But the inescapable fact we must contend with in the age of falling fertility is this: In addition to all those beautiful but ineffable things, motherhood is also an enormous gamble with one’s health and financial security. In other words, motherhood is not rational.

Given its risks, even for women who have reliable partners and financial security, delaying (when not outright rejecting) motherhood seems like the smart thing to do, so that one can maximize education, earnings, experiences — to accumulate as much human capital within oneself as possible, prior to inviting a child into one’s heart and the Mother into one’s personhood.

While fertility is declining across the board, many have noted that the problem is particularly acute among the most capable young women—and why wouldn’t it be? If we want to persuade more young women to take the leap to motherhood sooner (as delay is the same as reduction in total number of successful pregnancies), we have to center her and address this problem directly.

But first, let’s get a few common and aggravating misconceptions out of the way:

1. The fertility decline is not an affordability problem.

Nearly everyone can “afford” kids, period. However, hardly anyone can have them while maintaining the lifestyle of a dual-income, childless couple. As I (and many others) have pointed out for years, if the problem was affordability itself, it wouldn’t be the case that the poorest Americans can have so many more than the upper middle class, nor would it be possible for the poorest countries in the world to have a higher total fertility rate than the wealthiest.

The problem is opportunity cost, not cost, and if you cannot understand the difference you cannot understand the problem. Parents are poorer relative to their childless peers, relative to where they themselves would be had they not had kids.

If the problem was pure “cost,” then child grants would help immensely—they would make children more “affordable.” But we know from countless schemes the world over that they move the needle slightly, if at all.

What you actually have to account for is one parent’s (usually, the mother’s) current and potential future earnings. That’s a lot of money! (In fact, it is too much money for the government to afford to offset directly—so it should not even try.) This is why poor Americans can “afford” more kids—their earnings are lower and so are the opportunity costs of bearing and caring for children. The middle class strivers bear the brunt of the pain here: their time is money, and for the upper middle class, it is good money. These are the women who delay as long as possible, and have fewer children than they would like. Eventually, however, the line turns around again: at a certain point money begets money, and in any case, buying the time of others becomes cheap.

Which leads me to my next point:

2. “Childcare” is not a substitute for parents

We should stop using euphemisms because they cloud discussion rather than clarifying it, and sometimes words that are technically not euphemisms begin working in the same way: clouding a reality, which, when directly confronted, would make some things far more clear.

I am going to argue that “childcare” is one of those words. Before I became a mother, I believed that—for a few hours at least—one could “buy” their way out of being a parent: I had blithely assumed that daycare and nannies, while costly, would nevertheless work adequately enough, and I could have something like a normal work schedule with young children in the house. I have never been more wrong (and that is saying something).

We should be more clear about what we need, particularly for young babies: a substitute mother. What we need is someone to do the job of caretaking that a parent does, in the way a parent would do it, for most of the day so that the parent can go to work.

When stated this way, I believe the pain points of various “childcare” options become more obvious.

Daycare in particular, while being a godsend to families that need their second income, is not a wonderful parent substitute for very young kids. (As children grow older, daycare becomes less harmful—even healthy, I would argue–if kept limited.) But a baby? A baby has incredibly high needs, needs that even its own mother may struggle to meet. But even so, a mother will rock her colicky baby for hours, hold it while it sleeps, nurse to soothe it as often as required. What will the daycare worker—who is nowhere near sufficiently paid and is tasked with several children at a time—do with a colicky baby? She will put it in the crib, and let it cry. (It is because of this grim reality that I am sick of the assumption that “childcare” will solve parental problems. The idea of shoving your child in a state-run daycare at six weeks of age, as NYC’s Mayor Mamdani has benevolently offered, can only sound attractive to people who are childless, as I imagine is the case for much of his young staff. But as a mother, this sounds like a punishment that I would go to great lengths to avoid.)

What happens when the child is sick, which happens more frequently than one can possibly imagine? Either a working parent leaves the miserable child in daycare, or, if they are too sick for that, scrambles to find some other adult they can pay or cajole into watching their child, or failing that (as many do, in a time crunch), takes leave from work. And what happens when both parents run out of leave? It shouldn’t be surprising that nearly every parent I know approaches daycare with weary resignation—a necessary evil that allows for the family to get through the workweek.

Nannies are a much better option, and service the “substitute mother” position much more closely. But beyond the enormous cost, at the end of the day, most go home. Sometimes they are sick and do not come in to work, a luxury the actual mother does not have, who must now both work and find her replacement. The good ones also want leave themselves, and of course, how can you deny them their time with their own family? But then you need someone else to cover those hours.

I won’t even touch the impossibility of nursing while working—every working mother I know gave it up due to the added hassle and stress. They didn’t want to deprive their children of the best nutrition available to them, but they had no choice. They had to work to maintain their lifestyle, which meant accepting the compromise of an institution or a stranger taking on the work of the mother, and hoping their baby received a minimum amount of attention.

But mothers who work are thinking of the future and making a pragmatic and fundamentally rational calculation. Many are doing it because it is difficult or impossible to rearrange their lifestyles, and for others, it is not feasible at all. Even in the best case scenario (one in which her spouse’s income can cover their necessary expenses) a mother who gives up her work gives up her independence. Her ability to jump back into work will be hampered every year she is out of the scene. The possibility of divorce looms in the back of her head, or worse, the death of her spouse (on whom her life now depends). It is reasonable for mothers to opt out of this; it is reasonable for them to choose a barely-adequate, but temporary, substitute mother over the possibility of future impoverishment, which she may suffer for the rest of her (and her children’s) lives.

I think some readers will begin to chafe at my consistent assumption of what used to be called “gender roles”—why I insist on using “mother” rather than “parent.” I do this because…

3. Biology is not equitable; the parental roles of the sexes cannot be easily swapped.

Do stay-at-home dads exist? Yes. Are some of them better at childcare, or even infant care, or enjoy it more, than their wives? Indubitably. Are some parents same-sex? Of course, etc. Outliers are real, and their Lives Matter.

Now that we’ve acknowledged this, let’s get back to the point: Here I want to talk about the situations more (if not most) people are likely to find themselves in. Here are some sex differences relevant to the discussion:

• Some pregnancies are incredibly difficult; working through them is grueling or downright impossible (my case).

• Breastmilk is the best source of nourishment, advisable for up to two years, and nursing is very difficult to keep up when a woman returns to work.

• Mothers are hardwired to better care for young infants.

• The vast majority of the time, the mothers want to be with their children more often than fathers.

These differences cannot be socialized away, because the “social world” did not create them. We should be wary of brute-forcing equality in the reproductive arena, as doing so can easily place more stress and work on everyone—especially the mother. Sometimes, for some families, it does work. But I do not think this is the usual case.

Feminists tend to bristle when I adopt such language, but I believe that in the attempt to make women mold themselves into the working lives of men, working women risk losing their chance to be mothers. Fathers do not have to choose, and their investment in their income only increases their chance to be dads1. The reverse is not true. Women are not reaching their reproductive goals, and improving their lives means helping them achieve these goals.

Lastly, misconception #4: We are not the Amish, and you cannot separate status from money

Many thinkers (especially those on the Right) are now floating the idea that the fertility decline has everything to do with status. I believe they are right in this respect, and this is partially why ideas about child credits or various payment schemes often fall flat (and would even if the payments were high): they are essentially handouts, and handouts are low-status.

The status people believe that this problem should be solved through culture—that we should morph into the kind of society that values procreation and grants it status. On the whole, they don’t seem to have any clue as to how to do this. I’ve seen some earnestly claim that we should “give mothers awards,” which evidently is the practice in…Mongolia. I hope the absurdity here is clear, but in case it is not obvious I will state plainly: This is not how status works. (At least, not in the West, and from the looks of their birthrates, perhaps not even in Mongolia.)

In addition, modifying culture at the drop of a hat is only a tiny bit easier than modifying biological constraints. We should instead search for options that do not require us to first become more like the Amish, or Mormons, or the indefatigable Collins’. Changing values is harder than changing behavior. The smarter tack is to alter the environment so that parenthood can become more attractive in the culture as it is, aligning with the values we already have. That means turning parenthood into an opportunity to get ahead.

Make Motherhood Rational Again

How to do this?

First, I propose a mental shift: we should think about a woman’s life in phases, schooling being one of those phases, having and raising children being another, and working being one more. Sometimes those phases overlap harmoniously, but we should accept that for children under two, a full-time career is very much not the ideal. Crucially, children are not “add-ons” to a working life, but that the business of having/rearing children is a distinct kind of work that requires more than haphazard attention. The lifestyle that worked well for two adults will not work for two adults with children.

But, more practically:

We should institute social programs which make parenthood and especially motherhood align with strategies to get ahead of one’s peers.

Policy oriented towards that end should ask itself this question: “What would make an intelligent, capable, 23-year-old feel as if motherhood is a risk worth taking–a possible advantage?”

