There were several interesting ones, starting with this.
In fact they are Recusants : “a person who refuses to submit to an authority or to comply with a regulation.” Most notably Catholics in England who refused to attend Anglican services. Not perfect, but more apt than IDW.
And then this.
The deep problem here is that to the extent it’s possible to change anyone’s minds about any moral, political, or ideological belief, it almost never happens by persuasion via rational arguments, and instead social pressures and tactics which exploit instincts of social psychology are immensely more powerful. Any society in which power and policy depends on opinion, and in which one is free to use these tactics to try and change opinion, will inevitably see the health of its intellectual life and discussions succumb to the pathology generated by these incentives.
And also this.
Paul Gottfried’s essay “Why today’s conservatives are useless debaters” is worth reading also. He goes back to Max Weber and says we must chose between “Politics as a Calling” and “Science as a Calling.” In that regard, we do have a Cathedral sort of situation in which the cathedral tells us what we are supposed to believe. Gottfried says “Big Conservativism” has hobbled itself by “driving out heretics, many of whom have been rhetorically gifted deviationists, since the 1980s and in some cases since the 1950s.”
I wonder if there is a significant bonding role in a group that comes from having dogmatic beliefs. A belief like “1 + 1 = 2” or “the sun rises in the East” has no bonding effect, because you cannot find a group of non-believers to oppose. But something that requires dogmatic belief allows you to identify and stigmatize the recusants.
I think of the IDW as bonding over old-fashioned empiricism. Our dogma is that we do not accept other people’s dogmas.
Other intellectuals go years toiling in the intellectual fields and Weinstein parachutes in with zero output, an astro-turfed website registered a couple of months ago, a clunky name and on that basis gets his picture and that of his relatives in a NYT profile. Amazing.
Effective branding, I guess.
What is new about the Intellectual Dark Web? Wasn’t this called Breitbart in 2010? Didn’t Rush Limbaugh become the lead voice in 1993? Probably the big difference is Breitbart & Limbaugh were leaders of Conservative Resistance against new Democratic Presidents while the Intellectual Dark Web is growing in the Trump era.
Did Breitbart in 2010 have Bernie Sanders supporters, anti-Christian atheists, or Harvard professors on staff?
@Collin: Come on. I really doubt you really think Pinker and Haidt are in the same category as Limbaugh and Breitbart.
I’m guessing Ben Shapiro is the only one in that crowd who consistently votes Republican, and who would self-identify as a conservative, though Christina Hoff Sommers might (with, I’m guessing, some caveats). Even Shapiro was a NeverTrumper, which by my count brings the number of Trump supporters to zero. That would apparently be so “dark” – only representing about half the population – that the IDW guy will have to create a new vantablack category for it.
Elizabeth Brown at reason had a really negative, inaccurate, and unfair article over at Reason, but this passage is ok:
Personnel is policy, so let’s go through the list of people to see what we can infer about what the IDW guy thinks this is all about:
Dr. Nicholas Christakis: He and his wife were involved in that nonsense at Yale about the Halloween costumes. Effectively forced out of their jobs, for nothing. Subject of a mass two-minutes hate on the internet. Check out the video of him trying to defend himself to students at one of the world’s most elite academic institutions. And despair for the future.
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying: Another married couple – supported Bernie Sanders! – caught up in that nonsense at Evergreen State U when it was insisted by the usual suspects that whites be excluded from campus for a day. Effectively forced out of their jobs, for nothing. Subject of a mass two-minutes hate on the internet.
Christina Hoff Sommers: Most of her political work revolves around pushing back against the unrealistic extremes and unjustified excesses of radical feminism. Go check out the videos of her trying to give (and usually being prevented from giving) talks on campuses about it. Subject of a mass two-minutes hate on the internet.
James Damore: Fired from Google for arguing that the evidence on male and female career preferences meant the company’s gender-based hiring and promotion quotas were misguided, and unfair. Subject of a mass two-minutes hate on the internet.
Haidt: His Heterodox Academy projects exists primarily to prove that academia and the progressive left more generally are intellectual tribal monocultures that exclude and bully everyone that doesn’t agree, and to beg and plead for them to maintain robust norms of free expression as they march towards ever more effective forms of suppression.
Pinker: Basically working on his own Haidt-like project in his own way.
Sam Harris: Subject of (several) mass two-minutes hates in high status media and on the internet, first for his comments regarding Islamism (verdict: Racist!), and, more recently, on the influence of genes on IQ (verdict: Racist!)
Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Kind of like the Christina Hoff Sommers for Islamism, who has spent most of her life in mortal danger because of it, and who is treated by the left and campus-protest crowd no better.
Well, I could go on, but I think you get the point.
But in case you don’t, almost all these people have directly experienced the unjust and malicious bullying, smearing, and silencing tactics of the progressive social justice warriors. They seem to have mostly been selected to demonstrate just how unjust and crazy things have become lately, how narrow the range of permissible opinion has become, and how the mania for excommunicating heretics is so voracious and uncompromising that it is now swallowing up talented, norm-following progressives and centrists who tend to argue their points respectfully and rigorously and engage in the minimum amount of partisan shenanigans.
I’m guessing Shapiro – who’s been on the receiving end of his own two-minutes hates and attempts at suppression and exclusion – mostly as a ‘conservative’ token. But mostly, the IDW guy is himself keen to forestall accusations that he is engaging in just another right-wing Republican project. He is keeping the number of actual conventional or mainstream right-wingers down to an absolute minimum.
