I think I want to apply my understanding of your thoughts on liberalsim to a critique of gender critical argument. I have suggested that the argument of biology vs ideology is problematic for us gen crits making it. I have suggest it's better that we make the case it's the ideology of self-identified-genderism vs an ideology of based on biology.
I have gotten well argued push back when I claim that a man has a right to think he's a woman and a woman has a right to do the same. Its only a problem when either wants to compel others through legal or other means.
i submit it is illiberal to claim a man is thinking wrong as a matter of fact.
Hmm. It's an attractive line of thinking, however, how does it cope with the following:
Whether eccentric identity claims should impact on employment?
What do do about people who are clearly deluded about their identity (e.g. "Jesus") and need to be told and treated?
What do do about about children and vulnerable people seeking medicalisation?
Claims that letting GCs gatekeep female spaces is the moral equivalent of letting racist white women gatekeep female spaces back in the bad old days (in both cases, each group sought to exclude a group of marginalised women from being proper women)?
Oh ! I hope you are up for good conversation! I think my theses (self ID isolated as an idea is not inherently wrong, and claiming biology wins > ideology is problematic, not effective) is proven by your #4!
Does being black not have an immutable biological component just as being a woman does? And that is the trap that the word biology presents for GCs. Biology is amoral. Biology has never stood alone as a pillar of constitutional mortality - e.g promoting the General Welfare.
Humans use biology in good and bad ways. We have ideologies of how biology should be applied. And we disagree culturally from vaccines to GAC to euthenasia. GAC friendlies use biology in ways to (use your own descriptor here) change secondary sex trait characteristics.
Peter uses biology to make a virus that could potentially harm and enemy and does so for geopolitical advantage. Or maybe he does it just because he loves biology and wants to see if he can do it! Paul figures out through biology that he can sell puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to teens and the parents of teens who have been told that their teens are going to kill themselves unless they take these medications and these medications change the secondary sex characteristics of this kid. His ideology is that he is doing something fantastic.
Mary is the hope biology can be used for good. Recent events maybe show the opposite, but maybe Mary 20 years from now figures out the way to cure a genetic disease that kills people before they turn 30. Mary thinks their biology does good for people.
Why do we want biology to be our champion?? It amoral! The the thing that makes the difference is the ideology.
I think we would do better to talk about history. I'm at a time in my life where I'm trying to raise teens and dealing with the certainty of death of my parents. Who are both alive. One who has successful brain surgery yay biology But with every passing season their ability to do stuff fades. The other just had a stroke. He's out of town so I make plans to see him knowing this could be the last time I see him. And yeah it's big and emotional and I wonder how many times in the history of humanity has this happened. I know my grandmother got on a boat as a child with her mother to go back to a little town near the tatra mountains and see the child's grandmother my grandmother's grandmother because they were dying.
The words they would have spoke wouldn't be in the same language.
I wonder if how I cry will be similar to my great gram. Parent to children relationships have meaning and history how long do we really know?
We have always known what woman and mother mean. We have language and a history of languages for ever into the past.
We have had capitalistic biology in medicine for what less than 100 years?
It's hard to say, "No you can't socially transition your child, and certainly not medically transition her" without taking a stance on whether it's right or wrong.
I think it's wrong to medically transition children. I think it's wrong that males can self-identify their way into female spaces.
I'm interested in how fellow gender critical folks make the argument. My contentions points are kind of twofold. One has to do with the ideology of self-identity held completely within the individual versus that ideology being applied in a social structure or legal fashion.
There is no legal or moral standing for anybody to engage as thought police, at least in the United States of America. If we're going to take the mantle of liberalism then we need to be liberal and allow ideas to be ideas. The other option is that we advocate for a clockwork orange type therapy where we try to compel people to think differently. I find this problematic and counterproductive. It seems that we forget the trajectory of human development from child to preteen to teen to young adult to the very stages of being a human as applied to age. And it reduces us to think that there's this hard black line that delineates a person on One day who is a child and can't consent or assent to these procedures and then at the stroke of midnight of the next day this is now an adult male invading women spaces and who is a threat.
I'm not certain I'm right about this if nothing more than the fact that the folks with whom I'm arguing mostly are long time arguers and women who are feminists and I'm a male who's been at this Gen crit game for all of three years.
And my thesis is absolutely self-serving. I'm engaging a human being whose brain already works better than mine however it lacks the discipline and the age and the maturity is it's not fully developed. I'm engaging the child who will become an adult here faster than I can't imagine. Tick Tock.
A point out of this though is that ultimately we need to win the battles of ideology. We need to win the battles of ideas. We need to win these ideas with people like my 14-year-old who plan on medically transitioning. We need to win these ideas with the large majority of Democratic voters for whom this is not a central issue and for whom they look to trans activists to set policy.
I've never seen arguments go well that begin with invalidating an idea. We need to be brave and validate the idea if only because it's an idea. This is liberalism. I hesitate but I feel like Helen pluckrose and JK Rowling have some level of alignment with this idea.
The other half of my thesis has to do with framing this as biology versus ideology.
The more I think about the more I'm convinced on this part: going to " biology " as the first and final and only argument is folly!
For f-bombs sake, biology is the science of hormones and double mastectomies!
