"Diversity" and diversity

As a Ph.D. student in Religious Studies at the University of California (I can only imagine what many readers of this blog will rush to conclude about me after that introduction), I have to say that so much of what is said about "the university" or college campuses (as if one could generalize about such institutions and communities) is utterly unrecognizable to me. This is so for at least two reasons: one is that I have never found myself in an environment more critical of the so-called orthodoxies of "the academy" than this one. As critical as others might be of "the university" or (always liberal) academics, smart and savvy academics (especially of the younger generation as I am) are far more critical, and far more vehement in their criticism, of foolishly PC and otherwise uncritical "scholars" (the scare quotes being deliberate) ~ regardless of their politics. The second is that I have yet to find a more nuanced discourse about the problems of "diversity" and the real challenges posed by real diversity and difference than the discourse I have been fortunate to encounter in graduate school. In other words, before any of us rush to generalize about and judge "the academy," it might be useful to hear from academics themselves, since -- in my personal experience (and I could be the exception that proves the rule, no doubt) -- the most insightful critics of the university and programs such as "diversity training" that I have encountered have been academics themselves, and so-called liberal academics at that.

As for the notion that "you're as likely to see a Republican on a university campus as you are to see a glacier in Iceland," I would respectully offer that any person who would advance such a claim has never set foot on, say, the campus of Texas A&M University (and I, as an Aggie, say, "Whoooop!!").

Criticism of the academy is necessary -- in fact, it is an integral feature of the academy at its best. Please, friends -- resist the impulse to paint academics and scholars with single, broad brush strokes. As an example (and I apologize for the length of this rambling post), allow me to share an observation. As liberal as the typical academic is thought to be, I have noticed recently that liberal academics are not uniformly liberal. This is anecdotal, to be sure, but telling: I have had conversations with more than two colleagues recently about the issues of abortion and gay rights. While (this being California -- thankfully) my colleagues are uniformly "liberal" with respect to gay rights (this also being personal, given that close friends and colleagues of ours are themselves gay), those very same colleagues are decidedly not "liberal" with respect to abortion. This is just an illustration, to be sure, but one that I think should be given some consideration, since it cuts against the grain of certain perceptions about academics.

I offer these observations only to contribute to the conversation. There are, no doubt, other observations to be seriously considered. I welcome any comments, however critical, in the hope that I might embody the best of the academy, beyond any ideology, by so welcoming them.

Blessings ~

There are several missing words and typos in the above, my apologies.

Ther peril of commenting when severely jet lagged (living in Singapore but home in California for the holidays!)

Not to belabour the point, but the more I reread what N. Rich wrote I am amazed.

First, ok N. Rich, let's do a study of the Texas A and M faculty. I would bet you a million dollars that you would find not only is it alot less conservative than you think, but that it is way to the left (by a huge margin) not just of Texas but to the American public at large.

Secondly, your anecdotal comments remind me of what people in the South use to say so many years ago. "Why, we're not racist, I have several black friends, and there is a black who runs the general store in town and everyone goes to him to buy their goods."

Pu-lease.

There is also an argument that many use that goes like this....well conservatives are just generally not up to the standards of academia....

To this I write, have you read the cvs of many faculty at so many schools?...take Duke for example, it is clear that very many of these faculty got their position, not because of academic talent, but because what they believed in, what race or gender they were, and how they appealed to a certain worldview in academia.

An inexplicably garbled comparison is not a "fact" gotten wrong. It would have been a fact gotten wrong had Rod written "there are no glaciers in Iceland."

dulcinatum, thanks for mentioning Marcuse. Conservatives should always keep in mind one of the things he said: Tolerance of ideas need not extend to those on the right (that's a paraphrase -- I don't have the exact quote at hand.)

In other words, the Left, by and large, does not feel any obligation to entertain the views of those on the Right. There is a 'marketplace of ideas,' but it includes only ideas representing various degrees of Leftism. Their 'tolerance' goes only one direction, so to speak. Of course this is not true of every individual Leftist, but it certainly seems accurate when describing the movement as a whole.

This mentality has been in effect on the Left since the 60s, and it's not been hidden. Thus it amazes me that conservatives continue to be surprised when Lefties don't "play fair" in this regard.

The following are some excerpts from a nice article in the Washington Post a few years back. It illustrates many of the points in my previous post.
-----
An Ode to Managers By Michael Kinsley

"...there are people in suits sitting around conference tables gravely discussing the mess in the Middle East. Some are government officials and politicians. Some are scholars or think-tank pseudo-scholars. Some are journalists....But the[se discussions] all have one thing in common: Nothing will come of them.

The Middle East issue is legendarily intractable. But most such discussions....aren't even intended to solve the problem they are addressing, except in the vaguest of long runs. When, after many years....I found myself bizarrely employed at a subdivision of a large corporation, the meetings....were disorienting.....Finally I figured it out: Not only were these meetings expected to produce decisions but those decisions were actually expected to produce results.

