A Problem with the Left
--
I consider my political affiliation to align most closely with liberalism. As a liberal, I am fundamentally opposed to conservatism in a fairly broad way. However, as some have noticed, there is a very vocal slice of the left that is fundamentally opposed to liberalism itself. This slice of the left may fail to recognize their opposition, but it is nevertheless present in an increasingly obvious way. And it is present all throughout our culture.
There are plenty of critics of the left in the political sphere. Some, I regard as highly uncharitable and others are much more fair in their assessment. One clear example of one who has behaved in an uncharitable way towards the left is political commentator and interviewer Dave Rubin.
Take Rubin’s characterization of the left. He has referred to progressivism as ‘basically a mental disorder.’ He has said that democrats are ‘kind of veering to some version of open-borders.’ His right-wing guests can make claims such as ‘Obama is a communist’ without any pushback whatsoever and he now refuses to have good-faith left-wingers (i.e. David Pakman, Kyle Kulinski) on his show, pretending that they ‘lie’ about him (though I sympathize entirely with his exclusion of Sam Seder).
This isn’t the full picture either. Rubin has had many far-right personalities on his show pretending that they’re apart of an emerging ‘new center’ in opposition to the far-left. These characters include Stefan Molyneux, Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson, Bridget Gabriel and Mike Cernovich; all of which have promoted conspiracy theories, again, without any pushback from Rubin.
I do not intend to treat the left in an uncharitable manner as Rubin has. Instead, I will do my best to steelman their claims that I regard as false while also giving them credit where necessary.
Not only is it true that our right-wing president denies the scientific consensus on climate change, most conservative republicans do as well. Another clear case of science denial on the right is the 57% of republicans that don’t accept that humans have evolved over time. In turn, the label ‘science denial’ has been directed primarily at republicans.
Conservatives are not alone in their ideologically motivated denial of science though. As the party known for its reliance on data and open-mindedness — even in personality — liberals have proved to be a part of the problem too.
The false ideas that are prominent on the left are usually motivated by the egalitarianism and other good intentions of those who believe them. Certain things to do with group differences are among the most common examples of this phenomenon.
One group difference that is often suppressed is psychological differences between the sexes. I found a piece of evidence that this denial is widespread through a personal anecdote. This semester, my communications professor discussed toy preferences between children, concluding that we are socialized to believe that boys should play with trucks and girls should play with barbies. “It is now clear that we are simply born as blank slates at birth,” she said.
It is evident that subscription to a blank slate narrative comes from a place of good intentions because those who adhere to it abore inequality. To be unequal is more often than not ascribed to discrimination and is therefore immoral. This is why the software engineer James Damore was fired from Google for writing about personality differences between men and women.
Google isn’t the only problem here either. In fact, highly prestigious science outlets and news organizations have made the same inaccurate claim. Take Nature as an example which has pushed the notion that “modern neuroscientists have identified no decisive, category-defining differences between the brains of men and women.” In other words, science has failed to prove that definitive psychological differences between men and women exist.
The New York Times also published an op-ed claiming that boys are more violent than girls because of “what they’ve been taught about what it means to be a man.” The author also claims that boys don’t come into the world with inborn tendencies for aggression or violence. The implication being that we live in a culture that encourages male aggression and dominance and socialization has made that outcome possible.
When my communications professor taught the class her ideas about human nature as fact, I felt obligated to respond: “I’m having a hard time understanding the notion that we are born ‘blank slates.’ Did evolution seize at the neck somewhere along the way?” My professor responded by stating that it is really just a combination of both nature and nurture and that scientists still debate this phenomenon today.
It is undoubtedly true that what makes us up is our hardware and our software. But to say that we come into the world as blank slates is to say that only nurture is at play with respect to our brains. This idea falls apart instantly when one considers that
- Children in the pre-socialization stage of cognitive development show a preference for gender-stereotypical phenomena, and
- Monkeys exhibit the same hormonally influenced behavioral and cognitive biases for sex-specific toys
What the Nature piece has left out is that scientists are able to predict one’s sex accurately using a multivariate brai n morphometry. This means that using multiple variables as opposed to just one vastly increases the accuracy of the prediction. We also know that there are personality differences between the sexes in the big five personality traits. Let’s go in order:
Openness (creativity, intellectual curiosity, etc.): There are no significant differences in this trait. The minor ones that have been found are that men tend to score higher on the ideas facet and women score higher on the facets of esthetics and feelings.
Conscientiousness (self-discipline, organization, etc.): Women score slightly higher than men on this trait especially with self-discipline, though this finding isn’t consistent, especially across cultures.
Extraversion (sociability, positive emotionality, etc.): Men and women differ on this trait based on the dimension. Men score higher on assertiveness and excitement seeking while women tend to score higher on warmth.
Agreeableness (cooperation, kindness, etc.): Women consistently score higher than men on Agreeableness.
Neuroticism (negative emotions, anxiety): Women have been found to score significantly higher than men on this trait in every domain except for one: anger and hostility.
That higher male aggression is a product of what culture encourages in masculinity, as suggested by the times, is a very simple view lacking certain essential nuances. While differences between individuals within each sex category vary vastly, even a small disparity in the mean between each sex can — and does — have a major impact on aggression in the extreme ends of the distribution. This is precisely why male human and non-human animals cross-culturally exhibit the majority of extremely aggressive behaviors.
Sex differences in aggression even replicate in more egalitarian countries — to an even larger degree.
It is very unfortunate that even the American Psychological Association makes the same flawed claims about male aggression and socialization. From big tech companies and mainstream, highly credible news sources https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ab.21799 to popular science journals and even the APA, leftist egalitarian ideology flows through covertly. Where does it come from though?
First, let me begin by explaining where it is not coming from. This ideology isn’t so dominant because of so-called Jewish influence, as the far-right loves to claim. While it is correct that jewish individuals are disproportionately represented in positions of influence, there is not a conspiracy underway.
When one begins to notice certain correlations that appear to support a conspiracy hypothesis, there are usually alternative explanations that don’t involve any kind of conspiracy at all. These tend to be the correct explanations. Even still, remaining skeptical is a valuable thing; and skepticism indeed includes questioning one’s own skepticism.
I invite the far-right to be skeptical of their hyper-skepticism by considering these three facts that professor of psychology Jordan Peterson explains in great detail:
- Ashkenazi Jews tend to have a significantly higher IQ than the general population
- IQ correlates with personality trait Openness, which entails thoughtfulness and philosophical thinking, and
- Openness is correlated with political liberalism, a political ideology that is dominant in mainstream culture (academia, mainstream media, tech, etc).
These data help us understand that the ‘Jewish Question’ is in fact a conspiracy theory, and one unsupported by evidence at that. Instead, something else is going on.
As can also be explained by personality, liberals dominate academia, and particularly the social sciences. In fact, only 1 in 10 social scientists are conservatives, as opposed to liberals. And the liberal to conservative ratio in my field of psychology is even higher: 17:1. This disproportion explains much of why the blank slate narrative can flow freely throughout academia, as well as liberal-dominated media and tech.
What many have come to call ‘blank slatism’ isn’t the only problem with the academic left though. This ideology runs much broader than just that.
Social justice has largely been a force for good, as I have argued in another article. However, there is a highly ideological aspect to recent Social Justice (SJ) activism that much of the left has either failed to recognize or actively participates in. Interestingly, there are many claims that the SJ left makes that are mostly true, somewhat true, or even just touching upon truths. In all three cases, there remains much room for criticism. But this is how they are able to make such claims without being immediately dismissed.
A few examples of half-truth claims made by SJ activists are their overuse and redefining of emotionally powerful words such as ‘racist’ or ‘sexist.’ Take the college protests that have resulted in not only attempted, but successful disinvitations of the speaker. One major sign of fundamentalism is the suppression of opposing viewpoints and curtailing freedom of speech. There are countless examples of this phenomenon on the left.
At Yale University, students demanded the resignation of professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis after the latter sent a measured and thoughtful email questioning certain orthodoxies regarding cultural appropriation. Several students said that they can’t bear to even live on campus anymore due to such minor grievances. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have identified this kind of student behavior as one of many cognitive distortions known as ‘catastrophizing,’ or interpreting common events as unbearable nightmares.
Another instance of this kind of behavior is at the school pictured at the beginning of this article: Evergreen State College. On this campus, students organized a ‘day of absence’ for all white people. While this wasn’t a requirement by the school, it might as well have been due to the extent that it was enforced culturally. After one professor thought that this was a ridiculous idea for a college, he showed up. This is the email he sent in response to the organized ‘day of absence’ for white people:
There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles….and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.
After being mobbed by students, protesters and even college leaders, being yelled at and called a racist, Professor Bret Weinstein decided to continue class off campus in a public park.
Other examples of this include credible academics, journalists and even a few bigots. But as anybody with any background knowledge on freedom of speech knows: we must support free speech for all; even those with reprehensible views. If we don’t, then who is to say anybody ought to be allowed to speak? It is inevitable that somebody will find something to be offended by in anything. Should we really all just remain silent at all times?
