Speculation

The Signal is not the Strategy (It's OK to be hypocritical, Part 3)

This is a blog about “The Discourse”. About ‘free speech’ and persuasion. In my current work, I’m reading about the application of signalling theory to political science, and the theory and practice of cultural evolution. These disciplines make two core observations about political life in social species.

Firstly, a political strategy is comprised of two inter-related elements: behaviour and signal. A behaviour is simply an external action by an agent; a signal is a sub-type of behaviour which carries information content between one social actor and another. Of course, behaviour can act as a signal and a signal is a behaviour, but conceptually we can distinguish between those parts of an action which conveys information between agents and those parts that don’t. When it forms part of a strategy, sending a signal to another social agent has the objective of altering the beliefs of the receiver for the advantage of the sender. A corollary of this is that a signal is only that part of behaviour which is observable and comprehensible to the receiver - it does not include actions or motivations that are hidden from them. Through the written and spoken word, humans have unusually sophisticated ways of signalling one another, which the ‘Machiavellian hypothesis’ proposes was largely evolved for the purpose of manipulating others in social settings.

Secondly, in the sphere of cultural evolution we say that social agents learn by imitating the behaviour of other agents. We imitate the social strategies of others more successful from ourselves, in order to minimise the fitness difference between us. A corollary of this is that we copy pretty blindly - so that if our instructor includes additional steps or rituals which are empirically unnecessary humans will tend to copy those rituals too as if there were essential to the behaviour. What isn’t copied are the reasons or motivations for behaviour - whether our social models and celebrities are Machiavellian manipulators, religious fanatics or eccentric oddballs, if their social strategies work, then we copy them blindly. In other words, we buy the breakfast cereals recommended by our favourite celebrities, even if their choice of product as little or no bearing on their success as an actor, athlete or musician.

What these two observations lead to is this: signals (i.e. speech) can effectively change behaviour - in other words, be persuasive - even if the receiver of those signals does not understand why their beliefs have changed or why others wanted change to occur. By performing that social strategy themselves, and sending the same signal, they create a new social equilibrium without, in the main, conceptually understanding or agreeing with it. So for instance, socialists and Marxists have an enormous body of theory justifying and explaining their economic ideas but if they have only one signal which is persuasive - i.e. “Medicare for All” - then that slogan, that symbol, will be the vector that spreads socialist behaviours.

Taboos

The more time that passes, the less individuals are likely to know the empirical reasons for the behaviour and the more they are likely to treat them as a given, as ‘common sense’. Liberal social contract rights such as universal suffrage and habeas corpus seem so obvious now that they hardly appear worth defending (often to our detriment). But several generations backs, these rights were hard fought gains that responded to very real systematic abuses. Over time, what was once sensible, necessary reform became symbolism and ritual, devoid of meaning - until the time we need to fight certain battles all over again.

This sanctification of politics is most visible in US political discourse, particularly around issues of race. The abolition of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation were massive political achievements, hard fought and won with incredible violence. And yet a few generations later, major debates are occurring over the taboo status of particular words and behaviours. But the strength of the taboo is correlated first and foremost with the significance of the civil rights struggle - so much so that performing ‘black face’ can end careers - and not the behaviour itself, so that over time as memories of that struggle fade the ritual power of the taboo appears irrational and disproportionate.

We have seen this most recently in the centre-right (and corporate) response to Steven Crowder’s homophobic harassment of Vox journalist Carlos Maza - which has focused on the appropriateness of Crowder’s words (especially “queer”) and not on the behaviour behind it. What is objectionable about Crowder is the intent behind his crusade to dehumanise and harass another human being on the basis of their personal characteristics, and the broader social harm this causes, not the particular words, phrases and symbols used. The Right has become very good at disingenuously claiming that the signals they send are socially sanctioned - pointing especially to the innocuous use of those signals or symbols by others communities - knowing full well that the motivations behind their actions are almost impossible to prove.

patreon: http://patreon.com/InnuendoStudios tumblr: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com twitter: https://twitter.com/InnuendoStudios transcript: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/182302598987/new-video-essay-internet-reactionaries-argue-as research: http://innuendostudios.tumblr.com/post/183630744222/research-masterpost Borrowed Observation #1 - David Roberts mentions the "card says moops" scene in Seinfeld while explaining postmodern conservatism: https://grist.org/politics/david-roberts-explains-postmodern-conservatism-in-36-tweets/ Borrowed Observation #2 - Jay Allen describes chan culture: https://twitter.com/a_man_in_black/status/540095841948553217 Borrowed Observation #3 - Schrodinger's Douchebag defined by Sally Strange (not

