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A Closed Mouth Gathers No Foot
Last night while playing cards, a friend of mine asked me my opinion of the whole “Google memo” affair. I told him the truth: I had no opinion.
In order to have any kind of reasonable, intelligent opinion, I’d need to look into the details, not just the headlines or what other people are saying about it. We’ve already crossed the line into this being “a thing,” and anyone writing about it at this point will emphasize some details and obscure others, to push their particular narrative or agenda.
So I’d have to read the memo myself, all 10 pages of it, examine the charts, follow the citations, and so forth, as well as details about the author, the circumstances of his termination, and what he did in the aftermath. And to be honest, I just don’t care enough about it. I got the slightest gist of the story and ran the other way. But I told my friend, who did do all that, and whose intelligence and opinion I respect, to please share his opinion with me. And he did.
And while I said I had no opinion, I do have one thing to say:
Any memo of that sort, no matter the merits of his argument, is a dicey proposition at best. The tone would need to be perfectly correct to communicate his point without causing a backlash, and that is incredibly difficult to do. That’s not a statement on political correctness, or victimhood, or “social justice warriors,” or anything of that sort. It has to do with basic prudence and communicating with other people, especially within a large organization.
Setting aside all the other stuff people bring to this issue, there’s a virtue to keeping one’s yap shut on certain issues in a workplace. I’m a person of … strong opinions. I’m also a talker. I like to share ideas, I like to explain things. But there are things that I choose not to talk about at work. It’s not because I’ll be repressed or because I’ll be burned as a heretic, but because they’re dicey to talk about. Nobody needs to hear my opinion about them, no good would come from it. It would negatively affect the work environment and my relationships with people. And relationships between people are essential to the functioning of an organization.
So let’s paint the best-case scenario for this guy: Say he’s doing this for benevolent purposes and that his argument is 100 percent correct on the merits. Even then, the memo is still all but guaranteed to upset people. No matter how correct a statement or a piece of information may be, it needs to be presented correctly in order for it to be received by the audience. If it’s something like “the sky is blue,” it’s simple. But depending on the complexity of information and the subjection matter, it may be more difficult. Considering the spectacular failure of his memo, the author clearly wasn’t up to the task.
I already see this guy being turned into some kind of political correctness martyr by people on the right. Color me unsympathetic. I’m not moved by anti-PC grievance mongering. As far as I see it, this guy’s crime wasn’t having the “wrong” opinion on gender differences (or whatever it was), it’s that he created a massive disruption in the work environment for no appreciable benefit.
Even if his goal was entirely benevolent and it was to improve the organization, unless he got the tone absolutely perfect, it was all but guaranteed to fail. He either knew that or was oblivious to that fact. If it was the latter, it means he didn’t understand the organization that he was a part of, its corporate culture, or how to relate to other humans.
Published in General
Again…humor. You may want to work on your humor receptors. Of course, if you don’t understand the reference then you aren’t up to speed on some of the HR issues involved in what James Damore was discussing. That’s why it would help if you actually read the dastardly memo in question.
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.
Yes, the conservative “victimhood mentality” culture is a sad copy of what the left has been doing for a long time, but you’re painting with too broad a brush if you use that to imply there are no conservatives being victimized by the PC culture. Not everything needs to be blown up into a huge media circus, but the blowing up here didn’t get started by conservatives.
I agree with you that there’s a time and place to speak one’s mind, and there’s a risk if you do it badly, but it sounds like you’re saying conservatives should never be honest about what we think and believe in a work environment. I disagree. If you’re respectful and polite and communicating in an appropriate forum, you shouldn’t have to hide what you think out of fear of reprisal.
As someone has already pointed out, all the time spent writing the OP and complaining in the comments about being offended would have been better spent actually reading the friggin’ memo. Wittgenstein said it best
More colloquially, if you don’t know what the heck you’re talking about, it’s best to shut up. You have to hand it to ol’ Wittie, he had a way with words.
But hey, it’s a heck of a lot more fun to pontificate from ignorance. And it’s certainly easier than doing the hard work of reading all (or even one of) those journal articles and thinking about their consequences.
This is one of those cases where I don’t think either side is in the right. Like Fred, I haven’t dug into the details of this story. But I’ve read enough to have an opinion.
I work for a large tech company not unlike Google, and if I were to circulate to my coworkers a political treatise criticizing my employer, I would expect to be terminated. But that’s because my employer has clear policies about misuse of company resources (like internal e-mail) for non-business purposes, not to mention the potential harm to the company that would come from an employee airing his discontent in a memo that would inevitably find its way to the public. (Indeed, I have seen this happen at my employer, though not often.)
The problem here is that, in firing Mr. Damore, Google didn’t just cite the misuse of resources, or the negative publicity. It explicitly justified the firing on the basis of thoughtcrime, saying that the employee in question advanced ideas that are at odds with Google’s approved ideology. They didn’t have to do that.
