Ta-Nehisi Coates Attacks “Journalism’s Great Sin” on Israeli Apartheid
15 November 2024
What role should your feelings play in moral logic? Much of our culture seems confused about how emotions and aesthetics relate to what’s right and wrong. For instance, certain celebrated writing circles operate as if presenting the plain details of a situation won’t be sufficient to influence readers, only a well-crafted story that evokes vivid emotions will move them on moral issues. The main factor in acting on moral matters, then, is feeling not fact (perhaps not coincidentally that self-flattering outlook, puts narrative-makers themselves in the driver’s seat of moral and political life). This could be called the Fine Feelings school of ethics, and this piece argues that it is widely and detrimentally influential in journalism and politics (and indeed throughout our culture). Troubled subcurrents in this essentially elite-serving worldview are evident in heated reactions to The Message, a pugnacious new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates. Among other things, the book is a manifesto for Writing, with a capital w. The first chapter (“Journalism Is Not a Luxury”) ends with this call to arms: “young writers everywhere [your] task is nothing less than doing [your] part to save the world.”
Devotees of the Fine Feelings school are trained to believe that stories are sovereign and that in general narratives with a clear moral stance are aesthetically undesirable—the many adjectives used to disparage instances of moral clarity include uninteresting, unliterary, melodramatic, didactic, binary, and crude. Nuance and complexity indicate refinement and sophistication, while moral lucidity risks oversimplification or immaturity or naivety. Coates attacks this aesthetic/ethical norm head on. His core accusation is that appeals to complexity often provide cover for elite-shielding immorality. He notes that when “evil speaks with clarity” it is a blessing, in contrast to all the diabolical, decorous dissembling and evasive evils elegantly cloaked in beautiful, emotive, nuanced-narrative guises. He forcefully objects to the “elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality” and argues that in some cases debate should exclude in advance “any defense of the patently immoral.” Otherwise we put “complexity over justice,” expressing in effect a preference for aesthetics over ethics. Under the Fine Feelings regime few speak with clarity about what the right thing to do is.
This tendency "to dissolve the distinction between the ethical and the aesthetic," has been documented by philosopher Charles Taylor. In Sources of the Self he writes that this shift arose in Romanticism’s “expressivist turn,” and in his view it has become a cornerstone of modern culture. The resulting cross-leakage of energies meant that for many the “good life [came] to consist in a perfect fusion of the sensual and the spiritual, where our sensual fulfilments are experienced as having higher significance." At times this spiritual significance could become “detached from benevolence and solidarity” (see also “Art and Our Cult of the Self”). In one influential stream of this culture, as Taylor notes in A Secular Age, the “aesthetic has now been placed outside of and above the moral." For many immersed in this stream, “nothing outside subjective goods can be allowed to trump self-realization." The entire world’s role is to be a source of subjective experiences, and your life’s mission is to maximally pursue the most desirable feelings. This is the central doctrine of the Fine Feelings school in a nutshell. It is related to “emotivism,” under which, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre says, "moral judgements are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling." A similar solipsistic shift is noted in literary critic James Wood’s contrast between novels about “how the world works” and those about “how somebody felt about something.” The core concern of the latter isn’t the events but how they made the protagonists feel (Wood being an ardent follower of the Fine Feelings school prefers the latter). An equivalent pattern of pernicious priorities operates beyond fictional narratives. For instance, consider Nigerian writer Teju Cole’s 2012 verdict on “the white savior industrial complex,” meaning western aid agencies and charities and the pundits who promote them to highly TEDucated audiences. In Cole’s view their mission “is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.” He writes that the “world exists simply to satisfy the needs—including, importantly, the sentimental needs—of white people and Oprah” (though that line expresses some truth, we should resist such blanket denigrations of all “white people”).
The media fireworks over The Message mainly revolves around Coates’ resistance to the suppression of stories of Israeli apartheid. “There is tremendous pressure not to have this conversation,” Coates told the Guardian, despite the fact that multiple humanitarian agencies say Isreal is openly practicing apartheid. He explains, "People don’t want to straightforwardly say: ‘I am defending apartheid because …’ Or ‘I think the apartheid is appropriate because ….’" He derives his moral certainty by analogy with the fight against American racial oppression. In his view there is no argument that could ever justify racial segregation or apartheid. It’s just wrong. It’s simply immoral. However the current complexities arose, the fact of that obvious immorality must take center stage. The unequivocal wrongness must be stated clearly and forcefully. Failure to squarely face the clear immorality makes it far easier for us to dodge our duty, which only enables the evils to continue.
