Summer's remarks raise an interesting question...

[Speck Tater]

I'm not going to take sides re: his remarks about women in science, but the whole hoopla does raise an interesting question.

We all agree that science should NOT be suppresed when it contradicts Biblical or other religious beliefs. Censoring science in favor of religious beliefs is just not acceptable.

But what happens when science is not PC? What if something is discovered that contradicts liberal beliefs or preferences? What happens if science discovers something that we, as liberals, really don't want to hear because we really don't want it to be true? What if science tells us that Women make lousy car mechanics or that men are not suited to work as nurses? What if science supports some stereotype we are uncomfortable with? Do we censor science when it contradicts our values? Or do we have the courage to admit that some aspect of our utopian fantasy is at odds with reality?

The question is not wheather Summers was right or wrong. I haven't seen the data or reviewed the studies do I don't have a clue. The real question is, if he is right is anybody willing to hear the truth? Or will the truth be censored because it is not PC?

[Bronco69]

1. I think that's what sets us apart from the other side.

We are willing to admit when we are wrong and move on, and they are not.

[fortyfeetunder]

2. Where science trumps religion

When I need a bridge to help me cross a river, I know better to hire an engineering and contracting firm instead of a minister!

[seabeyond]

3. or we can just be responible and say it is all relative

a female tends to use more of the whole of her brain than (central right) and men tend to be extreme left allowing for analysis and limited focus

yet, there is room for all people and it isnt going to be a given. this being the case, let us ask why, the positions that tend to fit womens brains are lower pay consistantly than the positions mens brains tend to adapt better too

is it because the mechanic is more valuable to society than the nurse

and what does it say about us to consistantly pay women positions significantly lower than what a typical male would hold

i a not opposed to recognizing the difference. both are valued and needed in our society equally

[dsc]

4. While many women's occupations have been and still are lower paid

I think your particular example is unlikely to be correct. While we pay very high costs to get our cars fixed, I don't think mechanics who don't own the place where they work are necessarily that highly paid.

[seabeyond]

5. you are right they use to be in the past

use to be able to take care of family, not today. no one gets shit

[tishaLA]

6. This isn't a debate about PC

or about academic freedom or about free speech issues. That's the way the right has framed it, but that's not what's going on with Summers.

I'm frankly not terribly inclined to be interested in what "science" proves vis-a-vis genders (or race or sexuality or nation) anyhow. I've read enough material on "race sciences" to fill a small library; it was something that pleased many of our greatest thinkers from the late 18th C. to the 20th C. Science is one discursive formation among many others that posits openings and limits in behavior. Too much faith in it, as in any other discourse, makes it a pure limit.

[CTyankee]

7. Something else is going on

and I think Summers was just riffing, as he seems to say (somewhat) in the full transcript. He is now painting himself as just posing provocative questions, in the Socratic manner. What he said he certainly did not have data to back up and he seems to have dredged up from some deeply mysognist place inside of him the worst kind of prejudice against women. What is so daring and cutting edge about a prejudice that is as old as the world, a reason to deny women full equality from the beginning of time? He should have taken his mental wanderings to the corner bar. A room full of serious scholars at one of the top universities in the world is no place to "talk trash."

[Lexingtonian]

8. No, there are no "interesting question"s

I'm troubled by the fatalism of your post, the whole premise "utopian fantasy" assumed to be "at odds with reality" which then requires "courage".

No, for the time being our side is responsible and uses rigorous arguments where and when it matters. Not that this is ubiquitous among Democrats, but we don't bother with them among each other when we are substantially in agreement.

Would Democrats insist, in the name of some abstract idea, that lifelong quadriplegics be given jobs teaching running? Of course not. This is American society, and in American society things that aren't practical or pragmatic or useful are held in a kind of cultural contempt. Political deologies and high theories are excuses resorted to when reason fails.

Summers is wrong because he doesn't even bother to know the mountains of evidence there are- he thought he was in a position to challenge it all, when a lot of the people he had decided to preach at are far more knowledgeable about the evidence than he was. Secondly, he invoked the word no idiot can do without these days when he chooses to argue the inadequacy of some group of people: Genes. Once upon a time it was God's Will that made groups inferior. Then it was Darwinian Selection. Now it's Genes that are the newest conceptual black box into which you stick any halfassed notions you like and it then spits out the conclusion you prefer.

The first thing you learn about disenfranchised groups growing into the expanded role that follows liberation/equality is that many individual people of the group don't live up to the new possibilities well in the first generation. This is obvious because no group is perfect, but it leads to a Blame The Victim phenomenon by naive outsiders who don't know how bad internalized blame and inadequacy are and the structural/class issues and demands on the first set of people to rise above the group's previous norm are.

The "utopian fantasy" involved is that people live up to their potential as best as they can. Isn't that the point of all major efforts of human life? The Democratic angle is one of seeing the relevant present problem as defined groups of people being held up by privileged others- privileged meaning that they don't have to make a defensible case to anyone other than themselves. The Democratic idea is that the Due Process and Equal Protection Of The Laws guarantees we supposedly live by are selectively enforced, if at all, and that is the problem. At times ignorable, but other times outrageous and travesties to any idea of or pretense to civilization.

I don't know who you surround yourself with, but people who distinguish between things that are 'PC' and 'not PC' are not liberals, they're Leftist. And you cannot censor truth. There are small truths and particulars that may be inconvenient, but given context they are always compatible with larger, unsuppressible, truths.

Democrats may live in denial of some things, generally the larger picture of how vain and uninformed and unthinking the mass of Americans is (because it's so hard to bear). But it's not of the facts that are of importance to the future.