Inserting “Culture” Into the Culture Wars

Ideology and formal rules are less consequential than most seem to think. This matters for institutional reform.

Writing at the tail end of the last Great Awokening, the sociologist James Davidson Hunter coined the term “culture war” to characterize the tumult of his current moment and previous periods of acute contestation over morality and politics. The culture wars, in his formulation, were perennial struggles between progressives and conservatives over the actual and ideal character and direction of the country. The intensity of the culture wars could wax and wane. The “front” of the culture wars could shift — gender issues right now, religion in public life last week, racial issues in a few months. Depending on circumstances, one side could end up “winning” for protracted periods — exerting dominance over systems and institutions — while the other retreats and regroups. But the victory is never final, because the respective worldviews of progressives and conservatives each appeal to deep and widespread human intuitions, but their core differences are fundamentally unreconcilable.

In the decades Hunter published his book, scholars, journalists and laypeople have come to routinely evoke the “culture wars” as a way of framing moral and political contestation or social unrest. However, these appeals rarely attend to the “culture” component of the term in a particularly serious or thoughtful way.

Most commonly, folks uncritically reproduce Hunter’s “conservatives are from Mars, progressives are from Venus” framing while paying almost no attention to specific cultural processes or mechanisms that underpin “cancel culture,” “censorship,” “wokeness,” or whatever else they’re interested in. Conversations about the culture wars are often based on vibes or anecdotes (i.e. histrionic claims about “kids these days” or the trajectory of “Western civilization” based on a handful of recent incidents at elite colleges) without, for instance, bothering to try to actually measure changes in cultural outputs, composition or behaviors in a systematic or empirical way: what is shifting, who (specifically) is driving the shifts, why now?

Hunter’s framing also assumes that the culture wars are driven, at bottom, by ideology. Yet, most Americans, although they may identify with one label or another, in fact hold a mishmash of contradictory views that do not systematically accord with the labels “progressive” or “conservative.” The Americans most likely to be engaged in the culture wars and to systematically organize their beliefs according to ideological labels (and adjust their views in accordance with messaging of political elites to make sure they think and say the “correct” thing in virtue of their political identity) — it’s the exact same swath of society that dominates the symbolic professions. We are ideologues. Most normie Americans are not. Yet, even among us, very few symbolic capitalists have actually read or deeply engaged with the ideas, thinkers, and works from which our ideologies are ostensibly derived. The role of “beliefs” in driving the culture wars seems to be overstated and misunderstood.

As I explained at a recent talk at University College London, one of the core aspirations of my first book, We Have Never Been Woke (from now on, abbreviated as WHNBW) was to chart a different path for analyzing the culture wars. This essay will extend some of the arguments of the book to help readers better understand the unusual social dynamics that define communities and institutions dominated by symbolic capitalists — among the “woke,” the anti-woke and conservatives alike.

But before diving into the culture wars, it may be helpful to take a step back and provide a quick primer on culture, per se.

Culture 101

Social scientists define culture, roughly, as “the values, beliefs and practices that are shared among a group of people and distinguish them from others.”

Cultures are fundamentally social. They are emergent properties of groups, communities or institutions. Individuals do not have cultures (although they may identify with or participate in shared cultures).

Cultures are dynamic: institutions, groups and communities are changing all the time, as are the constituents who produce and identify with a culture, as are the milieu in which cultures operate.

Cultures are produced, maintained and evolve as a function of three core processes: selection, transmission, innovation.

• Innovation helps drive cultural change. Stagnant cultures tend to die off. Dynamic cultures and institutions, on the other hand, tend to be antifragile: they’re not just capable of adapting to new circumstances, they can grow stronger in the face of change. Cultures innovate through a variety of means: technological developments can open up new possibilities of relating to and communicating with one another; contact with folks outside a system can provide new models for people inside a system to conduct and present themselves, or demonstrate new ways of talking and thinking or relating to others; adjustments to law and policy and restructure risks and incentives for individuals and institutions alike; changes to the environment in which constituents and institutions operate can create pressures to evolve.

• Transmission includes the messages, practices, behaviors that individuals, institutions and leaders model to signal who “we” are and what separates “us” from “others.” When older family members teach younger family members about their history, or celebrate traditions, or encourage them to take part in rituals of one kind of another – this is transmission. When new employees receive orientation and mentorship to help them understand and flourish in their new workspace – to understand the norms, priorities, dynamics, and success criteria – this is transmission. Transmission is often “vertical” in this way, but it also happens peer-to-peer. We look primarily to peers to understand what “normal” is and what we should aspire to. Comparison with peers is one of the main ways we come to make judgements about whether or not we’re flourishing in a system. These lateral acculturation processes are also examples of transmission.

• Selection is about who we fold into a group, community and institution – and who we exclude or purge – and on what basis. Selection criteria and processes profoundly shape the baseline characteristics of a population. They also set incentives for those who want to get accepted into the group, community or institution (or who merely want to remain a member in-good-standing). The traits, rhetoric, and modes of thought, behavior and self-presentation that are favored by selection criteria and processes will typically become more common and more evident in a system over time. Meanwhile, characteristics that are less favored will become both rarer and more muted. Where we live, who (or whether) we end up marrying, who we form friendships with, where (and whether) we go to college and/ or attend religious services, the professions we try to join – these choices simultaneously reflect and deeply shape who “we” are. The groups, institutions and communities we try to opt into send one set of signals about who “we” are and our desired place in society. The institutions that reciprocate interest and allow us admission (or not) send a second set of signals about who we are and where we belong. Collectively, these selection decisions by ourselves and others indicate and practically determine our social position.

Innovation and transmission are widely appreciated. Yet, although selection is incredibly important for shaping culture, it tends to be criminally neglected in analyses of cultural dynamics — regularly leading to intellectual dead-ends.

As an example, insufficient attention to selection leads people to think that there’s an epidemic of misinformation and mistrust brought about by social media echo chambers (innovation) and fake news (transmission). In fact, however, there’s tons of evidence suggesting that folks are actively seeking out and opting into the speech communities in question (rather than being passively pulled into them by social media algorithms), and they often express contentious beliefs to signal group membership (rather than, for instance, conveying their actual mental states and behavioral dispositions). The same holds true for conspiracy ideation: rather than growing suspicious of authorities as a result of being exposed to conspiracy theories, it seems that people gravitate towards conspiracies to explain their antecedent mistrust (and align themselves with others who feel the same).

As a matter of fact, across cultures and over time, the strongest predictor of mistrust of experts or embrace of conspiracy theories and “fake news” is perceived social distance from elites. For instance, constituents who are underrepresented in academia and the media tend to be especially mistrustful of academic research and journalism. When people feel like they don’t have a voice or a stake in an institution – and especially if they view the folks who dominate that institution as hostile towards people like them – the natural and rational reaction is to mistrust, resist, and marginalize that institution, its leaders and its outputs. This holds true for any type of institution, anywhere in the world, as far back as the empirical record goes. Put another way: the contemporary “crisis of expertise” turns fundamentally on questions of “Who gets to be an expert? In virtue of what? Whose perspectives are excluded? In virtue of what?” It’s a conflict driven primarily by selection instead of innovation (e.g. social media echo chambers and smartphones) or transmission (misinformation, propaganda, ignorance).

