The Chronicle of Higher Education is regarded as the most reputable site for news and opinion about American higher education. Not that you’ll agree with everything in it, but the article below, by William Deresiewicz, an author and critic who taught English at Yale for ten years, seems to me the most accurate and eloquent indictment about where American academia has failed in its mission. (Deresiewicz also wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, an indictment of Ivy League and other “elite” colleges.)
Nearly all the explanations for Trump’s victory over Harris involve in part a rejection of American elitism and wokeness (they’re connected, of course), and to Deresiewicz, the results of the November 5 election not only show that “the politics of the academy have been defeated”, along with “its ideas, its assumptions [and] its policies and practices,” but also that the rejection of Harris is connected with the public’s rejection of woke academia. As I said yesterday, the public’s respect for and confidence in higher education has dropped in recent years, and dropped quite sharply.
Below is figure from a recent Gallup poll. If you lump together those Americans who have a “great deal of confidence” in higher education with those having “quite a lot of confidence”, the composite percentage dropped from 57% in 2018 to 36% last year. That’s a substantial fall! And I agree with Deresiewicz’s view that the reason for this fall is connected with the defeat of Kamala Harris. Despite Harris’s conscious decision to look more centrist after her nomination, it was too late: the Democrats had already established themselves as the Party of Wokeness, with the center of gravity of the party, and Biden) having moved towards extreme Leftist “progressivism”:
Click the headline below to read Deresiewicz’s take:
There are some telling data in the second paragraph, and I’ve bolded the part giving evidence that the wokeness pervading the Democratic party and American universities, whose faculty are overwhelmingly Democratic, played a role in the election:
Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.
“Among swing voters, it ranked first”! They didn’t ask about the view that “sex in humans is a spectrum,” something codified into law by the Biden administration but not mentioned by Harris, but many voters who rejected the Democrats surely knew about this, too.
Here’s Deresiewicz’s view on how the teachings of elite colleges trickled down to the public, who rejected them on November 5:
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. . . [The author recounts the story a woman, a black graduate of Berkeley, who called into an NPR station on the air, saying that black people were fed up with being called “racists” when they simply opposed Biden’s policy of nearly open borders.]
Deresiewicz explains why academia (and the Left in general] has become more extreme. The leftward and largely unhinged shift has, he says, been spearheaded by “studies” department and other departments “not answerable to reality”. But as I’ve written frequently, science too, is being colonized by the “progressive” ideology that most Americans reject:
How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.
He calls these fields “intellectually corrupt”, and while that may seem extreme, the corruption is ubiquitous. Yesterday one of my colleagues in an elite college went to a talk on “fat studies”, a talk sponsored by Gender Studies. The point the speaker made was that being obese was not a cause of morbidity and mortality, and the data supporting that was a claim that fat is “protective” in rats. But fat rats die more often than normal ones, just like humans. And in humans, if you simply Google “obesity and mortality”, you find a gazillion references about how being too fat can cause considerable health problems and death. But the Fat Studies speaker simply denied this, saying that science is one of the impediments to fat acceptance. The speaker claimed instead that health problems with human obesity are the result of dieting, not being overweight!
This flat denial of reality—a reality everyone knows—in the cause of ideology is one reason for the intellectual corruption of “studies”. While such a thesis advanced before a biology department would meet with derision, I’m not so sure that the inhabitants would also soundly reject the claim that “there are only two sexes in humans.”
Here’s Deresieeticz’s argument about the disconnect between reality and “studies” programs, which he also lumps with “social sciences exclusive of economics” and “the schools of education and social work”:
The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.
These disciplines could be answerable to reality, as instantiated by the claims of the Fatness Studies speaker, but when data contradict their ideological underpinnings, they simply deny the data.
This piece is particularly well written, and I’ll add just two more bits to show that. Do read it if you have any interest in academia and the outcome of this month’s election:
[Academics] might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
. . . Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.
