About three weeks ago Michael Powell of The New York Times wrote a piece about the Dorian Abbot situation, M.I.T.’s Choice of Lecturer Ignited Criticism. So Did Its Decision to Cancel. I admire Powell a great deal, and I am obviously sympathetic to Abbot. But let me highlight this section of the piece, which went viral on Twitter:
Phoebe A. Cohen is a geosciences professor and department chair at Williams College and one of many who expressed anger on Twitter at M.I.T.’s decision to invite Dr. Abbot to speak, given that he has spoken against affirmative action in the past.
Dr. Cohen agreed that Dr. Abbot’s views reflect a broad current in American society. Ideally, she said, a university should not invite speakers who do not share its values on diversity and affirmative action. Nor was she enamored of M.I.T.’s offer to let him speak at a later date to the M.I.T. professors. “Honestly, I don’t know that I agree with that choice,” she said. “To me, the professional consequences are extremely minimal.”
What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate? Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?
“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.
Dr. Cohen has now put out her side of the story, Becoming Clickbait for Speaking Out. First:
By the time Michael Powell from The New York Times reached out to me, however, I was already wary, feeling unsettled by questions that a reporter from The Boston Globe had asked me. When Powell asked me to talk to him, I responded, “If you’re serious about nuance then I am willing to talk. But if you’re just looking for a pull quote about liberal cancel culture, I’m not your person.” Powell assured me he was indeed seeking nuanced conversation and “not looking to insert Quote A into Space B.” Feeling somewhat reassured, I agreed to talk with him.
A moment of sympathy for the devil: if a reporter approaches you always be wary, and don’t trust them. They want their story. You are just a means to an end. They don’t see you as human, you are a source. The good reporters won’t lie about what you say, but the bad ones will. Even the good reporters though will strip you out of your preferred context into their own narrative. I like Powell quite a bit, and I’m aligned with him. But if he asked to talk to me, I would still record it (I’m in a one-party consent state). Generally, I refuse to talk to reporters though. That’s bad for society, but good for me. The media has brought this distrust on themselves, and only fools or total friendlies will talk to them. Be a fool, you’ll learn the hard way that the scorpion always stings you in the end.
Second, she elaborates her viewpoint in detail:
Intellectual debate and the concept of “rigor” are often seen as the pinnacle — that is, the most ideal form — of intellectualism today in American higher education, a type of discourse that is prioritized and prized in a system that was created by and for white men. There are many other forms of intellectual discourse and knowledge building that don’t center on conflict. “Intellectual debate” is often cited as an ideal for finding truth, but in reality, it is a framework that gives equal weight to two ideas that often are not, in fact, equally worthy of platforming. Some things, such as the humanity of any group of people or the roundness of the Earth, are simply not up for debate.
Further, the idea that two people standing behind wooden podiums pummeling each other in front of a rapt audience is the only way to engage in discourse is exclusionary, outdated and ignores the many ways that knowledge is generated, reshaped and discussed. For example, calls to decolonize higher education and academic disciplines ask those of us in dominant groups not only to update and change our curriculum and syllabi but also require us to ensure our classrooms are spaces where students feel accepted and engaged, as well as active and equal partners with the professor in their learning. And outside the classroom, my most productive and engaging intellectual conversations — the ones that have actually moved my science forward — have not been based in conflict, but instead in collaboration and a shared spirit of curiosity.
Beyond the concept of “debate,” critiques that center on rigor are equally problematic. Rigor according to whom? What standards are we using, and who is setting those standards? For centuries, a very thin slice of our society — primarily white, Christian, wealthy, non-disabled, cisgender men — has defined rigor in Western education systems.
That is not to say that debate or rigor are inherently wrong, useless or lack a place in academic discourse. But they do carry with them their own contexts and biases, and they are not neutral. For example, many metrics that academe has historically used to evaluate merit, such as standardized testing, are poorly designed and better reflect variables like family income rather than intellectual ability or even success in graduate school. Thus, using them as the standard by which we judge all people and all discourse is inherently flawed.
…I spoke up because pushing back against flawed “free speech” and “meritocracy” narratives is vital…
I was wrong. In each article in which I was quoted, I seemed to be the lone dissenting voice. Me, a liberal arts professor and paleontologist — not an expert on campus free speech, not a scholar on the history of conservative thought, but a rather scientist who studies the early evolution of life on our planet.
Explicit and implicit biases, structural racism, and ableism contribute to not only few minoritized students entering the field but even fewer deciding to stick it out for the long run. Abbot’s views on meritocracy and affirmative action deny the real, lived experiences of these students, as well as ignore the numerous published qualitative and quantitative studies on diversity in the geosciences. Where is the merit in that?
Dr. Cohen admits she’s no historian. She’s a geologist and paleobiologist. But, she’s got sterling credentials and I think her views reflect much of the thought of many academics, and it is likely the future. To be entirely frank she has no idea what she’s talking about, but her views are also widely shared and will be promulgated as the truth on high from the podiums of many universities. Her views are wrong on the merits, as anyone who digs into intellectual history will know, but that doesn’t matter, academics can develop a group consensus fast in the age of social media, and anyone denying these assertions will be seen as “white supremacist” and “ignorant.”
There’s an irony here: the idea that rigor is fundamentally the patrimony of white men would be agreed to heartily by the white supremacists of yore. One of the bizarre things about the current elite discourse, which I started noticing around 2010, is that it recycles the ideas of early 20th century Nordic supremacism, though white men are depicted as devils and evil rather than the virtuous creators.
