How to avoid religion going bad

Belief can inspire us to do great things: think of the lives of Michelangelo, Newton, Malala. 

Belief can also inspire us to terrorise one another: think of the Inquisition, Orange Order marches, Malala’s shooting.

How can we safeguard against waking up one day to find ourselves using our beliefs as tools of oppression, without denying them any practical role in our lives? Can we continue to be comforted and uplifted by spirituality whilst escaping the nagging concern that its indulgence leads to irrationality and eventually bloodshed?

Here is a suggestion of how we might. Follow these three rules.

1) Never regard revealed truth as a reason for anyone else to behave in a certain way. 

By all means, treat a belief in God as a reason for your own actions. You can allow belief to influence your own goals, your life plan. Indeed, it is probably a good idea that you do, at least as part of a “balanced, healthy diet” of motivations that includes lots of rational ones too. (As numbers of thinkers have observed, pure logic can’t explain why you should continue to get up the morning.) But never, ever demand that others enter into your beliefs. If you want to make demands of others, you must do so on the basis of reasons that everyone – including those who haven’t received the revelations that you have – can accept. 

2) Never treat someone else’s religious faith as a reason to think any more or less of them.

Again, revealed truth can’t provide a reason for anyone who doesn’t share the revelation. So, don’t even privately treat it as a reason for them. If someone doesn’t believe in your God, your scripture (or your certainty that there is no God…) you should not allow this even to enter in your personal judgement of their character. Equally, don’t give anyone additional respect because of their religious faith. Judge people on grounds that everyone, not just your co-believers, will accept as good grounds for judging people (things like: whether they are wise, skilled, kind, etc).

3) Don’t ever put your trust in anyone who uses their faith to recommend themselves to others. 

  The world would instantly be a happier place if everyone adopted this rule. Bush Jr won elections by parading his Evangelical credentials. He then led his country into (what is now universally recognised to have been) a disastrous foreign invasion and an economic meltdown. Malala Yousafzai recounts in her autobiography, I Am Malala, how, tragically, the Taliban gained a foothold in her once-peaceful home region with the support of ordinary folk. Decent men and women handed over fistfuls of rupees to that bunch of worthless thugs, the former beguiled by the ostentatious piety of the latter. In both cases, America and Pakistan, people regretted their decisions. But how do they avoid making the same mistake again? Not by developing a Pavlovian aversion to the mere appearance of turbans or crosses, but rather by observing this rule.

This set of rules is intended as a tool, a kind of “thought-gadget”, to help citizens work out what role religion can play in their lives without it potentially endangering society.

Continuing the consumer tech analogy, I discuss the rules further below in the form of a set of FAQs.

FAQs

1.    How are these rules any advance on the ideology of secularism?

Secularism, in a nutshell, is the idea that there should be a separation between State and religion and that the State should be neutral in matters of belief. It is an idea with a long and distinguished history in political philosophy. 

Unfortunately, as a piece of practical thought technology it leaves a lot to be desired.

Its basic weakness is that it is a top-down ideology. It’s a theory about what the governments should or should not do. Such theories are all very well in the sense that no doubt there are things that governments generally should and should not do and, perhaps, if such principles were generally implemented the world would be a happier place.  But you or I are not States. We’re individual citizens. We’re individual voters, individual members of communities.

Saying that there should be a separation between Church and State… well, how does that help me decide who to vote for? Am I being asked not to vote for anyone in a turban, anyone with a belief? If so, isn’t that rather discriminatory. (And in a country where only a minority are free of religious affiliation, rather undemocratic?)

Or perhaps, conversely, “separation of religion and State” is something that has no role at the point of a person making their democratic choice. Perhaps it only applies to politicians once they have been installed in office. If so, that doesn’t to me sound like a great political principle. Modern political thinkers rightly emphasise the importance of an active citizenry and of democratic engagement. This means, bluntly, it is up to you and me to make sure that politicians stick within their constitutional limits. And, conversely, you and I should take ownership of what our leaders do within the limits of the constitution. Hence, in a democracy, the idea that there is a political principle (“secularism”) which is terribly, terribly important but is only for the political elite to worry about is surely a non-starter.

Moreover, much of what it is political in the world doesn’t have anything to do with the State.  People can club together to exercise power over other people in all sorts of ways that don’t require the take-over of the reins of government. They can form organisations, companies, raise money, spread (dis-)information, and shun and boycott one another. 

For instance, I Am Malala has been banned by the AllPakistan Private Schools Management Association, which represents 40,000 schools in the country (banned, incidentally, on account of its alleged secularism). And in some places, violent “non-state actors” – such as the Pakistani Taliban – wield as much, if not more, power than the official government. The aforementioned banned book describes how the Taliban established themselves in the Swat region by winning local hearts and minds. One of their leaders ran a popular radio broadcast peddling an initially soft and then increasingly strident Islamist message. Armed groups went around distributing earthquake relief before publicly forcing DVD shops and other centres of alleged vice to close down. The Taliban takeover was insidious, gradual, in other words, and done with a significant measure of public support.

For these reasons, if you want to stop people using religion to justify hateful, domineering behaviour, a principle about political institutions, about constitutional law, just doesn’t cut it. You need to a principle of everyday thought – of “practical reason” in the jargon of moral philosophy. The notion that one can use religion to guide one’s own life but not to make demands of others is just such a principle.

It’s a principle that you can take out of the box and use immediately. When your mate asks you if you want to come along to a protest where they’re burning an effigy of someone who has converted away from the religion, the principle that “you can’t use religious faith to tell anyone else what to do” (rule 1) provides a direct answer, in a way that “there should be a separation between State and religion” does not. 

Ditto the principles that you shouldn’t judge people based on their faith and that you should be suspicious of those who invite you trust them on that basis (rules 2 and 3). In a country where corruption is rife the (secularist) idea that a politician should be “neutral” about anything is going to be treated with derision. No politician in Kenya (say) is neutral as regards the distribution of public funds.  So why should they be neutral as regards matters of faith? In any event, a grand theory as to the proper role of the State isn’t going to persuade anyone not to vote for the “Christian Salvation Front” or the “True Islamic Faith Party”. But the notion that it is simply rather dodgy to sell yourself on your religious affiliation stands, I think, on its own two feet as an intelligible ethical principle. It is an idea that people who are never going to buy into the hifalutin apparatus of secularism might nonetheless buy into on its own terms.

2.     Does rule 1) basically stop politicians being driven by “inner convictions”? 

I don’t think so, no. You can go into politics and see your calling as a God-given one if you want without necessarily forcing your beliefs on others.

To give a slightly more controversial/problematic example, I think it might be a legitimate for a politician to draw on religious conviction in coming to a personal view that abortion is wrong, and hence to decide to campaign for its restriction – so long as, in conducting that campaign he strictly obeys rule 1). That is, he should never use scriptural justifications for what he is advocating, but only use reasons that make sense to people who don’t share his particular religious convictions. And if those reasons don’t convince, he will have to graciously back down and try again some other time (as opposed to going off and bombing clinics).

