OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Matthew Schmitz, of conservative Catholic magazine First Things, criticises Elon Musk and the American right over family values
Specifically, he points to a clash between what he regards as an older or more traditional set of family values on the right, heavily influenced by religious conservatism, which emphasises stable marriages and households, care for children and spouses, parents' obligations towards their children and children's duties towards their parents, and so on; and a newer set, which regards parental behaviour as largely unimportant, and instead prioritises genetic predisposition.
He takes Musk as a good test case. Seen from the former perspective, Musk is a despicable father - he has flitted between women and been irresponsible and uninvolved with the raising of his children. Seen from the latter perspective, Musk has perhaps been quite a good father - he has fathered many children while going to deliberate effort to maximise their genetic potential. Should Musk be admired or condemned?
Schmitz is, of course, on the traditionalist side, and he tries to draw a link between Musk's behaviour a kind of libertarian-transhumanist worldview which, he argues, also implicitly endorses positions that Musk repudiates, such as transgenderism, or which the right-wing has traditionally opposed, such as abortion. Naturally he wants a reassertion of the traditional worldview.
Apart from Schmitz's entirely predictable conclusion, though, I think he's correct to identify a tension here. It's no surprise that people like Richard Hanania (who has often protested that he doesn't like conservatives) are in the genetics-first camp, and it's more interesting to note even more 'mainstream' Republicans, like Matt Gaetz, turning towards the genetics-first position. Is there a transformation going on in the right? Are new divides forming around family policy and technology? Or is there some way to square the circle?
Since we just talked about Musk the other day, and since I know the Motte has a large share of what I would consider libertarian(ish) genetics-first or heredity-first posters, it'd be interesting to hear some comments!
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Sure, I've wanted bad things to be true about my opponents, though at my best I try to follow Lewis' advice. But I hope that I, and more importantly, I hope that most public figures would have enough presence of mind to not publicly endorse obviously false theories to that effect.
I don't disagree with you about the media being awful. I agree that they're agenda-driven and will put anything involving Elon Musk in the worst light possible. It's just that in this case I tend to agree with Hanania that Musk has been getting worse, and I suppose I find Hanania more credible for that judgement given that Hanania and Unherd are not mainstream media outlets, but are both part of the wider 'dissident' sphere that might otherwise be sympathetic to the right.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
And they'll have no bargaining frictions in terms of uncertainties. After watching enough William Spaniel, this implies bargains and settlements everywhere.
Fortunately SMBC made a comic about this too.
Not AI, of course, but if you are able to reliably predict the outcome of a conflict, you can just skip the conflict itself and go straight to the settlement.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path?
The post you are replying to explained this. Intelligence does not straightforwardly equate to success like that - it is one of many correlates. Musk's wealth has multiple causes; a person of equal or greater intelligence might easily not be as successful.
Musk is rich and powerful, but that in itself does not show that Hanania is wrong, nor does it absolve Musk of any of his obvious faults.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
If this is what you think everybody does, then... well, I question how many people you've been interacting with. Most people, I notice, seem to be able to not spend hours every day tweeting nonsense. Most people did not respond to the Paul Pelosi story with "LOL, I wish that were true, it'd be hilarious!", even if you hold that Musk was joking, which he does not appear to have been doing anyway.
No, most people are not like Elon Musk in this regard, and I find this an odd defense considering that you just said that Musk "doesn't operate like normal people". Which is it? Even in this post you accuse the media of "weaponising mental illness" - is Musk mentally ill? Is that your position? Is his behaviour normal or not?
But yeah everybody does shit like that, the only difference here is that Musk is a public figure so his bad behaviour is isolated and blown up into a big deal.
If this were the case I would expect there to be similar stories about every public figure, or at least, about every public figure that the mainstream media blob does not like. But that is not the case.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I haven't read that book yet, actually, but I remember Rowan Williams' review of it. Williams is certainly a theologian and biblical scholar of some depth, and one whose judgement I have a good deal of respect for, so that warned me away. It sounded more like Peterson reading the Bible and then using it, no matter what it says, as an excuse to get on one of his regular hobby-horses. This much harsher (and more entertaining) review made it sound quite self-indulgent to me.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.
