I am surprised to be the first to comment on this, as it has been out for 11 hours. I hope that is not because people are afraid to comment.
I have struggled with this issue, primarily because it hurts the very people it purports to help.
Why? Because I believe that we are all human, and deserving of compassion.
As someone who spent over 20 years serving the homeless in Calgary, I knew (and had the data to prove) that the vast majority of the homeless in Calgary were middle aged white men. I also knew that the 25 year old University Graduate tasked to evaluate my funding proposals believed that they were indigenous, LBQTQ+, women, & people of colour. (How do you deal with someone who's education told them something that simply was not true?)
I also knew that the primary qualification for determining who to help was "Who wanted help". You cannot help someone who does not want to be helped. So I believed my task was to help the person standing in front of me asking for help regardless of race, gender, social standing, religion, etc.
So fundamentally, the DEI agenda with respect to social services was disconnected from reality.
The other issue, is that that University Educated individual (with no real world experience) was not able to evaluate what actually worked because their professors had been chasing the latest, greatest & most fashionable ideas in order to survive the academic funding / publishing / get ahead in the faculty world. Even worse, most of these professors had no case load in the real world. So they were not testing their teachings against the real world of service delivery. No one was tracking the long term outcomes of their practices (5 years, 10 years, 15 years)
There is a lot to unpack there. It certainly reflects my perceptions.
I am trying to make the connection to the intellectual and moral disintegration on college/university campuses. Ric did a great job identifying the conceptual considerations (call it Post Moderism +) that had infected minds and created an entitlement culture.
Yes - today's universities suck. They are a liberal arts virtuous cess pool of bad ideas. I lean towards burn it down given the concept of intellectual development has been taken over by selfish Neanderthals. The Hoax Studies exposed what it has become and to watch Nicholas Christakis at Yale engage students felt far more like blunt force trauma of intellectual midgets. Today, you cant even trust medicene to get it right - go look at the decolonization of Toronto Metropolitan University Medical Program Admissions. It is a race to the bottom.
Let me start the fire by suggesting what you see if the femenization of culture and education because what is needed is a reinstatement of responsibility to go along with rights.
With in the Academic community, it is lack of a feedback loop that connects actions to the real world. So with in the institutions of higher learning, someone can go their entire career and never have to test their beliefs.
In ancient Babylon there was reputed to be a law that said that the Engineer had to live under the bridge they build, so that if the bridge collapsed, the Engineer & their family were the first to die.
We need to find a modern way to institute that principle on just about every front. (For instance the Media & Thinktanks have no downside to getting things completely wrong)
“Veritas non verba magistri.” Translated, this means “Truth – not the word of the teacher.”
These are the words of James Monroe, the 5th President of the United States
There is some accountability in the medical world thru civil malpractice court procedures. Criminal prosecutions are not out of the question - opioids being most recent. When will we see accountability with the anti-intellectual academics.
When it comes to “academics” anything ending in “studies” needs to go. Once they opened the door to let the bull shit topics add graduate degrees and post-graduate credentials we are opening the door to disaster. Next, the garbage studies were considered acceptable entry degrees to Law and other disciplines. How is that working out?
I don't have a problem with the idea of graduate studies, so much as how young people go from their BA to MA to PHD with out ever doing anything.
I had a young man working for me a few years ago who went off to England to study to get his masters in Alternate Energy. He had never even touched a windmill, a solar panel, or taken apart a turbine..... We would be so much better off if he had spent 5 years installing solar panels first, even if the only thing he learned was that there is no way that solar energy will ever be able to meet the base power load......
A timely subject and I am amazed viewing this on CBC (and BBC, I presume) was even possible these days. The very cancelling and self censoring that was an important component on the documentary remained unspoken when interviewed by the CBC's Piya. Let me see if I can recall even one such person... Tara. Nope, can't think of any (even though I follow their various substacks faithfully today). Not a peep. Hypocrisy much, Ric and Piya?