It was even more shocking to learn how hard it is to get from a decision that something ought to happen to making it happen. In Washington you can make a nice living just calling for things to happen. Or even declaring that it is "unacceptable" for them not to happen.....Actually making these things happen is usually a hopeless and unnecessary aspiration. Either that or it's just a matter of tidying up after the meeting. But in any case the point is the decision (or often merely the discussion) itself, not anything concrete that might come out of it.

Turning an opinion into a decision and a decision into a result turns out to be a real skill....As a skill, it is partly an innate gift and partly a set of learnable techniques....

One of the nice things about Washington, if you're an egomaniac, is that you can be a big shot without being a boss. The same is true of the literary world and academia and the media. In all these environments, lucky people get all the self-esteem and all the perks of having an important job without needing to take responsibility for the work lives and work product of other people. In fact, the first few employees a rising Washington big shot acquires -- a secretary, then another secretary, then maybe a scheduler and a speechwriter -- are there to relieve you of responsibility even for yourself....

To take the most unpleasant example, have you ever fired someone? In Washington there are people who have fired rockets -- and many who have written articles urging others to fire rockets -- but have never fired a human being. The natural tendency is to think, "I'm much too nice a person to do that sort of thing" -- and to feel superior to anyone without such scruples. Yet in an organization of any size there are going to be people who need or actually deserve to be fired....Watching a pro get the job done with minimum emotional damage on both sides is impressive. I couldn't do it, and most of you, dear readers, couldn't either.

As a humanities grad student at a top east-coast public university, I have to agree by and large with Rod's post. Academics is highly ideological and left-leaning. In my department, I and other grad students were treated during the last election cycle to tirades against Bush, against his environmental ideas, against his social ideas, against conservative Republicans in general, etc. Mind you, at the time I was more liberal than I am now, but even so, I knew that was not appropriate classroom talk. The 2 conservative grad students were offended, one too intimidated to speak up, and the other picked on constantly by the prof. This was not restricted to one single prof, either.

When I wasn’t being treated to such obvious bias, I was encouraged (if not directly by my profs, then by the recommended secondary readings) to consider everything through a homosexual or gender lens—apparently many Counter Reformation religious writers were really writing against the patriarchy, in favor of same-sex love, or to express frustrated sexual desire, and was discouraged from thinking that perhaps these great saints were actually writing about God and their longing for Him. By now the cat is out of the bag on my orthodox Catholic views (not so bad when my main interest is religious or religiously themed lit anyway), so I’m mostly left alone to do my own thing.

I was praying that none of my profs would find out about my local pro-life activism before my exams, to avoid possible discrimination. I now found that such discrimination isn’t far off, as the undergrad pro-life group was denied university services (for which they would have paid) with no reason given (others who work for said university service suggested that we not mention we wanted the services for a pro-life activity).

Catholic undergrads confirm being attacked for their views on homosexuality, contraception, premarital sex, abortion & euthanasia by professors and other students. True academic discussion of homosexuality is impossible on campus—and discussion on abortion is strained at best.

I don't think the idea is nonsense at all, although your point is well taken, esp. about philosophy. I think what Deneen is getting at, probably, is an idea that's run rampant in the humanities since the rise of poststructuralism: that there is no 'nature' but only 'culture,' and that most attempts to describe reality or texts in any sort of way is fascist, nefarious legerdemain, the suggesting that what is only culture is truly nature. Put differently and more simply, it sounds like he's talking about constructivism.

I have a PhD in the humanities and have spent time at Princeton and Duke, among other places, and in my experience, "diversity" and "tolerance" function as "clobber words" to exclude any sorts of conservative thought. Of course it depends on the school and the attitudes of given faculty memebrs, but it has been my experience that one really needs to keep one's head down as a grad student to make it, and as a young professor, one has to be very very careful not to offend the leftist powers that be.

"But what are future Ph.D.'s and reporters inculcated to do in their studies? QUESTION AUTHORITY."

And when the (minority) right-leaning students are no longer allowed to question the (majority) left-leaning authority? Then what?

Larry, actually the right used to have a very strong presence on college campuses both among the faculty and students. This shift to the left is a relatively recent change. As is the idea that questioning authority is a primary part of a student's training. It used to be understood that students were trying to learn a body of knowledge and the critical thinking skills to understand that body of knowledge, in large part so they would be able to build upon what their forefathers knew. Of course, the vitriol and denial which met many innovators who found that what their forfathers knew was wrong (ie Pastuer) demonstrates that this was probably a system in need of some tweaking, but it most certainly did not require tossing out the baby with the bath water.

