Normally, when you want to cancel an online subscription, you simply click cancel on your account on their website. But not with the New York Times. They are the Comcast-quality customer service of newspapers. No matter how many times I indicate I don’t want to talk to anyone, I just want to cancel, they keep barraging me with questions.
I was fine with paying $8 a month for a New York Times subscription but once they and the Los Angeles Times bumped me to $15 a month, I canceled, just as I canceled the Wall Street Journal when they tried to bump me to $40 a month rather than $10.
No means no! This New York Times attitude does not make me feel safe.
PS. I ended up taking the great deal the NY Times offered me.
PPS. Bud: “There was a gym i joined in addition to my local gym because it was 24/7 and pretty cheap. To shut off the month to month membership it couldn’t be done on website, I went to the gym front desk and was told i had to write a snail mail letter to the company hq in Colorado.”
Posted inNew York Times|Comments Off on The New York Times Makes It As Painful As Possible To Cancel Your Subscription
* The London Missionary Society had sent out their first man to south China, Robert Morrison, in 1807. Not long after his arrival, he had been asked whether he hoped to have any spiritual impact on the country: ‘No,’ he responded, ‘but I expect God will’.6 Thirty years later, he and his colleagues found themselves unable either to name or enumerate more than a handful of converts. Ill, depressed, stalled on the edge of the mainland, frustrated missionary observers of the 1830s spoke a pure dialect of imperialist paternalism: ‘China still proclaims her proud and unapproachable supremacy and disdainfully rejects all pretensions in any other nation to be considered as her equal. This feeling of contemptible vanity Christianity alone will effectually destroy. Where other means have failed, the gospel will triumph; this will fraternize the Chinese with the rest of mankind . . . [linking] them in sympathy with other portions of their species, and thus add to the triumphs it has achieved.’7 The missionaries became natural allies of the smugglers: when they first arrived on the coast of China, they docked among opium traders on the island of Lintin; they interpreted for them in exchange for passages up the coast, distributing tracts while the drug was taken onshore; and in the Chinese Repository, Canton’s leading English-language publication, they shared a forum for spreading their views on the urgent need to open China, by whatever means necessary. By the 1830s, merchants and missionaries alike favoured violence. ‘[W]hen an opponent supports his argument with physical force, [the Chinese] can be crouching, gentle, and even kind’, observed Karl Gützlaff, a stout Pomeranian missionary who would, during the Opium War, lead the British military occupation of parts of eastern China, running armies of Chinese spies and collaborators.8 The slightest provocation would do. In 1831, traders had written to the government in India, demanding a fleet of warships to avenge the Chinese authorities’ partial demolition of a front garden that the British had illegally requisitioned.
* In China today, the Opium War is the traumatic inauguration of the country’s modern history. History books, television documentaries and museums chorus a simple, received wisdom about the conflict, which goes something like this. In the early nineteenth century, unscrupulous British traders began forcing enormous quantities of Indian opium on Chinese consumers. When the Chinese government declared war on opium, in order to avert the moral, physical and financial disaster threatened by the empire’s growing drug habit, British warships bullied China out of tens of millions of dollars, and its economic and political independence. Gunboat diplomacy, opium and the first ‘Unequal Treaty’ of 1842 (followed by a second in 1860, concluding the ‘second Opium War’ begun in 1856) brought China – until the end of the eighteenth century, probably the richest and most powerful civilization in the world – to its knees, leaving its people slavish addicts, incapable of resisting subsequent waves of European, American and Japanese colonizers.23 This account of the Opium War is now one of the founding myths of Chinese nationalism: the first great call to arms against a bullying West; but also the start of China’s ‘century of humiliation’ (a useful pedagogical shorthand for everything that happened in China between 1842 and 1949) at the hands of imperialism.24 It marks the beginning of China’s struggle to free itself from ‘semi-colonial semi-feudalism’ (Mao’s own summary of the century of Chinese experience after 1842), and to ‘stand up’ (Mao again) as a strong modern nation – a battle that ends, naturally, with Communist triumph in 1949.
* Nine minutes. This grotesque discrepancy in military strength between the British and the Qing would be replayed again and again through the two years of the war.
* Qing China was after all no tribal power but one of the world’s great conquest empires.
How, exactly, could its armies have atrophied so drastically by 1840? The problems with the Qing military can be broken down into three main categories: materiel and defences; organization; and individual quality of troops.11
In all areas of equipment – weaponry, forts and most critically ships – the Qing equipment lagged behind that of the British.
* But why did the Qing fail to capitalize on their numerical superiority over the British? Theoretically, the dynasty commanded the largest standing army (800,000-strong) in the world at the time – 114 times more numerous than the 7,000-strong British force dispatched to China. In reality, however, most of these 800,000 soldiers were scattered through the empire, far too busy with domestic peace-keeping duties (suppressing bandits or rebels; carrying out disaster relief; guarding prisons; policing smugglers) to be spared for the quarrel with the British.
* During the Opium War, Qing politicians of the pro- and anti-war faction could agree on only one thing: that their army was hopeless. Travelling east from Canton to Zhejiang in 1841, Lin Zexu bluntly analysed the reasons for the army’s lack of interest in fighting the British. ‘The most coveted positions in the Guangdong garrisons were in the naval fleet, where one per cent of salaries was drawn from the grain and silver stipend, and the rest from opium-smugglers’ bribes. Once we banned opium, ninety-nine per cent of the navy’s income went up in smoke. How could we expect them to resist the English rebels?’20 ‘Our soldiers cheat everyone’, echoed Qiying, the emperor’s chief negotiator at the close of the war. ‘They refuse to pay full prices, gather in brothels and gambling dens, corrupt the sons of good families and handle stolen goods.’
* At pains to show themselves to be civilized, the British tried hard to inform their adversaries of their demands before they pulverized them in battle. Through July, the fleet made several unsuccessful attempts to deliver Lord Palmerston’s letter to the Chinese emperor at various points along the eastern coast.
* Everywhere the British went, they were dependent on local willingness to provide them with fresh food and water.
* Almost as soon as Yishan arrived in the city, he made the following diagnosis of the situation: ‘The trouble lies within, not without, because every merchant has got rich through the foreigners, and even the lowest orders make their livings from them. All the merchants and people who live near the coast are fluent in the foreigners’ language. The craftier of their number are spies, and know everything that is going on around the government offices, and are quick to pass it on.’ The going rate for information, he reported, was twenty dollars – for which locals were so avid that they regularly fabricated reports for the foreigners.
* It was perhaps the dismissal of Charles Elliot that marked the true turning point in this war: from here on, the campaign would be more about gunboats than diplomacy. True enough, back in the spring of 1839, Elliot had brayed as loudly as anyone for an instructive war that would ‘teach’ China to fall in line with civilized European trading norms. But once he’d got his war, he spent a curious amount of time avoiding it: calling regular pauses for talks, for trading, for elaborate negotiating banquets. Violence, he actually believed, was to be minimized at all costs. He was fighting, he argued, ‘a just and necessary war; but it is not to be forgotten that the acts of the Chinese authorities which made it so . . . [were] preceded by serious errors on the part of British subjects.’2
But with Elliot gone, so was any spirit of self-critical compromise. He was replaced by no-nonsense hardliners: professional men of the British army and navy who were there to do a military job – to subdue the Qing empire as expediently as possible – or by representatives of a chauvinistic new breed of rulers of British India. Gone was any sense that sympathy or familiarity with Qing customs or sensibilities might, in the long-term, more effectively open the empire to trade with Europe. No, the Chinese empire wanted blasting into line. ‘The body social of the Chinese’, one missionary expressed the sentiment well, ‘is too inert, too lifeless, for the whole body to be affected by a rap on the heel; it must be on the head.’3 It was, perhaps, with respect to China that the Victorians began wholeheartedly to embrace attributes that we now think of stereotypically Victorian: a strident patriotism that shouted about the civilizing missions of Christianity and Free Trade, while trampling over other political, economic and cultural visions. Sino-Western relations are still paying the price of the Opium War’s quick fix today.
* One cliff-face fort was taken by a single officer rushing up the hill and through its open gate, discharging every firearm he had on him at the forty or fifty soldiers he found there, ‘lolling and smoking [opium, presumably] between their guns.’10 Without hanging around long enough to notice his lack of reinforcements, the fort’s defenders rushed out of the opposite gate and back down the hill.
That evening, the British troops camped out on the cliffs; the next day they simply entered the island’s abandoned city (one of the country’s richest ports), with little to do except resist the temptation of abandoned vats of rice liquor and to tut-tut at the rapacity of Chinese robbers, who had already thoroughly looted it (its bullion had been ingeniously smuggled out inside hollowed logs). How extraordinary, the captain of the Nemesis exclaimed, that the massive bombardment and occupation of the island should lead to a general collapse in law and order. The only protection that locals had to look for ‘from the violence and plundering of their own rabble,’ Captain Hall remarked, ‘was from the presence of our own troops’.11
In other words, it was an Opium War battle like any other. Inside the walled city, watching the disaster unfold on 26 August, Yan did the only thing that a man in that situation could reasonably have done. He burst into tears and ran away.
* There was little new about the way Yuqian prepared for a British assault: three miles of thick mud walls, up to sixty feet wide and thirteen feet high, were built along the exposed southern coast of the island. And once the hard work of construction had been done, and 5,600 soldiers and militia stationed there, Yuqian could indulge in the traditional pastime of giving hopeful names to his fortifications. Two gates set into the wall were dubbed ‘Stable Governance’ and ‘Long-term Peace’; a fort on top of a hill in the middle of the earthworks became ‘The Fort That Terrifies Those From Afar’.
* local populations who fell under British rule should be so ‘perfectly contented with their new rulers, every kind of excess or plunder being rigidly prohibited.’
* Until 1842, any official servant who implicitly (by ignoring imperial orders to ‘exterminate’ the foreigners) or explicitly (by pointing out the weaknesses of the Qing army and the strengths of the British) acknowledged British military superiority had risked, at best, dismissal and more likely interrogation and punishment (exile, and possibly death). As a result, Daoguang’s nervous servants had spent the last two years diligently deluding him about the nature of the British threat and demands. But the more misinformed the emperor was, the less likely a solution became. Daoguang’s furious impatience with those who failed to resolve the conflict in accordance with his expectations caused his most experienced, talented officials to view an imperial commission to the front line of the war with dread.
* The army was crushed by defeat, he now wrote to the emperor, and the costs of war were crippling. The British cannon were too fierce, their soldiers too expert at fighting on land and at sea; the Chinese people – scourged by Qing armies – were easily bribed into collaboration with the enemy.
* Despite the ambivalence that the conflict had generated before and during the Opium War, the fact of victory convinced many that Britain had been right: that the war had performed a necessary and relatively bloodless service to world civilization by opening China. And once expectations (of opportunities for trade, conversion and travel) had been inflated by the Treaty of Nanjing, merchants, missionaries and diplomats set about manoeuvring for yet more concessions and advantages – and if necessary, for a second war to achieve them. For others, though, the war remained an embarrassment, generating guilty repentance. The very term ‘Opium War’ – satirically coined through the debates of early 1840 to draw attention to the ‘misdeeds’ in China of the ‘disgraceful’ Whig government – expressed this bad conscience. To Victorian Britain – a nation that prided itself on its sense of Christian superiority over the non-Europeans that it conquered – the name brought discomfort. The British, it announced, had fought a war to push an addictive, illegal narcotic on the Chinese population. It was, one strand of opinion held, ‘the most disgraceful war in our history . . . we lost about 69 men, and killed between 20,000 and 25,000 Chinese. There is no honour to be gained in a war like that.’6 ‘No man’, a speech-maker declared in 1858, ‘with a spark of morality in his composition . . . has dared to justify that war.’7 During the Second World War, both the Nazis and the Japanese government would try to discredit the Allies by reminding their subject populations (including Chinese civilians, whom Japanese soldiers killed in their millions between 1937 and 1945) of Britain’s past aggression against China.
* Through the 1840s, the Chinese Repository estimated that profits from the opium trade would leap from $33.6 million to $42 million, between 1845 and 1847 alone.33 However loudly England’s politicians and merchants bellowed about the civilizing mission of Free Trade, the fact remained that into the 1850s and beyond, opium sales in China (produced under British monopoly in India) underwrote much of the British empire: they funded the Raj (by 1856, opium revenue represented almost 22 per cent of British India’s total revenue), they generated the silver for Britain to trade along the Indian Ocean, and in China they bought tea and silk.34 To some extent, they kept the world economy moving: after British bills bought American cotton, American traders used these bills to buy tea in Canton; the Cantonese then swapped them for Indian opium.35 Acknowledging the economic importance of its opium monopoly, in 1843 the British annexed a new slice of west India, the Sind, at least in part to hike up transit fees on opium grown outside British Bengal, thereby helping to make production of the drug beyond British-controlled territories unprofitable.36 Through the 1840s and 1850s, after Pottinger had failed to legalize opium in 1842, British politicians remained nervous of a repeat of the 1839 campaign against the drug (which would jeopardize British profit margins), and pestered (without result) the Qing government to lift the official prohibition on the trade.
* The anti-opium lobby’s disapproval took on a new racial dimension when it was directed against use of the drug in China (which had emerged, in recent decades, as undoubtedly the world’s biggest opium market). Over the course of the nineteenth century, as Asia and Africa had fallen before Western science and industry, theorists of the European empires had sought convincing explanations for their supremacy, fixing the world into racial types distinguished by immutable characteristics – with the whites clearly at the top, and the ‘yellows’ and ‘blacks’ below. The conspicuous popularity of the drug amongst the Chinese became a symptom of the moral weakness and torpor of this alien, inexplicable race. The campaign that fought the opium trade in China was, therefore, a contradictory creature. On the one hand, it betokened a special sympathy for China and guilt about the role of the West (and especially Britain) in foisting the drug on the population. On the other, it could not conceal a certain disgust for the Chinese themselves. The opium trade produced a rationale for the Christian presence in China, turning the country into a depraved mass of opium sots to be disciplined and improved by salvation-hungry missionaries. ‘I am profoundly convinced’, declared the founder of the China Inland Mission, ‘that the opium traffic is doing more evil in China in a week than Missions are doing good in a year.’20 In other words, the Western presence in China had first created a problem then provided the service to solve it – the opium trade both generated and justified the civilizing mission.
* Almost wherever Chinese communities went, they were accused of vice, violence and mutiny, of being a secretive, alien, xenophobic community that refused to integrate with Anglo-Saxon society. ‘Colonies of Chinese’ were ‘being founded in all the chief ports of the British Isles’, announced scaremongers. ‘An imported horde of underpaid Chinese starvelings’ threatened to take over ‘the great traditions of the British sea dog.’41 While suspicion and violence grew, relations inevitably deteriorated, neatly reinforcing earlier prejudices about the sinister exclusiveness of the Chinese. As police and judges began to assume that any violence in Chinese communities was Triad warfare, these communities tried to resolve disputes between themselves rather than throw themselves onto the unsympathetic mercies of the law courts. Meanwhile, Chinese immigrants who tried to assimilate – by learning English, by wearing European clothes, by marrying local women – were ridiculed, or suspected of trying to penetrate English society for invidious reasons.42 Respectable middle-class magazines spread dread further up the social scale. In ‘The Chinese in England: A Growing National Problem’ (an article distributed liberally around the Home Office), one hack journalist warned of ‘a vast and convulsive Armageddon to determine who is to be the master of the world, the white or yellow man.’
