I find this highly relatable, similar to my own philosophical journey. One thing I might add is how the allure of nonpartisanship feeds into all this. Positioning yourself as a centrist or a libertarian or what have you allows you to be politically engaged while maintaining a sort of neutral, nonpartisan facade. That’s both an emotionally satisfying ego boost (“I’m so smart that I’m above it all”) and a defense mechanism when someone on one side of the aisle critiques you. E.g., when a reactionary calls you a leftist or a Marxist with disdain dripping from their voice, you can counter it by saying, “nope, I hate the left too.” When I was finally forced to acknowledge circa 2016 that the illiberal right was simply a much larger threat than the illiberal left, it still felt emotionally difficult, because I was so attached to that nonpartisan guise. Even today, I kind of bend over backwards to let people know I’m not a committed Democrat, I just see them as the lesser evil. No matter how bad the right gets, I feel like part of me will always have that impulse. And if it’s that difficult for me, I can only imagine how it is for others who have built up an even stronger contempt for all things left-coded.
Excellent piece. I thought I was already subscribed, but this one in particulars convinced me to do so. Spot on. Also, the center’s critique of feminism has no relevance or urgency in the context of total abortion bans and no exception for rape, incest or the life of the mother. There is a war on the majority that this centrist perspective fails at acknowledge.
I love this way of thinking about sex differences: we should recognize there may be "patterned differences in the brains of male and female populations, but...we should 1) be cautious about such inferences because the social construction of gender is also powerful, and 2) not lean too heavily on these average differences because doing so hardens their social realization, often at the expense of individuals who fall outside the patterns."
But I think your reading of Pinker, and of most of the others you name, is uncharitable. Is Pinker's critique of the strain of feminism that "believ[es] that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds" only justified if most feminists adhere to it? Does he even say in his book that most feminists do? (A: He does not.) Why wouldn't it be worth making a valid counterargument against a minority view? How do we advance knowledge other than by discussing and critiquing opposing explanations of the world?
In any case, how do you know that "most feminists" agree with your view of inherent sex differences? I wouldn't purport to know one way or the other, but no less a figure than Judith Butler (according to an "Introduction to Theories on Gender and Sex," apparently geared to undergraduates) argues
If that view is advanced by one of the most influential feminist theorists, assigned to practically every Gender Studies 101 student, is it fair to imply that Pinker is merely attacking a strawman?
More fundamentally, you complain about these writers generalizing and failing to fairly engage with others' ideas ("The kinds of centrists I have described proclaim utter nonsense about 'woke mobs' and 'the illiberal left' that distorts the ideas of actual people beyond recognition."), but I'd say that's exactly what you're doing. Why not attack their actual positions and tell us what they get wrong? Surely some of them have spouted utter nonsense, at least on occasion, but an essay just writing all of them off and giving us a meta-analysis of how small-minded people are fooled by their wrong think (so be careful around those dangerous people!) merely entrenches partisanship.
You write that these centrists "condemn those with an actual interest in understanding how race works in society, those who engage in actual research." Can you give examples of how these writers condemn attempts to even understand how race works in our society, how they have attacked individuals for being curious about that subject instead of attacking their ideas for being ill-formed or unsupported by evidence? If so, I'd be very interested to see it and I would join you in calling it out. But if you don't have any such examples, then aren't you just doing what you're accusing them of doing--unfairly distorting their ideas?
(Also, you can't use the phrase "in the year of our Lord" without a year after it. It's just a translation of "A.D." and it doesn't work by itself.)
This doesn’t make contact with reality. IDW types have fragmented because some were captured by their audience. But the ones that were more Sam Harris and less Weinstein brothers would argue that they stand for universal liberal values that SJW people have abandoned. This seems author also seems to be captured by bad ideas.
I think the core of the IDW types is in the name. They are "intellectuals" by identity, thus they will almost always find an enemy in those that insist on tempering intellectual pursuit with morality and ethics. However, they're not dumb or crazy enough to buck common morals. They even truly acknowledge the benefits they reap from liberalism, but anything beyond that is lip service and politics. The mix between the two is what often gives them the appearance of centrism.
In other words, they're fairly nonpartisan. However, if they feel that pursuit of knowledge is stopped by some political action, they'll pick the side that lets them push forward in whatever pet idea they have.
I find this highly relatable, similar to my own philosophical journey. One thing I might add is how the allure of nonpartisanship feeds into all this. Positioning yourself as a centrist or a libertarian or what have you allows you to be politically engaged while maintaining a sort of neutral, nonpartisan facade. That’s both an emotionally satisfying ego boost (“I’m so smart that I’m above it all”) and a defense mechanism when someone on one side of the aisle critiques you. E.g., when a reactionary calls you a leftist or a Marxist with disdain dripping from their voice, you can counter it by saying, “nope, I hate the left too.” When I was finally forced to acknowledge circa 2016 that the illiberal right was simply a much larger threat than the illiberal left, it still felt emotionally difficult, because I was so attached to that nonpartisan guise. Even today, I kind of bend over backwards to let people know I’m not a committed Democrat, I just see them as the lesser evil. No matter how bad the right gets, I feel like part of me will always have that impulse. And if it’s that difficult for me, I can only imagine how it is for others who have built up an even stronger contempt for all things left-coded.
Excellent piece. I thought I was already subscribed, but this one in particulars convinced me to do so. Spot on. Also, the center’s critique of feminism has no relevance or urgency in the context of total abortion bans and no exception for rape, incest or the life of the mother. There is a war on the majority that this centrist perspective fails at acknowledge.
I love this way of thinking about sex differences: we should recognize there may be "patterned differences in the brains of male and female populations, but...we should 1) be cautious about such inferences because the social construction of gender is also powerful, and 2) not lean too heavily on these average differences because doing so hardens their social realization, often at the expense of individuals who fall outside the patterns."
But I think your reading of Pinker, and of most of the others you name, is uncharitable. Is Pinker's critique of the strain of feminism that "believ[es] that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds" only justified if most feminists adhere to it? Does he even say in his book that most feminists do? (A: He does not.) Why wouldn't it be worth making a valid counterargument against a minority view? How do we advance knowledge other than by discussing and critiquing opposing explanations of the world?
In any case, how do you know that "most feminists" agree with your view of inherent sex differences? I wouldn't purport to know one way or the other, but no less a figure than Judith Butler (according to an "Introduction to Theories on Gender and Sex," apparently geared to undergraduates) argues
that gender "is by no means tied to material bodily facts but is solely and completely a social construction." https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/genderandsex/modules/butlergendersex.html
If that view is advanced by one of the most influential feminist theorists, assigned to practically every Gender Studies 101 student, is it fair to imply that Pinker is merely attacking a strawman?
More fundamentally, you complain about these writers generalizing and failing to fairly engage with others' ideas ("The kinds of centrists I have described proclaim utter nonsense about 'woke mobs' and 'the illiberal left' that distorts the ideas of actual people beyond recognition."), but I'd say that's exactly what you're doing. Why not attack their actual positions and tell us what they get wrong? Surely some of them have spouted utter nonsense, at least on occasion, but an essay just writing all of them off and giving us a meta-analysis of how small-minded people are fooled by their wrong think (so be careful around those dangerous people!) merely entrenches partisanship.
You write that these centrists "condemn those with an actual interest in understanding how race works in society, those who engage in actual research." Can you give examples of how these writers condemn attempts to even understand how race works in our society, how they have attacked individuals for being curious about that subject instead of attacking their ideas for being ill-formed or unsupported by evidence? If so, I'd be very interested to see it and I would join you in calling it out. But if you don't have any such examples, then aren't you just doing what you're accusing them of doing--unfairly distorting their ideas?
(Also, you can't use the phrase "in the year of our Lord" without a year after it. It's just a translation of "A.D." and it doesn't work by itself.)
This doesn’t make contact with reality. IDW types have fragmented because some were captured by their audience. But the ones that were more Sam Harris and less Weinstein brothers would argue that they stand for universal liberal values that SJW people have abandoned. This seems author also seems to be captured by bad ideas.
I think the core of the IDW types is in the name. They are "intellectuals" by identity, thus they will almost always find an enemy in those that insist on tempering intellectual pursuit with morality and ethics. However, they're not dumb or crazy enough to buck common morals. They even truly acknowledge the benefits they reap from liberalism, but anything beyond that is lip service and politics. The mix between the two is what often gives them the appearance of centrism.
In other words, they're fairly nonpartisan. However, if they feel that pursuit of knowledge is stopped by some political action, they'll pick the side that lets them push forward in whatever pet idea they have.