Review by Paula Weiss
We’re not out of the woods yet, but we never are.
When Donald Trump was re-elected in November, I was reading this book, and wondering whether it would now be, as we say in Washington, OBE, or “overtaken by events.” Anecdotally at least, the craziest Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) intersectional bullying seems increasingly on the defensive. Florida libraries have been pulling near-porn and racial diatribes off their shelves; some universities are scrapping their DEI apparatuses; and Michigan just dropped a DEI loyalty requirement for university employment and tenure. Corporations are quietly shedding their profit-draining DEI units, or so we’re told. Daniel Penny’s acquittal by a New York City jury last month after he accidentally killed a dangerous man on the subway offers hope that reason is percolating even on the woke streets of Gotham.
Gad Saad is a Canadian academic specializing in evolutionary psychology and consumerism. The key word is “evolutionary.” He criticizes academia and the intelligentsia writ large for resisting the idea that biology matters, and by extension factual evidence when it contradicts their ideological fantasies. The postmodernists, radical feminists, and social constructivists who insist that humanity is a blank slate and anything is possible if you simply restructure people’s ideology are not interested in evidence to the contrary. Saad accuses them of “Ostrich Parasitic Syndrome,” in which they refuse to consider or outright reject fundamental common-sense truths as a reaction to cognitive dissonance. For these folks, only malign social forces keep us from embracing Islam as a religion of peace, from endorsing women in combat roles, and from accepting as normal men and women who believe that they are members of the opposite sex.
For 20 years, reason and evidence have increasingly taken a back seat to ideologies that are fueled largely by emotion and wishful thinking. Mind you, Saad has no objection to emotion per se. He agrees that emotion and reason both have their place in human decisionmaking, but emotion has in too many cases supplanted reason in policy and science.
Saad had an early lesson in the destructiveness of emotional reactions over clearheaded reason. As a Lebanese Jew, he saw raw emotion in the form of communal hatreds destroy his family’s homeland in the 1970s. Emotion also almost got his family killed—his parents could not bear the thought of abandoning their home and were among the last Jews to escape that country, under gunfire with a paid PLO militia escort to the airport. Then they returned, only to spend weeks as hostages before finally learning their tough lesson and leaving for good.
Saad doesn’t say it explicitly, but emotion is also an anti-democratic force in policymaking, since it magnifies the seeming power of the minority. How many people were troubled by affirmative action, but stayed silent because they didn’t want to be seen as racist or be ostracized? In the absence of a rational public discourse aired by an open media ecosystem, these citizens also lack access to arguments that would legitimize alternative views and give scaffolding to their own concerns.
Somewhere along the way, rational and reasoned discourse aimed at addressing our society’s problems became the enemy, especially in the educational, governmental and intellectual arenas where it should normally take place. For social justice warriors, opposing views constitute a form of “violence” from which they need protection, which explains why campuses have become virtual echo chambers. The new religious orthodoxy is identity politics, which makes claims antithetical to biology and social science, now culminating in some bizarre transgender version of The Emperor’s New Clothes.
The book does more than rant about these familiar if egregious departures from reason. Saad offers “nomological networks of cumulative evidence” to combat the OPS assertions and seek truth. One must use evidence from methodologically varied standpoints to prove one’s point. He uses the example of toy preferences—boys and girls across virtually every culture and throughout time have preferred stereotypically boy and girl toys respectively. The hourglass female figure has been preferred as well throughout time, and one cannot claim after surveying a mountain of historical, biological, and artistic evidence that all female shapes are equally desirable. In science as well, results must be replicable, and even literature reviews, the bane of graduate students, matter too, since they can reveal whether a proposed hypothesis has already been found irrelevant, or “null.”
Saad finishes with a call to courage—we must be like the indefatigable honey badger that looks innocent but will fight to the death if attacked. He is dismissive of those who avoid confronting political correctness due to fears of giving offense, or of being ostracized. Saad has tenure, which gives him protection, but he responds to critics that even tenure is not completely bulletproof. Yet, for young people seeking a career in academia, publishing or government, who are already handicapped by their whiteness or maleness, lone honey badgerism will get them nowhere.
What is enabling the current pushback against DEI and intersectional social justice tyranny are money and political power. The civilized world of reason is breathing a huge sigh of relief at the return of Donald Trump, and his diverse array of allies. Elon Musk’s purchase of X in 2022 horrified leftists who knew that they were about to lose their monopoly on social media channels and thus control of the politically desired narrative. Trump’s re-election probably would have been impossible without the growth of the new media that has given Americans an alternative outlet to state propaganda. The swamp creatures who forced everyone to pretend that the covid virus was the product of wet markets and not a Chinese lab funded by the USG are now retreating and lawyering up. And even better, the scientists and activists they persecuted (cf. “Great Barrington Declaration.”) will now be heading the Department of Health and Human Services, the Center for Medicare, and even the National Institutes for Health and the Center for Disease Control. All this is making it easier for ordinary folks to be a honey badger.
But one should not assume the battle is over. Saad’s book is by no means obsolete. The postmodernist/feminist/constructivist heirs of Marxism who shun reason and claim justice and reason are merely a reflection of ideological or economic power are still out there licking their wounds. The widespread celebration that followed the murder of a health insurance CEO by a deranged but goodlooking leftist murderer in December was an alarming reminder that reason has a long way to go. A virtual orgy of class politics, envy and spite exploded on social media. In a related development, the left’s latching onto a nonexistent “Palestine” to express open anti-Semitism and luxuriate in violence is about emotion, not reason. Anyone who thinks—even before Inauguration Day—that the war has been won is dangerously naïve.
History also reminds us that the forces of emotion have resurged even when reason and learning were in the ascendant. The Inquisition burned heretics and rejected the notion of the earth revolving around the sun, even as learned men increasingly debated philosophy and explored science. In the early 20th century, Germany had the world’s finest universities, but hyperinflation, societal turmoil, and a desire to explain its war loss as a “stab in the back” disoriented the German public, and fueled fascism and antisemitism. Those who drove the German masses into obedient frenzies about their racial superiority also destroyed the universities, which have never regained their former status. Thus we should expect future assaults on reason, even if they take on a character different from the current wokish delusions. Human egos and frailty will always provide a fertile ground for sowing resentment and baseless emotion. The battle will continue. Saad’s book is worth reading as a broader explanation, and a warning, of the infrastructure of that eternal war.
Paula Weiss is the author of The Antifan Girlfriend and The Deplorable Underground.