Bari Weiss Enumerates the Core Beliefs of Wokeness – Critical Race Theory – Social Justice

I've been posting ad nauseam about Wokeness over the past 18 months because it starkly contradicts many of my core beliefs. And it starkly contradicts basic principles deeply cherished by what I believe to be the great majority of Americans. I have categorized dozens of my articles with the label Wokeness. You can read them all by clicking on this link. I have carefully documented not only theories about why this movement has gained traction. I have also carefully collected many instances in which people have hurt, belittled, fired, tormented and rattled each other by embracing Woke Ideology while throwing long-established beliefs (including basic Enlightenment Principles and Martin Luther King's "content of character" aspirations into the trash.

Bari Weiss has be speaking loud lately, rallying the great majority of people--they tend to be afraid to speak up--to say what they believe and to not feel compelled to say things that they don't believe. It all sounds so simple, but the Twitter mobs are loud and vocal and they have thoroughly intimidated those who are in charge of our meaning-making institutions (e.g., schools, media, government, social media). Weiss argues that if we all just start speaking up, this insanity will diminish greatly because it will encourage others to speak up too. Here is an excerpt from Bari Weiss' article at Commentary. It is titled "We Got Here Because of Cowardice. We Get Out With Courage: Say no to the Woke Revolution." Here is Wokeness in a nutshell from her article:

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools. And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully.

In this ideology, if you do not tweet the right tweet or share the right slogan, your whole life can be ruined. . . . In this ideology, the past cannot be understood on its own terms, but must be judged through the morals and mores of the present. In this ideology, intentions don’t matter... In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective.... In this ideology, you are guilty for the sins of your fathers. In other words: You are not you. You are only a mere avatar of your race or your religion or your class....In this system, we are all placed neatly on a spectrum of “privileged” to “oppressed.” We are ranked somewhere on this spectrum in different categories: race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Then we are given an overall score, based on the sum of these rankings. Having privilege means that your character and your ideas are tainted.... Racism has been redefined. It is no longer about discrimination based on the color of someone’s skin. Racism is any system that allows for disparate outcomes between racial groups....skeptics of any part of this radical ideology are recast as heretics. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots, subjected to boycotts and their work to political litmus tests.

How in hell's name could anyone be drawn to such stupidity? Weiss points to several causes that have made fertile ground for this dysfunction:

All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others.

Continue ReadingBari Weiss Enumerates the Core Beliefs of Wokeness – Critical Race Theory – Social Justice

The Relationship Between Truth and Courage

Nietzsche recognized that without courage we cannot have truth:

How much truth can a spirit stand, how much truth does it dare? For me that became more and more the real measure of value. Error (belief in the ideal) is not blindness, error is cowardice.

Every achievement, every step forward in knowledge, comes from courage, from harshness towards yourself, from cleanliness with respect to yourself. ..

Bari Weiss' newest article discusses the relationship between courage and truth. The title: "Some Thoughts About Courage We are living through an epidemic of cowardice. The antidote is courage."

Courage means, first off, the unqualified rejection of lies. Do not speak untruths, either about yourself or anyone else, no matter the comfort offered by the mob. And do not genially accept the lies told to you. If possible, be vocal in rejecting claims you know to be false. Courage can be contagious, and your example may serve as a means of transmission.

When you’re told that traits such as industriousness and punctuality are the legacy of white supremacy, don’t hesitate to reject it. When you’re told that statues of figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass are offensive, explain that they are national heroes. When you’re told that “nothing has changed” in this country for minorities, don’t dishonor the memory of civil-rights pioneers by agreeing. And when you’re told that America was founded in order to perpetuate slavery, don’t take part in rewriting the country’s history

. . . .

As Douglas Murray has put it: “The problem is not that the sacrificial victim is selected. The problem is that the people who destroy his reputation are permitted to do so by the complicity, silence and slinking away of everybody else.”

What caused our leaders to buckle under? To say things they don't believe and to refuse to say things that they know are true? Weiss blames the lack of courage:
There are a lot of factors that are relevant to the answer: institutional decay; the tech revolution and the monopolies it created; the arrogance of our elites; poverty; the death of trust. And all of these must be examined, because without them we would have neither the far right nor the cultural revolutionaries now clamoring at America’s gates.

But there is one word we should linger on, because every moment of radical victory turned on it. The word is cowardice.

The revolution has been met with almost no resistance by those who have the title CEO or leader or president or principal in front of their names. The refusal of the adults in the room to speak the truth, their refusal to say no to efforts to undermine the mission of their institutions, their fear of being called a bad name and that fear trumping their responsibility — that is how we got here.

