Introduction: Confessions and Commendations
I have a confession to make: I used to be a Sam Harris fan. Actually, I was a bit of a Sam Harris apologist. The neuroscientist, author, and podcaster had shaped my thinking on religion, science, and politics for nearly a decade. At some point, however, I began to see the cracks in his thinking. Specifically, I noticed his overreliance on “thought experiments,” which presuppose such a fantastical scenario that it makes his position on the issue seem more reasonable than it actually is. For example, in The End of Faith, Harris creates the nearly unheard-of situation involving a Islamist terrorist bomb threat in Los Angeles where thousands would die unless someone was tortured for information. This kind of thinking underscores one of Harris’ central problems: his inability to tie much of what he’s thinking to actual, lived reality.
This disconnect from reality in a desperate search for answers that satisfy the insensitive, inhumane, and downright insane is a hallmark of the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW), a cadre of writers, speakers, and “thought leaders” that includes Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and others. They received a glowing write-up in the New York Times in 2018 and have continued to gain plaudits from the mainstream press and alternative media. Yet, their brand of being “intellectual renegades” masks their baked-in, reactionary conservatism. We on the left, and honestly just people with good sense and empathy, need a guide to their insanity. That’s why Michael Brooks, host of the Michael Brooks Show and co-host of the Majority Report, is the perfect guide.
Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right (2020, zer0 Books) gives us Brooks’ uncompromising, hilarious, and brilliant analysis of the Intellectual Dark Web from a left perspective. He lays out for the reader all the problematic, insidious, and frightening aspects of the IDW and how we as leftists and socialists should respond to them. He ends the book with an optimistic message of humanism, universalism, and cosmopolitanism invigorated with class-conscious politics and a willingness to call to task the regressive tendencies of this new, but in some sense very old, configuration of the right.
His critique of the IDW begins with rejecting the framing that its bromides against political correctness are new or against the grain. As he writes:
In reality, both the group’s claim to be a persecuted minority and their depiction of the left as censorious and dominant were hardly new accusations. The conservative framing of American politics around a perceived culture war dates back to at least 1951 when National Review founder William F. Buckley, who was in that moment both a segregationist and a vocal white supremacist, released his book God and Man at Yale. Though the culture-war specifics might not have been firmly in place in that book, they certainly were by the time conservative philosopher Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in 1987. When the movie PCU (starring a bald Jeremy Piven) came out in 1994—10 years before the first season of The Apprentice and a full 24 years before Bari Weiss’s piece [on the IDW] hit the New York Times—these complaints were shop-worn clichés.
It’s important to linger on this point for a bit. Brooks is exactly right about the IDW in this regard. They parade themselves as bastions of a rebellious culture when in reality they perpetuate the very ideas that concretize our existing social and cultural relations. From Sam Harris’ simplistic and often racist attacks on Islam and Jordan Peterson’s defense of traditional gender norms to Ben Shapiro’s insistence on “Judeo-Christian” values as the cornerstone of the “West,” the IDW merely echoes the all-too-pervasive cultural shibboleths of the right and the broader status quo. There’s really nothing about them that is revolutionary or unique; it’s all in the marketing of these ideas that the IDW gets set apart.
Alongside this point, Brooks also foregrounds the importance of history in debunking the IDW. Harris, Peterson, and the rest of them all tend to either naturalize phenomena, explaining them in inane, scientistic language, or mythologize phenomena, in which broad literary and religious ideas are central to analysis. Explaining complex situations with only the simplistic framings of “it’s like this because of science” or “because God/myth of your choice says so” negates the social, cultural, economic, and political forces that shape our world. “Where they naturalize or mythologize social problems,” Brooks writes, “I am going to historicize them. I’ll critique the inadequate ways that the left has responded to the IDW’s challenge and the broader evolution of right-wing ideology that its members represent.” In developing that project of universalism, pluralism, and socialism, Brooks provides something that the left often lacks: hope for a future beyond reactionary politics.