The risk this causes for social progressives is that we might overly focus on the signal, not the strategy, for audiences that are not fully on our side, or theirs. The Right knows that when they use offensive language or symbols their signals have hidden structural meaning for their followers. And because we have studied our enemy, the Left knows what is motivating the right: when we say the Right is racist, homophobic or misogynistic, we’re not kidding. But for a non-informed audience who does not share the same social beliefs as us, we are limited to saying that certain speech has observable racist, homophobic or misogynistic consequences, or violates a social taboo. This then permits the Right to riposte with either ‘science’ (“You haven’t demonstrated the adverse consequences you claim”) or countercultural irreverence (“Stop being such a cultural regressive! It’s cool to rebel against taboos!”).

Early feminists and racial minorities fought for voting and legal rights first because that was the ground on which they could convince those with power in society of the rightness of their cause. And they won. But of course winning legal and political rights wasn’t at the root of their activism - economic and social marginalisation, endemic structural violence and oppression were. But when the newly empowered minority groups use their newly acquired rights to point the broader structural inequality out, the ruling majority says “Hey! This isn’t what we bargained for! We gave you what you asked and now you’re just asking for more [you ungrateful subordinate]!”. Backlash inevitably ensues, and so we keep fighting.

Sex and Gender

We have seen this process play out within our own lifetime over the issue of gay and trans rights. The progressive/liberal position on sex and gender is pretty straightforward: who and how a person has sex, and how they identify with and express their gender, are socially irrelevant facts and everyone should just be able to do whatever they want so long as it respects the rights of others. But as it turns out, you can’t create a social majority for progressive change with that argument - there are simply too many authoritarians who believe that people shouldn’t be able to do whatever they want, and too many social conservatives who believe that how and with whom you have sex are socially important facts.

So the version of the gay rights argument which was successful, and which spread most widely, was the version that appealed to the minimum necessary coalition to achieve social change, which was “Well, people don’t choose to be gay and you can’t judge someone on the basis of a characteristic they didn’t choose”. This argument lets you persuade a wider variety of choice liberals, and even religious individuals. Voila! You’ve changed society; the “Born This Way” narrative which supports the new equilibria isn’t everyone on the Left’s true posiiton, but it’s good enough, so it’s what we went with. But sexuality is fluid and complicated. Bi- and pan- people exist; experimentation and contextual homosexuality is a thing, and not every gay couple wants a marriage, kids and a picket fence. Some want to live in polyamorous, kink-friendly communes. The Left doesn’t care either way, but to the Right, this is just evidence of the Left’s bad faith and endless appetite for social deviancy - and why the Left should always be opposed from the outset.

The trans rights argument is playing out much the same way. This came up in a recent debate between the Twitch streamer Destiny and a self-described ‘gender abolitionist’. The accepted social signal in favour on trans rights mirrors the “Born This Way” argument: trans people are simply born into bodies of the ‘wrong gender’. This is not the position of everyone in the trans community or on the Left, but it’s the signal which is most effective in persuading a minimal viable social coalition. Of course intersex and non-binary people are a thing; individuals may have mixed reasons for adopting a particular gender identity or expression, and those reasons may change over time. The Left doesn’t care: you do you. But by using the metaphysical gender argument, we leave ourselves open to counter-attacks that the male brain/female brain dichotomy is empirically weak (the scientism rebuttal), or ontologically false (it’s just ‘gender ideology’). For the record, I agree with Destiny on this: we should adopt the strategy which is most effective in achieving our goals, and hide our true power levels. Aiming directly for non-binary, luxury gay space communism will get us precisely nowhere.

