A new book on the IDW takes a dimmer view of these above-the-fray intellectuals who claim to be motivated by hostility to ideological orthodoxy. Indeed, Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right is the most substantial critique of the IDW and its brand of ‘classical liberalism’ to date.

The book’s author is Michael Brooks, an American political YouTuber and a socialist. For Brooks, the IDW use a veneer of ‘reason’ and ‘science’ to justify prevailing inequalities. In a context where Donald Trump is the occupant of the White House and neo-liberal capitalism remains dominant (Jeff Bezos is forecast to become the world’s first trillionaire by 2026), the IDW’s cringeworthy posturing as a “persecuted minority” is glib and largely vacuous, in Brooks’s telling. As Brooks writes, the IDW “brand themselves as unclassifiable renegades even as they all share elements of an unmistakable anti-left agenda”.

The IDW’s lodestar is Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist and self-help guru who likes to talk about hierarchies and gender differences while dissecting Left-wing totalitarianism for the YouTube generation. Peterson has been preaching the same material for years. Yet he only truly gained prominence in 2016 following a campus row over pronouns for transgender students. The campus Left went berserk and Peterson started getting invited onto popular talk shows to rail earnestly against “post-modern Neo-Marxists”.

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Yet as time went on, what the ‘renegades’ of the Intellectual Dark Web were really reneging on was their previous commitment to the Left. As Brooks writes, “[the IDW] generate their audience by publishing a neverending stream of ‘oh my God, look at these leftists being crazy’ articles”.

Aside from Ben Shapiro, a religious conservative who refers to abortion as “killing babies”, the IDW is largely made up of former liberals who have been “mugged by reality”, in Irving Kristol’s famous phrase, even if they nowadays often sound indistinguishable from what Brooks describes as “old school reactionaries”. Dave Rubin was once a member of the progressive Young Turks network who today decries “oppression Olympics”. Sam Harris is a fellow New Atheist ‘Horseman’ and one-time supporter of Hillary Clinton who conducts thought experiments on torture and a nuclear first strike against Iran. Meanwhile Jordan Peterson implores readers of his bestselling book, 12 Rules for Life, to “Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world”.

Underlying much of this, Brooks argues, is an acceptance of prevailing inequalities — economic, gender, and racial — as natural. The IDW’s leading lights uncritically defend capitalism while drawing on biology and the dreary science of ‘IQ’ to bolster the status quo. They aim to “naturalize or mythologize historically contingent power relations”, as Brooks puts it. Behind every one of Peterson’s self-help homilies is an unbending fealty to the status quo. Hierarchies are hard-wired because lobsters follow them. Gender differences are real because women gravitate towards people and men towards things. Envy and resentment at the success of others will rot your soul. Oh, and stand up straight and make your damn bed.

The Left takes a dim view of the self-help movement — related, I suspect, to its own paternalistic preference for people who are on their way down rather than on their way up. Sinecured academics and privately educated scribblers make a handsome living telling poor people that they should “rise with their class, not out of it”. The sort of self-betterment promoted by the likes of Dr Peterson — so the argument goes — would be better channelled into a focus on structural change. Ironically, much like the Petersonian self-help mantras they disparage, large sections of the Left also want the poor to defer gratification — albeit until after the Revolution.

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But self-actualisation has its obvious limitations. As Brooks notes, “sometimes people’s houses aren’t in order precisely because of the condition of the world”. In contrast to many of his comrades on the Left, however, Brooks argues that, rather than dismissing Jordan Peterson’s fanbase — largely white, male and self-taught — as ‘deplorables’, the Left should try to win them over to a more substantive programme. “One of the most dangerous things the Left can do is to write off the demographic to which Peterson appeals because of its relative racial and gender privilege,” Brooks writes.

Brooks’ critique of the IDW is at its best when he pulls apart the latter’s penchant for “naturalising instead of historicising”. Much IDW thought seeks in effect to depolitisise politics. We cannot fundamentally change the world therefore we should only try to describe it. Particularly absurd, as Brooks points out, is the way in which ideology is portrayed among members of the IDW as something other people subscribe to, whereas they are merely disinterested, above-the-fray intellectuals. Thus Peterson launches tirades against the principle of absolute equality, which few people believe in anyway, while earnestly drinking the meritocratic Kool-Aid, which is as much an ideological mirage as anything Peterson opposes. Meritocracy, as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once put it, is an imaginary world in which “every prize can be attained, instantaneously, by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything”.

The belief in actually existing equality of opportunity is particularly credulous when it comes to accounting for racial injustices in the contemporary United States. Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, whose work is frequently cited by members of the IDW, made the astonishing claim during a 2007 debate that “most of the juice” had gone out of environmental explanations for racial inequality “by the 1970s”. This too is an ideological point of view. As Brooks notes with incredulity, this was “a single decade after the ‘Whites Only’ signs came out of the restaurant windows and black people started to be allowed to vote”.

Of course, one needn’t be affiliated with the IDW to understand that the movement’s popularity — Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson can easily pack-out auditoriums — is partly a backlash against the excesses of the Left. It was once said that the Bolsheviks sought to politicise sleep. Their successors on today’s social justice scene deploy the truism that everything is political as a licence to shut down opposing opinions as ‘phobias’ and ‘microaggressions’. Peterson is not entirely wrong when he compares the campus activist who vibrates with rage at some minor rhetorical transgression to the Cheka officer whose gloved-hand raps on the door in the middle of the night. The difference is one has political power while the other does not.

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What's the point of the Intellectual Dark Web?

By Peter Franklin

This remains an important distinction, however, especially in Donald Trump’s America. The cloying self-regard of much IDW debate is bad enough, but it seems especially self-serving to pose as a purveyor of ‘unorthodox thought’ when taking on the comic turbulence of campus politics — all the while saying very little about the moral abominations of the Trump Presidency. Flattering the likes of Charles Murray may constitute subversive opinion in some quarters, but it’s hardly Charter 77.

Despite his opposition to Peterson and company, Brooks is of the Marxist-influenced Left, which has little time for the hair-splitting narcissism of identity politics and what he refers to contemptuously as the “shallow analysis” of the “ultra-woke”. Brooks calls instead for a return to universalism because “good and liberating ideas, like bad and reactionary ones, have thrived in a variety of cultural settings”.