Sam Harris and the Cult of Reason
Brooks’ first target of critique is the man I started with in this essay: neuroscientist Sam Harris. Harris has built an entire career offering readers the most simplistic, teenage atheist schtick for years, railing against Islam consistently while neglecting to actually study its history, culture, or multiple scriptural interpretations. In my estimation, Harris falls into the camp so often seen in atheist circles of not understanding that religion is more than the sum of its beliefs. Brooks keenly understands this problem in the following passage:
While many of my major intellectual influences are in fact atheists of the old school materialist tradition who analyzed religion as a cultural force determined by economics and social relations, I was always critical of the obsessive view of atheism as an innately liberating belief system that superseded the material conditions that we all live in and that shape our lives. The New Atheists, and Harris in particular, spent a lot of time obsessing over the problem that people believe “bad things” even as they ignored the real-world forces that might generate those bad beliefs, and in turn, adopted much of the reactionary worldview of their Christian counterparts in the Bush administration. . . .
We cannot divorce religion from social relations, because if we do, we’re actually not being proper materialists in the Marxist sense. As such, while Harris rejects god and superstition, he is nevertheless an idealist who believes that ideas trump everything else, that they have this magical power over people that is completely separate from the material realities they experience.
Like me, Brooks is also critical of Harris’ “thought experiments,” which aren’t really thought experiments at all. Thought experiments, like the classic examples of the Trolley Problem or the Prisoner’s Dilemma, are imagined scenarios that highlight complicated moral quandaries. There are no easy answers in a thought experiment. By contrast, Harris’ thought experiments are merely scenarios that are so wildly off base, so incredible in the traditional sense of the word, that they make his position seem reasonable or even laudable by contrast. They are not experiments but rhetorical devices that find a way to defend US imperialism, torture, and racial profiling. Or, as Brooks puts in a pithy passage, “his working definition of the phrase seems to be some bullshit I wrote that should be immune from criticism.”
In one of Harris’ most outrageous “thought experiments” in the End of Faith, the United States would be justified in initiating a nuclear first-strike against a country like Iran or Iraq, whose religious fundamentalism would preclude any pretext for self-survival in a nuclear standoff. In commenting on this example, Brooks writes: “Harris’ “hypothetical” scenario ran roughshod over what was happening in the real world and gave cerebral cover—and moral license—to some of the most dangerous policymakers in Washington. In addition to being morally appalling, Harris’ take was historically and politically illiterate.” In fleshing out this historical context, he further notes that “many revolutionary states, from Stalin’s Soviet Union to Mao’s China to the Ayatollah’s Iran, have very quickly determined that their geopolitical decisions cannot be based on ideological fervor, but must rather be premised on the cold calculations of Realpolitik. This is simple stuff, and it is appalling and embarrassing that Harris’ “thought experiment” isn’t informed by any knowledge of historical facts.” But “simple stuff” is often difficult for an ideologue like Harris, who will conveniently warp reality towards his preconceived notions of America’s nobility in the world and the threat of a monolithic Islam.
Harris is, by all measure, a racist who loves to parade himself as “being reasonable.” This comes to an astonishingly grotesque apex with his soft-pedaling of race science. A few years ago, Harris had Charles Murray, the notorious intellectual who brought race science into the mainstream again in the 1990s with his book, The Bell Curve, co-authored with Richard Herrnstein, on his podcast. One of the book’s central premises is that African-Americans, on average, have lower IQs than whites, and any social programs we enact to address this difference won’t change anything. Murray has the air of respectability as a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank he has worked at for years. Yet, the arguments sound more out of the nineteenth century, an era when cranial measurements to access intelligence were taken seriously. The acclaimed paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould thoroughly discredited Murray’s ideas in a revised edition of his seminal work, The Mismeasure of Man.
When Harris had Murray on his podcast in 2017, he essentially argued that Murray was the victim of a smear campaign for merely “showing the science.” He further shared his support of Murray’s research and said it shouldn’t be considered problematic or taboo to discuss. This then led to an over two-hour conversation between Harris and Vox editor Ezra Klein, who had heavily criticized the neuroscientist’s support of Murray. In this conversation, Harris says something that is so obtuse, so devoid or intellectual curiosity, that Michael Brooks poignantly highlighted it in his chapter on him. When Klein attempts to place that average IQ scores of African Americans in the historical context of slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and continued abuses at the hands of the state, Harris just says, “history is irrelevant.” This kind of fetish for “science” as a pretext to ignore history, politics, ideology, and economics completely destroys any semblance of credibility that Harris may have had. As Brooks writes, “Attempts to ‘scientifically’ justify racial hierarchy always end up in the historical dumpster of empirically refuted garbage science.”
