In the following excerpt from my conversation with Bloggingheads Creative Director Nikita Petrov, we discuss a vital if vexing question: just how widespread is the woke panic?
As a social scientist, I’m obligated to say that, until we have some kind of reliable data set to study, we won’t be able to evaluate the problem in a systematic way. But as an observer of social and political life in the U.S., I can say that it’s clear something big is going on. No matter how many or how few people are losing their jobs or their reputations to political correctness-related infractions, the reverberations of these incidents are being felt throughout the culture.
Nikita (who has a newsletter of his own called Psychopolitica) has some excellent questions. I was delighted that they provided me with an opportunity to talk about some of my favorite social theory of the last century, as well as some of my own work.
NIKITA PETROV: One of the things that I was surprised to see in the messages that came in is the amount of fear that people have about speaking up. There are cases where there's a decision that's being made at the university, let's say, and speaking up in that context takes a certain amount of courage. If there's a conversation happening at a cafeteria table at an office and people are discussing BLM protests or something, and somebody who doesn't have the opinion that the majority of their progressive company shares has a real concern about even voicing that opinion because they fear some consequences. My question is, how do you assess the validity of that fear? How afraid do you think people are and how afraid should they be?
GLENN LOURY: It seems to me there are two voices that I could use to respond to that question. One would be with a green eyeshade on, as a social scientist who regards the question as an hypothesis, and would look for the data and the strategy of inference with those data that would allow me to quantitatively address the question. No doubt, some of what you say is going on. But the difference between the anecdotes—even hundreds of anecdotes in a country of 300 million-plus people—and the reality could be quite substantial.
And one just would want to be careful not to make glib generalizations based upon your own personal or idiosyncratic experience about a matter as important as that. I mean, if I am given, as I am given, to saying that the fear that many African Americans express about dealing with the police is overblown—even though there are instances where things go badly for African Americans dealing with the police, without any doubt—nevertheless, a country of 300 million people, et cetera. Then likewise, I should be cautious in making broad statements here.
So "I don't know" is the answer at that level of rigor. It's a fair question, and certainly one would want to have research organizations that do survey research of opinion and so on thinking about including questions, for example, in the General Social Survey—the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago oversees the General Social Survey. They have a panel of, I don't know, it's probably 10,000 or so people to whom they ask, Americans. It might be bigger, I've not looked at it in awhile. They ask a wide battery of questions about their opinions about politics and social life and so on, that kind of thing.
I would hope that people who run surveys of that sort are thinking about trying to expand the set of questions that they put before people to take into account this kind of concern about political correctness—about injury to their reputations to their professional possibilities, just to their peace of mind associated with speaking out about sensitive matters of racial content in a highly polarized context. Maybe the person doesn't like Black Lives Matter. Maybe they didn't really appreciate the diversity training that was inflicted upon them by their employer, et cetera. And they don't feel comfortable saying that.
So I hope that serious people take this kind of a question seriously enough to try to provide us with something more than anecdote to assess from a social scientific point of view about the scope of this problem.
Are we in an era of a kind of new McCarthyism? I was alive in 1948, I was born that year, but I wasn't aware of what was going on in American politics in the late-1940s and the early, mid-1950s. But I understand that there was a climate in some ways similar to what it is that people whom you were referencing are reporting about now, where you just have to be careful what you said about what was going on in the newspaper or whatever. One did not want to get identified as being on the wrong side of that question.
Now, people will get angry hearing me compare concerns about cancel culture and political correctness and race with the anti-communist hysteria that swept through American culture and politics in the late-’40s and early-’50s. And I'm not asserting that they are at exactly the same or maybe even close to being the same things in terms of intensity. I've acknowledged it. I actually don't know, but I think anyone familiar with the historical experience will see echoes of it in some of what it is that we're seeing going on right now. So anyway, part of my response is “I don't know” because it hasn't been measured in a way that I think could definitively address the question.
On the other hand, my very strong impression is that—and certainly from the correspondence that I'm getting, which is not a systematic survey, and also from my reading of what's going on—I mean, the cases multiply. There's this young woman, Jodi Shaw at Smith College, who's become a cause célèbre amongst the anti-cancel culture segment of American politics—a small segment, but we're still here, alive and kicking—because she objected to the diversity training that was inflicted upon employees of the college and basically has left her job at the college and has gone on a crusade with a YouTube channel and periodic videos that she posts, where she simply gives the account of what happened to her at Smith College.
And it is basically, if you're white, you must be a racist and you need to repent, repent, repent. And she'd say, “Well, wait a minute, why did my race even become a matter of discussion in the context of my employment? This is a hostile workplace where you're asking me to apologize about being white.” And there were other things that go along with the Smith College environment that Jodi Shaw has gotten publicly involved in. But I give that as one little example of the things that could be repeated over and over again.
A teacher, Paul Rossi at the Grace Church Academy, which is a private school in Manhattan in New York City, an elite private school that costs $50 or $60 thousand a year to send your kid to. He's a math teacher there. He was objecting to the woke sensibility that informed the teaching materials on racial issues that were being used in the curriculum at the school and to the diversity training and the kind of political indoctrination that the staff and the families, the parents of students matriculating at the school, were being subject to.
And actually he mentions Glenn Loury in his letter, because he says he suggested to the head of the school that he might want to share some of the writings of Glenn Loury with his students to give them an alternative perspective on how to be thinking about the problems of race and racism. And the school had discouraged him from doing so, saying to him in effect, "Loury being Black and talking like this is hardly representative of the sensibility of most Black people. And it would only confuse and infuriate our students and others if they were to be exposed to Loury's writing. Why don't you find a mainstream white conservative whom you can share with your students? And you could perhaps get the same point across without confounding it with this Black guy."