All this seems to make the point that “If even these people can’t hold talks on campuses, or disagree with the latest progressive orthodoxy without being branded as bigots and fired, then the whole pretense of a free and open intellectual environment – “so long as discussions are conducted respectfully” – is a giant farce, and left-dominated institutions are really just Madrassas for Progressivism – probably even less tolerant of heresy, blasphemy, and apostasy – except that they pretend not to be.
ETA: Here’s the latest completely reasonable and respectable response to some IDW folks trying to give a talk on a campus.
I note that you say “our dogma”, so I wonder if you count yourself somewhat in the category as those folks?
It is interesting to me that in the domains that folks like you, Russ Roberts, Nassim Taleb, Robin Hanson, Bryan caplan, etc all focus on there is a lot of similarity to the “IDW” in process/approach to open discussion and “creepy economist” ideas.
I question whether bonding is what goes on for a majority of people. Sure, there are those who participate in groups and have individual relationships with others of like mind and maybe a little give and take there. Many other people don’t care to make politics, or even policy analysis, a part of their social lives. These folks look to the web to find reassurance that there are like-minded thinkers out there and they are not alone. I am not sure who are the exiled heretics that paleoconservative Gottlieb has in mind. The people he mentions like John Derbyshire and Steve Sailor might not be published by National Review anymore, but VDARE and Taki’s Magazine do.
And I don’t think bonding takes into account the prevalence and popularity of people I like to think of as “the loyal opposition.” Many are not IDP types at all, but are isolated from any movement due to their independence, but nevertheless attract an appreciative following due to their intelligence and integrity.
For example, take Professor Bainbridge’s April 25 blog post “Can populism be rehabilitated” examining a Frank Buckley piece “Conservatism: Trump and Beyond.” Two brilliant minds, neither part of any labeled movement, neither having much to do with each other, and neither seeming to need much approbation public or otherwise. But brought together in agreement with regard to “an alternative political economy that may be more humane than the present model.” This sort of intersectionalism is why blogs are so great and makes all the concern about social status and popularity pale in comparison. Its the ideas that count.
After having thought over this post and the original post for a few days, I have figured out the reason for my initially negative reaction to the “IDW” moniker and the way in which it has been interpreted.
The narrative around the “IDW” casts this group as an exclusive network of individuals whose indignation stems from their own exclusion from the mainstream media. This interpretation is articulated, for example, in Elizabeth Brown’s claim that these individuals “view of themselves as victims of unfortunate and intensifying forces…” and also in Paul Krugman’s tweet he didn’t realized “how oppressed” he was, insinuating that these individuals are claiming to experience oppression.
Broadly speaking, this narrative inaccurately interprets the “IDW” through the oppressor-oppressed axis. In particular, it envisions the “IDW” as a single group that views itself as oppressed but in actuality is working to perpetuate its privileged status.
All of these interpretations are inaccurate. The “IDW” is not a coherent group, and it is not exclusive. It is not even a thing. It is just a very loose collection of people who have had a few YouTube conversations together due to a shared belief in open/free inquiry and the power of the internet to reach large amounts of people. Most importantly, members of the “IDW” do not view themselves as oppressed and do not seek to rectify their own oppression. They are interested in discourse due to its value for society as a whole.
I hope that some individuals involved recognize the problematic implications of the frame of the “IDW” and explicitly distance themselves from the us-versus-them mentality that characterizes the activist left.
I think people are missing the forest for the trees here.
You have to ask yourself why YouTube and podcast and other online format-adept public intellectual moderates dominate the list.
Keep in mind that, for most people in our culture, we are quickly becoming a kind of post-literate society, where most people won’t bother to explore or expose themselves to written content of it involves reading more than 500 words or so, in executive summary format and a basic reading level, and involves any more cost or effort or time than the instant gratification of clicking a link.
They will do it, however, in video or audio format, if they only have to press play, and they will stick with it if the intellectual is a talented, entertaining, compelling, and captivating ‘performer’ in his or her preferred medium (and if he is careful to avoid stepping on any ideological landmines that cause people to immediately bail out.)
So, imagine one comes across a story in which some author of books has been banned from some college, fired, or tried to give a speech on some campus only to encounter passionate protests. If you aren’t actually going to read the author’s book, and you believe some low-level news report about the author being a controversial extremist or worse, well, that’s the end of it. Nothing in one’s worldview is disturbed, no frustration or outrage provoked, and one returns to ones complacent comfort zone with no sense of anxiety or alarm about what is going on.
On the other hand, when the youtube or podcast link is right there, and one pushes play out of curiosity and to see what the big deal is, and then watched some enjoyable clip of Jordan Peterson start to finish, one starts to wonder, “Wait a minute, that guy seems totally normal, reasonable, and of good character. He’s saying a lot of things that seem very common sensical, or which accord with what I already believe.”
The idea is to get people to realize, “Hold on, these aren’t some well meaning demonstrators protesting “hate” and some bad person, they are protesting me. They are trying to silence my views. And they are succeeding. That’s not cool.” And perhaps that person begins to appreciate – and personalize some of the danger and urgency of the matter. And even identify themselves as being on “the side” of those encountering these unjust suppressions.
Who knows whether that has an hope as a political strategy to marshal some kind of popular resistance to the kind of nonsense which, to know, has proceeded from victory to victory with no effective push-back. But it’s better than nothing, and has to be better than what’s been tried up to now, and found wanting.