Once upon a time, Scientific American was a great way for humanists–a fancy name for the scientifically illiterate–to keep up with what was happening in the world of science. The magazine was wide-ranging, deep enough to be respectable but written for the interested layman. Above all it everywhere displayed a contagious curiosity about the natural world. In recent years, alas, it has been more and more infected by the virus of political correctness. The April 2008 issue contains a particularly silly article that illustrates the problem. It’s called “Buried Prejudice: The Bigot in Your Brain” (h/t the always excellent Arts & Letters Daily). The author, Siri Carpenter, accurately notes that all of us “unwittingly hold an astounding assortment of stereotypical beliefs and attitudes about social groups: black and white, female and male, elderly and young, gay and straight, fat and thin.” But instead of asking what that tells us about the reality of human nature–and by extension, what it tells us about the reality of the world that human nature is responding to–Carpenter launches into an extended liberal-guilt dance about the persistence of “implicit bias.” “Deep within our subconscious,” a bold-faced description of the article reads, “all of us harbor biases that we consciously abhor. And the worst part is: we act on them.”
But what if we didn’t act on them? Carpenter begins this threnody by quoting Jesse Jackson’s famous–or infamous, depending on the depth of one’s commitment to liberal orthodoxy–admission that when he walks down the street and hears footsteps behind him, he is relieved when he looks around and sees somebody white. Carpenter is aghast at the prejudice Jackson’s comment betrays. She laments “a basic fact of our social existence, one that even a committed black civil-rights leader cannot escape,” namely that “ideas that we may not endorse—for example, that a black stranger might harm us but a white one probably would not—can nonetheless lodge themselves in our minds and, without our permission or awareness, color our perceptions, expectations and judgments.”
Carpenter is horrified that even Jesse Jackson–Jesse Jackson!–should be tainted by the sin of prejudice. But let’s step back a moment and examine the word “prejudice.” At least since John Stuart Mill, we have been encouraged to associate prejudice with ignorance and bigotry. How many teachers, in primary and secondary schools as well as colleges, regard it their first duty to relieve their students of “prejudice.” But prejudice does not have to mean bigotry or ignorance. It can also mean the repository of moral, social, and intellectual wisdom represented by custom, habit, and tradition.
This was something that Edmund Burke, for example, saw clearly. “Prejudice,” Burke wrote, “renders a man’s virtue his habit. . . . Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature.” In seeking to relieve us of prejudice, well-meaning liberals also seek to relieve us of those unspoken commitments that families and churches have painstakingly sought to instill. That indeed is one reason parents are right to be suspicious of teachers who promise to “emancipate” their students from prejudice. What that often means in practice is emancipating them from the moral and religious precepts they have been brought up on. It is a form of social engineering brought into the classroom and carried out by the same wretched people who think that “it takes a village” to educate our children.
Let us grant that there are such things as stultifying homogeneity and ignorant bigotry. That is not at issue. The point is that there is also such a thing as groundless diversity which just might pose a much more serious threat to our society today than prejudice. In order to be meaningful, diversity must rest on a common moral, social, and intellectual culture. Without that common ground, diversity rapidly degenerates into mere tribalism. Dialogue requires not only diversity but also devotion to shared principles.
There are basically two problems with the sort of programmatic “non-biased” approach to the world that Siri Carpenter extols. One is that it systematically discounts the advantages of that “just prejudice” Burke commends to our attention. The second, and in some ways more serious, problem is its implicit utopianism. I note from her personal web page that Carpenter advertizes the fact that she contributes “5 percent or more of my profits to various non-profit, philanthropic organizations.” It’s nice that she makes the contributions. I trust that I am not alone in finding the public declaration slightly emetic. Carpenter wishes the world were a certain way. Alas, the world refuses to cooperate. What if Jesse Jackson’s reaction was rational, i.e., a reasonable inference from the available evidence? What then?
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8 Comments
1. Paul:You’re right about the descent of Scientific American from once-Olympian status: it was a scientifically meticulous and editorially super-competent voice of science for serious (but not necessarily professional) readers. That was a long time ago. It was the voice of scientists doing the best work, pushed editorially into a stylistic excellence not always their own but always the magazine’s. Here such uniformity was a rare plus: the writing was sound, but it was also fully intelligible and aloof from trendiness and politics (this even in the editorial or review pieces). Au revoir! The irresistible lure of socio-political righteousness that captured the culture as a whole did not fail to work on this journal. Excellent pieces of the original kind still appear in almost every issue; but now self-righteous sophomores get the same editorial respect as in the media generally.
