This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Setting aside the word fault. If you have a culture that is suspicious of academia and other not real work, then it is likely the people in those positions are going to react and to be suspicious of you in return. I don't think it is either sides fault. Its the chicken or the egg. I think it is the outcome of the structural and systemic differences in value sets between tribes. Blues mock Reds for being dumb hicks and Reds mock Blues for being effete intellectuals. The result is any space that leans slightly one way or the other is going to cascade. Whether anyone is deliberately planning it or not.
90% of farmers are Republicans and that is ok. It is ok for your values and preferences to determine that some areas will be dominated by one tribe or the other. At scale individual choices are overtaken by systemic differences. There likely isn't any way to have a 50/50 split in academia for Reds and Blues short of changing what Reds want and hence what Reds are. Likewise with farming and Blues.
But the existing farmers don't make prospective farmers write a "why I love Trump and how my work will advance the cause of Trump" document in order to become a farmer. The left wing academia DOES make prospective new academics write DEI impact statements. If conservatives are so uninterested in being academics why did the academy need to put up so many walls and man their gates so firmly?
I can’t speak for farmers, but expressing liberal opinions will make it much harder to get a trades career going.
More options
Context Copy link
They didn't, because 1) They don't in general see a DEI statement as being analagous to supporting Trump or a wall.They see being anti-racist as something any decent person should do. They would see the fact conservatives won't do that as evidence they hold sexist or racist attitudes. They do not see that as being left wing and thus filtering out conservatives. They see it as being decent people and if conservatives aren't decent people that says more about conservatives and not them. That is the of power of "its just the right thing to do" framing.
Now I don't work for an an Ivy League school or indeed any of the top ranked schools so maybe its more common and problematic there. But I think people have skewed ideas about academia as a whole, by looking at say Harvard or Columbia.
As for farmers, they have their own ways of enforcing social pressure. Its just not going to be a written statement. A Catholic farmer back home might find all of his neighbors equipment is mysteriously not available for him to rent come harvest time. Or an ex neighbor of mine in rural PA talked about how they charged hippies more for calves because they didn't know any better and were just going to go under anyway.
All communities enforce behaviors and beliefs, they just do it in different ways.
I don't know about that, I've been attached to X academic institutions in the last X years (sorry, vague, opsec blah blah) and while I've never had to write a diversity statement I also don't know any faculty who are "out" as a Republican and I know of exactly one student (who was widely criticized and socially censured).
I know plenty of students and faculty who hide their affiliation (in fact...it is a lot), and I've seen how both are treated when they are assumed to be Republicans (often by demographics and shallow stuff like owning a truck) and the way they are treated is about even with how old school racists treated Blacks.
In my experience academia is even worse than you'd guess from the stories.
I've never seen anything similar to that at all. Heck when I lived in a small Red town, I had my Blue colleagues over for bbqs alongside my Red neighbors and there was never any kind of problem.
I will say students seem to be more performatively anti-conservative than the faculty by a long way. So while I haven't seen them socially censuring conservative students, that wouldn't exactly surprise me. Our faculty is (or at least appears to be) more politically diverse than our students I would say. But it is a very Blue city.
Actually I think it might be more helpful to emphasize the natural history of a lot of my interactions with students and faculty these days.
On meeting me they assume and worry I'm conservative based off of my physical appearance, demographics, and superficial temperament.
They then express relief (sometimes explicitly) when they find out I'm calm, caring, have a good bedside manner and am overall not an asshole and am a good teacher - because someone with these features couldn't be conservative.
Sometimes, I later reveal heterodox opinions (generally because the person appears right leaning and needs support or because the person is pretty moderate and needs to know that nice heterodox people exist). I frequently hear "I would never believe you were one of those people."
It certainly reminds me of how some people treated minorities back in the day.
What appearance and demographics if you would you mind sharing? I'm a straight white, relatively tall, big blonde/red bearded white man and I've never perceived anything like that. The default assumption is anyone here is Blue as far as I can tell. (Which is an issue but a slightly different one, I think)
Now as soon as I open my mouth its clear I'm British not American and that often surprises people. And when I do talk about my history and my family being essentially rednecks it surprises them more because they seem to have the idea all Europeans are quasi-communists.
