Curious. Is there any data about what older generations thought about this issue when they were the same age of gen z respondents today? Like was something like this asked 20 years ago? That would help rule out age -- independent of generation -- as being a contributing factor.
I was going to make this exact comment. Age is one of the single biggest predictors of violent behavior full stop, not just ideologically motivated violence. The 18 to 29 age demographic pretty reliably does more than it's expected share of violence:
A potential hypothesis is an extension of Mary Harrington's take on support for trans activism amongst gen z; to paraphrase "you can reskin your digital avatar, so why not your meat avatar?"
To extend this to support for political violence amongst gen z: "you can agitate to get someone's account banned/deleted online, so why not agitate to get someone "deleted" in real life?"
Although as the porr fellow who was debating Charlie Kirk at the moment of his assassination found out, it's not at all the same thing.
I think this is an excellent point. Whether or not the physical dissociation imposed by media absorption is on its own the cause of these things, it is absolutely a major contributor and accelerator. Extending it a bit further in terms of "speech" specifically, it's long been obvious that people will be vitriolic, tribal, and quick to resort to ad hominems when they are debating on a screen in a way they would not if they were talking face to face. On a screen, you're not engaging with another human really, but with an abstraction, with a human reduced to a few opinions that you dislike. So with Gen Z you have a generation whose whole development into adulthood has been digitized, gamified, and disembodied, and their exposure to "debate" or "discourse" is depersonalized.
As people live more and more in computer games and online, I think this is a take that deserves consideration.
Did people seek transition long before this was an issue? Definitely. Are more people seeking transition now because of this? Perhaps. This may be a separate issue from the violence issue.
Also worth noting is the shifting threshold for what is considered violence.
Support for political violence must be considered TABOO! It should be socially disqualifying. People should be shamed and ostracized for it. The people who got fired for celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder deserved to get fired. And I assume FIRE would not defend them, right?
FIRE didn't defend anybody who celebrated Kirk getting killed. I bet they've never defended anybody who got fired for expressing explicit and overt, hateful bigotry towards a group of people, or who endorsed violence. Those are not just TABOO, but every employer could legally fire those people for violating their codes of conduct against discrimination or creating an unsafe workplace.
If you or they have examples that prove otherwise, I'd like to see them. If not, then I think this shows that by not defending those people, even FIRE tacitly admits that some speech is deserving of social consequences, which can apply to government employees as well.
Doesn't FIRE publish all the cases that they take on? If somebody got fired for celebrating Kirk's murder and FIRE was going to take it on, wouldn't they have done so already?
I think you could go further back and see that my theory holds true through all of their work. They will take on cases they can win. And they likely can't win cases where somebody was fired for explicit and overt, hateful bigotry and/or the endorsement of violence.
For what it's worth, I've long been an admirer of FIRE and Greg. I just think that they've failed to acknowledge the role of social consequences to punish what I call our 'universal moral taboos' against overt, hateful bigotry. And I think this causes a tremendous amount of harm as it opens up a vacuum for bigots to operate in with impunity.
Some of this came up in the Q&A at the last FIRE event I was at in Boston. Lukianoff's answer is that FIRE needs to retain the focus on its mission, partly because loss of focus is something that destroys a lot of non-profits. Then he listed a few organizations that are doing other work related to creating a stable society where free speech is one of the components (Braver Angels is the only one I remember - it stuck in my head 'cuz I donate to Braver Angels). Mr. Lukianoff is not unaware of the issue.
I think FIRE's tag line "Free speech makes free people" is ridiculous. I've said in public multiple times that free speech is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having a free people. I'm not sure what the other conditions are, but having a society that's civil has to be near the top of the list.
I would like to make dehumanization a taboo, because it so often leads to people dying because they're perceived to be less than human. Unfortunately, the urge to dehumanize seems to be very human.
Regarding Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, yeah, that's messy. Exactly where do you draw the line? Again, it's very human to be intolerant of some things and some people to some degree. I don't know where that line is, but I do feel like we should avoid dehumanizing the dehumanizers - dehumanizing the dehumanizers leads to a rapid downward spiral.
Regarding rights in general, lots of countries and organizations have declarations of rights that aren't worth the paper they're written on. Simone Weil makes the excellent point that rights are nothing without the societal structure to support them. I'm not sure I want to go with her solution. . .but creating a society that supports the enforcement of rights sounds like an important pre-condition if people want rights and want to talk about rights without that talk being hollow.
