Mike Huemer has yet another great thought experiment:
Suppose you learned that there was a school staffed mainly by right-leaning teachers and administrators. And at this school, an oddly large number of lessons touch upon, or perhaps center on, bad things that have been done by Jews throughout history. None of the lessons are factually false – all the incidents related are things that genuinely happened and all were actually done by Jewish people. For example, murders that Jews committed, times when Jews started wars, times when Jews robbed or exploited people. (I assume that you know that it’s possible to fill up quite a lot of lessons with bad things done by members of whatever ethnic group you pick.) The lessons for some reason omit or downplay good things done by Jews, and omit bad things done by other (non-Jewish) people. What would you think about this school?
I hope you agree with me that this is a story of a blatantly racist and shitty school. It would be fair to describe the school as promoting hatred toward Jewish people, even if none of the lessons explicitly stated that one should hate Jews. I hope you also agree that no parent or voter should tolerate a public school that operated like this.
Now, what if the school’s right-wing defenders explained that there was actually nothing the slightest bit racist or otherwise objectionable about the school, because it was only teaching facts of history? All these things happened. You don’t want to lie or cover up the history, do you?
I hope you agree with me that this would be a pathetic defense.
Huemer’s target is Critical Race Theory, but his insight generalizes nicely. If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about markets, it is fair to call you “anti-market.” If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about the rich, it is fair to call you “anti-rich.” If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about men, it is fair to call you a “man-hater.” If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about rare risks, it is fair to call you a “fear-monger.”
Granted, there’s no shame in being “one-sided” about things that are, on balance, terrible. But if that’s your position, you should be prepared to defend it, not hide behind the misleading claim that you’re “just teaching the facts.”
Thus, as you may have noticed, I habitually complain about voters and politicians. But my method is not to sift out all the good that voters and politicians do, then share the bad stuff that’s left. Rather, I explicitly argue that, on balance, voters are severely irrational and politicians are deeply evil. I’m not trying to trick readers into these conclusions with a selective reading of the evidence. Indeed, I go out of my way to argue that what most people like about voters and politicians is actually bad, so the “offsetting good” mostly just compounds the bad.
If you take Huemer’s thought experiment to heart, you will realize that mainstream media is scarcely better than bona fide “fake news.” Epistemically speaking, the purpose of one-sided true complaints and full-blown lies is the same: to spread false beliefs about the Big Picture. The news doesn’t have to be propaganda, but in practice, it almost always is.
Reminder: This is my last day blogging for EconLog. Starting tomorrow, March 1, look for my posts on the all-new Bet On It, brought to you by the Salem Center for Policy at the University of Texas.
READER COMMENTS
Phil H
Feb 28 2022 at 9:46am
“If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about the rich, it is fair to call you “anti-rich.” If you spend your life making one-sided true complaints about men, it is fair to call you a “man-hater.””
I agree with all this. But if you believe in this stuff, it would be bizarre and perverse to focus your attention on the sins of the woke, when the other side is literally passing censorship laws to enforce their own skewed beliefs on children. One of these things is not like the other!
And the part about the mainstream media is nonsense. Newsroom editorial standards have always been a flawed but powerful tool for weeding out utter nonsense.
robc
Feb 28 2022 at 10:23am
The New York Times published Walter Duranty, so their nonsense filter has been broken for at least 80 years.
A powerful tool? That is just not true.
Philo
Feb 28 2022 at 1:12pm
Different bloggers/writers/speakers have different audiences. Bryan’s audience is educated, intelligent, thoughtful people. He would be wasting his time inveighing against the stupidities of the conspiratorial alt-right, views for which his readers have no sympathy, no inclination towards acceptance. On the other hand, wokeness is precisely a manifestation of educated, intelligent, thoughtful people, the social peers of Bryan’s audience. For him, e.g., the claim that government schools should indoctrinate pupils in “anti-racism” or socialist economic history is worth discussing, while the claim that they should indoctrinate pupils in fundamentalist Christianity or white supremacy is not. Bryan’s target is the wrong views of our intellectual elite rather than those of (some of) the ignorant masses.
Phil H
Mar 1 2022 at 2:07am
This argument would work if true, but… (1) The audience here is right-leaning; (2) this is a liberty-oriented blog, where you’re supposed to be sensitive to things like government censorship; (3) writers here do fall for alt-right nonsense, so I assume some of the readers do, too. Henderson spent time down the ivermectin rabbit hole. Lemieux compared woke to the Nazis in all seriousness.
