In the Name of Wokeness: Institutionalized Racism | Heather Mac Donald | EP 350

should accept yourself just the way you are what does that say about who I should become is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way so am I done or something get the hell up get your act together adopt some responsibility put your life together develop a vision unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within be a force for good in the world and that'll be the adventure of your life [Music] and a scientist's comparative advantage is not social work it is not social justice even if we're going to bracket that term social justice which I am forced to do because I think it's a Preposterous phony term but let's say there is such a thing that is legitimate it is ridiculous for our academic our universities now to be telling scientists that we are going to evaluate you based on whether you are doing enough equity work the only obligation of a scientist is to use his intellectual capacity to push back the boundaries of ignorance and to continue this stunning Evolution out of poverty penury disease want vulnerability that has given us lives that would have been unimaginable 200 years ago we live like no God on Olympus ever had a hope of living [Music] hello everyone Heather Lynn McDonald is an American political commentator essayist attorney and author her new book mid-april release when race Trump's Merit is now available Heather it's a pleasure to be able to talk to you today I thought I might open our conversation about your new book when race Trump's Merit with a technical description of what constitutes Merit and so and you may know some of this but I I doubt very much whether the people who are watching it watching and listening know um so imagine that you're tasked as a psychologist with ethically proceeding to develop hiring criteria for a given job so what you have to do is you have to perform what's called a job analysis and what that means is a decomposition of the requirements of the job into a list of skills and functions and then you you have to look for predictors then on the hiring side that will increase the probability that the person you hire will be able to carry out that list of skills and functions now it turns out that as Jobs increase in complexity and so a complex job is one where the demands of the job change quite rapidly so there are jobs like Factory line worker is a good example where once you've learned the routine all you do is repeat it and then there are other jobs where the requirements of the job switch from situation to situation and day to day and so managerial jobs are complex sales jobs are complex jobs in the medical field are complex scientific jobs are complex and then it turns out that if the ability to deal with complexity is one of the Hallmarks of Merit then the best predictor of that ability is a test of General cognitive ability and essentially on age corrected test of General cognitive ability is an IQ test and the reason that IQ tests are good predictors of performance in complex jobs is because IQ tests assess the ability to learn and they're actually very very good at that and the problem with throwing out the cognitive test literature let's say because it does produce disparate racial impact is that there aren't any more well-validated measures of anything at all in the social sciences or in medicine than tests of General cognitive ability and the people who derive the statistics that made tests of General cognitive ability possible are the same people who derive the statistics upon which all social and medical science is predicated and also by the way a fair bit of physical science as well because physicists use equations that are derived from the statistical literature statistics means State and you know you hear that social scientists have physics Envy but much of the approach conceptually that physics physicists have used particularly in the last century were actually derived from the social sciences rather than the reverse so Merit there's actually a technical definition of Merit and Merit is the rankering ordering of people in relationship to their ability to perform the tasks of a given job there's a commonality of Merit across complex jobs and the general tests of General cognitive ability are a measure of that central tendency to adapt to complex situations and so insofar as there are jobs and in so far as people differ in their ability to perform those jobs there is Merit and Merit in that sense can be assessed there's Merit in relationship to those jobs Merit can be assessed most accurately by tests of General cognitive ability and then that instantly gets us into the equity nightmare so anyways that's the technical definition of Merit for those of you who are watching and listening in case you're interested um now Heather has just written a book called when race Trump's Merit and I thought it could have been titled somewhat more broadly when group identity trumps Merit because it's not a problem that's only focused on Race although that's definitely a punchier title so what why is it that you decided to focus on this particular topic and what do you think your book brings to the table we'll walk through your book step by step but we might as well open with that uh Jordan thank you so much this was a writ book written out of a combination of sorrow and rage sorrow at the fact that the institutions that I love classical music art philosophy literature were being torn down by a false narrative saying that if a tradition has a demographic history that is predominantly white that is the European tradition it is per se a racist tradition so classical music because the Great Western composers uh Bach Brahms Chopin Beethoven smetana we're all white therefore we should look upon that tradition with contempt and suspicion and rage because the arguments that are being made are so completely false uh and yet every single leader of a tradition that brings us Beauty Sublimity wit has turned on its own his own uh tradition and joined in the anti-racism Crusade so this book provides the data that explains why there is disparate impact when you apply those colorblind neutral standards of Merit there's a vast academic skills Gap that means that any neutral completely non-discriminatory standard of academic skills or the cognitive abilities that you described will have a disparate impact and that is not because of racism so Heather you've yeah so you've noted that the technical definition of Merit and the objective definition of Merit which we've just run through has been subverted or replaced by this insistence that if you take any given domain of inquiry or Endeavor and you note that there are any differences in representation um of population by group category that that's a prior evidence for something approximating systemic prejudice and your concern which is partly what you're laying out in this book is that that axiomatic a priori presumption of prejudice based on the mere observation of differential group representation is not only faulty but faulty enough to threaten the entire Enterprise of Merit itself you know Adrian Wooldridge wrote a very good book on the history of meritocracy pointing out that the historical alternatives to something like objective assessment of Merit haven't been Equity or equality of opportunity but nepotism and Dynasty and so if we were realistic about this even on the side of the left we would note that well if we scrapped objective tests of Merit there's no reason to presume that what we would get out of that wouldn't be something far worse that being nepotism and Dynasty now what what has been your response to the replacement of the idea of Merit with the idea of equity or equality of outcome and how do you define equity well first of all you know it's it's a puzzle what really does the left believe there's two options one option is they think that these objective tests are in fact covertly racist that despite the history that you described of the development of these occupational analyzes that had nothing to do with race you know this was not the issue it was it was employers seeking help from psychologists in breaking down the cognitive needs of different jobs uh if this could have happened in China or in India where the race issue was not present so there was no reason to think that those tests were devised with some ulterior motive of keeping out blacks but no quite the argument well quite the contrary because even by the critical standards of the left if capitalism is motivated by the greed that the left purports motivates it there was every reason nonetheless there was every reason for the people who were developing these tests to concentrate not on nothing but race and sex blind Merit if for no other reason than to maximize their own profit and so because it meant that if you got a if you developed a test that could find Talent then it had been hidden by racial or sex Prejudice you could Arbitrage that and make a fortune which is what you do if you can hire extremely qualified people at a lower than market rate because they've been prejudiced against so in fact all the the the tension that might have pushed the tests in a biased Direction was actually extant even by the leftist's own hypothesis in exactly the opposite direction and that is in fact how it turned out in reality because the use of cognitive tests did allow us as a society to discover talent that had been hidden from view beforehand and that was well established by the Socialists for example in the UK in the 1930s and then also in the U.S military you know that was certainly the case with the development of the s.a.t of trying to break up the hegemony of the of the New England wasp Elites in the transit between Andover and and Yale um but but just again what explains this what is their hypothesis and as I say they would either be arguing that there was covert racism in the development of these tests leaving aside the economic capitalist interest in finding talented workers or it's even more nihilistic than that and they actually do not believe in ideas of of Merit or of accomplishment or excellence and that any test that purports to find cognitive ability is per se invalid and in that case then we should all be going to a lottery you know if they really if they really believe that these tests were illegitimate uh and and you have college presidents themselves preposterously blaming their own institutions for racism you know whenever whenever a Yale University president