This is a welcome blast against the dominant fetish for what Brooks describes as “drawing artificial lines between cultures”. Campus-driven heresy hunts are a distraction and a turn-off for ordinary people, as Brooks notes. Damning someone for being male or having a white skin may provide some cheap and ephemeral thrill, but it is not a serious approach to winning political power. As Brooks writes, “comradeship and solidarity across racial and national lines… is going to have to be central to any kind of viable movement to achieve a better world”.

Moreover, by the time Peterson and co appeared on the scene, many liberals had apparently forgotten how to argue for the things they believe in — thinking that moral indignation alone was enough. The brass standard here is Cathy Newman’s flailing attempt to interrogate Peterson in a 2018 interview for Channel 4 News. The interview went viral on the back of his running rings around her. Newman’s subsequent attempt to blame the humiliation on “men with an agenda” was as fatuous and complacent as her interview style.

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The gospel according to Jordan Peterson

By Richard Godwin

But the Intellectual Dark Web — Peterson in particular — have thrived off the back of an overblown fear, particularly prevalent in the United States, of a resurgent Socialism. This would probably find a less substantial audience if people like Michael Brooks stopped trying to resuscitate Marxism-Leninism. Brooks contrasts the reactionary Left-baiting of the IDW with his own fruitless search – encapsulated in the pages of the socialist magazine Jacobin — for a “rejuvenated, humane, internationalist, and appealing version of the politics of the Finland station”[1].

In setting out what he believes in (as opposed to the IDW), Brooks evokes St Petersburg’s Finland Station to convey his sympathy for the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Brooks concedes that one should not be an “uncritical apologist for everything that happened in the years after Lenin arrived at the Finland Station” — which is big of him — but he contrasts the reactionary politics of the IDW with his own dream of Communism with a human face. This reader wasn’t persuaded. Indeed, this sort of Socialist wish-thinking was once likened by the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski to trying to cook a “dish of fried snowballs”. Leninism leads to famine, terror and forced labour camps — even if Jordan Peterson and the IDW say so.

Anti-Communism comes in a variety of hues though, some of which are more interesting than others. One irony of the ongoing culture war is the sense — to those of us standing on the sidelines at least — that one extreme sustains its opposite, and vice-versa. Christopher Hitchens briefly appears in Brooks’s book — only to be showered with abuse about his “failing liver”. Once upon a time Hitchens cautioned his friend the novelist Martin Amis to be careful about the type of anti-Communist he turned into. Brooks similarly reprimands the IDW for “obsessing about ‘freedom’ while getting chummy with authoritarians like Viktor Orban”. The IDW might here be reminded of Peterson’s Rule #6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the World.

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Cuba killed my communism

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One should also look at the material reasons why, historically, socialism has gained traction, but this doesn’t seem to interest the IDW. This might after all indicate that something was rotten with the status quo. Indeed, one can imagine Ben Shapiro or Dave Rubin reading Dickens’s classic revolutionary drama, A Tale of Two Cities, and coming away looking for Jacobins under the bed — while entirely missing the line which warns: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms.”

The Whiggish liberalism of the Intellectual Dark Web sometimes feels like an ideology for affluent and comfortable times — in common with the narcissistic culture of identity politics it defines itself against. In this sense the IDW bring to mind an older generation of 19th-century liberals and conservatives who, in the words of Czesław Miłosz — a far more interesting anti-Stalinist than anyone the Intellectual Dark Web has produced — continued to “mouth 19th-century phrases about respect for man” — while all around them the world burned.

But the culture wars haven’t gone away. As we’ve seen with the recent Black Lives Matter protests: Covid-19, stagnant economies and mass unemployment are lighting a fire beneath ongoing ideological battles over history and social justice. One therefore imagines that the IDW will go on having the “important conversations that the mainstream won’t”, as Dave Rubin portentously phrased it. For Brooks, however, those seeking answers to the big questions of our time be better off looking elsewhere.

[1] Jordan Peterson may call Lenin “an ideologue & mass murderer”, yet the hero in Lenin’s favourite novel — Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? — is a man called Rakhmetev who eschews sex and alcohol and eats only raw steak while following a rigorous exercise programme. Which sounds an awful lot like Jordan Peterson.

Look up those words online and you’ll find them ascribed to Cicero (though you’d be a fool to take that as read). Whoever said it was being a tad harsh. Finding fault in others, rather than ourselves, is a peculiarly human quality.

We’re all in denial about our own faults – which is why those of others provide such a welcome distraction. All the more so, if their faults also happen to be our faults. In such a situation we can surface our flaws while also displacing them. How therapeutic!

*

For Left-leaning readers of The Guardian and the New Statesman there’s some therapy to be found in a pair of essays about the ramshackle state of conservatism. I’m not saying that the authors (Andy Beckett for the Graun and Robert Saunders for the Staggers) are fools for finding fault on the Right – there’s a lot to be found there. Nevertheless, their essays are more interesting for what they inadvertently reveal about the state of the Left.

Here’s the nub of Saunders’ argument:

“British Conservatism has broken with three of its most important traditions. It has stopped thinking; it has stopped ‘conserving’; and it has lost its suspicion of ideology. Historically, the Conservative Party has been a party of ideas, but not of ideology.”

Beckett’s argument is not dissimilar, though he tackles American conservatism alongside its British counterpart (conservatism everywhere else is pretty much ignored). Like Saunders, he sees the conservative movement as intellectually moribund. Talking about free market think tanks on both sides of the Atlantic, he observes that they have “grown old together” and that their “answer to every problem has remained essentially unchanged: lower taxes, less regulation, smaller government.”

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Well, yes – it would do, because that’s what they believe in. If you look at corresponding think tanks on the centre-Left, their answer to every problem has also remained essentially unchanged: higher taxes, more regulation, bigger government. Still, it can’t be denied that this is not a golden age of conservative thought. Saunders, a historian, draws a contrast with previous, more intellectually fertile eras – such as the Tory response to Labour’s landslide victory in 1945; and, a generation later, the first stirrings of the Thatcher revolution.

Clearly, there’s nothing so momentous going on today. But then there doesn’t have to be. In the 1940s, conservatism had to be reinvented for the era of the universal welfare state. In the 1970s, with the post-war settlement coming undone, there was another great transition underway – this time to neoliberalism. Today, the failings of neoliberalism are plain for all to see, but a transition to something else is nowhere in sight.

