In his new book Panic Attack, he writes,
it does seem like the left proceeded from Marxist assumptions about the oppressive nature of capitalism, swallowed Marcusian ideas concerning the power of language to thwart social change, embraced the postmodernist approach to eschewing the Enlightenment in favor of radical subjectivity, and let intersectionality endlessly expand the circle of grievances. Sprinkle in a new cultural understanding of safety as requiring emotional protection, and the portrait of a suddenly speech-critical left is complete.
I find it implausible that today’s youth came to scorn free speech by discovering Marx or Marcuse. My current rule of thumb is that whenever I observe young people with an outlook that seems alien to me, I presume a technological cause. Think of society evolving into Homo Appiens.
Remember last month, when I gave an impassioned plea for free speech and college students pushed back? I would describe the dialogue as me saying “We need free speech!” and them saying “But there are bad people saying bad things!” and repeating those exclamations over and over, talking past one another.
I’ve been thinking about why it might be that young people are more upset than I am about bad people saying bad things. Think back to the Nazis marching through Skokie in 1977. After one day of marching, those Nazis were never heard from again. Back in those days, bad people saying bad things were invisible 99 percent of the time.
But with today’s technology, Homo Appiens is constantly aware of the presence of bad people saying bad things. Young people know that there are alt-right racists and Antifa goons and Muslim extremists. And if they try to ignore extremists, their “friends” in social media and the mainstream media remind them, in part because commentary gets more attention by exaggerating threats than by downplaying them. As a result, young people feel something tugging at them to do something about bad people saying bad things.
At the moment, Homo Appiens seems to be adapting to the pervasive awareness of bad people saying bad things by heading toward censorship. I don’t think that is the most constructive way to adapt, but I can see why the problem differs from what we experienced back in the free-speech heyday.
Overall, I would describe Soave’s book as a painful must-read, certain to make my list of top non-fiction books of the year. I will be recommending it often.
I think you give your opponents a pass when you assume that their opposition to free speech is really a plea for, say, “better App Filters” — so no one’s buzz is taken down by having to hear “mean things being said.” Ask them to describe what they consider “mean things”. Ask them whether “mean things” can be heard along an ideological spectrum. Ask them to define exactly where they would draw the line as you travel Left on that spectrum. Otherwise, this seems to me this is all about silencing those who disagree with them; and then to fill the vacuum with indoctrination. Marx. And if not, Lenin.
Interesting. Points I had not considered.
It’s easier to threaten people these days on the internet. You would think people making threats would get in trouble, but it seems that often it doesn’t happen. It often seems to depend on who you threaten, and how. All kinds of bad behavior seem to be easier with technology.
Examples…
1. Tyler Barris, now sentenced to 20 years in prison for a swatting death, seems to have engaged in the prank of “swatting” dozens of times before he got someone killed. Technology made it easy for him to call in fake 911 incidents (angry man with gun and hostages) hundreds of miles from where he lived. You’d think he would have faced strong negative consequences earlier, but only getting someone killed seems to have stopped him. He pled guilty to 51 charges sometime in the last year.
2. David French, the conservative lawyer / blogger associated with National Review, said he got death threats for opposing Trump, as well as vile comments about his non-white adopted children. I tend to think he’s not making that up.
3. Anecdotal example, personal acquaintance, name withheld. A woman my age who now hides her identity online (though she continues to propound online a hard left viewpoint with fervor and self-righteousness). She says people want to kill her and and her children. I’m not certain that she’s well, but I suspect people really have threatened her online.
= – = – = – =
The book _The coddling of the American Mind_ by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff makes some good points about what makes younger cohorts more fragile in the face of disagreement. I think they’ve identified some of the factors that have changed for younger cohorts. see summaries of the book for details.
I realize that David French may be a polarizing figure but he’s mainstream conservative rather than “fringe.” The article worth reading for examples is here.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/10/donald-trump-alt-right-internet-abuse-never-trump-movement/
I’ll tell you a story similar to French, but entirely offline as far as I can tell.
