Signs of resistance to the woke gang’s war on reason

Opinion is usually excluded by the proponents of diversity, but some brave souls are fighting back.

Monica Koehn — a member of Heterodox — is doing her doctorate in evolutionary psychology and mating behaviour.

Will we ever wake up from the “woke” activist nightmare? This week, Kmart insisted it was a software glitch in photo printing ­kiosks — not some PC edict — that erased the “offensive” word Jesus from captions. Maybe, but the suspicion of journalists is hardly surprising. The grim reality of offence-activism keeps racing ahead of parody.

In Britain, transgender folk angry at being “misgendered” go running to the bobbies, who may be distracted by an epidemic of knife crime. Two years ago a biology professor at a US liberal arts college, Bret Weinstein, objected on moral grounds to a diversity “day of absence” when whites were told to stay away from campus. Harangued as a “white supremacist”, Weinstein was forced out of his job after the college president pandered to “courageous” students fighting racism with more racism. Some days the outlook seems bleak, and we may miss the filaments of hope. So, at the risk of being a politically incorrect Pollyanna, here’s a handful of reasons for optimism.

Planet Peterson

Had a gutful of anti-social media? On Sunday, Jordan Peterson, the most famous psychologist on the planet, gave a sneak preview of Thinkspot, his new online venue for people to speak their minds. “Once you’re on our platform, we won’t take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law,” he said. “We’re trying to make an anti-censorship platform.” Unlike Twitter, where unwoke posts can get you banned. Ever on the lookout for white supremacists and other malefactors, Twitter last month suspended Ray Blanchard, a psychologist who helped write the diagnostic bible on “gender dysphoria”. He’d posted “hate speech”, namely his clinical opinion that sex-change surgery was less than ideal for children who might grow up to bitterly regret it. This won’t happen on Thinkspot. Peterson’s social media play may shake things up. He has 1.2 million followers on Twitter. Others in the loose grouping known as the intellectual dark web — united by the belief that without free speech and honest debate, society can’t correct its errors — also command big audiences. To join Thinkspot, you’ll have to pay a subscription and forswear mindless blurts of abuse. “If the minimum content (for posts) is 50 words, you’re going to have to put a little thought into it,” Peterson said. “If you’re being a troll, hopefully you’ll be a quasi-witty troll.” Thinkspotters will be able to tag a point of interest in a podcast, attaching their own remarks, audio comments or video clips. “We can really add dialogue to the podcast and YouTube world (with) continual running conversations.” Peterson is also plotting a private, online university to bypass what he sees as a corrupted academy.

Smarter than we look

Entrepreneurs are twigging to the podcast secret: a vast, hitherto unsuspected audience hungry for long-form debate of deadly serious stuff, plus jokes. Likewise the appetite for that crusty old form, the 90-minute public lecture. Peterson’s rather severe self-help book, 12 Rules for Life, has filled halls in 130 cities around the world with more than 300,000 people. And their pay-off is to be told that life is suffering and malevolence made bearable by the meaning that comes with willingly shouldering a heavy burden of responsibility. Peterson: “It’s almost inconceivable the degree to which people are starving for encouragement, how little they get and how little it takes to make a massive difference in their life, to say to them, you are a sovereign individual … and you can put your life together with truth and courage.”

Name your grievance

Believe it or not, dog-humping is good news for the intellect. Canine rape culture, Hitler’s Mein Kampf as an influence on “intersectional feminism”, “fat-exclusionary” bodybuilding, a plan to put white students in “light chains” to teach them about their “privilege” — all this and more went into a booby trap sprung upon activists disguised as journal editors. Even insiders couldn’t tell the difference between hoax gibberish and genuine gibberish. The credit for this expose goes to three left-leaning scholars (two Yanks, one Brit) fed up with repulsive excess in “grievance studies” — critical race theory and kindred identity politics on pseudo-­academic steroids. Helen Pluckrose, the Brit of the trio and a medievalist, will be in Sydney on Tuesday night at the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation to give a lecture against woke rewriting of higher education’s “colonialist” curriculum. She and her co-conspirators in the grievance studies hoax — mathematician James Lindsay and philosopher Peter Boghossian — have been alert for any sign that this academic victimology might fall out of fashion, as happened to the skull bump mumbo jumbo of phrenology. Pluckrose: “(Grievance studies has) got so dominant, it’s overreaching and so much of it now is so ridiculous that even the best intentioned left-liberals, who really want to support identity-based politics, are having to say, oh come on, this is a bit much.” From the US state of Tennessee, Lindsay thinks he can already discern what looks like sanity up-in-arms. “A rapidly increasing number of people are sick of the ultra-woke,” he says. “Most people don’t want to focus on race and sex all the time and be told they’re never doing it right, and they’re sick of what is pretty clearly racist attitudes (against whites).” In Portland, Oregon, Boghossian is less sanguine: “My guess is that things will get a lot worse before they correct.” He’s the only one of the three employed at a university, and may lose his job after being found guilty of an ethics breach for failing to alert journal editors to the hoax. Of course, this would have sabotaged the hoax, sparing universities the spectacle of ­scholarship deranged by activism. But this is a story with staying power. Mike Nayna, a Melbourne-based filmmaker, has documented every move in the grievance studies saga. Coming to a screen near you this year, with any luck.