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Is Harry Potter an apologist for neoliberalism?

By Polly MacKenzie

Beckett talks about a “revival of the radical left”, but what does this actually entail? Intellectually, the most interesting ideas on the Left in the UK and US depend on outlandish scenarios: the end of scarcity (Aaron Bastani’s Fully Automated Luxury Communism); a complete decarbonisation of the national economy in the space of just 10 years (the Green New Deal); reversing the roles of monetary and fiscal policy, so that central banks issue governments with all the money they need and taxation is used to control inflation (Modern Monetary Theory). These are fascinating speculations as to what might be possible several decades hence. But as a basis for escaping neoliberalism in the here-and-now, sci-fi socialism is a non-starter.

If the intellectual Right has nodded off, it’s because the intellectual Left is in dreamland.

*

The last time the Left mounted a semi-serious challenge to the status quo was in the 1990s, under the leadership of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. That, however, was about reforming neoliberalism not replacing it, which was why the conservative rethink at the time was so half-hearted. Compared to 1945, it took the Tories twice as long to recover from the defeat of 1997.

But is Saunders right to claim that the Conservative Party has “produced no significant thinker in decades”? It rather depends on one’s definition of ‘significant.’ If one sets the bar at the speeches and pamphlets produced by Tory thinkers like David Willetts and Oliver Letwin in the 1997-2010 period, then I’d challenge anyone to name a Labour Party thinker of recent decades that could be seen as more significant. Only the heterodox Blue Labour school of thought comes anywhere near.

Saunders does give ‘Red Toryism‘ a fleeting mention and there’s a quick hit on David Cameron’s ‘Big Society‘ from Beckett. It’s sadly true that, to quote Beckett, “these visions of renewals have melted away” (as did Theresa May’s attempt in 2017). However, it’s important that we see these failures for what they are – not intellectual, but political. The culture and practice of contemporary politics is dominated by style not substance, presentation not content. The comms guru is king, not the policy wonk – and certainly not the public intellectual. Ideas like the Big Society did not fail as ideas – but because the people with actual power only ever used (and then discarded) them as gimmicks.

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Those who insist that Conservative Party never properly modernised are wrong. The Tories have not only modernised, they’ve post-modernised – and that’s the problem. They’ve adopted a style of politics in which there is no reality, only narrative. In this world, to communicate an idea is functionally equivalent to implementing it – to have it talked about is the same thing as getting it done.

Okay, I’m exaggerating somewhat – there is a level of government where gesture is set into motion, even if it doesn’t happen with much force. However, it is hard to exaggerate the extent to which the centre of power is concerned first and foremost with immediate impressions.

*

The hollowing out of our political culture is not an exclusively Right-wing phenomenon. Indeed, the modern masters of spin were Bill ‘I feel your pain’ Clinton and Tony ‘pretty straight sort of guy’ Blair. The rest of the political spectrum followed where they led. One need look no further for an explanation for the dumbing down of our politics.

However, because it applies left, right and centre, it doesn’t suit a narrative of specifically conservative intellectual decline. Beckett and Saunders therefore look elsewhere for causal factors that they seem to attach to the Right alone.

For instance, Saunders believes that the Conservative Party has lost its “sense of history”:

“As the historian Kit Kowol argues, ‘Conservatives once used the past to imagine the future. Today, they are trapped by the only history many of them now know: the Second World War.’ The result is a cartoonish morality tale that privileges resolve over reflection, in which ‘every leader becomes either a Chamberlain or a Churchill, foreign policy a question of appeasement or intervention, and all difficulties capable of being overcome with a dose of ‘Dunkirk Spirit’.”

But isn’t there a Left-liberal equivalent? For instance, in crediting the EU with maintaining the peace in Europe – as if Germany might invade Alsace-Lorraine again. Or what about the dodgy parallels drawn between 21st-century populism and the 1930s? If you want Tories to stop banging on about Churchill, then perhaps lefties could stop using deadly-serious words like “fascist” and “Nazi” with such careless abandon.

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Winston Churchill is not the only Tory icon, of course – there’s Margaret Thatcher too. Saunders compares the Conservative Party to an “ageing Eighties tribute band, [flubbing] wearily through the same tired playlist, barely noticing that the stadiums are empty, the hairstyles ludicrous and the fans long departed.” Ouch! There’s more than a little truth to that, but it still leaves the Tories 10 years ahead of the Seventies leftism of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party. A sure sign of our inability to move on from the neoliberal era is that the Right has regressed to its heyday and the Left to before it even began.

*

If nostalgia is not an exclusively Right-wing political vice, what about what Beckett calls the “modern conservative media bubble.” There’s Fox News in America, Tory tabloids in the UK – and all manner of online echo chambers. The Right’s capacity to insulate itself from inconvenient truths and challenging viewpoints can’t be good for its intellectual health.

And yet there’s a Left-wing media bubble too – and one that extends a long way into public broadcasting, academia and most of the cultural establishment. With a safe space that big, it’s easier for Left-wingers and liberals to shut themselves off from contrary opinions than it is for conservatives.

But what about Brexit? Theresa May’s is the fourth Conservative premiership to be destroyed by the Europe issue. Isn’t this evidence of a specifically Right-wing dysfunction – one that’s all set to consume the next Tory Prime Minister too.

Has the party taken leave of its senses? A movement that was all about resistance to revolutionary change is now ready to rush headlong into the unknown of a no deal Brexit. How is any of that conservative? Saunders puts it this way:

“A political tradition that once sought chiefly to conserve now resembles an apocalyptic cult, ready to torch Britain’s trade relations, parliamentary institutions and even the Union itself in order to build the New Jerusalem on their ashes.”

But hang on – who are the real revolutionaries here? Committing ourselves to a European project of ever-closer union, a single currency, loss of control over national borders, enforced austerity and the prospect of further integration within a system of laws very different from our own represents a profound discontinuity in our development as a nation. The electorate was asked whether it wished to remain within such an enterprise and more people said no than yes.

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By Peter Franklin

Let’s not pretend the choice was ever between business as usual and disruptive change. The choice was always between two disruptions – either to our national sovereignty or to our trading relationships with our closest neighbours. This isn’t a dilemma that the Conservative Party chose for itself, but one it was presented with. Indeed, it is presented to us all – including the Left. By enforcing the so-called ‘four freedoms’, the European project guarantees the continuity of neoliberalism and punishes entire nations for attempting to choose a different path. Now that there is no more avoiding the issue, the Labour Party also finds itself torn apart by the dilemma.

