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I’ve noticed there are some traits that one would ideally like in an thinker that are easier to notice if you disagree with them. For example, when authors I disagree with describe viewpoints I hold, some of them correctly describe what I believe, while others’ descriptions are so distorted that it’s like looking through a funhouse mirror. Some authors seem to have compassion for people different from them, while others loathe them or write about them like we’re a zoo exhibit. Some authors lay out the best evidence against their case, while others hide things that might prove them wrong.
I try to pay attention to those traits whether or not I agree with the author, of course. But it’s much easier to notice when viewpoints you personally hold are being misrepresented or groups you’re part of are hated. So I thought I’d create an open thread where people can share authors they disagree with that they respect– authors who avoid strawmanning and have compassion for the outgroup– so that people who agree with those authors know who to check out.
I don’t know the political leanings of every person who comments on Thing of Things, so I can’t enforce this, but I’d like to ask people to list people they personally disagree with whom they respect, and not people they agree with whom they think other people would totally respect if they gave them a chance. To the extent possible, please list people you disagree with substantially about important issues, not people you mostly agree with but have a small handful of minor disagreements with.
When the comment thread has died down, I’ll make a top-level post with people’s answers.
Here’s my list, to get you started:
- Mark Yarhouse (evangelical Christian whose work focuses on LGBTQ people; consistently thoughtful and compassionate)
- Catharine MacKinnon (radical feminist; wrote one of the best definitions of liberal feminism I’ve ever read)
- Melinda Selmys (Anglican, lesbian married to a man)
- David Friedman (anarchocapitalist; erudite, intelligent, obviously passionately concerned about the poor, and very funny)
- Barbara Ehrenreich (socialist feminist)
Moderation notes: I’d like this to be a thread where people can share names, not a thread of political arguments. You can feel free to ask questions, but arguments about other people’s beliefs are not appropriate for this thread. “How could you say X is compassionate and intellectually honest, they believe Y!” will be deleted without mercy.
Thing of Things 
As much as his name is a joke for his many bad and predictable opinions, one has to admit Ross Douthat has a decent and sympathetic understanding of most liberal’s point of view.
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Harold Feld, moderate liberal/progressive.
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Off the top of my head: I agree with the people who’ve listed David Friedman and Ross Douthat; I’d also go with Jacob Falkovich of Putanomonit, and you yourself.
Emma Pierson of Obsession with Regression may be getting too close to “I agree with her myself”, but I disagree with some bits of what she writes, and I think she exemplifies the virtues you’re looking for very well.
Kelsey Piper of Unit of Caring and Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex definitely cross that line, so I can’t recommend them myself, but if anyone with views very different for mine is looking for people to recommend as exemplifying those virtues, I think those might be blogs worth evaluating, and I’d be interested to hear if people who actually disagree with their views share my assessment of them.
In a second tier of people who have some, but not all, of those virtues, I might include
Nathan J Robinson – totally devoid of compassion for or understanding of his outgroup, and regularly whines about how little charity they show him while showing even less himself, but does make an effort to set out his ideas for a hostile audience.
Rod Dreher of the American Conservative – polite, compassionate, bigotted, hypocritical, is not always as honest in his characterisation of and engagement with hostile ideas as he should be, but sometimes tries to be.
Barry Deutsch of Alas, A Blog – some compassion for outgroup, some attempt at honesty, some failures at both. Based on their writings, I have a fairly low opinion of both Robinson and Dreher as people (as opposed to as polemicists), but Deutsch comes across as a basically decent person with attitudes I disapprove of.
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I agree with much of what Kelsey Piper writes, but when I disagree with her, I do find she remains still full of compassion and doesn’t caricature anyone’s views.
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FWIW, while Scott is both a very thoughtful and generally reasonable and charitable person whose thoughts are very worth reading and also a person I often disagree with, I find that precisely on the things I most disagree with him on he is not actually very good at being reasonable and charitable. this is very understandable, as from what he’s written these things are triggers for him and I don’t expect anybody to be very charitable around their triggers, but it still seems an important caveat.