But I think these assertions are based on false history. There are two major threads to this, the contingent and the general. In a contingent sense “disputed questions”, the genealogical ancestor of the contemporary Western intellectual tradition, began under the scholastics. In The Warriors of the Cloisters Christopher Beckwith argues that this method was imported (and perfected) into the West from the Islamic world and that its ultimate origins go back to Turanian Buddhism. Ergo, its origins are not Western, but Central Asian.
There is also a more general issue about rigor and debate: is this not the common human inheritance? There were intellectual debates in ancient India, over 2,000 years ago. There were debates in ancient China. And of course, in ancient Greece. These traditions didn’t emerge from a common invention by a lone genius. Debate didn’t have to be invented, it is part of human nature. We argue, we dispute, and we criticize.
Dr. Cohen asserts that some questions are simply not up for debate, pointing out whether particular groups are human and if the earth is round as two examples. But the consensus in these cases arose only after debate and discussion. At some point, questions are closed, and that’s what Dr. Cohen wants to do with affirmative action. She and her colleagues get to decide which ideas should be platformed, or not. This is just empirically true. Even though the American public is skeptical of affirmative action, there is now a consensus among the liberals who dominate academia that skepticism is racism, so that’s that.
Though Dr. Cohen is a scientist, of course, she doesn’t know the field of psychometrics and just repeats falsehoods that I hear commonly among academics. She asserts that tests are poorly designed (they’re not!), and that family income, not intellectual ability predicts scores (this doesn’t even make sense, as the two are entirely different sorts of variables), and that they don’t predict success in graduate school (range restriction). If standardized testing were part of her intellectual domain she wouldn’t engage in such sloppy thinking. But it’s not, and the things she says are now held to be truths across broad sectors of academia, so I don’t mind that she’s repeating nonsense. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Finally, she asserts the “lived experiences of these students.” Which students are these? Those she and her fellow travelers deem worthy of counting and considering. Many nonwhite students feel that rigor is their inheritance, their birthright, and they oppose affirmative action. But their lived experiences don’t count, they are dismissed. They decide.
I appreciate Dr. Cohen’s piece because she articulates the dominant mode of thought that is on the march in the academy today. There are dissenters, like Abbot, but most are silent in the face of the new order. This is the future Americans pay for in their tax dollars and tuition.
But a bittersweet aspect of this all is that when you banish rigorous debate as the ultimate arbiter of intellectual discussions, what you have left is pure power. When Dr. Cohen says that her most “productive and engaging ” intellectual advances “have not been based in conflict, but instead in collaboration,” listen. This is the velvet glove of power. If you disagree deeply, you are not a collaborator. If you are not on her team, you are problematic. They come not to bring peace but a sword. They will burn these institutions to the ground, and we will stand and watch because the courage of men has failed. We have only ourselves to blame.
.. I think her views reflect much of the thought of many academics, and it is likely the future.
Hm, Animal Farm? In some parts of the US it maybe will be future, but in others? I am very sceptical about that. My hope based on last Virginia election, and the most part of Asian American population.
Cohen and her ilk are just self-appointed political commissars. I await an American Franco to sweep away this nonsense. It’s either that or we are going to become a second rate or even a third rate power while others more interested in advancement than bizarre ideologies power ahead.
Andrii, affirmative action never wins an “election”. It has lost multiple referenda in California, of all places. But they continue implementing it. The people staffing the permanent bureaucracies will continue making the decisions regardless of elections. Sometimes, as with gay marriage, public opinion will come around after the unelected have made the decision for the public. But, while convenient, they don’t really need that.
@Andrii
You should not be hopeful about Asian Americans. We vote for Democrats at a rate of 70% and that has not changed over the years. Yes, the older immigrants are socially conservative but the second generation quickly assimilates into the progressive woke establishment.
Intellectual debate and conflict are not the same thing, although human nature being what it is, personal conflict/rivalries and other types of emotional involvement can influence an intellectual debate, and occasionally can harm debate and hinder progress. In my experience, debates work best when conducted without personal animosity, so that truth can be arrived at without the hindrance of bias.
But it is precisely not-so-nice conflict and verbal conflictual displays between rivalling males that is a human universal, and who thinks it doesn’t exist among African Americans, the only major racial group that can be said to be marginalized in US academia, is deluded.
The capacity for intellectual debate is also a human universal. How highly free debate vs. tradition and authority are valued may be culturally variable, but intellectual debate is clearly deeply entrenched in West Eurasian cultures. The (largely pre-Islamic) Talmud consists almost entirely of protocols of debating positions of individual “sages” and their pro and con arguments/the logic behind them, and later comments on the same.
Cohen, like all the neoracist antiracists, is enabling the white nationalists who also believe that Millsian free debate liberalism and the scientific method are an exclusive “white” cultural patrimony, and that “white” culture is going to be erased to suit immigrants and black Americans. The identitarian left and the identitarian right truly agree on almost everything nowadays.
@Harry Jecs
I don’t know if the majority of young Asian Americans , conservatives or liberals, but I don’t think that most of them support far left or the far right. I strongly doubt that young Asian Americans will support those ideas that harm them in the first place. Most Americans of Asian descent, both old and young, have critical thinking.
OT, I am amused to see how far off its game is the algorithm that suggests Related Posts at the bottom. The first two related posts are:
Powell’s started in Chicago
The revolution swallowing Powell’s Books?
W/o even reading these, I will go far out on a limb and state that they are not even as closely related as homonymns like mine (the pronoun) and mine (the noun). I am surprised that the algorithm missed this post from the blog’s ancient history.
As I began with, off topic, but then so is the algorithm.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Prof. Cohen was a beneficiary of affirmative action herself. Likely as a woman in STEM.
While, she is likely to be in the top 90-95% of the population in terms of intellect but was competing against people in 95-99% range.
People like that often have “imposter syndrome” for the simple reason that they are imposters. It is much easier on the ego to rationalize the idea that the system is broken rather than that you are at the bottom of your small sub-culture.
@Andrii
It doesn’t matter what most Asian Americans think because most of them will vote Democrat. We have seen no real change in Asian voting pattern in the last 4 years despite the rise of wokism. Conservatives have this fantasy that Asians will start voting Republican because they don’t like affirmative actions. But most Asians with any cultural or political influence are on the left and the regular people will vote Democrat. If there is a minority group that Republicans should be hopeful about, its the Hispanics.
(I tried to post this earlier, but just noticed that it is not there. Assuming some kind of glitch, I am trying again. If it was deliberately deleted, apologies for repeat posting).
OT, I am amused to see how far off its game is the algorithm that suggests Related Posts at the bottom. The first two related posts are:
Powell’s started in Chicago
The revolution swallowing Powell’s Books?
W/o even reading these, I will go far out on a limb and state that neither is even as closely related to this post as homonymns like mine (the pronoun) and mine (the noun). If the algorithm identified these as related, how did it miss this post from the blog’s ancient history.
As I began with, off topic, but then so is the algorithm.
I think perhaps there’s a question here of common heritage vs equal ownership. The history here is of course absolutely watertight as expected, but I’ll try a different tack and be a smart aleck and suggest maybe (despite being right in the fact) it even admits too much to the wrong side in this argument to try and justify things in their terms? Those terms being that we must prove a common heritage that belongs to ethnic groups to give permission for us to treat certain methods as providing truth.
Isn’t it enough for us to say that the methods arise as inevitable part of process to understand nature better, that as far as human intellect can tell would universal beyond humans to *any* kind of thinking being? That if they arose in some cultures more than others, this is just contingent and not necessary requiring those specific ethnic cultures and where they arose does not make those methods part of an “owned” cultural heritage, belonging to a people?
(And if that contingency includes dependence on things like the emergence of “Individualistic Psychology” as per Henrich, that doesn’t really change the fact of that contingency, nor create an ownership by certain cultures).
It seems like this is some kind of an outgrowth of an emerging concept of cultural ownership of ideas, or more commonly stated, “cultural appropriation”. Itself an idea that I would argue didn’t really cover any good, useful new ground that wasn’t already covered by opposition to crass commercialisation or by opposition to false histories. (It’s enough to oppose wrong histories that erased significant figures and commercialised their work without due consideration, without getting into ideas that cultures own ideas).
Seems like this is almost back-to-front view of the universe where rather than people believing that methods are deep and true, and are only contingently found more or less in particular human cultures due to the happenstances of human history, some people are convincing themselves that methods are deeply and in essence and universally bound to particular human cultures, and at the same time are not deeply true at all and random ways of understanding reality that are all equally productive.
I think this post misses a major point: even if it were true, who cares? Are we to devalue every human development that wasn’t developed by an woke-approved rainbow coalition of races and gender identities? Why? Are we prepared to live in a retrograde world created by forfeiting so much progress? Again, to what end?
I am generally pessimistic on “Asians” in America turning rightist, but this statement is untrue. Trump’s 2020 vote share among Asian voters increased from his 2016 share (somewhere between 1 to 3 percentage points). I would wager that the Republican share of the Asian vote in 2021 VA elections increased still (by the way, when Bob McDonnell won the governor’s race in VA – the last Republican to do so before Youngkin – he carried a majority of the Asian vote).
I commented on this broad topic in depth at Unz, so I won’t repeat it here, except provide some broad key points.
1. The demographic composition of “Asians” has changed dramatically in the U.S. Indians were a tiny fraction of “Asians” decades ago, but are now something like 20-25% of all Asians in America and are growing rapidly still. Moreover, they are extremely highly selected educationally – 70% of them have college degrees and over 40% (!) have graduate degrees – so their salience in elite circles (industry, politics, super zip codes) is even more magnified.
2. Traditionally, the most rightist Asians in America were the Koreans, the Filipinos, and the Vietnamese. They were either very anti-communist (Koreans, Vietnamese) or very Christian (Koreans, Filipinos) in America, which also meant that they had high indices of assimilation (see the Manhattan Institute data on migrant assimilation). The Chinese and the Indians, who now make up a large fraction of Asians in America are the least Christian in religion and display the lowest indices of assimilation. They also vote consistently for the Democrats by a wide margin; in the case of the Indians, they essentially vote like blacks.
3. On the positive side of the ledger for the GOP is the fact that Asians have the weakest party ID of among the major ethno-racial groups, meaning, their votes are “gettable” for campaigns that hustle for them. I don’t know how successful it was, but Youngkin’s campaign hustled hard for the Korean and the Vietnamese vote in Northern Virginia (didn’t hurt that the campaign was HQ’d in Chantilly which is surrounded by dozens of churches that catered to these communities).
