Dark Web Centrism

Dear Bari Weiss,

You say, “Mr. Peterson is now arguably the most famous public intellectual in Canada, and his book “12 Rules for Life” is a best-seller.”

Let me introduce you to a famous Canadian intellectual you may heard of: http://margaretatwood.ca. There are others, more famous, and much, much smarter.

Hugs and kisses,
A Canadian

“Conservative intellectuals” (an oxymoron) do nothing else than “[parrot] what’s politically convenient” for them. These “ideas” of theirs are ridiculed and marginalized for the simple reason that they are demonstrably wrong, which we have known for decades. Human beings are one least genetically diverse species of animals on earth and the overwhelming majority of that variation is between individuals in the same group. We are also characterized by very high levels of neural and behavioral plasticity. That is our brains aggressively rewire themselves in response to environmental factors and we display a huge amount of behavioral variability, even within families. Identical twins raised apart can have IQs which differ by as much as 30 points. As my geneticist colleague says, it is never just about the genes. In many cases, genetic factors only play a relatively minor role.

Its not totally out of the ordinary to say that people have been silenced if they’re marginalized but still able to get out their message. A whole lotta LGBT activism would be retroactively deemed nonsense if we decided that nobody is “silenced” if they still have the means to spread their message.

My not very original take- this “dark web” stuff groups up a lot of people that I don’t actually see as similar in anything but superficial ways, and while the original article acknowledges that there are a lot of differences I don’t think the similarities it mentions go very far.

Short, quippy version of what could otherwise be a long comment: Any list that groups Haidt and Owens together needs to really justify why they’re doing it. Haidt is just a run of the mill centrist who thinks campus culture sucks on discourse issues (he’s right, while exaggerated by conservatives for political gain the no platform brigade is frequently stupid and we would be better off without them). Whereas Owens is an actual crazy person maybe?

Insisting on grouping these people up in this way just opens you to attack from, well… from people like Henry Farrell, who will use the association to tar everyone involved. Grouping Heying with Owens is good for Owens and bad for Heying. I mean, imagine that its three weeks ago and Farrell wants to write an attack piece on people like Heather Heying by tarring her with gamergate. We’d all laugh at him. But group her up with Shapiro and Owens and suddenly it doesn’t sound so stupid.

who believe they are “locked out” of mainstream media, in Weiss’s words, and who are building their own ways to communicate with readers.

Oh wait, I thought it was Al Gore who invented the internet.

Will somebody please ask the darkheads what they think of the US pulling out of the Iran deal? Anyone with a functioning intellect and who can synthesize a train of facts is likely to conclude that the US will become militarily isolated (with Israel) and also it will lead the US into faster economic decline.

Sebastian H: “That’s what happens when conservatives have been largely ‘excluded’ from the academic world. They feel excluded.”

These ‘excluded’ conservatives are almost exactly like the ‘economically struggling’ Trump voters; which is to say, when you look at the conservatives who are complaining about being excluded, you find that they aren’t by and large being excluded, and when you look at the people who voted for Trump, you find that they aren’t by and large economically struggling. Isn’t that so, Sebastian?

From the Vox piece:

The truth is rather that dark web intellectuals, like Donald Trump supporters and the online alt-right, have experienced a sharp decline in their relative status over time. [Emphasis mine].

If Weiss’s piece demonstrates anything, it’s that the figures under discussion have seen a sharp rise in their relative status over time.

Conservative intellectuals have been defining themselves as suppressed rebels fighting against a liberal suppressive consensus for decades.

Even by the most charitable definition of “conservatism”, conservative thought is going to systemically lag the evidence — be more and more-predictably wrong — than other frameworks.

You’re not going to have inspiring new ideas from conservative intellectuals because definitionaly conservatism doesn’t produce new ideas. There’s no need to keep hiring conservative intellectuals: their work is done.

I mean, Sebastian says academics exclude conservatives, but… what exactly is a conservative academic supposed to do? Argue against new ideas? We… don’t actually need that. “Argue against” is done by the reader, individually.

There’s a lot of confusion about how different intellectual traditions should be treated in respectable venues such as newspapers, magazines or universities, and it often comes down to a misguided desire that poor arguments have as much merit as good ones.

Weiss fails to acknowledge that problem directly, but she does recognize the risk inherent in refusing to make distinctions between truth and falsehood, or between decency and loathsomeness. There are arguments that are too vile and stupid even for her to accept, and she is quite clear that she wants them to remain beyond the pale.

Here is Chait, stumbling over the same problem:

Standards are vital, but if we fall for the temptation of using them only as grounds for excluding conservatives, standards are ultimately having the effect of closing our minds rather than opening them.

Sure, our biases will lead us to be unfair to arguments we don’t find congenial, but that doesn’t mean we should abandon standards to pursue spurious fairness. The answer to the problem that Chait identifies is to try to publish fewer falsehoods, not more.

Chait’s argument proves way too much. Biologists are, as a group, much more sympathetic to evolutionists than creationists, but if you systematically exclude the conservative viewpoint, aren’t you failing to properly challenge scientists?

Chait doesn’t name conservatives who are inappropriately excluded from the liberal conversation. I suspect this is because the real-life examples don’t reflect well on his argument.

Kevin Williamson routinely makes fantastically bad arguments, and when your stated beliefs are this profoundly dishonest, you have no claim on the attention of people who aspire to determine the truth.

Liberals do make arguments this bad, but when they do, they are criticized by liberals. There was no conservative outcry against Williamson’s ludicrous work because modern conservatives are part of an intellectual tradition that doesn’t find fault with an argument merely because it is absurd.

when left to define themselves they may claim some basic level of exclusion by more relevant thinkers than their group… however there is little sense in ms. weiss’ commentary as far as their being anything worth noting… when the evidence is the same as the fact that there is no there there we are left with the empty phrases echoing forth:
redundancy is always a closed circle when nonsense is the prime interger and this ms. weiss has in abundance…

“Weiss fails to acknowledge that problem directly, but she does recognize the risk inherent in refusing to make distinctions between truth and falsehood, or between decency and loathsomeness. There are arguments that are too vile and stupid even for her to accept, and she is quite clear that she wants them to remain beyond the pale.”

I think this is over-charitable. Weiss recognizes no such risk. She wants “gatekeepers”, not “principles.” She wants people to be granted the authority to decide what should be printed. People like the editors who employ her. (She’s using the rhetoric that 15 years ago was directed by the likes of the NYT at the likes of Slate and Salon.)

Having read both pieces, now, I think my primary reaction is disappointment that the “they’ve lost status so of course they’re upset” argument has survived 2016. It reads as superficial and self-congratulatory (but then after all it’s Vox). Labeling the people responsible for the idea of “the intellectual dark web” as “centrist” also seems . . . misguided. If there’s a disconnect between academia and the real world that’s of any consequence, I suspect it’s an almost entirely incompatible sense of where the political lines are and what the distribution of ideas is among reasonably literate people outside the academy, and slightly “offbeat” ways of deciding what’s “left,” “right,” or “center”. I’m not thrilled about the word “contrarian” either.

This is an annoying abuse of the phrase “dark web”– the actual dark web is not people who are “shut-out” of the mainstream, they’re people who are hiding from the mainstream. If conservatives are now aligning themselves with pedophiles and drug-dealers, that’s a new thing in itself.

I’m not sure how much research you did on the actual ‘Intellectual Dark Web site.’
Here’s how the site creator describes her/himself:
“The author of this site is left of centre with mostly progressive, liberal values…”

Identity?

“I might choose to share that later. It’s hardly important. (Huh? To whom?) I have no affiliation with any of the people listed on this site, (I’m just an impartial soul bundling together a ‘dark collective’) old media, new media or any political movement. I’m just a person who is trying to tell the truth. (Of course, you are, poor dear.) Talk to me @edustentialist. (Perhaps another time.)

I can’t frankly imagine Pinker MIT/Harvard identifying as marginalized in any sense. Pinker’s widely-disseminated ideas and academic contributions are easily accessible. The fact that he may/may not be currently out of favor with a community that self-identifies as progressive/liberal for the most part means about as much as not being ‘liked’ this week on Instagram.

The fact that Dr. Peterson is even identified as a Canadian intellectual, rather than as a tenured professor and popular author speaks to the weakness of the piece. There are a great many highly-regarded Canadian intellectuals and Dr. Peterson isn’t on many lists, even as a psychologist.

The current exercise began as the creation of a left of center anonymous author who created a website about the right – called it the ‘Intellectual Dark Web.’ Now we’re doing our part to help drive the meme through the web using language which I’m certain Pinker and Harris would object to. You’re better than this. Really. Very shabby.

Apologies, Henry, and thanks to b9n10nt@18 for the link to Robinson, who provides the history of the DW term- ‘term coined by Eric Weinstein’ who actually does appear to be an idiot.

You’re right to add clarity and context to the discussion. That said, I still object very strongly with identifying any intellectuals (even Murray) with the DW. Conflating Peterson, Pinker, and Harris in any sense with pederasts, snuff-film addicts, and other sundry debased souls crosses too many lines.

I’m guilty in my @20 of not getting more data on the use of DW and for relying on the shabby NYT piece. Very bad me. Criticism withdrawn with apologies.

Apart from your repeated use of the appalling term DW, your Vox piece is excellent.

Maybe he’ll get a gig at Infowars to complete the fall.

Is Alex Jones now hawking pills (I would guess labelled Spanish Kant?) that enable the users to see through religious obscurantism and achieve a true state of secular Enlightenment?

I must get me some of those…

Z #15

“…even Stalin apparently agreed that mathematics had little to do with political preferences”

Yeah maybe. But Joe certainly thought that political preferences had a lot to do with genetics. Is there a clear distinction between Trofim Lysenko and Charles Murray ?

What is actually weird about the assumptions behind this, is that genuinely radical thought should somehow be mainstream, and if what you define as genuinely radical thought is not mainstream, then something needs to be done about this.

Now, I think it has been established that in any case the people being referred to are a) not genuinely radical and b) receive a lot of mainstream attention (which is what you might expect). However, if they were genuinely radical — that is, if their thoughts genuinely endangered the positions of a lot of powerful and wealthy people — then you would assume that the only mainstream attention they would receive would be dismissive, since the mainstream exists to serve the powerful and wealthy.

Hence the whole thing seems foolishly self-contradictory, and no wonder the New York Times published it.

