This Week in Zeh Lo FAIR is All In with Jonathan Haidt (12/18)
David Shasha
Zeh Lo FAIR is All In with Jonathan Haidt!
I recently posted an item on FAIR’s Tikvah Dara Horn-inspired attack on poor Ken Burns:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/BzvPZHIBRUw
For those not familiar with the group, it should act as an introduction to their Zeh Lo FAIR way of seeing things, in the Trumpscum Rabbi Bengelsdorf manner.
In their Thursday newsletter, FAIR made an important announcement:
Here it is:
Dear Friends of FAIR,
I am thrilled to announce our newest advisory board member: social psychologist, Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University Stern School of Business, founder of Heterodox Academy, and gifted author Jonathan Haidt.
If there is anyone who can explain the zeitgeist of our times, and the impact of social media on our discourse and culture, it is Jon. Last year, a month or two after launching FAIR, and in the midst of the Covid pandemic, my wife and I were invited to join a small in-person event to discuss possible solutions to the growing illiberalism and intolerance that had affected my kids school, and other K-12 schools across the country. I was there to try to make sense of what had happened, and how to solve this problem, and Jon was one of the few people offering answers that made sense.
Over the past two years as I have worked to establish FAIR as a much-needed civil rights organization, Jon has been helpful and supportive, and encouraged me every step of the way.
Below is Jon’s statement on why he signed up to join FAIR’s Board of Advisors:
The first 50 years of my life, from 1963 to 2013, were the greatest period of social progress and the extension of rights and inclusion in human history. Progressives should have been celebrating success and vowing to continue on toward the fulfillment of Martin Luther King's dream. Instead, because of changes to social media platforms in the early 2010s, new, terrible, and illiberal ideas flooded into universities, and from there to the rest of our institutions. I co-founded Heterodox Academy to push back against illiberalism in universities. I joined FAIR's advisory board because FAIR is pushing back everywhere else.
I am deeply grateful to Jon for his support of FAIR and our mission of advancing civil rights and liberties for all Americans, and promoting a common culture based on fairness, understanding, and humanity.
Welcome to the team, Jon—thank you for joining the pro-human movement!
Yours,
Bion
For those not familiar with “Heterodox” Jonathan Haidt, I take the liberty of including my 2019 on the Bill Maher macher at the end of this post.
He is also very FAIR not FAIR.
A perfect SHIDDUCH!
Just for good measure, they followed the Haidt announcement with some primo Free Speech Grift, a la Rufo Austin Elon Musk Bari Weiss, from our dear friend Glenn Loury:
In our latest video, FAIR Advisor Glenn Loury explains the spiral of silence in social justice using the analogy of the fairytale The Emperor's New Clothes.
Though censorship is often spoken of as the leading threat to open discourse, the more subtle threat is the voluntary limitation of one’s own speech, creating a spiral of silence...[but] with just a little bit of bravery, you can choose to be the child who spoke truth to the Emperor...
It’s all in the MISHPOCHEH!
No Free Thought allowed here.
Welcome to the Brave New World of Straussianism, the New American Fascism, led by stalwarts like Mr. and Mrs. Pornographer Thomas:
Loury loves it!
https://glennloury.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-clarence-thomas
This is what the New Neo-Con Right Wing looks like.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/lawrence-texts-show-lying-clown-042029812.html
“Hero” ROOSKIE ROODY approves!
David Shasha
Jonathan Haidt Against “The Coddling of the American Mind”
In SHU 861 I included an article on Jordan Peterson and the resurgence of Conservatism by Yoram Hazony:
Peterson, a vile Right Wing academic celebrity who is now doing his lectures on what could be considered the Rock concert circuit, is also mentioned in the following article by the great Pankaj Mishra:
Peterson has become one of the most prominent Right Wing enemies of PC culture in the benighted age of Trump.
NYU Professor Jonathan Haidt has become another go-to anti-PC scourge, as we can see from the following 2011 New York Times article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08tier.html
Haidt and his writing partner Greg Lukianoff published a much-discussed article in The Atlantic back in 2015:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
The article has now been expanded into a book, both called “The Coddling of the American Mind.”
The duo did a book event at Politics and Prose in DC back in September that was broadcast on C-Span’s Book TV:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?450784-1/the-coddling-american-mind
Haidt has, like Peterson, become an academic celebrity who is being deployed by a lot of old White people to attack the current climate of “Safe Spaces” and “Micro-Aggression” on college campuses.
As I have not been on a college campus for many years, I cannot speak with any authority on exactly what is going on and how things might have changed over time.
But I do know that Haidt’s Social Science flow charts, case studies, and taxonomies are as much a part of the problem as the apparent PC hysteria. There is not only the problem of Social Science and its number-crunching soullessness, but there is the ever-expanding Corporate University and – most importantly – the way it is undermining the Humanities.
Indeed, Haidt and Lukianoff make much of case studies and examples of campus “horrors” to frighten the old White people in the audience, but they never once discuss Culture – meaning, they do not discuss Literature, Music, Film, Art, and the rest of it.
As I have already said, while I am not conversant with the specifics of campus life today, I do teach young people and find that, because of the Haidts and the Petersons of the academy, there is currently a fatally impoverished Cultural-Intellectual climate. This has to do with Social Media and economics, but it also has to do with the encroachment of Social Scientific models of reality, which have sought to eviscerate the classical Humanistic education.
It is interesting to note how the first wave of this anti-PC polemic came from Conservative dogmatists like Allan Bloom and Charles Murray:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Murray_(political_scientist)
Back in the Reagan years, it was the great Henry Louis Gates Jr. who best addressed the problem they presented in the battle over the Canon:
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/26/books/whose-canon-is-it-anyway.html
But today the polemic is being given a “Liberal” imprimatur by clever marketers like Haidt; slick operators who know how to sell their product to a nervous public, and who avoid the larger Cultural issues like the “Idiocracy” and its connection to Poptrash and Hip-Hop.
Indeed, the “Idiocracy” is everything:
I have discussed the problem of Poptrash and Hip-Hop in the following article which attacks New York Times music writer Jon Caramanica:
But Haidt, as I have said, obstinately chooses to avoid the Cultural discussion, seeking to stick closely to his Social Science absolutism.
There is a modicum of elitism in this debate, given that much of it comes from the hallowed precincts of academia and its “Peer Review” incestuous echo-chamber.
It is not that there are not problems with a generation of spoiled children entering Higher Education on their way to Silicon Valley and Wall Street, but that those problems have long been connected to the dumbing-down of the curriculum, as well as the reductive nature of Social Science; long the enemy of creative Artistic and Humanistic thinking.
Back in 2001 I wrote a lengthy essay on American Education which discussed the seminal ideas of Richard Hofstadter and Diane Ravitch:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1v5nq6euk-KpK4V_mudVJjg_V21rm5VALNRL_eYtcKCQ/edit
I discuss there the development of Progressive Education in this country and the debased tradition of Anti-Intellectualism.
It is critical to engage in this discussion on American Education if we are to get to the root of the current problems with Social Media and PC dogmatism and the concomitant ills they have generated, in a social networking system mired in cruelty, violence, and dysfunction.
We have sadly seen a degrading of the Humanities with a corresponding increase of pseudo-scientific research into human issues, which have long been addressed by our creative arts.
So, without seeming to know it, Haidt is part of the very problem he is dealing with.
David Shasha
From SHU 884, March 6, 2019