- Pamela Paul in NYT distinguishes progressive from liberals; the answer is, the former are driving cancel culture from the left;
- How I’ve changed my mind about threats from the right, vs. those from the left;
- Jerry Coyne, who follows university politics and their various policy statements emphasizing inclusion over empirical merit, seems to agree.
Today I’m fascinated by the topic of threats from the left. In the big picture, as civilization progresses, it’s usually the right that protests; being conservative, they want to preserve what they think of as the best of the past, and reject change; they presume that their traditions, especially the religious ones, are the only true way to live in the world. Meanwhile, through the discoveries about the reality of the enormous universe we live in, and the clear genetic evidence that humanity did not arise from a single couple a mere 6000 years ago, those religious myths have been discredited. And so the conservatives tend to reject the centuries of advancement in science and technology, preferring their myths, all the while taking advantage of those centuries of progress when it suits them.
Now, conservatives have long criticized the left as being beholden to “identity politics.” Prioritizing identity — being black, gay, or whatever — over our commonality as members of a larger society. E pluribus unum.
Yet, humans have tribal instincts. It accounts for all the political and religious tribes on the right. Yet in recent years, it seems that those instincts are also apparent on the left. This has been the subject of articles and books about the “cancel culture” — though as I’ve said, the right is apt to cancel certain entire subjects, and classes of people, while the left’s cancel culture typically targets individual speakers and professors.
So — here’s the latest thing I’ve changed my mind about — I’m willing to admit there are forces on the left that are against democracy, free speech, progress, and so on, as well as those on the right.
Here’s the article that precipitated these thoughts.
NY Times, Pamela Paul, Opinion, 16 Nov 2023: Progressives Aren’t Liberal
She acknowledges that, as I’ve thought, the terms progressive and liberal were roughly synonymous. So I sat down to read this, wondering, what does she see the difference is? The answer is:
… [L]iberal values, many of them products of the Enlightenment, include individual liberty, freedom of speech, scientific inquiry, separation of church and state, due process, racial equality, women’s rights, human rights and democracy.
Whereas…
Whereas liberals hold to a vision of racial integration, progressives have increasingly supported forms of racial distinction and separation, and demanded equity in outcome rather than equality of opportunity. Whereas most liberals want to advance equality between the sexes, many progressives seem fixated on reframing gender stereotypes as “gender identity” and denying sex differences wherever they confer rights or protections expressly for women. And whereas liberals tend to aspire toward a universalist ideal, in which diverse people come together across shared interests, progressives seem increasingly wedded to an identitarian approach that emphasizes tribalism over the attainment of common ground.
More reactionary still is the repressive nature of progressive ideals around civil liberties. It is progressives — not liberals — who argue that “speech is violence” and that words cause harm. These values are the driving force behind progressive efforts to shut down public discourse, disrupt speeches, tear down posters, censor students and deplatform those with whom they disagree.
And how this distinction has become more apparent in the reaction to the Hamas/Israel war in the middle east. I’m not going to get in to that. But I will note that these themes have become more apparent in my recent reading. I read the Lukianoff/Haidt book The Codding of the American Mind, and I have Lukianoff’s newest book, The Cancelling of the American Mind on hand.
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So is “progressive” really the term now to be associated for this left-wing version of “cancel culture”? Well, here’s Jerry Coyne, today, who as an academic pays close attention to various university policies.
Jerry Coyne, 17 Nov 2023: Queensland University of Technology completely ditches merit-based hiring, favoring gender, “looks”, and personality
This gem of a story is about how one Aussie university went to the logical endpoint of the diversity-trumps-merit controversy: Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane is apparently about to hire solely on the basis of diversity, and has erased any mention of the word “merit” in its hiring policy. This of course is ridiculous, intolerable, and a recipe for academic disaster (see our big article, “In defense of merit in science“). But it’s very “progressive”!
I don’t follow university politics here at all, as Coyne does, but this quote links a big article that Coyne contributed to, In Defense of Merit in Science, published back in April, that defends merit over various diversity requirements. It was much talked about, earlier this year.