Deresiewicz says that the solution is for academics to “entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things, and for a long time,” but considers that this is unlikely compared to academics “staying the course”, which of course means becoming woker and woker. If you’re fighting against this at a university, as many of us are, you know that while there are some hopeful signs, like the decline of DEI (a decline that will become steeper under Trump), there is little to stop the slide towards denial of the truth in the service of ideology. Since one of the purposes of academia is to discover and promulgate the truth, this will ultimately lead to academics becoming a mockery in the public eye. It’s already halfway there.
I used to consider myself so far left that I was just to the right of Commie. Nowadays, not so much; like a lot of folks here, I think that the Left shifted much farther to the left–which is a proverbial bridge too far for me.
Deresiewicz’ article re-enforces for me an opinion I’ve had since high school – leftism is always and everywhere authoritarian.
Nearly every leftist I’ve shared this opinion with has been dumbfounded that anyone could ever think such a thing.
Seems a good chance that they define “left” differently, for example:
“Generally, the left wing is characterized by an emphasis on “ideas such as freedom, equality, fraternity, rights, progress, reform and internationalism” while the right wing is characterized by an emphasis on “notions such as authority, hierarchy, order, duty, tradition, reaction and nationalism”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left%E2%80%93right_political_spectrum
Freedom and equality are mutually contradictory. Even the dodge of equal opportunity requires interference with individual freedoms. And of course “freedom from want” requires theft from those who have any of anything that someone else wants. “Freedom from fear” means locking up those whom you are afraid of. (I acknowledge that the Four Freedoms were a rhetorical flourish in a time of great trial.)
Only some definitions of progress are allowed under leftism. Rights to live off someone else’s labour are good progress. Cheap energy that enables material well-being with less grinding human effort is bad progress.
Reform means anything a reformer wants it to mean. Historically it usually means stealing land. But it can also mean reforming the electoral system so that only taxpayers with property can vote. A right-wing party in Canada was actually called the Reform Party, with goals less ambitious than reforming the suffrage. There is one in the UK, too. The right may have captured that notion.
It seems to me that the Left values all the ideas except freedom, as it will with grim pleasure suppress freedom to achieve all its other goals. Event the leftist concept of “rights” contradicts freedom. Which gets us right back to Matthew’s proposition.
We could probably have fun with the notions on the right, as well.
“Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Well that’s a pretty bleak view of “the left” (and not really in keeping with the wikipedia text of course). I hope you give equal treatment to the “the right”!
I think you may be onto something fundamental about the difference between right and left. A fundamental purpose of government, perhaps THE fundamental purpose, is to balance the rights of the individual versus the well-being of the society as a whole. Leftists value the common good much more than the right does. The right believes that everyone (or at least every male) should be able to do anything they want. So the left is in favor of big government, to regulate and control the selfish behavior of men left to themselves. Limiting individual freedoms is actually fundamental to this goal. Leftists care about the environment and think that industry should be tightly controlled, for the common good, while the right wants the smallest amount of control possible in order to maximize profits to certain individuals. Government’s job is to solve the “paradox of the commons”.
It seems like the best solution is something in between left and right. Too many controls stifles the economy, which actually ends up hurting the common good. Too few controls yield a rapacious capitalism that impoverishes and sickens the customers and workers that capitalism needs. Politics is all about finding the balance.
I increasingly think the fundamental purpose (or first purpose, there are others) of government is to claim and enforce its monopoly on violence. Everything else (rule of law, equality of opportunity, freedom from ideological oppression, economic opportunity) depends on it: if government abandons its monopoly on violence, someone else will fall that gap (cf. the Hamasniks in the streets of Montreal a few days ago).
Under my view of the role of government — finding a balance between the common good and the rights of the individual — the current 50/50 divide between those who favor one side or the other of this balance suggests that we currently (pre-Trump II) are sitting close to the perfect center point.
“A fundamental purpose of government, perhaps THE fundamental purpose, is to balance the rights of the individual versus the well-being of the society as a whole.” This is a wholly leftist understanding of govt, as it assumes it is possible for anyone to understand what constitutes the well-being of society (a concept so complex as to be beyond human comprehension).
Also, there is no ‘paradox of the commons’, it is the tragedy of the commons – which is solved by capitalism in a manner that creates widely shared benefits.