I would rather ask chat GPT to search up all of language for the entirety of history and give me a word for mother and woman in every single language that it can find. I would rather discuss the bones found in a grave of our ancestors from thousands of years ago. And that one set of bones was a woman's and the other was her infant child. And that probably likely they both died in childbirth. And this happened thousands of years before the word transgender was invented and thousands of years before Mr money started experimenting on people and this was done thousands of years before the word biology ever existed. All those who witness mother and child die in birth knew exactly who was a mother and who was a woman and who was a child. They didn't need biology to confirm this.
Now is there a time to bring in biology? Sure! Collin wright and his work on evolutionary biology and his writings are fantastic. But this is not your stable of starting pitchers that gets you to the world series. Collin wright is your closer.
I'm not making the case that it's wrong to be 100% deterministic that it's obvious who's a woman and who is not.
I'm making the case for true brave liberalism. If I just scream at my kid that they are wrong - no matter what the issue is - I'm not going to be very effective. If I want them to be open to a different idea a different ideology a different way of thinking than what they've already locked in on, what should I model as a parent?
If I model stubbornness certainty and authority, what will I get in return from my teen child?
I know that with this argument I move in and out of applying it towards childhood medicalization versus males and female spaces.
And this is an argument not just made two or with 14-year-old people. And yet I feel that the strengths of this type of engagement would apply to the moderate Democratic voter who to this day believes that anybody who is against medicalization and men and women sports is a right wing reactionary bigot.
If if we come in always screaming and insisting that an idea is invalid because of biology, I feel like we're going to shut a lot of doors and reinforce this perception that folks who are making an argument for the definition of a woman the sanctity of women spaces and the sanctity of letting children go through natural puberty, well we're going to appear close-minded and dogmatic.
Hi, Day. Probs gonna read over your reply a few times more in consideration and offer segmented reply. I think my thesis still has some legs, and your #1 and #2 might cause it the most difficulties.
I think the one I would address now is the one I would prioritize the highest: #3, children and vulnerable (adults).
My gate way issue to the Gender Conversations was my child 14yo as of now. I'm in boxers hug with them a bit. It's important to me to effectively engage and parent them. Fundamentally my choices in how I communicate with my teen are going to be framed for them in agree/disagree assement for them. They are litterally biologically wired to rebel and disagree with me.
It's taken me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that my "political home" is liberalism. For most of my life I've been fairly moderate (and somewhat inconsistent) on economic issues, but more radical on issues of liberty. In the US, we had libertarians, but they always seemed too crazy to follow, like taking liberty and divorcing it from all other considerations, where I look at liberty as the most important of many competing considerations.
I get that. I am a liberal leftist and libertarians will say that means I am not liberal. I am least liberal economically. But I think as long as we have a democratic system and people vote for policies, left-liberal is a coherent thing.
I misread your first comment the first time and thought you were in favour of restricting immigration from Muslim countries. That usually follows people pointing out that it’s hard to tell what someone’s values are individually. Things are getting very heated and nasty in the UK over immigration and it has happened very suddenly. I think we are going to need policies that require people to indicate convincingly that they will support the rights of women and homosexuals and of people of other religions, particularly Jews and will tolerate people criticising Islam.
It’s very difficult to manage this from a liberal perspective because we don’t like to think about people statistically and we also want to support freedom of speech even for horrible ideas. But I think, given the cultural climate, we should make it clear that this is a country that protects religious freedoms, is accepting of homosexuality and respect the equal status of women and have incoming people commit to that. Whether that will be enough, I do not know. Discussion of the train stabbings are nuts. The guy who did them was not Muslim but a man who threw himself in front of a young girl and held the guy off while others ran down the train was Muslim. It seems nobody can be sane about this and say, “Yes, this was one of the many Muslims who is an asset to the country and an exceptional one. We have still have some worries about Islam and Muslims who are not. Noooo. Identitarians on the left insist this shows the problem to be non-existent and identirarians on the right say it doesn’t matter and we should still deport him. I am despairing of liberalism in my country right now.
Any sort of "test of the mind" simply feels like a betrayal of principles to me. We're deliberately excluding on the basis of viewpoint. I have little trouble discriminating against someone based on actions. But discriminating based on what someone may or may not think (since we have no way of knowing) seems ultimately authoritarian. And if we're willing to be authoritarian to preserve freedom at the border, how long before we start making "little" exceptions in other places too?
Yeah, a commitment not to *do* certain things is reasonable. E.g., think & say homosexuality is a sin but leave homosexuals alone. People point out that democracies are vulnerable to idea change though. We now have a number of MPs elected on an Islam-based platform, raising issues like criminalising the “desecration” of the Quran in parliament.
I suspect that part of the problem is that "liberal" is used in two significantly different ways, one that emphasizes the "libre" in "liberalism" (as Ms. Pluckrose does), and another where "liberal" is more a synonym for "left-leaning." This seems to be especially true in my country, the United States.
Worse, attempted clarifications like "classical liberal" don't work, because that's often used to describe conservatives, even those who aren't liberal in the "libre" sense.
Yeah, I've noticed that when I say I'm a classical liberal, people get some of that right-coded association as well. And in reality, I'm not a classical liberal; a classical liberal is far more free-market, laissez-faire than I am (though I am far from the left). Closest thing I am is probably neoliberal, but that's not exactly right either, and that term has been tarred and feathered to the point of uselessness anyway.
The Libertarian Party booed Trump when he made an appearance at their last national convention, and then nominated Chase Oliver, a gay antiwar activist, rather than the right-wing Mises Caucus candidate. So they sometimes surprise me in a good way.
