Political agendas raise valuable questions in any social science. Were it not for feminist linguistics, I might not have looked carefully into the role of the referent in pejoration, an important aspect of semantic shift, or the distribution of colloquial terms for abuse of authority and what it tells us about gender. Those questions are invaluable, leading to deep insights...as long as the agenda doesn't bias the results.
As much as a political agenda can raise important and valuable questions, it can also stifle the research if the movement grabs the first results, waves it prominently as some kind of banner and places too much importance on it. As a standard for the movement, it may effectively intimidate researchers from further research. It may also undermine the credibility of the movement if intrepid researchers find that the first grab results turn out wrong.
We should never fear that results of further research won't align with our political agenda. If there is an injustice, it will emerge in the results as long as we continue to pursue that research. That's why academic freedom matters -- the underlying injustices require relentless pursuit, not grabbing the first flag of evidence and waving it.
Academic research and activism are very different in method and goal. The activist world is one of factional interests in a competition for power. It's a drama of conflicts. In the drama of policy, the activists must express their interests as loudly and one-sidedly as possible otherwise it will not be heard at all under the magnified megaphone of authority and the interests authority serves. Truth is not the priority. Need, cure, repair for injustice, are. The world of politics is like an opera: each role has an aria and only that role gets to sing that song. If that aria is not sung, the plot cannot move forward, and if it isn't sung clearly over the orchestra to the furthest reach of the theater, the audience will not all fully understand what the story they are witnessing is about. Academia is supposed to be a place apart from that dramatical theater. The academic world is ideally one of truth-seeking, not interest-serving. The meeting of these two social locations -- activism and academicism -- is inevitable, but mutually dangerous. Research can amplify the activist voice, but muffle the academic calling, and because science is unstable, activist reliance on it is precarious.
(To give credit where due, it was Michael Shenker, the leader of the squatters movement in Manhattan, one of the most brilliant talkers I've ever met, came up with that opera analogy. No surprise, he was himself a musician.)
Is there a solution or best balance? The IQ inheritance debate tells us, no, there can be no best balance, a problem with only unsatisfactory options. The debate seems to be stalled at: either accept the state of the science and abandon DEI, or doubt the science and trust that DEI will improve outcomes for the next generation at the expense of the current. The third option is the whatabout answer: there has always been plenty of dysfunction among the privileged whites or Jews or whatever, that hasn't prevented the economy, the academy, the society and the nation from progressing and thriving.
We seem to be able to sustain plenty of drag. That's sort of the long history of the agrarian revolution. Technology allows us to thrive and progress even when the species declines. That's exactly what technology is for: conveniences to allow people to do less, know less, care less, and self-monitor less. It works!
I'd categorize the IQ-inheritance issue along with "gay marriage will turns us all gay" and Jordan Peterson's "pronouns will destroy Western culture and the Collective Unconscious". It's not a mountain, bro, it's a mole hill. Take off your magnifying glasses and look around you. The sky is not falling. Yes, there's a coupla clouds. Aren't they pretty? If you seed them, they might rain and then you'll need to run for cover.
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A colleague wrote a letter to a conservative newspaper in the Midwest, introducing herself as an academic and an activist. I thought, isn't that just feeding the conservative bias that academics aren't interested in research into truth, only promoting their personal political agendas and social identity?
There are often good reasons why academics in the social sciences tend to be non conservative. In the post on the hierarchy of data*, you'll see that the data of the social sciences -- the difference between what people say or think they are doing and what they actually do -- necessarily reveals hypocrisy in the society. It's impossible to avoid.
Not all social scientists object to the hypocrisy -- social illusions can provide social coherence, stability, direction and wellbeing -- but they can't deny it's there. So it shouldn't be surprising that social scientists would be skeptical of conservatism since conserving the illusions means conserving a degree of hypocrisy or at least, conserving falsehoods. The progressive inclination among the social sciences is not all the result of a culture of liberalism, it's actually a reflection of the truths uncovered by the science. That's a legit side of the social sciences, observing social beliefs and testing them against the social realities.
The public, of course, is the bearer of these social beliefs, so people are often not aware of the disparities between what they believe and reality since we interpret reality through what we believe. It's natural for the public to view social science research as a biased political agenda, even when that research is double blind, controlled, unbiased, and replicated. You sort of have to be in the science to recognize when it's skepticism of the scientist and not the liberal activism of the university culture.
