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The Shallowness of the Intellectual Dark Web

Edmund Burke’s arguments against the French Revolutionaries resonate because he understood the revolutionaries’ position quite well.”

Introduction

Nate Hochman recently produced an interesting op-ed for the conservative National Review entitled “The Intellectual Dark Web’s Quiet Revolution.” Hochman makes the interesting argument that conservatives may be overestimating the extent to which college campuses are engendering a new generation of young leftists. He points out that many students tire of the, “intersectional narrative that is the foundation of the progressive belief system” and have a “knee jerk” reaction that there must be something wrong with it. This leads them to eventually embrace new forms of conservatism—in this case, the Intellectual Dark Web. Although the members of the Dark Web may not be uniformly conservative, Hochman argues that their criticisms of the contemporary intersectional Left resonate with many students and leads them towards conservative politics.

“…This new class of intellectuals serves for many as the new gatekeeper to the Right. Through them, many college students—myself included—have found their way to Edmund Burke. And to the convert whose access to the conservative tradition came through this cohort of thinkers, it is no coincidence that, despite the variety of political beliefs espoused by individual members of the IDW, they often lead many of their followers to a more traditionalist conservatism,” he writes. 

Interestingly, Hochman goes beyond these anecdotal but interesting social observations and connects it to the broader history of conservatism. He maintains that the, “path to conservatism” for many begins with a feeling that whatever leftists are proposing at the time, “must be wrong.” Oftentimes, conservatives are unwilling to express why in an intellectually cogent manner. Hochman goes a step further. He argues that it is precisely this gut level reaction against the Left is, “in itself, an ideology.” He then approvingly cites Michael Oakeshott’s characterization of conservatism as less a rational philosophy and more of a “disposition,” an opinion shared at points by luminaries like Russell Kirk (a fact which Frank Meyer criticized him for). Thinkers like the members of the Intellectual Dark Web then provide a more systematic justification for this “knee jerk” disposition against Leftist projects. In effect, the Left creates its own opposition through “unwittingly” creating new generations of conservatives who feel it is going too far. Some of these conservatives may even consist of former Leftists dissatisfied with their former allies.

“The IDW and their followers are composed of many on the Left who find themselves identifying more with conservatives than with their previous political allies, who seem suddenly taken with moral relativism, postmodernism, and the elevation of gender and racial identity over honest intellectual combat and the pursuit of truth.”

There is a lot to chew on in Hochman’s piece, which warrants a careful rebuttal. I will start by indicating where I agree with his argument, before specifying where I think it misses the mark. This is particularly true in his appraisal of the contemporary left.

Campus Activism, the Left and Political Aesthetics

Having taught at universities for many years, first as a teaching assistant and now as a professor, I would agree that there is something to Hochman’s account of why students become attracted to conservatism in general and the Intellectual Dark Web in particular.  Many students came to me over the years to opine that they felt their curriculum was too slanted to support left-wing viewpoints—or that there was insufficient attention paid to the conservative tradition, or that they simply disliked the tone and character of campus activism. This led them to feel alienated from their peers and faculty. Now, to some extent I think Hochman overstates the extent to which these inclinations are purely driven by the overemphasis and style of left-wing agitation on campus. Many of the students who came to me expressing their discontent were clearly already of a conservative bent, and their experience at university merely served to confirm their gestating viewpoints. But there is no doubt that this move to the right was accelerated by these experiences, and there were indeed some centrist and even left-wing students of mine who shifted right for similar reasons.

