A guest post by Jeff Culbreath.
Inclusiveness is best described as the notion that distinctions of sex, age, religion, culture, race, ethnicity, sexual preference/orientation, and so forth should be of no consequence in public life. More specifically, it "requires that persons of every race, ethnicity, religious background, sex, disability status, and sexual orientation participate equally in all major social activities, with nearly proportional presence and success ..." The only distinctions that matter are distinctions of merit, measured scientifically and identified by credentials that are thought to demonstrate merit. Increasingly, though, even merit is suspect, as it is assumed that all those deficient in merit have been unfairly disadvantaged. Inclusiveness is therefore another term for radical egalitarianism. To publicly oppose “inclusiveness” today is, essentially, a one-way ticket to social, political, and economic marginalization. One is lucky to get away with mere exile and irrelevance while still being able to earn a living.
James Kalb, however, is not intimidated. His latest book is broadside against the “diversity regime”, and his name is on the cover. The strength of “Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It” is that the author understands the worldview of political liberalism and the complex motivations of its acolytes. He writes as someone intimately acquainted with the highest liberal patterns of thought. The best arguments present opposing views with justice, not caricature, and Mr. Kalb works hard to find rational coherence and high motives in the ideologies of those who are actively engaged in the destruction of our civilization. At times, one wonders if he gives them too much credit. Ultimately, though, this is a book that methodically exposes the fatal weaknesses and contradictions of the “inclusiveness” project – weaknesses that have compromised its proponents from the beginning, and which in Mr. Kalb’s opinion, will prove to be its undoing.
“Against Inclusiveness” is devoted to analyzing the motives behind the drive for inclusiveness, to demonstrating its contradictions and unworkability, and to exposing its tyrannical effects in everyday life. The distinctions we are not supposed to care about – differences in religious beliefs, for example – often matter greatly, in both public and private life, and frequently enough involve matters of conscience. The inclusiveness regime is therefore necessarily dishonest, and forces everyone to go along with the dishonesty. Furthermore these traditional distinctions always surface in inconvenient ways and must be dealt with. The old code of chivalry left an ethical vacuum, and needed to be replaced by proscriptions against sexual harassment that pretend not to notice sex differences. A friendly and benevolent but, yes, somewhat paternalistic relationship between racial groups needed to be replaced with affirmative action, quotas, and militant demands for equality where no equality exists. The enforcement of unreality on any single point is always morally corrosive, and the effect has been a tyrannical denial of human nature on the part of our reigning managerial elite.
The overwhelming dominance of the inclusiveness principle in the lives of Americans is hard to overstate. With few exceptions, education in the United States from pre-school through graduate school is saturated with inclusiveness and diversity concerns. Government at all levels shares this obsession, and that is important because 58 percent of Americans are directly or indirectly dependent upon government for their livelihoods. Government contractors, for example, must embrace an ideology of inclusiveness in order to compete for government projects. Corporate America is certainly no refuge from the madness, and most major corporations try to outdo each other in their promotion of inclusiveness. A typical example of corporate allegiance to the inclusiveness regime might be the “Global Diversity and Inclusion” website of Microsoft, which commences with this statement:
“Global Diversity & Inclusion is a long-term business principle that is linked to the current and future success of Microsoft. By providing access to technology, Microsoft strives to help all people realize their potential. This means that diversity and inclusion are not just words on paper for us; they are core values and business imperatives. We promote diversity at every level within our organization and strive for inclusiveness in everything we do. We believe that employing the world’s top talent from all groups within our communities—from many backgrounds and with varied experiences—helps us to better serve our customers and gives us a competitive advantage in the global marketplace.” – Steve A. Ballmer, CEO
For Microsoft and almost every major American corporation, inclusiveness is not merely one consideration among others, but an overriding ideological commitment that is intended to transform every activity and every relationship within the organization. It is a "non-negotiable" revolutionary principle, an absolute moral code that justifies economic success, embraced and imposed with something akin to religious fervor. Inclusiveness is the “air” everyone breathes - and must breathe - in order to secure a comfortable place in mainstream American society.
The author explains that the inclusiveness regime requires the support of other seemingly unrelated dogmas. One of the most significant is that of scientism – a belief that, in the public square, the only reality that matters is that which can be verified by the methods of modern empirical science. Nevermind that the advocates of scientism are often wrong about science itself, and irrational in their selective applications of its findings. Scientism is pernicious because it excludes a priori any truths that are not discoverable by what passes for the “scientific method”. Love, beauty, tradition, culture, divine revelation, moral character, and many other intangible realities are excluded from relevance apart from a few unprincipled exceptions – patriotism, for instance – that can be manipulated into the service of inclusiveness. Because these forbidden realities are stubborn and persistent, their exclusion from public life makes necessary a total system of rewards and punishments, incentives and disincentives, etc. to prevent their having meaningful influence.
