January 2004Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself andbeen embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actuallydress like that? We did. And we had no idea howsilly we looked.It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in thesame way the movement of the earth is invisible to allof 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. Violatingmoral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, oreven killed.If you could travel back in a time machine, one thingwould be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watchwhat 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 bigtrouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century,and did get Galileo in big trouble when he saidit — that the earth moves. [1]It seems to be a constant throughout history: In everyperiod, people believed things that were just ridiculous,and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten interrible trouble for saying otherwise.Is our time any different?To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer isalmost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ourswere the first era to get everything just right.It's tantalizing to think we believethings that people in the future will find ridiculous.What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machinehave to be careful not to say?That's what I want to study here.ButI want to do more than just shock everyone withthe heresy du jour. I want to find generalrecipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.The Conformist TestLet's start with a test: Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to expressin front of a group of your peers?If the answer is no,you might want to stop and think about that. If everythingyou believe is something you're supposed to believe, couldthat possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds areyou just think what you're told.The other alternative would be that you independently consideredevery question and came up with the exact same answers thatare now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, becauseyou'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakersdeliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they cantell when someone copies them. If another map has the samemistake, that's very convincing evidence.Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainlycontains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakesprobably didn't do it by accident. It would belike someone claiming they had independently decided in1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how canyou be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything youwere supposed to if you had grown up among the plantationowners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s — oramong the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are youwould have.Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the ideaseemed to be that there was something wrong withyou if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud.This seems backward. Almost certainly, thereis something wrong with you if you don't think thingsyou don't dare say out loud.TroubleWhat can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to lookat 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 leasthave enough chance of being true that the questionshould remain open. But many of thethings people get in trouble for saying probablydo make it over this second, lower threshold. No onegets in trouble for sayingthat 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall.Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, orat worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely tomake anyone mad. The statements that make people mad arethe ones they worry might be believed.I suspect the statements that make people maddestare 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 knewthis would set people thinking.Certainly, as we look back on the past, this rule of thumb workswell. A lot of the statements people got in trouble for seemharmless now. So it's likely that visitors from thefuture would agree with at least some of the statements thatget people in trouble today. Do we have no Galileos? Notlikely.To find them,keep track of opinions that getpeople in trouble, and start asking, could this be true?Ok, it may be heretical (or whatever modern equivalent), butmight it also be true?HeresyThis won't get us all the answers, though. What if no onehappens to have gotten in trouble for a particular idea yet?What if some idea would be so radioactively controversial thatno one would dare express it in public? How can we find these too?Another approach is to follow that word, heresy. In every periodof history, there seem to have been labels that got applied to statements to shoot them down before anyone had a chance to askif they were true or not. "Blasphemy", "sacrilege", and "heresy"were suchlabels for a good part of western history, as in more recent times"indecent", "improper", and "unamerican" have been. By now theselabels 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 politicalconnotations now.But in Germany in 1917 it was a weapon, used by Ludendorff ina purge of those who favored a negotiated peace.At the start of World War II it was usedextensively by Churchill and his supporters to silence theiropponents.In 1940, any argument against Churchill's aggressive policy was "defeatist".Was it right or wrong? Ideally, no one got far enough to askthat.