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.

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Helen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Earlier this year, British author Helen Pluckrose, also the Editor-in-Chief of Areo Magazine, co-authored a new book, Cynical Threories, with James Lindsay, who is the creator of the anti-woke website New Discourses.  The long title to their book is also their compact thesis: Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody.  

Pluckrose was recently interviewed by Jason Hill of Quillette. The topic was the brand of postmodernism embraced by modern Critical Social Justice activists. In recent years CSJ's version of postmodernism has been increasingly employed as a political strategy by the Woke Left.  What is "postmodernism"?  Pluckrose offers these four characteristics:

  1. Objective knowledge is inaccessible and what we consider knowledge is actually just a cultural construct that operates in the service of power.
  2. Dominant groups in society—wealthy, white, heterosexual, western men—get to decide what is and isn’t legitimate knowledge and this becomes dominant discourses which are then accepted by the general population who perpetuate oppressive power dynamics like white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, heteronormativity, cisnormativity, ableism, and fatphobia.
  3. The critical theorists exist to deconstruct these discourses and make their oppressive nature visible. This results in the breakdown of boundaries and categories through which we understand things like emotion and reason, fact and fiction, male and female.
  4. [Critical theorists] also produce a profound cultural relativism and a neurotic focus on language and language policing as well as a rejection of individuality and humanism in favor of identity politics. This is a problem because of the resulting threats to freedom of belief and speech, the divisive tribalism and the rejection of science, reason and liberalism.

Hill asked Pluckrose why it was necessary for Lindsay and Pluckrose to write Cynical Theories at this time? Pluckrose offered this response:

Continue ReadingHelen Pluckrose Discusses the Need to Push Back Against Critical Social Justice Activism (Woke-ness)

Rediscovering Connection at your Local Park

The Internet is an amazing tool that offers us easy ways to connect with each other with very little effort. This magic technology also allows social media sites to pummel us with videos of people bullying each other and physically fighting each other in public places. The triggering "excuses" for these flare-ups are countless. It's often about masks, but many of these videos focus on the bizarre propensity of many people have to divide others into political and “racial” tribes.

In some of these videos people violently assault each other. I recently viewed a video of two families arguing on a store parking lot. Somebody apparently accidentally bumped somebody else, then the situation quickly and needlessly escalated to the point where guns were drawn. I cringe when I see this insanity. A couple of these disheartening videos show up on my feeds every week, posted by people whose motives are often unclear. Some of these videos involve police officers but the great majority do not. Often, every one of the people featured in the video is ill-behaved. Other videos involve unprovoked violence, however, and many of those incidents culminate in physical injuries to an innocent person. Watching too many of these videos plants a false intuition that we are watching typical human beings doing typical things.

Is there a silver lining to these displays of anger and violence? Is it important to sometimes document our human frailties and cruelties? Should we occasionally hold some of these videos up like mirrors to force ourselves to acknowledge the risk that our anger can dangerously escalate into brutality? Can we use some of these videos as teachable moments, showing what can happen when we fail to show restraint and kindness?

Even if there is such a silver lining, it can’t be healthy to watch a steady stream of these videos showing so many people being so shitty to each other. It seems to me that too much exposure to these videos numbs us to the pain and suffering of others. At some point, our in-group tendencies can completely anesthetize our empathy for "the other." Once we cross that line where we no longer care about the pain of others, these videos serve mostly as conflict pornography. For years, Hollywood has been peddling gratuitous violence as entertainment. Movie and TV studios too often stoop to the lowest level of profitable "entertainment." The proliferation of smartphone camera social media videos suggests that there’s no longer any need for Hollywood to continue paying highly trained writers substantial money to concoct their stylized ballets of violence.

In this age of COVID-19, many people are feeling trapped in their homes. Many of us are also transfixed to our screens on which we exposed to far too many videos of people acting badly. Slouching on the couch to watch strangers being mean to each other can’t be harmless. Aren’t these videos causing permanent social damage? And aren’t there better things to do with one's time?

Almost every day, I walk through glorious Tower Grove Park, near my home in St. Louis. On almost every walk I see people from many different demographic and ethnic groups. They show up in the park with their own styles of clothing, music, food, games and language, even now as the weather is turning colder. It is an especially beautiful thing to behold the families at play, parents and their little children. [More . . .]