Social and Economic Justice

To be clear, the signal/strategy dichotomy does not merely apply to cultural issues: it’s also of vast significance in the way we argue about economic and structural inequality. If we make the claim that corporations - or the “millionaires and billionaires” - are uniquely bad and evil people and the working class are uniquely oppressed and virtuous, then our persuasion is exploitable by both empirical and ontological claims that this is untrue. Sadly, Destiny himself has fallen into this trap. For the Marxist leftist, the moral virtue of the capitalist and worker is irrelevant - these are classes performing social roles that are determined by a material structure. In other words, no amount of charitable giving can make the existence of billionaires just - any system which permits individuals and families to accumulate that much wealth off the backs of the labour of others is inherently unjust.

Climate change is another issue where I fear we’ve gone slightly off the rails. Of course, this is not just a left vs right issue - there’s a broad technocratic consensus that something must be done. But by focusing our signalling of the minimal viable level of persuasiveness (i.e. the men in white coats say the world is going to end), we’ve left ourselves open to dissension on grounds of both science (“some scientists disagree; 1.5 degrees isn’t that bad!”) and epistemology (“why should we trust the experts anyway?”). When the Right claims that the Left is being disingenuous about climate change, and thus should be opposed on principle, they have a point. Climate change is an inevitable by-product of the structure of capitalism, and for the Left climate change offers a unique opportunity to democratise and regulate how we produce energy. But if we said that, nothing would be done. So we hide and bide.

My point in bringing all this up is not to critique the way the left has done things. I am a Whiggish historian and generally do think the Left has won and will continue to win most of thesd battles. But I don’t think it’s sufficient for us to rebut the Right by pointing out that they obviously argue in bad faith, because on some level the Left is also acting in bad faith. By calibrating political messaging to appeal to a broader coalition than would actually subscribe to our underlying philosophy, we have to be aware that the hypocrisy is baked in. This creates two problems: first of all, when you’re trying to persuade another person of your position, don’t believe your own talking points. It may be that you are genuinely committed to those points, because you - although a committed and passionate progressive - don’t understand the full consequences of the position you’re taking. Only by immersing yourself in the theory can we recognise, and therefore own, our own bullshit.

Secondly, we should strongly resist the urge to moralise and ritualise our persuasive strategies. We should be aggressive as we possibly can be in convincing other people to support a new social equilibrium, but also flexible and acknowledge that these positions are often hypocritical and adopted in response to temporary political alignments that will continue to change in the future. Don’t uncritically defend the ritual and symbolic importance of certain words, because taboos are merely tools for a political end and their symbolic value is merely a social construct. What we really care about is the social harm that those words licence. Don’t bother debating Rights about the reality of sex or racial differences because these are not things that matter to us and wouldn’t change our position. Know how to argue the science, because we need to rebut our opponents and persuade those in the middle. But never engage the Right on them directly, because they’re not being honest about their true position and neither are we.

The Culture War is about Liberalism

One of the frames I employ in my first book, “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder” is the [not original] hypothesis that there’s a statistical correlation between progressive economic values and libertarian social views, and a corresponding correlation between conservatism and authoritarianism. So, at least in the modern Anglo-Saxon social equilibrium, an economic progressive is more likely than not to also be socially liberal, and a laissez-faire capitalist is more likely than not to be socially conservative. I suggest that this correlation is driven by the question of interpersonal trust: progressives believe that other people will look out for both their own best interests and the those of others.

But correlation is not deterministic, so there’ll be a significant minority of voters on the Left who are economically progressive but socially conservative, and a significant minority of voters on the Right who are ‘fiscally conservative’ but socially liberal. In order to win a majority, each side’s base (i.e. the economic and social progressives vs the economic and social conservatives) must cobble together a coalition from the minority factions - so both the Left and Right aim to sway a mix of working-class conservatives and socially liberal capitalists. Since the 1980s, the global Right has won this battle overall - in my view, largely because parties of the centre Left gave up on offering genuine economic alternative. We’ll return to the question of who really ‘won’ the neoliberal era later.

The Stupidpol Nexus

I’ve been reading [the late] Mark Fisher lately, as well as a little bit of Zizek. Both are cynical philosophers, deeply critical of capitalism. Their work represents the kind of writing that could inspire a movement like “Occupy Wall Street” but not offer a blueprint for the future. Today’s Left is a lot more optimistic about the potential for transformative economic change. Both Fisher and Zizek, though, sometimes let their critique of neoliberal capitalism seague into a critique of the liberal project more broadly. Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” is one of the seminal texts of what later became the anti-Identity Politics Left and Zizek has been such an effective foil against the Intellectual Dark Web-types largely because he’s a quasi-Marxist who agrees with their some of their criticisms of feminism, queer theory and immigration.