Dichotomous thinking is another common human habit that's not always constructive. Partly it results from the structure of language - language without distinction conveys no meaning. Many people are hung up on the dichotomy of supporting Jewish Israelis vs supporting Palestinians. I think this is some of what drives the current wave of antisemitism (although antisemitism is probably at least a couple of millennia old and a constant undercurrent). If people need a dichotomy to hold onto, perhaps Israelis-and-Palestinians-looking-for-a-peaceful-solution vs Israelis-and-Palestinians-willing-to-fight-to-the-bitter-end is a more constructive dichotomy. The Onion (as is often the case) has an excellent commentary on this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9qErRFYVX64
1. I'm sorry but that's a cop-out by Greg. FIRE does not need to change their focus. They already choose to not take on certain cases to defend people who were fired for certain speech. They could just make it clear that there are speech lines that if crossed, while they should not face any legal consequences, they can result in termination even for government employees. And Greg himself can make clear that his crusade against "cancel culture" (which I generally support) also has limits.
2. I do not think we need to dehumanize the dehumanizers. We just need to say they and their beliefs have no place in our polite society (or our mainstream politics).
3. I do not think we can define a precise line, but I have created principles for restoring these moral taboos (which includes an open door for those that recant their hatred), a guide to define them, and a framework for assessing harmful speech to determine how we should address those who potentially cross that line. These can all be found in my 3-part guide: https://elevin11.substack.com/p/lawful-but-awful-a-guide-to-moral
4. While we can't define that precise line, and thus will always have difficulty gaining universal agreement on lots of speech that is near that line in the grey area, there are no shortage of examples that are unequivocally hateful and eliminationist in their bigotry and pretty much everyone would agree are socially unacceptable. If all we do is ensure that this most vile hatred is ostracized out of polite society, but still end up with the subtler and coded bigotry espoused, we will still be infinitely better off than we are today where that overt hatred is openly expressed without consequence.
Footnote 3 feels like a buried admission of a massive methodological issue.... "the effect is so strong that those changes seem unlikely to override it anyway." Says who? What theory or evidence do you have to back that? It seems completely logical to me that people grow less extreme in their views on this topic as they mature and experience the ebbs and flows of political power.
Yes, this is a very good point. If you look at crime, every generation is the most criminal generation when they are young, and then becomes less criminal over time, succeeded by the younger generation. If you think of accepting violence as a variation of criminal activity, then it appears this could be an age effect rather than a generation effect, and it's unfortunate that this essay conflates the two.
It is not clear to me that there is a common meaning of the word "violence" being used across the respondents here. Is heckling violence? What about refusing to use somebody's stated pronouns? What about using sarcasm in a debate? Or racial slurs? Did the survey address this potential problem?
That's because same young liberals were raised in an environment devoid of any meaningful risk to the freedoms and privileges they grew up with (and have taken for granted). It's apparently human nature to truly appreciate something when it's gone.
It will be a useful research if we can establish the cause of this need to censor others one disagrees with. What are variables at play here? I hope you do the research and write an article on this.
I am starting up a new program I call "Growing Each Other Up: Linkages For Life Program for Intergenerational Co-Mentoring".
I am bringing together "Youngers" (Erikson Stage 5, 12-18 & Stage 6, 18-40) with “Olders” (Erikson Stage 7, 40-65 & Stage 8, 65+) to meet as equals for a guided heartfelt conversation online or in person to enact the “The Cure of Care”.
We know that Loneliness and Isolation is shortening the lives of as many people as obesity and smoking, so my intention is to facilitate these intimate and equal exchanges between Youngers and Olders to establish securely attached adults who will not need to censor others.
I think the label very liberal is bundling a lot. Could pool ANTIFA with fans of John Stuart Mill. Very conservative on the other hand is a label frequently avoided even by people who it arguably might fit.
It’s the public schools, they don’t allow ideological diversity, so the kids are never taught to debate politely and agree to disagree.
Up through the 90’s the schools still focused more on critical thinking and open debate. They switched to memorizing for standardized tests, and now most young people can only regurgitate other’s ideas.
They may grow out of it a bit but it really is early training.
Not to be rude, but I'll give this more consideration when organized religion has decoupled itself from violence. That said, I think violent action comes from those moments when the lizard brain wins out over the monkey brain - people will often rationalize this violence as stemming from religion or politics, etc., but it my mind it just stems from our evolutionary past. And, as Hume said, the rationalization follows the decision, it does not precede it.
Curious. Is there any data about what older generations thought about this issue when they were the same age of gen z respondents today? Like was something like this asked 20 years ago? That would help rule out age -- independent of generation -- as being a contributing factor.
I was going to make this exact comment. Age is one of the single biggest predictors of violent behavior full stop, not just ideologically motivated violence. The 18 to 29 age demographic pretty reliably does more than it's expected share of violence:
https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/violent-incidents-victim-and-offender-age-2023?utm_source=perplexity
People are quick to try and make this a generational thing, but I suspect it's more about human nature and developing brains
A potential hypothesis is an extension of Mary Harrington's take on support for trans activism amongst gen z; to paraphrase "you can reskin your digital avatar, so why not your meat avatar?"