After I started going to church I became very good friends with a dude and eventually he was my roommate for awhile.
He was a non-white blind person who had been adopted by a white family (he was an adult, my age). The family had four natural children and five adopted children (non-white, various countries, some disabled). There were the quintessential perfect Christian family. I’ve been to their home for the holidays and other events. They are a very happy very polite very Christian household. It’s a joy to be around them, just like its usually a joy to be around my friend.
Here’s the thing though. There is a huge difference between the natural and adopted kids. The natural kids all grew up to be upstanding middle class christian bourgeois like their parents. The adopted kids are fuckups. They sleep with the wrong people. Marry and divorce the wrong people. Can’t hold good jobs. Even my friend is kind of a fuck up. Bad with money. Drinks too much. I tried bailing him out of some financial trouble once only to watch him squander my money on some bullshit.
Now, America and white society have been very good to these people. They were orphans abandoned by their own people. They were adopted and raised in a loving white household at great strain to the adoptive parents. Most have received a lot of government assistance.
And yet, especially with my friend, there is just a resentment. It pre-dates Trump and got worse with Trump.
I’m sure David French can’t fathom such an upstanding Christian family supporting Trump. How can someone that exudes decency like a saint possibly not be #NEVERTRUMP. And yet the parents and all the biological children all support Trump. The non-white adoptees all hate Trump.
And really, I think you can see it in the values too. The white family members support self sufficiency and restraint. The non-white adoptees are constantly looking to get bailed out of things and blame on circumstances or others. They’ve been taught decent enough manners, and the mother did what I would consider a great job raising them, but there just isn’t much to work with there.
One thing that made it difficult to get along with my friend is that he started going on about Trump all the time. He also adopted all the basic progressive bromides. Even though I avoid all talk of politics or culture in real life, he would always try to shoehorn it in. In the end, he even called his adoptive mother, the most loving perfect woman I’ve ever met who sacrificed so much for him, a Nazi because she voted for Trump.
There is something fundamentally weird about adopting non-white kids, and it seems often doomed to failure. Everyone I’ve seen do it has been kind of off. I would actually consider my friends parents the most normal non-white adopting parents I’ve ever met (there are a lot of these at church), and its had its obvious problems.
Also, being around Christians all the time and especially around a non-white disabled person, we were CONSTANTLY having Christians walk up to us and try to “help”. This usually annoyed the hell out of my friend who was trying to get on with his day, as this help was usually more of a hinderance. Often such help was basically pushed upon him, and it was obvious this was about the Christians in question feeling good about themselves rather than really helping. I remember one mixed race (white dude/black girl, with the dude looking like a limp church nerd) couple in particular that would not stop bothering us while he and I were doing a walk through to prepare for his proposing to his wife (he needs to have been to a place before to navigate it more easily). When we finally shoed him away my friend went off on how he’s constantly harassed by people, especially Christians, trying to help him when he doesn’t want help.
I wouldn’t do what these people did to French, and I wouldn’t spend my time that way. I don’t really get social media (I’m not on it) and so I’ve never seen stories like this and don’t think of it as normal. My friend doesn’t have any social media, and he ended up calling his own adopted mother a Nazi.
But I do get the weird uneasy feeling you get when you see a couple with white couple with an adopted black kid. It’s weird. It’s not automatically bad, but it’s a warning sign. It’s particularly a warning sign if you think it somehow makes you a better person or the only true source of human decency. My friends mother adopted five non-white kids and never took that kind of attitude. She was very humble about it (the kind of humility where you’re actually humble, not reminding people how humble you are).
Thanks for the anecdote. There is a lot there to process. It’s going to take me a few weeks to mull it over.
We’re starting to go off the rails here. No matter how weird David French is for adopting non-white kids who might have negative unobserved attributes, and who might not make the best neighbors, the kind of abuse he was subjected to is inappropriate. My understanding is that some of the abuse is legally actionable under criminal statute.
I see at least two issues offhand.