Another way to think about the same question: What could we offer women so that you might recommend young motherhood to your own daughter or sister?

My primary goal in writing this piece is not to sell you on my answers to these questions. I am writing so that you will ask this question, and not another one.

However, I do have some ideas:

1. Tie childbearing/raising to “getting ahead” schemes—to future high status: education, training, a leg up in jobs.

An example of this might be the parent version of the GI Bill, which offers educational benefits to those who served in the armed forces. The motherhood version would tie young childbirth with future education: except here (as we are thinking about striving women) the focus would be on post-secondary education—assistance with graduate school. I will leave fussing about the exact details for others—but the point here should be this: we offer young women who leave the workforce (or incur the “motherhood penalty”) a leg up when they re-enter by helping them boost their credentials.

A second tactic is to make mothers more competitive upon re-entry into the workforce. We offer federal programs to hire felons—why not offer enticing benefits and credits to companies who hire mothers? A few years of the employer’s payroll tax waived for the mom employee, or some such temporary benefit—designed to provide monetary incentives to companies who take chances on mothers with large gaps in their employment.

In other words: Instead of taking mothers away from their children (or attempting to find substitute mothers/“childcare”), we should focus on assisting mothers in getting back on the horse when they are done. Tie a carrot at the end of the motherhood phase.

If done right, some young, striving women would recognize the advantage of choosing this track: They would not lose their fertile years; they could still achieve their educational and career goals. Some of these goals might even become more achievable, if the woman comes from limited financial means.

Even for women who never utilize any of these possibilities—perhaps they have many kids, financial means, and enjoy staying home—these options would still help quell the fears of losing independence in the case of divorce, death, or disability of the spouse.

Why is this better than a simple cash handout? Because opportunities are games, and “winning” allows for you to differentiate yourself from the rest. A cash handout is equally accessible to idiots, a neuroscience PhD is not.

I’m happy to think about ways to include fathers in some of these schemes, if they are the primary caregiver and the roles are reversed—but those are details, let’s first agree on the premise. Speaking of fathers, an indirect side effect: If a mom is taking time off to bear and raise kids, that means the father must step up. Far from being a problem, I am of the opinion that this kind of challenge is good and even necessary for men. They are not left behind; they are not “nice to haves.” They are doing work as irreplaceable as their wife’s—this grants them a sense of meaning and purpose (without actually forcing their wife into a permanently weak position, as might have happened a generation ago).

2. Tie parenthood to retirement benefits, especially Social Security.

An under-discussed economic reality: Fertility rates begin dropping when pension schemes begin cropping up2. Although I’ll leave the analysis to the economists, this accords with my understanding of why my own parents had kids: they grew up in the developing world and we are their retirement fund.

But in a world of pension schemes, children can easily seem like a liability, not an asset. My childless friends don’t just have bigger homes and better vacations than me: they have much more saved towards retirement.

Here, families get screwed in two ways: Even though they provide the workers necessary to keep the logic of the social welfare schemes going, they have less money to put towards their own retirements. For a stay-at-home parent the reality is even worse: they have no income for many years, so less Social Security benefit when the time comes.

If the children die, or are disabled, or otherwise incapable or unwilling to help their parents—well, that’s just too bad!

The invisible labor of childbearing and raising is never accounted for in our social welfare system, and the injustice is vicious. If all else fails, most working Americans will have their Social Security or other pension benefits to reap. But a mother who took time off, or otherwise suffered workplace setbacks due to her divided attention, gets a terrible deal. She faces a greater likelihood of impoverishment in old age if her children or husband do not provide for her—all the while the wages of her children are cut to finance the retirements of others.

One solution to make this whole deal a tad more fair: Entitle parents to greater Social Security benefits, with a special provision for parents who stayed at home to off-set their low-earning years.

So that’s it, my humble offering on the fertility crisis. There are, of course, important caveats and considerations I haven’t addressed. But I hope to convince others of the fundamental reframe more so than the particularities of any solution I provide. Please share!

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In this post, I will broadly address why I feel many of them are missing the point, and detail my “floor/ceiling” model a bit more, so you should read that first.

To start, I will reiterate what we have to face: The exact opposite of what some predicted has happened. There is an illogical and unscientific ideology rippling through our public institutions, and atheists and agnostics are more likely to believe in it than the religious. Worse, they don’t just accept it without question, they are highly intolerant of dissent.

This isn’t just true of “movement” atheism, this is true of atheists more broadly:

There are many reasons offered for why this particular irrationality has gone far with atheists (atheists are confusing gender with LGBT rights, atheists are reflexively opposing the religions, etc), but all have troubling implications of their own: Are atheists only rational when the religious are irrational? Can atheists be more vulnerable to social pressure than the religious? Are atheists more likely to blindly support new and untested theories than the religious?

Meanwhile, they do not explain why a commitment to “reason” and a (supposedly) greater understanding of biological science seemed to have no impact at all in preventing the madness in this population.

The great Richard Dawkins recently wrote a piece in the Spectator which, although not addressed to me and focused on a related but different theory, unfortunately also highlights the refusal to face the problem:

“An irritating strain of the Great Christian Revival is the myth of the God-shaped hole. “When men choose not to believe in God, they then believe in anything.” …..How patronising, how insulting to imply that, if deprived of a religion, humanity must ignominiously turn to something equally irrational.”

…Except in this case, that may be exactly what has happened! We are encountering evidence that the thing that is too insulting to presume might be true for anyone appears to be happening, and to exactly the people one might suspect would be most vulnerable.

In other words, reality is giving us feedback.

When I was knee-deep in ex-Muslim activism I would frequently encounter Muslims who denied the violence inherent in Islam by asserting something like “Islam means peace”, as if that was the end of it, as if somehow our repeated exposure to Islamic terror was invalid because some Quranic verse gave occasional lip service to the virtues of coexistence.

But we instinctively know to mistrust such claims. We know that nothing is more real than, well, reality, and the phenomenon of Islamic terror demanded an explanation, not a rebuttal. Similarly, the submission of the anti-dogma/pro-reason tribe to clear absurdities must be directly addressed, not dismissed with a scoff or an appeal to the possibility of a brighter secular future.

To be clear, like Dawkins, I have no “God-shaped hole”. I have missed very few aspects of faith and for the most part, enjoy my life and mind much more without it. I have fought for a world where more people can be free to be like me. I also dismiss gender ideology precisely due to its irrational claims and denial of science.

So it should be clear that I’m not asking anyone to join a church, or give up on science or reason as a key tool in your analytical toolbelt. I am asking you to imagine that what is true for us may not be true of others. I am asking you to allow the feedback given by this situation to enter your mind, and to seriously grapple with it.

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Religion as ceiling and as floor

Having said all that, I am not actually proposing the existence of a “God-shaped hole” as many of my critics presumed. (I am not commenting on the merits of that conception, I am saying that I am pointing to something different–an indirect benefit of faith that benefits reason).

From my last piece:

In the past, I had mostly thought about the “ceiling” that faith created–the ways in which religion hindered progress, scientific achievement and understanding. But now I think much more about the “floor” it creates, too. Perhaps without certain myths granting the power of the sacred to some fundamental truths (like the fact that there are two sexes), we would drift away from reality altogether.

This view does not contend that, on the whole, religion is a “better way of knowing the world” than reason or science–the floor exists, but so does the ceiling. Instead, it recognizes the vulnerabilities of reason to other pressures, and proposes a value in safeguarding certain precepts with extra-rational support.

Let’s start with the assumption that religions are interested in propagation and longstanding faiths tend to be good at propagation-via-procreation in particular. This is a process that requires behavior to pass a minimal standard of reality-acceptance, as reality-denial without any brakes can easily result in harm, if not death, to yourself and any progeny.

As religious convictions shape decision-making, we might assume that if a faith has coexisted with society for a length of time, it is unlikely to include or otherwise require its adherents to commit to ideas that lead them to catastrophically destructive consequences in the near-term.

And as these religions are competing with other ideological systems, we might also expect them to include some degree of the inverse: ideas that act as a prophylactic against the most self-destructive bad ideas that humanity has shown itself to be vulnerable to.

This is what I propose constitutes the “floor”.

Of course this doesn’t apply to any or all faiths; newer cults would not have had time to develop this floor, and are therefore disqualified. And as time goes on and we encounter new threats, we would expect an update-resistant floor to be less useful.

Further, the set of ideas that constitute the floor can themselves be untrue, or even irrational. Inherent truth value is not a good standard for a floor. The purpose of the floor is to thwart more dangerous irrationalities, however it can.

The cost of the floor, as I presume my readers are well aware, is the existence of the ceiling.

Happy weekend!

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While they are saying goodbye to FFRF, I think it might be a good time for me to say goodbye to organized atheism altogether.

