Heterodox is only meaningful when it's compared to the orthodox. The heterodox thinkers are not a group that will coalesce around the same sets of ideas; they are not "center right" (though certainly some are). They are defined against the orthodoxy of their group, which is ultimately liberal, stretching from classical liberal to anti-progressive leftist.
What brought them (us) together was resistance to and rebellion against the stifling progressive identitarian orthodoxy. Some groups may form from the heterodox where there are overlapping values beyond simply "we think an orthodoxy that bans dissent is very bad both for our political success and for our success as a country." But "the heterodoxy" will not become some cohesive group, because we're not one.
Agreed. The heterodoxy seemed to spring up from the ground in many different shoots, while the orthodoxy felt like a giant press push pushing down from above.
I don't think it was a miscue for Harris to skip Rogan. Her performance would have been so catastrophically bad that the election results would probably have been even worse for her than they were.
I was disappointed with the extent to which so many heterodoxers did turn MAGA-lite. It just seemed like it had the ultimate frisson of the forbidden. Like in order to prove your open mind it opens so wide it snaps back and eats all your core beliefs?! My red line for approaching heterodox intellectuals is can they offer substantive critiques of Trump and MAGA along with their anti-woke takes? If not I think they’ve just drunk a different flavor of KoolAid.
I see a center-left heterodoxy and a more right-wing heterodoxy. Sam Harris, Blocked & Reported, Quillette, Persuasion, and (before heterodoxy was a thing) Bill Maher are in the former camp. That's pretty much where I'm at. I thought Free Press and Bari Weiss were there as well, more or less. So I was surprised to see her thing get more Trumpy, more Trump-tolerant, more even actively pro-Trump than I could possibly stomach.
I'm with you (and a fellow BaRpodian)---in fact, BaRpod brought me to Persuasion after I listened to their interview with Yascha and I've enjoyed it ever since.
That being said, I'm only vaguely familiar with the center-right heterodoxy that Sam describes here. I wonder how much of Sam's analysis could be applied to the center-left heterodoxy... Is there a similar sense of cohesion among the center-left or would it be fair to say that it's more dispersed?
Heterodoxy by definition is not a coherent ideology. It is a challenge to the status quo. And the status quo as exemplified by the American left is so stifling and, I would argue, so potentially dangerous that challenges to it come from all over the cultural and political map. Rogan, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shermer would not be in the same political category at any other moment in history - except now. Historically, though, there are some parallels to the situation a hundred years ago when the progressives in the West defended Soviet communism, which was opposed by a motley collection of groups, from fascists to liberals to libertarians and even Social Democrats. The lesson of that time is that attention should be paid to who opposes who and why. The excessive focus on Trump obscures the real ideological realignment we are witnessing. We know what the "woke" or identarian left is (though more analysis of this ideology is needed). But what is its viable alternative? If not MAGA, then what?
Naw. You get it wrong. It isn't heterodox. You see, heterodox is this thing that starts and then grows popular and then become orthodox. That is the Democrat way... the activists... the Shirky Principle... luxury beliefs and virtue signaling. If you explain MAGA or Trump or the vote against the Democrats as heterodox, then it is just another cycle of this. And Democrats would then be wise to wait in the weeds and restart their own heterodox attempts again at what has become more popular. But that is not the case.
This anti-Democrat movement is simply one of opposition to everything wrong. For Democrats to correct for that means they need to shed all the wrong-think and adopt ideas that are real solutions to the big problems. Now, doing so will create real heterodoxy as THAT is expected even when the orthodoxy is perfect.
The Democrats attempted to drag the Overton Window way over to the left next to hell. Maybe other than seeing the Trump MAGA movement as heterodoxy, it is a movement to prevent the Democrats from actually succeeding in dragging us all the way to hell.
Another term that had its day, chronologically after Intellectual Dark Web and overlapping with heterodox, is contrarian. (MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dismissed Bari Weiss as “a performatively contrarian former New York Times op-ed writer” in March 2023.) I prefer that word, because it connotes vigilance against misguided trends as distinct from a non-standard set of beliefs.
