Enlightenment Now? Out, Out, Brief Candle.
Something is rotten in the Heterodox Academy.
This essay was first published in The Post Millenial in November 2020.
In his book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Terror and Tyranny, Russian dissident and gulag survivor Natan Sharansky, proposes a simple test to discern if you are living in, what he calls, a free society or a fear society. He calls it the Town Square Test: Can a person walk into the middle of the town square and express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm? Today, the “town square” exists virtually, on social media, on Twitter and Facebook and the answer is a resounding, no.
There have been numerous incidents in the UK of people being visited by the police and told to “check their thinking” after voicing dissent against reality-denying ideologies. People today regularly run the gauntlet of being labeled a fascist for stating unequivocal biological facts. The trend continues apace. Last year, feminine hygiene producer Tampax launched a marketing campaign on Twitter claiming their products are for “people who bleed” and not women who menstruate.
Then there was this monstrosity.
In October 2020, as the mainstream media constructed a Biden firewall around the presidential presumptive son’s laptop; as Twitter and Facebook continued to curate the zeitgeist; I was left wondering if perhaps the first sign of serious
trouble was way back in 2006.
This was the year Larry Summers ‘resigned’ as president of Harvard University after a vote of no confidence by the liberal arts faculty. The reason? He had suggested that innate, average sex differences and not sexism, could be partly responsible for the underrepresentation of women in some industries. This was, and still is, a perfectly reasonable hypothesis in the real world, but is haram in the secular church of critical social justice theory. Since then, many people have lost livelihoods – and even their lives, as in the case of Mike Adams – after coming under progressively censorious and tyrannical scrutiny.
The First Socialist Revolution
The excesses of progressive, leftist ideology are not new to human civilization. Writing about the French Revolution in 1790, Edmund Burke, warned against the ideologues’ tendency to imbue themselves with false virtue, believing they are combating prejudice whilst actually declaring war on nature. This describes the present situation well.
Burke predicted the subsequent French reign of terror — the first socialist revolution — in which well over ten thousand people were put on trial and executed for political ‘crimes’. He wisely noted that when people play God they soon begin to behave like devils. This is as true today as it was then, and is a chronically overlooked fact by self-defining “liberal lefties”. As much as they dislike conservatives and republicans, the realism inherent to modern conservatism emerged from the same liberal enlightenment principles they support, in order to guard against the excesses of the dark side of human nature. One thing revolutions always lack is checks and balances on that very issue.
People like to blame politics and politicians for the things people do, but politics is not the first principle in these matters. Human nature is. Leftist romantic idealism — emerging from Locke’s doctrine of the blank slate and Rousseau’s noble savage — is a dangerous naivety, as the horrors of Stalin and Mao well demonstrate.
There appears to be a romantic idea that being a liberal somehow imbues you with saintly goodness. This is a complete fantasy. In my opinion, the most robust signifier of being a dogmatic leftist is not that you are a good person but a hopelessly deluded one! Nonetheless, the romance of the term is compelling to many.
As the US elections drew near in 2020, a gaggle of once heterodox intellectuals retreated from tricky, centrist ground to the comfort of the fallacy of the benign left. The fertile middle ground has become a dangerous place.
Though Pluckrose stated in the above tweet that she would not denounce co-author and friend, James Lindsay, the hyenas smelled blood and, as in the fable of the scorpian and the frog, predictably followed their true nature.
Lindsay’s crime was to announce his intention to vote for Trump in the election. Every accusation thrown at him since is a direct result of this and nothing more. He is the same person now as before. Standing for the same principles. He did not forsake heterodoxy and centrism, they forsook did him.
In the weeks prior to the 2020 election, we saw the principle of political heterodoxy crash and burn with a good deal of accelerant provided by ‘centrists’. Steven Pinker posted a bizarre tweet arguing, of all things, the libertarian case for voting for Biden. Perhaps he genuinely believed in his vision of benevolent liberalism; the “case for reason, science, humanism and progress” he made in Enlightenment Now. Or maybe those actions were an attempt to pay coin to his captors, and ward off future woke attacks, as the ancient Britons paid Danegeld to their Viking invaders in the hope of
staving off rape and pillage. I’ve long admired Pinker as a man who has tried to straddle the left/right ideological divide all his life with intellectual integrity. He has long self-identified as a social liberal but, as he is also an empirical
evolutionist, he cannot in good conscience deny the realities of biology.
