Principles are consistent. People are not.

(Getty/iStock/Spotify)

I.

Throughout the whole Joe Rogan/Spotify imbroglio,  I’ve seen people I admire defending bad arguments. 

When the anti Rogan people shifted their campaign from charges of misinformation to charges of racism, the defenders of free speech began shifting to defend Rogan's comments and try to give those charges more context or explain away "what he was really saying."

It was funny to me because I felt that 1. Rogan should not be censured, and 2. I didn't need to defend anything he said. Maybe he did say something racist once upon a time. Maybe he said shitty things. Maybe he's a shitty person. That doesn't change my belief about freedom of speech (As a utilitarian, I also believe censuring/canceling him would have a net negative effect on misinformation).

And yet, I saw people twisting themselves into knots to defend Rogan's reputation, even people who weren't huge fans of his show. The same thing happened in 2020 when BLM supporters began defending rioters and looters and the people burning down police departments. You don't have to do this? It's okay to admit when the people on your side fuck up.

What I came to realize is that there is often a tendency to conflate thinkers and their ideas. So because Rogan is anti-institutions and challenges the intelligence community's narrative, people who share that view feel the need to defend all of his actions, even if they don't align with the ideas they're defending to begin with.

And I get it. Our default setting is to defend those in our ingroup, to find people who espouse the ideas we believe in and defend them. But people are much more flawed than universal principles, and you’ll end up defending the person when they conflict with the principle.

It's like my favorite version of the galaxy brain meme, specifically the second frame:

Most critiques of the Enlightenment don't critique the ideas themselves, but focus on the flaws on some of the thinkers. Just like criticism of our constitution is often cast on the fact that most of our founders owned slaves rather than focusing on the actual ideas of the document.

I hate it when judges try to interpret the Constitution by trying to decide on the Founders' intentions. The progressives' accusation that many of the Founders were racist is valid. (Where progressives go wrong is using this as an argument for tearing up the constitution and starting a new one from scratch.) The better view is to try to interpret the Constitution based on the Enlightenment ideals that informed the thinking of the Founders, which would suggest that universal individual rights should be granted to all people regardless of color. 

II.

Ross Douthat examined this tension with clarity and precision: how do we parse honorable acts from possibly dishonorable people?

"our monuments and honorifics exist primarily to honor deeds, not to issue canonizations — to express gratitude for some specific act, to acknowledge some specific debt, to trace a line back to some worthwhile inheritance."

So if your university is named after a racist, you should think of the name as honoring the gift to establish the university, not honoring its namesake.

And how do we think about the founders; the good, the bad, and the ugly?

"Thus when you enter their Washington, D.C., memorials, you’ll see Thomas Jefferson honored as the man who expressed the founding’s highest ideals and Abraham Lincoln as the president who made good on their promise. That the first was a hypocrite slave owner and the second a pragmatist who had to be pushed into liberating the slaves is certainly relevant to our assessment of their characters. But they remain the author of the Declaration of Independence and the savior of the union, and you can’t embrace either legacy, the union or “we hold these truths …” without acknowledging that these gifts came down through them."

The job of the rationalist thinker is to commit to universal principles and apply them even when they force you to criticize those you love. Even when they force you to admit that the worst person you know just made a good point.