Zadie Smith and the 'Both Sides' Problem

On Centrist Meta-Commentaries

Catch-up service:
Notes on the Renaissance
The Good Enough Trap
What’s the Point of Protests?
Why Does Being Left-Wing Make You Unhappy?

This week Zadie Smith published a short essay in the New Yorker concerning the campus protests at American universities. I rather wish she hadn’t. Smith is one of Britain’s best and most adventurous novelists, and an erudite, humorous, and humane public figure. I didn’t enjoy seeing her being attacked by some of the nastiest people on social media after her essay went online. The worst thing is that they had half a point.

I’ll try and summarise Smith’s piece, which is not easy, since despite being short, it is meandering. In essence, the argument consists of two parts. The first is that the protesters should apply ethical principles consistently rather than only in defence of the side they support. If they support the the weak against the strong, as in the case of Gazans versus the Israeli military, then they should also support the Jewish student who says she feels unsafe when walking past the tents on campus.

The second part is an argument concerning the use of language, which can be boiled down to this: that we shouldn’t unthinkingly adopt slogans (her examples include “river to the sea” and “existential threat”) or labels (“Zionist”, “terrorist”) without acknowledging their historical complexity and linguistic ambiguity (in fact, she hints that doing so is impossible). These words, she suggests, are not being used to convey the full richness of meaning they contain but as dumb badges declaring tribal affiliation. She calls them “shibboleths” (perhaps after Thomas Sowell: "What political shibboleths do is transform questions about facts, causation and evidence into questions about personal identity and moral worth.”)

The tone of the piece is erratic: there are parts where she adopts the stuffed-shirt tone of a philosophy seminar, others where she’s more humble and personal. At the end comes a touch of defiance. There is a crabbed and cautious feel throughout, as if she’s inching through a building she knows is occupied by enemies. In the opening section she tells a story about attending an Extinction Rebellion protest which I suspect is there to establish that she’s the kind of person who attends Extinction Rebellion protests, so that the mild criticisms of left-wing protesters she’s about to make will therefore be listened to. Good luck with that.

She concludes the piece by refusing, rather ostentatiously, to say where she stands on the issue of Israel-Gaza. To do so, she suggests, would inevitably entail the abuse of words for political ends: “Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do.” Anyway, she says, her personal views are worthless. “The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead.”

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. It surely is possible to express a view on Gaza or the protests that doesn’t involve crude simplifications, even if such opinions seem to be in short supply at the moment. If Smith doesn’t believe herself capable of expressing a view that won’t seem tribal, you have to wonder why she feels compelled to pitch in at all. There was always the option of not writing an essay in the New Yorker.

If we are to make the case for Smith’s piece, then, it’s as a valuable meta-commentary - that is, a commentary on the discourse around Israel-Gaza, rather than on Israel-Gaza itself. In other words, we might applaud her intervention because of the way it exposes the rhetorical abuses on both sides of the divide. Smith is careful to balance her list of shibboleths to make it clear that she sees problems with the rhetoric of supporters of Israel and Gaza. Surely, amidst this viciously polarised, one-eyed discourse, such even-handedness is welcome and necessary?

We can safely say that the online left does not agree. After surveying some of the responses on Twitter you can understand why Smith, who sees herself as of the left, is painfully apologetic whenever she ventures criticisms of her own side. The tenor of the response is angry, contemptuous, and abusive. See for example this witless screed, or this from the endlessly self-parodic Professor Gopal:

All the usual elements of a leftist pile-on are present, including academic credentialism and insistence on the centrality of racial identity to political belief.

What’s funny about this is that Smith’s implied stance is decidedly left-wing. She says that the campus protesters “deserve our support and praise” without feeling the need to say why (other views are available). She declares, as if it’s self-evident, that “Hamas will not be ‘eliminated’”. She asserts without argument that the deployment of police to clear protesters is a “moral injury”. She describes both the Hamas attacks on October 7th and the Israeli military response as “brutal mass murder”. She doesn’t accuse Israel of ‘genocide’, and the withholding of this word is partly what has driven her leftist critics bonkers, but this might be seen as a failure of nerve, for it’s the most obvious example of a shibboleth.

In polarised debates, centrists or moderates sometimes present ‘upsetting both sides’ as evidence of intellectual integrity. It proves the person making the argument isn’t in hock to either tribe’s fallacies or shibboleths. But we should be wary of this temptation because it’s quite possible to be bi-directionally wrong. For all that I think the worst of Smith’s critics are, well, the worst, I can understand why people find this piece incredibly annoying. I find it mildly annoying myself. It is tough to be told by somebody who refuses to take a position or make an argument that you, all of you, are going about this in the wrong way. “Hi, novelist here, I don’t do politics but we need to talk about your poor use of words”. When bombs are being dropped, a mere insistence on linguistic hygiene can come across as prim and otiose.

