I’m tired today, and also have work to do, so it may turn out that all of my posts have videos in them. Graduation is tomorrow, and I plan to be around to see if it goes smoothly (disruption is threatened).
Bari Weiss is often demonized, but I think her critics are largely mistaken. She’s a centrist, but leans Left; and those who criticize her for being a member of the “Intellectual Dark Web” (which seems to me to consist largely of people who think for themselves) or for being some kind of right-winger, is simply misguided. In the 16-minute TED talk below, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A moderated by Chris Anderson (the head of TED) Weiss extols what she sees as the highest of virtues: courage.
She begins by laying out a litany of her beliefs, which are quite good (save for one note that we’re all “created in the image of god”), comporting with good liberalism, though some of them might be controversial (she thinks Covid came from a lab, that hiring should be based on merit rather than on “immutable characteristics”, promotes standardized testing, etc.) As she says (the transcript is here):
The point in all of this is that I am really boring, or at least I thought I was.I am, or at least until a few seconds ago in historical time,I used to be considered a standard-issue liberal.And yet somehow, in our most intellectual and prestigious spaces, many of the ideas I just outlined and others like them, have become provocative or controversial,which is really a polite way of saying unwelcome, beyond the pale. Even bigoted or racistHow?How did these relatively boring views come to be seen as off-limits? And how did that happen, at least it seems to me, in the span of under a few years?
My theory is that the reason we have a culture in crisis is because of the cowardice of people that know better. It is because the weakness of the silent, or rather the self-silencing majority.So why have we been silent?Simple. Because it’s easier.Because speaking up is hard, it is embarrassing, it makes you vulnerable. It exposes you as someone who is not chill, as someone who cares a lot, as someone who makes judgments, as someone who discerns between right and wrong, between better and worse.
Weiss’s ending is lovely, and is followed by a standing ovation.
The freest people in the history of the world seem to have lost the hunger for liberty.Or maybe it’s really the will to defend it.
And when they tell me this, it puts me in mind of my hero, Natan Sharansky, who spent a decade in the Soviet gulag before getting his freedom.
He is the single bravest person that I have ever met in my life. And a few years ago, one afternoon in Jerusalem, I asked him a simple question.
“Nathan,” I asked him, “is it possible to teach courage?”
And he smiled in his impish way and said, “No.
All you can do is show people how good it feels to be free.”
The talk:
[ Applause ]
We look up to great ideas, and wisdom, for good reason.
At the same time, I am reminded of this famous quote as a temperament, as a restraint from the allure of personality, from the unending manipulations of tyranny :
“But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. ”
-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
The Gulag Archipelago
Written 1958-1968, published 1974
… I recently learned he spoke at PCC(E)’s doctoral commencement, which I found to be amazing! I need to get the book again, as the larger context of the quote is mutating in my notes, so I omitted it.
A youtube recording of his full Harvard speech (in Russian as he was more comfortable with real-time translation in English subtitles) is available at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVG8SnxxCM
It has a couple of embedded ads and lasts about one hour.
AMAZING – I never thought to look!
Prescient:
“A Decline In Courage”: youtu.be/WuVG8SnxxCM?t=649&si=88vzY0pyI9DEhVE6
… numerous other apparently eternal themes.
It IS amazing what primary source material we have access to these days. Several years ago, We lived at what I used to call “the end of the world”: the tip of a peninsula jutting out into the eight mile wide mouth of the James River. I was in the library at about 3:00 am in a night where sleep kept evading me, reading a biography of Oppenheimer. There was a footnote on a 1950’s TV interview he had done with Edward R. Murrow with a url listed. I typed it into my iPad and immediately found myself watching the half-hour black and white film of the show, Murrow’s cigarette smoke and Oppenheimer’s pipe smoke mixing together, almost obscuring the chalk board and the subjects themselves. Yes. Amazing. Three in the morning. Alone reading. overlooking a dark river. Yet news from a half century earlier is immediately available on demand in its original form.
+1
How right you are. I love the image you describe here. I will try to hold onto it for the next time I get pissed at my smartphone and feel the urge to heave it at the wall.
Moderation is the cardinal virtue. All other virtues become vices without it. Courage becomes cowardice or foolhardiness without moderation. Being virtuous is VERY tricky. I believe it is impossible to be virtuous if you think you know the “truth” as that closes your mind to improving, correcting mistakes, and moderating your actions.
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
-Blaise Pascal
Pensées
sec. SECTION XIV: APPENDIX: POLEMICAL FRAGMENTS, no. 864
17th c., posthumous
(1670 2nd. ed.)
ccel.org/ccel/pascal/pensees/pensees.xv.html
BTW “Pascal’s Wager” is supposed to be in that^^^
Some have more to lose than others. It’s telling that the most disruptive students are often the ones in the most prestigious and expensive schools. The other ones are just trying to get an education…they don’t have influential/rich parents to help them.
