The point of all this isn’t just more academia-bashing (fun as that is, and thank you Jesus for early retirement). The point is: Life deals people bad hands. Many, perhaps most, of the people I know in academia are there because they really can’t do anything else — a combination of (as they feel it) genes and circumstance has landed them there, and while it looks like a really cushy upper-middle-class life materially, spiritually it’s the pits, because it’s aesthetically awful. The Classical Greek adage that the Good is the True is the Beautiful might not be factually accurate, but it sure feels right …
… and never more than to people who know themselves un-beautiful, therefore not good, therefore false, and locked in it. Forever.
These people hate us, not because we’re better looking, more socially skilled, or whatever — this is, after all, the Internet — but because we’ve got options. We’re not all fighting over who gets to be Big Fish in an ever-shrinking pond. We’re different things to different people; we haven’t collapsed our social context down to faculty mixers and the one or two non-hamplanet grad students who are silly enough to apply each semester. We can go days, maybe even weeks, without obsessively comparing ourselves to our peers. We don’t care that we’re not “Chad” or “Stacy,” because we’ve got other settings on the emotional dial than “smugness” and “jealousy.”
But we need to start caring. I don’t mean getting obsessive over our appearance. I mean that, since this is in many ways an aesthetic battle, aesthetics will help us win. I half-jokingly suggested a “Normal Guy Uniform” a while back – an all-white ball cap with the New England Patriots’ logo on it. I’m not really kidding now. The Left wins, in large part, because they’re fugly losers that no normal person could possibly consider a threat … until they bash your skull in, or get you fired, or send a SWAT team to your house.
Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.
February 22, 2021
QotD: Modern academic “life”
February 19, 2021
Freddie DeBoer’s arguments against successful charter schools
Scott Alexander’s extensive review of Freddie DeBoer’s book The Cult of Smart includes this discussion of DeBoer’s belief that American charter schools are fraudulent and only manage their headline-worthy educational outcomes by “cooking the books”:
I think DeBoer would argue he’s not against improving schools. He just thinks all attempts to do it so far have been crooks and liars pillaging the commons, so much so that we need a moratorium on this kind of thing until we can figure out what’s going on. But I’m worried that his arguments against existing school reform are in some cases kind of weak.
DeBoer does make things hard for himself by focusing on two of the most successful charter school experiments. If he’d been a little less honest, he could have passed over these and instead mentioned the many charter schools that fail, or just sort of plod onward doing about as well as public schools do. I think the closest thing to a consensus right now is that most charter schools do about the same as public schools for white/advantaged students, and slightly better than public schools for minority/disadvantaged students. But DeBoer very virtuously thinks it’s important to confront his opponents’ strongest cases, so these are the ones I’ll focus on here.
Success Academy is a chain of New York charter schools with superficially amazing results. They take the worst-off students — “76% of students are less advantaged and 94% are minorities” — and achieve results better than the ritziest schools in the best neighborhoods — it ranked “in the top 1% of New York state schools in math, and in the top 3% for reading” — while spending “as much as $3000 to $4000 less per child per year than their public school counterparts.” Its supporters credit it with showing “what you can accomplish when you are free from the regulations and mindsets that have taken over education, and do things in a different way.”
DeBoer will have none of it. He thinks they’re cooking the books by kicking out lower-performing students in a way public schools can’t do, leaving them with a student body heavily-selected for intelligence. Any remaining advantage is due to “teacher tourism”, where ultra-bright Ivy League grads who want a “taste of the real world” go to teach at private schools for a year or two before going into their permanent career as consultants or something. This would work — many studies show that smarter teachers make students learn more (though this specifically means high-IQ teachers; making teachers get more credentials has no effect). But it doesn’t scale (there are only so many Ivy League grads willing to accept low salaries for a year or two in order to have a fun time teaching children), and it only works in places like New York (Ivy League grads would not go to North Dakota no matter how fun a time they were promised).
I’m not sure I share this perspective. Success Academy isn’t just cooking the books — you would test for that using a randomized trial with intention-to-treat analysis. The one that I found is small-n, short timescale, and a little ambiguous, but I think basically supports the contention that there’s something there beyond selection bias. Teacher tourism might be a factor, but hardly justifies DeBoer’s “charter schools are frauds, shut them down” perspective. Even if Success Academy’s results are 100% because of teacher tourism, they found a way to educate thousands of extremely disadvantaged minority kids to a very high standard at low cost, a way public schools had previously failed to exploit. That’s not “cheating”, it’s something exciting that we should celebrate. If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t scale, but maybe the same search process that found this particular way can also find other ways? Surely it doesn’t seem like the obvious next step is to ban anyone else from even trying?
And we only have DeBoer’s assumption that all of this is teacher tourism. Success Academy itself claims that they have lots of innovative teaching methods and a different administrative culture. If this explains even 10% of their results, spreading it to other schools would be enough to make the US rocket up the PISA rankings and become an unparalleled educational powerhouse. I’m not claiming to know for sure that this is true, but not even being curious about this seems sort of weird; wanting to ban stuff like Success Academy so nobody can ever study it again doubly so.
