A partial defense of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates is right to ask for more space to have discomfiting conversations about human moral frailty.
Written by Bo Winegard.
“It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!”
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
In a viral video cut from a longer conversation on Trevor Noah’s podcast What Now?, Ta-Nehisi Coates, referring to Hamas’s terror attack of October 7th, 2023, said:
And I haven't said this out loud, but I think about it a lot. Were I, 20 years old, born into Gaza, which is a giant open air jail, and what I mean by that is if my father is a fisherman and he goes too far out into the sea, he might get shot by somebody off of, you know, inside of Israeli boats.
If my mother picks the olive trees and she gets too close to the wall, she might be shot. If my little sister has cancer and she needs treatment because there are no facilities to do that in Gaza and I don't get the right permit, she might die, and I grow up under that oppression and that poverty, and the wall comes down, am I also strong enough, or even constructed in such a way where I say, this is too far, I don't know that I am. I don't know that I am.
Upon first watch, I thought this was a candid and contemplative admission of Ta-Nehisi’s own moral frailty and a healthy exercise in empathy, which all mature adults should practice from time to time to expand their ethical imaginations. His point was straightforward. Evil is not some alien or inexplicable force. It is in the human heart. And in the right context, many of us would be the opportunistic criminals, the callous soldiers, the fanatical terrorists we casually condemn.1
I was therefore perplexed when I saw several prominent thinkers on Twitter criticizing Coates for his moral depravity.
Thomas Chatterton Williams, for example, noted with indignation:
And the genuinely thoughtful Colin Wright (a friend whose civility I consider laudable) wrote:
When one encounters disagreement from intelligent and generally charitable people, one should reflect carefully. Perhaps I had missed or overlooked something about the conversation and Ta-Nehisi was in fact applauding the terrorist attack. Or perhaps those humans with the capacity to imagine supporting the slaughter of innocent civilians in certain (horrible) circumstances are morally corrupt, even irredeemable. Or perhaps, even if they are not hopelessly corrupt, there is something unhealthy and inadvisable about reflecting upon mankind’s darkness and depravity.
Therefore, I listened to the entire conversation between Ta-Nehisi Coates and Trevor Noah, which although undeniably partial, was also thoughtful and ethically serious. Coates was clearly not endorsing or lauding Hamas’s October 7th massacre, for he followed the edited comments in the Twitter video with these reflections:
I just wish we had room to work through that, you know what I mean? And to think about that and to talk about that. And I think that is not unique to Israel, that is not unique to Palestine, that is not unique to Zionism.
That is human history, that's human beings. I always tell people, you know, like, they think if they lived in the time of slavery, that they would not have been enslavers. And I always tell them, you would have. You would have, because it's a system.
Coates was not exultant or celebratory; rather he was pensive and subdued. And his point was not that Hamas’s terrorist attack was justified, but rather that humans are inevitably shaped by their context and are capable of appalling barbarism, barbarism which those of us who were born into peace and luxury find difficult and perhaps impossible to imagine. For it is easy in the tranquility of affluence to forget or dismiss the lust for violence and power, for hatred and vengeance, that must have stirred our ancestors as they struggled to survive in a wild, primitive, and often implacably hostile world, a world in which those who would not kill were killed.
Thus the most straightforward and charitable reading of Ta-Nehisi’s argument is that we should have more space for honest conversations about moral complexity and contingency and should use our moral imaginations to expand our understanding, humbly confessing our own frailties, ambiguities, and uncertainties. One does not need to agree with Ta-Nehisi’s view on the Israel-Palestine conflict to support this argument. And those who routinely denounce cancel culture and bemoan condemnations of candor and nuance should support it. We need more honesty and more debate, not less.2
I confess that unlike Wright, I can easily imagine myself supporting all kinds of odious acts in the right circumstances. If my family were slaughtered by an invading army, for example, I do not doubt that I would desire bloody and indiscriminate revenge. Same if my family were killed by a terrorist attack. And so on.
That I would likely support such deplorable vengeance does not make it right, of course. The point of such an act of empathy is not to condone the envisioned horror but to understand it. Reflect upon it. And ultimately to reject it, praising the moderating influence of civilization for restraining most of us from acting upon our violent impulses.
More important than my own imagination, which is unique to me and fallible, is an objective scientific assessment of human nature. In his tweet, Wright contended that “only the toxic thinking of group-identitarianism” (as taught by CRT) can get a person to feel justified in “brutally murdering a bunch of innocent civilians.” Is this true? Are people who can imagine supporting abhorrent acts of revenge and slaughter unusual or otherwise intoxicated by toxic identitarianism?
History and theory suggest no. Humans have diligently slaughtered each other for thousands upon thousands of years. And although historians may be biased toward the “register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes” of mankind, they have not had to scour their sources for inspiration since mankind has furnished more than enough grim and bloody material for thousands of years of continued writing and analysis. The wars and atrocities of the twentieth century alone could fill a capacious library.
Evolutionary theory provides an explanation. Humans have long competed in coalitions for control of coveted resources such as food, water, shelter, and mates. Because of this, they evolved tribal propensities and a willingness to conquer, subjugate, and kill outsiders—yes, even innocent outsiders. They also evolved proclivities for revenge, perhaps even at great cost to themselves, to deter others from exploiting them. Kill one of our tribe, we will kill four of yours. This does not require the inculcation of a bizarre identitarian ideology. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Preventing tribal war and slaughter requires the moderating influence of civilization and pacifying ideologies.