This is not, to be clear, a goodbye to atheism. Despite the reports of famous re-conversions of former-atheists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I cannot find God in my heart (or even a “God-shaped hole”). The switch has flipped; the myth has fully unraveled and been replaced by an understanding of the world that sits firm in my mind (far more comfortably than faith ever did). On this point, I don’t believe there is a way back for me. (I nearly wish I could manage some wiggle room here, if only so that I can understand what it is that my newly-religious friends are feeling and accepting. But no such luck.)

Still, I have become friendlier to the idea of religion as a social good as of the past few years, and now (more controversially), I even feel that there are intellectual benefits to faith too–or at least, to some forms of it. Much of this is informed by my experiences working within the atheist activism space, and by my resulting intellectual drift.

As some of you know, I had been involved in “movement atheism” for most of my career, primarily through my work organizing for the rights of ex-Muslims. I ran a nonprofit, produced videos, gave talks, held events etc, etc. I also worked with other organizations in the same space, collaborating on various projects through the years, and becoming friendly with many kind and thoughtful people.

Right from the get-go, however, I had felt a tension between myself and this new world. I sensed a staggering homogeneity in thought: everyone had the same social and political views as everyone else. I had never experienced this before—my high school buddies included committed Trotskyites and those who would earnestly argue that the Inquisition Wasn’t All Bad—even my former religious community was more heterodox. A few libertarians and old school liberals floated in and out, but otherwise, the secular world was progressive through and through. And worse, many of the younger generation were radicals who followed a highly intolerant brand of progressivism.

This was frustrating; I had always understood atheism to be a passive claim, a denial of the truth claims of religion and nothing else. The closest thing to a “value” I had any reason to expect from a fellow atheist might be a respect for the tools that led many of us to reject faith (reason/science) and for the freedom of speech and belief that allow us to be open about it.

And it is true that given the historical lack of social acceptance of atheists on the Right, one might expect that atheists would lean Left. But they didn’t just lean there, they fell in head first. I had ways to ease my discomfort: I could imagine that this was so because atheists were oriented around reality, and when compared to the religious Right, so was the Left. When the woke took over, I speculated that this was because atheists were having their compassion hijacked. When it came to Islam, perhaps they were simply misinformed.

That sufficed, until…gender.

I have never seen anything like it. In amazement, I watched scores of people I respected add pronouns in their emails, flags to their bios, and repeat circular mantras like “trans women are women”. The same people who laughed at religious credulity accepted the idea of a “gender” fully and without question, and worse–they suppressed all open discussion. Overnight, the same people who campaigned against blasphemy laws enacted their own version without a hint of irony. I watched long-standing figures in the movement be cast down for this crime of doubt; first by insane radicals on social media, but as the disease progressed, also by the most prominent organizations we had.

In other words, movement atheism had betrayed nearly every value it claimed to stand for.

I think of all the kind and generous people I had met there (including the heads of FFRF), and my heart breaks to see their fall. There are many, I’m sure, who are bowing only because the pressure to do so is enormous, and I can sympathize with this and wouldn’t wish a woke mob on anyone. I myself stayed silent far longer than I should have. But while I have compassion for the bullied, I am astonished at the zealotry of the believers, who are legion.

Most humiliating of all is the fact that atheists appear to be more likely than the religious to hold this particular unscientific dogma–a malfeasance heightened by the direct contradiction it poses to (alleged) core principles of reason and science.

It is because of this I now seriously ponder what I could not have imagined myself considering just a few years ago: the intellectual value of faith.

I wonder if I have greatly overestimated human reason. In the past, I had mostly thought about the “ceiling” that faith created–the ways in which religion hindered progress, scientific achievement and understanding. But now I think much more about the “floor” it creates, too. Perhaps without certain myths granting the power of the sacred to some fundamental truths (like the fact that there are two sexes), we would drift away from reality altogether. Maybe that is what is happening now. I could not have imagined it could be so. I was wrong.

But perhaps it is good to (once again) be humbled by a misjudgment, and to be forced to contend with the (occasionally contradictory and always fascinating) complexity of reality.

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I also went on Ethan Strauss’ podcast to discuss a few similar themes (here).


Happy Friday,
Sarah

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The main difference I make between the two is the degree of dependance on public perception.

“Reasonable” is a social descriptor–a person appears reasonable to others. To be reasonable, therefore, is to be legible–you must be able to make yourself understood. But legibility requires a whole host of other things too, for example: shared knowledge, assumptions, and even values. A person who grows up in an isolated religious context and does not know basic science might not find a reference to the theory of evolution all that reasonable, and they are not wrong to feel that way. If a society is made up of such people, then Darwin is, by definition, unreasonable. 

Rationality, however, has no such requirements. Rationality is independent of human perception–Galileo was not “reasonable” in his time, but he was rational in all times. (However, it is important to understand that while rationality may have a greater claim to approaching truth, a rational argument can be wrong if the presumptions are wrong—some scientists who initially opposed Galileo can also claim to be rational. We needed a new physics, after all.)

The point I want to make with this distinction is that what is rational quite often sounds unreasonable.

A rational argument can easily look crazy if “fashion” pulls powerfully against it (the lab leak hypothesis is my favorite example of this), or if it runs against a valued social norm. A rational person can also look crazy to all the reasonable folk, if the degree of separation between the spheres of knowledge is far enough. This is one reason I recently argued that being a heavy reader is probably bad for one’s chances at running for political office–ideally, one should be just slightly better read than their audience or must compensate for their damning level of knowledge by also possessing extraordinary communication skills. (Obama is an example of the latter, both well read and excellent at making himself understood, while JD Vance might be a heavy reader who fails the communication test.)

But it isn’t just politicians walking the tight rope—the pressures to place the reasonable above the rational affect us all, including (and perhaps especially) “public intellectuals”.

While politicians can garner support through other means, reasonableness is the main capital of the public intellectual. They must always have large stores—stores that they accumulate by being only as rational as the demands of reasonableness will allow. However, when the two are in tension, it is career suicide for the public intellectual to choose the unreasonable-but-rational position. In such cases, it is often better to remain silent, or speak out only if one has amassed a great deal of social capital as a “reasonable voice”. Then, people are more likely to question their own assumptions, but it is still a risky act and must be rarely done.

This is one reason I argue intellectuals might be more likely than the public to defer acknowledging important but controversial truths—the cost to reasonableness may be too high.

I remember the taxonomy of the political coalitions back in my college classes, which were overlaid with the assumption that while we may see drifts here and there, the basic structure would remain. In a report, the Manhattan Institute cites one political science textbook from 1998 which details what were formerly considered the party distinctions: “lower-status people, those with less education, those with low incomes, recently immigration ethnic groups, racial minorities, and Catholics are more likely to vote Democratic. Higher status people, the college-educated, those with high incomes, whites of northern European stock, and Protestants are more likely to vote Republican.” 1

Which of those is still true? 

Working class districts are more likely to be represented by Republicans, as is less educated America in general. Meanwhile, the Democrats have captured the managerial class. The religious front is a tad more complicated, but there are still interesting deviations from the old pattern. Catholics can be said to be “divided” (depending on where the Latinos go), while mainline WASPs first left Christianity, and then shifted over to Blue.

Racial minorities remain broadly on the Left, but they appear to be headed over to the Reds too–remarkable given the extreme racial hostility that is alleged to be waiting for them there.

I’m not a pollster nor particularly interested in horse-race politics, but this issue in particular has fascinated me for years, as I began to feel this change on the ground. I started my “culture war” participation in an arena where the ideals of the Left theoretically clashed with its desire to be supportive of a maligned minority group. In reality, there was not much of a debate at all, and the hijab became a symbol of progressivism. Politically, this would make more sense if the minority group was powerful, or a even a long-standing of the coalition. But American Muslims were quite favorable towards the Republicans before 9/11, and outside of Michigan they wield limited power. At the very least, it was hypocritical for social progressives to treat Islam favorably while castigating conservative Christians for far lesser crimes. But over time, I began to realize that the stance towards Islam wasn’t pandering towards Muslims as a voting bloc–the reality of Islam did not matter, nor did the livelihoods of Muslims. 

The sensibilities being catered to instead belonged to educated white liberals who defined themselves by their tolerance towards groups disfavored by the majority. It was here where I first began to notice the incredible power of this bloc–although I continued to remain in denial for quite some time. (When I pictured “political dogmatism”, the picture in my mind was a purple-faced, sweaty man yelling from the pulpit of some mega-church, not the soft-spoken, kindly NPR listener. Eventually, I accepted that even the sandal-wearing can be politically powerful, oppressive even.)

I’m getting off track here, so I’ll jump to the short of it: I believe what we are seeing now is the extended fallout of the political “white flight”. When the educated whites began to shift from Red to Blue, their strengths in coordination, resources, and institution dominance forced everyone else to reconfigure. I suspect their abandonment of the Right was a necessary condition for the ascendency of Trump–their absence tacitly weakened the GOP establishment until it collapsed under the weight of the Trumpian challenge. 

