Jason Pontin at MIT declares what cannot be said in polite society in 2013:
“The non-legal constraints upon free speech are real and, in many cases, justifiable. The number and range of ideas about which I may not speak or write and still hope to be employed or loved are large and various, and continually expanding. In the middle-class, heterosexual, educated-but-essentially-philistine milieux of knowledge workers in Boston, the Bay Area, Seattle, New York, Washington DC, and London such unmentionable ideas include belief in innate racial differences or the superiority of men at any mental activity; the sexual attractiveness of young adults or the delights of sadomasochism; the inalienable property or privacy rights of corporations and the State; and the justice of the Confederacy’s cause or of a Jewish state. Without opprobrium, I cannot say that fat people are disgusting gluttons or transsexuals fetishistic self-mutilators. I may not write that marriage is a grim gulag or children boring barbarians. Under no circumstances may I express the fugitive thought that the only things other than our fellow humans that matter at all are novels, poems, plays, paintings, and sonatas, and a handful of very beautiful mathematical proofs, scientific theories, and computer programs. More generally, it is unacceptable to speak or write about many ordinary events in human life, including abortions, disease, depression, the experiences of real poverty or wealth, or how our loved ones actually die. Without specifying, I have believed a few of these ideas, and experienced most of those events, but I cannot be candid.”
