By now you’ve read about the ten-page “anti-diversity screed” that was published by an anonymous engineer at Google. Well, he’s no longer anonymous. His name is James Damore and yesterday Google fired him.
But before we go any further, I’d encourage you to read the actual memo Damore wrote. Because it is neither “anti-diversity,” nor a “screed.” What it is, is a rational case against the worst excesses of corporate identity politics and—most notably—it’s a case made from the left. Damore does not appear to be terribly conservative. Here are some selected passages:
And:
And:
Whatever else you might think of Damore, he does not appear to be severely conservative.
Damore’s main points can be boiled down to three arguments:
(1) Because Google has an overwhelmingly liberal corporate culture, the company should be tolerant of dissenting opinions and cognizant of the dangers of confirmation bias.
(2) The differences in gender outcomes may be influenced by a host of factors, only one of which is discrimination.
(3) Google should try to remediate these differences in gender outcomes through non-discriminatory means.
That’s it. That’s the screed.
Ordinarily, you might read this and think that it’s nothing but common sense. But the reaction to the memo proved Damore’s point beyond a reasonable doubt.
Here, for instance, was the opening to a piece on the memo from Vice’s Motherboard: “Saturday morning, we reported the existence of an anti-diversity manifesto written by a Google software engineer that was shared widely within the company. . . .While the document itself contains the thoughts of one employee, responses to the document from other Google employees show that some people at the company share the same beliefs.”
No kidding: This sounds like something from The Lives of Others. Motherboard went on to note that several Google employees internally had called for the firing of the anonymous engineer. There’s more. But the best part came in the form of a response from Google’s Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance, Danielle Brown (how much revenue do you think her division brings in?), who wrote to her colleagues:
In sum: This employee voiced “incorrect” thoughts which will not even be linked to so that other employees may form their own opinions and, by the way, it’s crazy to have any concerns about not being able to speak freely at Google.
This is Stalinist.
Not in the literal sense—Damore didn’t’ wind up in a gulag. (Not yet, anyway.) He was merely deprived of his livelihood a few days after writing a samizdat essay in which he politely and compassionately expressed a coherent set of rational ideas.
But just like in Stalin’s Russia, at Google there are Right Thoughts and there are Wrong Thoughts. These categories are determined by those in power and the average worker dissents from them, even by an inch, at his peril.
