Towards a Better Heterodoxy

Part One: The Brightening Landscape

Photo by corina ardeleanu on Unsplash

“The challenge of being heterodox, of doing something politically or intellectually in the world that is genuinely new, is to live without a country.” Ted Nordhaus, The Breakthrough Institute Michael and Me - The Breakthrough Journal

Readers of this substack may be curious about, or attracted to, the idea of “heterodoxy.” It is a term much bandied about now in a time of cross-cutting allegiances, dissolving certitudes about politics and culture, and shifting coalitions. It has become a term with both positive and negative associations, depending upon the individual or the group using it, often in the world of journalism, punditry, or popular discourse. The shifting valences associated with “heterodox” ideas or individuals or “heterodoxy” in general, suggest the need for a more searching thought process, with at least somewhat firmer foundations for the ideas underpinning it. This search for clarity about ‘heterodoxy” is especially important as we attempt to navigate the fractured information ecosystem where words acquire meanings that change in different contexts and with different writers and “influencers” using them.

An excellent example of this accelerating morphing attaches to the term “woke” itself, as discussed by linguist John McWhorter. In a recent article, he shows how that term has shifted meanings with ever-increasing rapidity in recent years, sometimes in spans of a few months. We now have the term “woke Right” (also discussed by James Lindsay and Andrew Doyle) that mirrors the psychological tendencies of the “woke Left.” Those tendencies include a demand for conformity, purity, vanguardism, and control over language and gestures in social settings. McWhorter accounts for this shift by the linguistic process that he calls “semantic broadening,” whereby words accrete new meanings in the popular discourse and undergo inversions that confuse momentarily, forcing all of us to make more rapid adjustments. With both “woke Left” and “woke Right,” however, the psychological tendency is a drive for moral purity that is intolerant and illiberal, unwilling to consider fellow citizens as valued members of a society who have different and potentially useful perspectives. Journalist Isaac Saul has also described how extreme reactions to his very balanced Tangle newsletter cause him to think of “purity tests” as the driving compulsion of both woke progressives and populist-right conservatives. Purity tests are another sign of moral absolutism found in illiberal habits of mind.

With the ever-morphing “woke” term in the popular and academic discourse as well, how are we to think about a similarly evolving term, that is found in the very title of this substack— “heterodoxy”? Are the semantic shifts the same? Or is there only a swirl of confusion and weaponized use of the term? Can we think of it with a stable meaning, either denotative or semantic, at all?

Any familiarity with “heterodoxy” in the popular discourse—among mainstream press outlets and journalists and academics who trend progressive—suggests that it’s a “right-coded” descriptor. “Heterodoxy” conveys dissent, a touch of rebellion or heresy, or a reaching for unorthodox views against a prevailing consensus. “Heterodoxy” can include dissenting views in a discipline, or in public debates about climate change, public health measures, election integrity versus voting rights, transgender issues, and most intensely now, DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs and their efficacy. The same impulse toward dissent can focus on the role of social media in promoting connection or isolation, and a welter of other fraught issues.

The shape-shifting of “heterodox” versus “orthodox” views on all of these fought-over issues is a daily occurrence on social media platforms themselves, as well as in the mainstream press, and often in academic conferences and journals. “Heterodox” views run like a braided counter-story through these debates and shifting coalitions that form and reform with greater speed. To shift metaphors, it’s as if a kaleidoscope of shifting combinations of perspectives, allegiances, beliefs, and attitudes keeps forming new patterns in view. We’re challenged to look again, and think again, to find the stability, if it can be found, in “heterodoxy.”

The Intellectual Dark Web as Heterodox Testbed

Any account of the recent mutating and uncertain meanings of “heterodoxy” must start with the history of the loose conglomeration of noted public thinkers called the Intellectual Dark Web (never a coherent coalition based on a shared set of views or ideology). Now passé as even a recognizable group, the IDW was so described by journalist Bari Weiss, following the lead of Eric Weinstein, because of their dissenting, unorthodox views. In the original IDW, such figures as Dave Rubin, Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein and his brother Bret, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Joe Rogan, and even public intellectuals like Sam Harris and journalist/editor Claire Lehmann were considered “heterodox” members. But Harris and Lehmann have strongly dissociated themselves from some of the stranger beliefs originating in the IDW, and have forged their own paths into better evidentiary terrain and have their own large followings.

