The Intellectual Dark Web

"Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web" - An alliance of heretics is making an end run around the mainstream conversation. Should we be listening?" 

So reads a recent New York Times headline, and social media is now abuzz with talk about it.

"Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

The "Renegades" of the Intellectual web.
Do these look like spaghetti western villains to you?

In case you don't know, this is a loose group of bloggers and academics who are known for bucking the trends in today's cultural spaces. Their names are by now familiar to most of us. Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Heather Heying, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Christina Hoff Sommers, Claire Lehmann, Joe Rogan and Maajid Nawaz, among others. A mixed bag to be sure, though leaning towards a kind of classical liberal consensus. Some more "classical" than others.

The response has been what you'd expect.

The Guardian, showing that it has no intent on slowing its descent into becoming the Infowars of the left, runs the headline: The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ – the supposed thinking wing of the alt-right. THE “INTELLECTUAL DARK WEB” IS JUST A BUNCH OF WHINY RICH PEOPLE reads the subtle and nuanced headline at the outline.com. Nice all caps, guys. We would never have guessed that their great sin was being privileged white males had you used lower case letters. That ever vigilant bearer of the truth, Vox, runs this headline: The “Intellectual Dark Web,” explained: what Jordan Peterson has in common with the alt-right. 

Now to be fair, the Outline article is correct in pointing out that these thinkers aren't exactly marginalized or being censored. Not that they're claiming to be - most are expressing dismay at the state of free speech on campus rather than themselves claiming to be victims. Thus far, many of them hold academic positions, have published best selling books and bring in tens of thousands of dollars monthly on Patreon. So it is a stretch to paint the IDW as a posse of outlaw renegades on the run due to their heretical views. They aren't quite Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, I'll give the reg-left blogosphere that much. Besides, everybody knows that the real victims of marginalization these days are tenured women's studies professors in Ivy League colleges, "diversity officers" at publicly traded Silicon Valley tech giants and bloggers for outlets that are not exactly fringe themselves, like the Guardian. Poor things. It would sure be nice if feminists could just be heard in the media, online and on campus every once and a while.

A more accurate picture is painted in a more recent National Review article:

More substantively, I guess I still don’t get it. Having read the essay twice, it seems to me this IDW thing isn’t actually an intellectual movement. It’s just a coalition of thinkers and journalists who happen to share a disdain for the keepers of the liberal orthodoxy. Weiss recounts a bunch of conversion tales where once-respected and iconoclastic liberal types run head-on into the groupthink or party line of the liberal establishment. They suddenly have a revelation about the enforced orthodoxy of their own side, and as they pull on these intellectual threads, they face blowback and reinforcement from unexpected places.

That National Review more often than not paints a more accurate picture of the world than supposedly liberal outlets like the Guardian and Vox do is something I'm still struggling to become accustomed to. And that's precisely what the IDW, as described in Weiss's New York Times article, is really all about. It's about a complacent progressive left's loss of the moral and intellectual high ground. It shows for once and for all that St. George really has become the dragon. What began in the 1960s as a campus rebellion for free speech against an ossified status quo has itself become an ossified status quo that makes no mistake about its hostility towards free speech.

Regressive left indignation is thus more easily understood, if still unjustified. For one thing, the IDW is far from united behind a right wing banner. Indeed, Ben Shapiro is among its only outrightly conservative members (a poor choice IMO, Victor Davis Hanson is who I'd have gone after had I wanted a right wing intellectual). Jordan Peterson is arguably (and make no mistake, it is an argument) right leaning, given that his now heavily memed description of crustacean society emphasizes the natural occurrence of dominance hierarchies.

Beyond that, we're not talking the G.O.P national convention here.  Consider that one of its purported members, Sam Harris - no fan of Donald Trump, to put it mildly, was also part of the wrecking crew that dismembered the Christian right back in the Bush years. Good to see he'd be happy to repeat the performance with the regressive left.

