Die Hard with a Weinstein
Why a model of skepticism, reason and compassion should compete for campus hearts and minds — and why it can eventually win
Note: The Evergreen incident referenced in this article can be detailed here and many other places readily searchable online.
I write this article as a reaction to the Evergreen controversy involving biology professor Bret Weinstein. In a somewhat recent public incident that quickly went viral, he was essentially forced off campus by security concerns after a period of confrontation by student protesters. Overall, this writing is seeking to help tackle a wider problem, for which Weinstein’s journey — and subsequent dialogues - provide a noteworthy point of entry into finding a solution. My aim here is not necessarily to analyze this single incident and its particulars, but to give a summary of the larger problem on many campuses — as well as to offer a new direction.
Weinstein has been saying in various interviews that, in essence, people don’t know how to talk to each other anymore. And, that an understanding of evolution and behavior can help us orient ourselves to better strategies for mutual understanding and cooperative discourse. People like Dr. Weinstein (as he articulated in detail to Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan), as well as Dr. Michael Rectenwald (NYU Professor and Exchange Spaces co-founder), Dr. Jordan Peterson, and others within academia, are seeking better paths for human discussion, rooted in a sober understanding of cooperation, realism, and our nature as human beings. This is where I decided to use the title reference, “Die Hard with a Weinstein”.
In the Die Hard films, the situation tends to be resolved with one or a few people taking the initiative and thinking outside the box, even against seemingly overwhelming odds. Perhaps an unconventional approach is what we need on campuses today. Outside-the-box thinking, creativity, and fortitude, combined with a defiant resilience exhibited by those lone few willing to go out on a limb, may be what’s truly needed to escape from our toxic state of campus discourse.
Before I propose the specifics of this proposed way forward (and a possible set of tools that more of us can come together on), I want to make sure I specifically describe the problem that we are fighting. As with any anti-extremism or counter-radicalization campaign, we have to properly orient ourselves to the nature of the problem so that we can find the best points of intervention.
PART ONE
The Problem
Fueling the Echo Chambers: The social consequences of the Evergreen effect.
The ability to have conversations and think critically about issues, as well as a willingness to listen and change our minds, is central to problem solving and social progress.
Whether people are comfortable about it or not, many sensitive topics and issues are not black and white in every aspect. While we can all agree on the basic merits of justice and equality, or the evils of things like racial discrimination, the surrounding details of these topics often allow for nuance. Often at times demanding it. These issues, from problem to solution, are rarely as simple as hardliners make them out to be. Almost by definition, they tend to encompass legitimate dissenting points of view, or a spectrum of legitimate debate and discussion. For example, we should all band together against fascism in any form. However, the best way to properly define it and combat it is more than worthy of debate.
When this occurs, people should not be afraid to voice their honest feelings on a matter. The moment this becomes suppressed by shaming and ostracism, the echo chambers located at or near the extremes start to grow. As Sam Harris constantly tries to explain when dealing with sensitive issues like Islam and immigration in Europe, silence by decent and reasonable people leads to a higher volume of noise for extremists. When we shame and suppress discussion on unavoidably important topics, we are outsourcing the conversation to the far Right. And this dynamic is something that I’ve long noticed in all my years of analyzing psychological warfare across various ‘battlespaces’, be it Iraq or Berkeley.
People should not be shut out from expressing their personal convictions merely because a loud minority of ideological voices deems a topic to be off limits. This is not only philosophically problematic but potentially hazardous. The Evergreen incident had the effect of chilling the expression and dissent of students and professors alike, far beyond the walls of that school. This is a recipe for the extremist echo chambers to thrive.
This is due in part to the chilling effect it creates — that is, the way it can dissuade people from voicing their true opinion, or from raising important questions. Movements and ideas thrive when people can question things, point out errors, and raise constructive criticism. As with evolution, peer reviewed science or mixed martial arts, this acts as a sort of feedback system. It’s a corrective mechanism that allows us to see our blind spots, adjust our biases, and refine the rough edges, while remaining open to self-correction and improvement. When a movement or social trend is insulated from this corrective mechanism, it is far more prone to misdirection or even failure.
The chilling effect arguably leads to this very thing. By slowly closing the window of self-criticism and self-improvement, it greatly weakens the ability to understand the problems we are fighting, and to adapt our ways of fighting it. Rather than encouraging openness to criticism and refinement, this chilling effect acts to deter and dissuade it. It increasingly resists the very openness to honest discussion and dialogue that is so crucial to having informed, civil discussions — and to keeping extremism at bay.
Part of the reason that functional, civil discourse is so essential in combating extremism is that it allows civility and reason to compete with bad ideas: it allows people to ask the hard questions, and encourages more sensible voices to compete with the extremists in providing answers. Open, fearless discussion by good people can provide alternative voices — better voices, and better answers. However, the chilling effect we’re seeing on many campuses — and in more areas of wider society — tends to lead to the opposite effect: it suppresses open discourse and deters public discussion by civil people.
In essence, this helps to funnel these conversations further into the (public as well as dark) corners of the echo chambers, and into the chat rooms and back-door conversations of the extremist movements. The Alt Right, in particular, feeds off of this chilling effect, by dishonestly (and very cleverly) capitalizing on the ‘Naked Emperor in the Room’ effect: they pretend to be the only one’s brave and honest enough to stand up to the PC overreach and authoritarian tenancies of some elements on the far Left.
