Groupthink and Academic Culture

Dan Klein gives a lecture on academic groupthink, tying in our joint paper and my "Heterogeneity" paper. Dan asks how groupthink can dominate entire academic disciplines.

Departmentally based decision making, collegiality, depends on majority vote.  Democratic processes are eminently susceptible to conformity pressure, as de Tocqueville noticed in the 1830s.

Scholars like Irving Janis (also Milgram and Asch) have suggested that groups tend to conform.  Love of people like ourselves, homophily, leads to the eradication of alternative viewpoints.  Highly intelligent people are easily capable of groupthink, as Janis's book Groupthink points out with respect to the Kennedy cabinet.  Klein points out that academic beliefs are more closely related to self-image than the decisions that Janis describes; the nature of academics' beliefs is closer to Jonathan Haidt's "sacred beliefs."

Klein uses the example of the  ideological field of history. At the departmental level, homophily leads to groupthink.  At the national level, the field's hierarchical hiring allows the elite universities to create a monotone ideological perspective.  Learned societies scour non-conforming academics by keeping them from publication opportunities.  "The profession answers these questions for all."

Universities are the reverse of what they appear. They do not encourage thought. They encourage mindless conformity.

Klein asks: "What if waiters worked as professors do, so each waiter job is controlled by a central waiter department?"  Of course, waiters are not as inept or incompetent as professors because there is no centralized waiters' learned society.

A Witch Hunt Comes to Cambridge

Dan Klein wrote an excellent piece about Cambridge fellow Noah Carl's sacking because left-wing extremists disapprove of his work on IQ.  I wrote the following letter to President Trump:

Dear Mr. President:

I urge you to amend your executive order requiring First Amendment compliance by public colleges  to prohibit funding to American universities that do business with foreign universities that violate the First Amendment.

Professor Noah Carl was a fellow at St. Edmund's Cambridge.  He was recently fired for pursuing objective scientific research about IQ.  There was a demonstration at Cambridge at which 1,400 left-wing students and professors--out of about 30,000 Cambridge students and professors--demanded his firing. Cambridge caved to the extremists' demand and revoked Carl's appointment.  A recent article about his sacking is  at https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2019/06/a-witch-hunt-comes-for-the-nonconformist/

American universities can subvert your First Amendment executive order by collaborating with intolerant, left-wing universities in foreign countries.  Eliminating federal funding of  universities that do business with foreign universities that violate the First Amendment will ensure that public monies are not used for extremist causes.

Sincerely,

Mitchell Langbert

Alberto Mingardi's "Is Liberal Civilization a Somewhere?"

In Econlib.org Alberto Mingardi writes a useful critique of Daniel B. Klein's "10 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Call Leftists Liberal,"  which I also just blogged.  Mingardi makes a good point:  The claim that liberalism is the heart of Western Civilization overstates the case.

Western civilization was born in two ancient cities: Athens and Jerusalem. One bestowed reason; the other bestowed morality.  Rome transmitted both traditions through its longstanding admiration for Greek culture, which likely began with its close links to the Etruscans, and through its adoption of Christianity following Constantine's conversion.

In turn, the Germanic tribes that invaded and assumed control of Rome adopted Christianity, so by 1100 almost all of Europe was either converted to Christianity or conquered by Islam. Hence, there are a number of sources of European culture, including the values and cultures of the barbarian tribes, which may have contributed to belief in natural law, and Islam, which transmitted Aristotle, who had been lost, back to Europe.  Thomistic scholasticism, the fusing of Aristotelian and Christian thought in the 12th and 13th centuries, would not have been possible without the recovery of Aristotle. 

Hence, the sources of Western civilization are diverse, and its manifestations are even more diverse.  Mingardi is right: the Reign of Terror, the Holocaust, and Noam Chomsky's denial of the Cambodian holocaust are as much parts of Western civilization as are the Wealth of Nations and the Declaration of Independence.

However, Klein makes a slightly different point.  He says that classical liberalism is the soul of Western civilization.  That is, while there are many elements of Western civilization, the tradition that is best, that is most rational, and that has helped humanity more than any other is classical liberalism.

Saying that liberalism is who we are is like saying that Aristotle was what Greek philosophy was or that the Declaration of Independence rather than his ownership of slaves was who Jefferson was.

Dan Klein's "10 Reasons You Shouldn't Call Leftists Liberal"

Daniel B. Klein has written an excellent piece in Intercollegiate Review on the 10 reasons why you shouldn't call leftists "liberal."  Klein notes that the word "liberal" has two meanings: (1) that pertaining to generosity and (2) that pertaining to a free man, as in "liberal education."  The first to use the term in its political meaning was Adam Smith, and some scholars, such as Larry Siedentop, have claimed that liberalism was the result of Christianity.*

The ideology of the Progressives was not liberal, for it places state institutions at the center of economic decision making, leaving a sphere to a market that is shaped and dominated by the state.  This approach was the product of the later German historical school led by Gustav von Schmoller, and Bismarck implemented it.

