I think that your division into masculine (and presumably feminine) virtues is part of the problem. We have too many cowards in society, period, and a good many women think that they get a free pass on this, because courage is somebody else's problem. Or worse, that there _are_ courageous people is the problem, in a world where cowardice is called a virtue, such as 'being agreeable'. Courage is for everybody. Daughters need to be taught how to be brave, too.
Also that last line: "If you’re still afraid, then the problem is you" suggests the common misconception that being courageous is about not feeling fear. Being courageous is more often about _getting it done anyway_ despite feeling fear.
More than that, women should be raising masculine men and demanding masculine husbands when they choose to get married or have children. Not violent men, of course. People want to conflate the word violent with masculine and it's ignorant.
We are now facing such a paucity of virtue and opportunities to cultivate magnanimity that I couldn't care less where it comes from so long as we engender some awareness of it among some human beings.
A woman here; somehow this causes confusion in my head and I'm not sure what it is. The first thing that comes to mind is that girls are already being taught to be brave and stand for women's rights and against misbehaving males, and that's how we have excess wokeness problems (to some point this is definitely good). At the same time boys are taught to be... what? Less boy-ish? So maybe the host is talking about mainly men because boys actually get different education, which doesn't highlight courage or freedom of thought.
Are girls being taught to be brave and stand up for women's rights against misbehaving males?
I'm under the impression girls are being taught to suppress their instincts, be ashamed of having boundaries and allow men and boys into every aspect of their lives.
Women's rights have been nullified through use of the word "gender."
Groups of women and girls suffer together in excruciating humiliation feeling forced and manipulated by those in power to undress in front of a man and allow the man to undress in front of them.
I wish it were true that girls were being taught to hold boundaries. It's badly needed.
Actual courage tends to involve expecting at least the possibility of a genuine worst case scenario and being willing to tolerate it. In practice those who will behave most courageously are those who actively fantasize about things like making shit-tons of money after they've been declared persona non-grata and so getting their revenge, being a successful part of an actual war or revolution that involves killing and storming machine gun nests etc. The percentage of women who do this rounds down to zero. Of course, they are going to behave with "courage" when courage happens to mean, doing exactly what institutional authorities are telling them to do.
Uh, right. Can't argue against this. Of course most men also don't really want to storm actual machine gun nests, there's some overlap between genders, but risk-aversion is definitely one of the big intersex differences. Certainly we are less brave than men, a young woman storming a machine gun nest would just mindlessly ruin her reproductive chances. I suppose that nowadays when all children are brought up by the state if something happens to the mother, selection might favor some more physical/social courage by middle-aged women (though not girls), yet this takes many generations to make a change.
So do you think that advocating for the virtue of social courage only works for men as they have the actual instinct to respond to this? I tentatively think some women would also respond a little, as such brave male endeavors sound cool to us, and being a woman who does cool male-like things feels very good indeed.
Although women may not be so predisposed to physical bravery, they can and indeed should be engaged in demonstrating social and moral bravery. Courage to stand up against group think, to lead by example, etc. Too many women now seem willing to compromise on what is right in order to not rock the boat or irritate authority, while whispering "omg you can't say that!"
Men too, obviously, but just as men need to be the physically brave sex, women need to be the morally brave sex because they are better at it. Men will follow women's moral lead.
This sounds good and I would like it all to be true, but right not I'm at an agnostic position. In an evo-psych story-telling style I can imagine a long evolutionary past where women were trying to keep up highly unstable good relationships with other non-related women in the group - all of them competitors - and conforming to local norms might have been especially important. Women and girls are likely to collectively shun and exclude a wrong-thinker, this could've been catastrophic for any female wrong-thinker in the past. This story is supported by meta-analyses that find that on average women conform to norms more than men. This doesn't mean that there can't be some cultural change in a trait like this, if we take a serious try.
I see it in part being a matter of women retaining more stable cultural and moral norms, and keeping them men from haring off in more spastic directions. From the evo-psych side, men have far larger variation and do more dangerous experimentation, and women are more cautious and keep things from getting too nuts, the men dialing things back to what women will accept. Women have tended until fairly recently to be rather more conservative (small c) in their outlook on behaviors, less adventurous about shaking up the social order in big ways just to see what happens. That is good when you have a good solid moral base and small steps are safest. It is bad if you have had a big crazy shake up and now need to move away from it quickly. Women who will stand up against an established structure are far more powerful than men doing so, however.
The behavioral difference is courage to stand up for the consensus vs standing up for what you believe is right, and young women the past 30 odd years have been pretty heavily indoctrinated into standing up only for the consensus and following authority.
It's the whole 'toxic masculinity' thing. They're trying to turn girls into boys and boys into girls. It's sort of dumb. I suppose it benefits masculine women to some degree--nobody likes feminine men even now.
Idk, if I even question what counts as "women's rights" or what priority they should have relative to other considerations, I get a lot of hysterical shrieking and accusations of being a misogynist or some other such nonsense. So I'd argue that women aren't actually being taught to be brave, or at least if they are that bravery is confined to supporting leftist narratives.
Yes, well. I suppose the women shrieking at you were seeing the situation "holistically", so that having questions about women's rights meant you were against these and probably against all other good things; which other rights might you question next? They were not being brave, just defending the official ideology (though they might feel like it's brave, see All Debates are Bravery Debates https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/).
I suppose the early suffragettes were brave and probably destroyed their reputations quite a bit. As a movement gets more and more mainstream, supporting it takes less and less bravery, but this may not be realized by the members. The current hysterical-sounding feminists also destroy their reputations a tiny bit, even if it may mean just scaring off some good suitors, or suchlike.
I think this is a side effect of Richard reading a lot of enlightenment period writings on virtue. Most writers of the period divided up the virtues as masculine and feminine, seemingly not because they though the other sex did not display those virtues but because those virtues were more closely tied to/expected from that sex. (Although some might have come from a different position, I certainly haven’t read them all myself.)
