>Basically, we pushed Putin to take the actions he is pursuing
No, we absolutely didn't. Putin has has imperislistic ambitions from day one and was always going to use whatever excuse is handy to him to justify it. Did we "push" Putin to annex crimea and arm terrorists in eastern Ukraine too?
" stop trying to ban teachers from even mentioning racism or queer issues in class"
Which will get your school run into the ground and downgraded by Ofsted, because you're supposed to be teaching geography and instead you're getting the kids to talk about their privilege:
"The Ofsted report, published on the school’s website, found much to praise about the school with its first-class resources and well-qualified teachers. The inspectors said the school, which teaches four- to 18-year-olds, has high expectations and “gives strong importance to equality and inclusion”.
The report added: “Sometimes, however, teaching places much more weight on the school’s approach to social justice than on learning subject-specific knowledge and skills.”
In lower-school social studies, inspectors pointed out that pupils “spend much time repeatedly considering identity (including analysing their own characteristics) rather than learning, for example, geographical knowledge”.
The teaching of middle-school humanities, including English, also led to a focus on social issues rather than subject knowledge and skills, the report said, leaving some pupils feeling underprepared for the next stage of their schooling."
>If CRT is taught almost nowhere, then there should be no problem in banning it, right?
That would be true if the ban is written narrowly enough to *only* ban CRT, rather than banning any mention of bad things that happened to black people in the past. Sadly, we don't live in that world.
I'm entitled to at least as much hyperbole as the rest of the people in this thread. But if you insist, I could revise it to "banning teaching anything that might make a student feel uncomfortable" and then note that many students might feel uncomfortable to know that their country did some pretty shitty things to black people.
Or perhaps "requiring teachers to teach multiple perspectives on controversial issues, like the Holocaust," which was another gem to come out of the Texas CRT law.
When government employees engage in pervasive racism to students while on the job, their parent's governmental representatives grow understandably concerned about those government employees.
You may think it's an overreaction, but most of the student's parents probably think it's an underreaction and not likely to result in much actual effect beyond making government school employees a little more careful in how obvious they are about their previously blatant racism.
And how many decades has it been since that happened in the United States, compared to teachers singling out kids for being white as having something inherently wrong with them, and requiring students to dwell on their imagined racial identities?
OP: The problem with CRT bans is that they're so broad they cover a teaching basic facts about black history.
Reply: Yeah, but teachers are telling students to check their privilege and we have to ban that.
OP: They aren't just banning that, the bans are broad enough to cover basic history.
Reply: Yeah, but teachers are racist against white people so we need to ban that.
<repeat a dozen times in different branches of the thread>
Even if you believe that current teaching is a complete disaster and that harsh laws restricting teachers are the only way to stop the tides of SJ, the laws that are being passed are not the answer because *the laws are badly written.* They will result in perfect ordinary non-woke teachers who just want to teach what happened in America in the 1960s getting sued or fired. Badly written laws are a bad thing regardless of whether you agree with the intent.
Some of us have also requested (see just above, 3 hours ago) examples/links/citations to a specific law which is "so broad they cover a teaching basic facts about black history." so that we can evaluate the law itself directly.
Also, it's extremely rich to complain about facts not being allowed to be taught when this is one of the central pillars of the woke agenda
"Badly written laws are a bad thing regardless of whether you agree with the intent."
Wokeists are introducing bad laws on an almost daily basis. We either fight back, or act as noble pacifists who allow ourselves to be beaten up. Not fighting back, even in a bad faith way, is self-destructive.
"which for the most part they don't need to because as it turns out CRT is taught almost nowhere."
Do you have a preferred terminology for distinguishing between "Actual" CRT, and stuff that is strongly influenced by CRT and was called CRT before "the right" started using the term CRT?
>One such measure, introduced by the NEA’s board of directors, said the nation’s largest teachers’ union will support and lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, **critical race theory**, and ethnic … studies curriculum in pre-K-12 and higher education.” The measure is part of a larger $675,000 effort to “eradicate institutional racism” in public schools.<
Later they removed the phrase from the effort, leaving something of a "serial numbers filed off" feel.
The name got poisoned-by-association when, IIRC, Chris Rufo started bandying it about, so we end up in this situation where (over-generalizations incoming) "the left" denies CRT exists outside of an obscure and obscurantist legal theory, and "the right" calls everything CRT. The truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle but there's no acceptable name to capture what that questionable middle ground is.
>"far more insidiously"
It's fair complain about what you see as injustice, but things hardly get *less* insidious than legislation. Maybe there's some questions to just how prosecutors and courts will interpret the wording, and that's troublesome, but the text is all out there. It's not like whisper networks.
>(And don't start with complaints of "guilt by association"; we're responding to post that described anyone who had a humane reaction to George Floyd's death as "woke")
This is a childish use of loaded language.
Is it "humane" to propose policies like defunding police? What if it's just, you know, wrong? Am I supposed to support policies that would cause serious harm in order to be "humane"?
If public schools in California were found to have teachers that worked Christianity into every lesson, no matter how unrelated, and the school boards and teachers unions weren't doing anything about it, would you have a problem with the California legislature banning the practice?
As a conservative that believes religion and faith are good, I am still committed to the principle that neither belongs in a public school* outside of neutral discussion of the historical significance (such as in the appropriate history or literature class). Public schools* act on behalf of the government, ie all of society, and as such should not be taking sides on inter-society social issues. As such, what public schools* teach isn't speech, at least as far as 'freedom of speech' goes. What students say should be speech, as long as the school is committed to facially neutral rules designed to balance individual rights with the need to teach.
* - (at least, below the university level, which is what 'academia' should actually be. Academia should have a separate commitment to freedom of research by professors, with the caveat that what is published by professors doesn't represent the government.)
Maybe precomit to a definition of intolerable policy that's worth going berserker over (and then follow through when necessary), but mostly stick the Fabian thing and build whisper networks.
The woke wish to rectify harms done to victims, because that's what any conception of justice does for those that the conception of justice sincerely sees as "victims."
If I steal your car, you're the victim of my action. If the police catch me, give you your car back, and make me pay you restitution, they are "rewarding the victim." Did they do this because they think you're "virtuous and deserving?"
True, but the wish is selective on the group level. I've heard dozens of people (not media cherry picked, but personal conversations) say that destruction during protests was a good thing because it advanced the cause and peaceful protests were ignored by the media. People who saw their businesses destroyed don't register as 'victims.' It's this bias that's problematic.
Wokeness has a strong leveling aspect where only certain groups are allowed to be considered victims deserving of justice.
The notion of 'virtue' seems like an individualist notion that is a strawman when applied to collectivist models. Wokeness views disparate group outcomes as evidence of systemic failure. Virtue is a concept applied to individuals. It doesn't enter into the Woke model.
Right--the disagreement is about who counts as "victims" and what counts as "injustice."
I also had these conversations during the protests, and strongly disagreed with the variously blasé or approving attitude a lot of people took toward violence and property destruction. But even here, I don't think that this is the attitude that makes "wokeness" unique.
Many people, for instance, would say that if the Ukrainian military destroys some buildings in the process of stopping the Russian invasion, they've acted appropriately and the harms to the owners of those buildings are relatively unimportant forms of victimization. In other words, we'd accept the concept that some kinds of harm constitute acceptable collateral damage. One thing that circulated a lot during the protests was a statement by a Minneapolis store owner whose store was destroyed, who basically said "If it stops the racial violence in this country, let it all burn." Many (including myself) would see this as an appropriate attitude toward the loss of personal property during the proper conduct of a just war.
Where I (and I assume you) differ with the woke people who favored or didn't mind property destruction during the protests was that I didn't see the protests as something similar to a just war. I saw them as justified protests raising an important issue to a basically legitimate government. And I don't see destroying property as acceptable conduct in that context.
My sense of what makes "woke" ideology distinctive is really two things: the first, as you point out, is an emphasis on social inequality between groups or social categories, especially around race, gender, and sexuality. Seeing these inequalities as more important means justifying more extreme countermeasures. The other is seeing democratic liberal states and liberal social norms as illegitimate or less legitimate. Everything else, it seems to me, follows from those two beliefs.
> Wokeness has a strong leveling aspect where only certain groups are allowed to be considered victims deserving of justice.
They also don't give a fuck if individuals are poor. Opiate-destroyed miners in Appalachia? Doesn't matter, Bill Gates is rich.
Favouring blacks in med school admissions helps blacks who are already doing ok as shown by being able to apply to med school, it doesn't repair broken inner city families, etc.
I think wokeness is more than the weird way they define victims and oppressors via increasingly imaginary offenses.
1. There's more tribalism to it than regular justice. I don't think mugger-victims see themselves as a tribe engaged in a struggle with the mugger-tribe. And there's no attempt to especially glorify the history of mugger-victims with a history month or whatever. Memes about mugger-victim martyrs and hagiographies seem much rarer than the same about victims of alleged racism.
2. There's less respect for due process and freedom of speech.
Another way to frame that tribalism: Wokeness is more inclined to follow Lenin's formulation of "who, whom".
Wokeness has a quasi-Leninist conception of class enemies and class allies, except they're not defined in terms of class but in terms of intersectionality. Those who lack these intersectional credentials must demonstrate their loyalty with redoubled efforts or be assumed to be traitors. And even then the way they demonstrate this loyalty is frequently annoying and must be subject to rebuke: e.g. that recent article from a female black historian complaining about white people being *too* enthusiastic about wanting to discuss Black History Month.
You could probably tie this into a larger thread: the politicization of everything. The old academic left-liberalism sharply contrasted with Wokeism in its delight over shades of gray and a spirit of intellectual curiosity. If you were weirdly obsessed with some period of Western history, your moral character wasn't really questioned for simply trying to understand and describe it in an accurate and neutral manner -- indeed, such an effort could be a mark of virtue.
> I don't think mugger-victims see themselves as a tribe engaged in a struggle with the mugger-tribe.
On the other hand, I do think that this is observable. Coming from a non-US perspective, we often see all kinds of underprivileged groups being disproportionally engaged in property crime and muggings, and there being a social struggle between them and the "respectable middle class" (i.e. "mugger-victim tribe"). Those groups sometimes are ethnic or immigrant minorities, but in more homogenous places they would be just subcultures, perhaps distinguishable by clothing, slang, tattoos, piercings, habits, etc - not a racial/national/etc separation but still a distinct "tribe" whom every person from the "respectable tribe" would shun as "definitely not one of us", would support all kinds of sanctioning and othering, and in cases of violent conflict would definitely glorify the member of the "respectable tribe" fighting the "criminal subculture".
And looking from outside towards USA, I do seem to recall reading about USA events that very much seem like a representation of a struggle like that - it seems that some communities glorified e.g. George Zimmerman as something like "martyr for the anti-mugger tribe", and when I read about American people justifying George Floyd's murder, their core argument seemed to be "he's from the 'mugger-tribe' so that's an expected, justified part of the struggle against them".
I agree with 2, but am not sure if I agree with 1.
You're right that mugging victims, for the most part, don't identify as a group or tribe, and don't ask to have their history celebrated or acknowledged. That's partially because being a mugging victim is pretty random. Mugging victims don't often have mugging victim parents and mugging victim friends, and so don't really have any "history" as a group.
It's also because mainstream society takes muggings fairly seriously and tries to immediately address the harm caused by mugging. When that's not true--for instance, New York in the 80s, crime victims absolutely start seeing themselves as a class or a tribe, elevating heroes (i.e. Berhnard Goetz, Curtis Silwa), and demanding respect and redress from the rest of society.
So, I think that demanding redress for a history of victimization and demanding respect as a group may be a fairly standard response to belonging to an identifiable group that feels that it has been repeatedly victimized without redress.
That said, I do think that because wokeness has an expansive definition of harms and an expansive sense of appropriate redress, there's a tendency of people in "woke" circles to try to attach themselves to harms or victimization in order to gain standing. But even there, I'm not sure how unique this is--Curtis Silwa faked subway attacks to gain clout for the Guardian Angels and apparently lied about having been kidnapped.
When I looked it up 5 or 10 years ago, there were 2 or 3 memorials to crime victims in general in the U.S.. I think they were in places where cops tend to live, such as Long Island.
There were also memorials to victims of specific crimes. For example, although the governor of Massachusetts not too many years ago dedicated a memorial for Sacco & Vanzetti, there is also a memorial to their two victims on the spot of their armored car robbery.
In general, it is considered in poor taste by journalists to remember crime victims as a class.
On the other hand, true crime stories involving specific victims are very popular, and popular fiction, such as Batman movies, is much concerned with crime and its victims.
"The woke wish to rectify harms done to victims, because that's what any conception of justice does."
You are wrong. The normal Western concept of "Justice" is to judge individuals as culpable based on their own actions, and to restore individual victims according to their individual injuries caused by those specific wrongful actions.
Woke "social justice" is the opposite -- it's about class-based victimhood and retribution. The "Bourgeoisie" or the "Kulaks" are class enemies of the people so must be punished. Current wokesters just substitute "white males" as the designated class enemy.
More precisely, woke is about group-based victimhood. They don't use social class as a group (except in passing as lip service) because they themselves belong to the upper social classes, and therefore to do so would be arguing against their own class based interests.
Yes. In almost *any* discussion where the victim and the perpetrator are clearly established and then discussed, the discussants (more or less rightly) treat the victim as relatively virtuous and deserving and the perpetrator as relatively indecent and undeserving. The frame or window of the discussion is typically only how great the relative distance.
Discussions which explicitly try to invalidate or flip this framing are mostly either implicitly trying to swap victim and perpetrator status, or moot the distinction entirely.
That being said, I agree that wokeness is more complex and top comment is reductive (if we assume it's a definition).
I basically agree with you, but I'd quibble in the following way.
Any discussion where the victim and perpetrator are clearly established will treat the perpetrator's actions as indecent and underserving. They don't typically treat the victim as any more decent or deserving than they were before being victimized.
In other words, we establish that "car theft" is an indecent action, and that "car thieves" don't deserve the cars they steal. But we don't tend to assume that people who have their cars stolen are thus more decent or more deserving than are people who didn't have their cars stolen, or that they're any more decent or deserving than they were before having their cars stolen. If I give them their car back, it's not rewarding them for their virtue, it's rectifying a specific injustice (and we'd see giving the car back as just even if the person who's car was stolen isn't a very nice person).
Similarly, if I say that person A racially discriminated against person B, I am saying that person A is doing something unvirtuous and indecent, but I'm not saying that being a victim of racism is virtuous. If I say that person B should be compensated for the harm done to them by person A, I'm not trying to reward person A for their virtue, I'm trying to rectify harm done to them by person B. Their general character or moral standing isn't really relevant.
Does it involve seeing victimhood as a source of status? My not very well informed impression is there is an element of "more oppressed than thee" in woke culture.
> I don't have a good definition, but it certainly doesn't involve claiming that being a victim is a virtue.
I think it does. I think that being a cult of victimhood is at the heart of wokeness: the idea that if you're a member of an accredited victim group (e.g. blacks, women, gays, tans, Muslims, etc) then thereby you become a virtuous person and other people are morally obliged to be on your side.
E.g. George Floyd became a woke saint because he was murdered by the police.
If being a victim isn't virtuous in wokeness, why did Jussie Smollett fake a hate crime against himself?
I suspect the conceptual distinctions between "being deserving of care" and "being virtuous" that, say, Aristotle might have drawn are collapsing. These days, there are mostly just good people vs. bad people, and what more do you need to know?
I wouldn't say you've entirely wrong, but I think think there's a distinction on the Social Justice side between victims deserving of care and people supporting Social Justice who are deserving of praise.
If you've decided they're the enemy, you've already decided to make this problem worse. You destroy your enemies. You crush them, you humiliate them, and sometimes you kill them. Do you want to do this to (other side of whatever fence you use to define "woke"?) Are you willing to pick up a gun and spill blood into the streets over this? Because that's the choice you're making by calling them an enemy. If two halves of the US are each other's enemies, the US will stop existing. Yes, that's the choice all those people on the other side who are calling you an enemy are doing to, and I tell them the same thing. We need de-escalation.
And "punching down" is a decency concept phrased in woke language. Do you believe it's virtuous to mock a crippled person for being in a wheelchair? Do you think it's a neutral action? Or do you think it's an inherently mean-spirited action that can be ameliorated based on the circumstance (e.g. if the crippled person is nasty and mean-spirited themselves, there's likely more of a sense of karma if someone calls them names)?
There's a couple ways to read these kinds of situations. Like, for a lot of people, me included, pretending the other side isn't an enemy is pretty much just laying down and letting them shoot you in the back of the head. Because in your model, where proclaiming the other side an enemy leads to bloodshed, it doesn't *stop it* from happening if I pretend it's not.
It's surprisingly often in rationalism that I'm told something that basically boils down to "winning is for the other guys. Send them birthday cards and ignore all the tanks near alsace".
The second paragraph is what the woke say punching down is when they are snuggled up in the motte. But out on the bailey, the direction "down" just means "the direction I am, and they aren't; I'm allowed to hit them, you see". Again, the ask here is that I *let them hit me for free*. And again I'm mystified as to why I'd lose on purpose and default surrender.
I'm not saying "surrender", I'm saying that thinking of this as a war will end in it being an ACTUAL war. Like, with guns, and bombs, and knives, and people dying. I am NOT saying one side bears exclusive guilt here, I am saying that I don't want The Troubles x 50, and I'm going to guess that you don't want that either. Like the old saying about marriage goes- no matter how big the fight gets, at the end of the day you're still going to have to live with each other. At the end of the day, all the "woke libtards" and "alt-right CHUDS" are going to have to live in the same country, go to the same schools, etc, and adopting a siege mindset where anything short of total tribal loyalty is seen... exactly as you see it, not only ends extremely badly, but also is how we got to this exact position to begin with.
I'll admit it's not an easy place to come down from, but right now both the Woke and the Anti-Woke seem to be playing a game of Chicken to see who'll be the first to veer away from outright advocating and carrying out the mass murder of the other side, and someone's going to have to give or else everyone loses- especially people like me who are dirty filthy evil doubleplusungood fence-sitting traitors who refuse to pick either side (aka most Americans).
The Woke can say "punching down" is anything they want, I just want to register that basic human decency is, in fact, good, and shouldn't be thrown out because it's an obstacle to Winning. That's the definition of Moloch- dehumanize not only your enemy, but yourself, because it's "more efficient".
What I'm saying is, it's an actual war. They are taking 100% of the ground they can within what they think they can do; they aren't confused about us (us being: anybody who isn't who they define their team as) being the enemy. They take jobs when they can; they demand you swear fealty and adopt special language to show you will bow when called on.
But within that concept, somehow they aren't shooting anybody.
Now, there's five potential ways this goes:
1. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can; they aren't unclear about this. But I don't shoot them, I work within the rules to resist them, and lose but don't go to arms.
2. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can, but now instead of working inside of the rules I either pre-commit to going to arms if I lose or just go to arms immediately.
3. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can, I resist them, I win, and THEY go to arms.
4. I don't admit they are enemies and they just win by default because I'm pretending they are nice and reasonable even though they keep telling me they aren't.
Rationalists are very disproportionately likely to say that 4. is the only option, that we need to lay down and take our licks and pretend the other guys are nice.
But note that 1-3 exist, and out of those both 1 and 3 are good, moral options. But even if they weren't AND I planned on laying down and taking my beating, it still doesn't change the fact that they are my enemies, if they are, the same way appeasing does not in fact change the fact that some people would reallly like a second-hand country of France.
I'd think of this argument a lot differently if it seemed like you were arguing that it wasn't in fact a war, or they weren't in fact enemies. Like we might disagree, that's whatever. But not wanting a war and ignoring an actual war for that reason doesn't stop the war, it just means you lose faster.
No, it isn't. You are using hyperbolic language. I've personally seen the remains of "actual war". It makes student protests, or even riots, look like a frolic in a field.
If you want this to be an ACTUAL war, though, please go ahead and keep deciding that every person you're ideologically opposed to is a mindless psychopath who must be crushed and cast out of society just like they do. Keep your foot flat on the pedal, they'll surely swerve first.
I think both sides here consist of small cores of people who are terminally ideological to the point of hating life and loving death and a bunch of people who have been tricked into listening to those people. Those are the ACTUAL sides here: normal people and those who hate life and love death, whether that takes the form of Terminal Woke or Terminal Anti-Woke. The latter win when they get the former to kill each other, and the former win when they ignore the latter, because the latter are actually very small and weak and can only cause damage beyond a tantrum with a gun when they convince other people that loving death and hating life is Just and Noble or Stunning and Brave or Based and Redpilled or whatever other banner those ghouls will eventually hoist next.
In summary- I hope every person on both sides who sees this as a total war and a whole half of the country as their irreconcilable enemies chokes on their own frothing spittle and spares the rest of us the mass deaths they crave. A pox on both your houses. Consider me the general of the Army of People With Actual Problems In Their Lives declaring war on both of your camps.
I used to be kind of a big right wing influencer, once upon a time, but I guess I've shifted back towards the center and become more chill now, thanks to Scott.
I don't think anyone is ever going to left-wing-death-squad you [99% confidence]. Metaculus predicts only a 3% chance of a second US civil war by 2031 ( https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6179/second-us-civil-war-before-2031/ ) and even that number is probably inflated by a minority who doom scroll too much.
I recommend to everybody on all sides who has a lot of anxiety about politics to just take some weeks off of social media, news, and any other sources of outrage porn. Just live life. Life is good.
Nobody is coming for you except a few obese radicals who wanna tattle to your employer for writing unwoke things on the internet. And even in that worst case scenario there are plenty of other jobs and plenty of ways to make a living as your own boss. I've been my own boss for almost 6 years now. It's great. Office space was one of my favorite movies. Peter's character arc totally resonates with me. Fortunately I found something that pays a lot better than construction.
I'm using the word "enemy" as hyperbole, I suppose. I don't believe there will be a civil war here. My chief political opponents are the social conservatives on the left (the woke) and the right (mostly bible-thumpers).
Because there's no clear divisions in the culture wars, (would I side with conservatives? Hell no. Would I side with progressives? Hell no.) I don't see how we would end up choosing sides for an actual war.
I'm glad to hear you essentially agree with me, but sadly the effective lines in the Culture Wars are Right-Wing Death Cult and Left-Wing Death Cult, and they both assign the vast numbers of people who are NOT in the Death Cults membership in the other camp.
As with all such contests, in this strategy the person with whom the fight is being picked is irrelevant. The point is what observers of the fight think; and the target observers appear to be the anti-woke and the neutrals who don't think that way.
Further, the opponent doubling down is traditionally (though not necessarily correctly) viewed as desirable - the idea is that if they double down hard enough it will alienate the observers.
The idea that "punching down is bad" is *itself* part of the whole victim-complex ideology, though, a component of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic. Effectively a way of saying "it's okay when we do it".
If you read any pre-20th century satire, for instance (satire being a common victim of this attitude) you'll see that the barbs are directed at human weakness and folly *wherever* they're found. If a beggar has character flaws, mercilessly mock the beggar.
These people were always GOING to have a victim complex, and now that the nonsense has moved out of universities and into the real world where peoples bank accounts are being frozen, it isn’t punching down in any meaningful way to go all out against wokeness
These people were always GOING to have a victim complex, and now that the nonsense has moved out of universities and into the real world where peoples bank accounts are being frozen, it isn’t punching down in any meaningful way to go all out against wokeness
I feel like it really depends on the academic’s personality. You have to be high in disagreeableness and enjoy conflict somewhat to successfully pull off the Berserker strategy. And you have to be generally agreeable and thought of as a non-troublemaker to execute the Fabian strategy.
Also just because you can't be fired doesn't mean they can't make you want to quit. This academic's will to continue on is now the weakest link in this strategy. So they should choose what fits them, and choose what they think they can continue to do for many years.
NY Telephone wanted my father to move to the Westchester office. He refused, noting that we had family on the Island, the kids were in school, had friends, etc. They gave him NO WORK for an entire year. He survived, and we didn't move.
Right! (Ball successfully returned into the court of Scott and the Academician. :^)
I will observe that Jordan Peterson left academia because he was hurting any students he had. Being a pariah, working with him was a black mark against the student. Finally the message I got from the Canadian truckers, was that if you don't control the narrative, then your message will be formed by those who do control it.
> if you don't control the narrative, then your message will be formed by those who do control it.
This. It doesn't matter what you do and why; it will be described as something else done for a different reason.
So maybe the step one would be to put your "elevator pitch" on youtube? Like, not more than five minutes, otherwise in this era of instant gratification no one will watch it.
Not sure about step two, though. Or maybe you should just make funny anti-woke memes.
Great point. As I was reading the descriptions I was thinking "wow, it would be great to be a Berserker," while at the same time knowing that I'm just not cut out for it emotionally. I'd have to go Fabian pretty much every time. Darned high agreeableness causes me no end of trouble!
Of course the dilemma is: what if this group (Scott's subscribers) concludes by virtue of reasoned argument that Berserker is the most effective approach and Fabian is mostly ineffectual?
Time to practise enjoying being disliked, I suppose.
I'm surprised more people aren't harping on this. If you have two choices, one of which will surely make your life miserable, it seems like a Bad Idea to go that route if there is literally any other way to run your life and do good. As a very strong rule of thumb, I don't think we should be encouraging people to make irreversible decisions with excruciating consequences for themselves.
This was going to be my comment as well. I think it really helps when we stick our necks out that something natural in us guides us to want to do that. It may be because we're the kind of person who likes to pick fights -- I don't mean that entirely negatively, more as being someone who likes to be a campaigner and public leader and all that implies. It may be because the person feels so strongly about the one issue that's arisen (yoga classes being cancelled) that it provides fuel for them to overcome their dislike of being a campaigner/leader (in my experience, that can be quite costly for that person, even if maybe they feel it's worth the cost -- one needs to at least account for the cost).
I don't see it being successful for people to pick a strategy abstracted from local conditions and their own tendencies and then force themselves to pursue it as a general matter. That's a recipe for a lot of unproductive "shoulds" in a person's head. Particularly when they have another job to do -- ie, being a campaigner isn't their full-time job.
Whenever we're asking ourselves about a course of action, I find it helpful to ask "what do I want guiding me in this choice?" Fear? An abstract idea? A dearly-held value? Recognition of where my ingredients can be best put to use? The kind of role I enjoy playing? My own natural sense of motivation? It's a lot easier if we're not swimming against our own tide in taking on a big commitment.
There are so many ways to be of use and it's a delusion to imagine that there's an exact right way one can choose in advance of events. That's a kind of black and white thinking that's not really responsive to how reality unfolds.
Having spent most of my life as a classical liberal/libertarian academic, I strongly agree. There is no best way of changing the world in your desired direction, only a best way for you. That applies more broadly than to this particular question.
Exactly this. The article clearly lays out that neither strategy is a clear winner. So the academic should do what comes naturally to their personality. Any other choice may be more effective in the short term but will cause fatigue and burnout in the long term.
Gosh, I am out of touch. This post feels like reading the last book of Harry Potter without having read anything else. Maybe I should be using Twitter to keep up with the conversation online. Who I am kidding, I'm too lazy for that.
This post made me think about to the filter bubble / shadow universe post Scott made a while back. I have no idea what it's like in Scott's world, coming from my shadow universe:
At work: one of the managers likes to find something offensive to say every day just to get a reaction.
My dad, a normally very grounded guy, talked to me in a straight face about aliens the other day, and my brother and sister-in-law don't go to church because they believe in aliens.
My wife used to believe Nancy Pelosi went to China to meet with their leaders and arrange how COVID would be released. It was all part of Democrats plan to steal the election. I don't think she believes that anymore, but she still thinks they stole the election. She also, however, believes strongly in vaccines (going to school to become a nurse, she was a MA) and we both have our booster. Neither of us wear a mask at the grocery store but some people still do.
I don't bring up COVID with most people because most of the people I know are on the COVID conspiracy spectrum, but we have a few friends on the other far side, who wanted to have a party in the winter cold but wouldn't let anyone go inside their house for fear of exposure.
I think it's just a totally different memetic environment around here, especially among our church friends, and probably Facebook at the time too.
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.
I'm currently reading China Mieville's The City & the City about two cities occupying the same space at the same time, with strictly enforced separation to the point of "not seeing" the other cars on the street, and have been wondering what allegory they are going for. Your Scott quote above captures the mood perfectly.
There was a Philip Jose Farmer science fiction book called "Dayworld" in which, because of overpopulation, people spend six days a week in suspended animation and each "day" is basically a seperate society that exists parallel to but barely interacts with each other day.
This is an underrepresented and very helpful point of view. The use of "code-switching" is particularly interesting; are there any specific examples besides the COVID protocols that you've seen or specific vocabulary/actions that you use?
It seems to me that a good way for people to more successfully adopt general policies is to think of how they would apply in the opposite political context. E.g. if "speech has consequences, tough luck" is the response to conservative pleas for intellectual tolerance on campus, would that also apply to, say, Biden voters in rural Pennsylvania who get treated poorly by their Trump-voting neighbors?
You don't have to go as far as rural Pennsylvania - that contradiction is literally happening on the very same college campuses. The same universities that claim conservative professors just have to suck it up are the ones banning speech that could make students uncomfortable and therefore feel "unsafe".
This contradiction is not at all surprising, and whenever people bring this kind of thing up, it's kind of like "no shit, have you been living under a rock?" It reminds me of the top comment on this post. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/senate-democrats-use-the-jim-crow
Tribes are never and have never been consistent about general principles like civility, freedom of speech, etc - the only thing they are consistent with is tribal allegiance. So of course the left aren't consistent when students have "safe spaces" but conservatives are told that they are SOL - but they are consistent with supporting the in-group and opposing the out-group. That's the one thing tribes will always be consistent about.
It does seem like the left is currently worse about this than the right. I haven't heard of many conservatives seriously arguing for censorship of leftists - most actually support free speech for all. But it's arguable that that's just because conservatives aren't in a position where their demands for censorship of the left would actually be answered (since tech companies and the media are so far to the left), so it's kind of pointless to even attempt it. If conservatives ran tech platforms and media companies, they would likely be censoring as well, albeit less-so than the leftists are currently.
I don't understand this point: isn't anti-crt and don't say gay basically trying to intentionally conflate anything potentially challenging of right-leaning ideals as dangerous woke rhetoric? I'm not convinced that the book burning/banning has suddenly stopped from the right, nor will it. I think we have a tendency to see a cultural shift as necessitating an absolute reversal of roles. I don't think anarchism is any more corporatist/statist now than it was in 1980 (at least any form that hadn't been co-opted by the alt-right). Calls for civility and decorum are still coming from the folks who claim the world is controlled by a zionist conspiracy.
Maybe I'm in a vastly different bubble but I'm in a huge metro on the west coast and I doubt we're in a woke dystopia.
I am faintly hesitant to head back into the office after two years of WFH for this reason. We have been using various online tools to communicate and the discussions on there tend to be to the woke end of the spectrum. People have even started adding their pronouns to their usernames which makes me shake my head in amused pity.
I am pretty sure that most of my colleagues have middling political opinions, but it is also possible that there has been some sort of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers" type event and they will all be completely insufferable in person.
Maybe wokeness peaks at different times in different places, and the Bay Area is avant-garde so it peaked there first and now is declining. There are definitely places where wokeness never reached hegemony yet (and maybe never will because they were vicariously immunized by watching the overreach in other places), but those places aren't the major cities that steer American culture (New York, Los Angeles, SF)
"my brother and sister-in-law don't go to church because they believe in aliens" ... can you join the dots for me here? I can't imagine what connection there would be between whether or not you believe in aliens and whether or not you go to church.
I think a lot of it comes down to the core story of Christianity - God creates humans, humans sin, God comes to earth and dies for their sins. That's not incompatible with the idea of extraterrestrial life, but it does raise a lot of odd questions. ("Did aliens sin, did Jesus die for the sins of aliens, etc.")
The idea that humans are unique/special isn't an *essential* aspect of Christianity, but it's a very strongly linked philosophical view.
Interestingly, CS Lewis wrote about the possibility of aliens in one of his essays, and didn't even seemed phased by the prospect, and discussed the possibility that intelligent aliens may not be 'fallen creatures' like humans, and thus have no need for salvation. I think the Catholic Church also has a position on how we should regard aliens should they be discovered. In general mainstream Christianity seems nonchalant about the theological implications of aliens, though I can see why that might seem intuitively surprising (I'm not Christian, so don't this as apologetics, but I was surprised myself at how unbothered Christian thinkers seemed to be by aliens).
Yeah, I'm not surprised - the theological questions of aliens aren't insurmountable, they just require a bit of creativity, so it's not surprising that CS Lewis, who had no shortage of creativity, was particularly not phased by them.
More(Strikethrough more, replace with "also") interestingly, Mark Twain also wrote about Christ dying, many times, to save many alien worlds. "Captain Stormfields's visit to heaven" or something.
I mean, if you believe in directed panspermia ("aliens made Earth life and/or humans"), then either you believe Christianity is a Chinese-whispers version of the truth or it's wrong.
The use of "wokeness" here as a catch-all term for anything related to social justice, as if it were a single force to be supported or opposed, feels really lazy and indiscriminate to me. There was a lot of reaction after George Floyd was killed, because a man was slowly murdered on camera while onlookers couldn't do anything about it, and that's horrible. Lots of people reacted in lots of ways, some of which seem wholly appropriate to me (protesting police brutality and lack of accountability), some of which were foolishly utopian but you can see where they were coming from (defund the police), and some of which were the kind of ridiculous symbolic gestures that get rightly derided as "woke" (renaming the "master" branch of version control systems to "main") - it was not nearly as simple as "wokeness got stronger".
Any serious attempt to deal with the genuine problem of dysfunctional "woke" ideology has to deal with the fact that a lot of people are trying to create a better world, and you don't _want_ to push back against that - you want to push the discourse sideways, so that that effort is directed in a healthier way.
I think this is a bit unfair. There's clearly been a general trend over the last decade or so that distinguishes current "woke social justice" from the social justice that preceded it. That trend is difficult to distill exactly, and "woke" is definitely a simplistic shorthand. But my guess is that Scott is assuming (reasonably imho) that most of his audience shares his understanding of "woke" as a shorthand.
That's rather begging the question. People who self identify as 'woke' would almost certainly not agree that they are taking part in a performative social status game, or at least not with the implication of inauthenticity which is a toxic non-argument that seems to get thrown around a lot in these kinds of debates.
Performative social status games are mostly not conscious at all. Human navigation by mimicry is a feature not a bug. Ref Henrich/ Hanson/ BJ Campbell etc
But what is the purpose of you claiming that someone is taking part in a performative social status game? If everyone is doing that unconsciously anyway, then it's a contentless assertion. I take it actually as a toxic claim that they are being inauthentic, and that their claims can be ignored.
It's quite possible that they are unconsciously taking part in a performative social status game, and it's also possible that anyone making that claim is too. It's relevance to the substantial topic under discussion is zero. In practice when people say this, they're not making a sociological analysis, they're making a cheap, illogical attack on their argumentation partner.
I agree that trying to dismiss woke people by saying they are *just* status-seeking is a discursively toxic move. But there is a cluster of behaviours among some social-justice oriented people which seems to play no other role than securing public affirmation from other social-justice-y people, i.e. "Wow, good job, you're so woke!" (e.g., banning yoga club b/c cultural appropriation). It seems to me like when people say they are anti-woke, what they mean is they are against this kind of behaviour. So, internal to anti-woke communities, using "wokeness" to refer to this kind of tendency seems natural. Of course this could create problems & poison the well of discourse between wokes and anti-wokes, but at least it's not a total idler wheel.
Relatively few people continue to self-identify as 'woke' once the term was adopted by their outgroup, but there doesn't seem to be a commonly-agreed-on replacement term, either (as Freddie deBoer opined in "just tell what I'm supposed to call this thing." The linguistic treadmill is running full steam on this vague nameless thing that everyone seems confident exists.
They won't get a good answer for a long time, either. I still don't know what a hippie is/was. I know what lots of people say they are/were, but mostly those descriptions don't match anyone I knew, and I lived in Berkeley during the 1960's/70's. "Long haired freak" at least had identifiable correlations with people I knew.
The thing is, "hippie" was popularized by a gossip columnist. It took off as a phrase among lots of people who didn't know anybody that it described, so they let their imaginations fill in the details. I think that something similar occurred with "woke", though it was probably an internet talk board.
My guess is that currently "woke" predominantly means "someone whose politics I don't like" and that it tends to be used among right-wingers. (I'm not going to call them conservatives, because they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids. So that's not conserving.)
>"Long haired freak" at least had identifiable correlations with people I knew.
LOL! I was once gifted a "long-haired freaks need not apply" sign when I grew my hair out.
>(I'm not going to call them conservatives, because they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids. So that's not conserving.)
Thank you for this consideration and clarity!
I get annoyed with that kind of abuse of the phrase "conservative," and I do appreciate this.
>they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids.
Note: This is essentially a textbook definition of a reactionary.
Woke in its modern usage was re-popularized by BLM. It's often used as a sneer, but it was and is a self-id with positive connotations as well. The obvious comparison is SJW, which originated as a sneer and was pretty much always used that way.
Sourced from the wiki but it comports with my memory and personal experience.
The phenomenon you're pointing at -- broad labels dissolve into their particulars at fine resolution -- is real. The experience of being inside a social group is one of learning to distinguish its members from one another, and not to determine what they all have in common. But this doesn't mean they *don't* have things in common, or that they *aren't* an identifiable group. I used to feel this way about communists, who often get lumped together, but who almost always define themselves in opposition to each other, and are prone to violent rhetorical outbursts when mistaken for those opportunistic wannabes in the Judean People's Front. It's only when I stepped out of that bubble that it became very clear to me that "communist" is a meaningful category, even if it has no single modal member who would be accepted as a representative by everyone inside the category.
On the Woke: I know particular people who are definitely Woke. I could tell you their names if we were in person. They are very real. They have differing beliefs, but a lot ties them together. They share common assumptions, common rhetoric, common aesthetics. I agree with some of their politics, disagree with others, so I do not think I am simply defining them in opposition to myself.
I think "the good old days were a myth" is a *foundational* misunderstanding of "conservative" viewpoints that can only come from a "zeitgeist progressive".
"The good old days were terrible actually" is a thing that is taught to people in blue tribe areas since literally 6th grade (in my real life experience).
I think Scott wrote a whole thing on this in his "NRX in a nutshell" post - I think it's actually 100% fair to look at things like constant social media panopticons + the sexual revolution driving ever larger numbers of young men to suicide, the decline of plausible life scripts other than "try as hard as you can to be elite, and if you don't make it, enjoy being a receptionist", increasing alcoholism and "deaths of despair" primarily caused by deindustrialization of smaller towns - with the response of "just move to the city!", and those cities look like Seattle, WA or San Francisco - where you can't ride public transportation or go to the grocery store without being assaulted by people who need serious mental health interventions.
You can say "well actually things in the beforetimes were bad" - but I think suggesting that there's absolutely no argument at all that in the glorious march of neoliberal universal culture, something fundamental was lost strikes me as well, the sort of opinion one has when your entire experience of American history is reading about slavery for the entirety of the formative years of your life.
I think they (possibly we) are keeping woke. I identify as half-woke, my wife would probably identify as full woke. I think that the thought that the term has been abandoned is mostly a result of personal bubbles.
Good to know! It can be hard to tell what's a bubble or what's a local variation and what isn't.
I'd be interested in the variation between who still uses it versus those who claims it's just a right-wing slur now or whatever, but that would be hard to get reliable data. I think part of it, beyond bubbles, is as you say in your other comment- "woke" had more positive connotations than SJW, but they've both gone through "linguistic treadmills."
You're missing my point: what I'm criticizing is not the use of "woke" to point generally at those ideological trends, but the use of "woke" to imply that any political fight involving e.g. race is _about whether those trends will prevail_ rather than about e.g. police brutality. To talk as if wokeness was a general marshalling his forces to seize territory, so that we must battle back social justice in general to defeat him, rather than a dysfunctional tendency within social justice. The response to George Floyd's murder was not _about_ wokeness - we saw a lot of wokeness because people were horrified and didn't know what to do, and the bad intellectual currents meant that often got expressed as performative activism.
Sure. I just don't share your interpretation of Scott's post as saying that the George Floyd protests were "about" (or proximately caused by) wokeness in some general sense. If anything I think this, and the linked article in the text, are implying the inverse - that the George Floyd reaction enabled a spike in wokeness.
My speculation is that my interpretation comes from reading Scott's writing on wokeness for a long time, so I already know where he's coming from on the topic. So by extension, I think it's reasonable to assume that most of his audience won't share your interpretation either.
"Were The George Floyd Protests An Example Of Woke Power Or Woke Overreach?" "The usual cancel culture intensified by an order of magnitude." "...rallying a previously flagging social justice movement, allowing them to make a giant show of strength, briefly cow everyone, and intimidate any attempt at change." "...they’d previously bought into the “wokeness is the underdog” narrative, and only then noticed how much power and control it was grabbing for itself."
Your implication that I'm misinterpreting Scott due to being unfamiliar with his writing is both rather irritating and completely wrong: I've read most of what he's written for more than a decade now.
The quoted section reads as implying the inverse of your interpretation to me. As does the relevant section in the linked article. I guess we're at an impasse.
I'm a very long time reader here and I largely share Deciphered Stone's interpretation, particularly the sense that the battle against "wokeness" is as performative as the battle for wokeness unless it's grounded in specific concerns. Deciphered Stone seems to be saying some of the protest against police violence engages with real concerns and some of it is more performative. A college campus canceling yoga classes (in the hypothetical) might be a real concern for this university worker, but an abstract battle against wokeness seems ill-conceived to me (and it seems also to DecipheredStones). You may not agree with that view and that's totally fine obviously -- but that seems to be a question one could discuss without dismissing it entirely as already resolved in this setting.
I'm taking as an assumption and maybe shouldn't that you see a distinction between "this broad cultural dynamic we're calling wokeness is destructive and I don't like it" and "is our analysis of it precise or clear enough that our strategies of opposition are likely to be skillful or effective?"
My point is: I don't see this piece as calling for "an abstract battle against wokeness", and I think that's an unfair and uncharitable reading given the context of everything else Scott's written on the subject.
As I see it, the premise of the piece is a discussion between two people who are on the same page regarding certain interrelated trends in academia, and wondering what can be done to resist or reverse these trends. These two people can happily use a vague term like "woke" without fear of misunderstanding, because they share a common set of assumptions about what the problem is and what they're talking about, etc.
I think Scott projected that common set of assumptions onto his audience. And I thought that was reasonable since his audience would have read the (many) other pieces he's written on the subject and therefore know where he was coming from. Moreover, it's an informal piece asking his audience for feedback on a question that came up during a conversation he had - not an argument for any particular stance - so explicitly building up the relevant assumptions in a 4000 word preamble seems excessive (though admittedly not out of character). But I see that plenty of people on the comments read the piece very differently.
So either I'm right and Scott's assumption about his audience was a giant swing and a miss, or I'm wrong and his views on "woke"-related issues have shifted and he's experimenting with some new argument format. Maybe he'll update us later...
Speaking as someone who can't specifically recall Scott's writing on wokeness despite reading a lot of SSC/ASC for years, I'd say that DecipheredStones has a very reasonable take on how an outsider might interpret what's being said if they didn't have certain definitions of "wokeness as a term of art particular to SSC/ASC" easily called up to mind.
"DecipheredStones has a very reasonable take on how an outsider might interpret what's being said"
That's why I assumed he was an outsider, which he found very irritating. The question I'm left with is: Why are so many SSC/ASC insiders pretending to be outsiders for the sake of interpreting this post? That's what strikes me as an unfair thing to do.
But the Floyd protests were not about police brutality. The protests were very explicitly making much more controversial points:
- That the Floyd murder was caused by racism
- That these cases of racism were significant and systemic in law enforcement
- That these situations are to some extent endorsed by society
None of which was evident in the Floyd video, let alone proved by it. And this is why a word like "woke" is needed to describe the ideological fight that goes way beyond the actual case of police brutality. There has to be a different way to distinguish, let's say, fighting to ban the knee tackle that killed Floyd, and fighting to get the point across that the police is systemically racist and therefore profound reforms are needed.
- That the response to these first three claims should be a massive transfer of wealth wrapped up in the language of "reparations."
I agree that "woke" does not mean "social justice," it means taking a totalitarian movement that wants revolutionary change and dressing it in the clothes of social justice to make it appear like it's on the right side of history, when it is very much on the wrong side.
Needless to say, many individuals who support "woke" causes nevertheless think they are being virtuous and are not bad people, but they have been gulled into giving support and weight to a dangerous set of philosophies.
Well said. Black cops don't have a higher rate of Black homicides in the line of work than other races of cops do. This is the point where people switch from 'racism' to 'systemic racism' and looking at disparate outcomes rather than racial prejudice. American Blacks are policed more because they have, as a group, a murder rate over 4x that of other groups. This results in a lot of understandably unwanted attention to those who are law abiding, including being more likely to encounter problematic cops. But police homicides, specifically, are not driven primarily by some bias on the part of the police even when such bias exists. (This doesn't touch on forms of police harassment which _don't_ escalate to homicide, granted.) Of course, I agree that improved police procedures would disproportionately benefit those who already are more policed.
The great frustration is the role of the legacy media in all of this.
If, in their reporting of black people being killed by cops, they emphasised that, based on interactions with police per capita, you are no more likely to be killed by a cop if you are black than if you are white (or Hispanic), this simple fact would defuse much of the tension around the whole policing/BLM movement.
The fact that they don't (despite consistent academic evidence showing this to be the case) should make us question what they are doing.
Are they really deciding to incite race riots leading to millions of pounds of damage, the destruction of livelihoods and multiple murders just because they think it will help the Democrats at the polls?
Are they really that venal? Or have they drunk the Koolaid and just don't know that the narrative they push so forcibly is false?
Wokeness includes the tendency to accuse those in favour of academic freedom of being supportive of police brutality, etc. As pro-academic-freedom people, we unfortunately don't get to pick and choose which issues we fight, as the woke will lump us in with the worst views anyway. Thus our problem actually is wokeness itself, as not only does it oppose academic freedom, but it also prevents normal political discourse about the things we actually care about whilst the woke movement is calling the shots on how that discourse works.
As the reproductively viable worker ants used to say, "you don't *join* [anti woke movement], you get thrown in here with the rest of us."
"Social justice" itself is the problem; wokeness is not a dysfunctional tendency, it's the core of a construct which equivocates between individual and communal culpability/responsibility for an equivocation between individual and communal outcomes.
Concerns about legitimate vs. illegitimate uses of violence aren't some scary new force that showed up on college campuses in the last 15 years. Law and political philosophy are ancient subjects. Police departments are not just now developing use-of-force policies at the behest of angry blue-haired college kids. That is not wokeness by any reasonable usage.
What is a new force is high levels of credence given in popular and elite circles to extremely blunt and ill-considered forms of engagement with these questions, like police abolition. Ideas which once marked their proponents as unserious change almost overnight into marking their skeptics as monsters. Not as a result of some kind of rational consideration, but because they fit the mood. That is wokeness in the sense that I mean it, and in the sense that I think Scott means it here.
The problem is that “woke” is *also* used as a shorthand by another far less savory group of people, namely actual racists/transphobes/antisemites, to refer not just to liberal over-reactions, but also to normative statements like “trans people shouldn’t be killed and put through a meat grinder,” or something. Without clarification, many well-meaning people coming from a primarily left-leaning environment will likely assume (in my experience) that someone calling out “wokeness” is part of the latter group, not the former.
"Without clarification, many well-meaning people coming from a primarily left-leaning environment will likely assume (in my experience) that someone calling out “wokeness” is part of the latter group, not the former."
But why would people who've read Scott's other writing on the subject also make that assumption? That's the part that seems unfair to me.
I'm more thinking in terms of outsiders hearing about Scott's work for the first time, seeing a post like this, and immediately being turned off, I guess.
This is unavoidable though. Any word used to describe a pernicious element understood to be on one side of the political spectrum will inevitably become a pejorative for that entire side. One could as easily dismiss criticism of white supremacy, on the personal experience (often so in my experience) that people using that phrase are often doing so disingenuously as a byword anything they disagree with, or criticism of socialism, if one sees the term often used as a byword for even moderately left of center economics. Anyone who insists on interpreting use of such words as indicative of being a bad actor has already removed themselves from the discourse, and probably isn't a fruitful target audience, since any new word one could come up with to describe 'liberal overreaction' (or actual white supremacy or socialism or what have you) will end up suffering the same fate and become overused as a broadly applicable pejorative. That's why IMO there's no substitute imo for seeking clarification, as opposed to just assuming a (often uncharitable) meaning, in the face of ambiguous language.
I certainly think his understanding is messed up, but it's more to do with the "anti" part than the "woke" part. He knows what it is, but he's not really anti-it.
I was also pretty disappointed with this post (I say this as a fan, not as someone to whom Scott owes anything). 'wokeness' is being used as a cultural identifier. The right way to deal with the aspects of the culture you don't like is to argue and fight against those (and probably in priority order), not against the culture in general. Fighting against the culture is fighting against individuals, when individuals are exactly who you are trying to persuade.
"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke". This seems hideously irrational to me. Just because some supporters of an idea do stupid combative things has nothing to do with whether the idea is true or not. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find any major idea that didn't have at least some stupid combative supporters. There may be ways to rescue this statement, and if there are, knowing Scott those might be insightful, but this post as it stands feels like a very superficial take.
I am extremely unlikely to be an ally in a fight against 'wokeness', where I might be an ally in e.g. a fight against censorship, so take on censorship not wokeness.
"'For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke'. This seems hideously irrational to me."
Scott is talking about his visceral response to stimuli. He's doing that honestly, in an attempt to determine the best strategic course of action in situations like this. He's pointing out the real human tendency to disagree with people who treat you poorly, or who act badly. He specifically talks about whether the proper strategy in these cases is to publicize bad behavior to evoke this negative response. I don't take it that he's proud of that emotional reaction, but he's not denying it exists either.
Imagine your most hated enemy did the thing you dislike the most, and did it obviously and egregiously. Would you have an emotional reaction to that? Would that reaction cause you to want to respond in some way? That's what Scott is talking about. Woke (or whatever term you want to use) overreach causes reactions. It's true, and it turns people away from the social justice movement. More to Scott's point, if social justice were 100% about identifying injustice and 0% "stupid and unnecessarily combative" it seems obvious to me that there would be more people in favor and less opposed to social justice. It wouldn't be everyone, but it would be a lot closer.
The "woke" can either learn to modulate their views to make them more palatable to a wider audience or deal with whatever negative reactions they provoke. Maybe they want to provoke those negative reactions and their strategy is working perfectly. Scott is correct in what he's saying, and I don't read a value judgement in that statement, just an understanding of how reality works.
Ok, on reading more carefully, I see you're right on this point - the argument is that being seen as combative and stupid diminishes support for your side, so you should avoid being seen as combative and stupid. I'm not convinced this advice generalises to every situation (maybe a resistance organisation during an occupation shouldn't take this advice), but it's probably true in the main.
That's a very concise conclusion; I like where this ended up. "being seen as combative and stupid diminishes support for your side." Can't wait to bust that one out at a party or family gathering.
This strikes me as an attempt to disrupt a growing coalition against a pretty clearly identifiable villainous force in our society. Fighting against intangible concepts like "censorship" isn't very effective politically, but fighting against "censors" themselves is actually feasible. We can't fight a behavior without holding the people doing that behavior accountable.
I'm trying as best I can to express my views and thoughts on the situation, in the hope of persuading others where I'm right and being persuaded where I'm wrong.
How doing that affects a coalition against a villainous force is not a frame I'd even considered until I read your comment, and while I suppose I need to think about it more, it seems on its face pretty paranoid and grandiose.
I might agree with the rest of your post if I knew a bit more about what you actually mean by holding accountable. I think that fighting effectively against censorship would best be done by fighting specific instances of censorship (ideally the ones that were most clearly bad rather than the difficult edge cases), and that probably would involve calling out specific individuals. It wouldn't involve trying to tag a disparate group of people with the label 'censor' and then trying to punish them for it.
"Just because some supporters of an idea do stupid combative things has nothing to do with whether the idea is true or not"
The problem is precisely that even if you accept the idea, the policy being proposed on the basis of this idea can be unbelievably stupid. Even if you think police brutality is a problem, "defund the police" is extremely dumb and harmful.
Is it? "Defund the police" is also a catch-all term for a lot of social policies. And it's not just a cover, too, I've seen a lot of people genuinely argue for the steelmanned "we shouldn't be giving the police huge budgets that go into buying surplus (or even brand new) military equipment, while letting social workers make do with scraps".
The US is one of the countries that spends the largest portions if its GDP on police. It's not extremely dumb and harmful to imagine some of that budget could be better allocated on other public services.
"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke". While this sentence absolutely sounds pretty stupid on the surface, I couldn't help empathizing with something about it. While not by any consciously intentional choice of mine, I'll be the first to admit I don't know very many people in protected/victimized classes generally seen as underdogs by the woke community with the few exceptions common to the rationalist community: eg. autistic people and trans-women. When someone suggests a seemingly unnecessary or regressive "woke" policy that may have some benefit for a particular group but at the usual cost of raising law-suits, taxes, regulation etc., I want to know how common the situation being addressed is. The _correct_ thing to do is lots of very careful statistics, but it seems it's never possible to do statistics carefully enough to be beyond reproach and even when you do there will always be problems with how your data was gathered. It's nice when Scott does the statistics for me and writes a blog post about them, but he can't do that for literally every woke claim anyone's ever made. The super duper _incorrect_ thing to do is to take anecdotal evidence from things you hear about happening on the news because news stories are biased towards reporting things which are newsworthy which generally means exactly the opposite of things which are commonplace and so which I care most about. In fact, the fact that there's a news story about a thing might even be evidence that I should update _away from_ believing that thing is commonplace. I often have very little anecdotal evidence (eg. When considering defunding the police, I want to know if police do more harm than good. In my personal experience, police have always been heroes doing unquestionable good. But I live in a low-racism area and don't know very many black people, so those cases that would supposedly be most helped by defunding the police aren't in my realm of experience) so when I _do_ here about something happening to someone I know personally, that actually kind of ends up being a big update for me.
I agree with DecipheredStones on this; it really felt like a lack of nuance in the discussion of George Floyd protests.
In addition, it felt to me that the whole post was written with the perspective that the highest priority for this anonymous academic was to fight against wokeness. If I were this person's colleague I'd be pretty pissed off; you give someone tenure in the hope that they will continue to contribute well to teaching and research, not use it as a platform for a personal crusade. I think this matters even if you buy the 'woeness us the ultimate enemy' perspective, as annoying all your colleagues is likely to make it harder to achieve your goals.
"You give someone tenure in the hope that they will continue to contribute well to teaching and research" is a talking point by the anti-woke, who hold that woke academia defected first and defected hard.
That's a good point; perhaps what we're missing is the context of where this person works. I've probably been implicitly assuming they work somewhere resembling the academic institutions with which I am familiar; but I can see the proposed approach being more reasonable if their institution is much more extreme.
“ the highest priority for this anonymous academic was to fight against wokeness”
That’s a really uncharitable take. The conversation was not “what is the most important priority as a tenured academic” this was “one particular academic came to me and asked how they can promote anti-wokeness effectively now that they didn’t have to fear so much for their livelihood that they suppressed their true beliefs”.
Maybe omitting 'it felt to me that' from your quote could also be seen as an uncharitable take?
But more seriously, the fact that the impact of the person's actions on their work and colleagues was (AFAIR) not discussed as a serious factor seemed a bit off to me. I agree that was not the question asked (at least as far as it was presented to us), but I think part of giving good advice is to discuss possible unforeseen/unintended side effects of proposed actions, even if not strictly relevant to the immediate goal under discussion.
I thought that the fact we were discussing your opinion/feeling of this academic’s priorities was pretty clear in both our statements. Your opinion/feeling is what I found uncharitable.
What about the unforeseen side effects of this person not speaking up? Clearly, they believe that their own ability to be honest about their beliefs has been suppressed to this point, and furthermore they believe that others with less “cover” are in the same boat and need an advocate.
I think there is an underlying assumption that the purpose of teaching and research has been damaged by one side pre-emptively excluding the other side from discussion. If having an academic opinion that's different from the rest of your colleagues is enough reason for you to not be able to speak, then the first order of priority must be to regain the ability to have discourse. If your department has taken a stance that specifically precludes you from sharing your opinion, there isn't much else that you can do. They are only permitting you to share their perspective, otherwise, which means you are doing no research or teaching of what you actually think is true.
When it was the liberal left that was excluded from having opinions in college, they also pushed for free speech and an opening of dialogue, and most of society generally agrees that was appropriate (in hindsight at least).
I think you need a bit of uncensored history. Social groups, including universities, have always put controls on what can be said. The degree and nature of those constraints changes from time to time. "Academic freedom" is never absolute. It needs to be relatively greater, but that's a different point. It also needs to be sufficiently constrained that it doesn't damage the institution providing it. Classes on atheism at a Catholic University need to be done very carefully.
I often think the constraints are unreasonable, but I'm quite aware that I don't know the entire context. (Also, it's been quite a long time since I was associated with a university.)
Does your local university support classes teaching the flat earth theory? If not, shouldn't that constraint be challenged? And the Bible clearly indicates that Pi == 3.
Not all opinions deserve to be heard. There's a real problem in deciding which should be allowed, but it's not a "yes or no" question.
When I have raised these kinds of opinions, people younger than me have said that things have changed a huge amount from the days I was in college. Their contention is that the limits on what's allowable on campus and in some workplaces has gotten quite a bit narrower, that the dominant ideology is more dominant than prior dominant ideologies (we can maybe name some exceptions to this -- McCarthyism, etc) and the consequences for not following it more costly. Declining tenure-track jobs and declining unionization rates in the rest of the economy fuel this insecurity because there are fewer job protections for someone who steps out of line.
It's also fueled by the country being more divided. And by "information silos", where people are fed curated opinions as if they were facts. I suspect that just about everything that consumes time and attention feeds into this tendency, as it leaves less thought available for other things.
That said, whenever people feel uncertain about their future, they tend to look for simple answers. And they don't want those answers questioned. And on-line posts are available for inspection by nearly anyone...including not only "human relations personnel", but folks trying to put the company/university into the news in a way the organization may not like.
So, yes, that's probably true. And now that you bring it up, expected. This is also to be expected when the population is aging, so that's another thing pushing in the same direction. But public perception of a University/Company can be very important in whether that organization even survives.
I don't know what the appropriate balance is. I'm thankful I've never needed to decide. But it may not be the same now as it was a decade ago.
I think the contention would be that we're well past the point where the constraints exclude positions on that are reasonable and relevant enough to warrant inclusion (or that the standard of reasonability applied to admitting ideas on the right into the Overton window is much more stringent that the standard for ideas on the left). I think that's a premise of this whole discussion. Obviously, to someone who believes conservative views marginalized in academia today are akin to flat-earth theory, well, the whole conversation is moot.
The issue here is that many academics on the left are explicitly turning their position into a vocal crusade to support a specific political point of view. There are increasingly changes in tenure and hiring requirements to have various litmus tests for political orientation and to support viewing activism alongside teaching and scholarship for hiring and promotion.
The extent to which this shift has happened already varies by school and department, but there are already major pushes to "decolonize" the hard sciences in the name of "equity" and such by pushing for less rigor and more of a focus on "addressing equity issues" in scholarship and teaching. See, for instance, requirements that scientific grant proposals address DEI issues or how academic journals are now running editorials soaked in DEI diction.
For perhaps the best encapsulation of recent efforts to fundamentally change the orientation away from teaching and research, see UMass-Boston's proposed recent change to its mission from a teaching/research institution to "an anti-racist and health-promoting public research institution" where "Diversity, equity, shared governance, and expansive notions of excellence are core institutional values" and "Climate, environmental, and racial justice align with sustainable economic and planning decisions." None of this language is unusual and it seems like the future direction for many institutions of higher education.
Unfortunately, we're in a figure-ground inversion situation where what you see as "ridiculous gestures" for me are the main event, and their scale and chilling effect on free speech and free thought is terrifying.
This is a more eloquent version of what I came here to say; yes, there's some overreach and some not-actually-helpful solutions being pushed here, but people are rightfully upset about police brutality and how awful (and ineffective) prisons are.
Yes, "decolonial mathematics" is ridiculous, but getting a wider range of voices and experiences in literature and history is not.
A real life example: when I was in high school in Eastern Canada in the early 2000s, my history textbook had literally a single page on pre-colonial history, in which a generic Native American was presented as a sort of state-of-nature being who crossed over from the Bering land bridge and anyway then white people showed up and that was great. A curious reader may at this point wonder what happened to said Native Americans afterwards, but they are never mentioned again.
That is bad! That's a bad education! More recently a more woke set of history teachers have come in and moved to recognise the specific groups that were in the region, their history (to the extent possible without written records), the ways in which they were nearly wiped out by disease, displacement, and violence, and the continuing complexity of making our current society work in view of continued poverty on reservations and the scarring effects of residential schools.
When we argue against wokeness, we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater; there have been some important wins.
“ yes, there's some overreach and some not-actually-helpful solutions being pushed here, but people are rightfully upset about police brutality and how awful (and ineffective) prisons are.
Yes, "decolonial mathematics" is ridiculous, but getting a wider range of voices and experiences in literature and history is not.”
This is the motte-and-bailey. The motte is “a wider range of voices”, the bailey is “math is racist, objectivity is white supremacy…. and we need to cancel the hell out of anyone who doesn’t toe our line on that because disagreement is violence that makes LGBTQ+ POCs unsafe”.
I don’t get the impression that either Scott or his interlocutor are opposed to the motte position.
One person's motte and bailey is another's Weak Men are Superweapons. It's important to be able to object to the more egregious versions without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and tarring with too broad a brush.
Being thoughtful and explicit in making that kind of distinction seems to me a hugely important part of the way forward, which is why it seems unhelpful to me to talk about strategy at the generic level of "fighting wokeness" as a general ambition. People right now mean too many different things when they say "wokeness is bad, let's fight wokeness" and that imprecision I think matters a lot when it comes to plotting strategy.
Michael's comment just below is a good example of a very broad interpretation of wokeness that carries many implications for people who inhabit what's being called the motte position above.
Joe's comments above are another example in the sense of someone who feels that our shared understanding of what's motte and what's bailey is so obviously settled that there's no need to even talk about it.
Scott's post seems to come at the question of "what can I do about wokeness now that I have tenure?" at a level of abstraction that is so general that it also doesn't clarify what's motte and what's bailey nor that it would help people clarify what might be priorities in a strategy aimed at changing current condtions.
Motte and bailey (I don't like that term - surely it should be keep and bailey - you retreat to the keep not the motte) doesn't really apply here. You're not talking to someone who is saying decolonial mathematics is good, and then when it's attacked, retreating to the position of 'wider range of voices'. You're talking to someone who believes 'wider range of voices' is a win and an example of something 'wokeness' has achieved that is positive for society. They are explicitly saying that they don't think 'decolonial mathematics' is a good thing. I expect that I could take any position of yours or anyone else's, construct a ridiculous 'bailey' around it (or find someone already arguing for such a thing), and then accuse you of motte-and-bailey. It wouldn't be fair.
The whole issue here is lumping everything together as 'wokeness' when the term isn't clearly defined, and according to a lot of people includes a lot of good stuff, even if there are extremists who go too far. Well, extremists always go too far, but fighting against 'wokeness' is going to place you against all those people who think wokeness has achieved good stuff. Fighting against 'decolonial mathematics' would be a much better option, because you'll gain support from people who otherwise might seem 'woke'.
I think the narrative that "yeah, a few crazies are talking about decolonizing math, but most of us actually just want reasonable change" is disingenuous given the outsized influence that concepts on the level of "decolonizing math" have within extremely influential institutions. Universities, government agencies, media companies, and tech platforms all have a tremendously disproportionate amount of these extremists. So I don't think the focus on them is undue.
I think you're probably overweighting a really quite small number of voices which use outrage to get free amplification, but it's an empirical matter and I accept I may be wrong. I don't think it makes a tonne of difference to what the right strategy should be.
Unless we're talking about a truly extreme split like 98% 'crazies' and 2% 'reasonable change', then the strategy of trying to split the 'crazies' from the 'reasonable change' group by exploiting the differences of opinion on key topics should still have a significant effect.
Anything that persists in lumping it all together and attacking 'wokeness' as an identity means that you're solidifying the group. People say that it was really the USA invasion in 1812 that created the Canadian national identity.
That hasn't been my experience, but I don't have anything like a comprehensive view on any data on it.
Serious question: What do you propose I call my position outlined above? I read the Freddie de Boer post on the topic and was admittedly somewhat surprised by it (but I'm not familiar with the American context); I know quite a few people who are comfortable describing that set of beliefs as woke, and although I'm a relative 'moderate' on the scale, I wouldn't be offended if someone called me 'woke'; I wouldn't immediately assume they were implying that I thought physics was a tool of the patriarchy.
"the outsized influence that concepts on the level of "decolonizing math" have within extremely influential institutions"
Can you source that claim? I haven't heard any reports of schools switching to a "decolonizing math" curriculum on any serious scale, just anecdotes.
I *have* heard reports of laws being passed in conservative US states being passed to ban "critical theory", with the implicit goal being to discourage talking about slavery or segregation in history classes.
With the example of Canada, the motte is "we need to teach Canadians a better version of their country's history" and the bailey is "we teach a version of history that casts indigenous peoples as helpless victims and inculcates a sense of guilt and shame in old stock white Canadians in order to facilitate a transfer of resources from the latter to the former."
Do you think any significant number of people would actually assent to that second statement as you have presented it, or are you strawmanning a more nuanced position?
People would probably not assent to it because he phrased it in a negative way, but a lot of people probably would assent to something that used more positive vocabulary but was substantively the same.
Then the charitable thing to do is to try to understand why they think the positive vocabulary version is different to the negative vocabulary version. Maybe they're being irrational, or maybe they do have some kind of answer.
I don't expect people who part of the woke coalition to agree, no. In their conception, this is simply social justice, fairness, a desirable end or outcome, etc. But is that not at least part of the expected outcome? Are guilt, shame, and reparations not part of the plan? Consider the following:
In the “Act” section of the training program, AT&T encourages employees to participate in a “21-Day Racial Equity Habit Challenge” that relies on the concepts of “whiteness,” “white privilege,” and “white supremacy.” The program instructs AT&T employees to “do one action [per day for 21 days] to further [their] understanding of power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity.” The challenge begins with a series of lessons on “whiteness,” which claims, among other things, that “white supremacy [is] baked into our country’s foundation,” that “Whiteness is one of the biggest and most long-running scams ever perpetrated,” and that the “weaponization of whiteness” creates a “constant barrage of harm” for minorities. The 21-Day Challenge also directs employees to articles and videos promoting fashionable left-wing causes, including “reparations,” “defund police,” and “trans activism,”
"Are guilt, shame, and reparations not part of the plan? "
No, no, and yes.
At least in my DEI trainings, there's never any shame or guilt applied. Understanding white privilege (or male privilege) or whatever is about better understanding the world and better understanding the lives of people who are different from us. It's not about making people feel bad, just more aware of things that are otherwise outside their bubble.
I think you are mischaracterizing the bailey. Having been shunted through sjw institution after sjw institution for my entire life, not a single teacher was interested in making me guilty/ashamed as a way to motivate reparations. They certainly painted indigenous people as victims, but hey, they don't have to try very hard because their case is very plausible (see: The Clearing of the Plains). And sjws don't think in terms like "old stock Canadians" -- old stock Canadians do.
Your description doesn't mention race at all. And that's reasonable in one sense -- there's not the least skerrick of evidence that George Floyd's race was a factor in what happened to him.
And yet the conversation around it became immediately and irrevocably racialised. If it had been a cultural moment about police brutality, then reasonable people couldn't possibly have objected. But it became a cultural moment about police brutality against black people and black people and only black people, to the point where somehow "all lives matter" was described as a white supremacist slogan. 2020 was a crazy time.
And I think this is what "wokeness" is about -- turning every issue, no matter how sensible, into an opportunity for some kind of race war or similar. Individuals don't matter, only the war between Designated Oppressor Groups and Designated Oppressed Groups.
Wokeness isn't about race, it's about collectivism. And in that sense it's just the latest rebranding of collectivism, which has been known by so many names.
Why - well, literally everyone I know who is woke is also a feminist, and believes just as strongly that women are an oppressed minority as much as black people are. And I'm sure if I bothered to probe I'd discover a whole bunch of other groups they think are oppressed. Probably it's just whoever isn't a straight white man. By default, that is, but it's just a default and now it's Ukrainians even though that's a bunch of white people who are .. um .. not exactly famous for their love of gay rights. But it's an oppressed group so the woke are now totally focused on Ukrainians=awesome, Russians=evil even though there's no racial component to that, they're both groups of white Christians more or less.
Th one thing that remains consistent is their refusal to reason in terms of individuals. People are not their own minds but rather ants who belong to whatever quasi-arbitrary group they got dumped into today. The reason "all lives matter" was so inflammatory to collectivists, the reason it caused such massive meltdowns, is that it's a literal and direct repudiation of their most deepest ideological commitment. It's a statement that you need to consider the individual when making judgements and not try to sort society into ranked groups. Which they cannot handle, largely I think because that makes virtue signalling impossible (saying "I support John Smith" is worthless if nobody knows who John Smith is), and the need to virtue signal is perhaps an inherent part of human nature. In the past it was done by wearing cross necklaces and turning up to church on Sunday, saying "praise be" and so on. Today it's done by tweeting about how much you support group X.
Long term the solution to wokeness, feminism, racism, communism, Islamism, piousness and so on is individualism. Only when people focus on the unique properties of the people they actually know, and only when people are comfortable with their own morality, does the need to constantly associate with "oppressed" groups go away.
Michael, it sounds to me like you are dismissing the impact that systems can have on individuals. Ignoring for a moment the completely irrelevant mention of Ukraine. If a system produces racially skewed results saying "it's just the choices individuals made" is completely ignoring the possibility of a flawed system. If a flawed system did exist, hyperfocusing on individualism would not be able to fix it. We can observe that different groups of people have different distributions of outcomes in a way that does not seem due to the inherent characteristics of each of the groups, this suggests some other factor (systems) ought to be changed to be more equitable.
Your aside about Ukraine is ridiculous; people support Ukraine because an autocracy (Russia) decided to invade a sovereign democracy on a whim. Most people are against needless wars, and Russia is the obvious aggressor, so people support Ukraine's effort to not be annexed. Attempting to frame this as "white people vs white people why do people think it's oppression" is ignoring everything important about the conflict.
"We can observe that different groups of people have different distributions of outcomes in a way that does not seem due to the inherent characteristics of each of the groups, this suggests some other factor (systems) ought to be changed to be more equitable."
What makes you think that if it's not due to the inherent characteristics of a group, then it must be due to "systems"? Don't groups have other non-inherent characteristics?
I'd also challenge the assumption that inequitable outcomes should inherently be challenged.
"University of Chicago students circulating a letter calling for the cancellation of John Mearsheimer over “Putinism,” “anti-Ukrainian ideology,” and spreading Russian disinformation like that there was a coup in 2014 and it included fascists."
You can swap the words Putinism, Ukrainian, Russian and the date in that tweet for all kinds of different topics in recent years. Not a month goes by without college students trying to cancel people for something they said years ago about some new battle between two groups, identified as oppressed and oppressors.
My point is not to pass judgement on all these running battles over speech and western norms. My point is to say that linking them together is not irrelevant, that in fact, these are all different facets of the same underlying ideology.
"Why - well, literally everyone I know who is woke is also a feminist, and believes just as strongly that women are an oppressed minority as much as black people are."
Does literally no one you know who is woke, know how to count? Women cannot be an "oppressed minority", because women are the majority.
Which is to say, there's a tendency among a certain segment of the population that I'll get yelled at if I try to apply any name to, to try and shoehorn every possible cause into a single simplistic narrative - "[X] is an Oppressed Minority; all of the power structures of our society were historically established by the White Male Majority to oppress [X], and it is now imperative that we remodel society to rectify this injustice". And that never really fits if you look at it closely enough, but even when it is trivially obvious by googling the numbers that it doesn't fit, never mind the facts, women are an "oppressed minority".
Also, words mean whatever the Woke chose them to mean, and can mean many different things as required. The question, as Humpty Dumpty properly noted, is who is to be master - that's all.
Your point about numeration is reasonable, but if what's being counted is the ability to exert power...
Actually, even there a small group of women exert an unreasonable amount of power. But they usually delegate the control of that power to a white male.
HOWEVER
When most folks (in the US) are observing the power structures around them, they notice that most of that power is exerted by white men. Minority is inappropriate to use to designate women, but it was, I think, chosen by analogy to various other oppressed groups, who numerically are minorities. (Everyone is a minority if you divide things properly. E.g. white women are less than half the population. Being a stickler over definitions isn't too helpful here.)
Now if you want to claim that women aren't oppressed, then you would be making a real claim...though one that's hard to defend. It would be much easier to defend that this is biologically inherent.
Why is it hard to defend? One can argue that everyone is oppressed in one way or another, but I assume that the relevant claims is that women are more oppressed than men.
Measuring how well off people are is hard, since there are lots of relevant variables, and many women are married to men and pooling income. But one obvious measure is how long people live and women live significantly longer than men.
I think you're wrong about the "all lives matter" thing. "Black Lives Matter" means "black lives matter *as well* and black people are being killed significantly more often than white people so can we do something about it" not "*only* black lives matter". "All Lives Matter" was the response of people didn't want to engage with the actual meaning of "Black Lives Matter", and some of the people saying it were definitely white supremacists.
"Defund the Police" was a dumb slogan from the start, there's a lot of dumb wokeness about, but "Black Lives Matter" is fine.
But no, African Americans aren't being killed more often, and to a first approximation, the outrage machine doesn't care when Caucasians die at the hands of police.
BLM explicitly focuses on deaths of African Americans, and doesn't care about injustices in general. It is a racially motivated power play.
I can't speak for the outrage machine but it seems that if you are black you are *more likely* to be killed by the police (in the United States), and that is something to be concerned about.
Is every death at the hands of police unjustified? Should police never use lethal force? Legitimate question here, because if they sometimes should, then merely discussing the per capita rate of death at hands of police is woefully under specified. Surely we should be looking at unjustified deaths at the hands of police.
Going simply by those sorts of numbers also shows how sexist the police are, as they kill (and arrest) men at a rate far exceeding the population share of men in the country. If police weren't so sexist, they wouldn't single out men for law enforcement actions.
In the US, African Americans commit violent crimes at a rate far in excess of other racial groups, even when accounting for poverty. This difference drives differences in police encounters, some of which go bad. Which is a tragedy, but the lives of the people murdered by common criminals and thugs also matter - not just those of the criminals and thugs.
That's what All Lives Matter means to me - that we don't dismiss a death because of race or criminal activity, but we don't ignore that living in a crime ridden neighborhood hurts people more than cops do.
I think it's quite possible to want both less violent crime and less killing of people by police; it's not one or the other. The problem with "All Lives Matter" is that everyone who isn't nuts already agrees with it; it's a slogan that gets used to change the topic.
I don't know what to do about black people being disproportionately involved in violent crime; I don't think looting the Apple store is a good response to George Floyd's murder either. I'm not convinced institutional racism is as prevalent as many claim it is. There's a whole gordian knot here to unpick, but "All Lives Matter" is a disingenuous response.
I'll be that guy in this instance. That 12% of the population is 24% of the deaths by police shooting but ~50% of the murderers and way above 24% for all the other violent crimes. The entire disparity in shootings can probably be explained by disparity in criminality. And the racial disparities in arrests for violent crimes almost perfectly mirror the racial disparities in offenders reported by victims in the National Crime Victimization Survey, so it's actual criminality and not just police bias.
Though BLM focused on the deaths of African-Americans, I think if you talked to the protesters themselves, most would agree that "injustice in general" is also bad.
Similarly, if you went to a 5k walk to raise money to cure Alzheimer's or whatever, sure the walk itself focuses on Alzheimer's, but most participants would agree that diseases in general are bad.
If I said "fuck cancer", and someone else was like "that's a ridiculous thing to say - fuck ALL diseases", I would ... be confused.
Similarly, imagine some people went to protest the silencing of conservative voices on collage campuses, with a slogan like "conservative voices matter". You could argue that it was a strategic mistake of them to focus on conservative voices rather than censorship in general, but I don't think it would be fair to hold that against them too much. They're highlighting a perceived real trend/problem, which is that conservative voices are disproportionately discriminated against in college settings (I don't know if that's true or not, but if the protesters think it's true then they *should* protest). Plus, I'm sure many of those same students probably *do* care about censorship in general and maybe have even attended generic protests against censorship.
I suspect the *real* point of disagreement here is whether black people are discriminated against by the police/justice system in general. But even if they *aren't*, I really don't see why that means the protesters are acting in bad faith. If they believe in that premise, then why shouldn't they protest it? And since they're protesting racial discrimination (much like the college protesters above would be protesting political discrimination), it makes sense to make it about race. And I'm sure many BLM protesters *have* attended generic anti-police-brutality protests, etc.
In short, I'm not sure how you conclude that the protests must be "a racially motivated power play", unless via your factual disagreement with the idea that the police/justice system discriminate against black people. But even if you end up to be right on that factual front, I *still* don't see how that proves the protesters are acting in bad faith.
You are right that people can have different priorities for action, and that having one focus doesn't mean that other priorities are somehow wrong headed. But that's not what BLM protesters, supporters, and common man-in-the-conference room said and did - the BLM line was that the only victim group worthy of mention was African Americans, and that to disagree wasn't just having a different focus, but being oppressive, racist and evil ones ownself - for pointing out that other people were also suffering.
Lee Fang interviewed a black man participating in a BLM march who said that ALL black lives matter, including relatives of his who had been shot by civilian criminals. For this "platforming" Lee was accused of racism.
Our funding for diseases is also skewed. Massive amounts of money for breast cancer & AIDS relative to other diseases that kill lots of people (which is partly explainable via many deaths occurring among the elderly that we don't think of as great tragedies, and other diseases being associated with bad lifestyle choices although AIDS is exempt). Funding is skewed in favor of women over men. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/government-medical-research-spending-favors-women.html
> black people are being killed significantly more often than white people
They aren't. From 2015 to April 2021, almost twice as many whites (2884) as blacks (1497) were fatally shot by police. They are killed more proportionally, but that is not the assertion made.
You could also try to look at the numbers and see just how many were unarmed and not attacking officers or a member of the public. Let me know what you find.
Fair point; I should have said 'proportionally more', which is what I was getting at. Looking at unarmed vs armed is a bit beyond a lunchtime Google search whilst catching up on blogs, so I'll pass on that for now, but it is a good point.
The reason he suggested that is if you exclude people who are armed or attacking officers, the US numbers drop to something that on the scale of a country is miniscule - in the dozens, iirc, not thousands or tens of thousands.
There have been many reports, some of which have been essentially proven true, of police fabricating evidence that a victim of their violence was threatening them, or even that they had a gun or knife. So I wouldn't trust the statistics. CYA is a long tradition, and not just among police. Lying to do so is less common, but still not unusual.
I'm sure it does happen. I'm sure most of us would stretch the truth somewhat if we'd just made a major screw-up and were faced with serious consequences.
But does it happen more often in cases involving one race than another?
Murder is probably the best recorded crime and murder is mostly intraracial, so race of victims may be the closest we have to an objective measure of how violent crime rates vary with race.
There was a definite messaging breakdown. "Black Lives Matter Too" could have solved the issue, and then only the actual white supremacists would have been saying "all lives matter." As it was, there was a significant number of people who misheard/misunderstood the BLM message. I am not sure that the misunderstanding was not intentional (on both sides), or that many preferred the fight and ability to write off anyone who said "all lives matter" rather than trying to solve the misunderstanding.
The problem with "Black Lives Matter Too" is that it's not a three-word slogan; the only four-word slogan with traction is "Make America Great Again" and that's a definite outlier. "Yes We Can" and "Take Back Control"; that's the kind of thing you want. It's like band names. (See also http://brexfest.eu)
That seems like a silly reason to allow a major misunderstanding to persist. I think it much more logical that people on both sides were happy to let the misunderstanding continue in order to advance their position. You even wrote that the BLM position is "Black Lives Matter *As Well*" which clearly takes more than three words. You were speaking for clarity, so I suspect you are aware of that nuance and the need for it.
When "BLM" first became a slogan, I heard a lot of truly genuine confusion about why it was specific and not general. The resulting "[No, or Not just, but] All Lives Matter" was seen as a genuine statement of a more correct stance. The fear was that the statement "BLM" was meant to be exclusionary. It's not hard to find a few scattered examples where that would be true, which some very disreputable people were happy to share around. So we have some confusion, the best way to handle would be to do what you did, clarify that you mean "As well" and solve the problem.
The actual reaction was to denounce anyone saying anything different as a white supremacist and thoroughly destroying what remaining discourse was possible. There were two times where the BLM side could have ended the confusion, one of which I don't believe was of any fault (the first slogan, which I agree was shorter to make it more slogan-friendly). The second chance, where they seek to clarify their stance in the face of opposition, was a missed opportunity. I'm not sure I assign blame to most who did it, who probably also felt genuinely threatened by someone taking what (in their mind) was a perfectly reasonable statement about their lives *also* mattering and rejecting it by interposing their own statement in its place.
Or they could have gone with "End Police Brutality", which would be three words and wouldn't be racially divisive. It would be something that pretty much everyone can agree on.
But an "end police brutality" protest movement would have got a modest turnout, some approving nods from everyone, and then vanished after a weekend. If you want a _major_ protest movement then you need to start a race war.
The phrase "Black Lives Matter" does not actually imply that any other life matters, whereas "All Lives Matter" must include black lives (and thus, as Bryan Caplan said in a post I can no longer find, people who say the latter should also say the former). That being said, if people in authority were actually looking at a metric of the expected lifespan of African-Americans that would be closer to utilitarianism/consequentialism than what we have now, where lots of people can die from all sorts of causes and nobody does much about it.
There is a very large body of evidence that police misconduct and subsequent impunity disproportionately affects black Americans and because of that, individual instances of police misconduct directed at black Americans can very quickly be seen in terms of symbolism for the greater societal problem. Floyd resulted in an explosion of protest related to this.
"Black Lives Matter" is a slogan meant to express that black American's lives have value and are deserving of basic respect and is primarily used as a slogan to criticize racial discriminations against blacks, especially as it relates to criminal justice issues. Retorting "all lives matter" in practice and usually in intent is an effort to dismiss concerns about societal racial discrimination and redirect attention away from it. It was a favored slogan by racists and people using it shouldn't be surprised when people raise their eyebrows at the people they are associating with by choice.
This is a great example of how "wokeness" just ends up being, "positions on any cultural issue, especially as it relates to identity, I personally dislike." Here "wokeness" includes seeing the murder of George Floyd in a racial context.
Any serious attempt to deal with the genuine problem of dysfunctional "woke" ideology has to deal with the fact that a lot of people are trying to create a better world, and you don't _want_ to push back against that - you want to push the discourse sideways, so that that effort is directed in a healthier way.
"
So to me the big problem with wokeness or whatever we want to call it, is that they specifically resist this. Any attempt to disagree on the means is shouted down as a disagreement on the ends; disagreements about solutions are portrayed as disagreements about the existence of problems; challenging their narrative at all from start to finish just gets you labeled as a big racist enemy.
There is certainly a lot of this shouting down going on, and maybe this is what's best referred to as "wokeness" -- but we might as easily call it epistemic closure or "splitting" as we like to say in psychology, and it shows up in various forms in the whole history of all social movements. I think there's a case to be made that we're experiencing it at somewhat historically unusual levels (though not unique across all of history).
At the same time, out in the real world, at school board meetings and on campuses and in workplaces there are more substantial conversations happening sometimes too. If this textbook is unacceptable, what one shall we use? Is this yoga class in fact reducible to cultural appropriation or can we explore anyone else's cultural practices with respect? Are we renaming our school/bridge/building and if so, why and to what? All those practical negotiations are happening also. They are contentious but that's the way it works.
In schools around here, teachers and school administrators for months have been receiving death threats for upholding state-mandated mask requirements (now in the process of being lifted). It seems like actors on all sides are capable of counterproductive epistemic closure but that we lose a lot of analytical capacity if we reduce efforts for change to nothing more than shouting people down.
Many aspects of wokeness are vaguely defined in rhetoric. It's only you get down to allocating budgets and HR decisions that you start to see what they mean in practice, which are often blatantly biased, ineffective or even counter-productive at achieving their stated goals, and a waste of money for everyone but the ever-expanding DEI staff. But any opposition or criticism of them marks you with suspicion and immediately devalues any of your ideas (both then and in later discussions).
It's also just giving up a ton of ground if you admit this, and in admitting it you are reinforcing something that's an objective, obvious lie. They don't improve shit, or even try to; they go around bashing heads, taking power, and hurting outgroups. Why is this the one place we feel like we should swallow clearly false marketing slogans?
I largely agree with this, but I also think there is a performative dimension, and further that the performance is often calibrated -- consciously or subconsciously -- to *avoid* change, by spamming the conversation with professions of supporting change.
I know plenty of people on the left who were involved with meaningful, concrete social justice work for many years before 2020. I did some of this work too, in fits and starts. But the conversation and norms really did shift in 2020. People who had blocked efforts at work to address equity and discrimination concerns suddenly embraced them emphatically, at least on the surface; but the actual forms of this work were implemented in thin ways that steered attention away from what people in their organization had been trying to change.
I can't find the reference now, but I was struck by a particular example: a female professor whose conversation with another professor got unexpectedly spread online, because she said that Black students in her classes seemed to struggle more. I imagine there are huge numbers of progressives, of all races, who agree that that is an unfortunate and unjust trend, and believe it is caused by systemic racism denying those students an empowering education before college. But they do agree that it is a real phenomenon, and in fact that denying it would paper over the depth of racism and the need for change.
But you can guess what actually happened: this professor was pilloried, almost no progressives spoke up to say they agreed with her (Matt Yglesias was a prominent exception), and in general a woke performance of outrage not only prevailed but completely steamrolled any conversation about actual reform in racial justice to invest more fairly and effectively in Black students. IIRC, the professor was suspended.
In fact, I'd go even farther, and say that it's *because* what this professor said made so much sense that the professions of outrage were so emphatic. An edge case that you declare your loyalty against is more powerful than an obvious case. This echoes what Scott has written about edge cases going viral.
So even though I'm well to the left of Scott and also find the use of "woke" as a sweeping term obnoxious, I agree that there is a gap, in reality, between those whose positions and work involve left-oriented social justice critique, and an illusory consensus machine that finds shaky hot-button cases and makes them into absolutist shibboleths.
On the contrary, I’m pretty sure Scott is using wokeness deliberately to exclude what might be called “liberal Social Justice” from this particular discussion. Not all Social Justice is “woke”, so that’s why Scott says “woke” here.
But DEI initiatives are things that are done by conservative bureaucratic organizations, while cancel culture is something that is done by radical populist mobs. And "critical race studies" is something that is done by academics in theoretical positions. There is relatively little overlap among these things, even though the presence of one often feeds into the other.
Just as with the original "political correctness" wars of the '90s, where "anti-PC" just became its own form of political correctness that lumped together a million disparate things, it seems to me that anti-wokeness is just about creating its own kind of wokeness, where you prepare anti-DEI initiatives and defund certain institutions and raise cancellation mobs against the woke, and doesn't actually do anything useful when you consider it as a unified movement.
I agree with this take. It's worth remembering that the US really does have a long history of racism and overt racial discrimination. Jim Crow laws were only abolished 58 years ago! There are still lots of people alive today who were legally banned from accessing quality schools, good places to live, and the opportunity to vote in elections (among much more) because of the color of their skin. Of course that's going to have long-lasting impacts. And what of their kids? And grandkids? What of the 157 congresspeople who voted against the Civil Rights Act, did they stop holding racist views in their personal lives as soon as the act passed? And what of the voters who elected those congresspeople, did they stop supporting racism just because of the law?
I think there are specific places where the modern "woke" movement gets stuff wrong, and it's useful to try and push back against that. But most "anti-woke" people seem to end up forgetting the part where racism is bad actually. I think that's especially likely to be a problem with berserker strategy. If you start picking lots of big public fights with "woke" people, even if those fights are on specific issues where the "woke" position is probably counterproductive to the movement's goals, you'll end up with lots of people on the left saying "wow this guy is kind of a jerk" and lots of people on the right fawning over you. I think it's easy then to get pulled into an increasingly right-wing echo chamber.
I think there are a few examples of people who've taken publicly "anti-woke" positions while not forgetting that racism is bad. Matthew Yglesias and German Lopez are two that come to mind. I think it's worth reading their work and understanding how they position themselves.
And that doesn’t even begin to account for the impacts of continued prejudice and discrimination. I think the literature here is harder to make sense of, which is why I’m focusing on it less, but if within many people’s lifetimes there was a clear corps of politicians and voters who eagerly supported laws that denied people legal rights based on the color of their skin, it seems obvious that discrimination didn’t just end when those laws were removed.
My overall point is that racism isn’t a problem of 58 years ago, it’s a problem that meaningfully impacts a lot of people’s lives today, even in the absence of explicit legal discrimination. Focusing on “wokeness” as bad neglects the fact that “woke” beliefs are trying to respond to a serious problem. To be an effective critic rather than a pure culture warrior, one needs to acknowledge the problem that the “woke” movement is trying to respond to and be able to seriously engage with it.
Thanks for the reply. It sounds like we're actually not that far apart from one another, just disagreeing on appropriate terminology. To me, it seems natural to include disparities that exist as a result of historical discrimination under the overall umbrella of racism (or if you want to get specific, call it structural racism), but the choice of terminology seems less important than just the recognition that those disparities are important.
To get back to Scott's post (and to my original reply), I think that many people get so caught up in criticizing "wokeness" that they lose track of the real-world issues that "woke" people are responding to. Regardless of your exact terminology, racial discrimination has negatively impacted the lives of lots of people in the US and there's a big difference between thinking that certain "woke" tactics and priorities aren't the best way to address them and thinking they aren't there entirely. Scott's post comes across if he's in the second camp, and that's why I think it's worth having this discussion.
"To get back to Scott's post (and to my original reply), I think that many people get so caught up in criticizing "wokeness" that they lose track of the real-world issues that "woke" people are responding to. "
Wokeists think george floyd dying is a bigger issues than the 5000 or so white people murdered by black people over the past decade.
FURTHERMORE, wokeists are flat WRONG about most of their claims. For example. thinking that black people are disproportionately killed by police. They're not. Once you control for the relevant factors like violent crime rate and rates of violence against police, they're not overrepresented at all. But wokeists think referring to this data is an act of unspeakably evil racism.
And wokeists aren't just people trying to make the world better in good faith. They're explicitly racially hateful. They talk about white people in a way they would be considered horrendous if white people talked about black people in that way.
One thing that would probably do a lot to reassure people on the anti-woke side is if people on the woke side were to support, and indeed help to fund, research into how much of the outcome disparities are due to environmental factors and how much are due to genetic differences between the relevant groups. If we did that, we'd have a much better handle on what sort of social interventions can be expected to work, and what the likely limits on their effectiveness are. But in reality, people on the woke side almost invariably try to prevent such research from being carried out, and try to paint researchers as evil for even being willing to consider the possibility that some of the disparity could have a genetic cause.
"These and other stats show massive gaps in outcomes between black and white Americans that greatly impact a large number of people’s lives."
You CANNOT just assume this is a result of "racism". These differences are perfectly explainable as a result of primarily heritable factors. The idea that black people commit vast amounts of crime due to 'poverty' or any other social factor has zero evidence.
" For example, having less money (and historical overt housing discrimination) means being forced to live in less desirable and more polluted neighborhoods"
They're less desirable BECAUSE of black people. Look at detroit. Once a great city, and then gradually decayed as it became more diverse. Same as any other diverse inner city area. There's no evidence that "bad neighborhoods" exist independently of the people living there.
I agree, though it's instructive to look at the way that Yglesias is now seen as semi-cancelled on the left for his heterodoxy and mildly combative social media tone. I'm active with a YIMBY group and recommended Yglesias's "The Rent Is Too Damn High" ebook (it's what began to convince me of the YIMBY cause), but was told -- understandably -- that Yglesias's reputation meant that choosing to read him would court unnecessary controversy.
Yeah I agree with all that. Yglesias still thinking that racism and prejudice are bad hasn't protected him from controversy, but it's the right thing to do and he's done it better than most run of the mill "anti-woke" commentators.
Equating "woke policies and actions are harmful, insulting, and counter productive" and "racism is cool and more people should do it" is an example of how woke does things very very wrong. Basic racial stereotyping and bigotry are bad actions, but they are nowhere as pervasive nor corrosive in modern society as the woke crowd would like everyone to believe. Continually heartening back to the 50 yo actions of other people (most of whom are dead) in order to justify hysteria and bias against other people *today* is wrong, and should not be tolerated, much less encouraged.
My response to trebuchet's comment basically also covers what I'd say here. I think the "woke" movement is responding to big differences in outcomes between black and white Americans are clearly influenced by the long history of racial discrimination in this country. The difference between being a right-wing culture warrior and being an effective critic of the places where "woke" people may be getting stuff wrong is in meaningfully engaging with that history and reality.
I agree that historical events can have lingering effects, and we need to keep that in mind. However, 'influenced by' and 'primarily caused by' are not the same thing and both justice and factual integrity are disservice by pretending that they are. Furthermore, 'meaningfully engaging with' history does not - and must not - mean punishment and rights infringement of people living to day, particularly when that infringement is conducted in order to benefit or enrich other modern people who have not been subject to any significant additional obstacles in comparison to the general population. In other words, if the child of two college graduate parents is admitted or promoted over the child of a single working class mother on the basis of race, that is injustice and wrong. Continued calls for 'righting past wrongs' have already taken on both the appearance and effect of revenge against...well, anyone who can be blamed for anything, rather than making whole previous damages. This needs to stop, as it is the opposite of helping fix anything.
"I think the "woke" movement is responding to big differences in outcomes between black and white Americans are clearly influenced by the long history of racial discrimination in this country."
You're just ASSUMING that, and a big problem with the woke is that they are 100%, absolutely opposed to anyone attempting to show that this is not the case. They literally believe research into the objectively true heritable differences in behavior and cognition between racial populations should be banned.
Their tactics aren't just wrong, their beliefs are. And they're more hateful than right wingers are by a country mile.
I think it seems wildly uncharitable to assume that everyone who opposed that particular piece of legislation held racist views. I mean, I'd oppose legislation authorizing the use of force against "woke" practices, but that doesn't mean I hold "woke" views in my personal life.
"There are still lots of people alive today who were legally banned from accessing quality schools,"
"good quality schools" is a total myth. Sending black kids to "good schools" has done nothing to improve scores. It has made a lot of high performing schools stop being so high performing. School voucher lottery programs show that there's little evidence of "good schools" existing independent of the students who go there.
" good places to live,"
Again, this idea that there are "good places to live" independent of the people living there is completely wrong headed. After jim crow ended. millions of blacks moved to "good" places, and they quickly stopped being good places.
"I think there are specific places where the modern "woke" movement gets stuff wrong, and it's useful to try and push back against that. But most "anti-woke" people seem to end up forgetting the part where racism is bad actually. "
Jim crow existed because of and only because of black behavior. White people did not want their cities ruined by the extremely high rates of crime and anti-social behavior of black people. What happened after jim crow ended? Numerous cities were ruined by crime and anti-social behavior from black people. This is in large part why there was so much movement to the suburbs, because inner cities became unsafe and unpleasant places to live. Nobody should have to be alright with this.
"I think there are a few examples of people who've taken publicly "anti-woke" positions while not forgetting that racism is bad. "
It would help if you would even make a token effort at defining what """racism""" is, because its really become a meaningless word used as a catch-all bludgeon against anyone who doesn't support essentially black-nationalist viewpoints.
But please, PLEASE tell me why I am obligated to care about people supposedly, what, having anti-black view? Black people murder around 500 white people every year (which is around 10 times higher per capita than vice versa), and the majority of interracial assault, rape and robbery is black on white. I'm supposed to support "Black lives matter" when black people literally have no problem with outrageously ghigh rates of black on white violence?
> Jim crow existed because of and only because of black behavior.
Alternate hypothesis: Jim Crow existed because of whatever cultural factors led to white people seeing chattel slavery as a virtuous thing to enforce.
Like, if people A are enslaving people B for centuries, it's not too far-fetched to assume that most of people A are racist against people B. This should really, really be obvious.
Some people are trying to create a better world and of course any decent person supports that, but while the Black Panthers created a breakfast program for kids, the “new woke” is extremely performative around what words people use and how they present themselves, and what they put on their social media accounts.
“Woke” —even if it includes the occasional demonstration of marching in the streets— is almost completely divorced from follow-up and follow-through: the pursuit of actual justice, fairness, improving the world, things like ….cleaning the water in Flint; or making sure everyone has health care a good education and a wage they can survive on; or making sure that women don’t get penalized in their careers for having children; or making sure the most vulnerable among us have food and a place to sleep.
If ever I see one of “the wokes” develop an actual program that helps people— a breakfast program for the homeless …or, even showing up at the local food bank warehouse to fill boxes of food for families (where the wokes are conspicuously absent: it’s all people doing forced community service, teenagers who are filling a school requirement, a few random Christians, and a few working class people, many of whom probably formerly needed the services of the food bank) I’ll reassess my view of whether the wokes are serious about improving anything for anyone. They’re too busy putting Ukraine flags on their Instagram and talking up Democratic candidates who won’t do a damn thing for anyone.
There is so much out there that needs doing, and from my view, “the wokes” are not _just_ not doing it: they are distracting everyone of their ilk (comfortable, well-meaning middle class people) into not doing it, by pretending that a hashtag about Ukraine is activism.
>while the Black Panthers created a breakfast program for kids,
This isn't the first time I've heard people defend the Black Panthers this way.
Saddam Hussein did good things for members of his tribe who lived locally. Organized crime helps people in the neighborhood all the time. Partly because of tribalism, partly because it's a cheap way of getting support.
Just sayin'...you can point to concrete good things that ***even*** the Black Panthers and/or Saddam Hussein did, and yet you cannot point to concrete good things that the wokes are going for anyone.
Or, to put it another way, my point was most obviously not a defense of the Black Panthers. My point was the startling uselessness and insubstantial-ness of the wokes, and so I don't think it makes sense to defend them on the basis on them wanting the world to be a nicer place. If they want the world to be a nicer place, they can do something about it instead of jabbering and engaging in their woke verbal olympics.
> and yet you cannot point to concrete good things that the wokes are going for anyone
The definition of "woke" is sufficiently fuzzy that this just sounds like No True Scotsman. If someone points to an example of a concrete good thing that "wokeness" is doing then you can just say "well that's not wokeness, that's just people being sensible".
This isn't a defence of wokeness, I'm just saying that maybe we need to improve our terminology.
I’m saying, in all sincerity, that I don’t see any “wokes” volunteering in the places where I happen to volunteer in the community. I don’t see any evidence of the wokes of my acquaintance — they who add their pronouns to their emails and zoom bios, they who have “in this house” signs on their lawns— doing anything to make other people’s _material_ conditions better.
The people I see helping other people in concrete ways belong to religious groups and the working class. That’s in the Western US. Reliably. Maybe it’s different where you are. It’s not the professional-class wokes, beating their chests about diversity and how racist they are, who are in the trenches trying to make sure people are housed and fed and medically cared for and literate.
That’s not a “no true Scotsman”— that’s just an observation. Show me a professional class woke who harps on this stuff and virtue-signals in this way who actually gets their hands dirty, doing something to help people in a material way, and I’ll be very surprised.
Among people I know who put pronouns in their emails: people who volunteer for suicide hotlines, people who do voter registration, people who do trash cleanup in our local park, people who volunteer to help refugees, people who re-build trails in nearby conservation land, people who provide pro bono counseling and legal services for poor people, and people who do volunteer work with children and families in crisis. And then not in a volunteer capacity but whose jobs are more about service than pay: teachers, school counselors, social workers, therapists, union organizers, pastors/religious leaders, and nurses.
I think if we define "woke" as people who only do performative political signaling not of my tribe, then it will be easy to miss all the regular people out there getting their hands dirty in socially constructive ways who happen to be not of your tribe and who also happen to put pronouns at the bottom of their emails.
There are loads of people of all political persuasions who spend their time engaged primarily in narcissistic and performative online tribal warfare. But the soup kitchens and the crisis hotlines and the community cleanup efforts and the blood donations are not all being done by your tribe, I promise.
I've heard repeatedly that people who are more or less woke who are doing useful work aren't as noisy or as hostile.
I talked recently with someone (I'm not outing them with specific details of the work they're doing, sorry) who was willing to agree in private that the anti-white aspect of woke is real and a problem.
And I know another who's pretty woke, doing useful work, and not a keyboard warrior.
I have no idea how it would be possible to get conflict-averse people to be more public in the current environment, but it would be nice.
Yes it really might come to that: the conflict-averse aren’t speaking up about how weird / counterproductive the new replacement (faux) “left” ideology is; and the conflict-embracing really, really love a chance to tell other people how awful they are. That subset of people, those who thrive on conflict and hostility, are also probably lower-functioning socially / personally and don’t get out in the community much to do anyone any good.
So part of my perception might stem from a knee-jerk antipathy toward angry, low-functioning people who seem to live for ensuring others’ misery. And part might stem from my own anger at seeing what I perceive as the “real” left being taken over by noisy idiots, shutting me out of my political home because I’m more interested in deeds and material outcomes, not the shibboleth du jour.
There's been a recent scandal about the top people in BLM doing financially well for themselves and not doing useful work.
I'd been seeing complaints for a while on youtube from local BLM people about not getting money from BLM the central charity.
Scam charities aren't unique to woke, but it's possible that not believing in formal organization adds to the risk. On the other hand, what's the excuse for the Red Cross in Haiti?
Not an excuse but an explanation...locally staffed organizations are more likely to reflect local values than those of the parent organization. (See also Puerto Rico). In a lot of places around the world, there is a higher value & merit to promoting and enriching family and supporters than in rigorous adherence to the spirit of public service. It's not *corruption*, you see, it's being a proper human and taking advantage of the environment to take care of your family.
Effective Altruists are trying to create a better world, so they actually try to measure how much good they're doing. This makes them very unusual. We could try to evangelize EA so that impulses get redirected that way, and I do in fact try to get my relatives to donate to GiveWell recommended charities, but I think there's a very limited amount of interest.
"There was a lot of reaction after George Floyd was killed, because a man was slowly murdered on camera"
This seems like a needlessly inflammatory way of phrasing things. A man *died* on camera, sure, and we should be open to discussion about the negligence of the wielder of the knee, but there is enough residual uncertainty as to whether Floyd caused himself a fatal drug overdose ... and about whether the average jury member at Chauvin's trial wouldn't have been motivated by a chain of reasoning that goes something like "Regardless of Chauvin's guilt or innocence of murder, if I vote to acquit, more people will die in the ensuing riots, possibly including myself if my name gets leaked", that I would be very circumspect about calling it murder.
And that's before you get to the fact that the specific claims of BLM, as already mentioned by other posters below, go well beyond 'we should reduce police brutality somewhat', and include such highly contentious propositions as 'the police are specifically targetting blacks for death, to a degree that does not disappear even after you adjust for the fact that blacks commit violent crime at a higher rate than non-blacks'.
While that is true, it was one of the most dubious high-profile convictions of recent times that I'm aware of, such that appying that standard feels comparably odd to insisting on calling OJ Simpson *not* a murderer.
I can understand why someone with woke sensibilities would be averse to the term's popularization. For the last few years/decades, we really didn't have a term to describe these types of people, which made it harder to identify them and call them out. Terms that describe patterns of behavior, like cancel culture, don't have the same sort of otherizing effect. But now that we can describe "woke people" / "the woke", we have specific groups of people we can rally against. The woke don't like this because it is politically advantageous to be unidentifiable. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
I find it perplexing that you view this as a feature rather than a bug. Are you trying to fight against 'specific groups of people' or are you trying to fight against patterns of behaviour and incorrect belief?
There are people in this thread with 'woke sensibilities', and they aren't conspiracists trying to undermine freedom, they're just honest people trying to make the best decisions they can on complex topics. Why is it a good thing to be able to more easily attack them without regard to their specific stances?
And even if you feel terribly strongly that they are badly misguided and are harming civilisation, why do you want to 'other' them? Surely it'd be better to convince them. It's these people with 'woke sensibilities' that are the moderate face of wokeness who might be open to well phrased arguments. Othering just leads to irrationality and if taken far enough genocide, I don't really see an upside here.
I agree that tribalism is ultimately really bad, but it's kind of the name of the game. We have to fight to win. If on one side we have a cancel culture mob with massive influence over society, and on the other side we have honest, rational people standing up for vague principles, then we know who's going to win.
But your cancel culture mob with massive influence over society is made up of individuals who in the main also believe they are honest, rational people standing up for principles. And as far as I can tell from your comment and others, both tribes are very firmly convinced that they are persecuted victims.
It may be that because I have never had a cancel culture mob come after me, all this seems ridiculously extreme. Perhaps the ability to treat people and arguments in isolation is a form of privilege based on not feeling that I'm under existential threat. However, from my privileged position, I would suggest that rather than fighting against 'the woke' as if they were a horde of zombies, try the jujitsu approach instead - transform 'wokeness' into something that you can coexist with, by finding the most egregiously wrong aspects of it and fighting those specific aspects, one at a time. Don't even be considered anti-woke since that makes you easier to ignore. Be anti-this one thing. If your arguments are good, you'll form a majority on that issue (including lots of woke adjacent, woke inclined and mild wokeists), and gradually resolve it. Then repeat as required.
Of course everyone believes that they themselves are honest and rational. But let's not delve into complete postmodern epistemological pessimism where no one can know anything and everything is relative.
Lately, a certain tribe seems to be disproportionately responsible for employing authoritarian social and political norms, otherizing their political opponents, and calling for radical social upheaval. This tribe also disproportionately paints itself and its allies as victims, and constantly talks about the widespread societal oppression embedded in every aspect of life. I think an objective observer would concur.
This tribe has exercised such an extreme degree of influence on our institutions that we are past the point of both-sides-ism or fighting against individual actions that we disagree with. As a matter of political practicality, we have to identify the group of people responsible and hold them accountable. Unfortunately, this will likely require using some of their own strategies against them.
I think a huge number of people in the USA would think that your second and third paragraphs characterise republicans rather well, and be able to point to objective truths to back that up too.
I'm all for objective truth, but I don't think the situation is anywhere near as cut and dried on these topics as you do, and you shouldn't be so sure that the 'objective observer' would find in your favour.
Okay, then stop using the word "racism". At this point, it's literally meaningless and is simply used as a bad faith bludgeon against people who can be making 100% factual statements with no value judgements whatsoever, let alone espousing racial hatred.
>And even if you feel terribly strongly that they are badly misguided and are harming civilisation, why do you want to 'other' them? Surely it'd be better to convince them
Because they're not able to be convinced. One of their defining features is precisely their dogmatic intolerance of dissent. That's why "cancel culture" is even a thing. If you disagree, they shout you down as a "racist", they dox you, they destroy your livelihood, they shutdown talks by people who they disagree with. They're beyond convincing, and on many topics it's forbidden to even try. That's precisely why you don't try and convince them, you provoke them to publically expose their behavior and then use the spectacle to convince everyone else to stop giving them so much power.
And for goodness' sake, do you honestly say this to woke people? Do you say "don't call them racists/nazis/fascists/white supremacists, just try and convince them"? People on the right are vastly more interested in actually debating stuff. Wokeists have near unviersal institutional support that they feel they don't need to ever debate or discuss anything with anyone, and prefer to silence dissent.
There are lots of 'wokeists' or people with 'woke sensibilities' in this thread who do not do these things. Trying to bundle them all together and 'other' them and 'fight' them and 'punish' them is not a sensible strategy to get what you want, if anything it's likely to lead to a worsening of the situation. That's the position I and others have been taking throughout this thread.
Do I say to people on both sides that they should calm down and look at things on their merits? Absolutely. I'm very aware that some of what people think of as 'racism' is actually nostalgia, or other less freighted terms. I'm also not scared of the word 'racism'. I believe that almost everyone (including myself) has racist tendencies, that doesn't make them evil or mean that their arguments should not be listened to.
>The use of "wokeness" here as a catch-all term for anything related to social justice, as if it were a single force to be supported or opposed, feels really lazy and indiscriminate to me.
Vastly less indiscriminate than the use of "racism" as a catch-all term for "non far-left views on anything remotely related to race"
>because a man was slowly murdered on camera while onlookers couldn't do anything about it
He wasn't murdered. There's no evidence Chauvin intended to kill Floyd. He put him in a reckless restraint which he wasn't supposed to.
> (protesting police brutality and lack of accountability)
If you expect us to take this seriously, they should stop calling themsleves "black lives matter". This stuff affects all races, and contrary to the dogmatic claims of BLM, black people are not disproportionately killed by police after controlling for relevant factors (like the fact that blacks are vastly more overrepresented amongst those responsible for murdering police, as well as violent crime generally)
>has to deal with the fact that a lot of people are trying to create a better world, and you don't _want_ to push back against that - you want to push the discourse sideways, so that that effort is directed in a healthier way.
The obliviousness of this is astonishing. Are you implying that your political enemies WANT to make the world a worse place? Of course they don't. You just hate their views so you feel justified in not treating them with the kid gloves.
Considering Chauvin was convicted for murder, I'd say there's pretty good evidence he did murder Floyd. The whole point of the court system is to decide if there's enough evidence.
Sure, but the court system doesn't have some magic force field where other concerns can't factor in to the calculation. If jurors believe (rightfully) that if they acquit, they might be doxxed, fired, attacked, or killed, it's not surprising that they convicted. It's possible they would have convicted regardless of those concerns, but if we can't be confident that they would have acquitted if there actually wasn't enough evidence, then them convicting does not serve as Bayesian evidence that it was actually murder.
Outside of a legal context, people overwhelmingly use the word "murder" to denote intention killing. Chauvin was not convicted of any crime involving intentional killing, which the vast majority of BLM supporters don't seem to realize.
"He wasn't murdered. There's no evidence Chauvin intended to kill Floyd. He put him in a reckless restraint which he wasn't supposed to."
Murder, by law, doesn't require specific intent. Sufficiently reckless behavior resulting in a not-specifically-intended death, is murder under the law. And in common usage, the definition is even broader.
Minnesota draws the line differently, and I suspect Chauvin would have been convicted of manslaughter in most states - but even so, using "murder" to refer generically to murder+manslaughter is a common shorthand in non-legalistic contexts. Chauvin did do his killing in Minnesota, though, and was fairly convicted, and is a murderer straight up. If it was important to him to be able to say "hey, I'm only a manslaughterer, get it right!", he should maybe have worked in a different state.
