Taboo U
There is a lot of discussion of the Taboo mentality going on right now – which is good, in the sense that the dangers of the taboo mentality are being pointed out, but it’s bad, in the sense that there is also a lot of Taboo mentality around right now. Is it worth it to have some people thinking badly to give an occasion for other people to explain what’s wrong with bad thinking? Wouldn’t it be better and simpler just to have everyone thinking clearly to begin with? Yes, probably, but since that’s not going to happen, it’s a good thing there are people around to do some nudging.
Salman Rushdie at Open Democracy, for example.
At Cambridge University I was taught a laudable method of argument: you never personalise, but you have absolutely no respect for people’s opinions. You are never rude to the person, but you can be savagely rude about what the person thinks. That seems to me a crucial distinction: people must be protected from discrimination by virtue of their race, but you cannot ring-fence their ideas. The moment you say that any idea system is sacred, whether it’s a religious belief system or a secular ideology, the moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision, or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.
There’s a lot of disagreement over that thought, but it seems right to me. Declaring a set of ideas immune from criticism or satire does seem like the one thing you don’t want to do with a set of ideas. You could say that that’s what the word ‘God’ is for – a kind of imaginary rubber stamp or strongbox or chastity belt serving to render a particular set of ideas undiscussable, unchangeable, non-negotiable. Given what human ideas can be and what they can do, that seems like a very risky approach.
Steven Pinker in The New Republic is talking about the same general idea, though in a different instantiation.
To what degree these and other differences originate in biology must be determined by research, not fatwa. History tells us that how much we want to believe a proposition is not a reliable guide as to whether it is true…
And not only history. An easy thought-experiment can show us the same thing. Let’s see…I want it to be true that there is a steaming-hot pizza with feta, pesto and artichokes on the table. But there isn’t, and it isn’t. I guess my wanting isn’t all that powerful, then.
What are we to make of the breakdown of standards of intellectual discourse in this affair–the statistical innumeracy, the confusion of fairness with sameness, the refusal to glance at the scientific literature? It is not a disease of tenured radicals; comparable lapses can be found among the political right (just look at its treatment of evolution). Instead, we may be seeing the operation of a fascinating bit of human psychology. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has argued that the mentality of taboo–the belief that certain ideas are so dangerous that it is sinful even to think them–is not a quirk of Polynesian culture or religious superstition but is ingrained into our moral sense.
As a matter of fact, it was reading Pinker on Tetlock and others on taboo that inspired my colleague to create the ‘Taboo’ game. Of course, some ideas are ‘so dangerous’ – the ideas that swirl around ethnic cleansing, genocide, purity, eugenics, generally cleaning up humanity by thinning it out radically, are an obvious example. But as Pinker puts it –
Unfortunately, the psychology of taboo is incompatible with the ideal of scholarship, which is that any idea is worth thinking about, if only to determine whether it is wrong…The tragedy is that this mentality of taboo needlessly puts a laudable cause on a collision course with the findings of science and the spirit of free inquiry.
Yes. Books published by Taboo University Press are not the ones that promise a searching look at which ideas are wrong for what reasons. I’ll order mine from Free Inquiry Press, thanks.
What about your little caveat, though? Should legitimate scholars publicly debate Holocaust deniers, for example, thereby giving the deniers a respectable platform for propagating their noxious ideas? For every member of the audience who is persuaded by the legitimate scholars there will probably be two or three who lazily split the difference and decide that although something bad may have happened sixty years ago, it probably wasn’t as bad as they had previously thought…which is exactly what the Holocaust deniers are hoping to achieve.
Maybe some “taboos” aren’t so bad.
But, then, isn’t the Ward Churchill controversy, orchestrated as an ideological operation from the right-wing machine, precisely an instance of taboo-thinking. Prof. DeLong cited Churchill’s more sober, emended explanation of of his original screed in order to denounce him as a liar. Apparently, in the good professor’s book, a liar can not be also telling the truth, however inadvertently. The problem with the likes of Churchill is that he substitutes, opportunistically, crude polemic for sober consideration of historical context and rational institutional analysis, which is the only rational hope for altering the course of the institutional organization and loosing of violence upon the world, assuming, that is, that the precedence of historical injustice is a source of our ideas of justice and a measure of any genuine progress. Without that constraint, the recitation of historical atrocity becomes as self-serving as the historical obliviousness of the jingoism it opposes. But to join in the fray, which is actually an effort to impose a litmus test in quasi-McCarthyite fashion, is to privelege the smaller truths over the larger lies. (The best comment I read comes from Digby: “I wish I could join you in this, but I’m already too busy denouncing Jane Fonda and Stalin, my own personal mentors.”)
As for the virtues of thinking clearly, consider the following: “Churchill remained unimpressed by such considerations, arguing the use of gas a ‘scientific expedient”, should not be prevented ‘by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly.'” That’s the other W. Churchill.