Peter salavi or Princeton's Christopher ice Gruber gets up there and beats his chest and say woe is me Yale at Princeton are so systemically racist which is merely a case of of uh virtue signaling to get attention from The New York Times he's implicitly accusing his own faculty of racism uh and so if if he really believed that then they should go to randomized admissions if it's not possible to distinguish between somebody who is more cognitively suited for a high-stakes High demands in academic environment or a workplace environment and there's really any kind of test like that is per se invalid let's just let's just admit by Lottery and they will never do that because in fact they do know that these tests are valid they predict uh there's nothing that predicts first grades uh first year grades in college better than the SAT those grades in themselves predict by and large how students behave so it is a utterly hypocritical narrative that wants to demean these tests as because they have racially disparate impacts at the same time that these schools are ruthlessly trying within within groups uh to rank by cognitive ability right well you'd also have to scrap the within School grading structure as well and assign grades on a random basis because if you open up the admission process randomly and I think you could make a case for that I'm not saying you should but you could make a case for that for early stage University education because you could say well let's ever let's let everybody in and those who can float will float and those who can sink will sink and now that has the advantage of a kind of radical equality of opportunity it has the disadvantage of extreme inefficiency in that many many people will fail and that will be very expensive for them and for the institution if you have grading criteria with regard to success within the class you're going to get a rank ordering of achievement inevitably if there are any criteria that are being applied at all and the probability that those criteria will if they're valid indicators of competence the prime probability that they'll be correlated with General cognitive ability is about 0.6 it's very very high and then you could even go a step further and you could say well let's just scrap the idea of Merit altogether and what that would mean is that you would no longer have choice in your selection of service person right you'd have to accept whatever lawyer came your way you'd have to accept whatever lawyer came your way whatever physician it would be a lottery of of of of matching between professional and customer as well and you'd also have to scrap disparate pay because so in order to remove this so-called systemic bias you can't only do that on the selection side well because actually because the selection side never quits you're selected on some basis um with regards to your ability to go to university then when you're in University you're selected on your basis to do the work and then when you graduate from University you're selected on your ability to do the job and that might be merely to satisfy your customers but if if among salesmen for example if you look at what predicts how satisfied customers of salesmen are with the salesman especially if they're selling something complex one of the things you immediately find is that a very good predictor of sales success happens to be General cognitive ability and so the fundamental problem is that General cognitive ability is so pervasive as a merit index that there's no getting rid of it without eradicating the idea of choice and difference at every single level of every interaction in human society and if you don't think that would be a nightmare then you've never had a bad plumber I'm going to play Devil's Advocate and you're absolutely right and and it would be a very useful test to ask the levelers on the left that are trying to tear down every Sublime institution of Western civilization in the name of fighting disparate impact are they willing to go that far and Have randomized Not Just College admissions not just law school and medical school admissions but randomized choice of professionals and Consultants let me just say though in one sense if you are a radical egalitarianism that would be in one sense an ideal situation because what we have now is we you and I Jordan are people of education and relative prosperity and we can choose our doctors and our engineers and our architects and our lawyers uh from pretty much the top of the pool but if we went but the pool is the same so somewhere in that pool of doctors are people who really were at the bottom of their medical school class squeaked out with without the assistance of racial preferences uh same with plumbers same with lawyers well somebody's hiring them and and so there is presumably a a scale of medical competence and the wealthy presumably get the best doctors now that's that's Complicated by the fact that if you are in an inner city a large inner city you're probably using that City's uh teaching Hospital which may be Colombia or Harvard in which case when you go to the emergency room you are getting the Top Doctors uh not the worst but if you're relying on a clinic in on 126th Street East 126th Street in East Harlem uh you may not be getting the doctors that we assume as our Birthright we should be able to to contract with so it's an interesting question I mean the the demands of equity might in fact say why should poor people get less good medical care and be able to hire less good profession medical professionals but this is getting this is getting a little far afield and and uh into sort of um you know rawlsy and definitions of of what you would choose it in your uh prior you know part of the problem and this is an intractable problem is that and it is really a painful thing to encounter I mean one of the things that the authors of the bell curve pointed out Richard hernstein one of the authors was that in the typical ivy league environment the typical ivy league inhabitant never meets anybody in the lower half of the cognitive ability distribution and so if you happen to teach at Harvard you're less able students are people who have an IQ of 115 and that puts them at the 85th percentile in the general population you never have a student who has an IQ of 100 and you certainly never have a student who has an IQ of 85 which is 10 percent of the population and one of the things hernstein pointed out is that what that means is that the typical Elite the atypical inhabitants of an elite institution has no idea what the full range of human cognitive ability actually constitutes now I was a clinician for a very long time and I had many clients who were inhabitants of the lower end of the cognitive distribution so I had one client for example with whom I spent 29 hours teaching I spent 29 hours teaching him how to fold a piece of paper with sufficient accuracy to put it into an envelope with sufficient Precision so that it could be put through a automatic letter sorting machine now if you bend and mutilate the envelope to any degree it'll it'll Jam the machine and so you have to be very precise and this problem was complicated by the fact that there were photos um stapled to this letter and in a somewhat random manner so that with each folding exercise you had to take into account the position of the photo which also couldn't be folded over and it was virtually impossible for this man to learn how to do that and you actually have no idea how complex a task that is until you watch someone who just can't do it and it's part of the reason that the equity problem and the systemic racism problem is so deep and pervasive is that it's actually extraordinarily painful to apprehend the full range of human and cognitive ability because there are people for whom the easiest task mathematically is no more difficult than falling off a bed and so that might be someone with an IQ of 160 who specialized in physics and there are others For Whom the probability that they will ever learn to make change uh facilely is zero and that's a difference in quantifiable ability so great that it becomes qualitative and it is one of the most painful facts of human existence that that unbelievably wide range of generic ability makes itself manifest and it does so in a rather arbitrary fashion as well it's that you know it isn't obvious that the typical extremely bright four-year-old has done anything in particular to deserve being that bright it just happens to be the case that that's the manner in which they're gifted and that brings with it a tremendous Advantage it's far better by the way economically to be born at the 95th percentile for General cognitive ability in in terms of your likely economic outcome at the age of 40. it's better to be born into 95 percentile Mark for cognitive ability than the 95 percentile Mark for familial wealth so there isn't a form of wealth that's more profound than that natural General cognitive ability and there's an immense diversity in capacity that's built in there at the beginning and it's no wonder people recoil against that it's if you run into that as a clinician or a researcher it's it's brute force of nature phenomenon like the claws and the teeth of a predator it's it's it's a it's a terrifying reality and it's very difficult to mediate against I mean you know you know the American Military for example determined after about a hundred years of General cognitive ability testing that um people with an IQ of less than 83 and so that's about 12 percent of the population cannot under any circumstances or with any training protocol conceivable be trained to do anything of any utility whatsoever at any level of military organization and so it's illegal in the United States to induct someone with an IQ less than 83 and if you know that that's 12 percent of the population that's an absolutely terrifying statistic because it means that the very Enterprise that is most hell-bent on um finding Personnel that would be the military concluded that despite their own necessity for finding Personnel they have to put 12 percent of the population per per person permanently Out Of Reach it's unbelievably sad well you speak about the uh complete uh bubble that surrounds people teaching in ivy league universities and their cluelessness about the range of cognitive ability and how people live outside of Cambridge or New Haven uh and it reminds me when you read the founders rhetoric uh and 18th century political theorists and it's not a egalitarian Viewpoint at all