Category: Authoritarian Left

Two approbations for The Letter, and a summary of the critics’ views

July 12, 2020 • 10:00 am

I thought I wouldn’t write any more about “The Letter”, which of course refers to the Letter in Harper’s and four other international venues decrying “cancel culture” and promoting open debate and free speech. That piece,”A letter on justice and open debate“, with 153 signers, now sports its own Wikipedia page!

Over the past few days I’ve read a number of pieces both in favor of and against the letter, though one would think that a standard call for freedom of speech, and against “cancellation” (hounding, bullying, and trying to ruin people’s reputations and careers in place of debate and counterspeech) wouldn’t be that controversial. But to think that would be to underestimate the prickliness and capacity for outrage of the Woke.

Today I want to call your attention to two short articles in favor of The Letter, but first I’ll summarize the objections that I’ve seen, which I’ve put in bold (my answers are in plain type).

1.) The signers of the letters were famous, rich, and entitled, and had nothing to fear from calling for free speech.  This completely misunderstands the purpose of the letter, which was to have powerful voices stand up on behalf of those who have no such power, and who have been cowed into silence by the mob. The answer is simple, and was given by Steve Pinker in this tweet:

 

2. The signers of the letter were not silenced; after all, they published a big letter that got a lot of attention. They were beefing about nothing. Response: see #1. They weren’t complaining about their own cancellation. 

3. Many of the signers, while calling for free speech and open debate, tried in the past to suppress other people’s speech, so they were hypocrites.  I have no knowledge of any such attempts, but even if there were one or a few, it’s the principle of the letter itself that was being endorsed. Indeed, you could do a pot/kettle thing here and note that at least two people who worked for Vox complained on Twitter about one colleague, Matt Yglesias, who signed the letter. One of the Vox employees, a trans woman named Emily VanDerWerff, sent an email to her and Yglesias’s boss, which she posted on Twitter, saying that Yglesias signed a transphobic letter that made her feel “unsafe.” The letter was not transphobic, and I can’t imagine how VanDerWerff felt “unsafe” (I tend to be dubious about such claims.)

4. Nevertheless, Ezra Klein, a co-founder of Vox and an editor-at-large, issued this tweet raising another canard: the signers of the letter were merely trying to gain power and glory by publishing it.  The pushback from the Woke was merely a call for them to debate rather than tout themselves and “cancel” others.

Klein’s “dog whistle” (LOL):

Yglesias deleted his tweets, apparently because the Boss asked him to:

And Klein got some well-deserved pushback. Claims of “feeling unsafe” are all too often a way to call attention to yourself and your feelings, thereby avoiding debate.

One of the exponents of this view is the reliably Woke (and obtuse) Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who apparently missed the point of The Letter:

5. Bad people (e.g., J. K. Rowling) signed the letter, rendering its message completely worthless. See the response of Wendy Kaminer below.  Here’s an example of hyperbole from a piece criticizing The Letter in In These Times:

I say this, of course, in the context of today’s letter, published in Harper’s and signed by more than 100 of the worst people in the world of public intellectualism, titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.”

Seriously? “Worst people in the world?” I’d rather hang out with these people any day than with the writers at Vox.

6. The Letter was full of right-wing and anti-trans “dog whistles”. This claim is based on no evidence, existing solely in the Pecksniffian minds of the critics. The letter doesn’t mention anything that approximates “dog whistles” criticizing transsexual people or pandering to conservatives. If you don’t believe me, read it again.

7. The letter didn’t give examples of “cancel culture” transgressions. Rightly so, and for a reason—it was making a larger point and didn’t want to get bogged down in specific details. As we’ve seen in several rebuttals, any example of “cancellation” given can always lead to an argument by the woke about how it was really something else, and those arguments become unending, mired in minutiae.  In fact, there’s no doubt, except among the Woke, that there is indeed a new a climate of chilled discourse in America and the UK. The evidence for that, which I cited yesterday, is that a large fraction of college students, especially conservatives, are simply afraid to open their mouths on campus. It resembles the chilling of the McCarthy era when people were sniffing out “communists” everywhere.

8. The letter called out the Left but not the Right for suppressing speech.  This claim is palpably ridiculous; read the letter again. It explicitly mentions the Right and Trump, but does concentrate on cancellations by the Left, which are those that are most frequent and get most of the attention, playing into the hands of Trump and Faux News, which report on this stuff regularly. And nearly all the signers I’d classify as on the Left.

9. The letter was motivated by racism: to suppress marginalized people who were “punching up”, so that those who called for free speech were the elitist signers, not the oppressed. This is a claim that might have been expected given the ubiquity and power of calling people racists. One example of this accusation is below:

This is a ridiculous assertion with no evidence behind it. Further, many of the signers were from minority groups, which makes the accusation even more ludicrous. But since when have the Woke cared about accuracy?

On to a brief mention of the two articles defending The Letter. They’re by two people whose writings I always enjoy: Wendy Kaminer and Nick Cohen. Although I rarely disagree with them, I still read them religiously because they often have fresh viewpoints, and Cohen gives the viewpoint of a journalist working in Britain.  Here’s Cohen writing in The Guardian:

I’ll quote him only briefly, as his piece, and Kaminer’s, deserve full reading. I cite this bit because it reprises, in the third paragraph below, the ridiculous obsession of the Washington Post with a “blackface” incident that wasn’t racist but was meant to call out racism: the racism of Megyn Kelly. Truly, showing up in blackface is not a good move, but the motivations of the woman, a government employee who got fired two years after the incident, weren’t even considered. The Post went nuts writing long articles about her:

I’m surprised such a statement of the obvious could be controversial. No honest observer can deny that the dominant factions in the modern progressive movement reject freedom of speech. They punish opinions they disagree with when they have power; and the more power they have, the more they will punish. You may think the censorship justified, but to deny its existence is absurd. Tellingly, few bother to deny it now. Occasionally, you can see them raise the exhausted excuse from the grave that only the state can censor. On this reading, Islamists killing cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo, or CEOs firing whistleblowers, are not censoring because they are not civil servants. More popular in the past week has been the claim that writers with the reach of Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, JK Rowling and Salman Rushdie cannot take a moral stand because no one can suppress their thought – even though their critics give every impression of wanting to do just that.

Leave aside their belief that ad hominem and ad feminam attacks can refute an argument, and consider that the worst of the old elite directed its attention to silencing the marginalised because it knew that their voice was often the only weapon the latter possessed. Then look around. Now as then, people without access to lawyers and influential friends suffer the most.

To take an example of that encapsulates the cowardice of our times: the Washington Post, a newspaper I admire and have written for, went to enormous lengths to destroy the life of one Sue Schafer, a middle-aged woman who made a mistake. She turned up to a Halloween party at the home of one of its cartoonists in blackface. She did not mean to insult African Americans but had come dressed as a ghoul in the guise of a conservative morning show host who had defended whites blacking up. The joke didn’t work, as several guests forcefully told her. Because the words “Washington Post” and “blackface” could be said in the same sentence, and because several guests looked as if they might go public two years later, the paper gave 3,000 words to the “story” – the amount of space normally reserved for a terrorist attack or declaration of war. Her employer, a government contractor, fired her. Everyone’s back was covered except Schafer’s and, frankly, she was a woman of no importance.

Panic at the fear of denunciation and bad faith posing as rectitude can be found across the west. A comparison with the right shows how deep the decay has reached. Conservatives know there are thoughts they cannot whisper – Brexit is a mistake comparable to Munich and Suez, anti-black and anti-Muslim racism are tangible evils, poverty makes a nonsense of equality of opportunity. Likewise on the liberal left, the canny careerist takes care to avoid being caught on the “wrong side” of arguments about trans and women’s rights, leftwing antisemitism, and bigotry in ethnic minorities. The canniest decide the best course is to say nothing at all.