DeBoer’s second tough example is New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina destroyed most of their schools, forcing the city to redesign their education system from the ground up. They decided to go a 100% charter school route, and it seemed to be very successful. Unlike Success Academy, this can’t be selection bias (it was every student in the city), and you can’t argue it doesn’t scale (it scaled to an entire city!). But DeBoer writes:
After Hurricane Katrina, the neoliberal powers that be took advantage of a crisis (as they always do) to enforce their agenda. The schools in New Orleans were transformed into a 100% charter system, and reformers were quick to crow about improved test scores, the only metric for success they recognize. Whether these gains stand up to scrutiny is debatable. But even if these results hold, the notion of using New Orleans as a model for other school districts is absurd on its face. When we make policy decisions, we want to isolate variables and compare like with like, to whatever degree possible. The story of New Orleans makes this impossible. Katrina changed everything in the city, where 100,000 of the city’s poorest residents were permanently displaced. The civic architecture of the city was entirely rebuilt. Billions of dollars of public and private money poured in. An army of do-gooders arrived to try to save the city, willing to work for lower wages than they would ordinarily accept. How could these massive overall social changes possibly be replicated elsewhere? And how could we have any faith that adopting the New Orleans schooling system — without the massive civic overhaul — would replicate the supposed advantages?
These are good points, and I would accept them from anyone other than DeBoer, who will go on to say in a few chapters that the solution to our education issues is a Marxist revolution that overthrows capitalism and dispenses with the very concept of economic value. If he’s willing to accept a massive overhaul of everything, that’s failed every time it’s tried, why not accept a much smaller overhaul-of-everything, that’s succeeded at least once? There are plenty of billionaires willing to pour fortunes into reforming various cities — DeBoer will go on to criticize them as deluded do-gooders a few chapters later. If billions of dollars plus a serious commitment to ground-up reform are what we need, let’s just spend billions of dollars and have a serious commitment to ground-up reform! If more hurricanes is what it takes to fix education, I’m willing to do my part by leaving my air conditioner on “high” all the time.
February 11, 2021
QotD: Progressive credentials as positional goods
But if PC was not really about protecting anyone, and really all about expressing one’s own moral superiority, PC credentials would be akin to what economists call a “positional good”.
A positional good is a good that people acquire to signalise where they stand in a social hierarchy; it is acquired in order to set oneself apart from others. Positional goods therefore have a peculiar property: the utility their consumers derive from them is inversely related to the number of people who can access them.
Positionality is not a property of the good itself, it is a matter of the consumer’s motivations. I may buy an exquisite variety of wine because I genuinely enjoy the taste, or acquire a degree from a reputable university because I genuinely appreciate what that university has to offer. But my motivation could also be to set myself apart from others, to present myself as more sophisticated or smarter. From merely observing that I consume the product, you could not tell my motivation. But you could tell it by observing how I respond once other people start drinking the same wine, or attending the same university.
If I value those goods for their intrinsic qualities, their increasing popularity will not trouble me at all. After all, the enjoyment derived from wine or learning is not fixed, so your enjoyment does not subtract from my enjoyment. I may even invite others to join me – we can all have more of it.
But if you see me moaning that the winemakers/the university have “sold out”, if you see me whinging about those ignoramuses who do not deserve the product because they (unlike me, of course) do not really appreciate it, you can safely conclude that for me, this good is a positional good. (Or was, before everybody else discovered it.) We can all become more sophisticated wine consumers, and we can all become better educated. But we can never all be above the national average, or in the top group, in terms of wine-connoisseurship, education, income, or anything else. We can all improve in absolute terms, but we cannot all simultaneously improve in relative terms. And that is what positional goods are all about – signalising a high position in a ranking, that is, a relation to others. This leads to a problem. Positional goods are used to signalise something that is by definition scarce, and yet the product which does the signalling is not scarce, or at least not inherently. You can increase the number of goods which signal a position in the Top 20 (of whatever), but the number of places in that Top 20 will only ever be, er, twenty. Increasing the number of signalling products will simply destroy their signalling function. Which is why the early owners of such a signalling product can get really mad at you if you acquire one too.
Kristian Niemietz, “The economics of political correctness”, Institute of Economic Affairs, 2014-04-30.
January 30, 2021
Obey your technocratic elites, peasant!
Scott Alexander considers some historical (and current) examples of you peasants being steamrolled by the powers of the government at the behest of the technological elites of the day:
I am not defending technocracy.
Nobody ever defends technocracy. It’s like “elitism” or “statism”. There is no Statist Party. Nobody holds rallies demanding more statism. There is no Citizens for Statism Facebook page with thousands of likes and followers.
[…] it worries me that everyone analyzes the exact same three examples of the failures of top-down planning: Soviet collective farms, Brasilia, and Robert Moses. I’d like to propose some other case studies:
1. Mandatory vaccinations: Technocrats used complicated mathematical models to determine that mass vaccination would create a “herd immunity” to disease. Certain that their models were “objectively” correct and so could not possibly be flawed, these elites decided to force vaccines on a hostile population. Despite popular protest (did you know that in 1800s England, anti-smallpox-vaccine rallies attracted tens of thousands of demonstrators?), these technocrats continued to want to “arrogantly remake the world in their image,” and pushed ahead with their plan, ignoring normal citizens’ warnings that their policies might have unintended consequences, like causing autism.
