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April 2022  
  
One of the most surprising things I've witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth
of the concept of heresy.  
  
In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment
when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:

> Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly to whatever
> he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins:
> crime, heresy, and marriage. 

The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly medieval. How
strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But when I reread it 20 years
later it sounded like a description of contemporary employment.  
  
There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those
doing the firing don't use the word "heresy" to describe them, but
structurally they're equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things
about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or
falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done.  
  
For example, when someone calls a statement "x-ist," they're also implicitly
saying that this is the end of the discussion. They do not, having said this,
go on to consider whether the statement is true or not. Using such labels is
the conversational equivalent of signalling an exception. That's one of the
reasons they're used: to end a discussion.  
  
If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might
be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being
thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of
x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the
truth. That's obvious enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they
answer no, it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such
labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.  
  
The clearest evidence of this is that whether a statement is considered x-ist
often depends on who said it. Truth doesn't work that way. The same statement
can't be true when one person says it, but x-ist, and therefore false, when
another person does.   
  
The other distinctive thing about heresies, compared to ordinary opinions, is
that the public expression of them outweighs everything else the speaker has
done. In ordinary matters, like knowledge of history, or taste in music,
you're judged by the average of your opinions. A heresy is qualitatively
different. It's like dropping a chunk of uranium onto the scale.  
  
Back in the day (and still, in some places) the punishment for heresy was
death. You could have led a life of exemplary goodness, but if you publicly
doubted, say, the divinity of Christ, you were going to burn. Nowadays, in
civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by
losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy
outweighs everything else. You could have spent the last ten years saving
children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're automatically
fired.  
  
It's much the same as if you committed a crime. No matter how virtuously
you've lived, if you commit a crime, you must still suffer the penalty of the
law. Having lived a previously blameless life might mitigate the punishment,
but it doesn't affect whether you're guilty or not.  
  
A heresy is an opinion whose expression is treated like a crime — one that
makes some people feel not merely that you're mistaken, but that you should be
punished. Indeed, their desire to see you punished is often stronger than it
would be if you'd committed an actual crime. There are many on the far left
who believe strongly in the reintegration of felons (as I do myself), and yet
seem to feel that anyone guilty of certain heresies should never work again.  
  
There are always some heresies — some opinions you'd be punished for
expressing. But there are a lot more now than there were a few decades ago,
and even those who are happy about this would have to agree that it's so.  
  
Why? Why has this antiquated-sounding religious concept come back in a secular
form? And why now?  
  
You need two ingredients for a wave of intolerance: intolerant people, and an
ideology to guide them. The intolerant people are always there. They exist in
every sufficiently large society. That's why waves of intolerance can arise so
suddenly; all they need is something to set them off.  
  
I've already written an _essay_ describing the aggressively conventional-
minded. The short version is that people can be classified in two dimensions
according to (1) how independent- or conventional-minded they are, and (2) how
aggressive they are about it. The aggressively conventional-minded are the
enforcers of orthodoxy.  
  
Normally they're only locally visible. They're the grumpy, censorious people
in a group — the ones who are always first to complain when something violates
the current rules of propriety. But occasionally, like a vector field whose
elements become aligned, a large number of aggressively conventional-minded
people unite behind some ideology all at once. Then they become much more of a
problem, because a mob dynamic takes over, where the enthusiasm of each
participant is increased by the enthusiasm of the others.  
  
The most notorious 20th century case may have been the Cultural Revolution.
Though initiated by Mao to undermine his rivals, the Cultural Revolution was
otherwise mostly a grass-roots phenomenon. Mao said in essence: There are
heretics among us. Seek them out and punish them. And that's all the
aggressively conventional-minded ever need to hear. They went at it with the
delight of dogs chasing squirrels.  
  
To unite the conventional-minded, an ideology must have many of the features
of a religion. In particular it must have strict and arbitrary rules that
adherents can demonstrate their _purity_ by obeying, and its adherents must
believe that anyone who obeys these rules is ipso facto morally superior to
anyone who doesn't.   
  
In the late 1980s a new ideology of this type appeared in US universities. It
had a very strong component of moral purity, and the aggressively
conventional-minded seized upon it with their usual eagerness — all the more
because the relaxation of social norms in the preceding decades meant there
had been less and less to forbid. The resulting wave of intolerance has been
eerily similar in form to the Cultural Revolution, though fortunately much
smaller in magnitude.   
  
I've deliberately avoided mentioning any specific heresies here. Partly
because one of the universal tactics of heretic hunters, now as in the past,
is to accuse those who disapprove of the way in which they suppress ideas of
being heretics themselves. Indeed, this tactic is so consistent that you could
use it as a way of detecting witch hunts in any era.  
  
And that's the second reason I've avoided mentioning any specific heresies. I
want this essay to work in the future, not just now. And unfortunately it
probably will. The aggressively conventional-minded will always be among us,
looking for things to forbid. All they need is an ideology to tell them what.
And it's unlikely the current one will be the last.  
  
There are aggressively conventional-minded people on both the right and the
left. The reason the current wave of intolerance comes from the left is simply
because the new unifying ideology happened to come from the left. The next one
might come from the right. Imagine what that would be like.  
  
Fortunately in western countries the suppression of heresies is nothing like
as bad as it used to be. Though the window of opinions you can express
publicly has narrowed in the last decade, it's still much wider than it was a
few hundred years ago. The problem is the derivative. Up till about 1985 the
window had been growing ever wider. Anyone looking into the future in 1985
would have expected freedom of expression to continue to increase. Instead it
has decreased.   
  
The situation is similar to what's happened with infectious diseases like
measles. Anyone looking into the future in 2010 would have expected the number
of measles cases in the US to continue to decrease. Instead, thanks to anti-
vaxxers, it has increased. The absolute number is still not that high. The
problem is the derivative.   
  
In both cases it's hard to know how much to worry. Is it really dangerous to
society as a whole if a handful of extremists refuse to get their kids
vaccinated, or shout down speakers at universities? The point to start
worrying is presumably when their efforts start to spill over into everyone
else's lives. And in both cases that does seem to be happening.  
  
So it's probably worth spending some amount of effort on pushing back to keep
open the window of free expression. My hope is that this essay will help form
social antibodies not just against current efforts to suppress ideas, but
against the concept of heresy in general. That's the real prize. How do you
disable the concept of heresy? Since the Enlightenment, western societies have
discovered many techniques for doing that, but there are surely more to be
discovered.  
  
Overall I'm optimistic. Though the trend in freedom of expression has been bad
over the last decade, it's been good over the longer term. And there are signs
that the current wave of intolerance is peaking. Independent-minded people I
talk to seem more confident than they did a few years ago. On the other side,
even some of the _leaders_ are starting to wonder if things have gone too far.
And popular culture among the young has already moved on. All we have to do is
keep pushing back, and the wave collapses. And then we'll be net ahead,
because as well as having defeated this wave, we'll also have developed new
tactics for resisting the next one.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
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