In general, the IDW was an eclectic group of public figures whose public statements, books, articles, interviews, and evolving views placed them outside established norms or views of others in their disciplines, professional fields, or consensus views in the public discourse. Some of them were more anti-conformist than others, some engaged in conspiracy theorizing and speculations outside the boundaries of evidentiary support within their fields, some evolved into what we now call, more generally, “influencers”, in using social media and newer forms of other media to increase their visibility and impact outside the typical channels of peer review, gatekeeping, and editorial control.

Journalist Cathy Young has recently described the contours of the Intellectual Dark Web, and its now questionable legacy, too often veering into conspiracism or crankish views, often set against the “establishment” and the mainstream press. Some of the beliefs gathering steam from the IDW included the so-called “stolen election” of 2020 (refuted in a special report written by election lawyer Ben Ginsburg and other conservatives); or total climate change denialism; or the worst forms of COVID conspiracism (rather than more complicated views about the public health measures taken to mitigate a terrible disease wreaking havoc across the globe).

The most salient point about the Intellectual Dark Web was the variety of perspectives it encompassed. The willingness of some of its members to become provocateurs or “conflict entrepreneurs”, against what they considered consensus or settled views, to challenge orthodoxies, and to open unusual new lines of inquiry and investigation, produced some needed intellectual questioning. However, the quality of thinking, depth of investigation, and willingness to entertain edge theories, rumors, and propaganda from lower sources in the information ecosystem, varied enormously across the members of the group.

Another feature that emerged from within the group was a focus on performativity, marketing, and merchandising. This focus is the source of the relational "vibes" that we now see so much in the current generation of social media "influencers"--where audiences contribute to creating "narratives" based on audience-driven storytelling. As a result, relational "vibes" have now created enormous fanbases. The descent into performance art, polarizing entertainment, and improv-theatre “influencing,” among some members of the IDW, stands out as one of the destabilizing features of our politics, our culture, and our information ecosystem.

The Better Heterodoxy

This is one set of features of “heterodoxy” that gives the mixed valence in the present. Set against this flight from reality is a better emerging tradition of “heterodoxy”: the open-minded, truth-seeking, challenging-of-conventional-wisdom dimension, ranging across dissenters with varied ideologies, tendencies, beliefs, and degrees of independence from their own ingroups. A willingness to challenge some ideas tending toward liberal/progressive orthodoxy in the academy led Jonathan Haidt, for example, to co-found the Heterodoxy Academy itself, and to propel that organization from the outset toward its core values of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. Steven Pinker has not been shy in challenging cancel culture and conformity at Harvard, and to challenge also conventional beliefs about irremediable wrongs in society, and worsening conditions for humanity across long time spans. Lee Jussim has experienced his own “cancellation” and has written and spoken compellingly about it, and the dangers of censorship in his field of psychology. Kathleen Stock and Carole Hooven have both challenged the recent orthodoxy about gender identity and gender fluidity, in both the U.K., and the United States, and paid professional consequences for their truth-telling. Michael Bailey as also experienced those consequences for his research on sexual orientation and on rapid-onset gender dysphoria.

The world of “heterodox” scholars and thinkers has surged into greater public awareness in recent years on some of the most debated issues of our time. For example, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Adolph Reed, and Erec Smith, have all questioned the intensely valorized idea of “systemic racism” in western and especially American societies. In the U.K., Nigel Biggar wrote a more complicated history of colonialism, against the accepted orthodoxies in his field, and saw rapid denunciations come his way. Also in the U.K., political scientist Eric Kaufmann has conducted extensive research on the contours of “woke attitudes” across generational and gender lines, and against the enforced “social justice” orthodoxy at one institution, and resigned from it to found the Centre for Heterodox Social Sciences at another institution.

Even compelling journalists like Thomas Chatterton Williams, with his promotion of the Harper’s Letter in 2020, and his reflective memoir Self-Portrait in Black and White, on racial identity and the supposedly immutable characteristics associated with it, has lived more controversially as a public intellectual because of his “heterodox” stance on race and social justice issues. A podcast host like Meghan Daum, with her previous partner in podcasting Sarah Haider, add more to the richness of this better “heterodoxy. ” Daum and Haider built community to challenge conventional views of feminism, gender roles, and other aspects of identity, to transcend tribalism and groupthink.

