Marie Snyder: Teaching Critical Thinking, Part Four

I had intended to include more than one audio clip in this post, but once I started unpacking some of the issues we discussed, things expanded pretty quickly. Never mind, whatever I don't deal with this week will come up in future articles.

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Before I dig into it, I'd like to add my usual plea for support. I put a fair amount of work into this blog, so if you can afford it, why not buy a subscription? It's easy to do through Patreon and Pay Pal.

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Cloudwalking Owl · Conservative Versus Liberal Bias

The bit about Bob Altemeyer and "a conservative point of view" opens up a bit of a nest of complex, inter-related issues so I'm going to take some time explaining what we were talking about. 

Altemeyer is famous for his research into a specific type of politics. He was a professor in Manitoba who convinced a lot of politicians and supporters in both Canada and the US to fill out surveys. The results suggest that there is a specific type of human being---what he calls the "authoritarian personality" who make up significant subset of the population. They consist of two groups of people who were made for each other: a lot of people who want someone to tell them what to think and do, and, a much smaller group that want to do the telling. (You can download a free book about this phenomenon here.) The evidence that he found shows that this sort of person tends to support right-wing political parties in Canada (the Conservatives) and the USA (the Republicans). In contrast, the other people in both countries---who I will just label "liberals"---support one of the other parties. (Please remember that this is a statistical generalization---there will be examples of other personality types in all parties.)

I mentioned that people routinely ask why universities can't have a "conservative point of view" expressed more often in classes. The problem seems to be that authoritarians and liberals have very different ways of processing information---and that gets back to my question about "judging each issue on its own merits".

Let's consider a recent example that illustrates what I'm talking about. When the Supreme Court ruled in favour of gay marriage there were a lot of plaintive cries that the sky was falling. If memory serves, our local MP broke with government policy and voted against the bill that legalized it and a local official refused to officiate at same sex marriages and lost her job. I also remember hearing politicians say "the biggest issue facing Canada right now is same-sex marriage". Now it's a great, big "nothing burger". How come?

At the time I personally looked at the issue. I found out that there are several different elements to the issue: practical, ecclesiastic, and, moral. 

The first thing to understand is that there are a whole list of practical benefits that accrue from being married.

• pension survivor benefits, drug and dental plans, etc
• legal issues: hospital visitation rights, adoption, immigration sponsorship, etc
  

I realized that part of this was about something as prosaic as whether or not your life partner could get her teeth fixed. This seemed to me a really good, practical reason to allow same-sex marriage. (Although it can be argued that the real solution would be to change all of these things so they aren't based upon marriage. This could include extending OHIP to include drug and dental---but that would involve a much bigger battle.)

Secondly, several religious organizations said they were being discriminated against when the government said it wanted to legalize same sex marriages. No one was saying that Roman Catholic priests would be forced to perform gay marriages, so it was hard to understand what exactly they were upset about. If any religious group was being interfered with, it was the Unitarians who did want to perform gay marriages but who were forbidden by law. I came to the conclusion that various Christian groups were upset because they were losing some undue influence on society. Loss of privilege often seems like discrimination to people who have had it all of their lives. Not being a Christian, however, that argument didn't put butter on any of my parsnips---.

Finally, if you believe that being gay is "immoral" then you think that supporting it in any way shape or form is also doing something evil. This is the foundational issue, IMHO, because if people think that gay marriage is "sin" (to quote the Pope), then having the state support it is also "sin". When I looked into this issue, however, I saw lots of research that said being gay isn't a "choice"---it's instinctual. Moreover, when biologists look into the behaviour of other animals they found that lots of other species seem to manifest gay sub-populations. So in actual fact, contrary to popular opinion, being gay is actually totally "natural". (And, being a Daoist, being "natural" does put some dairy lipids on my favourite root veggies.)

I know that many Christians believe that all sex is sinful and that our instinct for it is actually the promptings of Satan. But, frankly, I think all of that is errant nonsense and I don't think that our legal system should have anything at all to do with it.

What I was doing in the above is dealing with the issue of gay marriage "on its own merits". As near as I can tell, authoritarians looked at the issue very differently. Their response was to look towards their traditions and the authority figures in their lives. Then they came to the conclusion that gays are "outsiders" and "weird"---and as such should not be "encouraged". 

