Heresy

Heresy. An essay by Paul Graham, April 2022.

Heresy comes back

Paul Graham says one of the strangest things he's seen in his lifetime is the return of heresy.

Richard Westfall's biography of Newton describes his Trinity College fellowship: a comfortable living, so long as he avoided three sins.

In the 1990s that sounded quaintly medieval to Graham. Twenty years on, it read like the terms of a modern job.

A label that ends the argument

In Graham's view, more and more opinions can now cost you your job, and they work just like heresies, in two respects.

First, heresy outranks truth. Once a statement is labelled x-ist, the discussion ends. No one goes on to ask whether it's true.

So ask: can a statement be x-ist and also true? Say yes, and you're banning truth. Say no, and you're easy to refute.

Because the same words get called x-ist or not, depending on the speaker. Truth doesn't work like that.

Uranium on the scale

Second, a heresy outweighs everything else about you. On ordinary topics, like history or music, people judge your views on balance.

A heresy is a different kind of thing. Graham's image: “like dropping a chunk of uranium onto the scale.”

Heretics used to be burned. Now they lose their jobs. A decade spent saving children won't protect you.

It's treated like a crime. A clean record might soften the sentence, but it can't change the verdict.

Often more harshly. Many on the far left want felons given a second chance, as Graham does, yet feel some heretics should never work again.

Why now?

Graham says there are far more heresies now than a few decades ago. Why? A wave of intolerance, he argues, needs two ingredients.

Intolerant people, and an ideology to steer them. The people are always there: the aggressively conventional-minded, usually just a group's local scolds.

But sometimes many of them line up behind one ideology at once, like arrows in a field all swinging the same way. Then a mob forms.

China's Cultural Revolution is the notorious case. Mao started it, but eager enforcers did the rest, once told heretics were among them.

An ideology like a religion

The second ingredient is the ideology. To unite these people, Graham argues, it has to work like a religion.

It needs strict, arbitrary rules that followers obey to prove their purity, and a belief that obeying makes you better than those who don't.

The best rules are about trivia, like which words to use. Easy to follow, so orthodoxy becomes a cheap substitute for virtue.

In the late 1980s, he says, such an ideology arose in American universities. Decades of looser norms had left little to forbid, so enforcers seized on it.

Graham sees the wave that followed as shaped like the Cultural Revolution, only far smaller. A second surge came in the 2010s, probably driven by social media.

Why no examples

Graham names no specific heresies. One reason: heretic hunters always brand those who object to their methods as heretics too.

That move is so reliable it works as a test, for spotting a witch hunt in any era.

Also, he wants the essay to hold up later. The enforcers will always be around, needing only an ideology to tell them what to ban.

In his view, they exist on both left and right. This wave comes from the left only because its ideology did. The next could come from the right.

The problem is the trend

Graham grants that in the West it's nothing like the old days. You can still voice far more opinions than a few centuries ago.

Graham's worry is the derivative. Until about 1985 the window kept widening, and anyone would have expected more. Instead it began to shrink.

Measles is similar. In 2010 you'd have expected US cases to keep falling. Thanks to anti-vaxxers, they rose. Still low, but heading the wrong way.

When should we worry? Presumably when a few extremists start spilling into everyone else's lives. In both cases, Graham thinks, that's happening.

Antibodies

So, he says, it's worth pushing back to keep the window open. He hopes the essay builds social antibodies against the very idea of heresy.

The West has been developing ways to disarm that idea since the Enlightenment, and there must be more to find.

He's optimistic. The long-run trend is good, and this wave may be peaking: dissenters seem bolder, some leaders have doubts, and the young have moved on.

If people keep resisting, Graham expects the wave to break. And we'd come out ahead, with new tactics ready for the next one.

In short

Graham argues heresy is back, as opinions that can cost you your job.

As before, it outranks truth and outweighs everything else you have done.

Waves come when the aggressively conventional-minded unite behind a religion-like ideology.

Speech is still freer than centuries ago, but the trend has turned. Graham's answer: keep pushing back.

The original is short, and better than this. Read it: paulgraham.com/heresy.html