Why are There So Few Free Thinkers at the Grass Roots Level?
Every generation likes to imagine that it invented rebellion. Young people distrust their parents, mock established conventions, experiment with forbidden ideas and congratulate themselves on seeing through the hypocrisies of the society they inherited. It is one of the oldest rhythms of cultural life. Something peculiar has therefore happened to the present generation.
Eric Kaufmann, a professor of politics who spent more than two decades studying demography, identity and political behaviour before establishing the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham, argues that an entire generation has been subjected to an extraordinary experiment in ideological education. In a recent discussion with Peter McCormack, he described the spread through schools and universities of ideas about race, gender, identity, equality and oppression that were once confined largely to specialised academic disciplines.
Kaufmann calls the broader ideology "cultural socialism." His argument is not simply that teachers tend to vote for parties of the Left. That would hardly constitute indoctrination, because people in every profession have political opinions. The more serious allegation is that particular contested political theories have gradually ceased to be presented as theories at all. They have become moral facts around which education is organised.
Teaching a student that some scholars believe disparities between racial groups are principally products of structural discrimination is education. Teaching the student that structural discrimination is the explanation, while competing interpretations are morally suspect, is something quite different. Likewise, teaching competing theories of sex and gender is education, while presenting one contested philosophical account as unquestionable moral truth is something else. Education says: here are the arguments; examine them. Indoctrination says: here are the correct beliefs; internalise them.
Kaufmann's claims deserve argument rather than automatic acceptance, but his earlier research makes the underlying problem difficult simply to dismiss. His surveys of academics in Britain, the United States and Canada found substantial ideological imbalance in the social sciences and humanities, widespread self-censorship among conservative academics and measurable willingness among some academics to discriminate against colleagues holding unfashionable political opinions.
In Britain, Kaufmann reported that roughly a third of academics surveyed would discriminate against a Brexit supporter in hiring, while more than four in ten American and Canadian academics said they would not hire a Trump supporter. His research also found that conservative academics frequently regarded their departments as hostile environments for their political beliefs.
The numbers can be debated, as survey findings always can, but the mechanism should concern anybody who values intellectual diversity. Imagine an academic discipline in which one broad political outlook becomes overwhelmingly dominant. Hiring committees consist largely of people sharing it, and they select the next generation of academics. Those academics then select graduate students, review journal articles, award grants, design courses and recommend colleagues for promotion. Nobody needs to organise a conspiracy because selection does the work.
Over several generations the intellectual ecosystem can become increasingly homogeneous while every individual appointment appears perfectly ordinary. Eventually ideological assumptions cease to be visible precisely because almost everybody inside the institution shares them. Fish presumably spend very little time discussing water.
The really interesting question, however, comes after Kaufmann's diagnosis. Where were the rebels? If millions of young people were exposed to a largely one-sided political worldview, why did more of them not simply laugh at their teachers and walk in the opposite direction?
That question becomes especially interesting because adolescence and early adulthood are supposedly periods of intellectual rebellion. The student radicals of the 1960s defined themselves against university authorities. They occupied buildings, challenged professors, mocked bourgeois morality and treated conformity as almost a moral failing. Today's rebel faces a stranger situation because the university itself may tell him to challenge traditional hierarchies, interrogate privilege, reject conventional assumptions about sex, question inherited national narratives and expose structures of oppression. What exactly is rebellious about agreeing with your lecturers?
There is a delicious historical irony here. Ideas that once presented themselves as attacks upon establishment authority became institutionalised. The language of resistance entered university bureaucracies, human-resources departments, professional associations, corporations and government agencies. Rebellion became part of the curriculum.
The student can therefore experience himself as courageously challenging power while repeating propositions endorsed by many of the most powerful cultural institutions around him. This may explain part of the shortage of grassroots free thinkers. Genuine dissent requires recognising where institutional authority actually resides. If your professor, university administration, professional association, preferred media organisations and social circle all broadly agree with you, you may still be right, but you are not exactly Galileo before the Inquisition.
There is also the elementary human desire to belong. Young people are extraordinarily sensitive to social status, and university is not merely a collection of lectures. It is a community in which friendships are formed, romantic relationships begin, careers are launched and reputations established.
Imagine being an eighteen-year-old student encountering a classroom in which virtually everyone appears to accept a particular moral proposition. You doubt it. Do you raise your hand? Perhaps, but first you perform a calculation. Will the lecturer think less of me? Will the other students think I am stupid? Will somebody call me racist, sexist, transphobic or extremist? Could this affect my marks? Will somebody complain about me? Will my comments be repeated online without context?
