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What You Can't Say
January 2004
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been
embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like
that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It's the
nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the
movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're
just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But
they're much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good
design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly
gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you
fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed.
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be
true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you
said. Opinions we consider harmless could have gotten you in
big trouble. I've already said at least one thing that would
have gotten me in big trouble in most of Europe in the
seventeenth century, and did get Galileo in big trouble when
he said it that the earth moves. [1]
It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period,
people believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed
them so strongly that you would have gotten in terrible
trouble for saying otherwise.
Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount
of history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a
remarkable coincidence if ours were the first era to get
everything just right.
It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the
future will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to
visit us in a time machine have to be careful not to say?
That's what I want to study here. But I want to do more than
just shock everyone with the heresy du jour. I want to find
general recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any
era.
The Conformist Test
Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you
would be reluctant to express in front of a group of your
peers?
If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about
that. If everything you believe is something you're supposed
to believe, could that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it
isn't. Odds are you just think what you're told.
The other alternative would be that you independently
considered every question and came up with the exact same
answers that are now considered acceptable. That seems
unlikely, because you'd also have to make the same mistakes.
Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so
they can tell when someone copies them. If another map has the
same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost
certainly contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the
same mistakes probably didn't do it by accident. It would be
like someone claiming they had independently decided in 1972
that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.
If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you
be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you were
supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation owners of
the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s or among
the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you would have.
Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed
to be that there was something wrong with you if you thought
things you didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward.
Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you
don't think things you don't dare say out loud.
Trouble
What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to
look at things people do say, and get in trouble for. [2]
Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say.
We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at
least have enough chance of being true that the question
should remain open. But many of the things people get in
trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower
threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5,
or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously
false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as
evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone
mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they
worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make
people maddest are those they worry might be true.
If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall,
he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying
the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew
this would set people thinking.
Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb
works well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for
seem harmless now. So it's likely that visitors from the
future would agree with at least some of the statements that
get people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Not
likely.
To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in
trouble, and start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be
heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), but might it also
be true?
Heresy
This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one
happens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet?
What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial that
no one would dare express it in public? How can we find these
too?
Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every
period of history, there seem to have been labels that got
applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a
chance to ask if they were true or not. "Blasphemy",
"sacrilege", and "heresy" were such labels for a good part of
western history, as in more recent times "indecent",
"improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now these labels
have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're mostly
used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.
The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political
connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used
by Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated
peace. At the start of World War II it was used extensively by
Churchill and his supporters to silence their opponents. In
1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was
"defeatist". Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far
enough to ask that.
We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them,
from the all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded
"divisive." In any period, it should be easy to figure out
what such labels are, simply by looking at what people call
ideas they disagree with besides untrue. When a politician
says his opponent is mistaken, that's a straightforward
criticism, but when he attacks a statement as "divisive" or
"racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's false, we
should start paying attention.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future
generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a
label "sexist", for example and try to think of some ideas
that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be
true?
Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't
really be random. The ideas that come to mind first will be
the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already
noticed but didn't let yourself think.
In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of
radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung
cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologists missed
a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site
of it. Part of their brain knew there was something there; it
just didn't percolate all the way up into conscious knowledge.
I think many interesting heretical thoughts are already mostly
formed in our minds. If we turn off our self-censorship
temporarily, those will be the first to emerge.
Time and Space
If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of
our taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do
something almost as good: we can look into the past. Another
way to figure out what we're getting wrong is to look at what
used to be acceptable and is now unthinkable.
Changes between the past and the present sometimes do
represent progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree
with past generations it's because we're right and they're
wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away
from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the time you get
to social questions, many changes are just fashion. The age of
consent fluctuates like hemlines.
We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more
virtuous than past generations, but the more history you read,
the less likely this seems. People in past times were much
like us. Not heroes, not barbarians. Whatever their ideas
were, they were ideas reasonable people could believe.
So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff
present ideas against those of various past cultures, and see
what you get. [4] Some will be shocking by present standards.
Ok, fine; but which might also be true?
You don't have to look into the past to find big differences.
In our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas
of what's ok and what isn't. So you can try diffing other
cultures' ideas against ours as well. (The best way to do that
is to visit them.) Any idea that's considered harmless in a
significant percentage of times and places, and yet is taboo
in ours, is a candidate for something we're mistaken about.
For example, at the high water mark of political correctness
in the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and
staff a brochure saying, among other things, that it was
inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student's clothes.
No more "nice shirt." I think this principle is rare among the
world's cultures, past or present. There are probably more
where it's considered especially polite to compliment
someone's clothing than where it's considered improper. Odds
are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a
visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if
he happened to set his time machine for Cambridge,
Massachusetts, 1992. [5]
Prigs
Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll
probably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge.
This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t
crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and
your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And that
suggests another way to find taboos. Look for prigs, and see
what's inside their heads.
Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems
fitting to us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The
picture we give them of the world is not merely simplified, to
suit their developing minds, but sanitized as well, to suit
our ideas of what kids ought to think. [6]
You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty
words. A lot of my friends are starting to have children now,
and they're all trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit"
within baby's hearing, lest baby start using these words too.
But these words are part of the language, and adults use them
all the time. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate
idea of the language by not using them. Why do they do this?
Because they don't think it's fitting that kids should use the
whole language. We like children to seem innocent. [7]
Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading
view of the world. One of the most obvious examples is Santa
Claus. We think it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa
Claus. I myself think it's cute for little kids to believe in
Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tell them this stuff for
their sake, or for ours?
I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably
inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids'
minds in cute little baby outfits. I'll probably do it myself.
The important thing for our purposes is that, as a result, a
well brought-up teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete
collection of all our taboos and in mint condition, because
they're untainted by experience. Whatever we think that will
later turn out to be ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside
that head.
How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought
experiment. Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who
has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as
a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of a nightclub in
Miami. The specifics don't matter just someone who has seen
a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head
with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old
girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would shock
her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies,
present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is
what we can't say.
Mechanism
I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say:
to look at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions
arise, and why are they adopted? If we can understand this
mechanism, we may be able to see it at work in our own time.
Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary
fashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when
everyone imitates the whim of some influential person. The
fashion for broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe
began because Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot.
The fashion for the name Gary began when the actor Frank
Cooper adopted the name of a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral
fashions more often seem to be created deliberately. When
there's something we can't say, it's often because some group
doesn't want us to.
The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous.
The irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble
for repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't.
In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated
his book to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was in
the throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much more
worried about unorthodox ideas.
To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between
weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to
protect it. It's not considered improper to make disparaging
remarks about Americans, or the English. And yet a group has
to be powerful enough to enforce a taboo. Coprophiles, as of
this writing, don't seem to be numerous or energetic enough to
have had their interests promoted to a lifestyle.
I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to
be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper
hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to
enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.
Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as
struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was
at bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up
being cast as a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen
from the corrupting influence of Rome. It's easier to get
people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their
ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God
wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the
victor.
We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom
over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet
Union was also one of the winners.
I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that
they will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether
they are or not. And just as there is nothing so unfashionable
as the last, discarded fashion, there is nothing so wrong as
the principles of the most recently defeated opponent.
Representational art is only now recovering from the approval
of both Hitler and Stalin. [8]
Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources
than fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption
seems much the same. The early adopters will be driven by
ambition: self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish
themselves from the common herd. As the fashion becomes
established they'll be joined by a second, much larger group,
driven by fear. [9] This second group adopt the fashion not
because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of
standing out.
So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the
machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make
unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what
ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished
by association when they ended up on the losing side of a
recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to
differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his
parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What
are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?
This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I
can think of some that aren't the result of any recent
struggle. Many of our taboos are rooted deep in the past. But
this approach, combined with the preceding four, will turn up
a good number of unthinkable ideas.
Why
Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why
deliberately go poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas?
Why look under rocks?
I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under
rocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious
about anything that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for
myself.
Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being
mistaken. If, like other eras, we believe things that will
later seem ridiculous, I want to know what they are so that I,
at least, can avoid believing them.
Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good
work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially
need a brain that's in the habit of going where it's not
supposed to.
Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have
overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that's
unthinkable. Natural selection, for example. It's so simple.
Why didn't anyone think of it before? Well, that is all too
obvious. Darwin himself was careful to tiptoe around the
implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his time
thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused
him of being an atheist.
In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able
to question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least
of the good ones, is precisely that: look for places where
conventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart the
cracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories
come from.
A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore
conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it.
Scientists go looking for trouble. This should be the m.o. of
any scholar, but scientists seem much more willing to look
under rocks. [10]
Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most
physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program
in French literature, but few professors of French literature
could make it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be
because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories are true
or false, and this makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be
that, because it's clearer in the sciences whether theories
are true or false, you have to be smart to get jobs as a
scientist, rather than just a good politician.)
Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between
intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This
isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes in
conventional thinking. I think conventions also have less hold
over them to start with. You can see that in the way they
dress.
It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any
competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that
others daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies
few dare utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of
hand-wringing now about declining market share. Yet the cause
is so obvious that any observant outsider could explain it in
a second: they make bad cars. And they have for so long that
by now the US car brands are antibrands something you'd buy
a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stopped being the
Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspect no one dares
say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would have tried to
fix the problem.
Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages
beyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you
stretch before running, you put your body into positions much
more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you
can think things so outside the box that they'd make people's
hair stand on end, you'll have no trouble with the small trips
outside the box that people call innovative.
Pensieri Stretti
When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it?
My advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.
Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color
yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as
"yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color.
People who like orange are tolerated but viewed with
suspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothing wrong with
yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be denounced as a
yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot of
arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to
rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But
if you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled
as a yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots,
and you become an idiot.
