Pandora Opens the Box

 

Helen Andrews has written an article for Compact Magazine arguing that “cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field.”

“Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization.” 

“Wokeness is not a new ideology, an outgrowth of Marxism, or a result of post-Obama disillusionment. It is simply feminine patterns of behavior applied to institutions where women were few in number until recently.” 

“Everything you think of as wokeness involves prioritizing the feminine over the masculine: empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition.”

I would add an essential problem: women are mentally inclined to always see the trees, not the forest. As a result, they easily and soon stray from the mission. This explains why so many businesses recently seem to be straying from their core mission for the sake of wokeness: whether that mission is to sell beer, or movie tickets, or restaurant ambiance, or hold sporting events.

Once pointed out, this correlation seems obvious. Over the past few generations, women have come to dominate a number of fields and professions, and this has corresponded closely to these fields becoming “woke” and ceasing to perform their intended functions. 

Where do women dominate? HR departments. Public schools. Journalism and the media. Advertising. Now academia, especially the humanities and social sciences. And this corresponds perfectly with the centres of cancel culture and errant wokery.

Women have most recently begun to dominate the legal and medical professions. As these too lose their functionality and trustworthiness, civilization seems liable to collapse. “The rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”

Our ancestors warned us of this; no doubt it was tried before, in places and at times in the distant past. A warning was surely embedded in the legends of Pandora, of Eve, of Psyche, of Lemnos and the gnostic Sophia. The Buddha warned that allowing Buddhist nuns would halve the lifespan of the dharma.

Is there anything we can do, at this late stage, to pull back from this? Not to mention feminism’s role in our collapsing demographics?

Andrews proposes banning affirmative action, and allowing employers to hire once again on merit. 

I fear she is too optimistic. When women are already in control of the HR departments, can they be counted on to hire on merit? When any profession is dominated by women, the hiring process is no remedy.

We urgently need affirmative action—requiring the hiring and promotion of men.

Why Canada Is Broken?

 

This article makes an interesting case that affirmative action is why systems no longer seem to work as well as they used to; why you can't get a passport, a doctor, a decent book or movie, or an affordable house, any longer.

And why wouldn't it be so?

Affirmative Action in College Admissions Ruled Illegal in US

 

Great news. Let's hope that, as usual, little brother follows big brother's example.

https://youtu.be/5LK0GoZf5LU

There Is No "Good" Discrimination

My Liberal friend Xerxes writes that he rarely hears protests against “affirmative action” any longer.

That may be so. But it remains a grave injustice. He takes this instead as a sign of progress.

“Affirmative action” is a euphemism. The words “affirmative action” literally mean almost nothing; or might mean anything. Who can be against “affirmative action”? Like all euphemisms, it seeks to conceal an ugly reality. It is used as code for, literally, discrimination on the basis of sex or race. Discrimination on the basis of sex or race is always wrong.

Of course, Xerxes would justify it as “righting a previous wrong.” This is untrue. You might pretend it is significant and meaningful that someone else with the same skin tone or of the same sex as the person you are favouring now was discriminated against somewhere else in the past. But that is irrelevant. A skin color is not a person. Obviously, it is not the same person, and the person you are discriminating against now had nothing to do with the original discrimination. To argue “I am told a Jew once robbed one of my ancestors; so I have the right to take from any Jew now as a result” is extreme racism.

It is not justice to endlessly repeat a wrong with new people; a million more wrongs can never make one right. Each compounds the injustice.

And there are futher problems. Any claim of discrimination in the past is generally at least debatable, and should remain open to debate. How certain are we of our sources? Yet the present discrimination, by contrast, is beyond question; it is systematic, written in law, and openly professed. There is nothing we can really do about apparent discrimination in the past, at least past the death of the ones discriminated against. But we can end discrimination now. AS US Chief Justice Roberts put it, “The bes way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating.”

Historically, whenever and wherever discrimination has been widespread, it is always justified as “reverse discrimination,” exactly as is “affirmative action” now; there is nothing novel about this discrimination, and there is no special category of “reverse discrimination.” It is always advertised as helping out some group that has been previously oppressed. That, for example, was the standard justification for discriminating against Jews for generations. The Jews, after all, controlled all the banks and secretly owned everything, right? They were an international power conspiracy. Just like “Anglo cis males” supposedly are today.

