I think underlying many of these discussions is a fundamental question:
"If not all cultures and values are equally successful in modern society, should we (as a society) encourage people to adopt a more successful values, or should we adapt society to make all cultures and values equally successful?"
(edit: obviously I have biases, but I tried to phase this in a way that masked my biases. If there's a more neutral way to phrase this, I'd be interested in hearing it)
The only way to accomplish the latter is to pull the excellent down to the level of mediocrity or worse. How do you propose to raise up a culture that doesn't value creativity and hard work, for example, to the level of success of one that does. Culture is much more than what food you eat and music you listen to.
This reminds me of a famous Tocqueville quote:
There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater.
But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
I prefer positive examples. It's no secret that the Jewish people have done so phenomenally well, despite two millennia of persecution, because of their strong values of hard work, family, and creativity.
I'm not saying it's controversial, but I'd rather see strong evidence that just make assumptions based on general cultural stereotypes like "Jewish people work hard" or weak evidence like "they own a disproportionate amount of wealth."
Eh, it's a little bit controversial. As nearly as I can tell the 25% figure comes from Stormfront, and I've been unable to find any independent source for it; the triple parenthesis are a bit of a tip off. It is probably a corruption of a claim that 25% of US billionaires were Jewish, which is a radically different claim.
I've actually never seen Stormfront, but you're right that my sources are shit. I've not been able to find any figures on what the correct percentage would be, and Wikipedia says that only 2% of America is Jewish. And it is closer to 30% of the Forbes 400 now, and 30% of the top 100.
It's likely being down-voted because it is brought up in the context of black Americans. In this context a quite frustrating argument familiar to black Americans often follows:
"If the Jews are okay, then how come you couldn't figure it out? HMMMMMM? That's what I thought." is heard often when bringing up the American Jewish within the context of this discussion. While I don't agree with down-voting a comment that smells similar to something toxic (I doubt the grand-parent intended this interpretation). The highly negative reaction is likely due to the frequency with which this argument is brought up, and its lack of any validity.
Comparing the American Jewish to African-Americans is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The time spans for the comparison are horribly different - When were Jews recently generationally slaved for centuries?
The thing that really annoys me about this comparison between Jews and African Americans is "because of their strong values of hard work, family, and creativity". In my opinion these values of Jewish Americans are obtained through the tightly ingrained religious and familial structures. Unlike the Jewish, however, African-Americans' culture was systematically annihilated when they were enslaved. There are few traces of African religions and customs that remained after slavery. Any shared values were destroyed by such an event. You can similarly say that the massive amounts of black males that have since been imprisoned for minor drug crimes in the U.S. has had a similar effect on the familial unit.
The plights of Jewish and Black Americans in the U.S. have been very different. This is likely why people reacted poorly to the subject being brought up.
>Unlike the Jewish, however, African-Americans' culture was systematically annihilated when they were enslaved.
Yes, Black Americans have suffered a truly horrible history of oppression that has caused cultural problems. If anything, you're agreeing with Wax that culture matters.
I was only speaking admirably of the Jews. I'm not sure what you're getting at, or what's sarcastic or not in your post. But I don't see the need for the triple-parentheses.
> It's no secret that the Jewish people have done so phenomenally well, despite two millennia of persecution, because of their strong values of hard work, family, and creativity
This is a commonly held hypothesis but the question of "why are the Jews successful despite being outsiders" is complicated and not in any way settled. What I know of it comes from reading some of "the origins of totalitarianism" Hannah Arendt. "The Jews are really hardworking" is a lazy and easy explanation for the question of how some Jews have flourished despite persecution.
It is not simply the case that culture is the proximal cause of (some) Jewish wealth than the particular material conditions of certain Jews throughout history that has lead to the affluence of and importance of some, mostly European Jews. For example, many Jews came to have a privileged position in European courts because of the rise of protestantism (a hardworking culture that doesn't value credit, something that Wax would probably say is "bad"). You're ignoring politics and history when you just chalk everything up to culture. It's survivorship bias at it's finest.
Edit: I butchered a sentence in the middle of my comment. Added a line break.
Many, if not all, successful cultures have a tradition of helping others overcome difficulties. Maybe that's what we should be looking at, rather than making too much of a deal of the fate of the excellent, who are generally well-able to look after themselves. Society is not a zero-sum game, unless we choose to play it that way.
It is a fact that different cultures value things differently. Japanese culture has different values than Hawaiian culture, or southern white culture. Where there is difference in kind, there is different in adaptation. Every culture likely has its advantages in some areas, but not every one of those areas is deemed valuable by a modern society or economy. It is an inescapable fact that some ways of living, and some systems of moral and social values are more conducive to a modern, democratic capitalist society than others.
What we choose to do about that is up for debate. The fact of the situation, however, is not.
Culture and society engage with one another. To take an extremely concrete example, our society takes every possible opportunity to treat young unwed mothers like absolute shit.
"Raising up" the culture of people who are unsurprised that people at the peak of their fertility tend to get pregnant even in an environment where marriage is increasingly unattainable to that population is more about not going out of our way to kick people while they're down than hobbling the excellent.
I take huge issue with this statement because it tries to sneak certain statements past the reader without evidence.
How do you mean marriage is increasingly unattainable ? A marriage license costs $55. Are you alluding to something else here?
Single mothers are one of the last bastions of subsidies and welfare, especially considering how everything else has been scaled down in the recent years.
> our society takes every possible opportunity to treat young unwed mothers like absolute shit.
I have plenty of anecdata to the contrary. I'd like to hear why you think this, there must be a somewhat personal reason.
Welfare is structured so that single moms get more money if they stay single. It is bad for the kids to grow up without a father and it is bad for society to encourage it.
Poor policies that leave people in poverty traps (e.g. having a single mom find a job that pays barely above her welfare benefits shouldn't be stripping her of benefits, but a much more gradual sliding scale instead) should constantly be brought to light and fixed.
> It is bad for the kids to grow up without a father and it is bad for society to encourage it.
Absolutely, but to fix that we also have to look at why the fathers aren't sticking around, not only why single mothers aren't remarrying and/or getting out of poverty quicker.
I think there are a lot of reasons fathers aren't sticking around. I think a lot of those can be helped if there was less drug use and gang violence and more enfranchise on education, family planning, and marriage.
I think there are both structural (welfare, education, ect) and cultural changes that need to be made before all of those areas can be improved.
TANF (the last vestige of single-mother welfare) is ~$30bn/yr for the whole US, state & federal contribution.
SSDI (a mix of people with severe medical problems and the work-shy) is $150bn/yr.
OASI (I'm old - gimmie money) is $813bn/yr
Medicare (I'm old - gimmie healthcare) is $709bn/yr
Single mother welfare is a rounding error in the budget compared to other subsidies and welfare, which is mostly diverted towards older and wealthier people.
I'm not just talking about cash welfare -- try holding down a job while raising a kid by your own and see how much our society will bend over backwards to accommodate any lifestyle choice other than single child-rearing.
I don't have a dog in this fight - I'm a middle-aged, childless single guy. But I have eyes to see and it doesn't take much research to figure out who's getting the short end of the stick in our social order.
I appreciate the elaboration of your position, we seem to have more in common than originally thought.
> But I have eyes to see and it doesn't take much research to figure out who's getting the short end of the stick in our social order.
Part of the plight of single mothers is rising inequality and inability of the fathers to find decent jobs. Whenever arguments about children are made, I strongly believe at looking at a broader picture - how can we make sure the child grows up in a nuclear family for at least 16-18 years? I think that has to be looked at in the context of both sexes.
Thanks for the numbers as well, although I believe medical care is also subsidized for single mothers (at their median income level). It's hard to argue against expanding TANF (One of my college Economics courses examined effectiveness of welfare programs, and found that TANF was the most beneficial as far as how far each dollar goes).
>should we adapt society to make all cultures and values equally successful?
Given that this includes people who value a society where particular values aren't successful, it is probably not possible to have a society like that.
If 'all cultures are not equal' is a false statement then we're stating 'all cultures are equal' which I interpret as saying there is no metric by which we can measure the 'goodness' or 'effectiveness' of a culture.
So let's accept the statement 'all cultures are equal' at face value: all cultures are equal and therefore there exists no metric for measuring 'goodness' or 'effectiveness.' If C(now) captures my current cultural state and C(future) captures my future cultural state and we're saying both of these states are equal - because all cultures are equal - then where's the impetus for any new legislation? Where's the drive for change?
In the United States our past culture included slavery, which we'll call C(slavery). Are we really saying C(slavery) == C(now)? I bet most people would claim C(now) > C(slavery) and if so should be suspect of any claim that all cultures are equal.
This isn't a rigorous proof, but I do think it calls into question the notion that all cultures are equal. But maybe that's not what the phrase actually means: maybe what they really intend to say is we've yet to identify unbiased metrics by which we can use to measure cultures and thus correlate them. Presumably most people would bias the metric in such a manner that their culture turned out to be the best. If that's what's actually meant by the phrase 'all cultures are equal' (and I've never heard of anyone presenting it that way) then it should be stated as such because then we can work toward identifying those metrics so we can objectively improve our own culture.
>we're saying both of these states are equal - because all cultures are equal - then where's the impetus for any new legislation? Where's the drive for change?
To play the devil's advocate (since I don't agree that all cultures are equal), three answer:
1) Mere preference/taste.
2) Who said "change is required"?
3) Within a culture we might have criteria to stand as impetus for change/legislation etc inside the culture. So the statement just means that we can't use them to judge another's culture but only our own.
> But maybe that's not what the phrase actually means: maybe what they really intend to say is we've yet to identify unbiased metrics by which we can use to measure cultures and thus correlate them.
> If that's what's actually meant by the phrase 'all cultures are equal' (and I've never heard of anyone presenting it that way) then it should be stated as such because then we can work toward identifying those metrics so we can objectively improve our own culture.
I agree with you about "all cultures are equal" being a hard statement to defend if you take it to literally and nihilistically to mean that there is no objective way to measure good or bad. Not a lot of people are that nihilistic. Most people believe in some degree of moral relativity and some degree of moral absolutism. It's hard.
I don't have a rigorous proof for my feelings towards this, but I feel like the goal shouldn't be to reduce CULTURE down to KPIs. I don't think we should be putting culture on a scale and asking how it effects the economy because I think it's the kind of bad social science that people on HN usually detest. This is a good letter from one of Wax's critics, posted to Heterodox Academy:
I think that the belief that all cultures are equal is usually a mistake based on fuzzy thinking. The underlying thought is that “all cultures have value”, which mutates into “all cultures have equal value in terms of increasing insight into how humans interact with the world and each other” and this gets universalised via a mental shortcut into “all cultures have equal value” and then anyone who questions it gets shouted down.
Additionally, cultures are porous, overlapping aggregations of chaotic, abstract and mutating human created concepts which resist analysis almost by definition.
Assessing a culture based mainly on its economic expediency seems like a startlingly narrow criteria?
I feel like this should all be short-circuited by the fact that cultures are not a fixed value that can be compared for equality. Congruence, perhaps, but there are too many moving parts in culture to be able to rank them, which is an implication of solving for a single (imaginary) term.
Right. For example, there is no one "white culture". I'm white, and there are plenty of white people in my home town with whom I share little to no cultural values. Any conversation about relative values of "cultures" is probably better cast as a discussion about cultural memes (in the original Dawkins sense [1]), with the understanding that the flow of memes tend to follow social contours as clusters, and interact with one another.
I agree that it's best to inspect culture from the bottom up rather than the top down. Start with the most granular units. Is anyone here acquainted with the current sociological orthodoxy or is that population mutually exclusive with HN commenters? :)
"White Culture" only exists in the domain of Identity Politics. Remove Identity Politics & you remove the notion of "White Culture", among other socially divisive memes.
"White Culture" was invented as a defense of Slavery and Colonialism. Remove racially-based oppression as well as its legacy, and you remove the notion of "White Culture"
"White Culture" also acts as an easy straw man for those discriminated against and other minorities. Remember there aren't any cultural Eastern Europeans or Appalachians or what have you in the face of the monolith.
That makes me wonder how many cultures only exist in the realm of identity politics. Certainly there is "culture" that white people are the predominant part of (I'm thinking of the church basement Lutheranism of my childhood as an example), but no one would call that "white culture". What other cultures are a political construction as opposed to a "natural" one?
Relative to all people living today, let alone whom have ever lived, you probably share rather a high percentage of the variation in cultural values with white people, however construed. Check out this map, for example:
i suppose that there is no correct answer to this, but i believe that if there are people who mutually identify in a particular way and share practices and beliefs then it can be said that they belong to a culture
Lets imagine a culture that says anyone that has brown eyes is a non-person and can be owned. Once owned that person can be beaten, raped, or killed at the whine of the owner. Further more, any crime comes with a price tag, if you pay the price, you can do whatever you want with no legal repercussions.
I think we can rank our current culture as better than that one. If we can rank two culture than it is possible to compare them. That said, we might not be able to conclude if Japanese or German culture today. But we can say that Sudan could be improved by adopting parts of those cultures.
I think saying we cannot rank cultures leaves up hobbled when it comes to critically evaluating them.
The issue here is applying logic to actions that are predominantly displays of virtue driven by fear of being marked as not belonging to the in group. Reason isn't going to win here unfortunately.
Good and bad is in the eye of the beholder and what you value.
Is American culture (a loaded term because American culture is the product of numerous sub-cultures) better than all other cultures because of our economic strength? If not, then what are the objective measures that define a "good" culture.
I'm very glad slavery doesn't exist, because I value equality and freedom. Yet still, I'd ask who is the authority that determines that one culture is better than another because they hold that value?
Europeans via too many systems to name here (e.g. colonizing much of the world, forcing religion on indigenous people, slavery, apartheid, etc.) imposed their cultural values on the world and then held them up as the best.
Ultimately, it's not right to conflate what you believe with what is objectively good. It all depends what your solving for (e.g. profit, equality, harmony, etc.)
Frankly, a world in which we are not confident enough to say that slavery is worse than freedom, is a dystopia. It's valid to talk about difficulties of analysis, fragmented values, fallacies, edge cases, caveats, caution etc, but we cannot and should not abdicate from judgment.
I'm not confident enough to say that slavery is objectively worse than freedom. I have no reasons that lead me to consider that an objective answer exists.
I'm still completely opposed to slavery and willing to fight it, by force if necessary.
That's called moral relativism. It does't get you very far, because it is a belief system with no values, and therefore nothing to aim at.
There are some tools for objectively judging morality aka "good and bad". One is the principle of universality. So an outcome is moral if you can reasonably state that you would be equally happy to be on either side of the table. Slavery generally fails this test, since most people would prefer not to be slaves. Virtually everyone on either side of the slavery divide (slave/free) valued freedom, some of them just didn't value the freedom of other people.
There's nothing objective about picking and applying an arbitrary principle, though.
Also, it's not true that a moral relativist must have no values. One can have values while believing they are not objective, but closer to preferences held very strongly.
I'm not saying I don't have beliefs, and sometimes feel that those beliefs are right compared to what other people think, but I try to recognize where things may be objective (like slavery) and subjective (like government spending).
The tool you mentioned makes a lot of sense for issues that have a clear preference e.g. slavery or not, but I suspect it would show cracks if we start looking at more subjective issues (which I imagine dominate nowadays).
As an interesting aside, this statement shows the massive impact Kant has had on modern thought. To the point that it's difficult to overestimate his impact. The principle of universality is a relatively modern phenomenon. For much of recorded history that was not the dominant value.[1]
[1]: There's several good texts exploring how people may have thought at various times in history (because it's all speculation, of course), but one I enjoyed was A Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England.