To extend this to support for political violence amongst gen z: "you can agitate to get someone's account banned/deleted online, so why not agitate to get someone "deleted" in real life?"
Although as the porr fellow who was debating Charlie Kirk at the moment of his assassination found out, it's not at all the same thing.
I think this is an excellent point. Whether or not the physical dissociation imposed by media absorption is on its own the cause of these things, it is absolutely a major contributor and accelerator. Extending it a bit further in terms of "speech" specifically, it's long been obvious that people will be vitriolic, tribal, and quick to resort to ad hominems when they are debating on a screen in a way they would not if they were talking face to face. On a screen, you're not engaging with another human really, but with an abstraction, with a human reduced to a few opinions that you dislike. So with Gen Z you have a generation whose whole development into adulthood has been digitized, gamified, and disembodied, and their exposure to "debate" or "discourse" is depersonalized.
As people live more and more in computer games and online, I think this is a take that deserves consideration.
Did people seek transition long before this was an issue? Definitely. Are more people seeking transition now because of this? Perhaps. This may be a separate issue from the violence issue.
Also worth noting is the shifting threshold for what is considered violence.
Support for political violence must be considered TABOO! It should be socially disqualifying. People should be shamed and ostracized for it. The people who got fired for celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder deserved to get fired. And I assume FIRE would not defend them, right?
Having followed FIRE for a few years, I would question this assumption. And I think FIRE is on the correct side of this, as a first amendment issue.
FIRE didn't defend anybody who celebrated Kirk getting killed. I bet they've never defended anybody who got fired for expressing explicit and overt, hateful bigotry towards a group of people, or who endorsed violence. Those are not just TABOO, but every employer could legally fire those people for violating their codes of conduct against discrimination or creating an unsafe workplace.
If you or they have examples that prove otherwise, I'd like to see them. If not, then I think this shows that by not defending those people, even FIRE tacitly admits that some speech is deserving of social consequences, which can apply to government employees as well.
Since these cases are recent, they will take time to work their way through the court system. Then we will have our answer.
Doesn't FIRE publish all the cases that they take on? If somebody got fired for celebrating Kirk's murder and FIRE was going to take it on, wouldn't they have done so already?
I think you could go further back and see that my theory holds true through all of their work. They will take on cases they can win. And they likely can't win cases where somebody was fired for explicit and overt, hateful bigotry and/or the endorsement of violence.
For what it's worth, I've long been an admirer of FIRE and Greg. I just think that they've failed to acknowledge the role of social consequences to punish what I call our 'universal moral taboos' against overt, hateful bigotry. And I think this causes a tremendous amount of harm as it opens up a vacuum for bigots to operate in with impunity.
If you're curious, I laid out my case here (which they've yet to respond to): https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-more-speech/
Having now read The Dangerous Myth. . .
Some of this came up in the Q&A at the last FIRE event I was at in Boston. Lukianoff's answer is that FIRE needs to retain the focus on its mission, partly because loss of focus is something that destroys a lot of non-profits. Then he listed a few organizations that are doing other work related to creating a stable society where free speech is one of the components (Braver Angels is the only one I remember - it stuck in my head 'cuz I donate to Braver Angels). Mr. Lukianoff is not unaware of the issue.
I think FIRE's tag line "Free speech makes free people" is ridiculous. I've said in public multiple times that free speech is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having a free people. I'm not sure what the other conditions are, but having a society that's civil has to be near the top of the list.
I would like to make dehumanization a taboo, because it so often leads to people dying because they're perceived to be less than human. Unfortunately, the urge to dehumanize seems to be very human.
Regarding Popper's Paradox of Tolerance, yeah, that's messy. Exactly where do you draw the line? Again, it's very human to be intolerant of some things and some people to some degree. I don't know where that line is, but I do feel like we should avoid dehumanizing the dehumanizers - dehumanizing the dehumanizers leads to a rapid downward spiral.
Regarding rights in general, lots of countries and organizations have declarations of rights that aren't worth the paper they're written on. Simone Weil makes the excellent point that rights are nothing without the societal structure to support them. I'm not sure I want to go with her solution. . .but creating a society that supports the enforcement of rights sounds like an important pre-condition if people want rights and want to talk about rights without that talk being hollow.
I think Adam Smith's the-other-within is very valuable concept and one we should strive to cultivate. I read an excellent piece on it here https://hashiloach-org-il.translate.goog/the-fellow-in-the-chest/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp (excellent even in machine translation. Probably event better in the original).
