By Auguste Meyrat
Monday, September 10, 2018
As people in the West dwell on their first-world
problems, Christians in the Muslim World and various totalitarian nations
continue to suffer severe persecution, an issue that should alarm the religious
and nonreligious alike. William Kilpatrick, Raymond Ibrahim, and many others
have written extensively on this issue, citing abundant evidence and debunking
many myths. Their arguments are solid and intensely relevant given the vast
demographic change coming from Muslim migration happening all over the Western
world.
Yet, outside a relatively small group of conservative
readers, few people seem to know these writers or their arguments. Something
that involves so many lives and cultures is hardly known or considered by
otherwise educated, cosmopolitan people.
While lamentable—particularly for the victims, who perish
unnoticed, and the victimizers, who are too often validated—this strange
silence shouldn’t be surprising. Talking about Christian persecution will
necessarily implicate certain groups and ideologies and invite uncomfortable
arguments.
A discussion about Christian churches burning in Egypt or
Christian farmers being slaughtered in Nigeria would bring up questions about
Islam, which could lead to some considering whether Islam is inherently violent
or incompatible with pluralistic representative government. Even if such a
conversation could lead to reforms or clarifications in understanding, most
people, including church leaders, have decided to dispense with discussing it
altogether in the interest of preserving the peace.
Inverse
Relationship Between Seriousness and Attention
This fairly typical craven attitude has sidelined many
other important issues: immigration, the environment, the sexes, family
breakdown, education, political authority, abortion, and others. It has become
easy to tell if something matters by seeing if public intellectuals,
politicians, and media pundits have chosen to ignore it. In a strange inversion
of values, we often find the less something is talked about, the more it
matters, and vice versa.
Some might say “good riddance” to the public discussing
these issues, since it would only create more confusion and spread more
falsehood. In light of serious media bias, this argument has some merit, but it
ignores a much bigger problem: Few people are talking about these issues, so
few people are learning about them. Instead, people either ignore the news and
retreat into a customized electronic world indefinitely, or take in the
misleading narratives and random attention-grabbing minutia of ultimately
meaningless events and personalities.
Those interested in learning more have to search for it
themselves. This search inevitably takes them away from the mainstream,
respectable world and into a questionable, troubling one. The views are as
unorthodox as they are varied. The platforms range from sleek and professional
to embarrassingly clunky and amateur. The most influential voices are
self-conscious and guarded to the point of paranoia.
Otherwise awkward nerdy intellectuals like Ben Shapiro
and Jordan Peterson have made themselves quite popular in this strange place.
While talented and informed in their own right, they also happen to be the only
show in town for young people who simply want an alternative to the spin and
drivel of mainstream news.
What You Find
Inside the Conservative Ghetto
It is encouraging that alternative (and mostly
conservative) ideas are still expressed somewhere and happen to have some
traction with a wide range of audiences, but this does not hide the fact that
it occurs far away from normal media. Bari Weiss of The New York Times coined
the term “Intellectual Dark Web” for this world, which sounds cool, but is
meant to be an insult.
Rather than writing on the same distinguished pages as
Weiss, teaching at the Ivy Leagues, and enjoying a place on Stephen Colbert’s
couch, these dark web intellectuals make do on much smaller platforms and
speaking tours amid heckling and make their cases to cynical audiences on the
intellectual fringes, secretly hoping something they say or do goes viral and
attracts the interest of more legitimate voices.
A more honest term for this underground would be the
Intellectual Conservative Ghetto (ICG). Like other important issues, no one
likes to talk about its existence. Weiss drew heavy criticism for even
mentioning it. Despite all evidence to the contrary, people on the left prefer
to believe their views are objective and inclusive. They would never like to
admit, even to themselves, that they have marginalized such a large group of
people and essentially put them in the media equivalent of ghettos.
Conservatives and others who stray from the mainstream
catalog of acceptable subjects inhabit a realm that, while free and diverse,
lacks the safeguards and rules that normally govern civil discussions. Some
arguments and reports are more academic and well researched; other arguments
are not so developed or logical. Some stories are outright fabricated.
And then there are the memes, which are more rhetorical
graffiti than articulated positions. At one end, there are professors and
policy wonks at Public Discourse or National Review, and at the other, there
are conspiracy theorists at InfoWars and the trolls at Reddit. There are no
gatekeepers (it’s a ghetto, not a gated community) and no consistent quality
control. Readers must proceed at their own risk and learn how to sift.
Dark Web Content
Is Also Defensive and Derivative
Even when readers do find trustworthy content with
responsible editors at the helm, they still run into another problem in ICG
content: It is all derivative and reactive. As more affluent boroughs of the
city create culture, set trends, and dictate economic and political activity,
the mainstream media creates the narratives, sets the contexts, and dictates
the prevalent arguments and positions on every issue.
