Good Monday! I hope your Father’s Day weekends included time for you to enjoy with your families. The format of this morning’s newsletter is going to be a little different from previous installments, as I continue to refine the design and test out new approaches.
I’m trying to include an original essay every other week, and today is the first installment: a review of the newest Tiger Woods biography and what it made me think about with respect to fatherhood, identity, and more. I wrote this for Father’s Day a couple of years ago, but I think it’s evergreen. Let me know if you agree.
One Original Thing: Tiger Woods
Golfing in the Dark by Zac Crippen (The Vernaculist)
I wrote this in 2018, before Tiger’s incredible 2019 Masters win. There was a beautiful father-son moment between Tiger and his son Charlie that mirrored a parallel moment in 1997 between Tiger and his father. Enjoy the essay.
Tiger Woods opens with the same anecdote that Wright Thompson tells in his 2016 history of Woods for ESPN Magazine: In 2006, Earl Woods passed away, succumbing to a years-long battle with cancer and cardiac problems. Tiger Woods quietly traveled with his mother Kultida and his half sister Royce to Manhattan, Kansas — out of the prying eyes of the media and adoring fans — to lay Earl Woods to rest. “They buried the ashes and left,” writes Thompson with telltale brevity. Authors Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian include an additional detail in the prologue to their new biography, courtesy of the caretaker who dug the grave: “There is no gravestone . . . it’s like he’s not even there.”
Read the rest here.
One Big Thing: The Great Awokening is Here
There are multiple ways of describing The Great Awokening, but I define it as “the ubiquitous narrowing and shifting of the Overton Window so as to disallow from civil discourse and to expunge from civil consciousness any ideas—present and past—that deviate from fashionable conceptions of identity, ideology, or epistemology.” In other words: if you’re embracing an idea about who we are, how we interact, or how we come to know reality as it is and your idea is not acceptable to the mob, then you must be erased (or at least sentenced to “menial work”, perhaps in a gulag?).
My contention is not that there are no views that are unfit for human society, but rather that in order to determine what views are appropriate, we need to be able to discuss these views. We need to be able to think. George Orwell quipped in 1984 that “Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” The Great Awokening is, ironically, also The Great Unawakening—society’s great descent into the slumber of a hive mind.
That might sound dramatic (I admittedly have a penchant for melodrama), but recent events have highlighted our collective inability to tolerate dissent and to engage in good faith discussion of unorthodox ideas, even if those ideas were completely orthodox five minutes ago.
Don’t believe me? Let’s briefly recap some of the absurd anecdotes of “cancel culture” over the last few weeks:
J.K. Rowling, one of the most successful authors of all time, is facing renewed calls for book burning due to her “explosive comments” about biological sex. Rowling’s thoughtcrime, briefly articulated on Twitter and later expanded in an essay on her website, is that she is “worried about the new trans activism” because of its real costs, both to biological women and to trans people. Rowling’s views are generally consistent with what trans activists call “trans-exclusionary radical feminism” (TERF)—an umbrella term ascribed to feminist thought that is sex essentialist, i.e. your sex is determined by your biological sex (imagine that) rather than your psycho-referential gender identity. According to so-called “TERFs,” trans activism can be problematic to women for a number of reasons, particularly because it can neglect the needs of biological women or fail to appreciate the unique dignity and experience of biological women. (It’s worth noting that J.K. Rowling is used to being cancelled and labeled a TERF—she writes that when she spoke out in support of Maya Forstater last year, “I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then.” Not all heroes wear capes.)
The New York Times fired their opinion editor James Bennet after the publication of a Sen. Tom Cotton editorial arguing for military troops to restore order to riot-beleaguered cities. Michelle Goldberg called it a “fascist op-ed,” and another Twitter user (it’s unclear if he had actually read the piece) said that it amounted to a U.S. Senator calling for “mass murder in the streets.” I disagreed with the Cotton piece, but that’s still a gross mischaracterization that can only stem from either a bad faith misreading or extreme ignorance. But it doesn’t matter; young NYT staffers declared via coordinated talking points that the piece “put Black NYT staff in danger” (see the Chait article below for the absurdity of that claim), and these woke young staffers held the senior staff to account in the days following, ultimately leading to Bennet’s sacking and the installation of a new editor whose main self-described task is to make sure that no one is ever made uncomfortable by something she publishes. (For those interested, Bari Weiss has a really good Twitter thread on the new dynamics of the NYT newsroom, and Jay Rosen has an interesting essay on the subject too.)
Philadelphia Inquirer Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski, an employee of the newspaper for over twenty years, lost his job after he allowed a story about historic buildings being destroyed by rioting to go to press with the headline, Buildings Matter Too. Forty-four journalists of color wrote to the newspaper arguing that the headline could put their lives at risk.
David Shor, an Obama campaign alum and data analyst previously employed at Civis Analytics, was fired for tweeting a 2017 article from a Princeton University academic (who himself is Black). The article posits that violent riots had adverse consequences for Democratic vote share, whereas nonviolent movements had positive effects. One commentator said that Shor’s position reeked of “anti-blackness,” and Shor was banned from a progressive email listserv of which he had been a member for years. His semi-apology followed a day later.
Lee Fang, an Asian-American journalist for Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, attended protests in Oakland and asked a Black man named Max for his thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement. Max shared his thoughts; Lee shared the video to Twitter. His colleague at The Intercept criticized Lee for “using free speech to couch anti-blackness.” Lee too had to publicly apologize, probably to save his job.
