Myths of the Old Order: The Kirk/Spock Dialectic and Toxic Rationality

Nerd culture is ascendant: video games are mainstream entertainment; bland superhero movies top the box office with depressing regularity; and everyone binge-watches TV in order to earn social capital and remain part of the cultural elite. But nerd culture is also fundamentally broken: an ageing generation reacts with rage to almost every attempt to modernise their childhood myths, and yet can't but help but reproduce them through its social behaviour. As I've written before, the counter-culture of yesterday is becoming the hegemonic conservative culture of tomorrow, and that transition is fraught with danger for women and other minorities that were historically marginalised within that culture. The modern white, male 30- or 40-something sees their cultural ascendency as a triumph over the stultifying, Cold War environment of their childhood, and has difficulty seeing themself as subjects of critique. 

The Kirk/Spock Dialectic

To my mind, the Kirk/Spock dialectic is one of the foundational archetypes of nerd culture and at the root of one of its most toxic aspects. In the original Star Trek, the hot-headed cowboy Captain Kirk is defined by his humanity: confident, suave and capable of violence at a moment's notice, he represents the archetypal masculine hero of the mid-20th century. But for the nerds his First Officer, the half-Vulcan Spock, is the protagonist of the narrative: an outsider in the human-dominated Federation, he struggles to suppress his own emotions and solves problems using logic, reason and utilitarian calculus. Speaking as a member the nerd demographic, I can attest that the Spock archetype came to embody the ideal of masculinity for multiple generations of scientists, engineers, wonks and other social outcasts. And it was by-and-large a successful ideal: Gates, Jobs and Musk are the protagonists of the popular age, the Iowa farmboys of the American mid-west relics of a by-gone era. 

tumblr_mx0y9za3U11ren9jno1_500.png

The Kirk/Spock archetype dates from the sixties, but became culturally fixed because it suited the times. When the world poised on the edge of an irrational nuclear holocaust, the logical cool of the negotiator offered hope for the future of humanity. The "Next Generation" doubled down on the Kirk/Spock structure, with the erudite Captain Picard working in partnership with the android Data, whose literal incapacity to experience emotion made him the vital point-of-view character for many people with autism and autism-like personalities. As the Soviet Union disintegrated in the 1990s, and with seemingly incomprehensible ethnic and religious rivalries tearing societies apart, Data and Spock were role models of emotionless and disinterested technocratic expertise. The last of the original Star Trek films, the excellent "Undiscovered Country" makes this explicit with Spock the peace-maker convincing the Cold Warrior Kirk (who at one points literally shakes with grief and vengeance over the death of his son) to give peace a chance and save the Klingons from extinction.  

Toxic Rationality

Nerd culture, or 'wonk culture' if we're describing the variant that actually holds power, is not unemotional: in fact, it is often hyper-emotional when activated by a backlash bias towards those that challenge their social position. But it does prize rationality above perhaps all other values. We are a generation of critics, who can't simply say that we like or dislike a cultural product (or policy or social outcome) but must articulate the reasons why. Statistics and data are valued; subjective experiences and empathy are devalued. We can blame the technocratic utilitarianism of neoliberalism for this, in part, and we can also blame the values of the patriarchy - which teaches men, and particularly men in positions of authority, to distrust and suppress their emotions. But the Spock (and/or Data) character provides the role archetype that I believe a culturally significant group of smart, perhaps well-meaning men, are subconciously performing and reproducing because at the time they grew up the rationalist hero was the man they desired to be. 

My book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder" is in part a critique of the privileging of supposedly neutral logical of utilitarianism in the public sphere. The policy wonks and elites of my generation - the Obama-types, the centrists and neoliberals - do certainly offer an improved quality of governance over some of the alternatives and the world is certainly a better place because of it. But their instinctual distrust of emotion, including the dismissal of the rage and loss felt by those that have been made worse off by their policies and their inability to offer a positive, hopeful vision of the future of society, has led them to a political cul-de-sac and is arguably contributing to the fraying of liberal democratic societies. There are many (many!) good reasons to oppose Trump, but the way he makes his supporters *feel* positive and energised must be acknowledged as potent political technique.