Helen, I agree with you, ergo you are correct. well at least on this topic, I'm still not onside with the whole "British cuisine" thing. The left/right categorization is indistinguishable and to me at least, irrelevant when it come to freedom. Both are strident, believing they hold the key to true liberty, at least for their side. I suspect we would be at odds in a discussion of economic liberty, me being more on the "market" side but it comes to true liberalism, I'm shoulder to shoulder.
This really speaks to me and why I began writing after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the deployment of the national guard in Chicago.
Illiberal, authoritarian thinking was emerging in places I least expected it and with perilous consequences if given the reigns of democracy or what remained of the liberal political coalition.
A very helpful analysis Helen, as I was never fully convinced by the argument which seems to be implied in the widely shared Colin Wright cartoon linked to below (although the cartoon did begin to explain why I have recently been accused of being ‘right wing’, even though my allegiance to classical liberal values has not changed): https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17MngW3GFr/?mibextid=wwXIfr. I found the following two sentences of your article particularly helpful:
‘People who think in terms of “centrism” tend to see principles as relational rather than consistent. They see them as defined by where someone stands, not by what one stands for.’ As an aside, it may be worth noting that the term ‘universalism’ seems to be acquiring negative connotations in some contexts e.g. when used to characterise the rigid ideological position of those who refuse to acknowledge the very clear - to me at least - reality that not all cultures - and thus not all forms of immigration - are the same.
Not the same, no. Some argue that they are equally good and then this is relativism rather than pluralism. They criticise universalists for our humanist stance which claims that all people have equal worth, not all ideas.
There is, of course, just one race - the human race - but the collapsing, and thus denial, of significant cultural differences does seem to have contributed to some of the negative consequences of immigration and multiculturalism.
I seem to have missed that excellent piece Helen. Thank you for drawing my attention to it. Back briefly to the idea of connotations, isn’t it interesting how the word ‘discrimination’ is almost exclusively used as a pejorative by the ‘Critical’ Social Justice Movement? If they were a bit more ‘discriminating’ on occasion then perhaps they wouldn’t come out with so much ‘uncritical’ nonsense.
I do have a question from a rather individualist perspective as it relates to immigration: how do you know what culture someone has? I suppose you could issue a questionnaire, but it seems stupidly easy to game (though perhaps the types of culture that we'd like to limit would be either unwilling to dissemble about some questions, or would be turned off from coming in the first place?).
To me, at least, "let's reduce immigration from majority Muslim countries" or something similar is the opposite of individualism.
Yeah, it likely wouldn’t be easy for everyone to demonstrate that they hold values compatible with the country they are wanting to move to, but perhaps it’s OK if it’s not easy? If I wanted to move to the US but there were concerns about values compatible with the 1st Amendment in British culture, I could show my writing, obviously, but other Brits might have to go to some trouble to demonstrate that they support free speech.
From my perspective, I don't even mind admitting people whose values don't match the country's values, as long as we're not admitting so many people whose values clash with ours that the country's values ultimately shift away from the liberal values that founded it. However, in our case in the US, at least, it largely hasn't been immigrants who move us away from liberalism; the authoritarian left and right are largely native citizens.
Very good points all. There actually was a liberal/social-democratic militia (the Reichsbanner) in Weimar Germany! Of course, we know how that turned out...
I think the problem is that liberalism is a dominated strategy in game theory terms--it's never the optimal strategy for gaining power. In the prisoner's dilemma, it's always a better idea to defect than cooperate. If you can ban your opponents, you gain a big advantage over them and so liberalism tends to decay into illiberalism over time as illiberals of the left or right use liberalism's weaknesses against it.
Of course, the other big result of the prisoner's dilemma is that defect-equilibria are worse for all concerned than cooperate-equilibria. Liberalism only won out because it ganged up with communism to defeat fascism and then communism collapsed from its own inefficiency. Before that it took a couple hundred years to get rid of all the kings. And in the future...well, China seems to have done a nice job of taking the effective bits of capitalism without the freedom. Meanwhile over here across the pond we're stuck between woke and right-populism, both of whom seem quite eager to censor their opponents. I am not optimistic.
I watched this all unfold in real-time and had to laugh as the responses fall right in line with a false binary. It's something Eric Weinstein calls the superposition problem of politics where he wrote:
“The principle of superposition is not limited to quantum weirdness, and it may be governing your life at a level that you never considered. Think about where you are most divided from your loved ones politically. Then ask yourself, when I listen to the debates at my dinner table, am I hearing a set of multiple-choice answers that sound like they were developed by scholars interested in understanding, or by activists who are pushing for an outcome?"
Hi Helen, I may be being nitpicky here but my conception of liberality (?liberaling?) seems to imply that my support (or not) for any particular policy measure or institution is always contingent on its nature and effects in our particular time. Here in Australia, for example, due to the corporatizing of unions and their domination of the superannuation fund management industry, it's difficult to see them as a "liberalising" influence. So while I certainly support individuals' rights to belong to a union, as a liberal I'm also of the opinion that union influence in Oz needs to be curtailed to support liberality.
In a wider scope of relevance, it is not at all clear, on the evidence of the last 40+ years, that social welfare has, in its non-intentional effects, supported and sustained liberal society. As this article (https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-welfare-system?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) maintains, the de-fathering of families in lower socio-economic groups in US has tended to produce many young men whose socio-emotional development tilts them toward fascism-like belief and allegiances.
