I think the left also has a large amount of misunderstanding and lazily bad opinions about free market economics. I have progressive friends and relatives who think that capitalism and big business are the root of all evil in the modern world. They share these opinions on smart phones. They drive modern cars. Their 401k’s are invested in stock indices.
I can't remember the title but there is a book by Ilya Somin (a libertarian law professor) that discusses Rational Ignorance on the part of voters--that it is rational for them to behave in the manner you describe in your article. You might find it illuminating, but not something that would likely be on your radar.
The Wilson episode is an example of misinformation. The centrist examples are simply times that people made reasonable assumptions based on the information available. Being wrong by ignoring facts is different than being wrong in the absence of information.
I would love for society to stop treating the misinformation problem as a "people are stupid problem". Misinformation spreads because of how the human brain works. Smart people fall for misinformation all the time. People believe misinformation when it comes fro people who they trust or are like them. Like the essay mentioned, people often aren't all that familiar with topics and they may just assume that what they hear from their friends about those topics is true. That happens to everyone.
And then there's confirmation bias -- and if people of a certain ideological bent are less susceptible to it than those on the other side it's not evident to me.
I largely agree with your thoughtful comment. No Pollyanna, I recognize that most politics, successful anyway, is contentious. I awoke to an uglier streak with the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Solution? This Pollyanna(?) proposes that moderates, left and right, get off their butts in the primaries and take the choice of candidates away from the impassioned, divisive extremes. Improbable for certain.
For some progressives, climate change serves a pre-existing agenda which, despite egalitarian pretensions, is quite aristocratic in nature.
There is a romanticized view of preindustrial times when the common people were content to live simple lives as farmers and craftsmen. The reality of course is that life back then was pretty miserable for most people. "Inequality" meant real deprivation and suffering, not just the difference between a Cadillac and a Chevy.
"Perhaps the most prominent version of this is the idea that the world faces a hard tipping point to climate apocalypse sometime around 2030."
Already in the earliest stages of climate change we are seeing large areas becoming virtually uninhabitable from heat, multiple crop failures from flooding heat and drought. They will get worse under any scenario. This will trigger migration of millions (billions?) of climate refugees, stressing our already weakened political system. The world economy is quite fragile even without climate stress. A few years ago an oil pipeline on the US East Coast closed from a ransomware attack. It was re-opened five days later, just as severe fuel shortages were starting to choke the region. A ship ran around in the Suez Canal for six days. World trade was disrupted. Just think if it had sunk and taken weeks to refloat.
I appreciate your level-headedness but we can't use it to close our eyes to an upcoming disaster.
"And even more importantly, there are no magic tipping points."
I think it would be more accurate to say that there _probably_ are no significant tipping points, at least not within the ranges anyone's talking about for the next hundred years. But at least in theory there _could_ be a point at which we hit some kind of runaway feedback loop (e.g. massive methane and CO2 escapes from the tundra, total die-off of the remaining old-growth boreal forests and rainforests, etc) which shifts the climate so drastically that it disrupts food production, resource scarcity wars ensue, and technological civilization falls apart.
We're running a real-time experiment, in which we shift the composition of the atmosphere and see what happens. If you acidify the ocean enough to cause a massive die-off in phytoplankton, in the short term that means the rate at which CO2 gets cycled back into O2 slows down. And that means concentration of CO2, and acidity, get further boosted. The planktons have pretty fast reproductive cycles, so maybe they adapt and spring back. Or maybe we end up on a trajectory where, in the absence of geo-engineering intervention (which may be difficult if we've collapsed into tribes fighting over access to food and clean water), in 10-20 thousand years there's so little O2 in the environment that animal life as we currently understand it stops being viable.
Truly catastrophic outcomes are _very unlikely_. Maybe on the order of 0.1% or less, given the current trajectory where we're decarbonizing just because renewables have become cheaper than fossil. But it's difficult, given the analytical tools we have, to actually _rule them out entirely_. So there's a kind of "F*** around, and find out," logic at work here, and it doesn't seem completely crazy to feel some urgency around reducing the amount of f***ing around.
The scientific consensus opinion as far as I can tell is that there are indeed several critical tipping points associated with the 1.5 deg c warming figure, most notably Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheet collapse. Together, these are associated with estimated 10ft ln sea level rise.
Sea level rise would be terrible and disruptive of course, but does not, as far as I know, have a major self-reinforcing aspect where it accelerates further CO2 concentration or warming. (I guess it's at least possible -- ice loss in the polar regions reduces overall albedo. I'm not sure how big a forcing factor that is, though.)
My point is that it doesn’t need to runaway for it to be catastrophic. It just needs to be irreversible, intensely disruptive, enough to cause massive displacements and conflict, extinctions and loss of ecosystems etc.
