Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2018

The impact of universities on Generation X

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Last month, Aaron Clarey explained why (in his view) the 1980s were so much better than the 1990s:

For example if you went to the gas station you would buy gas there. If you went to Target you bought staples and everyday supplies. If you went to the coffee store they would serve you coffee. And if you went to a movie theater they would show you a movie. They were simpler times and it made my halcyon childhood days very enjoyable. But then something started happening in the 90’s that would end these blissful, innocent times.

College.

Well, not college unto itself necessarily, but the propaganda…err..umm… “education” my generation (Gen X) would receive in college. For you see, while we were all told we “had to go to college” because it was necessary for us to have any sort of career or professional life at all, at the same time some very conscious and very intentional people in academia had a political agenda. And it was to make sure that we not so much had skills that would land us jobs in the future, but more importantly (to them anyway) that we placed more value on social and political agendas than profit, production, efficiency and reality. So that by the time Gen X graduated from college, and inevitably started taking over the reigns of control of the economy (which we have), we would not be so much concerned with offering the best product at the best prices possible, but what I like to call “Profit Plus Purpose.”

Politics Politics Everywhere! In Your Soup and in Your Hair!

You see this “Profits Plus Purpose” every day in western economies. It is literally unavoidable. If you go to a hotel there is always a sign asking you to “save the planet” by reusing your towels. If you go to a coffee store they cannot help themselves from bragging about their organicfairtradefreetradegaiaunicorn credentials. When you walk into a Target they’re always bragging about how they give back 5% to the community. Even British Petroleum tells you about how environmentally friendly they are at their gas pumps, while Exxon Mobil actually has a “corporate social responsibility page.” Matter of fact, this propaganda is so thorough and so complete Generation Z will be the first generation to be brought up where there has ALWAYS been some kind of secondary political message forcefully embedded into nearly every product and service sold in America.

The reason “Profits Plus Purpose” propaganda was so COMPLETE and UNIVERSALLY successful can be found in its genius genesis. It capitalizes on the egotistical and lazy nature of human beings. Leftist academics and politicians started propagandizing Generation X in college with the beginnings of things like “diversity,” “feminism,” “environmentalism,” “global warming,” etc. (you could almost pinpoint it to the date Captain Planet first aired). Whether you believe in the veracity of these “isms” or not is moot, because their ulterior purpose was to give then-naïve-and-egotistical Gen X’ers immediate gratification, purpose, morality, and ego in exchange for their life-long leftist political loyalty and further advancing said political agendas well into the future.

Why, you weren’t just some rank and file Mechanical Engineering major. You were an environmentalist Mechanical Engineering major.

Why, you weren’t some mass produced business major. You were an empowered, feminist, future business leader.

You weren’t some worthless, math-avoidant liberal arts degree major. You were a pro-refugee activist utterly unemployable liberal arts degree major.

Thus, whereas learning a real skill from a real degree took deterring work, effort, and rigor, immediately subscribing to some kind of moral leftist political crusade was effortless, yet provided immediate value and agency. Gen X couldn’t sign up fast enough and thus virtue signaling and Social Justice Warriors were born.

H/T to SDA for the link.

April 24, 2018

QotD: Bisexuality

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The word ‘bi-curious’ makes me feel even more like heaving. Just because I was in love with a girl for six months two decades ago, a swath of unappealing ‘straight’ females for quite a while saw fit to try it on with me after a few Babychams. ‘But I want to experiment with my sexuality!’ they would wail as I ejected them into the night. ‘Then buy a Bunsen burner and a Petri dish, and stick ‘em where the sun don’t shine!’ I would squeal indignantly. And the current Special Snowflake simper of ‘sexual fluidity’ makes me feel like burning a rainbow flag – it sounds like something you’d ask the pharmacist for a cure for in a hushed voice, all the while itching madly.

But the act of being bisexual – I prefer to call it ‘sexually flexible’ or even better ‘spontaneous’ – is truly to have drawn the golden ticket in the tombola of dirty joy. Yes, some bisexuals are miseries – my ex-girlfriend once sniggered to me that at every Freshers’ Week at the universities she attended, there was inevitably a Bisexual Stall bearing the legend ‘Twice the fun’ and manned by a creature whose misery was so tangible that he made Morrissey look like Little Mary Sunshine. With certain women, you get the feeling that having had mutually dismaying relationships with as many men as they could physically manage, they decided to bat for both sides sheerly in order to double the number of potential partners they can make as miserable as they are.

