Switch the [ Richard Armitage ] off ?

So, yeah. I still am feeling no need to watch the first part of series 3 of Hannibal. I may have a have a lot of time on my hands shortly.

If you don’t want to sound preachy, Mr. Armitage, stop preaching. Since you report about yourself that you delete most of what you say, anyway.

There are so many self-contradictions in what you said that I am going to struggle to avoid tu quoque. We’ll see how it goes.

I understand what you to do for a living to be exploring different identities on behalf of audiences. As you put it a few days ago, “Imagining.” Okay. So that’s apparently different than what people do when they develop an online identity by means of a pseudonym. It would be great if you could clarify exactly what that difference is. The point about bullying isn’t creating an identity or an alternative one — even people who aren’t online create their identities. We might call that [cough] one of the fundamental activities of the human condition, one of the basic outcomes of consciousness: exploring our own identities. It’s one reason we watch drama and pay people like you — because actors mirror the human condition and we are permitted in watching to explore the character’s identity through our empathy with him (or lack of same).

You write that we should express our opinions via art. But art isn’t just something that people like you do, who are paid for it, or which belongs exclusively to the names we all know as great artists. It’s something everyone of us does all the time. It’s something that we do even when we write on line. Do you think that those of us who write online don’t think about which words to use, how to justify our opinions, how to express best what we feel so that others understand? That is art. It demands freedom of thought and expression. Most importantly, it demands freedom of conscience even when others don’t understand why we are saying what we are saying or doing what we are doing, or disapprove of these — a point that Arthur Miller was trying to get across in The Crucible. You are free to play a serial killer; fans are free to speak about and write about you in the communities we build. A conversation, too, is a kind of art, and for centuries people gave advice about it. Psychological speculation on motive is also an art. And a human right. No matter who does it. Even if I don’t like to read it when it’s done about me.

I know you don’t recognize this distinction, but there’s a difference between anonymity and pseudonymity. A pseudonym groups statements around a particular name that is not one’s real name; anonymity, in contrast, means that we pretend to assign no identity to what we say. Anonymity has its place, I think, even though it is more often abused than used effectively. Pseudonymity is a creative technique. People can use pseudonyms to hurt each other, yes, but people can also use cars to hurt each other. That’s no reason for responsible people not to drive them. Pseudonyms are actual identities — including artistic ones. The Brontë sisters? They all published using pseudonyms. Servetus is also a coherent identity, similar to, but not quite the same, as the person who writes Servetus. If you don’t believe that, check out how betrayed blog readers feel when Servetus does something that’s not in their picture of her, or says something they believe she should not say.

I am skeptical that you think in much detail about the effect your words cause when they’re not causing us to swoon, about the effect they have on us when we disagree with each other, which is a normal human reaction, and not, as you imply in these piece and the last one, something to be avoided and suppressed. Even now fans of yours who don’t use pseuds on Twitter are congratulating themselves over it, because you approve of that, and the next time there’s a problem, the ones who do use pseuds will inevitably be targeted because “Richard thinks people who uses pseuds are bullies.” You were the one who charged your reader to think about “the destination of our words” and “the fuel propelling it.” Nothing you said today was ill meant — but it will still be used by some people who read it to police others.

This is what it is. No one who speaks can ultimately control the destination or the effect of his or her words. There’s a lot you can do — express yourself more precisely, for instance — to control what you say or write. But you can never control (or even anticipate all the possibilities) of how what you say will be understood. If that were the condition for speech, that no speech could ever hurt anyone, even accidentally, no one would ever speak.

And this, too, was a kind of breathtaking misunderstanding of what speech is or why people insist on free speech protections:

And even as I write this I know that there will be those who just say “No, I have the right to speak about what I like, how I like and to who I like, I have the right to be a bully if I wish”

Having the right to speak about what one likes is not the same as having the right to be a bully. You still haven’t defined cyberbullying, but I really wonder what you know about history. It’s stunning that you think that people who disagree are doing it just to be contrary:

It could be anger, it could be hatred. Sometimes it’s provocation, sarcasm, humor. Sometimes it’s just to be contrary to what everyone else is saying.

Do you know why people are sarcastic? Have you thought about why they express themselves via humor as opposed to using another trope? Every rhetorical strategy, every genre, has its own purpose.

Sure, there are contrarians in the world and people who write chiefly to anger others. But that’s not why those of us who defend free speech do so. We do so because, in the market of possibilities, despite all of the worthless stuff out there, which you point out and I concede, there are still contrary opinions that are worth articulating, considering, expressing, defending.

That goes as much for the world of entertainment and acting as it does for politics and society. Does it matter who is the most convincing Macbeth? Does it matter who should play Batman? Yes, because even if we don’t answer that question definitively, figuring out why we think the way we do tells us more about our artistic choices the next time. That there is much out here in social media land that is not worth reading does not meant that everything out here is worthless; that an opinion is angry or contrary to the majority does not mean that it is incorrect. That something may be unworthy of our attention does not imply that it must be so. Would you have liked to have your own art written off this way when you were a teenager? Or a young actor, trying to be brave?

Do think that people who disagree don’t empathize with others? That was the most surprising implication of this interview and the previous one, which seemed to espouse passive aggressiveness and conflict avoidance as virtuous life strategies. I’ve listened to a lot of sermons in my life, 2-3 a week for my entire childhood, and then I did a research project as a scholar where I read 1,600 sermons over about two years. I know a homily when I read one. Medieval sermon authors knew, and the ancients before them, a millennium ago and more, that vaunting one’s humility is also a species of pride. Unlike them, though, I would say: pride is not a sin. Just a human tendency.

~ by Servetus on June 12, 2015.