Phil H
Mar 1 2022 at 2:22am
I wrote an answer to this post, but it mentioned two of the bloggers on this site by name, and so it’s gone into moderation! I don’t normally mind modding – I understand the value of civilised discourse, and sometimes it takes a bit of modding to achieve it. But sometimes this site can be a little bit too touchy. It’s not a great look for you so-called “libbers”.
Alexander Turok
Feb 28 2022 at 3:37pm
“I agree with all this. But if you believe in this stuff, it would be bizarre and perverse to focus your attention on the sins of the woke, when the other side is literally passing censorship laws to enforce their own skewed beliefs on children. One of these things is not like the other!”
No. It’s called a public school system setting its curriculum. Teachers are free to say anything they want when they aren’t on the job and are talking to a non-captive audience.
Phil H
Mar 1 2022 at 2:01am
“It’s called a public school system setting its curriculum.”
No, the schools set their curriculum and then politicians legislated to tell them they had to change it. When the legislature tells you what you can say, that’s censorship. It’s not the same as normal administrative curriculum setting.
Alexander Turok
Mar 2 2022 at 8:29am
Yes, the school system answers to elected politicians, it’s called “democracy.” Teachers who don’t like the government telling them what they can teach have the option to not take a job as a government-paid teacher.
Mark Z
Feb 28 2022 at 4:45pm
Can you explain what’s qualitatively different about barring the teaching of racialism in schools compared to barring the teaching of religion in schools? Some of the CRT bans overreach, but conceptually, the idea of banning political indoctrination in schools is no different from barring the teaching of religious indoctrination in schools. We don’t accept that school boards or teachers have a right to teach their preferred religion, and that higher level governments’ restricting that is somehow illiberal or unfair. I don’t see why requiring neutrality with respect to political ideology in the same way is different. All the same reasons apply.
Phil H
Mar 1 2022 at 2:17am
“Can you explain what’s qualitatively different about barring the teaching of racialism in schools compared to barring the teaching of religion in schools?”
There are two problems with this question. (1) You seem to be making the assumption that “CRT” (the dodgy label applied to a wide range of teaching practices) (a) teaches ‘racialism’ and (b) there would be no teaching of ‘racialism’ in schools if CRT were not taught. I’m ambivalent on the first, and strongly disagree with the second. The point of these teaching practices is that teachers perceive that bias already exists in their teaching materials and context, and the critical practices are supposed to be a corrective. You don’t live in a colorblind nation. This should not be news.
Second problem: I don’t need to explain it, I leave that up to the framers. The people who designed the US constitution thought that religion was the one thing that was so important that they had to expressly separate it from the state. They didn’t say that about political ideologies. (I don’t really see the racial awareness teaching practices as an ideology, but that’s not relevant for this point.)
robc
Mar 1 2022 at 9:49am
This argument is why Hamilton was both right and very, very wrong about the Bill of Rights. Hamilton opposed the bill of rights because he foresaw this very argument — that if they didn’t specifically write something down it wouldn’t be covered.
But, as this argument makes clear, he was very, very wrong, because if we didn’t have some things written down, we wouldn’t have those at all. The Phil H’s of the world wouldn’t even acknowledge freedom of religion if it wasn’t there.
The gist of Hamilton’s argument was that they gave specific powers to the government in the body of the constitution and any that weren’t there weren’t allowed to be done, so a BoR was totally unnecessary. The proponents of the BoR disagreed, but put in the 9th Amendment to assuage Hamilton’s worries.
Phil H totally ignored the 9th amendment, which clearly covers the issue at hand.
zeke5123
Mar 1 2022 at 4:28pm
Deciding what goes into a curriculum necessarily involves excluding (a) and including (b). When that curriculum is control by politics, then necessarily there is a political element to deciding what is (a) and (b).
The problem isn’t the bills pushing for CRT to be in category (a). The problem is public schools in the first instance. Create choice and this issue can largely go away (unless you limit the choice through politically motivated accreditation agencies).
TGGP
Feb 28 2022 at 10:49am
That sounds like the “Chinese robber fallacy“.
Floccina
Feb 28 2022 at 11:20am
I say this as a person who thinks that the concept of “universality” has been lost and that’s a bad thing on net. But, Huemer’s thought experiment has one weakness. If Jew’s where 70% or more of the population and they looked to be in an unassailable position for at least the next 100 years, one might see it as far less harmful to teach about them with this negative bent and maybe even good for white people to help them be humble and understand humans can be/are evil.
I though am concerned that some harm from such teaching might fall on the non-Jews who might then lash out. That is what I see as the biggest danger of anti-white and anti-market teaching. Rebellion against all authority, an unwillingness to serve a boss or customers is not generally good for one’s prospects, but I expect few people to much moved by what they learn in school as compared to what their eyes see, that most white people are not whites are not all that hard to avoid. The greatness of markets is a harder to see.