The capitalism system itself fails the universality test, because a person wouldn’t be equally happy to be on either side of a table with Jeff Bezos on one side and an unskilled immigrant on the other.
Arguably slavery never went away, it’s just that the slavery franchise was disguised/rebranded and then extended as social mobility was slowly rolled back.
That's not a valid test, since you can't switch bodies with Jeff Bezos. I'd also disagree with your premise, because presumably the unskilled immigrant desired to immigrate to capitalist America in this thought experiment.
I think it went away. Capitalism doesn't force anyone to work, you may choose not to participate in the labour market and be homeless.
You have a good point, but the next sentence clearly states the metric: "Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy." It's not a statement about the artistic or spritual value of cultures, only their ability to create economically productive individuals, which is easy to measure.
Well, it seems to me intuitively obvious that cultures that value education prepare children better for their economic future than cultures that don't value education.
I may not be able to compute it. I may not even be able to measure it. But I think that anyone who disagrees is making a far less reasonable claim than I am making, and therefore has the burden of proof.
Well, that depends on what you mean by 'education.' If you mean actual adaptive critical thought, then what you say is true, but almost tautological. If you mean rote indoctrination into an existing way of thought, then it is neither intuitive nor obvious that this leads to a better economic future. If you mean something in the middle, then we could land anywhere in between, couldn't we?
“Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy” is problematic because it can be rephrased as “Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be (successfully exploited by those who control capital) in a (specific type of) advanced economy (which is rigged in favour of those who are already wealthy and/or educated/connected/privileged in a particular way for historical reasons)”.
As a parent, I can vouch for the fact it’s difficult to successfully raise children but there are many other possible ways to support the young in becoming net contributors to society because there are clearly many viable cultural alternatives to the nuclear family that could thrive under a system other than the kleptocratic oligarchy of late US neoliberal globalist vulture techno-capitalism.
Wax argues competently but is guilty of a slight lack of imagination as most conservative thinkers are; the preference to move backwards towards a solution based on a mythical idealised point in the past, letting their preferred outcome dull their analysis of their cognitive biases.
Unfortunately shutting down debate seems to be the favoured approach of those who are over-engaged with identity politics at the current time. It’s almost as if the left have been infiltrated by self-loathing alt-right 4chan agent provocateur trolls who are so scared of choice and diversity that they want to speed a “return” to a totalitarian hegemonic monoculture by getting the left to do their work for them. I think that the actual situation is maybe more prosaic, a case of undergraduate courses teaching critical theory without first teaching the fundamentals of critical thinking (with social media is turning the heat up across the board).
It is clear that cultures can be valued against one another only when metrics can be agreed. Wax seems to unsafely assume that there is a consensus on metrics and I think there is a need for more science and philosophy in that area before real progress can be made.
There is such a thing as legitimate authority based on domain knowledge but cultural legitimacy doesn’t seem to quite work in the same way. New generations will experiment with solutions to the problems (and privilege) they are faced with in their time. The debate has become more shrill as the web has accelerated change and revitalised sub-cultures, and conservatism will act, as it always has, as a speed brake on change.
"Culture' is an exceptionally poorly defined term, and there is no hope of applying any kind of rigor here. Most of the time it's shorthand for a constellation of behaviors that a) exist independently of each other across cultural groups, and b) aren't actually as consistent in practice as one might think.
"Good and bad is in the eye of the beholder and what you value." - Now put your hand on a hot stove and say that again. Nature forces some values. (quote from apoverton but the principle, vs Hume, applies to many other comments here.)
You made a pretty contrived comment to refute the parent poster, considering how unlikely it is that someone would find it a fun and exciting thing to do.
You make a good point that there are rarely any absolutes, but your example ends up reinforcing the parent's point: everything that "we" consider good or bad amounts to collective opinion. You can probably find a fringe group that has just about any opinion you want to dream up, but if it's rejected by the vast majority of the population, it's going to be considered "bad".
You can also examine things from other perspectives.
Darwinian, perhaps: does enjoying pain give any kind of evolutionary advantage? Maybe in a few niche areas, but overall, no, since pain is a way for our brains to signal damage, or future damage if we keep doing what we're doing. Ignoring pain up to a certain threshold can be useful, but enjoying pain to your detriment is not.
Or maybe just economic: does enjoying pain give any kind of economic advantages?
And so on...
I think it's important to acknowledge that there are no absolutes when it comes to opinion, but sometimes you just have to observe near-unanimity and go with it.
> I bet most people would claim C(now) > C(slavery)
Without defending slavery, the obvious problem with your line of reasoning is that most people (implicitly most people alive today) are influenced by C(now). Even if you identify a group of values that are relatively constant across cultures (including bygone cultures), the best you can do is say "culture X better conforms to the majority values than culture Y". It's probably worthwhile to be able to make such a statement, but it's still not an objective statement. If you want to make objective statements about morality and cultures, you need to subscribe to a philosophy of moral absolutism, which is antithetical to liberal tradition prior to a few years ago.
True, but that doesn't help. Whether or not due to influence by C(now), there are very few people currently alive who would not say that C(now) > C(slavery). Those people cannot (validly) also argue that all cultures are equal.
Worse, I'd guess that there is a liberal/conservative element here. Liberals are more likely to believe that C(now) > C(slavery); they are also more likely to believe that all cultures are equal.
I think my post agrees with your first paragraph, but your post reads like a rebuke.
I disagree that conservatives are more likely to believe that C(slavery) was better than C(now), but I agree that conservatives are more likely to process an absolute morality position (with liberals it seems more complicated--most would say they support moral relativism, but they seem to view other moral systems as fundamentally racist and thus evil, which can't be far from moral absolutism). This is more an elaboration on your point than a correction, I think.
Definitely. It's veering on absolutism when you try to enforce your subjective morality on everyone else. This was the left's principal criticism of the right only a decade ago, after all.
If moral relativism is true, as I believe it is barring evidence showing the opposite, then enforcing one's subjective morality is inevitable. Banning slavery and rape, enforcing property rights, all of that is enforcing subjective morality, since there's no other.
But it's not absolutism if one recognizes that the enforcement is based on subjective opinion and not on intrinsic qualities of the actions being banned.
Essentially, it's might makes right, and I just happen to be lucky that we opponents to slavery are mightier than its advocates.
That's all well and good, but that wasn't the argument employed against conservatives when conservative values were mainstream; the argument was "you can't enforce your values because it's not fair to folks with different value systems". This argument was generally characterized as "moral relativism". Regardless of terminology, my point is that the left flip flopped as soon as they became the moral majority.
That might be technically correct (as we know, the best kind of correct), but it's not a useful argument to make, outside of pedantry.
You may not be defending slavery, but you are suggesting that we cannot make a definitive statement about whether slavery is good or bad. If we can't do that, then what's the point of practical discussion about the direction of our civilization?
Perhaps with the best of intentions, the left seems to be silencing the discussion, or at least attempting to. It's a paradoxical defense of cultural relativism with a morally absolute position (saying x is bad and should be institutionally censored). I don't have an easy way to resolve that dilemma, but sometimes it seems the left is more concerned with appearance than with discussion.
Yeah, I definitely see that, and it worries me as well.
I do believe that the concept of tolerance can go too far, and that simply tolerating intolerant people can actually give you a worse outcome than censoring them. But I'm afraid that the left (of which I consider myself a part) goes too far sometimes. It's taboo to even try to discuss some topics, and people who don't understand and are just trying to learn get slapped down. That's not helping.
Disclaimer: I'm an Obama-voting moderate liberal (for whatever that's worth), and I'm writing this from my phone in great haste. Please forgive bluntness and typos.
One concern I have is that the left is arguing that it should be okay to punch intolerant people ("what's wrong with punching Nazis?"),
but they are also happy to use "intolerant" to describe pretty much anyone with whom they disagree (the Christakis/Yale incident and the Google Memo fiasco come to mind, but I see this all over). Anyone who isn't convinced about theories of structural racism or discrimination as the root cause of all disparities are increasingly called intolerant (to your point about people getting slapped down), and it seems like only a shallow victory for liberal thought (people are "accepting" these theories out of fear, and will probably vocally challenge them again when the fear is removed). The left should do the hard work of persuading, and if they fail to persuade huge swaths of the population, perhaps they should step back and examine their theories instead of taking it as evidence that the country is indeed full of Nazis (because only Nazis would disagree, right?)
Besides being concerned about abusing a hypothetical "right to punch Nazis", I'm equally concerned that suppressing hate is more likely to have the reverse effect (which probably best explains the uptick we're seeing now, though I can't prove it). It seems like the left had a really good system several years ago, which was to challenge bigoted ideas in open debate. It may not have completely rooted out hate, but that could be because it wasn't practices long enough or well enough or perhaps there is simply some small percent of people who are unreachable with reasoned debate and we reached everyone else (we seem to have done a good job of making these people insignificant, prior to the last couple of years).
It's been almost 90 years since Antonio Gramsci designed the culture war in his prison notebooks[1], so things have morphed a bit and the centrally planned communism he advocated is out of favor as an end goal, but the blueprint is still pretty much the same.
To quote Wikipedia a little: "Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting."
In his theory any culture C (!Hegemony)>C (Hegemony). When he refers to Hegemonic culture he was talking ato the time about what he called "Fordism" which was the state of the art in enlightened capitalism at the time meaning treating and paying workers well with the workplace working in tandem with the family to re-enforce the traditional family unit.
Gramsci was trying to figure out a way to cause communist revolution at the time and he said that in order to attack Fordism they must get together everyone who is opposed to the dominant culture, including socialists as well as all cultural minorities including civil rights activists, feminists, libertines, homosexuals, radical islamists, some criminals, etc who felt they had some greivance with the dominant culture. It really didn't matter if they were morally justified or not by any philosophy. The point was is that they were opposed to the hegemony and that's all that mattered. Thats because the point of their activity was not to change laws within the current system, but to create discontent to foment a socialist political revolution by any means.
Now these days this strategy has morphed into something that is not a communist plot, but just a general strategy to seize power in organizations. The reason you can't say any culture is better than any other except the hegemonic culture is because it ideologically undermines the means of political revolution that has been picked up by several generations of political opportunists who use this strategy to build and maintain a powerbase.
This is a classic reactionary comment that doesn't understand the asymmetry between the "bourgeoisie" and the lower classes.
The "hegemonic" "bourgeoisie", secure in the status quo, sees politics as a game for "opportunists", while the oppressed classes lay aside their differences so they can try build enough power to overthrow the oppression and end their suffering.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013753/quotes/qt1525548
[City Councilman Dan White is complaining that he is having trouble getting re-elected because his base doesn't have any problems that need government intervention, while 'lucky duck' Harvey Milk has the natural support of the gay voter base who want the police to stop murdering them.]
Dan White: You have an issue [gay rights].
Harvey Milk: It's more than an issue. This is our life we're fighting for.
Yes. The Hegemony did include anti-homosexuality, racial and gender discrimination that I'm glad we've gotten rid of. Part of the hegemonic core value set is that the norms and rules can be carefully changed over time.
Now, since the hegemony has adapted and added tolerance of homosexuality and disapproval of racial and gender discrimination, the Gramscians are reaching further and further into the discontented for supporters. What's really revitalized the cultural right is when the Gramscians tried to pull in Islamists and non-citizens (the least politically charged name I could come up with for this group) into the coalition of the disaffected. The contradictions in their ideology as a purported means for peaceful change of the existing system just got too huge and many people didn't understand the justification for the movement anymore in terms of a nationalist and progressivist basis. This is similar to how many people lost the plot on the justification for the Iraq war on a nationalist and progressivist basis.
It really didn't matter if they were morally justified or not by any philosophy. The point was is that they were opposed to the hegemony and that's all that mattered.
Wait...you're saying that they pursue their own interests?! How dare they!
The problem is that non-hegemonic factions may have contradictory interests. For example the Islamists and homosexuals do not agree on important issues. This isn't really important to the political opportunists because they are primarily interested in creating as large a power base aa possible for their ambitions so these contradictions are ignored as much as is possible by them.
The fight a few years ago within the Sierra Club environmental organization between pro and anti-immigration factions was a similar display of the political contradiction's that plague the coalitions of non-hegemonic cultures.
And organizations are also capable of resolving, setting aside, or deprioritizing those contradictions when it is in their mutual interest. To pick up from where you left off, that's why you now see the Sierra Club coming out as a group to protest against the end of DAVA' no doubt there are Sierra Club members who don't agree wit this stance, but they've either given up on the argument or chosen to stay home if they don't agree with the organization's direction.
It's interesting how all these groups get absorbed by the Gramscians whether they want to or not. They can't maintain their focus with all the money from the big donors at stake who are not really dedicated to their original mission and instead want to amalgamate them into the big hegemony smashing coalition.
You could say that we're applying lean startup principles to to social engineering :-)
There are still lots of dogmatic and theoretical Marxists of various flavors, but since the financial crisis the left has become more agnostic and pragmatic. Wait until you see the next phase of our cunning plan.
I think the Clinton Campaign was the epitome of cunning and pragmatic. At least that's the tone that generally pervaded the Podesta Wikileaks emails, especially the disastrous plan to elevate radical candidates like Trump to make it easier for Hillary to win. That might have worked in a more idealistic era, but people have really lost their idealism these days.
Here's another culture. C(not equal) is a culture that believes that all cultures are not equal. But those arguing that all cultures are equal are in fact arguing that their culture, C(equal), is better than C(not equal).
That is, by the act of making the argument, they refute the argument they are making.
Let's recall that that assertion was made in the context of a "provocative essay" (Haidt's words, not mine) in a newspaper rather than in the context of a rigorous scholarly argument. You're building a very elaborate theory on the corpse of a rather obvious straw man in Wax's original article.
> If 'all cultures are not equal' is a false statement then we're stating 'all cultures are equal'
Not necessarily. There is a system of logic where a double negation doesn't yield the same result. (e.g. if A = True, then !A == false, but !!A == true is not necessarily true)
There are two propositions you can entertain here.
1. All cultures are equal in the sense that they are equally as good.
2. There is no way to compare the merits of any two cultures.
(1) is a claim that attributes equal merit to each culture. It is then necessary to establish what exactly these merits are.
(2) is a claim that does not per se exclude the possibility of there being a matter of fact about which culture is superior in which ways w.r.t. other cultures. It denies the possibility of establishing what the fact of the matter is.
(1) admits only two possible presuppositions. Either (a) all cultures are equal because the good they impart onto individuals and societies is ultimately the same and thus differences are merely cosmetic, or (b) cultures are not a good (that is, neutral or inert w.r.t. the good).
(2) admits two possibilities as well. Either (a) our ability to know is limited or impaired or (b) we cannot know because there is nothing to know, i.e., (1b).
I think focusing on (1) in this context is a waste of time because clearly no one in this context actually believes it. Protests have a motive and motives only make sense w.r.t. to some end. As you point out, what's the impetus when change produces no change in the good? Protesters and revolutionaries may hold incoherent and confused beliefs, they may have ulterior motives, they may be wrong, but ultimately there is a belief that what is now is evil and what they aim at is better.
Ultimately, to be able to judge the merits of any culture requires (at least) a sound philosophical anthropology. You need to understand the nature of man to know what he requires to flourish. Only then can you judge whether, in what ways and to what degree a culture enables that flourishing.
Large, pluralistic societies create a new kind of natural-selective environment that pushes cultures towards greater fitness in their niches or rewards cultures that expand into or create new niches. You definitely can't expect all cultures to behave the same way and exist in all niches. See e.g. the enormous propensity of Mormons towards dentistry - "be a dentist" is not a valid universal cultural attribute, but can be adaptive for a small group. There are many routes to success.
