Critiquing the Intellectual Dark Web: Michael Brooks’ “Against the Web”

“Peterson comes across no better in Brooks’ telling. He acknowledges that much of the Canadian psychologist’s self-help is quite useful, and he even jokingly admits that many leftists could do with some tough love about cleaning their room.”

Introduction

In 2018, the world was introduced to the “Intellectual Dark Web” in the pages of The New York Times. The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) was described as a collection of intellectuals and academics who varied ideologically but were united in their disdain for progressive identity politics and political correctness (PC) culture. It included religious conservatives such as Ben Shapiro, academics like Jordan Peterson, members of the New Atheist movement such as Sam Harris, and libertarians like Christina Hoff Sommers. Since then, the IDW has been subject to both unstinting praise from fans, as well as relentless critiques by opponents (including myself). To fans, the IDW is a necessary corrective to powerful and dangerous progressive movements threatening freedom of speech, social stability, and even Western civilization itself. To its fiercest critics, the IDW is a screen for advancing controversial views about race, ethnicity, and capitalism under the pretentious veil of being reasonable. Personally, I simply wish the more sophisticated members of the IDW took their ideological opponents seriously enough to mount well-reasoned criticisms. All too often, figures such as Peterson and Shapiro take pot shots at straw men, rather than actually dealing with progressive arguments in a rigorous way.

Michael Brooks, the host of The Michael Brooks Show, recently published an excellent new book entitled Against the Web, which distills many of these criticisms into a very handy and highly readable tome. Released with the critical theory outlet Zero Books (which—full disclosure—also publishes the works of  yours truly), Brooks’ book does much to respond both critically and constructively to the Intellectual Dark Web. Anyone with an interest in contemporary politics and the culture war should find it engaging.

It offers progressives powerful arguments against the Intellectual Dark Web’s positions, while sketching out a moving alternative to life in the Vampire Castle of cancel culture and PC policing.

Naturalizing Hierarchy

Brooks devotes a chapter-a-piece to criticizing the main intellectual figures of the IDW, starting with Sam Harris, moving through to Jordan Peterson, and concluding with Ben Shapiro. Each figure gets treated seriously, as Brooks reads through their major works and points out where they make serious errors or engage in recklessly dangerous polemecism under the guise of being more “reasonable.” Despite their substantive ideological and philosophical differences, Brooks notes that each of the major thinkers of the IDW falls into the same trap of trying to explain away injustices through naturalizing or mythologizing them. As Brooks puts it in the first chapter:

“They all defend the capitalist economic order domestically and American imperial hegemony globally. They all see themselves as defenders of a poorly understood (and frankly historically illiterate) construct called ‘the West.’ They all defend what they imagine to be ‘biology’ against feminists, and at least some of them—like Sam Harris, who’s supported the odiously far right and overly bigoted Charles Murray—defend a similar stance when it comes to race. Crucially, in all of these areas the IDW promotes narratives that either naturalize or mythologize historically contingent power relations—between workers and bosses, between men and women, they are old school reactionaries.”