First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness. Second, in an age in which popular feelings about the way things ought to be often override facts about the way things actually are, each is determined to resist parroting what’s politically convenient. And third, some have paid for this commitment by being purged from institutions that have become increasingly hostile to unorthodox thought — and have found receptive audiences elsewhere.
I wish that her piece had honed in more closely on some basic questions:
1. Is the Intellectual Dark Web important?
2. If so, why?
3. Why does it seem to fit the format of long-form YouTube videos and podcasts?
I see the IDW as an attempt to model dignified, open-minded discussions. Perhaps the answer to (3) is that this goal is better achieved in long-form conversations or lectures than tweets or Facebook posts.
Really, the principles of good intellectual debate are not that obscure. Just make arguments as if you were trying to change the mind of a reasonable person on the other side. I believe that the reason that we don’t observe much of this is that most people are trying to raise their status within their own tribe rather than engage in reasoned discourse. It’s sad that reasoned discourse does not raise one’s status as much as put-downs and expressions of outrage.
The current situation is that the left’s bullying tactics have migrated from college campuses to corporations. President Trump answers left-wing bullies in kind, but that does not move us in the direction of dignified, open-minded discussions. I think that the effort of the IDW is worthwhile, but I am pessimistic that we will see an improvement in the quality of intellectual debate overall.
“Intellectual Dark Web” is an attempted to tie them to the neoreactionary movement sometimes called ‘the dark enlightenment. But that’s not who they are.
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.
Nice word, and totally new to me.
It is interesting how many of the terms come back to a religious vocabulary, which is sensible because the basic phenomena seem to be religious (the campus lecture is a not a scientific lecture but a sermon; the person who disagrees is not mistaken or failing to understand but a heretic; the person who gets this stuff is “woke” (John McWhorter has pointed out this is a bit like being born again).
In this case the ‘catholicism’ that the New Recusants refuse to give up is simply the older norms of collegiality and free inquiry, which were one of the purposes the academy was meant to serve but which it now rejects. They don’t share an idealogical common ground, but do share a nomological common ground.
Karma > Dogma
Here’s a nerdish point to be made regarding “creedal tests” and admission to elite universities. For the longest time in England, until a date well after 1800, one could not attend Oxford or Cambridge without attesting one’s agreement to the 30-some-odd points of Anglican belief.
“Dissenting” protestants who could not swear to these went to dissenting academies. Joseph Priestley, for example, who did useful scientific experiments, was a Unitarian. Methodists, Quakers, Baptists were not at “Oxbridge.”
In the UK at this time, much scientific and mechanical research was done at these dissenting academies or privately. Or in Scotland.
Methinks Acton, a Roman Catholic, was educated largely on the continent. Where Jews tended to study is beyond me (without looking it up). Disraeli was a Sephardic Jewish convert to the Anglican Church, so his thumbnail biography is not much help. David Ricardo was a Sephardic Jewish convert or lapsed who married a dissenter (Unitarian?) and also died youngish…under 40?
Some waggish journalist went around sometime in the last couple years, asking current Brits what these creedal points of belief were. A non-random sample–perhaps this was a lazy “man on the street” exercise, like Jay Leno’s “Jay walking.”
Most people these days cannot enumerate even a few, and most people are probably surprised to learn that these creedal points actually existed and mattered to anyone’s career or life history.
My point: The publicly stated beliefs that get you excluded from elite universities seem to change. Two hundred years ago in England they were religious and linked to the established church. Currently they seem to be sociological tenets.
Correction: David Ricardo died at 51, says Wikipedia. He eloped with a Quaker at the age of 21, converted to Unitarianism. Wikipedia has details.
_Principles of Political Economy and Taxation_ came out in 1817.
I don’t know if he ever went near universities after he retired from business–or before.
“Intellectual Dark Web” was coined by one of the group members, and it more refers to what’s called the “Dark Web” – the part of the Web that isn’t indexed by search engines.
“Bullying tactics,” is too general and conceals the the heart of the matter. It makes it seem that there are a bunch of independent, unrelated tactics, with similar levels of effectiveness and frequency of use.
