Sex, Violence, and Cognitive Prisons

Ideological Epistemology Serves No One

SEX, VIOLENCE, AND COGNITIVE PRISONS

Ideological epistemology serves no one

Maximilian Werner

Their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. —E. O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

In “Science, Scientists, and Policy Advocacy,” biologist Robert T. Lackey argues, “the ability of scientists (and scientific information) to inform constructively ecological policy deliberations has been diminished when what is offered as ‘science’ is inculcated with policy preferences.” Although Lackey focuses on ecological policy deliberations, “the formidable challenge of developing and providing technical and scientific information to inform policy deliberations in an objective and relevant way is not unique to ecological fields.” Thus, any policy—ecological or otherwise—that incorporates scientific information into the deliberative process must guard against policy preferences and ideological distortion. Otherwise, Lackey notes, science and scientists risk undermining their credibility and independence. But these are not the only potential consequences when scientific information is subordinated to ideology: Our understanding of—and, therefore, our ability to solve—problems is undermined as well.

Compared to the ecological sciences, the social sciences (to say nothing of the Humanities) may be especially prone to ideological inculcation and distortion, in part because of what Glen Love describes in his book Practical Ecocriticism as the social sciences’ “lingering resistance to biological science” and the fact that “many in these fields are still working under the assumptions of the so-called Standard Social Science Model.”

For example, the article “Gender-Based Heat Map Images of Campus Walking Settings: A Reflection of Lived Experience,” published in the journal Violence and Gender, is an paradigm case of ideology subverting science. In the study, participants looked at various images of locations on campus and, “using the Qualtrics heat map tool, selected features that stood out to them most.” The results differed depending on whether the participants were men or women. Although well-intentioned, the article clearly demonstrates the distortion that occurs when ideological commitments—or what Lackey would refer to as “normative science,” which is science that is “developed, presented, or interpreted based on a tacit, usually unstated, preference for a particular policy or class of policy choices”—supplant “policy neutral science [which] strives to describe the world accurately and is characterized by transparency, reproducibility, and independence.”

Fittingly, the first sign of potential trouble begins with the article’s reference to gender in its title. For notwithstanding widespread confusion about the differences between sex and gender, gender and sex are not the same. Stated briefly, “sex refers to biological differences (chromosomal, hormonal, reproductive), whereas gender refers to socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and expectations associated with femininity and masculinity.” I say “potential” trouble because at this point in the article there is no reason to assume that it will not honor this distinction and will in fact focus on the “socially constructed roles” of gender, of which there are over 70 at last count. However, the first three sentences of the abstract indicate that the article actually focuses on biological males and females—and not gender—for the study:

Fear of crime can influence our view of and experience with the world around us. This can be problematic for individuals seeking physical activity, including from walk commuting. Prior work shows fear is especially evident among women, who report fear of rape and sexual abuse by men as a primary concern.

The article makes repeated references to “men” and “women,” and “male” and “female,” which at a minimum implies agreement on the biological definitions of “males” and “females”. Why, then, suggest otherwise by including “gender” in the title, especially when it may result in conflating two distinct concepts?

Although one could argue that linguistic obfuscation is both a hallmark and a consequence of the Standard Social Science Model (SSM), Cory Clark and Bo Winegard point to a more charitable explanation in their article “Tribalism in War and Peace: The Nature and Evolution of Ideological Epistemology and Its Significance for Modern Social Science”:

Over the past several decades, social scientists have sedulously documented various tribal and ideological psychological tendencies on the political right, and more recent work has documented similar tendencies on the political left. We contend that these tribal tendencies and propensities can lead to ideologically distorted information processing in any group. And this ideological epistemology can become especially problematic for the pursuit of the truth when groups are ideologically homogenous and hold sacred values that might be contradicted by empirical inquiry.

While it is possible that the Heat Map article’s conflation of sex and gender is merely an oversight (an error also consistently made by the general public), the references to “problematic” and “lived experience” signal a particular (and decidedly nonscientific) ideological epistemology: the epistemology of critical social justice (CSJ). Even though these terms have quotidian meanings (“problematic” can simply mean “capable of causing or containing problems,” which is how Clark uses the word in the above excerpt, while “lived experience” can refer to the fact that everyone’s experiences affect their perceptions), in the context of CSJ, “problematic” and “lived experience” have other, much more exclusive, ideological meanings. As James Lindsay points out:

Problematics in the narrower critical usage are not necessarily the same thing as genuine problems, as they are identified by critical theory (see, critical theory), which isn’t necessarily concerned with understanding why and how a phenomenon works but rather how it falls short of being (morally) perfect according to the moral structure underlying the critical theory at hand. Thus, “problematic” in Critical Social Justice means something that either transgresses the moral boundaries of Critical Social Justice or that potentially could contribute to the transgression of those boundaries, even if only in Theory. (Italics added)

Similarly, Lindsay notes elsewhere—

Lived experience, as Critical Social Justice uses the term, refers more specifically to one’s life experiences in allegedly systemic power dynamics of dominance and oppression that shape society structurally as understood with a critical consciousness and interpreted through Theory. That is, one’s “lived experience” refers to the interpretation that Critical Social Justice Theory gives for the anecdotal accounts of experiences one has had. Because “lived experience” refers to an interpretation through Theory, it is only the “lived experience of oppression,” as Theory will have it, that counts.

CSJ’s emphasis on the “lived experience of oppression” may also help to explain why, even though both males and females participated in the study and provided data, the article makes no effort to account for or explore the significance of male responses or “lived experience,” despite the fact that such a comparison would certainly inform and enrich the authors’ conclusions. This exclusion is consistent with Honeycutt and Jussim’s finding that—

much (we suspect most) of the discourse about sexist bias in education, academia, STEM, and even psychology emphasizes the difficulties women face [even though] women now represent a majority of social psychologists, most of the leadership in at least one of the main social psychology professional organizations (SPSP, 2019), a majority of psychologists (American Psychological Association, 2015, 2018), and have been more likely to complete high school, college, and graduate degrees than have men for about 40 years (Sharp, 2010).

The authors go on to note—

If absolute equality was the only driver of motivated bias, one would be witnessing a dramatic upsurge in claims emphasizing biases against and obstacles to the success and representation of boys and men, given that inequality in these areas now favors women. That so much of the social science effort focuses on biases against women, and so little on those against men, even after women have largely turned the tables in these areas, is plausibly interpretable as indicating that, for some scholars, it is not equality per se that is held sacred.

Apart from the facts that omitting males from the analysis and including the terms “gender,” “problematic,” and “lived experience” indicate a particular ideological epistemology, the article provides several other clues that signal the oppressed/oppressor framing rather than an unbiased and scientifically neutral interpretation of the study’s results. “Fear of crime can influence our view of and experience with the world around us,” the authors state, which “can be problematic for individuals seeking physical activity, including from walk commuting.” Were it not for the word “problematic,” this would be a truism. Of course fear of crime (or disease, or being struck by lightning, or getting in a car accident, or any other undesirable outcome) influences us. So why make the point at all? Why spell out something so obvious?

This is where the difference between, and the implications of using, the everyday and theoretical definitions of “problematic” become apparent. However much the fear of being struck by lightning may differ from the fear of being sexually assaulted, and however much the everyday and theoretical approaches to responding to those fears may contrast, the distinction is of tertiary importance in that they (among countless other insults and injuries) will always be a potential threat. That is, to exist is to be threatened in whatever way, shape, or form with injury and, ultimately, nonexistence. The form of the threat may change; what does not change is the need to mitigate and, when possible, prevent those threats from being realized. But to do that, one must understand the dynamic variables of those threats. As the Heat Map article’s framing shows, however, ideological approaches are not especially effective at helping us understand, prevent, and/or survive threats to our wellbeing.

For Lackey, these approaches reflect the “fundamental difference between ‘is’ (i.e., fact) and ‘ought’ (i.e., preference) statements. Science deals with the ‘is’ world (facts about the past, present, or future).” By contrast, CSJ deals almost exclusively with what its proponents think ‘ought’ to be. As far back as 1941, novelist John Steinbeck and biologist Ed Ricketts wrote in Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research—

This kind of thinking considers changes and cures—what ‘should be’ in the terms of an end pattern (which is often a subjective or an anthropomorphic projection); it presumes the bettering of conditions, often, unfortunately, without achieving more than a most superficial understanding of those conditions.