Perhaps he has mended his errant ways? I noted in the essay that he mentioned reading some older stuff, although I suppose there has been enough interest in say Hume and Smith alone the last decade or so that one could read enough modern books to get the idea as well.
Funnily enough, probably the biggest cultural champion of female courage has been the modern YA genre (some examples - Katniss in Hunger Games, Juliette in Silo, Vin in Mistborn). It's about 110% liberal.
"Clearly, self-expression is important to you. But you just want all the benefits of participation in the marketplace of ideas, with none of the risks or potential costs. As someone who is openly in the public sphere, I see right-wing anonymous accounts as engaging in a kind of stolen valor."
- Most people aren't as great writers as you or as great trolls as you. They are never going to make this a career (even the 20hrs a week guys). As for your average right-wing anon they are also not pro-open borders and liberal democracy, and have no Caplan or other mainstream figure who'll openly advocate for them.
Furthermore, It's long been common for major philosophical and political figures to publish works anonymously. Our pragmatic repression of our thoughts is not always conscious and even the bravest among us will subconsciously repress them if we know we'll personally face their consequences. You compensate by being purposefully and exaggeratedly offensive, but one wonders whether you've compensated too much. The anon is free to just say what he means. That some become monstrous is but a reflection of their actual character, and it's good for the world that it's expressed.
The value of a claim does not turn on how "brave" or "cowardly" expressing that claim is.
I would argue, for example, that it is (absent extraordinary abuse or some such) good to call one's mother on Mother's Day. I suspect that this view is not particularly controversial. It wasn't brave at all for me to say that. It would be brave to say that one should be intentionally mean to one's mother. And yet, also, stupid.
Bravery is also contextual. For example, it's not brave, today, to argue that chattel slavery was a moral abomination. It would have been brave if one lived in Mississippi in 1855.
Is it "brave" for Hanania to defend Open Borders? If you're worried about What the New York Times Will Say, then no. If you're worried about a certain class of the intelligentsia, even some of the right intelligentsia, then again, no. But among those who read Hanania's Substack, among a certain segment of the right, it's at least mildly brave. Lots of people who are otherwise sympathetic to his views might be inclined to dislike him on this basis.
I'm one of them! I think his views on immigration are deeply stupid. But not because they are brave or cowardly; rather because I think he's wrong on the merits.
Is it "brave" for him to shill for Israel? Well, again, it depends on the context. If he were attending an elite school today, it might well be brave. If he were cultivating the AOC crowd as his audience, again, it might be brave. However, being pro-Israel is a very mainstream position among normal conservatives and Republicans, so to the extent that's his audience, it's not brave at all. Those who see this fight as a fight between a civilized nation and a barbarian horde don't have a problem with his views.
On the other hand, some of his audience is alt-right adjacent, and at least some of those people are really obsessed with the Jooooos, so he could lose some audience among those who love Unz but think Steve Sailer is a squish, and possibly a secret Jew himself.
My own reaction to him is not based on the courage/cowardice axis, but on whether I think he's right on the issue. (Which he clearly is.)
I love this essay. So much here. Minor point: The masculine virtue is a combination of speaking truthfully and openly under one’s own name combined with some sense of honor, epistemic integrity, and civic virtue. Conflating this with free speech alone seems off. Free speech is the foundation for this virtue but not the virtue itself.
Yes, there’s really no point in having a free speech movement and have it be disconnected from all other virtues, like making Alex Jones and his ilk your heroes.
There was famously a movement dubbed the "Free Speech Movement" in Berkeley, part of the New Left. It's part of how we got the college campuses we have today, where "free speech" is treated as a right-wing shibboleth.
This is one of those cases where I'd say Mencius Moldbug has a point: college administrators tended to sympathize with the students. Campus activists can and do agitate for a university to "live up to its values". If they'd had the opposite political stance, it wouldn't have worked.
"In America, you’re not going to be arrested or executed for your political views". This is not correct. Several pro-life grannies who protested in a non-violent manner are put in jail for several years under the FACE act. A Canadian man was fined CAD 60.000 for saying that a certain politician was a "biological male". The judge said that the fact that the statement was true didn't matter. Aparently you are allowed under free speech laws to insult someone with a lie but you are not allowed to insult someone with the truth.
Canada does not have a freedom of speech guarantee anywhere near that which exists in the U.S. It is most unfortunate. Individual freedoms are all subject to "the greater good" and can be quashed at any time
I am a great believer that society certainly requires a greater concern that its citizens conduct and represent themselves with integrity, particularly by being able and willing to state their genuinely held beliefs in the face of social disapproval. That said, I see what seem to me to be some severe flaws in the arguments here.
First, there is the question of whether our public discourse would benefit if the marketplace of ideas held fewer voices of cowards. This, at least as it is expressed here, strikes me as little more than the Fallacy of Ad Hominem given a glow up. It takes no courage to assert that "the world is round" today, and a great deal of courage to publicly argue that "the world is flat", but I will look hard askance at anyone who attempts to assert that we ought to give greater credit to the merits of Flat Eartherism AS A THEORY merely because its adherents are more persecuted for that belief than the majority expressing belief in a round planet. In its own twisted way, this is precisely the same sort of victim culture nonsense the woke are pushing: "the more oppressed you are, the more right you must be".
Secondly, let us examine the counterfactual. My Mother was quite fond of telling me in my youth "A man convinced against his will is of his own opinion still." It took me a while to understand the deeper meaning of that little limerick, but it goes something like this: there is a meaningful difference between actually persuading someone around to your own positions versus merely coercing them into silence or false agreement. If we did indeed consider it a virtue to promote a marketplace of ideas in which the cowards are silenced, what behavior would that incentivize? Is it ONLY The courage to speak against opposition? Perhaps. I suspect not. It also implicitly legitimizes that same persecution of others over their thoughts. If it is good that the cowards be silenced, then censorship becomes justified by its own success; "if they CAN be coerced into silence then they must not have been worth hearing anyway." This is darkly reminiscent of an abusive parent defending viciously beating their children "because they need to toughen up". Likewise, it perversely rewards extremism and being transgressive merely for the sake of being transgressive. This is another trend we've seen on the Left. Bereft of true villains like the KKK against which to demonstrate their valor, they stumble blindly across the cultural landscape like a would-be Don Quixote tilting at windmills in search of glorious victory over imagined ogres, reducing necessary pillars of a moral and functional society to rubble in their wake.
