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Notes -
‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’
I quite enjoyed this interview with Alex Byrne, a professor of philosophy at MIT. As an epistemologist his career was built on arguments about the nature of color (or colour, if you prefer) but in the past six years or so he has taken up questions about gender, eventually having a book dropped by Oxford over it. I was not previously aware that he is married to academic biologist Carole Hooven, an apparent victim of "cancel culture" over her writing on the biology of sex.
No one who has followed trans advocacy lately will find much of surprise in the interview, I suspect, but from a professional standpoint I really appreciated him laying this out:
Most of the professional philosophers I've met over the years pride themselves on "challenging" their students' beliefs. This has most often come up in the context of challenging religious dogmas, including faith in God. They (we, I guess I have to say) boast of teaching "critical thinking" through the practice of Socratic inquiry, and assuredly not through any crass indoctrination! And yet in my life I have been to dozens of philosophical conferences, and I cannot remember a single one where I did not at some point encounter the uncritical peddling of doctrinaire political leftism. And perhaps worse: when I have raised even mild pushback to that peddling, usually by raising questions that expose obvious contradictions in a relatively innocuous way, it has never inspired a serious response. Just... uncomfortable laughter, usually. Philosophers--professional argument-makers!--shy away from such argumentation. And yet they do not hesitate to skulk about in the background, wrecking people's careers where possible rather than meeting them in open debate.
I do have some wonderful colleagues and I think there are still many good philosophy professors out there; Byrne appears to be numbered among them. But I have to say that my own experiences conform to his descriptions here. I suspect a lot of it is down to the administration-driven replacement of good philosophers with agenda-driven partisans, which appears to be happening across most departments of higher education, these days. But that is only my best guess.
Or maybe they just think you're an asshole and your ideas are laughably wrong?
There's a certain thread of intellectual narcissism that reads 'I am so obviously correct, and yet all the smart people are disagreeing with me. They must be too scared to admit the truth, unlike me who is courageous and bold!'
Nah, man, they just think you're wrong, and have spent thousands of pages explaining why, and don't want you at their parties anymore because you're kind of annoying and mean.
That's not an "or." They obviously think that. It's the fact that they only seem to think that when CNN tells them to that is, at best, awfully suspicious.
There's also a certain thread of history that goes "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Socrates (well, Plato) laid it out in the Republic, when he suggested that men and women could be intellectual peers, and warned his students not to laugh at the idea simply because everyone else did. Many people who believe themselves to be correct are wrong. But laughing at them doesn't make them wrong, and it doesn't make you right. Sneering and laughing are not thoughts, they are thought-terminating clichés--which is all your comment has offered here.
They have not spent thousands of pages explaining why Byrne is wrong, they have steadfastly refused to engage, and tried to prevent people like Tuvel from doing so. Part of the impetus behind all of this was the cancellation of Byrne's book. Like, did you even read the article?
There is also an ambiguity in the way you've written your post, where the "you" is arguably general, but could also be directed toward Byrne, but could even be directed toward me. I don't know whether you wrote it that way on purpose, but it sure does come across as an artful bit of trolling, especially since your only point appears to boil down to a sneer-by-proxy.
It was directed at the person whose quote I was responding to, which is Byrne. I thought that was unambiguous as it was a direct reply to a direct quote, sorry if it was not.
I think that 'they are scared of being ostracized if they agree with me' and 'they actually disagree with me' are mutually exclusive reasons for why someone would say they disagree with you.
(or at least redundant in a way that makes them rhetorically exclusive)
Of course it is possible for both to be true, but genuinely disagreeing with you is sufficient reason for them to say they disagree with you. If they actually disagree with you, you don't need to go further to search for sinister or cowardly motives for why they are claiming to disagree with you, and doing so becomes uncharitable.
Why they are aligned with what CNN would want them to say is a meaningful question, but it's a different question from this. Again, if they believed Byrne was right, or at least interesting and useful, then CNN would be a good explanation for why they act like he's not... but if they genuinely have no use for him anyway, then bringing CNN into it is needlessly multiplying entities.
Yes, that sounds like a pretty good description of the trans rights movement.
It's not like there some ancient historical tradition of trans rights, and it's only now that brave new voices are stepping forth to propose that sex and gender are teh same thing actually. The people you're describing here are the people representing the status quo in intellectual development and common sense for the past thousands of years. They are the people laughing at Socrates.
They have, they just did it in like the 60s and 70s, when academic philosophy was first exploring these issues in a systematic way.
