Lengthy but excellent. Could have easily put this in the Education thread.
Haidt is a reserved and fair speaker, so it makes it easier to watch him despite what I think are meta-descriptive issues with his talk. Also, I'm not sure that we can still categorize the telos of scholarship as "truth." I understand the rhetorical move of that association, but to me it raises some quite serious implications relating to a hierarchy of social fields. This isn't really a major concern because I'm willing to grant Haidt the benefit of the doubt; but claiming that the telos of scholarship is truth seems, in my opinion, to privilege scholarship on the social hierarchy. After all, "truth" (whatever it is) has to apply equally to all other fields, and would also seem to govern their actions. I can't square his sense of truth. But anyway, that's another issue.
My bigger problem is with his self-admitted objectivity (for lack of a better word), which he states when showing his stats on left-wing academics in psychology departments. "I'm a centrist" he says. Haidt's entire shtick rests upon his ability to distance himself from ideological engagement. In order to maintain a position, he says, you need to understand the opposition and be able to defend your beliefs against it; and he establishes himself on the basis that he understands not only his own position, but those of liberals and conservatives. In fact, he has a better view of the antagonism because he's outside of it, so to speak.
This whole lecture would be way more interesting and convincing if he took his own position into account. The "truth," since it's already been brought up, is that Haidt is as ideologically and politically inflected as any liberal or conservative. He elides the way his politics influence his scholarship, and that strikes me as disingenuous. If I missed that somehow, then I apologize; but based on my viewing, this seems like a simplistic and somewhat non-reflexive critique of the two contradictory positions.
The fact that he's also generalizing and (nearly) universalizing various humanities fields is really troubling. His evidence would seem to be popular media coverage of academic departments, not any engagement with them himself. For instance, he insinuates that most academics in, let's say, gender and women's studies would claim that engineering is sexist because it employs fewer women. This is an outrageous claim that you might indeed find on certain particularly radical campuses and in certain departments on those campuses, but I find it extremely hard to believe that it is a widespread opinion among humanities departments throughout the country.
I really don't mind Haidt, I think he's fine; but I don't find his work very engaging.
Also, what's with the J.S. Mill vs. Karl Marx dichotomy at the beginning? How does he derive any opposition from the two quotes he selected? (not that there isn't opposition there, but he did a horrible job of explaining Marx's quote)