These tipping points predicted to be crossed at 1.5 deg C will likely cause the kind of conflict and disruption as to qualify for “catastrophic” imo. If sea level rises 10ft in the next 80 years, its going to be intensely ugly.
A question to any U.S. military veterans or active service members reading this on Memorial Day: what can/should American society do to support you better? I'm not just talking about the government; I mean what can/should ordinary civilians like me do?
We do a bunch of trivial stuff like saying "thank you for your service" and letting you board airplanes first, but what would be actually meaningful and helpful?
A small piece that wasn't covered, that I saw, in the Michael Brown shooting reporting, is that he most likely was psychotic. He had reported seeing God in the clouds, and had a long religiously-focused conversation with some nearby workmen prior to the fatal incident. This indicates a possible manic state, either natural or drug-induced.
You didn’t know about the Brown case facts because it wasn’t covered. There was wall to wall coverage of the Jussie Smollett hate crime”; when it came out that he faked it, and a court found him guilty, I watched MSNBC’s entire evening block to see what they’d do. The answer was they ignored it. I used to watch Maddow every night. No more. It started with Fox, but now the MSM - CNN, NPR, NYT, Fox - are all just peddling propaganda and ideological reinforcement. I ended my NYT and WaPo and Atlantic subscriptions; I stopped donating to local NPR because they kept trying to jam “Latinx” down our throats. They all badly mishandled COVID.
Ideologically driven, immune to facts, the media makes us dumb when they should make us informed. It’s why I subscribe here and a couple other Substacks. Nothing else is credible. The fall of the NYT and WaPo are the saddest of all.
I don't believe so. There have been accounts that there is some risk to teen males. My point is that it is irrational to vaccinate those at low to no risk.
This is something I feel very strongly about. I'm in academia, and I consider myself lefty/liberal, but I agree 100% that the right does not have a monopoly on misinformation and harmful ideology.
A *huge* problem on the left is the uncritical (heh) embrace of the belief that America is fundamentally racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and every other -ist and -phobic there is, and if you deny it, you yourself are racist, bad, blinded by your white fragility, etc. The misinformation about police shootings of Black men is just a small part of it. Matt Y had a brilliant piece a couple years ago about Tema Okun's work on how punctuality, hard, work, valuing the written word, and so on are signs of white supremacy. There's a quote from "White Fragility" that says (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "Whenever a Black and white person interact, the question to ask is not, Did racism take place? but How did racism manifest itself in this interaction?"
Can you think of anything more defeatist? If you are white, you *cannot* interact with Black people in any way shape or form without racism hanging over you like a deadly curse. You are doomed to spread racism wherever you go! But you must not complain or protest, because then you will just demonstrate how racist you really are. And if you show that you're hurt in any way, you will be guilty of "making it all about yourself" and "demanding emotional labor from Black people" and "making Black people feel unsafe with your white tears."
How are we supposed to have a healthy, thriving, multiracial, diverse society when people think this way?
Second, and I don't blame Matt Y for not touching this fun topic, but the far left/ progressive folks have made an absolute hash of gender issues. There's sex and gender and gender identity that you feel in your soul and gender presentation and gender-nonconforming and what gender others perceive you as and trans and nonbinary and genderqueer and genderfluid and agender and I have no idea how any of these fit together anymore, and if you question any of it you risk stepping on a landmine labeled "vile transphobe who wants queer/trans people to LITERALLY DIE."
I don't know what the solution is, but as they say in AA, the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem.
As a fellow academic my impression is that this problem is more about institutional capture and low-key fear rather than genuine conviction. Sure, *some* people believe in the stuff above (if not necessarily in its most absurd formulations), esp. certain demographics (young white native-born americans of privileged background and limited exposure to the the world). However many many do not which includes very much people on the left (even the far left). I also sense the fever is breaking a bit. We still have a long way to go but the discourse is a bit freer now than, say, in 2021, no?
Oh I absolutely agree with you; I don't think most people in academia *genuinely believe* in all the woke stuff. The problem is, you don't know a priori who the true believers are, so you don't want to talk openly of these matters to anyone you don't know very well.
It's not unlike what my mom told me about life on the far side of the Iron Curtain: most people did not believe in the Communist Party line, but you could not risk speaking freely for fear of a true believer finding out. It's disturbing.
I think you’re correct, the fever is breaking a little. I’m also an academic (hi everyone!) in a social science discipline and I’m actually surprised at how little I hear the leftist maximalist type stuff mentioned above. Like, pretty much never. Could be because I’m in the UK and I perceive the climate to be a tiny bit (wee bit?) more chill here - I’m not sure. But I’m able to have normal conversations with colleagues who are e.g. gender-fluid or not white and express boring-but-not-maximalist opinions about gender or race and still be friends with them. Which is cool.
