Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos” – its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?
The 
As a social psychologist who studies morality, I have watched these two teloses come into conflict increasingly often during my 30 years in the academy. The conflicts seemed manageable in the 1990s. But the intensity of conflict has grown since then, at the same time as the political diversity of the professoriate was plummeting, and at the same time as American cross-partisan hostility was rising. I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content.
Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable. Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.
[Please note: I am not saying that an individual student cannot pursue both goals. In the talk below I urge students to embrace truth as the only way that they can pursue activism that will effectively enhance social justice. But an institution such as a university must have one and only one highest and inviolable good. I am also not denying that many students encounter indignities, insults, and systemic obstacles because of their race, gender, or sexual identity. They do, and I favor some sort of norm setting or preparation for diversity for incoming students and faculty. But as I have argued elsewhere, many of the most common demands the protesters have made are likely to backfire and make experiences of marginalization more frequent and painful, not less. Why? Because they are not based on evidence of effectiveness; the demands are not constrained by an absolute commitment to truth.]
As I watched events unfold on campus over the past year, I began formulating an account of what has been happening, told from the perspective of moral and social psychology. I was invited to give several talks on campus this fall, and I took those invitations as opportunities to tell the story to current college students, at Wellesley, at SUNY New Paltz, and at Duke. By the time of the Duke talk I think I got the story worked out well enough to send it out into the world, in the hope that it will be shown on many college campuses. It’s long (66 minutes). But it is as short as I can make it. There are many pieces to the puzzle, and I had to present each one in order.
Here is the talk. An outline and additional materials are below the talk.
Here is a link to download the powerpoint slides i showed in the talk. Teachers and professors may borrow freely from them. (Right-click and then “save link as”)
OUTLINE OF THE TALK
Introduction:
I begin with two quotations:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” –Karl Marx, 1845
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…” –John Stuart Mill, 1859
Marx is the patron saint of what I’ll call “Social Justice U,” which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege. It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mill is the patron saint of what I’ll call “Truth U,” which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other’s biased and incomplete reasoning. In the process, all become smarter. Truth U dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox.
- Telos
Each profession or field has a telos. Fields interact constructively when members of one field use their skills to help members of another field achieve their telos. Example: Amazon, Google, and Apple are businesses that I love because they help me achieve my telos (finding truth) as a scholar. But fields can also interact destructively when they inject their telos into other fields. Example: Business infects medicine when doctors become businesspeople who view patients as opportunities for profit. I will argue that social justice sometimes injects its telos of achieving racial equality (and other kinds) into other professions, and when it does, those professionals betray their telos.
- Motivated Reasoning
A consistent finding about human reasoning: If we WANT to believe X, we ask ourselves: “Can-I-Believe-It?” But when we DON’T want to believe a proposition, we ask: “Must-I-Believe-It?” This holds for scholars too, with these results:
- Scholarship undertaken to support a political agenda almost always “succeeds.”
- A scholar rarely believes she was biased
- Motivated scholarship often propagates pleasing falsehoods that cannot be removed from circulation, even after they are debunked.
- Damage is contained if we can count on “institutionalized disconfirmation” – the certainty that other scholars, who do not share our motives, will do us the favor of trying to disconfirm our claims.
But we can’t count on “institutionalized disconfirmation” anymore because there are hardly any more conservatives or libertarians in the humanities and social sciences (with the exception of economics, which has merely a 3-to-1 left-right ratio). This is why Heterodox Academy was founded—to call for the kind of diversity that would most improve the quality of scholarship (at least, if you embrace Mill rather than Marx).
- Sacredness
Humanity evolved for tribal conflict. Along the way we evolved a neat trick: Our ability to forge a team by circling around sacred objects & principles. In the academy we traditionally circled around truth (at least in the 20th century, and not perfectly). But in the 21st century we increasingly circle around a few victim groups. We want to protect them and help them and wipe out prejudice against them. We want to change the world with our scholarship. This is an admirable goal, but this new secular form of “worship” of victims has intersected with other sociological trends to give rise to a “culture of victimhood” on many campuses, particularly those that are the most egalitarian and politically uniform. Victimhood culture breeds “moral dependency” in the very students it is trying to help – students learn to appeal to 3rd parties (administrators) to resolve their conflicts rather than learning to handle conflicts on their own.
- Anti-Fragility
“What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Nietzsche was right, and Nasim Taleb’s book “Antifragile” explains why. Kids need thousands of hours of unsupervised play and thousands of conflicts and challenges that they resolve without adult help, in order to become independently functioning adults. But because of changes in American childrearing that began in the 1980s, and especially because of the helicopter parenting that took off in the 1990s for middle class and wealthy kids, they no longer get those experiences.
Instead they are enmeshed in a “safety culture” that begins when they are young and that is now carried all the way through college. Books and words and visiting speakers are seen as “dangerous” and even as forms of “violence.” Trigger warnings and safe spaces are necessary to protect fragile young people from danger and violence. But such a culture is incompatible with political diversity, since many conservative ideas and speakers are labeled as threatening and banned from campus and the curriculum. Students who question the dominant political ethos are worn down by hostile reactions in the classroom. This is one of the core reasons why universities must choose one telos. Any institution that embraces safety culture cannot have the kind of viewpoint diversity that Mill advocated as essential in the search for truth.
- Blasphemy
At Truth U, there is no such thing as blasphemy. Bad ideas get refuted, not punished. But at SJU, there are many blasphemy laws – there are ideas, theories, facts, and authors that one cannot use. This makes it difficult to do good social science about politically valenced topics. Social science is hard enough as it is, with big complicated problems resulting from many interacting causal forces. But at SJU, many of the most powerful explanatory tools are simply banned.
- Correlation
All social scientists know that correlation does not imply causation. But what if there is a correlation between a demographic category (e.g., race or gender) and a real world outcome (e.g., employment in tech companies, or on the faculty of STEM departments)? At SJU, they teach you to infer causality: systemic racism or sexism. I show an example in which this teaching leads to demonstrably erroneous conclusions. At Truth U, in contrast, they teach you that “disparate outcomes do not imply disparate treatment.” (Disparate outcomes are an invitation to look closely for disparate treatment, which is sometimes the cause of the disparity, sometimes not).
