The Structure of Social Justice Revolutions

Kuhn accurately describes shifting social justice mores in his discussion of scientific revolutions; this also explains insanity in debate

I’m currently reading Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions. It’s quite a fascinating read. Kuhn is arguing against a simple view, according to which science progresses by the mere accumulation of more facts, which come about from scientists discovering more data, as they go on a semi-random search for new information. Kuhn argues convincingly that scientists have a paradigm—a broad lens through which they see the world—and this shapes what evidence they gather and what views are even on the table. Scott Alexander summarizes the thesis of the book excellently:

Science isn’t just facts. It’s paradigms – whole ways of looking at the world. Without a paradigm, scientists wouldn’t know what facts to gather, how to collect them, or what to do with them once they had them. With a paradigm, scientists gather and process facts in the ways the paradigm suggests (“normal science”). Eventually, this process runs into a hitch – apparent contradictions, or things that don’t quite fit predictions, or just a giant ugly mess of epicycles. Some genius develops a new paradigm (“paradigm shift” or “scientific revolution”). Then the process begins again. Facts can be accumulated within a paradigm. And many of the facts accumulated in one paradigm can survive, with only slight translation effort, into a new paradigm. But scientific progress is the story of one relatively-successful and genuinely-scientific effort giving way to a different and contradictory relatively-successful and genuinely-scientific effort. It’s the story of scientists constantly tossing out one another’s work and beginning anew.

But I think you’d expect science to be the field roughly least likely to be influenced by the paradigmatic assumptions. Sure, there is a paradigm and it will affect what evidence people gather and what theories are on the table—no one would accept theories that explain events in terms of the holiness of various particles, even if they explained the data well. But in science, there is an external world that one is measuring, and no matter how elegant the theory is, if it contradicts the data, it will be discarded. This is the reason that science progresses much more than other fields do—it’s less influenced by our assumptions and more dependent on the objective, measurable facts.

But Kuhn’s book is really convincing. Reading him is a bit like reading Chomsky; he’ll make some somewhat controversial claim, and then back it up with a ferocious wall of evidence, such that after a few pages of this, the specific facts sort of blur together and you’re just left with a general impression that his view has been thoroughly and conclusively established. It’s possible that the facts are either false or misleadingly presented, but I don’t think it’s likely; if you read reviews of Kuhn, they’re often big-picture things—everyone seems to agree that his encyclopedic mastery of the history of science is mostly accurate.

These two realizations show something frightening. If both

1. Science is largely determined by the paradigm that the scientists are using, such that there are probably widespread and systematic errors in our knowledge of science;

2. Science is the least paradigm-addled field—things are even worse in other fields;

are true, then this says something rather dismal about the other fields. If the most accurate field, the one where individual biases are least significant, is still persistently addled by bias, then it’s frightening how rampant misinformation is in the other fields. This finding is not terribly surprising—I’ve defended it elsewhere—but it is a bit depressing. It means that a lot of what we believe could be wrong in very fundamental ways.

Our knowledge-generating institutions often are very good at bringing our beliefs into a coherent web—making it so that they fit well with each other. Philosophers, for example, spend a lot of time thinking about the conditions in which people deserve things. Social justice academics provide grand, overarching theories of oppression, that explain why all the social justice platitudes are internally self-consistent. But an edifice can be entirely self-consistent without being true—the schizophrenic’s ideas may all be explained in terms of each other, despite him being raving mad.

I happen to think that there are knock-down arguments against desert. But there are no-doubt lots of things that are true that are unintuitive, that there aren’t knock-down arguments against. This opens up the possibility of persistent error; if even the sciences boast persistent error, so too do other institutions.

These errors come especially when there is group-think, when there are ideas that are widely accepted by everyone, that people are afraid to challenge. I think, consequently, this explains something very important about shifts in social justice norms over time. Like Kuhn, I’ll provide a particular case study: high school debate.

There’s been a firestorm recently over insanity in high-school debate, something I’ve been highlighting for a very long time. My comments here apply only to circuit policy and Lincoln Douglas debate, for those are the only types that seem to have a significant problem with this type of bias. For those who don’t know, at the most competitive national tournament, I lost based on my opponents arguing that I’m a bad person, and that judges shouldn’t vote for evil people like me. As the judge explained “A debate space where racist or violent people are not allowed is preferable to one where they are.” Racist or violent! Apparently, I’m either racist or violent based on a poorly phrased trivial claim in moral philosophy, that I made in a private discord chat, combined with a six word since deleted Tweet.

Much of debate has gone utterly off the deep end. In college debate, about a third of the top teams make arguments like the following:

The end is already here – ecological catastrophe is a structuring condition of Black life that cannot be disimbricated from the enduring social life of the plantation. Reliance on better science, or more empirics, or more data, or extinction as a predictive tool, only reproduces cruel mathematics and fatal liberalisms that make Black life into ecological excess and refigure European Man as the core of environmental politics

Apparently, trying to address global warming is racist because something something European Man fatal liberalism. Also, this means science is racist.