An implication of that is that, to the extent that one is committed to a policy position or a constellation of policy positions, one's liberalism will eventually be (or perhaps inevitably will be) in tension to that commitment.
Is there even a meaningful spectrum anymore that describes left and right principles?
I used to see it as individualism vs collectivism, but that model seems to have disintegrated.
To be in the middle was basically some form of social democracy, and that’s where most westerners stood.
But when BLM got sponsored by Nike, and men put in women’s prisons under the banner of social justice, it became clear that reality is too chaotic for one dimension to describe.
I think so, yes. I describe myself as liberal because I hold those values at the bottom and left because I support progressive taxes, nationalised healthcare and other services, focus primarily on class issues and workers rights and so support trade unions, social housing, welfare programmes etc.
But does liberalism map onto that spectrum? It’s easy to see where it’s not: any position that’s authoritarian, but is it a left-right thing?
I can see how liberalism was once obviously opposed to the traditional model of a universal hierarchy, with god at the top. But so much has changed since then, I’m not sure.
I mean the literal “not sure” as opposed to “sure it’s not”.
I am left but I am primarily liberal and the latter is the axis I can share with a wider range of people. I try to bring together people who hold any political or ideological position in a liberal way. Liberal leftists, like me, liberal conservatives, liberal socialists, libertarians, liberal Christians, liberal Muslims, liberal Jews, liberal anti-racists, liberal feminists etc. Anybody who opposes authoritarianism and defends the rights and freedoms of people who aren't them and sees people as individuals and part of our shared humanity and wants to resolve our conflicts with democratic processes and robust debate.
No, it's a different spectrum, but the spectrum of left and right still meaningfully exists when it comes to policies on economics, housing, healthcare, welfare, employment etc. When I vote, I vote left because I favour those policies. Liberalism is a higher overarching value, though. People can hold left-wing or right-wing views in liberal or illiberal ways. Liberals on the economic right - libertarians - will tell me that I am not liberal economically because freedom includes freedom of markets and minimal taxes and they'd be right. I am least liberal economically because I favour progressive taxes and some regulation on markets. So, they're not entirely different spectrums.
Helen, by your own words there is NO singular unique left-right spectrum. What if one is economically liberal but socially conservative (or vice-versa)?
What's illiberal is precisely to assume that there is a set of positions that must be all shared (of course subsets tend to correlate, but that's different).
This means that there are very many axis, and so the original post to which you replied is actually very stupid. If the tug war is north-south oriented and I want to go east it pretty much makes sense to pull from the middle.
I've long said that I'm a *pluralist*, not a centrist, that I'm eclectic rather than narrowly ideological in what my influences are, but that's not the same as simply choosing the middle position in any given argument.
Great read. The problem of politics is that it is a game of coordination. When we make something an 'ism', it gives us a shortcut to cooperation. Instead of having to do the hard work of evaluation, it's easy to simply support your own camp. Many times, even after having evaluated and disagreed, we think it is important to back our collaborators anyway. Which is why, it is in the interest of every coalition to have mechanisms to keep it on track. From an outside perspective, it does look like the two American parties have completely worn out mechanisms for 'checks-and-balances'. If I were a democrat I would look to build back these mechanisms, that's why the decision to not hold primaries was the biggest mistake ever. Bring back more debates, fight on the issues, work harder - the left of the world is watching with disappointment. PS - this also includes, evaluating Trump's policies on merit.
I'm liberal & love your writing. But, that person made a guess that abolishing slavery was seen as far left, but it was the Republicans who abolished slavery, and the democrats who were not wanting slavery to end.
Well...kind of. You're describing the Third and Fourth Party Systems. (We're on the Sixth or Seventh.) The problem is with two parties and racial as well as class divides you get some weird coalitions, and the further back you go the less they look like the ones we have now. The Republicans were aligned with the business power, which sounds kind of right-wing in a lot of places now, they were just against the slave power. Move a little forward to the New Deal era (Fifth Party System) and the Democrats had the Jim Crow white South and the ethnically-diverse big Northern cities on the same side.
The colors (heh) are a different thing where the networks used to switch red and blue and after 2000 with Bush-Gore David Brooks wrote a big article in the Atlantic about Red and Blue America and it stuck.
Lots of conservatives have the conspiracy theory the media pushed that color scheme to break the association of the left with red and communism (which has a worse rap over here). They might have a point. But the DSA, for instance, which is socialist and not affiliated with the Democrats, still uses the red rose.
My goodness, Helen. This post surprised me because I thought centrism was old school liberal, but I guess (old school, not the overused change in definition) liberalism is a radical departure from just being in the middle of leftism and rightism. It is a comittment to some pretty new freedom ethics--and how wonderful and successful it has been.
I think I want to apply my understanding of your thoughts on liberalsim to a critique of gender critical argument. I have suggested that the argument of biology vs ideology is problematic for us gen crits making it. I have suggest it's better that we make the case it's the ideology of self-identified-genderism vs an ideology of based on biology.
I have gotten well argued push back when I claim that a man has a right to think he's a woman and a woman has a right to do the same. Its only a problem when either wants to compel others through legal or other means.
i submit it is illiberal to claim a man is thinking wrong as a matter of fact.
Hmm. It's an attractive line of thinking, however, how does it cope with the following:
Whether eccentric identity claims should impact on employment?