Could the left even put forward its own IDW candidates? Besides the brothers Eric and Bret Weinstein, two of its central figures, that is? Despite showing his age and being a bit unhinged on occasion, Noam Chomsky is no dummy and has shown some dismay for the postmodern elements on the left. Slavoj Žižek remains the philosopher of the common man, though you wouldn't know it trying to read him sometimes. Kyle Kulinski at Secular Talk does a lot of sharp work. Ditto for Jimmy Dore. I'm sure there are others, none any more fans of excessive political correctness than most people on the right, and without the ideological baggage that conservatism brings with it.

Those pundits and more like them will be needed in the future. Gone are the days when being progressive came with a default sense of intellectual and moral superiority. That's been the true impact of the IDW. The left is going to have to work for it now, and they're out of shape, if the contents of The Guardian and Vox are anything to go by. Once upon a time, being progressive meant you got to be the smart one in the room when your opposition consisted of creation "scientists", televangelists like Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, climate change deniers, paid shills for the pharmaceutical or energy lobbies, conspiracy theorists a-la the aforementioned Infowars and raving a.m radio talking heads in the vein of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

Weren't those the days?  It's a shame they're gone.

Not the right wing loons, sadly. They're still with us. What's been lost is the default assumption of progressive intellectual advantage and moral integrity. That's been squandered by the SJWs.

Now, being progressive all too often means anti-whiteness events on college campuses and masculinity being toxic. It means equating right leaning libertarians a-la Ben Shapiro with outright Nazis and denying the very science and reason that once made the progressives oh so superior to Christian conservatives as social constructions that privilege socially powerful groups. It means hammer and sickle waving goons giving Nazi skinheads a run for their money and trashing colleges and urban centers. It means apologizing for Muslim extremists from behind the rubric of anti-racism and mindlessly following along with a closed and insular party platform drawn up in feminist theory and critical race theory studies departments without any regard for an outside world dismissed as hopelessly racist, misogynistic and oppressive. Hell, in the wake of #MeToo allegations targeting progressives in Hollywood, they can't even be morally superior to disgraced televangelists any more.

No wonder the progressive establishment is so ornery.

What remains to be seen is whether the IDW will be enough to topple the regressive left hegemony on most college campuses and in the mainstream media. I suspect not. Not yet. The regressive left has shown itself impervious to reason to a degree that even the Christian right was not. This will require more than a posse of intellectual outlaw renegades. It requires popular support and sustained effort on part of a movement that effectively organizes and strategizes. While the anti-SJW cause has come a long way since its genesis on 4chan and gamergate, we ain't there yet.

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Sam Harris, Identity Politics and Valid Argument

A white female commentator on Sam Harris's statements regarding identity politics had this to say:

I get very annoyed with Sam Harris whenever he speaks negatively about “identity politics.” Please understand that the suppression of what is thought of as “identity politics” is used to maintain the status quo of white supremacy and patriarchy. It mainly suits white men in power, and only works to silence and dismiss women and minorities further. 

Here is an example of what I’m talking about: In order to understand the serious problems of systemic racism and abuse within police departments, you have to listen to and validate the experiences of black people. You cannot simply value the data that is written down and reported, considering that it’s written down and reported by the police themselves, so it’s always biased in their favor. You should never simply assume that they are reporting every interaction objectively and honestly. If you assume that they are, you are incredibly naive. 

Additionally, think about everything that is never actually reported. Many black individuals describe a lifetime of being targeted and harassed by police officers, from the time they were young children. They often describe the disrespectful, rude manner in which many cops have spoken to them. There is no data that would describe this. But just imagine how a lifetime of being harassed and mistreated by rude cops might affect you and your reaction to the police. It would make sense to be a little angry and defensive with them, if you’re fed up with being harassed and mistreated. It also helps to paint a picture of the problem of systemic racism. 

The same can be applied to women as victims of sexual assault, rape, and sexual harassment. There is so much that we never report. The numbers don’t tell you the whole story. It’s far more common for women to be victimized by men than one might think.