There’s a lot more, and a good rationale for the Left calling out its own, but I’m running out of time and space.

Do read Kaminer’s piece in spiked (click on screenshot):

Two brief excerpts of a brief article:

‘I rest my case’, I’m tempted to say, reviewing the unhinged responses of cancel-culture fans intent on cancelling the judicious defence of free speech in our ‘Letter on Justice and Open Debate’, published by Harper’s this week. I signed emphatically, which makes me one of ‘the worst people in the world of public intellectualism’, according to In These Times. What’s so bad about defending ‘the free exchange of information and ideas’ and critiquing ‘intolerance for opposing views’ and ‘a vogue for public shaming and ostracism’? In doing so we were not really defending the right to debate and criticise, according to In These Times: we were trying to squelch debate and censor our own critics, exhibiting a ‘bizarre aversion to being argued against … [that] now borders on the pathological’.

This is what citizens of cancel culture have apparently learned from Donald Trump: confound your critics by accusing them of precisely the sins you’re busy committing. Social-justice warriors have long demanded protection from the ‘trauma’ of hearing speech they deem offensive, calling for suppression of the speech and shunning of the speaker. So, employing Trumpian tactics, they accuse free-speech advocates of the censoriousness and psychic fragility that’s the raison d’être of their movement.

. . .I saw only a partial list of signatories when I agreed to sign and didn’t pay it much attention. I focused on the text, not the names endorsing it. I’m not responsible for their views (which I don’t always share), and they’re not responsible for mine. The refusal to endorse a statement you support and consider important because it will be endorsed by people with whom you sometimes differ reflects the intolerance for debate that the letter addresses.

I disagree with many of spiked’s writers, for example, and they, no doubt, disagree often with me, but in my view that’s what makes spiked interesting. I have no desire to speak only with or to people who applaud me.

This apparently contrasts with the Woke opponents of the letter, who desire to converse only with those who agree with them. The others they shout down, and, if possible, ruin their careers. Kaminer is spot on when she notes that it is the censors who most loudly accuse The Letter’s signers of censorship.

HuffPo denies that “cancel culture” exists

July 11, 2020 • 10:45 am

HuffPo, one of the biggest exponents of “cancel culture”, now has published one of its longest articles claiming that such a culture doesn’t exist. The piece is a long and unconvincing response to the letter published last week in Harper’s (and four other international venues). That letter was simply a call for open debate, and “cancel culture” (CC) was defined implicitly in the piece. I’ll reproduce just a small section of that letter, and I’ve put the characteristics of “cancel culture” in bold. Note that the letter calls out these characteristics on both the Right and on the Left, though the signers, mostly Leftists, concentrate on their own end of the political spectrum:

. . . .The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

In other words, the “cancel culture” represents the cumulative effect of bullying and intimidation that, in the end, makes people who oppose the reigning ideologies afraid to speak. The culture prizes intimidation above discussion, seeing everything, à la critical theory, in terms of power imbalances. The culture is enacted by threatening the reputations and livelihoods of those who say what you don’t like to hear.

The Harper‘s letter deliberately omitted specific examples of CC transgressions, but it’s not hard to think of some. Those opposed to this reasonable letter were peeved that no examples were given, but that would have derailed the discussion into the pros and cons of specific cases—indeed, that’s what HuffPo does in its piece—rather than decrying a climate of increasing censoriousness and, on the Left, the hardening of ideological positions into those for which no dissent is permitted. The punishing of those who dissent from “approved ideology” is what CC is all about. One instantiation, not mentioned in the letter, is the recent tendency to pull down statues, even those of the Founding Fathers, because those founders transgressed modern norms (e.g. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and even statues, like “Progress” at the Wisconsin state Capitol, that have no connection to ideology at all).

Read and sneer.

 

Here’s author Hobbes‘s thesis:

On Monday, 153 prominent writers, academics and public figures signed their names to a statement entitled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” According to the signatories, “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”

While the letter itself, published by the magazine Harper’s, doesn’t use the term, the statement represents a bleak apogee in the yearslong, increasingly contentious debate over “cancel culture.” The American left, we are told, is imposing an Orwellian set of restrictions on which views can be expressed in public. Institutions at every level are supposedly gripped by fears of social media mobs and dire professional consequences if their members express so much as a single statement of wrongthink.

This is false. Every statement of fact in the Harper’s letter is either wildly exaggerated or plainly untrue. More broadly, the controversy over “cancel culture” is a straightforward moral panic. While there are indeed real cases of ordinary Americans plucked from obscurity and harassed into unemployment, this rare, isolated phenomenon is being blown up far beyond its importance.

Here are Hobbes’s beefs against the letter. I won’t quote him extensively as you can check my contentions yourself. Any quotes are indented, while my words are flush left.

1.) Cancel culture is a “reactionary backlash” by the “conservative elites” who try to magnify their grievances into a national crisis.

This is of course complete bunk. The signers of the letter were, by and large, on the Left, and decry actions by others on the Left. And, as the letter notes, the Right has long been guilty of restricting ideas itself, although the bulk of CC actions limned in the letter come from the Left.  For an example, go through the last decade of college-speaker deplatformings at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. If there is ever such a thing as a “cancellation”—which HuffPo denies exists)—it is the silencing of speakers by deplatforming them. The majority of deplatformings in recent years have come from the Left, though around a third are from the Right.

2.) The examples of cancellation given in the Harper’s letter are bogus, representing something other than cancellation. First, that letter doesn’t even use the words “cancel culture.” More important, it gave no examples—deliberately. But that doesn’t stop HuffPost from guessing about what the writers were thinking of. One was James Bennet, the op-ed editor of the New York Times, given his walking papers after publishing an editorial (one that the paper initially defended) by Senator Tom Cotton. Cotton endorsed the use of the military to monitor demonstrations and quash violence—a stand that I opposed, but one worth debating.  After enormous social-media pushback from readers, as well as a laughable claim by some NYT staffers that Cotton’s editorial made them feel “unsafe” (this is the trump card of the Perpetually Offended), the paper put in caveats and then fired Bennet.

HuffPo writer Hobbes says this isn’t “cancellation” because the paper admitted (after the pushback!) that it had erred, so Bennet’s firing represented not cancellation of his job, but due diligence by the paper. What a joke!

Hobbes:

While the op-ed did inspire widespread criticism, Bennet’s resignation is not a case of social-media censorship. The Times’ itself admitted that the piece “fell short of our standards” and represented a “breakdown” in the paper’s editorial process. Bennet eventually admitted that he hadn’t even read it before publishing it.

Yes—after staffers beefed and the public kvetched. Absent that, Bennet would still have his job.

But it gets worse: Hobbes says that Bennet wasn’t canceled because, after all, he’d transgressed before by publishing ideologically unsavory views:

And beyond Bennet’s incompetence, there is the simple question of accountability. Even before the Cotton op-ed, Bennet hired climate change deniers, neglected fact-checking and printed “pro-mercenary” articles by private military contractors. Are the signatories to the Harper’s letter really saying that Times readers and employees should not have expressed their frustration with these obvious breaches of ethics?

No, the signatories aren’t saying at all that people shouldn’t be able to speak up against what they dislike. Remember, the Harper’s letter says this: “We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.” Is that not clear enough, Mr. Hobbes? The signatories are saying that people’s jobs and reputations shouldn’t be on the line for bringing up issues that are worthy (to some) of debate.