Neglect of selection also commonly leads folks to try to explain “wokeness” via intellectual history or appeals to novel technologies (social media, smartphones) or the unique characteristics of “kids these days” – none of which can plausibly explain why “Great Awokenings” happen when they do and among the very particular subset of society where they tend to take root.

As I noted in my review of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, there was a “Great Awokening” in the 1920s that had virtually all of the characteristics that define the current period despite occurring prior to the emergence of “critical theory” and nearly a century before the birth of smartphones, social media, or Gen Z. Attending to selection pressures and incentives in the symbolic professions can explain much more about the timing and societal distribution of Awokenings, and why they take on the idiosyncratic forms they do, than appealing to various innovations (new technologies, “kids these days”) or the transmission of leftwing ideologies. Chapter 2 of WHNBW unpacks all this in great detail.

Previous essays on Symbolic Capital(ism) have illustrated at length that symbolic capitalists tend to have unique cultural and cognitive tendencies. We tend to pursue our political and moral goals in ways that are unusual and off-putting to most others in society (in electorally consequential ways). We tend to be laser focused on our standing with peers – conforming to or exceeding their expectations – even at the expense of alienating most others in society and thereby undermining the success of our outputs, employers and professions. This isn’t because symbolic institutions fold in a broad and representative slice of “normie” Americans and then warp them into extreme outliers. Instead, higher ed institutions and, by extension, the symbolic professions select for folks who are already strongly predisposed towards being ideologues, censors, and conformists before they ever set foot on campus. And they become more this way the longer they stay in universities and the symbolic professions, and the higher they go therein.

By attending to specific cultural processes rather than just talking about “culture” or “culture wars” in vague and hand-wavy ways, we can gain important insights into many distinct features of the symbolic professions.

Why Formally Free Spaces Can Be Repressive in Practice

Most workers in the U.S. have *literally* zero formal protections for free speech, freedom of association, freedom of conscience, privacy, etc. -- not even the 1^st Amendment applies to most private workplaces. The symbolic professions are noteworthy exceptions: as a result of guild-lobbied policies and longstanding cultural norms, symbolic capitalists have extraordinary protections for autonomy, speech, association, conscience, and privacy.

The freedom of the press is enshrined in the 1^st Amendment. The freedoms of symbolic capitalists go so far that lawyers and psychologists can even decline to cooperate with criminal investigations on the grounds of client privilege; journalists and academics can do the same to protect their sources.

Contemporary U.S. academics have immense formal freedoms and protections compared to virtually any other workers in the U.S. Even private academic institutions (not bound by the 1st Amendment) largely abide by the AAUP / AACU standards on academic freedom. American scholars have far more formal freedoms than peers in most other countries. They have far more freedoms today than U.S. academics have had in the past, because decades of intervening case law have settled areas of legal ambiguity, and almost exclusively in a way that expands freedoms rather than contracting them. David French recently observed that being a 1^st Amendment litigator in the U.S. is great: you show up to court, you collect your win, you collect your paycheck, you go to the next courtroom and do the same. Across administrations, across the country, and over time, 1^st Amendment cases overwhelmingly resolve themselves in favor of those seeking more freedoms or protections – and as a result, the sphere of formal protections has consistently expanded.

Yet, despite our expansive freedoms and protections, symbolic capitalists are significantly more likely than other workers to self-censor and to support the censorship of others – patterns that are evident before aspirants even land their first job.

Studies consistently find college students regularly self-censor in on-campus settings and beyond. When asked why they self-censor, students overwhelmingly report fear of being judged or ostracized by peers. They are significantly more worried about social sanctions than, for instance, being punished by administrators or docked by their professors.

One might be tempted to chalk this up to youth. Readers would be forgiven for assuming that professionals would be less concerned about popularity than folks fresh out of high school. However, it seems that symbolic capitalists do not, in fact, outgrow these dispositions. For example, when my colleagues and I analyzed data on the prevalence, distribution and drivers of self-censorship in science, we saw the same basic pattern among scholars that others observed among students: scientists were significantly more concerned about losing standing with their colleagues and students than facing termination or formal sanction for something they said or published. Pro-social concerns such as these were some of the main drivers of (self)censorship in science.

On the one hand, this makes sense: whether or not work gets published in an academic journal or university press ultimately comes down to evaluation by one’s peers. Whether a research design or grant application gets approved often comes to down judgements of one’s peers. Peer committees make decisions about hiring and promotion for oneself and one’s students. Peer committees decide whether one’s preferred applicants to grad programs get admitted, and much more. The esteem of one’s peers, in short, is of immense practical consequence to academics.

As Paul Bloom noted, because of the structure of committee decisions in academia, it often only takes one person to veto someone’s prospects, even if everyone else supports them. And this remains true even for senior scholars with a robust record of accomplishments:

“Let me tell you about a search committee I was once on. We were looking at senior candidates, and someone’s name came up—a person of considerable accomplishment. And then a member of the committee said something like, “I hear she’s difficult. Not really a good colleague.” And we all moved to the next person, because we had a lot of names, so why waste our time on someone that we weren’t all enthusiastic about?

If you’re a colleague of mine at any of the universities I’ve ever worked at, you might think that you remember that meeting. You probably do, because this has happened in every senior search committee meeting I’ve ever been in. Sooner or later, we end up talking about how likable the candidates are—to put it in more professional terms, about what sorts of colleagues they are—and, sooner or later, someone will express their concern that one of the candidates wouldn’t be a good personal fit with our department, and they’re dropped from consideration.

This sort of negative screening is less likely to happen for junior searches, where we’re looking at graduate students and postdocs, because such candidates aren’t as well known. Here, the cues to collegiality come mainly from the letters; it’s a rare letter that doesn’t talk about how nice the candidate is, about their warmth, generosity, and so on. Young people are more vulnerable to negative screening when they come up for tenure, because by then, they are better known.

The point here is not just that it’s good to be liked. I’m sure that helps, but I’ve seen people secure great jobs due to their accomplishments as scholars and scientists, even if they weren’t especially popular. Instead, the point is that it’s bad to be disliked—even by a small proportion of people. If 90% of the field adores you and 10% will describe you as ‘difficult’, you’re likely screwed, career-wise.”

Mindful of these potentialities, academics care about the views of their peers a lot. Most try to exemplify the characteristics associated with the “in” group while strenuously avoiding anything that could see them cast “out.”

Other symbolic professions exhibit similar dynamics. Again, symbolic capitalists make a living based on what we know, who we know, and how we’re known. Our social networks and our social standing often matter as much (or more) for our life prospects than any acquired knowledge and skills or our actual professional outputs.¹ Our behaviors reflect these realities. The symbolic professions tend to be contexts where workers have extraordinary formal protections compared to everyone else in society, but where virtually nobody behaves as if they’re free. Risk averse, conflict averse and status obsessed, symbolic capitalists aggressively police ourselves and our peers (typically, through intermediaries and impersonal processes) for infractions that are incomprehensible to most outside our professional cultures.²

Formal rules and norms are not the cause of these tendencies and they can do little to change censorious dynamics: the issue in the symbolic professions is not that they’re full of independently-minded and freedom loving people whose ability to tell the truth and follow their conscience is significantly hampered by a lack of formal protections. These are spaces that are highly censorious despite extraordinary rights and privileges (because they’re dominated by folks who are risk averse, conflict averse, status obsessed and dogmatic).