*

So, yet again, we see that intellectual crisis of the Right is a crisis for politics as a whole. The only way forward is not to focus on how badly the other side is dealing with it, but to look closer to home.

That advice applies to conservatives too, of course. As well as listening to what the likes of Andy Beckett and Robert Saunders might have to say about the crisis of the Right – they also ought to analyse what conservatives say about the crisis of the Left. As I said at the outset, we all project our deepest, unacknowledged insecurities upon others – therefore the faults we see in our enemies are the most honest guide to our own.

In this respect, the most interesting thing about conservative accounts of what ails the other side is the idea that the contemporary Left is alienating, indeed betraying, its traditional sources of support.

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By Peter Franklin

That’s not wrong, but the contemporary Right is doing exactly the same – above all by allowing the dream of a property-owning democracy to die, and standing by while vested interests suck the life out of the productive economy.

As things stand, the traditional parties of Left and Right are locked in a stalemate – while haemorrhaging support to parties of protest.

Neither side will recover until they start seeing their own faults first.

Since then, there have been a few more. The quackish field of ‘integrative medicine’, a serious-sounding rebrand of various forms of pseudoscientific alternative medicine, had its Sokal moment in 2010, when a professor of medical education submitted a paper to a integrative medicine conference about a new form of reflexology involving massaging the buttocks, complete with a little homunculus-map of the human body drawn around the circumference of the bum. (Massaging your buttocks is not a proven cure for anything, apart from tense buttocks.)

And last year the hoax article ‘The conceptual penis as a social construct’, arguing “that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct”, was published in the journal Cogent Social Sciences. (The penis is probably best understood as an anatomical organ.)

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The latest is from two of the same authors of the ‘conceptual penis’, but is far wider in scope. The pair, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian, along with a third, Helen Pluckrose, submitted 20 articles to various journals in fields such as ‘cultural studies’, ‘gender studies’, ‘critical theory’ or ‘identity studies’.

They included a paper on ‘rape culture and queer performativity’ in dogs, a paper suggesting that men should penetrate themselves anally with sex toys in order to become less transphobic, and a rewrite of a chapter of Mein Kampf as a feminist tract, ‘Our Struggle Is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism’. Seven (including those three) were picked up by a journal.

Pluckrose, Boghossian, and Lindsay describe the fields they were hoaxing as ‘grievance studies’, because, they say, their “common goal” is to analyse every aspect of society until you can find some way of attributing it to privilege and make it “problematic”.

It’s caused the predictable furore: people who think gender studies is a load of po-mo bullshit anyway think this shows how the whole field is riddled with nonsense; people who think gender studies is worthwhile think this is dishonestly undermining good scholarship. The latter charge is given a bit of weight by the fact that the hoaxers didn’t just write airy nonsense, as Sokal did, but pretended to have done actual fieldwork, with numbers and everything, which, to me, crosses a line.

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By Tom Chivers

But I have a different complaint. My complaint is that pointing out that ‘gender studies’ journals let a lot of bullshit through is too easy. Of course ‘gender studies’ has a lot of bullshit in it. I’m sure it has a lot of good and important scholarship in it too; it’s not my area of expertise but feminist philosophy is a proud tradition. And pointing out the failings of these odd little academic enclaves feels like displacement activity, distracting ourselves from the problems in our own household by looking at the neighbours’.

I think there’s a parallel with crackpot ideas. Homeopathy doesn’t work. Young-earth creationism isn’t true. 9/11 wasn’t an inside job. Most of ‘us’ in the real-world, study-the-evidence bits of society agree on that.

But if we go around saying “look at those silly people who believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories, we’d never be stupid like them”, we’re imagining that only other people, stupid people, believe things without good evidence. We are, as a wise blogger once said, ‘Other-ing’ irrationality. Then we look at all our own beliefs, none of which is quite as obviously preposterous as those of the “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” crowd, and nod, and congratulate ourselves on how wise we are. Whereas, what we should be doing is training ourselves to be vigilant for the ways in which our beliefs do go wrong, which of course they do, in more subtle and sometimes more insidious ways.

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Who let the thought police invade our universities?

By Julie Bindel

That’s what’s going on, I think, in the grievance studies hoax. Yes, these fields have a lot of bullshit. Yes, probably more than most scientific fields. But, by saying “look at those silly grievance studies journals, scientists would never fill our journals with stupid stuff like that”, we allow ourselves to pretend that there are bits of academia that are Wrong and Stupid, and that this one is somehow qualitatively different from the rest.

Sadly, that is not true.

A few weeks ago, Brian Wansink, a professor of food behaviour at Cornell University, resigned after being found guilty of scientific misconduct, following diligent detective work by other academics and good old-fashioned investigative reporting by BuzzFeed’s Stephanie M Lee. Thirteen of his papers have been retracted over the last few years, having been shown to be filled with statistical misconduct – basically, chopping up data to find interesting-looking correlations where there were none. His work had garnered huge amounts of media coverage and a position overseeing a $22 million “smarter lunchtimes” programme funded by the Obama administration.

Wansink was a high-profile example, but far from the only one. Statistical failings have undermined much-cited research into ‘power posing‘, ‘positive psychology‘, and the links between violent video games and aggression. There is great and understandable scepticism about the impressive claims made for the much-hyped educational concept ‘growth mindset’, and the doomy claims around social media and screen time.

And it’s not as if it’s only ‘gender studies’ that allows things through because they are appropriate to the current cultural climate rather than because they are empirically well-supported. Lots of workplaces still offer ‘implicit bias training’ to help staff avoid subconscious racism and sexism. At one of my old jobs we had a long diversity meeting which heavily relied on the concept; Hillary Clinton mentioned implicit bias while debating Donald Trump.

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So you think you're open-minded...

By Tom Chivers

But the whole concept of implicit bias, based on the ‘implicit associations test’, has been found to be predictively useless: people who score highly for subconscious racism do not behave in more discriminatory ways than people who don’t. (In fact, the best prediction, for whether someone will discriminate against black people or gay people or women, is still to ask them.) The whole of science, especially psychology and medicine, is riddled with these sort of problems, of studies which just don’t stand up to scrutiny. In the last seven or so years it’s become known and described as the ‘replication crisis’.

