What’s Our Problem by Tim Urban (Book Review)

Politics in the US has become ever more tribal on both the left and the right. Either you agree with 100 percent of group doctrine or you are considered an enemy. Tim Urban, the author of the wonderful Wait but Why blog has written a book digging into how we have gotten here. Titled “What’s Our Problem” the book is a full throated defense of liberalism in general and free speech in particular.

As with his blog, Urban does two valuable things rather well: He goes as much as possible to source material and he provides excellent (illustrated) frameworks for analysis. The combination is exactly what is needed to make progress on difficult issues and I got a lot out of reading the book as a result. I highly recommend reading it and am excited that it is the current selection for the USV book club.

The most important contribution of What’s Our Problem is drawing a clear distinction between horizontal politics (left versus right) and vertical politics (low-rung versus high-rung). Low-rung politics is tribal, emotional, religious, whereas high-rung politics attempts to be open, intellectual, secular/scientific. Low-rung politics brings out the worst in people and brings with it the potential of violent conflict. High-rung politics holds the promise of progress without bloodshed. Much of what is happening in the US today can be understood as low-rung politics having become dominant.

The book on a relative basis spends a lot more time examining low-rung politics on the left in the form of what Urban calls Social Justice Fundamentalism compared to the same phenomenon on the right. Now that can be excused to a dgree because his likely audience is politically left and already convinced that the right has descended into tribalism but not been willing to admit that the same is the case on the left. Still for me it somewhat weakened the overall effect and a more frequent juxtaposition of left and right low-rung poltics would have been stronger in my view.

My second criticism is that the book could have done a bit more to point out that the descend to low-rung politics isn’t just a result of certain groups pulling everyone down but rather also of the abysmal failure of nominally high-rung groups. In that regard I strongly recommend reading Martin Gurri’s “Revolt of the Public” as a complement.

This leads my to my third point. The book is mostly analysis and has only a small recommendation section at the end. And while I fully agree with the suggestions there, the central one of which is an exhortation to speak up if you are in a position to do so, they do fall short in an important way. We are still missing a new focal point (or points) for high-rung politics. There may indeed be a majority of people who are fed up with low-rung politics on both sides but it is not clear where they should turn to. Beginning to establish such a place has been the central goal of my own writing in The World After Capital and here on Continuations.

Addressing these three criticisms would of course have resulted in a much longer book and that might in the end have been less effective than the book at hand. So let me reiterate my earlier point: this is an important book and if you care about human and societal progress you should absolutely read What’s Our Problem.