Connie: A Memoir

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Luke Ford

Connie Chung writes in this 2024 book:

* I didn’t start out wanting to be a guy. But in the late 1960s, when I broke into the overwhelmingly male – dominated television news business, all I saw around me was a sea of white men. Bosses, colleagues in the newsroom, competing reporters, and even interview subjects were all the opposite sex. They were tall, wore identical staid suits and ties and wing – tipped shoes, and had deep, stentorian voices. I envied their bravado, their swagger, the way they could walk into a room and command it. When they spoke, it was with confidence and authority. They were entitled to respect because they were men.

[LF: Who else believes that men are entitled to respect because they are men?]

* I was sexually molested by our trusted family doctor, but what made this monster even more reprehensible was that he was the very doctor who had delivered me on August 20, 1946.
I was a cool coed, dating whomever I wanted. I was still a virgin but had advanced to the so – called heavy petting stage, short of intercourse. I assumed I would become sexually active and would need protection from pregnancy, so I went to this doctor for birth control pills, an IUD, or a diaphragm.
…I had never had a gynecological exam before, nor had I seen exam stirrups. It was all new to me, but I followed his instructions. I found it extremely odd to spread my legs and dig my heels into those cold iron stirrups.
Not understanding or knowing what he was doing, I stared at the ceiling. With his right index finger, he massaged my clitoris. Simultaneously he inserted his right middle finger in my vagina. He moved both fingers rhythmically, coaching me verbally in a soft voice, “Just breathe,” he said. He mimicked the sound of soft breathing, “Ah – ah,” and assured me, “You’re doing fine.”
Suddenly, to my shock, for the first time in my life, I had an orgasm. My body jerked several times. Then he leaned over, kissed me, a peck on my lips, and slipped behind the curtain to retreat to his office area.
I did not say a word. I could not even look at him. I quickly dressed and drove home. I may have told one of my sisters. I don’t remember what she said to me. I certainly did not tell my parents, and I did not report him to authorities. It never crossed my mind that reporting him could protect other women.

* In Timothy Crouse’s book about the adventures of the campaign press, The Boys on the Bus , he observed, “Few TV correspondents ever join the wee – hour poker games or drinking. Connie Chung, the pretty Chinese CBS correspondent, occupied the room next to mine… and she was always back by midnight, reciting a final sixty – second radio spot into her Sony or absorbing one last press release before getting a good night’s sleep.” The next morning, Crouse noted, I would be “bright and alert, sticking a mike into McGovern’s face” with pointed questions, while the print reporters, after spending the night drinking, stood bleary eyed, listening, just in case McGovern should say something newsworthy.
Tim was right. I said to myself, “I will not engage in such debauchery.” At the time, I haughtily thought, “Those reporters are just a bunch of drunkards.”
But when I woke up, I’d discover the New York Times or the Washington Post had broken an important story. Someone from the McGovern campaign had leaked an inside story to a boy on the bus! How did one of those drunks get that story? Then it dawned on me. The reporters were drinking with lubricated McGovern aides who then spilled their guts. How stupid could I be?
So much for staying in my room. No more good girl tucked in bed early. I joined the boys in the bar, just as I had in college. Yes, that made it harder to get up bright and early the next day — but I was not going to miss a scoop.

* As I made my way back to the dining room, I encountered [George] McGovern in a dark, narrow hallway. He stopped me and tried to kiss me. I was shocked. I stepped back. He quickly took the cue and stepped back too. It was not an aggressive act. Just a surprising one.

* I was seated at a black – tie dinner next to former President Jimmy Carter. At one point during the dinner, his leg and knee pressed against my leg under the table. I immediately looked at him. He smiled. Oh dear. This incident happened after President Carter had told Playboy magazine he had “looked at a lot of women with lust” and had “committed adultery in [his] heart many times.” I think I saw that look.

* Next scene: the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where I was exiting through a revolving door. Entering through the revolving door: Warren Beatty. We circled around a few times, laughing at the silliness. Remember Beatty? He was the one who chased every skirt on the 1972 McGovern campaign. I was a dedicated reporter who did not want anything to taint my reputation. I resisted his overtures.
Now I was in La – La Land and Warren was relentless. What the heck. He actually lived at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in a small room on a top floor, tucked in the eaves. We went out a couple times and he called often. There were times when he rang me at my apartment when Maury and his daughters were visiting me. One day, either Susan or Amy answered my phone. Her eyes bugged out when she whispered to me that Warren Beatty was on the line. She added, “We won’t tell Dad.” How cute is that? From then on, if Warren called and the girls were at my apartment, they would say, “Connie, it’s Walter!” — their code name for him.

