Public-Sphere Networks & Þe SubStack Bosses' Latest Pratfall-Flirtation
Þis Time wiþ Nazi-Adjacent Richard Hanania; a few reflections on how to turn a bitterly divided humanity into a successful and functional anthology intelligence...
Nazi-adjacent genocidaire Richard Hanania, who used to call—under the cloak of anonymity—for depriving women of the vote, driving all Hispanics south of the Rio Grande, and sterilizing low-IQ Blacks:
Richard Hanania: My Journey Out of Extremism: ‘It's important to discuss the nature of the recent journalistic attack [on me] and what it is trying to accomplish…. My initial instinct was to either ignore the story or simply denounce the source and its methods. The journalist behind the piece is a supporter of antifa... is now leading a mob on Twitter....
Fifteen years... If that's not a long enough time to be beyond the statute of limitations for holding repugnant views… there's really no hope for us ever moving beyond cancel culture.... [This] entire journalistic endeavor revolves around the goal of "unpersoning."…
How I came to the positions that I once held, and why I now find many of them so repugnant.... The desire to just adopt a posture that was the polar opposite of those I considered political enemies... speak “harsh truths” without much careful thinking.... It's really that stupid.... Around 2008, I had few friends or romantic successes and no real career prospects. Naturally, this led me to look around, and come to the only logical conclusion, which was that I was naturally superior to everyone else and women in particular shouldn't have any rights…. Such ideas don't appeal to me anymore.....
What ideas did Hanania put forward a decade ago that he now regards as “repugnant”? He does not say. But let me list a few candidates:
“There doesn’t seem to be a way to deal with low IQ breeding that doesn’t include coercion.… In the same way we lock up criminals and the mentally ill in the interests of society at large, one could argue that we could on the exact same principle sterilize those who are bound to harm future generations through giving birth…”
Latinos “do not have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first world nation…”
“The ultimate goal should be to get all the post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America to leave…”
“The biggest enemies of the Black Man are not Klansmen or multinational corporations, but the liberals who have prevented an honest appraisal of his abilities and filled his head with myths about equality and national autarky…”
Sarah Palin, “the attractive, religious and fertile White woman, drove the ugly, secular and barren White self-hating and Jewish elite absolutely mad…”
Rather than talk about how he thinks differently, Hanania claims that:
The reason I'm the target of a cancellation effort is because left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races.… Leftist suppression on these issues has clearly backfired, and we have to work towards… neither deny[ing the] reality [of racial differences] like much of the political establishment… [nor] adopting a mirror image of woke ideology and its doctrine of collective guilt....
What are the chances that he means any of this? That if he had access now to the anonymous identities he loved so much a decade ago, he would not be still saying that low-IQ Blacks needed to be sterilized, Hispanics all driven across the Rio Grande, and women deprived of the vote?
Well, let’s take his claim to to reject the “mirror image of woke ideology and its doctrine of collective guilt”?
Consider this from May:
Richard Hanania: ‘I don't have much hope that we'll solve crime in any meaningful way. It would require a revolution in our culture or form of government. We need more policing, incarceration, and surveillance of black people. Blacks won't appreciate it, whites don't have the stomach for it…
Collective guilt, much?
Thus I don’t have any reason to believe that he finds any of his old views about dangerous, criminal, and rightly subordinated races, ethnicities, and sexes “repugnant”.
I do think that he finds openly expressing them as he believes them impolitic—in large part, because of the “cancel culture” that is his main bugbear.
And yet, and yet, David Frum says:
David Frum: ‘A way back is vital, not only for the sake of the repentant extremist, but for the security of normal society. We want to reduce, not multiply, the ranks of the radically disaffected. We want to recall them to democratic constitutionality, not cast them as enemies forever…
Ooh boy!