A lot of the people who hold these sort of viewpoints in the US would benefit immensely from visiting and even living for a while in literally any other western democracy, or even just the English-speaking ones.
I can't think of any country in the western world who has a social welfare system on the same low level as the US - and yet we don't have such a 'decline in social indicators'. Quite the opposite. And we are not perfect: the upcoming NZ election is pointing out all the remaining flaws in our society, along with futile attempts to fix them by empty-promising politicians. But no one would ever say we are not vastly better off than the average US citizen, so clearly 'social welfare' is not the problem.
Maybe having a society where a random illness or infection doesn't destroy you economically - unless you are slaved to your employer with health insurance - might help fix things? Or maybe endless foreign wars and an influx of PTSD veterans along with an outflow of patriotically brain washed kids is not healthy? Maybe a political system where a egotistical demagogue can hijack the government is a flaw to correct?
It's hard to compare a country like NZ to the US in a fair and meaningful way. NZ is a small, ethnically (and therefore more importantly culturally) homogenous country. Now, it's not completely homogenous, but it is much more so than the US.
Being a democracy, the policies of the country are inseparable from its culture and demographics. You say universal healthcare might stem the tide of cultural breakdown. But we cannot be sure the causality doesn't flow the other way. Unfortunately, it's likely a feedback loop. We have bad policy in part due to the cultural and social decline the author describes, and we have cultural and social decline in part due to bad policy. Simply proposing policy changes neglects the complex interdependencies of these things, and is why national demographics are so important in a democracy.
Part of the reason NZ is able to cohere around its policy more than the US is because everyone in NZ (to a greater degree than in the US) shares the same values and cultural identity. This is why you see similarly idyllic societies in the Scandinavian countries. High social cohesion due to shared cultural and ethnic identity. Same in Korea and Japan - although Japanese culture is a good example of some of the downsides of ethnic and cultural homogeneity as well.
I'd be careful around claims about cultural identity and homogeneity. A lot of countries, like the scandinavian ones and NZ (and Australia) can look that way from the outside, but I think its a simplistic view. From our perspective, for example, apart from the obvious catastrophic partisan politics that have gripped the US, the US looks like it has a united cultural identity (e.g. a religious devotion to the founding fathers, patriotism, commitment to freedom of speech etc).
There was a recent article where a citizen of a Nordic country got upset at this common view, pointing out that perhaps it seems homogeneous to the US because in the US, today, you are white, black, hispanic, asian etc. There are not strong subdivisions in these categories, it seems, and subsequently they apply this view to other countries. But in Europe and Norway, Sweden etc, there are many flavours of 'white' with a long and recent history of animosity.
NZ is a country with a large indigenous population (the Maori), a lot of pacific island immigration, and increasing and accelerating immigrant population of Indians and Chinese (among others). These all assert social pressures of their own, and I would argue its partially our social safety net and maybe certain aspects of our culture and economic structure that have allowed it to be (mostly) harmonious, so far.
Not saying your entirely wrong, but that it is not (no pun intended) black and white.
Ya, it's definitely a spectrum. NZ is far from the most homogenous, and certainly there are divisions within the Nordic countries. No arguments from me there. But I think its fair to say that the US is more diverse than either of those two places, and that comes with benefits and it comes with problems. My point though is that it does have consequences, which is something that seems unfashionable to point lately.
>> NZ is a small, ethnically (and therefore more importantly culturally) homogenous country
Not according to the CIA Factbook it isn't:
NZ: European 71.2%, Maori 14.1%, Asian 11.3%, Pacific peoples 7.6%, Middle Eastern, Latin American, African 1.1%, other 1.6%, not stated or unidentified 5.4%
USA: white 72.4%, black 12.6%, Asian 4.8%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.9%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.2%, other 6.2%, two or more races 2.9% (2010 estimate)
Moreover, the Maori population was just as downtrodden and oppressed as the blacks of the USA, 50 or 100 years ago, and is still on the whole poorer and less educated than the white majority.
That breakdown leaves Hispanics out of the US, which seems to me to be, a pretty enormous oversight. I imagine they're being lumped in with 'white'. If you break them out separately, I imagine you'll see quite a difference.
the 'white' category in the US contains many more groups that would not be considered european on the NZ census, for instance hispanic and MENA ethnicities. the US is about 60% white by a categorization system closer to what is typically used informally.
I think that had the Penn students used your first two paragraphs as the gist of their response, there would be less commotion. To be sure, I don't know how well off the average US citizen is or the average NZ citizen; but it is silly to ignore economics and their effect.
I think that your third paragraph could use some some work, though.
> I can't think of any country in the western world who has a social welfare system on the same low level as the US - and yet we don't have such a 'decline in social indicators'. Quite the opposite.
But I thought the paper said "That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents."
The US has a welfare state if the banks need a TARP bailout, or if Cheney needs more contracts for Halliburton etc. Not so much for the rest of us. Actually, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage is lower in the US now than it was in the early 1970s.
One difference you have to remember about the US is the history of Africans in the US. There was slavery until 1865, then Jim Crow, then in the 1960s there was segregation, lack of voting rights, restriction on those of African background drinking from certain water fountains, sitting in certain bus seats, using certain bathrooms etc. Peaceful demonstrations against this were greeted by police dogs, fire hoses, batons, as well as extra-judicial Ku Klux Klan murders, bombings etc. Any how, some attempt to remedy this started in 1964 but by the 1978 Bakke ruling there was already enormous pushback. In fact Reagan announced his presidential candidacy in an obscure rural town unknown for anything aside from three people registering black people to vote being killed their by the Klan. As has been in the news, a white supremacist killed someone this year because they wanted a Civil War statue in their town taken down. In short, the US from its beginning to now has expended an enormous amount of energy
in subjugating people of African background. Google has very few engineers of African background, but fellow engineers like James Damore are incensed even about that due to what he perceives as his biological superiority. Now he's a hero on HN and much of the US. Polls show the majority of Americans are against towns taking down their civil war statues, and state legislatures are forbidding towns from tearing down statues celebrating a slaveholder uprising against the US government.
The writer mentioned talks about the "the anti-'acting white' rap culture of inner-city blacks". Even putting aside what I mentioned before, the "rap culture" is marketed by and controlled by the big media corporations. The real indigeneous inner-city black culture can more be seen by books written by and for blacks, which you can see in small stores and sidewalk tables, which the white, bourgeois companies don't sell for some reason. Perhaps it's not lucrative enough. In fact blacks have been saying for years that rap culture is bourgie junk corporations try to foist on black youth.
"if understood within their sociocultural context" is akin to saying "if you agree with all of our assumptions". It's a bullshit, vapid argument no matter how you use it, and the students should be embarrassed to be using such childish arguments. But of course they're aren't, because they're children.
Here is a follow-up article written by one of the 33 members of the University of Pennsylvania Law School faculty to sign a letter criticizing Amy Wax:
Don’t Care if Amy Wax Is Politically Incorrect; I Do Care that She’s Empirically Incorrect
All they care is that she is "Politically Incorrect" -- they could not care less about the facts.
Not to mention that when someone is wrong about facts you correct them, you don't fire them or ask for their condemnation. Professors are not supposed to be correct, just to probe for what's correct. In fact they should be encouraged to be boldly inquisitive and incorrect in that pursuit, and use dialog to sort out the ultimate answer.
And of course even "incorrect" ideas can be considered correct in an era -- in the 19th and up to the mid-20th century there were all kinds of facts and studies showing how some races were genetically inferior available to racists (that is: almost everybody).
Now we laugh at them, but how many similar (or even in the reverse direction) BS we take as fact because social "scientists" just put things under the rug and only give facts and statistics that are compatible with current cultural norms?
Professors are supposed to present the conclusions they've come to from their studies and work with no "self-awareness" filtering to avoid hurting anybody's feelings. Doubly so in an article, which is not a scholarly paper, and is meant to represent a broader picture with broader strokes.
And being a professor is not about only presenting raw factoids. It's also about drawing conclusions from the data and pointing to the bigger picture the way you interpret them -- a bigger picture that no data are going to give you by themselves alone. Informing the public opinion is not about being a glorified statistician.
Of course nobody would have batted an eye if a processor had done exactly the same kind of "stating of facts" for opinions they like (and that goes for "righteous indignation" both sides, left and right).
I think in the world of economics, those are very fuzzy lines. Economics and law are full of conjecture, the belief that if one thing is true, others will probably be as well (see supply-side economics, Marxism, and so on), and the amount those views are clung to despite existing data is startling. I don't agree with the conclusions she comes to, but it's not a huge jump from what economists the Krugman do all the time.
> All they care is that she is "Politically Incorrect" -- they could not care less about the facts.
Remember the saying "perception is reality"? Keep that in the back of your mind, I predict it is going to become increasingly indispensable to understand events going forward in Western nations.
Indeed - if Prof. Klick really "[doesn't] care if Amy Wax is politically correct", why did he sign a letter that says "We categorically reject Wax’s claims", instead of refuting them? Refutation is so much more effective than condemnation.
It is strange and disturbing to see academia joining the alt-right in its attempt to resurrect a pre-enlightenment age of dogma and allegations of heresy. For academia, it is a losing proposition.
What concerns me is that people act like she doesn't have the right to write her opinion (it clearly is just her opinion; it was published to the opinion section), without her facing repercussion.
It's not an opinion, it's a conjecture. Opinions are emotional responses to facts, not arguments about their veracity.
Examples of opinions include:
The color red is beautiful.
I'm sad that sharks are being hunted.
I hate poor people.
None of the following are opinions:
This rose is red.
My landlord poisoned my dog.
Poor people do more drugs than rich people.
In particular, a statement is not an opinion simply because it is presented without evidence. It is only an opinion if it can't possess any in the first place.
Tolerance only goes so far. You can have whatever opinion you want, but that doesn't mean you get to escape the consequences of having views that people find objectionable.
You can certainly walk around town telling everyone they are stupid, but you shouldn't be surprised when everyone hates you afterward. "It's just my opinion" is a weak excuse.
Thanks for posting. The original article is clearly hyper-racist--how unbelievable that the only cultural tradition suited for the 21st century also just happens to be the one which you hail from--but also just weirdly certain about things that deserve no certainty.
The response makes the situation even more absurd. Suddenly it is OK to denounce a professor because he/she is not correct from someones point of view? Isn't a debate about what is real and what is not the base for any science?
I would understand, but not be happy for, that professors are called for not being politically correct. I can't understand denouncing for not being correct by someone's argumentation.
I believe more and more that social justice and seeking for truth are not compatible.
If that were what this was about, it would all be a bunch of papers and op-eds discussing the evidence. And it's nice that you can link to some of that, and I wish this controversy was all just ding-dong of evidence, counter-evidence and the interpretations thereof.
But it's hard to see the linked article as anything but a fig-leaf, when the centre of the actual controversy is an attempt to sack Prof Wax, on the grounds that her arguments are morally unacceptable.
"Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks; the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants"
Already you lost me. There are plenty of single parents out of wedlock children in very white states like West Virginia, Kentucky, etc. How is rap culture or black people responsible for the actions of white people in these areas?
I live in a big city, my kids go to a bilingual school. Every parent there, hispanic or not, want their kids to do well, to get a good education, go to college, succeed professionally and personally. All of them have absorbed some American attitudes to one degree or another. The few parents who don't speak english well want their children to do so. None of these people are against assimilating.
There may be legitimate concerns of substance here, about having children out of wedlock, parents who are stretched thin. But this paragraph right here reads like thinly veiled racism targeted towards blacks and hispanics. All the sociological rhetoric does not hide this at all.
>Already you lost me. There are plenty of single parents out of wedlock children in very white states like West Virginia, Kentucky, etc. How is rap culture or black people responsible for the actions of white people in these areas?
Where did the author said it is?
They said there are "single-parent, antisocial habits" that are prevalent among some working-class whites" AND an "anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks" AND " anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants".
Three kinds of issues -- not an issue and two explanations for it.
>None of these people are against assimilating.
Hence the phrasing "anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among SOME" -- the author did not write "prevalent in ALL".
You are misreading it, she is listing three distinct groups, note the semicolons in the list. She is in no way saying one group is affecting the other, just that they all share non-bourgeois values.
Regarding being "not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment." she adds:
Nor are:
the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites;
the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks;
the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants
Show me hard proof of "anti-assimilation" ideas, not one obscure student group in California. I want real evidence. This whole passage reeks of a manufactured justification for racism.
Teaching in Spanish inherently is advocating for something other than English, and is definitionally anti-assimilation.
You can see the meta message in this article. Fewer Latinos are speaking Spanish, so teach them more Spanish in schools to preserve the language and culture. Whether you think that's a good idea or not, it is anti-assimilation.
You need to do a lot better than Prop 58 before I can validate your anti-assimilation argument.
#1 - At no point does the article you posted about prop 58 (from LA Times) say strictly English/Spanish bilingual education. Good idea or not, learning another language does not make it anti-assimilation.
#2 Most European nations require learning another language. The French learn English, the Germans learn French. At no point does anyone in France feel like they are assimilating because they have to learn English.
On top of that it wasn't that long ago Sarah Palin was revolting against teaching Chinese in California. Chinese is spoken by over a billion people and is a trading partner, it seems like a useful skill to have. But the whole thing reeked of xenophobic behavior.
I am not Latino. I want my kids to learn another language. Spanish seems most useful considering the languages used south of the US, as well as South America. Most of the world's industrialized nations advocates for learning a second language. Only in the US with the cult of ignorance does someone look at bilingual education as an attack on their own culture.
All the kids in the bilingual school my children attend learn Spanish. All speak English as their primary language.
The whole revolting against learning another language, specifically Spanish, sounds like some sort of fabricated justification to take a swipe at Mexicans. Learning to speak another language != anti-assimilation. The "anti-assimilation" argument allow intellectuals to make their racist ideas sound like they have some principle.
#1 - the fact that they don't have to specify, and we both know they mean spanish says it all. We have immigrants from Africa, from Brazil, from Italy, from Poland, but where are the Polish "bilingual" classes, Italian, or Portuguese? Everyone should learn a second language, I learned Spanish in Middle and High School, and German in College. The problem with Prop 58, and the old system in California, is only learning one language, and that language not being English. We know kids learn languages faster when immersed in it. When you take a kid who only knows Spanish, and you teach them in Spanish, you are either crippling them, or you have an ulterior motive to put Spanish on an equal level as English. I believe the second is the intent, and the first is the outcome.
You still have to do better than prop 58. And you sound like you are contradicting your argument here.
"The problem with Prop 58, and the old system in California, is only learning one language, and that language not being English. We know kids learn languages faster when immersed in it."
Supporters made the following arguments in support of Proposition 58:[2]
-The proposition would allow all students to become proficient in English as soon as possible.
-The proposition would encourage schools to use instruction programs rather than expand multilingual education, thereby providing English speakers the opportunity to learn a second language.
-The proposition would restore local control for California schools.
-The proposition's changes would prepare students more effectively for the future.
-Multilingual education encourages "intercultural interactions and empathy."
You still have to do better than just Prop 58. You are tipping your hand with the quote "you have an ulterior motive to put Spanish on an equal level as English". I guess I'm happier that you are putting that in the open, but it definitely sounds xenophobic. Are there people who might feel that way? Perhaps, but you cannot put all those people in the same group. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a kid who was born elsewhere but is in a US school who isn't compelled to learn english.
This is not thinly veiled racism. What the author was ineloquently trying to point out is simple. African American's have been screwed by the system and so they have been taught not only distrust the system, but also to resent authority. Furthermore, these communities are now self-seggragating. Where at one time there was a vision/dream/fantasy that African Americans and Whites were converging toward the same destinations. We would all end up in suburbs, or brownstones, ala the Cosby's.
