Boring Radicals

One tragedy of my generation's views coming from social media

Edit: apparently some of the views I described as radical are pretty mainstream. About a third of Americans think that Israel is committing a genocide, for instance.

I have a good friend who is a staunch critic of Israel. He’s studied the topic quite extensively—his view is about as anti-Israel as one can get without supporting the eradication of Israel. He thinks Israel has been engaged in repeated horrifying human rights abuses for nearly a century, that Israel has been the primary impediment to peace, that Israel is a force for immense evil in the world. And yet unlike most critics of Israel—or most people for that matter—he really knows his stuff. He can get into the weeds in regards to whether Israel unjustly acted in the 2000 Camp David Accords and has encyclopedic knowledge of the various Israeli military operations and their alleged immorality. He could effortlessly run circles around the vast majority of Israeli supporters.

I was recently thinking about just how rare that is among the anti-Israel crowd. It’s very common for people to allege that Israel is carrying out a genocide or ethnic cleansing, that it’s an apartheid state, without having the faintest awareness of the standard counterarguments or even what those terms mean. On TV, when one sees arguments about Israel, there’s extensive haggling over the details—whether, for instance, the Arab states have been repeated impediments to peace. Yet in the talks common among my generation, those arguments are absent, subsumed by vacuous bluster.

In the old days, when one expressed radical views on some topic, they actually had to know their stuff. When one gets their views from reading the news, books, or even watching long-form movies or videos, they inevitably hear the counterarguments and have something to say about them. They won’t always be experts, but it’s at least somewhat common for one who gets radical views from one of these mediums to have something significant to say on the various topics.

Yet with my generation, that is changing. My generation is largely getting their news from a sparse selection of 30-second video clips that are sufficiently engaging to get one’s attention, so that they don’t keep scrolling. These clips come from social media. The endless mirage of images, quickly flashing on the screen, leaves one with strong feelings about an issue but little information.

Many who are opposed to Israel, for example, are opposed largely as a consequence of many short video clips they saw showing injured or dead children as a result of the Israeli war. This is effective as a tool of propaganda but not for informing people. As a result, my generation is filled with those who shout “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” without having any idea what it means, or which river or sea they’re even talking about. It’s filled with those who accuse Israel of genocide or being an apartheid state without having looked at the evidence at all.

Think what you want about whether these people are right—they are boring. They have strong views subject to quite minimal reflection. They are willing to make bombastic and controversial claims without having looked into them at all. And this is sad!

I like having a world filled with radicals—willing to assert quite extreme positions. When I say extreme here, I’m not making a judgment about their correctness, merely about their being quite out of the mainstream. The world is more interesting and lively when people’s political views aren’t a homogenous blob of whatever happens to fall within mainstream opinion. When people are willing to express controversial views, it encourages people to be reflective and humble.

But it’s only interesting when people’s evidence is commensurate with the claims that they make. I remember many years ago, prior to the dawn of social media, chatting with a communist. And it was interesting! He seemed to know his stuff and had things to say that were genuinely thought-provoking—about, for instance, the calculation problem. They weren’t convincing, but they were at least interesting.

Yet since the dawn of social media, that has faded. Social media has caused people to spend more time shaming others for their views and vacuously signaling their moral superiority based on their radical views. As a result, my generation is filled with those who support abolishing the police, who haven’t spent 5 seconds considering what would be done, were the police to be abolished, with those who commit heinous crimes. They commit to an extremely radical position without stopping to pause, for 5 seconds, to consider the most obvious objection in the universe to such a position.

Some groups still have interesting radicals. If you ask, for example, the small population of monarchists what they make of the basic arguments for Democracy, none of them will say “Gee, I’ve never thought about that.” Monarchy isn’t sexy, there’s no social pressure to educate oneself on the glories of monarchy or to become a monarchist, so as a result, people only do so if they’re informed. Those who, like me, think factory farming is the worst crime in history tend to have lots of arguments in support of that view. And, of course, in every group, there are some interesting radicals.

But the interesting radicals are becoming less common. Radicalism has been submerged by the blob of generic left-wing politics, and as a consequence, the radicals have become boring and ignorant. I long for the days when the radical left-wingers will come with a Chomsky-esque binder of 10 trillion footnotes, rather than being almost wholly ignorant of the topics on which they express radical views.