How to have better conversations about contentious scientific subjects.
Last week, Joe Rogan aired a conversation on his podcast with longtime vaccine misinformation spreader and current not-inconsequential Joe Biden primary challenger Robert F. Kennedy Jr. According to an article in Vice, the three-hour episode was “an orgy of unchecked vaccine misinformation, some conspiracy-mongering about 5G technology and wifi, and, of course, Rogan once again praising ivermectin, an ineffective faux COVID treatment.”
On Twitter, Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, criticized the conversation. In response, Rogan invited Hotez to debate vaccines with Kennedy on his show. Hotez declined, instead offering Rogan a one-on-one conversation. Rogan insisted on a debate, and Elon Musk popped into his replies with a jab at Hotez, implying Hotez was afraid of the debate, afraid of being proven wrong. On Sunday, two people, evidently spurred into action by the kerfuffle online, harassed Hotez at his Houston home.
Still, Hotez refused to debate RFK. Good.
“Hotez made the right choice,” wrote epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina and physician Kristen Panthagani Tuesday in an issue of Jetelina’s newsletter.
It’s tempting to engage in debates with people who disagree on matters of fact, said Jetelina — but what results can look more like a UFC match than a forum for learning, and can actually result in further entrenching polarized perspectives.
Here’s why debates are actually a bad forum for discussing contentious scientific issues — and what works better.
Why debates are bad for communicating science
Debates are a less-than-ideal forum for having conversations about contentious issues —especially when they’re issues whose understanding is clouded with misinformation.
There are several reasons for that. For starters, a debate about a scientific issue implies there is scientific disagreement about that issue, said Rupali Limaye, a social scientist at Johns Hopkins University’s public health school who studies vaccine communication. You’re “giving individuals a platform to really promote something that goes against scientific consensus,” she said.
That creates a sense of false equivalence, said Limaye. In this case, it suggests there’s as much good science to support avoiding vaccines as there is to support getting vaccinated — when in fact, the scientific evidence overwhelmingly supports vaccination safety and effectiveness.
But another important reason that debates fail at science communication is that they’re usually conducted with an audience, whether they’re live in a studio, listening on headphones, or following on Twitter.
That has several consequences, one of which is to disincentivize participants from changing their minds. A debate’s performative aspect means its participants are rewarded for doing what best preserves their public image. For people whose public identity is strongly tied to holding specific beliefs, that means standing their ground — not learning something new, which they may see as signaling to their audience that their identity is on shaky ground.
Simultaneously, the promise of an audience incentivizes debate participants to do whatever it takes to draw in and retain an even bigger audience. “You want drama, you want something that people are going to click on and be like, ‘Oh, my god,’” said Limaye. The interior process of learning isn’t the most likely thing to elicit that response; debate highlights are far more likely to include snappy retorts than thoughtful murmurs. A participant who scores points off the other guy is most likely to gain followers and fame.
It’s not just vaccine science: Many areas of science really don’t benefit from “debate.” There have been plenty of debates broadcast on climate science, for example, but according to climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, they have hardly moved the needle on climate denialism. Schmidt wrote on Twitter that “however well [the debate] went, there was never any let up or shift in the opponents tactics or messages.”
Hotez appeared to offer a conversation with Rogan as an alternative to a debate with RFK. Jetelina thought it was a good alternative. “More of an educational kind of approach, question and answer,” she said, “may be helpful for a large audience like that.” With a Q&A, the focus is more on learning and less on winning.
What makes for productive engagement?
It makes sense for a scientist like Hotez not to engage in a public debate on Joe Rogan’s podcast. But what’s a good model for a conversation? We all come into contact with people we disagree with, and those disagreements aren’t often turned into a spectator sport. Might we have a chance to engage in productive conversation on contentious subjects?
Assessing who you’re communicating with, when and where you’re communicating, and what and how you’re communicating can provide some guardrails that make interactions around these subjects more likely to be productive.
Who are you talking to?
Understanding a person’s motivation for engaging is key to determining whether the two of you can have a productive conversation. “Is the goal fame and money,” said Jetelina, “or is the goal truly to get to the bottom of what do we agree on and what do we not agree on, and understanding that?”
Engaging with people who approach you and your conversation in good faith — that is, with real curiosity — makes a productive interaction more likely.
