No loyalty but to the truth

Jonathan Haidt is one of America’s most influential academics. Prior to writing the highly influential books The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, Haidt was already a successful and respected scholar. He has worked for top universities and has contributed research to the field of social psychology that has been extensively cited by other scholars. (Full disclosure: I serve on a national board with Haidt.)

The professor has regularly been seen in major media as a commentator on the problem of political polarization and he founded the Heterodox Academy with the mission of improving “the quality of research and education in universities by increasing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.” All this has come in the course of a highly public career.

Haidt made news again recently when he announced his intent to resign his membership in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. He resignation came in response to the group’s new requirement that scholars must explain how their research will “advance equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals” before it can be published or presented.

To the great credit of the Chronicle of Higher Education, the storied publication ran Haidt’s essay explaining his decision. Haidt, a longtime man of the left, maintains the old-fashioned view that just as medicine aims at healing, universities must aim at truth. In his view, adopting something like “anti-racism”—which would be ideologically and narratively loaded—redirects scholarship away from a disinterested pursuit of the truth and puts it in service to ideology.

Through his protest, Haidt is undertaking the kind of defense of scholarship that is necessary to preserve the entire academic enterprise from being subsumed into ideological programming. In his view, social justice can certainly serve as a value of universities, but it cannot rise to the status of an end in itself without creating a conflict with the first commitment of the university, which is to truth.

The social sciences present a special problem in this regard. Modern social science was supposed to demystify social phenomena by applying the scientific method to the study of human society. Through disinterested, unbiased, rigorous collection of data and the application of skepticism that must be overcome in order to reach a finding, social scientists would produce new insights that would guide us to greater abundance and less violence. We would be able to achieve those things in the same way medicine has produced greater health, which is through accumulated understanding and developing solutions based on that understanding.

However, there are difficulties that persist. First, our ability to conduct social science experiments is limited. There are few natural social science experiments of the type that exist with regard to North and South Korea where the same genetic people live in two different systems. Second, it is far harder to carry out experiments on people than on phenomena in nature that we can isolate and control. Third, if we are trying to understand things in the mass, it can be incredibly hard to figure out all the variables that could be exerting influence even with the most ingenious designs. Fourth, and most problematic of all, perhaps, is the fact that a great deal of social science research is typically done to support some kind of social solution which would often take us into the realm of politics, education, or ideology.

Unsurprisingly, those doing research and interpreting it for the public will be tempted to generate results or spin them in a way that fits within their own ideological frame.

This temptation of ideology and the ability to gain power through the authority of academic science leads to an irresistible draw not to accumulate knowledge, but to influence history. It is this dynamic that Haidt astutely observes. Scholarship becomes a pretext for activism and case-building. Christians must heed this message just as surely as advocates of “anti-racism.” If we want to operate in areas such as social science, then we have the same duty to pursue truth rather than being tempted to shade results or employ selective methods that will burnish our case.

Jonathan Haidt has offered a bold and honest statement about the crisis in the social sciences. Will the discipline be brave enough to respond?