2. School desegregation: Nine unelected experts with Harvard and Yale degrees, using a bunch of Latin terms like a certiori and de facto that ordinary people could not understand let alone criticize, decided to completely upend the traditional education system of thousands of small communities to make it better conform to some rules written in a two-hundred-year-old document. The communities themselves opposed it strongly enough to offer violent resistance, but the technocrats steamrolled over all objections and sent in the National Guard to enforce their orders.
US Highway System needs in 1965 from “Needs of the Highway Systems 1955-1984”, a letter from the Secretary of Commerce to the House Committee on Public Works, approved May 6, 1954.
US Government Printing Office via Wikimedia Commons.3. The interstate highway system: 1950s army bureaucrats with a Prussia fetish decided America needed its own equivalent of the Reichsautobahn. The federal government came up with a Robert-Moses-like plan to spend $114 billion over several decades to build a rectangular grid of numbered giant roads all up and down the country, literally paving over whatever was there before, all according to pre-agreed federal standards. The public had so little say in the process that they started hundreds of freeway revolts trying to organize to prevent freeways from being built through their cities; the government crushed these when it could, and relocated the freeways to less politically influential areas when it couldn’t.
4. Climate change: In the second half of the 20th century, scientists determined that carbon dioxide emissions were raising global temperatures, with potentially catastrophic consequences. Climatologists created complicated formal models to determine how quickly global temperatures might rise, and economists designed clever from-first-principle mechanisms that could reduce emissions, like cap-and-trade systems and carbon taxes. But these people were members of the elite toying with equations that could not possibly include all the relevant factors, and who were vulnerable to their elite biases. So the United States decided to leave the decision up to democratic mechanisms, which allowed people to contribute “outside-the-system” insights like “Actually global warming is fake and it’s all a Chinese plot”.
5. Coronavirus lockdowns: The government appointed a set of supposedly infallible scientist-priests to determine when people were or weren’t allowed to engage in normal economic activity. The scientist-priests, who knew nothing about the complex set of factors that make one person decide to go to a rock festival and another to a bar, decided that vast swathes of economic activity they didn’t understand must stop. The ordinary people affected tried to engage in the usual mechanisms of democracy, like complaining, holding protests, and plotting to kidnap their governors – but the scientist-priests, certain that their analyses were “objective” and “fact-based”, thought ordinary people couldn’t possibly be smart enough to challenge them, and so refused to budge.
Nobody uses the word “technocrat” except when they’re criticizing something. So “technocracy” accretes this entire language around it – unintended consequences, the perils of supposed “objectivity”, the biases inherent in elite paradigms. And then when you describe something using this language, it’s like “Oh, of course that’s going to fail – everything like that has always failed before!”
But if you accept that “technocracy” describes things other than Soviet farming, Brasilia, and Robert Moses, the trick stops working. You notice a lot of things you could describe using the same vocabulary were good decisions that went well. Then you have to ask yourself: is Seeing Like A State the definitive proof that technocratic schemes never work? Or is it a compendium of rare man-bites-dog style cases, interesting precisely because of how unusual they are?
I want to make it really clear that I’m not saying that technocracy is good and democracy is bad. I’m saying that this is actually a hard problem. It’s not a morality play, where you tell ghost stories about scary High Modernists, point vaguely in the direction of Brasilia, say some platitudes about how no system can ever be truly unbiased, and then your work is done. There are actually a bunch of complicated reasons why formal expertise might be more useful in some situations, and local knowledge might be more useful in others.
January 29, 2021
Costs of keeping Biden’s promise to forgive student debt
Antony Davies and James R. Harrigan consider the frequently issued campaign promise by Joe Biden and what it will cost to implement:
Given the results of the recent election, it should come as no surprise that we’re poised for the next big expansion: student debt forgiveness, a promise Joe Biden made frequently as he campaigned for the presidency. Like the big ideas that came before it, this idea will cost us more than we can afford from day one, and far more than its proponents will admit. Biden’s plan as currently envisioned would cost over $300 billion. But that’s just this year. The plan will set in motion unintended consequences that will doubtlessly persist for generations.
First, next year’s crop of new students will — understandably — demand that their loans be forgiven too. And so will those of the year after that, and so on. This program will quickly become a sort of college UBI, where the government just hands out $10,000 to every college student. Some argue that if this results in a better educated populace, then it’s worth the cost. But it won’t result in a better educated populace; it will result in a whole bunch of students majoring in things the market doesn’t value, and another batch simply taking a four-year vacation on the taxpayer’s dime. Heretofore, graduates knew they needed marketable skills in order to repay their college loans. But when student loans are forgiven as a matter of course, graduates bear no cost for wasting our collective resources by studying things the market doesn’t value, or by not studying at all.
Data sources: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, National Center for Education Statistics.