Julie Burchill, “In praise of bisexuality”, The Spectator, 2016-08-20.

April 13, 2018

The free speech views of “Gen Z”

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt argue that despite many nay-sayers, there really is a freedom of speech crisis on university campuses:

In our first post responding to the skeptics, we showed that the skeptics support their skepticism primarily by relying on data about the Millennial generation (those born 1982-1994). The skeptics are correct that Millennials are not much different than previous generations when asked about free speech issues. We also argued that this debate has nothing to do with Millennials; it is about CURRENT college students, who are not Millennials. By the fall of 2015, most college students (especially at elite four year schools) were members of iGen, the “Internet generation” (sometimes called “Gen Z”), which begins around birth year 1995, and which first arrived at college around 2013.

We noted that the new attitudes about speech — including the idea that speech can be violence (even when it includes no threat), and corresponding requests for safe spaces and trigger warnings — only began to appear on select campuses around 2013 or 2014, and we noted that these ideas only became widely known after the wave of student protests that began at the tail end of 2015. Therefore, we pointed out, it is unlikely that nationally representative samples, drawing on students in America’s 4,700 institutions of higher education, could have picked up any changes before 2015, when colleges were still full of Millennials who had never heard of trigger warnings and microaggressions. We proposed that the best way to evaluate whether or not things have changed on campus is to examine data collected on current college students in 2016 or later, and compare it to data on current college students from 2014 and before.

When we performed such comparisons, we found some evidence that in fact things are changing. There is not yet much data available to make direct comparisons, but the GSS does show a change for the little bit of iGen data that it has (see figure 1 in post 1), and the larger Knight study showed a change just from 2016 to 2017. In this post we do a much deeper dive. We present far more data on current college students and we assess whether the campus climate has changed in the last few years with regard to speaking up and sharing one’s views.

The key question is this: are students and professors today more reluctant than they were a few years ago to share their views or to question dominant views? If so, then there is a climate or culture problem on campuses where that change has occurred. We note that the overall climate can change rapidly even if there has been no change in average attitudes about speech. All that needs to happen is that a small group of students begins imposing social costs on those who say things they don’t like, while at the same time college administrators do nothing to stop them. (For a fuller explanation, see this essay by Lee Jussim, or this one by Nassim Taleb, whose title explains the key point: The most intolerant wins: The dictatorship of the small minority.) If college students are more likely to report the feeling of “walking on eggshells” in the years after 2015 than they did in the years before 2015, then there has been a change in the campus culture, even if the average student’s support for free speech has not changed.

QotD: Reynolds’ Law

Filed under: Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com, 2010-09-23.

March 25, 2018

QotD: America’s “read-only” activists

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Outside, unbeknownst to those of us on the panel, the individuals who left said things like, “even the women in there have been brainwashed!” and “Nazis are not welcome in civil society.”

When banal observations like “men and women are different heights” prompts the accusation that I’m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it’s clear that this was not good faith protest.

It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.

Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we’re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy.

Heather Heying, “On the dangers of read-only activism”, Medium.com, 2018-03-02.

March 21, 2018

Free speech at risk on campus

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt on the claims and counter-claims about the threat to freedom of speech in today’s universities:

Over the past two weeks, Jeffrey Sachs (a political scientist at Acadia U; not the economist at Columbia) has made the argument that There Is No Campus Free Speech Crisis, as he put it in a long twitter thread on March 9. Matt Yglesias then expanded on Sachs’ argument in a post titled Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong, and Sachs expanded his case in a Washington Post Monkey Cage essay with a similar title: The ‘campus free speech crisis’ is a myth. Here are the facts. Sachs and Yglesias both draw heavily on analyses of the speech questions in the General Social Survey, which were plotted and analyzed well by Justin Murphy on Feb. 16. In this blog post we will show a reliance on older datasets and the failure to formulate the question properly have led Sachs and Yglesias to a premature conclusion. Something is changing on campus, but only in the last few years.