“This is a wholly leftist understanding of govt, as it assumes it is possible for anyone to understand what constitutes the well-being of society (a concept so complex as to be beyond human comprehension).”
You are right that it is impossible for any single person to objectively know what is best for society as a whole, but in a democracy the society as a whole makes this judgement by voting.
If most people are badly suffering from air pollution just so a minor business can make a larger profit, they will vote to curb the freedom of the business owner to pollute the air. This is not leftist, this is what democracy is for.
True. Equivocation is key to leftists being able to remain leftists.
The clear giveaway in that article is that it doesn’t mention Nazism (i.e. National Socialism) .
Naziism is/was an extreme right ideology.
I’m so glad you made that assertion without any evidence or argument, or else I may have had to think about what you said.
They had socialist elements at the start but they sent the remaining ones to concentration camps in 1933 and murdered their leader during the night of long knives in 1934. They kept the name. After that it was fascism (extreme right) all the way.
https://www.britannica.com/story/were-the-nazis-socialists
You clearly don’t know the Roolz saying that you should not insult other commenters. Please knock it off. If you do this one more time, regardless of the intellectual merit of your comment, you’ll be banned.
Read the commenting rules at the link on the left-hand side of the site.
Far leftism certainly is authoritarian, no question. And it is fundamentally illiberal. It is a toxic mind virus.
Jeane Kirkpatrick, US Ambassador to the UN under President Reagan, called the right “authoritarian” and the left “totalitarian.” She preferred authoritarians. My response: On Sunday authoritarians beat you with billy clubs; On Monday and Tuesday you recuperate; On Wednesday totalitarians beat you with billy clubs; On Thursday and Friday you recuperate; On Saturday you try to convince people that being beaten by billy clubs is OK when done by authoritarians.
The leftists you spoke to no doubt shared Kirkpatrick’s vocabulary but felt being beaten by totalitarians was OK.
Ackchyually, Kirkpatrick referred to anti-communist dictatorships as authoritarian (using her particular definition of that word).
Leftists than acted in bad faith to claim she stated that the right overall is authoritarian. She did not.
You make a good point. No, the right overall is not authoritarian. Neither is the left overall totalitarian. My post would have been more accurate had I said “dictatorships on the right” and “dictatorships on the left.” But the point of my post was that there are two distinct words to describe the dictatorships, and the leftists spoken to were dumbfounded by the incorrect terminology.
To say that “leftism is always and everywhere authoritarian” is just plain daft. You know what you mean by “leftism”, but no one else does, and by using the ‘ism’ suffix, you aim to paint all left-leaning views pejoratively. But what are you talking about? Communism, libertarian socialism, anarchism, social democracy, liberal democracy? There’s a big difference between the first and the last, but any might be seen as leftist, at least to some people. It’s a statement that doesn’t really state anything.
I have no dog in this fight; I’m neither American nor do I have a political affiliation, but I know enough about US politics to have an informed opinion. Which is: if you cannot see the differences between the Dems and the GOP in terms of authoritarian strategies, tactics and behaviours, then you must have fallen asleep a few years ago and not woken up. There’s no comparison.
Many on the left are extremely authoritarian, and I hate the woke left agenda as much as anyone: the denial of biological reality, the gender and non-binary nonsense, the blue-haired protestors for Palestine (and everything else). What really gets my goat is the trans women in women’s sports (don’t get me started on that!)
Compare that with Trump and the right. We have the overturning of Roe v Wade, never-ending populist and poisonous rhetoric, the nomination of ridiculous and unqualified ideologues for critical roles, election denialism, clear attempts to overturn democratic elections, January 6th, and Trump’s rhetorical bullshit of ‘only I can fix it’. To bang on about ‘leftism’ as you are is missing the whole picture; it’s disingenuous and partisan, and you surely know that, don’t you?
I’ll leave you with this quote: “Root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.”
No, it’s not from the 1930s. Trump said this in a speech on Veteran’s Day 2024.