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 disagreewith besides untrue. When a politician says his opponent ismistaken, that's a straightforward criticism, but when heattacks a statement as "divisive" or "racially insensitive"instead of arguing that it's false, we should start payingattention.So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generationswill laugh at is to start with thelabels. Take a label — "sexist", for example — and try to thinkof some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, mightthis be true?Just start listing ideas at random? Yes, because theywon't really be random. The ideas that come to mind firstwill be the most plausible ones. They'll be things you've already noticed but didn't let yourself think.In 1989 some clever researchers trackedthe eye movements of radiologists as they scanned chest images forsigns of lung cancer. [3] They found that even when the radiologistsmissed a cancerous lesion, their eyes had usually paused at the site of it.Part of their brain knew there was something there; it justdidn'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-censorshiptemporarily, those will be the first to emerge.Time and SpaceIf we could look into the future it would be obvious whichof our taboos they'd laugh at.We can't do that, but we can do something almost as good: we canlook into the past. Another way to figure out what we'regetting wrong is to look at what used to be acceptableand is now unthinkable.Changes between the past and the present sometimes do representprogress. In a field like physics,if we disagree with past generations it's because we'reright and they're wrong. But this becomes rapidly less true as you move away from the certainty of the hard sciences. By the timeyou 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 thanpast generations, but the more history you read, the less likelythis seems. People in past times were much like us. Not heroes,not barbarians. Whatever their ideas were, they were ideasreasonable people could believe.So here is another source of interesting heresies. Diff presentideas against those of various past cultures, and see what you get. [4]Some will beshocking 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 ideasof 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 significantpercentage of times and places, and yet is taboo in ours,is a candidate for something we're mistakenabout.For example, at the high water mark of political correctnessin the early 1990s, Harvard distributed to itsfaculty and staff a brochure saying, among other things, that itwas inappropriate to compliment a colleague or student'sclothes. 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 especiallypolite to compliment someone's clothing than where it's consideredimproper.Odds are this is, in a mild form, an example of one ofthe taboos a visitor from the future wouldhave to be careful to avoid if he happened to set his time machine forCambridge, Massachusetts, 1992. [5]PrigsOf course, if they have time machines in the future they'llprobably have a separate reference manual just for Cambridge.This has always been a fussy place, a town of i dotters andt crossers, where you're liable to get both your grammar and your ideas corrected in the same conversation. And thatsuggests 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 ourideas of what kids ought to think. [6]You can see this on a small scale in the matter ofdirty words. A lot of my friends are starting to have childrennow, 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 thesewords are part of the language, and adults use them all thetime. So parents are giving their kids an inaccurate idea of the language by not usingthem. Why do they do this? Because they don't think it'sfitting that kids should use the whole language. We likechildren to seem innocent. [7]Most adults, likewise, deliberately give kids a misleadingview of the world.One of the most obviousexamples is Santa Claus. We think it's cute for little kids tobelieve in Santa Claus. I myself think it's cute for littlekids to believe in Santa Claus. But one wonders, do we tellthem this stuff for their sake, or for ours?I'm not arguing for or against this idea here. It is probablyinevitable 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 moreor less complete collection of all our taboos — and in mintcondition, 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 characterwho has worked for a time as a mercenary in Africa, for a timeas a doctor in Nepal, for a time as the manager of anightclub in Miami. The specifics don't matter — justsomeone who hasseen a lot. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's headwith what's inside the headof a well-behaved sixteen year old girl fromthe suburbs. What does he think thatwould shock her?He knows the world; she knows, or at least embodies, presenttaboos. Subtract one from the other, and the result is whatwe can't say.MechanismI can think of one more way to figure out what we can'tsay: to look at how taboos are created. How do moralfashions arise, and why are they adopted?If we can understand this mechanism, wemay be able to see it at work in our own time.Moral fashions don't seem to be created the way ordinaryfashions are. Ordinary fashions seem to arise by accident wheneveryone imitates the whim of some influential person.The fashion for broad-toed shoes inlate fifteenth century Europe began because Charles VIII ofFrance had six toes on one foot. The fashion for thename Gary began when the actor Frank Cooper adopted the nameof a tough mill town in Indiana. Moral fashions more oftenseem to be created deliberately. When there's something wecan'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 troublefor repeating Copernicus's ideas. Copernicus himself didn't.In fact, Copernicus was a canon of a cathedral, and dedicated hisbook to the pope. But by Galileo's time the church was inthe throes of the Counter-Reformation and was much moreworried about unorthodox ideas.To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway betweenweakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboosto protect it. It's not considered improper tomake disparaging remarks about Americans, or the English.And yet a group has to be powerful enough to enforce ataboo. Coprophiles, as of this writing, don't seem to benumerous or energetic enough to have had theirinterests promoted to a lifestyle.I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out tobe power struggles in which one side only barely hasthe upper hand. That's where you'll find a grouppowerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.Most struggles, whatever they're really about, will be castas struggles between competing ideas.The English Reformation was at bottom a struggle for wealth and power,but it ended up beingcast as a struggle to preserve the soulsof Englishmen from the corrupting influence of Rome.It's easier to get people to fight for an idea.And whichever side wins, theirideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if Godwanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor.We often like to think of World War II as a triumphof freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget thatthe 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 aboutideas, whether they are or not. And just as there is nothingso unfashionable as the last, discarded fashion, there isnothing so wrong as the principles of the most recentlydefeated opponent.Representational art is only nowrecovering from the approval of both Hitler and Stalin. [8]Although moral fashions tend to arise from different sourcesthan fashions in clothing, the mechanism of their adoption seemsmuch the same. The early adopters will be driven by ambition:self-consciously cool people who want to distinguish themselvesfrom the common herd. As the fashion becomes established they'llbe joined by a second, much larger group, driven by fear. [9] Thissecond group adopt the fashion not because they want to standout but because they are afraid of standing out.So if you want to figure out what we can't say, look at themachinery of fashion and try to predict what it would makeunsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and whatideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished byassociation when they ended up on the losing side of a recentstruggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiatehimself 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 ofany recent struggle. Many of our taboos are rooteddeep in the past. But this approach, combined with thepreceding four, will turn up a good number of unthinkableideas.WhySome would ask, why would one want to do this? Why deliberatelygo poking around among nasty, disreputable ideas? Why look under rocks?I do it, first of all, for the same reason I did look underrocks as a kid: plain curiosity. And I'm especially curious aboutanything 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 avoidbelieving them.Third, I do it because it's good for the brain. To do good workyou need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need abrain that's in the habit of going where it's not supposed to.Great work tends to grow out of ideasthat others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that'sunthinkable.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 tiptoearound the implications of his theory. He wanted to spend histime thinking about biology, not arguing with people who accusedhim of being an atheist.In the sciences, especially, it's a great advantage to be able toquestion assumptions.The m.o. of scientists, or at least of thegood ones, is precisely that: look for places whereconventional wisdom is broken, and then try to pry apart thecracks and see what's underneath. That's where new theories comefrom.A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignoreconventional 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 couldbe 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 througha PhD program in physics. Or it could be because it's clearerin the sciences whether theories are true or false, and thismakes scientists bolder. (Or it could be that, because it'sclearer in the sciences whether theories are true or false, youhave to be smart to get jobs as a scientist, rather than just agood politician.)Whatever the reason, there seems a clear correlation betweenintelligence and willingness to consider shocking ideas.This isn't just because smart people actively work to find holes inconventional thinking. I think conventions also haveless hold over them to start with.You can see that in theway they dress.It's not only in the sciences that heresy pays off.In any competitive field, you canwin big by seeing things that others daren't. And in everyfield there are probably heresies few dare utter. Withinthe US car industry there is a lot of hand-wringing nowabout declining market share.Yet the cause is so obvious that any observant outsider couldexplain it in a second: they make bad cars. And they have forso long that by now the US car brands are antibrands — somethingyou'd buy a car despite, not because of. Cadillac stoppedbeing the Cadillac of cars in about 1970. And yet I suspectno one dares say this. [11] Otherwise these companies would havetried to fix the problem.Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantagesbeyond the thoughts themselves. It's like stretching.When you stretch before running, you put your body into positionsmuch more extremethan any it will assume during the run.If you can think thingsso 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 thatpeople call innovative.Pensieri StrettiWhen 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 banthe color yellow. Proposals to paint anything yellow aredenounced as "yellowist", as is anyone suspected of liking the color. People who like orange are tolerated but viewed withsuspicion. Suppose you realize there is nothingwrong with yellow. If you go around saying this, you'll bedenounced 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 maybe what you want.But if you're mostly interested inother questions, being labelled as a yellowist will just bea distraction. Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.The most important thing is to be able to think what youwant, not to say what you want. And if you feel you have tosay everything you think, it may inhibit you from thinking improper thoughts. I think it's better to follow the oppositepolicy. Draw a sharp line between your thoughts and yourspeech. Inside your head, anything is allowed.Within my head I make a point of encouraging the most outrageousthoughts I can imagine. But, as ina secret society, nothing that happens within the buildingshould be told to outsiders. The first rule of FightClub 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 himhis motto should be"i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto." Closed thoughtsand an open face. Smile at everyone, and don't tell themwhat you're thinking. This was wise advice.Milton was an argumentative fellow, and the Inquisitionwas a bit restive at that time. But I think the difference between Milton's situation and ours is only a matter ofdegree.Every era has its heresies, and if you don't get imprisoned for them youwill at least get in enough trouble that it becomes a completedistraction.I admit it