Yes and yes. Just attended a FAIR orientation meeting and have been working on the background on similar initiatives. Please engage as best you can. Two critical points for me, it must be framed as a positive empowering message (builds trust/encourages collaboration across all demographics) that counters the downward spiral generated by the blaming/shaming techniques that inevitably lead to division and polarization and it needs to be of high integrity (not willing to violate point one).
Please bear with me as I sidle up to this from an oblique angle...
I'm a longstanding proponent of free-range-children-style parenting. Because of that, when the topic comes up and I find that others, too, view it positively, I make sure to point out to them that some very small number of kids are going to be hurt, or worse (or, Heaven help us, much, much worse) who would not have been had we helicoptered around them, keeping them home, arranging play dates and generally supervising them 24/7. I tell them, "Don't kid yourselves, because if you do you'll ultimately read some shockingly tragic news item and say 'Whoa! We need to dial this free-range thing back if it leads to outcomes like this.'"
No, what we need to do is recognize that the world is imperfect, that we can trade large-scale problems with a generation of hothouse children off against a few cases of individual tragedy, and since those cases aren't fully predictable and the victims are not known, the tradeoff is worthwhile.
Similarly, if you're looking to protect people from being socially and economically blacklisted for thought-crimes, but only people whose opinions fall within certain parameters, you'll find yourself unable to maintain that. If you can't say that policing thought is worse than racist thought, or that the emotional harm of exposure to offensive opinions -- and I mean really, really offensive opinions -- is outweighed by the harms inflicted by inquisitorial Twitter mobs and HR departments, then you can't be in this business. If you think racist (or misogynist, or anti-semitic or homophobic or whatever) thought is worse, all you can do is examine each case individually to decide where the speech stands on the spectrum of badness, which is a sucker's game -- in fact, you'll already have lost, because your opponents will be in a position to say, like Shaw, "Now we're just haggling over price."
So does that mean *all* speech has to be defended? I ask only because that's the way The Internet would typically read the above. Of course here at Persuasion we're a little more nuanced, so we can point out a few simple distinctions:
First, the law already delineates some types of speech that aren't protected, and though we're not dealing with legality here we can still use those guidelines.
Second, nobody's forcing anyone to befriend a despicable person. We're merely trying to protect even despicable people from being socially lynched or rendered unemployable -- and that's only because we're never going to all agree on how despicable one has to be to forfeit that protection.
Third, this was never going to be an exact science, so we're always going to reserve the right to say "Not *that* guy! Uh uh" (or, as the folks at Advisory Opinions might say "Naw Dawg."). We just have to use that right very, very sparingly, if at all, because guess what? Sometimes we're going to be *wrong*.
I am not a fan of Jordan Peterson. But if you look at the discussion that Jordan Peterson had with students in the Oxford Union, his answer to a question about free speech is very similar to yours. I thought the answer was brilliant, you might like it. Talking about a general culture of censoriousness that have spread in the US, liking a Jordan Peterson comment might be enough for me to be ostracised and be labeled a "problematic" person who needs to "educate" himself. The fact that I am a "person of colour" will not save me, as many others have found. Anybody these days can be accused of internalising the norms of white supremacy or misogyny etc. I lived in the US many years back when I was a grad. student, but I was so astonished by this whole "woke" phenomenon, that I started following American politics closely after a long gap. In a sense, it surprised me even more than the election of Trump, because America's cultural, academic and media elites are leading such an anti-liberal movement. I found the video of the student's question and Peterson's response. Here it is
Many grassroots organizations like The Tea Party have thrived thanks to million-gallon think tanks and their pipelines. Click through to the CBS News article on the Norquist meeting to size up some of them.
How far will Counterweight and American Purpose flow? Follow the money. A note of caution: the source of the river can sometimes end up at the mouth.
I applaud these efforts and Rauch's strong defense of reason in his latest book. But it's not enough. What's needed is the relentless application of reason against the world view of The Woken. They are wrong on many fronts. People like Sullivan, Mcwhorter and others are constantly elucidating this. Rauch, however, gives in to them here: "No reasonable liberal, after all, denied the reality of persistent social injustices, and no one wanted to imply otherwise." Got it, Mr. Rauch, you dare not even imply. Well, we need a movement of people who dare. I keep looking for more critique of the "systemic racism" foundation of Neoracist thought in Persuasion. I hope to see it soon.
Too often, defenses of free speech have sounded like "It's a sacred principle which we must obey even when it doesn't make sense" rather than make a positive case for what we gain by it. After all, free speech is to some extent counterintuitive: what sense does it make to protect people's right to be wrong? (As the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church used to say, "Error has no rights.) Yet there are real advantages in terms of openness to unexpected good ideas, in terms of know your enemy, in terms of dissent keeping our side honest. Let's make sure we make them.