As I’ve written before, the correct Left take on identity politics is that we like it, but recognise that it doesn’t offer a blueprint for meaningful structural change. It’s a tool for perfecting liberalism, not transforming it.

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Which brings us to the inspiration for this week’s blog, the 100th episode of the “Red Scare” podcast, guest starring Angela Nagle. I don’t normally listen to Red Scare for reasons I’ll explain shortly, but horrifying prospect of Sailor Socialism and Nagle offering an unfiltered look into the minds of anti-IdPol Left was too fascinating to pass up. Red Scare is a dirtbag left-adjacent podcast whose co-hosts flirt openly with the ‘Strasserite’ label. Nagle, who rose to fame as one of the foremost experts on the online extreme right, has in recent years raised questions about how must sympathy she has for her subjects, and provoked firestorms with takes such as “The Left Case Against Open Borders” which openly employed right-wing anti-immigration narratives [Zizek loved it]. Both are rapidly pro-Bernie, but largely for the same reasons the liberal-Left hate him: his understatement of race and gender issues, scepticism about open borders and opposition to US foreign policy.

Even knowing what I was getting myself into, I was appalled. Egging each other on, the episode was shockingly reactionary. Flirting ironically [or not so ironically?] with ‘national socialism’, openly contemptuous of both political correctness and cosmopolitanism, Nagle and the hosts openly praised communitarian philosophy (and leaders such as Brazil’s Bolsonaro) in opposition to an ethic of individual freedom. Red Scare’s central thesis is not just that liberal identity politics is philosophically and political weak, but that it is actually harmful [to the left]. One could make the argument they mean this tactically (as in: “we need to win back white working-class men”) - but I suspect Nagle at least sees liberalism as actualy corrosive to her idea of society, which may be socialist but is definitely communitarian and exclusionary. In this, the progressivism that Nagle represents is far closer to the European Left as embodied by people like Melenchon, who combine radical politics with a hefty dose of cultural chauvinism.

It’s for this this reason that the r/stupidpol crowd often find itself agreeing with the ‘anti-SJW’ Right. The centre-Right are so incapable of agreeing to any socialist policies that Nagle and the views she represents seem like a revelation. But to the smarter neo-Nazis, such as Richard Spencer and Matthew Heimbach, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson, they represent an opportunity. True fascists have no compunction against economic resdistribution, so long as it favours their chosen in-group. What matters to fascists is destroying liberalism - with its emphasis on personal freedoms, its open and multicultural societies and social experimentation. And in the communitarian Left, they see willing accomplicies in achieving this goal.

The New Right crumbles

Coincidentally, I’ve also become aware of an emerging culture war split on the American Right, as embodied by the David French v Sohrab Ahmari debate. I don’t pretend to even remotely follow right-wing discourse and everything I know about the situation comes from summaries by other writers. In essence, there seems to be a sense that William Buckley’s New Right coalition of the pro-capitalist and socially conservative wings of the Right is coming under strain [we saw some analogies to this in Australia under the recent troubled Prime Ministerships of Tony Abbot and Malcolm Turnbull]. Despite the manifest success of this electoral strategy, there seems to be a growing view from the Right’s socially and economically conservative base that they no longer need the neoliberal/libertarian technocrats in suits - that, coupled with the populist [Trumpian] outreach to the socially conservative working class, a permanent socially reactionary majority is attainable.

In this, the hard Right has the same complaint about their alliance with right-wing liberals that the anti-IdPol Left has about their alliance with left-wing liberals. For social conservatives, pro-market liberalism is not just a philosophically and politically weak movement, but is actually harmful [to the right] and their desired society. And they have a point. “Woke Capitalism” may be dysfunctional and inegalitarian, but it‘s proved more than willing to accommodate movements for social change that don’t challenge capitalism, to integrate and even cater to minority populations, and to prioritise the interests of capital when it comes to migration over any communitarian concerns about social and cultural cohesion. Rather than seeing the last forty years as a history of unparalleled right-wing political dominance, the far right sees a series of cultural setbacks (particularly on gay rights and women’s reproductive freedom). Liberal political values of secularism and cultural pluralism are a meaningful roadblock to the communitarian kind of societies they want to build. Of course, they’re deluded - abortion is on the chopping bloc in the US and not as secure elsewhere as we might like, and the backlash against feminism and queer movements remains vicious and culturally powerful. But that’s their theory.