* In the first two decades of the twentieth century, British tabloid readers were transfixed by a string of sensational stories in which beautiful young British women were seduced (sometimes with fatal consequences) by Asiatic drug-peddlers. In 1918, a wealthy Shanghai dilettante called Brilliant Chang was implicated in the death by overdose of the cocaine-snorting darling of the London stage, Billie Carleton. Four years later, three sisters, Florence, Gwendoline and Rosetta Paul, were found in an opium stupor next to a dead Chinese man in the bedroom over a Cardiff laundry. ‘The features of the women were so yellow’, their discoverer reported, that for a time he ‘did not realise they were white girls.’
* In probably every decade since its invention, the Yellow Panic has featured in Western consciousness, regardless of the reality of China’s own political, social or economic capacity to pose a threat. In 1898, as Matthew Shiel created Yen How, the Qing empire was still reeling from a shocking defeat in Korea at the hands of its former cultural tributary, Japan. As Sax Rohmer began generating his Fu Manchu canon in the 1910s and 1920s, ethnic Chinese populations in London arguably possessed the hardest-working and generally least threatening social and political profile of any non-white British group. The 1932 movie of The Mask of Fu Manchu (in which the eponymous doctor screams for the destruction of the white race while trying to resurrect Genghis Khan by sacrificing a blonde white woman lashed to a stone altar) was filmed as China’s military energies were fully absorbed either in civil war, or in facing off the Japanese aggression that would culminate in the Second World War.
* In almost any trouble connected with China, the old fears resurface. A typical example is the hysteria in 2007 that spread the idea of China exporting ‘poison’ to the world through its faulty products: pet food, drugs, toothpaste, lead-painted toy trains. ‘Is China trying to poison Americans and their pets?’ asked one article.86 ‘The Chinese Poison Train is still out there,’ warned one American consumer association, ‘lurking on a container ship headed our way. Nobody knows when it will strike again.’87 At the same moment, China’s profit-hungry companies were busy poisoning far more Chinese consumers: around 300,000 babies were taken ill in 2008, the year that the scandal about milk-powder tainted with melamine belatedly broke. And after recalling around 21 million toys manufactured in China, Mattel publicly apologized to its manufacturing partners in China, admitting that the ‘vast majority of those products that were recalled were the result of a design flaw in Mattel’s design, not through a manufacturing flaw in China’s manufacturers.’88 China has also been fingered for polluting the world with its economic miracle (the so-called Green Peril) – when Western consumers have been the principal market for cheap Chinese manufactures while letting China’s own natural environment absorb most of the damage. The survival of the Yellow Peril school of thought on Sino-Western relations indicates the resilience of the self-justifying ideas and arguments that drove Britain towards war with China in the 1840s and 1850s: a Western fixation on the idea of unthinking Chinese xenophobia, and on China’s determination to wish the West ill.
The greatest credibility problem for the Yellow Peril is that, historically, it has developed in isolation from opinion and events in China itself. It has thrived on delusional stereotypes generated by Westerners uninterested in what the Chinese themselves have made of events such as the Opium War and their subsequent relations with European invaders – the subject of this book’s remaining chapters. As Sax Rohmer himself proudly told his biographer, ‘I made my name on Fu Manchu because I know nothing about the Chinese!’
* Like the Social Darwinist that he was, Yan was not particularly inclined to question the morality of the balance of power in this brave new world – to him, the foreign invasions that China had endured since 1840 were an inescapable phenomenon of nature. ‘If a people is dispirited and stupid . . . then the society will disintegrate, and when a society in disintegration encounters an aggressive, intelligent, patriotic people, it will be dominated at best, and at worst exterminated’.19 (‘The tides of the world are unstoppable’, agreed Guo Songtao.20) Instead, Yan believed that China must recognize its own flaws and remedy them with the ideas and culture of the West. ‘What are China’s principal troubles?’ he asked. ‘Are they not ignorance, poverty and weakness?’21 Why, he wanted to know, had China failed to pick itself up since the defeat of 1842? ‘The people’s intelligence is not up to the task, and their physical strength and morality are not advanced enough to carry it through.’ The West’s ‘expertise in machinery . . . their steam engines and weaponry’ were only ‘scratches on the surface . . . they are not the blood veins of strength.’ No: the West owed its global supremacy to the two principles of ‘truth in learning’ and ‘justice in politics’. In comparison, almost everything about Chinese tradition struck Yan as hopeless. ‘There are almost innumerable practices in the customs of China, from law and institutions, scholarship and learning, to the ways we eat and live, owing to which the people’s strength is enervated and the quality of the Chinese race debased.’22
If the struggle for survival depended on the cohesion of the group, the Chinese had to bond themselves into the same species of social and political unit that had worked so well for the West and for Japan: the nation. And to do this, the Chinese needed to discipline themselves. The Chinese body politic required a radical overhaul, to teach its constituents to ‘live together, communicate with and rely on each other, and establish laws and institutions, rites and rituals for that purpose . . . we must find a way to make everyone take the nation as his own.’
* China in the third millennium possesses (as it did in the nineteenth century) about as many reasons to fall apart as it does to stick together: banks riddled with bad loans, the challenges of finding employment and pensions for a massive, rapidly ageing workforce, severe social inequality (which, according to Chinese estimates, reached potentially destabilizing levels as early as 1994), government corruption (at the end of 2009, a Chinese newspaper directly blamed the country’s rash of mass incidents on officials ‘blindly pursuing profit’ through ‘expropriating land and demolishing houses’), environmental degradation.
* For 170 years, the Opium War and its afterlives have cast a shadow over Sino-Western relations, both sides tampering with the historical record for their own purposes. Influential nineteenth-century Britons worked hard to fabricate a virtuous casus belli out of an elementary problem of trade deficit: to reinvent the war as a clash of civilizations triggered by the ‘unnaturally’ isolationist Chinese. Joining this blame game, twentieth-century Chinese nation-builders in turn transformed it into the cause of all their country’s troubles: into a black imperialist scheme to enslave a united, heroically resisting China. The reality of the war itself, by contrast, illuminated deep fault lines in the messily multi-ethnic Qing empire, as China’s rulers struggled unsuccessfully to rally its officials, soldiers and subjects against a foreign enemy.
The West’s public stance of self-justification over the war overlaid a moral guilt that has subsequently fanned further fears of, and tensions with, the Chinese state and people. Opium became a symbol both of Western malfeasance and of a sinister Chinese pollution, generating irrational clouds of Yellow Peril suspicion that arguably still haunt our media coverage. In China, meanwhile, opium, defeat and imperialism have manufactured an unstable combination of self-pity, self-loathing and pragmatic admiration for the West that continue to coexist uneasily in Chinese patriots.
Whether Western nations such as Britain have attacked the Chinese for their arrogance in refusing to pay them enough attention or respect, lambasted themselves for what they did or obsessed paranoically about Chinese retribution, one misconception has remained constant: that the West is central to China’s calculations and actions. But both back in the nineteenth century and now, China’s rulers have been primarily preoccupied with domestic affairs, rather than foreign relations. This refusal to look at matters from the perspective of the Chinese state’s own prerogatives helped drive Britain towards war in the nineteenth century, and risks pushing relations towards confrontation in the early twenty-first.
In 1839, the Qing court was too distracted by fears of social unrest to come up voluntarily with a pragmatic response to Western trade demands; Britain interpreted this political paralysis as inveterate xenophobia. In 2010, the situation did not look so very different, with the government infuriating Western states over its rejection of climate-change legislation that might slow growth, its harsh stance on social control and its aversion to compromise on international-trade issues, such as strengthening the yuan relative to the dollar (thereby making exported Chinese manufactures more expensive, foreign imports less so). ‘The current leadership’, China-watcher Jonathan Fenby observed in January 2010, ‘just want to get to retirement without the country collapsing. And their caution sometimes leads them into conflict with the West. Take the question of revaluing the yuan. There’d be plenty of advantages: less danger of a trade war with the US, cheaper imports. But they’re nervous of jeopardizing economic growth or looking like they were capitulating to the West – the public outcry in China might be too great.’57 For the noisy anti-Western nationalism that the state has programmatically engineered since the 1920s (and with renewed energies after 1989) regularly threatens to mutate into anti-government dissidence.
From the age of opium-traders to the Internet, China and the West have been infuriating and misunderstanding each other, despite ever-increasing opportunities for contact, study and mutual sympathy. Ten years into the twenty-first century, the nineteenth is still with us.
Posted inChina|Comments Off on The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams, and the Making of Modern China
Gossip undoubtedly destroys friendships, marriages, business partnerships and sometimes causes people to kill themselves and others, but much of the time, the damage that is blamed on gossip more rightly belongs on people who have acted badly. Such people often blame gossip for holding them accountable for their behavior.
If a man cheats on his wife, sometimes it is wrong to gossip about it and sometimes it is right. It depends on the circumstance. Sometimes it would be better for the wife to be informed and sometimes it would not.
Gossip is as bad as water. Sometimes water can save a life and sometimes water can kill.
Mar. 19, 2025, I ask Grok: “I don’t understand how a normal person can navigate life without participating in gossip. How can you do this in a way that helps you more than it hurts you?”
Grok says:
You’re wrestling with a messy truth here: gossip’s a double-edged sword, like water, as you put it—vital or lethal depending on how it flows. It’s not just idle chatter; it’s a social tool, and your take on it destroying lives while sometimes serving justice is spot-on. The cheating husband example nails the dilemma—spill the beans and you might save the wife from a lie, or you might torch a fragile peace. Context is everything.
Navigating life without gossip entirely? Tough, maybe impossible. Humans are wired for it—anthropologists say it’s how we’ve policed norms and built trust since tribal days. But doing it in a way that tilts the scales toward help over harm? That’s the trick. Start by picking your spots. If the info’s solid—not rumor—and could protect someone (like the wife who’d want to know), sharing it quietly, directly, with intent to help, not harm, keeps it constructive. Think less “spreading dirt” and more “strategic heads-up.”
Then there’s motive. Are you gossiping to vent, to bond, to wound? If it’s just to feel superior or stir the pot—like piling on a guy already down—you’re begging for blowback. But if it’s to clarify, warn, or hold a real wrongdoer accountable (the cheater, not the bystander), it’s got legs. Keep it tight—loose lips sink ships, and the more it spreads, the more it mutates into something you can’t control.
You’re right that bad actors love blaming gossip for their messes. The cheater crying “how dare they talk” is dodging the mirror. Gossip’s not the sin; it’s the megaphone. Play it smart: know why you’re talking, who you’re telling, and what’s at stake.
As Dennis Prager says, ethics are both situational and absolute. The context determines the moral absolute. Sometimes it is right to lie ("Where are you hiding the Jews?") and right to kill (such as the Nazis during World War II).
There's no escape from making moral judgments and deciding when to speak and when to keep silent, when to act and when to hold back.
"If we listen we can learn what people find offensive or what people find acceptable, what they don't find acceptable," says Dr. Sarah Wert, a research psychologist. "So to that extent, it's a way to learn how to be a better social actor."
…The accuracy of the gossip may not matter as much as how often you engage in it. "Gossip humanizes people," Froelich said. "And when people on the street can be like, 'oh, she's rich, she's beautiful, she's famous, she seems to have everything, but oh wait, her fiancé cheated on her too, hmmm …'"
"If you read my blogs, you'll see that I am a relentless exposer of the fraudulence not just in the chareidi world but in the Modern Orthodox world. It all needs to be exposed. But that doesn't mean that every simple person needs to know… As Rav Kook says, if they come into our world and try to affect us with their fraudulent stories, it needs to be exposed. But if they want to live by these bubbemeisers (old wives tales), that's a way of life. I'm like Rabbi Slifkin in this regard. Only if it threatens to interfere in the wider community.
"It's hard to know what lashon hara (gossip) is. You don't really know what lashon hara is. I have read many letters of gedolim and they are full of negative comments about other rabbis, which you would say is lashon hara. As anyone knows, they badmouth them all the time. If you asked the rav, he would say it is not lashon hara. The Torah says you have to expose chanafim (hypocrites, flatterers).
("The admonition to expose hypocrites is stated in Yoma 86b where it is derived from [the legal category of] Chillul HaShem," emails Marc in reply to my question.)
[Mar. 19, 2025, Grok says: “Judaism’s take on exposing hypocrites is a tightrope walk—balancing truth, justice, and the ripple effects of public shame. The Talmud in Yoma 86b ties it to Chillul HaShem—desecration of God’s name—which is a big deal. The idea here is that when someone prominent, especially a religious figure, acts pious in public but rotten in private, it’s not just their rep on the line; it mocks the whole system of faith. Exposing them isn’t just allowed—it’s a duty—to protect the community and sanctify God’s name by showing that fakes don’t get a free pass. But it’s not a free-for-all. The broader Jewish framework, pulling from Torah and later rabbinic thought, layers in heavy caveats. Leviticus 19:16 warns against being a “talebearer among your people,” and the rabbis in tractates like Bava Metzia 58b hammer home the damage of lashon hara (evil speech)—even true gossip can shred lives and social fabric. So, exposing a hypocrite has to clear a high bar: Is it for the greater good, like stopping harm or upholding justice, or just petty score-settling? Maimonides, in Hilchot De’ot 7:5, says you can call out a wrongdoer publicly if they’re unrepentant and their actions hurt others—think a corrupt leader or a serial scammer—but only after a private rebuke flops (per Arakhin 16b).”]
"We are supposed to expose hypocrisy. I would say that if you asked all these rabbonim who say terrible things about other ones and were great talmidei chachamim, if you asked them, they would say it is not lashon hara, but he's a fraud and I have to expose him. It could be that he's not a fraud and that it's just a personal dispute.
"I don't think it's lashon hara to talk about a dispute that the whole world knew about and it was in all the newspapers… If a certain rav did a bad thing. There's a rav, not a gadol of the first calibre but of the second calibre, but he had a child out of wedlock when he was about 17 and in yeshiva. About 20 years ago, one of the Israeli newspapers exposed him and published the birth certificate. I think that's a terrible breach of privacy. He made a mistake when he was young. I don't think it's anyone's business. I would never expose something like that. If I knew about it, I would probably choose not to write about him because how could you write about him and not talk about it?
"If there was a case like this where he abandoned the girl and wanted nothing to do with them and then he became a big scholar, a Talmud Chacham, a posek, I don't think that's lashon hara. This would be an example of exposing the hypocrites."
"I try to balance Jewish values with secular values. As a secular historian, you go into a grave and dig up the body if you need to. They dug up Zachary Taylor's body to see if he was poisoned. I would have no problem as a secular historian if I was writing about a figure like Einstein, but among gedolim, I do not do that. I can honestly say that I've never had to make that choice with Rabbi Yaakov Jechiel Weinberg. I would rather not write about somebody than have to cover something like that up… Certain great rabbinic figures, I would treat differently than other figures. If that is not in correspondence with historical [analysis], what are they going to do? Take my tenure away? Life is not only about historical craft."
Given this protective group function, gossiping too little may be at least as risky as gossiping too much, some psychologists say. After all, scuttlebutt is the most highly valued social currency there is. While humor and story telling can warm any occasion, a good scoop spreads through a room like an illicit and irresistible drug, passed along in nods and crooked smiles, in discreet walks out to the balcony, the corridor, the powder room.
Knowing that your boss is cheating on his wife, or that a sister-in-law has a drinking problem or a rival has benefited from a secret trust fund may be enormously important, and in many cases change a person's behavior for the better.
