The Rationalist: A Primer On How To Think, Pt. 2

In the last edition of the Rationalist, I explained what I thought were good principles upon which you should base your entire intellectual life. To be clear, it’s not that I wish I could control you into thinking a certain way. I know I can’t, and to be quite honest, I don’t particularly want to.


But what I do want, what would make me happy, is if you took the advice I gave you seriously. In this world, nuance is in short supply. Being willing to admit you are wrong when the evidence points you in that direction is a skill both vital and in shamefully short supply.

More to the point, there can be no greater danger to the American civil religion than the sentence I am about to write. If Americans no longer believe there is anything that unites us, the endless striving towards right and good that we attempt as Americans are meaningless and pointless.

Now if you believed that before, and will consider anything I say as serving “white privilege” and “white supremacy”, there is nothing I can do to change your mind.
There is a chance, even, that you will be one of those people who look at this and proclaim it no longer necessary for America.

You might even not say America how I say it, instead preferring to say Amerikkka as though this is some original thought.

But that is not the point. The point is that I promised to tell you who you should avoid. In my last article, I showed you how by not following certain patterns of thought you could fall into being snowed by those feigning intelligence. This time, though, we’re going to be a little bit more blatant. This time, I’m naming names.



Before we go any further, however, I must confess something. When I wrote this 2-part series, I did so with the idea that I could, in some way, pick up the barest splinter from the torch of a man I deeply idolize.

It’s not so much that I agreed with him without reservation, because I didn’t. His support of the Iraq war, for instance, is something I would have loved to have spoken with him about.

I believe it was wrong. More to the point I believe that he, with time and reflection, may have come to the same conclusion.

Rather, I idolized, and still idolize, Christopher Hitchens for the standard of thought he set.

The things I addressed in the last article, and the men and women I will address in this one, are all symptoms of a similar disease. It is the unwillingness to question, to hold enemies and allies alike to the same standard, that I find the most galling.

The best example, the one most commonly given, is Christopher Hitchens’s vivisection of the rapper Mos Def on Bill Maher’s HBO show Real Time. It was the intellectual equivalent of a bantamweight deciding to pick a fight with Mike Tyson.

But it was necessary, and vital, because there are few things worse in the world that being willfully intellectually vacant. If you don’t know something, that is not a problem. If you need it explained to you, also perfectly fine.
But to not know it, willingly and gleefully, is not fine. To admit that your distrust for the media and government is so thick, and complete, that you refuse to believe a terrorist exists simply because they say he does is beyond the intellectual line of what can be considered acceptable.

You must be smacked down for it, and reminded of the responsibility you have as a citizen to be well-informed.

So again, if the pair of articles I have written here do nothing else, I hope they pick up the splinters of the Hitchens mantle and can, a bit at a time, begin to put it back together.

With that said, allow me the freedom to begin doing what I said I was going to, and that is name names.

Firstly, Linda Sarsour.

Let me be clear, because I know simply by the act of mentioning her, I’m going to get some blowback for it. It currently is considered bad form to criticize someone on my same ideological side of the world.
But if I have showed nothing else to be true I hope I have made it abundantly clear that I care more for what you think, and how you arrived at the conclusion, than if you agree with me on some political matters.
And judging Linda Sarsour by that score, I am sad to say that she fails in totality.

If you’re the sort of person who believes Linda to be a coherent thinker on Anti-Muslim bias, I agree with you. She largely is. But that’s where it stops. On just about every other issue she is, frankly, dangerously obtuse.

This is a woman who, for instance, believes Saudi Arabia to be a better place for women to live solely on the virtue of better maternity leave standards than the USA.

Let me tell you about Saudi Arabia. (I will cite sources in parentheses after each point.)

Saudi Arabia is topped only by China and Iran in terms of executions via the death penalty from Amnesty International’s latest Global Death report. (https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/act50/0001/2015/en/)

Saudi Arabia is a country where apostasy, homosexuality, and speaking ill of the king is illegal. (https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/act50/0001/2015/en/)

I could go on. I could say more, and explain more, but suffice it to say that this is not a person I would want to take any more stock in than is necessary.

I could tell you how she finds common cause with Louis Farrakhan, a noted and infamous anti-Semite, homophobe, and generally a bad person.
But more galling, and as it happens more offensive, is how she responds to criticism.

I do not, of course, mean the false types of criticisms like death threats, attempts at doxing, and physical violence. No one condones those, and no one should.

Rather, I mean the standard garden-variety criticism of the sort anyone can expect on the internet.

If you are a public figure, especially one dealing in politics, there are a few things that should be expected. Criticism of your ideas, and sometimes far more vociferous than you might expect or wish for, is part and parcel of being a public figure.
Being able to handle that with good humor is vital.

Ms. Sarsour does not yet show the ability to respond to any of her critics with good humor.

Ms. Sarsour is a person who tweeted that Ayaan Hirsi Ali should have her vagina taken away.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a survivor of female genital mutilation. And because she does not happen to agree with Ms. Sarsour on the topic of Islam, what I just stated above was her response.

Anyone who responds to criticism of their religion with a desire to hurt someone in this way

Do not take her seriously.

But lest you think I am only here to attack easy targets, political dilettantes, I will now explain to you my other flawed political figure.

Ta-Nehisi Coates.

It’s not his intelligence that concerns me. Anyone who seriously will tell you Ta-Nehisi Coates is dumb is not a person you can take seriously.

 Rather, if I were to criticize Mr. Coates, it would be his nihilism that would be the bigger concern.

This is a man who defines himself, and demands to define everyone else, by his hopelessness.

According to Mr. Coates, any American who believes in the ideals of the American Dream is lost in a specious hope. And for him, that will simply not do.  Better to believe in the idea that the entirety of the American socio-political structure has been arrayed against your success than to accept your own complicity in your life not turning out the way you wished it.

I am a liberal, a liberal who believes in equality. But the difference is in the details. I am a liberal who believes strongly in equality of opportunity. This can be described as the idea that if we, as
Americans and citizens, do all we can to make sure everyone has the same chance at success that is the noblest goal.

This does not mean that everyone can achieve success.  But now, if racist structures that prevent opportunity being equal are defanged, it means success is down to individual skill, as it should always be.

Mr. Coates, I fear, does not believe in this.

Rather, my working theory is that he believes in the opposite. He believes the African-American cultural experience to be so tied up with racism, and so inherently oppressive, that reparations are required to inch towards fairness. Not to get to fairness, but to inch in its general direction.

I cannot countenance this. Nor should I be expected to.

Thank you for reading this article. Have a blessed day wherever, and whenever, this article finds you.