Tag Archives: CatoUnbound

More from the Cato Unbound symposium

Posted on by

I write,

Unfortunately, we are seeing on campus a form of reductionist progressivism that actually does take the oppressor-oppressed axis as the sole basis for framing issues. The campus justice activists are not only subject to the psychology that inclines us away from Persuasion Mode and toward Demonization Mode. Their very ideology justifies Demonization of dead (and living) white males while treating the values of free speech and open inquiry as tools of oppression.

Jonathan Rauch writes,

Pace Kling, I don’t think “centralized curation of content” and content restrictions are most of what will happen as digital media grapple with antisocial behavior, though we’ll certainly see some of those (and have, and should). More important, and more successful, will be human-machine partnerships and platform redesigns which identify toxic behavior and content and help users avoid them.

There is more at both links. But again, I don’t think that bad actors and factually incorrect posts are the core problem. The core problem is the way otherwise good people behave on social media.

More agreement with me

Posted on by

Donald Downs writes,

As for most major social problems, the causes of demonization are complex, defying perfect comprehension. I bring just one more cause to our attention, a factor that complicates the analysis: the rise of what social theorist Frank Furedi labeled “emotional correctness” in his book What’s Happened to the University? Furedi maintains that a governing purpose of higher education today is to protect the emotional comfort of students and others, regardless of how subjective and unreasonable the claim for comfort might be.

Nikki Usher writes,

In 1957, sociologist Robert Merton conducted a study of how mass media functions via interpersonal influence within a small town. He juxtaposed “locals” to “cosmopolitans”; “locals” were parochial and fundamentally self-interested to the exclusion of the nation and society around them, while cosmopolitans were “ecumenical,” seeing themselves as connected to the problems in society at large, looking outward

Note that this distinction seems to have been independently rediscovered by David Goodhart in The Road to Somewhere, where he speaks of “somewheres” (Merton’s “locals”) and “anywheres (Merton’s “cosmopolitans:).

Usher goes on to write,

My sense is that we are stuck in this battle between cosmopolitanism and localism/parochialism because those who identify as the most cosmopolitan are often the most likely to be narrow-minded and judgmental.

Overall, this issue of Cato Unbound might strike you as boring, because there is so little disagreement with my original essay. Perhaps they should have recruited one of the commenters here, perhaps Handle, to write one of the responses essays!

A conversation about political conversation

Posted on by

At Cato Unbound. I contributed the lead essay.

New analyses of polarization keep appearing, and new signs of the severity our political fault lines keep emerging. As a result, I sense that the latest edition of The Three Languages manages to be both timely and out of date. This essay will sketch some of the book’s key points, and then I will offer my current thinking, particularly concerning cultural forces that I think are behind the surge in polarization, and what we might do to try to counter those forces.

Read the whole essay before commenting. Note that some distinguished folks will be contributing essays in response. You can check out the overview page over this week and next (I’ll probably post reminders).