The Right Side of History

by Ben Shapiro

  The Left properly pointed out the widespread problems of racism and sexism in American society in the 1950s—and their diagnosis was to destroy the system utterly. That diagnosis was self-serving—since Marx, the Left had seen Western civilization as the problem, a hierarchy of property-owners seeking to suppress their supposed inferiors. Now, the Left claimed that all the ills of society could be laid at the feet of the system they so despised. And young Americans, living through the turbulent social change of the 1960s, resonated to that message. In the 1960s and 1970s, the counterculture, which saw America as a place replete with evil and suffering, became the dominant culture in academia and the media.

  “I’M ON THE RIGHT TRACK, BABY”

  If the system was to blame for all human shortcomings, then the answers could be found by pursuing your truth. Virtue, it turns out, was part of that old-style hierarchy that had kept humanity penned in for millennia. No, people merely had to “find themselves.” This newfangled gloss on Rousseauian romanticism found ecstatic followers on the New Left. Where once conscience had reigned supreme, now self-fulfillment became the key to self-betterment.

  The psychological theory of Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) was hijacked to support this new journey within. Maslow said that human beings sought self-realization—not the pursuit of virtue through acting in accordance with an objective telos, but realization of what you truly want. Repression prevents us from realizing what we want and need—and such repression begins in childhood, “mostly as a response to parental and cultural disapprovals.” We should seek our inner nature, which is “definitely not ‘evil,’ but is either what we adults in our culture call ‘good,’ or else it is neutral.” By removing repression, we can unlock our own good.15

  Dr. Benjamin Spock’s (1903–1998) Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), which sold fifty million copies between its publication and Spock’s death in 1998, placed the same emphasis on self-esteem. Spock, a devotee of the New Left, had told parents to put aside the rigidity of old-school parenting, which could instill insecurity and anxiety. Instead, parents should follow their instincts and refrain from criticizing their children. Spock admitted that his initial draft of the book led many parents to believe that they had to bend over for their children. “Parents began to be afraid to impose on the child in any way,” he said. Spock actually would change his book to emphasize parental standards in later editions.16 But Spock did believe in a notion of natural man as inherently good. “John Dewey and Freud said that kids don’t have to be disciplined into adulthood but can direct themselves toward adulthood by following their own will,” Spock stated in 1972, while running for president on the People’s Party ticket (his platform included free medical care, full withdrawal of all American troops from foreign countries, and a guaranteed minimum income).17

  This was hot stuff in the 1960s and 1970s. Nathaniel Branden (1930–2014), famously Ayn Rand’s paramour and an early objectivist, penned the bestselling The Psychology of Self-Esteem, in which he stated that the central human search was for self-esteem—and that self-esteem could be achieved only through rational appraisal. He attacked the doctrine of Original Sin, and argued that the will to understand could grant purpose.18 Later, Branden would write that there was not a “single psychological problem—from anxiety and depression, to fear of intimacy or of success, to spouse battery or child molestation—that is not traceable to the problem of poor self-esteem.”19

  Now, Maslow and Spock and Branden may have argued that self-esteem still had to be earned—but that message was quickly shunted aside in favor of a simple headline version of their philosophy: elevating self-esteem had to be pursued at all costs. If fulfillment lay in self-esteem, then children had to be taught that they were special. Furthermore, if values and standards stood in the way of self-esteem, then those values and standards had to be obliterated for the sake of true self-realization. Politicians began to echo the idea that children were owed a culture of self-esteem; as Jesse Singal of The Cut writes, “The self-esteem craze changed how countless organizations were run, how an entire generation—millennials—was educated, and how that generation went on to perceive itself (quite favorably).” As Singal also points out, the social science to suggest that crime and suffering would be minimized with the maximization of self-esteem was junk—it turns out not that self-esteem makes people more high-achieving, but that more high-achieving people tend to have higher self-esteem thanks to their achievements.20

  The true effect wasn’t to create generations of more fulfilled human beings, though—it was to create generations of more self-obsessed human beings. But society was quick to embrace the self-esteem movement, the notion that everyone’s feelings were to be honored in order to prevent crucial loss of self-esteem. Barney sang to countless school children, “Oh, you are special, special, everyone is special / Everyone in his or her own way.” And as they grew, Lady Gaga would sing to them, “Just love yourself and you’re set / I’m on the right track, baby / I was born this way.” Where children had once learned from Pinocchio to “always let your conscience be your guide,” now they were taught by Frozen, “no right, no wrong, no rules for me / I’m free! / Let it go!” Or, most crudely, Americans might hear that you and me baby ain’t nothin’ but mammals who ought to do it like they do on the Discovery Channel—not exactly the transcendental uplift of Psalms or Beethoven. Natural law had become nature, and through reveling in their nature rather than channeling it, human beings could finally find their bliss.

