E-Pluribus | March 12, 2024
Identity's identity crisis; the disconnect that is wrecking journalism; and breaking down a couple of First Amendment cases.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Brandon McMurtrie: Identity Satiation
Repeat “Pluribus” out loud about 20 times. (No, this is not just an attempt at free publicity.) After a while, any word repeatedly repeated sounds garbled and even silly. At Quillette, Brandon McMurtrie examines this phenomenon when applied to identity. McMurtrie asserts that all the introspection so in vogue today may actually be part of the problem.
Semantic satiation is the uncanny sensation that occurs when a word or sentence is repeated again and again, until it appears to become foreign and nonsensical to the speaker. You may have done this as a child, repeating a word in quick succession until it no longer seems to be recognizable. It’s a highly reliable effect—you can try it now. Repeat a word to yourself quickly, out loud, for an extended period, and really focus on the word and its meaning. Under these circumstances, most people experience semantic satiation.
This well-studied phenomenon—sometimes called “inhibition,” “fatigue,” “lapse of meaning,” “adaptation,” or “stimulus satiation”—applies to objects as well as language. Studies have found that compulsive staring at something can result in dissociation and derealization. Likewise, repeatedly visually checking something can make us uncertain of our perception, which results, paradoxically, in uncertainty and poor memory of the object. This may also occur with facial recognition.
Interestingly, a similar phenomenon can occur in the realm of self-perception. Mirror gazing (staring into one’s own eyes in the mirror) may induce feelings of depersonalization and derealization, causing distortions of self-perception and bodily sensation. This persistent self-inspection can result in a person feeling that they don’t recognize their own face, that they no longer feel real, that their body no longer feels the same as it once did, or that it is not their body at all. Mirror-gazing so reliably produces depersonalization and realization (and a wide range of other anomalous effects), that it can be used in experimental manipulations to trigger these symptoms for research purposes.
[. . .]
These phenomena provide an explanation for the worsening mental health outcomes of young people—particularly those encouraged to reflexively explore and inspect their own feelings and identities at a time when their bodies and identities are in a state of flux. The school curricula and social dialogue now dominant in the West feature endless discussions of identity and encourage constant introspection. This replicates thought patterns shown to result in poorer understanding and more confusion, and inadvertently broaches complex topics (such as cartesian dualism) that have preoccupied serious philosophers for centuries. The likely result is identity satiation, both through the semantic satiation of the words associated with various identity concepts, and through whatever mechanism drives the depersonalization-derealization effects of meditation and rumination.
In other words, the proliferation of therapy culture and compulsive introspection, intended to encourage self-knowledge and mental well-being, may in fact be more like the poison than its antidote.
Read the whole thing.
William Deresiewicz: How Pseudo-Intellectualism Ruined Journalism
William Deresiewicz has been an editor at Persuasion for a year now, but has been adjacent to journalism for decades. In his latest for Persuasion, Deresiewicz gives his perspective on what has contributed to the public’s frustration with journalism in 2024.
The main thing that I learned in journalism school [1986, Columbia School of Journalism] was that I didn’t belong in journalism school. The other thing I learned was that journalists were deeply anti-intellectual. They were suspicious of ideas; they regarded theories as pretentious; they recoiled at big words (or had never heard of them). For a long time, I had contempt for the profession on that score. In recent years, though, this has yielded to a measure of respect. For notice that I didn’t say that journalists are anti-intellectual. I said they were. Now they’re something else: pseudo-intellectual. And that is much worse.
[. . .]
Coming up working-class, you develop a certain relationship to facticity. Your parents work with their hands, with things, or on intimate, sometimes bodily terms with other people. Your environment is raw and rough—asphalt, plain talk, stains and smells—not cushioned and sweetened. You imbibe a respect for the concrete, the tangible, that which can be known through direct experience, and a corresponding contempt for euphemism and cant. You develop a gut and a bullshit detector, acquire a suspicion of experts who operate at a remove from reality, which means academics in particular. Hence the recognition, in figures like Breslin and Hamill, that the world is chaotic, full of paradox, that people evade our understanding. Hence their sense of curiosity and irony and wonder. At the source of their moral commitments, they had not rules but instincts, a feeling for the difference between right and wrong. For the masses, they felt not pity but solidarity, since they were of them.
That was the profession’s ethos—skeptical, demotic—and you didn’t have to grow up working class (or be a man) to absorb it. Molly Ivins, Nora Ephron, Cokie Roberts, Maureen Dowd, Mara Liasson, even Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm, in their own ways: all had it or have it. But none of them was born more recently than 1955. In the last few decades, journalists have turned into a very different kind of animal. “Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession,” wrote David Brooks not long ago, citing a study that found that more than half of writers at The New York Times attended one of the 29 most selective institutions in the country; “we’re an elite-college-dominated profession.”