The use of murder here was almost assuredly the colloquial sense, in which he deliberately killed somebody. Not the strict legal defintion.
It absolutely IS important that it wasn't with intent because it changes the whole nature of the situation. Whether he intended to kill Floyd changes waht hte implcaitions of this should be.
The strength of the George Floyd protests was down to the absolute horror of the Floyd murder itself. A cold blooded technicolor police murder, undeniable and inescapable. A secondary factor was that about ten percent of the workforce had lost their job and so were free to engage in political action they'd otherwise be too busy to even think about. The idea that you need some grand theory of wokeness (god I hate that word) to explain it is silly.
The way I think about this is Fourier analysis. Any specific event is always an overlap of contributing functions in different frequency bands. On the sub-year band George Floyd was about police brutality. On the multi-year band it was (arguably) wokeness that allowed the sub-year function to explode to begin with. (The better way to think about it is probably contributing functions in multiple dimensions, ie. time, free attention, coherence.)
Was it? I thought it was established that he was on dangerous drugs and was having major problems before the police even touched him. IIRC he was yelling "I can't breathe" at the top of his voice even before they put him on the ground, which they did specifically because he didn't want to be in the car. The drugs he was on at the time can cause this kind of problem, supposedly. Or was I misinformed about all that?
Calling it a murder is very tricky because there's no evidence of any planning or desire to kill Floyd. Even asserting racism as a motivation is tough because, weren't some of the other police officers on the scene black? A racist cop would presumably refuse to work with black officers.
"If you acquit, there's a guarantee you will be doxxed, condemned, fired, and harassed, there's a large likelihood you and your family will be attacked, and there's a not-insignificant chance that you will be killed. Furthermore, dozens more will die in the ensuing riots."
> IIRC he was yelling "I can't breathe" at the top of his voice even before they put him on the ground
Yes. He was likely having a panic attack. That doesn't mean that being compressed into the ground didn't kill him. Indeed, having watched almost the entire trial, I'm quite confident that the knee on the back was the primary cause of his death.
The court apparently agreed, since Chauvin was found guilty. That aside, it's not as clear a case as often presented, because these cops have to deal with people loudly claiming that they cannot breath even without the cops doing anything, and the cops still have to do their jobs.
Hindsight in place, we can all say that Chauvin shouldn't have put his knee on the guy's neck. In the situation, it's less clear what they should have done instead with a disruptive individual who is refusing to cooperate and is potentially using magic buzzwords intended to get the cops to comply with his demands whether they were true or not. Getting social workers on scene is a potential solution in some cases, but that's expensive and complicated to implement, and may not actually solve any issues. They can't just let the guy go, and he's verbally and physically refusing to get into the police car, to the point that he could be a danger to himself and others. Had he not died, it would have been one of a million unfortunate interactions that police deal with regularly. Had Chauvin not put his knee on the guy's neck, I don't know that there's anything else that happened that should not have. If that means he lived, then good on society removing that hold as an option. If he died anyway, I don't know where this conversation would have gone.
I can't recall at the moment, but I believe there was discussion about whether that was a currently permitted approach to suppressing a combative person. It apparently used to be, and I think Chauvin was claiming he didn't get the memo that it had changed? If it had been clear police procedure to use that kind of hold, which it had been in the past, then Chauvin gets cleared of all crimes, just doing his job.
There are amounts of weight sufficient to kill someone that way, but nothing a human body is capable of producing.
The court did convict Chauvin. At the time there were riots happening and presumably the jurors didn't want to encourage more of that like when the cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted.
Film lore has it that when the Mafia wishes to send a message, it does so with a severed horse's head. An equestrian-for-porcine substitution had apparently been found adequate to send a message during the ongoing deliberations in that trial, given that policemen were involved.
The chief medical examiner initially was quoted saying in private that he had a fatal level of fentanyl in his blood, and based only on the actual autopsy, he would have been deemed to have died of a drug overdose. He later went back on all of that and said that he died of asphyxiation without any real justification. Hmm.
Let's consider what would have happened if he had continued to argue that he died of a drug overdose, and then the jury acquitted on that basis. I think we can both agree there would have been massive amounts of nationwide rioting, and dozens more people would be killed. Furthermore, the medical examiner would be fired from his job, and he would be doxxed very quickly. After his home address gets leaked, his house would be burned down, and many people would likely attempt to kill him.
Now, it's entirely possible he legitimately changed his opinion later after seeing new evidence... but it doesn't seem like we can have any confidence that if he did actually believe the death was caused by a drug overdose, that he would argue for this position. Him denying the drug overdose cause of death, then, would not serve as evidence against the drug overdose theory, because in the hypothetical world where Floyd actually died of a drug overdose, he would almost certainly still deny it.
Sure, but the relevant question is whether kneeling on the back of someone else in the same manner who was not overdosing would have killed them, i.e. whether Chauvin took action that was the primary cause of Floyd's death, and whether he knew that it would cause his death.
For example, if I tase someone who has a rare heart condition I don't know about and they die, I did not murder them, since I did not take an action that I could have reasonably known would kill them.
I agree that increased unemployment probably largely contributed to the situation.
However, I think there had been several deaths recorded on video (e.g. Manuel Ellis,Daniel Shaver,Eric Garner), in which case the innocence of the victim was way more clear than in the George Floyd case. And probably that is why it triggered the events. As Scott already described the general idea:
How many police killings have you seen? How many violent deaths have you seen?
All most people have to go on when judging this against other deaths is a limited, almost certainly not representative subset. We're in an odd spot where we rarely encounter violent deaths in real life, yet a small number are newsworthy enough to mention that everyone hears about them, and yet we only actually see the reality of a small number of that small number (and even then the horror depends on how lucky the cameraman happened to be when recording the issue). A world where violent deaths were more common (be it the reality of the past of warfare, capital punishment or agriculture and industry that are horrifically unsafe by modern standards) would be one which most people had seen, if not violent deaths, then at least the results of traumatic injury. On the other hand, most of us have memories a past where not everyone was carrying a video camera with them 24/7.
It wasn't a "cold blooded murder". There's no evidence he intended to kill Floyd and none of the crimes he was convicted of involved establishing intent to kill.
Also, good job COMPLETELY missing the point of Soctt's post. He wasn't providing commentary on whether people should be upset over Floyd's death or not, he's saying what impact did the BLM riots have in terms of perceptions of woke ideology, and therefore using that to inform what strategy teh academic should take. You just saw somebody say something you think is bad and you launched into a knee jerk response that was not only irrelevant to this post but also factually incorrect.
Woke/unwoke has become a politically partisan issue, especially the unwoke half since Republicans view criticizing woke people as a winning political strategy. So Berserker strategy is far more likely to get your actions amplified by conservative media. That's great if you want to make money (you can quit your job where nobody likes you and start a conservative talk show!). Not so great if you want to actually convince anyone you're right on the merits.
Whether or not conservative media amplifies you is irrelevant. The goal is to get your opponents to amplify THEMSELVES with a message that will turn off the people in the middle.
This sounds like the mirror image Marxist accelerationist take, where the idea is that by making governments and corporations even more exploitative, the contradictions of capitalist society will become so great that it takes itself apart.
That actually fits fairly well, although the scale is definitely different. You don't need society wide events, because today just one local event can be amplified to a national level.
The comparison I was thinking of was actually negative political ads. The goal with those is similar, to get people who might have voted for your opponent out of habit to stay home on election day.
It's highly relevant, because once an issue gets captured by partisan politics, then people's views on the matter largely become entrenched. Also, there is always the danger that YOUR positions start to become entrenched based on political partisanship, which means there is basically no room for self-reflection. Maybe that woke/unwoke position you took actually isn't so great, but your brain will refuse to accept any criticism now that it's a politically partisan issue.
I think it depends on how many people are in the undecided middle, and also just how politically aware those people are. My impression is that this group is large and oblivious, but that's based on the small sample of people I interact with at work, plus my own family. I'm quite sure my workplace in Canada is not representative of the American people!
It's not so much that conservative media is ew, but more that once it becomes amplified by conservative media, you've now reached a point where the people you're fighting cannot be convinced you're right, and the people on your side cannot be convinced you're wrong. Which is a terrible spot to be in both epistemologically and if you want to effect meaningful change.
This can also be the case with liberal media, but generally woke/unwoke issues are far more likely to be amplified by conservative media.
The point isn't to convince anti-wokists to be anti-woke. The point is to persuade politically marginal individuals (in between woke and non/anti-woke) that wokeism is bad through the spectacle of woke tantrums. What your argument should have been is that this becomes less effective if people tend to dislike conservative media and therefore get turned off from being persuaded as a result.
My instinct, the best strategy is a hybrid Fabian-Berserker. Pick fights, but appear not to pick fights. Perhaps MLK was in fact closer to Berserker, but that’s not how he’s usually remembered. And that’s easier said than done, and may not generalize. After three minutes of thinking about it, I’m pretty stumped about how to actually evaluate the relative EV of these strategies. I suspect the answer is highly context dependent.
MLK was hybrid Fabian-berserker. His goal was to get in the papers—he was well known to cozy up with reporters—and then influence true Fabians like Federal officials to change policies and laws.
I'm really excited about this kind of idea and have thought about it a lot over the years.
* Smile, be kind, and show honest goodwill to people. - You can't fake this. You need to honestly care about people you disagree with, and let that show to people on the sidelines.
* Give people enough rope to hang themselves. - Create or engage in situations where you're standing against bad ideas in public. Pull this stuff into the public forum whenever possible.
* Never interrupt the enemy when they're making a mistake. - By pulling them out into a public forum you're giving them every opportunity to make an ass out of themselves. But the next step is important too. Don't call attention to the fact they're making an ass out of themselves. Don't be combative. If you sink to their level, it distracts people from what an ass they're being. Let the asshole have the spotlight, you're just their to smile and be kind.
* Once they've made a mistake, end the interaction before they can recover. - Just smile and say "Look man, I care about you, I hear where you're coming from, but I'm going to end this interaction if you won't communicate with me respectfully." and then walk away. You look like the one in control, and they look like a child.
Be MLK does seem to be a winning strategy, it just seems hard to replicate. Not many people can seem like akind and caring pillar of the community while also yelling and marching. Being a Reverend, and having a sympathetic cause we're important components. With religion not being as important for most Americans, it seems especially hard to replicate. Does anyone have a job that commends universal trust and respect anymore?
Re "How Should We Assess New Atheism?" - It contributed to the decline of the less credible claims of traditional religion. But perhaps it also contributed to the emergence of MORE credible non-traditional spirituality. Dawkins said loud and clear, in "The God Delusion" and elsewhere, that he is open to the possibility of God-like agents that emerged from and operate in the physical universe. He is also open to simulation cosmologies. In "Believing in Dawkins," Eric Steinhart develops a philosophy of spiritual naturalism, inspired by the works of Richard Dawkins but not attributed to Dawkins, to show “that the jobs once done by God can be done by natural entities,” including the possibility of life after death. I think non-traditional forms of spirituality like spiritual naturalism could continue to offer all that is good in religion, without all that is bad.
There was an online atheist debate a while ago where the atheist said that Sweden was becoming less religious/non-religious. What was interesting was that the religious appeared to be switching not to atheism, but to spirituality. The one number I can remember was that something around 70% of the Swedish in a survey reported believing in ghosts/spirits, but only ~20% were "religious."
It’s true in America as well: since the 90s we’ve gone from something like 2% atheist to something like 4%, but those identifying as “no religion” have increased sharply.
Mid 2000s, I read an online debate forum about religion. Why? Maybe because I lacked the courage to stab pencils into my eyes and this was the next closest thing.
I saw many debating strategies used, each with strengths and weaknesses.
You had guys who would focus on the core of an opponent's argument, and only respond to that. But without fail, their opponent would retort "aha! You ignored 80% of my post!"
Then you had guys who were like machines, doing line by line rebuttals of every word their opponent said. But often this backfired on them. They'd get bogged down on some point where their opponent was clearly right, and get hammered on it. It also had the disadvantage of fragmenting the debate, pulling it a dozen different directions.
In general, the people I respected were the ones who were clearly motivated by principles like truth, rather than being argument robots, spamming out talking points and canned rebuttals so that their side could "win".
And I respected arguers who weren't ferociously single-issue about something. It seemethey had balanced minds and souls. You'd get people who only cared about ONE VERY IMPORTANT THING and wrote fifty screeds a day about that one thing...that always came off as obsessive and deranged.
I hate arguing for the sake of arguing. Without naming names, I see some people on the anti-woke side who've kind of built their whole brand around being anti-woke, and oppose it beyond all moderation and sympathy. One of them (Rot13: Gurbqber Eboreg Ornyr) wrote a book about how business owners should fire SJWs from jobs, and so forth. That sort of approach doesn't attract my sympathy. It makes me think you're a win-at-any-cost demagogue.
I would say to your friend "pick your battles. And be known for something else. Don't let your whole identity become 'anti-woke academic.'"
The case for building your political identity around being anti-woke is that 1. modern western society is, on the whole, pretty good relative to all of history because of things like the enlightenment, capitalism, individual rights, and freedom, and 2. a bunch of revolutionaries have come along and are trying to destroy everything we've achieved for the past few hundred years and replace it with a totalitarian collectivist mega-state.
It would be like if aliens came down to Earth and started blasting people left and right, and then a human coalition formed around the idea of fighting the aliens, and you criticized them for defining themselves in opposition to the aliens rather than having some independent political vision.
Except that the woke people aren't aliens. They're also citizens of the nation they live in, not invaders from the outside (unless you want to be so completely tribalistic that you go to "The only REAL citizens are those who agree with me!" which isn't an improvement over them at all.)
As someone who models this entire issue as "sometimes people on both the left and right can be overly sanctimonious or prudish about otherwise legitimate moral issues, which can lead to problems when it drives toxic office politics, moral panics or government overreach", intentionally provoking overreactions from one specific side of the political spectrum would look a lot like a partisan political stunt to me.
If you wanted me to actually support an "anti-woke" movement, you'd need to either provide a compelling argument that the problem of moral sanctimony was qualitatively different on the left, or convincingly frame the movement as just a small part of a larger, much more even-handed effort to push back against this common failure mode.
It's not that moral sanctimony is more of a problem on the Left, it's that it's more of a problem to left-leaning people living in the left-leaning world. Like me, and Scott, and presumably this person as an academic.
It's that you have a lot more ability to "get our own house in order" than affect right-leaning people living in different states with different media and different internet than us.
The weird thing is that half of what I see being discussed here is just about creating a double-bind of moral sanctimony, where if the woke don't get you then the anti-woke will.
I think that's part of the confusion in the comments here. Anti-woke as a left-leaning project -- essentially a form of infighting to correct a self-destructive overreach -- makes total sense to me. But half or more of the comments on here don't make sense from that perspective and Scott's readership is not primarily left-leaning. So you get left-leaning people saying "this has gone too far" and you've got definitely not left-leaning people arguing something altogether different with a much wider definition of woke and who seem unaware of or undisturbed by similarly authoritarian dynamics in their own ranks.
Scott's readership may not be Blue Tribe, but what's relevant is, I think, where you live - someone in San Francisco lives in a left-leaning world regardless of their own political views.
My house is decorated with, among other things, a sign that says "Hail Satan". I'm not a Satanist; the point has nothing to do with Satanism, or Satan, or, when you get down to it, Christianity.
Hail Satan is just another form of "Fuck wokeness". The problem isn't who is on what political side, and anybody modeling it that way needs to find better news feeds.
Following the 1980s, when religious views were the ones being used to bully others, we've had many situations and cases chipping away at the toxic aspects of that movement. Today, in the US, I doubt too many people regularly experience toxic religious discrimination or similar outside of family and church (where I would hope we agree is not something society has as much interest or ability to interfere in as say, public universities or even private employers).
I believe that most people today, especially those on the left that are the focus of this discussion, would agree that chipping away at the toxicity was a strong positive. Since "woke" is the current group bringing toxicity into society, it makes sense (at least to me) that they would be the target of anti-toxicity movements.
Both are arguably important. You need the "Berserkers" to keep the issue in the public's mind, so that when "Fabians" in opaque committees want to argue against crazy ideas there is ample evidence that excessive wokeness can go wrong. So probably he should pick the one he does best / is most comfortable with?
There is another plus to being a "Fabian" if he feels they are scarce, though. They can support "Berserkers" (and other "Fabians") that are less protected than he is. This can reduce the feeling that to speak against the prevailing culture before you are unfireable is career suicide. There's only so many unfireable positions, so for logistics it's important. Becoming a "Berserker" means he should refrain from supporting too much others. Unfair as it is, we all know how "X was endorsed by Y, and I hate Y" works.
Right, obviously it's the increased visibility which is the issue. You've really understood your opponents and gotten down to the core of the disagreement.
Allowing trans women to be visible while trouncing natal females in sports. Trans people and allies being visible while espousing that biological sex is a myth (or at least irrelevant in literally all contexts). Trans activists visibly attacking JK Rowling. Rapists with visibly male bodies that rape women being put in women’s prisons, or being allowed in women’s restrooms and their crimes being hushed up. Being visible insisting that any non-gender conforming tweens should be given puberty blockers no questions asked, and visibly attacking anyone that says hey maybe we should consider unintended negative consequences of that.
Not all trans visibility is helpful to the project of improving trans acceptance and well-being.
First of all, "What about trans people being visible"? Stop it. That's not what the trans issue is just about and you know it. Is having 'transwomen' use the girls locker room in schools "visibility"? No, its making girls have to get naked around people with penises, and they may not like that. And then covering it up when one of those people with penises rapes one of the girls? Is that just "visibility"? There's bigger issues at play, and describing it as "visibility" is like acting surprised anyone could oppose affirmative action , because "What's wrong with equality"?
Secondly, trans issues are vastly less supported by the population than race issues. Hispanics in particular seem turned off by them, and the Democrats are counting on them for electoral success moving forward.
I kind of want to reply to all the replies to this comment so i'll just reply here - there seems to be an unfortunate amount of uncritical conflation of obviously bad ideas pushed by the (admittedly disturbingly influential) radically 'woke' fringe with the much more reasonable ideas of broad trans rights and acceptance.
A picture of the 'trans lobby' that claims it's in favour of trans women in competitive female sports and espouses biological sex as a myth isn't *quite* a strawman, since there are definitely vocal people making that argument, but the implication that the struggle for trans rights inherently involves this is hugely disingenuous, and a large part of the reason such a narrative is so strong is that conservative pundits have been continually selecting and highlighting the most extreme and inane activists they can in order to discredit the whole movement.
People who claim to prize rationality should really take more care not to fall into partisan rhetorical traps when confronted with ideology they feel threatened by.
I'm aware that there are disingenuous actors using reasonable trans rights as a motte to support their crazy baileys, but this (as with any other issue) doesn't preclude other, good faith actors from honestly believing the same stuff (without the bailey).
Take a step back from the issue itself, and you'll realise that you're effectively arguing that "[reasonable view] should never be given credence or treated as a good faith argument, because there are also people who abuse it to defend/advocate for [unreasonable, dangerous view]", which is exactly the kind of fallacious argument radical progressives use to shut down dissent all the time.
The eternal problem with "This incredibly aggressive ideology actually has quite reasonable voices hiding inside" is its a classic Prisoner's Dillema
1) If I cooperate and the opponent cooperate, we get trans acceptance and women's rights and rainbow colored unicorns
2) But if i cooperate and the opponent defects, they get to dox me, cancel me, jail me with false allegations, take jobs they're not qualified for, etc.....
3) If we both defect, we both get a chance at shitflinging, which seems somewhat fair
4) If i defect and opponent cooperate, well that was just me being the 'smarter' guy
Maybe the best long term strategy is cooperation, but the clear short term winner is defection. When you're asking your ideological opponents to cooperate, you're essentially asking them to trust you that a) you're actually honest b) your party is the controlling faction of your whole side, which does seem like a lot to take on faith.
This makes some sense to me, but thankfully i think the nature of debate is sufficiently continuous that the atomic transactional nature of the prisoner's dilemma doesn't straightforwardly apply. Certainly if you have any kind of continued exposure to an individual you can get a good sense over time of whether or not they're arguing in good faith and engage accordingly. And even in discussions with an unknown stranger, I think (I hope!) it's possible to cover your bases by engaging tentatively in good faith discussion but still leave yourself in a solid position to minimise your "opponent"'s credibility if they do "defect" and turn out to be putting forward a bad faith argument.
Not about wokeness specifically, but if you want to dismantle unnecessary and damaging academic bureaucracy, you'll find that being successful means usually both 1. building a coalition of people who will support your cause, and 2. finding someone in a position of authority to support you. It also means being patient and persistent.
One example: it took me over a year and many patient conversations to eliminate a useless committee. It's absence hasn't caused any issues in the 8 years it's been gone, and 7 faculty/staff have been spared a monthly meeting. To make it happen it required that I be more stubborn than the existing bureaucracy.
In general I think there's room for multiple different approaches to the same issue. I don't think having only public jerks on one side of an issue works long term, and I would appreciate more Fabians in the academy in general, so if in doubt I'd recommend more people lean that way on a variety of issues. Being intentionally provocative has it's place, but I'm not into it. Righteous anger still leaves you feeling angry.
Can you give me some more details on how you won that one (eliminating the committee)? I've found it pretty much impossible to ever change things in a subtractive way, that is to get an organization to stop doing something that is a waste of time. I am very interested in how to achieve this.
Sure. The committee in question was duplicating work done by others. It existed because of tradition, and because it gave something for people to include on promotion applications.
I started by suggesting we eliminate it. I got pushback by people who claimed it was necessary. I asked why and made a list of the answers. I then suggested ways to still fulfill all of those functions without the committee. That was the easy part.
The hard part was getting enough people on board to approve the change. I did this by talking with stubborn folks outside of committee, and bringing up the proposal regularly in committee and with other related committees. Eventually the idea of eliminating the committee had been presented enough times to enough people with no factual objections that we got the votes for it to happen, almost unanimously.
Nobody said this explicitly, but I think part of why it took so long was that people had workloads figured out for the year, and didn’t want to lose a responsibility midyear that might require reassigning responsibility. Another reason is that it took people a while to get comfortable with the idea of a committee that had existed for 10+ years no longer existing. It naturally brings up the idea: does that mean my work for the past few years was a waste? The real answer is yes, but there’s no need to force people to confront that uncomfortable truth, and it’s counterproductive. A helpful narrative about changing organizational needs helped people save face and be able to agree: my work was valuable, but ok, NOW we don’t need it anymore.
Fabian I guess, if I'm forced to choose (though I am totally loath to do that).
How grievous is the wokeness, what is its potential harm to principles and practices? If it's minor, don't fight it too much: voice your opinion with your reasons, but leave it at that. Listen to other people's reasons with an open mind, make sure everyone is heard if they have something they wish to contribute, try to use meeting practices that make it easy rather than hard to say something, treat each conversant fairly as you'd like yourself to be treated as a sensible adult with reasoned opinions.
Frankly, I find the whole idea of picking a strategy juvenile and sort of dishonest and disrespectful towards your fellow coworkers. You're not supposed to act as if your workplace is some battlefield, your coworkers constitute an opposition to overcome, and concocting a workable strategy for overcoming that opposition to install your smarter, more sensible regime. Organised job action would be the acceptable exception in my mind, where the disagreements are so vast that an official set of measures are required to settle them so people can get on with their important jobs.
I often find both woke and anti-woke sides silly to the point of exhaustion and wish the silliness would just be put to rest, and I think the best way to achieve it is to make concessions on both sides and be very generous to people's reasoning. Not being able to keep your head and choose the side that is right when you actually think they are right means you're consigning to a stupid crusade for appearances, and that's not how a mature person ought to behave while expecting others to treat you with respect. I find many woke things impotent as tools for changing actual injustices, but they're often also very innocent (like do we make a meeting quorate or not when discussing policy on racism, do we refer to immigrants as immigrants or migrants because of cultural connotations etc.), so I let them slide fairly often, pointing out that "I don't think that will bear fruit, but you seem to be convinced so maybe you're right, but either way it's not a big deal so let's press on with the rest of the agenda and agree to do it your way."
It's very hard for me to imagine a situation at my own place of business that would warrant the berserker strategy, but I'm sure they exist and would like to hear examples.
I think the point is stop thinking about it as too "sides" that are complete monocultures. If someone wants to "crucify you for any heresy on the spot" then you shouldn't engage with them at all. But I think the vast majority people are not in fact like that and especially if you can genuinely engage with them directly in way that give them the impression that you take their concerns seriously.
Yep, Dan H sums up my thoughts really well. Of course, in the real world you can't just pretend people don't exist e.g. if somebody wants to block you from a conversation, you should just explain the problem and try to get them to give you the room to explain your viewpoint. E.g. using the word "crucifixion" exaggerates the problem, and I would not use that word to describe the issue if wanting to be taken seriously by others at the same table. Further, I think people often are guilty of secretly psyching themselves up for all sorts of negative situations as some sort of defence system so they wouldn't have to endure indignation, and then they enter talks already bristled up. Being sympathetic (not nurturing, not patronising) and honest (treating them like adults) is very useful. Not that I always live up to that ideal myself, it's very difficult to contain your posture when you personally feel attacked.
Agree 100%. The "berserker" strategy seems like it would be a good strategy to get you invited on podcasts, but it's also very likely to turn your workplace into a thoroughly toxic environment where there is no hope of making any substantive progress. And more broadly, treating "wokeness" as some all-consuming malignant force that must be opposed I think is just wrong on the object level. The way to deal with people who, in response to legitimate concerns, behave in toxic and counter-productive ways is to actually take the concerns seriously and refocus on substantive action.
Hala! In the first half hour of this podcast I described why I had to create the Darwinian Gender Studies forum because the Richard Dawkins Forums had been taken over by irrational humanists. https://paulawright.substack.com/p/guesting-on-the-vent-podcast
What do I think? I think that putting phrases like "opposes wokeness" in the context of "join the fight for academic freedom" means that, somewhere when I was not looking, the meaning of "woke(ness)" changed from "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination", which is what I thought it meant, to "harsh cancel culture on behalf of racial issues." But I see that Wikipedia claims that the word's transfer into a pejorative already happened. Yep, I haven't been paying attention.
I also see the line about "hundreds of college students hurl garbage and expletives at some kindly old sociologist who said biological sex was real one time or whatever." I consider the phrase "biological sex is real" to be a kind of shibboleth, the use of which declares a willful refusal to understand what the fuss is about.
Nobody thinks that biological sex isn't real, least of all trans people. If there were no difference between the sexes, there would hardly be any point in transitioning between them, would there? What people who say "biological sex is real" and expect to be traduced for it are actually claiming is that epigenetic display is the -only- biological reality. What they're being traduced for (and properly so) is refusal to acknowledge that biological reality is more complicated than that, refusal to admit that sex definitions and assignments can be messy, and claiming that an internal sense of sexual identity doesn't exist (Ryan Anderson in "When Harry Became Sally" tries to make the concept of internal sense of sexual identity disappear in a puff of logic).
If Lucky Academic would like my support, he should take that giant chip off his shoulder.
> claiming is that epigenetic display is the -only- biological reality.
How many trans people are intersex in the biological sense? Because that seems like, first, a red herring, second, an insulting exploitation of a medical condition (which the claimer does not suffer from) to make a political point.
This seem to be a question of a category border, not of a fact.
Personally, I find considering non-cisgender and non-heterosexual people as part of a broad intersex spectrum a helpful idea. Some people have unusual chromosomes, some unusual genitals, some unusual way their hormones work. Likewise some have unusual mechanisms in the brain resulting in different sense of gender identity and/or sexual attraction. Seems to be a reasonable way to classify stuff.
I don't think that any societal changes are being pushed in its name. I haven't even seen this framework been strictly formalized anywhere.
Anyway, I find this model to be clean and simple in Occamian sense. It's reductionists, do not need lots of different entities with different labels and have great opportunities for gear-level understanding of phenomena in question.
As far as I'm concern this model was original idea of my girlfriend. And she is not nearly that influential.
Mind you, I do not claim, that lots of change isn't pushed for the sake of social justice, trans-right or other issues. I just point that they are not pushed in the name of this model, and whether we adopt it or not won't change much in this regard.
I don't think intersex has anything to do with being non-binary or transgender; this is largely a cultural fiction.
For example, the vast majority of people with non-XX or XY chromosomes do not have any readily noticeable differences in external sex phenotypes, and are not more likely than typical chromosome combinations to identify as transgender or non-binary. Think about it: two of the non-typical chromosome combinations are single X and XXX, so while there can be some phenotypic results of that, there isn't any male chromosomes to make someone "in between". Likewise, XYY individuals are phenotypically male, and might just be taller? More masculine? Which is not what you usually think of when you think of someone between being male and female. And then there is XXY, which can result in shorter stature and low sperm count, but these individuals identify as men similar to the rate in the rest of the population, their phenotypic differences are often minor, and many might not even realize that that have an unusual chromosome combination until they try to have children in adulthood and realize that they are less able to produce sperm.
There are also many, many other ways, for example with non-functional metabolic pathways, that individuals can develop phenotypes that are not binary male or female. But I wouldn't want to de-facto classify these individuals as trans or non-binary without their consent, if that's not how they experience their bodies. And I would never want any of these individuals to feel bad about how their bodies manifest, so I think that broad acceptance of being intersex is good, but it is also the case that these situations can have health related issues that have nothing to do with genitals or sex differentiation, and have a medical component, in a way that I would want to keep ideologically separate from an understanding of being transgender or non-binary.
I'm not saying that intersex people are trans. Nor I'm saying that all trans people have chromosomal abnormalities. I'm saying that there are real biological reasons why trans people are trans and gay people are gay just as there are real biological reasons why intersex people are intersex and it can be helpfull to consider all of them parts of the same cluster.
How are they "part of the same cluster" then? How do you relate them?
No, I think that "considering them as all in the same cluster" conflates two things that don't have anything to do with each other. I understand that you don't think there is a one to one correspondence. I go further and say that these categories largely have nothing to do with one another (besides, maybe, mutual allyship for social acceptance).
A deeper reason I have issue with your logic is that I don't like justifying cultural, social and moral things through biology. Relevant to the current conversation, the conservative position is that biology justifies gender, and conservatives respond to that with the answer that observable external sex equals gender. To counter, it seems that some progressives like to say that the sex biology isn't just genitals or chromosomes, its hormone exposure, organ development, and brain structure, in short a wider range of biological things. To me, this answer really misses the boat. We've provided an answer without asking if the demanding justification, "Is it based in biology?" is the right question to ask in the first place. And I would say it is the wrong justification to seek! We've retained a conservative justification and just provided a progressive answer. We should ignore this justification altogether.
Gender is a social, cultural, and moral category. I'm not a great moral philosopher, but it would seem that the only two questions to ask about any action or identity is: Does this hurt oneself or anyone else? Or does this improve one's life or anyone else? And if it doesn't hurt yourself or others, or rather benefits yourself or others, then one should feel absolutely free to be any gender (or identity) that feels best. I would also say that gender is an "ought" category, which means that gender identity tells me how I ought to relate to someone in order to be kind and respectful. It's an "ought" about the moral and social world I hope to live in.
Biology, on the other hand, is a product of physics and chemistry. It is an "is" category. It has no inherent moral, social or cultural meaning. We use biological building blocks as materials (combined with a lifetime of experiences) to build rich social identities and systems of meaning, but they aren't identities or meaningful in themselves. This is sex.
Arguing biology about trans issues is a total distraction. It's the naturalistic fallacy coming from both sides.
The actual issue is that people have different preferences, and they need to come to some voluntary arrangement that gets everybody most of what they want.
Many women want to have changing rooms where a straight man who claims some unobservable state of gender identity disorder can't just walk in and watch them changing.
Many women want to have sports competitions where XX women have a real chance of winning, instead of being super dominated by XY women.
Many transwomen want to be included in the tribe of women, and do all the things that women do, and not feel excluded from anything.
This is a hard problem. There isn't any easy way to give everybody what they want. There isn't any easy way to decide which group should get what they want, if you have to decide.
Some culture warriors sweep all this difficulty under the rug and just pretend the other side are evil mutants for wanting what they want. (see the below arguments that XX-sports = anti-trans = kkk, or go on gab to see the opposite side of the horseshoe)
This misses the entire point of politics, which is to negotiate a settlement that maximizes the aggregate fulfillment of preferences, not to just cancel everyone who has different preferences.
Often politics is dissatisfying because you can't come close to getting everything you want. One great way to supplement that is to built a local community, or a subculture, or a charter city, within which people of like mind can have many more of their preferences fulfilled.
As far as I'm concerned biological reasons for gender identity is where scientific evidence is pointing rather than a stance helpfull to have for political reasons. It's perfectly possible to argue both pro- and anti-trans points from both "gender identity is rooted in biology" and "gender identity is fully social". Same with sexual orientation.
I'm definetely not an expert, but here is my crude, layman explanation. Every function of our bodies exist for evolutionary reasons, and is encoded in our biology. Our psyche isn't an exception. And neither are our feelings gender identity and sexual attraction.
This doesn't mean that we are not affected by social and cultural stuff. On the contrary! The whole ability to adapt to the environment and being affected by stimuli is encoded in our biological wetware. It's safe to assume that we humans have some quality, there is some biological mechanism responsible for it, and there is an evolutional reason for this quality.
Why do humans have sexual attraction? This seems quite straightforward. Potential mate recognition is important for inclusive genetic fitness. Why do humans have the sense of gender identity? This is less clear, but probably has to do something with mating rituals and sexual dimorphism. We need to have a map of our bodies and as female and male bodies can be somewhat different this models have to be different in order to be accurate enough.
There are lots of others sex/gender realted biological mechanisms in our body. Complex mechanisms can break in multiple ways. Sometimes something weird goes with hormones. Sometimes with chromosomes. Such people are classified as intersex. But just as well something can go "wrong" with sexual attraction mechanism. Thus there are gays, bisexsuals and asexuals. And just as well something can go wrong with mechanisms related to gender identity. Such people are called transgenders.
We can talk about specific things that went "wrong". But it seems that it's reasonable to assume that all these people are part of a same cluster - people whose sex-related biological wetware is somehow "broken".
If there was any biological evidence here we would be able to measure and therefore self identification wouldn’t be needed.
Gender identity actually prefers gender to sex, it’s the belief that gender - which is something internal - surpasses biology. It’s a belief in a soul.
I'm not going to answer the biological question, because its irrelevant to how you accept and treat people.
As for things that aren't based in biology:
Do you think morality is a real thing? Freedom? The law?
What are you saying when you say something is meaningful? How is meaning real?
How about the identity of being Catholic or Canadian? Conservative? Progressive? A Nicks fan? A nerd, a jock, etc.?
Human categories (and identities) based on social interaction, culture, and experience are no less real than those based on biology. They aren't delusions, and biology and experience inputs probably work together in an intricately intertwined way to create identities. I would say our biology enables us to create identities based on non-biological inputs (just as language centers allow us to learn any of 100s of culturally developed languages).
You have an identities too, and each one is not a one-to-one correspondence with your biological motivations or body phenotype.
I'm not sure exactly what point you're making; however the issue I believe most people who take issue with the phrase 'biological sex is real' is that it's a stand in for quite silly ideas used to attack trans people. The principle ones that someone who feels a need to say biological sex is real imply are that people who discuss gender don't think that biological sex is real, or that gender is either an unimportant idea or mostly based in biology.
That’s all confused, since you seem to think gender is used in biology. It isn’t. Except as a direct synonym for sex. There are 3 definitions of gender.
1) gender = sex. Like on a census form.
2) gender = gender roles, the social construction of rules for the sexes. For instance, in the past a biological woman had a gender role that prohibited her from voting etc.
3) gender=gender identity.
For people like Judith Butler Gender identity supersedes both sex and gender roles. Therefore a 60 year old biological man who was brought up (thus socially constructed) as a man is really a woman if that is how s/he feels. No scientific tests are necessarily and no psychiatric evaluation need be involved for self identification which is the law in many countries.
What gender identity is not is gender dysphoria. That does need a psychiatric evaluation and recommends transitioning as a cure for the distress of a medical condition. It doesn’t claim though that the transition changes biology.
In countries with self identification laws, or organisations with these rules, no transition is needed, not even so much as a dab of lipstick or a wig.
> I also see the line about "hundreds of college students hurl garbage and expletives at some kindly old sociologist who said biological sex was real one time or whatever." I consider the phrase "biological sex is real" to be a kind of shibboleth, the use of which declares a willful refusal to understand what the fuss is about.
14,000 families face unjust persecution in Texas alone and may become refugees in their own country, but please, Scott, tell me more about how the real victim is a "kindly" old sociology professor who decided to side against those families, and the real criminals are the college students who are angry about it.
How about we just agree that there's two completely unrelated issues here:
1. Whether it's right to hurl garbage and shout expeletives at professors for making certain statements, and
2. What exactly the laws should be regarding various medical treatments at various ages
The temptation to tie a bunch of issues together and let your position on one affect your position on the other is the reason we have culture wars instead of sensible discussions.
I don't agree with that. First of all, the "throw garbage" example, to my knowledge, is invented. Even supposing there was a single instance of a mob of students throwing garbage at an invited speaker, I agree that would be bad and the college should discipline the perpetrators, but I don't agree that this constitutes an issue in the dictionary sense of "an important topic for debate or discussion".
So in my view there is one issue, which is that trans kids' families are being persecuted for seeking medical care for their children. There are also opponents of trans rights who are trying to distract from that issue by bringing up non-issues, like anecdotes (often invented) about woke mobs being mean to innocent academics who are just raising important questions. Or who are trying to reframe the issue in terms of a debate about what the laws "should be" - note that in this case, no law was passed or changed; the governor of Texas just unilaterally decided that the law has always regarded routine medical care as child abuse and instructed state officials to act accordingly.
Again, what about the case of Kathleen Stock? She didn't (as far as I know) have garbage thrown at her, but she has been subjected to a massive campaign of vilification which has extended to something that any reasonable person would regard as bullying and harassment. And she is not the only one. I don't see why this is not an important topic for debate - we can debate the fairness of that kind of vilification, AND condemn the Texas law at the same time.
Can we perhaps even go further than opposing harassment? Could we perhaps even agree BOTH that the Texas law is a massive injustice that would cause a lot of harm AND that Kathleen Stock should not be vilified or regarded as "transphobic" for believing that in certain limited cases (e.g. sport, rape crisis centers) biological sex should be the sole criterion for classification, and for believing that in certain other limited cases (e.g. changing rooms, places where people appear naked - see e.g. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-wi-spa-and-our-stunted-national?s=r) one should not be able to access them solely on the basis of an internal sense of gender identity? Do you really believe Kathleen Stock is "transphobic" for holding those views?
You've asked me twice about Kathleen Stock in the time it took to write a single response to your first comment about Kathleen Stock. I replied below, but the tl;dr is that Stock is appallingly transphobic, regularly insults trans people, accuses trans activists of being cryptofetishists, and has had her work cited in legal briefs and rulings which favor discrimination against and denial of medical care to trans people. The comment below has a link to extensive documentation of these claims.
Not familiar with the Kathleen Stock affair in particular, but given that there are autogynephiles who will admit that having a fetish about being a woman seems to be the most accurate way to describe what they have - see http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/ for a very long but interesting exploration of the idea - it doesn't seem prima facie unreasonable to assume that some trans activist fall into the same category, but are less open, or at least, less self-aware about it.
> The temptation to tie a bunch of issues together and let your position on one affect your position on the other is the reason we have culture wars instead of sensible discussions.
And what, precisely, about the original post should lead any of us to think that it's an attempt to end the tying of a bunch of issues together?
It seems to me that the entire idea of "anti-woke" is that "woke" is a useful linking of ideas, so we should link together all the opposites of those ideas. Anyone who thinks the linking is the problem should oppose "anti-woke" just as much as "woke".
I somewhat agree with your last point, but it depends whether you're using "anti-woke" as a quick convenient label for the kinds of things that you're against, or whether you're using it as a guiding principle.
This is why I said in my top-level comment that the academic in question should focus on figuring out what his actual principles are.
Why can't they both be "real victims"? And why do you assume that the sociology professor wouldn't side with those families? Like Kalimac, I don't think you really understand the full nature of the debate and the claims being made on each side. (And I agree with you that the Texas law is a diabolical travesty.)
"And why do you assume that the sociology professor wouldn't side with those families?"
Because in every real world example that I have ever seen about a campus speaker or professor being "canceled" by trans activists, the speaker has been consistently and deeply anti-trans.
Let me ask you again about Kathleen Stock. She does not appear to be "consistently and deeply anti-trans" at all - she accepts that trans people in most (but not all) circumstances should be treated in terms of their claimed gender identity, she believes that medical transitioning in some cases should be not merely permitted but supported from public funds. Yet she has definitely been vilified and viciously opposed by trans activists. I think you really are operating from a false account of the two sides here.
You've asked me twice about Kathleen Stock in the time it took to write a single response to your first comment about Kathleen Stock. I replied below, but the tl;dr is that Stock is appallingly transphobic, regularly insults trans people, accuses trans activists of being cryptofetishists, and has had her work cited in legal briefs and rulings which favor discrimination against and denial of medical care to trans people. The comment below has a link to extensive documentation of these claims.
Okay, I'll be very clear and bite the bullet on this one.
If you think that trans people should not receive medical care according to modern, scientifically-based standards developed by doctors, you're anti-trans. Yes, that includes puberty blockers for children.
If you think that trans people should be denied access to single-gender spaces on the basis that they are not the gender they claim to be, you're anti-trans. Yes, that includes changing rooms at spas, it includes single-gender holding facilities in prisons/jails, and it includes sports teams.
If you think that trans people are so inherently disgusting or deviant that the mere mention of their existence is harmful to children, then you are anti-trans. Yes, that includes children in kindergarten. If a child is old enough to know the words "boy" and "girl" then they have been taught gender, which means they can be taught that there are some boys who we used to think were girls and vice versa.
None of these are "exceptionally broad" definitions of anti-trans. These are all basic, conventional positions for framing discussion of trans issues. There is a pro-trans and an anti-trans side of each, and the pro- and anti-sides are clear and legible.
The people who are willfully ignorant are the people who believe that you can be against letting trans women use women's bathrooms, against letting trans children get medical care, and against teaching children that trans people exist, but also be in favor of trans rights. These are the rights in question. No one is debating whether trans women have the right to wear makeup.
Of course you have the right to be anti-trans. I'm not coming to anyone's house with a sign demanding that they adopt my values. But to me it's always a bad sign when the side of the debate that opposes minority rights feels the need to pretend they don't. If you know your beliefs are so odious that you're not even willing to characterize them accurately and bristle at those who do, that's a good indication that you're on the wrong side of history. I suspect that one day the anti-trans movement will be mentioned in the same breath as the KKK - a historical hate group who felt the need to hide their true identities. but I digress.
Perhaps you have a different definition of anti-trans? Or some examples of people who were canceled by trans activists despite not espousing any of the above positions?
There definitely are people (Judith Butler springs to mind) who are both extremely influential and who think that biological sex isn't real, or at least not real in any way that should have any significant effect on our categorizations and treatment of human beings. And the people (or at least the most thoughtful people) who are traduced for saying "biological sense is real" definitely do recognize that an internal sense of sexual identity can exist and can be mismatched with biological reality. Maybe read Kathleen Stock, "Material Girls", who both takes the "biological sex is real" line (and has been massively persecuted for doing so), and has a carefully argued and nuanced view of the nature of the debate and the claims being made on each side.
In short, I think you are grossly mischaracterizing both sides here. But I do (like Kathleen Stock!) agree that most real life non-academic trans people don't accept the "biological sex isn't real" line, and indeed that their actual transitioning presupposes it. The problem is that this has been overlaid with an academic theory of gender identity which in many university circles has become sacrosanct, such that denying it and arguing that biological sex should trump it in certain limited circumstances (as Kathleen Stock did) is considered "transphobic".
> or at least not real in any way that should have any significant effect on our categorizations and treatment of human beings"
It seems to me that this phrase does a lot of heavy lifting here. There are lots of things that are both real but unsignificant to treatment and categorization of objects in question.
Indeed. And Judith Butler claims that biological sex is one of them, and Kathleen Stock denies this, and says that biological sex should (in certain limited circumstances - not all or even most circumstances) be a primary factor that determines the way we categorize people. That is exactly the point.
It would be interesting to let them do the adversarial collaboration together and write a nuanced book about it. And it's a pity we do not live in a world where this is the immediate reaction to two public figures disagreeing about a matter.
However, this have little to do with the initial comment that you originally responded to. The claim was "noobody thinks that biological sex isn't real" and your response was "some people thinks that biological sex isn't relevant to the way people are treated". That's what I wanted to highlight.
"Stock often claims to respect trans people, to support their rights, and to merely be concerned to advocate for cis women's supposedly competing rights and interests. This sounds reasonable. In some pieces, she does a decent job of maintaining this guise, especially if you're unfamiliar with these issues. But attention to her activism and the actual things she says paints a very different picture. As I will document, she misrepresents and mocks trans identities. She is at best dismissive of trans people's needs and interests. She belittles and vilifies them. The "threats to females" that supposedly justify her opposition to trans inclusion are not real; she has been unable to point to any serious, coherent risk to cis women from the specific, concrete material advances for trans people she has opposed. While claiming to be centrally concerned with defending academic freedom and free speech, she has actively—and, unfortunately, successfully—tried to silence people who disagree with her. Specific claims she has made about political suppression have been untrue."
And then thousands of words, with links, substantiating each one of those claims. In my opinion the most damning are the ones where Stock attacks people who defend the right of trans youth to access standard medical care, claiming they are doing so on the basis of a sexual fetish.
The article concludes by noting legal cases and rulings which have cited Stock's work; there is a direct line between anti-trans academics like Stock and anti-trans laws and policies, like the one driving families to flee Texas right now. This is why I disagree with Melvin above about his proposal to try to disentangle the issues. You portray Stock as a victim of "persecution", but her work is literally cited in legal briefs supporting anti-trans employment discrimination in the US and opposing medical care for trans youth in the UK.
And note that Stock, who is not a medical doctor or researcher, is claiming that the medical consensus on treatment of trans youth is wrong - not because of studies, but because she thinks the doctors doing the research are perverts devoted to the interests of an obscure group of sexual fetishists. And that conspiracy theory is what passes for "carefully argued and nuanced" in the anti-trans discourse? Yikes.
lol she wasn't fired, but thank you for illustrating how widely propaganda about her case has spread.
In fact she quit because she couldn't tolerate the fact that she was unable to convince people to adopt her transphobia and couldn't handle disagreement (in other words, the free speech and academic debate of others).
You don't think that the harassment had anything to do with it? The posters attacking her all over campus? The graffiti demanding her sacking? The 100 students protesting outside her building with placards saying "Sack Stock"? The student letter of demands circulated with "Anti-Stock Action" on it? And all this continuing for months and months? This is, in your view, "the free speech and academic debate of others"?
I use the word harassment advisedly - it is the same word used by the Vice-Chancellor of her university after she resigned to describe the way she was treated (https://staff.sussex.ac.uk/news/article/56597-message-from-the-vice-chancellor). Someone who feels that her working circumstances have become intolerable because of it has not, in any legal or moral sense, freely "quit".
>"The 100 students protesting outside her building with placards saying "Sack Stock"?"
Or as the right calls it, "free speech."
>"The student letter of demands circulated with "Anti-Stock Action" on it?"
Or as the right calls it, "free speech."
>This is, in your view, "the free speech and academic debate of others"?
I'm not the one here asking for help strategizing how to stand up for academic freedom. But if "academic freedom" is not "the freedom of students on college campuses to express their opinions in word and print" then one of us is deeply, deeply confused about what academic freedom entails.
Now, if you want colleges to institute some kind of speech code which insists on collegiality and civility, go ahead and say so - but then be prepared to explain why Stock's repeated uncivil anti-trans statements wouldn't violate those codes.
Unfortunately this is simply a case where Stock picked a fight because she thought she could bully trans kids with impunity, and it turned out that she couldn't. There is simply no fair academic principle that could possibly allow Stock to attack trans people but not let trans allies complain about it in whatever media they had at their disposal. This is literally what free speech looks like - it's a battle of ideas in which one side can sometimes lose. If you call for free speech when you're winning and censorship when you're losing, you'll have to forgive me for viewing your principles as hollow pretexts.
I think this thread is as good as any at illustrating the inherent conflict between radical feminism and gender identity. It does not seem possible to defend the notion of females as a materially and politically relevant class while also defending transgender rights.
Basically, it is “transphobic” to believe that female is a meaningful class of people if said class does not allow trans women.
"Stock attacks people who defend the right of trans youth to access standard medical care"
What is "standard medical care" for trans youth? Counseling? Drugs? Immediate referral to a clinic that provides gender surgery? Is a "trans youth" someone who is of legal age or is it someone of any age who wants to change sex?
An adult who wants to transition is a different situation from a child (under 21? 18? 14?) who wants to transition.
> What is "standard medical care" for trans youth? Counseling? Drugs? Immediate referral to a clinic that provides gender surgery? Is a "trans youth" someone who is of legal age or is it someone of any age who wants to change sex?
If you have to ask these questions please stop and consider that perhaps your input into the debate over trans rights is detracting from the quality of the discourse rather than adding to it.
Seriously, if I walked into a debate over creating a no-fly zone in Ukraine and asked "where even is Ukraine? Is Kharkiv in Ukraine? How about Warsaw?" I would be laughed out of the room, if I were lucky.
But somehow people who know less than nothing about medical treatment for trans youth are allowed to make laws governing those who do, and if someone says "maybe we should just leave this one to the professionals" that's considered a violation of your academic freedom.
lol I don't know how you expect me to take comments like this seriously.
You have one case of an academic philosopher - not a medical doctor or researcher, mind you, but someone who plays word games for a living - getting "harassed out of their job" - and not because of a disagreement on the science, but because of a pattern of behavior which her community did not approve of.
That's literally the entire case for your claim that medical science is unduly influenced by trans activists.
On the basis of that - which, by the way, is chronologically backwards in addition to being unsubstantiated - you want us to believe that no study of treatment plans and outcomes can possibly be considered valid, that no medical consensus can possibly be viewed as trustworthy, and that the entire left is anti-science.
You bring nothing to the conversation besides unhinged conspiracy theories and trolling. Please, I hope you understand that when I fail to reply to most of your comments, it's not because you've made a point I can't answer - it's because I'm getting old and stooping to this level of discourse repeatedly is hard on my back.
If one is too young to consent to five minutes of someone touching their genitals pleasurably, they're *way* too young to consent to permanent mutilation of their genitals. Sex-change surgery (or whatever the current word on the euphemism treadmill) on children is probably child abuse. So is circumcision, but that has less potential for harm.
I mean, The World Professional Association for Transgender Health agrees with you - https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v7/SOC%20V7_English.pdf. They publish the most widely-used standard of care guidelines for transgender patients. Their guidelines clearly state that sex change surgeries may only be performed on people who have reached the age of majority in their countries (pp 59-60).
But again, let me state my strident objection to comments like yours. You are participating in a right-wing moral panic by 1) making implicit connections between LGBTQ people and pedophilia and 2) debating the categorically false straw man position that trans activists are demanding surgeries for toddlers.
Trans activists want trans children to be able to access the medical standard of care for trans people. If you're going to comment on that standard, you might find it helpful to have the tiniest quantum of familiarity with what that standard says. This information is not a secret - it's on Google. Otherwise, as I said to the previous commenter who didn't know anything about the issue we're discussing, your contribution is detracting from the quality of the discourse.
By the way, and I hope you don't think I'm being too hard on you, I believe there is a word for issuing a judgment about a topic before you know anything about that topic. You decided that parents and doctors of trans children were child abusers without even knowing what medical interventions trans children actually receive. That's pretty textbook prejudice. If you want to improve as a rationalist - I know, sort of a joke given the context - you might want to consider examining how your prejudices are impacting the conclusions you make about the world.
I looked at the article you linked to - as you say, thousands of words, lots of links. I don't have time to follow all of them in detail, but of the ones I did look at, I'm not sure "substantiating" is exactly the word I would use to describe them. Not that I found anything false, but, let's say, the author's characterization of them - and also yours - seems somewhat slanted.
For example: yes, it is true that Kathleen Stock is cited in legal briefs arguing that trans women should not in all circumstances be treated as women for employment. That follows from her basic position: because (e.g.) if she thinks (as she does) that trans women should not be clients in rape crisis centers, then it obviously follows that trans women should not be employed in rape crisis centers. I fail to see this as damning.
And yes, she holds a different theory of mind to that of the author of the article, specifically in terms of how that relates to transgenderism, which she, accordingly, characterizes very differently. Her theory does not strike me as obviously wrong, nor to rise to the level of "transphobia", even though the author of the article spends a lot of time attacking it as such, largely (as far as I can see) on the basis of introspection, which, while relevant, is not generally treated as the sole relevant criterion in philosophy of mind.
In other cases, there appears to be the "duelling experts" problem, where each side cites experts and then claims the other side's experts aren't real experts ... And so on, and so on.
But let's leave all that aside - let's accept that everything the article says about Kathleen Stock is true. Let's hypothesize an imaginary Kathleen Stock, who believes - and says in public - the following:
(a) Trans women are not women in the biological sense, but should be treated as women in most but not all social and employment circumstances. (Ditto trans men, but Stock's interest seems to be more in trans women.)
(b) There are, however, certain limited social circumstances where biology matters, where only people who are "biological women" should be permitted - for example, most sports (where having gone through male puberty may be argued to have conferred a permanent advantage).
(c) There are other limited social circumstances - such as single-sex saunas where people are habitually naked - where trans women should only be permitted if they have physically transitioned: gender ID is not enough.
(d) Let's add: the recent Texas law is a really bad law, and should not be allowed to stand. (As indeed it hasn't: it was blocked yesterday by the Texas appeal courts, so you need no longer worry about the thousands fleeing Texas.)
Such a person would be closely analogous to the sociology professor Scott cited. Should such a person be regarded as "transphobic"?
Well... let me amend that by saying that such a person would be expressing anti-trans positions. Describing a position and describing a person are different, and shifting the focus from what you say to what you are is a way to weasel out of accountability for for what you say. "Sure, Kathleen said XYZ, but she's a good person at heart." Great, that's unfalsifiable, we've derailed an argument from how we can help trans people to how we talk about anti-trans activists.
Specifically regarding b, I'd argue that if there are sports in which some physical characteristic predicts performance and we are interested primarily in competitions between people who have that characteristic within certain parameters, then we should use that characteristic, rather than using sex or gender as a proxy for it. Like weight classes in boxing.
Specifically regarding c, if I told you that Jews should be excluded from saunas to spare Gentiles the trauma of seeing a circumcised penis, would that or would that not count as an anti-Semitic position?
"Specifically regarding c, if I told you that Jews should be excluded from saunas to spare Gentiles the trauma of seeing a circumcised penis, would that or would that not count as an anti-Semitic position?"
Yes, but I don't regard that as a very good analogy to naked women being in the same room as people with exposed male genitalia. If you can't see WHY that is different, I'm not sure I have very much to say, except to invite you to read the entire history of women's spaces and women's attitudes to female and male bodies within different cultures, and talk to some women who rely on the privacy and femaleness of such spaces ...
I have never heard of a real-life Gentile who was literally traumatized by seeing a circumcised penis: I have spoken to women and read many things by other women for whom seeing male genitalia (apart from those of intimate partners or pre-pubescent children) is deeply and genuinely disturbing. Hence you seem to be raising a straw man analogy to compare to a real life case.
The image of exposed male genitalia in female public space is disturbing for reasons which have nearly nothing to do with trans women. Trans women are extremely unlikely to be sexual predators. Their bodies are not even close to typical male bodies. Their genitalias are not like typical male penises.
The whole panic about trans women using female bathrooms is completely manufactured. Are there any laws, that prevent cis-man from entering female bathrooms? There are no police officer at the entrance. And cis-men are the most likely sex-offenders. Were there any talk about it before the trans right discorse started?
"Specifically regarding b, I'd argue that if there are sports in which some physical characteristic predicts performance and we are interested primarily in competitions between people who have that characteristic within certain parameters, then we should use that characteristic, rather than using sex or gender as a proxy for it. Like weight classes in boxing."
That might (perhaps) work for some sports: I'm less than convinced that it works for others, where male puberty arguably provides a whole series of interlocking but separate characteristics of advantage which are not readily reduced to a single number. Nor am I convinced that it is an "anti-trans" position to believe that.
"if I told you that Jews should be excluded from saunas to spare Gentiles the trauma of seeing a circumcised penis, would that or would that not count as an anti-Semitic position?"
This is an interesting hypothetical - (though I wonder if in many parts of the world, it wouldn't affect Muslims more often than Jews - that is: there are many countries where Muslims outnumber Jews, but I'd expect Muslims to have a stronger taboo than Jews about getting naked in a public sauna in the first place). I think that, in the hypothetical world where people existed in any significant number who were traumatised by the sight of a roundhead but unfazed by the sight of a cavalier, then as long as foreskin status, rather than ethnoreligious background, *was* actually the criterion used to determine who gets into the sauna ... and especially if there was a separate sauna that the circumcised could use, then calling it antisemitic would seem like an unreasonable stretch.
"at least not real in any way that should have any significant effect on our categorizations and treatment of human beings."
As Age wrote, this phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting. They're not saying biology isn't real, they're saying that epigenetic display (which is what the 'biology is real' types mean by "biology") isn't a useful way of categorizing people in the social world (as distinguished from "pure scientific research").
And that viewpoint is in fact very widespread. But the contrary position to that is that epigenetic display is how we -should- classify people in the social world. It's an argument, but one to which fierce objection is legitimately raised; but to make that argument and then claim that all you're saying is that biology is real - that's deeply disingenuous and in fact is lying.
See what I said in another comment about the word "useful." If the other ways of categorization usually line up with epigenetic display ("biological sex" is a loaded term), then epigenetic perception may be the easiest way to tell at a glance, but the other categorizations should rule. It makes no difference in the 95% of cases where they line up, and it makes a big difference in the 5% where they don't. [figures purely guesswork]
I'm not totally sure whom you are accusing of lying here. The "biology is real" people (at least, the sensible ones) are not saying that "epigenetic display" is the ONLY way of categorizing people, only that it is A way that should be used in SOME social circumstances. The opposing point of view is, as you say, that it is NEVER useful in ANY circumstances (apart from scientific research).
"Lying" is claiming that you're just saying that "biology is real" when what you're actually saying is that "epigenetic display is the only way of classifying people's sex."
You claim that they only say that it's one way that's useful in some circumstances, but that's not the view of Ryan Anderson in "When Harry Became Sally," who insists that it's the absolute final word on sexual identity. He even brushes aside intersex conditions as too rare to be worth worrying about.
On the other side, perhaps when I said that the view is that epigenetics "isn't a useful way" I shouldn't have used the word 'useful'. What they say is that it shouldn't be controlling, shouldn't trump out contradictory indicators from other sources (most obviously, internal sexual identity). Instead, they should trump it, but contrary to any monolith image, the question of how controlling it should be is open. I haven't come across anyone actually holding the often-mocked parody view that a man should be able to say "I feel like a woman today" and thereby compete in women's sports.
"You claim that they only say that it's one way that's useful in some circumstances, but that's not the view of Ryan Anderson in "When Harry Became Sally,""
I said "at least, the sensible ones". I've never knowingly read a single word written by Ryan Anderson, so I've no idea if he's sensible or not! I'm happy to take your word for it that he isn't (as your characterization of his views would seem to suggest).
I read Ryan Anderson at the suggestion of a conservative friend who called the book "well-informed." It was not. I found it scientifically ignorant and fundamentally dishonest. This was my only extensive encounter with anti-trans literature, and I'm not eager for another.
"But the contrary position to that is that epigenetic display..."
I am confused by this. Did you mean *phenotypic* display? Epigenetics normally refers to the phenomenon whereby some traits can be passed from parent to child without being specifically encoded in the child's genome itself (though may include changes in which genes are expressed): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Possibly my terminology is out of date; I learned genetics in the 1970s. I mean the visible or otherwise detectable physical and behavioral characteristics that were determined by a combination of genes, genetic overlays (control genes that affect other genes), fetal development, and the hormonal and other chemical context in which that occurs.
The essentialist writers (i.e. "men are men, women are women, and there's a firm line between them") I've seen are too clever to point to the X and Y chromosomes alone as determining factors. They look at how it comes out at the other end in the born human, and that's what I'm trying to describe as the source of their definition of sex.
Yeah, I think that "phenotype" is indeed the word you're looking for in that case.
Though to be fair, a lot of the people that you're calling essentialists are using *gamete type* as the dividing line: if your reproductive physiology is arranged around the production of small, motile gametes, you're male, and if it's arranged around the production of large, immobile gametes, you're female ("arranged around" to take into account the possibility that it's possible to have non-functional testicular/ovarian tissue and be infertile but still be male/female).
I learned "phenotype" to mean the operating genes (as opposed to the complete genetic code or genotype), but it didn't incorporate the processes that could affect the expression of those genes in RNA or fetal development. So it doesn't sound to me as if "phenotype" is the word I want, though again my vocabulary could be obsolete.
I have not come across the gamete theory you describe. Thank goodness, probably.
I am puzzled by what you mean by "epigenetic display." Are you using the term as something akin to "phenotype?" My understanding is that epigenetics is primarily about DNA methylation, which doesn't seem relevant here.
Primarily? Surely methylation is an example of an epigenetic process, but it's not the whole thing. I meant the expression of genes in the resulting organism through whatever processes fetal development goes through. Phenotype is a factor here, but there are a lot of other processes and influences post-genetic code, and I was taught to call that epigenetics.
I think this notion that biological sex is not real is just due to basic innumeracy. If we took all the [adult] humans in the world, stripped them naked, and we put them into clusters according to a long list of biological properties (height, weight, sex organ morphology, skeletal structure, gamete type, DNA, etc. etc.), we will see two main clusters. We can label them "A" and "B", or "red" and "green", or "male" and "female", it doesn't really matter. There will be some data points that float between the clusters, and the cluster boundaries will be fuzzy, as is the case with nearly all real-world data. It would be factually untrue to say, "there are some data points that do not fit into any cluster, therefore these clusters do not exist". Biological sex is real in this way, just like biological hair color or handedness or anything else.
We could go one step further, and ask each human which gender they identify as; and if we do, we will see a strong correlation between this self-identification and cluster membership. This tells us that gender is mostly biologically determined, although, once again, the correlation is not perfect.
The problem with Judith Butler et al is that they're not doing math, they're doing philosophy; and in philosophy, there are no numbers -- there are just hard boolean distinctions. Thus, either all humans are 100% divisible into "Male" and "Female" categories, or the categories have absolutely no meaning. While I agree that this model is much easier to conceptualize, I just don't see how it could ever apply to anything useful in the real world.
See now, this is exactly what I meant by saying that "nobody thinks that biological sex isn't real." You're invoking this elaborate thought experiment to prove what nobody is trying to deny, and conjuring up innumeracy as an explanation for this imaginary denial of the trivially true.
What pro-trans people -are- trying to deny is the idea that, since the clusters exist, everything has to go into one or the other, and it has to be the one that this outside scientific classifier says it is. If we choose self-identification, rather than cluster appearance, as the determining factor, then - since as you note the correlation is strong - most of the time we'll get the same answer. But in those cases where the answer is different, we can stop shoving those few people into clusters they object to belonging to.
But it is very explicitly not everything. It's just things like sporting events and shelters for abused women. People keep making this point and you keep failing to address it, it's beginning to seem a little bit disingenuous.
I haven't seen anyone saying it's not everything. What they keep saying is that other people believe that "biological sex is not real," which is what you said they believe in the comment I'm responding to. That's nonsense and as long as people keep saying it, I'll keep calling it the nonsense that it is.
If you want to have a discussion about who should be admitted to women's sports or women's shelters, we can have that conversation, but I haven't seen anyone bringing up that complex matter in the thread descending from my top-level comment, which is the only part I've been systematically reading.
How is that an "elaborate thought experiment" ? This is literally how we classify everything (well, actually, we mostly use hierarchical trees, but still). My entire point was that sex/gender were no different from any other dimension.
The "elaborate thought experiment" isn't the point you're trying to make by it, but the procedure you're imagining of stripping everybody naked and studying them in order to prove that there are two sexes, which you're doing because you're deluded into thinking there are people who don't realize this.
As I said, that is not an "elaborate thought experiment"; yes, obviously no one literally strips people naked, that was just a whimsical expression meaning "consider only biological factors". Now I'm starting to think you're being obtuse just for the sake of winning the argument.
> Nobody thinks that biological sex isn't real, least of all trans people.
Yeah, that's the motte: sex is complicated, intersex people exist, etc. The bailey is the same as it is with any woke viewpoint on any issue: race, gender, sexual preference, what have you; and that viewpoint is, "burn the witch !". Wokeness is not a movement for human rights (at least, not any longer); it is a movement designed to destroy people in the most efficient (yet legal) way possible.
Strictly speaking, a shibboleth is the word "shibboleth." More broadly, it is "a password, phrase, custom, or usage that reliably distinguishes the members of one group or class from another" (American Heritage Dictionary). The exact circumstances of the original instance need not be reproduced; it's the general principle at stake.
>What do I think? I think that putting phrases like "opposes wokeness" in the context of "join the fight for academic freedom" means that, somewhere when I was not looking, the meaning of "woke(ness)" changed from "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination", which is what I thought it meant, to "harsh cancel culture on behalf of racial issues."
First of all, this is begging the question, because the fact that wokeists claim that "prejudice and discrimination" exists, it doesn't mean that it does. Secondly, the latter meaning has been in effect for YEARS now, and I can't comprehend not being aware of it by now.
>Nobody thinks that biological sex isn't real
Scott was mostly being facetious, but this is simply false. It's not uncommon on the far left to claim that biological sex is a "social construct" (in the most literal sense that's true, but they're too ignorant of that and use it to mean "doesn't really exist").
>If Lucky Academic would like my support, he should take that giant chip off his shoulder.
Whether a scientific category is real or a social construct is a question of whether the category is artificially imposed by human minds on nature for ease of understanding or communication or if it is something that exists independent of human minds cleaved in nature. There's all sorts of realism debates in science. For example, species concepts are best thought of as social constructs, but there's been (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to think of them as real categories.
Biological sex has a case for being real, but overdetermined in common use, but the people who say "biological sex is real" tend to mean something else entirely, so this ends up confusing things. As it is normally used, it's a social construct. It doesn't help that the phrasing is frequently used in the service of dismissing that psychological sexual development might not match one's physical appearance crudely associated with a given sex.
I don't understand the difference between the two strategies. Or rather, it seems the difference is more down to how the woke react to pushback, which is not something this academic can control, or even reliably predict.
IIRC, didn't Brett Weinstein express polite disagreement in a faculty meeting? Next thing you know he's driven off campus by an angry mob. Was that the Fabian or Berserker strategy?
"if the voting public is very anti-woke, but universities are very woke," the outcome will be bad for universities in the long run. The public will stop taking academy and academicians seriously.
The only problem is the culture has spillover into STEM fields where important work is being done, so you have all the diversity quota people up in your face while you're trying to cure cancer.
Then the result will be that cancer won't be cured and the public will trust scientists in academy less and less in runaway fashion. But then (hopefully) alternative universities could emerge and get things done, and sanity be restored.
That last part won't happen: new prestigious universities are nearly impossible to found. What would happen if the current STEM academia got destroyed is either little/no academia at all, or else academia will move to a different country (perhaps Asian academia will survive, with the current universities in Singapore/Japan/China growing more prestigious and becoming the center for STEM research).
I don't think the current state of affairs is an attractor state; if you break the system, universities won't naturally be restored.
How about University of Austin (https://www.uaustin.org) ? Of course if current attempts to create alternative universities in the US don't take off, more and more students will choose to study abroad as you say.
> That last part won't happen: new prestigious universities are nearly impossible to found
I'm not sure anyone has tried, recently.
With a chunk of money the size of the Harvard endowment ($53 billion right now, apparently) plus the cost of land and buildings, plus competent administration, I'm reasonably confident you could get a prestigious university started within a decade.
Just make a list of the top academics, and give them whatever they want in terms of salary and research funding. How can a university not be prestigious, when its whole maths faculty is Fields medallists, and its whole chemistry department is Nobel laureates?
Well, first off, any plan that starts with "first secure fifty billion dollars in funding" has the deck stacked very firmly against it at the start.
If you manage that, this sounds like a plausible way to establish a good research institute, but that's not the same thing as a university. In particular, undergraduate education is largely decoupled from high-prestige research professors. And there are synergies in having your research, your postgraduate education, and your undergrad education done in the same place if you can manage to keep doing that. But if we're giving up on the existing colleges and universities, this is a way to maybe partially replace them as research facilities, not as undergrad colleges.
And to the extent that hiring Nobel prize winning scientists signals a university or other institution's quality, it's mostly because it shows that those highly regarded scientists consider the institution to be the best place for them to do their work. If it is plainly obvious that they're doing it just because you threw obscene amounts of money at them, that's going to greatly weaken the signal.
This isn't the nineteenth century, or even the early twentieth. That was a different society. In particular, a much higher trust society, at least among the university-founding and -attending demographic. Things that were straightforward then, are much harder and maybe impossible now.
And the University of Austin, if it ever manages to actually graduate anyone, will be considered a partisan diploma mill only suited to producing right-wing thinkpiece writers and the like.
Europe maybe. The American ideological apparatus is strong in Europe but resisted in places like France. And ignored in the Mediterranean and the east.
When I read the description of the berserker strategy, it reminds me a lot of Jordan Peterson. I don't want to accuse him of picking fights, but he definitely stood his ground a lot, and usually on camera. I feel like it didn't work out that well for him in the end. But then again, I can't think of any notable examples of the Fabian strategy working out for Academics either, but I'd be interested if people had examples.
He became an alt-right superstar, which I'd consider a success, against his will, which I'd consider a failure. His ideas certainly reached a lot more people than if he kept writing academic dissertations on meaning.
I work at the intersection of academia and Hollywood (kill me.) I suspect there’s a false dichotomy here.
I mostly agree with Petey’s comment. You have to appear to be a Fabian and behave like a berserker. You have to take the logic of an obvious moment (“the state murdered a guy on live TV”) and expand it into non-obvious moments (“the same state is discouraging or punishing certain kinds of expression.”) Like a lot of people, I think we should avoid state oppression and promote self-expression.
I think that any state that relies on most citizens quietly hiding their sincere views is doomed. Where the New Atheists failed, I think, is in failing to provide an alternative positive theory of meaning. I think somebody in the near future will do a better job of this.
Perhaps counter-intuitive, but maybe try and work on addressing some of the underlying issues that "wokeness" cares about. I think a lot of the shift to the left over the past decade or so is just because most people in highly educated, cosmopolitan subcultures (like elite colleges and high-paid professional jobs) believe correctly (IMHO) that even if some "woke" people are annoying and behave in toxic ways, on the object level questions that have very real concerns. So they are prone to err on the side of ignoring excesses on the "correct" side of the issue. And the best way to marginalize the radicals is to provide a sane alternative that actually addresses the underlying issue. That is, the best defense against the crazy DEI consultants/trainings/etc is the actually help create a divers environment.
Of the people on the "correct" side of the issue, how many are interested in the disproportionate rate at which black people are killed by police, and how many are interested in the disproportionate rate at which men are killed by police?
How many get upset at that comparison? Why?
Are you sure this has anything at all to do with correctness?
38 states currently have legislation pending or passed which limits what teachers are allowed to teach about race and racism, and you're going to say with a straight face that an "unwoke" friend wants to join the fight for "academic freedom"?
This is the most alarmingly dishonest thing you've ever written, and it is deeply disappointing to think you're now using your considerable talents to fight the culture war on behalf of the side that unironically waves confederate flags. You have the potential to do real harm.
"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke."
So... you're openly admitting that you choose your ideology based on how sympathetic you are to the people who espouse it, and not on whether it is objectively true or morally correct? I mean, I guess the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, but as a reader of yours for years, I still find this shocking. "I don't want to be on the same side as annoying people" is a terrible, terrible, terrible epistemology. Surely you can see that?
All your talk about motivated reasoning and correcting for bias and searching for truth rings a bit hollow now. I hope you take stock soon and recover from whatever phase this is, because the sentiments you have expressed in this post are unworthy of the intellectual achievements you've made up until now.
But that reaction against CRT is exactly the kind of response you would get to wokeness. The recall of the education board in San Francisco is an example, and most voters were non white.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. It seems these board members were recalled for a variety of reasons, one of which was that their proposal to rename a bunch of schools was seen as a frivolous waste of time. Can we be against renaming a school named after Abraham Lincoln when students are suffering from pandemic-induced remote learning problems? Sure. Is that a representative reaction of what we mean by "wokeness"? No. Is that a threat to "academic freedom"? No. So I'm sorry but I'm having trouble seeing the relevance of this example, other than as an example of a single fight which "anti-wokes" won as long as you take it out of context and don't examine the facts too carefully.
Well you’ve decided the renaming of the schools (44 in all) isn’t wokeness but it was clearly driven by anti racist ideology. Lincoln of course was a racist (and white supremacist) by the standards of today as was nearly every white person in the 19C. The renaming was part of a process that started with confederate statues. It has waned a bit but if left to it’s internal logic would in fact see the US denuded of most of its statues and the renaming of most public buildings and streets.
The board themselves blame “white supremacy” for the recall - though as I said the voters were Asian.
The number of schools in question is immaterial. Again, it seems like you're just casting about for reasons to make this one recall election in one school board seem more important than it really is. Again, the reason is that it's the only ammunition you have in your arsenal.
I acknowledge that renaming schools is a thing that woke people do, but as I said (somewhat unclearly, I apologize) the normal reaction to renaming schools is not a recall election of the school board, so I don't find this case to be a good representative example of how a typical conflict between wokeness and anti-wokeness plays out. I also think the school board tried to make it about wokeness to save face, but in reality it was more about their neglect and incompetence. In any case, the name of a school (or 44 schools) has nothing to do with academic freedom, so this case does not demonstrate that wokeness is a threat to, or in conflict with, academic freedom.
Also, there's this: "Many Asians in San Francisco were already motivated by the Board of Education's plan to replace a merit-based admission system with a lottery program at Lowell High School, the city's most-elite public school. KQED's Scott Shafer reported on Morning Edition that Asian students make up more than half of its student enrollment."
This is much more an open and shut case of "merit vs. diversity" so it's interesting that it's not what is highlighted in the coverage of this case. I wonder why that could be... perhaps Fox News audiences would be less sympathetic if they knew they were supposed to be outraged on behalf of Asian kids than they are when they get to fight against the Wokes.
But again, the question of whether scarce educational resources should be given to students who do well on tests or to students who need them has nothing to do with "academic freedom", so again, I struggle to understand the relevance of this school board recall situation to my comment.
I’m not American but I did live for a few years in San Francisco - hence my better understanding of that city. Your original post in this sub thread indicates that 38 states want to stop the teaching of CRT, but given that the last presidential election had about 25 states voting for Biden this means that CRT is unpopular not just in solid Trump or Republican territory but across the country. This is an example where traditional liberals need to defeat “wokes” or be defeated. It can be as simple as moving onto something else, or even backtracking, like on defunding the police.
As to your second paragraph, I wasn’t going to discuss that in the interest of time but it also would be considered in the general woke category, as the removal of the merit system at Lowell high was in the interests of racial justice.
It sounds like you want to reify wokeness into a single thing, just as the people you are criticizing want to reify white supremacy into a single thing. It seems to me that the problem is lumping everything together into a single battle for the soul of the world, and the anti-woke are doing this as much as the worst of the woke are. This original post is just about enhancing the woke-anti-woke battle, and not about getting us out of it.
Brilliant -- why didn't Kant think of that? Always follow principles that are "objectively true and morally correct"! In your next post, you'll have to tell us how you identify those.
Yeah. All this talk about how wokeness kills academic freedom by cancel culture while there are literal governmental laws restricting teaching about racism unless it's done in an unwoke way looks really weird.
I mean I understand that diversity libertarian who values freedom of speech very much can be rightfully concerned about even non-governmental limitations of it. But this should be a lower priority compared to governmental limitations, shouldn't it?
It's complicated - ultimately the states, but some states give more control to local divisions and others centralize more. There are school boards that have a role in deciding curriculum (state or local) and then individual schools and teachers also have some discretion.
But on top of that, there are organizations that make curricula/textbooks to sell to schools. These are subject to market forces - "he who pays the piper calls the tune" - so publishers of textbooks have some incentive to tailor their content to the demands of the states where they have the biggest markets. In other words a history textbook publisher might not want to include bits of history that will make schools in Texas pick a different textbook.
Also, sometimes these organizations are incompetent, or border on grift, so you can get curricula in front of students (like the Wit and Wisdom scandal) that are genuinely not serving students needs, and sometimes there is little oversight, and it appears to happen due to corruption or marketing.
Also, there's "Common Core" which was put out by an advocacy/research group as a model curriculum which many states have adopted - that mainly covers math and english.
And then there are private schools which are often just totally different, and might teach the IB, or a religious curriculum, or whatever.
"governmental laws restricting teaching about racism unless it's done in an unwoke way"
These are government schools, after all. It seems reasonable for the parents of the children who attend them to both want input into the curriculum and for government leaders responsible to represent them to crack down on the rising tide of racism and racial exclusion/shaming involved in the movements they're against.
I don't believe any of the laws you mention restrict the actions of private actors to speak/teach whatever they want, they just limit the amount of racism government employees are allowed to inflict on their students while on the job.
If it's reasonable to forbid anti-black racism by government employees, then it's just as reasonable to forbid anti-white or anti-asian racism by government employees.
Besides the obvious, oft-repeated motte-and-bailey ("just teaching that slavery happened" vs "all white people are oppressors", segregating kids by race, telling white kids they are oppressors, telling black kids they are oppressed, "decolonizing" math, the 1619 project, etc), there is a fundamental difference between censorship, e.g. of a professor at a university or a social media user on a platform, vs. deciding what is taught in a curriculum. A curriculum, by definition, has to be curated. Something has to be chosen to be taught in that curriculum, so it's not censorship to change what is taught in public schools to be more historically accurate. On the other hand, social media websites are not publishers, they are platforms.
> "I don't want to be on the same side as annoying people" is a terrible, terrible, terrible epistemology.
I'd say it's an excellent heuristic. If a side contains way more annoying people than the other side, then either it is attracting dysfunctional members or the thoughtful members were repelled (initially, or they left as the insanity set in).
Look I hate to bring up the Semmelweis handwashing example because it seems like a black swan thing, but just for the sake of argument: Semmelweis, by all accounts, was objectively nutty, harassing and haranguing anyone who he could get his hands on, when trying to espouse his crazy theory that medical hygiene could save lives. He was also objectively correct, and choosing the "heuristic" to ignore people like Semmelweis got people killed.
But also if we look at *why* Semmelweis went crazy, the evidence seems to be that the fact that he couldn't get anyone to take simple, low-cost, life-saving steps like washing their hands after dissecting corpses and before delivering babies caused him to have severe anxiety. I can relate, trying to get people to put masks on in a pandemic.
Oh yeah, there's a better example. Who is more annoying in the mask/no mask debate? As a zero covider, I am ready to acknowledge that my side is a thousand times more annoying. We have to be. We're the ones pushing for a change in the status quo, and changing the status quo is annoying almost by definition. When you and your friends want to go out for drinks, we're the annoying ones who ask if everyone there will be vaccinated. Etc. Note that Scott, in his excellent post about masks, did not weigh how annoying maskers/anti-maskers were, nor did he (to my knowledge) adjust his opinion about the efficacy of masks based on the annoyingness of their proponents or opponents.
Sorry for the poor organization here, I'm writing this on the fly, but two key points: activists are annoying because change is often uncomfortable and inconvenient, and activists sometimes act or become crazy out of the sheer frustration of trying to overcome people's behavioral inertia. So IMO this is actually a terrible heuristic.
Semmelweis was a lone (apparent) crank, and he was correct. That's more like listening to the Unabomber than listening to a twitter mob.
The covid thing is a huge can of worms I'd rather not open - somehow the issue became so partisan both sides lost their shit and maximized disagreement.
Perhaps uncomfortable and inconvenient change shouldn't happen, or should at least be subject to cost and benefit calculation? Because activism in favor of change is usually about having the people preached to bear the costs, which they're understandably reluctant to do. There are a lot of causes, you care about some, I care about others. Being aggressive about yours and ignoring mine just makes you a dick, and will just convince me to tune you out.
This argument seems circular to me. "Annoying" isn't some objective condition, it's quite literally a subjective judgment about another person's behavior. Everyone thinks that the "other side" contains more annoying people than "their side" and they are probably right. In general you are much less likely to get annoyed by people doing things you broadly agree with.
But setting that aside, how would you even assess which "side" contains more annoying people? What even counts as a "side" here? Can the world be evenly divided into "woke" and "anti-woke"? If there are 100 times as many woke than anti-woke, then wouldn't the woke have way more annoying people than the anti-woke even if "annoyingness" were just some randomly distributed personality trait? Like the parent commenter said, it's terrible epistemology.
I think the "I don't want to be on the same side as annoying people" was trying to evaluate his own biases, generalize them on to others, and leverage/manipulate them without regard for rationality. It would have helped for it to be disambiguated as "I know this is irrational, but".
But also I got the same vibe as many other (but clearly not all) commenters here, where this post sounds to me as if Scott became freaked out after getting some woke app notifications, and is here to rally the troops for this "strategic discussion". The whole post is "given that we need a solution to the woke problem, what is our best weapon".
What's the actual goal? "Fighting wokeness" and "promoting academic freedom" feel like applause-lights to me.
Maybe the goal was to be judgement-free and solution-oriented, but when someone comes asking for armaments, so I think it's fair to want to know to what end. "These guys are ineffective and annoying" isn't a good reason.
Yes, you could be right about this point, but even if so, it runs the risk of substituting the typical mind fallacy for evidence about how people behave in the real world.
The phenomenon of backlash against an ideology due to the behavior of its adherents may be real, but it can be studied and quantified - for example we can look at swings in public opinion after peaceful vs. violent protests, and discover that overall peaceful ones tend to produce change while violent ones tend to produce backlash. We can try to quantify the effects of stupid vs. non-stupid slogans across various demographic groups (my guess would be that on balance dumber slogans would appeal to dumber people, but who knows?). All of this is subject to inquiry by social scientists, and it is at least uncharacteristically lazy and sloppy for Scott to elide it all into "when wokes are stupid and combative it reduces my support for minority rights".
But in the context of this particular post it's even worse than that, because the whole reason why I (and I suspect many others) read this blog in the first place is that Scott holds himself to a higher epistemic standard. It's great and important to acknowledge biases, and I don't want to jump in and attack someone for doing so, but I feel like if you're going to admit that you are not even trying to evaluate particular woke claims or policies on the merits because sometimes woke people are stupid or combative, then you ought to simply recuse yourself from discussions of wokeness entirely, rather than issue a rallying cry about how to fight wokeness while highlighting or inventing trite examples selected for maximum stupidity (canceling yoga) or combativeness (throwing garbage at an elderly man). It's not only epistemically irresponsible, it's also a gross violation of the principle of charity. It's selecting arguments as soldiers rather than scouts. It's doing all the things that I read Scott's blog to get away from on the rest of the internet - all the things Scott implicitly (and I think explicitly although I'm not going to hunting) promises to avoid doing here.
It just feels deeply, deeply off to me to see Scott explicitly toss aside his most dearly-held principles, and for what - to help his anonymous friend fight campus diversity initiatives? "I'm a rationalist except when it comes to making sure colleges don't hire too many black people" is not a take I was expecting to read when I woke up this morning.
It's made me stop and reflect on who I am as a *reader* of this blog - think about whether and why I've been ignoring warning signs, and whether I want to continue recommending this blog to my friends, and what the future ratio of rationalist posts to admittedly-biased, right-wing culture warrior posts might be. I should think it would merit reflection on the part of the writer as well, which is why I point it out.
While I totally agree with everything you've said, I'm a bit confused by
>"I'm a rationalist except when it comes to making sure colleges don't hire too many black people" is not a take I was expecting to read when I woke up this morning.
This is exactly the kind of thing I expect when I dip my toe into rationalist spaces. If I was being uncharitable (i.e, not hedging my experience with qualifiers), I would say that "making sure colleges don't hire too many black people" is a pretty central goal of a large chunk of the rationalist community.
Rationalists are a hugely anti-progressive bunch. Scott has been writing variations on the "progressives/anti-racists suck" theme for many years now (with an occasional intermission for "don't those people on the far right have some good ideas").
Yeah. Like I said, I'll have to reflect on the fact that I've been shoving evidence of this tendency out of my mind right up until it became impossible to ignore.
"I'm a rationalist except when it comes to making sure colleges don't hire too many black people"
sounds maximally uncharitable to Scott's actual beliefs to me.
Perhaps you'd be willing to make an attempt to rewrite/reword that to make it something that Scott would agree represents his actual position? Thus demonstrating your ability to pass a minor intellectual Turing test?
You're just cherry-picking the most uncharitable version of the critique I've made, out of a long thread, in which I've already represented Scott's position in several different ways including directly quoting him, and in a comment where I was clarifying what it is about Scott's position that bothers me, rather than how I think Scott would characterize his own position.
You imply that Scott would not agree that my admittedly somewhat glib paraphrase represents his actual position. But Scott was the one who chose the examples in this post, which included multiple mentions of diversity initiatives as being a prime example of what the problem is with wokeness. Let's not mince words here - the primary purpose of diversity initiatives in the US is to address the modern and historic imbalance in power and prestige between White and Black Americans as a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Diversity for Irish Americans or the left-handed is not at issue, and diversity for Hispanic/Indigenous/other POC groups is a more recent addition as these initiatives have broadened focus. Point is, diversity initiatives primarily exist to get more black kids into college and more black professors teaching there. While Scott chose to frame that issue using the "color-blind" terminology of "merit vs. diversity" (an offensive false dichotomy itself), let's be clear that it was Scott who chose that issue. Scott literally asked us to help him help his friend oppose the hiring of more black professors, even if he's not willing to write that out in those exact words in that order. The fact that he is not willing to cop to holding that position is part of the issue.
On top of that, Scott voluntarily admits that his wokeness - or to use Scott's example, his support for things like diversity hiring, which means his support for hiring more black professors - depends on his personal biases and on chance. So if Scott sees open anti-black discrimination he will be more likely to support hiring more black professors, but if he sees some students disrupt a lecture in the name of wokeness, he will be less likely to support hiring more black professors. Again, it's fine to admit that, as I have to admit that sometimes if I find myself on the same side of an issue as someone I dislike, I question my reasons - but that is not a rationalist approach to politics, even a little bit.
So it seems that the only part of my paraphrase which is not directly substantiated here by Scott's own words in this post is "I'm a rationalist".
Anyway, here's that rewording:
"I attempt to be a rationalist, but when it comes to wokeness I rely on a social heuristic instead of a rational evaluation of policies, and by the way I've decided to help my friend fight wokeness and specifically to dismantle mechanisms for increasing diversity even though my reasons for opposing diversity initiatives do not stem from malice towards their beneficiaries, who I am not specifying for completely innocent reasons and not because specifying who they are would be absolutely fatal to my attempt to strip them of the benefits of diversity initiatives, but rather from malice towards their allies, who are sometimes dumb and annoying."
Kind of clunky... too many caveats. I'm just not good at the mental gymnastics required to make such a position look palatable.
What struck me as the missing nuance from your summary description was the fact that Scott isn't actually against hiring more black professors, at least not because they are black. He may be against hiring more professors in general (I don't actually know his position on that), but his position against diversity initiatives is that he's against hiring black professors rather than better qualified non-black professors. i.e. he's against the use of race as a hiring criteria, not that he's against hiring any particular race compared to another one.
Since you've shown great patience with my long responses I'm going to produce another one.
I think it's true that Scott's introspective experience of his position is that he is not against hiring more black professors per se. I think that Scott believes in the principle of race-blind hiring on the basis that race-blindness is fair to individuals and maximizes value for society, and believes that diversity initiatives contradict that principle.
However, I'm not sure that I'd characterize such a description of Scott's beliefs - which deliberately excludes all of their shortcomings and negative implications - as a "fair description." In my mind, a fair description would include both the strengths and weaknesses of the beliefs, or at least frame the beliefs neutrally and with context rather than positively and without context.
So to be fair one would need to address what makes Scott so sure that pre-existing processes for defining, identifying, and promoting merit - processes which were designed by white people, and which, until activists intervened, coincidentally seemed to identify and promote merit almost exclusively in white people - meet his criteria of being fair to individuals and of maximizing value for society.
One would need to address Scott's apparent belief that anti-black discrimination does not exist in hiring committees, or, if it does, that it could easily be identified and corrected for using only race-blind methods.
Finally, I think one would need to consider Scott's apparent belief that diversity in itself adds no value to teams and organizations and has no benefits for individuals which might offset or outweigh any alleged value lost by abandoning a strictly merit-based system (to the extent that such a system can even exist given human bias).
Finally, perhaps to sum up - given that Scott's position would seem to produce a negative outcome for a specific, already disadvantaged racial group, I think that a fair description of Scott's position needs to consider why, exactly, Scott is willing to accept that outcome. Without understanding the beliefs and assumptions undergirding the position, we can't claim to have understood the position itself.
>"I'm a rationalist except when it comes to making sure colleges don't hire too many black people" is not a take I was expecting to read...
Not to put words into his mouth, but I'm pretty sure Scott would also want to make sure colleges don't hire too *few* black people. Surely a central plank of being a rationalist on the topic of how many teaching staff a college hires (or how many students it accepts) would be something like: What *is* the optimal percentage of professors/students of different races for a university to hire/matriculate?
To get a handle on that, you'd need to consider questions like:
-given the well-evidenced IQ gaps between different racial groups, after adjustment for their share of the population, what ratio would we expect to result from a truly race-neutral hiring procedure?
-Is the racial IQ gap at least partly genetic, or is it something that we should expect to disappear given enough well-targeted social interventions?
(sub-question: how sure are we that the racial IQ gap is a real phenomenon, as opposed to an artifact of test bias that we have not yet managed to detect within the tests?)
-Even if, under truly race-neutral conditions only a negligible number of blacks would get a position at the top colleges, is in nonetheless better for social cohesion to hire higher fraction of blacks at the expense of some better-qualified non-blacks?
-If so, does it matter that a disproportionate number of those blacks are highly-selected African and Caribbean immigrants or their immediate desendents, and that the number of old-stock African-Americans remains negligible?
-If a lot of blacks don't have the cognitive capacity to become STEMlords, but do have the cognitive capacity to become grievance studies professors, is that a net negative for the black population on average, since many of them may be encouraged to enrol in massively-student-debt-incurring grievance studies courses that result in them earning less, and being more resentful, over the course of their lives than if they'd just learned a skilled trade?
-Given that Northeast Asians, and the usually highly-selected population of South Asians in the US, tend to outshine whites in IQ tests, is there in fact a good social cohesion basis to tamp down on the number of Asians who would get the top jobs (on a 'don't import a hostile low-IQ underclass if you can help it, but also you might not want to install a smug overclass whose genetic interests don't align with the majority population either' basis)?
-Do you even want your universities to be vacuuming up the best and brightest from all social strata, or is Charles Murray-style cognitive stratification of society a realistic thing to be afraid of?
[Edit: - Does the presence of significant numbers of different ethnic groups within the same university have some sort of diversity-related social benefit in itself, regardless of tuition quality - i.e. does it make white students into better citizens if they spend their university years around significant numbers of blacks, and vice-versa, than if they had gone to an otherwise-similar mono-ethnic university?
-What if there is a diversity benefit but it only goes one way - what if a mixed-race campus is better for whites but worse for blacks, or vice-versa, than a mono-ethnic campus?]
Etc., etc. You get the point, I hope: for anyone who truly matches the platonic ideal of the rationalist phenotype, with all these issues and more, "Is this true or false?" is a vastly more important question than "Will I get called a racist if I approach this issue with genuine openness to the possibility of it being either true or false?". In reality, most people, Scott included, are nothing like that Kantorovitchy, but the rationalist space is still where you would expect to come closest to a large number of people who are genuinely open-minded and truth-seeking on questions where the mainstream has decided as an article of religious fiat that certain beliefs are inherently evil and that their truth or falsity is therefore not something that should even be investigated.
Here's a line from the first bill linked in the article I posted:
"A public K-12 school or public institution of higher education may not teach, instruct, or train any student to adopt or believe divisive concepts."
Note that regardless of whether you agree with a "divisive concept" the "academic freedom" position is that teachers should be allowed to teach students to follow the facts to their logical conclusions, even if these conclusions are divisive. Note also that this bill includes public colleges and universities.
Here's a line from the first bill linked in the article I posted:
"A public K-12 school or public institution of higher education may not teach, instruct, or train any student to adopt or believe divisive concepts."
Public institution of higher education includes college, in case that wasn't clear.
I don't really care to look through all 38 states, several of which have multiple bills pending. If you're interested I'm sure you could find out how many states are including colleges and universities in their antiwoke censorship bills and how many are only aimed at K-12 education.
Incidentally K-12 teachers and students should also be entitled to academic freedom.
First: No. K-12 teachers do not get academic freedom, because their freedom in that respect directly infringes upon that of the students, who have no freedom to not participate.
Second: The "divisive concepts" specifically listed that colleges cannot teach below. With the notable exception of #9, about meritocracy, all of these are already illegal to teach under Title IX for protected classes; unless you believe that Title IX regulations should be overturned, I do not take your complaint seriously.
(1) a. DIVISIVE CONCEPT. Any of the following
10 concepts:
11 1. That one race or sex is inherently superior to
12 another race or sex.
13 2. That this state or the United States is
14 fundamentally racist or sexist.
15 3. That an individual, by virtue of his or her race
16 or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether
17 consciously or unconsciously.
18 4. That an individual should be discriminated
19 against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because
20 of his or her race or sex.
21 5. That members of one race or sex cannot and should
22 not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex.
23 6. That an individual's moral character is
24 necessarily determined by his or her race or sex.
25 7. That an individual, by virtue of his or her race
26 or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past
27 by other members of the same race or sex.
Page 2
1 8. That any individual should feel discomfort,
2 guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on
3 account of his or her race or sex.
4 9. That meritocracy or traits such as a hard work
5 ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular
6 race to oppress another race.
7 b. This term includes any other form of race or sex
8 stereotyping or any other form of race or sex scapegoating.
9 (2) RACE OR SEX SCAPEGOATING. Assigning fault,
10 blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or
11 sex, because of their race or sex. The term includes any claim
12 that, consciously or unconsciously, and by virtue of his or
13 her race or sex, members of any race are inherently racist or
14 are inherently inclined to oppress others, or that members of
15 a sex are inherently sexist or inclined to oppress others.
16 (3) RACE OR SEX STEREOTYPING. Ascribing character
17 traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status,
18 or beliefs to a race or sex or to an individual because of his
> "First: No. K-12 teachers do not get academic freedom, because their freedom in that respect directly infringes upon that of the students, who have no freedom to not participate."
This argument makes no sense as stated. Compulsory education is equally compulsory regardless of content. Whether I'm making a ten year old learn algebra or Brown vs. the Board of Education, that child still has to be there.
(modulo the facts that there is school choice, homeschooling, private schooling, electives within schools, and kids of a certain age can get a GED and leave early, but putting that aside)
The concept of school choice includes the idea that each community has discretion in deciding, through the school board and communication with school officials, what its children are taught in school. Then if some parents don't want their kids to learn what the community consensus would have them study, they can put their kids in a different school.
Now personally I'm not endorsing this position - I'd be more in favor of a more standardized national curriculum, myself - but this is the libertarian-conservative position on public schools (of course some libertarians would go further and just privatize all schools, or abolish compulsory education altogether). It won't do to pretend that academic freedom has never included primary school when the exact same activists who push for it have also pushed for vouchers, privatization, and other measures to allow more local and parental choice in curriculum.
In addition, as a teacher myself, the broad consensus is that teachers do in fact have discretion when choosing which texts to teach - so if I wanted to assign Maus to my class that would be up to my professional judgment, and if a school board decided to ban it (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/maus-becomes-bestseller-after-tennessee-school-ban-180979499/) that would be considered a curtailment of a freedom that most teachers in most schools in most states enjoy.
> "With the notable exception of #9, about meritocracy, all of these are already illegal to teach under Title IX for protected classes"
Sorry, you think Title IX makes it illegal to teach that the United States is fundamentally racist? I have to disagree. How would a teacher teach the three fifths compromise while making sure students did not draw the conclusion that the US Constitution was a fundamentally racist document? How would a teacher explain the origin and persistence of the Senate without reference to the need for less-populated slave states to counterbalance more-populated free states? How would you teach the Civil War, or Redemption, or Jim Crow, or the Civil Rights movement? How would you teach Japanese internment in WWII? I learned that the US was fundamentally racist in seventh grade social studies class in 1993; the fact that almost 30 years later we're debating ways to hide it from children is a travesty.
And that was from a sanitized version of history! I didn't learn about Emmett Till, or about the Tulsa Massacre, or COINTELPRO, or the Tuskegee experiments, or half a dozen other atrocities committed by the US, until college. We could literally keep the 30 most racist things the US has ever done from children and they'd still have to conclude after studying American history that America is fundamentally racist. You literally have to lie to children if you want them to avoid learning these "divisive concepts".
And that's the point of this bill, isn't it? The bill is overbroad by design - it's meant to scare and intimidate teachers so that we are afraid to talk about race and racism at all, because any kid who studies history will learn what this bill forbids them to be taught, which means all history teachers are always guilty, which means any parent can take one of them out with a complaint at any time. Every teacher is always compromised, waiting only to be denounced. Thank goodness I don't teach in the US - watching the Stalinization of education there would put me in an early grave.
>This argument makes no sense as stated. Compulsory education is equally compulsory regardless of content. Whether I'm making a ten year old learn algebra or Brown vs. the Board of Education, that child still has to be there.
- Sure.
>(modulo the facts that there is school choice, homeschooling, private schooling, electives within schools, and kids of a certain age can get a GED and leave early, but putting that aside)
- Not everybody has school choice, nor does everybody have the income or time available for home or private education. (Nor have the courts actually upheld these rights consistently)
>Now personally I'm not endorsing this position - I'd be more in favor of a more standardized national curriculum, myself - but this is the libertarian-conservative position on public schools
- And?
>In addition, as a teacher myself, the broad consensus is that teachers do in fact have discretion when choosing which texts to teach
- Sure. However, you don't have unlimited discretion; you cannot teach students that black people are inferior to white people.
>Sorry, you think Title IX makes it illegal to teach that the United States is fundamentally racist?
- Yes, because I treat the "fundamentally" there as saying something. All of your examples miss the point that saying a thing is fundamentally racist is equivalent to saying that a given race has an advantage with it; to say something is fundamentally racist is itself a racist position to take. (If math is fundamentally racist, that is implying some races have an advantage in pure mathematics, regardless of the specifics of mathematics themselves.)
But even without that - yes, Title IX makes it illegal to say the United States is racist in a number of ways. For example, certain things you could say about affirmative action, as an argument that it is racist, would fall afoul of Title IX.
>And that's the point of this bill, isn't it? The bill is overbroad by design - it's meant to scare and intimidate teachers so that we are afraid to talk about race and racism at all
- I find this statement deeply and amusingly unaware.
The Three-Fifths Compromise is wildly misunderstood. It was a battle about representation in Congress: residents of free states wanted slaves NOT to count, and residents of slave states wanted them to count as full persons.
>"The Three-Fifths Compromise is wildly misunderstood. It was a battle about representation in Congress: Abolitionists wanted slaves NOT to count, and slaveowners wanted them to count as full persons."
And why, one might wonder, did slaveowners adopt the somewhat counterintuitive position that slaves ought to count as full persons? Was it perhaps out of the goodness of their hearts?
No... it's because counting slaves (who, by the way, were not allowed to vote) increased the apportionment of representatives in the House to slave states, thus giving them the political power they needed to do things like maintain slavery.
In any case, I mentioned my 7th grade social studies class in 1993. What I did not mention was the reaction of the Black students to learning about the three fifths compromise for the first time. It will stay with me forever.
Would you like to explain to an eleven year old - who may not have even mastered fractions, given the sorry state of mathematics education in the US - what it means that the Founding Fathers counted them as 3/5ths of a person?
Now go ahead and do that with this "anti-CRT" bill hanging over your head.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to do it either. Better to just skip it. Maybe conservatives have a point: maybe American history literally is just too racist to teach to children.
I was never taught in school that the Kente cloth was the traditional cloth of several African cultures that made their fortunes off the slave trade. More importantly, it was never taught to whoever had bright idea to have the congressional Democratic leadership photographed in it kneeling in solidarity with the George Floyd protestors.
There's only so much you can teach people. Yes, the United States of America did bad things in its history. You could spend all 12 years of education listing the bad things America has done. You could spend the 12 years listing the bad things just about any major culture had done. But does that generate an accurate picture? More importantly, who determines what American schools should teach, and what should they strive for? It's inaccurate to give students the impression that America is squeaky clean, but nobody is asking for that. If we want to function as a society, the history needs to bring Americans together, and that means covering both the highs and lows. Saying "America is fundamentally racist" does not do that.
You're confusing cause and effect. American society is divided and if saying "America is racist" alienates half the people, pretending America is not racist alienates the other half.
Deciding that the best way forward is to forget the past is begging the question. Some believe that, while others believe the best way forward is to acknowledge the past and take responsibility for the legacy we're left with.
Maybe you're right and memory-holing 3/5ths of American history is the best way to unite people. It just seems untenable to me to seriously adopt a political position that requires the widespread suppression of commonly-available knowledge. Like China can barely keep Tiananmen Square under wraps and you think the US is going to hide the entire first 200 years of its history?
If I literally believed that they would follow the literal letter of those laws, and not interpret them in broad ways, I would be fine with every rule here other than (5). ((5) seems to say that we should be forbidden from discussing the idea that people might, by their nature, automatically be race or sex conscious, and that therefore it might be better strategy to discuss race and sex and try to correct one's own consciousness of it than to try to ban all talk of race and sex.)
But I don't believe that they will restrict implementation to just banning claims that the United States is fundamentally sexist - I expect that anyone who is willing to pass rules like this will extend it to banning any claim that the United States has been governed by sexist individuals for its entire history up until the present, and claims that certain apparently neutral laws are actually racist or sexist.
And if you want to ban talk of certain truths just because those truths make you uncomfortable, I don't see how this is supposed to be anything other than funhouse-mirror-wokeness.
>"So... you're openly admitting that you choose your ideology based on how sympathetic you are to the people who espouse it, and not on whether it is objectively true or morally correct?"
What on earth is *objectively* true? Scott gave up on that years ago anyways.
What if having really terrible representatives of a "morally correct" position actually *hinders that position*?
There is practically no doubt in my mind that people Tema Okun and Ibram Kendi have done more to *harm* the cause of racial equality than help it. Okun, if you're unfamiliar, is the source of that "being on time is white supremacy" foolery. All those article about several BLM organizations being complete scams are *bad for real social justice*; they're not uncool, *they're actively harming the grander cause*.
>""I don't want to be on the same side as annoying people" is a terrible, terrible, terrible epistemology. "
You seem to be reading it as "I don't want to be associated with uncool people;" I think it should be read as "these people are harming their own cause by fighting for it in stupid ways." I don't dislike Trump (merely) because he's "uncool," but because he was and continues to be detrimental to anything to the right of
"Police brutality is bad" and a controversial example at the right moment helped "wokeness." Burning down minority-owned businesses hurt "wokeness." If you want to help "wokeness," you want more "police brutality is bad" and less burning stuff, right? It's not just that you think arsonists make for uncool friends!
If something is right, true, good, and beautiful, I want it to have good representatives that represent it accurately and with as few caveats as possible. If I want to support a cause, I don't want to have to say "oh, well, they don't count" or "oh, well, they don't really mean that" or "oh, well, you need to read this whole library of postmodernist obscurantist theory to understand the context that this hate speech isn't actually hate speech" or "oh, well, just ignore all the fires and shootings." The more you have to caveat and hedge because there's either A) too few good representatives or B) too many really bad representatives, the harder it is for that cause to succeed and spread.
Examine the log in your own eye, and that perhaps you only think this is "alarmingly dishonest" because it doesn't align with your own biases so nicely as his past writings that others found unworthy.
What do these bad laws have to do with the toxic academic culture problem being discussed? And should we be ignoring both of these things, because climate change is even worse?
There are things worth fighting currently living under that umbrella. Examples include:
- hypocritical (and/or clueless) performance of ineffective strategies that predictably won't do a damn thing to help the supposed victims.
- silencing people whose opinions someone doesn't like
- insisting that all righteous people must (pretend to) believe things that aren't proven, are never to be investigated, and are probably untrue
- witch hunts
Note that *all* of these predate wokeness. In my young adulthood, the prime offender for all of these (in the US) were righteous Christians. Somewhat before that, the prime offenders were anti-communists, such as senator McCarthy.
When I see someone who cares about free speech - if and only if the speaker agrees with them, or is part of their team - I see someone who doesn't care about free speech.
Ditto re "academic freedom".
I think your friend should decide what they really want.
As you present them, their goals seem about as thought out - and reasonable - as those of the average protest-prone sophomore.
Agreed. Probably framing this as fighting for academic freedom or something like that would be better. 20 years ago "Christians" were harassing professors, now we have the "woke" people, probably we will face another group concept 15 years down the line.
Ditto. I don't want a mob coming after me period- I don't care if it's for me supporting police reform or believing that a 6-year old isn't old enough to really know what gender even is.
The Fabian/Berserker axis is only one of several that need to be considered. Another (perhaps more) important one is the the Twitter/non-Twitter (or tribalism/reasoned dialogue) axis. Twitter has become THE vehicle for tribal pitch-fork-ism now, as in the recent beheading of Jeffrey Liebermann in your profession. He wasn't trying to be anti-woke (probably had no concept of such a thing), he just made an innocent mistake, which gave colleagues who wanted to take him down a peg their opportunity to move in. His ridiculous apology (from a psychiatrist!! "unconscious biases"? give me a break!) was clearly written for him; it sounds too familiar. But he shouldn't have put his name to it; there was in fact nothing in the least racist or sexist in his tweet and he should have stuck by that, perhaps apologizing for misunderstandings, since many of his readers evidently didn't realize that the expression "freak of nature" is not derogatory, has nothing to do with "freak" in its colloquial sense. He might agree now, looking back on it, but probably had no time to think about this.
But now the damage is done; another routine lynching, another nail in the coffin of the "open debate" whose absence in her undergraduate classes Emma Camp recently wrote in the NYT about (to the inarticulate distress of Nikole Hannah-Jones). But at least she and the students she describes can resist this tribalism *in person*; you can't resist it on Twitter -- you step on a banana peel and poof, you're gone! Liebermann could also have resisted in person, if he'd said it in person rather than tweeted it; he could have explained what he meant and apologized if someone had misunderstood and overreacted. So the choice between involvement-via-Twitter vs. involvement via media less vulnerable to tribalism is critical. There is no need for an academic to be on Twitter. Liebermann's mistake was to be on Twitter in the first place; it just gave his assassins-in-waiting (whom he was probably only vaguely even aware of) their forum and their opportunity.
So yes, the choice between Fabian and berserker is important (and doesn't need to be made once for all) but the choice whether to engage via Twitter or via slower, less tribally vulnerable media is equally important. And for an academic, that choice (unlike the Fabian/berserker one) is more of a no-brainer.
Atheism has nothing to offer in the face of existential risks and we are increasingly ridden with fear. I think another reason why we no longer debate is because reason has failed us, nothing is black and white, everything is an iceberg ---connected, complex more interrelated than what at first seems obvious. Beauty offers respite.
Perhaps wokism is starting to crumble because the fear of speaking out is transferred onto the much stronger existential fears of Covid and the possibility of a Nuclear War. Its narrow minded and narcissistic qualities have simply worn out. And academia....academia is entirely irrelevant.
I agree with others that you need to get more object-level here, and decide what it is you're actually fighting against.
Do you just care about invited speakers not getting cancelled? That might require some type of Berserker strategy (but make sure to be good at picking fights -- inviting some actual witch to speak will certainly backfire).
Do you instead care about ending affirmative action? That one's tough but I'd aim towards joining committees and silently pushing back where possible.
Are you trying to combat woke bias in social science research? That only works if this academic friend of yours is in social science to begin with; you did not specify.
Fighting these things requires different strategies. Decide what you want to accomplish, and taboo the word "woke". Some otherwise un-woke people are in favor of affirmative action, for example. It's ambiguous.
From my observations/experience, it's tough for even the tenured professors to exert influence over the university as a whole (unless your academic wants to become a dean) and therefore the best path would be to try to influence within the department.
But then it's tough to give advice without knowing what kind of academic this person is and how his peers think. In my experience with <specific hard science> departments at multiple universities, there's a tendency for the non-woke to go along with the woke just because they want to take the path of least resistance when it comes to every non-technical issue. So then being a Fabian makes sense because there would be a beloved colleague providing an alternative voice and perhaps provide some strength to those who would usually be swept up with the woke opinions to speak out as well. But I don't know if this strategy works in humanities and social science departments, where I imagine (but I don't know if this is the case) academics have actual opinions about social issues and aren't just trying to take the path of least resistance.
Both of those are hard ways. A better way is "Meme it to win it".
There are multiple possibilities to make wokeness uncool... and something else cool. Sometimes a good slogan does the trick, like BLM or MAGA. Sometimes one letter has the power, like Z. Sometimes associating your opponent with your enemy is the way to go, you know plenty of those. For example, given that anti-Putin sentiment happened to be stronger on the left, because of Trump, associating Putin's gagging of the media with the similar strategies of The Woke might work. "One Nation -- One Truth". Something smarter and catchier, of course.
Tangential, but I promise it is a genuine question:
> While I don’t morally blame the truckers for this, from a strategic point of view, they sure did cause it to happen.
I think this is petty. I think *you* think this is petty. So I hope you won't mind if I'm petty in return.
From a strategic point of view, people who failed to unequivocally support the truckers, caused the normalization of freezing bank accounts. While I don't morally blame the "silent majority" for this, they sure did cause it to happen.
I realize this isn't /quite/ apropos. Protest strategy is in some sense exogenous; the public's response is endogenous. Still, "an entirely nonviolent, but nevertheless internationally visible protest" is an extraordinarily high bar to meet, and the Canadian convoy managed it. Moreover, when I was a mere schoolboy, the standard story of the civil rights movement involved many benign protests designed to elicit a harsh overreaction. This, I was told, was a brilliant strategy: it made the protestors sympathetic, and the suppressive authorities were exposed as the bigoted incompetents they were. Did civil rights protestors (from a strategic point of view) normalize the use of firehoses on peaceful protests?
In short: What, specifically, could the truckers have done better, and how would it have led to better results?
Had a better cause. You can't really separate tactics from what the protest itself is about. To the extent that the civil disobedience during the civil rights protests were effective it was because a lot of northern white people were generally on the side of black people in the South and opposed to the Jim Crow regime.
