“No Debate” is always crap
Dominance plays, grift and toxic sacralisation.
One of the features of the “progressive” politics of the unaccountable classes—those who are just paid for turning up—is the demand that there be “No Debate” about various issues. The most obvious instances are “No Debate” about Trans and “No Debate” about climate change—hence demands that climate scepticism be outlawed.
All such “No Debate” claims are crap. First, any “No Debate” claim is presumptive evidence that what you are pushing is either not true or, slightly more subtly, is a mountain of bullshit erected on a molehill of truth. Robust cases for claims about the world are not afraid of debate.
Various moral urgency claims are mounted to support such “No Debate” claims. How do we determine moral urgency? From the evidence. If the evidence is clear, debate will not threaten that alleged urgency. On the contrary, it will reveal the urgency more clearly.
The underlying philosophical dynamic underlying “No Debate” claims is Critical Constructivism—the claim that reality is socially constructed; that all statements and knowledge claims are, in fact power claims; and that the righteousness of a claim can be determined by their (alleged) effects on (morally differentiated) social groups.
The underlying social dynamic is the use of affirmed beliefs to determine and display righteousness. If affirming X shows one to be one of the righteous, then not believing X shows one to be of the unrighteous. This is typically expressed in various terms of moral abuse (racist, Transphobe, Islamophobe, etc) whose use in media and academe has soared since 2014.
This is not because Western societies have become more bigoted—on any reasonable measure they have become far less so over time—but because the politics of Righteous Affirmed Belief has dramatically surged and so has therefore the stigmatisation of dissent.
To claim that affirming X shows ultimate moral propriety requires stigmatising not-X. For something is morally proper—indeed morally trumping—only if the opposite is morally improper. Thus is moral propriety is enforced by stigmatisation. Hence silence is violence—one must profess righteousness. Hence also words are violence—if affirmation of belief is the ultimate marker of righteousness then expressed disbelief becomes the ultimate marker of abusive malevolence. These dynamics lead to a great deal of preference falsification—people publicly affirming, or at least not opposing, claims that they do not privately believe.
These patterns lead into how the “progressive” politics of the unaccountable classes—of those paid to turn up—seek to remove stigmatisations that uphold a functioning moral and social order while promoting stigmatisations that uphold their claims to morally trumping righteousness, no matter how socially disordering such shifts in stigmatisation are. They seek to replace socially-ordering stigmatisations (e.g. against “petty” crime, various degradations of public spaces) partly due to sacralising various “marginalised” groups; partly because of adherence to Social Alchemy Theory whereby deconstructing the leaden oppressions of existing society will lead to the golden, socially transformative, future; and partly because they tend to be employed in institutions that gain more resources and authority the more that social pathologies increase. Socially dysfunctional patterns of stigmatisation serve them, both ideologically and institutionally. The homelessness industrial complex operates on such a pattern.
The Charlie Munger principle applies: show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome. We humans are every bit capable of whatever level of self-deception is required to act upon such incentives.
All this does, however, expose the key features of “No Debate”. First, it is a dominance claim—we have decided that you cannot dissent. Such dominance claims are self-serving abuse of others and a direct attack on the authority of citizenship.
Indeed, it is a direct attack on democracy itself. If something cannot be debated, it cannot be part of democratic debate. If dissent is illegitimate, so is any vote that upholds that dissent. “No Debate” is quite directly part of the assault by the unaccountable classes on democratic accountability.
Second, “No Debate” reliably hides a grift. Who wants to block debate? People who are profiting from something they do not want to be challenged over. This is members of the unaccountable classes (and various corporate allies) seeking to increase the flow of resources to them—and the authority upon which they claim those resources—by blocking any challenge to either.
Third, it rests on toxic claims of sacralisation. The realm of the sacred is the realm where trade-offs are not permitted against, or are very strongly resisted—either any trade-offs at all, or trade-offs from outside that sacralised realm.
The role of sacralisation is most obvious in the Trans case. “Trans people are sacred” as they are the ultimate “marginalised” group. This is because:
they are so small a group;
Trans activist claims require so much rationalisation and suppression of evidence; and
Trans folk represent the erasure of boundaries (between male and female) and constraint-as-oppression (specifically, the constraints of biological sex).
This combination makes them the ultimate group for the Oppressed/Oppression dichotomy and for the logic of the “open society” whereby constraints and boundaries become inherently fascistic.
The sacralisation claims underpinning “No Debate” claims on climate are somewhat more removed than they are for Trans. There is the sacralisation of nature, whereby any human action is presumptively a desecration of nature.
As the scientific basis for climate activism is way stronger than that for Trans activism, the moral urgency claimed to support “No Debate” on climate comes more from grand questions of survivability—the alleged threats to the biosphere (false) and to human civilisation (more arguable). What challenges to human civilisation there are from climate change is clearly a matter of considerable complexity. That complexity exposes just how spurious the “No Debate” claims on climate are.
Where climate activism and policy does veer over into Trans levels of nonsense is Net Zero, which has no evidentiary basis that matches its costs but does wander into human-action-as-desecration territory. Net Zero is a particularly destructive dominance claim based on destructive piety displays that are destructive precisely because those displaying their piety do not bear the costs of such displays.
They are displays—not signals—as the only cost to the proponents is the level of rationalisation required to disconnect Net Zero from inconvenient evidence. On the contrary, it is the failure to conform—to support the mutual status plays—that is much more likely to incur costs of stigmatisation. They are piety, not virtue, because they do not require effort; they do not show good character.
So, next time you see a “No Debate!” claim, remember that it is a spurious dominance claim, in support of claims that are presumptively false or wildly over-stated, that will supports grifts and is based on sacralisation claims not worthy of your, or anyone else’s, respect.
References
Scott Atran, Robert Axelrod, Richard Davis, ‘Sacred Barriers to Conflict Resolution,’ Science, Vol. 317, 24 August 2007, 1039-1040. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6123217_Sacred_Barriers_to_Conflict_Resolution
Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, Fall 1986, Vol.6, No.2. https://raritanquarterly.rutgers.edu/issue-index/all-volumes-issues/volume-06/volume-06-number-2
Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, ‘Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality,’ December 11, 2006. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=980844
Joe L. Kincheloe, Critical Constructivism, Peter Lang, [2005] 2008.
Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lives: The Social Consequences of Preference Falsification, Harvard University Press, [1995] 1997.
Jonathan Rauch, Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, University of Chicago Press, [1993] 1994.
R.R.Reno, Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West, Regnery Gateway, 2019.
Will Storr, The Status Game: On Social Position And How We Use It, HarperCollins, 2022.
The neatest trick of critical theory is on the one hand claim to be deconstructing, subverting and opposing "power" while simultaneously being brutishly authoritarian, then having people believe this preposterous nonsense.
While I agree that debate must never be off the table, there is another reason for it that I don't see you engage with. Simply put, the amount of effort and evidence required to debunk a crazy and wrong theory is disproportionate to the benefit. I have seen this discussed in the context of podcast hosting: if you argue and push back on everything that your fringe guest says, you will never get around to discussing anything else.
Ultimately, these arguments become boring. For topics that have become mimetic, like vaccines, climate change, sex-is-a-social-construct, and abortion, both sides can arrive with canned arguments that at least are efficient that way, even if they ultimately persuade nobody. We could, as the joke goes, conduct these debates by reference code. "Pro-choice argument 64!" "Pro-life counter-argument 22!" Fresher topics, like "is Trump in the Epstein files" might still require back-and-forth.