Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident-turned-president, wrote a famous essay about the life of the mind under a system of totalitarian control. He invoked the example of a greengrocer who puts a sign in his window saying, "Workers of the world, unite!" -- not believing in it and perhaps not even knowing what it meant, but ritually accepting it as the officially sanctioned worldview. He wrote of a brewery worker who was punished for dissenting without meaning to -- by trying to make beer more efficiently, thereby calling into question whether the communist approach to production was anything but optimal.
Under such a system, many questions must never be asked, even by accident. The beauty of this arrangement is that the system never needs to show that the dissident's ideas are false. The mere act of posing the question is illegitimate. By extension, the answers would be neither true nor false: They too would be illegitimate.
Havel's piece came to mind last week as I followed the controversy over Google and James Damore, the engineer who was fired after circulating a note complaining about the company's policies on gender balance and diversity. Google's response seemed to set a new benchmark in the ongoing efforts of America's educated elite to deem opinions it disagrees with not just wrong but illegitimate. In this supposedly free country, the list of questions that cannot be asked seems to keep growing.
Damore's memo argued that Google's policies on gender balance failed to take account of biological differences between men and women that could lead women, on average, to be less interested in engineering than men. The argument could be wrong but it isn't crazy or intemperate. The memo wasn't an "anti-diversity screed," as many outraged commentators judged it to be. Apparently, it's broadly correct on the science. That, perhaps, is what made it so offensive. Full story...
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Under such a system, many questions must never be asked, even by accident. The beauty of this arrangement is that the system never needs to show that the dissident's ideas are false. The mere act of posing the question is illegitimate. By extension, the answers would be neither true nor false: They too would be illegitimate.
Havel's piece came to mind last week as I followed the controversy over Google and James Damore, the engineer who was fired after circulating a note complaining about the company's policies on gender balance and diversity. Google's response seemed to set a new benchmark in the ongoing efforts of America's educated elite to deem opinions it disagrees with not just wrong but illegitimate. In this supposedly free country, the list of questions that cannot be asked seems to keep growing.
Damore's memo argued that Google's policies on gender balance failed to take account of biological differences between men and women that could lead women, on average, to be less interested in engineering than men. The argument could be wrong but it isn't crazy or intemperate. The memo wasn't an "anti-diversity screed," as many outraged commentators judged it to be. Apparently, it's broadly correct on the science. That, perhaps, is what made it so offensive. Full story...
Related posts:
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- All the news that fits...
- Rushdie warns of new dangers to free speech in West...
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