Even in the rather religiously intense US, I think it is fair to say this approach is generally adhered to. People there understand that religion can inspire political action, but it can’t justify it. 

3.    Do these rules mean I can’t allow myself to relate more to other atheists / Evangelicals / Jews than I do to other people?

No they don’t, in short. We can’t help relating to people who have similar assumptions about the world to our own. That’s just human nature. Maybe we should try to be a bit more open-minded about who we relate to, who we make friends with. But that would be another project. 

The above rules are, instead, about how we criticise, praise and make demands of one each other, which is a somewhat different topic to how we “relate” to one other. A guy who likes Tom Waits might get on well with another guy who likes Tom Waits. But he wouldn’t deny someone a job based on their not liking Tom Waits (or we would criticise him if he did). Still less would he consider burning an effigy of a Tom Waits-hater. Luckily, in our world, we don’t need a set of rules to stop this kind of behaviour in the case of musical taste. But we do apparently need it in the case of religion.

4.    Ok. Nice try with these rules. But aren’t beliefs such as “human life is valuable” – which you need to explain even basic social rules such as the prohibition on murder – pretty much revealed truths? I mean you can’t prove that “human life is valuable” is valuable; it’s just something that everyone believes.  So why treat religious beliefs any differently?

The key here is that “human life is valuable” is indeed something that everyone, or practically everyone, believes. That means we can deal with it by agreement. Hence, there is no violation of rule 1). Anyone who, in an argument, references the principle that “human life is valuable” can rely on the consensus to establish the point and does not need to rely on any underlying blind faith or revelation. To condemn murder, you don’t need not use some personal spiritual intuition as a trump card.

Many moral and political demands in which the claim that “human life is valuable” plays a part are contentious ones, it is true. Take the debate over gun control. Some people say the principle that human life is valuable supports banning guns, because unrestricted gun ownership leads to more deaths.  Some people say that same principle means that there should be more guns because thus will lead to fewer deaths (despite the overwhelming statistical evidence to the contrary) because of, like, this cartoon, see.  But everyone understands that the making, and assessment, of these competing claims depend on evidence and logic, not revelation.

As that example reminds us, these rules are hardly going to solve all political controversy. No simple principle ever will.  But in places like Pakistan (and Poland, Alabama… etc) they might draw some of the dangerous heat out of political life, and allow the debate to proceed on a more rationale – and more humane – basis.

Notes on Jordan Peterson, Part 1 of 2: How to Be a Public Intellectual

https://jordanbpeterson.com/

How do thinkers attract a following? Why are some more successful at this than others? How come we've all heard of the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH), but not of, say, Trevor from the local secure unit (PBUH too), who has also been visited by an angel and also has a number of views on a number of topics? This question – that of the reception of ideas – is always a fascinating one.

The phenomenon of Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor and sometime clinical psychologist who recently achieved Transatlantic fame for “dominating”, as his fans would have it, a British TV news interview provides an interesting case study.

A brief chart of Peterson's fame goes like this. In 2013, still an obscure academic in his early 50s, he started recording his lectures at the University of Toronto and uploading them to YouTube. Already popular with his students, the lectures started to build up views and a podcast followed.

Then, in 2016, Peterson tipped his hand in the culture wars, releasing a series of videos attacking a proposed bill (since passed) to amend the Canadian Human Rights Act to prohibit discrimination on grounds of gender expression and identity. This had the (presumably desired) effect of triggering student protests, the coverage of which made him a mainstream media celebrity and added yet further legions of subscribers to his YouTube channel. A week or so ago, on a world tour to promote his bestselling self-help book Rules for Life, he did that interview with Cathy Newman on Channel 4 News. And now he is something approaching a household name in the UK.

A common response amongst intelligent people I know seems to be like this: “I don't agree with what he says, but I do like his presentational style and/or his method.”

My take, however, seems to be nearly the opposite of this. For me, the more troubling aspects of Peterson's output are not the opinions he expresses, at least when these are expressed explicitly (in which case they are often sound, so far as they go), but rather the presentation and the methodology. 

In this post, I'll explain my disquiet about the presentation: how Peterson communicates his material, including how he presents his arguments (to the extent he does this at all). In the sequel, I'll talk about methodology, in the sense of the sort of questions he asks and how he goes about answering them.

That Interview

First off, though, there's the response to the Channel 4 interview itself. I can't let this pass without comment. It seems that I'm largely alone in thinking that there was little in it that was in any way impressive. I feel I should explain my reasons for so thinking.

Peterson, it's true, has a magnetic presence in the clip. He has a Byronic intensity. Physically handsome and brooding, he earnestly listens to the questions and delivers his responses with calmness and apparent directness. But isn't it the content that should count when you are deciding whether or not someone is worth listening to?

Let's consider the segment on the gender pay gap (starts around 5:20), the bit for which Peterson got the ravest reviews.

What I would suggest we must bear in mind when evaluating it is this: the notion that women may transpire to be disadvantaged in the world of work, fairly or unfairly, for reasons other than direct discrimination on the sheer ground of their membership of a category called “women” (to be clear, other than even unconscious discrimination on that ground) is not a difficult or esoteric idea. It is not something that the average educated person requires an academic to be flown over to appear on telly to have pointed out to him or her.

To give a well-known example, a higher percentage of women than do men work part time (largely because women are more frequently left looking after children). Hence, the once common employment practice of excluding part-time workers from occupational pension schemes disproportionately affected women and for that very reason was outlawed by the European Court of Justice in a 1994 ruling as contrary to equal pay protection. In 2018, the existence of such possibilities, to use a concept that Peterson endorses in his YouTube videos, is, or should be, part of the cultural context, the shared framework of meaning, of any current, educated discussion of the topic.

In practical terms, this means that if your contribution is just to say, “Aha, the gender pay gap could be due to reasons other than (direct) discrimination on the ground of gender!”, the value of your contribution is approximately zero. Yet that is precisely the tack that Peterson takes stubbornly for literally a minute and half of the discussion, until under persistent questioning he eventually, for the first time offers up a possible other reason, namely the (controversial) notion that women are biologically prone to be less “agreeable” than men (which I will come on to shortly).

Before this, during this 90 second period of darkness, Newman states that she is not making any claims about “why [the gap] exists”: in other words, that she is not asserting that it is necessarily down to direct discrimination. Peterson ignores the invitation to actually say something about indirect discrimination, and instead triumphantly declares: “You have to say why it exists”.

No. No. No! (As a famously disagreeable lady once put it.) It was for the supposed expert sitting there in the interviewee's chair to offer and defend a claim about why women are on average paid less than men, not hunker down and wait for his interviewer to propose something. He should have done so from the start instead of making obfuscating, impressive-sounding noises about multivariate analyses and making curt, empty denials of the charge that he is indifferent to the plight of people who suffer discrimination.

