the contagion of outrage: outside influences, part 2
This is the second part of me maundering on about how my feelings and opinions are affected by discussion online. In the first part I talked about how sometimes I get too affected by other people’s discussions of their very real problems, like a medical student with hypochondria. That is entirely my own problem. Not only do I not want other people to stop talking about their issues, I don’t want to stop reading about or discussing them, because those are people I care about and I want to know how they are.
Warning: this gets even longer than the first part.
Then there’s the problem of contagious outrage, and that’s a more general phenomenon, for good and bad. It can be good; there are many, many times when I read of someone’s outrage with something going on and realize that I should be outraged, too … only I missed it, either because I hadn’t heard about it at all or, more insidiously, because I’d heard about it and completely missed the aspect I should have been outraged (or at least annoyed) about. Sometimes I am not as sensitive to moral issues as I want to be. It’s all too fatally easy to feel discrimination against your own groups and to miss discrimination against someone else. An example I happened to be thinking about earlier today is the movie Avatar. I’m a fairly uncritical movie-watcher; if I hadn’t read a lot of the discussion before seeing it, I would have been annoyed by all the things the movie wanted me to be annoyed by - of course I’d have rooted against the big evil Earth interests cutting down forests and destroying innocent native culture. But I’m not sure I’d have cottoned on to the pernicious trope embedded in the movie itself, in which it requires a Noble White Man to ride in and save the day. I’m glad I was alerted to that; now I can look out for it elsewhere and try to avoid perpetrating it in anything I say or do.
The problem comes when the outrage is wrongly directed. Here’s one I’ve seen a few times today; people are upset that a heroic lesbian couple who saved a number of lives in the massacre at Utoya have been ignored by the news media outside Norway and the region. The implication is that they’ve been ignored specifically because they are a lesbian couple. I don’t actually think it’s true in this case. Have you heard about this man? He is a German expat living in Norway who did the same thing - possibly not as effectively as the women because people in the water were less inclined to trust him, but that doesn’t diminish his heroism. I happened to hear his story at the time via a link to a German article that understandably wanted to laud a German native. But I doubt he’s been extensively covered in international media either; I think that as usual they’ve already forgotten the story, moved on to the next thing, and aren’t writing about those heroes at all. (In fact, when I Googled just now, there were more storys about the two women than the one man.) There’s plenty to blame the popular media for, short attention span and a tendency to cover villains rather than heroes for two - but in this case, I don’t think anti-gay bias is a factor.
(I am glad to have written the above paragraph, because all three of those rescuers deserve lots of praise and attention. Another thing about contagious emotion is that reading about heroes can inspire bravery, even in small everyday ways.)
Even worse is the phenomena of the directed snowball, in which people aggressively try to change others’ opinions by claiming that there’s only one side for all right-thinking people to be on. This seems to happen a lot lately in relation to -isms: racism, sexism, heterosexism, and so on. I think in an ideal world, a conversation would go something like this:
Person 1: “Person 2 wrote this thing that can be taken in this awful and demeaning way.”
Then it diverges. One possibility is:
Person 2: “No, really not. I was misquoted or misheard.” (Example: “I said “niggard”, not what you thought I said.”
Person 1: “Oh, thanks for explaining!”
But more often, still in this ideal world, it might be:
Person 2: “Oh, my God! I totally didn’t mean that, but I can see how it can be taken that way! Thanks for pointing it out - I will try to do better next time!”
Person 1: “Thank you for the apology; I appreciate your trying,”
But it’s also reasonable to say something like “Thanks for your apology. I’m afraid I’ve been hurt so many times that I don’t want to risk more. I won’t be buying your next book, but I do appreciate your answer and your good will.” No one has a responsibility to stick around and be hurt, or to read stuff they don’t want to.
This not being an ideal world, the conversation, unfortunately, more often goes like this:
Person 2: “How dare you call me an -ist! I have impeccable credentials and anyway you’re way too senstitive and anyway I was only joking and anyway you obviously can’t read because that’s not what I said!”
Persons 3-10 (Person 2′s friends): “Yeah! How dare you! Person 2 is wonderful and you are an insignificant dung beetle!”
At that point Person 1 goes public and Persons 11 through 862 join in condemning Person 2. In the case just described, that might be a case of using a sledgehammer to kill an ant, but it’s not entirely unreasonable; after all, person 1 does deserve condemnation and those 851 people are each one person with one opinion to express, and all of the defenders have made it a bigger issue than just Person 1′s original words anyway.
There are a couple of ways it can all turn into an ugly case of mob rule. One is when some of those attackers team up, and start to attack Person 1, their friends, and anyone who might remotely want to point out that it’s not a completely simple case, and maybe Person 1, while certainly in error here, perhaps ought not to be excommunicated from humanity as an instance of all that is vile. An even worse case is when Person 1 does issue an honest apology, maybe even asking their friends to back off on the defense, and gets attacked anyway just as severely as if they’d defended their hurtful words. Worst is when both of those happen at once: Person 2 has apologized honestly but still gets daily attacks and sometimes personal threats, which then expand to anyone seen as being “on the wrong side”.
The thing is, often as not the people doing the snowballing actually are on what I think is the right side (against all those -isms). That makes it a bit easier for me to get swept along and I have to make a conscious effort to step back and make up my own mind. I’ve gotten to the point of believing that an ethical person who is good with words has a moral responsibility to make sure that they use persuasive invective only in a good cause, because it can have such an inflammatory effect.
I believe that the most brilliant and chilling character JK Rowling ever invented was not Voldemort but Deloris Umbridge, who (before Book 7) used bullying and brutal tactics in service of the “right” side. Barry Goldwater was wrong: extremism is a vice, even in defense of liberty.
ETA: based on some of the conversation in comments, I have changed the word “dogpile” to “snowball”. The image I want is one of a force that can be used for good or bad, so it’s clearer to start with a term that isn’t emotionally loaded with negative associations. Also, I don’t want to seem to condemn righteous outrage; it’s one of the most effective forces I know of for positive change in society. (In fact, that’s exactly why I hate to see it sometimes co-opted by bullies. When the outrage is genuine (either inherent or raised by having unjustness pointed out), you can get anything from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to Abolitionists to the people twirling rainbow umbrellas to protect affianced same-sex couples waiting for marriage licenses from protestors.)
Mirrored from Dichroic Reflections.