#1. Much of the problem driving calls for censorship is anonymity or pseudo-anonymity, as well as the rude behavior that emerges when we argue with people we don’t know and are not seeing face to face.
Info technology permits anonymity or pseudo-anonymity. Presumably most of the people who run around on the internet suggesting that we “Gas the Jews” or “Send ‘Em Back to Africa” or “I’m Gonna Burn Your House Down and I Know Where You Live” don’t sign their little notes with their full name, return address, and zip code.
They hide behind an avatar or handle, and often throwaway accounts and IP-masking software.
So…part of the problem of censorship is caused by that.
Some “bad behavior” that promotes a knee-jerk call for censorship is facilitated by the way people say things pseudo-anonymously on the internet that they would not say in a signed letter to the local newspaper, or face to face socially.
We used to think that human nature was slightly better than that. Human nature, though deeply flawed, was kept more restrained in debate because most of us knew we couldn’t say things anonymously.
Now we can say things pseudo-anonymously, arguing and insulting each other without leaving the house.
As Prof. Arnold notes, the Nazi march in Skokie did not re-establish National Socialism as growing trend in the USA. Rather, it demonstrated that the number of people who will go through the trouble to travel to Skokie to march in a Nazi parade is pretty small.
We are now learning that the number of people who will troll and “shitpost” from their basement is much larger.
#2. There is also the “Coddling of the American Mind” Problem.
Another issue is what Haight and Lukianoff discuss–people in high school and college, arguably, really have been coddled in some ways. When that cohort gets out into the wider world and discovers people openly saying things that couldn’t be said without punishment in high school, they feel threatened.
If you have a taste for irony, you might actually suspect that the stereotypical snowflake feels especially threatened because some of the things they hear and find objectionable may be true. To give a mundane specific, “We can observe that world class mathematicians so far have rarely been women.” Half the physicians practicing in the USA are now women. Math research seems to be different.
P.S. I enjoyed your anecdote and composed a long digressive response but then edited it out again. Email me if you want it. abbott.charles@gmail.com
Thanks for the thought. I don’t do email, or anything I think might get tracked in any way. I hope you can understand. It’s fine if you don’t want to post here, we derail Arnold’s threads enough.
My thought is this. Below “Edgar” has posted what my children are going to be taught in school. Is any of that polite? Reasonable? Does it show respect for me and my children as individuals?
Of course not. When that’s the official line being shoved down your throat by people with real authority and real decision making power…maybe its time to stop being polite. Whose a bigger threat, internet trolls or the Superintendent? They’ve got all the real power and they use it, maybe people engage in internet trolling because its the only weapon they feel they have.
Politeness should be used when it’s an effective strategy. When politeness is met by politeness. When its met by “politeness = weakness, attack”, it’s not the right tool in the toolbox. What is “White Fragility Theory” other than an attempt to eliminate politeness as a strategy.
Now trolling may or may not be an effective strategy in this or that instance. I don’t see what was gained by going after David French in this manner. It seems like a kind of masturbation, feeling like you’re doing something without actually doing something.
But I also don’t have a problem with saying brutal things if it’s true and necessary. If it is a more effective strategy for achieving an important goal, and if its proper and just given what the other party is doing.
Sometimes its necessary simply to keep your own soul. It may be they overwhelm us with their power and we can’t stop them, but at least we don’t internalize their narrative. I learned this from Chinese Malaysians at my college, you never give up your self worth and accept their bitching, even if they have the numbers and the power.
I go back to Asia, the only first world countries where they haven’t had to deal with all this. They are a very polite people, but they quickly become not polite if you shovel shit at them. What did LKY say openly in his speeches, “The human being is not equal, never will be!” That all major religions and ideologies were wrong on this. He would say it in open speeches to the public. When Charlie Ross said immigrants were America’s strength in an interview, he laughed at the idea that a bunch of “fruit pickers” would be good for society. I found this general attitude throughout Asia, not just in Singapore.
Is that attitude respectful? Polite? No, it’s dehumanizing to most of the worlds population. Is what LKY said really all that different from me saying that the fruit pickers are net liabilities for society?
