utilitarian than John. But the point here is the two big grounds that the Mills provide for why freedom of speech is important.
The Social Justice movement has been notorious for its intolerance to dissenting opinions, and has often reached high levels in university administrations. And of course such left-wing movements on race and gender have a long history of attacking “dead white males” – in contrast to those contemporary right-wingers who seek to “RETVRN” to a premodern West, stylizing it with a V to indicate their classical sympathies. So when a university orders a professor to remove Plato from his philosophy syllabus, surely that must be a woke thing. Right?
There are some reasonable objections one can make to transracialism. The trick is that those objections usually also work as objections against transgender. I think that’s why the reaction against Rebecca Tuvel’s article was so vehement: it forces us in the trans movement to think about hard questions we’d rather not think about. But we need to think about them, if we’re going to have a chance of defending transgender identity in an era backlashing against it. I think a healthy defence of transgender should also be a defence of transracialism.
The first and perhaps most important such objection is that there are plenty of other categories in which few if any would reasonably accept self-identification as the criterion for identity. Identifying as otherkin doesn’t mean you’re actually a wolf. I don’t think anybody wants to say that someone who has lived for only thirty years should be able to access retirement benefits without a tax penalty, just by identifying as a 70-year-old. Why would we treat race, or gender, differently from age or species?
The bullying campaign to cancel Rebecca Tuvel’s defence of transracialism was shoddy and shameful. There was no merit in it at all. Whether or not you think Tuvel’s argument for transracialism succeeds, that part seems to me pretty obvious. But it does raise the next question, to which the answers are less obvious: does Tuvel’s argument work? Does the logic of accepting transgender identity imply accepting transracial identity?
You could not have got me to answer that question (in public) back in 2017, while Tuvel was still being actively persecuted. For a while, that bullying campaign and others like it successfully achieved their goal of terror: they succeeded in getting me, and others like me, to silence our dissenting views out of fear of the consequences that were so regularly experienced by others.
But the climate has changed a lot since then, in ways that make it still harder to speak on some issues (like Israel and Palestine), but easier to speak on this one. So I am going to take a risk now, stick my head up, bite the bullet, and answer the question: yes!
A couple years ago I wrote a post arguing that we should not be defined by biological categories. I stand by that post today. It focused on transgender (and did so before I came out as gender-fluid myself), but it also mentioned race: “I view the struggle for racial equality in the light of this ideal as well, as Prince Ea does: skin colour or related phenotypical characteristics should not define who we really are.”
Anyone who read that post could have come up with the reasonable question: well then, must you not also believe that we should allow transracialism alongside transgender? That people should be allowed to define their own race just as they define their own gender?
Rebecca Tuvel, from her faculty page at Rhodes College.
At the time I wrote the first post I would have refused to answer that question – for reasons that came down, in a word, to fear. I saw what happened to Rebecca Tuvel, who defended the idea of transracialism in a philosophy journal (Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist philosophy). After a smear campaign on Facebook and Twitter where Tuvel was accused of doing “violence”, more than 800 people signed an open letter demanding that the journal retract the article and publicly proclaim that publishing it was a “failure of judgement”. An associate editor immediately published an apology for publishing the article, followed by a spate of resignations that ultimately took the journal’s entire editorial staff.