Those in the workforce can’t afford to lose their jobs and be cancelled so hard that they can’t find work in their field ever again because they have become social pariahs. It’s a really awful affect.
Good point, and I have noticed that too.
‘ “Nathan,” I asked him, “is it possible to teach courage?”
And he smiled in his impish way and said, “No.
All you can do is show people how good it feels to be free.”‘ Bless you for highlighting these words of BW.
Thank you all.
“Make them your examples, and, esteeming courage to be freedom and freedom to be happiness, do not weigh too nicely the perils of war.” Thucydides.
“Cowardice . . . is the most terrible vice.” (Mikhail Bulgakov, Master and Margarita)
Some translations will use “sin.” Sin or vice, the problem is the same. Many of the high and respectable people of the West–at risk of little other than ridicule and peer disdain, occasionally of job and reputation–have proven themselves as cowardly as those of the Soviet Union who faced the Gulag, torture, purges, show trials, loss of their children, exile, and death.
We are pathetic.
I think the reason there are lot of quiet people who, under other circumstance might be called courageous by Weiss, is because of the cost and effectiveness. We do not have the megaphone they have, so it feels like shouting into a windstorm. More importantly, absolutely no one cares, for example, what I think (about anything) and the costs to me for speaking out, without significant wealth or assets to weather the storm, could be devastating. Fortunately, I work in an environment that is blessed to be free of most of the nonsense I’ve seen and heard about, though the wokeists are circling.
I do believe moderation is the cardinal virtue, but after that you do need courage to be virtuous, especially when virtue is unpopular. Telling a friend un unpleasant truth that will help them takes courage. I have often found that when people come to me for advice they want help being courageous enough to do what they already know is right, or permission to do what they know is wrong- but easy.
Well, bully for her, with her centrist values and standing up for fundamental human rights. But a creationist who “thinks COVID came from a lab” (there’s really not any scientific controversry, professor, overwhelming evidence of its natural origin via the animal trade in the Wuhan market — and this is important) — has narrow intellectual bandwidth. As she states, there always has been and will be a fringe, and she’s bought into a fringe viral disease theory right there. I certainly am glad to see her speak against sexual theories promulgated by post-modern sexual (whoevers) but I wonder about her general recognition and acceptance of mainstream science.
Yeah-I agree with a lot of her talk but clearly some oddball views too. Jay Bhattacharya isn’t much of a hero. Yes he was right that lockdowns and the like became more harmful than helpful after a point (not however at the point he was saying), but his ideas on how to deal with the virus were not good ones either, and he massively downplayed the danger of a virus that killed millions world wide. I don’t think the cancellation he received was at all helpful, but his published science (in particular the Santa Clara study) were poorly done.
A
I don’t know much about him so I cant’ say I agree with that choice.
Situation Normal makes a good point. Although I liked much of Bari Weiss’ talk, she unfortunately passed over a major aspect of the cultural crisis in question, flowing from a familiar cliché in academia. It is summed up in certain academic pronouncements that use the expression knowledgeS in the plural. It means that empirical, evidence-based analysis is just one of many narratives, all equally valuable. If that were correct, then everything in modern life, from the absence of cholera to the light that appears when you press a light switch, is all a gigantic, jaw-dropping coincidence. Uh huh. In retrospect, it is amazing that this vastly implausible figment was even entertained (let alone permitted to spread) at academic sites which do not allow departments of Astrology or Homeopathy.
I have to disagree that courage is the most important virtue. It is just as easy to courageously pursue a foolish or malicious or selfish end as it is to courageously pursue a virtuous end.
I put pursuit of truth as the most important virtue. We can never actually know truth but our brains can model it. The more accurately those models reflect reality the more effective we will be in creating a healthy and stable society.
Courage is a product of conviction. The more certain one is of ones convictions the easier it is to act “courageously” in regard to them. The real question is are those convictions born of gut feelings and shoddy thinking or of evidence, logic and proper critical thinking.
For most Americans (most Americans are in situations of possible financial distress), “benefit” in relation to governance is an economic “bread and circuses” issue. Principled advocacy of “freedom” is difficult — think of the teacher role and Charlie Brown from Peanuts movies.
Like most complicated situations, heads of households depend upon narratives of acclaimed experts.Indeed, when Aristotle addressed “order” (what is prior and what is posterior) in Categories, he explicitly includes social status among a plurality of order types.
After losing my information technology career in 2001, I found “menial” work in the construction industry doing facade repairs on Chicago high-rises. Is it courage to proceed with unsolicited and unwanted pedagogy about freedom and our Constitution in a blue-collar workplace? That is not for me to answer.
My coworkers came to accept that that is simply who I am. Discretion and moderation in these matters had been a must. And, continued employment in that industry mostly involves a different kind of courage. So, I had been tolerated.
