The not-so-strange shortage of conservative professors

But once you accept that “DEI means never having to prove you’re competent” it’s quite reasonable to say that professors chosen first because they identify as right wing, and only second for any kind of academic ability, should obviously not be required to have a PhD or even a high school graduation certificate. And hiring people specifically to devalue or destroy an academic institution but requiring them to support the thing they’re supposed to destroy doesn’t make any sense (and not in a good “conservative” way).

I think the valuable critique here is asking what DEI is supposed to do, and whether common DEI practices actually accomplish that. Do we actually want universities that reflect the distribution of academic ability in the wider community, for example? You might think that “no” is the obvious answer, but as an academic you should have an explanation as to why you think that.

As with the Eindhoven University of Technology only interviewing women for some positions, the question is both whether what is done is acceptable to everyone (including fragile dominant group members) as well as whether it works. Obviously you also need to ask whether any action would be acceptable to everyone, and if not which groups deserve to be offended.

So: what’s the goal that leads to the action of hiring professors based on political stance. Is that goal one we want, for some definition of “we”? And are the groups offended by a given decision groups the aforementioned “we” think deserve to be offended?

https://www.science.org/content/article/radical-women-only-hiring-policy-improves-diversity-dutch-university

From my perspective*, a person predisposed to accept contemporary conservative ideology might have more than usual difficulty adjusting to research. They would also need to to avoid discussion of their work to a greater degree in social circumstances.
*Working class boomer.

Teles vaguely comes to mind as the guy who managed to be so judicious about the Federalist Society they were happy with his history of them, but thought one of the greatest crimes against Truth, Freedom and possibly the American Way was perpetrated by Nancy Maclean’s Democracy in Chains. Not sure events have warranted high confidence in the soundness of Teles’ judgment?

It appears Teles talks of left and conservative (why not left and right?) as if they equate to Democrat and Republican, which is extremely dubious in regards to Democrats and dubious in regard to Republicans. What is worse, it appears that Teles manages to disregard the issue of conservatism in respect of religion. I don’t expect even a moderate conservative (as Teles seems to me) is willing to worry about the lack of left wing professors in the seminaries, but if Teles isn’t addressing the issue of nonbelief, is he even talking about the underlying issues?

When I was young (the 1980’s), the industry-adjacent STEM fields contained quite a number of Republicans. I’m thinking chemistry and engineering. (The physicists and biologists were pretty solidly Democratic–and guess who funded them?) As I understand it today, the Republican engineers and chemists are disappearing, even though these fields remain industry-adjacent.

Iow, the conservatism of the 1980’s was relatively friendly to STEM minds. Today’s conservatism, not so much.

What do we make of the factoid that Elizabeth Warren was a registered Republican all her adult life, and by most accounts I can find, held moderate rightwing views, until she was hired at Harvard?

It can’t be the substantial increase in her salary, or the enhanced opportunities for consulting money.

Hint: Her friends say she began a serious study of consumer debt and its effects on people’s lives.

Maybe part of the issue is that there is no equivalent of luxury beliefs on the right that exist on the left. One would think that someone like Rob Henderson who popularized the idea of Luxury beliefs and does have a PhD from Cambridge would be the kind of conservative that many universities would want to take a look at and possibly hire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_K._Henderson_(author)

So, I can believe that there is a systematic effect where people with right-wing beliefs go into some other line of work that pays better than a university professor.

It is slightly stranger, that if we are ignoring some true facts that are inconvenient for our political beliefs, in asolutely all of them the left turns out to be correct. That demands more explanation .

COVID19 lab leak hypothesis as a counterexample, maybe? We’re still not absolutely sure on that, I think, but lab leak is at least in the realm of the plausible.

I think we can be very sure on the safgty of covid vaccines given that (a) a large portion of the population has been vaccinated, so your N for your sample size is very large, giving very strong evidence. (b) if lots of people were dropping dead after being vaccinated, we would know about it and the government would not be able to cover it up.

there is an even stronger reason for American conservatives to not bother pursuing academic careers – in around 35 states they can simply go to their local legislative body and make it so that it’s illegal to tell a child anything that contradicts movement conservatism. the local RINO judge might temporarily put a pause on a law that says LGBT history can only be taught by a megachurch youth pastor but boofer o’kavanaugh will write a decision on whichever window on his work computer isn’t streaming porn and, 6-3, it will be upheld for the next sixty years. why become a professor when you can just bring an ar-15 to a school board meeting and get what you want the same way?

Affirmative action for conservatives is stupid. And I agree with John Q that the lack of conservative professors is mostly due to self-sorting, not discrimination. But, I think, one factor driving the self-sorting may be that most campus cultures are so liberal that conservatives constantly feel claustrophobic, and this makes an academic career very unattractive.

I’m a conservative PhD candidate, hoping to defend spring ’25. Not expecting to get a job, mainly because I’m at a low-ranking institution and haven’t managed to publish in top generalist journals. But even if I could get a job, I’m no longer sure I want one. The culture at my current department is pretty opposed to my personal value-system and worldview.

My professors and peers who know I’m conservative are very chill about it. Still, for social survival, I often have to self-censor my views, especially on remotely-culture-war-related topics, some of which are of philosophical interest to me, e.g. the ethics of abortion, the notion of “sexual immorality” in general. When you can’t have vulnerable, messy, exploratory conservation with others about your deepest curiosities, your left feeling philosophically hungry.

But you say, “Why not just give your colleagues arguments for your views? Philosophers always listen to arguments!” True. But philosophy often starts with inarticulate intuitions, which you explore, build theories on, and eventually formulate arguments to defend. The problem is that some intuitions are basically illegal (e.g. “Homosexual desire is a perversion, and this is a wrong-making property”). I’m a verbal processor, so sitting in a closet developing my intuitions alone, keeping them to myself until I have arguments for them strong enough to withstand peer-review, doesn’t appeal to me.

If my personal experience generalizes (though perhaps it doesn’t), it’s fairly easy to see why many conservatives who are otherwise philosophically curious might be driven away from academia. A conservative choosing to become a humanities prof is like an atheist choosing to become a Christian pastor. It just doesn’t make sense.

@johnQ. .. if the claim is, the right is wrong on every single polticized question, then exhibiting a politicized question on which they were maybe (but not definitely) correct looks almost a counter example.

But Harry’s “Communism is great!” is a much, much better of the left being wrong about something.

@engels 9

I think you are right, but on the other hand it is also normal that there is some sort of hierarchy among workers, so people with high credentials are basically top workers, “the aristocracy of workers” if you will.

The idea that “workers” in the general sense can get all together, all agree what they want and then dictate policy without some sort of “cadres” is a big problem, even if it is implicit in marxism.

Yes, it seems quite obvious that the political leanings of academics are caused by a mixture of self-selection (e.g., biological research will be more attractive to those who love nature, so biologists will be predisposed towards environmentalism) and, perhaps less well explored in this thread so far, socialisation and formative experience that comes with one’s chosen profession (an impressionable young biologist may fall in love with the threatened species they study in their thesis and thus become an environmentalist as they learn why it is threatened). The idea of affirmative action in this area is as silly as affirmative action for having more left-wing farmers or police officers, and I assume that Steven Teles wouldn’t argue for that (?), although he would have to in order to be consistent and not hypocritical.

More interesting, then, perhaps the discussion of self-censorship and alleged discrimination against those conservatives who nonetheless chose that career path. I cannot judge the situation in, say, the humanities in the USA, but as a biologist at a research institution outside of the USA, the idea that I couldn’t work happily with a conservative is absurd. Not only that, but I see no particular reason why I should even know that a colleague is conservative, nor that they would ever have to learn that I have a vaguely Marxist view of history and economics, even if we worked on the same project for three years. Unless one becomes personal friends, politics in the sense of elections and party affiliation should be a non-issue in the workplace, and I have no idea how discrimination on that basis would even happen.

