I've been holding off writing anything about the New York Times' latest safari through the intellectual subcultures of the conservative movement. There was nothing I really felt like discussing about Bari Weiss' piece about the "Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" that hasn't already been said over and over again by commentators I respect, and who possess far larger audiences. With the alt-right imploding thanks to public ostracism and constant pressure, and the neoreactionaries continuing to be too esoteric to want or obtain mainstream recognition, it's about time the unholy alliance between right-libertarian think tanks, New Atheism and evolutionary psychology got some critical attention. Hey, at least now we have this handy list of the worst people on the internet.
For the record, the greentext version of the Intellectual Dark Web ('IDW') looks like this:
- be personally or ideologically committed to the preservation of the status quo
- encounter viewpoints, typically from a minority, that critique the status quo
- attempt to tone police critical minority
- minority continues to exist, and be critical. WTF I'm oppressed now.
The nature of the IDW's ideological commitments
Vox's take on the men and women of this self-professed intellectual movement strikes me as essentially correct in aggregate: this is a privileged group concerned about their relative loss of status and desperate to defend their established cultural hegemony. I've said as much myself in my previous blog on the interaction between structure, privilege and preferences. I'm less interested in why the members of the IDW position themselves ideologically as they do, than what form of status quo ideology they are actually committed to advocating. But this too, turns out to be largely uninteresting: while the IDW includes overt social conservatives (Shapiro, Hoff-Summers & Peterson), most of the 'classical liberal' contingent espouse philosophical positions will long traditions on the right wing of Western philosophy.
Put simply, inequality is the paradox at the heart of liberalism. As a philosophical and cultural system, liberalism puts priority on the equal dignity of all adult humans. And yet, inequality continues to exist in many forms and is measurably getting worse over time. Much like Christians grappling over centuries with the problem of the existence of evil, the intellectual history of liberalism is the story of attempts to variously justify or challenge the existence of inequality. Because the Intellectual Dark Web-types are terrified of Marx and other radical philosophies which [correctly] identify the actual causes of inequality in the structure of society, their intellectual options for resolving this dilemma are limited.
Quillette magazine is the respectable mouth-piece of the IDW, and they had a decent piece up recently summarizing the two main arguments justifying inequality: the consequentialist and the libertarian positions. In brief, the former argues that the unequal distribution of outcomes is justified when it is necessary to improve [economic] outcomes for society as a whole; the latter argues that inequality is justified because any attempt to remedy it would put at risk values of individual liberty and private property that are more highly valued.
The consequentialist position is arguably the majority position within mainstream economics, and in its Rawlsian form (the 'Difference Principle') it represents the standard position of liberalism from the centre-left to centre-right. For those unfamiliar, the Difference Principle requires that for inequality to be justified, it must improve the position of the worst off in society. As I argue in Chapter VIII of my book, "Politics for the new Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", the Difference Principle is a necessary but not sufficient condition for economic justice. In any event, consequentialism is an inherently flawed methodology: objective utility preferences are hard to define, much less measure, and the use of utilitarianism in decision-making is an inherently undemocratic and illiberal exercise.
The libertarian position is well known and understood within right-wing or 'choice' liberalism, and has been espoused for decades by the likes of Hayek, Nozick, Rothbard & Murray. In short, the libertarian position is that unequal outcomes are the product of individual choice and merit alone, and are therefore morally justified. When the patent absurdity of this viewpoint is pointed out, given that wealth, social status and income are all extremely heritable, we end up with compromises like luck egalitarianism which attempt to distinguish between moral and immoral inequality. Again: Rawls' Veil of Ignorance sets a sort of agreed minimum floor for the kind of inequality in a liberal society that is still consistent with the inherent dignity of all individuals: if an individual is denied their social contract rights, then they are not just unequal, but are de facto excluded from mutual recognition as a member of the social contract.
If pushed on their positive position, most of the self-described classical liberals in the IDW would posit the libertarian position, which offers a pleasant justification for the personal privileges they enjoy atop the media pyramid. When asked to explain why others fare less well, they typically offer variants of either the libertarian or luck egalitarian position: people are less well off because they either make bad choices or they had the misfortune to belong to a group (defined by race, gender, culture or sexuality) less well-equipped to 'succeed', or both. In summary, and as Ezra Klein has pointed out, the 'dangerous ideas' of the IDW are neither new, nor interesting, nor even particularly controversial within a certain ideological milieu.
On reputation, or "why are y'all so sensitive?"