Lastly, the argument Ad Absurdum. I see no limiting principle articulated here, so where does this argument take us if allowed to the bottom of the slippery slope? It's humorous to imagine a world that takes this argument to heart and decides that, because any future Commander-in-Chief must certainly possess physical courage and fortitude to credibly command our Armed Forces and deter our adversaries (as must the Congress that would declare war share at least some of the courage and suffering of the Soldiers they would place in harms way), therefore henceforth all political debates must be proceeded by an MMA match between each political candidate. They wouldn't need to actually win the fight to earn the right to be heard in the debate, but rhetorical jabs wouldn't be allowed from the mouth of anyone not willing to take a few physical jabs to the mouth first. It's funny to imagine and both of our current presidential candidates have publicly declared their own confidence in being able to take the other "behind the woodshed", but... Would that truly uplift our discourse? Would it improve the quality of ideas offered in the subsequent debates? Or would it simply reduce our debates even moreso towards the habitual trash talking braggadocio of a WWE show? Would we be regressing to a much earlier historical philosophy of "Might makes Right" and a ruling aristocracy of physical brutes and intellectual dimwits who obtained their political power primarily by their proficiency at pugilism?
Cowardice IS a negative trait and deserves to be stigmatized, but not to the extent that we accidentally valorize mere reckless disregard or malicious offense as "courage", nor make censorship and persecution a "necessary" evil in order that speakers may demonstrate their bona fides. As much as I typically enjoy these articles, this one reminds me of nothing so much as The Horn Effect Bias. Courage and intellectual competence are entirely separate domains; there is no shortage of brave idiots and timid geniuses, nor vice versa.
This is not to say that I believe that bad or even outright evil ideas and verbal filth ought necessarily to be without social consequence. The man who gratuitously insults my wife in my presence may fully expect that a physical altercation is imminent, the worker who proudly declares an allegiance to a violently genocidal ideology may rightfully be told by the employer that they are encouraged to seek more fitting opportunities elsewhere, and Freedom of Association means little in practice if it does not include the freedom to DISassociate from one's peers over irreconcilable differences of opinion, but those are the actions of individuals regarding their associations with other individuals and no true lasting harm is involved. This article rather mocks and glosses over the many and increasing number of people, including Americans, who have been assaulted by mobs in the streets with lethal violence and torture, been credibly threatened in their homes and against their families with vehement promises of rape and murder, or criminalized, arrested, persecuted, and imprisoned for their beliefs. Whatever you may think of the 6JAN protestors, it's a confirmed fact that many were held without trial or bail for prolonged periods in violation of their Right to a Speedy Trial, using entirely novel legal theories not applied whatsoever against far more destructive rioters of leftist ideology, employing charges that have since been thrown out by the Supreme Court. Lawfare has become rampant in this country of late and its disingenuous to ignore Democrat attempts to imprison their political foes merely because they have thus far been farcically incompetent at it against those defendants with the publicity and wealth to push back effectively.
It's no joke that cops have been called on parents at school board meetings for complaining that their daughters have been sexually assaulted in school restrooms by boys given access. It's deeply concerning that the FBI had banks flag purchases of Bibles. It's only by the grace of a few whistleblowers and a receptive court that this administration was rebuked in any meaningful way for pressuring social media companies to censor any dissent against government pronouncements and mandates that have since been proven to have been outright bad policy and misinformation without scientific merit. It's rather horrifying, given the conduct of Merrick Garland, to contemplate the likely fate of Trump, the 6JAN protesters, and anyone else speaking up against progressive shibboleths if this were a 6/3 Democrat-appointed Supreme Court instead, happy to rule that "hate speech" enjoys no 1st Amendment protections, men are owed no due process protections, and factual statements such as "There are only two sexes" constitutes a crime against persons deserving of imprisonment.
You want a phrase with some literary clout and an ironic left-of-center pedigree, there's Miguel de Unamuno to Millan-Astray: "Vencereis, pero no convencereis"--you have won, but you have not convinced.
No is risking getting hauled off to jail or beat up, this is all about money. All this means is that to say what you believe online, you have to be either so rich you don't need a job, or so broke you have nothing to lose. Or just reckless and stupid. I'm not into any rule that completely excludes the opinions of the mass of responsible, sane people who have jobs and need to keep them. Those are exactly the people we should be hearing from most. And any man who has children or other people dependent upon him to keep his job is not just being reckless and stupid if he states his opinions with his real name, he's also behaving unethically. Unless all of his opinions are so entirely vanilla and boring that no one would be interested in reading them in the first place.
Yeah, this is somewhat connected to the MAGA human capital problem. Only people who buy Trump's craziness or go along with it are in the movement now, and they get into all kinds of silliness--QAnon, antivax, etc.
People are afraid of the internet. 20 yrs ago we foolishly uploaded our lives. Now it has turned on us and the darkness has gathered and emerged. The threat feels omnipresent and unpredictable. Death threats are common, and we must think of our families. The activists are growing more violent.
I was punched in the face and had my nose broken by a "trans" activist.
I am a small, older female and I was holding a sign that said "Get the Cult Out of Schools". He was about twice my weight and 20 yrs younger than me. What a hero.
One of the first things I saw when I stood up out of the gutter was that didactic flag, on the top of City Hall. My attacker was a jackboot for this movement. He dressed all in black and carried a sign that said "No place for hate."