The substantive points Smith makes are not wrong, but they’re not revelatory either. If she truly wants better, more nuanced arguments about either the protests or Israel-Gaza, she could have tried to set an example herself, rather than dipping in to observe that some people are hypocritical and language can be abused, before stalking off again. Failing that, she could have pointed to examples of commentators who manage to take positions without wielding shibboleths: Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib, for instance.

This raises the question of whether it is ever a good idea to write a meta-commentary on controversial and complex debates. When is it helpful to critique a whole discourse rather than one side of it?

I’ve written a whole book about how to have better arguments. It doesn’t get more meta than that. I believe, deeply, that if you really care about an issue you have to understand the other side’s position - otherwise, as David Hume remarked, you don’t even understand your own. I also believe that a kneejerk aversion to “both sidesism” usually disguises an aversion to the hard work of thinking, reasoning and empathising. How many of the protesters have taken the trouble to think through the conflict from the Israeli perspective in the way that Alkhatib - who has lost relatives in Gaza to IDF bombs - has? Zero, would be my guess. And who is more serious about peace? The answer is obvious.

But I’m more wary than I used to be about “both sides” interventions. Over the last few years, as I’ve watched the debate over transgender rights unfold (and occasionally intervened in it) I’ve been struck by how annoying it is when mainstream centrist commentators, who for the most part strenuously avoid the issue (despite having opinions on everything else, like one-man government press offices) dip a toe into it. Almost invariably they do so to bemoan the low quality of the discourse. It’s toxic. It’s a culture war. Voters don’t care. They rarely risk an actual, substantive view on the issue itself. If they do, the language of these Orwell superfans suddenly becomes clotted and vague. Instead of parsing the political and legal issues involved they prefer to cast a plague on both sides and congratulate themselves on upsetting everyone.

A common rhetorical move is to say that it’s all so complex and complicated, and what we need is more nuance. Who can be against nuance? We’re all sophisticated people around here. But calls for nuance can operate as a tactic of evasion and obfuscation. Even when an issue is complex - and everything is complex if you look at it long enough - some things can be simple. For instance: humans, like any common-or-garden mammal, are born male or female, and cannot thereafter change sex. In a few areas of public life, sex differences matter very much. Males, however they identify, should not be in female prisons or safe spaces. Post-pubescent males should not be in female sporting competitions. Children, especially children experiencing mental turmoil, should not be encouraged or allowed to undergo life-changing medical procedures on the basis of insufficient evidence and a (let’s just say) contentious adult belief-system. When I see people calling for more nuance in the gender debate while failing to acknowledge such basic truths, I’m tempted to repeat the title of the sociologist Kieran Healy’s paper:

I was reminded of Healy’s piece because someone posted it in response to Smith’s essay. I suspect that the poster would disagree with me about what counts as a simple truth in the Israel-Gaza conflict, but I get where they were coming from. “Nuance” can disguise an absence of intellectual or moral clarity.

I’ll close with some recursive centrism by arguing both sides of ‘both sides’. The bad version of a ‘both sides’ stance is when the author positions themselves above the fray, and declines to take part in the grubby practice of making arguments. It means painting both sides of the debate in question as equally toxic, or indeed equally reasonable, without daring to say what either side gets right or wrong in any detail (this is not the same as ‘taking a side’). It is an attempt to sound authoritative and superior with minimum intellectual effort or reputational risk. It’s cheap talk.

The good version of ‘both sides’ entails (a) Making the effort to understand the arguments and sentiments of the other side (that is, other than the one to which you’re instinctively drawn) (b) Understanding the other side’s perspective so well that you actually make it harder for yourself to take a clear view. (c) Having done so, taking a clear view, and therefore risking counter-arguments, fair and unfair. Centrists tend to do a little of (a) and (b) but sometimes duck (c) in the name of nuance. Leftists tend to skip straight to (c) while denouncing opposing views as evil. Doing all three is really hard.

Of course, it’s perfectly fine to have no firm opinions on a controversial topic, if you feel you don’t know enough about it to have earned one. In fact, more people should refrain from having an opinion. I just don’t think you need two thousand words in the New Yorker to do so.

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After the jump: my thoughts on Apple’s disastrous ad, plus a rattle bag of juicy links, including a chart on the age-rage relationship.