The present essay makes a good companion to Cathy Young’s “When Anti-Woke Becomes Pro-Trump” (November 2, 2024). I hope the heterodox do eventually “find themselves the nucleus of a new center-right [or not-so-right] movement in American politics,” but that will probably entail a separation of wheat from chaff as some heterodox figures become merely neo-MAGA ones.
I thought ‘heterodoxy’ was a good idea until I went to a Heterodox Academy conference. The iconic moment which, besides the proceedings at the meeting, gave me a better idea of what was up was dinner with a couple of the male participants. One guy made some innocuous comment and then asked me, in all seriousness, whether it made me ‘feel unsafe’. A little later the two embarked on a lengthy discussion about how ‘women have no interests’, citing their wives as otherwise intelligent women who ‘just had no interests’. And so it went.
It became quite clear to me that one of the core commitments of heterodoxy was anti-feminism. In fairness, orthodox feminists are not entirely blameless for this response since over the years feminism at its most audible has morphed from a movement aimed at combatting discrimination in employment and other programs intended to promote fair treatment for women to LGBTQ+++ advocacy and all-purpose intersectionalism on behalf of everyone in any way disadvantaged for any reason.
The heterodox campaign against DEI, with all its nonsensical ‘trainings’ and diversity statements is a wedge aimed at driving academics away from the Left. The de facto goal of the heterodox movement is to dismantle programs aimed at giving women and minorities a fair shake, where discrimination is ongoing. ‘Heterodoxy’ is insidious and dangerous. The heterodox campaign for free speech and campaigns against alleged censorship has lured academics who would never fall for MAGA into the Right’s orbit.
To the extent that heterodoxy is anti-feminist, it's because feminism is one of the orthodoxies that tends to suppress dissent. Feminism has been one of the forces used by the orthodoxy to attack dissenters. The fact that a vocal group of feminists are against the transgender ideology doesn't mean they are not part of the orthodoxy otherwise. Were the orthodoxy to have maintained some semblance of sanity on transgender issues, most of those feminists would be squarely in the orthodoxy and content to suppress dissent from feminist orthodoxy.
What I mean by 'feminism' and what most feminists used to mean by 'feminism' was advocacy for policies aimed at ending discrimination against women in employment, access to credit, funding, and the allocation of other material goods. This doesn't have anything to do with transgender issues. I write on this issue--wait for my article 'Sex Reassignment and Gender Misfits' forthcoming in _The Journal of Controversial Ideas_. See also my pop piece 'Ending Gender' in _The Philosophers' Magazine_ here: https://archive.philosophersmag.com/ending-gender/
Thanks for sharing the article. It was an interesting read, and I appreciate the careful, stepwise thinking it displays. However, you lose me here:
"The transgender narrative has wide appeal because it confirms traditional assumptions about gender difference. It provides proponents of la difference who are convinced that no man or woman would deviate significantly from their idea of what men and women are like with a rationale for dismissing counterexamples. They can happily affirm that individuals who are male or female according to biological sex but do not conform to their expectations are not real men or women."
In my experience, the vast majority of those who are interested in insisting that men and women are inherently different and in some sense *should* occupy different roles (i.e., gender traditionalists) are highly critical of the transgender narrative. I think the transgender narrative *is* driven in part by retrograde ideas of gender, but those who embrace it are typically on the opposite end of the spectrum from conservative thought. Its wide appeal is not a function of its "traditional assumptions."
Like it or not, the Democratic party has gone crazy and is very likely to stay that way. Let me offer a few data points.
1. The reaction to Seth Moulton's (D-MA) very tame remarks was unhinged. Only one elected Democrat (Tom Suozzi - D-NY) came to his defense.
2. The Nation Academy of Sciences rejected a paper on merit in science because the idea of merit is "downright hurtful". For another article on the same subject, see "The Democrats’ Merit Problem" by Ruy Teixeira.