What do do about people who are clearly deluded about their identity (e.g. "Jesus") and need to be told and treated?
What do do about about children and vulnerable people seeking medicalisation?
Claims that letting GCs gatekeep female spaces is the moral equivalent of letting racist white women gatekeep female spaces back in the bad old days (in both cases, each group sought to exclude a group of marginalised women from being proper women)?
Oh ! I hope you are up for good conversation! I think my theses (self ID isolated as an idea is not inherently wrong, and claiming biology wins > ideology is problematic, not effective) is proven by your #4!
Does being black not have an immutable biological component just as being a woman does? And that is the trap that the word biology presents for GCs. Biology is amoral. Biology has never stood alone as a pillar of constitutional mortality - e.g promoting the General Welfare.
Humans use biology in good and bad ways. We have ideologies of how biology should be applied. And we disagree culturally from vaccines to GAC to euthenasia. GAC friendlies use biology in ways to (use your own descriptor here) change secondary sex trait characteristics.
Peter uses biology to make a virus that could potentially harm and enemy and does so for geopolitical advantage. Or maybe he does it just because he loves biology and wants to see if he can do it! Paul figures out through biology that he can sell puberty blockers and cross sex hormones to teens and the parents of teens who have been told that their teens are going to kill themselves unless they take these medications and these medications change the secondary sex characteristics of this kid. His ideology is that he is doing something fantastic.
Mary is the hope biology can be used for good. Recent events maybe show the opposite, but maybe Mary 20 years from now figures out the way to cure a genetic disease that kills people before they turn 30. Mary thinks their biology does good for people.
Why do we want biology to be our champion?? It amoral! The the thing that makes the difference is the ideology.
I think we would do better to talk about history. I'm at a time in my life where I'm trying to raise teens and dealing with the certainty of death of my parents. Who are both alive. One who has successful brain surgery yay biology But with every passing season their ability to do stuff fades. The other just had a stroke. He's out of town so I make plans to see him knowing this could be the last time I see him. And yeah it's big and emotional and I wonder how many times in the history of humanity has this happened. I know my grandmother got on a boat as a child with her mother to go back to a little town near the tatra mountains and see the child's grandmother my grandmother's grandmother because they were dying.
The words they would have spoke wouldn't be in the same language.
I wonder if how I cry will be similar to my great gram. Parent to children relationships have meaning and history how long do we really know?
We have always known what woman and mother mean. We have language and a history of languages for ever into the past.
We have had capitalistic biology in medicine for what less than 100 years?
I think you are trying to dodge deciding what's right and wrong!
Not that I m aware of. Right and wrong is of morality it's of ideas and ideology.. biology is not inherently right or wrong.
It's hard to say, "No you can't socially transition your child, and certainly not medically transition her" without taking a stance on whether it's right or wrong.
I think it's wrong to medically transition children. I think it's wrong that males can self-identify their way into female spaces.
I'm interested in how fellow gender critical folks make the argument. My contentions points are kind of twofold. One has to do with the ideology of self-identity held completely within the individual versus that ideology being applied in a social structure or legal fashion.
There is no legal or moral standing for anybody to engage as thought police, at least in the United States of America. If we're going to take the mantle of liberalism then we need to be liberal and allow ideas to be ideas. The other option is that we advocate for a clockwork orange type therapy where we try to compel people to think differently. I find this problematic and counterproductive. It seems that we forget the trajectory of human development from child to preteen to teen to young adult to the very stages of being a human as applied to age. And it reduces us to think that there's this hard black line that delineates a person on One day who is a child and can't consent or assent to these procedures and then at the stroke of midnight of the next day this is now an adult male invading women spaces and who is a threat.
I'm not certain I'm right about this if nothing more than the fact that the folks with whom I'm arguing mostly are long time arguers and women who are feminists and I'm a male who's been at this Gen crit game for all of three years.
And my thesis is absolutely self-serving. I'm engaging a human being whose brain already works better than mine however it lacks the discipline and the age and the maturity is it's not fully developed. I'm engaging the child who will become an adult here faster than I can't imagine. Tick Tock.
A point out of this though is that ultimately we need to win the battles of ideology. We need to win the battles of ideas. We need to win these ideas with people like my 14-year-old who plan on medically transitioning. We need to win these ideas with the large majority of Democratic voters for whom this is not a central issue and for whom they look to trans activists to set policy.
I've never seen arguments go well that begin with invalidating an idea. We need to be brave and validate the idea if only because it's an idea. This is liberalism. I hesitate but I feel like Helen pluckrose and JK Rowling have some level of alignment with this idea.
The other half of my thesis has to do with framing this as biology versus ideology.
The more I think about the more I'm convinced on this part: going to " biology " as the first and final and only argument is folly!
For f-bombs sake, biology is the science of hormones and double mastectomies!
I would rather ask chat GPT to search up all of language for the entirety of history and give me a word for mother and woman in every single language that it can find. I would rather discuss the bones found in a grave of our ancestors from thousands of years ago. And that one set of bones was a woman's and the other was her infant child. And that probably likely they both died in childbirth. And this happened thousands of years before the word transgender was invented and thousands of years before Mr money started experimenting on people and this was done thousands of years before the word biology ever existed. All those who witness mother and child die in birth knew exactly who was a mother and who was a woman and who was a child. They didn't need biology to confirm this.
