Progressive Myths - Some of the Things You’ve Been Told Are Wrong
It’s possible that in our pursuit of justice and equity that a few things might have been exaggerated.
By: Michael Huemer
Published: 2024
277 Pages
Briefly, what is this book about?
A wide-ranging debunking of most of the myths that flourished during the recent peak of social justice activism. Some myths concern specific incidents like those around Michael Brown and Kyle Rittenhouse. Others are ideological myths like the gender pay gap, or the efficiency of masks at preventing the spread of COVID. In total he covers twenty different myths.
What’s the author’s angle?
Huemer comes at things from a strong classically liberal approach. He is very wary of activism in all its forms. He’s also clearly not worried about annoying people. Though he is very worried about people trying to “read between the lines”.
Do not “read between the lines” to infer what I “must be implying”. If you think of some ridiculous or horrible political view that you think I’m implying, that is almost certainly just in your imagination. I am not the sort of writer who likes to imply his point.
Who should read this book?
If you consider yourself to be a good progressive I would definitely read this book. I suspect that such people won’t, but honestly, if you’re looking for the best steelman of the opposing arguments this is it. If you’re on the opposite side of the fence you still might find some things that surprise you (Also Huemer makes a point of also covering a few things that aren’t myths. Incidents progressives were correct about.)
Many people speak very highly of Huemer’s books, and I’ll probably eventually read all of them.
What does the book have to say about the future?
Huemer has many recommendations for how to proceed, but they mostly boil down to having better epistemology. One of the great sins he identifies is motivated reasoning, which obscures facts, and beyond that leads to broad conclusions which are entirely unsupported by reality. And we seem to be getting more of such reasoning.
Specific thoughts: How do we fix epistemology?
Regardless of how you feel about this book, hopefully we can all agree that we need better epistemology. How is this to be brought about? One imagines that there might be a variety of methods to accomplish that.
The first method I might suggest is the most straightforward: read this book. Unfortunately that’s not something that scales very well. A depressing number of people don’t read books at all, so asking them to read a specific, argument-heavy, non-fiction book is unlikely to get very far. And as I already mentioned, even those people inclined to read this type of book, may have objections to reading this exact book.
In the past one of the key methods for establishing shared truth, or at least understanding, was through institutions. Unfortunately institutions of all stripes have destroyed their credibility in support of precisely the myths that Huemer is calling out. At least they’ve destroyed it with half the country. The other half of the country continues to think supporting these myths was precisely what they should be doing. Now that Trump is president we get to see it working in the opposite direction, for example with RFK and the Department of Health and Human Services. So we’re not seeing any kind of correction.
To offer up a few good and bad examples: In 2014 Obama’s DOJ found that when Darren Wilson shot Michael Brown that he was not trying to surrender, rather, he was charging Wilson. This is an institution working correctly. However in 2013 we had the IRS under Lois Lerner disproportionately auditing Tea Party groups. In 2020 it seemed that nearly all institutions went crazy in one form or another. (There’s a whole chapter on “Mask Science”.) And moving down to the present day, I’m hearing that Trump is demanding that the DOJ pay him $230 million for the wrongful investigations it conducted around him. I’m hearing different things about the odds of him actually getting that money, but if he does I would argue that this is a singular example of institutions not working correctly. At least until the next thing comes along.
How do we get back to institutions that were above the fray? I think it’s going to take a long time. Longer than we think, but institutions are at least partially reflective of the public as a whole, and there are a lot of things we can do individually. So even if you don’t want to read this book consider the following pointers offered up by Huemer:
Be more skeptical
Refrain from amplifying content you haven’t verified. (Verification can be tough, doubly so when institutions can’t be trusted, so maybe you should not amplify such things at all.)
Listen to critics. Make sure you’re not just listening to one side of the story.
Identify reliable individuals.
Question all-encompassing ideologies.
Give America the benefit of the doubt.
As I said this is not easy, but the alternative is a society that’s increasingly fractured into opposing camps, both convinced that justice is on their side. It’s chaos. Unfortunately we’re already deep into that chaos and it may be too late to dig ourselves out.
As this is already a political post. I might as well ask a question that’s been on my mind: What do you guys think about the shutdown? I didn’t really expect it to amount to much. Previous shutdowns have come and gone without much long-term impact, so I expected the same here, but I guess we’re about to the point where November SNAP disbursements won’t get issued? That seems like a pretty big deal. Fortunately this blog, unlike most, doesn’t rely on federal funding, so you’ll continue to get my cranky takes until the heat death of the universe.