contrary to our current narrative about that and a certainty that of course the people should not be given too much power uh they don't necessarily shouldn't have the vote uh and the concern about the mob I think back in the 18th century there was much more exposure you don't have institutions that were completely sealed off to the less cognitive Elite and so there was maybe a little more um realism about what the vast range of human experience was but I would say Jordan I know that your instinct is always to de-emphasize a race aspect I can just tell you from the United States perspective that I think a lot of practically all of this discourse is driven by race I do not think if there were reliable and and seemingly uh continuous significant Gap standard deviation gaps in the average IQ between blacks and whites that there would be a lot of upset about cognitive testing I feel the same about our prison population we have this narrative in the United States about mass incarceration uh as something that is per se bad nobody looks at the actual numbers of who's in prison compared to the number of violent crimes being committed it turns out you have if you commit a crime in the United States there is a three percent chance that you will end up in prison so most crime is going unpunished you have to CR you know prison is still the Lifetime Achievement Award for persistence in criminal offending you have to try very hard to get a district attorney to say okay I'm actually going to take your case uh to court I'm not just going to plea plea bargain you down uh but you believe belong in prison you have to have a very long record before he actually says okay I'm going to pay attention now so but if our prison population was not racially disparate it is now about a third black whereas blacks are about 13 of the population if there was not that disparity nobody would give a damn about mass incarceration and it's the same thing with the fact that there is a distribution of academic skills the uh way out in the high end and we also have the gender issue the sex issue with males being overwhelmingly represented at both the high and the low end of math skills compared to females but but just to repeat I think in the United States we would not be as troubled as we are by what you say are are tragic uh cognitive disparities but for the race issue have you ever read the fine print that appears when you start browsing in incognito mode it says that your activity might still be visible to your employer your school or your internet service provider to actually stop people from monitoring your online activity you need expressvpn think about all the times you've used Wi-Fi at a coffee shop hotel or even a friend's house without expressvpn every site you visit can be logged by the Admin of that Network that's still true even when you're in incognito mode expressvpn is an app that encrypts all of your network data and reroutes it through a network of secure servers so that your private online activity stays private expressvpn works on all your devices and is super easy to use the app has one button you tap it to connect and your browsing activity is secure stop letting strangers invade your online privacy by visiting expressvpn.com Jordan that's expresvpn.com Jordan and get three extra months free expressvp n.com Jordan [Music] right right well I looked into the race issue a lot when I worked at Harvard because we were I worked with a student there on developing efficient assessment tests both on the cognitive and the temperamental side so for example in a managerial domain you want people who are who have traits that are associated with high intrinsic conscientiousness and by the way there's no racial differences in conscientiousness and conscientious people are diligent and orderly and industrious and task oriented and detail-oriented and fundamentally a conscientious person is someone who's capable of formulating and keeping verbal contracts and it's the next best predictor of success in managerial domains next to General cognitive ability it's not a great predictor of entrepreneurial ability by the way and uh we look deeply into the racial literature at that point and I was trying to account for the fact of these persistent racial differences and one of the things I found for example that was very strange was that the differences between the general cognitive performance of North American Native Americans and Caucasians was much smaller than the difference between uh performance between the black population and the Caucasian population and that's a that's a tough nut to crack because if you had to find a population that was as historically oppressed in the United States as the black population the Native American population would certainly spring to mind I think you could make a strong case for equivalence of outcast status let's say and certainly a strong case for multi-generational pervasiveness and continuing uh multi-generational pervasiveness but it doesn't manifest itself in the general cognitive ability difference front and so that was disheartening to note that more recently we might point out that um there are there's plenty of evidence that environmental intermediation can produce improvements in general cognitive ability the Flynn effect is demonstrated that and it's quite clear that on average people in the United States score quite substantively higher on IQ tests than they did a hundred years ago and a lot of that is a consequence of improved nutritional status for example and the fact that information is at hand for pretty much everyone and it's also the case that the racial gaps in general cognitive ability performance have been decreasing over about a 30-year period and that they're actually much smaller in childhood than they are in adulthood and that's the one point of optimism that someone very hard-headed might still maintain in relationship to the IQ literature looking at it on the racial front is that at the age of five or so the difference between Caucasians and blacks for example is something more approximating five points than the say 10 to 12 points that seems more standard by adulthood and no one really knows why that is why that Gap expands across time and it would be very useful to at least in principle to focus our sociological and psychological investigations into determining why that is I suspect phenomena like fatherlessness play a role I also suspect that early literacy is relevant you know that in the typical middle class family a kid of forget race for a minute if you look at the typical middle class family compared to the typical working-class family a typical middle class kid by the age of three or four has been exposed to a veritable plethora of books and and semantic information compared to a working class kid all things being equal and the differences in exposure magnitude is absolutely remarkable even by the age of three and so there's still some places we might look if we were really interested in remediating the remaining differences in general cognitive ability so um but well we've tried that I mean this is the whole Perry preschool experiment and yeah absolutely this has been noted the uh difference in the number of words that children hear from poor and middle class backgrounds and I I would absolutely agree with that one question is uh is the failure to surround lower class children with Rich verbal environments is that a function of just ignorance about good child rearing or do you get somewhat of a circular Loop where it is the lower cognitive level of the parents that results in this type of inadequate from our perspective maybe there's other strengths going on there I don't know I've got a kind of an appellation white trash uh couple living underneath me in my California apartment and I can tell you it's an amazing uh contrast there really are class differences that are hilariously stereotypical but these guys live up to it to the T I mean every everybody in their environment has no teeth uh either because of of meth or they're just beat each other up too much but there's clearly I I would not want to be the child of those parents and they're not married there's both um I mean so the best predictor of the IQ of a child is the average IQ of the parents and so you definitely get a situation where um cognitive resources accumulate and this is particularly true in the modern world because modern High status women are much more likely to mate they like like women in general they made a cross and up dominance hierarchy so that as women have become more educated the proclivity for educated women to only marry educated men and there's an Associated IQ uh uh assortative mating phenomenon going on there that's increased substantially in recent years and so it is definitely the case that environments that are set up by people who have lower cognitive function are less likely to be literacy producing environments but there may be also additional effects where you know that could be ameliorated to some degree because if your parents if the parents of a given child are both lower than um average in IQ their child will on average be slightly smarter than them there's a phenomenon called regression to the mean and so if you have parents who both have IQs of 145 they don't produce a child with an IQ of 60 160 they produce a child with an IQ of 130. and if you have two parents with IQs of 85 they produce a child with an IQ of say 90 or 95 on average it's something like that and so those children could benefit from a richer semantic environment but the problem with that on the educational front is that you know maybe part of the reason the IQ differences are pervasive racially is because there are real differences in literacy culture but a lot of those might be manifesting themselves as early as two years old you know because in the literate family kids that too are already sitting and reading often they're not they're just looking through books but they have a hundred books in the room and they might spend an hour a day leafing through them it's proto-literacy behavior and if you want to instantiate that kind of proto-literate behavior in children that early you have to adopt a pretty radically invasive neo-colonial attitude towards the lower class family and that's that is something that in and of itself is problematic you know you want what you want every working-class family to be mother father and well-meaning social worker I mean that's a dismal that's a dismal deal for everyone concerned but it's