After hypocrisy, “whataboutism” is the most vexing conversational vice of our time. And like hypocrisy, it’s almost impossible to criticize in good faith. None of us can dispatch a hypocrite bloodlessly – the sword of criticism cuts in both directions – and the “whataboutists” in our lives can count themselves safe on the same grounds. All have sinned and fallen short, etc.

Even so, I think that “whataboutism,” as a reflex, however much it tends to infantilize our discourse, is worth keeping in circulation.

The term “whataboutism” might literally have come from The Troubles of Northern Ireland, but it describes an ancient pattern with which we’re all familiar to some degree. It’s a more generalized application of the fallacious tu quoque argument, and its goal is the same: to avoid personal responsibility. When carefully used, it can serve a useful counter-cultural function. It can redirect public outrage from a minor sleight or gaff toward a larger, more deserving target. It contextualizes small breaches of decorum (and even ethics) by showing their place within a larger and more terrifying system.  

That’s an occasional benefit. But more often “whataboutism” is a child’s toy that adults use to excuse the worst kinds of human behavior. 

One egregious example: let’s say that a man murders another man in broad daylight and that the victim works in a deeply unsympathetic profession. Let’s say that the broader public valorizes the man who commits the murder and that the murder becomes a cause célèbre which straddles uneasily between the internet’s standard “post-irony” and a genuine appetite for bloodletting. Internet commenters who offer gestures of sympathy, caution, or regret for the murder are treated to long lists of the victim’s own actions over the course of his career. To return to the question of murder and to entreat our ordinary responses to murder is impossible: the broader public is more interested in scoresheets. What about…?¹²

The list of possible examples is bottomless.  

Whataboutism infuriates us because it challenges our power. We see our opponent equivocating, ducking, and dodging their way out of acknowledging the truth we want them to see. If they would stop moving for a minute, we could, as we do with misbehaving puppies, force their heads down into their own filth and let them stay there until they emerge whimpering and repentant. We are prevented from our exercise of True Justified Violence – and it makes us angry. 

The only way out of this anger is to experience it from the other side. I can think of several examples of this, and you can too. You (or your position) are thrust on the hot seat; you (or your position) are excoriated for your participation in some evil; you (or your position) are given no escape hatch. Why me? Why this position out of all the others? Why now, of all times? What about…

All have sinned and fallen short. Christians and the Soviets agree (correctly) that guilt exists everywhere, at all times, in everyone, and all it takes to find it in someone else is to choose to look for it. Every criticism of another’s shortcomings – intellectual, moral, or otherwise – is, on the cosmic scale, entirely justified. There is something there. Once we’ve got someone in the interrogation chair, we can keep them there indefinitely; their protests, on the cosmic scale, are weak and entirely unjustified. But who makes these kinds of calls? Who decides who ends up in the chair? 

In a way, it comes down to who makes the first accusation. Whoever throws the first stone and lands the first blow is, for a time, safe from the same treatment. It’s a game of brute power.

On the one hand, we are called to a life of radical self-examination; to hear our faults read back to us from others’ mouths should move us deeply. But on the other hand, we reserve the right to appeal to balance and proportion to preserve our sense of moral clarity. Perhaps this is “whataboutism.” Perhaps not. One does not preclude the other – radical responsibility is required us, while common sense tells us that flagellating our backs raw will leave us unable to shoulder the heavy burdens of the future. 

It’s frustrating to see others equivocate and “whatabout” themselves out of meaningful criticism. It’s a problem that probably will worsen over the rest of this decade. But I think it’s a fair tradeoff when considering the other extreme: an endless series of ridiculous Puritanical³ tribunals headed by the worst and least generous among us. 

1. Not to belabor the point here, but this is where common sense ethical judgments hold supreme. We reserve the right to say that something is morally wrong, and we reserve the right to be deeply suspicious of any calls to the contrary that cloak themselves in “nuance” and “complexity” and “a long history of [X]” (or, God forbid, “the revolution,” “the country” “racial purity,” “the intifada,” or whatever other excuses we make for others’ crimes). We oughtn’t chuck these questions to “the philosophers” when they seem beyond our reach – laymen too often discount their moral compasses, which often point truer north than those of their professional counterparts. ↩︎
2. The point isn’t lost on me, either, that moral contradictions of this variety are the cornerstones of literature itself, stretching back to Aeschylus and Homer and deep into prehistory. Revenge, comeuppances, revolution, blood-feuds, and questions of the appropriate exercise of violence have jostled their way into most literary canons of the world, and they’ve produced some of the world’s most passionate (and even beautiful) philosophical and political writing. We exist in a world at war with chaos and the legion evils of human nature. But to acknowledge that violence has a draw on us and speaks to our deepest selves is not (as obvious as it may sound) to justify it. That we cannot help breaking the moral law is not a reason to give up on the moral law – it is all the more reason to hold fast to it. ↩︎
3. I mean this, if you can believe it, without any disrespect to the actual Puritans. ↩︎