Paul Graham 2004: Essay, What you can't say.

[Zenaan Harkness]

Apropos in today's zeitgeist.


What You Can't Say
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

January 2004

Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at
the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we
had no idea how silly we looked. It's the nature of fashion to be
invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to
all of us riding on it.

What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They're just as
arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they're much
more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is
mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating
moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even
killed.

If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing would be true
no matter where you went: you'd have to watch what you said. Opinions
we consider harmless could have gotten you in big trouble. I've
already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big
trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century, and did get
Galileo in big trouble when he said it—that the earth moves. [1]

It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every period, people
believed things that were just ridiculous, and believed them so
strongly that you would have gotten in terrible trouble for saying
otherwise.

Is our time any different? To anyone who has read any amount of
history, the answer is almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable
coincidence if ours were the first era to get everything just right.

It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the future
will find ridiculous. What would someone coming back to visit us in a
time machine have to be careful not to say? That's what I want to
study here. But I want to do more than just shock everyone with the
heresy du jour. I want to find general recipes for discovering what
you can't say, in any era.

The Conformist Test

Let's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be
reluctant to express in front of a group of your peers?

If the answer is no, you might want to stop and think about that. If
everything you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could
that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are you just
think what you're told.

The other alternative would be that you independently considered
every question and came up with the exact same answers that are now
considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because you'd also have
to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers deliberately put slight mistakes
in their maps so they can tell when someone copies them. If another
map has the same mistake, that's very convincing evidence.

Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly
contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes
probably didn't do it by accident. It would be like someone claiming
they had independently decided in 1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a
good idea.

If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can you be sure
you wouldn't also have believed everything you were supposed to if
you had grown up among the plantation owners of the pre-Civil War
South, or in Germany in the 1930s—or among the Mongols in 1200, for
that matter? Odds are you would have.

Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea seemed to be
that there was something wrong with you if you thought things you
didn't dare say out loud. This seems backward. Almost certainly,
there is something wrong with you if you don't think things you don't
dare say out loud.

Trouble

What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look at
things people do say, and get in trouble for. [2]

Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're
looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have
enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But
many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make
it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for
saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet
tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or
at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make
anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they
worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people
maddest are those they worry might be true.

If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall, he would
have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying the earth orbited
the sun was another matter. The church knew this would set people
thinking.

Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb works
well. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seem harmless
now. So it's likely that visitors from the future would agree with at
least some of the statements that get people in trouble today. Do we
have no Galileos? Not likely.

To find them, keep track of opinions that get people in trouble, and
start asking, could this be true? Ok, it may be heretical (or
whatever modern equivalent), but might it also be true?

Heresy

This won't get us all the answers, though. What if no one happens to
have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet? What if some idea
would be so radioactively controversial that no one would dare
express it in public? How can we find these too?

Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every period of
history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to
statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to ask if
they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy" were
such labels for a good part of western history, as in more recent
times "indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now
these labels have lost their sting. They always do. By now they're
mostly used ironically. But in their time, they had real force.

The word "defeatist", for example, has no particular political
connotations now. But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by
Ludendorff in a purge of those who favored a negotiated peace. At the
start of World War II it was used extensively by Churchill and his
supporters to silence their opponents. In 1940, any argument against
Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist". Was it right or wrong?
Ideally, no one got far enough to ask that.

We have such labels today, of course, quite a lot of them, from the
all-purpose "inappropriate" to the dreaded "divisive." In any period,
it should be easy to figure out what such labels are, simply by
looking at what people call ideas they disagree with besides untrue.
When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that's a
straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as
"divisive" or "racially insensitive" instead of arguing that it's
false, we should start paying attention.

So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations
will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label—"sexist", for
example—and try to think of some ideas that would be called that.
Then for each ask, might this be true?

Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because they won't really be
random. The ideas that come to mind first will be the most plausible
ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let
yourself think.

In 1989 some clever researchers tracked the eye movements of
radiologists as they scanned chest images for signs of lung cancer.
[3] They found that even when the radiologists missed a cancerous
lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it. Part of
their brain knew there was something there; it just didn't percolate
all the way up into conscious knowledge. I think many interesting
heretical thoughts are already mostly formed in our minds. If we turn
off our self-censorship temporarily, those will be the first to
emerge.