Dichotomous thinking is another common human habit that's not always constructive. Partly it results from the structure of language - language without distinction conveys no meaning. Many people are hung up on the dichotomy of supporting Jewish Israelis vs supporting Palestinians. I think this is some of what drives the current wave of antisemitism (although antisemitism is probably at least a couple of millennia old and a constant undercurrent). If people need a dichotomy to hold onto, perhaps Israelis-and-Palestinians-looking-for-a-peaceful-solution vs Israelis-and-Palestinians-willing-to-fight-to-the-bitter-end is a more constructive dichotomy. The Onion (as is often the case) has an excellent commentary on this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/9qErRFYVX64
Thanks for sharing! I'll share a few thoughts:
1. I'm sorry but that's a cop-out by Greg. FIRE does not need to change their focus. They already choose to not take on certain cases to defend people who were fired for certain speech. They could just make it clear that there are speech lines that if crossed, while they should not face any legal consequences, they can result in termination even for government employees. And Greg himself can make clear that his crusade against "cancel culture" (which I generally support) also has limits.
2. I do not think we need to dehumanize the dehumanizers. We just need to say they and their beliefs have no place in our polite society (or our mainstream politics).
3. I do not think we can define a precise line, but I have created principles for restoring these moral taboos (which includes an open door for those that recant their hatred), a guide to define them, and a framework for assessing harmful speech to determine how we should address those who potentially cross that line. These can all be found in my 3-part guide: https://elevin11.substack.com/p/lawful-but-awful-a-guide-to-moral
4. While we can't define that precise line, and thus will always have difficulty gaining universal agreement on lots of speech that is near that line in the grey area, there are no shortage of examples that are unequivocally hateful and eliminationist in their bigotry and pretty much everyone would agree are socially unacceptable. If all we do is ensure that this most vile hatred is ostracized out of polite society, but still end up with the subtler and coded bigotry espoused, we will still be infinitely better off than we are today where that overt hatred is openly expressed without consequence.
Footnote 3 feels like a buried admission of a massive methodological issue.... "the effect is so strong that those changes seem unlikely to override it anyway." Says who? What theory or evidence do you have to back that? It seems completely logical to me that people grow less extreme in their views on this topic as they mature and experience the ebbs and flows of political power.
Yes, this is a very good point. If you look at crime, every generation is the most criminal generation when they are young, and then becomes less criminal over time, succeeded by the younger generation. If you think of accepting violence as a variation of criminal activity, then it appears this could be an age effect rather than a generation effect, and it's unfortunate that this essay conflates the two.
Perspective from experience and restraint rooted in myelination (partly).
It is not clear to me that there is a common meaning of the word "violence" being used across the respondents here. Is heckling violence? What about refusing to use somebody's stated pronouns? What about using sarcasm in a debate? Or racial slurs? Did the survey address this potential problem?
That's because same young liberals were raised in an environment devoid of any meaningful risk to the freedoms and privileges they grew up with (and have taken for granted). It's apparently human nature to truly appreciate something when it's gone.
Why do you assume that Gen Z's higher likelihood of endorsing g violence sometimes is accounted for oy by the left? No reason to think so.
Thanks for an important article.
It will be a useful research if we can establish the cause of this need to censor others one disagrees with. What are variables at play here? I hope you do the research and write an article on this.
I am starting up a new program I call "Growing Each Other Up: Linkages For Life Program for Intergenerational Co-Mentoring".
I am bringing together "Youngers" (Erikson Stage 5, 12-18 & Stage 6, 18-40) with “Olders” (Erikson Stage 7, 40-65 & Stage 8, 65+) to meet as equals for a guided heartfelt conversation online or in person to enact the “The Cure of Care”.
We know that Loneliness and Isolation is shortening the lives of as many people as obesity and smoking, so my intention is to facilitate these intimate and equal exchanges between Youngers and Olders to establish securely attached adults who will not need to censor others.
For those interested email me, Jack: themesofjack@gmail.com
“We heal ourselves by giving others what we most need.” Sherry Turkle
I think the label very liberal is bundling a lot. Could pool ANTIFA with fans of John Stuart Mill. Very conservative on the other hand is a label frequently avoided even by people who it arguably might fit.
It’s the public schools, they don’t allow ideological diversity, so the kids are never taught to debate politely and agree to disagree.
Up through the 90’s the schools still focused more on critical thinking and open debate. They switched to memorizing for standardized tests, and now most young people can only regurgitate other’s ideas.
They may grow out of it a bit but it really is early training.
Each generation has increasingly decoupled itself from religion and has become more secularized. The outcome shouldn't surprise us.
Not to be rude, but I'll give this more consideration when organized religion has decoupled itself from violence. That said, I think violent action comes from those moments when the lizard brain wins out over the monkey brain - people will often rationalize this violence as stemming from religion or politics, etc., but it my mind it just stems from our evolutionary past. And, as Hume said, the rationalization follows the decision, it does not precede it.
Yeah religion has never endorsed violence to silence ideas.