The Death of Socrates

Illiberalism is primarily about government action, about what people can force you to say and do or prohibit you from saying and doing, using the power of the state. But beyond that, and supporting that, there is a culture of illiberalism. For people to get to the point where they think they can send armed officers to shut you down or shut you up, they have to accept some form of puritanical doctrine that creates an extensive and ever-growing list of things that are supposedly so outrageous they cannot be tolerated.

Part of Symposium’s defense of a free society is to identify and push back against this culture of illiberalism, no matter where it comes from. Here are a few examples.

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The standard template for a big feature article in Quillette goes something like this: “I’m an academic, and I wrote or said something totally sensible, and an online or campus mob tried to get me fired.” It’s a formula, sure, but it work because it keeps on happening.

Here’s the latest: MIT philosophy professor Alex Byrne attempted to bring his discipline to bear on the question, “What is a woman?” The result is what you might have predicted: a series of incidents in which journal articles and eventually a book were derailed by protests and denunciations from other academics.

The whole thing gets into a lot of petty details about academic publishing, so I’ll just quote one part of Byrne’s story.

In June 2022, I heard back from the editors of the Handbook of Applied Philosophy of Language. My chapter [on pronouns] would not be appearing in it after all; no revisions allowed. (Revisions would plainly not have satisfied the senior philosopher who threatened a boycott.) Lepore apologized, and I could hardly blame him—I have taken the primrose path of least resistance myself before. Subsequently, a replacement chapter on pronouns was commissioned. This turned out to be a fine piece in many respects, but (unlike mine) it ignored any feminist heretics, who didn’t even make an appearance in the bibliography.

The conclusions of the new chapter were congenial to the prevailing ideology in feminist philosophy. “He” for Elliot Page is not a simple courtesy, but just as correct as “he” for Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is because, according to the authors, “he” does not presuppose that the person is male; rather (simplifying a bit), “he” presupposes that the person is a man. And, according to the authors—as if no one had ever dreamed of denying it—Elliot Page is a man. Never mind whether this is correct; what was disappointing was the pretense that it is beyond dispute. In science, authors should be required “to reveal rather than hide controversies, for example to accurately describe well-argued alternatives to views promoted”; the same goes for philosophy.

Byrne goes on to describe the main reason I didn’t end up in academia.

Academics—as is sometimes observed—are selected for conformity. (I used to think that philosophy was an exception to this rule, but not anymore.) Brazen unprofessionalism is permitted, even encouraged—provided it’s from those with the “correct” opinions. Junior academics and graduate students soon learn what they are not allowed to say.

But it’s his introductory observation that I find more interesting.

These very public cancellations, in philosophy and elsewhere, understandably grab all the attention. But they aren’t particularly frequent, which gives the impression that academic life chugs along as it should for long periods between outbreaks of intolerance. This essay is about why that impression is wrong. A kind of philosophical cold war prevails during peacetime, stifling debate and memory-holing inconvenient views. I cannot speak for other disciplines, but the fact that this happens in philosophy, with its traditional encouragement of gadflies and skeptics, bodes ill for the academy in general.

Byrne talks about how DesCartes began his Meditations by entertaining a radical skepticism, questioning every belief he has, even the most seemingly self-evident. But I would cite a different philosopher. Socrates launched philosophy as a distinct discipline by going around Athens asking his fellow citizens probing and uncomfortable questions about the meaning of ordinary concepts, like “truth” or “justice,” that they had taken for granted—and he made a habit of not uncritically accepting the vague and conventional answers.

This is the original task of philosophy, and it is also what got Socrates literally cancelled. In our own era, we are committing, albeit in a last drastic way, the same sin against philosophy.

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By now, some will notice a familiar pattern for pieces like this in Symposium, in which I review recent stories about the fate and prospects of liberalism. I start by describing an illiberal trend originating from the left, then I immediately go on to write about an illiberal attack from the right. Since some of you will criticize me for this, sure, I’ll throw you a bone and direct you to one more piece about something bad from the left.

