Peter Tregear, Honorary Principal Fellow, University of Melbourne/
The Conversation, Austrlia
A scene from the 1961 film West Side Story. The casting of an Australian performer as Maria in a local production of the musical was recently criticised for ‘white washing’ a story about a Puerto Rican immigrant
Recently, a group of respected academics, including Melbourne-born philosopher Peter Singer, announced that they were launching a new academic journal called the Journal of Controversial Ideas. In it, authors will have the option of remaining anonymous.
The editors say they wish to
enable academics – particularly younger, untenured, or otherwise vulnerable academics – to have the option of publishing under a pseudonym when they might otherwise be deterred from publishing by fear of death threats… threats to their families, or threats to their careers.
This is a justification that should trouble us all, not just those of us who happen to work in and for universities. Scientific advance, as well as the health of our society and the political and cultural freedoms that underpin it, depends on our capacity to accept that ideas, when properly and rigorously argued, are capable of being judged with a reasonable degree of objectivity, regardless of who is positing them.
We should expect academics in particular to be willing to assess an idea on the basis of what is being argued, not who is arguing it. Failing to do this is traditionally understood as committing an ad hominem fallacy.
True, we know that all human knowledge is subject to a myriad of visible and hidden prejudices that shape how we think. But reasoned argument gives us various tools that we can use to expose these prejudices, and thus also the possibility of rising above them.
Thus academics are trained to judge an idea primarily on the basis of the cogency, originality and rigour of the arguments that support it. We can assess the underlying validity of those arguments by scrutinising their inherent reasoning and by comparing them against bodies of pre-existing knowledge.
The peer review process is one particular tool we use to uphold these standards. It involves the “blind” assessment of submissions to academic publications. The recent “grievance studies” hoax, however, has drawn public attention to some of the weaknesses of the peer review system. It also helps us understand the wider context that has motivated the creation of a Journal of Controversial Ideas.
In this hoax, three academics concocted articles that parodied a certain style of academic argument. Several of the fake articles were accepted for publication despite their dubious content. Their titles included Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon and An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant.
The hoaxers argue that the fact such articles were accepted for publication points to the corrupting influence of “identity politics” on academia. The righteousness of one’s personal experiences of, or feelings about, an issue (and, more broadly, the identity groups with which one identifies) are, they suggest, increasingly valued as a source of authority over abstract reasoning or generalised observation.When our identity becomes the principal filter through which we understand the world, however, we can no longer presume that notions like truth and objective facts actually exist. We must instead accept that we live in a world of multiple competing truths, with no agreed consensus about how we might choose between them.
Rejection of expert advice
Both the election of Trump and the result of the Brexit referendum in the UK have been in part attributed to the success of political campaigns so conceived. Both involved an explicit rejection of reasoned advice from academic experts such as political scientists, climate scientists, and economists. Instead, appeals for support targeted particular sections of the electorate based on voters’ race and ethnicity – identity politics at its purest.This is not a phenomenon restricted to the political right. As the New York Times observed last year, the right has itself been responding to a form of political thinking already common to so-called “progressive” political movements.For instance, if you happen to be white, male, cis-gendered, working class, and so on, you are likely to look for a tribal allegiance of your own. Or, as Mark Lilla put it in his 2017 book The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics, “as soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the same”.Lilla argues that we must instead reassert the importance of appeals to a “universal democratic ‘we’” (as opposed to “I”) “on which solidarity can be built, duty instilled and action inspired”.
One of the reasons this is so difficult to do is that our identity does matter when we confront many genuine political grievances. Racism, poverty, misogyny, homophobia are, alas, very real problems. They affect us individually very differently depending on how others perceive us – or we perceive ourselves – in terms of race, gender, class, sexuality and the like.To effectively solve the injustices that arise out of these social phenomena, it is necessary to recognise that the significant forms of disadvantage and discrimination they cause are not natural, but socially constructed. They need to be contested and addressed as such.Lilla is right to argue, nevertheless, that we risk taking our focus on identity too far. The emergence of a Journal of Controversial Ideas is only one particular sign that our once generally accepted belief in the possibility of disinterested political, theoretical, or even scientific, knowledge may be threatened by an over-focus on identity.