Bi-Weekly "Metapolitics" Discussion

The next two discussions will cover the escalating Culture War between two relatively new political groups the "Social Justice Warriors" and the "Cultural Libertarians".

This week's discussion will center around the "Social Justice Warriors" (SJWs), which is a term that refers to young, highly vocal left-wing activists that follow a relatively new collection of theories tied to fourth-wave feminism & post-Marxist identity politics such as intersectionality, privilege theory, and microaggression theory, safe spaces & speech codes (google those terms if you want to learn more about them). It can be difficult to distinguish SJWs from other left-wing activists, but the defining feature appears to be that SJWs reject certain "civil libertarian" principles (e.g. freedom of speech & press, freedom of association & assembly, presumption of innocence, due process, judicial impartiality), especially as they might apply in collegiate settings. They tend to want colleges to be "safe spaces" for persecuted minorities and training grounds for social justice advocacy, and so they typically reject the "civil societarian" conception of colleges as non-partisan institutions with ideological diversity & academic freedom. (Similar terms used recently for this group are the "regressive left", "illiberal left" and "PC police".) SJWs tend to be most active on college campuses and on social media platforms, and came to national attention with the "Gamergate" controversy & debate over college campus "rape culture" in 2014 and the student activist protests at Yale & Mizzou in 2015.

Next week's discussion will shift focus to the opponents of the SJWs - the "Cultural Libertarians". "Cultural Libertarians" is one of the terms for a new coalition of groups that oppose the SJWs and tend to see their push for "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" on as an infringement of free speech. The "cultural libertarian" coalition involves people from a wide variety of positions on the political spectrum: center-left academics who've faced persecution from SJWs on campus, center-left civil libertarians - especially comedians & other entertainers, right-wing libertarians, traditional conservatives, and the new far right ideologues known as the "Alt-Right".

(* It's worth pointing out that even though they haven't joined the "Cultural Libertarians," many far-left socialist & anarchist groups reject some of the major tenets of SJWs such as "privilege theory" because it tends to sideline economic arguments & they fear that it splits the working class into factions based on race, gender & sexuality and diminishes worker solidarity.)

As usual, I've linked a bunch of articles, but I certainly don't expect our members to read them all prior to our discussion. I've summarized their points as much as I can, so hopefully if you can't read all the articles you can at least get the general gist of them.

1. Measuring the Rise in Millenial Student Activism & Differentiating Mainstream Millenial Progressives from "Social Justice Warriors"

So the first order of business in understanding the "Social Justice Warrior" phenomenon is to figure out roughly what percentage of college students are involved in campus activism, and also see if we can distinguish between Millennials who hold relatively mainstream progressive views about social justice and those who favor more radical actions. I've linked several polls below... Rather than go into in-depth analysis I'll just point out the general takeway: Millenials tend to be more politically progressive than earlier generations, and today's college students are even more progressive than non-students, but the majority of college students do not favor the more radical positions of the SJWs and hesitate to identify with more radical movements on campus.

Mikhail Zinshteyn at FiveThirtyEight and Chance Layton at the National Association of Scholars both looked at the Higher Education Research Institute's poll that showed today's college students are more politically engaged than in previous decades, although only 9% say they'd be likely to attend protests. A majority (70%) favor banning racist/sexist speech on campus and a large minority (43%) favor banning extreme speakers from campus.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/college-freshmen-are-more-politically-engaged-than-they-have-been-in-decades/

https://www.nas.org/articles/college_students_want_to_ban_uncomfortable_ideas

Jesse Singal at NY Mag's "Science of Us" blog looked at the Pew Reseach poll and concluded that the widely reported stat that 40% of Millennials favored censorship of certain types of offensive speech wasn't atypical and did not indicate a recent upsurge in support for censorhip.