Freedom, pluralism, and related goods are ultimately a matter of culture, not laws. If folks are not respecting or taking advantage of the freedoms and protections they already have, proliferating still more of them would not change much about how these institutions function. Laws and litigation are valuable to protect the few who actually possess spines, but their relevance and success is premised on their intended beneficiaries possessing at least a modicum of courage and a willingness to dissent (without these, there is nothing for these laws to protect in the first place: pluralism only has value in the presence of divergent views. Freedom only has meaning in the context of someone doing or saying something that others will not like).³

On their own, formal rules promoting freedom cannot easily override cultural selection pressures towards censorship and conformity. There is, perhaps, no clearer example of this reality than academic tenure.

Why Academic Tenure is a Conformity Gauntlet

Contemporary tenure protections were created in the U.S. to empower scholars to do edgy, risky, challenging, provocative and ambitious work. Tenure was intended to liberate scholars from the apparent need to serve powerful stakeholders’ moral, political or financial interests. And, in fact, tenure does provide real protection for scholars.

Data from FIRE shows that it’s really easy to “cancel” contingent faculty. They typically lose their jobs when they are targeted for their speech (I have personal experience with this reality). Yet, for tenure-line faculty, the story is much different: they overwhelmingly survive cancellation attempts. They’re one-fifth as likely to be terminated for speech related crimes as non-tenured faculty are. This is true even for faculty who are not yet tenured but are on the tenure track.

One can argue (and this is my personal view) that a 10 percent cancellation success rate for tenured faculty is still higher than it “should” be. One can rightly note that the process of trying to defend oneself from cancellation is, itself, an ordeal even if campaigns against tenure-track professors overwhelmingly fail: cancellation attempts typically trigger formal investigations into professors’ conduct, and when the investigation is concluded, faculty often end up with smaller sanctions even if they ultimately keep their jobs.

Source: FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire database

Rather than being emboldened by surviving a cancellation attempt, those who find themselves the targets of these campaigns often self-censor more than they used to — especially in public forums. Others, having experienced “institutional betrayal” as their universities punished rather than protected their speech, their unions declined to support them when the chips were down, their colleagues (at best) provided backchannel solidarity or (at worst) actively and publicly stabbed them in the back, and their students immediately believed a wild caricature of them and avoided their classes or grew hostile therein — they can become bitter, reactionary and extreme. Very few people who find themselves targets of cancellation campaigns emerge from them healthy. It’s a genre of events where “that which doesn’t kill” nonetheless tends to leave people durably worse for the wear.

It should be noted, however, that it’s only a tiny share of faculty who ever find themselves facing speech related disciplinary campaigns to begin with. When we’re talking about tenure-line faculty losing their jobs after cancellation campaigns, we’re talking about a small share (who get fired) out of a small share (who get targeted) out of the ever-shrinking minority of faculty who are tenure-line in the first place.

To put it in numerical terms: over the first two decades of the 21^st century, a total of 1080 tenured and tenure-track faculty were targeted for political speech and 110 of these were fired. From 2000 – 2022, on average roughly 49 tenure line faculty were targeted for speech each year, and about five lost their jobs per annum. During this same period, there were about 1.5 million people working as faculty in the United States (at all ranks and levels) during any given year – and about one third of these faculty were tenured or tenure track. These data allow us to put the cancellations into context. In any given year, the odds are a mere 1: 600,000 that any particular U.S. faculty member would

1. Be either tenured and tenure-track,

2. Find themselves targeted for their speech and,

3. Get fired as a result.

Even just restricting our analysis to the much smaller pool of U.S. tenure-line professors, the odds of any particular faculty member getting terminated following a cancellation campaign in a given year are 1: 200,000. These are extremely low probability events. Tenure – even just being on the tenure track – provides very real protections.

And it deserves to be stressed: even the comparatively weak protections afforded to adjuncts are still far more robust than what most normie workers experience. Again, outside the symbolic professions, workers typically have zero rights for free speech, etc. For most workers, if you do or say something that leads to significant public controversy, internal turmoil, or other major inconvenience for one’s employer — especially while acting in a professional capacity — you’ll almost certainly be fired or sanctioned. The fact that contingent faculty have a 50/50 shot of keeping their jobs when targeted for cancellation, while terrible compared to tenure-track professors, looks good compared to the odds a cashier at Home Depot would face if their speech kicked off a firestorm for their employer.

Given that academic work in general -- and tenure track contracts especially -- provide strong protections, one might expect an academic self-censorship pattern that runs like this:

• Contingent faculty self-censor more than other academics (because their contracts are more precarious and protections are weaker) but markedly less than most other workers.

• Untenured faculty who are on the tenure-track self-censor less than contingent faculty but more than folks who already have tenure.

• Tenured faculty rarely self-censor. Compared to everyone else, they speak and write quite freely.

However, when my co-authors and I reviewed the empirical evidence, this is not what we found. Tenured faculty do not become much more likely to take up contentious and challenging projects on moral and political issues upon securing the most robust set of workplace protections. They do not speak more freely on controversial topics post-tenure. We found basically no difference at all between contingent, tenure line and full tenured faculty in terms of proclivity to self-censor.⁴

What explains this null finding?

Well, first, the fact that tenure provides a lifetime appointments cuts two ways: it’s a fantastic arrangement if you’re liked, respected, and well-integrated in your academic community. A lifetime appointment is pretty miserable, however, if you’re widely reviled and socially isolated within your institution or field.

In No Exit by Jean Paul Sarte, God outsources torture of sinners to the sinners themselves. Although technically free to leave, they ultimately antagonize one-another for all eternity. The play is perhaps most famous for its declaration that “Hell is other people.” Bleak, but perhaps an apt description of being reviled in an institution where one was granted a lifetime appointment.

Again, social sanctions matter more than professional sanctions: professors don’t want to be in a situation where they walk into the room and folks roll their eyes before they’ve even said a word. They don’t want to preside over chronically hostile or under-enrolled classes. They do want to get invited to things – from student-run events on campus to a night out with their peers. This requires getting and staying on institutional stakeholders’ “good side.” Tenure, precisely in virtue of being a lifetime appointment, may reduce concerns about formal sanctions while also dramatically raising the stakes of fitting in and being liked.

Pre-tenure selection pressures are also very important here. Tenure stream professors may face significantly lower professional risks than contingent peers, but the pool of people who comprise this subset of the professoriate may also be especially conformist compared to other scholars (who are, themselves, especially conformist relative to most others in society).

After all, the most common strategy is to be awarded tenure is to:

1. Do safe and conventional projects that make you legible within the discipline. More specifically, be laser-focused on projects that conform with the preferences and expectations of the editors at top disciplinary journals.

2. Produce work your peers want to publish, read, and cite, and share – usually by affirming peers’ preferred narratives about the world (and providing data and methods that help others advance the preferred narratives ever-more convincingly).

3. Keep your head down and your tail between your legs. Avoid stirring up controversy and making enemies. Try not to end up in the crosshairs of scholars who are well-positioned to sandbag your career. Try to ingratiate yourself with prominent scholars who can enhance your prospects.

