#mays Patreon print! will b making real post about it later

[stinkybrowndogs]

Bird Dog

[jmrphy]

Meta reflections on Jesse Pinkman’s new book, Enlightenment Now, with a special focus on the Joe Rogan chapter

Warning: This was supposed to be a really quick thing about the reception of Steven Pinker's new book, in part just to rev this blog back up as an easier-going place for short, fun stuff. Accidentally it became a 4k-word world-historical meta-narrative about the changing political coordinates of contemporary intellectual life on a razor-thin evidentiary base.

I just read RS Bakker's thoughts on the new Pinker book. I thought they were very stimulating and seemed important/credible—although I didn't grok everything in my one time through on the train. They did, however, motivate me to jot down a few thoughts that have been recurring to me lately. They're not really related to Bakker's post.

I'm not going to comment on the Pinker book, first because I haven't read it; second, because I don't like playing in already overpopulated peanut galleries, it pains my frail ego; third, because, as with many things today, it seems to me the real theoretical points of interest are at a meta level. There's a time and place to use proper names, no doubt, but individuals and their particular products are often red herrings, I think. If I use the name Pinker below it's just for shorthand; this will really be about the larger class of prestigious public intellectuals of which he is only one example (as opposed to, say, the high-brow but unpaid batshit blogger class, the personal-brand-with-a-patreon class, the Youtube philosophy for dummies educator class, the Alex Jones balls-to-the-wall flight from Earth class, etc.). It turns out there are wayyy more ways to be a famous and influential intellectual than anyone could have known when they were in grad school in the 70s or 80s, or even the 90s really.

In fact, I won't even use Pinker's name, to emphasize that I'm really not out here trying to ankle-bite this great and good scientist who is much smarter and more accomplished than myself. Wherever I might want to refer to Pinker as an example, I will instead refer to Pinkman. That way you'll think of Jesse from Breaking Bad, in the form of a prestigious social scientist instead of a meth kingpin.

Highly successful and publicly influential academic intellectuals are playing a very particular kind of game. The logic of this game made sense even ten years ago, but I'm not sure it does anymore. The logic is something like this "Get really smart, make real scientific contributions, earn legitimate credentials and status, then leverage this elevated status to shape the body politic toward the Good (and also be handsomely remunerated, admired, etc. — but hey, fair enough.) I've never met Pinkman or many other famous scientists but my sense is they have given much of their life to some version of this noble vocation. This is an archetypal Liberal identity-mold, a tried and true, recognizable Calling, in a world where such things are increasingly hard to find.

Well, the past decade has thrown up some data points that really make you wonder whether the basic terms of this model still obtain. A few things lately have given me the bad feeling that someone like Pinkman may have invested most of their life in a certain kind of bargain with Liberal Society that, sadly, Liberal Society has now reneged on. I say this is a bad feeling because, if true, it's very unfortunate and I genuinely feel for them.

So what's this bargain I speak of, in a little more detail? First, for background, remember that for much of our history highly talented and creative individuals are typically punished by their groups. Reverse dominance hierarchies, etc., you can't let super talented people get too ahead of the others because then they'll dominate, or group morale suffers, or the group disintegrates, or whatever. Bad things will happen. So they'd cut you down to size at every opportunity. But liberal society was willing to offer super smart and able people a bargain: If you're really smart and able, then you can go off and cultivate your smarts but only on condition that you respect Liberal Society. It's a pretty genius solution actually: let the ablest flourish above everyone else but make them pay a cut of their gains to the cohesion of the whole. Win-win. The society got all the benefits of crazy geniuses solving problems, without them dominating or collective cohesion suffering. The geniuses not only got to enjoy their objective superiority on full blast, they also got to feel like it was all about doing good for others. And maybe it is.

It is the right to generously bestow social improvement that is one of the great joys of being a prestigious intellectual--could you imagine how exhilarating it must feel to have earned, through a life of study, the exalted role of institutionally sanctioned Society Improver at grand scale, how genuinely good it must feel to know that all of your sacrifice and hard work now empowers you to improve the knowledge and character of millions, and the political health of a whole society? Understood a little more rational-choicely, this is one of the key income streams that liberal society pays to its most prestigious geniuses, in return for their lifelong loyalty to all of the official tenets of harmonious Liberal Society. I think the data is pretty obvious in showing that no matter how genius you might be, if you go off the rails of "reasonable discourse" beyond a certain degree you quickly lose all of your standing and influence (on this model, anyway.

