On the Fear of Being Hunted, part 1

One arguably constructive use of public shaming is as a deterrent against bad behavior. If there is a substantial risk of being exposed as a sexual harasser in a given professional environment, and the consequences of exposure are severe for your reputation and career, then you have a powerful incentive not to sexually harass your colleagues. Every case of public shaming in your profession, then, would remind you that if you behave similarly, you risk similar consequences. The fear of exposure can come either because your profession has a strong tradition of internal whistle blowing, or because it is under the watchful eye of the public media, journalism in particular. Harassers live in what may be called just fear of exposure by these means. I.e., their fear of being shamed is a public good.

It is easy to imagine a professional environment that is deficient in "justice" on this score. Real and potential sexual harassers may never witness any notably public shaming of their "colleagues" (i.e., their fellow harassers in the profession.) Indeed, they may regularly hear of, or even witness, sexual harassment that goes unpunished, and this may embolden them to begin or continue harassment campaigns of their own. They may even be inspired by their peers and mentors as they listen to their heroic tales of conquest and the inefficacy of the machinery of justice to hold them to account. The current debates about "tolerance" on college campuses seems to turn on this kind of charge against the environment.

But there's also another kind of injustice. I'm thinking of the miscarriage of justice in which innocent colleagues are shamed and ridiculed for acts they did not carry out, or views they do not hold. I have previously referred to this as the danger of "overdiagnosing" sexism in a particular profession. (I'm purposely keeping open, for now, which profession we're talking about, on the assumption that you will grant that some professions are more sexist than others and that one can therefore very well be wrong about the extent of the problem in any particular environment.) If people who have no inclination to sexually harass their colleagues regularly witness the public shaming of people they know not to have done anything wrong, or their humiliation is based on evidence that is, on the face it, inadequate to credibly support a charge, then they may begin to fear such shaming themselves. The fear of a non-harasser of being publicly shamed for harassment is not, let us agree, a public good.

If the consequences of a just culture of publicly shaming is to discourage harassers from engaging in the dirty business, and the consequence of an unjust culture—one that lacks a sufficient sense (and practice) of shame—is to embolden people to carry on with their bad behaviour, then the consequences of an overly zealous culture of shaming is to discourage everyone, good and bad alike, from being open about their thoughts and feelings.

This year, we were offered almost a controlled experiment in public shaming. On June 8, 2015, Tim Hunt was publicly called out for allegedly sexist remarks he made at a luncheon in Seoul. (I recommend Jonathan Foreman's version of the events, though I'm obliged to note that it remains "controversial".) In early October, the results of a sexual harassment inquiry spanning over a decade of Geoff Marcy's career became public knowledge. (Azeen Ghorayshi at BuzzFeed, as far as I can tell, deserves the credit for breaking the story.) Since the theme of both cases is sexism, it's not surprising that they've been brought together in media commentary, but the difference between the two cases is in fact rather striking.

While I'm personally convinced, after having looked at the case very closely, that Tim Hunt is entirely innocent of the charges that were brought against him, i.e., I believe that Tim Hunt has nothing to be ashamed of (however much he may regret the "stupidity" of his remarks*), I have not yet looked closely enough at the Geoff Marcy case to have an independent opinion of whether he is indeed guilty. For the purposes of this post, however, the actual guilt or innocence of either man is not important. The question is what sort of example his shaming sets for others.

Consider the difference between what we can called "the fear of being Hunt" and "the fear of being Marcy". What does it mean to be "Hunted"; what does it mean to be "Marcied"?

The example of Geoff Marcy tells us that even a long and very successful career in science does not protect you from facing the consequences of an equally long career as a sexual harasser. Eventually, you will be brought down by both the academic institutions that supported you and the professional journalists that promoted your work. No matter how many planets you have discovered you will be remembered by most people for creepily groping your students at receptions. You will probably even have lost your shot at an otherwise well-deserved Nobel prize.