So I am not particularly broken up by the fact of Damore’s firing, because frankly, he brought it on himself. But Google has also shown themselves for what they are. Their progressive ideology is no surprise, but their poor judgment — their tone-deafness, as they prove Damore’s point for him — is. They’ve made it clear that they actually care more about their ideology than about running a business, and a part of me is hoping that they pay dearly for that.
If we’re doing German now:
Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig, es ist nicht einmal falsch.
David French articulates the crazy inconsistency in how women are viewed in the business world by the women’s groups and society at large. It would be worth reading.
Except in Damore’s case, there was no misuse of company resources. He didn’t create an email and send it out to everyone on a whim. He submitted it to an internal forum that was created specifically for feedback – at least that’s my understanding. And it sat there a month with basically no response until someone decided to leak it to the public. That’s when Google decided they had to take action.
Honestly, I don’t know what to think about Damore. I would think he should have known what to expect when he posted his thoughts in the feedback forum there at Google. But having seen him in the interview that was linked several posts back, he looks so young – like barely out of high school young. So maybe he’s more of an idealist and found out the hard way that independent thought is not usually appreciated. I don’t know.
Channeling Pauli?
Nice piece, though there’s nothing new in it. The Google incident (Googlegate?) just brings into focus what has been obvious for years, at least if you’ve been paying attention. Mr. French gives a succinct summary.
I find it dismaying, though not surprising, that some of the findings that got Damore sacked are coming as a shock to many, even to some ’round here. No doubt everyone remembers Larry Summers and his defenestration back in 2005. Even though Larry had impeccable leftist credentials, it was out the window with him. Hard to believe it’s been over ten years; how time flies when you’re having fun. Meantime, people kept gathering and publishing more evidence. Scribble, scribble, scribble!
tl;dr: Larry said a lot of the same stuff over a decade ago. I know some of you guys are simply too busy to read these things. You may now return head into sand.
I’ve been thinking of poor Larry Summers for days now too. It is almost the same event all over again.
No. This means you disagree with me on whether the use of Wikipedia links undermines the idea that it’s “well-documented,” and instead of saying so, you tried to show I was somehow lying on those being the links I first saw. I wasn’t lying, so that’s a non-starter.
Now, for what we actually disagree on: I think two Wikipedia links is two too many; it raises questions for me about the rest of the research. Clearly it does not for you. If you would like to (politely) discuss that, I’d be happy to. But my first comment that got you all riled up was completely factual.
Edited to add: as a potential jumping off point for finding common ground, I read the whole memo and found I agreed with it, though I also concede that I don’t have the field expertise necessary to assess the quality of the journal references. I continue to think that the sourcing I stumbled upon is problematic for something that inevitably would get severe backlash from the SJWs who read it. Why make it easier to dismiss by using any Wikipedia articles? Better to use all journal articles, and ideally two or more per citation, just to make sure that they cannot be easily dismissed as outliers. That, it seems to me, gives you a better chance of starting a real discussion.
So we should just surrender.
They can say anything anywhere to anyone with impunity, we should avoid eye contact and shut up. We’ll only cause a ruckus.
Just bake the cake for the gay marriage…you’ll only cause trouble.
Give the same sex couple a marriage license already … Why get the grief?
Just let in the illegal immigrants.. They’re going to get in anyway?
abortion and Obamacare are the law of the land … Get over it.
Do the words “summer soldier” and “sunshine patriot” sound at all familiar?
Who is “we”? Are you in the same boat as this guy? Do you also work at Google?
I’m sorry, but you have to seriously misread what I wrote to say “So we should just surrender.” Because that is not what I said at all.
Look, if I had to boil this down to two sentences, it would be “Pick your battles” and “Read the room.” Neither of those have anything to do with “surrender.”
The implication being that he picked the wrong battle in the wrong room.
If you’re not willing to fight battles over how youe time is spent in the rooms that you spend 1/3rd of your life in most days of the week, what exactly are you willing to fight for?
Other stuff.
Look, it’s a work place, not the crate on a street corner. Make you stand or whatever, but unless you’re the owner, it’s not your forum.
And I realize that this was some kind of internal forum for the solicitation of discussion or whatever, but you still have to read the room and pick your battles.
Joe & Fred,
I think we might be coming to a turning point and “the room” might get a serious kick in the face in the form of a defamation lawsuit. It’s been a long time coming.
Regards,
Jim
I think some commenters are glossing over Fred’s point a bit, which really resonates with me so I want to pontificate on it here: “there’s a virtue to keeping one’s yap shut on certain issues in a workplace.”
I love Ricochet and I come here of my own voilition to hear other people’s opinions. I do not go into the breakroom at work to hear other people’s opinions. I go there to get coffee. It’s an entirely different matter if you have a relationship with your colleagues and you all go to lunch and discuss various topics – politics, religion, trans-gender bathrooms, but increasingly I am subjected to other people’s political and personal opinions while I am sitting at my desk attempting to perform my job. I am so sick of it. By the way I am a Millennial and I am vastly more Conservative than the majority of my colleagues. Which side you are on doesn’t matter though; I also get annoyed at the uber-Conservative in our group constantly (and loudly) fawning over Trump. I just want to go back to a time when it was a faux pas to discuss any personal opinions in the workplace. Is that too much to ask? Maybe it was never the reality to begin with.