For the CSJ crowd, the “end pattern” is what Clark and Winegard refer to as “equalitarianism,” which, they argue, “stems from an aversion to inequality and a desire to protect relatively low status groups,” including women, but which “leads to bias against information that portrays a perceived privileged group more favorably than a perceived victims’ group.” Thus, information produced in the context of CSJ has a largely aspirational, sociopolitical objective, not a practical or scientific one.

In addition to its use of linguistic obfuscation, the article under discussion is replete with examples of the broader assumptions and limitations of the CSJ approach, including the rejection of a universal human nature. Returning to the opening sentences quoted above, the authors suggest that women’s greater “fear of crime” (which they later attribute to “social messaging of gender roles and fear of rape crime”) is the only reason we need to conclude that “environmental and systems changes within U.S. college towns [are needed] to promote improved female college student health and wellbeing.” But is this all that is required and involved, not only for alleviating women’s fear responses but also for understanding the dynamic nature of our interactions with the environment, not to mention the etiology of fear itself? Is this the “holistic” approach the authors have in mind when, at the end of the abstract, they write: “Viewing walking safety through the lens of lived experience could be productive for holistic community walking safety”?

Based on what the article says, or rather, on what it fails to say, it is impossible to know for sure. What we do know, however, is that women experience different levels of fear for a variety of reasons, not all of which are reliable. According to Day and Stevenson’s article “The neurobiological basis of sex differences in learned fear and its inhibition”:

Learning that certain cues or environments predict threat enhances survival by promoting appropriate fear and the resulting defensive responses. Adapting to changing stimulus contingencies by learning that such cues no longer predict threat, or distinguishing between these threat‐related and other innocuous stimuli, also enhances survival by limiting fear responding in an appropriate manner to conserve resources. Importantly, a failure to inhibit fear in response to harmless stimuli is a feature of certain anxiety and trauma‐related disorders, which are also associated with dysfunction of the neural circuitry underlying learned fear and its inhibition. Interestingly, these disorders are up to twice as common in women, compared to men.

Insofar as we no longer inhabit the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) in which Homo sapiens evolved, some fears may in fact be irrational or unsupported by the evidence. This does not mean that our fears need not be taken seriously, but rather that explanations for why we fear—let alone any policy changes we may recommend on their basis—could benefit from being informed, in this case, by neurobiology, rather than from accepting the mere existence of the fear as a reason for making “environmental and systems changes.” It turns out there are multiple reasons for why we fear, including evolutionary ones, which helps to explain why, in the Heat Map article’s words, the “feeling of being ‘on-guard’ appears to travel with the person despite changes in risk” (italics added). To the extent that modern humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, our nervous systems and emotions are similarly primordial, which is at least partly why, again in the words of the Heat Map article, we still “carry around” our fears “despite changes in actual risk.” Thus, our fears are both personal and impersonal at the same time. They persist because they helped our ancestors stay alive, and they help us presently as well. A truly “holistic” approach would consider these factors and, in turn, would empower us to question our fears and, when necessary, adapt to “changing stimulus contingencies” instead of being their unwitting victims.

I am not entirely sure how, in the absence of these considerations—these parts of the whole—the authors of the Heat Map article came to their conclusions. But given everything we know about the various forms of applied postmodernism (of which CSJ is one), together with the authors’ own interpretations of the data, perhaps this information was overlooked because it errs on the side of “is” rather than on the side of “ought”. That is to say, it complicates (if not outright contradicts) the overly simplistic oppressed/oppressor narrative that is the lifeblood of the CSJ frame.

No one would deny the seriousness of sexual assault or the unpleasantness of one’s fear of it. But if the goal is to empower women to protect themselves, then clearly the more information we have about what is involved—the more we consider what Steinbeck and Ricketts called “the relational picture,” which itself “should be regarded only as a glimpse—a challenge to consider also the rest of the relations as they are available”—the more likely we will be to succeed.

If, however, the goal is to advance an ideological interpretation of the problem, then, as Clark and Winegard pointed out, one may wish to avoid information “that might be contradicted by empirical inquiry.” The fact is, the entire Heat Map article skews toward an ideological account of the so-called “gender-based” differences in how males and females visually interact with the built environment.