My (outsider's) impression is that intellectual life in the UK is in a somewhat better state than the US. First, it's far less polarized (much more singificant swing vote, both main parties are sane). Second, on gender specifically the gender critical feminist movement is much more prominent which helps keep the range of acceptable opinion more sensible.
All could be. I’m an outsider (American living in the UK), so it’s hard for me to say definitive things about political culture here. Re: less polarized, yes, somewhat. The Tories in particular are themselves a pretty motley coalition (e.g. the “Truss wing,” the “Braverman wing,” etc.), so there’s a lot of internal debate (and backstabbing). As for “saner,” I suppose so - although it’s sort of hard for me to allow that the kabuki around pretending Brexit was “The Greatest Thing EVAR, how dare you say otherwise,” could be called “sane” (an affliction that has spread to Labour, to boot - I can’t vote, but if I could I think it’d have to be Lib Dem as the only vaguely “pro-Europe” party left). At the very least, there’s no Il Duce phenomenon (Johnson worship from certain quarters notwithstanding) here, so that’s something. As for the gender critical feminist movement, could be, though hard to say. I suppose JK Rowling’s public profile gives it prominence and cover it might not otherwise enjoy, although as you know the blowback has also been pretty heavy.
I'll give one concrete example of the clusterfudge that is the discourse around gender issues. A few years ago, I was reading a comment thread on coming out as trans, and one of the commenters used the word "femme."
As far as I could gather, that commenter used "femme" as a word for people who are *perceived by others as female*, regardless of whether they are cis women, trans men who are still perceived by others as women, trans women who can successfully "pass," or nonbinary folks whose appearance is coded feminine.
Well that one word unleashed a total s**t storm in the comments. People started accusing the commenter of using the word that is literally violent, because "femme" excludes trans women who feel that they are women, but who cannot convincingly "pass" as such. This was triggering and traumatizing and unacceptable. Other commenters tried, reasonably IMHO, to make the argument that it's *useful* to have one word meaning "people who are perceived by others as women, regardless of how they identify," e.g., when discussing sexism. But the "you are an evil transphobic POS if you use the word femme" crowd would not be appeased and the thread degenerated into insults flying back and forth. I withdrew from the thread as from a flaming car wreck, relieved that I had not commented.
I don't doubt for a second that this is true -- I've been on the receiving end of that for questioning Covid-era at-home-schooling policies (was accused of wanting to send kids to, and I quote, "death camps"). It was frustrating and annoying and upsetting.
But then I look at what Dem politicians say, and contrast that with what GOP politicians say, and then look at the actual LAWS that the GOP is passing....and I have a hard time being too worked up about some people being dumb and assholes online.
"Our capitalist, imperialist, hegemonic, oppressive society destroyed their native countries to the point where they feel forced to come here!"
(There's a grain of truth to that, too: America has a lot to answer for re: propping up horrible dictators in other countries on the "He's an SOB, but he's our SOB" principle.)
Some do, though. The Gulf states can get plenty of South Asian migrant labor, although their abusive labor practices are (by now) fairly well known. People will put up with a lot, if their prospects at home are bad enough.
Really enjoyed this essay. I think Matt should extend it in three ways:
1. There is a spectrum from misinformation-as-in-falsehoods through misinformation-as-in-wrong-synecdoche-for-complex systems. Thinking that Brown was murdered is the former; not understanding that Black folks have more opinions about policing that a desire for less racism in its application is the latter.
2. Because, like everyone else he struggles with the sheer complexity of climate change and the machinery of human prosperity that causes it, Matt sometimes spreads the second kind of misinformation with regard to clean energy. Because he has grasped the true and important fact that nuclear and geothermal MAY abate gigatonnes of emissions from natural gas in the 2030s and beyond, he often downplays the true and important fact that solar, wind, and batteries WILL abate gigatonnes of emissions this decade AND beyond. To his great credit, he champions permitting reform that would accelerate both mechanisms of abatement. "We're doomed if we don't hit zero by 2030" is bullshit, but so is "renewables are a distraction from nuclear." Consider the latest IEA report[1], especially its finding on the incredible persistence of ACCELERATION in renewables[2].
3. Informed citizens, a minority, are enormously more informed than they used to be. I've been reading the NYT for over three decades. Today it is much deeper, broader, and more accurate than it was in 1990—better in every way. But most people don't approach news with a scholarly perspective, and never have. Matt addresses this point, but could perhaps grapple more with the dilemma of us chattering classes separating themselves from the minority by studying up. (I may be forgetting his doing so.)
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
There is a ton of misinformation in the environmental movement, and most of it comes directly from the naturalistic fallacy. (That's the belief that anything "natural" is good and anything "unnatural" is bad.)
