Neven Sesardić on Brian Leiter

Leiter Laid Bare

My Sesardić posts:

Reading Now: When Reason Goes on Holiday

Omertà Among the Philosophers

Full text on Leiter below the fold: 

Neven Sesardić on Brian Leiter

If you are mainly surrounded by people who strongly lean to the left and who, living largely in the political echo chamber, tend to radicalize themselves more and more in the same direction, there will be a social reward for producing a new argument for distanc­ing oneself even further from those on the other side of political spectrum. Indeed, on LeiterReports.typepad.com, the most-visited philosophy blog on the Internet—which most philosophers check regularly to get professional news about their discipline (new hirings, changes in the expert ranking of top philosophy depart­ments, professional gossip, etc.)—conservatives have been routinely referred to as "repugs," "morally depraved," "morally deranged," "crackpots," "lunatics," "idiots," "twits," "nuts," "slimy," "stupid," "crazies," "villains," "moral monsters," "fools," "fascistic psycho­paths," "Neanderthals," "despicable Neanderthals," "sociopaths," "threats to humanity," "morons," "dishonest scumbags," "right­-wing slime artists," "noxious right-wing creeps," and "brainless fascist thugs." The blog's hostility to conservative politics is hard to describe. It once went so far that the blog owner, University of Chicago professor Brian Leiter, linked in a 2007 post to a list of "the 50 most loathsome people in America," and after recommend­ing crude and insulting descriptions of a few politicians disliked by the extreme left he drew the readers' attention to "apt" comments about the popular talk show host Rush Limbaugh, which contained the following sentence: "It's hard to believe this repulsive shit foun­tain is even human, until you remember that we share 70% of our DNA with pigs." Another comment, also called "apt," about the conservative columnist Ann Coulter, is so tasteless that it is simply unquotable.

The fact that the philosophical community had no problem at all, until recently, with enabling such an extremely intolerant and politically unhinged person to play an important role in the profession tells us enough about how bad the situation is. All those scholars who served as evaluators for the ranking of philosophy departments or who provided other disciplinary information for the blog were apparently unbothered by the fact that the results of their professional efforts would later be presented and mixed together with wild and uncontrolled outbursts against public per­sonalities and colleagues with different political views. It would be unimaginable for philosophers to agree to cooperate in the same way with, and give so much power to, someone who would use his blog to repeatedly call leading Democrats "threats to humanity" or "morons," describe Paul Krugman as "a moral monster," or find it appropriate to refer to Michael Moore as "this repulsive shit fountain."

For all we know, some of Leiter's collaborators may have been put off by his frequent political fits but, if such people existed, their irritation did not reach the level that would lead them to publicly voice concern, or issue public criticism. Since most of them are liberals who often share the same antipathy toward conservatives, they apparently don't realize how bizarre it will look to an impartial outside observer that one whole academic discipline, claiming to carry the torch of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, allows its key source of professional information to be constantly marred by childish name-calling and gratuitous insults of people with certain political views.

The recent massive criticisms of Leiter and requests that he stop playing such an important role in philosophy only strengthen my point. For they were triggered by his email exchange with a female colleague in which he, many thought, threatened to harm her career in retaliation to what she had written about him on her blog. As a result, more than six hundred philosophers signed a statement of protest and pledged not to provide volunteer work for the Philosophical Gourmet Report (Leiter's popular ranking of philosophy departments) as long as it stayed under his control (September Statement 2014).

Consider the asymmetry: A single private email from Leiter, fol­lowed by a Twitter post, started this avalanche of outrage among hundreds of philosophers, but his years-long uncontrolled tor­rent of public insults directed at his conservative colleagues and Republicans was never seen as a problem. Also, while the philosoph­ical community rose up in outrage over his (comparatively) slight rudeness toward a female philosopher, did anyone find anything objectionable when in 2007 Leiter publicly praised an extremely vulgar attack on a right-wing female columnist which (among other things) made fun of her breasts? No. Apparently feminist sensibili­ties are not activated when crass and witless insults are being hurled at conservative women.

One thing is undeniable: Without the support of a huge num­ber of philosophers, Leiter would certainly not have been able to turn his blog into such a prominent platform for his political par­oxysms. Some of his readers may have merely tolerated his vitriol, but many obviously reveled in it.