- Justice
There seem to be two major kinds of justice that activists are seeking: finding and eradicating disparate treatment (which is always a good thing to do, and which never conflicts with truth), and finding and eradicating disparate outcomes, without regard for disparate inputs or third variables. It is this latter part which causes all of the problems, all of the conflicts with truth. In the real world, there are many disparities of inputs, but anyone who mentions such disparities on campus is guilty of blasphemy and must be punished. I work through an example of how the attempt to eliminate outcome disparities can force people to disregard both truth and justice. This is no way to run a university.
- Schism
Given the arguments made in sections 1-7, I think it is clear that no university can have Truth and Social Justice as dual teloses. Each university must pick one. I show that Brown University has staked out the leadership position for SJU, and the University of Chicago has staked out the leadership position for Truth U. (This has been confirmed by their rankings in the new Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges.)
I close by urging students on every campus in America to raise the question among themselves: which way do we want our university to go? I offer a specific tool to raise the question: the Heterodox University Initiative. If students on every campus would propose these three specific resolutions to their student government, perhaps as the basis of a campus-wide referendum, then students could make their choice known to the faculty and administration. The students would send a clear signal as to whether they want more or less viewpoint diversity on campus. At very least, a campus-wide discussion of Marx versus Mill would be a constructive conversation to have.
Opinions expressed are those of the author(s). Publication does not imply endorsement by Heterodox Academy or any of its members. We welcome your comments below. Feel free to challenge and disagree, but please try to model the sort of respectful and constructive criticism that makes viewpoint diversity most valuable. Comments that include obscenity or aggression are likely to be deleted.
Liberals haven’t just demonized their political opponents, they’ve demonized the very act of trying to think like their political opponents. Trying to sympathize with, say, a Trump supporter, has come to constitute a kind of thought-crime for many liberals (and almost all progressives). So it’s not that liberals have less imagination than conservatives or libertarians; it’s that they’ve set up mental firewalls that actively prevent them from even going there. Just as Odysseus’s men stopped up their ears with wax so they wouldn’t be tempted by the seductive song of the Sirens, many liberals have, it seems, set up taboo boundaries which more or less ensure that they’ll never have to empathize with a conservative or a libertarian. Strategically speaking, this is decidedly unwise. The three truly great treatises on the art of war—Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Art of War (1521), Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1832), and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War—are in agreement on this: you must understand your enemy before you can defeat him.
I’ll just add that these discussions shouldn’t be restricted to elite university examples. The number of students graduating from less famous schools is much higher. There’s also a few fundamentalist Christian schools where the viewpoint diversity is almost non existent. Probably not a factor in terms of numbers of graduates per year, but certainly worth considering in principle.
(My comments aren’t meant to be provocative in and of themselves. I would hope they’re worth reading, if nothing else.)
I have a feeling that everyone (that means you and I) already knows that the right wing has been pushing its agenda for quite some time now. The thing is, the left’s new agenda is, well… NEW!
If anyone reading this is willing to consider the assertion that trigger warnings are useful and don’t inherently restrict speech, I suggest contacting Erika Price, who is likely to be able to provide factual support rather than what many would consider snowflake apologism.
You find yourself in an interesting place. I suggest asking yourself to what extent you want to broaden the window of discourse, and to what extent you want to move it away from people you disagree with. I’d say that to people of any persuasion there’s an unconscious impulse to do the latter which works against the goal of doing the former. Reading the comments, it’s pretty evident that Truth U has unquestioned axioms of its own. Mostly that the left is wrong most or all of the time, and apparently contempt and scorn is the appropriate response. (To whatever extent I agree is beside the point.) Which is fine, in my opinion, to an extent. Every time a school chooses between two candidates for a position, they’re drawing a line.) But, when you take that as a truism, you are by necessity becoming less heterodox.
Recent developments suggest you should also ask yourself if and where you should draw the line on the right. Rejecting untrained people who want to study genetics to support their conclusions about race is also a form of gate keeping. Doing so on the grounds of their lack of expertise will invite accusations of ideological censorship.
“You” is even vaguer than it usual is in this post. I don’t presume to know what statements of above are appropriate to any particular reader.
I’m puzzled by the false dichotomy erected here, as though an honest effort toward social justice would somehow promote action and thought contrary to the search for and recognition of truth. As such, in this article there just a bit wee too much of the familiar ol’ “conservative” cant. (As someone who thinks of himself as skeptically conservative-minded–in politics as well as in other matters–I feel it is entirely justified to put quotes around “conservative” when this word is applied to the works and deeds of right-wing ideologues calling themselves “conservative.”)
I agree and found the forced choice at the end rather discordant and disingenuous. The justice section of his own talk discussed the overlap between seeking social justice and seeking truth – because an overlap exists and the two are not competing in any fundamental, zero sum way.
I think that he is rightly pointing to some logical fallacies used by social justice crusaders that are problematic and need to be corrected. I can understand the danger and frustration he expressed about “blasphemy laws” and how difficult it is to fix. But then he throws the baby out with the bathwater.
A university has multiple purposes including truth and social justice. Creating a new anti-social justice blasphemy rule to ensure that it only pursues “truth u” avoids his responsibility for disconfirmation. It is lazy and motivated thinking. Be a little more anti fragile Jon! Have a little more precision with the take home.
That is some high-quality [expurgated] posting, right there! Congratulations. The last paragraph literally re-deploys every single one of Jonathan’s lecture concepts in a passive-aggressive re-direct, right back at him! I salute you sir, for your Mastery of Troll.
Jonathan, I definitely prefer Truth University. I also watched your Ted Talks lecture on conservative and liberal moral foundations– it seems like that lecture (or at least part of it) would be best taught in Social Values University, though(?) — since, AFTER the objective-truth-research, your conclusions include advocacy, a clear call for some people to change their behaviors. The Ted talk (and your book) seem very much concerned with social justice. I’m trying to reconcile the two?
Upon further reflection I think the message of this video is wrong.
Here’s why:
Post election Trump protesters are not protesting Trump.
They’re protesting the grotesque image of him they see through the lens of their grand narrative / moral matrix.
The lens is deeply flawed.
It’s flawed because the education system not only failed to correct the imperfections in the lens, it exaggerated them.
The imperfections are the MANY entrenched yet questionable orthodoxies that are integral to the grand narrative of American Culture. There are far more of them than are listed on the Heterodox Academy’s “Problem” page
VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY ALONE WILL NOT FIX THIS!
THE QUESTIONABLE ORTHODOXIES THEMSELVES MUST BE CALLED OUT.
AND THEY MUST BE CORRECTED.
The job of the education system must be to improve the lens.
The political system is failing because the education system is failing to do its job.
