What You Can't Say -->
January 2004
(This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts,<br>and what to do with them. The latter was till recently something only<br>a small elite had to think about. Now we all have to, because<br>the Web has made us all publishers.)--><br>Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and<br>been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually<br>dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how<br>silly we looked.<br>It's the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the<br>same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all<br>of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too.<br>They're just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people.<br>But they're much more dangerous.<br>Fashion is mistaken for good design;<br>moral fashion is mistaken for good.<br>Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating<br>moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or<br>even killed.
If you could travel back in a time machine, one thing<br>would be true no matter where you went: you'd have to watch<br>what you said.<br>Opinions we consider harmless could have<br>gotten you in big trouble.<br>I've already said at least one thing that would have gotten me in big<br>trouble in most of Europe in the seventeenth century,<br>and did get Galileo in big trouble when he said<br>it � that the earth moves. [1]
trouble.<br>They say improper things<br>for the same reason they dress unfashionably and have good ideas:<br>convention has less hold over them.<br>--><br>It seems to be a constant throughout history: In every<br>period, people believed things that were just ridiculous,<br>and believed them so strongly that you would have gotten in<br>terrible trouble for saying otherwise.
Is our time any different?<br>To anyone who has read any amount of history, the answer is<br>almost certainly no. It would be a remarkable coincidence if ours<br>were the first era to get everything just right.
It's tantalizing to think we believe<br>things that people in the future will find ridiculous.<br>What would someone coming back to visit us in a time machine<br>have to be careful not to say?<br>That's what I want to study here.<br>But<br>I want to do more than just shock everyone with<br>the heresy du jour. I want to find general<br>recipes for discovering what you can't say, in any era.
The Conformist Test
Let's start with a test:<br>Do you have any opinions that you would be reluctant to express<br>in front of a group of your peers?
If the answer is no,<br>you might want to stop and think about that. If everything<br>you believe is something you're supposed to believe, could<br>that possibly be a coincidence? Odds are it isn't. Odds are<br>you just think what you're told.
The other alternative would be that you independently considered<br>every question and came up with the exact same answers that<br>are now considered acceptable. That seems unlikely, because<br>you'd also have to make the same mistakes. Mapmakers<br>deliberately put slight mistakes in their maps so they can<br>tell when someone copies them. If another map has the same<br>mistake, that's very convincing evidence.
Like every other era in history, our moral map almost certainly<br>contains a few mistakes. And anyone who makes the same mistakes<br>probably didn't do it by accident. It would be<br>like someone claiming they had independently decided in<br>1972 that bell-bottom jeans were a good idea.
If you believe everything you're supposed to now, how can<br>you be sure you wouldn't also have believed everything you<br>were supposed to if you had grown up among the plantation<br>owners of the pre-Civil War South, or in Germany in the 1930s � or<br>among the Mongols in 1200, for that matter? Odds are you<br>would have.
Back in the era of terms like "well-adjusted," the idea<br>seemed to be that there was something wrong with<br>you if you thought things you didn't dare say out loud.<br>This seems backward. Almost certainly, there<br>is something wrong with you if you don't think things<br>you don't dare say out loud.
Trouble
What can't we say? One way to find these ideas is simply to look<br>at things people do say, and get in trouble for. [2]
Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say.<br>We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least<br>have enough chance of being true that the question<br>should remain open. But many of the<br>things people get in trouble for saying probably<br>do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one<br>gets in trouble for saying<br>that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall.<br>Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or<br>at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to<br>make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are<br>the ones they worry might be believed.<br>I suspect the statements that make people maddest<br>are those they worry might be true.
If Galileo had said that people in Padua were ten feet tall,<br>he would have been regarded as a harmless eccentric. Saying<br>the earth orbited the sun was another matter. The church knew<br>this would set people thinking.
Certainly, as we look back on the past, this...