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“Deutsch comes across as a basically decent person with attitudes I disapprove of.”
Thanks! 🙂
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I met Ampersand in person one time (at a Chinese restaurant lunch in NYC in 2010 or so, if that rings any bells) and I can confirm that his basic decency is indisputable 🙂
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I second the suggestion of Rod Dreher. I read his blog to get a conservative Christian perspective on things. He’s rarely convincing, but he genuinely believes what he is saying.
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I third Rod, with one caveat: you don’t necessarily need to read his constant signal-boosting of social justice or the American left going too far. His reasoning is that he wants to make clear to his readers where we as a society are headed, and what Christian families with be dealing with unless they strategically disengage. He may well be right, but the more he engages with the excesses, the less charitable about it all he becomes. You can see in the past few weeks especially how alarmed he is by the left over Kavanaugh.
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Honestly — I enjoy reading Scott’s blog, and agree with him most of the time, but the times when I disagree with him I find his posts infuriating. So I tend to think that the people who disagree with him would feel that way reading much of what he writes.
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If someone is being thoughtful and reasonable while coming to the ‘wrong conclusion’, then that can be infuriating, because you cannot explain why the author is wrong or unreasonable, which causes acute cognitive dissonance, which causes frustration, which causes anger. But that’s a problem of the reader that no author on the subject (that comes to the ‘wrong conclusion’) could prevent. So I don’t think that should count against a particular author.
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J.R.R. Tolkien. Conservative values but compassionate af. Devout Catholic who could look at Pagan spirituality and admire its courage and virtue, while refusing to romanticize it into some innocent primitivism. I can read all of Tolkien’s polemics and arguments strongly disagreeing with everything, and feel no venom at all; I’ve never had this experience online.
Adam Smith. As wrong as he was on the value of capitalism, if you actually take the time to read the damn guy, he was surprisingly sympathetic to workers and the poor, to the necessity of governmental aid for the poor, the dangers of oppression with corporate influence on governments and so on. Wrote a lot on morals, assumed moral norms and empathy to be absolutely necessary in any society. A far cry from the “invisible hand ftw” caricature.
Judith Butler. The exact opposite of my position on the nature of gender. Given her social-construction philosophy, it would be super easy for her to fall into transgender-critical ideology, as some of her contemporaries have. Yet she has emphatically rejected this reading of her theses, on the simple grounds that it would be oppressive and awful (“We do not have to agree upon the ‘origins’ of that sense of self to agree that it is ethically obligatory to support and recognize sexed and gendered modes of being that are crucial to a person’s well-being.”). In these dark times, this kind of sincere empathy is really heartwarming.
Zoë Quinn. After all they went through, the way they argued for restorative justice took me off-guard. I actually can’t say I disagree anymore because they changed my mind on the point of disagreement; their compassionate take on their abusers, on the phenomenon of abuse itself, made me reconsider my formerly more punitive views on the topic.
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@ozymandias
Does the ban on “How could you say X is compassionate and intellectually honest, they believe Y!” extends to “How could you say X is compassionate and intellectually honest, they committed Y!” ?
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Best to steer clear of it, I’d say.
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@ozymandias
Thanks for the clarification. Considering @mel boiko said they changed their mind the point of disagreement, thus breaking your “list people you personally disagree with whom you respect, and not people you agree with whom you think other people would totally respect if they gave them a chance” rule, you won’t put it in your top-level post anyway I guess.
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I mean, for me the obvious example is you, but I’m not sure if that’s helpful. 😛
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That would also be my first example, and I’m pretty sure it’s helpful. If “it’s much easier to notice when viewpoints you personally hold are being misrepresented or groups you’re part of are hated” then it’s going to *always* be hard to watch yourself for misrepresentation and hate, and having Not The Ingroup verify that you’re not slipping up might be nice.
