E-Pluribus | May 6, 2022

If speech falls in a forest and no one is there to hear, is it really free; the extremes of left and right meet at the bottom; and an academic in exile.

May 06, 2022

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

Antonio García Martínez: Freeze peach and the Internet

At his Substack The Pull Request, Antonio García Martínez addresses the issue of “freedom of reach” - is speech really free if no one can hear it? As the internet prepares for the era of Musk-owned Twitter, questions of moderation, algorithms, censorship and free speech absolutism are likely to only increase, but Martínez says this really isn’t anything new.

It’s simply not the case that freedom of speech is some legal binary switched between an abstract allow/not-allow state. Freedom of speech is now a continuous spectrum, a reach knob adjusted by algorithms and tweaked by the companies where speech happens and the audience is. To think otherwise is to fall into the trap she accuses her opponents of, which is thinking this some Greek agora where you can either set up your soapbox next to Socrates and blab to your heart’s content or not, and how far your voice carries amidst the tumult is irrelevant. There is indeed no agora anymore: it’s just what appears in most Twitter feeds, and algorithmic amplification (like it or not) is key to that freedom.
[. . .]
Let’s just state this once and for all to hopefully move the debate up from the mutual strawmanning level where it’s currently mired: nobody sane is asking for absolute free speech. Having to constantly rehash the point that no public forum possesses absolute free speech, like it’s some thundering assertion, is a waste of time and probably just disingenuous grandstanding anyhow.
[. . .]
Our American public square, including and especially the periods of maximum democracy creation, has never been more than a bareknuckle brawl happening in the middle of a food fight surrounded by a jeering mob. To try and engineer something else either via immature ML technology that isn’t up to the task (and won’t be any time soon) or hamhanded policies that are obvious ploys to favor one’s own side, is delusional and futile.

Read it all.

Robert Tracinski: The Race to the Bottom

Image via @Tracinski with apologies to @SwipeWright

Elon Musk’s use of Colin Wright’s cartoon describing his “lived experience” as a center-lefter ruffled a lot of feather last week (see May 4, item 2.) Robert Tracinski at his Symposium Substack, while finding the reactions to Musk’s cartoon over the top, describes his own experience, but with a twist.

It undoubtedly is, and the existence of Symposium and similar publications that reach out to a disaffected liberal center-left is evidence of that fact. It should all be coming into clearer focus with the news that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court is planning to overturn Roe v. Wade, giving new credence to the complaint that the woke left has been so busy trying to erase the existence of women in favor of “birthing persons” that they were unable to protect what they used to regard as a core issue of women’s rights. More to the point, the expected Supreme Court ruling would not be possible without the six-justice conservative majority made possible by Donald Trump’s narrow victory in the 2016 presidential election, which he won in part by loudly advertising himself as the candidate who rejected “Political Correctness.”
For a section of the left, though, wokeness is not a distraction from its core agenda; it is the core agenda. Others on the left have a strong incentive to want to avoid making the choice, to pretend that they can appease the woke fringe—which is very loud and very angry and disproportionately represented in elite academic, media, and professional circles—without sacrificing the support of Joe Sixpack. So there has been a wave of recent attempts to argue for such a policy and even to pretend that woke ideas are a source of popularity for the left.
[ . . . ]
. . .Republicans have spent the past year and half spreading conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, excusing an attempt to overturn the results of that election, and plotting to create the mechanisms to overturn it successfully in 2024. I hope these are issues we “fellow liberals” would care about as much as “free speech, individual rights, and women’s rights”—and in fact, that we would regard them as all part of the same issue.

Read the whole thing.

Bo Winegard: Academic Exile, Two Years On

Bo Winegard was let go by Ohio’s Marietta College in 2020 after complaints about his remarks regarding variations between racial and ethnic groups. Two years on, Winegard laments at Quillette the stifling atmosphere he says still exists in higher education that is suppressing free expression and inquiry to the detriment of everyone.

Academia is supposed to promote free inquiry and debate. It is supposed to be full of contentious discourse, controversial claims, bold hypotheses, and rigorous argument. And, certainly, it remains full of scientists and philosophers who believe themselves to be modern Socratic truth-seekers, pursuing knowledge with implacable dedication while challenging the ignorance and bigotry of the establishment. The truth about academia is less inspiring. It currently functions as the very thing it claims to oppose: the protector and promoter of doctrine, which it defends with moral intimidation and threats of professional ruin.

Many professors and scientists are devoted to pursuing the truth, and many are admirable people who think that censoring ideas and punishing unorthodox scholars is repugnant. However, these people must survive in an institution that has been commandeered by an ardent minority of progressive activists. They fear losing their jobs. They fear losing their professional status. They fear injuring the careers of their graduate students. And so, they generally remain silent. I could lament their cowardice, but I also sympathize with their predicament. It takes many years of preparation and training to secure a position as a professor, and it is not an easy job to recover once lost. Dismissal from one university for expressing forbidden opinions makes it exceedingly difficult to get rehired at another. For the academic pariah, years of often tedious and expensive training are suddenly redundant.
[ . . . ]
Although I have become much more conservative as I have aged, this should not be about politics. I do not lament the execrable state of the university system primarily because it is full of leftwing professors and administrators. I lament it because it has quashed the spirit of free inquiry that enthralled me as a young scholar. I lament it because it has expelled so many important ideas and debates. I lament it because it is no longer devoted to understanding human nature. Instead, universities exist to promote ideas that advance a particular policy agenda and to suppress those that do not. The social sciences have not yet been destroyed by the rot of postmodernism and become post-truth. But they are post-dispassionate-exploration-of-human-nature. And we should all lament this whatever our political preferences.

Read it all here.