A Confession of Liberal Intolerance
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
"My Facebook followers have incredible compassion for war victims in South Sudan, for kids who have been trafficked, even for abused chickens, but no obvious empathy for conservative scholars facing discrimination."
miss the mark. Excluding people based on their beliefs is completely a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them. The feelings of the author (and me, and a lot of others besides) is that staunch liberals in academia might be flawed in excluding conservatives. But not because it's akin to racism, it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.
“Why stop there [hiring conservatives]?” asked Steven. “How about we make faculties more diverse by hiring idiots?”
edit: Which, IMO, is a weak argument specifically designed to avoid mentioning reparations, which can make some of the nicest white people go feral.
the saddest part is how it equates war victims and trafficked children to conservative scholars.
Can one? My political beliefs aren't my tastes: they are things that I believe. I can't choose what I believe to be true. Can you?
Yes.
This means your beliefs ought to be malleable. And when they don't change after evaluation you ought to have a reason for it. Even if it's just: No new evidence, evaluate later.
Uhhh, what? Fundamentally belief is the acceptance in an idea as true or real. It represents the amount of confidence you have in what is presented to you. Confidence can be based on many things (evidence, social pressure, etc) and can change over time. So you are absolutely free to choose what you believe is true or false.
Now, when it comes to the actual topic at hand – political liberalism vs. political conservatism – I don't think the vast majority of people's political beliefs are the result of a conscious choice to believe one thing rather than another – they are primarily the consequences of social and emotional and personality factors (reason and evidence do play a role, but far less than either side would like to think.) While in theory a person could consciously choose to try to make themselves believe in a particular political ideology, I doubt many people ever actually make that choice in practice.
No, The second doesn't follow from the first. Sure, confidence can change over time. That doesn't mean that you can make a conscious choice to believe something. (With skill, you may be able to identify the factors that influence your belief and then chose behaviors which will lead to experiencing the factors that will influence your belief in the direction you wish, but its absolutely not directly and simply within your control, even before considering that a belief that something is true itself generally precludes the belief that you should believe that it is not true in the first place.)
In practice, you're generally able to read as much as you want, talk to as many people as you want, and choose who you care about and what issues are important to you. A person's beliefs are changeable with time, effort and understanding of the world they live in.
No you can't. I'd love to read and research more on a wide range of topics but I don't have enough time. We all have to take shortcuts while developing our beliefs. Ultimately you have to choose a set of giant's shoulders to stand on, as they say. You can't thoroughly research everything on your own, and even if you could there's no guarantee that you'd come up with better answers than anybody else.
edit: I'm honestly jealous (and intolerant) of people who can. My deeply religious grandmother told me once during a long discussion about her Christianity that "faith" to her meant making a choice to believe. I told her that I have never had faith, and will never have faith. I have faith in that:)
Probably for the best. Your belief that you will win the lottery doesn't mean that you actually will win the lottery, but it might lead to you losing a lot of money.
That's the essence of being a rational human adult. If you can't, figure out why. If you won't, you're still a child.
If you'd like a taste at some of the advanced stages that are available with belief objectification, I recommend this short PDF:
http://newpossibilitiesassociates.com/uploads/9_levels_of_in...
If two beliefs are mutually conflicting then at least one is wrong. If X^Y is false, then I don't want to believe that X^Y is true. That'd be insane!
Not necessarily. Since you try bringing math in, then there are other possibilities—both could be consistent with your axioms. The continuum hypothesis is neither "true" nor "false", but rather independent of the axioms of ZFC. You are free to adopt it, or its negation, and proceed from there.
As an example:
Belief 1: The floor I am standing on is real.
Of course it is real. I can experience it right now.
Belief 2: The floor I am standing on is not real.
Of course it is not real. Most materials are empty space and our nervous system generates the experience of solidity. Besides, time doesn't exist as there is only this present experience so there is no container for material things to exist in.
I regard both of these as true from different lenses.
Is it insane? Maybe. But it also avoids a ton of existential angst.
I'm not sure why you're downplaying this; in an academic setting, that seems just as objectionable as racism.
Would the author of this comment be willing to say the same thing if the shoe were on the other foot? Say, a high school refusing to hire someone based on their liberal beliefs (say, transgender people being able to use the bathroom they identify as)? After all, it's very possible for the school to say "nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them".
