Raise the bar
(Update: As I was putting the final touches on this post, Bret Weinstein recorded a three-hour long podcast with Joe Rogan, which I have embedded below. It’s a very good and sober summary of the flurry of recent events I think.)
I have been warming up to this post for a few weeks, even if what’s being said mostly isn’t me saying it. As I have argued on previous occasions, it has become customary to claim that the world is going to hell in a hurry, and that the only solution to this problem is to tear civilisation down, and start anew. I am on record for rejecting both these hypotheses, though for the sake of argument, let’s say that I concede the former. Let’s say that I accept the premise that the way we’re doing things—capitalism, globalisation etc—is in need of fundamental re-design. What would be the most important prerequisite for such a project to succeed?
I’d argue that at whatever level of society such an endeavour is made, it can only prevail if everyone shares an objective method for sorting fact from fiction, truth from false, and sense from nonsense. Without such tools, any such project, at any degree of ambition, would fail. Luckily, humanity has powerful tools at its disposal for such inquiries in the form of science, technology and epistemology. Coupled with good faith, tolerance, compassion and mutual respect, I think that we could achieve just about anything that we set out to achieve. So, what are our chances? Based on the recent evidence, I’d say; slim to none.
As the world tries to get to grips with the return of an old existential foe, a respiratory-illness epidemic, and as (violent) protestors turn to the streets in the U.S., and to a lesser extent in Europe, ostensibly to demand justice for blacks in the U.S. after the brutal killing of George Floyd, a scary reality is emerging. The clearer it becomes that decisive and coordinated action is needed to solve the challenges of our time, the clearer it becomes that the tools with which to achieve such progress are being thrown by the wayside. Instead, we are being treated with ideas such as “Defund the police,” “Stop STEM”, and a statute-down-tearing mob bend hell on erasing symbols of history who, in their contemporary time, did something which would be deemed offensive, inappropriate or even vile and illegal had they been alive today. In other words, the just starting point for BML protests has long since been replaced, and captured, by something entirely different, and much more sinister.
It makes no sense for me to run through the chronological milestones around the sentiment described above. You either sense it or you don’t. In the latter case, you will have stopped reading anyway. I want to jump straight to Sam Harris’ recent podcast—Can we Pull back from the Brink—which, in his own words, “discusses the recent social protests and civil unrest, in light of what we know about racism and police violence in America.” I am not going to say too much about it except that it is detox for the mind. In this conservation with himself, Sam does his best to restore the discussion about racism in the U.S. to one based on sanity, facts and common sense. He does so from a position of tolerance towards people who disagree with him, but with adequate resolve on the points where argument is neither needed, nor productive. On #DefundThePolice, for example, he notes that:
“Giving a monopoly on violence to the state is just about the best thing we have done as a species. It ranks right up there with keeping our shit out of our food.”
At this point, I am supposed to say something like that you should go listen to it even if you don’t tend to agree with Sam Harris’ arguments. But that’s not the point. You should go listen to the podcast for the simple, and absolutely crucial, reason that it sets the appropriately high bar for how a discussion on this topic must take place, if we are to make any progress. You should listen to it, because Sam proceeds to make his argument in an inviting, though intellectually challenging, atmosphere with a fine balance between humility, when facts are thin on the ground, and resolve when they are clear. You should listen to it, because discourse like this is our only way out of the madness, correctly identified by Sam at the offset, threatening to destroy us.
I am happy to extend the same warm recommendation to the tour de force series of conversations on the DarkHorse podcast, featuring Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, both of whom are no-bull-shit, fact and good-faith wielding, evolutionary biologists. It’s difficult for me to recommend going back to the first series in their ongoing Covid-19 coverage, which has recently morphed into a discussion about the killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter and the associated unrest. This is to say, I think it’s some of the best content around, but it’s best to just jump on the train such as it is. I will say, though, that episode 19 and onwards are particularly interesting, at least in terms of framing the most recent events. I’d highlight the following, as well as Bret’s recent conversation with Joe Rogan.