Now is there a time to bring in biology? Sure! Collin wright and his work on evolutionary biology and his writings are fantastic. But this is not your stable of starting pitchers that gets you to the world series. Collin wright is your closer.
I'm not making the case that it's wrong to be 100% deterministic that it's obvious who's a woman and who is not.
I'm making the case for true brave liberalism. If I just scream at my kid that they are wrong - no matter what the issue is - I'm not going to be very effective. If I want them to be open to a different idea a different ideology a different way of thinking than what they've already locked in on, what should I model as a parent?
If I model stubbornness certainty and authority, what will I get in return from my teen child?
I know that with this argument I move in and out of applying it towards childhood medicalization versus males and female spaces.
And this is an argument not just made two or with 14-year-old people. And yet I feel that the strengths of this type of engagement would apply to the moderate Democratic voter who to this day believes that anybody who is against medicalization and men and women sports is a right wing reactionary bigot.
If if we come in always screaming and insisting that an idea is invalid because of biology, I feel like we're going to shut a lot of doors and reinforce this perception that folks who are making an argument for the definition of a woman the sanctity of women spaces and the sanctity of letting children go through natural puberty, well we're going to appear close-minded and dogmatic.
Hi, Day. Probs gonna read over your reply a few times more in consideration and offer segmented reply. I think my thesis still has some legs, and your #1 and #2 might cause it the most difficulties.
I think the one I would address now is the one I would prioritize the highest: #3, children and vulnerable (adults).
My gate way issue to the Gender Conversations was my child 14yo as of now. I'm in boxers hug with them a bit. It's important to me to effectively engage and parent them. Fundamentally my choices in how I communicate with my teen are going to be framed for them in agree/disagree assement for them. They are litterally biologically wired to rebel and disagree with me.
It's taken me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that my "political home" is liberalism. For most of my life I've been fairly moderate (and somewhat inconsistent) on economic issues, but more radical on issues of liberty. In the US, we had libertarians, but they always seemed too crazy to follow, like taking liberty and divorcing it from all other considerations, where I look at liberty as the most important of many competing considerations.
I get that. I am a liberal leftist and libertarians will say that means I am not liberal. I am least liberal economically. But I think as long as we have a democratic system and people vote for policies, left-liberal is a coherent thing.
I misread your first comment the first time and thought you were in favour of restricting immigration from Muslim countries. That usually follows people pointing out that it’s hard to tell what someone’s values are individually. Things are getting very heated and nasty in the UK over immigration and it has happened very suddenly. I think we are going to need policies that require people to indicate convincingly that they will support the rights of women and homosexuals and of people of other religions, particularly Jews and will tolerate people criticising Islam.
It’s very difficult to manage this from a liberal perspective because we don’t like to think about people statistically and we also want to support freedom of speech even for horrible ideas. But I think, given the cultural climate, we should make it clear that this is a country that protects religious freedoms, is accepting of homosexuality and respect the equal status of women and have incoming people commit to that. Whether that will be enough, I do not know. Discussion of the train stabbings are nuts. The guy who did them was not Muslim but a man who threw himself in front of a young girl and held the guy off while others ran down the train was Muslim. It seems nobody can be sane about this and say, “Yes, this was one of the many Muslims who is an asset to the country and an exceptional one. We have still have some worries about Islam and Muslims who are not. Noooo. Identitarians on the left insist this shows the problem to be non-existent and identirarians on the right say it doesn’t matter and we should still deport him. I am despairing of liberalism in my country right now.
Any sort of "test of the mind" simply feels like a betrayal of principles to me. We're deliberately excluding on the basis of viewpoint. I have little trouble discriminating against someone based on actions. But discriminating based on what someone may or may not think (since we have no way of knowing) seems ultimately authoritarian. And if we're willing to be authoritarian to preserve freedom at the border, how long before we start making "little" exceptions in other places too?
Yeah, a commitment not to *do* certain things is reasonable. E.g., think & say homosexuality is a sin but leave homosexuals alone. People point out that democracies are vulnerable to idea change though. We now have a number of MPs elected on an Islam-based platform, raising issues like criminalising the “desecration” of the Quran in parliament.
I suspect that part of the problem is that "liberal" is used in two significantly different ways, one that emphasizes the "libre" in "liberalism" (as Ms. Pluckrose does), and another where "liberal" is more a synonym for "left-leaning." This seems to be especially true in my country, the United States.
Worse, attempted clarifications like "classical liberal" don't work, because that's often used to describe conservatives, even those who aren't liberal in the "libre" sense.
Yeah, I've noticed that when I say I'm a classical liberal, people get some of that right-coded association as well. And in reality, I'm not a classical liberal; a classical liberal is far more free-market, laissez-faire than I am (though I am far from the left). Closest thing I am is probably neoliberal, but that's not exactly right either, and that term has been tarred and feathered to the point of uselessness anyway.
The Libertarian Party booed Trump when he made an appearance at their last national convention, and then nominated Chase Oliver, a gay antiwar activist, rather than the right-wing Mises Caucus candidate. So they sometimes surprise me in a good way.
Helen, I agree with you, ergo you are correct. well at least on this topic, I'm still not onside with the whole "British cuisine" thing. The left/right categorization is indistinguishable and to me at least, irrelevant when it come to freedom. Both are strident, believing they hold the key to true liberty, at least for their side. I suspect we would be at odds in a discussion of economic liberty, me being more on the "market" side but it comes to true liberalism, I'm shoulder to shoulder.
