At a kind of vibe level, I understand the picture you paint, and I can think of
enough instances that fit it, to agree that there is a problem to correct.
But how far can you go to defend the premise that the retirement of some
academics was a HUGE problem in this country — or more specifically, do you
think that is causal for the choice of what has become the political right to
go in for fascism, with its considerable elements of cynicism, anomie, and
nihilism? Had there been “ideas” on offer from some university faculty, do you
think these people would have wanted them? Or just wanted to burn that down
too along with all the rest of it?
As with many things I can kind of recognize at a vibe level, if I look at it
more closely, I don’t know what I should understand the categories even to
refer to. By which I mean, what should I attach to the word “conservatism”, as
any range of things from a movement name, to a social group-label, to a domain
or thesis of “ideas”. For instance, is it:
1. A backfilling of what is meant to look like argument, but anchored for real
in the motive of holding onto power, wealth, and agency by those who have it,
and further concentrating it, specifically to increase the asymmetry over those
who don't? Certainly that goes on, and those who want to fight the C label as
a label would say this is its essence. Is that its essence, or is that the
essence of a corruption when the real C word has been lost? If it is part of
the genuine thing, how far does it go toward efforts to cultivate the belief
that people are constitutively different enough that there is no defensible
right of agency and freedom for everybody on an equal footing, and there should
be rulers and ruled?
2. A thesis that “move fast and break things” was not an admirable values
system, and that seeking change merely for change’s sake is too harmful
relative to what it achieves to be allowed to go on un-regulated or
un-restricted? That would fit with the name C. Wendell Berry died a couple of
days ago, somebody I knew a little and had some time with in person, and have
also read some of though not nearly a lot. This was one of his theses. Close
to the notion of upholding the Ordnung among the Amish, or a defense of Luddism
as honorable precaution.
3. A notion that a category like “family” is robust only through cultural collective and cooperative effects, and that a type system needs to be built up, and most types excluded from participation in it, because otherwise it is so fragile that the admission of more than one form endangers it? So, for instance: we have no real way to distinguish abusive from supportive marriages, so as long as there is one man and one woman, so-identified by self and others (maybe a subset of who the others are allowed to be), we have to admit it all. But other kinds of unions need to be kept outside the perimeter as viewed by the protections of law and the rights of civil society? The argument being (?) that there are certain obligations the institution needs to enable people to keep (raising and support of kids being the obvious one, but you can imagine others, and I know of marriage customs that symbolically encode several different ones), and we know so little about how to do that,
that some one form accepted at whatever level of consideration constitutes social convention is the only conceivable solution, so anything else needs to be presumptively excluded.
4. That people have to experience religious devotions, of whatever kind? The
word “faith” has become very popular by people trying not to alienate any of
those who go through life with a chip on their shoulders, the new PC (really
the same old PC). If people just used it, it wouldn’t be such a sore thumb to
me, but the pandering feels really blatant. Does that self-identified group,
and any Greeks using it as a Trojan Horse for whatever else motivates them —
since it is not clear how any “sincerely” motivated people police their own and
keep the fakers out — get veto power? Are the mystics excluded, as the
doctrinal religious people have often wanted them to be? Or are they religious
enough that they are okay too?
5. That anybody who doesn’t live an entire life in the place he was born is
automatically suspect? The view being that he hasn’t tied himself into any one
local lifeboat, ergo there can’t be any way he can be counted on to defend it
existentially? This is also close to one of Wendell’s views, though in person
it was important enough for him to like people, that he didn’t go into his
personal relations plastering doctrines of Original Sin on anybody to whom they
could be applied. But as a core of ethnic tribalism, this impulse to reinforce
mutual obligation seems to me to be one of the oldest and most universal
cultural things people do, and if it is ever temporarily absent in some pocket,
some of the people there will recreate it from whole cloth.
6. Is it a negotiation of how much of the completed past needs to be kept
current as a debt, and how much needs to be let go? Meaning: when, by making
extra effort to identify and support people who are on the wrong end of a
structural exclusion or exploitation, are we actively working to dismantle the
structure, and when have enough generations gone by and enough circumstances
created new people, that there isn’t anything productive to be done by trying
to trace an indefinitely long past of who-displaced-whom? I am emphasizing
here, as possible C, the premise that there is a negotiation on that point to
be carried out, as opposed to a dogma that to ever let go of anything is a sin.
And if that is the C premise, is there a distinction that is also C between
having that negotiation in good faith and having it in bad faith? Of how one
tries to police against plain irresponsible self-interest hijacking the form
with no moral or ethical anchor?