There’s a lie that early-career scholars often tell themselves: they’ll follow this strategy until they get tenure – but then, watch out! Once their tenure protections are in place, they’ll do big ambitious work and say what they really believe, directly and without fear. Pew, pew, pew!

The problem with this narrative is obvious: if someone spends 4 years in their undergrad, at least 6 years in grad school, and another 6 years working through the tenure track – at each stage taking care to avoid ruffling feathers – at the end of this process, they’re no longer the kind of person who says (or perhaps even thinks) edgy things. They are someone who keeps their head down and does safe and conventional work. And they’ll likely tell their own students to do the same because it apparently worked for them (even as taking on students provides a convenient opportunity for tenured professors to justify continued self-censorship: they’re biting their tongue despite tenure, yes, but not because they are cowards! They’re just looking out for the best interests of their advisees, whose prospects are partially bound up with their own reputation).

Most early-career scholars who follow the dominant strategy don’t seem to recognize the strong survivorship bias at play among those who endorse it.

From Wikipedia: This hypothetical pattern of damage of surviving aircraft shows locations where they can sustain damage and still return home. If the aircraft was reinforced in the most commonly hit areas, this would be a result of survivorship bias because crucial data from fatally damaged planes was being ignored; those hit in other places did not survive.

In fact, the vast majority of aspirants who follow the roadmap described above do not end up with a tenure-line offer. The overwhelming consequence of going on the academic job market is fail to secure a tenure-line position. Even for those who apply to tons of jobs at a wide range of institutions over multiple cycles, the modal outcome is to walk away empty-handed (or to ultimately accept a contingent position instead). And of those who do get a tenure-track job, roughly a third will ultimately be denied tenure when they’re up for review (although rates vary significantly across fields and institutions and over time).

Given the low baseline odds of success, it’s not obvious that bucking the dominant strategy would meaningfully undermine one’s job prospects. If you’re likely going to fail either way, you might as well do work you find important and be forthright in your observations in the meantime. It’s statistically unambiguous, in any event, that the overwhelming majority of aspirants who follow the conventional advice ultimately betray themselves for nothing. Yet, most continue to betray themselves anyway.

Instead of encouraging people to take intellectual risks and to pursue ambitious projects, the “carrot” of academic tenure often pushes scholars even further in the direction of risk and conflict aversion and conformity. In practice, tenure ends up selecting for and reinforcing the very tendencies it was created to undermine.⁵ This is not because the formal protections aren’t strong enough (although there is always room for improvement). It’s because professors are generally cowards. In many cases, it’s precisely their antecedent risk aversion that led them to cling so intensely to academia in the first place.

Why the Symbolic Professions Are Easily Steamrolled

If you haven’t been tuning into the news: the Trump 2.0 Administration has been aggressively targeting the symbolic professions over the past year. The Democrats – symbolic capitalists’ preferred political party – have offered little substantive resistance. Occasional carefully worded statements and empty symbolic gestures aside, Trump has had free reign over U.S. society, institutions and culture because the “opposition” party is incapable of mustering meaningful opposition. This is exactly what one would expect of a party comprised top to bottom by symbolic capitalists: cowardice, conformance and risk-aversion. We can see these tendencies just as clearly in how virtually all other symbolic capitalist dominated institutions have responded to Trump too.

Harvard University, for instance, is the richest, most prestigious, and most influential educational institution on planet earth. It is a century older than America itself and will certainly outlast the Trump Administration no matter what it does over the next few years. Yet, from the moment Trump declared war on higher ed, Harvard began a campaign of aggressive anticipatory compliance. They planned to quickly fold to White House demands just like their Ivy League cousin, Columbia University. This ultimately proved untenable because, emboldened by Columbia’s rapid acquiescence, the Trump Administration issued demands to Harvard that were *literally* impossible to comply with (because they were self-contradictory and often starkly illegal besides). And so, with trepidation, Harvard ultimately took Trump to court and, unsurprisingly, won their case easily. But what’s striking here is that they had to be forced into basic resistance in order to secure this easy win, despite being extremely wealthy and powerful and possessing many viable options other than compliance. The first and overriding instinct of universities is virtually always to rapidly fold.

As I noted in a previous essay, I saw this dynamic up close after I was dismissed from the University of Arizona following a Fox News smear campaign. Of course, I was far from the only scholar who lost a job because of a witch hunt. Whether the attacks come from the left or the right, university leaders consistently think that if they just give the mob a head it will make them go away. In fact, this compliance just makes folks hungry for more heads even as it shows everyone that mobbing tactics are an effective way to coerce the administration in question. This is a “strategy” that virtually guarantees subsequent pressure campaigns downstream. Yet, appeasement remains the go-to move for many university leaders.

And it’s not just domestic stakeholders who can easily steamroll universities. As Authoritarians in the Academy powerfully illustrates, higher ed institutions in the U.S. regularly cave to foreign actors as well: curtailing the speech of U.S.-based students, faculty and staff in order to comply with dictates of international agents.

Here, however, I should stress that while the academic response to Trump and other illiberal actors has been genuinely pathetic, it has not been unusual relative to other symbolic professions.

For instance, if anyone had the resources and capability to, say, fight Trump in court, it would be Big Law. Yet, when Trump demanded concessions from some of the nation’s premier legal firms, they folded immediately. The deals they cut were disastrous on every level. They were also completely unnecessary.

Like Harvard in the university sphere, there were some law firms who could not comply for various reasons, and so they took the Trump Administration to court. In each and every case that has been tried to date, the litigants scored clean victories. So far, the White House is 0 for 4 in these cases. When firms actually tried to win them, they were easy cases to win. Yet, institutions with unparalleled legal and financial assets at their disposal immediately waved a white flag instead.

As a reward for their cowardice, some of those firms now find themselves in legal jeopardy, because while Democratic lawmakers have been effete in pushing back against Trump, they apparently have no problem piling onto those who have already demonstrated themselves to be weak and non-confrontational, and so they’re launching probes into whether these firms broke the law in acquiescing to Trump’s demands (rather than trying to hold Trump accountable for making unlawful demands to begin with).⁶ Peak symbolic capitalist behavior, right there!

Big Tech is just the same. The communications, software and technology industries are among the most dynamic in the economy and are increasingly central to basic operations of virtually all social systems and institutions. Industry firms and professional organizations are some of the top lobbyists in the political ecosystem, giving industry actors direct leverage over many politicians. The CEOs of these symbolic industries are among the richest and most powerful people on planet earth. They have “f***k you money.” They’re well-positioned to push back against the White House if they chose to. And yet, near unanimously, these companies and executives have instead bent the knee. As tech journalist Steven Levy put it:

“A shadow has fallen over Silicon Valley. The community still overwhelmingly leans left. But with few exceptions, its leaders are responding to Donald Trump by either keeping quiet or actively courting the government. One indelible image of this capture is from Trump’s second inauguration, where a decisive quorum of tech’s elite, after dutifully kicking in million-dollar checks, occupied front-row seats… tech giants are certainly capable of standing up for the long-term viability of their industry. And for democracy. So far they are doing the opposite.”

Critically, the industry doesn’t just demonstrate this easy compliance for Trump. During the Biden Administration these companies regularly banned content and users at the request of the White House too – even without direct threats attached to the administration’s “requests.” As Evgeny Morozov powerfully detailed, these companies have long complied with dictates of foreign authoritarian regimes as well — censoring content, helping them surveille activists, and much worse.