Social Justice University ALREADY EXISTS. And so do Social Justice High, and Social Justice Middle School, and Social Justice Elementary School.
THE TELOS OF SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE DISTORTED LENS IT CREATES IS THE ROOT CAUSE OF MOST OF OUR CURRENT PROBLEMS.
ONLY the Telos of Truth is acceptable.
The feeling of being invalidated as a person when one’s narrative is challenged seems to be have morphed from just a cultural thing to almost a personality thing. Ideology, feelings, sense of self, sense of identity, sense of one’s place in the world, and even perception of the world, are ALL conflated into a single thing.
“I think, therefore I am” has transitioned to “I’m progressive, therefore I am.”
Losing the election is devastating.
Some progressives are angered or saddened by the election results not because they think the country is going in the wrong direction, but because the results invalidate them as people; makes them invisible, non-persons.
I REALLY wish I had seen this video before I took this Feminist Psychology class.
For the record, both feminism and psychology are wonderful things that I’m very glad exist, and prior to taking this course I would have said I was both a feminist and a psychologist… Now I’m not so sure. I should have stuck to psychology.
Good points. My (admittedly very minor) contribution is this: the plural of “Telos” is not “Teloi” (as it would be if “Telos” were a 2nd decl. masc. noun, which it deceptively resembles).
Rather, the plurlal is “Telea” (since it is a 3rd decl. neut. noun).
The most egregious example of left-wing bias and censorship in academia is the way in which they handle the topic of creationism.
Biologists, like social psychologists, tend to skew liberal and atheist, and as a result the educational system gets biased towards a liberal point of view with regards to the origin of life.
Jonathan Haidt points out that at “Social Justice U”, conservative ideas are often labeled as “threatening” and banned for being “blasphemous” rather than being discussed.
I would point out that this is exactly how our educational system deals with creationism. Rather than teach the controversy, liberals have used the justice system to ban creationism from public schools instead. Creationists are then demonized for committing the “blasphemy” of believing the Bible instead of kowtowing to Darwin, the patron saint of atheism (second only to Marx in importance at SJU)
Mr. Haidt, if you are not a hypocrite you out to come forward and advocate that creationism should no longer be censored. If you truly care about truth you should lend your name to the cause of letting ideas like creationism be debated instead of simply being banned.
Except that Creationism does not pass the criteria of being true. It still would not be taught at Truth U because it has no evidence to support it and more than ample evidence to the contrary. Don’t confuse the rejection of an untrue idea with politically correct suppression.
The EXISTENCE of creationism IS true, just as the existence of all other “isms” is true.
This fact most certainly could be taught at Truth U, for example in a course that overviews the world’s different belief systems, or in a history course, or in a law course, that covers the events and controversies in which creationism has played a part.
In that context sure, but certainly not in the context of a science class. Creationism is in the dustbin of untrue ideas, like heliocentrism and the flat earth.
*geocentrism… oy vey…
The topic of the Telos of truth opens a Pandora’s box, or lets the Genie out of the bottle, of all sorts of untrue ideas that BELONG in the dustbin of untrue ideas yet to this day still are core, foundational, assumptions upon which entire ideologies are built and/or the logic that follows from those assumptions.
Among these are the “entrenched yet questionable orthodoxies” listed on Heterodox Academy’s “Problem” page:
•Humans are a blank slate, and “human nature” does not exist.
•All differences between human groups are caused by differential treatment of those groups, or by differential media portrayals of group members.
•Social stereotypes do not correspond to any real differences.
•Affirmative action is highly effective at advancing the interests, success, and status of oppressed or underrepresented groups.
Other ideas that are candidates for this list include
• Correlation is causation
• Disparate outcomes proves discrimination
• Reason is the path to moral truth
• Since the mind is a blank slate at birth, everything we know about right and wrong is learned; either from formal education or from direct experience.
• Therefore, all that’s needed in order to create the “New Man” and the “Good Society” is to put in place the right social policies and teach the right things
• The main reason we have not yet been able to “Fundamentally Transform” our culture in this way is because we have not been able to do ENOUGH of the above
• The main reason we have not been able to do enough of the above is because the people who “cling to their guns and their religion” have enough political power to hinder us “enlightened” folks from doing everything that so obviously needs to be done.
Exactly. The best example of stereotypes corresponding to real differences is obviously the stereotypes of black people as stupid, lazy, and violent.
The truth is that the IQ gap between blacks and whites is well known, and is almost certainly due to genetics rather than “racism” or any other bogus environmental cause.
Genetic predisposition for stupidity and laziness also explains why black people continue have lower levels of academic achievement and higher levels of unemployment even though its been decades since the Desegregation and the Civil Rights Act made racial discrimination illegal in education and in hiring.
Furthermore, even though blacks are only about 10% of our nation’s population, they are responsible for over 50% of the violent crimes. Once again, this obviously has a genetic cause, seeing as the much larger white population commits only a fraction of the violent crimes as blacks.
Sadly, whenever the police justifiably shoot one of these thugs in self-defense, they end up “chimping out” as you can see in a typical “Black Lives Matter” protest.
These harsh truths might not be “politically correct”, but thanks to groups like heterodox academy, we can finally start being honest about the problems that black people pose for our society.
Wow, you just went full retard on us.
@Tony Sinclair “The truth is that the IQ gap between blacks and whites is well known, and is almost certainly due to genetics rather than “racism” or any other bogus environmental cause. ” “Genetic predisposition for stupidity and laziness”
So if you believe that, now how do you propose to *treat* them? Do you propose to treat each individual as a individual or to treat them according to that? Guess what! Even if I became convinced you were right, it would not move me *one iota* to change how I *treat* Blacks, which is with as much humanity is everyone else deserves. Now would you do the same? Yes? Okay. No? THERE’s your problem!
On the contrary, creationism has literally mountains of evidence behind it- indeed, creationists and evolutionists often use the very same evidence, but interpret it differently. If you had been exposed to creationist ideas instead of close-mindedly censoring them, you would already know this.
The reason creationism isn’t taught is because liberals used the justice system to censor creationism as being “politically incorrect”. This is why many people such as yourself dismiss creationism without ever being exposed to it. They never even bother to question their assumptions, and instead seem content submit to the liberal dogma.
