Dawkins offers another installment of The Philosophy of Twitter today.
Today I posted a series of tweets, relevant to this discussion and designed to be read in order:-
As a pejorative, “Politically Correct” has lost its bite. It’s now a cliché. What we have is an Orwellian (but unofficial) “Thought Police”.
Rotherham Police & Council were fearful of the Thought Police:
Let’s learn to lose our fear of the Thought Police.Academics fly kites, try ideas on colleagues & students, often rejecting them after discussion. “What if . ..?” “Could it be that . . .?”
It’s a pity if we have to look over shoulder for fear of PC Thought Police, Verbal Vigilantes, Feeding Frenzy of Political Piranhas.
Yesterday I raised an academic, philosophical question on vulnerability of all our existences to apparently unconnected causes such as WW1.
And many responded in interesting ways. But also many responded with vitriol as if offended by the very idea of asking academic questions.
Maybe Twitter is not the place for fully worked out exposition. Maybe it is a good place for thinking aloud & seeing how ideas will fly.
This is what many of my tweets try to do: think aloud & see what others think. It works for some readers. If you don’t like it, don’t follow.
Okay let’s see how one of these ideas will fly – the idea that “Politically Correct” is vieux chapeau so now let’s talk about the Thought Police instead.
That doesn’t fly very well, as far as I’m concerned. The problems with “politically correct” are not just that it’s stale. One problem with it is that it tends to be right-wing and ill-natured. Yes, concerns about nomenclature can sometimes come across as meddlesome point-scoring or tiresome literalness or any number of other annoying things, but then again contempt for concerns about nomenclature can come across as immovable smugness, too, so where does that leave us?
One place it leaves us is saying that “Thought Police” is hardly an improvement. It implies that we should never ever correct our own thinking. Well is that true? No. Of course it’s not true. We all used to think all kinds of things that we know recognize as both wrong and shitty. How do we learn better? For one thing, by being told. Complaining about the “Thought Police” just sounds like saying you’re already perfect as you are so shut up.
Katy Cordeth put it neatly on the RDF thread.
I dunno. PC Thought Police, Verbal Vigilantes, Feeding Frenzy of Political Piranhas.
These terms are politer than Cunt, Twat, Nazi, I’ll give you that.
They hardly seem designed to encourage rational, civil debate.
As I might have said before, I don’t twitter myself. Is it all just name calling on that network?
Exactly.
And she expanded on the point.
I’m actually a fan of political correctness. I think for the most part it’s awesome. We have this phenomenon to thank for the drop in racism, homophobia, sexism. Even if you just happen to be ginger and are picked on for it, your employer or headmaster will summon the guilty party to his office and read this bully the riot act. You might object to this but, like pork products being draped on the outside furniture of a religious establishment, no one other than the pig itself has cause to complain.
Seriously, how can any decent person not love PC? It’s only right wingers, Daily Mail/Express readers, Fox News viewers and other haters who rail against political correctness.
Yup, pretty much.
Some people confuse it with fascism role-play. The difference is: it’s consensual.
FFS.
Far more truthfully, what we have is lèse-majesté.
(Somehow, without the incarceration and the torture the thought police don’t seem as worrisome)
If the Thought Police are unofficial, then they’re not Orwellian. It was kind of the point of 1984.
That’s not the bloody point! The bloody point is that Dawkins isn’t being greeted with the reverence he deserves for being brave enough to ask tough questions about who should be forced to abort whom.
I mean, if he doesn’t ask those tough questions, then who will?
Okay, yes, every 18-year-old libertarian in an intro pol phil seminar.
But besides that, who’s gonna ask the tough questions about who should die for their own benefit?
Okay, yes, every 14-year-old on X-box Live. And Twitter. And YouTube. And unmoderated blog comment sections. And lots a lot older than 14 too.
But besides them, who other than Dawkins?
1. Giving a discredited idea a new name doesn’t give it a fresh reputation. It didn’t work for “Intelligent Design,” and it isn’t going to work for “Thought Police.” Except among the kind of people who thought that “politically correct” was a stinging indictment to begin with.
2. The real world is a lot different from the Oxford faculty lounge. And not just because we’re all so much dumber. Your colleagues know you personally in a way that the Twitterverse just doesn’t; you can expect a little more benefit of the doubt from the former.
3. A medium in which people have to compress their thoughts because of a character limit is one in which readers justifiably infer a lot of subtext behind each communication. Such a medium is very ill-suited to batting ideas around, “playing Devil’s Advocate,” etc.
4. Having said that, there are some people who probably can “get away with” such things on Twitter, or who get the benefit of the doubt generally. However, when you have made a career out of saying blunt, controversial things and then scoffing at the very idea that people’s offense is even worthy of consideration, then you are not going to be one of those people.
5. There’s “just asking questions” and there’s “Just Asking Questions.” Dawkins himself knows the difference quite well: there are certain questions that identify the asker as a creationist who thinks he’s “gotcha” as opposed to someone with a genuine curiosity. And you frame your response differently depending on who you’re dealing with.
I am unsure what the dear man means by “unconnected causes such as WWI” as its causes can be traced without difficulty to the time of Charlemagne. One of those causes was us – us being the UK in this instance.
The only problem is that by August 1914 we had not found a way of settling minor disputes except by having yet another massive war, much like retired academics can only believe that something is being adequately discussed if one side sets the terms of debate and is allowed freely to abuse its interlocutors, especially those who can think of better ways to address whatever the issue is this week.