True, Newman could, perhaps, faced with such obtuseness, have better articulated and pressed Peterson on the possibility of discriminatory practices unfairly targeting circumstances associated with a particular group (such as the treatment of part-time workers, who are mostly women) as distinct from direct discrimination of members of that group qua members of that group (as with the Presidents Club). But to place any weight on this failure would be to forget – and many of those fawning over Peterson's showing do seem to have forgot – that this was a TV interview with a professor conducted by a journalist, not a debate. It occurred purely as an opportunity for Peterson to expound upon his ideas – all to help sell his own fucking book, no less.

Indeed, even if we read the exchange as a debate rather than an interview, Peterson's approach leaves a hell of a lot to be desired. The essay-writing advice he gives his students (per his lectures) is to build up one's opponent's argument, to put it in its strongest possible form before attacking it. Here, you can watch someone conspicuously fail to follow that advice. There is no attempt on his part to anticipate and meet objections, just utter defensiveness.

You do not – or, at least, you shouldn't – score points in a debate by treating it as courtroom cross-examination, by imagining that the aim of the game is to stick to your side's already pleaded case and to concede as little as possible by giving little more than yes/no answers. Normal debate – or at least valuable debate – involves repeated concession, the routine acknowledging of the element in truth in what the other side is saying. Consider, by the way, in this respect, the squeals of delight from alt-right nutjobs over Newman's admission at one stage in the interview “You've got me”, when Peterson makes what she regarded as a good point. According to Breitbart, for instance, this was the moment when “Feminist Cathy Newman Crumbles”. In light of that headline, the only thing that it is surely crumbling is the Socratic tradition of earnest, rational discourse that has nourished Western civilization for 2,500 years.

The other thing that I dislike about Peterson's approach is his failure to articulate conclusions, a failure to make explicit what its all too often merely implicit in what he says.

For example, let us assume, for these purposes, that he is 100% right that women get paid less because, or in large part because, they tend to be less assertive about their own compensation. What should we make of this? Do employers have any responsibility to change their wage-setting practices, or is it all down to individual women to learn how to be more assertive? I think everyone watching, if asked, would agree that Peterson in fact thinks the latter. In the discussion that ensues he seems to imply that there is very little that employers, still less wider society, can or should do about the matter. But he doesn't – at least not in this interview – ever expressly say this. He does not say explicitly, for example:

“It is not unreasonable for firms to pay more assertive employees more than less assertive ones”.

Now that would be an interesting, controversial proposition that might open up fertile vistas of discussion. But Peterson doesn't go there, doesn't take on the challenge. I think there are at least some other commentators occupying broadly the same part of the political spectrum who would be candid enough to complete the thought. For example, by way of analogy, when debating the decriminalization of cannabis, Peter Hitchens will tell you not just that cannabis is a nasty drug and that liberals don't take the issue seriously enough (the usual tack of commentators taking an anti-drugs line), but will go on to assert that serious jail time for its use would act as an effective deterrent and hence eye-watering tough sentences for mere users are justified. This is what is good about Peter Hitchens. For in light of such a suggestion, it is possible for the rest of us to wonder: Hmm, is locking up dope-heads for 15 years really going to do more good than harm? In the same way, to say outright that (for example) “it is not the responsibility of private businesses to do anything about how macho, domineering behaviour is received at work” yields a concrete proposition that we can examine and challenge. I respect such an approach – i.e. that of putting a concrete proposition on the table – even if I might happen to think the proposition in question a silly one, because its very articulation generally advances the debate by allowing us to see what the real issues are. Unfortunately, it seems to be part of Peterson's debating modus operandus to avoid advancing propositions. Too much is being done by insinuation.

Another thing worrying me is that several people praised Peterson for the “consistency” of his views as expressed in the interview. This endorsement baffles me, since not contradicting yourself in the course of a 30-minute discussion is a low bar indeed. One, therefore, wonders this particular piece of praise actually has as its real target, consciously or otherwise, the marked lack of nuance in his approach. If this is a correct supposition about how people evaluate thought, that is fucking terrifying (for reasons which I presume are too obvious to have to labour by further articulating here).

Incidently, after writing the above, I happened to catch another Channel 4 news debate about the gender pay gap, between Kate Andrews of the Institute of Economic Affairs and Catherine Meyer of the Women's Equality Party. In this piece, those key issues that the Peterson discussion completely ignored – those of indirect discrimination and structure inequalities – were acknowledged by both sides and debated in an constructive way. It was just so much more enlightening, so much better, than the Peterson/Newman affair. I would challenge anyone who watches this to identify any good reason – reason other than that of our frail, human weakness for entertaining displays of machismo over serious discussion – why we are all talking about the other clip instead.

Down with the kidz

When it comes to the YouTube videos that made Peterson's name, I am going to admit that his lecturing style has some admirable features. But, again, there are some features which are less admirable. And we need to talk about those too. For my suggestion, as we will see, is that both the more admirable features and the less admirable ones likely play a direct part in explaining his popularity.

I watched the lecture series “Maps of Meaning”, based on Peterson's magnum opus, explanation-of-everything book (which I have not read, but then neither have most of his internet fans). I picked the 2016 vintage for no particular reason (he updates the series ever year). So far I have got as far as Lecture 4, meaning I've seen about 5 or 6 hours of footage in total. 

The lectures are a sort of blast through various strands of thought in psychology, theory of knowledge, cognition, sociology and political theory. We learn about theories of motivation, the social behaviour of squid, high school killers, René Descartes' evil demon, women sniffing out attractiveness from bloke's T-shirts, the open texture of language, the psychology of board games, Mutually Assured Destruction, chimp behaviour... All kinds of fun things. (Whether it is supposed to be anything more than a blast is a question we will come to shortly.)

It is generally entertaining stuff. Peterson, when on form, has an immediate, engaging style that soon has everyone in the seminar room eating out of his hand and that even goes a long way towards winning over someone like me (Breitbart: “... Liberal Danno Crumbles!”).

So, for example, he will start talking about Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment by saying that he highly recommends it, how it is about a protagonist, Raskolnikoff, who you will really relate to because, hey, he's just like you, he's a student, bright but having a tough time of it, trying to make ends meet and feeling jealous of his peers. We then get a lovely account of how Dostoyevsky sets up the psychological and ethical drama by making the young killer's motivations horribly plausible, in part by making his landlady victim so unloveable and in part by so beautifully articulating the twisted chain of reasoning the student adopts to justify the murder – an observation which Peterson now uses as the springboard for the previously mentioned advice (an old academic chestnut, but good advice nonetheless) that if you want to make a serious argument, make the position you are attacking as attractive as you can possibly make it.