Limaye cautions that having questions or hesitations on a complex topic does not automatically signal bad faith. People’s reasons for delaying Covid-19 vaccination ranged broadly: During Limaye’s pandemic-era conversations with about 3,000 people who were hesitant to take Covid-19 vaccines, she guesses about 90 percent were approaching her with genuine good intentions.
“They were just like, ‘Oh, I heard I can’t take it because I have this comorbidity,’” or because they’d heard there’s formaldehyde in the vaccine. “They weren’t there to bait me,” said Limaye. (And these concerns are easily addressed: Severe allergic vaccine reactions and certain post-vaccination inflammatory syndromes are the only contraindications to Covid-19 vaccines, and the minuscule amount of formaldehyde that occurs in vaccines is smaller than what naturally occurs in the human body.)
It’s not always easy to identify people motivated by less noble goals. However, if someone seems most motivated by a desire to create a public spectacle — if, perhaps, they refuse one-on-one conversation — or they don’t seem interested in learning something new about a subject, these may be indicators that an interaction with that person is going to be unproductive.
You’re allowed to decline to interact with people you judge to be bad-faith actors. If you do, it’s ideal to be civil — although that can be really hard, said Jetelina — and to leave the invitation open for a more productive conversation in the future.
When and where are you talking?
Finding the right venue for a conversation, whether online or in the real world, can make a big difference in determining its direction.
First, there’s the decision of whether to have a conversation in public or in private. Because public conversations involve an audience, there’s always the threat of the other person playing to the audience — and playing to win. Private conversations are less likely to turn into a circus (although the downside is that you reach fewer people).
There’s also the consideration of whether to interact online — whether in text, audio, or video — or in person. But this choice comes with some hard-to-adjust-for variables. People speak and interpret each other’s speech differently in these worlds (i.e., you don’t have tone of voice or body language to know how aggressive someone is being). Each pairing of people in an online conversation brings its own communication challenges.
If there’s doubt about someone’s goals or about how you may interpret each other, moving the conversation from the public sphere to a private space — potentially even to the real world — can help. Refusing any of these modifications could, again, signal a bad-faith engagement.
There’s also the issue of timing: The ideal approach to scientific communication gets ahead of public concerns, said Jetelina. She has written that this kind of proactive method requires anticipating and preventing information voids by providing timely and digestible answers to questions before they arise. For example, she suggests, public health authorities could be releasing a lot of messaging right now in anticipation of the RSV vaccine misinformation likely to appear this fall.
What and how are you communicating?
Determining what to say and how to say it when the stakes seem high can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to. The most critical thing here, says Jetelina, is listening to the concerns of the person you’re talking to.
Asking what concerns and questions a person has, and patiently hearing them out, allows you to zero in on what information they might have wrong — and what they might have right. “When you’re able to pinpoint it, and you’re able to find that kernel of truth, that’s when you’re able to start breaking it down and bringing them along for that scientific discovery,” said Jetelina.
This applies to other subjects where misinformation plays an important role in shaping opinions. Research on combating anti-trans prejudice has shown that nonjudgmental listening, following up on concerns, and asking people to reflect on their lived experiences can actually help move the needle on changing viewpoints.
When she shares facts with people in these scenarios, Jetelina says she’s not trying to convince them to take one action or another. “I’m okay with anyone making whatever individual-level decision they want, as long as they have the evidence-based science presented to them,” rather than basing their decisions on myths and disinformation, she said.
She typically shares facts in “truth sandwich” form: presenting the evidence-based truth first, then the misinformation it corrects, and ending by repeating the truth.
Part of working toward a better future is having conversations with people we disagree with that are genuine enough to allow us to find things in common, said Jetelina. It’s hard work, but it’s better than the alternative.
Debates like the one Rogan envisioned “just don’t help people discover what’s true,” Jetelina said, “and it’s hard for scientists to watch and participate in, as well.”
The Coast Guard is still looking for the sub, despite the detection of “banging noises” near where it went missing.
Time is running out for the search and rescue effort to recover a submersible vessel that was lost during an expedition down to the shipwreck of the Titanic. But, in the words of US Coast Guard Capt. Jamie Frederick, who is helping to lead the effort, “You always have hope.”