Of course, this works because I do not spend the lunch break trying to evangelise my poor colleagues into my political beliefs, and I expect the same courtesy from them. Nor did I spend half my job interview expounding unprompted on my personal views on trade policy. Is that “self-censorship”? Maybe some would argue so, but it is only a dramatic term for “being professional” and “a safe work environment where we don’t harass each other”. This self-censorship is fully equivalent to how we generally wouldn’t consider it normal or socially acceptable to accost a random stranger on the street and randomly engage them in a shouting match over whether Shakespeare or Goethe is the best poet of all time.

But more than that, I also wouldn’t see any reason to have issues working with a colleague if I know his conservative views… unless what defines conservatism for them is hatred of and discrimination against other people, including perhaps our other colleagues or students who are of diverse ethnicities or sexual orientations. As that classic tweet goes:

Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views

Me: Holy s—! You were censored for wanting lower taxes?

Con: LOL no…no not those views

Me: So….deregulation?

Con: Haha no not those views either

Me: Which views, exactly?

Con: Oh, you know the ones

Nobody forces conservatives to build their entire identity on hatred, resentment, discrimination, and culture war shibboleths, creating unsafe workplaces and causing very avoidable interpersonal conflicts among staff and collaborators. I have, over the decades of my life so far, known conservatives who weren’t at all like that. It is a choice. Just… don’t. Get yourself a less miserable hobby.

Reading the comment from Closet conservative stimulated some interesting reflections for me, and I am conscious that I could write a lengthy response, but rather than do that (or possibly before doing that) I pose this question:

Supposing the situation is as described by Closet conservative, and supposing that is considered (by Closet conservative or by anybody else) to be a problem, then what action would be recommended (by Closet conservative or by anybody else) to remedy that problem?

That’s one of the main things I notice about Closet conservative’s comment: there’s no suggested answer to the question ‘What should be done about that?’

OP: “As Teles observes, the disparity between the views of academics and those of the legislators who ultimately fund them is a major problem for US higher education, and ultimately for the US. But this is ultimately a reflection of the fact that conservatism, in the form it currently takes in the US, involves rejection of the intellectual values of a university.”

The rather rough assertion in the final sentence seems to belong to a different argument than the one in the paragraphs above it, which are focused on the question, “How can we account for the relatively low representation of political conservatives in natural scientific fields, as well as the fields of social sciences and humanities?” But the final paragraph raises an even more interesting question, related to the first: “If it is a fact that the intellectual values held by “conservative” legislators differ from the intellectual values held by academics in the sciences and humanities, how do we account for this fact, and what exactly are those differences?” I think it can be safely assumed that the intellectual values governing the activities of politicians called, in the current understanding, “conservative” (i.e., the Republican Party) are incompatible with the intellectual values of the truth-seekers who mainly make up the disciplines in the university. The question is, how are the former allowed to have any influence in governing the activities of the latter?

Perhaps in former times there was not such a gap between the intellectual values accepted by politicians called, in those days, “conservative” and those of academics in the university. Shared intellectual values allowed rational argument to be the norm in the university, and respect and support for the role of the university to be the norm in the legislature. But the intellectual values of the politicians that are today called “conservative”, e.g., represented by the likes of ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, Steve Bannon, etc., are no longer those of the university. So, why does this fundamental difference in intellectual values exist, where does it come from , and what exactly are the relevant differences?

Let me give a crude and inadequate provisional attempt to set up this last question (in my previous comment). There seems to be a fundamental difference in the conception of how what I’ll call “the intelligence” is to be used. (By that term I mean to refer, roughly, to the totality of resources a person or community of people has (e.g., the category of causality) for effectively making sense of the world.) Effective truth-seeking ideally requires seriousness of intent. Practical (as opposed to ideal (“theory-driven”)) intelligence perhaps requires a focus on personal “survival” (concern with personal “salvation” vs concern with how best to get along with other autonomous souls in a community), but in human societies it is normally subordinated to an ideal system of ethical principles. Truth-seekers in universities have developed an understanding of “best practices” that are effective for figuring stuff out, solving problems to reduce human suffering, etc. But I’ve noticed that for a certain group of people (e.g., Republican Party, ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, Steve Bannon, etc.) they like to bend their entire repertoire of intellectual resources to the single aim of “getting what they want”, and to plot how to get it with like-minded others behind closed doors, as opposed to sharing ideas with others, everybody, in an attempt to persuade and come to agreement. Instead of agreement attained under the norms of rational argument, the cooperation of others is to be attained by force and power. So, the question is, why does there exist this fundamental difference in conceptions of how the intelligence is to be used, and, if it does exist, how can we describe the specific relevant differences? I’m thinking of a critical (in the Kantian sense) understanding of the question, “How do human societies make (what is the best way to make) sense of the world?”

” but the examples are far enough back that there can be hardly anyone in an academic job today who was around to cheer the Cultural Revolution, let alone Stalinism.”

Yeah, that’s fair enough… my sense of time may be distorted! Though, some figures who were enamoured with the Cultural Revolution are still revered in some part of the academy, eg Friere.

Closet conservative: “My personal objection to abortion is more visceral. I just find it intuitively icky that a fetus created via a consensual sexual encounter (e.g. a one-night stand with a stranger) would be medically discarded, despite the inherent teleology of sex being (at least partly) reproductive.”

I can appreciate the intuition, but it’s ok for someone to request something more than an intuition — an argument that appeals to some sort of shared premise. Icky, as I like to point out to my students, is not a technical term (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t count for anything just that I always want more). Marquis gets purchase by assuming that the fetus is not a person, just as Thomson gets purchase by assuming that it is. In the case of your intuition I want to know what gives the teleology moral force (or what makes the fact that sex is reproductive teleological). Suspicion that you can’t get an ought from an is doesn’t seem to me a peculiarly liberal commitment. Its true, though, that not all intuitions are treated equally. In fact I don’t think they should be, but I do think our discipline suffers from being so limited in diversity of many kinds including political and religious diversity. A close friend is a Republican in academia (not philosophy) and religious to boot, who regularly experiences the assumption that everyone in the room agrees about things they don’t agree about, and yes it is alienating. They had a career in public admin before grad school that –well, I was going to say that made them tough, but more likely they were tough already. I mean, really tough. (And they enjoy universal, and well-earned, respect among colleagues, which must help make the experience ok).

“A Republican chemist or materials scientist would have no need to reveal their political views to potentially hostile colleagues.” But it is likely they have social media output, and that even a cursory review of said output would in many cases reveal their political views.

“Fwiw, in my own little corner of the humanities I find that there is a substantial quantity of low-quality, very ideological left-wing work which gets a pass because the audience thinks its heart is in the right place and is disinclined to spot any flaws.”

I don’t really see this in Philosophy, but my goodness it rings true in Education, especially in the more humanities-inflected work, and to a lesser extent in the part of philosophy of education I pay less attention to. If there were more scholars in those fields who were conservative that would almost certainly improve the overall quality of the work (not because we’d have it, plus conservative ideological work) but because the interaction would improve the work actually being done.

JQ: in these conversations I sometimes wonder whether being in Economics means that you have less exposure than MrMister and I are reporting to large swathes of very bad ideologically left ‘scholarly’ work. I’m betting that just as I pretty much only read very good work in the disciplines I’m not it, you pretty much only read very good work in the disciplines you’re in?

I think in these contexts ‘intuition’ means something like ‘tentative proto-judgment about a case’, not what it means in normal English. Philosophers sometimes talk as if their ‘intuitions’ are pre-theoretical, but anyone who actually thinks that about their intuitions hasn’t looked at their intuitions enough (Thomson, utterly brilliant as she is, has an unfortunate tendency to take her intuitions as bedrock moral data, which they’re just not). That’s one of many reasons why one shouldn’t trust one’s intuitions about anything. They help you get started is all — hence the need for arguments and, for most of us, the kind of interaction with others who have different intuitions that CC feels unable to have.