That was also the standard justification for Jim Crow laws in the South: it was a matter of oppressed poor Southerners trying to protect their rights and their culture against an onslaught by the rich and powerful Northern carpetbaggers, who had crushed them militarily. If the main target in practice was local blacks, it was because they were feared as a fifth column. Almost exactly the same situation led to apartheid in South Africa. The poor Boers had been crushed militarily by the mighty British, denied their freedom, even herded into concentration camps. They naturally feared the African blacks as weapons of the oppressor to be used against them.

And so too with all the awful genocides in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Korea: all in the name of defending the poor oppressed proletariat from the rapacious rich and powerful.

On top of all that, it is almost self-evident that any government-enforced or legally-mandated or even strongly socially-enforced discrimination like “affirmative action” will automatically discriminate in favour of those already socially favoured, and against those already discriminated against. Is social pressure likely to pull two ways at once?

So any new social discrimination, however justified, will always make the existing discrimination worse, never better. But it is really insane to even have to point this out. Few propositions come closer to being self-evident.

Boys 2 Men

Even though I went to an all-boys Catholic grade school, I did not get a male teacher until grade 6, my last year.

Every one of us loved Mr. Moore. He was like a revelation.

And it makes me wonder; was it all about Mr. Moore, or was it at least in part about having a male teacher?

Later, in high school and in university, there were more men. And my favourite teachers were always men. Female teachers might get the job done—or might not—but were never inspiring.

We make quite a fuss about the need for “role models.” So we insist that black kids have to have black teachers, and aboriginal kids are supposed to have aboriginal teachers, and so forth.

And yet we leave 50% of our students pretty much without role models at a young age.

I am doubtful whether it matters in the case of something so trivial as skin colour. But it surely does in the case of sex. Men and women are systematically different, not just physically, but mentally. And a boy does NOT want to act like or model himself after a woman.

If ever there was a place where affirmative action was called for, it is here.

Discrimination at University of Manitoba

Bastion of white privilege.

A recently dismissed sessional instructor at the University of Manitoba has written a piece in the campus graduate student magazine protesting the system of student evaluations that caused her not to be renewed, on the grounds that it is unfair to minority professors.

Her evidence is that studies show “minority faculty often receive significantly lower and more negative evaluations in comparison with their white counterparts.”

Given that no studies are clearly cited, we need not accept that claim. There is a reason why academic standards require clear references and footnotes. Lose that, and anyone can say anything. The word “often” renders it ambiguous in any case—it does not necessarily mean more often than “white” instructors.

But let us assume that is so. It does not demonstrate that said minorities are being discriminated against because of their ethnicity. It might equally demonstrate that the current regime of affirmative action in hiring and promoting is, predictably enough, producing an inferior product. Why would it not, when you hire not on the basis of merit, but of other irrelevant factor like genitalia or skin colour? Merit must suffer, and especially among those of the preferred skin colour. It will correspondingly rise in those groups discriminated against—here, the “whites.”

Odd, though, that this could be a consideration for someone named Sardana Nikolaeva. Isn’t that an Eastern European name? Yet she is implicitly claiming here to be non-white. If Eastern Europeans are not white, who is? Does the term mean anything? Is there really a general prejudice toward Eastern Europeans in Canada?

Indeed, it seems quite a stretch for her to claim she got her--by her own account--universally negative evaluation sheerly because of her supposed visible minority status. Especially since she demonstrates the truth of the complaints in this very essay. Among the intolerable student comments she quotes are, ”she had an agenda,” ”she made me feel ashamed that I was white,” “she hates Canada and our culture,” as if they could not possibly be true. But her next paragraph begins, “As any predominantly white neo-liberal educational institution, the University of Manitoba functions within the politics of ignorance.” Is she not saying that any “white” institution is ipso facto “ignorant”? Would that not include Canada?

The seminar she taught, she explains, “revolved around the topics of racism and discrimination, white privilege, problematic aspects of multiculturalism, and experiences of marginalized communities in Canada.” Doesn’t sound like she has any political agenda, there, does it?