I'll conclude with this excerpt from a conversation between Bari Weiss and Brian Stelter:

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MIT Cancel’s Geophysicist’s Prestigious Carlson Lecture Because of his View on DEI

The following Tweets tell the story of Dorian Abbot's recent cancelation:

What were the ideas of Dorian Abbot that got him canceled at MIT. They appear in Newsweek. He expressed his belief that DEI is unfair and that we ought to be hiring purely on merit. Here are some of his excerpts from his August 12, 2021 Newsweek article:

American universities are undergoing a profound transformation that threatens to derail their primary mission: the production and dissemination of knowledge. The new regime is titled "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" or DEI, and is enforced by a large bureaucracy of administrators. Nearly every decision taken on campus, from admissions, to faculty hiring, to course content, to teaching methods, is made through the lens of DEI. This regime was imposed from the top and has never been adequately debated. In the current climate it cannot be openly debated: the emotions around DEI are so strong that self-censorship among dissenting faculty is nearly universal.

The words "diversity, equity and inclusion" sound just, and are often supported by well-intentioned people, but their effects are the opposite of noble sentiments. Most importantly, "equity" does not mean fair and equal treatment. DEI seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups . . .

DEI undermines the public's trust in universities and their graduates. Some on campus might be surprised to learn that, according to a recent Pew poll, 74 percent of Americans think only qualifications should be taken into account in hiring and promotion, even if this results in less diversity. . . .

We propose an alternative framework called Merit, Fairness, and Equality (MFE) whereby university applicants are treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone. Crucially, this would mean an end to legacy and athletic admission advantages, which significantly favor white applicants, in addition to those based on group membership. Simultaneously, MFE would involve universities investing in education projects in neighborhoods where public education is failing to help children from those areas compete. These projects would be evidence-based and non-ideological, testing a variety of different options such as increased public school funding, charter schools and voucher programs.

I have enchanted many people who completely agree with Professor, but they are afraid to express their views because they would risk damage to their careers (the exact kind suffered by Professor Abbott). The result is that a critically important topic (whether we should be hiring solely based on merit) is not being debated. Another professor, Gordon Klein, recently expressed similar views in a lawsuit he filed against his employer, UCLA. He has alleged that he was punished for refusing to discriminate. On Sept 30, 2021, his article appeared at Common Sense with Bari Weiss. Here are a few excerpts from Why I am Suing UCLA:

My saga — which nearly led to my firing — began on the morning of June 2, 2020, when a non-black student in my class on tax principles and law emailed me to ask that I grade his black classmates with greater “leniency” than others in the class. “We are writing to express our tremendous concern about the impact that this final exam and project will have on the mental and physical health of our Black classmates,” the student wrote. (There was no project in this class, and it was unclear to me who the “we” in this case was. . . . I suspected the student simply used a form letter he found online and neglected to change the subject.) “The unjust murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the life-threatening actions of Amy Cooper and the violent conduct of the [University of California Police Department] have led to fear and anxiety which is further compounded by the disproportionate effect of COVID-19 on the Black community. As we approach finals week, we recognize that these conditions place Black students at an unfair academic disadvantage due to traumatic circumstances out of their control.” To try to make his case, the student drew on UCLA’s “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” agenda, which directs professors to grant preferential “equity” to students belonging to “underrepresented groups.”

I wholeheartedly support these principles as most of us understand them. I think all human beings should be treated the same. I welcome — I celebrate — a diversity of opinions and arguments. And, to say the least, I believe in making room for anyone with the grades and gumption to study at one of the nation’s most competitive universities. But academia has so corrupted these words that they are now hollowed out corpses devoid of their original meaning. Today, “diversity” means ideological homogeneity. And “inclusion” means the exclusion of some from a taxpayer-supported university to favor others deemed more deserving of an educational springboard to prosperity.

Shocked by the student’s email, which struck me as deeply patronizing and offensive to the same black students he claimed to care so much about, I collected my thoughts and, 20 minutes later, emailed back: “Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black half-Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they are probably especially devastated as well. I am thinking that a white student from there might possibly be even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they’re racist even if they are not.”

I wrapped up my reply by citing Martin Luther King’s vision of a colorblind world where people are judged solely by the content of their character — making it clear that I had no intention of treating any students differently on the basis of their skin color.

