We live in a merciless age. And maybe many of us need to suffer mercilessness for a while. There’s very little space given on social media for people to overlook things done by other people near or to them. We like to track people going bad, losing their shit, flailing in public. We’ve all done it, of course—both the tracking people going bad, and the going bad itself—but not all of us (yet) have been caught out doing it in public. Social media, and to a lesser degree phone cameras, take the blessed oblivion of chance away. Everything we do is caught by someone. Everything is recorded. Nothing is forgotten. In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes, and it’s a mortal lock that at least ten of those minutes, probably more, are going to be ones we’d rather not have recorded for posterity.
These are pretty much facts, it seems to me. Everyone is at best only about two-thirds put together. Like pro baseball players, hitting .300 is a remarkable average.
Much of what is caught on camera--the very large majority in fact--deserves to be caught on camera. And people need to be held to account for their behavior. I enjoy the shaming as much as the next person. Then again, I’ve never had it done to me, yet. At least not in a big way. It could happen any time.
In a world where nothing is forgotten and nothing is forgiven, where we have to be ourselves all of the time and everything we do is recorded for posterity and available to be seen by humanity, life is, shall we say, complicated. Our capacity to control our own narrative is far more challenged than it otherwise would be.
The most visible form of this is the various manifestations of white supremacy to which we white people are prone. None of this is at all new, of course. What’s changed now, is that those behaviors are increasingly caught on camera—though that reality, mind you, is seen by almost all white people as simply very, very proximate to “just being a jerk,” so is easily self-exculpatory, or other-exculpatory (when it's your friend) after the event (so long as it’s not recorded) not as a matter of our trafficking in racism and white supremacy--which would be very hard to bear, so we choose to deny it--but instead as “just having a bad day.” That's not true, of course. (Every white person who watches those videos with a shred of self-awareness is not only horrified by the person’s behavior; it’s also the case that it is all too easy to imagine someone we know and love--an uncle, a parent, a sibling, a friend--doing that, both endangering the lives of the people they’re abusing, and annihilating their own reputation in perpetuity in the process.) Here's a truism: we white people are being shown that this behavior is far more common than we told ourselves it is. It is sobering. The main aim of the recording is just to bear witness—to how deeply racist logics grip us whites, even when we don’t know, and wouldn’t dream of naming them as such. As such, those are good and, I think, likely to be effective.
That’s all I’ve got to say on that topic, for now. But “mask shaming” in particular is interesting, and perhaps in a smaller way suggesting some of the limits of the effectiveness of relentless publicity. This article lays out some of the scenarios of people losing their sanity when asked to wear a mask. Clearly, their behavior is disastrous, and ridiculous. It’s not quite the direct manifestation of white supremacy, though it often seems klan-proximate. No, mask shaming is a special kind of stupid, steeped in Trumpist ideology, or worse.
But what is the “shaming” doing? It makes me feel outraged at the people. It increases my sense of contempt of them. Still, I’m not sure those emotions on my end need more technological assistance for their amplification and perpetuation, though. But is it actually “shaming” anyone to good effect? Is it convincing others who might act in this way, not to behave that way? I’m not sure. The article suggests that in fact it is deeply ineffective in changing peoples’ behavior—that we have learned about norm changes (say, changes in the public acceptablility of smoking or wearing seatbelts or binge-drinking or same-sex marriage or sexual harassment or recycling or any other major norm that has changed dramatically over the past several decades), is that they don’t come from threat but from encouraging the person to change. As the scholars who have studied earlier campaigns point out, “You have to be the bigger person and you have to be empathetic,” and recognize that Changing someone’s mentality on public health requires effort and time.
I think about this in the recent fracas about the Harper’s Magazine letter on so-called "cancel culture." I'm not sure there is really much of a thing there. (And the asymmetry of bad behavior on left and right in our culture is a topic I've mentioned before, so it's not an example of "liberal fascism" or anything like that. In general I found Jeffrey Isaac's small piece on this helpful.) I happen to know a number of the people who signed the letter. I also happen to know a number of the people who are most outraged about it. I think, in some ways, they’re talking past each other. Or talking to different moral communities.
I don't have much in the way of a summative judgment here, just a question. How do we do better? Or do we? Can we? Or are these conflicts just the inevitable noise and gristle of real social change?