How to [not] argue with Hanania

Highbrow progressives expose the conspiracy lurking behind that devious mask

This is a picture of crooked timber.

“The bull of Left Critique thunders towards the matador, who twitches his cape to one side, so that the poor beast careens into the side of the ring, and then staggers back with crossed eyes and mild concussion, raring for another go that will have the same unfortunate result, or worse.” – Henry Farrell on a libtard getting trolled by Hanania

Crooked Timber is a highbrow progressive blog that produces reliable and informative content, and also some empty and disjointed introspective blog posts (the latter are more my style). Unlike the majority of progressive commentary, it even engages with Lord Voldemort writers like Steve Sailer and links to thoughtful and sophisticated critics thereof like Cosma Shalizi.

I checked in on them yesterday and noticed that they’ve been incensed about Richard Hanania for months. They’ve produced a couple of posts about “how to argue with Richard Hanania” which are revelatory of his reception by intelligent progressives. These posts linked to other posts on other progressive blogs about Hanania, like this one at the Racket.

It appears that not everyone is buying into Hanania’s self-described maturation process toward the center, calling into question the success of his “Consummation” as a mainstream pundit. I discovered that they receive Hanania in a manner similar to how I’ve received him and Yglesias. This suggests to me that he’s going to have a very successful posting career.

Hanania has annoyed me because he adopted the Yglesias style of trolling downscale white populism. Those are my people and I don’t like him generating outrage from my peeps to secure head pats from progressives. I blocked Yglesias years ago for the same reason. However, it seems that Hanania is running the same troll on progressives, and progressives are very mad. Thus, I have to hand it to Hanania. He really has carved out an enlightened centrist position, and I’m happy to be the foil.

In the Racket post linked above, Jonathan Katz goes into Hanania’s impressive academic pedigree (his Expert Credentials) and then pivots to exposing a thinktank with which Hanania is associated. Katz describes the thinktank in sinister terms as a clandestine “laundering service” to distribute money to “reactionaries” and subsidize papers espousing “reactionary talking points.” That sounds to me like a thinktank/grant foundation that gives money to academics Katz disagrees with.

The rest of the post is paywalled but I think the tone of the article suggests consistency with the Crooked Timber posts, so I’ll turn to those. The authors of the Crooked Timber articles perceive Hanania to be running some kind of conspiratorial PSYOP to trick experts into agreeing with his uncouth ideas.

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The first article

In The Correct Way to Argue with Richard Hanania, Johns Hopkins professor Henry Farrell provides a toolkit to assist progressive intelligentsia in circumventing Hanania’s “truly formidable trolling techniques.”

The overarching goal of implementing the toolkit is to prevent Hanania’s “shoehorning” of “Steven Sailer” (read: racism) into a spectrum of enlightened centrism that includes Matt Yglesias and Jonathan Haidt.

One way to defeat Hanania is to “go after the details of Hanania’s social science claims,” but this isn’t the best way to win a debate with a troll. While Farrell “would be startled” if Hanania wasn’t engaging in “selective misreadings,” he’s not going to prove as much because it’s a “waste of time.” And it’s a waste of time because such engagement is akin to participating in a rigged fight, pitting the honest but doomed leftist bull against the well-armed bullfighter-troll.

So what is a leftist to do? They’re supposed to “[f]igure out what is wrong with the terms of the fight and press back hard against them.” This sounds like a big brained philosophical endeavor to refute the premises of the argument, but really just involves translating Hanania’s explicit assumptions into more ideologically sinister forms so that they can be dismissed without argument. Thus, Farrell translates the assumptions Hanania believes everyone should accept into their sinister hidden meanings (stricken phrases are Hanania’s assumptions):

(Yes, this is how professors write now. Enjoy your reddit professors, zoomers.)

If you accept these premises, according to Farrell, you’ve already lost like the bull who chases the cape. So, what’s Farrell’s advice? Dispute Hanania’s premises.

Wait, what? I thought we were supposed to just translate and ignore them. In fact, we’re supposed to first translate them into a version that we feel comfortable refuting and then refute them, sort of like building a man we feel comfortable beating up out of straw and then beating him up.

So why does Farrell need a long article teaching progressives how to deal with the master troll by questioning his assumptions? The answer is that progressives don’t know how to debate anymore because they’re not used to having their assumptions challenged.

Obviously, a normal person would say: Well, wait a second. We don’t both agree that the heredity of intelligence implies racial heredity of intelligence. Let’s hash that out. But we’re dealing with experts, not normal people.

Farrell wants to treat the refutation of Hanania’s assumptions as settled science so that he can ignore them and dismiss things like “race realism” as a “DDOS attack on the time and attention of anti-racists.” This means he wants to go back to the (pre-internet) status quo ante when institutional authorities didn’t have to do the work of refuting challenges to their authority.

To Farrell’s credit, he has engaged Hanania’s assumptions, and for all I know he’s decisively refuted them. But the point of this article is to prove that he IS TIRED and won’t do it anymore, and neither should progressives:

So take this post as an attack on premises, and a statement of principles, rather than the slightest hint at a desire to get stuck back into discussion on race-IQ and similar. Very possibly … the best way of arguing with Richard Hanania is simply not to argue at all.

