The Postmodern Diaries #2

Essay 2: My Relationship with Tim Urban

2-Dimensional Politics:

I was off to the races. Equipped with nothing but my open-mindedness and a passion to learn I took to the internet to get to the bottom of these left wing ideas. While listening to Lex Fridman’s podcast one day, his guest, Tim Urban, was spouting some pretty awesome ideas that were right up my alley. He was proposing that while our society has this left/right political dimension to it, he deemed this to be the horizontal dimension and not a complete picture of our political thinking. Shortly after listening to the podcast, I bought his new book, What’s Our Problem?, on the Google bookstore, ushering in the age of reading books on my phone and destroying what was left of my eyesight. Many of us have seen and possibly even taken the political compass test. It has the typical left/right horizontal dimension and a vertical dimension ranging from authoritarianism at the top and libertarianism at the bottom, but Urban’s vertical dimension was different. While the political compass test defines its vertical dimension as a set of ideological stances, no differently than its horizontal dimension does, Urban’s vertical dimension focuses on how we think about our politics. His vertical dimension ranges from higher mind at the top to primitive mind at the bottom. While a political compass test does not attach any normativity to its positions, apart from the perhaps more implicit message that being too far to any end of the compass could be problematic, Urban’s vertical dimension was to be treated as something fundamentally normative. I was very intrigued by this proposal and could not wait to keep learning about it.

Learning about Urban’s vertical dimension to political thought was very eye opening. It was not so much that the ideas around it were anything groundbreaking, they were actually quite simple and obvious once they were fleshed out. However, as I mentioned before in Peterson’s book, what makes a work of nonfiction great is its ability to take something that you implicitly understood to be true and important and make it explicit. The utility of this is that it allows you to better communicate poignant ideas to yourself and build on them via self dialogue. Not only that, but you can also begin to articulate them to others as well. Urban makes the distinction between the higher mind and the primitive mind using a ladder analogy. Depending on where you are on the ladder your approach to three important aspects of your politics will be different. These aspects are: 1) your thinking, 2) your morals and 3) your tactics. High rung thinking seeks truth while low rung thinking seeks confirmation. This means that individuals on the higher rungs are willing to brave the discomfort of self criticism and cognitive dissonance on their political journeys while those on lower rungs shy away from them. High rung morality strives for consistency while low rung morality results in hypocrisy. Too often do we see even the sharpest intellectual representatives on either the political left or right effortlessly straw man their opponents and constantly double down when clear flaws in their arguments are presented to them. They forgo consistency and justify their rational gymnastics by adopting a false moral stance that causes them to protect their ideology no matter what. The moral hypocrisy can be traced back to the value of low rung thinking, seeking confirmation. Only by staying morally consistent will we be able to direct our aim towards staying truthful, letting our guard down and dare I say it, admitting that we may have been wrong. Finally high rung tactics favour fair play and persuasion while low rung tactics are ripe with cheating and coercion. Low rung tactics are very visible in our modern discourse. Ad hominem attacks mean to shame us and shake our confidence in our beliefs and cancel culture bullies us into compliance in fear of complete societal ostracization. These tactics are not an authentic way of changing minds leaving any declarative evidence of such to be performative at best. Forcing one into espousing ideas they don’t truly believe only harbours resentment. Conversely, changing minds through the art of fair play and persuasion allows those engaging in dialogue to be vulnerable to each other, allowing for the organic diffusion of differing perspectives into each other’s minds. This vertical dimension is clearly better at the top than it is the bottom, and it has also become a pivotal framework in how I approach political discourse to this day.

This vertical dimension was a breath of fresh air for me. While Peterson had very profound perspectives on what ought to be considered virtuous behaviour, he was clearly politically partisan. Urban made space for ideas all across the political spectrum. Instead of viewing harmful ideas as too far left or too far right, he associated harmful ideas with a combination of low rung political thinking at any position on the horizontal dimension. I was completely on board with this as I could not stand how politically polarized our society was becoming and knew deep down that it had nothing to do with the nature of either side. It seemed much more plausible to me that the polarization was due to issues at the level of every individual taking a political stance. Ideally, no matter where someone stood on the horizontal spectrum, if they were to engage in dialogue with others at different horizontal positions while holding true to the virtues of high rung thinking, the conversation would be meaningful. People may agree to disagree, but I’d wager that by the end of the conversations, some people may change their horizontal position on a variety of political issues and be more open to their nuances. I saw a poignant synthesis between taking personal responsibility and being cognizant of the vertical dimension. A future started materializing in my mind where we could use this synthesis to break out of the harmful trap of identifying with the checklist of ideas and stances that occupy the different positions of the horizontal spectrum. It is the identifying with ideas that make them dangerous and isolating. Urban’s two dimensional take on politics helped me understand that the horizontal spectrum is not one to take a position on, but rather a spectrum to be viewed in its entirety, allowing us all to have full access to a vast array of ideas that we can pragmatically apply at any time. It was the vertical dimension that we needed to more strictly adhere to if we wished to end the age of half the Western world hating the other half.