People like Byrne are not a new emerging philosophical ideas, they're just a political backlash to a long-established school of philosophical study emerging into mainstream acceptance and actually affecting our daily lives.
The reason it's not worth serious people's time to engage with the likes of Byrne and Tuvel is that they're not saying anything genuinely new that hasn't been written about and argued about a thousands times decade ago. They're just aiming it at a new audience of political laymen who aren't familiar with the literature and think it's all brilliant new ideas.
I don't know what to say to this, because as far as I can tell it's just empirically false. Are you an academic philosopher working in these areas? You want to show me some papers written in the 1960s that you think respond "in advance" to Byrne's paper and book?
I work in this area. My direct personal experience is that things in academic philosophy are exactly as Byrne describes. Even outside philosophy, there is a huge chill on faculty speech on anything plausibly "woke." People can and do lose jobs (that are not easy to get!) for saying anything that gets them dragged by the legacy media. You are writing as if this is all very silly, or confused, or overblown, and all that suggests to me is that you have no idea what you're talking about.
Re: Byrne... in the third paragraph of the article you link, he pulls the standard trick of switching from using the word 'gender' to the word 'sex' without notice or justification, as if the proposed difference in the meaning of those two terms weren't the entire crux of the question at issue here. In the second paragraph, he plays the standard 'identify as an attack helicopter' card (in this case, a princess) as if this were actually a meaningful comparison.
Yes, it's true that writers back then were not writing things specifically responding to Byrne's specific rhetoric, because that specific rhetoric hadn't been compiled back then.
Better to say that writers back then were already writing things that obviated his arguments. That were sufficiently careful about semantics that they make these types of games obvious and hollow, that explored the different types of social roles and their relation to physical processes, that talked about the battle between society and the individual to define identity and social function, in ways that make his rhetoric look sophomoric.
Much of this doesn't even need to come from writing on gender, the rhetorical tricks being used are broader than that, and flimsy enough to be shown up by more general philosophy.
Re: arguing about which one of us should be treated as the authority on this topic... No, I'm not an academic philosopher working on topics of gender, as I'm pretty sure you aren't either (would have been weird not to mention given the rest of your comment). Yes, I have worked in academia and on faculty in the social sciences, and currently have a wife and several other family and friends working as active professors in various social and hard sciences, and am pretty abreast of all of the issues you mention.
And yes, I'm aware of a lot of professors feeling the type of tension you're talking about, and I'm not denying it exists.
What I am saying, to be as clear as possible, is this:
The fact that professors would get in trouble for actively promoting transphobic ideas to a wide audience, is not evidence that those ideas (or more mild ones on that side of the argument) are correct.
The fact that professors might face social policing for publicly agreeing with or praising Byrne, is not evidence that actually they secretly admire and agree with him but are too chicken to admit it.
This is what I was trying to get at in my first comment and in the first part of my previous comment, and I kind of wish it were where this conversation was focused since it was my original point.
This is not to say that it can never be the case that true, good ideas become unpopular and censured, and that this can lead to them not receiving the attention and respect they should have. This absolutely does happen, and indeed we should be ever vigilant for cases of it.
But it is, in fact, possible for bad and wrong ideas to become unpopular and censured, too.
In fact, we should a priori expect that the happen much more often than the reverse, and my experience of the world leaves me with the belief that this is how it more often goes.
At the very least, an idea being unpopular and censured should not be treated as evidence in favor of it being correct (or important or useful or etc), which I fear is very much the implication I get from articles like Byrne's and threads like this one.
If you will permit me to use the ad absurdum case for clarity, rather than as any kind of insinuation: just because Hitler's ideas are very unpopular and any professor would get censured or fired for publicly endorsing them, is not evidence that actually they are correct or important and need to be discussed more widely and taken more seriously. To the extent there is any causal relationship between those two factors at all, it is probably a negative correlation rather than a positive one.
That's most of what I'm really reacting against, here: my impression that people are using emotional affect against censors and cancel mobs to improperly imply Bayesian evidence in favor of their victims being correct, in ways that drive people towards incorrect conclusions and worse arguments.
I care a little bit about the lives and rights and happiness and etc. of trans people. But I care a lot more about bad argumentation and improper Bayesian reasoning. That's what is driving me nuts, here, and what I find I am ussually agitated by when I read arguments on this topic.
Jesus Christ. Can you name an article that you think does this job? Because as far as I can tell you're still just wrong about this. Gender theory has been infected with postmodernist motte-and-bailey doctrines from its very inception. Even de Beauvoir's foundational cleave of sex and gender is mostly motte-and-bailey, trivial when true but primarily useful to gender radicals when false.