P.S. I don’t wish to appear rude, and please forgive me if you feel I am, but your point further down suggesting that Nazis were socialists seems almost childlike in naivety. I’m sure you didn’t mean to say that, but it’s how it came across – to me, at least.
As for Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court invented a constitutional right to abortion out of thin air back in 1973, trying to be hip with Women’s Lib and all that. In 2022 a new Supreme Court un-invented it, returning the matter to the state legislatures. Someday, I suppose, yet another Supreme Court will re-invent the right. It’s unfortunate that you led off with what is a highly contentious issue to people of good will as smoking-gun proof of malevolent authoritarianism when in fact Dobbs represented a defeat of federal authority to meddle in state autonomy. State governments are closer to the people and should normally, in a society that is no more authoritarian than necessary to keep order and secure the borders (oops!), be free to legislate in areas of their turf. Most Americans live in states where abortion is legal later in the pregnancy than almost anywhere else in the world. And if a state does criminalize abortion, what is that to you, as someone who doesn’t live in that state?
Whether abortion, or anything else, should be regulated at the federal or state level is a different question. I agree, thought, that Roe vs. Wade invented a constitutional right where none was intended (based on the amendment which freed slaves). The main point is that the Democrats could have put a right to abortion into law when they were in a position to do so, but didn’t. Why not? Because, by claiming that they are bound by the court, they could have what they wanted without offending anti-abortion Democrat voters.
Important is the point that where abortion is legal in the States then it is legal much later in pregnancy than in most places in the world. In countries where abortion is essentially no longer an issue, there is usually some sort of compromise such that it is legal in the first three months and thereafter only in exceptional cases. But such a compromise is not possible in the States. Yes, there are the extreme “pro-life” people, but the main reason is the extreme “pro-choice” side which thinks that only the woman should decide, and can do so at any time up until (or, if pushed, some will even say, which is not illogical given their justiifcation, after) birth. Even if one doesn’t not agree that abortion is murder, one has to refute that argument (which is not that hard). No-one has ever won a debate by claiming that their opponent believes something they don’t. (In other cases, where there is no question at all of harming a third party, such as prostitution and pornography, surprisingly many “pro-choice” people don’t accept the “my body, my choice” argument. Rather, their position is that only the woman should decide as long as she agrees with their own position, otherwise they will legislate morality just like the MAGA Bible-thumpin’ rednecks.)
I disagree that we should ignore territories we don’t live in.
The Nazi party was actually named “National-socialist”, and had many socialist policies, which helped win the support of many short-sighted voters. Leftists were quite successful in obscuring this aspect of German history.
Very nice. I will try to share to FB, but FB tends to take down links to this website
I posted this excerpt a number of times, seems to fit here with some length preserved .. it’s how this works ..(emphasis added):
“Transformation is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ agenda for responding to global challenges facing humanity and the planet. Setting our world on a more sustainable course requires radical shifts in current development paradigms that are exacerbating inequalities and imperilling our common future. This transition is dependent on new knowledge, research and competences that only higher education institutions are in a position to provide, rooted in their historic role of service to society.”
[…]
“In 1964, inspiring the 1968-student revolt a couple of years later, Herbert Marcuse wrote a key text against “one dimensional man”, urging universities and campuses around the world to become places that resisted reductionism. ”
Parr, et. al.
“Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability”
2022
UNESCO
doi.org/10.54675/YBTV1653
“Transformation” is always a red flag for Hermetic alchemy – exerting a supernatural control over the material world to convert it into the Ideal image as perceived in the mind – an alchemy not of base metals, but of thought, of theory.
This of course is most well-known as originating with Hegel and his gnostic, speculative friends in alchemy.
I cram in one last point : “Sustainability” is a religious doctrine.
I’ve been listening to James Lindsay’s New Discourses podcast lately as a direct result of these types of posts to understand the basic philosophy better. I’ve been very familiar with the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers and marginally familiar with Hegel/Marx, but his podcasts have really filled out my knowledge. “Alchemy” in particular was interesting to understand, especially as related to Soros.
Yep. 100%.
This one is from The Strange Death of the University podcast – with the SDGs as Sauron’s eye.
