Progressive Intellectuals

Image v. Reality  at Fake Nous.

My usual audience will wonder Why are we going over this ground again? It's a fair cop. This will look like many other discussions we have seen here and at our small corner of the internet.

First, it's a great name for site.  I was determined to link to something from the main page; the host is a philosophy professor with significant libertarian leanings. He doesn't pull punches.

I have spent many years around progressive intellectuals. They fill the academic world and the elite cultural circles of our society. As a group, they seem to me incredibly deceived and self-deceived people—much more self-deceived than right-wing intellectuals (of whom there are far fewer). Their worldview revolves around self-serving lies, and much of their self-image is practically the opposite of reality. 

Second, many of the themes I have tried to tie into the Dueling Intellectuals debate over the years are in this article. Echoes of the various tribes will show up.

That is the first element of progressive self-deception: they style themselves warriors against prejudice, but they are the biggest force stoking prejudice in our society. They think that their prejudice is different because the group they’re attacking is actually bad. They don’t see their stereotypes as stereotypes but just as the truth. That, of course, is what all bigots think. 

Many leftists seem to live in an alternate reality in which our society—including the most left-wing-dominated of institutions—is filled with neo-Nazis bent on hurting women and minorities at every turn. In the academic world, you can hear people talking about how biased the academic world is against women, in the very same meeting that everyone present agrees to give women preference over men in hiring, and no one notices the dissonance. Constantly talking about how the other side has all the power, while being constantly directly confronted with their own side’s power. 

 Third, some new insights I had not thought of, or not articulated as clearly

 This sort of echo chamber tends to make people overconfident, to make them ignore problems with their worldview and even take increasingly extreme and implausible positions. Conservative intellectuals, by contrast, are probably more self-aware because they keep hearing criticisms from left-wing intellectuals. (But this is not true of the right-wing masses, who ignore the left-wing intellectuals.) 

I have a friend who worked long amongst liberals who had tiring and irritating prejudices.  But she took a new job that involved a lot of work with bluer-collar guys who had different false beliefs, about contrails and power lines.  There was a general cynicism that everything was not what it seemed and was either a sham or a shady plot by the worst of the powerful.  CS Lewis noted much the same nearly a hundred years ago. It was not merely different prejudices, but a different kind of prejudice.