The craft, called the Titan, went missing in the North Atlantic Ocean on Sunday morning less than two hours after being deployed by a former Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker called the Polar Prince. On board are five passengers, including a French maritime expert, a billionaire British explorer, a British-Pakistani tycoon and his teenaged son, as well as Stockton Rush, the founder and CEO of OceanGate, the company leading the expedition. According to some estimates, they could all run out of oxygen on Thursday, if they’re even still alive.
This is more than a search and rescue story, though. Following news of the missing submersible has become a global media obsession as it touches on everything from the difficulties of underwater exploration to the rise of risky chartered expeditions for the ultra-rich. (A trip on the Titan submersible costs $250,000 per passenger.) It also raises questions about the attention we pay to when a wealthy person’s hobby goes wrong versus to the near-daily reality of maritime disasters affecting the less fortunate.
Here are nine questions about the Titan and the effort to find it. This is a developing story, and we’ll be updating this post as the story develops.
- When and where did the Titanic submersible disappear?
After departing from St. John’s on the eastern edge of Newfoundland on June 16, the Polar Prince dropped anchor roughly 900 miles east of Cape Cod and was scheduled to deploy the Titan at 3 am ET the morning of June 18, although the Coast Guard said it didn’t begin its descent until around 7 am ET. The sub was supposed to send out a ping every 15 minutes during its descent down to the Titanic shipwreck, nearly 13,000 feet below the ocean’s surface. The entire voyage was supposed to take just two and a half hours, but the Polar Prince lost contact with the Titan approximately an hour and 45 minutes into the trip, triggering a desperate search for the now-missing sub. —Adam Clark Estes
- Who is on board?
There are five people aboard the Titan submersible, including Stockton Rush, the 61-year-old pilot. He’s the founder and CEO of OceanGate Expeditions, which organized the expedition that the submersible embarked on to see the wreckage of the Titanic. Rush is an aerospace engineer with a well-documented love of deep-sea exploration and designing experimental aircraft and modded submersibles (there’s been a lot of talk of how the Titan is maneuvered by a jury-rigged video game controller). Though OceanGate was founded in 2009, tours to the Titanic weren’t available to paying customers until 2021. As of April 2020, the company had raised almost $37 million in total funding, according to data from PitchBook, including a new $18 million investment that year to help fund the nascent Titanic expeditions.
Also on board is Hamish Harding, a 58-year-old British billionaire with a penchant for adventuring to the extremes of the Earth. In 2016, he visited the South Pole with astronaut Buzz Aldrin; he holds three Guinness world records, including one for a more than 4-hour dive in the deepest part of the Mariana Trench. Last summer, he joined the six-person crew of a suborbital flight with Blue Origin, the space exploration company started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He also flies planes and skydives; in 2022, he was inducted into the Living Legends of Aviation, an award recognizing people who have made significant contributions to aviation — other honorees include space billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and actors Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford.
Paul-Henri Nargeolet, a 77-year-old former commander of the French Navy, is a deep-sea search expert who has completed at least 35 dives to the wreck of the Titanic. An authority on the famous shipwreck, Nargeolet is also the director of underwater research at RMS Titanic Inc, which has exclusive rights to salvage artifacts from the wreck. Nargeolet was part of the Air France Flight 447 search efforts, helping to find the plane that had disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean.
Shahzada Dawood, a 48-year-old Pakistani-British businessman and philanthropist, joined the Titan crew with his 19-year-old son Suleman. He heads the Engro Corporation, one of the largest conglomerates in Pakistan, which operates in the food and agriculture, energy, and telecommunications sectors. He sits on the board of trustees of his family foundation, which focuses on education in the sciences and technology. Dawood is also on the board of the SETI Institute, a renowned scientific research organization that, in part, searches for extraterrestrial life.
The five passengers aboard the submersible are connected by an interest — and some experience and bona fides — in exploring air, space, and sea, as well as the financial means to pursue these passions. Again, OceanGate’s Titanic expeditions to the wreckage site cost as much as $250,000 per passenger. The company has claimed that its aim is to increase access to the deep sea for tourists and to contribute research on the wreck and its surrounding debris. —Whizy Kim
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OceanGate Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
- How exactly does the sub work and why does it need help?