I get it, he wants to continue as if his assumptions are unimpeachable. Everyone does.

The reality is that the concept of settled social science is meaningless. Social science is notoriously unreliable. Crooked Timber posters are academics so it’s safe to assume they rarely interact with the real world. Academics are the pre-internet version of the extremely online.

Farrell might be able to ignore people who disagree with him, but deep down he must know that the disastrous regime of social pseudo-science that prevails today continues to alienate and fracture the general population.

Whatever the problems may be with “reactionary studies” or Hanania’s assumptions, those studies and assumptions do not inform corporate or government policy, nor do they inform new legislation in the manner of the spurious research about systemic racism or implicit bias.

Academics like Farrell aren’t professionals so they don’t understand that people in the real world have to endure the consequences of the institutionalization of deranged mythologies about microaggressions, micropunches, bias etc. or the various miasma theories of racism.

The current state for the average citizen is no different from being a captive of Scientology. Academics like Farrell are bourgeois leftists so they love this kind of utterly dubious “research” and “science,” because in addition to positioning them as Experts/Priests, it functions as a DDOS attack against people with real jobs and destroys any possibility of social solidarity among ordinary citizens. So what if we tell people it’s their fault for causing transgender suicides if they accidentally misgender someone? You can’t ignore these social scientific assumptions - you must take the time and do the work!

I don’t want to be a slave to people like Farrell. I’m a powerless citizen, so while I enjoy engaging with and even embracing radical and uncouth truths, I know at the end of the day that I have to compromise. While I don’t have a problem with other people like me regardless of their race, I also have no problem offending them if it also offends and DDOSes the Farrells of the world.

He shouldn’t be able to hide behind the vanity and narcissism of other races and sexual identities. Thus, I applaud Hanania’s trolling and hope that every bit of spurious “settled” mainstream social science dogma is met by a reciprocal right-wing assumption backed up by sinister reactionary research. Keep DDOSing these people until they agree to compromise or return to their academic caves forever.

The second article

In How To Argue With Hanania – Now With More Nietzsche, associate professor of philosophy John Holbo riffs off of Farrell’s analysis given the recent leak/doxx of Hanania.

Holbo’s conclusion is similar to Farrell’s: you should ignore Hanania (and BAP). Guilt by association and a history of adopting bad ideas is sufficient to dismiss someone and not engage with their claims. I’ve written much about this new rigorous philosophical style of debate on my blog (e.g., here).

Holbo first provides a nice summary of the Farrell position:

That is, the ‘centrism’ schtick hinges on getting some alleged Big Facts accepted into evidence early, and then the game is rigged. A certain amount of plausible social science something-something and suddenly we are all radically anti-democratic race realists from the get-go.

Holbo therefore shares the concern that the enlightened centrist troll uses PSYOPs like presenting rhetorically well-dressed enthymematic arguments to trick the honest and supremely intelligent expert progressive into accepting sinister hidden premises.

Hanania conceals these premises by exploiting the good faith of progressive experts, which really means he’s exploiting the progressive expert’s bias in favor of centrism and anodyne Burkean “conservatives” whom the progressive knows to be agreeable and gentlemanly sparring partners. The result of accepting Hanania’s devious troll premise is that the good faith progressive transforms into a race realist as the tesseract of logic apodictically folds back upon itself.

Really this means that the progressive didn’t know that Hanania was a secret Nietzschean Nazi. If the progressive had known that, they wouldn’t have engaged with Hanania’s arguments, because as representatives of mainstream thought, they have the privilege to simply ignore people who disagree with them.

A second kind of Hanania troll technology is the old Yglesias style which I readily admit has filtered me:

Henry’s point, riffing on DD (riffing on Galbraith, riffing on Friedman) is: you don’t want to get too distracted by bits of outrage bait, actually. That’s bait. And then, when you lunge for it – ‘a-HA!’ – Hanania does this ‘no one here but us social scientific centrists’ straight-faced sidestep…

To repeat: the game is to dangle outrage-bait, then that gets twisted at the last second into nothing of the sort, just clear-eyed tough-mindedness. Burkean conservatism. Foolish leftists and their utopian schemes!

This is, for Holbo, the kind of Nietzscheanism people like Alasdair MacIntyre criticized in his work of Michel Foucault. From behind the persuasive Foucaultian mask comes a confession of taboo:

So, as Henry says, you end up missing the anti-democratic, ‘race realist’ face behind the ‘centrism’ mask.

Indeed for Holbo, Hanania must be fixed in the person exposed by journalists in the leak/doxx. Hanania today must be the “race idealist” of the youthful Nietzschean Hanania, who harbored an aesthetic preference for white supremacy:

So all the Burkeanism centrism and Effective Altruism bean-counting is a mask for an aesthetic vision of politics. It truly is a kind of quasi-Nietzschean Great Politics. (I like Nietzsche, but one must face facts.)

Having fixed Hanania in the past like an atheist pretending Unitarian Christianity is the same as Inquisition era Catholicism, we can be confident that nobody respectable will need to suffer Hanania’s DDOS attacks in the future.

