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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Thinking Outside the Vox

Way back in the halcyon days of 2010, when hope and change were still things in the democratic party, blogger Julian Sanchez used the term epistemic closure to describe the crisis he saw on the political right in those days.  Long story short, epistemic closure refers to the insulation of both a belief system and the media built up around that belief system against any further knowledge, ideas or lines of reasoning.  Naysayers and dissenters are best ignored alltogether, or tarred by association with the enemy - whoever they are.  But it goes deeper than that: once an ideological system is firmly commited to, lines of thought that even potentially threaten it simply can't be given even the slightest legitimacy.  The rapidity with which the USSR unravelled after glasnost was introduced illustrates the risks invovled.

Hence epistemic closure.  For the American conservatives, the Reagan Era only really ended when our favorite reality T.V star won bigly over the GOP establishment.  Up until then, there was nothing a tax cut couldn't fix and the democrats were forever coming to take everybody's guns away.  Argue with them about any of it, and you'd had the wool pulled over your eyes personally by Obama, Hillary or Nancy Pelosi, who were nothing but Marxists out to destroy all things American.

When Sanchez described this phenomina on the right, he saw little comparison on the left in 2010.   As perhaps a foreshadowing of what was just around the corner, he cited liberal obsessions with racism as being the sole motivation of the tea party as the closest that the left, such as it was, came to its own brand of epistemic closure.

He would not have to wait long for the leftist equivalent to epistemic closure.  Allow me to explain.  Or perhaps I should say, allow me to voxsplain:

One of the most striking examples of this epistemic closure among liberal writers are their forays into “explanatory journalism.” The idea that many people might like clear, smart explanations of what’s going on in the news certainly has merit. But the tricky thing with “explaining” the news is that in order to do so fairly, you have to be able to do the mental exercise of detaching your ideological priors from just factually explaining what is going on. Of course, as non-liberal readers of the press have long been well aware, this has always been a problem for most journalists. And yet, the most prominent “explanatory journalism” venture has been strikingly bad at actually explaining things in a non-biased way. 

I am, of course, talking about Vox, the hot new venture of liberal wonkblogger extraordinaire Ezra Klein. It was already a bad sign that his starting lineup was mostly made up of ideological liberals. And a couple months in, it’s clear that much of what passes for “explanation” on Vox is really partisan commentary in question-and-answer disguise.

The article also mentions the fact that most "voxsplainers" - the tired pontification of liberal canards to the ignorant masses as if they've never heard it before - cannot pass Brian Caplan's Ideological Turing Test, defined as the ability to convincingly and authentically relay their ideological opponent's position on the relevant issues.

Perhaps the most quintessential Voxsplaining I've yet encountered is Aja Romano's protracted voxplanation of How the Alt-Right's Sexism Lures Men into White Supremacy.  It's what you'd expect:

In many alt-right communities, men are encouraged to view women as sexual and/or political targets that men must dominate. The men in these communities don’t see themselves as sexist; they see themselves as fighting against their own emasculation and sexual repression at the hands of strident feminists. 

So called "manosphere" concepts are then used as a kind of gateway drug to interest socially isolated young men deeper into an esoteric politics of crypto fascism and white supremacy.

Well, duh!

The alt-right and the manosphere are full of what the internet nowadays calls cancer - content that is light on intellectual content and heavy on cringe.  But the deeper point here can be summed up in an old African proverb that warns that if you don't initiate your young men into the tribe, they'll eventually come back and burn your village down.  Experts on gang, cult and extremist recruitment tactics have long understood this.  Alienated young men with no roots in the community and little prospect for a good life are easy marks.  Ironic then that the most strident on the alt-right, and their Islamic Jihadist nemesis, are ultimately drawn from the same ranks of humanity.  Ironic, but hardly without precedent.

Absent from Romano's analysis of the Alt-Right and its origins is any prescription of actually countering this that might actually reduce the propensity of young men to be drawn to extremism.  Targets are described as being sexually frustrated and often raised by feminist single moms, and the lure of being a real man as opposed to being weak and emasculated is what's used to draw them in.  The only difference between "Sieg Heil" and "Allahu Akbar" in this case could well be whichever one gets to them first, and what color their skin is.

The article chides the alt-right for offering alienated young men no real advice for dealing with loneliness, emotional issues and relationship difficulties and instead simply scapegoating independent women and minorities for their personal problems.  While this is a fair criticism, it's one that could as easily be leveled against Vox, and its countless clones across the internet.  Apart from scolding young white men for their racism and sexism, what is the mainstream left really offering them by way of an alternative?

Especially since the Vox article traces the history of the Alt-Right through Donald Trump's victory, through the Brexit vote and back to the GamerGate online movement, and to the various segments of the "manosphere" that existed prior to that.  The numbers and influence of these angry white dudes - the rank-and-file, or mooks - to use online video game terminology - of the forces of oppression only grew, despite all of the efforts made by Vox, Slate, Salon, Everyday Feminism, Occupy Democrats, Jezebel, The Mary Sue and other outlets of enlightened progressivism to tell them how very, very sexist, racist and fascist they were being all the while.  In fact, how very Nazi they had always been simply by virtue of being white males.

And now they're surprised when these same angry young dudes turn out to accept and embrace an ideology that actually promotes racism, misogyny and fascism.  They're surprised that the generation of young men these single feminist mothers raised have become exactly what single feminist women have been telling them they were since they were old enough to pluck letters off a computer screen: racist, misogynist and fascist.

Who would have guessed?

That, folks, is what epistemic closure on the left looks like.

Young white males are quite within their rights to reject the online left's obsessive and compulsive idealization of women and minorities.  They are well within their rights to reject the ceaseless narrative of white male "power" and "privilege," especially when it comes from credentialed academics and pundits who have way more power and privilege than many of these young white dudes will ever have.

They are not entitled to have the women to whom they're attracted reciprocate that attraction.  That much is true.  But they are entitled to not have their natural instinctive urges tarred as misogyny, entitlement and objectification.  They are entitled to pursue love in a culture in which all the weight of mass society is not behind the demonization of male sexuality and the equation of female rejection of men with female power and independence.  And they sure as hell are entitled to not have to function in a society that brands their own similar rejection of women (or men passing themselves off as women) to whom they're not attracted as being misogyny, "fatphobia" or "transphobia."

Alternative online communities are not attacking "social justice warriors" because they're all - to the last, racist, mysogynistic and otherwise deplorable.  People of all descriptions object to the SJW's self righteousness, their hypocrisy, their arrogance and their propensity to milk privilege theory and "power plus prejudice" rationalizations for all the self serving double standards and get-out-of-jail free cards they're worth.  This, it would seem, is the real gateway drug to bona-fide fascism, racism and misogyny if indeed there ever was one.  And that should concern us all.

Fighting the alt-right cannot be done by further pontificating to angry white dudes on how very deplorable their anger, their whiteness and their dudeness is.  Perhaps the wisdom of Lao-Tsu could be of help to us - and the wisdom he conveyed in The Tao Te Ching, not The Art of War.  Sometimes the way to victory is by not fighting, but by offering an olive branch; membership in the tribe before the village gets burned down.

The mainstream leftist media shows at best a mixed inclination to do this.  Perhaps the real antidote to the alternative right is an alternative left.  One that might think that full employment, maybe even a job guarantee, might be a more effective way to get young men out of their parent's basements than yet another lecture on girl power would be.  One that has not yet succumbed to epistemic closure and is thus able to think outside the Vox.