Reflections on a year of outrage

There are other costs, too. Some of the “guilty” are over-punished for some social transgressions; even many innocents live in fear of online mobs.

And when so much is treated as outrageous, a culture loses the ability to focus on the ills that matter or even to easily describe why they are truly outrageous. For example, I’ve argued for many years that more outrage is warranted in response to U.S. drone strikes that kill innocent civilians. Circa 2009, one could convey the horrors that affected certain villages in Yemen or Pakistan by talking about the awfulness of “feeling unsafe in one’s home,” or “the erasure of a marginalized community.”

Now language like that signifies very little. Its power has been sapped by all the people who say they’re unsafe when they mean they’re uncomfortable, and by those who talk as if verbal criticism can literally erase its targets.