This doesn’t let grievance studies off the hook. The Sokal-style hoaxes really do remind us that, at best, the gatekeeping of those fields is weak and inadequate. And it’s not without consequence: a lot of the endless, furious back-and-forth about transgender rights has its basis in some piece or other of academic work from within these fields. The thinking that goes on within “grievance studies” cloisters can burst out into the world, just as it can from any part of academia.

For people like me, though, and for people in the sciences in general, it’s easy to point to grievance studies’ woes and say: “Look, that’s what Bad Academia looks like. Isn’t it great we’re not like them?” and then carry on with business as usual. That’s not a great idea.

Something of an obsessive, he had an unhealthy relationship with women, often fixating upon a particular romantic attachment. He tried to join the Roman Catholic church twice, but both times he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. He loved stray dogs. May he rest in Peace.

My own interest in Wallace was sparked by a brilliant graduation address he gave to students at Kenyon College in 2005, entitled “This is Water: Thoughts delivered on a Significant Occasion about Living a Compassionate Life.” Two fish meet an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. “Morning boys!” says the older fish, “How’s the water?” The two younger fish swim on, then one turns to the other and asks “What the hell is water?”

Further reading

Consumer greed is making suckers of us all

By Giles Fraser

Water, for Wallace, is the ubiquitous cultural presumptions in which we are all immersed, so all-surrounding as to be invisible. They are the beliefs that we all take for granted, that shape and sustain us. But the purpose of a good liberal arts education, Wallace maintains, is that throughout the boring everydayness of queueing at the supermarket checkout or whatever dulling routine our jobs lead us into, whatever the water in which we swim, it gives us the intellectual tools to take a step back and choose what to make of our circumstances.

“You get to decide what you worship” is how he puts it. “Because … in the day-to-day trenches of adult life there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” And a good reason for worshipping some sort of god is that “pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive”.

What follows is like a preacher on fire:

“If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you… Worship power, you will end up weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, you will always end up feeling stupid, a fraud.”

I was rocked by this address. “The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.”

David Foster Wallace was himself a student during the high point of critical theory and post-modern philosophy, a cultural moment that emphasised the need for irony and a kind of self-referential knowingness that looked with suspicion, derision even, at all attempts at moral seriousness. Wallace, though, sought a return to what has come to be called ‘the new sincerity’, an attempt to recapture the sort of “passion, conviction and engagement with deep moral issues that we – here, today – cannot, or do not, permit ourselves”. The sort of moral seriousness that Wallace admired in a writer like Dostoyevsky.

Further reading

John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly Mackenzie

Wallace saw his own culture as being trapped in a sort of feedback loop of knowing nods and winks, like one of those Ferris Bueller asides, when he breaks the fourth wall, looks straight into the camera and (apparently) wryly comments directly to those watching the film at home. In such a world, nothing is real, nothing is solid. Everything is exposed as sort of fiction, lacking true bottom. Those who pretend moral sincerity here become the butt of the joke, the rightly object of parody. Sincerity becomes the object of scorn. A laughable credulity.

In such a culture, we all have to pretend our utterances are tongue-in-cheek, even when we are trying to say something important, even when we are crying for help. For Wallace, “irony and ridicule … are agents of great despair and stasis in US culture.”

Irony, for Wallace, does have an important emergency function; it undermines the hypocrisy of authority. It is a shock tactic but it is not basis for culture as such. Because irony is “singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks”.

Here is the core of Wallace’s assessment of his cultural predicament:

“Even gifted ironists work best in sound-bites. I find them sort-of wickedly fun to listen to at parties, but … as for actually driving cross country with a gifted ironist or sitting through a 300-page novel full of nothing but trendy sardonic exhaustion, one ends up feeling not only empty, but also … oppressed.”

The ironist is an expert at destruction, at undermining authority, but offers nothing to replace it. We deliberately smirk at ourselves when why try and say something important or venture weighty things, pretending that we only half mean it. Like Ferris Bueller, we too feel we have to wink at the camera.

Two days after Wallace hanged himself, Lehman Brothers went into administration, an event that became emblematic of the global financial crisis that was to come. Wallace had spent his whole literary career trying to revive a form of moral sincerity that he believed had been hollowed out of American culture by the toxic irony of continual mockery. And he defiantly sought to revive the single entendre of moral seriousness from within a culture dominated by the double entendre of not really meaning it. Because, in such an environment, moral values had struggled to survive.

Further reading

Insincere politicians are cheapening public debate

By Giles Fraser

When some people dared to speak of right and wrong, cultural sophisticates smirked knowingly and chuckled at their naivety. Post-modernism had all but cleared the stage of moral sincerity. Looking back, it seems little surprise that the greedy and the powerful of Wall Street were able to fill their boots.

Our moral consciousness had been sabotaged, and, too busy laughing, we hadn’t really noticed. “This is Water” now reads like a warning. The change in our moral environment had been so thorough, deep and all-pervasive as to be invisible. And millions paid the price as houses were repossessed, savings wiped out, and wages flatlined. Governments bailed out the banks with billions and instituted programmes of austerity for the poor. The joke was well and truly over.

In an illuminating piece for Quillette, Jonathan Church introduces us to the notion of ‘white fragility’:

“The brainchild of sociologist Dr. Robin DiAngelo, ‘white fragility’ has gained much currency in academic and progressive circles in recent years as a concept that goes a long way in ostensibly explaining why it’s so hard to talk to white people about racism.”

The basic idea is that white people are so habituated to their privileged position in society that they unthinkingly accept it as the way things ought to be:

“As a result, they experience ‘race-based stress’ when faced with a challenge to their ‘racial worldview’ because they perceive it to be an affront to their ‘identities as good, moral people’… This makes it hard to talk to white people about how their attitudes and beliefs make them complicit in the perpetuation of ‘institutional racism.’”

But wouldn’t you know whether you’re racist or not? Either you accord lower/higher worth to certain people on the basis of their ethnicity or you don’t. In other words, racism has to be a conscious attitude of mind, doesn’t?

Further reading

'Unconscious bias training’ doesn't work

By Peter Franklin

Not necessarily, say the theorists of white fragility:

“Racism, [it is] claim[ed], is not so much about explicit beliefs white people consciously hold about people of color, but about implicit—or unconscious—biases that sustain institutional inequities in the distribution of societal resources across different racial groups.”

