Weaponisng 'humanity' in social justice discourses

I recently read this piece by Ulrich Baer in the NYT. I found it quite surreal and wrote a wall of text on a friend's Facebook page as a result. Seeing as I'd already written something nearly as long as an op-ed I thought I might as well extend it out a bit and post it here.

I'm not going to talk much about the free speech arguments in this piece. April Kelly-Woessner already published a long piece specifically on that over at Heterodox academy. Not need for a re-hash.


What I want to talk about is some of the claims about epistemology, and about the use of 'denial of their humanity' in a way that I find quite ludicrous.

Let's start with this claim that we shouldn’t rehash debates that were already won decisively by advocates of lived experience. No discipline I’m associated with (which includes economics, psychology, political science and philosophy) thinks lived experience is good evidence as far as research is concerned. Indeed, we are increasingly moving away from accepting any sort of evidence that isn't quantitative and experimental as being useful for anything other than initially motivating research. More generally, eyewitness testimony has never been given less weight in trials than it is today, substantially because of the all the research showing how unreliable we are as narrators, especially of our own experiences. So in what sense were these debates won by advocates of lived experience? 

My impression is that post-modernism came through and made some very good points about how meta-narratives (Lyotard) are stupid (Popper was simultaneously making the point from a different direction) and experts can be just as biased as everyone else (Foucault). I frequently defend these aspects of post-modernism as being extremely important ideas from the 20th century philosophy against people who think po-mo is just 100% dumb. Then it went off the reservation with Derrida and others claiming that knowledge is relative, there is nothing outside the text, and anecdote is just as legitimate as experimental, quantitative evidence. Shortly thereafter, sociology took its intersectional turn, and people started to pay a more attention to the voices of the subaltern, especially insofar as motivating research into marginalised groups is concerned. Once you start that research however, you quickly have to move to quantitative methods to obtain any kind of confidence that you have observed something other than a very rare phenomenon, especially if you want to progress to policy change.  And so everybody outside of literature faculties stopped paying attention to post-modernism and got on with science. That debate ended decisively against lived experience. It is literature faculties that are trying to re-hash it. 

I consider it no coincidence that this nexus of ideas is advanced almost entirely by literature faculties for two reasons. First, a good story is typically of an unusual situation. The average is boring. So of course literature is interested in unusual anecdotes. Second, literature is not a science. Literature is not trying to get at facts. It is fundamentally concerned with feelings, and even therein, a lot of literature study is not concerned with facts about feelings. How many literature professors have done research methods 101 or theory of knowledge 101? I'll wager it's close to zero, especially when so much of the faculty (rightly) is hired for their writing skills and not their academic output. In many ways I think this is all completely fine. The problem seems to be when people want to take this idea that unusual stories are valuable from a literature point of view and extrapolate it to public policy. Public policy affects the majority. There are enormous risks associated with messing with its setting on the grounds of a few anecdotes, no matter how powerful those anecdotes are. 

The second thing was this claim about ‘systematically denied them their humanity’. This particular turn of phrase is a trope of identity politics. One of its most recent usages has been towards people like Ben Carson who says things like transvestites are 'men hiding in women's clothes'. That's a horrible thing to say, but in what sense does it deny someone's humanity? If I say, ‘I don’t trust your testimony’, that doesn’t deny your humanity—I don’t trust anybody’s testimony if it sounds far-fetched and especially if it is controverted by the evidence. That’s just sensible. For example, when Pauline Hanson says she feels ‘swamped by Muslims’ I need to be able to say ‘well that’s silly because they’re only 2% of the population’. The denial of humanity claim was recently directed at psychology professor Jordan Peterson after he refused to use transgender pronouns as is now required under Canadian Law. In what way is not behaving as someone else would like sufficient grounds to claim that you are denying their humanity? What is it about being a human that is undermined when someone calls you she instead of xer? Humanity does not constitute a right to be taken exactly the way you would like to be taken, or to be believed. It’s not even a right to be respected. Whose definition of ‘human’ is that? Are liberals denying Bannon’s humanity when they claim he is a white supremacist despite his frequent claims to the contrary? 

Now actually getting political change is quite different, and I don’t deny the role of respect and engagement with lived experience in that, but that’s quite different from what it means to be human. Denying someone's humanity is an extremely strong claim and I can't help but think that it is here being used in a weaponised, emotive way that isn't helpful to anybody. 

Moving on, I agree with Baer's point that with the internet, people can access controversial speakers whenever they want. I also agree that inviting Milo and Spencer is very low-value when you can invite someone with far more genuine scientific credentials. But someone I would categorise that way is Charles Murray, who is regularly targeted for no platforming. Certainly the Biologist E. O. Wilson qualifies, and he was regularly no-platformed for his views on race. So it seems to me that this is really about where we draw the line in terms of who is ‘useful’ to listen to, and people like Baer draw it further than I do. The solution to me seems not to let small groups dictate what other small groups can listen to, but instead to just let people listen to whoever they want, otherwise you could foreseeably get people no-platforming Marcuse for being an intolerant bigot, or the leadership of Venezuela for being tyrants.

Finally, this idea that the parameters of public speech need to be redrawn to accommodate those who previously had no standing is specious—‘a right to free speech’ is universal: everyone has the same standing. To see the speciousness of suggesting that everyone should be granted the same volume of voice (the right to equal speech) through coercion all you have to do is think about those 1% of climate deniers who would be given 50% of the airtime under such protocols, or indeed, all the members of the KKK. It's perfectly sensible that in a society trying to maximise aggregate welfare we give greater volume to people who represent majority opinions. If minority opinions are convincing they will carry the day in the long run. They have been doing so at a very rapid rate since at least the end of WW2 if not since the Enlightenment began. Indeed, at such a rapid rate that progressives are now starting to be concerned about the speed of change and its impact on the working class. When socialists deride 'incremental change' as being slow, I am genuinely flummoxed.