The result is that contemporary journalists have a relationship to ideas that is more or less the opposite of the old school’s. It begins before they even get to campus. Students at elite colleges are drawn overwhelmingly from the upper classes, with roughly two-thirds coming from the top 20% of the income distribution. (Given the kinds of starting salaries that journalism pays, it’s fair to assume that those who go on to join the field skew even more heavily toward the higher end of the scale.) They grow up not only having little contact with ordinary people, but amidst the class of experts. Their parents—and their friends’ parents and their parents’ friends—are doctors, lawyers, bankers, executives, policy professionals, professors: people who work with abstractions and symbols, not things. They learn to see the world from the point of view of experts, to have faith in expertise, to speak its language and accept its values. Their epistemology is top-down: they start with ideas and come to tangibilities, to concrete facts, only later, through their lens.
Then comes college—and not just college, but the college of today. The college of Critical Theory and “studies” departments. This isn’t liberal arts school, either. You do not start with texts, with philosophy and literature and history, and see what they have to teach you. You start with theories and impose them on texts. You do not argue and debate; you write down what the teacher says. (If you ever do “debate,” you are careful to do so within the parameters laid down by Theory, by the ideology.) You do not think; you are handed a set of abstractions—patriarchy, intersectionality, late capitalism, and so forth—and let them do your thinking for you. Your institution’s goal is to teach you to be not a skeptic, an intellectual, but an activist.
Read it all here.
Clay Calvert: The First Amendment’s First Principle Dictates Why Social Media Platforms Must Prevail in the NetChoice Cases
While they’re not grabbing a lot of national media attention, Clay Calvert at the American Enterprise Institute says the NetChoice cases before the Supreme Court are important nonetheless. Florida and Texas have led a recent push by several states to regulate internet content they see as harmful to the public. But Calvert asserts that, regardless of the motivations, these states have run afoul of the Constitution.
During oral arguments last month before the US Supreme Court in the First Amendment cases of Moody v. NetChoice and NetChoice v. Paxton, much discussion involved their procedural posture as facial challenges (not as-applied attacks) against Florida and Texas statutes regulating content on social media platforms. As I explained earlier, some justices felt this left them without enough facts for understanding the types of platforms the statutes regulate. Do they cover not just the Facebooks, YouTubes, and Xs of the online world but also e-commerce sites and services like Etsy, Uber, and even Gmail?
Compounding the problem in Moody was Florida’s all-or-nothing stance in the lower courts that its law “doesn’t even implicate—let alone violate—the First Amendment because the platforms aren’t engaged in protected speech.” (Emphasis in original). As Paul Clement asserted for NetChoice, Florida put all of its “eggs in that basket,” wrongly believing it would thwart the courts from imposing a preliminary injunction that has stopped––for now––the bulk of the law’s enforcement. In brief, Florida unsuccessfully argued that only the platforms’ conduct, not their expressive activities, was regulated.
This might delay the cases’ final resolutions, but it shouldn’t influence their ultimate outcomes in the platforms’ favor. The cases, at bottom, hinge on the most fundamental of all First Amendment principles: The constitution prevents government censorship of speech, not private businesses and individuals from organizing and moderating it.
The First Amendment’s opening word makes that evident: “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech.” The Court in 1925 expanded “Congress” to include state entities and officials. The First Amendment thus is triggered only by state action, not by private regulation of expression.
It’s therefore not a First Amendment violation if the National Football League tells players they cannot kneel during the National Anthem to protest police brutality. The NFL sometimes acts like the government, but it isn’t, and thus there’s no First Amendment violation. In contrast, if a public (i.e., government) high school bars student athletes from peacefully taking a knee, that violates the First Amendment.
Likewise, when Facebook and Twitter jettisoned then-President Donald Trump after the Capitol riots of January 6, 2021, that didn’t raise a First Amendment issue. It did, however, spark Florida’s and Texas’s politically motivated laws now at issue in the NetChoice cases, transforming Red States into regulatory ones that dictate to private businesses the speech they must carry and how they must present it.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
The Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium has the details of Middlebury College’s disparate treatment of the two sides in the Israel/Palestinian conflict:
Is the House’s proposed TikTok ban a reasonable national security measure, or a violation of the First Amendment—a backdoor to government censorship? Rep. Thomas Massie and the Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party sparred on Twitter (though the committee didn’t respond when I asked about Massie’s other point).
And finally, Guy Benson spotted some DEI misinformation on CNN: