A virtuous lie is a falsehood that's promulgated & not corrected despite known falsity b/c it serves an "emancipatory" end.
#1619Project, New History of Capitalism, Hawaiian indigeneity: lies that're "good" b/c they free us of an oppressive past.
2/
We quite literally live by these lies. At my college, you see signs that say "This is Tongva land." No one cares that before the Tongva got here, the Hokan were here. The Tongva, an Uto-Aztecan people, replaced the Hokan, as Uto-Aztecan peoples did across western N. America.
3/
We live by these lies b/c to do so makes us good people. To question them is to align oneself w/ evil. Famous author addressed a local HS with a talk straight out of New History of Capitalism. He painted American slavery in the most gruesome colors. So far so good. However...
4/
...he lied that cotton made up 50% of the US economy and that cotton's increasing productivity resulted from increasing torture.
Logic of the virtuous lie: nobody wants to be the one who points out that this is contradicted by the best research. What, you support slavery?
5/
The author's lies were virtuous. Slavery is a moral abyss: one can never overdo one's condemnation of it...even if one lies. Such lies are virtuous, serving noble goals like reparations, as was explicit in the author's talk. To correct the lies is to oppose the noble goals.
(1) NL promotes positive self-conception; VL, self-criticism. (2) NL reconciles us to social inequality; VL aims to dismantle inequality. (3) NL is metaphysical; VL is historiographical.
7/
Like Luxury Beliefs (LB), virtuous lies (VL) are both emancipatory & signal moral goodness. However, LB are prescriptive, e.g., "defund the police." VL, in contrast, are descriptive, e.g., "cops are more likely to kill black people." Thus, VLs provide "factual" basis for LBs.
8/
I'll update this 🧵 with examples of "virtuous lies."
From Isabel Wilkerson's book "Caste." The lie is subtle: You're invited to believe that 1/1000 black men & boys are currently being killed by the cops while unarmed. That'd be genocide! Truth here: freeblackthought.substack.com/p/what-the-dat…
9/
"Virtuous lies" underlie many communications at elite institutions. This talk announcement simply *presupposes* that "unkindness" is a distinctive characteristic of "our post-1492 era."
Almost every utterance on campus invites us to see the US as implicated in unique evils.
10/
Virtuous lie: inflating mass shooting stats.
Fact: "mass shooting" is defined by federal gov't: 3+ killed in public rampage.
There've been 141 since 1982. 3.53/yr: Far too many, but not what's claimed.
Inflating mass shootings is a virtuous lie. It's morally "good" to inflate. It signals that you take the problem seriously. Insisting on the true number is to "minimize" & thus "bad."
Yet getting it wrong matters, b/c it impedes effective responses:
"Implicit bias, attitudes or internalized stereotypes that affect our perceptions, actions, & decisions in an unconscious manner, exists, & often contributes to unequal treatment of people based on race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, etc."
13/
CA's Assembly Bill 241 (quoted prev Twt), mandating "implicit bias" education for MDs and nurses, is wholly based on the "virtuous lie" that we understand what we mean when we say "implicit bias" and that whatever it is, it influences behavior. This is an outright falsehood.
14/
The truth about implicit bias is:
"it's not clear precisely what is being measured on implicit attitude tests; implicit attitudes do not effectively predict actual discriminatory behavior; most interventions [such as CA's new law] are ineffective."
It's a "virtuous lie" that for gender dysphoria, science is settled on (1) "puberty blockers for adolescents going through early stages of natural puberty," followed by, for "older teens," (2) "cross sex hormones, essentially avoiding natal puberty."
"West Coast [progressivism] is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent. On the one hand, it’s the same schoolmarmish, nanny-state liberalism you can find in any blue state: bans on plastic straws, quotas for women on corporate boards, mandated gender neutral toy aisles. On the other, it’s the exact inverse: permissiveness verging on criminal negligence. 🧵
2/
"In SF, for instance, it’s illegal not to compost your food scraps. But you can smoke meth outside a playground and suffer little more than glares from passersby. In California, college students are required by law to obtain repeated, vocal permission from their partners for a sexual encounter to be deemed not rape. But pimps can openly sex traffic minors on city streets in broad daylight, and the police can do little about it. All of these disparate approaches to perceived social problems are regarded as 'progressive.'