Hobbes cites other examples, only to knock them down, but his view that this is just robust debate is not supported. Debating someone like Cotton is not the same as firing the person who publishes his words.

3.) Rich people or public figures aren’t subject to cancelation anyway because they get their views expressed.  Hobbes:

Consider the following two examples of “cancel culture” run amok:

  1. David Shor, a polling researcher, is fired from his job for sending a tweet summarizing the findings of an academic study.
  2. Gillian Philip, a children’s book author, is fired by her publisher after adding “I stand with J.K. Rowling” to her Twitter profile.

While they may look similar on the surface, these cases in fact have little in common.

First, the person being “canceled.” It makes no sense to apply the same standard to public figures and random citizens alike. Philip, unlike Shor, is a public figure. She is a bestselling author and is surely aware that her political statements will affect her standing among her target audience and her publisher. Let’s not be coy about this: Declaring support for J.K. Rowling in July of 2020 is a de facto statement that you agree with her controversial, unpopular views on transgender people.

Public figures certainly have a right to express their controversial views. Readers have the right to react accordingly, and publishers have the right to take these views into account when deciding which books to publish. That’s why it’s called, as “cancel culture” critics love to point out, the “marketplace of ideas.”

So far, there is no indication that private citizens are being held to the same standard as bestselling authors.

Of course they are! Do I need to name James Damore, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Peter Tatchell, and many others to show how private citizens are treated when they transgress? Many of the damned expressed views with which I disagree, but firing or demonizing them is not the way debate is supposed to happen. Further, the attacks on both public figures and private ones, with the public figures still remaining rich (e.g., J. K. Rowling), all help create that climate of intimidation so pervasive in the U.S. (especially on campuses) and the U.K. Campus surveys repeatedly show that conservative students are afraid to speak their minds (see here, for instance). Why, if not for cancel culture?

4.) The actions that constitute cancel culture are limited to the Left.  Hobbes is lying here, as a simple reading of the letter shows.

5.) The authors of the Harper’s letter propose no solutions to ending cancel culture. I would have thought that the solutions were clear: stop bullying people on social media or firing people, or, like Vox writer Emily VanEerWerff, trying to resolve disputes by getting your opponent—a colleague in her case—demonized and fired.

In the end, Hobbes admits that he has a chip on his shoulder, for his own attempts to promulgate the “truth” were ignored by the “gatekeepers of the elite media”—a group he characterizes as “overwhelmingly white, male, straight, and cis.” What happened is when the “Ebonics” kerfuffle happened some years ago (“Ebonics” is the name for African-American English, which some schools proposed to teach), Hobbes tried to show that the controversy was overblown. The elite media ignored him, and that left him with a bad taste about a group of editors who confected, says Hobbes, a “moral panic.”

So he’s got a beef. But what that has to do with the signers of the Harper’s letter, who are not editors of elite media, but public figures, eludes me.

Hobbes ends with this rant:

“Cancel culture” is nothing more than the latest repackaging of the argument that the true threat to liberalism resides not in lawmakers or large corporations but in overly sensitive college students and random social media users. It is no more sophisticated than the “war on Christmas” and has the same goal: to imply that those pushing back against injustice are equivalent to the injustice itself.

Some of the signatories of the Harper’s letter know this and some of them don’t. All of them should have known better.

My response is to quote Andrew Sullivan: “We are all on campus now.”

_________

For another far-Left attack on the Harper’s letter, see this piece in In These Times. A quote from author Hamilton Nolan, who shows that he has no understanding of what the letter was trying to say.

I say this, of course, in the context of today’s letter, published in Harper’s and signed by more than 100 of the worst people in the world of public intellectualism, titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” The letter is certainly not about any reasonable definition of “Justice,” and is about Open Debate only to the extent that people who make very healthy salaries arguing in public for a living seem to have a bizarre aversion to being argued against. This aversion, I’m afraid, now borders on the pathological. We have entered a brave new world in which those waving the banner of “Free Speech” accuse their opponents of being unable to take criticism while waging a histrionic campaign against anyone who dares to criticize them. Accusing your opponents of doing exactly what you are yourself guilty of is a classic propaganda technique. It works well, unfortunately.

 

Five timely readings for the day

July 10, 2020 • 10:30 am

I have nothing to say, but it’s okay (Good morning!).  Actually, duck duties in the pouring rain (yes, I got soaked, but in a good cause), combined with overdue grocery shopping, has put a crimp in my day. But, mirabile dictu, I have five—count them, five—pieces that are worth your time to read. I’ll give a link to all of them in screenshots, though the second piece, from The Economist, is behind a paywall (judicious inquiry might yield a copy). And the indented bits are quotes from the article.

In this interview with Steve Pinker (published, in all places, at the Templeton-funded Nautilus), he discusses why Americans continue to defy social distancing and abjure masks despite the palpable health risks.  It’s largely about tribalism, but part of that involves not just solidarity with the group, but distrust of “elitist” experts.

A few bits:

We turned to Steven Pinker for help with an answer. The professor of psychology at Harvard, author of widely discussed books, including How the Mind Works and most recently, Enlightenment Now, sees the deep-seated mindset, tribalism, at work in people’s defiance of health recommendations. But it’s more than a tribalism of being with your crowd. “There’s a moralistic component to this kind of tribalism, mainly that people tend to see their own tribes as victims of some kind of oppression or harm by some rival coalition,” Pinker says, his distinctive mass of gray hair filling the Zoom screen. “They believe their actions on behalf of the group, even if symbolic, are a kind of justice, a kind of settling the score, making a statement, advancing a moral cause—as strange as that may be to those of us who are not part of that coalition, and might even have contempt for that cause. But from the inside, it always feels as if your group has been victimized, has been a longstanding victim of a series of affronts and harms for which you seek redress. And that’s common in the invented histories and myths and narratives of many peoples.”

Pinker says it can be easier to understand the effect of tribalism by putting the shoe on the other foot. “Some of the people on the political right could, indeed, ask that question of the people showing up at Black Lives Matter rallies. They’re crowded together. They’re shouting. They’re chanting. A lot of them are not wearing masks. If we imagine answering that person’s question from the point of view of our buddies on the street protesting that Black Lives Matter, we can get probably some insight, even if we have our loyalties as to which is a legitimate cause and which is the not-so-legitimate cause. But you’re asking about psychology, about what people could possibly be thinking. Well, what could they be thinking in the street, shouting slogans without a mask? What could the public health experts be thinking, telling people it’s OK to do that?”

. . .Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, heads the Cultural Cognition Project at the university, which explores how cultural values shape public risk perceptions. He has shown, time and again, that the need to belong to a group, usually political or religious, overrides the facts of science. Kahan, who was unable to be interviewed, has written in Nature: “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.”

Pinker agrees, but stresses that doing the right thing is never easy for anybody. “With coronavirus, it’s genuinely hard to know whether surfaces are potential vectors, whether six feet is enough or not enough, whether masks help or don’t help,” Pinker says. “From a scientist’s point of view, it’s not surprising the information would shift. That’s because our natural state is ignorance. We can only learn from data, and as the data comes in, our state of knowledge and best practices will change. But, partly because people think of experts as oracles, as opposed to experimenters and exploiters of trial and error, there’s a presumption that either the experts know what is the best policy from the get-go, or else they are incompetent and ought to be replaced. That’s opposed to what we know to be the correct situation in science—namely, no one knows anything, and you have to learn.”

 

***************

A piece in The Economist describes the differences between justified complaints about racism and the view of those who, on both the Right and Left, “exploit racial divisions as a political tool.” One of the cures proposed by the anonymous author is free speech and a curbing of identity politics, as well as a list of tangible governmental policies that will reduce inequality.