This has long been the conservative self-image. It didn’t start with Trump. In fact, remember Bush – Rebel in Chief? Yeah, Fred Barnes, asslicking back in the day!
In fact, institutions do have politics. I imagine, for instance, that it is a lot harder being a centrist liberal type in a management job at a petroleum company than it is being a rightist type in a psychology department. Although of course even in the psychology department, empathy will only get you so far – for the big time you have to research for a pharma company to create the next big addictive mood alter-er.

Farrell’s point, though, still holds. In the establishment media, where Weiss has a job, a pro-Trump conservative has little chance of getting a hot job. That job will go, almost certainly, to never-Trump conservatives – which, as innumerable people have pointed out, is insane, if the point is to broaden the “conversation.” Never-Trump conservatives have a constituency consisting of the children of the Krystols and the children of the Podhorentzes. That is about it. Meanwhile, there is not a single socialist op ed person in any major media position.

Which is all about the politics of these institutions, and the worries associated with them. I’ve never heard of a petro company head worrying that too many oilmen are conservative. But the media and academy do worry about this, since they, after all, depend on the petro companies – ads, endowments, etc. Beneath the status quicksand underneath the feet of conservative intellectuals, there is, as well, the quicksand underneath the foundations of those traditional institutions, like academia and the press, which are making them much less powerful in the status-conferring business.

Ronan @ 29

Seems to me if the under representation of conservatives among faculty is due partly to differences in what counts as “conservative” or “liberal” it might not matter that much. In the “real” world, a person who brings gender differences into every discussion might have a hard time maintaining a view of himself as “liberal,” no matter how much time they spent thinking about climate change and government support for basic research. That fact seems to be exactly what people like James Damore resent, in fact.

politcalfootball @21

Data absolutely could be racist! When you assert that black people are, as a group, intellectually inferior to whites, you are making a racist claim. Period. The question is: Is racism supported by the data? If racism were the correct lens through which to view society and history, it would still be racism.

What an odd thing to say. If some reliable data show that the normal curve of IQ for some group is different to that for another group, there is no value judgment involved. ‘Racism’ is denigration of an individual(s) based on (supposed) membership of a racial category. There are no denigrations to be found in good quality data. If there were such data, then the statement that ‘caucasians on average have lower IQs than Asians’ has an objective meaning. Statements that might sound racist will either be just statements of fact, or they will be unsupported by evidence, and thus may be intentionally racist. Not much to see here. Or did I miss some sharper than usual satire?

(for the avoidance of doubt, I have no interest in the black < white < asian IQ schema, and couldn't care less whether there are data proving it or not; this is just a point on clear thinking).

With respect to the OP, the NYT article is uninteresting, but I also don't see the problem with that much of Pinker, Harris, Haidt etc. They seem mainly interested in defending what remains of enlightenment civilisational values from the radical left / postmodernists, who don't care about history, the relative quality of particular ideas, or much else, as far as I can see. They can all be critiqued on specific points just as anyone else can, but the true problem people are the tribal ideologues, on whatever side of politics.

Back in the day Joseph Priestly was “silenced” for his phlogiston theory. If he had access to the internet would he have started a Phogiston Dark Net?

casmilus @15, sorry I misread your point. I take back my reply to you above.

“I still object very strongly with identifying any intellectuals (even Murray) with the DW. Conflating Peterson, Pinker, and Harris in any sense with pederasts, snuff-film addicts, and other sundry debased souls crosses too many lines.”

1. Have they objected? (I ask this question in actual ignorance; I honestly don’t know the answer.)

2. If they have, can’t they be trusted to speak for themselves? Are they hapless enough that they need to be defended? Can’t they stand on their own feet and prove their own points? Can’t they fight their own battles? Why do they need your help?

3. And if they haven’t (objected, that is) — why should you? Don’t they have the right to choose their own companions? If they don’t like the people they’re surrounded by, they can find another crowd to hang out with, as would any of us.

Just asking…and apologies for any impoliteness shown.

I don’t think that the marginalization that these people are talking about is the same marginalization that the OP ist talking about. See e.g. Bret Weinstein on the issue.

@46 I don’t much care if Peterson et al object. I object to Republicans and religious cranks conflating homosexuality with pederasty. I object to the entire Peterson and company are being silenced nonsense because it is, as Henry and others confirm. I’ve a longer comment in mind by not the time, so I’ll try to hammer it out quickly.

I first started reading CT when David Horowitz and company were actively trying to get people like Berube fired. There’s no question that this gang of assholes (Koch-funded in many cases) have an agenda of their own. Hence, the need for constant scrutiny simply for self-preservation purposes. As Henry points out, however, there are fewer orthodox NRO readers than Jonah Goldberg, Bill, Kristol, and Nicole Wallace would like.

Trump and his supporters couldn’t give a damn about TG bathrooms, most are simply sick of reading about how important the TG issue is when wages are flat, infra-structure is collapsing, the opiates are destroying communities, and good jobs are evaporating.

Musa al-Gharbi argues that Sanders would have won with a message of economic populism and that voting trends indicate identity politics is actually destroying the Democrats coalition: https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/52739?in=00:01

Henry’s Vox piece is a mix of expert analysis, meme production with a strong subtext of venality and even resentment, in my view. The term DW runs through Henry’s entire piece which for me is problematic to say the least because the thrust of Henry’s argument and that of others seems to be that there is no DW.

So, why not employ the term DW, as Henry does, or conflate Pinker with pederasts? Simple. It’s dismissive and debasing at best, and detracts very much from Henry’s valid points.

The prospects for Democrats remain grim even in 2018. The large lead Dems held has disappeared to a single point. Musa al-Ghabri, Blyth, and others argue that Democrats need to stake out a clear economic program and run on it, even if that means horrifying their Davos-class donors. I’ve already retracted my poorly-grounded complaints. I believe I’m on much firmer ground here. Al-gharbi presents the case clearly – wake up to the reality that African-Americans need only to drift away from Dems in small numbers, as they did in 2016, for there to be huge consequences. DW nonsense is frankly a waste of time, and given that the Democratic party is in the worst shape since the civil war, you’d think a few of the brighter sticks might notice and respond thoughtfully to the crisis.

That’s it from me. My next project is watching Glenn Loury and John McWhorter https://bloggingheads.tv/videos/52779?in=00:01 rif on their role as dissenting intellectuals, the DW, Kanye West, Coates, and has Trump done anything for black America.

Susanc

I think Pizzagate is a nonsense conspiracy theory, but some of its supporters apear to be genuine about trying to prevent child abuse

You might want to think about what work the words ‘I think’ are doing at the beginning of that sentence, and once you’ve done that you might consider leaving them out the next time you express that thought.

@53 There’s no mystery. Academics have high education and (compared to others with the same education) low income. That combination is strongly predictive of voting Democrat, or at least not Republican. As I point out here

https://crookedtimber.org/2016/10/09/if-professors-made-500kyear-would-they-be-republicans/

you can see it among doctors. Those in high income specialties are mostly Republicans, those in low income specialties are mostly Democrats.

On the opposite side, the archetypal Republican voter is a low-education, high income small business owner (coded as “working class” in most US discussions). No one invokes discrimination to explain the absence of Democrats in this group.

kidneystones: “The large lead Dems held has disappeared to a single point.”

Didn’t you say you taught statistics? You should be unemployable in that field.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/congress-generic-ballot-polls/?ex_cid=rrpromo

@Sebastian H 05.11.18 at 7:08 pm
> I don’t believe the divide between attraction to wealth is particularly sharp

Why don’t we have more pacifist professional soldiers and atheist priests?

It doesn’t seem all that surprising that people whose political views are positive towards the corporate world (including the fairness of the income distribution in it and its contribution to society at large) are more inclined to choose to work in the corporate world, and people whose political views are negative towards the corporate world are more inclined to choose to work in an alternative sphere outside of the corporate world. And, of course, cynically, one may argue the converse – people with personal characteristics that enable success in the corporate world may be more likely to develop political views that are positive towards the corporate world, and vice versa. The same applies to the attitude towards wealth: the more you believe that it is deserved and reflects one’s genuine human worth, the more it makes sense to strive towards it, and vice versa. And the easier you find it to acquire wealth, the more attractive it is to believe that it is deserved and reflects one’s genuine human worth. Finally, of course, all of this applies to one’s attitude towards all kinds of prestige and ‘success’ in general, also within academia.

As for conservative religious people of the ascetic variety (not the Weberian Calvinist type, that is) – again, the more you are inclined to believe or accept claims based on authority and tradition, the less attracted you will feel to a place where knowledge is sought through logical reasoning. Such people may instead become priests. Conversely, the more you believe contemporary society needs to be reorganised in a more reasonable and fair way, the more you will be attracted to such a place.

Then there’s the other logic, of course – success in any sphere is success, elite status in any sphere is elite status, and all sorts of elite should support each other against the plebeians. This factor is also present and influences academic attitudes now to some extent. It has also resulted in conservative predominance in academia before, and, in many countries, it is also completely predominant at the moment. This result is what is beind demanded here, too.

Very roughly, and ignoring the gradient nature of the distinction and the constant presence and increasing prevalence of the more ‘corporate’ type everywhere, one may schematise this as follows: there are two types of people, each of them has sought out its own place under the sun, and one of them currently wants the other one not to have any place under sun anymore. This is what the discrimination complaints – as well as the movement for maximal connection of the former ‘ivory towers’ with business – are about. And this aspiration is unsurprising, since there has always been a mutual threat. No alternative to capitalist hegemony is to be allowed to exist anywhere in society. It must be made impossible to be combine opposition to the prevalent pattern of the status quo with simultaneous prosperity – or, preferably even survival – under that status quo.

Layman, kidneystones is a contract English teacher. Draw your own conclusions about his critical thinking skills.

Statements that might sound racist will either be just statements of fact, or they will be unsupported by evidence, and thus may be intentionally racist.

Human races do not exist, that is, race is neither a scientific nor an anthropological concept. Fortunately, governments asking their populations to self-identify from a list of 19th century quack races such as white, black, and Asian is pretty much confined to the anglosphere.

People from the rest of the world are not socialized from an early age to self-identify and identify others using this colonial folk taxonomy peddled by English-language governments, media, and academia, much less call doing so left-wing politics.

kidneystones: “Note for Layman: Feb – 16 point advantage; March – 6 points; May – 3 points. Winning!”

Yes, that’s what I meant when I said you’d be unemployable as a teacher of statistics. Thanks for affirming my comment.

kidneystones: “The only utility I can see in discussing my position as an adjunct lecturer is to point out how my current situation helps make me a Trump supporter. My salary has flat-lined since 1994 when I began teaching.”

If Trump were to do anything at all to improve your wages, it would only be by accident. To me, it seems that – like many! – you were tired of not having enough to eat, so you decided the right response was to shoot the farmer; and that you as yet lack the distance or the character to admit the error.