I have some predictions as to how this might play out in the coming years, if indeed it is true that we are in the middle of a re-alignment. 

• Educated whites might make for nice neighbors, but they make for tyrannical political allies. The ideological exclusion will continue to foster an increasingly inhospitable climate for minorities and new immigrants, who are more religious and socially conservative. Meanwhile, the population decline of whites overall will make the threat of white bigotry less frightening, and so minorities (particularly the “underrepresented” sort) will continue to shift over to the Reds. 

• As a byproduct of the multi-polar nature of their new coalition, the GOP will become the party of ideological “innovation”. By this, I don’t mean to say it will necessarily innovate in a progressive direction–but simply that it will accept non-conformists and demand less ideological consistency than it had in the past because it must, which will make it attractive to society's “deviants”.  

• Meanwhile the Left, which has understood itself as the champions of the “marginalized”, will increasingly resort to relying on chosen identities as its legitimizing force, with transgenderism leading the way.

• God will be everywhere and nowhere. The atheists who hate Christianity will go to the Left, the atheists on the Right will go to church. 

It is interesting to think about what the reversal will do to the underlying ideologies that the parties hold–how will “conservatism” and “progressivism” transform? Where will the old-school liberals go? 

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This time the realization was prompted by my assumption that if/when the Blue team saw the cognitive degeneration of the President in a way that was undeniable, the bubble would pop. No one could deny the nakedness of the emperor, and this new shared consciousness would allow for something new to occur.

The savvy Blues would realize that the reality of his mental state had been deliberately kept from them by his handlers (whose identities can only be guessed), and that the legacy media institutions (which pride themselves on being the “check” against the government) covered for him. 

They would wonder how it could have happened—how the media and much of the Blue political class could have gaslit themselves and others on this existentially vital issue. If the President has one job, they would think, it is to be ready and willing to act in a crisis. Regardless of the correctness of his politics, this man clearly cannot do that, and this fact was kept from us for months, likely years. 

If the US was a company, there would be fury from shareholders and employees alike if it was revealed that the CEO was rapidly losing his cognitive abilities and the c-suite covered for him and lied about it for ages. But the US is not a corporation, and this is orders of magnitudes worse than a business scandal. It is a heinous and self-serving dereliction of duty—nearly treasonous.  

But as the title of this post suggests, the bubble has not popped. 

Yes, there are now calls from many for Biden to step down, but little introspection among anyone about how we could have gotten here to begin with. This means they are not to be trusted—they will not learn.

Those who have been keeping up with me know what I have to say about how this happened: The American left is deeply, dangerously isolated both ideologically and increasingly, socially. Despite the claims of right-wing culture warriors, modern cancellations have largely been a phenomenon of the left towards others dissenting liberals or leftists, and we are finally witnessing the consequences of this approach on the tribe as a whole: they have mutilated themselves. Having purged anyone capable of disagreement from their ranks, they are blind and helpless and likely to remain that way. 

I feel compelled to write about this issue, as I hope this is a unique opportunity to free ourselves from the corruption eating its way through our most vital institutions.

Unlike other “old-school” liberals, I do not think DEI is bad because it has gone “too far”. I think DEI is bad, period. Far from being “our strength”, the DEI version of diversity acts as a tax on institutions and degrades professional competency. In the social realm, it does even more damage: it crystallizes arbitrary divisions, fosters tokenism and implicit racism, while harming actual diversity. 

The following is the first of at least two essays on the topic. 

My hope is to convince well-intentioned liberals to see DEI for what it is, a blight on our social fabric, in the hopes that they will gain the courage to bury it.

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Last year, a remarkable (edit: and possibly bogus)1 statistic came out from an analysis by Bloomberg: In the course of 2021, 94% of new jobs in S&P 100 companies went to “people of color”.

The response was of surprise from across the political spectrum—while all expected the post-Floyd years to lead to an increase in minority hires, 94% seemed…quite high. Discriminatory, even. But outside of conservative spaces, there was no outrage, nor did this finding do much to change the ongoing narrative of minority oppression. 

It is hardly worth saying that in any other context, the Bloomberg analysis would be taken as a clear sign of a rotten state of affairs. It isn’t taken that way because our state is much worse than that: while no one attempts to defend the explicit racism in hiring decisions, hardly anyone worthy of note considers it all that fuss-worthy. Worse, if someone were to raise alarms about it, they would find that the castigation falls not on the racism, but on the character of the person attempting to draw attention to it, particularly if that person happens to be white.

Not that being a minority would spare you. Race-consciousness, evidently, means consciousness of the fact that there are some sorts of people who must not be sympathized with, whose interests are always malign, whose mistreatment cannot, by definition, be an injustice. To the students of history, it might be obvious that wherever injustice cannot even be named, it is likely to thrive. (94%!) But the first lesson of history is that no one learns any lessons from history. 

This is especially the case of people who claim to be granted authority from history itself. It is they who are most interested in circumventing the most significant lesson that our history can teach us: that treating people differently based on a characteristic out of their control is unjust.

They attempt, instead, to define the problem out of existence, which, alarmingly, appears to satisfy many. (One cannot help but wonder at the possibilities. “Robbery equals theft plus power!” I shriek at the shopkeeper as he fumbles to open his cash register. “Homicide equals murder plus power”, I plea to the judge, later.) More serious people might try to rationalize it–solemnly proclaiming a duty to make amends for a historical injustice, but they too play fast and loose with long-standing principles (“collective punishment”, for instance).

Despite the poor attempts at justification, it has worked.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be a surprise–there are good reasons this nation might feel as if it owes its minorities a leg up in the game. (I’ll spare you the lengthy throat-clearing here, let’s skip to the part where I’ve condemned the obvious, and we are clear about my good intentions. Or if it's easier, I can remind the reader that I am a Woman Of Color and ineligible for Klan membership.)  

But is it really “guilt” that’s driving it all? We are “guilt-tripped” regularly, sure–but does it work? Do we feel guilty, or do we feel that we have to feel guilty? Is the mechanism at work here a sense of true remorse, or is it social desirability? Are we compelled by the force of some argument–did careful reasoning lead the way? Or are we here precisely because it didn't—that we absorbed the consensus through our skin without bothering to check where it is taking us? 

I admit, I was in denial about the latter for a very long time. As a committed meritocrat, I believed in the competence of the system and the people who inhabited its highest rungs and moderated the national discourse. Few without skill, dedication, and intelligence can get through to the end of the meritocracy maze, and I reasoned that this means they deserve the prestige and power that goes along with it. As a matter of fact, I still think they deserve the acclaim (insofar as anyone does), and it would be outrageous to deny the intelligence of our ruling class.

But I wonder now whether that is enough. They have power, but can they wield it? Doesn’t leadership require courage and independence, too?  These days I think a lot about how the long, complicated meritocratic mazes bring along costs, too—getting to the end is easier if you are smarter, but also if you are compliant.  

“Just A Nudge”

Out of the many writings following the former President of Harvard’s ousting, my favorite was that of Bret Stephens in the New York Times, who clarified that the problem wasn’t Claudine Gay, but the environment that placed an unqualified woman into its most senior position.

“...The important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history. How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers…reach the pinnacle of American academia?”

Stephens wonders whether the toppling of the “model of excellence” by the “social justice model” is to blame, a process that may have begun as far back as the Bakke decision of the Supreme Court, which permitted race to be a factor in college admissions. 

But it did not have to be this way, says Stephens.

“...The problem with Bakke isn’t that it allowed diversity to be a consideration in admissions decisions. It’s that university administrators turned an allowance into a requirement…if affirmative action had been administered with a lighter hand — more nudge than mandate — it might have survived the court’s scrutiny last year.”

Stephens’ perspective is shared by many of my fellow liberals. They too believe that the problem with racial preferences is not in principle–a little bit of extra credit to minorities is a good thing, a sportsmanlike leg-up for the downtrodden. They see the value in the DEI complex, and would like it to be contained, not abolished. 

There is also a chorus of Jewish Americans who see the growth of antisemitism on campuses as a problem not originating in DEI, but rather, in faulty, misapplied DEI.

But they are wrong. There can be no such thing as “a little bit” of affirmative action–there are no stops on this train, as I will show. 

Instead, the institution of racial preferences kicks off an an ever-expanding feedback loop, which I am calling the “Spiral of Tokenism”.  I theorize that no matter how benevolent its intent, “positive” discrimination has a strong tendency to devolve into bald tokenism over time, and that the logic of that tokenism will reinforce itself, generating new justifications for “negative” racial prejudice.

Tokenism: Then and Now 

Tokenism was understood by civil rights activists as a practice of superficial inclusion of a tiny percentage of minorities for the sole purposes of demonstrating a lack of prejudice. The word was a useful description of a practice that provided cover for otherwise discriminatory institutions (the organizational equivalent of saying that one can’t be racist because they have a black friend), while putting an immense burden on the tokenized individual to act as a representative of their entire racial group. 

“Tokenism is hypocrisy. One little student in the University of Mississippi, that's hypocrisy. A handful of students in Little Rock, Arkansas, is hypocrisy. A couple of students going to school in Georgia is hypocrisy. Integration in America is hypocrisy in the rawest form. And the whole world can see it. All this little tokenism that is dangled in front of the Negro and then he's told, "See what we're doing for you, Tom." Why the whole world can see that this is nothing but hypocrisy. All you do is make your image worse; you don't make it better.”

Malcolm X, Michigan State University. 23 January 1963.

“But in the tradition of old guards, who would die rather than surrender, a new and hastily constructed roadblock has appeared in the form of planned and institutionalized tokenism. Many areas of the South are retreating to a position where they will permit a handful of Negroes to attend all-white schools or allow the employment in lily-white factories of one Negro to a thousand whites.”

MLK, NYT, Aug. 5, 1962

I argue that tokenism still exists, but does not look quite like it did in the Civil Rights Era. Modern tokenism reflects the changes brought upon since its inception: the passage of the Civil Rights Act, the broadscale acceptance of racial minorities in social life, the drastic expansion of incentive programs for minorities by both local and federal governments, and the subsequent entrenchment of DEI in administration. 

Today's tokenism is still, in large part, the “superficial inclusion” of minorities. The tokens are held “apart” from the rest–they are held to different standards of behavior, achievement and general competence. Although today’s tokens receive authoritative credentials and titles, they are still primarily valued as avatars for a “victimized” collective, and their “inclusion” is above all a display that is meant to speak well of the including group, not a vote of confidence in their individual competence and expertise. The closest thing to professional respect they may receive is a reverence for their “lived experience” as a member of a marginalized people, but even that can be rescinded if they refuse to see themselves in those terms. 

This means that decades after the passage of the rights revolutions of the 60s and 70s, women and minorities of various stripes are still denied equal dignity and worth as individuals, even as they gain considerable power as collectives.

For example, when an institution explicitly searches for and chooses a black woman for a prestigious position, the honor that is bestowed does not belong to her, nor can it. She may be the proximal beneficiary of the gesture, but it is ultimately directed to the collective to which she belongs. 

This is why there were numerous calls to replace Claudine Gay with another black woman. The honor was bestowed on Black Womanhood, the political category, not on the black woman herself. This illustrates one important sense in which modern tokenism is unlike its predecessor: far from being objected to as a sign of contempt and condescension, tokenism today is demanded by activists.

So the question is: how did this happen? How did tokenism go from being despised to being demanded by an expansive DEI complex?

The spiral begins with a flawed premise: the belief that “unbalanced” representation of any group is, in itself, evidence of prejudice or discrimination. 

For example, if an institution has no women in upper management, activists might claim this is sufficient evidence of the sexism of that institution. This sexism may be intentional, but it can also be “systemic”–arising from procedures and policies that are not intended to be sexist, but impact women differently than they do men. Similarly, if a field struggles to recruit numbers of a racial group in proportion to their numbers in the population broadly, then the activists will say that it is likely that this field is prejudicial towards the group. 

The most hysterical among them will go further–they will claim that there is only one possible other reason for disparities other than discrimination: biological “inferiority”. They then reason backwards: If one disagrees with the notion that discrimination is causing disparities, then one must be saying that the underrepresented group is “inferior” in that arena, which is the same as saying they have less worth as humans. In other words, if you do not want to be a racist/sexist/-phobe, the activists say, you must accept the discrimination explanation for the existence of disparities.  

So if you find yourself in a context without proportional representation, you must find that context (and yourself to the extent that you are related to it) guilty of discrimination and further, you must commit to addressing this disparity. Accepting this charge is like a plea bargain–you get off on a lighter sentence, in this case, of “unintentional” discrimination. But resisting the charge of discrimination, paradoxically, proves your racism. If you deny that the problem lies with you, then you are implying it lies with them, and then it's just a few more implications to full Klan membership, so it's best to just admit fault and receive the lighter sentence.

But then what? Given that the fault really doesn’t lie with you (as far as your lying, bigoted eyes can tell anyways), how can you fix what isn’t broken?  

Fortuitously, a solution is presented by the more enterprising activists: protection money an investment in various DEI initiatives. This solution works for the institutions–they can escape the worst of activist scrutiny, prove their ideological commitments, and (best of all) boost headcount of underrepresented populations by hiring them as DEI administrators. (The jobs aren’t crucial to the functioning of the organization, so the damage is minimal beyond the price tag.) Meanwhile, the activists can enjoy these well-paying but non-taxing jobs for which they are shoe-ins, and from which (to the eventual dismay of the institutions) they can amass even more leverage as in-house agitators. As DEI does nothing to correct for the causes of the disparity, it will always have a reason to stick around, and stick around it does.

In the next essay, I will explain why this shake-down scheme is, well, so hard to shake off, and later, explain why I worry that implicit racism is due for a comeback.

Its happening! A debate on the sexual revolution’s legacy, with myself and the musician Grimes against the author Louise Perry and Red Scare’s Anna Khachiyan—moderated by Bari Weiss.

Whatever you think of the topic, you have to admit, this lineup is sick. I’m excited (also nervous, I haven’t been on a stage since pre-COVID and I get terrible stage-fright).

The debate will be in L.A. on September 13th, hosted by The Free Press and FIRE—you can buy tickets here.

What do you guys think are my chances here? (Be 80-90% honest).

Dear Subscribers— 

I have an exciting announcement!

I’ll be debating the legacy of the sexual revolution with Grimes, Louise Perry, and Anna Khachiyan LIVE in L.A., with Bari Weiss as our moderator.

I haven’t been on a stage in a long time, so I admit to being a little nervous. If it wasn’t obvious (which I admit, it might not be),…

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But wait! What is the IBW?

WHAT:

To understand the IBW, you must first understand the context: Weird things are happening in the brown world. Old alliances are breaking….new, strange ones are taking shape. The former lines fell around religion: ex-Muslim vs. Muslim. But the new ones are responding to the broader shift in our politics, and might be better understood as woke browns vs. based browns.

The IBW is essentially a discussion group—four very different commentators from Muslim backgrounds, who meet to discuss the cultural issues of the day, and please note (because you really need to announce these things now that playfulness is dead) the name is a joke.

WHO:

Host:

• Razib Khan, population geneticist. Substack: Unsupervised Learning

Panelists: 

• Myself 

• Shadi Hamid: Senior Fellow at Brookings. Writes on his personal Substack and can also be found at Wisdom of Crowds. 

• Murtaza Hussain: Reporter at the Intercept, also writes on personal Substack.

Missed the first episode?

You might have, because I didn’t upload directly on this Substack. I’ve got it up now, you can find it here.

What do you guys think? What should the IBW discuss next?

Host:

• Razib Khan, population geneticist. Substack: Unsupervised Learning
  

Panelists: 

• Myself 

• Shadi Hamid: Senior Fellow at Brookings. Writes on his personal Substack and can also be found at Wisdom of Crowds. 

• Murtaza Hussain: Reporter at the Intercept, also writes on personal Substack.

You can also catch me making the same argument on the most recent episode of my podcast with Meghan Daum. Meghan thinks that “only women can stop this” (this meaning the various manifestations of wokeism—cancel culture, DEI complex, etc)—and I mostly agree, except that I think they almost certainly won’t. We have to reckon with the fact that this is a politics that suits (or at least exploits) female psychological disposition very well, and this means that we can expect to see a bias towards it everywhere women are in power. It is possible, but I think highly naive to imagine that the same group that is contributing to the growth of something will somehow turn it all around and lead the charge for its destruction.

As it is in our interest to keep women engaged and involved in society—we must get creative in terms of solutions. I think the first step is acknowledging that men and women are not the same, and that our institutions were created to suit the psychologies of men and not women, so it is likely that when women are introduced into the picture in large numbers, some of these institutions can begin to function abnormally—especially those whose “missions” involve practices that are uncomfortable for women. 

For example, a vast majority of the polling of student opinions of free speech that I am familiar with finds that female students are reliably more censorious than males, and have a stronger preference for “diversity and inclusion”. This matters, because women now make up a majority of students and and even bigger majority of graduates—which means that our future elite is going to become more and more female. 

If wokeism is simply a feminization of liberalism, then we cannot approach the problem as simply one of “bad ideas” that have to be “challenged”. Persuasion for the liberal side is going to get harder, not easier, as time goes on.

Bizarrely enough (for me, anyways!) I do see the faint glimmer of hope. In the past, I did not have a working theory as to why institution after institution “fell” to insipid woke-logic, I could not understand how so many seemed to have “found the light” of the new religion simultaneously. Now I think I am closer to a working model, with this being one of the more important legs, so that is some kind of progress. It is possible, in my mind, to create institutions with incentives that counteract natural tendencies of the people in them, or to work with those tendencies in a positive way—much like how capitalism can turn human selfishness into societal progress, if instituted correctly. 

So while “changing minds” sounds very nice to liberal sensibilities, the solution is probably going to involve changing systems.

A Special Place In Hell

Subway Masturbators and Radicalized Singles

Listen now (77 min) | This week: Why New York (continues) to suck, why we still don’t trust the news, and what might be turning our young singles into raving SJWs / far-right nationalists. Plus, Sarah’s theory blaming (who else?) #AllWomen for the corrosion of our institutions, at which point Meghan breaks character and defend female honor. Will women put a stop to this madn…

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3 years ago · 10 likes · Meghan Daum & Sarah Haider

Lastly, on a totally unrelated note, I’ve been looking into reading more social science published *prior to the 60s*, because it is my understanding that that is when it all went to hell. I would love recommendations, particularly esoteric ones!

That’s all for now. Happy Monday.

https://twitter.com/FordFischer/status/1666193308912164864?s=20

Similar scuffles are taking place in Canada, and around the world conservative Christians are locking arms with Muslims in their opposition to the inclusion of gender and orientation in classroom materials. Some are applauding this new brotherhood of Abraham, and hoping that this heralds a change in the winds.

https://twitter.com/TheRealKeean/status/1667192126235639808

I’ve been receiving some questions from followers and friends about all this, such as:

• Is this new coalition a “turning point” in the culture/gender war? 

• Will the parental outcry help progressives recognize that they might be pushing things too far?

• Will progressives instead recognize the socially conservative tendencies of Islam and correct their stance on the faith?
  

The short answer: No, no, and no. Sorry. The longer answer is more interesting, so I’ll get to it.

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“True Islam” is Intersectional Islam

It is true that Muslims have “energy” in a way Christians do not and progressives will have a tougher time opposing a “marginalized” group. Nevertheless, if a Muslim-Christian coalition emerges, it will make things broadly worse for most parties. 

It is worth remembering that in America, Muslims have no direct political power. Unlike European Muslims, ours are fewer in number and are more dispersed—nor do they have the finances to make up for it. American Muslims are also some of the most socially progressive in the world—which means that the Muslim parents will face opposition from within as well, most effectively from an archetype I have come to know well: the MINOs (Muslims in Name Only).

While it is commonplace to see nominal Christians disregard the majority of biblical teachings, this is a much more rare occurrence in the Muslim community and the stigma against it remains powerful. Therefore, these types are few in number—far fewer even than the population of ex-Muslims. 

But their numbers are irrelevant—the few MINOs that do exist are larger than life, as they are the literal poster kids for what I like to call “Intersectional Islam”. This Islam is a product of the West, more specifically, of the desires of elite white liberals.

In that sense, the Islam of the MINOs might be better understood as an “identity” rather than a religion—a kind of personal vibe, a stylistic choice. It leans strongly on visible markers of “otherness”—colorful ethnic clothing, the casual peppering of foreign words in everyday conversation (alongside exaggerated “correct” pronunciations), and instagram pictures of gorgeously prepared traditional food. Intersectional Islam provides the kind of diversity that educated liberals are comfortable with—all the “enriching” accouterments of cultural difference without any of the underlying ideas. MINOs don’t eat pork, but they do support #TransRights.

*Lest any of you get mad at me for using a real person as an illustration, I’d like to point out that the woman pictured above is a Rachel Dolezol-level faker. As a “progressive Muslim”, she swam in circles adjacent to mine, and from what I recall she seemed nice but personified multiple stupefying contradictions intersectionalities. (Yes, she’s a hijabi—by choice! And yes, she is also a proud gay woman—what of it, bigot?)… Meanwhile her multi-ethnic status (Latinx/Arab/South Asian) meant that she didn’t shy away from race either—even landing a senior position as a diversity officer at a major progressive nonprofit in large part due to her “lived experiences”. Unfortunately, her mom decided to rain on the rainbow parade by telling the truth: her daughter is a race-hoaxer (“white as the driven snow”), the revelations throwing all the other identities into doubt. 

If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion (“How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist”, etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between “their Islam” and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. “True Islam”, it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.

Muslims Get the Apostate Treatment

Muslims might be tempted to correct the record, to debunk MINO claims using evidence, legal histories, and scholarship, but they will find (as ex-Muslims know) that no one cares about the truth. When Reza Aslan claimed that “the first thing Muhammad did was outlaw slavery”, the blatant and easily disproved falsehood was uncritically accepted. This was in the time of ISIS and Aslan had said what everyone (including, mainstream Muslims) wanted to hear. When ex-Muslims attempted to expose the lie—to point out that all evidence incontrovertibly points to the fact that Muhammad was a slave owner himself—it was we who were kicked out of polite society. 

This is the future that lies ahead of Muslims who do not prescribe to the Islam the New York Times anoints. Their skin color might prevent them from facing the most direct fire, but they will find themselves instead made invisible: Regardless of how much they protest, they will not be heard outside of conservative circles. The media apparatus that couldn’t wait to hear from them when they might have served as sympathetic victims of random-attacks-of-MAGA will look straight through them. It is bad optics for white people to confront brown people, so they simply won’t acknowledge Muslims at all—focusing all their energies on the more palatable villains in their story: the white Christians. 

Meanwhile, the MINOs will be deployed to do the work that the whites cannot, and will begin to label those who object to progressive social values as “extremists”. It won’t matter if these “extremist” views are, in fact, widely held in the Muslim community (and thus not actually “extreme”—just deeply conservative relative to American norms). It has never mattered what Muslims actually believe—Islam has always served as a proxy for domestic squabbles. Muslims were too happy to overlook this when they were being valorized by the Left as noble savages, but now the bill is due. The cost of being idealized is that along with the imperfections, your humanity is stripped away too.

Muslims were never truly part of the Leftist fold. The inclusion was only of their idealized representation, a creation that both parties maintained through a mix of falsehoods and self-deception. It was a marriage of convenience, and like all such marriages, bound to turn sour eventually.

On a related note, a public statement signed by many Muslim scholars was released last month, the purpose of which seems to be to corral Muslims into a clear, unified position around LGBT issues and to serve as a point of reference for non-Muslims.

The statement makes clear that sexual relations within the same sex is an explicit sin in Islam, as is “imitating the appearance of the opposite gender”. In addition, Muslims may not “take pride in identifying with labels that categorize them by their sins”—#Pride is haram.

The statement also makes clear that there can be no “progress” on this issue as “...particular principles that are explicitly stated in revelation, known to be necessary elements of Islam, and unanimously agreed upon by qualified scholars are deemed immutable and not open to revision by any person or entity, including the highest religious authorities”. Attempts to reinterpret doctrine to be inclusive of LGBTQ affirmation are, therefore, “theologically indefensible”.

So far, no surprises for those familiar with doctrine.

Next comes the more interesting part, a plea to MINOs and other liberal Muslims who might be tempted in fashioning a more #Pride-inclusive Islam:

We urge Muslim public figures to uphold the sanctity of our faith and refrain from making erroneous pronouncements on behalf of Islam. We reject any attempt to attribute positions to Islam concerning sexual and gender ethics that contravene well-established Islamic teachings. To be clear, we cannot overstate the detrimental spiritual consequences for those who intentionally reject, advocate the rejection of, or misrepresent the will of God, as in doing so they endanger their status as believers (Quran, al-An‘ām: 21).

Sounds a little desperate to my ears—one imagines that if they really did have the authority they claimed, this would not need to be said. Other parts of the document addressed lawmakers and activists, referencing constitutionally-protected right of Muslims to practice their faith. In a profound reversal of the mode of operation for the last few decades, the scholars felt it important to remind the public that disagreement does not equal hate:

“As a religious minority that frequently experiences bigotry and exclusion, we reject the notion that moral disagreement amounts to intolerance or incitement of violence.”

I had figured that at some point Muslims would come around to this. The romance with the Left was bound to fizzle out, and the ideological gulf between the two would become apparent, and then they would need to fend off the charges of bigotry. Still, it is probably too much to hope that this new “ideas are not people” principle will be applied to the critiques of Islam, too. It is certainly not going to become popular in the parts of the world in which Muslims remain in charge—nor do I expect the American Muslim community to care.

I find that it is easiest to adopt high-minded civil libertarianism when one is in a position of weakness, so (reasoning backwards) we can surmise that if a group is newly adopting such principles, they are newly finding themselves in a vulnerable position. Boring old gays did not have as much moral authority as Muslims in the intersectional victimhood matrix, but the modern LGBTQ+ apparatus is a different beast altogether. If Muslims challenge it, they may lose. Another way of gauging power here is to notice which of the opposing groups can most easily weaponize the word “bigot”. Tellingly, the word “islamophobia” did not occur once in the above statement.