The “heterodox” figures enumerated here vary widely in their backgrounds, professions, beliefs, and approaches to understanding the world and human beings, but they all share certain characteristics:

• True independence of thought, regardless of professional and social consequences, including censorship, deplatforming, and career ostracism in some cases

• A willingness to stand alone, apart from one’s “ingroup”, and to speak or write publicly about the importance of truth-seeking, and the evidence to support it

• A mental discipline of what Philip Tetlock calls “integrative complexity” that searches for divergent evidence, and then creates convergent predictions and theories about complicated realities (and capable of revision with new evidence)

• A quest to live within the broad ambit of empiricism, to live and profess within what Jonathan Rauch calls the “reality-based community”

These thinkers—whether academics, journalists, podcasters, or generally, the new public intellectuals who rise about the “influencer” level of fandom and audience capture—show us what is possible with the best aspirations within this broadly conceived, semantically broadening (to use McWhorter’s term) “heterodoxy”. The hallmarks here include intellectual rigor, integrity of purpose, and persistence in seeing beyond the immediate firestorms of controversy on social media, in professional circles, with colleagues and even friends. The overarching imperative of truth-seeking requires this kind of intellectual formation.

The Better Heterodoxy and Public Intellectuals

In 1987, Russell Jacoby published a much-discussed book, The Last Intellectuals, which made a case about the disappearance of independent public intellectuals from public discourse. He described how intellectuals of his era had retreated from influencing public thought, by moving into the academy for secure positions. He asserted they engaged in esoteric research with little impact, and were co-opted into groupthink that reduced their intellectual independence. Some of Jacoby’s claims are supported because of the enormous growth of research and scholarship that is rarely read, and the splintering of disciplines into subdisciplines and their ever more arcane language not understandable even by other academics in cognate fields. However, the past several decades have shown a counter-tendency, with a rapid growth of wider-influencing academics and scholars who now write for, and speak to, the general well-educated public.

The world of Lionel Trilling, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and John Kenneth Galbraith may have disappeared, but Jacoby’s claims are now questionable given the rise of another generation of public intellectuals directly involved in large questions and debates before the general public, and who publish and write often on new platforms such as Substack, or who speak through podcasts and other media formats.

Some of these voices are among the best in the “heterodox” sphere: Haidt, in discussing the mission of higher ed institutions, and his more recent work with a broader public on social media harms and the “phone-based childhood”; Nicholas Christakis, with his research spanning sociology and health sciences, focusing on network theories and how human flourishing in communities develops; Tyler Cowen, with his polymathic interests, but grounded in economics and his widely read Marginal Revolution blog, and his short courses in economics; Anne Applebaum, with her research, speaking, and writing on politics and culture of Eastern European countries and Russia, along with the new networks of authoritarian regimes around the world; and Anna Lembke, with her research on addictions, resulting in her book Dopamine Nation. The stature of “heterodox” public intellectuals continues to grow through their wide reach into conversations with a larger public.

The world of substack publishing also continues to bring more academics and independent journalists before the public as well. Increasing diversity of views and “heterodox” perspectives flourish among them. These include academics and writers as various as Damon Linker, Yascha Mounk, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Sheena Mason, Lee Jussim, and Cory Clark; journalists such as Robert Tracinski, Matt Yglesias, and Jesse Singal; commentators as different as Brink Lindsay, Mike Brock, Jeffrey Miron, and Anand Giridharadhas. These are just a few of the new public intellectuals who influence public discourse in a positive way through critical inquiry, careful sifting of evidence, and with distinctive voices that avoid illiberalism and encourage citizens to think and discuss together, beyond the fractured information ecosystem we experience daily. Their voices help to create a better “heterodox landscape”, and are aspirational models for all of us to listen to, engage with, and create a better shared reality together—a new reality beyond the ingroup hallucinations and breakdowns in trust during our current fraught moment.

The “better heterodoxy” is an invitation for all of us to become more open-minded, more independent in our judgments, less tribalistic, and more attuned to the necessary self-corrections that are part of “heterodoxy” at its best. If Ted Nordhaus’s resonating quote at the beginning of this article matters, it means that becoming “unclassifiable” should be an aspiration in the service of truth-seeking pluralism. And that independence of thought should help us renew our library profession, our communities, and our society.

We should become better in “heterodoxy.”

This is the first of a two-part series on “heterodoxy.” The second part will address the darkening forces within “heterodoxy,” with examples, and point toward intellectual disciplines and habits of mind that librarians and others might employ to contribute more effectively to heterodoxy in our professions and in our roles as citizens.

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