GMOs are a great example. Once I was looking online for information about a certain processed food ingredient and I came across a website that claimed GMOs were "unstable" as if modified DNA was akin to a radioactive isotope - a piece of total nonsense, clearly invented by someone who knows nothing about the underlying science but thinks it makes sense because the gene editing process is unnatural and therefore it must be bad, right? They also often talk as if genes can migrate out of organisms and across species - they can't, they only pass from parent to offspring. Or as if a single gene taken from a virus that infects plants could somehow be dangerous to humans - again, total nonsense, plant viruses don't infect people and one gene is not a virus even if it came from one.
And this sort of thing is not OK. Gene editing can be used for dubious purposes as well as good ones, but doing things like blocking the adoption of rice that has vitamin A in it because it's "unnatural" just perpetuates avoidable suffering in poor countries and does nothing to help the environment. And GMOs aren't the only area where you see this - overstating the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear waste, and scaremongering about chemicals regardless of how strong the evidence against a given chemical really is, are very much part of the problem too. More discipline and intellectual rigor is needed here, both to keep the environmental movement from discrediting itself and to actually craft good policy that actually protects the environment and our health.
GMOs might be used for purposes useful to consumers.
But they are not really in practice at all. The GMOs actually on the market nearly all promote harmful farming practices in the form of herbicide resistance so that single genetic strain crops can be doused in chemicals which are not harmless to humans or the larger environment.
Sure, gmos could be used to create frost and drought resistant crops, improved nutrition and all sorts of other benefits. But these possibilities have not been implemented. So, I have to say, I cannot blame the distrustful consumer attitudes regarding food science and nutrition. The American public has been wholesale misled on these issues for generations, and our interests have been largely ignored for profits.
Don’t blame “the left” for GMO misinformation. Blame the food tech industry for using GMOs for shitty purposes. If GMOs are so great and beneficial to consumers, they should prove it. With GMO crops that actually improve consumers lives.
I would strongly argue that rampant misinformation about GMOs is the reason they haven't been used for better purposes. Monsanto and other for-profit Big Ag companies don't care what people think, they only care what they can make money off of, so widespread fear and mistrust of GMOs doesn't deter them from using the technology. But the non-profit, public health, and public interest groups DO care what people think, so widespread fear of GMOS does deter them from using it. Misinformation about GMOs is the reason golden rice didn't catch on, and it is probably deterring a whole bunch of other worthwhile projects from even being attempted.
Thats a very good point you make. The golden rice is a great example - I didn’t know its recent history.
Still, its because as you say, Monsanto and those Big Ag players don’t care much about consumer perceptions. They totally lost the narrative on this whole technology, which was always controversial. They seemed to think they could wait out the consumer resistance rather than win over consumer acceptance.
Its a real shame the golden rice isn’t getting picked up more broadly. If they had started with that, rather than decades of nothing but roundup ready, I’d imagine it would be different.
"They also often talk as if genes can migrate out of organisms and across species - they can't, they only pass from parent to offspring."
Actually, this is not true; there are many known examples of so-called "horizontal gene transfer". The easiest examples to understand occur through retrovirus infection: a virus with two hosts accidentally copies part of host A's genome into child virions, that then infect host B, and insert their genome (including the accidental portion of A's genome) into B's DNA. But there are other, less-organized methods, because even free-floating DNA has a (_very_) small-but-nonzero chance of getting taken up by the nucleus. If you place cells under stress (say, by applying an antibacterial that disrupts cell membranes), the chance of absorbing the new DNA goes up. Wikipedia's article on the topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer#References) has a large number of good primary-source citations.
What is true is that horizontal gene transfer is vanishingly unlikely for any particular pair of species within any particular human lifetime; we only see so many examples because biologists study a large cross-section of all life, and the tools of modern molecular biology let us trace back their history for millions of years.
The frustrating thing about that (I experienced it in full force, living in Seattle at the time) was that it trivialized the very real needs of people with Celiac.
That, my friend, is a "health fad". There is an entire industry dedicated to making up new ones, telling us to eat this or not eat that, try this new diet trick, to get clicks, sell books, get booked to sow hype on lowbrow talk shows, make money, and then move on to a new one the moment people start realizing that it doesn't work. This particular serial scam has been ongoing for longer than any of us have been alive.
I think the left also has a large amount of misunderstanding and lazily bad opinions about free market economics. I have progressive friends and relatives who think that capitalism and big business are the root of all evil in the modern world. They share these opinions on smart phones. They drive modern cars. Their 401k’s are invested in stock indices.
I can't remember the title but there is a book by Ilya Somin (a libertarian law professor) that discusses Rational Ignorance on the part of voters--that it is rational for them to behave in the manner you describe in your article. You might find it illuminating, but not something that would likely be on your radar.
