It has become a cliché that we live in fraught times. We confront major problems that loom over us and add to our daily tension. They are well known, and can be briefly cited, but this is not the time for elaboration.
How nations relate to climate destruction will determine the fate of the planet. The ability of humankind to come together and summon the requisite political will is required, but our track record is not promising. American society is stridently divided by political viewpoints both on specific issues and ideologies. Our historical divisions of race, ethnicity and class have become vicious and violent as we witness the resurgence of hate groups that have become normative features on the political landscape. Conspiracy theories and the adherence to irrationalism (America has always had movements embracing the irrational) are extremely distressing and difficult to account for. Perhaps most menacing is that American democracy is teetering on a precipice and which way it will fall can only evoke additional anxiety. It is plausible that the American experiment may be reaching its end, and the American idea will be overrun by the darkness of autocracy. Any one of these problems alone is sufficient to cause great disquiet; coming together they present a unique onslaught of fear.
On the interpersonal level none of these disturbances that suffuse the political and social environment makes conversation easy, especially across lines of difference. But the unease is also closer to home and enters our professional lives. I am referring here to the so-called cancel culture. I contend that it is not a fabricated nor rare phenomenon. It is real and nearby. I have friends and colleagues who have been personally hurt, reputations greatly damaged, and in certain cases, their careers destroyed.
There is a foul wind blowing. And it carries with it an air of righteous judgment and excoriation that is launched from unseen places by people who must assume that they possess the sole and correct viewpoint. Deviation from it brings merciless consequences. Say the “”wrong” thing, associate with the “wrong” people, deviate from the “correct” position, even if what you said or did, or with whom you associated with was years ago, and you will find yourself thrown into a black hole. The destruction to free and open speech, to dissent, is tremendous; the chilling effect is widespread, and the damage done to good people is far beyond what fairness, justice, let alone decency, require.
People in the professions potentially find themselves especially vulnerable – doctors, lawyers, clergy, professors, therapists. We who are in these professions now walk on egg shells, liable to be called out by students, patients, parishioners and clients despite the most innocent or inadvertent occurrence.
The journalist, Anne Applebaum, has an important essay in this month's Atlantic illustrating the reality and effects of the cancel culture. She interviewed a dozen professionals who have fallen victim to it and recounts several of their stories. She notes:
“Scarlet letters are a thing of the past...Except of course they aren't. Right here in America, right now, it is possible to meet people who have lost everything—jobs, money, friends, colleagues—after violating no laws, and sometimes no workplace rules either. Instead, they have broken (or are accused of having broken) social codes having to do with race, sex, personal behavior, or even acceptable humor, which may not have existed five years ago or maybe five months ago. Some have made egregious errors of judgment. Some have done nothing at all. It is not always easy to tell.
Some of those I interviewed have behaved in ways that I, or readers of this article, may well consider ill-judged or immoral, even if they were not illegal. I am not here questioning all of the new social codes that have led to their dismissal or their effective isolation. Many of these social changes are clearly positive. …
Still, no one quoted here, anonymously or by name, has been charged with an actual crime, let alone convicted in an actual court. All of them dispute the public version of their story. Several say they have been falsely accused; others believe that their “sins” have been exaggerated or misinterpreted by people with hidden agendas. All of them, sinners or saints, have been handed drastic, life-altering, indefinite punishments, often without the ability to make a case in their own favor.”
Applebaum concludes her essay by observing that not only individuals but society as a whole is done injury by this trend. However, she does not provide any solutions to it.
I can't either, but I do suggest one very small change in our culture that would help mitigate the judgmental environment she so aptly documents. Here I want to be personal.
I identify myself as a humanist and a philosophical naturalist. In other words, I believe that nature is all that there is and there is nothing outside of nature. As such I am an atheist. But I must admit that I am an atheist who has long been fascinated by religion. Indeed, I have attained three graduate degrees in the philosophy of religion, intrigued by the metaphysical speculations the religions bring to questions of existence, even as I greatly dissent from the answers they most often profess.
What this boils down to is that I overwhelmingly live my life as a secular person, surrounded by friends who are mostly secular and I fill my time with secular preoccupations. Among the most consuming is my investment in politics which, as suggested, any person concerned with society and its future cannot ignore.
Politics is a wholly secular activity. Even those religions that have political agendas, when they enter the political arena must speak a secular language. Indeed, any politician or political actor must speak a public language, and not a sectarian or parochial one, and the common denominator is secular discourse.
A related example that comes to mind emerges from my academic field of human rights, to which I have also devoted years as an activist. The foundational document of human rights is The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. The Declaration contains 30 brief articles outlining the rights all people possess solely on the basis of their humanity. It contains many which are totally familiar: The right to free speech and opinion, religious freedom, a fair trial, the right to marry, the right to be free of enslavement and torture as well as economic entitlements such as food, housing, an education and health care, among others.
Some thinkers see human rights as a contemporary religion. I do not do so. However august and essential, human rights is a political tool kit to ensure the promotion and protection of human dignity and autonomy. My point is that however important and far reaching the Universal Declaration is, it remains a secular document that includes certain rights essential for the flourishing of individuals and society but omits others.
Here is the point: In these times of strife and barbed relations secularists and our secular society would be better off if they borrowed certain humane values that are considered the special province of religion. We suffer from an absence of more benign and compassion-driven values that leaves secular discourse thinner than it ought to be. More specifically, such values, if applied to our daily lives, would serve to mitigate the rawness which festers in our social relations and renders aspects of our lives so fraught and unkind.
There are a multitude of religiously inflected values, but the ones that come most immediately to mind are grace, forgiveness, repentance and reconciliation. All these partake of an existential reality that our times have tragically chosen to forget. That reality is that all human beings are imperfect. We are all fallible and inevitably make mistakes. We all have our vulnerabilities.
It is this basic truth of the human condition that makes forgiveness necessary. Without forgiveness human relations become too brittle to sustain. This is where we have arrived. I must admit I am astounded at how barren of forgiveness our society has become. Years ago, I endeavored to give an address on forgiveness, and was surprised to discover that I could find only a single text written by a secular philosopher on the subject.
The religion of my childhood was Judaism and my education was orthodox. Judaism has well developed practices around forgiveness, which often require repentance. I find them attractive. If a person has offended another, the one who rendered the offense must approach the person he of she has hurt and ask for forgiveness. If the one beseeched rejects the request three times, the moral onus falls on that person. When the offense is significant it is required that the offending person needs to demonstrate that there has been a change of heart through some manifest behavior, that is, through an act of repentance. Repentance can take many forms, but among the most significant is the demonstration that the harmful act will not be repeated.
The Hebrew word for repentance is teshuvah, usually translated as “return,” and often seen as a return to righteousness. I see this move as opening to the door to reconciliation; reconciliation not only with ethical norms, but reconciliation with other persons who have been injured.
A problem we confront in these times is the propensity for judgment aligned with self-righteousness. It is a form of hubris. My concern is that too many persons as well as institutions find it too easy to point an excoriating, judgmental finger at others. We should beware the gratifications of passing judgment on others. The vulnerabilities we call out in others may often reside no less in ourselves.
As I see it, our higher task as individuals and society is molding practices of reconciliation that value compassion and empathy and the strengthening of the human bond rather than judgment that separates people from one another. The more important work is done in the repair.
I would like to see a movement and a social trend to promote the practices of forgiveness and reconciliation. This could be undertaken in businesses, colleges, religious communities and other organizations in which people gather, work and relate with one another. But before we can create the structures that realize these practices we must begin to appropriate the language and make its use a habit of our social conversation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/