To the left, the nerd’s ungraceful and sometimes probing utterances have become a major burden. || Dain Fitzgerald
We’re in strange times when the center right is home to intellectually freewheeling nerds just as the left is getting fed up with navel-gazing and hell-bent on epistemic closure.
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“If I see someone in a Batman t-shirt, I no longer assume they’re a sensitive soul,” laments Jennifer Wright at The New York Times. “Instead, I wonder if they harassed women during Gamergate or hang out on incel message boards talking about how Elliot Rodger was right to kill ‘blonde sorority sluts.’”
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Nerds are infamous for lacking a certain level of social awareness, being awkward and at odds with common sense and sensibility. And with progressives enjoying their common sense phase—the ability to shape the kind of thing ad-driven corporations want something, as opposed to nothing, to do with—the nerd’s ungraceful and sometimes probing utterances have become a major burden.
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There’s a growing sense that empiricism, rationalism, evidence and debate are all at odds with the imperatives of the modern left. (In fact they’ve all become tropes on the right, along with the meta-issue of free speech.) Biology has no place in the discussion around trans rights; evidence—and even long-standing notions like “innocent until proven guilty”—are considered an egregious rebuke e.g. to the notion of needing to “listen and believe” a woman’s claims about harassment.
There’s a kind of disrespect to popular sentiment shown when nerds who can’t read a room engage in deconstructing lefty zeitgeist. To even entertain thoughts at odds with progressive common sense is to “normalize” hate.
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So just how did common sense, and the hostility to interrogating it, become so wedded to progressives? Software engineer Mark Ledwich’s recent piece for Medium is suggestive: Progressives dominate the culture industry, and this has paid handsome memetic dividends.