(Neven Sesardić, When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics [New York: Encounter Books, 2016], 200-2 [italics in original; footnotes omitted])

If you are mainly surrounded by people who strongly lean to the left and who, living largely in the political echo chamber, tend to radicalize themselves more and more in the same direction, there will be a social reward for producing a new argument for distanc­ing oneself even further from those on the other side of political spectrum. Indeed, on LeiterReports.typepad.com, the most-visited philosophy blog on the Internet—which most philosophers check regularly to get professional news about their discipline (new hirings, changes in the expert ranking of top philosophy depart­ments, professional gossip, etc.)—conservatives have been routinely referred to as "repugs," "morally depraved," "morally deranged," "crackpots," "lunatics," "idiots," "twits," "nuts," "slimy," "stupid," "crazies," "villains," "moral monsters," "fools," "fascistic psycho­paths," "Neanderthals," "despicable Neanderthals," "sociopaths," "threats to humanity," "morons," "dishonest scumbags," "right­-wing slime artists," "noxious right-wing creeps," and "brainless fascist thugs." The blog's hostility to conservative politics is hard to describe. It once went so far that the blog owner, University of Chicago professor Brian Leiter, linked in a 2007 post to a list of "the 50 most loathsome people in America," and after recommend­ing crude and insulting descriptions of a few politicians disliked by the extreme left he drew the readers' attention to "apt" comments about the popular talk show host Rush Limbaugh, which contained the following sentence: "It's hard to believe this repulsive shit foun­tain is even human, until you remember that we share 70% of our DNA with pigs." Another comment, also called "apt," about the conservative columnist Ann Coulter, is so tasteless that it is simply unquotable.

The fact that the philosophical community had no problem at all, until recently, with enabling such an extremely intolerant and politically unhinged person to play an important role in the profession tells us enough about how bad the situation is. All those scholars who served as evaluators for the ranking of philosophy departments or who provided other disciplinary information for the blog were apparently unbothered by the fact that the results of their professional efforts would later be presented and mixed together with wild and uncontrolled outbursts against public per­sonalities and colleagues with different political views. It would be unimaginable for philosophers to agree to cooperate in the same way with, and give so much power to, someone who would use his blog to repeatedly call leading Democrats "threats to humanity" or "morons," describe Paul Krugman as "a moral monster," or find it appropriate to refer to Michael Moore as "this repulsive shit fountain."

For all we know, some of Leiter's collaborators may have been put off by his frequent political fits but, if such people existed, their irritation did not reach the level that would lead them to publicly voice concern, or issue public criticism. Since most of them are liberals who often share the same antipathy toward conservatives, they apparently don't realize how bizarre it will look to an impartial outside observer that one whole academic discipline, claiming to carry the torch of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant, allows its key source of professional information to be constantly marred by childish name-calling and gratuitous insults of people with certain political views.

The recent massive criticisms of Leiter and requests that he stop playing such an important role in philosophy only strengthen my point. For they were triggered by his email exchange with a female colleague in which he, many thought, threatened to harm her career in retaliation to what she had written about him on her blog. As a result, more than six hundred philosophers signed a statement of protest and pledged not to provide volunteer work for the Philosophical Gourmet Report (Leiter's popular ranking of philosophy departments) as long as it stayed under his control (September Statement 2014).

Consider the asymmetry: A single private email from Leiter, fol­lowed by a Twitter post, started this avalanche of outrage among hundreds of philosophers, but his years-long uncontrolled tor­rent of public insults directed at his conservative colleagues and Republicans was never seen as a problem. Also, while the philosoph­ical community rose up in outrage over his (comparatively) slight rudeness toward a female philosopher, did anyone find anything objectionable when in 2007 Leiter publicly praised an extremely vulgar attack on a right-wing female columnist which (among other things) made fun of her breasts? No. Apparently feminist sensibili­ties are not activated when crass and witless insults are being hurled at conservative women.

One thing is undeniable: Without the support of a huge num­ber of philosophers, Leiter would certainly not have been able to turn his blog into such a prominent platform for his political par­oxysms. Some of his readers may have merely tolerated his vitriol, but many obviously reveled in it.

(Neven Sesardić, When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics [New York: Encounter Books, 2016], 200-2 [italics in original; footnotes omitted])