This book contains many insightful digressions into the consequences of liberalism and the various ideas that make inclusiveness tick. One memorable passage involves the phenomenon of “coolness” which takes its energy from modern man's crisis of identity resulting, in part, from inclusiveness policies:
“The liberal order is irretrievably prosaic and boring. It turns everything into a productive resource or consumption good and so effaces distinction and individuality. Its ideas are unsustaining, and it has no room for the soul. A makeshift remedy, but the best available within the liberal order, is provided by ‘coolness’. It seems trivial, but people take it much more seriously than they admit. After all, what else is there?Coolness started with jazz musicians and still has something of the spirit of the night, of escape from everyday reality, of unconditioned freedom, of improvisation without a goal. It is the liberal equivalent of the divine grace that bloweth where it listeth and none can define. It has something in common with sanctity, inasmuch as the cool are in the world but not of it. They possess a certain disengagement, so that they are independent of their surroundings and not easily flustered or excited. They are not conventional and have a sort of perfect pitch in matters of perception, expression, and practical decision.
Of course, coolness is also very different from sanctity. Sanctity is about eternity, coolness is about now. It has religious aspirations, but its hedonism and individualism mean they go nowhere. The lives of the saints have enduring interest because they point to something beyond themselves. The lives of hipsters do not. This lack of substantive content allows coolness a place in the spiritual world of liberalism, but is otherwise a radical defect. Coolness makes things a matter of style, which is why a clumsy attempt to be a saint is admirable, while a clumsy attempt to be cool is ridiculous …
At bottom, coolness is as silly as people think. It is notoriously unsustaining. Those who live by it either crash and burn, fall into gross hypocrisy (‘sell out’), or grow out of it. Within the liberal order, though, growing out of it means growing out of the only thing other than sex, drugs, celebrity, or lots and lots of money that redeems life from quotidian dullness. It means turning into a boring, conventional older person, just like Mom and Dad.”
I do have a few minor criticisms. It would have been helpful if Mr. Kalb were more interested in making ontological and hierarchical distinctions between the qualities of sex, religion, culture, race, and ethnicity. The book alternates so freely between these examples that one gets the impression (unintended, I am sure) that all traditional distinctions should be equally indulged all the time. It would also have been helpful to examine circumstances when these qualities might indeed be legitimately subordinated to a greater public good. Race in many contexts is easier to transcend than sex or religion or culture, and in the United States, due to our peculiar history and experiences with race, a public square that transcends race would seem to be a laudable goal. It would also have been immensely helpful to have more in-depth analysis of concrete situations under the inclusiveness regime. What is it like to be male, middle-aged, married with children, white, and openly Christian - with traditional attachments to family and community, strong religious values, a normal sense of humor, etc. – working for an inclusivist cultural wrecking ball like Microsoft in the ultra-liberal metro of Seattle? What are the pressures and challenges? What are the meetings like? What do the managers and memos say? What is spoken around the water cooler? What is the impact on morale? What kinds of traps are set for those who don’t conform? How must a man change to survive? Etc. In fairness, such an analysis may have been too far beyond the scope of this book.
We owe James Kalb a debt of gratitude. “Against Inclusiveness” is an intellectually formidable challenge to the core ideology of today’s managerial elite. It is also an essential book for traditional conservatives who really ought to better understand the complex motives of their adversaries. But the salient message of the book – the one thing every reader needs to take away – is that defeating the inclusiveness regime demands re-thinking our own assumptions and learning to speak a “new” language. Many of us will find that we have unwittingly bought into the same philosophical errors that bolster the emerging tyranny. It isn’t the policies that are ultimately the problem, but liberalism’s underlying false assumptions about reality. Rather than arguing for policy improvements on liberal terms, we need to present our arguments in the language of truth, goodness, and things that are real – and live our lives accordingly.
Comments (28)
I won't discuss Kalb's theorizing here because I've done that enough times, going back to before he discovered inclusiveness as the essential liberal principle. (Tolerance and freedom were Kalb's two "single" foundations of liberalism before inclusiveness; maybe there was a different single principle before them, I don't know.)
Instead, I'll answer Jeff's question, "What is it like to be male, middle-aged, married with children, white, and openly Christian - with traditional attachments to family and community, strong religious values, a normal sense of humor, etc. – working for an inclusivist cultural wrecking ball like Microsoft...?"
Not all those properties apply to me, but enough do that I think I can answer. The answer is, not that bad at all - relatively speaking. That is, relative to the soul-crushing experience of working for any large, bureaucratic corporation. I work for a different firm, whose management is liberal and inclusive, and whose culture reflects that. The inclusive stuff is relatively easy to shrug off. What's not easy to shrug off is the technocratic mindset, the assumption that everything is a means to an end, plus all the usual organizational annoyance that sociologists have been writing about for about a century, long before the Civil Rights acts of the 1960s or the inclusiveness fad of the 1990s.
