In the field of American studies (and the subset African American studies), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. sits both inside the priesthood (in his Harvard professor role) and outside (with his TV work, notably Finding Your Roots). Like GMU economists, he does more than anyone to bring the public into academic conversations (in this case about history and genealogy) that the priesthood largely controls. I once heard a professor lament "I'd write a whole book slamming him [Gates] but my grandmother would kill me."
There are always popular preists who engage with the public in approved ways. You have to walk a fine line of appealing to the masses but not being heretical, so you need to be both in good standing in two communities. The pope is a person. He is the pope of AAS. There are also sometimes lesser popes. Academics who write popular books, but aren't heretics. Still it's risky, I think of Jared Dimond as a popular priest who the lost a battle and is now mostly considered a heretic.
Diamond's sin is writing outside of his field. He's a biochemist writing history. From historians' perspective, he's not a heretic; he's a rando who doesn't know what he's talking about.
Plus, he didn't really know what he was talking about. Or if he did, he purposely presented the supporting data and ignored examples that contradicted his thesis. I go back and on whether he did this on purpose or not.
I wouldn't say that, i think he's a great and very important public intellectual. Like a lot of big thinkers, he gets some big things wrong (some of them were obvious to me immediately on reading, like the idea that Australia has no easily domesticable wild plants), but I think he gets more right in the end.
It's odd, I've often come across references to Diamond being debunked or discredited, but every time I try to dig into the details it's either minor quibbles that don't really contest his core point, or obvious absurdities like trying to claim Europeans never actually conquered most of the world. Is there a source anywhere that actually tackles the question of "Why Europe?" and comes to a substantially different conclusion than Diamond's?
I've also searched for criticisms of him on r/askhistorians, and I just saw people getting upset that he took on a bigger project than "here's what we learned from digging into this one tomb."
I took a history class freshman year on this exact issue, and my professor's argument was that one of the biggest reasons why the New World was less advanced in terms of military technology was that iron and coal deposits were so far away from each other that it would have been almost impossible to coincidentally make steel, which was almost inevitable in the Old World where such deposits overlapped.
As far as major inaccuracies, iirc one of the biggest was that Diamond had this whole argument about sedentary food production being easier in the Old World leading to more stratified and complex societies leading to military superiority, but the Inca Empire was in fact massive, sedentary/farming-based, and highly stratified. The lack of horses was a major factor in their defeat, but they weren't helpless in the way Diamond describes; they actually persisted fighting the settlers in some capacity for decades, including one point at which they did massive damage to the settler groups by organizing massive groups of people to drop boulders on them.
This is disorganized and I could look for/think of more if you'd like but these were some of the big complaints he had.
This is my experience as well. Anything i read debunking him smells desperation and cope. They are quibbles about the story at the introduction, which is a dumb story and it's wrong, but wasn't the point of the book. The basic point that Eurasia is big east to west, so things moved quickly between different parts, and that mostly explains it, and no one refutes that. They just don't like big thinking and have a priestly visceral reaction to his work. It's kind of shameful. Like I keep waiting for the debunkers to you know get to a point and debunk, but they got nothing.
My main problem with Diamond is he puts theory first and then selectively collects facts to support his theory rather than working from facts to develop a theory. Worse yet, many of his facts are just plain wrong, and he ignores the facts that don't support his theory. The so-called "big thinkers" like Diamond, who like to make grand simplifications while not bothering to dig into the actual data, are really small thinkers who distort our understanding of the world.
Most diseases do not transfer to humans from domesticates, is the most obvious one. Smallpox, ebola, covid, etc, do not come from domesticates. This is a core part of his explanation of the disease gradient between the Americas and the Old World - and the disease gradient is the single biggest factor in the ultimate crushing victory of the Old World - and is actively wrong.
Additionally, the disease gradient worked the opposite way, in Africa's favor, despite the fact that many of the most important domesticates (horses, cows) basically die on contact with Sub-Sahelian African environs due to sleeping sickness.
I haven't read that book, but as far as I can tell, it argues for the geographic superiority of Eurasia, even including North Africa, over the rest of the world.
Anyone who sums it up as "this is why Europe triumphed" is cheating.
Why Western Europe and not India, the Middle East, or China?