At another juncture, he draws on Jean Piaget's studies of childhood play to make an extended point about how people create meaning through the partly cooperative, partly competitive medium of game playing. He brings this alive by asking his students whether Settlers of Catan is a “good or a bad game?” Is is better or worse than Risk? Monopoly? Why in each case? This the class finds, rightly, a fascinating exercise. Later, in the same vein, he talks about massively multiplayer online games, referencing the work of Edward Castranova who calculated the GNP per capita of some of the fictional worlds in EverQuest was higher than that of real world countries such as Bulgaria. This is then a springboard for inviting his class to consider whether the internal world of such games is at least, if not more, “real” than much of the external, physical world. Surprisingly, for someone whose current USP is telling millennials to Grow Up And Get A Job, Peterson here comes down on the side of the virtual worlds, even going as far to argue that there is more reality in participating in a sophisticated online game than in serving burgers in McDonalds.

There are lots and lots of recommendations (Orwell, Carl Jung, YouTube videos of DNA molecules): “you must go take a look at”; “I highly recommend”, “it's a great book”... Peterson genuinely wants to inspire his students to go out and get this stuff for themselves, and hopefully his sheer enthusiasm for the material is infectious.

True, Peterson has been labelled a stupid person's smart person for a set of reference points “apparently drawn from a high-school English-class reading list”. But I don't think the basis of this criticism (as opposed to, I'm sorry!, the conclusion, as will become apparent...) is terribly fair, or to any sensible point. If Peterson can inspire a young person's interest in political theory using Animal Farm as a way in, or, I don't know, in motivation frames by chatting about Settlers of Catan, then that is surely a good thing. I can't see any sting in the sneer that someone is trying to be Down With The Kidz, unless (as often happens) they fail in this endeavour. But Peterson succeeds: his students evidently love him.

Bigger than Darwin

What, however, is questionable about the lectures is the complete lack of any structure, and in particular, any high-level, sustained argument. To say that they are discursive or digressive would be an understatement. This would be to imply that there is some overall thread of thought that is being digressed from. There simply isn't.

What you get is basically lots of 5 minute chunks composed of anecdotes and summations of modern learning on a particular topic. We then segue onto a new topic by way of digression (a sketch of his style: “... oh, and by the way, chimps are seriously bad guys, really they are. What they do is this...”). Or else the professor will come to the end of a point, pause romantically, holding his head as if to channel his thoughts, and launch into a new topic that is essentially a non sequitur (albeit in the literary rather than the logical sense) from what it follows. Indeed, at the start of Lecture 2, rather alarmingly, Peterson asks his class literally to stop him at any point if they hear him repeat anything he has said before: “I can't precisely remember what I've told you... I don't want to tell you the same story three times, you know”. Apparently even he cannot quite recall how all this fits together!

Not only is there no overall argument, no serious carry-forward from one idea to the next, there is no organisation of the material according to any logical system at all. The lectures are not histories of thought within a particular field. Nor are they topic-by-topic examinations. Basically, the only evident organising principle – the only reason that we might infer as to why Peterson is talking about one thing rather than another at any given moment – is that these are Things That Jordan Bernt Peterson Thinks. So much, then, for the Enlightenment project of replacing respect for oracular pronouncements of wise men with respect for depersonalised reason and learning.

Sometimes our professor gets so convinced that every single thing in his head is a pure nugget of wisdom, so swept up in the performance of this massive brain dump of these riches, that he badly embarrasses himself. Or, to put it more politely, what he says falls short of the accepted standards of serious scholarship. I've taken the trouble to transcribe this extraordinary segment, in which Peterson claims that he has worked out, purely deductively, that modern evolutionary science is fundamentally incomplete in some way that he cannot fully articulate because he is, like, not all that up-to-speed on the latest stuff, sure, but, hey man, you need to just take his word for it:

“The way it works, apparently – and I don't believe this is the whole story, although it is more-or-less the whole Darwinian story – is that something more-or-less works and it makes a million copies of itself and there's tiny variations in those copies, often, at least in principle, because of copying error – which is where I think the theory is weak – and then they all die, except, like, two. And so why didn't those die? And the answer is that they happened to vary by chance in the direction that the environment varied, and so they get to continue. And so the reason evolution works is that everything dies. Everything fails. ...

“Now I think that's not exactly right because I don't believe that our understanding of evolution is complete. There's a bunch of reasons I don't believe it. One is, DNA is pretty damn complex. It is not obvious how it could have evolved [Oh yeah: like the eye...]. And even the people who discovered DNA were very, very perplexed by the fact that it existed. So one of them … thought that it came from outer space and it had evolved somewhere else. ….

"But there is this other issue too and it's called epigenesis [in fact epigenetics - epigenesis is something else] and that's put a whole spoke in the scientific wheels in the last 20 years, because the theory was 20 years ago that all evolution proceeded through random mutation. And it was random, right? But it turns out that that is not exactly right because there have been a number of demonstrations that if something happens to generation A, that will produce a transformation in the genetic information that's transferred to generation B. And the transformation is not only the consequence of damage but actually a form of adaptation to the environment. Now that's a tough one because 20 years ago when I was studying evolutionary biology, if you had said you can transmit acquired characteristics, it would be like, you're over there with the creationists! Because that was no go, that was against the rules.

“The fact that epigenesis [epigenetics] happens at all means that there are a lot of things about how DNA works that we don't know [No, it doesn't. For an for an informed comment on the misunderstandings and quackery surrounding the concept see this article]. Now I actually think what's happening is the DNA is a very complex microcomputer. And I don't know exactly how it operates. But maybe it's a quantum computer. It's very complex. Remember, it's had 3 and half billion years to figure out what's going on and it's pretty good at surviving. So you don't want to underestimate it. And the structures it builds at the molecular level are so complex it just... there are some great animations of those things … on the net. They are so complex that you can't help but think of them as computation when you watch them. They're not random processes, man! [By now, Peterson seems to be conflating the notion of the computational nature of normal biochemical processes, which isn't controversial or in issue, with the notion that mutations in DNA might somehow be controlled by such processes, which is the suggestion in issue and is controversial.] I watched the little molecule that checks for errors in the DNA replication string. I mean it checks for errors in the DNA replication string, man! To figure out how it does something like that without some form of computation strikes me as impossible. 

"Anyways, I think what happens is that over time the DNA plays – like, it can manifest itself in many different forms – and it also capitalizes on mutation. I think that is how it works.

I mean. Fuck. This is the guy we are installing as the next Public Intellectual? Could we maybe have instead that US Senator who talked about the Series of Tubes? Or, say, Joey Essex? Sure, those guys would talk a lot of shit – perhaps, sure, even slightly more than you and I might do down the pub. But at least you won't catch any of me, Senator Stevens or Joey Essex taking our vague speculations about what men in white coats could be coming up with if only they were a bit more imaginative and attempting to elevate these half-baked ponderings to the status of wisdom via the ex cathedra authority that comes from being a Professor of Psychology saying stuff in a seminar room midway through a scheduled lecture that he is giving in a University of Toronto Department of Psychology undergraduate course. Listening to Peterson talk on this topic I was reminded of Bob Trivers' snarky aside about Stephen J Gould – that he thought he was “bigger than Darwin”. Except Gould at least bothered to train as a palaeontologist, do some relevant research and publish a bunch of scientific papers on the subject before venturing to challenge aspects of Darwinian orthodoxy. How plodding of him. Gould apparently knew he wasn't smart enough to conduct all of his iconoclasm via the medium of an ex tempore aside in a lecture about personality (and without first learning the difference between epigenesis and epigenetics).