"We all know people who are not calibrated to the social world at all, who if they participated in gossip sessions would learn a whole lot of stuff they need to know and can't learn anywhere else, like how reliable people are, how trustworthy," said Sarah Wert, a psychologist at Yale. "Not participating in gossip at some level can be unhealthy, and abnormal."
Unless you acknowledge the powerful good that gossip can give, you are not confronting the issue. Almost all religious texts I've read about gossip, including the best (such as by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin), give short shrift to the moral necessity of much gossip (which protects the innocent from predators). By so doing, religion ignores reality and impedes progress towards a better world.
Mar. 19, 2025, Grok says:
Sarah Wert’s point cuts deep—gossip’s not just chatter; it’s a social radar for folks who’d otherwise be clueless about who’s solid or shady. She’s right that some people, especially those out of sync with social cues, need it like a crash course in human nature. You can’t glean that intel from a book or a sermon; it’s raw, real-time data—who’s a cheat, who’s a rock. Her angle that skipping it entirely might be “unhealthy” flips the script on the usual tsk-tsk about loose lips. It’s not just idle fun; it’s a survival tool.
She’s got a bone to pick with religious takes, and I see why. Texts like Rabbi Telushkin’s Words That Hurt, Words That Heal—top-tier stuff—lean hard into lashon hara (evil speech) bans, rooted in Leviticus 19:16 and Talmudic warnings (Bava Metzia 58b). Judaism, for one, treats gossip as a wrecking ball; even if true, it’s suspect unless it’s saving someone from harm. The Chofetz Chaim grudgingly okays it to expose predators, but only with strict conditions—private rebuke first, pure intent, no collateral damage. Christianity’s got its own version: Matthew 18 pushes quiet correction over public airing. The vibe’s clear—gossip’s a sin unless it’s a last-resort shield.
Wert’s critique stings because she’s not wrong: these traditions often skim over the “moral necessity” of gossip’s upside. It can protect—think warning a friend about a sleazy boss or a two-faced partner. Religion’s caution can feel like it’s shielding the guilty, leaving the naive exposed. Yet the counterpoint’s got weight too: unchecked gossip spirals fast, torching reputations on flimsy vibes. The religious lens isn’t ignoring reality; it’s obsessed with the fallout.
So, here’s the rub: gossip’s a messy good, like fire. Wert says embrace it for its light; faith says watch the burn.
The primary reason gossip has a bad name (in secular or religious life) is that the benefits of gossip are diffused among many people (though they are better informed, they have little incentive to speak up for the value of gossip) while the price of gossip is concentrated on individual subjects who have a huge incentive to tamp it down.
Mar. 19, 2025, Grok says:
You’ve hit on a sharp economic logic here—gossip’s rep takes a beating because its benefits are spread thin while its costs hit hard and personal. The upside—better info, social calibration, predator alerts—trickles out to the crowd, but no one’s rushing to defend it; they just quietly cash in on the intel. Meanwhile, the guy caught in the crosshairs—say, the cheater or the fraud—feels the full blast: shame, lost trust, ruined gigs. They’ve got every reason to scream bloody murder and paint gossip as the devil. It’s a classic diffuse-benefits, concentrated-costs setup, like pollution regs or tax hikes—those hurt loudest drown out the quiet winners.
Secular or religious, the dynamic holds. In everyday life, people shrug off gossip’s utility until it’s about them—then it’s a scandal. In faith traditions, like Judaism’s lashon hara rules or Christianity’s “speak no evil” vibe, the focus lands on the victim’s pain—reputation trashed, dignity torched—because that’s the visceral hit. The Talmud (Yoma 86b) or Telushkin’s work barely nod to the collective good; they’re too busy wrestling with the wreckage on the individual level. It’s not that they miss the benefits—they just weigh the loud, immediate cost heavier.
Let me give an example. Let's suppose a rabbi is so physically affectionate (not that he's a predator) that he makes some people he hugs uncomfortable.
Gossip about this hugging rabbi protects those who would not like to hugged by the rabbi.
The rabbi could take this gossip as a form of reproof and reform his ways, but his most likely reaction would be to feel angry and protest vigorously that he's done nothing wrong, and that this gossip is evil because it humiliates him unnecessarily.
From the 8/96 issue of Psychology Today:
The English word "gossip" originated as "godsibb," meaning "a person related to one in God," or a godparent. Until the 1800s, "gossip" denoted friendship. Today gossip is defined by the dictionary as "chatty talk; the reporting of sensational or intimate information."
"If people aren't talking about other people, it's a signal that something is wrong – that we feel socially alienated or indifferent," says Ralph Rosnow, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Temple University and coauthor of Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay.
"For a real understanding of our social environment, gossip is essential," agrees Jack Levin, Ph.D., professor of sociology and criminology at Boston's Northeastern University and coauthor of Gossip: The Inside Scoop. "It's primary function is to help us make social comparisons. For example, if we read bad news about celebrities in the tabloids, or get into the gruesome details of our neighbor's misery over a cup of coffee, our own problems begin to pale in comparison."
Many people may gain from being gossiped about. Targets of gossip are made more human, more easy to identify with.
Gossip is a way for people to let you know, without confrontation, the limits on personal behavior. "If you move into a community and your neighbor tells you how the previous homeowner never disposed of his garbage properly, his gossip is letting you in on something else.
"Gossip shepherds the herd. It says: these are the boundaries and you're crossing them. You're not abiding by the rules and you'd better get back in step," says Rosnow.
"If you want to know about the kind of insurance coverage your employer offers, look in the company handbook," says Levin. "But if you want to know who to avoid, who the boss loves or loathes, who to go to when you need help, what it really takes to get a promotion or raise, and how much you can safely slack off, you're better off paying attention to the company grapevine."
Gossip tells you who's in. If you're worth being talked about, you're in. If you've got valuable information, you're in.
Kids' gossip is more innocent and cruel than that of adults. "Cruel comments, but effective ones," says Levin, "because the target learns some important information. Namely, that he is not invisible to the rest of the world. The result? This vital piece of information [badly dressed, a cheater or whatever] helps him see he needs to change his offensive behavior."
Women gossip more than men. Women talk about people in their lives while men engage in "shop talk," which revolves around work, sports stars, politicians…
"Gossip is similar to a Rorschach test," says Levin. "If you look at the nature of someone's gossip, you can find out what concerns them."
"We found that people who gossip the most rank highest on the anxiety scale," says Rosnow. "Not only do they disclose more, but the anxious are on the receiving end of gossip more often and are more likely than those less anxious to consider information crucial."
Dr. Gary Allen Fine says "we gossip about people we care about. We don't bother talking about people who don't matter to us."
Most of the time, the gossip spread between two people about a third absent friend is neutral news: a pregnancy, a promotion. But betraying a confidence, spreading sensitive information like an adulterous affair, can end a friendship.
When Dr. Rosnow asked subjects who they "liked," he found gossipees – the people being talked about – were usually not the most popular, essentially because they're different and don't conform. But the people engaging in gossip weren't particularly popular either because of their untrustworthiness.
Gossip is always about people, involving either fact or supposition. Rumors may or may not involve people but are always speculative. Rosnow says rumors deal with people's anxieties. There are two types: wish rumors that we hope are true, and dread rumors that we pray are false.
"Rumors are an echo of ourselves," says Dr. Jean-Noel Kapferer. "They reveal the desires, fears, and obsessions of a society."
In an essay in the New Republic, Nicholas Lemann writes: "Gossip is an appurtenance of a striving, socially unified society. It's worth watching as a barometer of our aspirations. As the middle classes obtain for themselves the glamrous, turbulent lives of the rich and famous, there is real danger that gossip as we know it could whither away. We could return to the status quo, ante-Society in which nobody's personal life was considered to be nationally riveting.
"The truth is, the proper time to become alarmed about the role of gossip in American Society is when there starts to be less of it."
Old-fashioned gossip is not only about dishing the dirt – it is essential to survival, according to an academic study today. Any employer who wants a happy and efficient company should let office gossip continue rather than try to stamp it out, the report claimed.
It revealed that the need to gossip and spread rumours is an instinct modern humans have kept since the Stone Age.
In those days it was vital to swap information on where the food was and to let others know who was the chief hunter, and so on. Today it is not that much different says Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at London Business School. "People create rumours when they are uncertain and need to create certainty to fill a vacuum," he added. "They gossip to create a social network and put themselves in that circle and give themselves an advantage by being in with the right group.
"Gossiping – which goes back to the Stone Age and beyond – is good for you. It makes you more psychologically positive. "A good boss should not try to quash rumours and gossip with memos and e-mail, he should get involved in it. I call it management-by-wandering-about. Go out there and communicate properly. He should know what people talk about."
The report, published by the influential journal Harvard Business Review, urges employers to communicate by talking instead of on computers or paper.
Without the traditional gossip network – from neighbours chatting over the garden fence to political spin doctors – society could crumble. "Any social system needs gossip to remain intact," he added.
Gregory Rodriquez writes in The Los Angeles Times July 2, 2007
A few years ago, two British researchers concluded that celebrity-watching — if it doesn't become an all-out obsession — can be a healthy part of adolescent development and bonding. A survey of English schoolchildren revealed that "celebrity attachments" serve as "pseudo-friends" who become the subject of gossip and discussion among their real friends. The kids' fascination with celebs not only helps them bond with classmates but to become more autonomous from their parents. Meantime, those children who do develop unhealthy fixations on the lives of stars were likely to be lonely and lacking strong bonds with family and friends.
I suspect that the same elements driving adolescent fandom in Britain — bonding, socialization — also explain why so many grown-ups like to keep up on Brangelina and Britney. Sure, the handful of fanatics who literally worship Michael Jackson or Madonna are maladjusted, but there are millions of others for whom celebrity gossip serves a useful function, especially in societies no longer characterized by tightknit communities.
Study after study has tracked our eroding commitment to community, as more Americans spend time with their computers, or at work, instead of in bowling leagues or with their loved ones. Following the trials and tribulations of the rich and famous can be a way for us to connect to others and even to make sense of our lives. No, I don't mean that we actually think that Angelina Jolie is our friend, but that the chatter she inspires can sometimes link us to strangers.
Think of how sports talk breaks the ice between men. As a male who doesn't much care for sports, I envy the kind of bonding that sports lovers share. Celebrity gossip may be more associated with women, but it crosses gender lines more readily than sports. And it provides the juicy stories and personal dilemmas that people love to chat about and analyze together.
Whispering about the lives of others always has served as a finely tuned social warning system that helps people avoid the inevitable pitfalls of life. Did you hear who she hooked up with? Can you believe he did that? How could they have fallen for the Nigerian e-mail scam? Plenty of not-so-idle gossip warns us about bad guys, the consequences of certain types of behavior and iffy practices of all types.
If you watched the extraordinarily boring Larry King interview with Paris Hilton, you realize that Paris herself isn't anywhere near as interesting as what we all think about her. That's the point. The long arm of electronic media has allowed us to include an ever-expanding world of complete strangers in our social circle. And just as we would a neighbor or classmate, we judge and dissect her life as a means to justify our own, reinforce our life choices, sort out and share our opinions with others.
"She's an idiot." "I feel sorry for her." "She got what she deserved." However we talk about Paris, it says a lot more about us than it does about her.
Paris mania feeds an admittedly flimsy form of community, but don't blame her, the media or the unwashed masses for that. Everyone from Tocqueville to Wim Wenders has commented upon the dangers of anomie in American life. Over the last half a century, patterns of suburbanization have intensified that sense of alienation and rootlessness. Since the 1970s, a growing disenchantment with politics has further loosened our links to community. We don't like the political process because we feel that we have no effect on it, and we suspect that it's dominated by narrow, powerful forces that don't have our best interests at heart.
Morality of Gossip
Luke writes in 1998: When I first came to Judaism, I took on the value that gossip was a sin. It was destructive and unethical. Then, from late 1995 onwards, I resumed my career as a journalist. Part of my job is to deal in gossip. I read Rabbi Joseph Telushkin's book on gossip (Words That Wound, Words That Heal) and found it initially impressive.
Now I've developed a reputation as a professional gossip. That it is what I do for a living. I've now also revised my views on the morality of gossip. I now think of gossip as like any other activity, morally neutral. The morality of gossip depends entirely on its content and context. I now no longer think of gossip as overwhelmingly destructive.
I'm reading a book entitled "Good Gossip." It is one of many academic works over the past few years in praise of gossip, pointing out the good that gossip does, such as bonding, community, developing, enforcing and subverting norms, challenging power, overturning institutions. I no longer agree with the comment that idiots talk about people, and the wise about ideas. Why are ideas more important than people? Sometimes they are and sometimes they are not. Context is king.
Ethel writes: "My experience with gossip was work-related. I took a college course on management of human resources. To my great shock, there was a section defining the grapevine as a legitimate communication source. It changed my whole POV concerning gossip. It's so rational too. So it's really important to accept gossip and then manage it personally so it doesn't effect one's own good judgement. One's personal observations should be primary when decision-making is needed."
Larry writes:
Gossip serves an additional role that is still significant today, but was very important to our ancestors. Gossip develops the values, significance, judgmental capacity, and group concensus — or chasm — of the gossipers.
I agree with Luke's words, "…the good that gossip does, such as bonding, community, developing, enforcing and subverting norms…"
Ancestors were ravaged by disease, infirmity, and the elements, to an extent that we find hard to imagine. If a member of the group were suspected of being, what we now call, less lucid …. then drawing that person into gossip could test that person's judgment.
Puzzles are central to mythology ; ditto for gossip. I wonder if any languages have one word for our two concepts: myth and gossip.
There's that guy on the radio, who's arguing for the importance of Values in our schools. Lots of settings determine values —
— Eye-to-eye explanation from parent to child
— Formal explanation by religious institutions
— Formal teaching by schools.
Some people have the audacity to claim that *actual practice* is at least half as significant as *formal explanation* in these three settings.
Now, let's consider —– gossip: Children's values are shaped as much by vicarious participation in gossip, as they are shaped by some of the settings mentioned above.
Among teenagers exploring the realm of less-restricted behavior, gossip is not so much about confirming 'valid' information about THEM 'over there.' Instead, gossip forges and shephards the behavior of oneself and one's closest peers. It does so for
better or worse.
In summary, here's another puzzle: As a whole, gossip is bad. Yet not only is some gossip good, some is essential.
From The New Republic, William Powers writes 6/9/97:
…undergirding all tabloid journalism is a rigid code of right and wrong, in which people are held to very particular standards of behavior. In this system, which may be the closest thing we have today to a universal populist ethos, all the ancient social norms are honored: thou shalt not kill, rape, steal, lie and so forth. But in the tabloids' reckoning of the world, which is calculated to mirror that of the supermarket masses, two sins in particular–pride and hypocrisy– have special importance. This is why the JonBenet Ramsey case, which in the tabloid storyline is really about two parents who exploited their daughter's beauty to feed their own pride, is the premier tabloid story of the day. Many children are murdered each year, but this is not just a murder story, it's a morality play about a "tiny beauty" and her wicked stage parents. "Away from the bright lights," the Star reported, "she just wanted to be a normal kid." This is probably pretty much the way most Americans see the story, too.