And that has become public. As a consequence of Rossi making that public, he's in effect been fired from the school. He's been asked to leave the school, his teaching position there, and asked not to set foot on the property of the school without prior consultation with the authorities there, because he's provoked a furious backlash. And one has to wonder, how many Paul Rossis are there out there who are saying nothing because they know that, were they to speak up, a similar fate would befall them?
Now, this is not exactly a firing squad. This is not being stoned to death by a mob or anything like that. I think witches are not being burned at the stake here. But the sense that, "Please don't tell anybody I said this. I write to you anonymously. I write to you confidentially. Here's my report”—this is a standard opening paragraph of a lot of this correspondence. So there is something. There is something there.
There's another element to this that I'm wondering about, which is, even if the concern that makes people fearful is overblown—there's not real danger, you can speak up at your progressive company and you're not going to get fired, you're not going to get in trouble—you still choose not to speak up because you're afraid. And that changes the dynamic of the situation. And it can be a bit of a feedback loop.
I suppose it's a similar thing with the fear of cops. If you're actually not in more danger than anybody else walking by a cop car, but you fear the police, and if a portion of a population starts to fear the police as a rule, then that is going to change the relationship between the police and that part of the population and the overall dynamics in society. I guess a question there, to me, is if you're that person, if you work at a progressive company, you do go through the training. And nobody at the training says that they're uncomfortable with it. And you don't know how many people actually are uncomfortable, because nobody says anything. Isn't that partly on you to actually speak up, even though you might be afraid?
Well, I smile because this question that you put to me triggers in my mind so many friendly associations that make me smile about things I've read or thought. So there's, she may not be living any longer, a German political scientist named Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. “Preference falsification” was her idea. I think this book was written in the 1960s. But her observation is that because of forces of conformity such as those that we're describing here, people who may have deviant thoughts from the acceptable line and anticipate that if they express their thoughts, they will be punished socially—perhaps again not the guillotine or the firing squad, but nevertheless, unpleasantness—they keep it to themselves. Which makes it impossible for any individual one of them to know whether or not the deviant opinion that they harbor is widely shared.
They don't know. And so they think they may well be in the minority and are afraid to express themselves, but they might not be in the minority. And she explores the implications of this. And this idea of hers is taken up by an economist, a Turkish economist working in the United States named Timur Kuran. And I think he calls it preference falsification or something like that. He’s got a book out there, I can't remember the title of it offhand, but it would be very easy to find.
And he wants to observe that such environments are ripe for rapid and seemingly inexplicable political change once the dam breaks, once a few people, and then a few people more, and then a few people more encouraged by those who have already done so begin to express their true preferences, and then all of those "silent majority" who have been husbanding their thought and not wanting to share it feel authorized to do so. And the next thing you know, what had been a consensus has been completely washed away and you get radical change. Such might be one man's theory of some kinds of social revolution.
So those kinds of thoughts are triggered in my mind. I do think that there's an interesting strategic issue here and it's exemplified by the climate of enforced conformity, which is abetted by interested parties who may well know that the consensus view has deep problems, but who can profit from playing it up. I mean political actors who can use the tropes and the platitudes and the slogans in order to rally their troops or appeal to some part of the electorate or something like that. Corporations who may see their bottom line business interest as being reinforced by them getting on a bandwagon themselves. And again, helping to create an environment that might not be true to the actual sentiments of the populace but that they gauged to be.
You want to be on the right side of history. You want to look good. You want to manage your brand, cultivate your brand in a way that appeals to other people, to the masses of people. So if Black Lives Matter and a few outspoken athletes decide that a certain kind of demonstration of their concerns about social justice is appropriate, you may find major players getting behind it, just because they calculate that this is the path of least resistance without perhaps having any deep investment themselves. But the effect of that will be to reinforce the larger consensus and the further marginalized people who have issue with it. Something like that. I'm thinking off the top of my head here.
I mean, if I may just say, Nikita, your humble servant Glenn Loury, in 1994 in a journal called Rationality and Society—that's a refereed scholarly sociology journal—published a paper called "Self-Censorship in Public Discourse." It's not at all inaccessible to anyone who might be interested in it, it can be easily found online. In it, I develop a sustained argument along these lines, drawing on Noelle-Neumann and Kuran amongst others in pursuing that argument. So this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart. I've been thinking about it for a long time.
I might just add, and this is somewhat parochial, amongst African Americans, we are only 10% of the population here in the country, I would reckon perhaps not much more than 10% of the viewership of The Glenn Show, if I judged by what appear to be the people commenting on what John and I present. But amongst African Americans, there is enormous pressure to conform around these issues. And I hear from people who identify themselves as being Black—in the comment section, as well as in my private correspondence—who are very grateful for the presence that The Glenn Show is making and the point of view that is being espoused. Because they feel it themselves but have felt terrified to say to their friends that this is what they actually think. Because it's associated with disloyalty to the cause to say anything critical of, say, what Black Lives Matter are saying about police violence.
But you know, there, there are many other racial issues. If you speak, as I did, with a skeptical tone about the claims of Jim Crow racism rearing its head again in the Georgia election security dispute. There's a dispute about a law in the state of Georgia. It's caused a major consternation in some, talk about boycott of the state of Georgia because of a law that they've enacted, trying to secure elections, which some people allege is a law that is intended to disenfranchise African Americans. And if you question that as a Black person that's sort of beyond the pale.
And yet I have questioned it, and I am a Black person. And I've heard from people, “Better you than me, but I'm awfully glad you've said it." That is, other Black people who also have these questions but who know how high a price they might have to pay were they to express themselves openly about them. So I think there's something to that, and I'm not sure how our efforts at the Patreon page can be helpful. Maybe if only putting people in touch with each other. But I don't know.