Should Philosophers Censor Kevin MacDonald?Nathan Cofnas
13 Jan 2022
According to the mainstream narrative about race, “white supremacy” is an all-controlling social force responsible for bad outcomes such as racial disparities. According to an alternative narrative popular on the far-Right, Jewish influence is a similarly powerful force, which explains outcomes disliked by those on the Right, such as multiculturalism and mass immigration.
Last year, I published a paper in the Israeli philosophy journal Philosophia arguing that both the woke and the far-Right narratives are wrong and rooted in similar errors. I focus on the work of Cal State Long Beach psychologist Kevin MacDonald. MacDonald argues that Judaism is a “group evolutionary strategy,” and that Jews were a necessary condition for the triumph of liberalism, which he sees as bad for white gentiles. His approach is similar to that of MSNBC anchors who cherry-pick (real or imagined) examples of racism and then spin fanciful stories about how these isolated cases illustrate a “system” of “white supremacy.” MacDonald points to examples of prominent Jews promoting liberalism, ignores prominent liberal gentiles, and claims to find evidence that Jewish liberals are secretly motivated to undermine gentile society for the benefit of their co-ethnics.
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On January 1st, MacDonald’s reply to me, “The ‘Default Hypothesis’ Fails to Explain Jewish Influence,” appeared online in Philosophia. I strongly agree with the decision to publish this. If there are compelling reasons to publish my side of the debate, then the other side should be given a chance to make its case. MacDonald’s response meets the normal standards of publishability, ergo it should be published. Mainstream scholarship in all areas with which I am familiar (philosophy, psychology, nutrition, etc.) often distorts sources, cherry-picks facts, and the like. The fact that MacDonald’s scholarship displays these flaws does not, therefore, seem like a sufficient reason to deny him (but no one else) the right to reply to criticism.
But many philosophers do not think that controversial ideas should be discussed—let alone defended—in academic journals. And so the backlash swiftly followed. On January 2nd, Philosophia’s associate editor Moti Mizrahi called on the editor-in-chief Asa Kasher to “reconsider” the publication of MacDonald’s paper, then resigned in protest.
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When I first started writing on conspiracy theories about Jews, I thought this would win me some political correctness points. After all, I say there is not a Jewish conspiracy! But, as I discovered, that’s not how it works. The only way you’re allowed to criticize a politically incorrect idea is to call its proponents a slur ending in “-ist,” “-ite,” or “denier.” If you try to provide evidence against it then you are guilty of taking the evil idea seriously and therefore just as doubleplusungood as someone who actually believes it. Luckily, I don’t care about gaining political correctness points, or I would live my life very differently.
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In one of the most upvoted comments on Daily Nous, SUNY Buffalo philosophy professor Lewis Powell notes that MacDonald’s work “has been roundly rejected by his own former institution, at the level of his department all the way up to the entire academic senate.” For Powell, this is an important reason “why we shouldn’t engage [MacDonald] academically.” If you’re looking for an idea that’s not worth considering, I cannot think of a better example than we shouldn’t discuss X because X has been rejected by some faculty senate. (After I pointed out how ridiculous this is, Powell denied saying what he clearly said.)
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/01/13/philosophers-want-to-censor-kevin-macdonald/
