How to read like a centrist

Why it's so hard to take social justice seriously

When I was a youngster — college in the early Aughts — I read a lot of folks who would later become associated with the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a remarkably silly name for a group that has some limited ideological diversity but is united by a sense that the “regressive” or “illiberal left,” and “social justice warriors” represent a grave threat to our liberal values. In the ancient parlance, “political correctness,” but in the year of our Lord, “wokeness,” has run amok according to the IDW, or as I will call them, reactionary centrists. I’m thinking of folks like Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, etc.

One of the first “big idea” books I read was the Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. I remember this being an excellent book. Dawkins is a gifted writer who could explain the subtleties of evolutionary biology with grace and depth. He also stoked by nascent atheism, which was pretty militant (I’d follow the New Atheist writers before that term took hold), coming as I did from a conservative religious upbringing in deep red Oklahoma. I was keen on reading more.

One passage from his River Out of Eden stuck with me for some reason.

Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite … If you are flying to an international congress of anthropologists or literary critics, the reason you will probably get there — the reason you don’t plummet into a ploughed field — is that a lot of Western scientifically trained engineers have got their sum right.

There are a few things going on in this passage. One is the “Western” chauvinism, as if science is intrinsically Western. Another thing to notice is the casual scorn for left-coded people, his anthropologists and literary critics. Dawkins today would almost certainly use “gender studies professor” in the example. But perhaps the most important thing to notice is the idea that there is some non-negligible number of “cultural relativists” and similar who array themselves against science and engineering as such, and who deny the importance of “getting sums right.”

Dawkins — and he’s a perfectly typical example of the IDW mood — evokes a picture of critics of dominant paradigms (of science, of liberalism, of the Enlightenment, etc) never as mere critics but as total enemies. Most critics of science as it’s practiced aren’t hostile to science per se but question the kinds of hypotheses and whose that get entertained, the research programs that get attention and funding, and how data are interpreted. All of these lines of critique are of course political, but they don’t at all erode scientific virtues of rigor, honesty, and accountability to one’s scientific peers, to observation, and ultimately to reality. The specter of whole classes of people, thankfully contained within college campuses (and now online) but always at risk of breaking out into the wider world, who hate science and reason because they’re oppressive or whatever is a pure conjuration of the febrile centrist imagination.

Or consider Steven Pinker on feminism. The following is from Blank Slate, but he hadn’t improved in the Better Angels of Our Nature and his Enlightenment Now project is a book length example of the kind of thing I’m talking about: a defense of rational, liberal values against caricatures of the allegedly illiberal left.

Feminism as a movement for political and social equity is important, but feminism as an academic clique committed to eccentric doctrines about human nature is not. Eliminating discrimination against women is important, but believing that women and men are born with indistinguishable minds is not. Freedom of choice is important, but ensuring that women make up exactly 50 percent of all professions is not. And eliminating sexual assaults is important, but advancing the theory that rapists are doing their part in a vast male conspiracy is not.

Pinker leaves the reader with the impression that feminism has some core liberal insight—women have rights—intrepidly carried forward by crowd-defying "choice feminists" like Christina Hoff Sommers, but that today's feminists are a little batty and have gone too far. Needless to say, typical feminists do not see themselves reflected in Pinker’s portrayal.

Just to spell it out, most feminists will not argue that there are no patterned differences in the brains of male and female populations, but that 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.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find any feminist who thinks that women should make up exactly 50% of all professions. But large differences in occupations are like neon signs pointing to areas that warrant some investigation as to why and how such differences have arisen. We should investigate why men dominate computer science departments and why male college enrollment rates are falling and we should be curious about what role gendered expectations play in these stories.

And feminists do not proffer a vast male conspiracy, but they do describe systemic patterns that fall along sex and gender lines, and the incentives individuals (men, women, and all the cross terms) face that tend to uphold such patterns. Pinker is just being silly, and the fact that his broad brush caricatures of whole bodies of thought are taken seriously is a testament to the magnetism of the hierarchy-upholding center.

But note how Pinker nevertheless allowed that there was some core truth of basic feminism; it is just corrupted by social justice warriors. This is a recurring theme of the reactionary center. Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan, for example, insist that of course racism is vile but that antiracists let their ideology precede and defeat legitimate scientific inquiry. Antiracists are afraid of inconvenient truths and themselves illiberally reduce individuals solely to their race.