A significant part of the problem is that politicians have actively worked to undermine trust in the academic establishment. This has led to incredibly low trust in academia among Republican voters. Additionally, there has been a significant general decline in trust since the start of the pandemic. While academia could certainly do more to rebuild that trust, it faces a significant challenge when one side of the political aisle consistently seeks to undermine scientific principles and findings.
Tempted to just put in “+1”. But since a significant theme of this blog is to tackle the “illiberal left” — and to now correctly point out “leftish” folly that contradicts established science — I might also ask if you refer to overall, the Republican ploy of denial of the reality of anthropogenic climate forcing, alliance with the denial of evolution, and now the attack on science-based medicine (no, not the blog that’s gone away on gender, but the general edifice) and, for example the demonization of virologists — e.g. attacks on Anthony Fauci & colleagues. Lab leak conspiracies theories, but see also Bill Maher and Jon Stewart. Bah!
It’s not “just the start of the pandemic”. It’s been going on for a long time and will become much worse before anything improves. Please note that the major medically-oriented grifters & cranks are Republicans openly aligned with Trump.
Also, why I switched to a ‘nym. They come in from the ‘left”, they come in from the right. There is a lack of civility, from the ultra-purity of the left on campus (fringe players, in my time decades ago), but also institutionalized by Newt Gingrich tactics.
Every time you claim that the lab leak is a conspiracy, it should be pointed out that this is a premature conclusion. There is no dispositive evidence one way or the other, making claims of discovery (spillover, lab) unjustified and at worst scientifically dishonest.
I’m a theoretical high energy physicist, and I have lost almost all faith in my colleagues in the “other side” of the university, and not at all because of Republican propaganda. At some point in the mid-2010s I started carefully reading papers written by my colleagues at my former employer. The example Jerry mentions above about “fat studies” is representative of a large fraction of what I saw. Errors of logic, statistics, and inference so insane that even an outsider like me could spot them a mile away.
Silly physicists like me spend hours laboring over factors of two, minus signs, integrals, etc. Meanwhile my colleagues were sitting back in armchairs, stroking the chin, and coming to remarkable conclusions that definitely aren’t sweeping conspiratorial nonsense about the Jews, oh wait, sorry, white supremacy animating all aspects of Western society.
And with good respect to your field, with my own interest in virology and ecology, there is a large body of well documented literature with as much evidence as could be gathered from the market and associated regions, as well as previous work and recent work on zoonotic spillover that make the Wuhan market zoonosis hypothesis reasonably near a certainty.
There are articles in the top tier journals (not woke, this stuff) with extensive references therein. Open access in Cell, Nature, Science, the more specialized journals. (E.C. Holmes. M. Worobey as a couple of people to help your search terms — and references therein) There are maybe half a dozen discussions of this on TWiV with the papers attached there. So yes, I would relate lab leak to conspiracy. Certainly there are issues with the conduct of the Chinese authorities, and there are brave Chinese virologist who have had problems in China. It’s important ot understand and respect the decades of research on the zoonotic origins of many human viruses. On the other side, “lab leaks don’t really have anything substantive, when it’s held up before the full body or available evidence and argument. Just dark allegations and unreasonable expectations. You must understand, given the nature of Coronavirus, that the precursor virus, quite likely from a farm, will never be found. But see the recent article in Nature of zoonotic potential of the virus circulating in fur farm sin China (could apply to nay animal/human interface).
With respect, I would still say that declaring discovery on the basis of circumstantial evidence is still premature and too close to dishonesty for me to be comfortable with. Cultural norms may play a big role here. “We have indirect evidence for X but the final verdict is unclear” is perfectly normal in physics. “We have indirect evidence for X and much less for Y therefore X is correct” is not.
Here’s an example that is as I understand it on a far better footing than zoonotic spillover, and yet still is (correctly!) discussed with caveats and qualifications: (cold) dark matter.
There is an enormous amount of indirect and quantitative evidence for it, coming from galactic rotation curves, the formation of large scale structure, gravitational lensing, etc. And, yet!, it has yet to be discovered and until it is the honest statement is that it is an excellent working hypothesis that simultaneously explains many disparate pieces of data, even the best explanation of the ones we know of. But it has yet to be confirmed and there are still people working on alternatives and until the matter is definitively settled by Nature not by humans with opinions we will not know with certainty.
