This is the year that broke the truth. This is the year when millions of Americans — and not just your political opponents — seemed impervious to evidence, willing to believe the most outlandish things if it suited their biases, and eager to develop fervid animosities based on crude stereotypes.
The question is, who are these people who are impervious to evidence, believing in outlandish things which appeal to their biases and eager to develop fervid animosities based on crude stereotypes. Sure sounds like the critical theory left who conduct the politics of personal destruction, deplatform anybody who disagrees, are happy to suppress any diversity of opinion, still entertain the Russian conspiracy as a viable theory of the facts, disbelieve in heritability of various traits, and still refuse to accept that there is any variability between individuals and therefore any differential in outcomes must be system bias rather than variation on capabilities, behaviors, and objectives.
Since it is David "Critical Theory Establishment Class" Brooks, it seems pretty obvious he is not talking about them, but the indictment doesn't really match anyone else. Talk about willful blindness.
So many of our hopes are based on the idea that the key to change is education.
We have known for years that persuasion is much more than simple education and presentation of facts. All the way back some 2,500 years ago when we formalized rhetoric as the means to persuade. Nobody paying attention had hopes based on simple education or fact presentation.
But this was the year that showed that our models for how we change minds or change behavior are deeply flawed.
It turns out that if you tell someone their facts are wrong, you don’t usually win them over; you just entrench false belief.
Again, how unaware is Brooks to even advance this as being true? And are the beliefs really false? If, at the beginning of the pandemic you had a firm conviction that masking was an integral part of slowing the spread of the disease or, alternatively, you had a passionated conviction that masking was empirically irrelevant, both positions have been supported by the same experts at different points in the past nine months. We have to at least get to some sort of relevant and credentialed claim which is widely supported and for which there is little contra-evidence before we can start talking glibly about false beliefs.
Brooks then goes after the failure of racial diversity training to make any empirical difference in behaviors and outcomes. Given the comprehensive and repeated failure to demonstrate any positive or useful outcome to diversity training, one might question the assumption that there is a real problem to be solved. Not Brooks.
Implicit bias is absolutely real. The problem is that courses to reduce its effects don’t seem to work.
Well . . . possibly. But if you keep taking a treatment for a disease and nothing happens, perhaps the problem is not the treatment but that the disease, as diagnosed, isn't real.
There is plenty of evidence that people have varied objectives, life goals, assessments of facts and weighting of factors, differential risk assumptions, different diagnoses of causersal mechanisms, different trade-off decisions, different formulations of desirable solutions sets, etc. Of course people will make different decisions about whom they wish to work to solve a problem. People want to collaborate with like minded individuals.
The Mandarin Class and Critical Theory devotees really want America to be a racist nation and the America of liberty and human universalism and enlightenment values keeps refuting them. Keeps refuting Brooks. Diversity training doesn't work because it is solving the wrong problem. Solving an imaginary problem.
People aren't biased owing to race per se, they are biased based on epistemic variances.
The cognitive dissonance outs the authoritarianism of the Brooks of the world.
Finally, our training model of “teaching people to be good” is based on the illusion that you can change people’s minds and behaviors by presenting them with new information and new thoughts. If this were generally so, moral philosophers would behave better than the rest of us. They don’t.
People change when they are put in new environments, in permanent relationship with diverse groups of people. Their embodied minds adapt to the environments in a million different ways we will never understand or be able to plan. Decades ago, the social psychologist Gordon Allport wrote about the contact hypothesis, that doing life together with people of other groups can reduce prejudice and change minds. It’s how new emotional bonds are formed, how new conceptions of who is “us” and who is “them” come into being.
The superficial way to change minds and behavior doesn’t seem to work, to bridge either racial, partisan or class lines. Real change seems to involve putting bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood. That’s national service programs. That’s residential integration programs across all lines of difference. That’s workplace diversity, equity and inclusion — permanent physical integration, not training.
This points to a more fundamental vision of social change, but it is a hard-won lesson from a bitterly divisive year.
Regardless of the huge diversity of goals and values and behaviors and abilities, etc., Brooks wants to abandon empiricism, abandon human universalism, abandon personal freedom and force a racist model where the Mandarin Class can force citizens to serve at the will of the authoritarian dictatorship to solve a problem which does not exist.
Brooks wants to put "bodies from different groups in the same room, on the same team and in the same neighborhood" without realizing that that happens all the time among free people pursuing shared goals. Americans work across racial, ethnic, gender, religious, class lines where it is mutually beneficial. And we do it well and are pleased when it is successful.
It is only the Critical Theory Mandarin Class who are upset when this happens based on free people making free choices.
No comments:
Post a Comment