Now regardless of whether or not you agree with the core substance of progressivism, you should at least be able to acknowledge that its cause is not well served by remaking its echo chamber in its own image. This is a case that Jonathan Chait makes eloquently in a recent essay: progressivism must coexist with classical liberalism.
The Still-Vital Case for Liberalism in a Radical Age by Jonathan Chait (New York Mag)
Chait talks about a lot of the examples I’ve included above, but here’s the gist of his argument:
Without rehashing at length, my argument against the left’s illiberal style is twofold. First, it tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas. Those questioning whatever is put forward as the positions of oppressed people are therefore often acting out of concealed motives . . . Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.
And in case you missed it last week, here’s Matt Taibbi on the same problem.
I don’t agree unreservedly with Taibbi and Chait, but we share many of the same concerns. I contend that the Great Awokening’s newfound cancel culture is dangerous for three big reasons. First, lives and livelihoods are at stake. When someone (e.g. David Shor) strays outside of the Range of Acceptable Opinions™, they lose their job, their friends, their job prospects, and more.
Second, this narrowing of the Overton Window provokes a profound counterreaction: as minority opinions are increasingly derided and their proponents decried as inhumane, those ideas will find safe haven in pockets that do not have built-in countercorrectives. We’ve already seen this play out through the “intellectual dark web,” which lets countercultural ideas flourish but has a structural weakness of one-sidedness that fails to both moderate bad ideas and to improve good ones. The same lack of corrective allows ideas that are within the Range of Acceptable Opinions™ to suffer the defect of not having a voice to hold them accountable, meaning that the Overton Window itself will continue to narrow and become more radical. (I’d contend in fact that this lack of a countercorrective is more prominent in mainstream discourse than on the intellectual dark web, i.e. you’ll find greater ideological diversity in the latter than in the former.)
And finally, the Great Awokening gives us reason to “otherize” our fellow human beings, seeing them not as individual moral agents with the capacity for moral thought and the dignity of moral choice, but rather as propagators of “good” and “bad” ideas which respectively serve to either advance or curtail the utopia toward which we are moving.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. —George Orwell, 1984
Thank you so much for the incredible response to The Vernaculist! We now have hundreds of subscribers and are so excited about the work ahead. If you like the content, please consider sharing with some friends!
I’m also grateful to several readers for sending along interesting articles they found this week, and am always interested in your submissions for future installments. You can email me directly or click the button below.
One interesting thing.
Are more cops on the streets the pathway to better policing?
Camden, NJ Did Police Reform Right by the Stephen Eide (Manhattan Institute / NY Post)
In 2013, state and local officials dissolved the old Camden Police Department and reconstituted it as the Camden County Metro Police. They did so for both programmatic and fiscal reasons. They created a new public-safety department within the Camden County government, dedicated to policing Camden city. The old department was disbanded. A new department allowed officials to enact an entirely new union contract. Featherbedding work rules that kept cops off the streets were out. . . . Community policing had been impractical under the former city contract, which allowed too many uniformed officers to spend their days on civilian desk work. Far from scrapping the police in favor of social workers or “community organizations,” Camden almost doubled the number of officers out patrolling neighborhoods under its new regime.
The emphases above are mine, but they highlight the multi-pronged approach of a successful example of police reform. First, the department was dissolved, not in favor of no police but in favor of a rebuilt police force; second, a new public safety department was established; third, the union contract was rewritten; and fourth, the number of officers patrolling streets was nearly doubled.
Two brief points on that last idea: first, the increase in patrolling officers was only possible due to an expansion of public safety programs for which police offers were decidedly no longer responsible (this is akin to the funding reallocation ideas bandied about today). Second, an increase in police officers is not as crazy as it sounds: Vox has published multiple articles (here’s one from last year; and another from 2015) explaining the research that backs up this theory. The Camden experience could suggest a counterintuitive via media between “defund the police” and “don’t touch the police.” Maybe the answer is to increase non-police public safety funding and to increase police payrolls while rewriting union contracts.
One Funny Thing.
Afterwords
Thanks so much to subscribers Joe C., Caroline H., and Sam H. for reaching out.
Sam took issue with my use of the word imbecilic to describe Donald Trump. His critique wasn’t a factual one (I’m not sure if he agrees with my claim or not), but rather a criticism that my description violates the second principle of my newsletter: respect human dignity. I accept the criticism and will try to refrain from offensive (if accurate) descriptions of intellect in the future. I will also add, however, that imbecilic is not disrespectful of one’s dignity per se, because our dignity is not tied to our brainpower: Albert Einstein’s human dignity, for example, is equal to that of an infant with severe congenital cognitive impairment.
But I’m evading: I was describing Trump in those terms without criticizing a specific idea or behavior of his; for that reason it shares the defect of ad hominem arguments I detest. Thank you to Sam for keeping me honest.
Sam also shared Coleman Hughes’ Stories and Data, which I think is a great addition to this week’s newsletter. Hughes is a Black American and a fellow at the Manhattan Institute whose contentions in this piece are twofold: that the story of the racist cop killer is a myth not supported by the evidence, and that America (as a big, gun-toting country in the smartphone age) faces unique challenges in confronting police violence.
We’re running long so I’m skipping the watch/listen/read recommendations this time around. On the docket for next week (subject to change): civil protests-cum-religion, the new iconoclasm, and a bad take on Flannery O’Connor.
Have a great week!
I would love to hear your feedback: zac@vernacularpodcast.com.
One true thing.
Dr. Esau McCaulley nails the spirit of The Vernaculist: