Last Will and Testament
By Michael Jaffrey
It was the last essay of the term and as I hit the submit button a lovely sense of relief and achievement washed over me. I’m almost at the end of my degree and everyone tells me how good it feels to finish. I can’t wait. I will take a well-earned break, which probably won’t last very long because boredom and the craving for intellectual stimulation will force me back to the lecture theatre.
I had just finished a unit on statistics. This was a big surprise to me; who would have thought that so many funny Greek letters and endless lists of raw numbers could be interesting to a student of creative writing?
But it was.
It satisfied on two levels. The tedium of collating raw data was a kind of meditation that tied down the monkey mind and gave me a rest from thinking - a kind of intellectual basket weaving. Then, after the slog work was done, the little adding up men inside my laptop did their work and an amazing picture emerged; an X-ray of the body social which revealed all sorts of interesting trends, structures, and pathologies. It was like looking at an MRI image of humanity’s lower colon.
This degree has cost me something in the order of $30,000, but it has been worth every cent. It has taken me on a literary journey from the temple poetry of ancient Assyria, through the intellectual Renaissance world of Thomas More and the romanticism of Mary Shelly, to the tortured sophistry of Michel Foucault. What a ride!
But I got more value for money than the average student. Having gone to school before the education system divided the world into oppressors and oppressed - encouraging young minds to hate one and pity the other – I was not seduced by this reductionist worldview so that when I got to university, I was free to observe it in operation in the classroom.
This second education was as horrifying as it was fascinating. I wrote about it in a previous article for Cureiux, Against Presentism, where I described how, for the first time, I realized that UC wasn’t the cross between the Oxford of Brideshead Revisited and the exciting academic ferment of the 1970s – but call me a romantic.
In this article I described a brazen case of “presentism” in a class on children’s literature. Our tutor pointed to a picture of a Victorian woman reading to two children and said: “What is wrong with this picture? Yes, gender stereotypes!”
You could have blown me over with a copy of Honi Soit. My naïve presumption that art should be examined in its historical context was ripped from me and I stood naked before the ideological beast: the Marxist beast that says it is more important to change the world than to understand it.
A tortured cry escaped my academically virginal lips: “According to who?” I yelled.
Our tutor hesitated before replying: “Because I say”, and then after a moment’s reflection, “You won’t find anyone around here who thinks differently.”
This statement was more disturbing than the first, but it showed something that many hours of study could not have revealed. My question had torn away her saccharine primary school teacher’s façade to reveal the grim face of the ideological Terminator beneath.
But no one else seemed to notice. No one said, “Excuse me, that’s an argument from authority, isn’t that a logical fallacy?”, or “Shouldn’t we examine cultural tropes in context?” No, she was preaching to the converted.
This was my introduction to the bizarre universe of Foucauldian Postmodernism; a dystopian world where everyone wears a cultural virtual reality helmet which plays the movies of their race. A dystopian world where each one is forced to fight a “narrative” war against the enemies of their group, and the battle lines are constantly changing; men against women, whites against blacks, straights against gays, gays against trans - and everyone’s favorite - the West versus the rest.
For those who buy into this game there is a tremendous payoff; when all “narratives” are equally valid no one can tell you who you are, and no one can tell you what to do.
The contradictions contained within this relativist philosophy are succinctly described by American philosopher Stephen Hicks: “All truth is relative – relativism is true; all cultures are equally deserving of respect – Western culture is uniquely destructive and bad; all values are subjective – sexism and racism are evil; Western technology is destructive – it’s unfair that some people have more technology than others; tolerance is good, and dominance is bad – no other creed but relativism is to be tolerated.”(1)
You would think that an ideological beast constructed on such a foundation couldn’t survive in a rigorous intellectual environment like a university; but you’d be wrong.
In one of my units - Big Stories – our tutor proclaimed that all representation of “cisgender” marriage was “harmful,” and in almost the next breath she said that all cultural narratives were “context dependent.”
I pointed out that both these statements couldn’t be true at the same time. I used Japan as an example of a culture where pictures of traditional cis gender marriage were commonplace. Our tutor made no reply to my objection, but simply murmured “cultural context always” to herself like a mantra, and no one in the class commented on the obvious contradiction.