But members of the IDW, or in the case of race we can talk about FAIR, are profoundly incurious about how racism and racial disadvantage actually function and shape the life prospects of racialized individuals. They take a bowdlerized version of Martin Luther King Jr and hold up all discussions of racism against a fabricated “I have a dream” color-blindness. They go on to condemn those with an actual interest in understanding how race works in society, those who engage in actual research.

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 they are taken at face value and given lucrative book deals and rake in Youtube and podcast dollars. It’s hard to say just where ignorance ends and duplicity begins except on a case by case basis. How are they so believable?

The Sequence

Here's the sequence. You start like I did with these mainstream, apparently credible intellectuals who prime you with the idea that feminists, antiracists, and so on are often quite unhinged, opposed to science and free inquiry, and definitely a threat to liberal values and institutions. You like what you read — they’re not untalented communicators! — and you read more of their stuff and the other folks they recommend.

You don't read primary social justice literature for a long time because what’s the point. When you finally do, you’ve already built a massive skeptical rampart, which nudges you to misinterpret what you do finally read. You already know this feminist probably thinks all heterosexual sex is rape or whatever. Indeed the first antiracist or “gender ideologist” book you read could be a hate-read, just to experience first-hand how ridiculous these people are.

But, being a good open-minded liberal, suppose you do read something directly from a social justice literature and you read it with enough charity to see that this author at least isn’t too off the wall. When she talks about intersectionality, it doesn’t sound like Oppression Olympics at all, just qualitative differences in life experiences that are easily missed by coarse social categories. And how a good old-fashioned virtue like solidarity interacts with that. Maybe you read a few more academic writers and find similar results.

But it’s the college kids. It’s when these ideas are put into practice that they get crazy. All this time you’ve been laudably engaging your curiosity you’ve also been keeping your standard media diet of reactionary centrist-framed stories about woke mobs, cancel culture, and “the illiberalism on both sides.”

This final stage is the hardest to get through, the veil beyond which you realize that even social justice activism on the ground is largely fine. I’m not saying there won’t always be stories of college kids or social media personalities that veer into the genuinely dumb and absurd. This is just the human spectacle. But social justice activism is subject to garden variety — not exotic — epistemic foibles. But by the time someone who began their intellectual trajectory with a Michael Shermer or a Jordan Peterson has realized that everything they’d ever been told by their early favorites about critical race theory or trans people is lop-sided at best, they’ve wasted years of their life just climbing out of a poisoned well.

The Asymmetry

Of course the same thing happens going the other direction. Liberals, progressives, and leftists can foster ignorance in their own echo chambers. Someone consuming a leftist-only media diet will almost come to believe a great many false things about the ideas of Adam Smith or Friedrich Hayek or Francis Fukuyama. I’m regularly dumbfounded by what exactly the leftist crowd for whom “liberal” is an insult think, say, liberal feminists actually stand for.

But there’s some reason to think this epistemic problem is worse for the antiwoke centrists. Social justice, by its nature, targets social hierarchies. Social hierarchy has a number of reinforcement mechanisms. The first is obvious: power, in terms of social status, wealth, and access. But we humans have a tendency also to sympathize with the powerful, perhaps because it’s more soothing to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the rich and mighty than in those of the downtrodden and oppressed. Or maybe just because of “just world bias,” the tendency to think that people generally get what they deserve. This undergirds notions that the poor are poor because they are lazy, and black-white outcome gaps are driven by black cultural pathologies (or just innate genetic inferiority, as friends of the IDW like Charles Murray suggest).

And just maybe social hierarchy is normative, meaning it’s enforced by actual norms. So when we deviate from our expected social roles, as when a woman assumes or tries to assume a position of elite authority or when a trans person openly exists, at least some part of the population feels a sense of grievance or impropriety, and pushes back. Hence the “reactionary” in “reactionary center.”

But the most important reason to treat the media consumption habits of the right of center — many claim to be on the left, but they also always seem to be punching the social justice left — with a greater degree of urgency than the left of center is because of the way they enable the far right. When centrist or moderate so-called liberals focus their fire on the alleged threats from social justice, they associate danger with those groups social justice advocates seek to protect: gender and sexual minorities, racial minorities, and immigrants. But these groups are precisely the targets of rightwing antidemocratic authoritarianism. You might even say these groups are the terrain on which the authoritarian right seizes control. When democratic rights are compromised, it is to weaken the political power of the Black vote. When the right imposes its control over what children learn, it is to whitewash history of crimes against racial minorities and it is to censor information about sex and gender diversity. It is trans kids who are taken away from parents and immigrant families that are rent apart. When the reactionary center attacks social justice warriors it softens the body politic for fascism.