So if you look at it together with the spiritual horror of existence in some large bureaucratic organization, which has been written about and talked about for over a century, all the liberal inclusiveness is just icing on the cake.
Posted by Aaron Gross | September 13, 2013 2:51 AM
"if you look at it together with the spiritual horror of existence in some large bureaucratic organization, which has been written about and talked about for over a century, all the liberal inclusiveness is just icing on the cake."
I'd say, rather, that while liberal inclusiveness was initially a somewhat superficial characteristic (in the corporate world I'd say that it was deemed hip, trendy and thus vaguely "good for business"), it has now become an inherent feature of the corporate/state "bureaucratic nightmare." You can choose to ignore it, but it's always there, often right in your face.
It does go hand-in-hand with modernity's technocratic mindset. The reduction of the Creation to mere stuff to be manipulated by man does not have any inherent mechanism by which to exclude man himself from this manipulation. Men are not created, thus "all men are created equal" defaults to "all men are equal," which enables the manipulators to work their wills with the resultant "human resources." Why should any traditional differences matter, provided they don't affect the efficiency/output of the bureaucracy? Diversity creates a facade that gives them the illusion of being "nice" while they move people around and o/w treat them like objects.
For an interesting take on the origins of the whole diversity/tolerance thing, see Christopher Shannon's A World Made Safe for Differences, in which he places the roots of it not in the 60's but in the "consensus liberalism" of the 50's Cold War-era.
Posted by Nice Marmot | September 13, 2013 7:40 AM
I know of someone who works for a corporation that has a "Pride" group and expects various units to contribute to a "diversity quilt," etc. He always has to turn down doing these things on grounds of religious conscience. He thinks it not improbable that eventually he'll be fired for not fitting in on these things, not getting with the program. He's a person with a sunny disposition and not given to worrying (like I am), so he doesn't obsess about this, but it must be stressful. I gather that his experience is somewhat different from Aaron Gross's.
Posted by Lydia | September 13, 2013 9:27 AM
He should start getting a list of witnesses together who can testify to his personality and demeanor and document both his attempts to turn it down and how they're received. The moment he's fired, slam them with a wrongful termination lawsuit.
Conservatives and libertarians may find that using the liberals' laws against them is dirty, but the left won't be defeated by playing nice. Likewise, if you have someone who is thin-skinned and very PC, you need to prepare a list of citable offenses and be prepared to go on the offensive the moment they act like they might go to HR so you can beat them there with a list of "fireable offenses."
Posted by Mike T | September 13, 2013 11:17 AM
Mike, I have no problem with bringing such a suit. Maybe Craig James should do it. He was fired merely for having the "wrong" opinion on homosexuality, as manifested by his comments _last year_ when a political candidate, not for any behavior on the job.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/sep/9/fox-sports-fires-craig-james-homophobic-comments/
Posted by Lydia | September 13, 2013 11:38 AM
@ Aaron Gross:
One's mileage may vary, of course, depending. The best some people can hope for while working for companies like Microsoft is that they might be left alone if they keep their heads down, toe the line, and quietly decline to participate in the most objectionable activities. But this is still a tragedy. There are few acceptable expressions of workplace camaraderie. Even the most harmless comments and opinions must be suppressed. One must almost disguise himself. That kind of life takes a heavy toll on individuals. And a nation of such people becomes a lonely cultural wasteland.
Posted by Jeff Culbreath | September 13, 2013 12:05 PM
I want to stress yet further something Jeff mentions briefly: Merit is actually really passe right now in the liberal worldview. The idea that various diversity requirements and anti-discrimination rules are intended to cause us to focus on merit has been out the window for a looong time--decades, really. The feminists and the race-baiters were attacking the notion of merit as covertly discriminatory several decades ago, and postmodernism as an ideology only heightened that. Criteria _obviously_ related to merit-for-the-job, such as height and strength requirements in the police and fire units, had been forcibly thrown out under non-discrimination laws. All tests which had "disparate impact" on favored groups were prima facie suspect, and employers might have to defend themselves against gimlet-eyed scrutiny in court for using such tests, even if normal, sensible people would understand quite well how the tests in question would tend to pick out desirable employees. Unfortunately, adding "disability" to the list of preferred class designations in federal law made things even more anti-merit, because of course the whole point of "discriminating" against people with a disability is that allegedly they can't do the job! But now they are to be "accommodated," with the courts deciding when and whether one has lowered or altered standards enough to show one's desire to be accommodating. Into this anti-merit mix comes "gender identity," so that one is under such laws not permitted to fire a male employee if he shows up to work fully decked out as a drag queen. It ought to be considered completely obvious that that is a matter of inappropriate employee behavior and that an employee who does that does not meet the standards of the job, but in our postmodern world that doesn't matter. What matters is affirming the "identities" of preferred mascot groups, even when those "identities" and the behaviors connected with them are obviously bizarre and disruptive.