After a brief review of the titulars, it appears that the “Intellectual Dark Web” is marketing. These folks want a paying pulpit. The podcasts and videos are like infomercials and advertorials. A lot of it is prefaced with I, I, I, me, me, me, you, you, you. Indeed contrary to their advertised opposition to “identity politics”, most of this stuff is steroidal egotism (the most basic form of identity politics). Indeed I would guess that some of it is hemorrhoidal. The content is tinged with libertarian assertiveness training, which is another big audience draw, especially for male teens. The self-description of being “dangerous, controversial, forbidden, excluded” is a slogan, a movie marketing technique.

If you want to be a real intellectual, forget the self. Get lost in the crowd, comment at a place like Crooked Timber, keep it brief and defend your points (if you can) when the ton of bricks inevitably comes down on your head.

But a paying gig? For a few hundred years, there weren’t a lot of paying gigs in the commentating racket: 1. college professorships, 2. newspaper columnists and then broadcast commentators, 3. book authors, and 4. not much else. The mass-market computer web is only around 20 years old, and we are still in a transition period. A transition to what, we don’t know. There appears a new niche for the ascension of expositors and bloviators. This new niche has new characteristics: Anyone can jump into it. With enough views you can get paid advertisers, maybe start with enough to pay your rent. The medium is two-way communication, so it’s best to combine audience conversation e.g. “social media”, and to promote personal appearances at conventions and so on. New means, to answer old questions: How do you get well-known? And how do you rake in the dough at the box office?

Intellectually the Intellectual Dark Web is thin stuff. Intellectually almost anything is thin stuff unless you are learning a standard school subject, or watching a college lecture. The occasional long interview with someone distinguished in their field can be interesting and educational. Instead in this new internet “intellectual” racket, we see one-on-ones lasting an hour or more, that devolve into self-navigation, mood affiliation and self-promotion within minutes. Just as young actors & directors use YouTube and Vimeo to be seen in Hollywood, this is also the farm team for talk radio and cable news.

Kiwanda

The IDW notion is kind of silly, but just about the only thing the people mentioned have in common is indeed a “general commitment to intellectual free exchange”.

I expect Sam Harris says that he is committed to intellectual free exchange. So: how many critics of Sam Harris has Sam Harris invited to be guests on his podcast? Or: how many critics of Jordan Peterson has Jordan Peterson invited to present their case on his Youtube channel?

I don’t see in what way biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein are not “genuine leftists” …

Neither do I. But then, I know little about them. I don’t know in what way (if any) they are genuine leftists. If you could explain that, it would be helpful.

The Evergreen situation was a bit more than “skeptical criticism” …

Undeniably. So: does Bret Weinstein treat all sceptical criticism as appropriately lumped in with the experience of having his class disrupted by protesters; or are there forms of sceptical criticism (that is, of his own position) which he treats (by his reactions to them) as different from the experience of having his class disrupted by protesters?

@65

So why did he beat Ted Cruz? There was a Rod Dreher column, lamenting that Donald was beating Ted in one of the Republican primaries and that he wasn’t talking about the *real important issues* like mixed bathrooms and gay weddings. And a commenter gently explained to Rod that Ted was going hard on both issues and *no one cared*, it was all about jobs, stupid.

Of course Trump wandered off script after he won. But that’s a different world.

J-D:

It’s strange that you think that the burden of proof isn’t on the people doing the armchair psychoanalysis, but OK, a few bits of specific evidence regarding Bret Weinstein’s bona fides: support of Occupy and a couple other pieces at Commondreams, calmly whistleblowing on frats as a first-year college student.

Regarding Bret Weinstein’s willingness to talk with people of different opinions, what do you think he was doing, or trying to do, those last couple years at Evergreen? Do you think that someone who could remain so calm in this situation, or that, has trouble with some back-and-forth?

JQ @55
“90 per cent of Trump voters were Republicans who had previously voted for Romney. The economic program they want is the one they got – big tax cuts for companies and the rich.”

And for the remaining 10%, while they may not prefer tax cuts, are willing to tolerate them in pursuit of their other priorities, such as ethnic grievance.

support of Occupy

This is an explanation of why he doesn’t support Occupy. You don’t have to read any further than the headline: “A Horizontal World? Occupy Can’t Win with Utopian Impossibilities.”

I think you need to have someone explain to you the difference between “support” and “concern trolling.”

Kiwanda, is it not true that Weinstein ended up holding his classes in a park? Is that where you would go to hold classes of you feared for your safety? Also, is it not true that his job was guaranteed early on by the head of the university? In very clear language? What happened to him was very unpleasant, but his University stood by him. And can I ask, while I’m at it, how it is that a bunch of angry undergraduate students come to represent the left generally? Did Bernie Sanders tell them to go get Weinstein? I read these examples of poorly behaved students and they certainly seem like a bunch of dickheads, but it seems universally the case that only left wing street activists get linked to the broader movement. If you doubt that, then I’m happy to hold you personally responsible for Heather Meyers death. Your call!

Also what’s with your dirty little rhetorical shift over multiculturalism? Opposition to multiculturalism is a central tenet of conservatism but when the op suggests the IDW losers have this in common you try (and dismally fail) to present evidence of IDW thinkers (haha) who don’t oppose it. Do you actually have any ideological principles, or do you simply believe anything that disagrees with liberals at any point in time? Did you want to say the IDW isn’t opposed to multiculturalism because you want to show they’re diverse thinkers, while simultaneously accepting that they’re all right wing? How does that work? Or did you want to show they’re not opposed to multiculturalism because you know that opposition is code for racism and you don’t want to be seen as racist? Is that why you assumed the foreign-sounding IDW thinkers (haha) did not oppose multiculturalism, before you even checked their written work?

I ask because I’m wondering whether the IDW thinkers (haha) are just trolls, or racist trolls. Thanks in advance!

@81 So, your hypothesis is that the observed partial correlation (that is, holding income constant) between having a 4-year college degree and liberalism is due to system-wide discrimination against conservative students. As you say, we shouldn’t rule this out a priori. But, at a minimum, you need some kind of evidence that conservatism is an identifiable trait. You could do that for the tiny minority of students who are politically active in, say, College Republicans and check their graduation rates. But the vast majority just turn up to classes, most of which give them no opportunity to express any kind of political views.

To take an obvious example, the proportion of active scientists who are Republicans is (from memory) around 6 per cent. It’s easy to see that anyone who studies science will learn that it contradicts a lot of what Republicans say, and that will predispose conservative entrants to change their political views. But unless students do something really silly, like quoting the Bible in a geology essay, their teachers won’t know anything about this.

Of course, you could be saying that universities are discriminating against the holders of wrong beliefs of all kinds by making them listen to evidence against their beliefs. That’s the kind of rightwing relativism I’ve been complaining about elsewhere.

John, it may be that you aren’t aware of the discussion of discrimination against women in the computer science field (really in many fields but that is the most recent locus of the discussion) in the US. There is very little direct evidence of widespread direct discrimination, and the mere existence of an enormous differences from the underlying population are given as prima facie evidence of discrimination.

But the lack of evidence of direct discrimination on such a widespread level AT THE HIRING STAGE has complicated the discussion. Especially since the hiring companies in question point out things like “women are less than 20% of the degree holders in the field”. So the discussion turns to the university experience. The Republican suggestion is that women aren’t interested in computer science much. But I’ll outsource to Ingrid Robyens a discussion of what happens when you’re a member of a group that isn’t well represented at the university. here. She mentions a number of issues which are likely to plague conservative students, especially in the more politically charged humanities arena. Implicit Bias (with the ‘collegiality’ concept of wanting someone who will ‘fit in with us’), Networking opportunities, operating in a vicious cycle the lower their numbers drop. Mentoring (related to collegiality). Role Models. As she notes, all of these can work to drive people out of a discipline at multiple decision points.

The history of conservatives in the University strongly suggest that ideas like “they aren’t philosophically inclined toward becoming professors” don’t hold.

You speak of “my hypothesis”, but really I don’t have a firm one. I’m pointing out that under the current understanding of what counts as discrimination evidence, there is similar levels of evidence for a problem. Now that doesn’t mean that the locus of the problem is exactly the same in the “women in computer science” and “conservatives in professor position” cases. Just that there is something going on. I’m also a bit resistant to just so exculpatory stories that of exactly the type that are laughed at in the computer science case (inherently unsuited/pure individual choice accounts). I think it is correct to be suspicious of them in both cases.

I think in both both cases thinking in terms of polluted dynamics more than discrete moments of discrimination would offer more insight. The conservative decline in professorships PREDATES the climate change war on science mess. At some point in the 1970s or so, something in the dynamic changes. This creates the kind of dynamic in implicit bias, mentoring, and networking which frustrates or excludes interested conservative proto-professors. This causes them to ‘self select’ out of tracts which might lead to professorships, including many PhD programs which aren’t as useful if you think your professorship chances are low (especially in the humanities). This contributes to a reinforcing distrust of the academic world which increases as exposure decreases.

Now a large part of that AT THIS POINT, represents the current state of the Republican Party. By 2008 or so we had gotten to the point where a relatively conservative person such as myself won’t vote for Republicans. But as far as a damaging social dynamic goes, the insularity of the Republican Party has been strongly reinforced by declining opportunities for conservatives in once mixed areas.

Republican Party aside, conservatives still represent a large portion of the population. They were once relatively well represented in the University, and their decline in it well predates the point where Republicans should have been anathema. That suggests to me, that from a poisonous dynamic look, their early exclusion may have contributed to their later increase in insularity.

John Quiggin:
Personally, I think self-selection is more plausible (both in this case and with respect to choices of fields of study), but I think the idea is not so much active discrimination, or “making them listen to evidence against their beliefs”, but something more like (oy) “micro-aggressions”: a constant background noise of hostility to their beliefs.

Collin Street gets to do his “conservatives don’t know how to read and think shtick” without anyone on his side calling him on it

In fairness to the rest of us, several people have noted that this is, at best, tedious and not helpful, and others have pushed harder. I agree with all of that. It has, at most, only slightly slowed down the constant refrain. Some dogs get a bone, and just won’t let go no matter what…

OK, Sebastian H. Let’s start over.

