What Has Happened to Courage?

How Dr. Glenn Loury Sold Out (and Why It Matters)

YouTube has gotten around to taking down one of Dr. Glenn Loury’s videos. With respect to whether a tech corporation has an obligation to provide free press for tawdry ideas, I’m ambivalent.

Nevertheless, I’m glad that they did take one down, if for no other reason than that it gave me an opportunity to write about Dr. Loury — something I’ve been yearning to do for quite a while.

When the Great and Wonderful American Treasure known as Bloggingheads began to sadly fall apart, I followed Dr. Loury over to Substack and paid the ticket price for the exclusive members content. In addition to following Dr. Loury, I was also excited to support the work of Mark Sussman and

Nikita Petrov

(of Psychopolitica, one of my favorite publications on Substack), both of whom were also veterans of Bloggingheads and

Nonzero Newsletter

. And within a few months, 10% of the money I was paying was going to the Woodson Center, which I thought would walk the walk of actually trying to build some infrastructure to create livable communities for black folk in urban environments.

It was not long, however, before I found said exclusive content intolerable, and I cancelled my membership. A few months later (frankly, missing Dr. Loury and his voice) I re-subscribed — only to find out that it had gotten worse. The comments section felt a lot like Parler — a lot of people mistaking impoliteness and contrarian vulgarity for genuine polemics, and there was less of a sense of wanting to evolve as a species, and more of a nostalgic desire to regress into old hat systems like incarceration and public shaming.

The thumbnail of the censored video alludes to statements made by Ben Shapiro, and depicts the participants gleefully laughing at a vulnerable straw-person, while suggesting that their opponents’ ideas are not valid enough to participate in discourse.

Within the confines of Bloggingheads, Dr. Loury’s discourse with Dr. John McWhorter was a refreshing counterpoint to the conversation-at-large housed within a Liberal institution: a sort of quasi-academic collective of thinkers such as

Robert Wright

, John Horgan and Dr. Daniel Kaufman. It was a network that assisted in launching the careers of journalists like Michelle Goldberg, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, and Ross Douthat. More, each week one could see two of my favorites — conservative

Matt Lewis

and liberal

Bill Scher

— on The DMZ (highly recommended!) where they still provide excellent analysis of the day’s political goings-on.

Dr. Loury, a Reagan and Hillary Clinton-supporting economist and graduate of MIT, has fluctuated ideologically over the years, mulling over issues like affirmative action and reparations with a scholarly eye that shares a body with a huge heart. And listening to him talk through pressing challenges facing black America, his pairing with the effete linguist Dr. McWhorter would often kick up wholly original ways of thinking, especially given Dr. Loury’s penchant for “steel-manning” opponents’ viewpoints.

But Dr. McWhorter had already written an entire book on his own Substack devoted to the notion that “Wokeism” (whatever that is) is allegedly a “Religion” which, (according to him) was initially spurred by the observation of real circumstances, but is now perpetuated only by a cultic adherence to a hallucinatory metaphysics. Under ordinary circumstances, Dr. Loury would bristle at this denigration of religion (it was partly a born-again experience which got him off of crack cocaine, after all). In this new context, however, intensified by the fact that he is now bankrolled by the Manhattan Institute, Dr. Loury seems happy to jump down the hegemonic rabbit hole to frolic with rapscallions. I’m certain it’s good for increasing traffic to the site.

I read the transcript of the offending video and wasn’t certain what to expect. In part, it was predictable — they had used no slurs, they had said nothing to which one could point and say “Hate.” This is what a video typically looks like when it’s yanked from a platform. The Trump can always say that they walked right up to the edge of inciting the violence while remaining innocent of having uttered whatever offending words might be criminally charged.

But I was surprised at how cavalier Dr. Loury was about depicting his opponents (whoever they are — the straw-person in this video is wildly diffuse) with such a lack of respect and compassion. Here is a sample of his introduction to the video, followed by a few of the opening remarks of the interview:

Debates about wokeness often frame the issue as one of identity, identitarian groups, and representation. How central to our personal identity are racial, gender, and ethnic categories? What role ought those categories play in determining how we apportion public resources and benefits? To what degree should the historical experience of groups determine identity in the present?