This strikes me as timely for me as I recently began using a college level biology text to teach my son AP Biology. The anti-religious bias in this book which needed only to cover hard science was unbelievable. The author had created a fanatsy of Christianity as always and everywhere standing in opposition to science and had even included many factual errors in order to perpetuate this idea.
I chose the book because I like the way the material was presented, it's up-to-date and scientifically sound. Fortunately, I was able to get it as an e-book and was able to copy it into word and cut out the religious baiting.
However, how ridiculous is it that a biology professor and his supervisors and editors feel that it is OK or even his place to include anti-religious commentary in a science book? You really have to be living in an acho chamber not to realize how absurd and out of line this is!

I also think it's time for me to acknowledge once again for the record, that I know I am a terrible typist and need and editor. And it would help if I didn't have kids crawling all over me and wasn't typing one-handed while nursing much of the time :) IJS.

"A virtual industry of pundits, writers, and gadflies were born from that twin experience and they still rail against liberal academia even today. So much for stifling intellectual discovery."

The rise of a counter-cultural cottage industry is not the same as having an equal hearing in the marketplace of ideas. If conservatives were allowed to contribute to the latter, the former wouldn't be necessary.

Franklin, I swear, I wasn't plagiarizing (since this has become a controversy on CC, as you well know ...).

I saw your own use of "pendulum" the instant I hit the "POST" button.

D'oh!!!

No one is picking apart a fundamental premise in Deneen's article: "diversity training" is intended to make every person on campus equally tolerant and non-judgmental toward everyone else, and, in fact, equally uncaring. Difference is to exist but not to matter. But this is as undesirable as it is impossible: difference can only exist if it really matters, if differences are noteworthy enough for us to notice and care."

How to start? How about this phrase: Skin color, for goodness sakes, should NOT matter, but it is a difference and if we take the world as it exists today, it DOES matter, but less and less so as we exert ourselves. Is Deneen really trying to argue that it is undesirable for the difference of skin color to exist but not matter???

In civil affairs and employment, religious differences may exist, but they should not matter in terms of how one is treated on the job. Does anyone disagree with this?

Further, I reject this definition of "diversity". In all my corporate training as a manager in the AT&T system, the essence of diversity was: (a) differences should not matter in decisions of hiring, firing, job performance evalution, etc; (b) In inter-personal communication and leadership, cultural differences could quickly lead to misunderstandings unless one made extra effort to avoid various pit-falls; (c) at an individual level, no assumptions should be made about a person's skills, likes/dislikes etc. based on a perceived group affiliation (i.e. avoid stereotyping -- all women are good at project management and intuitive communication, all Asians are good at analytical tasks but not such good communicators); (d) in decision-making, it is good to get all points of view on the table as opposed to only accepting input from people who think like yourself.

I wonder if the problem is the philosophy of diversity itself or the group think politics/entrenched orthodoxy dynamic that some apparently see in academia today. I suspect the latter has existed all along, and all that changes are the pet philosophies one must espouse to belong to the "club". Since I haven't had any prolonged exposure to academia except for a recent stint teaching Calculus at a local community college, I cannot gauge that.

I would be interested in the viewpoint of anyone else in corporate life who has had diversity training.

i've never read this blog before and can't believe that grown adults are sucked into such a zero-sum discussion. having self-identified with conservative values in my 40's and progressive values in my 50's, i can now say that both are partially right and each are incomplete. perhaps if a few enlightened leaders in both camps unstuck themselves from their egoic illusions and power hungry trances, more people might transcend these petty, limiting and intolerant world views.

"There is one forbidden idea: the idea that there may be limits based in nature."

Oh, you mean like limits on the carrying capacity of the planet? Or limits on how much fossil fuel waste we can emit and still have a liveable climate?

'"Diversity", at its best, should mean that differences exist, and matter, but should not be used as the basis for hierarchy...'

Hierarchy is inevitable, and by its very nature has to be based on differences. The trick is in making the hierarchies just and keeping them that way.

Diversity in and of itself means nothing -- it is a null. It's only pertinent to a given situation if it has some effect on results or outcome.

Sig, this may not be what Rob meant, but it's my experience: a meritocracy.

Specifically, a professional association where status is based on credentials, authority rests with the most accomplished, and upward mobility is strictly defined in those terms. The measure of "just" resides in the apparent and actual practice of arbitrary violation of the merit definitions.

As a professor here in Texas I will post of my experience. I have taught many diversity/race and ethnicity classes and currently teach in a social work program (just so you know that I have liberal street cred!) The point of a college education is to expand the student's worldview beyond the simplistic dichomotous view they have developed over the years of, primarily, public education. Their worldview rarely includes any shred of critical thinking. My role is NOT to point out how supposedly wrong or right they are, but rather to engage them in a critical analysis of BOTH sides of an issue...how wrong and right both sides can be! Diversity in the classroom is not about ignoring differences...how anyone could come away with that impression is beyond me! I have never asked a student to be "color-blind" - that would negate the different life experiences of different people, whether these differences be related to skin color, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, etc. I ask them to see how our differences can be the basis of stratification - differential access to the rewards and resources of our society.
Yikes, I have a meeting. Maybe more liberal ranting later!!

