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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   28343 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and is expected to strike down racial preferences in college admissions. The looming decision is starting to worry people in the DEI industry.

This Supreme Court case could spell the beginning of the end for affirmative action. It’s a looming crisis for corporate America (use reader mode to unmask the article. Paywalled version here).

Gillard and her colleagues in DEI are bracing for a crisis. Gillard created Factuality, a 90-minute interactive game and “crash course” in structural inequality that has been used as an employee-training tool at companies such as Google, Nike, and American Express, as well as at Yale University, among others. Factuality has seen an uptick in demand in recent years, but Gillard is under no illusions about why companies hire her: “I really feel that there are people who participate in these programs and initiatives because it’s required and mandatory,” she tells Fortune, “and that with this decision they’re just emboldened to stop.”

There's some funny stuff in the article too, for anyone who's wise enough to not bring up politics or religion at work:

It’s crucial, too, for companies to diligently vet public statements related to diversity initiatives. For example, in today’s climate, making public promises that a company’s board will be 25% female could create a legal vulnerability, Bryant, the McGlinchey Stafford lawyer, says. “Sometimes messages that are very well intended can get an organization in hot water if it’s not necessarily done and crafted in the right way.”

That’s a lesson several of Carter’s clients learned last year after announcing plans to pay for employees’ travel costs if they have to cross state lines to get abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Instead of just applause, they faced controversy and complaints.

“There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”

If the legal landscape does change, this is a chance to empirically test Richard Hanania's thesis that Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. If the majority of woke supporters (at least within institutions) are supporters only because of civil rights law, then support for wokeness could turn pretty quickly.

I would be happy to let corporations discriminate at will, as long as there's no law requiring them to discriminate in a particular direction. Let woke capital duke it out with meritocratic techbros and see which kind of company performs better. There's a lot of iffy research out there claiming that diversity has benefits for team performance etc. but this would be the true test. I'd expect the equilibrium to be a diversity of companies with different hiring policies based on their company goals and the purpose of each job role. Maybe for engineers and accountants meritocracy is best, while for public-facing roles the workers should be chosen by their appeal to customers, including by matching customers' race and other currently-protected characteristics.

That’s a lesson several of Carter’s clients learned last year after announcing plans to pay for employees’ travel costs if they have to cross state lines to get abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Instead of just applause, they faced controversy and complaints.

Well gosh, I cannot understand how this could possibly be. When those companies are signalling as hard as they can:

"Hey, uterus-havers! (Because we are impeccably DEIB and would never use a discriminatory and hurtful term like "women" staff or employees) We're willing to pay if you have to travel to get rid of that clump of cells, because if you had a baby you'd probably be whining at us about maternity leave, and then if the brat "got sick" or "is graduating college" then at best you'd be thinking about them instead of putting your job first and foremost as the most important thing in your life, as is right and proper, and at worst you'd even be expecting paid time off to go attend to the spawn. So we, your socially progressive owners*, are going to graciously pay for your travel costs to prevent that happening (*when you take on a job, the job owns you, you should realise that by now if you want to 'have a career')".

Now what was that verse by somebody or other?

But mother is happy, for mother is free.

For mother is dancing up forty-eight floors,

For love of the Leeds International Stores,

And the flame of that faith might perhaps have grown cold,

With the care of a baby of seven weeks old.

I thought "my private life is my own affair and nobody else's business"? But now your employer wants to know all about if you're knocked up and going to 'take care of that', so they can get "applause" for supporting you with the cost of a plane ticket or however much they'll give you. Do Planned Parenthood clinics do vouchers?

Now what was that verse by somebody or other?

Well, two can play at that game.

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"

A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort - that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of the home, to help shape the future

It's easy to portray a working life as drab and meaningless, but one can equally do so for the non-working mother. FWIW I think both are oversimple and overgeneralised.

she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"

I've always thought this was a ridiculous question. The answer is clearly "yes" and I don't think this would have been difficult for most people before WW2. Indeed, Ecclesiastes said millennia ago:

Men are born only to die, plant trees only to displant them. 3 Now we take life, now we save it; now we are destroying, now building. 4 Weep first, then laugh, mourn we and dance; 5 the stones we have scattered we must bring together anew; court we first and then shun the embrace. 6 To-day’s gain, tomorrow’s loss; what once we treasured, soon thrown away; 7 the garment rent, the garment mended; silence kept, and silence ended; 8 love alternating with hatred, war with peace. 9 For all this toiling of his, how is man the richer?[1] 10 Pitiable indeed I found it, this task God has given to mankind; 11 and he, meanwhile, has made the world, in all its seasonable beauty, and given us the contemplation[2] of it, yet of his own dealings with us, first and last, never should man gain comprehension. 12 To enjoy his life, to make the best of it, beyond doubt this is man’s highest employment; 13 that gift at least God has granted him, to eat and drink and see his toil rewarded.

The human condition is the indignity of being an eternal soul bound to a finite body, trapped in a fallen world filled with suffering. Even non-Christians feel a similar void. I'm no Nietzschean but I sympathize with him when he says:

“If there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god? Therefore, there are no gods.”

The default experience is to "struggle alone," to wrestle with the apparent fact that life has "no goal, no ambition, no purpose," feel that one is "buried alive" by the hideously mundane, tedious, and exhausting demands of daily life.

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