Brilliant Essay!
This really speaks to me and why I began writing after Charlie Kirk’s assassination and the deployment of the national guard in Chicago.
Illiberal, authoritarian thinking was emerging in places I least expected it and with perilous consequences if given the reigns of democracy or what remained of the liberal political coalition.
Wonderful work, thanks again for your steady voice in such giddy times....
A very helpful analysis Helen, as I was never fully convinced by the argument which seems to be implied in the widely shared Colin Wright cartoon linked to below (although the cartoon did begin to explain why I have recently been accused of being ‘right wing’, even though my allegiance to classical liberal values has not changed): https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17MngW3GFr/?mibextid=wwXIfr. I found the following two sentences of your article particularly helpful:
‘People who think in terms of “centrism” tend to see principles as relational rather than consistent. They see them as defined by where someone stands, not by what one stands for.’ As an aside, it may be worth noting that the term ‘universalism’ seems to be acquiring negative connotations in some contexts e.g. when used to characterise the rigid ideological position of those who refuse to acknowledge the very clear - to me at least - reality that not all cultures - and thus not all forms of immigration - are the same.
Not the same, no. Some argue that they are equally good and then this is relativism rather than pluralism. They criticise universalists for our humanist stance which claims that all people have equal worth, not all ideas.
There is, of course, just one race - the human race - but the collapsing, and thus denial, of significant cultural differences does seem to have contributed to some of the negative consequences of immigration and multiculturalism.
Yes, I addressed that in my last piece.
https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/stop-talking-nonsense-about-culture-ed6
I seem to have missed that excellent piece Helen. Thank you for drawing my attention to it. Back briefly to the idea of connotations, isn’t it interesting how the word ‘discrimination’ is almost exclusively used as a pejorative by the ‘Critical’ Social Justice Movement? If they were a bit more ‘discriminating’ on occasion then perhaps they wouldn’t come out with so much ‘uncritical’ nonsense.
I do have a question from a rather individualist perspective as it relates to immigration: how do you know what culture someone has? I suppose you could issue a questionnaire, but it seems stupidly easy to game (though perhaps the types of culture that we'd like to limit would be either unwilling to dissemble about some questions, or would be turned off from coming in the first place?).
To me, at least, "let's reduce immigration from majority Muslim countries" or something similar is the opposite of individualism.
Yeah, it likely wouldn’t be easy for everyone to demonstrate that they hold values compatible with the country they are wanting to move to, but perhaps it’s OK if it’s not easy? If I wanted to move to the US but there were concerns about values compatible with the 1st Amendment in British culture, I could show my writing, obviously, but other Brits might have to go to some trouble to demonstrate that they support free speech.
From my perspective, I don't even mind admitting people whose values don't match the country's values, as long as we're not admitting so many people whose values clash with ours that the country's values ultimately shift away from the liberal values that founded it. However, in our case in the US, at least, it largely hasn't been immigrants who move us away from liberalism; the authoritarian left and right are largely native citizens.
Yes. Same here too. We can’t do much about them.
Very good points all. There actually was a liberal/social-democratic militia (the Reichsbanner) in Weimar Germany! Of course, we know how that turned out...
I think the problem is that liberalism is a dominated strategy in game theory terms--it's never the optimal strategy for gaining power. In the prisoner's dilemma, it's always a better idea to defect than cooperate. If you can ban your opponents, you gain a big advantage over them and so liberalism tends to decay into illiberalism over time as illiberals of the left or right use liberalism's weaknesses against it.
Of course, the other big result of the prisoner's dilemma is that defect-equilibria are worse for all concerned than cooperate-equilibria. Liberalism only won out because it ganged up with communism to defeat fascism and then communism collapsed from its own inefficiency. Before that it took a couple hundred years to get rid of all the kings. And in the future...well, China seems to have done a nice job of taking the effective bits of capitalism without the freedom. Meanwhile over here across the pond we're stuck between woke and right-populism, both of whom seem quite eager to censor their opponents. I am not optimistic.
I watched this all unfold in real-time and had to laugh as the responses fall right in line with a false binary. It's something Eric Weinstein calls the superposition problem of politics where he wrote:
“The principle of superposition is not limited to quantum weirdness, and it may be governing your life at a level that you never considered. Think about where you are most divided from your loved ones politically. Then ask yourself, when I listen to the debates at my dinner table, am I hearing a set of multiple-choice answers that sound like they were developed by scholars interested in understanding, or by activists who are pushing for an outcome?"
The 'center' is, like you said, a rejection of the false binary and the adherence to liberty. More here on how to avoid it: https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/quantum-superposition-and-politics
Reading your posts is like a breath of fresh air. Thank you for not being insane.
Hi Helen, I may be being nitpicky here but my conception of liberality (?liberaling?) seems to imply that my support (or not) for any particular policy measure or institution is always contingent on its nature and effects in our particular time. Here in Australia, for example, due to the corporatizing of unions and their domination of the superannuation fund management industry, it's difficult to see them as a "liberalising" influence. So while I certainly support individuals' rights to belong to a union, as a liberal I'm also of the opinion that union influence in Oz needs to be curtailed to support liberality.
In a wider scope of relevance, it is not at all clear, on the evidence of the last 40+ years, that social welfare has, in its non-intentional effects, supported and sustained liberal society. As this article (https://ifstudies.org/blog/family-breakdown-and-americas-welfare-system?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email) maintains, the de-fathering of families in lower socio-economic groups in US has tended to produce many young men whose socio-emotional development tilts them toward fascism-like belief and allegiances.