David Henderson
Feb 28 2022 at 11:39am
What do you mean by “most white people are not whites are not all that hard to avoid.”
Floccina
Feb 28 2022 at 12:01pm
Sorry I meant to write:
” most white people are not so bad and if you want to go further whites are not all that hard to avoid.”
Floccina
Feb 28 2022 at 12:06pm
An even better way to put it:
” most white people are not so bad and if you think that they are, they are not all that hard to avoid.”
David Henderson
Feb 28 2022 at 6:27pm
Thanks.
Gary Lowe
Feb 28 2022 at 11:40am
I agree with Heumer’s take however, it leaves out one tenet of so-called woke ideology: the relative power of the parties. In the current woke ideology, because white people have dominated and still continue to dominate to some extent, American society, they can be racist but other groups cannot be.
I think Bryan and Tyler and other heterodox thinkers know this, so I am rather puzzled that they keep promulgating thought experiments like the one proposed by Heumer rather than being more explicit on their main point which is they (and I) believe: what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Tyler Wells
Feb 28 2022 at 2:25pm
I am not sure that I understand, it is acceptable to be dishonest, as long as you are being dishonest about someone who you perceive as being more powerful than you? Or are you saying that they should leave aside the dishonesty of the attacks, and instead focus on discrediting the idea of a power imbalance?
Mark Z
Mar 1 2022 at 1:17am
It’s possible Bryan picked this specific thought experiment with that claim in mind, since Jews are even more ‘dominant’ in American society than non-Jewish white people. They are much more disproportionately represented in positions of wealth, power, and influence. To the extent that a ‘collective power imbalance’ (assuming that’s even a coherent concept) renders prejudice less bad, then anti-Semitism should be more socially acceptable than even anti-WASP prejudice.
Nick Ronalds
Feb 28 2022 at 4:40pm
Leaving? I’d certainly hate to lose the insights from you I’ve come to appreciate over the years. I note that the Bet on It site is “under construction”. Hope it’s soon up and running, with you on it. Thanks for all your contributions to Econlib over lo, these many years!
steve
Feb 28 2022 at 5:27pm
If a school functioned as described it would be wrong, but I dont know of or have not heard of any doing that. So lets fix the thought experiment.
A school teaches conventional American and international history for 6 years. For one month a year a school teaches about bad things Jews have done, and that teaching is specifically focused only on those bad things that were done to harm other religious groups, especially religious groups smaller than them and without the ability to fight back against the bad things, so that Jews could benefit.
Steve
Mark Z
Mar 1 2022 at 1:23am
I’m quite certain schools teach about how bad white people are in more than one month a year. And none of the conditions you add for the thought experiment make it less reprehensible.
Daniel B
Mar 1 2022 at 4:24am
steve I am sorry to say that you are unaware of what’s going on in far too many high schools and colleges. It’s not only “one month a year” that students are not getting exposed to the other side. It’s much longer than that. In high school and college I was never told of the existence of F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, or Thomas Sowell. They simply were never mentioned. I never had to read any of their or similar authors’ books, or at least hear a summary of their arguments. I never got exposed to any of the information in, for example, Black Rednecks and White Liberals‘s very informative chapter on slavery. I never got exposed to information that would compare America’s sins to the sins of other nations so we could have some perspective. The academic curtain is very real.
I find the idea – which you seem to approve of – of teachers using the education system to morally one up bigger groups of people very dangerous and wrong. You will get the one-sidedness and dare I say indoctrination that you have going on right now, and that I have personally experienced. I know this because many teachers right now are already following your thought experiment’s philosophy; see The College Fix, Campus Reform, and a book called Inside American Education for current and past examples of indoctrination and one-sidedness, including on matters of race.
Whites are supposed to “benefit” from taxpayer-funded white criticism sessions? As a white person myself I certainly haven’t benefitted. I wasn’t taught how to think. All I’m getting is resentment of your well-meaning but misguided attempts to make me feel guilty. What is your evidence about these alleged benefits? Ah, if only I could cloak an attempt to force everyone to learn about the “bad things” anti-free-market groups have lead to. If only I could cloak it by saying “anti-capitalists and other skeptics of the free market will benefit from it; the believers in free markets are too small to strongly fight back against the growth of big government.” Maybe you’ll understand my perspective a little more when the shoe is on the other foot. (Not that I advocate such a system; I’m only making a point.)
steve
Mar 1 2022 at 9:56am
The topic was not about teaching kids libertarian principles, but since you brought it up the wife and i have been pretty heavily involved in our local school’s forensics. The kids are exposed to libertarian thought and in debates kids not uncommonly cite Hayek or Freidman. Some of us coaches have even helped with suggesting better libertarian sources. **(Sowell is not that important so not sure why he would get cited.) At any rate, not teaching a specific book that you like doesnt mean we have a problem.