-In the last 40 to 50 years and right, the best predictor of right-wing vs. left-wing vote in many Western democratic countries with a right/left separation of the political spectrum is precisely the relative income you get compared to the educational level you reach. This is not a just-so story, this is a well-established and amply discussed sociological observation. Read La distinction, if you have to. In view of this fact, it is entirely unsurprising that plumbers, shop-keepers and business owners are more right-wing than the population at large (a point also made by John Quiggin @54) and that nurses, teachers and university professors are more left-wing than the population at large. Note that in countries where teachers are particularly well-paid, they are not particularly left-wing, in conformity with the thesis.
-In the US (and mostly in the US alone), there are complicating factors (the legacy of race, the complete craziness of the main right-wing party…). If your intention is to discuss the specifics of the American case, you should clearly say so (in particular, you often mention statistics that hold true only for the American case, as if it were self-evident that only the American case interests you).
-In your 75, you are very sensitive to the correlation between educational level and political affiliation (more on that later) and in your 81 you discuss employment in the Silicon Valley (also more on that later) and point out differences in treatment but you are completely oblivious to a much more salient difference: being a woman is an intangible fact, being a conservative is not. Indeed, a huge part of one’s political beliefs and affiliation is precisely built at the moment one determines higher education choices. So it is precisely at the moment a given person “decides” to become a conservative, or a liberal, or a socialist or what-have-you that they also “decide” to become a lawyer, a programmer or a librarian. This massively complicates your story (or lack thereof).
-OK, you say that educational achievement is not independent of political affiliation in your 75 and you explicitly point out to the monopoly of higher education given to Universities. What’s the obvious next step? Go to a country in which Universities do not have a monopoly of higher education and have a look there! So I’ll present to you France, with its dual system of higher education: large, relatively less prestigious and unknown universities and tiny, ultra-élite, very well-respected grandes écoles. Unsurprisingly (to me, but to your utter surprise, apparently), grandes écoles graduates (who tend to earn a lot more than the median salary) are much more right-wing than the population at large (or used to be before Macron changed everything to the three-party system) whereas university-graduates are much more left-wing, and again unsurprisingly (to me), grandes écoles graduates who then become academic gradually shift to the left-wing in a very noticeable trend year after year (another well-studied sociological trend, read La noblesse d’État, if you have to).
-Oh, and by the way, the three-party system! In the three-party system, the main predictor of whether you vote for the neoliberal block is not the difference between education and income, as in the two-party system, but the sum of them. So suddenly, all high-education/high-income academics in France became Macron supporters alongside engineers, lawyers, bankers and heads of marketing divisons while adjuncts, teachers and high-education/low-income academics became Mélenchon supporters alongside postmen, blue-collar workers and students, almost as if it was their social position that predicted their vote, and not their vote that predicted their job (or maybe as soon as Macron came out, a conspiracy of Macron-leaning academics conspiracy just formed to exclude Mélenchon voters from their rank, and damn they were efficient).
-About CS and the Silicon Valley, “But treating it like you’ve never heard of these kind of arguments before” I think again you are confusing the world at large with the US, and some segments of the American political world with the CT commenting section. I have indeed heard of such discussions and arguments, shook my head at poor Americans and moved on. There are apparently people who take them seriously, I heard they exist on Twitter. I don’t know any of them myself, and I don’t see why I should discuss their opinions.
-“There are a large number of deeply religious conservatives who aren’t particularly wedded to wealth. Why aren’t they professors?” They are, Sebastian, they are! Check how many deeply religious people you’ll find in academia compared to people with the same educational level. I’m even slightly surprised you brought out this point, as the university professor observant Jew is almost a cliché.
-“But I’ll outsource to Ingrid Robyens a discussion of what happens when you’re a member of a group that isn’t well represented at the university” Well, here you’re onto something, but you again neglect the obvious fact that a woman in a male dominated department cannot become a man while a conservative student in a left-wing department can (and usually will) become more left-wing. You might say it’s a pity, but that’s usually what happen. And honestly, didn’t you become much more left-wing these last 15 years or so? Are you surprised that it happened to you, considering what happened in your country this last 15 years? Is it surprising that it also happened to people like you?
-“She mentions a number of issues which are likely to plague conservative students, especially in the more politically charged humanities arena” well that could be true, but the discrepancy is as noticeable in STEM, and there, having just completed two rounds on both side of the process, I can say the hiring is precisely as Alex SL described @53.
-“Your argument would have equally explained why there were no conservatives THEN, which should suggest that its explanatory power now is weak.” OK, there are a number of problems with that statement: first, again you seem to consider that the US is the only country in the world (which is fine, if you want to, but you should say so); second, before claiming that my model made the same prediction, you should check if the income of academics relative to general income was the same then as it is now, I suspect it was not, know it was not in the case of my own country, correctly assess that my model predicts that academics then were much more right-wing than they are now, check that this prediction holds (of course it does, I’ll let you do the work for your own country); third, I never claimed my model was of universal application, it held true in the last 40 years (but then again, see Macron) but beyond that, there are (of course) complicating factors (if only geopolitical ones).
-Now, to finish with some intellectual charity: I’m ready to believe that – specifically in the US – some segments of academia are so intellectually polarized and the Republican party so crazy that it is completely impossible to be a supporter of the Republican party and (for instance) a sociologist of crime, in the sense that even if you were to submit articles arguing in good faith Republican points, your referee would react negatively enough that this cold impact your career. That’s rare, but I’d say that happens.

All this focus on the politics of undergraduates…. has there been any serious study of the “lefties get right-wing as they get older” phenomenon, such as it is?

In my experience the truth just seems to be that young people who are strongly active in far left groups (Socialist Workers etc.) at college get disenchanted and fall away, mostly due to the internal dynamics, although they may break with orthodoxy on one particular issue, usually related to far-away countries. They then end up much more virulently anti-Left than simple everyday conservative voters who never read them fancy books or gave any thought to what Marx actually wrote.

The UK right-wing press has many star columnists who ended up as fierce defenders of the established order after a youth spent in Trotskyite reading groups (Peter Hitchens, Janet Dailey, etc.) Does not generalise to the shifting party allegiances we see amongst civilian voters.

(Obviously ‘unanimous’ is very implausible; I must have misremembered the details of it…)

I’ve served on many hiring committees, and never once had a clue what the politics of a candidate were. I bet I could count on one hand the number of students whose contemporary political affiliation I was aware of, out of many hundreds of students. And I dare say no student of mine could identify my politics, except by a lucky guess. My experience may not be typical.

Thomas Beale @40: Racism, like any other belief system, is based on a set of assertions that can be scrutinized for their truth value.

An underlying belief of racists is that black people are inherently, on average, less intelligent than white people. Leaving aside the question of whether this belief is true, it is, by definition, racist.

You want to define racism as being inherently factually incorrect. And for everyday practical purposes, that’s a useful heuristic. Racism relies on falsehoods. But if racism were the correct lens through which to view society, it would still be racism. Murray is arguing that blacks are intellectually inferior. He is a racist. That is a separate issue from the fact that he is also wrong.

Whatever you think of Keynesianism or Christianity, it would be ridiculous to say: “That belief can’t be Keynesian; it’s true” or “That belief can’t be Christian; it’s true.” It makes no more sense with racism. The facts could justify racism or — in the Saletan/Harris formulation — the data could be racist. It’s just a fact of human history that they aren’t.

I was channel-hopping and paused on Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner the other day. Hepburn’s character explained how she taught her daughter about racism:

We told her it was wrong to believe that white people were somehow essentially superior to black people… or the brown or the red or the yellow ones, for that matter. People who thought that way were wrong to think that way. Sometimes hateful, usually stupid, but always wrong.

If you think racism is the correct lens through which to view society, you are racist.

casmilus — I always imagine that phenomenon is connected to two things — i) the personal ambition of people like that when they join up in the first place and ii) personal dynamics after the fact. Hitchens being a prime illustration of that –I can’t imagine he is a very different person now than he was then, and someone like that either made it to the leadership (as a personality he really appears remarkably like some of the SWP leaders I’ve met), or didn’t, and if they didn’t they were liable to be very pissed off, but attribute it not to their own failings or bad luck but something more fundamental to the ideology.

Murray is arguing that blacks are intellectually inferior. He is a racist. That is a separate issue from the fact that he is also wrong.

Jailed Americans spontaneously further jail themselves into racial groups because most Americans believe there is such a thing as race, that is, black, white, Asian, and Indian, according to the US Census Bureau. According to a study I read, American children, 5 and 6 years old, can sort pictures of people by Census Bureau race and even name them using the official nomenclature.

According to the Census Bureau and even Wikipedia, human races are not a scientific or anthropological category, and yet, Americans are socialized into self-identifying into one of them, academics use these categories as independent variables, and politicians grant their patronage to groups that self-identify with three of the four official races.

The question is: how can a nation be racialist (races exist and they are equal) without being racist (races exist and one of them is superior)? That is where political correctness comes in.

Another question: What countries officially categorize their populations by quack race? It is practically limited to the anglosphere.

This is what I find most interesting about the mutation of 19th century scientific racism (human races exist and one is superior) into 21st century scientific racialism (people spontaneously self-identify into unscientific categories that are equal and which the state quantifies): it’s an anglospheric phenomenon.

Z, I was exaggerating a bit. I haven’t read the whole paper but the basic argument seemed compelling to me, and seems in accord with your references to Bourdieu above.

“You know quite well that they are all liberal”

No, I don’t, and neither do you.

“the institutional discrimination does all that for you”

It is not doing so through me, and I am after all part of the institution. Moreover, no one anywhere is being politically discriminated against “for me,” since such discrimination would not be done on my behalf, by my say-so, or in my interests.

Sebastian you should come study in UK, elite universities here are full of Tories.

Correction:
…feeds grads into the industry.

Once again Sebastian is ignoring the big fat white elephant shitting in the Republican punch bowl. Conservatives are not qualified for academia because they can’t handle evidence, and they self select out because objective study would disabuse them of their silly notions. A conservative Christian who enters a biology degree will learn evolution and be required to accept it in order to succeed in the field. A conservative economist who enters any field of science has to accept the fact of global warming. The same person entering public health faces a choice of consistently ignoring evidence or accepting the importance of socialised health care systems (even the world bank and IMF have had to accept this). It’s not that conservatives don’t enter the academy, it’s just that they don’t leave it. The objective study of reality washes out their views – except of course in economics, which remains impervious to reality or any statistical method beyond ols.

Until Sebastian can explain how a global warming denialist can succeed in science, or indeed why scientists should show any kindness towards representatives of a movement that has repeatedly and viciously attacked them, his pleas simply sound like the worst kind of affirmative action.

Ogden perhaps your friend could do a stats degree at GMU, where he can learn how to use plagiarism and fraud to smear other scientists and deny politically inconvenient facts. And if Sebastian gets his way, the affirmative action programs in other universities will ensure your friend has a comfortable career no matter how much of a hack he becomes!