  THE RISE OF INTERSECTIONALITY

  For the advocates of the Frankfurt School, the point of focusing on self-esteem was obvious: if they focused instead on the spread of material prosperity, they’d have to give up Marxism in favor of Judeo-Christian-values-supported capitalism. By focusing on self-esteem, however, the New Left could kill three birds with one stone: they could overturn reliance on Judeo-Christian religion, Greek teleology, and capitalism. Religion, Greek teleology, and capitalism all have something in common: none of them cares particularly much about “your bliss.” Religion suggests that your self-realization lies in consonance with God, and that any attempt to placate your ego through pursuit of personally defined happiness is bound to fail. Religion suggests that “your bliss” does not exist: only God’s bliss does. Greek teleology is utterly unconcerned with your personal definition of self-realization; the only thing that counts is whether you are acting virtuously in accordance with right reason. And capitalism cares far less about how you’re feeling than about your ability to create products and services someone else wants.

  By calling self-realization the highest good, then, the New Left had cast out the specter of the roots of Western civilization and replaced them with a call to action. What was that call to action? Forming alliances directed at tearing down the system. The theory went like this: self-esteem is the key good. But self-esteem cannot be achieved while there are structural impediments to that self-esteem.

  Those structural impediments came in the form of sexism, racism, and other forms of bigotry. Such bigotry didn’t have to be expressed outwardly—the structures of society themselves were institutionally biased against victim groups. And members of those victim groups couldn’t achieve self-realization so long as those institutions remained standing.

  Second-wave feminists like Betty Friedan (1921–2006) characterized the role of American women as “the comfortable concentration camp.” She argued, like other members of the New Left, that women were being prevented from achieving true happiness by the informal expectations of society; in The Feminine Mystique (1963) she lamented, “a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States.” What had led to this unspoken suffering? Quoting Maslow, among others, Friedan argued that women had sold themselves out thanks to societal pressures, turning themselves into “walking corpses.”21 Feminist author Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex and existentialist partner of Sartre, went
so far as to say that society should bar women from becoming mothers: “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.”22

  Meanwhile, in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, which righteously fought against true institutionalized racism through legal structures, a new argument was made: that America was irredeemably racist, and that such racism could never be overcome. Malcolm X argued in 1963 that even the pursuit of civil rights legislation was foolhardy: it would “never solve our problems.”23 Black Panther honorary prime minister Stokely Carmichael, along with Charles Hamilton, wrote in 1967 in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation, that institutional racism went far too deep for anything but total systemic change to abrogate it. “Racism is both overt and covert,” they wrote. “It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism.” Institutional racism is vague and difficult to target—but we can tell it by its fruits. Wherever there is disparity, there is obviously discrimination. When black Americans lack “proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism.” White people may not be bombing churches anymore or stoning black families, but they are still “support[ing] political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies.” Thus, political disagreement is merely a guise for covert racism.24

  The only way for members of these victimized groups to restore their self-esteem would come by banding together to tear down the system. Feminist Gloria Steinem wrote that women and other victimized groups could not actually achieve self-esteem in the current system; to achieve self-esteem, victims would have to bond “with others who share similar experiences (from groups of variously abled people to conferences of indigenous nations) bonding with others in shared power . . . and taking one’s place in a circle of true selves.”25

  Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw of Columbia University came up with a term to describe this coalition of victims: intersectionality. According to Crenshaw, human beings are members of various groups: racial groups, gender groups, religious groups, sexual orientation groups. And we can describe their “lived realities” by referring to the intersection between those groups. Thus, a black female lesbian Muslim has a different lived reality than a white male heterosexual Christian. Furthermore, we can identify the level of difficulty someone has experienced in life simply by referencing the various groups of which she is a member. The more minority groups to which you are a member, the more you have been victimized; the more you have been victimized, the more your opinion about the innate institutional bigotry of the United States ought to carry weight.

  The actual goal, as Crenshaw acknowledges, is to bully those who aren’t members of these intersectional groups—to force them to “check their privilege.” Crenshaw explains, “Acknowledging privilege is hard—particularly for those who also experience discrimination and exclusion.” But acknowledge they must, or be accused of complicity in institutional racism.26

  White citizens must recognize their white privilege or be cast out; males must recognize their “toxic masculinity”; identity politics becomes a path toward true justice. Repressive tolerance must be exercised against those who would fight the tribal notion of intersectionality. Those who refuse to abide by tribal dictates of intersectionality—people who insist that they are not victims of American society simply by dint of their skin color—are deemed sell-outs, Uncle Toms. Thus Clarence Thomas is not legitimately black because he doesn’t vote Democrat; Nikki Haley isn’t legitimately a woman because she is a pro-life Republican. According to Ta-Nehisi Coates, when black people call for individualistic thinking that strays from traditional Democratic ideology, that means supporting “white freedom”: “freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant.”27

  VICTIMHOOD TRIUMPHANT

  In order to promote discussions about intersectionality, systems of oppression must be curbed—including the speech of others. Discussions must end. Reason must be thrown out the window since, owing to our different life experiences, we cannot understand one another. Freedom—supposedly a tool of the white power structure—itself must be redefined so as to protect the self-realization of intersectional people.