By that evening, students were calling for my job. Soon after, they circulated a petition demanding I be fired; within a day or two, nearly 20,000 had signed — without knowing anything about me or taking into account, as far as I could tell, the implications of non-color-blind grading. I was attacked for being a white man and “woefully racist.” On June 5, three days after I was first emailed, I was suspended amid a growing online campaign directed at me.

Here is the federal complaint spelling out Gordon Klein's detailed allegations pertaining to the misconduct of UCLA.

We need to be able to discuss ideas freely, especially controversial ideas, especially at universities, the mission of which has long been to expose students to controversial ideas. In the current climate, however, many people are being threatened and punished for expressing or attempting to discuss important issues of the day. This trend blatantly violates the three prerequisites set forth by Jonathan Rauch (in his new book, The Constitution of Knowledge) for enabling us to determine what is true and what is not true. We are nudging month by month closer to a new national principle: Declaration of Truth by Edict.

Continue ReadingMIT Cancel’s Geophysicist’s Prestigious Carlson Lecture Because of his View on DEI

The (Old) Solution to our Two Dominant Troll Cultures

From The Constitution of Knowledge, by Jonathan Rauch (2021):

We are in for a fight against two insurgencies: the spread of viral disinformation and alternative realities, sometimes called troll culture, and the spread of enforced conformity and ideological blacklisting, sometimes called cancel culture. One is predominantly right-wing and populist, the other predominantly left-wing and elitist. One employs chaos and confusion, the other conformity and social coercion. But their goals are similar, and often, weirdly, they act as de facto allies.

What troll culture and cancel culture have in common is that they are techniques of what propaganda experts often call information warfare. Rather than using rational persuasion to seek truth, they manipulate the social and media environments for political advantage. They may appear marginal, disorganized, or unhinged, but they are aggressive, expansionary, and rooted in a sophisticated understanding of human cognitive and emotional vulnerabilities. They have captured commanding institutional heights, including (for four years) the White House and substantial parts of academia. They exploit the capabilities of digital technology to amplify their speed and reach. But they have also engendered encouraging pushback, as awareness of the methods they use and the dangers they pose has grown.

How do we protect ourselves from these trolls? We need to sustain and defend our most maligned and most important principle: Free Speech. Rauch explains:

The miracle is how robust free expression and liberal science have proved to be, despite unremitting attacks from every direction over hundreds of years. The idea that obnoxious, misguided, seditious, blasphemous, and bigoted expressions deserve not only to be tolerated but, of all things, protected is the single most counterintuitive social principle 'A Terrible Statement Unless He Gets Away with It”

In all of human history, every human instinct cries out against it, and every generation discovers fresh reasons to oppose it. It is saved from the scrapheap of self-evident absurdity only by the fact that it is also the single most successful social principle in all of human history. Those of us who favor it, and also our children, and also their children and their children, will need to get up every morning and explain and defend our counterintuitive social principle from scratch, and so we might as well embrace the task and perform it cheerfully.

Constitution of Knowledge, pp 17-19.

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The Consequences of Not Belonging to any Political Tribe

What is it like to not feel part of any political tribe? Mostly, it is to be dismayed to hear lies from the right and then lies of the left. It is to have a seat near the net of the tennis court, looking to the left, then the right, over and over, as lies are zinged back and forth. The party in power now, the Democrats, are certainly doing their part, whether it be immigration, COVID, Russia-Trump, abolishing the police will keep cities safer. And now there is the Democrat claim about Biden's economic package:

They are insisting that their plans, which are still in flux but amount to a call for some $4 trillion in spending over two bills, have no real costs at all—or that the costs should not be factored in, because they are "unfair and absurd."

As if $4 trillion will not risk massive inflation. As if $4 trillion will be completely paid for.

I'm not taking a position on whether parts of these packages make sense for the U.S. My concern is that the risks of these packages are being actively suppressed. I have very little respect for Joe Manchin, but I think he's correct when he claims that the current proposal amounts to "fiscal insanity." We are not having any meaningful national conversation about what is really in these bills and the extent of economic risk of committing $3.5 trillion to those things.  This, from the remorseless political party that threw the working class overboard decades ago.

This is simply the most recent example of a system that is completely broken with no hope of repair. It's a system where big corrupt campaign money and ideology drive the decisions, where inconvenient truths are ignored and suppressed and where most voters line up in ignorance to cheer their respective teams.

In four years, we might see the Republicans taken over, with their own brand of fiscal and ideological insanity. I truly see no end in sight.

This is the sort of thing that led George Carlin to indicate that he no longer had "a stake in the outcome."  I wish I could claim that everything is going well for our country, but I can't.

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