The police guidance is unambiguous and publicly available, so why do so many commentators continue to deny what it says?
By: Andrew Doyle
Published: Jun 10, 2026
‘The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.’ These words are among the most frequently quoted from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. We see them in memes, in online arguments, repeated endlessly in opinion columns in the national press. The passage has turned into the very thing that Orwell hated the most: a cliché.
Yet ideas become clichés for a reason. So many aspects of Orwell’s novel seem prescient today, not least this tendency among authoritarians to blur the lines between truth and fiction and demand that the population play along. There is no clearer example than what has become known as ‘two-tier policing’. The evidence for it is overwhelming, and yet commentators, journalists, politicians, podcasters, activists and online loudmouths continue to deny it. Once again, the narrative has taken precedence over reality.
The notion that members of the public must be treated differently according to their group identity is not simply a speculative explanation for egregious police conduct. It is explicitly encoded in guidance published by the College of Policing and the NPCC (National Police Chiefs’ Council). There are numerous recorded interviews with officers who tell us that their job is to investigate and arrest those who have caused offence to particular groups. Multiple whistleblowers have revealed details of training sessions they have been compelled to attend that have instructed them to take a two-tier approach.
But you wouldn’t know any of this had you only read a recent article by Andy Hughes, LBC’s Crime Correspondent. Hughes argues that it is ‘nonsense to say police are told to treat people differently based on their ethnicity’ and claims to have spoken to dozens of officers who have confirmed his view. It seems odd that Hughes does not realise that there is nothing particularly surprising about officers repeating the party line. Far more revealing are those who are speaking out about two-tier policing – none of whom Hughes appears to have spoken to – in spite of the risk to their career. They’re called ‘whistleblowers’ for a reason.
Then there is the police guidance itself. Hughes attempts to shrug off the Police Anti-Racism Commitment on the grounds that he doesn’t understand it:
‘The NPCC guidance says: “Producing equality of policing outcomes for people from different ethnic groups by responding to individuals and communities according to their specific needs, circumstances and experiences.”
I’ve read this section several times, and I still don’t know what it means.
The wording is “clumsy”, as the NPCC admits, and police chiefs say they will review the guidance.
But to suggest this means every police officer is now told to treat people differently based on race is inaccurate – and dangerous.’
A generous interpretation would be that Hughes simply hadn’t read the following sentences in the guidance, which could not be clearer even for those unfamiliar with the activist jargon.
And there you have it. The ‘Police Anti-Racism Commitment’ explicitly states that officers should treat people differently based on race and that they must reject the principle of equality before the law. Their commitment to racial equity, it says, ‘does not mean treating everyone “the same” or being “colour blind” (racial equality)’. Of course, it’s unlikely that Hughes stopped reading at that point. It’s more plausible that he realised that the document flatly contradicted his narrative and decided to omit the relevant line.
However, the ‘clumsy’ language that Hughes cites (but does not understand) is evidence enough. When the guidance calls for ‘equality of policing outcomes’, it is saying that suspects should be treated differently according to their race in order to reduce disparities. It draws on a principle of Critical Race Theory, that equality of outcome is evidence of unequal treatment. As Ibram X. Kendi puts it, ‘racial inequality is evidence of racist policy’.
It’s the same logic that prevented Valdo Calocane, a paranoid schizophrenic, from being sectioned by the NHS. Having perpetrated a violent crime, mental health staff did not detain him because they were concerned about ‘over-representation of black men’ among those committed. They were simply following the NHS guidelines, but Calocane went on to murder two teenagers and an older man in June 2023. When ‘racial equity’ is adopted as policy, it costs lives.
Let’s have a closer look at the evidence of institutional capture as reflected in the official police guidelines.
The key change in policing practice occurred because of the shift from equality (treating everyone the same) to equity (treating people unequally to ensure equal outcomes). These principles are oppositional, but are frequently presented as synonymous. When Sir William MacPherson wrote his report in 1999 about the racially-motivated murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence six years prior, the need for racial equality was emphasised. This was not a controversial stance, and the vast majority of the public still agree that racism in law enforcement must not be tolerated.
Twenty-one years after the report, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) submitted written evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee for a follow-up inquiry. By this point, there had been a clear shift away from equality and towards equity, although the specific term was not yet used. While the NPCC made a pledge ‘to embed diversity, equality and inclusion into our workforce and into the services provided to communities’, point 9 was perhaps the most significant: ‘We are committed to understanding disparity within policing and to explaining that disparity. If we cannot, we will reform.’
We all understand that disparity of outcome does not automatically mean that there has been unequal treatment. Nobody, for instance, claims that since 96% of the prison population are male, that must mean that sexism against men is embedded into the system. So while black people are represented in prison at roughly three times their share of the population, we cannot assume that this is because of racism in the police force. Tony Sewell, the chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities in 2021, has persuasively explained how family structure, education and socioeconomic factors can account for the disparity.
In other words, the NPCC was proceeding from a false premise. But it was only after the death of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent Black Lives Matter riots and protests that the concept of ‘equity’ became the guiding principle. The Police Race Action Plan, launched in May 2022, opens by explaining that it had been authored in response to an event that had taken place across the Atlantic and in a completely different context of police practices.
‘In the summer of 2020, nations across the globe were rocked by the outpouring of emotion following the murder of George Floyd. It provided a catalyst for the expression of deep concerns about the social injustice experienced by Black people. This was the same in the UK. Although this was a wider expression against societal injustice, it was about policing.’
The document repeatedly referred to the need for ‘equitable’ rather than ‘equal’ treatment. By now the seeds had been thoroughly sown for the abandonment of the principle of equality before the law. By the time we get to the updated Police Race Action Plan of 2025, also produced by the NPCC and the College of Policing, the language is explicit: ‘The police service of England and Wales is committed to anti-racism and racial equity’. Every force in England and Wales has been encouraged to implement this plan, which has led to local forces producing their own likeminded policy guidance.
In 2025, the Met Police commissioned what it described as ‘two key documents’ - 30 Patterns of Harm and A Structural Companion Guide - as part of its London Race Action Plan. The analysis was based on the highly tenuous premise - expressed as though it were incontestable - that ‘anti-Black harm is not incidental to policing; it is structured into its logic’. On the ideal of police neutrality, the author of the review (Dr Shereen Daniels) had this to say:
‘Neutrality is often presented as a position of fairness, balance, or objectivity. But in practice, especially in institutions like the Met, neutrality is not neutral. It reflects dominant norms, particularly whiteness, in how risk, credibility, professionalism, and even “evidence” are defined. To claim neutrality is to claim distance from bias. But that distance is not real. It is structurally coded. It hides power while appearing impartial.’
Such dogma was the inevitable result of the ideological capture of the College of Policing and the NPCC, whose Police Race Action Planestablished a new performance framework for law enforcement. This was then filtered down through training, policies and local action plans. Suddenly, officers were being told to acknowledge their ‘white privilege’ when they should have been honing strategies for crime prevention. The influence of this ideology has been undeniable, but that hasn’t stopped many from denying it.
Those who cling to their belief that two-tier policing is a myth have a Sisyphean struggle ahead of them. They will have to explain why all of the relevant guidelines explicitly promote a two-tier system and expect officers to implement it. They will have to account for why so many police officers have described training sessions in which they are instructed to treat suspects according to the principle of equity rather than equality. In short, it is their unenviable task to disprove what the evidence so plainly reveals. Good luck with that.
By prioritizing ideological concerns over scientific inquiry, anthropology is losing its ability to educate and innovate.
By: Elizabeth Weiss
Published; Jan 17, 2025
Biological anthropology and archaeology are facing a censorship crisis. Censorship can be defined simply as the suppression of speech, public communication, or information, often because it is deemed harmful or offensive. It can be enforced by government agencies or private institutions. Even self-censorship is increasingly prevalent, such as when an author decides not to publish something due to fear of backlash from their colleagues, or the belief that their findings may cause harm.
In these fields, censorship is primarily driven by professional associations like the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the California Society for Archaeology, academic journals (often produced by these associations) such as Bioarchaeology International, universities, and museums, including the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The focus of this censorship largely involves the suppression of images—including X-rays and CT-scans—of human remains and funerary objects, which are artifacts found in graves.
Biological anthropologists, such as bioarchaeologists (who study human remains from the archaeological record), have historically used photos and X-rays of skeletal remains and mummies to explore disease patterns of past peoples, teach new methods of age estimation and sex identification, and attract new students to the field of biological anthropology. Archaeologists use photos of artifacts to facilitate comparisons with other artifacts, aid in reconstructing past cultures, and explore topics like the peopling of the Americas, prehistoric trade patterns, and the emergence of new technologies. These are just a few of the many ways images have been used in the field.
Yet, in recent years, the use of photos of human remains and artifacts has faced increasing censorship. For example, the guidelines of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) and its journals state: “Out of respect for diverse cultural traditions, photographs of full or explicit human remains are not accepted for publication in any SAA journal.”
