Thus Spoke Sprezzatura

Lee Siegel declares that “we” — and by that he means “you” — lack James Baldwin’s empathy and moral rigor:

Today we still revere Baldwin, but by and large we no longer follow his lead as a thinker. There is little patience now for such a rigorous yet receptive moral and intellectual style; these days we prefer ringing moral indictment, the hallmarks of which are absolute certainty, predetermined ideas and conformity to collective sentiments.

Anyone aware of the early-aughts contrarianism Seigel was raised in knows exactly where this is going — Baldwin’s moral authority is going to be used as a shield to make excuses for some asshole Seigel wants to defend.

In the process of abandoning the type of complex moral clarity that Baldwin practiced, we have made behavior that is unacceptable the equivalent of behavior that is criminal. An equal amount of fury is directed toward actions as morally — and legally — distinct from each other as rape, harassment, rudeness, boorishness and incivility. The outrage over a police shooting of an unarmed black teenager unfolds at the same level of intensity as the outrage over what might or might not be a case of racial profiling by a sales clerk in a small Brooklyn boutique.

Ah yes, the argument Bari Weiss can never get enough of: in the age if #metoo, rudeness and sexual assault are treated as being exactly the same thing. There is never any evidence provided for this claim, no least because this is not in fact happening, but there will never be a shortage of editors who will put the claim into print.

So, anyway, do we at least get a cherry-picked example of a rich white guy who’s been treated unfairly?

The representative figure of our age is not the poet, the artist, the novelist, the scientist, the businessman, the actor, the athlete, the statesman. It is the prosecutor. There exists a kind of silent censoring of any attempt to understand a person’s ugly behavior rather than seeking exclusively to punish it.

If, in a spirit of free intellectual and imaginative inquiry, you dared to suggest that a man who masturbated in front of a woman he barely knew without her consent might have been acting out, in an attitude of aggressive contempt, his own shame and emasculation — if you tried to understand his actions, without justifying them — you would be shouted down and vilified.

Imagine the outcry if you went further and speculated about why Harvey Weinstein allegedly manipulated some actresses dependent on his power into watching him while he was naked. Could it be that Mr. Weinstein, who reportedly had often been mocked for his appearance, wanted to dehumanize these women as well, while at the same time turning himself into a person who is watched and admired, like a person of beauty?

If even a fraction of the charges against him are true, Mr. Weinstein should be banished to the distant reaches of society. But however justice is finally administered in his case, we should try to grasp what social and psychological forces made him what he is, without the distracting din of moral denunciation forbidding us from doing so.

Harvey Weinstein? That’s your example of someone being treated unfairly? Anyway…well, there’s this:

If it was, Siegel (or anyone else) could read loads of books on the “social and psychological forces” of abusers. The anger comes from knowing that questioning the motivations of men like Weinstein is more often about dismissing women’s experiences than true curiosity.

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) July 25, 2018

In addition:

• No genre of argument is less convincing that “I am being censored from preventing views that I am currently presenting in the nation’s highest-visibility opinion section.”
• Good arguments do not need paragraph after paragraph of preemptive throat-clearing implying that it’s wrong to criticize the argument.
• “Bullies sometimes pick on people when they’re in a position of power because they were themselves picked on,” far from being some kind of suppressed view, is as hoary as armchair psychological explanations get.
• You ain’t James Baldwin.

….keta in comments observes Seigel’s world-historical pretension-to-achievement ratio:

A quick adding up notes this essay invoked Baldwin, Elijah Muhammad, Capote, Mailer, Aeschylus, Euripides, Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Mann, Gide, Camus, Wright, Vidal, and Mamet all in an urging to better understand why Harvey Weinstein pounds his pud in front of women who want no part of him.