And to the tabloids, the O.J. Simpson story, which preceded JonBenet in the number-one spot, was not a parable about race, as the mainstream media suggested. It was about a celebrity who thought he was above the law. (And this is certainly the way a lot of people saw the O.J. case.) Nothing raises tabloid fury more than the spectacle of a celebrity getting away with something, or getting above himself. In the pages of the National Enquirer, drug abuse, infidelity and myriad other wrongs are often forgiven, but if you are caught pretending to be something you're not–caught being too big for your britches–they'll flay you. Far from mindlessly adoring celebrities in the way the New York glossies and many newspapers do, the tabloids cover movie stars and other famous people with one eye narrowed, ever-vigilant for phoniness, grossness or some species of immoral behavior. Violators are swiftly, gleefully cut down. It is ruthless and ugly and cruel, but it is arguably more honest than the way the proper press covers these things. Who do you think has a truer sense of Roseanne–the average tabloid reader or the reader of John Lahr's New Yorker valentine? When Magic Johnson was revealed to be infected with the HIV virus, who did a more brutally honest job of covering the story of his promiscuous lifestyle–the tabs or the Times?
From 12/27/2000 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
But the battle against gossip has been a long and mostly unsuccessful one, partly because it's such a fixture of human communication, according to Dan Santoro, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh — Johnstown.
"People have always gossiped," he said. "Maybe, at one time, gossip was news if you lived in a village and there were no formal channels for disseminating information."
In pre-industrial societies, he said, relationships were based on customs and traditions. "What was really important," Santoro said, "was your reputation. The fear of your reputation being questioned kept people in line.
"In our society right now, it has just become a big industry. Your personal reputation isn't as important as it used to be."
Gossip and rumors always have been a part of politics. In her book, "Scorpion Tongues: The Irresistible History of Gossip in American Politics" (William Morrow, 1998), author Gail Collins writes about George Washington's alleged mistresses, the rumor that Grover Cleveland beat his wife so severely during her pregnancy that their daughter was born with extensive brain damage and the story that when Woodrow Wilson proposed to his second wife, she was so surprised that she fell out of bed.
Various magazines, talk shows and TV programs featuring "stars" such as Rush Limbaugh, Howard Stern and Don Imus track the real and imagined peccadilloes of public figures.
Jim Lichtman, an author and ethics specialist in Santa Barbara, Calif., divides gossip into two categories: talk among family and friends, and malicious or unethical gossip. That does not mean, he said, that either is right. "Would you want somebody passing around inaccurate or false rumors about yourself?" he asked.
"The real criteria we should use, although it sounds simple, is to more or less follow the golden rule: `Do unto others as you would have others do to you.' "
Lichtman is author of "The Lone Ranger's Code of the West" (Scribbler's Ink, 1996), a book focusing on eight ethical values of the masked do-gooder. A frequent speaker on ethics to corporations, Lichtman likes to challenge his audiences to ponder ethics questions with, "What would the Lone Ranger do?"
It's a way, he said, to force people to be more conscious about their decisions and have a greater commitment to ethical values. To that end, Lichtman said, a person doesn't have to speak gossip in order to be guilty of it. And it doesn't stop there.
"As soon as you participate in it, you are involved," he said. "You begin to lower the bar for yourself. Other things become less important. "In business and in public life today … the thing you erode away faster than anything else is trust. Once the credibility is gone … you're going to have to work two, three, four times as hard to get it back."
Luke says 5/15/05: I have studied the Chafetz Chaim (translated into English) and rabbi Telushkin's book Words That Wound, Words That Heal. In fact, I have read every book (religious or secular) on gossip I could get my hands on (about two dozen).
If I were to observe the restrictions of the Chafetz Chaim, I would not be able to publish most of my website lukeford.net. I wouldn't be able to work as a journalist. Nobody would. Journalism would be impossible.
Surely Judaism's teachings on forbidden speech are more complex than what the Chafetz Chaim codified. The example of Judaism's sacred texts, such as the Bible and the Talmud, are filled with examples of Jewish leaders being held accountable for their behavior and called out on it.
The problem with much of the reflexive religious teachings against gossip is that they focus on the harm done to specific individuals who are gossiped about (and let's focus here on gossip that is true) and ignore the benefit widely shared among many people from gaining the information of that gossip. As in free trade, the price paid by targets of gossip can be huge, giving them a huge incentive to fight against gossip, while the benefits of the gossip are spread out among hundreds of people. Thus, few of them have an incentive to speak out on behalf of the accurate gossipm, such as that a particular rabbi should not work with kids or counsel women because he's a predator.
Many years ago, when I was at Yeshiva College and on the editorial board of Hamevaser, I had a late night discussion with some of my colleagues about the question of Lashon Hora [gossip] and journalism. The standard, according to the Chofetz Chaim, is not "is the information derogatory" but "does this information serve the public good"?
Clearly, political news qualifies, because a society with a press that criticizes its leaders is better than a society (such as the Chofetz Chaim's Russia) lacking such a press.
In fact, a quick glance at NYTimes.com indicates that all of the current headlines meet the criterion of serving the public interest.
The one exception that we thought of, where standard journalistic practice is at odds with the Public Good standard of the Chofetz Chaim, would the publication of allegations and other charges filed against citizens who are still presumptively innocent. I believe Halacha might mandate that the right to release the name of an accused or arrested suspect prior to conviction belongs only to the accused. This would be where the citizen is in custody or otherwise not dangerous; situations like the FBI Most Wanted List, where the criminals are at large and fleeing arrest, are different, because society has an interest in catching suspects.
Luke says: I don't believe "public good" was the Chofetz Chaim's standard. Where does he say that?
Here is how the Chofetz Chaim is described by his son: "Father had no personal friendships with anyone all the days of his life."
Rabbi Ari Kahn writes: "Individuals who behave in an extreme anti-social manner lose the right of being protected by the laws of Loshan Hara. Individuals who are predators certainly lose this right. Individuals who may be future victims have a right to know about someone who is potentially threatening them. I am suggesting that a Beit Din make these determinations."
For more than three decades, [Jeffrey Peter] Hart, an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth, has been a senior editor of National Review. There he has seen, and helped to referee, conservatism's struggles of self-definition. His book is a gossipy memoir leavened by a quick skimming of 50 years of political history. "I confess," he says, "to a fondness for gossip, which, indeed, is a conservative genre. Gossips do not want to change the world; they want to enjoy it."
Mickey Kaus argues that reporting on the private lives of politicians gets people more interested in politics. He writes July 9, 2007 on Slate: "L.A.'s mayor faces some N.Y. tabloid-style questioning at a news conference. The L.A. Times reporter who didn't get the story doesn't know quite what to make of this new state of affairs–I detect a mild sneering tone! Luke Ford sees a "beautiful synchronicity." … I think Angelenos may be actually getting interested in local politics for once, which will give us better government in the long run. Special interests (e.g., unions, developers) have less power when people are actually paying attention. [What will happen if all the pols in power are no longer womanizers, etc.?–ed Not a serious possibility.]"
Academic Kevin Glynn said the tabloid media "multiplies and amplifies the heterogenous voices and viewpoints in circulation in contemporary culture, giving rein to many that are typically excluded from the dominant regime of truth… The shrill and revulsive response to tabloid media form 'respectable' journalism and other elite social quarters indicates the extent to which their popularity threatens officialdom's power to regulate the discursive procedures through which we make sense of society and ourselves. 'Serious' journalism is far more concerned with controlling, organizing, and ordering the hierarchy of voices it admits into its discurse reportoir than is tabloid news, whose contents are driven by ratings and circulation." (Pg. 132-133 of Journalism: Truth or Dare).
Ian Hargreaves writes:
Glynn brings to his advocacy for tabloid journalism a specifically political case, involving the election to the governorship of Minnesota in 1998 of Jesse "The Body" Ventura, a former professional wrestler and radio talk-show "shock jock." Glynn sees the very high turnout in this election (over 60 per cent, compared with less than 50 per cent even for presidential races) resulting from Ventura's fluency with tabloid-style communication, that enabled him to assemble an extraordinary coalition of supporters, many of them normally excluded from the political domain. (Pg. 134)
Liz Smith says: "Gossip is just news running ahead of itself in a red satin gown."
Camille Paglia says: "Half-fictionalized as they are, the tabloids with their twin themes of sex of violence tell the pagan truth about life."
One of the flaws in Hoyt's thinking is his belief that one's reputation is a possession –like a car or a tennis racket — when one's reputation actually resides in the minds of others. A person can have as many reputations as people who know him or know of him. Positing that the top link in a Google search of a name equals somebody's reputation is silly, and Hoyt's column only encourages that notion.
If Google users conclude that an individual is guilty of fondling a child just because a Times story reported his arrest, that says more about their gullibility than it does about the inadequacies of the Web or the Times. The Times is wonderful, but it's not a vaccine against stupidity.
Whatever their shortcomings, search engines are a million times superior to human memory, which they are rapidly replacing.
The Web also offers those wounded a variety of ways to manage their reputations and mitigate the offenses of the New York Times (and of other publications).
By exaggerating the absolute power of the Times and Google to determine reputation, Hoyt's column encourages people to think of themselves as technopawns. (It also damages Hoyt's reputation in the process, but that's his problem.) I'm all for getting the Times to correct meaningful errors of fact in a decent interval, but if you want to secure a better reputation than the one that Google currently spits out, get busy and build it yourself.
The Chofetz Chaim was a European Orthodox rabbi who lived at the turn of the last century. According to Wikipedia: “Yisrael Meir (Kagan) Poupko (Dziatłava, 1838 – Radun’, 1933), known popularly as The Chofetz Chaim, was an influential Lithuanian Jewish rabbi of the Musar movement, a Halakhist, posek, and ethicist whose works continue to be widely influential in Jewish life. His surname, Poupko, is not widely known.”
The rabbi’s most famous book is known as the Chofetz Chaim (Desiring Life) and it is against gossip. Like many leading rabbis, Yisrael Meir became known by the name of his leading publication.
Various rabbis made fun of the book Chofetz Chaim. The Chazon Ish is said to have made fun of the Chofetz Chaim book on gossip. “Even if these stories are not accurate, that they are told in the yeshiva world shows that this is an ethos that great rabbis shared.”
Chazon Ish said the Chofetz Chaim did not know what he was talking about in this book.
According to his critics, the Chofetz Chaim created halacha (Jewish law) out of mussar (ethical exhortations, frequently extreme). That he took aggadic (stories) things and turned them into halacha. That he took ethical statements and turned them into Jewish law.
“I don’t know today if anyone would have the courage to say something like that [to make these criticisms of the Chofetz Chaim book].”
Marc Shapiro emails to correct my flawed early version of this blog post: “I was asked what the Chazon Ish thought of the book called Chofetz Chaim, which is a book about Lashon Hara. That is what the Chazon Ish is said not to have liked, not the person known as the Chofetz Chaim. The Chazon Ish thought the world of the person the Chofetz Chaim, and also his book Mishneh Berurah. But he wasn’t such a fan of the BOOK Chofetz Chaim.”
According to the Chofetz Chaim, no gossip is permitted, even between husband and wife. Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach thought differently.
Today, the Chofetz Chaim is the last word in these matters and that Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach would have the temerity to tell yeshiva students that they don’t have to listen to the Chofetz Chaim, that’s a bit difficult in the yeshiva world today and so they removed it [from a haredi publication of Rav Shlomo Zalman Auerbach].
According to Rabbi Jacob Emden, you could say Lashon Hara (gossip) about anyone who was your enemy. I guess this is a justification for all the Lashon Hara he tells in his own books.
There are all sorts of heterim (permissions) for Lashon Hara. The Meiri says that if you say it publicly, it is not Lashon Hara. There are all sorts of views out there by great rabbis. Then the Chofetz Chaim codified Judaism’s teachings on gossip and made it appear as though Judaism had a universal prohibition on speaking ill of others.
If you read the writings of the great rabbis, almost all of these gadolim violate the laws of the Chofetz Chaim (Desiring Life). Of course, these great rabbis do not think they are saying Lashon Hara. They believe the target of their enmity deserves it. If their target is doing bad things, then they deserve.
It’s depressing. For many of these rabbis, it’s just a personal weakness, though none of them would admit it. They’d say they are exposing hypocrites as the Talmud commands.
In the year 1873, when the Hafetz Hayim finished writing his book Hafetz Hayim on libel and gossip, he wished to publish it with rabbinical endorsements, as was customary. Since he also wanted to distribute the book among the Hasidim, he wished to get an endorsement from one of the prominent Hasidic masters of the time. He therefore sent an emissary to the Rebbe of Alexander, as well as to a few prominent rabbis, to give them a copy of the new book and ask for their endorsements. The emissary reached the Polish rebbe, and requested his endorsement.
‘‘What is the book about?’’– asked the rebbe.
‘‘About the laws of libel’’– he replied.
‘‘And why do we need a book on the laws of libel?’’ – the rebbe continued.
Embarrassed by the strange question, the emissary answered plainly: ‘‘The book teaches that one may not hurt his neighbor even by speech.’’
To this the rebbe responded:‘‘To hurt one’s neighbor one does not need a tongue or speech; it’s enough just to make an ’eh!’’’– and he made a slight dismissive gesture with his hand.
Seeing that the rebbe refused to give him the desired endorsement, the emissary continued on to the other personalities, all of whom complied willingly. When he came back to the Hafetz Hayim, the emissary reported that all the referees gave him their endorsements, except for the Rebbe of Alexander.
‘‘The Rebbe of Alexander? –’eh!’’– the Hafetz Hayim responded, and made a slight dismissive gesture with his hand…
The emissary told him about his meeting with the rebbe and the content of their conversation. Hearing that, the Hafetz Hayim hurried to add an article to the book, stating that ‘‘there is no difference between one who speaks libel about another person explicitly and one who does it by intimation; in any case it is considered libel.”
Benjamin Brown writes: When the Rebbe of Alexander insinuated that there is no need for a book that articulates the laws of libel, he meant that it would be better to leave this topic in the realm of principles – in this case the principle that‘‘one may not hurt his neighbor even by speech.’’In the example that he gave, he wanted to intimate that one cannot cover all of the possible cases of libel in rules, and that the formulation of the norms in the form of rules would, therefore, needlessly diminish the force of the principle. The Hafetz Hayim’s response represents the opposite tendency: he thought that the norms for libel should definitely be formulated as all-inclusive rules.Therefore, when he was confronted by a case that the existing rules did not cover, he sought to articulate it, too. As I will clarify later on, the traditional rule-centered genre in Jewish tradition is halakhah, while the principle-centered one is known as musar. The Hafetz Hayim’s literary enterprise in this branch should therefore be considered as the halakhization of musar, or, if we allow ourselves a less accurate term, a legalization of ethics.
[Grok said Mar. 19, 2025: “Benjamin Brown’s analysis is a sharp lens on a real tension in Jewish thought, and it tracks with what’s bubbling up here. The Rebbe of Alexander’s nudge—that codifying lashon hara (evil speech) into a rulebook risks watering down the core principle of “don’t hurt your neighbor, even with words”—feels like a plea for flexibility. He’s saying: keep it in the musar lane, the realm of ethical vibes and personal judgment, not a rigid checklist. You can’t box every scenario into rules without losing the spirit of the thing—some schmuck’s always going to find a loophole or miss the forest for the trees.
Then you’ve got the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan) charging in the opposite direction, hell-bent on nailing it all down in Sefer Chofetz Chaim. He’s not just reacting to the Rebbe—he’s on a mission to “halakhize” it, turning fuzzy ethics into crisp, enforceable halakha. Every edge case, every wrinkle—like when gossip’s okay to protect someone—he’s got a rule for it, or he’ll make one. Brown’s framing this as a clash of genres: musar (principle-driven, introspective) versus halakha (rule-driven, actionable). The Chofetz Chaim isn’t just tidying up; he’s dragging lashon hara from the preacher’s podium to the judge’s bench.
