At New Discourses, Calum Anderson notes that Douglas Murray is offering important ideas for our moment in time using incidents from several recent colleges to illustrate. The article is titled, "Why University Students Need to Listen to Douglas Murray." An excerpt:
As is the case with all truly interesting people, the least interesting thing about Douglas Murray is his sexuality. He has been a steadfast voice of reason during an age of unreason, and a formidable opponent of the woke activists who presume to speak of his behalf as an openly gay man . . . Murray specifically chastises employees at Penguin Random House for their attempt to prevent their employer from publishing Jordan Peterson’s upcoming book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life. He calls the inability to listen to contrary points of view a “generational phenomenon” which has been adopted by children who believe that “speech is harm, and harm is not harm, that silence is violence and that violence is fine.” Murray was addressing my generation, and despite what may be regarded as a sweeping generalization I am not the least bit offended. Not every twenty-something thinks this way, but the most vocal among us do and that is a serious problem: “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity” (Yeats).
The self-annointed thought police are still working overtime at Haverford, where free-speech is merely a phrase and where tribal truths are the reality. I could not imagine sending any student to Haverford if they wanted to learn how to think self-critically and be prepared to hold a job in the outside world.
Jonathan Kay's long article leaves a pit in my stomach and casts a pall over my evening as I write this comment. He needed to fill his article with an extraordinary amount of details in order to substantiate his extraordinary conclusions, including the following: A) Nothing insensitive or racist occurred at Haverford College leading up to the current shrill unrest. B) Nothing that happened at Haverford justified the long ridiculous list of student demands (to which the administration mostly acceded). C) Most chillingly, the administrators of Haverford (and many other colleges) lack the the necessary resources to have meaningful conversations with students or to take respectable negotiating positions during these Woke-fueled paroxysms.
A few excerpts from Jonathan Kay's excellent article:
[T]he mania that swept Haverford College in late October and early November 2020 lays bare, with unusual clarity, the fervid atmosphere of grievance and self-entitlement that has made the administration of elite colleges and universities so difficult.
Of all the Haverford community members I spoke with, the only one who asked to be quoted by name was recently graduated philosophy major Alex Gutierrez, who once summarized the mindset of campus activists in an essay about Jacques Lacan. “Modern activists have psyches that are built for the joy of transgression,” he observed. “They engage in activism so they can repeatedly experience that joy, a joy that is denied them in everyday life because everyday life is dominated by the ethics of pleasure… And so they need to invent fictional dominant orders so that they can defy them. This is why protesters would actually be extremely unhappy if oppression went away. They want white patriarchy to be as powerful as possible, so they can defy it.”
Gutierrez wrote these words before his alma mater fell into upheaval in late October. But his analysis seems apt. When students complained that Raymond had caused them “harm” with her October 28th email, they weren’t really speaking up as activists denouncing racism on campus (since there doesn’t seem to be much of it), but as consumers whose parents paid good money for them to experience the sensation of transgressive social-justice heroism. “Normally, the administrators are the perfect target for student transgression,” Gutierrez told me. “They take the abuse and they’re not supposed to push back. That’s part of their role. That’s what students expect.”
‘Do Vulva Owners Like Sex?’ Is the Wrong Question — Here’s What You Should Ask Instead. . . . Some do like sex and some don’t. Just like some penis owners like sex and some don’t.
This question, in and of itself, isn’t great, though. It makes some broad generalizations and assumptions about people and sex in general.
So instead of asking whether vulva owners like sex, you should really be focusing on the person you want to have sex with, and ask them how they feel, what they want, and what they need.
Here's an article about a recent ad by Tampa. Same issue:
One of the things I find most disturbing about "anti-racists" is their demand that you must either agree to everything they say or else you are a "racist." Popular authors Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo claim that if you are not an "anti-racist" you are a racist. There are only two options. Thus speak the anti-racists. This false dilemma, this unjustified dichotomy, is just "because."
"Anti-racism" is not the opposite of racism, despite the misleading nomenclature. It is virulent new form of racism. To pull off this minor miracle of creativity, the "anti-racists" have invoked a new expansive definition of "racism" that has nothing to do with specific unfair attitudes or behavior of specific people. The "anti-racists" invoke a Manichean claim that it is OK to judge people as good and bad (respectively Blacks and whites) based on immutable physical appearance, just because. In doing this, they are dusting off that old disreputable idea that melanin should serve as a guilt barometer. This is something they have in common with racists of the Civil War and Jim Crow eras, although the new barometer is upside-down.
This "anti-racist" formula has worked all too well for the past several years. Well-meaning people who fervently disagree with this "anti-racist" claim, however, including the specific claim that "all white people are racist," are being held emotional hostage. They are afraid to speak up, to disagree in public places. It is truly bizarre to see so many people who disagree with these "anti-racist" claims who are afraid to speak up. I know this from numerous private conversations. It's starting to look like many religions, where the preachers preach at the flock and members of the flock merely nod their heads, even thought they know in every bone of their bodies that the Earth is not 6,000 years old, that virgins don't have babies and that (an example from my Catholic upbringing) eating the host is not literally eating bloody muscles and capillaries. Members of the flock sat in total silence when the NYT promoted claims that the American Revolution was primarily for the purpose of promoting slavery, a central claim of "The 1619 Project."