Some conservatives and traditionalists don't like talk of merit, because, perhaps, they think that it means that you can't take on your son to work in a family business, that you have to construct a nationwide job search instead. I have to say that I have _never_ heard a meritocratic conservative (the type who opposes affirmative action) apply his principles in that way, and I rather doubt that they would.
We'd actually be a lot better off if employers were both permitted to take real merit-related issues into account and if they _did_ do so. In general I suspect that the smaller businesses, who can't afford Pride groups and all that nonsense, who actually have to focus on doing a good job at producing some needed product or service, would be happy to have all that junk off their backs and be able to focus on getting and keeping good employees. As for the larger corporations who are all on board with it, Microsoft or anybody else who thinks that being a drag queen is actually a business qualification for a job selling computers (because it "increases diversity" or some such nonsense) is living in a delusional world informed by leftist and postmodern ideology, not by any real or even any ordinary idea of merit. You know, merit for building and selling computers--for doing the job.
Posted by Lydia | September 13, 2013 12:09 PM
Lydia, I think you'll find that corporate America still tries hard to hold on to merit as a legitimate distinction, despite its opposition to inclusiveness dogma. In academia the reverence for "merit" and academic credentials is definitely still there (which I regard as a good thing in itself) but is kind of an open secret and functions as an unprincipled exception. Interestingly, too, is that meritocratic attitudes seem a tad exaggerated in egalitarian academic circles where it should otherwise logically be suppressed.
Posted by Jeff Culbreath | September 13, 2013 1:36 PM
Lydia (and Jeff C.),
I was immediately struck by how ironic the Steve Ballmer quote turns out to be, because Silicon Valley (and I assume Microsoft is really no different) is ruthlessly meritocratic:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/02/silicon-valley-employment.html
As Steve Sailer likes to joke -- diversity for thee, but not for me!
Posted by Jeffrey S. | September 13, 2013 2:12 PM
Jeff, you can't really generalize about academia, because there is a huge amount of variation among disciplines, and even within a discipline different priorities will come into play at different times. For example: You might have an English department that usually scrambles to hire women under any possible circumstances but that in a given case insists on hiring a male postmodernist over a female who is less radical in her literary methods. You might have a philosophy department that prides itself on being rigorous and meritocratic but that discriminates ideologically against prospective graduate students with degrees from Christian undergraduate institutions. You might have a math department that moans and worries about "not having enough women" but that tries to rectify this "problem" by setting up ghettoized sub-disciplines into which to attract women and keeping its ordinary sub-disciplines strongly meritocratic. And then you have completely faux disciplines like Africana Studies and Women's Studies who hire along strictly ideological lines and according to a blatant spoils system. Then there's engineering or computer science, which probably really is still just plain old meritocratic to a very large extent.
All of these are in academia, but as you can see, the variation makes generalization more or less meaningless.
Posted by Lydia | September 13, 2013 2:39 PM
I don't know that merit is old hat or anything. Almost every argument for immigration revolves around that we, meaning the US, are in a "competition" for the "best minds" or something like that. I'd have to agree with any lefties who argued against merit though. Realistically, you can't find the "best" person for a job etc. based on a few credentials and a short interview. Companies may as well just trim the hiring department, set a baseline (e.g. degree in applicable field and 1400 SAT) and then just throw a dart. If it's a McDonalds position, just hire the first person that shows up and looks sane.
In general, the inclusive stuff at corporations is something like Soviet propaganda. No one really believes it and it is mostly the product of bloated HR departments with no useful work to do. You do need to watch what you say, but that is always the case. Any large assembly of humans will have taboo things that must not be said.
Overall I think it is largely a waste of time to complain about e.g. AA. It just makes you look callous and AA has so little impact it might as well not exist. The most newsworthy instances of AA are independent initiatives that would exist regardless of government policy, such as at colleges. But opposing it has become foundational to the rightist identity.