A few excerpts:

This ideology also has some valid insights. Racism is sustained by unjust institutions and practices. Sometimes, as in policing, this is overt. More often, in countless small put-downs and biases, it is subtle but widespread and harmful.

But then the ideology takes a wrong turn, by seeking to impose itself through intimidation and power. Not the power that comes from persuasion and elections, but from silencing your critics, insisting that those who are not with you are against you, and shutting out those who are deemed privileged or disloyal to their race. It is a worldview where everything and everyone is seen through the prism of ideology—who is published, who gets jobs, who can say what to whom; one in which in-groups obsess over orthodoxy in education, culture and heritage; one that enforces absolute equality of outcome, policy by policy, paragraph by paragraph, if society is to count as just.

. . . The pity is that these ideas will not solve America’s problems with race. They will not eliminate inequality because they are a poor way to bring about beneficial change. Unless you can freely analyse causes and question orthodoxies you will not be able to solve problems. And unless you can criticise people and practices without fear of being called out, you will not be able to design effective policies and then go on to refine them.

The new race theory blocks progress in another way, too. The barriers to racism can be dismantled only when they are exposed—and so they must be, however painful. But the false idea that ingrained racism will forever block African-Americans at every turn is a barrier in its own right.

And, by focusing on power and division, this ideology only creates more space for some on the right to exploit race as a tool. A fundamental belief in power above persuasion frustrates coalition-building. Essential allies are not carried along, but forced along. When every transaction at work, at home, or at the school gate is seen through a prism of racial power, no encounter between different races can be innocent.

. . . . Liberals can help in America, too. Much of the material gulf between African-Americans and whites can be bridged with economic policies that improve opportunity. You do not need to build a state based on identity. Nor do you need tools like reparations, which come with practical difficulties and have unintended consequences. Economic policies that are race-neutral, which people qualify for because of poverty, not the colour of their skin, can make a big difference. They have a chance of uniting Americans, not dividing them. If the mood now really is for change, they would be politically sellable and socially cohesive.

Our Briefing lays out what some of these policies might look like. Top of the list is tackling the housing segregation that is central to America’s racial economic inequality. The reform of zoning laws and the grant of rent-assistance vouchers are the chief ingredients. That would bring many benefits, improving public services and lessening violence. More integrated housing would integrate schools too and, given America’s locally financed education, mean that more would be spent on black children. Affordable measures, including advice and modest cash grants, have been shown to boost graduation from college. A third tool is the tax system. The earned-income tax credit tops up wages of working adults. A child allowance would cut poverty. A baby bond would help shrink the wealth gap.

***********

 

In this piece in Quillette, Lawrence Krauss argues (correctly, I think), that science is not structurally racist: that is, there are no longer built-in barriers to the advancement of ethnic minorities. This doesn’t mean, of course, there aren’t barriers, but that they rear up before minorities even get a chance to do science. That’s why, despite fervent efforts by every biology department I know to hire blacks and Hispanics, as well as procure minority graduate students, we aren’t succeeding. That’s not because there’s discrimination at the hiring and grad-school level, but that the pool of people reaching that stage is tiny. And that’s because there’s a lack of opportunity beginning early on: even before school starts.

Quotes:

During the academic strike called for by the APS [American Physical Society], it was emphasized that the proportion of black physicists in national laboratories such as the Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois (where one #strike4blacklives organizer works) is much smaller than the percentage of blacks in the population at large. It was implied that systematic racism in the profession was responsible for this, although no explicit data supporting this claim was presented.

In fact, there is a simpler explanation. There are fewer tenured black physicists at universities and laboratories because there are fewer black PhD physicists. There are fewer black PhD physicists because there are fewer black physics graduate students. There are fewer black graduate students because there are fewer black undergraduates who major in physics. This latter fact is a cause for concern. But the root cause lies in inequities that arise far earlier in the education process. These cannot be addressed by affirmative action policies at the upper levels of practicing professional scientists.

Well, affirmative action policies could help remedy the problem, but, argues Krauss, one has to abrogate the duty of science to adhere to the policy that “quality alone [is] the final discriminator.” Some will disagree with this, and for this statement Krauss has been demonized widely. I’ve argued that some form of affirmative action is useful here, but science departments throughout the U.S. have failed miserably, simply because the pool of people is so small. We need to adopt the kind of policies that the Economist article describes, and try as hard as we can to ensure equal opportunity for all from the outset. As scientists we can start doing this by doing outreach in minority communities. But that’s not nearly enough because, after we sell our field to others, we go home to our prosperous digs while the targets of our actions return to a life bereft of opportunity.

I do agree with Krauss that our main duty is to do science, and, while we should do our best to give everyone an opportunity to do science if they want to, we are not suited to be social engineers. As Krauss says:

Assistant professors of physics cannot solve racial inequality in our society. The professional responsibility of individual scientists, especially young scientists, is to do the best science they can, and to train their students as best they can. It is not to become part of a social movement, however well-intentioned that movement may be.

To see a better statement of this idea vis-à-vis official stands of universities and their academic departments, read the Kalven Report that, until recently, held sway at the University of Chicago. (Sadly, it’s dissolving as our University is deciding to take ideological stands). No, it’s not our duty to become part of a social movement, but as an evolutionary biologist whose work was funded by the public, I at least feel an onus to give back to the public by showing people how great the study of evolution is. Is that kind of outreach helpful in increasing diversity and equity? Who knows?

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Several readers have sent me a multi-page list of demands, signed by hundreds of Princeton faculty, students, and staff, directed at their school as a cure for the systemic and pervasive racism they see in that institution. Although the motivation is laudable, the execution is poor, with many items almost fascistic in their requirements. This is a true document of Authoritarian Leftism.

There have been two pieces of pushback. One is by Samantha Harris, a Princeton alum writing at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE):


Here she describes two of the demands, one of which is clearly illegal:

The petition includes a long list of “demands,” several of which stand in direct opposition to Princeton students’ and faculty members’ rights to free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of conscience. (Notably, one of them — a demand that faculty of color receive extra pay and sabbatical time compared to white faculty — is simply illegal.) Princeton’s leadership should categorically reject these illiberal demands and make clear that the fundamental rights of its students and faculty are non-negotiable and will not be subordinated to political expediency.

The most chillingly illiberal demand in the petition asks Princeton to:

[c]onstitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

The threat of discipline for speech, research, and publication that is subjectively deemed “racist” by a committee of ideologically motivated Princeton faculty is an anti-intellectual, frontal assault on free speech and academic freedom at Princeton that would shut down entire avenues of inquiry, research, and discussion. How, exactly, would such a committee determine whether faculty expression or research is “racist”? A look at some recent demands for faculty discipline is illustrative.

. . .In a terrific article last month in Inside Higher Ed, University of Pennsylvania professor Jonathan Zimmerman argued that faculty must rally behind academic freedom in this historic moment — one he compared to 1950s-era efforts to purge universities of Communist-leaning faculty. Zimmerman wrote:

The biggest myth about the McCarthy period is that purges of university faculty were imposed upon an unwilling professoriate. In fact, most American faculty members embraced the campaign to remove Communist or left-leaning colleagues. They took loyalty oaths, condemned “fellow travelers” and did everything else they could to protect the university from its supposed Red enemy.

Noting that universities are “repeating all the same patterns” today, Zimmerman urged his colleagues to stand up for the academic freedom rights of unpopular colleagues:

Our university leaders are busily issuing new loyalty oaths, declaring allegiance to Black Lives Matter, and everyone else is expected to follow along. That can’t be good for our democracy, or for our universities. It’s not even good for Black Lives Matter! Like any other social movement, BLM can only benefit from a full and free discussion of it.