> There is in the end something deeply defeatist about the argument that we have to make room for the cowardly because they have at least as much to contribute to the marketplace of ideas as the brave do, if not more so. It assumes that we can hope for individuals who are either courageous or smart, but not both
It's not about being courageous versus smart. If you think the opposite party winning means that your country will turn into a totalitarian dictatorship, you will find it easier to find the courage within yourself to act, since you and everyone you care about will be put at risk in such a situation. If, on the other hand, you think the opposite party means some bad policies will be enacted and things will be worse on the margins but otherwise chug along, it'll be pretty easy to go along to get along. The latter is generally more accurate, and thus people who believe the former will tend to be more disconnected from reality, but more likely to act.
ah yes. The professional opinion-haver whose entire existence is reliant on there being backlash against spicy opinions being expressed berets random nobodies for not putting their name and face on the ideas they occasionally put out in open since getting nuked from their jobs/relationship/family, often years if not decades after the fact, is just "subtle discrimination" and they're cowards for not willing to take the risk.
What about the radical notion that people should discuss ideas disconnected from individuals instead? Having a face attached to any given idea has no bearing on the value of the idea itself.
On a *totally* unrelated note, why did you denounce your own white supremacy/alt-right ideology-inspired ideas that you published under a pseudonym once those got linked with your real name? What did you have to lose that you chose to write that stuff under a pseudonym in first place?
“What about the radical notion that people should discuss ideas disconnected from individuals instead? Having a face attached to any given idea has no bearing on the value of the idea itself.”
Except there’s no one more obsessed with the identities of speakers than anonymous online rightists, who hide their faces while obsessing over “physiognomy” and think calling someone a “Jew” or pointing out that they’re a woman or a minority is a refutation of their arguments.
If you are trying to say people that dismiss ideas based on nothing but who are expressing them are dumb we are in agreement. Though I'm not seeing how attaching names and faces to the ideas being expressed helps with that in any way.
Literally the only way it could have any benefits would be if the current system of "cancellation" remains in full effect if not getting stronger so that people that do dismiss arguments based on who is making them could get isolated from the society or punished in some other way.
If someone waved a magic wand and people actually did feel free to express their ideas without the fear of life-ruining consequences it could only make the people as you described feel more power and freedom to obsess over physiognomy and to dismiss ideas based on who are making them.
If there still will be negative consequences for expressing ideas the society doesn't like then having names and faces on those ideas will only make the situation worse than it is today.
Basically, the argument your article is making would be indistinguishable from the biggest establishment fanboy trying their hardest to convince their ideological opponents to remove themselves from the marketplace of ideas by committing societal suicide.
just like Richard here, Nick's entire livelihood is built around being a professional opinion-haver whose living relies on having a backlash to his opinions.
Who cares about those nobodies? Don't waste them thinking about them at all. Far more worthwhile is Scott Alexander, who still doesn't go by his real last name after being doxed because people know him under the name he has voluminously blogged under.
The subheading claims "men are now cowards" but the essay doesn't support that with evidence. Allan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind" spills quite a lot of ink on examples of cowardice in US academia in the 60s and later. This isn't a new thing. (And he's mostly accusing liberals of not standing up for liberal values.)
I should also note that it's probably easier to be brave against an enemy like an invader (since you cited Ukraine) when you have people on your side than it is to go against your own side when you have no support, even if the first instance is clearly more objectively dangerous.
That's important and underexamined. Peter Thiel is immune to this because he's gay and can presumably find a man with his views, or doesn't need to marry at all.
I agree with most of the points you make in this essay but I think you're missing something. The issue imo isn't free speech (tho I agree we can use more of it) but that most people aren't equipped to handle these conversations at all.
Afaik somewhere at the top the left creates these tricky concepts and passes them down to the more dedicated followers through articles and media which implicitly teach them both framings and arguments for certain things. Then those people use said concepts on their peers to align them to the latest leftist fads.
So basically the average person cannot invent concepts like microaggresions or systemic racism or do any sorts of stats or research to back them. And yet they're known by many cause the lefts media handed them out to the intelligencia. The average person doesn't know enough or have enough time or research capacity to look into whether these concepts are right or wrong and decipher their rhetorical tricks, and if they do the left has moves on to a new concept. And even worse the people who they're arguing against won't even understand the counterarguments cause they didn't come up with the arguments in the first place.
So while I think more people should speak out I don't think they can just voice a vague disagreement and come out ahead due to the industrial scale ideological and rhetorical backing the left has equipped many of its followers with. And that's a really difficult problem imo.
I think a correct culture to have of free speech is a complex issue that I go back and forth on. If someone tweets something, and they get fired for it, on the surface that doesn't seem very free speech-esque. But why should an employer be pressured to keep an employee who doesn't share their beliefs, or whose beliefs might scare away customers? And I like the idea of the "marketplace of ideas", where as long as we have free speech, the best ideas will spread the most, but in practice that's not how it actually works.
Maybe your idea of just encouraging speaking bravely so people with masculine virtue will have outsized influence is good. Although I'm not sure masculine virtue would actually be associated with being correct.
What I think I'd want is first a cultural of epistemic honesty and legitimate fact checking. Make it so everyone who puts forth a controversial opinion finds some way to create a betting market around it, to put their money where their mouth is, and so foolish loudmouths go broke. After that's established, I'd be happy to see a culture of total free speech, because the vast majority of opinions spoken would be correct if we kept to the strict standards of epistemology.
I largely agree with you. Unfortunately, the American professional class does not value Honesty and Courage. The Woke have trained them to lie and feel good about it. If we are to rebuild American institutions, that must change (among other things).
I think that your division into masculine (and presumably feminine) virtues is part of the problem. We have too many cowards in society, period, and a good many women think that they get a free pass on this, because courage is somebody else's problem. Or worse, that there _are_ courageous people is the problem, in a world where cowardice is called a virtue, such as 'being agreeable'. Courage is for everybody. Daughters need to be taught how to be brave, too.
Also that last line: "If you’re still afraid, then the problem is you" suggests the common misconception that being courageous is about not feeling fear. Being courageous is more often about _getting it done anyway_ despite feeling fear.
I agree with your point. Still, I think there's a brokenness around masculine virtues in our culture at the moment that Richard is speaking to.