very hard but as I said early we we had these early preschool experiments that were extremely intensive and they did produce a uh narrowing of the cognitive skills Gap but those differences uh disappeared Yeah by 12 or 16 years later as you suggest I I would say possibly um it's a misplaced Obsession of the elites to be so concerned about pulling everybody up to a higher average level of cognitive capacity what really is concern to our society at this point is the breakdown of Bourgeois values and you say there's no differences in conscientiousness among groups I hope that's the case but that's really I think you know our race problems would go away if we could extirpate the dysfunctional underclass culture and that is something that is tearing down uh Black's potential to succeed by embracing this I ant oppositional culture that says that academic effort and achievement is anti is acting white it glorifies criminality uh glorifies conspicuous consumption misogyny maximal uh procreation you know having as many children as you can by different baby mamas if we could get uh I would say an intervention that was maybe focused Less on the cognitive matters and more on simply deferring gratification self-control the types of of issues that that uh Edward Banfield wrote about in the uh unheavenly City that that would be the most important thing to focus on because I'm not sure that efforts to change the cognitive skills Gap will be that successful over time but but really all we ask is people to respect the law uh and to to restrain their impulses and as you pointed out the the data for let's say uh the Head Start Enterprise does indicate very clearly that these wide scale attempts to increase General cognitive ability did not succeed what you saw with Head Start was that the children who went through Head Start were more likely to be in the proper grade for their age and they were more likely to graduate from high school and they were less likely to become pregnant in teenage Hood but that hope for expanding boast of cognitive ability as a consequence of Early Childhood Intervention did it occurred in the immediate aftermath of the Head Start experience but was obliterated as a general rule by grade six all the other kids caught up and so then there's only two places to go from there and one is to go even earlier into the intervention which means you start taking kids away from their family in some real sense at the age of let's say two or even earlier and that's a Rat's Nest and a nightmare of its own accord or to understand that as you pointed out that there are other socioeconomic variables that might be focused on I think one of the most interesting ones biologically is likely fatherlessness like we do know for example that girls who don't have a father will hit puberty on average at least a year earlier which is substantially earlier and that indicates a real biological impact of the lack of a masculine figure in the household because that's a walloping um physiological difference we know that boys who have lack of father at the age of 12 have telomeres so this is a genetic difference that are on average something approximating 15 percent shorter which means that all other things being equal they're already doomed to a much shorter life and so well and so we don't know what the pervasive multi-generational consequences of the breakdown in familial structure in the final analysis are I mean it does appear that the black population has fallen behind on the family integration and stability front since the early 1960s rather than making advances and it doesn't look like that's good for anyone concerned given the absolute wealth of data showing how pervasive a problem at every level fatherlessness happens to be we also have no idea what the consequence of fatherlessness is on the development of General cognitive ability across time there might be a literature on that I that I don't have to be familiar with but it's it is certainly the case that that's another place we might look if we were trying to bolster social stability and eradicate some of the pervasive differences in in uh what would you say General psychological well-being that seemed to be associated with race well yeah I mean you're I think you're uh you're playing this as how how bad it is you know when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his astoundingly present report in the 1960s warning that the country was about to Screech to a dead halt with regards to further civil rights progress uh his reason was not a Resurgence of white racism or changing economic positions in the country opportunities in the country his reason was what he saw at the time as a catastrophic breakdown in the black family at that point when when Moynihan wrote this report the out of wedlock birth rate for blacks was 23 percent and Moynihan said that with that number of young black males growing up in single-family homes without fathers to socialize them to civilize them growing up without the expectation of a marriage culture this population is doomed it you will not get out of underclass poverty culture gang culture well what what are we at today we're at 71 percent uh of of what Moynihan was raising an alarm about so Three Times Higher about and so it is absolutely at civilization destroying levels and what is as bad and we know you say we don't know the cognitive uh consequences of that that's probably true but we certainly have ample data on the fact that kids growing up in single parent family homes are four or five times as likely to be poor you know you say you'd be better off being born with a smart parent than a rich parent I would say you're better being better off being born with two parents than one welfare supported single mother who happens to have a larger government income than to working class married parents that are maybe pulling in twenty five thousand dollars a year you still if you're in a rawlsian position of choosing where you want to end up you choose the two-parent family over the wealthy single mother so things are really bad but the problem is how do you fix it and people like you and I have been going around talking about the problem of single parenting and and I was just going to add the problem is not just for the individual uh child and growing up without a father but when boys are raised in a culture that does not expect them to get married before they have children they are absolved of the types of expectations that can help them become functioning males and I know I'm in your territory here Jordan and talking about how do you civilize the The Savage male libido but one way you do so is say if you want to make yourself a plausible mate you have to learn to defer gratification you have to learn to have future orientation and when you're growing up in an inner city and it is absolutely the norm that you can start having sex with girls at age 12 they may or may not get pregnant but you will have no further responsibilities there is no reason to develop those those skills of self-control that make you a plausible worker a plausible husband a plausible colleague in any kind of voluntary Association so that's the problem the solution though is extremely difficult uh because as I've been reprimanded in the past by Deborah Dickerson the relationship between the sexes in the black community is very very troubled so Heather um I spent a lot a lot of time studying motivation for drug and alcohol abuse and among savvy researchers into the addictive realm the question is never why do people take drugs the question is always given the overwhelmingly reinforcing properties of drugs cocaine and alcohol perhaps above all why don't people do nothing but take drugs all the time and the answer in the typical situation for young men who are statistically more likely to abuse alcohol for example is that most young men abuse alcohol when they're young say between the ages of 17 and 25 or so and the reason they stop is because they take on what we would generally regard as adult responsibilities they develop a career they get a permanent girlfriend maybe they have children and they re realize that their impulsive hedonic lifestyle is interfering with that and that it isn't sustainable and so they grow the hell up and wise up and start walking on the straight narrow path if you're never required in your lifetime to adopt the responsibilities particularly of Parenthood there's no reason that that competitive hedonistic lifestyle won't just continue now you know it gets pretty stale and ugly by the time you're 40 uh even if who wants you know you want to be a juvenile teenager teenage player by the time you're 40 it's pretty contemptible but um the the problem with depriving people of responsibility is that you deprive them of the necessity that matures them and the problem with that is that that produces a lifestyle that is self-destructive in in and actually relatively short order and so by lifting the responsibility off the shoulders of people and replay replacing that with let's say State support you're actually demolishing you're certainly demolishing the women because they have no men to rely on but you're demolishing the men too because they have no necessity to to require them to mature and that's actually a catastrophe not a not a freedom I think yes that there is a misunderstanding in Western countries today that Define poverty exclusively by the income of a household or government benefits and the government believes that just as a government check can substitute for a father and that social workers can substitute for father that that income is all that we need whereas in fact what really is the key is whether the household is passing on social capital and those traits that make one able to sees opportunities that still are available in Western societies there's a critique from the right that uh is trying to adopt some Lefty economic criticism uh that might say that well uh because of big business or or globalization uh the economic situation for the working classes is irredeemably grim and that I'm not going to dispute that but I still would say uh that there is there are opportunities for people who are willing to hustle to uh discipline themselves to not be addicted you know the the problem of drugs in the United States is absolutely horrific we are a society that seems to be so spiritually bereft that people turn to drugs at much higher rates than elsewhere but if you are straight and are reliable and show up every day and do not scream at your at your