Yascha Mounk and Eboo Patel on Pluralism

An interesting Persuasion interview (text and audio). I expect I disagree with Patel on much, but I found his comments to be thoughtful and well expressed. One excerpt from the beginning:

What's happened is an interesting critique morphed into a paradigm which then shifted into a regime. Anti-racism is an interesting critique. Here's what you're not talking about: you're not talking about structural racism; you're not talking about oppressed peoples; you're not talking about oppressors, etc. So I think that's an interesting critique.

But when it becomes a paradigm, it seeks to explain all of the facts of the world. And now you're in trouble, because there's lots of things that anti-racism doesn't explain. It doesn't explain why 57% of the people in higher education are women and only 43% are men, right? That is not usefully explained by any kind of classic left-wing perspectives of patriarchy, structural racism, etc. It doesn't explain the opioid epidemic in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, rural Ohio, etc.

Once you lock yourself into an explanatory framework or a paradigm, well, now you're in the situation of kind of twisting the facts of the world to fit your worldview, which, by the way, I think is the cardinal sin of an intellectual.

But actually what's happened is in some places it became even worse than a paradigm; it became a regime. Now, all of a sudden, it has coercive force and the ability to punish: We are going to require you to write a DEI statement that agrees with our perspective for you to be considered a faculty member at this university. We are going to advertise our bias response team and we are going to encourage you to report what we think of as bias in order for us to kind of launch an investigation.

I personally think that oppressor-oppressed frameworks, while I disagree with them, are an interesting thing to bring to the table. It's a useful perspective. It should not be a paradigm and it should absolutely not be a regime—that's what's happened over the last 10 years.

And one more:

I want to tell you all the ways that I'm inspired by Islam. It is not Islamophobia that makes me a Muslim. It's Islam that makes me a Muslim. I don't want to tell a victim story. That's demeaning. I want to tell an inspiring story.

The whole thing is much worth reading, I think.

Comments

[ReaderY]

i think the worst problem is not that oppressor-oppressed frameworks explain too little. It’s that they explain too much.

Both the post-Reconstruction Redeemers in the United States South, and the Nazi Party, among others, relied heavily on oppressor-oppressed frameworks to justify their programs. So did the Soviets; dividing the world into capitalist oppressors and worker oppressed enabled Stalin to put any undesirables, such as Ukrainian peasants, into the capitalist oppressor camp with ease. As with oppressor-oppressed frameworks today, any criticism or disagreement could be portrayed as support for oppression.

It is the tendency of oppressor-oppressed frameworks to overexplain, not their tendency to underexplain, that is the real problem.

[Brett Bellmore]

Might be a terminological problem here. The framework "explains" what it doesn't really explain. It purports to explain things for which it isn't really an explanation.

[Sarcastr0]

I do not understand what you mean here.

[Brett Bellmore]

The framework purports to explain a great deal that it isn't actually an explanation for. That's pretty straightforward, I would think.

Looking at it from one end, this qualifies as "over-explanation", because the purported explanation greatly exceeds the actual explanatory power. The purported explanation is excessive.

Looking at it from the other end, this qualifies as "under-explanation", because the actual explanatory power is deficient.

As an example, prisons are disproportionately full of minorities. The purported explanation is that this is a product of racial bias in policing and the justice system. Once you presume this to be true, any fix has to involve fewer minorities in prison.

But this 'explanation' can't explain why victimization surveys, of minorities themselves, actually confirm the disproportionate offense rate. It's a false explanation.

But as Patel says, once the critique has morphed into a paradigm, it's no longer admissible that it isn't right, and reality has to be warped to agree with the paradigm. The victimization surveys get ignored or rationalized away, and the program based on the false explanation must proceed.

And the effort to drive down hypothesized wrongful enforcement produces under-enforcement, making crime worse.

[Sarcastr0]

I think you're writing checks sociological frameworks can't cash, and then dinging them for it.

They don't promise the things you say they promise. Unless and until they become a paradigm, and then they're a different thing entirely.