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/11/false-alarm-on-millennials-and-free-speech.html

Meg Panetta looked at the Spring 2016 Harvard Public Opinion poll and notes there's a gender gap amoung Millenials in their support for feminism, as well as a gap between college students and non-students who tend to be less progressive. She also noted there's a gap between the large number of Millenials who support gender equality and the smaller number that self-identify as "feminists".

http://harvardpolitics.com/hpargument-posts/47892/

Huffington Post looked at the Harvard poll and reported that Millennials are divided by race when it comes to trusting the police and in their evaluation of the Black Lives Matter movement.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/29/millennials-police-poll_n_7172604.html

The conservative student organization, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), hired a polling company to poll college students on their opinions, and found that the majority of college students feel the Black Lives Matter movement has gone too far, and the majority of students also feel that penalizing students for using gendered pronouns is too extreme as well.

http://www.yaf.org/news/exclusive-poll-shows-what-college-students-really-think-about-free-enterprise-blm-gender-pronouns/

2. "Adverse Selection," "Evaporative Cooling" and Ideological "Superweapons" in the Social Justice Activist Community

"Adverse Selection" and "Evaporative Cooling" were two problems with to group formation & cohesion we discussed before in relation to libertarianism. Adverse Selection referred to the fact that a "thin market" niche group can have a hard time accumulating the critical mass needed to form a larger movement because its initial adherents tend to be cranks & weirdos. Evaporative Cooling is a problem that a relatively popular group can face when they begin to eject more reasonable members who were exerting a moderating influence, leading them to turn into a small radical group that can't regain their mainstream popularity or influence. Both of these issues seem to be serious problems for the SJWs...

Christian Jarrett, "Activists Have an Image Problem, Say Social Psychologists"

http://digest.bps.org.uk/2014/01/activists-have-image-problem-say-social.html

Conor Friedersdorf, "Outside the Social Justice Movement's Small Tent"

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/outside-the-socialjustice-movements-small-tent/479049/

Toni Airaksinen, "I'm Not A Feminist Even Though I Attend A Women's College"

http://quillette.com/2016/01/13/im-not-a-feminist-even-though-i-attend-a-womens-college/

Scott Alexander, in an early essay entitled "Eighth Meditation on Superweapons," argues that a major problem with left-wing activist groups (and feminists in particular) is they develop a collection of rhetorical "superweapons" which allow them to easily dismiss any criticism or attempts at moderation. For SJWsm this includes concepts like mansplaining, gaslighting, sealioning, concern trolling, bad allies, internalized racism/sexism, respectability politics...

Scott explains that moderately people like him (he identifies as left-libertarian) who would normally be supportive of the social justice movement are repelled by their radical tactics: "My [negative] view on feminism isn't really driven by my view on gender relations or women or men or society. It's driven by my view on applause lights (http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/), on inability to urge restraint (http://lesswrong.com/lw/ls/when_none_dare_urge_restraint/), on death spirals (http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral), on anti-charity, on zero-threshold medical testing, on superweapons, and most of all on epistemic hygiene. I don't care how righteous your cause is, you don't get a superweapon so powerful it can pre-emptively vaporize any possible counterargument including the one asking you to please turn off your superweapon and listen for just a second. No one should be able to do that."

http://squid314.livejournal.com/329561.html

3. Estimating Big Five Personality Traits for "Social Justice Warriors"

I wasn't able to find a Five Factor Model (FFM) study of SJWs, but I did find a study on college students broken down by major. Considering that we know most student activists tend to be arts & humanities major, this helps a lot. Art & humanities majors tend to score higher on Openness, lower on Conscientiousness, lower on Extraversion, higher on Agreeableness, and higher on Neuroticism. The findings are explained somewhat, but not entirely, by the gender distribution among college majors - women are more likely to enter the arts & humanities and women tend to be more neurotic, agreeable, and conscientious than men. The researchers dispute the idea that college academic programs socialize students to exhibit certain personality traits, noting that the FFM test was administered shortly after students arrive as freshmen - instead, personality types seem to be attracted to certain majors.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/my-major-my-self/426984

A recent study found an upside to lower Conscientiouness & lower Agreeableness among left-wing college students -- it tends to make individuals more likely to reject authority in cases where they are told to harm others. The setup was similar to the classic Stanley Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures. The study found that disobedience was influenced by political orientation, with left-wing political ideology being associated with decreased obedience. From the abstract: "Although our results suggest that adaptive traits in the interpersonal domain may be maladaptive in a context involving destructive authority, they also suggest that some behaviors that may disrupt social functioning, such as political activism, may express and even strengthen individual dispositions that are both useful and essential to the whole society, at least in some critical moments."

