The Sick New Culture Of Censorship As Usual
John McWhorter writes in The Atlantic:
Our national reckoning on race has brought to the fore a loose but committed assemblage of people given to the idea that social justice must be pursued via attempts to banish from the public sphere, as much as possible, all opinions that they interpret as insufficiently opposed to power differentials. Valid intellectual and artistic endeavor must hold the battle against white supremacy front and center, white people are to identify and expunge their complicity in this white supremacy with the assumption that this task can never be completed, and statements questioning this program constitute a form of "violence" that merits shaming and expulsion.Skeptics have labeled this undertaking "cancel culture," which of late has occasioned a pushback from its representatives. The goal, they suggest, is less to eliminate all signs of a person's existence--which tends to be impractical anyway-- than to supplement critique with punishment of some kind. Thus a group of linguists in July submitted to the Linguistic Society of America a petition not only to criticize the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker for views they considered racist and sexist, but to have him stripped of his Linguistic Society of America fellow status and removed from the organization's website listing linguist consultants available to the media. An indication of how deeply this frame of mind has penetrated many of our movers and shakers is that they tend to see this punishment clause as self-evidently just, as opposed to the novel, censorious addendum that it is.
...To the extent that the new progressives acknowledge that some prominent people have been unfairly tarred--including the food columnist Alison Roman, the data analyst David Shor, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art senior curator Gary Garrels--they often insist that these are mere one-off detours rather than symptoms of a general cultural sea change.
For example, in July I tweeted that I (as well as my Bloggingheads sparring partner Glenn Loury) have been receiving missives since May almost daily from professors living in constant fear for their career because their opinions are incompatible with the current woke playbook. Then various people insisted that I was, essentially, lying; they simply do not believe that anyone remotely reasonable has anything to worry about.
However, hard evidence points to a different reality. This year, the Heterodox Academy conducted an internal member survey of 445 academics. "Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?" To the hypothetical "My reputation would be tarnished," 32.68 percent answered "very concerned" and 27.27 percent answered "extremely concerned." To the hypothetical "My career would be hurt," 24.75 percent answered "very concerned" and 28.68 percent answered "extremely concerned." In other words, more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory.
Non-tenured and tenured faculty are fearful now.
And check out the tenor of the accusations:
The charges levied against many of these professors are rooted in a fanatical worldview, one devoted to spraying for any utterances possibly interpretable as "supremacist," although the accusers sincerely think they have access to higher wisdom. A white professor read a passage from an interview with a well-known Black public intellectual who mentions the rap group NWA, and because few of the students knew of the group's work at this late date, the professor parenthetically noted what the initials stand for. None of the Black students batted an eye, according to my correspondent, but a few white students demanded a humiliating public apology.This episode represents a pattern in the letters, wherein it is white students who are "woker" than their Black classmates, neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice. From the same well is this same professor finding that the gay men in his class had no problem with his assigning a book with a gay slur in its title, a layered, ironic title for a book taking issue with traditional concepts of masculinity--but that a group of straight white women did, and reported him to his superiors.
Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China.
This is very much how this viewpoint sounds and it is all about quashing anything but "correct" thinking, which whomever holds the most powerful weapon of destruction (including social destruction) gets to decide.
It's the antithesis of free thinking and free inquiry that are supposed to be integral to universities and the quashing of it makes us worse and more backward (and more horrible) as a society.
Yeah, I'm watching the ungoing drama of Smith (my undergrad) unfold. There's a group of maybe 5-10 women who are basically trying to destroy every facebook group. They go in and accuse everyone of racism or transphobia or something, and then if the mods don't respond exactly the way the want them to (by telling off the accused *-ists and shutting down anything they post, immediately with no discussion) they turn on the mods and accuse them of *-ism (even the non white, gay, whatever ones) and demand their resignation. In one case, a couple pretended to sympathize with the admin, she added them as mods and they removed her!
People are starting shit on such controversial groups as the Friday afternoon tea group (where we would discuss what happened to us that week and what we were having for our afternoon snack), and the parents group (hitherto used for discussing cloth vs disposable and best breastfeeding techniques and covid homeschooling woes)
It's happening to group after group. Same group of women doing it each time. And they seem unstoppable.
NicoleK at September 2, 2020 1:48 AM
This has been going on in academia for a long time, and reached a high level of intensity about 10 years ago. It was inevitable that it would ooze out into the larger society, and now it clearly has.
David Foster at September 2, 2020 5:42 AM
Have you considered turning on them and getting them banned?