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Chloe Valdary Discusses Critical Race Theory Training with Christopher Rufo

I’ve followed Chloe Valdary on Twitter for many months. She is nuanced and kind-hearted, the diametric opposite of most advocates of critical race theory. In her hour-long discussion with journalist Christopher Rufo, Valdary compared and contrasted the typical training in critical race theory to the training Valdary developed, which she calls “Theory of Enchantment.” She describes her program as having the mission “to combat racism and bigotry by teaching society how to love.”

It’s not that CRT is ill-intended. CRT is good to the extent that it raises awareness of access of desperate people to material goods, jobs and healthcare. That said, Valdary accuses CRT of reducing human beings to their race. CRT claims that it is seeking equity, but it actually seeks “raw material power.” According to Valdary, CRT’s objectives are different than the objectives of the civil rights generation, which was interested in the inner lives of human beings that transcended race. For CRT, race is the “end all and be all.” CRT is defective in that it tries to reduce society to material things and disparities, ignoring transcendence—the capacity to feel empathy and the recognition of community bonding. CRT ignores the sacredness of life, the beauty of all human beings, and their imperfections and individuality that ultimately lead to “organic diversity.” Valdary points out that CRT claims to improve life, but it knows nothing about human flourishing and is thus “playing with fire.” CRT training is promoting hostile work environments that are “setting up companies for lawsuits.”

[What follows is a transcript I create for parts of the above interview. I cleaned up unnecessary or repeated words and phrases, but I have been careful to accurately preserve the flow and meaning of the conversation.]

Christopher Rufo: Explain white fragility to me.

Chloe Valdary: Okay, I will. I will caveat this by saying that a lot of these terms are completely incoherent. And so I will do my best to explain what my understanding of these terms are. But I think some of these are beyond explaining. White fragility is basically this idea that if you are a white person your very existence perpetuates white supremacy. You're living in a fundamentally white supremacist environment. If you disagree with any of that, then you are just demonstrating your fragility. And so disagreement is a double bind, essentially. Disagreement is proof that you are a racist. That's the cause of white fragility. It was made most popular by Robyn D'Angelo who wrote a book called white fragility. What happened was Robyn D'Angelo had a series of racist ideas about black people and projected them onto other white people. And she essentially said, oh, I'm having all these racist ideas about black people. I hardly know any black people. And she somewhat expressed that in some of her comments. It's like, I'm going to go and assume that every other person that looks like me, extensively, also has these views and projects them onto other people. And if you don't agree with it, then you just proved my point. It's a very, somewhat pathological disposition, I think.

Christopher Rufo: It's like in high school, when one of your friends is like, Oh, yeah, man, you know, I'm feeling this way. Everyone feels that way, right? Everyone has this. Actually, no, it's just you.

Chloe Valdary: Yeah. Yeah,

Christopher Rufo: White fragility discourse is a way for progressive, elite institutional white people to, in a kind of critical language, center their own experience. The most important thing is happening is my own kind of internal experience, my own internal deal, my own internal shame and, in a way, elevate that experience above actually anything productive or tangible.

Chloe Valdary: I set up what I like to think of as a practice. The purpose of the practice is to teach people that, from a psychological perspective, racism often flourishes or occurs when individuals are operating from a space that is informed by a lack of holiness. What I mean by that is on a very, I say, psychological spiritual level, what we perceive often of others is what we perceive of ourselves. What we do in our program, is we train people, first, how to develop that sense of inner contentment and inner wholeness based upon three principles. First principle is to treat people like human beings, not political abstractions. We help our clients work through what it actually means to be a human being, which sounds really obvious and cliche, but it's actually one of the most profound things, I think, one of the most beautiful things, most sophisticated things. How does one deal with this thing that is the human condition? How do you deal with vulnerability? How do you deal with mortality? How do you deal with imperfection? How do you make peace with these things so that they don't control you? And how do you deal with emotional regulation? We teach stoicism for example, in the course and how you reckon with your own potential. You are trying to live up to your own potential. So the first third of the full training is really about teaching people how to make peace with these things, make peace with themselves and the human condition

