Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

But we have seen that when a creed becomes attached to an in-group, the critical faculties of its members can be disabled, and there are reasons to think that has happened within swaths of academia.⁵⁸ In The Blank Slate (updated in 2016) I showed how leftist politics had distorted the study of human nature, including sex, violence, gender, childrearing, personality, and intelligence. In a recent manifesto, Tetlock, together with the psychologists José Duarte, Jarret Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, and Lee Jussim, documented the leftward swing of social psychology and showed how it has compromised the quality of research.⁵⁹ Quoting John Stuart Mill—“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that”—they called for greater political diversity in psychology, the version of diversity that matters the most (as opposed to the version commonly pursued, namely people who look different but think alike).⁶⁰

To the credit of academic psychology, Duarte et al.’s critique has been respectfully received.⁶¹ But the respect is far from universal. When the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cited their article favorably and made similar points, the angry reaction confirmed their worst accusations (the most highly recommended comment was “You don’t diversify with idiots”).⁶² And a faction of academic culture composed of hard-left faculty, student activists, and an autonomous diversity bureaucracy (pejoratively called social justice warriors) has become aggressively illiberal. Anyone who disagrees with the assumption that racism is the cause of all problems is called a racist.⁶³ Non-leftist speakers are frequently disinvited after protests or drowned out by jeering mobs.⁶⁴ A student may be publicly shamed by her dean for a private email that considers both sides of a controversy.⁶⁵ Professors are pressured to avoid lecturing on upsetting topics, and have been subjected to Stalinesque investigations for politically incorrect opinions.⁶⁶ Often the repression veers into unintended comedy.⁶⁷ A guideline for deans on how to identify “microaggressions” lists remarks such as “America is the land of opportunity” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job.” Students mob and curse a professor who invited them to discuss a letter written by his wife suggesting that students chill out about Halloween costumes. A yoga course was canceled because yoga was deemed “cultural appropriation.” The comedians themselves are not amused: Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Bill Maher, among others, are wary of performing at college campuses because inevitably some students will be enraged by a joke.⁶⁸

For all the follies on campus, we can’t let right-wing polemicists indulge in a bias bias and dismiss any idea they don’t like that comes out of a university. The academic archipelago embraces a vast sea of opinions, and it is committed to norms such as peer review, tenure, open debate, and the demand for citation and empirical evidence that are engineered to foster disinterested truth-seeking, however imperfectly they do so in practice. Colleges and universities have fostered the heterodox criticisms reviewed here and elsewhere, while delivering immense gifts of knowledge to the world.⁶⁹ And it’s not as if alternative arenas—the blogosphere, the Twittersphere, cable news, talk radio, Congress—are paragons of objectivity and rigor.

Of the two forms of politicization that are subverting reason today, the political is far more dangerous than the academic, for an obvious reason. It’s often quipped (no one knows who said it first) that academic debates are vicious because the stakes are so small.⁷⁰ But in political debates the stakes are unlimited, including the future of the planet. Politicians, unlike professors, pull the levers of power. In 21st-century America, the control of Congress by a Republican Party that became synonymous with the extreme right has been pernicious, because it is so convinced of the righteousness of its cause and the evil of its rivals that it has undermined the institutions of democracy to get what it wants. The corruptions include gerrymandering, imposing voting restrictions designed to disenfranchise Democratic voters, encouraging unregulated donations from moneyed interests, blocking Supreme Court nominations until their party controls the presidency, shutting down the government when their maximal demands aren’t met, and unconditionally supporting Donald Trump over their own objections to his flagrantly antidemocratic impulses.⁷¹ Whatever differences in policy or philosophy divide the parties, the mechanisms of democratic deliberation should be sacrosanct. Their erosion, disproportionately by the right, has led many people, including a growing share of young Americans, to see democratic government as inherently dysfunctional and to become cynical about democracy itself.⁷²