I am a Christian and a professional earth sciences educator in the museums and heritage field, so I am well-acquainted with the arguments. I was actually being generous when I said that Creationism has no evidence… Not only does it not have evidence, but it doesn’t even have a coherent methodology. It’s entire process is built on cherry-picking and deliberate misinterpretation in order to support a predetermined claim, which is that the two Creation stories in Genesis must form a single, coherent, literally historically and scientifically factual account of the planet’s origins. And not only does it not pass muster scientifically, but it’s also bad theology. Creationism also misinterprets Genesis while capitulating to the post-Enlightenment assertion that only what is scientifically demonstrable is true. About the only use of injecting Creationism into a course would be, as Chris Ball said, to provide an example of both pseudo-science and pseudo-theology.
If the Telos of Truth were to be followed then CW Gross’ comment would be equally true if a small number or words within it were changed as follows:
“I am a LIBERAL and a professional earth sciences educator in the museums and heritage field, so I am well-acquainted with the arguments. I was actually being generous when I said that PROGRESSIVISM has no evidence… Not only does it not have evidence, but it doesn’t even have a coherent methodology. It’s entire process is built on cherry-picking and deliberate misinterpretation in order to support a predetermined claim, which is that PROGRESSIVISM forms a coherent, literally historically and scientifically factual account of HUMAN NATURE AND HUMAN HISTORY. And not only does it not pass muster scientifically, but it’s also bad SCIENCE. PROGRESSIVISM also misinterprets HUMAN NATURE while capitulating to the post-Enlightenment assertion that only what is scientifically demonstrable is true. About the only use of injecting PROGRESSIVISM into a course would be, as Chris Ball said, to provide an example of both pseudo-science and pseudo-theology.”
I completely support “teaching the controversy,” as you put it. Teaching both sides and getting students to think critically about it will strengthen their understanding of why Darwinian evolution is the truth much more than teaching only the Darwinian view ever could.
Creationism is a spiritual worldview, while natural selection is science-based. Both are theories, but science uses a different set of tools. Theoretically, if creationists choose to embrace the scientific method, and if they are able to present a cohesive theory using the tools of science, then it would be appropriately suited to a science class. So far, though, this is very far from the case. I could see creationism being included in a class like world religion, though, or maybe theology or history of spirituality?
If only we could go back to the Academy of the 40s and 50s when there was true freedom…
If all these complaints about SJWs really had the goal of stopping the impulse to control, they’d start with an acknowledgment that it has always been so and that there are lessons to be learned from the past.
This fact has been, to me, the most depressing thing about this post. Haidt is one of the good guys. He means well and I think he is right about the substance of what he says, but at our cultural moment even the defenders of truth are sadly lacking in cultural formation and don’t really know much about the tradition they are putatively defending. They know some things about Aristotle, some things they read in the funny papers, but actually knowing Greek? The best we can hope for now, I’m afraid, is teloi.
In this post I offer some comments on Prof. Haidt’s excellent presentation: http://stuartschneiderman.blogspot.com/2016/11/the-problem-with-social-justice-warriors.html
The main thing is this:
The two “teloi” can not clash. Because: whatever is not based in *truth* can not be, properly speaking, justice.
If “social justice” is irreconcilable with truth, that means one thing. It is not justice. It is some counterfeit morality, a simulacrum based in error. Which is precisely the case.
There cannot be a conflict between truth and justice. Justice is applied truth.
Very perceptive article. I find a great resonance with the situation in Indian universities and indeed in public sphere where perhas anything other than SJ is anathema.Sometimes an extreme example proves the princpile best and I am afraid it exists here.
C’mon, why not go with sjw/feminists facts like “1 in 5 raped” “wage gap” & more
The justification for the truth teleos should be self evident. If the function of universities is the discovery and dissemination of knowledge (if not, then what) then truth must be the primary objective. Reason and evidence provide the only valid epistemology. The abandonment of this is the primary cause of social injustice, political dysfunction, and in many countries, the promotion of destructive religious ideologies. The lack of a truth telos masks this insight, hence the problematic nature of our predicament.
The “problem” of current intellectual hegemony began in the later half of the 19th century with pervasive, government/tax-revenue funding (and thus increased control) of education. Warnings were issued, but largely ignored.
Subsequently, the 20th century saw the rise of scientism and the modern technocracy. The late Theodore Roszak warned of the social consequences in his 1969, The Making of a Counter Culture, Anchor Books.
“An expert, we say, is one to whom we turn because he is in control of reliable knowledge about that which concerns us. In the case of the technocracy, the experts are those who govern us because they know (reliably) about all things relevant to our survival and happiness: human needs, social engineering, economic planning, international relations, invention, education, etc. Very well, but what is ‘reliable knowledge’? How do we know it when we see it? The answer is: reliable knowledge is knowledge that is scientifically sound, since science is that to which modern man refers for the definitive explication of reality. And what in turn is it that characterizes scientific knowledge? The answer is: objectivity. Scientific knowledge is not just feeling or speculation or subjective ruminating. It is a verifiable description of reality that exists independent of any purely personal considerations. It is true…real…dependable…It works. And that at last is how we define an expert: he is one who really knows what is what, because he cultivates an objective consciousness. p. 208
“Thus, if we probe the technocracy in search of the peculiar power it holds over us, we arrive at the /myth of objective consciousness/. There is but one way [according to the elite] of gaining access to reality—so the myth holds—and this is to cultivate a state of consciousness cleansed of all subjective distortion, all personal involvement. What flows from this state of consciousness qualifies as knowledge, and nothing else does.”
The argument rests on two dubious an undefended premises. The first is that the purpose of university is truth. It might be, but it’s unlikely to be it’s only purpose, and it’s certainly not good enough to simply claim that it’s obvious. The second undefended (and unstated) premise is that there are no true justice claims. If justice claims can be true and we accept the first premise (no real reason to, but let’s go with it for a moment) then the purpose of university would be to discover justice. Of course, we’d actually have to make some arguments to show that our premises were true, something Haidt might want to think about himself doing in future.
No, neither of these is a premise for the argument made. The argument is that the lodestar goal of pursuit of truth leads to approaches and priorities that are in conflict with the approaches and priorities that sometimes arise from a lodestar goal of social justice. A university should consider and commit to its guiding function and should say what that is so students and, I imagine, faculty can make informed choices. A university’s primary purpose would be pursuit of truth when it makes that commitment instead of another one. And he certainly does not argue that there are no true justice claims, and says so explicitly. Although not part of this case, I suggest Ta-Nehisi Coates’ argument for reparations for slavery is an example of arriving at a social justice claim by making tla “truth” claim – in that case, for a true understanding of the long history and the fallacies in the contrary arguments.