Additionally, they add that “line drawings or other renderings of human remains may be an acceptable substitute for photographs.” In other words, they also may not be acceptable! So, the photo on the left would definitely not be accepted in SAA journals, and the image on the right may or may not be accepted.
In conference bookrooms, books featuring covers with photos or realistic images of bones are now being rejected for display. Ironically, just ten years ago, my cover photo from Paleopathology in Perspective: Bone Health and Disease through Time was so popular that someone stole the poster from the SAA conference bookroom. Just three years later, however, the SAA wouldn’t allow my publisher to buy advertising space using the cover of my book Reading the Bones: Activity, Biology, and Culture. Now, even realistic images of human remains are shunned! Somehow, I doubt my latest book, On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors, will make it into any anthropology or archaeology conference bookrooms either!
Southeastern Archaeology, the journal of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, has implemented a policy that it “will no longer publish photographs of funerary objects/belongings.” This is an expansion of their previous policy against publishing photographs of human remains. They now add that “in lieu of photographs, authors may choose to include line drawings or other representations of funerary objects/belongings.” This decision was initially made without member input, leading go backlash against the decision. However, after a discussion and a vote, the censorship was upheld. Majority rule is no way to run a scientific organization—which should be done on adherence to the principles and methodologies of science!
Not to be outdone by the southeastern archaeologists, the Society for California Archaeology (SCA) declared that “NO depictions of the remains of any specific person, regardless of ancestry, are to be included in any presentations, including photographs, drawings, X-rays, 3-D models, etc.” So, forget displaying any historic figures such as the mummy of Lenin, the death mask of Ishi, or the skeletal remains of Joseph Merrick (also known as the Elephant Man, who taught many people that physical deformity does not equate to a lack of intelligence). This restriction even extends to individuals like Jeremy Bentham, a professor from London College, who explicitly requested his preserved body be displayed, illustrating the breadth of these new policies. All of these and many others are now strictly off limits!
While banning photos, the SCA does permit the use of “[d]iagrams of generic skeletons, bones, teeth, or other body tissues.” Additionally, at their conferences, “[a] caution symbol will be placed next to all presentations discussing human remains in the program and on signage outside the door of the session so that those who wish to avoid this subject matter can easily do so.” Is education truly about avoiding uncomfortable information and materials?
The AAA’s Commission on the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains has ruled that images and digital materials must be treated as parts of bodies—and, thus, not published in any public spaces, including on social media. They state:
The use of images and any other digital materials (e.g. maps or GIS) derived from human tissues or Ancestral remains should be considered as part of the respectful treatment of those whose actual remains are used. This treatment acknowledges that their use should be restricted to defined (and consented) purposes, and that such use should remain confined to a protected, nonpublic space (and should never be displayed on social media or other non-password protected internet sites, including educational sites, and museums).
In other words, even maps constructed with DNA information are now subject to restriction!
They also plan to require members to take an “ethics pledge” to join or renew their membership. This is to ensure that no one goes rogue and shows a human bone in a place where someone might actually see it.
Journals that once served as valuable resources for understanding bone pathology (or disease) are now discarding the most important tool of all—images. Bioarchaeology International now demands “explicit recent permission” from descendants for the use of photos or images of human remains, even if the image were taken before these requirements and had been previously published (often on multiple occasions). These are referred to as “legacy images.” The journal further states that “if no permissions are forthcoming, the manuscripts are not considered for review.” Bioarchaeology International is not alone in censoring the use of legacy images; nearly all peer-reviewed anthropology and archaeology journals now enforce a similar policy.
One exception is the American Association of Biological Anthropology, which publishes the prestigious American Journal of Biological Anthropology. This organization specifies that the requirement to obtain permission for images and data of human remains applies only to new data; “legacy data is not included.” One wonders how long these comparatively ‘courageous’ holdouts will last before caving in. Currently, they have a committee developing a policy on human remains.
The International Journal of Paleopathology specializes in case studies of rare pathologies, where photos are essential to conveying information. The editorial board acknowledges the usefulness of photos, but they also state that:
While careful description of pathological lesions is essential to research in paleopathology, authors are encouraged to consider whether photographs of human remains are critical to the presentation of the research. If not essential, out of respect for descendent communities, they should be replaced with drawings or included as supplementary material. Authors may wish to consult the editor regarding these issues.
Can a line drawing really do justice to the complex and intricate changes that occur on skeletons due to diseases like osteomyelitis (bone infections), osteoarthritis, cribra orbitalia (a sign of anemia), or the various forms of dental disease seen sometimes in a single individual?
Beyond this censorship, institutions are also toeing the ideological line to exclude images of human remains. In September 2023, Penn Museum decided that its inventory would not include such images. And, the renowned Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which aims to educate the public about anatomical medicine and health, has removed all images of human remains from its online database. This includes the image of Carol Orzel, who had specifically wished that her body be displayed to educate others about fibrodysplasia ossificans progressive, the painful, debilitating, and fatal bone and cartilage disease she suffered from.
The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History issues a warning to anyone who might find human remains: “Never take photos of human remains in our region; that is culturally inappropriate here.” But Santa Barbara is a region that encompasses many cultures, including some Central Mexican communities who do not view photographing human remains as inappropriate, as they celebrate their ancestral past by displaying the dead. For example, Lisa Holtzover and Juan R. Argueta note in their 2017 article that in the central Mexican town of Xaltocan, indigenous residents support archaeological research and the exhibition of ancient human remains. Yet, North American academics often criticize their cultural preferences, even while they claim to be decolonizing the field. In their blind adherence to wokeism, academics’ patronizing “we know best” approach towards indigenous peoples who deviate from their narrative exemplifies a white savior complex. Ironically, those who claim to oppose racism in their quest for wokeism are themselves perpetuating it. What next? Should we give Egyptian mummies a Christian burial in the name of decolonization?
Universities, especially in California, have also imposed complete moratoria on the use of human remains images. For example, on August 30, 2023, California State University Bakersfield’s president issued a moratorium that stated:
[T]he university is placing a moratorium on the research, teaching, display, imaging, and circulation of human remains and cultural items (including archival material, notes, movies, and data) that are potentially subject to NAGPRA and CalNAGPRA.
Similarly, on March 26, 2024, the president of California Polytechnic Pomona issued a memorandum stating:
Cal Poly Pomona will consult with Tribes prior to access, use, distribution or display of potentially sensitive or proprietary information. This includes but is not limited to images, renderings, and reproductions of ancestral remains and cultural items that are or have been in a university’s collection.
The universities are dressing up their actions as compliance with national and state reburial laws, yet these laws do not yet ban the use of images. And, from the look of anthropologists’ self-censoriousness and the acts of university presidents, new laws are likely not even necessary to restrict scientific research and educational efforts.
But this isn’t just a US problem. For instance, Uppsala University in Sweden advises that “photographs of human remains from indigenous ethnic groups are not normally to be published.” Similarly, the National Museum of Scotland has put out a statement that “All images of human remains except those that are wrapped have been removed from our online collections database.” At the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, this policy resulted in the absurd covering up of a mummy that was wrapped because of the photo behind the mummy contained images of skulls from a forensic collection.
One may wonder what has led to such vast censorship. Progressive anthropologists have decided that images—and, in some cases, data—from human remains and funerary objects cause harm to indigenous peoples. They adopt the narrative from indigenous activists that these images are dangerous, rather than explaining the importance of research and dispelling the notion that societal ills like alcoholism, missing women and children, and poverty stem from evil spirits roaming the earth and wreaking havoc on their lives.
For instance, in a 2020 book chapter on digitizing anthropological collections, Laure Spake and colleagues, citing the Smithsonian’s collaboration with the Tlingit, stated, “the disturbance of Ancestors and their belongings can result in physical danger for the living.” Ironically, the authors used this argument to advocate for 3D scanning and creating replicas to allow for the rapid reburial of human remains as quickly as possible—a viewpoint that is now considered outdated!
At a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act meeting on January 5, 2023, there was a discussion on the deletion of digital data. Even non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were discussed, although those discussing them didn’t even know what they were. During the meeting, Hawaiian Native activists argued that it’s possible to “entice the spirit of someone to inhabit” photos, digital data, and replicas, which they assert can be harmful. Consequently, the tribe opposes making scans and casts.
Larry Zimmerman and Margaret Conkey, in their 2024 article for the SAA Record, argue that control over photos and data should belong to Indigenous communities because it is “respectful” to believe their feelings of harm. In their words, “when someone tells you that what you are saying or doing hurts them and you truly respect them, you will make every effort you can to eliminate or at least to understand the cause of the hurt.”
Furthermore, in the 2024 AAA Ethical Commission on Human Remains, Sabrina Agarwal and her colleagues repeatedly imply that harm will come to descendent communities from research. The term “harm” actually was mentioned 44 times, including in the statement:
As an ethical approach to ethical solutions, the Commission chose to meet with representatives of those most affected by anthropological work with ancestral remains to learn their assessments of how they might be harmed or protected from harm when research and education is considered.