Liberal Socialism

Here then, is my central thesis. As I began at the top of this bog, dominant political coalitions tend to bring in at least some of the minority perspective of the other side. For the hard Right, the bipartisan coalition between laissez-faire economics, social progressivism and social conservatism incudes too many social progressives for their liking. For the Left, the coalition between social progressives of all stripes, economic justice and neoliberalism has included far too much accommodation of the neoliberal perspective. The very coalitions each side needs to win power include sufficient moderating forces to prevent them from becoming entirely hegemonic.

In other words, the Culture War that is consuming the intra-factional politics of both Left and Right is about how each side should adopt and incorporate elements of the liberal political and social programme, which at least in the modern era is the hegemonic, centrist status quo against which other ideologies contend. My own position on this is clear: socialism is the natural heir and development of classical liberalism and the libertarian Marxist tradition’s emphasis on both political and economic freedom and self-development is the obvious next step in human cultural evolution. Stripped of its commitment to bourgeois liberal values, socialism has historically become extremely communitarian, rigid and dare I say Stalinist. In other words, I am a firm proponent of the alliance between social progressives and egalitarians of all stripes.

I also think it’s in the Left’s best interest to encourage and widen the split between cultural conservatives and economic liberals. We already see the foundations of this in Europe and Australia, when the pro-business Greens and pro-gay marriage Liberals constitute a genuine political threat to the conservative heartland - which in turn in moving in an ever-more populist direction. The worst possible thing the broader left could do in response to these trends is to jump exclusively on the cultural bandwagon, and become committed to urban, white-collar liberalism. Our commitment to social justice is secondary to our commitment to structural economic change and we have to make sure we win back the working class vote. In doing so, the Left’s base has to be bridge-builders not mere followers - convincing working class conservatives that social liberalism poses no threat to them if it also secures the material basis of their their way of life, and urban liberals that higher taxes and economic redistribution is the only route to action on climate change and true personal freedom.

The alt-lite and Rituals of Provocation

Landing in Australia last week, I found to my chagrin that Canadian alt right-adjacent internet personalities Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux were 'touring' with a predictable response of protests, wall-to-wall media coverage and conservative concern trolling over 'free speech' [paywall]. Meanwhile, in the US, the Proud Boys are marching and rioting in famously progressive Portland, and well-funded conservative trolls Milo Yiannopolis, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray and Christina Hoff-Summers are routinely invited onto university campuses by right-wing student groups in order to get media attention and a rise out of their opponents. These provocateurs form an essential tactical bridge between classical (i.e. conservative) liberals, whose anxieties about freedom of speech they prey on, and the fascist alt-right, who rely on the violence these events generate to radicalise and 'blood' their foot soldiers. 

These modern agitators are working in an established tradition. Street violence between fascists and anti-fascists has a long history, dating back to the demise of the Bavarian Soviet in 1920, the Spanish Civil War and the street battles of 1930s Europe. This violence succeeded in convincing many liberal moderates that authoritarianism was a necessary palliative to restore order. The left was more successful in the aftermath of the war, with anti-fascists in the UK and Germany stamping down hard (cf. The Battle of Lewisham) on neo-Nazis and rendering them a (mostly) harmless political joke until Richard Spencer and friends came along and rebranded the alt-right. While political violence is often read as either instrumental, and therefore a product or elite manipulation, or irrational and therefore chaotic and anarchical, the truth is that the alt-lite's trolling shares a strategic form with contests fought along ethnic and religious lines: "Rituals of Provocation" that serve to sharpen and antagonise group identities.

Rituals of Provocation

In the 1990s, anthropologists including Stanley Tambiah, Allen Feldmann and Peter van der Veer undertook detailed studies of pre-conflict tensions between ethnic and religious communities in Northern Ireland, mainland India and Sri Lanka. Their accounts disclose a universal ritual, a shared type of performance common across diverse political and ethnic contexts. In short, processions through disputed territory (think the Orange marches in Northern Ireland) commonly led to riots, which in turn increased the salience of group identities and encouraged armed aggression between them. 