Philosophers are constantly saying things that other people would dismiss as moronic, and they do so in the service of making progress. You can always say “Here’s a thought: —-“; what should we say about that?”. I encourage my students to do that, and find it productive to do it myself. This kind of behaviour is much more acceptable in philosophy than in most other disciplines (Econ is another exception).

I think it’s a mistake to see ideological sorting in academia as a single thing, with explanations that apply across all or most institutions and disciplines. There has been some discussion of this in this thread, for instance about the different contexts and incentives in STEM, the humanities, etc. I want to take this one step further.

A major reason this issue has been so politicized and has evoked so much interest from non-academics is that ideological selection is a problem in much of the humanities. I taught at a college where the percentage of left of center (including well left of center) academics was in the upper nineties, but there was a deep cleavage between those with an ideologically committed, closed mindset and those who had remained curious and self-questioning. When we experienced a crisis in 2017 that shut down the campus, it was interesting to me that most of the more traditionally left academics (my field was political economy) were, to varying degrees, critical of the activism that provoked it, while the majority of those who thought the meltdown was a great victory were barely left wing at all in, again, more traditional terms. The difference was about tolerance for doubt, reflection and the demand for evidence. Perhaps you could say it was the capacity to accept cognitive dissonance.

So the universities-are-run-by-Stalinists-who-discriminate-against-conservatives meme has political resonance because something similar to it is true at some schools and in some departments—but it is not left/right! Unfortunately, however, I’ve come to believe that the unwillingness of more reasonable people, many on the left, to distance themselves from bubbles of cognitive authoritarianism in academia has made the problem worse. (And this applies to published work that fortifies the echo chamber; see for instance, today’s post on Andrew Gelman’s blog: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/08/09/crap-papers-with-crude-political-agendas-published-in-scientific-journals-a-push-pull-problem/)

But there is so much more to the academic world, where the political/intellectual factors vary immensely. Many fields, like much of the natural and social sciences, attract new recruits who are curious and want to answer questions that gnaw on them. That mindset, under present circumstances, definitely leans left. Other fields are more vocational, and I suspect the ideological bias of the professoriate in those schools is likely to reflect (but not necessarily mirror) its counterpart in the profession itself: engineering, business, nursing, etc. Then we need to talk about those professions in the wider society.

I like the distinction some have brought up between views in one’s own area of expertise and elsewhere. People can be bundles of contradictions, open-minded, inquisitive and responsive to the weight of evidence in the area they work in but quick to form opinions and slow to change them in others. And ironically, in more authoritarian disciplines the proclivities can be reversed. Until fairly recently, economics was ruled by a doctrinaire welfarism (still too pervasive) that intrinsically leans to the right in political-economic terms, but many practitioners I worked with were rather progressive in most respects except in their area of economic specialization. It’s really a mistake to throw out wide generalizations in such a variegated world.

As for what to do about all this, (1) I do think intellectual standards need to be revived in some corners of the humanities. It would be nice if this could happen internally, but if not perhaps more demands for cross-disciplinary collaboration where ideologues would have to rise to the standards of evidence-based scholars – demands, not just incentives – could help. (2) Ideological affirmative action is bonkers and a recipe for disaster, as the OP and many commenters have pointed it. Even the good affirmative action (race, gender, etc.) is not about dismantling assessment of quality but making the extra effort needed to give every possible chance for candidates from underrepresented groups to demonstrate this quality, and to think non-dogmatically about what “quality” can mean in a given context. But quality is never about what you think, but how you think.

Sorry to go on so long, but this is an issue that has reached out and touched me personally.

JPL@30 raises the cogent question – were there in past times conservative views that were not at odds with the intellectual project of a university? and of course the answer is “obviously yes”, and there are also many projects underway currently at universities that conservatives could – if they chose – cheerfully contribute to, even in the humanities. i suggest that the humanities are probably the place where campus conservatives can most easily thrive! after all, despite the moaning and groaning of youtubers and other legislators about how a black lady played juliet one time, the great classics of art, thinking and history are still studied in every college in america. if you are a conservative and part of your conservatism is you really love shakespeare (or goethe or mozart or john locke or the bible) and think shakespeare should be taught well and engagingly, and has something to offer to all, the university environment will welcome you with open arms and give you an absolute mountain of students eager to engage with your passionate development of knowledge of that subject.

but that is not what american conservatism presently desires – it desires not a place where their ideas, history and thoughts can be presented, but one where anything that might contradict or even cause reconsideration of them is excluded, by an armed cop if possible. conservative academic thought these days isn’t “i love mozart and i want to pass along my passionate and in depth knowledge of mozart to students” – that’s a liberal view now! these days the american conservatives position has nothing to do with developing knowledge of, say, bach, and presenting that knowledge to students in a way that engages them – it’s eliminating any effort to give a similar treatment to hip-hop, the blues or ragtime.

it used to be that the “conservative art snob” was such a real thing that it was a comedy stock character in film, books, etc. “you want to dance to rock and roll, but what about my beloved ballet?” they sniff, and then they learn a little something from the rock and roll kids or, often, vice versa. in 1980 if you really loved ballet you were probably politically conservative and in 2010 if you really love ballet you’re probably a fanatical socialist, and it wasn’t because ballet changed, it wasn’t because swan lake isn’t loved now. swan lake is still loved! it was american conservatism that changed, quite intentionally, and set about dismantling every ballet, orchestra and theater company it could get its hands on.

america still will engage with and celebrate conservative art, when it’s produced – the superhero film boom of 2005-2020 demonstrated that. but those films weren’t racially pure or anti-gay enough to satisfy the present-day movement conservative, and so millions of dollars and thousands of hours of time were invested to scream that they were all woke trans communism. the entire relationship of american conservatism to art changed in the 1990s around the time of gingrich. and until it changes back they truly don’t have anything to say to anyone, so there’s no reason for them to be a teacher.

The mismatch between universities’ opinions and those of legislators could be reduced by giving all universities a seat in Congress, like Oxford and Cambridge used to have [/joke]

If today’s “conservatives” really believe that the academy is hiding their light, why don’t they turn to what has long been the conventional conservative solution? I.E. to start their own institutions, which in prior eras, littered the ground thickly (i.e. the vast majority of liberal arts colleges in the US were founded by Protestant religious groups, etc.) “Conservatives” aren’t more lacking in institutional resources now than they were then, but the institutional resources (i.e. rich donors) are either withholding their philanthropy, or doing other things with the money. That’s on the “conservative” movement(s)’ heads, and it’s certainly up to them to work with “conservative” donors, not whine to the liberals that the liberals haven’t gotten the “conservative” donors to give the “conservatives” more money.

42 …a deep cleavage between those with an ideologically committed, closed mindset and those who had remained curious and self-questioning.

A spot-on description of (much of) left-wing twitter. As seen recently with some left-wing accounts tweeting angrily and/or dismissively at other left-wing or center-left accounts for expressing the view that it would be better if Biden stepped down.

JQ Harry et all, & Closet conservative 08.09.24 at 10:49 pm “I think the dearth of conservative professors is due to self-sorting, not discrimination.”

A conservative academic husband and wife team trying to research this question. Someone needs to take up the baton…

“Rethinking the Plight of Conservatives in Higher Education”
“Findings that run against the grain of assumptions.”
By Matthew Woessner
https://www.aaup.org/article/rethinking-plight-conservatives-higher-education

And why self sorting, but it’s already been said. 87 refs.
FALL 2022*

“From Anti-Government to Anti-Science: Why Conservatives Have Turned Against Science’
AUTHORS
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
https://www.amacad.org/publication/daedalus/anti-government-anti-science-why-conservatives-have-turned-against-science

KT2 — thanks for the link to the Woessner piece. I’ve read their papers on what happens in classrooms, which are pretty good, though have limitations.