[Brett Bellmore]

"But as Patel says, once the critique has morphed into a paradigm"

They start out as frameworks, the framework is the motte. They get applied as paradigms, that's the baily.

[Sarcastr0]

1. You seem to be making this into some intentional thing, rather than just an ideological evolution. Not everything is a deep plot.

2. You can't have a motte and baily separated temporally, that's not how the argument works.

3. the OP does not seem to require that every framework morph into a paradigm. You do.

4. Even taking your weird conspiracy as true, that still doesn't make your original argument correct - a framework when it's a framework is not trying to explain everything.
You're going after frameworks as though they are paradigms. They are, under the OP's definition, different things.

[Both Sides]

I agree, but I would expand that critique to pretty much all the "this political lens explains everything" political theories, from Marxism to libertarianism, and many points in between.

[Brett Bellmore]

"But when it becomes a paradigm, it seeks to explain all of the facts of the world. And now you're in trouble, because there's lots of things that anti-racism doesn't explain."

It largely doesn't even explain the things it purports to explain. It has actually become an unfalsifiable "explanation", which blinds people to anything else that might be going on.

[DWB]

It does give a certain type of prog the OK to release their inner sexism, classicism and racism.

(Yes, I'm looking at you)

Hating on someone is all many people have. Seems like a sad life, but... {SHRUGS}

[Dr. Ed 2]

There is a LOT more there than many realize.

I usually get in trouble for saying this, but when you look at the personal lives of White Supremacists, if you have a scintilla of human decency, you have to feel sorry for them.

And I've often said that the real purpose of Jim Crow was to suppress WHITE people -- who wouldn't ask why Mr. Jones has the nice mansion up on the hill while they don't even have running water.

[DWB]

Poor white Southern Democrats got what they wanted, to feel "superior" to someone while getting NOTHING else from Democrats.

I have zero sympathy for them.

[Dr. Ed 2]

"We are going to advertise our bias response team and we are going to encourage you to report what we think of as bias in order for us to kind of launch an investigation."

The bigger problem is the underlying star chambers -- the Behavioral Intervention Teams -- which operate and act in secret, and I'm not so sure that university presidents have control over them either.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Those two seem comfortable with bigotry (gay-bashing, misogyny) so long as it is rooted in religion, but they (claim to) draw the line on Nazis and anti-Zionists. They also find fault with social justice warriors but not with Wheaton College.

Not a particularly enlightening pair or discussion.

[Aubrey LaVentana]

You seem comfortable with yours.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

Does this blog publish enough racial slurs to satisfy you, Aubrey LaVentana?

Are the daily expressions of right-wing bigotry at the Volokh Conspiracy too many, not enough, or just right, in your judgment?

[Aubrey LaVentana]

I eschew racial slurs, Rev. I also don't see many of them here.

The most slurs of any kind upon accidents of birth in this forum (since blocking one or two users) come from you.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

You claim to eschew racial slurs yet you are a fan of a blog that habitually publish racial slurs as part of the blog’s daily stream of right-wing bigotry.

You seem to be a lying conservative dumbass.

[mulched]

I had high hopes for him when he came in as an Obama advisor. Then, and now, he said a lot of things about civic life versus political life that I agree with and practice IRL.

Regrettably, he did not have the impact he wanted (think Little Sisters of the Poor) and he left the administration

[Brett Bellmore]

You couldn't expect much positive influence from a reasonable advisor to Obama. Remember, Obama famously said, "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors."

A guy who thinks that isn't going to be much influenced by advisors.

[Jonathansingletary]

This comment overflows with irony. Bless your heart.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah, I don't recall ever saying I knew more than experts. Occasionally I catch an expert in a mistake, but that's just to say that experts are mortal, not that they don't know more in their own field than I do. They catch me in a lot more of them...

The fact is that Obama had a notoriously high opinion of himself, (But who would run for President who didn't?) and no advisor was going to make much headway against that.