I'm not sure the median Trump voter knows that so much as does not pay attention to politics?
The median voter does not necessarily engage in this kind of theorising. I suspect the median voter just votes straight R or straight D because that is what they have always done. I suspect that what the median Trump voter knows is more along the lines of - Trump's opponents constantly accuse him of lying, they are liars themselves, sure Trump can be a bit hyperbolic sometimes, but he's correct on the big picture. And then they probably don't think too much about specific details.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I linked the Rolling Stone piece because that was the piece Hanania linked in his article, if you were paying attention, and as much as we look down on Rolling Stone (which is absolutely reasonable, it's a rag), the claims that I took from it are true. It links Musk's own tweets. He really did believe that Twitter had fake employees and that Paul Pelosi was attacked by his gay lover. I then gave two additional examples of my own, so I was not relying wholly on one article - Musk's belief that Community Notes were being gamed, and that Dominion voting machines were influencing the election. These are all directly sourced to thinks that Musk said himself, in public.
Nothing in that list looks more unhinged than when he was calling that diver a pedo for making him look bad, and that was well before he bought twitter, so is he just a slow motion train wreck that also makes successful rockets and ai and doge and fakes playing diablo? There's a whole lot of ruin in that man!
Um, yes? Musk is clearly an erratic man with a bizarre relationship with the truth. He said unhinged things well before 2022, and he continues to do nonsensical things today, like buy high level Path of Exile 2 accounts and unconvincingly pretend to be an uber gamer. None of that makes it implausible that he has gotten worse over time.
I'm just going to repeat myself - what does that, even if true, have to do with anything?
I haven't speculated on Hanania's private motivations, in the depth of his soul, because I don't care about them. He's a guy who commentates on politics, and he's provided commentary here. Either that commentary is true and useful, or it isn't, and in neither case does it matter what you think his private dreams and aspirations might be.
Hanania has commented negatively on Musk's character and behaviour. As far as I can tell those comments are well-grounded in observable evidence. What more do you need?
Yes, Musk is "vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania". This is true. This is, in fact, the whole reason why it is appropriate to write articles in Unherd about Musk's character, addictions, changing behaviours, etc., and would not be appropriate to publish similar analyses of Hanania. Musk's character, behaviour, choices, etc., affect vastly more people in the real world, and therefore it is both fair and necessary to subject Musk to closer scrutiny.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Peterson has been a particularly sad one to watch - in some of his early appearances he seems relatively articulate, but watch anything from him later on and it's like watching a man destroy himself in slow motion. My first reaction to Peterson was that he was uninteresting but basically reasonable. Now my reaction to Peterson is a kind of tragic pity.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything?
Analysing the tribe that Hanania belongs to may be great sport, but it is, surely, completely inconsequential to the points he makes, which the top-level post presumably wanted to discuss?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth.
This is only relevant if we think that Twitter followers or personal wealth are proportional to intelligence.
There is no doubt some correlation between intelligence and success at one's endeavours. Some. But it is not total, and so if we consider why Hanania isn't fabulously wealthy and followed by a lot of people on the internet, we might consider the very many relevant factors other than intelligence. For instance, Hanania is younger than Musk, Hanania has different personal goals and priorities to Musk, Hanania has a different personality profile to Musk, Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was, and that's all well before we even get to considering luck or arbitrary fortune.
Maybe you think Hanania is dumb anyway, and sure, maybe he is.
But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides than Musk. I'm also willing to bet there are lots of people with less net wealth than Musk's 225 billion that you and I would agree are smarter than Musk.
Likewise for other celebrities. Justin Bieber has 109 million Twitter followers and a net worth of around 300 million. That's a lot more than most people. Are you prepared to become a Belieber?