4. On the much more negative side, the “new Asians” – increasingly comprised of highly-educated, non-Christian Indians – are not a fertile electoral ground for a rightist party that is powered by blue-collar Christian whites (and perhaps Hispanics).
5. One thing East Asians and South Asians seem to have in common – certainly as immigrants – is that they tend to be conformist toward those currently “in charge” of our society. After all, they came here to succeed and join the elite establishment, not to fight a cultural insurgency on the side of the losers. They aren’t sending their children to Liberty University here – the vast majority of their thought-leaders are being, and will be, indoctrinated by the Wokist establishment.
So, to reiterate, I am not optimistic. However, nothing is set in stone, and if the Democrats continued to turn into the black supremacist party, that will go much toward counteracting these tendencies. Steven Sailer’s term “the Coalition of the Fringes” is quite apt here, and such a coalition is inherently unstable long term.
@Twinkie
I completely agree with your observations. In general, I think Indian Americans will be like Jewish Americans(Btw the most woke people on this planet probably are Indian American women). Most Indians will always be separated from the broader white majority because of the difference in religion, which Hispanics and Koreans/Filipinos can assimilate into. Even if the country is secularizing, cultural Christianity still holds sway especially on the right. It would be very hard for non-Christian populations to be a part of this movement as Republicans are the party of old America. Democrats are the party of new America. So its natural that immigrants who have little in common with the old America in terms of culture, language, ethnicity or religion will support the party of new America.
It is hard to resist the idea that we should should go Henry VIII on the universities. What with the Federal government ramping up for multi trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, those multi billion dollar endowments look mighty tempting. And all of that real estate?
Let us face it. the intellectual life of the universities is dead. There is no policy lever we can pull to fix them. Only disassembly and financial attacks are available to us.
Tax the endowments. Impose wage and price controls on tuition and salaries. Research activities that receive Federal grants must be conducted by separate research institutions with their own trustees, management, books, etc. Hospitals must be separated as well. Any athletic events that allow members of the general public to attend or are broadcast must be done through taxable entities.
BTW: Cohen’s statement revealed no context or nuance. The reporter could not have deprived her of those. It just showed that she can duckspeak goodthink.
Another factor to consider is the rate of military service (it is indeed utilized by the Manhattan Institute study on assimilation as a proxy for civic assimilation). Hispanics, Koreans, and Filipinos have comparatively high rates of military service. Prevalence of Hispanics in the military is well-known to many Americans. Koreans, at one point, were 70-80% of Asian cadets at West Point and are even today well-represented in the Army officer corps. Filipinos were frequently employed in naval vessels, a tradition that still continues to some extent (and let’s not forget, too, that when the Japanese were a major component of the Asian population in America, they were rightfully valorized for their incredible bravery and sacrifice for their adopted country in World War II – the famed 442nd RCT and all).
In contrast, the “new Asians,” especially Indians, have extremely low rates of military service, something that also sets them apart from “old Asians” and further retards their assimilation into traditional “whiteness” as such.
They are already there.
This is something of a tangential cultural comment, but I always find it mildly amusing that when I go to my Judo and BJJ schools (or gun club), I see and meet some combination of “generic” whites, Hispanics, blacks, East Asians, etc., but hardly ever meet Indians… or Jews. With the latter two groups, there is definitely some “men without chests” vibe going on in general (Martin van Creveld once thusly described diaspora Jews).
I have read some good commentary on the migration of wokeness from academia to the MSM and how it is a good fit there and with global capitalism. I have also read good explanations of why the feedback works well among elites and wannabes who rely upon MSM and how it is valuable to enhancing elite power by obscuring class differences and exacerbating racial conflict. What I haven’t read is a good explanation of how and why it came to dominate academia.
@ iffen – For what it’s worth: Growing up in the 1960s, me and my snarky friends (we were smartass baby boomers) would disparage “guilty white liberals”. We felt comfortable in doing it because we were white liberals ourselves but didn’t have the baggage of guilt that they did. I think what’s changed is that now just about everyone who wants to be a good person feels guilt, and the way to expiate your sins is to support DEI.
Of course, that just pushes back the question of why potentially good people now feel obliged to be guilty. Part of it is just increased knowledge of bad things that went on. Part of it is that the people who dug up that knowledge and publicized that knowledge generally put it in a context that screamed guilty. Which again pushes the question back to why so many people accepted that context.
Maybe the decline of sin in religion left a vacuum for “social sin” to fill. (And there is a long tradition of “social sin” in intellectual America dating back at least to Walter Rauschenbusch in the early 1900s.)
There is a small tribe of people who have captured the universities. See Ron Unz on Harvard. Ms Cohen is saying collaborate with us or you will be excluded totally> The iron hand in the velvet glove
On the subject of cancellation, we have this morning:
“The Hounding of Roger Pielke Jr.: A journalist recently contacted me to ask about what happened after I was investigated by a member of Congress. Here is what I told her.”
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-hounding-of-roger-pielke-jr
“It has been quite a ride. You can read about it here.”:
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2021/11/Laframboise-Pielke.pdf
Hi, Razib and all readers,what you think about this:
https://eurogenes.blogspot.com/2021/11/when-it-seems-like-whole-world-has-gone.html?m=1
@Twinkie wrote:
“or Jews. … there is definitely some “men without chests” vibe going on in general (Martin van Creveld once thusly described diaspora Jews).””
