Noah Millman, writing in The Week, has pondered the awkward way that American citizens today cope with offensive material in the media. In nearly all cases where offense is taken by someone, the reaction includes widespread fretting. Instead of focusing on the question of whether or not the thing deemed offensive is OK or bad, the debate jumps into the deeper weeds of what at all means.

In current conditions, though, with no widely-respected authority or set of standards to consult, nobody can be sure what is acceptable and what isn't. So institutions are exposed simply for exercising judgment and they try to limit that exposure any way they can.
Maybe what we need is precisely such an authority.

Millman is half kidding about the idea. He doesn’t think it is likely to happen. But he makes a good case for some kind of established authority — he calls it a Woke Index — to say whether any particular idea or expression should be publicly acceptable or not.

Let’s review.

This is all provoked by the decision of Dr. Seuss Enterprises to stop publishing six books by Dr. Seuss that it considers insensitive (“hurtful and wrong” is the language they used) by today’s standards. The books it picked out were some of Seuss’ earliest and less wellknown titles. His overall body of 80 or so books is hardly diminished by the loss of these. The books were discontinued because of their content, but they might also have been dropped as a business decision based on sales or brand focus.

Silly folks responded by going out and buying up copies of Green Eggs and Ham and other titles that weren’t on the list. Kevin McCarthy, the supremely silly minority leader of the US House of Representatives, posted a tweet of himself reading Green Eggs and Ham, which, again, wasn’t deemed offensive by anyone and wasn’t being cancelled.

Millman suggests that if there were some recognized authority for judging what’s OK and what isn’t, we could save ourselves at least some of the grief.

Note, at this point, that supporting an authority doesn’t support censorship. Just having an authority in place doesn’t mean the authority would censor everything, or that it would censor nothing. It doesn’t presume that the authority would be run by the national government, or by either political party, or by liberal Hollywood, and by prudish religious leaders.

It only means that thoughtful, caring, and dedicated people would devote their time to serving the public interest, A large part of the American public cares about whether or not this or that story or image or phrase may be used in public. It makes sense to devote public resources to addressing public concerns.

The question fearful people want to ask is, “Who’s going to do the judging?”

And the answer, in a nation that practices representative democracy, is, “You, and other people like you.”

Today, there is no consensus about what is OK and what isn’t. More than that, there is no consensus about who gets to say what is OK and who isn’t.

If they would pause just a second, the people who reacted to the cancelation of the six Dr. Seuss books would have realized that the people who own the intellectual property rights to the Dr. Seuss books are exactly the right people to decide whether to publish those books or not. McCarthy should have seen this as a matter of property rights and respected it. But he couldn’t do that because he lacks a basic sense of how judgements ought to be made.

Millman’s idea of a thought police or Woke Index would solve that:

[T]here would now be an address where people could lodge complaints. If the Index permitted something you found appalling — or if it rejected something you found unobjectionable — you would know who to yell at. And the yelling would be expected to come from both sides, enabling it to, over time, find an equilibrium. If the promulgators of said Index didn't want to lose credibility — and with it market power — they would have to hold a line that, even if it didn't represent a broad social consensus, would have to represent something like a consensus within its own censorious sphere. They couldn't simply say no to everything; they'd have to stop being critics and start being judges. They'd have to develop standards, and make those standards public.

What Millman describes here is democracy and representative government. it is how America ought to work.

Where public expressions are concerned, the first principle ought to be a broad toleration for differences. Nobody should condemn or proscribe something just because it isn’t to their tastes. So nobody who plans to force their ideas on the rest of the country should be allowed to do that.

As is true in every case, supporting an activity is never the same as support for that activity done badly.