by Steven Gimbel
The list of Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and medicine includes men and women, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists, gay men, lesbians, and cis-scientists, people from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Australia. So, is the ultimate example of meritocracy also the epitome of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?
Absolutely not. All of these figures who form the zenith of human intellectual achievement come from the same small group. One and all, they are nerds. The irony of our times is that the people leading the charge to have government agencies wipe away remembrance of the achievements of people of color, women, gay and trans heroes in the name of anti-DEI not only harbor animosity for people of color, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community, they really hate nerds.
I know this because I am a white nerd. My heritage traces back to Eastern Europe and I teach logic and critical thinking at the collegiate level, I hold a Ph.D. for a dissertation on the philosophical ramifications of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, I am the occupant of an endowed named professorship, and I was bullied in elementary school and middle school by people who probably applaud the white supremacy that is trying to use the progress made by other nerds who happened to be white as evidence of their superiority. They tried to copy off my test in sixth grade and now they are trying to do it again on a grander scale.
My doctoral work was undertaken at Johns Hopkins University, an institution that has been hit excessively hard by cuts to science and other intellectual pursuits, a school that raises the ire of anti-DEI power mongers because, like the rest of the locations where high-powered research is done, it looks like the United Nations. Control for any property—skin color, gender, hair color, sexual orientation, favorite ice cream flavor—and a small percentage will be nerds. We come in every size, shape, and color and as a white nerd, I have more in common with them than I do with those trying to usurp nerd-created intellectual successes for their own bigoted purposes.
This is why Vice President Vance labeled all college professors as the enemy, because we reside in our little Nerdvana where we take seriously the contributions of all our fellow researchers regardless of the properties they want to consider inferior. This is not to say that the Academy has no struggles with racism, sexism, or classism. It does. But, it has also been working to correct them over the last several decades by researching the roots of the problem, understanding how it is manifested, and crafting a range of possible solutions. This project has given us notions like structural privilege, invisible labor, and intersectionality which allow us to make sense of the different lived experiences of those with varied backgrounds. The success of the project is meant to serve as a model for understanding and correcting biases beyond the Ivory Tower in the rest of society. And that, of course, is what makes it so dangerous. That is why war has been declared on higher education.
These notions reside in the discipline of sociology. Sociology studies the dynamics of large groups and institutions and norms within social structures. It accounts for what Emile Durkheim, a founder of the field, termed “social facts” which are beliefs that are universal and enforced so that they become so internalized that they become invisible. When explaining this notion in the classroom, I will ask students how many of them are wearing pants. All hands go up. I asked how many chose to wear pants. Again, all hands are raised. I then asked how many, when getting dressed, paused to ask themselves whether this was going to be a pants or no-pants day. No hands go up as the class laughs. “If you did not seriously consider whether to wear pants,” I ask, “then how can you say that you decided to wear pants?” We then consider why not wearing pants to class was not seen as a live option. “Because I could be arrested,” “People would look at me funny,” and “I would feel uncomfortable” are the replies always given. Yes, I tell them, the rule that you must wear pants is enforced by formal and informal means so that its seeming necessity becomes internalized. In this way, much of what is merely normal is mistaken for that which is necessary.
Further, some of these social facts lead to social problems. Some of our society’s ills can be traced back to norms that should be changed. I teach at Gettysburg College, a site where certain former socially acceptable practices were famously fought over in 1863, making the point clear to my students. But if the source of the problem is in the social structure, then so too must be the solutions. This is why policy focuses not on individual people’s racist beliefs, for example, but structural racism, that is, the way in which the bias does not need to be held by any given person making any given decision, but is baked into the institutions, decision procedures, and social facts that go unquestioned.
But they do not want these questions asked. They do not want the notions of privilege and intersectionality to do the work they were designed for. And so, they launch what we call an “ad hominem attack.” This is where you try to undermine a view not by giving evidence that it is false, but by calling opponents names or by trying to give the position a negative brand that will lead people to reject it without understanding it. In this way, anything that comes from sociologists is labeled “cultural Marxism.”
The idea behind this name is two-fold. On the one hand, Karl Marx is one of the early figures in sociology who, like all other sociologists, argued that we need to understand observable elements of society like the distribution of wealth and power, economic development, even personal resentment as arising from social facts. So, did Karl Marx hold this sort of view? Well, yes, just like Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and all other sociologists past and present.
Why single out Marx for the label, then? Because when you think of the combination of the terms “Marxism” and “cultural,” what comes to mind is the authoritarianism of Stalin’s Soviet Union and Maoist China when the rights of the individual were curtailed for the supposed benefit of the collective and life was repressive and bleak. It is a slimy rhetorical trick employing psychological priming to keep the listener from doing the work to understand the view. If you can convince them to not even think about it by branding it as evil, then they will not stop to consider whether it, in fact, is. It is the same sleazy trick that both “pro-choice” and “pro-life” uses to bias the listener with a label. Everyone is in favor of having choices and everyone is in favor of being alive, so by giving the pro-abortion rights and anti-abortion rights movements those names, they use emotional attachments to keep you from thinking hard about the range of intricate arguments around a difficult moral/political question. So it is with “cultural Marxism,” where the attempt is made to plant in your mind negative images that have nothing to do with whether or not social problems like racism, poverty, or the undermining of democracy have anything to do with aspects of our social structure.
Do they? Maybe, maybe not. To answer the question, we need to ask the hard questions and use the tools developed to answer them. Who develops these tools? Who asks these questions and finds innovative ways of understanding them and of potentially solving them? Why, it is nerds, of course. The people that the white supremacists simultaneously want to silence and whose work they want to claim credit for. So, in light of the current context when scholars are being violently seized by masked government agents, in order to try to begin to fix the damage being wrought, let me coin a phrase that might resonate with these folks: All nerds matter.
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