Why Identity Liberals Can’t Fish
I would not want my children working for Google. I would not want my sons to be subject to that kind of ritual defamation and professional ruin for expressing the “wrong” opinions. And I would not want my daughter to have the kind of power over her coworkers that women do in the identity-liberal culture of Google. I want all my kids to work for employers that care about justice in the workplace, but do so within a context that — as James Damore suggested in his memo — treats employees as individuals.
.. I do not believe I am the only one who observes this Google mess from outside and sees the company and its ideological mob of backers behaving like the kind of lunatics Mark Lilla calls out in his anecdote. These people would be toxic to work with. On Quillette, four scientists respond to the controversy. Here’s an excerpt of what Rutgers psychologist Lee Jussim has to say about the Damore memo, and the commentary about it on the Gizmodo site:
This essay may not get everything 100% right, but it is certainly not a rant. And it stands in sharp contrast to most of the comments, which are little more than snarky modern slurs. The arrogance of most of the comments reflects exactly the type of smug self-appointed superiority that has led to widespread resentment of the left among reasonable people. To the extent that such views correspond to those at Google, they vindicate the essayist’s claims about the authoritarian and repressive atmosphere there. Even the response by Google’s new VP in charge of diversity simply ignores all of the author’s arguments, and vacuously affirms Google’s commitment to diversity. The essay is vastly more thoughtful, linked to the science, and well-reasoned than nearly all of the comments. If I had one recommendation, it would be this: That, before commenting on these issues, Google executives read two books: John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind.
.. I have personally been in a situation in the workplace in which a perfectly ordinary thing I said that was directly related to my work almost turned into a Human Resources situation that could have cost me my job and my career, had I not decided that this was not a hill I was prepared to die on. My accuser had a laughable case — seriously, if I told you the details, most of you liberal readers would agree with me, I’m sure — but the accuser also had power within the culture of that particular workplace, because of the accuser’s identity as a member of a favored class. I judged that I was unlikely to win any showdown. After that, though, fear of false accusation seriously affected my work. I avoided that co-worker, and when I could not, was careful not to say anything that this person could construe as hostile — even though it meant I was not able to do my job as well as I had before.
.. if you are put on trial in the court of the Human Resources Department, you will not be treated as an individual, but as a member of an oppressor group. The people passing judgment on you will consider themselves virtuous to find you guilty of heresy.
.. Damore’s mistake was to believe Alphabet (Google’s parent company) CEO Eric Schmidt’s recent claim that Google runs itself according to “science-based thinking”.
No, it doesn’t. It runs itself according to the religion of Identity Liberalism. There is no “right” and “wrong” there; there is only “good” and “evil”.
.. The problem is only partly that it’s criteria for judging the fairness of a workplace are contradictory and unfair, as Dr. Miller points out above. The core of the problem is that identity liberalism construes disagreement as heresy, and viciously punishes heretics.
And it is therefore impossible for identity liberalism, and the institutions that embrace it, to self-correct, because all criticism is treated as evil. The critic finds himself, like Damore, defending not his thesis (which may or may not be wrong), but his moral worth.
.. Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X… This is not an anodyne phrase. It tells the listener that I am speaking from a privileged position on this matter. (One never says, Speaking as a gay Asian, I feel incompetent to judge this matter.) It sets up a wall against questions, which by definition come fro a non-X perspective. And it turns the encounter into a power relation: the winner of the argument will be whoever has invoked the morally superior identity and expressed the most outrage at being questioned.
.. What replaces argument, then, is taboo. At times our more privileged campuses can seem stuck in the world of archaic religion. Only those with an approved identity status are, like shamans, allowed to speak on certain matters. Particular groups — today the transgendered — are given temporary totemic significance. Scapegoats — today conservative political speakers — are duly designated and run off campus in a purging ritual. Propositions become pure or impure, not true or false. And not only propositions but simple words. Left identitarians who think of themselves as radical creatures, contesting this and transgressing that, have become like buttoned-up Protestant schoolmarms when it comes to the English language, parsing every conversation for immodest locutions and rapping the knuckles of those who inadvertently use them.
.. What happened to James Damore at Google is that he was made a scapegoat for violating a taboo.