These are all relevant questions, but they don’t address a more essential problem underlying these identity-based questions: Should we credit the subjective experience of reality as much as we do objective, empirical fact? In some sense, it depends what we make of these terms. Of course, subjective experience is “real.” Our emotions are real, and most of the time the accounts we give to others of these emotions are sincere. A problem arises only when we try to treat those emotions, impressions, and feelings as equivalents to or substitutes for objective facts. I may feel in my gut that, say, a given policy is racially biased. I may be sincere in that stated belief. But unless I can demonstrate through reasoned argument and the presentation of evidence that the bias is objectively real and demonstrable, I will have given an account of my own emotional state, and nothing more.

[. . . ]

JOHN MCWHORTER: Hey Mark. You have written a really interesting book (I Feel, Therefore I Am), and it's a book that is going to make a lot of people mad. Frankly, it's a book that's going to make a lot of people madder than they should be. And I just wanna lay out what the basic premise is and ask you to give a specific example or two of what is meant by what is actually.

The back jacket copy of this book is better than on most books. Whoever did this may, maybe it was you, but somebody really ...

MARK GOLDBLATT: I suspect it was me. 

JOHN MCWHORTER: The summary of the book is this. This works perfectly. 

People often grouped under the umbrella term “woke” share more than a perpetual sense of grievance and attraction to street theater and an intense dislike of straight white guys who drink cheap beer and wear their baseball caps backward. They share a devotion to subjectivism. Their gathering principle is the idea that subjective belief, if it's heartfelt, trumps whatever objective, verifiable evidence may be brought against it. For these social justice warriors, if you sincerely and passionately believe and injustice is being done, then the effort to determine whether that belief corresponds with reality is a further injustice.

So this sounds like people who are clinically insane, and yet you're not referring to people who are clinically insane. They are thoroughly sane, usually highly intelligent. What are these people? What do they do? 

“They” (whoever “they” are) aren’t clinically insane, but they have taken an ideological potion which has made them incapable of gaining access to their faculties of reason, which is effectively the same as being clinically insane (which is a real thing that Dr. McWhorter can verify with “Enlightenment Science.”) Rather than dealing with any particular person or idea, the team is delighted to spend an hour kicking around an imaginary soccer ball, scoring epithetical goals.

Hate speech? Nope. Rabble-rousing to get a bunch of people upset about a non-academic fiction called “Wokeism” to sell books (including Dr. Loury’s forthcoming memoir)? Yep.

There was a time when Dr. Loury could be seen as an absolutely vital participant in some of the most important conversations facing our nation and world. That time has passed. He is now content retiring to his own little corner of the internet hawking sensational paperbacks. (A brief look at the cover of the guest’s book reveals its silliness. This is a close second to the time when Dr.s Loury and McWhorter heralded conspiracy-minded Dylanologist Joel Gilbert’s take on the Trayvon Martin case.)

I could get into statements about why Spinoza is better than Descartes¹, or how Marilynne Robinson’s take-down of Pinker² is solvent, or how both professors (if they carry on in this way) need to reckon with the arguments of The Rationality of Emotion by DeSousa³, but that’s not really the point.

The point is that Dr. Loury left the mainstream, entered a corner, and began to profit handsomely courting people who are fueled by resentment. Whether or not YouTube should have taken down the video is irrelevant. What matters is that Dr. Loury gets to profit from the fact that they did, whether or not it was fair.

And that is a sickeningly saddening thing to me. I miss him.

But — more than that — we need him. Just as the culture-at-large desperately needs Jordan Peterson’s message about the psychological underpinnings of religious traditions, we are now watching another helpful public intellectual sailing off into the factional abyss. Only two years ago, Dr. Loury was one of the few public intellectuals poised to make a dent in the meaning crisis, potentially helping tens of millions of people by using his economist's balance of social science, art, and data analysis to render his inspiring story to help others recover from addiction and find meaning in life.

Instead, caught in the smoke left by his decision to sequester himself, I find it useful and necessary to ask the same thing Catharine Stimpson asked him in 1991:

1. Eakin, Emily. “I Feel, Therefore I Am.” New York Times. April 19th, 2003. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/19/books/i-feel-therefore-i-am.html

2. Robinson, Marilynne. Absence of Mind. Yale, New Haven. 2010.

3. De Sousa, Ronald. The Rationality of Emotion. MIT, Cambridge. 1987.