The sceptical culture of the internet has birthed multiple manifestations of this cult of rationality, including the New Atheism movement, the so-called rationalist/effective altruist community and the Intellectual Dark Web. But all too often this is rationality without a moral compass: it's no coincidence that the same communities have become a treadmill pushing people towards Islamophobia, opposition to trans rights (muh chromosomes!), outright racism (the "human biodiversity" crowd) and the privileging of pseudo-scientism as an explanation of inequality rather than the real culprit (y'know: the capitalist order). The Kirk/Spock dialectic has produced a generation of wannabe Spocks who don't know how to govern real people and on a deep level don't want to. Ironically, this is because it was the underdog Spock they most empathised with as children, rather than the bullying Captain Kirk. But they've got it wrong. Spock is not the hero of the Original Series: the Federation is - a society that creates room for both Spock and Kirk to co-exist in leadership. 

Re-Discovering the Social Emotions

What fans tend to forget is that the Original Series is based around a leadership triad, not a duo: Doctor McCoy is the emotional and empathetic heart of the system, the balance to the hyper-rationality of Spock and the dominance drive of Captain Kirk. The Original Series makes it clear that heroic actions result when all three perspectives are taken into account; it's to the Abrams reboot's great discredit that this dynamic is wholly absent. Hell, multiple Star Trek films were devoted to the lesson that the needs of the one can outweigh the needs of the many, yet this lesson is anathema to the modern Spock archetype. The Southern gentleman McCoy represents the other-regarding outlook of traditional societies, and this might explain why it's a perspective that is devalued by an increasingly elite community that sees empathy (and demands for empathy) as a archaic characteristic of alien 'others'. The New Generation didn't help in this regard by making the McCoy archetype a female alien whose empathy was a literal superpower; Counsellor Troi was a neat concept whose character development and depth was sacrificed to focus on the Picard/Data dyad. 

What the cult of rationality misses, in its blanket dismissal of emotion, is that many emotions are a positive force in people's lives and that other-regarding preferences are actually necessary to make cooperative societies sustainable. One of the key insights of evolutionary game theory is that self-regarding rationality alone is insufficient to sustain large scale societies: emotions are not vestigial organs that lead to adverse results in modern conditions, as the Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychologists believe, but refined tools that make it easier for humans to act in ways that maintain the integrity of their communities. Daniel Kahnemann and Johnathan Haidt are right in at least this sense: rationality is a better tool for post hoc justification of our actions than an a priori generator of moral behaviour.  So today we see rationality offered up as an exculpatory excuse for abhorrent opinions and social policies. 

It's ironic, then, that the most recent Star Trek Series ("Discovery") has received a fan backlash because to my mind it actually gets this right. In a fascinating reversal of the situation in "Undiscovered Country", the season one finale of Discovery has the Vulcans (in fact, Spock's father) and Starfleet willing to commit genocide against the Klingons in order to contain them as a threat, and it's up to the human character, who was raised by Vulcans, to reject that sort of utilitarian calculus and advocate the heroic position of hope and trust in the future. It's probably indicative of the times that the protagonist (Burnham) is both female and non-white, but the message would be and should be the same regardless of the character's identity. The writers of Discovery recognise, in a way that perhaps the writers of the Next Generation didn't appreciate, that emotion and empathy can have both positive and negative aspects, and that the privileging of rationality as paramount value lead to a society that can be morally monstrous. As a society, we need irrational optimism to survive and thrive. 

One Year Blogversary!

Well, it's official. This blog has existed for exactly one year. One year of blogging in support of my (first) book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder"; one year of commentating on politics, philosophy and the culture wars from Geneva and outside of the government mothership. Getting the chance to be interviewed on a podcast as a result of my piece on social media and social trust was definitely a highlight. In honour of the anniversary, today's post will be a little different, looking back at what worked, and what didn't. 

Over the last twelve months, this blog:

  • was visited by >2,700 unique individual readers;
  • roughly half of those visitors were from the United States. Australia, the UK, Canada and Switzerland made up most of the remainder;
  • one third of my readers came from Reddit, which explains the considerable increase in readership I got on posts that were posted there;
  • finally, 74 of my visitors clicked through a link to buy a copy of my book. Thank you to each and every one of you!