Second, colleges and universities will respond to this new reality by raising tuition commensurately. Tuition and fees were a pretty constant 18 to 19 percent of family income from the 1960s until 1978. In 1965, the federal government started guaranteeing student loans. In 1973, Congress established Sallie Mae and charged it with providing subsidized students loans. And by 1978, tuition and fees had started a steady march to 45 percent of family income today. When the government makes it less painful for students to borrow, whether by guaranteeing, subsidizing, or forgiving loans, it takes away some of the pain of student borrowing, which makes it easier for colleges and universities to raise tuition.
Third, expect many taxpayers to cry foul. Homeowners will quite sensibly wonder why the government is not forgiving their mortgages. After all, student loans add up to about $1.4 trillion, while American mortgages total more than $16 trillion. If relieving students from the burden of their debts is a good idea, it should be an even better idea to relieve homeowners of theirs.
What about students who worked multiple jobs or attended less prestigious schools so they could avoid going into debt? Why aren’t they being rewarded? What about students who diligently paid off their debt and are now debt free? Will they receive nothing? What about, fantastically, people in the trades? Is it reasonable to charge people — via the higher taxes loan forgiveness will bring — who did not go to college to subsidize those who do? Regardless of the answers to these questions, implementing this plan will be fraught with difficulty.
January 6, 2021
QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s views on eugenics
The Irishman’s opinions are, however, coming back to mangle and even smash his reputation. A group of students at RADA have called for Shaw’s name to be removed from the drama school’s theatre as part of an anti-racism action plan. This matters, because Shaw provided for the school in his will, and last year the royalties from his work contributed more than £78,000 to RADA. Yet the accusation that the renowned theatre college “celebrates historical figures who embraced racist ideologies” does have a certain merit. Problem is, as has been debated myriad times: do, can, and should we separate an artist’s work from their period, character and ideas? If the ghosts of anachronism and historical assumptions are never to be exorcised, there are an awful lot of people who will fail and fall to the wide-awake litmus test.
Shaw did indeed write, that, “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man” and, chillingly, “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.” He lectured for the Eugenic Education Society, praised Stalin (naturally) the early Mussolini, and even Hitler as late as 1935. He abandoned most of all this in his old age but never made any formal apology.
He was also an incisive critic of imperialism, mercilessly exposed establishment hypocrisy, opposed war and oppression throughout his career, and cared passionately about actors and writers – the very people at RADA trying to expunge his name from their place of learning. And here’s another challenge and even embarrassment for those who would remove the social engineers from the litany of the great and the good: many of their harshest opponents were not others on the left but, in Edwardian Britain and in the 20s and 30s, conservative Roman Catholic writers led by G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc.
Michael Coren, “Eugenics and the intellectual left”, The Critic, 2020-09-16.
December 23, 2020
Our “systemically racist and patriarchal society” which oppresses “people of color, women, and LGBT”
To hear some people (especially on social media in these locked-down pandemic days), there has never been a human society that more greatly benefits white heterosexual men and oppresses everyone else like the modern west. Here are some stats from Rav Arora to challenge that claim:
We are frequently told by commentators and theorists on the progressive and liberal Left that we live in a systemically racist and patriarchal society. The belief that Western societies privilege white men and oppress people of color, women, and LGBT citizens is especially popular within academic institutions, legacy media, the entertainment industry, and even sports. However, newly released statistics from the US Department of Labor for the third quarter of 2020 undermine this narrative. Asian women have now surpassed white men in weekly earnings. That trend has been consistent throughout this past year — an unprecedented outcome. Full-time working Asian women earned $1,224 in median weekly earnings in the third quarter of this year compared to $1,122 earned by their white male counterparts. Furthermore, the income gap between both black and Latino men and Asian women is wider than it has ever been. The income gap between white and black women, meanwhile, is much narrower than the gap between their male counterparts.
These outcomes cannot exist in a society suffused with misogyny and racism. As confounding to conventional progressive wisdom as these new figures appear to be, copious research finds that ethnic minorities and women frequently eclipse their white and male counterparts, even when these identities intersect. Several ethnic minority groups consistently out-perform whites in a variety of categories — higher test scores, lower incarceration rates, and longer life expectancies. According to the latest data from the US Census Bureau, over the 12 months covered by the survey, the median household incomes of Syrian Americans ($74,047), Korean Americans ($76,674), Indonesian Americans ($93,501), Taiwanese Americans ($102,405), and Filipino Americans ($100,273) are all significantly higher than that of whites ($69,823). The report also finds substantial economic gains among minority groups. Valerie Wilson at the Economic Policy Institute reports that from 2018 to 2019, Asian and black households had the highest rate of median income growth (10.6 percent and 8.5 percent, respectively) of all main racial groups (although she cautions that overall disparities remain “largely unchanged”). On a longitudinal scale, Hispanics, not whites, had the highest income growth in 2019 relative to the start of the Great Recession in 2007 (although many of these gains have been reversed by the pandemic).
Rapidly rising female economic success is partly a product of higher academic representation. 2019 was the 11th consecutive year in which women earned the majority of doctoral degrees. Women accounted for 57 percent of all students across American colleges in 2018 according to the latest US Department of Education figures and earned the majority of associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees. According to University of Michigan economist Mark J. Perry, “By overall enrollment in higher education men have been an under-represented minority for the last 40 years.” Sex differences in cognition can help to explain differential performance along gender lines — although men typically perform better on quantitative and visuospatial tasks, several studies have found that on average women perform better in verbal and memory tasks and on reading and writing tests.
