Oh, you mean, there really is a bias in academe against common sense and rational thought?
Jonathan Haidt decided, for some reason, to point out the obvious to a group of American academics recently, that they are overwhelmingly modern materialist statists (liberals).
He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.
“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal. In his speech and in an interview, Dr. Haidt argued that social psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility — and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
Why anyone would bother pointing that out, I don’t know. It’s not a bias against conservatives, anyway; it’s a bias against rationality, which they don’t believe in. Our brains, remember, are shaped for fitness, not for truth. Indeed, these are the very people who channel Barney Rubble and Fred Flintstone for insights into human psychology, and anyone who doubts the validity of such “research” should just shut up and pay their taxes, right?
Well, his talk had attracted John Tierney’s attention at the New York Times (February 7, 2007), who drew exactly the right conclusion (for modern statists and Darwinists):
“If a group circles around sacred values, they will evolve into a tribal-moral community,” he said. “They’ll embrace science whenever it supports their sacred values, but they’ll ditch it or distort it as soon as it threatens a sacred value.” It’s easy for social scientists to observe this process in other communities, like the fundamentalist Christians who embrace “intelligent design” while rejecting Darwinism.
[ … ]
For a tribal-moral community, the social psychologists in Dr. Haidt’s audience seemed refreshingly receptive to his argument. Some said he overstated how liberal the field is, but many agreed it should welcome more ideological diversity. A few even endorsed his call for a new affirmative-action goal: a membership that’s 10 percent conservative by 2020. The society’s executive committee didn’t endorse Dr. Haidt’s numerical goal, but it did vote to put a statement on the group’s home page welcoming psychologists with “diverse perspectives.” It also made a change on the “Diversity Initiatives” page — a two-letter correction of what it called a grammatical glitch, although others might see it as more of a Freudian slip.
I have friends here in Canada who make bets on when the Times will finally, mercifully shut down.
Meanwhile, Megan McArdle weighs in at Atlantic Monthly, driving home the shame: Read More ›