The university telos is education, not truth, nor social justice. I wonder how Jonathan chose his candidates for uni. telos? Why pick just 2? Why those two which imply moral superiority on his behalf? He committed several logical fallacies here. Notably: moral high ground and false dilemma. If I must pick the lesser of two evil from his bifurcated list, I’ll go for truth.
Apparently, in answering the question “What is the telos of education?” your answer is “Anything you want. It doesn’t matter.” And thus the university’s marketing department has led the way with its principle of financial Darwinism.
I’d rather be disciplined by the market than the self-styled ‘left’ currently encamped at universities. A left who seem to care most about their own vanity and least about the concerns of everyday people.
We likely agree here. However, market discipline doesn’t exist in education because of society’s late 19th century decision to allow the intervention of government-funding into the process.
“He [A.A.Hodge, Princeton] saw the statist claim, that ‘self-preservation’ of the State required [monopolistic/tax-subsidized] statist education, as a denial of the competence of other agencies as well as of their right to self-preservation.” RJR
Much of what is useful to learn is technical so there are often no ethical values to be instilled at a subject level. IMO, this applies to the sciences, history, even arts and literature. Ethics are important in economics, politics, religion, philosophy. Subjects relating to how we govern our affairs. Even philosophy is mostly a technical subject, outside its subdomain of “ethics”. I think logic and epistemology are more important than ethics in philosophy too.
Interesting and refreshing perspective, Jonathan.
The only thing I take issue with is the association of Marxism with social justice. Not only are the two not associated, they are dissociated. Marx considered himself a scientist, not a moralist.
Marx’s prophecies about the impending proletarian revolution were not anchored in normative analysis or in calls for justice. Marx argued that the working class would be *compelled* to seize the means of production because of the laws of motion of historical development. The class structure was not going to be abolished because a flat social structure is ‘fair’. Marx made that crystal clear in his writing.
In his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx heaped scored on the social democrats of his day who argued that the unequal distribution of income was ‘unfair’. Marx called the moralizing associated with egalitarian politics ‘obsolete verbal rubbish’ and ‘ideological nonsense about right’. He had contempt for people who argued that income and status differentials *ought to be* mitigated because statements of value, for Marx, are not scientific.
Under capitalism, the fact that workers receive wages and capitalists receive profits is fair, by legal definition. The fact that workers are overseen and must answer to capitalists is fair, by legal definition. Legal and moral conventions will only shift once the ‘relations of production’ shift, and that latter are dependent upon the ‘forces of production’, namely technology.
To repeat: Marx did not believe in social justice, the Marxist political program was not anchored in notions of fairness or in other moral notions, for that matter, and the historical record of Marxist regimes leaves very little room for doubt that Marxism is a morally sound doctrine.
Aside from this point, I think this a fine article and applaud your efforts, Jonathan.
Thank you! Sharing this with others frustrated by the current situation on campuses and in our society.
I like this argument, but it implies that this choice is not hamstringed in advance by the DoE dear colleague letters and the very explicit threat of losing funding. Many college administrations are simply not willing to risk it.
I am generally sympathetic to the argument, but it was hard to get past the beginning. How do Apple and Amazon help you find truth? An argument can be made for Google and its work on placing scholarship in the public domain, but a store and a maker of entertainment devices?
Patrick, The “store” and “entertainment device” provide the means for accessing Truth anywhere in the world, via books and (mobile) internet access. Until quite recently, Google produced no mechanism for actually receiving information. We could catalog the entirety of human knowledge (as Google very nearly has), but without the means for the public to access it, our efforts would be in vain.
I think Google and Wikipedia would be better choices. The first allows you to search for stuff, and if you are clever perhaps find what you are looking for. Wikipedia gives one a starting point with a topic with some references.
Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist who does “Doonesbury,” once said it is the job of the political cartoonist to always punch up and never punch down. That is, it is the telos of the cartoonist to be a social justice warrior. But is it? I’m sure it makes him feel noble and oh so righteous. But is that really the job (telos) of a political cartoonist? No. It is the job of the political cartoonist to use satire and humor to point at the truth, irregardless whether that means punching up or punching down.
For example, would Trudeau avoid doing a strip critical of the Black Lives Matter movement even if that meant turning a blind eye to the Black Lives Matter hogwash that white cops are racists intent on murdering innocent blacks?
Is this not the problem with the social justice position? When truth is sacrificed for social justice, great harm occurs. Truth far outweighs social justice.
The problem with this argument is that the author’s interpretation of social justice (and truth for that matter) is never explicitly defined — which would be a requisite starting point for any rigorous logical argument. It is assumed that the reader defines “social justice” and “truth” in the same way as the author which is a dangerous assumption since those terms are by nature “fuzzy” and may mean different things to different people. Only if one identifies social justice to mean “aiming for equality of outcomes at the expense of everything else” would “truth” (who’se truth?) necessarily be wholly incompatible with social justice as the author claims. That is the author’s implicit definition which he never makes explicit as an assumption of his argument which means his argument is flawed IF you don’t agree with his definition. Incidentally but less importantly, the author also makes broad assumptions about the nature of truth, but those assumptions I’d posit are likely less controversial than his implicit definition of truth – which doesn’t however mean they are necessarily true.
Extortion and social justice students go together. Never a good sign.
The methods they use can be considered as well when deciding whether we listen to someone.
Good piece, but it’s not really a dichotomy between “truth” and Social Justice as much as it is a broadly classical liberal or utilitarian approach to the world versus Social Justice. Real, unvarnished truth tells you nothing at all about what one OUGHT to pursue. Max Stirner-style nihilism and, say, the Effective Altruism people – a broadly classical liberal crowd informed by analytical philosophy, loads of statistics, and evolutionary psychology – are hardly the same crowd.
Also, it’s unfortunate IMHO to bring a criticism of “safety culture” into the mix. The mission creep of ever greater demands for physical safety is distinct from the imperative to maintain “psychic” safety. Or at least it should be. Stranger Danger may be culturally difficult to distinguish from demands for trigger-free content in curriculums, decades later, but there’s a world of difference.
Haidt’s seventh point about Justice is similar to mine about equality.
If we pull the logical threads of the telos of Truth and the telos of Social Justice, where do they take us?
I suggest that the logical thread of the Telos of Truth leads inevitably and inescapably to the Negative conception of liberty (freedom from), and to the Process-based conceptions of equality, justice, and fairness (one set of rules that applies, and is applied, the same for everyone).