boss but have the ability to to with strain your impulses you will be able to have a decent life and those are the issues that are most essential uh not not whether you've got parents with money or what your race is it really is the Bourgeois values and those are are disparaged in in society today you know there's the book by by former editor at City Journal the dream in the nightmare that pointed out that the 60s counter-cultural revolution of of you know tuning out getting high and and uh you know disparaging what your parents worked hard for that that was something that the wealthy could dabble in and then come out ahead but when you have that corrosive idea that normalcy is somehow racist or acting white and that you give license to people that are going to thumb their noses at the law that are going to shoplift Rob Turn Style jump with impunity and get more involved in drugs they're not they don't have the safety nets and so that was really a catastrophic uh development in our culture that the elites survived listeners of the show are probably familiar with Dr Peterson's lion diet as a producer I've been inspired by Dr Peterson to add more meat to my own diet that's why I'm so excited for the arrival of my own moink box let me tell you why sixty percent of U.S pork production comes from one company their Hogs are given something called ractopamine which is banned in 160 countries yet you find it in your grocery aisle every day if you like knowing exactly where your meat comes from check out moink today with moik that place is from small Family Farms all across the country Mike delivers grass-fed and grass-finished beef and lamb pastured pork and chicken and sustainable wild caught Alaskan salmon right to your door wink offers rib eyes chicken breasts pork chops salmon fillets and much more you choose the meat delivered in every box you can help save the family farm and get access to the highest quality meat on earth when you join the moink movement today so keep American farming Going Strong by signing up at moinkbox.com jbp right now and Dr Peterson's listeners can get a free package of bacon in your first box it's the best bacon you'll ever taste that's m-o-i-n-kbox.com jbp moinkbox.com jbp Heather you open your book with a discussion of the cultural revolution in it it is in part this revolution of the 1960s that you described and you also described the values that the uh radicals in the 1960s the rich radicals let's say we're rebelling against as Bourgeois and I would say from a psychological perspective it's actually reversed is that what constitute Bourgeois values are actually functional values and the reason that they're functional is because they work if you iterate them for a long period of time in a social environment and so conscientiousness is a good example of that because in many ways Bourgeois values are values that promote conscientiousness they're pushed very hard in Asian societies for example and those would be virtues of discipline and dutifulness and dedication and industriousness and um and the ability to maintain to formulate and maintain contracts and that is a very good predictor of long-term success and so those values aren't precisely Bourgeois they just happen to be productive and the Bourgeois tend to be productive and so they have those values but the idea the thing is by claiming those virtues as Bourgeois you fall prey to the Marxist worldview that claims that those are merely secondary derivations of something that's arbitrary and class-based when in fact they're not there are preconditions for success and it also helps us understand how we might better Define wealth because on the one hand you could say well if you just provided people with enough of a basic income they would be wealthy but on the other hand you could respond to that say no if you're not being raised in a familial environment that engenders within you the virtues that will make you successful in a social context over the long run you're poor no matter how much money you have all that money is going to do for you is pave the highway to hell and of course that happens to lots of people who are incoherent on the value front who have a windfall is that money is the worst thing that could possibly happen to them because it just speeds their inevitable demise I saw that happen in my clinical practice all the time when I had incoherent clients who were badly socialized let's say much to their own Chagrin who would receive their unemployment check or their welfare check and their Psychopathic friends would instantly descend and they'd be out of commission entirely for the three days it took them to spend every cent They had on alcohol and cocaine and then they'd be face down in the gutter and wake back up and well then they were back in therapy but money wasn't going to help that in the least we on the conservative side or even on the classic liberal side we have to very carefully beware that we don't fall into the Trap of assuming that assuming the reflexive leftist stance that the reason people are poor is because they don't have money because that isn't the problem poverty is way deeper problem than mere lack of money not that lack of well I don't think any conservative would would ever argue that I think just the opposite I think I think it's the left that defines poverty exclusively in terms of of economic levels and and ignores cultural factors completely and and if you talk about culture you're viewed as blaming the victim uh and and those values are now uh criticized as white values conscientiousness you know with caring about getting things right accuracy those since the 1990s and the reign of the of the charlatan corporate diversity consultant used to go around to a T and and Levee Strauss and say that if you focus on promptness and punctuality well that's just not that's not valuing differences and you need to be retrained so that you don't impose your your white structure on on on your employees so that's been going on for a long time and I I don't think it's the it's the right that is deficient in that but to get back to your question of of the way that the term Bourgeois sounds I would welcome Alternatives I certainly am not using it in a uh economic context necessarily of capitalism uh but it may be that it is a uh counterproductive word to use because to the left it does sound like you are simply wanting to prop up this illegitimate system of of private Enterprise and profit but so when I use Bourgeois simply mean uh habits of of self-control of conscientiousness of respect for authority that used to be middle-class values well you're basically you're basically just laying out a case for the pragmatic utility of trait conscientiousness and it is the second best predictor of long-term lifetime economic success and as I said there is no evidence whatsoever that there are intrinsic ethnic differences in conscientiousness and there's certainly no evidence that uh I'd be surprised well I'm surprised as well but that is the case and the uh the idea that those virtues are somehow associated with racial identity is just it's there's not there's not a shred of evidence for that and in fact the scholarship that established the idea that these Virtues Of promptness for example and of a hard work-oriented ethic that scholarship first of all was conducted by people who had no academic standing whatsoever it was one weird opinion paper unfortunately I can't remember the derivation at the moment that was published about 30 years ago that gained cachet because it fit the leftist narrative but there isn't a single serious researcher into the conscientiousness domain that would ever make a claim like that and it's useful to know just on a technical level that conscientiousness is the best second best predictor of long-term life success and in instilling conscientious virtues which is by the way what Asian families seem to really um they're really they really excel at that so for here's an example so um the children of first generation Asian immigrants are likely to do far better academically in the United States than the children of American of Americans uh who aren't immigrants but that that Advantage disappears in three generations as the children become more and more American in their conscientiousness virtues and the the Asian advantage in um economic success which is pronounced not only among the uh well pronounced throughout the Asian immigrant population does seem to be a consequence of the in inculcation of conscientious disoriented values so that does seem to be a very positive uh field of open possibility in relationship to remediating racial differences in an outcome now we don't know how to do that because it's not all that obvious how you instill conscientious virtues I mean the Asians do it in the confines of their own private family and how to duplicate that say on the educational front um isn't obvious so we're stuck on that front to some degree as well now you yeah in oh please go ahead I was just going to say again I mentioned my former editors uh Myron magnet he had a relationship with with George W bush and was pushing his idea of homes for teen single teen mothers where you would take a a young single teen mother and put her in an environment of others living small group homes that would just absolutely surround that child with I'm not going to use Bourgeois anymore you've taught how to say conscientiousness and and people that will uh absolutely insist on on uh ability to be prompt to respond to to request politely uh doing homework meeting expectations and that this this group home project was based on the understanding of how deep the lack of those values were in your typical inner city home where the mother may be strung out on crack uh is you know you've got five different children by five different parents there the the Father the boyfriends are coming in and out it's a completely chaotic household but the problem maybe this would work that degree of intensity but it was clearly economically impossible it would have been so expensive so what do we have as a second best solution the second best solution would be a school that would be unrelenting in its emphasis on self-discipline it's it's application of discipline for failure to obey rules and you had that for a bit with the development of what was came to be known as the no excuses Charter Schools things like Kip uh the Success Academy in New York well what happened to the the no excuses Charter Schools they fell prey to the uh self-immolation of