The top three posts from this year were:

Overall, the keys to success appear to have been a) wading into controversial areas, and b) making sure my work was seen on high profile sub-reddits. Oddly enough, my book reviews have also performed solidly, with my review of Yuval Noah Harari's "Sapiens" just barely missing out on the top three. 

What posts performed the worst?

  • Sadly, my holiday writings on the issue of a 'Voice' for Indigenous Australians received the lowest readership of all my posts, despite it being a touchy issue in Australian and me sharing the entries widely on Reddit. 
  • I'm more personally disappointed that some more philosophical writings on evolutionary ethics ("Three Duties") and the evolution of sex and gender categories ("The colour analogy") were both read less than ten times. I'm rather proud of both pieces: perhaps the abstract titles and topics were to blame?
  • Finally, it's odd that my follow-up to that podcast interview, "Climate Change Broke the Neoliberal Consensus Too" fared so poorly, despite being promoted by the "Connected and Disaffected" podcast crew and being clearly linked to that appearance.

So what's next? Expect the pace of new writing to slow down a bit over the next few months as I manage the return to Australia and gear up to write the first draft of my second book. That's right, there's a follow-up coming that I'm quite excited to get started on. Perhaps by the second blogversary, I'll be able to tell y'all a little more. Until then, thanks for reading!

The Politics of Recognition, a Second Look

In anticipation of this blog's imminent one year anniversary, I've been looking over my older posts to see what, if anything, I might do differently twelve months later. In particular, the piece "Identity Politics, a Second Look", which was conceived at the height of the Bernie Bro v Hillarycrat post-election acrimony, caught my eye. It's one of the more popular and controversial older posts (with >100 views), and I stand by its conclusions: intersectionality, as a practice, is vital and necessary but pure identarianism is both illiberal and undemocratic and is correctly disavowed by everyone to the right of "dictatorship of the proletariat" communists and to the left of ethnic supremacists. However, today's I'm going to offer a refinement of part of my earlier analysis that I now feel was undercooked. 

The Politics of Difference

In short, I was too dismissive and imprecise in the central part of the analysis regarding the liberal version of identity politics. By this I meant redistribution policies predicated on the demonstration of significant statistical differences in outcomes for socially defined groups of people, for example: the underrepresentation of women and other minorities in positions of political and corporate authority. In this form, identity politics or the politics of difference is  consistent with both the liberal universalist tradition and limited redistributionary policy aims. To summarise: if all citizens are equal in formal opportunity, then measurable group-level differences in outcome must have a hidden or informal cause. We can argue about what those causes are, and what mix of redistribution or prevention is best to prevent those differences from recurring, but the acknowledgement of structural-level privilege and oppression, whether it's called the patriarchy, structural racism or the capitalist mode of production, is the sine qua non of left-of-centre politics (and its denial the sina qua non of right-of-centre politics).

The struggle for LGBT rights is the most salient example, here, because it's so fresh in the memory of most people. The lifting of legal prohibitions on homosexuality and the granting of marriage equality sees LGBT people treated equality before the law, but outcomes for LGBT people remain challenging in many areas: LGBT individuals are more likely to be living in poverty, to be victims of violence, and to self-harm. The job of activists, at least in the West, will likely change from a fight for recognition to fighting for policies to remedy these persistent economic, cultural and historical patterns of disadvantage, so long as they persist. In much the same way as legal equality for women left the greater work of challenging the second-class status of women undone, and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the United States kept the economic structure of African-American disadvantage intact, all movements transition eventually from fighting for equal recognition to fighting for equal distribution. 

As a socialist, I see the politics of difference as necessary but insufficient. Discovering LGBT individuals or ethnic minorities have a greater than expected chance of living in poverty is important, but it doesn't answer the question of why *anyone* is living in poverty. Any measurement of structural disadvantage for particular sub-populations takes as an implicit reference point the status quo division of resources. The politics of difference is relational, not absolute: we can say that the relative deprivation of minorities is unjust, but liberal identity politics lack a framework to critique the justice of the entire social order. Without linking these individual struggles together to see the bigger picture, we risk leaving an otherwise unjust system intact or, worse, setting it as our explicit goal! 