More than that, women should be raising masculine men and demanding masculine husbands when they choose to get married or have children. Not violent men, of course. People want to conflate the word violent with masculine and it's ignorant.
We are now facing such a paucity of virtue and opportunities to cultivate magnanimity that I couldn't care less where it comes from so long as we engender some awareness of it among some human beings.
A woman here; somehow this causes confusion in my head and I'm not sure what it is. The first thing that comes to mind is that girls are already being taught to be brave and stand for women's rights and against misbehaving males, and that's how we have excess wokeness problems (to some point this is definitely good). At the same time boys are taught to be... what? Less boy-ish? So maybe the host is talking about mainly men because boys actually get different education, which doesn't highlight courage or freedom of thought.
Are girls being taught to be brave and stand up for women's rights against misbehaving males?
I'm under the impression girls are being taught to suppress their instincts, be ashamed of having boundaries and allow men and boys into every aspect of their lives.
Women's rights have been nullified through use of the word "gender."
Groups of women and girls suffer together in excruciating humiliation feeling forced and manipulated by those in power to undress in front of a man and allow the man to undress in front of them.
I wish it were true that girls were being taught to hold boundaries. It's badly needed.
Actual courage tends to involve expecting at least the possibility of a genuine worst case scenario and being willing to tolerate it. In practice those who will behave most courageously are those who actively fantasize about things like making shit-tons of money after they've been declared persona non-grata and so getting their revenge, being a successful part of an actual war or revolution that involves killing and storming machine gun nests etc. The percentage of women who do this rounds down to zero. Of course, they are going to behave with "courage" when courage happens to mean, doing exactly what institutional authorities are telling them to do.
Uh, right. Can't argue against this. Of course most men also don't really want to storm actual machine gun nests, there's some overlap between genders, but risk-aversion is definitely one of the big intersex differences. Certainly we are less brave than men, a young woman storming a machine gun nest would just mindlessly ruin her reproductive chances. I suppose that nowadays when all children are brought up by the state if something happens to the mother, selection might favor some more physical/social courage by middle-aged women (though not girls), yet this takes many generations to make a change.
So do you think that advocating for the virtue of social courage only works for men as they have the actual instinct to respond to this? I tentatively think some women would also respond a little, as such brave male endeavors sound cool to us, and being a woman who does cool male-like things feels very good indeed.
Although women may not be so predisposed to physical bravery, they can and indeed should be engaged in demonstrating social and moral bravery. Courage to stand up against group think, to lead by example, etc. Too many women now seem willing to compromise on what is right in order to not rock the boat or irritate authority, while whispering "omg you can't say that!"
Men too, obviously, but just as men need to be the physically brave sex, women need to be the morally brave sex because they are better at it. Men will follow women's moral lead.
This sounds good and I would like it all to be true, but right not I'm at an agnostic position. In an evo-psych story-telling style I can imagine a long evolutionary past where women were trying to keep up highly unstable good relationships with other non-related women in the group - all of them competitors - and conforming to local norms might have been especially important. Women and girls are likely to collectively shun and exclude a wrong-thinker, this could've been catastrophic for any female wrong-thinker in the past. This story is supported by meta-analyses that find that on average women conform to norms more than men. This doesn't mean that there can't be some cultural change in a trait like this, if we take a serious try.
I see it in part being a matter of women retaining more stable cultural and moral norms, and keeping them men from haring off in more spastic directions. From the evo-psych side, men have far larger variation and do more dangerous experimentation, and women are more cautious and keep things from getting too nuts, the men dialing things back to what women will accept. Women have tended until fairly recently to be rather more conservative (small c) in their outlook on behaviors, less adventurous about shaking up the social order in big ways just to see what happens. That is good when you have a good solid moral base and small steps are safest. It is bad if you have had a big crazy shake up and now need to move away from it quickly. Women who will stand up against an established structure are far more powerful than men doing so, however.
The behavioral difference is courage to stand up for the consensus vs standing up for what you believe is right, and young women the past 30 odd years have been pretty heavily indoctrinated into standing up only for the consensus and following authority.
Wonder Woman stormed an actual machine gun nest!
She was (1) fictional and (2) invented by a polyamorist into BDSM.
(I know you were joking.)
It's the whole 'toxic masculinity' thing. They're trying to turn girls into boys and boys into girls. It's sort of dumb. I suppose it benefits masculine women to some degree--nobody likes feminine men even now.
Idk, if I even question what counts as "women's rights" or what priority they should have relative to other considerations, I get a lot of hysterical shrieking and accusations of being a misogynist or some other such nonsense. So I'd argue that women aren't actually being taught to be brave, or at least if they are that bravery is confined to supporting leftist narratives.
Yes, well. I suppose the women shrieking at you were seeing the situation "holistically", so that having questions about women's rights meant you were against these and probably against all other good things; which other rights might you question next? They were not being brave, just defending the official ideology (though they might feel like it's brave, see All Debates are Bravery Debates https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery-debates/).
I suppose the early suffragettes were brave and probably destroyed their reputations quite a bit. As a movement gets more and more mainstream, supporting it takes less and less bravery, but this may not be realized by the members. The current hysterical-sounding feminists also destroy their reputations a tiny bit, even if it may mean just scaring off some good suitors, or suchlike.
I think this is a side effect of Richard reading a lot of enlightenment period writings on virtue. Most writers of the period divided up the virtues as masculine and feminine, seemingly not because they though the other sex did not display those virtues but because those virtues were more closely tied to/expected from that sex. (Although some might have come from a different position, I certainly haven’t read them all myself.)
I thought Richard didn’t waste time reading old books …
Perhaps he has mended his errant ways? I noted in the essay that he mentioned reading some older stuff, although I suppose there has been enough interest in say Hume and Smith alone the last decade or so that one could read enough modern books to get the idea as well.
Funnily enough, probably the biggest cultural champion of female courage has been the modern YA genre (some examples - Katniss in Hunger Games, Juliette in Silo, Vin in Mistborn). It's about 110% liberal.
