Andrew Sullivan, summarizing some of the core concepts of the new book by Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge.:
[J]onathan Rauch lays out some core principles that liberal societies rely upon. These are not optional if liberal society is to survive. And they are not easy, which is why we have created many institutions and practices to keep them alive. Rauch lists some of them: fallibilism, the belief that anyone, especially you, can always be wrong; objectivity, a rejection of any theory that cannot be proven or disproven by reality; accountability, the openness to conceding and correcting error; and pluralism, the maintenance of intellectual diversity so we maximize our chances of finding the truth.
The only human civilization that has ever depended on these principles is the modern West since the Enlightenment. That’s a few hundred years as opposed to 200,000 or so of Homo sapiens’ history, when tribalism, creedalism, warfare, theocracy or totalitarianism reigned.
The genius of liberalism in unleashing human freedom and the human mind changed us more in centuries than we had changed in hundreds of millennia. And at its core, there is the model of the single, interchangeable, equal citizen, using reason to deliberate the common good with fellow citizens. No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.
In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.
My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.
A friend is quite perturbed at me for (as I view it) not adopting the top-to-bottom progressive platform. The friend found it disturbing that I would get some of my information from sources that the friend considered to be the other team. I told this friend: "You are the 1,000th person to get frustrated with me for wanting to get my facts straight without reference to the prevailing narratives of political tribes. I am prepared to die on this hill."
I am wired to make sense of things as best I can, letting the chips fall, regardless of whether I offend people in the process (with rare exceptions). I was prepared for this way of learning during a childhood where my father force-fed me buckets of religious dogma, resulting in this five-part essay.
I am willing to get useful information from anyone who has information that seems useful. I'm working hard to not divide the world into "good" people and "bad" people. Good people often say untrue things and bad people often say things that make sense. Everyone has a batting average. Everyone is flawed. It is my act of faith that we need to listen to all of it and then pretend that we are emotionally detached Martian anthropologists in order to decide what is accurate. In other words, we need to pay close attention to John Stuart Mill, who is as relevant as ever.
Hence, I reject any Manichean outlook. I fear that our two main political tribes and their respective news silos (amplified by social media) are poisoning our national dialogue. In fact, ruining our national dialogue to the point where, truly, our de facto national motto is getting to be "Fuck e pluribus unum!" It's gotten to the point where people are hating other people for ideas, whereas I think we can hate the idea but must always love the person. I am not religious, but I think that Jesus' "Love your enemy" is one of the most radical, brave and brilliant things ever said.
We need to listen to people that others call the "enemy" because sometimes they are right--sometimes it takes years for it to become apparent that they are correct. I have long been ridiculed for listening "to the enemy." That is, and will forever be, my plight, because the world is complex, not a cartoon, and no tribe has it completely right. We need to actively listen to each other and test each others' claims without feeling like this is a threatening thing to do, in order to make good sense of our world. Without each other, we are all prone to become ideologues who "win" all of our arguments because we refuse to consider competing views (and in fact many of us actively work to muzzle competing views). Hard earned, carefully distilled facts first to prepare the way for meaningful opinions, is the only way to make sense. Whenever we do the opposite, indulging in thinking and opinion-vomiting as a team sport, we are poisoning all dialogue and shutting down human flourishing.
I believe that real conversation (not the pundits barking at each other on CNN, or regular folks on the street, imitating the pundits) will dissolve many of the differences we see in each other. That brings me to an inspiring dialogue I recently heard: a discussion involving Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald. This is an odd couple in many ways. At the beginning of the show they both admitted that, in prior years, they weren't each others' favorite people. But they reached out, sat down for three hours and had a riveting conversation that covered many issues, including whistle-blowers, corruption in Brazil, Hunter Biden. My favorite part is where Joe and Glenn discussed the importance of reaching out to people who think differently in order to understand them and to better understand yourself.
Rogan and Greenwald both tout the long-form podcast as one of the best ways to dissolve the pundit-coating that people construct around themselves and to then get down to some interesting conversation--the kind of conversation where people learn interesting things about each other and about themselves. You can be a politician for a short session on FOX or NPR, maybe even 30 or 40 minutes, but you can't hide it for several hours. Rogan mentions that he stumbled upon this powerful revelation because he was too lazy to edit his long podcasts, but then he started to appreciates incredible power of the long-form podcast to reveal who people really are. This conversation between two wide-open complex minds is pure gold, and I invite you to listen to the entire podcast, but especially from 118 min mark to the 140 min mark. You can also read along here (beginning at 2:01:38).
Chelsea Mitchell runs track at the college level. On May 22, USA Today published her Op-Ed in which she complained that runners who had "male bodies" are repeatedly and unfairly winning championships in women's college track meets. Three days after the publication of the Op-Ed, USA Today retroactively edited Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed, offering the following reasons as an editor's note:
Editor's note: This column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY’s standards and style guidelines. We regret that hurtful language was used.
I took the liberty of running a "compare" of the edited part of the original article (published in its original form by Alliance Defending Freedom) to the new version of the USA Today article, the one from which the "hurtful language" has been removed. The red corrections were the changes made by USA Today.
I don't understand what is factually inappropriate about saying that the MTF (male to female) transgender runners to some degree, retained "male bodies" if that is what Chelsea Mitchell (an accomplished athlete) observed. These are facts that are also strongly borne out by the stunning success of these runners when they are competing against the runners who are biologically female. That is, in fact, the entire point of Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed. Apparently, she will not be allowed to make her argument in her own words.
Mitchell's article did not even once mention the vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless word, "gender." Her article was about the two sexes, male and female. Perhaps USA Today also finds basic biology principles hurtful, including this finding, which goes back for thousands of years: Mammals, including human animals, come in two and only two sexes, male (small gametes) and female (larger gametes) (and see this peer reviewed article. There is not a third type of gamete. Mitchell should be allowed to freely discuss and compare the competitive advantages of those with biologically male bodies versus those with biologically female bodies. That said, this is 2021, and we are in the deep throes of Wokeness.
Last year, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege.” The program, hosted on Zoom for a cohort of 13 Lockheed employees, was led by the diversity-consulting firm White Men As Full Diversity Partners, which specializes in helping white males “awaken together.”
This "training" happened last year. It is the easiest thing in the world to predict that based on these revelations, future training will not have written materials (as a school administrator urged here).
Bonus Woke Tip: Being punctual is a "white" thing, so Lockheed should simply tell the customers, "We'll get you that order of fighter jets next year, maybe 3 or 4 year year from now, maybe ten years from now. Whatever." :
Apoorva Mandavilli is a reporter for the NYT specializing in COVID issues. She thinks that her job is to NOT investigate how this pandemic-causing virus was able to infect human beings, allegedly because to ask this question is "racist." Maybe the NYT ought to replace Mandavilli with a new COVID reporter who has at least a mild interest in science.
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