* All night, I kept getting glimpses of Ryan O’Neal, who was looking very Love Story – ish. Our eyes met several times during the night, but I never seemed to be able to gracefully weave through the stars to talk to him. Before I knew it, the night was over, and everyone was heading to the door to give hunky wannabe actors our valet tickets so they could run and get our cars. I found myself at the door just in front of Ryan O’Neal. I looked at him and a line from old black – and – white movies emerged from my lips: “Your place or mine?” O’Neal replied, “Up to you.” With a subtle and casual glance back at him, I said, “Follow me.” I hopped in my black Jensen – Healey convertible, gunned my motor, and scooted down the hill — waiting for him down the road. Feel free to use your imagination.
One night a girlfriend of mine and I decided to go to dinner at Musso & Frank, a small, funky restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard. We settled into a booth, just the two of us. Not far away, at another booth, were four guys. They asked if we wanted to join them. “Sure.” We nodded, squeezing into their booth.
They seemed nice, smart, fun. I asked the guy I found most appealing what he did for a living. “I play in a band.” At the end of the dinner, he asked me if I wanted to go to his house. “Sure.”
In his cluttered living room, an upright piano took a prominent spot. “Would you play something you perform with your band?” I asked innocently. “Sure.” He launched into “Hotel California.” Gulp.
By this time, Maury, who had gotten an anchor job in San Francisco, had already moved on to the NBC affiliate in Philadelphia, where he was a news anchor, reporter, and talk show host. We were still a two – city couple, but the long travel time between LA and Philly slowed our romance. Still, we talked frequently. I called to tweak him: “I went out with an Eagle.” Maury replied, “You mean the Philadelphia Eagles?” How I groaned.
Even though we both knew we did not have an exclusive relationship, Maury felt compelled to remark: “You are star – f*cking!”
I retorted, “YOU can’t even remember the FIRST names of the women you are dating — let alone the LAST names.”

* Jane Pauley’s coanchor, Bryant Gumbel, set the macho tone. Steve Friedman, Today executive producer, was the cocaptain of the male brigade. Before the program started, the guys joked and talked among themselves. Even though I was sitting right next to Bryant, I was invisible. Quietly reviewing my material, I went about my business. Bryant would not talk to me until the red light went on and we were on the air.

* Since NBC had a history of fourteen failed magazine programs, the news division created a documentary unit instead. Happy to be assigned to that staff, I thought I would be creating solid hours of serious journalism, but Executive Producer Paul Greenberg and Senior Producer Sid Feders had other ideas for me.
I wanted to do a documentary about security breaches at the US embassy in the Soviet Union. Greenberg adamantly refused, knocking down the idea despite a well – researched pitch from a female producer and me. Nothing she or I said would convince him.
Instead, Feders suggested doing what I would not call a documentary. It was called Scared Sexless and was about sex and AIDS, a blatant ratings grabber. I vehemently resisted. I tried to fight in a civilized manner, but I could not find a way to buck the system. I lost, and it was a significant loss.
Just as I had known all those years before that the miniskirt special I’d been assigned at Channel 5 was not dignified, serious journalism, I knew this kind of tawdry play for ratings would hurt my career. My inability to extricate myself from the sex blather set in motion a perception that tarnished my reputation for all the years that followed. Much to my dismay, the curse was that it was a ratings hit — garnering the highest ratings for an NBC News documentary documentary in ten years.
Another Sid Feders extravaganza followed, called Life in the Fat Lane , about weight loss. Yet again, I succumbed to the wishes of the men in charge, even though I was embarrassed by this hour of infotainment. Again, the ratings came in just short of the top ten of the week — it ended up eleventh. After each of those hours, I was skewered by media critics, especially the Washington Post ’s Tom Shales, who called me “Connie Funn” and the programs “popumentaries.” The insults were awful to read, yet frankly, I agreed with Shales. I earnestly traveled to do all the interviews, but it was my worst series of programs ever.
Later Shales, in a column about other documentaries by NBC women, called Real Life with Jane Pauley “superficial friffle” and Cutting Edge with Maria Shriver “another exercise in thumb – twiddling anti – journalism from a news division that seems to be steadily losing interest in the news.” Shales went on, “ Cutting Edge was produced by Sid Feders, the man who perpetrated many of the mockumentaries and schlockumentaries that starred Connie Chung.”
That story by Shales highlighted what I already knew. The men in the documentary unit, such as Tom Brokaw, would never touch the schlock and were never put in a position where they had to refuse to do celebrity – tainted superficial subjects. Three women were. We did not wiggle out of it. Why? I don’t think it ruined Jane Pauley and Maria Shriver’s reputations, yet I know it ruined mine. Unfortunately, I did not know how to fight it.

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The President Of Talk Radio

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Luke Ford

Robert E. Brown writes in 2017:

Remove the content from Limbaugh and what is striking is the anger. Anger is the sex of talk-radio, and sex sells. In the jargon of talk radio, there are monsters—tabloidhot news monsters. The author David Foster Wallace described how the terrorist torture of a captured prisoner functioned as a news monster to stoke rage and crystallize opinion:

“The Nick Berg beheading and its Internet video compose what is known around KFI as a “Monster,” meaning a story that has both high news value and tremendous emotional voltage. As is SOP in political talk radio, the emotions most readily accessed are anger, outrage, indignation, fear, despair, disgust, contempt, and a certain kind of apocalyptic
glee.” (Wallace, 2005)

Before Limbaugh’s paper Big Bang of 1988, a fiery talk-show host named Ray Briem dominated talk radio in Southern California from the latter years of the 1960s through and after the eras of the Vietnam War. Berating counterculture values, especially of war-protesting youth, as anti-American, pro-Communist, immoral, and treasonous, Briem consistently drew the highest ratings of any host in Southern California with 15% of the available audience. (Edwards, 2016)

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The Myth Of Morality

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Luke Ford

Richard Joyce writes in this 2007 book:

* We have evolved to categorize aspects of the world using moral concepts. Natural selection has provided us with a tendency to invest the world with values that it does not contain, demands which it does not make.