Sachs and Yglesias claim that the current wave of concern about speech on campus that began around 2014 (with media reports about safe spaces and trigger warnings), and that intensified in 2015 (after the Yale Halloween controversy, and the earlier publication of The Coddling of the American Mind, by Lukianoff & Haidt) is a classic moral panic. They believe it is merely a media frenzy in response to a few high profile incidents. In a typical moral panic, people on one side of the political spectrum get riled up because stories about outrageous incidents appeal to their desire to believe the worst about a group on the other side. Sachs and Yglesias claim that conservatives and conservative media have gleefully exploited a handful of campus stories to fuel hatred of left-leaning students, or “social justice warriors,” when in in fact nothing has changed on campus.

Given how frequent moral panics are, especially as political polarization and cross-party hatred increases, and as social media makes it easy to whip up a panic, it is vital to have skeptics. It is important for people with different biases and prior beliefs to dig into survey data that bears on the question. It is also crucial to formulate the question properly. What exactly is it that has changed, or not changed, on campus in recent years?

Here are the three major positions in the current debate, along with our proposal for how each should be operationalized.

H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.

March 9, 2018

QotD: Contempt for science

Filed under: Education, Media, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The waging of a “war on science” by right-wing know-nothings has become part of the conventional wisdom of the intelligentsia. Even some Republican stalwarts have come to disparage the GOP as “the party of stupid.” Republican legislators have engaged in spectacles of inanity, such as when Sen. James Inhofe, chair of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, brought a snowball to the Senate floor in 2015 to dispute the fact of global warming, and when Rep. Lamar Smith, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, pulled quotes out of context from peer-reviewed grants of the National Science Foundation so he could mock them (for example, “How does the federal government justify spending over $220,000 to study animal photos in National Geographic?”).

Yet a contempt for science is neither new, lowbrow, nor confined to the political right. In his famous 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” C.P. Snow commented on the disdain for science among educated Britons and called for a greater integration of science into intellectual life. In response to this overture, the literary critic F.R. Leavis wrote a rebuttal in 1962 that was so vituperative The Spectator had to ask Snow to promise not to sue for libel if they published the work.

The highbrow war on science continues to this day, with flak not just from fossil-fuel-funded politicians and religious fundamentalists but also from our most adored intellectuals and in our most august institutions of higher learning. Magazines that are ostensibly dedicated to ideas confine themselves to those arising in politics and the arts, with scant attention to new ideas emerging from science, with the exception of politicized issues like climate change (and regular attacks on a sin called “scientism”). Just as pernicious is the treatment of science in the liberal-arts curricula of many universities. Students can graduate with only a trifling exposure to science, and what they do learn is often designed to poison them against it.

Steven Pinker, “The Intellectual War on Science”, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2018-02-13.

March 1, 2018

Penn & Teller – The Right Not to be Offended

Filed under: Education, Humour, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

DeadJ0ker27
Published on 19 Feb 2010

I’m personally offended by people who get offended.

February 28, 2018

QotD: Words as “physical violence”

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad of well-meaning but ultimately flawed theses, namely, 1.) that all discourse is about power and that any speech that renders a listener physiologically uncomfortable therefore rises to the level of a physical attack upon that individual, thereby justifying actual physical violence in response, 2.) that for the sake of historically marginalized voices, persons who are members of historically privileged groups should forfeit their right to free speech or ought to remain silent, 3.) that certain assertions, even if possibly true, are nonetheless morally impermissible to make since to do so will likely create conditions whereby bad-intentioned persons will inevitably and successfully advance their morally heinous projects.

This first thesis — that all discourse is fundamentally about power — finds its philosophical origins in the likes of post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To quote Foucault, “Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations.” Thus, on Foucalt’s view, if all discourse is, at heart, really just veiled force relations between competing groups; if language isn’t fundamentally capable of being about objective truth or about the world in any meaningful sense, then the ink symbols written on the page and the shaped air admitted from one’s mouth in the forms of ‘rationality’, ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘truth’ are just another set of weapons in a person’s overall arsenal to seize and maintain power, no different in kind from weapons of a physical sort. To speak then, on Foucault’s view, is to wield a weapon, albeit a subtler and refined one. The uncomfortable physiological feeling of hearing offensive speech, it would then seem, vindicates this view that one is being attacked. One might thus conclude, “Why not attack back with heavier, more effective, and more expedient weapons?”

Michael Robillard, “In Defense of Offense”, Quillette, 2018-02-05.