Take, as another example, this loaded passage from early in the Introduction:

At times, fear unfairly burdens those it afflicts by limiting their power to pursue life, liberty, and happiness (Kennedy, 2023; Rierson, 1994). Most research about female college student nighttime commuter safety has been set in European countries, although there is a growing body of research based in North America. Time of day appears important in determining feelings of safety and risk for crime. Sunset conditions increase perceptions of danger and pose greater risk for women who commute or exercise at night (Boomsma and Steg, 2014).

One of the ironies of applied postmodernism’s argument against objective knowledge in favor of cultural relativism is that it is indefensible by its own standards. And yet that has not stopped the authors from proffering the quintessential social construct of “fairness” and, late in the Background section, “entitled rights,” presumably, to add emotional gravitas, moral urgency, and importance to their findings. “Why can't we live in a world where women don't have to think about these things?” Robert Chaney, the article’s lead researcher, was quoted as asking. In other words, why can’t we live in a utopia, that is, in a world that is quite literally “no place”? It’s an admittedly odd question that suggests an almost religious disconnect. For beyond whatever aspirations we have to the contrary, we do not inhabit, nor are we trying to survive, the world that we think ought to be; we are trying to survive the world as it is. And in the world that is, there have always been, and will almost certainly always be, hostile conspecifics who do not have our best interests in mind, fairness and entitlement be damned. This is not to say that we need not aspire to create a fair, just, and safe world—the world that we think “ought” to be—but the idea that we are entitled to, or will ever inhabit a world that uniformly shares these commitments is incompatible with reality, which serves no one.

The passage’s mention of fairness is not the only indication of applied postmodernism’s rejection of (as Pluckrose and Lindsay put it in Cynical Theories) “objective knowledge, universal truth, science (or evidence more broadly) as a method for obtaining objective knowledge, the power of reason, the ability to communicate straightforwardly via language, a universal human nature, and individualism.” For here and later in the Introduction, the authors emphasize that “the available research about student safety perceptions has predominately been conducted in European settings and the transferability to U.S. college communities is not known.” Perhaps the purpose of this observation is to identify a gap in our knowledge that future research might fill, but it raises the question, why wouldn’t the research be transferable?

The authors seem to suggest that because the “social messaging” and/or “fear of rape crime” in Europe may not be the same as our own, we might expect different results. But again, this interpretation ignores the fact that, however much cultures may vary, we all share a universal human nature owing to our evolutionary past, which predisposes us to noticing survival-relevant, environmental cues that denote “prospect and refuge,” which the authors acknowledge, as well as “hazard,” which they don’t. All three concepts are integral to habitat theory and point to what E. O. Wilson describes in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge as a “hereditary orderliness that has borne our species through geological time and stamped it with the residues of deep history.” Why the most relevant concept of the three—hazard—was omitted will have to remain a mystery.

Regardless, insofar as the sexes evolved under different selection pressures, they have overlapping but different environmental priorities or predispositions, that is, because “women in the EEA likely experienced higher levels of fear and anxiety-like symptoms in order to remain sensitive to their environment and protect themselves and their children,” women today retain that sensitivity, despite the fact that the “anxiety-like behaviors needed for survival in the EEA are in an evolutionary mismatch with current industrialized societies.” Although the Heat Map authors argue that “[m]ale and female responses demonstrated they were seeing different things despite being shown the same images,” and imply that the sexes are essentially the same and therefore should (ought to) see the same things, the images themselves tell a different story:

As this and the other images show, females and males do not necessarily “see” different things (both sexes notice the outlying areas because, however much “social messaging” may play a role, both females and males have, throughout evolutionary history to the present, risked being ambushed), but rather each sex spends more or less time focusing on and prioritizing those areas depending on their survival relevance. Obviously, the threat of being assailed is important to both males and females, but it is now, and has always been of less concern to males throughout evolutionary and recent history.

Because of these differences, and despite lead author Robert Chaney’s feeling that “[i]t would be nice to work towards a world where there is no difference between the heat maps in these sets of images,” males and females necessarily spend more-or-less time focusing on survival-relevant features of the environment. Although the article attempts to explain why women focus more on outlying areas, it does not think to ask why men focus more on the destination. One wonders how our understanding would be improved had the reverse been true. Still, there is no reason to assume that research done in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter) would yield significantly different results. In E. O. Wilson’s words, “we are all of the same species and possess biologically similar brains.” Suggesting otherwise is unfounded, untenable and, therefore, does not improve our understanding of ourselves or the world we inhabit. Which brings us to the question, what is the value of the Heat Map article and applied postmodernism’s approach more generally?

