I was always under the impression that you had to be convinced in order to change your mind about something. But if there is anything that I've learned lately, it's that you can be unconsciously duped into having a knee jerk response to something that your conscious mind finds ridiculous. Bear with me.
The reboot of the underappreciated series Party Down made me go back and rewatch the first two seasons recently, which aired from 2009-2010. During the same week of that binge, I watched The Hangover 2, a pretty terrible movie that happened to come out a year after Party Down was canceled in 2011 (I only mention the dates to show that they both came out in the same historically recent cultural moment.) Between the two, there was all manner of offensive language being thrown around. Characters that we were supposed to sympathize with were calling each other things like "queer" and "retard", debating the true definition of "jungle fever", and on and on. I have to admit that one of my first thoughts was kind of a cliche that goes something like, "This could never be made today." Maybe true, maybe not, but kind of a cheesy point to try and make either way. That's not what this is about.
The interesting part was my in-the-moment reaction to said dialogue, which was a sort of cringey surprise immediately followed by slight shock at my own reaction. It was like having the physical response of being offended combined with a mental backlash to it. I have never had two contradictory reactions to something in such quick succession. Nor have I ever been one to take offense easily, especially to a show that I wasn't offended by the first time that I watched it. Or been anything other than acutely aware and critical of the aggressive attempt to create new taboos around countless words and ideas over the last few years. Which is why this almost felt like my own mind defying itself. Did decade-old, lowbrow comedy break my brain into two competing halves? In what other ways have I been unconsciously altered by the bullshit of the day? I'm being melodramatic, but seriously.
Let me get all opinionated on the subject more generally to show why it was so strange. This is regarding a debate that has been ongoing for years now, but it’s relevant here. I've come to distrust even the most charitable read on the so-called compassionate side of the free speech argument in its most recent form. Maybe there are still individuals out there who genuinely believe that words are violence, among other slogans, but it's come to seem like the broader goal of the project is sheer cultural and political dominance. This could be cynicism on my part, or it could just be paying attention over the last decade. And though I lean towards the other extreme (the freest of speech) in my own beliefs, there seems to be the same single-minded goal and often gleefully shitty tactics coming from zealots on that side as well. Not to mention hypocrisy (refer to the current Twitter overlord). And just as a side note-this is not a political point, however much your mind is automatically turning it into one right now. Free speech has always been used and abused in this country by political players of both stripes, so it's purely opportunistic and arbitrary which team has taken which stance on it in this latest spat. Maybe the politicizing of it by some is exactly what gives it that team sport flavor.
This is all to say that I have no team in the "free speech" versus "hypothetical compassion" fight, insofar as you could even apply the word team to it. Maybe it's more like "loosely-related groups of people online (mostly), with similar interests in mind”. At best. And while I might agree more with one side than the other, I never agree with the tactics or trust the stated goals of either once it starts to look like sport. And that is probably enough opinions on this for now. It's all to show that if anything, I should be less shocked by things than I've ever been instead of being apparently resensitized to some degree. I blame my subconscious for being the weak link. The sensitivity had to get in somehow.
But it makes me wonder; if someone who is unmoved by the current speech argument is still affected, does everyone who has been energized and polarized by it see something entirely different when they watch the same thing? Let's do some stereotyping based on how this could hypothetically play out. Imagine: one viewer cheers for the good old days of rampant slurs being the norm when Roman from Party Down calls someone a queer, while another hears the same line and cowers in the corner, waiting for the inevitable violence to be inflicted. It's a cartoon, but you get the point. Would two people who had been pushed to different ideological extremes have a totally different experience watching a short-lived comedy series from 2009? Or watching something maybe slightly more consequential?
I already sort of know the answer to this. You almost see it when partisan news outlets cover the same story with a different spin, leaving their viewers with totally different impressions of the same reality. Not a perfect analogy, but close. You see something almost analogous in a variety of other places covering current events as well, a prime example being this disaster right here. It's not good. But the self-centered takeaway from this story is something like this-even those of us who are most repelled by the tribes that are constantly forming around every issue are still affected by them. Maybe I was arrogant to think that it could be otherwise. Or maybe I need to get offline.
I am genuinely curious if anyone else has had this same experience, though. So if you are up for it, here is a little homework. Grab a jaded friend who is fairly online, sit down and watch The Hangover 2, and gauge their reaction to it. If the strip club locker room scene or the choice word that Mr. Chow uses at one point (you'll know it when you hear it), doesn't have an obvious effect, then maybe it's just me. Let me know how it goes. Until next time.
This may be a kind of corollary of Robert Conquest's second law: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. Except in this example, the organization is your mind.
In my particular case, if I were to attempt to watch a movie (which I never do) and were to select one that perhaps I loved as a young person, I would find it disgusting now because of all the proto-woke messaging. Why the godawful hell is a princess without Jedi powers or basic training formidable in blaster combat? How on earth do musicians from entirely unrelated biospheres and evolutionary backgrounds have enough in common to play together in a cantina? Etc.
One of my friends (an individual so anti-woke he's embracing *bad* ideas just to "own the libs") described having a similar reaction during his wedding. In our tradition there is a point in the ceremony where the priest says something to the effect of "Whereas woman has been created as a help mate to man". When that line was said he looked uncomfortable and later stated he had a physical cringe reaction, even though he considers himself very anti-feminist and intellectually agrees with very traditional marriage roles. (In practice, they both work but his wife is very much the breadwinner)