I can imagine any of the above, or none of them, as being what “conservatism”
is supposed to stand for. And I can imagine many combinations of people
proudly advocating any of them at the same time as others would sharply
distinguish what is okay and what is corrupt or degenerated.
There’s another mid-length rant about how I watch the memes change, on
timescales of about 1–4 years, and while each of them has some truth, I feel
like they are substitutes for seeing a kind of paralysis and inability or
unwillingness to actually do things that need to be done, across the whole of
society, that feels to me like a better candidate for cause of the fascist and
nihilist turn. But this note is too long already, and I should do work.
Eric
On Sep 3, 2026, at 2:04, Eric Charles <[email protected]> wrote:
I know I'm coming to it late, but I did not find that article very convincing.
The main problems are:
1. Nothing about the omnipresent DEI initiatives of the past few decades assures
viewpoint diversity, and, if you are only getting people deeply devoted to DEI you are
for sure actually quashing viewpoint diversity. And, by deeply-devoted I mean that
academic job applications require DEI statements, teaching statements are required to
highlight how your teaching relates to DEI efforts, applicants are judged based on
"diversity" goals at the college and within departments, some members of hiring
committees explicitly see it as their goal to right past wrongs against certain groups
with their selections, etc.
2. In certain contexts there is very, very good justification to prefer a narrow range
of viewpoint diversity over maximal diversity. For example, having a math department with
different perspectives on what math "is" creates a positive environment for
students to learn in. For example, it might be nice to have a math realist, someone with
an aesthetic approach, a hard core logician-mathematician, etc., and you certainly want
people who study different fields within math. However, you might not want someone who
thinks mathematics is a tool of colonialist oppression which should be rejected from the
curriculum. In fact, it might be problematic to have proponents of that argument in
decision-making roles /anywhere /within an /educational /institution.
3. I have seen (when I was full-time in academia), and continue to see (via colleagues
in academia) actual discrimination against academics with conservative views, and a ton
of self-silencing based on anticipated discrimination. To use the DEI phrase, most
faculty settings are not a "safe space" for them.
4. Most of what the author asserts to be secretly implied or covertly assumed
or bad faith about the efforts seems very upfront and straightforward.
5. Frankly, the failure to replace conservative academics as they retire has created
HUGE problems in this country. The conservative movement used to have decent group of
hard-core academics and public intellectuals as a key part of it. The current trainwreck
of ideas that pass for "conservative" these days could be, and could have been,
greatly helped if academia broadly returned a good chunk of the prior support it used to
give to people doing serious intellectual work from a conservative perspective.
6. While this obviously applies to humanities and social sciences, it applies in all fields. It is good for a chemistry department to have some people who believe in hard core merit and some who believe in actively supporting those who might have had less opportunity growing up. It is good for a chemistry department to have some people who see "less opportunity" in terms of structural oppression rampant within a society and others who see it in terms of individual hardship. etc.
<mailto:[email protected]>
All that said, for sure the Trump administration is acting in bad faith in many
ways, about all things... but that's a different issue.
On Tue, Sep 1, 2026 at 8:57 PM Santafe <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Agree Siraganian is wrong.
I believe the etymology of the expression “red herring” was not intended to
be a compliment to the dogs that run off following it.
In some lecture or interview or someplace, I remember Snyder making a
connection that seems good for the current situation: Authoritarian
gaslighting really works by adopting the main premises of postmodernism (as it
has become in its now-degenerated form; I understand the defense of some of the
original work). A thing Snyder didn’t say, which just calls out a further
point of context, but that I think is also within the center of his point: in
eras where postmodernism hadn’t spread as widely as it has here and now, the
need was the same, but the authoritarian gaslighters had to build some of the
infrastructure they wanted to use. For today, it is just there at the Ikea
where you can go pick it up and assemble it the same day. Or, so widely
distributed in Amazon warehouses that they can deliver it the same day,
anywhere.
Another nice little frame I saw, from some commenter on some article, was:
For my friends, the Unitary Executive Theory.
For my enemies, the Major Questions Doctrine.
And then:I have heard (reasonable) people criticize Paul Krugman for having
lots of public opinions in areas where he doesn’t have a lot of earned
expertise. Okay; fair enough for that. But I think it is to his credit that
he started calling out bad faith as the central issue, quite a long time ago
(when I also thought that needed to stay the focus). Not leaving it to irony,
as Siraganian sort-of does, but being plain that it is too frontal an attack to
be winked at in irony.
