The Limits of ‘Heterodoxy’
When it becomes an identity, it becomes an orthodoxy of its own—lessons from the first “Dissident Dialogues” conference.
IN AN AGE OF POLITICAL POLARIZATION and tribalism, “heterodoxy” has become an increasingly popular concept for the tribeless, denoting people and ideas that defy traditional left/right descriptions. The Heterodox Academy, cofounded by renowned psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt in 2015 in reaction to progressive groupthink in academia, is the most prominent example; but the label is also embraced by what Radley Balko identified as the “new genre of heterodox punditry”—as found in publications like Quillette, UnHerd, and the Free Press. Amid competing and stultifying orthodoxies, the concept of heterodoxy can feel like a refreshing alternative.
Yet problems can arise when heterodoxy becomes not just an inclination but an identity—as illustrated by the trajectory of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” the network of self-proclaimed dissidents that has largely devolved into crankery and contrarianism. And now there’s a new heterodox venture: “Dissident Dialogues,” a self-styled “place for dangerous ideas” that has British organizers but held its inaugural two-day festival in Brooklyn earlier this month.
The IDW parallel suggests itself; one of the speakers, comedian and blogger Bridget Phetasy, brought it up in her standup comedy interlude on the event’s first day: “Are we like the new Intellectual Dark Web? I hope not, because we all know how that turned out: Not great.”
It’s too early to say whether Dissident Dialogues will follow in the IDW’s footsteps—although it hasn’t entirely managed to avoid some IDW-like pitfalls, including the self-dramatizing name with its subtext of persecution and peril. To its credit, the festival reserved the moniker of “a true dissident” for exiled Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, whose session went by that title. Co-organizer Winston Marshall, a musician and podcaster, told me that “dissident” as applied to the rest of the program was “a bit of fun” and was used as a synonym for “heterodox.”
The festival, organized in partnership with UnHerd, certainly offered plenty of interesting content and an impressive lineup of speakers, from intellectual stars like Harvard cognitive psychologist and bestselling author Steven Pinker to interesting unknowns like London-based writer, fashion stylist, and cultural commentator Ayishat Akanbi. But in many ways, it also illustrated both the promise and the limits of heterodoxy.
FOR ALL THE “DISSIDENTS,” many panels had surprisingly little dissent; Marshall conceded that there was “room for improvement” on diversity of opinion.
Take the session on “gender medicine,” with Irish psychotherapist Stella O’Malley, British journalist Mia Hughes, and Manhattan lawyer and “anti-woke” Democrat Maud Maron. It featured a solid consensus against gender-affirming care for minors and more generally against progressive gender theory, which is indeed a “dissident” position in mainstream culture; but while the panel offered some thoughtful discussion, several highly debatable claims—for instance, that “gender identity” itself is a myth rooted in sexist stereotypes—went unchallenged. Ironically, on an earlier panel about feminism, liberal feminism was almost unanimously trashed for rejecting stereotypical views of masculinity and femininity—two mutually contradicting positions united by the fact that both are “unwoke.”
The panel titled “Is government censorship ever justified?” was united in its opposition to “censorship” in the form of nonbinding communications from government officials about social media posts that may promote disinformation; but there was no real acknowledgment of the problems posed by malicious disinformation. Anti-establishment contrarianism abounded, with unironic references to America’s “ruling party.”
There was genuine, sometimes spiky disagreement on the panel discussing the future of the “mainstream media,” but that session also featured a bona fide and notorious crank, former New York Times reporter and COVID-19 contrarian Alex Berenson, once accurately dubbed “the pandemic’s wrongest man.” This time, Berenson argued that institutions such as the Times and the Atlantic were hopelessly “broken” by their hatred of Donald Trump, and cited the fact that he couldn’t get hired by the Times today as evidence of this brokenness. He got, however, some highly effective pushback from Atlantic columnist Thomas Chatterton Williams, an actual dissenter from progressive orthodoxy—especially on racial issues—who on this occasion offered a forceful defense of “legacy” media with their imperfect but real professional standards, resources for reporting, and commitment to fact-checking. There was more counterbalance from former Vice correspondent and We the Fifth podcast cohost Michael Moynihan, who had his own criticism of the media but argued that the problems are open to self-corrections (and who also dissented from the festival’s framing, declaring, “We’re not dissidents! This isn’t dangerous!”). I’m not sure why Williams and Moynihan had to share a stage and time with a serially dishonest crackpot. But the media panel at least had a clear and necessary lesson: If mainstream institutions can benefit from the checks and balances provided by “heterodox” alternatives, “heterodoxy” definitely needs checks and balances from mainstream institutions.