3/
"In the past two decades or so, the West Coast’s version of progressivism has become ascendant in Left-wing American politics from coast to coast. New York City, for instance, has embraced not only San Francisco’s compost law, but its laissez-faire approach to public drug use too. How, then, can we explain this weird blend of big-state progressivism and Left-wing American libertarianism?
Colleges "decolonize" curricula even as they ax foreign languages. Why? I think (1) colleges want to appear to value "diversity" without scaring off students by requiring hard work; and profs urge decolonization/diversity only to advance (2a) their own parochial interests, or (2b) nakedly political agendas (see 2a). No one actually cares about "decolonization" or "diversity." If they did, they'd be advocating for much more rather than less language study. 🧵
2/
"Serious efforts to decolonize the American college curriculum cannot take place amid waning support for the study of world languages. Yet that is precisely what we are witnessing today: American colleges and universities eliminate language programs while continuing to trumpet their commitment to curricular diversity and 'inclusive excellence.'
3/
"It seems a stereotypically American, and perhaps more broadly imperialist, conceit to believe that we can create cosmopolitan monoglots. When we undervalue the study of world languages, we shut the door to true cosmopolitanism and all the awe and wonder it inculcates. We deny students the opportunity to participate in and engage deeply with other cultures, to fathom how our language shapes our view of the world, and to do the hard work that fosters meaningful cross-cultural interactions and mutual respect.
My college's Board of Trustees rejected a request by SJP/JVP to divest from Boeing, Elbit Systems, Caterpillar, and Lockheed Martin.
Student paper reached out for comment. Here's what I said.
"I endorse the decision of the Board of Trustees regarding the divestment proposal.🧵
2/
"The Board gave several reasons for their decision, the most important of which is, in my view, the consideration that 'taking a position on a complex geopolitical situation would potentially chill the expression of diverse opinions, undermine the expression of pluralism, ...
3/
"...and alienate members of our community.' The Board’s decision is very much in line with the stance of 'institutional neutrality' recommended in the well-known 1967 Kalven Committee 'Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action.'
"In itself the outcome would seem to vindicate a fundamental American principle, that no citizen is beyond the reach of justice. Yet over the long run this prosecution will probably do more to weaken than affirm the rule of law. 🧵
2/
"Legal experts have cited numerous avenues for credible appeal, and any appeal will not be resolved until long after the November election. That will make it all the easier for Mr Trump’s supporters to embrace his arguments that he is the victim of a biased judge and jury.
3/
"This verdict is particularly vulnerable to appeal because of the lack of clear precedent for the charges the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, chose to bring.
DEVASTATING review of 𝘊𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘈𝘯𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘴:
"The authors of the volume...appear not to be ‘scholars,’ but rather ideologues and political activists, interested in changing political reality rather than in studying the ancient world. ..."
🧵
2/
"Several months ago, when I was walking along Hills Road in Cambridge on a Sunday afternoon, I saw something unheard-of in Poland. Two students were standing on the pavement, holding up a poster of Lenin and distributing leaflets encouraging people to ‘join the Communists’.
3/
"For a while I wondered whether I should ask these nice-looking young people whether they knew what the Kronstad Rebellion or Cheka were. After all, they were most likely students of one of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Were I most deeply disagree with @Tyler_A_Harper is that I think wokeness in the Humanities is largely endogenous. It arose organically out of the pursuit of "the next new theory." The professional life and death of Humanists depends on their ability to find a new theory. ...
@Tyler_A_Harper 3/
I've watched this dynamic for over 40 years now. My dad was an academic. He embraced Deconstruction in the '70s. No admin made him do it. He found the theory truly compelling but also the theory set him apart, made him avant-garde, helped him in his competition w/ his peers.