The Wilson episode is an example of misinformation. The centrist examples are simply times that people made reasonable assumptions based on the information available. Being wrong by ignoring facts is different than being wrong in the absence of information.
I would love for society to stop treating the misinformation problem as a "people are stupid problem". Misinformation spreads because of how the human brain works. Smart people fall for misinformation all the time. People believe misinformation when it comes fro people who they trust or are like them. Like the essay mentioned, people often aren't all that familiar with topics and they may just assume that what they hear from their friends about those topics is true. That happens to everyone.
And then there's confirmation bias -- and if people of a certain ideological bent are less susceptible to it than those on the other side it's not evident to me.
I largely agree with your thoughtful comment. No Pollyanna, I recognize that most politics, successful anyway, is contentious. I awoke to an uglier streak with the Clarence Thomas hearings.
Solution? This Pollyanna(?) proposes that moderates, left and right, get off their butts in the primaries and take the choice of candidates away from the impassioned, divisive extremes. Improbable for certain.
Also improbable but arguably preferrable to what we've got now: revert to the smoke-filled-room method of candidate selection.
For some progressives, climate change serves a pre-existing agenda which, despite egalitarian pretensions, is quite aristocratic in nature.
There is a romanticized view of preindustrial times when the common people were content to live simple lives as farmers and craftsmen. The reality of course is that life back then was pretty miserable for most people. "Inequality" meant real deprivation and suffering, not just the difference between a Cadillac and a Chevy.
"Perhaps the most prominent version of this is the idea that the world faces a hard tipping point to climate apocalypse sometime around 2030."
Already in the earliest stages of climate change we are seeing large areas becoming virtually uninhabitable from heat, multiple crop failures from flooding heat and drought. They will get worse under any scenario. This will trigger migration of millions (billions?) of climate refugees, stressing our already weakened political system. The world economy is quite fragile even without climate stress. A few years ago an oil pipeline on the US East Coast closed from a ransomware attack. It was re-opened five days later, just as severe fuel shortages were starting to choke the region. A ship ran around in the Suez Canal for six days. World trade was disrupted. Just think if it had sunk and taken weeks to refloat.
I appreciate your level-headedness but we can't use it to close our eyes to an upcoming disaster.
"And even more importantly, there are no magic tipping points."
I think it would be more accurate to say that there _probably_ are no significant tipping points, at least not within the ranges anyone's talking about for the next hundred years. But at least in theory there _could_ be a point at which we hit some kind of runaway feedback loop (e.g. massive methane and CO2 escapes from the tundra, total die-off of the remaining old-growth boreal forests and rainforests, etc) which shifts the climate so drastically that it disrupts food production, resource scarcity wars ensue, and technological civilization falls apart.
We're running a real-time experiment, in which we shift the composition of the atmosphere and see what happens. If you acidify the ocean enough to cause a massive die-off in phytoplankton, in the short term that means the rate at which CO2 gets cycled back into O2 slows down. And that means concentration of CO2, and acidity, get further boosted. The planktons have pretty fast reproductive cycles, so maybe they adapt and spring back. Or maybe we end up on a trajectory where, in the absence of geo-engineering intervention (which may be difficult if we've collapsed into tribes fighting over access to food and clean water), in 10-20 thousand years there's so little O2 in the environment that animal life as we currently understand it stops being viable.
Truly catastrophic outcomes are _very unlikely_. Maybe on the order of 0.1% or less, given the current trajectory where we're decarbonizing just because renewables have become cheaper than fossil. But it's difficult, given the analytical tools we have, to actually _rule them out entirely_. So there's a kind of "F*** around, and find out," logic at work here, and it doesn't seem completely crazy to feel some urgency around reducing the amount of f***ing around.
The scientific consensus opinion as far as I can tell is that there are indeed several critical tipping points associated with the 1.5 deg c warming figure, most notably Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheet collapse. Together, these are associated with estimated 10ft ln sea level rise.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn7950
Sea level rise would be terrible and disruptive of course, but does not, as far as I know, have a major self-reinforcing aspect where it accelerates further CO2 concentration or warming. (I guess it's at least possible -- ice loss in the polar regions reduces overall albedo. I'm not sure how big a forcing factor that is, though.)
My point is that it doesn’t need to runaway for it to be catastrophic. It just needs to be irreversible, intensely disruptive, enough to cause massive displacements and conflict, extinctions and loss of ecosystems etc.
These tipping points predicted to be crossed at 1.5 deg C will likely cause the kind of conflict and disruption as to qualify for “catastrophic” imo. If sea level rises 10ft in the next 80 years, its going to be intensely ugly.