I do not doubt, to be clear, that some humans are not only incapable of imagining supporting the slaughter of innocent civilians, but also incapable of actually supporting the slaughter of innocent civilians in most real-world circumstances. But I also suspect that most of us are deluded by our own biases into thinking that we are more peaceful, more free from the primitive instincts and hatreds that animate those we denounce, than we really are. As Noah Cross (John Huston) says to Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) in Chinatown, “I don’t blame myself. See Mr. Gittes, most people never have to face the fact that at the right time and right place they are capable of anything.”
The saint believes in his own internal strength and nobility; the sinner, in the overwhelming power of temptation and circumstance. The truth is likely somewhere between.
Suppose we accept this. Humans are darker, more violent, more depraved than we would like to believe. Even decent humans are capable in the right circumstances of being enslavers, Nazis, and terrorists. Perhaps this knowledge, like the knowledge of many depressing, subterranean facts about the world, should be kept private or only disclosed to intimate others. And perhaps using the imagination to discover our own potential depravity is dangerous because it might subtly encourage it while fostering misplaced empathy for evil. Best to keep our demons locked away in the gloom.
Although this is not an unreasonable position, the opposite might also be true. When we become complacent about our own capacity for evil, our own share in original sin, we become arrogant, dogmatic, and even vulnerable to the seductions of primitivism. We come to fantasize about a noble savage and a future utopia, and we forget about the important restraining influence of civilization. If the cause of tribal violence, after all, is a toxic identitarian ideology and not an intrinsic aspect of human nature, then modern civilization, which depends upon identity-based coalitions (nation states), is the cause of prodigious and unnecessary suffering.
Perhaps this is precisely why conservatives and Christians have emphasized the importance of recognizing the savage instincts and propensities that lurk in our soul. Because when we do, we become more humble about our moral righteousness and more attached to the civilization which disciplines our unruly impulses. The moral clarity that we need is not the moral clarity of dogmatism; it is the moral clarity to examine our own heart and to say, “The horror! The horror!”
Ta-Nehisi’s own political views are not particularly edifying. Too often he relies upon a simplistic oppressor/oppressed narrative which mutilates on a Procrustean bed of progressivism the complicated realities of the world. Certainly he applies this thinking to the Israel/Palestine conflict, a conflict whose knotty and tangled subtleties have defeated the most supple of moral and political thinkers.
Coates refrains from applying the moral empathy to Israelis that he demands for Palestinians and thus promotes a polemical account of the conflict. In an interview with Ezra Klein, he even shockingly declared that he did not want to talk to any Israeli from the center to the right!
For me, I was willing to entertain probably a debate from people who were anti-occupation, but maybe not necessarily anti-Zionist. Maybe it would be classified as liberal Zionists even. All the way over to people who thought Zionism was a terrible idea and the worst thing that had ever happened. The justification for settlements was outside of my frame.
Nevertheless, his confession that he may have supported Hamas’s October 7th terror attack on Israel if he had been born in Gaza and his call for a more candid conversation about the contingency of human morality is salutary. I suspect that many of us could and would in the right circumstances support unspeakable atrocities on either side of the conflict. Obviously this does not justify those atrocities. But it should remind us that our relatively peaceful existence is precarious, threatened always by roiling passions and bestial desires, and held together only by the papier-mache of civilized norms and institutions. If we want to understand how ugly the world might be without this fragile order, we should inspect the darkness in our own hearts.
Bo Winegard is the Executive Editor at Aporia.
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Moral condemnation is often appropriate, of course. Ethical empathy does not require moral relativism. Furthermore, many of these behaviors are caused by some combination of character and context. A normal person does not become Hannibal Lecter after suffering bullying in middle school.
It is worth noting that Ta-Nehisi is not consistent in his open exploration of ethical ambiguity. In his interview with Ezra Klein, for example, Ezra asked, “Did you spend any time when you were there with people who I would classify politically as the Israeli right or the Israeli center.” Ta-Nehisi responded:
There are things in this world that I see that I just don’t want to hear the justification for. I just don’t think can be justified. I don’t want to hear — I don’t know what I can glean from a justification for — and I’m talking about in an American context — segregation.
I don’t know what necessarily I can glean from a justification for enslavement by hearing somebody like interviewing somebody and say, tell me why this is legal. Some things come down to, for me, just a moral decision. And I actually think journalists do this all the time. I think we all draw a line somewhere about what we feel is out of bounds and what we feel is beyond.
For me, I was willing to entertain probably a debate from people who were anti-occupation, but maybe not necessarily anti-Zionist. Maybe it would be classified as liberal Zionists even. All the way over to people who thought Zionism was a terrible idea and the worst thing that had ever happened. The justification for settlements was outside of my frame.
It's an interesting point, but I don't think Coates is sincere. Let's be blunt: he sympathizes with the Palestinians because they are "brown" and he dislikes the Israelis because he sees them as white.
Coates will strain to "understand" hamas but he would never extend that charity to white slaveowners or any other white wrongdoer. Notice that his other example of this thinking is to say that all white people would have been slaveowners if they had lived at that time.
Winegrad raises an interesting point about how the line between good and evil cuts down the middle of the human heart, but there are differences of degree. Some people really are just evil - and Coates is one of them. Let's not let our moral self-reflection blind us to the existence of psychopaths.
Uh, yeah I guess. But this cunt already has quite a bit of space to spew his uncomfortable and largely incorrect ideas around already, so I’m not sure he needs someone to advocate on his behalf. Anyone can talk about anything at any time- particularly if you’re rich, liberal and black. The only people stopping uncomfortable conversations from occurring these days are democrats and social media at the behest of democrats. “Regular” intellects have uncomfortable conversations all the time.
People are tripping over their dicks to publish his eloquent drivel because it fits the narrative and the profile of rich, misled urbanites that want to read shit like this because they’re so far removed from the realities that the unwashed masses have to deal with every day.
Fuck this guy.