Adding to this public distrust of this skeptical science, are the overt political agendas in academic research popularly called "woke". As mentioned, progressive political agendas play two roles in academic research. One is to pose questions that would not have been asked without the activist instigation. This is extremely valuable, since the university has a cultural tunnel vision, as all institutions have, and it needs to be pushed to see beyond its walls.
The other role is more troubling. As soon as an activist question is raised, researchers are likely to look for evidence in favor of the activist agenda. Once found, the activists take the ball and run with it, as if a research program ends as soon as one obtains the result desired.
Back in the 1970's, Robin Lakoff published a hypothesis that women's language reflects their disempowerment. Women, she wrote, are less assertive in their language, more polite, less direct and less free with vulgarities. The plausibility of the hypothesis is obvious, and, as I've written elsewhere, finding supportive evidence for just about any hypothesis is easy. But about thirty-five years later, a grad student at CUNY did a brilliant study of a huge corpus of women's and men's telephone customer service conversations. At the same time, the movie industry produced a data mine of all Hollywood scripts. She analysed both corpuses to see whether Lakoff's hypothesis was predictive.
What she found was that in the telephone conversations, the women and men used just as much polite, indirect, cautious and vulgar language. But in the movie scripts, Lakoff's hypothesis predicted accurately, almost too accurately. And of course the vast majority of Hollywood scripts are written by men.
In other words, Lakoff had assimilated or reproduced in her hypothesis the male (mis)perception of women express themselves as second class, disempowered, and weaker. But it is a misperception, at least linguistically. Women are linguistically as strong, forceful, vulgar and direct -- at least they are when alone on the phone -- as men.
To me this demonstrates an important principle that a lot of post modernism undermines, and that's human agency. What the culture or the language gives us is a limited range of symbols tied to values and meanings, but how you use them is your agency, just as the language has a relatively finite vocabulary, but you can use them to express an unbounded variety of ideas of your own. The post on two theories of gender describes one Marxist theory that ignores agency, and a linguistic theory that allows and even encourages agency.
The gender equality paradox also has two interpretations, one social-determinist, the other agentic. Why do engineers in gender unequal societies reflect the sex demographics (~50% of engineers are women) while more gender equal societies have the fewest ratio of engineers? One popular answer among social justice warriors is: equality has not erased cultural oppression. A more consistent answer: where women are give full choice, they opt for more rewarding work. Why sit in front of a screen all day in a cubicle manipulating symbols that you spent years studying when you could be playing with children or helping the ill who desperately need you and reward you with gratitude and respect? Women have agency, despite the cultural stereotypes or cultural expectations.
In the post on Ban Bossy, you will see that, contrary to Cheryl Sandburg's claims, people in our society object intensely to male abuse of authority, with a host of colorful slurs from jerk, motherf***er, douche, douchebag, dick, dickhead, scum, scumbag and schmuck to asshat and fucktard. For women, there's only the b-word for abuse of authority.
Examining the common disparaging words for women turns up dits, twit, airhead, bimbo and cow. These tell us a lot about our male-dominated language and cultural attitudes and gender expectations. All the words for women represent the opposite of abuse of power. They typically describe "pretty but useless", a lack of power or ability to manipulate, and in the case of "cow", useless and not even pretty. The language parallels the gender differences in clothing: male clothing is defined by pockets, pockets are for tools; women's clothing prioritizes the male gaze -- pretty but no tools, useless.
Notice that these are not people attitudes; they are symbolic cultural categories: the cultural male facing the world with tools to manipulate and control it, the cultural female turned towards the male gaze to gain its attention. It's the Samson and Delilah myth. A myth, ladies and gentlemen: correcting for the availability of words for abuse, it turns out that students object to male abuse of power as much as female abuse of power.
Now the difference in use of brilliant and genius for male and female instructors tells a different story of competitive male self-promotion and female interactive and emotional intelligence. You can read that here*.
And in the post on euphemisms, the broad-brush hypothesis that words for women have pejorated because women are disempowered, you'll see that the story is much more complex than seems at first sight.
None of these researches would have been possible without feminist linguists asking new questions. The study is truly fascinating, but when the research ends with the superficial hypothesis, it's neither interesting nor accurate. Science pursued beyond the activist agenda will always be more interesting and surprising than the quick cheerleading response of the activist.
None of this undermines the activist agenda, by the way. If there is systematic or structural injustice in society -- and anyone but the narrowest and most biased libertarian recognizes that there's plenty of injustice -- that injustice will appear in the research, though not always in expected ways, and very likely in surprising ways one would never have predicted or even guessed. Activists need never be afraid of academic research. And the academic should never settle for the quick fix.
