FAIR Weekly Roundup

January 16th, 2022

For The Atlantic, FAIR Advisor Thomas Chatterton-Williams wrote a piece titled, “Saving Classics From Identity Politics,” where he argued that a hyper focus on diversity and group identity in education may prevent students from learning about and understanding important aspects of Western intellectual culture that are necessary to navigage it. Chatterton-WIlliams writes:

In the all-consuming culture wars, Western customs and habits of thought, which are ever more conflated with oppressive “whiteness,” have been pitted against oversimplified understandings of diversity and group identity.

Chatterton-Williams says that many intellectuals currently appear to believe “that there is no such thing as an idea devoid of the historical power imbalances inscribed in contemporary identity designations.” Quoting Roosevelt Montas, he argues that using the “cultural backgrounds of a diverse student body as an organizing principle in general education necessarily leads to incoherence, essentialism, and tokenism.”

Read the full article here.

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For Persuasion, Seth Moskowitz discussed political “reactionaries,” which he defines as “someone with extreme opposition to dramatic social or political change” who make “two key intellectual mistakes.”

The first mistake is to become overly prooccupied what they’re against that their politics becomes rooted in “reflexive opposition rather than first principles or reason.” And the second mistake is to vastly overstate the threat of that which they oppose, which drives “responses disproportionate to the scale of the harms they critique.”

Moskowitz outlines what he calls the “reactionary trap,” and urges us not to naively believe that political reactionaries are solely a product of any one political tribe. By understanding that reactionaries can emerge from all ideological and political backgrounds, you’ll be better situated to avoid becoming a reactionary yourself.

Moskowitz writes:

Given that reactionaries can come from across the political continuum, each of us—particularly those of us on the left who have assumed that reactionaries always originate from the right—needs to take seriously the fact that we are vulnerable to the pitfalls of reactionary politics. After all, if we do not know the reactionary trap even exists, how are we to avoid falling in?

Read the full article here.

For Newsweek, Sheena Mason, President and co-founder of the Theory of Racelessness, wrote an essay titled “Undoing Racism Means Undoing Race.” In it she argued that improving race relations in America requires us to stop thinking about and seeing others in terms of “race,” but to instead “embrace our shared humanity and, perhaps, our shared Americanness.”

According to Mason, rejecting “race” as a valid concept does not negate the reality of racism. She states:

Of course, racism matters. But color is not the same as "race," even though it has become a proxy. Yet, practices associated with anti-racism and critical race theory (CRT) that double down on "race" to undo racism are misguided. They make us see racism everywhere because we've come to learn to see "race" everywhere.

Mason believes that because we teach racism is everywhere and further encourage people to embrace racial identities, it is no surprise that we continue to find racism where it does not exist, such as in the Kyle Rittenhouse case or in the election of Winsome Sears as Virginia’s lieutenant governor.

Read the full article here.

For Quillette, Matt Beard, a graduate student of political science at Carleton University, wrote about “The Importance of Academic Impartiality.” Beard laments the way activism and politics are being injected into institutions that require impartiality in order to function properly.

Beard argues that certain institutions, such as academia and journalism, must “uphold their responsibility to impartially seek the truth” for society to reap their important benefits. However, university administrators appear to have now gone the way of social media activists in forgetting that “the political realm benefits from a space which it cannot touch.”

In order to pursue truth objectively, Beard claims three principles must be defended. The first is that “you should speak the truth as you see it even if the consequences will be negative.” The second is a commitment to “open discussion and an impartial consideration of all perspectives. And, thirdly, that “academia and journalism ought to be refuges of truth against political and social power.”

Read the full article here.

For The Washington Free Beacon, journalist Aaron Sibarium reports that a race-based medical rubric used by SSM Health “gave race more weight than diabetes, obesity, asthma, and hypertension combined” was recently abandoned after the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative legal nonprofit, threatened them with a lawsuit claiming that the medical policy was both “immoral” and “illegal.”

The now-defunct rubric is much more radical, prioritizing healthy minorities over white patients with many of the largest risk factors for COVID-19. A 49-year-old white woman with hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and asthma would only get 19 points under the rubric, just shy of the 20 point threshold for antibody therapy. But a 50-year-old black woman with no underlying health conditions would receive 22 points, making her eligible.

The policy was initially justified by the claim that "COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on low income communities and certain racial/ethnic minorities in the United States." However, these purported racial disparities vanished when new analyses included relevant variables like health comorbidities and class.

"Black race was not associated with higher in-hospital mortality than white race," an analysis in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded, "after adjustment for differences in sociodemographic and clinical characteristics on admission." A study of Maryland and District of Columbia hospitals likewise found no relationship between race and severe disease "after adjustment for clinical factors."

Read the full article here.

In Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported on a recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) titled, “The rise and fall of rationality in language,” which documented a marked shift over the last 40 years from “words associated with fact-based argumentation” to “sentiment laden words.”

According to the study, “this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.”

Brown, however, warns that “drawing broad conclusions from all this may be a little hasty, as the findings could simply reflect a shift in the way language is used or the way authors state their cases rather than a deep reset in our modes of thinking.”

Read the full article here.

In Tablet, Ilana Redstone wrote a piece titled “The Crisis of Moral Legitimacy,” warning readers that “universities are training students not to see validity in alternative worldviews.”

According to Redstone, her students are frequently able to give abundant reasons for positions they support, however she found that they were routinely unable to come up with compelling reasons—apart from bigotry—why someone might take a contrary position.

Redstone believes this stark “asymmetry in the students’ ability to produce morally reasonable arguments” for certain positions is extremely concerning.

Can this be explained by students’ fears of voicing unpopular positions, or is it because they actually can’t think of an answer? Probably both factors are at play. After all, the inability to articulate other perspectives is often true even for students who themselves hold nonprogressive positions. But both point to the same problem: The need to understand the moral legitimacy of opposing perspectives when it comes to many controversial issues.

Read the full article here.

For The Atlantic, writer Derek Thompson argued that we need an “abundance agenda” to solve America’s many problems.

Thompson believes that many, if not most, of America’s current problems—such as food and gas shortages, insifficuent COVID tests, shipping delays, insufficient microchips for our cars and other electronics, etc.—all arise from systemic issues that result in accross-the-board scarcity. According to Thompson, many partisan issues could be solved by a unified commitment to increasing the supply of essential goods.

Thompson walks us through five areas—health care, housing, college, transportation, energy and climate change—where his so-called “abundance agenda” could fix serious longstanding problems.

By expanding access to essential services such as health care, we can reduce Americans’ pain. By going all-out on clean energy—solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and beyond—Americans can power more luxurious lives, free of the guilt that their luxury is choking the planet. By focusing on productivity and growth, we can become a richer country that shares its ample winnings with the less fortunate, reducing poverty and allowing us to work less with every passing decade, as economists once hoped.

Read the full article here.

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