By contrast, the ghetto cannot initiate or create, but
only respond. It is the exception, not the rule. Its denizens study those on
the other side, while the mainstream seldom bothers to acknowledge them. This
is the biggest reason conservatives know so much more about liberals than
liberals know about them.
This dynamic results in an unhealthy insularity and
divisiveness in the ICG. Ideas from the mainstream make their way into the
ghetto, but rarely otherwise (except when a conservative writes a book, but few
people really read articles about books), and writers and commentators all take
their turn at it, competing with one another on who can fetch the most readers
and make the wittiest takedown or look the most conservative.
Amusing as this is (these “red meat” articles are easily
the most popular), this second-hand topic cycle takes time and energy from more
pressing matters. Endless snarky tirades against Colin Kaepernick, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Sarah Jeong, plastic straws, Michelle Wolf’s standup routines,
avocado toast, soy boys, snowflakes, and “front holes” all take away attention
from real problems that affect real people.
Let’s Fight Our
Allies Instead of Our Enemies
They also lead to heated division among conservatives
themselves. While most pick the low-hanging fruit cultivated by mainstream
liberals, delighting in the easy win, they will spend the rest of their time
and effort differentiating themselves from other conservatives. Trumpkins,
Reluctant Trumpers, Never Trumpers, neoconservatives, paleoconservatives,
social conservatives, classical liberals, traditionalists, the Alt-Right, and
even monarchists prowl like gangs in the ghetto fighting for their little bit
of turf, often oblivious to the vast stretches of space outside their crowded
little world.
It is true that in many ways so much diversity in close
proximity can make conservative debates much more interesting and constructive,
with points made on the Enlightenment, global trade, federalism, health care,
religion, and other subjects. However, because it all takes place in a ghetto,
these more esoteric or wonkish debates are dwarfed in magnitude and multitude
by the tribal debates distracting scholar and troll alike.
In the 2016 election, many Republican voters who
witnessed the vitriol expended between various Trump and anti-Trump factions
often had to cry out like Prince Escalus in Romeo and Juliet: “You fools! The
real enemy is out there! She wants to expand the state, restrict freedom, and
she is an outright criminal! Can’t we come together on this?”
Fortunately, enough voters did come together, at least
for a brief moment, before they returned to the ICG and resumed the same
fight—leading many to doubt Republican election prospects this November despite
the weak and ridiculous slate of contenders representing Democrats.
How to Leave the
Ghetto
If conservatives and other non-leftists hope to finally
win the culture war and make sustained gains beyond making Trump president,
they need to leave the ghetto or somehow transform it. This does not mean that
they follow George Will’s quixotic advice to convert to the other side and
somehow reform the GOP, nor does it mean copying the other side and striving
for party conformity no matter how stupid or insignificant certain factions
are. It means escaping the ghetto mentality that fosters an inferiority complex
and petty infighting.
What does a conservative movement outside the CIG look
like? It looks like editors, writers, and their readers checking their weaker
impulses and staying focused on important issues. It looks like people coming
to the defense of any person being silenced, whether that be courageous
Christian Jack Phillips or insufferable kook Alex Jones. It looks like a real
coalition united against the depredations on freedom, with differences arising
over the means, not the ends. It looks like active participation in
conservative ideals, not just hopes of doing so in some distant future. It
looks like conservatives having the confidence to speak their minds everywhere,
not just with the likeminded.
Fortunately for ICG inhabitants, there is no better time
for this change than the present. Much like the gentrification of actual
ghettos happening in so many American cities, many people are leaving the Left
and showing interest in conservative thought. They have grown up in the safe,
artificial suburbs of progressivism and now seek the eclectic lively locales of
the ICG.
Those who have responded to this influx, usually those
who have learned to harness the great potential of online media, are quickly
becoming the new leaders of today’s conservatism. Those who continue nurturing
a defeatist attitude about culture and revel in Reagan-era nostalgia are
rightly being displaced.
The next step for conservatives and their new neighbors
is to initiate new discussions as they continue other ones. They need to
produce and consume content independent of the mainstream, and gradually shape
the general culture instead of remaining a subculture. They will no doubt meet
heavy resistance from the formerly hip liberals, who will call them all sorts
of names and discredit them regularly because they fear the ghetto will spread
to their own pristine neighborhood.
However, once they realize that the ghetto itself is
simply becoming richer and more popular, they will change their attitude and
move there themselves—and, in turn, leave behind a Liberal Intellectual Ghetto
where bad ideas and deceptive propaganda can wallow and die in obscurity.
In good conservative fashion, the choice to make this
move is up to the individual. Success will depend on whether people can make
this choice in united goodwill and thus form a true ideological community open
to growth, or whether they will continue as a fractious collective artificially
forced together that remains in the ghetto. Until people consciously make this
choice, nothing will change, important problems will go unsolved, and the world
will continue talking furiously about nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment