Reading Bari Weiss’s recent article on the “intellectual dark web,” one cannot help being struck by the diversity of opinion and partisan allegiance among the renegade thinkers challenging political correctness and its stigmatization of arguments that violate its axioms of group identity, racial strife, and transgenderism. A stultifying intellectual atmosphere, in which the subjective emotional responses of designated victim groups take precedent over style, argument, and empirical evidence, makes for unexpected alliances. Who would have thought that Kanye West would become, in the space of a few Tweets, the most famous and recognized champion of individual free thought in the world today? Who could have anticipated that New Atheist Sam Harris would find himself in a united front with Jordan Peterson, who instructs his millions of acolytes in the continued relevance of biblical story?
He compares the IDW to the Coalition for Cultural Freedom, a mid-20th-century reaction against the rigidity of Communist ideology and the threat of Nazism. Read the whole essay.
2. Andrew Sullivan sees the IDW coming up against the trend toward tribalism.
Instead of a willingness to disagree and tolerate, there is an impulse to loathe and expel. And this is especially true with people we associate with our own side. Friendly dissidents are no longer interesting or quirky; as the stakes appear to rise, they come to seem dangerous, even contagious. And before we even know it, we live in an atmosphere closer and closer to that of The Crucible, where politics merges into a new kind of religious warfare, dissent becomes heresy, and the response to a blasphemer among us is a righteous, metaphorical burning at the stake.
Again, read the whole thing. I was tempted to excerpt a lot of it.
As Eric Weinstein, Bret’s brother, and another member of the unofficial ‘intellectual dark web’ said — “bad faith changes everything”. It’s possible to have any kind of discussion with people you disagree with so long as they are approaching it in good faith — as soon as they are not, they’re just looking to boost their position, look good in front of others or advance their career within their tribe — as Peterson alleged Cathy Newman was — then true exchange of ideas is impossible.
Fuller argues that an NYT piece on Jordan Peterson exemplifies bad faith. Unfortunately, I think that is a good way to describe the NYT and the Washington Post these days. It goes beyond mere journalistic bias. They are not even making a good-faith effort to be honest.
Another example of bad faith would be Nancy MacLean’s book on James Buchanan. Perhaps what makes the IDW important is the way that bad faith has crept into key institutions and seemingly taken over.
What’s the IDWs plan to get people to stop acting in bad faith? Besides complaining about it.
+1
Most of the writers (OK not Kayne!) have worthy items to read but I dont see a huge movement here.
TBH, I still don’t quite get Jordan Peterson as a great thinker….He seems like a smart writer and speaker that does Self-Help 101 & 301 very well. He is a great speaker for corporations to hire for their pump up their sales team.
This is actually a very good question. One could makes a list of “escalation options” and tell how important someone really thinks something is by asking them, “Where is your off-ramp? At what point of either escalation from the opposition, or observed ineffectiveness of existing tactics, will you back down and surrender because, in your view, further escalation would be unethical, immoral, counterproductive, etc.?”
One could start with Stage-1 “marketplace of ideas” tactics, trying to get a fair hearing for one’s message, extolling norms of open and free expression, trying one’s hand at marketing and public relations in a hostile media environment, etc.
Stage-1 seems to be where we are at – where we have been for a while – and it’s obvious it won’t (and can’t) go anywhere. Opponents own all the commanding heights of information dissemination and influence over public opinion, and can too easily shoot anyone down.
Stage-2A could be “organizing, or enabling and encouraing, the coordination of informal social pressure.” Demonstrations, protests, boycotts, doxxing, bullying, intimidation, social media viral mobbing, etc.” That’s the left’s game too.
Stage-2B could be formal, official, state intervention. Quotas. Equal-time and equal-rates rules. Defunding institutions unless A, B, C, etc. Revoking tax exemptions for impingement on civil rights contrary to public policy (i.e. treat Yale like Bob Jones U.)
Stage-3 could be political upheaval, passive or active resistence and refusal, law-breaking inviting direct confrontations, disorganized and organized violence, etc.
My impression is that most “IDW-sympathetic” people aren’t willing to go past Stage-1, and so the future of the little that still remains of a society characterized by a genuine freedom of expression is bleak. Stage-2B might the the only peaceful way to settle these disputes in a way that stabilizes our situtation, but no one seems to have the stomach for any of that.
“…and so the future of the little that still remains of a society characterized by a genuine freedom of expression is bleak.”
Would you be willing to share with us why you feel this way? Have you ever been injured in some tangible way as a result of the expression of your ideas?
I have been cowed to keep my mouth shut on those matters by the many, many other prominent examples of people harmed in tangible ways for the expression of their ideas. I am an autre who has been encourager’d to betray my conscience; one out of many.