In a 2020 article in Sapiens, Chip Colwell wrote that “photographs of human are problematic because of specific cultural beliefs.” He elaborates that the Navajo, for instance, believe encountering spirits of the dead can sicken those who see them. He helpfully then adds that photos are more harmful than line drawings, 3D scans, or casts.
Also in 2020, Deborah Thomas, then the editor-in-chief of American Anthropologist, selected a photo of Margaret Mead with skulls for an issue featuring a special section on the anthropology of global white supremacy, complete with a republished conversation between Mead and James Baldwin. The image sparked a social media uproar and was said to be violent, racist, and harmful to indigenous and black communities. Thomas, agreeing that the image produced trauma, changed the cover and issued a groveling apology, which included the statement that “We know the role that anthropology has played in the erasure of Indigenous peoples in the Americas through its salvage/savage ethnography project and its continued use of human remains for ‘research’ purposes.”
Unfortunately, by leaving anthropology and archaeology devoid of images of human remains and funerary objects, we will learn less about the past. Legacy data will not be allowed for comparative research, and our next generation of forensic anthropologists will be poorly trained. More troubling is that non-scientists who attribute normal human variation to supernatural or alien influences will continue to captivate young minds with sensational images, drawing them towards pseudoscience instead of a genuine scientific understanding of the world.
Moreover, we should not expect censorship in anthropology and archaeology will be limited to new publications featuring human remains. I have no doubt that woke academics and publishers will start to remove previously-published materials. For example, the University of Florida Press deleted the images from my blog post, “Human Variation: More Than Skin Deep!”—which was intended to promote my book Reading the Bones—two years after its initial publication on their blog.
What is the solution for anthropologists? Woke anthropologists suggest a different mindset is needed. Zimmerman and Conkey argue that archaeologists will be required to abandon “cherished ideas like academic freedom” and “relinquishing complete control, ownership, or even stewardship of excavated materials” to continue working in the field. Additionally, the AAA Commission on the Ethical Treatment of Human Remains would also like to curtail our desire for academic freedom. They write, in a scolding tone, that “Academic freedom is not synonymous with ‘unrestricted access.’ Scholars, educators and museum curators must be responsible to descendants’ concerns for the dignified treatment of their dead.”
Once academic freedom is relinquished and the data—images and all—are in the hands of activist descendant communities, don’t expect new scientific discoveries. Instead, expect woke fairy tales arising out of victim narratives.
Censorship (and self-censorship) of images should not be seen as an isolated issue. It’s symptomatic of a wider pathology afflicting the field. Anthropology is dying. But when it’s finally dead, don’t expect to see a picture of the body!
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About the Author
Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at San Jose State University and National Association of Scholars Board Member. Author of On the Warpath: My Battles with Indians, Pretendians, and Woke Warriors.
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This is unabashed corruption.
Any organization or institution which implements policies like this must be stripped of all government (i.e. taxpayer) funding. You don't get to implement ideological dogma when the taxpayer is paying for it.
The notion that we abandoned our old faiths and replaced them with new ones is too tidy and simplistic.
By: Matt Johnson
Published: Jul 24, 2023
Remember “New Atheism”? In the mid-to-late aughts, public debates over religion suddenly expanded in scope and intensity. University auditoria, theaters, and even churches drew capacity crowds for public discussions about the existence of god and whether or not religion is a positive force in the world. Humanist and secular groups proliferated, particularly on campus and online, and a series of blockbuster books by authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens sold millions of copies worldwide, catapulting atheism into the mainstream. In their turn, these books inspired a constellation of other writers and intellectuals who believed that an explicit attack on religion was long overdue.
One of those writers was Konstantin Kisin. In a recent Substack article, Kisin explains that he was drawn to the New Atheists for their ability to “re-articulate the importance of Enlightenment values of truth, science and liberty from religious dogma.” He describes them as “daring, counter-cultural figures who could use their erudition, wit and refreshing honesty to effortlessly take apart the tired old arguments for a religious worldview” He says they were “smart, charismatic and, above all, they were cool.” He adds:
The new atheists were exciting because they were saying something new, challenging the dogma of their day and speaking truth to power. Not content with proving that religion wasn’t true, they ventured further in attempting to prove religion was, at best, unnecessary and, more likely, harmful. To this end, Dawkins wrote The God Delusion in 2006, with Hitchens delivering God is Not Great the following year. The argument was no longer about encouraging religious people to calm down and leave the rest of us alone, it was increasingly that religion was inherently wrong and bad. It was around this point that I began to lose my faith in atheism.
So, after praising the New Atheists for the courage and honesty with which they confronted religion, Kisin declares that this combative approach was, in fact, the source of his disillusion. It’s a strangely uneven passage. Kisin acknowledges that the appeal of the New Atheists—what made them “daring, counter-cultural figures”—was their willingness to deconstruct “tired old arguments for a religious worldview” and fight for “liberty from religious dogma.” He’s probably right about this—it was difficult to be a fan of the New Atheists without seeing some value in their claim that religion is “inherently wrong and bad.” They aggressively violated social taboos that protected religion from forceful criticism. They described religion as a powerful engine of irrationality, a source of tribalism, hatred, and conflict, and a generally noxious force that (in Hitchens’s words) should be relegated to the “bawling and fearful infancy of our species.”
If Kisin didn’t like this sort of rhetoric, it’s difficult to see what he admired about New Atheism in the first place. As he explains his reasons for rejecting New Atheism—he now describes himself as a “lapsed atheist”—his rationale becomes even more opaque:
First, it was clear to me that to attempt to challenge Islamic extremism with facts and logic as Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris had done was to fail on purpose. Despite their efforts, most of the Western world today operates under de facto blasphemy laws which are enforced not by religious activists lobbying for censorship but by knife-wielding fanatics and suicide bombers.
It’s bizarre to criticize the New Atheists—and Harris and Hitchens in particular—for the existence of “de facto blasphemy laws” in the West, as it would be difficult to find two figures who were more vociferously opposed to self-censorship and liberal capitulation in the face of Islamic extremism in the 21st Century. And surely the New Atheists’ use of “facts and logic” to resist theocratic encroachments on civil society shouldn’t be a point against them. Given Kisin’s position on the threat of Islamic fundamentalism, shouldn’t he be a little more tolerant of the New Atheists’ unsparing criticism of religious violence and extremism? Instead, he writes:
The liberalism that the new atheists so enthusiastically espoused, the idea that we should be free to criticise, mock and satirise anything, including religion, only works when the Government is willing to protect you from the consequences. In seeking to liberate us from the tyrannical instincts of dogmatic Christians, the new atheists delivered us into the hands of a different and far more pernicious religious zealotry from which the ordinary citizen has no security at all.
Of course free expression in liberal societies is ultimately dependent upon legal and physical protections from the state. When homicidal theocrats bearing automatic weapons show up at the offices of Charlie Hebdo or an acolyte of Ayatollah Khomeini jumps onstage and repeatedly plunges a knife into Salman Rushdie, the confrontation with religious violence is no longer a matter of ideas, it’s a matter of law enforcement. Kisin’s argumnt recalls the line taken by British reactionaries who complained about the taxpayer-funded protection that Rushdie received after Khomeini first issued his fatwa in 1989—a cringing complaint Kisin understands well, as he has criticized it before. Kisin’s second sentence implies that the New Atheists’ attacks on Christianity somehow increased the threat posed by Islamic radicalism, but as noted, New Atheists like Hitchens and Harris were every bit as critical of Islam, if not more so.
The title of Kisin’s article is “The Atheism Delusion.” He now regards religion as “useful and inevitable.” The argument that religion is inevitable is one the New Atheists have always taken seriously: Hitchens described religion as “ineradicable”; Dennett’s book Breaking the Spell examined the ways in which religion evolves and survives over time; a central part of Harris’s career is channeling the religious impulse into secular forms of introspection and mindfulness; and Dawkins acknowledges that religion may reflect a deep psychological need among many people. Where the New Atheists part company with Kisin is over his argument that religion is useful—particularly in the third decade of the 21st Century.
The religious impulse may be ineradicable, but that doesn’t mean the level of overall religious commitment in society is stable. When Harris published The End of Faith in 2004 (the first of the major New Atheist books), membership in religious institutions among American adults was around two-thirds—a proportion that had collapsed to 47 percent by 2020. This means that the percentage of American adults who said they belonged to a church, synagogue, or mosque fell below a majority “for the first time in Gallup’s eight-decade trend” a few years ago.
Recent Pew surveys reflect this trend: since 2007, the proportion of Americans who identify with Christianity has fallen from 78 percent to 63 percent, while those who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” surged from 16 percent to 29 percent. The share of Americans who say they “seldom or never” pray has jumped from 18 percent to 32 percent, along with a corresponding decrease (58 percent to 45 percent) in the number who pray daily. While 16 percent of Americans said religion was not at all or not too important in their lives in 2007, one-third now say so. Meanwhile, the proportion who describe religion as “very important” is down from 56 percent to 41 percent over the same period.