Why this hurts our ability to combat extremism, well beyond the confines of the campus
This problem affects us well beyond the walls of places like Evergreen, NYU, Toronto or Portland. The dynamic between Antifa and the far Right thrives off of the increasing inability of decent people to see each other outside of a binary opposition. This kind of ‘reciprocal radicalization’ is something that many notable liberals and conservatives find deeply troubling, with prominent figures of the Left like Chomsky and Chris Hedges voicing concerns about the counterproductive effects of the Antifa-Alt Right dynamic. In an article for The Indipendant, Chomsky is quoted as saying,
“Associated with the loose antifa array are fringe groups that have initiated the use of force in ways that are completely unacceptable and are a welcome gift to the far right and the repressive forces of the state, while also providing some justification for the absurd claim that antifa is comparable to the far-right forces.”
(Noam Chomsky: Antifa is a gift to the far right and US state repression)
Echo Chambers and Radical Recruitment: The Cyber Dimension
There is a vicious cyber component to this as well, that occurs with online communities, increasingly bonding together like ‘tribes’ inside an ‘ideological bubble’. Social media has arguably made us more polarized, as well as isolated and closed off from one another. This has nurtured an environment for people and movements to organize and recruit, and identify with one another. We are also — generally speaking — seeing increasing political polarization, not only in the US but parts of Europe as well.
Extremists on both sides seek to fill the vacuum left by the chilling effect of toxic and broken discourse. Hyper-polarization and radical recruitment on the fringes of our political spectrum are acting to undercut sensible discourse, fueling a kind of reciprocal extremism that makes us less safe, less intelligent, and less empathetic to those outside our immediate ideological circle. Universities, professors, public thinkers and even many students are seeking practical answers.
We need a plan of action. In the end, the war against tribal thinking, dogmatism, hive mentality, and empathy gaps will require a new set of tools. Not the conventional approaches of ideologues and bureaucrats, but of innovation, courage and scientific understanding. As well as compassion.
PART 2
Thinking Outside the Box: The Roots of an Unconventional Approach
I hope to offer a perspective here that might help enrich the discussion, and compliment some of the wonderful work being done by these publicly vocal academic dissenters. My background comes not only from academia and the skeptic community, but from the US Army and Defense community’s war against extremism abroad, and how Special Warfare can work on the soft power side to enable local populations to fight parochial pockets of radicalization and insurgency within their own backyard.
What if we were to take this approach, in a non-military and peaceful way, and apply it across our college and university campuses? Imagine, for a moment, if we gave people an alternative. Not only skeptics and Socratic dialogue advocates, but passionate social activists (who are often in both categories), would be shown and given a meaningful alternative to mob intolerance and violent tactics.
The aim of such an approach would be to facilitate dialogue and to increase understanding among students, and between disparate ideological/identity groups. We would seek to provide a visible alternative to the ideological and political extremism and polarization — across the spectrum. Finally, we would aim to train and equip others to tailor and adopt this model to their own campuses. To build these platforms of conversation from the ground up, in a way that fits the local situation and sociocultural context.
As of 2016, myself and others within academia have been working on just that. We are working to make an ‘exchange spaces’ model: a scaled, “living university,” to become a self-organizing movement across the US and Canada.
A Requisite Step Forward: Recognizing the need for learning and growth within our discourse.
Part of the problem — especially within the ‘Left-Center-Right’ divide — is that many of the tools to engage the kind of polarization and extremism we are seeing on our campuses — and across America in general — are rarely discussed, of understood. What is more, these approaches are — ironically — employed far more across the spectrum of military training and operations in a counterinsurgency environment than here at home. The approach that many of our soldiers take while working with populations abroad is often very different — sometimes almost diametrically opposite — that taken by partisans and political enthusiasts here in America.
Yet seldom do we step back and really evaluate the effectiveness and sense behind the way we approach our problems of divisive politics and polarization. Rather than take a reality-based approach and ask the hard questions about how effective we really are in how we deal with the ‘enemy tribe’, we double down in our epistemic bubble, ideological safe-house or social comfort zone, reiterating old mantras about how correct we are and how categorically unworthy of engagement the other side is. However, this has led to us missing the opportunity to see a better way. There is a far better path that we can take. There are lessons we can learn — not only from the warzones and tribal engagements abroad, but from much of the reasons why it works. Bret Weinstein has approached many of our most daunting challenges through the lens of evolutionary science and human behavior.
What I aim to do in the next article — Die Hard with a Weinstein: Part 2 — will attempt to summarize a few of the main principles, as well as specific ideas, steps and approaches, that we can take to respond to the breakdown of civil discourse and the rise of reciprocal radicalization and extremism on our campuses. The need for these alternative ideas and approaches applies in many ways to our neighborhoods, our communities and our cities. This will be explored more in later writings. For the moment, I think it may be helpful to lay out ways that science, skepticism and free speech advocates — as well as social activists who are open to better discourse — can work together for better discourse. How we can create viable alternatives to dogma and extremism, by creating real exchange spaces across our country.