Also, I hardly think citing Pinker as an exemplar for free-thinking critical scrutiny makes much of a point. At some point, appeals to the voluminous “scientific” literature of a supposed academic discipline, much of which consists in weak statistical inferences for hypothoses desperately in need of relevance, which may, after all, amount to so much fashinable nonsense,- to coin a phrase,- should be countered by a criterion of authenticity. Large claims for the biological causation for small cognitive differences, let alone for the sense of morality as a whole, are grasping at problems by the smallest of statistical tails and amount to a kind of petitio principii. That is, they are very little likely to be true and show every evidence of having failed to adequately conceptualize the domains to which they claim to refer, and the stakes involved in them. With reference to morality, though it might be considered a legitimate question to inquire into the biological antecedents of morality or of phenomena that are deemed to have ethical relevance, such as emotions, morality as a whole is entirely a meta-biological affair.
As to the supposed under-representaion of women in “hard” mathematical sciences, which I would take to refer primarily to physics and related forms of engineering, there are any number of factors that might apply, other than small differences in supposedly innate ability. Might I put forward as one that the atmosphere in such disciplines tends to be particularly cocky, perhaps because physics takes itself, mistakenly, to be the most basic and therefore ultimate science and this generates an aggressive cognitive attitude. Hence there may be some adverse self-selection among women with relevant aptitudes. (I’m basing such an ad hoc hypothesis on a PBS documentary about a female experimental physicist at Fermilab, and the tussles she got into from the sense of threat she posed to her male colleagues was the drift of her plaint.) So perhaps Iraguay might, inadvertently, have had a point, after all. At any rate, off hand, not only can I think of a couple of women who have made major contributions to biology, but a number of women who are prominent economists, and the latter discipline, for better or for worse, is highly mathematicized.
Since it’s my day off, I did take your little “taboo” quiz. Might I suggest that it is biased against deontic conceptions of morality, which, after all, are the main line of modern moral thought? Actually f**king your chicken rather than just choking it, might well be considered morally wrong even though no harm apparently results from it. Since morality has to do with human agency in its relations with others qua other, such behaviors might be deemed to violate the gradient of respect that makes ethical potentials possible. I don’t think that such a line of thinking merely amounts to an after-the-fact rationalization of a “hard-wired” emotional repulsion, since not only in matters of morality, at least according to such conceptions, are there, strictly speaking, no facts, but such a reason precisely points to the “fact” of morality as such, at least according to such a conception.
Yeah, what about my little caveat indeed. It was nagging at me rather, while I typed.
But then the word ‘taboo’ has to do with declaring things sacred, rather than dangerous. Then the disagreements can take place over whether one is treating an idea as a profanation or as a danger. Which is hard to do, with the women-in-math issue – I can see where people would think the innatist idea is indeed dangerous.
Yes, I think the Churchill controversy is an example of taboo thinking, of a tiresomely familiar kind. Trouble is, that doesn’t make him any more defensible.
Not sure I see the point of the other W Churchill example. I mean to refer to actual clear thinking, not just the phrase used by any old opportunist. The fact that people use the term to flatter themselves doesn’t mean that clear thinking doesn’t exist or isn’t a good idea, does it?
I wasn’t citing Pinker as an exemplar for free-thinking critical scrutiny – I was citing an article he wrote on the subject. I think the article is good (and clear), independent of whether or not Pinker is.
“there are any number of factors that might apply, other than small differences in supposedly innate ability.”
Of course there are, and nobody including Summers is saying there aren’t. Summers (I gather – I haven’t read an actual transcript or anything, so I’m relying on secondary reports) simply cited the possible innate differences as one possible factor, not the only one.
And biology and economics were not what Summers was talking about. Part of the question at issue (again, I gather) is why there are so many more women in biology than there are in physics and math. And anyway, surely you know that even if you had said you knew lots of women in physics and math, that wouldn’t really be all that relevant.
Sure, you can suggest that about the quiz. I think the trouble with what you say though is that if you’re right, then a harm is done, and the quiz stipulates that no harm is done – that’s the thought experiment. It’s interesting though. Gradient of respect: interesting.
Mind you, I neither designed Taboo nor wrote the questions, so I may be quite wrong, it may be that your suggestion is a deal breaker.
OB:
Of course, I was behaving opportunistically. I could care less about Ward Churchill, an obscure, minor academic, and I wouldn’t particularly endorse anything he spouted. But Prof. DeLong’s denunciation of him as simply a liar does go to the notion of theoretical clarity, ever self-certain, as the hallmark of truth, as if the old Greek liar’s paradox, whereby a liar tells the truth, were necessarily an impossibility. (It’s actually a pragmatic rather than a logical imposibility.) The underlying point goes to the relations between truth/meaning, ambiguity, and reality. Is reality such that it is raised to its true “ontological” status through “clear” thinking, as if that were its destiny, because of some supposed identity of thought and being? Or does reality exist in a chiaroscuro, such that “clear” thinking amounts to a taking into account of that chiaroscuro? It matters little to me whether the reality in question is social or natural, since I think something of the same question applies to both realms.