There has been a similar phenomenon of secularization in Western Europe. Although the majority of Western Europeans identify as Christians, the prevalence of this identification varies greatly—from 80 percent in Italy to 41 percent in the Netherlands. Across the region, there have been significant declines in the populations who say they remain Christian after being raised Christian: 83 percent to 55 percent in Belgium, 79 percent to 51 percent in Norway, 92 percent to 66 percent in Spain, and large decreases in a dozen other countries. At the same time, the proportion of Western Europeans who are now religiously unaffiliated shot up: just 15 percent of Norweigians say they were raised unaffiliated, but the proportion who are unaffiliated now has risen to 43 percent. In the Netherlands, the increase was 22 percent to 48 percent; in Belgium, 12 percent to 38 percent; in Spain, five percent to 30 percent.
As traditional religion declines in the West, it has become increasingly fashionable to argue that new secular religions are taking its place: hyper-tribal and increasingly intolerant political factions; conspiracy cults like QAnon; the “transhumanism” movement (which looks forward to a day when technology will help us live forever); environmental movements that warn of apocalyptic consequences if their counsel isn’t heeded; and social justice activists who decry the original sins of racism and other forms of bigotry.
According to Kisin, the “absence of old religion seems to produce only a vacuum into which a new religion rushes in.” Kisin believes “old religion” is a bulwark against what he describes as the “woke warriors who think every problem in society is caused by an ‘ism.’” He argues that wokeness is a “new religion [that] has just as little regard for the truth as the old ones. That’s why Richard Dawkins who spent his best years arguing with creationists is now increasingly forced to explain basic biological concepts like the inability to change your sex by incantation on national television.”
Yet again, Kisin has picked a strange fight with the New Atheists. As he notes, Dawkins is decidedly anti-woke—he’s often critical of the language used by trans activists (which downplays the biological reality of sex differences), he argues that there’s no such thing as “Western” science (which is often presented as somehow racist or neo-colonial), and so on. Meanwhile, Harris is concerned about what he regards as the “woke capture” of major institutions, and Hitchens warned readers of his 2001 book Letters to a Young Contrarian that they should “have nothing to do with identity politics.”
By undermining traditional religion, Kisin believes the New Atheists opened the door to the emergence of new progressive dogmas. This idea is increasingly pervasive: “The rise of this new religion,” writes Toby Young in a recent essay for the Catholic Herald, “has coincided with the decline of Christian worship in the English-speaking world … which suggests it’s filling a ‘God-shaped hole.’” In his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, Douglas Murray argues that the collapse of “grand narratives” once provided by religion has driven efforts to “embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will.” Books like John McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos make similar claims.
It’s true that contemporary progressivism has acquired certain religious characteristics: zealous adherents, rituals of excommunication, a concept of original sin (in the form of racism or other types of bigotry), and ways to atone for that sin (such as taking the knee). But the same could be said of many social and political movements throughout history. Godless communism, for example, has often been described by former adherents as a religious phenomenon—a 1949 collection of anti-communist essays by André Gide, Richard Wright, Ignazio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, and Louis Fischer was titled The God That Failed. It isn’t easy to adjudicate what constitutes a secular religion.
The notion that we abandoned our old faiths and replaced them with the new alternatives is too tidy and simplistic. For one thing, the process of secularization has been gaining momentum for decades, long before the “Great Awokening.” For another, unlike the Pew researchers who ask respondents how their religious views have evolved over time, the critics of progressive dogma don’t provide much evidence for their claims about the ways in which religion is supposed to have been supplanted by this new faith. Isn’t it possible that many religious people identify with elements of progressivism? Black Americans are disproportionately religious and far more likely than their fellow citizens to support the Black Lives Matter movement (81 percent versus a national average of 51 percent). However, they’re less progressive when it comes to issues such as gay rights—black Protestants are considerably less likely than their white counterparts to support gay marriage. Young even admits that wokeness has “made converts within the established Churches, particularly the Church of England.”
Kisin, Murray, Peterson, and other figures who decry the religious aspects of contemporary progressivism are making an implicit (and sometimes explicit) claim: that the restoration of traditional faith would keep other forms of ideological commitment in check. But there’s a long history of Christian compatibility with a vast range of social and political movements—some good, some bad.
Many Nazis were Christians, and there were strong links between Catholicism and fascism in Europe during World War II. But some priests and other religious leaders resisted the Nazis, while the Western countries that fought fascism were predominantly Christian. In the early United States, Christianity was used to justify slavery. But John Brown’s Christian faith led him to wage war on slavery, and many early abolitionists (such as William Wilberforce) were evangelical Christians. During the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and other leading figures in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference invoked Christianity to oppose racism and advocate for freedom and equality. But secularists like Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph were instrumental in this movement as well.
European powers rationalized their imperialist domination of countries in Africa and Asia with the belief that they were bringing Christian civilization to the world. The United States did the same in the Western hemisphere with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. Yet many theologians in Latin America developed liberation theology in opposition to colonialism, racism, and other forms of oppression. Christianity is embraced by conservatives and libertarians who believe the Bible teaches thrift and personal responsibility. But it’s also embraced by progressives who think the central message of equality in the eyes of god is an argument for redistributive policies and greater support for the poor. The abandonment of religion isn’t a prerequisite for fervent commitment to any political cause or movement—including “wokeism.”
No matter how exhaustively the word “religion” is redefined, there’s plenty of evidence that secularization has taken place across the Western world. But there’s far less evidence for the opportunistic claim that this shift is responsible for the emergence of another socio-political movement. Those who say otherwise may have a “god-shaped hole” in their own lives, but they shouldn’t assume that everyone else suffers from the same affliction. More and more commentators are attempting to resuscitate religion under the guise of anti-woke politics, but they’re just exchanging one dogma for another.
[ Via: https://archive.is/PAij8 ]
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The solution to the problems caused by one religion is not another religion.
A colleague sent two challenges to me, posted by Jordan Peterson, suggesting I should respond. I’m happy to do so because I greatly respect
By: Richard Dawkins
Published: Aug 4, 2023
A colleague sent two challenges to me, posted by Jordan Peterson, suggesting I should respond. I’m happy to do so because I greatly respect Dr Peterson’s courageous stance against a bossy, intolerant thought-police whose Orwellian newspeak threatens enlightened rationalism. The hero of 1984, Winston Smith, was eventually persuaded by O’Brien that, if the Party wills it, 2+2 = 5. Winston had earlier found it necessary to stake out his credo. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”.
My answer to the question is no if you include supernaturalism in your definition of a religion, and a dear colleague takes her stand on this distinction. But the following three similarities are enough for me to justify a yes answer to Jordan’s question. The first of the three is characteristic of religions in general. The other two are kin to Christianity in particular.
1. Heresy hunting. Ruthlessly uncompromising, relentlessly unforgiving persecution of heretics: “Kill a TERF today”. “'If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face” etc. There is an orthodoxy, not written down in one particular scripture but understood by all votaries. And woe betide you if you transgress. As a minimum you’ll find yourself in the Twitterstocks, pelted with abusive epithets as a bigot. And you may well find yourself out of a job as universities, governments and businesses queue up to signal their virtue. Such latter-day Torquemadism rams home the fact that what we have here is a cult with its own religiously enforced dogma: dogma that makes no sense to anyone outside, but which resonates perfectly with cult insiders – the evangelical leaders and their sheep-like followers.
Why is a (white) woman in America vilified and damned if she identifies as black but lauded if she identifies as a man? That’s topsy-turvy, because race really is a continuum whereas sex is one of the few genuine binaries of biology. Why do journalists, police, and prison authorities respectfully kowtow to a convicted rapist by referring to “her” as “she”, even as “she” uses “her erect penis” to assault yet more women? Why do so many of us go along with a distortion of language so perverse that it comes perilously close to 2 + 2 = 5. We know the answer. Cowardice. Too many of us are afraid of the baying mob.
2. Hereditary Guilt. One of Christianity’s nastier doctrines is the notion that we are all, even tiny babies, born in sin. Every baby inherits, via a long lineage of semen according to St Augustine, the sin of Adam. Augustine could not be expected to know that Adam never existed and therefore could own neither sin nor semen. But post-Darwinian “sophisticated theologians” should know better, and their learned treatises are harder to respect
Today’s Original Sins are slavery and colonial oppression. All white people are born in sin, the sin of their ancestors. From the moment they are born, all white people partake in the “institutional racism” handed down, like Adam’s semen, from their great great great grandfathers, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon their children unto the third and fourth generation . . .” (Deuteronomy 5:9).