Kiwanda

It’s strange that you think that the burden of proof isn’t on the people doing the armchair psychoanalysis …

If somebody makes an assertion, it’s reasonable to ask that person to provide support for the assertion. On the other hand, I don’t consider myself (or anybody else) to be under an obligation to make that kind of request for every assertion made. Indeed, if I did ask everybody to support every assertion made, I would expect to be regarded as unreasonably vexatious. I ask for support for assertions when I feel like it. If you feel like asking me to provide support for any assertion I have made, please go right ahead and do so, and I’ll probably do my best to respond. I don’t feel under an obligation to do so, though; such requests are reasonable, but nobody’s under an obligation to respond to them. So I’m grateful that you did respond to my request, because it did help me to clarify my thinking. I realised that I could have made a better choice of questions to ask, or points to raise, than I actually did.

You wrote

The IDW notion is kind of silly, but just about the only thing the people mentioned have in common is indeed a “general commitment to intellectual free exchange”.

That’s not literally true. They have many things in common. They’re all deuterostomes, for example. This is not a relevantly distinctive characteristics, obviously, given that all humans are deuterostomes. More specifically, they are all literate, which not all humans are. But that would only be a relevant characteristic if they were grouping themselves together (or being grouped together) in a context where they were distinguishing themselves (or being distinguished from) other people who are illiterate. That’s evidently not what’s happening, so literacy also is a common characteristic which is not a relevant common characteristic.

So, if they were grouping themselves together (or being grouped together) in a context where they were distinguishing themselves from (or being distinguished from) other people who do not have a general commitment to intellectual free exchange, then it could be a relevant common characteristic that they shared a general commitment to intellectual free exchange, if in fact that was something that they did share. Therefore, to make the case that it’s the thing that binds them together, it would be necessary not only to show evidence that they do in fact share such a commitment but also to give at least some general indication of who these other people are, the ones who don’t share a general commitment to intellectual free exchange, the ones from whom they are distinguishing themselves (or being distinguished). When that hasn’t been plausibly indicated, it’s reasonable to look for some other explanation of what binds them together, as Henry Farrell has done in Vox.

John Quiggin:

I was suggesting a category of explanation not covered by your earlier comments, I wasn’t specifically proposing it as the right one in this case. But: a social environment in which a particular characteristic or viewpoint is clearly held in contempt and disdain by the majority (or by a vocal, unopposed minority) can be uncomfortable to someone with that characteristic or viewpoint, even if it is invisible. This is distinct from simply hearing other viewpoints, or seeing people without that characteristic, or even discussing/arguing over such differences.

As not-quite-an-example: how anybody at Reed who sympathized at all with ostracized student Hunter Dillman would feel.

@113
But isn’t this also because most political philosophies consist of multiple strands of values that are in tension?
For example:
Individual freedom, or enforcement of moral norms?

The answers vary, depending on the situations and people involved, which can be explained by blind tribalism.

But why shouldn’t it?
It would be a strange sort of dogmatic mind wouldn’t it, to think that moral norms can never be more important than individual freedom, or vice versa?

Maybe I have just seen too many people summon up contrived “universal and objective” rules for why freedom of speech covers this or that, but not the other thing, when what they really mean is that freedom really can only exist within a range of socially acceptable boundaries that are in constant movement.

Sebastian H, supposing it’s true (at least in the US) that conservatives are under-represented in academia, that this is a consequence of discrimination, that it’s a serious problem–I don’t know whether it’s true, but supposing everything you’ve written is true, what (if anything) do you suggest should be done about it?

Kiwanda, what’s the difference between the Hunter Dillman story and any other story of bullying at a school or university? Bullies have a background and need an opening. In this case they were left wing, and took some silly facebook discussion as an opening. But that’s what bullies do. Are you going to try and tell us that only left wing students bully people, or that bullying would never happen at GMU, or that if it did it would not have right wing overtones? Do you think the football team or athletics team don’t contain bullies? And if they show all the same behavior as the people who bullied Hunter Dillman, but don’t do it with a left wing opening, how are they different?

Also, that Spiked article is very careful to tell us the political leanings of everyone except Hunter Dillman. But it seems possible he is also left wing. It doesn’t support your thesis that left wing people are bullying conservatives out of the academy, if they are also bullying each other out of the academy. Does it? Is it possible that these guys are just good old fashioned bullies, but in a “liberal” college like Reed, the bullies are also “liberal”?

Also you should read the article about what happened to those protesters the following year. They got run out on a rail by other left wing students. How does that support your theory?

‘New York Times columnist Bari Weiss (5/8/18) describes some of the supposedly taboo topics—“That Which Cannot Be Said”—discussed by the “renegades” of the “Intellectual Dark Web”:

There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”

I agree that it’s dangerous to be under that degree of self-delusion; none of these ideas are remotely taboo; they’re the kind of things that are said routinely in outlets like, to pick one at random, the New York Times.’

https://fair.org/home/supposedly-taboo-ideas-that-actually-appear-frequently-in-the-pages-of-the-new-york-times/

@117

‘I’m not sure what university you went to…’

I think that would be the university of ‘I made it up’ in the country of ‘Imaginationstan’ doing the course in ‘Some Shit I read on the Fox News website’.

postmodernism (or what i would more properly label late-20th century continental philosophy and critical theory, maybe post-structuralism but that’s sort of just displacing the uncertainty) is actually experiencing a resurgence among some of the more intellectual elements of the younger left. my campus’s SDS reading group for example read edward said, angela davis, judith butler and michel foucault.

this is mostly because we find these thinkers ideas useful in our activism. for me personally postmodernism and the literature surrounding it is concerned foremost with political radicalism and readjusting and reformulating the goals and methods for revolution in tune with contemporary changes.

the only definition of “postmodernism” which could describe reactionaries in the same breath as revolutionaries is quite obviously not useful for telling you anything about how those groups think.

Faustusnotes: Maybe you might want to expand your critique to consider academic positions that are not in the sciences?

Sebastian I also went to university in the early 1990s and I didn’t learn any of those things. I learnt that evidence was important for establishing political beliefs, that sex was partly biological and partly socially constructed, and that human rights were universal.

Plenty of people went to university and were taught differently. Sebastian’s experiences are far from uncommon.

I think Sebastian is right to a point. There are definitely departments where right wing views are generally not welcome, and while I doubt those departments deliberately exclude right wingers, some ring wingers may well decide that they’d rather be in a more comfortable environment. But it’s definitely a subset (and not all colleges either) – English, History (maybe), Anthropology, Sociology along with disciplines that you’d expect (African-American studies/Women’s Studies, etc). Other disciplines seem pretty apolitical to me, and certainly seem to have right wingers in them – Engineering, certain sciences (Chemistry, Geology), Mathematics. And other disciplines seem to have plenty of right wingers pushing their views (economics, law, Political Science, International Relations).

As for why right wingers would be underrepresented… my guess is that there are a variety of reasons and you’d have to look at the department (and be more specific about which right wing views are excluded). Blanket statements about the entire academy just seem unhelpeful and are almost certainly untrue.

Thomas Beale: Let’s unpack that argument a little.

First of all the fact that prevalence of certain illness map to certain ‘races’ is true. But all we’re really saying here is that certain illnesses map to certain genetic markers. Some genetic markers broadly correlate with socially determinations of race, others don’t. They don’t make these definitions of race ‘real’, or ‘scientific’. They might if we defined races genetically, but we don’t. We define races based upon historical accidents (e.g. where certain borders were drawn up) and facts of migration. Some racial definitions of race are ludicrously broad. E.g. African American. Africa is a big place, and African-Americans genetic heritage usually has a mix of European and other DNA in there also (due to a history initially of rape, and then later intermarriage). Others are just artefacts of colonialism – e.g. ‘Indian’ (the Indian sub-continent’s existence as a country being an artefact of British colonialism). And really what does it mean to say somebody is ‘English’? or German? Given historical patterns of migration, warfare (and indeed rape)?

Or how about the term hispanic regularly used for people from South America? Tell me how that’s a race?

So yeah using race to make medical judgements is pretty unscientific, and does lead to bad outcomes (for example the different medical outcomes for ‘white’ and ‘black’ patients due to racial judgements made by doctors. See mother mortality rates for an example of this).

b) as a real social construct – there is no getting out of the fact that certain aspects of social association, grouping and culture follow racial boundaries, whether due to history, self-identification or something else. Sometimes even legislation reflects this: in the US and Brazil, affirmative action is based on race for example; there are many dating sites arranged broadly on the basis of race. It would be nice if neither of these things were true, but they are.

I’m sorry, but how is this an argument against racial definitions being a social construction? All these things are social constructions.

No, the definition of racism is a kind of intentional prejudice. If studies showed that there were IQ differences correlating to racial groups, a statistician can state this with no prejudice.

A statistician could state the factoid without prejudice (assuming it had been collected correctly, without bias and the statistician checked these things. History has plenty of examples where unconscious, and indeed conscious, racism perverted statistical data collection). But when a statistician, or anyone else, moved into analysis and explanation racism might well creep in (and usually does in practice). To unpick IQ – IQ is not a good marker of innate biological intelligence. Now if a scientist was to take that fact and ignore the possibility that there might be social factors affecting IQ – BUT LEAP IMMEDIATEDLY to biological explanations. THAT would be racism. Not because they were looking for excuses, but because their biases led them to ignore non-racist explanations.

This incidentally happens a lot in a number of areas. The social sciences are riddled with classist assumptions and explanations.

Cian:
I don’t know anything about the reliability of Spiked Online; if the article was fantasy, it was elaborately constructed. It’s not much verification, but, at least there is a “Hunter Dillman” with the right age, likely gender, and hometown. Certainly the controversy over Hum 110 at Reed is well-known. If you like, change my not-quite-example to “disagrees with RAR tactics and goals”.

pmqt@126:
postmodernism (or what i would more properly label late-20th century continental philosophy and critical theory, maybe post-structuralism but that’s sort of just displacing the uncertainty) is actually experiencing a resurgence among some of the more intellectual elements of the younger left.