Coates issues an incendiary industry-wide indictment. On a New York Times Ezra Klein podcast, Coates confesses that “I felt lied to. I felt lied to by my craft. I felt lied to by the major media organizations … I mean, like producers of books, films, et cetera. Like the whole corpus of storytelling, which is what this book is obsessed with.” His book explicitly castigates journalists who “themselves are playing god,” abetted by a “complex of curators” (network execs, producers, publishers) who decide which stories get told and who gets “purged from the narrative.” These god-playing gatekeepers are “establishing and monitoring a criteria for humanity” (page 148). The net result is well expressed by Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid: the “devastation of Gaza has confirmed for many Arabs and Muslims … [that they] are not viewed as equal or equally deserving of dignity. Arab and Muslim lives are expendable.” When Klein brings up excesses on both sides, Coates responds that he “can’t accept that the violence committed by the people who have less power somehow relieves you of the burden of forming a just society.” Do injustices committed by others license us to act unjustly? To respond in immoral ways? One telling case Coates uses to illustrate his position is that he would not have supported Nat Turner’s slave rebellion because of the “slaughter babies in their crib.” That’s just wrong, no matter the cause in whose name it is done.
Coates considers these sorts of organized lies (mostly of omission) to be “journalism’s great sin,” as he put it on a Vox podcast with Sean Illing. They’re his peer group’s “contribution to apartheid, because we are the agents through which people are dehumanized.” Coates emphasizes that his award-winning art always has “a politics attached” (in his view “beauty must be joined to politics”). This explains his choice of the epigraph of The Message from George Orwell: “In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer.” In the same essay Orwell says, “No book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude” (the implicit politics of which is typically designed to shield the privileges and tastes of those on top of the current material arrangements). More bluntly, Orwell writes that “few people have the guts to say outright that art and propaganda are the same thing." Those who command the most artful skills transmit propaganda of some kind, knowingly or not, even if it seems just an innocent ornate diversion (from the sins of the status quo). In a world like ours, Coates told Stephen Colbert, "you don't have the right … just to sit back and enjoy yourself and do back flips and amuse yourself with your pretty sentences."
Yet Coates plays his immorality-exposing role in this reluctantly, he believes he shouldn’t be the face of these particular issues: “Stories are best told when the people who have the most at stake are the storytellers” (Middle East Eye interview; stream here). In the Vox podcast Coates protested that the media “that dominate the conversation is not just devoid of Palestinian perspectives, but it’s devoid of Palestinians themselves.” Illing agrees noting that "a lack of empathy for the Palestinian experience because their story hasn’t been told enough, hasn’t been represented enough. He adds that “if I went there and saw the suffering firsthand, all of this would feel a whole lot less abstract to me.” Hewing to Fine Feelings school doctrine, Illing implies that the only way for a political or moral issue to have salience is by its effects on your personal feelings.
These sorts of exchanges are haunted by hidden tensions, moral dodges, and lax ethical logic. It is of course admirable that Coates uses his stellar talent to seduce his influential audience into facing injustices and harsh moral truths. He is himself a leading practitioner of the Fine Feelings school, his work enacts its priorities superbly, but he can sense its limits, without yet knowing how to overcome them. He chaffs at the downside of an aesthetic taste for complexity, but not the limits of appeals to feelings. The implicit Fine Feelings logic seems to be that an audience will only act on moral issues if they themselves have been emotionally moved enough. This is the pattern that Teju Cole complained about, where justice requires the delivery of a “big emotional experience” that satisfies the “sentimental needs” of the privileged. But this is emotivism run amok. It shifts the center of moral gravity away from those suffering and onto Fine Feelings delivered to others. Is an exquisitely crafted narrative of the emotional experience of genocide or famine necessary to know that they are simply morally wrong (and to spur commensurate action)? Shouldn’t we know that any narratives excusing such horrors are “patently immoral” (in the same way that Coates knows racial segregation is simply wrong). A regular opponent of his, Coleman Hughes makes an astute point in noting that Coates “writes as if his own personal feelings possess some higher moral authority.” But that isn’t limited to Coates, in the Fine Feelings worldview, everyone’s personal feelings are the ultimate arbiter. In a typically philosophically rigorous review, the Washington Post’s Becca Rothfeld says that Coates’ arguments is that “writing can succeed politically only to the extent that it succeeds aesthetically.” In this regime, to be admissible, your suffering must be emotionally and aesthetically palatable for the powerful.