But in fact, the left has one primary tactic these days, which is to frame ideological and political disagreement as fundamentally unjust and immoral, originating in either selfish greed, a sinful lust for oppressive domination, or evil bigotry, and thus beyond the pale and unworthy of consideration, fair hearing, or any platform from which one could advocate for those wicked causes.
Intellectual opponents can’t win, since if they are smart, moral, and rational, they must realize the depravity of their position and cannot be arguing in good faith, or else (in the morally best case!) they are being naive and dumb and don’t merit scarce attention or deserve a seat at the grown-ups’ table.
“Intellectual Heterodoxy” or “Intellectual Contrarianism” sounds tolerable, but “Moral Heterodoxy” or “Justice Contrarianism” sounds evil: it seems like you are advocating immorality and injustice. The trouble is the former are conflated with the latter, and there’s no good way around that without removing value judgments from the conversation. But “unilateral moral disarmament” doesn’t work, one needs agreement. We can see what happens to Robin Hanson when he tries to do that.
The only way to have a productive intellectual conversation about anything is when participants agree to demoralize the discussion (which is impossible when the crux of the matter is about differences in fundamental values), or when the topic itself is amoral by nature and without political implications.
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.
A few fragmented observations, which probably do not cohere.
* “Intellectual Dark Web” is an attention-getting misnomer. It’s unfortunate that there’s not a better term. “Heterodox Academy” has a pretty accurate name for itself, but “Intellectual Dark Web”–really, is that the best name you can come up with? It’s also sophomoric, like a tree house with “No Gurlz Aloud”. Ooh, could be cool, please can I join the cool kids in the inner ring?
* Some of these things remind me a bit of Soviet / Communist issues, in which there is party line that many don’t believe but that few are willing to stand up publicly and argue about.
In that sense, anyone who is interested in the phenomenon can learn by reading (for example) Solzhenitsyn’s “Live not by lies” essay, but also brief profiles of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Amalrik, Vaclav Havel, and anyone else living under Marxist Leninism who just got sick of lies.
* 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.”
Sorry to repeat myself about Gottfried’s essay–I’ve mentioned it before on this blog.
* Part of the problem, it seems clear to me, is “normative sociology.” If we have already decided what the causes of social problems should be, to question that decision appears shocking and mean-spirited.
* I suppose a final conclusion is that people don’t know how to think critically, or they are rewarded for refusing to do so and instead calling for people who disagree with them to be punished. Is it a lack of ability to think or an unwillingness to do so? Beats me.
From the Gottfried essay you reference:
“And let’s ask Phil Giraldi or Scott McConnell to take on someone who insists that Israel is America’s most indispensable ally.”
Professor Gottfried is his own worst enemy.
That may indeed be the case. Prof Gottfried may be a bit of a loose cannon. His bio says that he is is erudite and has written 10 or 20 books, and reads three or four languages. I learn something from reading him on occasion, and that particular essay made me think differently about the current Zeitgeist.
I agree that Prof. Gottfried is vastly learned and I have found much of what I’ve read of his work of value (not that he should care what I think of him). But he has a weakness for pandering in his popular articles to, well, the type of people who take Philip Giraldi and Scott McConnell seriously. It is well known that he was ill-treated by the mainstream conservative movement back in the ’80s, but I don’t think that’s an excuse.
I see your point. Would you believe I’m not entirely sure who Philip Giraldi and Scott McConnell are? I figured mentioning them in some circles was like waving a red flag in front of a bull, since mentioning Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire fit that description.
“Deviationists…talented rhetoricians…
A problem with being a talented rhetorician is sometimes your rhetoric is so good it outruns the basis of your argument. Plus you may just piss everyone off.
I would not categorize Giraldi and McConnell with Sailer and Derbyshire. The latter have important things to say (which is not to endorse everything they say, or how they say it). G and M, on the other hand, have a morbid, bigoted obsession with the country to which Gottfried refers (going well beyond criticizing its influence on US policy, which is fair enough). Gottfried’s shout out to them in that article is gratuitous and completely irrelevant to his point.
I see the IDW as an attempt to model dignified, open-minded discussions. Perhaps the answer to (3) is that this goal is better achieved in long-form conversations or lectures than tweets or Facebook posts.