Something that occurred to me is that we are using ‘conservative’ in a very loose way in all these discussions. Are British Conservative party politicians conservative? (I’d be inclined to say yes, sort of, most of them, though few of them are at all anti-science, and most of them would find the Democratic Party a much more ideologically comfortable home than the Republican Party). Are the Trumpists? (well, yes in some ways, not at all in others). If the Trumpists are, Is Orban? (I’ve no idea). Modi? In the US: I’m guessing most academics who voted for Bush, McCain and Romney subsequently voted for Clinton and Biden, and will now vote for Harris (this is an empirical and, in principle testable, claim).

The George paper Closet conservative mentions made a splash at the time and generated some academic responses. Closet conservative may be interested in John Corvino’s discussion in Debating Same-Sex Marriage and the Andrew Koppelman’s discussion in the article Judging the Case Against Same-Sex Marriage. Stephen Macedo has written about this too (at least about an earlier form of the argument).

As a gay man who was (marginally) involved in these discussions, I confess to some doubt about their utility. It’s true, of course (as Closet conservative says), that as a descriptive matter the sociological developments that brought same-sex marriage to social and political success had little to do with anything that happened in academic philosophy. (Equally, the reasons same-sex marriage was unthinkable for so long had little to do with people reading their Aquinas, let alone being persuaded by the New Natural Law form of the argument that was not developed until the last decades of the 20th century.) But on top of that, I am doubtful normatively that anyone need worry about whether they have adequately tangled with these sorts of arguments. For any matter of moral consensus it will generally be true that people haven’t thought much about the best arguments on the other side, but that’s not the same thing as not having good reasons for the moral consensus. And (to make a stronger claim) it’s not true that we can’t morally judge people for rejecting those good reasons, even if they have a philosophical argument, and even if we don’t have a knock-down refutation of that philosophical argument (how many arguments in moral philosophy have knock-down refutations?). In principle of course one would like to have a systematic and comprehensive rational account of moral truth–go to page 2483 and see why the human good of marriage is not in-principle different-sex. But nobody has that and you still have to live your life and make moral judgments and prioritize how you spend your time and your mental energy.

why philosophers are particularly vulnerable to cancel culture

I’ll read it later but from outside The Profession it appears philosophy has been engaged in an unseemly scramble for relevance following an overdue realisation that neither Rawls nor Timothy Williamson have a great deal to say about the Interesting Times we live in—which has led to severe crisis of confidence, exacerbated herding behaviour and enabled a few well-positioned entrepreneurs to make a killing (citationally speaking).

(It’s an aside, but I just can’t resist telling this story. My mother comes to visit, and complains that some of my books are misfiled on the shelves. Now, it is true that some books are just completely out of place, awaiting proper reshelving. The labels on some of the shelves read “Philosophy”, “Post-modern philosophy”, Buddhist Philosophy”. Is my mother really going to start an argument about exactly who is, and is not, a postmodernist? Looks like it, Crap. Crap. “Look, I filed Philosophical Investigations under ostmodernism, ok?” She picks up Nagarjuna in Sanskrit from another shelf. Me, nervously, “Sanskrit poetry. Definitely should be filed under Sanskrit poetry,”

Heath’s piece is interesting. Btw before I left X it seemed that “Socratic questioning” was being widely seen as a blockable offence (I suppose he might have been the first victim of “cancel culture”).

JHW – Thanks for your rich comment. Your point that knockdown arguments are unattainable, yet we still must muddle through the real world making the best tentative moral judgments we can, was well said and resonates with me deeply.

To clarify, my earlier comments were only intended as a counterpoint to OP. OP suggests (and I’m oversimplifying here) that the dearth of conservative professors is due not to “structural discrimination” (pace Teles) but rather self-sorting on the part of conservatives themselves, who tend to be “anti-science” and prefer more “practical” careers. I agree with OP on the self-sorting point, but I suspect that an overlooked factor driving the sorting may be the deeply liberal culture on campuses, which repels conservatives insofar as it makes them feel like atheists in church (they’re “not with the program”). Clearly this is not structural discrimination – but it’s not very flattering of universities either.

I’m not really criticizing universities, just proposing a descriptive thesis on why there are few con profs. Atheists should definitely let churchgoers do their thing in peace. Likewise, if universities want to orient around a certain ideological program – or discourage discourse at variance with the prevailing “moral consensus” – conservatives should shut up and let liberals be happy. I share your doubts about the utility of continuing to engage with conservative voices like George, Corvino, etc. in academic contexts.

But here’s an argument that universities shouldn’t discourage discourse at variance with the prevailing moral consensus. Traditionally universities define themselves as institutions seeking “universal” knowledge, or inquiring into questions of enduring interest and importance. The moral significance (or insignificance) of sex is one such question. Personally I think something like the teleological view of sex, family, and marriage espoused by the New Natural Law crowd – which incorporates independently interesting metaphysical conceptions of human persons as essentially embodied beings, as opposed to disembodied Cartesian ghosts contingently inhabiting animal/sexual bodies – might be true. The NNL view probably would have no popular purchase in Ancient Greece, where there was no concept of obscenity, no shame in nudity, and pederasty was common. In Victorian England, where virginity was revered, sleeping around was stigmatized, and Oscar Wilde was (tragically) put on trial for being gay, the NNL may have had purchase. Now, in modern US and UK, popular sexual attitudes are more Greek than Victorian (indeed calling someone’s sexual ethics “Victorian” is pejorative). The Gallup poll I shared earlier shows most Americans now approve of gay marriage, pornography, abortion, divorce, unwed pregnancy, and sex between teenagers (a sharp shift from the early 2000s). Consequently, NNL-style views may lack popular purchase. But this is a contingent state of affairs. It doesn’t suggest to me that philosophical questions about sex are officially settled. Philosophers and academics of course don’t have to be interested in questions of enduring importance, but if they claim to be, philosophical questions about sex qualify, I would think.

Closet conservative: Sometimes academic philosophy is trapped by the prejudices of its time, and certainly it’s good to break from that where possible. But also, sometimes moral learning is possible. It does not strike me as plausible that we are all misled by our deep-seated Cartesian dualist commitments (not least because Cartesian dualists are awfully thin on the ground these days, especially among secular people). And it seems wrong to say that modern sexual ethics are increasingly “Greek”–Americans and particularly liberal Americans care increasingly about robust autonomy and equality norms in sexual relationships that would have been foreign to the ancient Greeks, which is one reason why pederasty is not having a comeback.

What’s happened re sexual ethics is distinctively modern, not a rehash of an old thing:
– our society takes sex equality seriously, unlike Victorian England and ancient Greece, and marriage no longer structurally differentiates between men and women
– readily available contraception undermined the fear of unintended pregnancy that undergirded norms against premarital sex
– traditional natural law thinking–“Old Natural Law” if you will, in which there is an order of nature that reveals or embodies a binding moral order–is no longer credible post-Darwin, at least not in anything like its traditional sense

The NNL effort to rescue the traditional Catholic set of views about these issues, in the face of these developments, required a lot of revision to the internal logic of those views and (more importantly) looks a whole lot like a desperate rearguard action in the face of social developments that have deprived them of their plausibility. They have to make esoteric arguments about organic bodily union and personal dis-integration because the more ordinary reasons that most people once held the views that the NNL theorists still hold are no longer credible. And they cover for this with straw men (“disembodied Cartesian ghosts contingently inhabiting animal/sexual bodies”). None of this is a proof that they are wrong (if you want a more thoroughgoing response, I again recommend the work I mentioned above–to be clear, Corvino, Koppelman, and Macedo are all critical of the NNL arguments). But I think if we want to make progress on the sexual ethics questions of “enduring importance,” it doesn’t get us anywhere.