No, I dont approve of an attempt to morally one up anyone. I do approve teaching the truth. You seem to have a problem with that. I know what my son went through, have a good feel for what our local schools are doing and those of my very many nieces, nephews etc. No one is teaching CRT. Everyone teaches conventional American history. The kids now occasionally learn racism persisted past the Civil War and sometimes even after the CRA. No one has been taught that white people are evil.
Should I presume that you are supporting the laws being passed in some states that kids should not be taught stuff that makes them uncomfortable? I think that should worry us. IF we ever reach the point where some schools are actually devoting all of the time or even a large proportion of its time to issues surrounding racism then there is a problem.
** My caveat here is that I am sure there are some ultra-liberal private schools somewhere that avoid teaching multiple POV. However, since our schools include a number of them from rural areas and includes small religious schools I can also safely say that those schools are pretty careful in avoiding anything that might be thought to be liberal and in those schools they learn not much beyond that white men dies to free slaves. The extremes exist in our country. I ma not very interested in using those extreme examples to claim that they represent everyone.
Mark Z- Name some. Be specific about how much time they spend. Please define what they did that was bad. Is it OK to teach that white people used to lynch black people, burn them, then sell the burnt body parts for souvenirs? Is it oK to teach that even though blacks and whites use drugs at the same rate black people are much more likely to go to jail for drug use? What’s off limits?
Steve
Daniel B
Mar 1 2022 at 3:50pm
I am confused by your response. You say I’m citing “extreme,” unrepresentative examples despite the MOUNTAIN of information discussed in the sources I cited showing this problem is FAR from unrepresentative. I haven’t even discussed the work of Christopher Rufo which can be found on City Journal. Your response is to cite the example of your local school… and say virtually nothing about my cited information about the MANY other schools that are clearly unlike yours. It sounds like the only “extreme” outlier example here is yours.
I went to public schools (such as Tesoro High School, apparently a pretty highly ranked school — which only makes it more disappointing that it failed to teach me how to think) all my life and a public college (University of California, Irvine — I understand it’s also considered a good school, and it too failed to teach me how to think). I don’t know whether your school is private or not but I’m curious; if it is private it might be even more unrepresentative then it already is.
I’m sorry you think my complaint is that schools aren’t teaching the material I like. My complaint is more complicated than that. It is that in general schools are not adequately exposing kids to BOTH sides of the argument.
For example you mention disparities in drug sentencing. One complaint is about the disparity in punishments for crack cocaine (used by blacks more often) than powder cocaine (used by whites more often but not punished as severely as crack cocaine). But ‘“Eleven of the twenty-one blacks who were then members of the House of Representatives voted in favor of the law which created the 100-to-1 crack–powder differential,” noted Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy. “In light of charges that the crack–powder distinction was enacted partly because of conscious or unconscious racism, it is noteworthy that none of the black members of Congress made that claim at the time the bill was initially discussed’” (Jason Riley, Please Stop Helping Us, 72). Complaints about the disparity tend to omit this information — and it presents a very different image from the “racism” explanation so popular nowadays. There is other information in Heather MacDonald’s works that you might want to look into in terms of disparities (I forgot a lot of the discussion of drug sentencing disparities unfortunately).
Yes, Southern whites lynched blacks in horrific ways. ‘All the blacks lynched in the entire history of the United States2 do not add up to as many people as the number of Chinese slaughtered by mobs near Saigon in 1782,3 or the Jews killed by mobs in Central Europe in 1096 or in the Ukraine in 1648,4 much less the slaughters of Armenians by mobs in the Ottoman Empire during the 1890s or during the First World War’ (Black Rednecks and White Liberals, 65-66). How many people get a sense of proportion when learning about the sins of America? Some of the stuff done to the Armenians is easily as horrific as the lynchings of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Isn’t a sense of proportion important for learning “the truth”?
How many people get exposed to the other side of the story when it comes to the Founding Fathers and slavery? I recommend reading the chapter on slavery in Black Rednecks and White Liberals to get it. I was definitely not exposed to any of that material in school and it changed my opinion of the Founding Fathers. Maybe people wouldn’t have torn down a statue of Abraham Lincoln and other important US presidents/figures had they been exposed to that chapter.