Where the Left can learn from Hochman’s critique is on the aesthetic dimension of political agitation. The excellent progressive Youtuber Contrapoints has long claimed that even where left-wing causes and arguments are valid, leftists often turn people away due to the style and tone of their activism. Many people come to regard leftists as moralistic, puritanical, and censorious, which drives them away from that side of the political spectrum. This also explains why a large majority of people claim to despise “political correctness.” What political correctness actually means to people is quite vague, but it strikes me that the distaste for it reflects the “feeling” that the Left has gone too far, which Hochman talked about. Now to some extent, I would argue these “feelings” are in no small part manufactured by right-wing media, which often focus with tiresome myopia on campus politics and activism. This is why the National Review’s own David French was compelled to argue that there is a, “fake outrage machine on the right also.” But regardless, it is clear that the Left has an “image” problem it needs to work on. This is part of why I have started calling on my fellow leftists to adopt a different style of political activism in my articles via a shift towards the “engaged left.” Fortunately other figures and outlets, from Contrapoints to the publisher Zero Books and the eminently readable magazine Current Affairs, seem to understand the need for this shift. It is one way to try and win back what Hochman calls “converts” to the Right by illustrating their concerns will be given a hearing by Leftists.

Where I think Hochman goes wrong is on two points. The first is his characterization of the Left and the second is on the substance of his political disagreements.

It is that these figures are so far not really up to the task, and the result is a sense that they are either engaged in bad faith polemics at best or simply unaware of the complexities of progressive positions at worst.

The Contemporary Left and Its Discontents

Hochman frequently compares the critical observations of Edmund Burke to the more recent critiques of the Intellectual Dark Web, arguing that that they stem from the same reactionary disposition towards the Left. I think this is quite true, but it misses a key distinction. Edmund Burke’s arguments against the French Revolutionaries resonate because he understood the revolutionaries’ position quite well. Reflections on the Revolution in France and Burkes’s speeches are peppered with knowing references to the writings of the revolutionaries and their antecedents. The same high quality of criticisms is largely absent in the work’s of the Intellectual Dark Web. They may be driven by a shared disdain for contemporary left-wing agitation, but they rarely demonstrate an understanding of it which goes far beyond surface level distaste for the style and tone of social justice activism and identity politics.

These limitations have been observed by both me and numerous critics like Ben Burgis and Nathan J. Robinson at length, and I cannot summarize all the observations to that effect here. To give a few examples of the more intellectually auspicious members of the Dark Web: in his book (my review here) on post-modernism and socialism Stephen Hicks makes many interpretive and even factual errors about seminal figures; Ben Shapiro badly and frequently misreads seminal modern thinkers associated with Left (and even the political right ala Max Weber) in The Right Side of History, and despite his venom Jordan Peterson doesn’t appear to have actually read more than a few pages of Marx in years. These and other very basic errors convince many Leftists (and even some conservatives on some points) that, sadly, the Dark Web’s critique of the Left doesn’t go much beyond a “knee jerk” belief that they must be wrong accompanied by a few nice sounding but inaccurate rationalizations. It isn’t that the positions of post-modern theorists, or the Frankfurt School, or Marx cannot be robustly criticized from a conservative perspective. It is that these figures are so far not really up to the task, and the result is a sense that they are either engaged in bad faith polemics at best or simply unaware of the complexities of progressive positions at worst.

This brings me to the deeper point of contention. Hochman may be correct that conservatism begins as an instinctive reaction against the extremism of various left-wing positions. This is fair enough as it is. Most of us begin to adopt our political viewpoints for intuitive and emotional reasons and afterwards seek out justifications for our positions. But the problem with the reactionary impulse is it all too often disinclines people from trying to learn why many progressives hold the positions they do. This is a serious problem since it means conservatives often do not really engage with the arguments for social change—so much as try and engage in ex post-facto justifications for the status quo while dismissing criticisms. Burke was certainly not guilty of this, but many of his contemporary progeny are. When confronted with evidence that man made climate change is a serious threat to the population, conservatives to this day can either dismiss the charge or fatalistically claim that there is nothing we can really do about it now. Each time progressives point out that the myth of American meritocracy has significant empirical holes in it since a few are born with immense advantages denied to the rest of the population, someone is on hand with the bulletproof argument that life is just unfair, and we have to deal with it without substantially changing the systematic roots of unfairness. These aren’t really sustained engagements with left-wing arguments so much as deflections and naturalizations. And, of course, things have gotten even worse in the Trump era with the promulgation of false stories and hyperbolic rhetoric about the Left and its positions. Conservatism would not provoke many of the frustrated reactions it does if conservative pundits were more willing to take left-wing criticisms seriously and try to argue against them in a knowing and careful way.  Just invoking “logic” and “facts” as the Dark Web enjoys doing is not proof that one’s argument is either logical or factually grounded.