According to Altemeyer's understanding, therefore, the reason why the uproar over gay marriage dissipated was because during the kerfuffle over gay rights a lot of closeted gays to came out to their families and friends. And when that happened, opposition to same-sex marriage deflated like a soufflé during an earthquake. According to the authoritarian hypothesis this was because most of the people opposed to the law were folks who believed that gays were "outsiders" that they believed were "weirdos". But when they found out that their beloved aunt Sally was a lesbian and that guy they really respected at work was gay, they realized that homosexuals are "real people" just like them. And because they knew "good people" who said that the law was about getting the people they love on their dental plan instead of destroying Christendom, the "penny dropped" that same-sex marriage was a good thing instead of a plot by the anti-Christ.    

I've made such a fuss about the authoritarian hypothesis because understanding it is so important to making sense of what Snyder is saying about "liberalism is just true". I think it's important to really understand what is going on here. The point is that thinking critically about what we do and do not know isn't something that can be incidentally polluted with "liberal bias", thinking critically is what being "liberal" is all about. If you doubt this, consider the following definition that I got from just typing "definition of liberal" in Duckduckgo:

Favoring reform, open to new ideas, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; not bound by traditional thinking; broad-minded. synonym: broad-minded.

Now look at the following mission statements from two Canadian universities. First the University of Guelph:

The University of Guelph is a research-intensive, learner-centred university. Its core value is the pursuit of truth. Its aim is to serve society and to enhance the quality of life through scholarship. Both in its research and in its teaching programs, the University is committed to a global perspective.

Now the one for Ambrose University, a "Christian university" in Alberta:

Ambrose University prepares men and women for wise, joyful and redemptive engagement in the church, society and the created order through excellent Christian post-secondary education.

As you can see, Guelph University is committed to finding the "Truth" and broadening student's understanding according to a "global perspective". In contrast, Ambrose University "prepares" students for "engagement" with "the church, society and the created order". What this ultimately means is that the Guelph school is saying that students need to follow the facts where ever they lead, while the Albertan one is saying that the point of education is get young men and women integrated into the existing religious and social framework. These are two very different goals.

Another piece of evidence that points towards the way authoritarians understand the world comes from a Texas Republican policy plank that seems to specifically oppose their school boards from running the sort of program that Snyder teaches.

We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.

Again, from the authoritarian point of view, education shouldn't be about teaching children how to make up their own minds based on evidence or reason, it should instead be about reinforcing and solidifying the existing belief systems of the community and parents.

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Just in case someone is wondering about the various factual statements that Snyder makes in the rest of the above clip, here's a graph that cites one of the most controversial ones. It does a good job of showing how much the US tax system has changed in the last hundred years or so. (Click on the image to get a clearer version.)

From VisualizingEconomics.com . Public Domain image registered under the CopyLeft Agreement.

As you can see from the above, during the time when the American economy boomed the most, it also had---by far and away---the highest tax rates in its history.

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I can back Snyder up about poor people not wanting society to help folks like them because they hope to eventually be wealthy themselves. I can remember presenting a policy plank to a party convention over 30 years ago. I was arguing for a Guaranteed Annual Income plus a maximum allowable income. (Something that the USA pretty much had under the Eisenhower administration.) Only one person in the group didn't support it, and he was very poor. As he explained it, "I have an idea about how to make much more energy efficient windows. If my patent takes off and I become a millionaire, I don't want to have to pay excessive taxes on my wealth."

This is the same sort of idea that is expressed in the Ronald Wright quote:

"John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Snyder raises Charles Taylor's use of the concept "social imaginaries" to label this phenomenon. I haven't read any of his work, but from what I could see on-line, this seems very similar to the old Marxist idea of "False Consciousness". This does an excellent job of explaining that weird spiritual experience I mentioned to her. The conversation between my older sibling and our drover from about 50 years ago is a classic case of false consciousness. Both of them had so bought into the "system" that they didn't understand how it was rigged to ensure that people with manure on their boots handing over money to people who never have any on their shoes.  

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I've done a lot of "unpacking" in the above. But I think it was important to work out the nuances of what Snyder and I were talking about in the clip that began this post. Anyway, that should be enough for this week. Until my next post, please take care of yourself. Wear a mask, keep your distance, and, when you can, register for vaccination (I have). 

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Moreover I say unto you, we have to deal with the Climate Emergency!