Swiss politician Fabian Molina from the Social Democrats did not want to share a stage with Kati Schepis and cancelled his participation in a public event. Schepis, a pharmaceutical scientist, had been vocal about the public disinformation campaign regarding Covid vaccines. Eminent publicist Roger de Weck was afraid of a joint discussion event with political scientist and critic of technocratic authoritarianism Ulrike Guérot. He stayed away from the event as a precaution. And at a panel discussion, a climate activist got upset about the critical science journalist Axel Bojanowski: "I can't believe he's allowed to be here at all!”
(Anti)moral puritanism is booming. Who, after all, wants to play with next door’s trash kids? The exclusion procedure under the title of "inclusion", as well as the opinion monism christened "diversity" are based on a self-insurance practice that is as superficial as it is delusional. Predominantly, it is supposed to eclipse any reasonable speech - and that means speech based on enunciation and refutation – in the name of the "optics". With disarming loyal and nonetheless brash stupidity, the question whether person X may not be “detrimental to the optics” of a certain public event pops up at HR meetings in reliable, and perhaps increasing, frequency.
What is remarkable is the increasing internalisation of this logic even in circles that advocate Free Speech. Anyone who joins free speech activism today, for example, to further the aims of a call or declaration against digital censorship, is met with resistance when they mention names like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan or even J.K. Rowling as possible signatories. These are naturally viewed as being "too divisive" or "controversial". As if this censorship of the secondary order were not irrational enough, the initiators instead bring in celebrities who have attracted attention with authoritarian, not exactly Free Speech-friendly comments on Covid policy, but who could score points with an imagined left-liberal audience – at least according to the logic of some anti-censorship activists. The anticipatory and deeply contradictory obedience to a clientele that is simultaneously criticised with the appeal is ignored. One openly argues with the "optics" - after all, one does not want to attract unpleasant attention. One is considerate to the point of self-refutation.
The only astonishing aspect of it is the aristocratic indignation when a liberal impostor – in absolute accordance with his or her credentials - actually rejects their participation in a Free Speech movement. “We didn’t see this coming!”. It is true when they say there is nothing like real life satire.
And yet, that is what is fatal thing about camp thinking: the consideration of an ominous third party who never actually appears, but who has always ordered the discourse as a moral authority – be it the superego, the state, the law, God, or "the people". The surrender of moral authority to third parties has almost always been the symptom of the anti-civilising energies that turn people into Eichmanns (and -women). The suspension of the individual's own power of judgement – of conscience – has become an integral part of the threatening mentality of censorship and contact guilt. In the process, the purely visual, personal composition of declarations, talk shows, or panel discussions becomes the yardstick of society’s self-insurance practice, not the argument of the participants. Ad hominem is no longer a logical fallacy, but the means of choice for discrediting competitors in the marketplace of ideas, in order to maintain the appearance of one's own superiority. Not for nothing, aesthetics and optics are disciplines of sensual appearance, not of knowledge or cognition.
The fine-tuned separation of visually disagreeable from consensus actors is never about the content of a statement or even about divergent beliefs. It is about determining who gets to enjoy benefits and who does not. It is about power. Those who follow trans or climate activism, are "vaccinated", naturally refer to gender and race in casual conversations about the weather, and vote for the correct (red or Green) party have nothing to fear. But not everyone is allowed to, not everyone can participate. After all, resources are scarce. This starts with the disciplinary proceedings against the non-gendering university professor and ends with the freezing of the accounts of Canadian truckers, i.e., the real destruction of livelihoods. One's ears prick up as soon as someone leaves the circumference of sayable things, because there might be a vacancy there.
Since it is not about competing convictions and certainly not about competing content, Mr Molina can call the pharmacist and long-time pharmaceutical employee Kati Schepis an "extremist Covid denier" without any evidence. It is enough and obvious to all that the optics alone count. Those who are under the protection of state ideology do not have to argue. The fact that politics has now detached itself from all content must be seen as liberating by authoritarian public servants.
For everyone else, the new optics, tailored solely to maintaining the power of the elites, can be existentially threatening.
[A version of this text can be found in the October 2023 issue of Schweizer Monat.]
Cover: Hall and Oates - “Private Eyes” (video still, 1982).
I think it's important to also throw in the ideas of moral purity, moral pollution and moral contagion.
The Social Justice project is founded on a newfangled and sharp-edged Puritanical morality with a Platonic Victim at the center of our moral universe—with of course the members of a "marginalized group" spotless and centered, their allies in the next circle, and then the wicked and the damned thrust into the outer darkness.
If you can only claim ally status you are too far from the safe center and dangerously close to the circle of the damned, one wrong word or phrase, one wrong photo (what if someone snaps you in the same frame with a famous apostate!?), then you may be banished from your chosen community for carrying an unsafe viral load of "Hate".
(And I know Climate/Covid aren't exactly at the heart of Social Justice, but they have still somehow been incorporated into the belief system and work as another way to sort society into Good/Evil etc.)
Always so clear and relentless.
That 5th paragraph delivered it for me.