This brings me to something I have wanted to articulate in writing for a while, something that complements Brooks’ excellent chapter on Harris. The IDW built its brand on “reason, logic, FACTS!” That’s its supposed bread and butter. However, when you actually look at what they do and say, it’s just as emotional, bias-laden, subjective, and moralistic as any cultural blowhard. They are not “reasonable” in the traditional sense of the word, but belong to what I call “the cult of reason.” It’s using the veneer of reason, logic, and facts to say the most insanely reactionary bullshit. It’s akin to New Agers using the veneer of science to aggrandize their spirituality, to give it a polish for the secular-minded professional class that rules our world. Just because someone says they’re being reasonable or logical doesn’t actually mean they’re being reasonable or logical. You should be skeptical of anyone using the defense of “I’m just being reasonable” or “logic dictates...,” because they could be completely full of it. We on the left shouldn’t abandon reason or logic (Ben Burgis’ book, Give Them an Argument, articulates this better than I can), but we should call into question those, like Harris, who supposedly wield it to defend racism, imperialism, and neoliberalism.
Jordan Peterson and the Desire for Meaning
The next target of Brooks’ analysis is the IDW’s most enigmatic figure: Jordan B. Peterson. A clinical psychologist and professor at the University of Toronto, Peterson has gained international fame for his YouTube lectures on myth and meaning, his self-help bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, and his strident stand against Bill C-16, which added transgender people as a protected category under Canada’s human rights law. As Brooks writes, “Peterson claimed that the bill was a “compelled” speech law under which he could be legally penalized for failing to use trans students’ preferred pronouns.” Peterson himself has said of Bill C-16, “These laws are the first laws that I’ve seen that require people under the threat of legal punishment to employ certain words, to speak a certain way, instead of merely limiting what they’re allowed to say.” He has tied these new provisions to an “entire underground apparatus of political motivations” that would make him a “mouthpiece of a murderous ideology.”
Peterson’s hyperbolic view of the bill, arguing that the law could be used to stifle his free speech or even lead to his arrest, was thoroughly debunked by Brenda Cossman over at the Torontoist. Cossman, a professor of law at the University of Toronto, believed Peterson “mischaracterized” the proposed bill in his public statements. When Peterson claimed that the law criminalized the use of incorrect pronouns, Cossman rebutted this claim, saying: “The misuse of pronouns is not equivalent to advocating genocide in any conceivable manner. If he advocated genocide against trans people, he would be in violation, but misusing pronouns is not what that provision of the code is about.” Additionally, Ontario (the province he and his university reside in) passed a similar provision years before Canada considered it on a national level, so he should’ve been held liable anyway. The worst that would happen to Peterson if he violated the new law would be correcting his behavior, a fine, or some kind of sensitivity training— not really the Gulag of Peterson’s imagination.
On a rhetorical level, Peterson is the master of slippery, nebulous language that packs more of a mystical punch than a logical one. As Brooks details, “instead of just saying that feminists or trans activists are a threat to traditional values, he’ll go on and on about defending capital-O Order against “the dragon of chaos.” Similarly, he likes to accuse those who desire an “equality of outcome” of having an “incomplete” view of the world because they see social systems through the mythic archetype of “the Tyrant” without understanding that the latter is “forever bound together” with the archetype of “the Wise King.” Peterson is like a mirror image of Sam Harris— where the latter naturalizes, the former mythologizes. They are nevertheless doing the same mystifying moves that negate history and a material analysis of the world.
He’s also said things that, at a fundamental level, are just completely batshit. For example, he’s claimed that the only way to effectively quit smoking is through a “mystical experience,” that ancient symbols of entwined creatures anticipated the double helix structure of DNA by centuries, and “enforced monogamy” might be an effective antidote to mass shooters. Peterson uses the English language like a jazz musician uses a piano or trumpet; he’s improvising and seeing what sticks. Sometimes the melodies work, but more often than not, he’s hitting off notes. Yet, this also works to his advantage. In each of these examples, Peterson has walked back his claims, hedged his conclusions, or with the DNA example, denied he ever believed it.
