Troublemaking Dissent

At the recent Freedom of Intellectual Navigation conference at the University of Chicago, most of the speakers and attendees struck me as “dissident types”. This is an affinity that for better and worse I have long shared. Yet the political leanings have flipped from the dissident circles of my youth. They were leftward then in the US and Western Europe. They are rightward now. Here I speculate on why.

Most humans have a naturally strong tendency to share the beliefs of others and bend toward whatever the majority thinks is true. This has many evolutionary advantages in spreading knowledge and increasing social cohesion. However, a minority are naturally non-conformist, and while this can be personally costly, it helps society correct consensus errors and innovate.

Non-conformism comes in many varieties. The most flagrant is anti-conformism, where people delight in transgressive behavior. The non-conformism I focus on here has three distinctive features:

• It concerns ideas rather than behavior.

• It aspires for objective truth rather than subjective preference.

• It is undeterred by popular disapproval.

The first feature qualifies this as dissent rather than rebellion. The other two bode trouble, since people find comfort in consensus beliefs they share. I call this “troublemaking dissent”.

As a troublemaking dissident myself, I regard this as more affliction than blessing. The consensus often offers useful, or at worse inoffensive, advice so that parsing it is often a waste of time. Since dissenters’ own grasp of truth is imperfect, their quest might be properly rebuffed. Even when they are right, they court derision along the way and potential long-term ostracism. Their satisfaction requires some obliviousness to rejection—some half-Asperger’s mixture of not knowing and not caring.

Still, society gains enough from the occasional successes not to purge it from the gene pool. As psychologist Charlan Nemeth emphasizes, uniformity of opinion is a vastly overrated virtue. It feels good but narrows thinking. Dissent broadens perspectives and sometimes opens better ways of thinking.

Einstein provides the most celebrated modern example. His theories of relativity challenged the most solidly based physics theory of all time. He never received a Nobel Prize explicitly for them. When a book One Hundred Authors Against Einstein was published in 1931, he allegedly responded “Why one hundred? If I were wrong, one would be enough”. Yet Einstein too could be famously wrong too, as when he criticized quantum theory as too indeterminate: “God does not play dice with the universe”.

The US civil rights movement was full of troublemaking dissidents. Martin Luther King’s best-known speeches contrasted the US promise of equal rights to their legal deprivation. He intentionally courted opposition—as in my hometown of Birmingham—to highlight the contrast and inspire America to atone. The best-known fictional character in that quest, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, is a politely troublemaking dissident. He publicly demonstrates the innocence of a Black man falsely accused of raping and beating a white woman, despite his expectations that the community will convict regardless to preserve the aims and order of Jim Crow and that his own family will be endangered. His expectations are right. Why then does he bother? Because Atticus feels obliged to speak the truth:

“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Both Einstein and King leaned left. Few found that surprising, since the Western left was generally more willing to embrace unsettling scientific truth and equal rights. Let’s call that combination “liberalism”. To most young Westerners who flocked to the left, liberal conservativism seemed an oxymoron.

For me, that changed only when I studied Communist societies in earnest for my UC Berkeley economics PhD. The more I learned about their repression, their stultifying bureaucracy, and their daily hardships, both from books and academic exchanges, the less I could excuse as transitory failings or well-intentioned blunders. My enlightenment disillusioned; my disillusionment enlightened. How blessed I was to live in a society that not only let me learn that at minimal harm but also offered opportunities to atone through working on post-Soviet reform at the IMF and World Bank. (I subsequently advised investors from window seats at Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse, where my sad forte was warning that Western screwups would help propel a despot like Putin to power).

Along the way, I met many eastern Europeans who were as troublemaking dissidents as I was, with similar aims and policy views, but leaned right. “Left=regressive” seemed as clear to them as “left=progressive” had seemed to me. Overall their views were better grounded than mine, since their self-proclaimed leftist states were far more tyrannical, pervasive and truth-denying than Alabama’s under Jim Crow. Watch the documentary The Soviet Story on the links between Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR. Read the novels Master and Margarita or The Unbearable Lightness of Being satirizing the claimed higher ethics of Communism.

Fast forward to the present. Our universities in the US prize every kind of diversity except honest ideological debate. Fashionable memes deny objective truth; they insist that power shapes perception and strive to seize power. Factual reporting, including the guilt or innocence of the accused, is subordinated to the purported needs of a good society. And the good society is increasingly posed in explicitly racial or gender terms.

I recognize this vision from my childhood. It’s a return to Jim Crow, with all the injustice and phoniness, only with colors and genders reversed, like the negative of an old photograph. Like in To Kill a Mockingbird, the many good people are cowed into silence for fear of being deemed traitors to a higher cause.

Atticus Finch himself is under attack. In 2015 an early draft of To Kill a Mockingbird was published, perhaps when the author Harper Lee was too senile to give informed consent. The draft, set 20 years in the future, portrays Finch as a closet racist opposed to voting rights for Blacks. To many, the connection between the two Finches, coupled with the author’s likely recollections of her real-life father, expose To Kill a Mockingbird as an undeserved tribute to unfit “White Saviors”.

Personally, I expect all human virtue is bound with vice, don’t read to find saviors, and never interpreted a small-town court trial as a surrogate for broader activism. Finch’s downsides bring him closer to Huckleberry Finn, the uneducated scamp who absorbs every prejudice of his community, accepts that turning the runaway slave Jim over to the authorities is morally correct, and still decides to aid Jim. It is a telling condemnation of slavery’s corrupting influence on supposedly superior whites. In a similar vein, I applaud Atticus for standing up for innocence despite the rank prejudices he imbibed.

It is easy to feign bravery about events nearly a century removed knowing that all your neighbors will applaud you. It is easy to feign compassion for the oppressed while you live in state-funded luxury. Go ahead, flatter your self-righteousness all you want. But real life often forces a vastly harder choice. Support a popular bad cause and be praised, or an unpopular good cause and be damned? Most people opt for the former. Academics who privately affirm what they won’t affirm publicly are like the Mockingbird whites who stayed mum.

Academics ought to cherish the quest for truth, regardless of popularity. But the unpopular side naturally cherishes it the most. When the US was fighting the Cold War, the academic left defended dissent. Now that the left has captured the academic citadels, it despises dissent. The biggest loser is its own stated principles.

Orwell warned of this in Animal Farm. The pigs preach equality of animals, but once they overthrow human masters they discover that some animals are more equal than others and start to walk on two legs. The most telling analogy today is the apotheosis of anti-Zionism. Both Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King were strong supporters of Israel. They viewed this, and was viewed by others, as affirmation to their democratic-socialist leanings. Now most of the left considers Israel’s existence a colonialist affront and recasts hardline theocratic, totalitarian, anti-feminist, billionaire-run groups as liberation movements.

So here’s to truth-seeking dissidents, whatever political labels they use. Let’s hope they stir more trouble and applaud the brave souls who already do.