Even calling Byrne's arguments "rhetoric" is doing just exactly what you're accusing Byrne of doing with sex and gender. Using the purely rhetorical word "transphobic" as if it had some kind of clear and agreed-upon meaning is also assuming your conclusions in advance. You're not making arguments, you're just sneering at Byrne for not agreeing with you on the matter already. You decline to take up the substance of his argument because, why? Oh, because someone in the 60s or 70s already did, swear to God, not that you can apparently actually tell me who or where. You say that people laughing at him doesn't make him right--well, no shit! And yet all I've said to that is it doesn't make him wrong, either, and so people who proceed from laughter to avoiding even engaging on the merits (e.g. by cancelling his damn book, or in your case by hand-waving "this was surely handled in the 60s") look pretty fucking shady, from a Bayesian perspective or any other.
The point is not that someone is, or is not, correct because people laugh at them. The point is that the people who hold themselves out as being most committed to engagement with challenging ideas, have refused to engage with these challenging ideas. Your sneering response was "eh, you deserve to be laughed at instead of engaged with." Which is exactly what is being complained of.
You have dragged this conversation onto irrelevant grounds. I don't appear to disagree with you about whether laughter makes someone more or less likely to be right or wrong. Where you and I appear to disagree is that you have shown yourself to think that laughter is an adequate response to ideas you don't like, or don't agree with, or imagine to have been taken care of at some point in the past--and I do not. At minimum, because there are always new people who must learn what others before them came to discover! To refute with the shorthand of laughter is to decline the responsibility of teaching. Which is something I can accept from people whose vocation is not to teach, but when university professors engage in that shit, it is shameful and embarrassing. I pity all students subjected to attitudes like the one you are defending here--to say nothing of the fact that such responses contravene the very spirit of this discussion space.
It feels like you're really dedicated to assigning me a position and actions that I don't hold and am not taking. This assumption about me feels weaved throughout all your comments in a way that makes it hard to respond to the other parts, because engaging with any of it feels like granting your premise about my position.
I never called Byrne transphobic, nor anyone else. I've used that word exactly once in this conversation, in a hypothetical example to agree with you that professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things, and where I also explicitly called out the distinction between that and the milder, non-transphobic arguments on that side of the debate (eg Byrne and you and etc.)
Nor have I failed to engage with Byrne's ideas, in the comment you are currently responding to I called out two big philosophical failings in the first three paragraphs. If you are going to insist, I could go through the whole article you linked, doing a section-by-section analysis and re-explaining the same arguments against each point that everyone here has presumably been familiar with for a decade or so, but that's not related to the point I was originally making and not something I'm super interested in doing.
Because, as I have been trying to communicate, I'm not really making a point about the object-level question about gender philosophy. I'm making a point about the arguments and politics and rhetoric around those issues and how society discusses them, a point which you seem to at least partially agree with while also dismissing as obvious and irrelevant.
If you agree with my point but think it's not relevant to the situation, and would rather discuss all these other points, just say that! What I don't appreciate is assigning me a different point, then challenging me to defend it with citations.
To be clear: my point was that people finding that your ideas don't have enough merit to be worth engaging with, and have been answered so many times already that they don't need to be answered yet again, are sufficient to explain the observations which Byrne instead attributes to fear and weak stomachs. This meta-point about explaining observations in the situation would be equally relevant and valid if it were in some subject I know nothing about, like the historical study of 12th century architecture; my personal ability to refute the claims and cite sources is not relevant to the meta point that this is a sufficient alternate example.
And I think this all leads into another point that's related to my original point and becoming obviously relevant to the way the conversation is going now, which is the idea of the distributed Gish Gallop. The pattern where, thanks to the way modern media and the internet and politics work, the same questions and arguments can be asked and advanced a million times by a million different people, with a much smaller group of people 'responsible' for giving the same answers to each of the million instances, followed by swift declarations of victory and bad faith if they ever get tired or frustrated or bored and fail to answer a single instance, or ever make a single mistake in any of the million responses.
This pattern doesn't require that any one of the people bringing up the same points is being dishonest or hostile, it's at its most effective when a situations can occur when every one of them is more-or-less sincere and trying to engage honestly, because then they can be sincerely and honestly offended when engagement from the other side fails.