I further suggest that the telos of Social Justice, on the other hand, leads equally inevitably to the Positive conception of Liberty (freedom to), and to the outcome-based conceptions of equality, justice, and fairness (different rules for different people, depending on their membership in perceived victim identity groups, aimed at leveling the perceived disparities of outcomes)
This is my new favorite YouTube video.
I love that Haidt’s passion shows through in spots. Maybe he was trying to get through a lot of material in as short a time as possible, but he’s more animated and heartfetd in this talk than usual and I think it’s great.
I have a couple relatively minor quibbles, or nuances, I’d like to offer for consideration.
At 8:06 Haidt defines what he means by social justice. He does so by way of examples, saying:
“I think the telos of social justice, I’m recording it here as racial equality, because that’s the most passionate one in this country at this time. Ah, but that is meant to include gender equality, LGBT rights, ah environmental issues, ah the whole set of issues that are pursued by um ah by social justice activists.”
I think Defining social justice through the examples of current-day hot button topics is inadequate. It does not capture the essential essence of the ideal.
I’d suggest a better description is offered by Thomas Sowell, in his description of “Cosmic Justice,” summarized by Sowell himself, here: http://www.tsowell.com/spquestc.html
Or, alternatively, I’d suggest the description of Plato’s “Light” offered by Arthur Herman in his book “The Cave and the Light: Plato versus Aristotle and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization.” Plato argued that everything in the real world, including individuals, communities, etc., is but a pale shadow of its ideal self, and it is the role of the enlightened among us to help us to see the ideal and to help us to work toward achieving it. We hear this sentiment in RFK’s “I see things that never were and ask why not,” and in John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Another quibble: Buried in Haidt’s description of social justice is the word “equality.” But equality means different things to different people. It can be either a) process/rule based or, b) outcome-based. I think those two types of equality are essential sub-elements, or aspects, or logical consequence, of the schism between Truth and Social Justice.
Specifically, I think social justice, aka Cosmic Justice, aka Plato’s “Light,” embraces the outcome-based conception of equality (and for that matter, outcome-based “positive” conceptions of liberty, justice, and fairness as well.)
Why isn’t the telos of the university to educate?
Sukie,
the telos IS to educate.
The question is: About what?
Do we “educate,” or teach, social justice or do we teach truth?
The left-demanded telos of an unjust “social justice” does not actually originate within academia at all. It did not spring from moral philosophy and certainly not from any philosophy department. Instead, it is an imposition on academia from the non-diverse “diversity” bureaucracy that was created to impose and enforce sweeping campus affirmative action in all things, including subject matter.
Truth has always been the great enemy of the anti-diversity “diversity” parasite. Truth is merit and the sine qua non of the very existence of affirmative action is the contravention of merit.
The tool that the “diversity” bureaucracy implemented to attack truth is the elevation of a supposed “value” of inclusiveness, which sounds sensible to children, and feels natural to incoming students because it is now being strictly imposed on all k-12 schoolchildren under “zero tolerance” policies for “bullying.” No criticism of anything about anybody or anything is allowed, unless it is criticism tradition, or majority opinion, which supposedly can’t be bullied (as they are systematically bullied by official policy into total silence) because they are in the supposed position of strength.
Inclusiveness is violated whenever anyone says anything that a person on the left disagrees with. Disagreement or criticism makes them feel “unwelcome” and “unsafe,” and “not included.”
From the president of University of Wisconsin-Whitewater earlier this year: “Some of our multicultural and nontraditional students feel the environment on campus is not welcoming to all.” Some race activist black students, always on high alert for anything they can find any way to interpret as in any way offensive, had viciously accused some unsuspecting white students of disrespecting blacks by posting pictures of themselves getting seaweed facials.
Just imagine how unwelcome these race activists feel when confronted with the truly contemptuous criticism they fully deserve. Thus in the name of being “welcoming to all” everyone who does not welcome by full agreement even the tiniest minority opinion must be purged.
Such a standard obviously cannot be applied even-handedly or everyone would be purged, so they just purge the people with traditional, patriotic, non-leftist, sane opinions. Again, tradition is held to be in the strong position and hence immune to being bullied or to feeling unwelcome, even when it is being actively and officially purged.
Thus are the mere feelings of the tiniest minority given absolute power over the most fundamental liberty rights of the vast majority. Which is why this could never come out of an actual philosophy department. It is all manipulative dishonesty and double standards, betraying the very foundations of western liberty, which knowledge our philosophy departments are charged not to lose track of.
These foundations can be improved upon but not ignored, but the vicious leftists of the anti-diversity “diversity” movement have no academic regard for such standards. Their only objective is the pursuit of unjust power, not just a tyranny of the majority which the founders of this country were so concerned to protect against, but a tyranny of the minority, which the founders fought a revolutionary war against.
The “diversity” totalitarians are a true parasite, fundamentally inimical to the mission of the university, seeking, and succeeding, in usurping the power of the university and using it to destroy the truth-seeking mission of the university, replacing it with a mission of truth suppression.
When so much of the modern university is governed by professional administrators rather than faculty who are still actively teaching and researching, how likely would reform be even if scholars wanted it and worked toward it? And that’s not even counting the fact that for most disciplines, you’re asking a potential conservative scholar to invest 10-15 years as a doctoral student and junior faculty member (plus possibly post-doc) before getting tenure and feeling safe enough to “come out” publicly.
Faculty operate in the world of ideas. Administrators operate in the world of power politics. In that world, a politicized faulty is a resource and a power base. And going all-in for the party that promises grants, student loans to cover escalating tuition, and direct funding of universities makes good short-term political sense in rough budgetary times.
I’m just not seeing a scenario where the University reforms from within.
I would suggest that you would have the most-read college recommendation list ever if you could list universities that were more interested in truth.
Personally, I’m waiting for one.
I think there is an error in viewing “social justice” as some new concept.
Social justice is a secular form of the religious imperative to construct a just world, based on spiritual revelation and intuition.
Its also worth noting that all the great universities began life as religious institutions, but along the way, were forced to make the choice between pursuing the spiritual mission and objective truth even when it conflicted with scripture.
Safe words and “PC” are just new forms of social etiquette, where certain words and ideas are deemed blasphemous or profane.
What is causing so much consternation now is that the old boundaries are being readjusted.
You’re making a classic motte-and-bailey gambit.
Given criticism of “social justice” and “safe words” and “PC”, you’re advancing a sanitized and unobjectionable characterization — analogous to, “Feminism is the radical idea that women are equal.” Social justice is all about the justice, man, with feelings (“spiritual revelation and intuition”) legitimately subordinating objective truth, and illiberal thought- and speech-policing minimized and excused as “just new forms of social etiquette” because “the old boundaries are being readjusted.”
