Political Correctness
Comments on the Political Correctness Debate
There have been a lot of articles about the political correctness debate recently. I don’t want to rehash that or other debates around this topic about who is right, but instead want to add a few comments concerning things I have not heard explicitly stated in the majority of these conversations which I think are important to keep in mind.
- There is a lot of hypocrisy.
Most people who have a strong opinion in this debate act and feel differently depending on whether ideas they agree with are being defended or attacked. We need to keep this in mind when debating these issues. Flip the side being attached to ideas we disagree with and imagine if our position would change or not. That should affect the arguments we make.
2. People can act in bad faith in these situations.
The uproar around inviting sensitive speakers to campus is a bit incredulous at times. In certain cases it is hard to imagine that many of these guests were invited for reasons other than that they are controversial and will rile up the other side.
If that is indeed the reason they were invited, then there should be no reason to be upset when these speakers get blocked because they were never invited for a legitimate reason in the first place.
3. Not every voice or opinion deserves to be heard.
This relates especially to the speakers invited to campus and is related to the bad faith actions of inviting controversial speakers. Campuses and intellectual debates in general are supposed to be for open minded discussions that leverage the best evidence and research we have to work through disagreements in an informed manner.
Many conservative speakers who have made the news recently don’t meet this high bar and have incomplete or vapid arguments. A great example is Charles Murray’s argument that genetic causes are the main explanation for the variation in social outcomes. Vox has a great breakdown of why his argument is flawed.
But his research is flawed at a more fundamental level. Murray generally argues that we can decompose the sources of variation in outcomes into (1) environmental and (2) genetic factors. This breakdown ignores the interaction between the two, which has been shown to be highly influential through epigenetic studies that are all about how the environment can influence the genetic makeup and expression in individuals.
Epigenetic studies have shown that the environment can influence genetic expression and result in long term effects on individuals. One example is that children born during the Dutch famine around 1944 were more likely to have health problems in adult hood.
That is just one study, and there are numerous other studies noting the long term damage poverty and environmental issues like lead poisoning can cause on children as they develop.
Charles Murray really doesn’t consider any of these things and instead argues from a narrow, ideological point of view.
We need to have a better informed, complete, and less tribal debate about free speech that considers the context in which things are being discussed as well as the validity of evidence on each side.