FW -- I was just going to suggest that those folks who hadn't read Deneen's initial piece in full ought to do so. A lot of the concerns being raised here are actually answered there.

so sorry! the 3:27 post was me!

Also, not to thread hog, but I want to point out that Deneen isn't talking about differences not mattering in the sense of being color blind, as Abigail seems to assume.
Rather what is not allowed is for any meaning or even result to be applied to those differences. So the thing isn't that diversity training seeks to make us color blind, but that it insists that the differences which we see should not be given any meaning or offered as an explanation for different outcomes.
A fairly innocuous example of this is that many academics would probably not have a problem with me saying that personal relationships and loyalty tend to be valued more highly in black culture than it is in typical middle class white america. What I could not do then is say that it is this cultural value which may be largely responsible for the fact that african americans are more likely to enter into "helping" professions like nursing and teaching than their white peers. This difference is the result of internalized low expectations or steering by unconciously prejudiced guidence counselors or other "blocking" mechanisms which make it harder for african americans to enter into "harder" fields of study like economics, business, hard sciences and the like.
So, we can acknowledge the difference (especially when it is fairly positive), but it is verboten to think that these differences matter in any substanitive way.

"So, we can acknowledge the difference (especially when it is fairly positive), but it is verboten to think that these differences matter in any substanitive way."

Not if we put it in context. I'd find your first assumption interesting, but incomplete, regardless of what subgroup you were talking about. To talk about African Americans and not talk about the shadow of race and racism is to ignore the elephant in the room. Thus, it would reasonable to make your assertion about helping professions, but then add there is a counter argument that attributes some of it to race. That's both intellectually more honest and more complete.

Rebecca, I'm entering nursing and it isn't easier than the "harder" fields. Lower status, yes, at least in the high-powered area where I live, because it's physical, and service, and dirty work. High status in some parts of the country. Two of my fellow students who are black were accountants before starting the program.

Lisa, I don't think nursing is easier, but that is the position taken by the same sort of people who view being a full time mom as self-evidently less worthwhile and fulfilling than getting a paycheck for being a pig farmer.
Also, by hard, I mean being primarily concerned with facts, research and such rather than including "soft" issues like caring, dealing with people (particularly those in need) and such. I'm not speaking of degree of difficulty here.
Obviously nursing mixes the two, but anyone who has spent time in the medical system knows that the nurses tend to be concerned with wanting to take care of you (soft issues)while the doctors want to nail down the proper diagnosis and treatment plan (hard issues). That's all I'm sayin'.

I think there's an elephant in the room that people on the left are not talking about WRT to the left-leaning of academia. I don't really know how to softpedal this, so I will say bluntly: In academia, you're not allowed to be wrong. Or, rather, you're not allowed to be wrong and still be respected. And the right, at this point in time, has a history of being wrong about a good many things.

For example, the insanity of trickle-down economies and the theory that reducing taxes will increase government revenue. Or the theory that invading Iraq is a good idea. Or the idea that private charities would step in and provide when social services are cut back. Or totally wacked-out conceptions of how our branches of government are supposed to work. Or fighting evolution, or writing conspiracy theories about global warming.

And part of that is taking an contrary point of view to changes. But the right seems to have a giant echo chamber that automatically say 'Nuh uh!' to anything the left suggest, and repeats any theory the right suggests, and keeps it up well past when the academic community has already accepted or rejected it and now thinks you're all lunatics.

You want right-wing thinkers and right-wing theories to be taken seriously in academia, you have to get rid of the people sprouting insano crazy logic. It would be nice if academia operated in a vacuum, but it does not.

If someone comes up to me and tells me that X is true, I'll start unconsciously comparing them to other people who think X is true, and if most people I know about that think X is true are crazy alien conspiracy people or whatever, I'm not going to think to highly of that person, even if they don't actually think that.(1)

So the next time a right-wing political science teacher shows up, there's a doubt: Does he think the executive branch is super powerful? Does he think that Clinton murdered Vince Foster? Does he think the middle east should be flattened by nukes? What loony-toon right-wing theories does he bring to the table?

This is, indeed, unfair, prejudice, and discriminatory, as the right gleefully points out, but it's not going to stop until those crazy people promoting those crazy theories stop getting airtime.

1) This is, incidentally, why I'm very cautious about who I tell my theory to that the CIA, or rather James Jesus Angleton, hired Oswald to assassinate Kennedy, as he thought Kennedy was a soviet mole. Now, you see what I mean? Don't I sound a little bit crazy?

