The overall theme in this video is that we are not going to be able to solve problem if we are not willing to look squarely at the problem. The horrific problem we face in the U.S. is that a large percentage of black children are not fairing well in American schools. In 2019, only 20% of black children were proficient at math (compared to 52% of whites, 28% of Hispanic and 66% of Asian children). We never get to why this is happening or how to fix the problem if we deny that there is a problem. Wokeness/Critical Race Theory "fixes" the problem by pretending that mathematics is racist, in order words, by disparaging math as "white" and attempting to lower the standards. As Glenn Loury passionately points out, this is a racist move, a backhanded way of suggesting that black kids can't cut it, even though most other children all over the world can. This following video is a 15 minute excerpt of a longer discussion that one can view at Glenn Loury's Patreon Website.
in 2007, Greg Lukianoff wrote an article on "social justice" that the NYT decided was too hot to handle. Lukianoff then shopped his article to the Chronicles of Higher Education, which published it. The problem is that attempts to teach vague world views like "social justice" open the floodgates to teaching personal political preferences and unsubstantiated quasi-religious philosophies as though these are uncontroversial factually-anchored topics that can be described by objective standards. Here is an excerpt from "Social Justice and Political Orthodoxy":
Vague, subjective, and politicized evaluation standards are dangerous. They invite administrators and faculty members to substitute their own opinions and political beliefs in place of evaluating students’ skill as teachers. Many of us can think of teachers and professors whose politics we may not have agreed with but who were nonetheless exceptional educators. Having the “correct” political beliefs no more makes someone a good teacher than having “incorrect” beliefs necessarily makes someone a bad teacher.
The fact that such politicized standards may be well intentioned does not make them less troubling. Attempts to institute mandatory political orthodoxies for “good reasons” are nothing new. Depending on where the political pendulum is at any given moment, such tests may come from the left or the right. In the 1950s, attempts to root out Communist sympathizers in higher education were rightly opposed even by scholars and judges who believed the Soviet threat was very real, because they also believed such enforced conformity of thought incompatible with liberal education.
At the heart of the modern liberal university is an ideal simultaneously grand and humble: None of us are omniscient, none can know what strange paths can lead to wisdom and understanding, and it is arrogant for any institution to assume the role of final arbiter of truth. Official orthodoxies impede rather than facilitate education and lead to dogma rather than living, organic ideas. One would hope that we are long past the time when education was viewed as an opportunity to inculcate “correct” and unchallengeable answers to philosophical, moral, and societal questions.
The problem of imposing mandatory political orthodoxies is a serious one, whether those beliefs concern “social justice,” “individualism,” or “patriotism.” In 1943 the Supreme Court invalidated a mandatory school flag-pledge requirement challenged by Jehovah’s Witnesses because it went against their religious beliefs. As Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote then, efforts “to coerce uniformity of sentiment in support of some end thought essential” have proven destructive throughout history, raising the bitter question of “whose unity it shall be.” He concluded: “Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
This problem of compelled orthodoxy in the context of Critical Race Theory was addressed by Helen Pluckrose in an article titled, "White Fragility Training and Freedom of Belief." Here is an excerpt on Ideological Conformity
It is perfectly reasonable for employers to require employees to commit to not discriminating against anybody on the basis of race, and to not expressing racist beliefs. Because this is an important issue and employers will want to be very clear about it, a talk or meeting could be necessary and employees might be required to confirm that they understand and commit to following the rules. However, it is also important that the focus is on expected attitudes and behaviours at work and does not require anyone to affirm their commitment to any particular belief system that they may not believe in and should not be coerced into.
The ethical problem with requiring ideological conformity is often understood better by people on the political left when it comes to a belief system like Christianity, which is a majority view and often combined with conservative politics. It is usually clear to leftists that, unless the role is a specifically religious one, an employer should not require their atheist, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist or even Christian employees to affirm the Christian faith. It is less clear to a certain subset of them that they should not be required to affirm a belief in concepts of invisible systems of power and privilege such as whiteness. This is because Social Justice beliefs are not currently recognised as ones to which the concept of secularism should be applied. They should be. . . .
the belief system around these concepts of whiteness, privilege and fragility includes the truth claims that:
An invisible power system exists that perpetuates racism throughout every aspect of society.
