E-Pluribus | April 14, 2022

Identity overtakes feminism, how our discourse became "uniquely stupid", and why an op-ed about free speech generated so much vitriol.

Apr 14, 2022

A round up of the latest and best writing and musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:

Zoe Strimpel: How Feminism Got Hijacked

It’s difficult to fight for women’s rights when we are currently having a hard time defining what exactly a woman is. This new focus on “identity”, according to historian Zoe Strimpel at Bari Weiss’s Common Sense, has damaged the feminist cause and will do long term harm to gender equity.

It is not an accident that the rise of gender ideology coincides with the long anticipated petering out of the feminist cause.
That’s because the rise of the one and the decline of the other are closely linked with our fetishization of identity. The fight for transgender rights over and above that of biological women’s rights, just like the war on systemic racism, jibes perfectly with our new identity politics.
Unfortunately, identity politics cannot content itself with simply defending women’s rights or LGBT rights or the rights of black people to be treated equally under the law. It must persist indefinitely in its quest for ever-narrowing identities. (The ever-expanding acronym of gay and gay-adjacent and vaguely, distantly, not really in any way connected communities, with its helpful plus sign at the end, neatly illustrates as much.) Everyone is entitled to an identity, or a plethora of identities, and each identity must be bespoke—individualized—and any attempt to rein in the pursuit of identity runs counter to the never-ending fight for inclusivity. Even if that inclusivity undermines the rights of other people. Like women.
This dynamic, with the most marginal interest trumping all others, easily took over a feminism long primed by whacky postmodern ideas like Butler’s—paving the way for its second, related hijacking. This one by biological males.

Read the full piece.

Jonathan Haidt: Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

It seems like every week, there is a new inflection point in the ongoing and never-ending culture war. It’s honestly hard to keep track of the (often dumb) things we argue about online. Using the Tower of Babel as a metaphor, Jonathan Haidt argues at The Atlantic that this “uniquely stupid” moment in American discourse is rooted in how we use and interact with each other on social media.

By 2013, social media had become a new game, with dynamics unlike those in 2008. If you were skillful or lucky, you might create a post that would “go viral” and make you “internet famous” for a few days. If you blundered, you could find yourself buried in hateful comments. Your posts rode to fame or ignominy based on the clicks of thousands of strangers, and you in turn contributed thousands of clicks to the game.
This new game encouraged dishonesty and mob dynamics: Users were guided not just by their true preferences but by their past experiences of reward and punishment, and their prediction of how others would react to each new action. One of the engineers at Twitter who had worked on the “Retweet” button later revealed that he regretted his contribution because it had made Twitter a nastier place. As he watched Twitter mobs forming through the use of the new tool, he thought to himself, “We might have just handed a 4-year-old a loaded weapon.”
As a social psychologist who studies emotion, morality, and politics, I saw this happening too. The newly tweaked platforms were almost perfectly designed to bring out our most moralistic and least reflective selves. The volume of outrage was shocking.
It was just this kind of twitchy and explosive spread of anger that James Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.
The tech companies that enhanced virality from 2009 to 2012 brought us deep into Madison’s nightmare. Many authors quote his comments in “Federalist No. 10” on the innate human proclivity toward “faction,” by which he meant our tendency to divide ourselves into teams or parties that are so inflamed with “mutual animosity” that they are “much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to cooperate for their common good.”
But that essay continues on to a less quoted yet equally important insight, about democracy’s vulnerability to triviality. Madison notes that people are so prone to factionalism that “where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts.”

Read Haidt’s full essay.

Emma Camp: Why My NYT Article Inspired So Much Fury

Speaking of “uniquely stupid” online behavior, University of Virginia senior Emma Camp’s recent opinion piece on free speech in the New York Times prompted some outrageous reactions from many “very online” blue check types. At Persuasion, Camp reflects on that episode and what it tells us about the way we view free expression.

This environment, as further highlighted by a recent newsletter article by David French and last month’s editorial in the New York Times, is what happens when we lose a cultural appreciation for free speech and free expression. As French writes: “the priority of fending off legal threats to free speech does not mean that we should neglect the culture. Over time, the law tends to flow from the culture, and so a culture that despises free inquiry won’t long protect the First Amendment.” If we want to protect our legal right to free speech, it is important to stay vigilant to cultural changes. When our culture seems to view the First Amendment as a frustrating obstacle, rather than a gift, we ought to be concerned.
Of course, we all have the right to criticize—and in fact to do so in profoundly unproductive, unreasonable, and yes, cruel ways. I do not have the right, in a legal sense, to not be called terrible names by a stranger on the internet, and no one is required to offer constructive and thoughtful criticism of my work. Part of making a principled support of the legal right to free speech of course requires acknowledging the “right” for individuals to use their speech in objectionable ways.
That said, it is completely possible to uphold the value of a legal right while also noting how the abuse of those rights can sometimes lead to undesirable results. We ought to have the right to say basically whatever we choose. But if we want a culture that values free expression and open inquiry, we ought to refrain from our most vindictive impulses—to read in deliberate bad faith, to be cruel, to seek the online approval of an in-group by publicly shaming an approved target. These impulses make our ability to have thoughtful and productive discourse, both on- and off-line, much harder.
Unfortunately, that appeal rests on a pretty big “if.” Those with the loudest voices—from politicians, to academics, to the blue-checks of Twitter—do not really seem to care about preserving a cultural appreciation for free thought. From the “anti-CRT” bills of red state legislatures, to Whoopi Goldberg’s push to enlist the DOJ to investigate the speech of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, few seem willing to let ideological opponents speak without calling for the intervention of coercive authorities.