By Kyle Smith
Thursday, July
29, 2021
A thought revolution on the left targets
truth in academia, science, business, and the law
Last summer cardiologist Norman Wang,
a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, was demoted
after an online mob became enraged by a peer-reviewed paper based on his
assessment of 50 years of data that he had published months earlier in
the Journal of the American Heart Association. Wang wrote that
evidence suggested minority students were ill-served by being placed above
their ability groups by affirmative-action programs and concluded, “Evolution
to strategies that are neutral to race and ethnicity is essential. Ultimately,
all who aspire to a profession in medicine and cardiology must be assessed as
individuals on the basis of their personal merits, not their racial and ethnic
identities.” JAHA’s editor, Barry London, took the extremely
unusual step of apologizing for and retracting the paper, suggesting it was
racist. London cited no errors but said Wang “does nothing to get us towards
[the] goal” of increasing “diversity, equity and inclusiveness.”
The Oregon Department of Education has
urged teachers to be trained in “ethnomathematics,” which argues that white
supremacy is made manifest by an insistence on getting the right answer and
making students show their work. A training module called “Equitable Math”
claims, “The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally
false, and teaching it is even much less so [sic].” A spokesman for the
ODOE defended the materials because they would supposedly help “develop
strategies to improve equitable outcomes for Black, Latinx, and multilingual
students.” Elsewhere in Oregon, a (male) professor published a paper on
“feminist glaciology” “to provoke discussion about who is producing knowledge
about glaciers and what the implications of that existing knowledge are,
including whose voices are left out.”
Joseph Cesario of Michigan State
University and David Johnson of the University of Maryland at College Park
found, in a 2019 scholarly article published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, “no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic
disparities across shootings, and White officers are not more likely to shoot
minority civilians than non-White officers.” The following year Cesario and
Johnson requested that the entire article be retracted, writing that “although
our data and statistical approach were valid to estimate the question we
actually tested (the race of civilians fatally shot by police), given continued
misuse of the article . . . we felt the right decision was to retract the
article.”
Findings that fall into the wrong hands
must be renounced. Offensive knowledge is to be buried. Truth is contingent on
the identity of the person who finds it. The ascendant strain of thought today
amounts to an attack on reason, rationality, and empiricism. An organized,
well-funded, fiercely defended Disenlightenment is unfolding, and some of its
most engaged proponents are explicit about their desire to demolish a 300-year
tradition: In Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race
Theory: An Introduction, the authors note that “unlike traditional civil
rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress,
critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order,
including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and
neutral principles of constitutional law.”
Undoing the Enlightenment is an
astonishingly bold undertaking that runs so contrary to centuries of progress
in learning that it requires the frenzy of a guilt-wracked cult to sustain it.
The Disenlightenment is fueled by a religious ecstasy that shares some characteristics
with the Reformation (notably a dizzying rebirth of iconoclasm with no clear
goal except the orgiastic thrill of destruction), while its reason-denying and
reactionary elements recall the Romantic movement. Its unendingly bleak and
despairing undertones set it apart, however, from the passion of Byron or
Beethoven. No salvation or endpoint is ever suggested; the more vigorously the
culture flatters and bends to the will of the Disenlighteners, the more they
demand. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The
only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination” — Ibram X.
Kendi’s now-famous precept is a chilling vision of scales that will never be
balanced.
* * *
Not long ago, thought leaders such as
Barack Obama spoke optimistically of a Romantic “arc” of progress or history
that would inevitably bend toward justice, seemingly with little need for the
assistance of people such as Barack Obama. But just a few years later, the
obvious and inspiring progress made by black Americans is a closely held
secret, rarely discussed. The gap between the life expectancy of black and
white Americans closed from 15 years in 1900 to four years in 2019, for
instance. The happiness gap between whites and blacks narrowed by two-thirds
from the 1970s to 2008, according to a University of Pennsylvania study. Facts
such as these are not commonly known, because of a kind of intellectual
conspiracy not to mention them. The empirical case for an arc of progress has
been displaced by an anecdote-driven narrative for an arc of regress. Cultural
emphasis on rare events such as police shootings of unarmed people wildly
distorts the public perception of their frequency. A survey earlier this year found
that liberals believe that more than 1,000 unarmed black men are killed by
police in a given year. (The actual number is more like 13 to 27, depending on
the counting method used.) Access to information is cheaper and easier than
ever, and yet the relevant facts critical to the discussion go ignored.
