The set of ideas critiqued by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in Cynical Theories is normally regarded as a version of liberalism, albeit a version rejected by many who self-identify as liberals. Pluckrose and Lindsay do not contrast it with conservatism, though. They contrast it with another set that they call liberalism, which arose during the Enlightenment and has been expressed in political movements on both the right and the left.
It can get confusing, but not so much to us who understand why conservatism is sometimes disparaged as the worship of dead liberals. The political ideals that were advanced by Enlightenment thinkers would have been opposed by the conservatives of that age, if conservatism is construed merely as opposition to change. But once those ideas became politically orthodox, a new generation of conservatives came to defend them as the status quo and so, according to the conventional narrative, have resisted efforts to advance them any further.
As usual, the conventional narrative doesn’t tell the whole story. And, unfortunately, the whole story cannot be told in a 20-minute YouTube video. A series of 20 one-hour videos might suffice to give the Reader’s Digest version of the story.
The conventional narrative is about a protracted conflict between people who want to make the world a better place (liberals) and people who want the world to stay the way it is (conservatives). The whole story is about a protracted conflict between humanists trying to use reason and science to both identify and solve problems, thus making the world a better place, and authoritarians who wish the world would just do whatever they tell it do. We might call them the thinkers and the thugs, as Petr Beckmann did in A History of Pi. Most of our recent political fighting—the “uncivil war” to which President Biden referred—has not been between thinkers and thugs, but between two gangs of thugs, dubbed Wokestan and MAGAstan by Eric Weinstein.
I don’t regard Biden himself as a thug, but thugs in the woke left helped him win the presidency, and he knows that. He and Vice President Harris have already assured us that his administration believes the nation to be experiencing a resurgence of white supremacy and will govern accordingly. If we take them at their word, they have accepted the woke-left doctrines of Critical Theory that Pluckrose and Lindsay analyze in their book. Of course, we usually cannot take politicians at their word, but whatever these two really think about the woke left, they won’t forget what it did to help them win the election. Nor will they forget that the mainstream press and social media, which are solidly allied with the woke left, have been supporting them from Day One.
And so I take no hope from the president’s pleas for unity, because the people who could make some unity happen are not paying any attention to him. The only unity they want is to be the only people with any political power. That is the unity of a police state or an empire. I don’t think for a minute that Biden wants that kind of unity, but we don’t have to worry about what he wants. He is only the president, not the king. The people we have to worry about are the ones who wish we did have a king, provided only that the king would take his orders from them.
Of course nobody is saying so, but that’s because it doesn’t matter what you call a monarch as long as they’re the only person in charge of everything. We can call him the president and let him rule by executive order. That works just as well.
For these authoritarians, there is just this problem of the king/president having to win an election every so often, the problem being that the people cannot always be counted on to vote for the right person to be king/president. There is not much to be done about that except use whatever media are at your disposal to scold the people whenever they’ve made the wrong choice. Tell them they should be ashamed of themselves for their stupidity, or bigotry, or gullibility, or whatever you think they won’t like to be accused of. But there is a risk in that. A thug from the rival gang might seize the opportunity to tell the people, “Aren’t you tired of being insulted like that? Make me king/president and I’ll shut those people up.”
That seems to have been what happened in 2016, and the rival thug won that election. And then, because the media learned nothing from its mistakes, he was all set to win again last year until a pandemic came along and he botched the response so badly that he lost the election. And then he made things worse for his gang of thugs by acting like history’s sorest loser.
And so now the other gang of thugs is back in power. We had four years of MAGAstan, now we’ll get at least four years of Wokestan. No matter which of them is winning, the nation is losing. The Wokestan thugs will not stop insulting everyone who doesn’t vote for them, and the MAGAstan thugs will not stop promising to kick the other thugs’ butts. We won’t have a republic for much longer if this keeps up.
We need to swap out some of this thuggery for some thinking. This should be obvious, but if it were obvious, we wouldn’t be in this mess. We need a revival of liberalism, the kind of liberalism endorsed in Cynical Theories and also endorsed by Steven Pinker in Enlightenment Now. This is the liberalism that sensible conservatives are on board with. But the revival won’t happen easily, and it might even be too late to make it happen. Today’s thinkers—the few, the happy few, who know what our worst problems really are and what we must do to fix them—are likely engaged in a last stand, “a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected.”
This is not about one more faction claiming that it should be the one in power. The Enlightenment was never about who should have authority over the people. It was about the notion that nobody should have final authority—not even a majority of the people. It was where we got that idea about “a government of laws, not of men.” It was about assuming the existence of objective truths that could be discovered to a good approximation using methods with error-correction mechanisms built in, and about using those methods to settle public disputes by reasoned public debate. It was about accepting the universal fallibility of human beings, knowing that no man or woman could be immune from error on any subject, no matter the extent of their expertise.
These ideas and others derived from them have enabled the substantial progress our civilization has made, a progress that will be reversed if we abandon them. No serious thinker believes we have made all the progress we ought to make. Our nation is not as good as it ought to be, but it is better than it was when founded, and when founded it was the best there had ever been. A few people on both left and right—usually called center left and center right—know this. This is our common ground, and it is too sparsely occupied.
The kind of unity we should want is nowhere to be found except on this common ground. We won’t find it in the electoral victory of any political party or any faction within any party.
We also won’t find it by trying to shame or ostracize into silence those who hold opinions we disapprove of, regardless of our grounds for disapproval. This, though, is the kind of unity sought by those espousing the dogmas examined by Pluckrose and Lindsay in their book, and which would be enforced if the some of the people to whom Biden is indebted should ever get their way.