The White Male

Chapter One: Loomings

Call me Cynical. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – it began to distract me, a male of not unnaturally-nervous disposition, that efforts were afoot to segregate and undermine a section of our community. A community submitting not more unduly to the vast spectrum of human vices than any other, the vices moral that is, but from whose voices, more than most, escaped the blasphemies of inquiry and inutterable doubt. A community that casts shadows on the colourful pastiche of peculiarity that constitutes the erstwhile monotheistic grandeur known as Global Warming Consensus, which has of itself indeed morphed into a belief system equal amongst the earth’s greatest cults.

Calling themselves ‘Believers’ the cultists fashioned their fact-shares into foils to inquiry and refused to engage ‘Deniers’; instead besmirching antagonists with invented innuendo – the moniker ‘denier’ is but one – doing battle in the field of public opprobrium with simple slanders originating in ‘science’ so dubious as to be laughable if it weren’t fully orchestrated malevolence, circling the White Male and attempting to drive him from his pod, there to drive home the barbs of scorn and harpoons of derision.

But White Males were legion, some highly respected as scientists and communicators; it became necessary to further divide the community. Thus the ultimate foe was shaped in rudimentary sketches, just simple outlines of probability matches connecting dots of heresy with the most dangerous of the creatures imagined. So it was that the truly odious Right White Male darkened Believers’ perceptions as clearly defined enemy within the all-telling, if actually somewhat murky, latitudes of the ink-blots so examined.

Chapter next: The Chase

Bursting forth in print, coming on board for the cause, so to speak, limped believer’s Right White Male-chaser in the form of Associate Professor Taciano Milfont, spouting shonky science, spurting nonsense as unhinged and artificial as Captain Ahab’s wooden leg, eager to alert us all of the danger posed by the devilish creatures.

“New Zealand researchers have delved into the complex psychology behind climate denial in this country, to explain why conservative white men are more likely to be sceptics.”

Said the good Assoc-Prof of the Right White Male:

“More than half of those sceptics supported National, compared with about a third backing Labour. Associate Professor Taciano Milfont, of Waikato University’s School of Psychology, pointed back to a now-famous US study that identified what the researchers termed the “conservative white males” effect. To explain it, the researchers used what’s called the identity-protective cognition thesis.

Broadly speaking, Milfont said, political conservatives and “social dominants” – those who tended to value hierarchy between groups in society, and subscribed to a dog-eat-dog world view – backed stability and holding on to the status quo.”

Indeed, the good Mr Milfont has made much of the hay used in constructing the straw-men of argument against the Right White Male in this country, his earlier work describing their alleged foibles of Authoritarianism, System-justifying Ideologies and Dominant Social Order propensities; much like Little Mussolinis, sharing the gentleman’s penchant for trains running on time but divorced of that pleasant fellow’s meritable social conscience, while promoting nothing of their perceived qualities, being, as they are, significantly more honest and less neurotic than Believers:

“At the same time we also observed the novel findings that that climate believers and undecided tend to have greater levels of Neuroticism, while climate skeptics tend to have greater levels of Honesty- Humility.”

Milfont, Taciano (et al)  ‘Socio-structural and psychological foundations of climate change beliefs’ New Zealand Journal of Psychology Vol. 44, No. 1, March 2015

A word to those wise: don’t expect to see the self-evident headline ‘Global Warming Believers less honest, more neurotic, according to Academic Study’ any time soon.

Homing in on his target of Right White Males the NZ Herald article states:

“But, in a newly-published study, Milfont and his colleagues wanted to go further and look at other measures of political conservatism.”

But, wait, what if Milfont’s study wasn’t new, what if it was just a rehash of data harvested in a survey about gene-manipulation as a means of pest control; a survey completed by participants for reward?

And what if the actual survey, presumably un-redacted and original as normally required by academia, and described as “the full survey” in the source article, didn’t contain any questions about attitudes to climate change, or if in fact the word climate didn’t appear, at all, anywhere in the survey document as appended? Would that make you sceptical of our good professor-in-waiting’s claims? Because if you do feel that way, you may be a right-wing nut-job, free of neurosis and seeking the truth but, regardless of maleness or otherwise, among those railed so forcefully against by Milfont et al’s cohort just as Ahab railed against the White Whale.

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but un-conquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”

Which is just fine, I have no problems with any professor’s particular neurosis being on display at any time of day or night, but please, we implore you: our tormentors, just stick to facts, they’re very important to us.

“The new study comes as Milfont has just been appointed to the Climate Change Task Force of the American Psychological Association – the largest scientific and professional organisation of psychologists in the US. That makes him the sole member from the Southern Hemisphere in the group, which has served as an observer organisation of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2017.”

Crikey Dick. The end.

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