When Sam Harris says in this video that speaking about your experiences related to your identity is “not the sign of clear thinking,” he is gaslighting minorities and women. He is making a judgment about their rationality and is implying that they’re somehow crazy and less rational than him. But this is easy for him, a white man, to say. He is speaking from a place of privilege. 

This is an example of white supremacy and patriarchy in action. Sam is not a bad person. He doesn’t realize he’s perpetuating white supremacy and patriarchy. But he absolutely is. He is in the dominant majority, so his experiences are in line with those of the people who overwhelmingly have power, write our laws, and make the rules throughout our society. 

Here is more gaslighting from Sam, painting women and minorities as crazy and irrational: 

“If you’re reasoning honestly about facts, then the color of your skin is irrelevant” —(Easy for a white person to say!) 

“Not being emotionally engaged usually improves a persons ability to reason about the facts.” — (But of course you’d be “emotionally engaged,” if you’re speaking of how you’ve been abused and victimized. That shouldn’t make your experiences any less valuable! He is dismissive because he doesn’t have to be emotionally engaged. He comes from a place of privilege, so he doesn’t feel the same emotions about these topics. He hasn’t experienced the abuse, discrimination, marginalization, etc firsthand.) 

“The color of your skin simply isn’t relevant information. Your life experience isn’t relevant information. And the fact that you think it might be is a problem.” — (This is a very privileged, white supremacist, heteronormative, cisnormative thing to say.)

Sam's views on identity politics that are being discussed here are outlined in the below video

I think what Harris is trying to say here comes down to this: Either there is or there is not systemic discrimination against minorities in America. Whether that's true or not does not depend on whether the person making the claim is white or black. Above, a white female commentator, is making the claim that there is systemic discrimination against minorities in America. This is a claim regarding the status of minorities in America. Is that claim rendered false by the fact that the commenter is white?

The answer is obviously no, and that's what Sam Harris is really saying here.

The irony of a white woman invoking identity in this manner to defend identity politics should not be lost on us. Were she to discount the claims made by Black Lives Matter activists regarding police treatment of minorities, her own logic allows for the invalidation of her claims on the basis of her race. So why wouldn't this be the case since she's agreeing with them? Ditto for male feminists who discount male critics of feminism on the basis of they're being male? Funny how identity only seems to matter when it's a defense of a feminist or critical race theory from criticism, but becomes suddenly irrelevant when those theories are being defended. This is precisely the kind of rhetorical slight of hand that has led Sam Harris and many others, myself included, to distrust identity politics.

That is a very different thing from saying that the voices of minorities should not be considered when determining whether such discrimination is occuring or not. I don't think that's what Harris is claiming. He does admit in this clip that there are times when a person's identity and experience can be useful in determining whether a claim pertinent to that identity is true or not, as his example of Catholic theology exemplifies.  To fail to take into consideration what feminist or BLM activists have to say regarding the status of their groups would ultimately be guilty of the same kind of fallacy as these activists themselves would be when they shoot down their opponents for being white males. It assumes a-priori that the arguer has a vested interest in their claim and uses this to discount the claim. While either or both sides may indeed have a vested interest, and that should be noted, that does not make the claims made true or false in and of themselves. 

Blacks either are or are not subject to a greater degree of police harassment than white people are. Women either are or are not subject to a greater degree of street harassment and workplace sexual harassment than males are. The truth of those claims does not depend on the identity of the person making the claim, though actually listening to the testimonials of blacks and women is essential to establishing those truths.