Conclusion

My criticisms are, of course, not directed against Hochman himself, who has written a balanced and knowledgeable piece. There are a few quibbles I have with his interpretation of left wing theory; I don’t know any major theorist who reduces history down to a pseudo-Hegelian narrative of oppressor and oppressed, and most post-modern theorists dislike Hegel and his grand narratives to boot, but these are quibbles. My main contention is that we should seriously reconsider whether the Intellectual Dark Web as it operates now really constitutes a “revolutionary” turn of some sort. I would go further than Hochman’s contention that the Dark Web is “far from perfect” and contend that its efforts have actually been intellectually underwhelming so far. At least when directed against the positions of the Left. Some of the figures like Jordan Peterson are actually very knowing when commenting on subjects they are more familiar with, but left-wing theory and activism aren’t amongst those subjects.

This isn’t to say one cannot criticize the Left. As a proud leftist myself, I think there are many things we can work on related to political aesthetics and even substantive positions. I would argue that a reorientation towards inequality and the critique of capitalism is needed in today’s climate, which fortunately seems underway with the surge in support for socialist and social democratic parties. But I do not think many of these changes beyond the aesthetic will be prompted by the agitation of the Intellectual Dark Web. Unless they develop more interesting and erudite interpretations and criticisms of left-wing positions, their only significance for the Left is largely tactical rather than intellectual. Their bad arguments need to be exposed and their influence countered where possible. It is a shame since a more substantive dialogue between Left and Right would be enabled through good faith engagements which cannot happen when one is presenting caricatures.

Matt McManus is currently Professor of Politics and International Relations at TEC De Monterrey. His book Making Human Dignity Central to International Human Rights Law is forthcoming with the University of Wales Press. His books, The Rise of Post-modern Conservatism and What is Post-Modern Conservatism, will be published with Palgrave MacMillan and Zero Books, respectively. Matt can be reached at mattmcmanus300@gmail.com or added on Twitter via @MattPolProf.

10 thoughts on “The Shallowness of the Intellectual Dark Web

  1. The intellectual dark web isn’t a monolithic movement with an outlined doctrine. It’s a loose conglomerate of people who value free speech and discourse despite their individual differences on controversial topics. Whereas the left believes opposing beliefs aren’t even valid enough to discuss, the intellectual dark web values long-form discussion where two parties can debate their beliefs in a logical fashion, which benefits the audience in their attempt to form their own well-reasoned beliefs. Liberal thinker J.S Mill would support this, as to reference some of his work, he believed that truth was always somewhere in the middle, no matter how outrageous the opposing claim was. Realistically, this is ‘true’ most of the time.

    1. This is why the movement itself may seem “shallow”. There is nothing uniting those people who label themselves as being part of the IDW. What links these people together is a belief in the general value of free discussion.

      1. Mill didn’t really believe that truth was “somewhere in the middle.” His characterization of conservatism was quite tart. As he put it in a speech to Parliament

        “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives…
        I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.”

        It is also worth noting for the time he called for very radical reforms. His arguments for women’s emancipation were considered extremely taboo near the end of the 19th century, his extreme permissiveness about social mores would be radical today, and by the end of his life he even began saying nice things about socialism.

        https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ethic/article/viewFile/1677-2954.2010v9n1p17/18741

        Mill’s point was that a person who only understands his own side of the argument understands it poorly. That doesn’t mean one commits the fallacy of argument from moderation. It just means one considers all sides of an argument.