December 20, 2020
QotD: Online literacy
But sometimes I’ll find myself looking at the posts of a Facebook friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend and I see these random aggregations of misspelled words. They have the occasional capital letter or punctuation mark thrown in, as though the writer knew they were supposed to include those, but not how or why.
And I find myself wondering “What’s it like inside their head?” I mean, you’d probably be going through life slightly angry, thinking everybody was secretly laughing at you behind their hands, that there was some arcane code of keyboard use you were violating. The whole internet would be like one of those fancy restaurants with too much silverware and you never know which implement to use to eat which dish.
Tamara Keel, “I’ve always wondered…”, view from the porch, 2018-08-24.
December 16, 2020
QotD: Distorting the history of America’s “Gilded Age”
To some extent, during the late 1800s — a period historians call the “Gilded Age” — American politicians learned from the past. They had dabbled in federal subsidies from steamships to transcontinental railroads, and those experiments dismally failed. Politicians then turned to free markets as a better strategy for economic development. The world-dominating achievements of Cornelius Vanderbilt, James J. Hill, John D. Rockefeller, and Charles Schwab validated America’s unprecedented limited government. And when politicians sometimes veered off course later with government interventions for tariffs, high income taxes, anti-trust laws, and an effort to run a steel plant to make armor for war — the results again often hindered American economic progress. Free markets worked well; government intervention usually failed.
Why is it, then, that for so many years, most historians have been teaching the opposite lesson? They have made no distinction between political entrepreneurs, who tried to succeed through federal aid, and market entrepreneurs, who avoided subsidies and sought to create better products at lower prices. Instead, most historians have preached that many, if not all, entrepreneurs were “robber barons”. They did not enrich the U.S. with their investments; instead, they bilked the public and corrupted political and economic life in America. Therefore, government intervention in the economy was needed to save the country from these greedy businessmen.
Burton W. Folsum, “How the Myth of the ‘Robber Barons’ Began — and Why It Persists”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2018-09-21.
November 20, 2020
The political danger if the “chumps” unite
In City Journal, James B. Meigs describes what he calls the “Chump Effect” in American politics:
Senator Elizabeth Warren speaking at the Iowa Democrats Hall of Fame Celebration in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on 9 June, 2019.
Photo by Lorie Shaull via Wikimedia Commons.
Last January, a small but telling exchange took place at an Elizabeth Warren campaign event in Grimes, Iowa. At the time, Warren was attracting support from the Democratic Party’s left flank, with her bulging portfolio of progressive proposals. “Warren Has a Plan for That” read her campaign T-shirts. The biggest buzz surrounded her $1.25 trillion plan to pay off student-loan debt for most Americans.
A man approached Warren with a question. “My daughter is getting out of school. I’ve saved all my money [so that] she doesn’t have any student loans. Am I going to get my money back?”
“Of course not,” Warren replied.
“So you’re going to pay for people who didn’t save any money, and those of us who did the right thing get screwed?”
A video of the exchange went viral. It summed up the frustration many feel over the way progressive policies so often benefit select groups, while subtly undermining others. Saving money to send your children to college used to be considered a hallmark of middle-class responsibility. By subsidizing people who run up large debts, Warren’s policy would penalize those who took that responsibility seriously. “You’re laughing at me,” the man said, when Warren seemed to wave off his concerns. “That’s exactly what you’re doing. We did the right thing and we get screwed.”
That father was expressing an emotion growing more common these days: he felt like a chump. Feeling like a chump doesn’t just mean being upset that your taxes are rising or annoyed that you’re missing out on some windfall. It’s more visceral than that. People feel like chumps when they believe that they’ve played a game by the rules, only to discover that the game is rigged. Not only are they losing, they realize, but their good sportsmanship is being exploited. The players flouting the rules are the ones who get the trophy. Like that Iowa dad, the chumps of modern America feel that the life choices they’re most proud of — working hard, taking care of their families, being good citizens — aren’t just undervalued, but scorned.
The word “chump” probably derives from an ancient Norse term for a stump or large chunk of wood. The modern word “blockhead” comes to mind, which — no coincidence — was Lucy’s favorite label for the too-trusting Charlie Brown in the Peanuts comic strip. Lucy never tired of snatching away the football; Charlie fell for it every time. We all know the feeling: when you’re inching forward in the freeway exit lane, say, and another driver flies past and swerves onto the ramp at the last second; when your child has to complete her college-entrance exams within a designated time period, but your neighbor’s child gets twice as long because of a suddenly diagnosed “learning disability”; when you pay extra to have your pet travel in the airplane’s cargo hold but the yipping poodle across the aisle, an “emotional-support animal,” gets to ride on its owner’s lap for free. You didn’t know that you could get an emotional-support card just by claiming an anxiety disorder and paying a fee to an online agency? What are you — a chump?