February 16, 2018

Differences in interest drives gender disparity in STEM fields

Filed under: Education, Science, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David C. Geary and Gijsbert Stoet examine the STEM fields’ renowned gender disparities:

Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference in engagement with science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) fields. Or rather they are obsessed with the fact that there are more men than women in some of these fields. There is particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about the under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing.

The concerned academics have been especially effective in convincing others, or at least intimidating them, into accepting their preferred interpretations regarding the source of these sex differences (as illustrated in the Google memo debate). These interpretations are not surprising and they include sexism, stereotype threat, and more recently implicit bias and microaggression. Each of these ideas has gained traction in the mainstream media and in many academic circles but their scientific foundations are shaky. In this essay, we’ll provide some background on the STEM controversy and consider multiple factors that might contribute to these sex differences.

[…]

We’ve recently found that countries renowned for gender equality show some of the largest sex differences in interest in and pursuit of STEM degrees, which is not only inconsistent with an oppression narrative, it is positive evidence against it. Consider that Finland excels in gender equality, its adolescent girls outperform boys in science, and it ranks near the top in European educational performance. With these high levels of educational performance and overall gender equality, Finland is poised to close the sex differences gap in STEM. Yet, Finland has one of the world’s largest sex differences in college degrees in STEM fields. Norway and Sweden, also leading in gender equality rankings, are not far behind. This is only the tip of the iceberg, as this general pattern of increasing sex differences with national increases in gender equality is found throughout the world.

The recent uptick in interest in concepts such as stereotype threat, implicit bias, and microaggression may be a reaction to the low female STEM participation in highly developed nations. At one time, there were substantive social and educational impediments to women’s participation in these (and other) fields, but as explicit sexism and restricted educational opportunities faded into history, the sex differences (e.g., fewer women than men physicists) attributed to them should have faded as well. Some of them have even reversed, such that more women than men attend and graduate from college and women may now have structural advantages (e.g., hiring practices) in STEM fields. Even with these changes, many other sex differences remain or have become larger over time. The latter are serious problems for anyone with strong beliefs about purely or largely social influences on sex differences; if the obvious social causes have been addressed, then there must be other, more subtle oppressive factors afoot. This is where stereotype threat, implicit bias, microaggression and related concepts enter the oppression narrative.

We believe that with economic development and advances in human rights, including gender equality, people are better able to pursue their individual interests and in doing so more basic sex differences are more fully expressed. The differences in STEM are related in part to student’s personal and occupational interests and relative academic strengths. Sex differences in occupational interests are large, well-documented, and reflect a more basic sex difference in interest in things versus people. Men prefer occupations that involve working with things (e.g., engineering, mechanics) and abstract ideas (e.g., scientific theory) and women prefer working with and directly contributing to the wellbeing of others (e.g., physician, teacher). The sex difference in interest in people extends to a more general interest in living things, which would explain why women who are interested in science are much more likely to pursue a career in biology or veterinary medicine than computer science.

Programs designed to steer women into inorganic STEM fields would in effect steer these same women away from the life sciences. Such programs would, in our opinion, only be justifiable if women are not provided a fair opportunity to pursue inorganic STEM fields (for which there is no good evidence). The main argument from gender activists is that inorganic STEM fields are a better choice for women either because these jobs lead to higher incomes or that there is a labor market demand for them. Both arguments are fundamentally capitalist and dehumanizing in the sense that considerations of personal interest are overridden by considerations of societal demand. This is ironic, given that the agenda arguing for more women in STEM seems most popular among left-leaning people.

January 29, 2018

“… those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike [Jordan Peterson] more than the honest progressives I know”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Zachary Slayback tries to discover why so many intellectuals dislike Canadian psychologist Jordan B. Peterson:

I’ve spent the last few years thinking about how to upend higher education and have worked with some leading entrepreneurs and thinkers in this space. Continually, we come back to the question of liberal arts education and its value (remember, I studied philosophy!). Some people are too quick to dismiss liberal arts education as useless and not worth the time. Instead, they insist on purely vocational education. Yet many of the most successful and happiest individuals I know are widely read (rarely because of their college courses), can discuss ideas from Aristotle to Jung to Jacobs with you, and love the idea of entertaining big ideas.

