Category Archives: Politics

My objection to critical race theory

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Here is a concise explanation of why object to Critical Race Theory, intersectionality, and so on. Following Lindsay and Pluckrose, I will use the shorthand “Theory” to describe these ideas or mindsets.

1. Humans have two bases for hierarchies: prestige and dominance. In a prestige hierarchy, such as the international rankings of chess players or tennis players, people lower down appreciate and admire people higher up. In a dominance hierarchy, such as a violent gang, people lower down fear and resent people higher up.

2. Prestige is positive and dominance is negative. Participating in a prestige hierarchy tends to involve skill development, greater prosperity, and peaceful cooperation. Participating in a dominance hierarchy tends to involve violence, coercion, and repression.

3. When we examine a cultural institution, we may see elements of both prestige and dominance. For example, we may wear a mask during the current pandemic because we appreciate and admire those who recommend doing so. Or we may wear a mask mainly because we fear law enforcement or social pressure. Another ambiguous example is a corporate hierarchy. You may think of the CEO as a leader who enjoys the trust and respect of employees, investors, and consumers. Or you may think of the CEO as an autocrat exercising power over those constituents. In truth, there is some of both.

Government is an interesting example of an ambiguous case. If the way to become head of state is to use force, and the head of state rules by decree, then intuitively this is a dominance hierarchy. If the way to become head of state is to inspire followers, and the way to inspire followers is to have good ideas for policy, then intuitively this is a prestige hierarchy.

4. The idea of Theory is to expose the dominance that lies behind existing institutions that supposedly operate as prestige hierarchies. For example, STEM fields appear to be a prestige hierarchy, but Theory looks at the disparities in STEM positions by race and gender and sees a dominance hierarchy.

5. Today, Theory has taken this idea to extremes. It does not see our existing institutions as having any basis in prestige. Instead, it interprets all cultural institutions as serving a dominance hierarchy. In this view, the sole purpose of the SAT score is to perpetuate the oppression of blacks, so SAT scores should be eliminated. The sole purpose of police is to oppress blacks, so the police should be de-funded. The sole purpose of the use of the scientific method is to oppress indigenous people, so that the status of the scientific method should be lowered and instead other ways of knowing should be accorded more respect.

[UPDATE: This comment documents these examples.]

6. In going to these extremes, Theory is wrong. Many cultural institutions really do promote prestige and minimize dominance. They are good institutions. Where they fail to live up to our highest ideals, they can and should be reformed, not eliminated. We can improve the policies to recruit and train police, but not if we de-fund the police.

7. Even worse, Theory is dangerous. Because it thinks only in terms of dominance, its adherents seek to dominate. When the “Woke” encounter people who do not share their outlook, they use coercion, including mob intimidation, “canceling,” and brainwashing “training.” The movement has none of the tolerance for dissent that is the essence of a liberal society.

Martin Gurri watch

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Concerning the latest wave of demonstrations, Martin Gurri writes,

In a real sense, the digital environment represents the triumph of the image over the printed word. Because it provides the illusion of immediacy, the visual is viscerally persuasive: not surprisingly, the web-savvy public has learned to deploy images to powerful political effect. A photo of Mohamed Bouazizi burning alive sparked the protests in Tunisia that inaugurated the Arab Spring in 2011. As I write, we are flooded with images from dozens of U.S. cities in turmoil, a visual argument about the fragility of government control.

Read the whole essay.

Speaking of the power of the visual, the fact that Congresspersons consider themselves above the law has been an open secret for as long as I can remember. So if Nancy Pelosi’s visit to a hair salon had merely been reported in print, I suspect that it would not gotten much traction. But with the video. . .

Civil war watch

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1. Greg Lukianoff and others write,

A December 2019 survey by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group showed that, in both parties, about one in five partisans felt violence against the opposing party would be at least “a little” justified if their party lost the election; about one in ten felt there would be “a lot” or “a great deal” of justification for violence. Meanwhile, comparing ANES survey data from 2016 and 2018, the number of Americans who said violence was “not at all” a justifiable means of pursuing political goals declined 10% in two years, from roughly 82% to 72%.

2. Politico reports about an interview with Hillary Clinton.

“Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton said in an excerpt posted Tuesday.

