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Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Last week I asked readers, “How should liberal democracies utilize or eschew taboos?”

Replies have been edited for length and clarity.

Chris offers a theory of how to make good rather than bad use of them:

We in liberal democracies have a fondness for countercultural expression and norm challenging that can seem paradoxical—if so many of us come to love a rebel, when do they stop being a rebel and start being the status quo? Weighing this question, taboo is the fulcrum, not an object we can put on or remove from one of the scales.

When someone breaks a taboo in a way that resonates with a lot of people, as in the case of Bronze Age Pervert [an internet personality and bodybuilder who advocates for fascist politics and was profiled in The Atlantic’s September issue by Graeme Wood], that is our cue to relitigate the taboo. To be clear, this should rarely lead to discarding the taboo entirely. More often, we find the taboo is oversimplified and that some additional nuance is warranted. The best response to BAP’s popularity is not to lose our distaste for illiberal obsession with neo-fascistic overman thought, but rather to ask ourselves the deeper question: Has the sharp rise in compassion and acceptance toward maladaptive traits (a wonderful thing) created an impulse to avoid celebrating (or even to shun) virtues and visages of strength for the unfair reason that they are out of reach for many?

The decision by some schools to accommodate lower-performing math students by removing the curricular challenges that high-performing students need to advance in their education suggests that the answer, in at least some cases, is yes. Thus, we can recalibrate ourselves to realize that [efforts to ensure there is] “No Child Left Behind” include talented children who are effectively left behind when we take away the hard problems they ought to be confronting. When we make such adjustments, the novelty of thinkers like BAP is reduced to the baseless loathing of identity groups that rightly remains taboo in liberal democratic society.

The approach that Graeme Wood advocated for in his recent piece is the right way to use taboos. The wrong way is the one criticized in the recent writings of PEN America, George Packer, and Jill Filipovic: the effort to first identify an injustice and then devise and enforce a norm or taboo that purportedly addresses it, as is the case with book suppression, equity language, and trigger warnings. From the temperance movement to cancel culture, such well-intentioned projects of top-down taboo engineering are seldom remembered as unqualified successes. Liberal democracy has a sluggishness to it, in terms of both legislation and norm induction, that frustrates us to no end but is on balance one of its greatest strengths. When an organization decides words like poor or homeless are abrasive and releases guidelines discouraging their use, they are simply moving too quickly to do any lasting good. There must first be time for the talking stick to be passed around the room. If not, those who never held it will justifiably feel slighted, and the entire ordeal becomes in bad faith, dragging us into an unproductive fight over not the problem itself but rather the procedure by which it has been addressed.

Anyone who has attended a city-council meeting knows how easy it is for an important matter to go unresolved when adjudicators bicker over protocol. When we demand hard, fast decisions about sticky questions of civil behavior, we invite dysfunction and fail to make any good use of taboo.

Neil understands taboos to be a kind of meme:

A meme as originally defined was a fundamental progenitor (gene-like) of social interaction. A taboo is a negatively sanctioned (that is, disapproved) meme. There are also, of course, positively sanctioned, approved memes, or operating assumptions (“You deserve what you earn and earn what you deserve”) that underlie our social norms (rightful entitlement to six houses while others have none). It is often a taboo to question these positively sanctioned memes.

These days everything is weaponized––the culture war is a war over memes. One ascendant meme: Entangle the speaker with what is spoken, knowing a speaker can be broken with ridicule more easily than an idea defeated by counterargument. Is this a meme worthy of positive or negative sanctioning?

Melanie is a child-sexual-abuse (CSA) survivor who worries that taboos against talking about child abuse are exacerbating the problem. She writes:

Child sexual abuse is common. The Adverse Childhood Experiences study found that in a cohort of middle-class, educated, mostly white folks born in the 1930s–50s, 20 percent had experienced it. Newer research indicates those numbers haven’t changed much.

