April 2022One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime isthe rebirth of the concept of heresy.In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about themoment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College: Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage. [1]The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusinglymedieval. How strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But whenI reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description ofcontemporary employment.There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be firedfor. Those doing the firing don't use the word "heresy" to describethem, but structurally they're equivalent. Structurally there aretwo distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priorityover the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighseverything else the speaker has done.For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're alsoimplicitly saying that this is the end of the discussion. They donot, having said this, go on to consider whether the statement istrue or not. Using such labels is the conversational equivalent ofsignalling an exception. That's one of the reasons they're used:to end a discussion.If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels alot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believeany babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statementbe x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer isyes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obviousenough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no,it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice suchlabels are applied to statements regardless of their truth orfalsity.The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement isconsidered x-ist often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't workthat way. The same statement can't be true when one person says it,but x-ist, and therefore false, when another person does.[2]The other distinctive thing about heresies, compared to ordinaryopinions, is that the public expression of them outweighs everythingelse the speaker has done. In ordinary matters, like knowledge ofhistory, or taste in music, you're judged by the average of youropinions. A heresy is qualitatively different. It's like droppinga chunk of uranium onto the scale.Back in the day (and still, in some places) the punishment forheresy was death. You could have led a life of exemplary goodness,but if you publicly doubted, say, the divinity of Christ, you weregoing to burn. Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only getfired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But thestructure of the situation is the same: the heresyoutweighs everything else. You could have spent the last ten yearssaving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you'reautomatically fired.It's much the same as if you committed a crime. No matter howvirtuously you've lived, if you commit a crime, you must stillsuffer the penalty of the law. Having lived a previously blamelesslife might mitigate the punishment, but it doesn't affect whetheryou're guilty or not.A heresy is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime —one that makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken,but that you should be punished. Indeed, their desire to see youpunished is often stronger than it would be if you'd committed anactual crime. There are many on the far left who believestrongly in the reintegration of felons (as I do myself), and yetseem to feel that anyone guilty of certain heresies should neverwork again.There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punishedfor expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a fewdecades ago, and even those who are happy about this would have toagree that it's so.Why? Why has this antiquated-sounding religious concept come backin a secular form? And why now?You need two ingredients for a wave of intolerance: intolerantpeople, and an ideology to guide them. The intolerant people arealways there. They exist in every sufficiently large society. That'swhy waves of intolerance can arise so suddenly; all they need issomething to set them off.I've already written an essay describing the aggressivelyconventional-minded. The short version is that people can beclassified in two dimensions according to (1) how independent- orconventional-minded they are, and (2) how aggressive they are aboutit. The aggressively conventional-minded are the enforcers oforthodoxy.Normally they're only locally visible. They're the grumpy, censoriouspeople in a group — the ones who are always first to complain whensomething violates the current rules of propriety. But occasionally,like a vector field whose elements become aligned, a large numberof aggressively conventional-minded people unite behind some ideologyall at once. Then they become much more of a problem, because a mobdynamic takes over, where the enthusiasm of each participant isincreased by the enthusiasm of the others.The most notorious 20th century case may have been the CulturalRevolution. Though initiated by Mao to undermine his rivals, theCultural Revolution was otherwise mostly a grass-roots phenomenon.Mao said in essence: There are heretics among us. Seek them out andpunish them. And that's all the aggressively conventional-mindedever need to hear. They went at it with the delight of dogs chasingsquirrels.To unite the conventional-minded, an ideology must have many of thefeatures of a religion. In particular it must have strict andarbitrary rules that adherents can demonstrate their purity by obeying, and its adherents must believe that anyone who obeys theserules is ipso facto morally superior to anyone who doesn't.[3]In the late 1980s a new ideology of this type appeared in USuniversities. It had a very strong component of moral purity, andthe aggressively conventional-minded seized upon it with their usualeagerness — all the more because the relaxation of social normsin the preceding decades meant there had been less and less toforbid. The resulting wave of intolerance has been eerily similarin form to the Cultural Revolution, though fortunately much smallerin magnitude.