Yes, the school could say that, but they might not be right (a case of a valid but unsound argument). In any case I view that hypothetical (barring a teacher based on what they think about transgender bathroom priveleges) as preferable to, say, barring a teacher based on something they had no say on such as their skin color (although, as I must continue to point out-- that doesn't mean it's not also preferable to not discriminate at all!)
You sound really confident about that, would you care to cite your research? My ignorant assumption would be that people's temperaments would segregate them into political views naturally. I know Jonathan Haidt has done a lot of research into this area, and he has some interesting ideas - "All political movements base appeals on different settings of the foundations—and the culture wars arise from what they choose to emphasize. Liberals jack up care, followed by fairness and liberty. They rarely value loyalty and authority. Conservatives dial up all six."[http://www.thelavinagency.com/blog-jonathan-haidt-difference...]
Its very interesting why the all diversity loving liberals, live in heavily white neighborhoods. Actions, speak louder than words.
If its only against conservatives, its not racism.
> Its very interesting why the all diversity loving liberals, live in heavily white neighborhoods.
That's true of wealthy liberals (just as it is for wealthy conservatives), because they live in heavily wealthy neighborhoods, and wealth and race are correlated in the US (liberals, wealthy or not, tend to see this correlation as a problem, though.) Non-wealthy liberals tend to live in more ethnically diverse neighborhoods because (and, I suspect, moreso than do non-wealthy conservatives.)
If it is racist at all, it is racist against whites, as it communicates distaste for a person based on their relationship to another hated group (but even then, its not communicating a problem with their relationship with whites as whites, but with white oppressors as oppressors, so whether its racist against whites is probably questionable.)
There's scenarios where its use could be a form of paternalistic anti-black racism, such as its use by whites of a particular persuasion to criticize a black defector from white-led political program in favor of an opposing white-led political movement.
...a judgement call about whether you think their beliefs are so far from your own that nothing productive can come from sharing a department with them.
it's a different (and less objectionable) type of discrimination.
Is this what we really want? A society of distrusting, hating separatist camps that vilify and exclude each other? Using organizational authority to actively punish "thoughtcrime" should be anathema to fellow liberals and those who espouse humanist values. However, there is (and always has been) a collectivist/identity/responsibility camp who thinks such authoritarian stances are ok.
A tolerant society needs to tolerate the free expression of dissenting and even reprehensible speech. A tolerant democratic society should tolerate legal political expression. As much as an enlightened company should have room for projects to experiment and "fail fast," a society should afford its citizens the opportunity to choose "the wrong" side. Really, the whole point of a democratic society, is that there's no one entity above imposing their idea of right and wrong over the populace.
Collectivism isn't evil and it is a deep part of what it means to be human, but it can't be allowed to trump the rights of the individual. People are best protected and served when collectivism and individualism are in balance.
Obviously I'm equivocating, since that would make no sense any other way. The smooth progression over the past 70-80 years where "liberalism" has turned a 180 that at times it seems like nobody has noticed is... I dunno... fascinating, if nothing else. Tolerance, diversity, free speech, many other words, all have rotated 180 degrees in that time frame.
Others map this on 2-axes, like the D&D alignment diagram.
Cool observation - I really like this. Though in effect it goes from being one dimensional to two dimensional: x being extent of services, production, distribution, and exchange controlled by state or private bodies, y being level of participation of the population in the decision making process.
You could add z to measure spending policy - now you can represent fiscal conservatism, level of democracy and social policy as a tetrahedron.
If you say "I'm a liberal but I'm not an authoritarian", then I'd suggest at this point you may not actually be a "liberal" anymore, or certainly not a doctrinaire one. There's a lot of people who are, IMHO, coasting on definitions now a decade or two out of date and voting for people who are labeled "liberal" without noticing the two "liberals" in question aren't the same thing anymore. It's a significant driver in the realignment process that we've begun seeing in the spectrum. (Trump is only the beginning of the realignment, not the end, and he is an effect, not a cause.)