  Science, too, must take a backseat. Science might undercut the intersectional argument by providing evidence that not all suffering springs from institutional discrimination. Say, for example, that social science shows a high correlation between single motherhood and crime—and that single motherhood is especially predominant among American blacks. Or say that there are group differences in IQ, and that those differences may be at least partially heritable. Or say that men and women are biologically different, and that this difference explains differences in pay—since women choose different types of jobs than men and make different decisions with regard to the number of hours worked, their pay tends to be lower on average than that of men. Or say that gender is connected with sex, and that males who believe they are female are not in fact female.

  These basic facts become subject to scrutiny since science itself is a construct of the system. That’s the argument of Donna Hughes in the Women’s Studies International Forum, who explains, “The scientific method is a tool for the construction and justification of dominance in the world . . . the new methodological techniques were invented by men who were interested in explaining the inheritance of traits in order to support their political ideology of natural human superiority and inferiority.”28

  This sounds bizarre and foolish. That’s because it is. Science has created vaccines that have saved millions; that’s not a social construct, that’s a fact. But this postmodern idea about science as an ethnocentric construct has quickly entered the mainstream. In 2018, a lawsuit by former Google employee James Damore for wrongful termination alleged that the company had distributed an official handout to all managers. That memo, meant to encourage “inclusion,” suggested that “aspects of white dominant culture” could not be rewarded by managers. Those aspects included thinking in terms of “individual achievement,” “meritocracy,” “we are objective,” and “colorblind racial frame.” Instead, managers should seek to promote “noticing race/color and any racial patterns in treatment” as well as the concept that “everything is subjective.”29

  Most obviously, advocates of verifiable science have found themselves attacked for their supposed motives in discussing science at all. In January 2018, Steven Pinker discussed the problem of political radicalization, and particularly the newfound attraction by some college students to the alt-right. He stated that one of the reason for the alt-right’s sudden upsurge had come as a result of attempts to silence discussion about science. He mentioned that if rational people cited basic facts—facts like “different ethnic groups commit violent crimes at different rates” or “men and women are not identical in their life priorities, in their sexuality, in their tastes and interests”—they were immediately called racist and sexist. Because the Left saw such facts as inherently debasing of self-esteem, they sought to quash discussion of those facts—with the result that people who wanted to talk about those facts were more likely to draw foolish inferences from them. As Pinker explained, “If you’ve never heard these facts before and you stumble across them or someone mentions them, it is possible to come to some extreme conclusions . . . you’re never exposed to the ways of putting these facts into context so that they don’t lead to racism and sexism.” Pinker added, “If they were exposed, then the rationale for putting them into proper political and moral context could also be arti
culated, and I don’t think you would have quite the extreme backlash.”

  For expressing his opposition to drawing extreme views from facts, and for expressing his support of discussing controversial facts, Pinker was accused of complicity in racism and sexism—he was actually accused of being a member of the alt-right for a speech deriding the alt-right. Professor Joshua Loftus of New York University (a self-reported member of the Democratic Socialists of America) said that Pinker’s idea were indicative of a “pernicious problem . . . radical centrism of the likes of Pinker, Jon Haidt, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sam Harris, James Damore.”30 Jamelle Bouie of Slate magazine suggested that Pinker had embraced statements like “blacks cause crime” and “jews control the world.”31

  The same sort of ire has met Sam Harris, who dared to point out that IQ differentials between groups exist. He did not say they were entirely genetic; he did not draw any policy inferences from IQ studies (for the record, Harris was a Hillary Clinton supporter). Nonetheless, Ezra Klein’s Vox chided him for citing studies, with scientists Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard Nisbett suggesting that Harris had engaged in “pseudoscientific racialist speculation.”32 When confronted by Harris about this, Klein immediately retreated to the confines of identity politics: “These hypotheses about biological racial difference are now, and have always been, used to advance clear political agendas.” Thus, these hypotheses must never be discussed, since they fall afoul of identity politics considerations. And even engaging in scientific discussion is a form of identity politics, according to Klein—citing studies and fighting back against attempts to censor those studies is merely engaging in a tribalism of white scientists.33