And I think the response most people have to this is something like: What the fuck? How in the world did much of high level debate become a place where personal attacks are routine, where everyone is the type of deranged leftist that one usually finds on Tumblr. Why don’t people challenge the dominant ideas which are so crazy that fewer than 1% of people believe them? This isn’t just a lone judge—it’s easy to find dozens of debaters on Twitter cheering my loss based on unrelated, nontopical character attacks.

Apparently 59 people think that a round in which a judge votes on issues unrelated to the topic is perfectly fine. This is a sizeable chunk of competitive debaters. You can also read the reddit thread where I posted a link to my article—basically everyone agreed that my article was horrible.

Most people, find this appalling. This isn’t a general problem with the left—every single non-debater that I’ve seen of the thousands who have commented on my story have agreed that debate rounds should not be about unrelated character attacks. So how did a position become ubiquitous inside debate and nonexistent outside of it,

The mystery is not just limited to debate. I remember a while ago listening to an episode of the excellent and hilarious blocked and reported podcast, in which they described a knitting community that had gone totally off the deep end, where people were being canceled for the most mundane things in the world. The group-think was extreme. So how is it that communities become so crazy.

I think there are 4 basic explanations of why debate is so nutty: cardinal preferences, demographics, paradigms, and competitive incentives. Many of these apply to other communities.

Cardinal preferences and demographics explain why a lot of institutions like debate start out so liberal. Liberals care way more about politics than conservatives, meaning that they’re more likely to take positions of political influence. They’re more likely to disown a friend over their political views. Conservatives won’t vote against you for expressing mildly liberal views in a round of debate, because they don’t care that much, but leftists will vote against you for expressing mildly conservative—or even classical liberal—views. In addition, debaters are disproportionately from wealthy areas and elite colleges, which are vastly disproportionately liberal; this explains the demographics component. Various groups have weird demographics, and many of these make them almost exclusively liberal or conservative.

So these explain how debate becomes sort of like academia, containing people mostly left of center. But how is it that debate becomes farther left than academia, becomes a putrid abomination, almost a parody of left wing politics, something that disgusts even my reasonable socialist friends.

The explanation begins with competitive incentives. In debate, judges are mostly very arrogant and have had lots of bad experiences with judges voting against them because they don’t understand their arguments. As a result, judges pretend to understand things they don’t, and pretend that arguments are coherent, even when they are obviously not.

This makes it so that debaters have an incentive to be extremely vague, maximally amorphous and nebulous, so that their claims sound very radical but are very difficult to pin down. They say things like:

The juridico-economic is cohered through its faux inclusion of Blackness, rendered fungible and casted “personhood” to provide coherence. Governance WOULD not and COULD NOT redress anti-blackness.

and

We defend an infrapolitical ethics of care where trans people vest a duty to repair among ourselves. you all as judges have a duty to reckon with the way this space always disavows trans life, rage incites rebellion against cis-heteronormative orders but requires a community whose interdependence makes it possible to break the foundations of society.

and

Blackness is the embodiment of metaphysical nothingness and any attempt to liberate Black folk or make the world better that does not start with a theorization against the world itself will reproduce the antiblackness they try to resolve. Thus, the role of the ballot is to endorse the best strategy for rupturing metaphysics. The role of the judge is to evaluate the best Black scholarship produced to analyzed Black suffering

Because judges don’t want to look stupid, they lap this stuff up. They act like claiming that we shouldn’t clean up rivers because blackness is the embodiment of metaphysical nothingness is a reasonable, true, and coherent claim, like it’s something to be taken seriously. And because there is no actual logic behind the claim, it’s hard to refute. It’s hard to substantively rebut claims that have gibberish premises and ridiculous conclusions, if judges are willing to dogmatically accept that the premises justify the conclusions because the other team—while quoting a low-ranking queer studies professor at clown college—asserts as much.

So because of judges’ hubris, post-modern jargon and similar arguments began to take off. And because they were successful, they took off among the top teams. The best teams in the country began making these arguments—and winning. Other teams were unprepared. As a result of this, people internalized the message that sophisticated people take these arguments seriously.

After years of debaters making these arguments, taking them seriously became the entrenched paradigm. Those who regard them as idiotic—who recognize that the emperor has no clothes—were seen as uneducated rubes who don’t know the first thing about debate. This is why every time anyone challenges the orthodoxy, they’re looked down upon, regarded as being bad at debate. This is why lots of people insinuated that I was bad at debate; they just assume that those who challenge the orthodoxy aren’t educated in the methods. Insiders—the people who know a lot about debate—become so deeply entrenched within the paradigm that they rarely challenge it, while outsiders and novices challenge it often.

It’s similar to science. When one challenges the dominant paradigm, they’re seen as a rube. When some particular ideology is particularly entrenched, when it’s seen as what educated people believe, those who challenge it are assumed to be ignorant. This is true a lot of the time—nearly everyone who challenges evolution, for example, knows nothing about the science of evolution. But when an ideology gets entrenched not because of its truth but instead because of social pressures, then dissenting from it is not indicative of ignorance, it’s indicative of failure to succumb to groupthink.