A question to any U.S. military veterans or active service members reading this on Memorial Day: what can/should American society do to support you better? I'm not just talking about the government; I mean what can/should ordinary civilians like me do?
We do a bunch of trivial stuff like saying "thank you for your service" and letting you board airplanes first, but what would be actually meaningful and helpful?
Bonus question: should we bring back the draft?
A small piece that wasn't covered, that I saw, in the Michael Brown shooting reporting, is that he most likely was psychotic. He had reported seeing God in the clouds, and had a long religiously-focused conversation with some nearby workmen prior to the fatal incident. This indicates a possible manic state, either natural or drug-induced.
You didn’t know about the Brown case facts because it wasn’t covered. There was wall to wall coverage of the Jussie Smollett hate crime”; when it came out that he faked it, and a court found him guilty, I watched MSNBC’s entire evening block to see what they’d do. The answer was they ignored it. I used to watch Maddow every night. No more. It started with Fox, but now the MSM - CNN, NPR, NYT, Fox - are all just peddling propaganda and ideological reinforcement. I ended my NYT and WaPo and Atlantic subscriptions; I stopped donating to local NPR because they kept trying to jam “Latinx” down our throats. They all badly mishandled COVID.
Ideologically driven, immune to facts, the media makes us dumb when they should make us informed. It’s why I subscribe here and a couple other Substacks. Nothing else is credible. The fall of the NYT and WaPo are the saddest of all.
I don't believe so. There have been accounts that there is some risk to teen males. My point is that it is irrational to vaccinate those at low to no risk.
Thank you for this excellent column, Matt Y.
This is something I feel very strongly about. I'm in academia, and I consider myself lefty/liberal, but I agree 100% that the right does not have a monopoly on misinformation and harmful ideology.
A *huge* problem on the left is the uncritical (heh) embrace of the belief that America is fundamentally racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, and every other -ist and -phobic there is, and if you deny it, you yourself are racist, bad, blinded by your white fragility, etc. The misinformation about police shootings of Black men is just a small part of it. Matt Y had a brilliant piece a couple years ago about Tema Okun's work on how punctuality, hard, work, valuing the written word, and so on are signs of white supremacy. There's a quote from "White Fragility" that says (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "Whenever a Black and white person interact, the question to ask is not, Did racism take place? but How did racism manifest itself in this interaction?"
Can you think of anything more defeatist? If you are white, you *cannot* interact with Black people in any way shape or form without racism hanging over you like a deadly curse. You are doomed to spread racism wherever you go! But you must not complain or protest, because then you will just demonstrate how racist you really are. And if you show that you're hurt in any way, you will be guilty of "making it all about yourself" and "demanding emotional labor from Black people" and "making Black people feel unsafe with your white tears."
How are we supposed to have a healthy, thriving, multiracial, diverse society when people think this way?
Second, and I don't blame Matt Y for not touching this fun topic, but the far left/ progressive folks have made an absolute hash of gender issues. There's sex and gender and gender identity that you feel in your soul and gender presentation and gender-nonconforming and what gender others perceive you as and trans and nonbinary and genderqueer and genderfluid and agender and I have no idea how any of these fit together anymore, and if you question any of it you risk stepping on a landmine labeled "vile transphobe who wants queer/trans people to LITERALLY DIE."
I don't know what the solution is, but as they say in AA, the first step to recovery is to admit that you have a problem.
As a fellow academic my impression is that this problem is more about institutional capture and low-key fear rather than genuine conviction. Sure, *some* people believe in the stuff above (if not necessarily in its most absurd formulations), esp. certain demographics (young white native-born americans of privileged background and limited exposure to the the world). However many many do not which includes very much people on the left (even the far left). I also sense the fever is breaking a bit. We still have a long way to go but the discourse is a bit freer now than, say, in 2021, no?
Oh I absolutely agree with you; I don't think most people in academia *genuinely believe* in all the woke stuff. The problem is, you don't know a priori who the true believers are, so you don't want to talk openly of these matters to anyone you don't know very well.
It's not unlike what my mom told me about life on the far side of the Iron Curtain: most people did not believe in the Communist Party line, but you could not risk speaking freely for fear of a true believer finding out. It's disturbing.
I think you’re correct, the fever is breaking a little. I’m also an academic (hi everyone!) in a social science discipline and I’m actually surprised at how little I hear the leftist maximalist type stuff mentioned above. Like, pretty much never. Could be because I’m in the UK and I perceive the climate to be a tiny bit (wee bit?) more chill here - I’m not sure. But I’m able to have normal conversations with colleagues who are e.g. gender-fluid or not white and express boring-but-not-maximalist opinions about gender or race and still be friends with them. Which is cool.