Meanwhile, out in the real world, what we have is not mere “consternation,” but actual human beings having their reputations and careers irreparably damaged, their lives sometimes ruined, and college administrators capitulating to identity-politics whining rather than forthrightly standing up for free expression and free thought.
Yes, and how does the subjective spiritual intuition of social justice differ from that of religion?
Isn’t religion marked by the same propensity toward censorship and subordinating objective truth?
Speaking of mottes and baileys, when was this robust era of freewheeling iconoclastic truth-seeking from which we are diverging?
Because as recently as the 1960s, certain bookstores could be raided by the police and their owners arrested.
I’m actually quite sympathetic to the argument of a wider tolerance for objectionable thoughts. But its always a bit too easy to strike a heroic pose for free speech, when we are confident our own sacred totems will not be profaned.
Quite a few religions seriously look for flaws in their doctrines, using all the tools of logic, philosophy, and science. The Catholic Church goes so far as to have the formal office of Devil’s Advocate to bring to light any defects of people before they are added to the canon of saints.
The idea is that faith is a pretty sparse starting point from which to build an entire philosophy of living. From a miraculous burning bush you can derive nearly any theory of, say, adultery that you want, so great care and suspicion is needed. The Abrahamic religions even have the concept of Satan as the Prince of Lies, who as often as not uses pious words to set people against each other and wreak his destruction.
Can you imagine Social Justice U. hiring a Klansman’s Advocate, so that the students might learn to recognize the tools of racism? Neither can I. Their purpose is not to advocate a particular position, it is to gain power by fighting other positions. To the extent that it is religious, it is like the degenerate Catholic Church of the Middle Ages, with priests grown fat on the sale of indulgences.
If you genuinely cannot appreciate a single difference of any significance between religious taboos grounded in the orthodoxies of various faith traditions, and moving-target, here-today-something-different-tomorrow speech- and thought-policing grounded in individual special snowflakes’ hurt feelz, I’m afraid it’s going to be difficult to have a conversation.
Importantly, whatever propensity religion may have towards censorship and the subordination of truth to dogma, modern Western culture, led by the academy, largely stands in opposition to it, and modern Western law is an aggressive throttle on religion’s censorious ambitions. Contrast with the culture’s and the academy’s enabling and celebration of social justice warriors, and the use of the law — notably but hardly limited to Title IX — in furtherance of social justice speech- and thought-policing. Given that context the parallel you’re trying to draw is ludicrous.
The robust era of freewheeling iconoclastic truth-seeking was the stated aspiration of the free-speech liberalism of the 1960s — the liberalism that taught, correctly in my view, that things like raiding bookstores and arresting their owners were abhorrent in a free society. Those activists and their ideological heirs now control the commanding heights of the culture and the academy, and it’s entirely fair to hold them to account when they fail to live up to their own stated principles. Pointing to a cultural moment a half-century gone, that few people defend and fewer still advocate a return to, is neither exculpatory nor relevant; it’s just an attempt to change the subject.
Good point regarding the religious characteristics of “social justice.” However, my question is “When has non-truth ever resulted in an affirmative benefit (see the USSR, Nazi Germany, China, Venezuela, Cuba, etc., etc.)? In the social “sciences” or elsewhere? Why would a University choose ANY version of untruth in service of any purpose? If “social justice” requires lying, how can it be beneficial at all? Social Justice should merely be an end which Truth can be used to achieve, and not a separate Telos at all.
Yes, religion promotes solving the world’s problems by working for social justice but many of the oldest universities weren’t founded to do this as you contend. They were founded to raise up men to preach the Gospel of Salvation through Christ which is the only true solution to the world’s problems. Rationalism was the demise of that telos.
Social justice as a “telos” might not be so terrible — particularly, say, for a medical school or law school or social work school — if it were not based on a preconceived philosophy of human nature, to wit: (1) that all human beings are or should be born as blank slates, (2) that any unique transmission of value from a parent to a child (e.g., reading to them, encouraging them not to misbehave, providing a good family life and parental role models) constitutes an “injustice” in social terms because it is not provided universally to all children by the state, and (3) denial of the existence of the problem of moral hazard, that people are inherently selfish and that rules, laws, property rights, etc., are therefore necessary to preserve and protect the basic existence of the society.
To think universities of Prog Enslavement will choose Truth… is to think that iron-makers of shackles would vote for Lincoln in 1860.
In other words, Prog Education, by definition, enslaves all and will never choose Truth. Therefore we, the people, must defund Prog Ed in K-12, university, law-journalism-film schools; replacing the anti-republic pedagogy with Western Enlightenment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAS8D5T2tQE
On 9/11, Terrorism, Solution, Absolution and Re-Constitution
You sum up the central conflict of the modern university quite clearly. Once seen from your perspective, one question in particular looms large.
There are entire departments dedicated to overthrowing truth in the name of Social Justice. These departments typically begin with the name of a victim group and end in the word “Studies”.
Is there any sort of academic nexus advocating for truth that could possibly compete with these well-funded and powerful interests advocating for Social Justice?
Truth has lost, David Stove in his ‘A Farewell to Arts’ pointed this out three decades ago for Arts Departments.
“Its value, for my purpose, lies in proving that nowadays the Faculty of Arts has philosophy lecturers who frankly avow that their “philosophy” has nothing to do with an interest in truth and everything to do with an interest in power.”
Overall this was a clear and accurate– especially the parts on victim culture, equality of treatment vs outcome, and the distinction between correlation and causation.
However, I think Jon has the fundamental dichotomy wrong here. The conflict at the heart of the university culture war is not between changing the world (Marx) and understanding the world (Mill). There are many students and academics aligned with Mill who would are very motivated to change the world (economists, engineers, scientists). Similarly, campus social justice activists don’t seem to think they are sacrificing the truth. The real conflict is one of epistemic values. Classical liberals support a process of resolving truth through the evaluation of objective evidence. Though we are all biased and imperfect adherents to this value, we at least pay lip service to it. You are unlikely to find anyone who identifies as a classical liberal appealing to “lived experience” when trying to persuade. This is because it is understood that such appeals are not universalizable. They require you to take the other person’s honesty and fair-mindedness on faith, in a world full of disingenuous, self-deceiving, and fuzzy-thinking people. Essentially, it is saying: “just trust me”.