But one student did make a comment. He said that things in Japan were “changing,” meaning that cis gender “normativity” was being replaced by queer theory’s liberating doctrine of gender “fluidity.” In other words, the Japanese were being “freed” from the shackles of their traditional, oppressive, cis gender, cultural narratives.
Out of the mouths of babies.
This smacked strongly of Mao’s cultural revolution; his drive to eradicate the four old’s: “old ideas,” “old culture,” “old customs,” and “old habits.”
So, back to the study of statistics. In this class I also received two educations for the price of one. The first, an introduction to statistics; the second, an insight into Mark Twain’s famous quote about statistics: there are, “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
We were shown how statistics without sufficient information can be deceptive. The textbook example was a study showing higher rates of suicide among teenagers with acne. Various hypotheses were put forward to explain the correlation between acne and suicide: self-consciousness and social embarrassment, and various other theories. Nothing seemed to explain this trend until it was discovered that the medication commonly used to treat acne was a central nervous system depressant.
We were also shown how statistics could be used to reveal the underlying causes of community attitudes. The example given was the failure of the Voice to Parliament referendum with a statistical analysis provided by the ABC. (2)
To cut a long story short, if you sort the voting population according to three criteria a clear picture emerges. These are: distance from urban centers, education, and personal income. Variation along any of these axes indicates a clear propensity to vote Yes or No. Being less educated, living further away from urban centers and earning less money all indicate a tendency to vote NO, while those who live in an urban center, have a higher income, and are better educated tended to vote YES.
It also turned out that the same analysis applied to the 1999 Republican referendum. Our lecturer added his own personal perspective by saying that anyone who voted NO was “resistant to change.”
The not-so-subtle implication of this analysis is that education equals “enlightened” opinion, and that the “uneducated” regressive “right” are holding the country back from a racial harmony. Reading deeper between the lines, we see a “spiritual” dimension to the Voice as expressed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
There’s lies, damn lies, and then there’s statistics.
I did some digging and discovered something that should come as no surprise to anyone; that Australian universities – and universities all over the Anglosphere - have been drifting to the left since the late 1970’s, to the point now where the bias is extreme.
In Psychology Today, May 2020, professor of social psychology Lee Jussim writes:
“Red flags have been raised by serious scholars about political biases undermining the validity and credibility of scientific research on politicized topics for a long time.” (3)
He quotes research from 1976 by Professor Lawrence J Saha at ANU which puts the political breakdown of academics at:
Left – 50%; Center – 14%; Right – 32%. (4)
Over the next 40 years that picture changed radically. A study in 2014 showed that “radicals,” “activists,” and “Marxists” outnumbered conservatives by approximately 10:1. (5)
But more concerning are studies on the effect that political bias has on research and hiring. In a study from 2012 (6) left wing academics admitted to:
1. Reluctance to invite a conservative college to a symposium.
2. Negative review(s) for paper(s) (from) conservative perspectives.
3. Choosing liberal over conservative job candidates with equal qualifications.
This is confirmation bias.
To be fair, this bias works both ways. Lee Jussim writes: “In fairness, the few conservative faculty in these surveys expressed about as much willingness to discriminate against liberal opinion.” (7)
The logical conclusion is that while academia will never be free of bias, isn’t it desirable to aim for some level of balance?
The ABC’s suggestion that “enlightened” opinion was an outcome of “education” rests on the unspoken assumption that education makes a person more enlightened; that one’s capacity for making more intelligent and objective choices is improved by time spent in higher education.
This assumption is flawed.
I quoted these studies in class. Our lecturer’s response was immediate and vigorous, “That’s so unfair!”
He elaborated by saying that, while left wing bias in universities did exist, left wing education “teaches you to think.”
So how does left-wing education “teach us to think”?