        1. Then you’re ceding that when discussion is censored, a large portion of the general public is being done a disservice since they will only be presented with one side of the argument. They will understand their “own side of the argument” far less than if they were presented with the opposing side in a non-denigrating way. It seems like elites don’t trust the average citizen to use their own faculty in molding appropriate opinions in this regard: don’t offer the child the choice of donuts or broccoli for dinner because they will choose donuts when their care for health is superseded by their impulse for a tasty desert (the broccoli being logic and the donuts being rhetoric). The paternalistic approach of the elites states that the average citizen, using their own agency, will most likely be fooled into believing the “wrong” thing. And although you may be right in saying it’s misguided to posit that the answer is always in the middle regardless of the quality (supporting facts and reasoning) of one argument versus another, censorship in Mill’s eyes could only be justified through absolute certainty(of which is unobtainable). Mill says, “to refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility”(“On Liberty”). If the IDW is centered around free discussion then it’s safe presume Mill wouldn’t be opposed to its goal.

  2. I would argue that the IDBs arguments appear more sophisticated than Leftist positions because for years the Left has strategically shut down political debate through political correctness, calling those they disagree with stupid or racist, or attempts to use media and education to indoctrinate youths through very simplistic arguments. To me, your Leftist arguments seem uninformed too. For example, right wingers often ignore calls to fix climate change, not because they dont believe the science, but because they know that the Left will use climate change as an excuse to strengthen and enlarge governmental power, and usurp the Constitution.

    1. Many of them do, but I never said all conservatives believe this. But many still invoke skepticism about climate change. To give just a few examples there is the current President of the United States:

      https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46351940

      Then there is the Vice President of the United States

      https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/5-real-things-mike-pence-has-said-about-climate-change/

      A considerable number of male Republican supporters according to 2011 studies

      https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S095937801100104X

      And so on. This is a very serious problem since if one cannot agree on what is happening there is little possibility of a constructive dialogue about how to ameliorate the problem.

      1. And your response typifies the out-of-touch elitist Left. Again, all your doing is using isolated examples to mischaracterize those who disagree with you, rather than address the nuances of the argument against your position. For me it’s rather easy to demonstrate that the Left has heavily politicized climate change with the end goal of increasing government power. Just look at the widespread support of the Green New Deal by Leftist leaders that supports universal basic income for those who cannot or are unwilling to work. Back to my original point: I’m just a regular person with a regular job, while you are writing essays to explain Leftist positions and yet your talking points are so superficial and unsophisticated. It is no wonder people listen to Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro feel enlightened when they tune in to hear opposing viewpoints.

      2. show me one other subject of study, even one orders of magnitude less complex than this (anything smaller than a planet) where more than 90% of scientists agree 100% on the cause, trajectory, and likely outcome of a given phenomenon. Study after study with catastrophic predictions about the results of causing or allowing carbon to build up in earths atmosphere but on a steady diet of a wide range of news sources with particular interest in science and politics and economics, I have never seen anything written that even speculated on the logistics of switching the globe to renewables on a feasible timeline. You are an adult who has lived on planet earth for a while, what in your experience leads you to believe that every drop of oil under the earth right now will not be burnt up in a combustion engine? If we can start there then we can have a productive conversation. Don’t like that one. Ok. How do you feed 7 billion people AND keep them from destroying each other without airplanes not to mention all of the other equipment that runs on fossil fuels. Those advocating positions to address climate change deny fundamental facts of life on earth, basic facts of economics and engineering, and useful facts about how to influence people’s behavior and unite them around a common purpose. Denying or ignoring facts that are available, can be verified by real world and experimental outcomes, and that by themselves do not contradict the facts of your own position. The terms of the debate tell you it is not really a good faith debate because a debate premised on the idea that opposing viewpoints are essentially immoral and therefore undeserving of consideration is not a good faith debate undertaken by two parties seeking solutions for problems they may see differently. It is diagnosis and prescription at a population level. It is comparable to going to the doctor for a cold and being told the cure is so expensive it requires you to pay three of your four children, your house, your car, and it requires you to adopt a very restrictive diet and forego other comforts but the doctor tells you that if you do all of these things, make these sacrifices, you might be able to leave the hospital in a wheelchair in ten years. The left has such a lovely bedside manner. Why would anybody ask for a second opinion?