As such, I think we certainly should listen to what women, minorities and so forth are saying about the realities of being what they are in America at present. We should be mindful, however, that the dean of women's studies or black studies at Harvard may not be the best exemplars of the typical woman's or black person's experience. Quite often, the loudest purveyors of feminist and/or critical race theory are light years away from the typical experience of their respective demographics and do have an ongoing vested interest in the claims that they make being accepted entirely at face value by the broader society. I worry that a self appointed vanguard of quasi intellectual activists are going to exploit popular movements in order to seize institutional power (as we see in academia, in Silicon Valley, in a lot of media outlets, Hollywood, Disney and so on) and then use those positions of power to impose their will on the broader population and the postmodern academic ideologies they fabricate within the very privileged and cushioned walls of the ivory tower as legitimizing rationalizations for their own very real power and privilege. That's been happening a lot and is a major driver in the online backlash against social justice warriors. 

So we should be mindful of issues like that. The voices of women and minorities who do not uphold the oppression narratives cannot simply be dismissed. When concepts like false consciousness or internalized racism and/or misogyny get raised, that should raise red flags for critical readers and listeners. What's worse than actually arguing from identity consistently is cherry picking arguments from identity, and assuming them to be valid if and only if they conform to preexisting ideological narratives. This is quite obviously intellectually (and ultimately morally) dishonest.

But we should, if we want to reason honestly about the status of minorities in America, actually listen to what minorities are actually saying life is like for them and considering that when making the evaluation. Not all will say it's tougher being black - blacks have no way to know what it's like to be white so if identity is to be the basis of our arguments, it merely puts them back at square one for this reason. But many more blacks than whites, on a per-capita basis, will describe harsher treatment at the hands of police, I would suspect. I do think women and minorities face issues that white males do not, or face to a far lesser degree, and I do worry about the tendency to handwave their claims as mere SJW pearl clutching, and that tendency has grown online in the last few years. What's crucial to understand, though, is that their claims are true if and only if their claims are, in fact, true. Not merely because they belong to minority demographics. The distinction is subtle yet crucial.

Additional Commentary from the Alternative Left
Identity Politics: Pro Social Justice, Anti SJW
Socrates Talks Class and Identity
Why You Should Not be an Intersectional Feminist

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The New Atheism: When Bertrand Russell Met Lenin Once Again

The "new" atheism - a misnomer, really - emerged into the mainstream in the early 2000s with the publication of such works as The End of Faith by Sam Harris, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.  It was not really new in the sense that they were not saying anything that Bertrand Russell hadn't said back in the 1920s, and other philosophers before even him.

What was new was how this early 21st century wave of atheism used the internet to take the American cultural scene by storm.  The net was dominated by a younger, more libertarian cohort, and they were getting ever angrier and more frustrated with the Christian conservative Bush white house.  It wasn't just Bush's policies that drove their bitterness, but rather his facade of down-home folksiness, exemplified by his intentional mispronunciations of words.  These new atheist authors found a receptive audience in these social media pioneers, for whom the problems America, and indeed the world, were facing were reducible to too much church attendance among red state Americans.

The Meme of Legends

These new atheists did indeed make a convincing deconstruction of evangelical Christian doctrines, and their propensity to mop the floor with Christians in online flame wars became the subject of memes.  The case they make against the inerrancy of scripture is convincing.  Personally, I was never really convinced by them, however.  Not fully.  While this argument drove online atheists crazy, I was among those who thought of them as their own sort of evangelists.  I didn't trust the degree of importance they attached to the nonbelief in God, as if that was what made or broke a person morally or intellectually.  Funny how alike their mirror image fundamentalist rivals they were in that respect.

I didn't trust how eager so many of them were to pronounce as fact something they could not prove - the nonexistence of God, despite their constant insistence on smoking gun evidence for God's existence from their religious opponents.  The implication that all the world's problems could be laid at the feet of belief in Christian dogmas struck me as absurdly reductionist. Bertrand Russell became aware of the fact that God-belief wasn't the real root of the problem after meeting Lenin in 1920, and becoming extremely put off by Lenin's fanatical devotion to a decidedly non religious ideology.  My direct experience with Bush era internet atheists was that they were staunchly unwilling to learn from Russell's experience.  Talk to them of the terrors of the Soviet anti-religious campaigns or the Red Chinese invasion of Tibet and cultural revolution, and I was universally admonished - especially by female liberal atheists - to stop sounding like such a McCarthyite Republican.

Their experience with religion seemed limited to the conservative, evangelical Bush presidency and was defined entirely by being opposed to abortion and gay marriage.  I was no friend to religious conservatism either, and had not been since the Satanic Panic of the 1980s wherein I was accused of devil worship on account of listening to heavy metal music and playing Dungeons and Dragons.  But after having read Bertrand Russell, Eric Hoffer and others who'd done deeper research into the nature of belief and fanaticism, it seemed to me as though the new atheists were hamstrung by a decidedly one dimensional take on spiritual concerns.  Although some of them had even read works by Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, many atheists I knew online and in real life seemed to not grasp that side of human nature that was drawn towards the mythical, the poetic and the spiritual.

Increasingly, online atheism came to be about smugness, wittiness, signalling, sarcasm, posturing, decidedly anti-holy holier than thou-ness, and just how much smarter they all were than those stupid religious rubes, inbreeding in the Ozarks, or the like.  Being considered a good person was measurable by the correctness of one's beliefs and one's politics.  The smug scenester mindset that I'd seen among my counter-culture acquaintances in high school was there all over again, except it was religious incorrectness rather than listening to the wrong kind of music that would get you snubbed by the very same people who claimed to despise preppy snobbery.  There was no room at the table for people who believed in sky daddies, invisible pink unicorns or flying spaghetti monsters.  He who fought with monsters was not taking care, and gazing altogether too long into the abyss.

I disliked religious intolerance, of course, but much more the intolerance than the religious.  Especially when said intolerance was becoming increasingly agenda-driven and ideologically ego-stroking and self serving.  Most anti-religious liberals were decidedly unwilling to take on Islam, for instance, long before Maajid Nawaz called out regressive leftism.  Associations of anti-Islamism with racism were not invented by Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. It was old hat even then.  Censorship and sexual prudishness were only wrong when the Catholic Church and southern evangelicals were doing it.  When radical feminists and college campuses were doing it, you were obviously an anti-gay, anti-abortion Bush loving republican for even daring to say such a thing.  Clerical celibacy was just oh, so unnatural, but separatist radical feminism was heroic resistance against the patriarchy.

This was my experience from 2006 onwards.  What would come to be called the SJWs and the Regressive Left were, as popular concepts, years away still.  But the foundations had already long been laid and set.  The hypocrisy on the left that drove me to abandon progressivism in the late 1990s after reading Warren Farrell's Myth of Male Power only seemed to be intensifying.

Thus, when donglegate happened, and Elevatorgate happened, and Atheism+ happened, the new atheists were a lot more surprised than I was.  Descriptions of the debacle that was atheism+ in this 2013 article in Atheist Revolution now seem quaintly humorous in their familiarity.  Postmodern intersectional 3rd wave feminism: Like Seinfeld, classic Star Trek or the music of the Beatles, it's easy to forget that a much younger and less worldly you actually experienced it for the first time:

"On August 19, 2012, blogger Jen McCreight unleashed "Atheism+" upon unsuspecting atheists around the world, and some would say our community has been divided ever since."

"Still others were turned off by the manner in which Atheism+ quickly became an "us vs. them" endeavor that seemed to be more about branding, self-promotion, and purging the atheist community of those who were not liked by those who decided to promote Atheism+ than it did about social justice."

"I was wrong about most atheists valuing skepticism and critical thinking. I would soon realize that many atheists were not skeptics or critical thinkers, at least not when it came to some aspects of their ideology. Unfortunately, I discovered I was wrong by observing the behavior of many of the most vocal supporters of Atheism+. They demonstrated little willingness to think critically or skeptically about the particular form of feminism that seemed to be at the center of their worldview."

"Because Atheism+ was righteous, those who offered criticism were not just people who disagreed; they were bad people. In order to be a valued member of the community, one needed to be the right kind of feminist."