Time and Space

If we could look into the future it would be obvious which of our
taboos they'd laugh at. We can't do that, but we can do something
almost as good: we can look into the past. Another way to figure out
what we're getting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptable and
is now unthinkable.

Changes between the past and the present sometimes do represent
progress. In a field like physics, if we disagree with past
generations it's because we're right and they're wrong. But this
becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the
hard sciences. By the time you get to social questions, many changes
are just fashion. The age of consent fluctuates like hemlines.

We may imagine that we are a great deal smarter and more virtuous
than past generations, but the more history you read, the less likely
this seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes, not
barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideas reasonable
people could believe.

So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff present ideas
against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4]
Some will be shocking by present standards. Ok, fine; but which might
also be true?

You don't have to look into the past to find big differences. In our
own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok
and what isn't. So you can try diffing other cultures' ideas against
ours as well. (The best way to do that is to visit them.) Any idea
that's considered harmless in a significant percentage of times and
places, and yet is taboo in ours, is a candidate for something we're
mistaken about.

For example, at the high water mark of political correctness in the
early 1990s, Harvard distributed to its faculty and staff a brochure
saying, among other things, that it was inappropriate to compliment a
colleague or student's clothes. No more "nice shirt." I think this
principle is rare among the world's cultures, past or present. There
are probably more where it's considered especially polite to
compliment someone's clothing than where it's considered improper.
Odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one of the taboos a
visitor from the future would have to be careful to avoid if he
happened to set his time machine for Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.
[5]

Prigs

Of course, if they have time machines in the future they'll probably
have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge. This has always
been a fussy place, a town of i dotters and t crossers, where you're
liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same
conversation. And that suggests another way to find taboos. Look for
prigs, and see what's inside their heads.

Kids' heads are repositories of all our taboos. It seems fitting to
us that kids' ideas should be bright and clean. The picture we give
them of the world is not merely simplified, to suit their developing
minds, but sanitized as well, to suit our ideas of what kids ought to
think. [6]

You can see this on a small scale in the matter of dirty words. A lot
of my friends are starting to have children now, and they're all
trying not to use words like "fuck" and "shit" within baby's hearing,
lest baby start using these words too. But these words are part of
the language, and adults use them all the time. So parents are giving
their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not using them. Why
do they do this? Because they don't think it's fitting that kids
should use the whole language. We like children to seem innocent. [7]

Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleading view of
the world. One of the most obvious examples is Santa Claus. We think
it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. I myself think
it's cute for little kids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders,
do we tell them this stuff for their sake, or for ours?

I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probably
inevitable that parents should want to dress up their kids' minds in
cute little baby outfits. I'll probably do it myself. The important
thing for our purposes is that, as a result, a well brought-up
teenage kid's brain is a more or less complete collection of all our
taboos—and in mint condition, because they're untainted by
experience. Whatever we think that will later turn out to be
ridiculous, it's almost certainly inside that head.

How do we get at these ideas? By the following thought experiment.
Imagine a kind of latter-day Conrad character who has worked for a
time as a mercenary in Africa, for a time as a doctor in Nepal, for a
time as the manager of a nightclub in Miami. The specifics don't
matter—just someone who has seen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's
inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved
sixteen year old girl from the suburbs. What does he think that would
shock her? He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies,
present taboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is what
we can't say.

Mechanism

I can think of one more way to figure out what we can't say: to look
at how taboos are created. How do moral fashions arise, and why are
they adopted? If we can understand this mechanism, we may be able to
see it at work in our own time.

Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinary fashions
are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident when everyone
imitates the whim of some influential person. The fashion for
broad-toed shoes in late fifteenth century Europe began because
Charles VIII of France had six toes on one foot. The fashion for the
name Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the name of a
tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more often seem to be
created deliberately. When there's something we can't say, it's often
because some group doesn't want us to.

The prohibition will be strongest when the group is nervous. The
irony of Galileo's situation was that he got in trouble for repeating
Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't. In fact, Copernicus
was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated his book to the pope. But
by Galileo's time the church was in the throes of the
Counter-Reformation and was much more worried about unorthodox ideas.

To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness
and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it. It's
not considered improper to make disparaging remarks about Americans,
or the English. And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce
a taboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to be numerous
or energetic enough to have had their interests promoted to a
lifestyle.

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be
power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand.
That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos,
but weak enough to need them.

Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be cast as
struggles between competing ideas. The English Reformation was at
bottom a struggle for wealth and power, but it ended up being cast as
a struggle to preserve the souls of Englishmen from the corrupting
influence of Rome. It's easier to get people to fight for an idea.
And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have
triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that
side as the victor.

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over
totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was
also one of the winners.

I'm not saying that struggles are never about ideas, just that they
will always be made to seem to be about ideas, whether they are or
not. And just as there is nothing so unfashionable as the last,
discarded fashion, there is nothing so wrong as the principles of the
most recently defeated opponent. Representational art is only now
recovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. [8]

Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sources than
fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seems much the
same. The early adopters will be driven by ambition: self-consciously
cool people who want to distinguish themselves from the common herd.
As the fashion becomes established they'll be joined by a second,
much larger group, driven by fear. [9] This second group adopt the
fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are
afraid of standing out.

So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at the machinery
of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What
groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to
suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up
on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool
person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g.
from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What
are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?

This technique won't find us all the things we can't say. I can think
of some that aren't the result of any recent struggle. Many of our
taboos are rooted deep in the past. But this approach, combined with
the preceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkable ideas.

Why

Some would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberately go
poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?

I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look under rocks as
a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious about anything
that's forbidden. Let me see and decide for myself.

Second, I do it because I don't like the idea of being mistaken. If,
like other eras, we believe things that will later seem ridiculous, I
want to know what they are so that I, at least, can avoid believing
them.

Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good work you
need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain
that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.

Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked,
and no idea is so overlooked as one that's unthinkable. Natural
selection, for example. It's so simple. Why didn't anyone think of it
before? Well, that is all too obvious. Darwin himself was careful to
tiptoe around the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend his
time thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accused him
of being an atheist.

In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able to
question assumptions. The m.o. of scientists, or at least of the good
ones, is precisely that: look for places where conventional wisdom is
broken, and then try to pry apart the cracks and see what's
underneath. That's where new theories come from.

A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional
wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking
for trouble. This should be the m.o. of any scholar, but scientists
seem much more willing to look under rocks. [10]

Why? It could be that the scientists are simply smarter; most
physicists could, if necessary, make it through a PhD program in
French literature, but few professors of French literature could make
it through a PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's
clearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, and this
makes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it's clearer
in the sciences whether theories are true or false, you have to be
smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just a good
politician.)

Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation between
intelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas. This isn't
just because smart people actively work to find holes in conventional
thinking. I think conventions also have less hold over them to start
with. You can see that in the way they dress.

It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off. In any
competitive field, you can win big by seeing things that others
daren't. And in every field there are probably heresies few dare
utter. Within the US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing now
about declining market share. Yet the cause is so obvious that any
observant outsider could explain it in a second: they make bad cars.
And they have for so long that by now the US car brands are
antibrands—something you'd buy a car despite, not because of.
Cadillac stopped being the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I
suspect no one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would
have tried to fix the problem.

Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond
the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching. When you stretch
before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme
than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so
outside the box that they'd make people's hair stand on end, you'll
have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call
innovative.

Pensieri Stretti

When you find something you can't say, what do you do with it? My
advice is, don't say it. Or at least, pick your battles.

Suppose in the future there is a movement to ban the color yellow.
Proposals to paint anything yellow are denounced as "yellowist", as
is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are
tolerated but viewed with suspicion. Suppose you realize there is
nothing wrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll be
denounced as a yellowist too, and you'll find yourself having a lot
of arguments with anti-yellowists. If your aim in life is to
rehabilitate the color yellow, that may be what you want. But if
you're mostly interested in other questions, being labelled as a
yellowist will just be a distraction. Argue with idiots, and you
become an idiot.

The most important thing is to be able to think what you want, not to
say what you want. And if you feel you have to say everything you
think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think
it's better to follow the opposite policy. Draw a sharp line between
your thoughts and your speech. Inside your head, anything is allowed.
Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageous
thoughts I can imagine. But, as in a secret society, nothing that
happens within the building should be told to outsiders. The first
rule of Fight Club is, you do not talk about Fight Club.

When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton,
who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be "i
pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughts and an open
face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell them what you're thinking.
This was wise advice. Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the
Inquisition was a bit restive at that time. But I think the
difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter of
degree. Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned
for them you will at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a
complete distraction.

