To continue reading or not continue reading, that is the question.

From A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity by John Henry Clippinger.

Not the kind of book I often buy - business, speculative, trendy. But the title alludes to a real issue that I think bears deep consideration in our evolving knowledge and social ecosystem with proliferating affiliative virtual communities. But at $3, you can afford to take a gamble that the packaging belies the substance. On top of that, Clippinger appears to be both deeply and widely accomplished so the probability of useful insight increases substantially.

And in the first few pages, it felt like I was indeed in for a good intellectual ride. Framing of interesting and pertinent ideas. But then I encountered this passage on page 12.

Unfortunately, Hobbes's argument was not just a seventeenth-century intellectual artifice but has come over the centuries, and especially in recent years, to represent a kind of accepted wisdom among "realists" of the Right, whose political philosophy of international politics, contains the conviction that without the firm hand of a presiding authority, the world will revert to a Hobbesian state of nature in which anything goes. . . . The same logic was embraced by President George W. Bush and his war cabinet, who decided that once America was attacked, it could be understood as being in a continuous state of war, which conferred on it moral legitimacy to pursue whatever means it sees fit to defend itself to avenge any and all parties who support or harbor its shadowy enemies. You are either for us or against us. Bring it on. The same moral immunity appears to be extended to the domestic arena as well, by virtue of the fact that some potential terrorists may be domestic - hence, the invocation of Hobbes's state-of-nature argument for domestic surveillance and the weakening of the First and Fourth Amendments. Hobbes has been much in evidence so far in the twenty-first century.

Like suddenly stubbing your big toe on piece of furniture you hadn't noticed. This passage is so outside the tone in the other dozen pages that it's unexpectedness increases the disappointment.

Why this grubby, condescending, and incomplete partisan attack? Why the snide air quotes "realists"? Why the inference with "war cabinet"?

Just from this passage, you would think that the Iraq Resolution was not a bipartisan endorsement by both the House and Senate (including a majority of the Democratic senators in the Senate) of a major foreign policy. You wouldn't, from this passage, realize that virtually the entire current Democratic Party leadership (Biden, Clinton, Reid, Feinstein, Kerry, Schumer, etc.) all voted the Iraq Resolution.

Fair enough, the war in hindsight may or may not have been ill-considered or poorly conducted (judgments yet to be settled on either score). But it's inappropriate, if you want to be considered to be making a carefully reasoned argument, to so blatantly distort history in order to make virtue-signaling, high-horse post hoc condescending judgments.

Am I reading a genuine inquiry into the nature of identity in a universally connected world or am I reading some sort of hobby horse polemic?

Reluctantly, but with the hope that this was an aberration, I continued reading.

Just a few pages on, on page 17, there is this:

Yet as will be argued throughout this book, Hobbes's state of nature is a fiction, unsupported and even contradicted by neuroscience, anthropological, and behavior research.

Uh oh. Two out of those three sciences are pretty noted for their sloppy and long history of ideologically motivated research and the third has some pretty notable research failures. If you are going to build your argument on those foundations, you are going to have to be pretty cautious.

To be fair Clippinger published this in 2007, preceding by four years Steven Pinker's magisterial The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined which offers pretty compelling evidence that for much of human history, and still in some places, we did indeed live in a close to Hobbesian environment. However, Steven A. Le Blanc had made basically the same argument as Pinker but in 2004 in his Constant Battles: Why We Fight.

Anthropology, sociology, psychology, and behavior research have all been having a bad few years as classic study after classic study fails to replicate. For a sad reflection on this, read Reckoning with the Past by Michael Inzlicht, a practitioner who sees much of his professional life's working washing away under strict scrutiny. Alternatively, and a broader indictment, there is Scott Alexander's Devoodooifying Psychology.

All this overturning of classic work in these fields is recent but even in 2007 and earlier, there was much critical commentary on much of the work being done in these fields. Critics pointed out small sample sizes, reluctance to share source data, non-randomized test groups, etc. as red flags warning us to be cautious.

OK. Now I am pretty jaundiced. In the next few pages Clippinger veers into some significant moral equalizing which I take to be an intellectual exercise but also could be read as a legitimate belief on his part. Then on page 21 we get to:

Both Atta [9/11 terrorist leader] and Curtis LeMay remain heroes to their own. Both are perfect Hobbesian protagonists, from which philosophy they derive their shared moral legitimacy. But Hobbes is wrong, scientifically wrong. It is no longer just a question of theoretical philosophy or opinion, but of replicable scientific observation.

Set aside the sophomoric exercise of equating LeMay and Atta (I understand the logical exercise of doing so). On the preceding page (20), Clippinger has just observed that LeMay and Atta shared (in Clippinger's view) the failing of being men "void of doubt."

Fifty words later, Clippinger himself is supporting his argument with a fallacious appeal to authority (SCIENCE) in virtually identical wording as that which he ascribes to Atta and LeMay. Hobbes is scientifically wrong!!!!

A doubly ironical argument to make given that Pinker, Le Blanc, and the Replication movement have now, just a decade later, completely undermined the categorical conclusion that Hobbes is wrong.

The topic of identity in a universally affiliative world remains a worthwhile topic. At twenty pages though, there are a lot of red flags that perhaps there might not be much of value in this work, partisan, over-confident, and ill-sourced as it so far appears to be. Maybe a few more pages just to see, but my hopes are fading.