I take your point that disagreements about these issues can be a source of conservative self-exclusion. And not every moral consensus need rest undisturbed–I can certainly think of ethical issues where I think conservative voices are valuable (abortion, most obviously, where frankly everyone could benefit from spending more time thinking about the other side’s best arguments). I think though that this is a place where there are substantive stakes pushing in more than one direction. If I taught moral philosophy (not a likely eventuality) I don’t think I would teach NNL on homosexuality. But I hope I wouldn’t be hostile to a student who raised it.

My condolences for your loss, btw.

Thank you for the kind thought. As I say, it was my daughter’s best friend’s father. I knew him, it was sad news, I was at a guest at one of his birthday parties and I remember him, among other things, as the only person ever to offer me hashish. (To me it seemed that it was probably not a good idea to try hashish for the first time when I was going to be driving away from the party with my child and his as passengers in the car.) I was sad when he died, but my grief was not deep. In any case, it was years ago. Still, thank you. But I digress.

I’m not really criticizing universities, just proposing a descriptive thesis on why there are few con profs.

If you’re not suggesting that anything at all should be done about this, doesn’t that make your thesis one which is, if you’ll forgive me, of purely academic interest?

it seems wrong to say that modern sexual ethics are increasingly “Greek”–Americans and particularly liberal Americans care increasingly about robust autonomy and equality norms in sexual relationships that would have been foreign to the ancient Greeks, which is one reason why pederasty is not having a comeback. What’s happened re sexual ethics is distinctively modern

Yes: liberal Americans see sex, like everything else but especially labour, as essentially a transaction subject to the law of contract. Children and animals are protected by law but otherwise it’s a Nozickian utopia where traditional norms against pornography or prostitution are as oppressive as food safety standards or taxi licences. “Left” liberals sometimes have some naive equality stuff bolted on (“age gap relationships are icky”); right ones don’t (a vivid illustration of this might be the “Aella’s Birthday Gangbang” substack brought to my attention by another commenter, not that I could recommend Googling).

the “experience of an atheist in church” should simply be expanded to “the experience of an atheist in around two-thirds of america”. again, the crocodile tears of (american) conservatives when a university allows a trans person to attend and be trans has to be balanced against the complete and unshaken domination american conservatives have over every aspect of life outside these universities, in which churches get to campaign for conservative politicians tax-free, and legislators write 37 bills per year ordering books with gay people in them torn out of schools, then go on to win re-election by 38 points. the university might need to turn conservative to survive, of course, as every other institution in these vast regions of america has had to do, but we shouldnt consider it doing them a fucking favor. the university, like the rest of us, just doesnt want their family’s houses to get firebombed because the richest man alive goes on the social media network he owns and says they “disrespected” a white student.

LFC @63 “…many or most of the ideas Vance has embraced are quite frightening”.

What particular ideas do you have in mind, to whom are thy frightening, and why?

Susan C: Yes, I agree with that. Though I believe that some Southern states set the age of consent for marriage (and for sex, I guess) remarkably low prior to the 1960s, so I don’t know what conservatives (whatever they are!) really thought then.

cl0set conservative @ 75 – you don’t know any conservative that wants to roll back any part of queer liberation? taking your comment at face value it seems like maybe you should be looking to universities and colleges in texas, alabama, georgia, mississippi, florida, where unassailable legislative and executive majorities are passing law after law to do just that, followed by the complete removal from all schools and colleges of all books and media addressing themselves to LGBT history, literature, poetry, film and art as “pornography”. by this time next year, one way or another, obergefell will be overturned 6-3 and even gay marriage will be gone. if american conservatives win in november the trans ban in the military will be reinstated, supplemented by firing all trans people in federal and state government – see agenda 47 for more on that. a bill to make “allowing your child to be trans” child abuse and those children subject to immediate removal by the state came within an eyelash of passing in texas this legislative session and it will absolutely, positively pass next session, without hesitation or remorse. gayness is next – any conservative in any of these regions will flatly tell you so.

this is not to say i doubt you, you may indeed live in an area where these views are in the minority, but they’re in overwhelming, iron-lock control over around 2/3 of the country. i suggest you can find those views on many campuses in significant quantities. if you can’t find them, it’s because the universities in those regions – so far – haven’t been forced to expel everyone who disagrees. maybe check again in a year and see? because it seems like that’s the next step.

Closet conservative: I don’t necessarily have a problem with the idea of sex as sacred or bodies as temples but I don’t think it gets you to the view that gay sex is wrong. I suppose a very high regard for the reliability of disgust intuitions might get some people there but I don’t think their reliability is really defensible–people have disgust reactions about a lot of sexual acts, but some of these are clearly morally unproblematic (e.g., some people are disgusted at the thought of elderly people or people they find unattractive having sex) and historically even more so (what about the once-widespread sense of disgust around interracial relationships). (You rightly note that disgust is socially manipulable to target taboo violations but that means that such disgust reactions don’t independently justify the taboo.)

A strong view about the sacred nature of sex might get you to the view that casual sex or pornography is wrong. I think it is possible to make a serious argument for that position, though you have to make such an argument with eyes wide open to the fact that pregnancy risk was actually pretty important to the older social rules about this (as were ideas about virginity that I think even conservatives today would agree are retrograde).

When I say that NNL arguments about organic bodily union are esoteric, I don’t mean sexual conservatism writ large (which is both traditional and common, in its many varieties) but the specific details of their arguments. Beyond religious dogma, by far the two most common reasons to oppose gay relationships are (1) same-sex relationships are morally problematic because they are inconsistent with proper gender roles (complementarianism) and (2) gay sex is morally problematic because the natural teleology of sex is toward procreation. I think (1) is actually the most socially powerful argument today, particularly in justifying religious proscriptions, but in public life it doesn’t work because it’s inconsistent with sex equality norms. The well-worn problems with (2) are that sex biologically has more than one function (e.g., social bonding is also important), the biological functions of sex are not inherently morally meaningful (i.e., the argument commits the naturalistic fallacy, as Harry suggests somewhere above), and it’s not obvious why other kinds of non-procreative sex (e.g., sex by infertile or elderly couples) are in the clear.

NNL theorists want to redeem (2) but are aware of the problems and want to avoid them, so they abandon most of the traditional architecture of the argument. Instead they say that the sine qua non of morally permissible sex is “organic bodily union,” by which they mean the coordination of the partners’ body parts in the joint biological function of reproduction (irrespective of whether reproduction can occur). Only such union really unites their bodies, and only bodily union instantiates a marriage–and only marriage is the sort of common good aimed at in sex that saves the partners from treating their bodies as mere instruments for gratification. I stand by my statement that this view–which is difficult to make intelligible even to philosophers, and which as far as I know is novel to the NNL theorists–is pretty esoteric, and I think it would be esoteric to Victorians too. It is also, of course, false.

I appreciate you saying that in most ways you’re happy that the gay rights movement won. But in a way this makes my point. Robert George is not happy about that. John Finnis, who wrote the classic NNL article on this in defense of Margaret Thatcher’s law characterizing same-sex relationships as a “pretended family relationship,” definitely is not. Should we really treat as an open question whether same-sex couples who make marital commitments are engaged in a kind of self-deluded play-acting, as NNL effectively requires believing? Is that really compatible with the ordinary sort of moral knowledge that open-minded people living today acquire about LGBT people and our relationships? I say it is not.

