Originally a comment by Artymorty on Call it a mishap.
When liberal institutions like the CBC pull boneheaded moves like this, they only inflame the biases they’re attempting to quell.
Bigots are emboldened when they see liberals denying the terrorist nature of the 9/11 attacks, or claiming Jason Arday was a victim of “lynching”, etc.
DEI hysteria, Islamophobia panics, transphobia panics, homophobia panics, racism panics. All of these cases of liberal overreach are used to justify conservative overreach — they drive conservatives to become overly dimissive of the very causes liberals hold dear. And thus the culture war grinds on.
You’d think the CBC would be easing off on its overzealous “woke” bias, given that cries for its defunding on the political right are growing ever louder, but no: here they are, doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on the very behaviour that infuriates, emboldens, and validates their critics.
The same can be said for much of the academic humanities, arts institutions, NGOs, publishing, cultural organizations. Faced with mounting hostility from outside, they’ve largely responded by pushing back harder rather than asking whether any part of the criticism is warranted.
The question surrounding all of this is: why?
That’s really one of the great questions of our political age. I’m struggling to piece together a theory.
What I’ve got so far is that liberalism and the political left have undergone a cultural shift: away from a culture of actively open-minded thinking and toward a meta-social culture.
Liberal intellectual culture has historically placed considerable prestige on skepticism, critical thinking, intellectual experimentation and standing apart from the crowd. Challenging the prevailing liberal consensus could itself be understood as a liberal act. Now, the social incentives run in the other direction: what matters is positioning oneself correctly within the moral and political landscape of the group.
This can be understood as a shift from first-order thinking to second-order thinking: where once the liberal ecosystem promoted thinking for oneself — What do I think? Is this true? What does the evidence say? — now it promotes social triangulation: you predict what others in your group believe, then you come to believe things (or at least profess to) that would position you most favourably among your peers. What do people like me think? What do the people I oppose think? What will my peers infer about me if I say this? Who will be helped if I concede that point? Where does this belief position me socially?
Of course, to some extent, everybody has always done a bit of both. But the second set of questions has gained significant authority over the first.
Once second-order thinking has overtaken first-order thinking, beliefs cease to be anchored to material reality by the principles of critical inquiry. They start resembling a chain gang: everyone’s beliefs attached to everyone else’s, each person taking cues from the people around them, a mass formation, ungrounded and adrift. That’s when you get the feedback loop, the purity spiral, the madness of crowds, the stampede — pick your metaphor. A position shifts slightly. Everyone notices and adjusts, each adjustment becoming fresh information for everyone else. Everyone is using everyone else as “evidence,” and the whole formation veers off on a tangent.
So what changed? I think at least two enormous forces helped push liberal culture away from first-order inquiry and toward this more meta-social, second-order mode.
The first is social media.
The behavioural ecology of social media is unusually hostile to the expression of actively open-minded thinking. AOT asks you to slow down, entertain contrary evidence, tolerate uncertainty and risk changing your mind. By contrast, with its likes, reposts, ratios and pile-ons, social media makes the social landscape quantitatively visible, with social reward and punishment data continually feeding you in real-time. This makes the meta-social layer highly salient — you’re bombarded with information telling you what other people are thinking about what you’re thinking. This is practically a machine to drive people to prioritize second-order thought: see what gets applause; see what gets punished; learn where the boundaries are; adjust.
The second change is ideological homogeneity.
Liberalism has become the overwhelmingly dominant political identity within many of the institutions I’m talking about (culture, etc.). That changes what dissent means inside those environments.
When the surrounding establishment is conservative, challenging establishment assumptions can easily coincide with liberalism. When the surrounding establishment is itself liberal, genuine open-mindedness requires challenging your own people, and that is psychologically harder to do.
Thus, these institutions have shifted to a coalitional mindset: liberalism as a political identity has quietly displaced liberalism as an epistemic ethic. The prime directive shifted from What principles should we apply? to What position should our side take against theirs? Us-versus-them reasoning moved upstream of critical inquiry.
Social media then supercharged the whole thing. Ideologically homogeneous institutions supplied the coalition; social media supplied the surveillance and instantaneous reward system. Together they activated some extremely old primate tribal machinery: conformity, status sensitivity, fear of ostracism, coalition loyalty, imitation.
So I suppose that’s at least part of the answer to why.
Then comes the harder question: how do we fix it?
I don’t know. But it’s got to come from the leadership. The heads of schools, media outlets, non-profits, they have to take concrete, active steps to re-engineer the ecosystems they lead, altering the incentive structures of the institutions they run. They have to create environments in which challenging consensus is professionally safe, changing your mind is treated as intellectual strength, disagreement isn’t automatically interpreted as disloyalty, and people gain rather than lose prestige for identifying errors in their own side’s thinking.
In other words, they have to make actively open-minded thinking socially rewarding again.
(MAOTSRA! Where’s my hat?)
I imagine some absurdly grand gathering of liberal institutional heads convened specifically to confront the problem. Davos for editors-in-chief, university deans, publishers, arts administrators and nonprofit CEOs.
Or perhaps the analogy needs to be even more ridiculous.
Paris, 1919.
The war is over; liberal democracy has survived, just barely. Everyone arrives with maps under their arms. The borders have collapsed, several empires are in ruins, nobody entirely trusts anybody else, and somehow a roomful of exhausted people has to decide what the liberal world is supposed to look like now.