I'll PM you for opsec reasons but for others who might be reading it's not too dissimilar.
I'm amenable to the idea that the problem is in medicine specifically, since one of the biggest issues as far as I can tell is that conservatives are "known" to not be tolerant, and "tolerance" is a core and required part of being a physician. If you are assumed to be intolerant...well your license should be taken away (at least from the academia side of medicine, and as long as you aren't bringing in enough money that you are immune haha (this is how surgeons save themselves)).
The left seems to have no conception of the idea that they may be intolerant in general or have areas in which they are intolerant, or that some right leaning people (classically: good Christians) can be very tolerant.
Even when arguing with my own family members, some of whom are elected officials or otherwise deeply intwined with the Democratic Party I get a lot of "I don't understand, you are so kind and tolerant with your patients but not when we talk about politics." Admittedly some of it is "intolerant" but most of what I say is just...not woke.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there seems to be an assumption that certain good attributes are definitionally associated with woke politics and the greater left as far as some are concerned, and some of that drifts into beliefs of competence and descriptions of such. Likewise bad attributes can never apply to team blue.
I think that is just a failure state of all belief systems, like when I came "out" as an atheist, I heard a lot of "but you're a good person, how can you want to be an atheist" and the like, and many Christians say they don't think atheists can be moral people at all. That is basically the same argument you are getting.
If I think my values are good (and I must otherwise I would not hold them) then someone holding different, especially opposite values must be bad, otherwise they would hold my values instead. It's a failure state, I would agree, but a very common one. I elected not to reveal I was an atheist when I moved to a small Red town to avoid that exact scenario.
It's more of a problem for you because your industry is by the sound of it very Blue and one where we expect people to actually care. If you are pattern matched to a group that is seen to care about (for example) gay people less, then it doesn't take much of a push to expect you to treat some people worse than others. Because historically some people in your grouping have treated gay people badly. Even if of course, you personally would not.
Everyone wants to think they are good, therefore anyone who disagrees is at that the very least not good and at the worst actually bad. This is exacerbated by tribal politics and can grow from even small disagreements. See my own homeland where even two sects of Christians ended up murdering and discriminating against each other, even though to any outside view their differences in religion are much smaller than their similarities. Even though both their faiths say do not murder. They can rationalize it away, because they're bad Fenians or bad Prods.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm sure what is happening is that high end institutions and certain "other" institutions are particularly bad (I've observed the former uniformly and the latter seems centered around institutions that have been criticized for what is in essence, inadequacy - plenty of places have small dick energy) ...and some others are not.
I'm also coming from the place of medicine which I'm willing to admit might be more vulnerable to these games.
But the reason why I responded is my morning report this morning, in which the Elon Musk/Immigration stuff was talked about, their were zero facts to be had, total spouting of contextless fake news (and that's in the setting of news stories which sound plenty bad enough to many people). Several people were visibly uncomfortable and wanted to correct things but clearly didn't, and their was a noticeable subtext of "obviously nobody here for this would be stupid and evil enough to be Republican, since our job requires caring for people and being intelligent."
In other settings I've seen that evolve into - well if you are Republican you can't be a doctor because you don't care about people. That has a massively chilling effect on conservatives as you'd imagine.
Some departments are better at avoiding this (Periop specialities for instance) but the closer you get to teaching responsibilities the more that goes away.
Republican identifying people can't be trusted with the students is Known To All.
Edit: actually I want to try a difference answer frame to this, will reply to above.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This just seems like describing the how, rather than contradicting the notion that they metaphorically put up walls and man the gates against conservatives so firmly: they do so by genuinely believing that being anti-racist (by their conception of anti-racism) is something any decent person should do and rejecting the contention that this belief is due to their partisanship rather than due to it being true. It's particularly a severe failure for academia, where one of the ostensible main themes is the inescapability of individual bias and the need to correct for it through multiple contrasting perspectives.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link