Among more official punditry, Kevin Drum also immediately comes to mind – on anything controversial I think I have about a 50/50 chance of agreeing with him, but he typically “shows his work” so you can at least determine why he came to the conclusions he did.
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I feel very flattered! 🙂 I try my best.
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man, finding & paying attention to reasonable and good people I disagree with is one of my favorite things so now I feel somewhat embarrassed to not actually have that many good examples. here are some that come to mind from my podcast-listening, though.
Left, Right, and Center is a politics podcast which for every episode invites several people from across the political spectrum to discuss several current news events/political issues. I’ve found that this show is quite good at selecting thoughtful and well-informed conservatives-and-such (somewhat frustratingly to me as a very-much-not-a-conservative, I’ve often found the conservatives on this show to be better at thoughtful communication than the liberals). Some in particular who have been good on this show are Rich Lowry, Megan McArdle, David Frum.
David French had a good long discussion about culture war stuff on Ezra Klein’s podcast which he handled pretty well; I haven’t sought out much more of his writing but I would like to.
Tyler Cowen, of course.
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People at the higher end of the blogosphere/opinion circles like Ezra Klein and David French can get along despite radically different views because they know each other and socialize in real life. McArdle and Yglesias are allegedly very good real life friends to. Apparently meeting people in real life makes getting along despite vast ideological differences easier.
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Scott Alexander (anti-socialist/pro-capitalist)
Kelsey Piper (economic conservative)
Julia Serano (feminist)
Hannah Blume (deontologist)
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David French (https://www.nationalreview.com/author/david-french/)
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thanks for linking his rss feed! this has been the most concretely & easily actionable suggestion here for me so far
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Great idea for a thread! I’m finding several good suggestions in this thread to check out.
Kelsey Piper of Unit of Caring is the best example of this I’ve come across, and her writing is the thing I miss most now that I’m not reading Tumblr. I sometimes find her arguments wrong and frustrating, but I never find them lacking in compassion.
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Seconding Douthat- for more established examples, I’d include C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton as well.
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I can’t believe I forgot Lewis!
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It’s fine, Lewis could stand to eat a little humble pie every now and then 😉
But yeah, “Abolition of Man” is on the transhumanist reading shortlist for sure.
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oh, yeah, G. K. Chesterton definitely.
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As an atheist, I often feel this way about Marilynne Robinson and Graham Greene.
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William Gillis, of Humaniterations and the Center for a Stateless Society. He’s an anarchist and a supporter of antifa who often uses somewhat aggressive rhetoric, but he seems ethically and epistemologically diligent in a way that I rarely see among anarchists and leftists. He is intelligent, compassionate and principled. He is willing to go against the views of his in-group (opposing the entire concept of “cultural appropriation”) and seems to genuinely care about finding the truth. I find Gillis’s writings on interpersonal ethics especially insightful, and am quite fond of his essay on manipulation.
http://humaniterations.net/2016/02/19/manipulation-as-withholding/
https://c4ss.org/content/50151
Crash Chaos Cats, a detransitioner and radical feminst who is critical of mainstream transgender gender ontologies but continues to have compassion for trans people and respect for our autonomy.
https://crashchaoscats.wordpress.com/
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Ursula K. LeGuin is more standard-issue liberal than I am, but writes beautifully about many kinds of people, including people who are nothing like her.
Leah Libresco (I’ve read lots of her stuff) and Tim Keller (less of his) are as religious as I am nonreligious, but both seem deeply compassionate.
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The arch-conservative website The Imaginative Conservative has hosted two essays on Jacques Derrida that both seemed startlingly good (to me):
“Is Jacques Derrida Serious? How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Deconstruction” (The Imaginative Conservative, March 3, 2013), and
“Derrida’s Seriousness: On the `Existence’ of Justice” (The Imaginative Conservative, Mar 29. 2013)
The author of these two essays is Peter Blum, who is a professor of sociology and philosophy at Hillsdale College … an institution itself so arch-conservative, that it voluntarily foregoes all state and federal funding.
