How can smart people think differently from me? How do they develop opinions so contrary to mine? If they’re so smart, I reason, why don’t they see the light? It’s a well-worn riddle. Well, thanks to a stroke of serendipity, I’ve come to see clearly how conflicting views may be formed, more specifically how a very intelligent woman and I developed contrary opinions on a hot button issue.

This discovery was set in motion after I wrote my critical review of the “woke culture” (The Wooden-Headed World of Woke). If you haven’t read my review, you can find it by clicking here. Two unlikely events then followed, and voila!, I began to see why this very intelligent woman and I had developed different views on the woke culture.

Two events

The first of my unlikely events occurred on a long walk soon after I critiqued the “Woke Culture,” and the second followed hours later when this highly intelligent woman sent me an email explaining the background for her contrary opinion.

During my long walk, I was listening to a meditation-type app on my iPhone (the healthy minds program, which I’ll describe more fully at the end of this post). The app’s focus that day was, “Questioning Your Assumptions,”  and it directed me to pick a topic I considered to be important. I instinctively chose the Woke culture, because it was fresh in my mind.

My understanding of  “woke”

As I understand it, the term, woke, arose originally in the Black community and came to mean being aware of social injustices. I am all for that. I like the concept. What I don’t like is how woke activists are straining our society. But why do I think that? How did I come to that opinion? The healthy mind app pressed me for answers, indicating that our hidden assumptions often influence how we view, among other things, social situations.

The app was persistent in my ear buds, prompting me to uncover anything in my mind even distantly related to the woke culture, directing me to find any unconscious assumptions, no matter whether they were true or not, no matter whether they were good or bad, but just to find anything even distantly related to the woke culture.

Digging for answers

If that sounds difficult, it was. I started by remembering pertinent things I had heard or read, straining to do a thorough job. Then the app urged me to go back further in time, to think of all possible past connections to the subject, to examine any possible influences on my opinions. So I dug deeper for connections, for answers.

I’ll skip much of what I went through, but it was an enlightening process. I worked my way all the way back in time to my university days when I was a Jack Kennedy Democrat (As I reported in my very first post on this site [Stew of the Day, see it here]). I still have the same basic political beliefs, but the Democrats have shifted decidedly leftward over the years, so I now occupy a spot a bit to the right of that moving center line.

A Kennedy Democrat?

But why was I a Kennedy Democrat during my college days? (The healthy minds program kept pressing me for answers.) Well, for one thing, then as now I was a strong believer in free democracies, and free speech, and in Kennedy’s phrase “what I can do for my country.” Before enrolling at Wisconsin, I had spent three years with the U.S. Air Force in Germany, and I had seen firsthand what communist USSR had done with the Eastern part of Germany that it controlled after WWII. (The differences between the then-divided city of Berlin were extreme. What I observed in that divided city was appalling. You can find summaries of my observations by clicking here, and here.)

But as bad the economic woes of East Germany were after WWII, even worse was the fearful force of the Stasi, the dreaded East German secret police that infiltrated practically every aspect of East Germans’ lives. The Stasi had 100,000 paid employees, and more than a half-million silent collaborators, and that terrified the entire country. The silent collaborators stealthily monitored the personal lives and conversations of their neighbors and even their own families, and anonymously reported all to the brutal Stasi. So, talking frankly among family and friends was extremely dangerous because collaborating snitches were common. One could get into big trouble by speaking out. Fear was endemic. People didn’t know whom they could trust. If you don’t know about that horrible situation, you owe it to yourself to examine how devastating it was. An excellent summary is available here.

Mimicking the Stasi

But how did my knowledge of the Stasi influence my thoughts on the woke culture? I began to see the connection. Strident segments of the woke culture often reside in the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusiveness) offices of colleges and universities, and over half of these offices have launched so-called Bias Reporting Systems in which students and faculty who believe they have experienced or observed a “bias incident” can report it, usually on line, and anonymously if they wish (see details here). Sound familiar? Like silent snitches and a dangerous young Stasi in the making? I believe this activity should be stopped in its tracks.

Beyond that, I believe strongly in merit, but the incessant pushes for diversity, equity, and inclusion, have generated a system in which slots are often filled not by the best candidates, but by the applicants who check whatever boxes those with decision-making power over enrollment, or employment, chose to use, skin color and race prominent among them.  By these criteria, the best qualified are often are bypassed by this system, a form of discrimination in itself. Excellence often replaced by mediocrity, because the best candidates are often bypassed.

DEI goal

The goal of DEI is in itself laudatory, namely to help disadvantaged citizens, often black. The history of being descendants from slavery is often mentioned, but that ugly era has passed for those living today. Black citizens today face different, but still formidable, difficulties. Many Black citizens live in dangerous inner-city streets, in neighborhoods where their children are deprived of safe and effective schools. Black students surely learn as easily as white students, but those living in inner cities do not have equal educational opportunities. This is where they often fall behind, and this is where, I believe, efforts for improvement should be concentrated, where equity for every student is vital. Ignoring this obvious problem and attempting to solve it at the time of college enrollment is too late in the cycle, a cycle that will never end if critical neighborhoods and schools are not improved.

I strongly favor a color-blind society. I believe all individuals, regardless of race or color, deserve to have equal opportunity to live their lives peacefully in a safe environment. But we do not have that today. It is in this critical area, I believe, where activists such as the DEI community, Black Lives Matter, and others, should put major efforts to improve conditions in inner-city neighborhoods and schools.  Admittedly, this will require major efforts. President Johnson’s Great Society, designed to eliminate poverty and crime, was begun over half a century ago (see here), with little apparent success.