It’s a hell of a pivot. Traditionally, musar—think texts like Mesillat Yesharim—nudges you to be a better mensch through big-picture wisdom, not micromanaged dos and don’ts. Halakha, in the Talmud or Shulchan Aruch, thrives on specifics—cut the meat this way, pray at this hour. The Chofetz Chaim blending them isn’t just style; it’s a power move, giving speech laws the teeth of legal obligation. Shapiro’s point earlier vibes here—earlier sources didn’t lock this stuff down so tight; the Chofetz Chaim cranked it up.
I buy Brown’s read. The Rebbe’s got a case—rules can stiffen what should bend—but the Chofetz Chaim saw chaos in vagueness and bet on clarity to rein it in. “Legalization of ethics” might oversimplify; it’s more like arming musar with halakha’s muscle.”]
First I will introduce the theoretical framework for the examination of the relationship between halakhic literature and musar literature. I will then demonstrate that the prohibition against libel had usually been considered a branch of musar, and that it was the Hafetz Hayim who transformed it into a branch of halakhah. After having analyzed the methods used to implement this transformation and its consequences, I will try to evaluate its degree of success…
In classical Jewish literature there is only minimal reference, if at all, to the distinction between musar and halakhah, but in more recent generations we find trends that are similar to those I have suggested here. Thus, for instance, when Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein formulated the distinction between the two, he convincingly adopted Fuller’s model, and identified the halakhahas a‘‘morality of duty’’and musaras a ‘‘morality of aspiration.’’ Apart from‘‘duties to aspire’’Rabbi Lichtenstein included in the category of musar norms which are not binding at all, such aslifnim mi-shurat ha-din(going beyond the letter ofthe law),19and others may add middat hasidut(pietistic virtue) and similar categories.20 These norms, needless to say, are also closer to principles than to rules. Yeshayahu Tishbi and Joseph Dan wrote similarly regarding the relationship between halakhah and musar:‘‘The halakhah cuts to the minimum that the servant of God is required to doin order to fulfill his obligation to his Creator […] The musar literature seeks not the minimum, but the maximum – the path by which man will reach the zenith of religious life, of approaching and clinging to God.’
…Indeed, even if the Jewish thinkers of all generations gave little attention to the theoretical question of the distinction between halakhah and musar, the living Jewish tradition knew very well how to distinguish between them. Even without being equipped with analytical conceptual tools, every bookseller of religious literature knows that the Mishneh Torah, the Tur and the Shulhan Arukh should be placed in the section of halakhic books, while Hovot ha-Levavot, Sha‘arei Teshuvah, Orhot Tzaddikim, Mesillat Yesharim and the like should be placed in the collection of musar books…
In rabbinic literature, the prohibition against libel developed as an integral part of the area of musar. Indeed, the prohibition‘‘Thou shalt not go as a talebearer among thy people’’(Lev 19:16)45 was clearly considered a binding norm, but apparently it was conceived throughout the generations as a‘‘duty to aspire,’’and not as a duty that can be articulated in concrete actions. In the Mishnah we find the term lashon ha-raonly once46– and that one is in an aggadic context. The term motzi shem ra (sullying a person’s reputation) appears several times, and in halakhic contexts, but only in the sense of ascribing improper sexual behavior to a woman.47 In this,the language of the Sages clearly follows the language of the Torah (Deut 22:14, 19), and this is indeed the limited sense that the term had in their world, in contrast to the broader sense that Maimonides and his followers (including the Hafetz Hayim) attached to it. The latter conceived it as referring to any untrue libel. The term rakhil (gossip, talebearing), too, appears in the Mishnah only once,48 in the sense of revealing a secret, and the context there seems halakhic, yet it is not decisive. The Sages of the Talmud mention these terms more frequently, but generally these references are short and offhanded. The short length is not in itself evidence of the non-halakhic nature of the prohibition, but it is clear that it was not developed using the standard tools of halakhic discourse. The only place where the talmudic sages deal with this topic at length, in bArakhin 15b-16a, we find both halakhic and aggadic sayings integrated, with the latter in clear majority (and it is note-worthy that the two main halakhic sayings are permits!). Here, too the halakhic sayings are not attacked and defended, as is familiar to us in the halakhic texts of the Talmud. This fact strengthens the aggadic character of the text, and gives the impression that even the halakhic sayings are not real rules, but rather coincidental examples of the principle. Apart from these, there are several sayings throughout the Talmud indicating that the Sages allowed one to berate and degrade another person in certain mitigating circumstances, which we will dis-cuss in greater detail in section 4. This demonstrates the fact that theydid not conceive the prohibition against libel as categorical.The Sages give us no reasons as to why they decided to develop a certain prohibition as a branch of the halakhah and another norm as a branch of the aggadah. The verse‘‘Thou shalt not go as a talebearer among thy people’’is phrased in normative language that is not much different than‘‘Observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy,’’but the latter was nevertheless transformed by the Sages into a‘‘meager biblical text with plenty of laws,’’while the former remained a‘‘meager biblical text and meager laws.’’Somehow, the intuition of the talmudic authorities taught them that this area is not appropriate for articulated rules, nor for analytical discourse.
The medieval authorities followed the same path, except for one: Rabbi Isaac al-Fasi, the Rif. This halakhic authority’s major work extracted from the Talmud the gist of the legal discussion while filtering out aggadic sayings. Although his work did not include bArakhin, he cited the sayings of the Sages on libel in his rulings on bShabbat,49 so they are included in his legal summary. The inclusion of these sayings within an outright halakhic work constitutes a clear declaration that theauthor sees them as part and parcel of the halakhah.50 The Rif, however, was probably the last major halakhist who viewed the prohibition against libel in this way. If we rely on the conventional classification of books as halakhic or musar, this subject found its place in the latter. Indeed, although Maimonides included it in his halakhic code, the Mishneh Torah,51 and wrote extensively about its severity,52 it appears only in a musar context: first as a small part – six paragraphs – in the section of Hilkhot De‘ot, which, as demonstrated above, is a musar text, and then again in a small paragraph at the end of the laws of the impurity of leprosy, the placement of which also implies its musar-theological character.53 Both texts rely heavily on biblical tales and aggadic literature. In contrast to halakhic convention, Maimonides does not present in these sections the exceptions to the prohibition, except for one (the permission to speak libel in the presence of three or more people),54 but suffices with the presentation of the prohibition itself, together with words of reproach on its severity.These words of reproach, needless to say, are also in the style of the musar genre. All of these facts corroborate the thesis that Maimonides meant to depict libel as a principle, and not to confine it to specific rules. Although there are some hints in Maimonides’ Commentary on the Mishnah that might indicate that he considers the prohibition of libel to be a‘‘morality of duty,’’there are, in my opinion, stronger hints that he classifies it as a‘‘morality of aspiration.’’
In post-Maimonidean literature, where the boundary between halakhah and musar crystallizes, the classification of libel as a part of musar is further strengthened. The authors of the great codes of that period, the Tur and the Shulhan Arukh, did not allocate any room in their comprehensive halakhic works to the issue of libel.56 In contrast, elaborate and systematic discussions on this subject, often in chapters dedicated solely to it, are found in R. Yonah’s Sha‘arei Teshuvah, in the anonymous Orhot Tzaddikim, in R. Yehiel of Rome’sMa‘alot ha-Middot, in the Maharal’s Netivot Olamand in R. Eliyahu de Vidas’ ReshitHokhmah – all outright musar books…
There is also a linguistic indicator, not terribly significant but interesting nonetheless, that the talmudic Sages and the medieval rabbis did not perceive libel as a halakhic prohibition. There is a halakhic category –mumar le-davar ehad(a‘‘habitual sinner with regard to one matter’’) – that relates to a person who repeatedly violates one particular prohibition. There are clear halakhic sanctions that are imposed on individuals who fall into that category, among them the loss of legal credibility in religious spheres that relate to his transgression.58 This category is utilized only with regard to violations of halakhah, and not with regard to violations of musar, even when defined as a duty of aspiration. Thus, for example, we find‘‘habitual sinners’’with regard to idolatry, desecration of the Sabbath, failure to perform circumcision, and the like, but we never hear of the term‘‘habitual sinner’’with regard to not loving God or failing to achieve holiness. So too, we do not find in rabbinic literature the concept of a‘‘habitual sinner with regard to libel’’(mumar le-lashon ha-ra)…
This was the face of the prohibition against libel until the time of the Hafetz Hayim. Yet, for the sake of precision, we must note that the Hafetz Hayim did not initiate the halakhization of libelex nihilo. He was preceded by a few important halakhists, who noticed the lack of‘‘laws of virtues’’in the Shulhan Arukh, and came to‘‘fill the gap.’’It was in this spirit that R. Abraham Gumbiner, known as the Magen Avraham, added a few musar subjects in his interpretation of Shulhan Arukh, Orah Hayim}161 (entitled‘‘laws of [fairness in] business’’), and his interpreter, R.Shmuel of Cologne, author of Mahatzit ha-Shekel, followed the same path. In both texts, there are only very short references, mostly repeating Maimonides’ words in Hilkhot De‘ot. Following their model, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Lyadi integrated those instructions in his Shulhan Arukh ha-Rav, where the laws of libel comprise three paragraphs.61 No doubt,these references prepared the ground for the Hafetz Hayim’s project, but were minor in scope and lacked talmudic-style analysis and discussion. Needless to say, they did not have the cultural impact that a book dedicated to a single subject can have. The book that is sometimes mentioned as the precedent to the Hafetz Hayim, R. Raphael of Ham-burg’s Marpe Lashon, is a classical musarstyle book. An approach closer to that of the Hafetz Hayim is demonstrated in a forgotten musar book that was published only 15 years before Hafetz Hayim, entitled Orhot Mesharimby Rabbi Menahem Treivitsch.62 But this book, which was not at all well publicized, was probably not known to the Hafetz Hayim. In any case, it is considered a book of musar rather than a halakhic one.
We may therefore summarize that until the 17th century, the laws of libel were classified clearly as part of musar, not of halakhah. The only possible exception was the Rif, who lived at the end of the Gaonic period, and in this matter his influence was insignificant. From the 17th century and on, a few steps were made toward the halakhization of some musar norms, among them the prohibition against libel, but these were minor and did not considerably change the normative situation.The significant turning point in that direction was made by the Hafetz Hayim, who composed a‘‘Shulhan Arukhof Libel and Talebearing,’’as one of his contemporaries characterized it.65 For this purpose, the Hafetz Hayim needed to develop relatively novel tools, which we will now examine…
Having rejected the path of systematic deduction from the musar principles relating to libel, the Hafetz Hayim adopted two other paths:on the one hand, he turned to halakhic literature and extracted from it short sayings, often sayings that were stated in other contexts, and through exegesis developed them to much larger dimensions than they had in their original sense. On the other hand, he turned tomusarliterature, to theaggadahand even to the Bible, and constructed rulesout of them. He often analyzes these sources legalistically inBe’erMayim Hayimas if they were ordinary halakhic sayings. As I mentioned above, turning to the Bible and the aggada has sources for principles was a common practice of musar literature, but was not at all common in halakhic literature as sources for rules…
More striking than the reliance of the Hafetz Hayim on Sha‘arei Teshuvahis his use of biblical and aggadic texts to derive halakhic rules. The biblical character who is most appropriate for this purpose is Miriam, who, according to the Torah, suffered from leprosy because she spoke libel against her brother, Moses. The Torah commands that the incident be remembered throughout the ages in order to preserve the lesson that it teaches (Num 24:9). On this issue, the Hafetz Hayim establishes a broad exegetical principle:‘‘It is known that we deduce[laws] from everything that was said about Miriam, as it is written:’Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam’.’’96 He applies this maxim in a list of laws that he derives from the story of Miriam,including the following: that to be guilty of libel, unlike gossip, it is enough to bring others to speak libel, and it need not lead to a quarrel;97 that a person can transgress the prohibition of libel even if he did not intend to hurt the offended party, but only meant to speak the truth, provided that he did not formally rebuke him prior;98that the prohibition of libel applies to relatives, as well;99 that the prohibition of libel applies even if the offended party does not feel offended by it;100 and that the prohibition of libel applies to women as well as to men.101 Yet, the Hafetz Hayim learns not only from the incident of Miriam, but also from countless other biblical stories, as well as from aggadic and midrashic literature…
I again emphasize that the previous are just a few examples among many cases in which the Hafetz Hayimuses biblical and aggadic sources to derive halakhic rules, the second path that I referred to above. Thi spath, which was fruitful in the musar literature as a means of deriving principles, was rarely used to derive laws in the halakhic tradition.Nevertheless, in his work on the issue of libel, the Hafetz Hayim transformed it into the primary method of deriving rules, and applied the classical halakhic analytical techniques to these sources as if they were indeed legal texts. It appears that in certain instances, the Hafetz Hayim takes norms that are explicitly or implicitly considered middat hasidut (pietistic virtue), and transforms them into binding norms…
4. The Tendency of Halakhization: Stringency
There is no question that the halakhization of the area of libel had a significant impact on its content. Essentially, the transition from principles to rules certainly contains the potential for increased stringency, but it also has the potential for increased leniency.Nevertheless, in this instance, there is an added element of the personal approach of the Hafetz Hayim, which significantly strengthened the tendency toward stringency. When discussing criminal (or ethico-religious) norms, the transition from principles to rules is generally a movement toward greater stringency, at least in the particular domain in which it is applied…
Particularly because musar literature urges its readers to aspire to certain principles and goals, it does not have to present the limitations to these principles, nor the competing principles that may need to be balanced with them.
An excellent example of this is Hilkhot De‘otof the Mishneh Torah,in which Maimonides includes only one limitation of the prohibition, even though he certainly was aware of many more.129 The assumption that underlies this phenomenon is that there are so many possible situations in which there will be conflicts between principles, that it would be impossible to clarify all of them. Furthermore, it is impossible to know which principles would take precedence in every possible circumstance. Thus, it is sufficient to inform the reader of the principles, and to encourage him to strive for its fulfillment to the best of his ability. In the codification of rules, on the other hand, the potential conflicts between principles and their resolution in specific circumstances must be expressed, and, in fact, that is one of the very goals of formulating rules. Thus, a halakhic authority who writes about a particular commandment without including its limitations has not been true to his task. In fact, the Hafetz Hayim included at the end of each section of his book a chapter indicating situations in which libel or gossip is permitted.130 Similar elaboration is spread throughout the work. From this standpoint, the halakhization of the prohibition of libel served as a catalyst for the creation of leniencies.