I was really rooting for Urban as his book kept diving deeper and deeper into how our cognitive flaws were responsible for our societal woes. Unfortunately, just like Peterson, as I kept reading I began to notice some inconsistencies as well. To make things clear, Urban dedicated a sizable portion of his book to explaining the downfall of both the political left and the political right which I thoroughly enjoyed. I learned a lot about the history of the republican party, the immaturity of US congress as well as the dangers of ideological purity on the left. It was clear to me though that Urban was spending a lot more time dissecting the flaws of what he deemed to be critical theory, courtesy of the left, than he did the right. He did not make any partisan claims in favour of the right, but he did not see the right to be as much of a threat to the West’s current state of affairs as the far left. Earlier in the book, Urban makes another distinction between two types of games that society has been playing throughout history: the power games and the liberal games. The power games outline the type of life we all were forced into before the enlightenment period and the creation of the free world. Egocentrism and Monarchies reigned supreme and power was the only valuable measure of competence. The liberal games on the other hand were about establishing a playing field governed by individual rights and freedoms and respected autonomy. Its merits were based in the tenets of modernity, which Urban lists as science, reason and objective truth, rather than power. This was a monumental step up from the inherent unfairness of the power games. Urban then explains how the pillars of modernity formed the foundation needed for our society to enter the age of Liberalism. Liberalism is a set of ideas that include many of the concepts that we appreciate today such as freedom of speech, free market capitalism, equality of opportunity and other manifestations of individualism. To uphold Liberalism, Urban introduces a third level of structure into western society made up of all of the laws, policies and norms that aim to protect it. I was on board with this representation of our society as well and saw no apparent holes in it, but then Urban started to talk about the ideological groups who were most critical of this structure.

Urban’s Social Justice Reductionism:

You guessed it. In familiar fashion, Urban identified the main detractors of our societal pyramid as the Marxists and the Postmodernists. Chapter Five of What’s Our Problem? is a deep dive into social justice. I liked a lot of what this chapter had to offer, but this is sadly the chapter where I began to see the same type of flaws in Urban’s prose as I did in Peterson’s. The chapter starts off with a profound distinction between two types of social justice. Urban was right on the money with this and I found that this distinction was one that many people on the right and left were not able to see. According to Urban, the two types of social justice are Liberal Social Justice and Social Justice Fundamentalism. The former is the type of social justice that we all ought to support. Liberal social justice can best be characterized by the initiatives that led the social justice movements in the 50’s and 60’s spearheaded by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights movement had respect for Urban’s pyramid. It aimed to stay true to modernity and liberalism while critiquing only the third level of organization which were the laws and norms that were at the time, favoured towards white Americans and not cognizant enough of the systemic challenges that minority groups faced. MLK wanted to make it clear that 1) America was great and 2) a lot of work needed to be done. He approached social justice with empathy, compassion and humility and did not try to meet his ends by demonizing white Americans and blaming them for his problems. He appealed to the common humanity of all Americans and this resonated with the country. As a result of his efforts and many others, the civil rights movement managed to pass two monumental bills into law, transforming the third level of the pyramid into a more fair and equal version of itself. In 1964, the civil rights act was passed which ended discrimination based on colour, age, gender, sex or national origin and soon after that in 1965 the Voting Rights Act was passed which ended racial discrimination in voting. This was social justice done right. It used Liberalism as a means to illuminate the inconsistencies of Liberal society at the level of its laws and norms to enact meaningful change.