It is also strange, for example, to see "liberals" who are, presumably, still considering them superior to those stuffy, stuck-up Victorians with their hangups about sex, even as they push consent laws that are far more constraining than a Victorian would ever have dreamed of.
There's a huge gulf between what doctrinaire liberals believe, and what they believe they believe (no typo). It boggles my mind.
According to this, I'm center-left and anti-authoritarian:
That's not what I want, but it's certainly the the message I hear from conservatives and the republican party in this country.
Racism. Sexism. Class warfarism.
Collectivism isn't evil? It's an objectively false idea and actively destructive to human life. How is that not evil?
Luckily people are very good at making judgement calls about who to include and who to exclude, right? "Culture fit" is a great way to end up with a diverse workforce, isn't it? And obviously "unconscious bias" isn't ever a thing.
It's debatable if nothing productive can come from sharing a department with people whose beliefs are different from your own, but it's actively counterproductive to exclude those people.
If conservatives started painting those fields as valuable fields for scholarship which needed more conservative scholars, the gap would, I suspect, substantially disappear within a generation.
Also the article lists: "But that doesn’t explain why there are conservative math professors but not many right-wing anthropologists." I imagine that say, in the extreme cases of say: evangelical young earth creationists or a evangelical mormon believing that humans are 5000 years old or that Native Americans are the lost tribe of Israel is counterproductive.
The conservative movement in this country is vehemently anti-intellectual. People love to point to Trump but even George W Bush played dumb to appeal to his base.
Add in a strongly capitalistic attitude among the american right, that smart ambitious people should work in industry and not in "ivory towers". Why would a fan of Ayn Rand take a government job for meager pay?
Academics are probably biased against conservatives. But a conservative is biased against becoming an academic as well.
I notice no citation, nor what "much more likely" means.
The blog post still makes the very important point that no one cares about beliefs when hiring. If one so chooses to be a bad teacher and teach things that are flat out wrong, well, that just makes firing them justified based on incompetence.
I think the NYTimes article is begging the question; if you ask why there are fewer conservatives/evangelicals/fundamentalists in the universities, one possible answer is that they are self-selecting, not that they're being discriminated against.
Edit: re self-selection, two points:
1. If the self selection occurs at the student levels (i.e. professors are hostile to conservatives which causes them to drop out of academia before they get to the teaching level) this is still bad.
2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem.
Not necessarily; if someone realizes that their basic beliefs are incompatible with the basic tenets of an institution, that saves everyone time in the long run.
And I'd like to see some evidence, any evidence of professors being hostile to conservatives. And no, "God's not Dead" doesn't count. That's such a persecution complex strawman.
> 2. Even if it's entirely self selected, it's still a diversity problem.
There's diversity and there is pandering to vox populi and anti-intellectualism. The first is good, the second is not, and quite frankly, the face of modern conservatism in America has been anti-intellectual for quite some time.
And hey, Kristoff seems to have misrepresented the data!
https://medium.com/@ginasue/the-lie-of-liberal-intolerance-o...
Surprised, I am not.
> Of professors who say that they are religious, fully 19% of them can be classified as “traditionalists,” which would include evangelical Christians (which in Kristof’s NYT op-ed were presented as a maligned minority, not part of the solid 1-in-5 religious professors who are traditionalists found by the survey).
One in five religious professors are traditionalists. So what?
There is a popular narrative about what it means to be conservative, liberal, progressive, etc. This narrative is a small simple band in a vastly complex spectrum of views. Unfortunately, we have come to the point where the narrative is being echoed so much that it's impossible to have a conversation framed outside the popular narrative.
We have all been trained and self-trained to pigeonhole each other based on these meaningless labels to either a) dismiss each other or b) rally together to dismiss the "other".
The one thing that we can't do is suspend our emotional biases and sincerely listen to alternate narratives.
Is it related to their religion, their conservatism, or something else?
Many people who belong to the academic community consider these people to be a bunch of uneducated backwater hicks who do not belong in intellectual conversations based on logical thought. So when an intellectual states that they are an evangelical christian, many consider them to be flawed in some capacity, and thus have nothing of substance to contribute.
EDIT: to add to that, evangelical christians tend to embrace a literal translation of the bible; in that the world was created in literally seven days, and that every human is descended from Adam and Eve, a story which in its literal translation is of course not supported by science. So when a person who professes to follow science also professes to be a member of this faith, it can seem paradoxical to many.