You might also note that much of what she writes is rather difficult to make plain sense of. It is not just the illogical assumption that disparity of outcome must prove discrimination, or her arbitrary concept of “white.” It is sentences like this: “The biased attitudes expressed in student evaluations of minority faculty are particularly problematic as they contribute to already existing practices of discrimination, marginalization, and lack of support from peer faculty and administrators in predominantly white campuses.” That is unnecessarily obscure. Why not “Biased student evaluations add to existing discrimination from colleagues and administrators.” An inability to express thoughts clearly is the most basic sort of incompetence in an instructor.

Anyone who has been reading the news for the past twenty or thirty years, too, must be surprised by the claim made here that college campuses generally are hotbeds of anti-minority and anti-female sentiment. The reverse is the obvious case.

It is simply so that, in a democracy, it is improbable if not impossible to see the government intervene to protect any genuinely oppressed minority from general discrimination. If there really is general discrimination, such measures could not pass the bar of majority approval, pretty much by definition.

It follows that any intervention by the state or by state institutions like public universities in favour of one group over another will always be a case of increasing an advantage already bestowed upon that group by common prejudice.

Black like me...

We can therefore expect student evaluations, in fact, to already be biased in favour of, not against, “visible minority” instructors. But this is not enough. Advantaged groups always expect more advantage. The truly oppressed learn through experience that they must remain silent.

But this, in the end, does not logically apply to an instructor with an Eastern European name. Here, the demand for special rights for preferred minorities is clearly only a cover, an alibi, for discarding the idea of student evaluation of professors in general. The peons of the unwashed majority must be understood to be prejudiced and incompetent, and kept in their place.

Yet the very idea that the customer should have no say in his own interest would be deeply shocking any other context than education. Why should we not choose our own professors, just as we choose our own doctors, lawyers, repairmen, or legislators? Even if the student did not have that natural and inalienable human right, isn’t he, as a purely practical matter, in a better position than anyone else to evaluate the quality of instruction?

In the end, the essay demonstrates the frightening totalitarian tendencies of the modern academy.

Jim Crow Flies Again

In 1947, baseball integrated. The Brooklyn Dodgers fielded the first black player, Jackie Robinson, since the 19th century.

By 1953, there were fewer black professional baseball players than there had ever been.

This is the often overlooked aspect of the process of desegregation. The Negro Leagues, one of the most successful black-owned businesses in America, collapsed within a few years. Today, after over seventy years of integration, there are fewer blacks playing major league baseball then their proportion of the population.

So, did integration really help or harm black Americans?

People generally overlook the fact that segregation or discrimination cannot really harm a minority so long as you have a free market.

When the major leagues refused to hire blacks, as they did, beginning in the post-Reconstruction era, this merely created a healthy niche market for black baseball. Once the major leagues let in blacks, this market collapsed; black spectators quickly switched to the same league as everybody else, where they could see the best white as well as the best black players.

Integration was a net gain for the consumer, not for blacks specifically.

So it must be in any business. If one employer arbitrarily bases his hiring decisions on race or sex instead of on ability and application, he is voluntarily waiving a business advantage to any potential competitor. That gap, over time, is sure to be filled.

The only way this cannot be so is if there is a monopoly in that area of the market, or if government gets involved. Only government can pass laws and regulations binding on everyone.

This was the problem with "Jim Crow" laws in the US South – they legally required discrimination. All that as needed to end that injustice was to rescind all such laws.

Instead, we doubled down. Governments everywhere passed laws making it illegal for private businesses and private individuals to discriminate. Such laws could add nothing to the fight for equality. The free market would have taken care of that. At the same time, they violated the fundamental human right to freedom of association, which is no small matter. They violated property rights, which is almost as destructive.

Worse, not content with this, governments moved swiftly to reintroduce racial discrimination, with "affirmative action." Such laws can do nothing to prevent discrimination against the one group; Negro Leagues would just have arisen. At the same time, they require real discrimination against the other.

Jim Crow lives. He works for the government.

University of Manitobe Fac ulty of Education Reserves Almost Half of New Slots for Minorities

University of Manitoba

A reader alerts me to a piece by Peter Shawn Taylor in the National Post regarding the University of Manitoba faculty of education. Beginning next year, the school will admit 45% of students not on their academic record, but on the basis of minority quotas.

This is profoundly discriminatory, but not really new. I talked to Queen's faculty of education when I graduated with my BA, and was shocked to discover that my high marks mattered nothing to them. The academic entrance qualification then, at a posh university like Queen's, was exactly what it is now at the U of M: a C+ average. If I recall correctly, this was also the minimum required to graduate with an honours B.A. In every course, not overall. Beyond that, it was simply first come, first served.