What exactly do you mean by kids learning that racism “persisted” after the CRA? That encompasses everything from a more right-wing belief that discrimination exists but is not very pervasive or effective (I never denied that racism ceased to exist after the CRA), to a more left-wing view of of “systemic racism” and lots of racism and discrimination existing today.
I know you just want kids to be taught “the truth” about history. You are well-meaning as I said earlier. But sadly your philosophy has been at work for decades here in America. The cited sources I’ve given here document that and the effects have been pretty bad; one of them is backlash, some of which we can see in the laws banning CRT and other similar philosophies from being taught at all in high schools in some places. I don’t oppose the teaching of CRT or likeminded philosophies. I oppose the teaching of them WITHOUT giving a similar effort to expose kids to the other side of the story. I’m sorry to say that our education system has been failing students HEAVILY in that regard.
Daniel B
Mar 1 2022 at 4:54pm
Clarification: I forget how much Heather MacDonald discusses drug sentencing disparities, but I meant to say that it’s been a while since I’ve discussed drug sentencing disparities so I forget a lot of stuff about it. I don’t remember how much effort MacDonald devotes to that issue, although I recall that she discusses it quite a bit in her books.
I know the issue I discussed (crack vs powder cocaine) is not the only disparity people have been complaining about. I’m simply saying that I simply forgot a lot of the stuff I’ve learned about drug disparity issues which is why I didn’t devote too much effort to discussing it in my comment. But in any case my point stands: how many people get exposed to the other side of the story? Your comment doesn’t show much evidence of being aware of my point about crack vs powder cocaine, but that hasn’t stopped you from speaking approvingly of kids being taught that “even though” blacks supposedly use drugs at the same rate as whites, they are disproportionately likelier to go to jail for drug use.
“The press almost never mentions the federal methamphetamine-trafficking penalties, which were identical to those for crack—five grams of meth netted you a mandatory minimum five-year sentence—and which now, after the sentencing revisions in 2010, are much more severe. In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants (nearly as many as the crack defendants) were 54 percent white, 39 percent Hispanic, and 2 percent black. But no one calls the federal meth laws anti-Hispanic or antiwhite.” Mac Donald, Heather. The War on Cops (p. 155). Encounter Books. Kindle Edition. Another fact that many students probably aren’t exposed to in classes teaching the stuff you’re talking about.
Dr Zoltan Jorovic
Mar 11 2022 at 12:01pm
“Suppose you learned that there was a school staffed mainly by extremist teachers and administrators. And at this school, an oddly large number of lessons touch upon, or perhaps center on, bad things that have been done by the ruling class throughout history. None of the lessons are factually false – all the incidents related are things that genuinely happened and all were actually done by the ruling class. For example, murders that they commissioned, times when they started wars, times when they robbed or exploited people. (I assume that you know that it’s possible to fill up quite a lot of lessons with bad things done by members of whatever social group you pick.) The lessons for some reason omit or downplay good things done by the ruling class, and omit bad things done by other (non-ruling class) people. What would you think about this school?
I hope you agree with me that this is a story of a unusual school. It would be fair to describe the school as promoting hatred toward the ruling class, even if none of the lessons explicitly stated that one should hate the ruling class. I hope you also agree that no parent or voter would tolerate a public school that operated like this.
Now, what if the school’s defenders explained that there was actually nothing the slightest bit racist, classist, revolutionary, or otherwise objectionable about the school, because it was only teaching facts of history? All these things happened. You don’t want to lie or cover up the history, do you?
I hope you agree with me that this would be an interesting defence.”
We could substitute “the majority” or “the dominant cultural group” or any number of euphemisms and still we would see that this argument is largely the polar opposite of what happens at most schools. The so-called thought experiment in its original form is essentially trying to link the teaching of a particular view of history to an especially vicious type of racism. But all history teaching is biased, and mostly it is biased in favour of whoever the dominant group in that society is. So, the only establishment that would teach such lessons would be one where the dominant group was fanatically anti-semitic. The author seeks to link this repugnant idea to a situation where people are trying to address a bias by teaching an alternative view. Namely that how we see history is distorted and biased by the dominant group. This is self-evident, so rather than use a loaded example, the “thought” experiment (we could ask how much thought went in to it, and what sort of bigotry informed it) should have turned it around to address the reality of how history is taught. Excluding, belittling, ridiculing and blaming everyone except those who control and run society. Standard history as taught in the average school is often an exercise in gaslighting all the minorities and subordinate social groups for the faults, prejudices, exploitation, failures and wrongdoings of the dominant one.
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