I could go on about major media companies aggressively restructuring their coverage to avoid White House pressure or interference, or large nonprofits who are adjusting their funding priorities and biting their tongues to avoid ending up in Trump’s crosshairs – but I believe the point has been made: the symbolic industries and their preferred political party have been totally dominated by Trump and are easily steamrolled by other external actors — not because they have no leverage to resist, but because they lack the backbone to meaningfully try.

These same tendencies towards risk and conflict avoidance, conformance, and so on also make it easy for internal factions to “capture” institutions dominated by symbolic capitalists.

Why the Symbolic Professions Are Easily “Captured”

Symbolic capitalists broadly imagine themselves as people who think outside the box and color outside the lines. We see ourselves as visionaries and “disrupters.” The reality of how we operate is far out of step with our preferred narratives.

Consider the dynamics that often define symbolic capitalist spaces: bubbles and crashes, virality and death spirals, “blowing up” and “getting canceled,” and so on. Underlying each of these phenomena is the widespread inclination to copy others in one’s network, immediately and reactively. These are not phenomena one would expect to observe in contexts defined by those who painstakingly seek out “the facts,” exercise healthy skepticism, independently arrive at conclusions, comfortably defy the crowd, etc. As Meta executive Nick Clegg recently stressed to Bloomberg:

“Silicon Valley is a place of stampedes and fads. The funniest thing is that Silicon Valley is a place that prides itself on challenging orthodoxy, conformity and conventional wisdom — and yet in many ways, it’s the most conformist place I’ve ever lived in my life: Everyone dresses the same, they drive the same cars, they listen to the same podcasts, they claim to read the same books. You get this extraordinary herd behavior and everyone thinks they’re being super insightful, but in fact everybody’s kind of following the same trend.”

Silicon Valley is not an outlier. Most other symbolic economy fields are comprised of people who think of themselves as rebels and independent thinkers but who are, in fact, intensely conformist.

The widespread tendency in symbolic capitalist spaces to immediately copy the discourse and behaviors of one’s peers, and to conform non-confrontationally with imposed rules and standards, is a big part of why my colleagues and I were able to so consistently observe patterns like this when we analyzed academic research, media articles and other symbolic outputs:

The “Great Awokening” is, in large part, a story of compliance and rapid emulation.

Critically, these patterns do not just hold at the level of individuals and their aggregate outputs. Fields like higher ed , journalism and consulting are likewise defined by institutional isomorphism: a message or policy adopted by one institutional actor quickly gets picked up by others, even if the first-mover’s approach is straightforwardly not great.

We saw this tendency at work when institutions rapidly imposed DEI training in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, despite the abundant evidence that the adopted programs do not achieve their stated goals (and are often counterproductive).

These impulses were at work when many scientific organizations endorsed Democratic political candidates or defined themselves as part of the #Resistance to Trump despite tons of empirical evidence that these moves would not plausibly help their preferred political candidates win but would likely undermine trust in their institutions (most disturbingly, this evidence was sometimes published by the very organizations who later contributed to politicization anyway).

Even when leaders knew that what they were doing was probably a bad idea, no one wanted to preside over the only org that failed to make the “correct” political statements or promote DEI during these fraught cultural moments.

As a result of these tendencies towards conformism at the individual and institutional level, extreme ideas can became institutionally dominant within the symbolic professions even when they are not widely embraced by symbolic capitalists at the personal level. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb and others have detailed, an unrepresentative minority as small as 5% can dominate an institution if they are:

• Intolerant, and

• Highly-organized

Especially if they’re surrounded by others who are:

• More tolerant and/or less organized than the agitators

• More risk and conflict averse than the agitators (even if the agitators are, themselves, not particularly brave: they just have to be bolder than the cowards they’re surrounded by).

• Ambivalent, sympathetic, or averse to seeming opposed to the agitators’ cause

• Misinformed or uninformed with regards to how most others in the group think and feel or would react to dissent against the agitators

• Uncertain about what is “out of bounds,” whether and how any taboos will be enforced, and who will enforce them.

The symbolic professions are precisely the kinds of contexts where these conditions are consistently met, allowing the positions of unrepresentative minorities to become institutionally dominant. “Woke” discourses that play into the ostensibly altruistic telos of our fields are especially likely to face minimal resistance.

For instance, many symbolic capitalists were apparently disturbed by Ibram X. Kendi’s illiberal proposals. Some were troubled by his prominence given his apparent inability to even define basic terms in a non-tautological way. Others likely heard whispers of financial mismanagement and hostile work environment in institutions Kendi controlled. Yet, most who had reservations did not speak out against him — allowing him to attain a sage-like position (and rake in and then squander obscene amounts of money) on the basis of weak work and worse politics. See also: Robin DiAngelo, 1619, et al.

Other symbolic capitalists had deep concerns about Black Lives Matter diverting and disappearing huge amounts of money intended for victims of police violence (despite the protestations of the families of the victims in whose names they raised the funds) — even as they grew increasingly focused on issues that had little direct connection to incarceration or policing (e.g. their calls to dismantle the nuclear family). Still others were troubled by justifications of looting or calls to abolish the police that became fashionable during the post-George Floyd moment. But here, too, most who were troubled by these developments largely kept those concerns to themselves.

Broadly, during the post-2020 “racial reckoning” (and most of the decade preceding it), those who had issues with the behaviors and policies being promoted in the name of antiracism often avoided public dissent. This was, in part, because although they may have rejected specific proposals, they agreed with the cause of antiracism in principle — and they certainly didn’t want to be seen as being opposed to antiracism writ large (if you’re anti-anti-racism, the double negative implicates you as a racist, after all). Unfortunately, the systematic avoidance of expressed opposition ended up creating a misleading picture of widespread support. And insofar as actors within an institution erroneously believe they’re alone in their discontent, they avoid challenging the dominant view. Each person’s silence makes it less likely that others will speak up either (see pp. 33-36 and 206-213 of WHNBW for more on these dynamics).

The upshot is that most symbolic institutions are far less “woke” than they appear to be from the outside. It is important for people who wish to reform these institutions to understand and account for this reality. In the event an unfortunate position has attained institutional dominance, if dislodging that view required most stakeholder sin the system to reorder their fundamental worldviews, values and priorities — this would be insanely hard. However, getting a moderate majority to recognize itself as the majority and behave as such? This is still difficult (given baseline levels of cowardice and conformism), but it’s a far more tractable problem.

Indeed, years prior to Trump’s election, the symbolic institutions were already rapidly moderating. The same conformist tendencies that make it easy for positions to become institutionally dominant can also lead to the rapid collapse of institutionally dominant views. In many cases, all it takes is a cluster of folks with credibility and backbones to successfully break a false consensus. The fact that ill-considered views can remain institutionally dominant for so long because there are so few symbolic capitalists who apparently meet these basic criteria — this is an indictment of our professions.

Understanding the Fundamental Symmetry Between “Left” and “Right” Symbolic Capitalists

If the specific contents of each party’s beliefs were what shaped culture war behaviors (as the “conservatives are from Mars, liberals are from Venus” model assumes), we would expect to see symbolic capitalists from each camp think and behave in importantly different ways (as a function of their different priorities and concerns). Instead, there is broad symmetry and, often, symbiosis.