The correct answer to that question is undoubtedly no. So even in the case of Milo Yiannopoulos, we ought to be supportive of the right to speak. Not only did that not happen on his scheduled day to speak, violence from masked protesters broke out that caused more than $100,000 in property damage leaving at least 6 people injured. They threw commercial-grade fireworks and rocks at police, ignited fires with molotov cocktails, and smashed windows of the student union center all in an effort to….combat fascism?
Other events of suppression of speech on campus from the left include Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Charles Murray, Heather MacDonald, Nir Barkat (the then-Jerusalem Mayor), Erik Prince, Kevin Johnson, Christine Lagarde, Asra Nomani, George Will, David Harris-Gershon, Narendra Modi, Bassem Eid, Anita Alvarez, John Derbyshire, and an endless list of others. While there are instances of the right suppressing speech on campus, this is a largely a problem of the left.
SJ activists have decided that “prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior” doesn’t cut it anymore for defining racism. Instead, they have redefined the word as ‘prejudice plus power.’ This means that if one is not in a position of institutional power, they can’t be racist. Hopefully adherents to the ‘racism = privilege plus power’ formulation would grant that Hitler, as a isolated street-corner rabble rouser was not a racist; at least not until he came to power. To remain consistent, they must.
Adherents to SJ ideology also have come to reject one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s central messages of colorblindness. King desired to live in a world in which we all would judge each other not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. This isn’t even the only way these activists have vastly deviated from the early civil rights movements that they claim to be apart of.
Opposition to these new ideas will often be met with accusations of racism or sexism, as well as other emotionally charged words. This response, as well as much of the jargon that is used in many related fields provide assistance in keeping this worldview complicated and difficult to understand.
The source of all of this is nested in what is called ‘critical constructivism.’ This is a subset of constructivist epistemology which has many elements to it, including that knowledge is socially constructed, conscientiousness is socially constructed, and interpretation is central as opposed to reason and evidence. In fact, science is often portrayed as a weapon of white supremacy or patriarchy.
The social constructions listed above, and many others that haven’t been included here, are usually dependant on power dynamics between racial and sexual groups. This is why many on the left want to deny the scientific evidence of psychological differences between the sexes, as noted earlier in this piece.
The way these ideas spread into culture is through what biologist Bret Weinstein has termed “idea laundering.” Philosopher Peter Boghossian came up with a great example of this in action.
This process begins when certain academics have a moral opposition to something such as negative attitudes toward obesity in society. These academics who want to reduce negative attitudes towards obesity will then find other academics who share this moral opposition and write for a peer-reviewed journal, Fat Studies for example, and get published. After many academics participate in this process, they build an extensive ‘academic’ literature on the topic. Fat Studies is then considered to be an established academic journal.
In response, academics or anybody that shares these moral oppositions can use these ‘scholarly’ works to defend their radical claims. People will often accept the arguments they make because they seem to have science and evidence to back them up since academic journals have traditionally been trustworthy sources.
From science denial spreading to mainstream news sources and scientific journals to suppressing opposing viewpoints and freedom of speech, the left has more than simply ‘a’ problem. The goal in my particular choice of words for the title of this article was not an accident though. As I have noted already, it is but a slice of the left that is advocating for all of these things. To get a better picture, it is only about 8% of the US population, which is hilariously overwhelmingly made up of young, educated, privileged white people. The entire left is not illiberal in this way. And though the vocal and aggressive minority is powerful, there are ways to counteract it.
When something one knows to be inaccurate is said, they must speak up, especially when it comes from a college professor who obtains the power of authority and influence. It is important that this pushback is thoughtful and measured. Even with the fear of being called a racist, being reported, or any of the other social consequences, it is important to push back against this narrative. The more people who begin to push back, the more everybody else will realize who the true ideologues are.
The online publication Quillette has become a tremendous alternative to mainstream sources that are already entrenched in this ideology. One can and should share articles with their friends, ideological opponents and professors alike. Even the Atlantic is a fantastic source of information regarding the far-left much of the time.
We can also advocate for increasing viewpoint diversity on campus. Heterodox academy has been at the forefront among those who have come out in support of this. In fact, it is their mission. If you are a graduate student or higher (unfortunately, no undergraduates like myself are allowed), you may join.
Given the amount of academics and rational minds pushing back against the dominant narrative, no matter how small, I am optimistic that this will eventually fade. Inevitably, another feel-good ideology will dominate again, and perhaps it will come from the other side of the aisle next time. When that time comes, the rational minds of the world will do what they have always done to begin the process of intellectual defeat: have the conversation.
