Alan Jacobs

Same day, same neighborhood as the set of images posted earlier today. It’s pretty weird having Spring and Fall at the same time.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“800”] by Tobias Rothe[/caption]

All from my yard today.

  

Attempts to demean the conservative temperament — even assuming that there is such a thing as the conservative temperament — bother me less than the attempt to insist that such demeaning is merely neutral analysis. And I’m not only referring to the popular press: this Vox post by David Roberts takes its chief talking points from recent scholarship, for instance this article from Current Biology.

Let’s consider a key passage from that article, one that Roberts quotes. It goes like this (footnotes deleted for clarity):

Conservatives respond to threatening situations with more aggression than do liberals and are more sensitive to threatening facial expressions. This heightened sensitivity to emotional faces suggests that individuals with conservative orientation might exhibit differences in brain structures associated with emotional processing such as the amygdala. Indeed, voting behavior is reflected in amygdala responses across cultures. We therefore further investigated our structural MRI data to evaluate whether there was any relationship between gray matter volume of the amygdala and political attitudes. We found that increased gray matter volume in the right amygdala was significantly associated with conservatism (Figure 1B) (R = 0.23, T(88) = 22.22, p < 0.029 corrected).

Interesting, no? But what if the research had been presented in this way?

Liberals respond to threatening situations with less aggression than do conservatives and are less sensitive to threatening facial expressions. This lowered sensitivity to emotional faces suggests that individuals with liberal orientation might exhibit differences in brain structures associated with emotional processing such as the amygdala. Indeed, voting behavior is reflected in amygdala responses across cultures. We therefore further investigated our structural MRI data to evaluate whether there was any relationship between gray matter volume of the amygdala and political attitudes. We found that decreased gray matter volume in the right amygdala was significantly associated with liberalism (Figure 1B) (R = 0.23, T(88) = 22.22, p < 0.029 corrected).

Precisely the same conclusions — but notice how differently the argument reads when it treats liberalism as a deviation from conservativism rather than the other way around. Note that the article says that the conservative response "might exhibit differences" — but from what? From the norm, of course. The assumption that liberalism is the default (and presumably rational) position, and that any deviation from that position is what requires scientific explanation, not that position itself, is deeply embedded in the article, and indeed in the ideological framework of American social science tout court.

So David Roberts thinks that in writing his article he and the research he draws on are totally neutral — “Whichever of these personality traits, or clusters of traits, you might prefer, the research itself does not characterize any as better or worse” — so when conservatives get annoyed by posts like his, it surely must be tempting for him and his liberal readers to attribute that to more of that good ol’ conservative “heightened sensitivity.” (You people can’t even tolerate neutral description!) And so the liberal ideological bandwagon rolls on, and on, and on, serenely confident in its neutrality, its clarity in seeing things just as they are, its normalcy.

If the doctor could see her patient as a person who is suffering instead of as a set of medical conditions, she might become more empathetic. That is the goal of Tell Me More, a simple idea that started on Valentine’s Day 2014, when medical students at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital asked patients or their loved ones three personal questions (How would your friends describe you? What are your strengths? What has been the most meaningful experience in your life?) and displayed the answers on posters near their beds.

In the emotionally charged setting of a hospital, small talk can have a big effect. Med student Marie Oliva Hennelly says the signs helped her “know who we’re fighting for.” She says that one inspiration for the program was a poem by a doctor, Brenda Butka, published in JAMA in 2012, which ends, “Tell me about your father.”

Source: The American Scholar: Off the Charts - Brad Edmondson

I have been trying for a while now, and in multiple locations, to articulate an argument about recent modes of student disaffection in American universities. I think there is a bright, strong thread linking the “trigger warning” debates of last year with the student protests of this year. In an ideal world I’d turn these thoughts into a short book, or at least a very long article, but for now I’m just going to have to link the posts together into a virtual unity.

I began by discussing the way the upbringing of today’s students may have encouraged them to think that the core function of adults, including their teachers and university administrators, is to protect them from discomfort.

I then argued that when these expectations are thwarted, or seem to be thwarted, students can become frustrated very quickly if they do not have good reason to trust their teachers; this is a primary cause of the demand for trigger warnings.

And that mistrust is exacerbated by the fact that, in general, American universities do not present themselves as places where one goes to seek wisdom, but as places where one goes to get credentials for future career success — a message students have received very clearly.