People view the culture wars like this:

In practice, they tend to play out more like this:

As WHNBW explains (pp. 42-43):

“At bottom it cannot even be said that the anti-woke are genuinely hostile to wokeness—they parasitically feed off moments of Awokening to build and enhance their personal brand. They are dependent on wokeness far more than most other symbolic capitalists. They derive their income and status from keeping people engaged on the subject of wokeness, and from making woke ideas seem important and threatening to the status quo. In the process, they actually end up reinforcing the very impressions that their mainstream peers are desperate to impart: that the actions of ‘woke’ symbolic capitalists are genuinely radical and influential.”

Although they often criticize mainstream symbolic capitalists for being out of touch, right-leaning and anti-woke symbolic capitalists also take symbols very seriously – subordinating the bread and butter concerns of normie Americans to issues related to culture. Alongside their left-leaning peers, right-wing and anti-woke symbolic capitalists believe hat struggles over symbols and rhetoric have extremely high stakes — perhaps world-historical stakes (see pp. 38-43 of WHNBW for more on these points). Understanding this shared mindset makes it easier to understand why the Trump Administration, for instance, has spent so much time and effort on labels and symbols despite growing discontent by normie voters over bread-and-butter issues.

Likewise, although many on the right complain about left-wing DEI programs, they seem to broadly share the same assumptions and concerns about representation. This helps explain why, upon taking power, the GOP has aggressively worked to push right-wing DEI policies, appealing to the same types of arguments advanced by the left. Different groups are intended to benefit from the policies, but the underlying goals and rationales are roughly the same.

Finally, for those working from the premise that censoriousness among left-leaning symbolic capitalists is a product of adherents being indoctrinated by particular ideologies, we would expect that others who define themselves against those ideologies would be far less censorious than their ideological rivals. However, this is not what we see.⁷

Instead, as left-aligned cancellations began to decline as the Awokening wound down, right-aligned cancellations rapidly increased as the anti-wokening ramped up. For instance, as WHNBW explores, it tends to be a very select subset of the population who is “very online.” Basically, it’s symbolic capitalists. During the “Great Awokening” there was a wide gap in public opinion on whether campaigns targeting people online were “accountability culture” or “cancel culture.” Left aligned symbolic capitalists gravitated towards the former position, right leaning symbolic capitalists towards the latter.

Since the end of the Great Awokening, the left has grown far less interested in cancellation. However, in the midst of the anti-wokening, the right has become super interested in cancellation. And so, in polling post-2021, you can see a stark decline in leftists who believe online targeting campaigns are just “accountability culture,” accompanied by a sharp increase in the number right-aligned folks think cancellation is just “accountability culture.”

This is not just an online phenomenon. Data from FIRE show that cancel culture on campus today is now driven overwhelmingly by the political right:

On some issues, like Israel-Palestine and other foreign policy topics, the cancellation campaigns have always been driven mostly by the right. For instance, even in the midst of the Gaza protests and accompanying narratives about antisemitism on campus, it has primarily been the pro-Israel side leading harassment, intimidation and cancellation campaigns. Today, however, the right is the leading force in cancellations across virtually all issues.

Even where there are few left-wing people to target, these tendencies towards exclusion and intolerance remain pronounced. Liberty University and Hillsdale College aggressively censor those who do not tow the “correct” line. UATX is shaping up to be the very kind of monoculture it was created to avoid. As I stressed to the NY Times, many of the newly-launched centers and schools of civic thought will ultimately end up as hermetically-sealed echo chambers that have little interaction with, or influence on, the broader campus or mainstream disciplines. Right-aligned think tanks were created as alternatives to the ideologically constrained higher ed space, but they typically exhibit the same cultural dynamics as mainstream academia with even fewer protections for dissenters. The Manhattan Institute, for instance, recently severed ties with pioneering conservative scholar Glenn Loury for going off-script on their preferred narratives on Middle East politics.

Similar realities hold for right-aligned and anti-woke media organizations. For instance, Bari Weiss drew fame as a student for leading cancellation campaigns against professors at Columbia University. She had a breakthrough moment at the New York Times for popularizing (and, through her profile, galvanizing) the “Intellectual Dark Web.” She became increasingly outspoken about conformity, homogeneity and censoriousness at the Times. Following a high-profile resignation from America’s newspaper of record, she launched a new outlet, The Free Press, whose name is a good indicator of its explicit mission: to encourage debate and reflect a wide range of views on pressing social problems.

Based on this branding, one might assume that the FP has consistently featured differing perspectives on one of the most contentious issues of the day: the ongoing Israeli campaign in Gaza. That assumption would be incorrect. The New York Times that Weiss defined herself against has much more diversity of thought reflected in its pages than the FP on this topic. Even established “heterodox” voices are not free to diverge from the Free Press’ institutionally dominant view on the conflict.

Indeed, a year ago I was invited to do an interview on the FP podcast to discuss my book. In the last five minutes, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, my interviewer decided to shift to discussing foreign policy… either assuming we were on the same page or that, if we weren’t, he could easily ensure the “correct” narrative won out in the end. That isn’t the way those five minutes ended up playing out. And so, rather than presenting listeners with a civil interaction that featured genuine viewpoint diversity on this pressing social topic — or even just cutting the swerve into foreign affairs from the interview (because it was irrelevant to the book I joined the podcast to discuss) — the “Free Press” censored the entire interview.

As part of her tentative deal to sell the FP to Paramount, Weiss is poised to take on a pivotal editorial role at CBS — with an apparent mandate to reshape coverage of foreign policy and domestic politics to better conform to the preferences of the White House and the new billionaire owner of the network, David Ellison. Out with the old orthodoxies and taboos, in with the new.

In the interest of full-disclosure, I should note that I’ve known Bari for many years. Interpersonally, I like her a lot, and I think (hope) the feeling is mutual. I also know and have genuine affection for tons of people who work at the Free Press and/or write for the Free Press. I’m not trying to single them out. Indeed, my actual point is that The Free Press is not much different than any other media outlet (in fact, they’re poised to literally become an establishment media channel if the CBS acquisition goes through). The FP responds to the same mix of pressures and incentives as most other media outlets. They’re staffed by similar people and have a similar institutional culture. There is a difference in which views are institutionally dominant and which are taboo, but the overall dynamics are basically identical. Folks who are passionate about outlets like the FP, however, do not seem to be particularly aware, forthright, or thoughtful about these realities – perhaps because these institutions ultimately select for audiences and content producers who already subscribe to their institutionally dominant view.

As a consequence of cultural selection processes, the people who end up “in the system” at outlets like the FP are unlikely to ever face direct censorship (they already think, feel and say the “correct” things, so there is nothing to censor). Insofar as they face little-to-no pushback for anything they say, they can develop a reasonable but false conviction that the institution in question is not censorious. They can miss the extent to which alternative perspectives have been preemptively censored: filtered out through the selection process. To the extent that there are differences of opinion within this pre-screened population on many peripheral issues for which there is no institutionally dominant view – this can reinforce the illusion that these institutions are full of tolerance and diversity on virtually any issue⁸ — although this illusion is quickly pierced if they happen to stray outside the lines on the “wrong” topic.

