A new movement to speak truth to identity politics is our best hope against regressive thinking
Just below the surface of the roiling debates about how and why our country got into its current predicament, a radical movement is afoot. Sometimes called "the intellectual dark web," it lives largely on the internet, but it isn't a site or a channel, it's a collection of thinkers (and it's not the dark web of anonymous cybercrooks you've probably heard of). I actually see it not so much as a web but a nest containing rare birds that turn out to be more common than you might think.
Some in this movement are liberal, and some are conservative. They come from a range of backgrounds, professions, generations and identity groups. They differ on details, but they are united by a common set of frustrations and corresponding goals. To put it simply, they wish to foster a new discourse that can allow innovative thinkers to wrestle with the world's problems without having to tiptoe around subjects or questions deemed culturally or politically off-limits. (Quick example: Intellectual dark webbers would love to see the gender wage gap closed. But they know it can happen only if we talk about the career effects of biological sex differences as well as paternalistic conditioning and systemic discrimination. And that would be blasphemy in a lot of academic quarters.)
The nest of free thinkers includes, to name just a few, Claire Lehmann, founder and editor of the online magazine Quillette, the bioethicist and author Alice Dreger, and Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. The latter two are husband-and-wife biology professors who were driven out of Evergreen State College last year amid an utterly nonsensical controversy in which leftist student protesters decided to paint Weinstein, a lifelong political progressive and anti-racism activist, as a white supremacist.
Defectors from academia are generously represented here, but the concerns of the intellectual dark web go far beyond performative wokeness on college campuses or Twitter pile-ons in the name of social justice. The essence of the movement, as I see it, is having the courage to stand up to groupthink, even if it means losing friends or having your positions willfully misconstrued because they don't fit neatly in a particular ideological box. It's not about liberals beating up on liberals but, rather, understanding that the same tribalism and regressive thinking that is damaging the Republican Party, perhaps beyond repair, is also wreaking havoc on Democrats and their allies. It's about smart people asking other smart people to stop acting so stupid.
Read more: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-daum-intellectual-dark-web-20180316-story.html
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