One solution

Nevertheless, in my ideal world woke activists would go into inner city areas and assist the residents in making their neighborhoods safe while simultaneously upgrading their schools to national standards, thus attacking the core problems and providing students with the educations they deserve, thereby leveling the playing field for them. Furthermore, because positive role models are important for childhood development, it seemingly would be tremendously beneficial for prominent and successful Black citizens (athletes, actors, politicians) to go into these depleted neighborhoods on a regular and repetitive basis, to serve as role models for the children there. I occasionally see examples of this, something like a one-day sports camp sponsored by a well-known athlete, but the efforts are sporadic, often one-of-a-kind, and far less effective than more consistent and focused efforts would achieve.

To summarize my thinking, many present-day Black citizens do not have equity in either their inner-city neighborhoods or their schools, a persistent problem in desperate need of solution. It’s clear that inner city children learn as easily as others in more effective schools, but their inferior schools impede their progress, leaving them often less prepared for college than more fortunate children. But current DEI efforts ignore this fact and attempt to rectify this injustice by favoring inner-city youth for college enrollment over more qualified candidates.

This process of giving certain preferences to inner-city youth does nothing to remedy the core problem; it offers no hope for permanent improvement of inner-city education. Beyond that, DEI activities discriminate against better qualified students, thus reducing merit.  I think the solution is obvious. Provide proper education for students in the inner cities, and Black students will compete equally and successfully in a color-blind society.

The above is some of what I learned about my assumptions while employing the healthy minds app for guidance. Now we’ll switch to the email from the intelligent woman I’ve mentioned. She simply wrote spontaneously, unprompted by any app, yet her thoughts reveal her assumptions, and her views, quite clearly. She obviously has a more favorable view of the woke culture than I do. Some facts about this woman: we met in medical school, but lost contact until a chance encounter a few years ago. She is much better read than I am, and, as I said, highly intelligent. She reads The New York Times; I favor The Wall Street Journal. Here’s what she wrote.

A different point of view from an intelligent woman

Being a pediatrician and spending 25 years caring for children, adolescents and young adults, I have come to the conclusion that so much of what we become, what viewpoints we are open to are a result of our young, formative years. Whether you read about chronically homeless people and the traumas all of them have suffered in one form or another, or the very happy people who have had a pretty smooth course of development and life, those formative years are so key.

Loving parents

I was extremely blessed to have parents who not only loved me and nurtured me, they were well educated, had suffered bias themselves (my father being an Italian immigrant at age 5, my mother’s family immigrating from Italy just before she was born) at a time when the US was not too welcoming to Italians. Neither of them had any negative feelings about skin color, religion, or “caste” as we experience in America. I did not realize until I was in my late 40’s that one of the greatest gifts of all to me was my father raising me as a person, not as a woman. That gave me a freedom many females did not have, and encased me in the courage to become a physician when that was clearly not the norm for a woman. So, I could read anything I wanted, to pursue whatever curiosity I had about all sorts of things, though their value system did not make me want to explore darker things.

I saw on a regular basis what bias did to young people even though I lived in a very liberal community. The population was and is pretty “white” and many minorities live in different areas than the privileged white population. Our community does no better than others caring for the homeless, for example. The red lining to prevent people of color moving into certain areas is not as prevalent as elsewhere, but it is still there. That’s why I think every student in this country should be exposed to the 1619 Project. And, Toni Morrison should be required reading at some point before graduating high school. Many of us do not have the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of our populace, so never know them, and frequently are uncomfortable with them. That is a loss for humanity, in my view. I think good fiction provides an opportunity for the reader to create a visual image of what the author is trying to portray. I have learned much more about people and groups I have had little contact with by reading fiction than by reading nonfiction. It has been my experience that small children don’t see skin color or at least do not identify children by their skin color until they are taught that is something undesirable. One of the reasons I loved practicing pediatrics is that there is an innocence and curiosity and wonderful acceptance of so much that is then later taught to be not desirable.

Do not ban books

So, in my view, we should encourage children and young adults to read anything they want. We should certainly not let legislators, who have, by and large, no expertise in this area decide what books should be on the shelves, and what age they should be read. They can read anything they want as long as they want to and can read it. They may not get the nuances of it all, but I remember reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence as soon as it was no longer banned and thought it was an absolutely beautiful love story. I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved three times, because I thought her portraying the agony of a mother knowing what her child was going to face as a slave was worse than death, and so she killed her. What a horrible choice, a choice no mother should ever have to experience. And, we shouldn’t expose our children to that? That was what we had in this country from 1619 until the Emancipation Proclamation.

Parental guidance

I realize not all adults and parents want their children to be exposed to some things, and I respect that. They should be able to opt out if they don’t want their children exposed to certain things, but they are very naive if they think that will prevent their children from being exposed to things they don’t approve of. I think it is better for parents to be able to explain why something is not desirable.

We are facing so many really horrific problems in this world—climate change, war caused by autocratic rulers, pandemics, violence in our country, to cite a few. Let’s finally see if we can find an equitable way to deal with illegal immigration rather than just going through the same process and never making it better. There are enough intelligent people in this country that we ought to be able to come to some reasonable solutions for some of these really major problems and stop focusing on “the other.”

 

Final Note: As promised, I offer a final word about the healthy minds app. The healthy minds program was developed by Cortland Dahl at the University of Wisconsin. His well-designed app is available free from the Apple App store and also from Google Play. I have profited from its guidance, and I recommend you try it.