The Anti-tribal tribe

David Fuller writes,

Recently a new meme started doing the rounds on the Internet — the “Intellectual Dark Web”. The phrase was coined by the mathematician Eric Weinstein. It seems to have caught on — showing that whatever it is, quite a few people are recognising it — even though there’s a lot of discussion about what exactly it means.

. . .one of the things that unifies many of the thinkers in the IDW is a belief that the evolutionary strategies that got us to where we are now are unlikely to get us any further — particularly our hard-wired tribalism.

He links to the intellectual darkweb site, which is sort of a self-appointed unofficial hall of fame for the IDW. Also to a piece by Meghan Daum that appeared in a mainstream media outlet, the LA Times.

Reading Fuller’s essay and Daum’s column, I believe that my Three Languages of Politics book is in the IDW spirit. Also, at least a couple IDW hall-of-famers have read it.

Some challenges that the IDW faces:

–how to be non-tribal while opposing tribalism

–how to expose and overcome smugness without becoming smug about it

17 thoughts on “The Anti-tribal tribe

  1. Every time I hear about some “new” group of public intellectual commentators, it’s always the same few faces, over and over again. Average Is Over indeed.

  2. To your list of challenges I would add resisting being hijacked, and having their scholarly credibility misused, by intellectually unserious opportunists and propagandists. Of the people listed on the website, I would put Shapiro and Damore in that category, and there may be others– I am suspicious of people who host things with titles like “The Rubin Report” but I haven’t listened to it so will reserve judgment. But the general phenomenon is pretty clear: if you are a pot-stirring pundit you can make yourself look more worth engaging than you are by name-checking the more scholarly and nuanced folks on the list.

  3. Also, I am very surprised not to see Scott Alexander on the list– though he may not want the publicity.

    • You won’t see Tyler Cowen either. Because the reality is that it’s the progressives vs. everybody else. You hear a lot of denial of this truth, but that is because these people are “in denial” themselves (or at least performing as if they are.) Most of “everybody else” thinks they aren’t like those bad people the progressives target, and can somehow distinguish themselves as moderates who the progressives will tolerate and leave be.

      Nope: no friends to the right. So smarter, savvier, and more sophisticated and experienced people know better: they have everything to lose by having our society’s Eye of Sauron decide to turn its devastating gaze upon them, and there is no possible way to be less than one degree of separation removed from any “controversial” personality (i.e., one that has any possibility whatsoever of triggering progressive tribal attack instincts) without that happening.

      So one inevitably ends up in the depressing situation in which the exact figures one hopes would lend their status, reputation, and fame to such groups are precisely the ones that would never do so. And the ones that are left still have no ability to articulate the real nature of the dispute and conflict coherently.

      They are trying to to spoof the progressive IFF system, by claiming neutral alleigance to higher values or “universal” ones in some instrumentally pragmatic sense of shared commitment to norms of “Social Due Process.”

      But, alas, there are no such shared or common values. As I explained before, these conversations always go down the same, futile pathway. “We should have free expression.” – “No. There is hate speech. We can distinguish it from other kinds. There is no case to tolerate it. Are you the kind of person who wants more hate speech? Are you the kinds of person who can’t tell what hate speech it?”

      The next sound you hear is a ship crashing on the rocks, adding to the Alpine pile of planks and sail canvas of all the ships that tried and failed before it. “Hey, who’s up for building yet another ship, exactly the same way and with exactly the same crew, and trying again.” Definition of Insanity. That’s because no one is going to take on the notion of “hate speech” head on, and frankly, they can’t, because public debate on the issue is now completely impossible.

      • Handle,
        The only solution is the obvious one, following Conquest’s second law – founding a new republic on explicitly anti-progressive principles.

        The problem is that such a republic is going to immediately be the biggest enemy of USG as-is.

  4. 1) It might be wise to remember this is the first generation of people growing up with the internet reach. In early 1990s, the internet was a bunch computer weirdos and now the most dominant technology to connect the world. It may take time to adjust.