(Note that the newer classes of public intellectuals have figured out that if you decline the liberal institutional bargain, then going maximally off the rails can be its own direct path to extraordinary intellectual influence and economic reward. But more on that later, let's stay on track understanding the fine print of the liberal intellectual's bargain with liberal society).

Here's where things get a little shadowy because the harmony of Liberal Society is quite sensitive. It's kind of like a precious baby, and we love babies and would do anything to protect them, but this is how hypocrisy enters in automatically, because Liberal Society requires everyone to presume everyone else is an adult, and to treat everyone as such. For instance, when two groups violently disagree over certain deep moral questions, well, liberal society doesn't allow them to deal with it violently (a good thing perhaps, as Pinkman has amply documented). But what does it do instead?

The simplest way to summarize all of the things that Liberal Society does to reduce violence: It papers over the conflicts, which is maybe a brilliant solution, or maybe an insane, explosive solution that simply hasn't exploded yet — the jury is still out on that one. If Group A thinks abortion is murdering babies, and Group B thinks prohibition of abortion is enslaving women, the only way to deal with such profound and high-stakes ethical disagreement, other than civil war, is to derive some symbolic artifice(s) that will let both groups live peacefully with the other. Hmm, thinks Caesar, do we have anyone around here good at generating clever symbolic artifices? In swoops the knighted genius. The genius is delighted to take a break from self-cultivation in order to contribute to Harmony, and Caesar, as well as the common people, are happy to have someone on hand to explain why I don't have to worry if my neighbor is Evil. Win, win, win.

Thus baked into the vocation of the modern liberal intellectual is, from the get-go, a highly dissimulated condescension and hypocrisy. The liberal intellectual gets their status precisely from a superior ability (earned or inherited, doesn't matter) but they are contractually obligated to treat the normal masses as equals, when they know damn well that in fact, the normal masses are dumber, more dangerous, and in need of Harmonizing by institutions (paper). Also, remember that the genius wants to help, it's extremely rewarding to sincerely help society, but the noble sacrifice the genius admirably contributes to the social good is precisely the papering over, of whatever the normal masses need papered over for their well-being. This is how a basic minimum of dissimulation, condescension, and hypocrisy is structurally embedded in the vocation or calling of the modern liberal intellectual. We might note in passing it's also an avatar of Plato's Philosopher-King, a conceptual-political thought-rut that many progressive intellectual personae tend to inhabit in one way or another (and yes, here, Pinkman is a Progressive, despite some infamy among SJWs).

OK, so the modern liberal intellectual might be forced to pay lip service to a few small Noble Lies, but it's soooo much better than all that homicide and war in the earlier chapters of Pinkman's violence book, that it seems like a no-brainer. "There are political realities, it's not my fault, all I can do is speak the truth in a way that helps society the most. If that means I have to use my words judiciously, is that really so bad?" an elite cognitive scientist might reasonably ask. The only problem is that this entire model presumes that the speech of the prestige intellectual will remain highly weighted relative to the speech of anyone else who might take it upon themselves to explain things publicly.

What if external circumstances change in such a way that the masses start to intuit that the knighted geniuses have quietly been playing a political game all along? What if, empirically, things just so happen to play out in such a way that a critical mass of pretty average people (on the right and the left, and in their own languages and for their own reasons), quietly update their mental and behavioral models of the world in the realization that: "Eureka! I have a strong suspicion that some really serious issues have been papered over for some time now... and I'm not going to be a dupe any longer. I see what's going on, and I can play this game, too..." Well, one thing to note is that if this updating were to occur, even on a massive and rapid scale, there's no reason to believe we would know it anytime soon after it occurred. The next thing to see is that, suddenly, the entire bargain that the prestige intellectual based his whole life's labors on would suddenly be off the table.