Shuffle Appeal

Such horrendous lapses aside, the wider objection here is that by not giving us any sort of map (ironically, given the title of series) to the overall argument, if any, that Peterson is trying to advance the listener is prevented from meaningfully engaging with his thoughts. Sources of ideas are always duly credited – simple plagiarism is not, at least, one of his sins. But, yet, still, the unstructured approach makes it more or less impossible to determine what, if anything, he is uniquely bringing to the table, other than a sort of vague desire to emphasise certain themes (such as the importance of hierarchy, the Badness of chaos, the fact that motivation is needed for all thought and action, etc, etc). Ultimately, this makes it impossible to take him seriously as an original thinker.

Simultaneously, though, this haphazardness is, I strongly suspect, a major component in Peterson's popular appeal. The lectures are accessible, easy to follow basically because, frankly, you don't need to do too much work to follow along. This is precisely because there is no real large-scale argument running through them.

Consider that serious, important works of thought are never quite this easy to lap up. They are always difficult, at one level, to follow: rewarding, but hard work. This tends to be so even if they are composed in a light, engaging style with as least as much literary and rhetorical skill as Peterson can muster. I offer Darwin's The Origin of Species and Nozick's Anarchy, The State and Utopia as a couple examples. Why are those two books undisputed literary classics, ultimately great reads, and yet hard work? Because you have to have to pay serious attention throughout. This is because you carry forward what is argued in one section forward to the next, integrate it with, and critically evaluate it in the context of, the developing argument. You can't nod off for a bit because you will miss an important plank in the overall construction.

For example, in Species, Darwin starts, in chapter 1, gently enough, by criticising the then accepted wisdom that all the variation you see between breeds of domesticated animals is purely the result of centuries of breeders mixing and matching between a fixed, original set of archetypal breeds: all domesticated pigeons are descended, Darwin argued, from a single species, the rock pigeon, so all the differences of colour, shape and size you see between the different breeds must have arisen during the process of domestication. The reader must carry these thoughts through to chapter 2, where variation in nature comes to be discussed. Darwin then introduces the concept of the struggle for existence into the mix (in chapter 3), a further idea that the reader has to assimilate, before she is encouraged to takes these two findings (the fact of the struggle for existence, and the fact of variation) as premises and combine them with a third, that of genetic inheritance, to arrive the argument for natural selection (finally developed in chapter 4). Later chapters explore the consistency or otherwise of the theory (the multiple implications of which the reader has to keep alive in her mind throughout) with the evidence of the geological record and the geographic distribution of groups of species.

Even with the benefit of having been pre-taught the basic tenets of the theory of evolution, sitting down with the Darwin's original great (and surprisingly brief) work places demands on you as the reader. The demands arise because you have got to carry the building blocks of the argument forward from one stage to another: a big draw on your working memory. They also arise because you have to be able to distinguish between and be aware at all times of the different argumentative status of the various parts of what Darwin says: the distinction between evidence and argument, premise and conclusion, evidence that is building up to a conclusion yet to be drawn and evidence that is offered as corroboration for an already-stated conclusion. This requires a kind of constant forensic alertness. Darwin makes both of these tasks as easy as he possibly can by very clear signposting and great clarity and brevity of expression. (As Peterson would say: go read, highly recommended!) But it is still a somewhat demanding read. After all, natural selection is an inherently, non-trivially complex theory: it involves a specific form of interaction between three major component ideas: inheritance, variability and selective pressure. You cannot just reduce it down to one of those ideas as representing its “essence”, or some vague blend of the three. And it is ultimately rewarding for all the same reasons that it is hard work: you are integrating knowledge, getting a real sense of progress as you work you way through, and giving your brain a serious workout at the same time.

The easy, but rather short-term appeal of Peterson's lectures is that they doesn't work like this at all. You really can zone out for five minutes and return to find that what the guy is saying still makes some sense. There's no grander scale argument, and so no need to keep track. There's no seeming need, either, to monitor the status of the different anecdotes and examples that Peterson gives. For instance, are his comments about the Columbine killers supposed to be an example of what the human mind is capable of, or something that will be developed as an aspect of a more general, positive, law of (male?) psychology ... Who cares, man? You are not getting tested on any of this stuff!

Peterson's lectures have, in other words, what I would call Shuffle Appeal. They don't make excessive demands on your working memory because they each little segment fully works as a self-contained little presentation. And then it's off to the next anecdote, the next idea. Incidentally, to link back to the opening paragraph, that would also seem to be the organisational principle of the Qu'ran, which of course doesn't function as a stage-by-stage ethical treatise. (The same can be said for much of the Old and New Testaments too.) It is primarily a series of disconnected observations, anecdotes, pearls of wisdom and indignant moral criticism of young people today. As you might expect from the work of a well-to-do, 40-something merchant, as the Prophet was. It's your dad shouting at the telly, Jeremy Clarkson writing his newspaper columns, Alan Partridge on Radio Norwich... A middle-aged man thing, it seems. 

Propagandists, note, never, ever choose to advance their ideas in an argument when a narrative (Jud Suß) or a series of emotive images and associations (Triumph of the Will) will do the job. Why not? Because an argument appeals to the intellect, which is often a less powerful route than an appeal to gut emotions (in part, this is surely because of the issue of cognitive load, raised above). And because an argument is naked: it shows its workings, it is vulnerable to having its conclusions tested, its premises ripped away. Worst of all – from the perspective of tyrants and bullies – as Karl Popper pointed out (more of him in part 2), the advancing of rational argument always implicitly involves a concession to the person it is aimed at, a concession that their decision (to act a certain way, or believe a certain thing) must ultimately prevail – an acknowledgement that all the arguer can do is plead a case, seek to persuade the listener that her interest is in reality aligned with what the arguer asks. Not the sort of thing, perhaps, that a guy who always Stands Up Straight and Throws His Shoulders Back to assert dominance has any time for.

Perhaps, some readers will suggest, this is unfair. Perhaps Peterson isn't making any grand case at all. All he is doing, perhaps, is whetting his students appetites with a series of gee-whizz snippets of what philosophy and psychology can offer. OK, perhaps. Sure. But if so, it has to be conceded that Peterson cannot deserve the status of an important, original thinker. If, on the other hand, we are supposed to understand that there is some original, deep thought being traced in these lectures, then Peterson is open to the criticism that he doesn't actually argue his case at all whilst pretending to do just that – and so is guilty of a quite serious form of charlatanism.