I visited Peterson’s lectures and found them to be nuanced, intricate, and to jump well between clinical experience, psychological research (most of which was well-validated, hard to do in psychology), and Jungian myth interpretation. When he released his Bible lecture series, I found myself, for the first time since I was a child, intimately listening about the ideas that go into religion and how these ideas surface elsewhere in the culture. More than a decade of skepticism towards religious texts due to their shallow readings and uses for the Joel Osteens of the world melted away.

His lectures rarely touch on politics in any capacity. When it gets brought up, he’s quick to note that he does not oppose calling trans individuals by their pronouns but that he opposes having his language dictated by a central political committee. This seems commonsensical to me. Part of what made the American and Canadian traditions so egalitarian is their rejection of forced speech and titles.

And for those who listen to Peterson, he bridges any kind of ideological gap (in fact, those I know in the alt-right crowd dislike him more than the honest progressives I know). Peterson’s worldview is a classical liberal rejection of collectivism (an ideology that killed more than 50 million people in the 20th century alone) while simultaneously not falling into an atomized view of the individual relative to his culture.

Just last week, I met with an acquaintance in San Francisco, the Mecca of American political correctness, who described herself as a “liberal democrat type,” who had listened to and met Peterson at a company event. She admitted that she couldn’t read into his politics and found his talk compelling about the nature of the world, men in it today, and why people like Peterson must appeal to so many people outside the San Francisco and Washington DC bubbles. She was explicit in saying that she was neither a libertarian nor a conservative and still Peterson motivated her to introspect, read into Jungian archetypes, and better understand the culture that shapes the world.

She’s not alone. I regularly speak to friends and acquaintances from across the political spectrum who find value in Peterson’s talks. These are people years out of college (or who never went) who now pick up classics like Dostoyevsky, Jung, Neumann, and even the Bible with a critical intellectual lens. Peterson regularly talks about and shares letters from fans who admit that his moralistic talks inspired them to pull themselves together and “sort themselves out” by figuring out what they want from life and pursuing that. r/JordanPeterson (yes, he has his own subreddit) is filled to the brim with stories of people saying how Peterson helped them get control of their lives and navigate the world.

I’ve bought but not yet read Peterson’s recent book, 12 Rules for Life. It’s not the sort of thing I usually read, so I’m not quite sure what to expect (Indigo says it’ll be delivered tomorrow).

January 23, 2018

QotD: Indoctrination

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think … but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators.

William F. Buckley Jr., Up From Liberalism, 1959.

January 22, 2018

QotD: Expecting far too much from Economics 101

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

James Kwak is the latest to take up the point that Economics 101 isn’t all that good as a basis for designing public policy. To which the answer is, well, yes, of course. Why is anyone in the least bit surprised at this? We don’t use people with two semesters of college French as translators either. Introductory college courses are introductory college courses: that they provide an introduction to a subject and not full access to the deeper secrets of the profession is a surprise to whom? Well, obviously, apparently some rather large number of people but why there’s all this pearl clutching over it being true about economics and economics only is the mystery I suppose

[…]

What worries me far more about this discussion is this. Sure, it’s entirely obvious that we shouldn’t be designing public policy on the basis of what econ 101 tells us. But all too many people take that to mean that we should be designing public policy in entire violation of what econ 101 tells us. That the introductory course is not complete, does not contain all of the subtlety of all of the arguments is entirely true. But that doesn’t mean that those basic concepts are wrong, nor that they should be tossed on the bonfire of political wishes either. And that, sadly, is what all too many do. We see it all the time: econ 101 isn’t complete therefore the minimum wage doesn’t cost jobs. Econ 101 isn’t everything so therefore trade is a bad idea. As economists agree econ 101 doesn’t describe everything therefore my pet idea in violation of basic principles is right.

That to me is where the danger is: not that people are incorrect in agreeing that there’s more to it than just that introductory class, but that people incorrectly assume that because that is so they can reject what that first class is telling us about the basic of the subject.

Tim Worstall, “Yes, Of Course Economics 101 Is Useless At Designing Public Policy”, Forbes, 2016-05-14.