In these marches, the provocateur moves outside the environment of their own community and crosses a boundary demarcating the sacred territory of an opposing group. Marches "transform the [opposing] community into an involuntary audience" for one's own beliefs, and defile the opponent's territory through the aggressive display of political symbols, stereotyped and boastful rhetoric and triumphal music. A key component of such a performance, according to Tambiah, is an "array of triggering actions that are publicly recognised as challenges, slights, insults and desecrations inviting reprisal". In an Indian context, for example, such a procession may conclude with the slaughter of a sacred (or profane) animal in a public space holy to the other side. 

In other words, rituals of provocation are not about advocating for one's beliefs, or even addressing those beliefs to an audience that disagrees with them. Rather, they are an intentional violation of the sacred - a defilement of the 'safe spaces' of the target community with ritual words and phrases ("there are only two genders") specifically chosen to trigger an emotive and potentially violent defensive response (I've written about Jonathan Haidt's work on the sanctity trigger previously). We all recognise this strategy, whether in the form of al-Qaeda attacking the heart of US financial and military power, ISIS-inspired gunmen shooting up gay nightclubs, or Jesus attacking the moneylenders in the Temple at Jerusalem. The defilement of the sacred sharpens contradictions: the performance forces the 'audience' to choose one identity and take a side, where previously ambiguity and co-existence might have prevailed. Tambiah writes that many mixed communities manage to co-exist peacefully until provocateurs activate the latent fault-lines beneath them. 

In the West, we are used to thinking of ethnic and religious conflict as being in some sense irrational, emotional and performative, and political conflict as a separate sphere that is rational and instrumental, but this is a false dichotomy. The lines between religion, philosophy and political ideology are blurry, and each rely on a universal human psychological substrate to operate their social 'code'. In the Muslim and Christian worlds for example, one might identify with the majority religion while also offering gifts to the ancestors - up until some fundamentalist comes to town and starts tearing down your shrines. But politically too, we may happily profess both our commitment to freedom of speech and opposition to racism until some Nazis show up and use their freedom of expression to advocate the ethnic cleansing of your neighbourhood. 

Back to the free speech wars

The fact that the modern free speech wars centre around public universities is not, therefore, a function of the fact that educational institutions have become uniquely intolerant of divergent opinions. Universities have always been, and remain, some of the most vibrant centres of debate in any society and the idea that they have become Leninist training grounds for "Cultural Marxist warriors is, and always has been, empirically absurd. Rather, universities are being chosen specifically as sites for these rituals of provocations precisely because they are the territory of the young, political active and progressive. In the same vein, kids these days aren't special snowflakes who need protecting from opposing viewpoints: rather, they are being actively and consciously 'triggered' by political provocateurs who know precisely what words and phrases will provoke an emotive and media-friendly backlash. We find it easy to see religious believers as being uniquely vulnerable to manipulation of their sacred symbols, but should recognise it everywhere and amongst everyone. 

Lauren Southern, Stephan Molyneux and their ilk are therefore performing for two audiences simultaneously: on the one hand, they carry out acts of daring transgression that make their opponents appear weak and encourage their own base to engage in more risky and violent behaviour. But for the neutral observer who is not activated by their defilement of the sacred in the same way or to the same degree, their actions stripped of their symbolic meaning can seem reasonable or even defensible, and the emotive and defensive reaction of the target community in turn irrational and unreasonable. Lauren has the 'right' to speak, much as the Orange Order has the 'right to march' or Muslims in India have the 'right' to slaughter and eat beef. A wedge is thereby created between the norms of one community (the liberal moderate) and the norms of another (students who don't want Nazis at their university). 

As far as I can tell, there are few good defences against this strategy. Terrorism and extremism work because it only takes a few radicals in a community to sharpen contradictions and force a majority of citizens, who were formerly happy to ambiguously co-exist, into overt conflict. The history of political, ethnic and religious violence suggests that once activated, conflict is very difficult to damp down absent heavy investment in norm-building, de-escalation and co-existence. Yet I see little sign that the alt-right and their agents want to de-escalate current political tensions - quite the contrary. Perhaps the best we can do, right now, is for both socialists and liberals to recognise the tactics being used against us for what they are, and to consciously work to avoid being manipulated by charlatans, trolls and other bad faith actors. 

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. 

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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. 

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.