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-green-mind/201406/are-polite-people-more-violent-and-destructive

Keep in mind that while Openness has high correlation with liberalism & Conscientiousness has high correlation with conservativism, linking Agreeableness to political orientation is tricky. Like the other Five Factors, Agreeableness break down into 6 facets (Trust, Sincerity/Straightforwardness, Compassion/Altruism, Compliance, Modesty, Tender-mindedness/Sympathy), but although the facets are correlated people can score higher on some facets & lower on others. Research has found that one aspect of Agreeableness (Compassion) is associated with liberalism & egalitarianism, whereas the other (Politeness) is associated with conservatism & traditionalism.

(This research helps explain the way the left-wing activists in the Milgram-type experiment mentioned above were more likely to resist authority -- they probably scored much higher on Compassion & Sympathy than on Compliance.)

http://www.tc.umn.edu/~cdeyoung/Pubs/Hirsh_2010_A_politics_PSPB.pdf

4. Three Psychological Critiques of SJWs: Left-Wing Authoritarianism, Hyper-Mentalism & Paranoid Social Cognition, Pathological Altruism

Robert Altemeyer's concept of "Left-Wing Authoritarianism" (LWA) is one of the psychological frameworks that could be applied to the SJW subculture. Like its right-wing authoritarian (RWA) counterpart, the definition of LWA is based on 3 dimensions but with a twist - they identify with revolutionary authorities rather than conventional authorities. The 3 dimensions are: (1) authoritarian submission to those dedicated to overthrowing the establishment, (2) authoritarian aggression against perceived established authorities, as long as it’s advocated by revolutionary authorities; and (3) conventionalism in terms of strongly adhering to the norms of behavior endorsed by revolutionary authorities. Altemeyer's research on American college students in the 1990s & subsequent work in the 2000s suggests that militant people on the political left who he calls "Left-Wingers" don't tend to favor war & violence as highly as classic RWAs, but do tend to show a similarly low "need for cognition" (NFC) and "consideration for future consequences" (CFC). Altemeyer did identify a rarer type of person that mixed right- & left-wing authoritarian beliefs, which he called "Wild Card Authoritarians" (WCA), who favor war & violence - including violence in intimate relationships, and this type seems to match the profile of fascists. When we compare the Left-Winger & WCA profiles, SJWs seem to match the former -- moderately authoritarian but generally non-violent, with their main deficiencies being dogmatism, close-mindedness & short-sightedness.

http://ajbenjaminjr.tripod.com/articles/14b.pdf

Some of you may remember from Jonathan Haidt's study of libertarian psychology that self-identified libertarians tend to score high on the "systematizing" side of Simon Baron-Cohen Empathizing-Systematizing (E-S) Scale, which is associated with having an "extreme male brain" and autism spectrum disorders. There's been some research into similar psychological problems that may be common for people who score high on the "empathizing" side of the E-S scale and exhibit an "extreme female brain". This appears to be associated with psychosis, especially paranoid schizophrenia. While autistics are "hyper-mechanistic" (overly logical) & "hypo-mentalistic" (mind blind), paranoid schizophrenics are "hypo-mechanistic" (logic blind) and "hyper-mentalistic" (paranoid). While austism cause people to "under-infer" other people's thoughts & emotions, paranoia causes a person to "over-infer" other people's thoughts & emotions, often imagining that people are judging them or conspiring against them.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200803/male-brain-vs-female-brain-ii-what-is-extreme-male-brain

• Of course, it's important to remember the E-S traits exist on a spectrum. Just as most self-identified libertarians are not clinically "autistic" but merely have an "autistic" tendency to their thinking, if it turns out that social justice activism is linked not only to high scores on "empathizing" but also to a more "female brain" and thinking that exhibits some signs of paranoia, this doesn't mean most SJWs are clinically paranoid schizophrenics. However, it does mean they are more likely to display signs of "paranoid social cognition" such as perceived social distinctiveness, perceived evaluative scrutiny, uncertainty about the social standing, dysphoric self-consciousness, hyper-vigilance & rumination, sinister attribution error, overly personalistic construal of social interaction, and exaggerated perception of conspiracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoid_social_cognition