THE PARADOX OF HETERODOX ORTHODOXY was almost resolved by the panel on higher education, featuring Pinker, Columbia University linguist and cultural commentator John McWhorter, Greg Lukianoff of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (a cosponsor of the festival), and former University of Sussex philosophy professor Kathleen Stock, whose critique of gender theory caused such a hostile backlash that she resigned her post in 2021. All of them criticized the modern academy’s turn toward the pursuit of “social justice” at the expense of non-ideological scholarship. McWhorter proposed a memorable and inspiring ideal of the university as “a rarefied, peculiar place where all opinions are up for grabs and where we pretend that that’s the way it works in the real world.”
Yet despite broad agreement on that point, there was productive disagreement on how to remedy the problem. McWhorter proposed a “thought experiment” in which legacy institutions like Harvard evolve to focus primarily on science and technology while the humanities and social sciences migrate to alternative, smaller institutions. Stock sounded a cautionary note: So far, she pointed out, alternative academic centers are mainly funded by the right—and are in danger of becoming resentment-fueled “tit-for-tat institutions,” with a lot of “fulminating about critical race theory and cultural Marxism.”1 To truly work, Stock said, such institutions need political diversity in both funding and content.
The later conversation among McWhorter, Williams, and Ayishat Akanbi, the British writer and fashion stylist who has advocated moving away from polarizing identity politics, was doubly or triply heterodox. It offered a powerful critique of “woke” progressivism—a toxic form of “social justice” that sees everything through the reductive lens of identities and oppressions—but also acknowledged that “wokeness” had brought more attention to genuine social problems and to minority voices. It also arguably questioned the festival’s raison d’être by asking if we are past “peak woke” and discussing evidence that heresies are returning to the mainstream. McWhorter even admitted, in an admirable moment of self-reflection, that he found the tone of his own 2021 critique of antiracist activism, Woke Racism, “too shrill” on a recent re-reading—though he still feels it was appropriate for its moment. Today, he believes that “the worst is over, with the caveat of academia and the arts.”
But if left-wing “woke” extremism is receding, this raises an inevitable question: Should those concerned with illiberalism and irrationalism pay more attention to extremism on the populist-nationalist right? The obvious answer would seem to be yes. Yet, with the exception of a debate on the future of liberalism with Sohrab Ahmari of Compact magazine and Nick Gillespie of Reason, the two-day event was notably lacking in discussion of right-wing threats to freedom. And even in that debate, the focus was almost entirely on conservative philosophical challenges to Enlightenment liberalism, not on real-life right-wing regimes like Viktor Orbán’s Hungary.
This almost exclusive focus on enemies on the left resulted in some strange omissions. Several speakers deplored the illiberalism of COVID-mitigation strategies, which have not led to permanent restrictions on civil liberties in any democratic country, and certainly not in the United States; but if there was a single mention of Vladimir Putin—under whose rule, by the way, pandemic-related social-distancing rules are still evoked to ban demonstrations—I missed it. Trump came up only in the context of criticisms of his opponents.
The same omissions were notable in the festival’s much-anticipated finale, in which ex-Muslim-turned-ex-atheist-Christian Ayaan Hirsi Ali squared off against her former mentor, New Atheist doyen Richard Dawkins, with UnHerd editor Freddie Sayers moderating. While Ali spoke movingly of the inner void that led her to turn to faith, her comments left no doubt that her Christianity also has a political purpose: She believes Western culture needs it as an antidote to both the “woke mind virus” and the “Islamist mind virus.” Cringeworthy jargon aside, there was a major missed opportunity here: Sayers, who had earlier defended liberal values, did not ask a single question about Ali’s view of the political uses of Christianity by right-wing regimes—or about the startling illiberalism of her recently articulated view that Muslim religious schools should be shut down in Western countries.
This “no enemies on the right” blind spot is yet another problem that “Dissident Dialogues” shares, albeit in much less extreme form, with the IDW. That’s unfortunate, because the project can be commended for a genuine willingness to reach out beyond the “anti-woke” niche and assemble diverse thinkers. If it does continue, it should build on those strengths and apply a critical lens to some of the heterodox subculture’s own shibboleths (on anti-COVID strategies, for example). Above all, though, the “dissidents” must be willing to challenge the authoritarian right at least as much as the “woke” repressive left. “Heterodoxy” can add something valuable to the culture. But a one-sided heterodoxy will inevitably morph into an orthodoxy by another name.
Correction (May 19, 2024, 3:20 p.m. EDT): This sentence has been altered to clarify the description of Kathleen Stock’s remarks, removing a reference to an institution she did not mention.