Alan Jacobs

Last night when proofreading my newsletter, I saw that I had misnamed the founder of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra. (Instead of Benjamin, I wrote Franklin – obvious how that brain fart happened.) I was so pleased to have corrected myself in time … but I forgot to hit Save. Grrrrrrr.

Is our society’s Overton window unresizeable?

This week I did a one-topic newsletter, on Scott Joplin. I rarely do these – they don’t feel like a great fit for the medium – but I’d like to do more.

Does any society ever grow more tolerant? That is: Does acceptance of a position or a group hitherto untolerated ever come without the rejection of another position or group previously tolerated?

My suspicion is that the Overton window of any given place and time can’t be resized, it can only be moved. That is, there’s a politico-ethical equivalent of Dunbar’s number, a relatively fixed range of positions that at any one time can be accepted as potentially valid, or at least not-to-be-extirpated. Greater inclusion, if my suspicion is correct, never happens: an extension of toleration in one direction requires a constriction of toleration in the other, in order to avoid social chaos.

I’m sure I’m not the first to say this. But I think it’s important.

Another Sherman Alexie comment: “Self-censorship among writers is a real and serious problem in this era. To believe otherwise either means you live and work in a very small circle of like-minded friends or that you think this self-censorship is a good thing.” Surely people who organize social-media campaigns against wrongthink do indeed believe that self-censorship is a good thing. The point of such campaigns is less to punish already-published writing than to intimidate writers going forward. If writers self-censor for fear of offending someone, that’s precisely the goal of the intimidators.

Sherman Alexie’s comment that “the right wing are censorship vikings and the left wing are censorship ninjas” is accurate and useful.