[4]I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here.Partly because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, nowas in the past, is to accuse those who disapprove of the way inwhich they suppress ideas of being heretics themselves. Indeed,this tactic is so consistent that you could use it as a way ofdetecting witch hunts in any era.And that's the second reason I've avoided mentioning any specificheresies. I want this essay to work in the future, not just now.And unfortunately it probably will. The aggressively conventional-mindedwill always be among us, looking for things to forbid. All theyneed is an ideology to tell them what. And it's unlikely the currentone will be the last.There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the rightand the left. The reason the current wave of intolerance comes fromthe left is simply because the new unifying ideology happened tocome from the left. The next one might come from the right. Imaginewhat that would be like.Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies isnothing like as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinionsyou can express publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's stillmuch wider than it was a few hundred years ago. The problem is thederivative. Up till about 1985 the window had been growing everwider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985 would have expectedfreedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it hasdecreased.[5]The situation is similar to what's happened with infectious diseaseslike measles. Anyone looking into the future in 2010 would haveexpected the number of measles cases in the US to continue todecrease. Instead, thanks to anti-vaxxers, it has increased. Theabsolute number is still not that high. The problem is the derivative.[6]In both cases it's hard to know how much to worry. Is it reallydangerous to society as a whole if a handful of extremists refuseto get their kids vaccinated, or shout down speakers at universities?The point to start worrying is presumably when their efforts startto spill over into everyone else's lives. And in both cases thatdoes seem to be happening.So it's probably worth spending some amount of effort on pushingback to keep open the window of free expression. My hope is thatthis essay will help form social antibodies not just against currentefforts to suppress ideas, but against the concept of heresy ingeneral. That's the real prize. How do you disable the concept ofheresy? Since the Enlightenment, western societies have discoveredmany techniques for doing that, but there are surely more to bediscovered.Overall I'm optimistic. Though the trend in freedom of expressionhas been bad over the last decade, it's been good over the longerterm. And there are signs that the current wave of intolerance ispeaking. Independent-minded people I talk to seem more confidentthan they did a few years ago. On the other side, even some of theleaders are starting to wonder if things have gone too far. And popular culture among the young has already moved on. All we haveto do is keep pushing back, and the wave collapses. And then we'llbe net ahead, because as well as having defeated this wave, we'llalso have developed new tactics for resisting the next one.Notes[1] Or more accurately, biographies of Newton, since Westfall wrotetwo: a long version called Never at Rest, and a shorter one calledThe Life of Isaac Newton. Both are great. The short version movesfaster, but the long one is full of interesting and often very funnydetails. This passage is the same in both.[2]Another more subtle but equally damning bit of evidence isthat claims of x-ism are never qualified. You never hear anyone saythat a statement is "probably x-ist" or "almost certainly y-ist."If claims of x-ism were actually claims about truth, you'd expectto see "probably" in front of "x-ist" as often as you see it infront of "fallacious."[3] The rules must be strict, but they need not be demanding. Sothe most effective type of rules are those about superficial matters,like doctrinal minutiae, or the precise words adherents must use.Such rules can be made extremely complicated, and yet don't repelpotential converts by requiring significant sacrifice.The superficial demands of orthodoxy make it an inexpensive substitutefor virtue. And that in turn is one of the reasons orthodoxy is soattractive to bad people. You could be a horrible person, and yetas long as you're orthodox, you're better than everyone who isn't.[4] Arguably there were two. The first had died down somewhat by2000, but was followed by a second in the 2010s, probably causedby social media.[5] Fortunately most of those trying to suppress ideas today stillrespect Enlightenment principles enough to pay lip service to them.They know they're not supposed to ban ideas per se, so they haveto recast the ideas as causing "harm," which sounds like somethingthat can be banned. The more extreme try to claim speech itself isviolence, or even that silence is. But strange as it may sound,such gymnastics are a good sign. We'll know we're really in troublewhen they stop bothering to invent pretenses for banning ideas —when, like the medieval church, they say "Damn right we're banningideas, and in fact here's a list of them."[6] People only have the luxury of ignoring the medical consensusabout vaccines because vaccines have worked so well. If we didn'thave any vaccines at all, the mortality rate would be so high thatmost current anti-vaxxers would be begging for them. And the situationwith freedom of expression is similar. It's only because they livein a world created by the Enlightenment that kids from the suburbscan play at banning ideas.Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Chris Best, Trevor Blackwell, NicholasChristakis, Daniel Gackle, Jonathan Haidt, Claire Lehmann, JessicaLivingston, Greg Lukianoff, Robert Morris, and Garry Tan for readingdrafts of this.