Another good quote before we wrap up: 

“Peaceful coexistence does not necessitate agreement, acceptance, affirmation, promotion, or celebration. We refuse the false choice between succumbing to social pressures to adopt views contrary to our beliefs or facing unfounded charges of bigotry. Such coercive ultimatums undermine prospects for harmonious coexistence.”

Well said, and on the face of it this feels like a mature take on ideological differences. Sadly, it isn’t really true.

Some amount of ideological agreement is required for coexistence—or at least, a coexistence worth having. The ultimate function of the culture war is to establish that shared ground—which is yet another reason why those who think culture war issues are meaningless couldn’t be more wrong.

If I had to guess of where this will go, say, three years from now, I would say that it is likely that Muslims will broadly re-join the conservative fold. The Left will abandon Muslims, who are no longer cooperating nor all that useful for signaling tolerance. Conservatives might begin loosening up their xenophobia, and provided terror attacks remain rare, they are unlikely to pick it up with the same intensity as before (against Muslims, at least).

Meanwhile, the religious alliance taking charge of the conversation will discourage secular critics of woke extremism from speaking out—polarizing the debate further. As several writers and commentators have pointed out, the lack of a British religious Right has made it easier for feminists in the UK to speak out against gender ideology. If the religious come storming in citing holy books instead of presenting arguments that can move anyone, the debate will be billed as one about belief vs. “science”—and this is bad news for secular critics of gender.

It is worse news for gays—the religious Right can’t/won’t tell the difference between gays and lesbians and gender ideology—and the Left is giving them no reason to make the distinction. The Left is utilizing the social capital of gays to provide cover for the more radical claims of genderists—hoping that the newly-won unpalatability of homophobia will bias people towards accepting the full LGBTQ+ umbrella. Meanwhile, the religious Right is attempting something of the reverse—using the insanity of gender activism to seed doubt about the gay rights movement too.

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Some of you know that I had a series of public letter exchanges with Ayaan Hirsi Ali about wokism in late 2020. We were approached by the founders of a (now defunct) site called letter.wiki to have a kind of long-form conversation, presumably about Islam.

But when Ayaan and I finally got a chance to discuss what was on our minds, both of us found that we were far more interested in discussing the rise of another ideology: wokism. Ayaan was surprised by my sense of dismay. I believed that the battle was already lost, but she did not agree. She was sure that liberalism could face the challenge ahead of us, but I felt that it had already proven itself too vulnerable to it.

As this disagreement felt far more interesting than any conversation about Islam, we decided to hash it out in the letter format.

However, since then the website was taken down and our exchange disappeared along with it. I asked one of the founders, Clyde Rathbone, if he could send me the text and Ayaan whether I could repost it on this substack. Both were very obliging, and so now our letters are back up, listed in order below. I have added in some titles (the originals did not have any), but other than that, the text is unchanged.

If you haven’t read them before, I think the best are #1-3 (especially, the 3rd if you want a detailed breakdown of my views).

Looking at them again today, I am feeling as if my pessimism was warranted. I will give you all a chance to read before I send along more detailed thoughts on our exchange.

What do you think? Was I right?

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Letter 1: My opening to Ayaan

Letter 2 - Ayaan: “As long as there are true liberals out there, I do not think the woke are anywhere near any kind of victory”

Letter 3 - Sarah: “…Wokeism is deeply satisfying to our baser instincts….by contrast, liberalism flies in the face of human nature.”

Letter 4 - Ayaan: “What is baked into modernity is self-perpetuating, not self-destructive."

Letter 5 - Sarah: “…The woke faith will bend logic before it will bend its dogma”

~ S

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27 Dec '20

Dear Ayaan,

Yes, as you summed up so succinctly, if we want to go to Mars it will not be the theories of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi that will get us there.

There is something supremely grand, even magical, about space exploration. It is an endeavor so large that one cannot help but experience a diminishing of the ego. Yet wokeism does not look outward at the vast, unknown universe, but pulls its gaze firmly inward. It has an element of provincialism, which is as troubling as it is illusory.

One gains favor among the woke not for discovering some truth about the universe, but for discovering “truths” that are personal, subjective. Our media is routinely peppered with ceremonious unmaskings of some public figure’s “true self” and with confessions of deep, personal traumas. This self-indulgence is handsomely rewarded, as it confers the right identity label or “lived experience” that qualifies one to speak above the rest. 

Far from seeking liberation from immutable characteristics like race or sex, these now serve as a form of authority. Unsurprisingly, hyper-specific identity labels are now displayed with pride where one might have once placed accomplishments or interests. From this self-indulgent, confined vantage point, it is no surprise that sloppy scholarship follows.

Take, for example, the New York Times’ 1619 Project. As I read through the articles, I couldn’t help but notice the narrow scope of their study. How can they understand America or racism, I wondered, if the only racism they examine is the American variety, and the only history they consider is that of America? How would their logic fare if applied to the broader world? If America’s “true founding” was the date we brought slaves to these shores, then what are the true foundings of all other nations on earth, the majority of which have histories marred by slavery, sometimes of a sort far more grotesque?

Of course, America is far from perfect and I agree, of course, that we should aim our scrutiny on our own country first. But I contest the idea that there is a unique, unredeemable evil here that does not exist anywhere else. I also contest the idea that we can learn something about humanity and human nature by fixating solely on a single small aspect of it. Many have criticized Americans for our provincialism—our lack of interest in understanding the outside world. It is somewhat ironic that in that sense, the writers of the 1619 Project (and the woke more generally) are quintessentially American.

Far from getting us to Mars, this tendency is unlikely to get us closer even to social justice here on Earth. How can we hope to find solutions to injustice without first gaining an accurate understanding of its nature, form and origin? And is it possible for this knowledge to be accurately gained without rigorous debate that questions even the most sacred fundamentals?

Too often, the woke dismiss debate altogether, refusing even to entertain the idea that one may share a common goal without also sharing their beliefs as to which methods will achieve it.

Most damningly, they refuse to engage with reality when it contradicts what their faith requires them to believe. Take, for example, the absurd conclusion reached by New York Times columnist Charles Blow after the election exit polls appeared to indicate that minorities and LGBT Americans voted in greater numbers for Donald Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016. Did the rise in minority votes for Trump inspire Blow to re-examine whether race was as relevant a factor in voting as he imagined? Did he consider that it might indicate that Trump support may be a phenomenon he does not entirely understand? No.

“All of this to me points to the power of the white patriarchy and the coattail it has of those who depend on it or aspire to it,” Blow concluded. “It reaches across gender and sexual orientation and even race.”

When an exclusively racialist ideology such as white supremacy appears to be “reaching across” race itself, it may be time to reconsider one’s assumptions. But the woke faith will bend logic before it will bend its dogma.

In my last letter, I shared some thoughts on how wokeism has managed to become so pervasive. Let me add another element that leaves us vulnerable to its rapid spread: our prosperity—indeed, our privilege.

Far from taking America for granted, I, like you, was not born in this country and never imagined it to be my birthright. Despite spending most of my life here, I received my citizenship only a few years ago and the prospect of a possible future in a third world country—one of the very worst for women—was never far from my mind. For me, it has been impossible to forget all that is remarkable about America: the genius of her constitution, the endless opportunity she offers, the strength of her people.

So I wonder if perhaps what we are seeing is not an outright rejection of liberal, Enlightenment values, but a symptom of deep ignorance and privilege—an inability to comprehend the value of something many here have never lived without.

As John Stuart Mill explained, when a doctrine has been accepted so widely that the people have generally inherited, rather than adopted it, it begins an inevitable decline. Converts bring with them a zeal, but also an intimate understanding of the merits and pitfalls of both the ideology they left behind and that which they have adopted. Their beliefs were formed actively, by wrestling with objections and rebuttals. Those who have inherited the values that shape their lives may never have done this work, and thus may be far more susceptible to the simplest persuasion and emotional appeals.

“The fatal tendency of mankind to leave off thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful is the cause of half their errors,” wrote Mill. But if our success really is to blame, then we have cause for hope. It is possible that the challenge posed by the woke will serve to invigorate us, to wake us out of what Mill calls “the deep slumber of a decided opinion.” And that awakening—or shall I say awokening?—cannot happen a moment too soon.

Thank you again for sharing your time and insight with me in this exchange. I have learned, and hope to continue to learn, a great deal from you.

Best,
Sarah

Check out the full list of letters between me and Ayaan, here.

~ S

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11 Nov '20


Dear Sarah,

I admire you for what you see and for your will to fight back (or as you said in your first letter, to rebel) against the “woke” trends that seem to dominate. I agree: the dangers are real and growing, but I still have hope for our future. 