At some point African Americans, with encouragement through identity politics, perhaps rightly who am I to say, shifted toward wanting their own identity.
Now when you are raised to resent authority, and to live in your own subculture, you are cutting yourself off from the available avenues for success. Chances are many of your bosses will be white, many of your teachers and professors will be white. If you are taught to resent and discount them, you are at an immediate disadvantage. You have to listen to your boss, or at least give them a fair shot to make a living and advance. When you start your job as an adversary you cannot get power through the avenues readily available in broader society.
This is the author's point. Without the shared "bourgeois" values, as she calls it, makes succeeding very hard.
I will also note that there may be other ways to solve this problem aside from sharing those values.
The article is not arguing that values shouldn't change, just that empirically the new values we have chosen (single parenthood, self segregation, etc.) are producing inferior outcomes to the old bourgeois values. There is no argument as to whether there are other superior values to adopt, etc. There must be other paths forward but the article doesn't go there.
You can in some instances enact major shifts in social systems without modifying its core values. Values and beliefs are two different things. For example giving women the right to vote was a major change, but didn't shift any of the classic core American values (to be trite, freedom, independence, etc.)
All cultures are not equal and few cultures are uniformally isolated. Civilization is a byproduct of cultures interacting and blending.
And human happiness and quality of life is most supported by improving our diets, our education, our expressions and our psychologies.
Enlightenment ideals built the modern world, not relativism. We should be criticizing all cultures and our everyday actions.
"Culture" in some ways is just a random repetition of behavior and ideas. It may conform to environmental pressures but there is nothing intrinsic about it in regards to any ethnicity or race. All humans are lazy, hardworking, intellectual, superficial, selfish and selfless. The difference is which ideas push us in the right directions of our better nature.
>"Does that make Wax a white supremacist for saying that culture matters for poverty-related outcomes, that not all cultures are equally good for escaping poverty, and that the 1950s American “bourgeois cultural script” was particularly good for that purpose?"
This is the core premise of the article, the conclusion, of course, being 'no'. Unfortunately, it does not accurately deal with the fairly clear subtext being delivered by Ms. Wax.
> "In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian about the op-ed, Wax was quoted as saying that “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans,” because, in the phrasing of the DP article’s author, “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.” … [they then affirm Wax’s right to express her opinions, then say:] We categorically reject Wax’s claims."
This, in particular, is striking. Why is 'being ruled by white Europeans' the draw to migrants over, say, the relative wealth of the west in the aggregate? France and Germany certainly offer troves of opportunity, but is Greece really more of a destination for economic migrants than, say, Singapore? Would India's quasi-british culture provide a counter-example when compared with China's?
The lack of any of these comparative examinations leads us immediately to question the argument provided. Ms. Wax doesn't even make case compelling to show that it was the 1950s script itself, rather than other causes before she jumps into discussing the superiority of the white european ruling establishment. Could it be that America's economic rivals had just been bombed to ash which led to an influx of capital to the country during an era where unions had clout? Nah, its just the fact that it was ruled by white europeans (/s).
What does this have to do with the article? People (all people) fled violence, hunger and death that came from a series of conflicts so dire that some populations haven't fully recovered still.
Add to that incredible amounts of political violence at the dawn of the 20th century, and you have the immigration flows. Similar thing happened when the Soviet block collapsed and economic/political strife spilled out.
Exactly. Can you imagine being a black student from the "inner city" (which has been a dog whistle term since the 90s) and taking a class with her after this? Would you feel like you were being assessed objectively, say if you were late to class once or if you asked for an extension?
> Why is 'being ruled by white Europeans' the draw to migrants over, say, the relative wealth of the west in the aggregate?
It isn't of course.
But suppose there's a country, Foobaria, and "everyone" (hyperbolically speaking) wants to migrate there. But it has notoriously bad weather. In one sense it's true to say that "everyone wants to migrate to a country with bad weather" and in another sense it isn't.
(This is the extension/intension distinction.)
She can still be wrong. And of course it's hard to see inside people's heads and know what they really meant. One can certainly wonder why she phrased it like that -- but then, I don't know what she was asked. I'm having trouble finding this interview; is there a link somewhere?
Let's not get bogged down by the all cultures are not equal strawman. That is not at all the key point here. Amy Wax/OP's argument is problematic because it conflates very different things using a subtly disingenuous argument. She starts off by saying something completely uncontroversial: kids from stable marriages do well in school. But she then plays on the audiences implicit biases to imply -- but not explicitly articulate -- a completely unsubstantiated racist claim: inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy.
This sleight of hand where the speaker/writer stops just short of an explicitly racist implication that deliberately confuses causation and correlation in the presence of multiple confounding factors is a standard white supremacist parlor trick. That is why Amy Wax was roundly condemned. And the OP's claim that saying anything negative about the (lack of) black marriages is taboo in academia is quite blatantly false. Read for example this gushing review (https://nyti.ms/2kbBHRP) of Ralph Richard Banks' book on the very same topic by Imani Perry.
The question that the article raises is, should the Amy Wax face professional repercussions for making a racist argument? I think that as a law professor, the answer is yes - she should be held accountable for incompetence in op-ed writing in the same way that a scientist should be held accountable for incompetence in conducting an experiment.
If she were a math professor or something, I would say that she had the right to her opinion.
The idea that she made a "racist argument" is a HUGE leap. She argued that marriage is important. You might agree or disagree, but ruining somones career because they have social views you disagree with is just gross.
As a specialist in, among other related fields, "social welfare law and policy" her social views are the substance of her career. If a mathematician believed that 1 + 1 was 3, I'd want her fired. This is similar.
> .... inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy.
We must have read different articles because that's not what I saw - I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised.
Values are race, gender, and class neutral. A value or system of values can be adopted by a person regardless of their race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc. Values are the only way we can find common ground with others, they are the only way we can be unified as a society. Imagine a white supremacist. Certainly if his skin color was magically changed to black overnight he would no longer be a white supremacist. But that's not a possibility - a white supremacist cannot change his skin color. But he can change his values.
We all agree that a stable family life is very advantageous for children. Most often this stability is achieved via marriage. Examining it along this axis we can then say that bourgeois, pro-family, pro-marriage values are measurably better than others.
We can also imagine an inner city black who has a choice between two value systems - a bourgeois value system or a hedonistic "gangster" value system. Which value system should he adopt? The bourgeois one, as this one will have better outcomes for him, for his family, and for his community.
Now there's a possible danger here: that we assume that all inner-city blacks have a gangster value system. That by dint of skin color and geographic location a person must necessarily have a certain value system. So let's not make that error.
Additionally, I would be very surprised if a majority of inner-city blacks held to some sort of gangster value system. While I don't have the data or surveys on hand, I would assume that most of this population already agrees with and holds most of the pro-family bourgeois values.
If these bourgeois values are already widespread yet poor outcomes remain then we can't pin these outcomes on a person lacking correct values. There's another factor in play. It may be that bourgeois values are hostage to other social, economic, and cultural factors. That they might yet bloom into something positive but are missing other essential ingredients. Wax fails insofar as she assigns too great a weight to the impact of bourgeois values.
Building on this point, values for a single person/group can be ranked in terms of importance: I value easily drinkable water much more than I value easy access to cat pictures, and I value easy access to cat pictures more than I value Irish independence (for example).
This being the case, two groups that might differ on some values can oftentimes work together if they have similar regard for highly-prioritized shared values--for example, I would have no problem protesting with somebody from the IRA were our common supply of water or internet threatened.
The cancerous line of thinking adopted by extremist conservatives and progressives, though, requires that all values must be ranked according to some ill-defined group gestalt, and moreover, that any difference in value systems--no matter how low-priority!--is sufficient for name-calling and failing to cooperate.
That desire to gridlock over petty things is what rots a society.
In my argumentation and debate class I took at the University many years ago the professor made the somewhat provocative statement that there is a set of universal values which everyone holds dear. The problem is they rank them differently in terms of importance and that's where all the arguments stem from. The key to effective debate is to identify those values you share and show you have the same mutual concerns.
Yep. When arguing properly (as opposed to here, for example), I usually try to start with a common set of values or facts with my opponent--oftentimes just using theirs for convenience's sake--and try to reason back to my own position.
Rarely does this fail. When it does fail, it usually means that we both have an incomplete view of the world, or that there is some incorrectness in the chain of reasoning that becomes evident pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, people usually prefer to take the (quicker, sloppier, more quarrelsome) route of "I have my facts, you have your facts, you are evil for believing <X,Y,Z>".
"I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised."
There is no need to detect a dogwhistle. We have an explicit statement from Wax (http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/amy-wax-penn-law-cultur...) where she says Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior. "I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'" she said, adding, "Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify" these values. "Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans."
An aside, I grew up in a small Midwest town. There was one black family in town. One of the sons was in the grade above me in school and people would joke that he wasn't really "black". This was because he had been raise in a small Midwest town and had small-town values and habits. He and his family were an accepted part of the community because they had the same values.
If a member of the Bloods had moved in town, they would very much have been rejected because they would have been acting with very different values. Further more, they probably would have starting acting in ways that were contrary to cultural norms.
Is it racist to say that I think small-town Midwest values are superior to inner-city black values?
Is it racist to say that I think that the lives of inner-city blacks would be improved if they adopted small-town Midwest values?
What if I switch the statement and say that I think small-town Midwest values could improve the lives of all poor people in the inner city. Is that "dog whistling"?
You're assuming that "inner-city black values" is a thing, and that black people living in inner cities all have the same values. That's the part that's racist.
My sister taught in Memphis for 3 years. The kids she taught were of raise significantly differently than we were raised.
I will grant you that not all black people living in the inner city have the same values but I think it is factually incorrect to say that low income African Americans living in the inner-city do not have a common culture and common values.
My phrasing might be racist, if that is the case, can you point out how to express the same idea in a more neutral way so that I don't make the same mistake in the future?
I'm not sure how to answer that, because I still don't believe what you're saying is correct. Living and teaching in Memphis for three years certainly gives one more perspective than not doing so, but a school-district-sized parcel of Memphis likely doesn't even speak for Memphis as a whole, let alone all US cities.
I do expect that all low-income black people living in cities share some values, but that can be applied to any group. I wouldn't claim that low-income white people living in cities all have the same culture, either, despite the fact that they almost certainly share at least some of the same values.
Look, I'm not trying to say you're an evil racist. You just have biases (unconscious and conscious), just like all of us do. I just worry when people try to label a group of people so narrowly and homogeneously when there's more to it than that.
All discussion of culture is generalization. If you can't deal with that, you're going to have a very tough time. We can talk about cultures that generally fall along ethnic or racial lines with the understanding that the values don't hold for every person of that race or ethnicity.
The article you link to undermines you core claim that she implicitly claims "inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy." She explicitly states the opposite:
“Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she said. “The irony is: bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.”
> We can also imagine an inner city black who has a choice between two value systems
Far too many black families do no have the luxury to choose a new value system. Extreme generational poverty is bad enough, but many are not allowed to even start on a path towards self improvement because 7.7% of adult black men are currently in prison. How, exactly, does "pro-family culture" improve social mobility for the 1-in-9 black children with a parent in prison.
> It may be that bourgeois values are hostage to other social, economic, and cultural factors.
Exactly - it wouldn't surprise me at all if the "benefits" attributed to marriage are actually a proxy for race.
This underscores an error that many conservative thinkers make - that "values are everything." I think values are an important part of achieving good outcomes, but values don't exist in isolation. The war on drugs criminalizes behavior that could be better treated through rehabilitation. Then it compounds this error by imposing large externalities, like felony records that make it impossible to find a job, excessive mandatory minimum sentences, etc.
Values multiply positively with other factors. So it's not "bourgeois values" + "economic opportunity" == "success". It's more like "bourgeois values" * "economic opportunity" == success (multiplication instead of addition). When "economic opportunity" = 0 values will have no impact. This is an idea that a lot of us in the U.S. grapple with, that you can be virtuous but still end up with a bad outcome.
Inner-city blacks don't have a lack of stable family life because of "culture". It's because we lock up vast numbers of young black men for minor crimes right when they would otherwise be forming families.
I do agree completely, but it should be pointed out that she, before mentioning inner city blacks, also mentioned:
> Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites
Its a bit silly to split that along racial terms (both Wax and the offendees)... There are plenty of single-parent antisocial working-class blacks as well.
In my mind the real conflation is the difference between an eagerness and hopefulness for upward mobility and what Wax calls "Bourgeois" or "European" values. Bourgeois is a vastly superior word than European - the two are only conflated because for much of human history, only some Europeans were wealthy. The author could have saved herself a boatload of trouble (if she in fact is _not_ racist) by just pointing out that no one really knows what a modern, international, not-ruled-by-whites Bourgeois society will look like - but that we ought to bring back a general respect for nice things - rather than a lionization of poverty.
What I think a lot of rich/college educated white people don't understand is that the lionization of poverty was done _by the impoverished_ - media creation was finally in our grasps, so jazz, hiphop, rap, etc bloomed. It's only inevitable that there will be an identity conflict as the poverty and hardships are (thankfully!) eased over time by technology and wealth. The solution to people being proud of being poor is _to have no more poor people_ - and the solution to that is not cultural, it's economic and legal.
While Jazz is mostly an African American creation and most of it's most successful practitioners are black, most Jazz aficionados will bristle at lumping Jazz with hiphop... it would be like lumping Beethoven with Ozzy Osborne, doesn't compute....I am a big hiphop fan and a lover of jazz but they are different.
Well, of course they are, but your first sentence is all I was after. Jazz and hiphop share the fact that they were authored, in majority, by african-americans and the songs in both genres, in majority, tell tales of poverty and hope.
NOT AT ALL. While hiphop does a lot of "tales of poverty", jazz for starters is mostly instrumental. Secondly, Jazz is fairly diverse in terms of the topics (love and life) that are covered in songs...It is simply wrong to pigeon hole these art forms as about "tales of poverty".
> But she then plays on the audiences implicit biases to imply -- but not explicitly articulate -- a completely unsubstantiated racist claim: inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy.
I beg you to walk me through the logic of how reading this essay left you with the idea that "inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy"?
It seems far more "problematic" to infer a racist statement when none was actually made. It's disingenuous to put words in people's mouths.
Let's not forget a persons reputation is at stake here, and casually calling them a racist because you extrapolated something that they may or may not agree with can be extremely damaging.
If someone is truly a racist you don't really need to "out" them -- they'll do it themselves over time.
I think this is a key motivational paragraph from the article...
"The students are certainly correct that claims by a professor about the value of bourgeois culture could be misused by racists to say that one race is inherently superior to another. But does that make any discussion of cultural differences taboo? Does that make Wax a white supremacist for saying that culture matters for poverty-related outcomes, that not all cultures are equally good for escaping poverty, and that the 1950s American “bourgeois cultural script” was particularly good for that purpose? No, and here’s why."
No they're not, the second is just a clarification of the sense in which the first was meant.
By comparison, take the statement "All men are not equal. Or at least, they're not equal in their ability to play football". The second statement is obviously true, the first is controversial.
Why is that so? How can all men be equal if they're so obviously unequal in just about any metric you might choose to measure them on? Because they're equal in one specific sense: that we (most of us) believe they should have equal rights.
Decisions and choices have consequences. These are not made in a philosophical vacuum, they are made according to the values the individual holds - which are largely influenced by the culture from which the individual comes. Indeed the term "culture" arises from the Latin "cultus" which is a religion or value structure.
A culture that passes on default values of industriousness and a high regard for education will generate individuals that are more motivated and perhaps more resilient than one who does not. A culture that values consistent parenting of children will likely pass on more deliberate traits than a culture that does not value active parenting.