Social Justice Fundamentalism (SJF for short) on the other hand is something that I myself and many others find extremely problematic. Instead of respecting the tenets of Liberalism and high rung politics, SJF attempts to rid society of disparities through coercion and force. It does not respect free speech, does not view all individuals as equal and has a passionate disdain for the free market. It sees Liberalism as nothing more than a system that exploits underprivileged groups and gives unfair advantages to the overprivileged. The main positive I took away from Urban’s idea of SJF was that it was a much better term to use than ‘Woke’ to describe authoritarian far left politics. I also agreed with Urban that the type of thinking that SJF prescribed was detrimental to society. Not having much knowledge on Marxism or Postmodernism, I relied on Urban to explain them to me. After all, I found him to be someone who transcended the current political spectrum and was certain that he would give a fair and unbiased take on both modes of thought. Right out of gates as he begins to explain SJF, Urban claims that the set of ideas and philosophies that govern SJF are all derived from Marxism. He draws a comparison between Marxism and the liberal progressivism that was the ideological driver of liberal social justice. They were both on the left and looked at society through a critical lens that sought to point out systemic issues. What made the two fundamentally opposed, according to Urban, was that while progressive liberals respected Liberalism, the Marxists were critical of it. Urban claims that, ‘The thing the liberal progressive considers the foundation of a good society, liberalism, is the very thing the Marxist wants to dismantle.’. I took this at face value, and going forward as I kept reading about the ideas that derived from Marxism, I continued to hold the presupposition that Marxism wanted to get rid of Liberalism. I now know that being critical of something and wanting to do away with it completely are two very different things, but I had put my faith in Urban and rode with this obviously false presupposition. 

Under the impression that Marxists were against Liberalism, I was then introduced to the Neo-Marxist. From what I gathered at the time, the main distinctions between a Marxist and its neo counterpart were subtle, but nonetheless significant. A Marxist focuses on economics as the main driver of class disparities and sees the struggle between workers (the proletariat) and the workers (the bourgeoisie) as the engine of historical change. Meanwhile, a Neo-Marxist believes that economics alone is not enough to explain class disparities and the preservation of capitalism. Instead, they consider culture, ideas and institutions to be of equal importance in maintaining what they want to abolish. The Neo-Marxist school of thought made its home at The Frankfurt School in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923. While the Frankfurt school was the hub of critical theory, which I now know is the cornerstone of many ideas that do not have any action agenda tied to them, Urban maintains the position that it was simply the ideological hub of the purely politically driven Neo-Marxists. He introduces the idea of false consciousness, the Neo-Marxist idea that capitalism is maintained due to the notion that everyone participating in it believes it to be the natural order of things. Frankfurt School residents such as Marcuse and Horkheimer believed that the workers were oppressed into believing this lie. I now believe that this topic needs to be approached with more nuance and we should always make space for skepticism when it comes to our economic systems, but Urban and many other Marxist critics believed that false consciousness was simply a vehicle for a Communist revolution, as did I at the time. Urban goes on to explain many ideas that I still believe are not that helpful such as intersectionality, standpoint theory and critical race theory as Marxist vehicles for enacting an illiberal social justice initiative in the Western world. 

Then he introduced Postmodernism. While he spends several thousand words on the evolution of Marxism and Marxist thought, he squeezes in the aims of Postmodernists such as Foucault and Lyotard in a page or so, citing one excerpt from Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (this is a fantastic essay that I will come back to later). I’m beginning to sound like a broken record, but Urban’s prose made me believe that postmodernists were attacking our liberal society at the very base level of modernity itself, rejecting science, reason and objective truth as valid measures of legitimacy and believed them to be products of unjust power dynamics as well. Urban makes the classic stereotypical claim about postmodernists, ‘They believe any claim to objective truth is an illusion.’ and I would be lying if I told you that I did not buy into the exact same stereotype for a long time after finishing the book. He was making the same error as he was with the Marxists, conflating a critique of modernity to the intentional dismantling of it. Finally, I had enough context to understand Urban’s idea of SJF. SJF was ‘a philosophical Frankenstein’ of Marxism and Postmodernism that combined the ideas of culturally imposed oppressor/oppressed dynamics with the rejection of modernity to create a social justice behemoth that could deconstruct anything in an illiberal fashion. To summarize it all, Urban created this nifty flowchart that outlines this Frankenstein and reduces it down to its ideological components in a chronological order. At the time I thought this chart was genius as I was a sucker for the type of reductionist logic that flow charts provided. I showed the flowchart to everyone I knew who was interested in politics and intellectual discourse, spreading Urban’s narrative of what ‘Woke’ was really made of. Luckily for me, my curiosity endured and I view postmodernism much more favourably now, but it took me a while to really understand it. After almost two years of studying the epistemology of postmodern thought, I was finally able to see Urban’s blind spots. 