November 2, 2020
In the University of Michigan’s Sexual Health Certificate Program, “mainstream sexual health issues that affect wide swaths of the population, such as marriage, reproduction, and family life, were treated as niche topics”
In Quillette, Tim Courtois explains what the University of Michigan’s Sexual Health Certificate Program is actually intended to teach:
When I signed up for the University of Michigan’s unique, year-long “Sexual Health Certificate Program” (SHCP), however, I truly did believe the experience would be both professionally and intellectually rewarding. I care about sexuality. I know that it is a fundamental component of the human search for joy and meaning. As a Michigan-based psychotherapist and licensed professional counselor, I wanted to deepen my understanding of sexuality, and become better equipped to provide care for the many clients who come to me with issues related to sexual health. The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists sounded like the perfect fit for me, and the idea of becoming an AASECT-certified sex therapist appealed to me. I applied and was accepted for the 2019-2020 cohort. When I showed up, my class included participants from around the world — including Iceland, Egypt, Lebanon, and China — just as you’d expect at the kind of high-value, authoritative program that we all believed we’d signed up for.
The doubts started to creep in early, though — on day one, to be exact. Our first classroom module was titled “Sexual Attitude Reassessment.” I amused myself with the thought that this sounded like an unsettling euphemism for a brainwashing session. Sadly, that’s what it was.It quickly became clear that the issue of sexuality — the ostensible subject — often would serve merely as a pretext for more general harangues about society, and the urgent need to remake it according to AASECT’s ideological blueprint. In a keynote lecture entitled “Why Fetishism Matters,” the speaker argued that the world we inhabit is socially constructed, and told us (with what now seems like admirable candor), “I’m not neutral. I’m here to recruit you to a particular point of view about how kink should be valued.” The same speaker said that he’d been accused of teaching students that any form of sexual behavior is acceptable as long as there is consent from all parties. “Yes, that’s exactly right,” he said. Clearly, our attitude “reassessment” was well underway.
From the get-go, the scientific content was mostly superficial, and was often undercut by claims that the very idea of truth is a harmful (and even oppressive) construct. The teaching was not so much impartial and informative as it was evangelistic. Yet it was also self-contradictory: Declarations that there are no real “correct” moral values were uttered (without irony) alongside absolutist proclamations about the correct way to understand sex — and morality.As I learned, “Sexual Attitude Reassessment” (SAR) is an established term in the field, one that is often used to describe curriculum content that serves to educate sexual-health professionals about the wide range of sexual experiences that they may encounter among clients. The object is to ensure they won’t be shocked when such encounters occur, and to invite them to reassess their judgments and assumptions about various expressions of sexuality. These are valid and important goals. Unfortunately, the SAR in the SHCP descended into an exercise in overstimulation and desensitization — specifically, two full days of pornographic videos and interviews. At times, it felt like the famous brainwashing scene from A Clockwork Orange. There was a series of videos of people masturbating (one of which involved a strange interaction with a cat), a woman with “objectiphilia” who had a sexual attraction to her church pipe organ, various sadomasochistic acts, and a presentation on polyamory designed to make it clear that the polyamorous lifestyle is healthy, wholesome, and problem-free.
The focus on BDSM was a particular fixation throughout the program. In the SAR, we were shown videos of a woman meticulously applying genital clamps to the scrotum of a willing man, and a dominatrix teaching a class how to properly beat people while demonstrating on an eager participant. We also watched an interview with a sex-dungeon “dom” (the male equivalent of a dominatrix) who described one of his experiences: His client had instructed him, as the dom recounted it, “I want you to bind me and then beat me until I scream. And no matter how much I scream or beg you to stop, I want you to keep beating me.” The dom did as he was told, continuing the beatings through the customer’s begging and pleading, until the client went totally limp and silent, seeming to dissociate. At this point, the dom unbound the man, who then began to weep uncontrollably in the dom’s arms.
BDSM is a real and active sexual subculture, and I don’t object to its inclusion in the course materials. But I was shocked to see how much further the professors in the program took things, insisting that BDSM behaviors — up to and including the sexual “Fight Club” style of behavior described above — must be uncritically viewed as wholesome and beautiful. Students learned to sing from the same psalm book, with one memorably exclaiming “I’m so inspired by the wisdom and beauty in the BDSM community!” and insisting that the behavioral codes observed among BDSM participants can help us create a similar climate of safety and respect “in all our relationships.”
The program was focused on an agenda of “centering” the experience of minorities — in this case, sexual minorities. This meant that huge portions of time in class after class were spent focusing on BDSM, LGBTQIA+ issues, and polyamory, not to mention the obligatory discussions of oppression and privilege that were shoehorned into every discussion. Meanwhile, mainstream sexual health issues that affect wide swaths of the population, such as marriage, reproduction, and family life, were treated as niche topics. Further, while many Americans view sexuality through the prism of faith, religion hardly came up at all. And when it did, it was typically so that religious values could be denigrated. Even the few religious people in the program got the message: Whenever any made passing reference to their own observant religiosity, it was usually in a spirit of shame or penance.
