Infamous Motivational Quotes

These changes have been steadily eroding the barrier between scholarship and activism. It used to be considered a failure of teaching or scholarship to work from a particular ideological standpoint. The teacher or scholar was expected to set aside her own biases and beliefs in order to approach her subject as objectively as possible. Academics were incentivized to do so by knowing that other scholars could—and would—point out evidence of bias or motivated reasoning and counter it with evidence and argument. Teachers could consider their attempts at objectivity successful if their students did not know what their political or ideological positions were. This is not how Social Justice scholarship works or is applied to education. Teaching is now supposed to be a political act, and only one type of politics is acceptable—identity politics, as defined by Social Justice and Theory. In subjects ranging from gender studies to English literature, it is now perfectly acceptable to state a theoretical or ideological position and then use that lens to examine the material, without making any attempt to falsify one’s interpretation by including disconfirming evidence or alternative explanations. Now, scholars can openly declare themselves to be activists and teach activism in courses that require students to accept the ideological basis of Social Justice as true and produce work that supports it.38 One particularly infamous 2016 paper in Géneros: Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies even favorably likened women’s studies to HIV and Ebola, advocating that it spread its version of feminism like an immune-suppressing virus, using students-turned-activists as carriers.39

Where did this infamous character come from? His most intimate early portrait was created by Adam Smith in two major works, his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments and his 1776 book known as The Wealth of Nations. Today Smith is best remembered for having noted the human propensity to ‘truck, barter and exchange’ and the role of self-interest in making markets work.2 But although he believed self-interest was ‘of all virtues that which is most helpful to the individual’, Smith also believed it was far from the most admirable of our traits, knocked off that top spot by our ‘humanity, justice, generosity and public spirit . . . the qualities most useful to others’. Did he consider humankind to be motivated by self-interest alone? Not at all. ‘How selfish soever man may be supposed,’ he wrote, ‘there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.’3 Furthermore, Smith believed that an individual’s self-interest and concern for others combined with their diverse talents, motivations and preferences to produce a complex moral character whose behaviour could not easily be predicted.

At the core of this ugly period in our history is the idea that who “we” are as a country is changing for the worse—that “we” are becoming unrecognizable to ourselves. The slogans “Make America Great Again” and “Keep America Great” amount to nostalgic longings for a time under siege by present events, and the cascading crises we face grow out of, in part, the desperate attempts to step back into a past that can never be retrieved. The willingness of so many of our fellows to toss aside any semblance of commitment to democracy—to embrace cruel and hateful policies—exposes the idea of America as an outright lie. In the archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, I came across an undated handwritten note to Robert Kennedy from James Baldwin. The infamous meeting after the protests and violence in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, between Kennedy, Baldwin, and a group of Baldwin’s colleagues that included Lorraine Hansberry and Jerome Smith had ended horribly. Kennedy left the meeting suspicious of Baldwin, his motives, and his

This was a startup. We worked 70 to 80 hours per week. We had the vision. We had the motivation. We had the will. We had the energy. We had the expertise. We had equity. We had dreams of being millionaires. We were full of shit. The C code poured out of every orifice of our bodies. We slammed it here, and shoved it there. We constructed huge castles in the air. We had processes, and message queues, and grand, superlative architectures. We wrote a full seven-layer ISO communications stack from scratch—right down to the data link layer. We wrote GUI code. GOOEY CODE! OMG! We wrote GOOOOOEY code. I personally wrote a 3000-line C function named gi(); its name stood for Graphic Interpreter. It was a masterpiece of goo. It was not the only goo I wrote at Clear, but it was my most infamous. Architecture? Are you joking? This was a startup. We didn’t have time for architecture. Just code, dammit! Code for your very lives!