Posted by Matt | September 13, 2013 2:47 PM
Remember, Matt, that if you go full-bore anti-merit you're going to have to apply that consistently even _after_ the person is hired and one knows a lot more about him. There are going to be plenty of things one might find out about the person after he's hired that show him to be better or worse than "throwing a dart," yet if one doesn't believe in merit, one is supposed to ignore those things. Oh, that isn't what you meant when you were "going to have to agree with any lefties who argued against merit"? Well, guess what? That's what _they_ mean. If you find out that the person whom you hired is "disabled" in some way that means he can't do the job as well as you expected, the anti-merit lefty position is that you have to bend over backwards to accommodate him. If you discover that the person whom you hired is a feminist with a chip on her shoulder who is always looking for excuses to accuse other people of harassment, and you fire her, the anti-merit lefty (if he's honest) will admit that he hopes you get sued. If you find out that the woman you hired takes way more days off than the men in comparable positions because her heart is really at home with her kids (and I applaud her heart's being at home with her kids, but it's a problem for her being focused on her job), you aren't allowed to fire her. Or, oh, how about this one? A woman applies for your job eight months pregnant. You *aren't allowed* to ask her in the interview whether she's going to take three months off when the baby is born and expect her job to be held for her. The anti-merit lefties believe that that's "discrimination on the basis of gender" and mustn't be taken into account. What about if you do try to "set a baseline" such as you suggest to streamline a hiring process, but the test you use has disparate impact on favored racial groups? Whooops! Sorry, you can't use it, unless you can prove that the specific questions on the test are closely tailored to your specific line of work. General intellectual ability tests are highly suspect.
I could go on and on with examples. You can get as cynical as you want about "whether or not it's possible to find the best person for the job," and I can always find you demands made by the lefties who scoff at merit that, if you are a reasonable person, you will admit to be unreasonable demands.
Your final paragraph, I'm sorry, is baloney sausage. I've known about behind the scenes example after example in the academic world in which real people were grossly disfavored for real jobs on the basis of Affirmative Action. And it goes on at every level--admissions to under graduate, admissions to graduate school, hiring. Go and tell the academic who can't get a job when a *blatantly* less-qualified woman is drooled over by every school around the world that AA "has so little impact it might as well not exist."
As far as whether these "initiatives" would exist regardless of government policy, think again. Many of these are government schools. Government policy is _directly_ pertinent to what these schools do. Moreover, historically it is highly dubious that we would have gotten where we are as far as voluntary AA if AA hadn't initially been pushed as government policy decades ago. The pro-AA culture was initially created by government policy.
But I'll be happy to "complain about" the kind of AA I have in mind as "voluntarily" carried out by lefties in positions of power. It's wrong then too. And I don't say that because of some desire to defend "rightist identity." Good grief.
Posted by Lydia | September 13, 2013 4:54 PM
By the way, Matt, I don't know what "companies" you have in mind, but there are _lots_ of jobs for which you really can and need to do a lot more than setting a base line and throwing a dart. If the job involves writing, you want to read a writing sample. And interviews give more information than you might think.
But above all, let's please think about places where we do in fact want and need high quality. You can take _your_ kids to a doctor who got through med school either a) boosted by Affirmative Action at step after step or b) chosen for some career step by the "hey, set a baseline and throw a dart" method. I'd prefer not to.
Posted by Lydia | September 13, 2013 7:31 PM
What you have noticed here, Matt, is the effect of wrecking merit over decades in the schools, where 60 years ago the schools were the first stage winnowing process for who can do the job. By and large, other than a few very big name universities, a college B.A. in X discipline doesn't much tell a prospective hiring company whether you are any good at a job because of 2 things: book learning often does not transfer over to practical ability, and there is no way to know whether there is any book learning behind the degree.
When I was getting my math degree, my university school newspaper (run by students, of course) got totally fed up with the fact that graduating college students couldn't write properly. Nobody paid any attention to their editorials about the problem. So round about April one year, they printed a letter to the editor from a graduating senior, which proved the point. There were basic errors in noun-verb agreement and capitalization, run-on sentences, and so on. And not just a couple, in 500 words there were over a dozen basic errors plus stilted style and poor vocabulary. And the math department of the university was ready to tear its hair out (if it still had any) over the fact that some of the schools in this supposedly high-quality university had garbage for basic graduation requirements: the fine arts school allowed Math 101 to fulfill the entirety of their math requirement, and Math 101 was remedial 7th-8th grade math, not even algebra. And this was decades ago.
So in effect employers cannot look at a high school or college diploma and tell whether it is an empty piece of paper. Given that, yes it is somewhat true that hiring on the basis of paper credentials is a bit of a lottery.
But a few years into actual productive service in a job, that ceases to be the case. At that point, an employer really knows if someone has the basic knowledge, is smart enough, is hard-working, etc. At least, that's the case until the HR people get their hands on records and do the same job on muddling things that they already did to the schools. To the point where now the very job descriptions in befuddled organizations don't even clearly represent what one expects of people serving in that job. If you stick to employers too small to have an administrative staff just for hiring and identifying job descriptions and diversity policies, though, they can tell the difference between quality employees and dross in their own ranks. It's a little more difficult from inflated resumes.
Companies may as well just trim the hiring department
Well sure. Get rid of all the wacky HR "diversity" pushers. And the AA pushers too.