3. Andrew Sullivan wrote,

And let’s be frank about this and call this by its name: this is very Weimar. The center has collapsed. Armed street gangs of far right and far left are at war on the streets. Tribalism is intensifying in every nook and cranny of the culture. The establishment right and mainstream left tolerate their respective extremes because they hate each other so much.

4. An interview with Vicky Osterweil, author of In Defense of Looting.

Ultimately, what nonviolence ends up meaning is that the activist doesn’t do anything that makes them feel violent. And I think getting free is messier than that. We have to be willing to do things that scare us and that we wouldn’t do in normal, “peaceful” times, because we need to get free.

5. White House Siege

[UPDATE] At Bloomberg, Niall Ferguson argues against the trope that we are becoming like Weimar Germany.

Trump, whose worldview and political style are so much closer to vintage American nativism and populism that I have the utmost difficulty understanding why any educated person would liken him to Hitler. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: You don’t need the Weimar Republic to explain the appeal to many American voters of immigration restriction, tariffs and a culture war directed against a “globalist” elite — not to mention the loosest monetary policy in American history. That recipe is the essence of American populism. It has almost nothing in common with interwar German fascism, which was about racial persecution and ultimately annihilation, economic autarky and actual war (hence all the uniforms and jackboots).

Tell us what you really think

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When Andrew Sullivan castigates the illiberal left, I believe that he is on point. When he castigates President Trump, I believe that he is over the top and unfair. This either says something about his bias or mine.

Regarding the President, Andrew Sullivan wrote,

But it’s also vital to understand that the most powerful enabler of this left extremism has been Trump himself. He has delegitimized capitalism by his cronyism, corruption, and indifference to dangerously high levels of inequality. He has tainted conservatism indelibly as riddled with racism, xenophobia, paranoia, misogyny, and derangement. Every hoary stereotype leveled against the right for decades has been given credence by the GOP’s support for this monster of a human being. If moderates have any chance of defanging the snake of wokeness, and its attempt to deconstruct our Enlightenment inheritance, we must begin with removing the cancer of Trump from the body politic. It is not an ordinary cancer. It is metastasizing across the republic and spreading to the lifeblood of our democracy itself. Removing it will not be enough. But not removing it is democratic death.

For me, the case for hoping that a Biden election would calm the political waters rests on assuming the following:

1. The liberal left does not in its heart support the illiberal left.
2. Once the liberal left does not have to contend with President Trump, it will seek to contain the illiberal left.

Conservative intellectuals who support Trump’s re-election doubt that these two assumptions are true. Many conservatives believe that (1) is false. See Michael Anton or Victor Davis Hanson. Others believe that (2) is false. See Yoram Hazony, who I think believes that the liberal left is too weak-kneed to confront the illiberal left without the help of conservatives.

Thoughts on cancel culture

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1. Tyler Cowen writes,

So the policing of speech may be vastly more common than it was, say, 15 years ago. But the discourse itself is vastly greater in scope. Political correctness has in fact run amok, but so then has everything else.

In fact, the increase in bias at the NYT and WAPO may be more than offset by increased attention paid to podcasters like Bret Weinstein or Ben Shapiro. The intent to introduce “anti-racism” curriculum into schools may be more than offset by the way that the virus is creating a situation that lowers the status of school teachers among parents.

2. John McWhorter writes,

people left-of-center [are] wondering why, suddenly, to be anything but radical is to be treated as a retrograde heretic. Thus the issue is not the age-old one of left against right, but what one letter writer calls the “circular firing squad” of the left: It is now no longer “Why aren’t you on the left?” but “How dare you not be as left as we are.”

Here is where I think Pluckrose and Lindsay have the explanation, in Cynical Theories. The liberal philosophy that these older left-of-center academics share is incommensurate with what I would call the “folk” postmodernism of the younger leftists.

3. I think that there is at least a 30 percent chance that cancel culture has already peaked. The mobs, whether on Twitter, on campus, or in the streets, are engaged in bullying and making dominance moves, which create fear but also resentment. Academic administrators and progressive mayors are Neville Chamberlains, and I sense that an increasing number of people want to see a more Churchillian approach.

A few more thoughts on Cynical Theories

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Following up on this post.

