Censorship and the Nazi bar

I recently read an interesting book: What's Our Problem?, by Tim Urban. His basic thesis (grossly oversimplified) is that modern society has become too tribal, and would benefit from becoming more analytical. This is a thesis I agree with, but I found our points of disagreement interesting.

Urban is basically a left-leaning person, addressing a presumed left-leaning audience, so he finds it easy to demonstrate this dogmatic attitude happening on the American right. He spends a much larger amount of the book demonstrating similar behavior on the American left, which makes sense. His presumed audience is going to be much harder to convince of problems with the right than of similar problems with the left. Being on the left myself, I had some strong negative emotional reactions to these chapters. But, in the spirit of the book, I examined those reactions carefully to see if they were *just* emotional, or whether I had any substantive issues.

Urban presents many esamples of what he refers to as "Social Justice Fundamentalism", which can be summed up as regarding certain speech acts as completely taboo, to the extent that people's careers have been ruined by uttering such speech, and this has exerted a significant chilling effect on rational debate. This is the "cancel culture" that many complain about, and I reluctantly cede that it is a real phenomenon.

But I noticed a pattern in all the many, many examples that Urban provided. None of these taboo ideas were *new* ideas. They had all been quite solidly discredited by rational debate already. Most of them were simply factually false. There were some where it was possible to argue a kernel of truth. But the one thing these ideas all had in common was Nazi bars.( Read more... )