Maybe the idea is simply that you show people what good faith discussion looks like and they learn to dismiss and denigrate those who argue in bad faith?
“Fuller argues that an NYT piece on Jordan Peterson exemplifies bad faith. Unfortunately, I think that is a good way to describe the NYT and the Washington Post these days. It goes beyond mere journalistic bias. They are not even making a good-faith effort to be honest.”
This is lazy. The argument by Fuller that the NYT piece on Peterson exemplifies bad faith was incredibly weak. It was not presented as a pure news story. Discussing Peterson’s views is not news. It was an exploration of his ideas. Fuller never came close to arguing anything was inaccurate, only that Peterson’s perspective wasn’t properly framed as a discussion of archetypes. Regardless, he regards those archetypes as guideposts to our basic nature and believes in their power, and there was nothing unfair about the portrayal. What were they supposed to do, explore the wisdom of standing up straight?
It is perfectly fair to say that the NYT and the Washington Post express bias and that they need to improve. But to claim they don’t make any effort to be honest falls into a parroting of a silly Trumpian world view. The Times and the Post are human institutions. Claiming they make no attempt to be honest is an incredibly severe argument. If you insist on going down that sad rabbit hole, at least work at it. Citing this Fuller post certainly isn’t going to cut it.
Yes the article was an exploration of Peterson’s ideas, but it wasn’t done in good faith.
Umm, why is that?
This is where we’re at. People in good faith disagree on whether something is being done in good faith. What the IDW is fighting for is so ambiguous as to be intractable.
We are not disagreeing on whether something is being done in good faith. An accusation was made that an author was acting in bad faith.
When you say something like that, it is lacking in civility to assert it without further comment. You need to provide a reasonable argument that someone intentionally attempted to mislead the readers. The arguments Fuller made did not come close to meeting that standard, and several commenters here have made no attempt at all.
@MikeW – Peterson was the one who made the provocative comment. It is a position that he knew would likely produce an incredulous reaction, and was particularly goading to say to a female interviewer. It may have been interesting for the author to explore in more depth, but it was on Peterson to add qualifiers if he felt they were important.
Unless, at the very least, you have evidence that he did elaborate, but she purposely chose not to include the context, you have no business citing that as evidence of bad faith.
Peterson has an intensely nuanced understanding of the meaning of symbols and words. He knows very precisely how harsh the word “enforced” is in this context. He wanted to produce a reaction. He has gained a great deal by getting such reactions from progressives, then switching into professor mode when it suits him. If you think this is an example of bad faith, consider whether it may have been exactly what he was hoping for.
Tom DeMeo — I will grant you that Peterson should (and probably does) know that it’s not good to use such terminology without explaining it better. I still think the reporter treated it as a “gotcha”, though, rather than following up properly to understand.
@MikeW
Reread the article. I don’t think she treated it as a gotcha. She clearly characterized it as “absurd”, meaning that she saw through his attempt to bait her.
She didn’t explore it because she didn’t consider it a serious idea, and frankly, I would agree. Peterson is either being manipulative for using an overly melodramatic phrase, or he wants a form of social pressure that’s clearly oppressive to women, but almost never men. Neither position is admirable.
Please take responsibility for your assertion. Bad faith isn’t the same thing as a lack of neutrality, or mild criticisms of emphasis. Your are claiming an explicit intention to mislead and impugning someone’s character.
As just one example, if the reporter had been approaching the interview in good faith, she would have asked him what he meant by enforced monogamy, and maybe even had a conversation about it.
I don’t quite get IDW.
Good branding. Not much else.
My thought would be that some of these institutions that fall in the “bad faith” category would object not so much by insisting a particular report was accurate or unbiased, but by insisting they are confronting something much more important.
It is a much earlier example, but the gun control advocacy group, “Handgun Control, Inc.” published some statistics a number of years ago about the number of children killed by gun violence. The numbers were so outlandish, that a quick mental calculation was all that was needed to see that it could not possibly be true. I remember that when confronted by this, they made no real objection, but insisted that while the statistics weren’t literally true *as statistics* they were true, because they developed a higher truth about the danger gun violence posed to children, which was their point all along.
To my knowledge, they kept using the made up statistics…
Anyway, I suspect something like that is in play, and even pointing out a lack of good faith won’t sink in. That is, when one is fighting for a righteous cause, how could one possibly not be in good faith?
(As a footnote, providing a bulwark against this in Western culture in days past–I fear somewhat neglected these days–was the teaching of traditional Christian moral theology that no end, no matter how righteous, can ever justify committing even the smallest sin, ie, we cannot do evil that good may come. Once that brake is removed…)
WaPo and NYT are “not even making a good-faith effort to be honest”. Donald Trump had distilled precisely this wisdom into the pithy phrase “FAKE NEWS” shortly after the 2016 election.