of decent excellent institutions post George Floyd Kip used to have a motto as which was work hard be nice seems like a perfectly innocuous motto right no it turns out it's racist uh saying to Children work hard be nice is a function of white supremacy and so the founders of Kip who had begun with a civil rights motivation uh they began in in Texas and then these schools they spread and they were very almost uh like boot camp the children have to walk down one side of the corridor on their way to class uh every everything that the teacher does is scripted the students answers are scripted in order to remove uh variety or discretion from teachers because they believed that they had the answer to how you inculcate self-discipline and future orientation in children and it was working but now he has had some success with that at the Michaela School in inner city London which is a lottery admissions school and her graduates have a higher chance of being accepted to Russell group universities which include Cambridge and Oxford than any even private school in the UK and she adopts that extraordinarily disciplined approach and that you know unfortunate you know in some sense that's anecdotal although she has many graduates but it does look like there's some possibility on that front now you just alluded to a theme that you developed quite intensely in your book which is post George Floyd guilt on behalf of every institution that you can possibly name that had a meritocratic basis you walk through how these institutions have emulated themselves on the pyre of equity since the George Floyd killing you start with medicine for example and walk through science classical music Art Museum art art museums exactly and so these these institutions of higher order learning and culture and describe in painful detail how they have all allowed themselves in a fit of guilt to be subverted by this idiot Equity agenda which is an extraordinarily dangerous um uh movement do you want to start maybe discussing your book more specifically with a description of why the equity Doctrine which at first glance sounds a fair bit like a variant of equality of opportunity and that Second Glance seems like only basic fairness it's very difficult to for people to understand why that Doctrine is so pernicious and deadly and so can you can you summarize in relatively comprehensible form why the equity Doctrine is so catastrophic well here's the what the left is doing today it looks around and it chooses institutions almost at random and if it finds that there is not a proportional representation of blacks in that institution whether this is Google's computer science force or or Harvard's Medical Faculty Medical School faculty or a classical music orchestra or the uh Western Art collections of a museum or the partners at an elite law firm uh if there is not 13 percent blacks in that institution that institution is per se racist per se the only allowable explanation for racial disparities uh in a medical practice or in a physics department in an economics Department in a math department the only allowable explanation is racism and with that rule it means that any kind of standard that has a disparate impact on blacks such as an expectation of of mathematical skill or an expectation of a grasp of fundamental medical principles if that expectation has a disparate impact on blacks it must be discarded and it is all coming down there is not a single institution in our world that is not vulnerable uh and that will not be torn down as long as racism Remains the only allowable explanation for racial disparities here is the alternative explanation for why Google in its in its computer science and engineering Workforce is not 13 black the academic skills Gap it is mathematically impossible to maintain meritocratic standards and to engineer diversity as as the diversity mongers Define it which is basically racial uh proportionality if you look at black 12th graders in the United States and our 12th grade is the last year of high school before you go on to college so these are 16 17 year old students uh possibly on their way to college 66 percent of black 8th graders do not possess even partial Mastery of the most basic 12th grade math skills those skills are defined as being able to do arithmetical calculations or being able to recognize a linear function on a graph the number of black 12th graders who are merely competent in those simple 12th grade math skills is six percent and the number who are Advanced is too small in the United States to even show up statistically uh the reading picture is not much better the American College Testing organization the ACT uh says that only six percent of black 12th graders are college ready when you look at their combined math reading and science scores and again these are very basic minimal expectations so given that there is simply not enough competitively qualified blacks in the hiring pipeline to say that every physics department in this country every chemistry Department every I.T Department every Tech startup in Silicon Valley is going to be 13 black nevertheless it is a you've got to guarantee to end up on the front page if you write the usual racial inequity story uh that says okay this law firm's partner class just didn't have 13 blacks in it uh this is pernicious because are meritocratic standards are not racist they are designed as we began with our discussion uh Jordan to overcome traditional prejudices that had kept out say uh worthy Midwestern high school students from Elite ivy league law schools because the admissions officers were saying well you're not really of our our you know you don't fit in to Harvard because you came from a farming family and and so we developed the SATs because they were identity blind they were colorblind they were class blind anybody that has the cognitive skills can get ahead and the rise of objective colorblind testing gave us the first wave of cognitive Elite in our marriage accredit institutions which was Jews and now the Asians are coming in and they're whooping everybody's ass us because they do have those incredible transmission belts of conscientiousness in their homes uh but but they're getting in not based on race or class privilege but based on objective meritocratic standards so if we're going to tear down these standards because they have a disparate impact on blacks even though they are not racist standards we are engaged in a nihilist Enterprise that will halt progress it will halt scientific progress this is not confined to things that people say oh well it doesn't matter if if you know classical music flagellates itself for Phantom racism this is happening at the heart of our scientific Enterprise medical schools are junking objective tests of Merit because they have a disparate impact on blacks are federal science agencies like the National Institutes of Health are determining research priorities based not on scientific need but based on disparate impact so the NIH is Shifting precious Federal taxpayer research dollars from Pure science into research on racism and racial disparities in health for the simple reason that black researchers do less pure science and they do more racism research and so the NIH has determined that from now on as an anti-racist institution it should be funding more black scientists and so it is decided we're going to do less basic Research into the neurological Pathways of Alzheimer's disease or the way that signal cell signaling happens in nematodes for oncology research we're going to do less of that and we're going to do more looking at environmental and racist uh determinants of of black obesity and those may be valid uh object research objectives but we should determine what we research based on our societal needs not based on the idea that we should have racial proportionality in our research grants it's also the case that that proportionality is not only impossible to achieve technically for the reasons that you laid out but also impossible to achieve metaphysically and purposefully so because if you add the intersectional doctrine to the racial mix and you presume that the same argument with regards to disparate impact applies not only to race but to gender and then to all the admixture of the various gender identities and their interactions you're almost instantly mathematically in a situation where it's not even hypothetically possible to ensure that there's no disparate impact of selection techniques across all those multitudinous group categories and I actually think that's a feature of the metaphysical game rather than a bug because it's perfectly to the advantage of the radical leftists to set up a game that the that normative Society can't win no matter how assiduously it plays it and so so that's that's a huge problem because the problem of group disparity is never going to go away because you can endlessly multiply the nature of the groups that you're measuring and then on the uh societal side I mean one of the real problems with denying the most qualified Asians for example access to these privileged positions is that you're also denying Society access to their outstanding levels of diligence and general cognitive ability I mean part of the reason that we developed the acts and so forth lsats and the mcats was so that society as a whole could identify pools of extreme cognitive talent and exploit them to put it bluntly is that it's better for everyone if we can find the smart kids and give them as much opportunity as possible even if that means rewarding them in a disparate manner because we so desperately need what only they can produce and so you know we've also bought into this idea that well if you're an Ivy League scientist you're in a privileged position and forgot entirely that yeah but you also work 80 hours a week non-stop on your obsessional concern in a manner that no one else is capable of doing and the consequence for the rest of us is that well maybe we now have a cure for what would otherwise be an intractable disease and so by playing this idiot group identity game we deprive our ourselves of the best that our entire Society has to offer right I mean it's it's a it's an absolute value that human civilization should strive for excellence this is our greatness this is our Divinity to Aspire to be accomplishing things that have never been accomplished before to create Beauty but it is also if you want to be purely pragmatic about it in a geopolitical vein it is also essential for a country to be able to compete and