Setting aside for the moment Honeycutt and Jussim’s view that “there are no reasons to believe that social scientists are immune to the biases, errors, and social processes that can lead to distortions that stem from tribal loyalties; [and that] these tribal tendencies, combined with extreme ideological homogeneity, work to create significant problems for the pursuit of scientific truth,” a view, by the way, that reflects E. O. Wilson’s observation that “without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences—physics, chemistry, and biology—humans are trapped in a cognitive prison,” the Heat Map authors offer the following answer:

The results presented here can be a useful conversation starter for recognizing different lived experiences and to begin reclaiming everyday spaces for free mobility (Beebeejaun, 2017). Viewing walking safety through the lens of lived experience could be productive in terms of holistically building community trust and shared responsibility for ourselves and others in supporting the holistic safety and wellbeing of walk commuters.

I invite anyone to cite a time in the history of our species when “every day spaces” were claimed. That is, when have women (and men) ever not needed, or benefitted from practicing, vigilance? And if there has never been a time, then on what basis do the authors suggest that unconstrained or “free mobility” could be possible in the future? One of the problems of being “trapped in a cognitive prison” is that, like the “sparks from firework explosions,” one’s ideas are “devoid of following energy,” so while the article may have succeeded in starting a conversation, without a broader, more inclusive “lens” or frame of reference, that is as far as it is going to go.

The authors seem to tacitly acknowledge this fact when, after noting that “many campuses use on-call safety apps where walkers can press a button for emergency circumstances,” they write:

This reactionary approach ignores the lived experience and long-term impact of fear for a woman walking home, and as seen, the way that this typically differs from the experiences of men. An app is not going to fix that. The same argument holds for lighting. Although lighting is a critical part of built environments, the heat maps demonstrate that, even where there were lighted paths (e.g., Figs. 2–3), women still looked outside the path, suggesting a more systematic problem in the way men and women interact with the built environment (Kwan, 2000; Ravensbergen et al., 2019).

First, what makes on-call safety apps “reactionary” as opposed to “practical”? Second, what would it mean NOT to ignore the “lived experience and long term-impact for a woman”? Is it even possible or necessary to account for all the variation involved in people’s lived experiences? We might also ask for clarification on the long-term project or goal here. Is it to sterilize the environment? Is it to completely rid women of fear or vigilance in potentially dangerous situations? Assuming that were possible, would it be wise? Won’t such attempts always fall short or miss the mark?

Evidence suggests they will. Inasmuch as neither apps or lighting provide a solution, the authors would seem to agree, concluding that there must be “a more systematic problem in the way men and women interact with the built environment,” and thus simultaneously undermine the value of their study while inadvertently revealing the most relevant—and yet entirely overlooked—system of all so far as our responses to the environment are concerned: the human nervous system.

---

Maximilian Werner is an accomplished author and Professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah. With over two decades of teaching experience, he specializes in courses such as Intermediate Writing, Environmental Writing, and Writing about War. Werner holds an MFA from Arizona State University and has published seven books. His works include the novel Crooked Creek, the memoir Gravity Hill, and the essay collections Black River Dreams and The Bone Pile: Essays on Nature and Culture. His poetry collection, Cold Blessings, and his nonfiction work, Wolves, Grizzlies, and Greenhorns: Death and Coexistence in the American West, further showcase his diverse literary talent. His writing often explores themes of nature, culture, and the human experience, particularly in the context of the American West. Werner’s creative and scholarly work has been featured in numerous journals and magazines, including The Robert Frost Review, The Ecological Citizen, Times Higher Education, The Emerson Society Papers, Inside Higher Education, Counterpunch, and The North American Review. In addition to his literary achievements, Werner is recognized for his contributions to environmental and cultural discourse, making him a respected voice in both academic and literary communities. His previous articles fort the Journal of Free Black Thought are “Biggers Dream: Killing and Self-Preservation” and “Countee Cullen’s Lyric Ghosts.”