I will take umbrage with that. I think that the courage and martial prowess of the Jewish people has been demonstrated by the Israeli Army.
And it does not save you to claim that they are not part of the diaspora. Genetically and socially they are. And in the earliest and most desperate years a majority of them had been born and raised out side of the Land.
It is also a confusion to claim that the prudence of a tiny despised and persecuted minority in avoiding conflict is cowardice. Displays of many virtue and martial prowess are easy when you are the ruling class.
I don’t know who this Creveld character is, but I will treat him as I would treat any other Jew hater.
Martin would find your characterization of him hilarious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_van_Creveld
The Land, absolutely love it.
This is the kind of unabashed patriotism that we need to cultivate for America.
Is that why American Jews today avoid military service? Because they aren’t in the ruling class?
You got it completely backward: it was when there was greater anti-Semitism, Jewish service in the military (in America) was more pronounced.
https://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/archives/a-call-to-military-service/article_023157bf-51a2-54dc-9c59-59d5b944ef9c.html
https://www.jweekly.com/2001/10/26/attention-where-are-the-jews-in-the-u-s-military/
Read Martin Levi van Creveld’s ‘Culture of War,” chapter 19, where he discusses the background to the lack (or loss) of military culture among Jews through the history of diaspora (and anti-Semitism) and the subsequent effort to construct one, which began with emancipation.
@Roger
Can’t we just say some Hail Marys to absolve America’s sins? Do we really have to destroy it?
@ Twinkie: I ain’t taking the bait
From Scott Alexander:
Apply For An ACX Grant
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/apply-for-an-acx-grant
What is ACX Grants?
I want to give grants to good research and good projects with a minimum of paperwork.
How much money are you giving out?
ACX Grants proper will involve $250,000 of my own money
Why do you have $250,000 to spend on grants?
Unsolicited gifts from rich patrons, your generosity in subscribing to my Substack, and the second item here.
There is no bait here. There is only you ignorantly disparaging a respected (if “controversial”) Israeli military and cultural historian (and by extension me, for quoting him) as a “Jew hater” and then running off muttering about “bait” when presented with facts/numbers and similar opinions by America’s Jewish military officers.
I note that you say nothing about the eeeevil stereotype about the Indians in America as being unmartial in the same comment of mine, but apparently a similar observation about the Jews – based on not just personal experience, but demographic and social indicators, set off the “Jew hater” trigger.
Isn’t this exactly the kind of SJW/modern academy behavior that you routinely decry?
To keep this a little light, I’ll tell you a funny story a Jewish friend of mine told me a long time ago when I first got to know him. At the time, he was a decorated Navy commander (O-5, equivalent to lieutenant colonel in the army). So, him being a decorated senior military officer (O-5 and O-6, captain in the Navy, colonel in the Army, are right below flag/general rank and are the senior officers who actually lead and fight battles) and one who made his rank “below the zone” (that is, earlier than expected), you’d expect his mom to be very proud of him, right?
Well, my friend, the younger of the two sons in his family, went to visit his mother at home one day and found her talking to a group of her friends (now, imagine this being told in a very stereotypical NYC Jewish old lady accent). Upon seeing this hunk of a fine manhood walking in, the eyes of his mother’s friends all lit up and one of them quickly asked loudly, “IS HE THE DOCTOR?”
After a brief and embarrassing pause, his mother muttered, “NO, HE IS THE OTHER ONE.”
“Oh…” disappointedly said the lady friends.
There’s an old-time Jewish mother for you – there is a doctor son and then there is “the other one,” you know, the black sheep of a son who didn’t amount to much but become a decorated senior military officer of his nation. 😉
Hmm… Jewish recruitment in WWI in Germany was pretty good as far as I can remember. The era of Max Baer too (although that’s kind of 50:50). To some extent Jews were well represented among “bomb chucking revolutionary” types in that era also, I think, which isn’t exactly not physical courage.
I would think WWI and WWII particularly, and subsequent US debacle in Vietnam (and then probably Afghanistan and arguably Iraq) were all pretty discrediting of military nationalism, and that was particularly pronounced among some groups who saw the conflicts as particularly bad for them, or were otherwise predisposed to be skeptics.
Also I don’t really know either whether the military do much active “Moneyball” recruiting that targets really high IQ individuals. If they did, you’d expect high Jewish recruitment and more Jewish generals… but I think it’s more kind of “minimum threshold” and the focus perhaps is on active recruitment of large ethnic groups that are seen as a potential mainstay of a large army.
Though proportionate recruiting anyway would depend on whether the military is proportionate to society in its skill structure. If the military is disproportionately middle-skilled, then the groups with high-skill would be expected to be under-represented compared to share of society, even if they did go “Moneyball” on IQ. It wouldn’t be expected to be a mirror to society or to disproportionately represent high skill.
In general, military recruitment isn’t so much economic- or “skill”-dependent as culture dependent. For example, Asians are economically above average, and their share of those completing basic training was 8% in 2018, well above the overall population share (though there is a great deal of variation by ethnic origin). To the extent that the former variables matter, they manifest in enlisted vs. officer fractions or MOS selection (e.g. blacks end up driving trucks, white kids who grew up playing water polo become SF as do American Indians) rather than overall recruitment rate.