Anyway, I was very disappointed that Ric had no problem assigning political motive to the Right using this subject and its mountain of justified grievances for gaining centrist voter support yet couldn't bring herself to understand the scope of betrayal by the Left who institutionalized this ideology using state power. Just as quick example, why not mention (unless one truly does not see) how Obama's inversion of Title IX (or Trudeau's inclusion of 'gender identity' in the Charter and the use of kangaroo courts - oops, I mean human rights tribunals and commissions) directly led to an unprecedented assault on women's rights and effectively destroyed the basis for legal protections? Is this not political?
And, more importantly, doesn't the order of the assault offer an explanation why the Right has made hay on its RESPONSE?
Painting the advancement of the ideology as belonging to campuses without recognizing its political roots belonging very much to the far left and its place of primacy in its progressive expression harnessed over the past 30 years through effective social activism (and ongoing activist pedagogy across all public education at every level), I think falls far short of explaining why we see and hear the same terminology, the same motives of its activists, the same partisan tactics, the same social division across a spectrum of toxic issues (like we find trying to discuss trans/sports/prisons or Oct7th or George Floyd/BLM/defunding the police, or immigration/ICE or land claims or, or, or, or....). All of it is connected because the same framework of activism melded with moral certainty is being used in all of them. It's all the same thing, in other words, using local issues to advance the same activist agenda for the same ideological goal of a singular anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist, ideology not similarly found underwriting the political right. Unless and until the Left recognizes what this singular purpose is that is being promoted by the Left (advanced by accepting and using the ideological language of, and the framing and blaming by, the activist, we have no centre to hold. The centre has already been either captured or cancelled BY the centrists who go along to get along! That's why every institution captured by the progressive left has nothing of the principled centre remaining in it; those who have survived in positions of authority by necessity are the ideology's allies and appeasers. I just wish Ric had seen and revealed to us how it was all the same malignant thing.
Brilliant phrase: "a framework of activism melded with moral certainty". When I think about this, the interesting part is the concept of moral certainty. We all have our world views, whether it be Christianity, radical Islam, humanism, globalism, etc, etc. Who among us doesn't question our particular culture of beliefs from time to time, but to fall into "go along to get along" is counterproductive as it leads to tyranny by the activists of a different moral certainty. In my quest to understand the points of views of others and venture into conversations, I see all around me those who are falling silent - taking it all in but avoiding controversial activist stands.
This interview reminds me that I need to listen to Brett and Heather's podcasts again as I first did when first wading into the podcast universe. Good interview, I'll try to watch the movie.
The documentary is well worth the time because it's the first crack in the public broadcasting framework. Free speech for me but not for thee. But it is a surface skim and I guess it's a start.
How we think determines what we think. I'm a big fan of Bayesian reasoning where the preponderance of evidence leads to greater likelihood/probability, which I THEN assign a higher degree of confidence when informing my opinions and beliefs without fearing changing my opinion or beliefs later if given cause. This method of reasoning and being reasonable to evaluating evidence (stronger if independent of my own prejudices and biases) allows me to be both open and honest to counterarguments. Changing my opinion, therefore, is not just easy if warranted but without any personal cost to my 'identity' as a reasonable person who respects reality enough (and what we can know about it) to allow it rather than my imported beliefs to arbitrate claims made about reality. (Is this claim true and how might I know?)
But along comes post modernism repackaged as Identity politics/Critical Theory in all its disguises (which is why there is such a close proximity to blanket support by the believers of every issue framed this way, meaning a 'free Palestine' believer will be a trans supporter will be a left wing supporter will be an anti-racist land acknowledgment supporter and so on... like a Amazon package of beliefs successfully delivered). It's the framing inside this taught ideology the documentary captures on campuses - how students are taught to think across faculties and curriculum about using only this acceptable ideological framework or face an array of negative consequences like cancelling and denunciation by friends and colleagues - that relegates not just an independent reality but what's probably true about it to be equivalent to belief and personal preference. At best! Evil at worst.
Evidence no longer plays a central role in educational institutions to justify beliefs about reality courses pretend to represent with academic rigor and expertise; rather, language does - specifically, post modern inverted and obtuse language - subject to internal feelings and awarded virtue points on how strongly the feelings may be felt. Reality beyond this cosplay has no part. These feelings are then shielded from criticism and challenge by an imported certainty that cannot and must not ever be questioned. Doing so - questioning the framing, questioning the value of how to think way - is the far greater crime (and named as 'violence' and/or hate speech) than the subjects or claims under critical review.