Heterodox is only meaningful when it's compared to the orthodox. The heterodox thinkers are not a group that will coalesce around the same sets of ideas; they are not "center right" (though certainly some are). They are defined against the orthodoxy of their group, which is ultimately liberal, stretching from classical liberal to anti-progressive leftist.
What brought them (us) together was resistance to and rebellion against the stifling progressive identitarian orthodoxy. Some groups may form from the heterodox where there are overlapping values beyond simply "we think an orthodoxy that bans dissent is very bad both for our political success and for our success as a country." But "the heterodoxy" will not become some cohesive group, because we're not one.
Agreed. The heterodoxy seemed to spring up from the ground in many different shoots, while the orthodoxy felt like a giant press push pushing down from above.
Exactly.
I don't think it was a miscue for Harris to skip Rogan. Her performance would have been so catastrophically bad that the election results would probably have been even worse for her than they were.
I was disappointed with the extent to which so many heterodoxers did turn MAGA-lite. It just seemed like it had the ultimate frisson of the forbidden. Like in order to prove your open mind it opens so wide it snaps back and eats all your core beliefs?! My red line for approaching heterodox intellectuals is can they offer substantive critiques of Trump and MAGA along with their anti-woke takes? If not I think they’ve just drunk a different flavor of KoolAid.
I see a center-left heterodoxy and a more right-wing heterodoxy. Sam Harris, Blocked & Reported, Quillette, Persuasion, and (before heterodoxy was a thing) Bill Maher are in the former camp. That's pretty much where I'm at. I thought Free Press and Bari Weiss were there as well, more or less. So I was surprised to see her thing get more Trumpy, more Trump-tolerant, more even actively pro-Trump than I could possibly stomach.
I'm with you (and a fellow BaRpodian)---in fact, BaRpod brought me to Persuasion after I listened to their interview with Yascha and I've enjoyed it ever since.
That being said, I'm only vaguely familiar with the center-right heterodoxy that Sam describes here. I wonder how much of Sam's analysis could be applied to the center-left heterodoxy... Is there a similar sense of cohesion among the center-left or would it be fair to say that it's more dispersed?
One of the best posts I’ve read. The analysis is on the money throughout.
Heterodoxy by definition is not a coherent ideology. It is a challenge to the status quo. And the status quo as exemplified by the American left is so stifling and, I would argue, so potentially dangerous that challenges to it come from all over the cultural and political map. Rogan, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shermer would not be in the same political category at any other moment in history - except now. Historically, though, there are some parallels to the situation a hundred years ago when the progressives in the West defended Soviet communism, which was opposed by a motley collection of groups, from fascists to liberals to libertarians and even Social Democrats. The lesson of that time is that attention should be paid to who opposes who and why. The excessive focus on Trump obscures the real ideological realignment we are witnessing. We know what the "woke" or identarian left is (though more analysis of this ideology is needed). But what is its viable alternative? If not MAGA, then what?
Naw. You get it wrong. It isn't heterodox. You see, heterodox is this thing that starts and then grows popular and then become orthodox. That is the Democrat way... the activists... the Shirky Principle... luxury beliefs and virtue signaling. If you explain MAGA or Trump or the vote against the Democrats as heterodox, then it is just another cycle of this. And Democrats would then be wise to wait in the weeds and restart their own heterodox attempts again at what has become more popular. But that is not the case.
This anti-Democrat movement is simply one of opposition to everything wrong. For Democrats to correct for that means they need to shed all the wrong-think and adopt ideas that are real solutions to the big problems. Now, doing so will create real heterodoxy as THAT is expected even when the orthodoxy is perfect.
The Democrats attempted to drag the Overton Window way over to the left next to hell. Maybe other than seeing the Trump MAGA movement as heterodoxy, it is a movement to prevent the Democrats from actually succeeding in dragging us all the way to hell.
Another term that had its day, chronologically after Intellectual Dark Web and overlapping with heterodox, is contrarian. (MSNBC’s Chris Hayes dismissed Bari Weiss as “a performatively contrarian former New York Times op-ed writer” in March 2023.) I prefer that word, because it connotes vigilance against misguided trends as distinct from a non-standard set of beliefs.
