Penn in Paper

Penn Gillette, the vocal half of the magical duo Penn & Teller, has a very interesting and thoughtful interview in Cracked that I enjoyed reading. It initially crossed my path when folks noted his apparent repudiation of his long-standing identity as a libertarian, which included this banger of a line:

I completely have not used the word Libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown where a person from a Libertarian organization wrote to me and said, “We’re doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we’d like you to head it.” I looked at that email and I went, “The fact they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of, and I need to change.” Now, you can make the argument that maybe you don’t need to mandate masks — you can make the argument that maybe that shouldn’t be the government's job — but you cannot make the argument that you shouldn’t wear masks. It is the exact reciprocal of seatbelts because if I don’t wear a seatbelt, my chances of fucking myself up increase — if I don’t wear a mask, the chance of fucking someone else up increase. 

Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

But Penn also had some interesting comments when asked about Jews, Israel, and Palestine. At first, what he started to say made me a bit squirmy -- he indicated he didn't really understand the notion of being "culturally Jewish", and clearly thought it was a bit absurd. But he righted ship in the next question, when the interviewer asked "Because of the Israel-Hamas war, even talking about this can bring up accusations that, by being critical of Judaism[!!!] or Israel, it’s almost automatically anti-Semitism. Are you nervous talking about this?" Now, as you probably know, whenever I hear this "almost automatically antisemitic" claim, my blood pressure almost automatically spikes. But here I thought Penn said something very thoughtful in reply:

Yes, I’m very nervous. But I want to be a little more high-minded. I’m not as nervous about being attacked for it as I am nervous about being wrong. As a good friend of mine said, “I don’t mind being called an asshole — I don’t want to be an asshole.” (Laughs)

I've promised myself over and over again that I won’t say, publicly, even to friends, anything about what’s happening in Israel because it is far beyond me. I have no understanding of what it feels like for an organized group to come into where I’m living and kill people that I know — I’ve never experienced that, so, “Shut up.” And, yet, to live in the world, we have to contemplate that a little bit.

At the outset, I'm thrilled that Penn takes exactly the right line -- there's no entitlement not to be called an asshole ((or an antisemite)or an antisemite) when there's a colorable case that you're being one, and it's the latter prospect that one should worry about. Kudos to Penn for resisting this incredibly popular "anti-anti-racist" framing.

More broadly, someone -- I forget who -- said that one of the more pernicious features of current discursive climates on campuses is the immense pressure to declare an opinion, regardless of whether one feels confident enough in one's own knowledge to commit to one. "Silence is complicity" and all that; but it means that there is very little space for people to just step back and say "I don't know, I'm still learning about this, and I'm not going to be dragooned into a position before I'm ready to take one." The person who said this was talking about students in college, but I think the trend is more general than that, and again, I think Penn is quite right to resist it even as he notes (also correctly) that this forbearance is not stopping (and should not stop) him from thinking on the subject. As someone who thinks that one of the keystones of epistemic antisemitism is a perceived entitlement to talk about Jews without really knowing about Jews, I again view Penn's behavior here as a welcome form of epistemic humility.

So yes -- a good, thoughtful interview. I encourage folks to read it. It's a good example of someone who I think is committing himself to some important epistemic virtues even as he is clearly still, in my view, working through some thoughts.