On November 1, Twitter’s main character of the day was philosopher, professor, and mom Agnes Callard.
There she is in all her glory: Mean Candy Mom. Every year (but not this year) she’s taken her children’s candy and thrown it out. THROWN IT OUT! What a horrible mom. A horrible Halloween candy throwing-out monster of a mom. So horrible that I must immediately tell her how awful she is. Along with 10,000 other furious people who also must tell Agnes that she is the absolute worst.
Who is Agnes Callard? Do you know? The tweeters certainly didn’t. All they knew was that she had sent an awful tweet, an enraging tweet, an evil tweet, and that’s all they needed. Did she bake homemade bread for her kids? Go to all their Little League games? Read Harry Potter acting out all the characters’ voices? Make every single parent-teacher conference, even after she broke both her legs while baking homemade bread? Who knows? Not us.
Outside of parenting and stealing candy, did she give blood to the Red Cross? Canvas for local political candidates? Build shelters for wounded raccoons? Donate to Ukrainian refugees? Who knows? Not us.
All we knew was she was Mean Candy Mom and she needed to be punished with hateful tweets. One obsessive person without a life even went so far as to go on RateMyProfessor.com and give her a “1.”
This professor not only crosses picket lines of struggling students,1 but also makes it a favored pastime to post online about the cruelty they enact on their children, and the world around them. They also show an extreme bias towards what can only be called "the philosophy of Ayn Rand". An all around terrible professor.
This is social media insanity at its worst. We catch a brief glimpse of a person, a microscopically thin slice of their life, and bizarrely think that from that sliver of 49 words we can conclusively determine that they were always and will forever be an evil monster who must be destroyed.
It’s understandable human madness. We see a tweet, a picture, a video, and that’s all we need to see. Our story-telling brains extrapolate from that incomplete glimpse, fill in all the blanks, past and future, to tell the story of a complete person, a very very bad person. After all, whenever we look at Agnes Collard, she’s always doing the same thing. Throwing out her kid’s candy. Every time, every look, it’s always the same. Mean Candy Mom throwing out her children’s joy. Forever. See, take another look She’s still throwing out her kid’s candy! The only thing we know about her is transformed into a gut-level belief that it is the only thing there is to know about her.
If we stop and think, however, we know that Mean Candy Mom is not all there is to the thousand-tile mosaic that makes up Agnes Callard. Like all of us, she contains multitudes.
I’m a dad. I love my son with all my heart. I would do anything for him. If saving my kid required nuking San Diego, bye bye Padres. I’ve never thrown out his Halloween candy. I have, however, sometimes been a less than perfect dad. I’ve lost my temper. I’ve yelled. Not very much, I’m a pretty even-tempered guy, but there were moments. Now if you caught me in one of those moments, saw me shouting, face all red, looming over this innocent looking angel,2 you might not have thought well of me. You might have extrapolated from that brief glimpse that I was a horrible cruel father. Shouting Bully Dad. Not for a brief moment, but always. Always Shouting Bully Dad. Because that’s all you'd know about me, all you’d ever seen of me.
We do the same thing again and again. Catch a brief glimpse, make a snap decision, angrily type out the tweet, or maybe even more. We’ve seen all we need to see!
Remember the 2019 Covington Catholic School boys?
It was January 2019. Anti-abortion demonstrators showed up for the March for Life in Washington D.C. After the march, a bunch of kids wearing MAGA hats confronted a Native American elder. We saw the brief video. Smug boy at the center. Disrespectfully smirking at the elder. What a jerk. Man, I wanted to punch that kid.
Because that’s all I’d seen. One brief glimpse and I thought I knew everything. Of course, later I learned I was wrong. Reason magazine provided a good overview of the ways in which the initial story was a distortion. I watched the full video. Long stretches of bored kids, sometimes being yelled at by Black Hebrew Israelites (an extremist antisemitic cult), and then finally the Native elder steps in to confront kids who weren’t actually doing anything. In that context, the confrontation looks very different.
Maybe you’ll dismiss all this. You know enough about Mean Candy Mom, Shouting Bully Dad, Smirking Punk Kid. They’re bad. You’ve seen it with your own two eyes. And you’re being an idiot. An insensitive imperceptive fool.
But you know what? That’s not who you are. That’s you in a brief moment, reacting badly, your vision warped by your biases, your illusion of omniscience. Normally you’re a good person. You give to charity, help little old ladies cross the street, and never wear socks with sandals. It would be unfair of me to judge you by this one instant when you weren’t at your best. So I won’t.
So what does it all mean?
I’ve already written about this isue. A lot. In “Judge Not,” I discouraged people from judging others. “You aren’t Dredd. Don’t play judge, jury, and executioner.” In “They deserve it,” I argued that we don’t know what anybody deserves. I certainly don’t know what Callard deserves although I’m pretty sure it includes being left alone by Internet lunatics.
I want less judgment for all things but especially for parenting, one of the hardest jobs out there. (I think it’s generally agreed that the four hardest jobs are: #1 Alaska ocean fisherman, #2 Pacific northwest logger, #3 Mafia accountant, and #4 parent.) Except in extreme cases, I don’t judge other people’s parenting. (I always hated it when some interfering busybody stuck their nose up in my business and said, “Eight years old is too young to handle a chainsaw!” Nonsense! Chainsaw wounds build character.)
We don’t have anything resembling the full picture of who Callard is and what she’s done. If we want to tell her that she’s wrong about the candy thing, ok, it’s Twitter, but we shouldn’t threaten her job or her life. And once she’s been criticized by a few dozen people, we should think twice about adding our own comments.
P.S. A little more
Not central to my point, but this Twitter brouhaha made news in a small way and a few other people wrote about it. They don’t solve the candy conundrum but reveal Callard has a wry sense of humor.
The Daily Nous (“News for and About the Philosophy Profession”) interviewed Callard and she told them she got harassing phone calls, “including death threats.” Barring that grim note, the interview is a wee tongue-in-cheek.
JW: Since tricking someone typically requires more work and skill than merely being treated to free candy, would it be worse to deprive children of the spoils of their Halloween trickery than it would be to deprive them of their Halloween treats?
AC: Actually, I confiscate the candy largely because I want to incentivize tricking relative to treating. They haven’t figured this out yet.
Buzzfeed also asked a few questions. Callard told them that some harassers had even contacted her department. She said her decision of
not allowing [her] kids to gorge themselves on candy for an indefinite period of time after Halloween is a reasonable policy
She offered Buzzfeed a mini-lecture on the whole Halloween mess.
“There seems to be a need to build a kind of narrative around this candy thing; it's somehow important to people to be able to read this as a sign in a larger story, or a clue as to some deeper fact about me, even when this requires substantial interpretive creativity. The emotions that sustain this reaction, which are sometimes ecstatic, depend on the public development of this story. So I understand the reaction to my tweet as an attempt to retell my story, to cast me as a different person in light of the anger generated by the tweet. In a way, it's almost a protective behavior: once that anger is felt, and once the crowd has committed to it, it has to be justified. Or else the community's moral sensibilities are called into question.”3
A while back, there was a strike by graduate student instructors and Callard chose to teach anyway.
Dear reader, he was no angel.
Given Callard’s sense of humor, I’m still not entirely sure she’s on the level here. Maybe she does throw out her children’s candy and maybe she just likes trolling us all.
I just threw out my kids candy....
The point is, people read a tweet and think that's the whole person. (Like a frog in a well looking up and thinking he's seeing the whole sky.) And people ought to quit doing that. As for the candy, well, by the time they were six, it wouldn't have taken more than one Hallowe'en for my kids to start squirrelling it away BEFORE Mama got her hands on it.