The circular, impregnable resilience of Higher Miseducation
One of the more maddening aspects of the rise of wokeness in the last decade was how some of the younger advocates for “social justice” responded to criticism. “Read a book,” they’d tell me, and roll their eyes. I was twice their age, had relevant degrees from Oxford and Harvard, but I could obviously only believe what I believed because I had never “read a book.” No discussion was possible until I had “educated” myself — a task they refused to expend any “emotional labor” on. A few exasperated huffs, a slight panic in their angry eyes, and they were gone.
The same almost-Pavlovian response would arise during the BLM madness if you challenged for a millisecond the idea — shared by 44 percent of liberals in 2019 — that cops were gunning down over a thousand unarmed black men a year (the empirical answer was 29 — compared to 44 white men). Was I not aware of the fact of white supremacy, the self-evident systems and structures that Jon Stewart was an instant expert in? Or that sex and race were entirely social constructions? Sheesh. What rock had I been hiding under?
It wasn’t the differing opinion that upset me. One of my queerest character traits is that I love differing opinions. It was the assumption that none of this was opinion at all, but merely established empirical fact — of which I was blissfully unaware, probably because I was a bad-faith bigot, or had never picked up a book. This absolute certainty was also generally correlated with higher levels of education — just as “liberals” and “very liberals” were far more likely to have a college degree than those to their right. Over time, my friends began to wither among the educated classes, especially the newly minted and humorless “queers”, as I gravitated to normies, who had some strong views, were open to some others, and enjoyed a good chat and smoke sesh.
A new study tells me little I didn’t suspect already about my educational peers and how this strange correlation emerged between higher education and epistemological certainty. But it does prove something empirically important.