The remaining two-thirds is all about, okay, now that you know this about yourself, understand that every single human being you meet is dealing with these same issues, because this is what is universal. So human experience. Now we can work on developing that capacity for empathy, developing that capacity for compassion, for curiosity even for people you meet who don't look like you and have different opinions from you, because diversity comes in many different forms. Diversity is itself a very diverse thing, right? So that's really the process. And then the actual pedagogical experience is very rich because it uses pop culture to teach all these things. I believe in bringing the past with the present, having the past in conversation with the present. We use articles and essays written by James Baldwin, speeches from Dr. King, Maya Angelou, you know, folks who came before us who were part of that civil rights generation who had a lot to teach us, not merely about race, but about the human condition itself. And working through issues on race, being rooted in an understanding of the sacredness of the human being. This is what these great leaders brought to us. There's also stoicism. We also bring in a really multicultural, I'd say, curation of different things. So there's snippets of Disney films that folks have to say, in words, to understand human condition. There is music, a study of different aspects of theme song and hip hop. There's a rich conversation between the past and the present that transforms the client's relationship to both, transforms the client's relationship to themselves, and to their neighbors, and to those around them. That's what the process is like.

Christopher Rufo: How do you how do you deal with race? This is a fraught concept, something that is difficult to discuss, and for most folks, even more difficult to discuss, as it's been highly politicized. How do you address it in a way that cuts through in a way that is rooted in the kind of the kind of philosophical foundation that you've described, but then actually gets to this as an issue.

Chloe Valdary: We tackle race by specifically using texts. I'll just give you a quick example. James Baldwin's essays are taught in the very first part of the training. Our clients study the essays, which are on race, but are again, rooted in that understanding that something transcends race and that something is sacred about the human being. And that works through the challenges of race, through that paradigm of understanding the sacredness of the human being. By absorbing those texts by these individuals, knock on wood, James Baldwin doesn't get canceled by these individuals. [More . . . ]

Continue ReadingChloe Valdary Discusses Critical Race Theory Training with Christopher Rufo

The Woke Temple Tacks Away From Clown Graphics, But Maintains Laser Focus

For the past year or so, The Woke Temple has carefully summarized the preachings of Wokeness using brightly colorful graphics decorated with clowns. I think this approach was often effective at getting the point across. What better way to ridicule the preachers of Wokeness than by refusing to take them seriously? The Woke Temple combined this packaging with text that carefully and accurately restated Woke teachings straight from the books of Robin DiAngela, Ibram Kendi and others. This tactic reminds me of a quote by Isaac Asimov. “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” This allusion to religion is apropos here in that the Woke flock seem to be under the influence of something very much like a fundamentalist religion. Exhibit A is the ubiquitous Woke teaching that either you proclaim that you agree with Woke preachings or they will declare that you are a bad person, a "racist."

As the Woke Temple has colorfully illustrated over the past year, people who are Woke claim that the best way to address racism is to enthusiastically judge people based on the color of their skin, a tactic that pisses on the central teaching of Martin Luther King. This the far Left's equivalent of saying that the threat of COVID is going away while death rates are dramatically increasing. It is that absurd, yet this absurd set of teachings has now been embraced by HR Departments, Government agencies and schools throughout the United States. I can't think of a clearer example of a hostile work environment and I hope lawsuits start flying to stop these practices. Contrary to the claim of Joe Biden, these sessions are not effective ways to address "racial insensitivity" or to encourage "self-esteem."

We need to consider creative approaches to nullify Woke preachings because engaging in conversation does not work. People who have embraced Wokeness are impervious to contrary evidence and reasoning because once these ideas take root, they nullify the ability to think, evaluate contrary evidence and self-critically discuss teachings. Somehow, these Woke proclamations parasitically invade the thought processes of smart and good-hearted people, taking them emotional hostage.  Once a person becomes Woke, they would rather do anything--anything--than be called "racist," even by the proudly racist people who preach Woke principles.

Recently The Woke Temple has modified its tactics. The clowns are gone and the look is streamlined and straight-forward.  Perhaps it will be more effective in getting the message across to more people.  I hope so.  We need all the help we can get. Here's the latest graphic from The Woke Temple:

Continue ReadingThe Woke Temple Tacks Away From Clown Graphics, But Maintains Laser Focus