The web played a huge role in this, and “the younger left” at this point extends to those who are in their early forties. And I’d not limit it to the more intellectual elements of the young left; I’d just say the more activist elements of the young (progressive and liberal) left. Critical theory made inroads and essentially became orthodox by the ’00s in a lot of humanities, and importantly, that was the framework that activists who would go forth and set up online communities clove to. (Sidenote: WRT to critical theory becoming orthodox, when intersectionalism came to the forefront as a critique of the existing orthodoxy, economic class was a ubiquitous intersection – an academic feminist’s perspective would be highlighted as being skewed to not reflect the experience of e.g. a poor black woman. But a decade later, intersectionalism had been institutionalized and oh-so-strangely, poverty was no longer something it concerned itself with as a distinct consideration…) The move of critical theory indoctrination (and ideological reinforcement) from college campuses to the web made critical theory much more influential, but in shifting from the intellectuals to the activists as primary disseminators, rigor was lost. Theories that were carefully explained in academia with reference to exhaustive explanations are instead taught in anecdotes and thumbnail sketches… and just as often are weaponized to attack ideological rivals – both the near enemy and the far.

I’d not describe it so much as a resurgence as reaching critical mass. This has been building for decades, and is essentially symptomatic of the outsiders who challenged the orthodoxy several decades ago becoming the new orthodoxy and that orthodoxy becoming ubiquitous enough that it’s no longer confined to academic venues… although that also means it’s evolving outside the control of the academics who formulated it.

I’d also add as someone who was seduced by deconstructionism as an undergrad that I find the current prevalence of critical theory appalling, toxic, and dangerous.

I wasn’t moving in activist circles around 2000. Recent BA recipients did a lot to spread the word. Even now you find younger journalists and critics writing as if all educated people accept Lacan and Derrida. They are not all activists.

Much of the net in the late 90s was listservs set up by academics, as well. But what Sebastian is talking about isn’t a consequence of theory talk.

To sum up, the kind of thing Sebastian talks about was real, notably in departments of English lit and related disciplines, and was at least theoretically associated with the left, but
(i) was never as dominant as he suggests
(ii) was repudiated by much of the left at the time and afterwards
(iii) has produced some notable mea culpas in the light of its appropriation by the right, most famously that of Bruno Latour http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/165
(iv) is still around as a confused background assumption, as suggested by Harry.

To be clear, I like European philosophy and I’m somewhat sympathetic to serious forms moral relativism. What I found odd was the weird pivot among the US woker-than-thou from a pat moral relativism to an equally crude moral absolutism. And as Sebastian says it doesn’t seem to be the only issue where they flipped in this way, others include ‘mental illness’, the status of gender, pornography/sex work, and censorship. (That said I have no desire to defend the US ‘conservative’ take on any of this stuff which as far as I’m aware has always been positively unhinged..)

Another frequent trope of science studies is the notion of “social control,” which on reflection is such an ideology-laden term that I wonder how any but the most politicized students make sense of it. But that kind of thing is pretty common.

engels @ 141

It’s probably unprovable, but my guess is that the hollow nature of terms like “social control”—used within science studies as incredibly damning, and as a political motivation for doing the research in the first place—which to others were banal and lacking really any partisan valence at all—is one thing that helped to flip things. Gathering statistics on the population and formulating tools to analyze them is a tool of social control. Okay, that’s it’s origin. And statistics can be missed by bad governments. But that doesn’t mean the math is tainted (or worse). Or that liberal governments were always totalitarian because dialectic of enlightenment, which is more likely what they were getting at. But who knows how many people encountered that research and became Trumpian “destroy the government altogether” types?

Like Harry, the things I’m describing weren’t just one-offs. They were a comprehensive part of my undergraduate experience. In the UC system (in the early 90s) they were a part of the required writing/thinking course that every undergraduate had to fulfill. I don’t know how to respond to the idea that these concepts ‘were never as dominant as he suggests’. I presume you mean something like “never deeply accepted among the highest levels of the most respected professors”. That may be true, I can’t speak to that. But I can speak to “seemingly permeating the discourse at graduate and undergraduate levels” or “shows up all the time in activism”. It was all over the place there.

And I personally still see the fallout from it. To take a very recent example I was working with a local GLBT Center on homeless outreach planning. It was noted that transgender teens have I much higher prevalence of homelessness than cis-gay teens so the proposal was to spend about 60% of the budget on finding them and helping them. I suggested that while it was certainly proper to target them quite a bit more than we used to, or to tailor the programs to include them, the fact that there are so many fewer trans people than cis-gay people means that even though homeless rates are higher among trans people, the total number of at risk people in the cis-gay community was MUCH higher, so 60% of the budget didn’t make sense. I was then subjected to a 5 min scream fest about being an obvious cis-male transphobe who was using ‘so called science’ to colonialize oppressed peoples. It had all the fun check boxes, inappropriate use of the intersubjectivity critique, using identity politics to shut down discussion, conspiracy theories about why people use ‘facts’ to oppress people, just general ugh. And 60% of the budget went to targeting too small a group, which thus far looks to have gained about 1 additional trans teen this year, and about 5 fewer cis-teens.

Or during the #metoo movement, a few of my male friends foolishly thought they could talk about how they too were raped. They ended up being hounded all up and down facebook for things like “appropriating women’s emotional labor” or “raping women again by attempting to steal focus” or “failing to honor the intersectional difficulty of being female”. It was initially amusing to me to see women who were talking about verbal harassment trying to assert intersectional superiority of viewpoint over male rape survivors (who by any fair intersectional analysis have less societal support and are more forced to hide it even than the awful position that women are in) but that was before I saw how hard they were taking it. I spent two weeks picking up the pieces of a very deep depression triggered by 4-5 days of constantly slamming him for merely talking about his story.

This is the social fallout of ideas. You can say that the ideas have been clarified or put aside by the very top tiers, but they have not been abandoned by the cultural places that picked them up. We are so quick to see how failing to address racism at the top levels of conservatism has polluted discourse all the way down (hell that is Corey’s whole game) but we studiously ignore how the poisonous ideas from our side have trashed the ability to have discourse. If non-academics see a bunch of people spouting Criticism saying things like “science is colonialism” or “truth doesn’t exist” why are we so shocked that they are anti-intellectual? The intellectuals are being actively stupid, so they have learned to ignore them.

And please don’t use some sort of “they are misusing our ideas” excuse that you wouldn’t allow William F. Buckley to use. If your intellectual mistakes get out and cause huge damage, you can’t just say “I’ve clarified that position in a paper somewhere”. Great. That’s step one…

If I could add anything to the general discourse it would be something like “critiques are great, but don’t turn them into idols”.

For example. The proper post-modern CRITIQUE would be something like “how we know things is influenced by how society teaches us to look at things, so in order to get a better grasp on deep truths, you sometimes have to look at things in ways that society doesn’t want to teach you to look at things”. Or maybe a more pointed “culture teaches us to bias some approaches over others, which may work much of the time but cause us to overlook important things other times, so being aware of how, where, and why culture biases us is important”.

But po-mo idolatry uses it as a cudgel. “X is constructed, so anything you say about X is colonialist bullshit”.

Similarly the libertarian CRITIQUE is actually very useful. “Often governmental action will take steps which end up curtailing liberty in order to ‘do something’ about a problem, and then it turns out that the diminished liberty sticks, while the ‘do something’ turns out to be much less effective than advertised”.

Libertarian idolatry is bullshit. “We can’t trust the government to do anything, because it is always out to get you.”

The intersectionality APPROACH is useful. “Society treats people differently across a lot of dimensions. If you don’t inhabit one of those dimensions, you are very likely making assumptions about how society treats people that might be ill informed. Talk to them about what those lived experiences are before saying stupid things like ‘why don’t you just talk to the police'”

Intersectionality idolatry is horrible for discourse: “Shut up, you haven’t lived it”

The last is especially galling to me personally as I was recently told by a college aged trans-man “You don’t know what its like to be afraid people will find out about your sexual identity”. I’m a 45 year old gay man who 20 years ago had a friend stabbed TO DEATH for cruising the wrong guy. Some of the intersectionality idolaters could at least learn a bit of history.

@148

I’m trust Oxford a lot more than wikipedia, if we’re going to do comparative dictionary checking.

Definition of racism in English:
Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior.

(probably the paper version has more).

Although, the Collins online has this:

Racism is the belief that people of some races are inferior to others, and the behaviour which is the result of this belief.

Merriam-Webster has both:

Definition of racism
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 a : a doctrine or political program based on the assumption of racism and designed to execute its principles
b : a political or social system founded on racism
3 : racial prejudice or discrimination

Maybe we do have a definition problem.

But this bubble can be a useful incubator for further insights and further pursuits, and not merely about group-think.

Punctuated equilibrium, the biologists call it.

As far as I’m aware doctors don’t present different reference ranges for blood tests for black and white Americans. These ranges are set by the FDA, a list is viewable here. They are set differently for men and women (hideously referred to as “males” and “females” in that subtly misogynistic way that Americans discuss sex) in the link.

There is some evidence that black Americans have different WBC and neutrophil counts, and maybe hematocrit, than white Americans, but this evidence hasn’t reached the point where it affects FDA measurements. And why would it? Race is such a dubious concept – especially in America – that it would be almost meaningless. Even the notion of an “African American” is ridiculous, since Africa is not a country or a single ethnic group. Even if there were separate “races” of Africans, “African Americans” would not know what race they were after 400 years of enforced racial mixing through slavery. This is why the American Anthropological Association rejects racial categories, and epidemiologists study race as a marker of social disadvantage and difference, not as a biological category. It’s also why Australia does not record race on the census (we use the country of origin and language spoken at home), and Japan only records nationality.

I agree with Lupita (and the scientists who study this stuff) that race is not a meaningful biological concept. Socially of course it’s important – but only in countries where a lot of people discriminate on the basis of the meaningless pseudoscience of race.

Faustusnotes:

it seems vaguely psychopathic

I think the more apt term would be “religious”

faustusnotes

It’s also why Australia does not record race on the census (we use the country of origin and language spoken at home) …

The Australian census requires information to be provided about country of birth, languages spoken at home, and ancestry. There is space to write in whatever you like, so you’re not restricted to a fixed list in completing the form (also you can list two ancestries–actually, there’s space to list more than two but only two will be counted in the census statistics); the Australian Bureau of Statistics codes responses using an Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups.

I also have no idea what the ‘bodies’ thing is about

Most people moaning about “moral relativism” or the “social construction of knowledge” and the like seem never to have sat in a philosophy class or read any book on the history of ethics or epistemology respectively.

Examining the validity of moral claims and the nature and limits of human knowledge is simply what philosophers do and always have done – and there’s no deus ex machina coming to save us from vagueness, uncertainty and doubt.

There aren’t any absolute moral values or truth claims and it didn’t take Adorno, Derrida or Rorty to realise that. This doesn’t preclude anyone from trying to be a good person, trusting the scientific consensus or pursuing political change.