The most important thing is to be able to think what you want,
not to say what you want. And if you feel you have to say
everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking
improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the opposite
policy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and your
speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed. Within my head
I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous thoughts I
can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that happens
within the building should be told to outsiders. The first
rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.
When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry
Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto
should be "i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed
thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell
them what you're thinking. This was wise advice. Milton was an
argumentative fellow, and the Inquisition was a bit restive at
that time. But I think the difference between Milton's
situation and ours is only a matter of degree. Every era has
its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them you
will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a complete
distraction.
I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the
harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics
[12], or that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on
those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses [13],
or about people being sued for violating the DMCA [14], part
of me wants to say, "All right, you bastards, bring it on."
The problem is, there are so many things you can't say. If you
said them all you'd have no time left for your real work.
You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky. [15]
The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that
you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea
leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage
it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to.
This is not just a way to develop ideas; it's also a good rule
of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say
heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the
most interesting to know.
Viso Sciolto?
I don't think we need the viso sciolto so much as the pensieri
stretti. Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you
don't agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time,
but not to be too specific about what you disagree with.
Zealots will try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer
them. If they try to force you to treat a question on their
terms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you can
always just answer "neither".
Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry
Summers did when a group tried to put him in this position.
Explaining himself later, he said "I don't do litmus tests."
[16] A lot of the questions people get hot about are actually
quite complicated. There is no prize for getting the answer
quickly.
If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you
want to fight back, there are ways to do it without getting
yourself accused of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an
ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging the main
body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass them with arrows
from a distance.
One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of
abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you
can avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the
book or film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack
labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of
labels to prevent discussion. The spread of the term
"political correctness" meant the beginning of the end of
political correctness, because it enabled one to attack the
phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of the
specific heresies it sought to suppress.
Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller
undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by
writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials.
He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them
no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch
trials? And yet Miller's metaphor stuck so well that to this
day the activities of the committee are often described as a
"witch-hunt."
Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their
cause, invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in
kind to jokes. They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as
a mounted knight on a skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for
example, seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as
a joke. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness.
"I am glad that I managed to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur
Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often wished I'd had
the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what the
situation deserved." [17]
ABQ
A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a
tolerant society. It's true they have a long tradition of
comparative open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries
were the place to go to say things you couldn't say anywhere
else, and this helped to make the region a center of
scholarship and industry (which have been closely tied for
longer than most people realize). Descartes, though claimed by
the French, did much of his thinking in Holland.
And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to
their necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you
can't do there; is there really nothing you can't say?
Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no
guarantee. Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our
hypothetical prim miss from the suburbs thinks she's
open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be? Ask anyone, and
they'll say the same thing: they're pretty open-minded, though
they draw the line at things that are really wrong. (Some
tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead use a
more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or
"destructive".)
When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get
the wrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at
open-mindedness they don't know it. In fact they tend to think
the opposite. Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be
invisible. It wouldn't work otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem
like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like
the right thing to do. It's only by looking from a distance
that we see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing
to do, and can identify them as fashions.
Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of
new fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem
so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing,
the other end seems especially far away.
To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious
effort. Without time to give you distance, you have to create
distance yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as
far away from it as you can and watch what it's doing. And pay
especially close attention whenever an idea is being
suppressed. Web filters for children and employees often ban
sites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. What
counts as pornography and violence? And what, exactly, is
"hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of 1984.
Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a
statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about
it. You don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't
false, it shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements
being attacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current
values of x and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure
sign that something is wrong. When you hear such labels being
used, ask why.
Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the
mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be
able to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a
radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference between
children and adults. When a child gets angry because he's
tired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult can distance
himself enough from the situation to say "never mind, I'm just
tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a similar process,
learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions.
You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly.
But it's harder, because now you're working against social
customs instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow
up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few
encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount
society's bad moods.
How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be
questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And
why?
Notes
Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston,
Robert Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading
drafts of this essay, and to Lisa Randall, Jackie McDonough,
Ryan Stanley and Joel Rainey for conversations about heresy.
Needless to say they bear no blame for opinions expressed in
it, and especially for opinions not expressed in it.
*
* * Re: What You Can't Say * * * Labels
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* * Japanese Translation * * * French Translation
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* * German Translation * * * Dutch Translation
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* * Romanian Translation * * * Hebrew Translation
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* * Turkish Translation * * * Chinese Translation
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* * Buttons * * * A Civic Duty to Annoy
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*
* * The Perils of Obedience * * * Aliens Cause Global
* Warming
*
*
* * Hays Code * * * Stratagem 32
* *
*
* * Conspiracy Theories * * * Mark Twain: Corn-pone
* Opinions
*
*
* * A Blacklist for "Excuse * * * What You Can't Say Will
Makers" Hurt You
* *
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