Here’s more about a topic we’ll probably revisit many times to come: what are Obama’s chances in 2012?
The fortuitously-named Sean Trende offers an interesting analysis based on how approval ratings affect elections. But I remain convinced that such speculation is so premature at this point as to be almost meaningless. Too many events—including surprising and unforeseen ones—can occur between now and then. And one all-important question mark is who the Republicans will nominate to run against Obama.
For obvious reasons, several people have sent me this link to a NY Times article on the overwhelming presence of liberals in the field of personality and social psychology. Conservatives? This group has barely ever heard of em, except perhaps as subjects to study.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has, however, and he addressed the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s recent convention, confronting members with the fact that their profession is almost completely dominated by liberals to a degree so profound that it is a “statistical impossibility” that it is accidental. He added:
…[S]ocial psychologists are a “tribal-moral community” united by “sacred values” that hinder research and damage their credibility ”” and blind them to the hostile climate they’ve created for non-liberals.
Haidt illustrated that atmosphere by quoting letters and emails he’s received from conservative grad students in the field, who see the need to keep themselves closeted in order to have any hopes of advancing in their chosen profession.
To us it all sounds so familiar as to be glaringly obvious. But it’s easy to forget that, although some of this discrimination is conscious and purposeful, many of the rank and file who are safely cocooned in the bosom of that sort of group have no idea what’s going on. To them, if they notice the phenomenon at all, there’s a simple explanation (and one I’ve heard many times about many other fields of endeavor): that liberals are just smarter than conservatives, and also more interested in people and how they work. The possibility of systematic selection, or discrimination, or indoctrination, or self-fulfilling prophecies, is just too difficult to entertain or accept (even, or maybe especially, for social psychologists, who ought to know better) when it’s one’s own group that’s being accused.
I don’t know whether research would back me up, but my theory is that there’s at least a two-part process going on. The first part is that, as in many other professions such as that of therapy and journalism, the subject matter of certain disciplines does draw initially appeal to a disproportionate number of liberals. Many if not most of these fields are artistic endeavors, and/or are concerned primarily with feelings rather than hard facts or practical and technical matters.
Personality and social psychology is a research science, but of the exceedingly soft variety; you might call it the science of the study of feelings, especially as they are expressed in group dynamics (personality psychology does the same for individuals), and as such it would be no surprise it would appeal disproportionately to liberals. Here’s a definition of the group’s areas of interest as explained on the Society’s website:
How do people come to be who they are? How do people think about, influence, and relate to one another?…By exploring forces within the person (such as traits, attitudes, and goals) as well as forces within the situation (such as social norms and incentives), personality and social psychologists seek to unravel the mysteries of individual and social life in areas as wide-ranging as prejudice, romantic attraction, persuasion, friendship, helping, aggression, conformity, and group interaction.
There’s something ironically satisfying about such a group’s inability to understand its own prejudices and demands for conformity. That brings us to part two of the phenomenon, which is that the natural tendencies within the profession that draw more liberals to it in the first place are augmented by a purposeful selection process by which professors and researchers favor certain types of studies which get certain types of results. Therefore, when hiring and giving awards, they tend to choose people who have biases that mesh with the their own.
Each part of the process amplifies the other. The more unitary the group becomes the stronger the selection process becomes, unless there is a giant effort to reverse it. So Haidt has suggested that the group begin a affirmative action hiring policy for conservatives in order to offset it, and a few members (although not the executive committee) have even agreed that it would be a good idea to set a goal that by 2020 the Society include a whopping 10% conservatives.
Wow, talk about tokens! It’s hard to imagine that the affirmative action one out of ten would feel especially welcome around those casual discussions that tend to feature the knee-jerk dissing of conservatives and their political position. I know; I’ve been there too many times.
Haidt has a suggestion for that, too, although it’s a sly one. He gave the assembled psychologists an assignment: “to overcome taboos, he advised them to subscribe to National Review and to read Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions.”
Watch out, social psychologists! In Haidt, you not only have a conservative on your hands, you’ve got a subversive. By suggesting you actually read some of the best of conservative thought (including a work by a figure you would have thought chimerical, a leading black conservative), Haidt is setting the stage for the possibility not just of acceptance of conservatives in your ranks, but of potential political conversions among the in-crowd.