In 2006 Pinker actually defended Larry Summers’ heretical claims of average sex differences. This, and his failure to utterly submit to leftist ideology, earned him a place on their hit list. To true believers of the woke secular church, Pinker is a symbol of the cis-white-hetero-capitalist-patriarchy. All their roads lead to the destruction of these institutions built by such people. By any means necessary. I was aghast watching Pinker joyously dad dancing to Biden’s presidential win. This won’t save him. He can do all he can to save his legacy while alive, but after his death, the hyenas will strike, just as they did with E. O. Wilson.
(Hypo)critical Theory
This article is a lament because Pinker is a writer I have admired for many decades and wrote one of the most important books of the 21st century, The Blank Slate. It’s been hard for me to understand the position of Pinker and his intellectual cadre, who have helped document the inexorable capture of our institutions by the illiberal left over the last 50 years. The Larry Summers putsch was a clear warning that we failed to respond to. Now we find ourselves today in a place where leftists do not even try to hide their agenda, but instead, as with the 1619 project brazenly bends reality out of shape to support it. Where the enslavement of dead people is condemned whilst a thriving contemporary slave trade in Africa and Asia is willfully ignored. Black lives only seem to matter if they are dead.
In the face of these hypocrisies, liberals still try to claim that Trump’s four years in office were the biggest threat to liberal democracy. As Thomas Sowell was apt to say, “Compared to what?!”
Average intelligence is quite enough smarts to know that claim stinks. Common sense and logic have been inverted by critical theory and intersectionality. The intellectual classes have fallen for it, but not the working classes.
Becoming Woke on the Road to Montgomery.
Jon Haidt, author of numerous books including The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Religion and Politics, is another formidable self-declared liberal defender of critical thinking. He published a paper in 2015 noting that the underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology was likely a consequence of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. In response, Haidt created the Heterodox Academy, a group of four thousand academics, administrators, and graduate students who supposedly believe in academic viewpoint diversity.
He has, however, explicitly backpedaled from these principles this year, explaining his change from being a critic of critical theory to now “opening his heart” to it. His transformation happened, he said, after the death of George Floyd when he was invited to visit museums about slavery and lynching in Montgomery. He reported having a very powerful emotional experience and has since been trying to expose himself to “different webs of meaning”. Link below will take you to this moment:
All I can say is, good for him. I’ve never needed to visit a museum to empathize with humans in bondage or understand the horrors of slavery. Slavery is still ongoing in Africa and Asia. I felt the same about Anne Frank and the holocaust both before and after I visited the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam. If anything, the explicit lack of human empathy in the Black Lives Matter/critical race theory movement; the blatant attempt to capture wealth; the embedded Marxism; have done more to close my heart to it than open it. It was open before and it still is to people in need of help and compassion.
Critical race theory is racism and I will never “take the knee” to it.
This is not Haidt’s first inconsistency, however. Two years before becoming woke on the road to Montgomery, in a Sam Harris podcast, Haidt described a highly equivocal encounter as “unequivocally racist” and in that moment ruined an innocent, vulnerable person’s life. (Go to 36 mins on the timeline)
Harris is another of our public intellectuals who cannot seem to parse the difference between actual murderous authoritarianism around the world and Trump’s real – no bullshit – politik. Harris claimed that he found Trump more reprehensible than Osama Bin Laden. He protested he was taken out of context, but so did the person both he and Haidt casually condemned, to no avail.
Known as the Yale, “napping while black” incident and widely reported as a racially charged boundary dispute, there was no attempt by the mainstream media to represent both sides of the story. The accused, Sarah Braasch, was thrown under the equality and diversity bus by everyone involved. Including our heterodox heroes.