So this is where we are: the preachers are preaching and members of the flock keep sitting silently because they are afraid of going to "anti-racist" hell. For them, hell is what would happen is they were publicly called "racist." Thus, members of the flock will sit in paralyzed silence, even when the anti-racists call all "white" people and their Black intellectual allies "racist" no matter how exemplary their lives have been. Isn't that weird? "White" people are already being called racists as a group merely by their skin color, yet they fear being called "racist" as individuals. And what drives this fear is, ironically, that they hate racism. This is stranger than any fiction any creative writer could concoct. These "anti-racist" threats of name-calling are successfully turning many people into Zombies (this reminds me of how many types of wasps sting and zombify other bugs to use as hatcheries). After getting stung by the threat of being called "racists," the fearful zombified flock is willing to sit in silence even when the "anti-racists" make patently false claims that no racial progress has occurred since 1619, since the Civil War or since the Civil Rights era. They sit in silence while the "anti-racists" ridicule Martin Luther King's idea that we should not be judged by the color of our skin, but only by the content of character.
Once this creepy dynamic settled into place, anti-racists, such as Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, began getting free rides from individuals who knew better but who were afraid to speak out. More troublesome, the anti-racists' fact-free and oftentimes false diatribes also began getting luxury free rides from corporate HR departments, government agencies (and here) and many members of our sense-making institutions, including left-leaning legacy media. In addition to securing the silence of people who disagree under threat of being called names, the "anti-racists" employ another big weapon: the rage of Woke mobs who are willing to destroy the careers of anyone who dares to dissent (recent example).
Heterodox Academy was founded in 2015 by Jonathan Haidt, Chris Martin, and Nicholas Rosenkranz
in reaction to their observations about the negative impact a lack of ideological diversity has had on the quality of research within their disciplines. What began as a website and a blog in September of 2015 — a venue for social researchers to talk about their work and the challenges facing their disciplines and institutions — soon grew into an international network of peers dedicated to advancing the values of constructive disagreement and viewpoint diversity as cornerstones of academic and intellectual life.
All members of Heterodox Academy embrace a set of norms and values that they call “The HxA Way.”
“I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.”
HxA offers a tipsheet on how to how to approach moral disagreements in constructive ways. HxA encourages us to "engage in open inquiry and constructive disagreement can use these strategies to build mutual understanding and have better conversations on difficult issues."
I highly recommend visiting this entire article, but in this short article I'm setting out the basic ideas:
Lower the perceived state of the disagreement or conflict
Don’t sling pejorative labels or assign bad motives
Agree upon facts first ("Then talk about what to do about it or how best to address it. Start small and build out.")
Lower a disagreement’s visibility ("In public environments, including digital forums, there is much more pressure to conform to one’s group and to virtue signal. It is also far more embarrassing to admit you were wrong to the whole world than to a single person. People are generally much more reasonable in more intimate settings.")
Don’t demand too much from the conversation ("In cases of deep disagreement, the initial and primary goal should be simply to clearly understand where the other is coming from and to be well-understood oneself.")
Appeal to identity, values, narratives,and frames of reference
Speak to people in their own language ("people become much more willing to reconsider or even change their views and to accept controversial facts when presented to them in terms of their own values, commitments, and frames of reference")
The final point of this HxA tip sheet is to "Understand that it’s worth the effort." HxA elaborates:
If you do a deep dive into a radically alternative worldview with an open mind – that mind will be blown. The exploration might, at times, be disorienting, frustrating, or triggering – but you will learn a lot. You might not abandon your own commitments, but you’ll definitely come to see things in a dramatically different way. At the very least, you will discover that your rivals have legitimate reasons for holding the positions they hold on many issues. That in itself – really internalizing that – can be huge.
HxA position is that they prize pluralism and value constructive disagreement. They offer these additional five bullet points for accomplishing these goals:
Make your case with evidence.
Be intellectually charitable ("However, one should always try to engage with the strongest form of a position one disagrees with (that is, ‘steel-man’ opponents rather than ‘straw-manning’ them). One should be able to describe their interlocutor’s position in a manner they would, themselves, agree with (see: ‘Ideological Turing Test’)")
Be intellectually humble ("Take seriously the prospect that you may be wrong")
Be constructive.("The objective of most intellectual exchanges should not be to “win,” but rather to have all parties come away from an encounter with a deeper understanding of our social, aesthetic and natural worlds.")
Be yourself. This is a critically important point. Standing up to outgroups, in-groups and organizations sometimes takes considerable courage:
At Heterodox Academy, we believe that successfully changing unfortunate dynamics in any complex system or institution will require people to stand up — to leverage, and indeed stake, their social capital on holding the line, pushing back against adverse trends and leading by example. This not only has an immediate and local impact, it also helps spread awareness, provides models for others to follow and creates permission for others to stand up as well. This is why Heterodox Academy does not allow for anonymous membership; membership is a meaningful commitment precisely because it is public.
HxA offers many additional Tools and Resources for engaging in Heterodox Conversations. This is an excellent site to visit to prepare for conversations that might turn contentious.
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