Brainwashing Norway

See, documentaries can be fun. I've just watched one called Brainwashing Norway. It's brilliant. The Norwegian who made it, Harald Eia, seems to be a genial sort of guy, but alert, intellectually curious and quick-witted (caveat: all I really know about him is that he's a comedian with a sociology degree).

Unfortunately, the video takes a while to load on the internet. So I'll give a quick rundown of what happens.

It goes like this. Harald Eia has been brought up in a society which prides itself on "gender equality" which is understood to mean that sex distinctions shouldn't matter anymore. He himself has largely accepted this view; he tells us at one point that he doesn't treat his daughters as girls but as people (his daughters roll their eyes).

But he can't help but notice that sex distinctions do still matter in Norway, even though his country is ranked as the most gender equal in the world. For instance, Norwegian men and women are more likely, rather than less likely, to choose distinct occupations: 90% of nurses are female and 90% of engineers are men.

The Norwegian government has implemented programmes to make the balance more even, but they have had only a small and temporary influence on what men and women choose to do. So Eia starts to wonder if there might be innate differences between men and women.

He decides to interview some Norwegian academics to see what they think about this possibility. This is where the fun starts. These academics dress as if they are student radicals, but they are, in reality, staunch defenders of the state ideology. When he asks about the idea of innate differences, it's as if he's put a grenade into them.

This starts at 7.25 with an academic called Cathrine Egeland. She looks perplexed when asked if there might be biological differences between men and women that explain different occupational choices and she declares herself uninterested. Another academic, Joergen Lorenzten, then claims that research showing differences in the male and female brain is old-fashioned and that modern research shows that everything about men and women apart from the genitalia, hair and breasts is the same. He states that the interests, feelings, capacities and intelligence of men and women are identical.

So why then are men more interested in technical fields than women? The Norwegian academics give the stock answer that it has to do with the way that girls and boys are treated (i.e. that it is a social construct). A couple of strikingly female Norwegian women then try to persuade us that sex distinctions are produced by the different way that people address baby boys and girls.

Eia asks the academic Joergen Lorenzten if people are so "mouldable" that there are societies where men and women have the same interests (12:57). Lorenzten replies,

I feel that this is almost the basic theorem. We are, as you say, mouldable. There are no limits to what humans can do - in relation to what's important. And that is behaviour and emotionality.

To his credit, Eia decides to get some more information - this time from outside Norway. He travels to meet Professor Richard Lippa who has done a large-scale survey comparing occupational choices of men and women across 53 different countries. The Norwegian academic Lorenzten laughs when he hears of this plan to meet Lippa; he tells Eia that Americans are poor at doing academic research.

But Eia flies off to America regardless. Professor Lippa tells him that across the world there are the same differences in occupational choices. Professor Lippa does allow that culture might play a role in these choices, but believes that the differences are too consistent across all nations to be entirely a product of culture.

Next stop is Professor Trond Diseth, a child psychiatrist. Professor Diseth states that boys and girls show a preference for masculine or feminine toys from the age of 9 months. The professor believes that gender behaviour is a product of a biological disposition which is then influenced by culture. He strongly rejects the claims of Lorenzten that the research showing biological differences is old-fashioned.

Then we're off to England to meet Professor Simon Baron-Cohen. He has done research on newborn babies and found differences in what holds the gaze of boys and girls, i.e. before any cultural influence is possible. Baron-Cohen has also researched the effects of exposure to testosterone in the womb and found that this correlates to language and social development; also, that girls who are exposed to unusually high amounts of testosterone exhibit a preference for masculine toys; and that children aged 8 who were exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb have a higher level of interest in systems - in understanding how things work.

Eia returns to Norway to confront the Norwegian academics with this information (33.10). He asks Cathrine Egeland (who looks a bit like Ellen deGeneres) "What is your scientific basis to say that biology plays no part in the two genders' choice of work?" She replies,

My scientific basis? I have what you would call a theoretical basis. There's no room for biology in there for me. I feel that the social sciences should challenge thinking that is based on the differences between humans being biological. (34.50)

That's a bit like saying "I'm not interested in the truth, I'm interested in getting an outcome that I consider to be the moral one." Note too that liberals like to claim that they are the ones who are for science, but in this case it's the liberal Cathrine Egeland who is rejecting the way that science challenges her political beliefs ("there is no room for biology in there for me").

Lorenzten takes a different approach. He queries why scientists would be interested in finding biological differences:

The fascinating thing with this science is why they are so concerned with the biological origin to gender. Why this frenetic concern?

Lorenzten clearly thinks it's a bit beyond the pale to be researching biological distinctions between men and women. Eia's response is that he didn't think the overseas researchers did have a "frenetic concern" as they all recognised a mixed origin to sex distinctions: part cultural, part biological. Eia believes that it's the Norwegians who are frenetic in seeing everything as cultural.

It's interesting to see the liberal academics in Norway so discomfited when they are challenged in their views. You can tell that it doesn't happen to them often, that they inhabit an intellectual world where their own views are the orthodox ones.