3. Transubstantiation. Roman Catholics are required to believe that bread and wine, when a priest says certain magic words over them, become the body and blood of Christ. In a stronger sense than Protestants, who see the bread and wine as mere symbols. Catholics invoke Aristotle’s silly distinction between “accidentals” and true “substance”. The accidentals of wafer and wine remain wafer and wine, but in their substance they become body and blood. Hence the word “transubstantiation”. Similarly, in the cult of woke, a man speaks the magic incantation, “I am a woman”, and thereby becomes a woman in true substance, while “her” intact penis and hairy chest are mere Aristotelian accidentals. Transsexuals have transubstantiated genitals. One thing to be said in favour of (today’s) Catholics: at least they don’t (nowadays) insist that everybody else must go along with their beliefs.
Peterson is right to imply, in the rhetorical tone of his question, that there is a religion of woke. I have mentioned two specific similarities to Christianity. But more important is their extreme, intolerant zeal, shared with typical new cults, just beginning their journey towards eventual settled status as religions with a long and dignified tradition.
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And so to Peterson’s second challenge:
I see this accusation again and again in graffiti scribbled on the lavatory wall that is Twitter. Peterson’s tone is more civilised, of course, but the message is the same. We who have spoken out against the irrationality of religion are to blame for the rise of the irrationality of woke.
There is a certain logic that might be said to underlie the indictment. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a personal hero of mine, has suggested that in some parts of the world we need Christianity as a bulwark against Islam. Both religions are equally nonsensical, but Islam is the more evil. In the words of Hilaire Belloc,
Always keep a hold of nurse
For fear of finding something worse.
Belloc’s great hero GK Chesterton is supposed (perhaps wrongly) to be the author of the following quip: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing. They then become capable of believing in anything.”
I get the point, but I love truth too much to go along with it. I, along with Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Victor Stenger, Lawrence Krauss, Michael Shermer, and others, are against all religions without exception. And that includes the cult of woke. To oppose one irrational dogma by promoting another irrational dogma would be a betrayal of everything I love and stand for.
So much has been said about “wokeness” being a religion that it can fill a book—perhaps several. John McWhorter has written one, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see more in the next few years. I’ve quibbled with McWhorter a bit about the “religion” label, not simply because many find it inflammatory and it tends to shut conversations down, but also because it really is inaccurate. “Wokeness” isn’t literally a religion. There are legal and institutional reasons this distinction matters, and I often worry that the comparison McWhorter and others make causes more miscommunication than elucidation on the topic.
I can understand the comparison, however. Having grown up Catholic, it’s impossible for me not to see the resemblance. I’ve often said that a great deal of the seemingly insane and incongruous behavior displayed by many of those we call “woke”—and, unsurprisingly, by many of those we call “anti-woke” as well—only makes sense through a religious lens. Much of their precepts are taken on faith rather than evidence; much of their tenets are considered unquestionable; much of their logic seems circular and self-fulfilling; and many of their adherents behave in vicious and intolerant ways toward those who disagree. I still think that’s true, and I think McWhorter is right when he posits that alien anthropologists would have trouble distinguishing these relatively new dogmas from the more standard iron-age fare we’re all used to.
However, I think that same familiarity is causing some of us to misfire when it comes to what we should do about it. A certain cohort seem to believe not just that “wokeness” is a religion, but that it is a replacement religion—a pernicious new ideology meant to fill the hole left by our collective secularism. As we moved away from the church, they argue, we still had that deeply human need for meaning, community, and purpose. We needed something to get us out of bed, to make our lives feel important, and to make ourselves feel a part of something greater. Those desires had to get fulfilled somehow, and what some of us found were the political ideologies currently wreaking havoc on our discourse and institutions. As a result of these new dogmas, we seem hopelessly polarized and incapable of productive communication; we consume ourselves with out-group hostility and in-group factionalizing; and we use social media to feed our worst instincts and desires.
And much like those who look back on exes with rose-colored glasses because they’re miserable being single, the proposed solution is that we should all go back to church.
Given the desperate circumstances and heightened stakes the culture war seems to have created, I can understand the desperation. But we mustn’t make decisions from a place of desperation. There’s a good reason you and your ex broke up. Trading dogma for dogma is no solution at all.
Yes, our pattern-seeking brains are hard-wired to search for and create meaning amid life’s chaos. We are deeply social animals and have evolved to crave community and connection. We’re soothed by ritual, comforted by camaraderie, and need to feel a sense of purpose in our lives. Religions have historically provided these things, but at an incredibly high risk of intolerant and sometimes murderous dogmatism and tribalism, resistance and hostility toward scientific and social progress, and centuries of warfare and oppression. Let’s not forget just how steep that price has been, or else we might find ourselves a bit too enthusiastic about going backward.
I understand that plenty of people would resent the idea that returning to church is going backward. They believe that secularism was the true regress—particularly with respect to fulfilling those desires for meaning, community, and purpose. I, of course, must disagree. I often liken being traditionally religious today to running Windows 95 on a brand new MacBook Pro. You’re free to do it, and it may work for you, but there are far better ways to get what you want and more without the obvious drawbacks and outdated operating system. The energy you’ll inevitably put into working out all the bugs to make your system compatible with the twenty-first century would be better spent simply developing a new one. That doesn’t mean the new ones will automatically be good for us, however. We’re still human, after all, and prone to the same failings as our ancestors. If these political ideologies are serving as sources of meaning and purpose for people, it’s because a better alternative has yet to be presented—not because it’s impossible.
I happen to know that we can find meaning, community, and connection without believing a single thing on insufficient evidence, hating a single human being, or devolving into factions of rancor and division. I know because I’ve done it, and I’m far from alone. All it takes is an acknowledgement of what we know is true about the world around us and a broader perspective on what makes us human.
Look around. We are, each of us, interlocking and overlapping circles of identity and individuality, both unique and unified in our differences. We share 99 percent of our DNA, and yet within that 1 percent we are breathtakingly diverse and multifaceted. We are each a singular, inimitable expression of beauty and wonder; children existing within a fraction of an eye blink of history. We are individual waves in one ocean—together but apart, one and a multitude, infinitesimal and infinite. Everyone I meet is at once a stranger and my own long lost sibling. I see myself in them and them in me. We are, as Carl Sagan once said, a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are stardust. Every atom in our bodies, and in everything we see around us, was forged in the heart of a star, billions of years ago. We are, as George Carlin once put it, simultaneously greater than, lesser than, and equal to the universe. In a concrete, fundamental way, we are all manifestations of the cosmos—colliding, arguing, and disagreeing, but also uniting, befriending, loving, and working together to build a better world for ourselves and, by extension, for others.
Every word of that is true. It requires no faith, causes no hatred, and insists on no dogma. It’s also beautiful and can serve as the core of a sensible, scientific, and secular kind of spirituality.
I’ve always found it strange that the question “What is the meaning of life?” is considered unanswerable. The answer is in the capacity to ask the question. The meaning of life is to experience it and make it as good as we can for as many of us as we can. We will never be here again, and that is why every moment is a gift. Consciousness is its own reward.
Many people claim not to be moved by these notions, but I can’t fathom what could be greater, more numinous, more edifying, more unifying, and more comforting than the idea that we are at once in, of, and about the universe. If we’re looking to fill a God-shaped hole, we need look no further than ourselves and one another. We created that hole to begin with.
Our current political ideologies are terrible substitutes for the things we’re looking for, it’s true. There’s still a baby we haven’t quite figured out how to completely save without the bathwater—but that’s not an argument for keeping the bathwater. Religions had a head start by a few millennia, so it’s unsurprising that they’re further along and still getting by despite their flaws. To say that the psychologically and socially positive aspects of religion haven’t been adequately replaced isn’t a sign of failure; it’s a statement of purpose. It means that there’s still a great deal of exploration and discovery ahead of us.
I’m ready for it.
We are walking wonders of creation—miracles, in the only sense of that word worth its salt. The only thing I need to believe to find meaning, community, and purpose in life is in our capacity as human beings to do better together. I’ve seen too much of that already to believe anything else.
As the Grievance Studies scandal made very clear, these... “fields” are set up absent of rigor. Simply start with your pet peeve as the conclusion and work your way backwards. Find someone’s previous peeve and make it fit, or invent a concept out of thin air to prop it up. Direct your ire in the right directions and you’re good to go.
To disagree with any of it, someone must be some kind of bigot or wilfully ignorant, rather than someone who notices that it’s full of fallacies, language games, big empty words and sophistry, that it’s lacking supporting evidence and is entirely composted of unfalsifiable assertions propped up by scholarship that is itself un-evidenced unfalsifiable assertions.
Years ago, at the college where I teach, some graffiti on a restroom wall caught my eye. Inked into the tile grout was a swastika the size of a baby aspirin, and just above it, in a different hand, someone had written in large letters: “This says a lot about our community.” An arrow pointed to the offending sign.
I’d seen lots of responses to the odd swastika over the years—obscene remarks about the author’s anatomy, say, or humiliating additions to his family tree. But a claim that this itsy-bitsy spider of a swastika signaled a web of hatred permeating one of the most left-leaning colleges in the nation? That was a new one.