“(Glances nervously at an entire bookshelf of postmodernists),”

In my retirement, I’m (a) trying to get my reading speed in Japanese up to a level such that I could consider crashing (oops, auditing) college lit. crit. courses on Japanese lit. and (b) actually doing that. (I checked out the Waseda extension school the other day. They have an overview course that seems a bit too overviewish. The lit seminar at Yale had us read a novel a week, and in real life, I only got through two of the books. I managed to cheat (found a translation of the book I wrote a paper on), so I officially passed it as a course (being a computer nerd who actually showed up and made it clear he respected lit was worth a lot of brownie points, it seems. But I’d like to redo that, doing a better job.)

But. When I was frantically reading the hippy canon (in high school while waiting to be drafted), it was before postmodernism, so I’ve been a bit of a Rip van Winkle in terms of literary thought. But I found a book by a prof. at a lesser-light college that was an intro to criticism for high-school kids, and basically an advertisement for her courses so that said kids would know what they’re getting into, and she deftly sidestepped postmodernism, saying, essentially, that stuff is so late 20th century we don’t do it any more. (I found a recent vid. on YouTube about the Sokal Affair, and I claim she got it dead wrong. Sokal wasn’t/isn’t a righty ranking on lefty academics, he’s a liberal being embarassed about folks who ought to be doing a less silly job of it.) I suppose at some point I’ll have to deal with postmodernism somewhat more seriously…

Oh, yes. On atheists in church.

When said draft was breathing down my neck, mother (Radcliffe class of ’38, English lit. major) suggested that, since some of her relatives had been on the prosecutorial side of the Salem witch trials, I had grounds for claiming Shaker/Quaker background (religion being the only accepted grounds for conciencious objection), so I should check out the local (Beacon Hill) Quaker meeting house. It was a gorgeous building, and the “service” was great: everyone kept silent. Until some bloke got up and started blathering on and on about some inane aspect of inane Xtian dogma. Yep. Xtian dogma is sick stuff. Need to figure something else out; there’s no way I’ll ever convince anyone I’m a Quaker. Oh well. It was safer to be a grunt in the US army in Vietnam than to be a Vietnames peasant. (Really, it was. I ran the numbers: we slaughtered an incredible number of human beings.) I didn’t get drafted, though.

Is this to long-winded and off topic???

Eg prior to the Iraq a majority of the “left” (Democrats) thought Iraq did 9/11, and supported the invasion. Not something that would have been improved by listening to the right, and it’s a bit more recent than gulags.

bert1 @74
Vance wrote the foreword to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts.

According to a piece in The New Republic (link below):

So what can Big Government do for you? Chiefly, Roberts wants it to enforce a new America of Faith, Family, Community, and Work—what he calls “The Permanent Things” (a phrase he credits to Russell Kirk, which Kirk in fact got from T.S. Eliot), which he defines but struggles to make a case for. These abstractions, as defined by Roberts, constitute “the enduring record of human flourishing stretching back into the mists of history,” and they are what is currently under assault by the Uniparty and its many Skittle-haired minions. His definition of each is static and not subject to debate; of “Family,” he writes that the “nuclear family is the foundation of the human order”; of “Faith,” he explains that mankind “is made to worship, and our republic depends on the moral strength and habits of heart brought about by piety.” But having delineated these values, he offers no argument for them. They are taken as entirely axiomatic, and he proceeds on the assumption that they are unassailable.

These ideas, e.g. about people being inherently wired “to worship” and to live in conventional nuclear families, are frightening when linked to Roberts’s — and Vance’s — view that it’s the business of government effectively to impose them on the population, or try to do so (which does seem to be their view). They probably favor the recent Oklahoma (I think I have the right state) law mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in all classrooms, which violates the Establishment Clause on any reasonable interpretation. Also, Vance’s views on abortion are frightening since they are at the extreme end of the spectrum, and I believe he favors some kind of nationwide ban — frightening to those who favor reproductive rights in some form.

https://newrepublic.com/article/184651/voters-right-know-kevin-robertss-disturbing-book-says-j-d-vance-project-2025

About phonics: Because of my sympathies for the left, it was never clear to me how many of the whole-language/anti-phonics school were left as I understood it. My understanding is that the whole thing was based on the observation (correct as I understand it) that experienced and competent readers don’t consciously use phonics. The conclusion that therefore phonics was a boring detour in learning to read and getting practiced at it. When many or even most words are new, phonics seems to me to be essential.

This seems to me to be a kind of very basic error in pedagogy, if not logic. But then, I see the same kind of error in math programs that emphasize a commonplace tactic in numerate people, estimation. Like sight reading, that’s the result of familiarity with numbers achieved through practice. Or trying to teach graph interpretation in general, instead of relying on extensive use in context of real world examples. Or insisting on teaching calculus while ignoring practice in the trigonometric functions on the grounds that everybody can reconstruct them as needed. (That one was reported to me by a great-nephew.) Or trying to teach abstract critical thinking skills following Bloom’s taxonomy (hope that still isn’t a thing!) instead of a problem-specific approach. So maybe I’ve just exposed my misunderstanding of learning.

Coming at this rather late, in the 1960s when Eli was educated, physics and chemistry departments were ideologically heterogenious. The Vietnam War was a large divider, with the students on one side and the professors, at least the older ones, on the other, but other than that you could find equal numbers of professors on both sides.

The stuggle to create the APS Forum on Physics and Society reflected these splits.

Whether phonics is or isnt a effective method of teaching people to read who seem to be an empirical question you could get a handle on by teaching a bunch of people to read, but seems hard to resolve by a priori reasoning:

Many experienced readers (including myself) read word at once rather than sounding it out … at least for words we already know
But sounding out is the fallback for words you dont already know
English spelling is just horrible. Case for phones might be much clearer in other languages
Plausibly, sounding out is how you bootstrap reading whole words. Like, initially, you know almost no words so have to sound out everything, but then build up memory

Credible a priori arguments either way … yould need experimental data from actually teaching people to read to settle it

The idea that philosophers have ever had any influence on things, that the broad masses of the population (or even just a king) would read Confucius or Spinoza, and then society changes because of what they just read, is patently absurd. The causality is clearly the other way around:

First, while I don’t doubt that one can sometimes come up with clearer formulations, most ideas that matter to us were already brought up thousands of years ago, and likely in parallel in hundreds of societies. It is absurd to think that ideas such as “treat others like you want to be treated”, “there are no gods”, “why are we policing this behaviour when it harms nobody?”, or “the king is an idiot, maybe great offices should be assigned based on merit” need a formally trained philosopher in a university in the 18th century. They only need a wealthy farmer with a bit of spare thinking time in 1000 BC, and some of them only need three dudes sitting around a campfire in front of their cave.

Second, wealthy citizens want political power, or people get more tolerant, or society gets more secular, or an empire centralises power under the emperor, and then they pick from all the philosophical literature, ideas, and thought leaders floating around the one(s) that justify what they already want to believe. Conversely, if they read the greatest argument ever for something that is not in their interest, they simply don’t pick that as the thing they want to believe in.

Alex SL @90
I think it’s more accurate to see the causality as running both ways. (The base-superstructure view that your position implies is too mechanical and reductive, imo.)

The interesting question is not, for example, whether someone challenged kingship and its prerogatives before, say, the 17th and 18th centuries — I’m sure someone did, and indeed one could go back, for instance, to the Magna Carta — but rather why such challenges only really gathered steam, at least in parts of Europe and ‘the Atlantic world’, in those centuries.

Ideas don’t float freely, as someone has remarked, but they do matter and they can have a causal power or effect. One can see this in many social and political movements (or crusades) throughout much of history. Btw, not all of the influential philosophers in the 18th cent. were formally trained or connected to universities; some were, but many weren’t.

Affirmative Action for conservatives isn’t a joke, it already exists at several universities.