A frustrating aspect of describing these realities is that mainstream symbolic capitalists almost immediately gravitate to “hypocrisy” and “cynicism” frames to explain them, i.e. “The right-leaning and anti-woke crowd are a bunch of hypocrites who don’t really believe in free speech.” As I stress repeatedly throughout my book, this is a good tactic for scoring cheap political points, but it’s a bad approach to gaining insight into social phenomena. Nothing could be more banal than to assert a given individual, group or institution regularly violates its own expressed commitments. Because this phenomenon is more-or-less a human universal, most explanations of this hypocrisy that appeal to specific characteristics of the ideology, group or context in question are likely to be false or misleading. There’s not much to be gained, analytically, from pointing out hypocrisy.

What is far more interesting is the tight symmetry in the mindsets and behaviors between left, right and anti-woke symbolic capitalists in spite of subscribing to very different moral and political ideologies. Attending to this symmetry illuminates how the specific “ideologies” and “beliefs” associated with various factions of the culture wars are largely orthogonal to how the symbolic professions actually operate in practice.

Insofar as “alternative” media outlets, think tanks, university centers, etc. tend to be based in the same communities as their mainstream peers while requiring similar “meritocratic” credentials — and therefore draw from the same narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society — it should not be surprising that they are filled with the same kinds of people who exhibit the same kinds of tendencies that dominate mainstream institutions. The actual content of folks’ beliefs is largely irrelevant for understanding or predicting their broad psychological dispositions and behavioral tendencies towards conformism, conscientiousness, risk aversion, conflict aversion, and so on. Selection patterns that hold across these institutions seem far more salient.

Attending to these points can illuminate why attempting to ban, for instance, critical race theory, queer theory, and related lines of thought at universities (and/or impose requirements to teach conservative or classical liberal thought) is unlikely to change much of anything about the culture of higher ed. The problems these institutions face aren’t caused by the unique characteristics of “the left.” They are products of the unique characteristics of symbolic capitalists writ large.⁹

In a similar vein, there is little practical point to trying to genealogize or refute “woke” ideas. It might be interesting or useful to do this for intellectual reasons, but these arguments will do little to change any underlying cultural dynamics insofar as those dynamics are demonstrably not products of people having read and internalized work by Foucault et al. to begin with.¹⁰

Unless and until the symbolic professions change their selection criteria and processes, they’re likely to continue to producing roughly the same kinds people who think and behave in the same kinds of ways.¹¹ Antiwoke, right-wing and progressive symbolic capitalists may justify their actions by appealing to different ideologies, but in terms of substantive practice, they are basically the same. And this is precisely what one might expect by adopting a more thoroughly cultural approach to analyzing the culture wars.

1. Few people ever engage with most of the outputs symbolic capitalists produce, and those outputs typically have little practical impact “in the world.”

In his Vocation Lectures, for instance, sociologist Max Weber noted that science is and always has been overwhelmingly comprised of failures and errors, punctuated by occasional findings that are true-but-trivial, and a miniscule amount of work that actually matters. Vanishingly few scholars get serious engagement with their work when they’re alive, and even fewer produce work that is still engaged with after their death. For the overwhelmingly majority of scholarship, the world would look no different if it was never published at all. Nonetheless, science is important because of the marginal share of works that prove to be immensely consequential – fundamentally transforming our lives and societies. As Adam Mastroianni put it, science is a “strong link” problem.

Other symbolic professions operate in a similar manner: most journalism, art or entertainment outputs, for instance, receive little attention, have no shelf-life, and exert no meaningful impact on the world. No one would know the difference if they were never produced at all. As previously noted here, education does not shape young minds nearly as much as professors seem to hope (and conservatives seem to fear). Many positions in HR, consulting, law and administration are fundamentally “bullshit work.” See pp. 191-195 of WHNBW for more on these points.

Yet, critically, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of symbolic capitalist outputs are inconsequential, symbolic capitalists as a group exert immense influence over society. Most of what we do in our professional capacities never matters at all, but some of what we do is of immense practical consequence for a wide range of stakeholders in society.

I often think of it this way: on average, the bottom 95 percent of academics matter far, far less to society than the bottom 95 percent of mechanics (however defined). However, the top 1 percent of scholars would tend to be far more pivotal to the social order than the top 1 percent of mechanics. And so it would go comparing virtually any other randomly chosen symbolic and non-symbolic professions.

Most of us, however, are not in the top 1 percent. We do not make a living because our work actually matters in any practical sense. Who we know and how we’re known matters more than any concrete value of what we know or what we produce. See Chapter 3 of WHNBW for more on how symbolic capitalists artificially inflate our salaries (and depress the relative pay of other workers) independent of elite overproduction and despite the fact that most of what most of us do is of far less practical value than most other workers.

2. The highly constrained speech environment in the symbolic professions was something I struggled to get used to. When I worked in freight, for instance, people weren’t obsessed with politics and cultural issues the way that symbolic capitalists are – they don’t care about most of these issues nearly as much as symbolic capitalists do. But when these topics did come up, people spoke freely, sometimes getting into full-on arguments. But the arguments didn’t devolve into colleagues hating one-another or breaking social ties – again, it’s primarily symbolic capitalists who tend to cut off relationships over moral and political differences.

Rather than being symptomatic of a problem, getting into discussions about freighted issues and speaking freely about them was taken as a sign of trust and respect. It usually led to tighter social bonds despite persistent disagreement. Even when an argument ran hot, folks would show up to work the next day, and the relationship was unchanged or stronger. You didn’t just see this peer to peer, but also in “vertical” relationships:

When I worked selling shoes, because it was a very intimate job in many respects, people would tell me all manner of things about themselves — to include disclosing their opinions on political and moral issues. Although there was a strong power imbalance in these interactions (one cannot offend a customer or act unprofessionally – upon penalty of workplace sanction or lost revenues), I would still push customers on dubious or insufficiently thought-through claims when I felt like it. This never once resulted in negative professional outcomes; it often enhanced bonding (I had a very loyal customer base!).

Likewise, across the “normie” jobs I worked, if the manager wanted someone to do something and the worker disagreed, they’d often talk back to the boss. Ultimately, they’d usually end up doing what the manager wanted in the end, but not before they said their piece (and sometimes extracted additional concessions or compensation). And if a worker really didn’t want to do something, they’d often just say “no” flatly. Sometimes they’d walk out or (as needed) find a different job. Often, the work they declined to do would just be reassigned to someone more compliant.

When I’ve spent time in barber shops or an auto shops, I’ve observed the same patterns: workers diving into all kinds of issues with one-another in the presence of the customers, and sometimes in conjunction with the customers, in ways that reflect and enhance respect, trust and intimacy despite regular disagreements.

There are literally no protections for free speech, conscience, association, privacy at any of these workplaces, but people still speak their minds – including, often, to people who have practical power over them. Upon transitioning to university, and then working in the non-profit and academic spheres, I quickly discovered that things operate very differently in the symbolic professions.

3. To be clear: my point is not that rules and laws don’t matter at all, it’s that these formal rules and norms are a limited tool — a more limited tool than most appreciate. Above, I stressed that on their own proliferating a bunch of protections cannot radically change culture. But that isn’t to say lawsuits, legislations and formal policies aren’t an important part of the tool kit.

