Peter Boghossian: Don’t Mistake Criticism of Ideas for Harassment of People

Professor Peter Boghossian of Portland State has been called a "bully" and accused of harassment by a colleague, Dr. Jennifer Ruth, professor of film studies and vice president of grievances and academic freedom at Portland State University. Ruth set forth her accusations in a paywalled article published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. Boghossian recently responded with a detailed letter to the editor at the same publication. Boghossian's response takes aim at a set of recurring problems, all of them related to Woke Ideology. These problems are currently exploding into view at many American universities. I am quoting Boghossian at length because his letter succinctly identifies Ruth's hypocrisy--her unwillingness to subject her ideas to meaningful criticism in a meaningfully public venue.

As Boghossian points out, this dispute exhibits multiple iterations of ironic hypocrisy in that the topic of Ruth's alleged distress is that she should be able to attack people and ideas, face no meaningful pushback, at an institution dedicated to dissecting and critiquing ideas, at which she serves as a VP of "grievances."  And she has chosen to protect her original accusations against Boghossian (and is colleague, Dr. Bruce Gilley) behind a paywalled article. Gilley has written his own response here. Intellectual dysfunction doesn't get any better than this.  Boghossian does a great job of setting forth some basic principles common sense at his publicly available article:

By claiming that criticism of published ideas and pedagogical models is harassment, and by creating institutional mechanisms that erect barriers to wholly appropriate critique, entire lines of scholarship become exempt from scrutiny. The academic process depends on having the freedom not only to state ideas but also to criticize other ideas. Limiting criticism in academia is tantamount to telling potters they can make all the clay pots they want so long as they never use clay. This is particularly disturbing because the claims in question — almost always about race, gender, and sexual orientation — are presented as knowledge and then used to influence public policy.

It is worth noting that criticism is framed as harassment only by academicians working in certain domains of thought that are in Critical Theory’s orbit. Civil engineers are not claiming that criticism of truss bridge design is harassment. Physicists are not claiming they’re being persecuted when their contributions to quantum theory are criticized. Philosophers are not claiming victimization when their arguments about free will are scrutinized. Claiming criticism is harassment occurs when a discipline’s North Star is not Truth, but ideology.

The internal rationale for calling criticism “harassment” is as simple as it is absurd: because these Critical Theories are believed to proceed from one’s “social position” as an occupant of some “identity category,” the person and her ideas are treated as though they overlap. They do not. Thinking they do is a dangerous mistake for anyone to make, not least institutions that are nominally devoted to Truth. The backbone of rational thought is separating people from ideas to protect the dignity of the former while being free to criticize the latter. . .

One reason I use Twitter is to inform the public of what is going on in university classrooms and in what counts these days as academic scholarship. Academics who disagree with my ideas also frequently criticize them on Twitter. This is of value for nonacademic onlookers who can compare our arguments. Extramural criticism is one of the few avenues left now that academic journals have become echo chambers that reinforce and promote specific ideological lenses. . .

There’s a dual irony in Ruth’s accusations. First, if there’s an institutionalized rule that criticism of academic work is harassment, how would Critical Theory, which is entirely predicated on criticizing existing systems, have emerged? It would not have.

For yet other perspectives on this dispute at Portland State, consider this article at DI and this article by Bruce Gilley: Silenced by the Sheep: Academia’s New Censorship.

Continue ReadingPeter Boghossian: Don’t Mistake Criticism of Ideas for Harassment of People

“The Nation” Attempts to Fight Racism with Racism

Have you had enough racism from the Woke yet? This article by a 42 year old graduate of Harvard Law School is courtesy of The Nation, a publication that brags that it was "founded by abolitionists in 1865." Here's an excerpt demonstrating what now passes for an attempt [see The Nation's About page] to "bring about a more democratic and equitable world":

I’ve said, here and elsewhere, that one of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life. Over the past year, I have, of course, still had to interact with white people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about whether they would succeed in reelecting a white-supremacist president. But white people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less, only deal with whiteness when I want to. Their cops aren’t hunting me when I drive through my neighborhood; their hang-ups aren’t bothering me (or threatening me) when I’m just trying to do some shopping.

That’s because I haven’t been driving or shopping in person. White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them. I’ve turned my house into Wakanda: a technically advanced, globally isolated home base from which I can pick and choose when and how often to interact with white people.

This article has been noticed by many on Twitter. One of those people is one of my favorite writers on Twitter, Thomas Chatterton Williams. His Tweet and the resulting comments are well worth a visit:

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On the Woke Crucifixion of liberal Jesse Singal . . .