I have mixed feelings about this. We will see just how fair these organizations really are and just how determined they are to avoid becoming overly beholden to those for whom "fairness" really means either not wanting to lose their privileged position in society or a desire to use these efforts as a means of gaining a forum for hate speech and dis-information. I hold out the most home for FAIR, but even with them it is not entirely clear to me whether they would tolerate a belief that such tools as affirmative action (of various kinds) might be useful in achieving their stated end result. Must I accept that hundreds of years of discrimination deserve no more than a color-blind society? I agree we have gone too far in some respects with our intolerance, but I believe we have more to do than simply moving to a color-blind orthodoxy. Moreover, the First Amendment simply has no application in private business. And, finally, most businesses make decisions on the basis of what helps their bottom line--are we really going to start now demanding that they do otherwise? In the U.S., when it comes to private businesses, we have always chosen with our feet or our dollars. That was good enough when many businesses had a screaming conservative culture and product bias, so just how classically liberal is it to regulate businesses now who choose to "cancel" people and ideas that are not "woke"?
Thanks,KMW, these are good and important points and a reason for my admonition near the end of the article. As a long-time acolyte of public-choice thinking, I think pluralism functions better as a rule when more than one coalition of interests organizes, and it's often especially difficult to organize groups that speak for a diffuse majority against a concentrated minority. Employers may thus overreact to unrepresentative pressure groups, and hearing from other groups would give them more complete information. But that doesn't mean that every (or any) particular pressure group will get it right. My approach here is Madisonian: "extend the sphere."
I would assume they’ll defend people of all races, genders and sexual orientations to exactly the same degree. Those are core values of classical liberals. Not everyone sees the world through an obnoxious and fake intersectional oppression lens.
Lots to unpack, but I'll stick with what I feel is your most pressing point - yes, we need to be vigilant that whatever organization takes up the mantle doesn't become a different version of what we're pushing back against. We need to call BS if they do.
FWIW, I would suggest you engage and see for yourself. There's no commitment and they are doing these orientations with Bion (plus, their lead faculty/legal person) 2 or 3 times a week. I really love Persuasion (and it is a core part of the puzzle) but part of "community" to me in this moment means more than reading articles and engaging in weekly discussions - (quite "left of center") folks are anxious, (justifiably) fearful and silent. We aren't (at least I'm not) talking about "hate speech" and disinformation, I'm talking about not having my children constantly berated (blamed/shamed) for something they can't control every time they go to school. I pushed back - alone - for 2 years. It did not work - you need critical mass and, as Jonathan says, to extend the sphere.
"Be Pro Human" is FAIR's motto - I say, let's start there, be disciplined and vigilant and see if we can start engaging in good faith open discourse. We're going nowhere without it.
KMS, very good points, but there are some competing, confusing ideas stated nearly in one breath, which need delving into: (1) Demanding that a business cease its practice of intolerance of (mostly commonly-held) points of view by its employees is not in contravention of Liberal values, it's in direct accordance with them. The article was about public groups acting, almost union-style, to apply that pressure, not the Federal government. (2) How would this demand in any way affect the profitability of that business (your "bottom line" comment)? (3) You go on to imply that the withholding of "dollar-votes" is the most sensible — and I would argue economically Liberal — behavior, and I fully agree, but what if the business in question is a tech company with tight control over the public square, or any other corporation (in a consolidating world) with a near-monopoly over a good or service that has no real competition of which to reward? That would be like saying it is fine for businesses to ban the hiring of (or selling to) Lithuanians or Catholics or women (hey, "It's a private business") so long as we disincentivize this practice by spending our money elsewhere. That would be using a Liberal solution to combat an illiberal practice. What if it is an institute of higher learning in which the prevailing social vision is near-ubiquitous in its cultural ascendency and the only alternatives are religious schools or a tiny handful of conservative-led colleges, neither of which are appropriate for the disenfranchised center-left person put out by this phenomenon?
From my perspective, many of the corporations complicit in this sort of thought-policing are doing it because it cynically confers the desired street-cred and subsequent moral absolution for nearly nothing more than the cost of the fee of a corporate consultant such as DiAngelo, while they continue to perpetuate actual income disparities with obscene wage ratios, exploitation of (especially foreign) workers and even environmental degradation. So, in that sense, you're right that the woke-capitalists will "make decisions on the basis of what helps their bottom line", only that bottom line is helped by pretending to believe in academic Leftist pieties which affect real people, while actually carrying on business as usual. Public demand to "knock it the f*$% off" is not anti-business, regulatory or illiberal.
Yes and yes. Just attended a FAIR orientation meeting and have been working on the background on similar initiatives. Please engage as best you can. Two critical points for me, it must be framed as a positive empowering message (builds trust/encourages collaboration across all demographics) that counters the downward spiral generated by the blaming/shaming techniques that inevitably lead to division and polarization and it needs to be of high integrity (not willing to violate point one).