The prisoner's dilemma works for the bad actor as long as they are the only bad actor. Sometimes the only way forward is to recognize the other person is a bad actor and adopt the same tactics until they stop.
One good example of this is Antifa. They are quite happy to burn and loot and assault people as long as they are the only ones who get to do so. The moment violence turns on them they change from calling to defund the police to demanding police protection.
A second good example is elections in California. There are a number of Republicans in the state. But it is common for local elections to have two Democrats and no Republicans on the ballot. Historically there were a number of tactics that Democrats found acceptable and Republicans found unacceptable. Morality aside when only one groups was using those tactics they were very effective, and thus Democrats rule the state. Now millennials are coming of age. The people in charge (Democrats) have been using those tactics all their lives. They don't see them as immoral. Instead they see them as typical and have no problem using them as well.
So it will be interesting to see if millennials turn California red.
Ben at September 2, 2020 5:46 AM
So it will be interesting to see if millennials turn California red.
Not any time soon. #CalExit will see to that.
I R A Darth Aggie at September 2, 2020 6:47 AM
They do seem to lack humility. If they can destroy a career, or a business, or an icon, they count it as a win. No matter the harm the do.
An honest dose of Marxism would do them some good. The field work, poverty, and a sore back would be salutary. Plus, they would lose that 30 lbs. of capitalist lard they carry around.
Spiderfall at September 2, 2020 7:35 AM
The scary part is now they are trying to steal an election to make this totalitarian nonsense the law of the land. They might get away with it.
Isab at September 2, 2020 7:50 AM
StG, just ten hours I was thinking of posting a passage from McWhorter... About Orion.
Here's how modern life works: People who are much smarter than you or I happen to be are paid enormous sums of money to make particular things happen at particular times: Chemical reactions, financial intricacies, medical outcomes and logistical miracles of incredible complexity.
And they do it by using precise language, which is by nature very direct. When asked what the percentage will be at 9:00am, they don't say 0.8348% when they mean 8.8347%… And they don't make jokes that compel the questioner to ask again, and they don't bring up a bunch of other topics which they'd prefer to discuss. They look you in the eye and they say—
…or……or…And they look you in the eye when they say it. And you pay them for their clarity.And when they're NOT clear, they are (rightly) perceived as incompetent or fraudulent or cowardly.
'Activists' are challenging the professoriate not because they — having completed nothing more challenging in life than two shifts at Burger Doodle in the same week — have any new insights about racism or anything else; they literally just do not want to do their homework. Dozens of hours of reading every week for academic achievement is no fun… But being woke and pretending you were born with insight into history is easy!
So they can't give you straight answers. (Choose: incompetent / fraudulent / cowardly.)
This is from McWhorter in 2009:
As Insta so often says, "read the whole thing": Achievement in modern life becomes ever-more reliant on people who can see & describe the world in concisely literal terms: Programmers, engineers and technocrats who strip our challenges to the essence and vanquish them. You'd have to be a monster not to sympathize with people from cultures where speaking blunt truth is unpopular, and might even cost you your life:The problem isn't just inner cities, its entire geographic populations. Read about life in the Middle East, and be spellbound as the Western authorities are confounded by their seemingly erratic results for diplomacy: Arabs tell lies in public and tell the truth in private, where it tends to be the other way around in the west. (Achmed, I thought we had a DEAL...)
And in China (ete.), no one wants to get sent to Uyghurs Camp… Direct truth is incalculably precious.
Go back a few days and look over Conan's exchange with Orion. Coney's BEGGING the kid to sit straight and say what he has to say.
And the kid, from whatever deformity of development or culture, thinks he's being clever by evading and exaggerating. He's been doing this for years. He thinks wordplay is the key to success.
He's as terrified of the truth as the Wokies are.
In the world of modern success, you don't get to make things up and tell the grownups how it rilly works.
Crid at September 2, 2020 8:28 AM
StG, just ten hours I was thinking of posting a passage from McWhorter... About Orion.
Here's how modern life works: People who are much smarter than you or I happen to be are paid enormous sums of money to make particular things happen at particular times: Chemical reactions, financial intricacies, medical outcomes and logistical miracles of incredible complexity.
And they do it by using precise language, which is by nature very direct. When asked what the percentage will be at 9:00am, they don't say 0.8348% when they mean 8.8347%… And they don't make jokes that compel the questioner to ask again, and they don't bring up a bunch of other topics which they'd prefer to discuss. They look you in the eye and they say—
…or……or…And they look you in the eye when they say it. And you pay them for their clarity.And when they're NOT clear, they are (rightly) perceived as incompetent or fraudulent or cowardly.
