Silencing dissenting voices. How the left threatens freedom.

A letter signed by academics calls for Cambridge University not to give Dr Noah Carl an academic position because (they state but don't evidence) Dr Carl's work is racist. Now, since I haven't read much of Dr Carl's work, it's tricky for me to know whether or not this statement is true. I am also certain that, despite what they've said in the letter they've signed, few of the 200 hundred or so academics who've said Dr Carl is racist have read any of his work either.

This seems an isolated incident but it represents a trend in our society. Intelligent people, mostly who hold left wing views of one sort of another, collect to silence dissenting views. Dr Carl is a dissenter whose failing is that he is right wing (he challenges this assertion) and researches links between intelligence, politics, race and economic development (this is a simplification). More importantly, I suspect, is that Dr Carl is a prominent and outspoken critic of leftist bias within academia and especially in his own field of sociology and social psychology. It is this criticism that lies behind the academics' letter not the essentially spurious allegations of 'pseudoscientific racism'. Right wing voices must be either silenced or placed in a carefully quarantined box labelled "dangerously wrong ideas".

Don't misunderstand me here, I don't think there's a vast conspiracy of critical theory scholars and sociologists plotting in some university common room to silence voices arguing for conservative, classical liberal or libertarian ideas. It's rather that there's a consensus that these ideas are "wrong", that people who hold them are either sinister forces or misled by sinister forces, and that rather than engage with the ideas the motives of those promoting such dangerous thoughts must be questioned or else their character smeared (sometimes both).

We see this in the "who funds you response" directed (amongst anti-foreigner and misogynist slurs) to young female voices from organisations like the Institute of Economic Affairs, Adam Smith Institute and Taxpayers' Alliance. We saw it in the damning mischaracterisation of Toby Young as an eugenicist, in the selective misquoting of Roger Scruton following his appointment to chair as government body looking at aesthetics in architecture. And we've seen it in the bizarre conspiracy theories of George Monbiot and Carole Cadwalladr - a world where well known libertarians giving money to a libertarian-inclined think tank is "dark money" and where someone turning down the offer of a deal is proof positive of their collusion with the makers of that offer.

The problem - and it is a real one - is that too many left wing people simply believe nobody can support free markets, capitalism, free speech and economic liberty without being 'shills for corporate lobbyists'. This viewpoint is now firmly embedded right across the left of politics and academia, from the mildest of Blairite establishment figures through to the communists who work for Jeremy Corbyn - people are right wing because they are making money from it or thick or 'gaslighted' by those funded by "dark money" into backing ideas against their interests.

Dissenting voices - whether it is old-fashioned conservatives like Scruton or left-libertarian ex-trots like the folk at Spiked - cannot be tolerated. Hence calls for the BBC to stop having people from the IEA or TPA ("who funds you") presenting their work - it's not about the funding, it's about the ideas they promote. These ideas - conservatism, classical liberalism, free markets, open societies, free speech - are what the newly intolerant left want to silence and attacks on motives, slurs, misrepresentation, whataboutery and orchestrated calls for sackings or no platforming are justified by the need to either silence or discredit right wing thinking.

I don't offer a resolution, more a question and something of a warning. The question is how, when the centre-left and progressive mindset is so pervasive across the media, do we create a sense of balance? By way of example, the IEA is routinely referred to as a 'right wing' think tank when its researchers appear on broadcast media, yet when people from think tanks like the IPPR appear they are seldom introduced as from a left wing think tank. This imbalance reinforces the idea that right wing is problematic in a manner that left wing isn't. It is a moderate version of the manner in which communists and fascists are treated with the former allowed space and time and the latter excluded.

The warning is that, without freely expressed voices in support of freedom, we will lose that freedom. You don't have to be a supporter of the capitalist model (many libertarians aren't) or a believer in free markets (lots of conservatives aren't) to recognise that the manner in which such voices are excluded, discredited and demonised by the dominant mainstream left, especially in academia, represents a dangerous trend and a threat to wider freedoms. If one set of voices - many essentially moderate (there's nothing remotely threatening about the work of the Mercatus Centre but George Monbiot sees it as park of his nexus of "dark money") - are excluded, it's only a short step to the exclusion of other voices. This is already happening in academia, through deliberately orchestrated actions like trying to get Dr Carl sacked and through the manner in which the training, recruitment and appointing of academics is conducted as well as by the raising of mobs to shout down dissenting voices when they appear. If we want to be free we will have to challenge this illiberal progressive mindset so the ideas of freedom are heard.