To give an example, I can detect a ghostly, and rather disturbing, trace of an “argument”, if you can call it that, drawn through the course of Lecture 2, namely that because “meaning” is something that it is vitally important to humans we shouldn't try to defuse dominance hierarchies (that particularly vicious animal form of social organization) where they occur in the world because such hierarchies are one of the ways that animals, including humans, can create meaning in their lives. Now, the most charitable interpretation (given some of the absurd non sequiturs which would otherwise arise in the course of the lecture) is to conclude that, no, Peterson isn't making that, or any other grand argument on that scale. If, however, anyone disagrees with this and thinks that Peterson actually is here saying something like dominance hierarchies are a good thing and purporting to offer reasons for this, then I'd be interested to know. If so, I would have much to say (and none of it less than scathing) about his method of establishing the point.

Ultimately, I don't see how Peterson and his followers can avoid this skewer. Either he is merely an entertaining purveyor of other people's ideas in the way that, say, Bill Bryson or Alain de Botton are (but not someone who should be lauded as an original thinker), or else he is a thinker who offers a patter of anecdote and allusion in place of rational argument (and hence a charlatan or a mystic).

The Google memo and freedom of speech, part 3: how not to make a controversial case.

This is the final part of my reflections on the controversy around the anti-diversity that got software engineer James Damore fired from Google. This part delves into the murky content of the infamous 10-page document at the heart of the affair.

The other two parts dealt with, firstly, with some of the problems that bedevil discourse around freedom of speech and, secondly, the political philosophy underpinning the concept (but you don't have to have read either to make sense of what follows). They tend to lead to the following conclusions:-

(A) Saying something controversial such as suggesting there might be biological differences between men and women should not automatically lead to one's firing. (There is a public interest in a reasonably free and open discussion of ideas). But equally

(B) The fact that such comments could be said to be in the interest of the free exchange of ideas should not automatically protect one from being fired for this. (You don't have a moral, let alone a legal, right to make political/ideological statements as part of your job.)

So what is an employer to do if a 10-page rumination on such a theme, or some similarly controversial topic, starts circulating the office? The following factors might be relevant:

• Does it appear to be good faith advocacy for a change that the employee would like to see implemented? Or is he or she just trying to ruffle feathers and cause a nuisance?
• Is it closely targeted at some particular policy or else is it a generalised attack on the company's values?
• Has every attempt been made, where controversial statements are made, to avoid causing offence (or worse, belittling others)?
• Is it politely written, or is it instead aggressive or insulting?

Let's now turn to what James Damore wrote and circulated.

Here's a link to the full memorandum.

Read an extended sample of a person's prose and you get a sense of the mental world that they inhabit. This is not always an edifying experience. Spending any time with the thoughts of James Damore (as I did to write this piece) is rather like being stuck in a lift with a spotty, know-it-all 10-year old: it's not just the lack of basic emotional intelligence (something that is anyway a badge of pride for people like him: witness his call in the paper to “de-emphasize empathy”) but the pervasive intellectual ignorance, the lack of familiarity with ideas originating from outside of his very narrow fields of interest.

To trot out the line, for example, “[w]e have extensive government and Google programs, fields of study, and legal and social norms to protect women, but when a man complains about a gender issue issue affecting men, he’s labelled as a misogynist and a whiner” without recognising how desperately hackneyed this form of argument is, how many millions of times it has patiently been dismantled (not just in the sphere of the New York Review of Books or whatever but in ordinary living rooms, pubs and secondary schools around the world), marks one out as the sort of person who has never had a serious discussion with another adult about politics or read a broadsheet newspaper let alone developed a moderately cultured awareness of the major currents of contemporary thought.

The problem with accusations of pervasive bias

The title – “Google's Ideological Echo Chamber” – sets the tone. Damore certainly didn't hold back in critiquing his employers. He accuses Google of harbouring “several biases” that have conspired to create a “politically correct monoculture that maintains its hold by shaming dissenters into silence”. They are allegedly “blind” to alternative points of view whilst promoting “encroaching extremist and authoritarian policies”. It's tin foil hat stuff from the get-go. The word “bias” (or “biases”) appears a total of 37 times.

What is objectionable about Damore's use of the notion of bias is more than just a matter of the unbalanced, aggressive tone in which the point is pursued – although this aspect is bad enough and isn't at all ameliorated by the document being peppered with nauseatingly patronising platitudes (“[t]hankfully, open and honest discussion with those who disagree can highlight our blind spots and help us grow, which is why I wrote this document”). It goes to the substance of his position in several ways.

For one thing, the across-the-board extreme generality of the accusation of bias calls into question the entire bona fides of Damore's complaints. If you are seeking persuade another of anything you clearly have to be careful when suggesting that that person may have overlooked a particular factor: one does not want to be insulting or call into question their intelligence or integrity. If, instead, you tell the person that you are imploring that they have not merely overlooked a particular point in coming to a particular conclusion but suffer from a pervasive, thorough blindness that means that they cannot safely trust their own judgement on anything what on earth are they supposed to with this information? Resign from whatever position they hold? As a litigation lawyer I know that it is never a good move to accuse a judge of bias unless you think this will result in his or her recusal. Because otherwise you just end up with a pissed-off judge deciding on your case; Emerson's maxim “when you strike at the king, you better kill him” applies. My objection here, to be clear, lies not in the mere fact that Damore's approach is offensive to its target – lots of legitimate political writing is precisely that – it is rather that his target is one and the same with the person he is ostensibly seeking to petition, which calls into the question the genuineness of the whole endeavour. Did he really think that Google would respond by saying “hey, yeah, we are fuckwits, aren't we”?

Moreover, it can hardly be Google's management alone that suffers from biases. As Damore himself recognises at certain points in the paper of course we all do. But that being the case, one has to assume that the validity of the positions that Damore himself is advocating may be undermined by an equally pervasive blindness on his part. Ultimately then any suspicion of pervasive blindness ought to drop out of the picture because it appears on both sides of the equation. Whining on about it is therefore at best irrelevant, at worst a tedious diversionary tactic.

Good, bad and neutral biases

Even more objectionably, albeit more subtly, Damore uses the notion of bias in a specious way to attempt to relieve him of the burden of engaging with any of the actual merits of arguments that run against the positions he advocates. This strategy is tied up with the fact that there are at least three, quite radically different meanings of the word “bias” that are implied at different times by Damore's text. Not only does he fail to explicitly distinguish between these different meanings, but, as I will show, his argument relies actively on their conflation.

1. Bias in a distributional sense. People sometime use the word more-or-less neutrally to describe the relative distribution of elements in some state of affairs, eg. “there is a bias in the production of jelly beans towards red ones”; “Tim Greenhat's investment portfolio is biased towards North American small company stocks”.