One should not be surprised to see different distributions of outcomes from different groups who hold different values. One of the advantages of living in a multicultural society where people live together peacefully and actually listen to one another is that we can learn which choices lead to the best outcomes and encourage our children to emulate those and to avoid choices that lead to dependency and addiction.
The Brookings Institute can hardly be considered a right wing think tank and yet they published a well reasoned piece on the behavioral aspects of poverty [1].
I don't think there's inherently anything wrong with the original author's thesis: not all cultures are created equal. But the author does make a critical conservative assumption by implying that economic output is a proxy for "value".
This is honestly the critical point: our culture defines how we value things. Some cultures are not bothered by things like social welfare or socialist policies because the base unit of society is considered to be the family rather than the individual. Cultures like this may value things like "familial harmony" more than "individual prosperity".
So it's obvious that someone like the original author -- who likely grew up in this "bourgeois culture" -- would attribute everything bad in society to the decline in things she holds valuable. It's part of the definition.
As a counterpoint, American culture is much better for the individual than it was 30-40 years ago for anyone who isn't a straight white male. Those people have the viewpoint that things have improved. Bourgeois values aren't meaningful to these people because they never really applied.
So really, we're back to where we already knew we were: globalization had winners and losers. The losers were primarily located in the western middle class (i.e. the bourgeois class).
Could you clarify your argument? It sounds like you're saying something to the effect of "The author is just upset that life is better for people with different attributes than her; no one can legitimately hold her point of view". I don't think that's what you mean, but I want to give you the opportunity to clarify.
I'm trying to say that her argument simply isn't very interesting :)
Look, the only people who think America was better off in the 60s/70s are the ones who benefitted from the systemic discrimination inherent of that era. It's perfectly reasonable for them to feel that way, and I'm not even saying I blame them for feeling left behind. Is America actually better off today? It depends who you ask.
It's just not intellectually very interesting to talk about. All she's doing is imposing cherry-picked aspects of her chosen value system as objectively "better" while ignoring the whole point that any definition of "better" relies on a subjective personal value system to begin with.
This is spot on; cultures don't exist in a vacuum. How much of the success of the 'bourgeois culture' of the 1950s was due to the exploitation of other cultures?
Some things are zero-sum games, or at least don't scale to everyone getting the same benefit.
I guess zero-sum is not the correct term; there ARE ways we can improve the sum total quality of life in our country and planet, but we have to really think about what it would mean as the plan scales to everyone.
While I'm inclined to think that personal choices are a more powerful predictor of outcomes than race, I agree that we don't understand cultural dynamics well enough. I think this is all the more reason we should pause before accusing someone of white supremacism, etc.
> But the author does make a critical conservative assumption by implying that economic output is a proxy for "value".
I think she made a critical assumption that "ability to create economic output" is a proxy for "ability to lift people out of poverty". I consider that statement to be much more reasonable than its negation.
I don't think that's a great proxy. Just because a group has high economic output and an ability to lift people out of poverty, it doesn't mean they will. The rising income inequality in the US (without a desire to increase social welfare programs) coupled with the fact that the US's economy is still growing would seem like a counterexample.
Let me try to clarify what I meant. If a culture can enhance the culture's members' ability as individuals to create higher economic output, then that culture is probably more able to lift individual members out of poverty. Or, if you prefer, it gives the individual members better tools for lifting themselves out of poverty.
I'm not claiming that it will do better at taking care of the poor. I'm claiming that poor members of that culture will be better able to help themselves.
"Of course we are always free to dispute each other; Wax’s colleagues could certainly have written essays or a collective essay debating her claims and pointing out flaws in her reasoning, but when is it morally and professionally appropriate to issue a collective public condemnation of a colleague?
"I think such collective actions are only appropriate when colleagues have clearly and flagrantly violated their professional duties. I mean things like data fabrication or taking bribes to produce dishonest academic papers desired by a trade association."
Well, that's just your opinion man.
This is one of the key claims of this article, and it has no support. Why is a collective response inappropriate here? Why should those students and professors who disagree with Amy Wax not band together intellectually and through collective speech? Why is a collective response only appropriate when someone is clearly and vagrantly violating their professional duties? The author is making a very extreme assertion, but does it as an aside.
Why is that an extreme assertion? Until maybe two years ago, it would have been considered extreme to call for a professor's head for anything short of real misconduct.
> Why is a collective response inappropriate here?
I think that the default should be to allow a discourse that is wide ranging and open, and to only censure in cases that are truly extreme (such as incitement). Institutional censure carries with it a huge weight, and potentially the ability to silence opinions. Though I strongly disagree with this person, I must also try to imagine a situation where the roles are reversed, where I am in the minority and having my opinion censured. I believe that to live in a society that is truly free, it guarantees you will come into contact with opinions and beliefs that you find repugnant. It troubles me that the left has so aggressively mobilized against speech, not just disagreeing with it, but demanding that it be institutionally silenced.
That said, this school (being a private institution) and these professors (being individuals entitled to their own opinions) are also within their rights. Free speech does not free you from criticism for your views.
These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.[1]
People attach happy ideas during this time because during good economic times, things just work on all cylinders. However, two major things were happening that actually led to the advancements and fruitfulness of the time mentioned from 40s to mid 60s.
1) World War II happened and ended, everyone was obliterated but the US. This led to massive gains in all areas of wealth and industry. It was a war that took us to a superpower, and at the time, everyone owed us money. Good economic times lead to more ability to have kids and a solid consumer base to support middle class housing/restaurants/retail etc.
2) Women started entering the workforce and diversity started to happen opening up the workforce that was previously built for 1 person to provide for multiple people and salary needed for that, to suddenly having sometimes 2 in the house that brought in double the money needed for a time.
You could say a move away from family focused housing and middle class retail/restaurants is a problem, but that is more to do with wage stagnation and the internet/productivity. People can't afford to get married and have multiple kids as they could before, wages have not truly kept up and been steadily dropping since the 70s as well as share of productivity/GDP gains[2].
People have more kids in good economic times and less kids in bad economic times[3][4], same reason there was a baby boom in the time they mentioned from the 40s to the mid 60s. The 90s are similar in terms of good economic times, people had more kids, people bought more homes, more products, people were getting wage increases, new technologies/innovation that gains advantage worldwide etc.
In the end it is economics and timing, whatever is popular during those times people will attribute it to their own confirmation biases.
Thank you. I wondered if anyone else could see why the original essay is so ridiculous. It assumes that bad culture is the cause of poverty, and not the other way around. It's pretty obvious that the decision to get married and stay married is affected by material conditions. One consequence of the decline in manufacturing jobs is that less-educated men have pretty low employment rates. Since they can't hold down a stable job and be the primary breadwinner (as "bourgeois culture" expects them to), there's little reason for them to stick around (or for their partners to keep them around). This also explains the data Haidt and his group turned up on the correlation between parents' marriage status and children's future success. The couples that managed to stay together were the ones that had a better financial/employment situation. There's no reason to believe that a deadbeat dad would improve his child's future competitiveness that much just by staying married to the child's mother.
There's also the fact that single moms on welfare would lose their benefits if they married the father of their children. As one astute internet commenter on a similar article remarked, "Only an ivory tower egghead could think that poor people don't make rational economic decisions."
marriage has declined largely because women don't as often have to stay in shitty abusive marriages for financial reasons anymore. this is a good thing.
Of course we are always free to dispute each other; Wax’s colleagues could certainly have written essays or a collective essay debating her claims and pointing out flaws in her reasoning, but when is it morally and professionally appropriate to issue a collective public condemnation of a colleague?
Whenever the signatories of such a communication agree upon the idea, surely? Political agency only exists to the degree that one is willing to exercise it.
I find it perplexing that conservatives on the one hand deplore restrictions on speech that seem to stifle the expression of conservative ideas and so forth, but then complain about improper forms of speech when they find their ideas rejected. If it's OK for Wax to co-author a lightweight op-ed that expresses support for bourgeois (capitalist) moral values and breezily dismisses the downsides thereof, why should her critics limit themselves to scholarly analysis but abstain from making moral arguments of their own? Why is it OK for Wax to claim that "things are likely to get worse for us all" thanks to "the academics, media, and Hollywood", but not OK for Wax's colleagues to say they consider her to be giant hypocrite?
I have gone to great lengths to show that Wax’s central claim about culture is probably correct because the necessity of protecting dissent is clearest when the dissenter brings an important and neglected truth into the conversation.
In reality, Haidt takes one aspect of Wax's claim (about the value of marriage), shows some bipartisan/broad-spectrum support for the idea that promoting marriage can have social benefits, and treats this like an empirical result. I don't think that comes anywhere close to validating Wax's broad claim that the hegemonic post-war culture is the best cure for today's social ills, or that its shortcomings are incidental rather than inherent, or that its desiderata of modest obedience and productivity are the acme of human experience.
It's fine with me if he agrees with Wax, but this doesn't give him the right to dictate the terms of discourse. If Wax can write a "provocative essay" why must her critics restrict themselves to the language of theoretical discourse?
You are a little disingenuous - no one would be complaining if someone on the law faculty wrote a counter opinion piece. What's happening isn't an expression of disagreement, which would be fine, but an attack on Wax to try and suppress her POV. Her critics made no "moral argument" they simply condemn her.
First, I am absolutely sure that someone would complain no matter what the response.
Second, the letter which you linked to is very clearly an expression of disagreement. In what way is it 'an attack on Wax to try and suppress her POV'? It explicitly acknowledges both her civil rights and the security of her academic tenure, and explicitly rejects her claims rather than demanding she be fired or refrain from public expression of her views.
Third, they absolutely make a moral argument: We believe the ideal of equal opportunity to succeed in education is best achieved by a combination of academic freedom, open debate and a commitment by all participants to respect one another without bias or stereotype. To our students, we say the following: If your experience at Penn Law falls substantially short of this ideal, something has gone wrong, and we want to know about it.
I still fail to see why people who disagree with someone on a political issue should be required to express their disagreement in a particular form. It looks to me as if these academics consider Wax's arguments so specious as to be unworthy of discussion. Why should they feel obliged to respond in a forum or format of their opponents' choosing?
I have not read Amy Wax's original letter but my understand is that she made the claim that people in the lower social-economic classes have been rejecting the "Bourgeois" culture. She then went on to say that this rejection has and will have negative affects on those groups.
Would someone be willing to point out how that claim is offensive? Or is it how she made the claim that is the issue?
Some people translate "bourgeois culture" as "white culture" and thus interpret her conclusion as "if you don't act white your kids will be doomed". That's offensive to people who believe that diversity and multiculturalism are superior.
Ahh, your phrasing of "if you don't act white your kids will be doomed" puts it in a way I can understand it, thank you.
Part of me feels like the idea "white culture is harmful" is harmful. I think it would be much better if we could split it along economic lines "lower vs upper class" instead of racial lines "black vs white" that would help us draw parallels between the plight of rural Tennessee with inner city Detroit. But it feels like if I started talking about class people would accuse me of using class as a mask for being racist. Which just so happens to be the case here.
No one that doesn't spend every waking moment lying to themselves about the realities of our existence would have a problem with anything in that paragraph. Left eating itself
Looking at the Heterodox Academy's blog history, they seem mostly to be interested in advocating for a conservative viewpoint than anything else. To say that they're trying to 'break orthodoxy' comes across as ridiculous when they're based in a country where the current president and congress are the most right wing they've been for decades. The whole narrative of 'free speech' being under attack in academia has just been from right-wingers who really want nothing like free speech - they just want the ability to be racist and bigoted with impunity while shutting down speech in favour of equality.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 181 ms ] thread"If not all cultures and values are equally successful in modern society, should we (as a society) encourage people to adopt a more successful values, or should we adapt society to make all cultures and values equally successful?"
(edit: obviously I have biases, but I tried to phase this in a way that masked my biases. If there's a more neutral way to phrase this, I'd be interested in hearing it)
This reminds me of a famous Tocqueville quote:
There is in fact a manly and legitimate passion for equality that spurs all men to wish to be strong and esteemed. This passion tends to elevate the lesser to the rank of the greater.
But one also finds in the human heart a depraved taste for equality which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.
> How do you propose to raise up a culture that doesn't value diligent hard work
Which culture? Don't be abstract. Name what culture you think doesn't value hard work and I will and we'll see if I can't find a counterexample.
Are the downvotes about attributing it to their values? What else?
Their skill at (((accidental))) eugenics? The selection pressure put on them by other groups?
Other theory: KGB or Mossad votebots that want to suppress discussions about Jews not only being victims.
"If the Jews are okay, then how come you couldn't figure it out? HMMMMMM? That's what I thought." is heard often when bringing up the American Jewish within the context of this discussion. While I don't agree with down-voting a comment that smells similar to something toxic (I doubt the grand-parent intended this interpretation). The highly negative reaction is likely due to the frequency with which this argument is brought up, and its lack of any validity.
Comparing the American Jewish to African-Americans is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The time spans for the comparison are horribly different - When were Jews recently generationally slaved for centuries?
The thing that really annoys me about this comparison between Jews and African Americans is "because of their strong values of hard work, family, and creativity". In my opinion these values of Jewish Americans are obtained through the tightly ingrained religious and familial structures. Unlike the Jewish, however, African-Americans' culture was systematically annihilated when they were enslaved. There are few traces of African religions and customs that remained after slavery. Any shared values were destroyed by such an event. You can similarly say that the massive amounts of black males that have since been imprisoned for minor drug crimes in the U.S. has had a similar effect on the familial unit.
The plights of Jewish and Black Americans in the U.S. have been very different. This is likely why people reacted poorly to the subject being brought up.
Yes, Black Americans have suffered a truly horrible history of oppression that has caused cultural problems. If anything, you're agreeing with Wax that culture matters.
This is a commonly held hypothesis but the question of "why are the Jews successful despite being outsiders" is complicated and not in any way settled. What I know of it comes from reading some of "the origins of totalitarianism" Hannah Arendt. "The Jews are really hardworking" is a lazy and easy explanation for the question of how some Jews have flourished despite persecution.
It is not simply the case that culture is the proximal cause of (some) Jewish wealth than the particular material conditions of certain Jews throughout history that has lead to the affluence of and importance of some, mostly European Jews. For example, many Jews came to have a privileged position in European courts because of the rise of protestantism (a hardworking culture that doesn't value credit, something that Wax would probably say is "bad"). You're ignoring politics and history when you just chalk everything up to culture. It's survivorship bias at it's finest.
Edit: I butchered a sentence in the middle of my comment. Added a line break.
What we choose to do about that is up for debate. The fact of the situation, however, is not.
I don't follow. The quote strongly applies that freedom is preferable to slavery even if some would want otherwise.
* Life expectancy: this assumes longer is better
* Rate of suicide: happy secure people generally don't commit suicide
* Rate of preventable deceases: says something about health
* Rate of violent crime: secure people don't have to deal with crime
Lots of welfare, which gets back to the original point about marriage vs. single parents.
"Raising up" the culture of people who are unsurprised that people at the peak of their fertility tend to get pregnant even in an environment where marriage is increasingly unattainable to that population is more about not going out of our way to kick people while they're down than hobbling the excellent.
How do you mean marriage is increasingly unattainable ? A marriage license costs $55. Are you alluding to something else here?
Single mothers are one of the last bastions of subsidies and welfare, especially considering how everything else has been scaled down in the recent years.
> our society takes every possible opportunity to treat young unwed mothers like absolute shit.
I have plenty of anecdata to the contrary. I'd like to hear why you think this, there must be a somewhat personal reason.
Welfare is structured so that single moms get more money if they stay single. It is bad for the kids to grow up without a father and it is bad for society to encourage it.
Source: Wife worked in a homeless shelter.