So long as your pronouncements are weighted well by institutionalized attention monopolies, your lifelong service to science mixed slightly with Harmony-producing fluff was a reasonable and even maybe noble project. If your prestige loses its weight, then tempering your extreme intelligence with little white lies would be all for nought, because you're about to be left in the dust by new startups who specialize in unreasonably extreme truth-telling ("red pills" and many other colored pills now available) and also unreasonably extreme hypocrisy (self-help bullshit, SJWism, etc.). You'll still have your niche, but your effect on people and society will rapidly fall towards zero (along with the overwhelming majority of other people, including most smart people).

It seems to me that as a sociological phenomenon, Pinkman's recent book dramatizes a lot of what I'm modeling here. I think the world has changed a lot very recently and with many things we're like the roadrunner who's already off the cliff, but we haven't yet looked down to see the vast empty space beneath our galloping gait. In a strange way, I think dumber people have been doing more correct updating as of late, and some of the smartest people have been stubbornly failing to update lately. Dumber people have updated to not listen to a word of what the mainstream intellectual culture says, but smart people have not yet been able to update in response to this updating by dumber people (in part because smart people don't have any way of hearing about how dumber people are updating, and they're not exactly accustomed to caring about it). The inertia of media representations enforces a substantial lag between increasingly rapid techno-economic changes in the distribution of powers and our meager human mental models of where that power is.

All of this has been quite abstract, and I mentioned above that I have some data points, so I'll just end with those. I might have tricked you, accidentally, because to be honest, I've extrapolated this whole bonkers historical meta-narrative from a few very measly anecdotal observations. Well first, I kind of had in mind things like Trump and Brexit, i.e. signals of widespread mistrust of dominant institutions and respectable liberal wisdom. So those are pretty big and real data points for the kind of perspective I'm articulating here. I also have a few more specific ones, although they are very tendentious.

The first one is so silly, you're really going to laugh at me for writing this long post in part because of this ridiculously tiny and personal anecdote. You can write your own blog, I for one sense significant causal evidence in this little story. Basically, I listened to the Joe Rogan podcast with Pinkman about his new book and... Pinkman was fine, he's a brilliant and likable guy... but... something was wrong. Very wrong. Don't tell anyone because it's kind of orthogonal to my personal brand and I have to stay on point, but I've listened to many, many Joe Rogan podcasts. And I'm a professional social scientist mind you, so if anything the Pinkman podcast should be more interesting and effective on me, relative to the average episode. But it was just so... "boring" is not even the word. Flat? Anachronistic? Bloodless? Zombieish? None of these quite convey it, but together they give some sense. The point is that, as a minor young academic but a relative connoisseur of the new media, for me something really significant in the machinery of intellectual experience was failing to fire, so much so that it was quite strange. I was surprised and confused. But now I think I understand it; it's everything I've said above.

The world that Pinkman seems to think he is in, is not the world we're actually living in now. The book will be successful economically of course, but it has no affective-identity constituency, other than people who are already socio-culturally neutralized or priced-in by the current equilibrium. It's hard to see how anything will move or shake from this type of project anymore. Most intellectual figures preach to a choir, of course, so Pinkman is no better or worse for that — but some choirs move and shake and generate novel ripples on world history, while others just sit there doing nothing other than precisely what was yesterday's world history. Some books and podcasts and youtube videos make people want to leave their friends and family to join a jihad, some give you strong confidence that a reality-TV star would make a great president, some give you the extraordinary realization that all of society is controlled by a white supremacist patriarchy; all of these lead to novel, unpredictable schisms and re-aggregations, new social formations and subcultures, which in their affective vitality bubble up, viralize or mutualize or enter into arms races, and end up producing system-level outcomes such as electoral victories, migrations, communicating-contagion shooting sprees, various contagious mental pathologies, as well as genuine self- and community-improvement dynamics, unequally distributed. There's nothing better or worse about the Enlightenment Is Cool niche; it's just that it's identity-affective character seems predicated on precisely what we've recently realized is already gone, as demonstrated by the whopping piece of incontrovertible evidence that was my personal lukewarm reception of Joe Rogan's podcast with Steven Pinkman.