You may think you are immune to such things (and the majority of you probably are), but some of you may end up with the surprise of your lives. Some day you, too, may wake up and find yourself outside the circle dance.
[NOTE: I became a huge fan of “Northern Exposure,” although I was a bit late since I’d missed it the first time around. I watched all the episodes in reruns on TV. Until this scene came on, I had no idea I was watching the final episode. But when Iris Dement’s plaintive voice started singing “Our Town,” I was suddenly gripped by a near-panic at the thought that the series was ending, and that it might be I who was going to have to say good-bye to people I’d grown to (I had to admit it, though it was a bit embarrassing) love.
Especially affecting for me was the segment in which Maurice, usually a comic character, stops on the stairs and gazes around with a deeply contemplative stare. And by the time Marilyn had pulled the shade down in that ante-penultimate moment, tears were streaming down my face.]
The UK’s David Cameron has followed in Angela Merkel’s footstops and condemned the policy of multiculturalism which has led to the failure of many immigrants in Britain to adopt the culture and values of their new homeland. His words were clear and concise—and, of course, controversial among many Islamic groups and the left.
Cameron said:
A passively tolerant society says to its citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone. It stands neutral between different values.
A genuinely liberal country does much more. It believes in certain values and actively promotes them.
This glaringly obvious truth hardly bears mentioning, but our Western societies have become so timid about their own heritage and strengths, and the philosophical foundations on which they rest, that even such simple truths have become occasion for heated debate and even outrage.
The entire episode got me to thinking about an educational transition that was occurring around the time I went to college. Until then, it long had been standard to require a college course in what was then called “Western Civ.” But beginning in the 60s and 70s there was a fairly successful movement to make that curriculum elective.
I went to a supposedly excellent college. There I not only managed to successfully avoid taking a Western Civ course, but there were no required history courses whatsoever. This made me happy, because at the time I was under the impression that I hated the study of history.
Fortunately, I had been educated in the New York City school system at a time when the history foundation there was quite stringent. The following courses were required in order to receive an academic diploma: one semester each of Civics and Economics, and a year each of American History and World History (the latter included a fair amount of ancient history as well). So by the time I got to college, the gaps in my education were not too glaring.
I love history now; can’t get enough of it. But it’s no puzzle to me as to why I hated it back then, and why I cheered when I discovered I wouldn’t ever have to enroll in the dread Western Civ. Almost all the courses I had taken in high school had involved dry facts disconnected by any overarching vision of history or any context in which I could figure out how most of it mattered to me any more.
I don’t think that correcting this omission would have been an insurmountable difficulty for the school system. After all, history is rife with such connections, and patterns of great significance; I see them all the time now. But for some reason (and I don’t think it was PC thought, which hadn’t taken hold much back then, especially among my teachers most of whom were quite old) that was not done in my school, or at least very rarely done. Perhaps it was considered too difficult. Perhaps the NY schools were so focused on cramming all the information into us that they thought we would need to do well in the Regents exams that the broad picture went by the wayside.
Whatever the reason, it was a monumental failing, and not just because it failed to interest me in the study of history. My guess is that it failed the majority of my fellow students as well.
And the problem has only gotten worse over time. Now those omissions have all too often been replaced by a certain political agenda, which is to downplay the achievements of Western Civ and emphasize the multicultural oneness of humankind, with special emphasis on the third world.
I’m all for studying other cultures, but not to the neglect of our own. And I’m all for respecting others, but not when we fail to respect ourselves, and to be justly proud of the gifts Western Civilization (let’s use its full name) has given the world.
I recently read Savage Beauty, a biography of American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. There are several passages in the book that describe the power of Millay’s voice and its remarkable ability to transfix and even seduce (in Millay’s case, the word was not an exaggeration) by the force of her public readings. That made me wonder whether YouTube (ah, magical YouTube!) has samples of her reciting her poetry—and sure enough, it does.