"Clearly, self-expression is important to you. But you just want all the benefits of participation in the marketplace of ideas, with none of the risks or potential costs. As someone who is openly in the public sphere, I see right-wing anonymous accounts as engaging in a kind of stolen valor."
- Most people aren't as great writers as you or as great trolls as you. They are never going to make this a career (even the 20hrs a week guys). As for your average right-wing anon they are also not pro-open borders and liberal democracy, and have no Caplan or other mainstream figure who'll openly advocate for them.
Furthermore, It's long been common for major philosophical and political figures to publish works anonymously. Our pragmatic repression of our thoughts is not always conscious and even the bravest among us will subconsciously repress them if we know we'll personally face their consequences. You compensate by being purposefully and exaggeratedly offensive, but one wonders whether you've compensated too much. The anon is free to just say what he means. That some become monstrous is but a reflection of their actual character, and it's good for the world that it's expressed.
Hanania has become more cowardly since he was outed, as has Scott Alexander after he was doxxed.
Advocating open borders is not brave. Neither is shilling for Israel.
The value of a claim does not turn on how "brave" or "cowardly" expressing that claim is.
I would argue, for example, that it is (absent extraordinary abuse or some such) good to call one's mother on Mother's Day. I suspect that this view is not particularly controversial. It wasn't brave at all for me to say that. It would be brave to say that one should be intentionally mean to one's mother. And yet, also, stupid.
Bravery is also contextual. For example, it's not brave, today, to argue that chattel slavery was a moral abomination. It would have been brave if one lived in Mississippi in 1855.
Is it "brave" for Hanania to defend Open Borders? If you're worried about What the New York Times Will Say, then no. If you're worried about a certain class of the intelligentsia, even some of the right intelligentsia, then again, no. But among those who read Hanania's Substack, among a certain segment of the right, it's at least mildly brave. Lots of people who are otherwise sympathetic to his views might be inclined to dislike him on this basis.
I'm one of them! I think his views on immigration are deeply stupid. But not because they are brave or cowardly; rather because I think he's wrong on the merits.
Is it "brave" for him to shill for Israel? Well, again, it depends on the context. If he were attending an elite school today, it might well be brave. If he were cultivating the AOC crowd as his audience, again, it might be brave. However, being pro-Israel is a very mainstream position among normal conservatives and Republicans, so to the extent that's his audience, it's not brave at all. Those who see this fight as a fight between a civilized nation and a barbarian horde don't have a problem with his views.
On the other hand, some of his audience is alt-right adjacent, and at least some of those people are really obsessed with the Jooooos, so he could lose some audience among those who love Unz but think Steve Sailer is a squish, and possibly a secret Jew himself.
My own reaction to him is not based on the courage/cowardice axis, but on whether I think he's right on the issue. (Which he clearly is.)
Shilling for Israel is certainly brave if you are sorrounded by autistic groypers.
I love this essay. So much here. Minor point: The masculine virtue is a combination of speaking truthfully and openly under one’s own name combined with some sense of honor, epistemic integrity, and civic virtue. Conflating this with free speech alone seems off. Free speech is the foundation for this virtue but not the virtue itself.
Yes, there’s really no point in having a free speech movement and have it be disconnected from all other virtues, like making Alex Jones and his ilk your heroes.
There was famously a movement dubbed the "Free Speech Movement" in Berkeley, part of the New Left. It's part of how we got the college campuses we have today, where "free speech" is treated as a right-wing shibboleth.
So it worked, no?
This is one of those cases where I'd say Mencius Moldbug has a point: college administrators tended to sympathize with the students. Campus activists can and do agitate for a university to "live up to its values". If they'd had the opposite political stance, it wouldn't have worked.
"In America, you’re not going to be arrested or executed for your political views". This is not correct. Several pro-life grannies who protested in a non-violent manner are put in jail for several years under the FACE act. A Canadian man was fined CAD 60.000 for saying that a certain politician was a "biological male". The judge said that the fact that the statement was true didn't matter. Aparently you are allowed under free speech laws to insult someone with a lie but you are not allowed to insult someone with the truth.
Canada does not have a freedom of speech guarantee anywhere near that which exists in the U.S. It is most unfortunate. Individual freedoms are all subject to "the greater good" and can be quashed at any time
In Germany a woman who denounced rapists was given a longer jail sentence than some of the actual rapists.
I am a great believer that society certainly requires a greater concern that its citizens conduct and represent themselves with integrity, particularly by being able and willing to state their genuinely held beliefs in the face of social disapproval. That said, I see what seem to me to be some severe flaws in the arguments here.
First, there is the question of whether our public discourse would benefit if the marketplace of ideas held fewer voices of cowards. This, at least as it is expressed here, strikes me as little more than the Fallacy of Ad Hominem given a glow up. It takes no courage to assert that "the world is round" today, and a great deal of courage to publicly argue that "the world is flat", but I will look hard askance at anyone who attempts to assert that we ought to give greater credit to the merits of Flat Eartherism AS A THEORY merely because its adherents are more persecuted for that belief than the majority expressing belief in a round planet. In its own twisted way, this is precisely the same sort of victim culture nonsense the woke are pushing: "the more oppressed you are, the more right you must be".
Secondly, let us examine the counterfactual. My Mother was quite fond of telling me in my youth "A man convinced against his will is of his own opinion still." It took me a while to understand the deeper meaning of that little limerick, but it goes something like this: there is a meaningful difference between actually persuading someone around to your own positions versus merely coercing them into silence or false agreement. If we did indeed consider it a virtue to promote a marketplace of ideas in which the cowards are silenced, what behavior would that incentivize? Is it ONLY The courage to speak against opposition? Perhaps. I suspect not. It also implicitly legitimizes that same persecution of others over their thoughts. If it is good that the cowards be silenced, then censorship becomes justified by its own success; "if they CAN be coerced into silence then they must not have been worth hearing anyway." This is darkly reminiscent of an abusive parent defending viciously beating their children "because they need to toughen up". Likewise, it perversely rewards extremism and being transgressive merely for the sake of being transgressive. This is another trend we've seen on the Left. Bereft of true villains like the KKK against which to demonstrate their valor, they stumble blindly across the cultural landscape like a would-be Don Quixote tilting at windmills in search of glorious victory over imagined ogres, reducing necessary pillars of a moral and functional society to rubble in their wake.
