I'll let three philosophers speak, none of whom wanted to be named, of course, for the reasons well-stated by the second.
First, an eminent British philosopher (who supplied, awhile back, a scathing commentary on some of the madness), explaining why he had "decided not to blog, even in a small way, about the profession and its issues":
These people with their pathological self-righteousness are just not worth the trouble. It is like trying to argue with religious fundamentalists. I wish you luck in your continuing struggle with them. You are a more determined guy than me. I will stick to my policy of occasionally posting comments about the evils of contemporary capitalism. Even the modern multinational corporation is a more rationally intelligible foe than this bloodthirsty mob of wacko philosophy profs.
Second, from an eminent Canadian philosopher:
In my opinion, there is an atmosphere of reckless attack in our profession, and a lot of people are chilled by the possibility of ending up on the wrong side of the mob.
Perhaps if there are consequences for such reckless behavior, it will end? The rise of "wild west" unmmoderated blogs is surely a symptom of this problem too.
Third, from a young postdoc, graduate of a top philosophy program:
I have this sinking feeling that the whole profession is in the grip of some weird mania that's only going to get worse. It's like people are trying to catch up with the identity politics from other humanities fields from 20 years ago and they're going about it like Maoists.....[Y]ou'd expect a training in analytic philosophy to be a kind of inoculation against that kind of groupthink. But now the politics that seems to dominate English-speaking analytic philosophy is something that's Maoist in style but early '90s identity politics in content. Why? How? I just don't get it.
Let me just add one thing about the reason I kept calling the new identity politics "Maoist". I think there are some close similarities between it and Western Maoism from the 1960s (e.g., the SDS splinter group PLP in the US). One point of similarity is the practice of "calling out" members of the group for not adhering to the party line in some subtle way. In the case of the new identity politics this often involves failing to adhere to a nebulous and rapidly evolving speech code that forbids the use of various words of standard English—“blind review”, say—that are deemed ableist or sexist or … The offender is then expected to publicly confess to and apologize for their albleist or sexist or (etc.) speech. The similar Maoist practice was called “criticism and self-criticism” and was implemented in some pretty brutal ways in China during the Cultural Revolution and in gentler ways by Western Maoist groups to maintain discipline within their own ranks.
Another point of similarity is the language of personal transformation that the group members use in describing how they came to be group members. It’s a “transformative” experience or a “journey” that involves a something like an internal struggle session (to use a Maoist term), where one comes to see that in one’s previous life one committed all kinds of terrible crimes one didn’t even know were crimes, and one resolves to become a better person by adopting a new set of beliefs and habits. I know a few survivors of the 1960s Maoist groups, and this is exactly how they describe thinking of, and being encouraged to think of, joining the groups. If you have a look at how the converts to the new identity politics tend to describe their conversions, I think you’ll find something very similar. I’ll refrain from giving examples in case you decide to quote this.
One can go on to list other similarities like anti-intellectualism (to answer critics you just cite the party line) and the use of thuggish tactics like disrupting classes (the PLP was famous for this), but these aren’t features the new identity politics only shares with Western Maoism. What I had in mind when I said the former was “Maoist in form” but something else in content were just the two features I highlighted here: enforcement of discipline by criticism/self-criticism and the tendency to describe becoming part of the group (or “consensus”) as something like religious conversion.
In the real world, of course, it wasn't always as bad as on social media, with its endless preening competitions to express the most righteous indignation, the most solidarity, the most sensitivity. Indeed, in the real world, there were positive developments, most notably, universities actually getting serious about sexual harassment of students by faculty, the scandal of academic philosophy for too long. It is unfortunate that this tangible progress on providing remedies for real wrongdoing has been partly hijacked by those pushing unrelated ideological and vindictive agendas under the guise of being "kind" or "inclusive."
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