But I was surprised when I listened. Millay became famous during the early part of the 20th century, and fashions in voices seem to have changed since then. And if you don’t think there are fashions in voices, just listen for yourself:
One surprise was that it does not sound at all like the voice of a petite person, although Millay was very small and slender. There was also something vaguely British in her voice, something I’ve heard in other Americans of the time such as, for example, FDR and Eleanor, something that modern listeners hear as an affectation but that might have been more common then, especially among the upper classes and those who hobnobbed with them (Millay was well-educated at uppity Vassar, but she had a hardscrabble family past in Camden, Maine).
Here’s Eleanor Roosevelt, with that slight touch of Britain similar to Millay’s, but a higher pitch:
And finally there’s my guy Frost. A bit older than Millay, he sounds more modern to my ear, although there’s still an infinitesimal smidgen of that British quality, especially at the end when he gets to reciting a fragment of a poem. Like Millay, Frost was a New Englander (from the age of eleven, anyway). In Frost’s speech—and the quality of his humor—you can hear something close to a voice that still exists in rural New England today:
It’s not difficult to see why Frost was exceptionally popular on the lecture circuit.
As for Millay, her voice seemed merely odd when I first listened to it. But in preparing for this post I listened to the clip a few times, and after a while I found a change coming over me. On about the fifth go-round Millay’s voice seemed to take on an archaic power and I shivered listening to it, as though it were a declamation from some ancient sybil speaking to us across a divide of thousands of years.
[NOTE: This Levi’s commercial uses what is apparently the only recording of the poet Walt Whitman, reading a few lines from his poem “America.” He sounds remarkably contemporary, does he not?]
Nicholas Kristof says that the Muslim Brotherhood won’t be able to do much that’s bad in Egypt because even if they get elected, if the people don’t like what they’re doing they can just vote them out.
A brilliant notion, showing the depth of historical knowledge and the penetrating analysis that we’ve come to expect from a renowned columnist writing for the NY Times.
In other words: has Kristof never heard of what actually happened, and is happening, in Iran? Can the dissatisfied people just vote the mullahs out?
Or how about Venezuela and Chavez? Or any number of “democracies” that were hijacked by tyranny? And does he know of the “constitutional” manner in which it was usually accomplished? Has he never heard the expression “one person, one vote, one time?”
Does he understand that, unless there are numerous safeguards built into a political system, the will of the people can be overrun quite easily? Or that they can vote themselves into giving it up? Is he aware of how our own Founding Fathers studied and thought and argued and wrote until they came up with a brilliant system that is probably the best one devised so far to prevent this, but still not foolproof?
Does he—or President Obama, for that matter, who breezily assures us that the Muslim Brotherhood doesn’t have majority support—understand that in a parliamentary system, even 30% support can easily make a party the largest and most powerful voting bloc, and a huge force to be reckoned with?
Does this sound like the statement of a group with little clout and few followers? [emphasis mine]:
Egypt’s largest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said it would begin talks Sunday with the government to try to end the country’s political crisis but made clear it would insist on the immediate ouster of longtime authoritarian President Hosni Mubarak…
The Brotherhood said in a statement that its representatives would meet with Vice President Omar Suleiman to press its “legitimate and just demands.” Suleiman has accused the Brotherhood, businessmen and foreigners he did not identify as being behind a wave of looting and arson that swept much of the country last weekend after security forces inexplicably pulled out from the streets…
Mubarak, Egypt’s iron-fisted ruler of nearly 30 years, is known to have little or no tolerance for Islamist groups and the decision to open talks with the Brotherhood is a tacit recognition by his regime of their key role in the ongoing protests as well as their wide popular base…
And do you trust these promises of the MB?:
The Brotherhood aims to create an Islamic state in Egypt, but insists that it would not force women to cover up in public in line with Islam’s teachings and would not rescind Egypt’s 1979 peace treaty with Israel.
A political leader of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Thursday called on any government that replaces Hosni Mubarak’s regime to withdraw from the 32-year-old peace treaty with Israel.
Here’s background about the MB and its activities in Europe.
In November 1948 police seized an automobile containing the documents and plans of what is thought to be the Brotherhood’s `secret apparatus` with names of its members. The seizure was preceded by an assortment of bombings and assassination attempts by the apparatus. Subsequently 32 of its leaders were arrested and its offices raided. The next month the Egyptian Prime Minister of Egypt, Mahmud Fahmi Nokrashi, ordered the dissolution of the Brotherhood.
