Unacceptable thoughts
I listened to Moral Maze on groupthink yesterday. It was moderately interesting though it didn’t really dig very deep. From the blurb:
The word was coined in the 1970s by social psychologist Irving Janis. It has come to refer to people who are passionate about a particular view of the world and who treat those who don’t share their values with contempt, or even hostility. Today, commentators talk also of ‘cancel culture’ – public denunciations of high-profile individuals whose beliefs are deemed to be incompatible with the prevailing moral orthodoxy. When ‘unacceptable’ private thoughts are made public, reputations can be trashed and jobs are sometimes lost.
People aren’t going to stand up and say “hooray for groupthink,” are they.
But there is a kind of groupthink we do want, or at least prefer to the alternative. It’s the kind that Trump isn’t part of the group of which. It’s the kind that prevents us from babbling all kinds of stupid hostile destructive shit at and about other people, and other groups of people. It’s the kind that makes vocal racism taboo, which of course doesn’t get rid of racism but does at least interrupt the process by which people pass overt explicit racism (and all its cousins) on generation after generation.
The thing is you can put all kinds of pejorative labels on that. It’s conformist, it’s social pressure, it’s inhibiting, yadda yadda. It’s politicalcorrectness. It is, but that’s a good thing.
But then of course it depends what the taboos are. Once they’re put on items like saying men are not women…not such a good thing.
From what I gather of the woke framework, this sentiment makes you a white supremacist, maybe even worse than the KKK.
Yes, that’s obviously batshit, but whatchagonnado.
It’s a common paradox, isn’t it? We all value independent thinking, but the more someone brags about what an “independent thinker” they are, the less likely I want to spend time with them or even be near them.
Conformity to social norms is generally a good thing, because most social norms are good. I don’t want to be around the “brave thinkers” who reject the social norms around things like personal space, hygiene, not asking intrusive questions, etc.
Obviously there are some social norms that get entrenched because they’re useful to those with power, not because they’re good for society, and we need people to question and challenge those. But people who just want to rebel against every norm in sight are just plain anti-social, and I don’t mean in a cool hipster way, I mean as in “not fit for social interaction.”
Yeah, Screechy, I get a lot of flack for counting students off for not following instructions. What, do I really want to turn them all into mindless conformists? No. I want them to understand that there are times when you need to follow instructions. A lot of our students are training to be nurses, dental hygienists, auto mechanics, welders. Failure to follow instructions could be fatal to yourself or someone else in fields like that. So, yeah, conform when it’s necessary. Some rules really do have good reasons.
But as for accepting all conventional wisdom? Understand the proper times to rebel and think outside the box. Don’t just assume all boxes are bad.
That’s really a lot of the value of education to begin with, isn’t it? Learning — or proving that you already learned — how to complete intellectual tasks as assigned.
Especially at the post-secondary level, and particularly with liberal arts courses. Like, no, most of the employers you will work for in your career are not likely to care that you know what David Hume wrote, or how Tolstoy differs from other Russian novelists, or what social factors led to the Peasants’ Rebellion, etc. But this is not quite the killer argument that the “STEM is all that matters” crowd think it is.
There is huge value in demonstrating that you know how to review, process, and organize information. How to write and present arguments. To manage your time so that a term paper is completed on deadline. Etc.
A lot of people will read that last paragraph with incredulity. “Surely EVERYONE has those skills!” they say with scorn. No. No, they don’t. Anyone who’s had to hire people will tell you that’s not the case. Anyone who’s had to read other people’s writing on a regular basis (especially from many STEM types, sorry) can tell you that’s not the case.
Yeah, I don’t get that STEM is all that matters, and I am a scientist. Science matters, it matters a lot. But art matters. Literature matters. Music matters. (I actually do a lesson on non-science during the what is science portion of my class, and we talk about how these things matter.) Of course, I would think that, wouldn’t I? Because I also have an MFA, so I don’t understand that my STEM degree is the only one that matters; I believe the stuff I learned in my MFA also counts. Silly me.
I get that all the time. Usually from my friends in my playwriting group, who don’t seem to know anyone outside the intellectual groups they hang around with, anyone living outside their liberal educated bubble. It’s sad.
As for the writing by STEM, too true. I used to be in charge of cleaning up my boss’s writing at my first STEM job. He couldn’t write well if he had to – and, technically, he did, since his job was to write reports for the EPA. I remember one report I had whacked and beaten and thumped into shape for him, and the awe with which he told me it was the first time in the history of the agency that the EPA had returned the comments on the report with the first comment being “This is a very well written report”. They never got that before. And only one minor error to be corrected, the taxonomic designation of rabbits, for which I trusted the zoologist who had worked on the report before me, even as I corrected his miserable taxonomy of plants. (I learned my lesson; don’t trust zoology grad students in any situation involving the taxonomy of animals. Google it.)
Writing isn’t valued anymore. My college students write like the 7th graders I sometimes judge science fairs for. And the 7th graders write like 4th graders when I was in school.