Unleashing the Hounds Upon America

“How did it happen that the Wolves came to wield such power here, infiltrating academia, journalism, and other segments of society that were supposed to be high-minded bastions of truth and light?”

In a July, 2020 blog post, the tech guru and Y Combinator founder Paul Graham introduced a thought-provoking rubric for contemplating our present-day free speech crisis. He divided the world into four categories configured upon two axes: aggression and independent-mindedness. Thus, we get aggressively independent-minded Visionaries who are revolutionary doers and thinkers, passively independent-minded Dreamers who just do their own thing, passively conventional-minded Sheep who follow the herd, and aggressively conventional-minded Enforcers who make sure everyone is following the rules. He then offers this: “I’m biased, I admit, but it seems to me that aggressively conventional-minded people are responsible for a disproportionate amount of the trouble in the world, and that a lot of the customs we’ve evolved since the Enlightenment have been designed to protect the rest of us from them.” The very concept of free speech, he contends, is one defense we have devised against the aggressively conventional-minded set’s crack of the whip, the proclivity of such Enforcers to burn heretical books and people alike. In Graham’s conception, the free speech crisis is an infiltration of universities—once monasteries committed to the cloistering of independent thinkers—by these aggressively conventional-minded thinkers.

Graham has erected an intriguing foundation to build upon, but the particular edifice he has constructed leaves something to be desired. Indeed, he has fallen victim to something of the same error that compromised the work of Frankfurt School leading light Theodor Adorno and his collaborators in their notorious 1950 study of what they called “the authoritarian personality,” which was supposed to predispose the bearers of its complex of traits—traits such as conventionalism, aggression, and anti-intellectualism, among others—toward embracing fascism. Adorno, who would surely be an icon within the ranks of Antifa if the ignorant marauding goons comprising its core membership were interested in intellectual history rather than street thuggery, did his darndest to engineer a post-World War II “Brown Scare” before the looming threat of Soviet communism had swept the rug out from under him and brought the Red Scare to the fore. In his haste to root out closeted “fascists,” Adorno had overlooked many methodological flaws in his approach, chief among these being the fact that authoritarians of a very similar psychological complexion existed on both sides of the political spectrum. But another significant flaw in Adorno’s work, the one that Graham’s speculations share, is in failing to recognize the important distinction between those cultural conservatives who battle aggressively to preserve existing traditions and conventions (those who “stand athwart history, yelling Stop!” in William F. Buckley’s famous formulation)—and who, therefore, may justly be called “aggressively conventional”—and those individuals, whether on the far-left or on the far-right, who would overthrow the current order in favor of radical change in one direction or the other.

The woke mob is aggressive for sure, but in what respect is it “conventional” to rename buildings, tear down monuments to the Founding Fathers, defund police, and combat traditional gender and sexual binaries? These, after all, are items on the agenda of many of the same minions leading the free-speech crackdown that Graham tries to pin on aggressively conventional-minded thinkers. Commonalities notwithstanding, surely, again, there is a very real difference between those aggressive actors who fight to defend established conventions and traditions and those aggressive actors itching to tear it all down. Calling the latter aggressively conventional-minded cannot be correct. And yet those in this category are not quite aggressively independent-minded thinkers either.