The Kafkaesque implication is that to be anti-racist you have to admit to being a racist; and if you deny that you’re racist, well that’s proof of just how racist you are.

It’s a bit like when someone accuses you of being ‘defensive’ – there’s literally no defence against it.

Of course, on one level the theorists are absolutely right – racist beliefs can become both deeply and widely embedded across an entire society. Indeed, it would be impossible to sustain openly racist practices and institutions if that were not the case. And yet, even if the people of such a society didn’t view their prejudices as being wrong, they’d still be conscious of having them.

But can racist beliefs be held unconsciously? Indeed, could they be so insidious as to co-exist with a person’s consciously-held anti-racism? If they can (and the idea of white fragility depends on that possibility), then how are these hidden prejudices manifested?

That, surely, should be our main concern: exposing and stopping discrimination in the real world as it impacts on those it is directed against, rather than trying to identify a belief that not even the believer is aware that they have. Of course, it’s much easier to have unfalsifiable theories about unconscious prejudices than it is to gather evidence on, and campaign against, racism in practice.

White fragility is just one among many theories that feed into the growing blob of post-modern left-wing ideology. As with other post-modern orthodoxies – such as the idea that only white people can be racist in a Western society – it’s all about overturning established hierarchies of power (whether based on race, gender, sexuality or the intersections thereof).

Further reading

Free speech, blasphemy and structural discrimination

By Peter Franklin

Well, here’s an alternative theory of power – one that’s also a theory about theories. Any society which places the greatest value on practical knowledge and experience tends to decentralise power because such things can only be gained locally; however, a society that elevates theory over practice, tends to centralise power. Theory, especially unfalsifiable theory, allows theoreticians to assert their authority without limit or challenge.

To allow anyone, be it in politics or finance or academia, to become an untested arbiter of truth is a truly dangerous thing.

But what if he’d been born south of the border – in Montana, say, not Alberta? Assuming that the hypothetical American Peterson were otherwise similar to the actual Canadian one, then I reckon he’d be coming under some pretty intense pressure to run for President.

American politics right now is all about breaking the mould. That’s how Donald Trump got elected, it’s how Bernie Sanders almost got elected and, only last week, it’s how 28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rocked the Democratic establishment.

Further reading

Could the Democrats' blue wave unseat Trump?

By Amanda Whiting

Typically, such upsets are pulled off from the populist right or the radical left – and by polarising the electorate along ethnic and generational lines. But there are other possibilities. Like Emmanuel Macron in France, America could swing behind someone of a more centrist hue – as long as he or she were seen as a challenger to the establishment, not part of it.

Moreover, America’s cultural divides aren’t nearly so set in stone as one might think. For instance, one might assume that the Democrats can bank on the support of the Millennial generation. But according to Cas Mudde in the Guardian, the sands are shifting:

“…it may take liberals by surprise to hear that a recent Reuters/Ipsos mega poll of 16,000 respondents, found that the Democrats are losing ground with millennials. While millennials still prefer the Democratic party over the Republicans, that support is tanking. In just two years, it dropped sharply from 55% to 46%. Meanwhile, their support for Republicans has remained roughly stable in the past two years, falling from 28% to 27%.”

Closer examination of the figures shows an even more dramatic shift among white male Millennials:

“Today, as many white millennials support the Democrats as the Republicans (each 39%). Just two years ago, Democrats still had a 14% lead over Republicans among white millennials. The trends are even more pronounced among white male millennials. Today, this group favors the Republicans over the Democrats by a staggering 11%. In 2016, Democrats led white male millennials by 12%.”

The precise demographics of the Millennial shift might at first sight appear to confirm other cultural divides. However, those divides are artificially reinforced by a Republican President who has gone out of his way to repel women and ethnic minorities.

One can also view the shift in white male Millennials as a reaction against the ‘woke’ left’s pathologisation of ‘whiteness’ and ‘maleness’. But as the post-modern Maoists work their way down the hierarchy of privilege – targeting white women, black men and the less fashionable letters in LGBTplus – it might not be long before other groups of voters also push back against the self-consuming nature of ‘intersectionality’.

Further reading

The new political correctness: not a fad, but a deep cultural shift

By Peter Franklin

Finally, it’s worth pointing out that the Millennials aren’t the youngest group of voters anymore. Post-Millennials are now reaching voting age, and their political loyalties can’t be taken for granted either. If they can be engaged at all, it won’t be through the creaking apparatus of conventional politics.

For all of these reasons, there is a huge opportunity waiting for a new kind of leader: one with the guts to take on the post-modern left; the heart to reach out to all Americans; and the smarts to use technology to bypass the Beltway establishment.

In a parallel universe, an American-born Jordan Peterson is doing this right now. In this one, we may have to wait a while.

This how Tanya Gold explains the controversy in a piece for GQ:

“There is a new term of abuse in politics: a ‘gammon’. It refers to a middle-aged white man of a certain political persuasion. He is a Brexiteer. He is ugly. He is a conservative. He may wear hideous trousers. And, because he is a Brexiteer and so very ugly and a conservative who may wear hideous trousers, why not call him a gammon? Particularly if you are in politics to have fun, rather than to change minds.”

The insult has been in use for a few months now, but this week a full-scale backlash kicked in. Debate has been especially intense as to whether the term is racist or not.

It is certainly lookist – refering to the persistent redness of face that comes with age and/or medical conditions like rosacea. Moreover, the whiter someone’s skin, the more obvious any excess blood flow to the skin. If mocking people on the basis of perceived physical imperfections associated with a particular ethnic group isn’t racist, then what word should we use?

Similarly if seizing upon the cruelties of the aging process to humiliate your opponents isn’t ageist, then how else can it be described?

Gold is in no doubt as to the nature of the insult:

“But calling someone a gammon is not only a stupid waste of a two-syllable word, and meal. It is also, to steal leftist language, hate speech…

“…it is the discourse of the sewer. It’s like calling a Jew a k**e or mocking African Americans for eating fried chicken. It’s like calling poor white Americans trailer trash. So much of this sounds like American culture wars transported, horribly and no doubt eternally, to England.”

But what if there’s nothing wrong with a bit of hate – as long it’s directed to ‘progressive’ ends? What if, like the new left, you believe that the hierarchy of privilege needs to be brought tumbling down; with those at the top humbled so those at the bottom can have their voices heard? If that is your worldview then a term of abuse that targets older, well-fed, white males could be seen a serving a progressive purpose.