Here is the flowchart, despite my disagreements with it, it is still pretty awesome. It shows the clear flaw in the art of reductionism, which is the shallowness of the presupposition. The flowchart only remains coherent as long as the presuppositions of the first element in the flowchart are respected. This keeps the system of the flowchart contained. However, presuppositions will always take the element of the flowchart out of context and it will remain decontextualized as long as it operates within its self-referential system. This misleads people as the flowchart is rationally sound, but perhaps misses very important context about its elements. When the elements of your flowchart are ideologies that form a philosophical Frankenstein, you are giving people a false sense of truly understanding them with the proposed interconnectedness of the ideas.

Urban's subtle orthodoxy:

Both Peterson and Urban contradict themselves in their respective works. Peterson’s contradiction lies in his unwillingness to recognize his own resentment of the academy while promoting a mindset that utilizes personal responsibility and self reflection as a means to combat resentment.12 Rules for Life is overflowing with wisdom, beauty and truth, but Peterson undermines himself and his powerful message as he exposes his vitriol towards ideologies that he believes are in direct opposition to them. While most readers of Peterson’s work will focus on the benefits of personal responsibility and not give much thought towards the Postmodern Neo-Marxist, his more intellectual readers may suffer. Those readers who are interested in philosophy become aware of the dangers prescribed by Peterson. The drawbacks of this are two fold. Firstly, Peterson discourages intellectuals from meaningfully engaging with Marxism and Postmodernism by framing them as harmful. This can and does lead to a misguided mindset within the modern day intellectual where cultural and other systemic factors have an impact on both the outcomes and opportunities of those who take personal responsibility. The other drawback caused by Peterson’s othering of Marxism and Postmodernism is the polarization it causes within the social milieu of intellectuals. In reality, there are many intellectual thinkers who do engage with Marxist and Postmodern thought. By labelling them as antithetical to the noble pursuit of finding purpose in life through personal responsibility, Peterson alienates his more intellectual fanbase from these thinkers. This alienation does his supporters a disservice by incentivizing them to be closed-minded to certain ideologies as well as giving his supporters someone to blame for their problems. By creating a bogeyman out of the Marxist or Postmodern thinker, many intellectual, but unconscientious, readers who are fighting against the current to get their lives in order, will focus on hating the ideologies over taking personal responsibility. By refusing to acknowledge his own resentment, Peterson undermines his righteous goal of empowering others.

Urban’s contradiction is a bit more subtle because his rhetoric when discussing the ideologies he disagrees with is not nearly as resentful or emotionally charged as Peterson’s. In addition to his more level headed and humorous tone, Urban also stresses the importance of recognizing the value across the horizontal dimension of the political spectrum. He encourages readers to embrace the ideas on the far left and the far right as long as they think about them with humility and integrity. The vertical dimension he proposes is simply a metaphor for taking personal responsibility. Therefore, when Urban discusses ideologies such as Marxism or Postmodernism, more intellectual readers are likely to view them as ‘low rung’ ideas held by those who inhabit the political left. Similarly to Peterson, Urban’s characterization of Marxism and Postmodernism discourages readers who are worried about the current affairs of Western culture from engaging with the ideas meaningfully. He too easily conflates necessary critiques of Liberalism and Modernity with their complete destruction. The contradiction here is that while Urban embraces engagement with far left ideas, he fails to see how reducing Marxism and Postmodernism down to a strict focus on power relations, or low rung thinking, discourages the very engagement he is trying to encourage in his readers. This is most likely due to Urban’s moral principles. What’s Our Problem? may be open minded enough to address the flaws in the societal laws and norms of Liberal society, but Urban is far too defensive of their foundations, Liberalism and Modernity. While the tenets of Liberalism are hard to disagree with, its insistence on individual autonomy as its guiding moral principle can undermine the foundation of modernity that it stands on. Liberalism is antithetical to the idea of submission. An autonomous individual ought not submit to anyone or anything as doing so would encourage the oppressive stance that the countless authoritarian societies that preceded the free world relied on. However, if one does not submit to science, reason and objective truth, then the autonomy granted by Liberalism falls flat. A liberal society may discourage harming others, but its aversion to authority weakens its moral fabric as it changes the tenets of modernity from being foundational to something one merely uses to assert themselves. Then of course there are issues with science, reason and objective truth that rely on postmodernism to understand at all.

