Links to Consider, 10/2
Continetti, Lu, and me on the New Right; Alice Evans on religiosity; Brink Lindsey on temperance; Rob Henderson on statistical personality differences; Coleman Hughes on how he was treated by TED
Matt Continetti, Rachel Lu, and I discuss a book from the New Right. She does not find their proposed solutions convincing.
Also, I am now up to 5000 subscribers. 275 paid. In terms of unpaid subscribers, my guess is that this is probably around the 90th percentile. As you go up the percentiles from there, it starts to increase dramatically, so that the 99.99th percentile has hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
There may not be much net increase for me from now on. I get almost as many unsubscribes in a day as I do new subscriptions. And because it takes a few steps to unsubscribe, one can get a lot of people who subscribe but never read. I think about half of my 5000 are “quiet quitters” in that sense.
I am content with my current readership. I don’t feel like becoming more active on Twitter or adopting a more strident tone.
A wealth of evidence suggests that economic downturns, natural disasters, epidemics, and conflict motivate demand for social cooperation, cultural tightness, norm policing and strict theology. Peace and prosperity, meanwhile, encourage secularism.
One wonders: and then what? Is the feedback from less religiosity to peace and prosperity positive or negative, or do the consequences depend on other factors?
The Second Great Awakening more generally, and the antebellum temperance movement in particular, hold important lessons for us today. First, they show us that — contrary to a pessimistic strain of opinion common on the right — a society’s “moral capital” is not just some inheritance from the pre-modern past that is inevitably drawn down as the old traditions fade. Broad-based moral regeneration can occur under the conditions of modernity, and it can be rapid and dramatic. More specifically, the temperance movement shows us how a free society can respond to the challenges of addictive activities that subvert individual autonomy. In a free society, we generally presume that people should be allowed to do what they want. But informed by the distinction between liberty and license, we recognize that sometimes we face a conflict between our “first order” and “second order” wants: we may simultaneously desperately want a drink and desperately want to be free of that desire. The temperance movement shows that education combined with moral suasion — raising awareness of the threat posed by some addictive activity, and liberally wielding praise and blame to incentivize right conduct — can be effective in keeping self-defeating abuses of freedom in check.
One can add, and Lindsey would agree, that hard-coding temperance into law does not seem to work.
He suggests that we need a social-pressure temperance movement regarding media.
Age limits for access to social media should be raised and enforced; parents should see teen phone use in the same light as teen drinking. Initiatives should be launched to design non-addictive social media sites that respect user privacy and autonomy. The general sense of guardedness toward the virtual world should be heightened when entering it alone; excessive solitary media consumption should be regarded as worrisome, while family viewing time and neighborhood watch parties should be celebrated and encouraged. Book reading should be promoted for all ages, with sponsorship of book clubs and public book reading events and public service messages featuring media celebrities as class traitors. Online “political hobbyism” should be stigmatized as vulgar and creepy; cable news viewing of whatever ideological stripe should be actively discouraged through organized boycotts.
I would like to see social pressure applied also in other areas: against marijuana use; against promiscuous use of four-letter words; in favor of forming relationships that result in grandchildren.
But I had these questions for Brink:
Granting that temperance in this realm is desirable, what can we learn from the early temperance movement (a) about *how* to get it in motion and (b) how to keep it from going overboard?
It seems to me that the temperance movement had strong institutional support from organized religion, which no longer has much oomph, and from women with time on their hands, which may not be the case now that women are in the labor force. Who will drive a temperance movement, and won’t people be tempted to “outsource” their moral pressure to government policy, which we know was counterproductive when the temperance movement tried it?
Women are underrepresented in the STEM fields overall, in particular in the higher echelons. But in universities, women are now overrepresented as STEM students. This is a recent phenomenon that has occurred only in the last few years.
That one should be filed under Matriarchy Watch.
He cites Jordan Peterson:
Men and women show a large difference in interest in people vs. things. Men are more interested in things, women are more interested in people.
The increased male variability hypothesis: The average IQ for men and women is the same. But the male distribution has fatter tails, meaning that there are more men who have very low IQs and more men who have very high IQs.
…Greater male variability has been found among animals too. Evolution is more likely to tinker with male traits because males are more disposable.
Two weeks later, [Chris] Anderson emailed to tell me that there was “blowback” on my talk and that “[s]ome internally are arguing we shouldn’t post it.” In the email, he told me that the “most challenging” blowback had come from a “well-known” social scientist (who I later learned was Adam Grant).
Anderson and Grant take the stand in their defense. They would have been much better off taking the 5th or pleading guilty.
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Coleman Hughes description of what went on at TED is devastating, and I urge everyone to read it at the link. That there is within the TED organization a group called “Black@TED”, which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black" tells us that TED is a "woke" organization that likes to affect commitment to the values of open discussion but whose real mission is the propagation of Left ideology.
So how exactly is a "social pressure movement" supposed to happen? It sounds to me as wishful-thinking as the kind of "we ought to", "we need to to" bits that many journalists stick on the end of their pieces without offering anything in the way of "but how exactly?". To my mind, the only social pressure successes that could fit the label are those that have arisen from the banding together of once-tiny but obsessively one-track-minded gender dysphorics. I can't see anything by non-obsessive-malcontent types ever getting going in that way. Pessimism...sorry. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/