And yet, and yet. SubStack co-head Chris Best says:
Chris Best: ‘An honest post on a difficult subject, and the kind of genuine self-critique and that is necessary to move past bad ideas…
So let’s think some more about Substack, and its latest pratfall in showing itself as something that puts its finger on the scales to boost right-wing grifters, rather than serving as a neutral public square.
Why do they keep doing this?
There is money in it: a lot of people, primarily old, are willing to spend money so that people can scare them about the present and the future. What is SubStack’s revenue flow these days. Figure that SubStack has, maybe, 30 publications pulling down more than $1 million a year, and thus giving SubStack more than $100,000 a year as its cut. Figure $4.2 million a year from this top tranche. Those skew to the right-wing grifter nature, given the correlation of wealth with age and the increased likelihood that the old, the rich, and those with cognitive decline will succumb to right-wing grifting. And Substack is searching for a niche in which it can make money, because if it does not find such a niche, it will disappear.
But real intellectual talent on the right is scarce. Reality has a liberal bias. Education imparts a left-wing bias. Empathy imparts a cosmopolitan bias. And people who are reality based, well-educated, and empathetic have an enormous leg up in becoming interesting writers worth reading.
Hence people who can claim to be good writers who belong to the not-too-indecent right are valuable and scarce, and even more valuable because of their scarcity.
But how can the SubStack bosses—who really do believe in their public-square nurturing intellectual mission, who really did start this to save us all from the clickbait-outrage-machine social-media hellscape—justify what they are doing to themselves?
Here is my guess. It is only a guess. But it is my theory:
People… Think differently.
And people do not just think differently along one dimension: people think differently across a number of dimensions.
If people think _too_ differently, communication, and the processes of teaching and learning that communication is good for, simply do not happen: there will not be enough common ground for people to find even the good ideas of others persuasive and convincing, and so humanity is no longer a cooperative anthology intelligence.
In addition, people lie to others who they do not regard as peers. For communication to be honest, people have to see each other as close enough that they regard each other as partners and companions in shipwreck, rather than as tools or cattle to be used or manipulated or driven to think thoughts, and hence take actions, that are good for you, even though not good for them.
So how, then, do we humans fulfill our potential as an effective anthology intelligence—productively think through issues—given that people think differently, that gulfs of standpoint are wide, and that cooperative, benevolent intentions are far from guaranteed?
Perhaps the answer is: a web of communication.
Suppose that you arrange people in a line, where each person can communicate with their immediate neighbor. Consider five people: X, Y, Z, W, and Q.
X and Y can communicate, if they are next to each other.
Y and Z can communicate, if they are next to each other.
Z and W can communicate, if they are next to each other.
W and Q can communicate, if they are next to each other.
But if you place any other two people next to each other, when the dyad tries to communicate, the reaction will soon be disgust: breakdown.
Suppose X has a good idea, idea A, knowledge of which would be of benefit to all. Then, if people are properly arranged—the anthology intelligence that is the collective human intellect can function: Y learns idea A from X, Z learns idea A from Y, W learns from Z, and Q learns from W. Since communication is much cheaper than actual good-idea generation, this group of five arranged in a web so that they can communicate—[X, Y, Z, W, Q]—is five times as intelligent as [X, Z, Q, Y, W]. Get the right people talking to each other and: Voilà! Functional public sphere! Humanity self-organizing into a powerful anthology intelligence!
Multiple dimensions would help. If there is an R who thanks like Q with respect to issues related to idea A, but who is very close to thinking like X with respect to some other set of issues, it is possible that their trust in X along this other dimension will lead them to overcome their repugnance when they first hear idea A expressed in X's formulation, and they would actually listen. And once they have actually listened and constructed their own version of idea A, they can then immediately communicated to Q without having to go through Y, Z, and W.
Is this a useful model of the intellectual discourse of humanity as a potential anthology intelligence? Is this a useful model of how we can overcome differences in standpoint (and also work around the potential absence of benevolence) with respect to our dealings of people who are not almost exactly like us?
Perhaps.