The example that Tim Hunt sets is quite different. If anyone takes the time to find out who Tim Hunt is, what he stands for, and what, as far as we can tell, he said in Seoul that fateful day, the lesson is only as clear as it is disturbing. It is that no matter how successful you are as a scientist, your Nobel Prize and your knighthood well-earned, and no matter how decently you treat your colleagues, men and women alike, a few minutes of carelessness, while speaking informally to an audience during a luncheon, can seriously damage your reputation. You may be dis-invited from future speaking engagements (in some cases due to threats of violence) and you may find yourself having to stay away from some of your favorite gatherings. You may even lose academic posts and appointments, in some cases explicitly couched in terms of revoking the "honour" that those positions imply.

Interestingly, the fear of being Geoff Marcy does not include the fear of being "hung out to dry" (as Tim Hunt put it) by your academic institutions or your conference hosts, nor even of being unjustly maligned by shoddy, yellow journalism. When you look at the Marcy case, you see some serious institutional protections and some thorough, well-supported journalism. Some would argue Marcy was overly protected, of course, but it is precisely therefore that he constitutes such a strong example. Even when you think you're getting away with it, you are putting your career at risk.

The fear of being Hunted, however, is the fear of being completely abandoned by your academic institutions at a time when the shoddiest of journalism (an almost illiterate tweet and a couple of obviously agenda-driven blog posts) is inciting a predictably irrational Twitter mob against you. Moreover, it's the fear of being led into a trap. The very journalists who called Tim Hunt out also served on the organizing bodies of the conference that invited him.

One of the events that Tim Hunt was forced to forego his customary participation in was the Lindau Meeting of Nobel laureates. At a panel on "Communication Overkill", his case was discussed with some concern (see this video at 1:16:00 to 1:24:00). Torsten Wiesel raised the question of whether the community should not have done more to stand by Hunt in his time of trouble. Brian Schmidt rightly pointed out that the only protections scientists really have against the irrational shaming of the Internet are strong, real-world institutions that "stick by their values"*. There is, indeed, nothing one can do about the rage of the mob except to seek shelter from the storm until it blows over—that requires institutions. Adam Smith followed up on this by saying, again to my mind rightly, that the Tim Hunt case "highlights the dangerous environment that everyone inhabits" and that it's not surprising, given what happened, that scientists would be "discouraged from getting out in front of the press and saying anything at all."

Tim Hunt didn't realize that, by attending the World Conference of Science Journalists, he had stepped outside of the civilized discourse of scientists that is established in places like Lindau. (If he could have chosen to go to Lindau instead of Seoul, I don't think there's any doubt where he would have preferred to be.) He had stepped into the "dangerous environment" of those soi-disant journalists we call "science writers". They like to "keep it simple, stupid"; they like stories that bleed. They tweet first and ask questions later. They hunt. In packs.

[Read Part 2]

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*I will pick up on these points in part two. Schmidt and Wiesel, like Hunt, acknowledge that the remarks were ill-considered, but this does not imply, as Hunt's remaining critics like to suggest, that they were shameful.

(Re)Framing Tim Hunt

The ongoing vilification of Tim Hunt is a sad sign of the state of our sciences, our politics, and our public discourse about them. By "ongoing vilification" I mean the way in which he is confidently presented as an example of the problem of sexism in science. The most notable recent examples are Sarah Zhang's "A New Twist in the Fight Against Sexism in Science" in Wired and Mark Strauss's "Nobel Laureates Who Were Not Always Noble" in National Geographic. In both pieces, Tim Hunt is presented as part of the problem—in the latter in very strong terms, taking his place in a "rogues' gallery" of "racists, frauds, and misogynists". As far as I can tell, however, even those who support this basic narrative online (people like Dan Waddell and Paula Higgins) don't really claim to have any evidence that he's a sexist. Some say it doesn't even matter whether or not he's a sexist, only that he "said something sexist". This is strange to me, and, like I say, saddening.

To see what I mean, imagine that Tim Hunt's remarks had been misconstrued, not as an expression of sexist views (that he doesn't hold), but as an admission of sexual misconduct (that he doesn't, of course, engage in). Suppose the story had been, "Nobel Laureate admits trying to seduce women in his lab and, when they refuse his advances, verbally abusing them until they break down in tears." Suppose it was this sort of thing that was being said in Wired (where he was in fact paired with Geoff Marcy) and National Geographic. (Writing in the LATimes Robin Abcarian suggests shooting Hunt into space locked in a capsule with Marcy.) I would hope that everyone who's been writing about this, on both sides, would agree that such a characterization, and such a legacy, would be unfair to Hunt.

