Oct 2, 2021 11:07 PM
Left-wing authoritarianism is real & needs to be taken seriously in political psychology, study argues
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-11066-...l#pid46456
EXCERPT: . . . But in their new paper, Costello and his colleagues absolutely go there. They conclude that LWA does indeed exist, and they define not only its characteristics but the characteristics of the people who subscribe to it. They also reveal substantial similarities between authoritarians on the political right and the left... (MORE - details)
The culture war is coming for your genes
https://quillette.com/2021/09/30/the-cul...our-genes/
INTRO: In the opening pages of The Genetic Lottery, Dr Kathryn Paige Harden sets out her mission: “What I am aiming to do in this book is re-envision the relationship between genetic science and equality. … I will argue that the science of individual differences is compatible with full-throated egalitarianism.”
In this respect, Harden’s book bears a striking resemblance to last year’s The Cult of Smart, in which Freddie deBoer argued that “Hereditarianism [is] the best hope of a twenty-first century left” and proposed that recognising genetically based differences in academic ability was “simply taking left-wing thought to its logical conclusion.”
The critical difference is that Harden is a tenured professor in the genetics of human behaviour and she is lending the full weight of her scientific credentials to this moral and political crusade. This makes The Genetic Lottery a dangerous book that threatens to make our genetic advantages and disadvantages a new front in the culture wars.
Harden begins with an overview of the latest findings of behavioural genetics and explains how “genetic variation matters for understanding whether our children will succeed in school, will be financially secure, will commit a crime.” How much does genetic variation matter for these outcomes? The results are astonishing.
Genetic differences between people account for around 40 percent of the variation we observe in the years of education they obtain and in their lifetime earnings. Differences in our DNA also account for around 50 percent of the variation in violent criminal behaviour.
Equally sobering is the revelation that much of the remaining variation for these traits and outcomes is not explained by the family environment (“nurture” as we normally understand it) but from idiosyncratic environmental influences that make siblings in the same family different from each other. Results like these have been replicated repeatedly using different scientific methods and explode the blank slate narrative commonly peddled by activists and social scientists that the unequal outcomes we see around us are entirely the result of structural environmental advantages and disadvantages.
How, then, does Harden reconcile these results with her egalitarian political agenda? Not, to be sure, by promoting meritocracy. “Equal opportunity,” she writes, “will necessarily reproduce inequalities that are rooted in the arbitrariness of nature.” She therefore follows deBoer in explicitly disavowing meritocracy, approvingly citing a passage in which he writes: “Equality of opportunity is … a ruse, a dodge. It’s a way for progressive people to give their blessing to inequality.”
Instead, Harden argues that it is “our responsibility to arrange society so that it benefits all people, not just people with a certain set of genetic characteristics.” She invites us to radically expand our definition of “structural” sources of inequality to include social environments which allow “morally arbitrary” genetic differences to give rise to unequal socioeconomic outcomes. She even goes so far as to describe societies like ours that provide such social environments as “eugenic.”
That Harden is prepared to brandish such a morally loaded term in such a broad and unusual way should encourage her readers to reserve judgement when she uses the same label to attack her contemporary intellectual opponents. But this is just one of several ways that Harden adopts the language and tactics of the contemporary social justice movement with which she makes common cause.
Contemporary “anti-fascists” and “anti-racists” have defined themselves in such a way that previously respectable people are captured as “fascists” and “racists” under unrecognizably expanded definitions of those terms. Similarly, Harden describes her own political project as “anti-eugenic,” conveniently implying that anyone who disagrees with her is a eugenicist and a proto-Nazi.
But Harden shares more with the social justice movement than these linguistic tropes; she shares a whole moral framework with them: the framework of equity. Equity, Harden explains, is about giving disadvantaged people tailored support that puts them on a similar footing to their more advantaged peers. It is explicitly a philosophy of positive discrimination that can be extended to every conceivable dimension of disadvantage—including genetic disadvantage. But the legitimacy of that ethical framework stands or falls on the basis of whether the inequalities between the rich and poor, the abled and disabled, and the winners and losers of the genetic lottery can rightly be considered unjust.
To her credit, Harden valiantly attempts to support this central claim. She enlists the political philosopher John Rawls, who wrote: “The natural distribution [of genetic endowments] is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts … what is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts” [emphasis added]. But as several commentators have pointed out, Rawls’s conclusion in this famous passage is a non-sequitur. One cannot consider the redistribution of economic goods and opportunities as rectifying injustice if the unequal distribution of those goods and opportunities was not unjust in the first place. This is what philosophers call a category error... (MORE)
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-11066-...l#pid46456
EXCERPT: . . . But in their new paper, Costello and his colleagues absolutely go there. They conclude that LWA does indeed exist, and they define not only its characteristics but the characteristics of the people who subscribe to it. They also reveal substantial similarities between authoritarians on the political right and the left... (MORE - details)
The culture war is coming for your genes
https://quillette.com/2021/09/30/the-cul...our-genes/
INTRO: In the opening pages of The Genetic Lottery, Dr Kathryn Paige Harden sets out her mission: “What I am aiming to do in this book is re-envision the relationship between genetic science and equality. … I will argue that the science of individual differences is compatible with full-throated egalitarianism.”
In this respect, Harden’s book bears a striking resemblance to last year’s The Cult of Smart, in which Freddie deBoer argued that “Hereditarianism [is] the best hope of a twenty-first century left” and proposed that recognising genetically based differences in academic ability was “simply taking left-wing thought to its logical conclusion.”
The critical difference is that Harden is a tenured professor in the genetics of human behaviour and she is lending the full weight of her scientific credentials to this moral and political crusade. This makes The Genetic Lottery a dangerous book that threatens to make our genetic advantages and disadvantages a new front in the culture wars.
Harden begins with an overview of the latest findings of behavioural genetics and explains how “genetic variation matters for understanding whether our children will succeed in school, will be financially secure, will commit a crime.” How much does genetic variation matter for these outcomes? The results are astonishing.
Genetic differences between people account for around 40 percent of the variation we observe in the years of education they obtain and in their lifetime earnings. Differences in our DNA also account for around 50 percent of the variation in violent criminal behaviour.
Equally sobering is the revelation that much of the remaining variation for these traits and outcomes is not explained by the family environment (“nurture” as we normally understand it) but from idiosyncratic environmental influences that make siblings in the same family different from each other. Results like these have been replicated repeatedly using different scientific methods and explode the blank slate narrative commonly peddled by activists and social scientists that the unequal outcomes we see around us are entirely the result of structural environmental advantages and disadvantages.
How, then, does Harden reconcile these results with her egalitarian political agenda? Not, to be sure, by promoting meritocracy. “Equal opportunity,” she writes, “will necessarily reproduce inequalities that are rooted in the arbitrariness of nature.” She therefore follows deBoer in explicitly disavowing meritocracy, approvingly citing a passage in which he writes: “Equality of opportunity is … a ruse, a dodge. It’s a way for progressive people to give their blessing to inequality.”
Instead, Harden argues that it is “our responsibility to arrange society so that it benefits all people, not just people with a certain set of genetic characteristics.” She invites us to radically expand our definition of “structural” sources of inequality to include social environments which allow “morally arbitrary” genetic differences to give rise to unequal socioeconomic outcomes. She even goes so far as to describe societies like ours that provide such social environments as “eugenic.”
That Harden is prepared to brandish such a morally loaded term in such a broad and unusual way should encourage her readers to reserve judgement when she uses the same label to attack her contemporary intellectual opponents. But this is just one of several ways that Harden adopts the language and tactics of the contemporary social justice movement with which she makes common cause.
Contemporary “anti-fascists” and “anti-racists” have defined themselves in such a way that previously respectable people are captured as “fascists” and “racists” under unrecognizably expanded definitions of those terms. Similarly, Harden describes her own political project as “anti-eugenic,” conveniently implying that anyone who disagrees with her is a eugenicist and a proto-Nazi.
But Harden shares more with the social justice movement than these linguistic tropes; she shares a whole moral framework with them: the framework of equity. Equity, Harden explains, is about giving disadvantaged people tailored support that puts them on a similar footing to their more advantaged peers. It is explicitly a philosophy of positive discrimination that can be extended to every conceivable dimension of disadvantage—including genetic disadvantage. But the legitimacy of that ethical framework stands or falls on the basis of whether the inequalities between the rich and poor, the abled and disabled, and the winners and losers of the genetic lottery can rightly be considered unjust.
To her credit, Harden valiantly attempts to support this central claim. She enlists the political philosopher John Rawls, who wrote: “The natural distribution [of genetic endowments] is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts … what is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts” [emphasis added]. But as several commentators have pointed out, Rawls’s conclusion in this famous passage is a non-sequitur. One cannot consider the redistribution of economic goods and opportunities as rectifying injustice if the unequal distribution of those goods and opportunities was not unjust in the first place. This is what philosophers call a category error... (MORE)