My (outsider's) impression is that intellectual life in the UK is in a somewhat better state than the US. First, it's far less polarized (much more singificant swing vote, both main parties are sane). Second, on gender specifically the gender critical feminist movement is much more prominent which helps keep the range of acceptable opinion more sensible.
All could be. I’m an outsider (American living in the UK), so it’s hard for me to say definitive things about political culture here. Re: less polarized, yes, somewhat. The Tories in particular are themselves a pretty motley coalition (e.g. the “Truss wing,” the “Braverman wing,” etc.), so there’s a lot of internal debate (and backstabbing). As for “saner,” I suppose so - although it’s sort of hard for me to allow that the kabuki around pretending Brexit was “The Greatest Thing EVAR, how dare you say otherwise,” could be called “sane” (an affliction that has spread to Labour, to boot - I can’t vote, but if I could I think it’d have to be Lib Dem as the only vaguely “pro-Europe” party left). At the very least, there’s no Il Duce phenomenon (Johnson worship from certain quarters notwithstanding) here, so that’s something. As for the gender critical feminist movement, could be, though hard to say. I suppose JK Rowling’s public profile gives it prominence and cover it might not otherwise enjoy, although as you know the blowback has also been pretty heavy.
They would do well to spend some time in China to see what real racism looks like.
I'll give one concrete example of the clusterfudge that is the discourse around gender issues. A few years ago, I was reading a comment thread on coming out as trans, and one of the commenters used the word "femme."
As far as I could gather, that commenter used "femme" as a word for people who are *perceived by others as female*, regardless of whether they are cis women, trans men who are still perceived by others as women, trans women who can successfully "pass," or nonbinary folks whose appearance is coded feminine.
Well that one word unleashed a total s**t storm in the comments. People started accusing the commenter of using the word that is literally violent, because "femme" excludes trans women who feel that they are women, but who cannot convincingly "pass" as such. This was triggering and traumatizing and unacceptable. Other commenters tried, reasonably IMHO, to make the argument that it's *useful* to have one word meaning "people who are perceived by others as women, regardless of how they identify," e.g., when discussing sexism. But the "you are an evil transphobic POS if you use the word femme" crowd would not be appeased and the thread degenerated into insults flying back and forth. I withdrew from the thread as from a flaming car wreck, relieved that I had not commented.
Good gravy, where were these comments? Twitter? Or somewhere more niche (yes, activist Twitter is niche, but you know what I mean)?
It was an online advice column. I won't name it, because I like it overall and I don't want to make it look bad.
No worries - I was just wondering if it was something more generalist or more community-specific (sounds like the former).
I don't doubt for a second that this is true -- I've been on the receiving end of that for questioning Covid-era at-home-schooling policies (was accused of wanting to send kids to, and I quote, "death camps"). It was frustrating and annoying and upsetting.
But then I look at what Dem politicians say, and contrast that with what GOP politicians say, and then look at the actual LAWS that the GOP is passing....and I have a hard time being too worked up about some people being dumb and assholes online.
Wow - Godwin’s law and “think of the children!”, the combination of which is like the conversation-stopping royal flush.
"Our capitalist, imperialist, hegemonic, oppressive society destroyed their native countries to the point where they feel forced to come here!"
(There's a grain of truth to that, too: America has a lot to answer for re: propping up horrible dictators in other countries on the "He's an SOB, but he's our SOB" principle.)
Some do, though. The Gulf states can get plenty of South Asian migrant labor, although their abusive labor practices are (by now) fairly well known. People will put up with a lot, if their prospects at home are bad enough.
Really enjoyed this essay. I think Matt should extend it in three ways:
1. There is a spectrum from misinformation-as-in-falsehoods through misinformation-as-in-wrong-synecdoche-for-complex systems. Thinking that Brown was murdered is the former; not understanding that Black folks have more opinions about policing that a desire for less racism in its application is the latter.
2. Because, like everyone else he struggles with the sheer complexity of climate change and the machinery of human prosperity that causes it, Matt sometimes spreads the second kind of misinformation with regard to clean energy. Because he has grasped the true and important fact that nuclear and geothermal MAY abate gigatonnes of emissions from natural gas in the 2030s and beyond, he often downplays the true and important fact that solar, wind, and batteries WILL abate gigatonnes of emissions this decade AND beyond. To his great credit, he champions permitting reform that would accelerate both mechanisms of abatement. "We're doomed if we don't hit zero by 2030" is bullshit, but so is "renewables are a distraction from nuclear." Consider the latest IEA report[1], especially its finding on the incredible persistence of ACCELERATION in renewables[2].
3. Informed citizens, a minority, are enormously more informed than they used to be. I've been reading the NYT for over three decades. Today it is much deeper, broader, and more accurate than it was in 1990—better in every way. But most people don't approach news with a scholarly perspective, and never have. Matt addresses this point, but could perhaps grapple more with the dilemma of us chattering classes separating themselves from the minority by studying up. (I may be forgetting his doing so.)