One of the practical issues for the DarkHorse team is that they are producing so much content that teasing out the key bits requires editorial work. They have started such work now, clipping out key passages such as an analysis of what the most violent protesters really want, or the question of whether social media is driving us crazy, a point also discussed by Sam Harris. The main topic here is the protests and reactions in the wake of the death of George Floyd, but a quick run-through of the DarkHorse Covid-19 coverage should be enough to persuade you of the credentials of Bret and Heather, in case they weren’t clear already. Those of us who have followed their coverage will have known that masks are important, even as authorities were telling us they weren’t, that the virus is much less dangerous outside than inside, and we will have been treated to a fact-based discussion about whether the origins of the virus is, in fact, an escapee from a Chinese lab, rather than an accident in a wet market. This latter point culminated in a two-hour discussion between Bret and Yuri Deigin, and a subsequent Q&A. To put it as succinctly as possible, Bret and Heather are stewards of good faith and fact-based discourse, virtues that they have tried to bring to bear to pull us back from the brink.
Having been “cancelled” as tenured professors and lecturers at Evergreen in 2017, they are in a perfect position to expose the lies, dishonesty and hypocrisy of a mob, and to warn about what might happen to those, who stand up to it. They have done so to great effect in recent weeks, and you should make it your business to listen to them. We would be in a worse place without their work, though I am hard pressed to conclude anything other than the fact that the descent into madness has continued.
Stand up, stay silent, or abide?
The key problem is simple for anyone to see, though increasingly few are willing to say so out loud. The public discourse is now ensconced in a suffocating cloud of wokeness in which holding, let alone expressing, a “wrong” opinion makes you liable for immediate cancellation. Academics, politicians and journalists are most at risk, as far as I can see, though we are all ultimately in the firing line. This is a difficult environment in its own right, but it becomes outright toxic in the context of the warped reality imposed by this movement. If J.K. Rowing can get mobbed for pointing out that menstruation sets women apart from the other gender(s)—ostensibly because this was demeaning to trans women—where does this leave us? I don’t know entirely, but I don’t think it is a place that’s conducive for humanity as a species.
We should always be very careful ascribing motivations to other people’s actions. This is to say, we always should assume that people are acting freely and with they eyes open, but that is becoming increasingly difficult in the context of the convulsions that people and organisations are making to show the world that they too believe that Black Lives Matter. It is one thing for an individual or a group to “take a knee” in solidarity with the injustice towards black people, it is quite another for people to bow, or lie down, before a smartphone wielding mob. Alternatively, how about a pub-chain and an insurance company publicly apologising for their history, promising to pay reparations to the black community. I concede that reality is in the eye of the beholder on all such occasions, but let me put it like this. My bullshit detector is sounding the alarm. We have long since, in my view, moved into the realm of collective acts of insanity on this scorecard. How far back in time does original sin stretch, and when is the debt settled? It will have missed no one’s attention that this is being written by a Northern European white male, and it would be nice to know exactly what it is that I owe, and how to pay it off? Is a lump-sum amount required, or can I pay in instalments? At least interest rates are low at the moment, so perhaps there is a chance that I can sweat it off quickly!
Joking aside, the inference at the moment is that those who disagree with the current tenor of the woke discourse must hold the opinion that black lives do not matter. Surely, if they did, they would be on their knees, wouldn’t they? That is obviously nonsense, and claiming as such makes a proper discussion on the topic impossible in its own right. More importantly, the sleight of hand in labelling those who disagree with you as monsters rams home a point that Bret Weinstein has made on several occasions, either implicitly or explicitly, and which is echoed by Gad Saad, a Canadian evolutionary biologist (see here and here). To appease the mob is to externalise harm on others. This opens up a difficult discussion. The mob is dangerous; if you’re unlucky it can cancel you with enormous costs to you and your family. Surely, it’s best to just keep your head down? Alternatively, there is no need to become a martyr for the cause. We should try to run past the bayonets, not straight into them. Whether I have succeeded in doing that here I will let others decide. What is certain, however, is that I can’t just sit back and let this deluge of insanity continue. Our collective understanding of, and survival in, the world requires a minimum degree of discursive quality. I’d even say that it requires a high degree at our present juncture. In that vein the interlocutors referenced above—Sam Harris, the DarkHorse podcast, and Gad Saad—are all up to the task. They set a high bar for the rest of us. We can meet it, if we choose to.