Читать книгу Uncomfortable Ideas - Bo Bennett PhD - Страница 18

Conscious, group avoidance occurs when two or more people deliberately plan to keep themselves and/or others from exposure to or the entertaining of uncomfortable ideas. This kind of avoidance is common with universities, student groups, parents, and activist groups.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), since 2000, 82 total invited speakers were unable to speak at a university event because they were either formally disinvited, they voluntarily withdrew, or they were prevented from speaking due to substantial disruption by protesters in the audience.⁶ There are many more speakers who are protested by student or faculty groups who still end up speaking despite the efforts to stop them. Take Michael Bloomberg for example. In 2014, when word got out that he was scheduled as the Harvard commencement speaker, several students protested because of Bloomberg’s policies that they felt discriminated against minorities.⁷ This is a reasonable concern and certainly not unjustified. The problem is, actions, behaviors, and policies are very often a reflection of a person’s beliefs, moral code, and politics. Avoiding exposure to ideas from people whose actions, behavior, or policies we don’t agree with is the same as avoiding them for their ideas that we find uncomfortable. By avoiding these ideas, we are creating an echo chamber environment where principles in group psychology such as groupthink, group polarization, and memory biases all but assure that ideas uncomfortable to the group become even more uncomfortable to that group. For example, group polarization is the phenomenon that when placed in group situations such as student groups or entire student populations, people will form more extreme opinions than when they are in individual situations.

Uncomfortable Idea: Refusing to allow people to share their ideas, no matter how dangerous you may think their ideas are, can often do more harm than good.

Parents are well known from shielding their children from uncomfortable ideas. This is called parenting. Although there are as many philosophies to parenting as there are parents, virtually all parents would agree that there are some ideas to which young children should not be exposed. However, too many parents continue to shield their children from ideas throughout adolescence and even into adulthood. They teach their children what to think rather than encourage them to learn how to think for themselves. They teach them what they believe is right and wrong rather than how to determine for themselves what is right and what is wrong. This leads to generations of people who don’t know the difference between obedience and morality. Perhaps this is their goal.

Uncomfortable Idea: Parents are more interested in creating obedient children than moral children.

The online group South African Feminists state that “not all ideas are worth debating,”⁸ with which I would agree. I’m not spending my time debating a flat earth. Many years back, out of curiosity, I did look at the arguments and found them easily debunked. Unless a flat-earther has some new and compelling evidence that disproves hundreds of years of mathematical proofs along with geological, cosmological, and astrological evidence, it is not worth debating. The problem is with the reasons that are given as to why some ideas are not worth debating. The South African feminists group states that “One of our rules is that victim-blaming is absolutely forbidden; we assume that everyone in the group knows that victim-blaming is wrong.” Fair enough. It’s sick when people blame girls for getting raped because “they were asking for it” by the way they dressed. But is “blaming” the same thing as sharing some of the responsibility? If I go into a black neighborhood and start yelling “White people rule!” repeatedly at the top of my lungs, then I get the bejesus kicked out of me, do I not bear at least some of the responsibility for the fact that I have been beaten up even if I am not responsible for the crime of assault? We don’t know how the members of this feminist group would answer these questions because these are questions that we are expressly forbidden to ask. It is my guess that this group is conflating blame for the crime with sharing some of the responsibility for the action. While it is an uncomfortable idea, there have been several studies that link provocative dress and alcohol use to rape⁹¹⁰¹¹—at least enough that I, as a social scientist who understands the research, would be concerned enough about the safety of my teenage daughter to warn her how her behavior can increase the odds of becoming a victim of a crime. It sucks that we live in a society where this is true, but the fact that it sucks doesn’t change the fact that it’s true, and refusing to discuss this may make girls feel more liberated but certainly does not make them any safer.

Uncomfortable Idea: Victims of crimes often share some of the responsibility for the situation. Taking preventative measures (such as locking your car doors to prevent auto theft) can reduce the odds that you will become a victim.