* Most parties agree that the origins of morality lie in the development of human cooperation. Few will object to the view that the human tendency to help each other in certain circumstances is a trait that has been naturally selected for. In the past few decades we have gained a clear picture of how helping traits can be favored by forces of natural selection – something which, perhaps, seems initially puzzling. The first step is helping behavior among family members. Why should an individual provide aid even for
his or her offspring? The answer is that offspring contain 50 per cent of an individual’s genetic material, and therefore (among certain kinds of creatures) those who look out for their young will enjoy an increased probability of having offspring in subsequent generations over those who do not. This will go for helping tendencies towards siblings as well, and, to a lesser extent, cousins, nephews and nieces, etc. (bearing in mind that several nieces/nephews are worth more, genetically speaking, than a daughter or son).

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Optimally Irrational: The Good Reasons We Behave The Way We Do

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Luke Ford

Lionel Page wrote in this 2022 book:

* the brain represents only 2% of an average adult body’s weight, but 20% of its consumed energy.

* In a famous study, Schkade and Kahneman (1998) found that while people tend to believe that living in sunny California would make them happier, people living in California are not happier. Schkade and Kahneman called this the “focusing illusion”, the idea that we will be very happy with the next move to a better location, a better job, a better-looking car and so on. But in the end, “Nothing … will make as much difference as you think.”

* Success at attracting a partner depends on the ability to look like a good option relative to the other options available. …there are very good reasons why we care about our relative success: information and the benefits of relative standings. These reasons help us understand which group of people we are likely to choose as a comparison point to judge our achievements as successes or failures.

* “Under certain conditions natural selection favors … altruistic behaviors because in the long run they benefit the organism performing them.” (Robert Trivers)

* “Multiparty altruistic systems increase by several-fold the cognitive difficulties in detecting imbalances and deciding whether they are due to cheating or to random factors. One simplifying possibility that language facilitates is the formulation of rules of conduct, cheating being detected as an infraction of such a rule. In short, selection may favour the elaboration of norms of reciprocal conduct.” (Trivers 1971)

* prosociality (the fact of caring about others’ interests) seems to be widespread across cultures.

* even purely self-interested players would rationally engage in sustained cooperation over time. The only requirement for this to happen is that the probability of future interactions is high enough.

* we care about others’ outcomes; we care about others’ intentions; and we act as if caring about these others and their intentions is required by rules of morality that are objective (i.e., universally true, not relative to people or situations). …Evidence of reciprocal behaviour shows that people tend to be kind with people who are kind to them and unkind with people who are unkind to them.

* people seem motivated to do the right thing even if, most likely, nobody is affected by their decision.

* A person who never cooperates would certainly be a very poor player in social interactions, missing out on the opportunity of gains from cooperation and unable to get consistent benefits from uncooperative behaviour (because other people are not pushovers). The best way to play in repeated interactions is to care about others and about what they get.

* The past record of a player acts as a reputation, which will determine whether people decide to cooperate with the player or not.

* we are cautious about choosing our acquaintances. When doing so, we have to form a view on their likelihood to cooperate in the future (Baumard et al. 2013). Here again we can use other people’s reputation, based on their past actions, to guide such decisions.

A key aspect of social interactions is that there are many of them and that circumstances change frequently, meaning that while interactions are repeated, the specific payoffs and risks are going to vary over time. The future circumstances in which we will be in a situation where our fate depends on the actions of our partners are hard to foresee. It creates an incentive to look carefully for partners who are inclined to cooperate and on whom we may be able to rely on, whatever happens. In lay terms, we will look for people who show good character in their past actions… that people care about others’ intentions explains a lot about the intricate patterns of social interactions. For example, it creates incentives to exchange information about others’ actions and motives to find out what they are really up to. Such information is useful to ascertain whether somebody can be trusted as a cooperating partner. A typical form of such information exchange is gossip, which pervades social interactions across human societies… A person who does not take time to think before deciding to help is seen as nicer than somebody who takes a long time to make the same decision to help. In social interactions, splitting something equally without clearly looking at everyone’s cost and benefits is often preferred to the feeling of awkwardness associated with engaging in the required accounting… Mutual gifts allow potential partners to signal to each other an intent to engage in long-term cooperation, in opposition to a care for shortterm costs and benefits.