In a few brief web searches to find a public domain or Creative Commons image to use for this post, I realized that web search engines offer “safe” options for a reason…
October 17, 2020
Andrew Sullivan on the pervasiveness of Critical Race Theory in academia
In his latest Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan discusses how deeply embedded Critical Race Theory has become in the academic, journalistic and cultural realms controlled by the left:
… the CRT advocates have brilliantly managed to construct a crude moral binary to pressure liberals into submission. Where liberalism allows neutrality or doubt or indifference, CRT demands an absolute and immediate choice between racism and anti-racism (defined by CRT) — and no one wants to be a racist, do they? Legitimate anguish about racial inequality and the sheer terror of being publicly labeled a bigot have led liberals to surrender their core values to the far left.
The second reason for CRT’s triumph is that it’s super-easy. Social inequalities are extremely complicated things. A huge variety of factors may be in play: class, family structure, education, neighborhood, sex, biology, genetics and culture are some of them. Untangling this empirically in order to figure out what might actually work to improve things is hard work. But when you can simply dismiss all of these factors and cite “structural racism” as the only reason for any racial inequality, and also cover yourself in moral righteousness, you’re home-free. Those who raise objections or complications or cite nuances can be dismissed by the same easy method.
Then there’s the deep relationship between CRT and one of the most powerful human drives: tribalism. What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue. You don’t have to correct yourself when your tribal psyche makes you more cognizant of someone’s visible racial differences, and pre-judges them. You don’t have to resist this any more. You can give in to your core nature, and feel pride, rather than shame. You get to have all the feels of judging people entirely by their involuntary characteristics, while actually dismantling racism and sexism! What’s not to like?
Social aspiration also plays a part. The etiquette of wokery is increasingly indispensable for high society. They mark you as someone high up in the American social hierarchy. The right words and phrases signal your ease in this elite; the wrong ones — “sexual preference”! — expose you as a rube, a bigot or, worse, a middle class provincial. Rob Henderson argues that this aspiration to be in the upper classes helps explain why Asian-Americans, who are targeted for direct race discrimination under CRT, nonetheless often support it: “While money and education are tickets to the middle class, prizing diversity is a requirement to join the upper class. It’s part of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as cultural capital — tastes, vocabulary, awareness and mannerisms which give social advantages to those higher in the social hierarchy.” Reihan Salam has also written brilliantly about this.
There’s little doubt, either, it seems to me that there is a religious component to wokeness. A generation of nones can feel bereft of transcendence and meaning, and “becoming woke”, like being “born again,” fills that spiritual hole. In an atomized and lonely age, feeling as if you are on “the right side of history”, banishing doubt, joining with countless of your fellow converts in marches and seminars, can abate the isolation and emptiness of it all. Many moderns want the experience of religion without God. With CRT, as in the past with communism, they can have it.
But what also make CRT so successful is ruthlessness. Those who hold a view of the world in which only power, and the struggle for power, matters, have few qualms in exercising it. After all, under CRT, power is always on the side of the white cis-heteropatriarchy, so payback is always fair play. Discriminating against the unwoke or whites or males or the cis-gendered or Asian-American, is not just fair, but vital. Shutting down speech protects the oppressed; bullying on social media and in the workplace becomes a form of virtue; mercy and forgiveness are mere buttresses for white supremacy; HR departments diligently identify dissidents, and discipline them. Once you set up this system of censorship and fear, persecute a few prominent sinners pour décourager les autres, and encourage snitches, dissidents will increasingly self-censor, and dissent peter out, until the new orthodoxy is the only one.
In the past, a new set of ideas could be engaged in a clash of argument and debate. But you’ll notice that the advocates of what Wes Yang has called “the successor ideology” never debate any serious opponents of their position. This is because debate in a liberal society implies equal standing for both sides, and uses reason to determine who’s right or wrong. But there can be no “both sides” within CRT, no equation of “racists” and “antiracists”, and debates are inherently oppressive. Logic, evidence, and reason are, in this worldview, mere products of white supremacy, forms of violence against the oppressed. In CRT, remember, there is no truth or objectivity; there are merely narratives. So, yes, 2 + 2 = 5, and math is inherently a function of whiteness. And what racist is going to deny this?
October 13, 2020
QotD: Generalizations
H.L. Mencken, Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist, 1910.
September 12, 2020
Andrew Sullivan on a “genetic case for communism”
Actually, this isn’t the case Sullivan himself is making, but he’s summarizing a recent book by Fredrik deBoer, The Cult of Smart: How our broken education system perpetuates social injustice:
There aren’t many books out there these days by revolutionary communists who are into the genetics of intelligence. But then there aren’t many writers like Freddie DeBoer. He’s an insistently quirky thinker who has managed to resist the snark, cynicism and moral preening of so many others in his generation — and write from his often-broken heart. And the core of his new book, The Cult of Smart, is a moral case for those with less natural intelligence than others — the ultimate losers in our democratic meritocracy, a system both the mainstream right and left have defended for decades now, and that, DeBoer argues, gives short shrift to far too many.
This isn’t a merely abstract question for him. He has grappled with it directly. As a school teacher he encountered the simple, unavoidable fact that some humans are more academically gifted than others, and there’s nothing much anyone can do about it. He recalls his effort to teach long division to a boy who had managed to come a long way socially (he’d gone from being a hell-raiser to a good student) but who still struggled with something as elemental as long division: “At one point he broke into tears, as he had several times before … I exhaled slowly and felt myself give up, though of course I would never tell him so. I tried to console him, once again, and he said, ‘I just can’t do it.’ And it struck me, with unusual force, that he was right.”