Sure, if you go to Singapore they do a lot to show respect to all their ethnic groups, and they do a lot to make the lives of even their less fortunate better. And if you’re a less fortunate Singapore citizen that follows the rules, LKY does show a lot of respect to you. But they don’t accept the narrative that other peoples place in life has anything to do with oppression, and when someone comes preaching that line they shut them down with extreme prejudice.
If you really want to protect yourself, sometimes you need to call a spade a spade. If people don’t want to hear the truth, they need to stop exploiting lies for personal gain.
There’s no need to overthink this.
The world is now high school, and the left are a mean girl clique with everyone either fighting to be the alpha or desperately parroting what the alpha say hoping to advance within or at least maintain position within the clique.
The real question is, why are we letting mean girls run our culture and the entirety of our business and public life?
Mean girls run John Deere?
What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
-William Blake
“As a result, young people feel something tugging at them to do something about bad people saying bad things.”
The form of that tugging is shaped in large part by the extremist far left education/indoctrination establishment in the US. From pre-school to graduate school, children are conditioned to think and behave in conformance with leftist doctrine.
The radical leftist agenda of the education/indoctrination establishment is openly on display: look at the business items for their annual representative assembly on the NEA web site:
-New Business Item 11 (adopted) “Using existing resources, NEA will incorporate the concept of “White Fragility” into NEA trainings/staff development, literature, and other existing communications on social, gender, LGBTQIA, and racial justice whenever and wherever context and expense allows.”
– New Business Item 14 (odopted) “NEA will create model legislative language that state affiliates can use to eliminate the Praxis or alternative standardized test used for teacher certification.”
– New Business Item 17 (adopted) “The convenings created as a result of the 2018 NBI 117 Task Force report will recommend specific annual numeric goals for the recruitment of, and retention of, educators of color… …”
– New Business Item 19 (adopted) “NEA will promote the Black Lives Matter Week of Action in schools during Black History Month in 2020. Beginning in the fall of 2019, using existing communications resources, NEA will specifically call for clear efforts to demonstrate support for the four demands of the BLM Week of Action in schools:
1. Ending zero-tolerance policies and replacing them with restorative justice practices
2. Hiring and mentoring black educators
3. Mandating that Ethnic Studies be taught in preK-12 schools in age-appropriate ways
4. Hiring more counselors not cops.”
-New Business Item 25 (adopted) “NEA will collaborate and partner with organizations and individuals who are doing the work to push reparations for descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States and to involve educators, students, and communities in the discussions around support for reparations… ”
Now imagine children being placed in the custody of these radical leftists, day after day, for hours, in classroom exercises modeled after Maoist re-education exercises: praise and reward dispensed for each mention of sexism, racism, colonialism. And any nuance or dissent being severely punished.
Skinner box schooling producing progressive pigeons. That is what we have.
On Monday, Arthur Brooks and Russ Roberts were talking about dopamine, addiction, and how there’s a sort of a “cognitive satisfaction that comes with being right.” Kids are addicted to contempt of anyone without the Skinner Box programming. And it is an addiction impossible to break.
China will look like a libertarian oasis in the years to come compared to where the US is headed.
asdf and edgar:
I think your views towards parenting and education is skewed by The Nurture Assumption as described in Judith Rich Harris’ 1999 book. The Wikipedia page about the book says:
Bryan Caplan’s book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids can be considered a How To book based on Judith Rich Harris’ work.
If the contribution to personality/beliefs are about half genetic, about half peers, and about zero “nurture” (i.e. parenting and teaching) then the emphasis on parenting style/beliefs and educational indoctrination is probably off base.
I think the discussion might be more productive if we discuss whether or not Free Speech is protected in the committing of a crime; whether the crime is against humanity or the law.
I believe that youth struggles with the stalling Civil Rights movement and the resurgence of bigotry and prejudice regardless of the reason. They were brought up with equal justice and standing for all including brown, black, red or yellow people. All would also include refugees, residents, citizens or illegal immigrants. That is the way I was taught and even though I am a boomer, I can relate to the youth in this area.
