Perhaps the world could use a few more jerks

ALMOST no one believes the world needs more jerks. A Google search for the phrase returns exactly 12 hits, all of them sarcastic. Which only makes sense. Who likes being around jerks?

Allow me to introduce myself, then, as the jerk who thinks we need more jerks, particularly in knowledge-making fields such as journalism and academia — or at least the kind of people who get called jerks for saying things their colleagues don’t want to hear.

These professions used to be sheltered workshops for those kinds of “jerks”: naturally distrustful folks who like asking uncomfortable questions and experiencing an uncontrollable urge to say whatever they’ve been told not to. These character traits don’t make people popular at parties, but they might well help them ferret out untruths, deconstruct popular pieties and dismantle conventional wisdom.

Jerks were never the majority. But they were a teaspoon of leavening that kept social pressure from compressing the range of acceptable thought into an intellectual pancake: flat, uniform and not very interesting.

These days, human resources departments have cracked down on all manner of jerk-ish behavior — including, of course, saying things that offend one’s colleagues. But if you’re in the truth business, all this niceness comes at a cost, as a perspective just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences makes clear.

The paper’s multiple authors exhaustively categorize the rising pressures for, and tolerance of, academic censorship — including self-censorship. For example, they write, “A majority of eminent social psychologists reported that if science discovered a major genetic contribution to sex differences, widespread reporting of this finding would be bad.”

Their paper challenges many of our common assumptions about censorship. First, that because it’s bad it must be done for bad reasons; and, second, that censorship is mostly a matter of outsiders tyrannizing truth-seekers. In fact, censorship is often done by scientists themselves — and often for reasons that suggest, well, an excess of niceness: fighting injustice, promoting equality, protecting the weak. And if they also want to stay on the good side of their colleagues, well, nice people usually do.

Unfortunately, the universe isn’t here to please us, which means niceness and truth will sometimes be at odds.

I think, for example, of my fellow Post columnist Lawrence H. Summers, who was forced out as president of Harvard several years ago after he speculated, at a small private seminar, that one possible reason for the underrepresentation of women in elite science and engineering programs might be that their ability was less variable than men’s. So while both sexes perform about as well on average, the women might tend to cluster near the middle, while the men are overrepresented at the bottom and the top — the latter being where elite programs draw from.

Understandably, this caused hurt and outrage among many female academics. But things can be true even if they make us feel bad, and Summers’ speculation is at least compatible with what we know about sex differences in other animals. A truth-seeking institution would have set feelings aside and asked whether the hypothesis was right or wrong (as Summers himself said it might well be).

Instead, Summers resigned. This was a watershed event that has influenced how university administrators are selected, and how they behave — as we saw in the recent congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, where three nice university presidents struggled to mount a coherent, and plausible, defense of free expression on campus.

One reason they struggled was that campuses have in fact become more and more hostile to debate on issues of identity, as you will find extensively examined in “The Canceling of the American Mind,” a new book by Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott. But it’s not just a problem of overzealous DEI bureaucracies; scholars are censoring each other — and themselves.

One has to look only at the way some academic disciplines have veered into activism — including public health during the pandemic. Or at the papers concerning sensitive issues such as race and sexuality that were retracted under activist pressure. Or at recent editorial statements from the journal Nature suggesting that editors should vet papers not just for scientific accuracy but for possible harm to marginalized communities.

Undoubtedly, the folks who wrote that editorial thought they were helping make the world a better place. But, undoubtedly, so did the men who prosecuted Galileo. Niceness doesn’t prevent error — in fact, it may make mistakes more likely.

Sociologist Musa al-gharbi, one