….

Historical revisionism - ideology trumps scholarship

A depressing article about his dissertation from Jack Morgan Jones. I accept it's a one-sided piece but it sets out how a simple proposal to look at something that fascinates the author became a piece of boilerplate leftist nonsense. The idea of students having real autonomy in study is undermined, the article is worth a read for that alone, but worse it shines a light on leftist revisionism:

I meet with my dissertation supervisor for the first time. She insists that the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s was not totalitarian, and that using totalitarianism as an analytical framework has long since been dismantled by revisionist scholarship.

That's right folks, all those years you've been labouring under the misconception that Finer's definition of totalitarianism applied (in spades) to the Soviet Union of the 1930s. Jack goes on:

My supervisor seems peculiarly determined to render it obsolete. She firmly advises me against making totalitarianism the focus of my dissertation. She makes her case with emphatic certainty—the scholarship on this matter, she tells me, is settled. She is so dismissive that I begin to feel foolish for having even proposed it.

The scholarship is settled! So much for the spirit of enquiry, the joy of research - 1930s Russia wasn't totalitarian! I'm guessing Jack's supervisor and her pals see the Soviet Union of Stalin, with its gulags, state sponsored starvation, pogroms, murders, intrusive secret police and atmosphere of fear, as some sort of cuddly bear that we've all misunderstood. Seems to me that ideology is trumping scholarship here.

....

Quote of the day - on conservatives in academia

****

From Jonathan Haidt's review on political diversity (or rather its absence) in social psychology:

Conservative graduate students and assistant professors are behaving rationally when they keep their political identities hidden, and when they avoid voicing the dissenting opinions that could be of such great benefit to the field. Moderate and libertarian students may be suffering the same fate.

I asked a while back why there are so few right-wing sociologists (effectively none - although there are a couple of libertarian sorts). It's good to see some real academic confirmation of this as a problem, that having some colleagues who don't automatically blame society's ills on capitalism or neo-liberalism might be a good thing.

Nothing will change though. Most universities will remain hostile places for anyone who wants to explore society from a conservative perspective.

....

I am an economist!

****

In a (less successful) attempt to repeat the 1981 letter from 364 economists that didn't change Sir Geoffrey Howe's policy, a letter from 52 'economists' was sent to The Observer criticising George Osborne's economic policies. However, it is now clear that most of the 'economists' weren't economists but from other academic disciplines.

...only 15 of the 52 signatories were actually practising mainstream economists, with many more experts in subjects such as organisational studies, social policy theory, culture and media.

On the basis of this discovery - and being the holder of a BA in South East Asian Studies (including several modules of development economics) and an MSc in Urban Regeneration - featuring a dissertation testing the New Economics Foundation's LM3 multiplier model - I am now inclined to call myself an economist.

Except I'm not, of course!

...

Policy-based evidence making (or How Government is killing science with help from academics)

If I hear the phrase “evidence-based policy making” drop from the lips of a Labour minister or one of their bureaucratic lickspittles I shall scream. Labour came to power puffing this idea – and then ignored any evidence that got in the way of its mission.

But it’s worse – Labour’s academic apologists use bad research to support the Government’s case on education, on crime and on terrorism. Instead of a proper scientific enquiry these “researchers” use qualitative methods – mostly gathering the opinions of a few experts and presenting that as research – to arrive at “evidence”.

I completed a Master of Science degree that – had I so chosen – could have been gained without any quantitative analysis. (I hasten to add that I chose to do proper research).

This is not evidence it is opinion

The social sciences are dominated by innumerate people who even dream up cod intellectual justifications of their make-believe approach to enquiry. Nothing wrong with opinion guys - but it is not evidence.

So I am grateful for the Heresiarch coining the term:

Policy-based evidence making

It sums up everything wrong with the way we conduct government, train our future governors and sideline scientific enquiry.