Like, imagine some perfectly decent person who has lived all his life in some small town in Nebraska, who isn't very educated but also isn't a terrible person who goes around looking for excuses to hate people. Rural voters are statistically more religious and more conservative, so he probably has extra peer pressure to be like that himself, but at the same time is a little creeped out by people like Cruz who seem to be trying to convince him that atheist non-white city dwellers think that him and his family and friends are subhuman, and are trying to take away his rights and his livelihood. So he's on the fence, until one day he stumbles across someone complaining about "uneducated backwater hicks", at which point he decides that Cruz might be right after all, because clearly these college-educated urban strangers really do hate him and his friends and relatives.
It's a vicious circle that's only broken when people just suck it up and take the high road, but it feels like there's just never quite enough people willing to do that to make a difference. It's easy to judge less educated or less successful people, and I'm sure it feels really cathartic to do so. Especially when many of those people are being used as pawns by demagogues who are actively trying to roll back civilization. It's much harder to turn the other cheek and try to find common ground with them. Sadly that's the only way the trend towards cultural polarization is ever going to reverse, because neither side is going anyplace.
Actually, plenty of Evangelicals I've seen have cited strict literalism as one of the problems in Fundamentalism that Evangelicalism reacted against; while Evangelicals are more likely to view any particular part of the Bible as intended literally than are Christians who are neither Evangelical or Fundamentalist, there are plenty of Evangelicals who don't hold that the Bible is, cover to cover, intended literally.
If the orientation or race of these people is irrelevant to them performing their duties, why is faith or political leaning relevant?
It is almost never irrelevant. You know what George Bush said about Putin when he met him? He said he could tell that he was a great guy because he was wearing his grandmother's cross. If the leader of the free world can be tricked so easily because of his faith it is an issue. Especially when we know Putin hasn't worn the cross before or after. He figured that is all it took to fool the leader of the free world.
No, they aren't. The Evangelical movement was a reaction against elements of the Fundamentalist movement in much the same way that the Fundamentalist movement was a reaction against liberal/modernist Christianity, and explicitly saw itself as between the two. (It covers, in practice, a wide range, and obviously the more exclusionary, more nearly Fundamentalist edge of the Evangelical community has the most visibility in media, which tends to be conflict-oriented, a problem which is exacerbated by the fact that the tarnishing and genericization of the "fundamentalist" label has probably led to actual Fundamentalists grabbing on to the Evangelical label without the substance.)
Which is still not true as a generalization by any meaningful definition of "fundamentalist". The Evangelical movement was precisely a reaction against the elements of the Fundamentalist movement that made "fundamentalist" a generic term of zealous, narrow-minded extremists.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
Long story short, Christians are "red tribe", and most other religions can be thought of as "blue tribe".
"Some of it is certainly genetic – estimates of the genetic contribution to political association range from 0.4 to 0.6. Heritability of one’s attitudes toward gay rights range from 0.3 to 0.5, which hilariously is a little more heritable than homosexuality itself. (for an interesting attempt to break these down into more rigorous concepts like “traditionalism”, “authoritarianism”, and “in-group favoritism” and find the genetic loading for each see here. For an attempt to trace the specific genes involved, which mostly turn out to be NMDA receptors, see here)"
links to studies on the matter too
Oh give me a F*ing break. You CHOOSE to be a conservative. You aren't born a conservative and face true harassment, discrimination, and death threats because of it. Oh, right thats what YOU would do to someone who is gay probably now if you could get away with it.
You are being passed for jobs in academia partly because academia deals in truths and evangelical Christians usually have a world view lacking in many truths. Personally, yeah I would pass you for an academic job if I found out you were an evangelical christian. How can I trust you to know truths in your profession when you believe in complete nonsense like the earth began 2,000 years ago and that evolution doesn't exist. How can I trust you NOT to evangelize in the classroom? Isn't that the whole point of being an evangelical Christian?
Get over it. Religious extremism in ALL FORMS is a cancer and needs to be eliminated from society. Join the rest of the modern world or be further relegated to the edge as you so rightfully deserve to be.
Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued.
