from Jonathan Haidt.
in the academy now, if truth conflicts with social justice, truth gets thrown under the bus.
Earlier in the interview, he says,
For many years now, there have been six sacred groups. You know, the big three are African-Americans, women and LGBT. That’s where most of the action is. Then there are three other groups…Latinos, Native Americans, and people with disabilities. So those are the six that have been there for a while. But now we have a seventh–Muslims. Something like 70 or 75 percent of America is now in a protected group. This is a disaster for social science because social science is really hard to begin with. And now you have to try to explain social problems without saying anything that casts any blame on any member of a protected group. And not just moral blame, but causal blame. None of these groups can have done anything that led to their victimization or marginalization.
Read the whole thing.
Not mentioned is that the default tendency seems to be to blame any and all social problems experienced by these protected groups on the remaining 25-30% of Americans who aren’t part of a protected group, or on various necessary but unpopular institutions like capitalism, law enforcement, public education, etc. Look at the quack doctrine of critical legal studies as an example. Very corrosive to social relations at all levels.
Diversity + Proximity = War
Higher values like free speech are only possible amongst higher cultures populated by higher people. They are an exception to typical human behavior, and won’t be preserved without effort and sacrifice.
People carry signs in Europe over Muslim refugees stating they are against racism AND sexism. If they were allowed to read and process accurate social science data, they would conclude they can’t have both. That these values conflict and are irreconcilable. You have to choose, prioritize one value over the other or end up loosing both.
It’s the same with free speech and diversity. Only people who have a lot of core values and attributes in common can disagree on issues honestely. When people are too different all conflict becomes identity conflict, ideas are just too secondary to identity to survive.
Universality is lost.
Props to Haidt and Kling for posting this. I’m somewhat bewildered that Haidt is so horrified at this militantly truth-distorting and censorship driven social justice yet that’s precisely what 2008 candidate Obama was steeped in and represented. I do understand that a lot of people voted for Obama as a direct opposition to excessive military intervention from W Bush’s campaign. I’d also like to hear what horrifies Haidt about Cruz. On health care, at least, Cruz seems to best represent the free market health care ideas of the right-leaning libertarian economist circle.
He is not immune to the problem he is working on. On almost every race issue Obama chose to hype he was on the wrong side of the facts. He didnt choose to hype the ones that were actually troubling. Don’t we have to assume Obama is just as bad on everything else that we don’t hear him hyping?
Is Cruz (or Trump) worse than that, from their respective orientation? Did Obama result in Cruz and Trump as phenomenae? I think so.
Great answer. I would love to hear you elaborate on which race issues Obama hyped and was wrong on and which more serious issues he avoided. I can guess
He started out relatively strong with the Harvard professor breaking into his house and somebody calling the cops on him. Then the Martin shooting. Recently the kid who brought the bomb-looking clock to school.
Nothing about the guy selling cigs getting choked out or the buy shot in the back in Charleston while the black officer looked on while the shooter planted the tazer on the dead body.
Education is a confidence game and a racket. This is just a glaring example. If we fixed this, education might be a little better.
Really, this stuff should be largely irrelevant. As Haidt suggests, actual scientists have their hands full designing experiments or chasing down data sets and applying the correct methods (and ex plotting surly grad students, adjuncts, et. al.). The more time you have to spend on narrative, the less you are probably doing science.
Only the Christian heterosexual cismale ciswhite cisabled possess agency.
Haidt: “Yes, that’s right. Even much of the gender gap in STEM fields appears to result from differences of enjoyment-–boys and girls are not very different on ability, but they’re hugely different in what they enjoy doing.”
Praise Jesus. Maybe now that a,liberal speaks an obvious common sense maybe now it can be heard. Or, more likely, he’ll just be re-labeled as a conservative so he can be dismissed, as of course we’ve already seen.
Someone needs an attitude adjustment. Perhaps he should stop looking at problems and start looking for opportunities, stop looking to afix blame and start looking to assign credit, stop dividing and start unifying, stop looking at averages and start looking at variability, stop trying to validate preconceptions and start following the data. This is largely semantics but salesmanship sells.
Haidt? He already has. He has turned liberal bias in avademia into a research program…within academia. It is pretty brilliant. That is one reason I don’t really trust it as a change movement, but it is hard to fault him for it.
Isn’t it just stupid to think anthropology could close off the entire concept that people are different? Is there a better word, if this is true, than academics in these fields are just stupid? Let’s say in a diverse people, some are less winners in capitalism than others. That doesn’t preclude redistribution, assuming you are a horrible liberally biased researcher. Assuming it does is just stupid, and that is being as charitable as possible, right?