Manners, Morals, and Intolerance: Against Some Uses of #MeToo

Carina Chocano, “Inappropriate Behavior Could Mean a Faux Pas—or a Crime,” New York Times Magazine, June 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/magazine/inappropriate-behavior-could-mean-a-faux-pas-or-a-crime.html?comments

The concept of inappropriateness identifies the morally wrong with the socially awkward. Social norms differ from laws and moral principles in being vague: the origin is the merely tacitly normative character of practices that are known as habits. Our "liberal" (or better, "progressive") culture seems to need things like this, along with the necessarily ambiguous character of "micro-aggressions."

What this reveals is the progressive agenda to remake society by trading on these kinds of ambiguities while denying that that is what they are. The motto might be a twist on the old feminist one that "the personal is political": it is that "what is really political is the personal when it can be rendered moral--and some people made to pay."

In this way, our dominant corporate and media-based liberal culture, competitive and ad hominem, pursues an agenda of intolerance (or "zero tolerance") that should be called right-wing in at least one respect: Its consequences include subjecting still more people to punishments, in the world's most punitive society, with the most prisoners, whose Puritan culture that has long been known for its unparalleled intolerance. And that has demonstrably shifted to authoritarianism in the service of capital.

The left especially should get out of this business. Most injustice is not crime; it is structurally and culturally maintained; the question is not who is to blame but what is to be done. (Encouragement helps. Say: "Guys, be cool!")