Be serious. Hanania may well be dumb and wrong, but this kind of sneering "he doesn't have as much money as Musk" is worthless.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
'Faking normality' is a pejorative way to put it, but yes, he is demonstrably not very good at being socially aware in public. The correct level of social media engagement might be debated between people, but I suggest that it is less than Musk's use. This is too much. As for his gullibility, Hanania covered this perfectly well in the article. He linked this piece which notes, for instance, Musk's belief that Twitter had fake employees, and Musk's belief in the Paul Pelosi false claims. There's Musk's belief that Community Notes were being gamed because they correctly pointed out that Zelensky didn't have an approval rate of 4%, or election nonsense around Dominion voting machines. I do not think it should be very controversial to say that Elon Musk recklessly believes false things. Now not all false things are conspiracy theories, but insofar as a number of Musk's beliefs entail the claim that a clandestine group of people are manipulating events, in secret, for their own agenda, it's reasonable to call them conspiracy theories.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I would have thought that it is visibly the case that both Chinese and Europeans have been extraordinarily restive throughout history?
The generalisation you're responding to is indeed obvious nonsense, but I take a certain baseline level of rebelliousness as a constant. The idea that Chinese people are hereditarily passive, obedient, and conformist, in contrast to wild Westerners, is one that has snuck into some Chinese writing as well, but I think it can only be sustained by an arbitrary cherry-picking of history. The same is true for Europe as well.
I realise you're probably just parodying the claim to show how silly it is, but I sometimes completely miss humour, so...
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I don't disagree with anything Hanania wrote, and I do think there's value in publicly stating true things, even if some people in the audience already know them. The general thesis here - that Elon Musk has gotten a lot worse over the last few years, and that lately he seems far too dependent on social media and gullible to conspiracy theories - is, I think, undoubtedly true, and the more people who are aware of it, the better.
However, that said, for a piece titled "How Elon Musk lost the plot", I would have liked more of an attempted explanation as to why this happened. Hanania offers basically three theories:
-
Musk has optimised his thought process for business, not politics. Certain traits are advantageous in business, like tunnel-vision, innovation, drive, and disregard for limitations imposed by others, but are disadvantageous in politics, or in a serious attempt to comprehend the world. Musk's prior cleverness was non-transferable.
-
Musk has gotten addicted to social media, trapped himself in a bubble, and this is shaping all his thoughts.
-
Musk is on drugs.
It is, of course, perfectly plausible that it's a combination of all three - Musk's cleverness didn't transfer, he got himself into an echo chamber of conspiracist lunatics, and drug abuse made everything worse. That seems plausible to me, at least, and a reminder that a combination of factors are likely to exacerbate each other. Brilliance is not a single stable trait, but rather a confluence of factors.
Hanania only discusses the second and third theories offhandedly at the end, though, despite their obvious relevance to the rest of us. I would have been interested to see them integrated a bit more with the central thesis.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
The Motte is not a pulpit, or a place to try to build a consensus or support for any political platform. I think you may want a different forum for this speech.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I'm certainly not asserting any quality or intellectual rigour to his works - I just called him a pseudointellectual! I'm asserting, rather, that he is a professional academic whose ideas have had a significant impact on the course of left-wing politics.
Mediocre as he may be, he is a university professor whose thought has been influential in shaping politics. I don't think that's the case for right-wing academics. If you want to look for right-wing thinkers with similar impacts, you shouldn't go to university, but rather to think tanks. The people working at Claremont or wherever are less central examples of academics than professors, and I think they have less influence over the political tribe as a whole.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
That's the definitional issue again - see the discussion we had of Lomborg.
I have heard the argument that at present the right includes you if you hold a single right-wing position, and the left excludes you if you deny a single left-wing position, and that's a standard that puts people like Haidt or Lomborg on the right. But that doesn't seem to hold up well in practice, and the right has gotten increasingly exclusive - people with conservative credentials as impeccable as David French or Jonah Goldberg are cast out, for instance, while people as obviously and deeply liberal as, say, Bari Weiss get accepted. The tribes are not ideologically consistent and often seem to just operate directionally, to me. French started conservative and is drifting, if slowly, in a leftwards direction; Weiss started liberal and is drifting, if slowly, in a rightwards direction. Even though from an objective point of view French is still way more right-wing than Weiss, the only thing people care about is the direction of travel.