The point of this section was to stress that it’s a mistake to focus really intensely on formal rules and norms while broadly neglecting cultural dynamics and processes. The conclusion I want folks to draw isn’t that we should ignore the law but, rather, that we should attend to culture more than we typically do. For the formal rules and protections to work as intended, one must attend to cultural issues in addition to legal issues. The intense focus on laws paired with a broad neglect of culture has been generally unproductive to date.

To illustrate: on paper, higher ed institutions are freer than they’ve ever been. In practice, self-censorship in academia today may exceed the McCarthy era (according to Lukianoff and others’ estimates). We can’t understand or mitigate this state of affairs without attending to culture.

4. Other research has observed that scholarly productivity often declines after tenure, but professors do become marginal more likely to take up novel/ niche projects – albeit often in ways that are less ambitious or impactful. Rather than becoming more active and outspoken on issues of great relevance or controversy to the general public, they tend to go the opposite direction: retreating into arcane rabbit holes that probably would not have helped them establish a tenureable reputation in their field.

5. Hat tip to Greg Lukianoff for coining the term “conformity gauntlet” to describe this phenomenon.

6. In a similar vein, rather than trying to resist or restrict the White House, Democratic congresspeople recently sent a letter threatening to probe Harvard if they end up striking a deal with Trump despite their initial legal victories. Rather than targeting the bully, they’re attempting to exert cross pressure on the intended victim. So brave!

7. As I noted in my final essay as Communications Director for Heterodox Academy, on balance HxA members seemed to be eagerly trying to bridge differences, improve research and teaching, and expand their own horizons and the range of speech and inquiry in their fields. However, many co-travelers in the “viewpoint diversity” movement were clearly just interested in trying to advocate for their own preferred ideologies while trying to suppress or delegitimize the left. And those folks tended to exhibit the exact same mentalities and behavioral tendencies that they liked to condemn in others:

“In my time with HxA, I have been floored – absolutely humbled – by members’ commitment to put our ideals into practice, to translate our aspirations into realities. However, I have also been deeply distressed, and at times discouraged, by the lack of self-awareness, the imposition of double-standards — and at times, apparent bad faith — among many others who ostensibly align themselves with Heterodox Academy and its objectives. For instance, I’ve seen many, many people who decry victimhood culture on the one hand, yet eagerly depict themselves as victims at any opportunity; whole outlets have emerged for people to carry out this ritual. I’ve seen people who complain about the lack of academic freedom turn around and support legislation that would further curtail said freedom for the sake of advancing political goals. I’ve seen people publish anonymous complaints about others making anonymous complaints. I’ve seen people lamenting cancel culture and then celebrating or joining pile-ons against professors who make arguments they don’t like. I’ve seen people who ridicule ‘snowflake’ students absolutely lose it when subjected to criticism themselves – launching harassment mobs or character assassination campaigns, threatening to sue, calling for others to be disciplined by their institutions, all because someone had the gall to criticize them. I’ve seen a lot tribalism from people who purport themselves to be beyond tribes.”

8. Many left-aligned folks respond with incredulity when confronted complaints about unfreedom on campus or in the media for the same reason that many who work for the FP fail to recognize its constraints. If you support the institutionally dominant view, you are not just free, you’re often institutionally encouraged and supported. Working from a default assumption that one’s own experience is typical of most others, it can be easy for those who subscribe to the institutionally dominant view to therefore erroneously believe that a highly parochial institution is generally inclusive and open.

9. More broadly, as I’ve explored elsewhere, it’s hard to change many aspects of culture through legislation. One can force teachers to assign conservative thought, for instance, but it’s impossible to mandate and practically enforce a requirement that they teach these thinkers with enthusiasm and charity. It’s tough to ensure that students actually read assigned texts. It’s much harder to force them to read the texts deeply and with an open mind (rather than skimming the assigned texts in order to get what they need for tests or assignments — or else reading the text in an adversarial way, to refute it).

As Matthew Yglesias put it, “culture eats strategy.” Unless students and teachers go into the texts with the right types of attitudes, dispositions and norms – unless they genuinely appreciate the value of engaging with assigned ideas, thinkers and texts – then they are unlikely to profit much from being formally required to read them. In Nietzsche’s words, all education is, at bottom, self-education.

10. Persuasion is valuable in some cases. I’m a big fan of persuasion, i.e. engaging with people who do not already agree with you in a manner that they will find compelling and in venues where those people are likely to congregate. I regularly stress that persuasion is underrated. However, it’s important to understand the circumstances under which it will be effective.

Persuasion is a tool that is used when you have large numbers of sincere believers who need to be brought on board for your social project to succeed. That is, persuasion is most important in cases where there is an actual consensus you hope to disrupt rather than a false consensus you hope to expose. Persuasion also tends to be an intensive and gradual process.

In cases where an institutionally dominant view already enjoys little actual support, attempting to persuade people not to support the view is redundant, and trying to convert the zealots who endorse this view will be tough (because, in virtue of their position attaining institutional dominance, they’ll typically have concrete as well as intellectual stakes in maintaining their position). It’ll typically be far more efficient to just expose the false consensus as a false consensus.

For instance, during the last decade there were many people trying to push for extreme policy positions in the name of African Americans. One could try to get into the weeds genealogizing these ideas and trying to refute their specific moral, theoretical or empirical underpinnings, but very few people are going to read or care about these analytical refutations, and out of the few who do, many will try to refute the refutations. And the conversation will grow ever farther removed from on the ground realities.

Simply pointing out, “these folks claim to speak on behalf of most black people. In fact, most black people reject this” is an approach that does not, at all, engage with the substantive political, theoretical, moral or other arguments they’re making. It simply exposes the attempt to create a false consensus. But it proved to be far more effective, in practice, for dislodging institutionally dominant views on these issues than trying to refute their substantive arguments. In no small part because relatively few people who acquiesced to the institutionally dominant view actually read arguments, thinkers and works that their critics are trying to refute to begin with.

11. Given the centrality of selection to my analysis of institutions, readers may think that the best way to fix institutions like higher ed is to lean more heavily into hiring and admissions based on “merit.” In reality, unless we rethink our current measures of “merit,” such an approach is likely to exacerbate existing trends rather than ameliorate them.

As things currently stand, hiring and promotion in academia is, in fact, more standardized, open, transparent, competitive, and metrics-focused (i.e. “meritocratic”) than it has literally ever been (those who are under the impression that this is not the case seem to misunderstand or misremember the status quo ex ante). This has led to these institutions growing even less representative of society writ large – ideologically, demographically and otherwise.

The problem is, our current metrics for “merit” select for a very particular slice of society. It is wildly implausible that institutions could double or triple down on these criteria — selecting ever more intensely for the same narrow and idiosyncratic subset of the population — but somehow end up with a much wider range of views and dispositions. The big problem is not that the institutions are insufficiently “meritocratic.” The measures we most commonly use for “merit” select for traits that are broadly incompatible with risk-taking, dissent and pluralism. They help us isolate people who are conscientious and smart, which is good for many employers. But these criteria simultaneously tend to filter for people who are conformist, dogmatic, risk-averse and conflict-averse… and this is really bad for innovation and truth seeking (see pp. 203-213 of WHNBW for more on these risks).