(And of course Glen’s point is also exactly right, but already said: it is
just because the notion of what one wants from truth isn’t so easy that it can
be handled lazily, and if we did less of that, maybe we would be better
positioned to repel some of this other nonsense, or at least have a smaller
vandal-group to repel over it. That could itself be an interesting article,
but it would have a completely different aim (solving a new problem) than
Siraganian’s evident aim in this piece, which was to contribute to a struggle.)
I noticed, somewhere else, too, that Anne Applebaum has now started to use
the term “predators” explicitly to refer to the various oligarchs and the
relatively small and connected band of people trying to end the society and
turn it into a CAFO. It has been about time for that term to be one of the
standards for a while too. Not just in the generic term “predatory
capitalism”, which is also correct in some ways but has been both long-enough
used, and rhetorically over-used enough, to have become semantically bleached.
Applebaum’s use is more specific and meant to draw a role distinction in a
place and a time. The predator group are the thing that will still be here
when trump is gone, and that is what the world both knows and needs to come up
with some plan to deal with, if there is a path to be found through this that
isn’t pretty miserable.
Eric
> On Sep 1, 2026, at 20:56, glen <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>
>
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.aaup.org%2facademe%2fissues%2ffall-2025%2fseven-theses-against-viewpoint-diversity&c=E,1,b55AythETSm80UCsORPJraafH3z3tJu6asT6ZVhNKOP2vQ18isZEEIf7z4C3GPp5lj3OGTA_Qt38a-J92wtnOELDQdBiOHPtQqd5U3udVQ,,&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.aaup.org%2facademe%2fissues%2ffall-2025%2fseven-theses-against-viewpoint-diversity&c=E,1,b55AythETSm80UCsORPJraafH3z3tJu6asT6ZVhNKOP2vQ18isZEEIf7z4C3GPp5lj3OGTA_Qt38a-J92wtnOELDQdBiOHPtQqd5U3udVQ,,&typo=1>
>
> OK. I admit I've been a bit guilty in my emphasis on diversity. But I am aware of Goodhart's
Law. And given thesis 2, here, I think I'm going to stop calling myself a "methodological
pluralist" and use "instrumental pluralist" instead.
>
> But 1) what Siraganian says here is simply wrong:
>
> "To promote viewpoint diversity is to be thrilled to have my views in the mix,
even if you think they are wrong, because either (a) they contribute to more viewpoint
diversity (the more views you have, the more viewpoint diversity there is), or (b) they
provide more views to choose from to figure out which view is the most true. In the first
position, you end up not caring about whether a particular view is true or good, because you
care about viewpoint diversity intrinsically: What matters is having the greatest possible
variety of views. In the second position, you instrumentally value a diversity of views;
having viewpoint diversity only matters until you can figure out which view is the best or
most true, at which point all the other views can be rejected."
>
> If the "best" or "most true" is relatively smooth from the 1st best to the 2nd best, 3rd best,
etc., then NO, you do not reject "all the others". Such smooth grading has to remain contingent, defeasible. And
my guess is the gradation isn't smooth everywhere. It may be smooth for the first 2 or 3 distinguishable ideas, but #4 might
be batsh¡t. (cf. SynthID<https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09263 <https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09263>>)
>
> 2) Diversity remains a useful measure of the crosstrophic nature of
complex systems, circularity, industrial symbiosis, etc. So even in light of
Goodhart's Law, diversity is a reasonable *outcome*, even if it's dangerous to
optimize to that sole outcome.
>
> There are issues with all the theses she lays out. But persnickety nits aside, her
gist seems right. And you can't overlook the blatant hypocrisy of objecting to DEI
initiatives, but then arguing for "intellectual pluralism", pointed out in thesis
7.
>
> This post is too long already. But I know many, here, have succumbed to Haidt glazing. So I
offer this as further demonstration of Bad Faith rhetoric:
https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fassignedmedia.org%2fbreaking-news%2fjonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs%2f%2c&c=E,1,ngAIsHPbOX56tMD3TLOiPP3zB_rDDRBGj6yCaK5XLPuFc14XPOHo1PAnUmR0cgLwf_aU1VOVbz2Qm4aIIhJq35Fz9wAOItW1lSLlFynYJZWGIWmgx6evchreXotW&typo=1
<https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fassignedmedia.org%2fbreaking-news%2fjonathan-haidt-social-contagion-rogd-pbs%2f%2c&c=E,1,ngAIsHPbOX56tMD3TLOiPP3zB_rDDRBGj6yCaK5XLPuFc14XPOHo1PAnUmR0cgLwf_aU1VOVbz2Qm4aIIhJq35Fz9wAOItW1lSLlFynYJZWGIWmgx6evchreXotW&typo=1>
only peripherally about instrumental pluralism.
>
> --