IDW seems a simple rebranding of “alt-right”, or at least the more respectable side of “alt-right”. Jordan Peterson would have been considered “alt-right” in 2016. The National Review and the NYT have labored in bad faith to frame the “alt right” label as these horrible monsters. And there is some truth as some “alt-right”/IDW figures do say horrible things. But the labels “alt-right” and IDW are recently manufactured categories and their definitions and the distinction between the two is completely arbitrary.
Fake news began as something on the left to explain why Trump with winning. Now it’s owned by Trump.
Yes, that’s completely correct. The left started the term, and Trump flipped it on them. However, Trump’s adversarial relationship with the news media has strategic wisdom, that yes, the legacy news media is really not reporting in good faith.
I think Sullivan in particular is mis-using “tribal,” though he’s hardly alone. I recognize that the ship has sailed and everybody is using the word this way, but I think it was a mistake from the beginning – in the “Intellectual Turing Test” / “Non-ironic self-identification” sense – to characterize what is happening as “tribal” behavior.
Ironically, to even accuse someone of being tribal can be “tribal”, since it is a kind of dismissive insult liable to be abused and intended to avoid engaging with any argument and to lower the status of members of a group in a way that conveys they are unworthy of the attention of an open-minded hearing. “Those bad people over there are just being tribal, captive to their primitive impulses to despise the outgroup, and not thinking, reasoning, rational good people, like us over here.”
I think the root of the error is that commentators are trying to grasp for a kind of “folk evolutionary psychology” explanation, based in some “irrational” bias or cognitive tendency, for increased political polarization and the perception that emotions are become more intense, and mutual animosity more severe.
But that’s probably mistaking effect for cause (and, to be guilty of my own critcism, I think it derives from wishful thinking – wouldn’t it be great if the problem were just bad social psychology we could theoretically “solve” by merely agreeing to lower the temparature, instead of intractable ideological controversies to which one is not practically able to take a transcendant perspective without getting into trouble?) Our discourse is not awful because of “tribalism”, our coalitions are becomming tribal because “losing” at our various political contests means real consequences that are perceived as both awful and which no one can avoid – like losing a war.
So instead, I think it’s more likely that tribal emotions, behaviors, and tactics may be a consequence of perceptions regarding how high the stakes are in a political contest and anxieties regarding trends in relative power and status. That is to say, not something that can be defused by normative recommitments, but only by lowering what’s at stake, which could only be accomplished by some reliable guarantee of security for the status quo and giving up on one’s agenda for political reform in exchange for comity and peace.
But that’s the fundamental problem here. Progressive egalitarian-absolutist ideology frames many of those reforms not as “nice to haves” / “would make things better” but as pressing, nigh-inarguable moral imperatives to give oppressed people their fundamental human rights.
The clearest recent example would be same-sex marriage. To someone who believes in progressive ideology, opponents of same-sex marriage were, at best, ignorant of the argument and going along with systemic oppression out of inertia and conformity, or, much more often, just evil dumb bigots whose views don’t matter a bit more than political expediency requires.
Imagine calling progressives “tribal” for their lack of esteem and anger for their opponents on the issue. They would look at you with confusion and suspicion. “What’s “tribal” about it? They would say it’s the clearly the moral equivalent of dealing with flat-earthers. “Why shouldn’t we impose this on evil idiots the minute we have the power to safely so, to stop the daily crises of humiliation and unjust discrimation on innocent people?” WWII metaphors are quick to arrise.
Imagine accusing pro-market types in Venezuela of being “tribal” for their attitudes towards their ideological opponents and opposition to the people giving political support to the Socialist catastrophe that is unfolding there. They believe they are fully justified, and would think you were either evil or insane.
The problem with an ideological conflict regarding fundamentals is that there is no common moral framework from which to argue about details from a higher level, and so the real-world ramifications of politicla dominance by one side or the other must necessarily force a morally intolerable situation on the opposition.
Convincingly calling the consequent attitudes “tribal” requires a shared perspective that views all these moral claims as more or less equally valid (or invalid, arbitrary, relative, or particular.) No more meaningful or important than “bread butter up, or bread butter down.”
But there is no way to “de-tribalize” an ideological dispute without downgrading the status and salience of the fundamental principles in the minds of the adherents. The trouble is that things have evolved to the point where this can no longer be argued for, openly and in public under one’s own name, without making oneself vulnerable to accusations of “defending hate,” and exposing oneself to life-ruining consequences.