Now, why is this worth hammering on about? He won’t be fooling the NYT any more. He won’t apologise, since no one does (and he has written a paper on why you shouldn’t.)

Actually, he did apologize. Nietzsche didn’t apologize, though, but Holbo can still like him because he said stuff Holbo agreed with. Or did he? Maybe Nietzsche put on the anti-Christian sexual libertine mask for a more sinister reason!

I note in passing that the reason everyone likes Nietzsche is that he knew how to write for (and therefore troll) everyone. This is why so much Nietzsche scholarship surrounds leftists and rightists pulling off the philosopher’s mask in a way that reveals the true, good Nietzsche as a liberal or fascist or whatever.

Holbo reflectively raises the MacIntyre criticism again:

But how can I be sure that the final mask is the real one? Why should someone’s ‘real’ self be the one he sockpuppeted more than 10 years ago. Why shouldn’t that be, instead, just the outrage mask he tried on for recreational purposes, whereas his soul is centrist and bean-counting effective altruism-minded?

Yes, this is a good criticism of people who publicly promote a version of themselves and then self-protectively redefine it when exposed. But his moment of reflective honesty leaves unanswered the question of why we have to agree with Holbo that the young, Nietzschean white supremacist Hanania must be the true Hanania. Must there be a conspiratorial cabal of freema- I mean Ubermenschen walking among us and wearing masks?

I think this ship has sailed. Many academic progressives lied their way into power, cynically destroyed and exploited institutions with really, REALLY bad social science, and somehow came out the other end as the party of truth and honesty. Non-leftists have done the same (mostly with economics) and will do so again.

But maybe there’s an alternative to this conspiratorial view of debate and partisan conflict. What about sociological explanations? Progressives like those, don’t they?

As sociologist Randall Collins observed, fanatical ideological groups tend to function like inner city gangs, which means they focus most of their aggressive efforts on infighting. For some dissidents, this infighting becomes so tedious that they start finding the ideas of their original ideological enemies refreshing. This causes them to engage in a sort of face-saving evolution that retains some of their old views but concedes points to their old enemies, resulting in the creation of something known as the center.

On top of this we see the socioeconomic forces that animate “modernization” and “civilization” processes. The intimacy of social contact with enemies and out-group members in professional or high-status environments moderates and softens views. The incentives of money and fame do the same.

Perhaps instead of a conspiracy, sociological forces can explain enlightened centrism. And perhaps instead of ignoring and ghettoizing enemies, you could assimilate them. I’m not sure true-believing progressives are sober enough to recognize this dynamic.

Holbo then raises the specter of BAP:

This Graeme Wood piece on Bronze Age Pervert is pretty good. Wood notices that Michael Anton notices about BAP the same thing that Henry notices about Hanania. (Except Anton, being bad, likes it.)

The BAP PSYOP is the direct opposite of Hanania’s, but for potentially even more dangerous reasons. BAP doesn’t affect the enlightened centrist but rather promotes anti-semitism and racism to bamboozle the leftist and keep him mired in refuting those claims so that BAP can promote even worse “thoughtcrimes” and “more serious heresies,” which I assume involve impugning “The Founding” or whatever is more serious than racism.

No, BAP’s rhetorical strategy is not enlightened centrism but rather humor. As Holbo says, “Everyone likes a joke! Comedy is, thus, a form of centrism!”

Well, yes, everyone does like humor. You can’t fake humor. If you laugh or find something funny, it’s humorous. It can’t be anything else. This might be an alien concept to a Daily Show audience that long ago traded subversive laughs for regime approved applause.

What Holbo and Farrell really don’t like are forms of indirect communication like irony. Indirect communication becomes necessary when the threats of censure, civil liability, professional and social ostracism, and even criminal culpability disincentivize honest and direct communication.

So maybe we should create rules of evidence to protect progressive experts from accidentally agreeing with things that are bad or wrong. People should be prohibited from posting anonymously so that the progressive can see if the person they’re arguing with is bad. Maybe every person should have to go to progressive confession. Further, people should be prevented from using humor and irony so that progressives don’t accidentally find the messages of bad people engaging.

But I’m not sure what this would accomplish. I’m not even sure what Crooked Timber-type leftist academics believe. Despite their honesty, they seem incapable of communicating what they really believe in a positive sense. They’re at their most succinct and incisive when they’re refuting the right, but the positive programs are inconsistent and few and far between.

Sometimes they’re consequentialists, utilitarians, or liberal rights activists. Sometimes they’re critical of identity politics and sometimes they want us to embrace the essence of blackness.

The Crooked Timber word cloud suggests that “Limitarianism” is a big focus right now. Limitarianism is about limiting extreme wealth acquisition. That sounds like a good idea to me, but…wait a minute…have any of the authors ever said anything bad about mediocre white men? Do they believe we need an economic system that confiscates and redistributes the suburban boomer castle of the Mexican immigrant who built a nice landscaping business? We’ll have to wait for the leaks to see if we need to countenance Limitarianism in good faith.