What the current political climate is doing to our country and our universities
OK, this genre of pearl-clutching about college kids not being racist enough is overdone enough as it is, but this article by noted blowhard Jonathan Haidt is too much. I have to rant about this piece of shit.
What is happening to our country, and our universities? It sometimes seems that everything is coming apart.
This is a complaint found in every generation in every civilization on the planet. We have written records of ancient Greeks and Romans making this exact same whine.
Anyway, then there’s a brief summary of cosmology 101 because we’re in for the biggest historical stretch ever.
I’d like you to consider an idea that I’ll call “the fine-tuned liberal democracy.” It begins by looking backward a few million generations and tracing our ancestry, from tree-dwelling apes to land-dwelling apes, to upright-walking apes, whose hands were freed up for tool use, to larger-brained hominids who made weapons as well as tools, and then finally to homo sapiens, who painted cave walls and painted their faces and danced around campfires and worshipped gods and murdered each other in large numbers.
But enough about the 2016 Republican National Convention.
Here is the fine-tuned liberal democracy hypothesis: as tribal primates, human beings are unsuited for life in large, diverse secular democracies, unless you get certain settings finely adjusted to make possible the development of stable political life. This seems to be what the Founding Fathers believed.
I’m not sure the slave-owners were as committed to diverse and secular democracy as you think.
Thankfully, our Founders were good psychologists. They knew that we are not angels; they knew that we are tribal creatures.
Yet they completely failed to anticipate hyper-partisanship, an oversight that will be remembered as the one that caused America’s downfall.
So what did the Founders do? They built in safeguards against runaway factionalism, such as the division of powers among the three branches, and an elaborate series of checks and balances.
No, they were not concerned with factionalism, they were afraid of three things: tyrants, unqualified demagogues, and leaders beholden to foreign powers. Bang up jobs guys.
What would Jefferson say if he were to take a tour of America’s most prestigious universities in 2017?
Thomas Jefferson owned people and didn’t know what bacteria is, who gives a shit.
Why do we hate and fear each other so much more than we used to as recently as the early 1990s? The political scientist Sam Abrams and I wrote an essay in 2015, listing ten causes. I won’t describe them all, but I’ll give you a unifying idea, another metaphor from physics: keep your eye on the balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces. Imagine three kids making a human chain with their arms, and one kid has his free hand wrapped around a pole. The kids start running around in a circle, around the pole, faster and faster. The centrifugal force increases. That’s the force pulling outward as the human centrifuge speeds up. But at the same time, the kids strengthen their grip. That’s the centripetal force, pulling them inward along the chain of their arms. Eventually the centrifugal force exceeds the centripetal force and their hands slip. The chain breaks. This, I believe, is what is happening to our country. I’ll briefly mention five of the trends that Abrams and I identified, all of which can be seen as increasing centrifugal forces or weakening centripetal forces.
This is the metaphor that underpins the rest of the article. It’s admittedly interesting, too bad he applies it in the most asinine ways possible.
External enemies: Fighting and winning two world wars, followed by the Cold War, had an enormous unifying effect.
We put Japanese people in camps and spent the 50s afraid our neighbors could be communist spies, but sure, unifying, right.
The Vietnam War was different, but in general, war is the strongest known centripetal force.
War brings people together except for that one time it tore the country apart. Also all the other times.
Immigration and diversity: This one is complicated and politically fraught. Let me be clear that I think immigration and diversity are good things, overall.
I smell a “but” coming.
The economists seem to agree that immigration brings large economic benefits. The complete dominance of America in Nobel prizes, music, and the arts, and now the technology sector, would not have happened if we had not been open to immigrants.
So we agree immigrants are the only ones doing the things which future generations will remember us fondly for.
But
There it is.
as a social psychologist, I must point out that immigration and diversity have many sociological effects, some of which are negative.
This is from someone who just implied the World Wars had no meaningful negative side effects and Vietnam was just a big oopsie.
The political scientist Robert Putnam found this in a paper titled “E Pluribus Unum,” in which he followed his data to a conclusion he clearly did not relish: “In the short run, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighborhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down.’ Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer.”
That’s questionable, but notice how it specifies “in the short run.” What does Putnam have to say about the long run? Let’s take a quote from the abstract from that very link: “In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits.” Weird that Haidt left that part out, he’s so committed to diversity.
