Proposed Resolution for 2021: Heed the Results of Solomon Asch’s Conformity Experiments

Here's a resolution to consider The Solomon Asch conformity experiments should be taken seriously by all of us throughout 2021. You need to be the one to tell your favorite and coziest groups of people that you disagree whenever you disagree. To do otherwise will guarantee continued social dysfunction and misfiring communication for the next year.

Phil Zimbardo describes Asch's experiments in this short video.

Continue ReadingProposed Resolution for 2021: Heed the Results of Solomon Asch’s Conformity Experiments

Heterodox Academy Celebrates its Five Year Birthday

Earlier this evening, I attended the five year celebration of Heterodox Academy (HxA). The lineup of illustrious speakers included:

  • Jonathan Haidt (Psychologist and Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business)
  • Jeffrey Sachs (Political Scientist at Acadia University)
  • Randall Kennedy (Harvard Law Professor)
  • Nadine Strossen (Former President of the ACLU)
  • Nicholas Christakis (Sociologist and Professor at Yale)

What is HxA's main concern?

We see the following threats to Open Inquiry within the academy today:

Across the political spectrum, we see protest and backlash against scholars that threaten a preferred narrative.

Expanding bureaucracies at many colleges and universities subject ever more of campus life to administrative oversight — and encourage people to resolve disputes through reporting, investigations, and academic reprisals rather than good-faith debate and discussion.

Concerns about placating donors, ensuring high enrollments or positive course evaluations can distort research and pedagogy — especially for the growing numbers of contingent faculty whose careers and livelihoods can be threatened by a single upset student, donor or colleague. Contingent faculty are statistically more likely to be women, people of color, and other equity seeking groups whose numbers are underrepresented in tenure track positions.

Many fear losing the esteem of, or being ostracized by, one’s peers for saying the “wrong” thing. Even in the absence of formal sanctions, social and professional isolation can make academic life difficult — and many prefer to self-censor rather than risk it. This is a significant concern among students, faculty, and administrators: our 2019 Campus Expression Survey found that roughly half of students, regardless of their political ideology, agreed that the climate on their campus prevents people from saying things because others may find them offensive.

What does HXA propose as a solution to this problem?

To improve the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.  We aspire to create college classrooms and campuses that welcome diverse people with diverse viewpoints and that equip learners with the habits of heart and mind to engage that diversity in open inquiry and constructive disagreement.

We see an academy eager to welcome professors, students, and speakers who approach problems and questions from different points of view, explicitly valuing the role such diversity plays in advancing the pursuit of knowledge, discovery, growth, innovation, and the exposure of falsehoods.

Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan collaborative of thousands of professors, administrators, and students committed to enhancing the quality of research and education by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. All of our members embrace a set of norms and values, which we call “The HxA Way.”

All of HxA's members embrace the following statement:

I support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in research and education.

HXA proposes the "HxA Way" as the best way to support open inquiry. The four elements of the HxA Way are:

  1. Make your case with evidence.
  2. Be intellectually charitable.
  3. Be intellectually humble.
  4. Be constructive.
  5. Be yourself.

Who would have ever thought we would need an organization to help us learn how to talk to each other on important issues at colleges and universities?  Well, we do.  That's why I joined HxA tonight in my capacity as a law professor.  I'm looking forward to getting increasingly involved in all the HxA does.

Note: There is some overlap in the concerns and missions of HxA and FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education). If you support one of these organizations, you will probably also support the mission of the other.

Continue ReadingHeterodox Academy Celebrates its Five Year Birthday

Douglas Murray’s Message for College Students

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).

Continue ReadingDouglas Murray’s Message for College Students

Jordan Peterson’s Patience and Return

I had seen this interview before, but I happened on it again tonight.  If you've never seen it, you might agree that it's quite a spectacle--more than 25 millions viewers are evidence of that. Cathy Newman (of Channel 4 of a British TV show) is interviewing Jordan Peterson in 2018. This is intense and it goes on and on. I'm tempted to say that Newman violated every one of Heterodox Academy's suggestions for how to have a civil conversation. This is not a conversation, but it makes for some extraordinary theater. Newman entered the studio to school Peterson.  She put on a clinic in strawman argument. And after several of the most painful minutes, she still didn't seem to have the faintest clue about the meaning of "multivariate analysis" and its relevance to many of her questions.

Newman's main technique was to misstate Peterson's position, requiring Peterson to dig out, over and over, which he does with saintly patience. Toward the end, the attacks turn purely ad hominem and then it's finally over. This interview was a precursor to what has increasingly become a commonplace "interview" in 2020. Interviews are now too often gotcha matches based upon false accusations. When this happens, the advantage usually goes to the unfair interviewer because if the successfully defends the attack, the interviewer just moves on to another attack based on new falsities. There is an unfair disparity throughout these conversations, because it normally takes a lot longer to repair a false accusation than to make one. That said, Peterson patiently and swiftly swats these false accusations away, leading to ever new accusations.

I'm not entirely certain that I have yet distilled all of the take-home lessons here, but I watched the whole thing tonight, finding it impossible to click away to some other website. After it was all over, I found myself nodding in agreement with many of the comments, such as these:

Jordan: Hitler was evil

Cathy: So your saying you supported the Nazis? --

“Let me get this straight, you're saying we should organise our hierarchy like lobsters”

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Jordan Peterson: "I like ice cream" Cathy Newman: "So you're saying we should stop making yoghurt?"

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Kathy Newman's greatest life accomplishment is probably introducing millions to Jordan Peterson.

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I have recently read that Jordan Peterson is again entering public life after a long bout with illness.  In the following short video, he explains what he has been going through.

Continue ReadingJordan Peterson’s Patience and Return

John McWorter Draws a Line in the Sand When Ibram X. Kendi Publicly Labels his Ideas “Racist.”

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).

Linguist John McWhorter has not been afraid to call out the anti-racists.  He has done this in many places, including his article in The Atlantic,  "The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility: The popular book aims to combat racism but talks down to Black people." McWorther, a professor of linguistics, has taken a lot of flack from the far left for repeatedly calling out that the Emperor Has No Clothes.

McWhorter had more than his fill, however, when Ibram X. Kendi recently and publicly called McWhorter's ideas "racist."  Kendi has made dozens of claims that should be vigorously scrutinized by academics, book reviewers and the general public, but he has been surfing on the waves of fearful silence. That silence meant that the normally unflappable McWhorter had to fend for himself.  He decided it was time to push back dramatically, in a public way. Hence these excerpts from the November 23, 2020 episode of The Glenn Show with Glenn Loury:

Continue ReadingJohn McWorter Draws a Line in the Sand When Ibram X. Kendi Publicly Labels his Ideas “Racist.”