With his usual artistry, George Will dissects one of the latest excesses of woke word policing.

At Stanford, a full-service, broad-spectrum educational institution, an “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative” several months ago listed words to avoid lest they make someone feel sad, unsafe, disrespected or something. Problematic words include “American,” which suggests that America (this column enjoys being transgressive) is the most important country in North and South America. The list was quickly drenched by an acid rain of derision, and Stanford distanced itself from itself: The university’s chief information officer said the list was not a mandate. The list warns against using the “culturally appropriative” word “chief” about any “non-indigenous person.”

I found this part about “chief” particularly amusing, since it is not a Native American word. It’s derived from Latin by way of Old French and was applied by European settlers to the leaders of the native communities they encountered. But such linguistic folly is par for the course here, and Will concludes optimistically that “wokeness is being shrunk by the solvent of the laughter it provokes.”

I’m not as sure about that. I think we’ve turned a corner, but this current iteration of the culture war is far from over, because beneath it are some very big and enduring incentives.

The emphasis on word-policing reveals one of those incentives. Tell a bunch of intellectuals that to change the world, they have to do something—organize people, draft new laws, or god forbid build something—and they will be at a loss. But tell them that they can be heroes of human progress just by altering the definitions of words, and this is something they can do. Word-policing is such an intoxicating substitute for persuasion or action that I don’t expect the intelligentsia to give up on it easily.

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Now it is time to examine the right’s own attempts at policing wrongthink. (Look, if you don’t want me to both-sides these issues, then you’re going to have to stop your side from trying stuff like this.)

One of the reasons both sides are bad is that basic principles, once established in a culture, tend to work their way across the superficial dividing lines we initially set for them. It is tempting to adopt an illiberal principle but say that you are only doing it as a narrow exception, that there is one issue so important you need to impose controls, but no one should worry because that principle won’t be applied to anything else. Until someone comes along and turns your exception into a precedent.

For example, you can propose a law banning drag shows with minors in attendance, on the grounds that you want to protect children from sexualized performances. These days, that seems a bit like closing the barn door after the horse has gotten out, but sure, you can try. But you have to word such a ban in a broad and vague way that will have applications you did not anticipate, like this one.

Parents are divided after they were notified about the cancelation of an upcoming field trip to see a performance of “James and the Giant Peach.”

The school said it was due to the age-appropriateness of the performance….

Thomas told ABC13 this may have started during the public comment portion of a recent school board meeting. She said a parent shared her concern about the actors playing multiple roles that were both male and female, saying it’s drag.

Men playing women’s roles has a very long history in the theater going back to Shakespeare and before, particularly in small theater companies where actors have to play multiple roles. In fact, there was a time it was considered morally scandalous not to have men playing women’s roles.

But now we get the irony of conservatives who complained about the “woke” Bowdlerization of Roald Dahl doing their own cancellation of Dahl’s work. This is what happens when you have a moral panic. It doesn’t end with the reasonable cases and quickly moves on to the unreasonable ones.

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The Putin regime in Russia, which is very far ahead of the American right on this, has taken one of the next steps. A ban on “gay propaganda” that was supposed to apply only to children has now been applied to adults, leading the Bolshoi to cancel a ballet devoted to the life of one of its most famous alums, Rudolf Nureyev.

In America, we’re still pretending that this is only about schools. Yet even here, it is not proving as popular an issue as the right had hoped. Buoyed by popular dislike for “wokeness,” Republicans have been backing school board candidates devoted to their own culture-war agenda—and losing. It is almost as if parents don’t want their kids’ schools to be an ideological battleground in one direction or another.

Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis has already committed to this anti-woke crusade as the centerpiece of his political ambitions. But it has drawn him into a squid-and-the-whale conflict with one of his state’s major employers, the Walt Disney Company.