The IDW are, on the whole, an extremely sensitive lot whose interest in freedom of speech has less to do with principle than ensuring that they, and people like them, continue to be heard. It's unclear, at first, why they're so triggered by critics of the status quo: while it's possibly the manifestation of a backlash bias against perceived threats to the social order, I suspect that on the whole that the members of the IDW are closer to the 'virtue ethics' end of the backlash spectrum than the 'asshole' end. In other words (again, Shapiro, Hoff-Summers and Peterson aside), they're less interested in actively defending the status quo order than in defending the personal virtue they see themselves as possessing by being members of that order in good standing. In other words, they've done everything 'right', so why are they being protested?
A quick diversion. Quillette has published an interview by the site's founder and Australian (ugh) libertarian (ugh) Claire Lehmann with sociologists Brad Campbell and Jason Manning about their new book on the campus culture wars. In all honesty I haven't read the book, but as represented by the interview their argument is . . . just awful. They posit three moral cultures: "honor cultures", where an individual's reputation matters and is vigorously defended; "dignity cultures", where human equality is guaranteed and disputes are regulated by social institutions; and "victim cultures", which combine the worst elements of both (i.e. those damn college kids are both too sensitive and too totalitarian!).
The former two concepts are well known in the sociological literature, although they operate less as hierarchical levels of development and more a contingent function of social history and environment. The idea of 'victim culture', on the other hand, is a ridiculous straw man with zero anthropological support other than the existence of people who disagree with one another. I'd not be the first to point out that Quillette's promotion of the idea of 'victim culture', both in the interview above and more broadly, is a pretty obvious example of psychological projection. The IDW are not interested in the free speech or right to protest of their critics and engage in rampant appeals to authority to shut them down. Dave Rubin has said that self-identifying as a heretic feels personally empowering, yet appears incapable of making the intellectual leap of attributing the same motive to critics of the status quo.
If the IDW's concern was merely arbitrating between the respective speech interests of competing positions, then that clash of rights could be easily adjudicated by existing social mechanisms. Rather, the IDW are asserting a different right alongside their right to speak: a right to protect their reputation. They are arguing for a privilege that men and women of their class have implicitly enjoyed for centuries: to express bad ideas in public without suffering any kind of adverse reputational consequences. One need only listen to Sam Harris whine about how he's continually misrepresented to see that the primary concern of these people is their personal social standing and self-image.
As experiments in evolutionary game theory have shown for decades, a person's reputation is in fact an essential tool for regulating cooperation in small-scale societies. There's even biological evidence (in our human capacity for facial recognition and proficiency at gossip) that reputation mechanisms were important enough for long enough time in our evolutionary history to become genetically rooted. It's true that for the most part modern societies generate social trust through ideological tools grounded in universal human dignity and vast cooperative institutions to resolve disputes. However, it's an uncontroversial hypothesis that in the 'marketplace of ideas' a person's reputation is still a valuable currency: experts and public intellectuals rely on their reputation to ensure that their ideas are successfully propagated.
Hence the New York Times piece, and the signal-boosting of the IDW by other conservative sources. As Dave Pakman has pointed out, the IDW is ultimately a re-branding exercise for bad ideas. Like all advertising, it aims to preserve market share for products that don't deserve it based on quality. Unlike many on the left with unfashionable ideas, the IDW are capable of cashing in their social and economic status to marshal a defense of their intellectual and moral reputations and thus shield themselves from the detrimental effects of robust criticism of their positions. Personally, and as I've stated before, I'm something of a free speech fundamentalist so the idea of a right to one's reputation is not something I'm inclined to view favourably. Let ideas, words and art stand for themselves, and if people lower their estimation of you because of them, then you have to live with those consequences. The Right - and Bari Weiss - have certainly never held back from attacking the reputations of their opponents. But culture is static if existing ideas and artforms are shielded from criticism by entrenched privilege.
And yet: Article 17(1) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights does establish something like a right to one's reputation, and the appropriate scale and extent of libel and defamation laws is something that's been debated constantly and keenly in the legal philosophy literature for centuries. The law does generally recognise that we have a legitimate interest in our reputation, particularly when it has commercial value, and protects it against unlawful, deceptive or malicious interference. Of course, the IDW are more interested in claiming victimhood in order to attract resources from right-wing donors than, y'know, actually engaging with the philosophical or legal merits of their own positions. But I think it'd be fair to say to critical engagement with the ideas promoted by the IDW, even to the extent of forms of protest and ostracism recognised as legitimate in a free society, does not constitute an interference with their fundamental reputational rights. Instead, their diminished reputations are just the [small] price they have to pay for promoting bad and discredited views.