I argue that we must break with these justice-hindering habits of the Fine Feelings school to get to the point where the plain facts, basic moral imagination, and commitment to equal human dignity, can do the trick. Or must hellscapes like those in some parts of sub-Saharan Africa await a Coates-level Sudanese talent to tell the story in an aesthetically approved of manner with sufficient emotional heft before we heed its message? Or are we to depend on a prose-wizard outsider to parachute in and create a viscerally vivid narrative to deliver the Fine Feelings that will move us to action? Such aesthetic/ethical norms turn injustice into an empathy Olympics, where the oppressed must compete for attention by serving the aesthetic and emotional tastes of the powerful. Woe betide those whose suffering doesn’t have a sufficiently emotionally compelling poster child or sufficiently charismatic story.
A large part of the function of Fine Feelings gatekeepers is to protect and serve the privileged while seeming to be concerned about justice (for more on this pattern see Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, reviewed here). Hence the disincentives for deviating from rigorously enforced non-boat-rocking norms are legion. Asked about the foreseeable career blowback for highlighting the humanity of Gazans, Coates says, “I don’t give a f**k.” Sadly, “careerism is the dominant literary style in America” (in critic Christian Lorentzen’s view). These sorts of careerist pressures can easily undercut the logic of relying on the authentic voice of talented representatives of the oppressed to tell the salient stories. As Coates complains the “few Black writers working at the journals and magazines I read seemed bent on putting as much distance between themselves and Black people as possible.” Ascent into elite media, or maintenance of a position there, depends on pleasing Fine Feelings gatekeepers.
And let’s not forget that even the best Fine Feelings narratives, despite their immense emotional power, often fail to spur immorality-ending action. Even Coates’ own “Case For Reparations” (deemed “Top Work of Journalism of the Decade”) hasn’t yet generated concrete progress. More generally the role of emotional impact remains exasperatingly puzzling, for instance even the live-streamed horrors of Gaza over the past year (including murders of infants) have not moved enough of us to take action.
Further problems with the habits of the school of Fine Feelings are suggested by two New Yorker hit pieces on Coates’s new book. These matter because of the New Yorker’s taste-maker role in gatekeeping literary and journalistic prestige (the curation criteria for this kind of prestige must select material that’s compatible with protecting revenue from ads that sell the exquisitely expensive baubles beloved of New Yorker readers). Staff writer Parul Sehgal complains that The Message is “slipshod” and festers with “self-regard,” a remarkably odd and complaint since Coates is a proud practitioner of New Journalism, a style of creative narrative nonfiction the New Yorker itself led the charge in promoting (it could be argued that the rise of New Journalism was a central force in cementing the Fine Feelings school’s cultural hegemony). Legendary long-time editor of Harpers Lewis Lapham nailed New Journalism’s narratives as “strenuously self-glorifying.” They typically center the writer and bring along all the baggage of contemporary novelistic norms. Like those that led critic and novelist Amitav Ghosh to write that "English literature has long been a leading disseminator of the ideology of morbid individualism." Or the related rise of “main character syndrome” or “main character energy,” where your life is cast as a story in which you play the “central role, with everyone else [relegated to] a side character at best.” Philosopher Anna Gotlib has written that this mindset, common in Gen X and Gen Z, is “philosophically dubious” and “dangerous” (and it has been associated with “narcissistic personality disorder”). In the other New Yorker piece, Jay Caspian Kang rejects the idea that writers should seek to be world-savers, since “the pressure to always be political, significant, or weighty leads to leaden, predictable prose.” Coates’ recent work, Kang says, “often feels turgid.” Here Kang seems to put the reader’s aesthetic experience above the moral logic and weight of what’s described. Per the Fine Feelings school’s priorities, Kang seems to rank the emotional and aesthetic experience of the privileged over the facts of immoral oppression.
Speaking to Jon Stewart, Coates described how all politics is downstream from culture and storytelling: "There's a whole entire architecture that happens outside of that voting booth that defines what goes on inside of it, what issues are appropriate, frankly, who is human, and who is not. And that is the work of stories, movies, television shows, writing, all of that ... What I wanted people to understand is writing actually shapes the world around you entirely." As Illing usefully put it, “politics is a high-stakes storytelling competition.” The game is “narrative supremacy”: those with the most compelling stories win. So, it matters a great deal what moral norms guide professional storytellers. Hence Coates preaches the power of writing to haunt our minds and to reshape our moral imaginations (and thus our politics). We should all be haunted by the ghosts of those harmed by our political and moral passivity, by the hideous facts we ignored (egged on by the excuses of so-called political realists and their inertia-enabling story-creator or curator allies), since their stories didn’t rise to those standards of Fine Feelings that supposedly lead to action.
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