I think we are indeed too tribal and the woke left has often over-stepped…but Nathan G. Robinson makes some solid explanations for why “extreme” stances on issues are sometimes called for. Not to mention the hyperbole regarding the threat from the left.
Tim Urban is a blogger known for his website “Wait But Why,” which mixes (deliberately poor quality) drawings with text to explain subjects from artificial intelligence to procrastination. Urban’s blog was quite popular, and he did a TED talk that racked up 50 million views, but six years ago he stopped updating his site to go and work on a book. That book, What’s Our Problem?: A Self-Help Book For Societies, has now been published. It is over 700 pages long, has been endorsed by Elon Musk, and to hear Urban tell it, writing the book consumed his life. What began as another explainer post spiraled into a comprehensive treaty on the nature of human society that aims to conclusively diagnose the ills facing our species and propose remedies. Urban, who worked on this from age 35 to age 41, believes he has produced a magnum opus, “a new framework for thinking about our complex political environment,” “a new perspective on the world, on politics, on group dynamics, on how we think and why we believe the things we believe.”
What did Urban come up with after six years of reflection and research? What is the grand new Perspective On Everything that he presents over the course of 121,000 words and 300 of his signature scribbly drawings? Well, I don’t think it’s oversimplifying things too much to say that the core idea is that People Should Be More Reasonable, and that we need a sensible centrist politics that rejects the Tribalistic Extremism of both left and right. Urban is particularly concerned that leftist movements for social justice are wrecking the foundations of the civilized order. If you want to locate him politically, I think Urban roughly shares the viewpoints of Bill Maher and Joe Rogan, both of whom reject left-right labels but spend a lot of time whining about Wokeness……..
A snippet from Robinson’s critique:
But while I could go through all of Urban’s overstatements and bad arguments about social justice (he does the maddening “the gender wage gap isn’t real” thing that I refute in Responding to the Right), I’m more interested in the focus of this book. Remember, Urban went off for six years to research and think and write, and to come up with a comprehensive theory of what society’s deepest problems are and how we ought to solve them. And the answer he came up with is that angry people in politics are the problem, with “social justice fundamentalism” being the problem he devotes more time to than any other.
To which I can only say: have you looked around you lately? Urban writes a 700-page book on politics, filled with citations to current events, without considering the problems of nuclear proliferation, the climate crisis, the decimation of Earth’s biodiversity, animal farming, global wealth inequality, plutocracy, exploitation in the workplace, medical bankruptcy, opioid deaths, police brutality, homelessness, mass incarceration, COVID, unaffordable housing, student debt, or voter suppression. How out of touch with the basic facts of the world do you have to be to think that ethnic studies programs merit more attention than all of these colossal problems facing humanity? The title of Urban’s book is literally What’s Our Problem? Somehow the answer he comes up with isn’t, “We’re moving aggressively toward World War III and billions of people live in preventable misery.” It’s, “American politics are too tribal and people are rude to each other, plus those woke people are The Real Authoritarians (even though they don’t put anyone in prison and are often prison abolitionists).
I think Urban is grossly unfair to the social justice movements he spends chapter after chapter attacking in the book, and it’s obvious he’s a hypocrite who doesn’t practice his professed values of empathy and self-criticism. The book drips with arrogant certitude. But more importantly, I’m horrified that someone exists who could be this oblivious toward all the actual problems that people face in the world we live in. Urban clearly lives in a pleasant insular world where the worst problem you might encounter is that you find diversity training talking points with Robin DiAngelo to be really annoying. But what about the world where people go bankrupt because they get sick? What about the children working in factories and fields? What about the migrants in cages? How can you not notice any of that? How can you honestly think that too much Social Justice Activism is what matters? A 700-page treatise about The Problems With Our Society, and not once are the most serious forms of human suffering considered to be important. In fact, Urban makes it clear that he doesn’t really have a stance on that stuff. He says that the tribes in our country have “checklists” about the good stuff and the bad stuff and they go like this…
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/03/ ... efensible/
I wouldn't be considered a centrist because all of my positions are moderate, I would be considered a centrist because my positions are moderate when averaged together. I am a strong believer in capitalism and the market but I also believe that we should be taking reasonable to steps to mitigate our impact on the environment and climate. I believe that law enforcement plays a critical role in society and we should be supporting them and helping them to improve but I also strongly believe in LGBTQ+ rights.
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