The Rise of the Comfort College
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
This is a scary phrase because it requires immense power be rested in an authority that can not be questioned.
I have a friend who was a victim of domestic violence growing up, terrible beatings. The worst part was that the cause was not always known, a few times a week the parent would go into a rage and beat the first one or two children they saw. The beatings were terrible- belts, shoes, hockey sticks, dowel rods, etc - so my friend tried to avoid them. Early on he would ask “what did I do” and that would enrage the parent more as the offense was so massive that not knowing it was an offense that made the beatings longer.
The only thing that consistently worked was to arrange for other siblings to be encountered first and wear out the parent’s rage. My friend discovered this because his brother kept doing it to him.
My friend never figured out how to avoid the beatings, they just grew up and left.
I think it has to do with the subtext (I might be reading into this...) that knowledge is no longer a respected asset, but instead is viewed by some as a symbol of the 'old' status quo (and its related issues and in particular its failure in resolving some of those issues). The reaction to this, as I have understood it, is to either shun those who use knowledge (in the sense of this 'old' way) or outright censor them (remove them from the knowledge-pool).
The article did help in my understanding of identity-politics and why its such a powerful force in the USA and, for example, less so in places like Europe.
Right now the world is changing as it did a few times in the past as well. From families to tribes, from tribes to cities, from cities to countries to nations to whatever is currently in the brewing. And always when such a big change happens it is not possible for us humans to really understand it. There are some who overinterpret the change and become zealous about enforcing it, but in the wrong way. There are also those that want to stay close to the old ways and therefore enforce these with zealous spirit.
That doesn't mean the majority will not do as it always did: try to make the best of what happens around them while continue to live their normal lifes. And in that regard the majority is also interested in knowledge and logic and fairness etc.
If you feel knowledge is an important part of your path continue believing in it and that there are enough other people around you who feel the same. Even if they don't speak up. This crisis will pass and then we'll live in a new world. And certainly we rather need more knowledge workers than in past iterations.
While that is certainly true...it is also often the loudest voices that control the narrative, and therefore politics. Sometimes to disastrous consequences.
Aspects we can see emerging (and mentioned in the article) include: submission to and no questioning of the leadership/apostles; there being only one absolute truth; a persecution complex; control of actions through indoctrination and isolation; group think; and cognitive dissonance.
This is a good sentence. I've watched a few videos on YouTube of the interactions between some agitated, angry and "passionate" US campus students directing their indignation at what is often a single lecturer or orderly.
How is the irony of these types of hostile interactions lost of the very folks who insist on "safe spaces"?
"The world-citizen view insists on the need for all citizens to understand differences. … It is connected with a conception of democratic debate as deliberation about the common good. The identity-politics view, by contrast, depicts the citizen body as a marketplace of identity-based interest groups jockeying for power, and views difference as something to be affirmed rather than understood."
And yet, costing more than ever. For what? It's not like people are learning a lot more by paying a lot more.
When I was in college I thought it was more interesting and valuable from the conflict on campus. I'll call it conflict, too. People who were actually having differences with each other, and saying them, many times passionately if not angrily. Now it seems like people are so worried about offending each other they'd rather say nothing at all, which seems to defeat the point of having a diverse campus. If you have a diverse campus but everyone says the same thing, is it really diverse?
I also think the skills of being able to deal with, work with, and learn from people that are different from you (and possibly outright hate you, for reasons that may or may not be "valid") were some of the more valuable skills I learned in college. College was a lot more real world than say, high school. When you get out into the real world, nobody cares about your safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions. You have to find your own way, and fight for your own causes.
It's the wrong architecture to educate anyone. The only thing such environments, do is produce insecurity, defensiveness and rebellion on large scales. The reaction to which is "safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions". And then we get reactions to those reactions, rather than focusing on the underlying change in architecture that has happened.
I really think you're spot on with this one. Plus, not only are they evaluated, they are persisted on the internet forever to remind people of your previous misguided thoughts. And you are what your search results say you are.
Making mistakes is a natural, healthy part of learning. It seems like everyone is trying hard to not make mistakes, instead of learning from those mistakes.
You're not thinking maliciously enough.
If you give a population not only an enhanced ability but also the excuses to concern troll for political points (which the Internet has wholeheartedly enabled, and that a certain political faction favors because of the lip service it pays to the disadvantaged regardless of whether or not it helps them) then that's exactly what you're going to encourage, and that's where the insecurity and defensiveness has come from.
Amplify the wrong voices, reward those voices for being amplified, and you have a tiny cabal of bullies running the world under the banner of "progress".
Fortunately, generations that have seen this bullying happen are starting to rebel against it (and everyone in the generation in which that behavior is dominant are mostly just trying to keep their heads down and avoid being targeted by the bullies), so I think there's still hope for education and the American way in general even though it might appear to waver for a bit.
Is this because such things will never fly there, or because they haven't yet thoroughly propagated there? My concern is it's the latter.
1. Not everyone goes to college and gets indoctrinated like this thinking it is the way the world should be
2. America at least has free speech, which I really hope doesn't change (even for the people I hate and disagree with), and I think that is the opposite of all this safe space stuff.
3. We're so politically polarized, if anything I think the left could go this way, but the right probably won't. I don't think there will ever be a general safe space where everyone agrees.
So IMHO, it just won't fly.
We could see massive change.
Fortunately this has not yet hit education here from what I can see.
Civility is entirely different from dialogue. Disobedience is sometimes necessary but cannot be the base of a society.
You can be non-civil and still discuss and engage with your opponent, but shouting them down is not engagement, neither are loud protests without constructive ideas that actually can work, or without actual pressure. Lying and shooting down inconvenient research is not an acceptable tactic. That's what communists did. Putting words into mouth of your opponent only escalates stakes. What you do they can do onto you, and smaller (poorer, less in control of media or masses) will lose.
In dialog, both sides can win. Compromises led to steady victory for many movements. (Such as feminists.)
I don’t study in the US so have no opinion about US college, so don’t have any way to tell if these claims are any valid. Bloomberg has an history of making bold and empty claims to rile up viewership, is it limited to tech or is it the same for the other fields they cover ?
I think this adds to the article.
This definitely speaks to the subject of the article and is very telling in and of itself: most online communities are comfort-communities. This seems to be bleeding into offline life at a rather rapid clip ..
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/large-majo...
They might be more rare in the parts of the internet you visit, ie if you read about tech then you will see mostly male views in the comments.
so: to question something is an act of violence towards that something?
oops, I just questioned something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Works both ways, too, e.g. whenever religious groups rename any kind of disagreement with them as "Hate speech".
The difference with holocaust deniers (really quite an uncomfortable comparison of millions murdered to the demands of a few dozen rich, spoiled young adults that perceive violence) is that there is an existing evidence base documenting the holocaust. You can’t skip this step and there’s a lot of soul searching for the harm is caused to the collectors of that evidence.
Skipping the evidence base and going directly to no questions is a stupid approach in that it will not help people understand and avoid future harm.
To that extent do they dismiss it? In my country, Holocaust denial is illegal, but I think identity politics is still less widespread here.
The current free speech laws protects our minds from the government, but it does nothing to protect us from private entities unlike the laws protecting our bodies from discrimination.