1. Various academics are rushing to judge PL harshly because they “get ____ wrong,” where ____ is some set of philosophers. Yet I would say that as a model to explain and predict the rhetoric and behavior of the social justice movement, PL works well. Consider these out-of-sample events:

–the attacks on statues. PL had written,

The drives to decolonize everything from hair to English literature curricula, to tear down paintings and smash statues. . .

–the Smithsonian whiteness chart.

–the new book In Defense of Looting.

How do we reconcile the explanatory power of the model with the view that they get ____ wrong?

a) Perhaps PL did not get ____ so wrong after all.

b) Perhaps although PL get ____ wrong, subsequent academic developments in what PL call “applied post-Modernism” and “reified post-Modernism” followed that same path.

c) Perhaps PL also get the subsequent academic history wrong, but the ideas that filtered down to college administrators, public school curriculum writers, and others in high-leverage positions (including the people responsible for the three events noted above) followed the path that PL describe.

2. Another line of criticism is to suggest other factors that might account for the rise of Social Justice ideology among these bureaucrats. There is Jonathan Haidt’s psychoanalysis. Haidt’s view of social media’s psychological effects might suggest that the bureaucrats are responding to what young constituents want. The role of the demand side is also stressed by commenter John Alcorn. But I don’t think that the explanation for the appearance of Social Justice curricula in public schools is that the children and parents are clamoring for it. And I suspect that even at colleges there is much more energy on the supply side than on the demand side.

I am also receptive to the view that the Social Justice movement helps satisfy a human need for religious belonging.
But attempts at psychoanalysis do not provide us with cognitive empathy. That is, we need to take people’s ideas as ideas, and to try to explore how those ideas might make sense to the people who hold them.

I think that PL succeed in offering a perspective on Social Justice that helps us achieve cognitive empathy. If PL’s critics can come up with a perspective that provides even better cognitive empathy, more power to them.

3. I am talking about cognitive empathy with the movers and shakers in the movement, not with the most esteemed academics. I think that any time you want to connect a popular movement to a philosophical idea, you have to deal with the fact that hardly anyone reads philosophers. How many of Washington’s soldiers at Valley Forge had read John Locke? How many of Lenin’s Bolsheviks had read Karl Marx? In a sense, the ideas that matter are the ones in the heads of ordinary people that never get written down.

In the case of Social Justice, the ideas in the heads of college administrators, public school curriculum writers, corporate HR departments and so on probably do get expressed in written form. Perhaps sometimes they cite academic works. It might be fruitful to collect some of this material and analyze it. Not having done so, my guess is that such material would tend to conform to PL’s characterization (or caricature) of post-Modernism as it has evolved.

I doubt that the Social Justice adherents in influential positions could describe the twists and turns in post-Modernism of the last several decades. They themselves could not tell you the links, if any, between the policies that they promulgate and the philosophy of Derrida or Foucault. But that does not negate the PL project.

You might say that the Social Justice adherents are to academic philosophy what Milton Friedman’s billiard player is to physics. They are acting “as if” they had followed the intellectual path described by PL, and that is why the model in their book is so useful.

How the media woke up

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Zach Goldberg writes,

In 2011, the terms racist/racists/racism accounted for 0.0027% and 0.0029% of all words in The New York Times and The Washington Post, respectively. What we see over the past decade is a continual dramatic increase in usages of “racism” and its variations. Moreover, the graph shows that this increase occurred a half decade before the arrival of Donald Trump. By 2019, they would constitute 0.02% and just under 0.03% of all words published in the Times and Post—an increase of over 700% and just under 1,000%, respectively, from 2011.

…In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.

The gist of Cynical Theories

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I think that there is a natural tendency for professional philosophers to look at the book by Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay from the standpoint of how well it captures a philosophical position that the reviewer has studied extensively. That is not how I evaluate the book. I want the book to help me understand what you might call the “folk beliefs” that non-philosophers distilled from the academics.

By analogy, suppose somebody were to attempt a history of Keynesian economics with a goal of understanding how Keynesian economic policy came to be conducted. It is not so important to get “what Keynes really meant” (in fact, that is an endlessly debatable topic) or to provide a definitive account of the various Keynesian models that appeared in academic journals. Instead, what is important is to explain how the “folk Keynesianism” of journalists and political leaders developed and evolved.