Thank goodness. Noone should be ashamed of being a classical liberal. Never thought I'd have to say such a thing.
Please bear with me as I sidle up to this from an oblique angle...
I'm a longstanding proponent of free-range-children-style parenting. Because of that, when the topic comes up and I find that others, too, view it positively, I make sure to point out to them that some very small number of kids are going to be hurt, or worse (or, Heaven help us, much, much worse) who would not have been had we helicoptered around them, keeping them home, arranging play dates and generally supervising them 24/7. I tell them, "Don't kid yourselves, because if you do you'll ultimately read some shockingly tragic news item and say 'Whoa! We need to dial this free-range thing back if it leads to outcomes like this.'"
No, what we need to do is recognize that the world is imperfect, that we can trade large-scale problems with a generation of hothouse children off against a few cases of individual tragedy, and since those cases aren't fully predictable and the victims are not known, the tradeoff is worthwhile.
Similarly, if you're looking to protect people from being socially and economically blacklisted for thought-crimes, but only people whose opinions fall within certain parameters, you'll find yourself unable to maintain that. If you can't say that policing thought is worse than racist thought, or that the emotional harm of exposure to offensive opinions -- and I mean really, really offensive opinions -- is outweighed by the harms inflicted by inquisitorial Twitter mobs and HR departments, then you can't be in this business. If you think racist (or misogynist, or anti-semitic or homophobic or whatever) thought is worse, all you can do is examine each case individually to decide where the speech stands on the spectrum of badness, which is a sucker's game -- in fact, you'll already have lost, because your opponents will be in a position to say, like Shaw, "Now we're just haggling over price."
So does that mean *all* speech has to be defended? I ask only because that's the way The Internet would typically read the above. Of course here at Persuasion we're a little more nuanced, so we can point out a few simple distinctions:
First, the law already delineates some types of speech that aren't protected, and though we're not dealing with legality here we can still use those guidelines.
Second, nobody's forcing anyone to befriend a despicable person. We're merely trying to protect even despicable people from being socially lynched or rendered unemployable -- and that's only because we're never going to all agree on how despicable one has to be to forfeit that protection.
Third, this was never going to be an exact science, so we're always going to reserve the right to say "Not *that* guy! Uh uh" (or, as the folks at Advisory Opinions might say "Naw Dawg."). We just have to use that right very, very sparingly, if at all, because guess what? Sometimes we're going to be *wrong*.
I am not a fan of Jordan Peterson. But if you look at the discussion that Jordan Peterson had with students in the Oxford Union, his answer to a question about free speech is very similar to yours. I thought the answer was brilliant, you might like it. Talking about a general culture of censoriousness that have spread in the US, liking a Jordan Peterson comment might be enough for me to be ostracised and be labeled a "problematic" person who needs to "educate" himself. The fact that I am a "person of colour" will not save me, as many others have found. Anybody these days can be accused of internalising the norms of white supremacy or misogyny etc. I lived in the US many years back when I was a grad. student, but I was so astonished by this whole "woke" phenomenon, that I started following American politics closely after a long gap. In a sense, it surprised me even more than the election of Trump, because America's cultural, academic and media elites are leading such an anti-liberal movement. I found the video of the student's question and Peterson's response. Here it is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dem0-UlKiZ4
Thank you very much, that was fun. And yes, there's a lot of overlap between what I was getting at and what Peterson said.
This was a point of ACLU when defended KK right to demonstrate. I respected that position, ACLU lost its way since.
Many grassroots organizations like The Tea Party have thrived thanks to million-gallon think tanks and their pipelines. Click through to the CBS News article on the Norquist meeting to size up some of them.
How far will Counterweight and American Purpose flow? Follow the money. A note of caution: the source of the river can sometimes end up at the mouth.
I applaud these efforts and Rauch's strong defense of reason in his latest book. But it's not enough. What's needed is the relentless application of reason against the world view of The Woken. They are wrong on many fronts. People like Sullivan, Mcwhorter and others are constantly elucidating this. Rauch, however, gives in to them here: "No reasonable liberal, after all, denied the reality of persistent social injustices, and no one wanted to imply otherwise." Got it, Mr. Rauch, you dare not even imply. Well, we need a movement of people who dare. I keep looking for more critique of the "systemic racism" foundation of Neoracist thought in Persuasion. I hope to see it soon.
Hope you know how to generate twitter storms.
My two cents worth:
Too often, defenses of free speech have sounded like "It's a sacred principle which we must obey even when it doesn't make sense" rather than make a positive case for what we gain by it. After all, free speech is to some extent counterintuitive: what sense does it make to protect people's right to be wrong? (As the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church used to say, "Error has no rights.) Yet there are real advantages in terms of openness to unexpected good ideas, in terms of know your enemy, in terms of dissent keeping our side honest. Let's make sure we make them.