Obviously you’d need to be possessed by some pretty twisted ideas to think that way. But even within the confines of such a worldview there’s still a problem with ‘gammon’, which is that, as Gold says, it “reeks of class snobbery”. Those who use the insult – “the socialist bourgeoisie” – are clearly of a higher cultural status than those they use it against. It hardly fits with all that talk of privilege.

What it does fit with, however, is the long history of elite contempt for those who attempt to better themselves without the free pass of a university education, the correct opinions or the right cultural preferences. What better symbol for the skilled working class or the ‘lower’ middle class, than gammon – a dish that hasn’t been seen at smart dinner parties since the 1970s.

Further reading

No, Britain is not over-run with fascists or racists or bigots...

By Paul Embery

But does any of this really matter? As Adam Bienkov tweeted this week its not as if the ‘gammons’ are facing any real discrimination:

“No ‘gammon’ is not a racial slur. Nobody has ever been abused in the street, denied service or threatened with deportation because they’re an angry old white man with cheeks like two slices of Wiltshire.”

I wonder, though, whether we have to wait for hate speech to be acted upon before considering it hateful.

And let’s not forget that in other times and places, ‘gammons’ or people like them have been the target of the most horrific persecution. Look at the history of the Soviet Union, Maoist China and Cambodia under Khmer Rouge, and you see how the verbal abuse of ‘class enemies’ went hand-in-hand with mass murder. For instance, the liquidation of the ‘kulaks‘ in the USSR or of the ‘funong‘ in China – and indeed of anyone resisting the march of socialism. Up against some stiff competition, left-wing class hatred was the most murderous force of the 20th century.

Am I making a direct comparison between Corbynite trash talk on Twitter and the horrors of a darker age? No, because I’m not – I would contend – a complete idiot. However, as with hateful, contemptuous language anywhere else on the political spectrum, all of us should be mindful of the precedents.

The ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ is, therefore, an over-dramatic metaphor – a buzz phrase for the loose grouping of academics, journalists and other thinkers profiled by Bari Weiss in the New York Times.

Some of the best-known names include Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris and our own Douglas Murray. Some are libertarians, others are liberals or left-wingers. Though a largely secular bunch, their altitudes to religion range from outright hostility through to friendly engagement. What they have in common though is that they have all, in some way, violated the strictures of contemporary political correctness.

Recommended reading

Is there anything that Jordan Peterson can't disrupt?

By Peter Franklin

But so what? That’s true of lots of people – probably most people. It’s not as if they don’t get to have their say or can’t find publications that reflect their point of view.

For instance, one of the biggest news websites in the world is Mail Online – an extension of Britain’s lavishly un-PC Daily Mail. Another massively successful example is Fox News – the right-wing echo chamber par excellence.

So what on earth is the New York Times doing talking about an ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ as if the opponents of the PC-left were dissidents in a totalitarian state?

Well, let’s start with the word ‘intellectual’. The Daily Mail can be accused of many things – but having intellectual pretensions is not one of them. Of course, the right-leaning media does have its high-brow publications too – but almost all of these cater for a conservative audience with an interest in conservative themes. The IDW is broader than that – not only in terms of ideological outlook, but in seeking to participate in a discourse that is public not partisan.

Public intellectualism needs an ‘intellectual commons’ – universities, libraries , bookshops, museums, theatres, public service broadcasters, respected journals, and ‘newspapers of record’. Some of these public institutions may in fact be privately-owned and/or have their own ideological biases. Nevertheless they make it their mission to provide a platform for a genuine exchange of ideas across ideological divides.

The problem is that that the post-modern left is marching through these institutions – and not only disagreeing with other points of view, but seeking to delegitimise them.

The intellectual commons has become an increasingly hostile space. Several members of the IDW – including Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein and Christina Hoff Sommers have been subject to harassment. The problem isn’t just the rentamob, but also the academic, journalistic and cultural establishments who acquiesce or actively cooperate with the PC-left’s programme of delegitimisation.

To help understand what’s at stake I’d recommend Chris Beck’s profile of Claire Lehmann for Splice Today. Lehmann is one of the youngest members of the IDW and the founder what could be called its ‘house’ publication – Quillette:

“Lehmann contributed to a number of publications before launching Quillette, but claims the Australian media blacklisted her as soon as she started criticizing feminism. She rejects the ‘blank slate’ view that feminists, and progressives in general, have made a centerpiece of their dogma. It’s the belief that humans are strictly the product of culture and socialization, and the rejection of the idea that humans are born with certain innate characteristics.”

Note that challenging this form of feminism is not tantamount to anti-feminism. Indeed, if you believe that there are some ‘hardwired’ differences between the sexes, then it’s all the more important that things shouldn’t be arranged to the convenience of only one of them.

Of course, such subtleties are entirely lost on Quillette‘s critics:

“Quillette’s a place where people of various political persuasions can escape what Lehmann calls the ‘polarization entrepreneurs’—those who boost their careers by promoting divisiveness. Left-leaning critics call it a repository for reactionary thought, or a forum that polishes crude alt-right talking points so they appear erudite. Lacking substantive grounds for attack, they resort to name-calling.”

To the post-modern, PC, intersectional left, error has no rights. Any dissent from its theories is interpreted as oppression or even ‘violence’ – and must therefore be excluded from public debate.

It is this circular logic that spins the real intellectual dark web.

Recommended reading

What Peterson shares with Pelagius

By Giles Fraser

But don’t be fooled, this is really important stuff – and not just because the two sides constitute the most intellectually interesting bits of the British Labour Party. They are also representative of the much wider struggle between the working class politics of the old left and the bourgeois identity politics of the new left.

Ultimately, this goes beyond the left altogether, indeed beyond left and right – and towards the great dividing lines of the future, which will be about the nature of humanity in a world where technology poses a fundamental challenge to age-old understandings of who we are.

For the moment, let’s get back to the political geekery – and the beef between Blue Labour and the Accelerationists.

This is a divide I’ve peered into before, but this time I’m going to unpack a piece for the New Statesman by Jon Cruddas, a leading Blue Labourite. He begins by introducing the other side:

“Undiagnosed by the mainstream media and much of the academic community, a major intellectual renewal is underway across the left. It is energetic and tech-savvy… embraces bold ideas, and is well-organised and networked.