In reality, the idea that Oswald would set up such an assassination by himself is really implausible, and the idea that someone had him do it is not an amazing leap of logic. The mob had motive, but Oswald was more likely to work with the government, or someone in the government, and Angleton was convinced that there was a soviet mole 'at the highest level' of government.

No, my theory isn't crazy. It could be wrong, but it's not crazy, but it sounds crazy because of all the theories about magic bullets and multiple shooters and stuff. Stuff I didn't actually mention or believe. In fact, my theory explicitly rejects those things, as I said he was the shooter. Yet almost every person who read that thought 'crazy!'.

probably, not problem. Trying a new polish beer, i blame that!!!

A great deal of confusion would probably be avoided if the "diversity" euphemism were replaced with something else.

It seems to me that "almost no tolerance of chauvinism" is what is really meant, though no university could really deliver on that.

Cleveland, that was an excellent story, one I've heard from other civil servants along the way, with similar insight into the problems created by badly-designed "diversity" training.

From my subjective POV, the key issue is the concept of courtesy -- which contains the concepts of respect and tolerance -- that our society has been beating into the ground for a few decades now. Diversity training makes courtesy out to be an artificial, even arbitrary imposition on (by implication) ignorant people; it competely misses the common sense roots of courtesy, its simplicity in structure and practice. It makes a bad attempt to "teach" respect, when the minimum, default respect we can offer to any person is also based on common sense; and it makes tolerance into coerced agreement, when it really should just be the simple idea that a person is the way a person is, and we need not take differences personally in most situations.

I like Cleveland's and Franklin's observations about courtesy and common sense as well as the observation that what should be natural and common sense can feel coercive and artificial when run thru the blender/garbage disposal that is corporate culture and communication. (I would observe that this happens in other forums; religious education of children can easily slip into this same zone.)

But I still argue the point that if done in good faith (nod to Sig), such training can and does have a place, if only to broaden our horizons about interpersonal communications and the all-too-easy-to-make assumptions we can form about people.

"I like Cleveland's and Franklin's observations about courtesy and common sense as well as the observation that what should be natural and common sense can feel coercive and artificial when run thru the blender/garbage disposal that is corporate culture and communication. (I would observe that this happens in other forums; religious education of children can easily slip into this same zone.)

But I still argue the point that if done in good faith (nod to Sig), such training can and does have a place, if only to broaden our horizons about interpersonal communications and the all-too-easy-to-make assumptions we can form about people."

The problem with common sense and courtesy is that we all have different definitions of it. If you spend much time watching employment litigation, everytime you see a noose hung up in a workplace or porn being sent around on the email, people just say "we were having fun" and "this is how we interact here" or "they know we were joking." IOW, common sense is defined individually and not culturally.

If done well, diversity training in the workplace can be effective and positive. It creates a mindset that people need to be aware that not everyone thinks the way they do and maybe it's good to "stop and think" before doing something or saying something that will reflect on the employer.

Corporate American has embraced diversity not because they are benevolent or full of leftists, but because it is good for the bottom line. You want to attract the widest range of customers and recruit the widest range of employees. If the workplace is hostile to African Americans or gays, veterans or religious conservatives, you are going to have a hard time maintaining a bottom line.

"the whole thing is just a way for those who cannot concieve of their own fallability and hate to have their errors pointed out to them to excuse their intellectual protectionism."

Right. See Quinn's Law No. 10: "Liberals never think what they are doing is wrong, they only think they haven't done enough of it yet or it is underfunded."

Rebecca, excellent points, based on principles with which I can agree even while disagreeing with your personal views of the issues.

Daniel, I think I agree with you and your last post... but there's a niggling doubt in there over the following: The problem with common sense and courtesy is that we all have different definitions of it. I'm going to respond to that by itself, and ask that you expand on your thinking behind it.

Common sense and courtesy are societal in scope, and while they can and will have "local" variations, the core of them is the same no matter where one is. The variations can be described as differences in customs (practice), but the common, underlying concepts are easily discerned.

The crux of the problem, in my not so humble opinion, is enforcement. Common sense and courtesy are taught by example to each succeeding generation, and as the child ages to adulthood the learning process is simple: concept, practice, feedback both good for demonstrating understanding, and bad for violating the basic rules involved. Examples, even now despite my cynicism, are out there to be seen. However, as a society we have gradually diminished and eventually made negative the efforts needed to provide feedback, especially when it is bad. Criticism is necessary to any learning process. Criticism became, itself, antithetical to courtesy -- a paradox I continue to puzzle over.

Case in point: a person is rude. My impulse is to point the rudeness out to that person, but should I dare to do so other people around me will criticize me for speaking, often calling me rude as well. The rude person obtains, at least by inference, positive feedback for his rudeness; I, in turn, am further dissuaded from participating in (what I've termed) the common sense component of courtesy.