It began when the company’s former CEO opposed the passage of the state’s aptly dubbed Don’t Say Gay law, a broadly worded ban on discussion of homosexuality in Florida public schools. This led DeSantis to pursue a program of retaliation against Disney that has since reached a bizarre level of obsession.

Most recently, DeSantis threatened to build a prison near Disney World—a move guaranteed to be popular with parents, I am sure. This was after his big move to control the Mouse failed. DeSantis proposed, and the Florida legislature passed, a measure that eliminated the special governmental district that provides the Disney theme park with its water and sewers and other basic services, and the governor replaced it with a new board appointed personally by him. This was supposed to make Disney World hostage to the governor’s political agenda, since he could in effect cut off their essential services with a word to his cronies on the board.

But Disney quietly undercut DeSantis by having the outgoing district council vote to transfer virtually all of its operations to Disney for the foreseeable future. This was all done above-board in public meetings—yet somehow DeSantis didn’t find out about it until his board took over and found out they had won control of nothing.

DeSantis has vowed to nullify the outgoing board’s decision, but it is very doubtful whether he has the power to do so. More to the point, this pushes the action from the legislature, where DeSantis enjoys the support of a majority, to the courts—where Disney has an army of lawyers with a fearsome reputation.

The whole thing is turning into a legal quagmire for DeSantis.

On Wednesday, Mr. DeSantis’s new board voted to declare void those last-minute agreements. Disney then sued Mr. DeSantis, members of his new board and other officials in federal court. The lawsuit alleges the Republican governor was conducting a “targeted campaign of government retaliation.”…

On Wednesday, the Florida Senate passed a land-use bill with an amendment that would cancel the February land development approvals and other agreements. An identical amendment is advancing in the House and expected to pass. If it is signed into law, the move is almost certain to face an immediate legal challenge, lawmakers and legal experts said. 

“The amendment is unconstitutional on its face,” said Mr. Brandes, the Republican former state legislator. “My sense is, this is coming from the governor having been totally caught off guard and the recognition that he looks bad, like he’s not winning, so now he’s totally out for vengeance.”

The governor’s war on Disney is looking obsessive, but you can understand the imperative behind it. He has tried to position himself, especially in contrast to fellow Florida Man Donald Trump, as someone who fights the left, not just rhetorically, but with substantive action. So he has to look like he is winning this fight. But it is not a fight he can win, if Disney chooses to fight back, so his actions look increasingly desperate and impotent.

But here’s the dilemma for DeSantis: The harder he fights Disney, the more he makes it a political priority, the more likely he will lose in the courts. The reason is that he has been busy boasting that his fight against Disney is political retaliation—which is precisely their case against him.

When the Walt Disney Co. went looking for evidence to feature in its new lawsuit against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, its lawyers found much of what they needed in DeSantis’s own recently published memoir….

Memoirs by presidential aspirants often lay out a blueprint for their coming candidacies. DeSantis’s does, too. It boasts extensively about his war on Disney to advertise how he would marshal the powers of the presidency against so-called woke elites.

Disney’s lawsuit cites exactly these passages. DeSantis—who signed a law taking control of Disney’s special self-governing district, and moved to nullify the company’s efforts to work around it—repeatedly flouts the truth: These were retaliation against Disney for opposing his “don’t say gay” law limiting classroom discussion of sex and gender….

This is unusual, says Scott Wilkens, senior counsel at the Knight First Amendment Institute. In such lawsuits, Wilkens notes, you “often have to make inferences” about the motives driving government officials.

You can see the Catch-22. For his political purposes, DeSantis needs to boast that he is engaged in political retaliation against Disney. But legally, this makes his efforts against the company far more likely to fail, which will defeat his political purpose.

Here we see the more benevolent impact of the universal nature of principles. To make his actions consistent with a constitutional system and the rule of law, DeSantis must be able to argue that he is applying one principle equally to everyone, regardless of his political interests. Yet this is the opposite of his actual political goal.

The illiberal motive behind DeSantis’s war on Disney is precisely what is likely to cause it to be rejected by the legal system of a free society.