I take the view that it is unlikely that the arcane academics have much direct cultural influence. So arguing with Pluckrose and Lindsay (PL) about their analysis of the arcane academics is beside the point.

The people who are in a position to directly influence the culture are those who hold high-leverage positions in our society. They include college administrators who write policies and implement training programs, public school curriculum writers, corporate human resource departments, journalists, and career officials in government. I believe that one can be confident that PL are accurately characterizing the “folk ideology” of these influential bureaucrats. That “folk ideology” seems plausibly derived from some of the academic philosophy that PL discuss, even if there is room to quibble with the treatment of academic philosophy in PL–and there is always room to quibble with someone’s treatment of any school of philosophy.

For me, Cynical Theories does not stand or fall on the quality of it scholarly interpretations of Foucault, Derrida, or subsequent philosophers. It stands or falls on its ability to explain and predict the rhetoric, modes of argument, and behavior of the bureaucrats who employ what PL refer to as Theory with a capital T.

Here is what I see as the gist of PL’s claims:

1. Liberalism and Theory are incommensurate. Liberalism presumes that we should pursue truth objectively, using logical deductions and empirical observations. From the liberal perspective, some of the propositions held by Theorists, concerning sex for example, are false and even ridiculous. Theory presumes that truths are contingent on identity, so that a white male may hold to a different “truth” than a black female. From the Theory perspective, liberal concepts of logic and empiricism are primarily tools used to perpetuate the privileged in a power structure. They are not necessary or sufficient for the pursuit of truth.

2. Theory developed in three phases. I think of these as razing a village, designing a new housing development, and building a new housing development.

3. The first phase was post-modernism. According to PL, post-modernism developed two principles, a knowledge principle of radical skepticism that objective knowledge or truth is attainable, because knowledge is culturally constructed; and a political principle that society can be viewed in terms of power and hierarchies, and these culturally construct knowledge.

4. The second phase PL call “applied post-modernism.” This looked into specific topics, including colonialism, race, and gender, and looked at how the language and cultural practices in these areas could be interpreted as reflecting and protecting power structures.

5. The third phase PL call “reified post-modernism.” That means taking the ideas into the real world and trying to do something about the power structures. That is what all of the bureaucrats are doing. But one irony that the book emphasizes is that the first phase declared that there was no certainty in knowledge, but the final phase treats the analysis of power based on identity groups as if it were absolute Truth. In terms of my metaphor, when the original village was razed, it was with the view that nothing could stand up. But the new housing development discards that extreme skepticism (although it still does not think that the old village has any legitimacy).

Let me reiterate my first point. The rhetorical defenses of Theory are impregnable to the attempts by liberalism to appeal to what it considers to be reason. To put it starkly, the Theorists refuse to be reasoned with. They would say that someone like me is merely trying to uphold privilege, either consciously or otherwise.

Liberalism seeks to deal with dissent by listening to it, debating it, and co-opting it. But Theory does not have those mechanisms. Silencing dissent is its modus operandi, one might even say its mission. Regular readers know that I describe it as the religion that persecutes heretics. Left-leaning liberals have a hard time processing the threat that this represents. They would much rather focus on the threat that they perceive comes from Donald Trump.

Liberalism vs. Theory

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I am reading Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories. I would describe it as a solid critique of the social justice movement and a stalwart defense of liberalism.

An excerpt:

Liberalism accepts criticism, even of itself, and is therefore self-correcting; Theory cannot be criticized. Liberalism believes in progress; Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress. Liberalism is inherently constructive because of the evolutionary processes it engenders; Theory is inherently corrosive because of its cynicism and attachments to methods it calls “critical.”

If I could recommend one book to a student about to enter the indoctrination center known as a contemporary university, this would be it. In fact, I will be recommending it to a wide range of people, including readers of this blog.

My main takeaway is that the threat to conservatism on college campuses may not be as significant as the threat to liberalism. Liberalism’s natural reaction to dissent is to co-opt it. Liberalism accepts what it can of a dissenting point of view without losing liberalism itself. But the new ideology is so antithetical to liberalism that it cannot be co-opted.