The trucker protest was ineffective for roughly the same reason the Occupy Wall Street protests were ineffective: the "cause" was an incoherent collection of grievances that ranged from reasonable (vaccine mandates for truck drivers who are exceedingly unlikely to be significant spreaders of COVID given the nature of their work) to easily-caricatured conspiracy theories. The civil rights era was relatively well organized and intentional with a concrete, broadly popular goal.
I *sort of* agree. That is, I agree they should have had a better, and more concrete cause. Of course every protest has morons---and I think morons in this protest were deliberately amplified by hostile voices---but (to repeat the example) I recall that the civil rights protests were scrupulously policed by organizers, and the truckers should have done that here as well, from a strategic standpoint.
But the second part of my question was "and how would it have led to better results?". And I don't see how "have a better cause" and "better policing" would have prevented the government from enacting financial sanctions. So the *specific thing for which they're being blamed* (in some vague non-moral sense) wouldn't go away.
Uh. I should be a bit less oblique. Here are some things I believe are probably true (in increasing order of how certain I am):
1. The success of a protest is strongly dependent on how various elites view the cause. Civil rights, as you state, was viewed as a legitimate cause by the most powerful people in the country.
2. Victory is deemed moral post hoc. If the truckers had killed ~30 people, but caused enough disruption to overthrow the government, this would be viewed as a splendid example of how a protest should be run.
3. Making an offhand, largely tangential comment in opposition to unpopular cause X is much easier and safer than making a similar comment in support. This helps to create a systematic bias in "the discourse" (barf). I do not know of any way to avoid contributing to this phenomenon, other than total silence.
It's an ugly picture. These are the things that pushed me to express annoyance originally.
My advice would be: spend a lot of time thinking about exactly what your principles are. If you fight the Left they're going to spend a lot of time trying to tell you what you believe and why you're evil for believing those things.
It's important to keep a strong concept in your head of what you actually _do_ believe -- for instance, "I believe every individual should be treated equally regardless of sex, race or sexual orientation", or "I believe in [this very specific definition of] free speech". Then, be ready to stand up for those good principles when they are violated and articulate exactly why.
Being "anti-woke" is an understandable shorthand for a position, but it's not a good thought process for picking your fights. Fight the stuff that's genuinely wrong, not just the stuff that annoys you.
I agree with this (strongly!) and in lieu of an upvote I must leave a comment, to add: Focus on being honest.
I think a good starter is Solzhenitsyn's "Live not by lies", but it doesn't end there. In each circumstance, your first priority must be to tell the truth. Ensure that anybody who is *listening* knows what you believe the truth to be, and then don't add anything that might mislead them. That sort of sets an upper and a lower bound for what you must say. (In more suppressive societies this can perhaps be modified by telling the truth in a roundabout way.)
My sense is that the Fabian strategy is the one most compatible with this dictum. The more fights you get in, the more likely you are, in the heat of the moment, to overstep and say things you don't really believe. And then... well, it's just too tempting to double down and defend them.
Be quite, speak the truth when the opportunity presents itself, and have faith. It's better than trying to manipulate society, and I know of no other options.
I probably don't agree with you about the underlying issues, but I think your advice is exactly right. If you don't think exactly about what your underlying principles are, then you're liable to end up waging a war by committing precisely the same atrocities that you see the other side committing, because these atrocities feel like things to do when there's a war, and you haven't thought about what makes them atrocious. This original post seems to be about creating a wokeness of the anti-woke, just as the 1990s led to a political correctness of the anti-PC.
It's worth mentioning the real Fabian strategy is that of Fabius Maximus Cunctator, the Roman general who was appointed dictator after a series of disastrous defeats at the hands of Hannibal, and employed what we would nowadays call guerrilla warfare until Roman strength could be rebuilt, a rare instance of Romans fighting as the underdogs.
IN any case; he could try being not being aggressively annoying about speech when it makes him feel like a martyr, while totally failing to do anything but regurgitate reheated 90's pabulum about political correctness with the numbers filed off. That's been 100% of my experience with higher education reactionaries.
If he wants to challenge Wokeness as social phenomena, he needs to do it from the left, not the right.
When people attack Wokness from the right, it looks exactly like just being a normal ass racist. If he wants to convince people that aren't racist and aren't impressed with his noble defense of truth and freedom and blah blah blah, he needs to convince them that it's not just low class to be woke, but ineffective.
I’ve thought about this sort of question a lot in different contexts, but I think of the “Fabian” and “Berserker” strategies as “inside” and “outside” roles. Importantly, I do not consider them alternatives, but complements.
You need someone on the outside creating drama and generating pressure. And you also need someone on the inside negotiating a response to that pressure that suits your goals.
In professional politics I’ve seen members of party A deliberately feeding information to competing party B to attack party A with. Why would they do such a thing? Because that outside pressure helps them win the internal argument! “Party B is smashing us in this issue, we should do (thing I always wanted to do) so those attacks don’t damage us so much.”
So identify which of those roles needs to be filled in your current circumstance. If you have allies on the inside who don’t want to start drama and face blowback but do want to advance academic freedom, then you can fill the outside role and create drama so they can engineer “compromises” that give you some of what you want.
On the other hand if there is a lack of people on the inside that are sympathetic to the cause of academic freedom, then you should focus on building your own status and position and becoming that inside player.
What's the point of banning culture war discussions if the articles are about how to ignite culture wars? Isn't this the most counter productive thing for ACX you could do, even if it works?
Sorry I'm from Germany and really don't get it: what's the problem with wokeness? Is this really a big Problem in US? To me it seems like jumping the alt-right train because of annoyance of loved privileges. Also I don't get why quotas are a bad thing. It depends on the field but in politics and leading positions they are a valid tool imho.
Going with the charitable assumption you aren't just trolling (you must understand you sound kind of naive), because I know a bit about Germany and I can totally picture young German people being sincerely confused by this kind of article:
The whole point of the discussion is to avoid having to choose between "super-woke" and "alt-right" and not to get called "alt-right'" or "nazi" or "fascist" or "supremacist" or whatever awful insult you can think of if you happen to find (for example) "defunding the police" a very bad idea or "micro-aggressions" an unconvincing pseudo-scientific concept or gendering debates kind of ridiculous*** or banning books because they contain a certain word totally idiotic. This is very important because 1/ you also certainly don't want to be called a "stalinist" just because you suggest higher taxes might be good 2/ being called a "nazi supremacist awful person" is the first stage, being fired is the next one, and it's really happening.
(btw, I'm from France and I also see the American situation from far away - but I also see the thing coming across the pond. A university teacher got in serious trouble in Grenoble last year for refusing to equate "islamofobia" with antisemitism. Wehret den Anfängen!)
***like, what's that silly Sternchen? I lived in Austria fifteen years ago, the Binnen-I was everywhere, perfectly functional and practically unchallenged .
No I'm not trolling and also not young and I believe not naive.
For me it seemed like this:
There seemes to be some kind of problem with wokeness that Scott thinks is worth tackling aggressively. What always is mentioned is censorship and loss of job as a result of not thinking men and women are biologically equal.
I've never witnessed or seen this kind of stuff and also never really heard about it apart from US people that seem to think this is a huge problem. I've read some study about why this is a huge problem but for me it seemed like piece about an alien world.
So far the people who have to fear jobloss for me have been the people who have just not stopped voicing sexist opinions despite having been told several times to stop this and also often with some unsaid really bad history that everybody knew of but was not documented eg sexual harassment. I don't really get what's wrong with these people losing their job.
Now this mismatch and also the hopeful or maybe naive belief that the rationalist humanist community cloud ought to be more left wing confuses me.
The only explanation I got is that things in US are really that different. So I asked.
But I was futher confused by reading some catchphrases that I know - in Germany - are almost exclusively used by the alt right or people starting their journey on the alt right pipeline.
So the alternative explanation which I hope is false, is that the rationalist community as a whole is indeed fallable to alt-right viewpoints. This makes sense because alt right targets audiences where there are a lot of white males.
This seems to be not the case because several other people here also voiced confusion why going against people who want more social justice is supposed to be good thing.
Also who is called a Stalinist? That's a ln insult something almost exclusively to anarchists and trotzkist. Nobody else eben bothers to differ between different types of communists in Germany.
The * is just one of many possible alternatives to include transgender people. I don't really know if that changes something for the better but I do get that representation doese seem to matter and its not hurting anyone.
If you're not that young, you seem to be young to this blog... For at least nine years wokeness has been controversially discussed around here. I'm really sorry if I sounded condescending. (I may have been misled by your first name, if that's the real one. In France only very young people are called Leo. But then, in France only very old women are called Yvonne ;-)
Some (hopefully) short answers:
- "as a result of not thinking men and women are biologically equal."
First, for me "woke" is much more related to (a certain kind of) (so-called) antiracism than to basic feminism. I don't think there is much to be afraid of on this front, of course female and male are equal and that's not what I'm talking about. And of course sexual harassment is bad and a good reason to get fired. (I'm speaking strictly for myself, of course)
More generally, it's not about the content, it's about the methods. I do agree with a lot of ideas woke people promote (not all, obviously). But I do hate censorship and intimidation. And I think that's what Scott's article is about: how to promote freedom of thought and freedom from intimidation.
- "some unsaid really bad history that everybody knew of but was not documented eg sexual harassment."
...undocumented stories everybody knows about... Now we're getting at the problem. How do you discriminate between legitimate claims and smear campaigns against the unpopular guy? Losing one's job because of unsubstantiated accusations sounds pretty bad to me.
- "the rationalist humanist community cloud ought to be more left wing"
I don't consider myself a member of this community and I'm not really concerned. But my whole point is : "woke" is NOT synonymous with "left wing"! See Freddie DeBoer: He's as left wing as you can get, feminist, against racial injustice AND firmly anti-woke. The huge success he gets on substack seems to show he isn't alone there.
- "some catchphrases that I know - in Germany - are almost exclusively used by the alt right"
Is the alt right a thing in Germany now? No, I'm not trolling, I know about Höcke and Sarrazin and Maaßen and such, I just don't think they're (in their different ways) the same thing as the American alt right. Which German alt right do you mean?
And, really out of interest: which catchphrases?
- "Also who is called a Stalinist?"
That's my point. "Alt right" and "supremacist" and such are in most cases as ridiculous as "stalinist" is widely considered to be, at least in France and Germany. And yet they're in use and some people are prone to call people this in the manner of K-Gruppen turning against each other, because of I don't know which "catchphrase".
(besides, my father-in-law once got angry and called me a maoist because I voiced some pretty tame left wing concerns with concurrence not always leading to good results. It does happen!)
Okay, so I am too interested not to jump in here. I also a (not young) German who is an oooold reader to the blog (I was there in the ye oldent times, you see) and even though I might have a better idea of what Scott is talking about here, I am also confused on the project. The "woke" described in the article above seems very shallow in comparison to the depp-dives he did in earlier posts. Like, going the contrarian way on this just seems generally like a very bad idea to me. Also just going against wokeness ist just a weird project, since it is neither a coherent political group, philosophy, or methodology.
I agree that some things left-wing groups do is very bad - cancelling people who have done minor misdeeds, getting university professors fired for differences in opinion etc. However, I'd consider two things: first, why exactly are they able to do that. It is not like 20-somethings suddently have a lot more infuence or power? They are not a strong voter group, they can be resisted in university settings almost always etc. Don't get me wrong, I have seen a few university professors of mine on a woke-trial in my day. Curcially, however - none of them were actually fired. They had to suddently deal with the fact, that people made outrageous threats against them. That was hard, but that was... sort of it. Same with more rigorous things like quotas for political parties, jobs and the like. Like, there had been much talk, it has not happened. So, I'd really like someone to explain this panic to me.
Scott, as far as I can tell, sincerely disagrees with the neoreactionaries (i.e. the intellectual wing of the alt right) in various important ways. But he thinks that they have some important insights, and that these outweigh the downsides of having them in his community. Years ago he decided to cultivate the relatively smart, non-maximally-offensive segment of the neoreactionary movement as part of his readership, and to publicly criticise some of their ideas in a respectful, detailed way that also helped to promote their movement and its (in his opinion) better ideas. So it's no accident that the rationalist community includes some hard right elements. You can probably tell from my tone that I'm not and have never been comfortable with this -- but to Scott's and the community's credit, there is genuine diversity of thought here, hence your noticing that "several other people here also voiced confusion why going against people who want more social justice is supposed to be good thing".
Anatoly Karlin (who I think it is fair to peg as alt-right-ish, to the degree that Russian ideological clusters map onto Anglosphere ones) had a post on the demographics of the Less Wrong / SSC readership a few years ago that might be of interest: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/lesswrongsowhite/ . White people are overrepresented, but not by anything like as much as Kews in particular are overrepresented, which is not what you would expect from an ideological cluster that was overly biased in favour of the alt-right (but *is* what you might expect if you were looking at a dataset that included a lot of smart, open-minded people who were not so instinctively hostile to the alt-right that they were unable to even consider whether the alt-right might have some valid points).
To pick out this particular issue: quotas are a bad thing if ability is not equally distributed between the groups that you are quota-ing from. To take some of the most salient around these part: if, say, James Damore and Larry Summers are broadly correct, and there are biological reasons to expect there to be significantly fewer women than men at the very top echelons of maths-intensive, cognitively demanding fields given a totally sex-neutral hiring approach, a quota that required you to hire women for 50% of positions in those fields would be *guaranteeing* that the talent pool at the top of those professions was worse than it would be if all hires were made strictly acording to ability. That's not to say that it is *necessarily* wrong - if you live in a society where an angry mob will reliably burn down your maths department within 10 minutes of discovering that less than 50% of your maths professoriate is female, then you are better off paying the danegeld and hiring some excellent-but-not-the-*very_best* candidate women in order to keep your department going - but you would still be doing less good maths than you would be in the hypothetical where you did have free choice to pick only the very best.
Extend the same logic to racial groups: although the *cause* of the racial IQ gaps is still very much a matter of debate, the *existence* of significant differences in IQ between racial groups is not in any serious doubt among intelligence researchers ... meaning that having racial quotas that *presuppose* that there are no differences in average intelligence between groups guarantees that, at the margin, in certain mission-critical areas, you are going to get more bridges collapsing, more ships running aground, more space rockets exploding, more military conflicts lost, etc. than you would otherwise. Which, again, *could* be a price worth paying if the costs of people who don't understand the reasons for the disparity getting angry about it are severe enough, but you would need to weigh the pros and cons very carefully.
I think one of the biggest advantages of the Fabian strategy is that is lends itself towards institutionalization. You can build up a larger network/council/club/whatever that will persist for longer than you. Because eventually you’ll die, and my guess is that eventually something with similar problems will emerge (think the conservative censoring that went on in the late 1900s).
Is the anonymous academic an unwoke progressive/liberal? If yes, he should probably make it very clear, regardless of the strategy he picks. And not by self-identifying as a leftist but by directly supporting specific causes. It doesn't always help, but at this point putting oneself on the line to preach civility by saying stuff like "you should treat me charitably" makes people more hostile both to them and to civility.
(My reservation is that doing it too strongly might draw the contour of a belief-shaped hole around the beliefs in which he (and his colleagues) diverges from progressivism.)
Love the sign. Can it be ordered outside of the US?
"I, Greengrocer xy lives here" is rather cryptic though. Why does being a greengrocer, and/or denoting yourself xy, let you off the hook? Some local Berkeley story behind this, perhaps.
It reminds me of an old Peanuts strip. Lucy goes through the neighbourhood and gets everyone to sign a document stating, "I am absolved from all blame". Linus, a bit envious, comments: "That is a nice document to have".
I was recently thinking about the truckers protests. And one questions that I got struck with is that: is government freezing the bank accounts of people doing the activity the government doesn't like really worse than government arresting people, all things being equal?
I live in Russia and I would really prefer if my government freezed my bank account for the time I participate in the protest instead of sending SWAT to beat the shit out of me and then arrest for a couple of days during which I may or may not be tortured. The bank account freezing seems much less violent measure.
Similarly, now all the world is imposing economical sanctions on Russia. And this seems to be a much less violent measure than directly sending armies and everyone understands that. Why then we are so worried about this new norm of freezing protesters' bank accounts?
> And one questions that I got struck with is that: is government freezing the bank accounts of people doing the activity the government doesn't like really worse than government arresting people, all things being equal?
Reasons why it's worse:
1. Arrests have a certain amount of process involved. A police officer needs to have some well-defined level of belief that you've committed an actual crime. And then if you actually get charged then they have to prove you committed it, otherwise you're free to go. Freezing accounts doesn't seem to have any level of due process involved.
2. Arrests are at the discretion of individual police officers. The Prime Minister can't sit in his office and give orders for particular groups of people to be arrested.
3. In Canada, the police don't beat you or torture you after they arrest you.
In Russia, of course, none of these things applies. I'd much rather be arrested by the Canadian police than the Russian police.
Oh, I totally agree about the due process angle! That's why I wrote "all things being equal". But if this is the only issue, I think the correct response to this new initiative is supposed to be: we need to develop proper due process for bank account freezing and then replace as much arrests with it as possible.
The change in state violence from very visible, explicit violence to invisible violence is a terrible development from the perspective of those who disagree with whatever policy the government has decided to ban protesting against precisely because it protects the government from most negative consequences that would arise when they use explicit force to stop a viewpoint from being expressed.
Comparing the two consequences should you decide to protest:
If the government is forced to use the police or military to break up protests, it will generate large amounts of negative press and popular opinion, provide a rallying point for those who espouse the forbidden idea to focus on. If you continue to attend a protest that the government wants to crack down upon, you can immediately fight that crackdown with the legal system, they have to fight to stop you from protesting.
If the government can just decide to track protesters and order banks to freeze their accounts there is comparatively very little negative press (no photos of police and protesters, no visible violence). Instead, the protesters can simply no longer purchase food. It can't really be fought through the legal system; certainly not with the immediacy of an arrest. It is much harder to protest.
While negative press and public sentiment is more impactful in democracies than in autocracies, giving autocracies the power to silently vanish protests and dissent with more effectiveness than police is still a large increase in the states ability to commit violence against its citizens. The appearance of everyone peacefully choosing to obey and stay at home and support the state is quite different from arresting 13000 protesters,
You raise an interesting point! I didn't really think about this angle at all.
But I think there are lots of opportunities for negative press if your citizens are literally dying of hunger in the central square. In a sense it would be much more visible than when people are arrested in somewhere.
I thought the anti-woke were against the idea that words or laws could constitute violence. As someone who is generally sympathetic with wokeness, I think it's important to recognize the ways in which speech and social treatment can be powerful enough to be as bad as violence.
The wokeness movement, which is about power and control, not rights or repairing injustices, will not be beaten until some of its leaders are made to suffer personally. At the moment, they are in the position of bullies effectively able to pick on any target they choose. To the extent that right-wing legislators try to push back (and I think that's largely confined to the US) they are just playing the same game, albeit at a much more basic and unsophisticated level, and simply advance the victim narrative. Remember that wokeists have imbibed a half-understood set of ideas from Marcuse: tolerance is itself a form of violence, so it's wrong to tolerate people who disagree with you. So you can surrender to these people, or you can beat them, but you can't negotiate with them by definition.
What I would do is to pick a particularly egregious and unpopular wokeist, in a vulnerable position, and collect incriminating information on them. When you have enough, try to get them sacked or disciplined. Use their own tactics: mobilise students against them, get hold of alumni who have suffered at their hands, set up an anonymous bulletin board where people can make complaints .... Wokeists are used to treading all over opposition. They'll think again if they realise they may suffer personally.
This seems way too navel-gazey to be a worry right now. Given the political successes and organization of the far-right in the US, seems like the most important thing to worry about right now is that we don't re-elect a former president who wants to take us out of NATO, supports Putin, and came close to succeeding in a coup attempt on manufactured bullshit around an election. This is a real risk considering some of the bills passed to change voting at the state level. The people who have the actual power are more dangerous than the wokesters at this point. The wokesters are now a sideshow that the likes of Tucker Carlson can point to justifying the latest outrage.
I'm sorry, but this one should have stayed in Drafts longer. (-Kind +True +Necessary)
Ironically, most of the people I know who more than agree that "the previous panic about terrorism went a little too far" are either woke, or so danger-close to woke that it sure feels like you're knives-out for them.
People are trying to do what they think is best, and you're not trying to help them do Good, you're just planning how to fight them.
I hope that this post merely suffers from carelessness of writing, rather than serving as a rallying call for a proxy culture war.
Remember that time when whole communities rose up to support a minority group, and tried to recognize their struggles, and the minority group said "fucking finally"?
"People are trying to do what they think is best, and you're not trying to help them do Good, you're just planning how to fight them."
Do you think Scott and those people have the same concept of Good? Would you help anyone claiming to do Good, regardless of what they're actually trying to do?
I don't really know what wokeness is, besides the terrifying bogeyman. I don't follow the news particularly much, and I'm a college freshman in computer engineering so I haven't seen any terrifying suppression of academic freedom personally.
With that context, I think this post is written from entirely too meta a perspective. It reads to me that 'Wokeness' and 'Anti-wokeness' stand in for 'social justice and the belief that society needs to change to be more accepting' and 'society is accepting enough already; we don't need your delusions'. The Fabian strategy is being a polite and engaged community member and speaking up against policies not actually based in fact (if of course, there actually are issues with the policies) which attempt to signal an organizational belief in social justice but cause unintentional harm in other ways. The Beserker strategy is to intentionally try and cause people who want a more accepting and equal society to overreact and form a mob which harms some innocent seeming victim in order to defeat make them look bad and defeat wokeness. The latter seems to me to be an ineffective way to cause attempts at social justice to be rooted in data and experiment.
The ending section of the post, especially "maybe this will keep wokeness in the public eye long enough for the (now controlled by anti-woke people) government to reckon with it and change the relevant laws" stood about to me. What relevant laws? What fantasy based laws are tyrannizing academics? Laws meant to fix systemic inequalities? Those should be changed to be more effective certainly, but not removed---removing laws doesn't fix the inequalities. To me, the laws most in need of fighting are the anti trans laws many states (Idaho, Utah, Alabama, etc.) are in the process of passing.
"Wokeness" is about more than just the positions being argued, but the tactics used and justified to argue for them. It is to a large extent a replacement for "Social Justice Warriors", because apparently that term was offensive and unfair. But as the name implies, it's about someone's conception of social justice, and about believing that this is of such overriding importance as to justify War. If you're not with us, you're against us. If you're against us, you're a horrible evil person who should crawl under a rock and die, and nothing is off the table in driving you to that end. If all we can manage is petty harassment, we'll harass everyone who isn't with us just to prove we can. Details are left as an exercise for the student, but civility right out.
*That*, is worth fighting against. Therefore it's worth discussing the most effective tactics to fight against it.
Unfortunately, I don't think either of these strategies will lead to happiness, and both are career-limiting in the woke academy. The question, as posed, is essentially "how obnoxious can I be and still keep my nearly-solid job." That's not what junior faculty generally want to solve for. There are other strategies.
I think the Fabian strategy only works alongside the Berserker strategy. Fabians are supports for Berserkers (morally as well as practically), but the ideal strat is whatever one encourages the academic to do this consistently.
Probably the most important aspect of this is ensuring that Fabians can be recognised by other Fabians (or even by Berserkers)
I suggest that at least the Fabian strategy should include opposition to actual prejudice.
One of the crazy-making thing about this era is having two sides. One believes that any disparity is evidence of bigotry, and the other (consider Lowry and Sowell) seem to believe that no disparity is worth considering as evidence of bigotry. Both views save the trouble of looking at specifics.
Can you expand a bit on what you mean by 'actual prejudice'?
If I understand you, I strongly agree that the individual actions we take on each other outweigh any nebulous 'systemic' effects - at least at the level that any of us can affect. And most of the time, people's actions are in feedback loops, responding to actions of others. No man is an island, etc etc.
Suppose that you find people qualifications or claims in an assault case are being systemically ignored. That would count as actual prejudice. For the anti-woke crowd, I'll not that it still doesn't just happen to white men.
Or suppose you find that, in a particular case, what's going on with one person doesn't seem to get institutional traction.
What do you mean by 'systemically ignored'? I am seriously not trying to be an ass, just trying to understand what you mean.
It might help if I explain that I think that for most people and most things that are going on with them, whatever it is doesn't need institutional traction. Making an interpersonal conflict or a particular issue with bureaucracy & red tape into an issue that needs national attention is, I think, part of the problem.
For purposes of this discussion, I'm pretty much thinking of serious physical attacks, and maybe plausible threats. And maybe odds of promotion/firing.
Ok, I strongly agree that threats & physical attacks that arise in the workplace are a concern. (With caveats for misinterpreted smack talk.) I think in general promotion and firing is far too multi factorial to expect a general bias to outweigh all the other factors.
Modified Fabian. Become genuinely beloved in a different way, then use different tactics....
a. Start with relationships. Genuinely seek to befriend/mentor 2 to 4 African-American faculty and admin with strong Left/Woke credentials.
Start by having 30 coffee dates as one-shots. Whittle it down based on genuine connection and enjoyment of debate, and of course, people who seem to like you personally. Importantly, you are uniquely free to seek this. Others would be afraid to be cancelled on coffee chat itself (per UVa student column in NYT).
b. Do same with other tribes.
(Authentic relationships will also expose you to: actual and imagined discrimination your colleagues face. Perhaps it'll be the ratio you expect, perhaps not).
c. Now do what universities are supposed to do. Use those trusting relationships and create debate and discussion.
Maybe it's a "Forbidden Podcast" that discusses both the Fabian and Berserker concerns. Maybe it's "invite only" debates to give exclusivity/prestige. Importantly, you're not trying to "win" per se, you're trying to show the intellectual enjoyment of actual exchange. Honey not vinegar.
Model healthy exchange.
Goal: less Woke students gain courage.
Goal: more woke students see in your open-minded Woke counterpart - not YOU - the sheer fun of civil discussion without censorship.
d. Use your mini Dunbar of perhaps 15 new, real relationships to, perhaps once a year, defeat The Dumbest Thing. One Berserker per year. If there are 5 candidate targets, pick one where you have strongest alliance with a Woke tribe member so you can Berserker it together.
This is an excellent analysis, but you might want to limit the Berserker approach even further - bureaucracy can make those fights drag out, and if you're embroiled in some conflict or other too frequently you may alienate your coalition.
Die on another hill. Fighting wokeness or even it's bad policy manifestations is a far cry from the most important issues facing society. An academic in such a position has far more valuable contributions to make to society than battling the subtleties of social justice overreach into wokeness.
Christianity is far from gone. Politicians still have to convince everyone they’re good christians whose favorite book is the bible, ban abortion for religious reasons, etc. Everyone was Christian and then progressives let go of it whereas mostly conservatives kept it. But with wokeness the equivalent would be racism: everyone was racist and now progressives have shed that (and sometimes overshoot) and mostly conservatives are the ones holding on to it.
To be more precise, I should say something more like holding onto simplistic/outdated notions of racism as something very extreme thus excusing them of any blame unless they are literally out there lynching people. Refusing to accept the ideas of unconscious bias, and current effects of redlining policies, etc.
I also meant that in general the idea of being conservative is that you hold onto things and the idea of being progressive is that you embrace new things so it seems somewhat unavoidable
"Berserker" sounds incredibly stressful. Even if the woke can't fire you (and are you *utterly* certain of that?), they can still protest you, spread lies about you online, shout insults at you in public, send you death threats, et cetera.
In my own life, the pattern I've seen is that someone says: "it's okay if I make (X) mad at me because there's nothing they can really do to me" and then (X) demonstrates that this statement was *really* incorrect. My personal life lesson is to never make that statement again.
There's such a thing as sacrificing for a cause you believe in, but "berserker" seems to be a *very expensive* sacrifice. My advice is not to do that.
Maybe relevant: ABET, the accreditor for any engineering program worth attending, has updated their accreditation criteria to include the following:
"The curriculum must include:
c) a professional education component that is consistent with the institution’s mission and the program educational objectives and promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion awareness for career success."
and
"The program faculty must demonstrate awareness and abilities appropriate to providing an equitable and inclusive environment for its students, and knowledge of appropriate institutional policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion."
It seems that, for ABET, to be a successful engineer (or an engineering professor), you must be woke.
Fabian strategy and building a network behind the scenes, while waiting for a 100% fool proof berserker strategy about 5 to 7 years down the line, to be implemented strongly and once, to avoid the soft ending.
This. Actually. But I would maybe even juxtapose radical woke statements with radical right statements. But maybe that is picking too many enemies… can a reasonable but effective (ie not dominated by inertia) moderateness ever come to pass??
How many "radical right statements" are being made at US colleges? That would be a pretty thin section compared to the woke part. Anyway, reasonable people having been playing defense for too long. It's in their nature, but playing offense would be a lot more effective.
Conservative groups are trying to cancel anyone who does critical race theory, and ban talking about sexuality or race in student orientation. That sounds like a wokeness of the right, which is actually powerful in our university.
That's a long article. What is the key quote? Maybe this:
> “People want their kids to go to A&M because they think they will be less likely to run into things like being told if you’re white, you’re an oppressor and if you’re Black, you’re oppressed,” Hazlewood said.
Like it or not, that's a mainstream view. Creating an alternative publication does not equal cancellation.
The point of this is that there's a new president, who has engaged in a plan to completely restructure the university by September 1. Many people were worried about the changes out of usual bureaucratic conservativeness, though I thought that (for instance) combining sciences and liberal arts into a single college is a reasonable (if unreasonably fast) move.
But then two weeks ago she issued an announcement that the student newspaper will no longer have a print edition (even though they pay for their print edition out of their own ad revenues rather than university money) and now it comes out that she's been having secret meetings with a group that has been working to stack the board of regents with conservatives, so they can continue firing professors who protest against school symbols.
I thank the Hazlewood family for their funding of a fellowship for military veterans to get discounted graduate degrees (I don't know whether that came from their family fortune or if it was a legislator in the family who got it to come out of state funds) but if they're trying to shape the university administration in a way that leads it to restrict student publications and fire professors, then I think they're the real cancellation threat here.
The university is an extension of the state government. Governments have to be careful with political speech. That's pretty normal.
Edit: Lots of people are unhappy with how left-wing NPR and PBS have become, even though they are also mostly self-funded. Government is helping those partisan outlets exist, which amounts to state propaganda.
Okay, so what? >99% of colleges are the opposite of this, and as long as that number is >50%, why on earth should I care about this case more than the hundreds of opposite such cases?
And there's also an ENORMOUS asymmetry here. These people (supposedly) want to fire professors for teaching, essentially, that white people as a race are bad. You might have a point if left-wing cancellers were cancelling people for doing the opposite (teaching that white people as a race a better people or that black people are evil), but that's absolutely not what is happening in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The right overwhelmingly attempt to cancel over ideological statements (e.g. straight white men bad), the left however not only cancel for ideology but are also more than willing to cancel over value-judgement-free data-based dissent of any kind e.g. claiming that heritable race differences exist, claiming that the data do not support the claim that black men are disproportionately killed by police, claiming that certain immigrant groups have higher than welfare usage etc. Ironically, the right cancel over explicit statements of racial hatred, the left cancel over racial hatred inferred from factual statements.
I don't support anyone being cancelled, but even ignoring the sheer difference in how widespread respective cancelling types are, this desperate kind of attempt to paint conservatives as the "real cancellers" is silly when the left are engaging in a far more harmful type of cancellation, one that actual stifles good faith debate. Especially since this is increasingly spilling over into more mainstream STEM fields.
I was talking about more general contexts. Radical right statements are clearly more popular outside of academia.
My point is not whether you should fight or not. My point is that it's kind of sad that "reasonable people" brand themselves as "anti-woke". Are you against fairness? Are you against justice? Or are you just against one face of SJ movements that impacts your life most intimately? Shouldn't you brand yourself as "for-something"?
Of course, if you are in a setting that is woke-dominated, maybe saying you're "anti-woke" is clear enough to you. But still, that makes your definition of yourself context-dependent, and to that extent outside of your control.
Most people want to do their thing and not be bossed around by weirdos. They support freedom. You can frame it as anti-woke. After all, the bossy weirdos encountered at universities are generally woke. For me, #ShutDownSTEM and the associated peer-pressure, supported by university administrators, were clear signals. I support fairness but I'm against others pressuring me into their view of fairness. https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-around-world-prepare-shutdownstem-and-strike-black-lives
As an unwoke professor who made it to the dean ranks to try to make a difference, as soon as your friend reveals his true position and views his career progression will slow dramatically. There are a handful of universities where this would not be true, but for the vast majority of AAU research universities it is. The issue matters most in the humanities and social sciences, significantly less so in the physical sciences and engineering. Being ostracized is really hard over the long haul.
Berserker Strategy, because the Fabian Strategy doesn't work online.
I've been participating in online arguments longer than many people engaging in them now have been alive. I eventually stopped, realising that there weren't any actual arguments being had between people. There were Social Games. And I've been around long enough to see the pieces of the Social Games change, multiple times. The same people playing the Social Game exchange pieces for new ones, and they won't even notice. To treat these pieces as arguments, positions, or even beliefs, is wrong-headed.
Just to clarify, I may use words like "nobody" and "people" but this does not mean literally no person, or literally all people. An individual pointing out an individual exception and claiming victory by beneficially expanding to the tribe is itself part of the Social Game. The Social Game is played by groups, not individuals.
What does this have to do with the question? Well, now adays, Twitter is real life. We have made the wonders of the internet real, and it is more horrible than we could have possibly imagined. And because Twitter is real life, acting as if there are beliefs being held is a mistake.
Your friend is not fighting for academic freedom. Nobody really cares about academic freedom. People care about if they can be insulted as X-ist or Phobic, and if they can insult others as X-ist or Phobic. This time we live in now is not comparable to the Civil Rights era (that was not an internet Social Game), and so the Civil Rights era, and other real protest movements did not solve these problems, and cannot teach us anything about them. They had nothing to do with these problems.
New Atheism is also not comparable, at least not in the way you wish it to be. This is because New Atheism and the war against Religion-but-Actually-Just-Vague-Christianity was an online battle (and thus, nobody fighting it had beliefs), before the horrific merger of reality with Twitter. Ultimately the Christian Monoculture as you call it lost out, but New Atheism was just along for the ride. The pieces merely changed after the fall.
Nothing "convinces" people to be Woke or Un-Woke, because these are not beliefs and nobody cares about arguments. People switch sides rarely these days, and usually only for social reasons that I doubt could be distilled into any strategies.
Now, to take a completely different angle than trying to answer your specific questions, let me talk about 4chan. 4chan has mostly solved these problems, and solved them over a decade ago. The problem is not policy (Academic Freedom), but fashion (Wokeness). Fashion changes trends, and it is of groups, not individuals. If a single person goes outside wearing something completely bonkers, we call them tacky at best, crazy at worst. But if an entire group goes outside wearing something bonkers, we call them hipsters.
4chan eschews the entire concept of fashion by embracing a fashion that cannot be bought in to by half measures. That is, to speak specifically, 4chan values the policy of anonymity and freedom to such an extent that in order to preserve it, it spontaneously developed an extremely toxic environment as a defence mechanism, to both ward off and kick out anybody who refuses to conform to it. If you are the type of person who wants to build social capital by playing social games, you will find 4chan almost impossible to deal with. First of all it is so toxic most people will lose social capital merely by associating with it in the first place. Second, you will be relentlessly insulted for establishing an identity outside of a very few situations. And third, in order to learn how to avoid these two issues, you must not engage immediately and instead watch and learn how to fit in.
4chan cannot have any *real* culture wars, because its users have no identity within a culture in the first place. A fervent believer is indistinguishable from a troll. You cannot gain social capital, you can only lose it, which means there is no motivation to fight. It is not even easy to tell that discussion is happening at all, as discussion between multiple parties is indistinguishable from some random person performing an elaborate prank.
And how does this relate to our current situation, where real life and the internet are one thing? 4chan sustains its preferences by making opposition socially unpalatable inside of its domain. While it does this by being unpalatable to the wider population, it still succeeds at its goal. And so it seems that the equivalent strategy for real life is the Berserker strategy. Make sure you never lose fights in the academic sphere, and do your best to make sure your opponent can't win them. If everybody does this in their own domain in the same direction, it'll work out. Now there is still stuff to be said about the idea that perhaps there *are* underlying policies behind the Social Game, since this is a Social Game played In Real Life. But the "Woke" position is incoherent (something players of the Social Game will admit to when they need to claim that the Woke position doesn't exist in the form its detractors says it does) as a policy, and whatever real policies had by it, and the opposition players, are played in a different arena using different terms, by individuals and not groups.
Of course ideally we'd just uncouple the internet from real life. That's possible but also an entirely different discussion.
We don’t need more celebrity intellectuals. We need long-term, solid academics who can talk people away from the teetering point or lead people away by example. Especially if this person is publishing frequently, I think it’s better to become that community pillar. Fabian.
I can't say which strategy is more effective in a 'total war' against wokeness. But if you just want to cultivate your garden - and as part of that I would include making your garden a pleasant place for your colleagues! - I would recommend the Fabian approach. I am not in academia but have reached a similarly 'unfireable' position in my company while still being relatively junior, and have been employing this strategy for the last few years. It has been successful in curbing the worst excesses of HR/'People' teams, and has also I think helped to establish that it is possible to be 'unwoke' while *also* being a compassionate, caring and (I hope) competent boss. This has meant that as well as being able to fight my own little corner of the business, I now have allies in other parts of it who think and act likewise, and people who I have trained or who have reported to me have been in part converted to my position. If you care about your colleagues and don't want to sacrifice them in a larger conflict, please don't be a berserker.
I'm not sure this reduction to binary choices is helpful. The degree to which "woke" ideology is monolithic and dominant on campuses varies with the campus (since the context of the post concerns colleges and universities) and among units on campus. The optimal strategy a concerned faculty member might best adopt (depending on their personalities) could vary accordingly.
As others commenting have noted, there's a lot of what we call "woke" that involves both views that have broad validity and social results that have been constructive. I think the two elements that make woke culture destructive are the excessively simplistic and reductive tendencies of some extreme (but not necessarily fringe) elements of woke ideology, and the culturally stifling effects of woke campus culture at some schools where it has become dominant, either among the faculty and student bodies, or via administrative norms.
I think there is no reason a faculty member committed to mitigating the excesses of woke culture without reversing its positive features couldn't mix "Fabian" strategy and occasional "berserker" tactics. One is optimal for persuasion by positive example, the other for provoking persuasion by the negative example of woke cultural excesses. In the long run, the former seems preferable because its effect tends to undercut polarization, while pushing woke culture towards extreme behavior relies on exacerbating polarization and gambling that moderate pluralism will somehow win out, rather than full-blown anti-wokism, which risks the growth of white nationalist and similar elements, especially among the student body.
Which strategy is correct probably depends on the temperament and characteristics of that person. Which strategy can they execute better?
For me, personally, I am seeing that the berserker strategy just makes a bunch of semi-woke people get more woke. I've been talking with a friend i consider semi-woke and am realizing that my objections to wokism have been tinged with so much anger and frustration that he's never taken it seriously.
here was a paragraph i wrote that punched me in the face for great justice after i wrote it:
"it turns out that it's really, really, really, really hard to be truly open minded and fair to people we disagree with. It's extremely difficult, not because we are bad or evil, but because we care, and when people care a lot, and don't have the skills necessary to disagree calmly and fairly, they come across like belligerent assholes."
On that note, i don't think MLK was berserker style at all. I think he and the people in his movement _didn't_ get all aggressive and punchy and angry. They didn't sit at the counters in montomgery and say 'fuck you racist assholes we just want sandwiches.' They sat down camly, politely, with intense dignity while being attacked, and asked politely 'why can't i have lunch.' They arranged the bus boycott but they didn't block the busses. They marched peacefully, no shouting, no angry faces, and when the attack dogs came, they _didn't fight back_
I think people really do respond to truly virtuous behavior, and if we want to oppose wokism we have to be really virtuous and kind to do so successfully. Because the reality is that they are very very concerned about what is 'right', it's a religion, and nobody likes having their religion challenged. Telling Christians that they are idiots isn't nearly as effective as saying, 'but this jesus fellow seemed really loving, is that really a loving way to be?', in a kind, loving tone.
I’m not sure this quite fits your dichotomy, but the most effective tactic seems to be “let the really woke expose their crazier views” (or expose them yourself). These views currently are very powerful but in very narrow bubbles, and are protected by folks with outsized voices who are willing to “sanewash” these ideas outside the bubble. To the “normies” outside these media/academic/very online bubbles, the ideas are crazy. The sanewashers might be able to keep the normies sympathetic by religiously touting the motte, but put them in direct contact with the woke in the bailey and their support will collapse.
Which do you think did more damage to “wokeness”, getting Jordan Peterson onto Evergreen, or passing around that Smithsonian poster that said that punctuality and objectivity are white supremacy?
One of the bigger victories attributed to anti-wokeness was the election of Glenn Youngkin. Part of the catalyst for this was the pandemic giving otherwise mostly liberal parents a more direct view of what their kids were being taught in classrooms, and them not liking what they saw. Then, seeing what lengths the gatekeepers and sanewashers would go to to discredit them (up to and including keeping enemies lists and getting them labeled domestic terrorists).
That said, a good example of a relatively successful deployment of the Fabian strategy might be JK Rowling?
>Which do you think did more damage to “wokeness”, getting Jordan Peterson onto Evergreen, or passing around that Smithsonian poster that said that punctuality and objectivity are white supremacy?
How did that damage wokeness at all? Nobody's heard about that poster except a few people who listen to enough right-wing media already that the poster didn't change their mind, and an even fewer number of rationalists. The poster is invisible to the general public except to the people who are right there, and as a reflection on a greater movement, the poster is invisible to the general public, period.
While my gut response is sympathetic to Alex’s main points, I think a large part of that is because I am in a social milieu where critical analysis of the tools and language of woke movements are not adequately addressed (or even recognized). In this case, my response is partly emotional and tied to feeling affirmation.
However, taking a step back I have to agree with a lot of the more measured takes in the comments section, regarding the need to be more measured in our discussion of wokeness, and not to conflate it with social justice. The illiberal tendencies of wokeness I imagine many of us are concerned about is *not* exclusive to social justice movements. It is also shared by conservative movements, except there the litmus test is whether you use terms like “RINO” and “stop the steal”, and attempts at measured discourse get you primaried.
The point is, the illiberal tendency is everywhere. I think Alex did gesture at this point by comparing the SJ movement to Christianity. Growing up, I learned to pay lip service to Christian modes of speaking to get by.
I think the danger of simplifying wokeness (and our terminology) into only its illiberal tendencies is that it address ANYONE’s innocent concerns. A) it doesn’t address real concerns about diversity and inequality so woke people dismiss you and you’re only radicalizing their movement more by taking moderate people out, and B) you reduce your language to be imprecise, making your brand “anti-woke” when it really should be an orthogonal brand like “liberal discourse.” After the woke movement passes and the next ascendant movement comes with the same illiberal tendencies, you have to reinvent your branding and fight all the same fights. We need a better long term banner to fight *for*.
(Side rant: another pet peeve of mine is SJ activism language that analyzes everything as an evil of capitalism and systems. It’s monistic and lacks nuance. I also am perplexed by the extreme ethnocentrism that woke movements lean into. I agree with woke movements in their analysis that white-ethnocentrism has perpetuated harms because as a whole they have been the people with power to propagate harms, but the solution to that is *not* “more ethnocentrism around other groups!” That just shifts who has the power to do harm, instead of actually addressing deeper, harmful human tendencies, and in that sense isn’t really moving the needle in any way. But maybe I’m being idealistic in my desire to change human nature instead of merely guiding/aligning it with better outcomes)
What is more constructive long term (but harder) is to show constructive ways to align truth with other genuine/sincerely held concerns. This is maybe hard because all communication is lossy and we rely on shorthand that oversimplifies nuance (as pointed out by many comments), and the fact that truth is it’s own independent axis means sometimes it *does* run counter to your other interests, leading to illiberal tendencies when you sacrifice truth in favor of those interests.
Honestly it seems you can be anti-cancelling and cover most of the bad things anti-wokeness would cover, without also being against things like, "hmm, the only black professor teaches African American studies. That's weird"
Though anti-cancelling wouldn't cover the segregation and ethnonationalism some (too many) woke people horseshoe their way into
Agreed. It is a shame that anti-canceling feels so reactionary though. SJ movements are quite good at branding. Instead of “anti-system” they reframe it as “abolition”, ie not anti-X but for-Y.
As with the "donate 10% to charity because it's achievable" perspective, I think there are several things that non-woke can do to better the situation without making it their life pursuit. These can be applied to universities but also other organizations as well.
1. Kindly and consistently point out when your organization is attempting to do something illegal, like explicit discrimination. For instance, racial quotas, intentionally not hiring a qualified white person, or similar. On the more extreme end of this, report the illegal activity to the relevant governmental organization, police, or concerned NGO (like FIRE for universities). You can often do this anonymously.
2. Be a sane but non-confrontational voice in meetings. You don't need to make yourself a pariah in order to quietly speak against excesses of wokeness. You can even do this while being woke yourself, if the woke are taking something too far. You don't need to invite Ben Shapiro to your school just to make a point, but maybe a middle-of-the-road liberal that isn't explicitly woke but has useful thoughts on some subject. Say normal and sane things, make normal suggestions. Normalize being normal, even if your organization is much further left than normal. Quietly move the Overton Window back.
3. Be honest in filling out surveys and forms, and in private discussions. You can generally do this without jumping down specific rabbit holes (genetic differences between races, inherent sex differences) that you know will cause significant pushback. Basic responses like "I don't see an issue with his Halloween costume" or "we should hire the most qualified candidate" are necessary for a functioning society. One person being able to say the obvious will encourage others to do the same.
4. Be steady in your responses. You don't need to respond angrily. You don't need to fight. But you also shouldn't apologize for having a normal opinion about a subjective situation. It's perfectly okay to vote for a Republican, or to eat Thai food even if you're Polish, or whatever people might want to make you feel bad about.
5. Consider getting off of Twitter and other social media entirely. It's amazing how much less ability people have to harass and intimidate you when you take away the avenue.
One thing to keep in mind with this or any approach is the need to be a generally well-regarded member of your organization. It's a lot easier to attack the guy who constantly has interpersonal problems with colleagues, students, customers, whatever. It's easier to get management to discipline someone that's already a poor worker and barely doing their job. It's a lot harder to get a mob to go after the guy who is nice to everyone and has good interpersonal relationships.
The whole strategy is good, but #1 is absolutely brilliant. To add on to it, when others' proposals are discriminatory, say the magic words: "I think we should put this through a legal review." Almost no large organizations refuse to do legal reviews, as that looks like willful ignorance of the law. You can shut things down pretty effectively this way without having to appear too obnoxious.
Very true about the legal review. Lots of people seem willing to ignore the obvious legal consequences if there's no pushback, but very few people will reject that approach if someone brings it up.
One problem with this is that "Woke" organizations and activists have mastered the art of being palatable to the typical nice, blue tribe liberals that inhabit these institutions - in such a way that they are defended *even as* activists take them out behind the chemical sheds - because the definitional games (ie: the number of posts that I see in here debating whether "woke" is really an ideological movement or if it's just a mean name for people who want racial justice(TM)) have made it such that disagreeing with activists *too* loudly draws suspicion on yourself as someone who Supports Racism(TM).
What I think this actually is, is a failure of the relatively well off liberal's lizardbrain. Someone made the point re: QAnon and the like is that "it doesn't actually matter that the QAnon conspiracy theory is insane - there are real institutions like the FDA and academia that are Actually Out To Get Them, and the first thing you do when that happens is Form Up". This is the ironclad defense of "when you are detecting that someone or some group is out there trying to hurt you - you act like someone or some group is out there trying to hurt you".
For a more clear definition, most politics involves some amount of Policy and some amount of Lizardbrain Monkey Fighting. Currently, if you're a relatively well off upper middle class person living in a blue city - you have a sort of idea of the world that was based on the wide increase in liberalism, free thought, and truth winning the day because those things were moral goods but also because they created Success.
All of this gnashing of teeth is merely that group of people coming to realize that the groups that want to take advantage of their mistake-theory oriented viewpoints are not isolated to the American Right.
This gets very little attention, but the NAACP’s anti-segregation legal strategy was extremely Fabian. It started in 1935, when they sued on behalf of a black student who wanted admission to U of Missouri’s whites-only law school (Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada – Canada being the surname of the school registrar). Even under the “separate but equal” doctrine U of Mo didn’t have much of a case since there was no equivalent black law school. The Supreme Court rejected their offer that Missouri pay to have Gaines attend law school in a different state. The NAACP then won similar cases against whites-only Texas and Oklahoma law schools.
Southern states responded in two ways. Texas tried to create a separate black law school, but the Supreme Court found that this was obvious unequal since the new law school was tiny and less prestigious (Sweatt v. Painter, 1950). Oklahoma tried to create internal segregation arrangements in their graduate schools, which the Supreme Court regarded as degrading and ridiculous. (McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 1950). Only in 1951, after more than a decade of winning easier cases and establishing precedent for desegregation, did the NAACP decide to try desegregating primary schools in Topeka, Kansas.
This story is often told as NAACP as berserker – bravely using unconventional arguments to overturn established law in Brown v. Board, but it was absolutely a Fabian triumph. Perhaps heroic Fabians are always fated to be recast as berserkers. I’ve always thought something similar happened with gay rights: everyone likes talking about Stonewall but from what I can tell, there’s been tremendously increased acceptance since I became politically conscious in the early 1990s and disruptive activism has played almost zero role in that. Fabians may have won a lot of stuff without building legends.
If you are concerned with wokeness as a movement, the obvious answer is to crowd out bad ideas on solving or explaining away problems with better ones.
To me, it’s seems that the policing debate has been less successful for wokeness than people would have expected. We went from defund as scripture in 2021 to some real debate on the left and a bunch of democrats reneging on it.
(Not an American) - This seemed to be because:
1) many intended beneficiaries actually wanted policing,
2) the quiet and non-confrontational work of criminologists and economists who did studies on policing
3) the rising murder rate, which heavily affected minorités
This may require advocating for a saner and fairer form of social justice.
If anything, one should work to amplify non-conservative alt/anti-woke viewpoints or research.
Many anti-woke people noted that mainstream parties would have to deal with immigration concerns to stave off the far right if mainstream parties were indeed concerned about their rise and influence.
> For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke.
Understandable as it may be, I would encourage anyone with this mindset to reflect on whether it is an optimal strategy in an age where both partisan extremes are incentivized to amplify fringe voices through social media.
I never lived in a big liberal city. I am not compelled to shape my views on 'wokeness' based on woke SF-based twitter accounts, any more than I expect other readers to become more skeptical of conservatives because of my own worst experiences in rural Kansas. Besides, having brought both crowds together for my wedding, I am happy to report that people from both political 'extremes' get along just fine once you get them off the internet.
>Were The George Floyd Protests An Example Of Woke Power Or Woke Overreach?
This framing makes no sense to me - it asks many questions about the *method* and *intensity* of protest without ever mentioning the *subject* of the protest, which I would think is the most important part of whether a protest gets popular support!
To me, the simplest explanation is this: George Floyd shifted the stereotype of the SJ movement from "those people who complain that yoga classes are cultural appropriation" to "those people who are against black people being choked to death by police." Unsurprisingly, the latter got a lot more people out in support.
Asking "did the George Floyd protests result in wokeness gaining power?" where "wokeness" describes both the anti-yoga people and the anti-police-brutality people seems like a false category. It's like that post about how neoreactionaries lump modern democracies and murderous communist regimes into the same category of "not ruled by a king, therefore bad," and asking if Biden's election means that the communists are gaining power. They might share some supporters, in the same way that leftists probably prefer communists over fascists, but it doesn't seem useful to fight "wokeness" as a single entity and judge actions on whether it'll help or hurt that entity as a whole. You want to hurt the anti-yoga nuts and help the not-brutalizing-minorities crowd.
(And to show that I'm not simply splitting the group I like and homogenizing the rest, on the right wing I would like to hurt the QAnon nuts and help the free market types.)
Edit: It also reminds me of that "ethnic tension" post about how politics is often done by linking something you hate to something else that feels similar but is unrelated. I worry that making "fighting wokeness" a terminal goal would lead them to fighting something genuinely important just because it *feels* kinda similar to the anti-yoga people in terms of language used or the people who support it.
Your friend's target audience is fence-sitters. To pick his battles, he should figure out what things concern them about wokeness, identifying the rifts between them and the university orthodoxy. Then, he should hammer in the wedge as much as he can.
Do fence-sitters think we've clamped down too far on Halloween costumes? If so, your friend should pull a Christakis. Do they have a closeted belief in biological sex? If so, your friend should pull a Rowling. Do they think defunding police is a bad idea? Then he should voice that opinion.
Is this Fabian or Berserker? I don't think it necessarily involves being either... he doesn't need to be on committees, nor does he need to be an intentional provocateur; he can just write a careful op-ed. And regardless of which tactics he chooses, if he wants to move the needle, he needs to find the wedge issues.
In general, I favor the Fabian strategy for a different reason as well - it's more likely to converge on truth. If I'm wrong and wokeness actually is correct and necessary, it'll do better at avoiding hurting people and would be more likely to realize it was wrong.
(I think the actual word is less binary - with some wokeness things being bad and others being good - and on the detailed level, it's likelier to converge on fighting just the bad woke things).
Re the fashion barberpole - interesting to note that South Korea elected an openly anti-feminist president this week. Not sure if this shows American cultural exportability is weakening or if it's another crack at the top of the barberpole, but it is an interesting crack in global wokeness - I don't think there's been any first world country leader before (very much including Trump) who didn't at least give vocal support for feminism.
I don't think South Korea was participating as much in global wokeness in the past - to the point where I'm not surprised at all to hear that they've elected an anti-feminist. From what I know of their culture, I'm pretty sure that I (a fairly fervent right-winger) am more feminist than the South Korean Overton Window.
"While I don’t morally blame the truckers for this, from a strategic point of view, they sure did cause it to happen."
"Why do you make me do this to you? I don't want to beat you, but you make me so angry! You know you shouldn't provoke me!" is the mantra of abusers.
I didn't think the trucker protest was a good idea, but the way it was carried out seemed to be acting civilly; yes, they inconvenienced and annoyed people, but they didn't burn down any buildings or shoot people or any of the other types of behaviour we saw in other protests.
I've seen the Canadian truckers described as "far-right" which seems to be the new code for "Nazis or close to it". I don't know if they were, I'm not clear on what they were protesting about. But when it's the side of Tolerance and Inclusivity that starts using such tactics against those they deem unacceptable, it begins to look less like "we are on the right side of history" and more "when in power, we do what we want".
"I've seen the Canadian truckers described as "far-right" which seems to be the new code for "Nazis or close to it". I don't know if they were, I'm not clear on what they were protesting about."
They were protesting the Canadian government's vaccine mandates*. Given the fact that 1. truckers in North America tend to be right-wing and 2. opposition to vaccine mandates in North America largely codes as right-wing now**, I'd imagine most of the protestors were, in fact, right-wingers of some sort. Probably some significant minority of the protestors could be described as "far-right," and while I doubt very many were actually "close to Nazis," there were a few photos showing Nazi and Confederate flags being waved around at the protest, which caused opponents to start treating the entire thing as a White supremacist rally. Further complicating matters, some of those photos may have been fake, since a lot of supposed 'Canadian trucker protest' pictures were actually from entirely different events, including some that took place in countries as far-reaching as Brazil, Italy, and Russia (https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/feb/14/10-photos-falsely-linked-canadas-freedom-convoy-pr/).
*Technically, the federal government of Canada didn't actually have any vaccine mandates in place at the time (and still doesn't), although several provinces and municipalities do, and there are vaccine-related restrictions on cross-border travel to the U.S. as well as air travel (including domestic flights). There were also some prominent Canadian government officials who called for federal vaccine mandates shortly before the protests started, which may have been the instigating factor.
**It's odd because as recently as just 10 years ago, being anti-vax was something associated with the political left in this country more than with the right. Go back 20 years, and it was almost exclusively a far-left belief outside of a few hardline right-libertarian circles. But sometime around 2015-2016 - around the same time that the American right shifted from a very uneasy alliance of pro-business capitalists, foreign policy hawks, and religious conservatives to a more populist, nationalist, and anti-establishment movement - it started becoming seen as a right-wing view. And COVID really cemented that association so firmly that I don't think we'll see it change again for a long time.
I would try to sincerely want the best for everyone including yourself and then do what you think is right with a clear explanation. I don’t know how sustainable tit for tat games are beyond single exchanges and you can’t make people fight you every step of the way and change a culture. Or as my grade school martial arts teacher said: “when pushed, pull.”
That said, I do have a couple of more cynical things I do when someone is just being a dick that I call Fred Rogers Machiavellianism.
Preemptively agreement: I will pay very close attention to things a person has said and then use them to construct an argument for what I genuinely abs sincerely believe to be the best for everyone, but phrase it as though it was their idea. “Remember when you suggested X? Oh because you said A B C I took that to mean X which was a great idea and you did a good job coming up with it and it seems to follow really straight forwardly. So I just wanted to say I agree. We should do X.”
Deliberate Forced Understanding: related to above. If someone says something genuinely stupid, mean, hurtful, bad faith, etc I pretend I heard something that made sense and respond accordingly. I have never ever had someone stop me and say “No, wait, you misheard me. I was being a dick.” Or “No, wait, what I said was dumber than that.”
“You’re right it’s critical we increase the well being of group X, so we need to hold ourselves accountable with concrete measurable numbers and make sure we’re not just putting ourselves on the back but instead track trends over time.”
This does require me to understand where someone is coming from emotionally which sometimes people aren’t willing to do but I find it works.
Consensus Building: I never ever let something contentious come to a surprise vote. Always meet with people off the side and one on one and hear them out. Make needed adjustments. Then when I give a presentation I usually rattle on for five or so minutes about the most boring stuff imaginable with one slide up that has a boring top paragraph, a middle paragraph recapping what everyone already off to the side agreed on, and then another boring paragraph. Then I ask for ideas and without fail at least one person says what’s in the middle paragraph. Then I say I agree (and nobody notices I just agreed with myself) and then by sheer momentum another person agrees.
So, Fabian approach here. Has worked well for me on various projects.
I do genuinely get where a lot of the woke stuff comes from (mixed ethnicity family) but Jesus can it get tiring and counterproductive. People aren’t necessarily monsters because they want something good in a dumb/bad way.
As I think several people are saying, wokeness (as used here) is different in an essential way from things like homophobia or racism (in the historical form that the civil rights movement fought them). "The woke" is much less a category of people or a point of view and more a certain negative-sum strategy to fight for (at least initially) reasonable goals. While there are certainly people whose identity is wrapped in this negative-sum point of view and who have deeply held beliefs in favor of cancel culture, etc., they are a small percentage of the people who are participating in the epiphenomenon of wokeness. In this a much better historical precedent is anti-communism during the early cold war, minus the uniquely polarizing figure of McCarthy. I think one consequence of this difference is that changing media focus has a much larger impact on wokeness rhetoric than on more object-level disagreements like abortion or gay rights: in particular I expect to see a similar level of "loss of interest in woke discourse" during the war in Ukraine as we saw when people lost interest in #metoo in favor of #blacklivesmatter.
It seems to me there's some conflation here between "supporting academic freedom" and "opposing wokeness".
Mind, I oppose wokeness; it's currently the biggest threat to academic freedom. However, I also oppose conservatism, which is the second biggest threat to academic freedom.
(Although wokeness feels more acute, more like a fundamental betrayal, because the left was supposed to be the ones who fought this bullshit)
I don't know what my recommendation is, here, but both of these options seem to be targeting the wrong thing.
I'm of the opinion that wokeness, and social justice as a concept generally, are inherently problems; you don't "end the problems of wokeness" in the sense of making a non-toxic wokeness, because the equivocation between the individual and the group is an inherently toxic prospect. Like racism, another in the endless stream of equivocations between the individual and the group, it will always be toxic.
"That's not really fair" - no, it's exactly fair. To understand the toxicity in this equivocation, look at the solution attempted within the social justice framework in order to combat it, intersectionality, whose logical extreme, taking a person's entire personal history and experience into account, is the elimination of group-individual equivocation.
The toxic part is not, nor has it ever been, punishing people for their actions; it is the punishment of people for the actions of others. Firing people for calling for the murder of other people may or may not be acceptable - that's a question of social norms. However, applying disparate punishments based on whether or not other people do similar things - applying a different punishment for a member of a minority being racist towards the majority than a member of the majority for being racist towards a minority - is equivocating between the individual and the group.
This is the same kind of equivocation which takes place in toxic conservativism; this thing isn't bad because it's bad when I do it, but because it's bad when this other person does it; I can't do this drug because this other person would abuse it if people were allowed to do drugs. We can't have this kind of conversation, not because of anything intrinsic to us, but because of how this kind of conversation might change the behavior of other people.
(When you get down to it, wokeness is just a new version of conservativism.)
I'm not so sure that much of this is new or even cyclical. What were people saying about campus culture when you were in school? "Political correctness" has been used since the early 90s to describe many of the same things "wokeness" is used for and didn't fade particularly quietly into the night. It seems to me that's the better analogy than 90s Christianity, notwithstanding internet culture's apparent migration from atheism to feminism to social justice.
(A cynical point of view: both "political correctness" and "wokeness" are used to turn arguments about a just society into arguments about superficial behavior and language. This was partly an agenda-setting tactic by conservative media [as you point out, it's where the easy victories are] but eagerly adopted more widely, particularly in discourse about campus culture, partly for the usual reason that people who manipulate symbols for a living are inclined to believe symbol manipulation is a powerful force for change, to paraphrase Alan Jacobs. The terms so far have a similarly rapid trajectories in their adoption [if you like, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22+politically+correct+%22%2C%22+atheist+%22%2C%22+woke+%22%2C%22+culture+war+%22%2C%22+feminist+%22%2C%22+social+justice+%22&year_start=1960&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=0#]. Substituting this for your analogy, the default outcome is then that there continue to be mainly token symbolic victories for social justice alongside a corresponding reaction.)
I would advise a politically-minded academic who wants to maintain credibility to stay focused on material outcomes without investing their reputation in them.
My thought is to go meta. Instead of opposing woke people, oppose the idea of wokeness. Point out, whenever possible, that a liberal (classic liberal aka libertarian) society supports minorities as much as is possible. Sure, you could have governments enacting more supportive legislation. Instead, have civil society supporting minorities, because anything a government gives you, a government can take away.
I think there’s a lot to be said for the Fabian strategy because it’s very convincing on an interpersonal level when done right. Changing hearts is no substitute for winning legal battles, but nor will legal or technical victories suffice on their own. Enough people being openly and firmly unwoke (sub Muslim, atheist, gay, poly, whatever unfamiliar or suspect thing) while being beloved and helpful to the community is what actually changes minds, creates trust, and allows others to speak up.
Neither strategy is going to work, because the first time the professor in question employs it, he'll discover that he is not nearly as un-fireable as he thought. Wokeness has won and it's here to stay. Protesting against it is possible, but it should be done from minimum safe distance -- as Sakharov found out.
To reiterate a comment I made below: if your friend pursues the Fabian strategy, one of the most fearsome weapons in his arsenal can be asking for a legal review. "We're creating a program exclusively for black women in theater" - "can we do a legal review as a CYA?" It's costly for his counterparts to refuse, and can shut down civil rights violations.
See, they likely wouldn't outright say it's for a specific group. They would say it's to "empower previously excluded, anti-racist voices and identities that have suffered intersectional marginalization." That would generally get to the same endpoint, but would be less of an obvious lawsuit magnet. You might succeed in getting them to change the requirement away from a specific group, but they'll get to the same point anyway.
I absolutely agree that there are clever ways to dissemble and get there in the end. A careful administrator can discriminate and preserve plausible deniability. But I think you might be surprised how uncareful many people are about their intentions! The idea that excluding whites and asians from a certain program might be illegal or immoral often doesn't occur to them, as up until relatively recently, very few have been called out about the illegality of such programs.
TL;DR: you're right about the clever, careful ones; but many administrators fail to be either.
This was very enjoyable to read, and I'd like to provide a recent anecdote. I'm at a major Canadian university that has been somewhat quietly embroiled in a woke adjacent issue, specifically Israeli students and BDS supporters. The wrinkle here is that both sides claim the mantle of wokeness in public discussions. I've been involved in this for a few years now, and it's given me a great inside view of the machinery a university has to handle these issues. It took over three years for the University to hold back fees from the Student Union over them including a statement on Israeli borders in their Bylaws. (This was a bog-standard application of the Union's own equity policy, as it forces Israeli students to pay money into an institution that calls for their country to be sanctioned.)
This is of course an anecdote. The amount of work hours invested by university officials on this is hard to calculate, but I would guess it's quite high. Wokeness may lose symbolic battles, but there's a large carrying capacity for do-nothing positions in University Admin. These people think what they do is important, or at least, easy money.
Best case scenario we have mandatory milquetoast diversity training forever, but everyone treats it like fire drills. Worst case, we see a doubling down by those who stand to lose prestige and power if woke politics get deemphasized.
Does your friend want to do anything else with his life? The Fabian strategy is compatible with still living a reasonably normal and fulfilling professional life. The Berserker strategy means essentially becoming a full time activist (on the anti-woke side).
2. Make them live up to their own standards. If they begin talking about how structurally racist the University is, demand they turn back government funding which is contingent on not being racist, etc...
3. Try to create preference cascades. Figure out which aspects of wokeness are the least popular amongst the faculty/students and publicly defy those. Come up with ways for others to signal their support on the matter, at first anonymously, if necessary. Soon people will recognize that it's safe to defy that particular item and even better, it's popular to do so.
4. Publicize the most egregious examples. Shine sunlight as a disinfectant so much that the administration will run in terror whenever someone suggests a course of woke action which will cause them grief from the public / board when publicized.
5. Divide and conquer. Look at all the diversity administrators and keep wondering at faculty meetings how many professor/researcher/grad student salaries could be paid (or increased) if those useless positions were eliminated.
Some voice actors on animated series have actually done that, e.g. Jenny Slater and Harry Shearer - there are others. I suppose they must be given credit for putting their money where their mouths are. (Little reciprocation from black actors playing white characters has been evidenced, so far as I know.)
Scott, as a long-time reader and fan I know what you mean here, but I suspect the way you worded this post will do more harm than good. You went very vague in multiple places where vagueness is often interpreted in bad faith (mention of “George Floyd protest” and “bad” without clarifying what happened in particular that’s bad, etc.; this can and probably will be used by outsiders to imply that you think George Floyd deserved it or something), which is obviously not a great assumption for constructive dialogue, but it is the world we currently live in. I think the annoying reality is that if you want to talk about culture war stuff, using shorthand which is not clearly defined is a very dangerous game, since it people from different political backgrounds often use the same words to mean *very* different things.
One example of this I mentioned in response to another comment is the word “woke” itself. To grey tribe members it tends to mean “liberals over-reacting through censorship and bad-faith,” to red tribe members it can also mean that, but for both extremely leftist and very far-to-alt-right people, it is interpreted to mean “statements in support of the humanity of people who aren’t cis white American males”. For the alt-right-veering-on-neo-nazi-territory camp, this definition is used as a dog-whistle, and on the far left, the definition is used to ad-hominem anyone who uses the word “woke”.
As unfair as it is, I don’t want you to be immediately dismissed by blue-tribe individuals simply due to your use of wording, when I know your intentions are not actually in support of misogyny or anything terrible.
I think the implication that far-to-alt-right people view "wokeness" as "statements in support of the humanity of people who aren't cis white American males" is sitting in foundationally progressive priors. There are many things that are not rights or even normal privileges that are included in "woke" statements.
To give a proper example, the reason why "bake the cake bigot" became a meme on the right was that this was establishing a *new* right, that only exists if you're a Protected Minority. To a Modern Liberal - this is merely a statement in support of the Fundamental Humanity of LGBT People(TM).
At no point prior were "wedding cakes" a human right, nor was demanding that a baker make you one.
There's a social engineering reason that this is acceptable, and primarily it has to do with the fact that the one thing the market can't stop is a Religion - and that requires Principled Government Intervention to make sure that hotels aren't eg. forcing black people to sleep on the streets while they're driving through town.
That argument wasn't ever made - it was merely that anyone who doesn't want to bake a gay wedding cake must hate gay people and secretly be going to gay bars to murder them.
Interesting point, and I somewhat agree with your first paragraph, though after that our views diverge, which is fine. I am going to go ahead and say that your response is also coming from some assumed priors, probably stemming your position of (I assume) moderately right leaning political sympathies. In particular, when you complain about "wokeness," you're specifically referring to "things that are not rights or even normal privileges that are included in 'woke' statements," which is a totally fair thing to complain about (assuming your perspective on rights and privileges aren't insane of course). However, when far-to-alt-right people talk about "wokeness," what they tend to mean is something closer to "any statement asserting the rights of minorities (regardless of if those rights/privileges are reasonable or not by normative standards)". The problem is leftists will hear both you and genuine bigots who are actually homophobic using the same terminology, and assume that you're using the same definition, which you very much are not.
I'm not sure if links are allowed here, but if they are, I could provide a number of articles trying to define these terms from different political perspectives, and giving radically different definitions. My guess is that much of the political discourse that most divides people across American politics are in large part shaped by semantics, and fuzzy labeling.
The fact one of the anti-woke commentators on this very article was talking above about how Jim Crow laws were a justified response to black criminality illustrates your point.
Indeed. It’s annoying and it’s sad, but the fact of the matter is we *do* need to change our language once evil people start co-opting it, if we don’t want to be mistaken for those people. We are living in a period of information warfare, and we need to stay one step ahead of the game if we care about how we appear to outsiders.
Suppose this guy… [engages berserker-style]… If this case becomes news and helps set ppl’s expectations, what message does it send to the average academic?
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
(Were The George Floyd Protests An Example Of Woke Power Or Woke Overreach?)
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
…if you are unwoke or on the fence; what might push you more towards the woke direction?
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
For this, I think we need to choose which definition of "woke" we're working with--there are a lot running around!!
A friend of mine pointed out that initial usage of 'SJW' matched the apparent meaning of 'wokescold' at a later time. He'd say to himself, "it's crazy to think that a ton of people are using 'wokescold' thinking it's the first term to ever be used to succinctly describe this type of person." As he was noting, there's some kind of euphemism-treadmill (or "reverse-euphemism-treadmill"?) thing going on there!
"What would convince me to be woke?" Well, CONTEXT! For a parallel example, I've thought about how what people mean by "feminism" in a Nigerian context... Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are writers I associate with Nigerian feminism, and the perspective I get from their novels is something drastically different from what people mean by "feminism" in America.
So, envisioning a different context where "wokeness" might be appropriate--hypothetically, if I were alive 80 years from now, and by then wokeness had got pushed down and was good-and-dead, and social norms got turned in a DIFFERENT authoritarian direction that was neither progressive nor socialist nor conservative but something we haven't yet thought of and it was terrible... and there was a movement to uplift an oppressed subset(s) of people by accurately recognizing and supporting true accomplishments of theirs... (Humans NEVER recognize the value of other humans' accomplishments as much as they should!! News at 11.) and if that movement could somehow be described as, "woke-ism re-discovered as a bizarre sliver movement and COMPLETELY re-created," well... I might support that one!
But... I don't think that's what we mean by "wokeism." I think our working definition of woke-ism encapsulates both the means AND THE ENDS.
(Also, I think there's a now-deleted comment here that had some pretty good thoughts? Not sure!)
I edited my post to back off from a too-strong claim ("Wait, do I actually know what I'm talking about?") and to give a sense of where I was getting my claim from. (it's these writers' novels; mostly not from non-fic writings, etc.)
Original comment said: "I've thought about how what people mean by "feminism" in Nigeria (Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, iirc, are considered major figures in Nigerian feminism) ...and what its goals are.. are probably drastically different from what people mean by "feminism" in America."
I think it depends on how extreme your views are. If you think wokeness has good intentions, but the way they are handling it is wrong, the Fabian strategy is a great way to turn the movement gradually to something less harmful, and maybe even helpful. If you think it is a cynical power grab and that the country needs to do a 180 and accept extremely controversial beliefs, then I think berserker is more useful.
Temperament of the individual is also important. The most successful Fabians will be outgoing, personable, and soft spoken. The most successful Berserkers will have thick skin, be aggressive, and not mind having few friends.
Should we care about [the way that the New Atheists look at this moment in time, in hindsight]?
If you were giving strategic advice to Richard Dawkins in 2005, would you have told him to tone it down?
How analogous is the current situation?
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
Posts like this make me realize that I don't actually know what wokeness IS. All I've got right now is a cluster concept. But what is the thing that banning speakers and BLM virtue signalling and quotas and whatever else boil down to? What is it that this academic is against when he says he is anti-woke?
"To Reactionaries, the epitome of the progressive aesthetic theory against which they rebel is the fairy tale of the Ugly Duckling, where one duckling is uglier than the rest, everyone mocks him, but then he turns out to be the most beautiful of all. The moral of the story is that ugly things are really the most beautiful, beautiful things are for bullies who just want to oppress the less beautiful things, and if you don’t realize this, you’re dumb and have no taste."
Maybe wokeness is just the supercharged and enforced application of this aesthetic to everything? I'm not sure. If anyone knows of a good description of what's at the heart of wokeness, either from Scott or elsewhere, I'd love to read it.
Wokeness is just the most recent expression of social authoritarianism. For example, in the Soviet Union, a popular national pastime was to pick a random person; accuse him of counter-revolutionary tendencies; call a group meeting to denounce him in public; then have him shipped to Siberia. If you refused to participate, you'd run the risk of finding yourself in the boxcar next to the original victim. This was sometimes done to relieve the boredom, and sometimes to claim the victim's valuable property, such as a (practically palatial) one-bedroom apartment. The actual offence allegedly performed by the victim mattered little, because, given enough effort, pretty much anything that anyone had said and done could be used against them in the court of public opinion (and, eventually, the law).
This strategy lies at the core of modern wokeness; it is only the surface trappings that have changed. Instead of denouncing people for being Western capitalist sympathizers, we denounce them for being sexist or racist; but the overall social climate is the same. If you rewind history a bit, you'd find people being denounced for being closet Communists or worshiping the Devil, instead. It's all the same story, just with different decorations.
I was more asking about the actually ideology of wokeness, rather than the tactics people use to "convince" others of it. What is the set of beliefs that you must adhere to in order to be woke? You seem to suggest that woke ideology is essentially "racism and sexism are bad", but I think it's more complicated than that. To me, the hallmark of wokeness is a sort of verlan social hierarchy, where the more marginalized you are (or traditionally would be) the more worth and clout you have under wokeness. That's why I think that Scott's description of the progressive aesthetic gets at it well – but like I said, I don't think I've got a great handle on it. Where is the woke manifesto?
(Your comment made me realize that there are two senses wokeness – the actual ideology and the tactics used to enforce it – and that being woke in one sense has very little necessary bearing on whether one is woke in the other. I’m more interested in the ideology than in the tactics, but one thing I’ll say about the tactical sense of wokeness is that I’ve never found it to be a great look to go straight to the Soviet comparisons when discussing it. Wouldn't it be more effective to find a better analogy for what we see with wokeness than literal deportation to death camps? Maybe a better comparison would be, I don’t know, what people did to Susan Sontag after 9/11? Just a thought.)
Yes--the post-9/11 wave of "patriotic correctness" (as some pundit I've forgotten termed it) seems like a very good parallel. The "cancellation" of the Dixie Chicks seems like the most infamous example--I actually hadn't heard about Susan Sontag.
I worry about the hard won victories, because of the conservative prof who committed suicide a year or so ago after he'd won several victories, but become so beaten down and sad because of the constant attacks on his character and person.
(How Did Other Protest Movements Solve This Problem?)
Does [the possibility that MLK and both fall into the category “Berserker”] mean our dichotomy is too weak?
Did anyone do Fabian for civil rights?
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
(Does Poorly-Planned Resistance Provide A Cover For Crackdowns?)
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
(edited first to remove all the <b>html</b> that didn't work, edited a second time to remove more personal details.)
I recently witnessed a fairly "soft" cancellation attempt at my institution where I'm a postdoc, and I think I learned a bit from the experience. Here are some recommendations.
TL;DR: Please please do not go berserk. I'm begging you here. I think there is room for a couple of strategically-picked controversial actions above what the Fabian strategy would suggest, but the less you instigate edgy actions for the sake of being edgy, the better off we will all be.
Practical points:
Point 1: The berserk method is bad strategy for convincing institutions to be less woke (confidence: 70%). Your cause is to curb the excesses of wokeness (presumably while preserving the good parts like treating each other decently). I get that a controversial talk might bring that to make national news more than a benign one -- toxoplasma of rage and all that. But realistically, will that end up changing the climate on campuses nationwide? At the institutional level, I watched my institution (which is actually quite free-speech-friendly compared to others I've heard about) loudly and officially berate incidents at other universities that made national news, usually with no context to explain what actually happened. A faculty or student reader unaware of the event would come out with the impression that the event was Really Bad And Extremely Racist and they need to be more woke, not that something controversial had happened and gotten quashed mercilessly. This makes me think that even if you make national news and get lots of attention, you are only entrenching universities further. (Especially consider how the event will be portrayed in national news that academic administrators would read.) At the bottom of the post I have a suggestion for a different way you can impact the national campus viewpoint.
Point 2: The berserk method will not convince people on the fence, and will convince woke-proponents that they're right (confidence: 60%). Anyone who is already vaguely anti-woke is going to say "ugh, another example of leftists cancelling someone" and anyone who is vaguely woke is going to say "ugh, I can't believe a university actually invited awful demagogue So-and-So, what do they even still have to say at this point?" IMO there are two groups of people you can reach: (1) people who haven't made an opinion either way, and (2) woke-proponents who haven't seen an example of how bad it can get (surprisingly common!) Personally, I was on the pro-woke side of this for quite a while until I watched a video of some college students shouting down a pretty feminist speaker for a benign statement that was not quite feminist enough (I think she had said there were distributional differences between men and women). I would never have been convinced by watching college students shout down Ben Shapiro -- I mean, they were Right and he was Wrong. Maybe I'm typical-minding here, but with all due respect everyone in *my* bubble who has gone down this path has gone down it by seeing an example of a woke overreaction to something they could see as being mildly acceptable, not something they disagreed with, especially from a speaker who has a reputation of edginess for its own sake.
Moral point:
I really don't think fighting fire with fire is morally right here (confidence 65%). I could *maybe* see an exception if it were in "self-defense" i.e. if it looked like the overly-woke bandwagon were going to crack down forever. But I don't think it looks that way. So I think you can stay on the side of righteousness and preventing censorship without needing to invite edgy people just for the sake of it. I wouldn't say "don't go looking for trouble" but I will say "don't cause trouble for its own sake." This approach seems more honest to me, and I don't believe it's justified to abandon that approach unless absolutely necessary.
Advice:
Finally, a few points of practical advice, assuming you're in it for the long haul:
1. When speakers get cancelled at other universities for unrelated views, invite them to speak at your campus instead. For example when MIT cancelled a geophysics talk for the speaker opposing race-based affirmative action, Princeton invited him to speak there instead https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclusion/577972-princeton-hosts-speech-by-geophysicist-who-was . I think this would be a useful signal to professors and other potential speakers that they can hold semi-controversial views more openly without being blacklisted from speaking at every university.
2. Even if you don't invite edgy people yourself, defend *student-invited* edgy people. (don't "encourage" them to invite edgy people -- which will both look bad and mean you will actually be skirting the norms -- but if it's genuinely their idea, defend them as much as you can.)
3. Consider softening the edginess of edgy speaker invitees by inviting them for a "debate" rather than a "seminar." Pick someone to debate them that will actually do a good job.
4. Become well-liked by professor colleagues, administration colleagues, and students. Thinking you're un-fireable is one thing, but if you are universally loathed in your institution, good luck changing anything. Also, FIRE (see below) has documented many times when professors weren't as un-fireable as they thought.
So in your position, I would go about my daily life, pushing back on the small things when they come up. Keep your ear to the ground so that when something bigger comes up (as it surely will), you can spend your reputational points there. You're not trying to make "the news", you're trying to influence the national campus climate. Invite people cancelled by other universities, you don't have to completely hide out. But don't just invite edgy people for the sake of inviting edgy people; that will only make the overly-woke people -- and people currently undecided -- more convinced they're right.
A lot of people (outside the SSC bubble) will not know the difference between being against wokeness because you're e.g. racist versus being against wokeness because it has gone too far. They may not even know there is a difference. So if you want to change hearts, showing them those excesses will help. But doing stuff that gets you labelled e.g. "racist" could actually be counterproductive.
There could be another potential goal to show others that they can speak their mind without repercussions... but I think trying to pursue this is not such a good idea. Mainly because, you can look around and see it is clearly not true. It's not widely supported, and to get that support hearts need to change.
Does this suggest the Berserker Strategy, to make sure the issue doesn’t fade quietly into the night?
Is the goal to have different parts of society (e.g. the voting public vs. universities) out of sync with each other?
Would that conflict potentially keep wokeness in the public eye, and what would be the consequences of that? Some stuff that potentially really needs to happen?
Or is that playing with fire?
(I, umm, egregiously altered one of Scott’s final questions here!!
I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
Since the woke/nonwoke divide seems to break down along similar humanistic tendencies aligned with our hard wiring (e.g., head/heart, romanticism/ordered liberty, Rousseau/Locke, blank slate/evolutionary psychology, revolution/reaction) I expect a continuum with ebb and flow between the polarities with excesses toward one end contravened by events/public opinion back toward the other.
We reached peak wokeness in Summer 2020. Then the Prez election followed by the vaccines broke the fever, everywhere except academia (where I work) and those excesses are being voted out in this election cycle.
Will the Cold War Redux start to swing things back towards the Enlightenment Civilization and away from Post-Modern Revolution? I think so. Boutique, fabricated social crises will look absurdist compared to 21st Century land wars in Europe.
No offense, but this is one of the worst articles I've seen on this site in a long time. Is this really what you're focused on now, when a sovereign nations in the developed world is under attack by an expansionist superpower, the international order that's kept the world in a state of relative peace since 1991 (and arguably since 1945) is on the verge of breaking down, and food and fuel prices throughout the Western world are on the rise? I know that's something of a Whataboutist argument, and I'm not trying to say that people can't be upset about more than one bad thing at a time, but having articles on Ukraine followed up by a spiel about college SJWs that would have felt outdated 6 years ago really highlights the contrast in importance there, in a way that makes this feel especially irrelevant and tone-deaf.
On a more substantive level, the core problem here is that the article treats wokeness as a singular and unified movement, a thing-in-itself, when that really isn't the case. Most of what you're associating with "wokeness" isn't even an ideology at all, it's a set of tactics - harmful and counter-productive ones - that are used by people all across the political spectrum, even if they're used disproportionately more by a certain type of left-wing campus activists. (Islamic fundamentalists may be associated with terrorism in the public eye, but that doesn't make the non-Islamic terrorism of the Tamil Tigers any less deadly, nor does it make the non-terroristic Islamic fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia any less repressive.)
If you want to criticize the far-left, then criticize the Twitter tankies who are currently cheering Putin on out of contrarian hatred for NATO and some delusion that they're still living in 1956. If you want to criticize deplatforming tactics and the use of social pressure to browbeat people into ideological conformity, then criticize those tactics in general, including the many instances where they're done by the right. But just sniping at college activists like this amounts to little more than the sort of political tribalism that you've so often condemned in the past.
The wokesters have a very strong habit of always downplaying not only the evil of their own side, but how pervasive it's power is. Wokeism has taken over virtually every major entertainment studio, every college, and a growing majority of public corporations. It's not just "left wing campus activists" as liars try to pass it off as. That's a LIE.
It's mandatory diversity hiring schemes. It's mandatory diversity acceptance quotas in university. It's allowing men to rape women in prison. It's firing people because they said statistically true statements. It's allowing activists to burn down buildings in dozens of cities because they're angry. That's wokeness. It's evil and it's pervasive. And you're outing yourself by lying about what wokeness truly is.
History books are not going to talk about "wokeness." They're going to talk about the fact that the U.S. government utterly botched its pandemic response, crashed its once-successful economy into the ground, withdrew from a 20 year foreign conflict in a way that allowed enemy forces to retake the country in less than a month, and allowed the international order that had kept the world in a state of relative peace for 77 years to fall apart out of sheer apathy, all because the dominant political parties decided that sabotaging the entire country out of sheer partisan spite was preferable to ever letting the other side score any points.
Thinking that some overhyped crusade against wokeness is the most important battle of the modern era is narcissistic myopia. Partly because the very concept of "wokeness" is so poorly-defined that it apparently includes everything from Nike selling rainbow-colored shoes and Coca-Cola selling bottles with rainbow-colored stickers to literal communists calling for the government to be overthrown. (Do those really seem like they're even remotely the same phenomenon to you?) But mostly just because it demonstrates a staggering lack of perspective, not only in the broader global and historical sense, but even in the more limited context of American domestic politics. Most Americans care a hell of a lot more about rising gas and food prices than HR diversity seminars, and if you can't see that, it's because you've become incapable of seeing the world through any lens other than that of Internet Culture War. And that sort of tunnel-vision is exactly why you now have people earnestly thinking that the RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE is about wokeness, as if it's just another front in the Culture Wars.
Even from a right-wing perspective, it would be a lot smarter to focus on dealing with fiscal problems like inflation and the deficit and unemployment rates, considering those actually have far more of an impact on people's day-to-day lives than whether Twitter 'cancels' some comedian who'll end up getting a popular Netflix show and making $500,000/year regardless. And if you really want to hate on left-wingers, there are plenty of truly detestable leftists who do things far worse than saying mean things about people who believe in "human biodiversity" - like the tankies who are currently simping for a repressive and imperialistic dictator just because he also happens to hate the West: https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/geopolitics/2022/02/too-many-on-the-left-have-swallowed-putins-propaganda-on-ukraine. Of course, that would also require you to condemn similar sentiments from the other end of the political spectrum: https://www.axios.com/cawthorn-ukraine-zelensky-thug-woke-ideologies-6d9ef5f4-86f9-4a44-bb79-7da30bba0ffd.html.
What's with bringing up the Ukraine thing? You're not the first one in the woke camp to do it. It's just so incredibly orthogonal to this discussion. Neither you nor Ukraine is entitled to Scott's (or anyone's) writing or attention. Do you really think that war needs more signal boosting?
One of the narcissisms of wokesters is that we have to share their outrage for their cause when they're ready to be outraged about it. I wouldn't be surprised if you have some mental gymnastics about how this Ukraine thing is close and personal to you. I've also noticed a theme of "let's bring this topic back to my trauma" amongst the woke.
Let's be serious for a second: you're not going to go fight for Ukraine and you wouldn't let your son go fight for Ukraine. If you want to obsess about it, there are plenty of other places to indulge all that. This is article about a person close to Scott making an actual set of decisions about their career.
This is upsetting to me in part because it's upsetting to see anyone supporting a belligerent autocrat like Putin, but also just because it's flat-out wrong: This is a geopolitical conflict that's been brewing for decades and has absolutely nothing to do with "wokeness." But more to the point, it's wrong in a way that suggests an absolutely horrifying lack of perspective involved. If someone is looking at the biggest conflict of the past seven decades and can't see it as anything else but a subset of whatever hot-button-issue-of-the-day Culture War battle they're caught up on, that's an almost pathological level of mental myopia.
Of course, there are people on the far-left defending Putin as well, and they're likewise terrible, but as far as I've seen they aren't siding with him over perceived Culture War issues, they're siding with him because they hate NATO and support anyone who opposes so-called Western hegemony.
"This is article about a person close to Scott making an actual set of decisions about their career."
If that was all it was about, Scott could've simply sent an email to that person. Why make an article about it at all, unless it was intended to provoke a larger discussion?
I'm going to remember this conversation while I'm getting my teeth kicked in by a brownshirt in November 2024 and I'm going to laugh and laugh and laugh, because being a cynical bastard is just about the only way you can get by these days.
It looks like no-one has mentioned Charles Pincourt and James Lindsay's short book Counter Wokecraft, about how to resist woke culture, especially in academia. It makes a number of practical suggestions. Examples (from memory) include:
1. Make sure you understand the woke mindset, and don't get sidetracked into lengthy but ultimately pointless arguments.
2. Identify other like-minded people on campus and co-ordinate action with them.
3. Join committees and politely but firmly resist woke action by appealing to liberal values.
4. Insist on norms in meetings such as written agendas, keeping to time and procedures for voting, so that changes receive proper scrutiny.
5. Watch out for loosely worded regulations and statements that could be subverted to the woke cause.
The seeming trend of anti-woke liberals and leftists "going full reactionary" due to audience capture is, I believe, one of the main things that undermines the (very important!) effort to create a genuinely liberal and/or leftist movement pushing back against the current excesses. It strengthens the woke people I know in their conviction that crazy far-right views are the only real alternative to wokeness.
4 unrelated comments on strategy in ascending order of pointedness
1. Partner up
My local UU preacher would like a word about the strategic contrast between "Fabian" and "Berserker", between MLKJr and Malcolm X, between Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul, between the Mattachine Society and the Stonewall rioters, and so on. In clear terms, it's the choice between respectability politics and radicalism. My preacher would advise you to always choose both, if you want to win.
You can't do both yourself obviously; you need a foil, an antagonistic partner in progress. One side of the split takes the respectable approach, and the other takes the radical approach, because you'll need both. If a movement is composed only of polite reform-minded Respectables, they'll get ignored indefinitely and maybe forever. Oh, maybe there will be some rousing debates, but those will change only a few minds at the most. If the movement is composed only of un-ignorable fiery radicals, then it'll be trivially easy to paint them as unreasonable enemies of the people, and to whip up popular support for their suppression. But with enough people taking both the respectable and radical approaches, the political situation changes. The polarity is now not between the pro- and the anti-, but between the mild pro- and the extreme pro-. The cheapest, most convenient, most face-saving option becomes claiming to see reason in the arguments of the respectables and adopting some of their reforms.
So in your choice between the Fabian route and the Berserker route, consider reinforcing the weaker of those two factions.
2. Watch Out for the Great Sucking Void
Beware of success. If wokeness is displaced but not replaced, the result will most assuredly not be a pristine realm of freedom for all to pursue their individuality. It will be a great sucking void, and something will fill it. The first stage of filling it will be like Chesterton's quote, "When a man stops believing in <God/wokeness>, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything." All the cranks and crackpots and ideologues and true philosophers will rush into the gap, and cultural evolution will commence. Of necessity, what emerges victorious will have positive and negative social characteristics similar to wokeness and the previous conservative religious monoculture.
Maybe success is a long time off and you don't need to worry about the "what comes next". For what it's worth, I'm not so confident of that. But whether it's near or far, having a positive vision of what you could want to become the new corrupt monoculture will help.
3. Eventually you become who you pretend to be
If you go the Fabian route, eventually you'll really be a beloved pillar of the community. If you go the Berserker route, eventually you'll really be an antagonistic, litigious jerk.
4. Take a less provincial attitude and switch sides
I've never lived in a blue state, so it's true I don't know what it's like. Most states are not blue. Most countries are not blue. If you have the freedom to move versus stay and fight ... just move. It's easier and you'll be happier. It's really nice to not be a public target.
A strange thing might even happen. You'll stop being exposed to the excesses of wokeness, but you'll start being exposed to the excesses of anti-wokeness. When you see your state proposing to, e.g., make parents felons for moving out of state with a trans child (Idaho, March 9th 2022), you might even feel like switching sides for a while.
Imagine where it leads if everybody took up and moved. You'll have deep Blue states and deep Red states. With no dialog on community level. With only Federal level policy fighting based solely around mustering the most votes on the day. Not a healthy situation.
Two thoughts: 1) there's a lot of variation around what "woke" actually means, especially in the comments. 2) The choice between the two options depends to some extent on whether you're trying to persuade people to your cause vs. highlighting the issues.
1. Reading some comments in the thread that followed DecipheredStones' pushback, woke seems like more of a shibboleth than a meaningful term. It's characterized as performative social activism, but also as a creeping collectivist ideology, leveraging institutions to suppress dissenting voices, or even a totalitarian revolutionary movement. Many of these interpretations are so different it feels like the comments are talking past one another. Not to mention that some interpretations come from actual actions, while others seem to be coming second-hand from deeply uncharitable sources.
Lumping together individual and institutional performativity similarly seems to be concerning. Yale Law jumping the gun to sanction a student who sent an edgy email seems very different from the family across the street putting up a sign and spouting talking points they don't understand without making an actual change to their behavior. The harms of each are different, and the responses should vary as well.
2. It feels a little unclear what the berserker strategy does except gaining notoriety and isolation. Like I understand that the nominal goal is to provoke the woke into the type of excesses which alienate those on the fence, but in practice it seems like its just a performative as woke "awareness raising". In my experience, groups that would call themselves "anti-woke" end up adopting "woke" (e.g. performative but useless) tactics to try and bait out woke overreactions. For example, a group of college republicans staging a barbecue in front of a group hunger striking for racial justice.
the value of the Berserker is to bring up issues and challenge the status quo. It allows other anti- or on the fence people - perhaps Fabians? - to quietly pile their weight behind the Berserker without attracting all the negativity.
A lone Berserker with no support could be a net negative, depending on the level of aggression.
To the extent that the problems of wokeness are about performativeness, this entire discussion seems to be designed to bring these problems to the anti-woke side as well, rather than to get the woke side back on track about dealing with actual problems instead of creating their own.
There’s a third possible strategy (maybe more). Fabian vs Berserker considers the frame of this specific institution. But the larger societal and cultural frame is also grappling with woke. Maybe the academic wants to choose his(?) position in the National or international debate first and then see where that leaves him in regard to his institution.
If he’s really that unfireable, he has the ability to be a pillar of the movement to make it acceptable to not destroy norms of free speech and expression. Don’t waste that by going it alone. If you volunteer to be a trophy for the woke establishment, they will be happy to hunt you and it’s getting even less scrupulous. He’ll end up facing untraceable sexual harassment allegations, the IRS, they’ll find cocaine in his car. Fabian or berserker won’t matter.
Having allies at other campuses and other disciplines is good. Where is “woke” at historically Black colleges and universities? Heterodox Academy, Free Black Thought, there are people of color who are working to reframe social justice without the discourse-destroying, society-fraying, obedience-demanding elements. Find them, let them teach you. Then figure out your approach at your institution. Wokeness is antifragile in that the more the errors are pointed out, the more it’s debunked, the more the adherents refuse to consider other ideas. It makes them look bad, but mainly to powerless outsiders.
Signal-boost the next wave of social justice ideas that acknowledge and value free speech. Then when something comes along on your campus, your response can be consistent with whatever your larger stand is.
"He thinks a world where the [BLM] protests had never happened would be woker than our current world right now." "We both agree that wokeness is currently in a weird place; ascendant in all measurable ways, but with cracks beginning to show ."
But are Scott and his friend really in a position to know to whether the BLM protests strengthened or weakened wokeness? -- and how many cracks are beginning to show in wokeness? I'm sure Scott and his friend between them know quite a large number of people in academia and other relevant fields, but it's still a tiny sample of the total relevant population and almost certainly not a representative sample. So I'm in doubt about where really things stand overall with wokeness. Anyone have ideas about ways to assess this that are more systematic than generalizing from private conversations with acquaintances?
Also, even if we knew for sure that wokeness is getting old and brittle, it's not clear how things would play out if it were challenged in a particular way. Seems to be the kind of situation where all sorts of smallish things could greatly change the outcome: whether certain parts of the news media pick up on a particular challenge to wokeness at some university, what else is going on in the news cycle that day, which high-profile Twitter wits get off takes that go viral.
For what it's worth I'm inclined to be less optimistic about the Berserker Strategy since it looks to me like manifesting indignation does not break up the ice dams these days. Instead, one generates counter-indignation and the rage vs. rage equilibrium continues, keeping the social media machines humming vigorously, like power plants that run on rat shit.
Agreed. But the fact that the elephant's tail looks very like a rope isn't evidence that trying to climb it is going to work out well. You could end up someplace you don't want to hang out in.
My advice is to adopt the 'Skynet Weasel Strategy' and encourage the woke crowd to launch ICBMs against another nuclear superpower in the name of woke.
The goals are twofold:
1. The counterstrike will hit the woke much harder than the unwoke (targets are more likely to be urban not rural).
2. As the aggressor and the loser, 'woke' will become the new 'nazi'.
I think jokes about a nuclear holocaust should be made with as much consideration as jokes about the Nazi holocaust. Same with the "we need a new plague for population control" people -- its hard for me to laugh at a joke predicated on billions of deaths.
Then don't laugh, because it wasn't meant as a joke. People fight against wokeness because they think wokeness will end up destroying us.
Thermonuclear war would be like ripping off a band aid. I grew up in the 1980s where every kid was told that nuclear was 'the end of the world', but like the pandemic and climate change, that is an exaggeration.
The purpose of life is to make it count not avoid death at all cost.
160 years ago, young men suffered 600,000 excess deaths because it was more important to settle the question whether it was OK to own another person than to breathe as long as possible at all costs.
During the next 100 years every one of the 7.9 billion humans on this planet will die at one point or another and arguments that make use of a body count metric like it's Vietnam ca. 1968 are not only an appeal to emotion but also an example of the McNamara Fallacy.
If you're coming at it from a pure nihilistic perspective I guess I can't disagree on principle: nothing matters extrinsically so why care.
If you think, however, that the benefit from a hit against woke/progressivism causes more benefit than a thermonuclear war causes pain and harm, I think you're truly out of your mind or maybe just wrong. Nuclear war means famine, starvation, death from radiation, death of family members, a breakdown of the facets of modern life that give you ultimate freedom. I could go on. I would even agree that safety isn't the only concern in life, and treating it as such leads to weakness and lack of fulfillment. And maybe wokeness inhibits some things that lead to your fulfillment. But I can't imagine the calculation that makes those override the costs. Can you list the pros and cons in a way that would convince yourself? Would the average life really "count" more after a nuclear holocaust? Should Biden launch out nukes based on utility reasoning? I think not.
Is 'wokeness' just an inconvenience or is it a threat to mankind? Do woke people just have a different opinion that we can live with or are they frothing at the mouth, mentally ill, irresponsible, unreasonable, insane that will destroy everything we need to function as a society?
If you can't imagine the calculation that makes those override the costs then it's because you're only considering easy-to-measure metrics and pretend that qualitative factors don't exist.
Thermonuclear war will be over fast.
The effects of a single nuke scale with 0.4th power of the yield, so a nuke that is "50x more powerful than Hiroshima" is 'just' 4.7x as effective. Hiroshima went pretty much back to normal in 1950.
It is easy to poke fun at academics who betray their professions for the sake of taking pretentious stands in support of long ago freed slaves, long dead, whose humanity was denied them in order to steal their labor. I say pretentious, for much of modern pretenders of downtroddenness find themselves rightly prejudiced and well-earned opposition for antisocial and destructive behavior such as deliberate and chosen ignorance, slovenliness and lawlessness.
Much of that behavior has, especially since the "war on poverty", been mimicked by the hoard of whites who have slavishly clamored after government handouts. Even to the point of copying the pigeon English originally developed to disguise private conversation from slave-owners. One could justify such ignorance as a point of pride, but to insist on foisting it off in the school and workplace it appears more as defiance.
It is no wonder that such are attracted to Communism, with its envy-based attacks on discipline and hard work. It is something to be wondered at, however, that ignorance is preferred to learning. Hard work can be fairly easily be avoided, and discipline too, but ignorance is a bridge too far. More so in the workplace than, apparently, in academia. Woke, indeed, in stark contrast with awakened.
Poverty, especially imposed poverty, admits some sympathy. But self-imposed ignorance and poverty by way of ignoring obvious self-discipline issues like staying in committed relationships, taking responsibility for behavior and lack of willingness for hard work and willingness to comply with basic civic norms are beyond understanding. Drug dependency and drunkenness are equally inexplicable.
Maybe one of the most straightforward lessons to learn from the Fabian Society is, "organizations can achieve goals that individuals can't."
So, if I were giving advice to Scott's professor friend, I wouldn't frame it so much as "which strategy should you, personally, follow?" Instead, I'd say, "which organizations can you join which share your goals?"
For example, off the top of my head: Heterodox Academy. Is that the sort of organization they'd would be interested in joining?
Scott, I notice you don't ever reference Otto Rank and I wondered what you think about his idea that any ideology must deal with both our animal and spiritual nature? In other words, atheists still need to say something about soul belief, and if there's no soul then what happens to the taste of my food, what will happen to my rock 'n roll?
This feels like the kind of post that gets written by someone in the upper-middle class living in the bay area. When I went to college a few years ago, none of my professors were woke, and one econ professor would take points off your essay if you weren't sufficiently libertarian. There were a few protests that were woke, but they blended in with Greek life events and sports clubs. I have this weird feeling of seeing people complain about wokeness all the time, but they just don't seem like a gigantic problem where you need to intentionally antagonize woke people to win points.
In terms of actual advice for your friend, how about they try to do their job really well, get promoted, possibly become friends with people regardless of their politics, and try not to pick fights? I don't really think an academic is going to be super effective at achieving political goals anyway.
I'm probably too far to the "woke" side to really be who this article is for, but...
IMO the issue with Wokeness is less the goals than the means. Institutionalized disadvantages do exist and there's nothing wrong with challenging that status quo.
The problem is that a small but powerful subset of people have been raised by academia to believe persuasion against one's own interest is literally impossible. According to this philosophy, when someone asks to be persuaded before endorsing a cause or course of action, they're aggressively protecting their own power.
If debate and persuasion are doomed to failure, the only conceivable way to remedy injustice is coercion. That's the source from whence all "Woke" evils spring (and incidentally why it's ultimately doomed to failure - if you refuse to try to persuade anyone then nobody will be persuaded).
So the best advocate against wokeness is one who restores debate and persuasion to its rightful place. And the question to your friend is "has the taboo against persuasion metastasized in your institution?"
If it hasn't yet, then Fabian Strategy is the way to go - he needs to defend the norm of adopting ideas because people think they're good. Berserker tactics undermine that goal.
If it has, then unfortunately the best option will be Berserker tactics. He needs to demonstrate that the larger system in which his institution operates still wishes to be persuaded before acting, and will punish the new coercive norms.
Yeah, for the most part modern diversity efforts serve to elevate a small subset of middle-class minority people, and are entirely ineffective against the hard problems that would really address inequality - like zoning laws that keep affordable housing from being built, thereby increasing the historical disadvantages of black folks in the housing market, infrastructure that allows constant lead exposure for poor, urban neighborhoods, an antagonistic relationship with police as a result of gang predation on young black men, etc.
The fact that we let a few relatively well-off black folks into medical school over more qualified white folks does nothing to address inequality, but it also doesn't obviate that inequality.
Affirmative action's effects are way, way bigger than med school students. The woke took control of the most powerful institutions and chose affirmative actions and political correctness as their policy instruments.
The inequality obsession doesn't help create a better solution as evidenced by the most inequality obsessed people controlling institutions and choosing truly performative mandates. All the "hard problems that would really address inequality" don't need wokeness or inequality ideology as part of the solution set.
I am a white woman and I recently got a tenure-track faculty position at a large American university. While hiring a lab assistant, I was told by the administration that, in addition to a CV and cover letter, all applicants must submit a statement of DEI excellence, describing their past, present, and/or future activities in promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Obligatory disclaimer! I am a liberal, I hate racism, sexism, and all other -isms, and I want a society where everyone is treated with respect and has equal rights and opportunities.
All that said, I want to hire a good lab assistant who does the job well and is a decent person, but I really don't care whether they spend their free time advancing DEI excellence or sitting on the couch and watching "This Is Us." All this requirement is doing is narrowing my applicant pool to those who either are genuinely passionate about DEI or can convincingly fake it on their DEI statement.
Also, implicit in the DEI requirement is the belief that fighting racism/transphobia/etc. is the most important thing in American society today. What if a person doesn't do a thing about DEI, but instead volunteers at a food bank or helps register voters or campaigns against climate change in their free time? Is this applicant less worthy?
And I can't risk saying any of this at my university, lest I be branded a clueless, privileged, racist white Karen.
Looking forward to some good discussion in this thread.
> Looking forward to some good discussion in this thread.
Not knowing you, I can't speak to your other personality traits, but you certainly seem like an optimist!
More seriously, there are a distressingly small number of comments on this post in the vein of yours, which seems like the common-sense position to me. (I wouldn't describe myself as particularly liberal, and broadly agree that it would be nice to depoliticize jobs like 'university lab assistant', in the sense that ideological purity tests in front of them do nobody any favors.)
Granted that Scott's post was pretty culture-warrish, and it's therefore not too surprising to see culture-warrish discussion beneath it, but nevertheless, it is not the ACX/SSC commentariat's finest hour.
What I meant was, "I look forward to some advice/thoughts from people broadly agree with me that a) racism, sexism, etc. are bad things and b) there's something wrong with the current intellectual climate, particularly the assumption that all white people are racist and anyone who disagrees or seeks nuance is extra racist."
Same thing has happened in my university. It has followed this path: First, all applicants to all positions were asked to submit a DEI statement. Second, everyone sitting in any search committee needed to undergo DEI training. Now, everyone going up for tenure of promotion needs to include a DEI statement in their review package. So yes, get used to a world where fighting racism and transphobia within your university is the most important thing in the world. See my previous post on the change in ABET accreditation requirements.
Is there anywhere one could see a copy of what a DEI statement is -- what the language is and what people are being asked to provide?
I can see institutions having various recruitment and hiring protocols that are a matter of meet specific standards that are quantifiable or having baseline training requirements for staff (like there's long been around sexual harassment, for instance). I mean, people may obviously disagree about the value of those things, but at least they are clear transparent policies with measurable standards.
How would one would know when they've met whatever the standard is when it comes to "DEI excellence" seems scarily ambiguous and subjective and personal. I'd be curious to know what guidance a potential university staff person is given around such a thing so that they would know what constitutes adequacy in this area.
Note that these are not innocuous requests that only a hidden racist would object to; these are blatant demands for political orthodoxy and a very limited definition of "diversity."
The goal, of course, is to not hire any white males, and the faculty report seems pleased to note its success in getting rid of as many white males as possible during the cuts. Keep in mind too that the use of affirmative action is officially banned by public entities in California, but these kinds of DEI statements are being increasingly used as a workaround.
Wow thank you for that. It gives me a much clearer picture of where all this has gone since I left academia. There's so much more I could say but can't do that today, so I'll just leave it that I really appreciate your posting here this glimpse into the specifics of it. My reactions run in many different directions.
Yea similar stories over on the corporate America side of things. Plenty of institutionalized insanity around DEI / ESG mandates.
From where I sit, I can imagine an Anti-ESG signal gaining traction in certain parts of the market. If those parts begin to materially outperform then I think the entire ESG/DEI initiative could lose favor with "the right people" who generally tend to value being more wealthy.
This. DEI statements are also proliferating in my scientific field. They are clearly a litmus test used to enforce woke orthodoxy, a way of keeping people like me out of the field. As a junior scientist, it makes me wonder if I have a future.
My best advice is don't analyze any advice from someone who is a wokester. Listen for entertainment purposes if you like, but don't give their strategic advice any substantive value. Listening to people who disagree with you is great when you're trying to improve your epistemics. It's terrible when you're trying to devise a plan of action.
REALLY don't listen to any advice from people who are asking you to "improve your argument" or "convince people that wokeness is bad on the merits" because that's all just a trap to move you away from pursuing your goal and trying to make you reconsider it.
Academics get too caught up in the epistemic portion of OODA looping. They Observe the world of politics as they see it, they Orient themselves based on their observations and their education, they Decide that X is the correct plan, then they Act a little. But they always go back and check the feedback too quickly. You have to act enough to actually get meaningful feedback before reconsidering everything. This is the opposite of the wokesters who just have a pre-formed ideology/goal and just constantly act to further it without considering if it's the right ideology/goal for them.
My second best advice is think and investigate what would be hardest for the wokesters to deal with. Find out what they would NOT want you to do. Do that.
This is super unspecified. What kind of woke is this person against? People over applying cultural appropriation? Hormone therapy in children? Native land acknowledgments?
This goes to the picking of fights.
Also, as a medical professional who doesn't have smallpox and knows history... I am surprised you didn't point out that the Canadian truckers were there for a recklessly stupid cause.
I think the difficulty with the berserker strategy is that these ideologies thrive on conflict and define themselves by reference to their enemies' perceived power. So by choosing to create new conflicts you provide them with food. It is sort of like how Hamas is in a de facto alliance with the Israeli right. When one of them is ascendant the other gains power as well, because they practice the same brand of politics.
I'm never 100% sure what to make of any of Scott's posts on wokeness, because buried in there somewhere is the implicit understanding that abuses against minorities happen, that George Floyd probably shouldn't have gotten murdered, etc etc. But then these things are swept aside in favor of the _real_ injustices, people getting "cancelled" on twitter.
I would ask "who hurt you", but as a long time reader I know it was some incident in college. That was close to half your life ago, though, so instead I'll say "Please get over it".
It's more like the PETA problem, tbh: Everyone agrees that a system that murders poor black men at an insane rate is bad, though they may disagree on how to handle it. But because everyone agrees, it's hard to motivate people to change it. There's no enemy to fight, just a hard problem and a bunch of conflicting ideas on how to solve it. I mention PETA because I once remember reading a post (here, I think) about how PETA picks controversial fights because non-controversial fights don't get any press.
Scott seems genuinely interested in addressing society's massive systemic problems. That's why we get so much about effective altruism and articles about potential solutions to big, complex problems. But a performative article about how bad racism is, while it might make you feel better, isn't...like we all know. There's nothing new or interesting there.
And I don't subscribe to a school of thought that says that if one thing is more bad, another thing can't be bad.
It is very funny that I made my comment and the worst possible counterexample immediately showed up. But I still maintain there's no point to demanding Scott write "racism is bad" articles for no reason other than making sure we all know he thinks racism is bad.
This thing of pretending Twitter cancellation/discourse limits are a stupid thing to care about is weird. Either it has massive impact on people's lives, limiting debate to a prescribed list of valid positions, in which case it's pretty darn impactful, or it's a silly thing people on the internet complain about that doesn't matter, in which case it's not. Either way, people should stop doing it.
I'm not demanding that Scott write "racism is bad" articles (Although I'm not sure he could write one even if he wanted to. I doubt he'd be able to write one convincingly, and even if he did I predict it would probably do some damage to his substack income). As I indicated, I'm a longtime reader. My gripes aren't limited to this post in particular. This is a years-long trend that has me increasingly worried. For all the talk of the principle of charity, I don't think Scott understands the positions of his "ideological enemies" at all. The closest he's ever come was in that "Conflict Theory vs Mistake Theory" post, and even that would get partial credit at best.
