I don’t mean this in the sense someone would say “the King of Kings”, but in the sense someone would talk about the issue of questions. Socrates is credited with the formal development of this process in philosophical terms and it is called The Socratic Method in this context.
Questioning like this is often described as a process of arriving at the truth, but it’s also (and usually more likely) a process of delineating the boundaries of ignorance. Knowing what you don’t know can be a very useful thing indeed.
It is said that Thomas Edison was criticized for conducting 10,000 experiments that failed. His answer, which I paraphrase, was along the lines : I haven’t failed 10,000 times. I have successfully discovered 10,000 things that don’t work.
One of the principal characteristics we’ve all noticed about the woke, the Slogan People, alongside their obvious tolerance, compassion and loving nature as they scream “if you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”, is that they aren’t very good with being asked “difficult” questions.
How many times have we seen an exchange of the following form?
Slogan Peep : X is a hateful bigot
Normie : Oh my. What did X actually say?
Slogan Peep : . . . (silence)
If not silence, then “look it up on Google - I can’t be bothered to do the work for you”. You do this and, after wading through the first 20,000 results claiming X to be hateful, you find a buried link to what X actually said. And surprise, surprise, you struggle to find the “hate” anywhere.
I first noticed this when I woke to woke back in 2016. Nicholas Christakis, a professor, was surrounded by a mob of students in a quad at Yale. He spent the next couple of hours or so, with the patience of a saint, trying to reason with them. Not that I’ve ever tried, but it was like trying to reason with a rhinoceros on heat.
OK, students often get their knickers in a twist over some thing or other, and that’s fine. What wasn’t fine was their refusal to even engage with Christakis on anything but their own terms. There was no process of trying to understand Christakis’ position, whereas he spent a great deal of time trying to understand theirs.
A little after this I learned of the Evergreen incident - which is well worth reading about (do a search for Evergreen and Weinstein and you’ll probably, eventually, get enough articles detailing the events). One of the things that astonished me was an exchange Weinstein had with a colleague during a faculty meeting. They were told that Evergreen was another one of those places simply awash with racism. Black people were being subject to unimaginable horrors, apparently. Weinstein was puzzled by this and asked for evidence. He was told that
“asking for evidence of racism is racism with a capital R”
This statement is moronic with a capital M. I’m sure I don’t need to explain why it’s moronic to you guys, but this was a statement made by a professional academic. It’s hard to even process that fact, for me. The attitude implicit in the statement is the antithesis of what an academic should be.
What worried me at the time was that these kinds of views weren’t being expressed by random internet nutjobs who, God bless ‘em, make the internet such a lively and entertaining place. No, these were views being espoused by, supposedly, serious and gifted people - and certainly very privileged people. I knew we were in big, big trouble.
Several thousand DIE’s later and my fears have come true. We’re dying by a process of DIE, amongst other things. The ‘I’ bit here stands for inclusion - but it’s only about the right kind of inclusion. People with the wrong colour skin (white - or if you’re unlucky enough to be Asian you’re white-adjacent, you scholarly bastards taking up those black spaces at university), or the wrong ideas, or those who want to ask questions - they’re definitely not included in this glorious woke utopia.
After all, if you didn’t vote for Biden, you can’t possibly be black.
Try asking questions in a Humanities or Grievance department about whether white privilege is a correct, or sensible, concept with which to frame things and see how far you get.
And, in finest Evergreen style, questioning the relevance of white privilege, or its existence, is an example of white privilege.
Asking questions, even stupid ones, is a wonderful thing. If you don’t just reject it out of hand, it forces you to evaluate a position.
Here’s a recent question that occurred to me :
Although it’s definitely meant to be a provocative question, and perhaps a silly one, the process of giving a rational answer might well be illuminating for other questions about the nature of national identity and what influence ethnicity as opposed to simple land ownership might have had in the decades long conflict.
Here’s another one : if immigration is such a wonderful thing, then what was wrong with the mass migration of Jews into the region in the 1920’s?
This is a question that is somewhat pertinent for both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ positions on immigration in general today.
Here’s another one on the gender wars : if my girlfriend woke up this morning and decided she was a “he”, and I still found her attractive, does this mean I became gay overnight?
Or on the abortion issue : if a man gave his girlfriend a drug without her knowledge to terminate her pregnancy, what crime has he committed?