From Distribution to Recognition

Already, however, I have made a distinction between struggles for equal recognition and struggles for equal opportunity. Logically, the former must precede the latter. A person must be recognised by others as a social subject, entitled to equal regard by both the law and other citizens, before the conditions of equal opportunity laid out in the liberal social contract can be tested and remedied. This excellent explainer video by Ollie at PhilosophyTube sets out the argument and its origin in Hegel. Achieving recognition as a social subject is not only a feature of liberal societies: expansionary empires with religious characteristics typically regard their 'heathen' colonial subjects as less than human. It's only after colonial subjects convert to the faith of their colonizer that they win some level of minimal social status. 

Liberalism played this role for the European colonial empires, at least in their later stage. It justified, for the conquerors, the overthrow of "pre-modern" societies but it in turn provided tools for colonised people to re-claim recognition from their oppressors. By fighting for acknowledgement of their dignity as equal human subjects, Gandhi, Nkrumah and the other products of a colonial education re-established the sovereignty of their peoples in terms recognised, albeit begrudgingly, by the imperial centers (It goes without saying that colonialism and the denial of their common humanity was unjust from the outset). But the winning of recognition, of sovereignty, did not redress the vast material inequality of social outcomes between newly liberated states and the metropolitan powers. 

Charles Taylor, the communitarian philosopher, coined this version of the politics of recognition in a 1994 article. I'm not a fan of Taylor or his work in general, but this aspect of it is so widely referenced that it deserves discussion. Taylor recognised that an individual's identity is not somehow intrinsic to themselves but rather worked out through dialogue with others, and that therefore our sense of ourselves is defined relationally. The denial of this mutual recognition generates harm to oneself and one's sense of identity, which for a social species like humans leads to a wide variety of destructive behaviours and outcomes. Kant, Rawls and the other social-contract liberals have transformed this philosophical or psychological need into a universal principle: dignity under liberalism means that, prior to any other consideration, we enter into a society on the basis of the mutual recognition of each other's shared humanity. 

Not Just One or the Other

Prior to any engagement as political subjects of a liberal democracy on matters of distributional justice a marginalised group must therefore fight for recognition of its dignity: it must win legal equality for its members and the right to have rights, free of discrimination. But while equal recognition and material equality are distinct components of justice, they are not entirely separate ones. Denial of recognition generates material inequality, and sufficiently severe levels of substantive inequality may constitute an de facto denial of equal dignity. Dignity is not an absolute category, but rather relative to the dignity afforded to other members of society. 

In Chapters VIII and IX of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", I argue that a similar distinction lies at the explanatory heart of the difference between poverty and inequality. Poverty, like dignity, is often articulated in terms of the absolute denial of an individual's rights, whereas equality is relative to a society's overall level of affluence. But, as I argue in the book, poverty is also relative. What constitutes the denial of an adequate education, housing or standard of medical care can only be defined with reference to what is broadly possible in a given social and economic context. Poverty can exist by chance in even relatively egalitarian societies, but poverty becomes structural under conditions of high inequality. I wish I could claim credit for this argument about the twin bases of injustice, but I've learned subsequently that it's also the view of American feminist and philosopher Nancy Fraser. 

So too with dignity and recognition: if the material conditions under which a group is disadvantaged are so severe that their deprivation is not even acknowledged to be unjust by society as a whole, then they are not being afforded equal dignity. For example, while indigenous groups mostly enjoy equal citizenship in settler states, their social and material conditions are often so poor that it's easy to argue that the colonial society does not recognise them as equal human subjects. So too when the West granted women the right to vote, but continued to control and limit their sexuality and to grant spouses violent dominion over the household: it's straightforward to argue that under those conditions society had not fully acknowledged the status of women to be equal with that of men. Dismantling slavery was a win for African-Americans, but Black Lives Matter argues that disproportional state violence demonstrates that their community is still not being treated as equal social subjects. 

To wrap up, if I was re-writing my earlier piece on identity politics today, I'd hold on to my critique of the politics of difference as providing an insufficient critique of structural inequality. However, where inequality of outcomes is so severe as to represent a de facto denial of a group's equal citizenship, or where that denial of equal dignity is established by law and norms, I think both affected groups and supportive allies have a responsibility to put higher priority on redressing their alienation from the social contract.