Twitter cancellation is absolutely ridiculous. Look at all the people who have been "cancelled": Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, etc etc. Has their "cancellation" managed to limit debate? Not as far as I can tell. Has it had a massive impact on their lives? Yes, but mostly from the increased fame and fortune of having book deals and such. Are they actually silenced? I've heard that they are, but I've mostly heard about it from they themselves, on all the media that hosts them (And presumably pays them to be on). Scott himself is a funny test case here; A newspaper was rumored to publish some unflattering things about him, so Scott shut his blog down and now that the dust has settled he finds himself operates a larger and more profitable blog. Cancelled!
I'm sure it's very unpleasant, on a personal level, to have a bunch of people saying mean things directly to you, but this is present in pretty much every online space as far as I can tell. When twitter does it to conservatives we call it "cancellation", when leftists do it to each other we call it "leftist infighting", during a game of StarCraft when an opponent does it the community calls it "bm" or "bad manner". There's no need to make a political cause out of it, except in cases where political causes are a pre-existing condition.
When the dog from Paw Patrol is getting "cancelled", you know the whole thing has become a huge joke.
Okay, so what? They happen against white people as well. And contrary to the dogmatic claims of the woke, black people aren't overrepresented amongst the victims of police killings once you control for disparities in violent crime rates generally and disparities in the rates at which races murder polices officers specifically (which can be used as a proxy for violent behavior to towards police more generally).
More white people are killed by police each year than black people. Can you name even a single white person who's been killed by the police?
>that George Floyd probably shouldn't have gotten murdered
Oh, so you mean things that nobody with any power whatsoever doesn't agree with?
> people getting "cancelled" on twitter.
The cancelling happens on twitter, but apparently you're not aware the consequences extend far beyond twitter and people can have their livelihoods destroyed, their physical safety compromised, for what? Often for making 100% factual statements, not being okay with explicit hatred being directed at white people, etc. If you weren't okay with McCarthyism (when the risk of all out nuclear war with the soviet union was a thing), why should anyone be okay with this stuff?
Like seriously, nobody with anything remotely resembling power is saying its good Floyd died. That doesn't mean its already to engage in deadly, destructive nationwide riots, intimidate jurors, etc or that it's not completely lunatic to defund or even abolish the police, or ruin people's livelihoods for opposing nay of this stuff.
An aspect I haven't seen mention is that this person probably doesn't exist in a vacuum in academia - they have a job, probably interacting with students.
In general it feels like the Fabian strategie would lend itself more to a positive interaction with the students, which (imho) is useful for their academic advancement. If you are known to be a shit-stirrer, that will impact how much students trust you with their work and in general, and it will probably not make the most of his talents regarding his students. While it is not his job to be likable, we all know that student perception has an impact on their learning and work, and especially interacting with staff. Not only as agreeable, but also specifically as being percieved as picking fights.
You're probably not as immune to cancellation as you think.
And I don't see cracks in wokeness, except for the 20 Stalins criticisms. Scott said that some people question whether wokeness is the underdog because it's too powerful, but I wouldn't count that as a crack because iit's a self-correcting problem--if people actually gave up on wokeness for that reason, it would invalidate the reason. It's like the restaurant that nobody goes to because it's too popular. Seeing fewer BLM slogans is not a crack in wokeness either, because the left always turns on its own; there's a difference between the cause of the day not being the cause of the day any more, and an actual decrease in wokeness.
"You're probably not as immune to cancellation as you think."
Since "cancelled" is just a dysphemistic way of saying "criticized", I don't think anyone is or should be immune to it to any degree. I'm not sure why you would need to be, though.
"And I don't see cracks in wokeness, except for the 20 Stalins criticisms"
The notion of a "20 Stalins" criticism is a myth. What people call "20 Stalins criticisms" of wokeness are actually more like "let's assassinate Stalin for betraying the revolution and install a REAL Communist like Trotsky as our new leader" criticisms -- much bigger "crack".
What not enough people understand about "academic freedom" is its resemblance to communism: a beautiful utopian vision that has never been realized, and has eventually devolved into dystopic tyranny whenever anyone has actually tried to implement it--somehow without discouraging its many devotees. Universities are institutions founded on a completely different ideal: academic rigor, in which students and experts devote themselves to mastering and practicing complex, arcane disciplines. "Academic freedom" is in (often unacknowledged) direct tension with academic rigor, in the sense that rigor requires effectively forbidding or suppressing scholarship that doesn't meet the standards of the discipline.
These can be reconciled in various ways in principle, but in practice the institutional tools for imposing rigor can be--and inevitably are--ultimately co-opted to defeat academic freedom whenever the latter is prioritized. That's how today's "woke" tyranny works: the infamous mobbing and shouting down of dissenters on campus is just an outward symptom of the real power struggles taking place, in which "woke" faculty and administrators manipulate the processes designed to maintain academic rigor in order to establish "woke" ideas as part of the core standards of every discipline.
Campaigners for "academic freedom"--whether "Fabians" or "berzerkers"--are thus pursuing an entirely wrong, doomed solution to the problem they're seeking to solve. Instead of demanding more freedom on campus--thus easing the path for those who seek to co-opt and subvert academic rigor for their own ends, "woke" or otherwise--they should join the campaign for renewed academic rigor, calling out examples of shoddy academic research and teaching and demanding tougher accountability of academics for the quality of their work. Only an academia devoted to, and accountable for adherence to, its original purpose can fend off the corruption of that purpose in the service of other goals, including "woke-ism".
I really don't think the second aren't also the first. Show me the historian who goes "oh yes I write marxist analyses but politically I'm a free-market capitalist".
I think they wouldn't use those terms because they are unspecified.
Are Norwegians free market capitalists because they have a sovereign wealth fund and socialized medicine? What about Americans who all agreed to state control of that previous bastion of free market capitalism... Fire departments?
Sure most "Marxist" professors aren't going to be into some extreme libertarian thing like seasteading... At the same time, most of them are perfectly happy with free market capitalism with some regulations. At what point "regulation" goes from "common sense" to "the creeping communist road to serfdom" is kind of an individual thing.
Like we know that Taiwan has a government run national single payer health insurer... But are pretty avowedly not communists.
Most "Marxist" professors I've met are in the European social welfare state model of free market capitalist. I.e. let companies do what they want provided labor rights, the environment, and public health are protected.
"Most "Marxist" professors I've met are in the European social welfare state model of free market capitalist. I.e. let companies do what they want provided labor rights, the environment, and public health are protected."
How sure are you of that? Have they directly stated they think that's a better option than actual socialism?
This comment dovetails well with Nate Hochman's recent piece on academic freedom, which is definitely worth a read.
My objection to this argument though is that academic freedom seems to be one of the few uniting symbols across academia that could legitimately still command a majority of faculty support. It's one of the few things in place that might lead to at least some tolerance of conservatives on the vast majority of university campuses rather than fostering division into campuses explicitly based on ideology. It's a good thing to expose students to a variety of views, within some (debatable!) parameters, while still fostering a search for "good," especially since many on the left honestly do believe that they are supporting the "good" as they say it.
Yes, Hochman makes an important, fairly obvious point about public-school education--public schools are accountable for fulfilling a mission, not for allowing teachers to express themselves freely--that I'm extending to academia, where it's no less valid, but less obvious to many people.
I agree completely that academic freedom has near-consensus support-in-principle among academics, based on their understanding of it as, "I get to do pretty much whatever I want, and the university happily pays me handsomely no matter what they or anyone else may think of it". (This is where the communism analogy is particularly apt.) My claim is that this conception of academic freedom opens the door for traditional academic responsibilities and rigors--which can't completely disappear, lest the institution as a whole collapse--to be subverted and co-opted by agenda-driven factions such as the "woke". For example, the author of the recent NYT op-ed by a college student complaining of suppression of non-"woke" ideas in class was dismissed by defenders of "woke-ism" as a whiner whose bad opinions couldn't stand up to criticism from "woke" opponents. Defenders of "academic freedom" will always be vulnerable to such cynical invocations of academic standards to suppress them.
A far more effective solution would be to embrace academic rigor fully, and use it to drive out agenda-driven nonsense that's ultimately a far greater threat to academic freedom than academic standards will ever be. Nature, after all, abhors a power vacuum, even in academia, and the alternative to rule by the defenders of academic rigor isn't some academic-freedom Eden, but rather "woke" (or some other agenda-driven) Hell.
This is all a bit facile. Both your metaphors are drawn from armies. Armies are organized groups with substantial backing engaging in direct conflict which, at the end of it, the enemy is destroyed. Political battles do not work this way outside of maybe dictatorships. You can hit an army so hard it disintegrates and then stick its generals' heads on pikes. You cannot outvote a political party so hard it disintegrates and then execute its candidates in a democracy. That's a good thing! But it means such direct military analogies don't work.
The answer is building institutions. It basically always is. That takes many people but can start with one. The hard part is actually doing that and how to set it up so that it structurally serves your goals. And the issue there is that you haven't even defined the goals. If your goal is just to personally maximize then just... become the Vicar of Bray. If you want to change society then you can't do that alone, no matter how much power you personally amass. (In fact, power is inherently a social concept.)
To take a simple example: if you're really fighting wokeness then you could just hand the administration of every university to the Republican Party. You'd probably decrease academic freedom in net but that would certainly end wokeness. Is that what you want or is there some wider principle? If that seems ridiculous, keep in mind that is absolutely something that's been done historically. If you have some wider principle then what, specifically, is it?
The difference between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is not whether they delayed or attacked. They did both. The difference is the kind of organizations they built. But both realized, correctly, that in an atomized society the correct move for an individual Black person was to ameliorate their individual circumstances in ways that didn't change the overall system. Anyone who was more confrontational was marginalized or lynched. So they convinced large numbers of people to sacrifice collectively towards that goal. It was a coordination problem and one that MLK solved pretty well.
Seriously, if I have one critique of rationalism it's that it really doesn't seem good at building institutions. I have yet to see a rationalist I'd describe as a good cat herder. I've been told this is because I don't live in SF and there's a glorious promised land of rationalist institutions out there. I can't say. What I can say is that I've never encountered them.
This captures a reaction I also had in reading this post: "If you have some wider principle then what, specifically, is it?"
The conception of what is being fought ("woke") is vague and the goal beyond generically fighting it is vague. The question on the table is "do I fight it politely or not so politely?" which feels like a way less important question than what precisely is the "it" and what are your aims?
Opposing a thing isn't really an aim. And if the thing you're opposing isn't coherently conceptualized, it's even less an aim. So then when you get to the question "should I fight it politely or not so politely?" it feels like the question doesn't have much substance to it. ("you" in this context obviously isn't aimed at you Erusian).
I still think that most of the discussion around "wokeness" conflates many very different policy arguments under one term. Scott, would you really support cancelling yoga classes more if you saw more examples of black people being unjustly murdered by police? No, because there are actually two policy issues!
You can be in favor of police reform, and still think that white people can do yoga.
You can be in favor of some forms of affirmative action (you have one admission spot left in an engineering program—does it go to a rich white kid who skipped a grade and who got a 790 on the math section of the SAT with lots of extracurriculars, or the poor black kid who dropped out of high school, and got his GED and a 720 on the math section of the SAT at the age of 20, while working at a McDonalds?) and still think that the modern anti-SAT policies will result in a much higher number of legacy applicants at the expense of people who deserve it.
You can support the examination of the fact that US high school history classes, in many cases, present a niceified version of American History (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 are major events that I was shocked to learn about, because they seemed far more important than the stuff I had learned about), but still object to the removal of important voices from the curriculum just because they're white.
Most of the woke people I know see this as a fight against those who would use carefully designed policies to keep black people a perpetual underclass, excise gay and trans people from the public eye, force women to bear children and stay in the home, and make christianity the national religion of the United States, but they're only reluctantly allied with the attention-seeking virtue-signaling twitter mob.
The other group of woke people I know are people who legitimately see themselves as at risk of being killed or physically hurt by the actions of an unaccountable overclass—something which, although we may disagree on the extent to which it exists, I think we agree on the fact that it existing would be bad. They also dislike the mob, but see them as the lesser of two evils, one which will at least performatively support them when they come under fire.
I'm not sure what this says about how to prevent the uglier parts of wokeism from gaining hold in society at large—but it does make me uncomfortable every time I see them portrayed as the enemy.
>Most of the woke people I know see this as a fight against those who would use carefully designed policies to keep black people a perpetual underclass, excise gay and trans people from the public eye, force women to bear children and stay in the home, and make christianity the national religion of the United States, but they're only reluctantly allied with the attention-seeking virtue-signaling twitter mob.
Do you think they're correct in seeing "the fight" this way?
At least for that first one (perpetual underclass), I would be more concerned that the "uglier parts of wokeism" (decolonizing mathematics, objectivity doesn't exist, that kind of thing) will result in that, compared to anything "the right" has dreamed up in the last 70 years.
The rest... well, the rest also seem like the sorts of exaggerated summaries one would find on Twitter, or in Margaret Atwood's back catalogue. I'm no fan of the modern right, but those fears sound much like if I trawled through Tumblr to find the most extreme version of social justice to be concerned about.
Also, even being from West Virginia, we didn't learn about Blair Mountain. I wouldn't exactly say it was a "niceified" version of history; just that the Civil War (and attendant subjects) and WW2 take up so much time little else gets taught. WV's origin is unique and does lend itself to putting even more emphasis on the Civil War and slavery than most states, so I do tend to wonder how many complaints about other state curricula are legitimate versus overblown.
Neither strategy is appropriate. We all make choices. If we 'defund' idiocy -- i.e., withdraw physical support for ideas that offend us -- idiocy is diminished. If Europeans, for example, had wanted to protest American military adventures in Iraq or Afghanistan, they could have refused to patronize McDonald's, Starbucks, Apple, Microsoft, etc. We recently stopped patronizing a business that placed an offensive 'woke' gatekeeper between customers and their product, and redirected $5,000 in annual business to a more professional organization. The new place plays hokey country music on the radio, and the wait staff can be surly, but we don't have to do more 'validation' than a parking attendant. The 'woke' will eventually deplete the trust fund grandpa worked hard to create, and have to live by their own choices. Defund postmodernism.
As it applies to academia -- I'd recommend toeing the line through your PhD, and then going independent. We have several independent scholars on the culture and science of the Southwest who successfully work independently of the university, and garner grants, fellowships, and awards -- much to the chagrin of the Old Guard who've spent decades brown-nosing in their Departments to get where they are. Independents do most of the innovation. The departmental musical chairs and back-scratchers are jealous. Meanwhile, the state historical society is 7% Hispanic and 68% female in a state that's 31% Hispanic and 49% male: go figure, another white feminist NGO pretending to be diverse.
Neither of these strategies is going to be effective in the future in most parts of academia.
The Fabian strategy won't work because things will get worse. Younger generations of academics and students are even more left-leaning and less tolerant than others, according to a number of recent surveys. As you wait for the right time, the odds will become increasingly stacked against you.
I once witnessed an older center-left distinguished professor eloquently defend the right of conservatives to voice their speech on campus at a meeting in which a young assistant professor claimed that because conservatives caused "harm" with their rhetoric, they should be censored and prosecuted under the student code of conduct. There will be many more of those young assistant professors coming up and I doubt they'll mellow in their age.
And no matter how much respect you think you can amass among your colleagues and students, the moment you break with the orthodoxy you will become a pariah. All that respect will vanish when you "out" yourself as someone who's not part of the tribe.
The Berserker strategy's problems have been well-documented elsewhere in this thread in terms of turning away potential allies and bringing down massive social opprobrium on anyone who tries such tactics. I would only like to make two points:
First, this "berserker" approach is actually what centrists like David French are calling for when they say that current civil rights laws will protect the non-woke. They believe that you filing a lawsuit and enduring whatever interim punishment is inflicted on you for a decade or so will be worth it in the end and bring about lasting, fair changes. This, to me, seems absurd. Not only will your career in academia be finished, but there are many other tools that can be used to get around whatever ultimate court decision is made. Your fight will be for naught.
Which gets to my second point: Tenure will not protect you. They will find something. They might find some state law or policy that you at some point violated. The most likely is some very expansive notion of "harm" in which you are accused of causing it merely by existing on campus. Students will be useful allies for them in this case, and you will likely get accused of all kinds of things. Students will be "fearful" and "traumatized" by you. At the very least, even if you survive, they will make doing your basic duties like teaching a living hell. There's no enjoyment in that.
Also, lest someone bring this up, faculty unions have gone so far left that they would probably welcome the opportunity to openly refuse to fight for non-woke faculty's rights; in fact, they probably would view that as a positive step towards increasing equity and inclusion.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend anything other than hiding and biding one's time to retirement.
> The Fabian strategy won't work because things will get worse. Younger generations of academics and students are even more left-leaning and less tolerant than others, according to a number of recent surveys. As you wait for the right time, the odds will become increasingly stacked against you.
The thing that confuses me most about the discussion around "wokeness" on campus is the assertion that it's new. Maybe the precise terms and battles and tactics are new, but far-left domination of universities was a big issue in the 90s when I started university, and it was apparently an even bigger issue back in the 1960s.
Anecdotaly, I heard someone say that things were pretty bad in the 80s and early 90s (though it was "PC" instead of "woke") and then it kind of went away in the late 90s before coming back with a vengeance more recently.
I think there might be a bit of a false dichotomy involved. The Berserker strategy seems to be the most effective, or at least thorough, but an important aspect is that it only works once whatever you’re fighting for has a certain level of organizational/institutional support. Applying the Berserker strategy without the requisite institutional support would be not only ineffective but even counter productive, as shown by eg: the Canadian truckers, GamerGate or any other well known “anti-woke” movement in the past 8 years.
I’m reminded of a SlateStarCodex post that mentioned “respectability cascades” (unfortunately I forgot what the exact post was). Basically I think the best “meta strategy” would be to start with the Fabian strategy with an eye towards converting institutions and organizations to your cause. Once you reach a certain level of “respectability” (i.e. institutional support) that’s when you switch over to the Berserker strategy to “rout the enemy” and change society in your preferred way.
An example of what I’m talking about is the Civil Rights movement. The Berserker strategy of MLK (and to a lesser extent Malcom X) was undeniably effective, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the groundwork laid by Fabian strategists such as Booker T. Washington, who in turn never would have been able to get something like the Civil Rights act passed which required a stronger Berserker approach.
The biggest issue with this I think is determining when exactly you gather enough institutional support (“respectability”) to switch over from Fabian to Berserker. Doing it too late risks people losing interest, and doing it too soon risks undoing all the hard work you did building up support.
This risks betraying my username, but I have somewhat relevant experience. I'm a very fireable technically minded person working or studying in what would generally considered a very "woke" environment.
In the wake of a major diversity push I joined the relevant committee because I strongly believed in their goals, if not always their methods. From there I was able to use a combination of agreeableness and social capital to influence tone and priorities of the committee in a way that was consistent with maximizing positive impact and minimizing inflammatory or aggressive "woke" language.
I eventually burnt out on the efforts after a moderate amount of time but definitely believed that I had a substantial positive both in terms of impact, because I was able to steer the efforts in a way that garnered more support for the generally (small c) conservative leadership and provided resistance to some of the more gross excesses that got expressed in a neighboring division.
In general, I'm a strong advocate for the Fabian strategy and would advocate that there's a fair amount of space to leverage the fact that "woke" rhetoric often doesn't achieve "woke" aims to challenge people to push for more effective (and often as a result less "woke") efforts.
NB: I put "woke" in quotes because while I think it gestures pretty effectively at a vague cluster of traits, I think it a bad job of capturing really important distinctions between different schools of thought and is much more of a tribal signaler than I'm comfortable with.
Scott, do you realize there's a war on? I know you're relatively well-off and insulated from all of this, but don't you think it's a bit trite to keep going on about the whole woke vs. unwoke circus when millions of people are fleeing their homes and hundreds of millions more are going to feel extremely tough repercussions from the broader economic conflict at hand? Troops are massing on either side of the NATO border, prices for everything are about to undergo a stratospheric rise due to the global energy crisis and yet you still rant about academic freedom on campuses and twitter "mobs"? Now more than ever, don't you think it may be time to log off?
I have no qualms admitting the principle of distance vs empathy (not just literally, but also in terms repercussions - the war in central Africa is of little immediate consequence to most people in the West) and I simply assumed that Scott along with most people on here, who pride themselves on being unwoke, would also admit to a similar principle. But I see there's no stopping the circus. By all means, blabber away about campuses, being banned from Twitter, who gets invited by whom on someone's shitty podcast, trans bathrooms, age gap relationships, all that stale discourse - whatever gets your juices flowing I guess.
"I think what is going on in this war and all the other concerns spoken of here are deeply entwined."
It really isn't. The idea that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was somehow caused by "wokeness" is absurd. And when I hear people making claims like that, it makes me strongly suspect they're stuck in some sort of half-deranged "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" mentality, where EVERYTHING in the world worth discussing must tie into the Culture War somehow.
That's a good article and I do agree that Russia (as well as plenty of other countries) are looking at this in terms of a Huntington-style Clash of Civilizations. Although I don't really think that relates to the largely American, mostly Very Online "Culture War" between the Woke/SJWs and Unwoke/Anti-SJWs, except in the broadest of senses (i.e. they both involve conflicts over cultural values).
At any rate, sorry for being dismissive. I've just seen a lot of hot takes from internet pundits about how Putin is somehow "standing up to wokeness" by invading Ukraine, and how right-wingers in the West should support him because "at least he opposes gay marriage and transgender bathrooms" or whatever. Alex Jones claimed that if Russia lost the war, LGBTQ activists an Ukraine would start "castrating" young boys. And it's not limited to the fringe crackpot crowd either: Richard Hanania's, a respected conservative academic, claimed that Ukraine wouldn't be able to put up an effective resistance against Russia because the country had low birth rates and that was a sign of cultural weakness (ignoring the fact that Russia also has low birth rates).
Of course, it's patently ridiculous to think that "wokeness" is what motivated Putin to start a potential World War, especially when you consider that the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has been going on for years already and Ukraine is itself quite a culturally conservative nation, but that hasn't stopped right-wingers (including a U.S. Congressman!) from making these outlandish claims. And I erroneously assumed you were trying to make an argument in that vein. Again, apologies for assuming bad faith and giving such a flippant response.
The BLM rioters caused billions in property damage (including destroying countless small businesses) and refused to soically distance in the middle of a pandemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of people and in which small business were under extreme financial success, and for what? Because one guy died?
This is such a bullshit argument because people like you only ever talk about it when its something you disagree with. There's always a million bigger issues than 99% of stuff people are talking about, but this argument never gets made until somebody criticizes the left.
Arguably a successful movement needs a combination of both? Yes, berserkers will often alienate reasonable people, but without some sort of rallying cry people who agree there's a problem in principle may never consider the problem serious enough to actually do anything about it. Bonus follow-up question: Is that part of why Rationality is not viral? Because of a lack of berserkers?
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that all three of your bullet points are true, and that the Floyd killing is a good example to demonstrate those points. Also, those points are not made in a way that is annoying or insulting to one's intellect; which is how we know they are not woke
The move to wokeness in K-12 education presents the Fabian/Berserker paradigm in a similar way for teachers, though I think we have a third option: move to a school district in a place that aligns more closely with our politics. I'm still going to live in an urban area because I like cities and diversity, but I hate our district's piousness and censoriousness and don't feel like I would get anywhere trying to get them to be less woke, so I'm moving to a suburban district next year where the official line from the district is "let's not talk about politics."
Off-hand, I'd say that having a powerfully-placed anti-woke asset inside academia is too rare and valuable to waste on "berserker" stunts that could be better handled by activists. This is equivalent to the Russians recruiting Kim Philby or something.
Another question: Is it enough to rely on ad hoc actions by individuals to push back on Wokeism, or do the anti-woke need to organize a sophisticated, multi-layered, semi-centralized program to do a reverse-Gramsci "march through the institutions?"
Actually, the issue is probably moot as that kind of program is against the DNA of the Burkean Conservative, libertarians, and old-school Liberals who make up the ranks of non-woke/anti-woke.
"Volunteer for all those committees everyone always tries to weasel out of." -- You can't over-emphasize this.
I wrote a series of blog posts in 2017 called "How I took a literary theory class and accidentally stopped hating Republicans" ( https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/733383 ) after I enrolled to get a Master's of English Literature, took the "Literary Theory" class, and discovered that instead of studying literature, we studied Marx, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, feminism, body positivity, intersectionality, colonialism, and why straight white males are the source of all the world's problems.
I'd enrolled because I wanted to understand why printed fiction no longer held any interest for me. I discovered that this was by design. English literary fiction had been perverted by the doctrine that all art is purely political, and so the only task of critics is to expose political agendas, and the only task of artists is to undercut the bourgeois hegemonic powers by not producing more of their opiates (meaning art that normal people like).
The academic journals of English literature had likewise become Marxist propaganda flacks. In the 4th post in my series, "College English leftism: How did it begin?" ( https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/734086 ), I traced the problem back through the journals to "the sixties" (which actually means ~1967-1974). It had been trivially easy for radicals to subvert English literature journals and associations because *nobody else wanted to be on the committees*. They didn't have to argue or fight; they just had to show up.
My impression is that most people are better suited to either the Fabian or the Berserker strategy, and the strategic value of playing to one's strengths easily surpasses general strategic considerations. An academic with a lot of existing academic prestige (e.g., Pinker) can play the Fabian strategy successfully and keep that prestige, whereas he would tank it if he went Berserker. A relative outsider with a non-academic audience (like Kirkegaard) can ignore academic prestige and play to the vox populi, so the Berserker strategy becomes the right one. At the end of the day, the two flanks support each other unless they do a bad job.
Wokeness is at that strange point where it has lost all cultural momentum but is gaining political power (see FIRE's database of firings). I'd caution against letting the former lull you into a false sense of security. Putinism culturally ran out of steam in the late 2000s as the various Putinjugends ("Nashi", "Idushie vmeste") got mothballed, and never recovered its pull on the intelligentsia. Unfortunately, zombies can keep running without their brains.
Realistically, I think at most universities any of the things you are suggesting are almost certainly going to get him fired or to get him to quit. "Almost un-fireable" is not going to be enough. When his lack of wokeness comes up, nobody will care how useful, famous, beloved he is.
To be sure, there are universities somewhere where the administration stands behind their un-woke professors. There are just not a lot of them.
He will also become toxic to associate with, hurting his students, which is the reason Jordan Peterson quit:
I think just about the only things that might work are if he either somehow manages to become some university's president (while not known to be un-woke) or gets his university to hire as president another closet un-woke person who is ready to get out of the closet. Presidents do have a lot of power and influence. These are long odds, but this could actually work.
I'd like to point out that due to the changes in the rules of engagement, in these affected institutions, and in the media, that those pursuing the Fabian strategy will likely be labeled as Berserkers. Really making one question the values of building a reputation and laying low.
Perhaps MLK wouldn't have such a pristine reputation today if he hadn't been made a martyr. Not sure if this makes him a worse example for strategic inspiration.
Is there a post where Scott more thoroughly defines what he means by "Wokeness"? Because, in a sense, it's an emotionally loaded term without any kind of consistent definition across the spectrum (and with the definition changing depending on one's overall political views). Even in this post, using available context, it's hard for me to pin it down to a very precise definition. The meaning seems to change depending on the specific instance it's being applied to.
From the post, I get the following definitions:
- awareness of and sympathy to the challenges faced by marginalized people, possibly to the extent of taking action to effect change (Wokeness - Original Flavor).
- a performance signaling sympathy for marginalized people, in order to indicate alignment with current in-groups, but without any real sympathy or active steps to effecting change (Performative Wokeness).
- a zealous attack on anything that meets a strict, un-nuanced view of "racial/gender/cultural insensitivity" without regards for any mitigating circumstances (Dogmatic Wokeness).
It seems to me that those things are related, sadly.
Kinda like asking what is "Christianity"? Is it praying to Jesus and donating to the poor? Is it the "holier than thou" signaling? Is it burning witches and heretics?
Well, it's all of this. First this starts with some people praying to Jesus and donating to the poor, and as long as they are few, they are an admirable force in the society. But when it becomes too popular, then people who seek popularity will join, and now we have the "holier than thou" believers (or rather signallers). The greater the competition in signalling, the stronger signals you need to send, and at some moment, killing infidels may become the right kind of costly signal.
Similarly, wokeness starts with genuine concern about injustice in the society. But when there are sufficiently many woke people, it becomes a source of power, and then people who only care about power will join, and they will use their power to hurt others. At some moment, hurting the nonwoke becomes the normal thing to do.
"Woke" is literally a far more meaningful and good faith word than "racism", which at this point is meaningless and simply used as a bludgeon against people who disagree with anything that wokeists do.
>- awareness of and sympathy to the challenges faced by marginalized people, possibly to the extent of taking action to effect change (Wokeness - Original Flavor).
This isn't the original falvor. It was always extremely hostile and dogmatic. Giving these people data that shows black people aren't disproportionately killed by police once accounting from crime rates and rates of violence against police is a good way to recieve death threats from them.
Also, you say "marginalized people" as if it's some objectively true thing. It isn't. These so-called "marginalized" people have more wealth, power and rights than a majority of the world's population. Therefore, it should be "A belief that x, y, z groups are marginalized by soicety".
I did bring up to a Democrat friend from Chicago that I thought poor George would have never made the news had he been white, and she objected vigorously. I think she' wrong. Characters like Mr. Floyd -- whether black, brown, white, yellow, or red -- are physically abused and murdered by law enforcement too often and need the civil rights spelled out in the Fourth Amendment enforced by the federal government -- without exception. There is no license to kill criminal suspects for law enforcement or anyone. And no one is immune from prosecution. James Bond is make believe. But no, I haven't seen any evidence that race played a role in his death. He was killed for passing a bum $20 bill, and having the bad fortune to get a murderous cop.
It's sad, because 'activists' decided putting more black people in toothpaste commercials was the answer. We should be shutting down any legislation that keeps public safety personnel from being prosecuted, and having the feds investigate any serious physical harm that comes to criminal suspects let alone manslaughter. And I worked in corrections for 18 years.
And actual support for disadvantaged groups fell in between cracks. American liberals are getting into each other's hair, while American fundamental Christians finance anti-LGBT and pro-life propaganda unimpeded in Eastern Europe and Africa, causing real suffering.
I think this post was perfectly fine and reasonable tho I have no substantive input to share because I'm too personally averse to confront 'woke' anything in-person unless it's in small and mostly-private groups with which I expect at least modest tolerance of any dissent.
I recently left a tenured academic position and, while there were several issues, this was definitely one of them for me. I struggled a lot with how to approach the issue. What I realized is that I actually care about injustice at least as much as many of the woke people at the university. I actually tried pretty hard to address problematic situations. But whenever I tried to approach a problematic person, I was immediately written off as another crazy woke person. The point being, the extreme wokeness is actually hurting the cause by removing its credibility. Very frustrating. (And probably not surprising to readers here.)
Although I didn't have much success, I can share the approach I converged on when trying to talk to woke people. It boils down to, "I'm on your side, just with a different approach." My argument is that there are people on either end who probably won't change their minds, and we should focus on the people in the middle. But if we're so harsh with censorship then the people in the middle will feel alienated and just disengage. They will say the words while being silently frustrated. Indeed, I observed a bigger and bigger gap between what people think and what people say. But only changing what people say won't solve these big problems.
Overall, I can only reiterate how toxic the environment was. Open hostility towards while males was completely tolerated. Not sure if it's exaggeration but people who previously lived under oppressive regimes said this reminded them of old times.
The woke apologists in this thread need to take your perspective seriously. I've never seen this amount of resentment within corporate America. I'm not sure what the cathartic release will be but maybe the 2024 ballot box?
Out of curiosity, what's a "problematic situation"?
Didn't you write a post a few weeks ago (where you responded to reader complaints about the new blog) in which you asked if "wokeness is even a thing anymore"? Helping someone come up with a strategy to fight wokeness seems to be a fairly clear acknowledgement that it a) exists and b) is something worth worrying about. Would you care to clarify your stance here?
As for effective approaches for your academic friend, I would caution that being 'unfireable' doesn't really protect him from much. There are a lot of informal sanctions that he'd still be subject to: social shunning by other faculty, not advancing departmentally (e.g. never becoming dept chair), being tarred as 'racist', annoying student protests, possibly being targeted for fabricated accusations of sexual assault, etc. As a staunch anti-woker I'm not trying to discourage him from taking a much-needed principled stand against the lunacy, I just think he should consider the stakes before he sticks his hand into the hornet's nest.
Go back and read it because I don't think you're remembering it properly.
"But it seems like I must still be near the top of the barberpole - because while everyone else is freaking out about wokeness, I’m starting to feel like all my friends are anti-woke. Who’s woke anymore? Are there really still woke people? Other than all corporations, every government agency, and all media properties, I mean."
"What Message Does A Hard-Won Victory Send..... what message does it send to the average academic? It could be “have hope, it’s possible to win a fight against wokeness”. Or it could be “if you offend woke people, you’ll have to deal with angry mobs and a long court case; sure, you’ll win in the end, but it sounds horrible”.
I think it's a mistake to think of this as a message you are only sending to other academics. Your friend is unfireable and at least considering being brave/proactive. Yes, winning a battle would send a message to the normal guy, whichever the one you choose. But more importantly, you've just sent a message to the whole administration of the college that you are sue-happy and win sometimes.
Now the powers-that-be can't fire him, and he goes to bat and causes *them* a bunch of bullshit they have to deal with. There's no reason to assume the administration doesn't hear "There's someone who fights back and burns a ton of our time". If you are already assuming the students/fellow academics are going to have a strong reaction from *seeing* that, then you have to assume the administration has an even stronger reaction from having to deal with it.
When college administrations have to deal with a bunch of litigation, whining, protesting and bad press they fold like card tables. That's why we have the woke shit in the first place. Your friend wouldn't just be suing to show people how to sue; he'd be suing to gradually change the environment so they don't have to.
It's important to separate wokeness into its ideological component and it's cultural component. And these parts are linked somewhat but are also often separable. The ideological component involves opposition to meritocracy, cancel culture, equity, reparations. The cultural component involves blaming white supremacy and capitalism, declaring pronouns, acknowledging land.
A second observation is that a lot of the cultural war is, as the name implies, in the cultural realm.
So, a possible strategy would be to adopt woke rethoric and mannerisms and oppose woke ideology. This fits well with a Fabian strategy. It is the equivalent of saying "onto Caesar's what's Caesar's and onto God what's God's" in order to defend secularism.
Here's how it could pan out: you could argue that white supremacists latch on to subjectivity in order to discriminate against minorities. If they are not objective they have an easier time justifying their racist behavior. Don't you know that holistic college admissions were originally created in order to discriminate against Jews? That's why we need objective criteria that selects people based on how knowledgeable and competent they are ( don't use the word meritocracy, that's a dirty word). Say that even if we could on short term use subjectivity to defend minorities, such tool would create a precedent and soon be appropriated by the powers that be.
And you go on, acknowledge land, declare pronouns and do whatever meaningless ritual they expect you to do.
A woke ideologue will obviously not accept the argument, but for a woke adjacent, the person who's embedded in the culture and superficially agrees with it's tenets, but doesn't go into details, the above discourse looks a lot like the good, "our tribe" discourse.
That's a lot of Kabuki theater to communicate a pretty reasonable set of opinions. Who wants to live in a world where you have to do a land acknowledgement at the start of meetings?
I don't think using woke framing earns you much goodwill based on how little quarter is given to those who apologize for minor transgressions.
This also assumes a commitment to staying abreast of the woke linguistic norms.
Scream at anyone reading a Harry Potter book, shout to anyone that asks that America is racist because 50% of the prison population is Black, call Asians "White adjacent".
It is very easy to make woke points in a way that can easily be parodied and isolate ordinary people from it and it is safe because you can't be cancelled for it.
A pretty good example of the natural transition to anti-wokeness is the (post) French Revolution! After the excesses of the woke crowd purging the non-woke crowd, the incumbent government got elected on the basis of not being very woke, and enacted common sense measures to curb back wokeness.
This can clearly happen in the US as well, when a non-woke, non-Trump president gets elected.
Electing a non-woke president will do precious little to reverse these things. Even if they stick their neck out to introduce those policies and manage to get them passed somehow, it won't fix the underlying problem. It won't stop institutions being woke.
Hopefully your overall goal is to improve society, not to minimise wokeness at all costs. So please think about the possible negative side-effects of the 'beserker' strategy, beyond just the risk that it backfires directly and helps your woke enemies win. This isn't a zero-sum game, and tactics that turn up the heat and increase anger and division can plausibly leave almost everyone worse off.
I worry about berserker strategies feeding the toxoplasma of rage more than I worry about bad policies remaining in place long after public opinion has turned against them. We seemed to do pretty well about legalizing gay marriage as soon as possible when public opinion was 50/50. We seemed to do pretty well about getting rid of bussing kids around to fulfil racial quotas not too long after public opinion turned against it.
>We seemed to do pretty well about getting rid of bussing kids around to fulfil racial quotas not too long after public opinion turned against it.
And yet white and Asian applicants are still being discriminated against by colleges. Even in the places where said colleges were forbidden by law to continue doing this. Let me know when this is going to end.
But academics still seem to be mostly in favor of them.
If we get to the point where both congress and most academics agree affirmative action is bad, then most universities stop doing it, with 80% confidence.
But that's a big if. Whether it happens may depend on whether woke academia can purge itself hard enough to keep unwoke truths from seeping in.
Okay, but thaut that's a massive argument against what you're saying. You're basically saying that "things will be alright as long as institutional elites support good policies"....which is entire problem we're talking about in the first place!
Public opinion is against affirmative action, and yet it still exists, therefore we have a massive problem.
Weird that this is always 100% a single edged sword for you people. Weird that this isn't being directed at, you know, the people who have almost 100% universal institutional support and using it to to serious harm and destroy people's livelihoods and make America demonstrably less safe.
If getting people angry about these harmful behaviors helps reduce them, then good.
'Weird' that you're confidently and aggressively making a bunch of unsupported assumptions and simplistic generalisations. I'm probably not the stereotype you think I am. I'm happy not to be on whatever your team is, though.
"You people"? What on Earth? You're replying to a single person, you know. The whole idea that anyone who holds one view must also hold [big set of others] is literally part of the problem here.
It seems to me that to actually defeat wokeness, you need to defeat the institutions that lend it strength within the halls of power. I am no expert on the 90s Christian domination, but it seems to me that Christian influence on the elite/intelligentsia is not comparable to the domination of the woke. As Scott mentions, the woke have enacted a whole set of powerful institutions that reproduce, if not full insanity wokeness, at least a low-level concentration. It seems to me that, both strategies rely on the support of an anti-woke community. Fabians will need non/anti woke people to interact with, if only to prevent gradual assimilation. Berserkers will need shield-bearers to make their fights winnable and to keep their spirits up in the face of woke backlash. Because of this, it seems to me that the only way to win this fight will be groups of both Fabians and Berserkers. Berserkers do the actual job of tearing down woke institutions while Fabians help to provide aid and comfort to Berserkers in their fights.
One of the weaknesses of you paradigm, Scott, seems to me the intense individual focus. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Congressman #26 Who Voted For Civil Rights Legislation, even if they weren't directly collaborating and even if they often disagreed, all pulled in the same direction on the civil rights issue. It takes many people to reform a society. Thus, my advice to your academic friend would be to try and find a community who oppose the woke. Initially this will probably mean taking a Fabian approach (fools rush in where angels fear to tread) until a decent number of people have been found. After that, flip strategies whichever way you think will be conducive to increasing the strength and size of your anti-woke coalition, strength measured by ability to remove woke influence. (This may not be the same thing as size as a large but tepid group will be less useful to dismantling wokeness than a few devoted diehards).
The object-level question of this post -- "what should my friend in a powerful academic position do to most effectively curb the current problems of silencing on campus" -- seems perfectly reasonable. Speculating on the strategic and moral differences between the Fabian and berserk approaches also seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However, at the meta-level, it is clear there is a massive disconnect between various groups in the commentariat, and between some of those groups and Scott himself.
Two points on the subject:
1. Not an original insight: "Woke" means the positive aspects of decency to some people, but means the negative aspects of social silencing to other people. Scott probably thought he had already clarified his views on this but he hadn't.
As per the usual process, a word that doesn't really encapsulate the nuance of the question becomes the word that is used by proxy on two sides of the debate, meaning vastly different things to different people. I think it's fair to use the term "woke" as shorthand, but if you're speaking to a group of people who include both "pro-woke" and "anti-woke" people (as I expect the ACX comments section to), you will get some very confused readers if you pick one of those without explaining what you're doing. The folks who know "woke" as a synonym for good things -- treating each other decently, not using slurs, learning about various issues involving marginalized/oppressed groups, finding ways to fight that oppression -- will say "hey what do you mean, the problem isn't wokeness, it's censorship and witch-hunts, and those have been deployed in other settings like squelching communist intellectuals. The "pro-woke" people are right that those issues pre-date wokeness, but wrong that their use of the term "woke" is any better than the "anti-woke" people -- the anti-woke group could just as easily say that saying you're "woke" is silly when what you really mean is that you're for basic human decency and fighting against oppression. At this point I think it's fair for either group to use the term as shorthand, but people used to one or the other might get confused by the difference.
I realize Scott probably thinks he's already established that he uses the term "woke" as shorthand for bad connotations and not good connotations, but if you go back and look at some prior uses of the term on ACX/SSC, they're mostly compatible with both views (e.g. "[Trump was] probably not a white supremacist at all except in whatever boring way you can call anyone who isn't super-woke a white supremacist"). The only other post I can think of where he really came out and used the term "woke" purely negatively was the Why Do I Suck post, but that was a very small part of a large article, and I even for that I see comments on that post debating over whether "woke" represented the good parts (being against racism) or the bad parts (censoring people needlessly). I realize that having a disclaimer of "wokeness is a multi-faceted term" would have felt like a waste of time to make in this post, and that this probably wasn't intentional, but IMO this post was an exceptionally poor one to make the transition into using the term "woke" negatively as an assumption. Add to that some absolutely bananas takes on object-level wokeness-related questions and the result is some very perplexed and alarmed readers.
2. There are some absolutely bananas takes on object-level wokeness-related questions in this post
I was very taken aback by some of the takes in the second half of the post, especially wrt George Floyd. My perception of the George Floyd protests does not match Scott's in the slightest -- IMO they were an understandable reaction to an event that, if you watched the video, was absolutely awful. Compare the reaction to current events in Ukraine -- I see it as the same kind of expression, except the US one hit much closer to home. Everyone witnessed something horrible, everyone wanted to do something to show they were in support -- partly because I think people are desperate to feel like they're contributing, and partly because we've been awash with messages that signaling support is genuinely helpful. Did some of the BLM protesters go too far, did it enable negative consequences of wokeness? Absolutely. Are some of the Ukraine protestors going too far, is it enabling negative consequences of political opinions? Yes, definitely. But no one would suggest that the average person putting a Ukraine flag on their lawn is doing anything *wrong* or that it's a sign of "Ukrainian power" or "Ukrainian overreach" or anything like that (although some might question whether it's truly helpful). So to see BLM portrayed as either "woke power" or "woke overreach" seems absurdly outside the window of possibility to me -- we just live in a time when people want to declare their support for things, and so when things happen it's pretty normal for people to put posters up about it.
And one last point that comments on both the object-level strategy for Scott's friend and on the meta-level question of reactions to this post. Every time I see something like this, it makes me less willing to jump in and defend "anti-wokeness" (here meaning anti-witch-hunty-censorship). I'm not saying it doesn't come from a good place, and I even agree with the main issue -- I'm genuinely very concerned about the silencing going on in academia and I think cancel culture is a huge toxic problem. But even though this post seems to be about strategizing on how to make there be less silencing, there are all these really weird zingers in there like the George Floyd protests being "a giant show of strength, briefly cow[ing] everyone, and intimidat[ing] any attempt at change" (what kind of change???) or depicting the NAACP passing over other candidates pre-Rosa Parks as part of the "be as controversial as humanly possible" strategy (strategy != dishonest controversy). I find it really bizarre that the berserk strategy survived the initial round of potential criticisms *that Scott has made before* (e.g. in Sacred Principles as Exhaustible Resources) to the point where it was pitched in this post as an option with nearly-equal merit to the approach of not being maximally edgy.
I hope to see some continued interaction about this (maybe in a "Hightlights from the Comments" post), becuase I really think this post and its reception deserve a post-mortem.
"Woke" has never been about decency unless you have a non-standard, left-wing conception of what "decency" is. The earliest people to self-identify as woke were basically dogmatic black nationalists who shouted down anybody using data to dispute their claims as "racist".
>As per the usual process, a word that doesn't really encapsulate the nuance of the question becomes the word that is used by proxy on two sides of the debate
Yeah, until people like yourself are unwilling to use loaded, meaningless words like "racism" then nobody is going to take your argument here seriously.
I mean I don't think your problem with my post was the lack of nuance in the word "racism" but okay, fair enough, I punted the question to yet another word that is a proxy for a much more complicated topic. I'm not trying to make the claim "all words are meaningless", I'm trying to claim that the use of this word in this way in this particular case led to some confusion among some commenters. How else do you explain the reaction among commenters like Alternates.docx, Sean Cunningham, Viliam, SufficientlyAnonymous, lalaithion, jjinandtonic, walruss, WeDoTheodicyInThisHouse, LadyJane, Yitz, Melvin, DecipheredStones, Sylvilagus Rex, etc etc etc....
And, I guess I implied this but didn't say it outright, so I'll say it now: I think this is exactly the kind of post that people can trot out to make Scott look bad. All the stuff that happened around the culture war thread, NYT stuff, etc was really bad and an absurd narrative that had almost no connection with the truth. But I worry that the average NYT reader / person who heard of ACX only by bad reputation would read this post and say, "oh wow, yep, this is exactly what I was told it was" when it's really just mainly a miscommunication. Maybe you've written off anyone in that group as a lost cause, but I haven't.
>I mean I don't think your problem with my post was the lack of nuance in the word "racism" but okay, fair enough, I punted the question to yet another word that is a proxy for a much more complicated topic.
The point is that it's extremely rich of you to object to the word "woke" while being fine with using a word like "racism" which is meaningless and routinely used to shout down opponents. There's no good faith justification for using such a loaded, meaningless word. You should say what you actually mean (racial hatred, racial discrimination, racial bias, racial preferences etc). And if you're unwilling to accept that, why should anyone accept your objections to the word "woke"?
>Yeah, until people like yourself are unwilling to use loaded, meaningless words like "racism" then nobody is going to take your argument here seriously.
I take their argument here seriously.
It seems like the point of statements like that are to try to assert some group consensus that doesn't actually exist.
It's a half step above "we cool kids don't like you, you're the low status one here."
>It seems like the point of statements like that are to try to assert some group consensus that doesn't actually exist
Ask ten people want "racism" means, and you will get ten different definitions. It ranges from explicit racial hatred all the way to value judgment free acceptance of certain data points (e.g. black people commit more violent crime than white people).
And my whole point was precisely that it's BS to object to the word "woke" while using a bad faith word like "racism". The woke use "racism" a bludgeon against anyone they don't like. If you point to data that shows that black men aren't disproportionately the victims of police violence once you account for their crime rate and rate of violence against police officers, you get called "racist". Which is big fucking problem. By basing your views on data instead of ideology, you get lumped in with people who engage in explicit racial hatred or have desires to commit hate crimes, even if you don't have any negative feelings towards black people at all. This is a much, much bigger problem than people using the word "woke", so if you're fine with people flippantly using meaningless, bad faith words like "racism" then why should anyone care about your much weaker objections to
Nobody dismisses concern about police violence as "woke", only particular behaviors associated with it (e.g. BLM riots, defunding the police, destroying the livelihoods of people opposed to the previous two things) whereas "racist" is used against anyone who disagrees with any leftwing claim remotely related to race, regardless of the truth value or intentions of said disagreement.
And there's all kinds of non-bad-faith and more precise terms that can be used in place of "racism" (like racial hatred, racial dscrimination, racial bias, racial preference etc) but they aren't used because they don't carry the same weight that "racism" does when wielded against somebody (plus they don't exclude actions carried out by black people against white people the way "racism" these days does). But what's the alternative to "woke" i.e. dogmatic supporters of far-left social ideology that are intolerant of dissent and will use cancellation and threats of violence/actual violence to get their way?
Literally no part of this is responding to what I said.
Much as in the original comment I objected to, where you tried to speak for some unspecified group, you are now assuming that my annoyance automatically makes me a part of the opposing group, so you can just post a rant targeted at that group rather than responding to me.
It's a really poor way of thinking and engaging.
I'd already read and very much liked both of the links.
If that's true, then what precisely is your problem? Why should I care about objections to the word "woke" from people who unironically use the term "racism" as a catch-all for "disagrees with me about anything"
Thanks, I found this helpful. Me too about this part: "I'm genuinely very concerned about the silencing going on in academia and I think cancel culture is a huge toxic problem. But even though this post seems to be about strategizing on how to make there be less silencing, there are all these really weird zingers in there..."
In that sense, when I read a post like this, something isn't lining up for me in what Scott's communicating and then it feels like it becomes a Rorschach test with commenters interpreting from it what they want to rather than that the conversation can advance somewhere interesting.
Just noticed 'woke' pop up as an attack on Zelenskyy in Ukraine coverage, what a world:
"Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug," Cawthorn said in the video. "Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies."
Okay...so what? Are you ready to disavow the use of the word 'racism' because radical leftists often use it in disgusting ways (e.g. calling white children racist for acting like children)?
May I suggest a Third Way: make Woke people THINK. Thinking is what universities are for. There are woke values and woke solutions. The former are subjective. The latter are subject to thinking.
Once upon a time, about the only group talking about the mass incarceration of Black men was the Libertarians. They didn't talk as loudly as BLM, because such race-baiting was considered bad taste, and Libertarians tend to be nerdy white men. The take-away is that it is possible to be in favor of a much smaller prison population for Black men without calling for a socialist agenda or struggle sessions to expose subconscious racists.
So instead of bringing in red meat spewing right wingers, bring in those who share some of the woke values but have different solutions. Get people thinking about the unintended consequences of some woke policies.
For example, if you allow recreational shoplifting, you increase global warming as people move to the exurbs to get away from the crime. And bring in speakers who point out synergies: the slavery in Old Testament Law was in large part their alternative to prisons. Working on a farm is less harsh than living in an American prison! Old Testament slavery had a maximum term of 6 years, the enslaved kept their families, and they got capital upon release. That last factor is a biggie! Jail time stinks up a resume. To release people with little cash and a stinky resume is to send them back into criminality.
Here's another: subconscious bias exists, so having some kind of affirmative action as an offset is economically efficient as well as justice to offset past persecution. However, too much affirmative action magnifies the Peter Principle for the formerly persecuted. Meanwhile, hostile workplace laws make it downright dangerous to hire members of formerly persecuted groups. "We want you to hire this black women. As an incentive, if you make her mad, an economic bomb goes off which destroys your company." As a white male, I have this remaining privilege: I can be easily fired. This makes me a desirable hire for certain positions.
Bring on the controversial *solutions*, not the controversial values.
But the values are also sick and disgusting, this doesn't fix anything. "There should be fewer black men in prison!" – why? If you commit a crime you should go to jail for it, regardless of race, skin color, whatever. Every argument I've ever heard against this boils down to "there are too few white guys in prison", and I agree – more of them should go to prison. That doesn't prove that a single guy should get *out*.
Affirmative action isn't "justice to offset past persecution", it's injustice compounded on injustice. And so on. For me at least, any solution to destroy wokism that doesn't destroy wokism's *aims* as a concern inside the Overton Window of society generally is at best an insufficient drift in the right direction.
Jail terms are often too long for small crimes and too short for heinous crimes. There is WAY too much flex in how sentences are handed out, and too many different possible criminal charges for the exact same act.
I'm cool with public executions for murder -- as long as the jury that convicted throws the switch. I'm not cool with hellish prisons which dehumanize, especially for property crimes. Make prisoners work off their debt to their victims, yes. But house them safely and not brutally crowded together. And married prisoners should have access to family. And prisoners should walk out with enough nest egg so they have time to find a job when they get out. This is Old Testament values, by the way, which I don't consider sick and disgusting.
Multiple small crimes should lead to multiple small times.
And recreational drugs should be legal for those who can handle their high. (Though this can be a regional thing, so people who want to be far from temptation can have that option.) This business of crashing into people's homes at 3am KGB style in order to keep people from flushing their stash needs to end.
>Jail terms are often too long for small crimes and too short for heinous crimes. There is WAY too much flex in how sentences are handed out, and too many different possible criminal charges for the exact same act.
Why make it racial? If sentences are too long, sentences are too long. Period. If victimless crimes shouldn't be crimes, then change the laws. Making it about black people merely reinforces bogus racial oppression narratives that lead to wokeism in the first place.
Of course, just so we're absolutely clear, even in such a scenario, black men are still going to be vastly overrepresented in the prison population, and the whole problem wokeists have is not about sentencing or victimless crimes, it's that there's more black people in jail than white, PERIOD. So your policies would do little to quell their rage.
Disparate impact. If the justice system is bad -- and it is -- and black men have more contact with that system -- which they do -- then we have disparate impact, no racial bias needed. And that's the message that needs to be taken to the campuses.
>So instead of bringing in red meat spewing right wingers,
Except, that's not what anybody is doing. Have you listened to Charles Murray before? He's a kind, gentle soul with liberal leanings, and the left HATE HATE HATE him.
>Get people thinking about the unintended consequences of some woke policies.
It is hopelessly naive to think you will get anywhere doing this. At this stage, the woke are basically dogmatic religious fundamentalists. You can't change their minds, you can only get everyone else to stop living in fear of them and be comfortable containing them and their harmful policies.
>Here's another: subconscious bias exists, so having some kind of affirmative action as an offset is economically efficient as well as justice to offset past persecution.
You can't just claim this. You need to provide evidence.
If we only looked at achievements and SAT scores, the vast majority of people at top American colleges would be white and Asian. No "subconscious bias" is needed to explain this - the achievement gap is simply that large.
And if you want to claim this bias is what causes the achievement gap in the first place, then the burden of proof is on you to show this is the case, not merely assert it.
Charles Murray dwells on an impolite subject. People don't like being called stupid for some reason.
And at least some of that IQ gap is sociological, based on my observations. Nerding out is cool in certain Eastern cultures. It's frowned upon in macho cultures.
I do not think either strategy will change any hearts or minds. This entire article feels rooted in the assumption that there is no real problem with our society to which ‘wokeness’ is a response. And the end goal is to just somehow travel back in time to before ‘wokeness’ was a thing? I just don’t get it. Instead of yelling ‘this policy is bad’, why not connect with both administrators and students and work to understand the underlying concerns driving the creation of the bad policies and then work to figure out a better way to address those concerns. To assume that you totally understand everything and are right to wave your hand and dismiss the rabble who oppose you just reeks of arrogance, which, to be fair, is the American way.
I think the comparison is beyond silly, but MLK and Malcolm X were both beloved and respected members of their respective communities (btw, would highly recommend The Autobiography of Malcolm X if you have not read it). And they both had something your friend does not (yet): A vision for a better tomorrow.
Good luck.
Addendum: It is interesting that ‘wokeness’ is framed as the biggest threat to ‘academic freedom’. I suppose it is the blue-state goggles in play, but there is at least as much pressure on academic freedom from other directions. Texas seems likely to fight wokeness by removing tenure entirely from its public universities, and it isn’t because they’re worried about professors not being current on their pronouns.
>I do not think either strategy will change any hearts or minds. This entire article feels rooted in the assumption that there is no real problem with our society to which ‘wokeness’ is a response.
Black people murder over 500 white people every year (which is ten times more per capita than blacks killed by whites). This is a very real problem with society, and you ought to acknowledge this is a problem and allow me to be angry about it. If you don't, then you're perfectly guilty of what you're accusing scott et al of.
And let's say an 'issue in society' is the black/white income gap. I believe the evidence clearly shows that this gap is significantly a result of heritable differences between races. The woke mindlessly reject this, threaten and abuse any academic attempting to show that this is the case and wish to ban any research that could lead to this conclusion, no matter how rigorous the science is. So you don't understand why anyone would have a problem with the way wokeists approach these "issues with society" when they literally refuse to accept explanation for the source of these issues other than their dogmatic egalitarian ones that they use to justify policies that discriminate against whites (e.g. """affirmative action""") and advocate for wealth redistribution along racial lines?
Just because there's issues in society, doesn't mean your explanations for them are correct, especially if you assert it dogmatically and refuse to allow anybody to use data to show why you may not be correct.
>And the end goal is to just somehow travel back in time to before ‘wokeness’ was a thing?
What? You believe that the only option is wokeism and pre-wokeism? What about, dealing with the issues in society in a way that isn't about censorship, cancel culture, and explicit racial hatred against white people (which, yes, is exactly what wokeists do: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/)? Because then, you know, you may actually make the world a better place instead of creating division and enacting harmful policies.
> To assume that you totally understand everything and are right to wave your hand and dismiss the rabble who oppose you just reeks of arrogance, which, to be fair, is the American way.
God, your lack of self-awareness is stunning. Why doesn't this apply to YOUR political opponents? Or do you simply assume anybody who disagrees with you is 100% bad faith and ill-intentioned?
Why don't you try and understand the valid concerns that people have with wokeness?
it is precisely the woke that behave like this. Scott et al have explained ad nauseum their issues with wokeists. It is the woke who do not handle disagreement.
>I think the comparison is beyond silly, but MLK and Malcolm X were both beloved and respected members of their respective communities (btw, would highly recommend The Autobiography of Malcolm X if you have not read it). And they both had something your friend does not (yet): A vision for a better tomorrow.
Right, and their vision was revealed to be total nonsense. MLK predicted that civil rights and affirmative action would bring about equality in a decade or so. In reality, they made inequality much worse and black social pathology exploded. And that's precisely why having quote unquote good intentions isn't good enough.
One of the main problems with the woke is precisely that they're extremely dogmatic and unwilling to listen to criticism to the point of destroying people's careers in response, and they cannot tolerate (not even accept, but simply tolerate the existence of) people suggesting they're wrong. They could be the most well intentioned people on the planet (which they most emphatically are not), but if they're unwilling to accept criticism or disagreement they are going to end up doing enormous harm with their ""well intentioned"' polciies.
Thanks, Bret. I appreciate your candor. I do not agree with you or believe you understand what I was attempting to say (probably because I do not speak your language...my bad), but do not worry, you have my express written permission to be angry about whatever catches your fancy.
If explaining your point of view ad nauseam (with only the finest data as indelible proof) continues to not work, then you might consider a different strategy. Or not. It's a free country.
What IS cancel culture is being physically threatened or having your livelihood destroyed if you express a belief that George Floyd's death doesn't mean, say, that it's alright to burn down unrelated small businesses in a fit of rage.
Your response is precisely the reason people compare wokeness to a religion. You're incapable of rational thought or self-reflection. You think you're 100% morally right and anyone who criticizes your views in any way, you immediately assume they're bad intentioned and you ignore the nuance of their argument.
Over 500 white people are murdered by black people each year (which about 10 times higher per capita than the reverse). Are we allowed to protest against this? It's a much bigger problem than unjustifiable police killings of black people.
Fighting wokeness is a weird thing to organize your life around. I feel like being woke is a strategy to achieve certain social goals regarding justice and equality. Rather than opposing woke policies or cancel culture, shouldn't this professor try to optimize for their actual terminal values, eg free speech?
The comments so far suggest that wokeness requires defining before the discussion can proceed, so allow me to start with my leftist, materialist take.
What we gesture towards when invoking the term wokeness, the epistemically important part of it, should be thought of as a set of strategies and talking points evolved to maximize the users' fitness in the dog-eat-dog world of middle class institutions. It allows the young, upstart elite aspirants to coordinate with each other and conspire against the entrenched elite, with the goal of appropriating their positions, status, jobs, pensions, grant money, etc.
It's often mischaracterized as left-wing because many of its talking points are taken from left-associated philosophical currents like post-modernism/-structuralism or marxism. However, they're used completely aideologically, without any logical coherence and in a manner and with an aim contrary to those currents' intellectual goals. (In particular - by selectively applying them to their victims, and not themselves.)
Right-wingers have he hardest time intellectually opposing them, because they just straight up deny that the talking points are true, which, usually, they are. Meaning, they go straight for the motte without even thinking of cutting off the access to the bailey. But others struggle, too, the beauty of the tactic is that while the motte is hard to attack, the bailey, at least from within the institutional setting, is merely an even ground, with two elite factions accusing each other of being elite. Once entrenched, the woke lose their tactical advantage, and to preserve their status, they're forced to enforce a climate of strict intellectual conformity (so that no opposition to them arises) or to find an even higher-status target to continue with their charade of fighting for the disadvantaged. (It's usually culminating in a permanent moral struggle against an impersonal opponent - systemic, internalized evils permeating all society.)
You'll note that this tactic, despite its short-term advantages to individuals, is parasitical and long-term unsustainable, at least in the cases where the constant internal struggle interferes with normal functioning of an otherwise socially beneficial institution. Eventually, it will (temporarily) die off due to the mechanics of Turchinian fathers-and-sons cycle, with the woke as radicals and the growing movement of preserving the societal benefits of institutions (and either reclaiming them to do their real job or creating alternative ones actually performing that job) as moderates.
I can't emphasize enough how much all this points to a Fabian strategy in this particular situation. If you want to operate from within the institution, you want to cherish and cultivate the goals and benefits the institution provides. Berserk prevents you from doing this, instead, it's broadcasting the institution's inability to provide those benefits. You should only use it in cases where you think the institution is irredeemable and you're either trying to speed-up its demise or to show the road forward after its demise. (I'm currently going Berserk in mine, it's kind of fun, and a great occupational therapy for my social anxiety. But I have little hope for it, or for my own success within it.) It's extremely counterproductive if you simultaneously bet your future and continued employment on the institution's continued existence.
PS: MLK was clearly a Fabian, at least as a civil rights advocate, working within the social norms of US liberal democracy and christian religion, convincing people who believed in them that a) he's on their side and b) the norms would benefit from being more universal. (Later on, he turned his attention to an economically-transformative policy which went against a lot of entrenched institutions, so he had to go. Hereafter, wokeness avoids any serious tackling of economic inequality. It's just not a winning career strategy.) Malcolm X was a Berserker for the surrounding society, but nevertheless operated within a successful alternative social institution. Whatever your tactics, you need to act towards some socially beneficial goal. Society (whether at large or of your immediate peers) is the ultimate judge, and the best way to disarm the woke is to actually address the problem they disingenuously claim to be addressing.
(I posted this response first on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit. If it's impolite to repost it here, please tell me so and I'll delete it) Thanks for posting this article! It's close to a lot of the arguments that I've been having with myself. How polite do I want to be? How safe? Should I just keep my head down and work or stand up and fight? But my wife (an IT entrepreneur in Bulgaria who spent yesterday figuring out how to employ Ukrainian refugees) had a pointed answer: that's a false dichotomy. Do "real, solid, human" work.
The example she gave was of a Japanese flower-grower who set up greenhouses in Fukushima to convince people that things can grow there (and also he sells flowers and makes a profit). He's not working against the idea that "we should abandon Fukushima as an irradiated wasteland", he's working to grow and sell flowers.
For myself, I'm an ESL teacher and science fiction author. I connect with people by sharing stories, so I teach English to refugees and write about it (although neither exclusively). I'm not working against xenophobic Bulgarian nationalism* but _to_ give refugees a way to share their stories more broadly.
I don't know what kind of professor the OP is, but for the sake of argument, I'll imagine he's a history professor like my advisor in college. He might think "I teach history so that we will not repeat it" or "I teach history so that my students can become informed voters and productive citizens." Or he might teach for some other reason. Whatever that reason is, it will suggest an answer to his question. Not in order to work against Wokeness, but in order to work to ______ (please fill in the blank with the appropriate infinitive verb) :)
*note: almost all of the Bulgarians I talk to are eager to welcome Ukrainian refugees to their country. The level of xenophobia I see here is far outweighed by generosity.
Scott: Good to see you wading back into hot-button culture-war topics, as those are always interesting posts.
I hope the comments on this one have helped persuade you of something people were trying to argue in the comments on "Why Do I Suck": that wokeness is still a major area of controversy (what exactly it means and what it encompasses, which bits of it are good or bad, and whether it's good or bad overall), and that your post-woke bubble is very unrepresentative.
It may be "interesting" but I don't think it's good for Scott's brand (unless his goal is specifically to be seen as an IDW-type figure in the same mold as Jordan Peterson who's *only* known for being an anti-woke crusader, and I strongly doubt that's what he wants). I also don't think it's good for the SSC/ACX community, which he's spent years cultivating into a group for intelligent and respectful discourse between people from all over the political spectrum. Incendiary posts like this one tend to have comments sections that resemble Twitter flame wars, and if I wanted that, I'd actually use Twitter.
I mostly agree with you. But he built that community not by shying away from CW topics but by writing long thoughtful posts about them.
I would love it if ACX could, like SSC did, steer a course between two failure modes: one of avoiding CW topics altogether, and one of taking it for granted that wokeness is wrong and silly and that all readers will share those assumptions (which I guess is the IDW failure mode).
I know five unwoke academics. All stay under the radar and stick to the object level of their profession. They make slight pushes against woke overreach to keep pressure on the administration, but nothing big. My biggest concern in 2016 was that they were all going to become radicalized against anything even mildly smacking of woke as the politization of everything results in the mind-killing of everyone. I was really worried about several of my friends who seemed to be losing perspective and hope. Intellectual isolation clearly was taking a toll psychologically and academically.
Today, I think currently there is a lot more breathing room in private conversations than there was during Trump's presidency. But the institutional inertia is still pushing towards woke things. And while the current cracks get bigger when a Blue person holds the White House, the cracks shrink otherwise. So in this time of relative cultural harmony, I would make as many allies as possible.
I have tried berserker as an undergraduate along with some other professors in college. It's high risk! There are many ways to fail: choosing the wrong target, failing to grab widespread attention to the injustice, failure to execute in a synchronized way. If you fail to identify the right target, ranks close against you and the administration puts you under suspicion. If you fail to attract attention, no one notices that there was a bruhaha, and you don't make the news, and no lesson is learned. If you fail to affect change, you make enemies of potential allies who find you disagreeable, current allies are forced out, and then you find your cause more isolated than before.
Three allied professors were forced out, but the two top ranking administrators President and Dean of College were asked to step down. It was a Pyrrhic Victory at best, but in reality, it was damned disaster. Psychologically the toll was high, and losing professors is not worth the heads of a few administrators when the damage has already been done. It wasn't worth it for anyone involved.
Now as an experienced administrator, I can tell you, the Fabian Strategy works. Be seen working, industrious, come up with proposals, write down the ideas and the first draft of official documents, call the private meetings, make phone calls asking for feedback, be a good listener. Do a yearly review of the different internal documents and memos, propose revisions, streamline processes, make everyone else's jobs easier. It only takes two or three years of doing that to have an immense inertial change on an institution or department.
And that, in my opinion, is way better than waiting 100 years to get tenure.
Doesn’t it come down to a morality question? We’ve killed Christianity and people need something to fill the moral vacuum. Neo-Marxists have helpfully provided a substitute. Wokeness (or the next pseudo-morality fad to spin out of the Critical Theory dialectical logic machine) will only die when society finds a grounding morality. So what your friend needs to do (unless he wants to play morality whack-a-mole) is to identify and promote a grounding morality that society can get behind.
Liberal humanism is a great moral and ethical system. The problem is that a lot of people simply don't like it, because it doesn't provide them with enough of a sense of meaning and purpose, or maybe just because they find it "boring." So they turn to various far-right or far-left ideologies instead, which is why American political culture is in such a sorry state.
I think there are two weaknesses with the Fabian strategy that are not addressed here, although they do not necessarily recommend the berserk strategy so much as a hybrid.
1: By not coming into direct conflict that requires the woke to exert their power to strike you down, the woke get to claim that they are not doing anything wrong. One can see it over and over here in the comments, people asking "What unwoke people have been cancelled? What do you mean those on the right are blocked out of academia? Give one example!" Some of this is just partiality and ignoring of events, but it is also due to the fact that anyone on the American right that is is still employed by the vast majority of colleges and universities are there because they have been cowed into never sticking their necks out.
By way of analogy, if there was legislation saying "Everyone who eats hotdogs will be executed on the spot" and everyone gave up eating hotdogs, people would soon forget the legislation even existed. When was the last time you saw someone executed for eating a hotdog? There is no anti-hotdog movement! Although in this case there would at least be legislation on the books regarding the illegality of hotdog consumption; make all the rules informal based on interpretation of extremely vague statutes and you have life in the woke academy.
2: Simply pushing back on woke policy is often enough to get you in trouble. Woke ideology is used for competition, where "good enough" isn't enough to keep yourself safe. Rather you need to demonstrate that you are a true believer, perhaps the truest believer, to successfully keep your head down. Pushing back in any way demonstrates that you are not of the faith unless you can demonstrate that you are pushing back precisely because your target is doing the faith wrong.
Now in industry jobs, sure, Fabian as described is probably fine, (unless you work in Hollywood or at Disney or something.) The described Fabian strategy in academia, however, would keep you employed about as well as suggesting "Hey, are we REALLY sure there is a God?" would keep you employed in the College of Cardinals.
If you are very unfirable, beyond just tenured, the Fabian strategy might keep you safe and pushing back against the excesses of wokeism, but I don't think it is nearly so safe as some seem to think. Consider how many leftists in good stead got fired and cancelled via simply expressing concerns that were wholly acceptable just a few years prior.
Perhaps a third option: given Anonymous Academic's newfound position of power in proximity to "Woke People" maybe A.A. could try to form meaningful relationships with as many of "Them" as they can, especially those for whom "Woke" causes are not just a social scene, but real injustices and personal experience. Maybe they could try to understand where "They" are coming from, gather information from real people, update their world model, and do the hard introspection work in order to reconcile their own internal representation of what a "Woke Person" looks like with the actual people that they are now trying to have a relationship with. Admit that many things can be simultaneously true, and try to be as intellectually honest and open-minded as possible about discovering the totality of those truths, and force themselves to try to understand why certain truths may be more important to "The Woke" and other truths may be more important to "The Unwoke." Then do the opposite thing and admit that many things can simultaneously be bullshit. Try to gain their trust to the extent that you can have honest and difficult conversations about their bullshit and yours. Is it possible to do this in a way that helps them rather than defeats them? Is it possible to gain their trust to the extent that you can say "I'm saying this to help you" and they believe you even if they disagree with you? Maybe try to get out there and build some fucking community rather than trying to find the most strategic way win.
Rufo's strategy is already overreaching. The new bills governing higher education that are being passed/proposed are poorly written and likely won't pass legal muster (in addition to likely being ineffective at their primary goals). Rufo's strategy worked well for the corporate arena and for simply showing the bizarre things that were actually getting included in "DEI training" that liberals were dismissing as harmless, but the backlash to these laws is going to be bad and a lot of academics on both sides are going to be caught up in the middle of it.
Opinions are like quantum states. If you haven't expressed your opinion on a subject, then you do not have a well-defined opinion on the matter. I'm using the word "expressed" very broadly here, but otherwise I mean this more or less literally. They are not well-defined in the same way that quantum particles exist in a superposition of states until they are measured. (Hearing someone else express an opinion and not disagreeing with it *does not count*)
The expression of an opinion on a subject is like the R process. It causes the wavefunction to collapse to the expressed value. Between expressions of one's opinion on a particular subject the U process takes over, entangling with environmental wavefunctions (i.e. social influences) until the next time it is collapsed through expression.
This is relevant because cognitive dissonance is a powerful force. A thought experiment:
It's May 9, 2020. We select a random left-leaning American. On May 10, we do nothing. We wait a month and on June 10 we ask that person their opinion of police and policing in America.
Rewind the experiment back to May 10. This time we ask the person for their opinion of police and policing in America on May 10. We wait a month and ask the same question again on June 10.
Now, suppose that we happened to pick someone that on May 10 in the second timeline gave a mildly to moderately positive opinion about police and policing. The question is: How different are the June 10 answers between these two parallel timelines? What I'm suggesting here is that they're likely to be quite different.
More specifically, I think the June 10 opinion in the second timeline is likely to be much more positive, and specifically *because* expressing it on May 10 collapsed the wavefunction. Further, I suspect the more memorable their experience expressing their opinion on May 10 was, the more positive it's likely to be be on June 10.
Okay, so what does this have to do with strategy when combatting wokeness? Spontaneous decay of some quantum particles/systems can be indefinitely postponed just by repeatedly measuring its properties. Getting people to voice their opinions on a subject has a stabilizing effect, and the more frequently it is voiced the more stable it will be.
But once a person has put the BLM sign in their yard, it's probably too late. If you want to get public opinion to stabilize *against* wokeness, then you have to get out ahead of it. Understand whatever coherence is to be found in their arguments, and figure out *where it is going*. What backwards moral arguments are they likely to be spewing in 6 months? Start fortifying that position now just by getting non-crazy people to start talking about it. The bigger the conversation gets before it hits the hornets nest that is Twitter the better.
To be clear, I'm not saying this will stop the most woke people from spewing those crazy positions. But when they do, listeners will be anchored to the opinions that they previously expressed.
Is it okay for a white person to operate a taco truck, or is that a moral transgression of some sort?
(Now, I don't know whether anyone *actually* predicted ahead of time that they'd start trying to shut down restaurants that the woke deemed 'inauthentic' in this way... but I am pretty certain it wouldn't have been difficult to predict.)
Suppose that it did occur to you that this was likely to start happening, and that it occurred to you while the idea of cancelling people for this *was still outside the Overton window*. Start talking about it. Make public predictions that it will start happening. You will get a lot of people scoffing at you. They scoff *because* it is outside the Overton window. Good. The scoffing *is them expressing their opinion*. The scoffers are less likely to go along with it when it happens than their friends that never heard your prediction.
Alternatively, take the false flag approach. Start trying to cancel white people for operating taco trucks. With any luck you will be laughed out of town (although if you get there too late you may accidentally become the person that triggers the avalanche of cancellations..).
Or, to completely change metaphors in the last sentence of this comment: Wokism is AIDS and needs to handicap the immune system before it can actually start damaging organs, so trigger the immune response before they can disable it.
As an academic, I would argue that the Fabian strategy is better because the actions required to enact it are also those required to be good at your job. Doing service to your university community through committees, teaching well, and doing good research all earn respect and seniority. Respect and seniority earn you the ability to speak out in the way I think the Fabian strategy imagines. Berserker academics are only respected by other Berserkers, they’re a giant annoyance to the rest of us.
I didn’t say that. I was talking about the Berserker strategy in general. Berserkers are not usually Berserkers for a single cause and collegial chums for everything else. If you want more people in your institution to come around to your stance, I believe that the Fabian strategy is superior to the Berserker one.
People here may be interested in signing a letter in support of Prof. Angelo Corlett, who was removed from teaching at San Diego State because he conducted a class discussion about racial epithets.
I think discussing woke as a guiding principle for behavior is intellectually bankrupt. Considering yourself woke or anti-woke and acting on that basis means you're not considering the merits of the actual issue. Imagine if effective altruism decisions revolved around wokeness. "We're not donating to deworming because it's too woke (or anti-woke)." It's ridiculous. To the point about the George Floyd protests, ignoring police brutality and corruption because you don't want to be lumped in with woke people is silly. There are plenty of examples with the sides flipped as well. There are annoying, overreaching people on all sides of every issue these days. Focusing on who you dislike and making decisions on that basis doesn't necessarily teach those people a lesson, but it may end up making you one of them. Decide on the merits, not mood affiliation.
>ignoring police brutality and corruption because you don't want to be lumped in with woke people is silly
I mean, first of all, you've COMPLETELY missed the point of his discussion around George Floyd, which was purely about the effect that the protests had on the standing of woke people, whether it made the woke stronger or weaker, and then using this to inform the strategy of the academic.
Secondly, it's a total strawman to say anybody is "ignoring police brutality". You can think that what Chauvin did was wrong, but that doesn't mean deadly, destructive rioting (in the middle of the most deadly pandemic in recent history, no less) across the country is okay.
>There are annoying, overreaching people on all sides of every issue these days. Focusing on who you dislike and making decisions on that basis doesn't necessarily teach those people a lesson, but it may end up making you one of them. Decide on the merits, not mood affiliation.
Sigh...the whole POINT of focusing on woke people is precisely that they're the ones with all the power! They have almost universal institutional support. It's wokeism that is directing institutional policy, and woke civilians can basically do their woke nonsense and receive cover from these institutions (e.g. the media), whereas if anti-wokeists do something crazy then they lose their jobs/get expelled from college and get crucified by the media. And they're at risk of these even when they haven't done anything wrong (see media lies and woke outrage directed at the Covington high school students for the grand crime of standing still and smiling while an old native guy got in their faces)
If you take the academic's assumptions as a given, yes, that's the point. I'm saying I disagree with his (and your) assumptions. You're so locked into us versus them that you just wave away the underlying issues, like whether police brutality is an issue ("sure, sure, but let's move on to how much I dislike woke people").
Neither of those strategies are going to work. Woke is in dominating ascendancy right now because people are afraid of it. The only viable strategy that will work lies in convincing people that they can stand up to Woke without being destroyed. Watching a high-profile person who has successfully insulated themselves from consequences standing up to Woke does nothing to convince me that I could do the same without losing my job and reputation. The "strategy" they use makes no difference here.
There is a third strategy -- let's call it The Resistance. For this you need to look to Arif Ahmed at the University of Cambridge (my Alma Mater, coincidentally). Long story short, the university was planning a guideline that was threatening to free speech. A group led by Ahmed forced it to an anonymous vote by university faculty where it was voted down by 87%-13%. It's hard to imagine many other issues that would reach that degree of consensus. This is really what is going to work, long term. Find ways that people who disagree can do so without risking everything to do so. This is going to involve, at least in the short term, a whole lot of anonymity.
Personally, I prefer the berserker path. When you have a fight you know you can win, fight it. There is no point in avoiding a fight where you will come out victorious. On the contrary, you should use your inevitable victory in those conflicts as leverage to make your enemies absolutely grovel if they want you to be gracious enough to avoid pressing the fight and destroying them. If you either hurt your enemies enough by winning enough fights, or rub their faces in the mud enough times by forcing them to yield in a humiliating manner, then eventually you will condition them into realizing that it's a bad idea to fight people like you. Pain is the greatest teacher.
The term "woke" is basically always the opening to a motte and bailey situation. You should actually define what you mean specifically because its kind of bad faith.
When someone says "woke" it generally just reads as "anything to the left of me that I don't like". If you say "liberalism" or "socialism" or "social justice" or literally any other slightly more specific term its useful. Using "Woke" only really indicates which side of the political spectrum the person using it sits on.
As someone on the left, literally everything I believe has been called woke at some point including things I know the author agrees with. Its basically useless outside of signalling whose "side" you're on.
"Is anyone else obligated...?" No one is obligated. I just actually know and respect that Scott is capable of actually being more specific when talking about things.
The idea that the "heights of culture, business, and politics" are illiberal, censorious and destructive from some kind of left dominance is laughably absurd and can only be believed if you're mired in an internet echo chamber. The dominant political and economic ideology in the USA is centre right neoliberalism and has been for 30 /40 years.
The slight agitations from the left in the last 10 years have caused such derangement despite having made virtually no impact whatsoever on the political or economic sphere.
On the centre left "woke" was a briefly fashionable term that mean "to be aware of social issues. It seems that on the right its just a new cypher for the "political correctness" fears of the 90's. and 00's. Nothing new under the sun.
Okay, once you people begin defining "racism", then we'll start doing that. Racism is an extremely loaded and yet meaningless word, and because of that there is no good faith justification for its use. And if you disagree, read this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
I never said woke teachers are being racist against white students. I said they're spouting explicit racial hatred against white people. And I say that instead of saying "racist" because "racism" isn;t a meaningful word.
And no, "espousing explicit racial hatred" isn't a good defintion of racism, because almost none of the things the left call "racist" rise to the level of "explicit racial hatred". It's mostly useda s a bludgeon against people who disagree with woke claims related to race, regardless how data-based these disagreements with the woke are (e.g. black people not being dispropriotionately killed by police once you control for their race of crime and violence towards police).
And although most things wokeists complain about aren't legitimate, the point of me obejcting to the word "racism" isn't that they aren't complaining about something real. It's that it's BS to complain about the word "woke" while being okay with a much more problematic, bad faith bludgeon of a word that is much less meaningful than woke is.
Something is either good or bad, or true or false. Calling it "racist" serves no purpose but to silence your opponents.
Racism:- Discrimination, conscious or unconscious, based on race. Used academically in the social sciences to refer to the effects of power on racial relations.
Woke:- Anything to left of me that I disagree with.
Everything that follows from here is mostly based on my System I Direct Feed of small thoughts I had while reading, i.e. it's at least partly emotive and might be internally inconsistent. In order of "how salient these feel:"
* Prior to some big conversations with partners and friends in 2015 and on, I used to be 100% team Fabian. When taken too far though, the Fabian school is just a case study in respectability politics. That is, I realised pretty quickly (OK, over the last 5-7 years) how little has actually been achieved for human rights by Fabians trying not to make too many waves!
* This was a really significant update for me, as it took me from "feminists should be less angry in order to court more acceptance" into "WAIT! Toning down the anger only makes it easier to never listen to us! You said you'd listen to us if we said it right, but that was apparently a lie. Sacrificing our anger is and was a BAD IDEA."
* Closely interrelated update I've made: I now think we can safely retain an animus forged from justified anger. It's very important to acknowledge that being angry does not automatically mean you're mindkilled. Myself and many other LW-brethren have wandered down the path of trying to avoid strong anger, because it seems like it will lead to worse politics, and worse lever-pushing in general. I'm trying to stop associating anger and emotive force with the idea that it's a mind-killed way of being.
* On the other hand, we do have to be very careful with our justified anger, and we need to be careful not to let it become Blank Check Anger, because that's one of the more dangerous kinds, in terms of mind-kills.
* So, here's where I bite the bullet that Fabians aren't getting us where we need to be, both in terms of wokeness and the provision of social justice itself.
* BUT! A Berserker for a Bererker will make the whole world victims of berserking. In other words, both wokes and anti-wokes picking every battle would be unpleasant, unproductive, and I think will just mindkill everyone in range.
As an Australian looking into US culture, this is largely how I already perceive things to be going (based on Scott's writing and others, and to varying degrees in different states).
* Are there ways to Berserk without the above second order consequences? I sure hope so, because when no one wants to listen and you need to route around the damage in society, some tactical Berserkers are all we have.
* And this all elicits a very funny mental image. I present: The Tactical Berserker Squadron.
Agent Fabian94 sits in the driver's seat of the black minivan. Cold morning. Dewey. "Same old Portland," he smiles to himself fondly, while rubbing his hands together in his best maroon gloves.
F94 moves his head to peer through various parts of the iced up windshield, trying to see how conditions are unfolding. Seems peaceful. Probably no need for the big guns after all.
Heavy footsteps, a couple of grunts, and the sound of palms banging on metal emanate from the solid partition behind Fabian94's head. His heart skips a beat and he drops into dead silence to listen.
Muffled almost-silence again. The central double-locks are still engaged. The 'Zerks, despite their increasing agitation, aren't in any danger of leaving the minivan.
Nonetheles, the angry grunts and a disconcerting rocking of the minivan pull Fabian94 out of his vain attempt at re-establishing a calm mindset. "At least they're in the headspace already," Fabian94 muses, attempting to convince himself more than for anyone else's benefit.
The call rings harshly out of the walkie talkie like so much white noise and static war: "F94, we're gonna need you to pull that trigger early. Things have gone south out here."
Fabian94 says nothing in response to the unwelcome command. He closes his eyes. Steels his resolve. Pulls the trigger. Listens for that familiar "CLICK-whirr." Registers the sounds of yelling, pushing, and tousling. Closes his eyes to avoid seeing what always comes next. "A necessary evil" he whispers to himself over and over. It doesn't begin to drown out the distant yelling.
A lot of folks are expressing very strong opinions here, and it's obvious they have some very personal lived experience that ties into this subject. That's probably why when I first read it, I was a bit taken aback myself. You see, my understanding of the term "woke" is pretty different from what I'm seeing in this original post as well as in many of the comments here. In an attempt to help give some perspective, I'd like to share how I came to understand the word, irrespective of its current usage.
As a middle-class white kid from a small town in Texas (graduating class of 42 people), going to a public college exposed me to a lot of things I hadn't seen. As a music major I got to hang out with lots of folks that I'd likely not have even met in my small town. When I was working my way through, playing bass in various gigs throughout the DFW metroplex, I encountered the phrase "stay woke" for the first time (I believe it was 2003). Our drummer was heading out after a set, and the guitarist shook his hand and said "remember that thing on fifth, stay woke." Me being the only white guy in the rhythm section gave me the opportunity to say "what does that mean?" The guitarist gave me a sideways look and said "for real?" I shrugged. He was a very cool and patient dude, so as we broke down the rest of the gear, he explained it to me from his perspective.
He told me that Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, (better known as Lead Belly) closed out his 1938 recording of "Scottsboro boys" by saying "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there – best stay woke, keep their eyes open." You see, the song is about nine black teenagers who were accused of raping two white women. It's a complicated case, but the message was clear: "this is a place where white people will get you lynched if you step out of line, so be careful." I was pretty surprised, and asked what "the thing on fifth" was. Well, in that part of town, there'd been an assault on fifth street, and the perpetrator matching the description was a black male in his early twenties. The guitarist explained to me that four of his friends had already been stopped and questioned about it, one of whom spent the night in jail because he refused to comply with being frisked and stopped. I said I'd never heard anything like this before and had no idea what to say. He said "now you're woke, too. Stay that way."
My entire life since then, I've kept that in mind. I hadn't even heard of the assault on fifth. I didn't learn until the early 2010s that "stay woke" was being traced all the way back to the words of Marcus Garvey, imploring "Wake Up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation."
I see where folks are coming from now, in that "woke politics" or "woke academics" have specifically to do with left-leaning ideology, usually knee-jerk or alarmist in nature. So hearing "post-woke" makes some amount of sense, if you only think of it as an expression of political zeitgeist tied to the BLM movement and protests in that time period. I know enough about Scott to believe I'm not being overly charitable to say he did not intend for any of this to seem dismissive or harsh, but rather very prescriptive in a practical way to push back against a specific squeamishness to push academic rigor and value to avoid a cultural backlash. Here's the problem: if you told my friend the guitarist "no thanks, I'm unwoke" in response to his warning, how do you think it would land?
I think you're inferring a lot here. I don't think anyone gets a veto. But I also don't think anyone gets a pass on how things land, either.
MAGA folks tend to refer to themselves as such, but even if they didn't that's not the same thing as saying you are trying to oppose a specific set of principles in policy and don't care about how the folks behind those principles define them. Does that make sense?
I see what you mean, but I think the distinction is made important by the nature of the distinction in American politics itself.
If I say "MAGA" you know I'm talking about Trump and his populist positions. There's probably almost no actual policy there, just an overall sentiment. Take an example of three people running in a GOP Primary: Candidate A is for deregulating oil industry and protecting tax incentives for carbon-specific energy in the given state, Candidate B is focused exclusively on the second Amendment and rejecting a hot button high capacity magazine bill in the state, and Candidate C says that A and B are deep state stooges and they're going to Make America Great Again by making sure neither of them get elected. A and B split the vote of moderate voters, and C gets elected, then goes on to push a nebulous policy that continues to waver by public sentiment (Tarrifs are good! Except... this week someone pointed out they're taxes that consumers pay so they're bad, but only if they're not protecting things that are good like agricultural goods, but then they're bad if... etc)
On the other hand, you have a Democratic primary, in which five candidates run. Candidate A is running on a social justice platform, and specifically repeatedly calls for Defunding The Police, but they focus mostly on prison reform (measures to reduce recidivism and return rights to convicted felons). Candidate B is a white trans woman who repeatedly says that cops are pigs, but prison reform is not important, what's really important is protecting legal gender status and making sure the state's recent bathroom bills are fought. Candidate C is local shop-owner who has never run for public office but felt compelled to run because they feel that COVID is being mismanaged by vaccines which are made by evil corporations and only crystals can heal the pandemic. Candidate D is a Native American lawyer from a local tribe who has decades of experience in tribal and federal indian affairs law and wants to make sure that more treaties are honored on reservation principles. Candidate E is a life-long bureaucrat who has mostly spent their time pushing for incremental budget savings by cutting costs and keeping taxes raising but no faster than the cost of living.
Candidates A-D split the "woke" vote, because each interest is pretty distinct, and Candidate E wins based on a moderate voting and election record in the district. Now in the general, is candidate E more woke than the GOP Candidate A? Maybe. But what does that even mean? What kind of "woke"? Would DNC Candidates A-D consider GOP Candidates A and B more "woke" than C?
That seems like a diversion, because we're talking about someone in academics, but I think it speaks to the point here: what is "woke" policy? If you're openly trans and pansexual but you speak ill of Ta-Nehisi Coates coming to speak at your campus are you unwoke? If you're the descendent of a concentration camp survivor and you protest Nick Fuentes speaking at your college are you "woke"?
The problem I'm getting at is it was always a diverse set of correlated trends and interests, and just saying you're "anti the political movement that arose out of a disparate set of coinciding social movements" doesn't really inform anyone to your ideology does it? I mean I think some readers uncharitably assumed that Scott was saying he's into phrenology now, but that's obviously not what he meant.
Does this academic have a skill set that would lend itself for Sokal-hoax style undertakings?
Personally, I have found these very effective in convincing me that a lot of the obscure postmodernist writings woke people like to point to and derive their verbiage from is just crap. I don't know how convincing it is to other people of course...
However, there is a lot of potential for improvement when it comes to these operations. This is exemplified by the "Sokal squared" hoax:
1. None of the authors was in an "un-fire-able" position: one was an assistant professor and later DID essentially get fired, the other two were academic exiles.
2. The authors were controversial/heterodox rendering themselves attackable; one of them has since become an insane right-wing conspiracy theorist further tarnishing their work.
3. The methodology was at times questionable (inventing of a data set, targeting low-impact journals, "exposing" some practices that everybody knows are unfortunately extremely wide-spread in academia), opening them up for a counterattack in the form of an ethics investigation.
If somebody in an unassailable academic position with an untarnished reputation and showing otherwise restraint politically carried out such academic false-flag operations to a high methodological standard, I think it could greatly reduce the influence the academic foundations of wokeness hold over students. Granted, such a methodology would probably first have to be developed but that seems to be an interesting project in its own right.
I'm very surprised that both strategies are a kind of "war" for "victory". Is there no hope for being agreeable, making people see your point of view and persuading them (or being persuaded!)? Isn't this a symptom of the problem, that nobody is discussing and making specific decisions on merits anymore, but instead every decision is judged by its role as a battle in the neverending tribal political war? Everything is for the cameras, for the public, for the country. Nothing is local, personal, nuanced.
Maybe I'm naive, maybe things have gotten too bad for discussions. But I don't think the polarizations of the past left such a good legacy we're proud of.
Agree. There's even something a little depressing about the framing of a 'Culture War'. That may be what it both looks like and feels like, but there's room for a higher aspiration than that.
This is a naive "why can't we all be friends" take. The post is discussing actual, practical routes to move the world towards a more desirable state, where wokeness is weaker. Nuanced talk is not a practical course of action.
I've seen multiple comments like this. The problem is that all it takes is one person to take your personal, private, honest attempt at understanding to make it public and destroy you. You can have productive conversations 95% of the time, but all it takes is one person to release a misleading recording or twist your words when reporting your conversation to the resident "Bias Response Team/Tipline" and you're in for a world of hurt. Some of these conversations might be part of the Fabian strategy, but they alone will not solve this and lead to plenty of vulnerabilities.
The other thing is that you can't easily do this in areas of power disparities, say, with students. Trying to have an honest conversation with students on these issues will likely lead to another Christakis-style incident. Admins are too afraid to tell students that their demands are unreasonable or based on incorrect information (it would make the students feel "unsafe" and "traumatized"), so you'll get thrown under the bus.
No of course not. We wouldn't be having this discussion if that were the case.
I mean for goodness' sake, one of the very things we're discussing here is not attacking wokeists, but simply inviting a academic they dislike to campus because we know they will throw a tantrum and attempt to shut the lecture down. This has happened untold dozens of times already and is the exact opposite behavior of people who are willing to have an hoenst respectful dicussion.
These people are unwilling to duiscuss anything and will atempt to destory your livelihood for indicating you don't agree with them. The only hope is to embolden everyday people to stand up against this nonsense.
Also consider the personality of this unwoke academic. Is this person by nature a Fabian or a Berserker?
Also consider the "middle/pick your battles way". Stay a Fabian until a situation rolls around that looks either very amenable to going berserk/Berserk, or the issue related to the situation is worth the effort/suffering to go berserk/Berserk.
Me? I'm anti-anti-woke. (If you grew up before 1975, you'll know what this means.) Folk like me are very suspicious of the Berserkers, but can often support the Fabians.
If you're anti-anti-woke, you're effectively woke. How in god's name do you have a bigger problem with inviting "controversial" academics to speak on campus than you are people who throw a tantrum and shut down lectures by people through violence, intimidation, pulling fire alarms etc? If you're okay with that stuff, then you're not anti-anti-woke, you're woke.
When I saw the title, I hoped this was going to be about how to deal with woke if you *weren't* tenured. My uni now requires a DEI statement for employment. My son is probably going to become an academic. Will he even be able to get a job if he doesn't express enough woke enthusiasm? (*I* had trouble in the 90's -- got rejected by two potential employers for, apparently, not expressing enough PC enthusiasm.) If he gets past that, can he get tenure? I'm tenured. I'm safe. What about the next generation?
Don't forget about opportunity costs. The berserker approach sounds like it would take a lot more time/energy/money/etc than the Fabian strategy meaning this unwoke academic would have less of those resources for his other causes.
Their "crime" was pointing out the FACT that black students in their class were underperforming. Not as a way of being hateful towards black people, not in a way that means they're annoyed to have black people in their class. They literally wish they could have their black students perform well but they feel bad that they can't.
There's also a follow up at GT where a new hire was put on mandatory leave because he tweeted that it was bad for Biden to decide he would only pick black ladies for the supreme court.
It's worthless to respond to people like Brian with anything but mocking laughter. He's just trying to waste your time.
I find the Fabian strategy far more congenial, and appealing to both my character and my cultural hang ups (I'm British and don't ever want to "make a scene").
However, I think you've got to ask two questions:
(i) "How serious are the injustices currently being perpetrated?"
If the issues are small and no-one is being too badly hurt then it's wise not to rock the boat. But if you are in a context where serious injustice is being perpetrated, then it isn't OK to watch and hope that you can gradually improve things - the Berserker strategy becomes a moral imperative.
(ii) "Is time really on my side?"
Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus was fighting on home territory, knowing that for Hannibal delay was defeat - time was his ally. If a steady backlash is already happening, then it's wise to go with it and ride the wave home - the clock is working against your opponents.
But if your position is being steadily eroded, if the enemy is on home turf and receiving constant reinforcements, then the clock is working against you. Your opponent just needs you to wait and you will run out of time and become an irrelevancy - so you'd better go Berserk today.
The answer to each of these questions will be different in different contexts and when viewed through different moral frameworks. I'm currently running a Fabian strategy, but these two questions make me wonder if I should change my approach.
"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke."
This is an unconstructive asymmetrical set of conditions. "If there are problems that X people talk about, then I get convinced towards X. If some of X people are shitty, just like some of any group of people, I get convinced away from X." Do you not have an inverse set of reactions regarding antiwoke positions? "When I see Y i become more antiwoke, when I see antiwoke people being stupid and combative it makes me more woke."
Also, the incessant talk of how strong ""wokeness"" is for the last 12 years while they have received almost none of their policy goals besides police cameras makes me extremely skeptical of peoples evaluations of "How strong is X movement/ideology?" Obviously as a complaint against anti-woke posts, but seriously, "movement strength" feels like a confused mess to evaluate as I dive into thinking about it for any number of ideologies, which makes it difficult to evaluate what appropriate reaction levels are to any given indicator/movement.
I tend to favour the berserker strategy, because I favour active vs passive. This past couple of years has lead me to view passivity with the disgust it deserves…if we had risen up in mid2020 against the COVID1984 madness, we would have a better world now
>Basically, we pushed Putin to take the actions he is pursuing
No, we absolutely didn't. Putin has has imperislistic ambitions from day one and was always going to use whatever excuse is handy to him to justify it. Did we "push" Putin to annex crimea and arm terrorists in eastern Ukraine too?
" stop trying to ban teachers from even mentioning racism or queer issues in class"
Which will get your school run into the ground and downgraded by Ofsted, because you're supposed to be teaching geography and instead you're getting the kids to talk about their privilege:
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/mar/07/ofsted-downgrades-american-school-in-london-over-focus-on-social-justice
"The Ofsted report, published on the school’s website, found much to praise about the school with its first-class resources and well-qualified teachers. The inspectors said the school, which teaches four- to 18-year-olds, has high expectations and “gives strong importance to equality and inclusion”.
The report added: “Sometimes, however, teaching places much more weight on the school’s approach to social justice than on learning subject-specific knowledge and skills.”
In lower-school social studies, inspectors pointed out that pupils “spend much time repeatedly considering identity (including analysing their own characteristics) rather than learning, for example, geographical knowledge”.
The teaching of middle-school humanities, including English, also led to a focus on social issues rather than subject knowledge and skills, the report said, leaving some pupils feeling underprepared for the next stage of their schooling."
>If CRT is taught almost nowhere, then there should be no problem in banning it, right?
That would be true if the ban is written narrowly enough to *only* ban CRT, rather than banning any mention of bad things that happened to black people in the past. Sadly, we don't live in that world.
I'm entitled to at least as much hyperbole as the rest of the people in this thread. But if you insist, I could revise it to "banning teaching anything that might make a student feel uncomfortable" and then note that many students might feel uncomfortable to know that their country did some pretty shitty things to black people.
Or perhaps "requiring teachers to teach multiple perspectives on controversial issues, like the Holocaust," which was another gem to come out of the Texas CRT law.
When government employees engage in pervasive racism to students while on the job, their parent's governmental representatives grow understandably concerned about those government employees.
You may think it's an overreaction, but most of the student's parents probably think it's an underreaction and not likely to result in much actual effect beyond making government school employees a little more careful in how obvious they are about their previously blatant racism.
And how many decades has it been since that happened in the United States, compared to teachers singling out kids for being white as having something inherently wrong with them, and requiring students to dwell on their imagined racial identities?
The replies in this thread make no sense:
OP: The problem with CRT bans is that they're so broad they cover a teaching basic facts about black history.
Reply: Yeah, but teachers are telling students to check their privilege and we have to ban that.
OP: They aren't just banning that, the bans are broad enough to cover basic history.
Reply: Yeah, but teachers are racist against white people so we need to ban that.
<repeat a dozen times in different branches of the thread>
Even if you believe that current teaching is a complete disaster and that harsh laws restricting teachers are the only way to stop the tides of SJ, the laws that are being passed are not the answer because *the laws are badly written.* They will result in perfect ordinary non-woke teachers who just want to teach what happened in America in the 1960s getting sued or fired. Badly written laws are a bad thing regardless of whether you agree with the intent.
Some of us have also requested (see just above, 3 hours ago) examples/links/citations to a specific law which is "so broad they cover a teaching basic facts about black history." so that we can evaluate the law itself directly.
Where's your evidence?
Also, it's extremely rich to complain about facts not being allowed to be taught when this is one of the central pillars of the woke agenda
"Badly written laws are a bad thing regardless of whether you agree with the intent."
Wokeists are introducing bad laws on an almost daily basis. We either fight back, or act as noble pacifists who allow ourselves to be beaten up. Not fighting back, even in a bad faith way, is self-destructive.
"which for the most part they don't need to because as it turns out CRT is taught almost nowhere."
Do you have a preferred terminology for distinguishing between "Actual" CRT, and stuff that is strongly influenced by CRT and was called CRT before "the right" started using the term CRT?
I mean stuff like this: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teachers-unions-vow-to-defend-members-in-critical-race-theory-fight/2021/07
>One such measure, introduced by the NEA’s board of directors, said the nation’s largest teachers’ union will support and lead campaigns that “result in increasing the implementation of culturally responsive education, **critical race theory**, and ethnic … studies curriculum in pre-K-12 and higher education.” The measure is part of a larger $675,000 effort to “eradicate institutional racism” in public schools.<
Later they removed the phrase from the effort, leaving something of a "serial numbers filed off" feel.
The name got poisoned-by-association when, IIRC, Chris Rufo started bandying it about, so we end up in this situation where (over-generalizations incoming) "the left" denies CRT exists outside of an obscure and obscurantist legal theory, and "the right" calls everything CRT. The truth is, as usual, somewhere in the middle but there's no acceptable name to capture what that questionable middle ground is.
>"far more insidiously"
It's fair complain about what you see as injustice, but things hardly get *less* insidious than legislation. Maybe there's some questions to just how prosecutors and courts will interpret the wording, and that's troublesome, but the text is all out there. It's not like whisper networks.
One way to think of it is that the original CRT is just in law schools, but the stuff filtering out is heretical offshoots of CRT made by dumber people. https://zermatist.medium.com/on-pretentious-rhetoric-bf034a25bd41
>(And don't start with complaints of "guilt by association"; we're responding to post that described anyone who had a humane reaction to George Floyd's death as "woke")
This is a childish use of loaded language.
Is it "humane" to propose policies like defunding police? What if it's just, you know, wrong? Am I supposed to support policies that would cause serious harm in order to be "humane"?
I've missed you, Deiseach.
Very kind of you to say so, though do you mean in the sense of "I thought that rash had gone away"? 😁
If public schools in California were found to have teachers that worked Christianity into every lesson, no matter how unrelated, and the school boards and teachers unions weren't doing anything about it, would you have a problem with the California legislature banning the practice?
As a conservative that believes religion and faith are good, I am still committed to the principle that neither belongs in a public school* outside of neutral discussion of the historical significance (such as in the appropriate history or literature class). Public schools* act on behalf of the government, ie all of society, and as such should not be taking sides on inter-society social issues. As such, what public schools* teach isn't speech, at least as far as 'freedom of speech' goes. What students say should be speech, as long as the school is committed to facially neutral rules designed to balance individual rights with the need to teach.
* - (at least, below the university level, which is what 'academia' should actually be. Academia should have a separate commitment to freedom of research by professors, with the caveat that what is published by professors doesn't represent the government.)
I found this interesting on book bans, though it's from years ago: https://themillions.com/2012/03/ban-this-book-an-uncensored-look-at-the-lorax-and-other-dangerous-books.html/amp
I tend to agree, but I expect that will be the responds regardless of whether it makes sense.
Maybe precomit to a definition of intolerable policy that's worth going berserker over (and then follow through when necessary), but mostly stick the Fabian thing and build whisper networks.
I like this.
Possibly, but remember that wokeness starts from victimhood, claiming that it is a virtue. They already have a victim complex.
That's a weird definition of wokeness. I don't have a good definition, but it certainly doesn't involve claiming that being a victim is a virtue.
The woke wish to reward victims, because they are virtuous and deserving.
The woke wish to rectify harms done to victims, because that's what any conception of justice does for those that the conception of justice sincerely sees as "victims."
If I steal your car, you're the victim of my action. If the police catch me, give you your car back, and make me pay you restitution, they are "rewarding the victim." Did they do this because they think you're "virtuous and deserving?"
True, but the wish is selective on the group level. I've heard dozens of people (not media cherry picked, but personal conversations) say that destruction during protests was a good thing because it advanced the cause and peaceful protests were ignored by the media. People who saw their businesses destroyed don't register as 'victims.' It's this bias that's problematic.
Wokeness has a strong leveling aspect where only certain groups are allowed to be considered victims deserving of justice.
The notion of 'virtue' seems like an individualist notion that is a strawman when applied to collectivist models. Wokeness views disparate group outcomes as evidence of systemic failure. Virtue is a concept applied to individuals. It doesn't enter into the Woke model.
Right--the disagreement is about who counts as "victims" and what counts as "injustice."
I also had these conversations during the protests, and strongly disagreed with the variously blasé or approving attitude a lot of people took toward violence and property destruction. But even here, I don't think that this is the attitude that makes "wokeness" unique.
Many people, for instance, would say that if the Ukrainian military destroys some buildings in the process of stopping the Russian invasion, they've acted appropriately and the harms to the owners of those buildings are relatively unimportant forms of victimization. In other words, we'd accept the concept that some kinds of harm constitute acceptable collateral damage. One thing that circulated a lot during the protests was a statement by a Minneapolis store owner whose store was destroyed, who basically said "If it stops the racial violence in this country, let it all burn." Many (including myself) would see this as an appropriate attitude toward the loss of personal property during the proper conduct of a just war.
Where I (and I assume you) differ with the woke people who favored or didn't mind property destruction during the protests was that I didn't see the protests as something similar to a just war. I saw them as justified protests raising an important issue to a basically legitimate government. And I don't see destroying property as acceptable conduct in that context.
My sense of what makes "woke" ideology distinctive is really two things: the first, as you point out, is an emphasis on social inequality between groups or social categories, especially around race, gender, and sexuality. Seeing these inequalities as more important means justifying more extreme countermeasures. The other is seeing democratic liberal states and liberal social norms as illegitimate or less legitimate. Everything else, it seems to me, follows from those two beliefs.
> Wokeness has a strong leveling aspect where only certain groups are allowed to be considered victims deserving of justice.
They also don't give a fuck if individuals are poor. Opiate-destroyed miners in Appalachia? Doesn't matter, Bill Gates is rich.
Favouring blacks in med school admissions helps blacks who are already doing ok as shown by being able to apply to med school, it doesn't repair broken inner city families, etc.
In some cases, money was collected for black-owned businesses, but not others.
I think wokeness is more than the weird way they define victims and oppressors via increasingly imaginary offenses.
1. There's more tribalism to it than regular justice. I don't think mugger-victims see themselves as a tribe engaged in a struggle with the mugger-tribe. And there's no attempt to especially glorify the history of mugger-victims with a history month or whatever. Memes about mugger-victim martyrs and hagiographies seem much rarer than the same about victims of alleged racism.
2. There's less respect for due process and freedom of speech.
Another way to frame that tribalism: Wokeness is more inclined to follow Lenin's formulation of "who, whom".
Wokeness has a quasi-Leninist conception of class enemies and class allies, except they're not defined in terms of class but in terms of intersectionality. Those who lack these intersectional credentials must demonstrate their loyalty with redoubled efforts or be assumed to be traitors. And even then the way they demonstrate this loyalty is frequently annoying and must be subject to rebuke: e.g. that recent article from a female black historian complaining about white people being *too* enthusiastic about wanting to discuss Black History Month.
You could probably tie this into a larger thread: the politicization of everything. The old academic left-liberalism sharply contrasted with Wokeism in its delight over shades of gray and a spirit of intellectual curiosity. If you were weirdly obsessed with some period of Western history, your moral character wasn't really questioned for simply trying to understand and describe it in an accurate and neutral manner -- indeed, such an effort could be a mark of virtue.
> I don't think mugger-victims see themselves as a tribe engaged in a struggle with the mugger-tribe.
On the other hand, I do think that this is observable. Coming from a non-US perspective, we often see all kinds of underprivileged groups being disproportionally engaged in property crime and muggings, and there being a social struggle between them and the "respectable middle class" (i.e. "mugger-victim tribe"). Those groups sometimes are ethnic or immigrant minorities, but in more homogenous places they would be just subcultures, perhaps distinguishable by clothing, slang, tattoos, piercings, habits, etc - not a racial/national/etc separation but still a distinct "tribe" whom every person from the "respectable tribe" would shun as "definitely not one of us", would support all kinds of sanctioning and othering, and in cases of violent conflict would definitely glorify the member of the "respectable tribe" fighting the "criminal subculture".
And looking from outside towards USA, I do seem to recall reading about USA events that very much seem like a representation of a struggle like that - it seems that some communities glorified e.g. George Zimmerman as something like "martyr for the anti-mugger tribe", and when I read about American people justifying George Floyd's murder, their core argument seemed to be "he's from the 'mugger-tribe' so that's an expected, justified part of the struggle against them".
I agree with 2, but am not sure if I agree with 1.
You're right that mugging victims, for the most part, don't identify as a group or tribe, and don't ask to have their history celebrated or acknowledged. That's partially because being a mugging victim is pretty random. Mugging victims don't often have mugging victim parents and mugging victim friends, and so don't really have any "history" as a group.
It's also because mainstream society takes muggings fairly seriously and tries to immediately address the harm caused by mugging. When that's not true--for instance, New York in the 80s, crime victims absolutely start seeing themselves as a class or a tribe, elevating heroes (i.e. Berhnard Goetz, Curtis Silwa), and demanding respect and redress from the rest of society.
So, I think that demanding redress for a history of victimization and demanding respect as a group may be a fairly standard response to belonging to an identifiable group that feels that it has been repeatedly victimized without redress.
That said, I do think that because wokeness has an expansive definition of harms and an expansive sense of appropriate redress, there's a tendency of people in "woke" circles to try to attach themselves to harms or victimization in order to gain standing. But even there, I'm not sure how unique this is--Curtis Silwa faked subway attacks to gain clout for the Guardian Angels and apparently lied about having been kidnapped.
When I looked it up 5 or 10 years ago, there were 2 or 3 memorials to crime victims in general in the U.S.. I think they were in places where cops tend to live, such as Long Island.
There were also memorials to victims of specific crimes. For example, although the governor of Massachusetts not too many years ago dedicated a memorial for Sacco & Vanzetti, there is also a memorial to their two victims on the spot of their armored car robbery.
In general, it is considered in poor taste by journalists to remember crime victims as a class.
On the other hand, true crime stories involving specific victims are very popular, and popular fiction, such as Batman movies, is much concerned with crime and its victims.
"The woke wish to rectify harms done to victims, because that's what any conception of justice does."
You are wrong. The normal Western concept of "Justice" is to judge individuals as culpable based on their own actions, and to restore individual victims according to their individual injuries caused by those specific wrongful actions.
Woke "social justice" is the opposite -- it's about class-based victimhood and retribution. The "Bourgeoisie" or the "Kulaks" are class enemies of the people so must be punished. Current wokesters just substitute "white males" as the designated class enemy.
More precisely, woke is about group-based victimhood. They don't use social class as a group (except in passing as lip service) because they themselves belong to the upper social classes, and therefore to do so would be arguing against their own class based interests.
And it is absolutely explicit about this. There is a lot written in academia about "the inadequacy of individual rights" and the like.
Yes. In almost *any* discussion where the victim and the perpetrator are clearly established and then discussed, the discussants (more or less rightly) treat the victim as relatively virtuous and deserving and the perpetrator as relatively indecent and undeserving. The frame or window of the discussion is typically only how great the relative distance.
Discussions which explicitly try to invalidate or flip this framing are mostly either implicitly trying to swap victim and perpetrator status, or moot the distinction entirely.
That being said, I agree that wokeness is more complex and top comment is reductive (if we assume it's a definition).
I basically agree with you, but I'd quibble in the following way.
