1. Matt Continetti writes,

Reading Bari Weiss’s recent article on the “intellectual dark web,” one cannot help being struck by the diversity of opinion and partisan allegiance among the renegade thinkers challenging political correctness and its stigmatization of arguments that violate its axioms of group identity, racial strife, and transgenderism. A stultifying intellectual atmosphere, in which the subjective emotional responses of designated victim groups take precedent over style, argument, and empirical evidence, makes for unexpected alliances. Who would have thought that Kanye West would become, in the space of a few Tweets, the most famous and recognized champion of individual free thought in the world today? Who could have anticipated that New Atheist Sam Harris would find himself in a united front with Jordan Peterson, who instructs his millions of acolytes in the continued relevance of biblical story?

He compares the IDW to the Coalition for Cultural Freedom, a mid-20th-century reaction against the rigidity of Communist ideology and the threat of Nazism. Read the whole essay.

2. Andrew Sullivan sees the IDW coming up against the trend toward tribalism.

Instead of a willingness to disagree and tolerate, there is an impulse to loathe and expel. And this is especially true with people we associate with our own side. Friendly dissidents are no longer interesting or quirky; as the stakes appear to rise, they come to seem dangerous, even contagious. And before we even know it, we live in an atmosphere closer and closer to that of The Crucible, where politics merges into a new kind of religious warfare, dissent becomes heresy, and the response to a blasphemer among us is a righteous, metaphorical burning at the stake.

Again, read the whole thing. I was tempted to excerpt a lot of it.

3. David Fuller writes,

As Eric Weinstein, Bret’s brother, and another member of the unofficial ‘intellectual dark web’ said — “bad faith changes everything”. It’s possible to have any kind of discussion with people you disagree with so long as they are approaching it in good faith — as soon as they are not, they’re just looking to boost their position, look good in front of others or advance their career within their tribe — as Peterson alleged Cathy Newman was — then true exchange of ideas is impossible.

Fuller argues that an NYT piece on Jordan Peterson exemplifies bad faith. Unfortunately, I think that is a good way to describe the NYT and the Washington Post these days. It goes beyond mere journalistic bias. They are not even making a good-faith effort to be honest.

Another example of bad faith would be Nancy MacLean’s book on James Buchanan. Perhaps what makes the IDW important is the way that bad faith has crept into key institutions and seemingly taken over.

There were several interesting ones, starting with this.

In fact they are Recusants : “a person who refuses to submit to an authority or to comply with a regulation.” Most notably Catholics in England who refused to attend Anglican services. Not perfect, but more apt than IDW.

And then this.

The deep problem here is that to the extent it’s possible to change anyone’s minds about any moral, political, or ideological belief, it almost never happens by persuasion via rational arguments, and instead social pressures and tactics which exploit instincts of social psychology are immensely more powerful. Any society in which power and policy depends on opinion, and in which one is free to use these tactics to try and change opinion, will inevitably see the health of its intellectual life and discussions succumb to the pathology generated by these incentives.

And also this.

Paul Gottfried’s essay “Why today’s conservatives are useless debaters” is worth reading also. He goes back to Max Weber and says we must chose between “Politics as a Calling” and “Science as a Calling.” In that regard, we do have a Cathedral sort of situation in which the cathedral tells us what we are supposed to believe. Gottfried says “Big Conservativism” has hobbled itself by “driving out heretics, many of whom have been rhetorically gifted deviationists, since the 1980s and in some cases since the 1950s.”

I wonder if there is a significant bonding role in a group that comes from having dogmatic beliefs. A belief like “1 + 1 = 2” or “the sun rises in the East” has no bonding effect, because you cannot find a group of non-believers to oppose. But something that requires dogmatic belief allows you to identify and stigmatize the recusants.

I think of the IDW as bonding over old-fashioned empiricism. Our dogma is that we do not accept other people’s dogmas.

A commenter writes,

I still believe the Poli Sci theory that if the government can not govern all parts of society that other institutions will step in and perform the governing.

My first thought is “Bring it on!” In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, the U.S. government has collapsed into a pathetic joke, and territories all over the world are governed privately. I call this the “snow crash scenario.” It is dystopian in the novel, but not in my mind.

My second thought is that conservatives make the converse point that when the central government steps in, this undermines civil society and local government.

I think that the point that governance is needed from some institution is absolutely correct. But the institution does not have to be a corporate entity. It can be a standards-setting body, or a set of common-law precedents, or a popular religion, or a set of norms enforced in a decentralized manner by people who are passionate about those norms.

So what we might call the “law of conservation of governance” likely holds. Where governance is needed, what government fails to supply will be supplied by other institutions.

It is also worth thinking about what determines the need for governance. My thoughts are these:

1. Population density is a factor.

2. Interdependence is a factor. That gets back to the Alchian-Demsetz theory of the firm.

3. Complexity is a factor. The Internet requires a lot of governance. Fortunately, the Internet Engineering Task Forces handle the plumbing issues. Unfortunately, many people look to Facebook to govern their attention. I think you are better off using blogs for that purpose.

A commenter writes,

As a libertarian, I find large corporations a fascinating, and sobering counter-argument to my libertarian ideas. Here is an example of central planning evidently working better than distributed self-coordination. The question is why is this true, and at what scale does it stop being true (as it evidently does, at the scale of entire countries).

To my mind, a country is essentially a large, heavily armed not-for-profit corporation. If you dislike big corporations, you should dislike big government. And, if you are a libertarian who thinks big government exists only because it is heavily armed, then how do you explain the existence of (unarmed) large corporations? (And don’t tell me they exist because they’ve captured the armed government – they may do that, but that’s not why they exist.)

Also, as a libertarian, I find I have a distaste for large corporations (if you dislike big government, you should dislike big corporations), which gives me a starting point for finding common ground with my leftist friends (who generally dislike large – not all – corporations, but think government – a large, armed corporation is the solution).

As you know, the common ground with the Left is rather limited in this regard. The Left thinks of the government as a countervailing power. It represents “us” against the power of corporations. Libertarians do not think of the government as representing “us,” or certainly not doing a very good job of it. In that regard, the libertarian perspective does not strike me as obviously right or obviously wrong a priori. I would say that as a matter of empirical observation, I think that the libertarian perspective works better. That is, I think that market competition tends to work better than government at curbing abuse by large corporations. As I like to put it: “Markets fail. Use markets.”