If met, the Princeton faculty’s demand for a committee to police speech, research, and publication for signs of racism would be the end of academic freedom at the Ivy League university. And while one would hope that any free-minded academics at Princeton would simply leave the university under such oppressive circumstances, it is more likely that, given the challenges of the academic job market (particularly for faculty with dissenting views), they would instead opt for self-censorship.

Finally, Joshua Katz, a Princeton professor of Humanities and Classics, has written a “Declaration of Independence” (presumably from the letter of demands), also outlining those parts of the demands that would nearly destroy his school as a high-quality University.

One quote and then I will leave you to your reading. But at least look first at the letter of demands. What’s remarkable about that letter is that these days it is so unremarkable: it’s a boilerplate of every grievance of the offended.

Katz:

Indeed, plenty of ideas in the letter are ones I support. It is reasonable to “[g]ive new assistant professors summer move-in allowances on July 1” and to “make [admissions] fee waivers transparent, easy to use, and well-advertised.” “Accord[ing] greater importance to service as part of annual salary reviews” and “[i]mplement[ing] transparent annual reporting of demographic data on hiring, promotion, tenuring, and retention” seem unobjectionable. And I will cheerfully join the push for a “substantial expansion” of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which encourages underrepresented minorities to enter PhD programs and strive to join the professoriate.

But then there are dozens of proposals that, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate. Some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary” and “Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical” and “Provide additional human resources for the support of junior faculty of color.” Let’s leave aside who qualifies as “of color,” though this is not a trivial point. It boggles my mind that anyone would advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason other than their pigmentation.

“Establish a core distribution requirement focused on the history and legacy of racism in the country and on the campus.” There would be wisdom in this time of disunity in suggesting (not, in my view, requiring) that students take courses in American history and constitutionalism, both of which almost inevitably consider slavery and race, but that is not the same thing. Not incidentally, if you believe anti-blackness to be foundational, it is not a stretch to imagine that you will teach the 1619 Project as dogma.

. . . “Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty… Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the [usual] set of rules and procedures.” This scares me more than anything else: For colleagues to police one another’s research and publications in this way would be outrageous. Let me be clear: Racist slurs and clear and documentable bias against someone because of skin color are reprehensible and should lead to disciplinary action, for which there is already a process. But is there anyone who doesn’t believe that this committee would be a star chamber with a low bar for cancellation, punishment, suspension, even dismissal?

As Andrew Sullivan would say, “See you next Friday.” Actually, I’ll see you this afternoon and tomorrow morning.

h/t: Merilee, pyers, Paul

Pushback from Sean Carroll and others against the Harper’s letter promoting open discourse

July 8, 2020 • 9:30 am

UPDATE: In a New York Times article, Thomas Chatterton Williams, a Haper’s writer who helped organize the letter, got specific with some of the incidents that inspired its creation:

He said there wasn’t one particular incident that provoked the letter. But he did cite several recent ones, including the resignation of more than half the board of the National Book Critics Circle over its statement supporting Black Lives Matter, a similar blowup at the Poetry Foundation, and the case of David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted about academic research linking looting and vandalism by protesters to Richard Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory.

Is that good enough to answer those who say that the letter lacked specificity? I could add lots more!

________________________________________

Yesterday I reported on a letter, signed by many luminaries, about the need for open debate and the dangers of repressive “cancel culture,” whether from the Right or Left. The letter was published simultaneously in Harper’s, Le Monde, Die Zeit, La Repubblica, and El País.  Before we look at some pushback, please reread the original short letter:

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Note that this isn’t particularly controversial, at least to me. It seems incontestable that social-media mobs and other forms of demonization and bullying are indeed narrowing the range of acceptable speech, with strict penalties if you go against acceptable thought (on the Left, that would be “woke” thought, including critical theory).  (See the last Tweet at bottom.) This is in fact a classic defense of free speech, arguing that “justice and freedom cannot exist without each other.”

The letter indicts all parts of the political spectrum, though I think it was meant mainly as a message to the Left: “Don’t be like the Right.” Note as well that although it cites the kinds of censorious behavior that it decries, it doesn’t give specific examples. I think that’s fine, for examples would detract from the general point, and can be found quite easily. As I wrote yesterday:

I bet you could name an example of every action mentioned here (e.g., editors being fired = James Bennet; journalist barred from writing on certain topics = Andrew Sullivan, professor fired for quoting literature in class = Philip Adamo, and so on).

But, as you might expect, the letter brought pushback, some of which came not from its message, but from the identities of the signers. I was saddened, though, to see pushback against the message from physicist Sean Carroll, a man I’ve always admired (and admire still); he’s our Official Website Physicist.®  Here are screenshots of his 10-tweet thread, which you can find here.

Let me respond briefly to these tweets, as I think Sean’s argument—that the Harper’s letter was not only useless, but injurious—is misguided. I’ll take the tweets in their numbered order.

1.) How, exactly, is a letter calling for open discourse, and the withholding of a mob mentality towards those transgressing “accepted” wisdom, “anti-productive”? (The word is “counterproductive”, I think.) Sean’s explanation follows.

2.) Sean says that “some of the signatories have been involved in attempts to silence people they disagree with.” Curiously, though he faults the article for not giving specific examples, Sean declines to name names here, so I have no idea what or whom he’s talking about.  And even if a few have done this, which would be hypocritical, that doesn’t affect the message of the letter. Why not just take it as it is without minutely examining every signatory? After all, who has an unblemished record?

As for “none of them is exactly lacking ways to have their voices be heard,” why is that relevant? They wanted their voices to be heard on an issue that isn’t often discussed in the mainstream liberal press, and thus the letter was published in major media in five countries. What they’re doing is letting their voices be heard at a time critical for describing the tsunami of indictments for Thoughtcrime, Writecrime, and Newspeak.

3.) Sean claims that the “letter declines to engage with substance, instead straw-manning the incidents they object to. We are told, for example, that “professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class.”

There’s no strawmanning here; I can name one or more examples of every behavior cited in the Harper’s piece. It would be counterproductive to divert attention from the article’s message by going into detail about each claim. I could do that for you, and I’ve given several examples, but rest assured that there is no “strawmanning,” which I take to mean a claim by Carrol that the authors are exaggerating these incidents. They aren’t. And, of course, Carroll himself fails to give examples of the “censorious” people who, he says, signed the article.

4.) In the “4/n” tweet, Sean argues that nobody objects to “quoting literature” in a classroom in general, and he’s right. But that isn’t the point of the article. The point was that quoting literature in a classroom that makes people uncomfortable can lead to teachers being fired or disciplined, and that’s happened many times. If you follow my site and others, you’ll easily find such cases. Again, going into detail—giving five or six instances of each claim—would detract from the article’s message.

5.) Same as above: Sean’s beef is that details about the controversies are lacking (are “erased”, to use the argot of the Woke). If the details support the claims, which they do, this doesn’t concern me. The main argument is clear, and is far from a “simple morality play.”

6.) Sean claims that there is no “culture war here”, just the need for principled debate. But yes, there is a kind of culture war, with the Authoritarian Left trying to silence those who violate the dicta of Critical Theory by threatening them with career damage, being called a “racist,” and so on. I am not aware of many people on the Center-Left, like me, trying to silence anybody. In fact, this site is about debate. Note that although Sean says “phrases like ‘cancel culture’ serve to obscure more than clarify,” the Harper’s article doesn’t even use that phrase.