Even 20 percent of conservatives believe
that more than 1,000 unarmed black men are killed by police each year; by no
means are Disenlightenment tendencies confined to the Left. On the right, there
is a tendency toward reality-denial that takes a disturbing pride in rejection
of facts. Central to the Enlightenment spirit was the idea of knowability, of
reason and the scientific method being tools with which to establish fact —
“the primacy of rational and objective reasoning,” in the words of science
writer Matt Ridley. Today we know things that aren’t true, and if all evidence
points in a direction we’d rather not go, we simply choose contrary evidence,
regardless of its validity. Thanks to the Internet, conspiratorial notions are
available to explain away any inconvenient information. “Oh, it was in
the New York Times, was it?” we say with heavy sarcasm. “Then
you know it must be true.” Appeals to authority irritate us,
so we appeal to ignorance. The New York Times has made so many
errors of bias and judgment and actual fact in the past five years that it has
created an opening for conservatives to insist, absurdly, that if it is in
the New York Times, it is probably wrong.
When an event is as thoroughly investigated
as the November 2020 election, and everything points in the same direction,
facts get established. Yet a Monmouth poll in June found that 29 percent of
Republicans say they will never accept that Joe Biden is president, suggesting
minds utterly closed to the idea of unwelcome evidence. A CNN/SSRS poll
released April 30 found that only 26 percent of Republicans accepted that Biden
had legitimately won the election. A poll taken around Memorial Day for Yahoo
News/YouGov found that 73 percent of Republicans believed that left-wingers
deserved some or a great deal of blame for the January 6 Capitol riot, and in a
separate question, only 41 percent said that Trump supporters deserve some
blame or a great deal of it.
The evidence that COVID vaccines are safe
and effective is simply ignored by millions of Americans who harbor an almost
superstitious fear of them. A YouGov poll in July found that 44 percent of
Americans thought an adverse reaction to the vaccines constituted a bigger risk
than the disease that has killed more than 600,000 Americans. The many failures
of the global scientific community and the journalism industry, plus growing
awareness of scientism — the habit of pretending that subjective questions about
values and political tradeoffs are as objective as molecular formulas — are
obvious sources of the collapse in confidence in science, though there are
others. “Public trust in science may have been shaken by the publication of
academic papers based on false data in leading medical journals,” the medical
editor of Guardian Australia wrote last year. The
economist Arnold Kling recently published a dryly witty blog post titled “Signs
that we face an epistemological crisis: book titles, 2021.”
A dissatisfaction with Enlightenment
rationalism, together with the spiritual void created by the turn from God to
humanism, sparked the Romantic fad for new forms of mysticism and
transcendence. As Steven Pinker notes in his book Enlightenment Now:
The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, the Romantic
movement was steeped in a kind of manic faith in progress, albeit one achieved
via “mystical forces, laws, dialectics, struggles, unfoldings, destinies, ages
of men, and evolutionary forces that propel mankind ever upward toward utopia.”
Hints of mysticism today appear in white attitudes toward black Americans. Last
year’s clamor among major media outlets to capitalize the adjective “black”
(but not, in most cases, “white”) as though to sanctify it carried overtones of
the curious 1990s boom in movies about “magical negroes” — agreeable black
folks whose presence aided white men needing spiritual balm in movies such
as The Legend of Bagger Vance, The Green Mile, and What
Dreams May Come. (All of these films were intended to be racially
unctuous at the time, and all are now commonly denounced as racist.)
A 2015 study revealed that it is more
common to ascribe to black people than whites such superhuman qualities as the
ability to walk over hot coals or survive falling out of an airplane. “Taking
the knee” at sporting events was transmuted from a gesture of disrespect aimed
by black Americans at American symbols to more of a gesture of supplication by
whites toward blacks. When Indianapolis Colts head coach Frank Reich took a
knee on behalf of his mostly black team on its opening day last year, a press
release noted that the point was “humility — taken by the white community — to
acknowledge the injustice and inequality that is present.” Congressional
Democrats last June put on kente cloth in Emancipation Hall in the Capitol and
knelt in honor of George Floyd, though people commonly kneel not for the dead
but rather for the holy. The Disenlighteners place blacks on a rarefied
spiritual plane while aching to abase themselves and in some cases to carry out
a symbolic washing of feet. The “self-evident” truth that “all men are created
equal,” a foundational doctrine or at least an important aspiration of the
American Enlightenment, no longer applies. Some men are imbued with special
properties, and others should bend the knee to them. In this parody of
religious ritual, however, no forgiveness is ever offered in return for the
gesture.
* * *
Belief in witchcraft plummeted in the
early decades of the Enlightenment, as Ritchie Robertson notes in his
book The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790. Today,
during what might be termed the Disenlightenment pursuit of grievance, any
claims that “white supremacy” or “systemic racism” are fair characterizations
of the American republic in 2021 are deemed self-evident; blandly to ask to see
the evidence for these claims is framed as heresy. “Users of the phrase
[systemic racism] seldom offer any evidence beyond citing a fact about racial
disparity while asserting shadowy structural causes that are never fully
specified,” writes Glenn Loury for Common Sense with Bari Weiss, an
online newsletter on Substack. “We are all simply supposed to know how
‘systemic racism,’ abetted by ‘white privilege’ and furthered by ‘white
supremacy,’ conspire to leave blacks lagging behind.” At Grace Church School,
an expensive private school in Manhattan, head of school George Davison was
taped admitting on a phone call, “We’re demonizing white people for being
born.” A course run by a Seattle school district pushed teachers to accept that
the United States is guilty of the “spirit murder” of black children. As with a
17th-century accusation of witchcraft, the charge suffices to condemn; if a
farmer suffers a bad series of harvests, it must be the witchery, just as if a
black person who fails but is not obviously the victim of visible racism must
be the victim of invisible systemic racism. The Enlightenment presumption of
innocence is under attack.