* In social interactions, punishments of norm violators often start with mockery, signalling to the culprits that they deviated from the norm. If John never pays for his friends’ drinks in a pub while they frequently pay for his, he risks ending up being at the receiving end of jokes about his stinginess. If mockery does not work, stauncher punishments are bound to take place, like the simple withdrawal from future cooperation. In the case of John “forgetting” to take his turn paying for drinks, others may end up not inviting him to their social drinks any more.

* moral preferences are often experienced as truth rather than preferences. An action that violates a fairness rule will be perceived as unambiguously bad not because we have some preference over it but because it is bad. This feeling of objectivity is easy to understand in ethical philosophies supported by religious beliefs where a deity can give
an objective nature to a moral rule. But even secular ethical philosophies have relied on the notion of objectivity, such as the idea that individuals have natural rights.

* you may trust people more in business transactions if you know that they believe that unfair deals are forbidden by some objective rule… If… people understand moral behaviour as the unconditional respect of rules, observing whether somebody follows moral rules in one context is a good predictor of what this person will do in another context. Furthermore, the objectivity of the rule helps people to coordinate their expectations.

* there are very good reasons why people would follow commonly understood and shared rules. And acting as if these rules are objective may also help facilitate cooperation. …even though large cities now offer some interactions with strangers that are likely to be one-shot, it is a very novel and unusual type of interaction on the time scale of human history. Most of our ancestors have lived in small groups of up to 150 people for tens of thousands of years.

* There is no contradiction between our moral attitudes and an evolutionary explanation. Evolution should not necessarily select for selfish preferences. Instead, it is more likely that evolution led us to have moral preferences to help us navigate successfully the opportunities of repeated cooperation with others. …because we have these
moral feelings that are genuine (proximal cause), the idea of explaining them as instrumental (ultimate cause) can feel distasteful.

* Humans are social animals; they are pretty helpless alone and face large potential benefits from cooperation. It is therefore reasonable to expect that they will have evolved preferences helping them interact with others in ways that can be mutually beneficial. These considerations explain why people care about others’ fate, why they care about others’ intentions, and why they care about following fairness norms that, in a given social context, point to commonly accepted ways to share the benefits and costs from cooperation.

* neuroscience has shown that the brain regions activated when observing another person’s emotion, such as pain, overlap with those activated when experiencing these emotions themselves

* in many strategic situations, it can hurt you to have too many choices at your disposition.

* Anger can be helpful in a wide range of situations where it creates a credible threat that deters other people from taking advantage of you. …People are willing to engage in costly behaviour to retaliate when they feel they have been wronged. While this could be seen as irrational at first sight, it provides a benefit: it makes your threat of retaliation credible, because people know you are likely to carry on a threat if you have angry feelings… An even better solution than showing signs of anger when one is wronged is to build a reputation for anger and retaliatory behaviour in order to deter others from even trying to wrong you. Building such a reputation makes sense in situations where the rule of law is fragile and where opportunities of wrongdoing against you are frequent.

* Prisoners who are not part of a group risk ending up at the bottom of this hierarchy. Low positions in the prison’s social order may lead to being the target of systematic violence. In such an environment, some criminals engage in acts of self-harm, such as lacerating their arm with a knife, to build a reputation of irrationality and unpredictability.

* An effective strategy to make a threat of retaliation credible is to convince your opposition that you are not rational and could very possibly retaliate disproportionately in case of limited aggression. An important condition for it to work is for you to be able to send credible signals of anger to inform the other player that you would very likely act upon your threats.

* The emotion of guilt, with the visible cues it generates, credibly signals to others that one is trustworthy.

* “It is possible that the common psychological assumption that one feels guilt even when one behaves badly in private is based on the fact that many transgressions are likely to become public knowledge” (Robert Trivers)

* like anger and guilt, the strength of the feeling of love can bind an individual’s behaviour in a way that eliminates some moves. Love can act as a commitment device… When in love, people feel and act as if their partner is the only person they value in the world. They not only neglect other possible partners; they often purposely stay away from them.

* the people ready to sacrifice themselves in these situations were willing to do so for a group to which they belong and that they represent… Members of ethnic and cultural groups can go to great cost to mark their identity to a group. They frequently continue to follow norms from their groups, even when they live in foreign countries. They may show great care for key symbols of their group like a flag or anthem… The feeling of being part of a group, of belonging to a group, can raise strong emotions that do not seem to be simply about moral or religious values. On the positive side, there are feelings of elation when sharing positive moments as part of a crowd: singing in a church, cheering after one’s team victory. There are also feelings of pride when one’s group is successful (or when some members of one’s group are). On the negative side, there are feelings of anger against others who seem to hurt or disrespect one’s group.

* Individuals do not seem to go out of their way often to harm the interest of members of other groups. Such behaviour is mainly seen in situations where there is a conflict with the other group. In absence of conflict, individuals favour the members of their own group but act in a neutral way towards members of other groups…

* group membership does not just influence behaviour; it also influences perception. Once part of a given group, it seems that people overestimate how much people from other groups are alike… people look like different individuals in your own group, but they tend to seem alike in other groups.