Lastly, the argument Ad Absurdum. I see no limiting principle articulated here, so where does this argument take us if allowed to the bottom of the slippery slope? It's humorous to imagine a world that takes this argument to heart and decides that, because any future Commander-in-Chief must certainly possess physical courage and fortitude to credibly command our Armed Forces and deter our adversaries (as must the Congress that would declare war share at least some of the courage and suffering of the Soldiers they would place in harms way), therefore henceforth all political debates must be proceeded by an MMA match between each political candidate. They wouldn't need to actually win the fight to earn the right to be heard in the debate, but rhetorical jabs wouldn't be allowed from the mouth of anyone not willing to take a few physical jabs to the mouth first. It's funny to imagine and both of our current presidential candidates have publicly declared their own confidence in being able to take the other "behind the woodshed", but... Would that truly uplift our discourse? Would it improve the quality of ideas offered in the subsequent debates? Or would it simply reduce our debates even moreso towards the habitual trash talking braggadocio of a WWE show? Would we be regressing to a much earlier historical philosophy of "Might makes Right" and a ruling aristocracy of physical brutes and intellectual dimwits who obtained their political power primarily by their proficiency at pugilism?
Cowardice IS a negative trait and deserves to be stigmatized, but not to the extent that we accidentally valorize mere reckless disregard or malicious offense as "courage", nor make censorship and persecution a "necessary" evil in order that speakers may demonstrate their bona fides. As much as I typically enjoy these articles, this one reminds me of nothing so much as The Horn Effect Bias. Courage and intellectual competence are entirely separate domains; there is no shortage of brave idiots and timid geniuses, nor vice versa.
This is not to say that I believe that bad or even outright evil ideas and verbal filth ought necessarily to be without social consequence. The man who gratuitously insults my wife in my presence may fully expect that a physical altercation is imminent, the worker who proudly declares an allegiance to a violently genocidal ideology may rightfully be told by the employer that they are encouraged to seek more fitting opportunities elsewhere, and Freedom of Association means little in practice if it does not include the freedom to DISassociate from one's peers over irreconcilable differences of opinion, but those are the actions of individuals regarding their associations with other individuals and no true lasting harm is involved. This article rather mocks and glosses over the many and increasing number of people, including Americans, who have been assaulted by mobs in the streets with lethal violence and torture, been credibly threatened in their homes and against their families with vehement promises of rape and murder, or criminalized, arrested, persecuted, and imprisoned for their beliefs. Whatever you may think of the 6JAN protestors, it's a confirmed fact that many were held without trial or bail for prolonged periods in violation of their Right to a Speedy Trial, using entirely novel legal theories not applied whatsoever against far more destructive rioters of leftist ideology, employing charges that have since been thrown out by the Supreme Court. Lawfare has become rampant in this country of late and its disingenuous to ignore Democrat attempts to imprison their political foes merely because they have thus far been farcically incompetent at it against those defendants with the publicity and wealth to push back effectively.
It's no joke that cops have been called on parents at school board meetings for complaining that their daughters have been sexually assaulted in school restrooms by boys given access. It's deeply concerning that the FBI had banks flag purchases of Bibles. It's only by the grace of a few whistleblowers and a receptive court that this administration was rebuked in any meaningful way for pressuring social media companies to censor any dissent against government pronouncements and mandates that have since been proven to have been outright bad policy and misinformation without scientific merit. It's rather horrifying, given the conduct of Merrick Garland, to contemplate the likely fate of Trump, the 6JAN protesters, and anyone else speaking up against progressive shibboleths if this were a 6/3 Democrat-appointed Supreme Court instead, happy to rule that "hate speech" enjoys no 1st Amendment protections, men are owed no due process protections, and factual statements such as "There are only two sexes" constitutes a crime against persons deserving of imprisonment.
You want a phrase with some literary clout and an ironic left-of-center pedigree, there's Miguel de Unamuno to Millan-Astray: "Vencereis, pero no convencereis"--you have won, but you have not convinced.
Admittedly it works better in Spanish.
No is risking getting hauled off to jail or beat up, this is all about money. All this means is that to say what you believe online, you have to be either so rich you don't need a job, or so broke you have nothing to lose. Or just reckless and stupid. I'm not into any rule that completely excludes the opinions of the mass of responsible, sane people who have jobs and need to keep them. Those are exactly the people we should be hearing from most. And any man who has children or other people dependent upon him to keep his job is not just being reckless and stupid if he states his opinions with his real name, he's also behaving unethically. Unless all of his opinions are so entirely vanilla and boring that no one would be interested in reading them in the first place.
Yeah, this is somewhat connected to the MAGA human capital problem. Only people who buy Trump's craziness or go along with it are in the movement now, and they get into all kinds of silliness--QAnon, antivax, etc.
People are afraid of the internet. 20 yrs ago we foolishly uploaded our lives. Now it has turned on us and the darkness has gathered and emerged. The threat feels omnipresent and unpredictable. Death threats are common, and we must think of our families. The activists are growing more violent.
I was punched in the face and had my nose broken by a "trans" activist.
I am a small, older female and I was holding a sign that said "Get the Cult Out of Schools". He was about twice my weight and 20 yrs younger than me. What a hero.
One of the first things I saw when I stood up out of the gutter was that didactic flag, on the top of City Hall. My attacker was a jackboot for this movement. He dressed all in black and carried a sign that said "No place for hate."