Physicist here, though I went on to work in IT many years ago.
I’m not sure it would be “correct” to require from every field of science the same attitude. Technically it may be more precise to say “We have indirect evidence for X and much less for Y therefore X is way more likely” but I don’t think we can quantitatively estimate everything in terms of sigmas. And the opposite attitude may be unreasonable too:
A mathematician, a physicist, and an engineer were traveling through Scotland when they saw a black sheep through the window of the train.
“Aha,” says the engineer, “I see that Scottish sheep are black.”
“Hmm,” says the physicist, “You mean that some Scottish sheep are black.”
“No,” says the mathematician, “All we know is that there is at least one sheep in Scotland, and that at least one side of that one sheep is black.”
(The quote is from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the autistic child concludes that mathematicians are the best. I presume @Kristan would find the physicist stance better).
To me the problem seem to be how to best communicate with the public, knowing the short attention span and you risk both appearing conspiracist or too arrogant. I think the best would be to say that the lab leak is way less likely, and if we are speaking of policies, we better act to prevent both other zoonosis and lab leaks.
@Situation Normal: out of ignorance, would the evidence you quote be able to distinguish the case where a lab leak was subsequently propagated from Wuhan market (e.g. a lab worker infecting others there)?
As a mechanical engineer I get where you’re coming from. Those of us in technical fields have to have actual physical proof and relentlessly try to refute the data we have to ensure it’s correct. Those in the “studies” realm only have to use the correct lingo to state their case and argue that lack of data only shows how bad the problem really is using some convoluted anti-logic. We don’t talk politics at work because it doesn’t matter to what we do, but occasionally someone will point out some anti-science progressive lunacy in the same manner they used to point out creationist craziness (I once knew a creationist chemist who thought that C14 dating was false due to satanic influence but for some reason the rest of chemistry was unaffected).
And don’t get me started on the lazy prosecutors who actively don’t do their job of prosecuting crimes, in the name of social justice.
One encouraging trend: climate change denial seems to be in retreat. Five years ago, it was standard on the right. But no longer.
I think it’s become visibly obvious. People can now see it happening.
Is it obvious to China? Doesn’t seem to be. Mind you they aren’t likely to be worried about hurricanes in the Caribbean and mild winters that allow the pine-borer beetle to thrive in Alberta and British Columbia. They aren’t likely to achieve naval parity with the United States by going NetZero. It takes a lot of national wealth to build and man aircraft carriers and their air wings.
It probably is obvious to China but they don’t want to do anything about it. Not yet anyway.
China is all about Sustainable and Inclusive Dengism.
So, yeah, they are paying careful attention.
My comment was largely meant to reflect that one political group seems to have left scientific consensus behind, often favoring “common sense” and traditional values/views over scientifically established facts. This issue seems much more pronounced on the political right, but it is hardly exclusive to them.
I should have been more careful with my point about the pandemic. The pandemic exacerbated the problem, although it has bounced back a little bit as a survey from Pew points out. Nearly half of Americans think that scientists should stay out of public policy within scientific issues, which is deeply concerning. It suggests a mindset of “you can tell me the facts, and I’ll decide if I accept them or not.”
+1. As long as the left continues to deny the science of biology when it comes to sexes and undermines scientific principles related to that, as well as to other things (the SciAm article claiming that normal distribution is racist), trust in academia will not be restored. Only if the left can get back to science instead of “studies” will trust from voters be regained.
Both sides undermine scientific principles. And I’d say that disputing evolution, which is difficult to perceive and understand, is far more forgivable to me than disputing sex, which is obvious.
I have a friend whose son is at the age where he will be making decisions about which universities to apply to and which programs to enroll in. He has been a precocious reader of English literature and has by now read on his own War and Peace, Ulysses, etc. He would likely follow through with an English degree but dislikes the wokeness of his high school and my friend, who is familiar with the academy, does not see an apolitical path. So he will likely enroll in commerce or some other more practical field.