More evidence for this web was adduced a few months later when some racially charged fliers were posted anonymously around campus. Because the fliers offended people who failed to notice that they were meant as anti-racist satire, administrators punished the undergraduate who had put them up, even after it was discovered that he was a minority student with left-wing political leanings. Both the dean and the associate dean of students at the time gave voice to what has since become a mantra on college campuses—that the “impact” mattered more than the “intent.” But what if the “impact” is the result of flat-footed perceptions, or has been amplified by the administrators themselves? The case seemed so ill-conceived that faculty members from across the political spectrum worked for months to clear the student’s record. After all, the distinction between the letter and the spirit is hardly dispensable. Satire, irony, parody—these are things we teach. None exists without respect for intention.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, those were my first encounters with an alternate curriculum that was being promoted on many campuses, a curriculum whose guiding principles seemed to be: 1) anything that could be construed as bigotry and hatred should be construed as bigotry and hatred; and 2) any such instance of bigotry and hatred should be considered part of an epidemic. These principles were being advanced primarily, though not exclusively, by college administrators, whose ranks had grown so remarkably since the early 1990s.
Everyone knows about the kudzu-like growth of the administrative bureaucracy in higher education over the past three decades. What most don’t know is that at many colleges, the majority of administrators directly involved in the lives of students—in dorms, conduct hearings, bias-response teams, freshmen “orientation” programs, and the like—got their graduate degrees from education schools.
Ed schools, such as Teachers College at Columbia, or Penn’s Graduate School of Education, have trained and certified most of the nation’s public-school teachers and administrators for the past half-century. But in the past 20 years especially, ed schools have been offering advanced degrees in things like “educational leadership,” “higher education management,” and just “higher education” to aspiring college administrators. And this influx of ed school trained bureaucrats has played a decisive role in pushing an already left-leaning academy so far in the direction of ideological fundamentalism that even liberal progressives are sounding the alarm.
To anyone acquainted with the history and quality of American ed schools, this should come as no surprise. Education schools have long been notorious for two mutually reinforcing characteristics: ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards. As early as 1969, Theodore Sizer and Walter Powell hoped that “ruthless honesty” would do some good when they complained that at far too many ed schools, the prevailing climate was “hardly conducive to open inquiry.” “Study, reflection, debate, careful reading, even, yes, serious thinking, is often conspicuous by its absence,” they continued. “Un-intellectualism—not anti-intellectualism, as this assumes malice—is all too prevalent.” Sizer and Powell ought to have known: At the time they were dean and associate dean, respectively, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
More than three decades later, a comprehensive, four-year study of ed schools headed by a former president of Teachers College, Arthur Levine, found that the majority of educational-administration programs “range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” Though there were notable exceptions, programs for teaching were described as being, in the main, weak and mediocre. Education researchers seemed unable to achieve even “minimum agreement” about “acceptable research practice,” with the result that there are “no base standards and no quality floor.” Even among ed school faculty members and deans, the study found a broad and despairing recognition that ed school training was frequently “subjective, obscure, faddish, … inbred, and politically correct.”
A study from 2004, “Preparing Tomorrow’s Teachers,” examined the course syllabi used in the nation’s top-rated ed schools and found with distressing regularity one-sided curricula in which complex issues were trivialized and narrow ideological viewpoints treated as settled fact. Un-intellectualism seemed to have given way to anti-intellectualism: “The foundations and methods courses we reviewed suggest that faculty at most of these schools are often trying to teach a particular ideology—that traditional knowledge is repressive by its very nature—without directing their students to any substantial readings that question the educational implications of this view,” concluded the study’s authors, David Steiner, now executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at the Johns Hopkins University, and an associate, Susan Rozen.
It’s true, of course, that for many of the brave souls who graduate from ed schools and go on to teach in the nation’s K-12 public-school systems, ed school orthodoxy will often—though not always—give way to the practical demands of classroom teaching. In fact, some of the most perceptive criticism of that orthodoxy has been leveled by the teachers who have been schooled in it. But for those ed school graduates who join the administrative ranks of a college, practical checks may be few. They often find themselves in mini-fiefdoms of like-minded administrators and student assistants whose shared political vision is regarded less as a point of view than as a point of fact.
II. The Wages of Ideology
The weak foundations on which this vision often rests are evident in ed school scholarship. Take the essay generally regarded as the founding text of the recent microaggression movement, “Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life,” whose lead author, Derald Wing Sue, is a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College. His six co-authors were also associated with Teachers College when the article was published, in American Psychologist in 2007. Among administrators especially, their essay has achieved canonical status.
Reading the article for the first time last year, I was dumbfounded—not just that it had gained such currency, but that it had ever been published in a journal with pretensions to intellectual rigor. I don’t doubt that microaggressions exist or that they can do harm, but the confidence with which Sue and his co-authors reduce complex interactions to Manichaean encounters between villains and victims is astonishing.
The authors accomplish these reductions, at least in part, by stacking the deck rhetorically. Accused microaggressors only “seem” to have cogent explanations for what they said or did. They don’t “explain,” they “explain away.” They don’t defend themselves, they get “defensive,” and so on. In even the most tentative passages, the drive for indictment overwhelms any hint of ambivalence or ambiguity.
Microaggressive acts can usually be explained away by seemingly nonbiased and valid reasons. For the recipient of a microaggression, however, there is always the nagging question of whether it really happened. … It is difficult to identify a microaggression, especially when other explanations seem plausible. Many people of color describe a vague feeling that they have been attacked, that they have been disrespected, or that something is not right. … In some respects, people of color may find an overt and obvious racist act easier to handle than microaggressions that seem vague or disguised. … The above incident [an account of a disagreement between the lead author and a white female flight attendant] reveals how microaggressions operate to create psychological dilemmas for both the White perpetrator and the person of color.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, if there is in fact a “nagging question” about whether a microaggression “really happened,” why isn’t it called a “potential” or “alleged” microaggression? By the same token, can one be a “recipient” of something, the existence of which is, in any given encounter, open to question? And what exactly is the “psychological dilemma” experienced by the person of color, given that the author has already indicted a “White perpetrator”? Presumably a dilemma would arise only if one didn’t know whether one had encountered a “White perpetrator” or just a white person whom one has misjudged.
Those are rudimentary questions that anyone with an ordinary complement of so-called critical thinking skills would ask, not just about this paragraph but about the article as a whole. So why weren’t such questions asked?
Because doing so would derail a deep nostalgia, not of course for the overt brutality and dehumanization inflicted by Jim Crow and the likes of Bull Connor, but for the moral certainty those evils retrospectively allow for. “In some respects, people of color may find an overt and obvious racist act easier to handle,” so the essay obligingly develops a crude alchemy for transmuting the ambiguous into the obvious. This alchemy is little more than a way of behaving that masquerades as a way of knowing: Act as if ambiguities were certainties, and as if vague feelings were reliable registers of fact. Act, in other words, as if complex interracial encounters—which admit of both mistakes and misunderstandings—are conscious or unconscious acts of racism exercised by a “White perpetrator.” That will indeed make things “easier to handle.”
But such ease of handling is the product of presumption and simplification. It would be as if a marriage counselor approached every new couple having decided in advance that the complaints or suspicions of the shorter partner, or the male partner, or the minority partner, were necessarily legitimate, and that the other spouse’s objections, prejudged as “defensive,” were evidence of guilt. Moreover, because these objections would, in Sue’s pseudo-technical jargon, “invalidate” the “experiential reality” of the other partner (i.e. offer a different point of view), they would constitute yet another offense. Would anyone expect marital relations to improve under the counselor’s supervision? Would anyone even hire such a counselor?
By exalting “experiential reality” and “impact,” administrators portray students as pure receptors whose reactions are unmediated by expectation, projection, or choice. Hence the language of triggering, which converts students into objects for the sake of rendering their reactions “objective,” and by extension valid: a student’s triggered response is no more to be questioned than an apple’s falling downward or a spark’s flying upward.
But it’s a specious and self-serving portrayal. This is nowhere more evident than in an aspect of the Halloween-costume controversy at Yale in 2015 that has rarely been mentioned: the fact that when the ed school trained associate vice president for student engagement, Burgwell Howard, sent out an email warning students about insensitive Halloween costumes, he included links to scores of racist drawings, movie stills, and film clips, presumably as a way of refreshing their knowledge of racial stereotypes.
Without a trigger warning in sight, students who clicked on the word “Asian” were taken to a page of derogatory caricatures topped by a masthead consisting of a yellow smiley face with slanted eyes, protruding teeth, and “coolie” hat. The link for “blackface” directed students to the smiling, cartoon countenance of a black man, whose outsized pink lips and white teeth take up half his face. The page itself, with its own images and hyperlinks, invited students into a warren of mocking, racist denigration. All this, mind you, in an email warning students about the dangers of giving unintentional offense.