To question the framing that language rather than reality determines individual truths, for example, is the greater threat because it exposes the incoherence of, say, transwomen are women with reason and contrary evidence rather than belief. That's thinking crime and those who exhibit this are therefore intellectual criminals.
So the counterargument to legitimate criticism and contrary evidence isn't about reality or evidence; it's all about vilifying and dismissing those who haven't donned the jackboots the ideological faithful demand through participating in character assassination. A western form of communist struggle sessions. The critic isn't right or wrong, you see; the critic is immoral and must be silenced before the moral poison spreads. One of the more effective ways of doing this is to remove the critics from gaining a platform. And they must be de-platformed, cancelled, fired, drowned out, is because they are 'violent' and 'hateful' and are therefore a Really Bad Person. Participating in this witch-burning exercise by silence makes one an ally; if one participates, this makes one a good person.
None of this, I should mention, is new to the public atheist who has been subjected to this kind of thinking and this kind of equivalent abuse by 'virtuous' religious believers defending the faith forever. This is why training kids to become activists in the schools is so similar to religious indoctrination because in a similar way it's all about teaching kids how to think only in this way, only inside this one approved, virtuous, kind, and on-the-right-side-of-history ideological framing. The documentary helps a bit revealing how similar to religious zealots these kids on campus seem to the observer.
We are expected to call this framing and recruitment and practices and state involvement embedding it in institutional policy and law not what it is but an inversion of the words used to describe it: 'liberal' rather than authoritarian, 'inclusive' rather than intolerant, 'nice' rather than bullying, 'diverse' rather than uniform, anti-whatever as the whatever (think anti-racist means race-based). The ideology borrows from post modernism the tactic of using linguistic capture by redefining enlightenment values to mean their opposite. This is what 'good' people do because they are the True Believers. And, by coincidence, the only ones morally correct to decide, as in: Heads I win, tails you lose... but because I'm still willing to flip the coin, I must be a very good person doing the flipping, you see, and so what could be more fair than that?
I am more disturbed than anything. First, why is the documentary on Gem?
It feels like CBC is more trying to cover their tracks, report on something they decided not to cover when it happened because they were part of the woke weaponization effort.
Something got confused. The inmates dont run the asylum. Students must be accountable for their conduct and their behaviour. When it is no longer civil or behavior disintegrates further it is not acceptable to tolerate neo-todlerism, you suspend them. You boot them out!
I would have hoped Ric would have interviewed Lindsay Shepard or even gasp Dr. Jordan Peterson as Canadian examples.
I’m just happy this is being broadcast finally. “The Coddling of the American Mind” is now a documentary and a full Substack. One of the co-authors of The Atlantic article; Greg Lukianoff, has now written a follow up book: “The Cancelling of the American Mind”. Excellent.
Sadly it's about time, I image that every academic institution in Canada is operating that way. I think it's worth Mark Carney's attention, the administrators are not backing the faculty (for academic rigour) and thus the outcome sadly is a generation sorely impacted by social media at the worst time in a developing minds state, and no help for the faculty to get in front of it or feel supported by the administrators. Without a 'real' education, 'real' grades and 'real' debate (nothing wrong with a defined safe space that involves getting your personal beliefs questioned respectfully).
Very few of these folks have the leverage to change the rules for progress. It has been a long time since The Coddling of the American Mind came out, and Jordan Peterson citing the worst of cancel culture (a shame he was puritanical about it - not very Jungian). But as soon as Brett Weinstein got fired the game was on.
It has been going on at great speed and got completely headed off at the pass in the tech world (where they can just find the troublemakers and fire them). Who needs a bunch of employees that spend company time 'organizing'. Not for better conditions, but for the company not being like them.
It would be great to get Jonathan Haidt on, he has done so much work on the subject, and get his views on the doc, and the state of the situation.
As the previous commentor said - we are all human. We all suffer, and it's a lot to get past the many levels of ignorance we have. But boy, the kids today are having a very different experience that many of us X'ers.
A lot of this was foreseen interestingly in a book called Spiral Dynamics, look up 'green'.
I am surprised to be the first to comment on this, as it has been out for 11 hours. I hope that is not because people are afraid to comment.