As for the narrower question of male/female ratios in the sciences, I could care less about the staffing of specialized disciplines in relation to long-run results. I would prefer that the economy produce more biologists, ecologists, climatologists, etc. than physicists, who are in an over-supply as a legacy of the Cold War, but you and I both know why such a policy would not be funded. But the epistemic issue here has to do with a preference for the least likely, if technically most sophisticated, “explanation”. The broadest explanation, huffery-puffery aside, has to do with the burdens of female renunciation between career choices and personal commitments and how those get channeled, although already for a priveleged,- deservingly or not,- class of females. (My ad hoc hypothesis was just icing on the cake.) Larry Summers, who has early and long been known as a “bad boy”,- (most famously he argued for the economic benefits of pollution),- should know better. Has he ever met Alice Rivlin?
As for deal-breakers, the gerrymamdering- (or is that jerrymandering),- of tests has always been one of mine. That point applies to the claims of empirical research.
Actually, it’s jerry-rigging.
Or jerry-building.
“But, then, isn’t the Ward Churchill controversy, orchestrated as an ideological operation from the right-wing machine, precisely an instance of taboo-thinking”
Since you asked, the answer is “nope.” Do you think the controversy was about his criticizing capitalism or the U.S., ore even the 9/11 victims. That’s hardly taboo thinking at CU or many other campuses. Wasn’t the real problem with his qualifications , his “scholarly” writings, and with the institute at Hamiton College spending big bucks to bring him there to speak? If the real problem is as you say, that he substitutes crude polemic for sober analysis, then isn’t the real problem something other than an ideological crusade? And shouldn’t we be glad the right wing machine was there to smoke this guy out, I mean if we’re not above caring about it?
Oh, and “right wing machine?” The pajama clad bloggers? They”re now a machine?
Allan:
You can consult Kevin Drum for a chronology of the “scandal”. Bill “Loofah” O’Reilly is hardly a blogger or even a wearer of pajamas. And the screed in question is over 3 years old. So why is it being brought up now? Could it be to shore up support for failing, but continuing militarist adventures? As for shoddy scholarship, that has long been a furious academic growth industry. But you can bet your bottom dollar that neither of the cited academic institutions are betting their bottom dollar on their academic prestige rather than their football teams.
John,
I thought it was being brought up now because he was now being invited to speak att Hamilton College, and this was the second time they showed what we might call questionable judgment. The alleged failing but continuing militarist adventures brings up an issue that’s well beyond the scope of this post. If you think the Churchill issue is being orchestrated by the Administration, then maybe you should offer some proof., or were you just asking. As far as the chrononlogy goes, it started with an article in the local paper, was picked up by bloggers, and then O’Reilly mentioned it.
Finally, if Hamilton has a football team, not too many people know about it. If shoddy scholarship is a growth industry, then shouldn’t those who are footing the bill complain?
Allan:
I’m sorry if I’ve gotten Hamilton College wrong, since I’ve never heard the the place particularly. Perhaps they have a rhythmic basket-weaving team. But surely you are aware that there is a well-funded nexus of right-wing “institutions” of dubious intellectual legitimacy, amongst which are various “campus watch” organizations, and the manufactured nature of such “scandals” should be evident. The Republican governor of Colorado goes on T.V. and not only demands Churchill’s firing, but attacks academic tenure, as well. Coincidence? No, I think one should be quite wary of falling in with efforts to demonize dissent, or, more broadly, the foreclose the full spectrum of public opinion formation, the quality and efficacy of which, in the U.S.A., are already in a fairly abysmal state. As for the question of who pays, though the cost disease of American tertiary education is duly noted, that does not mean that the academic system should be reduced to an economic function, nor that either education or scholarship are construable in terms of property rights. “Questionable” judgments” are, in fact, what they should be all about.
Churchill’s screed is easy enough to pick apart: elsewhere, I described at as “leading with his chin”. Perhaps now he is being suitably gratified, if mortified, in his self-righteousness. But, for the sake of consistency, if nothing else, it is not a matter of defending the man himself, in particular. As far as I am concerned, the hermeneutical, tell-tale sign in his screed was not “little Eichmanns”, but the placement of the phrase “gimme a break.”
John,
I’m afraid I wasn’t aware of the existence of well funded nexus of right wing institutions of dubious intellectual legitimacy . There certainly are institutions that expose the excesses of the left , criticize what’s going on campuses, and biring in a speaker or two, but if that’s all that it takes to make them right wing, in some people’s eyes, then I’d say those people have a low threshold for right wingedness . As for the funding, if you compare all of them to the Ford Foundation, Tides Foundation, MoveOn, etc. just to name some that I can think of right now,, they’re out and out paupers.
My basic point was that you seem to use rhetorical questions to imply that there are right wing conspiracies instead of producing evidence for them. But we seem to agree that Churchill deserved being exposed,at least. so why argue about the bona fides of who exposed him?