Any discussion where the victim and perpetrator are clearly established will treat the perpetrator's actions as indecent and underserving. They don't typically treat the victim as any more decent or deserving than they were before being victimized.
In other words, we establish that "car theft" is an indecent action, and that "car thieves" don't deserve the cars they steal. But we don't tend to assume that people who have their cars stolen are thus more decent or more deserving than are people who didn't have their cars stolen, or that they're any more decent or deserving than they were before having their cars stolen. If I give them their car back, it's not rewarding them for their virtue, it's rectifying a specific injustice (and we'd see giving the car back as just even if the person who's car was stolen isn't a very nice person).
Similarly, if I say that person A racially discriminated against person B, I am saying that person A is doing something unvirtuous and indecent, but I'm not saying that being a victim of racism is virtuous. If I say that person B should be compensated for the harm done to them by person A, I'm not trying to reward person A for their virtue, I'm trying to rectify harm done to them by person B. Their general character or moral standing isn't really relevant.
its an old philosophical concept = Slave morality
Does it involve seeing victimhood as a source of status? My not very well informed impression is there is an element of "more oppressed than thee" in woke culture.
> I don't have a good definition, but it certainly doesn't involve claiming that being a victim is a virtue.
I think it does. I think that being a cult of victimhood is at the heart of wokeness: the idea that if you're a member of an accredited victim group (e.g. blacks, women, gays, tans, Muslims, etc) then thereby you become a virtuous person and other people are morally obliged to be on your side.
E.g. George Floyd became a woke saint because he was murdered by the police.
If being a victim isn't virtuous in wokeness, why did Jussie Smollett fake a hate crime against himself?
I think that describing being a victim as virtuous is importing a very different value system, and fails to describe how social justice works.
Being a victim is being deserving of care. This isn't the same thing as virtue.
I suspect the conceptual distinctions between "being deserving of care" and "being virtuous" that, say, Aristotle might have drawn are collapsing. These days, there are mostly just good people vs. bad people, and what more do you need to know?
I wouldn't say you've entirely wrong, but I think think there's a distinction on the Social Justice side between victims deserving of care and people supporting Social Justice who are deserving of praise.
What are you "waking up" to if not to some oppressor?
"punching down" is a woke concept. Let's not use the enemy's language.
If you've decided they're the enemy, you've already decided to make this problem worse. You destroy your enemies. You crush them, you humiliate them, and sometimes you kill them. Do you want to do this to (other side of whatever fence you use to define "woke"?) Are you willing to pick up a gun and spill blood into the streets over this? Because that's the choice you're making by calling them an enemy. If two halves of the US are each other's enemies, the US will stop existing. Yes, that's the choice all those people on the other side who are calling you an enemy are doing to, and I tell them the same thing. We need de-escalation.
And "punching down" is a decency concept phrased in woke language. Do you believe it's virtuous to mock a crippled person for being in a wheelchair? Do you think it's a neutral action? Or do you think it's an inherently mean-spirited action that can be ameliorated based on the circumstance (e.g. if the crippled person is nasty and mean-spirited themselves, there's likely more of a sense of karma if someone calls them names)?
There's a couple ways to read these kinds of situations. Like, for a lot of people, me included, pretending the other side isn't an enemy is pretty much just laying down and letting them shoot you in the back of the head. Because in your model, where proclaiming the other side an enemy leads to bloodshed, it doesn't *stop it* from happening if I pretend it's not.
It's surprisingly often in rationalism that I'm told something that basically boils down to "winning is for the other guys. Send them birthday cards and ignore all the tanks near alsace".
The second paragraph is what the woke say punching down is when they are snuggled up in the motte. But out on the bailey, the direction "down" just means "the direction I am, and they aren't; I'm allowed to hit them, you see". Again, the ask here is that I *let them hit me for free*. And again I'm mystified as to why I'd lose on purpose and default surrender.
I'm not saying "surrender", I'm saying that thinking of this as a war will end in it being an ACTUAL war. Like, with guns, and bombs, and knives, and people dying. I am NOT saying one side bears exclusive guilt here, I am saying that I don't want The Troubles x 50, and I'm going to guess that you don't want that either. Like the old saying about marriage goes- no matter how big the fight gets, at the end of the day you're still going to have to live with each other. At the end of the day, all the "woke libtards" and "alt-right CHUDS" are going to have to live in the same country, go to the same schools, etc, and adopting a siege mindset where anything short of total tribal loyalty is seen... exactly as you see it, not only ends extremely badly, but also is how we got to this exact position to begin with.
I'll admit it's not an easy place to come down from, but right now both the Woke and the Anti-Woke seem to be playing a game of Chicken to see who'll be the first to veer away from outright advocating and carrying out the mass murder of the other side, and someone's going to have to give or else everyone loses- especially people like me who are dirty filthy evil doubleplusungood fence-sitting traitors who refuse to pick either side (aka most Americans).
The Woke can say "punching down" is anything they want, I just want to register that basic human decency is, in fact, good, and shouldn't be thrown out because it's an obstacle to Winning. That's the definition of Moloch- dehumanize not only your enemy, but yourself, because it's "more efficient".
What I'm saying is, it's an actual war. They are taking 100% of the ground they can within what they think they can do; they aren't confused about us (us being: anybody who isn't who they define their team as) being the enemy. They take jobs when they can; they demand you swear fealty and adopt special language to show you will bow when called on.
But within that concept, somehow they aren't shooting anybody.
Now, there's five potential ways this goes:
1. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can; they aren't unclear about this. But I don't shoot them, I work within the rules to resist them, and lose but don't go to arms.
2. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can, but now instead of working inside of the rules I either pre-commit to going to arms if I lose or just go to arms immediately.
3. I admit they are enemies and will hurt me any way they can, I resist them, I win, and THEY go to arms.
4. I don't admit they are enemies and they just win by default because I'm pretending they are nice and reasonable even though they keep telling me they aren't.
Rationalists are very disproportionately likely to say that 4. is the only option, that we need to lay down and take our licks and pretend the other guys are nice.
But note that 1-3 exist, and out of those both 1 and 3 are good, moral options. But even if they weren't AND I planned on laying down and taking my beating, it still doesn't change the fact that they are my enemies, if they are, the same way appeasing does not in fact change the fact that some people would reallly like a second-hand country of France.
I'd think of this argument a lot differently if it seemed like you were arguing that it wasn't in fact a war, or they weren't in fact enemies. Like we might disagree, that's whatever. But not wanting a war and ignoring an actual war for that reason doesn't stop the war, it just means you lose faster.
"It's an actual war"
No, it isn't. You are using hyperbolic language. I've personally seen the remains of "actual war". It makes student protests, or even riots, look like a frolic in a field.
If you want this to be an ACTUAL war, though, please go ahead and keep deciding that every person you're ideologically opposed to is a mindless psychopath who must be crushed and cast out of society just like they do. Keep your foot flat on the pedal, they'll surely swerve first.
I think both sides here consist of small cores of people who are terminally ideological to the point of hating life and loving death and a bunch of people who have been tricked into listening to those people. Those are the ACTUAL sides here: normal people and those who hate life and love death, whether that takes the form of Terminal Woke or Terminal Anti-Woke. The latter win when they get the former to kill each other, and the former win when they ignore the latter, because the latter are actually very small and weak and can only cause damage beyond a tantrum with a gun when they convince other people that loving death and hating life is Just and Noble or Stunning and Brave or Based and Redpilled or whatever other banner those ghouls will eventually hoist next.
In summary- I hope every person on both sides who sees this as a total war and a whole half of the country as their irreconcilable enemies chokes on their own frothing spittle and spares the rest of us the mass deaths they crave. A pox on both your houses. Consider me the general of the Army of People With Actual Problems In Their Lives declaring war on both of your camps.
"What I'm saying is, it's an actual war."
No, actually, it's not.
I used to be kind of a big right wing influencer, once upon a time, but I guess I've shifted back towards the center and become more chill now, thanks to Scott.
I don't think anyone is ever going to left-wing-death-squad you [99% confidence]. Metaculus predicts only a 3% chance of a second US civil war by 2031 ( https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6179/second-us-civil-war-before-2031/ ) and even that number is probably inflated by a minority who doom scroll too much.
I recommend to everybody on all sides who has a lot of anxiety about politics to just take some weeks off of social media, news, and any other sources of outrage porn. Just live life. Life is good.
Nobody is coming for you except a few obese radicals who wanna tattle to your employer for writing unwoke things on the internet. And even in that worst case scenario there are plenty of other jobs and plenty of ways to make a living as your own boss. I've been my own boss for almost 6 years now. It's great. Office space was one of my favorite movies. Peter's character arc totally resonates with me. Fortunately I found something that pays a lot better than construction.
I'm using the word "enemy" as hyperbole, I suppose. I don't believe there will be a civil war here. My chief political opponents are the social conservatives on the left (the woke) and the right (mostly bible-thumpers).
Because there's no clear divisions in the culture wars, (would I side with conservatives? Hell no. Would I side with progressives? Hell no.) I don't see how we would end up choosing sides for an actual war.
I'm glad to hear you essentially agree with me, but sadly the effective lines in the Culture Wars are Right-Wing Death Cult and Left-Wing Death Cult, and they both assign the vast numbers of people who are NOT in the Death Cults membership in the other camp.
What makes you think 'punching down' vs 'punching up' is a useful distinction?
When I am punched, I am a representative of the lowest potential individual.
When I punch you, you are a representative of the highest potential individual.
As with all such contests, in this strategy the person with whom the fight is being picked is irrelevant. The point is what observers of the fight think; and the target observers appear to be the anti-woke and the neutrals who don't think that way.
Further, the opponent doubling down is traditionally (though not necessarily correctly) viewed as desirable - the idea is that if they double down hard enough it will alienate the observers.
The idea that "punching down is bad" is *itself* part of the whole victim-complex ideology, though, a component of the oppressor-oppressed dynamic. Effectively a way of saying "it's okay when we do it".
If you read any pre-20th century satire, for instance (satire being a common victim of this attitude) you'll see that the barbs are directed at human weakness and folly *wherever* they're found. If a beggar has character flaws, mercilessly mock the beggar.
These people were always GOING to have a victim complex, and now that the nonsense has moved out of universities and into the real world where peoples bank accounts are being frozen, it isn’t punching down in any meaningful way to go all out against wokeness
These people were always GOING to have a victim complex, and now that the nonsense has moved out of universities and into the real world where peoples bank accounts are being frozen, it isn’t punching down in any meaningful way to go all out against wokeness
I feel like it really depends on the academic’s personality. You have to be high in disagreeableness and enjoy conflict somewhat to successfully pull off the Berserker strategy. And you have to be generally agreeable and thought of as a non-troublemaker to execute the Fabian strategy.
I think this is the best advice.
Also just because you can't be fired doesn't mean they can't make you want to quit. This academic's will to continue on is now the weakest link in this strategy. So they should choose what fits them, and choose what they think they can continue to do for many years.
NY Telephone wanted my father to move to the Westchester office. He refused, noting that we had family on the Island, the kids were in school, had friends, etc. They gave him NO WORK for an entire year. He survived, and we didn't move.
Right! (Ball successfully returned into the court of Scott and the Academician. :^)
I will observe that Jordan Peterson left academia because he was hurting any students he had. Being a pariah, working with him was a black mark against the student. Finally the message I got from the Canadian truckers, was that if you don't control the narrative, then your message will be formed by those who do control it.
> if you don't control the narrative, then your message will be formed by those who do control it.
This. It doesn't matter what you do and why; it will be described as something else done for a different reason.
So maybe the step one would be to put your "elevator pitch" on youtube? Like, not more than five minutes, otherwise in this era of instant gratification no one will watch it.
Not sure about step two, though. Or maybe you should just make funny anti-woke memes.
+1. I couldn't run the Fabian strategy if I tried, and berserking is fun. I know people who are the opposite.
Great point. As I was reading the descriptions I was thinking "wow, it would be great to be a Berserker," while at the same time knowing that I'm just not cut out for it emotionally. I'd have to go Fabian pretty much every time. Darned high agreeableness causes me no end of trouble!
Of course the dilemma is: what if this group (Scott's subscribers) concludes by virtue of reasoned argument that Berserker is the most effective approach and Fabian is mostly ineffectual?
Time to practise enjoying being disliked, I suppose.
I'm surprised more people aren't harping on this. If you have two choices, one of which will surely make your life miserable, it seems like a Bad Idea to go that route if there is literally any other way to run your life and do good. As a very strong rule of thumb, I don't think we should be encouraging people to make irreversible decisions with excruciating consequences for themselves.
This was my thought too. Which life do you want to live?
This was going to be my comment as well. I think it really helps when we stick our necks out that something natural in us guides us to want to do that. It may be because we're the kind of person who likes to pick fights -- I don't mean that entirely negatively, more as being someone who likes to be a campaigner and public leader and all that implies. It may be because the person feels so strongly about the one issue that's arisen (yoga classes being cancelled) that it provides fuel for them to overcome their dislike of being a campaigner/leader (in my experience, that can be quite costly for that person, even if maybe they feel it's worth the cost -- one needs to at least account for the cost).
I don't see it being successful for people to pick a strategy abstracted from local conditions and their own tendencies and then force themselves to pursue it as a general matter. That's a recipe for a lot of unproductive "shoulds" in a person's head. Particularly when they have another job to do -- ie, being a campaigner isn't their full-time job.
Whenever we're asking ourselves about a course of action, I find it helpful to ask "what do I want guiding me in this choice?" Fear? An abstract idea? A dearly-held value? Recognition of where my ingredients can be best put to use? The kind of role I enjoy playing? My own natural sense of motivation? It's a lot easier if we're not swimming against our own tide in taking on a big commitment.
There are so many ways to be of use and it's a delusion to imagine that there's an exact right way one can choose in advance of events. That's a kind of black and white thinking that's not really responsive to how reality unfolds.
I came here to say this too. Really depends on the asker’s personality re what he will do, not necessarily what he “should” do.
Having spent most of my life as a classical liberal/libertarian academic, I strongly agree. There is no best way of changing the world in your desired direction, only a best way for you. That applies more broadly than to this particular question.
Exactly this. The article clearly lays out that neither strategy is a clear winner. So the academic should do what comes naturally to their personality. Any other choice may be more effective in the short term but will cause fatigue and burnout in the long term.
Gosh, I am out of touch. This post feels like reading the last book of Harry Potter without having read anything else. Maybe I should be using Twitter to keep up with the conversation online. Who I am kidding, I'm too lazy for that.
What a segue. I'm an instant fan.
This post made me think about to the filter bubble / shadow universe post Scott made a while back. I have no idea what it's like in Scott's world, coming from my shadow universe:
At work: one of the managers likes to find something offensive to say every day just to get a reaction.
My dad, a normally very grounded guy, talked to me in a straight face about aliens the other day, and my brother and sister-in-law don't go to church because they believe in aliens.
My wife used to believe Nancy Pelosi went to China to meet with their leaders and arrange how COVID would be released. It was all part of Democrats plan to steal the election. I don't think she believes that anymore, but she still thinks they stole the election. She also, however, believes strongly in vaccines (going to school to become a nurse, she was a MA) and we both have our booster. Neither of us wear a mask at the grocery store but some people still do.
I don't bring up COVID with most people because most of the people I know are on the COVID conspiracy spectrum, but we have a few friends on the other far side, who wanted to have a party in the winter cold but wouldn't let anyone go inside their house for fear of exposure.
I think it's just a totally different memetic environment around here, especially among our church friends, and probably Facebook at the time too.
Do you remember what the title of the post about the shadow universes / filter bubbles was?
I will go look for it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
"
There are certain theories of dark matter where it barely interacts with the regular world at all, such that we could have a dark matter planet exactly co-incident with Earth and never know. Maybe dark matter people are walking all around us and through us, maybe my house is in the Times Square of a great dark matter city, maybe a few meters away from me a dark matter blogger is writing on his dark matter computer about how weird it would be if there was a light matter person he couldn’t see right next to him.
This is sort of how I feel about conservatives.
"
I'm currently reading China Mieville's The City & the City about two cities occupying the same space at the same time, with strictly enforced separation to the point of "not seeing" the other cars on the street, and have been wondering what allegory they are going for. Your Scott quote above captures the mood perfectly.
There was a Philip Jose Farmer science fiction book called "Dayworld" in which, because of overpopulation, people spend six days a week in suspended animation and each "day" is basically a seperate society that exists parallel to but barely interacts with each other day.
With respect to Incurian, "Different Worlds" sounds like it's a better match for Azatol's description.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/
+1. I spent most of the pandemic in western Michigan for family reasons and returned to NYC last November. Whiplash!
This is an underrepresented and very helpful point of view. The use of "code-switching" is particularly interesting; are there any specific examples besides the COVID protocols that you've seen or specific vocabulary/actions that you use?
It seems to me that a good way for people to more successfully adopt general policies is to think of how they would apply in the opposite political context. E.g. if "speech has consequences, tough luck" is the response to conservative pleas for intellectual tolerance on campus, would that also apply to, say, Biden voters in rural Pennsylvania who get treated poorly by their Trump-voting neighbors?
You don't have to go as far as rural Pennsylvania - that contradiction is literally happening on the very same college campuses. The same universities that claim conservative professors just have to suck it up are the ones banning speech that could make students uncomfortable and therefore feel "unsafe".
This contradiction is not at all surprising, and whenever people bring this kind of thing up, it's kind of like "no shit, have you been living under a rock?" It reminds me of the top comment on this post. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/senate-democrats-use-the-jim-crow
Tribes are never and have never been consistent about general principles like civility, freedom of speech, etc - the only thing they are consistent with is tribal allegiance. So of course the left aren't consistent when students have "safe spaces" but conservatives are told that they are SOL - but they are consistent with supporting the in-group and opposing the out-group. That's the one thing tribes will always be consistent about.
It does seem like the left is currently worse about this than the right. I haven't heard of many conservatives seriously arguing for censorship of leftists - most actually support free speech for all. But it's arguable that that's just because conservatives aren't in a position where their demands for censorship of the left would actually be answered (since tech companies and the media are so far to the left), so it's kind of pointless to even attempt it. If conservatives ran tech platforms and media companies, they would likely be censoring as well, albeit less-so than the leftists are currently.
I don't understand this point: isn't anti-crt and don't say gay basically trying to intentionally conflate anything potentially challenging of right-leaning ideals as dangerous woke rhetoric? I'm not convinced that the book burning/banning has suddenly stopped from the right, nor will it. I think we have a tendency to see a cultural shift as necessitating an absolute reversal of roles. I don't think anarchism is any more corporatist/statist now than it was in 1980 (at least any form that hadn't been co-opted by the alt-right). Calls for civility and decorum are still coming from the folks who claim the world is controlled by a zionist conspiracy.
Maybe I'm in a vastly different bubble but I'm in a huge metro on the west coast and I doubt we're in a woke dystopia.
I am faintly hesitant to head back into the office after two years of WFH for this reason. We have been using various online tools to communicate and the discussions on there tend to be to the woke end of the spectrum. People have even started adding their pronouns to their usernames which makes me shake my head in amused pity.
I am pretty sure that most of my colleagues have middling political opinions, but it is also possible that there has been some sort of "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers" type event and they will all be completely insufferable in person.
Maybe wokeness peaks at different times in different places, and the Bay Area is avant-garde so it peaked there first and now is declining. There are definitely places where wokeness never reached hegemony yet (and maybe never will because they were vicariously immunized by watching the overreach in other places), but those places aren't the major cities that steer American culture (New York, Los Angeles, SF)
"my brother and sister-in-law don't go to church because they believe in aliens" ... can you join the dots for me here? I can't imagine what connection there would be between whether or not you believe in aliens and whether or not you go to church.
I can't connect the dots either. I guess they think God was only supposed to make humans so if aliens exist that's discrediting religion?
I think a lot of it comes down to the core story of Christianity - God creates humans, humans sin, God comes to earth and dies for their sins. That's not incompatible with the idea of extraterrestrial life, but it does raise a lot of odd questions. ("Did aliens sin, did Jesus die for the sins of aliens, etc.")
The idea that humans are unique/special isn't an *essential* aspect of Christianity, but it's a very strongly linked philosophical view.
Interestingly, CS Lewis wrote about the possibility of aliens in one of his essays, and didn't even seemed phased by the prospect, and discussed the possibility that intelligent aliens may not be 'fallen creatures' like humans, and thus have no need for salvation. I think the Catholic Church also has a position on how we should regard aliens should they be discovered. In general mainstream Christianity seems nonchalant about the theological implications of aliens, though I can see why that might seem intuitively surprising (I'm not Christian, so don't this as apologetics, but I was surprised myself at how unbothered Christian thinkers seemed to be by aliens).
Yeah, I'm not surprised - the theological questions of aliens aren't insurmountable, they just require a bit of creativity, so it's not surprising that CS Lewis, who had no shortage of creativity, was particularly not phased by them.
More(Strikethrough more, replace with "also") interestingly, Mark Twain also wrote about Christ dying, many times, to save many alien worlds. "Captain Stormfields's visit to heaven" or something.
I mean, if you believe in directed panspermia ("aliens made Earth life and/or humans"), then either you believe Christianity is a Chinese-whispers version of the truth or it's wrong.
I remember reading some woke stuff 7 years ago, but I don't where they hang out anymore.
The use of "wokeness" here as a catch-all term for anything related to social justice, as if it were a single force to be supported or opposed, feels really lazy and indiscriminate to me. There was a lot of reaction after George Floyd was killed, because a man was slowly murdered on camera while onlookers couldn't do anything about it, and that's horrible. Lots of people reacted in lots of ways, some of which seem wholly appropriate to me (protesting police brutality and lack of accountability), some of which were foolishly utopian but you can see where they were coming from (defund the police), and some of which were the kind of ridiculous symbolic gestures that get rightly derided as "woke" (renaming the "master" branch of version control systems to "main") - it was not nearly as simple as "wokeness got stronger".
Any serious attempt to deal with the genuine problem of dysfunctional "woke" ideology has to deal with the fact that a lot of people are trying to create a better world, and you don't _want_ to push back against that - you want to push the discourse sideways, so that that effort is directed in a healthier way.
I think this is a bit unfair. There's clearly been a general trend over the last decade or so that distinguishes current "woke social justice" from the social justice that preceded it. That trend is difficult to distill exactly, and "woke" is definitely a simplistic shorthand. But my guess is that Scott is assuming (reasonably imho) that most of his audience shares his understanding of "woke" as a shorthand.
Yes, linguistically we could say that 'social justice' is a political position, 'woke' is a performative social status game
That's rather begging the question. People who self identify as 'woke' would almost certainly not agree that they are taking part in a performative social status game, or at least not with the implication of inauthenticity which is a toxic non-argument that seems to get thrown around a lot in these kinds of debates.
Performative social status games are mostly not conscious at all. Human navigation by mimicry is a feature not a bug. Ref Henrich/ Hanson/ BJ Campbell etc
But what is the purpose of you claiming that someone is taking part in a performative social status game? If everyone is doing that unconsciously anyway, then it's a contentless assertion. I take it actually as a toxic claim that they are being inauthentic, and that their claims can be ignored.
It's quite possible that they are unconsciously taking part in a performative social status game, and it's also possible that anyone making that claim is too. It's relevance to the substantial topic under discussion is zero. In practice when people say this, they're not making a sociological analysis, they're making a cheap, illogical attack on their argumentation partner.
I agree that trying to dismiss woke people by saying they are *just* status-seeking is a discursively toxic move. But there is a cluster of behaviours among some social-justice oriented people which seems to play no other role than securing public affirmation from other social-justice-y people, i.e. "Wow, good job, you're so woke!" (e.g., banning yoga club b/c cultural appropriation). It seems to me like when people say they are anti-woke, what they mean is they are against this kind of behaviour. So, internal to anti-woke communities, using "wokeness" to refer to this kind of tendency seems natural. Of course this could create problems & poison the well of discourse between wokes and anti-wokes, but at least it's not a total idler wheel.
Relatively few people continue to self-identify as 'woke' once the term was adopted by their outgroup, but there doesn't seem to be a commonly-agreed-on replacement term, either (as Freddie deBoer opined in "just tell what I'm supposed to call this thing." The linguistic treadmill is running full steam on this vague nameless thing that everyone seems confident exists.
They won't get a good answer for a long time, either. I still don't know what a hippie is/was. I know what lots of people say they are/were, but mostly those descriptions don't match anyone I knew, and I lived in Berkeley during the 1960's/70's. "Long haired freak" at least had identifiable correlations with people I knew.
The thing is, "hippie" was popularized by a gossip columnist. It took off as a phrase among lots of people who didn't know anybody that it described, so they let their imaginations fill in the details. I think that something similar occurred with "woke", though it was probably an internet talk board.
My guess is that currently "woke" predominantly means "someone whose politics I don't like" and that it tends to be used among right-wingers. (I'm not going to call them conservatives, because they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids. So that's not conserving.)
>"Long haired freak" at least had identifiable correlations with people I knew.
LOL! I was once gifted a "long-haired freaks need not apply" sign when I grew my hair out.
>(I'm not going to call them conservatives, because they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids. So that's not conserving.)
Thank you for this consideration and clarity!
I get annoyed with that kind of abuse of the phrase "conservative," and I do appreciate this.
>they aren't trying to conserve anything. They may be trying to "go back to the good old days", but those good old days were a myth. They just didn't realize it because they were kids.
Note: This is essentially a textbook definition of a reactionary.
Woke in its modern usage was re-popularized by BLM. It's often used as a sneer, but it was and is a self-id with positive connotations as well. The obvious comparison is SJW, which originated as a sneer and was pretty much always used that way.
Sourced from the wiki but it comports with my memory and personal experience.
The phenomenon you're pointing at -- broad labels dissolve into their particulars at fine resolution -- is real. The experience of being inside a social group is one of learning to distinguish its members from one another, and not to determine what they all have in common. But this doesn't mean they *don't* have things in common, or that they *aren't* an identifiable group. I used to feel this way about communists, who often get lumped together, but who almost always define themselves in opposition to each other, and are prone to violent rhetorical outbursts when mistaken for those opportunistic wannabes in the Judean People's Front. It's only when I stepped out of that bubble that it became very clear to me that "communist" is a meaningful category, even if it has no single modal member who would be accepted as a representative by everyone inside the category.
On the Woke: I know particular people who are definitely Woke. I could tell you their names if we were in person. They are very real. They have differing beliefs, but a lot ties them together. They share common assumptions, common rhetoric, common aesthetics. I agree with some of their politics, disagree with others, so I do not think I am simply defining them in opposition to myself.
I think "the good old days were a myth" is a *foundational* misunderstanding of "conservative" viewpoints that can only come from a "zeitgeist progressive".
"The good old days were terrible actually" is a thing that is taught to people in blue tribe areas since literally 6th grade (in my real life experience).
I think Scott wrote a whole thing on this in his "NRX in a nutshell" post - I think it's actually 100% fair to look at things like constant social media panopticons + the sexual revolution driving ever larger numbers of young men to suicide, the decline of plausible life scripts other than "try as hard as you can to be elite, and if you don't make it, enjoy being a receptionist", increasing alcoholism and "deaths of despair" primarily caused by deindustrialization of smaller towns - with the response of "just move to the city!", and those cities look like Seattle, WA or San Francisco - where you can't ride public transportation or go to the grocery store without being assaulted by people who need serious mental health interventions.
You can say "well actually things in the beforetimes were bad" - but I think suggesting that there's absolutely no argument at all that in the glorious march of neoliberal universal culture, something fundamental was lost strikes me as well, the sort of opinion one has when your entire experience of American history is reading about slavery for the entirety of the formative years of your life.
I think they (possibly we) are keeping woke. I identify as half-woke, my wife would probably identify as full woke. I think that the thought that the term has been abandoned is mostly a result of personal bubbles.
Good to know! It can be hard to tell what's a bubble or what's a local variation and what isn't.
I'd be interested in the variation between who still uses it versus those who claims it's just a right-wing slur now or whatever, but that would be hard to get reliable data. I think part of it, beyond bubbles, is as you say in your other comment- "woke" had more positive connotations than SJW, but they've both gone through "linguistic treadmills."
One of the earlier instances of SJW I've been able to find was an ACLU eulogy: https://www.aclu.org/blog/lgbtq-rights/memory-social-justice-warrior-lgbt-rights-champion-carolyn-wagner?redirect=blog/lgbt-rights/memory-social-justice-warrior-lgbt-rights-champion-carolyn-wagner But I never had a confident feel for how widespread the positive/negative usage was, and how much positive usage was a sort of "reclaiming" process.
You're missing my point: what I'm criticizing is not the use of "woke" to point generally at those ideological trends, but the use of "woke" to imply that any political fight involving e.g. race is _about whether those trends will prevail_ rather than about e.g. police brutality. To talk as if wokeness was a general marshalling his forces to seize territory, so that we must battle back social justice in general to defeat him, rather than a dysfunctional tendency within social justice. The response to George Floyd's murder was not _about_ wokeness - we saw a lot of wokeness because people were horrified and didn't know what to do, and the bad intellectual currents meant that often got expressed as performative activism.
Sure. I just don't share your interpretation of Scott's post as saying that the George Floyd protests were "about" (or proximately caused by) wokeness in some general sense. If anything I think this, and the linked article in the text, are implying the inverse - that the George Floyd reaction enabled a spike in wokeness.
My speculation is that my interpretation comes from reading Scott's writing on wokeness for a long time, so I already know where he's coming from on the topic. So by extension, I think it's reasonable to assume that most of his audience won't share your interpretation either.
"Were The George Floyd Protests An Example Of Woke Power Or Woke Overreach?" "The usual cancel culture intensified by an order of magnitude." "...rallying a previously flagging social justice movement, allowing them to make a giant show of strength, briefly cow everyone, and intimidate any attempt at change." "...they’d previously bought into the “wokeness is the underdog” narrative, and only then noticed how much power and control it was grabbing for itself."
Your implication that I'm misinterpreting Scott due to being unfamiliar with his writing is both rather irritating and completely wrong: I've read most of what he's written for more than a decade now.
The quoted section reads as implying the inverse of your interpretation to me. As does the relevant section in the linked article. I guess we're at an impasse.
No irritation intended.
I'm a very long time reader here and I largely share Deciphered Stone's interpretation, particularly the sense that the battle against "wokeness" is as performative as the battle for wokeness unless it's grounded in specific concerns. Deciphered Stone seems to be saying some of the protest against police violence engages with real concerns and some of it is more performative. A college campus canceling yoga classes (in the hypothetical) might be a real concern for this university worker, but an abstract battle against wokeness seems ill-conceived to me (and it seems also to DecipheredStones). You may not agree with that view and that's totally fine obviously -- but that seems to be a question one could discuss without dismissing it entirely as already resolved in this setting.
I'm taking as an assumption and maybe shouldn't that you see a distinction between "this broad cultural dynamic we're calling wokeness is destructive and I don't like it" and "is our analysis of it precise or clear enough that our strategies of opposition are likely to be skillful or effective?"
My point is: I don't see this piece as calling for "an abstract battle against wokeness", and I think that's an unfair and uncharitable reading given the context of everything else Scott's written on the subject.
As I see it, the premise of the piece is a discussion between two people who are on the same page regarding certain interrelated trends in academia, and wondering what can be done to resist or reverse these trends. These two people can happily use a vague term like "woke" without fear of misunderstanding, because they share a common set of assumptions about what the problem is and what they're talking about, etc.
I think Scott projected that common set of assumptions onto his audience. And I thought that was reasonable since his audience would have read the (many) other pieces he's written on the subject and therefore know where he was coming from. Moreover, it's an informal piece asking his audience for feedback on a question that came up during a conversation he had - not an argument for any particular stance - so explicitly building up the relevant assumptions in a 4000 word preamble seems excessive (though admittedly not out of character). But I see that plenty of people on the comments read the piece very differently.
So either I'm right and Scott's assumption about his audience was a giant swing and a miss, or I'm wrong and his views on "woke"-related issues have shifted and he's experimenting with some new argument format. Maybe he'll update us later...
Speaking as someone who can't specifically recall Scott's writing on wokeness despite reading a lot of SSC/ASC for years, I'd say that DecipheredStones has a very reasonable take on how an outsider might interpret what's being said if they didn't have certain definitions of "wokeness as a term of art particular to SSC/ASC" easily called up to mind.
"DecipheredStones has a very reasonable take on how an outsider might interpret what's being said"
That's why I assumed he was an outsider, which he found very irritating. The question I'm left with is: Why are so many SSC/ASC insiders pretending to be outsiders for the sake of interpreting this post? That's what strikes me as an unfair thing to do.
But the Floyd protests were not about police brutality. The protests were very explicitly making much more controversial points:
- That the Floyd murder was caused by racism
- That these cases of racism were significant and systemic in law enforcement
- That these situations are to some extent endorsed by society
None of which was evident in the Floyd video, let alone proved by it. And this is why a word like "woke" is needed to describe the ideological fight that goes way beyond the actual case of police brutality. There has to be a different way to distinguish, let's say, fighting to ban the knee tackle that killed Floyd, and fighting to get the point across that the police is systemically racist and therefore profound reforms are needed.
and to add one more:
- That the response to these first three claims should be a massive transfer of wealth wrapped up in the language of "reparations."
I agree that "woke" does not mean "social justice," it means taking a totalitarian movement that wants revolutionary change and dressing it in the clothes of social justice to make it appear like it's on the right side of history, when it is very much on the wrong side.
Needless to say, many individuals who support "woke" causes nevertheless think they are being virtuous and are not bad people, but they have been gulled into giving support and weight to a dangerous set of philosophies.
Well said. Black cops don't have a higher rate of Black homicides in the line of work than other races of cops do. This is the point where people switch from 'racism' to 'systemic racism' and looking at disparate outcomes rather than racial prejudice. American Blacks are policed more because they have, as a group, a murder rate over 4x that of other groups. This results in a lot of understandably unwanted attention to those who are law abiding, including being more likely to encounter problematic cops. But police homicides, specifically, are not driven primarily by some bias on the part of the police even when such bias exists. (This doesn't touch on forms of police harassment which _don't_ escalate to homicide, granted.) Of course, I agree that improved police procedures would disproportionately benefit those who already are more policed.
The great frustration is the role of the legacy media in all of this.
If, in their reporting of black people being killed by cops, they emphasised that, based on interactions with police per capita, you are no more likely to be killed by a cop if you are black than if you are white (or Hispanic), this simple fact would defuse much of the tension around the whole policing/BLM movement.
The fact that they don't (despite consistent academic evidence showing this to be the case) should make us question what they are doing.
Are they really deciding to incite race riots leading to millions of pounds of damage, the destruction of livelihoods and multiple murders just because they think it will help the Democrats at the polls?
Are they really that venal? Or have they drunk the Koolaid and just don't know that the narrative they push so forcibly is false?
I would love to know.
*https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_analysis_tables_figures.pdf
Wokeness includes the tendency to accuse those in favour of academic freedom of being supportive of police brutality, etc. As pro-academic-freedom people, we unfortunately don't get to pick and choose which issues we fight, as the woke will lump us in with the worst views anyway. Thus our problem actually is wokeness itself, as not only does it oppose academic freedom, but it also prevents normal political discourse about the things we actually care about whilst the woke movement is calling the shots on how that discourse works.
As the reproductively viable worker ants used to say, "you don't *join* [anti woke movement], you get thrown in here with the rest of us."
"Social justice" itself is the problem; wokeness is not a dysfunctional tendency, it's the core of a construct which equivocates between individual and communal culpability/responsibility for an equivocation between individual and communal outcomes.
Concerns about legitimate vs. illegitimate uses of violence aren't some scary new force that showed up on college campuses in the last 15 years. Law and political philosophy are ancient subjects. Police departments are not just now developing use-of-force policies at the behest of angry blue-haired college kids. That is not wokeness by any reasonable usage.
What is a new force is high levels of credence given in popular and elite circles to extremely blunt and ill-considered forms of engagement with these questions, like police abolition. Ideas which once marked their proponents as unserious change almost overnight into marking their skeptics as monsters. Not as a result of some kind of rational consideration, but because they fit the mood. That is wokeness in the sense that I mean it, and in the sense that I think Scott means it here.
The problem is that “woke” is *also* used as a shorthand by another far less savory group of people, namely actual racists/transphobes/antisemites, to refer not just to liberal over-reactions, but also to normative statements like “trans people shouldn’t be killed and put through a meat grinder,” or something. Without clarification, many well-meaning people coming from a primarily left-leaning environment will likely assume (in my experience) that someone calling out “wokeness” is part of the latter group, not the former.
"Without clarification, many well-meaning people coming from a primarily left-leaning environment will likely assume (in my experience) that someone calling out “wokeness” is part of the latter group, not the former."
But why would people who've read Scott's other writing on the subject also make that assumption? That's the part that seems unfair to me.
I'm more thinking in terms of outsiders hearing about Scott's work for the first time, seeing a post like this, and immediately being turned off, I guess.
This is unavoidable though. Any word used to describe a pernicious element understood to be on one side of the political spectrum will inevitably become a pejorative for that entire side. One could as easily dismiss criticism of white supremacy, on the personal experience (often so in my experience) that people using that phrase are often doing so disingenuously as a byword anything they disagree with, or criticism of socialism, if one sees the term often used as a byword for even moderately left of center economics. Anyone who insists on interpreting use of such words as indicative of being a bad actor has already removed themselves from the discourse, and probably isn't a fruitful target audience, since any new word one could come up with to describe 'liberal overreaction' (or actual white supremacy or socialism or what have you) will end up suffering the same fate and become overused as a broadly applicable pejorative. That's why IMO there's no substitute imo for seeking clarification, as opposed to just assuming a (often uncharitable) meaning, in the face of ambiguous language.
I will say that I do NOT share his understanding of "woke" if he thinks he's anti-woke.
I certainly think his understanding is messed up, but it's more to do with the "anti" part than the "woke" part. He knows what it is, but he's not really anti-it.
I was also pretty disappointed with this post (I say this as a fan, not as someone to whom Scott owes anything). 'wokeness' is being used as a cultural identifier. The right way to deal with the aspects of the culture you don't like is to argue and fight against those (and probably in priority order), not against the culture in general. Fighting against the culture is fighting against individuals, when individuals are exactly who you are trying to persuade.
"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke". This seems hideously irrational to me. Just because some supporters of an idea do stupid combative things has nothing to do with whether the idea is true or not. Indeed, you'd be hard pressed to find any major idea that didn't have at least some stupid combative supporters. There may be ways to rescue this statement, and if there are, knowing Scott those might be insightful, but this post as it stands feels like a very superficial take.
I am extremely unlikely to be an ally in a fight against 'wokeness', where I might be an ally in e.g. a fight against censorship, so take on censorship not wokeness.
"'For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke'. This seems hideously irrational to me."
Scott is talking about his visceral response to stimuli. He's doing that honestly, in an attempt to determine the best strategic course of action in situations like this. He's pointing out the real human tendency to disagree with people who treat you poorly, or who act badly. He specifically talks about whether the proper strategy in these cases is to publicize bad behavior to evoke this negative response. I don't take it that he's proud of that emotional reaction, but he's not denying it exists either.
Imagine your most hated enemy did the thing you dislike the most, and did it obviously and egregiously. Would you have an emotional reaction to that? Would that reaction cause you to want to respond in some way? That's what Scott is talking about. Woke (or whatever term you want to use) overreach causes reactions. It's true, and it turns people away from the social justice movement. More to Scott's point, if social justice were 100% about identifying injustice and 0% "stupid and unnecessarily combative" it seems obvious to me that there would be more people in favor and less opposed to social justice. It wouldn't be everyone, but it would be a lot closer.
The "woke" can either learn to modulate their views to make them more palatable to a wider audience or deal with whatever negative reactions they provoke. Maybe they want to provoke those negative reactions and their strategy is working perfectly. Scott is correct in what he's saying, and I don't read a value judgement in that statement, just an understanding of how reality works.
Ok, on reading more carefully, I see you're right on this point - the argument is that being seen as combative and stupid diminishes support for your side, so you should avoid being seen as combative and stupid. I'm not convinced this advice generalises to every situation (maybe a resistance organisation during an occupation shouldn't take this advice), but it's probably true in the main.
That's a very concise conclusion; I like where this ended up. "being seen as combative and stupid diminishes support for your side." Can't wait to bust that one out at a party or family gathering.
This strikes me as an attempt to disrupt a growing coalition against a pretty clearly identifiable villainous force in our society. Fighting against intangible concepts like "censorship" isn't very effective politically, but fighting against "censors" themselves is actually feasible. We can't fight a behavior without holding the people doing that behavior accountable.
I'm trying as best I can to express my views and thoughts on the situation, in the hope of persuading others where I'm right and being persuaded where I'm wrong.
How doing that affects a coalition against a villainous force is not a frame I'd even considered until I read your comment, and while I suppose I need to think about it more, it seems on its face pretty paranoid and grandiose.
I might agree with the rest of your post if I knew a bit more about what you actually mean by holding accountable. I think that fighting effectively against censorship would best be done by fighting specific instances of censorship (ideally the ones that were most clearly bad rather than the difficult edge cases), and that probably would involve calling out specific individuals. It wouldn't involve trying to tag a disparate group of people with the label 'censor' and then trying to punish them for it.
It's precisely the edge cases that most need fighting, otherwise the edge moves steadily in the wrong direction.
But we also can't fight a behaviour until we can articulate exactly what that behaviour is and why it's bad.
(Actually we probably can, but we probably shouldn't.)
"Just because some supporters of an idea do stupid combative things has nothing to do with whether the idea is true or not"
The problem is precisely that even if you accept the idea, the policy being proposed on the basis of this idea can be unbelievably stupid. Even if you think police brutality is a problem, "defund the police" is extremely dumb and harmful.
Is it? "Defund the police" is also a catch-all term for a lot of social policies. And it's not just a cover, too, I've seen a lot of people genuinely argue for the steelmanned "we shouldn't be giving the police huge budgets that go into buying surplus (or even brand new) military equipment, while letting social workers make do with scraps".
The US is one of the countries that spends the largest portions if its GDP on police. It's not extremely dumb and harmful to imagine some of that budget could be better allocated on other public services.
"The US is one of the countries that spends the largest portions if its GDP on police."
A quick search suggests this is incorrect: https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-different-democracies
Part of the ambiguity is whether "defund the police" means to spend somewhat less on them or to not have police at all.
Psst. Search for SneerClub. Tell them Blerg sent you.
I would love to do that, but I do not have a reddit account, and I refuse to make one.
"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke". While this sentence absolutely sounds pretty stupid on the surface, I couldn't help empathizing with something about it. While not by any consciously intentional choice of mine, I'll be the first to admit I don't know very many people in protected/victimized classes generally seen as underdogs by the woke community with the few exceptions common to the rationalist community: eg. autistic people and trans-women. When someone suggests a seemingly unnecessary or regressive "woke" policy that may have some benefit for a particular group but at the usual cost of raising law-suits, taxes, regulation etc., I want to know how common the situation being addressed is. The _correct_ thing to do is lots of very careful statistics, but it seems it's never possible to do statistics carefully enough to be beyond reproach and even when you do there will always be problems with how your data was gathered. It's nice when Scott does the statistics for me and writes a blog post about them, but he can't do that for literally every woke claim anyone's ever made. The super duper _incorrect_ thing to do is to take anecdotal evidence from things you hear about happening on the news because news stories are biased towards reporting things which are newsworthy which generally means exactly the opposite of things which are commonplace and so which I care most about. In fact, the fact that there's a news story about a thing might even be evidence that I should update _away from_ believing that thing is commonplace. I often have very little anecdotal evidence (eg. When considering defunding the police, I want to know if police do more harm than good. In my personal experience, police have always been heroes doing unquestionable good. But I live in a low-racism area and don't know very many black people, so those cases that would supposedly be most helped by defunding the police aren't in my realm of experience) so when I _do_ here about something happening to someone I know personally, that actually kind of ends up being a big update for me.
I agree with DecipheredStones on this; it really felt like a lack of nuance in the discussion of George Floyd protests.
In addition, it felt to me that the whole post was written with the perspective that the highest priority for this anonymous academic was to fight against wokeness. If I were this person's colleague I'd be pretty pissed off; you give someone tenure in the hope that they will continue to contribute well to teaching and research, not use it as a platform for a personal crusade. I think this matters even if you buy the 'woeness us the ultimate enemy' perspective, as annoying all your colleagues is likely to make it harder to achieve your goals.
"You give someone tenure in the hope that they will continue to contribute well to teaching and research" is a talking point by the anti-woke, who hold that woke academia defected first and defected hard.
If I had a tenured colleague who used their position to fight against wokeness, I would be extremely grateful.
My guess is your position on this will depend heavily on your own department/academic field.
Hi Joe,
That's a good point; perhaps what we're missing is the context of where this person works. I've probably been implicitly assuming they work somewhere resembling the academic institutions with which I am familiar; but I can see the proposed approach being more reasonable if their institution is much more extreme.
“ the highest priority for this anonymous academic was to fight against wokeness”
That’s a really uncharitable take. The conversation was not “what is the most important priority as a tenured academic” this was “one particular academic came to me and asked how they can promote anti-wokeness effectively now that they didn’t have to fear so much for their livelihood that they suppressed their true beliefs”.
Maybe omitting 'it felt to me that' from your quote could also be seen as an uncharitable take?
But more seriously, the fact that the impact of the person's actions on their work and colleagues was (AFAIR) not discussed as a serious factor seemed a bit off to me. I agree that was not the question asked (at least as far as it was presented to us), but I think part of giving good advice is to discuss possible unforeseen/unintended side effects of proposed actions, even if not strictly relevant to the immediate goal under discussion.
I thought that the fact we were discussing your opinion/feeling of this academic’s priorities was pretty clear in both our statements. Your opinion/feeling is what I found uncharitable.
What about the unforeseen side effects of this person not speaking up? Clearly, they believe that their own ability to be honest about their beliefs has been suppressed to this point, and furthermore they believe that others with less “cover” are in the same boat and need an advocate.
I think there is an underlying assumption that the purpose of teaching and research has been damaged by one side pre-emptively excluding the other side from discussion. If having an academic opinion that's different from the rest of your colleagues is enough reason for you to not be able to speak, then the first order of priority must be to regain the ability to have discourse. If your department has taken a stance that specifically precludes you from sharing your opinion, there isn't much else that you can do. They are only permitting you to share their perspective, otherwise, which means you are doing no research or teaching of what you actually think is true.
When it was the liberal left that was excluded from having opinions in college, they also pushed for free speech and an opening of dialogue, and most of society generally agrees that was appropriate (in hindsight at least).
I think you need a bit of uncensored history. Social groups, including universities, have always put controls on what can be said. The degree and nature of those constraints changes from time to time. "Academic freedom" is never absolute. It needs to be relatively greater, but that's a different point. It also needs to be sufficiently constrained that it doesn't damage the institution providing it. Classes on atheism at a Catholic University need to be done very carefully.
I often think the constraints are unreasonable, but I'm quite aware that I don't know the entire context. (Also, it's been quite a long time since I was associated with a university.)
Does your local university support classes teaching the flat earth theory? If not, shouldn't that constraint be challenged? And the Bible clearly indicates that Pi == 3.
Not all opinions deserve to be heard. There's a real problem in deciding which should be allowed, but it's not a "yes or no" question.
When I have raised these kinds of opinions, people younger than me have said that things have changed a huge amount from the days I was in college. Their contention is that the limits on what's allowable on campus and in some workplaces has gotten quite a bit narrower, that the dominant ideology is more dominant than prior dominant ideologies (we can maybe name some exceptions to this -- McCarthyism, etc) and the consequences for not following it more costly. Declining tenure-track jobs and declining unionization rates in the rest of the economy fuel this insecurity because there are fewer job protections for someone who steps out of line.
It's also fueled by the country being more divided. And by "information silos", where people are fed curated opinions as if they were facts. I suspect that just about everything that consumes time and attention feeds into this tendency, as it leaves less thought available for other things.
That said, whenever people feel uncertain about their future, they tend to look for simple answers. And they don't want those answers questioned. And on-line posts are available for inspection by nearly anyone...including not only "human relations personnel", but folks trying to put the company/university into the news in a way the organization may not like.
So, yes, that's probably true. And now that you bring it up, expected. This is also to be expected when the population is aging, so that's another thing pushing in the same direction. But public perception of a University/Company can be very important in whether that organization even survives.
I don't know what the appropriate balance is. I'm thankful I've never needed to decide. But it may not be the same now as it was a decade ago.
I think the contention would be that we're well past the point where the constraints exclude positions on that are reasonable and relevant enough to warrant inclusion (or that the standard of reasonability applied to admitting ideas on the right into the Overton window is much more stringent that the standard for ideas on the left). I think that's a premise of this whole discussion. Obviously, to someone who believes conservative views marginalized in academia today are akin to flat-earth theory, well, the whole conversation is moot.
Which conservative views? Some of them are reasonable and some aren't. Deciding which on the basis of political slant is ... unreasonable.
I thought of it more as an example of an unrelated extreme, not a direct correlation...
The issue here is that many academics on the left are explicitly turning their position into a vocal crusade to support a specific political point of view. There are increasingly changes in tenure and hiring requirements to have various litmus tests for political orientation and to support viewing activism alongside teaching and scholarship for hiring and promotion.
The extent to which this shift has happened already varies by school and department, but there are already major pushes to "decolonize" the hard sciences in the name of "equity" and such by pushing for less rigor and more of a focus on "addressing equity issues" in scholarship and teaching. See, for instance, requirements that scientific grant proposals address DEI issues or how academic journals are now running editorials soaked in DEI diction.
For perhaps the best encapsulation of recent efforts to fundamentally change the orientation away from teaching and research, see UMass-Boston's proposed recent change to its mission from a teaching/research institution to "an anti-racist and health-promoting public research institution" where "Diversity, equity, shared governance, and expansive notions of excellence are core institutional values" and "Climate, environmental, and racial justice align with sustainable economic and planning decisions." None of this language is unusual and it seems like the future direction for many institutions of higher education.
"....expansive notions of excellence" - I would love to hear how they unpack that!
Unfortunately, we're in a figure-ground inversion situation where what you see as "ridiculous gestures" for me are the main event, and their scale and chilling effect on free speech and free thought is terrifying.
Otherwise, you raise a lot of good points.
This is a more eloquent version of what I came here to say; yes, there's some overreach and some not-actually-helpful solutions being pushed here, but people are rightfully upset about police brutality and how awful (and ineffective) prisons are.
Yes, "decolonial mathematics" is ridiculous, but getting a wider range of voices and experiences in literature and history is not.
A real life example: when I was in high school in Eastern Canada in the early 2000s, my history textbook had literally a single page on pre-colonial history, in which a generic Native American was presented as a sort of state-of-nature being who crossed over from the Bering land bridge and anyway then white people showed up and that was great. A curious reader may at this point wonder what happened to said Native Americans afterwards, but they are never mentioned again.
That is bad! That's a bad education! More recently a more woke set of history teachers have come in and moved to recognise the specific groups that were in the region, their history (to the extent possible without written records), the ways in which they were nearly wiped out by disease, displacement, and violence, and the continuing complexity of making our current society work in view of continued poverty on reservations and the scarring effects of residential schools.
When we argue against wokeness, we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater; there have been some important wins.
“ yes, there's some overreach and some not-actually-helpful solutions being pushed here, but people are rightfully upset about police brutality and how awful (and ineffective) prisons are.
Yes, "decolonial mathematics" is ridiculous, but getting a wider range of voices and experiences in literature and history is not.”
This is the motte-and-bailey. The motte is “a wider range of voices”, the bailey is “math is racist, objectivity is white supremacy…. and we need to cancel the hell out of anyone who doesn’t toe our line on that because disagreement is violence that makes LGBTQ+ POCs unsafe”.
I don’t get the impression that either Scott or his interlocutor are opposed to the motte position.
One person's motte and bailey is another's Weak Men are Superweapons. It's important to be able to object to the more egregious versions without throwing the baby out with the bathwater and tarring with too broad a brush.
> One person's motte and bailey is another's Weak Men are Superweapons.
This is a punchy way to sum up a recurring problem, thanks. I'll be stealing this phrasing
I'm now trying to imagine what situation I'd be throwing out bathwater and tarring something at the same time...
Being thoughtful and explicit in making that kind of distinction seems to me a hugely important part of the way forward, which is why it seems unhelpful to me to talk about strategy at the generic level of "fighting wokeness" as a general ambition. People right now mean too many different things when they say "wokeness is bad, let's fight wokeness" and that imprecision I think matters a lot when it comes to plotting strategy.
Michael's comment just below is a good example of a very broad interpretation of wokeness that carries many implications for people who inhabit what's being called the motte position above.
Joe's comments above are another example in the sense of someone who feels that our shared understanding of what's motte and what's bailey is so obviously settled that there's no need to even talk about it.
Scott's post seems to come at the question of "what can I do about wokeness now that I have tenure?" at a level of abstraction that is so general that it also doesn't clarify what's motte and what's bailey nor that it would help people clarify what might be priorities in a strategy aimed at changing current condtions.
Motte and bailey (I don't like that term - surely it should be keep and bailey - you retreat to the keep not the motte) doesn't really apply here. You're not talking to someone who is saying decolonial mathematics is good, and then when it's attacked, retreating to the position of 'wider range of voices'. You're talking to someone who believes 'wider range of voices' is a win and an example of something 'wokeness' has achieved that is positive for society. They are explicitly saying that they don't think 'decolonial mathematics' is a good thing. I expect that I could take any position of yours or anyone else's, construct a ridiculous 'bailey' around it (or find someone already arguing for such a thing), and then accuse you of motte-and-bailey. It wouldn't be fair.
The whole issue here is lumping everything together as 'wokeness' when the term isn't clearly defined, and according to a lot of people includes a lot of good stuff, even if there are extremists who go too far. Well, extremists always go too far, but fighting against 'wokeness' is going to place you against all those people who think wokeness has achieved good stuff. Fighting against 'decolonial mathematics' would be a much better option, because you'll gain support from people who otherwise might seem 'woke'.
I think the narrative that "yeah, a few crazies are talking about decolonizing math, but most of us actually just want reasonable change" is disingenuous given the outsized influence that concepts on the level of "decolonizing math" have within extremely influential institutions. Universities, government agencies, media companies, and tech platforms all have a tremendously disproportionate amount of these extremists. So I don't think the focus on them is undue.
I think you're probably overweighting a really quite small number of voices which use outrage to get free amplification, but it's an empirical matter and I accept I may be wrong. I don't think it makes a tonne of difference to what the right strategy should be.
Unless we're talking about a truly extreme split like 98% 'crazies' and 2% 'reasonable change', then the strategy of trying to split the 'crazies' from the 'reasonable change' group by exploiting the differences of opinion on key topics should still have a significant effect.
Anything that persists in lumping it all together and attacking 'wokeness' as an identity means that you're solidifying the group. People say that it was really the USA invasion in 1812 that created the Canadian national identity.
That hasn't been my experience, but I don't have anything like a comprehensive view on any data on it.
Serious question: What do you propose I call my position outlined above? I read the Freddie de Boer post on the topic and was admittedly somewhat surprised by it (but I'm not familiar with the American context); I know quite a few people who are comfortable describing that set of beliefs as woke, and although I'm a relative 'moderate' on the scale, I wouldn't be offended if someone called me 'woke'; I wouldn't immediately assume they were implying that I thought physics was a tool of the patriarchy.
"the outsized influence that concepts on the level of "decolonizing math" have within extremely influential institutions"
Can you source that claim? I haven't heard any reports of schools switching to a "decolonizing math" curriculum on any serious scale, just anecdotes.
I *have* heard reports of laws being passed in conservative US states being passed to ban "critical theory", with the implicit goal being to discourage talking about slavery or segregation in history classes.
Can you source that claim?
With the example of Canada, the motte is "we need to teach Canadians a better version of their country's history" and the bailey is "we teach a version of history that casts indigenous peoples as helpless victims and inculcates a sense of guilt and shame in old stock white Canadians in order to facilitate a transfer of resources from the latter to the former."
Do you think any significant number of people would actually assent to that second statement as you have presented it, or are you strawmanning a more nuanced position?
People would probably not assent to it because he phrased it in a negative way, but a lot of people probably would assent to something that used more positive vocabulary but was substantively the same.
Then the charitable thing to do is to try to understand why they think the positive vocabulary version is different to the negative vocabulary version. Maybe they're being irrational, or maybe they do have some kind of answer.
I don't expect people who part of the woke coalition to agree, no. In their conception, this is simply social justice, fairness, a desirable end or outcome, etc. But is that not at least part of the expected outcome? Are guilt, shame, and reparations not part of the plan? Consider the following:
In the “Act” section of the training program, AT&T encourages employees to participate in a “21-Day Racial Equity Habit Challenge” that relies on the concepts of “whiteness,” “white privilege,” and “white supremacy.” The program instructs AT&T employees to “do one action [per day for 21 days] to further [their] understanding of power, privilege, supremacy, oppression, and equity.” The challenge begins with a series of lessons on “whiteness,” which claims, among other things, that “white supremacy [is] baked into our country’s foundation,” that “Whiteness is one of the biggest and most long-running scams ever perpetrated,” and that the “weaponization of whiteness” creates a “constant barrage of harm” for minorities. The 21-Day Challenge also directs employees to articles and videos promoting fashionable left-wing causes, including “reparations,” “defund police,” and “trans activism,”
https://www.city-journal.org/att-racial-reeducation-program
"Are guilt, shame, and reparations not part of the plan? "
No, no, and yes.
At least in my DEI trainings, there's never any shame or guilt applied. Understanding white privilege (or male privilege) or whatever is about better understanding the world and better understanding the lives of people who are different from us. It's not about making people feel bad, just more aware of things that are otherwise outside their bubble.
They're certainly doing something by continually calling white Canadians "settlers".
I think you are mischaracterizing the bailey. Having been shunted through sjw institution after sjw institution for my entire life, not a single teacher was interested in making me guilty/ashamed as a way to motivate reparations. They certainly painted indigenous people as victims, but hey, they don't have to try very hard because their case is very plausible (see: The Clearing of the Plains). And sjws don't think in terms like "old stock Canadians" -- old stock Canadians do.
Your description doesn't mention race at all. And that's reasonable in one sense -- there's not the least skerrick of evidence that George Floyd's race was a factor in what happened to him.
And yet the conversation around it became immediately and irrevocably racialised. If it had been a cultural moment about police brutality, then reasonable people couldn't possibly have objected. But it became a cultural moment about police brutality against black people and black people and only black people, to the point where somehow "all lives matter" was described as a white supremacist slogan. 2020 was a crazy time.
And I think this is what "wokeness" is about -- turning every issue, no matter how sensible, into an opportunity for some kind of race war or similar. Individuals don't matter, only the war between Designated Oppressor Groups and Designated Oppressed Groups.
Wokeness isn't about race, it's about collectivism. And in that sense it's just the latest rebranding of collectivism, which has been known by so many names.
Why - well, literally everyone I know who is woke is also a feminist, and believes just as strongly that women are an oppressed minority as much as black people are. And I'm sure if I bothered to probe I'd discover a whole bunch of other groups they think are oppressed. Probably it's just whoever isn't a straight white man. By default, that is, but it's just a default and now it's Ukrainians even though that's a bunch of white people who are .. um .. not exactly famous for their love of gay rights. But it's an oppressed group so the woke are now totally focused on Ukrainians=awesome, Russians=evil even though there's no racial component to that, they're both groups of white Christians more or less.
Th one thing that remains consistent is their refusal to reason in terms of individuals. People are not their own minds but rather ants who belong to whatever quasi-arbitrary group they got dumped into today. The reason "all lives matter" was so inflammatory to collectivists, the reason it caused such massive meltdowns, is that it's a literal and direct repudiation of their most deepest ideological commitment. It's a statement that you need to consider the individual when making judgements and not try to sort society into ranked groups. Which they cannot handle, largely I think because that makes virtue signalling impossible (saying "I support John Smith" is worthless if nobody knows who John Smith is), and the need to virtue signal is perhaps an inherent part of human nature. In the past it was done by wearing cross necklaces and turning up to church on Sunday, saying "praise be" and so on. Today it's done by tweeting about how much you support group X.
Long term the solution to wokeness, feminism, racism, communism, Islamism, piousness and so on is individualism. Only when people focus on the unique properties of the people they actually know, and only when people are comfortable with their own morality, does the need to constantly associate with "oppressed" groups go away.
Michael, it sounds to me like you are dismissing the impact that systems can have on individuals. Ignoring for a moment the completely irrelevant mention of Ukraine. If a system produces racially skewed results saying "it's just the choices individuals made" is completely ignoring the possibility of a flawed system. If a flawed system did exist, hyperfocusing on individualism would not be able to fix it. We can observe that different groups of people have different distributions of outcomes in a way that does not seem due to the inherent characteristics of each of the groups, this suggests some other factor (systems) ought to be changed to be more equitable.
Your aside about Ukraine is ridiculous; people support Ukraine because an autocracy (Russia) decided to invade a sovereign democracy on a whim. Most people are against needless wars, and Russia is the obvious aggressor, so people support Ukraine's effort to not be annexed. Attempting to frame this as "white people vs white people why do people think it's oppression" is ignoring everything important about the conflict.
"We can observe that different groups of people have different distributions of outcomes in a way that does not seem due to the inherent characteristics of each of the groups, this suggests some other factor (systems) ought to be changed to be more equitable."
What makes you think that if it's not due to the inherent characteristics of a group, then it must be due to "systems"? Don't groups have other non-inherent characteristics?
I'd also challenge the assumption that inequitable outcomes should inherently be challenged.
If most people, especially Americans were actually against pointless wars the world would look very different.
The mention of Ukraine was related to this event:
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1500192254887022593
"University of Chicago students circulating a letter calling for the cancellation of John Mearsheimer over “Putinism,” “anti-Ukrainian ideology,” and spreading Russian disinformation like that there was a coup in 2014 and it included fascists."
You can swap the words Putinism, Ukrainian, Russian and the date in that tweet for all kinds of different topics in recent years. Not a month goes by without college students trying to cancel people for something they said years ago about some new battle between two groups, identified as oppressed and oppressors.
My point is not to pass judgement on all these running battles over speech and western norms. My point is to say that linking them together is not irrelevant, that in fact, these are all different facets of the same underlying ideology.
"Why - well, literally everyone I know who is woke is also a feminist, and believes just as strongly that women are an oppressed minority as much as black people are."
Does literally no one you know who is woke, know how to count? Women cannot be an "oppressed minority", because women are the majority.
Which is to say, there's a tendency among a certain segment of the population that I'll get yelled at if I try to apply any name to, to try and shoehorn every possible cause into a single simplistic narrative - "[X] is an Oppressed Minority; all of the power structures of our society were historically established by the White Male Majority to oppress [X], and it is now imperative that we remodel society to rectify this injustice". And that never really fits if you look at it closely enough, but even when it is trivially obvious by googling the numbers that it doesn't fit, never mind the facts, women are an "oppressed minority".
Also, words mean whatever the Woke chose them to mean, and can mean many different things as required. The question, as Humpty Dumpty properly noted, is who is to be master - that's all.
Your point about numeration is reasonable, but if what's being counted is the ability to exert power...
Actually, even there a small group of women exert an unreasonable amount of power. But they usually delegate the control of that power to a white male.
HOWEVER
When most folks (in the US) are observing the power structures around them, they notice that most of that power is exerted by white men. Minority is inappropriate to use to designate women, but it was, I think, chosen by analogy to various other oppressed groups, who numerically are minorities. (Everyone is a minority if you divide things properly. E.g. white women are less than half the population. Being a stickler over definitions isn't too helpful here.)
Now if you want to claim that women aren't oppressed, then you would be making a real claim...though one that's hard to defend. It would be much easier to defend that this is biologically inherent.
Why is it hard to defend? One can argue that everyone is oppressed in one way or another, but I assume that the relevant claims is that women are more oppressed than men.
Measuring how well off people are is hard, since there are lots of relevant variables, and many women are married to men and pooling income. But one obvious measure is how long people live and women live significantly longer than men.
I think you're wrong about the "all lives matter" thing. "Black Lives Matter" means "black lives matter *as well* and black people are being killed significantly more often than white people so can we do something about it" not "*only* black lives matter". "All Lives Matter" was the response of people didn't want to engage with the actual meaning of "Black Lives Matter", and some of the people saying it were definitely white supremacists.
"Defund the Police" was a dumb slogan from the start, there's a lot of dumb wokeness about, but "Black Lives Matter" is fine.
But no, African Americans aren't being killed more often, and to a first approximation, the outrage machine doesn't care when Caucasians die at the hands of police.
BLM explicitly focuses on deaths of African Americans, and doesn't care about injustices in general. It is a racially motivated power play.
Looking at the statistics here (https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/) and here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States) - in 2020 black people made up 12% of the population but accounted for ~24% of the deaths by police shooting, compared to 57% pop. / 45% police deaths to whites.
I can't speak for the outrage machine but it seems that if you are black you are *more likely* to be killed by the police (in the United States), and that is something to be concerned about.
Is every death at the hands of police unjustified? Should police never use lethal force? Legitimate question here, because if they sometimes should, then merely discussing the per capita rate of death at hands of police is woefully under specified. Surely we should be looking at unjustified deaths at the hands of police.
I'm sure some are justified but it's certainly less than ideal having any people killed by police
Maybe cops shouldn't have guns. https://youtu.be/m6L6NojS19Y
Going simply by those sorts of numbers also shows how sexist the police are, as they kill (and arrest) men at a rate far exceeding the population share of men in the country. If police weren't so sexist, they wouldn't single out men for law enforcement actions.
In the US, African Americans commit violent crimes at a rate far in excess of other racial groups, even when accounting for poverty. This difference drives differences in police encounters, some of which go bad. Which is a tragedy, but the lives of the people murdered by common criminals and thugs also matter - not just those of the criminals and thugs.
That's what All Lives Matter means to me - that we don't dismiss a death because of race or criminal activity, but we don't ignore that living in a crime ridden neighborhood hurts people more than cops do.
I think it's quite possible to want both less violent crime and less killing of people by police; it's not one or the other. The problem with "All Lives Matter" is that everyone who isn't nuts already agrees with it; it's a slogan that gets used to change the topic.
I don't know what to do about black people being disproportionately involved in violent crime; I don't think looting the Apple store is a good response to George Floyd's murder either. I'm not convinced institutional racism is as prevalent as many claim it is. There's a whole gordian knot here to unpick, but "All Lives Matter" is a disingenuous response.
Have you not ever once run into "FBI crime statistics Guy" on the internet?
I'll be that guy in this instance. That 12% of the population is 24% of the deaths by police shooting but ~50% of the murderers and way above 24% for all the other violent crimes. The entire disparity in shootings can probably be explained by disparity in criminality. And the racial disparities in arrests for violent crimes almost perfectly mirror the racial disparities in offenders reported by victims in the National Crime Victimization Survey, so it's actual criminality and not just police bias.
Though BLM focused on the deaths of African-Americans, I think if you talked to the protesters themselves, most would agree that "injustice in general" is also bad.
Similarly, if you went to a 5k walk to raise money to cure Alzheimer's or whatever, sure the walk itself focuses on Alzheimer's, but most participants would agree that diseases in general are bad.
If I said "fuck cancer", and someone else was like "that's a ridiculous thing to say - fuck ALL diseases", I would ... be confused.
Similarly, imagine some people went to protest the silencing of conservative voices on collage campuses, with a slogan like "conservative voices matter". You could argue that it was a strategic mistake of them to focus on conservative voices rather than censorship in general, but I don't think it would be fair to hold that against them too much. They're highlighting a perceived real trend/problem, which is that conservative voices are disproportionately discriminated against in college settings (I don't know if that's true or not, but if the protesters think it's true then they *should* protest). Plus, I'm sure many of those same students probably *do* care about censorship in general and maybe have even attended generic protests against censorship.
I suspect the *real* point of disagreement here is whether black people are discriminated against by the police/justice system in general. But even if they *aren't*, I really don't see why that means the protesters are acting in bad faith. If they believe in that premise, then why shouldn't they protest it? And since they're protesting racial discrimination (much like the college protesters above would be protesting political discrimination), it makes sense to make it about race. And I'm sure many BLM protesters *have* attended generic anti-police-brutality protests, etc.
In short, I'm not sure how you conclude that the protests must be "a racially motivated power play", unless via your factual disagreement with the idea that the police/justice system discriminate against black people. But even if you end up to be right on that factual front, I *still* don't see how that proves the protesters are acting in bad faith.
You are right that people can have different priorities for action, and that having one focus doesn't mean that other priorities are somehow wrong headed. But that's not what BLM protesters, supporters, and common man-in-the-conference room said and did - the BLM line was that the only victim group worthy of mention was African Americans, and that to disagree wasn't just having a different focus, but being oppressive, racist and evil ones ownself - for pointing out that other people were also suffering.
Lee Fang interviewed a black man participating in a BLM march who said that ALL black lives matter, including relatives of his who had been shot by civilian criminals. For this "platforming" Lee was accused of racism.
Our funding for diseases is also skewed. Massive amounts of money for breast cancer & AIDS relative to other diseases that kill lots of people (which is partly explainable via many deaths occurring among the elderly that we don't think of as great tragedies, and other diseases being associated with bad lifestyle choices although AIDS is exempt). Funding is skewed in favor of women over men. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/08/government-medical-research-spending-favors-women.html
> black people are being killed significantly more often than white people
They aren't. From 2015 to April 2021, almost twice as many whites (2884) as blacks (1497) were fatally shot by police. They are killed more proportionally, but that is not the assertion made.
You could also try to look at the numbers and see just how many were unarmed and not attacking officers or a member of the public. Let me know what you find.
Fair point; I should have said 'proportionally more', which is what I was getting at. Looking at unarmed vs armed is a bit beyond a lunchtime Google search whilst catching up on blogs, so I'll pass on that for now, but it is a good point.
Proportionally more relative to their population, sure. But men are killed vastly more relative to their population. Are police sexist?
The reason he suggested that is if you exclude people who are armed or attacking officers, the US numbers drop to something that on the scale of a country is miniscule - in the dozens, iirc, not thousands or tens of thousands.
There have been many reports, some of which have been essentially proven true, of police fabricating evidence that a victim of their violence was threatening them, or even that they had a gun or knife. So I wouldn't trust the statistics. CYA is a long tradition, and not just among police. Lying to do so is less common, but still not unusual.
I'm sure it does happen. I'm sure most of us would stretch the truth somewhat if we'd just made a major screw-up and were faced with serious consequences.
But does it happen more often in cases involving one race than another?
Murder is probably the best recorded crime and murder is mostly intraracial, so race of victims may be the closest we have to an objective measure of how violent crime rates vary with race.
There was a definite messaging breakdown. "Black Lives Matter Too" could have solved the issue, and then only the actual white supremacists would have been saying "all lives matter." As it was, there was a significant number of people who misheard/misunderstood the BLM message. I am not sure that the misunderstanding was not intentional (on both sides), or that many preferred the fight and ability to write off anyone who said "all lives matter" rather than trying to solve the misunderstanding.
The problem with "Black Lives Matter Too" is that it's not a three-word slogan; the only four-word slogan with traction is "Make America Great Again" and that's a definite outlier. "Yes We Can" and "Take Back Control"; that's the kind of thing you want. It's like band names. (See also http://brexfest.eu)
That seems like a silly reason to allow a major misunderstanding to persist. I think it much more logical that people on both sides were happy to let the misunderstanding continue in order to advance their position. You even wrote that the BLM position is "Black Lives Matter *As Well*" which clearly takes more than three words. You were speaking for clarity, so I suspect you are aware of that nuance and the need for it.
When "BLM" first became a slogan, I heard a lot of truly genuine confusion about why it was specific and not general. The resulting "[No, or Not just, but] All Lives Matter" was seen as a genuine statement of a more correct stance. The fear was that the statement "BLM" was meant to be exclusionary. It's not hard to find a few scattered examples where that would be true, which some very disreputable people were happy to share around. So we have some confusion, the best way to handle would be to do what you did, clarify that you mean "As well" and solve the problem.
The actual reaction was to denounce anyone saying anything different as a white supremacist and thoroughly destroying what remaining discourse was possible. There were two times where the BLM side could have ended the confusion, one of which I don't believe was of any fault (the first slogan, which I agree was shorter to make it more slogan-friendly). The second chance, where they seek to clarify their stance in the face of opposition, was a missed opportunity. I'm not sure I assign blame to most who did it, who probably also felt genuinely threatened by someone taking what (in their mind) was a perfectly reasonable statement about their lives *also* mattering and rejecting it by interposing their own statement in its place.
>a few scattered examples
Is this the modern equivalent of "it's just a few college kids"?
The "scattered examples" included major media and anyone who didn't believe in the "scattered examples" was powerless to speak against them.
Or they could have gone with "End Police Brutality", which would be three words and wouldn't be racially divisive. It would be something that pretty much everyone can agree on.
But an "end police brutality" protest movement would have got a modest turnout, some approving nods from everyone, and then vanished after a weekend. If you want a _major_ protest movement then you need to start a race war.
The phrase "Black Lives Matter" does not actually imply that any other life matters, whereas "All Lives Matter" must include black lives (and thus, as Bryan Caplan said in a post I can no longer find, people who say the latter should also say the former). That being said, if people in authority were actually looking at a metric of the expected lifespan of African-Americans that would be closer to utilitarianism/consequentialism than what we have now, where lots of people can die from all sorts of causes and nobody does much about it.
There is a very large body of evidence that police misconduct and subsequent impunity disproportionately affects black Americans and because of that, individual instances of police misconduct directed at black Americans can very quickly be seen in terms of symbolism for the greater societal problem. Floyd resulted in an explosion of protest related to this.
"Black Lives Matter" is a slogan meant to express that black American's lives have value and are deserving of basic respect and is primarily used as a slogan to criticize racial discriminations against blacks, especially as it relates to criminal justice issues. Retorting "all lives matter" in practice and usually in intent is an effort to dismiss concerns about societal racial discrimination and redirect attention away from it. It was a favored slogan by racists and people using it shouldn't be surprised when people raise their eyebrows at the people they are associating with by choice.
This is a great example of how "wokeness" just ends up being, "positions on any cultural issue, especially as it relates to identity, I personally dislike." Here "wokeness" includes seeing the murder of George Floyd in a racial context.
"
Any serious attempt to deal with the genuine problem of dysfunctional "woke" ideology has to deal with the fact that a lot of people are trying to create a better world, and you don't _want_ to push back against that - you want to push the discourse sideways, so that that effort is directed in a healthier way.
"
So to me the big problem with wokeness or whatever we want to call it, is that they specifically resist this. Any attempt to disagree on the means is shouted down as a disagreement on the ends; disagreements about solutions are portrayed as disagreements about the existence of problems; challenging their narrative at all from start to finish just gets you labeled as a big racist enemy.
There is certainly a lot of this shouting down going on, and maybe this is what's best referred to as "wokeness" -- but we might as easily call it epistemic closure or "splitting" as we like to say in psychology, and it shows up in various forms in the whole history of all social movements. I think there's a case to be made that we're experiencing it at somewhat historically unusual levels (though not unique across all of history).
At the same time, out in the real world, at school board meetings and on campuses and in workplaces there are more substantial conversations happening sometimes too. If this textbook is unacceptable, what one shall we use? Is this yoga class in fact reducible to cultural appropriation or can we explore anyone else's cultural practices with respect? Are we renaming our school/bridge/building and if so, why and to what? All those practical negotiations are happening also. They are contentious but that's the way it works.
In schools around here, teachers and school administrators for months have been receiving death threats for upholding state-mandated mask requirements (now in the process of being lifted). It seems like actors on all sides are capable of counterproductive epistemic closure but that we lose a lot of analytical capacity if we reduce efforts for change to nothing more than shouting people down.
Many aspects of wokeness are vaguely defined in rhetoric. It's only you get down to allocating budgets and HR decisions that you start to see what they mean in practice, which are often blatantly biased, ineffective or even counter-productive at achieving their stated goals, and a waste of money for everyone but the ever-expanding DEI staff. But any opposition or criticism of them marks you with suspicion and immediately devalues any of your ideas (both then and in later discussions).
It's also just giving up a ton of ground if you admit this, and in admitting it you are reinforcing something that's an objective, obvious lie. They don't improve shit, or even try to; they go around bashing heads, taking power, and hurting outgroups. Why is this the one place we feel like we should swallow clearly false marketing slogans?
I largely agree with this, but I also think there is a performative dimension, and further that the performance is often calibrated -- consciously or subconsciously -- to *avoid* change, by spamming the conversation with professions of supporting change.
I know plenty of people on the left who were involved with meaningful, concrete social justice work for many years before 2020. I did some of this work too, in fits and starts. But the conversation and norms really did shift in 2020. People who had blocked efforts at work to address equity and discrimination concerns suddenly embraced them emphatically, at least on the surface; but the actual forms of this work were implemented in thin ways that steered attention away from what people in their organization had been trying to change.
I can't find the reference now, but I was struck by a particular example: a female professor whose conversation with another professor got unexpectedly spread online, because she said that Black students in her classes seemed to struggle more. I imagine there are huge numbers of progressives, of all races, who agree that that is an unfortunate and unjust trend, and believe it is caused by systemic racism denying those students an empowering education before college. But they do agree that it is a real phenomenon, and in fact that denying it would paper over the depth of racism and the need for change.
But you can guess what actually happened: this professor was pilloried, almost no progressives spoke up to say they agreed with her (Matt Yglesias was a prominent exception), and in general a woke performance of outrage not only prevailed but completely steamrolled any conversation about actual reform in racial justice to invest more fairly and effectively in Black students. IIRC, the professor was suspended.
In fact, I'd go even farther, and say that it's *because* what this professor said made so much sense that the professions of outrage were so emphatic. An edge case that you declare your loyalty against is more powerful than an obvious case. This echoes what Scott has written about edge cases going viral.
So even though I'm well to the left of Scott and also find the use of "woke" as a sweeping term obnoxious, I agree that there is a gap, in reality, between those whose positions and work involve left-oriented social justice critique, and an illusory consensus machine that finds shaky hot-button cases and makes them into absolutist shibboleths.
On the contrary, I’m pretty sure Scott is using wokeness deliberately to exclude what might be called “liberal Social Justice” from this particular discussion. Not all Social Justice is “woke”, so that’s why Scott says “woke” here.
Defunding the police is not in any way creating a better world, and people who advocate that should be opposed forcefully.
Note that this wasn’t even mentioned in the post. It was about DEI initiatives and cancel culture and pretending that they’re done by the same people.
But DEI initiatives are things that are done by conservative bureaucratic organizations, while cancel culture is something that is done by radical populist mobs. And "critical race studies" is something that is done by academics in theoretical positions. There is relatively little overlap among these things, even though the presence of one often feeds into the other.
Just as with the original "political correctness" wars of the '90s, where "anti-PC" just became its own form of political correctness that lumped together a million disparate things, it seems to me that anti-wokeness is just about creating its own kind of wokeness, where you prepare anti-DEI initiatives and defund certain institutions and raise cancellation mobs against the woke, and doesn't actually do anything useful when you consider it as a unified movement.
I agree with this take. It's worth remembering that the US really does have a long history of racism and overt racial discrimination. Jim Crow laws were only abolished 58 years ago! There are still lots of people alive today who were legally banned from accessing quality schools, good places to live, and the opportunity to vote in elections (among much more) because of the color of their skin. Of course that's going to have long-lasting impacts. And what of their kids? And grandkids? What of the 157 congresspeople who voted against the Civil Rights Act, did they stop holding racist views in their personal lives as soon as the act passed? And what of the voters who elected those congresspeople, did they stop supporting racism just because of the law?
I think there are specific places where the modern "woke" movement gets stuff wrong, and it's useful to try and push back against that. But most "anti-woke" people seem to end up forgetting the part where racism is bad actually. I think that's especially likely to be a problem with berserker strategy. If you start picking lots of big public fights with "woke" people, even if those fights are on specific issues where the "woke" position is probably counterproductive to the movement's goals, you'll end up with lots of people on the left saying "wow this guy is kind of a jerk" and lots of people on the right fawning over you. I think it's easy then to get pulled into an increasingly right-wing echo chamber.
I think there are a few examples of people who've taken publicly "anti-woke" positions while not forgetting that racism is bad. Matthew Yglesias and German Lopez are two that come to mind. I think it's worth reading their work and understanding how they position themselves.
Average household net worth for black americans is 15-20% of the average household wealth of white Americans https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/wealth-inequality-and-the-racial-wealth-gap-20211022.htm. One third of black men have a felony conviction https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13524-017-0611-1?author_access_token=jXD6ohexE1c1ur2WRWhpkfe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4uMYrYNkMZx9I1WjnbPAWM-g13AQlmw4x8-VaL1oT3wS1z7bR6McpJuw6uJspKuwHQtTd1alIFBkHajdo4QVT1CPUCL7C_5xQhC8-ZXzjA6g%3D%3D. These and other stats show massive gaps in outcomes between black and white Americans that greatly impact a large number of people’s lives. And many of the older people counted in these statistics were legally denied access to opportunities because of the color of their skin. And many of the younger people counted in these statistics had to deal with conditions created by opportunities having been denied to their parents. Moreover, there are ways in which this historical inequality of opportunity has led to black Americans being structurally held back. For example, having less money (and historical overt housing discrimination) means being forced to live in less desirable and more polluted neighborhoods (see https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s13524-017-0611-1?author_access_token=jXD6ohexE1c1ur2WRWhpkfe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4uMYrYNkMZx9I1WjnbPAWM-g13AQlmw4x8-VaL1oT3wS1z7bR6McpJuw6uJspKuwHQtTd1alIFBkHajdo4QVT1CPUCL7C_5xQhC8-ZXzjA6g%3D%3D for info on differences in exposure to pollution). Pollution exposure as a kid has lifelong impacts on development, further propagating the impacts of historical discrimination forward in time.
And that doesn’t even begin to account for the impacts of continued prejudice and discrimination. I think the literature here is harder to make sense of, which is why I’m focusing on it less, but if within many people’s lifetimes there was a clear corps of politicians and voters who eagerly supported laws that denied people legal rights based on the color of their skin, it seems obvious that discrimination didn’t just end when those laws were removed.
My overall point is that racism isn’t a problem of 58 years ago, it’s a problem that meaningfully impacts a lot of people’s lives today, even in the absence of explicit legal discrimination. Focusing on “wokeness” as bad neglects the fact that “woke” beliefs are trying to respond to a serious problem. To be an effective critic rather than a pure culture warrior, one needs to acknowledge the problem that the “woke” movement is trying to respond to and be able to seriously engage with it.
Thanks for the reply. It sounds like we're actually not that far apart from one another, just disagreeing on appropriate terminology. To me, it seems natural to include disparities that exist as a result of historical discrimination under the overall umbrella of racism (or if you want to get specific, call it structural racism), but the choice of terminology seems less important than just the recognition that those disparities are important.
To get back to Scott's post (and to my original reply), I think that many people get so caught up in criticizing "wokeness" that they lose track of the real-world issues that "woke" people are responding to. Regardless of your exact terminology, racial discrimination has negatively impacted the lives of lots of people in the US and there's a big difference between thinking that certain "woke" tactics and priorities aren't the best way to address them and thinking they aren't there entirely. Scott's post comes across if he's in the second camp, and that's why I think it's worth having this discussion.
"To get back to Scott's post (and to my original reply), I think that many people get so caught up in criticizing "wokeness" that they lose track of the real-world issues that "woke" people are responding to. "
Wokeists think george floyd dying is a bigger issues than the 5000 or so white people murdered by black people over the past decade.
FURTHERMORE, wokeists are flat WRONG about most of their claims. For example. thinking that black people are disproportionately killed by police. They're not. Once you control for the relevant factors like violent crime rate and rates of violence against police, they're not overrepresented at all. But wokeists think referring to this data is an act of unspeakably evil racism.
And wokeists aren't just people trying to make the world better in good faith. They're explicitly racially hateful. They talk about white people in a way they would be considered horrendous if white people talked about black people in that way.
One thing that would probably do a lot to reassure people on the anti-woke side is if people on the woke side were to support, and indeed help to fund, research into how much of the outcome disparities are due to environmental factors and how much are due to genetic differences between the relevant groups. If we did that, we'd have a much better handle on what sort of social interventions can be expected to work, and what the likely limits on their effectiveness are. But in reality, people on the woke side almost invariably try to prevent such research from being carried out, and try to paint researchers as evil for even being willing to consider the possibility that some of the disparity could have a genetic cause.
"These and other stats show massive gaps in outcomes between black and white Americans that greatly impact a large number of people’s lives."
You CANNOT just assume this is a result of "racism". These differences are perfectly explainable as a result of primarily heritable factors. The idea that black people commit vast amounts of crime due to 'poverty' or any other social factor has zero evidence.
" For example, having less money (and historical overt housing discrimination) means being forced to live in less desirable and more polluted neighborhoods"
They're less desirable BECAUSE of black people. Look at detroit. Once a great city, and then gradually decayed as it became more diverse. Same as any other diverse inner city area. There's no evidence that "bad neighborhoods" exist independently of the people living there.
I agree, though it's instructive to look at the way that Yglesias is now seen as semi-cancelled on the left for his heterodoxy and mildly combative social media tone. I'm active with a YIMBY group and recommended Yglesias's "The Rent Is Too Damn High" ebook (it's what began to convince me of the YIMBY cause), but was told -- understandably -- that Yglesias's reputation meant that choosing to read him would court unnecessary controversy.
Yeah I agree with all that. Yglesias still thinking that racism and prejudice are bad hasn't protected him from controversy, but it's the right thing to do and he's done it better than most run of the mill "anti-woke" commentators.
Equating "woke policies and actions are harmful, insulting, and counter productive" and "racism is cool and more people should do it" is an example of how woke does things very very wrong. Basic racial stereotyping and bigotry are bad actions, but they are nowhere as pervasive nor corrosive in modern society as the woke crowd would like everyone to believe. Continually heartening back to the 50 yo actions of other people (most of whom are dead) in order to justify hysteria and bias against other people *today* is wrong, and should not be tolerated, much less encouraged.
My response to trebuchet's comment basically also covers what I'd say here. I think the "woke" movement is responding to big differences in outcomes between black and white Americans are clearly influenced by the long history of racial discrimination in this country. The difference between being a right-wing culture warrior and being an effective critic of the places where "woke" people may be getting stuff wrong is in meaningfully engaging with that history and reality.
I agree that historical events can have lingering effects, and we need to keep that in mind. However, 'influenced by' and 'primarily caused by' are not the same thing and both justice and factual integrity are disservice by pretending that they are. Furthermore, 'meaningfully engaging with' history does not - and must not - mean punishment and rights infringement of people living to day, particularly when that infringement is conducted in order to benefit or enrich other modern people who have not been subject to any significant additional obstacles in comparison to the general population. In other words, if the child of two college graduate parents is admitted or promoted over the child of a single working class mother on the basis of race, that is injustice and wrong. Continued calls for 'righting past wrongs' have already taken on both the appearance and effect of revenge against...well, anyone who can be blamed for anything, rather than making whole previous damages. This needs to stop, as it is the opposite of helping fix anything.
"I think the "woke" movement is responding to big differences in outcomes between black and white Americans are clearly influenced by the long history of racial discrimination in this country."
You're just ASSUMING that, and a big problem with the woke is that they are 100%, absolutely opposed to anyone attempting to show that this is not the case. They literally believe research into the objectively true heritable differences in behavior and cognition between racial populations should be banned.
Their tactics aren't just wrong, their beliefs are. And they're more hateful than right wingers are by a country mile.
I think it seems wildly uncharitable to assume that everyone who opposed that particular piece of legislation held racist views. I mean, I'd oppose legislation authorizing the use of force against "woke" practices, but that doesn't mean I hold "woke" views in my personal life.
"There are still lots of people alive today who were legally banned from accessing quality schools,"
"good quality schools" is a total myth. Sending black kids to "good schools" has done nothing to improve scores. It has made a lot of high performing schools stop being so high performing. School voucher lottery programs show that there's little evidence of "good schools" existing independent of the students who go there.
" good places to live,"
Again, this idea that there are "good places to live" independent of the people living there is completely wrong headed. After jim crow ended. millions of blacks moved to "good" places, and they quickly stopped being good places.
"I think there are specific places where the modern "woke" movement gets stuff wrong, and it's useful to try and push back against that. But most "anti-woke" people seem to end up forgetting the part where racism is bad actually. "
Jim crow existed because of and only because of black behavior. White people did not want their cities ruined by the extremely high rates of crime and anti-social behavior of black people. What happened after jim crow ended? Numerous cities were ruined by crime and anti-social behavior from black people. This is in large part why there was so much movement to the suburbs, because inner cities became unsafe and unpleasant places to live. Nobody should have to be alright with this.
"I think there are a few examples of people who've taken publicly "anti-woke" positions while not forgetting that racism is bad. "
It would help if you would even make a token effort at defining what """racism""" is, because its really become a meaningless word used as a catch-all bludgeon against anyone who doesn't support essentially black-nationalist viewpoints.
But please, PLEASE tell me why I am obligated to care about people supposedly, what, having anti-black view? Black people murder around 500 white people every year (which is around 10 times higher per capita than vice versa), and the majority of interracial assault, rape and robbery is black on white. I'm supposed to support "Black lives matter" when black people literally have no problem with outrageously ghigh rates of black on white violence?
> Jim crow existed because of and only because of black behavior.
Alternate hypothesis: Jim Crow existed because of whatever cultural factors led to white people seeing chattel slavery as a virtuous thing to enforce.
Like, if people A are enslaving people B for centuries, it's not too far-fetched to assume that most of people A are racist against people B. This should really, really be obvious.
Some people are trying to create a better world and of course any decent person supports that, but while the Black Panthers created a breakfast program for kids, the “new woke” is extremely performative around what words people use and how they present themselves, and what they put on their social media accounts.
“Woke” —even if it includes the occasional demonstration of marching in the streets— is almost completely divorced from follow-up and follow-through: the pursuit of actual justice, fairness, improving the world, things like ….cleaning the water in Flint; or making sure everyone has health care a good education and a wage they can survive on; or making sure that women don’t get penalized in their careers for having children; or making sure the most vulnerable among us have food and a place to sleep.
If ever I see one of “the wokes” develop an actual program that helps people— a breakfast program for the homeless …or, even showing up at the local food bank warehouse to fill boxes of food for families (where the wokes are conspicuously absent: it’s all people doing forced community service, teenagers who are filling a school requirement, a few random Christians, and a few working class people, many of whom probably formerly needed the services of the food bank) I’ll reassess my view of whether the wokes are serious about improving anything for anyone. They’re too busy putting Ukraine flags on their Instagram and talking up Democratic candidates who won’t do a damn thing for anyone.
There is so much out there that needs doing, and from my view, “the wokes” are not _just_ not doing it: they are distracting everyone of their ilk (comfortable, well-meaning middle class people) into not doing it, by pretending that a hashtag about Ukraine is activism.
>while the Black Panthers created a breakfast program for kids,
This isn't the first time I've heard people defend the Black Panthers this way.
Saddam Hussein did good things for members of his tribe who lived locally. Organized crime helps people in the neighborhood all the time. Partly because of tribalism, partly because it's a cheap way of getting support.
Just sayin'...you can point to concrete good things that ***even*** the Black Panthers and/or Saddam Hussein did, and yet you cannot point to concrete good things that the wokes are going for anyone.
Or, to put it another way, my point was most obviously not a defense of the Black Panthers. My point was the startling uselessness and insubstantial-ness of the wokes, and so I don't think it makes sense to defend them on the basis on them wanting the world to be a nicer place. If they want the world to be a nicer place, they can do something about it instead of jabbering and engaging in their woke verbal olympics.
> and yet you cannot point to concrete good things that the wokes are going for anyone
The definition of "woke" is sufficiently fuzzy that this just sounds like No True Scotsman. If someone points to an example of a concrete good thing that "wokeness" is doing then you can just say "well that's not wokeness, that's just people being sensible".
This isn't a defence of wokeness, I'm just saying that maybe we need to improve our terminology.
I’m saying, in all sincerity, that I don’t see any “wokes” volunteering in the places where I happen to volunteer in the community. I don’t see any evidence of the wokes of my acquaintance — they who add their pronouns to their emails and zoom bios, they who have “in this house” signs on their lawns— doing anything to make other people’s _material_ conditions better.
The people I see helping other people in concrete ways belong to religious groups and the working class. That’s in the Western US. Reliably. Maybe it’s different where you are. It’s not the professional-class wokes, beating their chests about diversity and how racist they are, who are in the trenches trying to make sure people are housed and fed and medically cared for and literate.
That’s not a “no true Scotsman”— that’s just an observation. Show me a professional class woke who harps on this stuff and virtue-signals in this way who actually gets their hands dirty, doing something to help people in a material way, and I’ll be very surprised.
Among people I know who put pronouns in their emails: people who volunteer for suicide hotlines, people who do voter registration, people who do trash cleanup in our local park, people who volunteer to help refugees, people who re-build trails in nearby conservation land, people who provide pro bono counseling and legal services for poor people, and people who do volunteer work with children and families in crisis. And then not in a volunteer capacity but whose jobs are more about service than pay: teachers, school counselors, social workers, therapists, union organizers, pastors/religious leaders, and nurses.
I think if we define "woke" as people who only do performative political signaling not of my tribe, then it will be easy to miss all the regular people out there getting their hands dirty in socially constructive ways who happen to be not of your tribe and who also happen to put pronouns at the bottom of their emails.
There are loads of people of all political persuasions who spend their time engaged primarily in narcissistic and performative online tribal warfare. But the soup kitchens and the crisis hotlines and the community cleanup efforts and the blood donations are not all being done by your tribe, I promise.
I've heard repeatedly that people who are more or less woke who are doing useful work aren't as noisy or as hostile.
I talked recently with someone (I'm not outing them with specific details of the work they're doing, sorry) who was willing to agree in private that the anti-white aspect of woke is real and a problem.
And I know another who's pretty woke, doing useful work, and not a keyboard warrior.
I have no idea how it would be possible to get conflict-averse people to be more public in the current environment, but it would be nice.
Yes it really might come to that: the conflict-averse aren’t speaking up about how weird / counterproductive the new replacement (faux) “left” ideology is; and the conflict-embracing really, really love a chance to tell other people how awful they are. That subset of people, those who thrive on conflict and hostility, are also probably lower-functioning socially / personally and don’t get out in the community much to do anyone any good.
So part of my perception might stem from a knee-jerk antipathy toward angry, low-functioning people who seem to live for ensuring others’ misery. And part might stem from my own anger at seeing what I perceive as the “real” left being taken over by noisy idiots, shutting me out of my political home because I’m more interested in deeds and material outcomes, not the shibboleth du jour.
There's been a recent scandal about the top people in BLM doing financially well for themselves and not doing useful work.
I'd been seeing complaints for a while on youtube from local BLM people about not getting money from BLM the central charity.
Scam charities aren't unique to woke, but it's possible that not believing in formal organization adds to the risk. On the other hand, what's the excuse for the Red Cross in Haiti?
>>>What's the excuse for the Red Cross in Haiti?
Not an excuse but an explanation...locally staffed organizations are more likely to reflect local values than those of the parent organization. (See also Puerto Rico). In a lot of places around the world, there is a higher value & merit to promoting and enriching family and supporters than in rigorous adherence to the spirit of public service. It's not *corruption*, you see, it's being a proper human and taking advantage of the environment to take care of your family.
Different cultures are different.
Effective Altruists are trying to create a better world, so they actually try to measure how much good they're doing. This makes them very unusual. We could try to evangelize EA so that impulses get redirected that way, and I do in fact try to get my relatives to donate to GiveWell recommended charities, but I think there's a very limited amount of interest.
"There was a lot of reaction after George Floyd was killed, because a man was slowly murdered on camera"
This seems like a needlessly inflammatory way of phrasing things. A man *died* on camera, sure, and we should be open to discussion about the negligence of the wielder of the knee, but there is enough residual uncertainty as to whether Floyd caused himself a fatal drug overdose ... and about whether the average jury member at Chauvin's trial wouldn't have been motivated by a chain of reasoning that goes something like "Regardless of Chauvin's guilt or innocence of murder, if I vote to acquit, more people will die in the ensuing riots, possibly including myself if my name gets leaked", that I would be very circumspect about calling it murder.
And that's before you get to the fact that the specific claims of BLM, as already mentioned by other posters below, go well beyond 'we should reduce police brutality somewhat', and include such highly contentious propositions as 'the police are specifically targetting blacks for death, to a degree that does not disappear even after you adjust for the fact that blacks commit violent crime at a higher rate than non-blacks'.
Even if you're right, Chauvin was actually convicted. Thus it is in keeping with the normal convention to refer to it as "murder".
Manslaughter- in most other states the word murder would not have been used.
While that is true, it was one of the most dubious high-profile convictions of recent times that I'm aware of, such that appying that standard feels comparably odd to insisting on calling OJ Simpson *not* a murderer.
He was convicted of non-intentionally killing Floyd. Outside of legal contexts, nobody uses the word "murder" to describe non-intentional killing.
I can understand why someone with woke sensibilities would be averse to the term's popularization. For the last few years/decades, we really didn't have a term to describe these types of people, which made it harder to identify them and call them out. Terms that describe patterns of behavior, like cancel culture, don't have the same sort of otherizing effect. But now that we can describe "woke people" / "the woke", we have specific groups of people we can rally against. The woke don't like this because it is politically advantageous to be unidentifiable. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what
I find it perplexing that you view this as a feature rather than a bug. Are you trying to fight against 'specific groups of people' or are you trying to fight against patterns of behaviour and incorrect belief?
There are people in this thread with 'woke sensibilities', and they aren't conspiracists trying to undermine freedom, they're just honest people trying to make the best decisions they can on complex topics. Why is it a good thing to be able to more easily attack them without regard to their specific stances?
And even if you feel terribly strongly that they are badly misguided and are harming civilisation, why do you want to 'other' them? Surely it'd be better to convince them. It's these people with 'woke sensibilities' that are the moderate face of wokeness who might be open to well phrased arguments. Othering just leads to irrationality and if taken far enough genocide, I don't really see an upside here.
I agree that tribalism is ultimately really bad, but it's kind of the name of the game. We have to fight to win. If on one side we have a cancel culture mob with massive influence over society, and on the other side we have honest, rational people standing up for vague principles, then we know who's going to win.
But your cancel culture mob with massive influence over society is made up of individuals who in the main also believe they are honest, rational people standing up for principles. And as far as I can tell from your comment and others, both tribes are very firmly convinced that they are persecuted victims.
It may be that because I have never had a cancel culture mob come after me, all this seems ridiculously extreme. Perhaps the ability to treat people and arguments in isolation is a form of privilege based on not feeling that I'm under existential threat. However, from my privileged position, I would suggest that rather than fighting against 'the woke' as if they were a horde of zombies, try the jujitsu approach instead - transform 'wokeness' into something that you can coexist with, by finding the most egregiously wrong aspects of it and fighting those specific aspects, one at a time. Don't even be considered anti-woke since that makes you easier to ignore. Be anti-this one thing. If your arguments are good, you'll form a majority on that issue (including lots of woke adjacent, woke inclined and mild wokeists), and gradually resolve it. Then repeat as required.
That's my suggestion anyway.
Of course everyone believes that they themselves are honest and rational. But let's not delve into complete postmodern epistemological pessimism where no one can know anything and everything is relative.
Lately, a certain tribe seems to be disproportionately responsible for employing authoritarian social and political norms, otherizing their political opponents, and calling for radical social upheaval. This tribe also disproportionately paints itself and its allies as victims, and constantly talks about the widespread societal oppression embedded in every aspect of life. I think an objective observer would concur.
This tribe has exercised such an extreme degree of influence on our institutions that we are past the point of both-sides-ism or fighting against individual actions that we disagree with. As a matter of political practicality, we have to identify the group of people responsible and hold them accountable. Unfortunately, this will likely require using some of their own strategies against them.
I think a huge number of people in the USA would think that your second and third paragraphs characterise republicans rather well, and be able to point to objective truths to back that up too.
I'm all for objective truth, but I don't think the situation is anywhere near as cut and dried on these topics as you do, and you shouldn't be so sure that the 'objective observer' would find in your favour.
Okay, then stop using the word "racism". At this point, it's literally meaningless and is simply used as a bad faith bludgeon against people who can be making 100% factual statements with no value judgements whatsoever, let alone espousing racial hatred.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
>And even if you feel terribly strongly that they are badly misguided and are harming civilisation, why do you want to 'other' them? Surely it'd be better to convince them
Because they're not able to be convinced. One of their defining features is precisely their dogmatic intolerance of dissent. That's why "cancel culture" is even a thing. If you disagree, they shout you down as a "racist", they dox you, they destroy your livelihood, they shutdown talks by people who they disagree with. They're beyond convincing, and on many topics it's forbidden to even try. That's precisely why you don't try and convince them, you provoke them to publically expose their behavior and then use the spectacle to convince everyone else to stop giving them so much power.
And for goodness' sake, do you honestly say this to woke people? Do you say "don't call them racists/nazis/fascists/white supremacists, just try and convince them"? People on the right are vastly more interested in actually debating stuff. Wokeists have near unviersal institutional support that they feel they don't need to ever debate or discuss anything with anyone, and prefer to silence dissent.
There are lots of 'wokeists' or people with 'woke sensibilities' in this thread who do not do these things. Trying to bundle them all together and 'other' them and 'fight' them and 'punish' them is not a sensible strategy to get what you want, if anything it's likely to lead to a worsening of the situation. That's the position I and others have been taking throughout this thread.
Do I say to people on both sides that they should calm down and look at things on their merits? Absolutely. I'm very aware that some of what people think of as 'racism' is actually nostalgia, or other less freighted terms. I'm also not scared of the word 'racism'. I believe that almost everyone (including myself) has racist tendencies, that doesn't make them evil or mean that their arguments should not be listened to.
>The use of "wokeness" here as a catch-all term for anything related to social justice, as if it were a single force to be supported or opposed, feels really lazy and indiscriminate to me.
Vastly less indiscriminate than the use of "racism" as a catch-all term for "non far-left views on anything remotely related to race"
>because a man was slowly murdered on camera while onlookers couldn't do anything about it
He wasn't murdered. There's no evidence Chauvin intended to kill Floyd. He put him in a reckless restraint which he wasn't supposed to.
> (protesting police brutality and lack of accountability)
If you expect us to take this seriously, they should stop calling themsleves "black lives matter". This stuff affects all races, and contrary to the dogmatic claims of BLM, black people are not disproportionately killed by police after controlling for relevant factors (like the fact that blacks are vastly more overrepresented amongst those responsible for murdering police, as well as violent crime generally)
>has to deal with the fact that a lot of people are trying to create a better world, and you don't _want_ to push back against that - you want to push the discourse sideways, so that that effort is directed in a healthier way.
The obliviousness of this is astonishing. Are you implying that your political enemies WANT to make the world a worse place? Of course they don't. You just hate their views so you feel justified in not treating them with the kid gloves.
Considering Chauvin was convicted for murder, I'd say there's pretty good evidence he did murder Floyd. The whole point of the court system is to decide if there's enough evidence.
Sure, but the court system doesn't have some magic force field where other concerns can't factor in to the calculation. If jurors believe (rightfully) that if they acquit, they might be doxxed, fired, attacked, or killed, it's not surprising that they convicted. It's possible they would have convicted regardless of those concerns, but if we can't be confident that they would have acquitted if there actually wasn't enough evidence, then them convicting does not serve as Bayesian evidence that it was actually murder.
Outside of a legal context, people overwhelmingly use the word "murder" to denote intention killing. Chauvin was not convicted of any crime involving intentional killing, which the vast majority of BLM supporters don't seem to realize.
"He wasn't murdered. There's no evidence Chauvin intended to kill Floyd. He put him in a reckless restraint which he wasn't supposed to."
Murder, by law, doesn't require specific intent. Sufficiently reckless behavior resulting in a not-specifically-intended death, is murder under the law. And in common usage, the definition is even broader.
Minnesota draws the line differently, and I suspect Chauvin would have been convicted of manslaughter in most states - but even so, using "murder" to refer generically to murder+manslaughter is a common shorthand in non-legalistic contexts. Chauvin did do his killing in Minnesota, though, and was fairly convicted, and is a murderer straight up. If it was important to him to be able to say "hey, I'm only a manslaughterer, get it right!", he should maybe have worked in a different state.
The use of murder here was almost assuredly the colloquial sense, in which he deliberately killed somebody. Not the strict legal defintion.
It absolutely IS important that it wasn't with intent because it changes the whole nature of the situation. Whether he intended to kill Floyd changes waht hte implcaitions of this should be.
The strength of the George Floyd protests was down to the absolute horror of the Floyd murder itself. A cold blooded technicolor police murder, undeniable and inescapable. A secondary factor was that about ten percent of the workforce had lost their job and so were free to engage in political action they'd otherwise be too busy to even think about. The idea that you need some grand theory of wokeness (god I hate that word) to explain it is silly.
The way I think about this is Fourier analysis. Any specific event is always an overlap of contributing functions in different frequency bands. On the sub-year band George Floyd was about police brutality. On the multi-year band it was (arguably) wokeness that allowed the sub-year function to explode to begin with. (The better way to think about it is probably contributing functions in multiple dimensions, ie. time, free attention, coherence.)
Was it? I thought it was established that he was on dangerous drugs and was having major problems before the police even touched him. IIRC he was yelling "I can't breathe" at the top of his voice even before they put him on the ground, which they did specifically because he didn't want to be in the car. The drugs he was on at the time can cause this kind of problem, supposedly. Or was I misinformed about all that?
Calling it a murder is very tricky because there's no evidence of any planning or desire to kill Floyd. Even asserting racism as a motivation is tough because, weren't some of the other police officers on the scene black? A racist cop would presumably refuse to work with black officers.
A US court of law found it to be murder.
>weren't some of the other police officers on the scene black?
One was biracial (black and white), one Asian, and one white.
Weird how Barack Obama is just “Black” but the cop that helped kill George Floyd is “biracial”.
I know Americans love their one drop rule, but calling this dude black is stretching the term to breaking point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmYwGmLVxgY
"If you acquit, there's a guarantee you will be doxxed, condemned, fired, and harassed, there's a large likelihood you and your family will be attacked, and there's a not-insignificant chance that you will be killed. Furthermore, dozens more will die in the ensuing riots."
"See, they found him guilty!"
Michael claimed there's no evidence he desired to kill Floyd. The court agreed, because he was convicted with:
1 count of second-degree unintentional murder
1 count of third-degree murder
1 count of second-degree manslaughter
And a US court of law found O. J. Simpson innocent, what's your point?
That by the law of the land, it was murder, and he's gonna do the time to match.
Michael claimed there's no evidence he desired to kill Floyd. The court agreed, because he was convicted with:
1 count of second-degree unintentional murder
1 count of third-degree murder
1 count of second-degree manslaughter
> IIRC he was yelling "I can't breathe" at the top of his voice even before they put him on the ground
Yes. He was likely having a panic attack. That doesn't mean that being compressed into the ground didn't kill him. Indeed, having watched almost the entire trial, I'm quite confident that the knee on the back was the primary cause of his death.
The court apparently agreed, since Chauvin was found guilty. That aside, it's not as clear a case as often presented, because these cops have to deal with people loudly claiming that they cannot breath even without the cops doing anything, and the cops still have to do their jobs.
Hindsight in place, we can all say that Chauvin shouldn't have put his knee on the guy's neck. In the situation, it's less clear what they should have done instead with a disruptive individual who is refusing to cooperate and is potentially using magic buzzwords intended to get the cops to comply with his demands whether they were true or not. Getting social workers on scene is a potential solution in some cases, but that's expensive and complicated to implement, and may not actually solve any issues. They can't just let the guy go, and he's verbally and physically refusing to get into the police car, to the point that he could be a danger to himself and others. Had he not died, it would have been one of a million unfortunate interactions that police deal with regularly. Had Chauvin not put his knee on the guy's neck, I don't know that there's anything else that happened that should not have. If that means he lived, then good on society removing that hold as an option. If he died anyway, I don't know where this conversation would have gone.
I can't recall at the moment, but I believe there was discussion about whether that was a currently permitted approach to suppressing a combative person. It apparently used to be, and I think Chauvin was claiming he didn't get the memo that it had changed? If it had been clear police procedure to use that kind of hold, which it had been in the past, then Chauvin gets cleared of all crimes, just doing his job.
Against this, Greg "creepy oracular powers" Cochran says you can't strangle someone by putting pressure on the back of their neck:
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1380062957694898185
There are amounts of weight sufficient to kill someone that way, but nothing a human body is capable of producing.
The court did convict Chauvin. At the time there were riots happening and presumably the jurors didn't want to encourage more of that like when the cops who beat Rodney King were acquitted.
Film lore has it that when the Mafia wishes to send a message, it does so with a severed horse's head. An equestrian-for-porcine substitution had apparently been found adequate to send a message during the ongoing deliberations in that trial, given that policemen were involved.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/04/18/us/chauvin-witness-barry-brodd-pigs-blood-santa-rosa/index.html
The chief medical examiner initially was quoted saying in private that he had a fatal level of fentanyl in his blood, and based only on the actual autopsy, he would have been deemed to have died of a drug overdose. He later went back on all of that and said that he died of asphyxiation without any real justification. Hmm.
Let's consider what would have happened if he had continued to argue that he died of a drug overdose, and then the jury acquitted on that basis. I think we can both agree there would have been massive amounts of nationwide rioting, and dozens more people would be killed. Furthermore, the medical examiner would be fired from his job, and he would be doxxed very quickly. After his home address gets leaked, his house would be burned down, and many people would likely attempt to kill him.
Now, it's entirely possible he legitimately changed his opinion later after seeing new evidence... but it doesn't seem like we can have any confidence that if he did actually believe the death was caused by a drug overdose, that he would argue for this position. Him denying the drug overdose cause of death, then, would not serve as evidence against the drug overdose theory, because in the hypothetical world where Floyd actually died of a drug overdose, he would almost certainly still deny it.
Fentanyl can interfere with your breathing, thus "asphyxiation" and "fentanyl overdose" don't have to be mutually exclusive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fentanyl#Respiratory_depression
Sure, but the relevant question is whether kneeling on the back of someone else in the same manner who was not overdosing would have killed them, i.e. whether Chauvin took action that was the primary cause of Floyd's death, and whether he knew that it would cause his death.
For example, if I tase someone who has a rare heart condition I don't know about and they die, I did not murder them, since I did not take an action that I could have reasonably known would kill them.
That's on the jury.
You would, however, lose the subsequent wrongful death suit, assuming your tasering wasn't justified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggshell_skull
"Fentanyl can interfere with your breathing"
A *fatal overdose* of Fentanyl is *guaranteed* to interfere with your breathing. Doesn't matter whether somebody chokes you out or not.
I agree that increased unemployment probably largely contributed to the situation.