This makes it mighty difficult for anyone to rebut him, as he can constantly reframe his remarks in a more favorable light. He did just this with the “enforced monogamy” comments printed in the Times; in a discussion with Dave Rubin, Peterson reinterpreted his comments to mean monogamy that is socially enforced by communities or families, rather than by government. The new framing isn’t much better than the old—as both positions are fairly misogynistic—but it allows him an out with a more susceptible audience. I used to know someone who was very interested in Peterson’s ideas, and every time I brought something to him about Peterson that I thought was problematic, he would shrug it off and share some apologetics to defend him. I found this odd and unsettling, but it got me to think much deeper about my own worldview. For years, I was a fan and apologist for Sam Harris. I would constantly do with him what my acquaintance did with Peterson. Recognizing that no amount of reinterpretation fixes a fundamentally flawed text or statement put me on a path towards rejecting the IDW and finding the political left.
Finally, let’s look at what Brooks finds as the central contradiction in Peterson’s worldview. In the now infamous debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek, the latter opened up an honest discussion about one of Peterson’s “rules for life”: “make sure your house is in order before you criticize the world.” This leads us to Brooks’ perfect insight on this exchange:
The problem, as Slavoj Žižek pointed out to Peterson in their debate, is that sometimes people’s houses aren’t in order precisely because of the condition of the world. As we’ll see, this is the central contradiction in Peterson’s worldview. On the one hand, he’s a cultural conservative bemoaning disorder and social atomization. On the other hand, he’s an uncritical apologist for the “free market” system that generates the very conditions he laments as predictably as a boiling tea kettle generates steam.
Peterson rails against the ills of neoliberalism while simultaneously celebrating its triumphs as an essential component of the “western ethos.” This sets him up as an intellectual that doesn’t grapple honestly with the problems our age, but rather tries to hide behind the cult of individual responsibility and slippery mysticism.
Brooks again highlights this dynamic in a further passage:
Though he affirms that he’s deeply disturbed by the alienation, fragmentation, and disruption of cultural continuity brought about by late capitalism, he nevertheless expresses an enthusiastic commitment to “free markets.” This leaves him without any mode of response more useful than an addled combination of conspiracy theories and self-help advice about lobsters and chaotic women.
While we should definitely write off Peterson, we shouldn’t write off what he’s attempting to speak to: the crisis of meaning in a seemingly meaningless age. This is where the left would learn much from Brooks’ point of view, which he calls, “part Machiavelli, part spirituality.” We need to develop a spirituality that is tolerant, open, and pluralistic. It doesn’t have to be directed towards a specific religion or even be about supernatural beliefs. Rather, it’s about cultivating a relationship with one’s self, others, the world, and the broader cosmos.
Brooks suggests scholars such as the anthropologist Scott Atran and depth psychologist James Hillman that “provide potent contrasts to Peterson’s mythology-enhanced market fundamentalism.” As a secular humanist influenced by Buddhism, I find this alternative approach both enlightening and fulfilling. A spiritual life, or even a secular one imbued with some of the best that spirituality has to offer, should push us toward more universal pursuits, such as political activism and mutual aid. Peterson’s worldview just doesn’t offer that and for that reason— among many, many others— we should reject what he offers and find a more rewarding alternative.
Ben Shapiro’s Myth of “The West”
While Brooks discusses a few other folks in the IDW gamut, the last figure I wish to discuss in this review is the popular conservative radio host and author Ben Shapiro. Shapiro has become a darling of the IDW in recent years, with podcast appearances alongside Sam Harris and Joe Rogan. For those less involved in the milieu of American politics, Shapiro is the fast talking, acerbic editor of the Daily Wire. His daily radio broadcast reaches millions and his books have appeared on the bestseller list of the New York Times. Online, he’s known as the “Shapiro destroys [insert person, usually of marginalized identity, here] with FACTS and LOGIC!” guy. The Times even called him the “cool kids philosopher.” I will say here the obvious fact: what makes Shapiro appear as if he’s intelligent, logical, or insightful is that he’s confident and he talks fast. Really fast. However, as Ben Burgis has done, if you break down most of his arguments, they end up being pretty terrible.