To them it looks like they raised these perfectly reasonable questions, one time, and no one wanted to talk to the. They're not considering the other side, where a thousand people wanted to ask you the same question, and you only responded to 500 of them.
Again, if no one had ever responded to ideas like Byrne's, then I'd agree with you that they are failing in their duties.
But my point is that Byrne is not making any new points (in the article you linked), he's making the same standard points and moves that Contrapoints was making videos against half a decade ago, he's using the same hacky attack helicopter logic that was a copypasta meme a full decade ago, he's equivocating between gender and sex without acknowledging the distinction in ways that haven't help academic rigor since de Beauvoir.
I agree that students should see those arguments refuted in the classroom (even if they're already seen them refuted a hundred times on social media and podcasts already), and I'd be surprised and upset if there was a class that was supposed to cover those topics and didn't consider them.
That's not what Byrne is talking about, though, he wants to be a public intellectual with a successful book deal, and to obligate everyone to argue with him in public in order to build his brand and name recognition. That's not actually a duty that accrues to other academics and intellectuals, they do get to choose who they engage with in the public sphere and why. And the nature of the distributed gish gallop on this issue is that many of them are both weary and wary of engaging with the next talking head down the pike repeating these same lines that they've been answering for a decade or more.
It's not actually a duty that accrues to me either, but you seem pretty fixated on it, so I'm willing to move to that topic if you want to go through it. To answer you specific question: people like Lévi-Strauss and Beauvoir and Friedan built the distinction between gender/social roles and physical sexual characteristics which obviates Byrne's 'look in a mirror' argument and makes clear the problem with his equivocation between sex and gender. His confusion about 'core gender identity' could be answered by meditating on Foucault's discussion of how Power creates Subjects. Etc.
Anyway, I'm not especially dedicated to the '60s and 70s' line, I think it's largely correct but I'm not enough of an expert on the history o philosophy to defend it in depth off the top of my head, and don't care enough to be the one responsible for doing all the research in this discussion. If you want me to shift my position to 'that was hyperbolic and wrong, I should have said 80s and 90s instead' then sure, fine, that doesn't really change my point at all.
My point is that in contemporary times, Byrne is not bringing up things that are novel enough that everyone should be expected to excitedly engage with them in the public square today, and I can demonstrate that by linking old Contrapoints videos.
This is still rhetoric. When you say "professors would get in trouble for saying transphobic things," you are describing what I would call "professors getting in trouble for saying things that challenge a particular worldview." The very use of the pejorative word "transphobic" is bullying a judgment into your argument. People who doubt gender revisionism are treated as bigots, and called "transphobic," only as a rhetorical silencing tactic. There is no substance to saying that Byrne's arguments are transphobic, there is only hollow condemnation of an outgroup. That is the whole substance of gender revisionism: refusing to engage on substance, expanding influence not through persuasion but more in the manner of a cult, through shaming and ostracism of doubters and coddling of those who send costly ingroup signals--like repeating obvious lies for the movement's good. The whole gender revisionist movement is culture war from top to bottom, and the scholars you have cited to me were all culture warriors to the bone. I am not unfamiliar with any of them, and I doubt Byrne is, either. I appreciate you citing them, though by your own admission you appear to regard them as holy scripture you haven't actually bothered to learn, rather than knowing them to be truly substantive pre-responses to Byrne. Now I am fully comfortable that my initial assessment was correct: you're definitely wrong.
You didn't say that, though. What you said was:
Now, you wrote that post in such a way as to possibly be an indulgence in a sort of prosopopoeia, "I'm not the one sneering, I'm giving voice to the totally understandable sneers of others." But the amphiboly you've left in the identity of the speaker and the addressees barely withstands charitable scrutiny or plausible deniability--in part due to your steadfast failure to steelman Byrne in the slightest. This is often how trolls approach discussion, and those using arugments as soldiers, which is why I made the comment I did about the spirit of this discussion space.
I have relatively little objection (beyond obvious points of simple disagreement) with what you've written since your first response to me. The only reason I am still talking to you is because your first post was bad, and if it hadn't been a direct response to me I would have moderated you for trolling and left it at that. You still seem to think this is somehow a conversation where you get to explain why it's okay for scholars to sneer at Byrne. I understand your argument. I just find it to be a lot of empty rhetoric aimed at defending the indefensible: the substitution of patient engagement, however Sisyphean, with mere vapid disdain. And while I recognize that this is probably asking too much of most people, I think that university professors, especially, should be held to a higher standard in this regard (as well as other spaces, like this one, which are explicitly committed to open discussion).
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