* Adopting cultural symbols and following specific cultural practices can act as visible signs of membership to ingroup as well as to out-group individuals. Belonging to a group often requires behaving in a certain way, not in others. The disrespect of such symbols and practices by members of the group can raise suspicion about their allegiance to the group. Some practices may seem inconsequential at first sight, like what to eat or what to wear. But imbued with a group membership meaning, these practices can become a litmus test of group loyalty. Hence, even those group members who do not care so much about the practices themselves may carefully respect them, in order not to raise doubts about their attitude towards the group.

* When having to choose between identities, a person takes into account the status associated with each identity. Shayo proposes that when choosing an identity, an individual will trade off the benefits of adopting a group identity given the relative status of the group and the costs of adopting this identity, which is harder if the individual’s characteristics are far away from the average characteristics of the target group.

* identification with a national identity that has a higher average status and a greater ethnic homogeneity may have seen its relative appeal grow. This explanation is in line with the observation that the growth of nationalist parties has largely benefitted from the migration of voters originally supporting left-wing parties with redistributive policies

* Groups opposed to each other, like sports fans, ethnic groups or political factions, can express hatred at each other in a way that seems not to make sense in modern societies. People engaged in violent group conflicts are often perceived as senseless. But another way to look at it is that this propensity to be swept by such feelings is likely part of who we are. It is a ghost of our ancient times, where readiness to stick to one’s group and violently fight other groups was key for survival… Our emotional
apparatus is likely designed to accompany a greater level of antagonism than would be optimal now.

* “Most things that seem irrational don’t seem so irrational once you understand signalling theory.” — Geoffrey Miller (Twitter post, 9 October 2019)

* Humans are equipped with the most complex language among all animals on earth. It allows us to communicate our knowledge and ideas to others. But human communication does not take the form of a simple exchange of clear statements between people. In many cases, people use not words but actions to communicate with others. Some other times people do not say explicitly what they want to say (e.g., innuendos, euphemisms). These features of communication seem strange and irrational only if we ignore that our means of communication are primarily designed to negotiate our interactions with others. In this process, transparent communication is sometimes not enough to influence others, and it is sometimes not desirable when people may react adversely to our intentions.

* The “quirkiness” of human interactions can generally be understood as good responses to the true nature and complexity of social situations.

* The need to manage others’ impressions arises when two conditions are met. First, others have imperfect information about us; second, the beliefs others have about us matter for our prospects.

* If you consider a heterosexual couple, the asymmetry in parental investment in offspring means that women are usually more wary of the sincerity of the stated dedication of potential male partners than the reverse… The time spent by a man in a courtship is a credible signal of interest because it is costly. Since courtship is generally somewhat socially transparent, a man usually does not court several women at the same time. Courtship therefore signals a man’s willingness to forego alternative opportunities in terms of partnership. Courtship also frequently features gifts to the courted woman such as flowers, or jewellery. Sozou and Seymour (2005) modelled this interaction as a signalling game. A potential male partner signals his dedication by making costly gifts to his intended female partner. The gifts need to be costly to signal a credible intent from a long-term partnership (a man usually does not make such gifts repeatedly to other women). But Sozou and Seymour also note that these gifts will have, most often, low resale value (you cannot sell flowers, and the resale value of a piece of jewellery is relatively low). This apparently peculiar characteristic makes sense from the man’s perspective: these types of gifts protect men from possibly being taken advantage of by women collecting valuable gifts without a real intention of becoming a partner.

* Engaging in any talk takes time (and also presents some cognitive costs). Hence, through short costly acts of discussions, people can signal to each other their shared consideration.

* “Those who know they are deep strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem deep to the crowd strive for obscurity” (Nietzsche). The obscurity of some writing is often just a signalling trick used by writers to look good.

* “When people speak, they often insinuate their intent indirectly rather than stating it as a bald proposition. Examples include sexual come-ons, veiled threats, polite requests, and concealed bribes.”

* “human communication involves a mixture of cooperation and conflict”

* People tend to exhibit systematically self-serving biases in their beliefs. They tend to think that they are better, smarter, nicer than they are. They attribute their success to themselves and their failure to external factors. They rationalise their errors and misdeeds but cast a critical judgement on others’ missteps. Surely, it is a sign that people are just poor at forming judgements about themselves and the world. In contrast to this view, we can explain these belief distortions by the fact that evolution likely selected us to form not accurate beliefs, but beliefs that can be useful. Research has shown that overconfidence, over-pessimism and warped reasoning may be selected features of our cognition, giving us advantages in a range of situations.

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When Reason Goes On Holiday: Philosophers in Politics

Posted on September 28, 2024 by Luke Ford

Neven Sesardic wrote in this 2016 book:

^ Many contemporary philosophers have disgraced themselves by defending totalitarian political systems and advocating political ideas they should have easily recognized as distasteful and inhumane. To give just three well – known examples, Jean – Paul Sartre championed Stalinism and later Maoism, Martin Heidegger actively supported and celebrated Nazism, and Michel Foucault publicly expressed enthusiasm for Khomeini’s Iranian Islamic revolution.