The present essay makes a good companion to Cathy Young’s “When Anti-Woke Becomes Pro-Trump” (November 2, 2024). I hope the heterodox do eventually “find themselves the nucleus of a new center-right [or not-so-right] movement in American politics,” but that will probably entail a separation of wheat from chaff as some heterodox figures become merely neo-MAGA ones.
https://thefamilyproperty.blogspot.com/2024/06/quite-contrarian.html
I thought ‘heterodoxy’ was a good idea until I went to a Heterodox Academy conference. The iconic moment which, besides the proceedings at the meeting, gave me a better idea of what was up was dinner with a couple of the male participants. One guy made some innocuous comment and then asked me, in all seriousness, whether it made me ‘feel unsafe’. A little later the two embarked on a lengthy discussion about how ‘women have no interests’, citing their wives as otherwise intelligent women who ‘just had no interests’. And so it went.
It became quite clear to me that one of the core commitments of heterodoxy was anti-feminism. In fairness, orthodox feminists are not entirely blameless for this response since over the years feminism at its most audible has morphed from a movement aimed at combatting discrimination in employment and other programs intended to promote fair treatment for women to LGBTQ+++ advocacy and all-purpose intersectionalism on behalf of everyone in any way disadvantaged for any reason.
The heterodox campaign against DEI, with all its nonsensical ‘trainings’ and diversity statements is a wedge aimed at driving academics away from the Left. The de facto goal of the heterodox movement is to dismantle programs aimed at giving women and minorities a fair shake, where discrimination is ongoing. ‘Heterodoxy’ is insidious and dangerous. The heterodox campaign for free speech and campaigns against alleged censorship has lured academics who would never fall for MAGA into the Right’s orbit.
To the extent that heterodoxy is anti-feminist, it's because feminism is one of the orthodoxies that tends to suppress dissent. Feminism has been one of the forces used by the orthodoxy to attack dissenters. The fact that a vocal group of feminists are against the transgender ideology doesn't mean they are not part of the orthodoxy otherwise. Were the orthodoxy to have maintained some semblance of sanity on transgender issues, most of those feminists would be squarely in the orthodoxy and content to suppress dissent from feminist orthodoxy.
What I mean by 'feminism' and what most feminists used to mean by 'feminism' was advocacy for policies aimed at ending discrimination against women in employment, access to credit, funding, and the allocation of other material goods. This doesn't have anything to do with transgender issues. I write on this issue--wait for my article 'Sex Reassignment and Gender Misfits' forthcoming in _The Journal of Controversial Ideas_. See also my pop piece 'Ending Gender' in _The Philosophers' Magazine_ here: https://archive.philosophersmag.com/ending-gender/
Thanks for sharing the article. It was an interesting read, and I appreciate the careful, stepwise thinking it displays. However, you lose me here:
"The transgender narrative has wide appeal because it confirms traditional assumptions about gender difference. It provides proponents of la difference who are convinced that no man or woman would deviate significantly from their idea of what men and women are like with a rationale for dismissing counterexamples. They can happily affirm that individuals who are male or female according to biological sex but do not conform to their expectations are not real men or women."
In my experience, the vast majority of those who are interested in insisting that men and women are inherently different and in some sense *should* occupy different roles (i.e., gender traditionalists) are highly critical of the transgender narrative. I think the transgender narrative *is* driven in part by retrograde ideas of gender, but those who embrace it are typically on the opposite end of the spectrum from conservative thought. Its wide appeal is not a function of its "traditional assumptions."
Like it or not, the Democratic party has gone crazy and is very likely to stay that way. Let me offer a few data points.
1. The reaction to Seth Moulton's (D-MA) very tame remarks was unhinged. Only one elected Democrat (Tom Suozzi - D-NY) came to his defense.
2. The Nation Academy of Sciences rejected a paper on merit in science because the idea of merit is "downright hurtful". For another article on the same subject, see "The Democrats’ Merit Problem" by Ruy Teixeira.