Is it worth disabling my adblocker to read the Atlantic? Think I’ll go with ‘no’

Install ublock origin instead. It seems to be working just fine. I mean you should install it anyway if you don’t have it…

Regarding conservatives and the academy, I don’t see where anyone has substantively responded to the claim that conservatism is often biased against the legitimate aims of scholarship. I thought I’d prod Sebastian et al again on this, and add some numbers from this typical survey (warning: pdf) of attitudes about evolution and global warming.

The question is a straightforward yes/no on belief in evolution or global warming: For the “very conservative,” 18% believe in evolution, compared to 68% who don’t and the rest are unsure. For the “very liberal,” it’s 92%-8% percent who acknowledge evolution, with 0% unsure. There’s a continuum between those views: the more conservative you get, the more hostile you are to the science of evolution.

On global warming, 70% of the “very liberal” accept it. (Interestingly, 92% of the “somewhat liberal” do.) And 4% of the “very conservative” acknowledge its existence.

Let us examine The Social and Political Views of American Professors. (another pdf!)

Biology has a 51%-6% split in favor of Democrats over Republicans, with the rest identifying as independents. Given the foundational nature of evolution in biology, how could it be otherwise? Accounting, Finance and Electrical Engineering tilt the other way ideologically, but somehow nobody demands affirmative action for liberals in those specialties.

I cite biology and climate science because any sensible person can agree that there is only one legitimate view on the factual basis for evolution and global warming. But conservatives have a fundamental epistemic problem with other disciplines, too, even if they can’t be stated as briefly.

Certainly conservatives make important contributions: Milton Friedman and Eugene Fama earned their Nobel prizes. And note: As conservatives, Friedman and Fama were clearly better-positioned to arrive at their insights than contemporaneous liberals.

But that’s the point. Truth isn’t ideology-neutral, and any unbiased search for the truth is going to favor some ideological positions over others.

High-quality journalism has the same problem as academia. Journalism is full of thriving conservative outlets, but it is generally understood that the quality of those outlets is awful. (I mean, Fox News’ production values are quite good, but the content is lousy because the organization’s mission is different from that of quality media outlets).

Conservatives are responsible for the poor quality of conservative thought. Liberals can’t be blamed for Fox or for the tilt in academia. We should be asking our scholars and journalists to seek truth, not to be “fair and balanced.”

@J-D

Indeed, terms like “ancestry”, “origin”, “ethnicity”, and “heritage” are used as euphemisms for race and the listed responses must also be considered. For example, if an “ancestry” category is “African, Caribbean, or African-American” it is clear that respondents are being guided into a pseudo-racial category where the marker is skin color, just like in 19th century scientific racism.

While the US, UK, and Canada censuses outright list white and black as response categories, Australia and New Zealand go for “ancestry” with clear response categories of what is meant (pseudo-race).

As faustusnotes mentioned, Japan does not quantify “race” and neither do China, India, Russia, DR of Congo, Ethiopia, Germany, France, Mexico, and Argentina. As far as I can tell, only the five countries of the anglosphere, Brazil, and a few others in South America do so. As to some South American countries joining the anglosphere in quantifying official racial categories, it is interesting to note that the US has been peddling this practice through the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean since the year 2000 much like it did independent central banks.

The reason I mention all this is because I believe that it is central to any discussion of identity politics, multiculturalism, ethnic studies, and political correctness to note that in the countries where these phenomena exist, there is also an official racial classification that sustains them. This is not coming from the folk, the left, the right, or foreign (to the anglosphere) influences such as Marx or Derrida. It is coming from above. Racialism is the official state ideology of the English-speaking countries.

Most people moaning about “moral relativism” or the “social construction of knowledge” and the like seem never to have sat in a philosophy class or read any book on the history of ethics or epistemology respectively.

Yeah for me the problem with critical theory is not that it assumes these things, but that when faced with these problems it gives up. How do you make good moral judgements about other societies when you’re so embedded in your own with all the assumptions (and implicit power structures). How do you help people from other societies without revisiting all the horrors of do-gooder colonialism (or whatever). Or deal with the fact that people with statistical expertise also probably will make judgements from their privileged perspective (which resulted in many many ills during the C19th and C20th.

Or for science, how do we deal with the fact that so much scientific knowledge is provisional, is created in ways that are influenced by social dynamics and is far from 100% reliable? And some of it is bullshit (evolutionary psychology I’m looking at you).

I used to use NoScript but I seemed to spend half my life disallowing and re-enabling things that I had no idea what they did until something went wrong.

The history and justification of the ancestry question is given here. It’s not really a race question and it’s not intended as such – it aims to find out where second generation migrants’ families came from. Unless you believe that the people who wrote the census really think “German” and “Scottish” are races?

I was there when the right started building the idea that the left love moral relativism and it wasn’t a reaction to Derrida. It was a reaction to the lefts refusal to privilege Christian bullshit as the source of all morality; our growing acceptance of multiculturalism; the demand that America behave the same in its tributaries as it demanded it’s enemies behave; and a general refusal to accept the hypocrisy of western leadership in light of what they did in the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s. In particular our rejection of the older generation’s “do as I say not as I do ” approach to things like adultery and abortion. The left weren’t the relativists – it was arseholes like Kissinger and the newly enriched evangelicals who were the relativists. But we got smeared with that brush for trying to hold them to account.

For a good example of that see how that Atlantic article treats the salience of the whole issue. When academics on the left were doing it it was A Big Thing. Now that academics on the left aren’t doing it but the people on government with actual power are doing it, there’s nothing to see here, the whole idea is dead. Meanwhile the guy the evangelicals support paid a chick 1.6 million to abort the child of their affair. Hmm, who are the moral relativism here …?

This moral relativism thing is entertaining. Here’s another article from 2012 about the death of relativism – note the difference between the title and the URL, I guess that’s a kind of relativism right there – which suggest that this death of relativism thing has been a dead horse worth flogging for at least 6 years. It has all the same tropes: a) select a couple of pop culture icons as doyens of the movement without reference to past icons who did the same or worse; b) blame it on leftists without any references or examples; c) ignore any right-wing hypocrisy or relativism. This one cites the Piss-Christ, which has got to be a high point manoeuvre, because apparently criticizing just one religion is relativism (unless it’s Islam, I bet!) It also cites Marilyn Manson as an example of someone who does shock value for the sake of it, which is apparently moral relativism, which makes Madonna and DH Lawrence moral relativists too I guess. Also apparently Marxism is moral relativism, and declaring that a modern book by a black author is as good as some ancient fusty text is a moral, not an aesthetic, claim. As is saying that everyone in Hamlet is gay – this is apparently a moral claim.

Me personally I’m stunned to discover that Marxists are into moral relativism. Who knew! Or that debating whether a book in the canon is as good as some other book is a moral act. Who knew! I guess if you declare anything you disagree with an example of moral relativism, then it’s easy to say it was ubiquitous back when you went to school. But I think the truth might be somewhere else …

I’ve concluded that the benefit (not equally distributed) of “theory” has been that it allows the religious (including phenomenologists) and Marxists to mingle without acknowledging the others’ existence. Once you get beyond rote memorization of taxonomies, it seems to me much more comprehensible if you have a metaphysics already when you encounter it the first time: either a religion (preferably one with a strongly articulated theology) or a form of socialism. But I took out my frustrations with its hollowness on Michael Walzer, on my blog (as here http://biancasteele.typepad.com/bianca_steele/2016/02/spheres-of-justice-the-new-historicism.html).

Lupita

The use of the word ‘indeed’ indicates that you are agreeing (or think you are agreeing) with whatever you are responding to. But your statement that ‘ancestry’ is a euphemism for race is not my statement, so you are not agreeing with me but are misrepresenting me.

For example, if an “ancestry” category is “African, Caribbean, or African-American”

Since this is not listed as a response category in the Australian census, nor included as a classification in the previously mentioned Australian Standard Classification of Cultural and Ethnic Groups (ASCCEG), it’s not relevant to a discussion of Australian census ancestry statistics.

While the US, UK, and Canada censuses outright list white and black as response categories, Australia and New Zealand go for “ancestry” with clear response categories of what is meant (pseudo-race).

Since ‘white’ and ‘black’ are not listed as response categories in the Australian census, and are not included as classifications in ASCCEG, they are not relevant to a discussion of Australian census ancestry statistics.

As mentioned previously, the Australian census allows respondent to write in their own descriptions of their ancestry, but there are a few response categories offered as options you can choose without having to write them in: for the most recent census in 2016, these were: English, Irish, Scottish, Italian, German, Chinese, Australian. The accompanying text also offered a non-exhaustive list of examples of what could be written in for ‘Other’: Greek, Vietnamese, Hmong, Kurdish, Maori, Lebanese, Australian South Sea Islander. I suppose people who wanted to could write in ‘white’ or ‘black’, but as far as I can figure out the only way the census statistics could report those answers (given the ASCCEG structure) is as ‘insufficiently described’. In the 2016 census, the two most frequently selected responses were ‘English’ (36.1% of respondents) and ‘Australian’ (33.5% of respondents).

If these facts are inconvenient for your argument, so much the worse for your argument.

@176

Actually the Right (especially the Radical Right) have always inveighed against relativism, especially moral relativism and for the precisely the reasons that you state: that these beliefs were perceived as undermining traditional Christianity (which is, of course, the ‘Objectivist’ philosophy par excellence). Not for nothing did Ayn Rand term her philosophy ‘Objectivism’. (I know she was an atheist, but the key point I’m making here is her aggressive hatred of relativism: she owed much to Aristotle, despite her disavowals, and of course Aristotle via Aquinas (Thomism) is to this day the philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church).

In Safranski’s biography of Heidegger he points out that pro-democracy thinking in Weimar Germany was attacked by conservatives for being (what else?) relativistic: the idea that political pluralism was a desideratum was considered to be a ‘slippery slope’ to the idea that there were multiple Goods, not one pure Good. Which would lead to people questioning ‘traditional’ Christianity, the ‘traditional’ (and, these people would argue, ‘objectively true’) position of men and women, the ‘traditional’ contempt for homosexuals, the ‘traditional’ dislike of Jews etc. And the only way to ‘fight against this’ was metaphysics: or, better still, religion. If one was a Platonist (it was not for nothing that Popper claimed Plato to be the original enemy of free societies) then morality and epistemology had an objective status (although this could, of course, only be perceived by white male aristocrats), and people who challenged this (women, homosexuals, socialists, ‘Jews’) were objectively wrong.