However, I think there had been several deaths recorded on video (e.g. Manuel Ellis,Daniel Shaver,Eric Garner), in which case the innocence of the victim was way more clear than in the George Floyd case. And probably that is why it triggered the events. As Scott already described the general idea:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
How many police killings have you seen? How many violent deaths have you seen?
All most people have to go on when judging this against other deaths is a limited, almost certainly not representative subset. We're in an odd spot where we rarely encounter violent deaths in real life, yet a small number are newsworthy enough to mention that everyone hears about them, and yet we only actually see the reality of a small number of that small number (and even then the horror depends on how lucky the cameraman happened to be when recording the issue). A world where violent deaths were more common (be it the reality of the past of warfare, capital punishment or agriculture and industry that are horrifically unsafe by modern standards) would be one which most people had seen, if not violent deaths, then at least the results of traumatic injury. On the other hand, most of us have memories a past where not everyone was carrying a video camera with them 24/7.
It wasn't a "cold blooded murder". There's no evidence he intended to kill Floyd and none of the crimes he was convicted of involved establishing intent to kill.
Also, good job COMPLETELY missing the point of Soctt's post. He wasn't providing commentary on whether people should be upset over Floyd's death or not, he's saying what impact did the BLM riots have in terms of perceptions of woke ideology, and therefore using that to inform what strategy teh academic should take. You just saw somebody say something you think is bad and you launched into a knee jerk response that was not only irrelevant to this post but also factually incorrect.
Woke/unwoke has become a politically partisan issue, especially the unwoke half since Republicans view criticizing woke people as a winning political strategy. So Berserker strategy is far more likely to get your actions amplified by conservative media. That's great if you want to make money (you can quit your job where nobody likes you and start a conservative talk show!). Not so great if you want to actually convince anyone you're right on the merits.
Whether or not conservative media amplifies you is irrelevant. The goal is to get your opponents to amplify THEMSELVES with a message that will turn off the people in the middle.
This sounds like the mirror image Marxist accelerationist take, where the idea is that by making governments and corporations even more exploitative, the contradictions of capitalist society will become so great that it takes itself apart.
That actually fits fairly well, although the scale is definitely different. You don't need society wide events, because today just one local event can be amplified to a national level.
The comparison I was thinking of was actually negative political ads. The goal with those is similar, to get people who might have voted for your opponent out of habit to stay home on election day.
It's highly relevant, because once an issue gets captured by partisan politics, then people's views on the matter largely become entrenched. Also, there is always the danger that YOUR positions start to become entrenched based on political partisanship, which means there is basically no room for self-reflection. Maybe that woke/unwoke position you took actually isn't so great, but your brain will refuse to accept any criticism now that it's a politically partisan issue.
I think it depends on how many people are in the undecided middle, and also just how politically aware those people are. My impression is that this group is large and oblivious, but that's based on the small sample of people I interact with at work, plus my own family. I'm quite sure my workplace in Canada is not representative of the American people!
Ew, conservative media.
It's not so much that conservative media is ew, but more that once it becomes amplified by conservative media, you've now reached a point where the people you're fighting cannot be convinced you're right, and the people on your side cannot be convinced you're wrong. Which is a terrible spot to be in both epistemologically and if you want to effect meaningful change.
This can also be the case with liberal media, but generally woke/unwoke issues are far more likely to be amplified by conservative media.
The point isn't to convince anti-wokists to be anti-woke. The point is to persuade politically marginal individuals (in between woke and non/anti-woke) that wokeism is bad through the spectacle of woke tantrums. What your argument should have been is that this becomes less effective if people tend to dislike conservative media and therefore get turned off from being persuaded as a result.
My instinct, the best strategy is a hybrid Fabian-Berserker. Pick fights, but appear not to pick fights. Perhaps MLK was in fact closer to Berserker, but that’s not how he’s usually remembered. And that’s easier said than done, and may not generalize. After three minutes of thinking about it, I’m pretty stumped about how to actually evaluate the relative EV of these strategies. I suspect the answer is highly context dependent.
This sounds pretty wise. I'm not sure how to operationalize that advice, though.
MLK was hybrid Fabian-berserker. His goal was to get in the papers—he was well known to cozy up with reporters—and then influence true Fabians like Federal officials to change policies and laws.
I'm really excited about this kind of idea and have thought about it a lot over the years.
* Smile, be kind, and show honest goodwill to people. - You can't fake this. You need to honestly care about people you disagree with, and let that show to people on the sidelines.
* Give people enough rope to hang themselves. - Create or engage in situations where you're standing against bad ideas in public. Pull this stuff into the public forum whenever possible.
* Never interrupt the enemy when they're making a mistake. - By pulling them out into a public forum you're giving them every opportunity to make an ass out of themselves. But the next step is important too. Don't call attention to the fact they're making an ass out of themselves. Don't be combative. If you sink to their level, it distracts people from what an ass they're being. Let the asshole have the spotlight, you're just their to smile and be kind.
* Once they've made a mistake, end the interaction before they can recover. - Just smile and say "Look man, I care about you, I hear where you're coming from, but I'm going to end this interaction if you won't communicate with me respectfully." and then walk away. You look like the one in control, and they look like a child.
Be MLK does seem to be a winning strategy, it just seems hard to replicate. Not many people can seem like akind and caring pillar of the community while also yelling and marching. Being a Reverend, and having a sympathetic cause we're important components. With religion not being as important for most Americans, it seems especially hard to replicate. Does anyone have a job that commends universal trust and respect anymore?
Re "How Should We Assess New Atheism?" - It contributed to the decline of the less credible claims of traditional religion. But perhaps it also contributed to the emergence of MORE credible non-traditional spirituality. Dawkins said loud and clear, in "The God Delusion" and elsewhere, that he is open to the possibility of God-like agents that emerged from and operate in the physical universe. He is also open to simulation cosmologies. In "Believing in Dawkins," Eric Steinhart develops a philosophy of spiritual naturalism, inspired by the works of Richard Dawkins but not attributed to Dawkins, to show “that the jobs once done by God can be done by natural entities,” including the possibility of life after death. I think non-traditional forms of spirituality like spiritual naturalism could continue to offer all that is good in religion, without all that is bad.
There was an online atheist debate a while ago where the atheist said that Sweden was becoming less religious/non-religious. What was interesting was that the religious appeared to be switching not to atheism, but to spirituality. The one number I can remember was that something around 70% of the Swedish in a survey reported believing in ghosts/spirits, but only ~20% were "religious."
It’s true in America as well: since the 90s we’ve gone from something like 2% atheist to something like 4%, but those identifying as “no religion” have increased sharply.
Mid 2000s, I read an online debate forum about religion. Why? Maybe because I lacked the courage to stab pencils into my eyes and this was the next closest thing.
I saw many debating strategies used, each with strengths and weaknesses.
You had guys who would focus on the core of an opponent's argument, and only respond to that. But without fail, their opponent would retort "aha! You ignored 80% of my post!"
Then you had guys who were like machines, doing line by line rebuttals of every word their opponent said. But often this backfired on them. They'd get bogged down on some point where their opponent was clearly right, and get hammered on it. It also had the disadvantage of fragmenting the debate, pulling it a dozen different directions.
In general, the people I respected were the ones who were clearly motivated by principles like truth, rather than being argument robots, spamming out talking points and canned rebuttals so that their side could "win".
And I respected arguers who weren't ferociously single-issue about something. It seemethey had balanced minds and souls. You'd get people who only cared about ONE VERY IMPORTANT THING and wrote fifty screeds a day about that one thing...that always came off as obsessive and deranged.
I hate arguing for the sake of arguing. Without naming names, I see some people on the anti-woke side who've kind of built their whole brand around being anti-woke, and oppose it beyond all moderation and sympathy. One of them (Rot13: Gurbqber Eboreg Ornyr) wrote a book about how business owners should fire SJWs from jobs, and so forth. That sort of approach doesn't attract my sympathy. It makes me think you're a win-at-any-cost demagogue.
I would say to your friend "pick your battles. And be known for something else. Don't let your whole identity become 'anti-woke academic.'"
I wish him luck. Many before him have failed.
What actions can you take to be known for something else? Is just doing something else enough?
Amen
> some people on the anti-woke side who've kind of built their whole brand around being anti-woke
Probably about half of the people on the University of Austin board did precisely this: https://www.uaustin.org/board-of-advisors
Some of them have had distinguished careers independently of this, and some of them transitioned those careers to this, but it's a big thing.
The case for building your political identity around being anti-woke is that 1. modern western society is, on the whole, pretty good relative to all of history because of things like the enlightenment, capitalism, individual rights, and freedom, and 2. a bunch of revolutionaries have come along and are trying to destroy everything we've achieved for the past few hundred years and replace it with a totalitarian collectivist mega-state.
It would be like if aliens came down to Earth and started blasting people left and right, and then a human coalition formed around the idea of fighting the aliens, and you criticized them for defining themselves in opposition to the aliens rather than having some independent political vision.
Except that the woke people aren't aliens. They're also citizens of the nation they live in, not invaders from the outside (unless you want to be so completely tribalistic that you go to "The only REAL citizens are those who agree with me!" which isn't an improvement over them at all.)
As someone who models this entire issue as "sometimes people on both the left and right can be overly sanctimonious or prudish about otherwise legitimate moral issues, which can lead to problems when it drives toxic office politics, moral panics or government overreach", intentionally provoking overreactions from one specific side of the political spectrum would look a lot like a partisan political stunt to me.
If you wanted me to actually support an "anti-woke" movement, you'd need to either provide a compelling argument that the problem of moral sanctimony was qualitatively different on the left, or convincingly frame the movement as just a small part of a larger, much more even-handed effort to push back against this common failure mode.
How would we do that?
It's not that moral sanctimony is more of a problem on the Left, it's that it's more of a problem to left-leaning people living in the left-leaning world. Like me, and Scott, and presumably this person as an academic.
It's that you have a lot more ability to "get our own house in order" than affect right-leaning people living in different states with different media and different internet than us.
The weird thing is that half of what I see being discussed here is just about creating a double-bind of moral sanctimony, where if the woke don't get you then the anti-woke will.
I think that's part of the confusion in the comments here. Anti-woke as a left-leaning project -- essentially a form of infighting to correct a self-destructive overreach -- makes total sense to me. But half or more of the comments on here don't make sense from that perspective and Scott's readership is not primarily left-leaning. So you get left-leaning people saying "this has gone too far" and you've got definitely not left-leaning people arguing something altogether different with a much wider definition of woke and who seem unaware of or undisturbed by similarly authoritarian dynamics in their own ranks.
Scott's readership may not be Blue Tribe, but what's relevant is, I think, where you live - someone in San Francisco lives in a left-leaning world regardless of their own political views.
My house is decorated with, among other things, a sign that says "Hail Satan". I'm not a Satanist; the point has nothing to do with Satanism, or Satan, or, when you get down to it, Christianity.
Hail Satan is just another form of "Fuck wokeness". The problem isn't who is on what political side, and anybody modeling it that way needs to find better news feeds.
Following the 1980s, when religious views were the ones being used to bully others, we've had many situations and cases chipping away at the toxic aspects of that movement. Today, in the US, I doubt too many people regularly experience toxic religious discrimination or similar outside of family and church (where I would hope we agree is not something society has as much interest or ability to interfere in as say, public universities or even private employers).
I believe that most people today, especially those on the left that are the focus of this discussion, would agree that chipping away at the toxicity was a strong positive. Since "woke" is the current group bringing toxicity into society, it makes sense (at least to me) that they would be the target of anti-toxicity movements.
What exactly are people on the right doing that's analogous to shutting down lectures from "problematic" academics?
Also shutting down lectures from "problematic" acedemics? https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/19/us/florida-education-critical-race-theory-bill/index.html
Both are arguably important. You need the "Berserkers" to keep the issue in the public's mind, so that when "Fabians" in opaque committees want to argue against crazy ideas there is ample evidence that excessive wokeness can go wrong. So probably he should pick the one he does best / is most comfortable with?
There is another plus to being a "Fabian" if he feels they are scarce, though. They can support "Berserkers" (and other "Fabians") that are less protected than he is. This can reduce the feeling that to speak against the prevailing culture before you are unfireable is career suicide. There's only so many unfireable positions, so for logistics it's important. Becoming a "Berserker" means he should refrain from supporting too much others. Unfair as it is, we all know how "X was endorsed by Y, and I hate Y" works.
Personally, I think the trans issue could end wokeness. On the other hand it’s increasingly institutionally embedded now.
What about trans people being visible is going to end what facet of wokeness? In what way do you think it will be resolved?
Right, obviously it's the increased visibility which is the issue. You've really understood your opponents and gotten down to the core of the disagreement.
Allowing trans women to be visible while trouncing natal females in sports. Trans people and allies being visible while espousing that biological sex is a myth (or at least irrelevant in literally all contexts). Trans activists visibly attacking JK Rowling. Rapists with visibly male bodies that rape women being put in women’s prisons, or being allowed in women’s restrooms and their crimes being hushed up. Being visible insisting that any non-gender conforming tweens should be given puberty blockers no questions asked, and visibly attacking anyone that says hey maybe we should consider unintended negative consequences of that.
Not all trans visibility is helpful to the project of improving trans acceptance and well-being.
First of all, "What about trans people being visible"? Stop it. That's not what the trans issue is just about and you know it. Is having 'transwomen' use the girls locker room in schools "visibility"? No, its making girls have to get naked around people with penises, and they may not like that. And then covering it up when one of those people with penises rapes one of the girls? Is that just "visibility"? There's bigger issues at play, and describing it as "visibility" is like acting surprised anyone could oppose affirmative action , because "What's wrong with equality"?
Secondly, trans issues are vastly less supported by the population than race issues. Hispanics in particular seem turned off by them, and the Democrats are counting on them for electoral success moving forward.
And second, the reason it threatens wokeness
Holy shit, that level of hostility is uncalled for.
Probably the parts about deconstructing, tabooing, and abolishing notions of gender and even biological sex in the community writ large.
I kind of want to reply to all the replies to this comment so i'll just reply here - there seems to be an unfortunate amount of uncritical conflation of obviously bad ideas pushed by the (admittedly disturbingly influential) radically 'woke' fringe with the much more reasonable ideas of broad trans rights and acceptance.
A picture of the 'trans lobby' that claims it's in favour of trans women in competitive female sports and espouses biological sex as a myth isn't *quite* a strawman, since there are definitely vocal people making that argument, but the implication that the struggle for trans rights inherently involves this is hugely disingenuous, and a large part of the reason such a narrative is so strong is that conservative pundits have been continually selecting and highlighting the most extreme and inane activists they can in order to discredit the whole movement.
People who claim to prize rationality should really take more care not to fall into partisan rhetorical traps when confronted with ideology they feel threatened by.
Nope. This Strawman is actually a Bailey.
I'm aware that there are disingenuous actors using reasonable trans rights as a motte to support their crazy baileys, but this (as with any other issue) doesn't preclude other, good faith actors from honestly believing the same stuff (without the bailey).
Take a step back from the issue itself, and you'll realise that you're effectively arguing that "[reasonable view] should never be given credence or treated as a good faith argument, because there are also people who abuse it to defend/advocate for [unreasonable, dangerous view]", which is exactly the kind of fallacious argument radical progressives use to shut down dissent all the time.
The eternal problem with "This incredibly aggressive ideology actually has quite reasonable voices hiding inside" is its a classic Prisoner's Dillema
1) If I cooperate and the opponent cooperate, we get trans acceptance and women's rights and rainbow colored unicorns
2) But if i cooperate and the opponent defects, they get to dox me, cancel me, jail me with false allegations, take jobs they're not qualified for, etc.....
3) If we both defect, we both get a chance at shitflinging, which seems somewhat fair
4) If i defect and opponent cooperate, well that was just me being the 'smarter' guy
Maybe the best long term strategy is cooperation, but the clear short term winner is defection. When you're asking your ideological opponents to cooperate, you're essentially asking them to trust you that a) you're actually honest b) your party is the controlling faction of your whole side, which does seem like a lot to take on faith.
This makes some sense to me, but thankfully i think the nature of debate is sufficiently continuous that the atomic transactional nature of the prisoner's dilemma doesn't straightforwardly apply. Certainly if you have any kind of continued exposure to an individual you can get a good sense over time of whether or not they're arguing in good faith and engage accordingly. And even in discussions with an unknown stranger, I think (I hope!) it's possible to cover your bases by engaging tentatively in good faith discussion but still leave yourself in a solid position to minimise your "opponent"'s credibility if they do "defect" and turn out to be putting forward a bad faith argument.
"Wokeness" is not that singular. If they lose the trans debate, it won't really affect wokeness in racial contexts.
Not about wokeness specifically, but if you want to dismantle unnecessary and damaging academic bureaucracy, you'll find that being successful means usually both 1. building a coalition of people who will support your cause, and 2. finding someone in a position of authority to support you. It also means being patient and persistent.
One example: it took me over a year and many patient conversations to eliminate a useless committee. It's absence hasn't caused any issues in the 8 years it's been gone, and 7 faculty/staff have been spared a monthly meeting. To make it happen it required that I be more stubborn than the existing bureaucracy.
In general I think there's room for multiple different approaches to the same issue. I don't think having only public jerks on one side of an issue works long term, and I would appreciate more Fabians in the academy in general, so if in doubt I'd recommend more people lean that way on a variety of issues. Being intentionally provocative has it's place, but I'm not into it. Righteous anger still leaves you feeling angry.
This is a pretty good point. Maybe Scott's friend, whatever sort of activism they settle on, should emphasize whisper networks.
(note: my phone autocorrected to "whisky networks," and as I erased it I thought that might actually not be a bad idea either)
Can you give me some more details on how you won that one (eliminating the committee)? I've found it pretty much impossible to ever change things in a subtractive way, that is to get an organization to stop doing something that is a waste of time. I am very interested in how to achieve this.
Sure. The committee in question was duplicating work done by others. It existed because of tradition, and because it gave something for people to include on promotion applications.
I started by suggesting we eliminate it. I got pushback by people who claimed it was necessary. I asked why and made a list of the answers. I then suggested ways to still fulfill all of those functions without the committee. That was the easy part.
The hard part was getting enough people on board to approve the change. I did this by talking with stubborn folks outside of committee, and bringing up the proposal regularly in committee and with other related committees. Eventually the idea of eliminating the committee had been presented enough times to enough people with no factual objections that we got the votes for it to happen, almost unanimously.
Nobody said this explicitly, but I think part of why it took so long was that people had workloads figured out for the year, and didn’t want to lose a responsibility midyear that might require reassigning responsibility. Another reason is that it took people a while to get comfortable with the idea of a committee that had existed for 10+ years no longer existing. It naturally brings up the idea: does that mean my work for the past few years was a waste? The real answer is yes, but there’s no need to force people to confront that uncomfortable truth, and it’s counterproductive. A helpful narrative about changing organizational needs helped people save face and be able to agree: my work was valuable, but ok, NOW we don’t need it anymore.
Fabian I guess, if I'm forced to choose (though I am totally loath to do that).
How grievous is the wokeness, what is its potential harm to principles and practices? If it's minor, don't fight it too much: voice your opinion with your reasons, but leave it at that. Listen to other people's reasons with an open mind, make sure everyone is heard if they have something they wish to contribute, try to use meeting practices that make it easy rather than hard to say something, treat each conversant fairly as you'd like yourself to be treated as a sensible adult with reasoned opinions.
Frankly, I find the whole idea of picking a strategy juvenile and sort of dishonest and disrespectful towards your fellow coworkers. You're not supposed to act as if your workplace is some battlefield, your coworkers constitute an opposition to overcome, and concocting a workable strategy for overcoming that opposition to install your smarter, more sensible regime. Organised job action would be the acceptable exception in my mind, where the disagreements are so vast that an official set of measures are required to settle them so people can get on with their important jobs.
I often find both woke and anti-woke sides silly to the point of exhaustion and wish the silliness would just be put to rest, and I think the best way to achieve it is to make concessions on both sides and be very generous to people's reasoning. Not being able to keep your head and choose the side that is right when you actually think they are right means you're consigning to a stupid crusade for appearances, and that's not how a mature person ought to behave while expecting others to treat you with respect. I find many woke things impotent as tools for changing actual injustices, but they're often also very innocent (like do we make a meeting quorate or not when discussing policy on racism, do we refer to immigrants as immigrants or migrants because of cultural connotations etc.), so I let them slide fairly often, pointing out that "I don't think that will bear fruit, but you seem to be convinced so maybe you're right, but either way it's not a big deal so let's press on with the rest of the agenda and agree to do it your way."
It's very hard for me to imagine a situation at my own place of business that would warrant the berserker strategy, but I'm sure they exist and would like to hear examples.
What if one of the sides is open to debate "what is right when you actually think" while the other wants to crucify you for any heresy they spot?
I think the point is stop thinking about it as too "sides" that are complete monocultures. If someone wants to "crucify you for any heresy on the spot" then you shouldn't engage with them at all. But I think the vast majority people are not in fact like that and especially if you can genuinely engage with them directly in way that give them the impression that you take their concerns seriously.
Yep, Dan H sums up my thoughts really well. Of course, in the real world you can't just pretend people don't exist e.g. if somebody wants to block you from a conversation, you should just explain the problem and try to get them to give you the room to explain your viewpoint. E.g. using the word "crucifixion" exaggerates the problem, and I would not use that word to describe the issue if wanting to be taken seriously by others at the same table. Further, I think people often are guilty of secretly psyching themselves up for all sorts of negative situations as some sort of defence system so they wouldn't have to endure indignation, and then they enter talks already bristled up. Being sympathetic (not nurturing, not patronising) and honest (treating them like adults) is very useful. Not that I always live up to that ideal myself, it's very difficult to contain your posture when you personally feel attacked.
I mean.... one side says mean things on Twitter, and the other side passes legislation that directly harms people. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’m hard pressed to know what sides you are talking about here. Either can be mean on Twitter.
This comment is a Rorschach test.
Yeh, I think he means the right is passing laws that harm people. Could be the opposite though - self ID as a harmful ideology.
Agree 100%. The "berserker" strategy seems like it would be a good strategy to get you invited on podcasts, but it's also very likely to turn your workplace into a thoroughly toxic environment where there is no hope of making any substantive progress. And more broadly, treating "wokeness" as some all-consuming malignant force that must be opposed I think is just wrong on the object level. The way to deal with people who, in response to legitimate concerns, behave in toxic and counter-productive ways is to actually take the concerns seriously and refocus on substantive action.
Hala! In the first half hour of this podcast I described why I had to create the Darwinian Gender Studies forum because the Richard Dawkins Forums had been taken over by irrational humanists. https://paulawright.substack.com/p/guesting-on-the-vent-podcast
What do I think? I think that putting phrases like "opposes wokeness" in the context of "join the fight for academic freedom" means that, somewhere when I was not looking, the meaning of "woke(ness)" changed from "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination", which is what I thought it meant, to "harsh cancel culture on behalf of racial issues." But I see that Wikipedia claims that the word's transfer into a pejorative already happened. Yep, I haven't been paying attention.
I also see the line about "hundreds of college students hurl garbage and expletives at some kindly old sociologist who said biological sex was real one time or whatever." I consider the phrase "biological sex is real" to be a kind of shibboleth, the use of which declares a willful refusal to understand what the fuss is about.
Nobody thinks that biological sex isn't real, least of all trans people. If there were no difference between the sexes, there would hardly be any point in transitioning between them, would there? What people who say "biological sex is real" and expect to be traduced for it are actually claiming is that epigenetic display is the -only- biological reality. What they're being traduced for (and properly so) is refusal to acknowledge that biological reality is more complicated than that, refusal to admit that sex definitions and assignments can be messy, and claiming that an internal sense of sexual identity doesn't exist (Ryan Anderson in "When Harry Became Sally" tries to make the concept of internal sense of sexual identity disappear in a puff of logic).
If Lucky Academic would like my support, he should take that giant chip off his shoulder.
> claiming is that epigenetic display is the -only- biological reality.
How many trans people are intersex in the biological sense? Because that seems like, first, a red herring, second, an insulting exploitation of a medical condition (which the claimer does not suffer from) to make a political point.
This seem to be a question of a category border, not of a fact.
Personally, I find considering non-cisgender and non-heterosexual people as part of a broad intersex spectrum a helpful idea. Some people have unusual chromosomes, some unusual genitals, some unusual way their hormones work. Likewise some have unusual mechanisms in the brain resulting in different sense of gender identity and/or sexual attraction. Seems to be a reasonable way to classify stuff.
I don't think that any societal changes are being pushed in its name. I haven't even seen this framework been strictly formalized anywhere.
Anyway, I find this model to be clean and simple in Occamian sense. It's reductionists, do not need lots of different entities with different labels and have great opportunities for gear-level understanding of phenomena in question.
As far as I'm concern this model was original idea of my girlfriend. And she is not nearly that influential.
Mind you, I do not claim, that lots of change isn't pushed for the sake of social justice, trans-right or other issues. I just point that they are not pushed in the name of this model, and whether we adopt it or not won't change much in this regard.
I don't think intersex has anything to do with being non-binary or transgender; this is largely a cultural fiction.
For example, the vast majority of people with non-XX or XY chromosomes do not have any readily noticeable differences in external sex phenotypes, and are not more likely than typical chromosome combinations to identify as transgender or non-binary. Think about it: two of the non-typical chromosome combinations are single X and XXX, so while there can be some phenotypic results of that, there isn't any male chromosomes to make someone "in between". Likewise, XYY individuals are phenotypically male, and might just be taller? More masculine? Which is not what you usually think of when you think of someone between being male and female. And then there is XXY, which can result in shorter stature and low sperm count, but these individuals identify as men similar to the rate in the rest of the population, their phenotypic differences are often minor, and many might not even realize that that have an unusual chromosome combination until they try to have children in adulthood and realize that they are less able to produce sperm.
There are also many, many other ways, for example with non-functional metabolic pathways, that individuals can develop phenotypes that are not binary male or female. But I wouldn't want to de-facto classify these individuals as trans or non-binary without their consent, if that's not how they experience their bodies. And I would never want any of these individuals to feel bad about how their bodies manifest, so I think that broad acceptance of being intersex is good, but it is also the case that these situations can have health related issues that have nothing to do with genitals or sex differentiation, and have a medical component, in a way that I would want to keep ideologically separate from an understanding of being transgender or non-binary.
You seem to be missing my point.
I'm not saying that intersex people are trans. Nor I'm saying that all trans people have chromosomal abnormalities. I'm saying that there are real biological reasons why trans people are trans and gay people are gay just as there are real biological reasons why intersex people are intersex and it can be helpfull to consider all of them parts of the same cluster.
How are they "part of the same cluster" then? How do you relate them?
No, I think that "considering them as all in the same cluster" conflates two things that don't have anything to do with each other. I understand that you don't think there is a one to one correspondence. I go further and say that these categories largely have nothing to do with one another (besides, maybe, mutual allyship for social acceptance).
A deeper reason I have issue with your logic is that I don't like justifying cultural, social and moral things through biology. Relevant to the current conversation, the conservative position is that biology justifies gender, and conservatives respond to that with the answer that observable external sex equals gender. To counter, it seems that some progressives like to say that the sex biology isn't just genitals or chromosomes, its hormone exposure, organ development, and brain structure, in short a wider range of biological things. To me, this answer really misses the boat. We've provided an answer without asking if the demanding justification, "Is it based in biology?" is the right question to ask in the first place. And I would say it is the wrong justification to seek! We've retained a conservative justification and just provided a progressive answer. We should ignore this justification altogether.
Gender is a social, cultural, and moral category. I'm not a great moral philosopher, but it would seem that the only two questions to ask about any action or identity is: Does this hurt oneself or anyone else? Or does this improve one's life or anyone else? And if it doesn't hurt yourself or others, or rather benefits yourself or others, then one should feel absolutely free to be any gender (or identity) that feels best. I would also say that gender is an "ought" category, which means that gender identity tells me how I ought to relate to someone in order to be kind and respectful. It's an "ought" about the moral and social world I hope to live in.
Biology, on the other hand, is a product of physics and chemistry. It is an "is" category. It has no inherent moral, social or cultural meaning. We use biological building blocks as materials (combined with a lifetime of experiences) to build rich social identities and systems of meaning, but they aren't identities or meaningful in themselves. This is sex.
Arguing biology about trans issues is a total distraction. It's the naturalistic fallacy coming from both sides.
The actual issue is that people have different preferences, and they need to come to some voluntary arrangement that gets everybody most of what they want.
Many women want to have changing rooms where a straight man who claims some unobservable state of gender identity disorder can't just walk in and watch them changing.
Many women want to have sports competitions where XX women have a real chance of winning, instead of being super dominated by XY women.
Many transwomen want to be included in the tribe of women, and do all the things that women do, and not feel excluded from anything.
This is a hard problem. There isn't any easy way to give everybody what they want. There isn't any easy way to decide which group should get what they want, if you have to decide.
Some culture warriors sweep all this difficulty under the rug and just pretend the other side are evil mutants for wanting what they want. (see the below arguments that XX-sports = anti-trans = kkk, or go on gab to see the opposite side of the horseshoe)
This misses the entire point of politics, which is to negotiate a settlement that maximizes the aggregate fulfillment of preferences, not to just cancel everyone who has different preferences.
Often politics is dissatisfying because you can't come close to getting everything you want. One great way to supplement that is to built a local community, or a subculture, or a charter city, within which people of like mind can have many more of their preferences fulfilled.
As far as I'm concerned biological reasons for gender identity is where scientific evidence is pointing rather than a stance helpfull to have for political reasons. It's perfectly possible to argue both pro- and anti-trans points from both "gender identity is rooted in biology" and "gender identity is fully social". Same with sexual orientation.
I'm definetely not an expert, but here is my crude, layman explanation. Every function of our bodies exist for evolutionary reasons, and is encoded in our biology. Our psyche isn't an exception. And neither are our feelings gender identity and sexual attraction.
This doesn't mean that we are not affected by social and cultural stuff. On the contrary! The whole ability to adapt to the environment and being affected by stimuli is encoded in our biological wetware. It's safe to assume that we humans have some quality, there is some biological mechanism responsible for it, and there is an evolutional reason for this quality.
Why do humans have sexual attraction? This seems quite straightforward. Potential mate recognition is important for inclusive genetic fitness. Why do humans have the sense of gender identity? This is less clear, but probably has to do something with mating rituals and sexual dimorphism. We need to have a map of our bodies and as female and male bodies can be somewhat different this models have to be different in order to be accurate enough.
There are lots of others sex/gender realted biological mechanisms in our body. Complex mechanisms can break in multiple ways. Sometimes something weird goes with hormones. Sometimes with chromosomes. Such people are classified as intersex. But just as well something can go "wrong" with sexual attraction mechanism. Thus there are gays, bisexsuals and asexuals. And just as well something can go wrong with mechanisms related to gender identity. Such people are called transgenders.
We can talk about specific things that went "wrong". But it seems that it's reasonable to assume that all these people are part of a same cluster - people whose sex-related biological wetware is somehow "broken".
If there was any biological evidence here we would be able to measure and therefore self identification wouldn’t be needed.
Gender identity actually prefers gender to sex, it’s the belief that gender - which is something internal - surpasses biology. It’s a belief in a soul.
I'm not going to answer the biological question, because its irrelevant to how you accept and treat people.
As for things that aren't based in biology:
Do you think morality is a real thing? Freedom? The law?
What are you saying when you say something is meaningful? How is meaning real?
How about the identity of being Catholic or Canadian? Conservative? Progressive? A Nicks fan? A nerd, a jock, etc.?
Human categories (and identities) based on social interaction, culture, and experience are no less real than those based on biology. They aren't delusions, and biology and experience inputs probably work together in an intricately intertwined way to create identities. I would say our biology enables us to create identities based on non-biological inputs (just as language centers allow us to learn any of 100s of culturally developed languages).
You have an identities too, and each one is not a one-to-one correspondence with your biological motivations or body phenotype.
I'm not sure exactly what point you're making; however the issue I believe most people who take issue with the phrase 'biological sex is real' is that it's a stand in for quite silly ideas used to attack trans people. The principle ones that someone who feels a need to say biological sex is real imply are that people who discuss gender don't think that biological sex is real, or that gender is either an unimportant idea or mostly based in biology.
That’s all confused, since you seem to think gender is used in biology. It isn’t. Except as a direct synonym for sex. There are 3 definitions of gender.
1) gender = sex. Like on a census form.
2) gender = gender roles, the social construction of rules for the sexes. For instance, in the past a biological woman had a gender role that prohibited her from voting etc.
3) gender=gender identity.
For people like Judith Butler Gender identity supersedes both sex and gender roles. Therefore a 60 year old biological man who was brought up (thus socially constructed) as a man is really a woman if that is how s/he feels. No scientific tests are necessarily and no psychiatric evaluation need be involved for self identification which is the law in many countries.
What gender identity is not is gender dysphoria. That does need a psychiatric evaluation and recommends transitioning as a cure for the distress of a medical condition. It doesn’t claim though that the transition changes biology.
In countries with self identification laws, or organisations with these rules, no transition is needed, not even so much as a dab of lipstick or a wig.
> I also see the line about "hundreds of college students hurl garbage and expletives at some kindly old sociologist who said biological sex was real one time or whatever." I consider the phrase "biological sex is real" to be a kind of shibboleth, the use of which declares a willful refusal to understand what the fuss is about.
Yes, and I'll also note that there are families who are being forced to flee states like Texas (https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/Some-Texas-families-flee-toxic-environment-16341326.php) because the governor has decided to criminally prosecute the parents of trans teens for seeking medical care for their children (https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/08/paxton-transgender-child-abuse/).
14,000 families face unjust persecution in Texas alone and may become refugees in their own country, but please, Scott, tell me more about how the real victim is a "kindly" old sociology professor who decided to side against those families, and the real criminals are the college students who are angry about it.
How about we just agree that there's two completely unrelated issues here:
1. Whether it's right to hurl garbage and shout expeletives at professors for making certain statements, and
2. What exactly the laws should be regarding various medical treatments at various ages
The temptation to tie a bunch of issues together and let your position on one affect your position on the other is the reason we have culture wars instead of sensible discussions.
I don't agree with that. First of all, the "throw garbage" example, to my knowledge, is invented. Even supposing there was a single instance of a mob of students throwing garbage at an invited speaker, I agree that would be bad and the college should discipline the perpetrators, but I don't agree that this constitutes an issue in the dictionary sense of "an important topic for debate or discussion".
So in my view there is one issue, which is that trans kids' families are being persecuted for seeking medical care for their children. There are also opponents of trans rights who are trying to distract from that issue by bringing up non-issues, like anecdotes (often invented) about woke mobs being mean to innocent academics who are just raising important questions. Or who are trying to reframe the issue in terms of a debate about what the laws "should be" - note that in this case, no law was passed or changed; the governor of Texas just unilaterally decided that the law has always regarded routine medical care as child abuse and instructed state officials to act accordingly.
Again, what about the case of Kathleen Stock? She didn't (as far as I know) have garbage thrown at her, but she has been subjected to a massive campaign of vilification which has extended to something that any reasonable person would regard as bullying and harassment. And she is not the only one. I don't see why this is not an important topic for debate - we can debate the fairness of that kind of vilification, AND condemn the Texas law at the same time.
Can we perhaps even go further than opposing harassment? Could we perhaps even agree BOTH that the Texas law is a massive injustice that would cause a lot of harm AND that Kathleen Stock should not be vilified or regarded as "transphobic" for believing that in certain limited cases (e.g. sport, rape crisis centers) biological sex should be the sole criterion for classification, and for believing that in certain other limited cases (e.g. changing rooms, places where people appear naked - see e.g. https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/on-wi-spa-and-our-stunted-national?s=r) one should not be able to access them solely on the basis of an internal sense of gender identity? Do you really believe Kathleen Stock is "transphobic" for holding those views?
You've asked me twice about Kathleen Stock in the time it took to write a single response to your first comment about Kathleen Stock. I replied below, but the tl;dr is that Stock is appallingly transphobic, regularly insults trans people, accuses trans activists of being cryptofetishists, and has had her work cited in legal briefs and rulings which favor discrimination against and denial of medical care to trans people. The comment below has a link to extensive documentation of these claims.
Not familiar with the Kathleen Stock affair in particular, but given that there are autogynephiles who will admit that having a fetish about being a woman seems to be the most accurate way to describe what they have - see http://unremediatedgender.space/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/ for a very long but interesting exploration of the idea - it doesn't seem prima facie unreasonable to assume that some trans activist fall into the same category, but are less open, or at least, less self-aware about it.
> The temptation to tie a bunch of issues together and let your position on one affect your position on the other is the reason we have culture wars instead of sensible discussions.
And what, precisely, about the original post should lead any of us to think that it's an attempt to end the tying of a bunch of issues together?
It seems to me that the entire idea of "anti-woke" is that "woke" is a useful linking of ideas, so we should link together all the opposites of those ideas. Anyone who thinks the linking is the problem should oppose "anti-woke" just as much as "woke".
I somewhat agree with your last point, but it depends whether you're using "anti-woke" as a quick convenient label for the kinds of things that you're against, or whether you're using it as a guiding principle.
This is why I said in my top-level comment that the academic in question should focus on figuring out what his actual principles are.
Why can't they both be "real victims"? And why do you assume that the sociology professor wouldn't side with those families? Like Kalimac, I don't think you really understand the full nature of the debate and the claims being made on each side. (And I agree with you that the Texas law is a diabolical travesty.)
"And why do you assume that the sociology professor wouldn't side with those families?"
Because in every real world example that I have ever seen about a campus speaker or professor being "canceled" by trans activists, the speaker has been consistently and deeply anti-trans.
Let me ask you again about Kathleen Stock. She does not appear to be "consistently and deeply anti-trans" at all - she accepts that trans people in most (but not all) circumstances should be treated in terms of their claimed gender identity, she believes that medical transitioning in some cases should be not merely permitted but supported from public funds. Yet she has definitely been vilified and viciously opposed by trans activists. I think you really are operating from a false account of the two sides here.
You've asked me twice about Kathleen Stock in the time it took to write a single response to your first comment about Kathleen Stock. I replied below, but the tl;dr is that Stock is appallingly transphobic, regularly insults trans people, accuses trans activists of being cryptofetishists, and has had her work cited in legal briefs and rulings which favor discrimination against and denial of medical care to trans people. The comment below has a link to extensive documentation of these claims.
Then you're willfully ignorant, or have an exceptionally broad definition of 'anti-trans'.
Okay, I'll be very clear and bite the bullet on this one.
If you think that trans people should not receive medical care according to modern, scientifically-based standards developed by doctors, you're anti-trans. Yes, that includes puberty blockers for children.
If you think that trans people should be denied access to single-gender spaces on the basis that they are not the gender they claim to be, you're anti-trans. Yes, that includes changing rooms at spas, it includes single-gender holding facilities in prisons/jails, and it includes sports teams.
If you think that trans people are so inherently disgusting or deviant that the mere mention of their existence is harmful to children, then you are anti-trans. Yes, that includes children in kindergarten. If a child is old enough to know the words "boy" and "girl" then they have been taught gender, which means they can be taught that there are some boys who we used to think were girls and vice versa.
None of these are "exceptionally broad" definitions of anti-trans. These are all basic, conventional positions for framing discussion of trans issues. There is a pro-trans and an anti-trans side of each, and the pro- and anti-sides are clear and legible.
The people who are willfully ignorant are the people who believe that you can be against letting trans women use women's bathrooms, against letting trans children get medical care, and against teaching children that trans people exist, but also be in favor of trans rights. These are the rights in question. No one is debating whether trans women have the right to wear makeup.
Of course you have the right to be anti-trans. I'm not coming to anyone's house with a sign demanding that they adopt my values. But to me it's always a bad sign when the side of the debate that opposes minority rights feels the need to pretend they don't. If you know your beliefs are so odious that you're not even willing to characterize them accurately and bristle at those who do, that's a good indication that you're on the wrong side of history. I suspect that one day the anti-trans movement will be mentioned in the same breath as the KKK - a historical hate group who felt the need to hide their true identities. but I digress.
Perhaps you have a different definition of anti-trans? Or some examples of people who were canceled by trans activists despite not espousing any of the above positions?
Thanks for clearly defining your views, I appreciate it.
There definitely are people (Judith Butler springs to mind) who are both extremely influential and who think that biological sex isn't real, or at least not real in any way that should have any significant effect on our categorizations and treatment of human beings. And the people (or at least the most thoughtful people) who are traduced for saying "biological sense is real" definitely do recognize that an internal sense of sexual identity can exist and can be mismatched with biological reality. Maybe read Kathleen Stock, "Material Girls", who both takes the "biological sex is real" line (and has been massively persecuted for doing so), and has a carefully argued and nuanced view of the nature of the debate and the claims being made on each side.
In short, I think you are grossly mischaracterizing both sides here. But I do (like Kathleen Stock!) agree that most real life non-academic trans people don't accept the "biological sex isn't real" line, and indeed that their actual transitioning presupposes it. The problem is that this has been overlaid with an academic theory of gender identity which in many university circles has become sacrosanct, such that denying it and arguing that biological sex should trump it in certain limited circumstances (as Kathleen Stock did) is considered "transphobic".
> or at least not real in any way that should have any significant effect on our categorizations and treatment of human beings"
It seems to me that this phrase does a lot of heavy lifting here. There are lots of things that are both real but unsignificant to treatment and categorization of objects in question.
Indeed. And Judith Butler claims that biological sex is one of them, and Kathleen Stock denies this, and says that biological sex should (in certain limited circumstances - not all or even most circumstances) be a primary factor that determines the way we categorize people. That is exactly the point.
It would be interesting to let them do the adversarial collaboration together and write a nuanced book about it. And it's a pity we do not live in a world where this is the immediate reaction to two public figures disagreeing about a matter.
However, this have little to do with the initial comment that you originally responded to. The claim was "noobody thinks that biological sex isn't real" and your response was "some people thinks that biological sex isn't relevant to the way people are treated". That's what I wanted to highlight.
https://www.praile.com/post/kathleen-stock-obe
This Kathleen Stock?
"Stock often claims to respect trans people, to support their rights, and to merely be concerned to advocate for cis women's supposedly competing rights and interests. This sounds reasonable. In some pieces, she does a decent job of maintaining this guise, especially if you're unfamiliar with these issues. But attention to her activism and the actual things she says paints a very different picture. As I will document, she misrepresents and mocks trans identities. She is at best dismissive of trans people's needs and interests. She belittles and vilifies them. The "threats to females" that supposedly justify her opposition to trans inclusion are not real; she has been unable to point to any serious, coherent risk to cis women from the specific, concrete material advances for trans people she has opposed. While claiming to be centrally concerned with defending academic freedom and free speech, she has actively—and, unfortunately, successfully—tried to silence people who disagree with her. Specific claims she has made about political suppression have been untrue."
And then thousands of words, with links, substantiating each one of those claims. In my opinion the most damning are the ones where Stock attacks people who defend the right of trans youth to access standard medical care, claiming they are doing so on the basis of a sexual fetish.
The article concludes by noting legal cases and rulings which have cited Stock's work; there is a direct line between anti-trans academics like Stock and anti-trans laws and policies, like the one driving families to flee Texas right now. This is why I disagree with Melvin above about his proposal to try to disentangle the issues. You portray Stock as a victim of "persecution", but her work is literally cited in legal briefs supporting anti-trans employment discrimination in the US and opposing medical care for trans youth in the UK.
And note that Stock, who is not a medical doctor or researcher, is claiming that the medical consensus on treatment of trans youth is wrong - not because of studies, but because she thinks the doctors doing the research are perverts devoted to the interests of an obscure group of sexual fetishists. And that conspiracy theory is what passes for "carefully argued and nuanced" in the anti-trans discourse? Yikes.
That’s all a bit Orwellian isn’t it? A woman fired from a university for believing that biology exists is the real villain here?
lol she wasn't fired, but thank you for illustrating how widely propaganda about her case has spread.
In fact she quit because she couldn't tolerate the fact that she was unable to convince people to adopt her transphobia and couldn't handle disagreement (in other words, the free speech and academic debate of others).
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/nov/03/kathleen-stock-says-she-quit-university-post-over-medieval-ostracism
You don't think that the harassment had anything to do with it? The posters attacking her all over campus? The graffiti demanding her sacking? The 100 students protesting outside her building with placards saying "Sack Stock"? The student letter of demands circulated with "Anti-Stock Action" on it? And all this continuing for months and months? This is, in your view, "the free speech and academic debate of others"?
I use the word harassment advisedly - it is the same word used by the Vice-Chancellor of her university after she resigned to describe the way she was treated (https://staff.sussex.ac.uk/news/article/56597-message-from-the-vice-chancellor). Someone who feels that her working circumstances have become intolerable because of it has not, in any legal or moral sense, freely "quit".
>"The posters attacking her all over campus?"
Or as the right calls it, "free speech."
>"The graffiti demanding her sacking?"
Or as the right calls it, "free speech."
>"The 100 students protesting outside her building with placards saying "Sack Stock"?"
Or as the right calls it, "free speech."
>"The student letter of demands circulated with "Anti-Stock Action" on it?"
Or as the right calls it, "free speech."
>This is, in your view, "the free speech and academic debate of others"?
I'm not the one here asking for help strategizing how to stand up for academic freedom. But if "academic freedom" is not "the freedom of students on college campuses to express their opinions in word and print" then one of us is deeply, deeply confused about what academic freedom entails.
Now, if you want colleges to institute some kind of speech code which insists on collegiality and civility, go ahead and say so - but then be prepared to explain why Stock's repeated uncivil anti-trans statements wouldn't violate those codes.
Unfortunately this is simply a case where Stock picked a fight because she thought she could bully trans kids with impunity, and it turned out that she couldn't. There is simply no fair academic principle that could possibly allow Stock to attack trans people but not let trans allies complain about it in whatever media they had at their disposal. This is literally what free speech looks like - it's a battle of ideas in which one side can sometimes lose. If you call for free speech when you're winning and censorship when you're losing, you'll have to forgive me for viewing your principles as hollow pretexts.
I think this thread is as good as any at illustrating the inherent conflict between radical feminism and gender identity. It does not seem possible to defend the notion of females as a materially and politically relevant class while also defending transgender rights.
Basically, it is “transphobic” to believe that female is a meaningful class of people if said class does not allow trans women.
"Stock attacks people who defend the right of trans youth to access standard medical care"
What is "standard medical care" for trans youth? Counseling? Drugs? Immediate referral to a clinic that provides gender surgery? Is a "trans youth" someone who is of legal age or is it someone of any age who wants to change sex?
An adult who wants to transition is a different situation from a child (under 21? 18? 14?) who wants to transition.
> What is "standard medical care" for trans youth? Counseling? Drugs? Immediate referral to a clinic that provides gender surgery? Is a "trans youth" someone who is of legal age or is it someone of any age who wants to change sex?
If you have to ask these questions please stop and consider that perhaps your input into the debate over trans rights is detracting from the quality of the discourse rather than adding to it.
Seriously, if I walked into a debate over creating a no-fly zone in Ukraine and asked "where even is Ukraine? Is Kharkiv in Ukraine? How about Warsaw?" I would be laughed out of the room, if I were lucky.
But somehow people who know less than nothing about medical treatment for trans youth are allowed to make laws governing those who do, and if someone says "maybe we should just leave this one to the professionals" that's considered a violation of your academic freedom.
lol I don't know how you expect me to take comments like this seriously.
You have one case of an academic philosopher - not a medical doctor or researcher, mind you, but someone who plays word games for a living - getting "harassed out of their job" - and not because of a disagreement on the science, but because of a pattern of behavior which her community did not approve of.
That's literally the entire case for your claim that medical science is unduly influenced by trans activists.
On the basis of that - which, by the way, is chronologically backwards in addition to being unsubstantiated - you want us to believe that no study of treatment plans and outcomes can possibly be considered valid, that no medical consensus can possibly be viewed as trustworthy, and that the entire left is anti-science.
You bring nothing to the conversation besides unhinged conspiracy theories and trolling. Please, I hope you understand that when I fail to reply to most of your comments, it's not because you've made a point I can't answer - it's because I'm getting old and stooping to this level of discourse repeatedly is hard on my back.
If one is too young to consent to five minutes of someone touching their genitals pleasurably, they're *way* too young to consent to permanent mutilation of their genitals. Sex-change surgery (or whatever the current word on the euphemism treadmill) on children is probably child abuse. So is circumcision, but that has less potential for harm.
Yeah, you're right, I mean, technically.
I mean, The World Professional Association for Transgender Health agrees with you - https://www.wpath.org/media/cms/Documents/SOC%20v7/SOC%20V7_English.pdf. They publish the most widely-used standard of care guidelines for transgender patients. Their guidelines clearly state that sex change surgeries may only be performed on people who have reached the age of majority in their countries (pp 59-60).
But again, let me state my strident objection to comments like yours. You are participating in a right-wing moral panic by 1) making implicit connections between LGBTQ people and pedophilia and 2) debating the categorically false straw man position that trans activists are demanding surgeries for toddlers.
Trans activists want trans children to be able to access the medical standard of care for trans people. If you're going to comment on that standard, you might find it helpful to have the tiniest quantum of familiarity with what that standard says. This information is not a secret - it's on Google. Otherwise, as I said to the previous commenter who didn't know anything about the issue we're discussing, your contribution is detracting from the quality of the discourse.
By the way, and I hope you don't think I'm being too hard on you, I believe there is a word for issuing a judgment about a topic before you know anything about that topic. You decided that parents and doctors of trans children were child abusers without even knowing what medical interventions trans children actually receive. That's pretty textbook prejudice. If you want to improve as a rationalist - I know, sort of a joke given the context - you might want to consider examining how your prejudices are impacting the conclusions you make about the world.
Yes, that Kathleen Stock.
I looked at the article you linked to - as you say, thousands of words, lots of links. I don't have time to follow all of them in detail, but of the ones I did look at, I'm not sure "substantiating" is exactly the word I would use to describe them. Not that I found anything false, but, let's say, the author's characterization of them - and also yours - seems somewhat slanted.
For example: yes, it is true that Kathleen Stock is cited in legal briefs arguing that trans women should not in all circumstances be treated as women for employment. That follows from her basic position: because (e.g.) if she thinks (as she does) that trans women should not be clients in rape crisis centers, then it obviously follows that trans women should not be employed in rape crisis centers. I fail to see this as damning.
And yes, she holds a different theory of mind to that of the author of the article, specifically in terms of how that relates to transgenderism, which she, accordingly, characterizes very differently. Her theory does not strike me as obviously wrong, nor to rise to the level of "transphobia", even though the author of the article spends a lot of time attacking it as such, largely (as far as I can see) on the basis of introspection, which, while relevant, is not generally treated as the sole relevant criterion in philosophy of mind.
In other cases, there appears to be the "duelling experts" problem, where each side cites experts and then claims the other side's experts aren't real experts ... And so on, and so on.
But let's leave all that aside - let's accept that everything the article says about Kathleen Stock is true. Let's hypothesize an imaginary Kathleen Stock, who believes - and says in public - the following:
(a) Trans women are not women in the biological sense, but should be treated as women in most but not all social and employment circumstances. (Ditto trans men, but Stock's interest seems to be more in trans women.)
(b) There are, however, certain limited social circumstances where biology matters, where only people who are "biological women" should be permitted - for example, most sports (where having gone through male puberty may be argued to have conferred a permanent advantage).
(c) There are other limited social circumstances - such as single-sex saunas where people are habitually naked - where trans women should only be permitted if they have physically transitioned: gender ID is not enough.
(d) Let's add: the recent Texas law is a really bad law, and should not be allowed to stand. (As indeed it hasn't: it was blocked yesterday by the Texas appeal courts, so you need no longer worry about the thousands fleeing Texas.)
Such a person would be closely analogous to the sociology professor Scott cited. Should such a person be regarded as "transphobic"?
Yup.
Well... let me amend that by saying that such a person would be expressing anti-trans positions. Describing a position and describing a person are different, and shifting the focus from what you say to what you are is a way to weasel out of accountability for for what you say. "Sure, Kathleen said XYZ, but she's a good person at heart." Great, that's unfalsifiable, we've derailed an argument from how we can help trans people to how we talk about anti-trans activists.
Specifically regarding b, I'd argue that if there are sports in which some physical characteristic predicts performance and we are interested primarily in competitions between people who have that characteristic within certain parameters, then we should use that characteristic, rather than using sex or gender as a proxy for it. Like weight classes in boxing.
Specifically regarding c, if I told you that Jews should be excluded from saunas to spare Gentiles the trauma of seeing a circumcised penis, would that or would that not count as an anti-Semitic position?
"Specifically regarding c, if I told you that Jews should be excluded from saunas to spare Gentiles the trauma of seeing a circumcised penis, would that or would that not count as an anti-Semitic position?"
Yes, but I don't regard that as a very good analogy to naked women being in the same room as people with exposed male genitalia. If you can't see WHY that is different, I'm not sure I have very much to say, except to invite you to read the entire history of women's spaces and women's attitudes to female and male bodies within different cultures, and talk to some women who rely on the privacy and femaleness of such spaces ...
I have never heard of a real-life Gentile who was literally traumatized by seeing a circumcised penis: I have spoken to women and read many things by other women for whom seeing male genitalia (apart from those of intimate partners or pre-pubescent children) is deeply and genuinely disturbing. Hence you seem to be raising a straw man analogy to compare to a real life case.
I want to point your attention at the noncentral fallacy your are implicitly commiting here.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world
The image of exposed male genitalia in female public space is disturbing for reasons which have nearly nothing to do with trans women. Trans women are extremely unlikely to be sexual predators. Their bodies are not even close to typical male bodies. Their genitalias are not like typical male penises.
The whole panic about trans women using female bathrooms is completely manufactured. Are there any laws, that prevent cis-man from entering female bathrooms? There are no police officer at the entrance. And cis-men are the most likely sex-offenders. Were there any talk about it before the trans right discorse started?
"Specifically regarding b, I'd argue that if there are sports in which some physical characteristic predicts performance and we are interested primarily in competitions between people who have that characteristic within certain parameters, then we should use that characteristic, rather than using sex or gender as a proxy for it. Like weight classes in boxing."
That might (perhaps) work for some sports: I'm less than convinced that it works for others, where male puberty arguably provides a whole series of interlocking but separate characteristics of advantage which are not readily reduced to a single number. Nor am I convinced that it is an "anti-trans" position to believe that.
"if I told you that Jews should be excluded from saunas to spare Gentiles the trauma of seeing a circumcised penis, would that or would that not count as an anti-Semitic position?"
This is an interesting hypothetical - (though I wonder if in many parts of the world, it wouldn't affect Muslims more often than Jews - that is: there are many countries where Muslims outnumber Jews, but I'd expect Muslims to have a stronger taboo than Jews about getting naked in a public sauna in the first place). I think that, in the hypothetical world where people existed in any significant number who were traumatised by the sight of a roundhead but unfazed by the sight of a cavalier, then as long as foreskin status, rather than ethnoreligious background, *was* actually the criterion used to determine who gets into the sauna ... and especially if there was a separate sauna that the circumcised could use, then calling it antisemitic would seem like an unreasonable stretch.
"at least not real in any way that should have any significant effect on our categorizations and treatment of human beings."
As Age wrote, this phrase is doing a lot of heavy lifting. They're not saying biology isn't real, they're saying that epigenetic display (which is what the 'biology is real' types mean by "biology") isn't a useful way of categorizing people in the social world (as distinguished from "pure scientific research").
And that viewpoint is in fact very widespread. But the contrary position to that is that epigenetic display is how we -should- classify people in the social world. It's an argument, but one to which fierce objection is legitimately raised; but to make that argument and then claim that all you're saying is that biology is real - that's deeply disingenuous and in fact is lying.
See what I said in another comment about the word "useful." If the other ways of categorization usually line up with epigenetic display ("biological sex" is a loaded term), then epigenetic perception may be the easiest way to tell at a glance, but the other categorizations should rule. It makes no difference in the 95% of cases where they line up, and it makes a big difference in the 5% where they don't. [figures purely guesswork]
We are considering biological sex. But biological sex is more than epigenetics. (The attempt to co-opt the term 'biology' is disingenuous.)
Source for your percentage numbers, please?
I'm not totally sure whom you are accusing of lying here. The "biology is real" people (at least, the sensible ones) are not saying that "epigenetic display" is the ONLY way of categorizing people, only that it is A way that should be used in SOME social circumstances. The opposing point of view is, as you say, that it is NEVER useful in ANY circumstances (apart from scientific research).
When one comes to some of those places where the "biology is real" people do think it should apply, like sports, then the idea that "epigenetic display" is not relevant is clearly a minority view - see e.g. https://www.axios.com/poll-public-split-trans-athletes-tokyo-olympics-d9b02e56-ad54-4525-8d41-d95676cdac49.html. Which does not, of course, mean it's wrong ...
"Lying" is claiming that you're just saying that "biology is real" when what you're actually saying is that "epigenetic display is the only way of classifying people's sex."
You claim that they only say that it's one way that's useful in some circumstances, but that's not the view of Ryan Anderson in "When Harry Became Sally," who insists that it's the absolute final word on sexual identity. He even brushes aside intersex conditions as too rare to be worth worrying about.
On the other side, perhaps when I said that the view is that epigenetics "isn't a useful way" I shouldn't have used the word 'useful'. What they say is that it shouldn't be controlling, shouldn't trump out contradictory indicators from other sources (most obviously, internal sexual identity). Instead, they should trump it, but contrary to any monolith image, the question of how controlling it should be is open. I haven't come across anyone actually holding the often-mocked parody view that a man should be able to say "I feel like a woman today" and thereby compete in women's sports.
"You claim that they only say that it's one way that's useful in some circumstances, but that's not the view of Ryan Anderson in "When Harry Became Sally,""
I said "at least, the sensible ones". I've never knowingly read a single word written by Ryan Anderson, so I've no idea if he's sensible or not! I'm happy to take your word for it that he isn't (as your characterization of his views would seem to suggest).
I read Ryan Anderson at the suggestion of a conservative friend who called the book "well-informed." It was not. I found it scientifically ignorant and fundamentally dishonest. This was my only extensive encounter with anti-trans literature, and I'm not eager for another.
"But the contrary position to that is that epigenetic display..."
I am confused by this. Did you mean *phenotypic* display? Epigenetics normally refers to the phenomenon whereby some traits can be passed from parent to child without being specifically encoded in the child's genome itself (though may include changes in which genes are expressed): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics
Possibly my terminology is out of date; I learned genetics in the 1970s. I mean the visible or otherwise detectable physical and behavioral characteristics that were determined by a combination of genes, genetic overlays (control genes that affect other genes), fetal development, and the hormonal and other chemical context in which that occurs.
The essentialist writers (i.e. "men are men, women are women, and there's a firm line between them") I've seen are too clever to point to the X and Y chromosomes alone as determining factors. They look at how it comes out at the other end in the born human, and that's what I'm trying to describe as the source of their definition of sex.
Yeah, I think that "phenotype" is indeed the word you're looking for in that case.
Though to be fair, a lot of the people that you're calling essentialists are using *gamete type* as the dividing line: if your reproductive physiology is arranged around the production of small, motile gametes, you're male, and if it's arranged around the production of large, immobile gametes, you're female ("arranged around" to take into account the possibility that it's possible to have non-functional testicular/ovarian tissue and be infertile but still be male/female).
I learned "phenotype" to mean the operating genes (as opposed to the complete genetic code or genotype), but it didn't incorporate the processes that could affect the expression of those genes in RNA or fetal development. So it doesn't sound to me as if "phenotype" is the word I want, though again my vocabulary could be obsolete.
I have not come across the gamete theory you describe. Thank goodness, probably.
I am puzzled by what you mean by "epigenetic display." Are you using the term as something akin to "phenotype?" My understanding is that epigenetics is primarily about DNA methylation, which doesn't seem relevant here.
Primarily? Surely methylation is an example of an epigenetic process, but it's not the whole thing. I meant the expression of genes in the resulting organism through whatever processes fetal development goes through. Phenotype is a factor here, but there are a lot of other processes and influences post-genetic code, and I was taught to call that epigenetics.
I think this notion that biological sex is not real is just due to basic innumeracy. If we took all the [adult] humans in the world, stripped them naked, and we put them into clusters according to a long list of biological properties (height, weight, sex organ morphology, skeletal structure, gamete type, DNA, etc. etc.), we will see two main clusters. We can label them "A" and "B", or "red" and "green", or "male" and "female", it doesn't really matter. There will be some data points that float between the clusters, and the cluster boundaries will be fuzzy, as is the case with nearly all real-world data. It would be factually untrue to say, "there are some data points that do not fit into any cluster, therefore these clusters do not exist". Biological sex is real in this way, just like biological hair color or handedness or anything else.
We could go one step further, and ask each human which gender they identify as; and if we do, we will see a strong correlation between this self-identification and cluster membership. This tells us that gender is mostly biologically determined, although, once again, the correlation is not perfect.
The problem with Judith Butler et al is that they're not doing math, they're doing philosophy; and in philosophy, there are no numbers -- there are just hard boolean distinctions. Thus, either all humans are 100% divisible into "Male" and "Female" categories, or the categories have absolutely no meaning. While I agree that this model is much easier to conceptualize, I just don't see how it could ever apply to anything useful in the real world.
See now, this is exactly what I meant by saying that "nobody thinks that biological sex isn't real." You're invoking this elaborate thought experiment to prove what nobody is trying to deny, and conjuring up innumeracy as an explanation for this imaginary denial of the trivially true.
What pro-trans people -are- trying to deny is the idea that, since the clusters exist, everything has to go into one or the other, and it has to be the one that this outside scientific classifier says it is. If we choose self-identification, rather than cluster appearance, as the determining factor, then - since as you note the correlation is strong - most of the time we'll get the same answer. But in those cases where the answer is different, we can stop shoving those few people into clusters they object to belonging to.
But it is very explicitly not everything. It's just things like sporting events and shelters for abused women. People keep making this point and you keep failing to address it, it's beginning to seem a little bit disingenuous.
I haven't seen anyone saying it's not everything. What they keep saying is that other people believe that "biological sex is not real," which is what you said they believe in the comment I'm responding to. That's nonsense and as long as people keep saying it, I'll keep calling it the nonsense that it is.
If you want to have a discussion about who should be admitted to women's sports or women's shelters, we can have that conversation, but I haven't seen anyone bringing up that complex matter in the thread descending from my top-level comment, which is the only part I've been systematically reading.
How is that an "elaborate thought experiment" ? This is literally how we classify everything (well, actually, we mostly use hierarchical trees, but still). My entire point was that sex/gender were no different from any other dimension.
The "elaborate thought experiment" isn't the point you're trying to make by it, but the procedure you're imagining of stripping everybody naked and studying them in order to prove that there are two sexes, which you're doing because you're deluded into thinking there are people who don't realize this.
As I said, that is not an "elaborate thought experiment"; yes, obviously no one literally strips people naked, that was just a whimsical expression meaning "consider only biological factors". Now I'm starting to think you're being obtuse just for the sake of winning the argument.
> Nobody thinks that biological sex isn't real, least of all trans people.
Yeah, that's the motte: sex is complicated, intersex people exist, etc. The bailey is the same as it is with any woke viewpoint on any issue: race, gender, sexual preference, what have you; and that viewpoint is, "burn the witch !". Wokeness is not a movement for human rights (at least, not any longer); it is a movement designed to destroy people in the most efficient (yet legal) way possible.
A shibboleth isn't something you say, it's something you force your (possible) enemies to say.
Strictly speaking, a shibboleth is the word "shibboleth." More broadly, it is "a password, phrase, custom, or usage that reliably distinguishes the members of one group or class from another" (American Heritage Dictionary). The exact circumstances of the original instance need not be reproduced; it's the general principle at stake.
The circumstances of its original use are entirely relevant.
No they're not. You're standing in the face of the actual usage of the word. (See the dictionary.) What a picayune objection.
I can see well enough how words are used.
Then don't insist on non-existent limitations, how about that?
>What do I think? I think that putting phrases like "opposes wokeness" in the context of "join the fight for academic freedom" means that, somewhere when I was not looking, the meaning of "woke(ness)" changed from "alert to racial prejudice and discrimination", which is what I thought it meant, to "harsh cancel culture on behalf of racial issues."
First of all, this is begging the question, because the fact that wokeists claim that "prejudice and discrimination" exists, it doesn't mean that it does. Secondly, the latter meaning has been in effect for YEARS now, and I can't comprehend not being aware of it by now.
>Nobody thinks that biological sex isn't real
Scott was mostly being facetious, but this is simply false. It's not uncommon on the far left to claim that biological sex is a "social construct" (in the most literal sense that's true, but they're too ignorant of that and use it to mean "doesn't really exist").
>If Lucky Academic would like my support, he should take that giant chip off his shoulder.
If wokeists want my support, they should stop telling me white men are evil and such. But again, rich of you to be saying this when you're admittedly ignorant on this stuff: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/
Whether a scientific category is real or a social construct is a question of whether the category is artificially imposed by human minds on nature for ease of understanding or communication or if it is something that exists independent of human minds cleaved in nature. There's all sorts of realism debates in science. For example, species concepts are best thought of as social constructs, but there's been (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to think of them as real categories.
Biological sex has a case for being real, but overdetermined in common use, but the people who say "biological sex is real" tend to mean something else entirely, so this ends up confusing things. As it is normally used, it's a social construct. It doesn't help that the phrasing is frequently used in the service of dismissing that psychological sexual development might not match one's physical appearance crudely associated with a given sex.
I don't understand the difference between the two strategies. Or rather, it seems the difference is more down to how the woke react to pushback, which is not something this academic can control, or even reliably predict.
IIRC, didn't Brett Weinstein express polite disagreement in a faculty meeting? Next thing you know he's driven off campus by an angry mob. Was that the Fabian or Berserker strategy?
"if the voting public is very anti-woke, but universities are very woke," the outcome will be bad for universities in the long run. The public will stop taking academy and academicians seriously.
This kind of already happened.
The only problem is the culture has spillover into STEM fields where important work is being done, so you have all the diversity quota people up in your face while you're trying to cure cancer.
Then the result will be that cancer won't be cured and the public will trust scientists in academy less and less in runaway fashion. But then (hopefully) alternative universities could emerge and get things done, and sanity be restored.
That last part won't happen: new prestigious universities are nearly impossible to found. What would happen if the current STEM academia got destroyed is either little/no academia at all, or else academia will move to a different country (perhaps Asian academia will survive, with the current universities in Singapore/Japan/China growing more prestigious and becoming the center for STEM research).
I don't think the current state of affairs is an attractor state; if you break the system, universities won't naturally be restored.
How about University of Austin (https://www.uaustin.org) ? Of course if current attempts to create alternative universities in the US don't take off, more and more students will choose to study abroad as you say.
Do you mean the University of Austin? (https://www.uaustin.org) The University of Texas (at Austin, and elsewhere) is a long-established institution.
Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry my mistake. Will edit previous comment.
> That last part won't happen: new prestigious universities are nearly impossible to found
I'm not sure anyone has tried, recently.
With a chunk of money the size of the Harvard endowment ($53 billion right now, apparently) plus the cost of land and buildings, plus competent administration, I'm reasonably confident you could get a prestigious university started within a decade.
Just make a list of the top academics, and give them whatever they want in terms of salary and research funding. How can a university not be prestigious, when its whole maths faculty is Fields medallists, and its whole chemistry department is Nobel laureates?
Yeah, many of the top universities now were basically founded just that way in the late 19th century: Stanford, Caltech, U Chicago, Carnegie Mellon
Well, first off, any plan that starts with "first secure fifty billion dollars in funding" has the deck stacked very firmly against it at the start.
If you manage that, this sounds like a plausible way to establish a good research institute, but that's not the same thing as a university. In particular, undergraduate education is largely decoupled from high-prestige research professors. And there are synergies in having your research, your postgraduate education, and your undergrad education done in the same place if you can manage to keep doing that. But if we're giving up on the existing colleges and universities, this is a way to maybe partially replace them as research facilities, not as undergrad colleges.
And to the extent that hiring Nobel prize winning scientists signals a university or other institution's quality, it's mostly because it shows that those highly regarded scientists consider the institution to be the best place for them to do their work. If it is plainly obvious that they're doing it just because you threw obscene amounts of money at them, that's going to greatly weaken the signal.
This isn't the nineteenth century, or even the early twentieth. That was a different society. In particular, a much higher trust society, at least among the university-founding and -attending demographic. Things that were straightforward then, are much harder and maybe impossible now.
And the University of Austin, if it ever manages to actually graduate anyone, will be considered a partisan diploma mill only suited to producing right-wing thinkpiece writers and the like.
Europe maybe. The American ideological apparatus is strong in Europe but resisted in places like France. And ignored in the Mediterranean and the east.
And thanks God for that!
When I read the description of the berserker strategy, it reminds me a lot of Jordan Peterson. I don't want to accuse him of picking fights, but he definitely stood his ground a lot, and usually on camera. I feel like it didn't work out that well for him in the end. But then again, I can't think of any notable examples of the Fabian strategy working out for Academics either, but I'd be interested if people had examples.
He became an alt-right superstar, which I'd consider a success, against his will, which I'd consider a failure. His ideas certainly reached a lot more people than if he kept writing academic dissertations on meaning.
I think his main problems were diet and drug related, rather than anti-woke strategy related
I work at the intersection of academia and Hollywood (kill me.) I suspect there’s a false dichotomy here.
I mostly agree with Petey’s comment. You have to appear to be a Fabian and behave like a berserker. You have to take the logic of an obvious moment (“the state murdered a guy on live TV”) and expand it into non-obvious moments (“the same state is discouraging or punishing certain kinds of expression.”) Like a lot of people, I think we should avoid state oppression and promote self-expression.
I think that any state that relies on most citizens quietly hiding their sincere views is doomed. Where the New Atheists failed, I think, is in failing to provide an alternative positive theory of meaning. I think somebody in the near future will do a better job of this.
I think you mean NAACP rather than ACLU?
Perhaps counter-intuitive, but maybe try and work on addressing some of the underlying issues that "wokeness" cares about. I think a lot of the shift to the left over the past decade or so is just because most people in highly educated, cosmopolitan subcultures (like elite colleges and high-paid professional jobs) believe correctly (IMHO) that even if some "woke" people are annoying and behave in toxic ways, on the object level questions that have very real concerns. So they are prone to err on the side of ignoring excesses on the "correct" side of the issue. And the best way to marginalize the radicals is to provide a sane alternative that actually addresses the underlying issue. That is, the best defense against the crazy DEI consultants/trainings/etc is the actually help create a divers environment.
Of the people on the "correct" side of the issue, how many are interested in the disproportionate rate at which black people are killed by police, and how many are interested in the disproportionate rate at which men are killed by police?
How many get upset at that comparison? Why?
Are you sure this has anything at all to do with correctness?
Jussim Lee, https://mobile.twitter.com/PsychRabble, has written a couple useful posts
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202011/ten-ways-tell-if-you-are-targeted-cancellation
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202012/ten-ways-defend-against-cancellation-attack
organization for people in scholars under pressure
https://counterweightsupport.com/
38 states currently have legislation pending or passed which limits what teachers are allowed to teach about race and racism, and you're going to say with a straight face that an "unwoke" friend wants to join the fight for "academic freedom"?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/petergreene/2022/02/16/teacher-anti-crt-bills-coast-to-coast-a-state-by-state-guide/?sh=10ee6f24ff64
This is the most alarmingly dishonest thing you've ever written, and it is deeply disappointing to think you're now using your considerable talents to fight the culture war on behalf of the side that unironically waves confederate flags. You have the potential to do real harm.
"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke."
So... you're openly admitting that you choose your ideology based on how sympathetic you are to the people who espouse it, and not on whether it is objectively true or morally correct? I mean, I guess the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem, but as a reader of yours for years, I still find this shocking. "I don't want to be on the same side as annoying people" is a terrible, terrible, terrible epistemology. Surely you can see that?
All your talk about motivated reasoning and correcting for bias and searching for truth rings a bit hollow now. I hope you take stock soon and recover from whatever phase this is, because the sentiments you have expressed in this post are unworthy of the intellectual achievements you've made up until now.
It seems more deeply problematic to fire people for having un-PC views than it does to have a lot of self-criticism.
But that reaction against CRT is exactly the kind of response you would get to wokeness. The recall of the education board in San Francisco is an example, and most voters were non white.
Are you talking about this recall? https://www.npr.org/2022/02/16/1081035770/san-francisco-voters-recall-three-school-board-members
I'm not sure I understand your point here. It seems these board members were recalled for a variety of reasons, one of which was that their proposal to rename a bunch of schools was seen as a frivolous waste of time. Can we be against renaming a school named after Abraham Lincoln when students are suffering from pandemic-induced remote learning problems? Sure. Is that a representative reaction of what we mean by "wokeness"? No. Is that a threat to "academic freedom"? No. So I'm sorry but I'm having trouble seeing the relevance of this example, other than as an example of a single fight which "anti-wokes" won as long as you take it out of context and don't examine the facts too carefully.
Well you’ve decided the renaming of the schools (44 in all) isn’t wokeness but it was clearly driven by anti racist ideology. Lincoln of course was a racist (and white supremacist) by the standards of today as was nearly every white person in the 19C. The renaming was part of a process that started with confederate statues. It has waned a bit but if left to it’s internal logic would in fact see the US denuded of most of its statues and the renaming of most public buildings and streets.
The board themselves blame “white supremacy” for the recall - though as I said the voters were Asian.
The number of schools in question is immaterial. Again, it seems like you're just casting about for reasons to make this one recall election in one school board seem more important than it really is. Again, the reason is that it's the only ammunition you have in your arsenal.
I acknowledge that renaming schools is a thing that woke people do, but as I said (somewhat unclearly, I apologize) the normal reaction to renaming schools is not a recall election of the school board, so I don't find this case to be a good representative example of how a typical conflict between wokeness and anti-wokeness plays out. I also think the school board tried to make it about wokeness to save face, but in reality it was more about their neglect and incompetence. In any case, the name of a school (or 44 schools) has nothing to do with academic freedom, so this case does not demonstrate that wokeness is a threat to, or in conflict with, academic freedom.
Also, there's this: "Many Asians in San Francisco were already motivated by the Board of Education's plan to replace a merit-based admission system with a lottery program at Lowell High School, the city's most-elite public school. KQED's Scott Shafer reported on Morning Edition that Asian students make up more than half of its student enrollment."
This is much more an open and shut case of "merit vs. diversity" so it's interesting that it's not what is highlighted in the coverage of this case. I wonder why that could be... perhaps Fox News audiences would be less sympathetic if they knew they were supposed to be outraged on behalf of Asian kids than they are when they get to fight against the Wokes.
But again, the question of whether scarce educational resources should be given to students who do well on tests or to students who need them has nothing to do with "academic freedom", so again, I struggle to understand the relevance of this school board recall situation to my comment.
I’m not American but I did live for a few years in San Francisco - hence my better understanding of that city. Your original post in this sub thread indicates that 38 states want to stop the teaching of CRT, but given that the last presidential election had about 25 states voting for Biden this means that CRT is unpopular not just in solid Trump or Republican territory but across the country. This is an example where traditional liberals need to defeat “wokes” or be defeated. It can be as simple as moving onto something else, or even backtracking, like on defunding the police.
As to your second paragraph, I wasn’t going to discuss that in the interest of time but it also would be considered in the general woke category, as the removal of the merit system at Lowell high was in the interests of racial justice.
It sounds like you want to reify wokeness into a single thing, just as the people you are criticizing want to reify white supremacy into a single thing. It seems to me that the problem is lumping everything together into a single battle for the soul of the world, and the anti-woke are doing this as much as the worst of the woke are. This original post is just about enhancing the woke-anti-woke battle, and not about getting us out of it.
If there’s any straw left over after that, I need some for kindling. Thanks.
Brilliant -- why didn't Kant think of that? Always follow principles that are "objectively true and morally correct"! In your next post, you'll have to tell us how you identify those.
Yeah. All this talk about how wokeness kills academic freedom by cancel culture while there are literal governmental laws restricting teaching about racism unless it's done in an unwoke way looks really weird.
I mean I understand that diversity libertarian who values freedom of speech very much can be rightfully concerned about even non-governmental limitations of it. But this should be a lower priority compared to governmental limitations, shouldn't it?
Who decides what is taught in schools in the US anyway, is it a free for all?
It's complicated - ultimately the states, but some states give more control to local divisions and others centralize more. There are school boards that have a role in deciding curriculum (state or local) and then individual schools and teachers also have some discretion.
But on top of that, there are organizations that make curricula/textbooks to sell to schools. These are subject to market forces - "he who pays the piper calls the tune" - so publishers of textbooks have some incentive to tailor their content to the demands of the states where they have the biggest markets. In other words a history textbook publisher might not want to include bits of history that will make schools in Texas pick a different textbook.
Also, sometimes these organizations are incompetent, or border on grift, so you can get curricula in front of students (like the Wit and Wisdom scandal) that are genuinely not serving students needs, and sometimes there is little oversight, and it appears to happen due to corruption or marketing.
Also, there's "Common Core" which was put out by an advocacy/research group as a model curriculum which many states have adopted - that mainly covers math and english.
And then there are private schools which are often just totally different, and might teach the IB, or a religious curriculum, or whatever.
So... yeah, sort of a free-for-all.
"governmental laws restricting teaching about racism unless it's done in an unwoke way"
These are government schools, after all. It seems reasonable for the parents of the children who attend them to both want input into the curriculum and for government leaders responsible to represent them to crack down on the rising tide of racism and racial exclusion/shaming involved in the movements they're against.
I don't believe any of the laws you mention restrict the actions of private actors to speak/teach whatever they want, they just limit the amount of racism government employees are allowed to inflict on their students while on the job.
If it's reasonable to forbid anti-black racism by government employees, then it's just as reasonable to forbid anti-white or anti-asian racism by government employees.
Besides the obvious, oft-repeated motte-and-bailey ("just teaching that slavery happened" vs "all white people are oppressors", segregating kids by race, telling white kids they are oppressors, telling black kids they are oppressed, "decolonizing" math, the 1619 project, etc), there is a fundamental difference between censorship, e.g. of a professor at a university or a social media user on a platform, vs. deciding what is taught in a curriculum. A curriculum, by definition, has to be curated. Something has to be chosen to be taught in that curriculum, so it's not censorship to change what is taught in public schools to be more historically accurate. On the other hand, social media websites are not publishers, they are platforms.
> "I don't want to be on the same side as annoying people" is a terrible, terrible, terrible epistemology.
I'd say it's an excellent heuristic. If a side contains way more annoying people than the other side, then either it is attracting dysfunctional members or the thoughtful members were repelled (initially, or they left as the insanity set in).
Look I hate to bring up the Semmelweis handwashing example because it seems like a black swan thing, but just for the sake of argument: Semmelweis, by all accounts, was objectively nutty, harassing and haranguing anyone who he could get his hands on, when trying to espouse his crazy theory that medical hygiene could save lives. He was also objectively correct, and choosing the "heuristic" to ignore people like Semmelweis got people killed.
But also if we look at *why* Semmelweis went crazy, the evidence seems to be that the fact that he couldn't get anyone to take simple, low-cost, life-saving steps like washing their hands after dissecting corpses and before delivering babies caused him to have severe anxiety. I can relate, trying to get people to put masks on in a pandemic.
Oh yeah, there's a better example. Who is more annoying in the mask/no mask debate? As a zero covider, I am ready to acknowledge that my side is a thousand times more annoying. We have to be. We're the ones pushing for a change in the status quo, and changing the status quo is annoying almost by definition. When you and your friends want to go out for drinks, we're the annoying ones who ask if everyone there will be vaccinated. Etc. Note that Scott, in his excellent post about masks, did not weigh how annoying maskers/anti-maskers were, nor did he (to my knowledge) adjust his opinion about the efficacy of masks based on the annoyingness of their proponents or opponents.
Sorry for the poor organization here, I'm writing this on the fly, but two key points: activists are annoying because change is often uncomfortable and inconvenient, and activists sometimes act or become crazy out of the sheer frustration of trying to overcome people's behavioral inertia. So IMO this is actually a terrible heuristic.
Semmelweis was a lone (apparent) crank, and he was correct. That's more like listening to the Unabomber than listening to a twitter mob.
The covid thing is a huge can of worms I'd rather not open - somehow the issue became so partisan both sides lost their shit and maximized disagreement.
Perhaps uncomfortable and inconvenient change shouldn't happen, or should at least be subject to cost and benefit calculation? Because activism in favor of change is usually about having the people preached to bear the costs, which they're understandably reluctant to do. There are a lot of causes, you care about some, I care about others. Being aggressive about yours and ignoring mine just makes you a dick, and will just convince me to tune you out.
This argument seems circular to me. "Annoying" isn't some objective condition, it's quite literally a subjective judgment about another person's behavior. Everyone thinks that the "other side" contains more annoying people than "their side" and they are probably right. In general you are much less likely to get annoyed by people doing things you broadly agree with.
But setting that aside, how would you even assess which "side" contains more annoying people? What even counts as a "side" here? Can the world be evenly divided into "woke" and "anti-woke"? If there are 100 times as many woke than anti-woke, then wouldn't the woke have way more annoying people than the anti-woke even if "annoyingness" were just some randomly distributed personality trait? Like the parent commenter said, it's terrible epistemology.
I think the "I don't want to be on the same side as annoying people" was trying to evaluate his own biases, generalize them on to others, and leverage/manipulate them without regard for rationality. It would have helped for it to be disambiguated as "I know this is irrational, but".
But also I got the same vibe as many other (but clearly not all) commenters here, where this post sounds to me as if Scott became freaked out after getting some woke app notifications, and is here to rally the troops for this "strategic discussion". The whole post is "given that we need a solution to the woke problem, what is our best weapon".
What's the actual goal? "Fighting wokeness" and "promoting academic freedom" feel like applause-lights to me.
Maybe the goal was to be judgement-free and solution-oriented, but when someone comes asking for armaments, so I think it's fair to want to know to what end. "These guys are ineffective and annoying" isn't a good reason.
Yes, you could be right about this point, but even if so, it runs the risk of substituting the typical mind fallacy for evidence about how people behave in the real world.
The phenomenon of backlash against an ideology due to the behavior of its adherents may be real, but it can be studied and quantified - for example we can look at swings in public opinion after peaceful vs. violent protests, and discover that overall peaceful ones tend to produce change while violent ones tend to produce backlash. We can try to quantify the effects of stupid vs. non-stupid slogans across various demographic groups (my guess would be that on balance dumber slogans would appeal to dumber people, but who knows?). All of this is subject to inquiry by social scientists, and it is at least uncharacteristically lazy and sloppy for Scott to elide it all into "when wokes are stupid and combative it reduces my support for minority rights".
But in the context of this particular post it's even worse than that, because the whole reason why I (and I suspect many others) read this blog in the first place is that Scott holds himself to a higher epistemic standard. It's great and important to acknowledge biases, and I don't want to jump in and attack someone for doing so, but I feel like if you're going to admit that you are not even trying to evaluate particular woke claims or policies on the merits because sometimes woke people are stupid or combative, then you ought to simply recuse yourself from discussions of wokeness entirely, rather than issue a rallying cry about how to fight wokeness while highlighting or inventing trite examples selected for maximum stupidity (canceling yoga) or combativeness (throwing garbage at an elderly man). It's not only epistemically irresponsible, it's also a gross violation of the principle of charity. It's selecting arguments as soldiers rather than scouts. It's doing all the things that I read Scott's blog to get away from on the rest of the internet - all the things Scott implicitly (and I think explicitly although I'm not going to hunting) promises to avoid doing here.
It just feels deeply, deeply off to me to see Scott explicitly toss aside his most dearly-held principles, and for what - to help his anonymous friend fight campus diversity initiatives? "I'm a rationalist except when it comes to making sure colleges don't hire too many black people" is not a take I was expecting to read when I woke up this morning.
It's made me stop and reflect on who I am as a *reader* of this blog - think about whether and why I've been ignoring warning signs, and whether I want to continue recommending this blog to my friends, and what the future ratio of rationalist posts to admittedly-biased, right-wing culture warrior posts might be. I should think it would merit reflection on the part of the writer as well, which is why I point it out.
While I totally agree with everything you've said, I'm a bit confused by
>"I'm a rationalist except when it comes to making sure colleges don't hire too many black people" is not a take I was expecting to read when I woke up this morning.
This is exactly the kind of thing I expect when I dip my toe into rationalist spaces. If I was being uncharitable (i.e, not hedging my experience with qualifiers), I would say that "making sure colleges don't hire too many black people" is a pretty central goal of a large chunk of the rationalist community.
Rationalists are a hugely anti-progressive bunch. Scott has been writing variations on the "progressives/anti-racists suck" theme for many years now (with an occasional intermission for "don't those people on the far right have some good ideas").
Does that mean I can say "making sure colleges don't hire too many Asians" is a central goal of the social justice movement?
Yeah. Like I said, I'll have to reflect on the fact that I've been shoving evidence of this tendency out of my mind right up until it became impossible to ignore.
"I'm a rationalist except when it comes to making sure colleges don't hire too many black people"
sounds maximally uncharitable to Scott's actual beliefs to me.
Perhaps you'd be willing to make an attempt to rewrite/reword that to make it something that Scott would agree represents his actual position? Thus demonstrating your ability to pass a minor intellectual Turing test?
You're just cherry-picking the most uncharitable version of the critique I've made, out of a long thread, in which I've already represented Scott's position in several different ways including directly quoting him, and in a comment where I was clarifying what it is about Scott's position that bothers me, rather than how I think Scott would characterize his own position.
You imply that Scott would not agree that my admittedly somewhat glib paraphrase represents his actual position. But Scott was the one who chose the examples in this post, which included multiple mentions of diversity initiatives as being a prime example of what the problem is with wokeness. Let's not mince words here - the primary purpose of diversity initiatives in the US is to address the modern and historic imbalance in power and prestige between White and Black Americans as a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Diversity for Irish Americans or the left-handed is not at issue, and diversity for Hispanic/Indigenous/other POC groups is a more recent addition as these initiatives have broadened focus. Point is, diversity initiatives primarily exist to get more black kids into college and more black professors teaching there. While Scott chose to frame that issue using the "color-blind" terminology of "merit vs. diversity" (an offensive false dichotomy itself), let's be clear that it was Scott who chose that issue. Scott literally asked us to help him help his friend oppose the hiring of more black professors, even if he's not willing to write that out in those exact words in that order. The fact that he is not willing to cop to holding that position is part of the issue.
On top of that, Scott voluntarily admits that his wokeness - or to use Scott's example, his support for things like diversity hiring, which means his support for hiring more black professors - depends on his personal biases and on chance. So if Scott sees open anti-black discrimination he will be more likely to support hiring more black professors, but if he sees some students disrupt a lecture in the name of wokeness, he will be less likely to support hiring more black professors. Again, it's fine to admit that, as I have to admit that sometimes if I find myself on the same side of an issue as someone I dislike, I question my reasons - but that is not a rationalist approach to politics, even a little bit.
So it seems that the only part of my paraphrase which is not directly substantiated here by Scott's own words in this post is "I'm a rationalist".
Anyway, here's that rewording:
"I attempt to be a rationalist, but when it comes to wokeness I rely on a social heuristic instead of a rational evaluation of policies, and by the way I've decided to help my friend fight wokeness and specifically to dismantle mechanisms for increasing diversity even though my reasons for opposing diversity initiatives do not stem from malice towards their beneficiaries, who I am not specifying for completely innocent reasons and not because specifying who they are would be absolutely fatal to my attempt to strip them of the benefits of diversity initiatives, but rather from malice towards their allies, who are sometimes dumb and annoying."
Kind of clunky... too many caveats. I'm just not good at the mental gymnastics required to make such a position look palatable.
Thanks for the response, I appreciate it.
What struck me as the missing nuance from your summary description was the fact that Scott isn't actually against hiring more black professors, at least not because they are black. He may be against hiring more professors in general (I don't actually know his position on that), but his position against diversity initiatives is that he's against hiring black professors rather than better qualified non-black professors. i.e. he's against the use of race as a hiring criteria, not that he's against hiring any particular race compared to another one.
Is that a fair description to you?
Since you've shown great patience with my long responses I'm going to produce another one.
I think it's true that Scott's introspective experience of his position is that he is not against hiring more black professors per se. I think that Scott believes in the principle of race-blind hiring on the basis that race-blindness is fair to individuals and maximizes value for society, and believes that diversity initiatives contradict that principle.
However, I'm not sure that I'd characterize such a description of Scott's beliefs - which deliberately excludes all of their shortcomings and negative implications - as a "fair description." In my mind, a fair description would include both the strengths and weaknesses of the beliefs, or at least frame the beliefs neutrally and with context rather than positively and without context.
So to be fair one would need to address what makes Scott so sure that pre-existing processes for defining, identifying, and promoting merit - processes which were designed by white people, and which, until activists intervened, coincidentally seemed to identify and promote merit almost exclusively in white people - meet his criteria of being fair to individuals and of maximizing value for society.
One would need to address Scott's apparent belief that anti-black discrimination does not exist in hiring committees, or, if it does, that it could easily be identified and corrected for using only race-blind methods.
Finally, I think one would need to consider Scott's apparent belief that diversity in itself adds no value to teams and organizations and has no benefits for individuals which might offset or outweigh any alleged value lost by abandoning a strictly merit-based system (to the extent that such a system can even exist given human bias).
Finally, perhaps to sum up - given that Scott's position would seem to produce a negative outcome for a specific, already disadvantaged racial group, I think that a fair description of Scott's position needs to consider why, exactly, Scott is willing to accept that outcome. Without understanding the beliefs and assumptions undergirding the position, we can't claim to have understood the position itself.
>"I'm a rationalist except when it comes to making sure colleges don't hire too many black people" is not a take I was expecting to read...
Not to put words into his mouth, but I'm pretty sure Scott would also want to make sure colleges don't hire too *few* black people. Surely a central plank of being a rationalist on the topic of how many teaching staff a college hires (or how many students it accepts) would be something like: What *is* the optimal percentage of professors/students of different races for a university to hire/matriculate?
To get a handle on that, you'd need to consider questions like:
-given the well-evidenced IQ gaps between different racial groups, after adjustment for their share of the population, what ratio would we expect to result from a truly race-neutral hiring procedure?
-Is the racial IQ gap at least partly genetic, or is it something that we should expect to disappear given enough well-targeted social interventions?
(sub-question: how sure are we that the racial IQ gap is a real phenomenon, as opposed to an artifact of test bias that we have not yet managed to detect within the tests?)
-Even if, under truly race-neutral conditions only a negligible number of blacks would get a position at the top colleges, is in nonetheless better for social cohesion to hire higher fraction of blacks at the expense of some better-qualified non-blacks?
-If so, does it matter that a disproportionate number of those blacks are highly-selected African and Caribbean immigrants or their immediate desendents, and that the number of old-stock African-Americans remains negligible?
-If a lot of blacks don't have the cognitive capacity to become STEMlords, but do have the cognitive capacity to become grievance studies professors, is that a net negative for the black population on average, since many of them may be encouraged to enrol in massively-student-debt-incurring grievance studies courses that result in them earning less, and being more resentful, over the course of their lives than if they'd just learned a skilled trade?
-Given that Northeast Asians, and the usually highly-selected population of South Asians in the US, tend to outshine whites in IQ tests, is there in fact a good social cohesion basis to tamp down on the number of Asians who would get the top jobs (on a 'don't import a hostile low-IQ underclass if you can help it, but also you might not want to install a smug overclass whose genetic interests don't align with the majority population either' basis)?
-Do you even want your universities to be vacuuming up the best and brightest from all social strata, or is Charles Murray-style cognitive stratification of society a realistic thing to be afraid of?
[Edit: - Does the presence of significant numbers of different ethnic groups within the same university have some sort of diversity-related social benefit in itself, regardless of tuition quality - i.e. does it make white students into better citizens if they spend their university years around significant numbers of blacks, and vice-versa, than if they had gone to an otherwise-similar mono-ethnic university?
-What if there is a diversity benefit but it only goes one way - what if a mixed-race campus is better for whites but worse for blacks, or vice-versa, than a mono-ethnic campus?]
Etc., etc. You get the point, I hope: for anyone who truly matches the platonic ideal of the rationalist phenotype, with all these issues and more, "Is this true or false?" is a vastly more important question than "Will I get called a racist if I approach this issue with genuine openness to the possibility of it being either true or false?". In reality, most people, Scott included, are nothing like that Kantorovitchy, but the rationalist space is still where you would expect to come closest to a large number of people who are genuinely open-minded and truth-seeking on questions where the mainstream has decided as an article of religious fiat that certain beliefs are inherently evil and that their truth or falsity is therefore not something that should even be investigated.
those laws are about indoctrinating children. this is inherently different from academic free speech.
the those laws are against super woke indoctrinating. not about "discussing race"
ofc, many laws are casting a wide net. but their intended target is extreme woke indoctrination of children. not "discussing race"
Here's a line from the first bill linked in the article I posted:
"A public K-12 school or public institution of higher education may not teach, instruct, or train any student to adopt or believe divisive concepts."
Note that regardless of whether you agree with a "divisive concept" the "academic freedom" position is that teachers should be allowed to teach students to follow the facts to their logical conclusions, even if these conclusions are divisive. Note also that this bill includes public colleges and universities.
You do realize there is a difference between the mandatory-attendance K-12 public education and college?
Here's a line from the first bill linked in the article I posted:
"A public K-12 school or public institution of higher education may not teach, instruct, or train any student to adopt or believe divisive concepts."
Public institution of higher education includes college, in case that wasn't clear.
I don't really care to look through all 38 states, several of which have multiple bills pending. If you're interested I'm sure you could find out how many states are including colleges and universities in their antiwoke censorship bills and how many are only aimed at K-12 education.
Incidentally K-12 teachers and students should also be entitled to academic freedom.
First: No. K-12 teachers do not get academic freedom, because their freedom in that respect directly infringes upon that of the students, who have no freedom to not participate.
Second: The "divisive concepts" specifically listed that colleges cannot teach below. With the notable exception of #9, about meritocracy, all of these are already illegal to teach under Title IX for protected classes; unless you believe that Title IX regulations should be overturned, I do not take your complaint seriously.
(1) a. DIVISIVE CONCEPT. Any of the following
10 concepts:
11 1. That one race or sex is inherently superior to
12 another race or sex.
13 2. That this state or the United States is
14 fundamentally racist or sexist.
15 3. That an individual, by virtue of his or her race
16 or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether
17 consciously or unconsciously.
18 4. That an individual should be discriminated
19 against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because
20 of his or her race or sex.
21 5. That members of one race or sex cannot and should
22 not attempt to treat others without respect to race or sex.
23 6. That an individual's moral character is
24 necessarily determined by his or her race or sex.
25 7. That an individual, by virtue of his or her race
26 or sex, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past
27 by other members of the same race or sex.
Page 2
1 8. That any individual should feel discomfort,
2 guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on
3 account of his or her race or sex.
4 9. That meritocracy or traits such as a hard work
5 ethic are racist or sexist, or were created by a particular
6 race to oppress another race.
7 b. This term includes any other form of race or sex
8 stereotyping or any other form of race or sex scapegoating.
9 (2) RACE OR SEX SCAPEGOATING. Assigning fault,
10 blame, or bias to a race or sex, or to members of a race or
11 sex, because of their race or sex. The term includes any claim
12 that, consciously or unconsciously, and by virtue of his or
13 her race or sex, members of any race are inherently racist or
14 are inherently inclined to oppress others, or that members of
15 a sex are inherently sexist or inclined to oppress others.
16 (3) RACE OR SEX STEREOTYPING. Ascribing character
17 traits, values, moral and ethical codes, privileges, status,
18 or beliefs to a race or sex or to an individual because of his
19 or her race or sex.
> "First: No. K-12 teachers do not get academic freedom, because their freedom in that respect directly infringes upon that of the students, who have no freedom to not participate."
This argument makes no sense as stated. Compulsory education is equally compulsory regardless of content. Whether I'm making a ten year old learn algebra or Brown vs. the Board of Education, that child still has to be there.
(modulo the facts that there is school choice, homeschooling, private schooling, electives within schools, and kids of a certain age can get a GED and leave early, but putting that aside)
The concept of school choice includes the idea that each community has discretion in deciding, through the school board and communication with school officials, what its children are taught in school. Then if some parents don't want their kids to learn what the community consensus would have them study, they can put their kids in a different school.
Now personally I'm not endorsing this position - I'd be more in favor of a more standardized national curriculum, myself - but this is the libertarian-conservative position on public schools (of course some libertarians would go further and just privatize all schools, or abolish compulsory education altogether). It won't do to pretend that academic freedom has never included primary school when the exact same activists who push for it have also pushed for vouchers, privatization, and other measures to allow more local and parental choice in curriculum.
In addition, as a teacher myself, the broad consensus is that teachers do in fact have discretion when choosing which texts to teach - so if I wanted to assign Maus to my class that would be up to my professional judgment, and if a school board decided to ban it (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/maus-becomes-bestseller-after-tennessee-school-ban-180979499/) that would be considered a curtailment of a freedom that most teachers in most schools in most states enjoy.
> "With the notable exception of #9, about meritocracy, all of these are already illegal to teach under Title IX for protected classes"
Sorry, you think Title IX makes it illegal to teach that the United States is fundamentally racist? I have to disagree. How would a teacher teach the three fifths compromise while making sure students did not draw the conclusion that the US Constitution was a fundamentally racist document? How would a teacher explain the origin and persistence of the Senate without reference to the need for less-populated slave states to counterbalance more-populated free states? How would you teach the Civil War, or Redemption, or Jim Crow, or the Civil Rights movement? How would you teach Japanese internment in WWII? I learned that the US was fundamentally racist in seventh grade social studies class in 1993; the fact that almost 30 years later we're debating ways to hide it from children is a travesty.
And that was from a sanitized version of history! I didn't learn about Emmett Till, or about the Tulsa Massacre, or COINTELPRO, or the Tuskegee experiments, or half a dozen other atrocities committed by the US, until college. We could literally keep the 30 most racist things the US has ever done from children and they'd still have to conclude after studying American history that America is fundamentally racist. You literally have to lie to children if you want them to avoid learning these "divisive concepts".
And that's the point of this bill, isn't it? The bill is overbroad by design - it's meant to scare and intimidate teachers so that we are afraid to talk about race and racism at all, because any kid who studies history will learn what this bill forbids them to be taught, which means all history teachers are always guilty, which means any parent can take one of them out with a complaint at any time. Every teacher is always compromised, waiting only to be denounced. Thank goodness I don't teach in the US - watching the Stalinization of education there would put me in an early grave.
Somehow I'm not surprised that you are not familiar with the concept of working abroad.
>This argument makes no sense as stated. Compulsory education is equally compulsory regardless of content. Whether I'm making a ten year old learn algebra or Brown vs. the Board of Education, that child still has to be there.
- Sure.
>(modulo the facts that there is school choice, homeschooling, private schooling, electives within schools, and kids of a certain age can get a GED and leave early, but putting that aside)
- Not everybody has school choice, nor does everybody have the income or time available for home or private education. (Nor have the courts actually upheld these rights consistently)
>Now personally I'm not endorsing this position - I'd be more in favor of a more standardized national curriculum, myself - but this is the libertarian-conservative position on public schools
- And?
>In addition, as a teacher myself, the broad consensus is that teachers do in fact have discretion when choosing which texts to teach
- Sure. However, you don't have unlimited discretion; you cannot teach students that black people are inferior to white people.
>Sorry, you think Title IX makes it illegal to teach that the United States is fundamentally racist?
- Yes, because I treat the "fundamentally" there as saying something. All of your examples miss the point that saying a thing is fundamentally racist is equivalent to saying that a given race has an advantage with it; to say something is fundamentally racist is itself a racist position to take. (If math is fundamentally racist, that is implying some races have an advantage in pure mathematics, regardless of the specifics of mathematics themselves.)
But even without that - yes, Title IX makes it illegal to say the United States is racist in a number of ways. For example, certain things you could say about affirmative action, as an argument that it is racist, would fall afoul of Title IX.
>And that's the point of this bill, isn't it? The bill is overbroad by design - it's meant to scare and intimidate teachers so that we are afraid to talk about race and racism at all
- I find this statement deeply and amusingly unaware.
The Three-Fifths Compromise is wildly misunderstood. It was a battle about representation in Congress: residents of free states wanted slaves NOT to count, and residents of slave states wanted them to count as full persons.
>"The Three-Fifths Compromise is wildly misunderstood. It was a battle about representation in Congress: Abolitionists wanted slaves NOT to count, and slaveowners wanted them to count as full persons."
And why, one might wonder, did slaveowners adopt the somewhat counterintuitive position that slaves ought to count as full persons? Was it perhaps out of the goodness of their hearts?
No... it's because counting slaves (who, by the way, were not allowed to vote) increased the apportionment of representatives in the House to slave states, thus giving them the political power they needed to do things like maintain slavery.
In any case, I mentioned my 7th grade social studies class in 1993. What I did not mention was the reaction of the Black students to learning about the three fifths compromise for the first time. It will stay with me forever.
Would you like to explain to an eleven year old - who may not have even mastered fractions, given the sorry state of mathematics education in the US - what it means that the Founding Fathers counted them as 3/5ths of a person?
Now go ahead and do that with this "anti-CRT" bill hanging over your head.
Yeah, I wouldn't want to do it either. Better to just skip it. Maybe conservatives have a point: maybe American history literally is just too racist to teach to children.
I was never taught in school that the Kente cloth was the traditional cloth of several African cultures that made their fortunes off the slave trade. More importantly, it was never taught to whoever had bright idea to have the congressional Democratic leadership photographed in it kneeling in solidarity with the George Floyd protestors.
There's only so much you can teach people. Yes, the United States of America did bad things in its history. You could spend all 12 years of education listing the bad things America has done. You could spend the 12 years listing the bad things just about any major culture had done. But does that generate an accurate picture? More importantly, who determines what American schools should teach, and what should they strive for? It's inaccurate to give students the impression that America is squeaky clean, but nobody is asking for that. If we want to function as a society, the history needs to bring Americans together, and that means covering both the highs and lows. Saying "America is fundamentally racist" does not do that.
You're confusing cause and effect. American society is divided and if saying "America is racist" alienates half the people, pretending America is not racist alienates the other half.
Deciding that the best way forward is to forget the past is begging the question. Some believe that, while others believe the best way forward is to acknowledge the past and take responsibility for the legacy we're left with.
Maybe you're right and memory-holing 3/5ths of American history is the best way to unite people. It just seems untenable to me to seriously adopt a political position that requires the widespread suppression of commonly-available knowledge. Like China can barely keep Tiananmen Square under wraps and you think the US is going to hide the entire first 200 years of its history?
If I literally believed that they would follow the literal letter of those laws, and not interpret them in broad ways, I would be fine with every rule here other than (5). ((5) seems to say that we should be forbidden from discussing the idea that people might, by their nature, automatically be race or sex conscious, and that therefore it might be better strategy to discuss race and sex and try to correct one's own consciousness of it than to try to ban all talk of race and sex.)
But I don't believe that they will restrict implementation to just banning claims that the United States is fundamentally sexist - I expect that anyone who is willing to pass rules like this will extend it to banning any claim that the United States has been governed by sexist individuals for its entire history up until the present, and claims that certain apparently neutral laws are actually racist or sexist.
And if you want to ban talk of certain truths just because those truths make you uncomfortable, I don't see how this is supposed to be anything other than funhouse-mirror-wokeness.
>"So... you're openly admitting that you choose your ideology based on how sympathetic you are to the people who espouse it, and not on whether it is objectively true or morally correct?"
What on earth is *objectively* true? Scott gave up on that years ago anyways.
What if having really terrible representatives of a "morally correct" position actually *hinders that position*?
There is practically no doubt in my mind that people Tema Okun and Ibram Kendi have done more to *harm* the cause of racial equality than help it. Okun, if you're unfamiliar, is the source of that "being on time is white supremacy" foolery. All those article about several BLM organizations being complete scams are *bad for real social justice*; they're not uncool, *they're actively harming the grander cause*.
>""I don't want to be on the same side as annoying people" is a terrible, terrible, terrible epistemology. "
You seem to be reading it as "I don't want to be associated with uncool people;" I think it should be read as "these people are harming their own cause by fighting for it in stupid ways." I don't dislike Trump (merely) because he's "uncool," but because he was and continues to be detrimental to anything to the right of
"Police brutality is bad" and a controversial example at the right moment helped "wokeness." Burning down minority-owned businesses hurt "wokeness." If you want to help "wokeness," you want more "police brutality is bad" and less burning stuff, right? It's not just that you think arsonists make for uncool friends!
If something is right, true, good, and beautiful, I want it to have good representatives that represent it accurately and with as few caveats as possible. If I want to support a cause, I don't want to have to say "oh, well, they don't count" or "oh, well, they don't really mean that" or "oh, well, you need to read this whole library of postmodernist obscurantist theory to understand the context that this hate speech isn't actually hate speech" or "oh, well, just ignore all the fires and shootings." The more you have to caveat and hedge because there's either A) too few good representatives or B) too many really bad representatives, the harder it is for that cause to succeed and spread.
Examine the log in your own eye, and that perhaps you only think this is "alarmingly dishonest" because it doesn't align with your own biases so nicely as his past writings that others found unworthy.
Fallacy of relative privation aka whataboutism.
What do these bad laws have to do with the toxic academic culture problem being discussed? And should we be ignoring both of these things, because climate change is even worse?
None of the above. Don't fight "wokeness".
There are things worth fighting currently living under that umbrella. Examples include:
- hypocritical (and/or clueless) performance of ineffective strategies that predictably won't do a damn thing to help the supposed victims.
- silencing people whose opinions someone doesn't like
- insisting that all righteous people must (pretend to) believe things that aren't proven, are never to be investigated, and are probably untrue
- witch hunts
Note that *all* of these predate wokeness. In my young adulthood, the prime offender for all of these (in the US) were righteous Christians. Somewhat before that, the prime offenders were anti-communists, such as senator McCarthy.
When I see someone who cares about free speech - if and only if the speaker agrees with them, or is part of their team - I see someone who doesn't care about free speech.
Ditto re "academic freedom".
I think your friend should decide what they really want.
As you present them, their goals seem about as thought out - and reasonable - as those of the average protest-prone sophomore.
Agreed. Probably framing this as fighting for academic freedom or something like that would be better. 20 years ago "Christians" were harassing professors, now we have the "woke" people, probably we will face another group concept 15 years down the line.
Yes!
More importantly, "anti-wokeness" as a movement is just as deeply committed to these four problematic things as the movement forms of wokeness are.
Ditto. I don't want a mob coming after me period- I don't care if it's for me supporting police reform or believing that a 6-year old isn't old enough to really know what gender even is.
The Fabian/Berserker axis is only one of several that need to be considered. Another (perhaps more) important one is the the Twitter/non-Twitter (or tribalism/reasoned dialogue) axis. Twitter has become THE vehicle for tribal pitch-fork-ism now, as in the recent beheading of Jeffrey Liebermann in your profession. He wasn't trying to be anti-woke (probably had no concept of such a thing), he just made an innocent mistake, which gave colleagues who wanted to take him down a peg their opportunity to move in. His ridiculous apology (from a psychiatrist!! "unconscious biases"? give me a break!) was clearly written for him; it sounds too familiar. But he shouldn't have put his name to it; there was in fact nothing in the least racist or sexist in his tweet and he should have stuck by that, perhaps apologizing for misunderstandings, since many of his readers evidently didn't realize that the expression "freak of nature" is not derogatory, has nothing to do with "freak" in its colloquial sense. He might agree now, looking back on it, but probably had no time to think about this.
But now the damage is done; another routine lynching, another nail in the coffin of the "open debate" whose absence in her undergraduate classes Emma Camp recently wrote in the NYT about (to the inarticulate distress of Nikole Hannah-Jones). But at least she and the students she describes can resist this tribalism *in person*; you can't resist it on Twitter -- you step on a banana peel and poof, you're gone! Liebermann could also have resisted in person, if he'd said it in person rather than tweeted it; he could have explained what he meant and apologized if someone had misunderstood and overreacted. So the choice between involvement-via-Twitter vs. involvement via media less vulnerable to tribalism is critical. There is no need for an academic to be on Twitter. Liebermann's mistake was to be on Twitter in the first place; it just gave his assassins-in-waiting (whom he was probably only vaguely even aware of) their forum and their opportunity.
So yes, the choice between Fabian and berserker is important (and doesn't need to be made once for all) but the choice whether to engage via Twitter or via slower, less tribally vulnerable media is equally important. And for an academic, that choice (unlike the Fabian/berserker one) is more of a no-brainer.
Atheism has nothing to offer in the face of existential risks and we are increasingly ridden with fear. I think another reason why we no longer debate is because reason has failed us, nothing is black and white, everything is an iceberg ---connected, complex more interrelated than what at first seems obvious. Beauty offers respite.
Perhaps wokism is starting to crumble because the fear of speaking out is transferred onto the much stronger existential fears of Covid and the possibility of a Nuclear War. Its narrow minded and narcissistic qualities have simply worn out. And academia....academia is entirely irrelevant.
I agree with others that you need to get more object-level here, and decide what it is you're actually fighting against.
Do you just care about invited speakers not getting cancelled? That might require some type of Berserker strategy (but make sure to be good at picking fights -- inviting some actual witch to speak will certainly backfire).
Do you instead care about ending affirmative action? That one's tough but I'd aim towards joining committees and silently pushing back where possible.
Are you trying to combat woke bias in social science research? That only works if this academic friend of yours is in social science to begin with; you did not specify.
Fighting these things requires different strategies. Decide what you want to accomplish, and taboo the word "woke". Some otherwise un-woke people are in favor of affirmative action, for example. It's ambiguous.
You can switch from Fabian to berserker if needed, you can not switch from berserker to Fabian. So you should always start Fabian and see how it goes.
+1
From my observations/experience, it's tough for even the tenured professors to exert influence over the university as a whole (unless your academic wants to become a dean) and therefore the best path would be to try to influence within the department.
But then it's tough to give advice without knowing what kind of academic this person is and how his peers think. In my experience with <specific hard science> departments at multiple universities, there's a tendency for the non-woke to go along with the woke just because they want to take the path of least resistance when it comes to every non-technical issue. So then being a Fabian makes sense because there would be a beloved colleague providing an alternative voice and perhaps provide some strength to those who would usually be swept up with the woke opinions to speak out as well. But I don't know if this strategy works in humanities and social science departments, where I imagine (but I don't know if this is the case) academics have actual opinions about social issues and aren't just trying to take the path of least resistance.
Both of those are hard ways. A better way is "Meme it to win it".
There are multiple possibilities to make wokeness uncool... and something else cool. Sometimes a good slogan does the trick, like BLM or MAGA. Sometimes one letter has the power, like Z. Sometimes associating your opponent with your enemy is the way to go, you know plenty of those. For example, given that anti-Putin sentiment happened to be stronger on the left, because of Trump, associating Putin's gagging of the media with the similar strategies of The Woke might work. "One Nation -- One Truth". Something smarter and catchier, of course.