On December 28, 1948 Egypt’s prime minister was assassinated by Brotherhood member and veterinary student Abdel Meguid Ahmed Hassan, in what is thought to have been retaliation for the government crackdown…
In 1952 members of the Muslim Brotherhood are accused of taking part in arson that destroyed some “750 buildings” in downtown Cairo ”” mainly night clubs, theatres, hotels, and restaurants frequented by British and other foreigners ”” “that marked the end of the liberal, progressive, cosmopolitan” Egypt…
After the attempted assassination of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasser, in 1954, a member of the secret apparatus was accused by the authorities of being the perpetrator of the attempt. Nasser then abolished the Brotherhood and imprisoned and punished thousands of its members…
Despite mass arrests, police harassment and an essentially closed political system, Brotherhood candidates have made strong showings in several parliamentary elections. In the past decade, the Brotherhood has made repeated calls for a more democratic political system, and in 2005 it participated in pro-democracy demonstrations with the Kifaya movement.
The MB is now the largest opposition bloc in Egypt. It is sometimes stated that they assassinated Sadat, but as best I can tell, he was killed by Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an offshoot descendant group that is more upfront about advocating violence and is now joined as part of worldwide al Qaeda. EIJ is headed by a familiar name, al Sawahiri, Osama’s Egyptian buddy and co-mastermind of 9/11.
What does EIJ think of today’s democracy movement in Egypt? Loves it:
Ayman al Zawahiri’s top deputy, Thirwat Salah Shehata, has released a statement praising the Egyptian people and calling for President Hosni Mubarak’s ouster.
Shehata is a longtime member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), a core part of al Qaeda, and has served Zawahiri since the 1980s. In the statement, which was released on jihadist message boards known to carry al Qaeda propaganda, Shehata calls on the Egyptian people to “remain steadfast” and refuse to settle for economic concessions from Mubarak’s regime.
“Indeed, the Pharaoh and his rotten party must depart,” Shehata says.
There is no evidence that the EIJ has played any role in Egypt’s turmoil. In fact, Shehata laments his organization’s inability to be “on the front lines sharing this honor.” The EIJ was “forced to leave the country after the regime’s war against us,” Shehata says, “and we ended up participating with the mujahedin on other fronts.”
According to Asharq Al-Awsat, a Saudi publication, an anonymous source close to the EIJ said that Shehata’s “statement was issued from Tehran where Shehata is currently residing.” Shehata and other top EIJ operatives received shelter in Iran after the Sept. 11 attacks.
There’s more, much more, in the article. But the part I’m quoting makes it clear how closely related all the world jihadist movements are, and what a golden opportunity they see in the Egyptian pro-democracy movement.
It is almost a certainty that, were the Islamicists to gain control of the Muslim world as they wish, they would jockey for position and fight among themselves. Some would adhere to Sunni and some Shi’ite Islam. Some would be more violent and some less.
But anyone who thinks they’re not all violent, and not all bent on Islamicist control of each country in the region, is misunderstanding their philosophy, motivations, and goals. These are not democrats, neither with a small “d” nor a large one. The mullahs of Iran are well aware of that, and have not been offering them shelter just out of the goodness of their hearts.
It’s not that the Egyptian demonstrators are supporters, either, although some of them undoubtedly are. It’s that pro-democracy movements are easy to co-opt in a country with no real tradition of liberal democracy, no cultural characteristics that would allow it to flourish, and where secular opposition parties have been thwarted and persecuted for decades. As in Iran before it, the Islamicists might just be the strongest game in town right now.
…the MSM scoured every Tea Party vigilantly for posters that exhibited any trace of racism and were disappointed to find almost none, and yet they seem to be mostly ignoring these seemingly commonplace anti-Semitic posters among the anti-Mubarak Egyptian demonstrators.
While doing research on political assassins of the past for this PJ piece of mine, I looked up the case of Herschel Grynszpan, a Polish-German Jew who had shot and killed the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath on November 7, 1938 in Paris. This was the event the Nazis seized on as an excuse for Kristallnacht.
I had had only a vague recollection of the facts. But when I read Grynszpan’s Wiki entry, I found a fascinating story—far sadder, and far more complex, than I had expected. You might want to take a look and read about the strange twistings and turnings of the case.