  3. If I read your argument correctly, it goes something like many people have a knee jerk negative reaction to the left, some intellectual lightweights are giving voice to this and lots of people seem interested in what they’re talking about, but they misrepresent the left in their critique of it because they don’t really understand it because they don’t want to because they have the knee jerk negative reaction to at least the aesthetics of the part of the left that is focused on identity politics to the exclusion of discussion of any other problem facing the species. So if the left could just address the style issue, everyone would see the consensus that has been reached on the way forward for humanity and get on board with the program, abandon these articulate, erudite, seductive intellectual snake oil salesman and remember that neoMarxist postmodernism, the dismantling of capitalism and the energy regime that sustains 7 billion people at a higher standard of living than humans have ever known, to embark on the utopian project at the end of history all because the most elegant solutions to the problems faced by the species now and in the future are fully articulated in persuasive language backed by multiple data sources in a piece your readers should already be familiar with and know is the real truth as verified by many experts that you all know. Listen to me not them. I have lightly skimmed and broadly characterized the views of an intellectually and socioculturally diverse group of academics and thinkers, all of whom have published books that sell and most of whom regularly post three hour long discussions covering a broad range of topics and bringing a broad array of perspectives, conceptual tools and frameworks primarily focused on widening the discussion taking place in the broader public and you dismiss their influence and their intellectual rigor as well as their character (bad faith) on the basis that they do not fully understand and therefore misrepresent the views of postmodern leftism. If they articulated your positions correctly, they would not be able to tap into that mysterious knee jerk reaction to the left, and the fraudulent nature of their enterprise would be exposed and clear the way for the very reasonable flavor of socialism we’ve all agreed is the reasonable, rational, obvious, and only way forward for humanity or at least the part of humanity that didn’t forfeit its humanity by exploiting the subjects of history to enrich itself and its descendants. Your rhetorical skills are unmatched and the rigor of your arguments is impressive. To have tied up all the loose ends of the human adventure and pointed the way towards a praxis that requires no faith, no reasoning, no violence, no competition, just solidarity with the oppressed and a commitment to equalize the distribution of resources based on the degree to which a group has been historically oppressed and excluded from power. A more equal distribution of wealth will reduce violence and conflict and lead to a more collaborative and creative society where a broad range of perspectives and experiences brought to bear on humanity’s remaining problems will lead to new and innovative solutions and a more prosperous future for the species. If the goal is a more prosperous future for the species and the disagreements lie in the logistics of how to get there then we have a conversation. I bet $ if you posted on here that you would debate any nominal member of the IDW and expose their ignorance of the true goals and praxis of postmodern leftists and the smoke and mirrors they use to deceive their naive audience into thinking they are discussing the fundamental issues facing humanity in the twenty first century, they would give you a forum to articulate your argument, challenge their discourse, and win the debate. You would be rewarded with a tremendous victory, championing your correct views and discrediting their deceptively amateur ones.

  4. I dislike the IDW because they are mostly from the Left, they talk nonsense and they themselves can be censorious (Saad, Peterson, excluded Goldie cause they didn’t like her views). I also don’t like them because they are intellectually shallow and ill informed. Note, I position myself on the Right. I wouldn’t give any of the so-called IDW any credence. The only tolerable one is Ben Shapiro except I do not see much of substance in him. To the point, why does this article act as if Peterson and others represent politics from the perspective of the Right when in fact they are mainly disgruntled Leftists? (To be fair, you do mention they are not uniformly conservative…) I keep editing this, for which I apologize. I also agree nothing good can come from figures who do not try to understand each others viewpoint. All that emerges is noise. I too would like something better than the IDW. Peterson only makes sense when he talks psychology, though I do not appreciate Jung’s rather speculative fantasies. When he talks Post-Modernism he seems very misinformed. I myself, from what I have read, favor Hobbes. It is in my somewhat mixed agreements with his arguments that I favor a conservative viewpoint.

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