A controversial New York Times article describes several popular white intellectuals as marginalized “renegades.”
What is the Intelectual Dark Web? It is a politically diverse movement, but mainly it is about right-wingers who don't like postmodernism. Centuries of dominant white male rule are coming to an end, and they don't like it.
Members of the intellectual dark web want to be at the center of intellectual debate. But the center has shifted.
To understand the unhappiness of dark web intellectuals, you have to go back in time. The past few years have seen extraordinary changes in how left-wingers, liberals, and liberal centrists understand themselves. But go back a bit further and marriage equality for gay people was a controversial issue, and women’s rights and the status of African Americans in American life were the targets of intellectually lazy speculation.
Precisely because we have changed so much, we have forgotten how bad things used to be. For decades, contrarianism on questions of race and gender — ranging from opposition to certain feminist projects or to affirmative action, to flirtation with the idea that black culture and even black brains were intrinsically inferior — was part of the intellectual mainstream of the center. Andrew Sullivan published an entire issue of the New Republic devoted to presenting, and debating, Charles Murray’s claim that black people were, on average, less intelligent than white people.
The “Intellectual Dark Web,” explained: what Jordan Peterson has in common with the alt-right
5 comments:
Sargon of Akkad describes himself as a classical liberal. Ben Shapiro is a Zionist American Jew, and JP is a conservative/libertarian. Basically every ideological segment that isn't in power in the west, right of center.
This would seem to put post-modernism as a progressive approach, whereas it is closer to fascist, since it essentially posits and provides the basis for a war of all against all, the end of history, limitations on freedom of speech, and the end of rational inquiry as a method of divining the truth. Jordan Peterson main virtue is that he fights for freedom of speech and rational inquiry (albeit too often jumping to unsupported political and unscientific conclusions himself under a veneer of rationality). In that, he sometimes resembles his post-modernist critics, but unlike them he is at least aware of the dangers of their voluntarist, anti-enlightenment and self-referential approach.
“ and the end of rational inquiry as a method of divining the truth.”
That doesn’t work either,,,, think DNA evidence in criminal investigations... that is based on Science not rational inquiry...
Surveillance cameras instead of eye witnesses are Science too... etc...
Look at MMT vs the other Theories... that is being conducted via rational inquiry and MMT is getting nowhere ...
It doesn’t work....
Science, properly conducted, is the ultimate form of rational inquiry. I am not saying that everything can be explained rationally, nor that an electorate can be convinced by purely rational arguments, and still less that the interests of those who govern have much to do with rationality. But if we are to save the planet, we need to be able to converse rationally, freely. Possibly the least original and least controversial thing ever written on this website, IMO.
Post a Comment