Woke mobs are trying to deplatform and crucify of liberal writer Jesse Singal, not because he has written anything false, but because he has consistently written carefully researched articles on transgender issues. This includes articles describing the situations of some people who have undergone transgender surgery and hormones, but who have then begun to de-transition, people like Kiera Bell. This onslaught by the Woke mob has brought ad hominem attacks to a new level. What should you call people who refuse to engage with the facts, but would rather smear the writer with a torrent of salacious lies in an attempt to end his writing career? And what would you call it when that same mob even attempts to deplatform Singal from his self-publishing work on Substack?

Singal's battle with these sociopaths was analyzed in depth by Glenn Greenwald and Katie Herzog.

Here is an excerpt from Jonathan Kay's recent detailed article on Quillette describing this abysmal situation, "The Campaign of Lies Against Journalist Jesse Singal—And Why It Matters." It's a long read, but worth it.

One of the odd-seeming aspects of progressive cancel culture is that many of the figures targeted by mobs aren’t especially conservative in their views. Rather, the victims tend to be heterodox liberals who simply offer a dissenting opinion on one or more compartmentalized issues—since these liberal targets tend to operate in left-leaning professional and social milieus through which a mob can exercise leverage and demand concessions. There are numerous popular writers and broadcasters who promote deeply conservative themes without attracting any notice from cancel mobs—even as lifelong leftists within such niche genres as Young Adult fiction, LGBT theatre, and knitting-trade journalism are excommunicated on the basis of minor verbal infractions.

In some notable mobbings chronicled by Quillette, in fact, the targeted dissenter wasn’t even offering an opinion per se, but merely highlighting facts we’re all expected to ignore. James Damore wasn’t fired by Google because he gratuitously insulted women, but because he pointed out real differences between the sexes. In Canadian literary circles, Margaret Atwood became reviled among a progressive fringe when she argued (correctly, as it turns out) that falsely accused novelist Steven Galloway should have received due process before being tarred as a rapist. If you grovel enough, woke mobs might eventually forgive you for being wrong—but never for being right.

On the issue of gender, a particularly interesting case study centres on Jesse Singal, a mild-mannered and amiable (I’ve met him) New York-based journalist, book author, and podcaster whom Quillette readers may remember from his 2019 appearance on our own show. As early as 2016, well before the culture war over trans rights reached its crescendo, Singal authored a ground-breaking New York magazine exposé on the cynical takedown of eminent Toronto psychologist Dr. Kenneth Zucker (who was subsequently paid more than half a million dollars by his former employer, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, as part of a legal settlement relating to its part in that smear campaign). Two years later, Singal wrote an impeccably researched cover story for the Atlantic titled “When Children Say They’re Trans”—one of the most widely discussed features in the magazine’s recent history. In these articles, and on social media, Singal has dealt with the issue of gender dysphoria with care and sensitivity, documenting the challenges faced by those experiencing the condition. And while he is the furthest thing from an actual transphobe, he acknowledges the plain fact that some children who present as trans later “desist” to an identity that accords with their biological sex.

As anyone who follows this issue closely can guess, Singal’s measured approach doesn’t always sit well with progressive activist and journalistic subcultures . . .

Continue ReadingOn the Woke Crucifixion of liberal Jesse Singal . . .

The Quest of the Annointed

Thomas Sowell believed that there is something to gain even by implementing severely flawed social schemes. This excerpt is from "Blurred Vision," in Reason Magazine:

What is the point of the ideological crusades of the left? To make the world better? Not primarily, according to Thomas Sowell. The main purpose is to make members of the left feel good, and to do so by placing them in a position of apparent intellectual and moral superiority to the rest of humanity. Leftists, in this book's terminology, are "the anointed," and their overriding goal is to distinguish themselves from "the benighted," which includes everybody else.

The "vision" of the anointed is a world view in which social problems exist because of the negligence or malevolence of the benighted—and thus can be solved by imposing the views of the enlightened few on the rest of society via government action. To believe otherwise—to view social conditions as largely outside of anyone's control and subject to innumerable trade-offs and constraints—is repugnant to left-leaning political and intellectual elites, Sowell argues, because it robs them of the opportunity to display their superior concern and insight.

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About the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Over the years, I have heard many references to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), but I never stopped to really understand the extent to which China was thrown into upheaval by mostly young people who sought to purify the country. Here are some websites (and here) and short videos that are among the materials I reviewed tonight.  As I studied these materials, I was repeatedly tempted to draw comparisons to the contagion, humiliation and the rhetoric used by the Woke as they try to purify colleges and other American sense-making institutions in modern times. To be clear, is my belief and my hope is that we will not face widespread violence as a result of Woke ideology--there are massive historical and cultural differences between 1960's China and 2020's U.S. My comparison of Wokeness to the Chinese Cultural Revolution thus is quite limited in scope, though it is compelling in some ways.

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