Another symptom of this is a story we've all heard, or seen for ourselves: an unrelated person (stranger) is angrily denounced for attempting to correct a child, may be threatened with legal action including a charge of child abuse or predation, and will receive this anger even when the situation is up to and including the child injuring himself and/or others. Clearly, this symptomizes the breaking of any common sense notions between the intention of the stranger -- enforcement of courtesy -- and the reactions of the parents.

If child-rearing is too sensitive a subject to use as an example, consider the checkout lines at a super market. One or more lanes are clearly marked "X or fewer items", yet people will ignore that and get into line with twice or thrice or more than the limit.

1) Anyone in line behind such a person, should he mention the violation, will be met with anger.

2) If the cashier should mention it, he receives the anger, and may even have little or no support from the people in the line on whose behalf he is attempting to enforce the courtesy defined in the situation.

I have common sense because I learned it. I have no respect for a person who calls his violation of what I've learned "common sense"; I despair of my fellows, whose silence reinforces that person's abuse of the term.

I apologize for the lengthy post, I have one final point to make: political correctness is the attempt to fill in the void left by the weakening and disappearance of the enforcement component I've described. I can and do acknowledge the good and constructive intent behind it, but from my POV it is wrong at its core both for the non-sensical methods it uses, and for the simple fact that the cure for the lack of courtesy is a return to the common sense method of teaching and enforcing it.

Franklin, I'll fill in with the conservative version of what you are saying. As a society we have abandonded the idea of shame. In fact, we have almost systematically sought out those things which were previously seen as shameful and worked dilligently to remove their shameful connotations. To a certain extent there were areas where this needed to happen. However, like most areas which were in need of reform, the baby got thrown out with the bath water.

There is some room for embarrassment, but that's just a shadow of what shame is. Embarrassment says, "oops, I made a mistake and now I look foolish." Shame says, "I have done something which reveals a fundamental flaw in my character that I need to address."

And this has extended down into our child rearing practices. Parents used to regularly say, "you should be ashamed of yourself." Today those words just aren't used that often. A lot of parents don't even quite know themselves what this shame stuff is. If anything, we don't want our kids to feel bad about themselves and since shame almost requires that you feel bad about yourself (hopefully so that you will be motivated to change for the better), it is a big no-no.

I actually had a long conversation with my oldest son after he consistently showed poor work ethic and a disregard for his parent's approval or disapproval where in a told him, "I want you to feel bad about yourself over this. You shouldn't feel good about yourself just because you suck air. You need to earn respect from those around you and from yourself. Right now you're not doing it and that should make you feel ashamed. Which should make you want to change what you're doing so that we can respect you and you can respect yourself."

He had to think about it for a week or two, but he's definately made a huge turn about since then. Shame has been and can certainly be abused, but it has its place. When people violate what you know as common sense, they should feel or should be made to feel ashamed. Taking shame out of the human experience has left us without a very powerful tool in our arsenal for dealing with the poorly socialized around us.

Tsk, tsk. Rebecca, you should be ashamed of yourself. (NOT!!) ;-)

I disagree with you... what you wrote need not be labeled a "conservative version", because I see it as common sense. :-)

It is interesting Rebecca that what you wrote about shame you think is from a "conservative" point of view, because I certainly have no qualms with what you wrote, though we probably have different ideas about the baby vs. the bath water.

I don't think any child should feel ashamed of being illegitimate. It was wrong for society to make said children feel ashamed of themselves.

I don't think any child should feel ashamed of his/her family for not being like the majority of families around them (whether that's race, economic class and/or gender of parents).

Finally, I think there there are two shame belief systems, one good, one bad. The good version, which I think you describe, acknowledges the character defect but has hope in ability to address the defect and a belief in the fundamental "OK-ness" (I'll get slapped for that, I know) of oneself.

The bad version of shame is the "I'm an irredeemably bad person and I've done another bad thing" shame that simply kills hope and spirituality and forms a sort of nihilistic spiral downward into darkness. This is the sort of shame cycle many gay people can get into (yours truly knowing it very well).

Perhaps the arguments about shame and whether it is OK or not are not clear about the "good" vs. the "bad" shame (if you even can follow me in understanding the difference between the two. Maybe people who've not felt the bad variety can't get it, I don't know.)

Jim, I'm sorry about the Ann Coulter thing. I was actually thinking about her "defense" of the remark in the NYT:

"I would never insult gays by suggesting that they are like John Edwards," she said. "That would be mean."

And I don't defend her comments at all, in any case. But even in this case, does anyone seriously think that any of this actually refelcts either her or other conservative's thinking on homosexuality? I mean if you really do, let me tell you the truth about that tooth fairy thing, the guy in the big red suit and that bridge in Brooklyn someone sold you! It's all just kabuki theater with less than no real meaning. Conservatives find the whole witch hunt that goes on when people utter forbidden words (regardless of the actual intent or meaning of the speaker) to be the most ridiculous, you must have gotten some bad cocaine, 'cause you're completely out of your freakin' mind spectacle. (Think of the GARBAGE that went down went a white house official used the word "niggardly" in public!) She was trying in a very unfunny way to play on this problem while making fun of Edward's tendency to preen himself. It didn't go over well. It wasn't funny. But it was also completely unrelated to any actual homophobia.