This also explains why basically all the people who dissent from debate orthodoxy are super low in agreeableness. The two people who have taken public stands against debate from within debate are me and Michael Moreno—and we’re both very stubborn, contrarian, and disagreeable. So was Newton. People who challenge the dominant paradigm must be especially abrasive and willing to challenge the social consensus. Of course, unlike Newton, Michael and I aren’t geniuses, but the basic point still stands: Those who refuse to accept groupthink must be pretty willing to rebel against social orthodoxy. As longtime readers will know, I’m extremely willing to challenge the status quo and be a contrarian. And this is exactly what we observe.

The orthodoxy in debate has no trouble persisting. Everyone being a woke leftist unwilling to accept any minute challenge makes conservatives quit debate quickly. This entrenches the dominant woke ideology; when those who rebel quickly quit, the dominant ideology solidifies. This is especially so when the people who defend the orthodoxy are willing to lie, and lob libelous accusations of racism, pedophilia, and Nazism, all the while relying on doctored evidence.

When everyone is woke, when everyone is a social justice liberal, everyone wants to signal just how woke they are. In order to do so, they end up trying to out-left their opponents. So the response to claims that arguing for the topic is racist so we should instead read poetry is that this compromises the fight against capitalism. I’m not kidding, this is the second most common response to those who jettison the topic in favor of talking about random other things, as occurs in a sizeable chunk of rounds.

In doing this, debaters constantly erect shibboleths—symbols to signify that they’re down with the woke elite orthodoxy. Debaters reveal their pronouns—to signify how woke they are—and they provide land acknowledgements. They adopt a particular vernacular—one that sounds totally alien to those outside of debate. Debaters refer to “antiblack and settler colonial logics.” They never say things are racist—that’s much too mundane a phrase. Every phrase they use has to sound like it came from a critical theory journal. Normal people don’t talk about the disimbrication of black life from the enduring social life of the plantation, but debaters do. It becomes hard to even formulate phrases that challenge the orthodoxy without sounding like a foreigner—without sounding like someone who doesn’t know about debate. As Orwell described, when people can’t even formulate the phrases to challenge the orthodoxy, it goes unchallenged.

But beneath all this jargon, beneath this sham paradigm, the emperor is butt-naked. When conservatives come along and argue with debaters, the debaters fold. I remember a few years back listening to Michael Moreno—a libertarian who criticized the dominant ideology in debate—argue with a bunch of debaters. They were utterly unprepared. It was like watching an episode of the Tucker Carlson show, where Tucker argues with some woke gender studies professor who can’t make her points without sounding condescending and appealing to obviously crazy assumptions that conservatives would never accept. When one takes an entire paradigm—an entire way of thinking—as axiomatic, then challenges to the paradigm are discarded automatically, and they never learn how to defend the paradigm.

This fuels a cycle of ever increasing radicalization. I recall one round that exemplified just how crazy things can get. This was in a debate between two of the top 5 or so teams. One of them had apparently called the other’s arguments incoherent, at some point. In response, they released the most woke, idiotic, self flagellating, and embarrassing apology ever written

The other team, so as not to be outdone, argued that this apology was racist. The other team was black. They argued that “It's time that we talk about the violence of white apologies. Apologies make black people dumping grounds for white shame and retraumatize black people all while giving white people a pat on the back.” They claimed, “The politics of apology are racialized, gendered, and institutionalized – apologies are a form of governance that absolves the apologizer of responsibility and enact reconciliation as violence.” The team that argued the other teams apology was racist won.

This is like something out of a Monty python sketch. One team releases the most humiliating apology where they take full responsibility for something that doesn’t even merit an apology—and the other team wins by arguing that their apology is “too little too late,” and violent. Nevermind the idea that debate should be about the topic—apparently apologizing to black people is such a heinous crime that it’s worth jettisoning the topic in favor of confronting the evil people who have the nerver to apologize. Apparently, within the paradigm of debate, apologies can be violent.

Debaters go out of their way to be accommodating, to refuse to challenge other teams making ridiculous arguments, because the paradigm has become so deeply entrenched. They go out of their way to show how super duper anti racist they are. They accept the underlying ideology and just quibble about the details.

Because of this, debate has become a training ground for academics who do not want their views challenged. It trains people to be very good at arguing over the details of leftist minutiae—who can argue that some movie or apparently progressive statement is secretly insidious and right wing. But it leaves people unable to challenge the fundamental assumptions of those they disagree with.

And in this echochamber where ideas are unchallengeable, where the dominant paradigm is so far left that left wing platitudes can be asserted as axioms, where just declaring that some argument is right wing is seen as discrediting it, free thought dies. Debaters become insular and irrational, and they never learn to think critically. The irony is that so called critical arguments—arguments that are supposed to be about challenging underlying assumptions—have opened up the types of debate that allow them—circuit policy and Lincoln Douglas debate—to a degree of dogma hitherto unforeseen in an activity that’s supposed to be about open inquiry, free expression, and challenging ideas.