This world could use some 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? Almost no one, that’s who. You’d have to be a bit of a jerk to suggest that we ought to have more of them despoiling our homes, workplaces and social gatherings.

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, which would be chaos. 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’s 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 last week’s 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 only to look at the way some academic disciplines have veered into activism — unfortunately including public health during the pandemic. Or at the papers concerning sensitive issues like 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 of the authors of the paper, pointed out that research shows people who viewed themselves as strongly principled were actually more willing to tailor their findings to the wishes of their funders or distort their findings to advance noble goals. “In many cases, people’s perception that they are strongly committed to social justice and rigor actually makes them more susceptible to being corrupted,” he told me in an interview.

Niceness also makes incidents of censorship harder to address. “If they were driven by bad people with bad motives, then the solution would be easy: Get rid of those people. But when it’s driven by people who are good, who are committed to doing good work and who are trying to do good through their work, then the solution becomes … more difficult.”

It might be worse than that, I responded: By trying to get rid of bad people, you could make science worse, because the most likely targets might be the semi-antisocial folks who just said what they thought, even if it upset people.

You know, the jerks.

“I think this is true,” al-gharbi said. “To the extent that we select for only the most pro-social people, we might actually be making science more vulnerable not just to censorship, but to some of these other problems like fraud and corruption as well.”

They and we would be better off if they kept a few ruthless iconoclasts around to periodically jerk them out of that complacency.