Well, I think you aren't noticing it because the effects are pandemic now. But I'll make you a deal: I won't bother to complain about it in so-called "private" initiatives such as colleges, if you first get rid of all the government mandates forced on every one of these same private entities (including all the colleges and universities) that they didn't want and would (initially) rather have done without that are tied up with forced equality of outcome. Start with Title IX.
Posted by Tony | September 13, 2013 8:08 PM
Lydia, to those really apt remarks I'd just add that to the extent that AA programs have been noticeably weakened, at least in higher education, it is only because of ardent opposition and legal activism on the part of "rightists." Matt's comment reminds me of those anti-anti-communists who, once 50 years of desperate Cold War struggle was over, smugly declared, "See? I told you all those supposed Communists were nothing to worry about."
Of course, I reject also the anti-empirical, downright lunatic premise that AA is practically non-existent. It's one of those things that people say because they know nobody can summon the will to go about refuting it. And as for its being such a critical part of "rightist identity," it's actually less a part of what it means to be conservative than at any time since the 1970's. It is perfectly possible to be a squish on AA and remain a "rightist" in good standing, and anybody who says differently obviously just doesn't read much of what passes for conservative material these days.
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | September 14, 2013 10:16 AM
I think opposition to AA is mostly a neoconservative position now (which is not to say that all neocons oppose it). To me, it's mostly exemplified by Ward Connerly, a neocon. The marginal right, or the pixel-based right, or whatever you call it - Steve Sailer, Jared Taylor, Richard Spencer, et al. - is also anti-AA, of course, but I don't think they're too interested in that or in any other boring, real-life policy issue, except for immigration.
Whatever the overall effects of AA - and I think Matt might be right, that the effect isn't all that strong, relatively speaking - the symbolism is huge. Opposition to AA is one of the few "pro-white" positions that white people can take that's still fairly respectable among other whites. I put "pro-white" in quotes because AA actually benefits lots of white people (women) at the expense of other white people (men) but nevertheless, AA is perceived as unequivocally anti-white. You'll get called a racist plenty of times if you oppose AA, but most white people won't take that seriously. So opposition to AA is important, symbolically, as a stalking horse for pro-white politics in general.
Posted by Aaron Gross | September 15, 2013 1:00 AM
Actually, I think a tremendous amount of mileage can be gotten out of the fact that many advocates of 'scientism' actually are loathe to rely on science for many of their claims.
In fact, I think it's been a mistake to accuse various people (the Cult of Gnu, etc) of 'being beholden to science' or 'liking science too much' or the like. They don't. They don't even care about it very much half the time. They like the authority of science - but who doesn't? Actual science, complete with its limitations, is uninteresting. And is sometimes threatening. (See Lysenkoism in the 'scientific' soviet regime.)
Posted by Crude | September 15, 2013 3:12 AM
and I think Matt might be right, that the effect isn't all that strong, relatively speaking - the symbolism is huge.
Aaron, the effect is significant whether it is strong or weak (and since "strong" and "weak" are relative to the eye of the beholder, your weak could be what someone else means by strong). And in any case, if the symbolism is huge, it is only huge in the eyes of those who oppose AA because it is also huge in those who benefit by it.
Opposition to AA is one of the few "pro-white" positions that white people can take that's still fairly respectable among other whites. I put "pro-white" in quotes...ut nevertheless, AA is perceived as unequivocally anti-white.
I think you missed the point. Yes, "pro-white" should be in quotes, but not for the reason you state. It is because the people who oppose AA (some of them blacks, please note) do so not because of the COLOR that AA is taken to promote, but because AA is used as the battering ram on a multitude of facets, all of which are used to attack the prior "white establishment" model of good. Can't score very well on the SAT? Well, then redefine the former basis for "very well" as a "white establishment" criterion, and change the SAT so that it no longer measures that. Can't get onto a ball team? Well, redefine excellence in sport as an "establishment" criterion, and reset the rules, or make new teams for mediocre players. Can't survive the physical fitness test of the fire department? Redefine the former test as a "white establishment" test and get rid of the weight element of it. Not all of the criteria are related to whiteness, not at all. But it is the whiteness of the white establishment reach of the criteria that make the old criteria easily defeated, even when the criteria are eminently justifiable and not in the least related to race.
Just listen to the extent of absolute outrage at black liberals who hear about the white (blond) South African who puts on his US college application that he is "African", and you will see that AA is both significant and that the symbolism is very strong indeed for those who benefit by it.
Posted by Tony | September 15, 2013 12:07 PM
I think that Tony's remark that the effects of AA are "pandemic" was right on the money. This is _especially_ evident when it comes to female-over-male AA, because of course women constitute 1/2 of the population, so it gets really noticeable really fast when you're preferring women over men. Pro-female AA has transformed the entire culture of the United States in so many area--police departments, the military, higher education, the corporate world. The list never ends. The feminized workplace, the feminized educational establishment, the sexual harassment racket. The men who don't even want to bother to go to college, the difficulty men have getting jobs. It's unending. It's huge. To say that the effects are relatively small or weak is simply laughable.