If you attack black folks (e.g., their intelligence) in your commentary, they might see that as a “crime” and basically want to shut it down.
Homo Appiens…? FOR SHAME, YOU ARE BETTER THAN THAT KLING!!!
Despite the fact that this post is one-sided, and that there are just as many people on the right who would gladly censor leftist speech if they were able to, I will just say this issue has gotten way more coverage than is warranted.
Some colleges and online forums have free speech problems. Some “moderators” on the left are going a little overboard with the whole “call everyone a nazi” thing. You do have to admit however that white supremacy, prejudice, and bigotry are more high profile today than say 10 years ago. This is partly due to social media and the news, but also a reactionary movement.
I’m not at all sure there’s any more bigotry and white supremacy than there was 10 years ago. I think there are just a lot more people using accusations of bigotry and white supremacy as a weapon.
Megan McArdle had a nice article a few years ago on the overuse of the term “white supremacy” in her essays at Bloomberg, and the semantic creep and “shock value” associated with it.
It might be paywalled.
Someone–most possibly Mark Lilla–said that often the best response to the accusation that someone or something is racist is to say this:
“That’s not an argument–that’s a slur.”
Link here to a quirky website. From there you can follow the argument back.
https://theindependentwhig.com/haidt-passages/haidt/haidt-teaching-students-to-slur-rather-than-argue/
Charles — so true.
The assertion that there is “more bigotry and white supremacy than there was 10 years ago” can itself be a weapon.
If you think that is true, an interesting experiment is to watch television commercials. Advertisers don’t want to piss off potential customers. If there were more bigotry and white supremacy, one would expect to see white people portrayed well and non-white people to be portrayed negatively or not at all.
That is not what you find. In fact, you’ll even notice a significant number of inter-racial couples. (Yes, he did marry your daughter.)
I’ve got this image of the next presidential election, with 15 thousand Russian bots sending emails every day to everyone on Facebook condemning say Elizabeth Warren as a maniacal socialist demanding “Lock her up! Lock Her Up!! LOCK HER UP!!!”
while 20 thousand Chinese bots are proclaiming “DUMP TRUMP NOW!” While, of course, Facebook’s 3 billion members — dispassionate, thoughtful, reflective individuals all — carefully click their LIKE buttons and dispatch copies of these posts to fifty or a few hundred of their close personal friends ….
You guys are super sure this is the sort of Free Speech John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had in mind? Or what ought to be part of the assigned reading in courses at Harvard University and Quincy Park Community College?
What you’re describing is Facebook’s problem to solve, not the government’s. If Zuckerberg thinks Russian dezinformatsiya and Chinese bots are bad for the platform (and it’s pretty clear he does), then he’s free to ban them.
Every moral panic leaves us with thousands of pages of law that undercut the principles set out in the founding documents. What would Madison say about the civil forfeiture laws we have thanks to our zeal to take down a handful of “drug kingpins,” as though taking out Pablo Escobar was going to suddenly diminish Americans’ appetites for Bolivian marching powder?
As for what the Adams and Jefferson thought about the 1A, in their time pamphleteers were notorious for accusing politicians of everything from murder to miscegenation and every other sin to be found. In the absence of railroads, telegraphs, or anything else, can you imagine the manner of crazy ideas that developed in taverns in isolated communities? The media of the 18th and 19th centuries was a lot closer to the Weekly World News than the Sunday Evening Post.
It wasn’t really until the rise of national broadcast media around WWII that a handful of large outfits began to drown out this teeming vox populi with the agreed-on versions of the story read in a mid-Atlantic accent. You could still print your pamphlets, but when the whole country could tune in to hear Lowell Thomas, it took a lot of the wind out of those sails.