An implication of that is that, to the extent that one is committed to a policy position or a constellation of policy positions, one's liberalism will eventually be (or perhaps inevitably will be) in tension to that commitment.
Brilliant essay.
Is there even a meaningful spectrum anymore that describes left and right principles?
I used to see it as individualism vs collectivism, but that model seems to have disintegrated.
To be in the middle was basically some form of social democracy, and that’s where most westerners stood.
But when BLM got sponsored by Nike, and men put in women’s prisons under the banner of social justice, it became clear that reality is too chaotic for one dimension to describe.
In the middle of all that? Fuck off, are we.
I think so, yes. I describe myself as liberal because I hold those values at the bottom and left because I support progressive taxes, nationalised healthcare and other services, focus primarily on class issues and workers rights and so support trade unions, social housing, welfare programmes etc.
Yeah, I see what you mean.
But does liberalism map onto that spectrum? It’s easy to see where it’s not: any position that’s authoritarian, but is it a left-right thing?
I can see how liberalism was once obviously opposed to the traditional model of a universal hierarchy, with god at the top. But so much has changed since then, I’m not sure.
I mean the literal “not sure” as opposed to “sure it’s not”.
I am left but I am primarily liberal and the latter is the axis I can share with a wider range of people. I try to bring together people who hold any political or ideological position in a liberal way. Liberal leftists, like me, liberal conservatives, liberal socialists, libertarians, liberal Christians, liberal Muslims, liberal Jews, liberal anti-racists, liberal feminists etc. Anybody who opposes authoritarianism and defends the rights and freedoms of people who aren't them and sees people as individuals and part of our shared humanity and wants to resolve our conflicts with democratic processes and robust debate.
Sorry, just a sort of placeholder comment to say “I’ve read and understood”. I can’t say any more than that as I need to think about it.
No, it's a different spectrum, but the spectrum of left and right still meaningfully exists when it comes to policies on economics, housing, healthcare, welfare, employment etc. When I vote, I vote left because I favour those policies. Liberalism is a higher overarching value, though. People can hold left-wing or right-wing views in liberal or illiberal ways. Liberals on the economic right - libertarians - will tell me that I am not liberal economically because freedom includes freedom of markets and minimal taxes and they'd be right. I am least liberal economically because I favour progressive taxes and some regulation on markets. So, they're not entirely different spectrums.
Helen, by your own words there is NO singular unique left-right spectrum. What if one is economically liberal but socially conservative (or vice-versa)?
What's illiberal is precisely to assume that there is a set of positions that must be all shared (of course subsets tend to correlate, but that's different).
This means that there are very many axis, and so the original post to which you replied is actually very stupid. If the tug war is north-south oriented and I want to go east it pretty much makes sense to pull from the middle.
I've long said that I'm a *pluralist*, not a centrist, that I'm eclectic rather than narrowly ideological in what my influences are, but that's not the same as simply choosing the middle position in any given argument.
Great read. The problem of politics is that it is a game of coordination. When we make something an 'ism', it gives us a shortcut to cooperation. Instead of having to do the hard work of evaluation, it's easy to simply support your own camp. Many times, even after having evaluated and disagreed, we think it is important to back our collaborators anyway. Which is why, it is in the interest of every coalition to have mechanisms to keep it on track. From an outside perspective, it does look like the two American parties have completely worn out mechanisms for 'checks-and-balances'. If I were a democrat I would look to build back these mechanisms, that's why the decision to not hold primaries was the biggest mistake ever. Bring back more debates, fight on the issues, work harder - the left of the world is watching with disappointment. PS - this also includes, evaluating Trump's policies on merit.
I'm liberal & love your writing. But, that person made a guess that abolishing slavery was seen as far left, but it was the Republicans who abolished slavery, and the democrats who were not wanting slavery to end.
Yes, but the Republicans were the progressive party then. That’s why the colours for the parties are the wrong way round.
Well...kind of. You're describing the Third and Fourth Party Systems. (We're on the Sixth or Seventh.) The problem is with two parties and racial as well as class divides you get some weird coalitions, and the further back you go the less they look like the ones we have now. The Republicans were aligned with the business power, which sounds kind of right-wing in a lot of places now, they were just against the slave power. Move a little forward to the New Deal era (Fifth Party System) and the Democrats had the Jim Crow white South and the ethnically-diverse big Northern cities on the same side.
More than you ever wanted to know: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_parties_in_the_United_States
The colors (heh) are a different thing where the networks used to switch red and blue and after 2000 with Bush-Gore David Brooks wrote a big article in the Atlantic about Red and Blue America and it stuck.
Lots of conservatives have the conspiracy theory the media pushed that color scheme to break the association of the left with red and communism (which has a worse rap over here). They might have a point. But the DSA, for instance, which is socialist and not affiliated with the Democrats, still uses the red rose.
In Canada conservative is blue, liberal is red, and The New Democratic Party is orange.
My God thank you…..we must all subscribe to the basic tenants of liberalism…from there well
My goodness, Helen. This post surprised me because I thought centrism was old school liberal, but I guess (old school, not the overused change in definition) liberalism is a radical departure from just being in the middle of leftism and rightism. It is a comittment to some pretty new freedom ethics--and how wonderful and successful it has been.