You can say I should not generalize from my personal affective experiences, but my personal position seems like it'd be most conducive to liking and being affected by the Pinkman podcast! I'm not talking about the content of his book whatsoever, I'm talking about the reality he takes himself to be playing in. I don't think it's here anymore. First of all, the halo effect of prestige markers is weaker than ever I think. Once upon a time his prestige would have increased the excitement of listening to him. Today, much less. Second, all of the intellectual action today is coming from unique combinations of intellectual horsepower with identity alignments. Jordan Peterson is blowing up in part because he's a smart, credentialed intellectual with a message but specifically because he gives an image of admirable life for a certain type of person. It's not that JP lovers are now changing the world in a way Pinkman lovers will not, it's that JP's identity-affective alignment is not already priced in by the status quo from which Pinker's authority derives (JP tapped emotional needs not already being supplied, through new media, not prestige; hence the socio-political splash). Hell, Joe Rogan himself, who no Serious Intellectual would even call an intellectual, is making similar waves in the intellectual ecology because his basic intelligence and character combine with a certain affectively attractive performance of life that he offers to certain types of people. I could go on.

The problem for traditional public intellectuals on the Liberal Vocation model is that the image of life they herald is radically unavailable to most people so the aspirational inroad to affective alignment is close to nil; it's actually genuinely contemptible to many people (and this is getting worse as the very real racket-nature of much academia is becoming increasingly transparent; ironically the hard-science backlash against postmodernism might have unintended consequences in this regard); and the information they're able to share with the unwashed masses tends to be freely available anyway. Or worse, listeners/readers can usually find someone rehearsing the same information who also offers an identity-performance more affectively aligned with their own temperament and social position. So vanilla prestige intellectuals don't have a monopoly on the information, they no longer even have an advantage on trustworthiness given widespread mistrust toward most institutions, and they uniquely, sorely lack one of the biggest drivers of intellectual impact in the new ecology: affective-identity alignment with moving and shaking niche audiences. (Although note that, with the global internet, "niche" can very well mean several millions of people). To make matters even worse, their cultivated knack for walking the line of polite respectable "good taste" is actually a negative on the balance sheet of their social influence.

Here's another data point. I was struck by the nearly instant appearance of so many reviews and commentaries, almost all of which were ideologically colored. I don't mean that in a bad way necessarily, I just mean so many of the usual suspects were saying things to the effect you would expect them to say. And when most of those items would appear on my radar, my eyes would just glaze over. But think about the commentary that most struck me, and by "struck" I mean this combination of intellectual horsepower plus temperamentally conditional excitement. I'm talking about the post by RS Bakker that inspired this post (by the way I really wanted to just hammer out a quick 500-word thing, but this always happens, which is why I can't let myself sit down to "write a quick 500-word thing" very often). As I said, I read it quickly on the train, and at this point I don't even really remember what it said. All I know is that it had intelligent comments about Adorno and Nietzsche and their critiques of Enlightenment modernity. It was scientifically competent as far as I could tell, and then it had some kind of batshit scientific extensions I didn't really understand but which seemed promising maybe. It was only after I read the post that I wanted to see who this guy was, and from what I could grok apparently he writes fiction but also co-authored with someone in Nature? (!).

So just reflect on this for a moment. Prestige scientist I admire writes book about philosophical/political topics I am highly interested in, he does a podcast that has no effect on me, a million reviews from prestige outlets come out and I can't feel any reason to care about any of them, and it just so happens that the one item in the intellectual ecology that affected me (e.g. motivated novel production on my part), was maybe the one fiction writer in the world who has a publication in Nature writing something on his personal blog (and I didn't even know anything about him until after I read the piece). That's so strange... or rather, it would be strange if we were living even in the 1970s or even the 1990s, but it's not at all strange today. Of course there exists in the world some scientifically sophisticated blogger able to talk deeply about Adorno and Nietzsche, of course he has a blog, and of course it would find its way onto my radar. Of course it would strike me, and of course as a young academic myself right now I am more motivated to write long blog posts than do my institutional duties. Of course, this is the new reality. The real puzzle is how and why the respectable prestige dancehall of liberalism v1.0 is still populated with a good number of really smart people, when all of the music is clearly pumping out of a variegated, thousand-room warehouse of the less compromising... liberalism flatlining at degree zero.