https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=BJYwWkQyf78
What it means to be a conservative in the 90s and especially in 2000s has changed. So it is true that the conservatives were not in any way anti-science until much more recent times. Now actually both sides are anti-science about different sciences, but in America the right wing, the Republican party, it’s controversial, but I do believe that the polarization starts with the right moving further out. So what it means to be conservative. To be anti-evolutionary, which is actually what’s happening on the left now too. Exactly. Well I talked to Brett Weinstein the other day and you know one of his claims is that evolutionary biology has something in it to offend everyone. So it’s a science that’s very likely to be targeted by extremists. You also brought up something that actually touches on the difficult problem of how it is that you might define someone who’s ideologically possessed, let’s say, or ideologically rigid. Because the idea was that you can make a valid case for the utility of free information flow and the free flow of people that would go along with that and you can make a good case for the danger of that. And so the idea might be that if you’re only making a case for the danger of that, then you’re tilted too far to the right and if you’re only making a case for the utility of that, then you’re tilted too far to the left. Exactly, that’s right. And so we can look at immigration as a nice example. There’s a recent essay in the Atlantic, I think it was by Peter Beinart. Where he reviews, he starts with a lot of quotes that are pretty nuanced positions about immigration from Barack Obama, Paul Krugman, a bunch of other people on the left who used to be able to say, on the one hand, you know, compassion, economic, on the other hand, you know, we have to have a legal process and there’s a threat to low-wage workers. So people on the left used to be able to talk about immigration and talk about the pros and cons, the pluses and minuses. But Beinart shows how in the last four or five years you can’t. If you so much as suggest that, well, maybe immigration is on net good, but it might have some deleterious effects on certain classes of low-wage American workers, you could get in big trouble. Right, because that’s instantly prejudicial. Because immigration has become a sacred topic. So this is the key thing that I want everyone to keep in mind. We are fundamentally religious creatures. We’re built for religion and it’s a great achievement to create a scientific establishment and an academic establishment that keeps that way of thinking out. Scientific thinking is not natural thinking. Religious thinking is natural thinking. And what’s happening to us in the last few years especially is a flooding in of religious thinking. And so let’s get a bunch of social scientists to talk about immigration. What are they going to do? Look at the data? Weigh up the pluses and minuses? No. They’re going to, many of them feel they’re on a team and that team is fighting the right. The right is anti-immigrant. It includes racist elements. Therefore that justifies us in being pro-immigration. And social sciences are always, there’s always ambiguity. There’s always conflicting studies. Yeah, there’s multiple causal factors as well. Always in the social science study. That’s right. So Beinart’s point was that the left used to be able to think straight about immigration. Clearly it had a, you know, it was generally pro-immigration but it used to be able to think straight. But in the last few years a religious orthodox mindset has overtaken it. Okay, so we might as well also point out that it’s a primordial religious mindset, right? Because I mean there are- Yeah, I don’t mean Christian or Jewish. I mean ancient, tribal, small scale, lots of gods. Right, right. Well, so then one of the things that you might suggest is that when you throw out a sophisticated religious structure, an unsophisticated religious structure comes in to fill the gap. I do think that’s true. Okay, okay. So that’s definitely worth thinking about. So that’s right. So that’s right. The thing to think about with religions, we have to clarify fundamentalism is the problem, not religion. And it’s close to tribalism. That’s right. If you get a fundamentalist, you know, I’m happy to say, and if you have people applying to a grad program in psychology and I find out that they’re Christian, that’s fine. There’s no problem. But if they’re fundamentalist Christian, I would think, well, let’s say it’s not psychology. Suppose it’s geology. So someone applies to a geology program, they’re a fundamentalist, young earth creationist. Are you going to admit them? No, I don’t think you should. They’re not able to do the right kind of thinking based on what we know to be the case. They’re not in the scientific paradigm. They’re not in the scientific, that’s right. So if we wouldn’t admit a fundamentalist Christian to a geology program, why would we admit someone who is just as fundamentalist about certain moral and political issues into a sociology program or into a psychology program? If they come in knowing what the right answer is, committed to that right answer, likely to get angry at anyone who contravenes that right answer, and showing signs of closed mindedness, I don’t think they belong in a grad program. Yeah, I guess the question is how in the world do you set up mechanisms to ensure that you’re not swamped by fundamentalists of any sort? So those are people who are reducing everything to a single cause, it’s something like that. How can you implement a structure that protects the organization against that without the structure itself becoming totalitarian? Because these things spin out of control so fast. Yeah, but so I think what we have to realize in the academy is that we face, I think we face an existential crisis. We rely an enormous amount on public goodwill, we get enormous tax subsidies, direct research support, and recent polling shows that while Democrats have always had a higher opinion of the universities and Republicans, until two years ago everybody thought universities are a good thing, they make life better. So Americans have been very supportive of higher education. There have been rising gripes on the right, but it’s only between 2015 and 2017 that now Republicans go from saying mostly universities are good things, in two years they go way down and say universities are bad things, they’re making things worse. Now how is this news greeted? Pundits on the left are saying, oh those Republicans are so anti-science, look how ignorant they are, they now hate universities. Come on, anybody who’s been watching the news, anybody who’s seen the mobs, the shout downs, the illiberal behavior, you know the metaphor I use is like, you know, Americans on the right and left are really supportive of the military. We have one of the few institutions that we still hold in high esteem on both sides. And so the Republicans more than Democrats, so suppose you had Gallup polling showing Republicans like the military more than Democrats, but both really like it. Then suddenly in 2015 we started seeing video from all over military bases, the military academies, in which the military leaders are overtly right-wing, they’re saying terrible things about leftists and progressives, and the midshipmen and the cadets, and everybody is mobbing the occasional liberal, and they’re behaving in a really despicable, scary, and intimidating way. What do you think the left would now think about the military? Obviously support for the military would plummet. That’s what’s happening in American universities. We are losing the support of half the country. This is unsustainable, especially in red states, where they control the purse strings. So I think we have a major crisis. I think we’ve got to go into crisis mode, and we’ve got to clean up our act.