The Titan is not a big submersible, nor is it designed for extended periods of time underwater, or capable to travel to a port without help from another vessel, as naval submarines are. The teardrop-shaped vessel is 22 feet long, can carry five people, and is equipped with one, small porthole window on the front of the vessel, where there is also a small toilet. The cylindrical, all-metal interior otherwise lacks seats and is approximately the size of a minivan, according to David Pogue, a CBS reporter and former passenger. Mike Reiss, a producer and writer for The Simpsons, traveled on the Titan in 2022 and said passengers were given sandwiches and water on board his voyage, which lasted 10 hours, during which the vessel’s compass was “acting very weird” and the passengers only had about 20 minutes to view the Titanic wreckage.
Because it travels so deep in the ocean, the submersible cannot use GPS and communicates with the Polar Prince through a text messaging system. It’s piloted with a video game controller, which is not as weird as it sounds. Even the US Navy uses Xbox controllers to operate the photonic scopes that replaced periscopes on submarines.
Critically, the Titan submersible only has 96 hours of oxygen reserves on board. That means that as soon as the vessel went missing, the clock started ticking on remaining life support. Even if the sub were able to resurface on its own, the passengers would be stuck inside until help arrived, since the hatch is closed from the outside and sealed shut with 17 bolts. —ACE
- Who owns and operates the Titan sub?
The Titan is operated by OceanGate Expeditions, a Washington-based private company that offers chartered deep-sea exploration for commercial and scientific purposes. The company has also become known for leading deep-sea tourism trips. Its first trips to the Titanic were in 2021 and 2022, and OceanGate has said it would return to the shipwreck annually to survey its decay.
OceanGate has led more than a dozen underwater trips, including to shipwrecks like the Andrea Doria, which lies up to 240 feet underwater near Nantucket. It has three five-person submersibles in its fleet: Antipodes, Cyclops 1, and Titan. While Antipodes and Cyclops 1 can travel just 1,000 and 1,640 feet below the surface, respectively, OceanGate says the Titan is designed to go 4,000 meters, or 13,123 feet deep — just enough to reach the Titanic wreckage, which lies about 12,500 feet down. That seems uncomfortably close to the vessel’s maximum depth.
OceanGate has for years faced criticism from experts about Titan’s safety. David Lochridge, who was an OceanGate employee from 2016 to 2018, warned about the thickness of the Titan’s hull and “the potential dangers to passengers of the Titan as the submersible reached extreme depths” in a 2018 report. Lochridge later said in a court filing that he was wrongly terminated after raising these concerns. More than three dozen experts subsequently sent a letter to OceanGate’s CEO Rush saying that the “‘experimental’ approach adopted by [the company] could result in negative outcomes (from minor to catastrophic).” OceanGate offered a response of sorts in a 2019 blog post that explained why the company had decided not to class the Titan — that is, get an independent group to evaluate whether a series of standards, including on safety, have been met, which is the industry norm. OceanGate argued that “innovation often falls outside of the existing industry paradigm” and that “by itself, classing is not sufficient to ensure safety.”
Rush seems quite cavalier in his own right. “I mean, if you just want to be safe, don’t get out of bed, don’t get in your car, don’t do anything,” Rush told CBS’s Pogue in 2022. “At some point, you’re going to take some risk, and it really is a risk-reward question.” He added that safety is a “pure waste.” —ACE
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Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images
- What do we know about the search and rescue process?
OceanGate contacted the Coast Guard after it lost touch with the Titan on Sunday afternoon. This kicked off what has become an international rescue effort on the water and in the air. The search yielded few updates until early Wednesday, when several maritime surveillance planes detected underwater noises, described as “banging noises,” in the area where the Titan went missing.
That effort includes two American C-130 aircraft and two Canadian P-3 aircraft that can deploy sonar probes into the water as well as a British C-17 to transport equipment. On the surface, the Polar Prince and Deep Energy, a Bahamas-flagged pipe-laying ship with two remotely operated vehicles that can dive nearly 10,000 feet, have been assisting with the search. A French research vessel, the Atalante, which is equipped with an underwater exploration robot called the Victor 6000, also arrived on Wednesday. The Atlante deployed its Victor 6000 is capable of descending nearly 20,000 feet, which is more than deep enough to reach the Titanic shipwreck. A Canadian ship, the Horizon Arctic, deployed a remotely operated vehicle that reached the ocean floor on Thursday morning. Even more ships are on their way to help.