*headdesk*
No, Dawkins, they were fearful of a strawman. They see that it’s not cool to accuse all Asians of being criminals who’re only here to steal our jobs and women, so then they assume that it’s not cool to deal with actual criminals who happen to be Asian? Why? The solution to this is not to do away with political correctness (which is so often just a term for dismissing factual correctness (Seriously. Not all Asians are criminal, and we shouldn’t treat them as if they are unless they actually are criminals. That’s factually correct.))
Let’s learn to be fucking reasonable, and not raise up a false distinction between treating people with basic dignity and it being racist to point out and deal with criminals who are also Asian.
I’m certainly not about to let a few Pakistani criminals justify abusing innocent people who share a cultural origin with those bastards. I know, god damn thought police, telling us who we can and cannot hate based on the most flimsy justifications, but fuck you and fuck your reasoning if you think that’s at all reasonable.
Useful discussion from this morning’s Radio 4 Today.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p025l540
(Does not agree with Dawkins!)
“Where there’s a failure of leadership, people ought to go,” says Keith Starmer [in that clip from Today that Maureen provided].
Anthony K @ 4 – I know, right? This idea that academics spend a lot of time asking showily “provocative” questions that can fit into a tweet is just funny to me.
Good. Awareness of sociopolitical sensitivities is a good thing because it adds precision. It should be a neutral.
Wait, what?
So the back and forth that society uses to come to decisions of current issues of importance is now the same as a government controlling expressions that implicitly support opponents or oppose the status quo? Maybe I’m missing some subtlety but this seems the literal opposite of the actual situation. Dawkins is receiving criticism, losing some supporters, and maybe even gaining some as a result of his actions (I would be very interested in correlations in that last group). You can’t frame the whole thing in terms of criticism and losing support as “Thought Police”.
That’s some serious conservative level whining at a changing culture right there.
Or we can learn to understand sociopolitical sensitivities so we can deal with them appropriately and contextually. Some matter, some don’t. Just ignoring them is how groups of little boys preferred to operate back in school.
What is being asked is for the casualness and thoughtlessness to be avoided. Who tries ideas and ignores whole categories of responses? Sociopolitical sensitivities are data! Is beating on lived experience really part of the equation? I find it hard to believe this guy is a scientist but I know better.
I’ve made the same damn mistake as Dawkins around here a couple of times (maybe more than a couple), but I asked people to tell me why what I said was a problem because I wanted to know what happened to give them a painful reaction so I could accommodate that phenomena because I don’t want to hurt people. That Dawkins can’t do this (maybe won’t, I’m unsure about the filters that being an authority puts on your mind) is very concerning.
Did Dawkins link any of these? Because I am at the point where whenever anyone gives an opinion that is essentially a averaged stereotype of what they perceive I want links.
Yes and if you started looking like you had the capacity to listen to people besides those you already agree with and who support you it would probably work out better. While we all try to avoid it we get to make mistakes, we get to accidentally piss people off, we get to accidentally hurt people. What matters is what you take from the experience and how you let it change you. Figuring out that part involves listening and showing that you comprehend independent of any agreement or disagreement.
I fail to see the usefulness of thought experiments that categorically rule out some responses, or fail to anticipate or accommodate them. It suggests that you have “proper solutions” to the experiment already in mind.
Sociopolitical sensitivities are data! QFT!
And just as I was doing this another South Yorkshire story popped up, this one about the strange habit of the cops in treating information differently depending upon whether or not they can make it conform to their pre-conceptions – http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/aug/28/south-yorkshire-police-hmic-report-rotherham
It is interesting to observe all this “it must be racism” or “it must be because it’s the Labour Party” or “it’s not fair to pick on Rotherham” or “how were we supposed to know?” nonsense.
I have no academic study to quote figures from, so don’t ask, and what I say is based upon living in either West Yorkshire or inner city London for almost all of the time since the autumn of 1960. It is based on observation, close and direct observation.
Let us take two recently arrived populations – those from Pakistan and Kashmir compared with those from the former British colonies of the Caribbean. In both cases the men arrived first and did a certain amount of classic male bonding for reassurance and protection. After a time women and children of both communities began to arrive. And there the similarity ends.
The Afro-Caribbean population continued the ways of a post-slave society where the mother and grandmother provided the strong, stable centre – protecting property, making decisions, the natural point of reference for community and getting together to organise – while the men went off and found work and other women as and when the chance was there.
The Pakistanis came from a tribal form of social organisation – male dominated, hierarchical, sometimes punitive. Even those of Pakistani descent who came via a couple of generations in Africa and were far more liberal could relate to this way of being organised. Any community outreach directed to this community would be met with “leaders” chosen traditionally and not a woman in sight!
So what has this got to do with Rotherham? Well, the police in places like Lambeth in the ’60s and ’70s kept wanting to talk to the men about “important things” and were unwilling to be told that those men were long gone or worse than useless – more colourfully expressed than that, though – so they should talk to the women who were both present and competent. Some found this difficult.
But where the largest incoming group was from, say, the Mirpur District of Kashmir from which a high proportion of UK Pakistanis come then they found a male dominated, pyramid-shaped, authoritarian set-up to which they could relate because in those days the police were just like that, too. No malice was necessary but it set the stage for later difficulty in dealing with the problems of women and children.
None of this detracts from the ability of the beat copper to give the youth of either community a hard time, though we do tend not to shoot them.
These girls are victims of ‘anti-racism’.