Tangential, but I promise it is a genuine question:
> While I don’t morally blame the truckers for this, from a strategic point of view, they sure did cause it to happen.
I think this is petty. I think *you* think this is petty. So I hope you won't mind if I'm petty in return.
From a strategic point of view, people who failed to unequivocally support the truckers, caused the normalization of freezing bank accounts. While I don't morally blame the "silent majority" for this, they sure did cause it to happen.
I realize this isn't /quite/ apropos. Protest strategy is in some sense exogenous; the public's response is endogenous. Still, "an entirely nonviolent, but nevertheless internationally visible protest" is an extraordinarily high bar to meet, and the Canadian convoy managed it. Moreover, when I was a mere schoolboy, the standard story of the civil rights movement involved many benign protests designed to elicit a harsh overreaction. This, I was told, was a brilliant strategy: it made the protestors sympathetic, and the suppressive authorities were exposed as the bigoted incompetents they were. Did civil rights protestors (from a strategic point of view) normalize the use of firehoses on peaceful protests?
In short: What, specifically, could the truckers have done better, and how would it have led to better results?
Had a better cause. You can't really separate tactics from what the protest itself is about. To the extent that the civil disobedience during the civil rights protests were effective it was because a lot of northern white people were generally on the side of black people in the South and opposed to the Jim Crow regime.
The trucker protest was ineffective for roughly the same reason the Occupy Wall Street protests were ineffective: the "cause" was an incoherent collection of grievances that ranged from reasonable (vaccine mandates for truck drivers who are exceedingly unlikely to be significant spreaders of COVID given the nature of their work) to easily-caricatured conspiracy theories. The civil rights era was relatively well organized and intentional with a concrete, broadly popular goal.
I *sort of* agree. That is, I agree they should have had a better, and more concrete cause. Of course every protest has morons---and I think morons in this protest were deliberately amplified by hostile voices---but (to repeat the example) I recall that the civil rights protests were scrupulously policed by organizers, and the truckers should have done that here as well, from a strategic standpoint.
But the second part of my question was "and how would it have led to better results?". And I don't see how "have a better cause" and "better policing" would have prevented the government from enacting financial sanctions. So the *specific thing for which they're being blamed* (in some vague non-moral sense) wouldn't go away.
Uh. I should be a bit less oblique. Here are some things I believe are probably true (in increasing order of how certain I am):
1. The success of a protest is strongly dependent on how various elites view the cause. Civil rights, as you state, was viewed as a legitimate cause by the most powerful people in the country.
2. Victory is deemed moral post hoc. If the truckers had killed ~30 people, but caused enough disruption to overthrow the government, this would be viewed as a splendid example of how a protest should be run.
3. Making an offhand, largely tangential comment in opposition to unpopular cause X is much easier and safer than making a similar comment in support. This helps to create a systematic bias in "the discourse" (barf). I do not know of any way to avoid contributing to this phenomenon, other than total silence.
It's an ugly picture. These are the things that pushed me to express annoyance originally.
My advice would be: spend a lot of time thinking about exactly what your principles are. If you fight the Left they're going to spend a lot of time trying to tell you what you believe and why you're evil for believing those things.
It's important to keep a strong concept in your head of what you actually _do_ believe -- for instance, "I believe every individual should be treated equally regardless of sex, race or sexual orientation", or "I believe in [this very specific definition of] free speech". Then, be ready to stand up for those good principles when they are violated and articulate exactly why.
Being "anti-woke" is an understandable shorthand for a position, but it's not a good thought process for picking your fights. Fight the stuff that's genuinely wrong, not just the stuff that annoys you.
I agree with this (strongly!) and in lieu of an upvote I must leave a comment, to add: Focus on being honest.
I think a good starter is Solzhenitsyn's "Live not by lies", but it doesn't end there. In each circumstance, your first priority must be to tell the truth. Ensure that anybody who is *listening* knows what you believe the truth to be, and then don't add anything that might mislead them. That sort of sets an upper and a lower bound for what you must say. (In more suppressive societies this can perhaps be modified by telling the truth in a roundabout way.)
My sense is that the Fabian strategy is the one most compatible with this dictum. The more fights you get in, the more likely you are, in the heat of the moment, to overstep and say things you don't really believe. And then... well, it's just too tempting to double down and defend them.
Be quite, speak the truth when the opportunity presents itself, and have faith. It's better than trying to manipulate society, and I know of no other options.
I probably don't agree with you about the underlying issues, but I think your advice is exactly right. If you don't think exactly about what your underlying principles are, then you're liable to end up waging a war by committing precisely the same atrocities that you see the other side committing, because these atrocities feel like things to do when there's a war, and you haven't thought about what makes them atrocious. This original post seems to be about creating a wokeness of the anti-woke, just as the 1990s led to a political correctness of the anti-PC.
Re: the Fabian strategy as applied to the civil rights movement, see these excellent recollections of Thurgood Marshall by one of his assistants:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/magazine/thurgood-marshall-stories.html
It's worth mentioning the real Fabian strategy is that of Fabius Maximus Cunctator, the Roman general who was appointed dictator after a series of disastrous defeats at the hands of Hannibal, and employed what we would nowadays call guerrilla warfare until Roman strength could be rebuilt, a rare instance of Romans fighting as the underdogs.
You've posted cringe
IN any case; he could try being not being aggressively annoying about speech when it makes him feel like a martyr, while totally failing to do anything but regurgitate reheated 90's pabulum about political correctness with the numbers filed off. That's been 100% of my experience with higher education reactionaries.
If he wants to challenge Wokeness as social phenomena, he needs to do it from the left, not the right.
When people attack Wokness from the right, it looks exactly like just being a normal ass racist. If he wants to convince people that aren't racist and aren't impressed with his noble defense of truth and freedom and blah blah blah, he needs to convince them that it's not just low class to be woke, but ineffective.
How many "normal-ass racists" are there, do you suppose? Let's say as a percentage of the population?
Ah, cynical political strategy! I love it.
I’ve thought about this sort of question a lot in different contexts, but I think of the “Fabian” and “Berserker” strategies as “inside” and “outside” roles. Importantly, I do not consider them alternatives, but complements.
You need someone on the outside creating drama and generating pressure. And you also need someone on the inside negotiating a response to that pressure that suits your goals.
In professional politics I’ve seen members of party A deliberately feeding information to competing party B to attack party A with. Why would they do such a thing? Because that outside pressure helps them win the internal argument! “Party B is smashing us in this issue, we should do (thing I always wanted to do) so those attacks don’t damage us so much.”
So identify which of those roles needs to be filled in your current circumstance. If you have allies on the inside who don’t want to start drama and face blowback but do want to advance academic freedom, then you can fill the outside role and create drama so they can engineer “compromises” that give you some of what you want.
On the other hand if there is a lack of people on the inside that are sympathetic to the cause of academic freedom, then you should focus on building your own status and position and becoming that inside player.
What's the point of banning culture war discussions if the articles are about how to ignite culture wars? Isn't this the most counter productive thing for ACX you could do, even if it works?
To be fair, the culture war is only banned in ½ of open threads, and is otherwise fair game.
More importantly, for a post ostensibly about resisting the culture war, it seems to be very tightly focused on heightening it.
Sorry I'm from Germany and really don't get it: what's the problem with wokeness? Is this really a big Problem in US? To me it seems like jumping the alt-right train because of annoyance of loved privileges. Also I don't get why quotas are a bad thing. It depends on the field but in politics and leading positions they are a valid tool imho.
Going with the charitable assumption you aren't just trolling (you must understand you sound kind of naive), because I know a bit about Germany and I can totally picture young German people being sincerely confused by this kind of article:
The whole point of the discussion is to avoid having to choose between "super-woke" and "alt-right" and not to get called "alt-right'" or "nazi" or "fascist" or "supremacist" or whatever awful insult you can think of if you happen to find (for example) "defunding the police" a very bad idea or "micro-aggressions" an unconvincing pseudo-scientific concept or gendering debates kind of ridiculous*** or banning books because they contain a certain word totally idiotic. This is very important because 1/ you also certainly don't want to be called a "stalinist" just because you suggest higher taxes might be good 2/ being called a "nazi supremacist awful person" is the first stage, being fired is the next one, and it's really happening.
(btw, I'm from France and I also see the American situation from far away - but I also see the thing coming across the pond. A university teacher got in serious trouble in Grenoble last year for refusing to equate "islamofobia" with antisemitism. Wehret den Anfängen!)
***like, what's that silly Sternchen? I lived in Austria fifteen years ago, the Binnen-I was everywhere, perfectly functional and practically unchallenged .
No I'm not trolling and also not young and I believe not naive.
For me it seemed like this:
There seemes to be some kind of problem with wokeness that Scott thinks is worth tackling aggressively. What always is mentioned is censorship and loss of job as a result of not thinking men and women are biologically equal.
I've never witnessed or seen this kind of stuff and also never really heard about it apart from US people that seem to think this is a huge problem. I've read some study about why this is a huge problem but for me it seemed like piece about an alien world.
So far the people who have to fear jobloss for me have been the people who have just not stopped voicing sexist opinions despite having been told several times to stop this and also often with some unsaid really bad history that everybody knew of but was not documented eg sexual harassment. I don't really get what's wrong with these people losing their job.
Now this mismatch and also the hopeful or maybe naive belief that the rationalist humanist community cloud ought to be more left wing confuses me.
The only explanation I got is that things in US are really that different. So I asked.
But I was futher confused by reading some catchphrases that I know - in Germany - are almost exclusively used by the alt right or people starting their journey on the alt right pipeline.
So the alternative explanation which I hope is false, is that the rationalist community as a whole is indeed fallable to alt-right viewpoints. This makes sense because alt right targets audiences where there are a lot of white males.
This seems to be not the case because several other people here also voiced confusion why going against people who want more social justice is supposed to be good thing.
Also who is called a Stalinist? That's a ln insult something almost exclusively to anarchists and trotzkist. Nobody else eben bothers to differ between different types of communists in Germany.
The * is just one of many possible alternatives to include transgender people. I don't really know if that changes something for the better but I do get that representation doese seem to matter and its not hurting anyone.
If you're not that young, you seem to be young to this blog... For at least nine years wokeness has been controversially discussed around here. I'm really sorry if I sounded condescending. (I may have been misled by your first name, if that's the real one. In France only very young people are called Leo. But then, in France only very old women are called Yvonne ;-)
Some (hopefully) short answers:
- "as a result of not thinking men and women are biologically equal."
First, for me "woke" is much more related to (a certain kind of) (so-called) antiracism than to basic feminism. I don't think there is much to be afraid of on this front, of course female and male are equal and that's not what I'm talking about. And of course sexual harassment is bad and a good reason to get fired. (I'm speaking strictly for myself, of course)
More generally, it's not about the content, it's about the methods. I do agree with a lot of ideas woke people promote (not all, obviously). But I do hate censorship and intimidation. And I think that's what Scott's article is about: how to promote freedom of thought and freedom from intimidation.
- "some unsaid really bad history that everybody knew of but was not documented eg sexual harassment."
...undocumented stories everybody knows about... Now we're getting at the problem. How do you discriminate between legitimate claims and smear campaigns against the unpopular guy? Losing one's job because of unsubstantiated accusations sounds pretty bad to me.
- "the rationalist humanist community cloud ought to be more left wing"
I don't consider myself a member of this community and I'm not really concerned. But my whole point is : "woke" is NOT synonymous with "left wing"! See Freddie DeBoer: He's as left wing as you can get, feminist, against racial injustice AND firmly anti-woke. The huge success he gets on substack seems to show he isn't alone there.
- "some catchphrases that I know - in Germany - are almost exclusively used by the alt right"
Is the alt right a thing in Germany now? No, I'm not trolling, I know about Höcke and Sarrazin and Maaßen and such, I just don't think they're (in their different ways) the same thing as the American alt right. Which German alt right do you mean?
And, really out of interest: which catchphrases?
- "Also who is called a Stalinist?"
That's my point. "Alt right" and "supremacist" and such are in most cases as ridiculous as "stalinist" is widely considered to be, at least in France and Germany. And yet they're in use and some people are prone to call people this in the manner of K-Gruppen turning against each other, because of I don't know which "catchphrase".
(besides, my father-in-law once got angry and called me a maoist because I voiced some pretty tame left wing concerns with concurrence not always leading to good results. It does happen!)
Okay, so I am too interested not to jump in here. I also a (not young) German who is an oooold reader to the blog (I was there in the ye oldent times, you see) and even though I might have a better idea of what Scott is talking about here, I am also confused on the project. The "woke" described in the article above seems very shallow in comparison to the depp-dives he did in earlier posts. Like, going the contrarian way on this just seems generally like a very bad idea to me. Also just going against wokeness ist just a weird project, since it is neither a coherent political group, philosophy, or methodology.
I agree that some things left-wing groups do is very bad - cancelling people who have done minor misdeeds, getting university professors fired for differences in opinion etc. However, I'd consider two things: first, why exactly are they able to do that. It is not like 20-somethings suddently have a lot more infuence or power? They are not a strong voter group, they can be resisted in university settings almost always etc. Don't get me wrong, I have seen a few university professors of mine on a woke-trial in my day. Curcially, however - none of them were actually fired. They had to suddently deal with the fact, that people made outrageous threats against them. That was hard, but that was... sort of it. Same with more rigorous things like quotas for political parties, jobs and the like. Like, there had been much talk, it has not happened. So, I'd really like someone to explain this panic to me.
Scott, as far as I can tell, sincerely disagrees with the neoreactionaries (i.e. the intellectual wing of the alt right) in various important ways. But he thinks that they have some important insights, and that these outweigh the downsides of having them in his community. Years ago he decided to cultivate the relatively smart, non-maximally-offensive segment of the neoreactionary movement as part of his readership, and to publicly criticise some of their ideas in a respectful, detailed way that also helped to promote their movement and its (in his opinion) better ideas. So it's no accident that the rationalist community includes some hard right elements. You can probably tell from my tone that I'm not and have never been comfortable with this -- but to Scott's and the community's credit, there is genuine diversity of thought here, hence your noticing that "several other people here also voiced confusion why going against people who want more social justice is supposed to be good thing".
I happen to be one of those relatively smart, non-maximally offensive segment of the neoreactionary movement that Scott is trying to cultivate.
So far I'm not really impressed with what's written here. These advice are mostly mediocre or useless for someone trying to oppose "wokeness".
Anatoly Karlin (who I think it is fair to peg as alt-right-ish, to the degree that Russian ideological clusters map onto Anglosphere ones) had a post on the demographics of the Less Wrong / SSC readership a few years ago that might be of interest: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/lesswrongsowhite/ . White people are overrepresented, but not by anything like as much as Kews in particular are overrepresented, which is not what you would expect from an ideological cluster that was overly biased in favour of the alt-right (but *is* what you might expect if you were looking at a dataset that included a lot of smart, open-minded people who were not so instinctively hostile to the alt-right that they were unable to even consider whether the alt-right might have some valid points).
>I don't get why quotas are a bad thing
To pick out this particular issue: quotas are a bad thing if ability is not equally distributed between the groups that you are quota-ing from. To take some of the most salient around these part: if, say, James Damore and Larry Summers are broadly correct, and there are biological reasons to expect there to be significantly fewer women than men at the very top echelons of maths-intensive, cognitively demanding fields given a totally sex-neutral hiring approach, a quota that required you to hire women for 50% of positions in those fields would be *guaranteeing* that the talent pool at the top of those professions was worse than it would be if all hires were made strictly acording to ability. That's not to say that it is *necessarily* wrong - if you live in a society where an angry mob will reliably burn down your maths department within 10 minutes of discovering that less than 50% of your maths professoriate is female, then you are better off paying the danegeld and hiring some excellent-but-not-the-*very_best* candidate women in order to keep your department going - but you would still be doing less good maths than you would be in the hypothetical where you did have free choice to pick only the very best.
Extend the same logic to racial groups: although the *cause* of the racial IQ gaps is still very much a matter of debate, the *existence* of significant differences in IQ between racial groups is not in any serious doubt among intelligence researchers ... meaning that having racial quotas that *presuppose* that there are no differences in average intelligence between groups guarantees that, at the margin, in certain mission-critical areas, you are going to get more bridges collapsing, more ships running aground, more space rockets exploding, more military conflicts lost, etc. than you would otherwise. Which, again, *could* be a price worth paying if the costs of people who don't understand the reasons for the disparity getting angry about it are severe enough, but you would need to weigh the pros and cons very carefully.
I think one of the biggest advantages of the Fabian strategy is that is lends itself towards institutionalization. You can build up a larger network/council/club/whatever that will persist for longer than you. Because eventually you’ll die, and my guess is that eventually something with similar problems will emerge (think the conservative censoring that went on in the late 1900s).
Is the anonymous academic an unwoke progressive/liberal? If yes, he should probably make it very clear, regardless of the strategy he picks. And not by self-identifying as a leftist but by directly supporting specific causes. It doesn't always help, but at this point putting oneself on the line to preach civility by saying stuff like "you should treat me charitably" makes people more hostile both to them and to civility.
(My reservation is that doing it too strongly might draw the contour of a belief-shaped hole around the beliefs in which he (and his colleagues) diverges from progressivism.)
Love the sign. Can it be ordered outside of the US?
"I, Greengrocer xy lives here" is rather cryptic though. Why does being a greengrocer, and/or denoting yourself xy, let you off the hook? Some local Berkeley story behind this, perhaps.
It reminds me of an old Peanuts strip. Lucy goes through the neighbourhood and gets everyone to sign a document stating, "I am absolved from all blame". Linus, a bit envious, comments: "That is a nice document to have".
It's a reference to https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23
Aha, many thanks!
I was recently thinking about the truckers protests. And one questions that I got struck with is that: is government freezing the bank accounts of people doing the activity the government doesn't like really worse than government arresting people, all things being equal?
I live in Russia and I would really prefer if my government freezed my bank account for the time I participate in the protest instead of sending SWAT to beat the shit out of me and then arrest for a couple of days during which I may or may not be tortured. The bank account freezing seems much less violent measure.
Similarly, now all the world is imposing economical sanctions on Russia. And this seems to be a much less violent measure than directly sending armies and everyone understands that. Why then we are so worried about this new norm of freezing protesters' bank accounts?
> And one questions that I got struck with is that: is government freezing the bank accounts of people doing the activity the government doesn't like really worse than government arresting people, all things being equal?
Reasons why it's worse:
1. Arrests have a certain amount of process involved. A police officer needs to have some well-defined level of belief that you've committed an actual crime. And then if you actually get charged then they have to prove you committed it, otherwise you're free to go. Freezing accounts doesn't seem to have any level of due process involved.
2. Arrests are at the discretion of individual police officers. The Prime Minister can't sit in his office and give orders for particular groups of people to be arrested.
3. In Canada, the police don't beat you or torture you after they arrest you.
In Russia, of course, none of these things applies. I'd much rather be arrested by the Canadian police than the Russian police.
Oh, I totally agree about the due process angle! That's why I wrote "all things being equal". But if this is the only issue, I think the correct response to this new initiative is supposed to be: we need to develop proper due process for bank account freezing and then replace as much arrests with it as possible.
The change in state violence from very visible, explicit violence to invisible violence is a terrible development from the perspective of those who disagree with whatever policy the government has decided to ban protesting against precisely because it protects the government from most negative consequences that would arise when they use explicit force to stop a viewpoint from being expressed.
Comparing the two consequences should you decide to protest:
If the government is forced to use the police or military to break up protests, it will generate large amounts of negative press and popular opinion, provide a rallying point for those who espouse the forbidden idea to focus on. If you continue to attend a protest that the government wants to crack down upon, you can immediately fight that crackdown with the legal system, they have to fight to stop you from protesting.
If the government can just decide to track protesters and order banks to freeze their accounts there is comparatively very little negative press (no photos of police and protesters, no visible violence). Instead, the protesters can simply no longer purchase food. It can't really be fought through the legal system; certainly not with the immediacy of an arrest. It is much harder to protest.
While negative press and public sentiment is more impactful in democracies than in autocracies, giving autocracies the power to silently vanish protests and dissent with more effectiveness than police is still a large increase in the states ability to commit violence against its citizens. The appearance of everyone peacefully choosing to obey and stay at home and support the state is quite different from arresting 13000 protesters,
You raise an interesting point! I didn't really think about this angle at all.
But I think there are lots of opportunities for negative press if your citizens are literally dying of hunger in the central square. In a sense it would be much more visible than when people are arrested in somewhere.
I thought the anti-woke were against the idea that words or laws could constitute violence. As someone who is generally sympathetic with wokeness, I think it's important to recognize the ways in which speech and social treatment can be powerful enough to be as bad as violence.
>I thought the anti-woke were against the idea that words or laws could constitute violence.
You're lumping together two very different things. *Laws* are enforced *using violence*.
The wokeness movement, which is about power and control, not rights or repairing injustices, will not be beaten until some of its leaders are made to suffer personally. At the moment, they are in the position of bullies effectively able to pick on any target they choose. To the extent that right-wing legislators try to push back (and I think that's largely confined to the US) they are just playing the same game, albeit at a much more basic and unsophisticated level, and simply advance the victim narrative. Remember that wokeists have imbibed a half-understood set of ideas from Marcuse: tolerance is itself a form of violence, so it's wrong to tolerate people who disagree with you. So you can surrender to these people, or you can beat them, but you can't negotiate with them by definition.
What I would do is to pick a particularly egregious and unpopular wokeist, in a vulnerable position, and collect incriminating information on them. When you have enough, try to get them sacked or disciplined. Use their own tactics: mobilise students against them, get hold of alumni who have suffered at their hands, set up an anonymous bulletin board where people can make complaints .... Wokeists are used to treading all over opposition. They'll think again if they realise they may suffer personally.
Trying to beat the wokeist at their own game never works.
This seems way too navel-gazey to be a worry right now. Given the political successes and organization of the far-right in the US, seems like the most important thing to worry about right now is that we don't re-elect a former president who wants to take us out of NATO, supports Putin, and came close to succeeding in a coup attempt on manufactured bullshit around an election. This is a real risk considering some of the bills passed to change voting at the state level. The people who have the actual power are more dangerous than the wokesters at this point. The wokesters are now a sideshow that the likes of Tucker Carlson can point to justifying the latest outrage.
I'm sorry, but this one should have stayed in Drafts longer. (-Kind +True +Necessary)
Ironically, most of the people I know who more than agree that "the previous panic about terrorism went a little too far" are either woke, or so danger-close to woke that it sure feels like you're knives-out for them.
People are trying to do what they think is best, and you're not trying to help them do Good, you're just planning how to fight them.
I hope that this post merely suffers from carelessness of writing, rather than serving as a rallying call for a proxy culture war.
Remember that time when whole communities rose up to support a minority group, and tried to recognize their struggles, and the minority group said "fucking finally"?
Yeah, I guess that was "a weird time".
"People are trying to do what they think is best, and you're not trying to help them do Good, you're just planning how to fight them."
Do you think Scott and those people have the same concept of Good? Would you help anyone claiming to do Good, regardless of what they're actually trying to do?
I don't really know what wokeness is, besides the terrifying bogeyman. I don't follow the news particularly much, and I'm a college freshman in computer engineering so I haven't seen any terrifying suppression of academic freedom personally.
With that context, I think this post is written from entirely too meta a perspective. It reads to me that 'Wokeness' and 'Anti-wokeness' stand in for 'social justice and the belief that society needs to change to be more accepting' and 'society is accepting enough already; we don't need your delusions'. The Fabian strategy is being a polite and engaged community member and speaking up against policies not actually based in fact (if of course, there actually are issues with the policies) which attempt to signal an organizational belief in social justice but cause unintentional harm in other ways. The Beserker strategy is to intentionally try and cause people who want a more accepting and equal society to overreact and form a mob which harms some innocent seeming victim in order to defeat make them look bad and defeat wokeness. The latter seems to me to be an ineffective way to cause attempts at social justice to be rooted in data and experiment.
The ending section of the post, especially "maybe this will keep wokeness in the public eye long enough for the (now controlled by anti-woke people) government to reckon with it and change the relevant laws" stood about to me. What relevant laws? What fantasy based laws are tyrannizing academics? Laws meant to fix systemic inequalities? Those should be changed to be more effective certainly, but not removed---removing laws doesn't fix the inequalities. To me, the laws most in need of fighting are the anti trans laws many states (Idaho, Utah, Alabama, etc.) are in the process of passing.
"Wokeness" is about more than just the positions being argued, but the tactics used and justified to argue for them. It is to a large extent a replacement for "Social Justice Warriors", because apparently that term was offensive and unfair. But as the name implies, it's about someone's conception of social justice, and about believing that this is of such overriding importance as to justify War. If you're not with us, you're against us. If you're against us, you're a horrible evil person who should crawl under a rock and die, and nothing is off the table in driving you to that end. If all we can manage is petty harassment, we'll harass everyone who isn't with us just to prove we can. Details are left as an exercise for the student, but civility right out.
*That*, is worth fighting against. Therefore it's worth discussing the most effective tactics to fight against it.
Unfortunately, I don't think either of these strategies will lead to happiness, and both are career-limiting in the woke academy. The question, as posed, is essentially "how obnoxious can I be and still keep my nearly-solid job." That's not what junior faculty generally want to solve for. There are other strategies.
I think the Fabian strategy only works alongside the Berserker strategy. Fabians are supports for Berserkers (morally as well as practically), but the ideal strat is whatever one encourages the academic to do this consistently.
Probably the most important aspect of this is ensuring that Fabians can be recognised by other Fabians (or even by Berserkers)
I suggest that at least the Fabian strategy should include opposition to actual prejudice.
One of the crazy-making thing about this era is having two sides. One believes that any disparity is evidence of bigotry, and the other (consider Lowry and Sowell) seem to believe that no disparity is worth considering as evidence of bigotry. Both views save the trouble of looking at specifics.
Can you expand a bit on what you mean by 'actual prejudice'?
If I understand you, I strongly agree that the individual actions we take on each other outweigh any nebulous 'systemic' effects - at least at the level that any of us can affect. And most of the time, people's actions are in feedback loops, responding to actions of others. No man is an island, etc etc.
Suppose that you find people qualifications or claims in an assault case are being systemically ignored. That would count as actual prejudice. For the anti-woke crowd, I'll not that it still doesn't just happen to white men.
Or suppose you find that, in a particular case, what's going on with one person doesn't seem to get institutional traction.
What do you mean by 'systemically ignored'? I am seriously not trying to be an ass, just trying to understand what you mean.
It might help if I explain that I think that for most people and most things that are going on with them, whatever it is doesn't need institutional traction. Making an interpersonal conflict or a particular issue with bureaucracy & red tape into an issue that needs national attention is, I think, part of the problem.
For purposes of this discussion, I'm pretty much thinking of serious physical attacks, and maybe plausible threats. And maybe odds of promotion/firing.
Ok, I strongly agree that threats & physical attacks that arise in the workplace are a concern. (With caveats for misinterpreted smack talk.) I think in general promotion and firing is far too multi factorial to expect a general bias to outweigh all the other factors.
Note that universities usually have people living in them. They aren't just workplaces.
The Berserker strategy is going to test just how strong the "almost" in "almost unfireable" really is.
wokeness spreads in bureaucracies because
A) it is very useful in office politics
B) it justifies increasing the size and power of the bureaucracy
C) it justifies separating the bureaucracy from accountability to the outside
fabianism or berserkering are strategies to deal with A (with bersekering trying to counter C)
they also only work for the very very few with a secure position
that is not enough
Modified Fabian. Become genuinely beloved in a different way, then use different tactics....
a. Start with relationships. Genuinely seek to befriend/mentor 2 to 4 African-American faculty and admin with strong Left/Woke credentials.
Start by having 30 coffee dates as one-shots. Whittle it down based on genuine connection and enjoyment of debate, and of course, people who seem to like you personally. Importantly, you are uniquely free to seek this. Others would be afraid to be cancelled on coffee chat itself (per UVa student column in NYT).
b. Do same with other tribes.
(Authentic relationships will also expose you to: actual and imagined discrimination your colleagues face. Perhaps it'll be the ratio you expect, perhaps not).
c. Now do what universities are supposed to do. Use those trusting relationships and create debate and discussion.
Maybe it's a "Forbidden Podcast" that discusses both the Fabian and Berserker concerns. Maybe it's "invite only" debates to give exclusivity/prestige. Importantly, you're not trying to "win" per se, you're trying to show the intellectual enjoyment of actual exchange. Honey not vinegar.
Model healthy exchange.
Goal: less Woke students gain courage.
Goal: more woke students see in your open-minded Woke counterpart - not YOU - the sheer fun of civil discussion without censorship.
d. Use your mini Dunbar of perhaps 15 new, real relationships to, perhaps once a year, defeat The Dumbest Thing. One Berserker per year. If there are 5 candidate targets, pick one where you have strongest alliance with a Woke tribe member so you can Berserker it together.
This is an excellent analysis, but you might want to limit the Berserker approach even further - bureaucracy can make those fights drag out, and if you're embroiled in some conflict or other too frequently you may alienate your coalition.
Die on another hill. Fighting wokeness or even it's bad policy manifestations is a far cry from the most important issues facing society. An academic in such a position has far more valuable contributions to make to society than battling the subtleties of social justice overreach into wokeness.
Christianity is far from gone. Politicians still have to convince everyone they’re good christians whose favorite book is the bible, ban abortion for religious reasons, etc. Everyone was Christian and then progressives let go of it whereas mostly conservatives kept it. But with wokeness the equivalent would be racism: everyone was racist and now progressives have shed that (and sometimes overshoot) and mostly conservatives are the ones holding on to it.
To be more precise, I should say something more like holding onto simplistic/outdated notions of racism as something very extreme thus excusing them of any blame unless they are literally out there lynching people. Refusing to accept the ideas of unconscious bias, and current effects of redlining policies, etc.
I also meant that in general the idea of being conservative is that you hold onto things and the idea of being progressive is that you embrace new things so it seems somewhat unavoidable
"Berserker" sounds incredibly stressful. Even if the woke can't fire you (and are you *utterly* certain of that?), they can still protest you, spread lies about you online, shout insults at you in public, send you death threats, et cetera.
In my own life, the pattern I've seen is that someone says: "it's okay if I make (X) mad at me because there's nothing they can really do to me" and then (X) demonstrates that this statement was *really* incorrect. My personal life lesson is to never make that statement again.
There's such a thing as sacrificing for a cause you believe in, but "berserker" seems to be a *very expensive* sacrifice. My advice is not to do that.
Maybe relevant: ABET, the accreditor for any engineering program worth attending, has updated their accreditation criteria to include the following:
"The curriculum must include:
c) a professional education component that is consistent with the institution’s mission and the program educational objectives and promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion awareness for career success."
and
"The program faculty must demonstrate awareness and abilities appropriate to providing an equitable and inclusive environment for its students, and knowledge of appropriate institutional policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion."
It seems that, for ABET, to be a successful engineer (or an engineering professor), you must be woke.
And these are the kinds of institutional changes that get the least coverage, but have the most impact.
Fabian strategy and building a network behind the scenes, while waiting for a 100% fool proof berserker strategy about 5 to 7 years down the line, to be implemented strongly and once, to avoid the soft ending.
Start a news site for his school that receives tips and reports all of the woke stuff. It could be as simple as a substack.
Publicizing wokeness will hurt enrollment and pressure the administration.
This. Actually. But I would maybe even juxtapose radical woke statements with radical right statements. But maybe that is picking too many enemies… can a reasonable but effective (ie not dominated by inertia) moderateness ever come to pass??
How many "radical right statements" are being made at US colleges? That would be a pretty thin section compared to the woke part. Anyway, reasonable people having been playing defense for too long. It's in their nature, but playing offense would be a lot more effective.
This is what we're dealing with: https://www.thebatt.com/news/the-rudder-association-a-deep-dive-into-the-conservative-former-student-group-with-plans-to/article_ee9f31ec-9dae-11ec-a4cc-efe4856b436c.html
Conservative groups are trying to cancel anyone who does critical race theory, and ban talking about sexuality or race in student orientation. That sounds like a wokeness of the right, which is actually powerful in our university.
oof thanks for sharing that perspective. exactly what I mean! The problem is not SJ wokeness per se. It's intolerant ideology in general.
That's a long article. What is the key quote? Maybe this:
> “People want their kids to go to A&M because they think they will be less likely to run into things like being told if you’re white, you’re an oppressor and if you’re Black, you’re oppressed,” Hazlewood said.
Like it or not, that's a mainstream view. Creating an alternative publication does not equal cancellation.
The point of this is that there's a new president, who has engaged in a plan to completely restructure the university by September 1. Many people were worried about the changes out of usual bureaucratic conservativeness, though I thought that (for instance) combining sciences and liberal arts into a single college is a reasonable (if unreasonably fast) move.
But then two weeks ago she issued an announcement that the student newspaper will no longer have a print edition (even though they pay for their print edition out of their own ad revenues rather than university money) and now it comes out that she's been having secret meetings with a group that has been working to stack the board of regents with conservatives, so they can continue firing professors who protest against school symbols.
I thank the Hazlewood family for their funding of a fellowship for military veterans to get discounted graduate degrees (I don't know whether that came from their family fortune or if it was a legislator in the family who got it to come out of state funds) but if they're trying to shape the university administration in a way that leads it to restrict student publications and fire professors, then I think they're the real cancellation threat here.
The university is an extension of the state government. Governments have to be careful with political speech. That's pretty normal.
Edit: Lots of people are unhappy with how left-wing NPR and PBS have become, even though they are also mostly self-funded. Government is helping those partisan outlets exist, which amounts to state propaganda.
Okay, so what? >99% of colleges are the opposite of this, and as long as that number is >50%, why on earth should I care about this case more than the hundreds of opposite such cases?
And there's also an ENORMOUS asymmetry here. These people (supposedly) want to fire professors for teaching, essentially, that white people as a race are bad. You might have a point if left-wing cancellers were cancelling people for doing the opposite (teaching that white people as a race a better people or that black people are evil), but that's absolutely not what is happening in the overwhelming majority of cases.
The right overwhelmingly attempt to cancel over ideological statements (e.g. straight white men bad), the left however not only cancel for ideology but are also more than willing to cancel over value-judgement-free data-based dissent of any kind e.g. claiming that heritable race differences exist, claiming that the data do not support the claim that black men are disproportionately killed by police, claiming that certain immigrant groups have higher than welfare usage etc. Ironically, the right cancel over explicit statements of racial hatred, the left cancel over racial hatred inferred from factual statements.
I don't support anyone being cancelled, but even ignoring the sheer difference in how widespread respective cancelling types are, this desperate kind of attempt to paint conservatives as the "real cancellers" is silly when the left are engaging in a far more harmful type of cancellation, one that actual stifles good faith debate. Especially since this is increasingly spilling over into more mainstream STEM fields.
I was talking about more general contexts. Radical right statements are clearly more popular outside of academia.
My point is not whether you should fight or not. My point is that it's kind of sad that "reasonable people" brand themselves as "anti-woke". Are you against fairness? Are you against justice? Or are you just against one face of SJ movements that impacts your life most intimately? Shouldn't you brand yourself as "for-something"?
Of course, if you are in a setting that is woke-dominated, maybe saying you're "anti-woke" is clear enough to you. But still, that makes your definition of yourself context-dependent, and to that extent outside of your control.
Most people want to do their thing and not be bossed around by weirdos. They support freedom. You can frame it as anti-woke. After all, the bossy weirdos encountered at universities are generally woke. For me, #ShutDownSTEM and the associated peer-pressure, supported by university administrators, were clear signals. I support fairness but I'm against others pressuring me into their view of fairness. https://www.science.org/content/article/researchers-around-world-prepare-shutdownstem-and-strike-black-lives
As an unwoke professor who made it to the dean ranks to try to make a difference, as soon as your friend reveals his true position and views his career progression will slow dramatically. There are a handful of universities where this would not be true, but for the vast majority of AAU research universities it is. The issue matters most in the humanities and social sciences, significantly less so in the physical sciences and engineering. Being ostracized is really hard over the long haul.
Berserker Strategy, because the Fabian Strategy doesn't work online.
I've been participating in online arguments longer than many people engaging in them now have been alive. I eventually stopped, realising that there weren't any actual arguments being had between people. There were Social Games. And I've been around long enough to see the pieces of the Social Games change, multiple times. The same people playing the Social Game exchange pieces for new ones, and they won't even notice. To treat these pieces as arguments, positions, or even beliefs, is wrong-headed.
Just to clarify, I may use words like "nobody" and "people" but this does not mean literally no person, or literally all people. An individual pointing out an individual exception and claiming victory by beneficially expanding to the tribe is itself part of the Social Game. The Social Game is played by groups, not individuals.
What does this have to do with the question? Well, now adays, Twitter is real life. We have made the wonders of the internet real, and it is more horrible than we could have possibly imagined. And because Twitter is real life, acting as if there are beliefs being held is a mistake.
Your friend is not fighting for academic freedom. Nobody really cares about academic freedom. People care about if they can be insulted as X-ist or Phobic, and if they can insult others as X-ist or Phobic. This time we live in now is not comparable to the Civil Rights era (that was not an internet Social Game), and so the Civil Rights era, and other real protest movements did not solve these problems, and cannot teach us anything about them. They had nothing to do with these problems.
New Atheism is also not comparable, at least not in the way you wish it to be. This is because New Atheism and the war against Religion-but-Actually-Just-Vague-Christianity was an online battle (and thus, nobody fighting it had beliefs), before the horrific merger of reality with Twitter. Ultimately the Christian Monoculture as you call it lost out, but New Atheism was just along for the ride. The pieces merely changed after the fall.
Nothing "convinces" people to be Woke or Un-Woke, because these are not beliefs and nobody cares about arguments. People switch sides rarely these days, and usually only for social reasons that I doubt could be distilled into any strategies.
Now, to take a completely different angle than trying to answer your specific questions, let me talk about 4chan. 4chan has mostly solved these problems, and solved them over a decade ago. The problem is not policy (Academic Freedom), but fashion (Wokeness). Fashion changes trends, and it is of groups, not individuals. If a single person goes outside wearing something completely bonkers, we call them tacky at best, crazy at worst. But if an entire group goes outside wearing something bonkers, we call them hipsters.
4chan eschews the entire concept of fashion by embracing a fashion that cannot be bought in to by half measures. That is, to speak specifically, 4chan values the policy of anonymity and freedom to such an extent that in order to preserve it, it spontaneously developed an extremely toxic environment as a defence mechanism, to both ward off and kick out anybody who refuses to conform to it. If you are the type of person who wants to build social capital by playing social games, you will find 4chan almost impossible to deal with. First of all it is so toxic most people will lose social capital merely by associating with it in the first place. Second, you will be relentlessly insulted for establishing an identity outside of a very few situations. And third, in order to learn how to avoid these two issues, you must not engage immediately and instead watch and learn how to fit in.
4chan cannot have any *real* culture wars, because its users have no identity within a culture in the first place. A fervent believer is indistinguishable from a troll. You cannot gain social capital, you can only lose it, which means there is no motivation to fight. It is not even easy to tell that discussion is happening at all, as discussion between multiple parties is indistinguishable from some random person performing an elaborate prank.
And how does this relate to our current situation, where real life and the internet are one thing? 4chan sustains its preferences by making opposition socially unpalatable inside of its domain. While it does this by being unpalatable to the wider population, it still succeeds at its goal. And so it seems that the equivalent strategy for real life is the Berserker strategy. Make sure you never lose fights in the academic sphere, and do your best to make sure your opponent can't win them. If everybody does this in their own domain in the same direction, it'll work out. Now there is still stuff to be said about the idea that perhaps there *are* underlying policies behind the Social Game, since this is a Social Game played In Real Life. But the "Woke" position is incoherent (something players of the Social Game will admit to when they need to claim that the Woke position doesn't exist in the form its detractors says it does) as a policy, and whatever real policies had by it, and the opposition players, are played in a different arena using different terms, by individuals and not groups.
Of course ideally we'd just uncouple the internet from real life. That's possible but also an entirely different discussion.
We don’t need more celebrity intellectuals. We need long-term, solid academics who can talk people away from the teetering point or lead people away by example. Especially if this person is publishing frequently, I think it’s better to become that community pillar. Fabian.
I can't say which strategy is more effective in a 'total war' against wokeness. But if you just want to cultivate your garden - and as part of that I would include making your garden a pleasant place for your colleagues! - I would recommend the Fabian approach. I am not in academia but have reached a similarly 'unfireable' position in my company while still being relatively junior, and have been employing this strategy for the last few years. It has been successful in curbing the worst excesses of HR/'People' teams, and has also I think helped to establish that it is possible to be 'unwoke' while *also* being a compassionate, caring and (I hope) competent boss. This has meant that as well as being able to fight my own little corner of the business, I now have allies in other parts of it who think and act likewise, and people who I have trained or who have reported to me have been in part converted to my position. If you care about your colleagues and don't want to sacrifice them in a larger conflict, please don't be a berserker.
I'm not sure this reduction to binary choices is helpful. The degree to which "woke" ideology is monolithic and dominant on campuses varies with the campus (since the context of the post concerns colleges and universities) and among units on campus. The optimal strategy a concerned faculty member might best adopt (depending on their personalities) could vary accordingly.
As others commenting have noted, there's a lot of what we call "woke" that involves both views that have broad validity and social results that have been constructive. I think the two elements that make woke culture destructive are the excessively simplistic and reductive tendencies of some extreme (but not necessarily fringe) elements of woke ideology, and the culturally stifling effects of woke campus culture at some schools where it has become dominant, either among the faculty and student bodies, or via administrative norms.
I think there is no reason a faculty member committed to mitigating the excesses of woke culture without reversing its positive features couldn't mix "Fabian" strategy and occasional "berserker" tactics. One is optimal for persuasion by positive example, the other for provoking persuasion by the negative example of woke cultural excesses. In the long run, the former seems preferable because its effect tends to undercut polarization, while pushing woke culture towards extreme behavior relies on exacerbating polarization and gambling that moderate pluralism will somehow win out, rather than full-blown anti-wokism, which risks the growth of white nationalist and similar elements, especially among the student body.
Which strategy is correct probably depends on the temperament and characteristics of that person. Which strategy can they execute better?
For me, personally, I am seeing that the berserker strategy just makes a bunch of semi-woke people get more woke. I've been talking with a friend i consider semi-woke and am realizing that my objections to wokism have been tinged with so much anger and frustration that he's never taken it seriously.
here was a paragraph i wrote that punched me in the face for great justice after i wrote it:
"it turns out that it's really, really, really, really hard to be truly open minded and fair to people we disagree with. It's extremely difficult, not because we are bad or evil, but because we care, and when people care a lot, and don't have the skills necessary to disagree calmly and fairly, they come across like belligerent assholes."
On that note, i don't think MLK was berserker style at all. I think he and the people in his movement _didn't_ get all aggressive and punchy and angry. They didn't sit at the counters in montomgery and say 'fuck you racist assholes we just want sandwiches.' They sat down camly, politely, with intense dignity while being attacked, and asked politely 'why can't i have lunch.' They arranged the bus boycott but they didn't block the busses. They marched peacefully, no shouting, no angry faces, and when the attack dogs came, they _didn't fight back_
I think people really do respond to truly virtuous behavior, and if we want to oppose wokism we have to be really virtuous and kind to do so successfully. Because the reality is that they are very very concerned about what is 'right', it's a religion, and nobody likes having their religion challenged. Telling Christians that they are idiots isn't nearly as effective as saying, 'but this jesus fellow seemed really loving, is that really a loving way to be?', in a kind, loving tone.
I’m not sure this quite fits your dichotomy, but the most effective tactic seems to be “let the really woke expose their crazier views” (or expose them yourself). These views currently are very powerful but in very narrow bubbles, and are protected by folks with outsized voices who are willing to “sanewash” these ideas outside the bubble. To the “normies” outside these media/academic/very online bubbles, the ideas are crazy. The sanewashers might be able to keep the normies sympathetic by religiously touting the motte, but put them in direct contact with the woke in the bailey and their support will collapse.
Which do you think did more damage to “wokeness”, getting Jordan Peterson onto Evergreen, or passing around that Smithsonian poster that said that punctuality and objectivity are white supremacy?
One of the bigger victories attributed to anti-wokeness was the election of Glenn Youngkin. Part of the catalyst for this was the pandemic giving otherwise mostly liberal parents a more direct view of what their kids were being taught in classrooms, and them not liking what they saw. Then, seeing what lengths the gatekeepers and sanewashers would go to to discredit them (up to and including keeping enemies lists and getting them labeled domestic terrorists).
That said, a good example of a relatively successful deployment of the Fabian strategy might be JK Rowling?
>Which do you think did more damage to “wokeness”, getting Jordan Peterson onto Evergreen, or passing around that Smithsonian poster that said that punctuality and objectivity are white supremacy?
How did that damage wokeness at all? Nobody's heard about that poster except a few people who listen to enough right-wing media already that the poster didn't change their mind, and an even fewer number of rationalists. The poster is invisible to the general public except to the people who are right there, and as a reflection on a greater movement, the poster is invisible to the general public, period.
While my gut response is sympathetic to Alex’s main points, I think a large part of that is because I am in a social milieu where critical analysis of the tools and language of woke movements are not adequately addressed (or even recognized). In this case, my response is partly emotional and tied to feeling affirmation.
However, taking a step back I have to agree with a lot of the more measured takes in the comments section, regarding the need to be more measured in our discussion of wokeness, and not to conflate it with social justice. The illiberal tendencies of wokeness I imagine many of us are concerned about is *not* exclusive to social justice movements. It is also shared by conservative movements, except there the litmus test is whether you use terms like “RINO” and “stop the steal”, and attempts at measured discourse get you primaried.
The point is, the illiberal tendency is everywhere. I think Alex did gesture at this point by comparing the SJ movement to Christianity. Growing up, I learned to pay lip service to Christian modes of speaking to get by.
I think the danger of simplifying wokeness (and our terminology) into only its illiberal tendencies is that it address ANYONE’s innocent concerns. A) it doesn’t address real concerns about diversity and inequality so woke people dismiss you and you’re only radicalizing their movement more by taking moderate people out, and B) you reduce your language to be imprecise, making your brand “anti-woke” when it really should be an orthogonal brand like “liberal discourse.” After the woke movement passes and the next ascendant movement comes with the same illiberal tendencies, you have to reinvent your branding and fight all the same fights. We need a better long term banner to fight *for*.
(Side rant: another pet peeve of mine is SJ activism language that analyzes everything as an evil of capitalism and systems. It’s monistic and lacks nuance. I also am perplexed by the extreme ethnocentrism that woke movements lean into. I agree with woke movements in their analysis that white-ethnocentrism has perpetuated harms because as a whole they have been the people with power to propagate harms, but the solution to that is *not* “more ethnocentrism around other groups!” That just shifts who has the power to do harm, instead of actually addressing deeper, harmful human tendencies, and in that sense isn’t really moving the needle in any way. But maybe I’m being idealistic in my desire to change human nature instead of merely guiding/aligning it with better outcomes)
What is more constructive long term (but harder) is to show constructive ways to align truth with other genuine/sincerely held concerns. This is maybe hard because all communication is lossy and we rely on shorthand that oversimplifies nuance (as pointed out by many comments), and the fact that truth is it’s own independent axis means sometimes it *does* run counter to your other interests, leading to illiberal tendencies when you sacrifice truth in favor of those interests.
Honestly it seems you can be anti-cancelling and cover most of the bad things anti-wokeness would cover, without also being against things like, "hmm, the only black professor teaches African American studies. That's weird"
Though anti-cancelling wouldn't cover the segregation and ethnonationalism some (too many) woke people horseshoe their way into
Agreed. It is a shame that anti-canceling feels so reactionary though. SJ movements are quite good at branding. Instead of “anti-system” they reframe it as “abolition”, ie not anti-X but for-Y.
As with the "donate 10% to charity because it's achievable" perspective, I think there are several things that non-woke can do to better the situation without making it their life pursuit. These can be applied to universities but also other organizations as well.
1. Kindly and consistently point out when your organization is attempting to do something illegal, like explicit discrimination. For instance, racial quotas, intentionally not hiring a qualified white person, or similar. On the more extreme end of this, report the illegal activity to the relevant governmental organization, police, or concerned NGO (like FIRE for universities). You can often do this anonymously.
2. Be a sane but non-confrontational voice in meetings. You don't need to make yourself a pariah in order to quietly speak against excesses of wokeness. You can even do this while being woke yourself, if the woke are taking something too far. You don't need to invite Ben Shapiro to your school just to make a point, but maybe a middle-of-the-road liberal that isn't explicitly woke but has useful thoughts on some subject. Say normal and sane things, make normal suggestions. Normalize being normal, even if your organization is much further left than normal. Quietly move the Overton Window back.
3. Be honest in filling out surveys and forms, and in private discussions. You can generally do this without jumping down specific rabbit holes (genetic differences between races, inherent sex differences) that you know will cause significant pushback. Basic responses like "I don't see an issue with his Halloween costume" or "we should hire the most qualified candidate" are necessary for a functioning society. One person being able to say the obvious will encourage others to do the same.
4. Be steady in your responses. You don't need to respond angrily. You don't need to fight. But you also shouldn't apologize for having a normal opinion about a subjective situation. It's perfectly okay to vote for a Republican, or to eat Thai food even if you're Polish, or whatever people might want to make you feel bad about.
5. Consider getting off of Twitter and other social media entirely. It's amazing how much less ability people have to harass and intimidate you when you take away the avenue.
One thing to keep in mind with this or any approach is the need to be a generally well-regarded member of your organization. It's a lot easier to attack the guy who constantly has interpersonal problems with colleagues, students, customers, whatever. It's easier to get management to discipline someone that's already a poor worker and barely doing their job. It's a lot harder to get a mob to go after the guy who is nice to everyone and has good interpersonal relationships.
The whole strategy is good, but #1 is absolutely brilliant. To add on to it, when others' proposals are discriminatory, say the magic words: "I think we should put this through a legal review." Almost no large organizations refuse to do legal reviews, as that looks like willful ignorance of the law. You can shut things down pretty effectively this way without having to appear too obnoxious.
Very true about the legal review. Lots of people seem willing to ignore the obvious legal consequences if there's no pushback, but very few people will reject that approach if someone brings it up.
This seems like a version of the Fabian track Scott proposed, a very good and strong version. Kudos.
Yes to all this. And do it to the excesses of the anti-woke as much as to the excesses of the woke.
One problem with this is that "Woke" organizations and activists have mastered the art of being palatable to the typical nice, blue tribe liberals that inhabit these institutions - in such a way that they are defended *even as* activists take them out behind the chemical sheds - because the definitional games (ie: the number of posts that I see in here debating whether "woke" is really an ideological movement or if it's just a mean name for people who want racial justice(TM)) have made it such that disagreeing with activists *too* loudly draws suspicion on yourself as someone who Supports Racism(TM).
What I think this actually is, is a failure of the relatively well off liberal's lizardbrain. Someone made the point re: QAnon and the like is that "it doesn't actually matter that the QAnon conspiracy theory is insane - there are real institutions like the FDA and academia that are Actually Out To Get Them, and the first thing you do when that happens is Form Up". This is the ironclad defense of "when you are detecting that someone or some group is out there trying to hurt you - you act like someone or some group is out there trying to hurt you".
For a more clear definition, most politics involves some amount of Policy and some amount of Lizardbrain Monkey Fighting. Currently, if you're a relatively well off upper middle class person living in a blue city - you have a sort of idea of the world that was based on the wide increase in liberalism, free thought, and truth winning the day because those things were moral goods but also because they created Success.
All of this gnashing of teeth is merely that group of people coming to realize that the groups that want to take advantage of their mistake-theory oriented viewpoints are not isolated to the American Right.
This gets very little attention, but the NAACP’s anti-segregation legal strategy was extremely Fabian. It started in 1935, when they sued on behalf of a black student who wanted admission to U of Missouri’s whites-only law school (Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada – Canada being the surname of the school registrar). Even under the “separate but equal” doctrine U of Mo didn’t have much of a case since there was no equivalent black law school. The Supreme Court rejected their offer that Missouri pay to have Gaines attend law school in a different state. The NAACP then won similar cases against whites-only Texas and Oklahoma law schools.
Southern states responded in two ways. Texas tried to create a separate black law school, but the Supreme Court found that this was obvious unequal since the new law school was tiny and less prestigious (Sweatt v. Painter, 1950). Oklahoma tried to create internal segregation arrangements in their graduate schools, which the Supreme Court regarded as degrading and ridiculous. (McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents, 1950). Only in 1951, after more than a decade of winning easier cases and establishing precedent for desegregation, did the NAACP decide to try desegregating primary schools in Topeka, Kansas.
This story is often told as NAACP as berserker – bravely using unconventional arguments to overturn established law in Brown v. Board, but it was absolutely a Fabian triumph. Perhaps heroic Fabians are always fated to be recast as berserkers. I’ve always thought something similar happened with gay rights: everyone likes talking about Stonewall but from what I can tell, there’s been tremendously increased acceptance since I became politically conscious in the early 1990s and disruptive activism has played almost zero role in that. Fabians may have won a lot of stuff without building legends.
If you are concerned with wokeness as a movement, the obvious answer is to crowd out bad ideas on solving or explaining away problems with better ones.
To me, it’s seems that the policing debate has been less successful for wokeness than people would have expected. We went from defund as scripture in 2021 to some real debate on the left and a bunch of democrats reneging on it.
(Not an American) - This seemed to be because:
1) many intended beneficiaries actually wanted policing,
2) the quiet and non-confrontational work of criminologists and economists who did studies on policing
3) the rising murder rate, which heavily affected minorités
This may require advocating for a saner and fairer form of social justice.
If anything, one should work to amplify non-conservative alt/anti-woke viewpoints or research.
Many anti-woke people noted that mainstream parties would have to deal with immigration concerns to stave off the far right if mainstream parties were indeed concerned about their rise and influence.
Wouldn’t the same apply here?
> For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke.
Understandable as it may be, I would encourage anyone with this mindset to reflect on whether it is an optimal strategy in an age where both partisan extremes are incentivized to amplify fringe voices through social media.
I never lived in a big liberal city. I am not compelled to shape my views on 'wokeness' based on woke SF-based twitter accounts, any more than I expect other readers to become more skeptical of conservatives because of my own worst experiences in rural Kansas. Besides, having brought both crowds together for my wedding, I am happy to report that people from both political 'extremes' get along just fine once you get them off the internet.
>Were The George Floyd Protests An Example Of Woke Power Or Woke Overreach?
This framing makes no sense to me - it asks many questions about the *method* and *intensity* of protest without ever mentioning the *subject* of the protest, which I would think is the most important part of whether a protest gets popular support!
To me, the simplest explanation is this: George Floyd shifted the stereotype of the SJ movement from "those people who complain that yoga classes are cultural appropriation" to "those people who are against black people being choked to death by police." Unsurprisingly, the latter got a lot more people out in support.
Asking "did the George Floyd protests result in wokeness gaining power?" where "wokeness" describes both the anti-yoga people and the anti-police-brutality people seems like a false category. It's like that post about how neoreactionaries lump modern democracies and murderous communist regimes into the same category of "not ruled by a king, therefore bad," and asking if Biden's election means that the communists are gaining power. They might share some supporters, in the same way that leftists probably prefer communists over fascists, but it doesn't seem useful to fight "wokeness" as a single entity and judge actions on whether it'll help or hurt that entity as a whole. You want to hurt the anti-yoga nuts and help the not-brutalizing-minorities crowd.
(And to show that I'm not simply splitting the group I like and homogenizing the rest, on the right wing I would like to hurt the QAnon nuts and help the free market types.)
Edit: It also reminds me of that "ethnic tension" post about how politics is often done by linking something you hate to something else that feels similar but is unrelated. I worry that making "fighting wokeness" a terminal goal would lead them to fighting something genuinely important just because it *feels* kinda similar to the anti-yoga people in terms of language used or the people who support it.
How many anti-yoga folks riot across the country, killing numerous people and causing >$1 billion in damages?
Your friend's target audience is fence-sitters. To pick his battles, he should figure out what things concern them about wokeness, identifying the rifts between them and the university orthodoxy. Then, he should hammer in the wedge as much as he can.
Do fence-sitters think we've clamped down too far on Halloween costumes? If so, your friend should pull a Christakis. Do they have a closeted belief in biological sex? If so, your friend should pull a Rowling. Do they think defunding police is a bad idea? Then he should voice that opinion.
Is this Fabian or Berserker? I don't think it necessarily involves being either... he doesn't need to be on committees, nor does he need to be an intentional provocateur; he can just write a careful op-ed. And regardless of which tactics he chooses, if he wants to move the needle, he needs to find the wedge issues.
In general, I favor the Fabian strategy for a different reason as well - it's more likely to converge on truth. If I'm wrong and wokeness actually is correct and necessary, it'll do better at avoiding hurting people and would be more likely to realize it was wrong.
(I think the actual word is less binary - with some wokeness things being bad and others being good - and on the detailed level, it's likelier to converge on fighting just the bad woke things).
Re the fashion barberpole - interesting to note that South Korea elected an openly anti-feminist president this week. Not sure if this shows American cultural exportability is weakening or if it's another crack at the top of the barberpole, but it is an interesting crack in global wokeness - I don't think there's been any first world country leader before (very much including Trump) who didn't at least give vocal support for feminism.
I don't think South Korea was participating as much in global wokeness in the past - to the point where I'm not surprised at all to hear that they've elected an anti-feminist. From what I know of their culture, I'm pretty sure that I (a fairly fervent right-winger) am more feminist than the South Korean Overton Window.
"While I don’t morally blame the truckers for this, from a strategic point of view, they sure did cause it to happen."
"Why do you make me do this to you? I don't want to beat you, but you make me so angry! You know you shouldn't provoke me!" is the mantra of abusers.
I didn't think the trucker protest was a good idea, but the way it was carried out seemed to be acting civilly; yes, they inconvenienced and annoyed people, but they didn't burn down any buildings or shoot people or any of the other types of behaviour we saw in other protests.
So it really was Side A showing its disdain, contempt and vengefulness against Side B. I'm sure any and every government would love to do such things, but that the Canadian government did this in this context, rather than against a different protest (such as this one https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/fairy-creek-protest-largest-act-of-civil-disobedience-1.6168210) does show a bias.
I've seen the Canadian truckers described as "far-right" which seems to be the new code for "Nazis or close to it". I don't know if they were, I'm not clear on what they were protesting about. But when it's the side of Tolerance and Inclusivity that starts using such tactics against those they deem unacceptable, it begins to look less like "we are on the right side of history" and more "when in power, we do what we want".
"I've seen the Canadian truckers described as "far-right" which seems to be the new code for "Nazis or close to it". I don't know if they were, I'm not clear on what they were protesting about."
They were protesting the Canadian government's vaccine mandates*. Given the fact that 1. truckers in North America tend to be right-wing and 2. opposition to vaccine mandates in North America largely codes as right-wing now**, I'd imagine most of the protestors were, in fact, right-wingers of some sort. Probably some significant minority of the protestors could be described as "far-right," and while I doubt very many were actually "close to Nazis," there were a few photos showing Nazi and Confederate flags being waved around at the protest, which caused opponents to start treating the entire thing as a White supremacist rally. Further complicating matters, some of those photos may have been fake, since a lot of supposed 'Canadian trucker protest' pictures were actually from entirely different events, including some that took place in countries as far-reaching as Brazil, Italy, and Russia (https://www.politifact.com/article/2022/feb/14/10-photos-falsely-linked-canadas-freedom-convoy-pr/).
*Technically, the federal government of Canada didn't actually have any vaccine mandates in place at the time (and still doesn't), although several provinces and municipalities do, and there are vaccine-related restrictions on cross-border travel to the U.S. as well as air travel (including domestic flights). There were also some prominent Canadian government officials who called for federal vaccine mandates shortly before the protests started, which may have been the instigating factor.
**It's odd because as recently as just 10 years ago, being anti-vax was something associated with the political left in this country more than with the right. Go back 20 years, and it was almost exclusively a far-left belief outside of a few hardline right-libertarian circles. But sometime around 2015-2016 - around the same time that the American right shifted from a very uneasy alliance of pro-business capitalists, foreign policy hawks, and religious conservatives to a more populist, nationalist, and anti-establishment movement - it started becoming seen as a right-wing view. And COVID really cemented that association so firmly that I don't think we'll see it change again for a long time.
I would try to sincerely want the best for everyone including yourself and then do what you think is right with a clear explanation. I don’t know how sustainable tit for tat games are beyond single exchanges and you can’t make people fight you every step of the way and change a culture. Or as my grade school martial arts teacher said: “when pushed, pull.”
That said, I do have a couple of more cynical things I do when someone is just being a dick that I call Fred Rogers Machiavellianism.
Preemptively agreement: I will pay very close attention to things a person has said and then use them to construct an argument for what I genuinely abs sincerely believe to be the best for everyone, but phrase it as though it was their idea. “Remember when you suggested X? Oh because you said A B C I took that to mean X which was a great idea and you did a good job coming up with it and it seems to follow really straight forwardly. So I just wanted to say I agree. We should do X.”
Deliberate Forced Understanding: related to above. If someone says something genuinely stupid, mean, hurtful, bad faith, etc I pretend I heard something that made sense and respond accordingly. I have never ever had someone stop me and say “No, wait, you misheard me. I was being a dick.” Or “No, wait, what I said was dumber than that.”
“You’re right it’s critical we increase the well being of group X, so we need to hold ourselves accountable with concrete measurable numbers and make sure we’re not just putting ourselves on the back but instead track trends over time.”
This does require me to understand where someone is coming from emotionally which sometimes people aren’t willing to do but I find it works.
Consensus Building: I never ever let something contentious come to a surprise vote. Always meet with people off the side and one on one and hear them out. Make needed adjustments. Then when I give a presentation I usually rattle on for five or so minutes about the most boring stuff imaginable with one slide up that has a boring top paragraph, a middle paragraph recapping what everyone already off to the side agreed on, and then another boring paragraph. Then I ask for ideas and without fail at least one person says what’s in the middle paragraph. Then I say I agree (and nobody notices I just agreed with myself) and then by sheer momentum another person agrees.
So, Fabian approach here. Has worked well for me on various projects.
I do genuinely get where a lot of the woke stuff comes from (mixed ethnicity family) but Jesus can it get tiring and counterproductive. People aren’t necessarily monsters because they want something good in a dumb/bad way.
As I think several people are saying, wokeness (as used here) is different in an essential way from things like homophobia or racism (in the historical form that the civil rights movement fought them). "The woke" is much less a category of people or a point of view and more a certain negative-sum strategy to fight for (at least initially) reasonable goals. While there are certainly people whose identity is wrapped in this negative-sum point of view and who have deeply held beliefs in favor of cancel culture, etc., they are a small percentage of the people who are participating in the epiphenomenon of wokeness. In this a much better historical precedent is anti-communism during the early cold war, minus the uniquely polarizing figure of McCarthy. I think one consequence of this difference is that changing media focus has a much larger impact on wokeness rhetoric than on more object-level disagreements like abortion or gay rights: in particular I expect to see a similar level of "loss of interest in woke discourse" during the war in Ukraine as we saw when people lost interest in #metoo in favor of #blacklivesmatter.
It seems to me there's some conflation here between "supporting academic freedom" and "opposing wokeness".
Mind, I oppose wokeness; it's currently the biggest threat to academic freedom. However, I also oppose conservatism, which is the second biggest threat to academic freedom.
(Although wokeness feels more acute, more like a fundamental betrayal, because the left was supposed to be the ones who fought this bullshit)
I don't know what my recommendation is, here, but both of these options seem to be targeting the wrong thing.
Exactly. The post seems to be about how to create a wokeness of the anti-woke, rather than about how to end the problems of wokeness.
I'm of the opinion that wokeness, and social justice as a concept generally, are inherently problems; you don't "end the problems of wokeness" in the sense of making a non-toxic wokeness, because the equivocation between the individual and the group is an inherently toxic prospect. Like racism, another in the endless stream of equivocations between the individual and the group, it will always be toxic.
"That's not really fair" - no, it's exactly fair. To understand the toxicity in this equivocation, look at the solution attempted within the social justice framework in order to combat it, intersectionality, whose logical extreme, taking a person's entire personal history and experience into account, is the elimination of group-individual equivocation.
The toxic part is not, nor has it ever been, punishing people for their actions; it is the punishment of people for the actions of others. Firing people for calling for the murder of other people may or may not be acceptable - that's a question of social norms. However, applying disparate punishments based on whether or not other people do similar things - applying a different punishment for a member of a minority being racist towards the majority than a member of the majority for being racist towards a minority - is equivocating between the individual and the group.
This is the same kind of equivocation which takes place in toxic conservativism; this thing isn't bad because it's bad when I do it, but because it's bad when this other person does it; I can't do this drug because this other person would abuse it if people were allowed to do drugs. We can't have this kind of conversation, not because of anything intrinsic to us, but because of how this kind of conversation might change the behavior of other people.
(When you get down to it, wokeness is just a new version of conservativism.)
I'm not so sure that much of this is new or even cyclical. What were people saying about campus culture when you were in school? "Political correctness" has been used since the early 90s to describe many of the same things "wokeness" is used for and didn't fade particularly quietly into the night. It seems to me that's the better analogy than 90s Christianity, notwithstanding internet culture's apparent migration from atheism to feminism to social justice.
(A cynical point of view: both "political correctness" and "wokeness" are used to turn arguments about a just society into arguments about superficial behavior and language. This was partly an agenda-setting tactic by conservative media [as you point out, it's where the easy victories are] but eagerly adopted more widely, particularly in discourse about campus culture, partly for the usual reason that people who manipulate symbols for a living are inclined to believe symbol manipulation is a powerful force for change, to paraphrase Alan Jacobs. The terms so far have a similarly rapid trajectories in their adoption [if you like, https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22+politically+correct+%22%2C%22+atheist+%22%2C%22+woke+%22%2C%22+culture+war+%22%2C%22+feminist+%22%2C%22+social+justice+%22&year_start=1960&year_end=2019&corpus=28&smoothing=0#]. Substituting this for your analogy, the default outcome is then that there continue to be mainly token symbolic victories for social justice alongside a corresponding reaction.)
I would advise a politically-minded academic who wants to maintain credibility to stay focused on material outcomes without investing their reputation in them.
My thought is to go meta. Instead of opposing woke people, oppose the idea of wokeness. Point out, whenever possible, that a liberal (classic liberal aka libertarian) society supports minorities as much as is possible. Sure, you could have governments enacting more supportive legislation. Instead, have civil society supporting minorities, because anything a government gives you, a government can take away.
I think there’s a lot to be said for the Fabian strategy because it’s very convincing on an interpersonal level when done right. Changing hearts is no substitute for winning legal battles, but nor will legal or technical victories suffice on their own. Enough people being openly and firmly unwoke (sub Muslim, atheist, gay, poly, whatever unfamiliar or suspect thing) while being beloved and helpful to the community is what actually changes minds, creates trust, and allows others to speak up.
Neither strategy is going to work, because the first time the professor in question employs it, he'll discover that he is not nearly as un-fireable as he thought. Wokeness has won and it's here to stay. Protesting against it is possible, but it should be done from minimum safe distance -- as Sakharov found out.
To reiterate a comment I made below: if your friend pursues the Fabian strategy, one of the most fearsome weapons in his arsenal can be asking for a legal review. "We're creating a program exclusively for black women in theater" - "can we do a legal review as a CYA?" It's costly for his counterparts to refuse, and can shut down civil rights violations.
See, they likely wouldn't outright say it's for a specific group. They would say it's to "empower previously excluded, anti-racist voices and identities that have suffered intersectional marginalization." That would generally get to the same endpoint, but would be less of an obvious lawsuit magnet. You might succeed in getting them to change the requirement away from a specific group, but they'll get to the same point anyway.
I absolutely agree that there are clever ways to dissemble and get there in the end. A careful administrator can discriminate and preserve plausible deniability. But I think you might be surprised how uncareful many people are about their intentions! The idea that excluding whites and asians from a certain program might be illegal or immoral often doesn't occur to them, as up until relatively recently, very few have been called out about the illegality of such programs.
TL;DR: you're right about the clever, careful ones; but many administrators fail to be either.
This was very enjoyable to read, and I'd like to provide a recent anecdote. I'm at a major Canadian university that has been somewhat quietly embroiled in a woke adjacent issue, specifically Israeli students and BDS supporters. The wrinkle here is that both sides claim the mantle of wokeness in public discussions. I've been involved in this for a few years now, and it's given me a great inside view of the machinery a university has to handle these issues. It took over three years for the University to hold back fees from the Student Union over them including a statement on Israeli borders in their Bylaws. (This was a bog-standard application of the Union's own equity policy, as it forces Israeli students to pay money into an institution that calls for their country to be sanctioned.)
This is of course an anecdote. The amount of work hours invested by university officials on this is hard to calculate, but I would guess it's quite high. Wokeness may lose symbolic battles, but there's a large carrying capacity for do-nothing positions in University Admin. These people think what they do is important, or at least, easy money.
Best case scenario we have mandatory milquetoast diversity training forever, but everyone treats it like fire drills. Worst case, we see a doubling down by those who stand to lose prestige and power if woke politics get deemphasized.
Does your friend want to do anything else with his life? The Fabian strategy is compatible with still living a reasonably normal and fulfilling professional life. The Berserker strategy means essentially becoming a full time activist (on the anti-woke side).
Berserker is very, very difficult. Never underestimate HR.
My recommendations to them:
1. Read Rules for Radicals
2. Make them live up to their own standards. If they begin talking about how structurally racist the University is, demand they turn back government funding which is contingent on not being racist, etc...
3. Try to create preference cascades. Figure out which aspects of wokeness are the least popular amongst the faculty/students and publicly defy those. Come up with ways for others to signal their support on the matter, at first anonymously, if necessary. Soon people will recognize that it's safe to defy that particular item and even better, it's popular to do so.
4. Publicize the most egregious examples. Shine sunlight as a disinfectant so much that the administration will run in terror whenever someone suggests a course of woke action which will cause them grief from the public / board when publicized.
As James Lindsay put it, for living up to their own standards, "put the quit in equity" : https://notthebee.com/article/jordan-peterson-and-others-have-started-a-resign-for-diversity-campaign-where-wokies-can-become-the-quit-in-equity-and-it-made-some-people-mad-
And apparently some places like Wired have (presumably unironically) run articles promoting the same idea.
That's a great example.
I'll add another suggestion:
5. Divide and conquer. Look at all the diversity administrators and keep wondering at faculty meetings how many professor/researcher/grad student salaries could be paid (or increased) if those useless positions were eliminated.
Some voice actors on animated series have actually done that, e.g. Jenny Slater and Harry Shearer - there are others. I suppose they must be given credit for putting their money where their mouths are. (Little reciprocation from black actors playing white characters has been evidenced, so far as I know.)
"put the quit in equity" was quality twitter trolling but I don't know if it actually accomplished anything.
Scott, as a long-time reader and fan I know what you mean here, but I suspect the way you worded this post will do more harm than good. You went very vague in multiple places where vagueness is often interpreted in bad faith (mention of “George Floyd protest” and “bad” without clarifying what happened in particular that’s bad, etc.; this can and probably will be used by outsiders to imply that you think George Floyd deserved it or something), which is obviously not a great assumption for constructive dialogue, but it is the world we currently live in. I think the annoying reality is that if you want to talk about culture war stuff, using shorthand which is not clearly defined is a very dangerous game, since it people from different political backgrounds often use the same words to mean *very* different things.
One example of this I mentioned in response to another comment is the word “woke” itself. To grey tribe members it tends to mean “liberals over-reacting through censorship and bad-faith,” to red tribe members it can also mean that, but for both extremely leftist and very far-to-alt-right people, it is interpreted to mean “statements in support of the humanity of people who aren’t cis white American males”. For the alt-right-veering-on-neo-nazi-territory camp, this definition is used as a dog-whistle, and on the far left, the definition is used to ad-hominem anyone who uses the word “woke”.
As unfair as it is, I don’t want you to be immediately dismissed by blue-tribe individuals simply due to your use of wording, when I know your intentions are not actually in support of misogyny or anything terrible.
So yeah, that’s my two cents on the matter.
I think the implication that far-to-alt-right people view "wokeness" as "statements in support of the humanity of people who aren't cis white American males" is sitting in foundationally progressive priors. There are many things that are not rights or even normal privileges that are included in "woke" statements.
To give a proper example, the reason why "bake the cake bigot" became a meme on the right was that this was establishing a *new* right, that only exists if you're a Protected Minority. To a Modern Liberal - this is merely a statement in support of the Fundamental Humanity of LGBT People(TM).
At no point prior were "wedding cakes" a human right, nor was demanding that a baker make you one.
There's a social engineering reason that this is acceptable, and primarily it has to do with the fact that the one thing the market can't stop is a Religion - and that requires Principled Government Intervention to make sure that hotels aren't eg. forcing black people to sleep on the streets while they're driving through town.
That argument wasn't ever made - it was merely that anyone who doesn't want to bake a gay wedding cake must hate gay people and secretly be going to gay bars to murder them.
Interesting point, and I somewhat agree with your first paragraph, though after that our views diverge, which is fine. I am going to go ahead and say that your response is also coming from some assumed priors, probably stemming your position of (I assume) moderately right leaning political sympathies. In particular, when you complain about "wokeness," you're specifically referring to "things that are not rights or even normal privileges that are included in 'woke' statements," which is a totally fair thing to complain about (assuming your perspective on rights and privileges aren't insane of course). However, when far-to-alt-right people talk about "wokeness," what they tend to mean is something closer to "any statement asserting the rights of minorities (regardless of if those rights/privileges are reasonable or not by normative standards)". The problem is leftists will hear both you and genuine bigots who are actually homophobic using the same terminology, and assume that you're using the same definition, which you very much are not.
I'm not sure if links are allowed here, but if they are, I could provide a number of articles trying to define these terms from different political perspectives, and giving radically different definitions. My guess is that much of the political discourse that most divides people across American politics are in large part shaped by semantics, and fuzzy labeling.
The fact one of the anti-woke commentators on this very article was talking above about how Jim Crow laws were a justified response to black criminality illustrates your point.
Indeed. It’s annoying and it’s sad, but the fact of the matter is we *do* need to change our language once evil people start co-opting it, if we don’t want to be mistaken for those people. We are living in a period of information warfare, and we need to stay one step ahead of the game if we care about how we appear to outsiders.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐌𝐞𝐬𝐬𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐃𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐀 𝐇𝐚𝐫𝐝-𝐖𝐨𝐧 𝐕𝐢𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲 𝐒𝐞𝐧𝐝?
(What message does a hard-won victory send?)
Suppose this guy… [engages berserker-style]… If this case becomes news and helps set ppl’s expectations, what message does it send to the average academic?
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
𝐖𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐆𝐞𝐨𝐫𝐠𝐞 𝐅𝐥𝐨𝐲𝐝 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐬 𝐀𝐧 𝐄𝐱𝐚𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐎𝐟 𝐖𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫 𝐎𝐫 𝐖𝐨𝐤𝐞 𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐜𝐡?
(Were The George Floyd Protests An Example Of Woke Power Or Woke Overreach?)
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐖𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐓𝐨 𝐁𝐞 𝐖𝐨𝐤𝐞?
(What Would Convince You To Be Woke?)
…if you are unwoke or on the fence; what might push you more towards the woke direction?
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
For this, I think we need to choose which definition of "woke" we're working with--there are a lot running around!!
A friend of mine pointed out that initial usage of 'SJW' matched the apparent meaning of 'wokescold' at a later time. He'd say to himself, "it's crazy to think that a ton of people are using 'wokescold' thinking it's the first term to ever be used to succinctly describe this type of person." As he was noting, there's some kind of euphemism-treadmill (or "reverse-euphemism-treadmill"?) thing going on there!
"What would convince me to be woke?" Well, CONTEXT! For a parallel example, I've thought about how what people mean by "feminism" in a Nigerian context... Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are writers I associate with Nigerian feminism, and the perspective I get from their novels is something drastically different from what people mean by "feminism" in America.
So, envisioning a different context where "wokeness" might be appropriate--hypothetically, if I were alive 80 years from now, and by then wokeness had got pushed down and was good-and-dead, and social norms got turned in a DIFFERENT authoritarian direction that was neither progressive nor socialist nor conservative but something we haven't yet thought of and it was terrible... and there was a movement to uplift an oppressed subset(s) of people by accurately recognizing and supporting true accomplishments of theirs... (Humans NEVER recognize the value of other humans' accomplishments as much as they should!! News at 11.) and if that movement could somehow be described as, "woke-ism re-discovered as a bizarre sliver movement and COMPLETELY re-created," well... I might support that one!
But... I don't think that's what we mean by "wokeism." I think our working definition of woke-ism encapsulates both the means AND THE ENDS.
(Also, I think there's a now-deleted comment here that had some pretty good thoughts? Not sure!)
I edited my post to back off from a too-strong claim ("Wait, do I actually know what I'm talking about?") and to give a sense of where I was getting my claim from. (it's these writers' novels; mostly not from non-fic writings, etc.)
Original comment said: "I've thought about how what people mean by "feminism" in Nigeria (Buchi Emecheta and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, iirc, are considered major figures in Nigerian feminism) ...and what its goals are.. are probably drastically different from what people mean by "feminism" in America."
I think it depends on how extreme your views are. If you think wokeness has good intentions, but the way they are handling it is wrong, the Fabian strategy is a great way to turn the movement gradually to something less harmful, and maybe even helpful. If you think it is a cynical power grab and that the country needs to do a 180 and accept extremely controversial beliefs, then I think berserker is more useful.
Temperament of the individual is also important. The most successful Fabians will be outgoing, personable, and soft spoken. The most successful Berserkers will have thick skin, be aggressive, and not mind having few friends.
𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐒𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐖𝐞 𝐀𝐬𝐬𝐞𝐬𝐬 𝐍𝐞𝐰 𝐀𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐬𝐦?
(How Should We Assess New Atheism?)
Should we care about [the way that the New Atheists look at this moment in time, in hindsight]?
If you were giving strategic advice to Richard Dawkins in 2005, would you have told him to tone it down?
How analogous is the current situation?
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
Posts like this make me realize that I don't actually know what wokeness IS. All I've got right now is a cluster concept. But what is the thing that banning speakers and BLM virtue signalling and quotas and whatever else boil down to? What is it that this academic is against when he says he is anti-woke?
Perhaps the closest thing I've seen to a good summation of what's at the core of wokeness came in Scott's post on Neoreaction (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/):
"To Reactionaries, the epitome of the progressive aesthetic theory against which they rebel is the fairy tale of the Ugly Duckling, where one duckling is uglier than the rest, everyone mocks him, but then he turns out to be the most beautiful of all. The moral of the story is that ugly things are really the most beautiful, beautiful things are for bullies who just want to oppress the less beautiful things, and if you don’t realize this, you’re dumb and have no taste."
Maybe wokeness is just the supercharged and enforced application of this aesthetic to everything? I'm not sure. If anyone knows of a good description of what's at the heart of wokeness, either from Scott or elsewhere, I'd love to read it.
Wokeness is just the most recent expression of social authoritarianism. For example, in the Soviet Union, a popular national pastime was to pick a random person; accuse him of counter-revolutionary tendencies; call a group meeting to denounce him in public; then have him shipped to Siberia. If you refused to participate, you'd run the risk of finding yourself in the boxcar next to the original victim. This was sometimes done to relieve the boredom, and sometimes to claim the victim's valuable property, such as a (practically palatial) one-bedroom apartment. The actual offence allegedly performed by the victim mattered little, because, given enough effort, pretty much anything that anyone had said and done could be used against them in the court of public opinion (and, eventually, the law).
This strategy lies at the core of modern wokeness; it is only the surface trappings that have changed. Instead of denouncing people for being Western capitalist sympathizers, we denounce them for being sexist or racist; but the overall social climate is the same. If you rewind history a bit, you'd find people being denounced for being closet Communists or worshiping the Devil, instead. It's all the same story, just with different decorations.
I was more asking about the actually ideology of wokeness, rather than the tactics people use to "convince" others of it. What is the set of beliefs that you must adhere to in order to be woke? You seem to suggest that woke ideology is essentially "racism and sexism are bad", but I think it's more complicated than that. To me, the hallmark of wokeness is a sort of verlan social hierarchy, where the more marginalized you are (or traditionally would be) the more worth and clout you have under wokeness. That's why I think that Scott's description of the progressive aesthetic gets at it well – but like I said, I don't think I've got a great handle on it. Where is the woke manifesto?
(Your comment made me realize that there are two senses wokeness – the actual ideology and the tactics used to enforce it – and that being woke in one sense has very little necessary bearing on whether one is woke in the other. I’m more interested in the ideology than in the tactics, but one thing I’ll say about the tactical sense of wokeness is that I’ve never found it to be a great look to go straight to the Soviet comparisons when discussing it. Wouldn't it be more effective to find a better analogy for what we see with wokeness than literal deportation to death camps? Maybe a better comparison would be, I don’t know, what people did to Susan Sontag after 9/11? Just a thought.)
Yes--the post-9/11 wave of "patriotic correctness" (as some pundit I've forgotten termed it) seems like a very good parallel. The "cancellation" of the Dixie Chicks seems like the most infamous example--I actually hadn't heard about Susan Sontag.
I worry about the hard won victories, because of the conservative prof who committed suicide a year or so ago after he'd won several victories, but become so beaten down and sad because of the constant attacks on his character and person.
𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐃𝐢𝐝 𝐎𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 𝐒𝐨𝐥𝐯𝐞 𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦?
(How Did Other Protest Movements Solve This Problem?)
Does [the possibility that MLK and both fall into the category “Berserker”] mean our dichotomy is too weak?
Did anyone do Fabian for civil rights?
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
𝐃𝐨𝐞𝐬 𝐏𝐨𝐨𝐫𝐥𝐲-𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐬𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐀 𝐂𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐂𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐝𝐨𝐰𝐧𝐬?
(Does Poorly-Planned Resistance Provide A Cover For Crackdowns?)
(I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
(edited first to remove all the <b>html</b> that didn't work, edited a second time to remove more personal details.)
I recently witnessed a fairly "soft" cancellation attempt at my institution where I'm a postdoc, and I think I learned a bit from the experience. Here are some recommendations.
TL;DR: Please please do not go berserk. I'm begging you here. I think there is room for a couple of strategically-picked controversial actions above what the Fabian strategy would suggest, but the less you instigate edgy actions for the sake of being edgy, the better off we will all be.
Practical points:
Point 1: The berserk method is bad strategy for convincing institutions to be less woke (confidence: 70%). Your cause is to curb the excesses of wokeness (presumably while preserving the good parts like treating each other decently). I get that a controversial talk might bring that to make national news more than a benign one -- toxoplasma of rage and all that. But realistically, will that end up changing the climate on campuses nationwide? At the institutional level, I watched my institution (which is actually quite free-speech-friendly compared to others I've heard about) loudly and officially berate incidents at other universities that made national news, usually with no context to explain what actually happened. A faculty or student reader unaware of the event would come out with the impression that the event was Really Bad And Extremely Racist and they need to be more woke, not that something controversial had happened and gotten quashed mercilessly. This makes me think that even if you make national news and get lots of attention, you are only entrenching universities further. (Especially consider how the event will be portrayed in national news that academic administrators would read.) At the bottom of the post I have a suggestion for a different way you can impact the national campus viewpoint.
Point 2: The berserk method will not convince people on the fence, and will convince woke-proponents that they're right (confidence: 60%). Anyone who is already vaguely anti-woke is going to say "ugh, another example of leftists cancelling someone" and anyone who is vaguely woke is going to say "ugh, I can't believe a university actually invited awful demagogue So-and-So, what do they even still have to say at this point?" IMO there are two groups of people you can reach: (1) people who haven't made an opinion either way, and (2) woke-proponents who haven't seen an example of how bad it can get (surprisingly common!) Personally, I was on the pro-woke side of this for quite a while until I watched a video of some college students shouting down a pretty feminist speaker for a benign statement that was not quite feminist enough (I think she had said there were distributional differences between men and women). I would never have been convinced by watching college students shout down Ben Shapiro -- I mean, they were Right and he was Wrong. Maybe I'm typical-minding here, but with all due respect everyone in *my* bubble who has gone down this path has gone down it by seeing an example of a woke overreaction to something they could see as being mildly acceptable, not something they disagreed with, especially from a speaker who has a reputation of edginess for its own sake.
Moral point:
I really don't think fighting fire with fire is morally right here (confidence 65%). I could *maybe* see an exception if it were in "self-defense" i.e. if it looked like the overly-woke bandwagon were going to crack down forever. But I don't think it looks that way. So I think you can stay on the side of righteousness and preventing censorship without needing to invite edgy people just for the sake of it. I wouldn't say "don't go looking for trouble" but I will say "don't cause trouble for its own sake." This approach seems more honest to me, and I don't believe it's justified to abandon that approach unless absolutely necessary.
Advice:
Finally, a few points of practical advice, assuming you're in it for the long haul:
1. When speakers get cancelled at other universities for unrelated views, invite them to speak at your campus instead. For example when MIT cancelled a geophysics talk for the speaker opposing race-based affirmative action, Princeton invited him to speak there instead https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversity-inclusion/577972-princeton-hosts-speech-by-geophysicist-who-was . I think this would be a useful signal to professors and other potential speakers that they can hold semi-controversial views more openly without being blacklisted from speaking at every university.
2. Even if you don't invite edgy people yourself, defend *student-invited* edgy people. (don't "encourage" them to invite edgy people -- which will both look bad and mean you will actually be skirting the norms -- but if it's genuinely their idea, defend them as much as you can.)
3. Consider softening the edginess of edgy speaker invitees by inviting them for a "debate" rather than a "seminar." Pick someone to debate them that will actually do a good job.
4. Become well-liked by professor colleagues, administration colleagues, and students. Thinking you're un-fireable is one thing, but if you are universally loathed in your institution, good luck changing anything. Also, FIRE (see below) has documented many times when professors weren't as un-fireable as they thought.
5. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has some good resources on this and coverage of prior cases that you can read to see how these things have gone: https://www.thefire.org . See especially their "Guide to free speech on campus" https://www.thefire.org/research/publications/fire-guides/fires-guide-to-free-speech-on-campus-3/fires-guide-to-free-speech-on-campus-full-text-2/ , it has a section on faculty speech. I wouldn't fall back on legal defenses where moral defenses will do, but it's good to know your rights.
So in your position, I would go about my daily life, pushing back on the small things when they come up. Keep your ear to the ground so that when something bigger comes up (as it surely will), you can spend your reputational points there. You're not trying to make "the news", you're trying to influence the national campus climate. Invite people cancelled by other universities, you don't have to completely hide out. But don't just invite edgy people for the sake of inviting edgy people; that will only make the overly-woke people -- and people currently undecided -- more convinced they're right.
+1 to this.
A lot of people (outside the SSC bubble) will not know the difference between being against wokeness because you're e.g. racist versus being against wokeness because it has gone too far. They may not even know there is a difference. So if you want to change hearts, showing them those excesses will help. But doing stuff that gets you labelled e.g. "racist" could actually be counterproductive.
There could be another potential goal to show others that they can speak their mind without repercussions... but I think trying to pursue this is not such a good idea. Mainly because, you can look around and see it is clearly not true. It's not widely supported, and to get that support hearts need to change.
Hmm, wokeness is not the problem per se. The kind of diversity universities need is more conservative, libertarian, republican voices. I've been binge reading Jonathan Turley https://jonathanturley.org/2022/03/09/should-universities-take-a-stand-on-ukraine-uchicago-is-facing-that-question/ , the answer to bad speech is more speech, not cancelling speech.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐚𝐮𝐥𝐭 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐨𝐫𝐲?
(What’s The Current Default Trajectory?)
Does this suggest the Berserker Strategy, to make sure the issue doesn’t fade quietly into the night?
Is the goal to have different parts of society (e.g. the voting public vs. universities) out of sync with each other?
Would that conflict potentially keep wokeness in the public eye, and what would be the consequences of that? Some stuff that potentially really needs to happen?
Or is that playing with fire?
(I, umm, egregiously altered one of Scott’s final questions here!!
I’m trying to do like Scott did to the recent “Classifieds” post—make top-level comments to collect answers to the various Q’s in these top-level posts in 1 place…-ish? May or may not be helpful!)
Since the woke/nonwoke divide seems to break down along similar humanistic tendencies aligned with our hard wiring (e.g., head/heart, romanticism/ordered liberty, Rousseau/Locke, blank slate/evolutionary psychology, revolution/reaction) I expect a continuum with ebb and flow between the polarities with excesses toward one end contravened by events/public opinion back toward the other.
We reached peak wokeness in Summer 2020. Then the Prez election followed by the vaccines broke the fever, everywhere except academia (where I work) and those excesses are being voted out in this election cycle.
Will the Cold War Redux start to swing things back towards the Enlightenment Civilization and away from Post-Modern Revolution? I think so. Boutique, fabricated social crises will look absurdist compared to 21st Century land wars in Europe.
Has anyone suggested he talk to Johathan Haidt?
No offense, but this is one of the worst articles I've seen on this site in a long time. Is this really what you're focused on now, when a sovereign nations in the developed world is under attack by an expansionist superpower, the international order that's kept the world in a state of relative peace since 1991 (and arguably since 1945) is on the verge of breaking down, and food and fuel prices throughout the Western world are on the rise? I know that's something of a Whataboutist argument, and I'm not trying to say that people can't be upset about more than one bad thing at a time, but having articles on Ukraine followed up by a spiel about college SJWs that would have felt outdated 6 years ago really highlights the contrast in importance there, in a way that makes this feel especially irrelevant and tone-deaf.
On a more substantive level, the core problem here is that the article treats wokeness as a singular and unified movement, a thing-in-itself, when that really isn't the case. Most of what you're associating with "wokeness" isn't even an ideology at all, it's a set of tactics - harmful and counter-productive ones - that are used by people all across the political spectrum, even if they're used disproportionately more by a certain type of left-wing campus activists. (Islamic fundamentalists may be associated with terrorism in the public eye, but that doesn't make the non-Islamic terrorism of the Tamil Tigers any less deadly, nor does it make the non-terroristic Islamic fundamentalism of Saudi Arabia any less repressive.)
If you want to criticize the far-left, then criticize the Twitter tankies who are currently cheering Putin on out of contrarian hatred for NATO and some delusion that they're still living in 1956. If you want to criticize deplatforming tactics and the use of social pressure to browbeat people into ideological conformity, then criticize those tactics in general, including the many instances where they're done by the right. But just sniping at college activists like this amounts to little more than the sort of political tribalism that you've so often condemned in the past.
The wokesters have a very strong habit of always downplaying not only the evil of their own side, but how pervasive it's power is. Wokeism has taken over virtually every major entertainment studio, every college, and a growing majority of public corporations. It's not just "left wing campus activists" as liars try to pass it off as. That's a LIE.
It's mandatory diversity hiring schemes. It's mandatory diversity acceptance quotas in university. It's allowing men to rape women in prison. It's firing people because they said statistically true statements. It's allowing activists to burn down buildings in dozens of cities because they're angry. That's wokeness. It's evil and it's pervasive. And you're outing yourself by lying about what wokeness truly is.
History books are not going to talk about "wokeness." They're going to talk about the fact that the U.S. government utterly botched its pandemic response, crashed its once-successful economy into the ground, withdrew from a 20 year foreign conflict in a way that allowed enemy forces to retake the country in less than a month, and allowed the international order that had kept the world in a state of relative peace for 77 years to fall apart out of sheer apathy, all because the dominant political parties decided that sabotaging the entire country out of sheer partisan spite was preferable to ever letting the other side score any points.
Thinking that some overhyped crusade against wokeness is the most important battle of the modern era is narcissistic myopia. Partly because the very concept of "wokeness" is so poorly-defined that it apparently includes everything from Nike selling rainbow-colored shoes and Coca-Cola selling bottles with rainbow-colored stickers to literal communists calling for the government to be overthrown. (Do those really seem like they're even remotely the same phenomenon to you?) But mostly just because it demonstrates a staggering lack of perspective, not only in the broader global and historical sense, but even in the more limited context of American domestic politics. Most Americans care a hell of a lot more about rising gas and food prices than HR diversity seminars, and if you can't see that, it's because you've become incapable of seeing the world through any lens other than that of Internet Culture War. And that sort of tunnel-vision is exactly why you now have people earnestly thinking that the RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE is about wokeness, as if it's just another front in the Culture Wars.
Even from a right-wing perspective, it would be a lot smarter to focus on dealing with fiscal problems like inflation and the deficit and unemployment rates, considering those actually have far more of an impact on people's day-to-day lives than whether Twitter 'cancels' some comedian who'll end up getting a popular Netflix show and making $500,000/year regardless. And if you really want to hate on left-wingers, there are plenty of truly detestable leftists who do things far worse than saying mean things about people who believe in "human biodiversity" - like the tankies who are currently simping for a repressive and imperialistic dictator just because he also happens to hate the West: https://www.newstatesman.com/international-politics/geopolitics/2022/02/too-many-on-the-left-have-swallowed-putins-propaganda-on-ukraine. Of course, that would also require you to condemn similar sentiments from the other end of the political spectrum: https://www.axios.com/cawthorn-ukraine-zelensky-thug-woke-ideologies-6d9ef5f4-86f9-4a44-bb79-7da30bba0ffd.html.
Yea it's almost like maybe we should collectively dial back the Ukrainian hot takes.
What's with bringing up the Ukraine thing? You're not the first one in the woke camp to do it. It's just so incredibly orthogonal to this discussion. Neither you nor Ukraine is entitled to Scott's (or anyone's) writing or attention. Do you really think that war needs more signal boosting?
One of the narcissisms of wokesters is that we have to share their outrage for their cause when they're ready to be outraged about it. I wouldn't be surprised if you have some mental gymnastics about how this Ukraine thing is close and personal to you. I've also noticed a theme of "let's bring this topic back to my trauma" amongst the woke.
Let's be serious for a second: you're not going to go fight for Ukraine and you wouldn't let your son go fight for Ukraine. If you want to obsess about it, there are plenty of other places to indulge all that. This is article about a person close to Scott making an actual set of decisions about their career.
I'm not Ukrainian and it's not personal to me in any way. The reason I'm bringing it up is because there's a particularly vocal subset of the cultural right that believes the Ukraine vs. Russia conflict is somehow a proxy war for their woke vs. unwoke conflict. (See: https://theshot.net.au/general-news/the-war-in-ukraine-has-nothing-to-do-with-wokeness-youre-just-a-right-wing-nutjob/)
This is upsetting to me in part because it's upsetting to see anyone supporting a belligerent autocrat like Putin, but also just because it's flat-out wrong: This is a geopolitical conflict that's been brewing for decades and has absolutely nothing to do with "wokeness." But more to the point, it's wrong in a way that suggests an absolutely horrifying lack of perspective involved. If someone is looking at the biggest conflict of the past seven decades and can't see it as anything else but a subset of whatever hot-button-issue-of-the-day Culture War battle they're caught up on, that's an almost pathological level of mental myopia.
Of course, there are people on the far-left defending Putin as well, and they're likewise terrible, but as far as I've seen they aren't siding with him over perceived Culture War issues, they're siding with him because they hate NATO and support anyone who opposes so-called Western hegemony.
"This is article about a person close to Scott making an actual set of decisions about their career."
If that was all it was about, Scott could've simply sent an email to that person. Why make an article about it at all, unless it was intended to provoke a larger discussion?
I'm going to remember this conversation while I'm getting my teeth kicked in by a brownshirt in November 2024 and I'm going to laugh and laugh and laugh, because being a cynical bastard is just about the only way you can get by these days.
It looks like no-one has mentioned Charles Pincourt and James Lindsay's short book Counter Wokecraft, about how to resist woke culture, especially in academia. It makes a number of practical suggestions. Examples (from memory) include:
1. Make sure you understand the woke mindset, and don't get sidetracked into lengthy but ultimately pointless arguments.
2. Identify other like-minded people on campus and co-ordinate action with them.
3. Join committees and politely but firmly resist woke action by appealing to liberal values.
4. Insist on norms in meetings such as written agendas, keeping to time and procedures for voting, so that changes receive proper scrutiny.
5. Watch out for loosely worded regulations and statements that could be subverted to the woke cause.
I'd say it tends towards the Fabian approach.
Impossible Conversations is a decent guidebook for finding common ground as well.
It's interesting that you mention Lindsay.
The seeming trend of anti-woke liberals and leftists "going full reactionary" due to audience capture is, I believe, one of the main things that undermines the (very important!) effort to create a genuinely liberal and/or leftist movement pushing back against the current excesses. It strengthens the woke people I know in their conviction that crazy far-right views are the only real alternative to wokeness.
Fabian but not to win colleagues, to win students.
4 unrelated comments on strategy in ascending order of pointedness
1. Partner up
My local UU preacher would like a word about the strategic contrast between "Fabian" and "Berserker", between MLKJr and Malcolm X, between Susan B. Anthony and Alice Paul, between the Mattachine Society and the Stonewall rioters, and so on. In clear terms, it's the choice between respectability politics and radicalism. My preacher would advise you to always choose both, if you want to win.
You can't do both yourself obviously; you need a foil, an antagonistic partner in progress. One side of the split takes the respectable approach, and the other takes the radical approach, because you'll need both. If a movement is composed only of polite reform-minded Respectables, they'll get ignored indefinitely and maybe forever. Oh, maybe there will be some rousing debates, but those will change only a few minds at the most. If the movement is composed only of un-ignorable fiery radicals, then it'll be trivially easy to paint them as unreasonable enemies of the people, and to whip up popular support for their suppression. But with enough people taking both the respectable and radical approaches, the political situation changes. The polarity is now not between the pro- and the anti-, but between the mild pro- and the extreme pro-. The cheapest, most convenient, most face-saving option becomes claiming to see reason in the arguments of the respectables and adopting some of their reforms.
So in your choice between the Fabian route and the Berserker route, consider reinforcing the weaker of those two factions.
2. Watch Out for the Great Sucking Void
Beware of success. If wokeness is displaced but not replaced, the result will most assuredly not be a pristine realm of freedom for all to pursue their individuality. It will be a great sucking void, and something will fill it. The first stage of filling it will be like Chesterton's quote, "When a man stops believing in <God/wokeness>, he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything." All the cranks and crackpots and ideologues and true philosophers will rush into the gap, and cultural evolution will commence. Of necessity, what emerges victorious will have positive and negative social characteristics similar to wokeness and the previous conservative religious monoculture.
Maybe success is a long time off and you don't need to worry about the "what comes next". For what it's worth, I'm not so confident of that. But whether it's near or far, having a positive vision of what you could want to become the new corrupt monoculture will help.
3. Eventually you become who you pretend to be
If you go the Fabian route, eventually you'll really be a beloved pillar of the community. If you go the Berserker route, eventually you'll really be an antagonistic, litigious jerk.
4. Take a less provincial attitude and switch sides
I've never lived in a blue state, so it's true I don't know what it's like. Most states are not blue. Most countries are not blue. If you have the freedom to move versus stay and fight ... just move. It's easier and you'll be happier. It's really nice to not be a public target.
A strange thing might even happen. You'll stop being exposed to the excesses of wokeness, but you'll start being exposed to the excesses of anti-wokeness. When you see your state proposing to, e.g., make parents felons for moving out of state with a trans child (Idaho, March 9th 2022), you might even feel like switching sides for a while.
I mostly agree with all but the moving part.
Imagine where it leads if everybody took up and moved. You'll have deep Blue states and deep Red states. With no dialog on community level. With only Federal level policy fighting based solely around mustering the most votes on the day. Not a healthy situation.
Two thoughts: 1) there's a lot of variation around what "woke" actually means, especially in the comments. 2) The choice between the two options depends to some extent on whether you're trying to persuade people to your cause vs. highlighting the issues.
1. Reading some comments in the thread that followed DecipheredStones' pushback, woke seems like more of a shibboleth than a meaningful term. It's characterized as performative social activism, but also as a creeping collectivist ideology, leveraging institutions to suppress dissenting voices, or even a totalitarian revolutionary movement. Many of these interpretations are so different it feels like the comments are talking past one another. Not to mention that some interpretations come from actual actions, while others seem to be coming second-hand from deeply uncharitable sources.
Lumping together individual and institutional performativity similarly seems to be concerning. Yale Law jumping the gun to sanction a student who sent an edgy email seems very different from the family across the street putting up a sign and spouting talking points they don't understand without making an actual change to their behavior. The harms of each are different, and the responses should vary as well.
2. It feels a little unclear what the berserker strategy does except gaining notoriety and isolation. Like I understand that the nominal goal is to provoke the woke into the type of excesses which alienate those on the fence, but in practice it seems like its just a performative as woke "awareness raising". In my experience, groups that would call themselves "anti-woke" end up adopting "woke" (e.g. performative but useless) tactics to try and bait out woke overreactions. For example, a group of college republicans staging a barbecue in front of a group hunger striking for racial justice.
the value of the Berserker is to bring up issues and challenge the status quo. It allows other anti- or on the fence people - perhaps Fabians? - to quietly pile their weight behind the Berserker without attracting all the negativity.
A lone Berserker with no support could be a net negative, depending on the level of aggression.
To the extent that the problems of wokeness are about performativeness, this entire discussion seems to be designed to bring these problems to the anti-woke side as well, rather than to get the woke side back on track about dealing with actual problems instead of creating their own.
With TSA pre check, you won’t have to take your shoes off before a flight. Though YMMV.
As a professor, the most important contribution would be influencing the students directly, instead of fighting administrative fights.
We're in a situation where the students are the problem. In collage as well as after graduation.
P.S. Last time I flu internationally from Boston they were not asking for shoes to be removed.
There’s a third possible strategy (maybe more). Fabian vs Berserker considers the frame of this specific institution. But the larger societal and cultural frame is also grappling with woke. Maybe the academic wants to choose his(?) position in the National or international debate first and then see where that leaves him in regard to his institution.
If he’s really that unfireable, he has the ability to be a pillar of the movement to make it acceptable to not destroy norms of free speech and expression. Don’t waste that by going it alone. If you volunteer to be a trophy for the woke establishment, they will be happy to hunt you and it’s getting even less scrupulous. He’ll end up facing untraceable sexual harassment allegations, the IRS, they’ll find cocaine in his car. Fabian or berserker won’t matter.
Having allies at other campuses and other disciplines is good. Where is “woke” at historically Black colleges and universities? Heterodox Academy, Free Black Thought, there are people of color who are working to reframe social justice without the discourse-destroying, society-fraying, obedience-demanding elements. Find them, let them teach you. Then figure out your approach at your institution. Wokeness is antifragile in that the more the errors are pointed out, the more it’s debunked, the more the adherents refuse to consider other ideas. It makes them look bad, but mainly to powerless outsiders.
Signal-boost the next wave of social justice ideas that acknowledge and value free speech. Then when something comes along on your campus, your response can be consistent with whatever your larger stand is.
"He thinks a world where the [BLM] protests had never happened would be woker than our current world right now." "We both agree that wokeness is currently in a weird place; ascendant in all measurable ways, but with cracks beginning to show ."
But are Scott and his friend really in a position to know to whether the BLM protests strengthened or weakened wokeness? -- and how many cracks are beginning to show in wokeness? I'm sure Scott and his friend between them know quite a large number of people in academia and other relevant fields, but it's still a tiny sample of the total relevant population and almost certainly not a representative sample. So I'm in doubt about where really things stand overall with wokeness. Anyone have ideas about ways to assess this that are more systematic than generalizing from private conversations with acquaintances?
Also, even if we knew for sure that wokeness is getting old and brittle, it's not clear how things would play out if it were challenged in a particular way. Seems to be the kind of situation where all sorts of smallish things could greatly change the outcome: whether certain parts of the news media pick up on a particular challenge to wokeness at some university, what else is going on in the news cycle that day, which high-profile Twitter wits get off takes that go viral.
For what it's worth I'm inclined to be less optimistic about the Berserker Strategy since it looks to me like manifesting indignation does not break up the ice dams these days. Instead, one generates counter-indignation and the rage vs. rage equilibrium continues, keeping the social media machines humming vigorously, like power plants that run on rat shit.
Even if they don't have a good view of the big picture, they have a decent view of one portion of it.
Agreed. But the fact that the elephant's tail looks very like a rope isn't evidence that trying to climb it is going to work out well. You could end up someplace you don't want to hang out in.
My advice is to adopt the 'Skynet Weasel Strategy' and encourage the woke crowd to launch ICBMs against another nuclear superpower in the name of woke.
The goals are twofold:
1. The counterstrike will hit the woke much harder than the unwoke (targets are more likely to be urban not rural).
2. As the aggressor and the loser, 'woke' will become the new 'nazi'.
I think jokes about a nuclear holocaust should be made with as much consideration as jokes about the Nazi holocaust. Same with the "we need a new plague for population control" people -- its hard for me to laugh at a joke predicated on billions of deaths.
Then don't laugh, because it wasn't meant as a joke. People fight against wokeness because they think wokeness will end up destroying us.
Thermonuclear war would be like ripping off a band aid. I grew up in the 1980s where every kid was told that nuclear was 'the end of the world', but like the pandemic and climate change, that is an exaggeration.
The purpose of life is to make it count not avoid death at all cost.
160 years ago, young men suffered 600,000 excess deaths because it was more important to settle the question whether it was OK to own another person than to breathe as long as possible at all costs.
During the next 100 years every one of the 7.9 billion humans on this planet will die at one point or another and arguments that make use of a body count metric like it's Vietnam ca. 1968 are not only an appeal to emotion but also an example of the McNamara Fallacy.
If you're coming at it from a pure nihilistic perspective I guess I can't disagree on principle: nothing matters extrinsically so why care.
If you think, however, that the benefit from a hit against woke/progressivism causes more benefit than a thermonuclear war causes pain and harm, I think you're truly out of your mind or maybe just wrong. Nuclear war means famine, starvation, death from radiation, death of family members, a breakdown of the facets of modern life that give you ultimate freedom. I could go on. I would even agree that safety isn't the only concern in life, and treating it as such leads to weakness and lack of fulfillment. And maybe wokeness inhibits some things that lead to your fulfillment. But I can't imagine the calculation that makes those override the costs. Can you list the pros and cons in a way that would convince yourself? Would the average life really "count" more after a nuclear holocaust? Should Biden launch out nukes based on utility reasoning? I think not.
Is 'wokeness' just an inconvenience or is it a threat to mankind? Do woke people just have a different opinion that we can live with or are they frothing at the mouth, mentally ill, irresponsible, unreasonable, insane that will destroy everything we need to function as a society?
If you can't imagine the calculation that makes those override the costs then it's because you're only considering easy-to-measure metrics and pretend that qualitative factors don't exist.
Thermonuclear war will be over fast.
The effects of a single nuke scale with 0.4th power of the yield, so a nuke that is "50x more powerful than Hiroshima" is 'just' 4.7x as effective. Hiroshima went pretty much back to normal in 1950.
"We are not amused," she said.
It is easy to poke fun at academics who betray their professions for the sake of taking pretentious stands in support of long ago freed slaves, long dead, whose humanity was denied them in order to steal their labor. I say pretentious, for much of modern pretenders of downtroddenness find themselves rightly prejudiced and well-earned opposition for antisocial and destructive behavior such as deliberate and chosen ignorance, slovenliness and lawlessness.
Much of that behavior has, especially since the "war on poverty", been mimicked by the hoard of whites who have slavishly clamored after government handouts. Even to the point of copying the pigeon English originally developed to disguise private conversation from slave-owners. One could justify such ignorance as a point of pride, but to insist on foisting it off in the school and workplace it appears more as defiance.
It is no wonder that such are attracted to Communism, with its envy-based attacks on discipline and hard work. It is something to be wondered at, however, that ignorance is preferred to learning. Hard work can be fairly easily be avoided, and discipline too, but ignorance is a bridge too far. More so in the workplace than, apparently, in academia. Woke, indeed, in stark contrast with awakened.
Poverty, especially imposed poverty, admits some sympathy. But self-imposed ignorance and poverty by way of ignoring obvious self-discipline issues like staying in committed relationships, taking responsibility for behavior and lack of willingness for hard work and willingness to comply with basic civic norms are beyond understanding. Drug dependency and drunkenness are equally inexplicable.
Maybe one of the most straightforward lessons to learn from the Fabian Society is, "organizations can achieve goals that individuals can't."
So, if I were giving advice to Scott's professor friend, I wouldn't frame it so much as "which strategy should you, personally, follow?" Instead, I'd say, "which organizations can you join which share your goals?"
For example, off the top of my head: Heterodox Academy. Is that the sort of organization they'd would be interested in joining?
This.
Was going to mention Heterodox Academy and especially Jon Haidt in my own comment. This is their territory. Thanks for saving me the trouble.
Scott, I notice you don't ever reference Otto Rank and I wondered what you think about his idea that any ideology must deal with both our animal and spiritual nature? In other words, atheists still need to say something about soul belief, and if there's no soul then what happens to the taste of my food, what will happen to my rock 'n roll?
I've seen Scott come off as lovably awkward before, but this is the first post I've been outright embarrassed to read.
This feels like the kind of post that gets written by someone in the upper-middle class living in the bay area. When I went to college a few years ago, none of my professors were woke, and one econ professor would take points off your essay if you weren't sufficiently libertarian. There were a few protests that were woke, but they blended in with Greek life events and sports clubs. I have this weird feeling of seeing people complain about wokeness all the time, but they just don't seem like a gigantic problem where you need to intentionally antagonize woke people to win points.
In terms of actual advice for your friend, how about they try to do their job really well, get promoted, possibly become friends with people regardless of their politics, and try not to pick fights? I don't really think an academic is going to be super effective at achieving political goals anyway.
I'm probably too far to the "woke" side to really be who this article is for, but...
IMO the issue with Wokeness is less the goals than the means. Institutionalized disadvantages do exist and there's nothing wrong with challenging that status quo.
The problem is that a small but powerful subset of people have been raised by academia to believe persuasion against one's own interest is literally impossible. According to this philosophy, when someone asks to be persuaded before endorsing a cause or course of action, they're aggressively protecting their own power.
If debate and persuasion are doomed to failure, the only conceivable way to remedy injustice is coercion. That's the source from whence all "Woke" evils spring (and incidentally why it's ultimately doomed to failure - if you refuse to try to persuade anyone then nobody will be persuaded).
So the best advocate against wokeness is one who restores debate and persuasion to its rightful place. And the question to your friend is "has the taboo against persuasion metastasized in your institution?"
If it hasn't yet, then Fabian Strategy is the way to go - he needs to defend the norm of adopting ideas because people think they're good. Berserker tactics undermine that goal.
If it has, then unfortunately the best option will be Berserker tactics. He needs to demonstrate that the larger system in which his institution operates still wishes to be persuaded before acting, and will punish the new coercive norms.
It's true that there are institutionalized disadvantages. They just flow in the opposite direction of what we're told to believe:
https://imgur.com/IhW97Bo
Get on melanin, boys, because it makes you a good doctor, even if you don't do well on tests. Apparently.