* This is what Einstein had to say in 1929, on the fifth anniversary of Lenin’s death: “In Lenin I admire a man who has thrown all his energy into making social justice real, at the sacrifice of his own person. I do not consider his method practicable. But one thing is sure: Men like him are the guardians and reformers of the conscience of mankind” (quoted in Grundmann 2005, 253).
Notice the only thing Einstein says about the Leninist method is that he does not consider it “practicable.” The German word Einstein used is zweckmässig, literally “conducive to the goal.” So his only criticism of Lenin’s method is that it would not achieve its goal. There was no condemnation or moral disapprobation of the method itself, nor even any hint that it was widely criticized as highly unethical. (If one knows that a politician killed thousands of innocent people in order to achieve his goal, usually one would not object merely that the politician’s method was “impractical” or “not conducive to his goal.”)
Indeed, why did Einstein praise Lenin so profusely as a “guardian and reformer of the conscience of mankind” despite evidence, easily accessible at the time, that massive atrocities had been perpetrated under his leadership during the first years of the Soviet Union?

* To the dismay of many of his friends, [Kurt] Gödel traveled from the safety of Princeton to post – Anschluss Austria in 1939 with the aim of convincing the Nazi authorities there to renew his university lectureship. He must have been aware that the condition for taking up the lectureship was signing an oath of loyalty and obedience to Adolf Hitler.

* Einstein and Gödel became friends at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and they had similar opinions about the postwar political situation. When it came to their critical attitudes toward the United States, their views were “nearly indistinguishable”.

* The American Philosophical Association (APA) has three divisions (Eastern, Central and Pacific) and more than 11,000 members, including many non – Americans. It is probably the most important philosophical organization in the world. It also has a long and rich history of being drawn into leftist political activism.

* In December 1971, Hilary Putnam proposed that the APA “condemn as unscientific and dangerous the views of [Harvard psychologist Richard] Herrnstein, [Nobel laureate physicist William] Shockley, and [University of California, Berkeley, educational psychologist Arthur] Jensen concerning the genetic basis of differences in mean intelligence between blacks and whites.” 2 The proposal also condemned the Atlantic Monthly, Harvard Educational Review , and the New York Times Magazine on the strange ground that they “irresponsibly supported” these “unfounded conclusions” merely by publishing articles in which these claims were defended. Despite complaints that the views in question should not be condemned without sufficient evidence and that the condemnation actually opposed the exercise of free speech and free research, the motion carried and was put to mail ballot. It was voted down, but a similar motion was proposed again the following year. Although it was suggested that it made no sense to push the same motion that had been defeated the previous year, without any events’ occurring in the meantime that would likely change the result, the motion carried and was again put to mail ballot (with an unknown result).

* There are many other examples, besides the APA, of important philosophical institutions undertaking political actions that are not only unreasonable but also occasionally harmful to the profession. A good recent illustration is the jumpy reaction of the editors of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) to a reported gender disparity in philosophy and their hasty and ill – considered attempt to correct it.
To see how the mere numerical fact of gender disparity — unaccompanied by any understanding of its origins or awareness of potential consequences of meddling with the existing situation — can move prominent philosophers to rush to a conclusion and galvanize them into urgent action, consider the following sequence of events. On June 19, 2013, the sociologist Kieran Healy publishes data on his blog showing that of all recent citations in four prestigious philosophy journals, female authors get only 3.6 percent of the total. Although Healy warns that “this is exploratory work” and that there are unanswered “questions about the underlying causes of any patterns that show up in the data” as well as “various comparisons that sound straightforward . . . but are actually quite complicated to answer properly, or imply a lot more data collection and analysis than I can do here,” when Edward Zalta and Uri Nodelman, the editors of the SEP, learn about Healy’s data they decide the issue needs immediate attention. On July 12 (just three weeks after Healy’s posting), they send an email with the subject “SEP request concerning citations” to all SEP authors, subject editors, and referees, which includes a link to Healy’s text, informing the SEP collaborators that the editors take the issue of undercitation of women philosophers seriously. Although they don’t explain why the issue is so pressing or what their objective is (besides pushing some numbers up), they announce that they want to “encourage our authors, subject editors, and referees to help ensure that SEP entries do not overlook the work of women or indeed of members of underrepresented groups more generally.” Furthermore, the collaborators are also urged to write to the editor “any time [they] notice a source missing from an SEP entry (whether or not it is [their] own entry).”
There are at least five problems here. First, Zalta and Nodelman seem to assume, without providing any evidence, that the “undercitation” of women is at least partly the result of philosophers’ bias, i.e., their tendency to “overlook” women’s publications more often than men’s. Second, the way the editors try to address the problem of the low citation of women looks very much like an attempt to cure a disease without knowing its cause. Third, their action will have a perverse effect as well. Namely, de facto pushing (or nudging) so many scholars to cite more female philosophers (and to report on those who fall behind in this task) may distort genuine citation patterns in the discipline and undermine the integrity of a bibliometric analysis of philosophical publications. Fourth, there might be another perverse effect: If the SEP initiative to boost the citation of women’s publications becomes more widely adopted in philosophy, then philosophers who do not believe that the “undercitation” is due to sexist bias might react to the new situation by correcting for what they perceive as the citation inflation for one group. As a consequence, they might start to take the number of citations of a woman’s work as being, on average, a less reliable sign of scholarly quality than the number of citations of a man’s work. And fifth, it should be expected that other demographic groups would soon follow suit and demand that their “unfairly” low citation rate be similarly jacked up.
Given the SEP’s importance to the discipline — in many ways it serves as a standard – bearer for philosophy as a research field — it is odd how unconcerned the editors were about making such crude and blatantly political considerations a part of their official editorial policy. Even odder is that of hundreds (thousands?) of philosophers who have been acquainted with the new citation guidelines for more than two years, no one has decided to start a public discussion about that issue.