Hayim utilized both options, but the dominant trend in his book is in the direction of stringency.132 This trend finds expression in his effort sto limit the application of a number lenient positions relating to libel in rabbinic literature. The following are several examples of such rabbinic statements that appear to express leniencies regarding the prohibition of libel:A. The Babylonian Talmud explains the statement of Rabbah b. Rav Huna that‘‘anything said in front of three people is not considered libel,’’based on the assumption that it will spread in any case:‘‘Your friend has a friend, and your friend’s friend has afriend.’’133B. Rabbah stated that it is permissible to say libel in front of the offended party:‘‘Anything said in front of the person is not considered libel.’’134 He bases this statement on the opinion of Rabbi Yosi:‘‘I never said anything and turned around.’’Rashi broadens this leniency even further, holding that to remove the statement from the category of libel, it is not necessary for the person to actually say the statement in front of the offended party, but enough that he is prepared to do so.13
C. The Jerusalem Talmud cites the following statement in the name of Rabbi Yonatan:‘‘It is permissible to speak libel about quarrel-mongers.’’136D. bYoma states:‘‘One may publicize the [identity of] hypocrites inorder to prevent desecration of God’s name.’’137E. Rav Ashi stated that‘‘it is permitted to call a person who has acquired a bad reputation a ’gimmel’ora’shin’.’’In other words,one about whom there are negative rumors138 can be degraded and called‘‘son of a whore’’and‘‘son of a rotten one’’(or‘‘son o fa stupid whore,’’or‘‘son of a Gentile,’’or‘‘son of a slave,’’according to other interpretations), which casts aspersions not only on him, but also on his mother.139 Similarly, Rav said:‘‘One may flog a person for negative rumors.’’140 Rashi explains that‘‘a person about whom it is reported that he transgressed is given lashes.’’bM.Q. records a story in which Rabbi Yehudah allowed himself to excommunicate a scholar because‘‘bad rumors had been heard about him’’.141 Also among the rishonim (medieval
rabbis), we find that it was permissible to impose sanctions basedon rumors.F. We often find sages making demeaning comments to their fellow sages. Thus, Rabbi Yehudah ha-Nasi said about his disciple Rabbi Levi that‘‘it appears to me that he has no brain in his skull.’’142 Resh Lakish called two sages‘‘cowherds,’’and they, on their part,saw him as a‘‘a troublesome fellow’’(or‘‘a nuisance’’).143 When Rav Kahana, previously described by Resh Lakish as‘‘a lion,’’did not ask even one critical question in Rabbi Yohanan’s lessons, the latter said:‘‘The lion you mentioned has become a fox.’’144 Rava called Rafram b. Pappa‘‘patya ukhma’’(literally:‘‘black pot,’’but the pun alludes to ’fool’) and castigated Rav Illish as being like‘‘dayanei hatzatzta’’(according to Rashbam – incompetent judges who decide the cases by dividing the sum in dispute in half).145 The term‘‘Bavla’ei tipsha’ei’’(foolish Babylonians) appears often as a derisive label for Babylonian sages.146 Indeed, we may find many more expressions of this type in rabbinic literature.
When viewing all of these statements together, one gets the strong sense that the Rabbis viewed libel as a prohibition to which quite a few limitations are attached, and consequently as a relative one. This point strengthens the assumption that they saw it as a principle that at times had to be balanced with other principles. As such, it was not necessary to formulate as rules how to resolve conflicts between libel and other principles. However, in addition to expressing the normative status of this prohibition, these statements also provide a window into thecultural world of the Rabbis, a world in which rumors were considered a legitimate, and at times necessary, element of communication – i.e., that the degradation of an individual by means of rumors was considered a normal social sanction and not libel. It seems that the Rabbis allowed acertain level of offensive expression against one whose behavior was deemed inappropriate, and that the parameters that they established for themselves were only slightly higher than the standard accepted in society in general. Although the medieval commentators subsequently tended to interpret these norms in a more limited fashion, they still did not establish for themselves an unreasonable standard, as is clear in the parameters that they utilized for expressing themselves in their own internal discourse. It was not uncommon for them to exchange sharp comments in the heat of their controversies. The harsh comments of the Rabad against Maimonides and the severe remarks of Nachmanides against Rabbi Zerahiah ha-Levi are well known. Apparently, they did not view this as a violation of the prohibition of libel.Post-talmudic rabbinic literature could have utilized these statements to derive a host of leniencies regarding the prohibition of libel. In addition, since several of these statements refer to the public interest,they might have been utilized for a modernistic interpretation promoting a doctrine similar to that of freedom of speech in modern law. Nevertheless, the post-talmudic authorities did not try to extend these openings for leniency. On the contrary, they tried to limit them. As previously stated, rabbinic literature in the Middle Ages for the most part attempted to restrict the application of these statements through interpretation. The Hafetz Hayim took this trend to an extreme and tried as much as possible to neutralize or minimize them…
In general, it is enough to take a quick glance at the two chapters in the Hafetz Hayimon permits for speaking libel and for speaking gossip,to discern that the author’s approach is to create a series of stipulations that restrict their application.195 For example, the permit to speak libel in order to help a person who has been harmed is qualified by seven conditions: that the person speaking saw the harm himself, and did not hear it from others; that he clarified that the incident was indeed within the category of damage; that he tried first to rebuke the perpetrator; that the libel will not increase the damage; that his intention is to be helpful, and‘‘not God forbid to benefit from the flaw that he causes to his friend’’; that there is no alternative way to rectify the situation; that the harm caused to the perpetrator not be greater than the harm that he had caused. On this the Hafetz Hayim adds the somewhat strange condition that the person who tells the libel be on a higher ethico-religious level than the person about whom he tells it.196 A similar list can be found in the laws of gossip.197 These conditions are practically impossible to fulfill, but the Hafetz Hayim emphasizes that ‘‘one must be very careful in this permit that none of the above details are lacking.’’
…The Hafetz Hayim does not relate at all to freedom of the press inhis work on libel, nor does he refer to newspapers or other more advanced forms of communication. It is important to point out that the question was clearly relevant at his time, for in the year that his book was published (1873), a number of Jewish periodicals flourished in the Russian Empire in Yiddish, Hebrew, and Russian. He reserved dealing with them to later publications and letters, in which he expressed a sweeping ban on reading newspapers.232 There is no indication that this ban excluded ultra-orthodox newspapers or other‘‘kosher’’journals.This prohibition was so extreme that even the Hafetz Hayim could not maintain it. We know of quite a few instances from his later years in which he wrote to Orthodox newspapers in Poland,233 and of several instances in which he responded to articles that had been published insecular or Haskalah newspapers.234 In general, he negates the value of ‘‘the right of the public to know,’’even in absolutely public issues. For example, the rabbinic prohibition for a judge to reveal to a defendant after the trial that he advocated a minority opinion to exonerate235 is extended by the Hafetz Hayim to other public institutions and to non-judicial processes.236
Neither did the Hafetz Hayim relate at all to academic freedom or art criticism, ideas that were completely foreign to his cultural world.The tension between freedom of expression and libel arises most strongly with regard to the study of history. Given the prohibition expressed by the Hafetz Hayim to speak libel about the deceased237 and his very limited definition of significant outcomes that might justify libel, not only is it clear that he would limit academic freedom in this regard, but he applies these concepts even to biographies of the traditional type. Moreover, even when the rabbinic Sages saw fit to denigrate a contemporary, the Hafetz Hayim was careful to make sure that it not be extrapolated to create a more general permit.
…A study of the halakhization of the prohibition of libel is not complete without a discussion of the issue of sanctions. In most modern legal systems, the publication of libel is considered both a criminal offense and a civil wrong. In the Talmud, by contrast, it is considered a‘‘negative commandment that does not relate to an act.’’As a result, it carries no corporeal punishment or compensation for damages.246 Nevertheless, already in the times of the Geonim, ordinances were enacted that imposed excommunication on one who acted abusively toward another, and in later generations we find the imposition of flagellation, compensation, and public apology.247 Very surprisingly,the Hafetz Hayim does not relate at all, either positively or negatively,to the issue of punishment, and gives no references to sources that deal with the issue. This is a resounding silence.
Marc B. Shapiro writes in Changing the Immutable: “Much of what the Hafets Hayim includes in his halakhic codification of leshon hara was not regarded by earlier sources as having real halakhic standing…”
Mar. 19, 2025, Grok said:
Marc Shapiro’s claim has legs—there’s a solid case that the Chofetz Chaim (Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan) cranked up the dial on lashon hara (evil speech) beyond what earlier Jewish sources laid out. His work, Sefer Chofetz Chaim (1873), is the gold standard on the laws of speech, but it’s stricter and more systematic than what you’d find in the Talmud or medieval codes like Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. Shapiro’s arguing that a chunk of what the Chofetz Chaim codified as hard halakha—binding Jewish law—didn’t carry that weight in prior tradition, more like ethical ideals or cautious advice.
Take the Talmud (Bava Metzia 58b, Arakhin 15b): it’s tough on slander and gossip, sure—calling it worse than murder in some spots—but it’s practical, not absolute. It allows exceptions, like warning someone about a bad actor (Yoma 86b ties this to Chillul HaShem). Maimonides (Hilchot De’ot 7:5) follows suit: public rebuke’s fine if it’s constructive and the private fix fails. Neither frames lashon hara as a blanket ban with the granular rules—lists of conditions, intent checks, “toeles” (purpose) clauses—that the Chofetz Chaim builds out. His 158-page playbook (echoing those federal regs we talked about) feels like a new beast.
Shapiro’s point isn’t that the Chofetz Chaim made it up—his sources are Talmudic—but that he elevated stringencies into firm law. Earlier rabbis, like the Ramban or Rashba, treated speech ethics more flexibly, focusing on intent and harm over rigid categories. The Chofetz Chaim, living in a 19th-century shtetl world of tight-knit gossip mills, might’ve doubled down to counter that vibe, turning gray areas into black-and-white halakha.
Is it true? Yeah, mostly. Pre-Chofetz Chaim, the lines were looser—less “this is forbidden” and more “this is unwise.” He didn’t invent the wheel, but he bolted it to a tank.
Marc Shapiro: “R. Jacob Emden’s view that you an speak leshon hara about someone who has ‘sinned’ against you. See his note on Mishnah Avot 1:17 in the Vilna Romm edition of the Talmud, and the complete version of this note (from manuscript) published in Emden, Megilat sefer, 6.” (113)
Posted inGossip, Judaism|Comments Off on Is Gossip Good?
Summary: “Why did some of the “best and brightest” of Weimar intellectuals advocate totalitarian solutions to the problems of liberal democratic, capitalist society? How did their “radical conservatism” contribute to the rise of National Socialism? What roles did they play in the Third Reich? How did their experience of totalitarianism lead them to recast their social and political thought? This biography of Hans Freyer, a prominent German sociologist and political ideologist, is a case study of intellectuals and a “god that failed” — not on the political left, but on the right, where its significance has been overlooked. The author explores the interaction of political ideology and academic social science in democratic and totalitarian regimes, the transformation of German conservatism by the experience of National Socialism, and the ways in which tension between former collaborators and former opponents of National Socialism continued to mold West German intellectual life in the postwar decades.”
Link: We should hope—emphasis on the should—for a discipline of Actual Social Science, whose practitioners strive to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, with the same passionately dispassionate objectivity they might bring to the study of beetles, or algebraic topology—or that an alien superintelligence might bring to the study of humans.
We do not have a discipline of Actual Social Science. Possibly because we’re not smart enough to do it, but perhaps more so because we’re not smart enough to want to do it. No one has an incentive to lie about the homotopy groups of an n-sphere. If you’re asking questions about homotopy groups at all, you almost certainly care about getting the right answer for the right reasons. At most, you might be biased towards believing your own conjectures in the optimistic hope of achieving eternal algebraic-topology fame and glory, like Ruth Lawrence. But nothing about algebraic topology is going to be morally threatening in a way that will leave you fearing that your ideological enemies have seized control of the publishing-houses to plant lies in the textbooks to fuck with your head, or sobbing that a malicious God created the universe as a place of evil.
Okay, maybe that was a bad example; topology in general really is the kind of mindfuck that might be the design of an adversarial agency. (Remind me to tell you about the long line, which is like the line of real numbers, except much longer.)
In any case, as soon as we start to ask questions about humans—and far more so identifiable groups of humans—we end up entering the domain of politics.
We really shouldn’t. Everyone should perceive a common interest in true beliefs—maps that reflect the territory, simple theories that predict our observations—because beliefs that make accurate predictions are useful for making good decisions. That’s what “beliefs” are for, evolutionary speaking: my analogues in humanity’s environment of evolutionary adaptedness were better off believing that (say) the berries from some bush were good to eat if and only if the berries were actually good to eat. If my analogues unduly-optimistically thought the berries were good when they actually weren’t, they’d get sick (and lose fitness), but if they unduly-pessimistically thought the berries were not good when they actually were, they’d miss out on valuable calories (and fitness).
(Okay, this story is actually somewhat complicated by the fact that evolution didn’t “figure out” how to build brains that keep track of probability and utility separately: my analogues in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness might also have been better off assuming that a rustling in the bush was a tiger, even if it usually wasn’t a tiger, because failing to detect actual tigers was so much more costly (in terms of fitness) than erroneously “detecting” an imaginary tiger. But let this pass.)
The problem is that, while any individual should always want true beliefs for themselves in order to navigate the world, you might want others to have false beliefs in order to trick them into mis-navigating the world in a way that benefits you. If I’m trying to sell you a used car, then—counterintuitively—I might not want you to have accurate beliefs about the car, if that would reduce the sale price or result in no deal. If our analogues in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness regularly faced structurally similar situations, and if it’s expensive to maintain two sets of beliefs (the real map for ourselves, and a fake map for our victims), we might end up with a tendency not just to be lying motherfuckers who deceive others, but also to self-deceive in situations where the payoffs (in fitness) of tricking others outweighed those of being clear-sighted ourselves.
That’s why we’re not smart enough to want a discipline of Actual Social Science. The benefits of having a collective understanding of human behavior—a shared map that reflects the territory that we are—could be enormous, but beliefs about our own qualities, and those of socially-salient groups to which we belong (e.g., sex, race, and class) are exactly those for which we face the largest incentive to deceive and self-deceive. Counterintuitively, I might not want you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my friendship (or the disutility of my animosity), for the same reason that I might not want you to have accurate beliefs about the value of my used car. That makes it a lot harder not just to get the right answer for the reasons, but also to trust that your fellow so-called “scholars” are trying to get the right answer, rather than trying to sneak self-aggrandizing lies into the shared map in order to fuck you over. You can’t just write a friendly science book for oblivious science nerds about “things we know about some ways in which people are different from each other”, because almost no one is that oblivious. To write and be understood, you have to do some sort of positioning of how your work fits in to the war over the shared map.
Murray positions Human Diversity as a corrective to a “blank slate” orthodoxy that refuses to entertain any possibility of biological influences on psychological group differences. The three parts of the book are pitched not simply as “stuff we know about biologically-mediated group differences” (the oblivious-science-nerd approach that I would prefer), but as a rebuttal to “Gender Is a Social Construct”, “Race Is a Social Construct”, and “Class Is a Function of Privilege.” At the same time, however, Murray is careful to position his work as nonthreatening: “there are no monsters in the closet,” he writes, “no dread doors that we must fear opening.” He likewise “state[s] explicitly that [he] reject[s] claims that groups of people, be they sexes or races or classes, can be ranked from superior to inferior [or] that differences among groups have any relevance to human worth or dignity.”
I think this strategy is sympathetic but ultimately ineffective. Murray is trying to have it both ways: challenging the orthodoxy, while denying the possibility of any unfortunate implications of the orthodoxy being false. It’s like … theistic evolution: satisfactory as long as you don’t think about it too hard, but among those with a high need for cognition, who know what it’s like to truly believe (as I once believed), it’s not going to convince anyone who hasn’t already broken from the orthodoxy.
Murray concludes, “Above all, nothing we learn will threaten human equality properly understood.” I strongly agree with the moral sentiment, the underlying axiology that makes this seem like a good and wise thing to say.
