#MeToo Movement

Heather Mac Donald is a lawyer and contributing editor to City Journal and is an author. She gave a speech at Hillsdale College on 4/18/18. I read her speech in Imprimis (April 2018 • Volume 47, Number 4 • Heather Mac Donald), and this blog entries is about her great, insightful speech, including some excerpts from that speech.

The #MeToo Movement, political correctness and especially identity politics cam out of, or were redounded to, by Academia, according to Mac Donald. Her worry is that political correctness and the hiring of job candidates based on race and gender quotas will disallow hiring manager to land the best job candidate due to political considerations, rather that merit. The disastrous consequence will be a loss of American competitiveness and scientific achievement.

 So true, I add. There will also a loss of and decline in intellectual and cultural achievemetn too. This is a horrible race to the bottom to the lowest common denominator of candidates, centered in groupist affiliation, rather than personal merit.

Imagine applying for a plum job in the Nazi regime: if one was a Nazi or a member of the Aryan race, one could go forward. For anyone else, no promotion, no employment, no acceptance, indeed, once identified as non-Aryan, one may well be arrested and sent to a concentration camp.

Though #MeToo correctness in all governmental and business hiring from now on will damage our whole country, hiring managers must yield or be destroyed. What Mac Donald has revealed is that any identity-based hiring, promoting or admittance to graduate school is actually mere totalitarian, groupist preferences being enforced upon candidates, hirers and the organizations in question. Under the guise of corrective action and promoting diversity, the politically correct crowd are literally setting up a police state of spies and consequences for not living in fear and hiring in fear. That this hysteria is gripping America should alarm any decent, thinking person.

I have long advocated that, if we want to hire and promote the best possible candidate, the goals of excellence, superior candidate chosen, with diversity, equality and fairness as unenforced, indirectly valued and influencing the decision-making, but an intended byproduct of merited hiring, will only be met if the candidates competing are maverized individualists, whose skin color, class origin, genitalia and sexual orientation, are mere, natural attributes owned but de-emphasized by each candidate and their hiring managers. Astoundingly superior, brilliant candidates will be falling over each other to be hired.

A gaggle of individuating mavericks, of utter diversity and original perspective, are meritocracy operating wide open.

#MeToo hiring practices, however well-meant, are the epitome of anti-meritocracy. This is why Mac Donald bravely and assuredly warns that organizations hiring this way will begin to decline. It should be immaterial if a candidate is a white, herterosexual male, or whatever that candidate is or professes.

Mac Donald reports that there is some shunned and silenced scientific research pointing out that men like more abstract-idea centered work, and women like more human-centered, relational activities. This can influence who goes into what field, and may explain why mathematicians, engineers, and high tech engineers are mostly male and white.

She points out that gender differences are real, significant and must be given recognition. Men and women are created equal and are equal, but they are not the same and not identical. To deny these differences is to flout God's gender preferences for us as De created us.

I must quote a whole paragraph from her wonderful speech--it is so articulate:
"The #MeToo movement has uncovered real abuses of power. But the solution to those abuses is not to replace valid measures of achievement with irrelevancies like gender and race. Ironically, the best solution to sexual predation is not more feminism, but less. By denying the differences between men and women, and by ridiculing the manly virtues of gentlemanliness and chivalry and the female virtues of modesty and prudence, feminism dissolved the civilizational restraints on the male libido. The boorish behavior that pervades society today would have been unthinkable in the past, when a traditional understanding of sexual propriety prevailed. Now, however, with the idea of “ladies and gentlemen” discredited and out of favor, boorishness is increasingly the rule"

Mac Donald is wise and exercises common sense. Let men be gentleman, manly and chivalrous. Let women be modest and prudent. Boorishness, out of control male libido and #MeToo movement witch hunts are the consequence of ridding our society of good manners and traditional gender identity.