I have mixed feelings about this. We will see just how fair these organizations really are and just how determined they are to avoid becoming overly beholden to those for whom "fairness" really means either not wanting to lose their privileged position in society or a desire to use these efforts as a means of gaining a forum for hate speech and dis-information. I hold out the most home for FAIR, but even with them it is not entirely clear to me whether they would tolerate a belief that such tools as affirmative action (of various kinds) might be useful in achieving their stated end result. Must I accept that hundreds of years of discrimination deserve no more than a color-blind society? I agree we have gone too far in some respects with our intolerance, but I believe we have more to do than simply moving to a color-blind orthodoxy. Moreover, the First Amendment simply has no application in private business. And, finally, most businesses make decisions on the basis of what helps their bottom line--are we really going to start now demanding that they do otherwise? In the U.S., when it comes to private businesses, we have always chosen with our feet or our dollars. That was good enough when many businesses had a screaming conservative culture and product bias, so just how classically liberal is it to regulate businesses now who choose to "cancel" people and ideas that are not "woke"?
Thanks,KMW, these are good and important points and a reason for my admonition near the end of the article. As a long-time acolyte of public-choice thinking, I think pluralism functions better as a rule when more than one coalition of interests organizes, and it's often especially difficult to organize groups that speak for a diffuse majority against a concentrated minority. Employers may thus overreact to unrepresentative pressure groups, and hearing from other groups would give them more complete information. But that doesn't mean that every (or any) particular pressure group will get it right. My approach here is Madisonian: "extend the sphere."
I would assume they’ll defend people of all races, genders and sexual orientations to exactly the same degree. Those are core values of classical liberals. Not everyone sees the world through an obnoxious and fake intersectional oppression lens.
Lots to unpack, but I'll stick with what I feel is your most pressing point - yes, we need to be vigilant that whatever organization takes up the mantle doesn't become a different version of what we're pushing back against. We need to call BS if they do.
FWIW, I would suggest you engage and see for yourself. There's no commitment and they are doing these orientations with Bion (plus, their lead faculty/legal person) 2 or 3 times a week. I really love Persuasion (and it is a core part of the puzzle) but part of "community" to me in this moment means more than reading articles and engaging in weekly discussions - (quite "left of center") folks are anxious, (justifiably) fearful and silent. We aren't (at least I'm not) talking about "hate speech" and disinformation, I'm talking about not having my children constantly berated (blamed/shamed) for something they can't control every time they go to school. I pushed back - alone - for 2 years. It did not work - you need critical mass and, as Jonathan says, to extend the sphere.
"Be Pro Human" is FAIR's motto - I say, let's start there, be disciplined and vigilant and see if we can start engaging in good faith open discourse. We're going nowhere without it.
KMS, very good points, but there are some competing, confusing ideas stated nearly in one breath, which need delving into: (1) Demanding that a business cease its practice of intolerance of (mostly commonly-held) points of view by its employees is not in contravention of Liberal values, it's in direct accordance with them. The article was about public groups acting, almost union-style, to apply that pressure, not the Federal government. (2) How would this demand in any way affect the profitability of that business (your "bottom line" comment)? (3) You go on to imply that the withholding of "dollar-votes" is the most sensible — and I would argue economically Liberal — behavior, and I fully agree, but what if the business in question is a tech company with tight control over the public square, or any other corporation (in a consolidating world) with a near-monopoly over a good or service that has no real competition of which to reward? That would be like saying it is fine for businesses to ban the hiring of (or selling to) Lithuanians or Catholics or women (hey, "It's a private business") so long as we disincentivize this practice by spending our money elsewhere. That would be using a Liberal solution to combat an illiberal practice. What if it is an institute of higher learning in which the prevailing social vision is near-ubiquitous in its cultural ascendency and the only alternatives are religious schools or a tiny handful of conservative-led colleges, neither of which are appropriate for the disenfranchised center-left person put out by this phenomenon?
From my perspective, many of the corporations complicit in this sort of thought-policing are doing it because it cynically confers the desired street-cred and subsequent moral absolution for nearly nothing more than the cost of the fee of a corporate consultant such as DiAngelo, while they continue to perpetuate actual income disparities with obscene wage ratios, exploitation of (especially foreign) workers and even environmental degradation. So, in that sense, you're right that the woke-capitalists will "make decisions on the basis of what helps their bottom line", only that bottom line is helped by pretending to believe in academic Leftist pieties which affect real people, while actually carrying on business as usual. Public demand to "knock it the f*$% off" is not anti-business, regulatory or illiberal.