In a press briefing on Wednesday afternoon, Capt. Frederick would not offer a timeline for the search. He said that the search area was now two times the size of Connecticut, or more than 10,000 square miles, and that the number of planes and ships assisting in the search would double from five to 10 in the next 24 hours. Frederick also emphasized that the amount of oxygen believed to be left in the Titan was just one data point for rescuers. If the 96 hours of reserve oxygen figure is correct, that would leave rescuers working under the assumption that the supply would run out some time on Thursday. —ACE
- Why is it so difficult to explore the deepest parts of the ocean?
You’re probably familiar with how 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is ocean, but its depths are a much bigger mystery. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, less than 10 percent of the world’s ocean depths are mapped with sonar.
Think of the ocean floor not as flat and even, but with geological features just like land on the surface. There are canyons, plateaus, mountains, and submarine volcanoes, among other types of formations. Crucially, the technology we have to map above ground doesn’t work as well underwater. Water is a very good shield. It’s excellent at attenuating light, radiation, electromagnetism — all of our conventional tools for studying stuff. Terrain mapping can include satellite imagery and GPS, both of which can’t operate beyond rather shallow depths. So beyond 50 meters of depth, you really can’t know what’s going on unless you’re physically there.
To identify objects in the very deep parts of the ocean, researchers are left to use sound waves, which can travel through water much more accurately, via sonar. We can use echo sounding to map the ocean floor in a practice called bathymetry. There’s also geodesy, a satellite technology that’s increasingly being used to map by measuring tiny changes in gravity, which in turn illustrate the bottom of the ocean.
A part of the struggle comes through relying on sound waves, which physically have to be deployed. It’s expensive to make vessels that can withstand the pressures of the depths, and even more expensive to get people in said vessels. The farther down you go, the higher and more deadly the pressure is. In 2016, scientists estimated it would cost more than $3 billion to map the ocean floor. OceanGate claims to provide submersibles for scientific projects as well.
“In some ways, it’s a lot easier to send people into space than it is to send people to the bottom of the ocean,” oceanographer Gene Carl Feldman told Oceana, an ocean conservation group. “The intense pressures in the deep ocean make it an extremely difficult environment to explore.”
So while we know where the oceans are, and their surface is mapped with satellites, the depths are still just roughly estimated. We have a better understanding of Mars’s geography than we do of the ocean’s.
As for the rescue, the OceanGate submersible only has sonar to rely on — and that’s if their technology is working. (The New York Times reported that it’s unclear whether the Titan even has an acoustic homing beacon.) —Izzie Ramirez
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US Coast Guard Handout via Getty Images
- How dangerous is deep sea tourism?
In most cases, folks who aren’t experts in deep-sea exploration aren’t ending up down near the sea floor. And if they are, usually they’re accompanied or trained by people who know how to operate deep-sea machinery and what to do in emergency situations. That’s what makes this particular incident with OceanGate precarious — generally, deep sea equipment has several, redundant failsafes to protect the people inside.
Because deep sea exploration trips are so expensive, there are limited ways to get on one. You can be conducting government-funded research, have extremely wealthy benefactors (or are wealthy yourself), or be contracted as an employee of an industry that’s operating in the depths. In the research arena, that’s improved loads. Just earlier this month, a Florida scientist — nicknamed “Dr. Deep Sea” — broke the world record for living underwater the longest. He stayed in a subaquatic compound for 100 days.
But it hasn’t always been so safe. And safety, of course, is dependent on the infrastructure and systems around an individual. In 1983, a team of saturation divers for Byford Dolphin, a semi-submersible oil rig in the North Sea, experienced a terrible accident. The diving bell, or the structure that maintains pressure to keep divers safe, released before a connecting chamber’s doors were entirely closed, instantaneously decompressing the area. Three of the divers died instantly, with the nitrogen in their bodies erupting, “boiling” into gas. Another was sucked through an opening — his internal organs scattered onto the deck after being torn from his body.
The danger of pressure underwater will likely never go away, but we’ve gotten better at building vessels and ships that have backup plans for their backup plans. That, and we don’t send as many crewed vessels into the deep. —IR
- How does deep-sea tourism compare to space tourism?