The entire SAT has been rewritten in no small part to try to minimize the male-female gap on certain sections.
And that's not even discussing the impact of racial AA.
Posted by Lydia | September 15, 2013 3:20 PM
But above all, let's please think about places where we do in fact want and need high quality. You can take _your_ kids to a doctor who got through med school either a) boosted by Affirmative Action at step after step or b) chosen for some career step by the "hey, set a baseline and throw a dart" method. I'd prefer not to.
His example was a 1400 SAT, which is certainly indicates competence in general mental ability; a 32 on the MCAT, for instance, is a nice threshold of competence . Surely, not much competence is required for most menial positions, thus his comment that the "first person that shows up and looks sane" would suffice is also accurate.
Posted by Black_Rose | September 16, 2013 2:07 AM
There is a growing desire on the left to apply Title IX to the hiring of science and engineering faculties since they are notoriously short on female membership. Parts of the Obama Administration have even mulled the idea which should suffice to prove that this is not a fringe political idea with minimal support.
My company has a program that is explicitly female-only and designed to give women training to help them fast track into senior management positions. Given our size and what I know of other employers in the region our size, this is fairly normal. Apparently, it doesn't exist or is so isolated as to be worthless to talk about. Maybe it's just callous to question why college-educated women (a college education is a hard requirement to get in the door) need any more privilege than has been thrown at them for about 17 years of education.
Posted by Mike T | September 16, 2013 8:25 AM
Sorry, BR, I want the doctor to have had to earn his spurs at every level where that's relevant to becoming a doctor, not just on the MCAT. What if he got a 32 on the MCAT and got all D's in med school? And then was eased into graduation and getting his MD for AA reasons? And then got a job with my local family practice because somebody "threw a dart"? Not a priori likely, but I don't want the doctor to succeed in becoming a doctor by way of a priori predictions but by actually, y'know, succeeding.
Mike T., exactly. Comments about the "minor" and "unnoticeable" nature of AA are so easily refuted by examples of female AA even without using examples of racial AA.
Posted by Lydia | September 16, 2013 8:31 AM
Apparently we are supposed to reward Godzilla for leveling Tokyo.
Posted by Scott W. | September 16, 2013 8:34 AM
MikeT, my company also explicitly encourages female managers to identify female subordinates to take on as proteges, so as to groom them for management. They eagerly do so, and this is not at all uncommon in my industry, which operates cheek-to-jowl with the federal government. Young, childless women fresh from college frequently--frequently--supplant men in their late 20s and early 30s with families to support as a result of this ridiculous AA spoils system. The idea that this is rare, or victimless, is nonsense just from the standpoint of common experience.
All of that to one side, I would concur with Jeff that Kalb's work (I've not yet read Against Inclusiveness, though it's in the queue on my nightstand) could benefit from more concrete examples. An abstractness pervades his prose that can make it seem that the problems under examination are still mainly theoretical. He says that education is increasingly propagandistic, and this is true, but the liberal rejoinder is that "it was ever thus," and he needs to show how that isn't so. Still, I do not get the impression that he aims to convert the committed liberal so much as expostulate for the benefit of people already open to his ideas. That's fine, but not everybody gets the same thrill from applying on his own the connections Kalb is working out.
Posted by Sage McLaughlin | September 16, 2013 10:24 AM
I am aware of certain practices by certain employers in this line of work that could be construed as official discrimination because they are so obsessively "pro-woman" and "pro-gay." I like to say that what makes being a white, heterosexual male awesome is that I'm part of a privileged minority that society expects to act like a full adult.
Posted by Mike T | September 16, 2013 11:30 AM
This is very timely for me. I work for a mid 200's Fortune 500 company. Here are some of my thoughts on this from a man who fits Jeff’s question pretty to the letter.
I just took a required course on this kind of topic.
The only other required courses we have to take are yearly courses on data security, copyright / trademark course and a course on our business practices from an ethical perspective - no bribes and no favoritism. We are global (All of Asia - huge outsourced presence in India, all of Europe, North America and South America).I've only worked in the US though about a third of my team at any given time is usually in India.
Interestingly, this is the only course I've ever had that was presented by an external training firm and we do a lot of in house training. That difference alone tells me something.
The course was about culture and the way it impacts out judgments. So it was more focused on the idea that differences in culture exist and how we work through those differences in our daily business. It even made fun (a bit) of what they considered a less sophisticated view where cultures that aren't one's own are considered superior in some ways - the Dances with Wolves idealization of the North American Indian. This course was clearly recognizing that cultures and outlook do matter and it boiled down to avoiding conclusion jumping and giving people the benefit of the doubt until more information is gained. In the case of an apparent conflict situation, figure out what's really going on. Is it a difference of cultural perception? If so, find the common values and work on resolution through those.