Questions like these have long been used to investigate the boundaries and consistency of our ethical positions. One of the most famous is the so-called trolley problem (and its many variations and tweaks)
I’m sorry folks, but if my daughter is the “one”, then the 5 are going to get squished. No question about it - and I wouldn’t blame you for coming to the same decision as me if my daughter was in the 5 and yours was the “one”.
But a process of gradually adding more conditions to the problem (if it was five 65-year olds and one 25-year old would you pull the lever to switch tracks?) helps us to understand the boundaries, and limitations or inconsistencies, of our ethical positions.
I couldn’t remember the name of the Canadian teacher who killed himself after suffering abuse and harassment after questioning a DIE instructor on whether Canada was more racist than the US. I did a Google and a Duck search. The results were illuminating (slightly more balanced on Duck - but that’s not saying much). I typed in the phrase “your job as white people is to believe” which is close to, but not quite, the actual phrase used by the instructor which was :
“Your job in this work as white people is to believe”
It’s a statement we’ve heard lots of times before - but I couldn’t find any example linked to by Google or Duck. What I got were many, many, links to articles explaining why white people were racist, and how they were the ‘problem’, and lots of articles about white privilege (not articles attacking the concept). I had to type in “Canadian teacher commits suicide over racism” before I got to links to the actual event.
It’s interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the assumption that we should automatically believe anyone is ridiculous. Secondly, even asking questions is not guaranteed to help when the answers (from Google and Duck) are constrained to only one perspective.
This is one of the fundamental problems we face. The whole process of questioning as a way of gaining a better understanding is being undermined. People who, in good faith, asked questions abut covid and the response to it were summarily ejected from their social media accounts, for example.
Governments have, of course, done this kind of thing for centuries. We expect this of the majority of the power-crazed duplicitous fuckers we call politicians - but what has changed is a shift in the attitudes of society towards the (often robust) process of getting to the “truth” by a process of questioning. This is very concerning.
A very worrying percentage of people think it’s the right thing for governments (and their Tech collaborators) to step in to “protect” people from misinformation - or that wonderfully nebulous thing we call “hate speech”.
In my view it’s not just the detail of the various issues we should be concerned about, but the whole process by which we arrive at an understanding or some compromise. Our ability to reach the kind of understandings and compromises we once took for granted as the outcome of argumentation is being severely curtailed by limitations on our ability to ask questions, the kind of questions we can ask, and the answers we are given access to.
Perhaps we need a slogan or two ourselves :
Questioners rights are human rights
Some more details on the Evergreen and Christakis incidents:
At Evergreen State College, a biology professor had his class invaded by a frenzied mob hurling ‘Fuck you, you piece of shit’ type abuse. The professor, ironically a lifelong progressive, “had refused to obey an edict from Evergreen’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services that all white faculty cancel their courses for a day and…white students were also ordered to absent themselves from the school to show ‘solidarity’.” Evergreen’s president expressed his “gratitude” for the mob’s “passion and courage”. In 2015 an orgy of foul-mouthed student self-engrossment took place at Yale: “Who the fuck hired you?!...You should not sleep at night!’ screams a black student at her college master Nicholas Christakis. “You are disgusting!” screams another. (His wife had recently suggested that the Yale multiculturalism bureaucracy did not need to oversee Halloween costumes.) “Christakis meekly tells the students that he was trying to understand their predicament.” He hugs one of the students, Abdul-Razak Mohammed Zachariah, in a conciliatory gesture, “but Zachariah orders Christakis to understand that the ‘situation right now doesn’t require you to smile’. Another female student, Alexandra Zina Barlowe, [responds to Christakis’s meek defence of free speech] ‘It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not…It’s not a debate’.” Yale subsequently conferred on Barlowe and Zachariah its graduation prize for accomplishment in the “service of race and ethnic relations”. The real shocker in these and many similar examples is not the behaviour of the (hopefully atypical) student ‘protesters’, self-engrossed and feral though it certainly is, but the sycophantic response to and encouragement of it by college administrators." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
The Yandex.com search engine went right to the story you were searching for -- its first two responses to a search using “your job as white people is to believe” nailed it. I'm guessing that the Russians are indifferent to our non-Russian news-filtering biases (no doubt they have their own). Now I wonder if Russians use Google or Duck-Duck to find out what's been printed or reported in their country.