Rush, in an interview with the New York Times last year, argued that OceanGate’s private explorations served a public good. “No public entity is going to fund going back to the Titanic,” he said. It’s an argument not dissimilar to the one spacefaring billionaires make about the societal value their multibillion-dollar ventures provide. They too point to a diminishment of interest and funding for space exploration — so thank the heavens they’re magnanimously picking up the slack. In a 2017 interview with Fast Company, Rush noted that as a teenager he dreamed of being the first person on Mars, only later turning his eye to the ocean.
He also said that the cost of OceanGate’s expeditions were a “fraction” of going to space. That’s true more broadly — setting up an aerospace company and building reusable rockets probably requires a lot more capital than sending submersibles into the depths of the ocean. But a ticket on a Virgin Galactic spaceflight also cost around $250,000 in 2021, though it has since upped the price to a cool $450,000. In February of this year, Rush was sued for fraud by a Florida couple alleging that the Titanic voyage they paid a hefty sum for had never happened.
In recent years, space exploration — often with dreams of colonizing Mars — has become the billionaire pet project du jour. But there have been plenty of other trendy, expensive fascinations too. In fact, the elite fascination with the deep sea appeared to be having a moment in the early 2010s. Richard Branson spent an estimated $17 million on a submarine in 2011, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen also revealed in 2011 that he had a megayacht big enough to house a personal submarine. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt founded the Schmidt Ocean Institute in 2009, which aims to advance oceanographic research. To date, Schmidt and his wife Wendy have contributed over $360 million to the institute.
While the degree of danger associated with the hobbies of the ultra-rich varies greatly, there’s a surfeit of adventurous pastimes enjoyed by the wealthy, whether it’s yacht racing — enjoyed by the likes of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Wendy Schmidt — or flying private planes, an infamously perilous activity that nonetheless remains a favorite hobby of rich people. —WK
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OceanGate Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
- Why does the media care so much about this story?
The quick answer to that question is that it’s pretty hard to imagine people spending $250,000 to voluntarily go to an extremely dangerous place in a claustrophobic tube with no additional safety. Rich people doing something astonishingly baffling and risky is always a point of curiosity. It’s a story, in the classic sense of the word.
The more complex — and arguably interesting — answer is that such a search endeavor reveals how little we know about the ocean. The hurdles with sonar, the physical challenges, the fact there’s so much science and guessing involved (Are they still alive and running out of oxygen? Were they instantly crushed?) can lead to a lot of important development in the future. This might be the impetus for governments to invest more in ocean exploration.
And yes, migrants unfortunately do go missing in oceans regularly in arduous, treacherous journeys for a better life. At least 78 migrants died and hundreds of others are missing after a boat capsized in the Mediterranean earlier this week, for instance. Outlets could do more to cover this painful issue with justice and accountability. As local and national outlets continue to cover immigration, human rights, and poverty, it’s a dual responsibility from news organizations and readers alike to decide what really matters. —IR
Updated, June 22, 7:45 am ET: This story has been updated to include new details about the search and rescue effort.
Talking Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma with Claire Dederer.
We’ve known for a long, long time that a lot of our culture’s most beloved artists have done some pretty messed-up things. Picasso was terrible to women. Hemingway beat his wife. Roman Polanski raped a child.
For just as long, most people have let it slide. They watch Chinatown. They like Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The backstory doesn’t bother them too much.
But almost six years ago, in October of 2017, two weird things happened. The first weird thing is that a whole bunch more of our most beloved artists got accused of doing even more messed-up things. And the second weird thing is that all of a sudden, almost out of nowhere, people started to care about it.
Louis C.K. was accused of sexual harassment. Netflix and HBO canceled their deals with him. Kevin Spacey was accused of sexual assault. He got cut out of a movie he was in just a month before it was released.
Then, people started to go back and look at the artists whose sins we already knew about. Michael Jackson. Woody Allen. Bill Cosby. These were artists whose work audiences had loved for decades … and audiences were starting to feel kind of weird about it.
They were confused by a big question, one we’re still grappling with: What do we do with the art we love when the artist who made it did something terrible?
The best answer I’ve heard to that question comes from Claire Dederer. So I called her up to talk it through.
Claire’s an essayist and author who’s written for the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the Paris Review. She began her new book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma after spending years grappling with her love of the films of Roman Polanski.