For example, as I wrote above, at one point in recent history, something like 70-80% of “Asian” cadets at West Point were Koreans. I don’t know the numbers today (hence the caveat), but that kind of extreme imbalance isn’t explained by economics or skill levels. And these Koreans at West Point were considered quite hard core by other cadets, especially other Asian cadets (a Chinese-American Green Beret who grew up privileged and “mellow” in NorCal once narrated the shock he experienced with his Korean roommate at USMA – he verbally bullied the latter for a while and after putting up with it for some duration, apparently the Korean just got up and wordlessly punched him and KO’d him – and he mentioned that this kind of pugnaciousness was the norm among the Korean contingent at West Point; by the way, boxing is a required part of the PE curriculum there).
The Korean Mafia at West Point centered around the “Korean-American Relations” Seminar/club and even their parents were/are extremely enthusiastic boosters of West Point. There remains a high degree of valorization of military service among Koreans that feeds into this (many of the “rooftop Koreans” during the L.A. Riots were former South Korean marines, some with combat experience in Vietnam).
Similarly, there is a Filipino Mafia in the Navy. Filipinos are numerically much greater in the Navy than Koreans are in the Army, but Filipinos tend to be more enlisted than officers while Koreans are better represented in the officer corps due to the educational/social disparity. For a while, my main BJJ training partner was a Filipino – former Marine and a SWAT officer at the time. And most of my Kali (stick/knife fighting) instructors were obviously Filipino.
These days, among all races in America, the primary factor affecting the rate of military service is prior family history and culture of military service, period. This ends up manifesting geographically with the Midwest and the South contributing proportionally greater shares of recruits.
I can add my in-laws to this pattern. My (white) wife hails from an elite family in the Midwest. Hers is the kind of family that once ran everything in their company town – businesses, farms, banks, hospitals, etc. Yet just about every able-bodied male has served – her grandfathers (WWII), her father and uncles on both sides (Vietnam), her brothers and cousins (GWOT), and now her nephews (one of whom just graduated basic training). Three of them were physicians in the military. For that matter, my wife is also a direct descendant of a Continental Army officer on her father’s side and her ancestors fought in just about every war America has fought. Military service is in her family’s enduring culture of martial leadership and sacrifice.
In her home town, this culture pervades all classes of men. Woe unto those men there who don’t belong to the local American Legion posts! And, not unrelatedly, guess what one of the most popular school sports in town is… it’s wrestling.
By the way, this might be of some interest, in light of the post-emancipation Jewish effort to construct a martial culture: https://www.jewishinsandiego.org/jewish-community-news/when-jews-ruled-the-fencing-world
@Twinkie, Asian recruits could be 8% completing basic training but only slightly under population share in active duty – https://www.statista.com/statistics/214869/share-of-active-duty-enlisted-women-and-men-in-the-us-military/ (5.4% total pop vs 4.4% male forces) ? Youth bulge?
Does seem like the US occupations (or US bases and assistance or however we want to put it) created links that matter today. I don’t think anyone would have suggested that the totally Yangban dominated, un-militaristic hermit kingdom had a deeply martial culture? But as the American occupation goes, so go the links, and then goes the downstream specialization. Similar thing for Filipinos maybe. Nothing like that in South Asia.
@ iffen -No, not destroy it; TRANSFORM it. Build it back better!
Build it back better!
I’m not sure that building back will do the trick. We need to build a better future and I’m not sure that we are up for the task. It seems to me that the Red Chinese are beginning to clean our clock and I’m not sure that trajectory won’t just continue. I have a visceral, knee-jerk repulsive reaction to elites, but elite failure is an ugly thing to watch and I take
novery little pleasure in it.Milan is gone but Twinkie carries on.
Do you have any substantive point or a rebuttal or are you just doubling down on dumb ad hominem?
Do you still maintain that van Creveld is a “Jew hater,” for example?
The manly thing would be to admit honestly you were uninformed, that you presumed what you shouldn’t have, apologize for calling names, and either move on or engage in further exchange (sharp or cordial) of information, analysis, and opinions.
Yes, I am calling your behavior out as unmanly.
There are several confounding issues on Asian demographics you ought to keep in mind in discussing this. First of all, the Asian population in America was considerably smaller than 5.4% even in the relatively recent past (the Asian population grew 80% during 2000-2019, for example. Second, note that a large portion of the older Asian population was foreign-born and/or non-citizens who faced some limitations or restrictions in military service (something that most American Jews haven’t faced in a very long time). Third, the Asian population – due to immigration – historically has skewed older.
When I discussed the lack of Indians in the military with an Indian friend of mine once, he brought up one of these points – that the proportion of foreign-born Indians in the U.S. is higher than that of, say, Koreans (meaning, a greater percentage of Koreans here are U.S.-born citizens than is the case with Indians, thus potentially raising Korean service in the armed forces). It’s an argument that bears addressing.
The Migration Policy Institute actually has some data on just the foreign-born immigrants serving in the military that sheds light on these cultural patterns. In 2008, the overall Indian population in the U.S. was roughly 2X that of Koreans (approx. 3 million vs. 1.5 million), yet among the foreign-born Indians (who constituted a bigger fraction of that 3 million than is the case with Koreans) only 390 served in the military. Meanwhile over 2,000 foreign-born Koreans in America served. And that’s without factoring in the fact that the Indian population in America has trended younger than the Korean one (meaning, more military age-eligible).
Parenthetically, I should note that around that time, the number of Mexican-born immigrants in the U.S. were about 12 million (not ALL Mexican-descended population, just the ones who were born in Mexico), yet only about a little over 6,000 foreign-born Mexicans served in the U.S. military in 2008.