And yet I have been … trained. Trained to instinctively apply my full powers of analytical rigor and skepticism to even that which is most sacred. Because my true loyalty is to the axiology—to the process underlying my current best guess as to that which is most sacred. If that which was believed to be most sacred turns out to not be entirely coherent … then we might have some philosophical work to do, to reformulate the sacred moral ideal in a way that’s actually coherent.
“Nothing we learn will threaten X properly understood.” When you elide the specific assignment X := “human equality”, the form of this statement is kind of suspicious, right? Why “properly understood”? It would be weird to say, “Nothing we learn will threaten the homotopy groups of an n-sphere properly understood.”
This kind of claim to be non-disprovable seems like the kind of thing you would only invent if you were secretly worried about X being threatened by new discoveries, and wanted to protect your ability to backtrack and re-gerrymander your definition of X to protect what you (think that you) currently believe.
If being an oblivious science nerd isn’t an option, half-measures won’t suffice. I think we can do better by going meta and analyzing the functions being served by the constraints on our discourse and seeking out clever self-aware strategies for satisfying those functions without lying about everything. We mustn’t fear opening the dread meta-door in front of whether there actually are dread doors that we must fear opening.
Why is the blank slate doctrine so compelling, that so many feel the need to protect it at all costs? (As I once felt the need.) It’s not … if you’ve read this far, I assume you will forgive me—it’s not scientifically compelling. If you were studying humans the way an alien superintelligence would, trying to get the right answer for the right reasons (which can conclude conditional answers: if what humans are like depends on choices about what we teach our children, then there will still be a fact of the matter as to what choices lead to what outcomes), you wouldn’t put a whole lot of prior probability on the hypothesis “Both sexes and all ancestry-groupings of humans have the same distribution of psychological predispositions; any observed differences in behavior are solely attributable to differences in their environments.” Why would that be true? We know that sexual dimorphism exists. We know that reproductively isolated populations evolve different traits to adapt to their environments, like those birds with differently-shaped beaks that Darwin saw on his boat trip. We could certainly imagine that none of the relevant selection pressures on humans happened to touch the brain—but why? Wouldn’t that be kind of a weird coincidence?
If the blank slate doctrine isn’t scientifically compelling—it’s not something you would invent while trying to build shared maps that reflect the territory—then its appeal must have something to do with some function it plays in conflicts over the shared map, where no one trusts each other to be doing Actual Social Science rather than lying to fuck everyone else over.
And that’s where the blank slate doctrine absolutely shines—it’s the Schelling point for preventing group conflicts! (A Schelling point is a choice that’s salient as a focus for mutual expectations: what I think that you think that I think … &c. we’ll choose.) If you admit that there could differences between groups, you open up the questions of in what exact traits and of what exact magnitudes, which people have an incentive to lie about to divert resources and power to their group by establishing unfair conventions and then misrepresenting those contingent bargaining equilibria as some “inevitable” natural order.
If you’re afraid of purported answers being used as a pretext for oppression, you might hope to make the question un-askable. Can’t oppress people on the basis of race if race doesn’t exist! Denying the existence of sex is harder—which doesn’t stop people from occasionally trying. “I realize I am writing in an LGBT era when some argue that 63 distinct genders have been identified,” Murray notes at the beginning of Appendix 2. But this oblique acerbity fails to pass the Ideological Turing Test. The language of has been identified suggests an attempt at scientific taxonomy—a project, which I share with Murray, of fitting categories to describe a preexisting objective reality. But I don’t think the people making 63-item typeahead select “Gender” fields for websites are thinking in such terms to begin with. The specific number 63 is ridiculous and can’t exist; it might as well be, and often is, a fill-in-the-blank free text field. Despite being insanely evil (where I mean the adjective literally rather than as a generic intensifier—evil in a way that is of or related to insanity), I must acknowledge this is at least good game theory. If you don’t trust taxonomists to be acting in good faith—if you think we’re trying to bulldoze the territory to fit a preconceived map—then destroying the language that would be used to be build oppressive maps is a smart move.
The taboo mostly only applies to psychological trait differences, both because those are a sensitive subject, and because they’re easier to motivatedly see what you want to see: whereas things like height or skin tone can be directly seen and uncontroversially measured with well-understood physical instruments (like a meterstick or digital photo pixel values), psychological assessments are much more complicated and therefore hard to detach from the eye of the beholder. (If I describe Mary as “warm, compassionate, and agreeable”, the words mean something in the sense that they change what experiences you anticipate—if you believed my report, you would be surprised if Mary were to kick your dog and make fun of your nose job—but the things that they mean are a high-level statistical signal in behavior for which we don’t have a simple measurement device like a meterstick to appeal to if you and I don’t trust each other’s character assessments of Mary.)
Notice how the “not allowing sex and race differences in psychological traits to appear on shared maps is the Schelling point for resistance to sex- and race-based oppression” actually gives us an explanation for why one might reasonably have a sense that there are dread doors that we must not open. Undermining the “everyone is Actually Equal” Schelling point could catalyze a preference cascade—a slide down the slippery slope to the the next Schelling point, which might be a lot worse than the status quo on the “amount of rape and genocide” metric, even if it does slightly better on “estimating heritability coefficients.” The orthodoxy isn’t just being dumb for no reason. In analogy, Galileo and Darwin weren’t trying to undermine Christianity—they had much more interesting things to think about—but religious authorities were right to fear heliocentrism and evolution: if the prevailing coordination equilibrium depends on lies, then telling the truth is a threat and it is disloyal. And if the prevailing coordination equilibrium is basically good, then you can see why purported truth-tellers striking at the heart of the faith might be believed to be evil.
Murray opens the parts of the book about sex and race with acknowledgments of the injustice of historical patriarchy (“When the first wave of feminism in the United States got its start […] women were rebelling not against mere inequality, but against near-total legal subservience to men”) and racial oppression (“slavery experienced by Africans in the New World went far beyond legal constraints […] The freedom granted by emancipation in America was only marginally better in practice and the situation improved only slowly through the first half of the twentieth century”). It feels … defensive? (To his credit, Murray is generally pretty forthcoming about how the need to write “defensively” shaped the book, as in a sidebar in the introduction that says that he’s prefer to say a lot more about evopsych, but he chose to just focus on empirical findings in order to avoid the charge of telling just-so stories.)
But this kind of defensive half-measure satisfies no one. From the oblivious-science-nerd perspective—the view that agrees with Murray that “everyone should calm down”—you shouldn’t need to genuflect to the memory of some historical injustice before you’re allowed to talk about Science. But from the perspective that cares about Justice and not just Truth, an insincere gesture or a strategic concession is all the more dangerous insofar as it could function as camouflage for a nefarious hidden agenda. If your work is explicitly aimed at destroying the anti-oppression Schelling-point belief, a few hand-wringing historical interludes and bromides about human equality having no testable implications (!!) aren’t going to clear you of the suspicion that you’re doing it on purpose—trying to destroy the anti-oppression Schelling point in order to oppress, and not because anything that can be destroyed by the truth, should be.
And sufficient suspicion makes communication nearly impossible. (If you know someone is lying, their words mean nothing, not even as the opposite of the truth.) As far as many of Murray’s detractors are concerned, it almost doesn’t matter what the text of Human Diversity says, how meticulously researched of a psychology/neuroscience/genetics lit review it is. From their perspective, Murray is “hiding the ball”: they’re not mad about this book; they’re mad about specifically chapters 13 and 14 of a book Murray coauthored twenty-five years ago. (I don’t think I’m claiming to be a mind-reader here; the first 20% of The New York Times’s review of Human Diversity is pretty explicit and representative.)
In 1994’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Murray and coauthor Richard J. Herrnstein argued that a lot of variation in life outcomes is explained by variation in intelligence. Some people think that folk concepts of “intelligence” or being “smart” are ill-defined and therefore not a proper object of scientific study. But that hasn’t stopped some psychologists from trying to construct tests purporting to measure an “intelligence quotient” (or IQ for short). It turns out that if you give people a bunch of different mental tests, the results all positively correlate with each other: people who are good at one mental task, like listening to a list of numbers and repeating them backwards (“reverse digit span”), are also good at others, like knowing what words mean (“vocabulary”). There’s a lot of fancy linear algebra involved, but basically, you can visualize people’s test results as a hyperellipsoid in some high-dimensional space where the dimensions are the different tests. (I rely on this “configuration space” visual metaphor so much for so many things that when I started my secret (“secret”) gender blog, it felt right to put it under a .space TLD.) The longest axis of the hyperellipsoid corresponds to the “g factor” of “general” intelligence—the choice of axis that cuts through the most variance in mental abilities.
It’s important not to overinterpret the g factor as some unitary essence of intelligence rather than the length of a hyperellipsoid. It seems likely that if you gave people a bunch of physical tests, they would positively correlate with each other, such that you could extract a “general factor of athleticism”. (It would be really interesting if anyone’s actually done this using the same methodology used to construct IQ tests!) But athleticism is going to be an very “coarse” construct for which the tails come apart: for example, world champion 100-meter sprinter Usain Bolt’s best time in the 800 meters is reportedly only around 2:10 or 2:07! (For comparison, I ran a 2:08.3 in high school once!)
Anyway, so Murray and Herrnstein talk about this “intelligence” construct, and how it’s heritable, and how it predicts income, school success, not being a criminal, &c., and how Society is becoming increasingly stratified by cognitive abilities, as school credentials become the ticket to the new upper class.
This should just be more social-science nerd stuff, the sort of thing that would only draw your attention if, like me, you feel bad about not being smart enough to do algebraic topology and want to console yourself by at least knowing about the Science of not being smart enough to do algebraic topology. The reason everyone and her dog is still mad at Charles Murray a quarter of a century later is Chapter 13, “Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability”, and Chapter 14, “Ethnic Inequalities in Relation to IQ”. So, apparently, different ethnic/”racial” groups have different average scores on IQ tests. Ashkenazi Jews do the best, which is why I sometimes privately joke that the fact that I’m only 85% Ashkenazi (according to 23andMe) explains my low IQ. (I got a 131 on the WISC-III at age 10, but that’s pretty dumb compared to some of my robot-cult friends.) East Asians do a little better than Europeans/”whites”. And—this is the part that no one is happy about—the difference between U.S. whites and U.S. blacks is about Cohen’s d ≈ 1. (If two groups differ by d = 1 on some measurement that’s normally distributed within each group, that means that the mean of the group with the lower average measurement is at the 16th percentile of the group with the higher average measurement, or that a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the higher average measurement has a probability of about 0.76 of having a higher measurement than a uniformly-randomly selected member of the group with the lower average measurement.)
Given the tendency for people to distort shared maps for political reasons, you can see why this is a hotly contentious line of research. Even if you take the test numbers at face value, racists trying to secure unjust privileges for groups that score well, have an incentive to “play up” group IQ differences in bad faith even when they shouldn’t be relevant. As economist Glenn C. Loury points out in The Anatomy of Racial Inequality, cognitive abilities decline with age, and yet we don’t see a moral panic about the consequences of an aging workforce, because older people are construed by the white majority as an “us”—our mothers and fathers—rather than an outgroup. Individual differences in intelligence are also presumably less politically threatening because “smart people” as a group aren’t construed as a natural political coalition—although Murray’s work on cognitive class stratification would seem to suggest this intuition is mistaken.
It’s important not to overinterpret the IQ-scores-by-race results; there are a bunch of standard caveats that go here that everyone’s treatment of the topic needs to include. Again, just because variance in a trait is statistically associated with variance in genes within a population, does not mean that differences in that trait between populations are caused by genes: remember the illustrations about sun-deprived plants and internet-deprived red-haired children. Group differences in observed tested IQs are entirely compatible with a world in which those differences are entirely due to the environment imposed by an overtly or structurally racist society. Maybe the tests are culturally biased. Maybe people with higher socioeconomic status get more opportunities to develop their intellect, and racism impedes socio-economic mobility. And so on.
The problem is, a lot of the blank-slatey environmentally-caused-differences-only hypotheses for group IQ differences start to look less compelling when you look into the details. “Maybe the tests are biased”, for example, isn’t an insurmountable defeater to the entire endeavor of IQ testing—it is itself a falsifiable hypothesis, or can become one if you specify what you mean by “bias” in detail. One idea of what it would mean for a test to be biased is if it’s partially measuring something other than what it purports to be measuring: if your test measures a combination of “intelligence” and “submission to the hegemonic cultural dictates of the test-maker”, then individuals and groups that submit less to your cultural hegemony are going to score worse, and if you market your test as unbiasedly measuring intelligence, then people who believe your marketing copy will be misled into thinking that those who don’t submit are dumber than they really are. But if so, and if not all of your individual test questions are equally loaded on intelligence and cultural-hegemony, then the cultural bias should show up in the statistics. If some questions are more “fair” and others are relatively more culture-biased, then you would expect the order of item difficulties to differ by culture: the “item characteristic curve” plotting the probability of getting a biased question “right” as a function of overall test score should differ by culture, with the hegemonic group finding it “easier” and others finding it “harder”. Conversely, if the questions that discriminate most between differently-scoring cultural/ethnic/”racial” groups were the same as the questions that discriminate between (say) younger and older children within each group, that would be the kind of statistical clue you would expect to see if the test was unbiased and the group difference was real.
Hypotheses that accept IQ test results as unbiased, but attribute group differences in IQ to the environment, also make statistical predictions that could be falsified. Controlling for parental socioeconomic status only cuts the black–white gap by a third. (And note, on the hereditarian model, some of the correlation between parental SES and child outcomes is due to both being causally downstream of genes.) The mathematical relationship between between-group and within-group heritability means that the conjunction of wholly-environmentally-caused group differences, and the within-group heritability, makes quantitative predictions about how much the environments of the groups differ. Skin color is actually only controlled by a small number of alleles, so if you think Society’s discrimination on skin color causes IQ differences, you could maybe design a clever study that measures both overall-ancestry and skin color, and does statistics on what happens when they diverge. And so on.
In mentioning these arguments in passing, I’m not trying to provide a comprehensive lit review on the causality of group IQ differences. (That’s someone else’s blog.) I’m not (that?) interested in this particular topic, and without having mastered the technical literature, my assessment would be of little value. Rather, I am … doing some context-setting for the problem I am interested in, of fixing public discourse. The reason we can’t have an intellectually-honest public discussion about human biodiversity is because good people want to respect the anti-oppression Schelling point and are afraid of giving ammunition to racists and sexists in the war over the shared map. “Black people are, on average, genetically less intelligent than white people” is the kind of sentence that pretty much only racists would feel good about saying out loud, independently of its actual truth value. In a world where most speech is about manipulating shared maps for political advantage rather than getting the right answer for the right reasons, it is rational to infer that anyone who entertains such hypotheses is either motivated by racial malice, or is at least complicit with it—and that rational expectation isn’t easily canceled with a pro forma “But, but, civil discourse” or “But, but, the true meaning of Equality is unfalsifiable” disclaimer.
To speak to those who aren’t already oblivious science nerds—or are committed to emulating such, as it is scientifically dubious whether anyone is really that oblivious—you need to put more effort into your excuse for why you’re interested in these topics. Here’s mine, and it’s from the heart, though it’s up to the reader to judge for herself how credible I am when I say this—
I don’t want to be complicit with hatred or oppression. I want to stay loyal to the underlying egalitarian–individualist axiology that makes the blank slate doctrine sound like a good idea. But I also want to understand reality, to make sense of things. I want a world that’s not lying to me. Having to believe false things—or even just not being able say certain true things when they would otherwise be relevant—extracts a dire cost on our ability to make sense of the world, because you can’t just censor a few forbidden hypotheses—you have to censor everything that implies them, and everything that implies them: the more adept you are at making logical connections, the more of your mind you need to excise to stay in compliance.