Every word seems right.
Looking ahead, I can hope (I always find hope) that leaders in the Democratic Party will shift to the center.
Meanwhile, the promised Trump policies may carry some political bombs into the right wing camp. His promise for mass deportations can mean a depopulation of people who harvest our crops and who do other work that Americans Will Not Do. I have heard a couple news pieces over the radio about how small towns that depend on their migrant workers are now very scared about what will happen, since their factories contain workers who may not be allowed to stay. They pay local taxes, buy from local stores, and their kids go to the schools in these small towns and that does translate to state funding of public education. I don’t think the locals will be too happy about what is coming and I bet they voted for Trump.
Meanwhile Trump has promised to further raise tariffs against China and other countries, and that will presumably raise prices even further. Farmers have long been very frustrated about this since they used to sell a lot of crops to China, and now not so much.
I don’t see how these actions will be seen as a good thing to the Republican base, but we will all get what they voted for.
The interesting thing about so-called undocumented worker rights is that this makes the progressives a tool for the business owners who gain the advantage of cheap labor. The capitalist pigs they hate have manipulated them into being their useful idiots. No one talks about how businesses are breaking the law by hiring them, even on the Republican side.
Tariffs don’t work as claimed by people like Trump. The result is higher costs, less efficiency, and diversion of resources away from more productive activity. Until Trump, tariffs were a Democrat policy to gain union votes, but Trump’s a mercantilist. In the case of protecting some important national defense industry, maybe tariffs make some sense. But otherwise they do not as has been argued since Adam Smith in 1776.
“The interesting thing about so-called undocumented worker rights is that this makes the progressives a tool for the business owners who gain the advantage of cheap labor.”
This is a great observation. J. Allen Smith, who wrote the excellent “The Spirit of American Government” back in 1907, which was highly critical of the US Constitution (he thought it was too anti-democratic and too difficult to amend, among other criticisms), was definitely what we would call “progressive” or even woke today. And his take on unfettered immigration was that it was indeed a tool of the capitalists used to lower wages and break the back of organized labor…this is the classic populist argument for laws controlling immigration.
If he were brought back to life and saw that the party that proclaims to be for the common person and against large business interests was FOR unlimited immigration, he’d conclude that said party was either secretly in league with the business interests or run by nitwits.
Or maybe both 😉
and this is also the reason why the woke lunatics should never be equated with “the left”, let alone “far left” (which one would expect to focus more on economics and class).
Plenty of socialists in the vast world decry wokeness’s lack of materialism.
I suggest you read Musa al-Gharbi’s “We Have Never Been Woke” or at least some of its excellent reviews you can find on the web.
I think it is correct to say wokeness heavily contributed to Democrats’ loss. But it would be an incorrect inference to deduce from this that voters are asking Dems to be more centrist. They are asking to be less woke, but since Woke Isn’t Left (to paraphrase Susan Neiman) they aren’t asking Dem to be less leftist.
Good that the Chronicle published this! I love how Deresiewicz doesn’t mince words. He is forceful and direct.
Two small errors:
“aksi”
“If you lump together those American_ who…”
Fixed, thanks.
The article nails my thoughts on the election results almost perfectly.
I have never voted Republican (where a choice was offered); but, dang, (fellow) Dems, you are straining my patience.
So it’s clear, given my rants so far, I read the Deresiewicz article and I applaud it.
Thanks for the timely post, whyevolutionistrue.
“When did liberalism mean no common sense?”
No sentence better encapsulates this piece than this one quoted in the piece. Thinking a lot about politics these days I’ve realized I’m not progressive or conservative, I’m a rationalist. This means balking at the irrational on all parts of the political spectrum. Evidence and not stupidly or tribalism should be our governing principle. It more or less used to be. Sadly not anymore.
I’m with you. We’ve seen the effects of tribalism at this site; Dr. Coyne was told not to criticize the anti-science views of the progressive left because it could hurt their candidate’s chance for election. I’m sure the same arguments were made on the other side on things like tariffs. If you can’t criticize your own party’s stupidity you end up with the mess we have today. Party positions require criticism in order to get them to change.