“It is fast becoming a new political movement; best captured in influential articles and books discussing ‘accelerationism’, ‘postcapitalism’ and even ‘fully automated luxury communism’.”

The animating idea of this movement is that, thanks to automation etc, there’ll soon be so much wealth available for redistribution that we’ll all be able to live on the welfare state – and not have to work unless we want to. How soon is soon is unclear, but the immediate task for the left is to accelerate progress towards the hi-tech socialist paradise.

Recommended reading

Accelerationism, Blue Labour and the future of work

By Peter Franklin

Cruddas places Accelerationism within a wider transformation in the nature of left-wing politics:

“The historic concerns of the left – nurturing citizenship and building the ‘common good’ – [has been] lost through a descent into relativism and a politics of the self…

“The character of the left has shifted. It has become obsessed with the belief that politics is an authentic search for the self, rather than a sacrificial contribution to the commons, with its trade-offs and compromises.”

Traditional socialism, of which Blue Labour is a part, emphasises working class solidarity allied to a sense of shared, though non-jingoistic, patriotism. It therefore stands at odds with the values of the new (or post-modern) left:

“This politics assumes that generalisation is not possible given our assorted personal histories and experiences of privilege, inequality and exploitation. Left politics has turned inward, preoccupied by questions of personal identity and with a new language of fluidity, hybridity and intersectionality. This dovetails with our modern narcissistic, individualised culture and Facebook echo chambers, in contrast to historic forms of collective agency and physical solidarities informed by traditional – often ancient – models of justice.”

Accelerationism is at the leading-edge of the post-modern left – because it purports to show how we can achieve a post-work economy and a borderless world. It is a vision of the future in which the things that Blue Labour stands for aren’t just seen as oppressive, but also obsolete.

No wonder Jon Cruddas doesn’t approve. His ideological opponents seek to detatch people from group identities and loyalties once held dear on the left. The post-modern approach is about individualised safe spaces, not common ground.

And yet, while some critics accuse the new left of pandering to the self-obsession of the ‘snowflake’ generation, others accuse them of making blanket generalisations – especially when ascribing ‘privilege’ or victimhood to individuals on the basis of ethnicity, gender or sexuality, while paying scant regard to personal circumstances, experiences or actions.

So is the new left a rabble of narcissistic individualists or a cabal of crude collectivists? Logically both accusations could be false, but they can’t both be true.

Except that they can. To understand why, let’s begin with the recent Twitter spat between the comedian Robert Webb and the journalist Julia Hartley-Brewer. As part of an online debate about exclusivity of journalism, the latter made her position clear:

“I didn’t go to Oxford because I was privileged. I went to Oxford because I was clever.”

In response, Webb tweeted the following:

“I didn’t go to Cambridge because I was clever. I went because I was a white male from a stable family who encouraged me to work hard at an excellent state school. That’s all privilege. All of it…”

It all got a bit unnecessary after that, and Webb ended up apologising, but let’s focus on the core of his argument i.e. “That’s all privilege. All of it.”

There couldn’t be a pithier summation of what the post-modern left is all about. If it’s all privilege (all of it) – then there can be no merit (none of it). No merit in work and no merit in citizenship. This legitimates the twin goals of a post-work society and a borderless world – and, therefore, the ‘liberation’ of the individual from the responsibilities and loyalties of the past.

Crude collectivism and narcissistic individualism are thus far from contradictory. Indeed, the former is how you get to the latter.

Recommended reading

Does capitalism have an answer to ‘fully automated luxury communism’?

By Peter Franklin

This even includes physical structures, for instance the arrangement of desks in a classroom. In a post for the teacherhead website, Tom Sherrington describes the battleground:

“Some of the strangest debates or memes about education that pop up now and then are about the idea of students sitting in rows. You don’t have to look too far to find people aligning this commonplace desk configuration along the axis of evil. Only recently I came across a tweet that mentioned children sitting in rows in a list of features of modern schooling that included compliant, submissive… It’s just the weirdest thing. But it’s not uncommon. Sitting rows = factory schooling, 19th C, Gradgrindian, ‘Victorian’ – all intended as pejoratives.”

As the old saying goes, ‘when you’ve got a hammer every problem looks like a nail’. Similarly, when you view the world solely in terms of power relationships (and necessarily oppressive ones at that), it becomes impossible to see that social structures might not have evolved to embed privilege, but rather to provide for the common good.

That’s certainly true of classroom seating arrangements:

“…sitting in rows is great because YOU CAN SEE EVERYONE’S FACE AT THE SAME TIME.  The reason classrooms are very often configured in this way is not because schools are old fashioned. It is because this very sensible, very human set-up has stood the test of time. And it always will.”

“Human? Of course it is. When I teach, I want to look everyone in the eye; I want to gauge their responses, hold their attention; I want to communicate with them. All of them. At the same time. This is the most intimate person-to-person aspect of teaching: eye contact. It matters; it’s powerful. It’s a deeply human element of communicating ideas and emotions.”

At the secondary school I went to, we mostly sat in rows. In a few classrooms, however, we sat in groups. We much prefered those for the simple reason that it maximised mucking around opportunities. This hasn’t escaped Mr. Sherrington’s attention:

“As I see first hand on many of my lesson observations, students sat in groups continually distract each other. The dynamics of the peer space are strong… Sometimes, grouped tables have been there so long, students have developed a group table culture with a mighty force field around them virtually impossible to penetrate with learning. Our space; keep out.”

Seating arrangements are a tangible example of the way that social structures evolve in response to context. For instance, churches, theatres, concert halls are like traditional classrooms – people sit in rows so that they can focus their attention on the person or people they need to focus on (be that the priest, the actors, the musicians or the teacher). In legislatures, elected representatives sit on opposing benches, or in a hemicycle, so that they can face one another, while identifying party allegiance. In restaurants, diners sit in small groups – creating private space in a public environment. In a courtroom, the complex seating arrangements help distinguish the very different roles and responsibilities of the judge, jury, lawyers, witnesses, the public and, of course, the defendant.

In many cases these structures arose by accident, but as Tom Sherrington says they have stood the test of time.

To deconstruct them on the assumption that tradition must be oppressive is to privilege the faddish theories of the few over the lived experience of the many. This is itself an elitist power grab and the ultimate in ‘post-modern irony’.