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Interview with Virginia Heffernan on Science & Culture Wars (Audio Version) *UNEDITED* (Patreon)

Published:
2022-01-27 05:26:26
Edited:
2022-01-27 05:32:09
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Downloads

  • VH 1.mp3

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Content

Virginia is a journalist and author who has written a bunch on the topic of technology and social media and especially in regards to the Edge organisation. She has a new podcast 'This is Critical' that is encouraging people to look critically at topics, which is quite on brand for us!

We have a  broad discussion about academia, the culture war, anthropology debates, race & IQ rationalists, etc. Will be interested to hear your thoughts. The edited version will not be out on the main feed for a few weeks.

Enjoy!

P.S. I did level the volume on all audio so hopefully this one has less variance in volume level. Let me know!

Comments

elcid

This is a conversation that needs to be be continued. Excuse the expression, but you were just getting your trousers off when it comes to the history of the IDW and it’s precursors (how far back can you go!?!) Virginia is fantastic and Matt’s final comments were beautifully simple and realistic and highlighted the difference between the real world and the Web 2.0. Truly magnificent work. When’s the research paper coming?

Paul Bowman

First - thanks for fixing the sound levels! Defo worked for me. Content-wise, all enjoyable, but like Chris said at the end, the EDGE + Epstein + IDW-genesis stuff is really interesting (I'd never heard of EDGE or Brockman before) and could have done with more time. If the core of the pod is the synchronic analysis of the traits and techniques of gurudom, a diachronic history of the birth and evolutionary arc of IDW history would be an interesting related subject.

Paul Bowman

Also, where will the show notes be?

Paul Bowman

Oh. And schismogenesis was actually coined by a different anthropologist, Gregory Bateson. Which is less by way of a correction than an opportunity to plug Bateson for anyone who hasn't come across his work before. His "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" wide-ranging collection of essays is awesome. Check it out

Tom Allison

„All the disqualified sophomores who suddenly have a microphone.” Love.

cv lCalm

The quote from TS Eliot is from Four Quartets, Burnt Norton, III, line 12: "...... Only a flicker Over the strained time-ridden faces Distracted from distraction by distraction Filled with fancies and empty of meaning Tumid apathy with no concentration Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind, That blows time after time, Wind out of unwholesome lungs Time before and time after."

Tom Allison

Wow. That was SO good. (I hope to find more words, soon -- but, just wow, for now. Excellent, excellent stuff.)

Tom Allison

Well... the short arc of an intellectual infatuation. That was a really good and massively enlightening conversation about Internet history bearing on the contemporary IDW. That was solid. I was also introduced to Ms. Heffernan and thought I had met a kindered spirit -- then I read around. She's white-hot bright and capable of juggling big ideas and -- as far as I could tell -- just ripped off one stellar take after another on a substantial breadth of subjects -- but have you read her on "science" in general? Have you followed her thinking about metaphysics and what counts as worth attending to? Ugh. Evolution/natural selection is "just another story" and creationism is a better story and therefore she chooses to believe it? Not sure I would give her a platform without at least asking her to address how this works, exactly, and why she finds global warming so boring...

Loki

I'd love to hear Virginia's interview decoded DTG style. Lots of problems here.

Chelsea Tremblay

Thank you for this conversation, I really enjoyed it! For me it included some really interesting context to the broader history of the IDW within the academic/popular-discourse sphere. And like so many conversations, I could have taken another hour of elaboration or debate on each topic and probably still enjoyed it! Appreciate the side-angle look at the culture/COVID wars after all the other episodes of deep diving into it. I also wanted to punch Brockman in the face after hearing about their meeting. But I understand the 'freeze' moment that can come in those imbalanced power situations . A hug from a stranger on that one, Virginia, thanks for elbowing your way through the BS to the other side for the rest of us.