'Activists' are challenging the professoriate not because they — having completed nothing more challenging in life than two shifts at Burger Doodle in the same week — have any new insights about racism or anything else; they literally just do not want to do their homework. Dozens of hours of reading every week for academic achievement is no fun… But being woke and pretending you were born with insight into history is easy!
So they can't give you straight answers. (Choose: incompetent / fraudulent / cowardly.)
This is from McWhorter in 2009: https://tinyurl.com/y5qnn48g
As Insta so often says, "read the whole thing": Achievement in modern life becomes ever-more reliant on people who can see & describe the world in concisely literal terms: Programmers, engineers and technocrats who strip our challenges to the essence and vanquish them. You'd have to be a monster not to sympathize with people from cultures where speaking blunt truth is unpopular, and might even cost you your life:The problem isn't just inner cities, its entire geographic populations. Read about life in the Middle East, and be spellbound as the Western authorities are confounded by their seemingly erratic results for diplomacy: Arabs tell lies in public and tell the truth in private, where it tends to be the other way around in the west. (Achmed, I thought we had a DEAL...)And in China (ete.), no one wants to get sent to Uyghurs Camp… Direct truth is incalculably precious.
Go back a few days and look over Conan's exchange with Orion. Coney's BEGGING the kid to sit straight and say what he has to say.
And the kid, from whatever deformity of development or culture, thinks he's being clever by evading and exaggerating. He's been doing this for years. He thinks wordplay is the key to success.
He's as terrified of the truth as the Wokies are.
In the world of modern success, you don't get to make things up and tell the grownups how it rilly works.
Crid at September 2, 2020 8:30 AM
Fucking software.
Crid at September 2, 2020 8:32 AM
"... the quashing of it makes us worse and more backward (and more horrible) as a society."
Well, now, that is the goal, isn't it? The existing society must be destroyed before the wokesters can create the socialist "utopia" they will impose on the rest of us -- for our own good, of course.
Jay R at September 2, 2020 10:12 AM
For the incompetent and lazy, destroying all standards makes their life easier. For the racist left, who assume that black people simply cannot compete, lowering standards helps achieve utopia. They have no idea that the reason they have electricity is that engineers obsessed with numbers and making things work keep it all running. You can't run a power plant by acting cooler than the other guys and talking smack. Being the most woke will not keep the lights on or water running (see California for proof).
cc at September 2, 2020 11:11 AM
TBH, it was worth saying twice.
only about 200 of the world's 6,000 languages are written in any serious way
I did not know that. Upon reflection, that's not surprising.
I R A Darth Aggie at September 2, 2020 11:11 AM
TBH, it was worth saying twice.
only about 200 of the world's 6,000 languages are written in any serious way
I did not know that. Upon reflection, that's not surprising.
I R A Darth Aggie at September 2, 2020 11:12 AM
It makes sense.
The world is overwhelmingly oral, especially these days. We don't write letters anymore. Very few people read for enjoyment any more.
Texting's character limits force us to exclude punctuation. A recent report in a British newspaper said young people today regard a period (or "full stop" as they call it) in a text as emphatic and a sign of anger.
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2020 11:34 AM
"Very few people read for enjoyment any more." ~Conan
I find such claims specious. If you go by the American time use survey the percentage of people who read for leisure has dropped from something like 25% in 2003 to 20% in 2017. I don't know how significant that is, but 1 in 5 people reading for leisure isn't very few. Also interesting the response rate has fallen over that same time interval. It was 57.8 in 2003 and 45.6 in 2017. I don't have the raw data but it looks like when the response rate increases so too does the leisure reading rate. It looks likely to me that when the response rate falls you are getting a sample skewing effect as not all groups are equally likely to not respond.
There are also studies of book sales. The problem there is that many good quality books are now available for free on the internet. As a personal example the amount of money I spend on books has fallen to almost nothing, while at the same time my leisure reading time has gone up (retirement will have that effect). I expect similar issues are hitting libraries.
Ben at September 2, 2020 12:03 PM
Ben, I'm going with with The Washington Post reported in 2018.
That's a 9-point drop. And the ATUS reported decline aligns with data from Pew and from the NEA.
The cause? WaPo says it's TV:
I think 1-in-5 qualifies as "very few," at least in the sense in which I made the statement. People are simply not spending as much time with the written word as they used to.
This decline is reflected in our communications today. Go through your Facebook feed and start counting grammatical errors - not only in posts from friends, but in linked national articles as well; articles that, in theory, have been edited for spelling, grammar, and fact checking.
