I mean, you're right on the censorship, but to calling Hanania the "world's greatest living essayist" makes it hard to take anything else in the essay seriously.
Platforms like Substack are an existential threat to NYT, Atlantic, etc. and are speeding their demise. Hence the "reporting". Beyond continuing their partisan rooting, they don't have a Plan B.
I think it was Tyler Cowen who pointed out that to the extent it's a problem, it's a demand problem not a supply problem. You can cut off a source, but if the demand is there, it will be filled.
When you write that Richard H. is "possibly the world's greatest living essayist" you make me doubt your judgment on everything else.
This has nothing to do with his politics. I've read quite a few of his essays, and they're fine as far as the quality of polemical essays go. Some of them strike hime, some are quite silly. I disagree with almost all of them.
The core premise of a free society is that individuals ought to think and act for themselves. The corollary of this is that individuals are ultimately responsible for protecting themselves against lies, against appeals to emotion, etc., and that it might be a good thing to improve the thinking skills of the public to give them the capacity to do this successfully.
On the other hand, the core premise first popularized among academics by "progressive" elitists about a century ago (people like Bernays and Lippmann) is that most people are just too stupid or uninterested to think about important things for themselves, which implies that the only way to protect them against misinformation is for benevolent propagandists to manipulate public opinion and engineer consent to the elite agenda, supposedly for the public's own good. The emergence of internet channels of mass communication that elites don't control, however, has made censorship a necessary component of engineering consent too, so members of the credentialed classes who share this sort of contempt for people they view as their intellectual inferiors have increasingly embraced the idea that government censors need to clamp down on internet speech.
This "progressive" contempt for the masses is wrong on several counts. First, the ethical case for individual autonomy isn't simply a matter of optimizing knowledge; it is rooted in the fact that for adult individuals, one's happiness is a function of one being in control of relevant aspects of one's own future and of recollections of one's own past. When pursuing happiness, people certainly do make errors in their judgements of value and in their understanding of the world and how it works, and lies circulated by unscrupulous characters do contribute to such errors. However, well-meaning paternalistic attempts to prevent such errors by depriving adults of their autonomy only guarantees that they will become miserable. Benevolent censorship is a cure that is worse for the patient than whatever risks are posed by error-prone people getting fooled by liars.
Second, free societies have a powerful self-correcting mechanism that authoritarian societies lack. A society of individual liberty is also a society of individual responsibility, where people who embrace errors also directly suffer the consequences of acting on their mistakes, and are thereby incentivized by their own personal experiences to think and act differently. The utopian progressive intellectual, on the other hand, is detached from the personal experiences of other people, and is often mesmerized by their pursuit of floating abstractions that are not grounded in the innate aspects of human psychology. Not only are censors as potentially corrupt and fallible as any other human beings are; their attempts at central planning of knowledge and wisdom are made in the absence of the empirical error correction that only individual experiences can provide.
Third, the emergence of many important social institutions and of the emergence useful social norms are not the product of rational planning at all; they are a spontaneous, unforeseen consequence of a vast array of interactions among many people pursuing their own narrow and divergent intentions or are blindly following irrational traditions that arose from a process of cultural evolution in previous generations, not from anyone's conscious planning. Individual liberty and individual responsibility are essential for keeping this evolution of irrational traditions and spontaneous emergence of social institutions aligned with the pursuit of human happiness. No authoritarian is so omniscient that their attempts to design new values and new institutions need not compete against old values and old institutions to prove their worth. An attribution of authentic progress to some novel norm or institution requires much more solid evidence than just a good yarn spun by professors in their ivory towers.
Hate to be the guy that recommends a 90min YouTube video as the canonical source of the argument, but if you think JK isn’t a TERF you’re out of the loop and I consider Contrapoints video on it the best way to get back into the loop
Excellent article. The fact, (remember them?) is that the ‘progressives’, ‘woke’ or whatever you want to call them, are never satisfied. You can concede every point, acquiesce to every demand and they will simply proclaim that is not enough. They will tolerate nothing but total supplication.
And what they demand today will be deemed inadequate tomorrow. Just look at how demands for tolerance for homosexuality(good), has literally turned into a demand that gay children be castrated (not so good).
I am one of the few who actually enjoys Twitter under Elon’s regime. I see so much more acknowledgment of reality there than when censorship ruled. Trying to turn Substack into the old Twitter would kill it. If someone doesn’t want to see something in either place, fucking block it yourself you lazy wuss.
Thank you for a fine post! What is this about ‘taking free speech too far’? It is impossible to ‘take free speech too far’. You either have it or you don’t. And, as Noam Chomsky used constantly to remind us, ‘Either you believe in free speech for those you despise, or you don’t believe in it at all’. It’s precisely by restricting free speech that the censors are able to conflate ‘opinions we don’t like’ with ‘Naziism’. When we are able to speak freely, the differences cannot be obscured.
These fringe people are so outside the mainstream and so discredited that they are no threat to anyone. There is no realistic situation where these opinions "catch on". I say that based on my old fashioned definitions of "Nazi" and "White supremacist". If others want a more expansive definition, all the more reason not to jump on censorship and deplatforming.
Great points. Interesting that those platforms criticizing Substack are on the hard Left, which means that nearly every Substack account on the moderate left, in the middle or anywhere on the right would be deemed Nazi sympathizers - so 95% of Substack’s creators, as well as viewpoints.
I mean, you're right on the censorship, but to calling Hanania the "world's greatest living essayist" makes it hard to take anything else in the essay seriously.
Platforms like Substack are an existential threat to NYT, Atlantic, etc. and are speeding their demise. Hence the "reporting". Beyond continuing their partisan rooting, they don't have a Plan B.
