Interesting interview about authoritarianism, R4, Helen Lewis/Karen Stenner

Agree with group think.

I don’t see the authoritarians on the anti trans side though.

A push to authoritarianism is in part driven by a desire to conform. This is what gets the academicians: they are spouting ideological drivel to fit in with contemporaries they admire and feel they belong to. There is also anxiety underlying this: being different from your group is anxiety-inducing. I say this from first-hand knowledge of academicians (not from the social science field). Also known as group-think I suppose.

I listened to Karen Stenner's interview and loved it. There are authoritarians on left and right, authoritarians who are pro-trans agenda, authoritarians against it. So the IQ side of things makes sense within the sex-gender debate. Stenner's findings on IQ only describe the average so there will inevitably be high IQ individuals who are also authoritarian and on the left. But on average, more open-minded, curious people are going to have a higher IQ. I can't see how it could it be otherwise.

It was a useful disambiguation. It probably contributes to a better understanding of several phenomena but I'd need to explore it further.

I had a listen, and she's right. Researchers do conflate authoritarianism and conservatism. I went and searched online for some questionnaires, and all of the ones I found characterised authoritarianism as conservatism.

In the New Statesman in 2019 she wrote that she believes TWAW, TMAM but has grave concerns about self-ID and doesn't believe gender identity is an inner essence, nor does she want "gender identity" adding to the Equality Act. See www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2019/01/maria-miller-called-me-fake-feminist-over-gender-self-id-now-she-says-i
Not sure if her views have evolved in the subsequent two years?

It's the attacks on Graham Linehan that I can't forgive. Yes, Graham has his loose canon moments but no one can doubt that his concern for women and girls is genuine and that he has paid a hell of a price for raising the issue publicly. He has to be one of the most brave and foolhardy men in the UK. He has nothing to gain from this except the knowledge that he fought hard on the right side of history and I can't understand why, if she isn't advocating for self-ID and gender identity, she would call out the dogs on him — and not just once.

This isn't a new idea; 'authoritarian' has been accepted as one of a list of personality traits for decades. The others include honest, pleading, placating, distracting and blaming.

There are also two modifiers;
sado/masochistic and
naive/paranoid.

Whatever the labels, I think the MN crowd has a tendency towards woke type hysteria and authoritarian , especially in recent years, towards things like BLM, Brexit, COVID, lockdown etc..

I'd agree with socially conservative. For me the eating threads are a big giveaway. Women berating other women for serving a small child a small portion of mayonnaise and a palpable fear of sugar and carbs. You can see the authoritarians out in force.

I'm struck by how rule-abiding so many MNrs seem to be and how this seems to have eaten away at both common sense and their own confidence. I've never been in trouble with the police (only one accidental parking ticket in 40 years driving) and am not much of a risk-taker but I don't stick rigidly to the rules.

unherd.com/thepost/the-difference-between-social-and-cultural-conservatism/

What do you mean by socially conservative?

Left-leaning politically, but extremely Socially Conservative.

Mumsnet is very left leaning IMO.

I find Mumsnet itself an interesting place when it comes to seeing authoritarian tendencies in full swing. The threads on self-isolation where the Op lives in the middle of nowhere (and therefore has zero risk of spreading covid) are a case in point, with poster after poster arguing that breaking the rules in these circumstances is selfish, entitled and dangerous. Now there's a rational argument for saying that covid rules should be unbending because of the need for social cohesion or whatever, but these posters seem to come from the fundamentally authoritarian position that there is a moral duty to obey any law, however patently absurd, in and of itself. Temperamentally I am at the very opposite end of the spectrum and most of my circle of friends are too. It's enlightening to see how many people have a moral universe which is utterly impervious to shades of grey.

Certainly in one of the fields I work in all the youngsters are ever so groovy and do lots of theory—sorry, Theory—related usually to literary texts, as this allows them to be very meta. Despite their skepticism about meta-narratives, they are perfectly comfortable with their own version thereof. There have even been calls to cancel the whole discipline, on the grounds that it is colonialist and heterociscandidohesperoonormative, and the real thing is to be PC and to get people to be politically active. Very few recruits still do the dull boring things like editing texts properly and newbies' knowledge of the relevant languages can be abysmal.

On the other hand, my other field, philosophy, is much more open. People argue endlessly, but about the things they always have argued about, and... well... you know, they are philosophers, so being argumentative is part of the deal. There is also a good deal of intolerance of a good sort, viz. of the various kinds of woo peddled so pompously elsewhere in academe. A friend of mine once said that there are only two departments in any university: the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Unwarranted Assertions. Of course, he was a philosopher.

Just look at all the ‘white privilege’, racist antiracist stuff. It’s all oppressor vs victims Marxist old wine in new bottles.

What drives me slightly mad is that while I can't speak so much to the social sciences, that sort of thinking is precisely what humanities education is meant to guard against.

I agree @SmokedDuck. In the social ‘sciences’ and humanities, they seem to specialise in logical fallacies, linking one thing to another in a linear way, if this is true than that is also true, missing out on a whole hosts of other factors that make the reality. Often the more obscure or tenuous the link, the more ‘clever’ or innovative they think they are , because …..bingo, new 💡 idea! Doesn’t seem to matter if it is true or not…

As far as intelligence, I will say that in my experience, lots of the people in academia who really evidence this kind of thinking are, in my opinion, stupid. They may be able to do the work required to get degrees, but that perhaps speaks to the quality of some degrees these days. There are some pretty shit meaningless grad and post-grad writing out there which seems to get a pass.

But also, I would say that it's a specific kind of lack of intelligence in many cases. They may be able to take certain premises and follow them to a conclusion, but what they don't seem to be able to do is integrate them into a larger reality, or think about meta-systems and the validity of the systems in their own discipline. They can follow a line but not see a net that the line is part of. They can't draw inferences or make comparisons with other areas of study.

Some of the worst examples seem to come out of "studies" programs, where seem to be based on an activist or ideological basis rather than anything else.

It's important to bear in mind that when people like Karen Stenner and Bob Altermayer take about authoritarians they are talking about people with specific personality profile that inclines them to support poltical authoritarianism. That doesn't mean that everyone who ever behaves in an authoritarian way has that personality type.

There are probably comparatively few academics who have an authoritarian personality because the need for fluidity and openess of thought that's required to be succesful as an academic runs counter to the desire for order and rigidity that characterises the authoritarian personality type. The authoritarian turn in academia is a lot more driven by social and cultural factors (e.g. belief in the "right side of history") than it is by there being lots of academics that are authoritarian by disposition.

a very different difficult read indeed

The Origins of Totalitarianism is a very different read indeed. It continually refers to a background and a context that you'd need to be a scholar of European history from the 40s and 50s to fully understand.

But it does contain so much startling stuff. I was shocked to read her analysis of why it was easy to stir up hatred of the Jews in the relevant historical period, what she wrote would probably get her shunned today.

Thanks, OP, for highlighting it. I still don't know how Helen Lewis can do an interview like this and be a trans ally.

I think the same about many diversity officers and feminists i come across, and Phillip Pullman and Margaret Atwood, or even lawyers who defend someone they know/believe is guilty.

Either they know exactly what they are doing and consciously choose to take their position, or they are gullible and truly believe it.

I'm not sure which is worse.