Anyhow. Now that I've given more time and brain cells to ann coulter than the woman deserves . . .

I don't want to get into public policy disputes with you (I think the war on drugs is retarded and that smoking bans are a violation of property rights, for example), but I really would stand by my contention that the liberals have been almost completely wrong about the things that effect people most for at least the last 35 years: marriage, family, sex, motherhood, fatherhood, and children.

Rebecca, just a helpful memory jog: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_%22niggardly%22#David_Howard_incident

Howard was an aide to DC mayor Anthony Williams. :-)

Rebecca, just a helpful memory jog: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controversies_about_the_word_%22niggardly%22#David_Howard_incident

Howard was an aide to DC mayor Anthony Williams. :-)

This might be a duplicate. I have no idea where the first attempt to post went. Shrug.

I think the social conservatives see this and point to the sexual revolution, changes in divorce law, women's liberation, etc. and say "we told you so".

Oh, I'm not saying the right hasn't be correct about some of their warnings about upcoming changes, although a lot of the anti-feminist stuff is retroactive justification for objecting to the loss of male power.

The fact they were correct about the effect does not mean they were correct about the claim we shouldn't do it, though.

As I said, a party that objects to new ideas and changes is a good thing. It's probably saved the left from humiliation more times than anyone knows, because their stupid ideas get shot down.

The problem is, conservatives have lost their ability to discriminate between bad new ideas and good new ideas. Anything the left proposes is bad. Anything the right proposes is good. You can see this weirdness in the health care discussion:

Government-sponsored health care would help businesses in this country, as they're competing against other countries with health care. And it seems to fall right in line with social conservative Christian thinking. (Government-funded temple upkeep, hehe.) Meanwhile, neocons don't care, and anti-illegal-immigration folks wouldn't care if it was promised it'd only apply to people here legally.

It would seem that only 'make the government as small as possible' libertarians would object to it, and they make up a tiny fraction of Republicans and have been ignored for decades.

Yet the GOP does object to it. They object to it using the libertarian framing, granted, but that is sheer nonsense. They could have just as easily framed the issue using a pro- argument for their two biggest groups that cared, businesses and social cons, and let the libertarians twist in the wind like normal. (They could have even used it as leverage on the illegal-immigration thing, demanding that be solved first to keep costs from running wild.)

So, ignoring the framing, what is the actual reason they object to it? Because the left, and even worse, Hillary, are in favor of it. It's Not Invented Here to the nth power.

You can assert the same thing about the left not liking ideas from the right, but it wouldn't really be true. Often, the left accepts anything that isn't obviously stupid on the face of it, like it accepted 'free trade' and 'NAFTA', and tried it out. Ugh.

But to drag this discussion back to academia, I should mention what Mike Savage said, two days ago, that 90% of the Nobel committee were child pornographers and molesters. It's handing microphones to that sorts of idiocy that causes the academic bias against the right.

Jim,
thank you for your response to David. I think you have it quite right.

Much of the antipathy from the right towards the left on these issues doesn't come from any desire to roll back the clock to the bad old days or the anger of white men over their loss of pride as I'm sure David would claim (I can't even read his stuff anymore myself). It is that when these changes were taking place and conservatives were saying, if we go down this road "x" is going to happen, the left generally refused to even entertain the idea that there was a potential downside to the changes which were being ushered in. So no real discussion could take place and there was simply no room for any moderating force.

What I think would have been useful, and what I think we're haltingly trying to figure out how to do now, is a real conversation where we discuss both the need to be free from what really were some onerous restrictions back in the day while looking at how to mitigate the inevitable accompanying negative consequences.

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that we view single women having children as a negative which should be strongly discouraged while also acknowledging that we should not be reviling the woman or her child. When those on the right warned of the disaster that liberalized divorce laws would have on the family, it would have been perfectly reasonable to say, "yes there will be problems, but we need to find a more moderate way than what we have right now." Acknowledging the problems created by the changes ushered in over the last 40 years wouldn't have required scuttling those changes altogether.

At the end of the day, I do know that there are a lot of liberals who aren't all that comfortable with the way things have turned out, but too often it seems like they get stuck on the idea that it's either the chaos we have today or the bad old days of 1950. If a real conversation had been allowed to take place 40 years ago, we probably could have found a more moderate path with far fewer casualties. It's a shame it didn't happen then, but it would be great if we could do a better job of coming together for that discussion today. And to get back to the original topic, our one sided, moribund academia is far more of a barrier than help in this regard. Which is just a shame.