Professor Blum writes extensively, too, upon Anabaptist theology, and is himself an attending Mennonite.
When essays as thoughtful as Peter Blum’s begin to appear on high-visibilty sites like Redstate and The Resurgent, there will be a sharp increase in my personal Bayesian prior for “the end times are upon us”, the reason being Kafka’s maxim “The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary.”
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Do you like those essays because you agree with them; or do you disagree with them, but believe that they are charitable, clear, etc?
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MarxBro1917 has been banned for being a tankie. Dictator apologists are not welcome on this blog.
I’ve pulled four comments out of the spam filter; if your comment has been spamfiltered, please email me at ozyfrantz@gmail.com.
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I’m worried that banning MarxBro will be silencing, given the thread that this is in, so I’d like to be clear that he didn’t say “I disagree with Stalin but he made some good points,” which would be allowed and on-topic, he said “the Cultural Revolution was mostly a good thing,” which is NOT.
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Ross Douthat. It is popular in liberal circles tor really hate him for his traditionalist Catholicism. Most people like to present him as a stupid misogynist reactionary. First, I think that arguing that Douthat or anybody else is stupid because they came to different conclusions than you did is very arrogant. Douthat might be many things but he is not stupid. I also believe that his world view is a lot more subtle than his opponents let on. His article on woke capitalism dealing with why business people these days tend to support a soft liberalism while business people of the past tended to be all for enforcing social conservatism was great.
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I would like to mention that there are more replies in the /r/slatestarcodex thread on this post.
(There are, er, less replies in the /r/sneerclub one.)
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Oh, Freddie deBoer’s pretty good, forgot him.
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Second Nathan J. Robinson, he does not tolerate his outgroup, but he backs up his arguments with evidence, often presents the weak points of his case, and makes an effort to persuade those that disagree with him.
William MacAskill, he has not yet convinced me to become a utilitarian or an effective alturist, but damn, he is getting there. Definitely thinks about other views and questions if he is wrong. I respect him immensely .
Maybe Bryan Caplan, I’m a moderate conservative and he does a good job not misrepresenting my views and tolerating my group, but I am less sure that he does the same for liberals or socialists.
Justice Ginsberg, completely disagree with her judicial philosophy, but she is an eloquent writer for her views, and tolerated her outgroup enough to go to the opera with Scalia.
And as many have said here, you are on my list.
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The one other person who mentioned Nathan Robinson so far noted that he didn’t quite make their bar; I want to warn against Robinson as well. He’s written some good essays, yes. But… well, maybe this isn’t the place to go into why we wouldn’t include certain people, that seems kind of contrary to the spirit of this. 😛 Still I wanted to caution against Robinson.
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Looking at Ozy’s criteria, he meets only 2 out of 3. I respect him, he avoids strawmanning, but he doesn’t usually have compassion for the other side.
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That’s sort of what I meant.
I think that Ozy has actually specified (at least) two bars – one about trying to make clear, thoughtful arguments intended to change the minds of people who disagree with them through argument and reason, and a second about compassion and charity towards outgroup and trying to represent their views fairly rather an misrepresenting them.
I think that Robinson comfortably clears the first bar, but then runs face-first into the second and starts chewing on it and frothing at the mouth while spitting out wood chips.
Whether or not that makes him what Ozy is looking for depends on what aggregation function they’re using for the two scores, I think.
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Fair point, Ozy can write an essay titled Conservatives as Moral Mutants that ends with them calling half the country evil and working towards a future where my values no longer exist, and they still exhibited compassion and charity towards the outgroup in that essay. That’s something Robinson can never do. I think his best attempt was Why Hopelessness is Conservative, an essay I really love and have used to show liberals why I disagree with them, but it is not nearly as compassionate or charitable. It recognizes a whole thread of conservative thought, but paints it into the most negative light it can.