I would say the big change of the conservative embrace of the Dark Web stuff, is young people in SoCal (and other liberal cities) are assuming Republicans are only out for certain white people. It was amazing to show my kids Ronald Reagan speeches of the 1980s and my favorite one to show them is the Reagan’s 1989 exit speech. (I noted to them the fall of the Berlin Wall happened later that same year.) And I am having my Republican in-laws take two of kids to the Reagan library in the summer before they take 20th Century US history. So it is not just colleges and public school teachers (or even a left center parent), but the embrace of Trump and The Wall young people are reacting to.
Living in SoCal and have kids going on campus, I really dont see a lot of this college brainwashing and outside of Tech/Hollywood where is the corporate brainwashing happening? (And remember Tech/Hollywood both have significant global customers here so their dedication to diversity makes corporate sales sense.)
In terms of my minority neighbor, the big change of opinions on Trumpian Repubicans was the reaction to Charlestonville last summer.
Even I, who was 26 when Reagan was elected, am amazed by his speeches. The way the American people have been voting, we may not look upon his like again. There will be great Americans, but I don’t know if they will run for President.
Re pessimism – nah. People like you set a good example that others emuulate. It may be a relatively slow process but people eventually grow tired of all the hate and seek virtuous alternatives. I dare say your audience is growing. Chin up and keep the good work.
+1 There are a bunch of lurkers who don’t post much or at all, but we are indeed listening and appreciate the tone and quality of discourse here.
Meh. This is the very leftmost corner of the shifting Overton window that the NYT is willing to recognize.
The group is more ‘baby’s first red pill’ than renegade.
I suspect the youtube/podcast thing is generational. I would much prefer to read a long-form post than listen to/watch a talking head. But the kids on my lawn seem to love the things.
A lot of people can’t read without effort. Some of that might be genetically mediated–like the hundred plus genes for tallness. James Thompson suggested that once and who knows where it was, because the citation is beyond me. Poor teaching doesn’t help, nor does too much electronic media too soon, nor does laziness, and just lack of time on task actually reading, nor does trying to get teenage boys to read Jane Austen rather than _Starship Troopers_ or _Beau Geste_.
Greg Cochrane at West Hunter blog had a comment about how the kids these days like to watch videos, preferring to get “take twice the time to get half as much information.”
Jordan Peterson’s videos–some of them, anway–are fun to listen to. The Canadian accent and the fact that he is speaking on the fly, not really a “canned” presentation, both seem to help hold my interest.
For some people podcasts are for either drive time or workout / dog-walking time–as soon as they step into the house the demands of family keep them from concentrating.
“Intellectual Dark Web”?
This is what we are to call the classical liberals who seek to develop ideas instead of use the rhetorical violence so prevalent?
Mises wrote of similar in ‘Liberalism’. He was presenting Fascism that arose as to use violence to push back against international socialism’s violence. Classical liberals lost the day as they tried to use ideas to defeat the communists. Perhaps the amplifying effects of the “dark” web will cause a different outcome this time round.
“Now it cannot be denied that the only way one can offer effective resistance to violent assaults is by violence. Against the weapons of the Bolsheviks, weapons must be used in reprisal, and it would be a mistake to display weakness before murderers. No liberal has ever called this into question. What distinguishes liberal from Fascist political tactics is not a difference of opinion in regard to the necessity of using armed force to resist armed attackers, but a difference in the fundamental estimation of the role of violence in a struggle for power. The great danger threatening domestic policy from the side of Fascism lies in its complete faith in the decisive power of violence. In order to assure success, one must be imbued with the will to victory and always proceed violently. This is its highest principle. What happens, however, when one’s opponent, similarly animated by the will to be victorious, acts just as violently? The result must be a battle, a civil war. The ultimate victor to emerge from such conflicts will be the faction strongest in number. In the long run, a minority— even if it is composed of the most capable and energetic– cannot succeed in resisting the majority. The decisive question, therefore, always remains: How does one obtain a majority for one’s own party? This, however, is a purely intellectual matter. It is a victory that can be won only with the weapons of the intellect, never by force. The suppression of all opposition by sheer violence is a most unsuitable way to win adherents to one’s cause. Resort to naked force— that is, without justification in terms of intellectual arguments accepted by public opinion– merely gains new friends for those whom one is thereby trying to combat. In a battle between force and an idea, the latter always prevails.”