So when the universities seem not to be living up to their neoliberal promises, angry students don’t think of this as a situation that calls for political protests of the Sixties variety; rather, they are consumers upset about the product they have purchased, so they bypass the lower-level staff and complain to the managers.

And the managers (i.e. administrators) respond the way managers always respond when the customers complain.

But this is not an adequate response. Administrators and professors alike need to recall that one of their key tasks is to organize the university as a kind of mediating or transitional space between the Home and the Wide World that encourages students to develop a genuine public individuality.

This developmental process is not and cannot be perfectly safe: many of students’ core beliefs about self and world will come under challenge. But it can be done in a healthy way, as long as fears are properly acknowledged and dealt with; however, to return to an earlier theme, fear of harm can only be overcome when students have good reason to trust those who teach them.

As long as fear is greater than trust, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to convince students that disagreement about foundational social and moral issues is not only acceptable, it is invaluable to individual and society alike. But to insist on this truth is the sine qua non of the current academic moment.

For this task, this insistence that there is something more and better than policing disagreement and building walls of separation between us and those who don’t see things our way, the humanities are invaluable: but they must recover some of their old moral robustness and commitment to the sovereign virtue of compassion.

If we want to get past this impasse of hostility and suspicion, we must remind ourselves, and then teach our students, that together we can travel better paths than that of neoliberal contractualism, which leads inevitably to code fetishism. We need not be such Baconian rationalists, such Weberian bureaucrats; and if we insist on living like that, if we forget that “there’s got to be a better way for people to live,” then all we have to look forward to is the academic equivalent of the shootout at the end of High Noon. But here in the real world there’s no way to tell who might win — if anyone does.

What's so fascinating and occasionally unnerving about the B-plot to our gun tragedies is the way they become a search for the far more diffuse and remote causes of violence. Namely, the cultural reasons that violence erupts, or the cultural reasons that we find ourselves unable to stop violence. Our elite culture has mostly rejected the idea that popular entertainment that glorifies violence is the problem. So now we search for something deeper. Can we really trust people with these religious convictions against what the state has deemed lawful? Does religion itself become an impediment to intelligent reform? Are people being radicalized by the deinstitutionalized and ungoverned free speech on the web? For now, the culture war spats that come out of these tragedies are mostly conducted within the elite media, using the tools of social stigma. People ask whether pro-lifers can use less-charged rhetoric. Or demand that the state of South Carolina take down a flag that is used to endorse racist violence.

Truth spoken here by Michael Brendan Dougherty. I made a similar argument earlier this year, but focused on social pressures rather than political action:

People who traffic in symbolic manipulation—and that’s most of us, these digital days—are typically inclined to overrate the importance of symbolic manipulation. It’s always tempting to think that to exercise control over symbols—like the Confederate battle flag, which, for the record, I have long despised—is to strike a blow for justice. Again, social media play a key role here: Jerry Gaus once wrote an article “On the Difficult Virtue of Minding One’s Own Business”, but given the hyperpublic character of the web services most of us rely on, and the difficulty of getting any of them to reliably provide intimacy gradients, everyone’s business now seems to be everyone else’s business. In such a environment, ABP—Always Be Policing—is the watchword. Survey and critique others, lest you make yourself subject to surveillance and critique. And use the proper Hashtags of Solidarity, or you might end up like that guy who was the first to stop applauding Stalin’s speech.

The late Robert Nisbet used to tell a story about the academic scientist who was angrily accosted by his humanist colleague for “speaking against the humanities” at the previous day’s faculty meeting. Au contraire, said the other; he was doing nothing of the kind. “I love the humanities! I would die for the humanities! All I asked was — what the hell are the humanities?”

– "Defining the Humanities Up" by Wilfred M. McClay | Articles | First Things

Rod Dreher has been reporting on what appears to be a recently implemented editorial strategy at New York Daily News: whatever happens, the Christians are at fault. Non-Christian murderers don’t fit the narrative; it turns out that Christians are not only at fault for praying, they’re at fault even when they’re the ones getting murdered.

I’m going to make a prediction here. Sometime in the next few years the News, or a similarly minded outlet, will find a Unabomber-like screed written by a fundamentalist Christian, maybe a member of a well-known megachurch, and will trumpet to the world that this is what all those bitter clingers to guns and God are scheming: violent attacks on the secular world. (And many otherwise reasonable secular people will believe it without question.) They probably won’t call it The Protocols of the Elders of Saddleback, but in effect that’s what it will be.