In answer to Dr. Coyne’s question, the political narratives in the United States have made the benefits of principled freedom opaque. So, the second alternative seems more probable, even if it had not been the intention.
A commenter on Weiss faults her for supporting mainstream science? Surely he jests? And her other opinions (“(she thinks Covid came from a lab, that hiring should be based on merit rather than on “immutable characteristics”, promotes standardized testing, etc.) Just what is wrong with these positions? Nothing at all. They are rational, defensible and credible, like many respected scientists who share her views. The Covid issue is unresolved but the flagrant knee-jerk unsupported attacks on the lab leak view have no scientific merit. What bothers me most about Weiss are her anti environmental views and discrediting of the movement. She is nowhere near being on the left and those who have read her for a long time immediately identified her centrist and right-leaning views.
Right leaning these days. I wouldn’t say right leaning 30 or even 20 years ago. I agree there was nothing inherently crazy about the lab leak hypothesis and those who espoused it were ridiculed in a politically motivated way. However at most it is still a hypothesis, one which actually currently seems less probable than the market hypothesis. We may never know with real certainly, but with respect to this and in general anything science related she should comment less I think.
Yes. Initially, Science Magazine reported on the market hypothesis alone. In this situation, some skeptics did present legitimate questions about a lab leak that could have a factive base. So, later, Science Magazine offered a more agnostic editorial position (still favoring the market hypothesis). I do not know what other journals chose to do.
Of course, resolution of these issues cannot be accomplished without the cooperation of the People’s Republic of China. Not too likely.
If it’s me you refer, to you misunderstand my comments. Her embracing the utterly unsupported notion that “COVID came from a lab” is at variance with well established and documented science, not only around SARS-CoV-2, but other coronaviruses. I have been following this carefully since the outset, and I have the background to understand the issue. The literature is deep, exhaustive. and continuing. You might try looking for it yourself, but it’s in the mainstream technical literature (Science, Nature, various virology journals) and those articles are bit hard to read. And don’t forget the references therein! The only thread of reality that does feed legitimate conspiracy is that the Chinese government isn’t helpful, and is, in effect, covering up the full extent of noxious and illegal (but allowed) wildlife trafficking. They’d just as soon have us trashing scientists — it helps to degrade our thinking. But it does resonate with both right-wing tribalism and crank “progressives”, anti-vaxxers, etc. Thus I wonder if Weiss rejects other aspects of science based medicine and, for example, the rather serious question of anthropogenic climate forcing. We already know she’s a creationist.
The lab leak hypothesis has not been rebutted nor a Wuhan market source proven. Nor has the hypothesis that both of these could have occurred in succession. You can use the word “unsupported” but that is applicable to ALL possible events. Nothing has been proven OR disproven. So good science requires all of them to be considered. Literature can be “deep, exhaustive, and continuing” and still lack evidence. All the journals I have read on this topic were compromised or hedged or even biased in one way or another because of the collective and ill advised knee jerk opposition to the lab leak hypothesis. Why are you associating skepticism, a strictly scientific mode of thought, with “right wing tribalism and crank “progressives” and anti vaxxers. Are you suggesting that that all skeptics are all ideological fanatics? And none of them
are intelligent, educated and informed? This is patronizing and dismissive.
I dont know if Weiss is a creationist but it seems absolutely irrelevant. Too much information has been lost or censored for us to expect any clear honest answer. This is the reason scientists dont reject the lab leak hypothesis. When jobs, grants and status are at stake, it is not possible to assume that a scientist will never falsify data and research. We know of too many examples in the scientific community where there was outright deception. It has NOT been “well established and documented science” that disproves a lab leak.
Where diid you get this idea? Mainstream technical literature is not the holy truth and does not escape the scientific method for proving or disproving an hypothesis, much as some scientists (whose ox is being gored) claim. “Deep and exhaustive” does not equal truth based on evidence.
Quite so. Being ‘brave’ means that sometimes your deeply held but uncommon beliefs will turn out to be undermined by later information. And sometimes your deeply held beliefs, against the ‘everybody knows’ resistance, will turn out to be true.
Bravery of the few, or many, is a characteristic of resistance to group think.
My problem with the lab leak hypothesis is not the hypothesis itself but my observation that supporting it correlates with diminished interest in control of the pandemic. Which is weird, because lab-leaked and naturally spread virus present absolutely the same health problems. There is apparently some psychological phenomenon going on.
Another observation of mine is that those who support the unproven lab leak hypothesis, blaming China, tend to be indifferent to other, 100% proven misdeeds of this rogue superpower. Again, I have no idea why this is so.
Maybe the lab leak hypothesis gives some of its supporters the satisfaction of being anti-establishment, without the trouble of actually doing anything against the establishment.
Disclaimer: these are just anecdotal observations and thoughts based on them. I am sure that there are people who find the lab leak hypothesis probable and at the same time are interested in research, prevention and treatment of COVID. They are just a minority among those whose opinions I know.