A classic question-begging statement is
this one, from Ibram X. Kendi in a July piece in The Atlantic:
“Those who wish to conserve racial inequity want us to focus on intent — which
is hard to prove — rather than the outcome of inequity, which is rather easy to
prove.” If a thing is hard to prove, therefore, we should skip the proof and
simply assume it. Such is the vigor of the Disenlightenment that it is possible
for one of America’s intellectual celebrities to openly urge that prescribed
outcomes must be dictated by racial quotas, with procedural fairness dismissed.
“Equity” is the Disenlightenment buzzword that frames justice as a question of
achieving pre-dictated outcomes.
Another Disenlightenment precept is the
phrase “social justice.” As with “mob justice,” the modifier nullifies the
concept. “Social justice” proposes that it is the outcome, not the process,
that determines the degree to which something is just. A leading
Disenlightenment thinker, Ezra Klein, who occupies an exalted post in cultural
authority (podcaster and columnist for the New York Times), has
openly called for a reversal of the usual principle, arguing that it is better
for innocent men to be convicted than to take the chance that any guilty man
might go free. “‘Yes means yes’ is a terrible law, and I completely support
it,” Klein argued in a notorious Disenlightenment text for Vox,
referring to a California law that upended the presumption of innocence for
college men in most sexual encounters by requiring “affirmative, conscious, and
voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.” Many other states have
passed their own versions of the law, which upends the Enlightenment value of
public support for institutions of higher learning by conditioning funding on
colleges’ willingness to abjure standard Enlightenment conceptions of due process
for the accused.
Written by people who have obviously never
had sex, the law states: “Lack of protest or resistance does not mean consent,
nor does silence mean consent.” Since most sexual consent is passive and
implied, the law opened up an avenue for punishing an entire class of innocent
persons — men who engage in sexual activity with others — to slake a mob thirst
for generalized vengeance against college men.
“The ‘Yes Means Yes’ law is a necessarily
extreme solution to an extreme problem. Its overreach is precisely its value,”
Klein said, basing his crisis mentality entirely on a single junk-science
online survey of women on two campuses. Unlike some Disenlightenment figures,
who simply ignore the implications of their arguments, Klein did trace out the
horrific implications of his reasoning and declared that horror was exactly the
result he wanted: “Critics worry that colleges will fill with cases in which
campus boards convict young men (and, occasionally, young women) of sexual
assault for genuinely ambiguous situations. Sadly, that’s necessary for the
law’s success. It’s those cases — particularly the ones that feel genuinely
unclear and maybe even unfair . . . that will convince men that they better Be
Pretty Damn Sure.” Justice, in Klein’s formulation, requires being “unfair.”
False accusations, he claims without supplying evidence, “happen very, very
rarely,” whereas sexual assault on college campuses, he claims, citing that
ludicrously unscientific survey, “happens constantly.” Due-process rights
developed in English common law, expanded upon by Montesquieu in The
Spirit of the Laws, and laid out in the American Enlightenment
document the Constitution (via such accepted standards as the Sixth Amendment
right to confront witnesses and to counsel), are all under threat.
Several Disenlightenment urges reinforced
one another in the case of James Damore, the Google engineer fired in 2017 for
writing a memo discussing sex differences in his field. The National Labor
Relations Board declared that Damore’s “statements about immutable traits
linked to sex — such as women’s heightened neuroticism and men’s prevalence at
the top of the IQ distribution — were discriminatory and constituted sexual
harassment notwithstanding efforts to cloak comments with ‘scientific
references’ and analysis.” The scare quotes around references to science tell
us that science must be ignored whenever it conflicts with Disenlightenment
dogma. In the Enlightenment, science was often referred to as a process of
unveiling — the frontispiece to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, ou
Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers depicts
the figures of Reason and Philosophy unveiling the figure of Truth. According
to the National Labor Relations Board, though, science is more of a cloak.
On the left, the catechisms of race and
sex upend our hard-won understanding of justice as blind, fairness as a matter
of rules-based procedure, and knowledge as independent of the identity of its
discoverer. On the right, there is widespread refusal to accept unwelcome facts
or the value of expertise. On both sides, disdain for science and reason is
surging. The constituency for undoing the intellectual work of three centuries
is broad. Writes Weiss on her Substack, “Revolutions can be bloodless, incremental
and subtle. And they don’t require a strongman. They just require a sufficient
number of well-positioned true believers and cowards.” A thought revolution is
well under way, and its target is truth itself.
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