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.