If 20 percent of the population experienced a trauma so dramatic that it can permanently affect their physical, mental, social, and financial health, you’d think we’d talk about it. But most of us feel like we’re the only one, at least for a portion of our lives. Some of that is due to human psychology, but some of that is the significance of taboos in our culture.

Do child-sex-abuse survivors live in fear of being presented with triggers related to child sexual abuse? Generally not. Some survivors are easily triggered by graphic depictions of child sexual abuse—e.g., they’re uncomfortable watching a movie where there is a visual depiction of it but have no trouble reading an article in the paper mentioning a local scandal. Many CSA survivors are sexually abused in someone’s home, so for many, the sights, sounds, and smells that actually trigger PTSD symptoms are mundane; certain intensities of light, vinyl shower curtains, and orange juice are PTSD triggers that survivor friends of mine have identified. None of them expect a world without those things; we all realize it’s our responsibility to learn how to manage our symptoms.

The invisibility that the taboos around CSA cause is a whole other problem. I graduated high school in 1995; I was aware of the “satanic panic” concerning CSA on talk shows and the burgeoning scandals involving CSA and the Catholic Church. But I could think of exactly one adult survivor in the real world (Oprah Winfrey) and two fictional ones (Jenny in Forrest Gump and Mallory Knox in Natural Born Killers). I had no concept of what adult life could be like for someone like me. Could I eschew Mallory Knox’s violence (the appeal of which I understood all too well)? Did healing mean not talking about it? Did it mean pretending it never happened? Did it mean forgiving my abusers? What would happen if other people found out? Could I live a life with peace and health and happiness and success, or was that all destined to evaporate?

Mallory’s story had some similarities to mine. On one hand, I took that to mean I wasn’t the only human in history to experience what I experienced. Millions of people had viewed a portrayal of something similar to what I went through. That meant that somehow, someday, I could possibly communicate my story to people and maybe be understood. On the other hand, I wasn’t sure if there was any possibility I could make it through life without violence and crime. I still am very grateful I got to see that portrayal, but I wish I had a few more “role models” to choose from than a fictional mass murderer.

The problem with trigger warnings is that they reinforce the taboo about CSA; by labeling it as something outside of our normal media-consuming experience, they make it too easy for those who are “uncomfortable” with it to ignore it. Not every CSA survivor agrees with this, but I think we need to break every taboo about CSA and talk about it. A lot. In a lot of different contexts. The taboo of silence that surrounds it separates survivors from each other and from healing. It separates us from understanding this issue on a micro and macro level. And it ensures it will keep happening.

Jaleelah argues that some taboos are necessary for society to function. She writes:

Would anyone support removing the taboo against greeting a new person by insulting their appearance? Or the taboo against praising the merits of rape? Neither is illegal.

Taboos are the only way to stop social interactions from constantly devolving into displays of everyone’s most vicious thoughts, which provoke angry and defensive responses in people. Even those who claim to support an unmasked, truthful society would probably grow tired of being insulted and degraded, a practice taboos currently shield people from, after experiencing being on the receiving end.

I actually disagree with the claim that taboos stop people from speaking their minds. Rather, they impose social consequences for behavior that makes it harder for people to cooperate in a civil manner. This means that people are willing to break taboos when they feel that the expression is important enough to outweigh the consequences. That’s why taboos generally stick when placed on sufficiently harmful behaviors and erode over time when they are misplaced … Bad taboos, like the one against gay people being themselves, get dissolved because there are good arguments for allowing the behavior in question. Good taboos, like the one against accepting pedophilia, remain in place because there are no good arguments for allowing the behavior in question. No one wants to forward an argument they can’t rationally win when they know they will suffer consequences. Potentially repressive laws deserve close scrutiny and lots of criticism. Potentially repressive taboos resolve themselves.

Some might argue that removing taboos allows bad people to expose themselves, which allows good people to stop associating with them. But dissociation is not always possible, and a huge number of people who would otherwise say and do cruel and uncivil things are kept in line—or at least confined to the shadows—by useful taboos. I would much rather a small group of fascists make mean jokes in private Twitter group chats than a larger group make them openly in a university dining hall. Some argue that taboos create reactionaries. But a lack of taboos creates widespread acceptance of open displays of cruel thoughts, and that’s much worse than a relatively small group of edgy people online.