A recent example is the Uluru Statement from the Heart. This document was “shouted from the rooftops” of academia. It was included in course material and spoken of in reverential tones in lecture theatres. The Uluru Statement from the Heart is - at its heart - a proclamation of religious faith. It proclaims the eternal and metaphysical – non-corporeal - relationship of Indigenous Australians with the land as expressed in Dreamtime stories. Aboriginal spirituality, like most other religions throughout history, is a belief in, and a connection to, the metaphysical.
The Uluru Statement makes this quite plain: “This sovereignty is spiritual notion.” It calls for the “establishment of a First Nations Voice enshrined in the Constitution,” so that “this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.” (8)
In other words, Australian universities are supporting the enshrining of the system of religious belief and practice of a tiny minority of the population into our nation’s most fundamental governing document. They are in effect advocating we take a significant step towards becoming a theocracy. Is this the “thinking” that my tutor was referring to? Or is it the setting up of an emotive framework where the acolyte is led to inevitable conclusions? This could charitably be called persuasion; uncharitably, indoctrination.
I will repeat what I wrote in my previous article which is that I can’t fault my teachers’ dedication to their students. From this point of view, they have all been excellent. But my experience of “totalitarianism” in academia is a common one. Examples of students being shut down for opposing the party line do occur in Australia, but more brazenly and more often in the US.
Probably the most famous example of academic “cancellation” was graduate student Lindsay Shepherd at Wilfrid Laurier University whose “crime” was to play a clip formerly aired by TV Ontario of Jordan Peterson debating Bill C-16. The legislation in question involved amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code aimed to include gender identity and gender expression in discrimination legislation, and to make prejudice and hate against people in these groups aggravating circumstances in criminal matters. (9) After Shepherd played the video of Jordan Peterson presenting his arguments, she was hauled into a meeting with her academic supervisor and two others, and was accused of creating a “toxic climate for some of the students” by playing the clips and “taking a neutral stance between the two positions.” An independent fact finder subsequently found that Shepherd had done nothing wrong and that the meeting should not have taken place.
Jordan Peterson famously objected to the bill on the grounds that to compel speech by the force of law was a tyrannical intrusion by the state on the rights of individuals to free speech.
Canadian law firm Prowse Chowne LLP summarised Peterson’s argument as follows: “…the necessity to utter certain predetermined pronouns is a precedent that can handicap free speech because the legislation is about what must be said, instead of what cannot be said (with reference to standard hate-speech clauses).” (10)
The truly astonishing thing about this episode is that an academic would censure a teacher for “taking a neutral stance between two positions.” It amazes me that they can say things like this with a straight face.
In closing, I’ll offer two pieces of advice to any first-year creative writing students. If you want to develop your writing skills and find your “voice,” this course will help you do it, so work hard.
Secondly, if you are served up a scholarly reading which you find difficult, don’t automatically assume the reason it makes no sense is that author is “deep,” and you are not. Go through it with a fine-tooth comb using good old fashioned common sense as your guide, and what you might find is that the wetness in your pocket isn’t water. (11)
Good luck, you’re going to need it!
References
1. “Stephen Hicks: Why Postmodernists don’t see their own Contradictions?,” March 25, 2020, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYabDlZSWOE
2. T. Leslie, A. Kyd, J. Fell, B. Spraggon and M. Liddy, “Beyond No, here’s what we know about the Voice results,” Australian Broadcasting Corporation, October 15, 2023, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-15/voice-results-explained-map/102978520
3. Psychology Today (website), Sussex Publishers, LLC, accessed December 13, 2024. https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/rabble-rouser/202005/political-biases-in-academia
4. Psychology Today.
5. Psychology Today.
6. Psychology Today.
7. Psychology Today.
8. The Uluru Statement (website), Uluru Statement from the Heart, accessed December 13, 2024. https://ulurustatement.org/the-statement/view-the-statement/
9. Bill C-16 (CA) https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/42-1/bill/c-16/first-reading
10. Prowse Chowne LLP: Legal Counsel Patent & Trademark Agents (website), Prowse Chowne LLP, accessed December 16, 2024. https://prowsechowne.com/focus-understanding-controversy-surrounds-bill-c-16/
11. An old expression used in reply when someone is trying to gaslight you: “Don’t piss in my pocket and tell me it’s raining.”