I have struggled with this issue, primarily because it hurts the very people it purports to help.
Why? Because I believe that we are all human, and deserving of compassion.
As someone who spent over 20 years serving the homeless in Calgary, I knew (and had the data to prove) that the vast majority of the homeless in Calgary were middle aged white men. I also knew that the 25 year old University Graduate tasked to evaluate my funding proposals believed that they were indigenous, LBQTQ+, women, & people of colour. (How do you deal with someone who's education told them something that simply was not true?)
I also knew that the primary qualification for determining who to help was "Who wanted help". You cannot help someone who does not want to be helped. So I believed my task was to help the person standing in front of me asking for help regardless of race, gender, social standing, religion, etc.
So fundamentally, the DEI agenda with respect to social services was disconnected from reality.
The other issue, is that that University Educated individual (with no real world experience) was not able to evaluate what actually worked because their professors had been chasing the latest, greatest & most fashionable ideas in order to survive the academic funding / publishing / get ahead in the faculty world. Even worse, most of these professors had no case load in the real world. So they were not testing their teachings against the real world of service delivery. No one was tracking the long term outcomes of their practices (5 years, 10 years, 15 years)
There is a lot to unpack there. It certainly reflects my perceptions.
I am trying to make the connection to the intellectual and moral disintegration on college/university campuses. Ric did a great job identifying the conceptual considerations (call it Post Moderism +) that had infected minds and created an entitlement culture.
Yes - today's universities suck. They are a liberal arts virtuous cess pool of bad ideas. I lean towards burn it down given the concept of intellectual development has been taken over by selfish Neanderthals. The Hoax Studies exposed what it has become and to watch Nicholas Christakis at Yale engage students felt far more like blunt force trauma of intellectual midgets. Today, you cant even trust medicene to get it right - go look at the decolonization of Toronto Metropolitan University Medical Program Admissions. It is a race to the bottom.
Let me start the fire by suggesting what you see if the femenization of culture and education because what is needed is a reinstatement of responsibility to go along with rights.
Agree. Lack of accountability is a huge issue.
With in the Academic community, it is lack of a feedback loop that connects actions to the real world. So with in the institutions of higher learning, someone can go their entire career and never have to test their beliefs.
In ancient Babylon there was reputed to be a law that said that the Engineer had to live under the bridge they build, so that if the bridge collapsed, the Engineer & their family were the first to die.
We need to find a modern way to institute that principle on just about every front. (For instance the Media & Thinktanks have no downside to getting things completely wrong)
“Veritas non verba magistri.” Translated, this means “Truth – not the word of the teacher.”
These are the words of James Monroe, the 5th President of the United States
There is some accountability in the medical world thru civil malpractice court procedures. Criminal prosecutions are not out of the question - opioids being most recent. When will we see accountability with the anti-intellectual academics.
When it comes to “academics” anything ending in “studies” needs to go. Once they opened the door to let the bull shit topics add graduate degrees and post-graduate credentials we are opening the door to disaster. Next, the garbage studies were considered acceptable entry degrees to Law and other disciplines. How is that working out?
Agreed.
I don't have a problem with the idea of graduate studies, so much as how young people go from their BA to MA to PHD with out ever doing anything.
I had a young man working for me a few years ago who went off to England to study to get his masters in Alternate Energy. He had never even touched a windmill, a solar panel, or taken apart a turbine..... We would be so much better off if he had spent 5 years installing solar panels first, even if the only thing he learned was that there is no way that solar energy will ever be able to meet the base power load......
A timely subject and I am amazed viewing this on CBC (and BBC, I presume) was even possible these days. The very cancelling and self censoring that was an important component on the documentary remained unspoken when interviewed by the CBC's Piya. Let me see if I can recall even one such person... Tara. Nope, can't think of any (even though I follow their various substacks faithfully today). Not a peep. Hypocrisy much, Ric and Piya?
