The "Intellectual Dark Web" and the Simplest of Ethics

Those interested in the public’s engagement with ideas might be paying attention to the praise given to the “intellectual dark web,” a loosely associated group of online writers, podcasters, and lecturers who see themselves as rejecting mainstream assumptions about what is true. Most of us, they maintain, are overtaken by a number of taboos that keep us from seeing clearly what is the case.

In the piece by The New York Times that gave the group their name, “intellectual dark web member” Bret Weinstein explains their "renegade" posturing. He tells us that “so many of our institutions have been overtaken by schools of thought, which are inherently a dead end,” that the “intellectual dark web” can be thought of as “the unschooling movement.”

One taboo which Weinstein wants us to unlearn is that increasing attention to non-majoritarian identities is a way to advance social good (such as civil rights and liberty).

He explained his position in a recent video in which he invoked a loose game theoretical framework, and maintained that when "reciprocity-based cooperation breaks down, we default to gene-based cooperation." He asks, "What happens if you back straight white males against the wall together?" The answer he gives? "White nationalism will emerge from that cohort."

He assumes that we realize that he hopes this does not happen, and says that history tells us that such groups can become a "genocidal menace."

There are so many oddities in just these few minutes of claims: To start, to do what he does, and associate white pride (but no other type of pride) with genocide flies in the face of his claim moments earlier that critics of "whiteness" are "bigots." One wonders if he thinks white nationalism has existed prior to today. One wonders why he does not invoke the research (at least to reject it?) done since World War II, on the factors that led to people supporting Nazis. My wish list is too long, but I also wish he had interlocutors from political theory as well, as one wonders how he would reckon with historical work on the rise of liberalism, which emphasizes the historical role "identify politics" has helpfully played in our current system of rights.

But as an ethicist, I wonder about this most of all: Where is the role for personal ethics? What account of human behavior is Weinstein using, if there is no focus on the idea that white nationalism is vicious, unjustified, and wrong?

One possibility could be that Weinstein sees the arguments against white nationalism as redundant and agreed-upon, but this is to forget that he is holding up an active white supremacist as an example (quoted below). Further, most white people will never, in their lifetime, despite any challenges you can imagine, see some new form of white nationalism as an option. Isn't the cause of this worth accounting for?

Source: J Baker/twitter

Weinstein talks of pushes and dignity lost. But what counts as a push? Not agreeing? With what? And what account of dignity is dependent on minorities in society giving way, somehow, to some expectation? Name the expectation. All of this seems to me to be kept in the dark—crucial, basic definitions deliberately omitted, which is not just anti-philosophical but anti-intellectual.

I was shocked by the absence of consideration for ethics in the same way as I was when Jordan Peterson began saying violent men need wives in order to slake their violence. This is to give up on the classic understanding of good behavior as being a matter of reachable self-control, something under our own responsibility.

One might possibly think that Weinstein is operating at an abstract, generally descriptive level of explanation so that he need not face the phenomenon of personal ethics. But not even economists, explaining just market behavior, use this excuse anymore. They have found that ethics plays a role in cooperative outcomes. We have the evidence. But to Weinstein and Peterson, the differences between those who choose plainly wrong courses of action and those who do not are of no interest? They are not worth even advertising when discussing the choice?

Imagine how this "ethics-free" thought would generalize. We would not explain the wrong of beating a woman but point out that it happens more often on rainy days to the perpetrator? We would address a person accused of a violent robbery by talking of reversion to "gene-based cooperation?"

I am, as ever, perplexed by the appeal of the "intellectual dark web." To me, it seems that they have engaged in "unschooling" to the extent that even the idea of personal ethics, as traditionally taught and diligently studied by so many fields today, is out the window. All of the consensus the rest of us shared about neo-Nazism being wrong is, I suppose, for the "intellectual dark web," taboo.

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