Between you and me, there has been a lot written over the past six years about how to handle monstrous art. Like, a lot. But Claire’s book is the most interesting and nuanced approach I’ve come across so far. She’s the kind of critic who reckons with both facts and feelings, and doesn’t try to force people to take their emotions out of the equation when it comes to dealing with art. I wanted to talk with her about how to find nuance in a conversation that can get very charged very fast.
Excerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity, follow. You can listen to the whole thing on the Gray Area podcast.
If we’re talking about the art of monstrous men, what do we mean by “monster”?
The word “monster” came up early on in the writing of the book during the fall of 2017. As the accusations started to come fast and furious in the Me Too reckoning, it was a word that I kept seeing, which I thought was interesting.
But I was also thinking about a quote from Jenny Ofill, who wrote this novel, Dept. of Speculation. In that book, she writes about the idea of the “art monster,” which is a person who doesn’t have to think about anything else besides making art, and they can only focus on this one thing and they always have someone else there, a wife, to take care of other things.
So that was why “monsters” came forward as a term. But as I thought about it, I asked exactly what you just did: What do I mean by this word? What’s my definition? And it really became someone whose biography — what we know of their biography — disrupts our experience of the work or disrupts my experience of the work. The word “monster” is othering, it’s very finger-pointing. “You’re over there. I’m over here. You’re the bad guy. I’m just fine.” I was interested in a more complicated inquiry.
In the book, you question the word “we” in the sentence “What do we do with the art created by monstrous men?” You write, “We is corrupt. We is make-believe.” What do you mean by that?
As I began to think about the problem, I realized that one of the things I was most interested in was dismantling or dethroning false or too-easy authority.
When you talk about this problem, what often happens is there’s a balance between the badness of the crime and the greatness of the work. And of course I was thinking about the crime or the bad behavior, but also what do we mean by greatness of the work? And who gets to decide that the work is so great, we’re gonna forget the crime?
So there’s all different kinds of ways I go after the idea of critical authority in the book. But the term “we,” where we create this shared experience that somehow puts a stamp of approval on an idea without asking the speaker, the critic, to just own that idea as their idea, their experience. The primacy of individual experience is at the core of this book. This is a book about the subjective experience of each audience member.
And the way that experience is talked about has changed a lot in a relatively short period of time. As someone who’s been engaged with this question for a while, do you see a difference in the way that people began approaching it after Me Too became public?
Yeah, I think it’s been an interesting journey, to use a memoir word. I think that in 2017 it was almost like the world was divided into two halves. The halves of the people who said, “You shouldn’t worry about the biography,” and then the people who believe that all the work should be thrown out. And that latter voice I’m talking about, the voice that says we’re just gonna let go of this work, was very strong for some time.
I think that it’s interesting to have published this book now as opposed to publishing it in, say, 2018 or 2019, because the first thing that happened was people stood up and said something that happened to them, we call it cancellation or accusation. The response to it steamrolled into this moment of culturally casting these men out. But in the past couple years, there’s been more of an understanding that we lose something when we do that. That we as audience members, whether we are women consuming the work of Roman Polanski or trans people consuming the Harry Potter novels or whoever we are, we don’t want to deny ourselves of the work that we love.
And I think that conversation has become more complex and more nuanced over the past year or two in a way that’s been really surprising and exciting to me.
I want to take a second to focus on this idea of the genius. This is the idea of the artist who can do whatever he wants, and the art he makes has transcended him out of the bounds of normal human behavior. I’m saying “he” here because when we talk about geniuses like that, we’re mostly talking about men, and mostly white men. We sometimes see folks on the right get really frantic about the idea that Me Too and the kids today and the wokeness have all permanently dethroned the figure of the genius. Do you think that’s the case?
I think that’s so far from the truth. This idea that genius can be dethroned — but also what are we dethroning? There’s this idea of the genius that is an umbrella term or something that floats free of these individual artists, and certainly nobody’s saying we’re never gonna read Hemingway again or look at Gaugin or Picasso again. So maybe they won’t get called “genius” in exactly the same way, but they’re certainly going to be part of the culture. And that idea of genius, I think, has done so much work to smooth over some of these accusations and kind of make a virtue out of them.