I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet. When I read about the
harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics [12], or
that pro-Israel groups are "compiling dossiers" on those who speak
out against Israeli human rights abuses [13], or about people being
sued for violating the DMCA [14], part of me wants to say, "All
right, you bastards, bring it on." The problem is, there are so many
things you can't say. If you said them all you'd have no time left
for your real work. You'd have to turn into Noam Chomsky. [15]

The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you
lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to
more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a
few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way
to develop ideas; it's also a good rule of thumb for choosing
friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting
jumped on are also the most interesting to know.

Viso Sciolto?

I don't think we need the viso sciolto so much as the pensieri
stretti. Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don't
agree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, but not to be
too specific about what you disagree with. Zealots will try to draw
you out, but you don't have to answer them. If they try to force you
to treat a question on their terms by asking "are you with us or
against us?" you can always just answer "neither".

Better still, answer "I haven't decided." That's what Larry Summers
did when a group tried to put him in this position. Explaining
himself later, he said "I don't do litmus tests." [16] A lot of the
questions people get hot about are actually quite complicated. There
is no prize for getting the answer quickly.

If the anti-yellowists seem to be getting out of hand and you want to
fight back, there are ways to do it without getting yourself accused
of being a yellowist. Like skirmishers in an ancient army, you want
to avoid directly engaging the main body of the enemy's troops.
Better to harass them with arrows from a distance.

One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level of
abstraction. If you argue against censorship in general, you can
avoid being accused of whatever heresy is contained in the book or
film that someone is trying to censor. You can attack labels with
meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent
discussion. The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the
beginning of the end of political correctness, because it enabled one
to attack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of any of
the specific heresies it sought to suppress.

Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller
undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a
play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials. He never referred
directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What
could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller's
metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the
committee are often described as a "witch-hunt."

Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause,
invariably lack a sense of humor. They can't reply in kind to jokes.
They're as unhappy on the territory of humor as a mounted knight on a
skating rink. Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been
defeated mainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation
as political correctness. "I am glad that I managed to write 'The
Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote, "but looking back I have often
wished I'd had the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what
the situation deserved." [17]

ABQ

A Dutch friend says I should use Holland as an example of a tolerant
society. It's true they have a long tradition of comparative
open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries were the place to go
to say things you couldn't say anywhere else, and this helped to make
the region a center of scholarship and industry (which have been
closely tied for longer than most people realize). Descartes, though
claimed by the French, did much of his thinking in Holland.

And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their
necks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there;
is there really nothing you can't say?

Certainly the fact that they value open-mindedness is no guarantee.
Who thinks they're not open-minded? Our hypothetical prim miss from
the suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she been taught to be?
Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they're pretty
open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are really
wrong. (Some tribes may avoid "wrong" as judgemental, and may instead
use a more neutral sounding euphemism like "negative" or
"destructive".)

When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get the wrong
answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindedness they
don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember,
it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn't work
otherwise. Fashion doesn't seem like fashion to someone in the grip
of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It's only by looking
from a distance that we see oscillations in people's idea of the
right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.

Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of new
fashions makes old fashions easy to see, because they seem so
ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum's swing, the other
end seems especially far away.

To see fashion in your own time, though, requires a conscious effort.
Without time to give you distance, you have to create distance
yourself. Instead of being part of the mob, stand as far away from it
as you can and watch what it's doing. And pay especially close
attention whenever an idea is being suppressed. Web filters for
children and employees often ban sites containing pornography,
violence, and hate speech. What counts as pornography and violence?
And what, exactly, is "hate speech?" This sounds like a phrase out of
1984.

Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a
statement is false, that's the worst thing you can say about it. You
don't need to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, it
shouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements being attacked as
x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values of x and y), whether in
1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign that something is wrong. When you
hear such labels being used, ask why.

Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not just the mob you
need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to be able to watch
your own thoughts from a distance. That's not a radical idea, by the
way; it's the main difference between children and adults. When a
child gets angry because he's tired, he doesn't know what's
happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to
say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don't see why one couldn't, by a
similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral
fashions.

You have to take that extra step if you want to think clearly.  But
it's harder, because now you're working against social customs
instead of with them. Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point
where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to
continue to the point where you can discount society's bad moods.

How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always be
questioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?



Notes

Thanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Robert
Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading drafts of this
essay, and to Lisa Randall, Jackie McDonough, Ryan Stanley and Joel
Rainey for conversations about heresy.  Needless to say they bear no
blame for opinions expressed in it, and especially for opinions not
expressed in it.