One item from the NEA article suggests a reason for the issue Crid's McWhorter link reported, reading comprehension and lower test scores for blacks vs. whites.
A lack of familiarity with the written word translates to a lower reading comprehension ability.
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2020 12:51 PM
Should be: "I'm going with what The Washington Post reported...."
Conan the Grammarian at September 2, 2020 12:54 PM
Also, I got the 'lies vs truth in public vs private' backwards, but you knew that anyway.
Crid at September 2, 2020 1:01 PM
"neatly demonstrating the degree to which this new religion is more about virtue signaling than social justice"
3 points
1 Social justice IS virtue signalling
2 people who seek to modify a concept like justice have no interest in justice
3 I'm back baby!
lujlp at September 2, 2020 2:51 PM
3 I'm back baby!
lujlp at September 2, 2020 2:51 PM
Welcome back.
Isab at September 2, 2020 3:03 PM
About public reading habits: how much remains after Harry Potter and Twilight are removed?
Do "graphic novels" count?
Radwaste at September 2, 2020 3:23 PM
> 2 people who seek to modify a
> concept like justice have no
> interest in justice
Social Justice is like Intellectual Honesty: It's one word too long.
See also, the Hawk.
Crid at September 2, 2020 3:24 PM
Conan, I can see cultural demographic shifts and TV significantly impacting leisure reading. I think teacher apathy and reduced costs to write are more significant contributors to low quality of writing than leisure reading habits. But I don't have anything to back that up.
I have a lot of different thoughts that branch off from this topic but they are hazy and poorly formed at the moment. More exercise would really help my thinking these days. But it is 85F and 80% humidity at midnight. It only gets worse when the sun comes up. So I don't really want to go outside. There are good reasons the south didn't get really colonized until after the air conditioner was invented.
Ben at September 2, 2020 5:42 PM
> This decline is reflected in
> our communications today.
Even the lawyerly ones.
Crid at September 2, 2020 7:52 PM
Sad truth is that teevee emotionally saturates.
Don't watch teevee.
Crid at September 2, 2020 7:55 PM
> This decline is reflected in
> our communications today.
Even the lawyerly ones.
Crid at September 2, 2020 7:52 PM
Spell check can be a lifesaver, just like calculators, but tech dependency can make you lazy and stupid.
Isab at September 2, 2020 8:36 PM
I've got a friend from grade school on my Facebook feed. He's a former Marine and die-hard Trump supporter who keeps calling Democrats "Hippocrates." Um, dude, that may pass spell-check, but it's not saying what you think it is.
Conan the Grammarian at September 3, 2020 7:25 AM
And that, Ben, is why you couldn't pay me to live in Houston. Although Charlotte is hot and muggy these days, too, it's tolerable and it cools down at night.
Conan the Grammarian at September 3, 2020 7:30 AM
it's tolerable and it cools down at night.
Conan the Grammarian at September 3, 2020 7:30 AM
Define cool. I like my nighttime weather between 50-60 degrees. Mostly here in Wyoming, I get that.
Isab at September 3, 2020 11:54 AM
We can get as hot as Houston in the summer, but our summer ends earlier than theirs does. It's 92ºF right now and the "feels-like" says it's 100ºF with 48% humidity. The forecast is 74ºF tonight. We'll be down in the '80s next week.
My deck thermometer said it was 78ºF last night at 11pm. If Wyoming weather is anything like Colorado's, we don't get as cool at night or as hot during the day as you guys do.
The hottest I've seen it get here is 104º with moderate humidity in the Jul-Aug timeframe. I lived in the East Bay in the Lamorinda area where the hottest I saw it get was 108º in August. I went to a wedding in Oregon at 114º in August, a graduation in Colorado at 114º in August, and a software conference in Phoenix at 114º in June. Those areas were hot, too hot, but there was little-to-no humidity and that can make a difference - although at 114º it doesn't really make that big a difference. Houston combines the worst of those high temperature areas with Louisiana-level humidity.
I miss San Francisco weather - anything above 80º was a heat wave. The temperature was nearly always between 40º and 80º - although jackets in July and summer being a week in October took a little getting used to.
Conan the Grammarian at September 3, 2020 12:30 PM
We've got frikken NASA just a little south of here. Why don't they build a dome and completely encapsulate Houston as a good test run on mars or venus habitats? Because I agree with you Conan. Houston is unlivable as a city. Most places you ask about where they live and they talk about the local features. People from Houston talk about their jobs. And that is the only reason people live here, to work.
Ben at September 3, 2020 2:15 PM
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