E.G.

Sarah McBride advocates a politics of grace. In a recent conversation with Ezra Klein, she defines grace like this:

I think grace in politics means, one, creating room for disagreement: assuming good intentions, assuming that the people who are on the other side of an issue from you aren’t automatically hateful, horrible people. I think it means creating some space for disagreement within your own coalition. I think it’s a kindness that just feels so missing from our body politic and our national dialogue.

McBride's view, I take it, is that in recent years, lefty activism, including but not limited to trans activism, has not been graceful enough. I think McBride thinks this gracelessness has had overall bad effects. For example, there seems to have been a rightward shift in American public opinion, which culminated in Trump's second term, and McBride seems to think that lefty gracelessness is part of the reason why that happened.

I do not know whether, or to what extent, I want to disagree with McBride. If she were saying that activists should not make demands, or if she were saying that activists should not try to change the world quickly, then I would disagree. But she does not say those things. What she says, I think, is that activists should aim high, but should sometimes accept slow change as a compromise between fast change and no change. She says:

It is our job to demand “now,” in the face of people who say “never.” But it’s also our job to then not reject the possibility for a better tomorrow as that compromise.

That seems sensible. Broadly, it is hard to disagree with the claim that we should be graceful in our disagreements with others. But I am not sure that we should always be graceful in McBride's sense.

***

I think it may be useful to say that confrontational activism typically, or perhaps always, aims to change people's behavior or beliefs by making them feel ashamed. Thus understood, confrontational activism aims at persuasion, but not rational persuasion, or at least not purely rational persuasion. Shame can make us change our beliefs and behavior, but when it does so, it's not usually through the specific kind of conscious, explicit, measured, unemotional (or minimally emotional) sort of intellectual process that we call rational.

I don't think confrontational activism is usually graceful in McBride's sense. It might be an interesting project to try find an approach to activism that is both graceful and confrontational. But grace, for McBride, is dialogical, rational, generous, kind. And shame, it seems to me, is none of those things. So, if confrontational activism is primarily aimed at shaming others, as I've suggested, it may be practically impossible for it to be graceful as well as confrontational.

Thus understood, two questions about confrontational activism are worth asking. The first question is about efficacy. When and under what circumstances does confrontational activism work (if it works at all)? The second question is moral. Even if confrontational activism works, might it nevertheless be immoral to engage in it?

***

Broadly, I think most people have what might be called a shame circle. If someone is in your shame circle, then it's uncomfortable to learn that they see you, or your beliefs or behavior, as shameful. But if somebody is outside of your shame circle, then it might not matter to you very much, if at all, what they think about you or what you believe and do.

If S1 is in S2's shame circle, and S2 finds out that S1 thinks that something about S2 is shameful, there's generally four ways for S2 to respond:

Option 1: S2 tries to change the feature that S1 regards as shameful.

Option 2: S2 tries to cause S1 to change her mind, i.e., to decide that the supposedly shameful thing isn't actually shameful after all.

Option 3: S2 tries to eject S1 from her shame circle. 

Option 4: S2 just continues on, and accepts the discomfort of shame.

Shame works, let's say, when the person being shamed chooses Option 1. Generally, shame is going to work when and only when (a) the person doing the shaming is in the shame circle of the person being shamed, and (b) Option 1 is the easiest, or least costly, or most attractive, of the four options.

Condition (a) puts limits on the efficacy of online shaming. Strangers on the internet, especially anonymous ones, probably aren't in your shame circle. Learning that they think that something about you is shameful might be little different from learning that Martians think that something about you is shameful.

When online shaming does work, I think it usually works in the following roundabout way. If you find out that a lot of people on the internet regard X as shameful, this may lead you to conclude, or to suspect, that some of the people you've got close relationships with—people who are probably in your shame circle—might well feel the same way. And then you might feel the weight of shame in regard to X, even if none of the people who are actually in your shame circle have ever given you any direct indication that they think X is shameful.

So, I think, online shaming can work, in the roundabout way I've just outlined. But I think shaming is more reliably efficacious when it takes a direct route. This is what happens, or can happen, in cases where the shamer and the shamee have some sort of real relationship to one another. If you learn that your friend, or your neighbor, or your colleague, or your family member regards X as shameful, this can be profoundly affecting, I think. That's because I think that, as a very rough psychological approximation, S2 is in S1's shame circle if and only if S2 and S1 have some sort of a real relationship with one another.

