Your Decision To Cave To Internet Weirdos And/Or Your Youngest And Most Annoying Staffers Is Unlikely To Age Well. By Jesse Singal

 — Read time: 6 minutes

JESSE SINGAL

NOV 23, 2023

PAID

Your Decision To Cave To Internet Weirdos And/Or Your Youngest And Most Annoying Staffers Is Unlikely To Age Well

Think about your legacy!

Last night I got drinks with a friend, let’s call him “Jon,” who is pretty well-connected in politics. He’s had a successful career working for a bunch of politicians, several of whom you have heard of. That’s why, in addition to being a very good guy, he is a fun person to get drinks with. These folks always have stories.

Jon and I both felt, circa 2016, that the whole “man, these college students sure are crazy” thing was overblown. Seven years or so later, there we were, catching up and shaking our heads at just how wrong we’d been. The craziness absolutely spread into liberal institutions and caused countless meltdowns, as documented most comprehensively by Ryan Grim in The Intercept. From 2016 or so on, Jon saw things get worse and worse in progressive politics, and I saw things get worse and worse in mainstream (that is, progressive) journalism, and the similarities. . .  weren’t subtle.

My friend told me that some politicians (including, again, ones you’ve heard of) are now “extremely frustrated and sick of their mostly younger and more radical staffers feeling entitled to dictate the terms of their policy positions and then slam them on social media if they didn't capitulate,” as he summed things up in a follow-up text message. These politicians are being less and less shy about expressing their views about these staffers in various ways. This, he thinks, is a sign of a pendulum swinging back toward relative normalcy after a period of major fervor.

But in some places, the pendulum isn’t quite there yet.

Jon said there’s still a lot of dysfunction in progressive politics, and what frustrated him the most was the extent to which it stymies actual progress out there in the real world. I told him about Freddie deBoer’s “iron law of institutions and the left” idea — in progressive institutions, as in all institutions, people often act in a manner seeking to improve their standing within the organization, rather than in a manner conducive to achieving the organization’s internal goals. Jon certainly had some examples on that front.

I think there’s a basic, important insight here: however pathetic they might act during a moment of panic and recrimination, at the end of the day the leadership of major organizations got where they are because they would like to accomplish things, and because they are capable of playing politics, compromising, and so on. They probably have a limited reserve of patience for staffers demanding these norms be tossed aside in favor of some sort of ill-defined Twitter revolution. That’s particularly true when it comes to younger employees, who have not yet accomplished anything or proven their worth, and who are sometimes — I know this from my conversation with not just Jon but others in the worlds of politics and NGOs — undeniable drags on their organizations that management keenly wishes they could un-hire.

In almost every mainstream organization, in other words, there’s a basic limiting factor on how crazy things can get. It just hasn’t kicked in everywhere yet.

***

On October 27, Helen Lewis wrote in her newsletter, “I’m talking to Hannah Barnes, author of Time to Think, about gender, science and scepticism in Brighton on 9 January.” Specifically, the event was to take place as part of the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub events series, which sounds like it combines several of my leading interests. (I interviewed Barnes about her book here, and we had Lewis on Blocked and Reported here [co-hosting with Katie] and here [joining us for an end-of-year too-online Christmas quiz].)

The event quickly sold out. Which makes sense, because Lewis (The Atlantic) and Barnes (BBC, recently decided to move to The New Statesman) are both big names within journalism, and because Time to Think is a book about a very hot subject (youth gender medicine) that was a Sunday Times Bestseller. And what better subject for an event hosted by a skeptics’ organization?

Except people got very upset, some of them complained, there was an open letter (I will link to it if I can find it, but no luck so far), and this morning — the morning after my conversation with Jon about meltdowns within progressive organizations — well, you can probably see where this was all headed: “Sorry to say that despite selling out immediately, this event has now been cancelled,” wrote Lewis on Twitter, which some people call X, which is a stupid name. “The organiser offered all kinds of compromises—a trans voice on the panel, a separate rebuttal event, even a statement disassociating the Skeptic Society from our views—but it wasn’t enough.” The event page no longer exists. (Update: Here’s an explanation posted by the organizer.)

This organiZer (sorry, Helen — this is America) acted in a really craven way here. I know it’s risky to become enamored with one theory and then use it to explain everything, because usually things are More Complicated Than That(™), but could you imagine a better illustration of the iron law of institutions and the left? Clearly, an event like this would have been good for the skeptics’ movement, given the subject matter. Clearly, the event was a success — it sold out! — that would bring more attention to this particular group due to the celebrity wattage of the invited guests. And yet this organizer was so worried about his standing within the organization and his broader community — or at least I’d bet a significant amount that that was what fundamentally motivated this — that he had to make the ridiculous move of canceling the event, even though that move was always going to cause a cavalcade of criticism from reasonable people everywhere. (“I set up Oxford Sceptics in the Pub 14 years ago,” tweeted (not Xed) Andy Lewis. “Right now, I am thinking of coming out of retirement to take on the utter clowns that have destroyed the whole concept of public critical thinking meetings.” (Lewis got hold of some other, rather colorful details about the campaign to cancel or disrupt the event, which you can read about here.)

I strongly suspect, based on the current trajectory of that great big invisible pendulum, that three or four years hence a cancellation like this will be unthinkable. But in the meantime, leaders of organizations should consider both their futures and their legacies. Is it likely that this man will think back to the time he canceled an event about a best-selling book and say “Yes, that was a good idea! That promoted the cause of skeptical thinking and critical inquiry.” Seems unlikely!

There’s a bigger, fascinating story here about what happened to large segments of the atheist/skeptic communities, albeit one that has been somewhat told already. It has to do with concepts like “Atheism Plus,” and it can partly explain the astonishing meltdowns of once-critically minded online spaces like Science-Based Medicine. Maybe someday a thorough excavation would make for good BARPod or Singal-Minded fodder.

But for now, all I’ll say is that individuals in leadership roles should keep that pendulum in mind, as hard as that might be to do when you are worried your friends and colleagues — particularly the very online, very angry ones — are mad at you, and might take that anger public. If you can’t make the right choice, maybe leadership just isn’t for you?

Questions? Comments? Proposals for a new movement called Atheism Minus-Plus? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com.