2. Cognitive biases. The concept of cognitive bias, pioneered by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, describes certain common reasoning processes that lead people to draw illogical inferences or form objectively irrational conclusions in certain circumstances. In simple terms a cognitive bias is a tendency to make certain kinds of mistakes. For example, confirmation bias – which is name-checked in Damore's document – describes the human tendency, confirmed by lots of psychological experiments, to interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preexisting conceptions, including by discounting conflicting information. Cognitive biases are a trendy topic at the moment, with Kahneman (who won the Nobel prize for economics 15 years ago, study of cognitive biases being fundamental in behavioural economics) publishing a bestselling book on the subject a few years back (which is well worth reading). Although some cognitive biases might plausibly be evolutionary adaptive (such as the self-serving bias: the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures) they are generally thought of as bad things. At least they always involve mistakes in the sense that the person suffering from such a bias is attempting to complete a specific mental task (working out which thing is most likely to happen, or determining which course of action will be most profitable, etc) but fails to achieve this.

3. Moral or ideological bias. Bias can also be used to describe our basic preferences, including our moral preferences. In his essay, Damore treats “preference” as identical to “bias”. (Some might think such usage is rather idiosyncratic but I will not quibble on that ground alone.) Hence “compassion for the weak” is a bias (a “Left Bias” according to Damore). It is a bias in a neutral sense because faced with a choice between two options, one of which favours the weak and one of which does not, the person with this preference all other things being equal will select the former. But by this logic there is no need to stop at the preferences that divide us politically. We should also include in the list of “biases” the various preferences that most humans share, for example:

• The aversion to using force or fraud to acquire resources
• The preference for protecting rather than harming children
• The tendency to praise people who act altruistically and conversely to criticise those who act selfishly
• The preference for making profits rather than losses
• The preference for happiness over misery as regards oneself and others

Such biases are essentially the entire content of human motivation and morality. They are very often, albeit not always, regarded as good rather than bad things.

Although not specifically invoked by Damore, there is also a fourth meaning of bias:

4. Bias as a lack of impartiality. I mentioned above the practice applying for a judge to recuse herself for bias. That kind of bias – a lack of impartiality, due to, eg some financial tie to one of the parties – only arises when somebody has a pre-existing duty to act fairly between competing parties because they are performing a specific role such as judging a lawsuit. This kind of bias is definitely a bad thing, although it's really not an everyday concern (unless you happen to be judge).

What Damore does is conflate the first three types of bias whilst trading on the negative connotations of the 2^nd as well as, I imagine, the 4^th in order to belittle any attitude that falls within the 3^rd category, ie moral and political preferences, where this conflicts with his own.

This is childish and absurd. For one thing, category 3 “biases”, as mentioned above, form essentially the whole of morality (as Damore kind of acknowledges: “Political orientation is actually a result of deep moral preferences and thus biases.”) You can label moral preferences “biases” if you want but if you do you cannot legitimately trade on the negative connotations of the word “bias”. It is a good thing that people favour those who help others. It is a good thing that people abhor violence and harm to children. It is a good thing (I think, at least) where people show compassion to the weak.

One cannot conflate moral/political preferences with cognitive biases because the former are preferences whereas the later are simply tendencies to make mistakes. To take a political preference that I do not myself share, namely “respect for authority” (correctly placed on the right-hand side of Damore's helpful ready reckoner on page 2 of the memo), whatever arguments I might legitimately use to range against maintaining such a preference, I cannot simply condemn it as a mistake, as a mere deviation from some other attitude that is “true” because it sits in the middle of some distribution curve of attitudes that various people hold. A preference for authority cannot be simply mistaken in the way that a judgement, assessment or calculation can be because, being a preference, the person holding it considers it to be a valid motivation. The fact that it leads to a particular weighted pattern of outcomes – bias in the 1^st sense above – can be no criticism: that is the whole point of a preference. It will either be a fundamental preference, ie one that cannot really be justified beyond the fact that it is preference that one holds (love is a common example), or else it is a preference held for particular reasons, in which case I need direct my arguments to those underlying reasons rather than the "bias" caused by the resulting preference itself.

Not only is is faintly depraved to treat all moral preferences (which, again, include wanting babies not to be injured) as equivalent to the kind of mental slipshodery that Tversky and Kahneman identified as leading people to make bad business decisions, it also permits Damore to suppose he can completely ignore the reasons that often sit behind such preferences. It allows him, in short, to put any goal that he does not share in a kind of black box and ignore any sensible rationale that might exist in its favour – to instead treat it merely as a fault to be corrected.

Diversity

To take the central policy goal discussed in the document – that of increasing representation of women and ethnic minorities in tech – there are all sorts of possible underlying rationales for this objective.

One of these reasons actually has nothing to do with long-term social engineering (or social responsibility) and everything to do with directly getting the best people for the job. It goes under the name of diversity. Although Damore uses the word six or seven times throughout the document no-where does he demonstrate that he actually understands what the argument for it actually involves and why it might in fact justify what he calls “discriminatory practices”.

Diversity – having people of different backgrounds and identities – is regarded as a good thing, for one thing, because it broadens the pool of experience that a company can draw upon. It is possibly also broadens – particular if Damore is right that there are relevant cognitive differences between men and women – the pool of skills at the organisations disposal. It is also a good thing if, by making the workplace a more comfortable, less exclusionary place to be for a larger proportion of the population it increases the company's hiring reach.

I do not comment here on the validity or the strength of those claims. But if diversity is a good – and Damore says (genuinely or otherwise) that he agrees that it is – then the only non-trivial (ie not by accident) means of achieving that good will all involve, one way or another, deliberately engineering one's recruitment programme to achieve the hiring of a cohort of employees with a somewhat different gender/ethnic make-up to that which would be achieved had diversity not been a goal at all. In particular, believing that diversity is good necessarily means believing that the best person for the job is not going to be fully independent of the characteristics of the other individuals you have already hired under the same job description.

These points should not be vastly controversial to anyone familiar with basic investment principles. Suppose I run a pension fund and I have $10 million to invest. I do some research and I come to the conclusion that Stock A is likely to produce the greatest return, Stock B will produce the next best return, and Stock C will produce the worst return of the three. Should I put all the money in Stock A, since I think this is the most promising? Almost certainly not: it is generally better, the extent depending on your (or your client's) appetite for risk, to diversify one portfolio and hold a variety of different types of stocks.

One way of conceptualising this is to say that the prudent investor is effectively hedging against the possibility that application of her own preferred criteria for investment are fallible – that they will not, in fact, lead to the best outcome. On her preferred, primary criteria Stock A is the best bet. But the investor know from experience that her crystal ball is of limited power and often the 'best bet' loses. So she effectively suspends her own preferred primary criteria for selection by using a secondary set of criteria, namely those that ensure a diverse portfolio is selected.

Can it not be said that the employer who employs a hiring practices that – shock-horror – “effectively lower the bar for 'diversity candidates'” (per Damore) is doing essentially the same thing, namely showing a prudent scepticism about the objective strength of its own primary selection criteria? Damore does not even consider the possibility. The case for diversity with recruits is even stronger than with stocks because stocks do not, as employees do, have to pool skills to work effectively with one another or attract other stocks to apply for a job. Again, Damore ignores these points. It seems that to his mind the only true, objective criteria to select for whatever job it was that he had at Google were the precise ones upon which he himself happened to be hired.