I asked why. The administrator said that no studies had ever shown that higher academic achievement led to better teaching. What is striking about this is how untrue it is. A lot of studies, notably those by Teach for America, based on a huge amount of data, show the opposite: that a high SAT, and graduation from a highly competitive university with good marks, is perhaps the most accurate predictor of future teaching quality. It is also just common sense: you cannot teach what you do not know. The basic requirements for a good teacher are therefore 1) subject knowledge, and 2) knowledge of how to learn, or at least how to do well at academics. Good university students with strong degrees are the experts in both.

Unfortunately, as with the almost universal prejudice against the Jews, people hate through envy anyone who is smarter or more accomplished than they. Once, up until the Sixties, teaching school was a viable option for very bright young people early in their career. At that point, as noted in the piece on John Taylor Gatto posted here recently, the teaching trade, and especially the educational administration trade, came to be dominated by weak students of relatively low intelligence:

… [O]f twenty occupational groups measured, public school teachers score seventeenth on the GRE. Who scores lower? School administrators, who score 51 or 80 points lower, depending whether you are measuring them against elementary or secondary teachers (p. 21).

This, I think, was directly related to the push to establish teaching as a “profession.” The “professionals” were those who never moved on. Drudges. Many if not most elementary school teachers, did not, at that time, even hold a university degree. I have seen this in other fields once they professionalize. Pay goes up as quality goes down. Relevant is Adam Smith's famous comment, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” See also this piece from The American Interest for an angle on the problem.

Once the drudges got control, disaster. They hated anyone who had genuine intelligence or academic ability as anti-Semites hate Jews. Not least of those who suffered and suffer: bright students. Of course the professionals were not going to give any new places to bright people or those with posh degrees, no matter what was in the interests of the students.

First, come first served is, however, still rather embarrassing. It makes school teaching look pretty Mickey Mouse. The U of M has hit upon a better alternative: make it look like “progressive” politics. Of course, as Taylor points out, if they were really concerned with employment equity, half the new places would be reserved for men, who are grossly underrepresented in the "profession."

Black Gettysburg

The Spirit of Detroit. Oddly like King Kong, no?

African Americans, despite the common claim that they are discriminated against, have in fact enjoyed great prestige for at least the past half century. What was it that Leonard Cohen wrote in Beautiful Losers (1966)? “In the Twentieth century, everyone wants to be black.” It would be blasphemy in polite company to say anything against Muhammed Ali, or Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King.

I think we may notice this now, because I think black prestige may have reached its high water mark this summer, and be starting on a downward slope. Due to a combination of events, the social capital blacks have been happily spending may now have finally been run through.

First, the Obama presidency. Remember that African-Americans are, in the end, a small minority of the US population—8.8%. Yet they have gotten one of their number elected president. That is a significant sign of popular approval. The Italians haven't done it yet. The Jews haven't. The Poles haven't. The Germans haven't. The Mormons haven't. Even the Catholics, a quarter of the population or more, have managed only one so far.

One can forgive the average non-black if, having voted for Obama twice, he or she feels the tally sheet is wiped clean. No more may he be inclined to feel some personal guilt for slavery—an absurd notion in the first place. African-Americans are now demonstrably on the inside, and may now be expected to act that way. No more claims of special grievance, no more claims of special moral high ground.

Second, against that backdrop, we have the Zimmerman—Martin trial, which has nevertheless demonstrated a continuing and extreme split between how blacks and non-blacks look at American politics and the American experience. In the aftermath of the jury verdict, an ABC News poll found that almost 90% of African Americans called the shooting unjustified; but only to 33% of whites (Wikipedia). And this difference in perception has been underlined by Obama's personal involvement in the controversy. Non-black Americans can be forgiven if they begin to wonder, in the end, whether African Americans are really on the same team. Despite a half century of real white sacrifices in the name of “integration,” blacks remain a community apart, and indeed a community with a continuing hostile view of their American compatriots. I think there is a real possibility that a lot of non-blacks are going to conclude that blacks are just being unreasonable. If not this, there is at least a possibility that many will give up any hope of satisfying them, and begin to worry about blacks being in effect a permanent Fifth Column in American society. I feel I begin to see this in some of the current commentary.