Urban lists the tenets of modernity as science, reason and objective truth. While there is no doubt that all three of these tenets are vital for a functioning society, Urban does not go into great detail to explain the relationship between them. Science and reason ought to be thought of as tools. Rigorous empiricism and rationality allow us to construct objective truths about the world, but only if they are oriented in the right way. Science and reason can just as easily be used in deceitful and selfish ways. They are categorization tools no more or less than the ideas that Urban opposes such as standpoint theory or intersectionality. These tools can only be used if the user of those tools distances themselves from what they are experiencing. With distance comes the inevitable decontextualization of what we see as we decide what is and is not relevant. If our sights are set on winning arguments and protecting our egos, both science and reason can be grossly misused. Objective truth on the other hand is a much more complicated idea that cannot be reduced down to something instrumental. This is where I believe Urban makes another mistake. To call objective truth a tenet of modernity is to confine truth to the modes of knowing that modernity legitimates. Professor John Vervaeke brilliantly categorizes four modes of knowing. At the surface, we have propositional knowing, which is knowing ‘that’ something is the case. Science and reason have a heavy focus on propositional knowledge, relying on facts, figures and the ability to deem something as true or false. Beneath the surface, knowledge becomes less propositional and more procedural. Procedural knowing is knowing ‘how’ to do something such as ride a bike, read or solve an equation. This mode of knowing is skill based and cannot be so easily put into words like a piece of propositional knowledge can. Even if these processes of how were to be written down like a recipe, the words alone would not account for knowing how to perform the process. Modernity certainly dips into procedural knowledge as modern education systems aim to teach students how to do a vast array of processes, but the scope of what we can know from a modern lens stops there. There are two more modes of knowing that modernity does not seem to accept as things that we can know at all.

Modernity falls short because it operates using a subject/object perspective of the world. This means that in order to know anything, one is required to detach themselves from the world in order to figure out what things are and how they work. However, in order to truly know everything, we need to bridge the gap between ourselves and the rest of the world. As Vervaeke would say, our relationship with the world is ‘transjective’. Reality is not composed of subjects and objects, but rather the relatedness between them. For example a cup (an object) can be grasped, but only by some being that possesses hands (subject). There is a dynamic relationship between subjects and objects that much better encapsulates what it means to be in the world than keeping the two ontological categories separate. The other two types of knowing break this Cartesian spell and immerse us back into the world. Perspectival knowing is knowing ‘what it’s like’ to be experiencing something. There is still a degree of subjectivity as you are not directly experiencing the phenomena, but this mode of knowing compels us to empathize in order for us to obtain the knowledge. Finally, the most visceral mode of knowing is participatory knowing. This is knowing ‘through being’. To explain participatory knowing, imagine becoming a parent. You can read as many books on parenting as you can, learn various modes of disciplining your child, talk to other parents in the attempt to empathize with them etc., but none of those knowledge pursuits will help you to understand what it is to be a parent. You will only be able to know once you fully immersed in the role, participating in the process. It is this mode of knowing that modernity rejects due to its subjective nature and lack of rationality. However, it is in this realm of knowledge where deep transformation, meaning and objective truth really come from. Urban may be encouraging open mindedness, understanding cognitive biases and a proponent of integrating various modes of thought, but his definition of truth is far too propositional. He subjects himself to an orthodoxy of modernist liberalism which causes him to reject very important aspects of the truth. He believes that his orthodoxy is both the epistemic high ground and optimal ethical solution for solving our polarization issues in the West. However, refusing to meaningfully engage with the ideas that critique his orthodoxy such as Marxism and Postmodernism does nothing but cause more polarization, especially amongst intellectuals. There is no mistake that Urban is well intentioned and is trying to promote a more intellectually tolerant culture that can engage in difficult conversations, but his narrow definition of truth and liberal orthodoxy is preventing him from reaching his goal.