[1] https://twitter.com/fbirol/status/1661598276544524289
[2] https://twitter.com/NatBullard/status/1661733708557336576
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov
There is a ton of misinformation in the environmental movement, and most of it comes directly from the naturalistic fallacy. (That's the belief that anything "natural" is good and anything "unnatural" is bad.)
GMOs are a great example. Once I was looking online for information about a certain processed food ingredient and I came across a website that claimed GMOs were "unstable" as if modified DNA was akin to a radioactive isotope - a piece of total nonsense, clearly invented by someone who knows nothing about the underlying science but thinks it makes sense because the gene editing process is unnatural and therefore it must be bad, right? They also often talk as if genes can migrate out of organisms and across species - they can't, they only pass from parent to offspring. Or as if a single gene taken from a virus that infects plants could somehow be dangerous to humans - again, total nonsense, plant viruses don't infect people and one gene is not a virus even if it came from one.
And this sort of thing is not OK. Gene editing can be used for dubious purposes as well as good ones, but doing things like blocking the adoption of rice that has vitamin A in it because it's "unnatural" just perpetuates avoidable suffering in poor countries and does nothing to help the environment. And GMOs aren't the only area where you see this - overstating the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear waste, and scaremongering about chemicals regardless of how strong the evidence against a given chemical really is, are very much part of the problem too. More discipline and intellectual rigor is needed here, both to keep the environmental movement from discrediting itself and to actually craft good policy that actually protects the environment and our health.
GMOs might be used for purposes useful to consumers.
But they are not really in practice at all. The GMOs actually on the market nearly all promote harmful farming practices in the form of herbicide resistance so that single genetic strain crops can be doused in chemicals which are not harmless to humans or the larger environment.
Sure, gmos could be used to create frost and drought resistant crops, improved nutrition and all sorts of other benefits. But these possibilities have not been implemented. So, I have to say, I cannot blame the distrustful consumer attitudes regarding food science and nutrition. The American public has been wholesale misled on these issues for generations, and our interests have been largely ignored for profits.
Don’t blame “the left” for GMO misinformation. Blame the food tech industry for using GMOs for shitty purposes. If GMOs are so great and beneficial to consumers, they should prove it. With GMO crops that actually improve consumers lives.
I would strongly argue that rampant misinformation about GMOs is the reason they haven't been used for better purposes. Monsanto and other for-profit Big Ag companies don't care what people think, they only care what they can make money off of, so widespread fear and mistrust of GMOs doesn't deter them from using the technology. But the non-profit, public health, and public interest groups DO care what people think, so widespread fear of GMOS does deter them from using it. Misinformation about GMOs is the reason golden rice didn't catch on, and it is probably deterring a whole bunch of other worthwhile projects from even being attempted.
Thats a very good point you make. The golden rice is a great example - I didn’t know its recent history.
Still, its because as you say, Monsanto and those Big Ag players don’t care much about consumer perceptions. They totally lost the narrative on this whole technology, which was always controversial. They seemed to think they could wait out the consumer resistance rather than win over consumer acceptance.
Its a real shame the golden rice isn’t getting picked up more broadly. If they had started with that, rather than decades of nothing but roundup ready, I’d imagine it would be different.
"They also often talk as if genes can migrate out of organisms and across species - they can't, they only pass from parent to offspring."
Actually, this is not true; there are many known examples of so-called "horizontal gene transfer". The easiest examples to understand occur through retrovirus infection: a virus with two hosts accidentally copies part of host A's genome into child virions, that then infect host B, and insert their genome (including the accidental portion of A's genome) into B's DNA. But there are other, less-organized methods, because even free-floating DNA has a (_very_) small-but-nonzero chance of getting taken up by the nucleus. If you place cells under stress (say, by applying an antibacterial that disrupts cell membranes), the chance of absorbing the new DNA goes up. Wikipedia's article on the topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer#References) has a large number of good primary-source citations.
What is true is that horizontal gene transfer is vanishingly unlikely for any particular pair of species within any particular human lifetime; we only see so many examples because biologists study a large cross-section of all life, and the tools of modern molecular biology let us trace back their history for millions of years.
The frustrating thing about that (I experienced it in full force, living in Seattle at the time) was that it trivialized the very real needs of people with Celiac.
That, my friend, is a "health fad". There is an entire industry dedicated to making up new ones, telling us to eat this or not eat that, try this new diet trick, to get clicks, sell books, get booked to sow hype on lowbrow talk shows, make money, and then move on to a new one the moment people start realizing that it doesn't work. This particular serial scam has been ongoing for longer than any of us have been alive.