#273 Joe Rogan and the Ethics of Apology

Anyone who has spent dozens of hours listening to Joe's podcast knows to a moral certainty that Joe is not racist. And there really is nothing more that needs to be said on that point. There is simply no workable definition of racism that includes Joe Rogan.

It would be hard to imagine someone less likely to actually care about the race of another human being than Joe. So, if Joe Rogan is your version of a racist, you have reached a moral and political dead end.

There is almost no desirable place to work or study or mingle in American society today—in academia, in film, or television, or journalism, or tech... You could literally take the highest status 20% of every corner of our culture; there is almost no place—and perhaps there is no actual place at all—where being a person of color isn't a positive advantage for gaining entry in the year 2022.

Find me a black man who has shot a cop and then apologized for it—or, in some cases, hasn't apologized for it—and I'll show you vast numbers of people on the left who are eager to see him brought back into the fold and even canonized as some kind of saint. But find a white guy who told a bad joke in 2007, and these same people will want to see him destroyed for it.

A sincere apology is a moral good, as is the forgiveness with which it is often met. We want to live in a world where people offer sincere apologies, and we want to live in a world where sincere apologies are generally accepted. This is born of the recognition that no one is perfect. Each of us is a work in progress. Everyone is growing, and forgiveness itself is one of our highest virtues. Forgiveness is a fucking miracle.

The idea that a white person cannot say the N-word for any reason... is completely insane. To hold this view is to attribute magical properties to words. It's the very essence of a childish relationship to language. It makes a mockery of the very real social problem of racism that is bigotry as applied through the lens of race.

There is simply no question that American hysteria around the use of the N-word is pathological and dishonest and destructive of people's integrity and an offense to basic sanity.

Using the N-word as a racial slur is completely different from using it in some other way. And if you insist that the word itself is magically destructive... If you really believe that someone somewhere will be harmed by any conceivable use of the term based merely on the color of the speaker's skin, you are just morally unprepared to solve real problems in our world.

Joe didn't have to apologize. Of all the people who could weather a controversy like this by saying absolutely nothing or by telling his critics to just go to hell, Joe is probably in the best position to do that.

Joe is generally considered to have the biggest podcast on Earth, and he has greater reach than almost any mainstream media outlet. So, this comes with great responsibility.

I was very glad to see Joe pivot last week and acknowledge that, on the topic of public health, he could and should be more rigorous and careful in the future.