Racist systems require power, therefore only white people can be racist and all white people are racist. This invisible racist power system is called whiteness.
Whiteness pervades everything and so is always present whenever white people do or say anything. It is impossible for white people not to behave in racist ways.
White people are generally unable to see the invisible force of whiteness and need theorists like DiAngelo to explain it to them.
Whiteness results in white people being privileged and it is always essential to focus on this privilege to the exclusion of all other factors that could help or hinder a person.
White people cannot bear to be confronted by DiAngelo’s beliefs in their racism. This is because they are psychologically fragile and not because they know their own minds.
Any attempt to disagree with this definition of racism, whiteness or privilege is simply a manifestation of this fragility. Being quiet or going away is also a sign of it.
White people therefore have two choices: they can be racist and admit it or racist and deny it. Both are bad, but the latter is willfully ignorant and therefore really bad.
Critical Social Justice theories of whiteness represent a complex and internally consistent belief system, which is the result of at least fifty years of discourse theory. The similarities between this belief system and belief systems more instantly recognisable as religious, which also believe in original sin, powerful but insidious forces of evil, a priesthood, epiphany and atonement, are clear.
A secular society does not deny belief systems power over others because they are factually wrong. It denies them power over others because it protects the individual’s right to her own private conscience, whether she is right or not. This is a remarkable and counterintuitive thing to humans, but it has served us well.
The principles of secularism hold that, no matter how strongly you believe your belief system to be true or how essential you think it is that all of society holds it to be true and lives according to its moral dictates, you do not have the right to impose it on anyone else. We currently live in societies that do a pretty good job of applying this rule to religion, but which have not yet recognised Critical Social Justice as the same kind of thing. Instead, Critical Social Justice is largely misunderstood as a continuation of the liberal civil rights movements, which worked to reform laws and to open up all opportunities to everyone, regardless of their identities, and whose principles can still, quite reasonably, be expected to be upheld by employers. This is a misunderstanding of Critical Social Justice. As shown above, Critical Social Justice is a very specific belief system, which revolves around several core truth claims, which have not been shown to be true. It requires an admission of inherent racism and regards all disagreement as evidence of the problem.
For my first 18 years of life, religion was shoved down my throat. My father was the well-intentioned aggressor. He wanted to protect me from the hot fires of hell and he repeatedly expressed disappointment in me for questioning such things as virgin birth and dead people who later became alive. Based on many discussions with my father (and many others) over the years, I learned to recognize religion whenever I saw it. I became an atheist because I took the time to read the Bible and because I listened carefully and with an open mind to religious apologists as they put their best feet forward.
One of the first things I notice about religions is that it is inappropriate (sometimes blasphemous) to ask certain questions, even obvious questions. Another thing that shouts "Religion" is that one is asked to believe things that don't make any sense. Here's my favorite. According to many religious folks, "everything has to have a cause." Most importantly, they will tell you, the universe had to have a cause, and thus (ergo, therefore) the cause of the universe was "God." They tell you that this principle of First Cause "proves" the existence of "God." When you ask what caused "God" (a question that would instantly occur to any half-alert 8 year old), believers tell you that God does not need to have a cause. This is the sort of thing that religion does to brains. It allows you to violate all of your most important principles in good conscience. It also attacks science whenever science becomes inconvenient. It excuses the use of undefined and ill-defined concepts, even foundational concepts. Religion excels at cherry picking, avoiding the discussion of the parts of the Bible where "God" commits mass killings. Believers will believe, no matter what the evidence is. Theology is "tennis without a net, as Sam Harris says at min 5 in this video:
As Harris says (Min 8):
This to me is is the true horror: Perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.
Wokeness is also tennis without a net. Wokeness apologists engage in the same shoddy thinking as many theologians and ordinary believers. Yet it is spreading through society like wildfire, ruining careers and celebrating censorship and setting fire to Enlightenment values whenever those become inconvenient to the cause.