Anyway you cut it, Koreans in America have a very high military service rate that is only exceeded by a handful of other groups such as the Filipinos (“Nursing or Navy”).
First of all, your premise is wrong. Korea was not a “totally Yangban dominated, un-militaristic hermit kingdom” even during the Joseon Dynasty.
How do you think the dynasty came into being? Answer: through a coup launched by a general who was given an army to invade Ming China. Not only was all Korean dynasties prior to Joseon highly militaristic (Hwarang warriors ring a bell?), even during the Joseon period, the Yangban examinations were divided into civil and military ones, the latter being popular with ordinary men looking to raise their status: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23719470
Don’t forget that Joseon experienced the deep trauma of multiple Japanese and Manchu invasions and invested heavily in military forces during various periods (so much so that the Ming required Joseon to furnish archers and arquebusiers, having deemed them superior to those fielded by the Ming). “Totally un-militaristic” people don’t produce a work like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Muye-Dobo-Tongji-Comprehensive-Illustrated/dp/1880336480
Moreover, van Creveld’s arguments about Jewish lack of martial history during the diaspora aren’t about other nations universally having “a deep martial history” – more that “normal” nations then coming into being in the 18th and 19th Centuries had more recent national mythologies of defending the blood and soil and the accompanying romance of martial valor, upon which to fall to reconstruct the ethos of their nascent modern national armed forces, something that the diaspora Jews obviously lacked.
Yes, absolutely the role of the U.S. is crucial for both Koreans and Filipinos (and vastly more so for the latter as the Americans literally ruled the PI as a colony). The modern South Korean “militarism” as such is tripartite in origin – Japanese imperialism, American occupation and patronage, and the native military dictatorship. Nonetheless, when it came time to reconstruct the Korean national military ethos, they could invoke the likes of Admiral Yi Sun-sin and the heroism of the Buddhist monks and the ordinary peasants (led by local Yangban) who resisted the Japanese invasions only a few hundreds of years ago, instead of having to reach all the way back thousands of years ago to something like Masada as the nascent Jewish state had to do.
On a personal note, I should mention that I spent time in Israel and thoroughly enjoyed the company of my Israeli counterparts. I found these Sabras to be very much Mentschen, not like the mostly effete Jews with whom I was acquainted growing up (to be sure, I knew some tough Jews, but these were mostly Russian immigrants, not the American Jews, and even these Jews tended to be more “cerebral” than the Russian-Russian immigrants I knew).
Matt, I replied to you at some length, but it is apparently sitting in moderation.
What’s the jist of it?
Twinkie: I am not taking the bait.
@Twinkie, “totally unmilitaristic” was I admit (slightly bait) hyperbole to see if I’d get a sort of national pride, “Honor and masculinity of the Korean male is at stake” sort of response out of you. Just that it wasn’t a sustained military fiscal state as in much Europe, or with as much constant warfare and fractious kingdoms as South Asia, and relatively more civilian, rather than the hyperbole which might imply no experience whatsoever. There are things they had to draw on. I do wonder if Jews ever drew on the idea of self-defence during pogroms as an expression of the ideas of national self-defence. (How much of that there ever was, I also don’t know).
This is jackassery and unworthy of someone who purports to deal in facts and reason. If you are the same “Matt,” whose comments on human genetic history I read with interest on this site, color me highly disappointed.
I don’t expect arguments to be devoid of human emotions and rationalization (that is to be expected from all human beings, to a grater or lesser extent). What I do expect from intelligent and forthright people is that, whatever the origins of their arguments or even the interior psychological necessities for the same*, those arguments should be good arguments that rest on sound evidence.
And if you are trolling to bring out a reflexive, emotional, and unthinking response, I am the wrong target here. I am not the one who stupidly called out Martin van Creveld as a “Jew hater” here. So kindly direct the “baiting” and argument-by-anonymous armchair psychological evaluation elsewhere.
*And if you or other readers of these comments sense that I am proud of the martial history of my own family (and, yes, that of my wife’s), you are absolutely correct. My family origin reputedly dates back to the 7th Century, but is historically attested on a firmer ground to the 13th Century, to a specific military leader. Since then my family has had a long history of military service.
Both of my grandfathers and all of my great uncles served in war. One of my great uncles (my mother’s favorite uncle) was only 17 when, as the cadet-captain of his high school JROTC, volunteered to don a satchel charge and ran into an enemy tank. The youngest of these great uncles retired as a lieutenant colonel in the army, having risen from a conscript. My own father attended the naval academy and served as an officer in my birth country. Two of my uncles were (infantry) company commanders in the Vietnam War.
So, yes, I am quite proud of my family’s service and demonstrated martial valor. Even so, the arguments I make about the different cultures of military service (or lack thereof) are not based on prejudices or even personal experiences (though the latter do color and inform my arguments sometimes) – they are based on empirical evidences and historical facts. I know what I and the men of my family have done and sacrificed – I don’t need to prop up a whole country to feel manly.