Girls vs. boys

Finally, onto the most controversial aspect of the memo: the suggestion that differences between the representation of men and women in STEM fields is down to innate biological differences between the genders.

Given that Damore spends so much of his 10-pages of infamy whining on about other people's biases, as I've said above, to no actual purpose, it is ironic that his reasoning on this crucial aspect provides an almost a classic example of one of Daniel Kahneman's favourite cognitive biases: attribute substitution. Attribute substitution occurs when your brain is called upon to make some judgement that will be computationally complex to carry out and it cheats by substituting a slightly different question which is easier to assess.

The question that Damore claims to be answering is: are biological differences the cause of the gender gap in tech? What he actually does is answer the simpler but ultimately irrelevant question: are there some biological differences between men and women?

He starts by trotting off a bullet-point list of alleged personality differences between men and women (some of which are partially supported by proper research citations, some of which aren't). Women are more interested in people, on average, than men. Men like taking physical risks more than women do on average. That sort of thing.

But when he is done with his list, he carries straight on as if he has now fully explained the cause of the gender gap: on page 5, under the heading “Non-discriminatory ways to reduce the gender gap” he says “Below I'll go over some of the differences in distribution of traits between men and women that I outlined in the previous section and suggest ways to address them to increase women's representation in tech without resorting to discrimination.”

Whoah! Hold on. Where was the bit where Damore cleverly explains how men's incrementally higher scores on some or other spatial reasoning test or risk-taking metric means that one should expect the gender ratio in Google tech roles to be more or less exactly the 80:20 split that it is? Where was the bit where he carefully examined at all the other myriad seemingly very plausible contributing causes that have been suggested for the gender gap and showed them conversely to have negligible numerical impact?

These crucial parts of the essay of course don't exist. They don't exist because providing convincing arguments for or against (let alone proving) causation is fiendishly difficult in this context. Damore basically doesn't bother. Instead, he is content to rubbish the concerns of anyone who cares about gender inequality in the industry based on his own unproven pet theories.

Disambiguating the effect of social conditions is important. For even where purely biological factors stand at the beginning of a chain of causation that ultimately leads to a lot less women going into tech jobs that leaves wide open the question whether those biological factors operate through the intermediation of social conditions.

Think about it. Suppose I showed you evidence that there was a particular genetic marker that some people in a particular population had and that others did not and that the majority of people with that marker were illiterate and the majority of the people who lacked it were not. You'd agree that the cause of the gene-carriers' illiteracy was down to genetics, right?

But the situation I have just described would pertain precisely if you were comparing the literacy of black and white Americans circa 1850, during slavery when, of course, education was not generally extended to the slave population. Having the genetic make-up of an African-American would predict illiteracy; having that of a White American would predict literacy. Yes, having African-American genes was then causal of illiteracy. But, for obvious reasons, it was causal in an entirely trivial way.

Interests vs. abilities

In fact, one piece written in the aftermath of the affair that does make a fairly convincing case that biological factors make a somewhat less trivial difference to the tech gender gap is this one by Scott Alexander, which unlike Damore's screed is carefully reasoned and worth reading. It argues that the evidence points to hormonal differences between males and females affecting levels of orientation towards pro-social behaviour (ie helping people). This, it is argued, leads women, on average, to be more interested in activities and career paths that are people-orientated (teaching, medicine, etc) than are men.

Alexander's conclusions are controversial (a nice thing about his piece is that includes, at the end, a detailed response from the writer who Alexander is responding to, which gives a full-circle view of the scientific controversy). But even if we assume his thesis is correct it hardly supports the sort of sweeping conclusion drawn by Damore to the effect that efforts to encourage greater participation of women in tech are worthless.

For Alexander's analysis is that differences in interest, rather than ability, drive the tech gender gap. The logic of this position is that some lower-ability men must be displacing higher-ability women in coding jobs because those higher ability women are peeling away from the relevant career path to do other, more people-orientated stuff like teaching (or, equally, because men, with their weaker pro-social instincts, are failing to do so). Let me say this again: the logic is lower ability people displacing higher ability people. All because of some dumb hormones. Surely the existence of such a dynamic ought to concern us. Surely it ought to particularly upset Damore given his jobs-ought-to-be-filled-with-the-highest-ability-candidates-no-matter-what-the-cost approach. One would think, indeed, that even were it to prove fairly expensive and difficult to overcome such instinctive motivational differences we might want to make the necessary investment.

In fact, there is good reason to believe that it is not all that difficult to overcome such biologically based motivational factors. Steven Pinker makes the point in Better Angels that people (men in particular!) are born with instinctive biases towards aggressive behaviour that in civilised society we do all sorts of things (create and hold to codes of manners, scold our young, etc) to repress. The civilised habits that such social controls instill become, Pinker points out, second nature to us – in contradistinction to our first nature, ie the Lord of the Flies-type barbarism that we would sink into if we were all left to our biological instincts alone.

If we can devise customs, values and programmes of education which constrain successfully (read Better Angels if you have a problem with “successfully”) the natural violent tendencies of men, then it shouldn't be beyond our wit to make a few tweaks to society so that high ability potential female software engineers are coaxed into using their talents to the fullest and ignoring the genetic siren-call towards people-orientated professions (and vice-versa with technically more mediocre men).

Parting with Damore

None of the above considerations got so much as a look in with Damore's manifesto.

He took the view, instead, that flinging together some homilies about gender differences of completely indeterminate quantitative standing and sprinkling the lot with random citations was enough to give him a licence to go off on an Alf Garnett-style rant about political correctness prefaced by a slimy, philosophical incoherent invocation of the right to freedom of expression as a pre-emptive shield against the criticism that he was aware was coming his way right from the start. It wasn't. There was always too much at stake: the sense of empathy and solidarity to which his female co-workers were entitled, his employers' reputation, and ultimately his own job.

I don't buy the line that Damore's sacking will inhibit open debate on the issue. It is evidently possible to make sane observations as to how biological differences between people might affect how we ought to behave to one another, how our companies and institutions operate or how we formulate education policy. The writers mentioned above – Pinker and Alexander – and many others have done so and avoided censure. Why? Because, quite simply, they avoided doing so in a dickish way.

The central reason why Damore deserved to be sacked was because revealed himself in those 10-pages of bile thinly-disguised as a helpful comment-box suggestion to be an unpleasant piece of work. The intellectual dishonesty of the work, the dismissive treatment of weighty considerations counter to his position, and the shockingly arrogant tone would be repulsive enough were he simply asking for a raise or, say, a transfer to another office. But given all of this shit was being leveled at dismantling policies designed at assisting marginalised groups of people become less marginalised these things were unforgivable. Google said, in effect, sorry, but he just wasn't their sort of person, and they were right, I think, to do so.