But even when the shamer is someone you've got a relationship with, shame is not guaranteed to work. Suppose you learn that someone you regard as a dear friend, someone who is definitely in your shame circle, thinks your job is shameful. If you're a typical person for whom changing to a new job is going to be a huge ordeal, then you're unlikely to choose Option 1 (quit your job). You're more likely to try Option 2 (attempt to change your friend's mind) or Option 3 (eject them from your shame circle, which might require dissolving the friendship) or Option 4 (simply accept the uncomfortable feeling of being shamed).

***

So, generally speaking, I think shame is most likely to be efficacious in cases where two conditions are satisfied:

(I) The relationship condition: Shamer and shamee have some kind of real relationship, such that the shamer is in the shamee's shame circle.

(II) The minimal cost condition: The shame is directed at a belief or behavior that the shamee can change relatively easily and at little personal cost.

An example of something that meets condition (II) is the use of people's preferred pronouns. For most people, getting used to using people's preferred pronouns does not require that much effort. And so it might be expected that, in general, when people learn that some of the people in their shame circle think that refusal to use preferred pronouns is shameful, they will just go ahead and put in the effort to use preferred pronouns.

And I suspect that this is why the movement to get people to use preferred pronouns has been as successful as it has been. And it seems to me that it has indeed been very successful in a surprisingly short period of time. I have noticed that even some prominent Trumpists, such as JD Vance, observe the practice.

***

So I think confrontational activism, understood as having the aim of compelling social change through the use of shame, can work. But there is a further question about whether confrontational activism might be morally dubious or problematic.

I see four moral objections that can be made to shame-based, confrontational activism.

The grace objection. It might be argued that treating others with McBride-style grace is, in general, morally required, or is at least morally required except in dire circumstances. If so, then to the extent that confrontational activism is ungraceful, it's morally objectionable.

The manipulation objection. Many people think that it's objectionably manipulative to try to get people to change their beliefs or behaviors through non-rational processes. On this view, we owe it to one another to rely solely on rational techniques of persuasion in our attempts to change one another's minds or behavior. This is a standard line of moral critique of certain techniques of advertising, for instance. The thought is that advertising that relies on non-rational processes (e.g., subliminal associations between a car for sale and sexual desire) is manipulative and therefore wrong. And shame, I've suggested, affects us in ways that are not rational, or not fully rational. So it might be thought that confrontational activism is objectionably manipulative in much the same way as advertising is or can be.

The backfire objection. This, I think, is McBride's main concern, or one of her main concerns. The idea here might be that, even when confrontational activism works, in the narrow sense that it causes people to change their beliefs and behavior, it may have further ill effects. For instance, it seems that people tend to become disoriented, angry, and confused when they notice a shift in what is regarded as shameful in their communities. And this might motivate them to cast about in search of ways to turn back the clock. This seems like a way to understand the psychological impetus behind something like MAGA.

The social cost objection. Shame, I've suggested, is most efficacious when it occurs in the context of relationships. But shame in that context can also quite obviously be damaging to relationships. Return to the case I mentioned above, where S2 and S1 are friends, and then S2 lets S1 know that S2 regards S1's job as shameful, and this leads to the dissolution of their friendship. Broadly, there is some significant degree of tension between maintaining and strengthening our relationships with one another, on the one hand, and trying to create social change through the use of shame, on the other hand. This might be a basis for a moral critique of confrontational activism, especially if our relationships with one another are thought to be highly morally valuable, intrinsically or extrinsically.

I've mentioned these objections, not because I think they're decisive, but because I think they are the kinds of objections that defenders of confrontational activism will need to say something about.

My overall view, which I won't try to defend in this post, might be something like this. There are many contexts where being graceful in McBride's sense is just what's called for. And there are many contexts where shame is not called for, precisely because it effects persuasion through non-rational means. For example, no one should be trying to shame anyone in a philosophy classroom. But I think there are many other contexts where shaming people can be both efficacious and morally defensible.