Anyway, I was very disappointed that Ric had no problem assigning political motive to the Right using this subject and its mountain of justified grievances for gaining centrist voter support yet couldn't bring herself to understand the scope of betrayal by the Left who institutionalized this ideology using state power. Just as quick example, why not mention (unless one truly does not see) how Obama's inversion of Title IX (or Trudeau's inclusion of 'gender identity' in the Charter and the use of kangaroo courts - oops, I mean human rights tribunals and commissions) directly led to an unprecedented assault on women's rights and effectively destroyed the basis for legal protections? Is this not political?
And, more importantly, doesn't the order of the assault offer an explanation why the Right has made hay on its RESPONSE?
Painting the advancement of the ideology as belonging to campuses without recognizing its political roots belonging very much to the far left and its place of primacy in its progressive expression harnessed over the past 30 years through effective social activism (and ongoing activist pedagogy across all public education at every level), I think falls far short of explaining why we see and hear the same terminology, the same motives of its activists, the same partisan tactics, the same social division across a spectrum of toxic issues (like we find trying to discuss trans/sports/prisons or Oct7th or George Floyd/BLM/defunding the police, or immigration/ICE or land claims or, or, or, or....). All of it is connected because the same framework of activism melded with moral certainty is being used in all of them. It's all the same thing, in other words, using local issues to advance the same activist agenda for the same ideological goal of a singular anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist, ideology not similarly found underwriting the political right. Unless and until the Left recognizes what this singular purpose is that is being promoted by the Left (advanced by accepting and using the ideological language of, and the framing and blaming by, the activist, we have no centre to hold. The centre has already been either captured or cancelled BY the centrists who go along to get along! That's why every institution captured by the progressive left has nothing of the principled centre remaining in it; those who have survived in positions of authority by necessity are the ideology's allies and appeasers. I just wish Ric had seen and revealed to us how it was all the same malignant thing.
Brilliant phrase: "a framework of activism melded with moral certainty". When I think about this, the interesting part is the concept of moral certainty. We all have our world views, whether it be Christianity, radical Islam, humanism, globalism, etc, etc. Who among us doesn't question our particular culture of beliefs from time to time, but to fall into "go along to get along" is counterproductive as it leads to tyranny by the activists of a different moral certainty. In my quest to understand the points of views of others and venture into conversations, I see all around me those who are falling silent - taking it all in but avoiding controversial activist stands.
This interview reminds me that I need to listen to Brett and Heather's podcasts again as I first did when first wading into the podcast universe. Good interview, I'll try to watch the movie.
The documentary is well worth the time because it's the first crack in the public broadcasting framework. Free speech for me but not for thee. But it is a surface skim and I guess it's a start.
How we think determines what we think. I'm a big fan of Bayesian reasoning where the preponderance of evidence leads to greater likelihood/probability, which I THEN assign a higher degree of confidence when informing my opinions and beliefs without fearing changing my opinion or beliefs later if given cause. This method of reasoning and being reasonable to evaluating evidence (stronger if independent of my own prejudices and biases) allows me to be both open and honest to counterarguments. Changing my opinion, therefore, is not just easy if warranted but without any personal cost to my 'identity' as a reasonable person who respects reality enough (and what we can know about it) to allow it rather than my imported beliefs to arbitrate claims made about reality. (Is this claim true and how might I know?)
But along comes post modernism repackaged as Identity politics/Critical Theory in all its disguises (which is why there is such a close proximity to blanket support by the believers of every issue framed this way, meaning a 'free Palestine' believer will be a trans supporter will be a left wing supporter will be an anti-racist land acknowledgment supporter and so on... like a Amazon package of beliefs successfully delivered). It's the framing inside this taught ideology the documentary captures on campuses - how students are taught to think across faculties and curriculum about using only this acceptable ideological framework or face an array of negative consequences like cancelling and denunciation by friends and colleagues - that relegates not just an independent reality but what's probably true about it to be equivalent to belief and personal preference. At best! Evil at worst.
Evidence no longer plays a central role in educational institutions to justify beliefs about reality courses pretend to represent with academic rigor and expertise; rather, language does - specifically, post modern inverted and obtuse language - subject to internal feelings and awarded virtue points on how strongly the feelings may be felt. Reality beyond this cosplay has no part. These feelings are then shielded from criticism and challenge by an imported certainty that cannot and must not ever be questioned. Doing so - questioning the framing, questioning the value of how to think way - is the far greater crime (and named as 'violence' and/or hate speech) than the subjects or claims under critical review.