Though there seems not to have been a report of offensive Halloween attire on Yale’s campus in nearly a decade, maybe the entire student body really did need graphic reminders of the racist history behind all the costumes they hadn’t been wearing. Still, why weren’t students “triggered” by that trove of bigoted images the dean had invited them to view? And why weren’t they “impacted” by such claims as the one found in the “redface” link that “because of the recent proliferation of casinos on Indian lands, Americans are beginning to view Indians as rich, greedy, and corrupt”? If Yale “is our home,” as an undergraduate would shout a few days later, why didn’t this break the rules?
The likely answer is that the outrage those images may have otherwise provoked was offset by the condemnatory fervor they excited and the moral simplification they encouraged: Jim Crow bigots on one side, their demeaned victims on the other. As long as that’s the lens through which Yale is to be viewed, no problem.
To be sure, college administrators are not the only ones on campus encouraging the use of this anachronistic, reductive lens. Far too many faculty members do the same. But undergraduates can avoid or drop a course that’s less about inquiry than inquisition, or at least balance it with courses that put ideas above ideology.
Students can’t drop their dorm supervisors, though, or escape the long arm of the more than 200 “bias response teams” presuming to micromanage their conversations. Nor can they opt out from the authority of conduct-review boards or evade first-year “orientation” programs—sometimes lasting an entire semester—that too often resemble clinics in ideological groupthink. Many of these venues are now heavily influenced, where they are not dominated by, ed school trained administrators who consider themselves qualified to offer training in, among other things, equity and social justice.
There might be nothing wrong with training students in equity and social justice were it not for the inconvenient fact that a college campus is where these ideals and others like them are to be rigorously examined rather than piously assumed. It’s the difference between a curriculum and a catechism. Do ed schools recognize that difference? Perhaps some do. But it’s significant that their largest national accrediting agency, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, for many years included “social justice” in its glossary of so-called “dispositions” that ed schools could consider when evaluating a candidate’s fitness for the K-12 classroom. It dropped the criteria only in 2006, after complaints from both the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the National Association of Scholars.
But de jure is one thing, de facto another. Administrators talk not just about social justice “training” but also about social justice “literacy.” What does that mean? It was explained in an article from 2009 by two professors of education, “Developing Social Justice Literacy: An Open Letter to Our Faculty Colleagues.” Formatted like a textbook, the article contains highlight boxes and sidebars which detail the terminology of “social-justice studies” with the crisp confidence one would expect from a handbook on Windows 10 or residential wiring. Racism is defined as “white racial and cultural prejudice and discrimination.” Black people can be prejudiced, but they lack the “institutional power” that “transforms it into racism.” Reverse racism does not exist owing to “power relations that are historic and embedded.”
Whatever the merits of those propositions, splicing them into the meaning of words is the lexical equivalent of splicing herbicide resistance into the genes of tobacco plants: It’s an attempt to immunize ideas from criticism, such that the student who mentions “reverse racism” in a discussion of affirmative action might as well have mentioned a unicorn in a discussion of endangered species. If she then drops the qualifier “reverse” and simply calls it “racism,” she’s again confounded, since “racism” is something of which only white people can be guilty. As with Newspeak in Orwell’s 1984, the aim is to construct a vocabulary in which “the expression of unorthodox opinions … [is] well nigh impossible.”
Even raising questions is an offense against this version of social justice. Being an “ally” of oppressed groups, we are told, requires “validating and supporting people who are socially or institutionally positioned below yourself, regardless of whether you understand or agree with where they are coming from” [italics in original]. And a sure symptom of having “internalized” one’s own sense of “dominance”? “Feeling authorized to debate or explain away the experiences of target groups.”
It’s hard to know what’s worse: the condescending implication that oppressed groups require unconditional support and validation (in the way that a child requires unconditional love), or the idea that “feeling authorized” to debate signals one’s racist hauteur rather than one’s democratic citizenship. To say nothing of the assumption that the range of opinion and experience among “target groups” is so narrow and homogenous that one could “validate” one person’s experience without running the risk of invalidating another’s.
For all the talk of diversity, it seems beneath the notice of those who wield the terms with such confidence that “social justice” is what anti-abortion advocates of all colors consider their highest aim; that “equity” may be as much the goal of the libertarian who wants to lower taxes for everyone as it is for the progressive who wants higher taxes for the wealthy; that in classifying as microaggressions statements such as “America is the land of opportunity,” or “Everyone can succeed in this society if they work hard enough,” one is stigmatizing not only the stereotypical views of whites but also the views of many African-, Asian-, Hispanic-, and Arab-Americans—to say nothing of the views of black youth who, as the Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has shown in The Cultural Matrix, overwhelmingly support a wide variety of mainstream American values, both for good and for ill.
But this kind of diversity of opinion and experience—a diversity that is no respecter of skin color, ethnicity, religion, class, or sexual orientation—is anathema to those for whom complexity is a grievous affront to, rather than a welcome elaboration of, knowledge. The map of ideology is so much neater and cleaner than the territory of actual human beings, who often say things you don’t expect and reveal things you don’t know. That’s why the phrase “This is not a debate” was shouted by protesters at Yale in 2015; why “This is not a discussion” was shouted at Evergreen State a year and a half later; and why groups of law students on my own campus declared last spring, at an event featuring the scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, that “there is no debate here.” These are variations on the same anti-intellectual, anti-democratic cri de coeur. They are the predictable fruit of a “curriculum” in which liturgy is passed off as literacy, and “social justice” signals the end of a discussion rather than the start of one.
III. From “Administrators” to “Educators”
How did college administrators become so involved in “training” undergraduates in subjects that are properly the domain of academic departments? It’s a complex story, and a long one. There are chapters in this story, however, and one of the most significant opened around 2004, when two administrators at the University of Delaware—both of whom have doctorates in “educational leadership”—determined that resident advisers should be thought of as residence-hall “educators.” And as educators, they needed a curriculum. Kathleen Kerr and James Tweedy said they felt “invited” to develop such a curriculum by the views of their professional organizations, the American College Personnel Association and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, which have more than 20,000 members between them. Delaware faculty members were not consulted.
The program Kerr and Tweedy developed, the “curricular model” (CM) for learning beyond the classroom, has had enormous influence on college administrators across the nation. Kerr and Tweedy celebrated that influence in an essay published last spring in About Campus, a professional journal for college administrators. They write with pride about the changes they helped initiate: how in the past decade “CM has caused a seismic shift at our campus and others across the country,” a shift in “the entire paradigm of how we approach our roles on campus and … how we view ourselves as educators.” Having implemented the model not only at Delaware but “along with hundreds of other colleagues on other campuses,” they’ve learned how important it is “to apply this approach beyond residence halls to all the learning opportunities that occur beyond the classroom in career centers, student conduct, orientation, health promotions, student engagement, and many other places on campus.” Reading this retrospective, no one could doubt its authors’ sincerity or excitement. For them, the advent of the curricular model opened a brave new world for college administrators.
But one could doubt their grasp of reality, since for many of those on the business end of their outreach, CM left a rather different impression. As was made clear once the program was exposed, back in 2007, the model was a scheme of political indoctrination and intimidation, the particulars of which outstrip parody. Students were questioned by their RAs about their political views on controversial topics; they were asked about their sexual identities and whether they would date people from different ethnic groups. As detailed in a 2009 video produced by FIRE, one program required students to stuff marshmallows in their mouths—rendering them speechless—in proportion to their lack of “privilege.” The more privilege, the fewer marshmallows, and the easier it was to speak. Groups of students were asked to list on posters the stereotypical characteristics associated with blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and Jews, thus exciting animosities while ostensibly ameliorating them. Administrators unselfconsciously referred to lesson plans as “treatments” and “interventions,” and they dictated “learning outcomes”: “Each student will learn about the forms of oppression linked with each identity group. Each student will learn that systemic oppression exists in our society. Each student will learn the benefits of dismantling systems of oppression.”
To almost any outside observer, the crass authoritarianism of such a “curriculum” would have been obvious at first glance. Within the closed circle of administrators, however, this was a fine plan, nobly wrought. Even after the Delaware program was stopped under withering criticism from students, faculty members, parents, and the press, their confidence was unwavering. Months after it was shut down, administrators repackaged virtually the same program under an expanded definition of “sustainability” and recycled it to the faculty three times, without success. Now, more than a decade later, the only problem Kerr and Tweedy register is that of having had a “highly aspirational goal of developing engaged citizens” but without enough “contact points with students” to do it. So many treatments, so little time.
But how could a program that brought such embarrassment to the University of Delaware become so influential nationwide? In 2009, shortly after the debacle, the Delaware professor Jan Blits suggested that the only lesson administrators seem to have learned was “the need for greater stealth” when instituting programs of their own. The years following have proved him right. Residential life “curricula” are now pervasive in higher education, and most are planned and delivered without any faculty oversight. An avid promoter of such programs, Kathleen Kerr has become more influential among administrators, not less, as a result of Delaware’s experiment in thought control. She has since served as a governing-board member, vice president, and president of the American College Personnel Association, and is a trustee on its Board.