January 20, 2018

Lindsay Shepherd discovered “that not only are critiques of social justice not taught, they aren’t even to be acknowledged”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Uri Harris writes about the trainwreck Jordan B. Peterson interview on UK Channel 4 with Cathy Newman, where Newman appeared to be unable to engage with his arguments, as though she was previously unaware of their existence. Harris also briefly touches on the background to the WLU kerfuffle with Lindsay Shepherd which I think explains a lot about how that incident was triggered:

When Lindsay Shepherd was reprimanded last year by three Wilfrid Laurier faculty members for showing her class a video clip from a televised debate on gender pronouns, Shepherd’s professor Nathan Rambukkana wrote an apology drawing attention to his teaching style. He wrote: “[T]here is the question of teaching from a social justice perspective, which my course does attempt to do.”

When I contacted Lindsay Shepherd earlier this month, she told me that she didn’t know Rambukkana taught from an explicitly “social justice” perspective. However, after going through the syllabus, she realised he had talked about it in his Week 2 lecture, and that the reading material that week also mentioned it. Yet even then, she said, she was unaware how loaded the term “social justice” is and how it often aligns with censorship and one-sidedness. Her response when I asked her whether she recognised various social justice terms was:

    My undergraduate degree is in Communication from Simon Fraser University, and the gist of my program was learning about power; mostly power as it manifests in media and media industries. I was very accustomed to talking about feminism, racism, and oppression. Less so the other terms you mention, which I only became more acquainted with in my graduate degree program, and many of them as a result of the Laurier incident — i.e. I was unaware of any substantial critique of intersectionality, gender theory, and critical theory, as we were only taught them from the “social justice perspective.”

Shepherd had lots of exposure to a social justice perspective, but only from within the perspective itself. She was taught social justice beliefs but had never been taught to critique those beliefs. When she came across a professor who did just that—Jordan Peterson—she found it interesting and new, even while disagreeing with him. (She later came to realise he may have been right about the legislation he was criticising.) So she shared a clip of the debate with her students, and only afterwards did she discover that not only are critiques of social justice not taught, they aren’t even to be acknowledged.

The methodology underpinning much of the social justice perspective is known as critical theory. What’s notable about critical theory is that it specifically distinguishes itself from ‘traditional’ theories through its emphasis on criticism. This makes the apparent unwillingness of its adherents to engage with criticism themselves especially noteworthy. When you explicitly emphasise your criticality and base your theory on a commitment to look beneath appearances and see things as they really are, you don’t get to be selectively critical.

January 16, 2018

QotD: Intersectionality

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The term and concept were presented in a 1989 essay by Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor at UCLA, who made the very reasonable point that a black woman’s experience in America is not captured by the summation of the black experience and the female experience. She analyzed a legal case in which black women were victims of discrimination at General Motors, even when the company could show that it hired plenty of blacks (in factory jobs dominated by men), and it hired plenty of women (in clerical jobs dominated by whites). So even though GM was found not guilty of discriminating against blacks or women, it ended up hiring hardly any black women. This is an excellent argument. What academic could oppose the claim that when analyzing a complex system, we must look at interaction effects, not just main effects?

But what happens when young people study intersectionality? In some majors, it’s woven into many courses. Students memorize diagrams showing matrices of privilege and oppression. It’s not just white privilege causing black oppression, and male privilege causing female oppression; its heterosexual vs. LGBTQ, able-bodied vs. disabled; young vs. old, attractive vs. unattractive, even fertile vs. infertile. Anything that a group has that is good or valued is seen as a kind of privilege, which causes a kind of oppression in those who don’t have it. A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/them thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side of each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose.

And here’s the strategically brilliant move made by intersectionality: all of the binary dimensions of oppression are said to be interlocking and overlapping. America is said to be one giant matrix of oppression, and its victims cannot fight their battles separately. They must all come together to fight their common enemy, the group that sits at the top of the pyramid of oppression: the straight, white, cis-gendered, able-bodied Christian or Jewish or possibly atheist male. This is why a perceived slight against one victim group calls forth protest from all victim groups. This is why so many campus groups now align against Israel. Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.

This means that on any campus where intersectionality thrives, conflict will be eternal, because no campus can eliminate all offense, all microaggressions, and all misunderstandings. This is why the use of shout-downs, intimidation, and even violence in response to words and ideas is most common at our most progressive universities, in the most progressive regions of the country. It’s schools such as Yale, Brown, and Middlebury in New England, and U.C. Berkeley, Evergreen, and Reed on the West Coast. Are those the places where oppression is worst, or are they the places where this new way of thinking is most widespread?

Jonathan Haidt, “The Age of Outrage: What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities”, City Journal, 2017-12-17.

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