One of the best examples of this comes from Brooks’ analysis of Shapiro’s view of the “the West” as the dominant part of the world— culturally, intellectually, and politically. In his recent book, The Right Side of History, Ben Shapiro makes the argument that Western civilization, from the emergence of democracy in Athens to the genius of the American founding fathers, is predicated on two major influences that set it apart from the rest of the world: Greek reason and the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. The problem with this view is that it is ultimately a myth and less an historical account. In fact, the teaching of “Western Civilization” as a course had its origins in post-WWII American academia, largely divorced from the historical record. As Brooks writes, “He uses history as a prop as he reenacts his preferred mythology.”
One particular aspect of Shapiro’s reading of “the West” that reveals his own biases more than anything is his discussion of Islam. As one of the three Abrahamic religions, Islam should be as integral a part of the Western intellectual tradition as Judaism or Christianity. Yet, in Shapiro’s hands, it is curiously left out. This has less to do with history and more to do with Shapiro’s own despicable track record on discussions of Islam, specifically Palestinians. As he said in a 2012 tweet: “Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock.” To be fair, Shapiro has put this tweet on a list of silly things he’s said in the past, but his view of Palestinian human rights and the contributions of Islam to the Western canon have not changed one bit.
As such, his view of history is less a narrative that conforms to the evidence or previous scholarship and more of a propaganda tract that leaves out crucial information in the service of an agenda. In relation to Islam, Brooks calls out Shapiro’s lack of historical accuracy in this passage:
[To Shapiro], a Muslim is “somebody else” who exists outside “our” civilization. Never mind that Judaism and Islam have at least as much in common with each other as either has with Christianity, or that the encounter between Islam and “Greek reason” actually happened a bit earlier than the parallel encounter between Christianity and the same Greek thinkers. In fact, if Muslim intellectuals hadn’t preserved some of those texts, they wouldn’t have been available to the likes of Thomas Aquinas.
The nuances required of historical scholarship are completely dashed in order to project a specific ideological bent, one that reinforces Shapiro’s retrograde politics. Brooks nails it on the head when he says of Shapiro, ““He’s just not interested in history, or in a history that centers not on dates, but on the interpretation and analysis of highly complex causal processes. Instead, what Shapiro is interested in is in reinforcing his reactionary mythology while repackaging himself as a Deep Thinker.” Like with Harris, Peterson, and the rest of the IDW, Ben Shapiro is a reactionary hack with pretensions of intellectual heft— and we should treat him as such.
Conclusion: A Left Universalism
If the Intellectual Dark Web is not the answer to our age’s problems, what is? What should the left articulate as an alternative? Here Brooks brings his biggest insights and provides us with a path forward that could truly reinvigorate radical left politics. “The answer to the IDW and the new right in general”, he writes, “is an Internationalist-socialist synthesis that is all about global and materialist politics.” Instead of the naturalizing ethos of Harris or the mythologizing turn of Peterson, Brooks argues that “we need a material analysis, buttressed with a sense of humor and a recognition of human fallibility, that connects the fight for a better world to the immediate interests of the majority of the population.” Centering our politics in meeting people’s material needs and involving as broad a coalition as possible could genuinely transform our society for the better. In fact, it’s the only way that has ever worked in the past. From the New Deal reforms of the 1930s to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a politics of solidarity with shared material goals brought about the most meaningful reforms of that era.
In effect, Brooks is arguing for a left universalism, a political mode that recognizes the shared needs and desires of all people while celebrating the diversity of humankind. As he notes, “we need an integral approach that fuses universal desires, aspirations, and material concerns with a recognition that we do in fact live in a globalized, interconnected, and neoliberal world still defined by grotesque inequality, ecological crisis, and resurgent right-wing authoritarianism.” This universalism is often unpopular within some aspects of the political left, who think it might cater to reactionary social attitudes in the service of a broader economic program. Brooks anticipates these critiques and offers his own rebuttal:
The kind of global socialist internationalism I’m talking about doesn’t mean that everyone has to do all of their thinking and theorizing in English—or even Esperanto. It means building a truly global intellectual and political culture with roots in a diversity of societies. Put another way, just because the messengers of universal humanism aren’t necessarily who we want them to be, doesn’t mean that the message itself isn’t just.