Poor policies that leave people in poverty traps (e.g. having a single mom find a job that pays barely above her welfare benefits shouldn't be stripping her of benefits, but a much more gradual sliding scale instead) should constantly be brought to light and fixed.
> It is bad for the kids to grow up without a father and it is bad for society to encourage it.
Absolutely, but to fix that we also have to look at why the fathers aren't sticking around, not only why single mothers aren't remarrying and/or getting out of poverty quicker.
I think there are a lot of reasons fathers aren't sticking around. I think a lot of those can be helped if there was less drug use and gang violence and more enfranchise on education, family planning, and marriage.
I think there are both structural (welfare, education, ect) and cultural changes that need to be made before all of those areas can be improved.
TANF (the last vestige of single-mother welfare) is ~$30bn/yr for the whole US, state & federal contribution.
SSDI (a mix of people with severe medical problems and the work-shy) is $150bn/yr.
OASI (I'm old - gimmie money) is $813bn/yr
Medicare (I'm old - gimmie healthcare) is $709bn/yr
Single mother welfare is a rounding error in the budget compared to other subsidies and welfare, which is mostly diverted towards older and wealthier people.
I'm not just talking about cash welfare -- try holding down a job while raising a kid by your own and see how much our society will bend over backwards to accommodate any lifestyle choice other than single child-rearing.
I don't have a dog in this fight - I'm a middle-aged, childless single guy. But I have eyes to see and it doesn't take much research to figure out who's getting the short end of the stick in our social order.
> But I have eyes to see and it doesn't take much research to figure out who's getting the short end of the stick in our social order.
Part of the plight of single mothers is rising inequality and inability of the fathers to find decent jobs. Whenever arguments about children are made, I strongly believe at looking at a broader picture - how can we make sure the child grows up in a nuclear family for at least 16-18 years? I think that has to be looked at in the context of both sexes.
Thanks for the numbers as well, although I believe medical care is also subsidized for single mothers (at their median income level). It's hard to argue against expanding TANF (One of my college Economics courses examined effectiveness of welfare programs, and found that TANF was the most beneficial as far as how far each dollar goes).
Given that this includes people who value a society where particular values aren't successful, it is probably not possible to have a society like that.
So let's accept the statement 'all cultures are equal' at face value: all cultures are equal and therefore there exists no metric for measuring 'goodness' or 'effectiveness.' If C(now) captures my current cultural state and C(future) captures my future cultural state and we're saying both of these states are equal - because all cultures are equal - then where's the impetus for any new legislation? Where's the drive for change?
In the United States our past culture included slavery, which we'll call C(slavery). Are we really saying C(slavery) == C(now)? I bet most people would claim C(now) > C(slavery) and if so should be suspect of any claim that all cultures are equal.
This isn't a rigorous proof, but I do think it calls into question the notion that all cultures are equal. But maybe that's not what the phrase actually means: maybe what they really intend to say is we've yet to identify unbiased metrics by which we can use to measure cultures and thus correlate them. Presumably most people would bias the metric in such a manner that their culture turned out to be the best. If that's what's actually meant by the phrase 'all cultures are equal' (and I've never heard of anyone presenting it that way) then it should be stated as such because then we can work toward identifying those metrics so we can objectively improve our own culture.
To play the devil's advocate (since I don't agree that all cultures are equal), three answer:
1) Mere preference/taste.
2) Who said "change is required"?
3) Within a culture we might have criteria to stand as impetus for change/legislation etc inside the culture. So the statement just means that we can't use them to judge another's culture but only our own.
> If that's what's actually meant by the phrase 'all cultures are equal' (and I've never heard of anyone presenting it that way) then it should be stated as such because then we can work toward identifying those metrics so we can objectively improve our own culture.
I agree with you about "all cultures are equal" being a hard statement to defend if you take it to literally and nihilistically to mean that there is no objective way to measure good or bad. Not a lot of people are that nihilistic. Most people believe in some degree of moral relativity and some degree of moral absolutism. It's hard.
I don't have a rigorous proof for my feelings towards this, but I feel like the goal shouldn't be to reduce CULTURE down to KPIs. I don't think we should be putting culture on a scale and asking how it effects the economy because I think it's the kind of bad social science that people on HN usually detest. This is a good letter from one of Wax's critics, posted to Heterodox Academy:
https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/09/03/i-dont-care-if-amy-w...
Additionally, cultures are porous, overlapping aggregations of chaotic, abstract and mutating human created concepts which resist analysis almost by definition.
Assessing a culture based mainly on its economic expediency seems like a startlingly narrow criteria?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme
I agree that it's best to inspect culture from the bottom up rather than the top down. Start with the most granular units. Is anyone here acquainted with the current sociological orthodoxy or is that population mutually exclusive with HN commenters? :)
http://www.iffs.se/media/1906/culturemap_may2015.jpeg
and notice how Anglos, even when separated by oceans for hundreds of years, tend to cluster in one corner of values-space.
I have no idea how to interpret this graph.
(I have no prior knowledge, I just searched)
I think we can rank our current culture as better than that one. If we can rank two culture than it is possible to compare them. That said, we might not be able to conclude if Japanese or German culture today. But we can say that Sudan could be improved by adopting parts of those cultures.
I think saying we cannot rank cultures leaves up hobbled when it comes to critically evaluating them.
Not to split hairs, but you were the one who phrased it like that.
Is American culture (a loaded term because American culture is the product of numerous sub-cultures) better than all other cultures because of our economic strength? If not, then what are the objective measures that define a "good" culture.
I'm very glad slavery doesn't exist, because I value equality and freedom. Yet still, I'd ask who is the authority that determines that one culture is better than another because they hold that value?
Europeans via too many systems to name here (e.g. colonizing much of the world, forcing religion on indigenous people, slavery, apartheid, etc.) imposed their cultural values on the world and then held them up as the best.
Ultimately, it's not right to conflate what you believe with what is objectively good. It all depends what your solving for (e.g. profit, equality, harmony, etc.)
I'm still completely opposed to slavery and willing to fight it, by force if necessary.
Is that dystopic?
There are some tools for objectively judging morality aka "good and bad". One is the principle of universality. So an outcome is moral if you can reasonably state that you would be equally happy to be on either side of the table. Slavery generally fails this test, since most people would prefer not to be slaves. Virtually everyone on either side of the slavery divide (slave/free) valued freedom, some of them just didn't value the freedom of other people.
Also, it's not true that a moral relativist must have no values. One can have values while believing they are not objective, but closer to preferences held very strongly.
The tool you mentioned makes a lot of sense for issues that have a clear preference e.g. slavery or not, but I suspect it would show cracks if we start looking at more subjective issues (which I imagine dominate nowadays).
[1]: There's several good texts exploring how people may have thought at various times in history (because it's all speculation, of course), but one I enjoyed was A Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England.
Arguably slavery never went away, it’s just that the slavery franchise was disguised/rebranded and then extended as social mobility was slowly rolled back.
I think it went away. Capitalism doesn't force anyone to work, you may choose not to participate in the labour market and be homeless.
I see this statement as a tautology, or at the very least as an ill posed question.
I think this might be formally incomputable...
I may not be able to compute it. I may not even be able to measure it. But I think that anyone who disagrees is making a far less reasonable claim than I am making, and therefore has the burden of proof.
As a parent, I can vouch for the fact it’s difficult to successfully raise children but there are many other possible ways to support the young in becoming net contributors to society because there are clearly many viable cultural alternatives to the nuclear family that could thrive under a system other than the kleptocratic oligarchy of late US neoliberal globalist vulture techno-capitalism.
Wax argues competently but is guilty of a slight lack of imagination as most conservative thinkers are; the preference to move backwards towards a solution based on a mythical idealised point in the past, letting their preferred outcome dull their analysis of their cognitive biases.
Unfortunately shutting down debate seems to be the favoured approach of those who are over-engaged with identity politics at the current time. It’s almost as if the left have been infiltrated by self-loathing alt-right 4chan agent provocateur trolls who are so scared of choice and diversity that they want to speed a “return” to a totalitarian hegemonic monoculture by getting the left to do their work for them. I think that the actual situation is maybe more prosaic, a case of undergraduate courses teaching critical theory without first teaching the fundamentals of critical thinking (with social media is turning the heat up across the board).
It is clear that cultures can be valued against one another only when metrics can be agreed. Wax seems to unsafely assume that there is a consensus on metrics and I think there is a need for more science and philosophy in that area before real progress can be made.
There is such a thing as legitimate authority based on domain knowledge but cultural legitimacy doesn’t seem to quite work in the same way. New generations will experiment with solutions to the problems (and privilege) they are faced with in their time. The debate has become more shrill as the web has accelerated change and revitalised sub-cultures, and conservatism will act, as it always has, as a speed brake on change.
Unsure of why I'm getting downvotes.. Are people completely unaware of the fact that some people enjoy pain?
You can also examine things from other perspectives.
Darwinian, perhaps: does enjoying pain give any kind of evolutionary advantage? Maybe in a few niche areas, but overall, no, since pain is a way for our brains to signal damage, or future damage if we keep doing what we're doing. Ignoring pain up to a certain threshold can be useful, but enjoying pain to your detriment is not.
Or maybe just economic: does enjoying pain give any kind of economic advantages?
And so on...
I think it's important to acknowledge that there are no absolutes when it comes to opinion, but sometimes you just have to observe near-unanimity and go with it.
For example, what is the best color? Many people have strong color preferences, but the question doesn't admit of a single objective answer.
Without defending slavery, the obvious problem with your line of reasoning is that most people (implicitly most people alive today) are influenced by C(now). Even if you identify a group of values that are relatively constant across cultures (including bygone cultures), the best you can do is say "culture X better conforms to the majority values than culture Y". It's probably worthwhile to be able to make such a statement, but it's still not an objective statement. If you want to make objective statements about morality and cultures, you need to subscribe to a philosophy of moral absolutism, which is antithetical to liberal tradition prior to a few years ago.
Worse, I'd guess that there is a liberal/conservative element here. Liberals are more likely to believe that C(now) > C(slavery); they are also more likely to believe that all cultures are equal.
I disagree that conservatives are more likely to believe that C(slavery) was better than C(now), but I agree that conservatives are more likely to process an absolute morality position (with liberals it seems more complicated--most would say they support moral relativism, but they seem to view other moral systems as fundamentally racist and thus evil, which can't be far from moral absolutism). This is more an elaboration on your point than a correction, I think.
Why? I can consider something subjectively evil, that is, I can feel a strong moral repulsion without considering that judgment to be universal.
If moral relativism is true, as I believe it is barring evidence showing the opposite, then enforcing one's subjective morality is inevitable. Banning slavery and rape, enforcing property rights, all of that is enforcing subjective morality, since there's no other.
But it's not absolutism if one recognizes that the enforcement is based on subjective opinion and not on intrinsic qualities of the actions being banned.
Essentially, it's might makes right, and I just happen to be lucky that we opponents to slavery are mightier than its advocates.
You may not be defending slavery, but you are suggesting that we cannot make a definitive statement about whether slavery is good or bad. If we can't do that, then what's the point of practical discussion about the direction of our civilization?
I do believe that the concept of tolerance can go too far, and that simply tolerating intolerant people can actually give you a worse outcome than censoring them. But I'm afraid that the left (of which I consider myself a part) goes too far sometimes. It's taboo to even try to discuss some topics, and people who don't understand and are just trying to learn get slapped down. That's not helping.
One concern I have is that the left is arguing that it should be okay to punch intolerant people ("what's wrong with punching Nazis?"), but they are also happy to use "intolerant" to describe pretty much anyone with whom they disagree (the Christakis/Yale incident and the Google Memo fiasco come to mind, but I see this all over). Anyone who isn't convinced about theories of structural racism or discrimination as the root cause of all disparities are increasingly called intolerant (to your point about people getting slapped down), and it seems like only a shallow victory for liberal thought (people are "accepting" these theories out of fear, and will probably vocally challenge them again when the fear is removed). The left should do the hard work of persuading, and if they fail to persuade huge swaths of the population, perhaps they should step back and examine their theories instead of taking it as evidence that the country is indeed full of Nazis (because only Nazis would disagree, right?)
Besides being concerned about abusing a hypothetical "right to punch Nazis", I'm equally concerned that suppressing hate is more likely to have the reverse effect (which probably best explains the uptick we're seeing now, though I can't prove it). It seems like the left had a really good system several years ago, which was to challenge bigoted ideas in open debate. It may not have completely rooted out hate, but that could be because it wasn't practices long enough or well enough or perhaps there is simply some small percent of people who are unreachable with reasoned debate and we reached everyone else (we seem to have done a good job of making these people insignificant, prior to the last couple of years).
To quote Wikipedia a little: "Capitalism, Gramsci suggested, maintained control not just through violence and political and economic coercion, but also ideologically, through a hegemonic culture in which the values of the bourgeoisie became the 'common sense' values of all. Thus a consensus culture developed in which people in the working-class identified their own good with the good of the bourgeoisie, and helped to maintain the status quo rather than revolting."
In his theory any culture C (!Hegemony)>C (Hegemony). When he refers to Hegemonic culture he was talking ato the time about what he called "Fordism" which was the state of the art in enlightened capitalism at the time meaning treating and paying workers well with the workplace working in tandem with the family to re-enforce the traditional family unit.
Gramsci was trying to figure out a way to cause communist revolution at the time and he said that in order to attack Fordism they must get together everyone who is opposed to the dominant culture, including socialists as well as all cultural minorities including civil rights activists, feminists, libertines, homosexuals, radical islamists, some criminals, etc who felt they had some greivance with the dominant culture. It really didn't matter if they were morally justified or not by any philosophy. The point was is that they were opposed to the hegemony and that's all that mattered. Thats because the point of their activity was not to change laws within the current system, but to create discontent to foment a socialist political revolution by any means.
Now these days this strategy has morphed into something that is not a communist plot, but just a general strategy to seize power in organizations. The reason you can't say any culture is better than any other except the hegemonic culture is because it ideologically undermines the means of political revolution that has been picked up by several generations of political opportunists who use this strategy to build and maintain a powerbase.
[1].https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_Notebooks
The "hegemonic" "bourgeoisie", secure in the status quo, sees politics as a game for "opportunists", while the oppressed classes lay aside their differences so they can try build enough power to overthrow the oppression and end their suffering.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1013753/quotes/qt1525548 [City Councilman Dan White is complaining that he is having trouble getting re-elected because his base doesn't have any problems that need government intervention, while 'lucky duck' Harvey Milk has the natural support of the gay voter base who want the police to stop murdering them.]
Dan White: You have an issue [gay rights]. Harvey Milk: It's more than an issue. This is our life we're fighting for.
It seems like his interpretation accords entirely with what you're saying.
Now, since the hegemony has adapted and added tolerance of homosexuality and disapproval of racial and gender discrimination, the Gramscians are reaching further and further into the discontented for supporters. What's really revitalized the cultural right is when the Gramscians tried to pull in Islamists and non-citizens (the least politically charged name I could come up with for this group) into the coalition of the disaffected. The contradictions in their ideology as a purported means for peaceful change of the existing system just got too huge and many people didn't understand the justification for the movement anymore in terms of a nationalist and progressivist basis. This is similar to how many people lost the plot on the justification for the Iraq war on a nationalist and progressivist basis.
Wait...you're saying that they pursue their own interests?! How dare they!
The fight a few years ago within the Sierra Club environmental organization between pro and anti-immigration factions was a similar display of the political contradiction's that plague the coalitions of non-hegemonic cultures.
There are still lots of dogmatic and theoretical Marxists of various flavors, but since the financial crisis the left has become more agnostic and pragmatic. Wait until you see the next phase of our cunning plan.
