I’ve been thinking, and I’ve come up with three criteria for occasions where it’s okay to mock others. This might seem like a bit of a depressing activity (spoiler: it is), but it’s also important - I think most people fall on at least one wrong side of discussions like this. Here are a couple of those viewpoints:
It’s never okay to mock others. This is horseshit. Frankly, there are occasions where, short of all-out street warfare, satire is the most effective way to point out how people are being dicks, and a live-and-let-live approach doesn’t work if you or the people you care about aren’t being allowed to live in the first place.
Everyone is fair game. (Haven’t you read the First Amendment?) Besides the fact that the Constitution is an American list of rules for a reason (with strengths and weaknesses), and that a metric tonne of countries legislate against hate speech: if you think that it’s okay to pick on innocuous, marginalised people who would never fight back even if you tried to force them, you’re an asshole.
Trigger Warning: while I’ll be avoiding being totally explicit in this post, there are cursory mentions of the Catholic church, dysphoria and general examples of bad people being bad people. If you want to avoid that sort of stuff, then, uh, do that.
Those, I’d say, are the extremes for getting it wrong. Which isn’t to say that there’s a tried-and-tested way of getting it right; like I said, all I have is criteria. Here they are:
The harm in their beliefs. And by this, I don’t just mean physical harm - if someone’s saying that’s upsetting, then that’s a problem. This needs to be approached carefully - while there’s usually some sense of wrong or right on most issues, that doesn’t mean you’re right. People with ugly opinions can get hurt too, and it’s entirely possible that from time to time, you’ll be one of the ugly ones.
Next: the size of the group. You will never get along with everyone, but picking a fight with anyone whose opinions upset you is exhausting. The internet takes every underground white supremacist group, every obnoxious misogynist, every angry evangelist and dumps them on your doorstep. While you might run into some of them in what we’ll carefully call your “real life”, you probably wouldn’t ever meet most of them.
Finally: absurdity. This links particularly well with the first: there are some upsetting beliefs that also happen to be good. Believe it or not, socialism works this way: in order to benefit the worst off, it involves harming you by taking away money you’ve supposedly earned. But that’s good, provided the system’s executed well - while it might be harder to get super-rich, no-one suffers abject poverty and everyone can at least afford a decent standard of living. That’s a harmful thing grounded in sound reasoning and good intentions. Religion can be incredibly harmful, and while it might still be grounded in good intentions, it can hardly be said to be reasonable. And then there’s stuff like white supremacism - dumb as hell, and outright hateful to boot.
Here’s the key: these three can be weighted in pretty much any direction. Take Catholicism. There’s some really bad stuff that isn’t just incidental in the Catholic church, but institutional - if one of your employees has done something unforgivable, you fire them and get them arrested, rather than try to cover it up and give them a different job. So openly mocking the institution of the Catholic church - which is huge, incredibly wealthy, disturbingly influential and above all fucking deplorable is okay.
BUT: Singling out an 84-year-old Catholic grandmother, who’s never harmed anyone in her life, and blaming her for the practices of the institution behind the cultural upbringing she’s never had the opportunity to question, is really stupid. So is ripping the shit out of a hermit who gave all of his worldly possessions and 99% of his earnings to Doctors Without Borders, who retains slightly racist views from his childhood in a London suburb. On stuff like this, you have to look at the stakes. People are never one thing outright, but if there’s a charged debate, it can be easy to reduce them to one characteristic. But one person alone is unlikely to make much a difference, and if you’re devoting your time and energy to them alone when you could be spreading a more positive message and drowning them out, then something’s a little amiss.
Absurdity alone is a funny one, and it’s where I suspect a lot of people trip up. If you’re an atheist (as I am), religion is fucking stupid, and even more so because those religions have a tendency to call you stupid (everyone’s stupid! Yay!). But just thinking something is stupid isn’t enough. Let’s take a particularly controversial example. Prior to joining the more esoteric ranks of the internet, I’d never heard of “otherkin” - that is, people who supposedly experience the same kind of dysphoria as transgender individuals, but with an inborn sense of being some kind of animal or fantasy creature (elves, dwarves, dragons and so on).
Now, here’s the thing: if I divorce this phenomenon from the people who experience it, I can’t help but find it silly. I think dysphoria, like autism, is something that has cultural factors involved in its dramatic rise in diagnosis over the last twenty years (we do not live in a society that promotes body confidence, and that’s relatively new in terms of current extremes). I also think that there’s too much disjointedness - there’s something sensible about gender dysphoria, because the biological differences between dudes and dudettes are already incredibly acute, so a little mental imbalance is understandable. But we don’t have that base similarity when it comes to animals.
Most importantly for me, I think it’s extremely problematic for people to say they experience dysphoria because their “true” form is an elf, or a dragon, because things like that aren’t grounded in truth to begin with. And yes, yes, gender is a social construct too, but hormonal development isn’t, and while the stereotype of the male advertising executive and the female housewife might be a little tired, anyone who argues that there’s no basic differentiation between male, female and intersex individuals has been reading so much Judith Butler that they forgot to look between their legs. You can arguably ground gender dysphoria to some extent in the delicate nuances of biology; otherkin dysphoria, you can’t.
So there we are: something that I think is a little silly, and that’s that. But (and I can say this with confidence), no-one who identifies as otherkin has ever harmed me, and never for that reason. This is what I mean by innocuous - arguably, otherkin communities (especially online) are fairly large, but they’re not exactly known for being harmful. It’s not a huge commercial enterprise. Sometimes you can think that something’s silly and just allow people to go about their silliness in peace.
All of these three factors work together, and usually fall down as justification once one’s lost. Say you’re an evangelical Christian: gay rights activists are definitely silly to you, and they’re pretty huge in terms of their numbers, but they’re not hurting anyone. The homeopathy industry - very silly, and not only harmful but harmful by virtue of their size - they wield cultural influence, which is how they get into our doctors’ offices. Size isn’t irrelevant, as it’s also how people get power, so you have to be careful when phenomena or movements start getting bigger. But it’s also a case of what they’re doing with that power - if it’s just to spread more goodness, then it’s idiotic to mock it.
If you’ve got this far and you’re just scratching your head going “um, so what?” then maybe you’ve got your head screwed on straight. But that last criterion is important to me, which is why I spent so much time on it. We are surrounded - surrounded - by stupid people, but only a small minority want to hurt us. And yes, we can devote our lives to focusing on that stupidity, and never connect with another human being again. A lot of people do this. I’ve been at university for three years now, and the attitude there towards people who aren’t getting a degree can range from mildly contemptuous to spitting bile.
Basically, be nice, and pick your fights wisely. Don’t stop fighting - there’s plenty to fight about - but focus it in the right direction. That’s about it.