Braasch is a working-class woman like myself, who fought hard to resist a pre-ordained working-class destiny. A vulnerable woman with a troubled childhood and a history of trauma. She is far from privileged. In fact, she is exactly the kind of woman the left ostensibly loves to help. Just the kind of woman they would say is vulnerable to further victimization. At the time of the incident, she was a committed social justice warrior, devoting her life to the study of systemic and institutional racism. Funded by scholarship, she was living in the Yale dorm in very unusual circumstances, in that she was the only person living on her floor, which was rarely used by other students. The encounter Haidt describes as “unequivocally racist” occurred in a dark room while the person was also covered in a blanket. As has been noted by other writers, Braasch could not have possibly known the person she found on her floor was either male or female, let alone black, until the escalation occurred.
Yet Haidt attributed explicit malign intent to a human being while robustly defending the institution it occurred in, on scant evidence. As years have passed, and the equivocal nature of the encounter has been established by numerous investigations, Haidt – and Yale – have singularly failed to apologise for the slander, which has compounded the difficulties Braasch has experienced as a vulnerable person with no family support or social safety net. She has spoken openly about suicidal tendencies (people have committed suicide under such stress) and regularly gets tweets like the following, encouraging her to do so.
Curiously, Haidt has refused to consider a more parsimonious explanation against the extraordinary ideological one; that a misunderstanding occurred, then an overreaction, followed by a completely unnecessary escalation by Yale and then Haidt himself. Like it or not, he’s a cog in this wheel and she has a valid grievance. He might not like that Sarah’s angry and has nothing good to say about him. But she’s not in a position to ruin his life as he has contributed to the ruination of hers.
I myself suspect the people who accused Braasch had singled her out for harassment, having clocked her as a vulnerable and isolated woman. I suspect this is a case of malicious female bullying, fueled by a certain personality type and the current ideological miasma which feeds and facilitates narcissistic personalities. In the age of ‘social’ justice and weaponized empathy, bullies have never been more enabled to make their victims pay for the crime of simply crossing paths with them. Oh, did I mention, Sarah, forsaken by the humanist liberals, endorsed Trump. And just like Lindsay, became fair game in the realm of humanist blood sports. As a species, we’ve clearly not lost our taste for human sacrifice.
As for Haidt, someone whose area of research is the study of morality, his inability to even consider an alternative scenario is not the act of a person who values heterodox approaches to complex human social phenomena.
Our public intellectuals today who by dint of writing about the real threat to freedom of speech, enjoy a wonderful quality of life, social standing, respect, pensions, life insurance, and a faithful following of their own shock troops, now seem curiously deaf to their own warnings. They have instead joined the chorus of condemnation aimed at Trump supporters who can see the social justice emperor has no clothes, leaving us all high and dry.
More tragically, Braasch’s plight is ignored by business plans that claim to explicitly exist to help people in her situation. Supposedly non non-partisan organisations like Heterodox Academy, Fire, and Counterweight refuse to help her. She’s feisty in her self-defense, she’s a fighter, her mental health has been affected and she doesn’t pretend it hasn’t. These very human responses to her predicament make her a problematic client. Maybe if she would just stop being so psychologically traumatized by her continued ostracism and public free-for-all character assassination, she might make a more attractive client for these professional humanists.
A Dark Adaptation
Human physiology is a fascinating thing. If you sit in a dark place for long enough, your eyes go through a process called a dark adaptation, where the eye adjusts to the lack of light and clarity and can see much better than you did upon entering. Our culture has gone through a similar process, a similar dark adaptation, where progressives have been sitting in the dark so long the light is now intolerable to them.
James Lindsay, as mentioned above, is a notable exception. He is co-author of Cynical Theories: How Activist
Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody. Unlike his co-authors, researching the book took him on a journey that changed him forever.
While writing the book he had a very different revelation to Haidt, and made the decision to publicly announce his intention to vote for Trump. His reason was that he saw the real threat very clearly. In November he told me,
“I know how it works. It works by taking over administrative bureaucracies and twisting
them to its agenda. Trump can barely control it in his own administration but is actually
trying. Biden won’t just be permissive but also encouraging of it. It’s not liberal and cannot
be pushed back without standing up to it.”
Has this stood the test of time? I’d say so. But his friends and colleagues have forsaken him.
