Kudos to David Brooks of The New York Times, whose strange column calling for Google CEO Sundar Pichai to resign forced me to read former Google engineer James Damore’s equally strange advisory on gender differences in the high tech workplace.
“Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things,” Damore writes. This led to his dismissal, which led to Brooks’ outrage. The op-ed columnist insists that Damore’s observations on gender differences have been backed up by “several scientists.” Ironically one of these “scientists,” Playboy columnist Deborah Soh, shows a great deal of interest in things herself. I invite you to read Dr. Soh’s reviews of the new “teledildonic” Fleshlight Launch, the Guybrator, and the Fun Factory Booty Set. These all fall under the Things Category, I presume, although I’m not going to spend a lot of time trying to verify that claim.
But what really caught my eye in Damore’s text is not the Thing Question but endnote number seven. As you probably already know, Damore doesn’t like all this diversity/affirmative action stuff at Google designed to address the fact that eighty percent of the company’s employees are men. So he lists a bunch of diversity programs of which he disapproves, then says they’re “veiled left ideology.” And to prove this, he backs up his claim with endnote number seven:
[7] Communism promised to be both morally and economically superior to capitalism, but every attempt became morally corrupt and an economic failure. As it became clear that the working class of the liberal democracies wasn’t going to overthrow their “capitalist oppressors,” the Marxist intellectuals transitioned from class warfare to gender and race politics. The core oppressor-oppressed dynamics remained, but now the oppressor is the “white, straight, cis-gendered patriarchy.”
Now I don’t want to caricature anyone’s prose, but one does get the impression from endnote number seven that Damore believes that Google has signed onto the latest iteration of the great communist conspiracy. If this is the case, he should at least get his history right. Following the failure of democratic socialism in the late nineteenth century, Lenin and his buddies gave vanguard communism a try, launching the Third International in tandem with their 1917 Russian Revolution. Then when Stalin pressed the pause button on this experiment, Leon Trotsky tried to keep the fire alive with his Fourth International. This fills in the blanks in Damore’s timeline. Now presumably comes the noted Marxist John F. Kennedy launching the President’s Committee on Equal Opportunity in 1961, that generally recognized as the beginning of affirmative action in the USA. Call this the Fifth International if you sympathize with Damore’s outlook. Goodness knows how many Internationals came and went before Google went commie two years or so ago, I guess.
In any event, I look forward to the Silicon Valley edition of None Dare Call It Treason, coming to a Reddit thread near you soon, if it isn’t already out yet.