I’m not sure I understand what that means.
Bingo!
There’s certain things that used to be considered taboo in polite conversation: politics, sex, religion. You can talk about those things, but unless its with close friends, it’s dicey.
Amen. And it’s worse than its ever been now. I have no love for Donald Trump, but I don’t need him to come up in discussion on every [expletive] social occasion. Doubly so in the workplace.
It seems to me that James Damore’s immediate working future at Google is not the biggest issue here and I thank him for making that sacrifice.
The cost of this battle has been the job of one eminently employable individual. The prize has been a worldwide discussion of the issues raised and some sunlight being shone on Google’s practises.
If there are no more James Damores among us then our culture is in trouble.
The problem is that the left hasn’t outlawed political speech at all. They promote political speech — but only for their views. And so we need to deal with How Things Are, not How We Wish They Were.
And How Things Are is that you will be punished if you express right-wing political views and left alone if you express left-wing political views.
So we’re in a situation where left wingers are encouraged to express their views by companies who promote those views in employee policy . . . and right-wingers are taught to be silent if they want to continue to hold their jobs.
And by saying “Yeah, this guy should have kept quiet” you are going right along with what lefties want. Their dominance, our compliance.
But what you do discuss at work are business decisions and strategy. James was discussing Google’s hiring process and goals. In response to a workshop on the issue, in a forum for the topic, as he was asked to do. Not in the breakroom.
Right. I know this is what conservatives tell themselves. That they’re all victims and oppressed.
But try being a left winger who expresses their views on a living wage or on working conditions or unionization, or a host of other topics, and see how much you’re encouraged to express yourself.
That might be what you heard, but that’s not what I said. In fact, I’m not even sure how you get there from what you quoted.
No one is saying that companies need to become open pits of argumentation over politics. But in the last few years, the workplace has increasingly become a platform for pushing Leftist SJW, identity politics initiatives from C-level executives and HR departments – see Starbucks, Target, Apple, Audi, Microsoft, Google and many others. The push for diversity and equity restructuring across organizations didn’t magically pop up out of thin air. It started in universities and has proliferated outward into the greater culture. The notion of “unconscious bias” is a construct from Neo-Marxist/postmodernist professors in academia who tutored a generation of social justice advocates. And yes there is ample proof for this – since one of the developers of the predominant test for unconscious bias is a self-avowed and proud Marxist. (listen to the many lectures of Stephen Hicks, Jordan Peterson and others critical of postmodernism and Cultural Marxism).
What happened at Google is clearly a disturbance in their force…and it’s not sitting well for thousands of employees nationwide who are fatigued from diversity training or having to go along with the absurd notion that they’re harboring unconscious biases – racism, misogyny, sexism, transphobia – and that in some cases they may have to be retrained to think and behave properly.
Damore is the fellow standing in front of their phalanx of tanks. This morning it was announced that Google canceled a company-wide meeting on the pretext that some employees would be afraid to offer questions and comments for fear of retribution and thus it wouldn’t be a safe space. Gosh, why would that be?
Google HR has been engaging in discriminatory practices by holding exclusionary workshops for only certain “oppressed” gender or racial groups and then fired an employee who questioned and challenged them on that among other things.
What Damore has articulated – very thoughtfully, by the way – in his memo is starting to send shockwaves through Silicon Valley and continues to generate spirited discussions all over social media. Thankfully!
You’re moral relativism is showing.
Your problem here is that he didn’t talk about those things. He was talking about the work environment.
That’s not moral relativism. He’s not claiming those liberal ideas are as equally good or valid as the ones expressed by James Damore. He is asserting that they different examples of the same, single behavior that he thinks is inappropriate.
I really need to write that post about relativism.
I still think it’s important to keep in mind that Damore wasn’t sharing his thoughts in the breakroom and forcing everyone to listen to them – not as far as I’ve heard anyway. What I’ve heard is that Google created an internal forum asking its employees for feedback. I’m assuming that meant criticism as well as compliments. Damore posted his thoughts there – anonymously. The comments sat there on the forum for about a month with nothing being said or done about them.
After about a month, someone decided to make them public. Once public, they went viral. At that point, Google – either already experiencing heat or expecting to experience heat over the comments – tracked down the person who had made the comments and fired him.
Should he have posted his thoughts in the forum? I’m of two minds about that. On the one hand, looking at the situation with half a century of life experience and from a total outsider’s perspective, I tend to think he should have known the comments would basically wind up being in vain and would eventually bring him grief. On the other hand, the idea that it’s inappropriate to leave constructive criticism in an internal company forum that’s been created specifically for feedback doesn’t sit well with me either.