May 8, 2008 - 6:30 am 2. LSD:I agree entirely. We have an eleven-year old daughter who will be the recipient of a lot of this sort of stuff. I constantly wrestle with the question of appropriate and effective intervention because I don’t want to become a repetetive curmudgeon. Sceince is a fascinating realm. The sort of pseudo-scientific pedantry that needs to be thrown out of the temple can sometimes be identified with such statements as “the debate on ______ is over”; the invitation at such an announcement is to become a member of the group rather than to think for yourself. Science is not afraid of such questions as “is it a good idea for humans to try to preserve all of the threatened species in our eco system?”, but I think that most classrooms are.
The evolution of National Geographic has also been dissapointing.
May 8, 2008 - 8:00 am 3. Doug Crockett:I had a subscription for over 25 years. Scientific American is now a publication full of direct and indirect political comment and innuendo, much like Time Magazine, but with a scientific gloss as the hook. This began when the editor changed and the magazine was revamped, maybe fifteen or twenty years ago. The magazine’s “science” is now the motor for political activism. My donnybrook was the advocacy position the publication took regarding a state education issue involving how to handle the teaching of Darwin, encouraging readers to voice the magazine’s one-sided editorial opinions to the state authorities and characterizing the matter as a threat to science. If you still have a subscription, which I don’t, you probably will find it impossible to get any acknowledgment of even the existence of legitimate dissension to the magazine’s politically-driven narratives. After all, the topic of the magazine is “science”, not politics, so politics is irrelevant. Or to put the magazine’s position more directly, the editor’s scientifically-enlightened politics is the only possible world view for rational people.
May 8, 2008 - 12:23 pm 4. Mike Huggins:(without having read the article, only RK’s synopsis) – I was wondering whether there was some actual testable “science” represented in Carpenter’s article, to get it published in “Scientific American” as opposed to “Psychology Today.” Next up, “Lysenko speaks for today.”
May 8, 2008 - 5:08 pm 5. jw:I subscribed to the Scientific American from 1955 until very recently. It used to be an excellent magazine with articles by distinguished scientists on physics, chemistry, biology, anthropology, psychology astronomy, even economics, as well as having a fine Mathematical Games section. Its article were not only for the layman but also for scientists, and its articles were used in university science courses. Since Gerard Piel ceased to be the publisher, it has deteriorated, and I have finally let my subscription lapse. I saw but did not read Siri Carpenter’s article, but I wonder if she even knows what bias is.
May 8, 2008 - 9:53 pm 6. John Moore:Totally agree about Sci. Am. It has been getting worse (and, perhaps not coincidentally) smaller. An example is its constant shilling for the anthropogenic global warming alarmists, and it’s publishing of 14 pages of ad homihem attacks against the author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” and the consequent threat of lawsuit against him when he defended himself on his blog.
One nit to pic:
Excuuuuse me? Not even close.
May 8, 2008 - 10:39 pm 7. flying squirrel:The re-valorization of prejudice has been conducted in our time by Hans George Gadamer in his Truth and Method. Mr RK should be familiar since the opening topic is truth in the work of art. Prejudice as a concept is historically developed from Medieval jurisprudenceas a name for an interim judgement necessary for subsequent inquiry.
May 9, 2008 - 8:31 am 8. RR Ryan:In this sense Gadamer discloses the historical character of culture to be prejudicial; to make implicit assumptions as a basis for further understanding. A scientific prejudice against the past, (history is bunk) when carried into the humanities makes for alienation; past = prejudice = error. The ‘revolutionary’ spirit of liberalism (PC) overvalues regicide and novelty, and undervalues or is blind to, the principled partiality of churches, schools and states. A conservatism that recognizes the importance of what doesn’t change (vs noisy fashion), that sees tradition as a benefactor and ground for our present stance, not just an object of rational critique, is a more honest (historically) intellectual stance and yields greater wisdom in government. I think it is also better equipped to discern real science from jargonized political advocacy.
The same thing happened to National Geographic. As a child, I spent many an hour poring over decades of back issues; some were as old as the 1890’s, if memory serves. When our subscription came due sometime in the 1990’s, we simply decided not to re-up. I want information, not a sermon.
May 10, 2008 - 12:26 pm