7-10.) This is where I disagree most strongly with Sean. His argument is more or less “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” That is, those who get hurt or “unfairly fired from their job” in the current climate of ideological purity, well, they’re just collateral damage in a tactic that he sees as “a bad strategy in an honorable fight.” But the point is that we all agree that the “fight”, i.e., the battle for equality, inclusion, equity, and against Trumpism, is an honorable fight. The point is that you don’t have to fight dirty.

I disagree that hurting people’s livelihood and reputations is “something we have to accept as part of progress.” No, we do not! Yes, we should push back against that, but by then the damage is done. The point is not to discuss the Cancel Culture, but to change it—to dissolve a culture that prizes bullying and censorship over open but respectful disagreement.  Frankly, I do not see the “weasel words” and “sweeping generalizations” in the Harper’s letter that, claims Sean, “undercut the struggle for equality in the name of free discourse.” Is he saying here that we should accept restrictions on discourse because they hinder the achievement of equality? I’m not sure. But I’m pretty sure that the Harper’s article will not undermine the fight for moral justice.

In truth, I’m not sure what Sean is trying to do with this series of tweets except to say that he’s opposed to the article.

*******

I just noticed that on his blog, P. Z. Myers has also dismissed the Harper’s letter as “whiny”. He also beefs about a lack of detailed description of the incidents—incidents that anybody can find in a moment of Googling:

Shorter Harper’s letter: We elites deplore the fact that people use the internet to criticize us. It’s clear that whoever wrote this had some specific incidents in mind, but chose to remove any details in that second paragraph to prevent anyone from thinking, “wait, that was a fair response to writing stupid ideas.” And the “threat of reprisal” they are concerned about is that people might use the privilege of free speech to disagree with them. The “ideological conformity” they’re concerned about is the growing realization that modern conservatism has poisoned our civilization, is a rotten idea, and maybe, just maybe, rotten ideas ought not to dominate our government.

It all boils down to yet another paean to Free Speech being used to silence anyone who might criticize the status quo. How dare you recoil in disgust at my thinly-veiled call for eugenics, or my distortion of biology to decree that there are only two sexes, or my concern that uppity Blacks should calm down and wait for justice to gently lap against your toes? We have bills to pay, and if you make our conformity to the conservative establishment less bankable, we might have to struggle to pay off the house in the Hamptons!

. . . they say nothing about what’s to be done to end “this stifling atmosphere.” Maybe because what they actually want is to shut everyone else up.

There’s more, but it makes me ill. Nobody is calling for people to shut up or not engage in debate here. As is palpably clear, the letter is simply decrying the tendency of social-justice mobs (and others on the Right), to threaten or try to ruin people’s careers for the most trivial of “sins.” One example is the letter to the Linguistics Society of America trying to strip Pinker of his LSA honors because of a few tweets and one word in a book (mild-mannered). Want more: what about the cancellation of Woody Allen’s memoirs by Hachette? Or the cancellation of young-adult fiction that isn’t sufficiently woke? Or the demonization of J. K. Rowling (who signed the article) for her views on trans women? I could go on, but I’m getting weary of Myers’s well known tendency to go after anyone who’s more famous than he, accusing them, as he does here, of racism, conservatism, and elitism.

*******

The Washington Post has a longish article describing reaction, both pro and con, to the Harper’s letter. You can read that for yourself.

********

An article at The American Conservative applauds the letter as a useful prod on the Right by the Left. (Am I demonized for citing that site? If so, that just shows the point of the Harper’s article!) The AC article contains several interesting tweets. I’ll show just a couple:
From a Vox writer criticizing one of her colleagues who signed the article. Dog whistles in there!

A retraction from a signer:

https://twitter.com/GreenidgeKerri/status/1280608456152678406

And a tweet (which I can’t find on the Twitter feed) from Thomas Chatterton Williams, a writer for the New York Times, a columnist at Harpers, and also one of the letter’s organizers.

The fact that many people agreed with the letter but refused to sign it emphasizes more than anything else the NEED for such a letter.

Williams’s Twitter feed has many good tweets from those who signed the letter or supported it. Have a look.

I end with a new tweet from Pinker

h/t: Chris, cesar

Two more people take up the cudgels for Pinker

July 7, 2020 • 11:00 am

Although Steve Pinker is perfectly capable of defending himself against insane charges by the Woke, as instantiated in a letter asking the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) to remove him from the position as a Distinguished LSA Fellow and designated media expert, I figured that I’d save him the trouble. After all, I’m just a lay reader who is able to compare what the letter said with the actual evidence supporting its indictments. My verdict: the letter should be dismissed with prejudice.

Since I posted my critique of the letter, two more defenses of Pinker have appeared. The first is from a famous linguist, Barbara Partee, who was not only an Inaugural Fellow of the LSA, but also a former President.  In 2014 she got an honorary degree from The University of Chicago, which awards such degrees only to distinguished scholars (no movie stars or Garrison Keillors, thank you). Her opinion, especially as a linguist who was chosen to be LSA President, carries considerable weight.

Her response, published on Medium, can be seen by clicking on the screenshot below.

Her responses are generally similar to mine, but she is a colleague of Steve’s and knew some things I didn’t. Further, she thinks, as did I, that the signatories of the letter showed no awareness of what Pinker wrote in his books. A quote from Partee:

I was shocked and surprised when I learned of this petition, since in my own experience Steven Pinker works hard for racial justice. Steven and I have been working together in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to help increase the number of Black linguists, and women, in those academies. He’s been playing a leading role in these efforts. I have no doubts about his commitment to social justice. Others who know him better than I do would probably be able to cite more of his work in advocacy and mentoring. The complaints in the petition seem related to the positions he has taken in his books The Better Angels of our Nature and Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, positions about progress which are controversial but sincerely held and backed by arguments that may be imperfect but should be answered with other arguments, not with censure, in my opinion. It’s not clear whether the petitioners have read any of those books.

Partee and I differ in only one very trivial matter:  in one of the six indictments of Pinker, all involving a total of five tweets and one word (“mild-mannered” for Bernard Goetz)—a ridiculous social-media rationale for demanding his dethronement from the LSA. Our minor difference is based on this New York Times article.

Pinker issued this tweet about the article:

And the Purity Posse took issue with Steve’s saying “Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately”, saying this:

Let the record show that Dr. Pinker draws this conclusion from an article that contains the following quote: “The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin.” (original emphasis) We believe this shows that Dr. Pinker is willing to make dishonest claims in order to obfuscate the role of systemic racism in police violence.\

In fact, if you read the bit after the quote, the article goes on to say that while African-Americans are being killed disproportionately, it may have nothing to do with race per se, but with a higher encounter rate between police and black suspects, for which there’s evidence. (We’ve recently discussed this at length.) As the article said:

Instead, there is another possibility: It is simply that — for reasons that may well include police bias — African-Americans have a very large number of encounters with police officers. Every police encounter contains a risk: The officer might be poorly trained, might act with malice or simply make a mistake, and civilians might do something that is perceived as a threat. The omnipresence of guns exaggerates all these risks.

Such risks exist for people of any race — after all, many people killed by police officers were not black. But having more encounters with police officers, even with officers entirely free of racial bias, can create a greater risk of a fatal shooting.

Arrest data lets us measure this possibility. For the entire country, 28.9 percent of arrestees were African-American. This number is not very different from the 31.8 percent of police-shooting victims who were African-Americans. If police discrimination were a big factor in the actual killings, we would have expected a larger gap between the arrest rate and the police-killing rate.

Right now we don’t know whether this, rather than the racism of police (for which there’s other evidence) is responsible for the “disproportional”.  Partee says that Pinker was “hasty/sloppy” in constructing that tweet, but, she adds, as I did:

It looks to me that Pinker did make a misleading statement in his tweet, but that the petitioners also make a misleading statement by omitting the context of their quote from the article.

