From Ideas to Ideology
Should you separate ideas from their context or just agree with your tribe?
A couple of months ago, I was talking to a young mathematician who was stressed about the disorder in his life. I told him that I liked Jordan Peterson’s line about how, if everything else in your life is going badly, you can at least clean your room.
The mathematician looked doubtful: “I don’t know about that. Doesn’t Jordan Peterson say bad things about trans people?” By his reckoning, if someone is problematic in one area they aren’t to be trusted on anything.
I tried to explain that someone could be 99% bad and I would still happily take the 1% that is good and true, leaving aside the rest. This is the nature of the cognitive decoupler: someone who intuitively isolates ideas from their context. Also, Jordan Peterson can’t get through an interview without bursting into tears. He is clearly a damaged human being. Perhaps we can empathise with his suffering and judge his words accordingly.
The mathematician almost looked convinced, especially when I started talking about percentages, but I realised that most people don’t think like me. There isn’t enough time to sift through a three-hour podcast or a 400-page book to find that elusive nugget of wisdom. People are either friends or enemies, goodies or baddies. However, it seems that many do enjoy hearing ideas discussed in a neutral setting.
Lex Fridman has cultivated a large audience by conducting civil discussions with people he finds interesting—from the socialist editor of Jacobin magazine to the antisemitic rapper Ye (aka Kanye West), as well as influential figures as diverse as Mark Zuckerberg, Mr Beast, and Aella.
This week, a profile of Fridman came out that seemed designed to soften him up for future cancellation. Fridman’s podcast gives people the space to discuss ideas without hysterics or point-scoring. There is, instead, soft-spoken nuance and an attempt to empathise. Julia Black’s article implies that even giving a platform to people like Ye is dangerous and that his “inflammatory comments” should not be platformed. She doesn’t trust Fridman’s audience to listen to the interview and understand that Ye is traumatised or wired differently. When I listen I just wish he’d get help. I am, it seems, still optimistic enough to believe that providing a fuller picture of the situation makes us more empathetic.
One counter-argument to all this is that discussing ideas in the abstract simply shows your immense privilege. Fridman is insulated from the consequences of such ideas and his platforming of them could help them to spread, just as 89 years ago HG Wells could cheerfully discuss collectivism with Stalin at the same time as collective farming was starving millions. Fridman goes from one interviewee to the next, never needing to turn ideas into policy frameworks that have real-world outcomes.
At BUZZCUT festival last week, I had the sense that people were attempting to practically live out their political ideals: accessibility was paramount and they attempted to avoid any barriers due to class, disability, race, sexuality, gender, or whatever. I don’t know their intellectual genealogy, but it seemed like they were enacting the ideas of John Rawls, the twentieth-century American philosopher whose book, A Theory of Justice, sketches a thought experiment in which you conceive of a society where you wouldn’t mind being born into any circumstance: where there is so much equality of opportunity that being born rich or poor, black or white, with disabilities or not, would only minimally affect your life chances. It’s a powerful thought experiment with huge implications.
Of course, any set of ideas can be turned into an ideological framework, a set of beliefs that shape your entire worldview, and it is at this point that it becomes difficult to have conversations in the abstract. Discussing ideas like this is a fun diversion, but if the person is ideological then the implication is that they won't listen to evidence. When Kate Forbes revealed that it was due to biblical scripture that she was against gay marriage it sounded absurd because we live in a culture that values evidence. If you gave Forbes a well-argued case in favour of gay marriage and she ignored it due to 3,000-year-old scripture, how could you trust her judgment on anything?
Although I enjoy discussing ideas in the abstract most politics exists on the level of the friend-enemy distinction. Effective operators—modern Machiavellians—choose which silo to put someone into and then move on. For such people, even the most benign idea, like cleaning your room, can be painted as a red pill that ends with you being nasty to Elliot Page. And, while the centrists and podcasters are discussing the finer points of philosophical texts, their enemies are making savage memes to make them look stupid. Which one is more effective?
This week, for instance, Ewan Morrison suggested I was becoming an ‘armchair social engineer’ for advocating the replacement of the M8 as if my support for the campaign was instantly going to destroy the lives of people who depend on the road to get to work. My position is that the building of a motorway through a city centre was itself a piece of radical social engineering, whose negative implications were only discovered much later. I am a pragmatist who acknowledges the world is a complex place with hundreds of problems that could be addressed. It’s only through campaigning and lobbying that those problems go up the agenda.
At the end of a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat, SN Goenka tells students the story of a child whose mother has made him rice with cardamon pods in it. The child hates cardamon because they look like stones and rejects the entire dish. The mother doesn’t despair, she simply takes out the pods and the child happily eats the dish. Goenka says that we should do the same when it comes to his teachings: embrace what is true and leave what you don't like.
It is impossible to imagine a set of teachings that are perfect in every regard. All teachings come from flawed human beings. Social media has created a purity spiral that rejects everything about a thinker if there is even one thing they disagree with. Far better to take a nuanced approach despite the immediate rewards of tribalism.
Great points Neil. It’s that kind of association that allows bad ideas to gestate - consider how over 30 years bad education policy was placed into every American primary school so that hundreds of thousands of kids didn’t learn how to read. George Bush recognised this during his tenure and tried to address it but because his political leanings met consistent backlash and so nothing was done. We should always be prepared to listen and be ready to accept good ideas even from people we might not like. The alternative is (in this instance) children being failed year after year.
As a side note I find it *interesting* that you find Buzzcut inclusive. I find it very singular and narrow in its politics and views. Superficially inclusive perhaps and I think the organisers probably want to be inclusive (?) (maybe?) ....
You got to it in the end - social media, that and the 24x7 news monster - Ye and such folks and their platforming is mainly a problem because, even if they could speak reasonably for 1 hour, the one sentence they said which was unreasonable would be endlessly repeated on social media / news and thus would dominate above all the reasonable chat. Hence everyone has to be ideologically pure. You'll have read it anyway but Jon Ronson's "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" covers this issue really well.