That is, by the act of making the argument, they refute the argument they are making.
Not necessarily. There is a system of logic where a double negation doesn't yield the same result. (e.g. if A = True, then !A == false, but !!A == true is not necessarily true)
#Pedantic #ImProbablyWrong
1. All cultures are equal in the sense that they are equally as good. 2. There is no way to compare the merits of any two cultures.
(1) is a claim that attributes equal merit to each culture. It is then necessary to establish what exactly these merits are.
(2) is a claim that does not per se exclude the possibility of there being a matter of fact about which culture is superior in which ways w.r.t. other cultures. It denies the possibility of establishing what the fact of the matter is.
(1) admits only two possible presuppositions. Either (a) all cultures are equal because the good they impart onto individuals and societies is ultimately the same and thus differences are merely cosmetic, or (b) cultures are not a good (that is, neutral or inert w.r.t. the good).
(2) admits two possibilities as well. Either (a) our ability to know is limited or impaired or (b) we cannot know because there is nothing to know, i.e., (1b).
I think focusing on (1) in this context is a waste of time because clearly no one in this context actually believes it. Protests have a motive and motives only make sense w.r.t. to some end. As you point out, what's the impetus when change produces no change in the good? Protesters and revolutionaries may hold incoherent and confused beliefs, they may have ulterior motives, they may be wrong, but ultimately there is a belief that what is now is evil and what they aim at is better.
Ultimately, to be able to judge the merits of any culture requires (at least) a sound philosophical anthropology. You need to understand the nature of man to know what he requires to flourish. Only then can you judge whether, in what ways and to what degree a culture enables that flourishing.
I can't think of any country in the western world who has a social welfare system on the same low level as the US - and yet we don't have such a 'decline in social indicators'. Quite the opposite. And we are not perfect: the upcoming NZ election is pointing out all the remaining flaws in our society, along with futile attempts to fix them by empty-promising politicians. But no one would ever say we are not vastly better off than the average US citizen, so clearly 'social welfare' is not the problem.
Maybe having a society where a random illness or infection doesn't destroy you economically - unless you are slaved to your employer with health insurance - might help fix things? Or maybe endless foreign wars and an influx of PTSD veterans along with an outflow of patriotically brain washed kids is not healthy? Maybe a political system where a egotistical demagogue can hijack the government is a flaw to correct?
Being a democracy, the policies of the country are inseparable from its culture and demographics. You say universal healthcare might stem the tide of cultural breakdown. But we cannot be sure the causality doesn't flow the other way. Unfortunately, it's likely a feedback loop. We have bad policy in part due to the cultural and social decline the author describes, and we have cultural and social decline in part due to bad policy. Simply proposing policy changes neglects the complex interdependencies of these things, and is why national demographics are so important in a democracy.
Part of the reason NZ is able to cohere around its policy more than the US is because everyone in NZ (to a greater degree than in the US) shares the same values and cultural identity. This is why you see similarly idyllic societies in the Scandinavian countries. High social cohesion due to shared cultural and ethnic identity. Same in Korea and Japan - although Japanese culture is a good example of some of the downsides of ethnic and cultural homogeneity as well.
There was a recent article where a citizen of a Nordic country got upset at this common view, pointing out that perhaps it seems homogeneous to the US because in the US, today, you are white, black, hispanic, asian etc. There are not strong subdivisions in these categories, it seems, and subsequently they apply this view to other countries. But in Europe and Norway, Sweden etc, there are many flavours of 'white' with a long and recent history of animosity.
NZ is a country with a large indigenous population (the Maori), a lot of pacific island immigration, and increasing and accelerating immigrant population of Indians and Chinese (among others). These all assert social pressures of their own, and I would argue its partially our social safety net and maybe certain aspects of our culture and economic structure that have allowed it to be (mostly) harmonious, so far.
Not saying your entirely wrong, but that it is not (no pun intended) black and white.
Not according to the CIA Factbook it isn't:
NZ: European 71.2%, Maori 14.1%, Asian 11.3%, Pacific peoples 7.6%, Middle Eastern, Latin American, African 1.1%, other 1.6%, not stated or unidentified 5.4%
USA: white 72.4%, black 12.6%, Asian 4.8%, Amerindian and Alaska native 0.9%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.2%, other 6.2%, two or more races 2.9% (2010 estimate)
I would say almost quite comparable.
I think that your third paragraph could use some some work, though.
But I thought the paper said "That trend also accelerated the destructive consequences of the growing welfare state, which, by taking over financial support of families, reduced the need for two parents."
The US has a welfare state if the banks need a TARP bailout, or if Cheney needs more contracts for Halliburton etc. Not so much for the rest of us. Actually, the inflation-adjusted hourly wage is lower in the US now than it was in the early 1970s.
One difference you have to remember about the US is the history of Africans in the US. There was slavery until 1865, then Jim Crow, then in the 1960s there was segregation, lack of voting rights, restriction on those of African background drinking from certain water fountains, sitting in certain bus seats, using certain bathrooms etc. Peaceful demonstrations against this were greeted by police dogs, fire hoses, batons, as well as extra-judicial Ku Klux Klan murders, bombings etc. Any how, some attempt to remedy this started in 1964 but by the 1978 Bakke ruling there was already enormous pushback. In fact Reagan announced his presidential candidacy in an obscure rural town unknown for anything aside from three people registering black people to vote being killed their by the Klan. As has been in the news, a white supremacist killed someone this year because they wanted a Civil War statue in their town taken down. In short, the US from its beginning to now has expended an enormous amount of energy in subjugating people of African background. Google has very few engineers of African background, but fellow engineers like James Damore are incensed even about that due to what he perceives as his biological superiority. Now he's a hero on HN and much of the US. Polls show the majority of Americans are against towns taking down their civil war statues, and state legislatures are forbidding towns from tearing down statues celebrating a slaveholder uprising against the US government.
The writer mentioned talks about the "the anti-'acting white' rap culture of inner-city blacks". Even putting aside what I mentioned before, the "rap culture" is marketed by and controlled by the big media corporations. The real indigeneous inner-city black culture can more be seen by books written by and for blacks, which you can see in small stores and sidewalk tables, which the white, bourgeois companies don't sell for some reason. Perhaps it's not lucrative enough. In fact blacks have been saying for years that rap culture is bourgie junk corporations try to foist on black youth.
Don’t Care if Amy Wax Is Politically Incorrect; I Do Care that She’s Empirically Incorrect
https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/09/03/i-dont-care-if-amy-w...
All they care is that she is "Politically Incorrect" -- they could not care less about the facts.
Not to mention that when someone is wrong about facts you correct them, you don't fire them or ask for their condemnation. Professors are not supposed to be correct, just to probe for what's correct. In fact they should be encouraged to be boldly inquisitive and incorrect in that pursuit, and use dialog to sort out the ultimate answer.
And of course even "incorrect" ideas can be considered correct in an era -- in the 19th and up to the mid-20th century there were all kinds of facts and studies showing how some races were genetically inferior available to racists (that is: almost everybody).
Now we laugh at them, but how many similar (or even in the reverse direction) BS we take as fact because social "scientists" just put things under the rug and only give facts and statistics that are compatible with current cultural norms?
And being a professor is not about only presenting raw factoids. It's also about drawing conclusions from the data and pointing to the bigger picture the way you interpret them -- a bigger picture that no data are going to give you by themselves alone. Informing the public opinion is not about being a glorified statistician.
Of course nobody would have batted an eye if a processor had done exactly the same kind of "stating of facts" for opinions they like (and that goes for "righteous indignation" both sides, left and right).
Remember the saying "perception is reality"? Keep that in the back of your mind, I predict it is going to become increasingly indispensable to understand events going forward in Western nations.
It is strange and disturbing to see academia joining the alt-right in its attempt to resurrect a pre-enlightenment age of dogma and allegations of heresy. For academia, it is a losing proposition.
Examples of opinions include:
The color red is beautiful. I'm sad that sharks are being hunted. I hate poor people.
None of the following are opinions:
This rose is red. My landlord poisoned my dog. Poor people do more drugs than rich people.
In particular, a statement is not an opinion simply because it is presented without evidence. It is only an opinion if it can't possess any in the first place.
You can certainly walk around town telling everyone they are stupid, but you shouldn't be surprised when everyone hates you afterward. "It's just my opinion" is a weak excuse.
Could you please quote the part of the article that makes that assertion?
I would understand, but not be happy for, that professors are called for not being politically correct. I can't understand denouncing for not being correct by someone's argumentation.
I believe more and more that social justice and seeking for truth are not compatible.
Universities must choose between TRUTH or Social Justice, not both: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaQ-ZF9S3uk
But it's hard to see the linked article as anything but a fig-leaf, when the centre of the actual controversy is an attempt to sack Prof Wax, on the grounds that her arguments are morally unacceptable.
Already you lost me. There are plenty of single parents out of wedlock children in very white states like West Virginia, Kentucky, etc. How is rap culture or black people responsible for the actions of white people in these areas?
I live in a big city, my kids go to a bilingual school. Every parent there, hispanic or not, want their kids to do well, to get a good education, go to college, succeed professionally and personally. All of them have absorbed some American attitudes to one degree or another. The few parents who don't speak english well want their children to do so. None of these people are against assimilating.
There may be legitimate concerns of substance here, about having children out of wedlock, parents who are stretched thin. But this paragraph right here reads like thinly veiled racism targeted towards blacks and hispanics. All the sociological rhetoric does not hide this at all.
Where did the author said it is?
They said there are "single-parent, antisocial habits" that are prevalent among some working-class whites" AND an "anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks" AND " anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants".
Three kinds of issues -- not an issue and two explanations for it.
>None of these people are against assimilating.
Hence the phrasing "anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among SOME" -- the author did not write "prevalent in ALL".
Regarding being "not suited to a First World, 21st-century environment." she adds: Nor are:
the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites;
the anti-“acting white” rap culture of inner-city blacks;
the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants
It allows for bilingual education. If it were advocating for something other than English it would have merit. But that is not the case;
"it preserves a portion of the statute mandating that all students become proficient in English, no matter what program they choose."
You can see the meta message in this article. Fewer Latinos are speaking Spanish, so teach them more Spanish in schools to preserve the language and culture. Whether you think that's a good idea or not, it is anti-assimilation.
http://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article120912998.html
#1 - At no point does the article you posted about prop 58 (from LA Times) say strictly English/Spanish bilingual education. Good idea or not, learning another language does not make it anti-assimilation.
#2 Most European nations require learning another language. The French learn English, the Germans learn French. At no point does anyone in France feel like they are assimilating because they have to learn English.
On top of that it wasn't that long ago Sarah Palin was revolting against teaching Chinese in California. Chinese is spoken by over a billion people and is a trading partner, it seems like a useful skill to have. But the whole thing reeked of xenophobic behavior.
I am not Latino. I want my kids to learn another language. Spanish seems most useful considering the languages used south of the US, as well as South America. Most of the world's industrialized nations advocates for learning a second language. Only in the US with the cult of ignorance does someone look at bilingual education as an attack on their own culture.
All the kids in the bilingual school my children attend learn Spanish. All speak English as their primary language.
The whole revolting against learning another language, specifically Spanish, sounds like some sort of fabricated justification to take a swipe at Mexicans. Learning to speak another language != anti-assimilation. The "anti-assimilation" argument allow intellectuals to make their racist ideas sound like they have some principle.
"The problem with Prop 58, and the old system in California, is only learning one language, and that language not being English. We know kids learn languages faster when immersed in it."
From ballotpedia, make what you will of it; https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_58,_Non-Engli...
Supporters made the following arguments in support of Proposition 58:[2] -The proposition would allow all students to become proficient in English as soon as possible.
-The proposition would encourage schools to use instruction programs rather than expand multilingual education, thereby providing English speakers the opportunity to learn a second language.
-The proposition would restore local control for California schools.
-The proposition's changes would prepare students more effectively for the future.
-Multilingual education encourages "intercultural interactions and empathy."
You still have to do better than just Prop 58. You are tipping your hand with the quote "you have an ulterior motive to put Spanish on an equal level as English". I guess I'm happier that you are putting that in the open, but it definitely sounds xenophobic. Are there people who might feel that way? Perhaps, but you cannot put all those people in the same group. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a kid who was born elsewhere but is in a US school who isn't compelled to learn english.
You quoted it
At some point African Americans, with encouragement through identity politics, perhaps rightly who am I to say, shifted toward wanting their own identity.
Now when you are raised to resent authority, and to live in your own subculture, you are cutting yourself off from the available avenues for success. Chances are many of your bosses will be white, many of your teachers and professors will be white. If you are taught to resent and discount them, you are at an immediate disadvantage. You have to listen to your boss, or at least give them a fair shot to make a living and advance. When you start your job as an adversary you cannot get power through the avenues readily available in broader society.
This is the author's point. Without the shared "bourgeois" values, as she calls it, makes succeeding very hard.
I will also note that there may be other ways to solve this problem aside from sharing those values.
You can in some instances enact major shifts in social systems without modifying its core values. Values and beliefs are two different things. For example giving women the right to vote was a major change, but didn't shift any of the classic core American values (to be trite, freedom, independence, etc.)
And human happiness and quality of life is most supported by improving our diets, our education, our expressions and our psychologies.
Enlightenment ideals built the modern world, not relativism. We should be criticizing all cultures and our everyday actions.
"Culture" in some ways is just a random repetition of behavior and ideas. It may conform to environmental pressures but there is nothing intrinsic about it in regards to any ethnicity or race. All humans are lazy, hardworking, intellectual, superficial, selfish and selfless. The difference is which ideas push us in the right directions of our better nature.
This is the core premise of the article, the conclusion, of course, being 'no'. Unfortunately, it does not accurately deal with the fairly clear subtext being delivered by Ms. Wax.
> "In an interview with The Daily Pennsylvanian about the op-ed, Wax was quoted as saying that “Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans,” because, in the phrasing of the DP article’s author, “Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior.” … [they then affirm Wax’s right to express her opinions, then say:] We categorically reject Wax’s claims."
This, in particular, is striking. Why is 'being ruled by white Europeans' the draw to migrants over, say, the relative wealth of the west in the aggregate? France and Germany certainly offer troves of opportunity, but is Greece really more of a destination for economic migrants than, say, Singapore? Would India's quasi-british culture provide a counter-example when compared with China's?
The lack of any of these comparative examinations leads us immediately to question the argument provided. Ms. Wax doesn't even make case compelling to show that it was the 1950s script itself, rather than other causes before she jumps into discussing the superiority of the white european ruling establishment. Could it be that America's economic rivals had just been bombed to ash which led to an influx of capital to the country during an era where unions had clout? Nah, its just the fact that it was ruled by white europeans (/s).
Give me a break.
Add to that incredible amounts of political violence at the dawn of the 20th century, and you have the immigration flows. Similar thing happened when the Soviet block collapsed and economic/political strife spilled out.
It isn't of course.
But suppose there's a country, Foobaria, and "everyone" (hyperbolically speaking) wants to migrate there. But it has notoriously bad weather. In one sense it's true to say that "everyone wants to migrate to a country with bad weather" and in another sense it isn't.
(This is the extension/intension distinction.)
She can still be wrong. And of course it's hard to see inside people's heads and know what they really meant. One can certainly wonder why she phrased it like that -- but then, I don't know what she was asked. I'm having trouble finding this interview; is there a link somewhere?
This sleight of hand where the speaker/writer stops just short of an explicitly racist implication that deliberately confuses causation and correlation in the presence of multiple confounding factors is a standard white supremacist parlor trick. That is why Amy Wax was roundly condemned. And the OP's claim that saying anything negative about the (lack of) black marriages is taboo in academia is quite blatantly false. Read for example this gushing review (https://nyti.ms/2kbBHRP) of Ralph Richard Banks' book on the very same topic by Imani Perry.