Most people are not Socrates, so they remain silent. Silence then produces one of the most powerful mechanisms of conformity because everybody looks around and sees apparent agreement. The student who privately doubts the orthodoxy sees nobody challenging it and concludes that perhaps he really is alone. Another student does exactly the same thing. Ten sceptical students can sit in the same classroom believing themselves to be the only sceptic present because none is willing to speak first. The orthodoxy becomes stronger through the illusion of unanimity.
Kaufmann calls part of this phenomenon "soft authoritarianism." It does not require secret police, censorship boards or professors explicitly ordering students to adopt a political position. Career incentives, reputational pressures and fear of social exclusion can accomplish a great deal without formal coercion.
Evidence of self-censorship on university campuses extends beyond Kaufmann's own work. Large faculty surveys have found considerable reluctance to discuss controversial subjects openly, particularly among people who perceive themselves as belonging to an ideological minority. Students likewise report avoiding subjects they fear will produce social or academic consequences.
An institution devoted to discovering truth should regard that as a flashing red warning light. Truth requires disagreement. Science advances because somebody says the accepted explanation may be wrong, philosophy exists because somebody asks whether the apparently obvious proposition actually follows, and history changes because new evidence challenges an established interpretation.
An intellectual culture in which people first ask whether an argument is socially permissible has placed politics ahead of inquiry. There is another explanation for the apparent shortage of free thinkers: ideological education begins increasingly early.
A university student encountering an unfamiliar political theory at nineteen possesses some intellectual distance from it. A child introduced to the same assumptions throughout schooling may experience them simply as part of the moral furniture of reality. Every civilisation educates children into values, and there is nothing sinister about teaching honesty, tolerance, courage or respect for others. The problem begins when political propositions masquerade as universal moral propositions.
"Do not mistreat somebody because of his race" is a moral principle compatible with almost every liberal political philosophy. "Disparities between racial groups demonstrate structural oppression" is an empirical and theoretical claim about society. The first can reasonably be taught as a norm of decent behaviour; the second should be argued about.
Once that distinction disappears, disagreement with a political theory can be reclassified as disagreement with morality itself. The dissenter is no longer merely wrong; he becomes bad. That transformation is enormously powerful because human beings will tolerate being thought mistaken much more readily than being regarded as immoral.
It also helps explain why some young people police one another more enthusiastically than institutions ever could. Once political beliefs become moral identity, enforcing them becomes evidence of personal virtue. The professor may not need to silence the dissenter because his classmates will do it for him.
Social media magnifies this process. Earlier generations could say something foolish in a university common room and watch it disappear into the air. Today's student knows that a controversial remark can be recorded, photographed, reposted and preserved indefinitely. Conformity consequently becomes rational risk management. Why endanger a future career for the pleasure of winning an argument in a tutorial?
This is perhaps the most depressing answer to the question of where all the free thinkers went. They may still exist; they may simply have learned to keep quiet.
A relatively small number of committed activists can exert disproportionate influence when a much larger population is unwilling to challenge them. The radical speaks, the liberal privately disagrees, the conservative remains silent, and the institution moves another step in the radical's direction. Repeat that process for twenty years and an enormous cultural shift can occur without anything resembling majority enthusiasm.
The grassroots failure therefore may not principally be a failure of intelligence. It may be a failure of courage, because independent thought is much easier to praise retrospectively than to practise when it carries a price. Everyone admires the historical dissenter after history has vindicated him. The difficult part is being the dissenter when respectable opinion considers him a fool.
That is why genuine education must teach something more fundamental than any particular political doctrine. It must teach students how to doubt. They should doubt conservatives, progressives, professors, politicians, journalists, corporations, activists and, most importantly, themselves. A student should leave university less certain that slogans explain the world, not more certain.
The tragedy of ideological education is therefore not simply that it may produce a generation holding the wrong political opinions. The greater tragedy is that it may produce a generation that has never learned how to have opinions independently.
That is why the scarcity of grassroots rebellion matters. A free society cannot depend indefinitely upon a handful of contrarians willing to endure professional and social punishment. It requires a culture in which ordinary people regard disagreement as normal rather than dangerous.
The most successful indoctrination does not produce people who know they have been indoctrinated. It produces people who believe they independently discovered precisely the worldview that every institution around them encouraged them to adopt.
The great educational rebellion of the twenty-first century may therefore be surprisingly old-fashioned: read the forbidden argument, ask the embarrassing question, demand the evidence and refuse to confuse consensus with truth. When everybody in the room agrees about something important, become curious about the argument that was not invited into the room. That is neither Left nor Right. It is what education was supposed to be.
https://www.petermccormack.com/episodes/209-politics-professor-how-they-indoctrinated-an-entire-generation-eric-kaufmann