Leo opposes taboos:

Taboos are illiberal mechanisms of enforcement and control, and they are to be resisted by any and all who wish to live in a free society. Where various factions fail to impose their will at the ballot box, the board meeting, or even the violent uprising, they succeed through the establishment of taboos. And that is why taboos are more or less synonymous with censorship. Taboos create these and other situations where, basically, we cannot simply acknowledge that up is up, down is down, and a spade is a spade. That sort of autocratic, irrational, ideological control of our free expression is ultimately the death of a liberal society. In fact, there are very real-world repercussions to breaking taboos: People get fired, books get banned (or never published), curriculums get rewritten, relationships get destroyed, and citizens wind up living in the same kind of fear they would experience if living under a mercurial, ruthless, and oppressive dictatorship.

Peter argues that “all human societies rest on a bedrock of self-restraint.” He writes:

A failure of “rationalism” is the belief that everything can be put into words. The model that we are all individually irresponsible, and that only written law controls us, is believed by both the rational left and the fascist right. The left believes it because they think they are clever enough to put everything into words. The right believes it because they think that by putting things into words they can control everybody. The only way that a society works is if most people realize that there are some things a decent person simply doesn’t do. There has to be an unwritten level of civility. There is no way to externally enforce that.

Roger writes, “I don’t want perfect people or a perfect society. I just want nicer ones.” He explains:

I’m 76 years old, a farm boy who started school then went to war. Never went back to the farm and never regretted it. I’ve seen sexuality taboos fall—good riddance—but are they really gone? I’ve seen the language of bigotry almost disappear as taboo, but now it is resurgent. These taboos are the public agreements, shared but never written and seldom spoken. Maybe it’s my rural roots but I liked the ones about language. Since my time in the Marines I almost never curse. I’m not religious; I just think that it’s “not nice.” In the same spirit I support the open expression of loving who you are sexually because it’s “not nice” to deny anyone something that fundamental. My taboo is: Don’t do what isn’t nice. Judging others on their thoughts isn’t nice, but judging them for how they treat others is okay.

Russ thinks relationships benefit from taboos. He writes:

Among friends, some form of the swear jar should be utilized. It doesn’t have to center around any particular issue, just what the group unanimously approves. Friends need some good way to let their friends know when they crossed a line and that there is a specific non-changing penalty for doing so. Example: I have best friends still from 50 years ago. Shortly after we became acquainted, we implemented a rule called “Suspicion.” If one said something brain-dead stupid, everyone who witnessed it got to punch the offender in the arm. Fifty years later we still have the rule, and the friendship. It worked for us. Every group can decide what works for them. But I highly recommend some form of holding your friends to account and yet being able to maintain the friendship.

Andrew favors taboos in some cases and opposes them in others:

A taboo is useful when it serves liberal values by protecting the rights of individuals without inviting input from the government. For example, a taboo against a 40-year-old dating an 18-year-old serves to curb predatory behavior, even when the relationship itself is legal. The taboo functions as a relatively gentle reminder that uneven power dynamics can be unethical without requiring the heavy hand of the law to interfere.

The most important taboo that a true liberal democracy needs to hold is one against intolerance. A taboo against intolerance ensures that individual rights are always respected, even if certain choices remain controversial. Adults must be allowed to make their own choices. In a true liberal democracy, an individual would always enjoy the right to live their life unencumbered by other groups, especially the democratic majority. Taboos become dangerous when the democratic majority enshrines their particular moral taboos into law. The fact that a democratic majority would feel entitled to legally formalize their taboos, therefore arbitrarily restricting the rights of minority groups, is evidence that the society may be a democracy, but it is not a liberal democracy.

Chris Jordan smashes an unbeaten 70 off 32 balls as Southern Brave beat Welsh Fire by two runs in a Hundred thriller.