You're not wrong, but answering the sub-question of "why not America, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Oceania" is at least a lot closer to addressing the "Why Europe" question than anything I've seen from his critics.
And don't forget that most of the game-changing inventions that changed the historical dynamics in Europe came from China. Paper and printing, iron and steel production, gunpowder, the compass, mechanical clocks, wheelbarrows, etc. One theory is that the reason China didn't exploit these inventions to dominate the world, is they had a relatively centralized empire most of the time. While Europeans were divided into feuding states that needed to exploit things like gunpowder to gain an advantage of their competitors. Note: I don't buy into this theory.
The short answer is that it wasn't just geographical, although geography played a role- especially in relation to coal sources transportable by waterways.
There was an epistemic layer. The monarch/sovereign state needed to lose it's absolute monopoly on property- in English Common Law the sovereign is also subject to the law. More importantly, religion/the state need to lose its absolute monopoly on truth.
There are other reasons. Guilt/forgiveness cultures are rare- honor/shame far more common. Both the scientific and entrepreneurial industrial revolution required a culture in which the consequences for mistakes and failures could be overcome. Japan has a suicide forest. A campaigner tried to have this changed. The authorities response was 'why would we want to that?'
As a central cultural archetypal figure. Jesus was absolutely essential for the global revolution which raised roughly 85% - 90% of the world's population up out of the types of poverty which most modern Westerners cannot even imagine.
> Is there a source anywhere that actually tackles the question of "Why Europe?" and comes to a substantially different conclusion than Diamond's?
I feel that you're asking a question as if you had looked long and hard, but... if you had looked long and hard surely you would have come across some other explanations.
I suggest two books to get you started:
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
By: Walter Scheidel
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
By: Joseph Henrich
Both are excellent, in fact far better than GG&S.
As far as "debunking" Diamond, well it depends on the specific argument. The idea that domesticable plants were more available in the fertile crescent has been attacked. I don't know enough to talk about it. Domesticable animals too, for example Zebra can be domesticated. The idea that Europeans were resistant to germs because the lived with domesticated animals seems false too as most germs didn't come through that route. The idea that length of shoreline lead to fragmentation is very tenuous in itself (lots of places with this feature), there are much better explanations.
And so on, and so on.
I like the idea that seasons and agriculture lead to selection for consciousness and intelligence (seemed like a direct consequence of the ideas in GG&S), but Diamond precisely told us that actually Europeans were dumber than Papuans for genetic reasons and because they watch too much TV.
It's less "as if I've looked long and hard" and more that it seems odd to me that people criticizing GG&S never seem to bring up alternate approaches to the question it's addressing. If people think Diamond addressed the question poorly, I would think the natural reaction would be to point to someone they think did it better, but in my experience it seems more common to act offended that he raised the question at all.
And I appreciate the book recommendations, although TBH I'm pretty unlikely to devote the time to read a full book on the subject any time soon.
Diamond,Jared, _Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies_, in the prologue:
"[...] natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies."
Funny how Diamond earlier had mentioned how despicable genetic explanations are, to suddenly come up with a genetic explanation of why Papuans can keep track of plants and animals better than Europeans.
Also, it never occurs to him that once agriculture started it may have created the conditions for the genetic selection of smarter more conscientious people. And yet, he believes that selection did happen, but only for resistance to some diseases.
In short, Diamond suffered very strongly of confirmation bias.
I think Diamond was quite open in the intro to his book that he did it on purpose.
There is a tendency among Jews to want to downplay racial differences because the Jewish religion treats ethnic competition as a matter of kill-or-be-killed (at least at pertains to Jews vs. non-Jews), and this naturally leads them to be fearful of the consequences if people were to believe race is real.
Or maybe they have a millenia-long history of people wanting to eradicate them down to the last child, with one of the latest and closest-to-successful incarnations very much on racial grounds?
What you are describing is Jewish religious teaching, which is not at all the same as history.
Anyone who behaved as the Jews behave, would have caused people to want to kill them. But the Jews behave this way largely because of their belief that others just innately want to kill them.
I’m not sure that “American Studies” counts as a priesthood. I think a priesthood has to have a few things
1. A specialized body of interconnected knowledge. I can’t form a priesthood around knowing ten random facts which any normie could learn if they so wished, the knowledge has to be such that it must be learned sequentially— that is, require a series of inferential steps to acquire. Otherwise, a lay person could learn the subject piecewise, studying whatever parts were relavant to the particular issue without being meaningfully impaired by not knowing the rest of the subject matter.