And yet, identity-based appeals to authority are explicitly advanced by social justice activists. In the past, religious authorities made similar appeals. The priest (or king) was validated by tradition and protected by blasphemy laws. The faithful motivated by fear and shame on the one hand, the promise of salvation and righteousness on the other. Today, educated people cannot be browbeaten with threats of hellfire. But they *can* be shamed into submission with appeals to victimhood by identity. Social justice authorities are validated by a collective fetishization of the oppressed, are protected by taboos against questioning their alleged experiences, and are now campaigning for blasphemy laws. The students and educated adults that yield to these, like the worshippers of the past, are motivated by the twin sticks of shame (of being a racist/sexist/misogynist sexual creep) and fear (of ostracism and disapproval), and the carrot of righteousness through submission.
In short, the culture war we see on campuses is not between “changing the world” and “knowing the world”. It is between faith-based and rational epistemologies. The particular brand of religion on display here has its roots in Marx, but a better patron saint would be Herbert Marcuse (who explicitly rejected the idea of fair intellectual standards, claiming that it was a kind of rigged game to favor the powerful). This is not to say that there are no dogmatic libertarians, or rational advocates for historically marginalized groups. But because academic culture has an enormous double standard regarding the acceptability of criticizing or ridiculing these two tribes, intellectually dishonest zealots have been able to seize power in the name of social justice, where conservatives of a similar cast are (rightly) marginalized.
P.S. Jon, not sure your point about fat vs sugar’s effect on satiety is correct. I suggest you check out neuroscientist Stephan Guyenet’s writings on the subject (http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/). At the very least, you shouldn’t just assert that fat fills a person up faster as if it were scientific consensus.
Solid epistemic true Truth. Bahnsen would be proud bro. Let’s watch this despicable experiment implode. God is literally damning the entire system because they reject His truth. I love to watch this scorched-secular show.
Sean Mackesey – you make a good point.
The funny thing to me is that I attended several religious schools, but none were so insistent on having their version of truth being taken on faith as the SJWs are. While they tended to be confident that an objective investigation would eventually prove their faith-based views correct, they all encouraged the pursuit of truth.
Great presentation Dr. Haidt, I always appreciate the clarity and concise nature of your work. I believe the trigger warning sign at Hofstra that you mentioned in the video was actually for a MTV pre-debate event called “Elect This” and not for the presidential debate itself, although your point still stands. Thanks!
We hear a lot about “triggers,” and how they are used to shut down political and cultural disagreement, particularly on college campuses. Someone might be going to say something on the other side of campus with which a snowflake might disagree, and this sets off a fit of the vapors, along with massive protests against whichever visiting culprit it might be.
What we need is for some enterprising grad student in sociology or psychology (someone who didn’t want to graduate anyway for some reason) to walk through the protesting crowd with a survey, asking them for a list of the last three movies they had watched. When he has a solid representative list, he should rank them in order of popularity, and then comb through those movies for possible triggers.
The point of the experiment, of course, would be to demonstrate the discrepancy between triggers that don’t work when it is entertainment and which do when someone else’s right to free expression is at stake.
I suggest this merely because it would be festive.
Great post. I aspire to watch the video later.
Getting to the point made by Taleb (Black Swan Guy), he would probably say “What doesn’t kill me kills others.” Many of us experience trauma or biological insult or deprivation–some of us survive better than others.
Case In Point: The Upper Middle Class kids from stable homes full of books and chatty intelligent parents “with the politics of truck drivers” can still end up well educated and not politically misled.” Especially if they are motivated.
It is the kids without books, magazines, newpapers on the table, without dinner table conversations, without travel, museums, religious instruction, etc. who end up totally bamboozled by “The Narrative” as provided in our institutions.
Keep up the good work!
I think the university, not the students, should chose the direction. Students are there for a short time, so it is for the university which has long term existence to make the decision, truth or social justice. The decision should be clear, and made public in their advertising for students and teachers.
The University’s have, moron. Thanks for playing.
“Universities”. Be sure of yourself before undertaking to correct others.
Thank you. The blogosphere is rife with poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation. Just another failure of government-run schools.
Thank you for this excellent argument. However, I don’t think this argument needs to rely on social justice specifically. The conflict can perhaps also be seen as between the knowledge factory, in the manner of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum, and the monastery, where scholasticism is practiced. In the one case truths are sought through investigation and falsification, while in the other truths are assumed given and appreciated more fully through study.
Seriously out of touch
Timo, perhaps Barry is out of touch with the current climate, because the current climate is formed by people (trolls?) such as yourself who lash out reflexively and without reasoned argument against anyone who might question their SJ beliefs. All the more regrettable because those beliefs were formed uncritically by listening to someone else equally uninformed.
You literally are an example of the cross partisan hostility mentioned in the article. Your comment was not meant to open any dialogue, it was just an ad hominem attack on a poster that accidentally responded to “Barry S”, because the views you assumed him to have.
C’mon
Barry, I do apologize, that comment was not directed at you. Forgive my cross-wiring.
oops yes, thank you!
“There seem to be two major kinds of justice that activists are seeking: finding and eradicating disparate treatment (which is always a good thing to do, and which never conflicts with truth), and finding and eradicating disparate outcomes, without regard for disparate inputs or third variables. It is this latter part which causes all of the problems, all of the conflicts with truth. In the real world, there are many disparities of inputs, but anyone who mentions such disparities on campus is guilty of blasphemy and must be punished.”
Sometime, it is not only disparity of treatment that need to be adressed for social justice. If one takes the salary gap. The main issue with salary gap is the lack of automonmy women face when they earn less than men. Because of that, they stop working much more often (because this is the most rational, isn’t it). And then they fall in a situation where the man have more power in the couple. Its not only a matter of merit, its also a matter of empowerment.
Now, regarding truth: we have the same issue. To reach truth (or be the closest from it), we need viewpoint diversity. That’s the whole point of your organisation, isn’t it? Then, we might advocate for increasing diversity despite of the disparity of ‘merits’. Doing so, truth is less biased. Even if some people with individual merit were left aside in the process.
Eventually, the telos I keep is truth, just like you. Over social justice defined as “merit-only based success”. You see, if we define a different way to reach truth and a different definition of social justice, your whole argument can be reversed…
Now, some people might deny there is any difference in merit and argue that any difference in outcome is a difference in treatment, because its simpler. Conservative will argue it’s not true. I would argue it is not always what matters.
(I have a limited nb of characters, there is so much to tell… but lets stick with this for now)