I support Andrew Sullivan at Substack. I consider him wise, good-hearted and highly articulate. He is also a gay man who is religious. In this recent article, "Religion and the Decline of Democracy," Sullivan announces that he is about to start attending Catholic Mass again, and he is going despite many strong reasons for not going. The Catholic Church has been unkind, even cruel, to Sullivan (and many others, including innocent children), yet so powerful is the pull of the church that Sullivan is about to march back to his religious tribe where it might reasonably be expected that he will receive even more abuse. As he sees it, he has stayed with the church because of his "need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose." Again, that is how powerful tribes can be despite intellectual, factual, scientific and social incoherence.
Today's irony is that this article by Sullivan expresses his grave concern about Wokeness. In this, he and I agree completely. The Woke are a tribe with a "need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose." The Woke are a tribe that proudly acts like a mob, like a religion that will stop at nothing to "save" the rest of us.
I will end with Sullivan's description of the Woke mob:
The transcendent has been banished in favor of a profoundly atheist view of the world as merely the arrangement of power structures. But the zeal of religious faith propels the ideology. It is Manichean — seeing the world only as good or evil, antiracist or racist, with virtue attached, horrifyingly, to skin color or gender. It can brook no compromise. It denies the individual soul. It seeks to punish and banish sinners as zealously as it insists on a total psychological re-birth for everyone who joins up. It demands confessions of sin; it requires the renunciation of the self in favor of the identity group; it urges, as so many sermons do, that people “do the work” every day to bring about the Kingdom of Anti-Racism.
These pseudo-religions will fail. They are too worldly, too rooted in contemporary culture wars, too baldly tribal, and too shallow in their understanding of the world to have much staying power. But they can do immense damage to souls and our society in the meantime.
This fascinating exchange starts with a Tweet by Gloria Steinem, to which biologist Heather Heying responds with a science lesson. Some legislatures are bringing this issue to a head and it remains unclear whether we will (as a society) resolve this debate with biology or ideology. Perhaps the battleground will be the dictionary. As Heying says,
Transwomen are transwomen.
Women are women.
Somehow, writing these two sentences is being construed by the Woke as bigotry, with no end in sight as to how or whether this dispute can be resolved.
And as I review this thread, I keep shaking my head, given that a Tweet by Gloria Steinem started this discussion. For many of us, one of the most important parts of feminism is the tenet that the things that you like to do (whether climbing trees or cooking or fixing cars) don't determine whether you are a fully man or woman. These things are irrelevant to your sex. You can be fully a woman even though you like to engage in activities typically associated with men. Yet I keep seeing writings by TRA's that a girl who likes "boy" things is dysphoric, potentially meaning that she should take testosterone and cut off her breasts. Jesus! This is from the same types of people who, 15 and 20 years ago railed at cultures who practiced clitorectomies because it because it is so grotesque to massacre a healthy female body. The TRA's argue that even young teenagers (who are too young to vote or drive) should be granted total deference when social pressures are appearing to be the main thing convincing them to make permanent changes to their bodies that will likely result in sterility. That that is where we are . . .
And the fringe left has pushed its ideology so hard that we are now supposed to think that there is no difference between a woman and a transwoman. There is a clear factual difference, as Heying explains.
None of what I am writing suggests that transwomen aren't entitled to legally and socially present themselves as women in most situations (though I would make exceptions for women's shelters, prisons and sports participation). Transwomen are entitled to our respect. They are human beings every bit as much as the rest of us. Because they are fully human, we owe them the respect of disagreeing with them when their claims violate basic principles of biology.
If you haven't notice, the ACLU is now proudly choosing sides politically, not so much acting on broad-based principles. Good luck trying to find any modern analogue to the ACLU 1978 Skokie litigation.
Matt Taibbi offers this quote by former ACLU director IRA Glasser.
Hello, I invite you to subscribe to Dangerous Intersection by entering your email below. You will have the option to receive emails notifying you of new posts once per week or more often.