Sovereign Money in Switzerland (MMT Part 3)

Living in Switzerland, one of the local oddities is the quarterly referenda on every conceivable topic. In the highly decentralised Swiss political system, voters are frequently asked to resolve policy debates that the weak and uncoordinated central institutions can't or won't deal with. The frequency of referenda, however, means that voter engagement is extremely low and the whole process lies open to manipulation by niche interests. The next vote is scheduled for June 10, and the top issue is a constitutional amendment on "pleine [or 'Sovereign'] monnaie". Yes, folks, modern monetary theory (MMT) has arrived in Switzerland and given my previously expressed scepticism towards MMT, it's time to take a look at what that looks like practice. 

In 2015, the allegedly non-partisan "Vollgeld Initiative" collected the required 100,000 signatures necessary to put a constitutional amendment directly to voters. The way this is being gone about is quite simple, and rather clever. The Swiss constitution, like many others around the world, establishes a National Bank (the 'SNB') with the sole authority to issue coins and banknotes. Among other minor changes, the proposed amendment inserts 'and electronic money' into the relevant clause of the Constitution. The change may be minor, but the implications for the Swiss monetary and financial system are most definitely not. MMT proponents have found a neat trick: pose simultaneously as defenders of the original intent of the constitution by protecting the Central Bank's monopoly over the creation of money and as reformers who are just 'updating' the constitution to deal with the modern era of electronic finance. 

Sovereign Money and Horizontal Money

In order to know what this seemingly minor change would mean in practice, it's important to know how the money supply is defined. Physical notes and coins (the M0 money supply) represent only a fraction of all currency in circulation; much more is held as bank deposits or loans which are recorded electronically (the M1/M2 money supply). MMT proponents are closely related to monetary circuit theorists (MCT), who describe how private banks increase the supply of "horizontal money" in the economy by issuing loans and creating debt: since both the amount loaned and the debt are units of exchange and account, they are currency. All forms of the same currency are convertible into one another, and under fractional reserve banking financial institutions can loan out (read: create money) in multiples of the deposits or other assets it holds (up to regulatory limits). So long as all its debts aren't called due simultaneously, the system expands the supply of capital and thus economic activity. 

So far, so good. Fractional reserve banking is an established practice with well appreciated risks. Risks that regulators try to manage by imposing reserve requirements and capital adequacy ratios. Can this be done better? The evidence of the Great Recession suggests undoubtedly so. Are there historical precedents for centralising control of money creation to alleviate financial risks? Absolutely: in the middle ages (and still in Scotland today!) banks commonly issued their own bank notes, a function which modern central banks took over for good reason. But the Swiss Sovereign Money initiative goes much, much further. If the central bank has a monopoly on the creation of 'electronic money', then fractional reserve banking would cease to exist (although it would no doubt be resurrected in more opaque and risky forms). Instead, if a bank wanted to issue a loan to a business or investment, it would have to rely on its own deposits or (and here's the kicker) borrow from the central bank, which would create 100 per cent of money which the bank loans out.

From an accounting perspective, transactions appear largely the same under either system; but the risk inherent in expansionary spending is transferred from the balance sheet of the bank to the balance sheet of the central bank, and thus the state. All debt - both public and private - would then carry sovereign or public risk. Now, given the post-GFC bank bailouts and the political imperative to stabilise the economy when the banking sector crashes it, it may be true that horizontal money is in some sense always a liability for the state. Sovereign Money would make that implicit assumption explicit and unavoidable. But if your policy concern is the risks posed to people's livelihoods by the selfishness of the finance sector, then your problem is with capitalism - not they monetary system. Changing the latter does nothing to alleviate the risks posed by the former. 

MMTs true face?

I've said before that there is a vast disconnect between the theory of 'modern' money (which is interesting) and the sorts of policies its proponents advocate. If MMT is just a description of how horizontal finance operates, then why is it being outlawed by constitutional amendment? If sovereign money means governments can already create and spend money more than present, why is a radical restructuring of the finance sector necessary to allow that to occur? The Swiss initiative is rolling out all the usual MMT canards in an effort to sway voters: sovereign money means more spending for things like a UBI, lower taxes, more jobs or more infrastructure [take your pick]! The SNB has called out the Initiative's backers for advocating the funding of public spending through seignorage - exactly the issue I highlighted in my previous blog post on MMT. 