An idea I deal with in the book is that the genius is the person who is responding to what I think you could call artistic impulse. You can call it the muse. You can call it an energy that’s greater than himself. That certainly corresponds with our idea of Picasso and his very gestural painting, very responsive to some larger force that he’s subject to, and there’s a way in which there’s a mental leap. If he’s subject to this artistic impulse that gives us all this work that we think is important and good, then maybe all his other impulses need to be protected, coddled, accepted, maybe even revered. So that there’s a sort of hall pass he gets for the work that then goes over to the behavior as well.
When I first started thinking about this, I was thinking about Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway in particular. They are these characters, their personas are brawling and male and abusive to women and children, and then that’s somehow tied to this very free art that they make or this very masculine art that they make.
And as I thought about it more, I realized that that image of the artist, that 20th-century idea of the genius isn’t just one that they embodied, but one that they helped to create because they were the writer and the artist of the early mass media era. And aside from being both truly, truly great artists, they were great at using that media. They were great at having a persona that was saleable and dominant in the media. And so they are examples of genius, but they also helped shape the idea of genius that passes through certain abstract expressionists, certain other writers, and I think finds its fullest expression in rock and roll. This idea of the man, the white male performer who’s totally free and his freedom is just as important offstage as it is onstage.
One of the big tensions in this book is that our reaction to the work of art is personal and can’t be dictated by anyone and can’t be taken away by anyone. But at the same time, there’s this sense that it’s not really fair that this sense of responsibility has ended up on our heads, the audience’s heads, as individual consumers.
Can you talk a little about how this sense of responsibility ends up on the heads of the audience, and what the issues there are?
That’s one of those ideas that really blossomed and grew as I worked on the book. In the opening of the book, there’s a much more traditional punitive liberal feminist point of view where it’s sort of like, “That guy’s wrong, let’s get him outta here.” I think many of us underwent a political education, and in the world was a growing understanding of systemic problems, and getting away from the idea that each of us can individually solve each problem.
I started thinking about my role in this larger cultural and capitalist system, and in the system of capital we are consumers. We might produce, we might have different roles, but at heart, our role is to consume. And I find it fascinating that when you have this problem that we sometimes call Me Too and we sometimes call cancel culture and we sometimes call accusation, there’s this leap over all potential responses to the consumer response, and we’re left with this sense that it’s our individual responsibility, even though that person has been supported by institutions, by business models, has often been aided and abetted in their crimes. That person is unleashed on the world and then we’re left as individuals to solve it.
And I think that ultimately the book comes away saying that, if your ethics are being expressed through what you consume, maybe that’s a dead end. Maybe you could think about a different way to be a good person and not try to express that through the means of your consumption.
You wind up on a provocative argument, saying, “The question, ‘What do we do with the art?’ is a kind of laboratory or a kind of practice for the real deal, the real question: What is it to love someone awful? The problem is that you still love her.” Which was striking to me, I think in part because we’re living in this moment where it’s kind of trendy to advise other people to just cut off contact with someone when they’re terrible. Which is good advice in some scenarios! But I’m wondering if any of the ideas that we’ve teased out here seem helpful for taking out of the laboratory of art and using when you’re faced with the terrible people that you love in the real world.
This idea of no contact has really made an appearance on the scene and I do think it parallels some of the questions that I talk about in the book. Because no contact, I think it’s really crucial for some people, as you just said. I think it can be a really valuable tool. But what are you missing when you let go of that art, what is Pearl Cleage missing when she stops listening to Miles? That’s what’s incredible about the Pearl Cleage essay. You know, 15 or 20 years later, she was giving an interview in Atlanta Magazine and she says, yeah, I listened to him again. I love that she gives herself the solace of his music and I think the same thing goes for human relations.
People are terrible. We all have terrible parts of ourselves. Pointing the finger at the other guy and saying, “You’re terrible,” is an easy thing to do, but the fact is we all have dark parts of ourselves.
So perhaps we’re in the same place with that conversation that we were with throwing out the art in 2017, and maybe in a couple of years we’ll be able to come to it with a little more room for gray areas.
Yeah. I think that it does come from a really similar place where somebody has raised their hand and said, “Hey, this is not okay,” and that instigating impulse is important. It’s important for people to say when stuff isn’t okay, “What happens next?”
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