If she were a math professor or something, I would say that she had the right to her opinion.
We must have read different articles because that's not what I saw - I think you're so focused on detecting a dog whistle that you're missing the key point being raised.
Values are race, gender, and class neutral. A value or system of values can be adopted by a person regardless of their race, gender, class, sexual orientation, etc. Values are the only way we can find common ground with others, they are the only way we can be unified as a society. Imagine a white supremacist. Certainly if his skin color was magically changed to black overnight he would no longer be a white supremacist. But that's not a possibility - a white supremacist cannot change his skin color. But he can change his values.
We all agree that a stable family life is very advantageous for children. Most often this stability is achieved via marriage. Examining it along this axis we can then say that bourgeois, pro-family, pro-marriage values are measurably better than others.
We can also imagine an inner city black who has a choice between two value systems - a bourgeois value system or a hedonistic "gangster" value system. Which value system should he adopt? The bourgeois one, as this one will have better outcomes for him, for his family, and for his community.
Now there's a possible danger here: that we assume that all inner-city blacks have a gangster value system. That by dint of skin color and geographic location a person must necessarily have a certain value system. So let's not make that error.
Additionally, I would be very surprised if a majority of inner-city blacks held to some sort of gangster value system. While I don't have the data or surveys on hand, I would assume that most of this population already agrees with and holds most of the pro-family bourgeois values.
If these bourgeois values are already widespread yet poor outcomes remain then we can't pin these outcomes on a person lacking correct values. There's another factor in play. It may be that bourgeois values are hostage to other social, economic, and cultural factors. That they might yet bloom into something positive but are missing other essential ingredients. Wax fails insofar as she assigns too great a weight to the impact of bourgeois values.
This being the case, two groups that might differ on some values can oftentimes work together if they have similar regard for highly-prioritized shared values--for example, I would have no problem protesting with somebody from the IRA were our common supply of water or internet threatened.
The cancerous line of thinking adopted by extremist conservatives and progressives, though, requires that all values must be ranked according to some ill-defined group gestalt, and moreover, that any difference in value systems--no matter how low-priority!--is sufficient for name-calling and failing to cooperate.
That desire to gridlock over petty things is what rots a society.
Rarely does this fail. When it does fail, it usually means that we both have an incomplete view of the world, or that there is some incorrectness in the chain of reasoning that becomes evident pretty quickly.
Unfortunately, people usually prefer to take the (quicker, sloppier, more quarrelsome) route of "I have my facts, you have your facts, you are evil for believing <X,Y,Z>".
There is no need to detect a dogwhistle. We have an explicit statement from Wax (http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/amy-wax-penn-law-cultur...) where she says Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior. "I don't shrink from the word, 'superior,'" she said, adding, "Everyone wants to come to the countries that exemplify" these values. "Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans."
If a member of the Bloods had moved in town, they would very much have been rejected because they would have been acting with very different values. Further more, they probably would have starting acting in ways that were contrary to cultural norms.
Is it racist to say that I think small-town Midwest values are superior to inner-city black values?
Is it racist to say that I think that the lives of inner-city blacks would be improved if they adopted small-town Midwest values?
What if I switch the statement and say that I think small-town Midwest values could improve the lives of all poor people in the inner city. Is that "dog whistling"?
I will grant you that not all black people living in the inner city have the same values but I think it is factually incorrect to say that low income African Americans living in the inner-city do not have a common culture and common values.
My phrasing might be racist, if that is the case, can you point out how to express the same idea in a more neutral way so that I don't make the same mistake in the future?
I do expect that all low-income black people living in cities share some values, but that can be applied to any group. I wouldn't claim that low-income white people living in cities all have the same culture, either, despite the fact that they almost certainly share at least some of the same values.
Look, I'm not trying to say you're an evil racist. You just have biases (unconscious and conscious), just like all of us do. I just worry when people try to label a group of people so narrowly and homogeneously when there's more to it than that.
“Bourgeois values aren’t just for white people,” she said. “The irony is: bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead.”
Far too many black families do no have the luxury to choose a new value system. Extreme generational poverty is bad enough, but many are not allowed to even start on a path towards self improvement because 7.7% of adult black men are currently in prison. How, exactly, does "pro-family culture" improve social mobility for the 1-in-9 black children with a parent in prison.
> It may be that bourgeois values are hostage to other social, economic, and cultural factors.
Exactly - it wouldn't surprise me at all if the "benefits" attributed to marriage are actually a proxy for race.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/26/ameri...
Values multiply positively with other factors. So it's not "bourgeois values" + "economic opportunity" == "success". It's more like "bourgeois values" * "economic opportunity" == success (multiplication instead of addition). When "economic opportunity" = 0 values will have no impact. This is an idea that a lot of us in the U.S. grapple with, that you can be virtuous but still end up with a bad outcome.
> Nor are the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites
Its a bit silly to split that along racial terms (both Wax and the offendees)... There are plenty of single-parent antisocial working-class blacks as well.
In my mind the real conflation is the difference between an eagerness and hopefulness for upward mobility and what Wax calls "Bourgeois" or "European" values. Bourgeois is a vastly superior word than European - the two are only conflated because for much of human history, only some Europeans were wealthy. The author could have saved herself a boatload of trouble (if she in fact is _not_ racist) by just pointing out that no one really knows what a modern, international, not-ruled-by-whites Bourgeois society will look like - but that we ought to bring back a general respect for nice things - rather than a lionization of poverty.
What I think a lot of rich/college educated white people don't understand is that the lionization of poverty was done _by the impoverished_ - media creation was finally in our grasps, so jazz, hiphop, rap, etc bloomed. It's only inevitable that there will be an identity conflict as the poverty and hardships are (thankfully!) eased over time by technology and wealth. The solution to people being proud of being poor is _to have no more poor people_ - and the solution to that is not cultural, it's economic and legal.
While Jazz is mostly an African American creation and most of it's most successful practitioners are black, most Jazz aficionados will bristle at lumping Jazz with hiphop... it would be like lumping Beethoven with Ozzy Osborne, doesn't compute....I am a big hiphop fan and a lover of jazz but they are different.
I beg you to walk me through the logic of how reading this essay left you with the idea that "inner city blacks are incompatible with an advanced free market economy"?
Let's not forget a persons reputation is at stake here, and casually calling them a racist because you extrapolated something that they may or may not agree with can be extremely damaging.
If someone is truly a racist you don't really need to "out" them -- they'll do it themselves over time.
"The students are certainly correct that claims by a professor about the value of bourgeois culture could be misused by racists to say that one race is inherently superior to another. But does that make any discussion of cultural differences taboo? Does that make Wax a white supremacist for saying that culture matters for poverty-related outcomes, that not all cultures are equally good for escaping poverty, and that the 1950s American “bourgeois cultural script” was particularly good for that purpose? No, and here’s why."
So for which statement is the author providing evidence? The first or the second?
They are two completely different statements.
By comparison, take the statement "All men are not equal. Or at least, they're not equal in their ability to play football". The second statement is obviously true, the first is controversial.
Why is that so? How can all men be equal if they're so obviously unequal in just about any metric you might choose to measure them on? Because they're equal in one specific sense: that we (most of us) believe they should have equal rights.
A culture that passes on default values of industriousness and a high regard for education will generate individuals that are more motivated and perhaps more resilient than one who does not. A culture that values consistent parenting of children will likely pass on more deliberate traits than a culture that does not value active parenting.
One should not be surprised to see different distributions of outcomes from different groups who hold different values. One of the advantages of living in a multicultural society where people live together peacefully and actually listen to one another is that we can learn which choices lead to the best outcomes and encourage our children to emulate those and to avoid choices that lead to dependency and addiction.
The Brookings Institute can hardly be considered a right wing think tank and yet they published a well reasoned piece on the behavioral aspects of poverty [1].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-behavioral-aspects-of...
This is honestly the critical point: our culture defines how we value things. Some cultures are not bothered by things like social welfare or socialist policies because the base unit of society is considered to be the family rather than the individual. Cultures like this may value things like "familial harmony" more than "individual prosperity".
So it's obvious that someone like the original author -- who likely grew up in this "bourgeois culture" -- would attribute everything bad in society to the decline in things she holds valuable. It's part of the definition.
As a counterpoint, American culture is much better for the individual than it was 30-40 years ago for anyone who isn't a straight white male. Those people have the viewpoint that things have improved. Bourgeois values aren't meaningful to these people because they never really applied.
So really, we're back to where we already knew we were: globalization had winners and losers. The losers were primarily located in the western middle class (i.e. the bourgeois class).
Look, the only people who think America was better off in the 60s/70s are the ones who benefitted from the systemic discrimination inherent of that era. It's perfectly reasonable for them to feel that way, and I'm not even saying I blame them for feeling left behind. Is America actually better off today? It depends who you ask.
It's just not intellectually very interesting to talk about. All she's doing is imposing cherry-picked aspects of her chosen value system as objectively "better" while ignoring the whole point that any definition of "better" relies on a subjective personal value system to begin with.
In the article, it was stated that there is a relationship here. Children are much more likely to be successful in live if their parents were married.
>the author [..] would attribute everything bad in society to the decline in things she holds valuable. It's part of the definition.
No, that's just a strawman.
Some things are zero-sum games, or at least don't scale to everyone getting the same benefit.
I guess zero-sum is not the correct term; there ARE ways we can improve the sum total quality of life in our country and planet, but we have to really think about what it would mean as the plan scales to everyone.
I think she made a critical assumption that "ability to create economic output" is a proxy for "ability to lift people out of poverty". I consider that statement to be much more reasonable than its negation.
I'm not claiming that it will do better at taking care of the poor. I'm claiming that poor members of that culture will be better able to help themselves.
"Of course we are always free to dispute each other; Wax’s colleagues could certainly have written essays or a collective essay debating her claims and pointing out flaws in her reasoning, but when is it morally and professionally appropriate to issue a collective public condemnation of a colleague?
"I think such collective actions are only appropriate when colleagues have clearly and flagrantly violated their professional duties. I mean things like data fabrication or taking bribes to produce dishonest academic papers desired by a trade association."
Well, that's just your opinion man.
This is one of the key claims of this article, and it has no support. Why is a collective response inappropriate here? Why should those students and professors who disagree with Amy Wax not band together intellectually and through collective speech? Why is a collective response only appropriate when someone is clearly and vagrantly violating their professional duties? The author is making a very extreme assertion, but does it as an aside.
I think that the default should be to allow a discourse that is wide ranging and open, and to only censure in cases that are truly extreme (such as incitement). Institutional censure carries with it a huge weight, and potentially the ability to silence opinions. Though I strongly disagree with this person, I must also try to imagine a situation where the roles are reversed, where I am in the minority and having my opinion censured. I believe that to live in a society that is truly free, it guarantees you will come into contact with opinions and beliefs that you find repugnant. It troubles me that the left has so aggressively mobilized against speech, not just disagreeing with it, but demanding that it be institutionally silenced.
That said, this school (being a private institution) and these professors (being individuals entitled to their own opinions) are also within their rights. Free speech does not free you from criticism for your views.
These basic cultural precepts reigned from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement. Adherence was a major contributor to the productivity, educational gains, and social coherence of that period.[1]
People attach happy ideas during this time because during good economic times, things just work on all cylinders. However, two major things were happening that actually led to the advancements and fruitfulness of the time mentioned from 40s to mid 60s.
1) World War II happened and ended, everyone was obliterated but the US. This led to massive gains in all areas of wealth and industry. It was a war that took us to a superpower, and at the time, everyone owed us money. Good economic times lead to more ability to have kids and a solid consumer base to support middle class housing/restaurants/retail etc.
2) Women started entering the workforce and diversity started to happen opening up the workforce that was previously built for 1 person to provide for multiple people and salary needed for that, to suddenly having sometimes 2 in the house that brought in double the money needed for a time.
You could say a move away from family focused housing and middle class retail/restaurants is a problem, but that is more to do with wage stagnation and the internet/productivity. People can't afford to get married and have multiple kids as they could before, wages have not truly kept up and been steadily dropping since the 70s as well as share of productivity/GDP gains[2].
People have more kids in good economic times and less kids in bad economic times[3][4], same reason there was a baby boom in the time they mentioned from the 40s to the mid 60s. The 90s are similar in terms of good economic times, people had more kids, people bought more homes, more products, people were getting wage increases, new technologies/innovation that gains advantage worldwide etc.
In the end it is economics and timing, whatever is popular during those times people will attribute it to their own confirmation biases.
[1] http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/paying-the-p...
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=2Xa
[3] http://www.prb.org/publications/datasheets/2012/world-popula...
[4] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/10/12/in-a-down-economy-...
There's also the fact that single moms on welfare would lose their benefits if they married the father of their children. As one astute internet commenter on a similar article remarked, "Only an ivory tower egghead could think that poor people don't make rational economic decisions."
Whenever the signatories of such a communication agree upon the idea, surely? Political agency only exists to the degree that one is willing to exercise it.
I find it perplexing that conservatives on the one hand deplore restrictions on speech that seem to stifle the expression of conservative ideas and so forth, but then complain about improper forms of speech when they find their ideas rejected. If it's OK for Wax to co-author a lightweight op-ed that expresses support for bourgeois (capitalist) moral values and breezily dismisses the downsides thereof, why should her critics limit themselves to scholarly analysis but abstain from making moral arguments of their own? Why is it OK for Wax to claim that "things are likely to get worse for us all" thanks to "the academics, media, and Hollywood", but not OK for Wax's colleagues to say they consider her to be giant hypocrite?
I have gone to great lengths to show that Wax’s central claim about culture is probably correct because the necessity of protecting dissent is clearest when the dissenter brings an important and neglected truth into the conversation.
In reality, Haidt takes one aspect of Wax's claim (about the value of marriage), shows some bipartisan/broad-spectrum support for the idea that promoting marriage can have social benefits, and treats this like an empirical result. I don't think that comes anywhere close to validating Wax's broad claim that the hegemonic post-war culture is the best cure for today's social ills, or that its shortcomings are incidental rather than inherent, or that its desiderata of modest obedience and productivity are the acme of human experience.
It's fine with me if he agrees with Wax, but this doesn't give him the right to dictate the terms of discourse. If Wax can write a "provocative essay" why must her critics restrict themselves to the language of theoretical discourse?
http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/open-letter-penn-law-fa...
Second, the letter which you linked to is very clearly an expression of disagreement. In what way is it 'an attack on Wax to try and suppress her POV'? It explicitly acknowledges both her civil rights and the security of her academic tenure, and explicitly rejects her claims rather than demanding she be fired or refrain from public expression of her views.
Third, they absolutely make a moral argument: We believe the ideal of equal opportunity to succeed in education is best achieved by a combination of academic freedom, open debate and a commitment by all participants to respect one another without bias or stereotype. To our students, we say the following: If your experience at Penn Law falls substantially short of this ideal, something has gone wrong, and we want to know about it.
I still fail to see why people who disagree with someone on a political issue should be required to express their disagreement in a particular form. It looks to me as if these academics consider Wax's arguments so specious as to be unworthy of discussion. Why should they feel obliged to respond in a forum or format of their opponents' choosing?
Would someone be willing to point out how that claim is offensive? Or is it how she made the claim that is the issue?
Part of me feels like the idea "white culture is harmful" is harmful. I think it would be much better if we could split it along economic lines "lower vs upper class" instead of racial lines "black vs white" that would help us draw parallels between the plight of rural Tennessee with inner city Detroit. But it feels like if I started talking about class people would accuse me of using class as a mask for being racist. Which just so happens to be the case here.