I maintain optimism that our institutions, born more than 230 years ago, continue to function, regardless of how mean, abusive, alarming, and pervasive the woke are—not to mention the alt-right with their conspiracy theories. Our institutions are being assaulted from every side but they continue to work. The levees have not yet broken. 

As you pointed out, a number of educational, media, grant-making and non-profit institutions, in addition to many large corporations, have succumbed to wokeism, but they have not all been captured. In Europe, the situation differs from country to country, with many actively opposing these trends. In the U.S., those skeptical of radical “wokeism” still have the Supreme Court, a majority of state legislatures, one Chamber of Congress, and, under the current administration, a White House that has taken an active stand against racially divisive wokeism. If, as now appears likely, there will be a transition to a Biden Administration, he and his allies in the Democratic party will have to find a way to resist the woke wing of the party or they will be unable to achieve anything.  

As we’ve seen this past week, there are always seats up for election and the American people continue to decide our fate, with the ability to move legislators in and out of power every six years in the U.S. Senate, every two years in the U.S. House, every four years in the White House. In addition to these high-profile positions, American citizens also vote at the state and local level on everything from circuit clerks, to judges, to sheriffs, auditors, and more. There is a genius in this design, in which so many thousands of people are elected. It creates not just one level of checks and balances, but multiple levels and layers. We always can come back from the brink.

There was a brilliance, as well, in allowing the people to determine their own future in a decentralized manner. Citizens’ decisions do not come from any centralized bureaucracy that dictates to them how to proceed; citizens decide for themselves and choose who they want.

This also requires the electorate to pay attention to civic affairs and get involved in monitoring carefully what exactly is being done in their name by office holders and legislators. The U.S. election results last week tell me that Americans are paying attention. They retaliated against the woke. Contrary to polling predictions, there was no “blue wave.” The self-styled progressives and democratic socialists—whose candidates fared dismally in House races—will not be able to ram through their radical policies. As seen in countless American elections, extremism, whether coming from the left or the right, is rejected. 

This all makes me optimistic about our country and future. In your letter, you correctly stated that “liberalism might ultimately be good, but it doesn’t feel good.” I believe the American people, so far, have proved that they have a genuine preference for the center ground. 

Feelings and sensations are illusory. They pass, but they can indeed leave a serious mark. We’ve seen countries in the past suffer from spasms of violence and revolutionary fervor. Such outbreaks come and go. The Soviet Union ultimately fell; the Axis powers were defeated by the Allies; Pol Pot was overthrown within just four years; ISIS was defeated in under six years. These systems do not last. 

The sentiments of primitive romanticism (a term coined by my late friend Roger Sandall) may be tempting to some, but modernity precludes certain core principles from being tossed out in favor of emotional impulses. No matter how woke or romantic you are, civil engineering is required to uphold the modern world, meaning that 2+2 can never equal 5. You have to keep planes in the air. You have to hold bridges up. You have to keep sewage systems, nuclear power plants, dams, trains, and all of the luxuries of our modern age running. These achievements rely on scientific facts that are what they are, no matter what the woke may think of their epistemic foundations. We cannot unknow what we know. 

What is baked into modernity is self-perpetuating, not self-destructive. Many young people may have their hearts and minds captured for now, but the facts of physics and mathematics will remain what they are even if their detractors insist these fields must go “woke” (the controversy surrounding mathematician Abigail Thompson shows these fields are not immune from ideological pressures). Sooner or later, these young revolutionaries do have to realize that, for real progress to be made, they will need to base policies on objective realities. If they want to go to Mars one day, it is not the theories of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi that are going to get them there. 

Warmly,

Ayaan 

Read the fifth and final letter, here, or check out the full list, here.

~ S

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22 Oct '20

Dear Ayaan, 

Thank you so much for your response. I am heartened by your optimism, but I must admit, I remain unconvinced. 

 I am not a cynic, and I have not given up. However, in order to effectively combat this foe, we must understand what we face, and strategize accordingly. I fear we underestimate our opposition, and overestimate our strengths.

I agree that wokeism is NOT an intellectually compelling ideology. In fact, it may not even be coherent enough to be classed as an ideology. The circular logic, appeals to the absolute authority of “identity” and privileging of “lived experience” over objective analysis are all feints, not arguments. The woke exploit the therapeutic language of “harm,” “safety” and “trauma” to disqualify discussion participants, heckle speakers and cancel events—ending rational debate before it begins. 

Their ludicrous prose, of which you offered such a ghastly example, is perhaps intentionally opaque. As Orwell recognized, “avoidably ugly” jargon, far from clarifying one’s thinking, performs “the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.” It limits discourse, discourages reflection and flattens thought before it can even occur. 

Additionally, wokeism shape-shifts at a dizzying rate: correct behavior today can become an outrage tomorrow. Perhaps there is no meaning to be found—no center around which this force moves. What are “woke values” that are not also progressive values?

Wokeism is, perhaps, an anti-ideology—a will to power that can be identified not by what it values or the future it envisions, but by what it seeks to destroy and the power it demands. This makes it especially disastrous. For, when an existing organizing structure is destroyed with no replacement, a more brutal force can exploit the resulting power vacuum. In Iraq, the defeat of Saddam paved the way for ISIS. In Iran, naive socialists helped overthrow the authoritarian power, hoping to create a more just world—instead, the Ayatollah took charge and promptly executed and jailed his former allies. Once liberal institutions have been delegitimized by the woke, what will replace them?

But while its philosophy is empty, the psychology of wokeism is deeply satisfying to our baser instincts. For the vicious, there is a thrill in playing the righteous inquisitor, in mobbing heretics and demanding deference—brutal tactics that keep the rest of us in line, lest we be targeted next. Meanwhile, the strict social hierarchies of the woke are reassuringly simple to navigate: one always knows one’s place. 

By contrast, liberalism flies in the face of human nature. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is a phrase so often repeated that we have forgotten how deeply counterintuitive it is. We want to punch the Nazi (or gag him), not defend his right to march. 

Liberalism might ultimately be good, but it doesn’t feel good. And this is why it may find itself vulnerable to public abandonment, especially in times where it is most necessary. In addition, with the rise of an authoritarian power in China, liberalism is meeting an existential challenge on the global stage. 

As you note, 

Islam has mounted a partly successful resistance to all these ideas for centuries, at the price of impoverishing Muslim-majority societies around the world

This was possible partly because Islam is more intuitive than liberalism, more satisfying to our primal urges. This is an advantage wokeism shares. 

You rightly point out that liberalism has formidable champions in Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling. Yet Hitchens is gone and all the others are over fifty. Likewise, this summer, when I co-signed an open letter in defense of free debate, I was disconcerted to see how few of the other signatories were even close to my age. 

Bari Weiss recently noted that:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.

This has been my experience, too. Woke adherence can be predicted by generation—where true liberals exist, they exist primarily among the old guard. If the woke have won over the young, they have captured the future. 

And it is undeniable that indeed they have—particularly the highly educated young: the future elite. Universities have become places where ideas are suppressed and the driving force behind this is not authoritarian administrators, but authoritarian students.

Are all young people bamboozled by wokeism? No. Most people of all ages are well-meaning conformists: they would like to do good in the world, but also want to avoid social opprobrium, whenever possible. 

Conformists, however, can illuminate power dynamics in our social environments. If this battle does not yet have a victor, then the conformists will remain passive. If, however, the conformists act, we can follow their direction to find where the real power lies. 

As Nassim Taleb has pointed out, a sufficiently intolerant minority can wield immense social influence. Like religious zealots, the woke infuse their language with morality, creating a powerful pressure to conform, and encourage social policing, shaming and shunning tactics that discourage dissent. Defying them can jeopardize your professional reputation and even your livelihood.

By their repeated capitulations, the conformists (including world-famous movie stars, corporate executives, and heads of influential magazines) have crowned a victor: the woke. 

So how can we fight this?

Instead of aiming our efforts on those already captured by wokeism, perhaps we should focus on the next generation, whose values are still in active formation, who will relish standing up to the empire of the woke as a function of youthful idealism.

In my work with ex-Muslims, we persuade curious, intelligent young people to stand up against the religious totalism that has destroyed so much of the Muslim world.

When I began my activism, even the word “ex-Muslim” was a rare sight. Now, there is a growing movement of young people happily adopting that label, addressing Islam critically with their peers and religious authorities. So extraordinary has been our success that the religious are now hosting conferences and workshops on the “problem” of rapidly growing atheism. We must employ a similar strategy against wokeism.

Jordan Peterson’s approach provides a good model. Though I have reservations about his specific message, he addressed the anxieties of young people and guided them through the culture war skirmishes. We must do the same.

We must counter the messages they receive at school and from their peers and from our media and cultural institutions. And we must educate them on the value of liberalism.

Thank you again for your letter. I welcome your thoughts on the path forward.

Sincerely,
Sarah

Read Ayaan’s response here, or find the full list of our letters, here.