Virginia Heffernan

Thanks for great comments, everyone. Yes, I’m an inveterate interrupter. It’s enthusiasm and building/collaboration — that’s what it feels like — but it’s also just being a dick. My 2013 essay on “creationism” was intended as a provocation in the ironic spirit of Bertrand Russell—and never fear for those who hated it! It got me dropped by Yahoo, blackballed from NYU, and down to income zero — so a truly sound cancelation. Mea culpa. True that IDW thinking strikes me as stultifying, but it also seems to open the imaginations of others, including our intrepid hosts, and that can’t be a bad thing. Richard Rorty was my college advisor, and pragmatism seems roughly the way to go: make your private life beautiful and your public life humane. Thanks 1m to Chris and Matt for having me.

Virginia Heffernan

Oh and many thanks for the Batesman citation and the proper Eliot poem — I need to keep more books at hand when I discuss such wide-ranging topics!

Virginia Heffernan

@Tom — yes, for such a short piece, and one intended as humor (though it missed the mark), that piece has followed me around and even briefly led to a hashtag campaign: #worsethanisis ! My Wikipedia entry is still regularly vandalized, I got death threats, etc. I did give context for it in 2 places: in an interview with VICE for video, and in one on Jian Ghomeshi’s old radio show. (Ghomeshi = whole other story.) I can’t find the links for these. I know that Andrew Brown in the Guardian gave it a fair treatment: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2013/jul/18/virginia-heffernan-creationism-nothing-wrong

Virginia Heffernan

…but the blowback for that slight piece was maybe the worst I’ve ever gotten for anything, and I just came off a full Tucker Carlson attack which involved the FBI, so that’s saying something. (Brookings did an analysis of that recently: https://www.brookings.edu/techstream/gender-based-online-violence-spikes-after-prominent-media-attacks/). I think the best I can say was I thought at the the time that the idea of “creationism” was cartoonish in an interesting way; I didn’t think a serious person could own the word; I was reacting to some evopsych scandals at Harvard; I wanted to play with the “Why I Am Not a Christian” format of Bertrand Russell. It didn’t land as funny or provocative, I see that now. But it hardly seemed so scandalous that it should land me in the penalty box — I had to leave journalism for a time — for so long. The NYT did a round table about the piece that took it all way too seriously, but at least it they didn’t issue violent threats. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/08/15/should-creationism-be-controversial/creation-and-evolution-beliefs-define-who-i-am-and-who-i-am-not

Virginia Heffernan

And to clarify: I entirely accept the facts of evolution.

Virginia Heffernan

Let’s see. I’d say that every single biologist from Darwin to the present has a better hold on the dynamics of evolution than I do — and as with many things in science, I accept whatever account of these dynamics works best for the people who deploy it. I can sign on to your statement above. In turn, I assume you’d accept as truth almost anything I say about Keats’s representation of death, as that’s an actual area of expertise, where I know the field.

Virginia Heffernan

It’s the zeal some scientists/quasi-scientists/atheists of the 00s have to see others knuckle under to their blocky conversion narrative — “I walked in darkness as a Muslim or Christian or random schmo and was a fool and now you have shown me a great light and I renounce my former ways” — that contains a power dynamic I reject. And wanted to send up. I didn’t want social pressure or even fear of being trolled or fired to make me recite a catechism scripted by the new atheists or IDW or whatever. As biologists, some of these guys seem great. As propagandists, several are good. As writers, most except Hitchens are terrible. As ideologues & philosophers, these guys are very parochial, don’t know analytic OR Continental traditions, & they don’t really — Hitchens is an exception - understand baseline ideas about how tropes work and achieve hegemony, get subverted, get rebranded as “true” etc etc. So it’s not much fun to mix it up with them. Chris and Matt are exceptions, of course. L

Virginia Heffernan

And btw! I wish I could cut and paste your statement that starts “Darwin’s proposal of evolution via natural selection stands as the best explanation…” and then sign it! It’s so succinctly and well said. I’m not trying to slip any knot or leave room for some minorly idealist / theist position. I promise.