    2) In terms of tribalism, most people are at less risk than ever before. So they see tribes Outside of a few Middle Eastern/Africa and Valenzuela, war and civil war is WAY DOWN compared to most of history. (Maybe not compared to 1995 – 2005 though.) So people have new tribes.

    3) TBH the dark web of ideas were always there and it used to be a lot eaiser to share or find these views. Check out Ron Paul newsletters in the late 1980s that hit more radars in 2008 than they did at publication.

    4) In reality race relations are better than ever and most of the activity is dumb internet comments. Young people never really saw the awfulness of segregation and the process of desegregation and also do have a beloved family member share so Not Safe Work Material. (Living in Maryland in 1979 I have memories of the reaction to an African-American middle class moving into our neighborhood. The family paid my friend $.50 to have their son protected going to school.) And it is not like identity did not exist before 2008. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were still elected to Congress in the 1990s while Jesse Jackson had a Bernie Sanders like campaign Democratic Primary 1988. (He was never going to win but made it the entire primary.)

  5. I’m probably falling into the smugness trap for saying this but this doesn’t sound like anything more than a few public thinkers showing a bit of a backbone, and then acting like they just came up with a revolutionary approach to public debate.

  6. Demand facts, reason, arguments, and discussion. Demand self examination, acknowledgement of flaws, weaknesses, past mistakes, apologies, questioning, and changed opinions, particularly of those on your own side and yourself. If they can’t manage this, you shouldn’t be listening to them, and if you can’t, you aren’t serious.

  7. I didn’t RTFA, but many of the IDW guests that Rubin has on his show are thoughtful and thought-provoking.

    I believe Eric Weinstein cited Arnold’s TLP in one of the Rubin Report appearances.

  8. Some challenges that the IDW faces: –how to be non-tribal while opposing tribalism

    IDW says one of its core principles is the “rejection of identity politics,” but they feature Ben Shapiro, who advocates the expulsion of “the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper.”

    How does IDW square that circle?

    • They won’t oppose identity for any peoples of color unless it’s explicitly violent. There’s only energy to oppose identity for white people.

  9. Human universalism vs. tribalism – it’s assumed the former is good, the latter bad. There are many cultures, some much better than others. People working together to preserve a valued civilized way of life from the encroachments of the barbarians are practicing tribalism, I suppose. And let’s face it; the bounds of community are set by practices of inclusion and exclusion.

  10. We are not post evolutionary, it is a biological built-in.
    The integration hypothesis, that the new is a rebuild of the old seems pedantic. We remain mostly stone age man in the sense the stone age shock likely had the greatest impact. They are right about rebuilding institutions, but I see that as a technology upgrade that keeps most of the old.

    What is new is the advent of unobserved algorithms managing goods, the FANGS. I think that works but we have significant possibility coordination failure as we deploy the unobservable algorithms with institutions not having done their homework.

  11. I like the idea of the IDW, and believe we need something to make us a better civilization, but this is pretty silly-sad:
    “that unifies many of the thinkers in the IDW is a belief that the evolutionary strategies that got us to where we are now are unlikely to get us any further”

    Venezuela is going farther, faster & faster. It’s just not better. China is soon going to have Big Brother Xi watching everybody, with AI listening to what is said, who meets who, and massive, massive surveillance. The UK with cameras everywhere won’t be far behind.

    Our post-Christian OECD countries need less new thinking than more old, honest thinking and acceptance of what can’t yet be changed (like XY & XX genes), and that socialism in material goods can’t work. (Maybe it can work in Intellectual Monopolies / Property, but IP socialism hasn’t yet really been tried. I do advocate getting rid of copyrights.) Another thing that won’t change is the desire in most people to be smug in their own biased beliefs.

    The anti-tribal tribe, thru internal disagreement & acceptance of non-conformity, has a much better chance of making progress than did/does the anti-organization org (the Libertarian Party I used to belong to).

    It does help to give such thinkers more publicity.

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