And this, the canary in the coal mine gone silent even in 2013:

"Social justice tends to emphasize human rights, making it more inclusive than the particular issues Jen listed after it. For example, social justice efforts have long focused on the plight of the poor. This was nowhere to be found on Jen's list."

You don't say!

The moment I had been hoping for since 1992, when I read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale - when a substantial portion of liberals would catch on to the fact that the postmodern progressivism of which the new atheism was a part, and Christian conservatism were much more alike than different beneath their cultural veneers - finally seemed to happen in the later part of 2014.  The tone of the discussion had finally shifted.  Bill Maher and Sam Harris were squaring off against Ben Affleck on Real Time, and a YouTuber calling himself the Amazing Atheist had finally found a punching bag he preferred to the Christian God in another YouTuber by the name of Anita Sarkeesian.

Once again, it seemed, Bertrand Russell had met Lenin, and was again unimpressed by what he saw.

About damn time.

Sam Harris on Identity Politics

Sam Harris talking sense about identity politics.

Sam Harris:

I distrust identity politics.  Of all kinds.  I think we should talk about specific issues.  Whether it's trade or guns or immigration or foreign interventions or abortion or anything else.  And we should reason honestly about them.  I'm not the first person to notice that it's pretty strange that knowing a person's position on any one of these issues generally allows you to predict his position on the others.  This shouldn't happen.  Some of these issues are totally unrelated.

Why should a person's attitude on guns be predictive of his views on climate change? Or immigration?  Or abortion?  And yet, it almost certainly is in our society. It's a sign that people are joining tribes and movements.  It's not the sign of clear thinking.  If you're reasoning honestly about facts, then the color of your skin is irrelevant.  The religion of your parents is irrelevant.  Whether you're gay or straight is irrelevant.  Your identity is irrelevant.  

In fact, if you're talking about reality, its character can't be predicated on who you happen to be.  That's what it means to be talking about reality.  And it also applies to the reality of human experience and human suffering.  For instance, if vaccines don't cause autism, if that is just a fact and that's what the best science suggests at this point, then when arguing against this view, you need data, or a new analysis of existing data.  You need an argument.  And the nature of any argument is that its validity doesn't depend on who you are.  That's why a good argument should be accepted by others, no matter who they are.

So in the case of vaccines causing autism, you don't get to say, "as a parent with a child with autism, I believe X, Y and Z."  Whatever is true about the biological basis of autism can't depend on who you are, and who you are in this case is probably adding a level of emotional engagement with the issue which is totally understandable, but would also be unlikely to lead you to think about it more clearly.  The facts are whatever they are.  And it's not an accident that being disinterested - not interested, but disinterested, that is not being emotionally engaged, usually improves a person's ability to reason about the facts. 

When talking about violence in our society, again, the facts are whatever they are.  How many people got shot, how many died, what was the color of their skin, who shot them, what was the color of their skin?  Getting a handle on these facts doesn't require one to say, "as a black man, I know X, Y and Z.  The color of your skin simply isn't relevant information.  

When talking about the data, that is what is happening throughout the whole society, your life experience isn't relevant information, and the fact that you think it might be is a problem.  Now this isn't to say that a person's life experience is never relevant to a conversation.  Of course it is.  And it can be used to establish certain kinds of facts.  If someone says to you, "Catholics don't believe in hell" it's perfectly valid to retort, "actually, my mother is a Catholic and she believes in hell."  Of course, there's a larger question of what the Catholic doctrine actually is.   

If a person is making a statement about a certain group of people, and you are a member of the group, you might be in a position to falsify his claim, on the basis of your experience. But a person's identity and life experience often aren't relevant when talking about facts, and they're usually invoked in ways that are clearly fallacious.  Many people seem to be making a political religion out of ignoring this difference.  

So I urge you not to be one of those people.   

Sound advice, Sam.