Examples Madison:

“UW-Madison will seek philanthropic support to create an endowed chair to focus on conservative political thought, classical economic theory, or classical liberalism, depending on the donor’s interest, conducting a national search to fill the position.”
https://crookedtimber.org/2024/04/01/indianas-dei-law/

Colorado:

“Visiting Scholars in Conservative Thought and Policy (VSCTP) come from academic, military, media or policy communities. … While on campus, the visiting scholar brings in prominent members of the conservative intellectual community from around the country for a day at CU Boulder.

The Center seeks highly visible individuals who are deeply engaged in either the analytical scholarship or practice of conservative thought and policymaking, or both.”
https://www.colorado.edu/center/benson/CTP

These are highly paid positions exclusively to be filled by “conservatives”, which includes fascists like Eastman and Deneen.

I pointed out before (https://crookedtimber.org/2024/04/17/52615/#comment-831249) that the claim about “liberal academia” is seriously flawed if you take the entire academic landscape into account. I wrote:

“My own experience with US academia is mainly with a Southern state university. Perhaps Madison and other more selective or even “elite” institutions in the US are totally different. But from my experience, there is no question there are plenty of conservative/right-wing faculty in the US. Beside that, those among faculty who identify as liberal are overwhelmingly centrists whose views would be considered middle of the road if it weren’t for the fact that the GOP has gone totally nuts. If students from conservative backgrouds feel shocked by the “liberalism” they encounter at university, that is not because there are so many professors with radical views, it’s because a conservative background nowadays means science-denying bigotry. If faculty are asked whether they support a science-denying fascist cult and most of them say no, that doesn’t really betray a lack of viewpoint diversity. Otoh how many US faculty are pro-union (universities are notoriously anti-union), critical of capitalism, in favor of strong climate action, etc.?

Debates about lack of viewpoint diversity in US academia that ignore these facts are simply not serious.”

someone who remembers that in 1980 if you liked ballet you were probably conservative @44 excellent comment.

CC 64: “The Gallup poll I shared earlier shows most Americans now approve of gay marriage, pornography, abortion, divorce, unwed pregnancy, and sex between teenagers (a sharp shift from the early 2000s)… It doesn’t suggest to me that philosophical questions about sex are officially settled.”

I think it’s less that people “approve” of everything on this list as that most Americans agree with Tim Walz that you should “mind your own damn business”. And if you are a conservative who disagrees with that view, you don’t really want viewpoint diversity, you want to impose your views on others.

engels 70: “liberal Americans see sex, like everything else but especially labour, as essentially a transaction subject to the law of contract”

Just curious, have you ever met any of these liberal Americans? I don’t think I have.

SussnC 71: “We now, typically, think sex is bad for underage persons”

No, we “typically” think that minors need to be protected from sexual exploitation by adults, especially much older ones. Very different position.

engels 77 correctly points out that US rightwingers are less likely to agree with that position, and more likely to think that while sex is bad for minors, marriage makes it ok.

LFC,

I think if you examine why certain ideas “only really gathered steam” at certain times, you will find that is merely another way of saying the same thing I did. You can come up with the idea that slavery shouldn’t exist in the Roman empire (and Spartacus, for example, did just that), but for some mysterious reason it just doesn’t gather steam, I wonder why perhaps because half the economy was built on mass slavery? And you can come up with the idea of a god-king who should personally own all of your nation (and I guarantee you there will be weirdos who believe that today), but mysteriously people will find it much less attractive than the elites of the Inca empire or of ancient Iraq did. The difference is never the existence of that idea as such or how well they are argued.

I guess part of what I am saying is that much of political and moral philosophy is fairly easy to reason out in the sense that you don’t need a natural history museum full of data or a particle collider to get there. For that kind of stuff – like the theory of evolution, heliocentrism, or antibiotics, you need tools and evidence that weren’t available thousands of years ago. For ideas like empiricism or meritocracy, you just need to reason. And people were able to do that thousands of years ago. The question was indeed if they would be stoned or shunned for expressing a given idea out loud, not if they had it in the first place.

@someone #102 – please re-read. it isn’t that “everyone” now loves ballet. if that were the case then yes, i would herald it as a triumph of conservative art (like the superhero film), and we would not be having this conversation about conservatives in the humanities because traditional art forms like ballet, classical music, the theater, sculpture, literature, and so on would all have enthusiastic conservative advocates on and off campus and conservative leaders would praise great artistic performances and institutions from the pulpit, the bully pulpit, on their radio shows (american conservatives have complete control over the radio airwaves and around a trillion dollars a year are expended to keep this going), and so on. but american conservatives now hate these things. dance and music and theater and books considered gay and trans and woke. they spent thirty years tearing to pieces any symphony or ballet or library they could get their hands on. if you come across a dance aficionado today, in 2024, you’re likely talking to a liberal or maybe even a socialist or communist – all the conservative ones quit! they now see dance, the art form, as fully corrupted by the blacks and queers and something which must be eliminated from all schools and colleges, permanently.

to put it another way, its actually illegal to perform twelfth night in public, where a child might see it, in arkansas, florida, tennessee, texas, north dakota, and montana. next year it will be a lot more states. thirty years ago, or even fifteen years ago, it was conservatives who urged that shakespeare should be celebrated and taught, not thrown to the wayside just because of the age of his work, and i (and all colleges and universities in the nation, by the by) agreed. since that time, american conservatives have essentially unanimously decided that the merry wives of windsor is pornography because falstaff dresses up as the wife of brentford, and it’s child abuse to let a 16 year old sees viola dress up as cesario. in a few months the supreme court will, 6-3, agree.

if conservatives still loved ballet (or goethe, or bach, or shakespeare, or mozart, or any type of art) and felt there was something in it that should be taught and expressed to students, they would easily find a place on modern campuses in the humanities (well, as easily as others who study art). colleges still teach these arts, and students still find great value in them. i would reiterate that in the 35-odd american states where conservatives have absolute, ironclad control over every aspect of life, they could even promote the value of the arts if they wished! they have enormous influence there! and they used to do exactly that! but the american conservative movement changed. they could change back if they wished, any time. but there’s too much money in bulldozing libraries, and who needs classical music when you have kid rock?

Closet conservative, briefly:
1. “Self-deluded play acting” is not rhetorical–because organic bodily union is the sine qua non of marriage, a couple who cannot do “organic bodily union” (penis-in-vagina sex) cannot be really married and therefore the practices and norms of marriage have no principled basis for them. Indeed, says Finnis, the sex they have is like copulation with animals, or sex with a prostitute–because not tied to an intelligible common good, it’s just consumptive mutual gratification, and the idea that it could embody love and commitment is nonsense. (“Reality is known in judgment, not in emotion,” he explains, anticipating “facts don’t care about your feelings.”)

The philosophical point I’m making isn’t that this is rude or hateful. It’s that it’s preposterous. It’s a total failure of an account of what’s going on in same-sex relationships. Yes, public views are contingent, etc., but in keeping with what I said before about moral learning, I think the existence of same sex marriages (de jure even if not metaphysically!) is a pretty valuable learning opportunity. That is the difference between today and 1994. I’m glad for that difference.

I don’t think believing in NNL is a basis for excluding someone from the academy. Not to draw an equivalence, but at least in philosophy I wouldn’t bar a creationist either. It’s not smart to exclude people who do good work because you think some of their opinions are silly or bad. But I think if we’re asking the distinct question is whether the NNL work on same-sex marriage should be academically respectable, I say no.

I remember reading Tim Walz is the first Democrat on a presidential ticket since Jimmy Carter not to have gone to law school.

This sex obsession (weird!) has become a thread derail but if JQ allows it, I’m gonna respond to CC‘s latest missive by pointing out, as a born and bred Catholic, that most of conservative catholic teaching about sex is by no means based on intuition, rather the opposite. Augustine‘s theory that sexual pleasure is sinful and should be avoided is so counter to normal human intuition that the morality based on it had to be imposed by incredible violence of both body and soul, and countless people over the centuries have suffered cruelly from trying to conform to an inhuman moral standard, or suffered terrible consequences from not conforming to those standards.