Yeah, for the most part modern diversity efforts serve to elevate a small subset of middle-class minority people, and are entirely ineffective against the hard problems that would really address inequality - like zoning laws that keep affordable housing from being built, thereby increasing the historical disadvantages of black folks in the housing market, infrastructure that allows constant lead exposure for poor, urban neighborhoods, an antagonistic relationship with police as a result of gang predation on young black men, etc.
The fact that we let a few relatively well-off black folks into medical school over more qualified white folks does nothing to address inequality, but it also doesn't obviate that inequality.
Affirmative action's effects are way, way bigger than med school students. The woke took control of the most powerful institutions and chose affirmative actions and political correctness as their policy instruments.
The inequality obsession doesn't help create a better solution as evidenced by the most inequality obsessed people controlling institutions and choosing truly performative mandates. All the "hard problems that would really address inequality" don't need wokeness or inequality ideology as part of the solution set.
This is a topic near to my heart.
I am a white woman and I recently got a tenure-track faculty position at a large American university. While hiring a lab assistant, I was told by the administration that, in addition to a CV and cover letter, all applicants must submit a statement of DEI excellence, describing their past, present, and/or future activities in promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.
Obligatory disclaimer! I am a liberal, I hate racism, sexism, and all other -isms, and I want a society where everyone is treated with respect and has equal rights and opportunities.
All that said, I want to hire a good lab assistant who does the job well and is a decent person, but I really don't care whether they spend their free time advancing DEI excellence or sitting on the couch and watching "This Is Us." All this requirement is doing is narrowing my applicant pool to those who either are genuinely passionate about DEI or can convincingly fake it on their DEI statement.
Also, implicit in the DEI requirement is the belief that fighting racism/transphobia/etc. is the most important thing in American society today. What if a person doesn't do a thing about DEI, but instead volunteers at a food bank or helps register voters or campaigns against climate change in their free time? Is this applicant less worthy?
And I can't risk saying any of this at my university, lest I be branded a clueless, privileged, racist white Karen.
Looking forward to some good discussion in this thread.
> Looking forward to some good discussion in this thread.
Not knowing you, I can't speak to your other personality traits, but you certainly seem like an optimist!
More seriously, there are a distressingly small number of comments on this post in the vein of yours, which seems like the common-sense position to me. (I wouldn't describe myself as particularly liberal, and broadly agree that it would be nice to depoliticize jobs like 'university lab assistant', in the sense that ideological purity tests in front of them do nobody any favors.)
Granted that Scott's post was pretty culture-warrish, and it's therefore not too surprising to see culture-warrish discussion beneath it, but nevertheless, it is not the ACX/SSC commentariat's finest hour.
I'll take that as a compliment :)
What I meant was, "I look forward to some advice/thoughts from people broadly agree with me that a) racism, sexism, etc. are bad things and b) there's something wrong with the current intellectual climate, particularly the assumption that all white people are racist and anyone who disagrees or seeks nuance is extra racist."
Same thing has happened in my university. It has followed this path: First, all applicants to all positions were asked to submit a DEI statement. Second, everyone sitting in any search committee needed to undergo DEI training. Now, everyone going up for tenure of promotion needs to include a DEI statement in their review package. So yes, get used to a world where fighting racism and transphobia within your university is the most important thing in the world. See my previous post on the change in ABET accreditation requirements.
Is there anywhere one could see a copy of what a DEI statement is -- what the language is and what people are being asked to provide?
I can see institutions having various recruitment and hiring protocols that are a matter of meet specific standards that are quantifiable or having baseline training requirements for staff (like there's long been around sexual harassment, for instance). I mean, people may obviously disagree about the value of those things, but at least they are clear transparent policies with measurable standards.
How would one would know when they've met whatever the standard is when it comes to "DEI excellence" seems scarily ambiguous and subjective and personal. I'd be curious to know what guidance a potential university staff person is given around such a thing so that they would know what constitutes adequacy in this area.
Sure, here's what UC Berkeley is using: https://ofew.berkeley.edu/recruitment/contributions-diversity/rubric-assessing-candidate-contributions-diversity-equity
Note that these are not innocuous requests that only a hidden racist would object to; these are blatant demands for political orthodoxy and a very limited definition of "diversity."
This rubric and similar ones are being used now to screen candidates in some instances and narrow the pool before even considering the rest of the candidates' applications: https://ofew.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/life_sciences_inititatve.year_end_report_summary.pdf
The goal, of course, is to not hire any white males, and the faculty report seems pleased to note its success in getting rid of as many white males as possible during the cuts. Keep in mind too that the use of affirmative action is officially banned by public entities in California, but these kinds of DEI statements are being increasingly used as a workaround.
Wow thank you for that. It gives me a much clearer picture of where all this has gone since I left academia. There's so much more I could say but can't do that today, so I'll just leave it that I really appreciate your posting here this glimpse into the specifics of it. My reactions run in many different directions.
Yea similar stories over on the corporate America side of things. Plenty of institutionalized insanity around DEI / ESG mandates.
From where I sit, I can imagine an Anti-ESG signal gaining traction in certain parts of the market. If those parts begin to materially outperform then I think the entire ESG/DEI initiative could lose favor with "the right people" who generally tend to value being more wealthy.
This. DEI statements are also proliferating in my scientific field. They are clearly a litmus test used to enforce woke orthodoxy, a way of keeping people like me out of the field. As a junior scientist, it makes me wonder if I have a future.
My best advice is don't analyze any advice from someone who is a wokester. Listen for entertainment purposes if you like, but don't give their strategic advice any substantive value. Listening to people who disagree with you is great when you're trying to improve your epistemics. It's terrible when you're trying to devise a plan of action.
REALLY don't listen to any advice from people who are asking you to "improve your argument" or "convince people that wokeness is bad on the merits" because that's all just a trap to move you away from pursuing your goal and trying to make you reconsider it.
Academics get too caught up in the epistemic portion of OODA looping. They Observe the world of politics as they see it, they Orient themselves based on their observations and their education, they Decide that X is the correct plan, then they Act a little. But they always go back and check the feedback too quickly. You have to act enough to actually get meaningful feedback before reconsidering everything. This is the opposite of the wokesters who just have a pre-formed ideology/goal and just constantly act to further it without considering if it's the right ideology/goal for them.
My second best advice is think and investigate what would be hardest for the wokesters to deal with. Find out what they would NOT want you to do. Do that.
1. Notice certain groups are treated unfairly
2. Start a movement to promote fair treatment
3. Movement horribly overreaches while still achieving none of its stated goals
4. Cry
This is super unspecified. What kind of woke is this person against? People over applying cultural appropriation? Hormone therapy in children? Native land acknowledgments?
This goes to the picking of fights.
Also, as a medical professional who doesn't have smallpox and knows history... I am surprised you didn't point out that the Canadian truckers were there for a recklessly stupid cause.
I think the difficulty with the berserker strategy is that these ideologies thrive on conflict and define themselves by reference to their enemies' perceived power. So by choosing to create new conflicts you provide them with food. It is sort of like how Hamas is in a de facto alliance with the Israeli right. When one of them is ascendant the other gains power as well, because they practice the same brand of politics.
I'm never 100% sure what to make of any of Scott's posts on wokeness, because buried in there somewhere is the implicit understanding that abuses against minorities happen, that George Floyd probably shouldn't have gotten murdered, etc etc. But then these things are swept aside in favor of the _real_ injustices, people getting "cancelled" on twitter.
I would ask "who hurt you", but as a long time reader I know it was some incident in college. That was close to half your life ago, though, so instead I'll say "Please get over it".
I think this is ungenerous.
It's more like the PETA problem, tbh: Everyone agrees that a system that murders poor black men at an insane rate is bad, though they may disagree on how to handle it. But because everyone agrees, it's hard to motivate people to change it. There's no enemy to fight, just a hard problem and a bunch of conflicting ideas on how to solve it. I mention PETA because I once remember reading a post (here, I think) about how PETA picks controversial fights because non-controversial fights don't get any press.
Scott seems genuinely interested in addressing society's massive systemic problems. That's why we get so much about effective altruism and articles about potential solutions to big, complex problems. But a performative article about how bad racism is, while it might make you feel better, isn't...like we all know. There's nothing new or interesting there.
And I don't subscribe to a school of thought that says that if one thing is more bad, another thing can't be bad.
ok maybe there are a few enemies to fight.
Only a few, surely.
It is very funny that I made my comment and the worst possible counterexample immediately showed up. But I still maintain there's no point to demanding Scott write "racism is bad" articles for no reason other than making sure we all know he thinks racism is bad.
This thing of pretending Twitter cancellation/discourse limits are a stupid thing to care about is weird. Either it has massive impact on people's lives, limiting debate to a prescribed list of valid positions, in which case it's pretty darn impactful, or it's a silly thing people on the internet complain about that doesn't matter, in which case it's not. Either way, people should stop doing it.
I'm not demanding that Scott write "racism is bad" articles (Although I'm not sure he could write one even if he wanted to. I doubt he'd be able to write one convincingly, and even if he did I predict it would probably do some damage to his substack income). As I indicated, I'm a longtime reader. My gripes aren't limited to this post in particular. This is a years-long trend that has me increasingly worried. For all the talk of the principle of charity, I don't think Scott understands the positions of his "ideological enemies" at all. The closest he's ever come was in that "Conflict Theory vs Mistake Theory" post, and even that would get partial credit at best.
Twitter cancellation is absolutely ridiculous. Look at all the people who have been "cancelled": Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, etc etc. Has their "cancellation" managed to limit debate? Not as far as I can tell. Has it had a massive impact on their lives? Yes, but mostly from the increased fame and fortune of having book deals and such. Are they actually silenced? I've heard that they are, but I've mostly heard about it from they themselves, on all the media that hosts them (And presumably pays them to be on). Scott himself is a funny test case here; A newspaper was rumored to publish some unflattering things about him, so Scott shut his blog down and now that the dust has settled he finds himself operates a larger and more profitable blog. Cancelled!
I'm sure it's very unpleasant, on a personal level, to have a bunch of people saying mean things directly to you, but this is present in pretty much every online space as far as I can tell. When twitter does it to conservatives we call it "cancellation", when leftists do it to each other we call it "leftist infighting", during a game of StarCraft when an opponent does it the community calls it "bm" or "bad manner". There's no need to make a political cause out of it, except in cases where political causes are a pre-existing condition.
When the dog from Paw Patrol is getting "cancelled", you know the whole thing has become a huge joke.
>that abuses against minorities happen
Okay, so what? They happen against white people as well. And contrary to the dogmatic claims of the woke, black people aren't overrepresented amongst the victims of police killings once you control for disparities in violent crime rates generally and disparities in the rates at which races murder polices officers specifically (which can be used as a proxy for violent behavior to towards police more generally).
More white people are killed by police each year than black people. Can you name even a single white person who's been killed by the police?
>that George Floyd probably shouldn't have gotten murdered
Oh, so you mean things that nobody with any power whatsoever doesn't agree with?
> people getting "cancelled" on twitter.
The cancelling happens on twitter, but apparently you're not aware the consequences extend far beyond twitter and people can have their livelihoods destroyed, their physical safety compromised, for what? Often for making 100% factual statements, not being okay with explicit hatred being directed at white people, etc. If you weren't okay with McCarthyism (when the risk of all out nuclear war with the soviet union was a thing), why should anyone be okay with this stuff?
Like seriously, nobody with anything remotely resembling power is saying its good Floyd died. That doesn't mean its already to engage in deadly, destructive nationwide riots, intimidate jurors, etc or that it's not completely lunatic to defund or even abolish the police, or ruin people's livelihoods for opposing nay of this stuff.
Just say things that are true and don't say things that are not true. Easy.
An aspect I haven't seen mention is that this person probably doesn't exist in a vacuum in academia - they have a job, probably interacting with students.
In general it feels like the Fabian strategie would lend itself more to a positive interaction with the students, which (imho) is useful for their academic advancement. If you are known to be a shit-stirrer, that will impact how much students trust you with their work and in general, and it will probably not make the most of his talents regarding his students. While it is not his job to be likable, we all know that student perception has an impact on their learning and work, and especially interacting with staff. Not only as agreeable, but also specifically as being percieved as picking fights.
So, I's say Fabian for that reason.
You're probably not as immune to cancellation as you think.
And I don't see cracks in wokeness, except for the 20 Stalins criticisms. Scott said that some people question whether wokeness is the underdog because it's too powerful, but I wouldn't count that as a crack because iit's a self-correcting problem--if people actually gave up on wokeness for that reason, it would invalidate the reason. It's like the restaurant that nobody goes to because it's too popular. Seeing fewer BLM slogans is not a crack in wokeness either, because the left always turns on its own; there's a difference between the cause of the day not being the cause of the day any more, and an actual decrease in wokeness.
"You're probably not as immune to cancellation as you think."
Since "cancelled" is just a dysphemistic way of saying "criticized", I don't think anyone is or should be immune to it to any degree. I'm not sure why you would need to be, though.
"And I don't see cracks in wokeness, except for the 20 Stalins criticisms"
The notion of a "20 Stalins" criticism is a myth. What people call "20 Stalins criticisms" of wokeness are actually more like "let's assassinate Stalin for betraying the revolution and install a REAL Communist like Trotsky as our new leader" criticisms -- much bigger "crack".
>Since "cancelled" is just a dysphemistic way of saying "criticized"
Cancellation means "mob-based criticism that results in disproportionate loss".
>install a REAL Communist like Trotsky
A 20 Stalins criticism is a criticism of "you are not extreme enough". Trotsky is less extreme than Stalin, so that is not a 20 Stalins criticsm.
What not enough people understand about "academic freedom" is its resemblance to communism: a beautiful utopian vision that has never been realized, and has eventually devolved into dystopic tyranny whenever anyone has actually tried to implement it--somehow without discouraging its many devotees. Universities are institutions founded on a completely different ideal: academic rigor, in which students and experts devote themselves to mastering and practicing complex, arcane disciplines. "Academic freedom" is in (often unacknowledged) direct tension with academic rigor, in the sense that rigor requires effectively forbidding or suppressing scholarship that doesn't meet the standards of the discipline.
These can be reconciled in various ways in principle, but in practice the institutional tools for imposing rigor can be--and inevitably are--ultimately co-opted to defeat academic freedom whenever the latter is prioritized. That's how today's "woke" tyranny works: the infamous mobbing and shouting down of dissenters on campus is just an outward symptom of the real power struggles taking place, in which "woke" faculty and administrators manipulate the processes designed to maintain academic rigor in order to establish "woke" ideas as part of the core standards of every discipline.
Campaigners for "academic freedom"--whether "Fabians" or "berzerkers"--are thus pursuing an entirely wrong, doomed solution to the problem they're seeking to solve. Instead of demanding more freedom on campus--thus easing the path for those who seek to co-opt and subvert academic rigor for their own ends, "woke" or otherwise--they should join the campaign for renewed academic rigor, calling out examples of shoddy academic research and teaching and demanding tougher accountability of academics for the quality of their work. Only an academia devoted to, and accountable for adherence to, its original purpose can fend off the corruption of that purpose in the service of other goals, including "woke-ism".
Being a Marxist in the academic environment can mean a lot of things.
It can mean you want to enact communism.... Or it means you want to look at the history of 17th century Thailand from an economics point of view.
Both are available but the second is more common than the first.
I really don't think the second aren't also the first. Show me the historian who goes "oh yes I write marxist analyses but politically I'm a free-market capitalist".
I think they wouldn't use those terms because they are unspecified.
Are Norwegians free market capitalists because they have a sovereign wealth fund and socialized medicine? What about Americans who all agreed to state control of that previous bastion of free market capitalism... Fire departments?
Sure most "Marxist" professors aren't going to be into some extreme libertarian thing like seasteading... At the same time, most of them are perfectly happy with free market capitalism with some regulations. At what point "regulation" goes from "common sense" to "the creeping communist road to serfdom" is kind of an individual thing.
Like we know that Taiwan has a government run national single payer health insurer... But are pretty avowedly not communists.
Most "Marxist" professors I've met are in the European social welfare state model of free market capitalist. I.e. let companies do what they want provided labor rights, the environment, and public health are protected.
"Most "Marxist" professors I've met are in the European social welfare state model of free market capitalist. I.e. let companies do what they want provided labor rights, the environment, and public health are protected."
How sure are you of that? Have they directly stated they think that's a better option than actual socialism?
This comment dovetails well with Nate Hochman's recent piece on academic freedom, which is definitely worth a read.
My objection to this argument though is that academic freedom seems to be one of the few uniting symbols across academia that could legitimately still command a majority of faculty support. It's one of the few things in place that might lead to at least some tolerance of conservatives on the vast majority of university campuses rather than fostering division into campuses explicitly based on ideology. It's a good thing to expose students to a variety of views, within some (debatable!) parameters, while still fostering a search for "good," especially since many on the left honestly do believe that they are supporting the "good" as they say it.
Yes, Hochman makes an important, fairly obvious point about public-school education--public schools are accountable for fulfilling a mission, not for allowing teachers to express themselves freely--that I'm extending to academia, where it's no less valid, but less obvious to many people.
I agree completely that academic freedom has near-consensus support-in-principle among academics, based on their understanding of it as, "I get to do pretty much whatever I want, and the university happily pays me handsomely no matter what they or anyone else may think of it". (This is where the communism analogy is particularly apt.) My claim is that this conception of academic freedom opens the door for traditional academic responsibilities and rigors--which can't completely disappear, lest the institution as a whole collapse--to be subverted and co-opted by agenda-driven factions such as the "woke". For example, the author of the recent NYT op-ed by a college student complaining of suppression of non-"woke" ideas in class was dismissed by defenders of "woke-ism" as a whiner whose bad opinions couldn't stand up to criticism from "woke" opponents. Defenders of "academic freedom" will always be vulnerable to such cynical invocations of academic standards to suppress them.
A far more effective solution would be to embrace academic rigor fully, and use it to drive out agenda-driven nonsense that's ultimately a far greater threat to academic freedom than academic standards will ever be. Nature, after all, abhors a power vacuum, even in academia, and the alternative to rule by the defenders of academic rigor isn't some academic-freedom Eden, but rather "woke" (or some other agenda-driven) Hell.
This is all a bit facile. Both your metaphors are drawn from armies. Armies are organized groups with substantial backing engaging in direct conflict which, at the end of it, the enemy is destroyed. Political battles do not work this way outside of maybe dictatorships. You can hit an army so hard it disintegrates and then stick its generals' heads on pikes. You cannot outvote a political party so hard it disintegrates and then execute its candidates in a democracy. That's a good thing! But it means such direct military analogies don't work.
The answer is building institutions. It basically always is. That takes many people but can start with one. The hard part is actually doing that and how to set it up so that it structurally serves your goals. And the issue there is that you haven't even defined the goals. If your goal is just to personally maximize then just... become the Vicar of Bray. If you want to change society then you can't do that alone, no matter how much power you personally amass. (In fact, power is inherently a social concept.)
To take a simple example: if you're really fighting wokeness then you could just hand the administration of every university to the Republican Party. You'd probably decrease academic freedom in net but that would certainly end wokeness. Is that what you want or is there some wider principle? If that seems ridiculous, keep in mind that is absolutely something that's been done historically. If you have some wider principle then what, specifically, is it?
The difference between Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X is not whether they delayed or attacked. They did both. The difference is the kind of organizations they built. But both realized, correctly, that in an atomized society the correct move for an individual Black person was to ameliorate their individual circumstances in ways that didn't change the overall system. Anyone who was more confrontational was marginalized or lynched. So they convinced large numbers of people to sacrifice collectively towards that goal. It was a coordination problem and one that MLK solved pretty well.
Seriously, if I have one critique of rationalism it's that it really doesn't seem good at building institutions. I have yet to see a rationalist I'd describe as a good cat herder. I've been told this is because I don't live in SF and there's a glorious promised land of rationalist institutions out there. I can't say. What I can say is that I've never encountered them.
This captures a reaction I also had in reading this post: "If you have some wider principle then what, specifically, is it?"
The conception of what is being fought ("woke") is vague and the goal beyond generically fighting it is vague. The question on the table is "do I fight it politely or not so politely?" which feels like a way less important question than what precisely is the "it" and what are your aims?
Opposing a thing isn't really an aim. And if the thing you're opposing isn't coherently conceptualized, it's even less an aim. So then when you get to the question "should I fight it politely or not so politely?" it feels like the question doesn't have much substance to it. ("you" in this context obviously isn't aimed at you Erusian).
I still think that most of the discussion around "wokeness" conflates many very different policy arguments under one term. Scott, would you really support cancelling yoga classes more if you saw more examples of black people being unjustly murdered by police? No, because there are actually two policy issues!
You can be in favor of police reform, and still think that white people can do yoga.
You can be in favor of some forms of affirmative action (you have one admission spot left in an engineering program—does it go to a rich white kid who skipped a grade and who got a 790 on the math section of the SAT with lots of extracurriculars, or the poor black kid who dropped out of high school, and got his GED and a 720 on the math section of the SAT at the age of 20, while working at a McDonalds?) and still think that the modern anti-SAT policies will result in a much higher number of legacy applicants at the expense of people who deserve it.
You can support the examination of the fact that US high school history classes, in many cases, present a niceified version of American History (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1898 are major events that I was shocked to learn about, because they seemed far more important than the stuff I had learned about), but still object to the removal of important voices from the curriculum just because they're white.
Most of the woke people I know see this as a fight against those who would use carefully designed policies to keep black people a perpetual underclass, excise gay and trans people from the public eye, force women to bear children and stay in the home, and make christianity the national religion of the United States, but they're only reluctantly allied with the attention-seeking virtue-signaling twitter mob.
The other group of woke people I know are people who legitimately see themselves as at risk of being killed or physically hurt by the actions of an unaccountable overclass—something which, although we may disagree on the extent to which it exists, I think we agree on the fact that it existing would be bad. They also dislike the mob, but see them as the lesser of two evils, one which will at least performatively support them when they come under fire.
I'm not sure what this says about how to prevent the uglier parts of wokeism from gaining hold in society at large—but it does make me uncomfortable every time I see them portrayed as the enemy.
>Most of the woke people I know see this as a fight against those who would use carefully designed policies to keep black people a perpetual underclass, excise gay and trans people from the public eye, force women to bear children and stay in the home, and make christianity the national religion of the United States, but they're only reluctantly allied with the attention-seeking virtue-signaling twitter mob.
Do you think they're correct in seeing "the fight" this way?
At least for that first one (perpetual underclass), I would be more concerned that the "uglier parts of wokeism" (decolonizing mathematics, objectivity doesn't exist, that kind of thing) will result in that, compared to anything "the right" has dreamed up in the last 70 years.
The rest... well, the rest also seem like the sorts of exaggerated summaries one would find on Twitter, or in Margaret Atwood's back catalogue. I'm no fan of the modern right, but those fears sound much like if I trawled through Tumblr to find the most extreme version of social justice to be concerned about.
Also, even being from West Virginia, we didn't learn about Blair Mountain. I wouldn't exactly say it was a "niceified" version of history; just that the Civil War (and attendant subjects) and WW2 take up so much time little else gets taught. WV's origin is unique and does lend itself to putting even more emphasis on the Civil War and slavery than most states, so I do tend to wonder how many complaints about other state curricula are legitimate versus overblown.
Neither strategy is appropriate. We all make choices. If we 'defund' idiocy -- i.e., withdraw physical support for ideas that offend us -- idiocy is diminished. If Europeans, for example, had wanted to protest American military adventures in Iraq or Afghanistan, they could have refused to patronize McDonald's, Starbucks, Apple, Microsoft, etc. We recently stopped patronizing a business that placed an offensive 'woke' gatekeeper between customers and their product, and redirected $5,000 in annual business to a more professional organization. The new place plays hokey country music on the radio, and the wait staff can be surly, but we don't have to do more 'validation' than a parking attendant. The 'woke' will eventually deplete the trust fund grandpa worked hard to create, and have to live by their own choices. Defund postmodernism.
As it applies to academia -- I'd recommend toeing the line through your PhD, and then going independent. We have several independent scholars on the culture and science of the Southwest who successfully work independently of the university, and garner grants, fellowships, and awards -- much to the chagrin of the Old Guard who've spent decades brown-nosing in their Departments to get where they are. Independents do most of the innovation. The departmental musical chairs and back-scratchers are jealous. Meanwhile, the state historical society is 7% Hispanic and 68% female in a state that's 31% Hispanic and 49% male: go figure, another white feminist NGO pretending to be diverse.
Neither of these strategies is going to be effective in the future in most parts of academia.
The Fabian strategy won't work because things will get worse. Younger generations of academics and students are even more left-leaning and less tolerant than others, according to a number of recent surveys. As you wait for the right time, the odds will become increasingly stacked against you.
I once witnessed an older center-left distinguished professor eloquently defend the right of conservatives to voice their speech on campus at a meeting in which a young assistant professor claimed that because conservatives caused "harm" with their rhetoric, they should be censored and prosecuted under the student code of conduct. There will be many more of those young assistant professors coming up and I doubt they'll mellow in their age.
And no matter how much respect you think you can amass among your colleagues and students, the moment you break with the orthodoxy you will become a pariah. All that respect will vanish when you "out" yourself as someone who's not part of the tribe.
The Berserker strategy's problems have been well-documented elsewhere in this thread in terms of turning away potential allies and bringing down massive social opprobrium on anyone who tries such tactics. I would only like to make two points:
First, this "berserker" approach is actually what centrists like David French are calling for when they say that current civil rights laws will protect the non-woke. They believe that you filing a lawsuit and enduring whatever interim punishment is inflicted on you for a decade or so will be worth it in the end and bring about lasting, fair changes. This, to me, seems absurd. Not only will your career in academia be finished, but there are many other tools that can be used to get around whatever ultimate court decision is made. Your fight will be for naught.
Which gets to my second point: Tenure will not protect you. They will find something. They might find some state law or policy that you at some point violated. The most likely is some very expansive notion of "harm" in which you are accused of causing it merely by existing on campus. Students will be useful allies for them in this case, and you will likely get accused of all kinds of things. Students will be "fearful" and "traumatized" by you. At the very least, even if you survive, they will make doing your basic duties like teaching a living hell. There's no enjoyment in that.
Also, lest someone bring this up, faculty unions have gone so far left that they would probably welcome the opportunity to openly refuse to fight for non-woke faculty's rights; in fact, they probably would view that as a positive step towards increasing equity and inclusion.
Unfortunately, I cannot recommend anything other than hiding and biding one's time to retirement.
> The Fabian strategy won't work because things will get worse. Younger generations of academics and students are even more left-leaning and less tolerant than others, according to a number of recent surveys. As you wait for the right time, the odds will become increasingly stacked against you.
The thing that confuses me most about the discussion around "wokeness" on campus is the assertion that it's new. Maybe the precise terms and battles and tactics are new, but far-left domination of universities was a big issue in the 90s when I started university, and it was apparently an even bigger issue back in the 1960s.
Anecdotaly, I heard someone say that things were pretty bad in the 80s and early 90s (though it was "PC" instead of "woke") and then it kind of went away in the late 90s before coming back with a vengeance more recently.
I think there might be a bit of a false dichotomy involved. The Berserker strategy seems to be the most effective, or at least thorough, but an important aspect is that it only works once whatever you’re fighting for has a certain level of organizational/institutional support. Applying the Berserker strategy without the requisite institutional support would be not only ineffective but even counter productive, as shown by eg: the Canadian truckers, GamerGate or any other well known “anti-woke” movement in the past 8 years.
I’m reminded of a SlateStarCodex post that mentioned “respectability cascades” (unfortunately I forgot what the exact post was). Basically I think the best “meta strategy” would be to start with the Fabian strategy with an eye towards converting institutions and organizations to your cause. Once you reach a certain level of “respectability” (i.e. institutional support) that’s when you switch over to the Berserker strategy to “rout the enemy” and change society in your preferred way.
An example of what I’m talking about is the Civil Rights movement. The Berserker strategy of MLK (and to a lesser extent Malcom X) was undeniably effective, but it wouldn’t have been possible without the groundwork laid by Fabian strategists such as Booker T. Washington, who in turn never would have been able to get something like the Civil Rights act passed which required a stronger Berserker approach.
The biggest issue with this I think is determining when exactly you gather enough institutional support (“respectability”) to switch over from Fabian to Berserker. Doing it too late risks people losing interest, and doing it too soon risks undoing all the hard work you did building up support.
This risks betraying my username, but I have somewhat relevant experience. I'm a very fireable technically minded person working or studying in what would generally considered a very "woke" environment.
In the wake of a major diversity push I joined the relevant committee because I strongly believed in their goals, if not always their methods. From there I was able to use a combination of agreeableness and social capital to influence tone and priorities of the committee in a way that was consistent with maximizing positive impact and minimizing inflammatory or aggressive "woke" language.
I eventually burnt out on the efforts after a moderate amount of time but definitely believed that I had a substantial positive both in terms of impact, because I was able to steer the efforts in a way that garnered more support for the generally (small c) conservative leadership and provided resistance to some of the more gross excesses that got expressed in a neighboring division.
In general, I'm a strong advocate for the Fabian strategy and would advocate that there's a fair amount of space to leverage the fact that "woke" rhetoric often doesn't achieve "woke" aims to challenge people to push for more effective (and often as a result less "woke") efforts.
NB: I put "woke" in quotes because while I think it gestures pretty effectively at a vague cluster of traits, I think it a bad job of capturing really important distinctions between different schools of thought and is much more of a tribal signaler than I'm comfortable with.
Scott, do you realize there's a war on? I know you're relatively well-off and insulated from all of this, but don't you think it's a bit trite to keep going on about the whole woke vs. unwoke circus when millions of people are fleeing their homes and hundreds of millions more are going to feel extremely tough repercussions from the broader economic conflict at hand? Troops are massing on either side of the NATO border, prices for everything are about to undergo a stratospheric rise due to the global energy crisis and yet you still rant about academic freedom on campuses and twitter "mobs"? Now more than ever, don't you think it may be time to log off?
I have no qualms admitting the principle of distance vs empathy (not just literally, but also in terms repercussions - the war in central Africa is of little immediate consequence to most people in the West) and I simply assumed that Scott along with most people on here, who pride themselves on being unwoke, would also admit to a similar principle. But I see there's no stopping the circus. By all means, blabber away about campuses, being banned from Twitter, who gets invited by whom on someone's shitty podcast, trans bathrooms, age gap relationships, all that stale discourse - whatever gets your juices flowing I guess.
I think what is going on in this war and all the other concerns spoken of here are deeply entwined.
We could feverishly call this time “a clash of civilizations“ or perhaps more coldly, a reversion to the mean.
"I think what is going on in this war and all the other concerns spoken of here are deeply entwined."
It really isn't. The idea that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was somehow caused by "wokeness" is absurd. And when I hear people making claims like that, it makes me strongly suspect they're stuck in some sort of half-deranged "when all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail" mentality, where EVERYTHING in the world worth discussing must tie into the Culture War somehow.
> The idea that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was somehow caused by "wokeness" is absurd.
That’s not what I said. Nor is it what I believe.
This is an interesting article that flirts with some of the dynamics i have in mind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/11/opinion/nato-russia-the-west-ukraine.html?unlocked_article_code=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACEIPuomT1JKd6J17Vw1cRCfTTMQmqxCdw_PIxftm3iWka3DODm8biOMNAo6B_EGKY6N_YJ4pwi-ARdYELL8iAeN_1fMaIk93Qgiur92EhJEBaW0TmL6EY1kXjdjLTKxqtnjjdHW4I-Nyg-LktU3Wama5RKKOgnE-IA8xoY9vJwqgxScJxPrBRbUi2YJ03ewzRcwvHUd2byGOuPXiCBl9OczXLU2Pr1lrBJwKHG3bjtWe6LkfcQ9NCVqgTH935Wg07No0K8pAde-kbEZmIJyi9O1XXm94L46pBIkzQpzXlthptb3Krx-Lyamm1p3wbcXyFjvTzPBUFtbFGLo&smid=url-share
That's a good article and I do agree that Russia (as well as plenty of other countries) are looking at this in terms of a Huntington-style Clash of Civilizations. Although I don't really think that relates to the largely American, mostly Very Online "Culture War" between the Woke/SJWs and Unwoke/Anti-SJWs, except in the broadest of senses (i.e. they both involve conflicts over cultural values).
At any rate, sorry for being dismissive. I've just seen a lot of hot takes from internet pundits about how Putin is somehow "standing up to wokeness" by invading Ukraine, and how right-wingers in the West should support him because "at least he opposes gay marriage and transgender bathrooms" or whatever. Alex Jones claimed that if Russia lost the war, LGBTQ activists an Ukraine would start "castrating" young boys. And it's not limited to the fringe crackpot crowd either: Richard Hanania's, a respected conservative academic, claimed that Ukraine wouldn't be able to put up an effective resistance against Russia because the country had low birth rates and that was a sign of cultural weakness (ignoring the fact that Russia also has low birth rates).
Of course, it's patently ridiculous to think that "wokeness" is what motivated Putin to start a potential World War, especially when you consider that the Russo-Ukrainian conflict has been going on for years already and Ukraine is itself quite a culturally conservative nation, but that hasn't stopped right-wingers (including a U.S. Congressman!) from making these outlandish claims. And I erroneously assumed you were trying to make an argument in that vein. Again, apologies for assuming bad faith and giving such a flippant response.
The BLM rioters caused billions in property damage (including destroying countless small businesses) and refused to soically distance in the middle of a pandemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of people and in which small business were under extreme financial success, and for what? Because one guy died?
This is such a bullshit argument because people like you only ever talk about it when its something you disagree with. There's always a million bigger issues than 99% of stuff people are talking about, but this argument never gets made until somebody criticizes the left.
Arguably a successful movement needs a combination of both? Yes, berserkers will often alienate reasonable people, but without some sort of rallying cry people who agree there's a problem in principle may never consider the problem serious enough to actually do anything about it. Bonus follow-up question: Is that part of why Rationality is not viral? Because of a lack of berserkers?
It is perfectly reasonable to believe that all three of your bullet points are true, and that the Floyd killing is a good example to demonstrate those points. Also, those points are not made in a way that is annoying or insulting to one's intellect; which is how we know they are not woke
apply the fabian strategy most of the time, and when the opportune moment arises, apply the beserker.
The move to wokeness in K-12 education presents the Fabian/Berserker paradigm in a similar way for teachers, though I think we have a third option: move to a school district in a place that aligns more closely with our politics. I'm still going to live in an urban area because I like cities and diversity, but I hate our district's piousness and censoriousness and don't feel like I would get anywhere trying to get them to be less woke, so I'm moving to a suburban district next year where the official line from the district is "let's not talk about politics."
Off-hand, I'd say that having a powerfully-placed anti-woke asset inside academia is too rare and valuable to waste on "berserker" stunts that could be better handled by activists. This is equivalent to the Russians recruiting Kim Philby or something.
Another question: Is it enough to rely on ad hoc actions by individuals to push back on Wokeism, or do the anti-woke need to organize a sophisticated, multi-layered, semi-centralized program to do a reverse-Gramsci "march through the institutions?"
Actually, the issue is probably moot as that kind of program is against the DNA of the Burkean Conservative, libertarians, and old-school Liberals who make up the ranks of non-woke/anti-woke.
Agreed.
"Volunteer for all those committees everyone always tries to weasel out of." -- You can't over-emphasize this.
I wrote a series of blog posts in 2017 called "How I took a literary theory class and accidentally stopped hating Republicans" ( https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/733383 ) after I enrolled to get a Master's of English Literature, took the "Literary Theory" class, and discovered that instead of studying literature, we studied Marx, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, feminism, body positivity, intersectionality, colonialism, and why straight white males are the source of all the world's problems.
I'd enrolled because I wanted to understand why printed fiction no longer held any interest for me. I discovered that this was by design. English literary fiction had been perverted by the doctrine that all art is purely political, and so the only task of critics is to expose political agendas, and the only task of artists is to undercut the bourgeois hegemonic powers by not producing more of their opiates (meaning art that normal people like).
The academic journals of English literature had likewise become Marxist propaganda flacks. In the 4th post in my series, "College English leftism: How did it begin?" ( https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/734086 ), I traced the problem back through the journals to "the sixties" (which actually means ~1967-1974). It had been trivially easy for radicals to subvert English literature journals and associations because *nobody else wanted to be on the committees*. They didn't have to argue or fight; they just had to show up.
My impression is that most people are better suited to either the Fabian or the Berserker strategy, and the strategic value of playing to one's strengths easily surpasses general strategic considerations. An academic with a lot of existing academic prestige (e.g., Pinker) can play the Fabian strategy successfully and keep that prestige, whereas he would tank it if he went Berserker. A relative outsider with a non-academic audience (like Kirkegaard) can ignore academic prestige and play to the vox populi, so the Berserker strategy becomes the right one. At the end of the day, the two flanks support each other unless they do a bad job.
Wokeness is at that strange point where it has lost all cultural momentum but is gaining political power (see FIRE's database of firings). I'd caution against letting the former lull you into a false sense of security. Putinism culturally ran out of steam in the late 2000s as the various Putinjugends ("Nashi", "Idushie vmeste") got mothballed, and never recovered its pull on the intelligentsia. Unfortunately, zombies can keep running without their brains.
Nice photo on this post...
Realistically, I think at most universities any of the things you are suggesting are almost certainly going to get him fired or to get him to quit. "Almost un-fireable" is not going to be enough. When his lack of wokeness comes up, nobody will care how useful, famous, beloved he is.
To be sure, there are universities somewhere where the administration stands behind their un-woke professors. There are just not a lot of them.
He will also become toxic to associate with, hurting his students, which is the reason Jordan Peterson quit:
https://nationalpost.com/opinion/jordan-peterson-why-i-am-no-longer-a-tenured-professor-at-the-university-of-toronto
I think just about the only things that might work are if he either somehow manages to become some university's president (while not known to be un-woke) or gets his university to hire as president another closet un-woke person who is ready to get out of the closet. Presidents do have a lot of power and influence. These are long odds, but this could actually work.
I'd like to point out that due to the changes in the rules of engagement, in these affected institutions, and in the media, that those pursuing the Fabian strategy will likely be labeled as Berserkers. Really making one question the values of building a reputation and laying low.
Perhaps MLK wouldn't have such a pristine reputation today if he hadn't been made a martyr. Not sure if this makes him a worse example for strategic inspiration.
"When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained." Mark Twain, Notebook, 1898.
Scott I am frankly disappointed in this piece. This is close to outrage bait, far below your usual standards.
Make an actual argument, or don't comment.
Is there a post where Scott more thoroughly defines what he means by "Wokeness"? Because, in a sense, it's an emotionally loaded term without any kind of consistent definition across the spectrum (and with the definition changing depending on one's overall political views). Even in this post, using available context, it's hard for me to pin it down to a very precise definition. The meaning seems to change depending on the specific instance it's being applied to.
From the post, I get the following definitions:
- awareness of and sympathy to the challenges faced by marginalized people, possibly to the extent of taking action to effect change (Wokeness - Original Flavor).
- a performance signaling sympathy for marginalized people, in order to indicate alignment with current in-groups, but without any real sympathy or active steps to effecting change (Performative Wokeness).
- a zealous attack on anything that meets a strict, un-nuanced view of "racial/gender/cultural insensitivity" without regards for any mitigating circumstances (Dogmatic Wokeness).
It seems to me that those things are related, sadly.
Kinda like asking what is "Christianity"? Is it praying to Jesus and donating to the poor? Is it the "holier than thou" signaling? Is it burning witches and heretics?
Well, it's all of this. First this starts with some people praying to Jesus and donating to the poor, and as long as they are few, they are an admirable force in the society. But when it becomes too popular, then people who seek popularity will join, and now we have the "holier than thou" believers (or rather signallers). The greater the competition in signalling, the stronger signals you need to send, and at some moment, killing infidels may become the right kind of costly signal.
Similarly, wokeness starts with genuine concern about injustice in the society. But when there are sufficiently many woke people, it becomes a source of power, and then people who only care about power will join, and they will use their power to hurt others. At some moment, hurting the nonwoke becomes the normal thing to do.
I would say that this is too generous. There are rotten core ideas at the core of at least parts of "wokeness".
"Woke" is literally a far more meaningful and good faith word than "racism", which at this point is meaningless and simply used as a bludgeon against people who disagree with anything that wokeists do.
>- awareness of and sympathy to the challenges faced by marginalized people, possibly to the extent of taking action to effect change (Wokeness - Original Flavor).
This isn't the original falvor. It was always extremely hostile and dogmatic. Giving these people data that shows black people aren't disproportionately killed by police once accounting from crime rates and rates of violence against police is a good way to recieve death threats from them.
Also, you say "marginalized people" as if it's some objectively true thing. It isn't. These so-called "marginalized" people have more wealth, power and rights than a majority of the world's population. Therefore, it should be "A belief that x, y, z groups are marginalized by soicety".
Is there any evidence that George Floyd's race played any role in his death?
I did bring up to a Democrat friend from Chicago that I thought poor George would have never made the news had he been white, and she objected vigorously. I think she' wrong. Characters like Mr. Floyd -- whether black, brown, white, yellow, or red -- are physically abused and murdered by law enforcement too often and need the civil rights spelled out in the Fourth Amendment enforced by the federal government -- without exception. There is no license to kill criminal suspects for law enforcement or anyone. And no one is immune from prosecution. James Bond is make believe. But no, I haven't seen any evidence that race played a role in his death. He was killed for passing a bum $20 bill, and having the bad fortune to get a murderous cop.
None, of course. His race however is why anybody knows who he is.
It's sad, because 'activists' decided putting more black people in toothpaste commercials was the answer. We should be shutting down any legislation that keeps public safety personnel from being prosecuted, and having the feds investigate any serious physical harm that comes to criminal suspects let alone manslaughter. And I worked in corrections for 18 years.
And actual support for disadvantaged groups fell in between cracks. American liberals are getting into each other's hair, while American fundamental Christians finance anti-LGBT and pro-life propaganda unimpeded in Eastern Europe and Africa, causing real suffering.
Lol, what? Source?
Why on earth would they need to finance "anti-LGBT propaganda" *in countries where it's literally illegal to be gay*?
It's exhibitionism. Best to ignore.
Good rule of thumb is, don't be an asshole. Using tenure as protection for being an asshole is bad form, regardless of content.
Fighting back against hateful mobs who wish to silence any and all dissent is NOT being an asshole. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I think this post was perfectly fine and reasonable tho I have no substantive input to share because I'm too personally averse to confront 'woke' anything in-person unless it's in small and mostly-private groups with which I expect at least modest tolerance of any dissent.
I recently left a tenured academic position and, while there were several issues, this was definitely one of them for me. I struggled a lot with how to approach the issue. What I realized is that I actually care about injustice at least as much as many of the woke people at the university. I actually tried pretty hard to address problematic situations. But whenever I tried to approach a problematic person, I was immediately written off as another crazy woke person. The point being, the extreme wokeness is actually hurting the cause by removing its credibility. Very frustrating. (And probably not surprising to readers here.)
Although I didn't have much success, I can share the approach I converged on when trying to talk to woke people. It boils down to, "I'm on your side, just with a different approach." My argument is that there are people on either end who probably won't change their minds, and we should focus on the people in the middle. But if we're so harsh with censorship then the people in the middle will feel alienated and just disengage. They will say the words while being silently frustrated. Indeed, I observed a bigger and bigger gap between what people think and what people say. But only changing what people say won't solve these big problems.
Overall, I can only reiterate how toxic the environment was. Open hostility towards while males was completely tolerated. Not sure if it's exaggeration but people who previously lived under oppressive regimes said this reminded them of old times.
The woke apologists in this thread need to take your perspective seriously. I've never seen this amount of resentment within corporate America. I'm not sure what the cathartic release will be but maybe the 2024 ballot box?
Out of curiosity, what's a "problematic situation"?
Didn't you write a post a few weeks ago (where you responded to reader complaints about the new blog) in which you asked if "wokeness is even a thing anymore"? Helping someone come up with a strategy to fight wokeness seems to be a fairly clear acknowledgement that it a) exists and b) is something worth worrying about. Would you care to clarify your stance here?
As for effective approaches for your academic friend, I would caution that being 'unfireable' doesn't really protect him from much. There are a lot of informal sanctions that he'd still be subject to: social shunning by other faculty, not advancing departmentally (e.g. never becoming dept chair), being tarred as 'racist', annoying student protests, possibly being targeted for fabricated accusations of sexual assault, etc. As a staunch anti-woker I'm not trying to discourage him from taking a much-needed principled stand against the lunacy, I just think he should consider the stakes before he sticks his hand into the hornet's nest.
Go back and read it because I don't think you're remembering it properly.
"But it seems like I must still be near the top of the barberpole - because while everyone else is freaking out about wokeness, I’m starting to feel like all my friends are anti-woke. Who’s woke anymore? Are there really still woke people? Other than all corporations, every government agency, and all media properties, I mean."
Huh, I sure did. Fair enough, thanks.
"What Message Does A Hard-Won Victory Send..... what message does it send to the average academic? It could be “have hope, it’s possible to win a fight against wokeness”. Or it could be “if you offend woke people, you’ll have to deal with angry mobs and a long court case; sure, you’ll win in the end, but it sounds horrible”.
I think it's a mistake to think of this as a message you are only sending to other academics. Your friend is unfireable and at least considering being brave/proactive. Yes, winning a battle would send a message to the normal guy, whichever the one you choose. But more importantly, you've just sent a message to the whole administration of the college that you are sue-happy and win sometimes.
Now the powers-that-be can't fire him, and he goes to bat and causes *them* a bunch of bullshit they have to deal with. There's no reason to assume the administration doesn't hear "There's someone who fights back and burns a ton of our time". If you are already assuming the students/fellow academics are going to have a strong reaction from *seeing* that, then you have to assume the administration has an even stronger reaction from having to deal with it.
When college administrations have to deal with a bunch of litigation, whining, protesting and bad press they fold like card tables. That's why we have the woke shit in the first place. Your friend wouldn't just be suing to show people how to sue; he'd be suing to gradually change the environment so they don't have to.
I'm just pleased to see Vaclav Havel's greengrocer reborn on a "In THIS house..." lawn sign.
Yeah but without a Good Soldier Svejk Strategy listed, what is the fucking point of bringing Havel into it?
It's important to separate wokeness into its ideological component and it's cultural component. And these parts are linked somewhat but are also often separable. The ideological component involves opposition to meritocracy, cancel culture, equity, reparations. The cultural component involves blaming white supremacy and capitalism, declaring pronouns, acknowledging land.
A second observation is that a lot of the cultural war is, as the name implies, in the cultural realm.
So, a possible strategy would be to adopt woke rethoric and mannerisms and oppose woke ideology. This fits well with a Fabian strategy. It is the equivalent of saying "onto Caesar's what's Caesar's and onto God what's God's" in order to defend secularism.
Here's how it could pan out: you could argue that white supremacists latch on to subjectivity in order to discriminate against minorities. If they are not objective they have an easier time justifying their racist behavior. Don't you know that holistic college admissions were originally created in order to discriminate against Jews? That's why we need objective criteria that selects people based on how knowledgeable and competent they are ( don't use the word meritocracy, that's a dirty word). Say that even if we could on short term use subjectivity to defend minorities, such tool would create a precedent and soon be appropriated by the powers that be.
And you go on, acknowledge land, declare pronouns and do whatever meaningless ritual they expect you to do.
A woke ideologue will obviously not accept the argument, but for a woke adjacent, the person who's embedded in the culture and superficially agrees with it's tenets, but doesn't go into details, the above discourse looks a lot like the good, "our tribe" discourse.
That's a lot of Kabuki theater to communicate a pretty reasonable set of opinions. Who wants to live in a world where you have to do a land acknowledgement at the start of meetings?
I don't think using woke framing earns you much goodwill based on how little quarter is given to those who apologize for minor transgressions.
This also assumes a commitment to staying abreast of the woke linguistic norms.
You can't ever be woke enough.
He could try accelerationism.
Scream at anyone reading a Harry Potter book, shout to anyone that asks that America is racist because 50% of the prison population is Black, call Asians "White adjacent".
It is very easy to make woke points in a way that can easily be parodied and isolate ordinary people from it and it is safe because you can't be cancelled for it.
A pretty good example of the natural transition to anti-wokeness is the (post) French Revolution! After the excesses of the woke crowd purging the non-woke crowd, the incumbent government got elected on the basis of not being very woke, and enacted common sense measures to curb back wokeness.
This can clearly happen in the US as well, when a non-woke, non-Trump president gets elected.
That's how got Reagan, then Clinton.
Electing a non-woke president will do precious little to reverse these things. Even if they stick their neck out to introduce those policies and manage to get them passed somehow, it won't fix the underlying problem. It won't stop institutions being woke.
Hopefully your overall goal is to improve society, not to minimise wokeness at all costs. So please think about the possible negative side-effects of the 'beserker' strategy, beyond just the risk that it backfires directly and helps your woke enemies win. This isn't a zero-sum game, and tactics that turn up the heat and increase anger and division can plausibly leave almost everyone worse off.
I worry about berserker strategies feeding the toxoplasma of rage more than I worry about bad policies remaining in place long after public opinion has turned against them. We seemed to do pretty well about legalizing gay marriage as soon as possible when public opinion was 50/50. We seemed to do pretty well about getting rid of bussing kids around to fulfil racial quotas not too long after public opinion turned against it.
>We seemed to do pretty well about getting rid of bussing kids around to fulfil racial quotas not too long after public opinion turned against it.
And yet white and Asian applicants are still being discriminated against by colleges. Even in the places where said colleges were forbidden by law to continue doing this. Let me know when this is going to end.
Public opinion is ~73% against those policies:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americans-say-colleges-should-not-consider-race-or-ethnicity-in-admissions/
But academics still seem to be mostly in favor of them.
If we get to the point where both congress and most academics agree affirmative action is bad, then most universities stop doing it, with 80% confidence.
But that's a big if. Whether it happens may depend on whether woke academia can purge itself hard enough to keep unwoke truths from seeping in.
Okay, but thaut that's a massive argument against what you're saying. You're basically saying that "things will be alright as long as institutional elites support good policies"....which is entire problem we're talking about in the first place!
Public opinion is against affirmative action, and yet it still exists, therefore we have a massive problem.
Weird that this is always 100% a single edged sword for you people. Weird that this isn't being directed at, you know, the people who have almost 100% universal institutional support and using it to to serious harm and destroy people's livelihoods and make America demonstrably less safe.
If getting people angry about these harmful behaviors helps reduce them, then good.
'Weird' that you're confidently and aggressively making a bunch of unsupported assumptions and simplistic generalisations. I'm probably not the stereotype you think I am. I'm happy not to be on whatever your team is, though.
>I'm happy not to be on whatever your team is, though.
So that means you hate white people, support censorship, support cancel culture, etc.?
"You people"? What on Earth? You're replying to a single person, you know. The whole idea that anyone who holds one view must also hold [big set of others] is literally part of the problem here.
It seems to me that to actually defeat wokeness, you need to defeat the institutions that lend it strength within the halls of power. I am no expert on the 90s Christian domination, but it seems to me that Christian influence on the elite/intelligentsia is not comparable to the domination of the woke. As Scott mentions, the woke have enacted a whole set of powerful institutions that reproduce, if not full insanity wokeness, at least a low-level concentration. It seems to me that, both strategies rely on the support of an anti-woke community. Fabians will need non/anti woke people to interact with, if only to prevent gradual assimilation. Berserkers will need shield-bearers to make their fights winnable and to keep their spirits up in the face of woke backlash. Because of this, it seems to me that the only way to win this fight will be groups of both Fabians and Berserkers. Berserkers do the actual job of tearing down woke institutions while Fabians help to provide aid and comfort to Berserkers in their fights.
One of the weaknesses of you paradigm, Scott, seems to me the intense individual focus. Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Congressman #26 Who Voted For Civil Rights Legislation, even if they weren't directly collaborating and even if they often disagreed, all pulled in the same direction on the civil rights issue. It takes many people to reform a society. Thus, my advice to your academic friend would be to try and find a community who oppose the woke. Initially this will probably mean taking a Fabian approach (fools rush in where angels fear to tread) until a decent number of people have been found. After that, flip strategies whichever way you think will be conducive to increasing the strength and size of your anti-woke coalition, strength measured by ability to remove woke influence. (This may not be the same thing as size as a large but tepid group will be less useful to dismantling wokeness than a few devoted diehards).
The object-level question of this post -- "what should my friend in a powerful academic position do to most effectively curb the current problems of silencing on campus" -- seems perfectly reasonable. Speculating on the strategic and moral differences between the Fabian and berserk approaches also seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. However, at the meta-level, it is clear there is a massive disconnect between various groups in the commentariat, and between some of those groups and Scott himself.
Two points on the subject:
1. Not an original insight: "Woke" means the positive aspects of decency to some people, but means the negative aspects of social silencing to other people. Scott probably thought he had already clarified his views on this but he hadn't.
As per the usual process, a word that doesn't really encapsulate the nuance of the question becomes the word that is used by proxy on two sides of the debate, meaning vastly different things to different people. I think it's fair to use the term "woke" as shorthand, but if you're speaking to a group of people who include both "pro-woke" and "anti-woke" people (as I expect the ACX comments section to), you will get some very confused readers if you pick one of those without explaining what you're doing. The folks who know "woke" as a synonym for good things -- treating each other decently, not using slurs, learning about various issues involving marginalized/oppressed groups, finding ways to fight that oppression -- will say "hey what do you mean, the problem isn't wokeness, it's censorship and witch-hunts, and those have been deployed in other settings like squelching communist intellectuals. The "pro-woke" people are right that those issues pre-date wokeness, but wrong that their use of the term "woke" is any better than the "anti-woke" people -- the anti-woke group could just as easily say that saying you're "woke" is silly when what you really mean is that you're for basic human decency and fighting against oppression. At this point I think it's fair for either group to use the term as shorthand, but people used to one or the other might get confused by the difference.
I realize Scott probably thinks he's already established that he uses the term "woke" as shorthand for bad connotations and not good connotations, but if you go back and look at some prior uses of the term on ACX/SSC, they're mostly compatible with both views (e.g. "[Trump was] probably not a white supremacist at all except in whatever boring way you can call anyone who isn't super-woke a white supremacist"). The only other post I can think of where he really came out and used the term "woke" purely negatively was the Why Do I Suck post, but that was a very small part of a large article, and I even for that I see comments on that post debating over whether "woke" represented the good parts (being against racism) or the bad parts (censoring people needlessly). I realize that having a disclaimer of "wokeness is a multi-faceted term" would have felt like a waste of time to make in this post, and that this probably wasn't intentional, but IMO this post was an exceptionally poor one to make the transition into using the term "woke" negatively as an assumption. Add to that some absolutely bananas takes on object-level wokeness-related questions and the result is some very perplexed and alarmed readers.
2. There are some absolutely bananas takes on object-level wokeness-related questions in this post
I was very taken aback by some of the takes in the second half of the post, especially wrt George Floyd. My perception of the George Floyd protests does not match Scott's in the slightest -- IMO they were an understandable reaction to an event that, if you watched the video, was absolutely awful. Compare the reaction to current events in Ukraine -- I see it as the same kind of expression, except the US one hit much closer to home. Everyone witnessed something horrible, everyone wanted to do something to show they were in support -- partly because I think people are desperate to feel like they're contributing, and partly because we've been awash with messages that signaling support is genuinely helpful. Did some of the BLM protesters go too far, did it enable negative consequences of wokeness? Absolutely. Are some of the Ukraine protestors going too far, is it enabling negative consequences of political opinions? Yes, definitely. But no one would suggest that the average person putting a Ukraine flag on their lawn is doing anything *wrong* or that it's a sign of "Ukrainian power" or "Ukrainian overreach" or anything like that (although some might question whether it's truly helpful). So to see BLM portrayed as either "woke power" or "woke overreach" seems absurdly outside the window of possibility to me -- we just live in a time when people want to declare their support for things, and so when things happen it's pretty normal for people to put posters up about it.
And one last point that comments on both the object-level strategy for Scott's friend and on the meta-level question of reactions to this post. Every time I see something like this, it makes me less willing to jump in and defend "anti-wokeness" (here meaning anti-witch-hunty-censorship). I'm not saying it doesn't come from a good place, and I even agree with the main issue -- I'm genuinely very concerned about the silencing going on in academia and I think cancel culture is a huge toxic problem. But even though this post seems to be about strategizing on how to make there be less silencing, there are all these really weird zingers in there like the George Floyd protests being "a giant show of strength, briefly cow[ing] everyone, and intimidat[ing] any attempt at change" (what kind of change???) or depicting the NAACP passing over other candidates pre-Rosa Parks as part of the "be as controversial as humanly possible" strategy (strategy != dishonest controversy). I find it really bizarre that the berserk strategy survived the initial round of potential criticisms *that Scott has made before* (e.g. in Sacred Principles as Exhaustible Resources) to the point where it was pitched in this post as an option with nearly-equal merit to the approach of not being maximally edgy.
I hope to see some continued interaction about this (maybe in a "Hightlights from the Comments" post), becuase I really think this post and its reception deserve a post-mortem.
"Woke" has never been about decency unless you have a non-standard, left-wing conception of what "decency" is. The earliest people to self-identify as woke were basically dogmatic black nationalists who shouted down anybody using data to dispute their claims as "racist".
>As per the usual process, a word that doesn't really encapsulate the nuance of the question becomes the word that is used by proxy on two sides of the debate
Yeah, until people like yourself are unwilling to use loaded, meaningless words like "racism" then nobody is going to take your argument here seriously.
I mean I don't think your problem with my post was the lack of nuance in the word "racism" but okay, fair enough, I punted the question to yet another word that is a proxy for a much more complicated topic. I'm not trying to make the claim "all words are meaningless", I'm trying to claim that the use of this word in this way in this particular case led to some confusion among some commenters. How else do you explain the reaction among commenters like Alternates.docx, Sean Cunningham, Viliam, SufficientlyAnonymous, lalaithion, jjinandtonic, walruss, WeDoTheodicyInThisHouse, LadyJane, Yitz, Melvin, DecipheredStones, Sylvilagus Rex, etc etc etc....
And, I guess I implied this but didn't say it outright, so I'll say it now: I think this is exactly the kind of post that people can trot out to make Scott look bad. All the stuff that happened around the culture war thread, NYT stuff, etc was really bad and an absurd narrative that had almost no connection with the truth. But I worry that the average NYT reader / person who heard of ACX only by bad reputation would read this post and say, "oh wow, yep, this is exactly what I was told it was" when it's really just mainly a miscommunication. Maybe you've written off anyone in that group as a lost cause, but I haven't.
>I mean I don't think your problem with my post was the lack of nuance in the word "racism" but okay, fair enough, I punted the question to yet another word that is a proxy for a much more complicated topic.
The point is that it's extremely rich of you to object to the word "woke" while being fine with using a word like "racism" which is meaningless and routinely used to shout down opponents. There's no good faith justification for using such a loaded, meaningless word. You should say what you actually mean (racial hatred, racial discrimination, racial bias, racial preferences etc). And if you're unwilling to accept that, why should anyone accept your objections to the word "woke"?
>Yeah, until people like yourself are unwilling to use loaded, meaningless words like "racism" then nobody is going to take your argument here seriously.
I take their argument here seriously.
It seems like the point of statements like that are to try to assert some group consensus that doesn't actually exist.
It's a half step above "we cool kids don't like you, you're the low status one here."
>It seems like the point of statements like that are to try to assert some group consensus that doesn't actually exist
Ask ten people want "racism" means, and you will get ten different definitions. It ranges from explicit racial hatred all the way to value judgment free acceptance of certain data points (e.g. black people commit more violent crime than white people).
And my whole point was precisely that it's BS to object to the word "woke" while using a bad faith word like "racism". The woke use "racism" a bludgeon against anyone they don't like. If you point to data that shows that black men aren't disproportionately the victims of police violence once you account for their crime rate and rate of violence against police officers, you get called "racist". Which is big fucking problem. By basing your views on data instead of ideology, you get lumped in with people who engage in explicit racial hatred or have desires to commit hate crimes, even if you don't have any negative feelings towards black people at all. This is a much, much bigger problem than people using the word "woke", so if you're fine with people flippantly using meaningless, bad faith words like "racism" then why should anyone care about your much weaker objections to
Nobody dismisses concern about police violence as "woke", only particular behaviors associated with it (e.g. BLM riots, defunding the police, destroying the livelihoods of people opposed to the previous two things) whereas "racist" is used against anyone who disagrees with any leftwing claim remotely related to race, regardless of the truth value or intentions of said disagreement.
And there's all kinds of non-bad-faith and more precise terms that can be used in place of "racism" (like racial hatred, racial dscrimination, racial bias, racial preference etc) but they aren't used because they don't carry the same weight that "racism" does when wielded against somebody (plus they don't exclude actions carried out by black people against white people the way "racism" these days does). But what's the alternative to "woke" i.e. dogmatic supporters of far-left social ideology that are intolerant of dissent and will use cancellation and threats of violence/actual violence to get their way?
Please read these articles:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/please-just-fucking-tell-me-what?s=r
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
Literally no part of this is responding to what I said.
Much as in the original comment I objected to, where you tried to speak for some unspecified group, you are now assuming that my annoyance automatically makes me a part of the opposing group, so you can just post a rant targeted at that group rather than responding to me.
It's a really poor way of thinking and engaging.
I'd already read and very much liked both of the links.
If that's true, then what precisely is your problem? Why should I care about objections to the word "woke" from people who unironically use the term "racism" as a catch-all for "disagrees with me about anything"
Thanks, I found this helpful. Me too about this part: "I'm genuinely very concerned about the silencing going on in academia and I think cancel culture is a huge toxic problem. But even though this post seems to be about strategizing on how to make there be less silencing, there are all these really weird zingers in there..."
In that sense, when I read a post like this, something isn't lining up for me in what Scott's communicating and then it feels like it becomes a Rorschach test with commenters interpreting from it what they want to rather than that the conversation can advance somewhere interesting.
Just noticed 'woke' pop up as an attack on Zelenskyy in Ukraine coverage, what a world:
"Remember that Zelenskyy is a thug," Cawthorn said in the video. "Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies."
https://www.wral.com/madison-cawthorn-calls-ukraine-government-evil-zelenskyy-a-thug/20180165/
Disgusting.
Okay...so what? Are you ready to disavow the use of the word 'racism' because radical leftists often use it in disgusting ways (e.g. calling white children racist for acting like children)?
May I suggest a Third Way: make Woke people THINK. Thinking is what universities are for. There are woke values and woke solutions. The former are subjective. The latter are subject to thinking.
Once upon a time, about the only group talking about the mass incarceration of Black men was the Libertarians. They didn't talk as loudly as BLM, because such race-baiting was considered bad taste, and Libertarians tend to be nerdy white men. The take-away is that it is possible to be in favor of a much smaller prison population for Black men without calling for a socialist agenda or struggle sessions to expose subconscious racists.
So instead of bringing in red meat spewing right wingers, bring in those who share some of the woke values but have different solutions. Get people thinking about the unintended consequences of some woke policies.
For example, if you allow recreational shoplifting, you increase global warming as people move to the exurbs to get away from the crime. And bring in speakers who point out synergies: the slavery in Old Testament Law was in large part their alternative to prisons. Working on a farm is less harsh than living in an American prison! Old Testament slavery had a maximum term of 6 years, the enslaved kept their families, and they got capital upon release. That last factor is a biggie! Jail time stinks up a resume. To release people with little cash and a stinky resume is to send them back into criminality.
Here's another: subconscious bias exists, so having some kind of affirmative action as an offset is economically efficient as well as justice to offset past persecution. However, too much affirmative action magnifies the Peter Principle for the formerly persecuted. Meanwhile, hostile workplace laws make it downright dangerous to hire members of formerly persecuted groups. "We want you to hire this black women. As an incentive, if you make her mad, an economic bomb goes off which destroys your company." As a white male, I have this remaining privilege: I can be easily fired. This makes me a desirable hire for certain positions.
Bring on the controversial *solutions*, not the controversial values.
But the values are also sick and disgusting, this doesn't fix anything. "There should be fewer black men in prison!" – why? If you commit a crime you should go to jail for it, regardless of race, skin color, whatever. Every argument I've ever heard against this boils down to "there are too few white guys in prison", and I agree – more of them should go to prison. That doesn't prove that a single guy should get *out*.
Affirmative action isn't "justice to offset past persecution", it's injustice compounded on injustice. And so on. For me at least, any solution to destroy wokism that doesn't destroy wokism's *aims* as a concern inside the Overton Window of society generally is at best an insufficient drift in the right direction.
Jail terms are often too long for small crimes and too short for heinous crimes. There is WAY too much flex in how sentences are handed out, and too many different possible criminal charges for the exact same act.
I'm cool with public executions for murder -- as long as the jury that convicted throws the switch. I'm not cool with hellish prisons which dehumanize, especially for property crimes. Make prisoners work off their debt to their victims, yes. But house them safely and not brutally crowded together. And married prisoners should have access to family. And prisoners should walk out with enough nest egg so they have time to find a job when they get out. This is Old Testament values, by the way, which I don't consider sick and disgusting.
Multiple small crimes should lead to multiple small times.
And recreational drugs should be legal for those who can handle their high. (Though this can be a regional thing, so people who want to be far from temptation can have that option.) This business of crashing into people's homes at 3am KGB style in order to keep people from flushing their stash needs to end.
>Jail terms are often too long for small crimes and too short for heinous crimes. There is WAY too much flex in how sentences are handed out, and too many different possible criminal charges for the exact same act.
Why make it racial? If sentences are too long, sentences are too long. Period. If victimless crimes shouldn't be crimes, then change the laws. Making it about black people merely reinforces bogus racial oppression narratives that lead to wokeism in the first place.
Of course, just so we're absolutely clear, even in such a scenario, black men are still going to be vastly overrepresented in the prison population, and the whole problem wokeists have is not about sentencing or victimless crimes, it's that there's more black people in jail than white, PERIOD. So your policies would do little to quell their rage.
Disparate impact. If the justice system is bad -- and it is -- and black men have more contact with that system -- which they do -- then we have disparate impact, no racial bias needed. And that's the message that needs to be taken to the campuses.
>So instead of bringing in red meat spewing right wingers,
Except, that's not what anybody is doing. Have you listened to Charles Murray before? He's a kind, gentle soul with liberal leanings, and the left HATE HATE HATE him.
>Get people thinking about the unintended consequences of some woke policies.
It is hopelessly naive to think you will get anywhere doing this. At this stage, the woke are basically dogmatic religious fundamentalists. You can't change their minds, you can only get everyone else to stop living in fear of them and be comfortable containing them and their harmful policies.
>Here's another: subconscious bias exists, so having some kind of affirmative action as an offset is economically efficient as well as justice to offset past persecution.
You can't just claim this. You need to provide evidence.
If we only looked at achievements and SAT scores, the vast majority of people at top American colleges would be white and Asian. No "subconscious bias" is needed to explain this - the achievement gap is simply that large.
And if you want to claim this bias is what causes the achievement gap in the first place, then the burden of proof is on you to show this is the case, not merely assert it.
Charles Murray dwells on an impolite subject. People don't like being called stupid for some reason.
And at least some of that IQ gap is sociological, based on my observations. Nerding out is cool in certain Eastern cultures. It's frowned upon in macho cultures.
I do not think either strategy will change any hearts or minds. This entire article feels rooted in the assumption that there is no real problem with our society to which ‘wokeness’ is a response. And the end goal is to just somehow travel back in time to before ‘wokeness’ was a thing? I just don’t get it. Instead of yelling ‘this policy is bad’, why not connect with both administrators and students and work to understand the underlying concerns driving the creation of the bad policies and then work to figure out a better way to address those concerns. To assume that you totally understand everything and are right to wave your hand and dismiss the rabble who oppose you just reeks of arrogance, which, to be fair, is the American way.
I think the comparison is beyond silly, but MLK and Malcolm X were both beloved and respected members of their respective communities (btw, would highly recommend The Autobiography of Malcolm X if you have not read it). And they both had something your friend does not (yet): A vision for a better tomorrow.
Good luck.
Addendum: It is interesting that ‘wokeness’ is framed as the biggest threat to ‘academic freedom’. I suppose it is the blue-state goggles in play, but there is at least as much pressure on academic freedom from other directions. Texas seems likely to fight wokeness by removing tenure entirely from its public universities, and it isn’t because they’re worried about professors not being current on their pronouns.
>I do not think either strategy will change any hearts or minds. This entire article feels rooted in the assumption that there is no real problem with our society to which ‘wokeness’ is a response.
Black people murder over 500 white people every year (which is ten times more per capita than blacks killed by whites). This is a very real problem with society, and you ought to acknowledge this is a problem and allow me to be angry about it. If you don't, then you're perfectly guilty of what you're accusing scott et al of.
And let's say an 'issue in society' is the black/white income gap. I believe the evidence clearly shows that this gap is significantly a result of heritable differences between races. The woke mindlessly reject this, threaten and abuse any academic attempting to show that this is the case and wish to ban any research that could lead to this conclusion, no matter how rigorous the science is. So you don't understand why anyone would have a problem with the way wokeists approach these "issues with society" when they literally refuse to accept explanation for the source of these issues other than their dogmatic egalitarian ones that they use to justify policies that discriminate against whites (e.g. """affirmative action""") and advocate for wealth redistribution along racial lines?
Just because there's issues in society, doesn't mean your explanations for them are correct, especially if you assert it dogmatically and refuse to allow anybody to use data to show why you may not be correct.
>And the end goal is to just somehow travel back in time to before ‘wokeness’ was a thing?
What? You believe that the only option is wokeism and pre-wokeism? What about, dealing with the issues in society in a way that isn't about censorship, cancel culture, and explicit racial hatred against white people (which, yes, is exactly what wokeists do: https://ideasanddata.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/american-racism-and-the-anti-white-left/)? Because then, you know, you may actually make the world a better place instead of creating division and enacting harmful policies.
> To assume that you totally understand everything and are right to wave your hand and dismiss the rabble who oppose you just reeks of arrogance, which, to be fair, is the American way.
God, your lack of self-awareness is stunning. Why doesn't this apply to YOUR political opponents? Or do you simply assume anybody who disagrees with you is 100% bad faith and ill-intentioned?
Why don't you try and understand the valid concerns that people have with wokeness?
it is precisely the woke that behave like this. Scott et al have explained ad nauseum their issues with wokeists. It is the woke who do not handle disagreement.
>I think the comparison is beyond silly, but MLK and Malcolm X were both beloved and respected members of their respective communities (btw, would highly recommend The Autobiography of Malcolm X if you have not read it). And they both had something your friend does not (yet): A vision for a better tomorrow.
Right, and their vision was revealed to be total nonsense. MLK predicted that civil rights and affirmative action would bring about equality in a decade or so. In reality, they made inequality much worse and black social pathology exploded. And that's precisely why having quote unquote good intentions isn't good enough.
One of the main problems with the woke is precisely that they're extremely dogmatic and unwilling to listen to criticism to the point of destroying people's careers in response, and they cannot tolerate (not even accept, but simply tolerate the existence of) people suggesting they're wrong. They could be the most well intentioned people on the planet (which they most emphatically are not), but if they're unwilling to accept criticism or disagreement they are going to end up doing enormous harm with their ""well intentioned"' polciies.
Thanks, Bret. I appreciate your candor. I do not agree with you or believe you understand what I was attempting to say (probably because I do not speak your language...my bad), but do not worry, you have my express written permission to be angry about whatever catches your fancy.
If explaining your point of view ad nauseam (with only the finest data as indelible proof) continues to not work, then you might consider a different strategy. Or not. It's a free country.
Cheers!
is there anything this academic can do to contribute to AI safety
Protesting Black people being murdered is cancel culture...
Now that's nice and clear.
Strawman.
What IS cancel culture is being physically threatened or having your livelihood destroyed if you express a belief that George Floyd's death doesn't mean, say, that it's alright to burn down unrelated small businesses in a fit of rage.
Your response is precisely the reason people compare wokeness to a religion. You're incapable of rational thought or self-reflection. You think you're 100% morally right and anyone who criticizes your views in any way, you immediately assume they're bad intentioned and you ignore the nuance of their argument.
Over 500 white people are murdered by black people each year (which about 10 times higher per capita than the reverse). Are we allowed to protest against this? It's a much bigger problem than unjustifiable police killings of black people.
Really disappointed The Good Soldier Svejk strategy wasn't listed. Why are the great ideas from literature always ignored?
Fighting wokeness is a weird thing to organize your life around. I feel like being woke is a strategy to achieve certain social goals regarding justice and equality. Rather than opposing woke policies or cancel culture, shouldn't this professor try to optimize for their actual terminal values, eg free speech?
The comments so far suggest that wokeness requires defining before the discussion can proceed, so allow me to start with my leftist, materialist take.
What we gesture towards when invoking the term wokeness, the epistemically important part of it, should be thought of as a set of strategies and talking points evolved to maximize the users' fitness in the dog-eat-dog world of middle class institutions. It allows the young, upstart elite aspirants to coordinate with each other and conspire against the entrenched elite, with the goal of appropriating their positions, status, jobs, pensions, grant money, etc.
It's often mischaracterized as left-wing because many of its talking points are taken from left-associated philosophical currents like post-modernism/-structuralism or marxism. However, they're used completely aideologically, without any logical coherence and in a manner and with an aim contrary to those currents' intellectual goals. (In particular - by selectively applying them to their victims, and not themselves.)
Right-wingers have he hardest time intellectually opposing them, because they just straight up deny that the talking points are true, which, usually, they are. Meaning, they go straight for the motte without even thinking of cutting off the access to the bailey. But others struggle, too, the beauty of the tactic is that while the motte is hard to attack, the bailey, at least from within the institutional setting, is merely an even ground, with two elite factions accusing each other of being elite. Once entrenched, the woke lose their tactical advantage, and to preserve their status, they're forced to enforce a climate of strict intellectual conformity (so that no opposition to them arises) or to find an even higher-status target to continue with their charade of fighting for the disadvantaged. (It's usually culminating in a permanent moral struggle against an impersonal opponent - systemic, internalized evils permeating all society.)
You'll note that this tactic, despite its short-term advantages to individuals, is parasitical and long-term unsustainable, at least in the cases where the constant internal struggle interferes with normal functioning of an otherwise socially beneficial institution. Eventually, it will (temporarily) die off due to the mechanics of Turchinian fathers-and-sons cycle, with the woke as radicals and the growing movement of preserving the societal benefits of institutions (and either reclaiming them to do their real job or creating alternative ones actually performing that job) as moderates.
I can't emphasize enough how much all this points to a Fabian strategy in this particular situation. If you want to operate from within the institution, you want to cherish and cultivate the goals and benefits the institution provides. Berserk prevents you from doing this, instead, it's broadcasting the institution's inability to provide those benefits. You should only use it in cases where you think the institution is irredeemable and you're either trying to speed-up its demise or to show the road forward after its demise. (I'm currently going Berserk in mine, it's kind of fun, and a great occupational therapy for my social anxiety. But I have little hope for it, or for my own success within it.) It's extremely counterproductive if you simultaneously bet your future and continued employment on the institution's continued existence.
PS: MLK was clearly a Fabian, at least as a civil rights advocate, working within the social norms of US liberal democracy and christian religion, convincing people who believed in them that a) he's on their side and b) the norms would benefit from being more universal. (Later on, he turned his attention to an economically-transformative policy which went against a lot of entrenched institutions, so he had to go. Hereafter, wokeness avoids any serious tackling of economic inequality. It's just not a winning career strategy.) Malcolm X was a Berserker for the surrounding society, but nevertheless operated within a successful alternative social institution. Whatever your tactics, you need to act towards some socially beneficial goal. Society (whether at large or of your immediate peers) is the ultimate judge, and the best way to disarm the woke is to actually address the problem they disingenuously claim to be addressing.
(I posted this response first on the r/slatestarcodex subreddit. If it's impolite to repost it here, please tell me so and I'll delete it) Thanks for posting this article! It's close to a lot of the arguments that I've been having with myself. How polite do I want to be? How safe? Should I just keep my head down and work or stand up and fight? But my wife (an IT entrepreneur in Bulgaria who spent yesterday figuring out how to employ Ukrainian refugees) had a pointed answer: that's a false dichotomy. Do "real, solid, human" work.
The example she gave was of a Japanese flower-grower who set up greenhouses in Fukushima to convince people that things can grow there (and also he sells flowers and makes a profit). He's not working against the idea that "we should abandon Fukushima as an irradiated wasteland", he's working to grow and sell flowers.
For myself, I'm an ESL teacher and science fiction author. I connect with people by sharing stories, so I teach English to refugees and write about it (although neither exclusively). I'm not working against xenophobic Bulgarian nationalism* but _to_ give refugees a way to share their stories more broadly.
I don't know what kind of professor the OP is, but for the sake of argument, I'll imagine he's a history professor like my advisor in college. He might think "I teach history so that we will not repeat it" or "I teach history so that my students can become informed voters and productive citizens." Or he might teach for some other reason. Whatever that reason is, it will suggest an answer to his question. Not in order to work against Wokeness, but in order to work to ______ (please fill in the blank with the appropriate infinitive verb) :)
*note: almost all of the Bulgarians I talk to are eager to welcome Ukrainian refugees to their country. The level of xenophobia I see here is far outweighed by generosity.
Scott: Good to see you wading back into hot-button culture-war topics, as those are always interesting posts.
I hope the comments on this one have helped persuade you of something people were trying to argue in the comments on "Why Do I Suck": that wokeness is still a major area of controversy (what exactly it means and what it encompasses, which bits of it are good or bad, and whether it's good or bad overall), and that your post-woke bubble is very unrepresentative.
It may be "interesting" but I don't think it's good for Scott's brand (unless his goal is specifically to be seen as an IDW-type figure in the same mold as Jordan Peterson who's *only* known for being an anti-woke crusader, and I strongly doubt that's what he wants). I also don't think it's good for the SSC/ACX community, which he's spent years cultivating into a group for intelligent and respectful discourse between people from all over the political spectrum. Incendiary posts like this one tend to have comments sections that resemble Twitter flame wars, and if I wanted that, I'd actually use Twitter.
I mostly agree with you. But he built that community not by shying away from CW topics but by writing long thoughtful posts about them.
I would love it if ACX could, like SSC did, steer a course between two failure modes: one of avoiding CW topics altogether, and one of taking it for granted that wokeness is wrong and silly and that all readers will share those assumptions (which I guess is the IDW failure mode).
I know five unwoke academics. All stay under the radar and stick to the object level of their profession. They make slight pushes against woke overreach to keep pressure on the administration, but nothing big. My biggest concern in 2016 was that they were all going to become radicalized against anything even mildly smacking of woke as the politization of everything results in the mind-killing of everyone. I was really worried about several of my friends who seemed to be losing perspective and hope. Intellectual isolation clearly was taking a toll psychologically and academically.
Today, I think currently there is a lot more breathing room in private conversations than there was during Trump's presidency. But the institutional inertia is still pushing towards woke things. And while the current cracks get bigger when a Blue person holds the White House, the cracks shrink otherwise. So in this time of relative cultural harmony, I would make as many allies as possible.
I have tried berserker as an undergraduate along with some other professors in college. It's high risk! There are many ways to fail: choosing the wrong target, failing to grab widespread attention to the injustice, failure to execute in a synchronized way. If you fail to identify the right target, ranks close against you and the administration puts you under suspicion. If you fail to attract attention, no one notices that there was a bruhaha, and you don't make the news, and no lesson is learned. If you fail to affect change, you make enemies of potential allies who find you disagreeable, current allies are forced out, and then you find your cause more isolated than before.
Three allied professors were forced out, but the two top ranking administrators President and Dean of College were asked to step down. It was a Pyrrhic Victory at best, but in reality, it was damned disaster. Psychologically the toll was high, and losing professors is not worth the heads of a few administrators when the damage has already been done. It wasn't worth it for anyone involved.
Now as an experienced administrator, I can tell you, the Fabian Strategy works. Be seen working, industrious, come up with proposals, write down the ideas and the first draft of official documents, call the private meetings, make phone calls asking for feedback, be a good listener. Do a yearly review of the different internal documents and memos, propose revisions, streamline processes, make everyone else's jobs easier. It only takes two or three years of doing that to have an immense inertial change on an institution or department.
And that, in my opinion, is way better than waiting 100 years to get tenure.
Brilliant comment +1
Doesn’t it come down to a morality question? We’ve killed Christianity and people need something to fill the moral vacuum. Neo-Marxists have helpfully provided a substitute. Wokeness (or the next pseudo-morality fad to spin out of the Critical Theory dialectical logic machine) will only die when society finds a grounding morality. So what your friend needs to do (unless he wants to play morality whack-a-mole) is to identify and promote a grounding morality that society can get behind.
Liberal humanism is a great moral and ethical system. The problem is that a lot of people simply don't like it, because it doesn't provide them with enough of a sense of meaning and purpose, or maybe just because they find it "boring." So they turn to various far-right or far-left ideologies instead, which is why American political culture is in such a sorry state.
The most intolerant wins. So Berserker
I think there are two weaknesses with the Fabian strategy that are not addressed here, although they do not necessarily recommend the berserk strategy so much as a hybrid.
1: By not coming into direct conflict that requires the woke to exert their power to strike you down, the woke get to claim that they are not doing anything wrong. One can see it over and over here in the comments, people asking "What unwoke people have been cancelled? What do you mean those on the right are blocked out of academia? Give one example!" Some of this is just partiality and ignoring of events, but it is also due to the fact that anyone on the American right that is is still employed by the vast majority of colleges and universities are there because they have been cowed into never sticking their necks out.
By way of analogy, if there was legislation saying "Everyone who eats hotdogs will be executed on the spot" and everyone gave up eating hotdogs, people would soon forget the legislation even existed. When was the last time you saw someone executed for eating a hotdog? There is no anti-hotdog movement! Although in this case there would at least be legislation on the books regarding the illegality of hotdog consumption; make all the rules informal based on interpretation of extremely vague statutes and you have life in the woke academy.
2: Simply pushing back on woke policy is often enough to get you in trouble. Woke ideology is used for competition, where "good enough" isn't enough to keep yourself safe. Rather you need to demonstrate that you are a true believer, perhaps the truest believer, to successfully keep your head down. Pushing back in any way demonstrates that you are not of the faith unless you can demonstrate that you are pushing back precisely because your target is doing the faith wrong.
Now in industry jobs, sure, Fabian as described is probably fine, (unless you work in Hollywood or at Disney or something.) The described Fabian strategy in academia, however, would keep you employed about as well as suggesting "Hey, are we REALLY sure there is a God?" would keep you employed in the College of Cardinals.
If you are very unfirable, beyond just tenured, the Fabian strategy might keep you safe and pushing back against the excesses of wokeism, but I don't think it is nearly so safe as some seem to think. Consider how many leftists in good stead got fired and cancelled via simply expressing concerns that were wholly acceptable just a few years prior.
Perhaps a third option: given Anonymous Academic's newfound position of power in proximity to "Woke People" maybe A.A. could try to form meaningful relationships with as many of "Them" as they can, especially those for whom "Woke" causes are not just a social scene, but real injustices and personal experience. Maybe they could try to understand where "They" are coming from, gather information from real people, update their world model, and do the hard introspection work in order to reconcile their own internal representation of what a "Woke Person" looks like with the actual people that they are now trying to have a relationship with. Admit that many things can be simultaneously true, and try to be as intellectually honest and open-minded as possible about discovering the totality of those truths, and force themselves to try to understand why certain truths may be more important to "The Woke" and other truths may be more important to "The Unwoke." Then do the opposite thing and admit that many things can simultaneously be bullshit. Try to gain their trust to the extent that you can have honest and difficult conversations about their bullshit and yours. Is it possible to do this in a way that helps them rather than defeats them? Is it possible to gain their trust to the extent that you can say "I'm saying this to help you" and they believe you even if they disagree with you? Maybe try to get out there and build some fucking community rather than trying to find the most strategic way win.
Rufo's strategy appears to be working fairly well. How do we classify it? Seems Berserker-like.
Rufo's strategy is already overreaching. The new bills governing higher education that are being passed/proposed are poorly written and likely won't pass legal muster (in addition to likely being ineffective at their primary goals). Rufo's strategy worked well for the corporate arena and for simply showing the bizarre things that were actually getting included in "DEI training" that liberals were dismissing as harmless, but the backlash to these laws is going to be bad and a lot of academics on both sides are going to be caught up in the middle of it.
Opinions are like quantum states. If you haven't expressed your opinion on a subject, then you do not have a well-defined opinion on the matter. I'm using the word "expressed" very broadly here, but otherwise I mean this more or less literally. They are not well-defined in the same way that quantum particles exist in a superposition of states until they are measured. (Hearing someone else express an opinion and not disagreeing with it *does not count*)
The expression of an opinion on a subject is like the R process. It causes the wavefunction to collapse to the expressed value. Between expressions of one's opinion on a particular subject the U process takes over, entangling with environmental wavefunctions (i.e. social influences) until the next time it is collapsed through expression.
This is relevant because cognitive dissonance is a powerful force. A thought experiment:
It's May 9, 2020. We select a random left-leaning American. On May 10, we do nothing. We wait a month and on June 10 we ask that person their opinion of police and policing in America.
Rewind the experiment back to May 10. This time we ask the person for their opinion of police and policing in America on May 10. We wait a month and ask the same question again on June 10.
Now, suppose that we happened to pick someone that on May 10 in the second timeline gave a mildly to moderately positive opinion about police and policing. The question is: How different are the June 10 answers between these two parallel timelines? What I'm suggesting here is that they're likely to be quite different.
More specifically, I think the June 10 opinion in the second timeline is likely to be much more positive, and specifically *because* expressing it on May 10 collapsed the wavefunction. Further, I suspect the more memorable their experience expressing their opinion on May 10 was, the more positive it's likely to be be on June 10.
Okay, so what does this have to do with strategy when combatting wokeness? Spontaneous decay of some quantum particles/systems can be indefinitely postponed just by repeatedly measuring its properties. Getting people to voice their opinions on a subject has a stabilizing effect, and the more frequently it is voiced the more stable it will be.
But once a person has put the BLM sign in their yard, it's probably too late. If you want to get public opinion to stabilize *against* wokeness, then you have to get out ahead of it. Understand whatever coherence is to be found in their arguments, and figure out *where it is going*. What backwards moral arguments are they likely to be spewing in 6 months? Start fortifying that position now just by getting non-crazy people to start talking about it. The bigger the conversation gets before it hits the hornets nest that is Twitter the better.
To be clear, I'm not saying this will stop the most woke people from spewing those crazy positions. But when they do, listeners will be anchored to the opinions that they previously expressed.
Is it okay for a white person to operate a taco truck, or is that a moral transgression of some sort?
(Now, I don't know whether anyone *actually* predicted ahead of time that they'd start trying to shut down restaurants that the woke deemed 'inauthentic' in this way... but I am pretty certain it wouldn't have been difficult to predict.)
Suppose that it did occur to you that this was likely to start happening, and that it occurred to you while the idea of cancelling people for this *was still outside the Overton window*. Start talking about it. Make public predictions that it will start happening. You will get a lot of people scoffing at you. They scoff *because* it is outside the Overton window. Good. The scoffing *is them expressing their opinion*. The scoffers are less likely to go along with it when it happens than their friends that never heard your prediction.
Alternatively, take the false flag approach. Start trying to cancel white people for operating taco trucks. With any luck you will be laughed out of town (although if you get there too late you may accidentally become the person that triggers the avalanche of cancellations..).
Or, to completely change metaphors in the last sentence of this comment: Wokism is AIDS and needs to handicap the immune system before it can actually start damaging organs, so trigger the immune response before they can disable it.
As an academic, I would argue that the Fabian strategy is better because the actions required to enact it are also those required to be good at your job. Doing service to your university community through committees, teaching well, and doing good research all earn respect and seniority. Respect and seniority earn you the ability to speak out in the way I think the Fabian strategy imagines. Berserker academics are only respected by other Berserkers, they’re a giant annoyance to the rest of us.
You get annoyed that they invite lecturers to the college that woke students freak out over? Seems like your annoyance is misdirected.
I didn’t say that. I was talking about the Berserker strategy in general. Berserkers are not usually Berserkers for a single cause and collegial chums for everything else. If you want more people in your institution to come around to your stance, I believe that the Fabian strategy is superior to the Berserker one.
People here may be interested in signing a letter in support of Prof. Angelo Corlett, who was removed from teaching at San Diego State because he conducted a class discussion about racial epithets.
https://fire-dkzwf.formstack.com/forms/faculty_open_letter_san_diego_state_u
I think discussing woke as a guiding principle for behavior is intellectually bankrupt. Considering yourself woke or anti-woke and acting on that basis means you're not considering the merits of the actual issue. Imagine if effective altruism decisions revolved around wokeness. "We're not donating to deworming because it's too woke (or anti-woke)." It's ridiculous. To the point about the George Floyd protests, ignoring police brutality and corruption because you don't want to be lumped in with woke people is silly. There are plenty of examples with the sides flipped as well. There are annoying, overreaching people on all sides of every issue these days. Focusing on who you dislike and making decisions on that basis doesn't necessarily teach those people a lesson, but it may end up making you one of them. Decide on the merits, not mood affiliation.
That's quite a hypothetical you have there.
>ignoring police brutality and corruption because you don't want to be lumped in with woke people is silly
I mean, first of all, you've COMPLETELY missed the point of his discussion around George Floyd, which was purely about the effect that the protests had on the standing of woke people, whether it made the woke stronger or weaker, and then using this to inform the strategy of the academic.
Secondly, it's a total strawman to say anybody is "ignoring police brutality". You can think that what Chauvin did was wrong, but that doesn't mean deadly, destructive rioting (in the middle of the most deadly pandemic in recent history, no less) across the country is okay.
>There are annoying, overreaching people on all sides of every issue these days. Focusing on who you dislike and making decisions on that basis doesn't necessarily teach those people a lesson, but it may end up making you one of them. Decide on the merits, not mood affiliation.
Sigh...the whole POINT of focusing on woke people is precisely that they're the ones with all the power! They have almost universal institutional support. It's wokeism that is directing institutional policy, and woke civilians can basically do their woke nonsense and receive cover from these institutions (e.g. the media), whereas if anti-wokeists do something crazy then they lose their jobs/get expelled from college and get crucified by the media. And they're at risk of these even when they haven't done anything wrong (see media lies and woke outrage directed at the Covington high school students for the grand crime of standing still and smiling while an old native guy got in their faces)
Meanwhile, woke college lecturers can literally say whatever they want and keep their jobs, like explicit hatred of white people: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/08/23/rutgers-professor-anti-white-facebook-posts/1071370002/
If you take the academic's assumptions as a given, yes, that's the point. I'm saying I disagree with his (and your) assumptions. You're so locked into us versus them that you just wave away the underlying issues, like whether police brutality is an issue ("sure, sure, but let's move on to how much I dislike woke people").
Neither of those strategies are going to work. Woke is in dominating ascendancy right now because people are afraid of it. The only viable strategy that will work lies in convincing people that they can stand up to Woke without being destroyed. Watching a high-profile person who has successfully insulated themselves from consequences standing up to Woke does nothing to convince me that I could do the same without losing my job and reputation. The "strategy" they use makes no difference here.
There is a third strategy -- let's call it The Resistance. For this you need to look to Arif Ahmed at the University of Cambridge (my Alma Mater, coincidentally). Long story short, the university was planning a guideline that was threatening to free speech. A group led by Ahmed forced it to an anonymous vote by university faculty where it was voted down by 87%-13%. It's hard to imagine many other issues that would reach that degree of consensus. This is really what is going to work, long term. Find ways that people who disagree can do so without risking everything to do so. This is going to involve, at least in the short term, a whole lot of anonymity.
Personally, I prefer the berserker path. When you have a fight you know you can win, fight it. There is no point in avoiding a fight where you will come out victorious. On the contrary, you should use your inevitable victory in those conflicts as leverage to make your enemies absolutely grovel if they want you to be gracious enough to avoid pressing the fight and destroying them. If you either hurt your enemies enough by winning enough fights, or rub their faces in the mud enough times by forcing them to yield in a humiliating manner, then eventually you will condition them into realizing that it's a bad idea to fight people like you. Pain is the greatest teacher.
https://questioner.substack.com/p/how-to-make-enemies-and-influence?s=w
The term "woke" is basically always the opening to a motte and bailey situation. You should actually define what you mean specifically because its kind of bad faith.
When someone says "woke" it generally just reads as "anything to the left of me that I don't like". If you say "liberalism" or "socialism" or "social justice" or literally any other slightly more specific term its useful. Using "Woke" only really indicates which side of the political spectrum the person using it sits on.
As someone on the left, literally everything I believe has been called woke at some point including things I know the author agrees with. Its basically useless outside of signalling whose "side" you're on.
"Is anyone else obligated...?" No one is obligated. I just actually know and respect that Scott is capable of actually being more specific when talking about things.
The idea that the "heights of culture, business, and politics" are illiberal, censorious and destructive from some kind of left dominance is laughably absurd and can only be believed if you're mired in an internet echo chamber. The dominant political and economic ideology in the USA is centre right neoliberalism and has been for 30 /40 years.
The slight agitations from the left in the last 10 years have caused such derangement despite having made virtually no impact whatsoever on the political or economic sphere.
On the centre left "woke" was a briefly fashionable term that mean "to be aware of social issues. It seems that on the right its just a new cypher for the "political correctness" fears of the 90's. and 00's. Nothing new under the sun.
Okay, once you people begin defining "racism", then we'll start doing that. Racism is an extremely loaded and yet meaningless word, and because of that there is no good faith justification for its use. And if you disagree, read this post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
I never said woke teachers are being racist against white students. I said they're spouting explicit racial hatred against white people. And I say that instead of saying "racist" because "racism" isn;t a meaningful word.
And no, "espousing explicit racial hatred" isn't a good defintion of racism, because almost none of the things the left call "racist" rise to the level of "explicit racial hatred". It's mostly useda s a bludgeon against people who disagree with woke claims related to race, regardless how data-based these disagreements with the woke are (e.g. black people not being dispropriotionately killed by police once you control for their race of crime and violence towards police).
And although most things wokeists complain about aren't legitimate, the point of me obejcting to the word "racism" isn't that they aren't complaining about something real. It's that it's BS to complain about the word "woke" while being okay with a much more problematic, bad faith bludgeon of a word that is much less meaningful than woke is.
Something is either good or bad, or true or false. Calling it "racist" serves no purpose but to silence your opponents.
Racism:- Discrimination, conscious or unconscious, based on race. Used academically in the social sciences to refer to the effects of power on racial relations.
Woke:- Anything to left of me that I disagree with.
Everything that follows from here is mostly based on my System I Direct Feed of small thoughts I had while reading, i.e. it's at least partly emotive and might be internally inconsistent. In order of "how salient these feel:"
* Prior to some big conversations with partners and friends in 2015 and on, I used to be 100% team Fabian. When taken too far though, the Fabian school is just a case study in respectability politics. That is, I realised pretty quickly (OK, over the last 5-7 years) how little has actually been achieved for human rights by Fabians trying not to make too many waves!
* This was a really significant update for me, as it took me from "feminists should be less angry in order to court more acceptance" into "WAIT! Toning down the anger only makes it easier to never listen to us! You said you'd listen to us if we said it right, but that was apparently a lie. Sacrificing our anger is and was a BAD IDEA."
* Closely interrelated update I've made: I now think we can safely retain an animus forged from justified anger. It's very important to acknowledge that being angry does not automatically mean you're mindkilled. Myself and many other LW-brethren have wandered down the path of trying to avoid strong anger, because it seems like it will lead to worse politics, and worse lever-pushing in general. I'm trying to stop associating anger and emotive force with the idea that it's a mind-killed way of being.
* On the other hand, we do have to be very careful with our justified anger, and we need to be careful not to let it become Blank Check Anger, because that's one of the more dangerous kinds, in terms of mind-kills.
* So, here's where I bite the bullet that Fabians aren't getting us where we need to be, both in terms of wokeness and the provision of social justice itself.
* BUT! A Berserker for a Bererker will make the whole world victims of berserking. In other words, both wokes and anti-wokes picking every battle would be unpleasant, unproductive, and I think will just mindkill everyone in range.
As an Australian looking into US culture, this is largely how I already perceive things to be going (based on Scott's writing and others, and to varying degrees in different states).
* Are there ways to Berserk without the above second order consequences? I sure hope so, because when no one wants to listen and you need to route around the damage in society, some tactical Berserkers are all we have.
* And this all elicits a very funny mental image. I present: The Tactical Berserker Squadron.
Agent Fabian94 sits in the driver's seat of the black minivan. Cold morning. Dewey. "Same old Portland," he smiles to himself fondly, while rubbing his hands together in his best maroon gloves.
F94 moves his head to peer through various parts of the iced up windshield, trying to see how conditions are unfolding. Seems peaceful. Probably no need for the big guns after all.
Heavy footsteps, a couple of grunts, and the sound of palms banging on metal emanate from the solid partition behind Fabian94's head. His heart skips a beat and he drops into dead silence to listen.
Muffled almost-silence again. The central double-locks are still engaged. The 'Zerks, despite their increasing agitation, aren't in any danger of leaving the minivan.
Nonetheles, the angry grunts and a disconcerting rocking of the minivan pull Fabian94 out of his vain attempt at re-establishing a calm mindset. "At least they're in the headspace already," Fabian94 muses, attempting to convince himself more than for anyone else's benefit.
The call rings harshly out of the walkie talkie like so much white noise and static war: "F94, we're gonna need you to pull that trigger early. Things have gone south out here."
Fabian94 says nothing in response to the unwelcome command. He closes his eyes. Steels his resolve. Pulls the trigger. Listens for that familiar "CLICK-whirr." Registers the sounds of yelling, pushing, and tousling. Closes his eyes to avoid seeing what always comes next. "A necessary evil" he whispers to himself over and over. It doesn't begin to drown out the distant yelling.
A lot of folks are expressing very strong opinions here, and it's obvious they have some very personal lived experience that ties into this subject. That's probably why when I first read it, I was a bit taken aback myself. You see, my understanding of the term "woke" is pretty different from what I'm seeing in this original post as well as in many of the comments here. In an attempt to help give some perspective, I'd like to share how I came to understand the word, irrespective of its current usage.
As a middle-class white kid from a small town in Texas (graduating class of 42 people), going to a public college exposed me to a lot of things I hadn't seen. As a music major I got to hang out with lots of folks that I'd likely not have even met in my small town. When I was working my way through, playing bass in various gigs throughout the DFW metroplex, I encountered the phrase "stay woke" for the first time (I believe it was 2003). Our drummer was heading out after a set, and the guitarist shook his hand and said "remember that thing on fifth, stay woke." Me being the only white guy in the rhythm section gave me the opportunity to say "what does that mean?" The guitarist gave me a sideways look and said "for real?" I shrugged. He was a very cool and patient dude, so as we broke down the rest of the gear, he explained it to me from his perspective.
He told me that Black American folk singer-songwriter Huddie Ledbetter, (better known as Lead Belly) closed out his 1938 recording of "Scottsboro boys" by saying "I advise everybody, be a little careful when they go along through there – best stay woke, keep their eyes open." You see, the song is about nine black teenagers who were accused of raping two white women. It's a complicated case, but the message was clear: "this is a place where white people will get you lynched if you step out of line, so be careful." I was pretty surprised, and asked what "the thing on fifth" was. Well, in that part of town, there'd been an assault on fifth street, and the perpetrator matching the description was a black male in his early twenties. The guitarist explained to me that four of his friends had already been stopped and questioned about it, one of whom spent the night in jail because he refused to comply with being frisked and stopped. I said I'd never heard anything like this before and had no idea what to say. He said "now you're woke, too. Stay that way."
My entire life since then, I've kept that in mind. I hadn't even heard of the assault on fifth. I didn't learn until the early 2010s that "stay woke" was being traced all the way back to the words of Marcus Garvey, imploring "Wake Up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa! Let us work towards the one glorious end of a free, redeemed and mighty nation."
I see where folks are coming from now, in that "woke politics" or "woke academics" have specifically to do with left-leaning ideology, usually knee-jerk or alarmist in nature. So hearing "post-woke" makes some amount of sense, if you only think of it as an expression of political zeitgeist tied to the BLM movement and protests in that time period. I know enough about Scott to believe I'm not being overly charitable to say he did not intend for any of this to seem dismissive or harsh, but rather very prescriptive in a practical way to push back against a specific squeamishness to push academic rigor and value to avoid a cultural backlash. Here's the problem: if you told my friend the guitarist "no thanks, I'm unwoke" in response to his warning, how do you think it would land?
I think you're inferring a lot here. I don't think anyone gets a veto. But I also don't think anyone gets a pass on how things land, either.
MAGA folks tend to refer to themselves as such, but even if they didn't that's not the same thing as saying you are trying to oppose a specific set of principles in policy and don't care about how the folks behind those principles define them. Does that make sense?
I see what you mean, but I think the distinction is made important by the nature of the distinction in American politics itself.
If I say "MAGA" you know I'm talking about Trump and his populist positions. There's probably almost no actual policy there, just an overall sentiment. Take an example of three people running in a GOP Primary: Candidate A is for deregulating oil industry and protecting tax incentives for carbon-specific energy in the given state, Candidate B is focused exclusively on the second Amendment and rejecting a hot button high capacity magazine bill in the state, and Candidate C says that A and B are deep state stooges and they're going to Make America Great Again by making sure neither of them get elected. A and B split the vote of moderate voters, and C gets elected, then goes on to push a nebulous policy that continues to waver by public sentiment (Tarrifs are good! Except... this week someone pointed out they're taxes that consumers pay so they're bad, but only if they're not protecting things that are good like agricultural goods, but then they're bad if... etc)
On the other hand, you have a Democratic primary, in which five candidates run. Candidate A is running on a social justice platform, and specifically repeatedly calls for Defunding The Police, but they focus mostly on prison reform (measures to reduce recidivism and return rights to convicted felons). Candidate B is a white trans woman who repeatedly says that cops are pigs, but prison reform is not important, what's really important is protecting legal gender status and making sure the state's recent bathroom bills are fought. Candidate C is local shop-owner who has never run for public office but felt compelled to run because they feel that COVID is being mismanaged by vaccines which are made by evil corporations and only crystals can heal the pandemic. Candidate D is a Native American lawyer from a local tribe who has decades of experience in tribal and federal indian affairs law and wants to make sure that more treaties are honored on reservation principles. Candidate E is a life-long bureaucrat who has mostly spent their time pushing for incremental budget savings by cutting costs and keeping taxes raising but no faster than the cost of living.
Candidates A-D split the "woke" vote, because each interest is pretty distinct, and Candidate E wins based on a moderate voting and election record in the district. Now in the general, is candidate E more woke than the GOP Candidate A? Maybe. But what does that even mean? What kind of "woke"? Would DNC Candidates A-D consider GOP Candidates A and B more "woke" than C?
That seems like a diversion, because we're talking about someone in academics, but I think it speaks to the point here: what is "woke" policy? If you're openly trans and pansexual but you speak ill of Ta-Nehisi Coates coming to speak at your campus are you unwoke? If you're the descendent of a concentration camp survivor and you protest Nick Fuentes speaking at your college are you "woke"?
The problem I'm getting at is it was always a diverse set of correlated trends and interests, and just saying you're "anti the political movement that arose out of a disparate set of coinciding social movements" doesn't really inform anyone to your ideology does it? I mean I think some readers uncharitably assumed that Scott was saying he's into phrenology now, but that's obviously not what he meant.
Does this academic have a skill set that would lend itself for Sokal-hoax style undertakings?
Personally, I have found these very effective in convincing me that a lot of the obscure postmodernist writings woke people like to point to and derive their verbiage from is just crap. I don't know how convincing it is to other people of course...
However, there is a lot of potential for improvement when it comes to these operations. This is exemplified by the "Sokal squared" hoax:
1. None of the authors was in an "un-fire-able" position: one was an assistant professor and later DID essentially get fired, the other two were academic exiles.
2. The authors were controversial/heterodox rendering themselves attackable; one of them has since become an insane right-wing conspiracy theorist further tarnishing their work.
3. The methodology was at times questionable (inventing of a data set, targeting low-impact journals, "exposing" some practices that everybody knows are unfortunately extremely wide-spread in academia), opening them up for a counterattack in the form of an ethics investigation.
If somebody in an unassailable academic position with an untarnished reputation and showing otherwise restraint politically carried out such academic false-flag operations to a high methodological standard, I think it could greatly reduce the influence the academic foundations of wokeness hold over students. Granted, such a methodology would probably first have to be developed but that seems to be an interesting project in its own right.
I'm very surprised that both strategies are a kind of "war" for "victory". Is there no hope for being agreeable, making people see your point of view and persuading them (or being persuaded!)? Isn't this a symptom of the problem, that nobody is discussing and making specific decisions on merits anymore, but instead every decision is judged by its role as a battle in the neverending tribal political war? Everything is for the cameras, for the public, for the country. Nothing is local, personal, nuanced.
Maybe I'm naive, maybe things have gotten too bad for discussions. But I don't think the polarizations of the past left such a good legacy we're proud of.
Agree. There's even something a little depressing about the framing of a 'Culture War'. That may be what it both looks like and feels like, but there's room for a higher aspiration than that.
No, there absolutely isn't. These people aren't willing to discuss anything. It's practically one of their defining features.
This is a naive "why can't we all be friends" take. The post is discussing actual, practical routes to move the world towards a more desirable state, where wokeness is weaker. Nuanced talk is not a practical course of action.
I've seen multiple comments like this. The problem is that all it takes is one person to take your personal, private, honest attempt at understanding to make it public and destroy you. You can have productive conversations 95% of the time, but all it takes is one person to release a misleading recording or twist your words when reporting your conversation to the resident "Bias Response Team/Tipline" and you're in for a world of hurt. Some of these conversations might be part of the Fabian strategy, but they alone will not solve this and lead to plenty of vulnerabilities.
The other thing is that you can't easily do this in areas of power disparities, say, with students. Trying to have an honest conversation with students on these issues will likely lead to another Christakis-style incident. Admins are too afraid to tell students that their demands are unreasonable or based on incorrect information (it would make the students feel "unsafe" and "traumatized"), so you'll get thrown under the bus.
No of course not. We wouldn't be having this discussion if that were the case.
I mean for goodness' sake, one of the very things we're discussing here is not attacking wokeists, but simply inviting a academic they dislike to campus because we know they will throw a tantrum and attempt to shut the lecture down. This has happened untold dozens of times already and is the exact opposite behavior of people who are willing to have an hoenst respectful dicussion.
These people are unwilling to duiscuss anything and will atempt to destory your livelihood for indicating you don't agree with them. The only hope is to embolden everyday people to stand up against this nonsense.
Also consider the personality of this unwoke academic. Is this person by nature a Fabian or a Berserker?
Also consider the "middle/pick your battles way". Stay a Fabian until a situation rolls around that looks either very amenable to going berserk/Berserk, or the issue related to the situation is worth the effort/suffering to go berserk/Berserk.
Me? I'm anti-anti-woke. (If you grew up before 1975, you'll know what this means.) Folk like me are very suspicious of the Berserkers, but can often support the Fabians.
If you're anti-anti-woke, you're effectively woke. How in god's name do you have a bigger problem with inviting "controversial" academics to speak on campus than you are people who throw a tantrum and shut down lectures by people through violence, intimidation, pulling fire alarms etc? If you're okay with that stuff, then you're not anti-anti-woke, you're woke.
When I saw the title, I hoped this was going to be about how to deal with woke if you *weren't* tenured. My uni now requires a DEI statement for employment. My son is probably going to become an academic. Will he even be able to get a job if he doesn't express enough woke enthusiasm? (*I* had trouble in the 90's -- got rejected by two potential employers for, apparently, not expressing enough PC enthusiasm.) If he gets past that, can he get tenure? I'm tenured. I'm safe. What about the next generation?
Don't forget about opportunity costs. The berserker approach sounds like it would take a lot more time/energy/money/etc than the Fabian strategy meaning this unwoke academic would have less of those resources for his other causes.
"firing professors who say unwoke things" is this something that has actually happened? [aside from "post hoc ergo propter hoc" cases]
Yes, of course. How are you not aware of this?
ok, got an example?
https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/georgetown-law-professor-fired-after-comments-about-black-students/2603777/#:~:text=One%20Georgetown%20University%20Law%20Center,dean%20Bill%20Treanor%20told%20students.
Their "crime" was pointing out the FACT that black students in their class were underperforming. Not as a way of being hateful towards black people, not in a way that means they're annoyed to have black people in their class. They literally wish they could have their black students perform well but they feel bad that they can't.
There's also a follow up at GT where a new hire was put on mandatory leave because he tweeted that it was bad for Biden to decide he would only pick black ladies for the supreme court.
It's worthless to respond to people like Brian with anything but mocking laughter. He's just trying to waste your time.
I find the Fabian strategy far more congenial, and appealing to both my character and my cultural hang ups (I'm British and don't ever want to "make a scene").
However, I think you've got to ask two questions:
(i) "How serious are the injustices currently being perpetrated?"
If the issues are small and no-one is being too badly hurt then it's wise not to rock the boat. But if you are in a context where serious injustice is being perpetrated, then it isn't OK to watch and hope that you can gradually improve things - the Berserker strategy becomes a moral imperative.
(ii) "Is time really on my side?"
Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus was fighting on home territory, knowing that for Hannibal delay was defeat - time was his ally. If a steady backlash is already happening, then it's wise to go with it and ride the wave home - the clock is working against your opponents.
But if your position is being steadily eroded, if the enemy is on home turf and receiving constant reinforcements, then the clock is working against you. Your opponent just needs you to wait and you will run out of time and become an irrelevancy - so you'd better go Berserk today.
The answer to each of these questions will be different in different contexts and when viewed through different moral frameworks. I'm currently running a Fabian strategy, but these two questions make me wonder if I should change my approach.
"For me, seeing actual injustices against minorities makes me more woke, and seeing woke people be stupid and unnecessarily combative makes me less woke."
This is an unconstructive asymmetrical set of conditions. "If there are problems that X people talk about, then I get convinced towards X. If some of X people are shitty, just like some of any group of people, I get convinced away from X." Do you not have an inverse set of reactions regarding antiwoke positions? "When I see Y i become more antiwoke, when I see antiwoke people being stupid and combative it makes me more woke."
Also, the incessant talk of how strong ""wokeness"" is for the last 12 years while they have received almost none of their policy goals besides police cameras makes me extremely skeptical of peoples evaluations of "How strong is X movement/ideology?" Obviously as a complaint against anti-woke posts, but seriously, "movement strength" feels like a confused mess to evaluate as I dive into thinking about it for any number of ideologies, which makes it difficult to evaluate what appropriate reaction levels are to any given indicator/movement.
I tend to favour the berserker strategy, because I favour active vs passive. This past couple of years has lead me to view passivity with the disgust it deserves…if we had risen up in mid2020 against the COVID1984 madness, we would have a better world now