2. It must be professional: its members must rely on it for a significant portion of their livelyhood. Otherwise the incentives against coruption which Scott discusses don’t work nearly as well. Also, this is the requirement which keeps fandoms from being classified as a priesthood.
3. It has to have public relavance. We care what doctors and lawyers and scientists think becuase we have questions about health or the law of the natural world whose answers the priesthood is better positioned to discover. And we actually care about the answers to these questions, which is from whence the priesthood ultimately derives its power over us.
I maintain that American Studies, as an academic discipline, is not a priesthood, because it fails point 1. If you nuked the discipline from orbit, there is no relavant question which the public would be thereby unable to answer. Certainly, there are interesting questions which a priest could answer better than a random person, but these could be answered by an economist, a historian, or a sociologist just as easily, without the economist, historian, or sociologist knowing the whole basics of American studies, or indeed anything outside their field.
By Scott's definition of a priesthood, I would argue that it is not -- the definition of a priesthood implies that in normal times, they have an epistemic advantage over the public society.
Academic grievance studies are more like a cult masquerading as a priesthood.
Lawyers have been a functioning profession for a very long time. Not ephemeral at all on the scale of human societies. Unless you mean a geologic time scale, in which case who cares.
"Law" has. A given type of lawyer has not. Same with "religion" and "medicine." That's not what we're talking about here. Those aren't priesthoods. The group of individuals who have passed the American bar exam and currently practice law is a priesthood.
> 1. A specialized body of interconnected knowledge. I can’t form a priesthood around knowing ten random facts which any normie could learn if they so wished, the knowledge has to be such that it must be learned sequentially— that is, require a series of inferential steps to acquire. Otherwise, a lay person could learn the subject piecewise, studying whatever parts were relavant to the particular issue without being meaningfully impaired by not knowing the rest of the subject matter.
I would dispute that. Medical textbooks are available in any decent library. Any amateur can read up the literature on any medical specialty, it takes some time and smarts, but is quite possible. Case in point: our host has offered literally hundreds of articles on all kinds of topics a mile removed from his medical specialty (e.g. on economics, or literature, or philosophy) and seems rarely be hampered by not knowing the secrets of any particular priesthood.
Your medicine skill level is not what makes you a part of the physicians priesthood any more than a PhD in theology makes you a Catholic priest. It does not matter how much you know about medicine, if you operate on people without being ordained as a priest, you will go to jail, just like any bishop would excommunicate any layperson who decided that they know enough theology to celebrate the Eucharist.
These priesthoods which enjoy a state-sponsored monopoly (Lawyers are another one) are generally the the tightest knit communities: if you are kicked out of your profession, you are just an unemployed person with a maxed skill which is about as professionally useful to you as if you had spend a decade leveling up your Star Trek lore.
My own field is STEM academics, which is a little more porous. Sure, nobody will publish you without a STEM-adjacent degree (and preferably a PhD degree and an important professor co-author), but at least you can move between subfields. The phrase "Go back to your outer electron orbitals and do not sully this room with your presence, chemist!" is rarely if ever spoken.
"and seems rarely be hampered by not knowing the secrets of any particular priesthood"
I'd say he is often hampered by lack of field-specific expertise but does an admirable job of compensating for it through general smarts, extensive research, and interaction with his readership that includes experts in many of those topics. Still, he says lots of things that end up needing correction or clarification, and would be absolutely silly to try to publish in a journal of that field.
Likewise in medicine, you can read up on a specific problem and often learn details that most doctors wouldn't know off hand, but if you tried to put that knowledge into practice without consulting a doctor first you'd be likely to screw up in important ways.
> Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
Accepting the premise that this "infection" was worse than previous infections -- it could be that this "virus" (wokeness) was more virulent than other viruses OR that the immune system of the priesthood was weaker than for previous infections.
You seem to favor the former explanation, but I think the latter is far more likely. We are literally in the middle of the largest revolution in communication technology in human history; the barrier between inside and outside the priesthood is radically different than it was before.