Pushing people into intellectual, moral, or political silos in the service of avoiding “appropriation” is exactly the kind of narrow thinking we must abandon in order to forge a universalist socialist project. As Brooks sees it, “Instead of policing each other’s influences and enjoyments for evidence of “cultural appropriation,” we should all strive to emulate the curiosity and rigor of the great Christian revolutionary intellectual Cornel West, who explores the echoes between Anton Chekhov and the blues with no interest in drawing artificial lines between cultures.”
Building on this theme, Brooks also criticizes another aspect of the contemporary left that he sees as a stumbling block to universalism: the tendency towards what the Marxist scholar Adolph Reed, Jr. calls “essentialism,” or “the almost metaphysical belief that culture stands apart from politics and economics.” Essentializing people to only their race, religion, or cultural context not only stops us from realizing the universal needs that connect us but actually trivializes the very identities we’re supposed to elevate. As Brooks beautifully puts it, “there is no magical or particular essence that gives people born into a culture the right to deny those who are not from that culture access to art, ideas, music, and the like. We should all be open to all cultures and should in fact embrace and encourage cultural exchange and syncretism.”
If this all seems impossible to fathom, Brooks provides readers with an historical example of the kind of international, universalist socialism he’s advocating—the African National Congress’ (ANC) Freedom Charter, written in 1955. The ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first president after the end of the brual Apartheid regime, argued in the Freedom Charter for a program that ended segregation, embraced universal democracy, provided protections for all cultural development and exchange, public ownership of material wealth, and freedom of movement for all. While much of the Freedom Charter has been achieved in regards to political freedoms in South Africa, the work of ensuring its economic program still continues. This is what Brooks sees as our opportunity in the here and now to combat the forces of neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and economic devastation. In the closing sentence of Against the Web, Brooks writes, “What the world needs to counter these forces is a renewed commitment to the kind of international socialist politics embodied in the Freedom Charter. This book has been my contribution to that cause.”
In all, Against the Web is a brilliant book that perfectly captures the problems of our current moment and articulates a meaningful way forward for the left. Brooks blends his characteristic wit, humor, historical knowledge, and grace into a package that leaves readers inspired and ready to learn more. I am also in complete agreement with him that for us on the left to truly gain influence and power, we must shake off the petty in-fighting and parochialisms and strive towards a universal, humanistic, and cosmopolitan worldview that leaves no one behind. Brooks’ global perspective, gained over years of research and discussions with dissidents, leaders, and activists around the world, has informed a book we’ll be talking about for years to come, well after the relevance of the IDW fades away.
*
It is heartbreaking to know that only months after Against the Web was published, Michael Brooks sadly passed away on July 20, 2020 at the age of 36. Tributes poured in from all over the world, including from his beloved hero, former Brazilian president Lula da Silva. As Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of Jacobin magazine wrote in his tribute:
Michael sought to make the world rather than be made by it, that much is true, but I’ll remember more than his politics. I’ll remember someone who was deeply human; someone who made an impact in those parts of life which politics never quite solves. He was all these things, and he was also an ambitious winner, someone who wanted to take on our callous rulers, and help build a just world, one where accidents of birth don’t condemn millions to misery.
On a personal level, he was such an inspiration to me and really played a huge role in my political evolution towards socialism over the last couple of years. His intelligence, his kindness, his idealism, and his grace were unparalleled. While I did not know him personally, I had a few social media interactions with him where he was beyond kind and generous to me. His ideas and his show have made me a better thinker and a better person.
I am inspired by the continuation of his show by co-hosts David Griscom, Matt Lech, and his sister, Lisha Brooks. They are keeping Michael’s ideas and vision alive for future generations to discover and learn from. Despite this horrible loss, the sheer brilliance of Michael Brooks will continue to live on in every listener of his show, every guest he shared a conversation with, and every person whose lives he touched. Without a doubt, Michael Brooks proved that left truly is best.