Worse, the black community has been seen publicly lynching George Zimmerman, a Hispanic (at least, if Zimmerman is not Hispanic, Obama is not black). And the president has joined in. This tends to undermine the notion that in the matter of racism, blacks are only victims; the more so since it follows years of high-profile, openly expressed black hostility to Jews and Koreans. Sooner or later, this is going to matter. In the end, blacks and Hispanics are competing for the same jobs. Will they continue forever to vote together? I can see blacks becoming, as a group, themselves politically incorrect, voted off the island by the other special interest groups in the leftist coalition. Just as they were in the early twentieth century.

Third, there is Detroit. Detroit is and was for forty years held up as a proud model of black self-government. Since Coleman Young became mayor in 1974, blacks have been in charge politically in Detroit.

This is just not a good advertisement for African American culture. Blacks in Detroit are probably worse off than anywhere else in the US. And in Detroit, there are no white men left to blame.

I just hope the end of "reverse racism" (sic) does not lead us straight back into anti-black racism.

What's the Opposite of Diversity? University!

The current official justification for "affirmative action"--that is, racial discrimination--in university admissions in the US is that it is needed in order to create "diversity." "Diversity" in turn is held to be an important learning goal. There is no justification in terms of righting past wrongs--first, such past wrongs were done to other people, not the ones now advantaged; and second, such programs do not discriminate between more recent immigrants, whose ancestors were never discriminated against and/or whose ancestors never discriminated, and those whose ancestors genuinely were or did. There is no justification in terms of ending poverty or preventing the development of an elite class: studies show that, on balance, racial preferences hurt the poor and help the rich, systematically excluding poor whites while mostly aiding upper-class minorities. If income level were the criterion instead of race, black participation in the best colleges would fall from 8 to 4 percent, Hispanic from 8 to 6.

But at least there's "diversity." Or is there? Granted that "diversity" in itself is a good thing--something that could easily be debated--a study by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford, calculating the effects of "affirmative action" at eight elite US colleges, suggests that the current practices actually reduce ethnic diversity at said campuses. (Robert VerBruggen, "Racial Preferences by the Numbers," National Review Online, November 30, 2009).

This is not a conclusion of the study; and this fact itself makes the data presented seem more reliable. There is no axe honing here. But it is clear in the figures. Stay with me here.

If racial preferences were eliminated at the private colleges studied, Espenshade and Radford calculate that the number of "white" students would not go up--it would go down. "Whites" would drop from 60 to 53 percent of the student body at the most prestigious colleges. So would the number of "black" students: from 8 to 3 percent. "Hispanics" would drop from 8 to 5 percent. But "Asians" would jump from 24 to 39 percent.

Look at those numbers, and one fact is clear: the major effect of current racial preferences is not to help blacks or Hispanics--the numbers there are trivial--but to harm Asians. These quotas, whatever the official justification, work exactly like the earlier quotas against Jews.

Taking "whites" as the mainstream, the raw "diversity" without racial preferences is seven percent greater--the difference between 40 percent and 47 percent "other." But that is only a partial picture: for the categories traditionally used are themselves fairly arbitrary. In America, there is a great deal more cultural diversity within the category "Asian" than within "black." With all due respect, as Martin Luther King insisted, most American blacks differ from most American whites in little more than skin colour. They speak the same language, belong to the same religion, eat the same foods, play the same sports, listen to the same music, and watch the same TV.

But "Asians" are fairly likely to be fresh-off-the-airplane immigrants, or first or second-generation immigrants, with genuinely different attitudes and life experiences. Different religions, different mother tongues, different foods, different sports, different cultures. And within this group is a-near-infinity of further differences: an "Asian" might be Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Sri Lankan, Bengali, Indonesian, Thai, Vietnamese, Pakistani, Iranian, Central Asian, Burmese, Arabian; a wide variety of very different countries and cultures, covering half the world's population and three of the four traditional world civilizations.

Really, trust me, guys: all foreigners are not the same.

That's what we are blocking out with racial preferences. Given their international reputation, if America's most exclusive colleges stayed strictly with merit, they would draw the best and the brightest from the entire world, and be about as diverse. By cheapening their degrees with racial preferences, they prevent this.

The same is true for less-well-known institutions: if you want real diversity, the surest path is to concentrate on merit and merit alone as your entrance criterion.