* According to a 2013 – 2014 study by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, the ratio of university professors who described themselves as politically “far left” vs. those on the “far right” was between 30 to 1 and 50 to 1 (Eagan et al. 2014, 112). The ratio for philosophers, however, must be considerably higher than that figure, which is the average across all academic disciplines.
I think these facts must be a large part of the explanation for why so many leading analytic philosophers were Stalinists or Soviet sympathizers, whereas there is no single instance of anyone of a similar stature having publicly supported the supposed right – wing equivalent — a fascist leader, say, or even much less odious right – wing politicians such as, for example, Pinochet.
A nice illustration of the effect of ideological majority pressure in philosophy is the case of Robert Nozick. He admitted that at one point he went along with the incorrect representation of his views just because he expected it would make his colleagues view him more favorably:
“[I]t was so nice for people to be slapping me on the back and telling me that they had faith in me and they believed in me. Because they hadn’t been saying that for years. And they started welcoming me back into the fold. And you know, God help me, but I just liked to not be vilified for a change. I liked to not be a pariah in my own department. And so I went along with it. I could have done the snarky thing and said, No, your approval of me is based on a misunderstanding. I could have said that, but I just didn’t. I was tired and I just let it go (reported in Schmidtz 2012).”
It should be pointed out that at the time (the end of the eighties), Nozick was a tenured full professor at Harvard widely admired for his intellectual brilliance. If despite his very high standing in the profession he still felt “like a pariah in his own department,” it is not hard to guess how much worse the position must be for those younger, less accomplished, and much more vulnerable scholars who share his political views. They would be much more motivated to let their opinions be misrepresented in the left – wing direction, not to mention that many of them might under pressure genuinely migrate away from beliefs that could sound outrageous to most of their colleagues. This is one of the mechanisms via which the high left – wing ratio might reinforce itself and increase further.

* The idea that a black – white difference in average intelligence might play some explanatory role cannot be dismissed out of hand. After all, the authoritative report “Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns” issued by the American Psychological Association states that “the Black mean is typically about one standard deviation (about 15 points) below that of Whites” (Neisser et al. 1996, 93)…
A good illustration is the case of the philosopher Michael Levin, who in 1990 published a short letter in the Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (62 – 63) in which he suggested this explanation for the low proportion of blacks in philosophy. In the next issue the editor of the bulletin reported that Levin’s letter “has provoked the largest and most impassioned outpouring of letters I have yet received.” The members of Levin’s philosophy department at City College of New York published a letter distancing themselves from his views. Eighteen reactions were published, all of them negative, with some authors expressing strong disagreement and others condemning the APA for publishing Levin’s letter and calling it “racist propaganda.” Needless to say, Levin was not invited to respond to this barrage of attacks, although this is a customary courtesy extended to authors who generate a controversy.
A similar case (in which a prominent philosopher makes a late appearance) involves Frank Ellis, a former lecturer in Russian and Slavonic studies at the University of Leeds, who publicly expressed agreement with Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s claims, made in their controversy – generating book The Bell Curve (1994), about the black – white difference in intelligence and its social effects. In response, the student union urged the administration to fire Ellis. The vice – chancellor of the university suspended him from his duties pending the outcome of a disciplinary process.

* well – known philosopher Richard Rorty said in an interview for the Believer in 2003: “I think all that September 11 changed was to give the fascists a chance. The Republicans saw that if they could keep us in a state of perpetual war from now on . . . they could keep electing Republicans more or less forever.”

* David Albert’s account of his 1992 conversation with Sidney Morgenbesser, an iconic figure in analytic philosophy and one of the sharpest minds in that whole tradition: 3
“I remember Sidney and I sitting together in my office in 1992, on the morning after Clinton was elected. Neither of us had any illusions about Clinton, but both of us were caught up just then in the immense relief of Bush’s having lost. We were laughing and happy, and all of a sudden Sidney starts to kvetch. He said, “I can’t tell you what it’s been like for me, I can’t tell you how I have suffered, these past 12 years under Reagan and Bush.” And then he started to cry. At that, the floor just sort of came out from under me. I didn’t quite know what I was in the presence of, and I didn’t quite know what to do (Albert 2005).”
Obviously Morgenbesser must have sincerely felt these powerful emotions that brought him to tears. But it is equally obvious that Albert, his close friend and apparently a fellow liberal, could not make any sense of this reaction. And the reason he could not is simply that in objective terms the reaction made no sense at all. For what on earth could Morgenbesser have imagined himself to have suffered so much under those two Republican presidents?