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@aristides11
I read the essay and in my opinion, it presents a false dichotomy where you either have to choose to be extremely conservative and believe 100% in personal responsibility or extreme progressive and believe that everything can be solved by government intervention. I think that the essay strawmans not just nearly all conservatives, but nearly all progressives as well.
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I dunno if they have blogs, but a lot of the folks from the social justice intellectual turing test seemed to understand both sides of that issue, and that one is basically a voodoo doll for the whole Culture War. Maybe some of them, if you are still in contact and they have blogs?
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people have already mentioned Chesterton, The Unit of Caring and some others above. both very kind people who disagree with sometimes.
Ummmm….. off the top of head
Guy Consolmagno – really dislike his (mis) understandings of pagan and non-christian societies to the point of getting almost angry sometimes, but have all the respect for what he is doing about convincing people that science and the really valuable parts of religion don’t have to be in conflict. Almost worth any collateral damage.
Cyborgbutterflies on tumblr – disagree with some of the details of what the transhumanist future should look like, and sometimes think she has some blind spots with usa/canada but respect the hell out of her.
Jeana Jorgensen – don’t always agree but generally open
Samantha Fields – kink critical or almost, disagree with some of her views, but is very kind.
Noam Chomsky – linguist ideas are wtf, but interesting political ideas, and even when disagree with them, don’t find that he is bad to argue with.
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Do you also take weird “pretentious” sounding writers/philosophers?
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Go ahead!
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ok, weird “pretentious” af writer/philosopher edition
Judith Butler – don’t agree with how she says gender works at all, seems awfully close to terf radfem territory, and also just not close to what have seen, but when she actually gets close to coming into conflict with trans issues she actually says that people doing gender stuff as they want is important and that trans people might have something important to say even if they don’t fit in to the idea.
Karl Marx – the lumpenprotelariat is just a bad idea, it’s literally the kind of divide and conquer his theories were trying to go against, and they also have problems with art. But at least you can tell he was trying to care at a time when that was needed.
Kleist – no, don’t think that relativism and postmodernism and noticing that people have different perspectives are the end of the world. Otoh, respect that he was willing and able to dive into that and talk about those ideas and talk about sex ed and gaslighting and such, even though they were maybe as viscerally creepy to him as weird foreign rituals were to lovecraft.
Mainländer – am generally very not into antinatalism, but if you are…. he’s one of the few have found who doesn’t have any icky eugenicist overtones, who really says that antinatalism, (and self-deliverance/self-annihilation) can be for anyone who chooses, not for those people over there who we think are icky or less than us. He also seems very compassionate and put a lot of thought into how to help people and reform government and marriage laws, things like safet nets and divorce and poly marriage. don’t agree with everything their either, and it was probably shocking at the time, but it was based on listening to people. If you want to do the pessimist/antinatalist thing, would recommend please reading both Schopenhauer and Mainländer, they really balance eachother and fix some of eachother‘s issues.
and then maybe read Camus….
Jonathan Bentham – not sure how well hedonic utilitarianism works outside of a few very narrow things. But again, seems very compassionate.
and actually ozy should have been on some list somewhere, so…..
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Oh, and Bettelheim, yeah he had some very weird psycho sexual analytical ish ideas, but he also said basically if 5he people you’re supposed to be analyzing are enjoying or into something, just shut up and let them do it.
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It’s not compassion that I look for so much as clarity. I respect Catherine MacKinnon because she never uses weasel arguments or word games to make her arguments seem more palatable than they actually area; she’s precise and clear about exactly what she believes.
Ross Douthat would be a questionable choice for me. He’s definitely someone that I disagree with about many things, and who I nevertheless respect. But I think mostly I respect him for the things he agrees with me on, and on topics where he disagrees with me (ObamaCare, sexual mores) I find his arguments obtuse.
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