Whether it is or not, I think it is behind one of the bets that Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and the rest of the SubStack team are making:
Construct a dense web of intellectual argument, discussion, debate, influence, and persuasion.
In this web each live link is between people who are similar enough that understanding is easy and benevolence natural.
Rely on the fact that there is sufficient difference across the nodes then each of us can be, in our turn, Y, Z, or W in the chain of intermediate links that ultimately leads to X's good idea A arriving at Q in a form in which Q can appreciate it.
And, lo and behold, you have a functioning public sphere, in which discourse proceeds and humanity gains its superpower as an anthology intelligence.
Jeet Heer communicates with Brad DeLong who communicates with Matt Yglesias who communicates with Ross Douthat, and everyone is tugged toward ideas that are true and useful by logic and evidence, and rapidly—because it is much easier to learn than to break ground—everyone becomes much smarter.
There are, however, potential problems with this:
A first problem is that of gaps in the web—intellectual places we are nobody is listening in both directions and translating ideas from their left into forms in which they have resonance on their right and vice versa. What to do then? Well, from Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie and company's perspective, what you do is obvious: find someone who can fill in the gap, boost them, and pay them to join the chain and be the relay.
Enter Richard Hanania. And now we see the second problem:
“Liberal” discourse communities can do well even with broad differences in standpoint, provided everyone is there to listen and learn as well as teach. But they are vulnerable to cuckoos. A cuckoo is not there to learn: is unteachable and unreachable. A cuckoo generates bad ideas at ferocious rates. Think of a Richard Hanania, who does not seem badly described by the term “neonazi”. Think of a Clarence Thomas, they are fettered by their desire for material comfort and their knowledge that the flow of bribe money to them will dry up should they actually listen to their colleagues on the bench.
Report, block, impeach: that is how you have to deal with cuckoos. You must do this, or the anthology-intelligence system will collapse.
But now there is a third problem": how do you do this without overdoing it, and falling into the trap of groupthink?
My bottom line?
My view is that both algorithmic timelines and individualized recommendations and boosts by SubStack as an entity are mistakes: bad mistakes. The apparent long-run incentives for SubStack-as-an-organization-hoping-to-make-a-profit are opposed to those for SubStack-as-public-square. It can either have a future as a public square, or not. And if it chooses not, it will probably disappear, as a failed shadow of The FaceBook.
Neutral public square, or else.
"David Frum: ‘A way back is vital, not only for the sake of the repentant extremist, but for the security of normal society. We want to reduce, not multiply, the ranks of the radically disaffected. We want to recall them to democratic constitutionality, not cast them as enemies forever…"
They are not enemies. They're not even opponents. They're people with bad ideas. And these aren't new bad ideas that people should think about/deliberate. These are ideas that have been tried from time to time with awful results. The outcomes were bad because the ideas were poorly thought through and have been shown to be poorly thought through every time they were proposed. Their premise is all wrong, even if the logic or analysis might be impeccable. Frum should know this. He is instead blaming the people who want to shun those ideas from their sphere ("we want to ... not cast them as enemies"). He's calling them intolerant. Is that the best he's got? Chris Best should know that people here today will leave Substack -- I will leave -- the day it starts looking even remotely like a Nazi bar.
Matt Yglesias notes that 'the current evidence that I have been excessively kind to Richard Hanania is a tweet in which I describe him as a “crazy person.”' But in the same tweet he also described Hanania as 'a smart guy with interesting things to say.'
The problem I have with this is that the actually existing Hanania that I have observed has mostly said dumb and boring things that weren't 'crazy' but merely malicious. This is not a case of uncovering the sordid past of someone we thought was a secular saint - as Yglesias has noted himself. So I will say what I said on the Musk-app: if you want to steelman Hanania, be specific. What is an example of a smart and interesting thing that Hanania has said? How representative is that of his writing and thought? Because I'm not going to waste my time doing that work for you.