In many ways we’re living through a transition to a form that’s in part unprecedented and in part a throwback to those old days. Thirty years ago a doctor on 60 Minutes would tell you child vaccines were essential and if you had your suspicions you had to send a SASE to a PO box in the back of some magazine you bought in a hippie store to get a booklet on the evils of Thimerosal. Now some idiot celebrities can talk about it and all their idiot followers can connect instantly and reinforce each other’s biases. At the moment the previous generation of error-correction technology (big three networks & co) are a spent force so it’s a bit of a wild west but I think in a generation or so we’ll find a more stable equilibrium. The years after Gutenberg started printing Bibles weren’t calm ones either.
Our youth has one characteristic the elders do not have.
The youth never voted for most of the debt they pay for. They have every right to be angry, but they do not understand the details, they weren’t there! We have a series of federal loses (about 50% of our debt is basically failed programs, defense, bailout, failed entitlements that need a redo.). The youth didn’t do much if any of those losses!
Nor should the youth have to attempt to decipher a crooked government history and try to isolate all those losses, they never caused, it is not their problem. The proper answer for youth is default, default at least a third of that debt.
What do you mean by ‘a painful must-read’?
The problem with this story is that sudden mass manias, moral panics, and popular enthusiasms seeking to eradicate all sorts of evils, are by no means new phenomena, and often exhibit the same kind of generation gaps in passionate intensity. Everyone is now using apps, so every phenomenon is happening on the apps, but it doesn’t follow that it is happening because of the apps.
This is by no means to deny the fact that in addition to its benefits, the emergence of modern social media can with fairness be said to be primarily responsible for some significant bad trends. But many other temporal correlations are spurious.
An alternative and much more general theory of the origin of the choices and preferences of young people (and especially college students) – not just views, beliefs, and opinions, but all sorts of other arbitrary fashions – is that human beings are very culturally flexible, that the reaction to the same information, technology, and context can vary tremendously and is by no means technologically or biologically determined, and so they pick up on the environmental cues regarding who has elite prestige and social status, observe and absorb the signals which distinguish those elites from those with lower-status, and the Social Calculus Modules in their brains automatically and spontaneously generate what feel like sincere and ‘authentic’ impulses (the SCM coldly deploys ‘genuine’ emotions the way one moves pieces across the chessboard), which of course take the form of imitation and mimicry and some effort to extrapolate an adaptive trend along its apparent trajectory, both to affiliate with those high status people – which boosts one’s perceived status, influence, and opportunities – and in an attempt to gain some fame and make a name for oneself, which boosts one’s status, influence, and opportunities even more.
This Status Model (unfortunately ‘Standard’ is associated with the SSSM) is well-established in fields like Anthropology and Evolutionary Social Psychology, and I think it should always be the presumptive starting point for any discussion of what determines any particular human ideas and behaviors, and I tend to be immediately skeptical of any story which doesn’t allow these mechanisms a substantial role in that determination.
One immediate implication of the Status Model is that one ought to expect to observe gradual, “trickle-down” propagation of fashions – including intellectual and ideological fashions – from a vanguard of high status, influential elites and institutions (which definitely includes prestigious professors and top universities) to those imitating, aspirational youth, and, eventually, to the common masses and even – get this – old people.
So, as a test, we can ask whether the current fashion for censoring or penalizing harassing and offensive speech suddenly burst on the scene suddenly (which one could infer was because of the apps), or does it represent merely the latest version of a trend with has been going on and trickling down for a long time, with gradual but steady expansion of the class of punishable expression, and before widespread use of the internet (which would tend to exclude the apps as a causal factor).
Well, in line with Kling’s story about the impact of the sudden arrival of lots of post baby-boomer women and blacks on American campuses, we start to see the emergence of increasing penalties for harassment and offense in the 70’s, first more informally and as extension of existing behavioral guides and honor systems, and then formally, with the first official ‘speech code’ at the University of Wisconsin in 1981. No apps in sight back then. Indeed, it was only 17 years after the infamous Free Speech Movement year at Berkeley, and my impression is that the period around 1980 seems to represent the important inflection point that started the long trend of erosion and deterioration leading to where we are today. The impetus for the “something must be done” impulse was not a result of decentralized digital communications.
