The current scandal between Google and James Damore presents our culture with a choice: Should we safeguard opportunity for individuals simply because they are individuals, or limit individual opportunity in order to pursue the advancement of groups? It’s a question as old as liberal democracy itself.
Damore is well known for having written a memo in which he hypothesized that the tech gender disparity may be (in part) the result of biological differences between men and women. On average he said, some scientific literature indicates that men are more interested in technology-related fields, and women are more interested in people-related fields. After his memo was leaked to the public in August, he was fired for “perpetuating gender stereotypes.” He quickly became a poster-child for free speech and anti-political correctness; rubbing elbows on YouTube with the free speech heroes including Jordan B. Peterson, David Rubin, and Joe Rogan. In addition to the name calling (the Guardian‘s Owen Jones called Damore a “sexist aresehole”) many believe that his position is sexism pure and simple.
Now Damore has filed a class action law suit against Google in California, alleging that the company discriminates against white people, men, and people who are perceived to have conservative beliefs. Independent of whether or not Damore has an actionable legal case, or whether or not his understanding of the biological and psychological literature on sex differences is reasonable, if Damore’s complaint is accurate then Google was implementing a prototypically discriminatory practice that violates our central American commitment to open opportunity to the individual regardless of group membership.
The most fundamentally anti-individualist policy is that of that of the group-based quota. That says: We are going to decide who gets what based upon group, and we will inhibit individuals from obtaining opportunities to reach our group-based goals. According to Damore’s complaint, that was the policy Google higher-ups promoted. On March 30 2017, the lawsuit states, Google brought in two presenters for a meeting on women’s history month: Ruth Porat, the Chief Financial Officer of Google, and Eileen Naughton, the human resources director of Google. At the meeting, “either Portat or Naughton pointed out and shamed individual departments at Google in which women comprised less than 50 percent of the workforce. Alternatively they applauded and praised departments such as the sales department where women comprised more than 50 percent of the workforce.”
Google was angry at the staff that had not achieved the acceptable group quotas. They put social pressure on the employees to become anti-individualists: to decide that certain individuals should not work at work at a department based purely upon their gender. Surely, they did not explicitly mandate a quota. But when an employee knows he will be more likely to be publicly applauded and less likely to be publicly shamed if he tacitly operates on a quota basis, he is far more likely to do so.
To be clear, there is a difference between mandating a quota and affirmative action. Affirmative action, when practiced at its best, is simply when colleges or companies make a positive effort, rather than just not discriminating, to reach out to groups of people who have been historically excluded. This does not entail anything in regard to the outcomes, such as who will get the job or the spots in college. It is rather a means, sometimes arguably a necessary means, of equalizing opportunity.
On the contrary, promoting group based quotas as Google is doing here is systematic discrimination, and not in the vague way people throw that term around. Google leaders was promoting a pervasive policy whereby individuals would be discriminated against on the basis of their gender.
Even more stifling to the flourishing of the individual, Google prohibited and shamed dissent from its collectivist hiring ideology. While at a “Diversity and Inclusion Summit” conducted by Google, Damore “asked questions about whether Google looked at viewpoint diversity with respect to hiring decisions and in evaluating how inclusive Google was as workplace. The answer he received was that Google only looked at demographic diversity (gender and/or race) when making hiring and promoting decisions – not at viewpoint diversity.” Google was interested only in promoting identity difference, not intellectual differences. Google’s policy may have been even more narrow, for Google’s notion of demographic diversity does not appear to include characteristics like class background, culture, or religion.
Further, at the women’s history month meeting, Porat and Naughton said that “when looking at groups of people for promotions or for leadership opportunities on new projects, Google would be taking into account gender and ethnic demographics. They then mentioned that Google’s racial and gender preferences in hiring were not up for debate, because this was morally and economically the best thing to do for Google.” Google was enforcing a top down moral and economic orthodoxy which, more than being intolerant, prohibited disagreement. Then, when Damore’s memo went viral, he was unapologetically shamed.
“You’re a misogynist and a terrible human,” one of Damore’s colleagues Alex Hidalgo emailed him “I will keep hounding you until one of us is fired. Fuck you.”
There is a Talmudic saying: Whoever saves one life saves the world. This can be read to say that contained within every man are endless generations, but the ethical point that each individual is, by virtue of simply being an individual, so ethically valuable as to be worth the entire world. The belief in the value of the individual as such is found throughout the West’s ethical philosophy – from Kant’s view that the individual is an end in-itself, to Nozick’s non-aggression principle – and also inhabits our national foundation. There are certain actions, the Constitution says, that we may never do to individuals no matter the gain. But Google’s hiring practice reflect a different ethical system – one that is willing to hurt individuals based upon group identity to achieve an apparently better future end. Surely, we could adopt this ethical viewpoint and become a more utilitarian nation. Or, we can maintain our tradition that limits any possible group gain, to whether or not it shall cause an individual definite harm.
Max Diamond is a reporter and writer in Raleigh.