* Derek Parfit, one of the most influential living philosophers. It would be very hard to find an analytic thinker today who is held in higher regard.
In June 2015, Parfit gave a talk at the invitation of the Oxford organization Giving What We Can, which tries to promote “the most cost – effective poverty relief, in particular in the developing world.” As has already been richly documented in these pages, it is exactly such occasions of political activism that tend to bring out the worst in philosophers, leading them to make extravagant feel – good statements and also to throw logic to the wind.
At the beginning of his talk Parfit says that according to William Godwin, if you walk past a beggar and you don’t give him your coins, you’re stealing; the money doesn’t belong to you, because the beggar needs it more than you, so you’re stealing (“Derek Parfit — Full Address,” YouTube, 8:15 – 8:39). Immediately after citing Godwin’s eccentric opinion that not giving to a beggar equals stealing from him, Parfit surprisingly goes on to agree with it enthusiastically: “Well, that is actually what I feel we rich people . . . in the world today are doing. We’re not entitled to our vast wealth.” And a minute later he adds: “If people from sub – Saharan Africa came and started removing my property, I wouldn’t feel that I had a right to stop them.”
So Parfit is arguing, first, that rich people are not entitled to their wealth (even if it is the result of their hard work), and second, he is making a much stronger claim: that rich people are actually stealing from poor people. The charge of stealing appears to be based only on Godwin’s rather flimsy reasoning (which Parfit seems to endorse) that if X needs “your” money more than you do, this by itself establishes that you are stealing it from X…
If Parfit genuinely believed that he had stolen his house, car, money, etc., from others, isn’t it clear that he wouldn’t continue to hold on to all those things? He is obviously not the kind of person who would keep something he himself regarded literally as stolen. Hence the very fact that he has been unable to renounce his possessions indicates that in his heart of hearts he does not truly believe that he stole them.
If Parfit did believe this, though, it would have been extremely easy for him to restore justice in his own case. For after having publicly announced that he wouldn’t stop the poor if they came to his place to remove his property, the only thing that remained for him to do in order to facilitate a quick and rightful restitution was to disclose to the world the address of his Oxford residence. Which he has not done.
Notice, however, that Parfit is not talking only about Parfit. He is talking about all well – to – do people in the West. Consequently the import of his statement is far – reaching. His view implies that if millions of sub – Saharan Africans came to the United States, Canada, Australia, England, France, Germany, and Italy, not only would they have a moral right to remove property from rich and well – off households in those countries, the local people would have a moral duty to invite these newcomers into their homes and ask them to take away all the stuff that the current “owners” had stolen from the needy.
Such a radical approach to economic redistribution is almost unheard of. In terms of ordinary political taxonomy, it is best classified as belonging to the extreme fringe of the extreme left.
To conclude, here is a concise evaluation of Parfit’s view: very high on compassion for the downtrodden, very low on logic.

* …philosopher Jeremy Waldron, professor at the New York University School of Law and until recently Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford. Waldron participated in the debate “Is Torture Ever Permissible?” at Columbia University on April 21, 2005. (In the meantime the video of the debate disappeared from the Internet, but I saved the file on my hard disk.)
Since Waldron is well known for his absolute condemnation of torture under any circumstances, he was inevitably asked about the notorious “ticking bomb scenario”: What would Waldron’s advice be if a nuclear device were planted in New York City and if the only way to save millions of innocent people from a certain and horrible death were to torture an arrested terrorist who knew the location of the bomb?
He replied that the answer is clear: Since morality tells us there are certain things that must not be done under any conditions — and torture is one of those things — then it follows that in that kind of situation we should “take the hit” and let all these millions of people die.

* One of the leading logical positivists spends more than two years doing propaganda for Stalin while millions die in the government – caused famine. Reactions? None. One of the most highly esteemed philosophers joins a militant Maoist party and is very active in it for four years, during the horror of the Cultural Revolution. Any interest among his colleagues in knowing more about the episode or understanding how this was possible? Nonexistent. A hugely influential thinker describes in his autobiography and several interviews how he suspended his opposition to Hitler after the Nazi – Stalin Pact and then reversed himself miraculously on the day of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Reaction? Yawn. A person who is widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century did basically the same thing. Ever discussed? Not really. A preeminent philosopher is knighted for service to philosophy and racial justice despite giving a platform at All Souls College, Oxford, to a notorious and vicious racist. Comments? None. (Apparently this is regarded as not worth even mentioning or it did not register at all.) A scholar in one of the top philosophy departments in the UK defends for years the brutal Soviet oppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as a completely justified response to a “fascist rebellion.” Response? A total lack of interest, followed by his being elected to the prestigious Chichele chair of political theory at Oxford. A renowned philosopher of science was in his youth an ultra – Stalinist as well as a police informer and also gratuitously forced a young woman to commit suicide. Response? An attempt to distort some of these facts and present them in a positive light, plus naming a university building and the highest award in the field after him.

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