After Wisconsin did it, these codes spread like fire (no relation to FIRE, quite the contrary), and by 1989 we already see the first important challenge to these codes in the case of Doe v. University of Michigan (1989).
Which is so much on point to this conversation that it’s worth reading in full (Don’t miss the Bollinger quote which today adds some sting to “the past is a foreign country”). Here’s an excerpt:
“A rising tide.” In the 80’s? Boy, doesn’t that sound familiar. The tide is always rising! Take that King Canute! Of course the problem was Trump inspiring alt-right hate among an army of KKK white supremacist deplorables and … oh, wait. In that case, it was Reagan’s fault. Obviously. Trump avant la lettre. Reagan was alt-right before it was cool. Heck, before it was alt.
Where did those speech codes come from? Why couldn’t those Old Left Liberals who had already established control over universities, and who we are told loved Free Speech so much, stop them? Well, by the late 70’s and early 80’s, they had already changed their tune, and had already started along the road to what we recognize as contemporary Political Correctness, such that the term really exploded in use as a pejorative in conservative criticism of the New Left in the late 80s and early 90s. Which, again, had no apps.
And here we are, fully 30 years later. PC has been an issue and gaining steam for two generations now, and what should we expect but that young people with no memory of a pre-PC world, and who have been marinated in it since birth – told by every high status person they’ve ever seen that offensive speech is truly evil – would come to gave indifferent or outright antagonistic attitudes toward values of free expression? And this prediction would only be bolstered by a general understanding of the principles of progressivism, the logical implications of which inescapably mandate censorship precisely of this nature. And thus, with the continued dominance of progressivism, it was inevitable and only a matter of time, apps or no apps.
As a final note, getting back to one of the major social harms of Social Media, it seems to create an enormous problem with presentism and historical amnesia, and creates false impressions that certain contemporary phenomena are truly new and have only recently burst upon the scene. If one filters out the Social Media spheres, and for reasons of idiosyncratic interest has kept a finger on the pulse of these particular issues for a while, one will have an easier time recognizing the continuance of long-standing historical trends.
+1
Another way of looking at it is does there exist today a part of the world where the presence of Social Media/Apps hasn’t resulted in the same ideological trends. And of course we have an example, one which has actually been some years ahead of the west in that sort of technology for the most part. All of Asia! Hard to miss those billions of people. These people have social media and apps, but in addition to not detecting some progressive death loop, there don’t seem to be any of the modern problems associated with such technologies over there.
I’m willing to buy that Social Media (etc) are *an accelerant* of underlying trends, but those trends must already be there. If they aren’t (as they are not in much of Asia) then it doesn’t do anything on its own.
One complication of the Status Model is that it is not simple to determine who has “Status”. Much of what we think of as “the sixties” involved people denying status to a lot of high-ranking people and institutions.
Perhaps it was inevitable that into the vacuum swept the universities. Most young people nowadays have not spent more than a few weeks at a time away from the benevolent directors of their life found in daycare and school.
This is a good example of the difference between easy and simple.
There are many deeply complex instictive skills which come completely automatically and effortlessly, and even subconsciously, without even any awareness of underlying learning and processes. Consider face recognition or learning language.
It’s the same with the instincts for determining who has higher or lower status, and the reactions to those judgments, which often involve deploying existing biological mechanisms for social purposes. For example, you have a disgust symptom which is supposed to create an immediate feeling of overwhelming aversion from potentially toxic substances or contagion vectors which may harm your health, e.g., feces, vomit, corpses, visibly diseased people, etc. The Social Calculus Module is able to deploy the same disgust reaction to social circumstances, to protect you from socially toxic low-status individuals, in terms of your reaction to observing them engage in behaviors associated with low-status people. All of this goes well below the level of conscious awareness, and most people only experience it as a visceral, gut-level instinct.
Lewis Caroll’s Humpty Dumpty controlled word meanings, Orwell (1984) controlled related thoughts and now disagreement is hate speech demanding suppression by educators/government … seems a logical enough progression, doesn’t it?