E-Pluribus | August 3, 2022

"Say you're sorry!", when art meets "ableism", and has Viktor Orbán worn out his conservative welcome?

Aug 03, 2022

A round-up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Stephanos Bibas: The Corruption of Apology

As children, we were often made to apologize - “say you’re sorry!” And we all learned saying you’re sorry is far easier than actually being sorry. Stephanos Bibas writes at Persuasion that for adults in particular, coerced apologies are pointless and counterproductive; rather than leading to healing, false or insincere apologies just make things worse.

True apologies are precious. They’re a secular process of remediation, drawing on moral intuitions shared by many religious traditions. They encourage membership in one’s moral community because they are fundamentally relational: They heal the bond between wrongdoer and wronged. By temporarily humbling the perpetrator and vindicating the victim, they pave the way for both sides to make up.
[ . . . ]
These days, apologies are in great demand, but they don’t function as we want them to. Consider the example of the Palestinian immigrant Majdi Wadi, who was living the American Dream, building an empire of restaurants as well as a bakery, grocery store, and hummus factory. His Holy Land brand of hummus was sold widely. But activists discovered that his daughter had posted offensive tweets years earlier, as a teenager, and demanded an apology. She apologized; he fired her; he even apologized himself. Yet the apologies didn’t matter. His company was boycotted, evicted from a location, and lost millions in contracts.
The instinct to apologize is laudable: When in doubt, be humble and make amends. But real apologies grow out of the fertile soil of relationship and community. Today’s demands for apology, though, are dangerous. They debase the coinage of apology, masquerading as the real thing. Far from healing, they can sow bitterness and discord. And they usually lack the three conditions needed for apologies to succeed.

Read the whole thing.

Liz Wolfe: Beyoncé, Under Fire for Using an 'Ableist Slur,' Chooses Self-Censorship

Some popular music is rife with offensive language, but the words generating a backlash these days are raising some eyebrows. At Reason, Liz Wolfe explains this recent trend that first caught Lizzo and now Beyoncé in its snare.

According to a certain subset of disability activists, any use of the word spaz or its derivatives is marginalizing. "Disabled people's experiences are not fodder for song lyrics. This must stop," tweeted the disability rights organization Scope. "When Beyoncé dropped the same ableist slur as Lizzo on her new album, my heart sank," reads the headline of a Guardian article by the activist Hannah Diviney, who wrote that she has "no desire to overshadow" Beyoncé's "lived experience of being a black woman…but that doesn't excuse her use of ableist language." Beyoncé's publicity team quickly responded to the heat, saying she'd be changing that line and removing the word from the song, just as fellow artist Lizzo did two months ago when she came under similar scrutiny, led by some of the same activists.
But "disabled people's experiences" are not being used as fodder for song lyrics.
[ . . . ]
[I]t's pathetic to give these activists this veto power. Rap tends to use words in ways people actually talk, not the platonic ideal of how people should talk if they want to be maximally sensitive. Beyoncé comes from that tradition, and her earlier work—like that shameless reference to Ike and Tina—is in line with that. It's possible that Beyoncé was legitimately unaware of the term's origin, and that she actually cares that her words might offend some disabled people. The more plausible explanation is that she has an image to uphold and has chosen the path of least resistance, bending when needed to merit the good publicity to which she has become accustomed. Regardless, her decision suggests that perhaps she didn't mean what she initially said; that words can be substituted on demand; that she has little attachment to the art she released.

Read it all here.

In an effort to broaden the opposition to progressive political and cultural trends, some on the right have taken to embracing or at least flirting with those who might otherwise be shunned. William A. Galston at the Wall Street Journal wonders if Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán might have finally gone too far for conservatives who have latched on to the anti-woke Hungarian with his recent comments on race.

In this speech, Mr. Orbán characterized “population replacement or inundation” as one of the principal challenges of our time, and he recommended an “outstanding” book on this issue, “The Camp of the Saints,” by the French monarchist Jean Raspail. This poisonous novel is the ur-text for the notorious “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that white nationalists have cited approvingly in the U.S. and in Europe, which holds that elites are using immigration to undermine the cultural and political power of white Christian populations. Mr. Orbán said that the book explains “the West’s inability to defend itself” against threatening hordes of non-Western immigrants.
Lest there be any misunderstanding, Mr. Orbán proceeded to express his opposition to a “mixed-race world”—that is, a world “in which European peoples are mixed together with those arriving from outside Europe.” These countries, he claimed, “are no longer nations: They are nothing more than conglomerations of peoples,” and they are no longer part of what he calls “the Western world.” He made no effort to exclude the U.S. from this judgment, and it is difficult to imagine how he could.
The time will come, Mr. Orbán concedes, “when we have to somehow accept Christians coming to us” from the West and “integrate them into our lives.” He excluded from his “Western world” Christians from the global South and all non-Christians.
His defenders contend that his real target is Islamic immigration. But as the Bulwark’s Cathy Young points out in a stinging critique, the Hungarian word for “race” that Mr. Orbán used has a longstanding anti-Semitic resonance. This partly explains why Hungary’s chief rabbi responded so strongly.

Read it all.