Thread by @paulcrider

I want to describe a phenomenon that partially explains the stickiness of hostility toward and misinformation about the whole suite of social justice concepts. Here's a THREAD from personal experience.

As a youngster in the late 90s/early 00s I read a lot of folks who would go on to become the "IDW". Dawkins, Shermer, Harris, Pinker, etc. This was my introduction to "intellectual" fare. I have no regrets about this, but it built a certain ideological momentum. 2/

Dawkins, to take one example, was a legit scientist—the Selfish Gene was one of the first "big books" that I read and it was excellent—who wrote beautifully, stoked my nascent atheism, and had some apparent authority both in his field and generally as a public intellectual. 3/

This passage from River Out of Eden has stuck with me. I'd forgotten the target was cultural relativists, but it captures the mood: critics of dominant paradigms (of science, of "the West," of the Enlightenment, etc) never seek to modify or delimit, but to destroy wholesale. 4/

A passage like that leaves the reader with the impression that there are people out there who really want to cancel Science. But I don't want to crash into a field! 5/

Pinker leaves the reader with the impression that feminism has some core liberal insight—women have rights—intrepidly carried forward by crowd-defying "choice feminists" like Christina Hoff Sommers, but that today's feminists are a little batty and have gone too far. 6/

6.1 I was reminded here of this excellent thread on how Pinker interacts with feminist scholarship.

https://twitter.com/magi_jay/status/972958282125062144

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan insist that of course racism is vile but that antiracists let their ideology precede and defeat legitimate scientific inquiry. Antiracists are afraid of inconvenient truths and themselves illiberally reduce individuals solely to their race. 7/

Here's the sequence. You start with these mainstream, apparently credible intellectuals who prime you with the idea that feminists, antiracists, etc are often quite unhinged, opposed to science and free inquiry, and definitely a threat to liberal values and institutions. 8/

You don't read primary social justice literature for a long time. When you finally do, it is against a massive background of skepticism, which nudges you to misinterpret what you do finally read. You already *know* this feminist probably thinks all heterosexual sex is rape. 9/

Now you've read a little of the relevant literature and discovered that, okay, *this* antiracist isn't *that* bad. *This* feminist doesn't literally hate *all* men. She's surprisingly nuanced! It's just all the others. 10/

Next you've come to appreciate the sophistication of these SJW academics, but your social media feed is still filled with IDW folks sharing IDW-framed scare stories of Twitter mobs and firings, so you think "It's not the ivory tower ideas, but their real world *application*." 11/

Many centrist publications are situated btwn the last two stages. Entities who do solid reporting, like @TheEconomist, propagate the divisiveness and antiliberal charges and both-sides credible scholars (Kendi) against bad faith hacks (Jimmy Concepts). 12/

https://twitter.com/paulcrider/status/1281638551348637696

By the time you realize that the vast majority of social justice activism even on the ground is *fine*—subject to garden variety rather than exotic cognitive foibles—you've wasted years climbing out of a well you've only just discovered was poisoned all along by bad faith. 13/13