This was Hillary a couple days ago: “There are certain things that are so essential they should transcend politics. Waging a war on the rule of law and a free press, de-legitimizing elections, perpetrating shameless corruption and rejecting the idea that our leaders should be public servants undermines our national unity. And attacking truth and reason, evidence and facts should alarm us all.”
The charitable explanation is cognitive and psychological. She’s just lacking in self-awareness. She’s blinded by an invincible sense of her own righteousness. She’s a victim of the same tribalism that makes hypocrites of us all.
And the alternative explanation doesn’t make any sense. Nobody could be that brazen. A stage Machiavel, yes, but nobody in real life talks like Richard III.
Real people fool themselves first. They believe their own BS. It didn’t occur to her, as she was speaking these words, that her own party has spent the last year and a half “de-legitimizing” an election with their ridiculous slurs about treason and hacking and about that Russian guy who came up with the line “Hillary is a Satan, and her crimes and lies had proved just how evil she is,” and how he put that on Facebook and thus undermined democracy itself.
She isn’t thinking of her own party’s record of surveillance against journalists, or of her own party’s record of putting journalists on the no fly list. She isn’t thinking of how Democrats in the FBI spied on the opposition, or of Democrats in the IRS harassing the opposition. Her party acts like a Third World junta, but she doesn’t understand that. She’s psychologically incapable of understanding that.
Granted, she was flat-out lying when she claimed not to know that (C) stands for classified. She simply lied about that, and she knew she was lying. But most of the time she’s fooling herself. And tribalism is an explanation for how she’s able to pull off that feat.
I would ask you to reconsider your conclusions here. I think it is possible in most cases to have civil discourse on these matters, with some qualifiers. Certain liberal arts college environments have lost their capacity to discuss such things calmly, and it probably isn’t a good idea to air out such debates at the workplace without knowing how management might react, but you should otherwise be OK.
There is less tribalism than you think. The number of people out there that buy into the full slate of progressive ideology is pretty small. A larger portion, myself included, reject large swathes of it, but do believe in an inclusive society. There is a wide spectrum of views out there, and it is usually possible to have a civil discussion if you want to.
The question is not whether it might be possible in some ideal circumstances with some reasonable participants who will keep your confidence.
The question is one of risk.
As a hypothetical, if what you said appeared on the cover page of an employee packet being looked over by a hiring committee, what are the odds that it would contribute to a rejection? In my office, theoretically one in which First Amendment rights apply, any indication that an individual does not fully support and promote diversity programs (mostly the special recruitment of women and racial minorities), or is less than completely committed “to a workforce representative of all segments of society” (i.e., quotas and not merit-based) is practically a guarantee that, if known ahead of time, one won’t be hired in the first place (and certainly won’t be told the real reason, leaving the applicant without knowledge of a cause to sue), and if already an employee, completely ineligible for promotion, most especially to any supervisory positions, and forget about senior management if there’s even any rumors of faint hints that you once might have thought things like that. (I bring this up because I am personally familiar with a case in which a colleague was reckless – perhaps lulled into complacency by appeals like yours – with voicing his honest sentiments in favor of colorblind assessment – note: in a perfectly civil and respectful way – and that was the end of his career.)
Most progressives I know would say that this is 100% appropriate and for the best, an extension of common-sense notions of morality and social justice, and indispensible to creating workplaces and fair socities without discrimination or identity animus, where everyone feels safe and included, except dumb, evil, angry hater losers, naturally. They would think it absurd to argue that this whole filtering mechanism ought to be abandoned wholesale. “Why? All these marginalized and oppressed people have to suffer real trauma every day for the sake of a few obnoxious nazis, so they can get away with their vile abuses without consequence?”
Now, how can one have a “civil”, forthright conversation or debate (in public, under one’s own name) about such matters when that sword of Damocles is hanging over one’s head? Impossible. You either go along with everything and keep your mouth shut about it, or you’re guilty of some species of “hate”, and worthy of excommunication.
Nothing is ever really new under the sun. In this vein, it is to Niall Ferguson’s credit that he remembers what happened to Charles Murray. But hats off to Mickey Kaus for reminding us of previous individuals who fell astray of holier than thou bandwagons: https://twitter.com/kausmickey/status/997962948071968769 Bottom line, integrity extracts a toll. Always has, always will. The IDW are just the latest batch to find out that there is a price to not going along to get along. Bless them all, but they have predecessors.
Off-topic…sort of…does anybody remember who I made bets with on the Trump presidency? I honestly can’t remember. There’s still no wall and now it seems like an actual full border wall is an afterthought. Still no Muslim bans, no wars, etc.
On-topic in the sense that people wringing hands over the IDW, fake news, Trump, etc. get it all bass-ackwards and predictably so.