To defend Hunt from such an accusation would not be tantamount to trivializing the problem of sexual harassment, it would be the simple pursuit of justice for a falsely accused man. Tim Hunt, after all, has never actually been accused by anyone of sexual harassing them. If he had we can be pretty sure that it would have come out by now. But what those who use his name to stand for "casual sexism" forget is that he has also never been accused of sexual discrimination or even of casual sexism before or since his toast to women scientists in Seoul. Just as no women have come forward to tell stories about how he came on to them inappropriately in a lab or how his brutal criticism (born, let's say, of his disprized love) made them cry, no woman has ever suggested that he passed her over for promotion because she was female, or that he treated the men in his labs with greater respect than her. In other words, the image of Tim Hunt as even a casual sexist is as unrelated to reality as the image of him as a sexual harasser.

And yet, because of a three-minute improvised toast in (as Waddell and Higgins have taken great pains to tell us) a half-listening room, he has been made into a symbol of something that, his record shows, he is actually the very opposite of. The reason for this was a sloppily composed tweet by a journalist who was in an important sense (as a member of the WFSJ board) his host, and who herself said she wasn't listening carefully (only realizing when she thought he said something offensive that he was also notable enough to make for a sensational news story), published three hours after his words were spoken. Subsequent research exonerates him of all charges of actually harboring sexist views, and reveals only that he may be a bit too optimistic (for some tastes) about the current state of gender equality in the sciences.

Whatever you may think about what he is said to have said, if you think Tim Hunt is a casual sexist and therefore got what he deserved, you're wrong. And you're wrong in exactly the same sense that you'd be wrong if he really was a casual sexist but was being presented in the science press as a sexual harasser like Geoff Marcy. However wrong what he stands accused of may be, what is being said about him is just plain false.

How can such a grave injustice be done? A recent piece in Nature, which, unfortunately, also propagates the myth of Tim Hunt as a "sexist", provides an explanation. “People who don’t have power really can have their voices heard,” it quotes Northeastern communications researcher Brooke Foucault Welles as saying. “They can reframe the story.”

That is, what we now call "the power of social media" is really the power to use any event and any personality as a focus point around which to "reframe" a narrative that, one believes, isn't getting enough attention. If you want to bring attention to sexism in science, for example, just accuse a scientist of being a sexist, and then celebrate the "support" that his "victims" are getting every time he is called a "misogynist" (see David Calquhoun's tweets) or, my personal favorite, a "rat fucking bastard". Also make sure to emphasize the abusive trolls that predictably attack your accusations with vitriol, while ignoring principled defenses that try to assess the evidence.

In fact, what you do is to construe any defense as illegitimate, by equating the claim that the accused isn't actually a sexist with an expression of sexism itself. It's absurd, of course. This not only harms the reputation of the accused, who in this case happens to be a great supporter of women in science, it is an affront to all the real women that have in fact been victimized by manifest bastards who actually hate women. The ability of these women to tell their stories is significantly diminished by the sloppy journalism and slapdash activism that (re)framed Tim Hunt as a "sexist scientist".

The Age of Science and Politics

I think I need to restart this blog. I need to consider, again, the particular problems of poetry and philosophy and the place they meet, namely, the imagination. Ezra Pound began his ABC of Reading by announcing that “We live in an age of science and abundance,” a statement which is probably more true than is commonly recognized. All things considered, it is surprising that we seem to be living in an “age of austerity”. As Pound was fond of pointing out, whatever local scarcity we may experience in the supply of particular goods and services, the problem is not one of production, but distribution.

We also, I would point out, live in age of science and politics, rather than an age of philosophy and poetry. (William Carlos Williams was concerned that we might be living in an "age of philosophy and science”. Things have gotten worse.) While the word “science” continues to be held in general esteem in the popular mind, politics is only generally celebrated in the highly idealized form that travels under the banner of “democracy”. (Here at the Pangrammaticon, we think of distinctly “modern” politics as being broadly democratic, and modern science as being largely experimental.) But there can be no question that the quality of our lives is determined by the quantities that our scientific and democratic processes produce.

