I'm not calling him out. I'm saying that he has zero intellectual credibility to describe these issues accurately. For instance: >But the “Invisibilia" episo

I'm not calling him out. I'm saying that he has zero intellectual credibility to describe these issues accurately. For instance: >But the “Invisibilia" episode implicitly suggests that call-outs are how humanity moves forward. Society enforces norms by murdering the bullies who break them. When systems are broken, vigilante justice may be rough justice, but it gets the job done. Prominent anthropologist Richard Wrangham says this is the only way civilization advances that he’s witnessed. >Really? Do we really think cycles of cruelty do more to advance civilization than cycles of wisdom and empathy? I’d say civilization moves forward when we embrace rule of law, not when we abandon it. I’d say we no longer gather in coliseums to watch people get eaten by lions because clergy members, philosophers and artists have made us less tolerant of cruelty, not more tolerant. Here Brooks straw-mans Wrangham and Brooks' other ideological opponents. Many/most of us would not say that "clergy, philosophers, and artists have made us less tolerant of cruelty". We would say that, as a society, we no longer gather to watch people being fed to lions because the lowest sectors of society have gained enough power to prevent themselves being fed to lions. This difference in lens derives directly from Brooks' being a Republican: he comes from what has traditionally been called an "idealist" tradition, and he illustrates that here. He thinks that ideas move history, so better ideas (from philosophers, artists, and clergy) make society better. In other traditions, particularly the one he's attacking, the engine of moral progress is the gradual, halting, progressive balancing of power across individuals and groups. To successfully attack the "balancing of power" model, you have to actually name that model, then show counter-evidence. Brooks has instead casually elided the model he hopes to attack in favor of pillorying his purported opponents as incompetent at applying his model. If you have a severe fever, you might have mononucleosis, and you might have meningitis (this happened to someone I know). Or you might have the flu. If I think you have the flu, I can't label running a test for mono as incompetent treatment of the flu. It's testing an entirely different hypothesis which stands on its own. This goes to the heart of Brooks' conclusion: >The problem with the pseudo-realism of the call-out culture is that it is so naïve. Once you adopt binary thinking in which people are categorized as good or evil, once you give random people the power to destroy lives without any process, you have taken a step toward the Rwandan genocide. If you think that ideas drive history, call-out culture is the first step to the Rwandan genocide. If you don't believe that in the first place, you have no reason to accept the conclusion: preventing an "American Rwandan genocide", in your view, might require something else entirely, or such a genocidal war may be a priori so unlikely that it's no more worth "preventing" it than spraying "tiger repellent" on oneself when going outside.