2018-05-31

Niall Ferguson on the Intellectual Dark Web and the Culture War (Youtube)

Attracted to conservative history at university because it was more fun. And they were right (e.g. Robert Conquest saw the truth about Stalin at the time of Stalin's crimes.) Howard Zinn's history has gradually pushed conservative viewpoints out of university. The left won the culture war at university - its road to victory was imperceptible. Most notably the war was won by attrition. Classical historians were replaced on death or retirement by Zinn historians. The right did not fight very hard to promote their successors. Niall was naive in believing the system would be broadly meritocratic, that hard work and smarts and good faith would win in the end. In reality patronage is everything. If you are not in the right patronage network then you are done.

How do networks work? How do they capture institutions? Niall attended a class about 9/11 where the students had not entertained the idea that the attacks were religiously motivated, that they stemmed from American oppression - the Zinn interpretation.

The intellectual dark web's defining characteristic is that you have been targeted for reputational sliming. "racist-sexist" in particular. You are attacked for your alleged bad faith (by people who are themselves acting in bad faith). "Cowardice is the most powerful force in human history. I am constantly amazed at just how much cowardice is out there. My wife's* experience has shown me that"

Ayyan Hirsi Ali

In addition to cowardice, the university leftists saw it a part of their mission to support leftist students and to bootstrap them into university positions. The shift to the modern leftist hegemony began in earnest in the late 60's, early 70's.

"Cults define themselves by beliefs in a lot of things that are slightly weird." - describing the left's defeat in 1989 with the collapse of communism when it decamped to culture. The liberal orthodoxy came to regard sex as a social construction for example. To disbelieve that absurdity is to be engaged in hate speech - or in older terminology, heresy, manifest in academic meetings where people introduce themselves by name and preferred pronoun.

We assumed that the Internet would connect everyone and utopia would ensue - a mantra of Silicon Valley for 20 years. But in networks, "birds of a feather flock together." Polarization (or self segregation) manifests naturally in networks. "if you are in a network that cuts you off from contrary ideas, you are lost." People can now retreat into a bubble of confirmation bias. The algorithms feed this tendency. Humility is essential. "In the culture war, the only thing that works is reputational destruction."