Pinker’s tweet: “Data: Police don’t shoot blacks disproportionately. Problem: Not race, but too many police shootings.”

Petitioners’ quote from the article: “The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin.”

Larger quote from the article: (doesn’t support Pinker’s statement, but it shows that their quote doesn’t represent the article’s point.)

Also, the meaning of “disproportional” is ambiguous here, which could account for Pinker’s tweet. Blacks could be killed by cops disproportionately to their percentage in the general population, which is true, but—and I think this was Steve’s point—they could be killed disproportionately even taking into account a higher encounter rate. That is, if cops on duty encounter blacks twice as often as whites, but kill blacks four times as often as whites, that would be a different form of disproportionality.

But it hardly matters. To me, the signatories’ deliberate distortion of the article’s point—and Steve’s—is far worse than Steve using “disproportional” in a sense different from the article. If you read the article, the point is clear.

And that’s about it. At the end, Dr. Partee expresses sadness that she seems largely alone in her defense of Pinker:

That’s it. I stopped there except for this one last paragraph on July 4th (now on July 6 I’m changing only tenses) so I could share this with my colleagues before I went to bed, since this was so current right then. There was already an interesting long thread on David Pesetsky’s Facebook page. David was careful in his post to not weigh in on the justice of the accusations against Pinker, but to talk only about the wisdom of the two proposed remedies — stripping him of his Fellow status or removing him from the LSA-approved list of media contacts — if the accusations were sound. Most people on the thread said that the LSA should do at least something to acknowledge that they don’t approve of that behavior of Pinker’s. I saw very very few others who seemed to share my opinion that they should do neither because he has done nothing that is inconsistent with the LSA’s principles. I seem to be in a small minority, but I feel quite strongly about it. I may be influenced in part by my husband’s opinions, which derive from his growing up in Communist Russia.

I will add on July 6 only that I no longer feel quite so alone; a few colleagues have expressed agreement with what I’ve written and suggested that I share it more widely, which I am hereby doing.

Beside me, another defender is the estimable Scott Aaronson, who on his website pulls no punches (click on screenshot):

Scott is steamed!

Again and again, spineless institutions have responded to these sorts of ultimatums by capitulating to them. So I confess that the news about Pinker depressed me all weekend. The more time passed, though, the more it looked like the Purity Posse might have actually overplayed its hand this time. Steven Pinker is not weak prey.

Let’s start with what’s missing from the petition: Noam Chomsky pointedly refused to sign. How that must’ve stung his comrades! For that matter, virtually all of the world’s well-known linguists refused to sign. Ray Jackendoff and Michel DeGraff were originally on the petition, but their names turned out to have been forged (were others?).

Note that at least two people’s names were forged or added to the original letter without permission. How did that happen?

Scott goes on:

But despite the flimsiness of the petition, suppose the Linguistics Society of America caved. OK, I mused, how many people have even heard of the Linguistics Society of America, compared to the number who’ve heard of Pinker or read his books? If the LSA expelled Pinker, wouldn’t they be forever known to the world only as the organization that had done that?

I’m tired of the believers in the Enlightenment being constantly on the defensive. “No, I’m not a racist or a misogynist … on the contrary, I’ve spent decades advocating for … yes, I did say that, but you completely misunderstood my meaning, which in context was … please, I’m begging you, can’t we sit and discuss this like human beings?”

It’s time for more of us to stand up and say: yes, I am a center-left extremist. Yes, I’m an Enlightenment fanatic, a radical for liberal moderation and reason. If liberalism is the vanilla of worldviews, then I aspire to be the most intense vanilla anyone has ever tasted. I’m not a closeted fascist. I’m not a watered-down leftist. I’m something else. I consider myself ferociously anti-racist and anti-sexist and anti-homophobic and pro-downtrodden, but I don’t cede to any ideological faction the right to dictate what those terms mean. The world is too complicated, too full of ironies and surprises, for me to outsource my conscience in that way.

Good for Scott. It’s time that all of us stand up against the madness of the Purity Posse and the Authoritarian Left. Each of us who calls them out empowers others to speak up.

Endangered Lincoln statue isn’t what it seems

June 29, 2020 • 11:00 am

I guess statue destruction is the topic du jour, but do read about this one, as it raises some conflicts for protestors.

About ten days ago, I reported about a statue of Abraham Lincoln that might be pulled down or replaced. The original is The Emancipation Memorial (sculptor: Thomas Ball, erected in 1876) on Capitol Hill in Washington, D. C., and there’s a replica in Boston that was the subject of controversy.  Here it is:

 

In my post, I quoted a Boston site about the statue being endangered.

As WBUR News in Boston reports:

The statue in the city’s Park Square is a replica of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington and depicts Lincoln with one hand raised above a kneeling man with broken shackles on his wrists.

The statue is meant to show Lincoln freeing the man from slavery, but a petition against the statue says it “instead represents us still beneath someone else.”

The petition was started by Tory Bullock, a Boston man who says the statue has long led him to ask, “If he’s free why is he still on his knees?” His call to remove the memorial had attracted nearly 6,000 signatures as of Saturday.

The Boston Globe reports that Mayor Marty Walsh is in favor of removing the statue and is interested in replacing it with something that recognizes equality. Walsh’s office said the administration is looking into the process required to make the change.

Indeed, at first glance I found the statue, well, “cringeworthy”, but I added a caveat in my own take, a caveat that turned out to be crucial (my emphasis below):

I have to say that, in a modern context, it’s a tad cringeworthy. However, the question “If he’s free why is he still on his knees?” might not be relevant if Lincoln is seen in the process of raising up those who were downtrodden. A statue made today wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—show a crouching black man, but are we to tear this down because it was made in 1876, not long after Lincoln died? If you think it should stay up but be contextualized, how would you contextualize it? At least we don’t have to tear down statues of Lincoln by himself, like the great marble sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

But you know, I was too lazy to actually look up the statue, but was finally prompted to do so by this tweet from Sarah Haider, which has an African-American lady explaining the statue’s symbolism. Listen to what the woman on the video has to say:.

And Wikipedia verifies the woman’s words:

Designed and sculpted by Thomas Ball and erected in 1876, the monument depicts Abraham Lincoln holding a copy of his Emancipation Proclamation freeing a male African American slave modeled on Archer Alexander. The ex-slave is depicted on one knee, with one fist clenched, shirtless and broken shackles at the president’s feet.

The Emancipation Memorial statue was funded by the wages of freed slaves.

This gives the statue an entirely different meaning, and had I, or the purity sniffer Tory Bullock, looked it up, you’d find it not only inoffensive, but inspiring. And seriously, the original was erected by former slaves? No matter that the replica is in Boston: both statues convey the same message. Who would be so churlish to haul this statue down in light of its history?

Nevertheless, Tory Bullock, who seems to be black (if the picture below is him), persists. His question, “why is he still on his knees?”, is answered with “he won’t be for long”, though of course we still have the residuum of slavery. But the history of this statue, and what it’s supposed to show, convinces me that it should stay. If some get offended, well, too bad.

Bullock’s iPetititon (click on screenshot below), originally aimed to garner 1,000 signatures, now has over 12,500, and he reports this:

The Arts Commission in Boston has decided to hold a public hearing to shape and eventually VOTE on what happens to this statue. THANK YOU for signing the petition to get their attention but now it’s time to make YOUR VOICE HEARD! They’ll be taking live and written testimonials about the piece. I’m going to need the full squad on this one. This memorial has been up for more than 100 years and now is the time we all stand up…this is our chance to finally respectfully put this image away while NEVER forgetting its history.