–Mises, Ludwig von. Liberalism (pp. 49-50).
That the NY Times is trying to label this the “Intellectual Dark Web” reveals they see honest, open, respectful discourse as a serious threat to their cause.
When you in one sentence call for open, good-faith conversation, and in the next say that the, “current situation is that the left’s bullying tactics have migrated from college campuses to corporations,” it’s hard to believe you can engage in debate without devil shifting anyone you disagree with. Open and honest debate is sadly rare, but that doesn’t mean calling names and painting with onerously broad brushstrokes is sensible or even close to correct.
… President Trump answers left-wing bullies in kind
First is there leftist bullying? Yes. Forcing Christians to bake special gay wedding cakes, stopping Libertarian (not-Rep) Charles Murray (and others) from speaking on campus (like Milo at Berkeley), having Google fire an engineer over women’s failure to like programming, having the police bully-interrogate a pro-gun rights Florida High School student who was innocently at a rifle range with his father. There’s a long, long list of actual organized bullying against Republicans, against men, against whites, against Christians. There’s even a name for it: Political Correctness (=bully these others)
Along with the bullying there are frequent insults. The insults, like calling Sarah Palin a c*nt on TV news, or how Trump is Hitler, etc., seem to be preludes to the bullying. But they are not bullying. There’s that early scene in 2001 where the early human uses a bone tool; lots of shouting/insults at the other tribe, then actual violence. The violence / bullying is different than the Free Speech insults.
Trump has not bullied US Citizens, but he HAS been insulting them back, and verbally fighting.
Neither the IDW nor most efforts will be enough, by themselves, to bring back civility. The real bullies, especially in education, need to be punished. I don’t see that much happening soon, so the elite & the wanna-bees will remain bullies.
Funny, the #MeToo movement is doing more now to punish the guilty than Trump — could even say the Dem Fem bullies are getting Dem pro-abortion male elite jerks fired. The Dem Fem bullies are FAR more effective at firing Dem jerks than Trump. Like every justice system, to get more guilty punished, the #MeToo folk are wrongly punishing more not-guilty guys. On the other hand, few faithful husbands seem to be suffering much, so the Dem Fem bullying is likely to help a few men be more faithful husbands (which is good).
Reality & Truth are not PC — those who support the PC views are against the truth. If America stays free, the truth will eventually win. The Flight 93 election of 2016 was a bigger step towards more truth than I even thought back then.
[commenter stooped to trolling. deleted by ed.]
It is more like cheerleading fun, like a football game.
But the search engines are powerful and for any subject that interests us, we can see through the shouting. We end up with entrepreneurs watching the two groups and estimating the future equilibrium, then organizing things a bit. It all works out, or, it certainly should be much better than before.
See also this from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex
http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/ about challengers to existing orthodoxies.
Along the way it contrasts the differing fates of Soviet mathematicians Andrey Kolmogorov who understood the state was corrupt and worked from within to co-opt it to his needs and Leonid Kantorovich who wrote a stern but friendly letter to Stalin that nearly got him killed. It contains this gem:
“Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time.”
I seriously cannot believe how little attention Scott is receiving from the IDW crowd. Perhaps because he doesn’t want to be in a video interview? Some of them have to be reading his stuff.
Scott deliberately keeps a very low profile. Very inactive on Twitter for example. Avoids YouTube. Little by way of outreach and affiliations, and what little there is is lefty (e.g. Current Affairs mag).
As a resident of the Bay Area, he’s no fool.
My father was kind enough to correct me when I made the same grammar error that you did, so I will do you the same favor.
“I wish that her piece had honed in more closely…” should read
“I wish that her piece had homed in more closely…”
What a difference a letter can make!
Thanks. One of my pet peeves…
Please relax. Rational people may differ on this mild point.
http://grammarist.com/eggcorns/home-in-hone-in/
That is just documentation that lots of people misuse it. Hone means sharpen. “Sharpen in” makes no sense.
But “sharpened her argument” certainly does make sense, and is what most reading folks will understand.
“her piece had honed in more closely on some basic questions” is better with “honed in” than with “homed in”, sort of meaning hit the center of the target / key piece of the argument.