"I have common sense because I learned it." Franklin

You have common sense because the God you don't believe in wrote it on everyone's heart: it's wrong to murder; homosexual tendencies or an attraction to Pam Anderson :) are not evil in themselves; minorities and poor people and children should not be taken advantage of just because we can; etc.. Catholics would argue that common sense is encompassed in "natural law" as distinct from revealed law, which you do learn. Ralph Waldo Emerson (I think) said "Nothing astonishes men so much as common sense and plain dealing." St. Paul said Pagans who never heard of natural law are led by reason to do what it commands.

"I am not threatened when that term is used by someone I know has no issues w/LGBT people in general. Ann Coulter is not one of those people." Jim

Whoa, Jim. The only "issues" Coulter has with LGBT people in general are common sense issues--neither she nor I want "progressives" force feeding homosexuality to our children in school as an OK alternative, and we don't want our sacred institutions, such as marriage and constitutionally free Church pulpits, threatened as in Europe. Coulter's mean sarcasm is a steam valve. As a private person, she probably is more tolerant and charitable than many of us. Just as Rush is.



"The bad version of shame is the "I'm an irredeemably bad person and I've done another bad thing" shame that simply kills hope and spirituality and forms a sort of nihilistic spiral downward into darkness. This is the sort of shame cycle many gay people can get into (yours truly knowing it very well)." Jim

That breaks my heart, Jim. Shame is something ALL of us share for our transgressions of natural law. NEVER EVER let it kill hope, my friend.



"Rebeccat, don't forget that conservative fought to keep marriages like yours illegal, just as they fought every major piece of civil rights legislation from school desegregation to the Civil Rights Act. That's a legacy that isn't easily overlooked. They opposed family leave, disability rights, the right to access contraceptives, and the rights of women to access credit. They opposed expanding job bias rights to women, and they opposed the Equal Pay Act." Daniel

You could stand some diversity training, Daniel. Someone could turn the tables on you by pointing out, as just two of many examples, that it was the Democrats that fought tooth and nail for slavery, until the Republicans stopped them. It was the Democrats that would have killed the Civil Rights Act by filibuster had not Republican Senator Dirksen shamed them into relenting. That's a legacy that isn't easily overlooked. Why bring up your heavily-spun past version of things just to start a fight with conservatives? Don't protest when we defend ourselves.

I would pay a lot to have Ann Coulter review this thread and give a diversity training session.

I knew the second I deleted it from my crazy-long post that someone else would bring it up.

it was the Democrats that fought tooth and nail for slavery, until the Republicans stopped them.

That's nothing! They opposed a central bank too!

Small hint: Slavery ended 140 years ago. No one alive then is alive today.

And, while we're talking about party names, it's worth noting that the party that won the civil war, (and thus, actually freed the slaves), was not the Republican party, but Abraham Lincoln elected on a 'National Union' ticket, a party set up by pro-war Democrats and Republicans, so that neither peace-Democrats or Radical Republicans would win.

So if you want to pretend that the Republican then is the current party, then your party is the party that radicals basically forced Lincoln out of, in the middle of a war no less, and into the arms of the Democrats.

Or maybe we can just go with the idea that pretending names mean anything outside of their time is stupid.

It was the Democrats that would have killed the Civil Rights Act by filibuster had not Republican Senator Dirksen shamed them into relenting.

That is an...extremely goofy reading of things, especially considering you could make the claim without it. The filibuster was threatened over the very improper method of getting the bill out of committee, not over the contents of the bill. (Without that improper method, done by the Senate Majority Leader, the Democrat Mike Mansfield, the bill would have probably died in the Judiciary Committee*.)

Meanwhile, the bill wouldn't have even have existed if not for Kennedy pushing for it, and then it never would have gotten out of the House*, where it was subject to some sort of hold, if Johnson hadn't pushed for it after Kennedy's assassination.

* However, both of the threats to the vote on it were, indeed, Southern Democrats, Howard Smith and James Eastland. (Although Eastland never did anything because of the improper bill movement.)

But in the end, the bill was entirely voted on by regional lines, not party lines. Which resulted, as Johnson foresaw, in the Democrats losing the South for a generation.

In other words, before the Civil Rights act, there were two parties. Those two parties were both split in half, north/yes and south/no, by the act, and the Democrat's northern half lived and their party as a whole got their views, and the Republican's southern half lived and their party as a whole got their views.

However, we weren't talking about 'Democrats' or 'Republicans'. We were talking about the left and the right.

"Cleveland, I'm puzzled by your repeated references to Pamela Anderson.... Surely a man of taste and culture such as yourself could find a more worthy object for your unseemly lusts." Sig

Too old for lust, I am but a weak and sinful man; one of neither taste nor culture. Moth to a flame, Sig. It's called concupiscence.

PS: You and my sainted mother would have gotten along swimmingly.