Good points. Another angle on the slippery slope is that appeasing zealots is impossible and every demand you give in to will just yield new demands.
I think it was Tyler Cowen who pointed out that to the extent it's a problem, it's a demand problem not a supply problem. You can cut off a source, but if the demand is there, it will be filled.
When you write that Richard H. is "possibly the world's greatest living essayist" you make me doubt your judgment on everything else.
This has nothing to do with his politics. I've read quite a few of his essays, and they're fine as far as the quality of polemical essays go. Some of them strike hime, some are quite silly. I disagree with almost all of them.
Very, very well said.
Censoring the Nazis wouldn't be the end for them; it would be the beginning.
"OK, we've got them on the run. Now let's get J.K. Rowling!"
Exactly. And the NYT article makes it clear they’d like to go after “anti-vaxxers” next.
https://substack.com/@tianwen/note/c-46046340
The core premise of a free society is that individuals ought to think and act for themselves. The corollary of this is that individuals are ultimately responsible for protecting themselves against lies, against appeals to emotion, etc., and that it might be a good thing to improve the thinking skills of the public to give them the capacity to do this successfully.
On the other hand, the core premise first popularized among academics by "progressive" elitists about a century ago (people like Bernays and Lippmann) is that most people are just too stupid or uninterested to think about important things for themselves, which implies that the only way to protect them against misinformation is for benevolent propagandists to manipulate public opinion and engineer consent to the elite agenda, supposedly for the public's own good. The emergence of internet channels of mass communication that elites don't control, however, has made censorship a necessary component of engineering consent too, so members of the credentialed classes who share this sort of contempt for people they view as their intellectual inferiors have increasingly embraced the idea that government censors need to clamp down on internet speech.
This "progressive" contempt for the masses is wrong on several counts. First, the ethical case for individual autonomy isn't simply a matter of optimizing knowledge; it is rooted in the fact that for adult individuals, one's happiness is a function of one being in control of relevant aspects of one's own future and of recollections of one's own past. When pursuing happiness, people certainly do make errors in their judgements of value and in their understanding of the world and how it works, and lies circulated by unscrupulous characters do contribute to such errors. However, well-meaning paternalistic attempts to prevent such errors by depriving adults of their autonomy only guarantees that they will become miserable. Benevolent censorship is a cure that is worse for the patient than whatever risks are posed by error-prone people getting fooled by liars.
Second, free societies have a powerful self-correcting mechanism that authoritarian societies lack. A society of individual liberty is also a society of individual responsibility, where people who embrace errors also directly suffer the consequences of acting on their mistakes, and are thereby incentivized by their own personal experiences to think and act differently. The utopian progressive intellectual, on the other hand, is detached from the personal experiences of other people, and is often mesmerized by their pursuit of floating abstractions that are not grounded in the innate aspects of human psychology. Not only are censors as potentially corrupt and fallible as any other human beings are; their attempts at central planning of knowledge and wisdom are made in the absence of the empirical error correction that only individual experiences can provide.
Third, the emergence of many important social institutions and of the emergence useful social norms are not the product of rational planning at all; they are a spontaneous, unforeseen consequence of a vast array of interactions among many people pursuing their own narrow and divergent intentions or are blindly following irrational traditions that arose from a process of cultural evolution in previous generations, not from anyone's conscious planning. Individual liberty and individual responsibility are essential for keeping this evolution of irrational traditions and spontaneous emergence of social institutions aligned with the pursuit of human happiness. No authoritarian is so omniscient that their attempts to design new values and new institutions need not compete against old values and old institutions to prove their worth. An attribution of authentic progress to some novel norm or institution requires much more solid evidence than just a good yarn spun by professors in their ivory towers.
Hate to be the guy that recommends a 90min YouTube video as the canonical source of the argument, but if you think JK isn’t a TERF you’re out of the loop and I consider Contrapoints video on it the best way to get back into the loop
Excellent article. The fact, (remember them?) is that the ‘progressives’, ‘woke’ or whatever you want to call them, are never satisfied. You can concede every point, acquiesce to every demand and they will simply proclaim that is not enough. They will tolerate nothing but total supplication.
And what they demand today will be deemed inadequate tomorrow. Just look at how demands for tolerance for homosexuality(good), has literally turned into a demand that gay children be castrated (not so good).
All great points, but its also important to note that the Nazi scare is much ado about nothing: https://public.substack.com/p/censors-are-trying-to-trick-you-into
I am one of the few who actually enjoys Twitter under Elon’s regime. I see so much more acknowledgment of reality there than when censorship ruled. Trying to turn Substack into the old Twitter would kill it. If someone doesn’t want to see something in either place, fucking block it yourself you lazy wuss.
Thank you for a fine post! What is this about ‘taking free speech too far’? It is impossible to ‘take free speech too far’. You either have it or you don’t. And, as Noam Chomsky used constantly to remind us, ‘Either you believe in free speech for those you despise, or you don’t believe in it at all’. It’s precisely by restricting free speech that the censors are able to conflate ‘opinions we don’t like’ with ‘Naziism’. When we are able to speak freely, the differences cannot be obscured.
These fringe people are so outside the mainstream and so discredited that they are no threat to anyone. There is no realistic situation where these opinions "catch on". I say that based on my old fashioned definitions of "Nazi" and "White supremacist". If others want a more expansive definition, all the more reason not to jump on censorship and deplatforming.
Great points. Interesting that those platforms criticizing Substack are on the hard Left, which means that nearly every Substack account on the moderate left, in the middle or anywhere on the right would be deemed Nazi sympathizers - so 95% of Substack’s creators, as well as viewpoints.
And before Rowling, you had the extremely nasty and ongoing campaigns against Orson Scott Card and Chick-Fil-A.