As it turned out, Schmoller and Bismarck's third way turned into Hitler's third way, which adapted aspects of Mussolini's third way: Fascism.   Like Hitler and Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed cartelization and intense state influence on industry.  The Supreme Court scuttled Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act, but elements of it, such as the National Labor Relations Act, were enacted. 

The interest in third way economic policies flowed from the war economy of World War I. Although World War I was on every level a fiasco, the media convinced the public--modern propaganda having been an important innovation during the war--that without a powerful state the Great War could not have been fought and won.

Alas, without its having been fought and won, the world would have been much better off, but that seems to have escaped my grandfather's and parents' generation, as well as my own.

Also during the World War I era, Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt aimed to paint Progressivism, as Mussolini did Fascism, as a third way in between liberalism and socialism.   Hence, Progressivism, Fascism, and Nazism are variations of the same system.  They differ from the overt socialism of the USSR and Red China, and they also differ from liberalism, which is based on natural rights and profit-seeking and which leads to optimal economic performance.  The third way systems and the twentieth century socialist systems evolved from the war economies of World War I, and they are linked to the military state.

Klein is right that the use of the word "liberal" to describe the views of the World War I-derived ideologies--the third way and social democracy--is Orewellian.  Whenever the media calls a leftist liberal, a devil gets his horns.

*I was just listening to Professor William R Cook's Great Courses lectures  The Catholic Church: A History, and it is evident that mainstream Catholicism has not been in favor of liberalism.  In  1864 Pius IX  issued  Syllabus of Errors, which opposes separation of church and state and claims the right of the Catholic Church to use force.   In 1891 the Catholic Church moved to a third way approach under Leo XIII's  Rerum Novarum, which opposes class warfare, opposes socialism,  favors natural rights (grounded in Thomistic philosophy) and favors private property, but opposes free-market wage determination and favors workplace regulation.   Hence, the Bismarckian system, which was, I believe, the product of German Protestants, can also be called Christian.  Liberalism is associated with Calvinism, but Lutheranism and Catholicism may be closer to the third way.

HL Mencken on American Education

Daniel B. Klein just sent me this quote.  It pretty well sums up what is wrong with American education, except Mencken wrote it around 1920. (See Mencken, H.L. (1987) Smart Set Criticism. Regnery Gateway. Washington, DC, p. 222.)

Think of what the average American schoolboy is taught today, say of history or economics. Examine the specific orders to teachers issued from time to time by the School Board of New York City—a body fairly representative of the forces that must always control education at the cost of the state. Surely no sane man would argue that the assimilation of such a mess of evasions and mendacities will make the boy of today a well-informed and quick-minded citizen tomorrow, alert to error and wary of propaganda. The plain fact is that such an education is itself a form of propaganda—a deliberate scheme to outfit the pupil, not with the capacity to weigh ideas, but with a simple appetite for gulping ideas ready-made. The aim is to make “good” citizens, which is to say, docile and uninquisitive citizens. Let a teacher let fall the slightest hint to his pupils that there is a body of doctrine opposed to the doctrine he is officially ordered to teach, and at once he is robbed of his livelihood and exposed to slander and persecution. The tendency grows wider as the field of education is widened. The college professor of Emerson’s day was more or less a free agent, at all events in everything save theology; today his successor is a rubberstamp, with all the talent for trembling of his constituent gutta-percha. In the lower schools the thing goes even further. Here (at least in New York) the teachers are not only compelled to stick to their text-books, but also to pledge their professional honor to a vast and shifting mass of transient doctrines. Any teacher who sought to give his pupils a rational view of the late Woodrow at the time Woodrow was stalking the land in the purloined chemise of Moses would have been dismissed from his pulpit, and probably jailed. The effects of such education are already distressingly visible in the Republic; let Dr. Wells give an eye to them when he is among us. Americans, in the days when their education stopped with the three R’s, were a self-reliant, cynical, liberty-loving and extremely rambunctious people. Today, with pedagogy standardized and a school-house in every third block, they are the herd of sheep. (Ovis aries).

Is there a New Classical Liberal Movement?

Dan Klein forwarded this Politico piece by Phillipe Huguen/Getty.  It suggests that there is a new, emerging  "classical liberal" (as opposed to "conservative,"  "libertarian," "progressive,"  or 1940s "liberal") movement.  Classical liberals favor free speech and limited government. Sounds good to me.  Huguen/Getty suggests that the classical liberal movement may  parallel the conservative movement of the 1950s, which spawned Barry Goldwater's candidacy only a few years after its founding.  

Dan Klein's "The Joys of Yiddish and Economics"

My coauthor, Daniel B. Klein, is publishing a hilarious piece ( https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers2.cfm?abstract_id=2916854 ) about the libertarian and classical liberal ideas in Leo Rosten's Joys of Yiddish. I laughed out loud about ten times. It's well worth reading.