For that matter, I have shared my feelings in the past just what I think about the cosmetics-wearing males of the present generation of young men in South Korea. It’s not for nothing that I called the “Rooftop Koreans” of the early 1990’s the Peak Koreans. If P.J. O’Rourke were to visit South Korea today, he wouldn’t refer to them the way he did decades ago thusly:
There was a lot of warfare and invasions in Joseon history and the rise of “the civilian” as such was a particularly late Joseon phenomenon when international borders and relations stabilized. If you knew of South Korean history even cursorily – and only people who do or purport to know about some semblance of Korean history throw around terms such as “Yangban” – you’d know about Admiral Yi Sun-sin. Before his well-publicized heroics in the Imjin Wars (Hideyoshi’s invasions of Joseon), how do you think he acquired such military expertise? The answer is that that there was considerable instability in Joseon’s northern border and Yi took part in the interminable border wars against the Jurchen (the precursor to the Manchus).
You seem to be confusing the literate traditions of the ruling elite in East Asia with scarcity of military conflict in the region.
You also should keep in mind that, prior to the late 18th Century, warfare was very much an elite affair, even in Europe (“military fiscal state” or no). Before levee en masse was instituted by the French Revolution, most ordinary European people didn’t fight in war and were not participants in “the culture of war.” Similarly, in Japan, the Samurai class that fought in endless wars prior to the Tokugawa unification was a tiny fraction of the population. Yet, when it came time to create a national, modern army based on universal conscription, the warrior ethos (perceived or real) of the Samurai was invoked and then instilled in the sons of the Japanese peasants (and even the urban proletariat), because it was there to be utilized.
If you are genuinely curious, get yourself a copy of van Creveld’s “The Culture of War” and read chapter 19 (“Men without Chests”) in particular. A little spoiler – it’s not what “Walter Sobchak” thinks (i.e. Jew-hating or, I guess, Jew-self-hating, van Creveld being an Israeli). To a great extent, it’s about the legacy of Western anti-Semitism and what being deprived of a historically persistent national romance of martial valor does to a people.
If you are invested enough in the discussion to keep trying to throw a parting shot and still “win the internet,” surely you can at least clarify the charge of Jew-hating (which practically equates to an accusation of being subhuman these days).
Or are you just a snowflake who can dish out unthinking ad hominem, but can’t stick around to defend his words?
@Twinkie, well, come on here, you can’t really act so outraged at the same time as making comments about “effete” Jews that are somewhat unnecessary and probably aimed drawing a particular response from Walter. I think you’ve made a clear argument here (whether or not I find an ounce of it convincing, particularly as relating to anyone alive today) and I am interested in what you say, I’m not just purely trolling you.
Clarifying, above was just explaining why I used a mildly provocative bit of exaggeration in the discussion; I wasn’t describing or dismissing what your eventual response was like (though it may have seemed like I was).
I am not “outraged.” I wrote exactly how I felt about what you wrote – “highly disappointed.” Please stop purporting to know my emotional state. This is the kind of what I call argument-by-anonymous armchair psychological evaluation people online seem to use frequently “to win the internet.” This only compounds my aforementioned disappointment.
I described most of the Jews with whom I grew up in the U.S. thusly, because that was EXACTLY how I perceived them. I also mentioned, in the same comment, that I found Israelis Jews whom I encountered and worked with in Israel to be, to use a bit of NY Yiddish, “Mentschen” – meaning, manly. Both are parts of MY particular experiences.
I have had other, “confirming” experiences. As I mentioned, in all my years of training in Judo and BJJ in the U.S., I have rarely run into Jews (or Indians). I don’t believe these groups are well-represented in combat sports in general in the U.S., be it wrestling, boxing, TKD, etc. Meanwhile, in Israel, Judo is a very popular sport and there have been several Israeli world champions in Judo such as Sagi Muki. Israelis even have their own “martial art” (Krav Maga). Again, different cultures – more relevantly, of course, those who avoid military service (even if they could) in Israel will find it difficult to find jobs and face other aspects of ostracism whereas in the U.S., as the Jewish Air Force officer I quoted above writes, “nice (diaspora) Jewish boys and girls aren’t raised to grow up and be soldiers.”
And setting aside my particular experiences, there are measurable proxies to consider such as rates of military service, which seem to confirm my intuitions and experiences. If someone disagrees with my assessments – and I welcome reasoned disagreements – I’d like to hear it and why so.
Unlike what you did earlier, I have zero interest in “drawing a particular response” from my interlocutors on this topic. I will use the words I used whether my conversation partner is Razib Khan, Walter Sobchak, or “Matt.”
Moreover, your chronology is off. My usage of the word “effete,” came long after Mr. Sobchak slandered van Creveld (and me, by extension). And, yes, I find his subsequent routine to be unmanly, period. If he found my (and van Creveld’s) characterization of diaspora Jews distasteful, but did not wish to engage in a discussion on the topic, he could have ignored it simply. Throwing up ad hominem, bad arguments that can be falsified easily that are also insulting and minimizing toward others (“Displays of many virtue and martial prowess are easy when you are the ruling class”), and then engaging in parting shots and refusing to argue forthrightly all strike me as the behavior of an intellectual coward. And I have never known an intellectual coward to be anything other than physically cowardly as well.
Why not state whether you do or not, indeed, and elaborate why? Obfuscating your own position and just taking pot shots by pop-psychology doesn’t make for a productive or interesting conversation.
If you are genuinely interested in what I write, is there even a need to troll me “impurely” or partly? Maybe human genetic history is serious to you, but a topic such as the culture of military service is not. Well, it’s an important and weighty topic to me (don’t forget I was a military historian in another life).
If you sincerely want my opinion on something, all you have to is ask – and I will give you my earnest answers. And I will also address – to the best of my abilities – any points of contention you have about the said opinions.