Haidt was, in my sense, a fairly straight-down-the-line liberal up until his work in moral psychology, leading up to Moral Foundations Theory and The Righteous Mind, caused him to develop more appreciation for tradition and custom. I read Haidt as then moving into a centrist space overall, but avoiding being pigeonholed in any one category. Since then, unfortunately, Haidt has gotten much more focused on a kind of activism, this time around social media, mental health, and parenting, and on his pet issue he's... probably slightly on the right? The whole 'free range kids' agenda doesn't neatly map on to left or right, but if you put a gun to my head I'd say it's a bit closer to the right.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
Steam doesn't distinguish between expansions and DLC, but I take that to be a limitation of the Steam storefront. Firaxis in producing and selling content for Civ VI clearly distinguish between expansions and DLC packs. The store page for Gathering Storm reads, "In Gathering Storm, the second expansion to Civilization VI, the world around you is more alive than ever before." By contrast, the store page for Vietnam and Kublai Khan describe it as a "content pack".
The ACT article joke has a "no DLC" qualifier, but Canada is not in a DLC, but rather in a full expansion. It meets the criterion.
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
cf. "we need to have a conversation about race".
Or speaking from Australia, this is how I feel about demands for "truth-telling", or for "telling indigenous stories", or "listening to Aboriginal voices", or anything like that - the same media that devotes disproportionate time and attention to reporting on Aboriginal concerns and telling people about Aboriginal culture then with a straight face asserts that the problem is that nobody is talking about them. Excuse me, what do you think we've all been doing, extremely loudly, for years?
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
I suppose we should define 'serious', in a sense.
I think it's pretty clear that academics or intellectuals occupy a different place in the ecosystem of the right to that of the left. There is no right wing equivalent of, say, Judith Butler or Ibram Kendi. However pseudointellectual those people might be, they are seriously involved in shaping left-wing discourse and setting left-wing priorities. Intellectuals don't get to occupy the driver's seat on the right. My theory would be that left-wing domination of academia has made the right in general sufficiently paranoid about academia that they on principle refuse to follow academic theories if they can't see where they're going.
But if by 'serious' we mean something like 'of genuine original intellectual output', then there are no doubt some on the right, though I don't think I buy all of your examples. Mollie Hemingway, for instance, is not an academic. She may be a fantastic journalist, pundit, and media commentator, but I wouldn't describe her as a member of the intellectual class. Bjorn Lomborg is an intellectual, but wouldn't consider him a conservative or right-wing thinker - he's just a global warming skeptic.
I think the issue is that we're looking for public intellectuals. It's possible to name individuals who are intellectuals and happen to be more-or-less on the right, but I take my own challenge here as being about intellectuals who intelligently comment on public, political matters from a conservative perspective.
My first thought was the late Roger Scruton, but we are feeling his absence; and I think he was definitely of a different generation to the current crop.
There are a number of intellectuals I think of as significant who might lean right-ish on a few issues - think of people like Michael Walzer or Jonathan Haidt - but who probably wouldn't identify as conservative in a general sense, and at any rate are totally divorced from the Trumpist right. I don't think the latter has to be fatal; Trumpism is a pretty nakedly anti-intellectual movement, so you don't find many intellectuals aligned with it. However, I do think some kind of positive identification with conservative or right-wing thought is a requirement.
I suppose someone like Patrick Deneen is in fact the closest to what I'm looking for, but I feel like Deneen's output has declined sharply since he went from analysing problems to proposing solutions. Aristopopulism is a bad joke. I don't rate Yarvin as a serious thinker. Yoram Hazony doesn't impress me much but he is at least attempting some kind of intellectual thesis.
You see why I'm coming up short!
OliveTapenade
5mo ago
In the political sphere specifically?
I admit I'm blanking.
I would say that one's personality may shape one's goals and priorities?
For example: I would say that Thomas Aquinas was devastatingly intelligent by any fair standard. He chose a path of life that committed him to both celibacy and poverty. By the standard you've given, though, he cannot be intelligent. He did not achieve worldly power, office, or glory.
I conclude therefore that your standard is a bad standard. It does not measure intelligence. There are extremely intelligent people who do not achieve "great effects on the world", at least in the sense that you've given. In Aquinas' case this seems to be a result of his choice not to seek that type of success. He sought something else.
Likewise "Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken" is a non sequitur. It is entirely conceivable that a person might have great effects on the world while having a brain that is, in some sense, broken. You just cannot get from "Musk has influenced the world" to "Musk has no significant faults". The claim is fallacious.
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