While scientific processes make discoveries and political processes make decisions, and thereby determine the content of our perceptions and our actions respectively, we cannot deny that, as contexts in which our lives go on, politics also shapes our desires just as surely as science shapes our beliefs. This formative influence is experienced as a kind of pressure to believe certain things in certain ways, and to desire certain people in certain ways. It is both thought and felt by us.

Yesterday something occurred to me, and this is what has caused me to take this blog out of retirement. Imagine if all your beliefs were scientifically correct and all your desires were politically correct. Now, the record of both science and politics over the past century or so by no means suggest that this tantamount to imagining that all your beliefs are true, nor that all your desires are just. (Truth is to knowledge as justice is to power.) So one will imagine, actually, only that one's beliefs and one's desires are constantly evolving according to the progress that science and politics are making, and that one is, as it were, “keeping up” with these “Joneses”.

That is, I am asking you to imagine that all your beliefs are supported only by the methods of modern science, and all your desires are supported only the mandates of modern politics. When the scientists change their mind, your beliefs change. When the politicians have a change of heart, your desires follow suit. It is not so much that you are scientifically and politically correct but that you have to be. When “progress” is made, you will simply experience a kind of difficulty in sustaining your presently held beliefs about, say, the global climate, or your desires, say, about the local women. There will be a kind of pressure. That pressure will be what it is like to be alive in the age of science and politics.

And that pressure, that difficulty, from now on, is what this blog is about. The instruments we use to gauge it are called “concepts” and “emotions”, and the arts by which we engage with it are called philosophy and poetry. It is their grammar that we are trying to understand. The effort will involve all the usage in the world.

Spring and What the Fall Is

"Sometimes I speak of imagination as a force, an electricity or a medium, a place. It is immaterial which: for whether it is the condition of a place or a dynamization its effect is the same: to free the world of fact from the impositions 'art' ... and to liberate the man to act in whatever direction his disposition leads." (William Carlos Williams)

This is the last post at the Pangrammaticon, marking exactly ten years of blogging. I'm grateful to everyone who has been following along.

Early on, I invoked Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The key to that book lies in the proposition "We make ourselves pictures of the facts". What Wittgenstein does not tell us is how; he merely asserts that we do. The relevant faculty is, of course, imagination, Einbildungskraft.

Rereading that post now, I notice, with pleasure, that it closes with a reference to Williams. It was no doubt the lineation of the "The Red Wheel Barrow" that I was referring to there, but it wasn't until a few years ago that I finally read Spring and All. The shock of its symmetry with the Tractatus is hard to describe. It was a vindication of everything I've done here.

Imagination is both a force and a craft. (The German word "Kraft" can mean force, or strength, or skill.) Forces are of nature as crafts are of culture. Suffering is where they meet. We call the joint by its Latin name. Art. Beauty is difficult.

"Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist," said Wittgenstein. "The world is everything that is case," or, perhaps, "all that is befallen." History is everyone who's on my case, or, all kidding aside, all that's happened. In any case, spring was beautiful this year. The summer was long. And the fall, too, has been delightful. Thus, in any case, as the weather goes.

Be reasonable! the philosopher demands. Be passionate! suggests the poet. I've tried to use this blog to find my grammatical composure. "All the usage in the world." I don't know how far there is to go, but I feel I've made some progress. Let us be reasonable and passionate. Let us be as articulate about our reasons as our passions. Let us put these beautiful bodies where our mouths are.

The Enigma of Departure

Giorgio de Chirico.
The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon, 1911-12.

After almost ten years, I've decided to retire this blog. It has become clear to me that if this line of thinking is ever going to amount to anything it will have to become a book of some kind. I will keep my notes about poetry and philosophy to myself while I work on it.

There's a lot of stuff in the archives and I'm going to leave it up for anyone who's interested. I'm grateful to everyone who has followed along and commented on my ideas, both online and off. You have helped me to find whatever precision—clarity in regard to concepts, intensity in the grip of emotion—these pages may provide.

This is not quite my last post. It's only an announcement. As an official tenth-anniversary/retirement party on November 17, I'm going to post a kind of summary of what I think I've been doing here and what I may have accomplished.