It’s tempting to attribute such blinkered persistence to the grip of ideology alone. But it’s more than that, and less. For what’s striking about Kerr and Tweedy’s 10-year retrospective essay, besides the moving sidewalk of bureaucratic jargon, is how little content there actually is, ideological or otherwise, until one gets to the issue of status—the status of administrators themselves as “educators.” That’s when things get concrete, and personal. Above all, the authors argue, their curricular model changed “how we view ourselves as educators,” “how we think about … our own roles as educators,” and “the spaces and places on campus” administrators now “occupy.” The model is “energizing and reinvigorating to professional staff,” they report, quoting new administrators in the thralls of relevance: “I finally get to use my master’s degree.” In the penultimate paragraph they declare: “The first change for everyone involved in this transformation is deciding unequivocally that we are educators.”
Such undisguised anxiety about their status as educators might provoke sympathy were it not for the authors’ lack of anxiety about the things that actually matter—the substance of education itself and the intellectual welfare of students; their right, for example, not to be coerced into facile, unreflective orthodoxy. Judging from the essay, those aren’t even peripheral considerations.
But the reason for this obsession with status has less to do with the individual authors themselves than with the institutional history of which they’re a part. Ed schools have been the buck privates of higher education for nearly a century, and no disinterested study of the institutions as a whole has raised their reputation.
This low status is partly the effect and continuing cause of the schools’ ideological rigidity. Of course, the vast majority of college campuses have leaned to the left for decades. If nothing else, though, the variety of disciplines and the internecine struggles within those disciplines have kept things relatively contentious and fertile. But ed schools have occupied a space apart. The widest street in the world, runs a famous quip, is New York’s West 120th Street, which divides Teachers College from the rest of Columbia University. This insular exile has encouraged a group cohesion and intolerance for dissent that have only magnified the problems identified by Sizer and Powell more than four decades ago.
The invisibility of the ed school influence to even the most severe critics of higher education’s leftward lean was exemplified in an article in Campus Reform, a conservative website, which collected a set of tweets from a conference on critical race studies held in May 2017. “Whiteness and the United States knows itself through the death of the subordinated.” “The term ‘diversity of opinion’ is white supremacist bullshit!” “White Tears are an act of physical and political violence.” Research is “a colonial, white supremacist, elite process.” “Some people need to be slapped into wokeness.” Described simply as “professors” by Campus Reform, the authors of all five tweets are in fact professors of education. The author of the last tweet is also an associate dean. They will be training college administrators for years to come.
Many of those administrators will in turn train their student subordinates, most of whom, as was the case at Delaware, will have financial incentives to comply. In the fall of 2017 at Clemson University, aspiring RAs were required to “demonstrate a commitment to social justice,” and to undergo a nine day training program replete with lessons in, among other things, microaggressions and triggers. Naturally, this residence-life curriculum is overseen by the university’s ed school trained executive director of housing and dining, and the only required course for applicants is taught in Clemson’s College of Education.
And in the spring of 2017, the residential life office at the University of California at Los Angeles began taking applications from students for paid positions in “social-justice advocacy.” The grant program financing these positions is headed by a team of students, most of whom are enrolled in UCLA’s education school. According to the application form, these advocates will help their peers “navigate a world that operates on whiteness, patriarchy, and heteronormativity as the primary ideologies.” In other words, they’ll help their fellow students beg all the questions that universities are supposed to be asking, and thus deprive them of the education they’re supposed to be getting.
IV. Woke Corporatization of Higher Ed
But there’s a paradox here. How is it that administrators who often caricature what happens in a college classroom by inveighing against “the banking theory of knowledge,” “passive education,” and other ed school bugaboos, will enact that caricature themselves when they become “educators” with a “curriculum” of their own? E. D. Hirsch theorized back in the mid-’90s that much of ed school ideology was the product of low-status resentment rather than deep commitment. The ed school community’s antipathy to knowledge, he argued in The Schools We Need, was largely a reactive and displaced hostility to the prestige of college professors, whose strong suit “knowledge” was supposed to be.
Hirsch’s theory is borne out not only in the speed with which “active learning” gets replaced by authoritarian “treatments” once administrators assume the mantle of educators, but also in the way that the language and aims of campus bureaucracies, however radical their ideology may appear, dovetail with the corporate model of topdown governance and the business-friendly lingo of “efficiencies,” “competencies,” and “bottom lines.” Their monographs wave the flags of progressive liberation—”learning,” “learners,” “change agents,” “activism”—but the substance, if one can call it that, is often a Möbius strip of buzzwords in which assumptions twist into conclusions, and active leadership curls into passive obedience. Consider a line from a 2008 monograph, Toward a Sustainable Future—11 of the 13 authors have graduate degrees from ed schools—on the role of student affairs in creating “healthy environments, social justice, and strong economies”: “[B]y teaching change-agent skills, we can help members of the campus community learn to act on their commitment to sustainability and build self-concepts of a lifelong learner engaged in helping to create the triple bottom line of a sustainable future.”
To simply mock this as vacuous, bureaucratic jargon is to miss what it reveals. “To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox,” Orwell wrote. The corollary is true here: Despite all the can-do bluster, the 2008 passage and the document from which it comes are both politically orthodox and intellectually fearful—fearful of saying something definite enough to be questioned or disputed by anyone higher in the food chain. It counsels obedience and is itself obedient to the felt necessity of not simply fitting in, but of seeming indispensable to the university in its role of providing employers with what they need—students who are prepared for what the essay calls “the reality of the world of work.”
Thus the corporate techniques of “discipline, indoctrination, and control” that Noam Chomsky has identified with the increasingly bureaucratized university are registered in the defensive abstraction of the monograph’s style and replicated in its patronizing attitude toward students. “Their highly structured lives have been framed by standardized tests and inexperience questioning the status quo,” the authors write without irony, and then cast themselves as the “scholars and practitioners” whose “expertise in student development” will give these hapless students the direction their lives apparently need. First fabricate the problem, then claim to be the solution.
Even if the problem did exist as described, ed schools would be the last place to look for a solution. Asking genuine questions about the status quo, after all, requires genuine knowledge of both how it came to be and how it continues to function: the variety of the interests it serves and subverts, the dangers it courts and curtails. No institution has done more to cauterize such knowledge at the level of slogan than ed schools. As a result, the “progressive” ideology of many college administrators is a mile wide and an inch deep, and thus easily adaptable to the shortsighted, bottom-line thinking of the corporate university.
The low quality of many ed schools is itself the product of such bottom-line thinking, and their condition offers a glimpse into the dismal future of higher education generally. A recurring point in Arthur Levine’s report is how ed schools have been used as “cash cows” by their home institutions. At many universities, ed school leadership programs in particular have been engaged in a race to the bottom as they compete for students by lowering standards of both admission and graduation. His report compares the situation to The Wizard of Oz, with universities granting “an endless number of scarecrows the equivalent of honorary degrees.”
The situation was bad enough when these degrees were used to leverage higher salaries for K-12 teachers, principals, and superintendents. It was an added expense for governments and municipalities, with little to show for it in the way of administrative expertise or educational results. Now that many of these same ed schools are granting degrees to college administrators, universities are reaping more directly what they’ve sown: Thanks to an administrative sky bridge spanning “the widest street in the world,” the same resistance to inquiry and debate that has long plagued ed schools has a foothold at colleges across the country.
It’s difficult to question orthodoxies under the best of circumstances. When they come armored in the rhetoric of caring and community, it can seem impossible, especially if the purported beneficiaries are students. It’s worth remembering, though, just how much bigoted energy was coiled in the amiable phrase “family values,” and how much suffocating constriction may be required to make a university a home. After all, a home for whom? To many students, “home” is the name for a pretty restrictive place. It’s where they’ve had to hide their politics, their religious doubts, their sexuality, you name it. “My house, my rules.”
Ironically enough, no one knew the dangers of home better than Paulo Freire, whose 1968 book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has for decades been canonical in ed schools. Perhaps he is more revered than read.
The atmosphere of the home is prolonged in the school, where the students soon discover that (as in the home) in order to achieve some satisfaction they must adapt to the precepts which have been set from above. One of these precepts is not to think.
So, in the spirit of Freire, it’s critical that we ask: In whose interest is it to persuade students that a university is a “home” where they’re not to think? In whose interest is it to persuade them that they’re fragile, that they’re threatened, that words are violence, that an imagined slight is as bad as a real one, and that they’re surrounded by people and ideas from whom they need so much protection? In short: Cui bono? Not our students, that’s for sure.
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There’s an amazing circular hypocrisy in the US education industry’s insistence that what’s needed to solve current issues of low standards and poor performance is more of the ideology that helped to create the low standards and poor performance in the first place.
It’s terrifying that the roots of this corruption can be traced back even further than the emergence of the postmodern theology that plagues us today. But it certainly explains the current panic and gaslighting over curriculum transparency.