Few people put ketchup on ice cream but many, probably most people engage in sexual practices that conservatives claim are wrong. If that weren’t so, there would be no need for conservative sexual morality in the first place! So to claim that there is anything intuitive or natural about conservative sex obsessions is breathtakingly dishonest.

Closet conservative @ 103 (part 2 of 3)

The point is only that, as philosophers, I see no sound methodological reason to treat widespread moral intuitions as baseless-by-default-until-elegantly-theorized.

OK, in the survey you linked to the currently some 64% of people think that gay and lesbian relationships are morally acceptable. It seems to me that it would be not completely unreasonable to suggest that the current widespread moral intuition is very much the opposite of moral disgust. Now, I wish to be clear here, I am not suggesting that that is significant (I don’t think morality is simply a popularity contest!), but given you seem to think that moral intuitions are indicative – why don’t you believe that that is good evidence? Or are you contending that moral disgust is in fact that natural reaction, and that it is only that there is a distorting effect of society (in which case, why don’t you think that the socially conservative/religious societies could exert a equal-yet-opposite distorting effect?). It is just that you seem to vacillate between arguing that a widespread belief means something and then that it doesn’t. Now, perhaps you have some excellent chain of reasoning behind your positions, were I to draw a conclusion purely on the basis of what you’ve written here then it would be that you are being highly inconsistent or not explaining some key principles.

Now, I want to emphasise I am not trying to trick you, or to argue that if you can’t address every point to my satisfaction you must be wrong checkmate. I am simply trying to suggest that it is not actually exceptionally unreasonable to ask someone to make a case for their position, to ask questions to clarify points, or even (shock horror) not accept a position if they don’t think the case has been made.

But if I, in my capacity as a scholar interested in questions of enduring interest, write an academic paper expressing support for NNL, why should that be inappropriate?

Well, it would rather depend on what you wrote, surely? I mean, if you wrote “I support NNL based on [rational argument]” then it might well be very appropriate. If you wrote “I support NNL because I feel it to be true, and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong and only doing so because liberals control academia – and asking me for any evidence is simply forcing me to fit into the dominant liberal paradigm” then…yes, it might in fact be a little inappropriate (not because of the position, but because of the disinterest in actually defending the position).

“ If philosophical questions about sex have been settled for all time”

Out of interest, in your time as a philosopher, have you ever come across the term “false dichotomy”?

Might it be possible that certain positions have been examined, not demonstrated a good foundation, and thus may be set to one side unless new evidence arises? Or for some questions to indeed be settled (to the extent that anything is – that is unless and until new evidence/arguments arise) while others are not? Or for broader social context to be such that certain questions should only be posed with the greatest of care?

I am not making a specific case here, only suggesting that there does seem to be a bit of a gradient between “all questions are valid” and “all questions are settled for all time”, and that perhaps some degree of nuance might be useful.

Doru – I would be interested in that as well, as the latest comments of JHW, engels, J-D, notGoodenough, Tm, and steven t johnson raise important points worth being addressed.

Engels: „I remember reading Tim Walz is the first Democrat on a presidential ticket since Jimmy Carter not to have gone to law school.“

Indeed, that’s one more reason why I think that Walz is an excellent choice. He’s still highly educated of course, only as a teacher he wasn’t the kind of educated that typically makes a lot of money, which is an important distinction I think.

“Augustine‘s theory that sexual pleasure is sinful and should be avoided is so counter to normal human intuition” (@TM 112)

Normally “sinful” things are either pleasurable of advantageous: moral laws will prevent stealing (advantageous) or eating junk food (pleasurable in the short term) because those are desirable, there will be no moral sin in giving away money (disadvantageous) or eating flavourless food (unpleasurable) because nobody wants to do it in the first place.

So it is normal that moral laws command things that are in the short term disadvantageous or unpleasant, even if one could make the case that the purpose is to reach a longer term advantage, or pleasure, or advantage for someone else.

My point of view, as an utilitarian, is that moral laws should be acceptable only if they lead to long term greater happiness, and that old and dubious moral principles might have some aspect that comes from some utilitarian reason (e.g. sexual and gender norms exist IMHO because unrestricted sexuality is socially disruptive) but has gone wild and/or is exaggerated (I see no advantage in forbidding or limiting gay people to have gay sex).
I don’t really understand what moral intuition has to do with this.

the right represents the class interest of the small busines owner and its own worldview, the left the class interest of the professional and its own worldview, with everybody else left to pick a side

Yup. Plus because of the way politics is funded both are ultimately accountable to the super-rich (+ various lobby groups we needn’t mention).

What could possibly go wrong?

@TM 125

First of all, historical fascism/nazism happened in a period where there was a transition from an agricultural society to one where agriculture is a very minority occupation, so there are difference with the world of today.

Second, “big government” doesn’t mean “intrusive in any sense” government, but a redistributive government (the welfare state). This welfare state is presently the one and only plan of the left, and this is what the righties are opposed to. It is true that fascists and nazists had some welfare state, but they did so in a situation where the welfare state was growing everywhere and they represented a less-welfary option VS the communists (both in Italy and Germany they came to power as an alternative to socialists/commies).

Finally, at least for Italy the fascists did put out a truckload of offices and bureaucrats, but these were generally dominated by industry (e.g. fascist “corporazioni” where like labor unions where the boss of the labor union was the owner of the factory), so again if we are speaking of “welfare” burocracies they were undermining them.

So on the whole I don’t think historical fascists or nazis really undermine my argument, rather they had big bureaucracies but as a necessity and as a way to limit the even bigger bureaucracies that a socialist state, or even a social democracy (welfare state) requires.

Here the problem is that the “small government few taxes” dream of the right is a pipe dream, so it’s impossible for them to put it in practice literally, even if they get full power.

@Stephen
“Big government” in the sense used by conservatives essentially means big taxes, big welfare state.

There is nothing in “all in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” that implies high taxes or a welfare state, so in this specific sense that sentence doesn’t imply “big government” or “big bureaucracy”. Only that internal conflict must be crushed.

We could look at contemporary cases. Is Orban anti-bureaucracy and anti-big government? What about your Meloni, is she anti-bureaucracy?

If you mean to say they are against welfare state and redistrubtion, just say they are against welfare state and redistribution. No need to take their own dishonest slogans at face value.

@TM
My point, relative to the OP, is that “professors” are naturally inclined to the left. To use another different word for the same thing, the left tends to be “technocratic”.
It is intuitive that the person who works well with high education has a mindset that leads to technocracy.
Tecnocracy on the other hand is required by a lot of standard leftish policies, mostly the redistributive ones.
This complex of technocracy + redistribution is what conservatives call “big government”.
One could argue that also, say, the government banning divorce is a form of “big government”, but this is not what is generally meant by it. Also, even if the concept comes from conservatives, it seems to me it describes some common aspects of leftish policies.

MisterMr, I don’t think it’s „intuitive that the person who works well with high education has a mindset that leads to technocracy“ and I don’t agree with that generalization at all. What does seem intuitive, however, is that education workers tend to be, well, pro-education, and in an environment where the political right is anti-education, especially anti-public education, they may „naturally“ tend left.

Once again re “small government”, it’s a deliberately misleading right wing slogan and as J-D- says, it’s always a mistake to accept right wing framing. Right-wingers want to use the government for different purposes than left-wingers, that is self-evident, but they don’t generally want to make it smaller.

I would add that I encounter the “small/big government” discourse only in the context of US politics. German politics isn’t generally framed that way. How about Italy? Do Italian right wingers talk about “small government”?