Given the way things are going, only a few offended people are needed to sufficiently shame others, afraid to be called racists, to vote for tearing down a statue. As Greg reported this morning, two statues in Madison, Wisconsin have been pulled down even though they have no negative connotations and one of them was of an anti-slavery activist killed while fighting with the Union Army against Confederates.

This makes no sense. What we have here is hair-trigger Offense Detectors, which are so sensitive that they detect things that aren’t offensive. At some time we have to start pushing back against the mishigas, and that time is now.

 

Jefferson statue pulled down, Lincoln is next

June 18, 2020 • 10:30 am

I go back and forth on how we deal with famous people who had views that, while widespread in their time, would be rightly seen as odious were they expressed today. For example, there was hardly an Anglophone white man before the turn of the 20th century who wasn’t a racist or had some association with oppressing people of color.  These include Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who kept slaves, Winston Churchill, who was a nativist and bigot, and Charles Darwin, who, although an abolitionist, clearly expressed views on the superiority of white people that would be excoriated today.

What do we do with statues of such people, or buildings named after them? I suppose my solution would be to take it on a case by case basis. For example, statues of Confederate generals put up after the war to celebrate white supremacy seem “problematic”. But we pull them down, as is happening recently to widespread acclaim, or do we give them “context” with explanatory plaques or “counter-statues” nearby? My views tend to be not to erase history, but, when that history is especially odious, to “contextualize” it. Or, as with the Nuremberg stadium where Hitler held his famous rallies, just let them go to seed. (I think they’ve done this in Sofia, Bulgaria with Soviet-era statues.)

Here are three cases in which I can see the problem, but don’t favor effacing history. This comes from my judgment that, on balance, the good done by these people outweighs what bad stuff stemmed from their views. In other words, a memorial serves not only a celebratory purpose, but a historical one. This puts me at odds with many of my fellow Leftists, but let me know your own take.

Thomas Jefferson statue. This article comes from Oregonlive.com (click on screenshot). Protestors pulled down a statue of Jefferson from an eponymous high school in Portland, Oregon:

From the report:

Earlier in the day, the statue’s pedestal had been defaced with graffiti that, among other things, identified Jefferson as a slave owner.

Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence that proclaimed “that all men are created equal,” publicly decried slavery — even as he enslaved hundreds of people and profited from their forced labor.

It was unclear when the statue was taken down, but by 10 p.m. when dozens of protesters streamed back onto the football field at Jefferson High School, the statue was no longer standing.

The crowd cheered as an organizer announced: “There’s an interesting piece of history up here… Mr. Thomas is all beside himself.”

“We’re taking this city back,” the organizer said, “One school at a time. One racist statue at a time.”

Yes, Jefferson had slaves (and took one for a mistress), but he’s perhaps the most famous and accomplished of the founding fathers, author the Declaration of Independence, of the Virginia Constitution (which served as a model for the U.S. version), of the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom (calling for the separation of church and state), the third President of the U.S., and the founder of the University of Virginia (for which he forbade a theology school).

Perhaps I’m soft on TJ because he went to The College of William and Mary, my alma mater (a statue of TJ at the College was defaced three years ago, as was a statue of James Monroe, also a slaveholder), but it seems to me that the good he did for our country outweighs his status as a slaveowner (which, as I understand, was always problematic for him). Are we then to further efface Jefferson from our history because he had slaves? If so, then also efface George Washington, who had hundreds of slaves. Shall we tear down the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument? If not, and you think statues to Jefferson are racist, why not?

And if you want to “contextualize” this statue (doesn’t everybody know now about Jefferson, his slaves, and Sally Hemings?), how would you do it?

Abe Lincoln Statue. In Boston, a statue of Abraham Lincoln might be removed because it shows him towering over a kneeling slave, even though Lincoln was neither a slaveowner nor an advocate of slavery. After all, he did sign the Emancipation Proclamation and did not, contrary to the claims of the NYT’s 1619 Project, favor sending blacks back to Africa, the land of their ancestors.

The statue in Boston:

As WBUR News in Boston reports:

The statue in the city’s Park Square is a replica of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington and depicts Lincoln with one hand raised above a kneeling man with broken shackles on his wrists.

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The statue is meant to show Lincoln freeing the man from slavery, but a petition against the statue says it “instead represents us still beneath someone else.”

The petition was started by Tory Bullock, a Boston man who says the statue has long led him to ask, “If he’s free why is he still on his knees?” His call to remove the memorial had attracted nearly 6,000 signatures as of Saturday.

The Boston Globe reports that Mayor Marty Walsh is in favor of removing the statue and is interested in replacing it with something that recognizes equality. Walsh’s office said the administration is looking into the process required to make the change.

I have to say that, in a modern context, it’s a tad cringeworthy. However, the question “If he’s free why is he still on his knees?” might not be relevant if Lincoln is seen in the process of raising up those who were downtrodden. A statue made today wouldn’t—and shouldn’t—show a crouching black man, but are we to tear this down because it was made in 1876, not long after Lincoln died? If you think it should stay up but be contextualized, how would you contextualize it? At least we don’t have to tear down statues of Lincoln by himself, like the great marble sculpture in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Winston Churchill Statue. Even though who admire Churchill, as I do, must admit that the man was flawed. He was a white supremacist who made rabidly bigoted comments about others. He was also a jingoist who favored the perpetuation of the British Empire. As Newsweek mentioned when discussing the government’s plans to perhaps remove the statue from its place in Parliament Square:

“Churchill was quite explicit that he did believe that white people were superior,” Prof Richard Toye, head of history at the University of Exeter, has said.

“He said he disliked Chinese people, he described Indians as a beastly people with a beastly religion, by which he meant Hinduism. He often described Africans as being sort-of childlike. He was certainly criticized during his own lifetime for having outdated, antiquated views on race.

“We know that he made very negative comments about Indians and blamed them really for the [Bengal famine in 1943], saying it was their fault for breeding like rabbits. But that’s not to say that he deliberately planned or engineered the famine or wanted to perpetuate deliberate genocide against Indians.”

Even his granddaughter, Emma Soames, accepted that Churchill’s views “particularly now are regarded as unacceptable but weren’t necessarily then” but “he was a powerful, complex man, with infinitely more good than bad in the ledger of his life.”

I would agree with that, but others might differ. After all, he did save Britain from being Nazified during WWII, and helped end the Hitler regime, which killed millions, forever. There’s no doubt that, at least for a time, he was one of the world’s great leaders.

His statue, however, is being defaced because he was deemed racist.

The statue had been covered with a protective cage, but the cage was removed for a visit by French President Emmanuel Macron. This picture is from a Reuters report. Some say that the statue should be put in a museum rather than left in the open, where it will surely be defaced in the future.

The issue of what to do with statues celebrating flawed or even thoroughly odious people is not an easy one, though to some it seems simple: pull ’em down! But by so doing you are erasing history, and, as we all know, not all of history is pleasant. It pains us to remember much of it, but do we erase the pain by erasing the past? Remember, erasure of history was Winston Smith’s job in Orwell’s novel 1984. I’d hate to think that, four decades after the time of Orwell’s prognostications, we’re approaching this kind of erasure for real.

Now I don’t favor leaving all statues up, but I’m generally in favor of it with “contextualization” of the more problematic ones. As a (secular) Jew, I still wouldn’t call for a statue of Hitler to be removed, but simply contextualized, perhaps with the kind of memorial to exterminated Jews that one sees in Israel or in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

By all means give your own take on this issue, including the three men above, in the comments.