We can’t talk about group differences, for fear that anyone arguing that differences exist is just trying to shore up oppression. But … structural oppression and actual group differences can both exist at the same time. They’re not contradicting each other! Like, the fact that men are physically stronger than women (on average, but the effect size is enormous, like d ≈ 2.6 for total muscle mass) is not unrelated to the persistence of patriarchy! (The ability to credibly threaten to physically overpower someone, gives the more powerful party a bargaining advantage, even if the threat is typically unrealized.) That doesn’t mean patriarchy is good; to think so would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy of attempting to derive an ought from an is. No one would say that famine and plague are good just because they, too, are subject to scientific explanation. This is pretty obvious, really? But similarly, genetically-mediated differences in cognitive repertoires between ancestral populations are probably going to be part of the explanation for why we see the particular forms of inequality and oppression that we do, just as a brute fact of history devoid of any particular moral significance, like how part of the explanation for why European conquest of the Americas happened earlier and went smoother for the invaders than the colonization of Africa, had to do with the disease burden going the other way (Native Americans were particularly vulnerable to smallpox, but Europeans were particularly vulnerable to malaria).
Again—obviously—is does not imply ought. In deference to the historically well-justified egalitarian fear that such hypotheses will primarily be abused by bad actors to portray their own group as “superior”, I suspect it’s helpful to dwell on science-fictional scenarios in which the boot of history is one’s own neck, if the boot does not happen to be on one’s own neck in real life. If a race of lavender humans from an alternate dimension were to come through a wormhole and invade our Earth and cruelly subjugate your people, you would probably be pretty angry, and maybe join a paramilitary group aimed at overthrowing lavender supremacy and re-instantiating civil rights. The possibility of a partially-biological explanation for why the purple bastards discovered wormhole generators when we didn’t (maybe they have d ≈ 1.8 on us in visuospatial skills, enabling their population to be first to “roll” a lucky genius (probably male) who could discover the wormhole field equations), would not make the conquest somehow justified.
I don’t know how to build a better world, but it seems like there are quite general grounds on which we should expect that it would be helpful to be able to talk about social problems in the language of cause and effect, with the austere objectivity of an engineering discipline. If you want to build a bridge (that will actually stay up), you need to study the “the careful textbooks [that] measure […] the load, the shock, the pressure [that] material can bear.” If you want to build a just Society (that will actually stay up), you need a discipline of Actual Social Science that can publish textbooks, and to get that, you need the ability to talk about basic facts about human existence and make simple logical and statistical inferences between them.
And no one can do it! (“Well for us, if even we, even for a moment, can get free our heart, and have our lips unchained—for that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!”) Individual scientists can get results in their respective narrow disciplines; Charles Murray can just barely summarize the science to a semi-popular audience without coming off as too overtly evil to modern egalitarian moral sensibilities. (At least, the smarter egalitarians? Or, maybe I’m just old.) But at least a couple aspects of reality are even worse (with respect to naïve, non-renormalized egalitarian moral sensibilities) than the ball-hiders like Murray can admit, having already blown their entire Overton budget explaining the relevant empirical findings.
Murray approvingly quotes Steven Pinker (a fellow ball-hider, though Pinker is better at it): “Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
A fine sentiment. I emphatically agree with the underlying moral intuition that makes “Individuals should not be judged by group membership” sound like a correct moral principle—one cries out at the monstrous injustice of the individual being oppressed on the basis of mere stereotypes of what other people who look like them might statistically be like.
But can I take this literally as the exact statement of a moral principle? Technically?—no! That’s actually not how epistemology works! The proposed principle derives its moral force from the case of complete information: if you know for a fact that I have moral property P, then it would be monstrously unjust to treat me differently just because other people who look like me mostly don’t have moral property P. But in the real world, we often—usually—don’t have complete information about people, or even about ourselves.
Bayes’s theorem (just a few inferential steps away from the definition of conditional probability itself, barely worthy of being called a “theorem”) states that for hypothesis H and evidence E, P(H|E) = P(E|H)P(H)/P(E). This is the fundamental equation that governs all thought. When you think you see a tree, that’s really just your brain computing a high value for the probability of your sensory experiences given the hypothesis that there is a tree, multiplied by the prior probability that there is a tree, as a fraction of all the possible worlds that could be generating your sensory experiences.
What goes for seeing trees, goes the same for “treating individuals as individuals”: the process of getting to know someone as an individual, involves your brain exploiting the statistical relationships between what you observe, and what you’re trying to learn about. If you see someone wearing an Emacs tee-shirt, you’re going to assume that they probably use Emacs, and asking them about their dot-emacs file is going to seem like a better casual conversation-starter compared to the base rate of people wearing non-Emacs shirts. Not with certainty—maybe they just found the shirt in a thrift store and thought it looked cool—but the shirt shifts the probabilities implied by your decisionmaking.
The problem that Bayesian reasoning poses for naïve egalitarian moral intuitions, is that, as far as I can tell, there’s no philosophically principled reason for “probabilistic update about someone’s psychology on the evidence that they’re wearing an Emacs shirt” to be treated fundamentally differently from “probabilistic update about someone’s psychology on the evidence that she’s female”. These are of course different questions, but to a Bayesian reasoner (an inhuman mathematical abstraction for getting the right answer and nothing else), they’re the same kind of question: the correct update to make is an empirical matter that depends on the actual distribution of psychological traits among Emacs-shirt-wearers and among women. (In the possible world where most people wear tee-shirts from the thrift store that looked cool without knowing what they mean, the “Emacs shirt → Emacs user” inference would usually be wrong.) But to a naïve egalitarian, judging someone on their expressed affinity for Emacs is good, but judging someone on their sex is bad and wrong.
I used to be a naïve egalitarian. I was very passionate about it. I was eighteen years old. I am—again—still fond of the moral sentiment, and eager to renormalize it into something that makes sense. (Some egalitarian anxieties do translate perfectly well into the Bayesian setting, as I’ll explain in a moment.) But the abject horror I felt at eighteen at the mere suggestion of making generalizations about people just—doesn’t make sense. It’s not even that it shouldn’t be practiced (it’s not that my heart wasn’t in the right place), but that it can’t be practiced—that the people who think they’re practicing it are just confused about how their own minds work.
Give people photographs of various women and men and ask them to judge how tall the people in the photos are, as Nelson et al. 1990 did, and people’s guesses reflect both the photo-subjects’ actual heights, but also (to a lesser degree) their sex. Unless you expect people to be perfect at assessing height from photographs (when they don’t know how far away the cameraperson was standing, aren’t “trigonometrically omniscient”, &c.), this behavior is just correct: men really are taller than women on average, so P(true-height|apparent-height, sex) ≠ P(height|apparent-height) because of regression to the mean (and women and men regress to different means). But this all happens subconsciously: in the same study, when the authors tried height-matching the photographs (for every photo of a woman of a given height, there was another photo in the set of a man of the same height) and telling the participants about the height-matching and offering a cash reward to the best height-judge, more than half of the stereotyping effect remained. It would seem that people can’t consciously readjust their learned priors in reaction to verbal instructions pertaining to an artificial context.
Once you understand at a technical level that probabilistic reasoning about demographic features is both epistemically justified, and implicitly implemented as part of the way your brain processes information anyway, then a moral theory that forbids this starts to look less compelling? Of course, statistical discrimination on demographic features is only epistemically justified to exactly the extent that it helps get the right answer. Renormalized-egalitarians can still be properly outraged about the monstrous tragedies where I have moral property P but I can’t prove it to you, so you instead guess incorrectly that I don’t just because other people who look like me mostly don’t, and you don’t have any better information to go on—or tragedies in which a feedback loop between predictions and social norms creates or amplifies group differences that wouldn’t exist under some other social equilibrium.
Nelson et al. also found that when the people in the photographs were pictured sitting down, then judgments of height depended much more on sex than when the photo-subjects were standing. This too makes Bayesian sense: if it’s harder to tell how tall an individual is when they’re sitting down, you rely more on your demographic prior. In order to reduce injustice to people who are an outlier for their group, one could argue that there is a moral imperative to seek out interventions to get more fine-grained information about individuals, so that we don’t need to rely on the coarse, vague information embodied in demographic stereotypes. The moral spirit of egalitarian–individualism mostly survives in our efforts to hug the query and get specific information with which to discriminate amongst individuals. (And discriminate—to distinguish, to make distinctions—is the correct word.) If you care about someone’s height, it is better to precisely measure it using a meterstick than to just look at them standing up, and it is better to look at them standing up than to look at them sitting down. If you care about someone’s skills as potential employee, it is better to give them a work-sample test that assesses the specific skills that you’re interested in, than it is to rely on a general IQ test, and it’s far better to use an IQ test than to use mere stereotypes. If our means of measuring individuals aren’t reliable or cheap enough, such that we still end up using prior information from immutable demographic categories, that’s a problem of grave moral seriousness—but in light of the mathematical laws governing reasoning under uncertainty, it’s a problem that realistically needs to be solved with better tests and better signals, not by pretending not to have a prior.
This could take the form of finer-grained stereotypes. If someone says of me, “Taylor Saotome-Westlake? Oh, he’s a man, you know what they’re like,” I would be offended—I mean, I would if I still believed that getting offended ever helps with anything. (It never helps.) I’m not like typical men, and I don’t want to be confused with them. But if someone says, “Taylor Saotome-Westlake? Oh, he’s one of those IQ 130, mid-to-low Conscientiousness and Agreeableness, high Openness, left-libertarian American Jewish atheist autogynephilic male computer programmers; you know what they’re like,” my response is to nod and say, “Yeah, pretty much.” I’m not exactly like the others, but I don’t mind being confused with them.
The other place where I think Murray is hiding the ball (even from himself) is in the section on “reconstructing a moral vocabulary for discussing human differences.” (I agree that this is a very important project!) Murray writes—
I think at the root [of the reluctance to discuss immutable human differences] is the new upper class’s conflation of intellectual ability and the professions it enables with human worth. Few admit it, of course. But the evolving zeitgeist of the new upper class has led to a misbegotten hierarchy whereby being a surgeon is better in some sense of human worth than being an insurance salesman, being an executive in a high-tech firm is better than being a housewife, and a neighborhood of people with advanced degrees is better than a neighborhood of high-school graduates. To put it so baldly makes it obvious how senseless it is. There shouldn’t be any relationship between these things and human worth.
I take strong issue with Murray’s specific examples here—as an incredibly bitter autodidact, I care not at all for formal school degrees, and as my fellow nobody pseudonymous blogger Harold Lee points out, many of those stuck in the technology rat race aspire to escape to a more domestic- and community-focused life not unlike that of a housewife. But after quibbling with the specific illustrations, I think I’m just going to bite the bullet here?
Yes, intellectual ability is a component of human worth! Maybe that’s putting it baldly, but I think the alternative is obviously senseless. The fact that I have the ability and motivation to (for example, among many other things I do) write this cool science–philosophy blog about my delusional paraphilia where I do things like summarize and critique the new Charles Murray book, is a big part of what makes my life valuable—both to me, and to the people who interact with me. If I were to catch COVID-19 next month and lose 40 IQ points due to oxygen-deprivation-induced brain damage and not be able to write blog posts like this one anymore, that would be extremely terrible for me—it would make my life less-worth-living. (And this kind of judgment is reflected in health and economic policymaking in the form of quality-adjusted life years.) And my friends who love me, love me not as an irreplaceably-unique-but-otherwise-featureless atom of person-ness, but because my specific array of cognitive repertoires makes me a specific person who provides a specific kind of company. There can’t be such a thing as literally unconditional love, because to love someone in particular, implicitly imposes a condition: you’re only committed to love those configurations of matter that constitute an implementation of your beloved, rather than someone or something else.
Murray continues—
The conflation of intellectual ability with human worth helps to explain the new upper class’s insistence that inequalities of intellectual ability must be the product of environmental disadvantage. Many people with high IQs really do feel sorry for people with low IQs. If the environment is to blame, then those unfortunates can be helped, and that makes people who want to help them feel good. If genes are to blame, it makes people who want to help them feel bad. People prefer feeling good to feeling bad, so they engage in confirmation bias when it comes to the evidence about the causes of human differences.
I agree with Murray that this kind of psychology explains a lot of the resistance to hereditarian explanations. But as long as we’re accusing people of motivated reasoning, I think Murray’s solution is engaging in a similar kind of denial, but just putting it in a different place. The idea that people are unequal in ways that matter is legitimately too horrifying to contemplate, so liberals deny the inequality, and conservatives deny that it matters. But I think if you really understand the fact–value distinction and see that the naturalistic fallacy is, in fact, a fallacy (and not even a tempting one), that the progress of humankind has consisted of using our wits to impose our will on an indifferent universe, then the very concept of “too horrifying to contemplate” becomes a grave error. The map is not the territory: contemplating doesn’t make things worse; not-contemplating that which is already there can’t make things better—and can blind you to opportunities to make things better.
Recently, Richard Dawkins spurred a lot of criticism on social media for pointing out that selective breeding would work on humans (that is, succeed at increasing the value of the traits selected for in subsequent generations), for the same reasons it works on domesticated nonhuman animals—while stressing, of course, that he deplores the idea: it’s just that our moral commitments can’t constrain the facts. Intellectuals with the reading-comprehension skill, including Murray, leapt to defend Dawkins and concur on both points—that eugenics would work, and that it would obviously be terribly immoral. And yet no one seems to bother explaining or arguing why it would be immoral. Yes, obviously murdering and sterilizing people is bad. But if the human race is to continue and people are going to have children anyway, those children are going to be born with some distribution of genotypes. There are probably going to be human decisions that do not involve murdering and sterilizing people that would affect that distribution—perhaps involving selection of in vitro fertilized embryos. If the distribution of genotypes were to change in a way that made the next generation grow up happier, and healthier, and smarter, that would be good for those children, and it wouldn’t hurt anyone else! Life is not a zero-sum game! This is pretty obvious, really? But if no one except nobody pseudonymous bloggers can even say it, how are we to start the work?
The author of the Xenosystems blog mischievously posits five stages of knowledge of human biodiversity (in analogy to the famous, albeit reportedly lacking in empirical support, five-stage Kübler-Ross model of grief), culminating in Stage 4: Depression (“Who could possibly have imagined that reality was so evil?”) and Stage 5: Acceptance (“Blank slate liberalism really has been a mountain of dishonest garbage, hasn’t it? Guess it’s time for it to die …”).
I think I got stuck halfway between Stage 4 and 5? It can simultaneously be the case that reality is evil, and that blank slate liberalism contains a mountain of dishonest garbage. That doesn’t mean the whole thing is garbage. You can’t brainwash a human with random bits; they need to be specific bits with something good in them. I would still be with the program, except that the current coordination equilibrium is really not working out for me. So it is with respect for the good works enabled by the anti-oppression Schelling point belief, that I set my sights on reorganizing at the other Schelling point of just tell the goddamned truth—not in spite of the consequences, but because of the consequences of what good people can do when we’re fully informed. Each of us in her own way.
Posted inBiology, HBD|Comments Off on Book Review: Charles Murray’s Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