China I'm not going to be a an apologist for China it clearly is has its streaks of unbelievable Insanity as we saw with its covid policies uh and it it probably has massive corruption nevertheless when it comes to educating its massive population it is as far as I know ruthlessly meritocratic and it wants to find its top math talent and and throw everything it's got at them it has a single exit exam from high school students study possibly pathologically for that you know it may destroy childhood but they are certainly focused on on maximizing their their talents and it then China takes those students and pushes them and and they are China is pulling ahead from the United States in many many fields that are essential to I.T competitives and frankly to defense a whole range of nanotechnologies a whole range of artificial intelligence what are we doing here we are dismantling gifted and talented programs we are saying you may be talented in math but that is a fault that is a problem we are going to tie you down and not make sure that you accelerate at the rate that maximizes your potential because gifted and talented programs are not racially proportional there's not 13 percent blacks and gifted and talented programs therefore we're dismantling them we're dismantling the exam schools whether it's uh the the Lowell High School in San Francisco that has traditionally been extraordinarily demanding it has taken students and pushed them into careers where they Advance knowledge human knowledge and it has gone to a lottery system well not surprisingly the first year after the lottery system the proportion of D's and F's in the uh ninth grade class jumped up 300 percent uh the Thomas Jefferson School in Virginia also it is being dismantled because it had a colorblind utterly Fair non-culturally biased admissions test but it produced uh that test had a disparate impact on blacks and so we're getting rid of it we have these absurd diversity equity and inclusion statements that scientists have to sign that are basically doing several things they're saying I will never ever ever break the taboo and discuss the academic skills Gap I will conform to the Mantra on campus that the only allowable explanation for disparate impact is racism and I will try to pigeonhole my my life's passion of studying how you know mitosis happens with an eye towards understanding cancer development I will I will try to fit fit that into some kind of racial Equity narrative but the fact is as you suggest Jordan there is comparative advantage and a scientist's comparative advantage is not social work it is not social justice even if we're going to bracket that term social justice which I am forced to do because I think it's a Preposterous phony term but let's say there is such a thing that is legitimate it is ridiculous for our academic our universities now to be telling scientists that we are going to evaluate you based on whether you are doing enough equity work the only obligation of a scientist is to use his intellectual capacity to push back the boundaries of ignorance and to continue this stunning Evolution out of poverty penury disease want vulnerability that has given us lives that would have been unimaginable 200 years ago we live like no God on Olympus ever had a hope of living merely electricity itself is a miracle every day that we walk into a room and flip that light switch on and we get light that's all you need like beyond that I'm like in awe but that is itself incredible and we take it for granted we take and you know why we're we're also demeaning that because the history of science for the last 200 years it took off in the west there was some early competitors with other civilizations but the Scientific Revolution the Industrial Revolution the anti-poverty revolution it has been the great conversation predominantly among the anglo-american European sphere China's getting into that conversation now but because it is overwhelmingly white it is now viewed as again simply a source of white supremacy and you have heads of medical organizations you have the heads of scientific journals like science that are on a practically monthly basis putting out statements saying that science is racism the White House Office of under Joe Biden the White House Office of technology and science policy recently a couple months ago put out a statement saying that medicine is an inequity producing Enterprise these are atrocious Lies by people that do not deserve their power but they are not innocuous because they are breeding resentment and they are pulling back our greatest talent to a level of mediocrity we'll be right back first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest [Music] Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question now in your book race when race Trump's Merit you spend a fair bit of time concentrating on the effect of the equity Crusade on the artistic world and so the world of visual art the world of music um why did you choose to exemplify those domains as uh in particular and can you run us through a description of what you found on the artistic and musical Visual Arts and musical front why did I choose those domains because I love them because they are the source of human joy and Transcendence uh what else is there besides the I mean the the scientific Enterprise the the engineering Enterprise the tinkerers those people who have figured out how to build things to create Composite Materials all of this is extraordinary But ultimately what matters is the unbearable Eros of brahms's solo piano work the pathos of a Chopin Nocturne or mazurka the Elation that one gets from Ramos opera overtures or or Mozart's uh the the the thrill of Mozart's extraordinary energy and passion and Sublimity the driving force of the classical style the beauty of Vermeer of of Dutch Baroque Golden Age still lives all of these teach us and and literature that allows us to enter modes of human consciousness that we never would have had access to if we remained mired in our petty narrow narcissistic selves artists have the capacity to take us along with them into their observation of The Human Condition and they'd have done so in the past with Exquisite gem-like eloquence a command of language that none of us possess a command of Melody of Harmony of being able to paint Beauty the watercolors of John Singer's Sergeant his capacity to paint Italian light on Italian Stone and sculpture and and lemon trees in full bloom one is in awe these Traditions that have given us so much Beauty so much ability to leave behind possibly even our sorrows and and lose ourselves instead in a novel of somebody else that that is filled with wit and irony whether it's Mark Twain or George Eliot we can lose ourselves for for hours in in those imaginary worlds they are now all every single Western tradition is being torn down on the phony charge of racism all that the yahoos have to do all that the rabble has to do is point out that a tradition that was born in Europe which was demographically historically enough ineluctably white is therefore racist now here's what they do not do this is a completely one-sided game you could also go to Africa you could say that the tradition of Yoruba drum language is is all black it is not diverse Africa was demographically black we do not expect Africa in its Traditions to have white artists we don't go to Chinese classical Opera which for San centuries was created by Chinese and we don't say you don't have black people in Chinese Opera you're racist or you don't have white people in Chinese Opera we do not go to the Indian tradition of the classical epic and we don't say gee why aren't you writing about black people in your classical epic you must be racist the only tradition that gets the deconstructive demystifying technique is the white tradition and Museum curators are now turning on their own collections that have been given to them over the centuries by donors of immense generosity the inevitable wall plaque now if you go to the 17th century Dutch and Flemish uh wing of a museum I've I've noticed this in the Rice Museum in Amsterdam it's true in the Metropolitan Museum I'm planning next week to go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and I was sort of snooping around the website and seeing what they got so they've got a new hanging of their 17th century Dutch art collection uh it's their permanent collection but they've re reconceptualized it of course they've made the same argument which is Pleasant all these which is if you have a gorgeous Dutch still life of cut crystal of of shining silver of peeled lemons of translucent Grapes of oysters possibly a pheasant that still life is all about colonialism you should see it through the lens of racial resentment because the Dutch at the time were engaged in colonial trade and Imperial conquest and therefore any household wealth that was generated in Holland in delft in Den hog it's all on the backs of colonialized subjects this is preposterous a still life is not about colonialism but these curators are teaching young people who may be entering their museums for the first and possibly the last time to see beauty Through The Eyes of racial resentment those Museum directors should all be fired they are betraying their their duties they're betraying their privilege which is to curate one of the greatest accomplishments and and civilizational Legacies of all time and they are tearing it down through the phony lens of racial disparity I used to see this in um English literature departments for example is that in principle the people who study English literature are great admirers of the literary tradition but of course one of the things that's painful if you happen to be an academic who admires a great author is the realization of your comparative inability to produce such a great work and if you love those works and are unable to replicate them yourself it's quite easy to fall prey to a kind of bitter resentment and then if you Ally that with a Marxist Doctrine which is quite convenient on the moral front you can claim moral superiority to the progenitors of that tradition on the basis of their hypothetical participation in the in the oppression landscape and so you can falsely Elevate yourself above even that which you love right I mean you destroy your own ideal in doing so and that's a heavy price to pay but I can hardly walk into art museums anymore because I see these great works of art and then beside them there's a commentary which basically I don't think there's