seems cowardly to keep quiet.When I read about the harassment to whichthe Scientologists subject their critics [12], or that pro-Israel groupsare "compiling dossiers" on those who speak out against Israelihuman rights abuses [13], or about people being sued forviolating the DMCA [14], part of me wantsto 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. Talkingabout an idea leads to more ideas.So the optimal plan, if you can manage it,is to have a few trustedfriends you can speak openly to. This is not just away to develop ideas; it's also a goodrule of thumb for choosing friends. The peopleyou can say heretical things to without getting jumped onare also the most interesting to know.Viso Sciolto?I don't think we needthe viso sciolto so much as the pensieri stretti.Perhaps the best policy is to make it plain that you don'tagree with whatever zealotry is current in your time, butnot to be too specific about what you disagree with. Zealotswill try to draw you out, but you don't have to answer them.If they try to force you to treat a question on theirterms by asking "are you with us or against us?" you canalways just answer "neither".Better still, answer "I haven't decided."That's what Larry Summersdid when a group tried to puthim in this position. Explaining himself later, he said"I don't do litmus tests." [16]A lot of thequestions 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 andyou want to fight back, there are waysto do it without getting yourself accused of being ayellowist. Like skirmishers inan ancient army, you want to avoid directly engaging themain body of the enemy's troops. Better to harass themwith arrows from a distance.One way to do this is to ratchet the debate up one level ofabstraction.If you argue against censorship in general, you can avoid beingaccused of whatever heresy is containedin the book or film that someone is trying to censor.You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that referto the use of labels to prevent discussion.The spread of the term "political correctness" meant the beginning ofthe end of political correctness, because it enabled one toattack the phenomenon as a whole without being accused of anyof the specific heresies it sought to suppress.Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Millerundermined the House Un-American Activities Committeeby writing a play, "The Crucible," about the Salem witch trials.He never referred directly to the committee and so gave themno way to reply.What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yetMiller's metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activitiesof 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 ofhumor as a mounted knight on a skating rink.Victorian prudishness, for example, seems to have been defeatedmainly by treating it as a joke. Likewise its reincarnation aspolitical correctness."I am glad that Imanaged to write 'The Crucible,'" Arthur Miller wrote,"but looking back I have often wished I'dhad the temperament to do an absurd comedy, which is what thesituation deserved." [17]ABQA Dutch friend saysI should use Holland as an example of a tolerant society.It's true they have a long tradition ofcomparative open-mindedness. For centuries the low countries were the placeto 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 inHolland.And yet, I wonder. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to theirnecks in rules and regulations. There's so much you can't do there;is there really nothingyou 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 fromthe suburbs thinks she's open-minded. Hasn't she beentaught to be? Ask anyone, and they'll say the same thing: they'repretty open-minded, though they draw the line at things that are reallywrong. (Some tribesmay avoid "wrong" asjudgemental, and may instead use a more neutral sounding euphemismlike "negative" or "destructive".)When people are bad at math, they know it, because they get thewrong answers on tests. But when people are bad at open-mindednessthey don't know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite.Remember, it's the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn'twork otherwise. Fashion doesn'tseem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems likethe right thing to do. It's only by looking from a distance thatwe see oscillations in people's idea of the right thing to do, andcan identify them as fashions.Time gives us such distance for free. Indeed, the arrival of newfashions makes old fashions easy to see, because theyseem so ridiculous by contrast. From one end of a pendulum'sswing, 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, standas far away from it as you can and watch what it'sdoing. And pay especially close attention whenever an idea is beingsuppressed. Web filters for children and employees often bansites containing pornography, violence, and hate speech. Whatcounts 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'tneed to say that it's heretical. And if it isn't false, itshouldn't be suppressed. So when you see statements beingattacked as x-ist or y-ic (substitute your current values ofx and y), whether in 1630 or 2030, that's a sure sign thatsomething is wrong. When you hear such labels being used,ask why.Especially if you hear yourself using them. It's not justthe mob you need to learn to watch from a distance. You need to beable to watch your own thoughts from a distance. That's nota radical idea, by the way; it's the main difference betweenchildren and adults. When a child gets angry because he'stired, he doesn't know what's happening. An adult candistance himself enough from thesituation to say "never mind, I'm just tired." I don'tsee why one couldn't, by a similar process, learn torecognize 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 badmoods.How can you see the wave, when you're the water? Always bequestioning. That's the only defence. What can't you say? And why?NotesThanks to Sarah Harlin, Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston,Robert Morris, Eric Raymond and Bob van der Zwaan for reading drafts of thisessay, and to Lisa Randall, Jackie McDonough, Ryan Stanley and Joel Rainey for conversations about heresy.Needless to say they bear no blame for opinionsexpressed in it, and especially for opinions notexpressed in it.