> There is in the end something deeply defeatist about the argument that we have to make room for the cowardly because they have at least as much to contribute to the marketplace of ideas as the brave do, if not more so. It assumes that we can hope for individuals who are either courageous or smart, but not both
It's not about being courageous versus smart. If you think the opposite party winning means that your country will turn into a totalitarian dictatorship, you will find it easier to find the courage within yourself to act, since you and everyone you care about will be put at risk in such a situation. If, on the other hand, you think the opposite party means some bad policies will be enacted and things will be worse on the margins but otherwise chug along, it'll be pretty easy to go along to get along. The latter is generally more accurate, and thus people who believe the former will tend to be more disconnected from reality, but more likely to act.
ah yes. The professional opinion-haver whose entire existence is reliant on there being backlash against spicy opinions being expressed berets random nobodies for not putting their name and face on the ideas they occasionally put out in open since getting nuked from their jobs/relationship/family, often years if not decades after the fact, is just "subtle discrimination" and they're cowards for not willing to take the risk.
What about the radical notion that people should discuss ideas disconnected from individuals instead? Having a face attached to any given idea has no bearing on the value of the idea itself.
On a *totally* unrelated note, why did you denounce your own white supremacy/alt-right ideology-inspired ideas that you published under a pseudonym once those got linked with your real name? What did you have to lose that you chose to write that stuff under a pseudonym in first place?
“What about the radical notion that people should discuss ideas disconnected from individuals instead? Having a face attached to any given idea has no bearing on the value of the idea itself.”
Except there’s no one more obsessed with the identities of speakers than anonymous online rightists, who hide their faces while obsessing over “physiognomy” and think calling someone a “Jew” or pointing out that they’re a woman or a minority is a refutation of their arguments.
If you are trying to say people that dismiss ideas based on nothing but who are expressing them are dumb we are in agreement. Though I'm not seeing how attaching names and faces to the ideas being expressed helps with that in any way.
Literally the only way it could have any benefits would be if the current system of "cancellation" remains in full effect if not getting stronger so that people that do dismiss arguments based on who is making them could get isolated from the society or punished in some other way.
If someone waved a magic wand and people actually did feel free to express their ideas without the fear of life-ruining consequences it could only make the people as you described feel more power and freedom to obsess over physiognomy and to dismiss ideas based on who are making them.
If there still will be negative consequences for expressing ideas the society doesn't like then having names and faces on those ideas will only make the situation worse than it is today.
Basically, the argument your article is making would be indistinguishable from the biggest establishment fanboy trying their hardest to convince their ideological opponents to remove themselves from the marketplace of ideas by committing societal suicide.
Nick Fuentes doesn’t hide his face.
just like Richard here, Nick's entire livelihood is built around being a professional opinion-haver whose living relies on having a backlash to his opinions.
Who cares about those nobodies? Don't waste them thinking about them at all. Far more worthwhile is Scott Alexander, who still doesn't go by his real last name after being doxed because people know him under the name he has voluminously blogged under.
The nobodies themselves care about not having their life ruined and Richard here was talking about those nobodies so he cares.
Scott is keeping to his pseudonym as that is more known than his real name and improves discoverability = fame/influence.
WHY does Richard care about nobody antisemites?
For a lot of pseudonymous people (like me), our pseudonym is better known than our real name (a very low bar).
"If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds." - Napoleon Bonaparte
The subheading claims "men are now cowards" but the essay doesn't support that with evidence. Allan Bloom in "The Closing of the American Mind" spills quite a lot of ink on examples of cowardice in US academia in the 60s and later. This isn't a new thing. (And he's mostly accusing liberals of not standing up for liberal values.)
I should also note that it's probably easier to be brave against an enemy like an invader (since you cited Ukraine) when you have people on your side than it is to go against your own side when you have no support, even if the first instance is clearly more objectively dangerous.
Academics were never a particularly brave bunch. Even back in the 60s the job was very political.
I honestly can't believe how many of my peers in the last few years refuse to speak out against obvious BS because their spouse won't let them.
That's important and underexamined. Peter Thiel is immune to this because he's gay and can presumably find a man with his views, or doesn't need to marry at all.
I agree with most of the points you make in this essay but I think you're missing something. The issue imo isn't free speech (tho I agree we can use more of it) but that most people aren't equipped to handle these conversations at all.
Afaik somewhere at the top the left creates these tricky concepts and passes them down to the more dedicated followers through articles and media which implicitly teach them both framings and arguments for certain things. Then those people use said concepts on their peers to align them to the latest leftist fads.
So basically the average person cannot invent concepts like microaggresions or systemic racism or do any sorts of stats or research to back them. And yet they're known by many cause the lefts media handed them out to the intelligencia. The average person doesn't know enough or have enough time or research capacity to look into whether these concepts are right or wrong and decipher their rhetorical tricks, and if they do the left has moves on to a new concept. And even worse the people who they're arguing against won't even understand the counterarguments cause they didn't come up with the arguments in the first place.
So while I think more people should speak out I don't think they can just voice a vague disagreement and come out ahead due to the industrial scale ideological and rhetorical backing the left has equipped many of its followers with. And that's a really difficult problem imo.
'somewhere' is university departments of gender studies, black studies, etc., or in the older days, the humanities.
*an anonymous ape-man liked this post*
I think a correct culture to have of free speech is a complex issue that I go back and forth on. If someone tweets something, and they get fired for it, on the surface that doesn't seem very free speech-esque. But why should an employer be pressured to keep an employee who doesn't share their beliefs, or whose beliefs might scare away customers? And I like the idea of the "marketplace of ideas", where as long as we have free speech, the best ideas will spread the most, but in practice that's not how it actually works.
Maybe your idea of just encouraging speaking bravely so people with masculine virtue will have outsized influence is good. Although I'm not sure masculine virtue would actually be associated with being correct.
What I think I'd want is first a cultural of epistemic honesty and legitimate fact checking. Make it so everyone who puts forth a controversial opinion finds some way to create a betting market around it, to put their money where their mouth is, and so foolish loudmouths go broke. After that's established, I'd be happy to see a culture of total free speech, because the vast majority of opinions spoken would be correct if we kept to the strict standards of epistemology.
I largely agree with you. Unfortunately, the American professional class does not value Honesty and Courage. The Woke have trained them to lie and feel good about it. If we are to rebuild American institutions, that must change (among other things).