Welcome to Tackle, a place to analyze and discuss core problems we face in Western civilization so that we can eventually—yes—tackle them. Tackle’s premise is that “the West” is something of value that should be preserved, nurtured, and cultivated.
I believe deeply in this premise, yet I also believe that the West has long been and continues to be under grave attack. It was under attack during the Cold War by the Soviets and it is currently under attack by multiple forces. What those forces are should be the subject of analysis and debate. There are multiple candidates to draw upon: Putin’s Russia, the Chinese Communist Party, Iran’s theocracy and Islamism, more generally.
These are external adversaries, but they alone, or even collectively, cannot explain Western decline. Indeed, it may be more likely that Western decline explains the brazenness of these actors. We also face challenges that reflect our mindset. The West’s commitment to a liberal education aimed at fostering an ability to think critically, to calibrate one’s confidence in one’s beliefs, and to be open to considering divergent perspectives has eroded substantially and rapidly. Many, myself included, have a sense that the education system from kindergarten through university has become an ideological battleground where children are not encouraged to think and explore ideas for themselves but rather are indoctrinated in the precepts of “woke” cultural Marxism.
We seem to have entered an age of Manichean predispositions, where instead of developing the ability to understand subtle distinctions and negotiate complex tradeoffs, people are reverting to simplistic narratives that glorify or vilify entire groups. Instead of rebutting positions one disagrees with, the tendency is to cancel the message by delegitimizing the messenger through various forms of personal and social stigma. In the 1990s, when I was in graduate school, it was typical to object to a viewpoint one encountered by saying I don’t accept your position and here’s why. However, as we near the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, it seems more likely that the response to an objectional viewpoint will be the accusation: “you’re a racist.” The ability to argue has waned. People are too afraid to offend. Too scared to speak their minds and too willing to be bullied by not-so-smart people who have discovered that loud and nasty moralizing is something they can do well and that it’s on sale in the West.
We need to see through the tactics that are subverting freedom of thought and the spirit of Western civilization. We need to uncover the important trend lines. We need to take the assaults on our cherished ways of life more seriously and not simply hope they will remain fringe tendencies that will somehow go away. Anyone watching developments over the last decade must realize that such hopes are delusional acts of self-deception and cowardly. It is time to wake up from our slumber, gather intelligence, and tackle the gargantuan challenges we face before it’s too late. The end of history is over. History is back and in the making. If we want it to play out well for the West, for ourselves and our loved ones and for what we stand for, we have to tackle the challenges of our time.
For me, this is personal. I am a scientist (an experimental psychologist, to be more precise), a skeptic, and a Zionist Jew. In recent years, I have seen the deterioration of the scholarly societies I once held membership in with pride. Most of these organizations have been overrun by overzealous social justice warriors who have traded rationality for a new godless religion. The politicization of science and its extreme skewness favours the hard left, who euphemistically regard themselves as progressive, reflecting the same skewness in academia.
This has had a devastating effect on the quality of science and the preconditions for scientific success. While a generation of younger social scientists squabble about the replication crisis their disciplines face, few are paying attention to the much larger crisis in which free thought itself is under attack as politicized ritualisms replete with mental taboos that are antithetical to the spirit of scientific inquiry skyrocket. It has been a mere few hundred years since the scientific revolution began. Science has propelled our understanding of the universe (multiverse!) and corrected many ingrained preconceptions that were wrong. It has taught us most of all to hold skeptical priors and subject our best conjectures to fair opportunities for experimental falsification and theoretical refutation. It is not only the engine of technological development that has transformed our lives, it is also when applied properly (that is, rigorously and in Mertonian good faith), the best antidote to the dangerous exuberance of utopianism.
Finally, if it were not for Hamas’s horrific terrorist attack on Israelis on October 7, 2023, and the wave of antisemitism it unleashed precisely at a time when the West should have been comforting and supporting the Jewish community in Israel and worldwide, and if that wave had not washed directly over the Jewish community in Toronto and flooded my own home, then I probably would not be here starting Tackle. It is not that it would not have been an aspiration, but it would not have pressed itself as a necessity and I would be much more comfortable writing another few academic papers a year than doing this.
I will have much more to say about this topic, but all I will say here is how a tragedy, a crime against humanity, became in 24 hours a trigger for virulent antisemitism in the West is something that was, for me and Jewish communities across the diaspora, a wake-up call. Whatever we thought was happening in the West was much worse than we thought. It was much worse for Jews, of course, but what starts with us, never ends with us. It was confirmation that the time to gather intelligence, plan, and fight back was behind us. We missed the firing shot. All we could do was accept that in 2023, post-October 7, and into 2024, we were living through a mechdal. Mechdal is a Hebrew term with no precise English equivalent that roughly signifies a tragic or catastrophic blunder brought about by one or more grave acts of omission. It was used to describe the strategic surprise of the Israelis during the Yom Kippur War. All strategic surprises demand careful self-examination, and this is yet another reason for Tackle.
I hope you will enjoy reading Tackle and will engage through the comments or reposts with comments. For now, I plan to write the posts myself, but I hope that others will join me as writers in the future and that we can build a community of writers and thinkers. Meaningful communities have been gutted. This is part of the subversion of the West, and something we also need to tackle. Toward that end, I plan to comment through notes on restacked content so that Tackle doesn’t become insular but, rather, makes connections to others’ ideas. I hope that will be reciprocated too. In at least some small measure, then, I hope that Tackle will help build a meaningful community. So once again, welcome!
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