What DeBoer tries to do is explain how our current culture and political system is geared to torment, distress and punish this kid for no fault of his own. “This is the cult of smart,” DeBoer proclaims. “It is the notion that academic value is the only value, and intelligence the only true measure of human worth. It is pernicious, it is cruel, and it must change.” It has become un-American — or perhaps it always was? — to say that an individual has natural limits, that, even with extremely hard work, he won’t always be able to realize his dreams. And this is not because of anything he has done or failed to do — but simply because of his draw in the genetic lottery of life. The very American cult of education is supposed to end this injustice — except that it doesn’t, because it can’t, and its brutal logic actually exposes and entrenches the least defensible inequality of all, the inequality of nature.
This genetic reality — in fact, the very idea of nature existing at all — is currently a taboo topic on the left. In the most ludicrously untrue and yet suffocatingly omnipresent orthodoxy of our time, critical theory leftists insist that everything on earth is entirely socially constructed, that all inequality is a function of “oppressive systems”, and that human nature itself is what John Locke called a “white paper, void of all characters” — the famous blank slate. Freddie begs to differ: “Human behavioral traits, such as IQ, are profoundly shaped by genetic parentage, and this genetic influence plays a larger role in determining human outcomes than the family and home environment.”
People are not just born unequally and unfairly into class, and culture, and place, they are inherently unequal in various ways in their very nature: “not everyone has the same ability to do calculus; not everyone has the same grasp of grammar and mechanics … we can continue to beat our heads against the wall, trying to force an equality that just won’t come. Or we can face facts and start to grapple with a world where everyone simply can’t be made equal.” And this is not a counsel of despair. What Freddie is arguing is that, far from treating genetic inequality as a taboo, the left should actually lean into it to argue for a more radical re-ordering of society. They shouldn’t ignore genetics, or treat it as unmentionable, or go into paroxysms of fear and alarm over “eugenics” whenever the subject comes up. They should accept that inequality is natural, and construct a politics radical enough to counter it.
[…]
This genetic case for communism can leave a reader a little disoriented, I have to say, if only for its novelty. But it is more coherent, it seems to me, than a leftism that assumes that genes are irrelevant to humans and society, that the ultimate goal is to be as smart and thereby wealthy as possible, and that we can set up an educational system where everyone, regardless of their genetic inheritance, can succeed or fail by their own efforts. What sounds like a meritocratic dream is, in practice, a brutal and unforgiving formula for most who can’t achieve it — and has obviously failed if its task is to foster equality. In fact, mass education appears to have increased the gulf between rich and poor. As Freddie notes, “education is not a weapon against inequality; it is an engine of inequality.”
September 9, 2020
Today’s intelligentsia: helpless captives of their uber-woke disciples
Theodore Dalrymple on the temptations of power:
A building burning in Minneapolis following the death of George Floyd.
Photo by Hungryogrephotos via Wikipedia.
One must not exaggerate, of course. We do not yet live under a Soviet-type tyranny in which every university thesis, on no matter how arcane a subject, was obliged by hook or by crook to quote Lenin. It is still possible, though not at all easy, to live as a scholar in our societies outside the university system. But it does not require the tyranny of the complete police state to obtain a high degree of intellectual conformity, as we can now observe at our leisure. Young university academics of my acquaintance in several countries tell me that they are now afraid to speak their mind, not because they would fear for their lives, but fear for their promotion. This is not the same, or as terrible, as fearing for their lives, but it is nonetheless very far from the Millian ideal of freedom of thought and speech.
There is much worse. It is not merely that they must keep their mouth shut and not say what they think, bad enough as this must be for those who have chosen the life of the mind; it is that they must positively subscribe to things that they believe to be bad or false. And this is a mark of totalitarianism. They must subscribe to doctrines they believe absurd, for example by describing in job applications their future efforts to promote diversity, so-called. By making the expression of untruth the condition of employment, probity is destroyed in advance. Those who lack it are easier to control.
Increasingly, social movements do not allow any neutrality with regard to the causes that they promote. Non-adherence is no different from enmity and derogation is evil: if you are not part of the solution you are part of the problem. In vain might you argue that your interest is elsewhere, in the taxonomy of grasshoppers, for example, or in the biochemistry of acorns, or in the bibliography of Alexander Pope: there is one subject that trumps all others in importance, and on it only one opinion is permissible. You must pass a test of loyalty.
The latest of these movements is, of course, Black Lives Matter, and its success in cowing so large a part of the intelligentsia is in a way admirable, a model of political organization for the future, though one much to be feared. By claiming that silence is violence, it has made hand-wringing (to avoid its anathema) the mark, and almost the whole, of virtue. It has successfully reversed Martin Luther King’s goal, such that the colour of a man’s skin is once again more important than the content of his character, and it has made respectable that most Stalino-Maoist of notions, that people should be promoted and rewarded according to their social (in this case, racial) origins. And anyone who disagrees is an Enemy of the People, the word People being here used in a severely technical sense, to mean the arbiters of the allocation of rewards.