They made a case that diversity is increasing, that businesses find it profitable and (unspoken) inclusivity is as inevitable as the sunrise - who knows where those studies come from or what the assumptions were. Of course, left unspoken but clearly implied, is the value of one culture's outlook over another's. Say the Nazis or the Soviets were still important world views, one wonders if these courses would still be teaching that one needs to understand where they are coming from. (The overall liberal variant of Lydia’s “choice consuming itself.”)
This course does have an undertone of cultural equivalence just by leaving out that discussion. And in fact now that I think of it, that undertone probably conflicts with the ethics course we take - we are not to "understand" or "suspend judgement" that bribery works in so many parts of the world. We are to simply turn off our relationships with folks who work that way.
We watched two videos that were meant to demonstrate how deeply our values drive our judgements. I don't think anyone questions this, but they subtley managed by the examples they used to make us wonder about the values we use. The lesson was really - find out what is going on before jumping to conclusions. But the way they went about it made us actually question our values.
They showed us a scene without words or sounds where we jumped to a conclusion based on typical American semi-liberal values and then told us the scene represented something completely different based on the culture in which those actions had meaning.
It subtly made one question one's own values. (This wasn't the scene, but imagine Catholic priesthood ordination where one sees youngish men coming in and laying flat on their stomachs on the ground in front of a man clearly superior. Imagine that scene taken out of the Cathedral. Imagine the reaction to this by the typical American Homer Simpson. Repulsion.)
What I mean is that they could have demonstrated the depth of our assumptions about a given situation and the need to simply suspend them for a few minutes to find out what is actually going on (whether to confirm or not) with a different scene. But they chose a specific scene that gets us to question the value of our own values.
Except for that bit of subversion (and one more scene situation that demonstrated racial bias), the class was about as benign as one could get given that inclusivity is valued today.
Ultimately, it's the telling of the old tale not to jump to conclusions. But it's told within the diversity and inclusion framework. And by giving that twist to it this kind of thing becomes subversive of the cultural norms. Unless one really delves into the presentation and the examples used, it's going to leave one with the impression of cultural relativity along with the more surface level point of conclusion jumping being bad.
Posted by Tim H | September 21, 2013 12:12 PM
Like Robert Bork's "Slouching Toward Gomorrah" (1996), this book is a highly polarizing jeremiad against modern liberalism. Sometime author James Kalb hits the mark, especially against the Great God of Diversity and Inclusion. All too often, however, he sounds like a weirdly dyspeptic and despotic nanny wagging his finger against any and all expressions of individuality. As Kalb's reactionary traditionalist Catholic sensibility would have it, self-expression constitutes a revolt against God.
Speak for yourself, Mr. Kalb, but I happen to despise that worldview. If his vision were to prevail, we will have laid the groundwork for a modern police state, subsuming the sense of worth of every man and woman under a group of narrow prelates whose "scholarship" in practice is far more a product of self-interested power-seeking than they would have us believe. It would be a tyranny far more real, and inescapable, than the "tyranny" of free choice that we enjoy in a market-oriented society. No thanks.
Posted by Carl | April 19, 2014 12:40 AM
Contemporary liberalism is not liberalism at all but simply social democracy, a form of socialism. Classical liberalism is liberalism and is a flawed ideology as is socialism and it antithetical to human nature. Modern, contemporary liberalism/social democracy is a thoroughly corrupt ideology that can not with stand the impending crisis that it itself has created.
Liberalism has brought western civilization to the brink of moral and economic bankruptcy. When the collapse comes it will be sudden and swift with many people unable to cope.
The world economy will collapse due to massive debt arising from governments and individuals, Russia and the cult of Islam will bring about a regional nuclear war in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Indian sub-continent. Islam will be consumed by its own inherent evil, and the People's Republic of China will invade the Middle East and North Africa to take possession of the oil fields because they need a secure energy source to keep themselves going.
The west will unite to fight China in North Africa and the Middle East to prevent them from controlling its resources. The Chinese will be defeated at a great cost in human lives.
La Pama in the Canary Islands will explode and slide into the ocean causing a massive tsunami to hit Africa, Spain, Britain, Ireland, Iceland, and North and South America. The detonation of this volcano will send seismic shock waves through the lithosphere triggering earth quakes around the world particularly along the mid-Atlantic ridge. This leads to the detonation of the ice capped volcano in Iceland vaporizing the ice into high temperature steam which in turn pulverizes the volcanic ash mixed with it. The resulting pulverized volcanic ash will blanket the northern hemisphere and blot out the sun for three days of darkness.
Posted by John Roesch | October 19, 2014 4:27 PM