Barbara Oakley's concept of "pathological altruism" is connected to Baron-Cohen's theory since she posits a link, but her theory also extends it and specifically links it with social justice advocacy. She notes that pathological altruism is a major downside to too much empathy & hyper-mentalism and is linked to the poor epistemic hygiene Scott Alexander noted above: "Empathy is not a uniformly positive attribute. It is associated with emotional contagion; hindsight bias; motivated reasoning; caring only for those we like or who comprise our in-group (parochial altruism); jumping to conclusions; and inappropriate feelings of guilt in non-cooperators who refuse to follow orders to hurt others."

Oakley list two types of pathological altruism that are more common in activist communities - "masochistic altruism" (martyr complex) & "malignant altruism" (guilt tripping). Oakley's book also has a variety of essays by different authors discussing a wide range of ways that certain traits associated with altruism & empathy can be harmful, and two of the essays -- one on the biological basis of "pathological certitude" by Robert A. Burton and another on "self-righteous indignation" as an addictive behavior by David Brin -- seem especially relevant to the problems inherent in the SJW community.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324688404578545523824389986

5. Social Psychology Explanations for the Rise of "Social Justice Warriors" - Helicopter Parents, Concept Creep, Victimhood Culture, Moral Panic

Quite a few social psychologists have published research papers that help explain the rise of SJWs and point out the problems this type of radical activism poses for not only the college educational system but also American democracy, which has traditionally valued freedom of speech and the exchange of ideas.

Steven Horwitz, "Cooperation Over Coercion: The Importance of Unsupervised Play"

• Horwitz explain the rise of SJWs as a result of the decline of unsupervised childhood play for Millennials. Moral panics over kidnappings & school shootings in the 1980s-'90s led to "helicopter parents" shielding their children from the normal process of sharing, compromising, handling bullying & other forms of social conflict with other children on their own. This creates a shift from cooperation to coercion as a means of solving conflict, creating "tattle tales" and shifting children's attitudes towards petty authoritarianism. Now in college, Millennials have a tendency to demand that authority figures intervene in even the most minor forms of social conflict. Horowitz also link college students inability to negotiate boundaries in an intuitive manner to the recent calls for "affirmative consent" laws.

(It would be interesting to see how Horwitz's explanation breaks down by socio-economic class. Heavy supervision & tattling seems to fit better with SJWs who come from pampered middle class backgrounds & suburban schools. Activists who come from hard-scrabble working class backgrounds & inner-city schools where children are more likely to play without supervision & settle disputes by fighting would seem less likely to defer to authorities and more likely to view "snitching" as cowardly, which would probably push them more towards anarchist or "militant activist" groups.)

http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2015/06/cooperation-over-coercion-the-importance-of-unsupervised-childhood-play-for-democracy-and-liberalism/

Nick Haslam, "Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm & Pathology"

• Haslam explains the recent concerns with "microagressions" as a form of "concept creep" that has expanded our definitions of deviant behaviors ("horizontal creep") as well as strengthen our response to even minor forms of deviancy ("vertical creep"). He focuses the way that abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice have been redefined to cover wide swathes of human behavior that was previously considered harmless or only a minor form deviancy that didn't require a response from the legal system. Haslam thinks the best explanation for concept creep is the broader cultural shifts outlined by Stephen Pinker in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/concept-creep/477939/

Bradley Campbell & Jason Manning's "Microaggressions and Moral Culture"

• Campbell & Manning essentially combine the arguments from Horwitz & Haslam, and then point out that there is an institutional & individual motivation for "concept creep" in terms of expanding definitions of harm & victimhood - i.e. both the "victim" that suffers "harm" and the authoritative third party that intervenes to redress & prevent "harm" can gain status & power. They posit a 3-stage evolution of moral culture in America, from an "honor culture" in early America where people were sensitive to social slights but would avenge them extra-legally, to a "dignity culture" in the late 19th to 20th century where people became less sensitive to social slights but demanded the legal system address major breaches of justice, to today's "victimhood culture" that is just sensitive as the old "honor culture" towards social slights but now expects the legal system to treat them as if they are major breaches of justice.

http://righteousmind.com/where-microaggressions-really-come-from/

Jonathan Haidt, "Why Concepts Creep to the Left"

• Haidt's article (described above in The Atlantic link) builds on Haslam's work and makes an argument about institutional motivations very similar to Campbell & Manning, and then makes an explicit critique of academia's left-ward creep over the past several decades, resulting in a lack of ideological diversity in education and persecution of conservative students & faculty.

Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, "The Coddling of the American Mind"

• Haidt & Lukianoff build on the work of all of the above researchers, acknowledge this bodes ill for the educational environment of American colleges, but then shift their focus to the negative implications for the mental health of college students. They allege that "victimhood culture" is essentially the inverse of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and encourages a host of cognitive distortions: mind-reading, fortune-telling, catastrophizing, labeling, discounting positives, negative filtering, overgeneralizing, dichotomous thinking, excessive blaming, endless what ifs, emotional reasoning & inability to disconfirm.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

Christina Hoff Sommers, "Rape Culture is a Panic Where Censorship, Paranoia and False Accusations Flourish"

• Although I couldn't find a research paper that discussed SJW activism as a moral panic, I did notice an article by "equity feminist" Christina Hoff Sommers that argued the media firestorm over the "campus rape epidemic" in 2014 was a moral panic comparable to the "satanic ritual abuse" panic of the 1980s. Sommers cited BJS statistics that showed that the incidence of campus rape was 1-in-40, not 1-in-5 as the White House alleged. She says the CDC study that was the basis of the "1-in-5" stat was flawed because it polled female students on whether they had ever had sex under the influence, and then counted all who said yes as rape victims.

http://time.com/100091/campus-sexual-assault-christina-hoff-sommers/

6. Social Justice Community's Response to Above Criticisms

I couldn't find a lot of research that contested the above critiques of SJW activism and "victimhood culture". However, I did find two data-driven articles by Jesse Singal in NY Mag's "Science of US" blog which is roughly comparable to FiveThirtyeight & NYT's Upshot. I've also linked 2 op-ed responses by progressive at Salon & HuffPo who support the social justice activism on campus and feel that the above critiques were unjust:

Jesse Singal, "The Myth of The Ever-More-Fragile College Student"

• Singal responds to Haidt & Lukianoff by arguing they have only anecdotal evidence of students becoming more psychologically fragile, but there's no hard evidence of a rise in mental illness or suicide among today's college students. He also argues that economic insecurity may be an underlying factor for student anxiety.

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/11/myth-of-the-fragile-college-student.html

Jess Singal, "Is There Any Evidence of Trigger Warnings?"

• Singal brings up a recent survey on "trigger warnings" in college classes conducted by the National Coalition Against Censorship. He says the results show that the use of trigger warnings is actually uncommon and that most class discussions go on without activist disruptions, but vested interests are cherry picking data to make a case that this phenomenon is much more widespread.

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/are-trigger-warnings-actually-widespread-at-all.html

Jim Sleeper, "The Coddling of the Conservative Mind"

• Sleeper essentially makes a long ad hominem argument against conservatives, pointing out that when universities were conservative establishments before the 1960s they made sure they "coddled" conservative ideas & didn't tolerate much dissent. Sleeper also laments the loss of a "wiser, civic-minded conservativism" in favor of crony capitalist ideology on the political right. He see addressing the problems of the political right's ideology as far more serious than some minor problems with left-wing activists on college campuses, and says that critics of campus activists have stirred up a "moral panic" that doesn't deserve the media attention it's getting.

http://www.salon.com/2016/01/13/the_coddling_of_the_conservative_mind/

David Palumbo-Liu, "Coddled Students? That's Not the Problem"

• The author echoes the charge that conservatives are stirring up a moral panic to "fan the flames of reaction", and points out that they're not criticizing "reactionary" counter-protestors on campus such as Jews in favor of the occupation of Palestinian territories and anti-feminist men. He places much of the blame for student anxiety to inadequate college prep caused by rigid curriculums focused more on memorization than understanding. He also argues that students are right to challenge their professors and call out their racism, sexism, etc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-palumboliu/coddled-students-thats-not-the-problem_b_8080166.html