Immoral Clarity

The promotional tour for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s latest book revealed to all who can accept the evidence of their own eyes that the celebrated author is a shallow political observer. Coates, who famously rejects complexity, determined that we were all overthinking the generations-old conflict in the Middle East after an eleven-day sojourn to Israel. He papered over the existence of non-Jewish Israeli citizens. He flattened the causes of the wars in 1948, 1967, and 1973. He all but erased the PLO, the intifadas, and Iran’s “ring of fire” terror campaign against the Jewish state. When this cognitive labor was complete, he applied the template of U.S. race relations to Israel-Palestinian discord, pronounced a perfect overlap, and expected to be fêted for his insight. It didn’t quite work out that way.

The question this episode raises is why it took so long for that revelation to dawn on so many. The reaction CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil generated from his employer’s “race and culture unit” following his gentle pushback against some of the premises the author promulgated is instructive. As some of my colleagues observed, Coates’s pronouncements aren’t meant to be scrutinized and fact-checked. They are catechisms. Reading his work as though it were intended as a scholarly contribution to the sum of human knowledge is a mistake. He proclaims orthodoxies. And when his word is challenged, it is not because his observations conflict with reality. It is merely because first contact with this blinding brand of enlightenment can “scare people.”

The enforcers of Coates’s dogmas in the press long ago internalized the notion that their job wasn’t to challenge the factually deficient canon of their credo. It was to promote their conception of “moral clarity.”

To hear the promoters of this alternative mission statement tell it, moral clarity exists in opposition to conventional definitions of objectivity. In 2020, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wesley Lowery advocated “a method of moral clarity” as an antidote to the “failed experiment” of “view-from-nowhere, ‘objectivity’-obsessed, both-sides journalism.” Objectivity is “a privilege afforded to white journalists,” the essayist Pacinthe Mattar declared. The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen applied a Marxian heuristic to journalistic practice and concluded that objectivity fails to account for the disparities in American power dynamics. The protester vs. the protested against, “voices that have been marginalized throughout history” vs. the New York Times editorial staff, reporters themselves vs. the subjects on which they are reporting; even if objectivity is an aspirational goal, its pursuit compels its pursuer to abandon universal values in favor of thick-headed neutrality. The product objective reporters produce is, therefore, flaccid treacle. It only confuses readers by failing to guide them to the most righteous conclusions about the bad actors in our midst and imbue them with resolve to fight, to oppose, to resist.

A guerrilla impulse to muscle into the public consciousness a sort of revolutionary zeal arises not just from profound hubris on the part of the journalistic establishment but utter contempt for their audiences. Not only do they believe you are incapable of arriving at moral rectitude on your own, you also lack the requisite gumption to promote the right as they see it. When the facts get in the way of that objective, the facts have to go. So it was that this hothouse environment produced an epidemic of racial hoaxes which, while unfounded themselves, reveal a deeper social rot. It was this epidemic of intellectual corruption that compelled 550 specialists in the field of women’s issues to declare without fear of reputational consequences that the United States is host to a more abusive environment for women than the one cultivated by public officials in places like Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria. In this inverted narrative, genuine victimization is blotted out by calls to action.

Coates was one of the more prominent expostulators of this practiced moral blindness even when he was the toast of the town. The New York Times review of his 2015 book, Between the World and Me, conceded that it was “startling” to read Coates attack the first responders who ran into the flames engulfing the World Trade Center on 9/11 as “not human to me” because he was understandably overcome with “emotion over the loss of his friend and his anger at police killings of unarmed black men.” There cannot be any distinction between the law-enforcement officers who allegedly commit abuse and self-sacrificing heroes, between a terrorist attack and a routine traffic stop. Nor can we allow any distinctions between America’s constitutional framers and the blood-thirsty barbarians who set out to slaughter every Jew they could find.

Advocates for this outlook abandon dispassion in favor of activism. They would dragoon their colleagues into a campaign aimed not at chronicling events but manipulating them. They sacrifice discernment and even good taste to shield you from corrupting exposure to nuance. The nobility of their mission licenses every intellectual depravity, every abuse of your intelligence. Advocates of this approach to journalism believe they are in command of a monopoly on virtue, and everything is permitted in its promotion. Scruples can only get in the way of “moral clarity.”