I repeat that diversity has many good effects too, and I am grateful that America took in my grandparents from Russia and Poland, and my wife’s parents from Korea. But Putnam’s findings make it clear that those who want more diversity should be even more attentive to strengthening centripetal forces.
And yet you left out that Putnam agrees with you.
The final two causes I will mention are likely to arouse the most disagreement, because these are the two where I blame specific parties, specific sides. They are: the Republicans in Washington, and the Left on campus. Both have strengthened the centrifugal forces that are now tearing us apart.
Haidt sees too equivalent forces at work: the party that dominates every lever of government, makes all laws, controls the presidency and all executive departments, and the majority of state governments. On the other side, there’s a 19-year-old Oberlin student who wrote about safe spaces for the school newspaper.
The more radical Republican Party: When the Democrats ran the House of Representatives for almost all of six decades, before 1995, they did not treat the Republican minority particularly well.
Those six decades included long periods where Dixiecrats voted with Republicans more often than with their own party, giving Republicans a functional majority. There were also the so-called “Rockefeller Republicans”, socially liberal Republicans named after their de fact leader, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. They voted with Democrats a good chunk of the time. This blended partisan makeup sort of kills his whole belief in the permanent partisanship of American politics, so I don’t expect him to mention it, if he knows about it at all. I don’t know how Democrats mistreated Republicans during this period, maybe by almost impeaching their profoundly criminal president?
The new identity politics of the Left: Jonathan Rauch offers a simple definition of identity politics: a “political mobilization organized around group characteristics such as race, gender, and sexuality, as opposed to party, ideology, or pecuniary interest.” Rauch then adds: “In America, this sort of mobilization is not new, unusual, unAmerican, illegitimate, nefarious, or particularly leftwing.” This definition makes it easy for us to identify two kinds of identity politics: the good kind is that which, in the long run, is a centripetal force. The bad kind is that which, in the long run, is a centrifugal force.
Yes, I’m sure Haidt does find it quite easy to separate the civil rights movements he likes and those he doesn’t like. I’m going to predict the ones he likes are the ones led by dead people who aren’t here to make him uncomfortable. I predict the I Have A Dream speech will make an appearance.
When slavery was written into the Constitution, it set us up for the greatest explosion of our history. It was a necessary explosion, but we didn’t manage the healing process well in the Reconstruction era. When Jim Crow was written into Southern laws, it led to another period of necessary explosions, in the 1960s.
While I would contest that racial strife happened in fits and bursts, and not in a long continuous stream, I appreciate that Haidt acknowledges the thing that torpedoes his first billion paragraphs about the Founders’ commitment to peace and justice.
Martin Luther King’s rhetoric made it clear that this was a campaign to create conditions that would allow national reconciliation. He drew on the moral resources of the American civil religion to activate our shared identity and values: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note.” And: “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’
Called it.
Of course, some people saw the civil rights movement as divisive, or centrifugal.
“Some people” meaning the FBI and the guy who shot him.
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.
That has never happened.
Intersectionality is like NATO for social-justice activists.
I have no words.
Can you imagine a culture that is more antithetical to the mission of a university? Can you believe that many universities offer dozens of courses that promote this way of thinking? Some are even requiring that all students take such a course.
I’m only in my first year of grad school for linguistics but I can tell you that it’s literally impossible without an understanding of intersectionality.
Anyway, the rest of the article is just rephrasing the first parts, and then he plugs his website called “The Heterodox Academy” (it means “unconventional.”) Being unconventional or contrarian is like being rich: if you have to tell people you are, you’re probably not. The purported goal of this website is to challenge “conventional thinking” that became conventional supposedly without evidence. The ones listed in their FAQ are:
Humans are a blank slate, and “human nature” does not exist.
No one has believed this since the 60s, so you can triumphantly cross that one off your list.
All differences between human groups are caused by differential treatment of those groups, or by differential media portrayals of group members.
Groups? What groups? Like, theater nerds, history buffs, professional bowlers? Oh you mean races, your goal is to promote race science, got it.
Social stereotypes do not correspond to any real differences.
In case it wasn’t clear this was about racism.
In conclusion, Johnathan Haidt is racist buffoon and the only injustice at work is that he was ever given respect in the first place.