In the gulag, Natan Sharansky noted that there were all kinds of political prisoners and though each was centered their own concerns, there was also a functional heterodoxy. They all agreed they wanted to live in a free society. They all agreed on the definition of a free society, “A society is free if people have a right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm.”
There are many of us who are fighting for this today but are ostracised by the newly anointed as well as the old.
In today’s digital age, that definition of a “free society” needs to be extended to include the right not to be stalked and canceled on Stasi media, and pretend that this kind of relational aggression, typically favored by women and older men, doesn’t lead to real harm, hardship and death.
This isn’t hyperbole. If it is, then the last 20 years of public intellectual engagement, from The Blank Slate onwards, is also hyperbole.
Where does it leave us when intellectuals such as Pinker and Haidt the very people who taught us critical thinking, forsake it themselves? The only progressive thing about contemporary progressivism today is its familiar creeping totalitarianism.
Next read:
Do you still consider James Lindsey an average, middle of the road centrist?
All the talk about a neferious "global elite,..." and seeing groomers everywhere is more and more convincing me that he has gone down a bit of a conspiracy route.
Good summary. Mutilating children, universities with 2/3 women, openly racist/sexist policies/justice-system, feelings over facts, Scientific American becoming dribble, and so much more often make me bewildered and wanting to stop the world and get off. If a science fiction writer had described this world a mere two decades ago I would've claimed it as laughable unrealistic.
But what is the root cause? How did we get here?
I think your diagnosis that Summers was the canary in the mine is very true. However, how could a handful of unknown and in all regards mediocre female professors in women studies et alea get Summers fired so quickly? Summers was famous, came from the Clinton administration, and had done wonders for the coffers of Harvard. If he wasn't close to the top of the Patriarchy, who was? Haidt and Pinker are clearly also high up in the Patriarchy but they seem to bow to what is often a small minority of women. How did this swarm of mostly anonymous women get so powerful?
The theory I came up with is that we're seeing an evolutionary anomaly play out. Over the eons, women were powerful in the private sphere but relied on men to compete in the public sphere for their protection and well being. The strength imbalance evolved women to develop sex based coalitions to oppose male domineering. E.g.. Madeline Albright's "There is a special place in hell for women that do not help other women."
Women domineered the private space and developed traits like more empathy, higher levels of anxiety, more altruism. Since they had to collaborate with kin and neighbors, her competence was not that important for the position in the hierarchy. Intra-female conflicts are rarely heads on addressed but handled through gossip and female coalitions. A woman's safety (and thus the safety of her children) is more important to her than group loyalty.
Men evolved fluid competence hierarchies to forage food and build cathedrals. This made snitching a deadly sin; bullying and testing was used to get rid of the weak and useless men. Intra-male conflicts were directly addressed, if necessary physically as a last resort. There is usually a very strong group bonding creating an intra-group loyalty.
In the private sphere, women could dominate using coalitions and a strong normative modus of operation. Most feminist stories about oppression are laughable, they do not match human nature. Actually, most of the oppressive stories have a background of protection in a cruel nature with predators. Male traits are not that useful in the private sphere. Conflicts with your wife generally end up with the woman winning. Being the gatekeeper to sex is a very strong force. I.e. when a men asks "Do I look fat in these trousers" he will get a very different answer from a man than if a woman asks. Men tend to be fundamentally dishonest with women's praise because he will lose any conflicts and when she is very attractive, his blood is not in his brains. This made happy women in the private sphere.
In the public sphere, the masculine traits competence is paramount. However, feminists (a female coalition if there is one) used an appeal to fairness, and blackmail with victim hood, to make the public space less competitive to give women a bigger chance.
Once such a woman was inside, she immediately started to work on getting more women to create a female coalition. When you have only 20-30% women, they effectively take over the organization for anything related to their interest. Men have no immune system against women and therefore do not know how to oppose. This generally changes to organization to have more services, arrangements, and facilities for women. The mission then often changes to become more feminised. E.g. Scientific American. In the long run, the organization dies.
Men never developed an immune system for some of the female traits when applied at scale in the public sphere. To all our detriment, for the female traits that do their wondrous work in the private sphere turn toxic in the public sphere.