Bad ideas mean well

Universities are an ideas incubator for society, so their vices matter. Next Friday and Saturday, 300-plus pointy heads will converge on the Sheraton New York Times Square hotel for seemingly yet another academic conference. But this is different because the host, Heterodox Academy, wants universities to choose between truth-seeking and political activism. Diversity is a higher education fetish — more women and people of colour, please — but “viewpoint diversity” is an awkward topic because of progressive groupthink in the social sciences, humanities and university administration. Heterodox Academy has put viewpoint diversity on the agenda, challenging the dishonesty that prevails when noisy activists intimidate the sensible majority. For authorities to preside over this campus culture — of “safe spaces” and “deplatformed” speakers deemed to offend groupthink — is a form of malpractice, according to American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, a prime mover in Heterodox. “To teach students to see society as a zero sum competition between groups is primitive and destructive,” he says. The brutal tribalism of social media has compounded errors of judgment by administrators who ignore the findings of psychology. If you want to make young people resilient, the worst thing possible is to shelter them from different views, to play along when they equate unwelcome words with injury, allow feelings to trump reason and abandon all nuance for moral warfare. It has grown rapidly and the underlying conditions are present throughout the Anglosphere. It’s not just scary, it’s a threat to the very purpose of the university. “We can’t do higher education with no nuance,” says Haidt.

Our friend, dissent

It’s welcome news that next month Haidt will make his first tour to Australia, speaking about “Moral psychology in an Age of Outrage”. It should boost Heterodox membership Down Under, which is small. One graduate affiliate is Monica Koehn, a mature-age student at Western Sydney University with a business background. She is doing her doctorate in evolutionary psychology and mating behaviour, a field where gender politics sometimes denies inconvenient science. Koehn says: “If universities had more viewpoint diversity, I believe people would be more willing and able to listen to evidence from differing points of view.” Like Haidt, her politics happen to be on the left but she opposes the shutting down of debate. “If people don’t have the ability to hear a speaker or understand both sides of a controversial topic, how are they able to make up their own minds?” Another Heterodoxer is Kevin Carrico, now at Monash University in Melbourne but American-born and a seasoned visitor to China, the object of his scholarship. “A considerable amount of my thoughts about viewpoint diversity and orthodoxy very much grew out of my experiences in China, where I was not always particularly impressed by the vitality of political debates,” he says. “Coming back to the US after living in China — I don’t want to be too hyperbolic, but I suppose I did recognise the dangers of a situation in which everyone agrees on something and nobody raises any questions about it.” He, too, regards himself as progressive. “But sometimes in academia, critical engagement is too often simply equated with a far left or Marxist viewpoint, which in my perspective … don’t actually provide us with any real understanding of the sheer complexity of the world.”

Lovely Links

Noble stuff

• Quillette
• Sydney Initiative for Truth
• Open Mind Platform
• Free Intelligent Conversation
• UnHerd
• Coddling of the American Mind
• Joe Rogan talks to Jonathan Haidt
• Greg Lukianoff on campus free speech
• IPA report on freedom of expression on campus
• French report on university free speech
• Chicago University’s speech manifesto
• Dissenting view: no need for Australia to emulate Chicago U
• Australia could use a local version of this: College Pulse
• Sam Harris

Satirical stuff (we think)

• The glory that is grievance studies, with never before seen video
• When you so woke, you asleep, courtesy of BBC
• Satiria News
• Looking for a Nazi to call out? Try here
• Titiana McGrath, radical poet
• John Cleese on Twitter’s outrage industry
• The death of Godfrey Elfwick
• I sexually identify as an attack helicopter
• Intersectionality calculator (don’t miss the comments)