Me, I don’t trust any of ’em.
Thanks for summing up my thoughts…once again. I distinctly remember PCC(E) being chastised again and again for simply and accurately describing his observations. Many here were similarly scolded. I saw that as a function of people’s insecurities. My guess was that they saw the very same problems/weaknesses in their party, but foolishly thought that by not talking about them they would disappear.
I think you’re overly optimistic here about human nature. After actively ignoring the problems for a while one doesn’t see them anymore. So they didn’t need to work for the problems to disappear, since experientially they already had.
Check out (if you haven’t – because I hadn’t ’til recently) :
Scottish Common Sense Realism.
What an excellent article, and thank you for sharing.
At what point do we stop using the word “elite” to describe these purveyors of pablum?
When I think of an elite athlete, I think of someone like a gymnast…doing physical things I could only dream of. A glorious confluence of raw talent, hard work, and expert instruction.
Similarly, elite academics should be intellectual virtuosos, producing advances in knowledge that I could only dream of. Or at the very least, being very good at understanding and teaching the best of what humanity has come up with.
Instead, far too many seem like mediocrities…too underpowered intellectually to do groundbreaking work or even absorb and then teach the output of their betters. Hence the intellectual pollution at many universities. We need a new name for people like this other than “elite”.
Pundit? Egghead? No. Privileged!
Agree. I call them activists, although the far left professors aren’t. But they sympathize with the activists.
The activists drove the Dems to crazy extremes. It was a set of activist questions that had the question about transgender surgery for illegal aliens. The one that the Trump campaign so successfully mocked.
These people need to go away. But they’re noisy and prone to taking to the streets.
I just remembered McWhorter’s The Elect
… and how Bill Maher says if he needs one, an élite brain surgeon.
I think that sets up a good contrast. How would an elected brain surgeon sound?
Of course I assume they are board certified, but y’know…
How about The New New Mandarins?
Thanks for broadening discussion to include a Chronicle of Higher Education article.
Did I overlook a link to an archived version of this article or is everyone signing up for the “read for free” option (I’ve done that with this publication before and was inundated thereafter)?
+1
I gave in and signed up again! I only wish my tech skills were up to par so I could post the link here — maybe that wouldn’t help anyway since they know which browser/address we’re originating from (did I say that right?) I am, in fact, reading the article right now and it is a good one. Maybe worth all the stuff you’ll have to delete from your inbox…
It’s antipositivism, is what it is.
Interesting!
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antipositivism
In 1968, performances by the Tom Haydn/Bernardine Dohrn theatre troupe incited a backlash that helped the Republican Richard Nixon win the election. Next, the same troupe put on a show of random window-breaking in Chicago in 1969, and similar charades, predictably leading to Nixon’s landslide re-election in 1972—and, beyond that, to the Republican domination of the entire 1980s decade. By then, members of the pop-Left troupe had retreated to academe, where they busied themselves creating various mock academic fields collectively known as grievance studies.
In the 2000s, the shibboleths of grievance studies escaped from the groves of academe and infected Hollywood, some municipal governments, some public education systems, and the Democratic Party—thus becoming all too visible to the general public, which could eventually respond by voting against the last. 2024 may thus be the start of another period in US politics like the 24 years after 1968. Our pop-Left rather reminds one of Inspector Clouseau, the hapless fumbler in one “Pink Panther” film comedy after another.
Very interesting paper and equally interesting discussion.
I’ve been intending to pose a question in this forum, but haven’t managed to get around to it, and the mention of “the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups” has reminded me of it once again.
How about racist abuse chanted or yelled at football/soccer players before, during and after the matches? Should this be seen as protected speech? Should the affected players just have to put up with it? Grin and bear it so to speak? Or should the offending parties be sanctioned in some manner?
I am generally a free speech absolutist. However, an event that you have to pay to attend has the inherent components of a contract. So, the party hosting an event can enforce behavioral norms. If the attendee does not wish to comply with those norms, they can choose not to attend the event.