Therefore any anti-metaphysical philosophy (e.g. materialism) would ‘inevitably’ (said these people) lead to ‘relativism’. And what was the major materialist philosophy of the time? Why Marxism. And Marx was a Jew and so was Trotsky, and what else did you need to know?

Modern theorists of cultural studies may well inveigh against positivism (and perhaps with reason: so did Karl Popper) but at the time, logical positivism was loathed by the right for (what else?) leading to moral relativism,* as well as the ‘preponderance’ of Jews in its ranks, and the fact that logical positivists tended to be socialists.

*The whole point of logical positivism is that moral chatter is objectively meaningless and that, for example, ‘Torture is wrong’ is not true or false but without meaning. It’s pretty easy to see why some people found this threatening.

Doubtless this all goes back to the French Revolution, as most of these things do, but I don’t have the expertise to comment on that.

@183

Asking someone to read Derrida and counter the best possible interpretation of what he means, before they can say they believe cultural relativism is wrong, is exactly equivalent to saying someone has to read Aquinas before they can “honestly” be an atheist. I don’t agree with Peterson but that’s kind of ridiculous.

Hidari,

Agh, I think I read you as referring to Peterson and not “people on this thread.” I got up too early for a Saturday and hadn’t had coffee yet. Sorry. I do think “read Derrida” is not likely to be a helpful suggestion. He didn’t invent cultural relativism and he didn’t write to explain it. And you could as easily read him and say “okay, that’s the best argument for relativism? well I do hold to a ‘metaphysics of presence’ and his demonstration that this or that writer also does, doesn’t give me a reason to change my mind.”

Maybe the switch from the left and liberals defending relativism to attacking it was caused by “the dress.”

[insert no true-Scotsman discussion for the next 30 comments]

Sebastian, your argument seems to be “the UC system around 1990 had a particular kind of undergraduate education that sounds a lot like what was being discussed in other places and situations in the national press around that time, therefore not only the left as a whole in 2018 but liberals too have a responsibility to condemn a whole bunch of things center-right people don’t like.”

I’d think that was a bad argument even if you were on my own side and replaced what came after the “therefore” with “you’re probably exaggerating your anecdotes by mixing in outrage you picked up from conservative columnists.”

Ironically enough, someone on that Reddit thread puts it best:

‘”Post Modernist” has become the new “Cultural Marxist” which is the new “Cultural Bolshevist” which means “anyone on the left who I don’t like”.’

In the same way, as used, generally speaking, by the Right, ‘relativist’ usually just means ‘someone who disagrees with me, for whatever reason.’

I don’t think Pinker and Harris ever claimed to be particularly interested in Derrida (but I could be wrong as I’m not particularly interested in any of them).

If Pinker wrote a book critiquing Derrida he should read Derrida. If he was criticising wider trends and people who claim to Der-readers (as it were)—not so much.

Harris’s email exchange with Chomsky shows he doesn’t feel a need to engage with much of an intellectuals work before criticizing him, and is arrogant enough to think a single reading of one of his later works pays sufficient respect to their work. He also comes across as not very smart or self critical, when you see how he releases email chains he thinks are self-aggrandizing when they’re actually excruciatingly embarassing. So it seems likely to me that he would base his entire criticism of Derrida on a single lecture he didn’t understand.

It also seems likely to me that he’s not smart enough to understand Derrida but arrogant enough to think if he doesn’t understand something it must be bullshit. Which leads to my favourite suicidal tendencies aphorism :” just coz you don’t understand it don’t mean it don’t make no sense.” All the “new Atheists” could stand to listen to a little more metal, I think.

FN@198:
It also seems likely to me that he’s not smart enough to understand Derrida but arrogant enough to think if he doesn’t understand something it must be bullshit.

Understanding Derrida is not a matter of intelligence as much as a matter of patience. His work has a reputation for being exceedingly obtuse and unnecessarily verbose, and it’s a very well-deserved reputation. It’s not for nothing that Hidari made made mention of secondary sources that explained his ideas in plain language. And there exist quite defensible arguments that the plain-language renderings of his works do so in an extremely charitable manner.

Which is to say, regardless of how much of a pompous ass Harris might be, I’d avoid using his condemnation of Derrida in particular as a basis for making broad judgements about him as it rests on the controversial premise that Derrida isn’t bullshit. A lot of very intelligent, thoughtful, and thorough scholars have read Derrida at length and meticulously argued that his theories are vacuous bullshit.

Post modern criticism may be all sorts of things in theory, BUT AS WIDELY PRACTICED it really is a lot of the things that conservatives criticize it for.

And it really is a lot of the things that cartesian anarchists criticize it for (see the link to Chomsky discussing the topic in the thread on Witches), and it really is a lot of the things that Marxists criticize it for, and it really is a lot of the things that critical sociologists criticize it for (see what Bourdieu or Wacquant say about the topic). Etc. So what? I think that what you have convincingly shown is that many people disagree with post-modernism. But did anybody doubted that?

I think you also established that your undergraduate philosophy course kind of sucked, but you must realize that’s not a terribly rare state of affair and no real reflection on what goes on within a field. (My own undergraduate philosophy course, mandatory for all students like yours and at one of the most élite of French higher education institution, was given by Alain Finkielkraut – google him if you have to, though he also taught at Berkley so you might actually know him, but I bet you good money that I can find way worse than anything you ever endured under his name; and now that I think of it, my undergraduate math course was riddled with embarrassing errors like proving that A implies B then that not B implies not A to prove that A is equivalent to B, even though it was given by a brilliant mathematician with many astounding theorems to his name. So what?).

It wasn’t an undergraduate philosophy course. It was the philosophy taught in the year long basic writing course required for all undergraduates. The difference in general acceptance that placement implies is totally different from some random undergraduate philosophy course or some random English teacher because it doesn’t reflect just one bad teacher getting away with shit.

It was a highly scripted (with three different professors just the year I took it) curriculum movement that was intended to be uniform as it rotated professors through it each year. A high level of systemic buy-in is reflected when a joint curriculum venture across multiple departments plays out that way. See also Harry, it wasn’t just the University of California system.

Characterizing it as one or two teacher side note is not understanding the situation at all.

And the repeated insistence on treating it that way makes me less likely to believe allegations that it only happened in California. If you’re so dismissive of ‘year long multi disciplinary curriculum required of all students” in one place, I don’t see why I should trust you to recognize what the problem looks like in others. But it may just be that I’m not communicating the depth of it.

And the year long multi disciplinary curriculum required of all students wasn’t the only place I saw it either. I saw it in at least half of my Literature classes (my major), one of the two history classes, all of the one sociology classes, and oh boy all over the place in my ethnic studies classes.

And good heavens I’m not suggesting that conservatives are the only people to have noticed that post modernist critique got out of control. I’m arguing as strongly here because so many people upthread appear to be in denial about how deep the out of control craziness got in our institutions and are treating it as if conservatives just made it up.

Sebastian don’t be a bullshit artist. The seeds of denialism were sown by big tobacco, and had nothing to do with post modernism. See for example Scruton – no mora relativist – attacking the who with faked up facts funded and supplied by big tobacco.

Whatever its flaws, you can’t blame postmodernism or your undergraduate writing course for the deep sins of modern conservatism. You speak for the party of personal responsibility, so you should take some.

Sebastian H It wasn’t an undergraduate philosophy course. It was the philosophy taught in the year long basic writing course required for all undergraduates.

Sorry, I expressed myself badly, I understood what you meant the first time (that course of mine I referred to was also a philosophy course mandatory for all undergraduates).

How we got here was part of a multi decade dynamic process. Being willing to look at how our part of the process enables their part of the process is important. It doesn’t let them off the hook, but the dangerous part is that we might need to change too.

OK, you’ve convinced me.

How in the world did a discussion of a right wing movement that many consider to be based partly in a misuse of the insights of postmodernism turn into an argument that the one really bad thing about them is that they haven’t adopted the insights of postmodernism?

I think the “there’s no conservatives in academia” thing starts to evaporate a bit when you consider the distinctions academics make between each other. I definitely remember professors who were considered conservative and who had distinctively different points of view from the professors who were considered liberal, but once you left the university they were all sort of grouped together as liberals because even the “conservatives,” conservative though they may have been according to the norms of their field, were against things like torture and for things like some form of response to global warming.

Academy: Liberal: Government action on global warming. Conservative: Governments should encourage market based action on global warming.

Real life: Liberal: Government action on global warming. Conservative: China invented global warming to trick America into crippling its industrial production and putting coal workers out of work.

Academy: Liberal: Torture is bad. Conservative: Torture undermines American moral authority and therefore our interests, and also is bad.

Real life: Liberal: Torture is bad. Conservative: Torture is great not only for information gathering but also as a morally justified form of retribution against evil people who deserve to suffer.

You see the problem? The real life voter members of an anti intellectual populist movement aren’t going to recognize their closest intellectual allies as fellow travelers.

There are a few issues on the left where this happens a little bit, but nothing to the extent that it happens to conservative scholars. And over time, you can’t expect conservative scholars to consider themselves conservatives while constantly voting against their own movement.

And I know the usual retort is to tell me that I’m essentially saying that there are few conservative professors because conservatism is stupid, and that this shows that I must just be a self righteous and judgmental prick. But look at Washington and tell me, with a straight face, that real life American political conservatism is a reasonable expression of a valid and warranted perspective.

Lupita

If you read the reasons Australian demographers and statisticians give for first omitting the race question and then their problems with the ancestry question, you will see that they are the same as mine, that race is an unscientific, undefinable, non-discrete, uncontrollable variable that the state has no business measuring.

Why does the state have no business measuring it?

Here is the US Census summary explanation of why the information is collected:
https://www.census.gov/acs/www/about/why-we-ask-each-question/race/

Here is the report of a review which gives more details about why the information is collected, and why it is collected in the particular format that is used:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Revisions-to-the-Standards-for-the-Classification-of-Federal-Data-on-Race-and-Ethnicity-October30-1997.pdf

bianca steele

You’re suggesting that I criticized people on this thread …

No; I did not suggest that you were criticising anybody. You used the expression ‘How in the world’, which I interpreted as indicating surprise. If I express surprise at something somebody has written, that’s not an expression of criticism, and if I suggest that somebody else has expressed surprise, I am not suggesting that the other person was being critical.

J-D

Since I don’t think anyone could honestly think that comment expressed surprise, especially taken together with my other comments in this thread and elsewhere on CT in the past week or so, and since you don’t seem to have anything to say other than that you believe I’m defective by comparison to you, and since you didn’t respond to me at all except to reiterate what you’d said earlier, it isn’t at all obvious to me why I should care about your “interpretation” of me.