Instead of hone in: ‘her piece had a sharper argument about some basic questions’ is not quite the same point as ‘her piece hit more of the key basic questions’, tho they are not so different. One is sharpen the argument, the other to cover key issues.
Most modern dictionaries accept “hone in” for this purpose, and I like it & understand it as above.
(This is a trivial, yet real disagreement. With respect from my side.)
You said what I was thinking.
I don’t want to beat this to death, so I will just say that your argument doesn’t make sense to me. I agree that it makes sense to sharpen an argument, but not to sharpen in on an argument.
I don’t think that most of these guys pass the ideological Turing test, from what I have seen.
With each new media technology, somebody comes along who figures out how to use it better. I don’t watch many Youtube lectures or listen to many podcasts, but perhaps some of these individuals are just better at these formats than predecessors?
For example, it’s hard today for young people today to figure out why Bing Crosby and Bob Hope were such big deals a long time ago, but they were the first in song and comedy to really figure out the new technologies of microphones and radio. Crosby figured out that singers didn’t have to belt it out to the back rows anymore, they could sing intimately into a microphone. Hope figured out that with a microphone that he could start the next joke before the laughter from the last one had died down, and that a national radio show meant that he needed to hire joke writers to provide him with a constant stream of new material.
(By the way, Crosby was so fascinated by technology that he became an important venture capitalist in analog high tech and moved from Hollywood to what’s now Silicon Valley. For example, it was long assumed that the famous seventh game of the 1960 World Series was lost in the mists of time because the TV network hadn’t made a copy of its live broadcast, but then somebody recently found Bing Crosby’s personal videotape made by one of the high tech companies he invested in in his old wine cellar.)
for reasoned discussion blog posts are probably better because they can be fisked or quoted but the audience prefers an audio track that they listen to while doing something else like commuting or working or playing a game.
I see the IDW as an attempt to model dignified, open-minded discussions. Perhaps the answer to (3) is that this goal is better achieved in long-form conversations or lectures than tweets or Facebook posts.
On this point, I think it’s interesting how Dan Carlin (host of a popular history podcast done in a talk radio style and a spinoff political analysis podcast) gets included in the IDW list given his seeming complete lack of interest/engagement in “internet culture war” content.
Whoever created that website clearly sees a connection that isn’t explained in the article.
http://intellectualdark.website/dan-carlin/
Happy I am that there is a forum not controlled by establishment media.
The whole market monetarism movement may have been stillborn except for the invention of the Internet.
Still I do there are whole topics which rarely get discussed even in self-reverential libertarian right-wing circles. While everybody is for free trade and against the minimum wage, they tend to go mute when the topic is property-zoning or the decriminalization of push-cart vending.
I keep hoping for more intellectual honesty in alternative forums, but they often turn into echo chambers
In the weekly roundup done by the neo-reactionaries at Social Matter, all the IDW related posts are classified under “Liberalism Besieged” . They are pretty much classical liberals who had the stones to take on larger opponents.
By “they” in the second sentence, I mean the IDW folks. Sorry for the confusion.
This is Social Matter’s most recent “Liberalism Besieged” entry:
“Our coverage of Liberalism Besieged has taken the week off. The heroic efforts of the folks at Heterodox Academy, Jordan B. Peterson, Stephen Pinker, and Charles Murray to make Liberalism work the way it never did will return next week.”
It is remarkable that the academic/cultural/media establishment now considers people as conventionally “liberal” (in the mid-century American sense) as Pinker, Harris and Hirsi Ali to be intellectually deviant.
My take on this is that over the past 50 years or so, the pushback on contentious social debate has actually softened. Throughout human history, espousing certain views often was dangerous, or even fatal. We can still see some traces of this where there are truly unjust consequences to speaking one’s mind, and this is still a problem, but it’s increasingly rare. Bucking the ingrained habits of the society you live in is tough business.
In far more cases, this is intellectual wimpiness. Someone got mad at me and they used mean language! Boo, hoo.
Up to about 2008, I’d agree that the free speech was pretty riskless. But Google fired James Damore, and many others, would say it’s becoming more dangerous, again. The PC-bullies are using “hate speech” offense to stop free speech they don’t like.
The anti-PC backlash is building strength. It may take a few more election cycles to make a bigger splash.