any worse writing that's ever been done by anyone ever anywhere than art criticism writing it's it's its own Universe of pathological enviousness and there's a great work and then beside it there's a commentary which basically says I the person who's writing this commentary on this great work am ethically superior to the artist who made this work on the following grounds and you can share in this ethical superiority by making a few casual references to a colonial Enterprise that you don't possibly have the depth of historical understanding to even begin to comprehend and it's such a it's an invitation to an attitude that's so corrosive and pernicious because it's not only denigrates the piece of art which is bad enough given that it's the whole reason for the Enterprise to exist but it also invites the viewer instead of being brought to his or her knees in awe and gratitude at the creative ability and to see and feel painfully the gap between themselves and that Creator but to say oh no fundamentally as a mere modern person no matter how ignorant I am I'm far superior to any of these people on ethical grounds because I don't participate let's say in the colonial Enterprise even though of course you're participating in the bloody Colonial Enterprise in 50 different ways with everything you ever purchase and so it's it really is I think it's the re-occurrence of the eternal spirit of Cain essentially you know that fratricidally and then genocidally envious spirit that pulls down and destroys and to see that manifest itself in art museums and in the domains of Higher Culture is uh well appalling Beyond Comprehension and and painful to anyone who does love those things that's the difference I mean that's what is that is the appalling thing about today it is the very heads of these institutions that are turning on their own tradition that is something new this isn't sort of the academic critics and Departments of art Theory and whatnot in universities off to the side this is this is Max hollane of the Metropolitan Museum game of art it is uh Rondo the head James Rondo the head of the Art Institute of Chicago they are the ones that are putting out this rhetoric of hatred and resentment and it gives students who are already just woefully ignorant I mean laughably ignorant a a reason an excuse a righteous motivation to embrace their ignorance you know that all they tell them to do students now right to dismiss an author and say I don't need to read uh Mark Twain or Jonathan Swift or Anthony trollope or William Wordsworth uh or Keats is to say well it's a white male therefore I'm not going to read it I only want to read I only want to read books that confirm my own identity how absurd the point of reading is to get out of your identity but it gives when we this we saw this uh it had been long Brewing but the famous chant at Stanford University in the 1980s against their very modest Core Curriculum uh survey course that all students had to take in western civilization uh the chant of those students hey hey ho ho Western sieve has got to go this was sort of a play on words because Western Civ referred both to the actual course at Stanford but it turns out that this was actually against the entirety of Western Civilization because that is what's going on now and so it is an excuse for ignorance one of the things we might point out too here for everyone who's watching and listening is that you might say well fair enough but why bother with the whole cultural mess and who gives a damn about literature and art and so forth and why are we making such a big fuss about it in the first place and there's actually a psychological answer to that being Jonathan height has recently re-analyzed some data on the relationship between political affiliation and mental illness showing that well first of all there's pronounced gender gap in that a substantially higher proportion of women girls and women are suffering from diagnosable mental disorders than men and that's an exaggeration of a proclivity that has been there for a long time because women have higher levels of negative emotion but that that's also massively um affected by political affiliation and so the people who have the highest rates of diagnosable mental illness currently are young liberal women and the reason for that in part is that the identity that they've been offered which is this fragmented subjective hedonistic identity is actually so dysfunctional as an identity that it produces anxiety and hopelessness and it does that because it doesn't unite them with other people because to be mentally healthy you actually have to be United with other people and it also doesn't give them any goal of value to strive for in the future much less and I and a unifying identity and so that produces a kind of hopelessness and so part of the reason that it's so cataclysmic for students to be disenchanted with the domain of higher aesthetic inquiry is that if they can't escape the bounds of their limited subjective hedonistic identity the necessary consequence of that will be social disunion isolation Discord anxiety and hopelessness those are the Alternatives and the reason you go to university to study literature isn't so you can become educated and join the club it's so that you can have a better life that your identity fleshes itself out not least by the necessity of coming into contact with other modes of apprehension that are more sophisticated than your own but that it actually orients you in the world so that you are more firmly grounded and more hopeful metaphysically in a fundamental Manner and so you know the leftist Trope is that all of the different knowledge systems are nothing that means to claims on Power and so there isn't any qualitative distinction between that which is civilized and that which is impulsive except as a consequence of the self-justification of the hypothetically civilized but it's simply not true is that there are all sorts of modes of sophisticated being that are much more likely to produce psychological stability and Hope and Faith rather than catastrophic and cataclysmic nihilism and the universities as Greg lewkinoff has pointed out the universities couldn't be making people anxious and depressed at a more rapid rate than they are if they had planned using the help of expert psychologists to do precisely that to produce this narcissistic emphasis on subjective feeling this constant referral to subjective feeling States and this corrosive nihilism in relationship to anything approximating a unifying identity and I do think this is one of the places that your book really shines is that that's exemplified by the proclivity of modern institutions of higher Endeavor to emulate themselves on the pyre of an idiot reflexive guilt they're not doing anyone any favors whatsoever by doing that including themselves and they're certainly dooming an entire generation especially of women as it turns out to something like an abysmal hopelessness well let's face it the feminization of the university is a complete disaster it explains a heck of a lot that we're seeing now that we regard as pathological especially the shutdown of of freedom of discourse of inquiry of speech uh because females overwhelmingly Embrace safetiest values over those of rationality and freedom of intellectual inquiry so they are the ones whether why do you think that is why do you think that well I well this gets into your trade which is we're spiking in the beginning about uh different levels of of neuroticism you know we just know that there's females are much higher on the big five trait of neuroticism uh and and there's also one could say that well uh they're sort of more relational they're more worried about people fitting in or not feeling excluded and so they are uh believe in see part of the problem is though is that I actually think this whole claim that speech is harmful is completely BS and no nobody should take it for for seriously for one instant it's all just a form of whining and attention getting on the part of these favored victim groups to say that they actually feel endangered uh by certain ideas uh but to the extent that that's true one could argue that females maybe have a more maternal nurturing uh impulse Instinct and so they they want to protect people from real or perceived harm but they're also uh less interested in ideas and and the pursuit of of logic reasoning to its end point uh let's do this then let's do this we're we're running out of time on the YouTube front and we've walked through the broader context of your of your new book and some of the details as well the new book being when race Trump's Merit um I want to talk to you for about half an hour on the daily wire plus side of the platform maybe we could have a specialized conversation in the feminization of modern institutions because I'd like I would like to talk to you about that in some details so for those of you who are listening and watching on you on the daily wire plus platform I often walk my uh guests through a bit of an autobiography looking at how their career unfolded for them and how their interests made themselves manifest in their life how their parents supported them or didn't support them more often did support them in the case of successful people but I think with Heather will turn to this issue of the feminization of of the modern institution and delve into that a bit more in detail so for those of you who might be interested in that you could pick that up on the daily wear plus platform and we should probably turn to that for now thank you very much for talking to me about your book today and about your broader concerns and uh the book is coming out when April 18th but it's available for pre-order now I don't know when this podcast goes out but you can be in with within the next week or two so it should be well timed with regard to the release of your book and so thank you everyone for attending on the YouTube side of the world and for the daily wire plus people who've made this conversation possible for the film crew here in Oxford England because that's where I happen to be today and and to you Heather thank you very much for agreeing to talk to me today and congratulations on the impending publication of your book thank you so much Jordan I appreciate it it's always a pleasure hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 498,365

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: ZkXJojxSE0U

Length: 107min 16sec (6436 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 20 2023