Well, personally, I would say you are born with a fabulous side so you are just being true to yourself. Congrats and have fun!
> Yes, choices do have consequences, but social exclusion based on those choices can still be critiqued.
The problem is you are making a choice not only to believe in something completely void of fact (you can be ignorant if you want to be I guess) but you are also making a choice that HARMS society as a whole. When a person's choice guides them to discriminate a whole group of people based on some stories written a few thousands of years ago thats a choice that deserves to be critiqued. If your choice guides the people you vote for to be anti-science yeah, that choice deserves to be ridiculed.
Honestly, I don't think it does; traditional protected classes, after all, include things that are just as much choice as political ideology (particularly, religion.)
"Oh give me a F*ing break. You CHOOSE to be a conservative. You aren't born a conservative and face true harassment, discrimination, and death threats because of it. Oh, right thats what YOU would do to someone who is gay probably now if you could get away with it."
It's been shown that DNA is a pretty good predictor of being conservative or not. AFAIK, this hasn't yet been shown for being gay! Conservatives don't have a choice.
Now that you know that conservatives are in fact born that way, at least more so than gays, can you spare some compassion for conservatives? You can make them feel really weird with affirmative action quotas for conservatives.
Um what? There have been PLENTY of studies over the last few years indicating homosexuality is expressed either at a DNA level or as the brain is developing in utero.
http://www.livescience.com/50058-being-gay-not-a-choice.html
>It's been shown that DNA is a pretty good predictor of being conservative or not.
First, show me where this has been studied. Peer reviewed please. Second, if your conservatism violates human rights, yeah thats a problem. Conservatism, in the US has been the excuse for slavery (the bible says we are better than them!), Jim Crow and segregation, interracial marriage, and now LGBT rights. Conservatives have been on the WRONG side of history on ALL of these issues.
http://www.medicaldaily.com/nature-versus-nurture-variants-d...
What religious people seem to be angry about is the lack of symmetry - that they are judged for discriminating against reasonable people. The lack of symmetry is due to the fact that the universities being discussed are intended to be institutions of reason. There are other universities for people who believe in every sort of invisible world, which do not hesitate to discriminate openly, and fight for their right to do so.
No I'm not an atheist but I am against anti-intellectualism.
I think Republicans need to face the fact that they just nominated someone who's entire platform lacks even basic critical thought. Even if you put aside how odious and xenophobic what Trump has proposed, it's basically impossible to implement any of it anyways and anyone with an ounce of critical reasoning skills would easily realize that. And the one area where colleges cannot compromise on the faculty is in the area of critical reasoning skills. More than anything else, the purpose of a college education is to learn critical reasoning skills.
GP didn't say (or imply) that Trump is an evangelical; there was an implication in that post that lack of critical reasoning, which is a trait GP also ascribes to evangelicals, among the Republican electorate was a factor in Trump's success, though.
While Donald Trump has blown up the entire conservative base this year, this is fundamentally untrue.
Read through the Growth and Opportunity project, written by key conservatives in 2012. http://goproject.gop.com/
There is a LOT of depth and understanding here that liberals miss out all the time. True, conservatives have blind spots in their policies. But liberals have blind spots all the same.
And when you read good reports like the Growth and Opportunity Project, you start seeing the benefits of conservative thought. Conservatives are very local and have trust in the smallest, closest government to them. (So much so, they wish to remove powers from the Federal government to "give back to the States"). In part, its because local government is where the GOP and conservative values functions best.
In particular, I found the chapter on Campaign Finance to be intriguing, because online you normally only see people who are against Citizens United. But you can see that the true conservative argument is far more nuanced and comes from a completely different perspective.
The wall is the best example. He wants to build a massive wall that will cost tens of billions of dollars. That wall ignores the fact that almost all illegal immigration comes from visa overstays rather than people walking across the border. And the wall would still be relatively easy to get over without someone guarding it.
Last Week Tonight, a comedy show, did a pretty thorough dismantling [1] of the logic behind building it. Scientists, Engineers and Immigration officials would have an even easier time arguing against it. It's just a really stupid idea that he probably came up with watching Game of Thrones (Mexicans == Wildlings) and yet he's used it to help win the Republican nomination.