The Swiss initiative is also playing a dangerous game with populist and nationalist talking points. One of the campaigns key slogans is that voters want 'real francs', not merely promises to pay from banks. Rather than educating voters about the complexity of the financial system, the Initiative aims to force finance to behave in accordance with the naive picture voters have of it in their heads. The Initiative is also obsessed with talking about debt, which is an odd position for a economic movement which tells policy makers to massively expand public spending. Voters are being told that sovereign money will 'eliminate' private debt [which sits at more than twice GDP] - which is true only in a very technical sense. Private debt isn't a risk if [most] businesses that are lent to remain solvent and have the ability to repay their loans over time. The Initiative is weaponising conservative talking points to pursue a policy that would socialise private debt and give Switzerland a higher public debt-to-GDP ratio than Greece. 

Best Case Scenario

The best case scenario for Sovereign Money is that it works as advertised and that the disruption to the Swiss monetary system is primarily technical. As a result, the SNB would become the dominant actor in the economy, with vast powers to set the direction of economic and fiscal policy by deciding which economic activities are funded and on what terms. Swiss debt would be 100% backed by the state's printing presses, making the country an attractive destination for foreign capital fleeing systemic risks in the global economy. Banks would be almost totally prevented from adding to systemic economic risks on their own, with the caveat that those risks would be distributed throughout the economy and depend almost entirely on consumers (and international money markets) continued faith in the value of the Swiss franc. 

Now, I'm all in favour of a heavy regulatory hand on banks, and a public option for private banking, but jumping immediately from laissez-faire finance to central economic planning is a bit too much of a leap, even for me. The central bank, and by extension the government, would own all debt - for both good and ill. Anything and everything that goes wrong in the economy will be the state's responsibility, by definition. Whether the economy performs well or performs badly will be seen rightly, as a judgement of whether the government has lent too much or too little. And yet, capitalism and all its structural flaws would remain in place. As I've said before, Sovereign Money is not a panacea that let's us make an end-run around the actual hard work of regulating and reforming capitalism. As the Keynesians discovered in the 1970s, if your only policy tool for managing a downturn is inflation, you're going to eventually encounter a catastrophic collapse of economic activity. 

Worst Case Scenario

The worst case scenario, to me, would appear more likely. Like most government agencies under capitalism, the Central Bank would not use its new powers to tame private markets for the good of voters, but instead become captured by private interests and use its powers in furtherance of private agendas. No government will be able to say no to printing the funds for whatever project enters a key constituency's fancy; banks, in turn, would enjoy unrestricted and completely risk-free access to the public's piggy bank in order to pursue their own private profits - including investing overseas, offshoring local manufacturing or by buying up highly risky or speculative asset classes. In effect, a Sovereign Money system would formalise the kind of developmental capitalism that is still prevalent in some parts of the world where big businesses enjoy privileged or corrupt access to public funds and use those funds to invest in capital-intensive projects of self-aggrandisement with little or no assessment of its benefits for national productivity. And when such projects fail, as some always must, or drive up inflation without producing sustainable economic activity, it's the state that's left to clean up the mess. 

A run on a bank may collapse that bank, if it has structured its debts unwisely and regulatory oversight has been lax in preventing excessive risk. A bank collapse or a bad investment means that excess capital, or at least some of it, is written off and the economic activity supported by that money deflates and self-corrects. But a run on a sovereign currency would mean the [digital] printing presses went to work with all the inflationary implications that entails: every debt, public or private, would *have* to be redeemed, in full, or the national currency would become immediately worthless. Capital could only ever expand, and unprofitable or risky economic activities could continue indefinitely without any mechanism for self-correction ('creative destruction') other than, well, central economic planning. 

For those reading at home worried about all this, I say: don't panic. Almost the entire Swiss establishment opposes the Sovereign Money initiative and I've read interviews with its backers where they say they don't expect to win and are merely testing the public appetite for this sort of policy. But the Swiss referendum provides a preview of the sorts of policies, and tactics in support of those policies, that we might anticipate MMT advocates pursuing elsewhere in the world when given an opportunity to do so. 

On Reputation: Or, how and why bad ideas need rebranding

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:

  1. be personally or ideologically committed to the preservation of the status quo
  2. encounter viewpoints, typically from a minority, that critique the status quo
  3. attempt to tone police critical minority
  4. 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.