To question the framing that language rather than reality determines individual truths, for example, is the greater threat because it exposes the incoherence of, say, transwomen are women with reason and contrary evidence rather than belief. That's thinking crime and those who exhibit this are therefore intellectual criminals.
So the counterargument to legitimate criticism and contrary evidence isn't about reality or evidence; it's all about vilifying and dismissing those who haven't donned the jackboots the ideological faithful demand through participating in character assassination. A western form of communist struggle sessions. The critic isn't right or wrong, you see; the critic is immoral and must be silenced before the moral poison spreads. One of the more effective ways of doing this is to remove the critics from gaining a platform. And they must be de-platformed, cancelled, fired, drowned out, is because they are 'violent' and 'hateful' and are therefore a Really Bad Person. Participating in this witch-burning exercise by silence makes one an ally; if one participates, this makes one a good person.
None of this, I should mention, is new to the public atheist who has been subjected to this kind of thinking and this kind of equivalent abuse by 'virtuous' religious believers defending the faith forever. This is why training kids to become activists in the schools is so similar to religious indoctrination because in a similar way it's all about teaching kids how to think only in this way, only inside this one approved, virtuous, kind, and on-the-right-side-of-history ideological framing. The documentary helps a bit revealing how similar to religious zealots these kids on campus seem to the observer.
We are expected to call this framing and recruitment and practices and state involvement embedding it in institutional policy and law not what it is but an inversion of the words used to describe it: 'liberal' rather than authoritarian, 'inclusive' rather than intolerant, 'nice' rather than bullying, 'diverse' rather than uniform, anti-whatever as the whatever (think anti-racist means race-based). The ideology borrows from post modernism the tactic of using linguistic capture by redefining enlightenment values to mean their opposite. This is what 'good' people do because they are the True Believers. And, by coincidence, the only ones morally correct to decide, as in: Heads I win, tails you lose... but because I'm still willing to flip the coin, I must be a very good person doing the flipping, you see, and so what could be more fair than that?
I am more disturbed than anything. First, why is the documentary on Gem?
It feels like CBC is more trying to cover their tracks, report on something they decided not to cover when it happened because they were part of the woke weaponization effort.
Something got confused. The inmates dont run the asylum. Students must be accountable for their conduct and their behaviour. When it is no longer civil or behavior disintegrates further it is not acceptable to tolerate neo-todlerism, you suspend them. You boot them out!
I would have hoped Ric would have interviewed Lindsay Shepard or even gasp Dr. Jordan Peterson as Canadian examples.
I’m just happy this is being broadcast finally. “The Coddling of the American Mind” is now a documentary and a full Substack. One of the co-authors of The Atlantic article; Greg Lukianoff, has now written a follow up book: “The Cancelling of the American Mind”. Excellent.
Sadly it's about time, I image that every academic institution in Canada is operating that way. I think it's worth Mark Carney's attention, the administrators are not backing the faculty (for academic rigour) and thus the outcome sadly is a generation sorely impacted by social media at the worst time in a developing minds state, and no help for the faculty to get in front of it or feel supported by the administrators. Without a 'real' education, 'real' grades and 'real' debate (nothing wrong with a defined safe space that involves getting your personal beliefs questioned respectfully).
Very few of these folks have the leverage to change the rules for progress. It has been a long time since The Coddling of the American Mind came out, and Jordan Peterson citing the worst of cancel culture (a shame he was puritanical about it - not very Jungian). But as soon as Brett Weinstein got fired the game was on.
It has been going on at great speed and got completely headed off at the pass in the tech world (where they can just find the troublemakers and fire them). Who needs a bunch of employees that spend company time 'organizing'. Not for better conditions, but for the company not being like them.
It would be great to get Jonathan Haidt on, he has done so much work on the subject, and get his views on the doc, and the state of the situation.
As the previous commentor said - we are all human. We all suffer, and it's a lot to get past the many levels of ignorance we have. But boy, the kids today are having a very different experience that many of us X'ers.
A lot of this was foreseen interestingly in a book called Spiral Dynamics, look up 'green'.
Brilliant interview. Fascinating topic. I will definitely make time to watch the documentary.