Now, I think that academics have done a *particularly poor job* of adapting to the reality of communication today. I study social media and politics, and I think that the way academic twitter evolved was a disaster: mixing our professional communication with our political beliefs in an open, activist-heavy platform was an immunological nightmare. I think you and I agree about this. But I think it means that the success of "wokeness" is epiphenomenal to the specific tenets of it.
I wrote about this recently -- "Musk Bad" is a strategically useful frame to get academics to stop using Twitter, but really the problem is "Twitter Bad for Priesthood"
Wokeness is powerful because the fundamental idea that it is based on, current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts or at least first-mover advantage in the distant past and maintained through collective action today, is undeniably true and important. Wokeness overreached by doing things like cancel culture and various clownish claims, but it was a vessel for this underlying idea.
I disagree with your implied claim that current inequalities ALWAYS reflect group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts in the distant past. There's the obvious rebuttal (which inequalities? does the fact that men are stronger than women indicate that men as a sex committed wrongful acts in the past to bring about this state of affairs? or that Norwegians are taller than Japanese?), but even if you're limiting yourself to economic inequality, there are innumerable counter-examples.
Well, as in many things, the concept itself is an important tool to admit within your model of the world. Much better to be able to grasp that than to live in some delusional Just World in which you're convinced that everyone only gets precisely what they deserve by rights of their own skill and effort. But as in many things, it being an important tool does not mean it can then be applied indiscriminately to ANY problem and produce equally useful results. Don't use a hammer to drive in screws.
I don't think this is the fundamental idea that wokeness is based on; I don't think it's original to wokeness; I don't think woke people are the only ones who believe it (many or most conservatives acknowledge the reality of intergenerational wealth and privilege); and many ideas or beliefs that people consider "woke" are obviously wholly disconnected from this idea (e.g. most apologists for wokeness in this thread are invoking the idea that respecting people's preferred pronouns is just "being a decent person", and gender ideology obviously does not derive from the idea that "current inequalities... reflect group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts").
It's not the only idea that's foundational to wokeness but most of the others are equally reasonable at their core. For instance gender ideology grows from the basic liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone.
That's such a bizarre gloss of the connection between the two beliefs that I'm rather flabbergasted. In no particular order:
1) The NORMATIVE belief that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone does not in anyway imply the FACTUAL claim that everyone has an intrinsic, ineffable "gender identity" knowable only to themselves.
2) Many liberals (e.g. JK Rowling) are more than willing to meet trans people halfway and say that how they choose to live their lives is their business. Proponents of gender ideology do not accept this and demand nothing less than absolute fealty to their worldview, and openly call for violence against people who do not recognise that trans women are literally women.
3) Most active proponents of gender ideology either do not recognise the "active harms" caused by their worldview (e.g. women convicts being raped in prison by "trans women" with fully intact male genitalia; children who have been permanently sterilised because they erroneously believed that medical transition is the only route to happiness and flourishing
4) If gender ideology flows logically from the liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone else, you would expect trans activists to be rather live and let live politically. I think it's fair to say that this is not remotely the case.
5) If gender ideology flows logically from the liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone else, why are trans activists not ardent supporters of transracial people? If all trans people are demanding is the right to live their lives in peace in a way that makes them happy, why don't they extend the same courtesy to transracial people?
Randomness obviously exists - either in the form of literal quantum randomness, or pseudo-randomness arisen from complex causal chains too long and entangled for us to interpret them as more than background noise. That is also obviously a factor. But if you see some kind of difference between two groups that has statistical significance then obviously that can not easily be written off as mere coincidence, and that's where having more articulate explanations than just "everyone gets what they deserves" comes in play.
Again, I don't think this should be applied bluntly to answer EVERY question. I agree some people go to ridiculous extremes to deny any contribution of individual merit or luck just like some people go to ridiculous extremes to deny any systemic biases. All of these are real effects that play off each other. Which produces which result is an empirical question that should be studied as such, not by starting with an answer and then working out the rationalisations for it.
I think you are straw-manning what they said. I think it's true that current inequalities are always _partially_ downstream of past acts, but in the sort of trivial sense that in a complicated world, _everything_ is partially downstream of things in the distant pass (and yes, I think limiting this discussion to social/cultural/economic inequalities is what was meant/intended in the first comment).
But what they actually said was that the idea that acts in the distant past impact current inequalities is true and important. I do think that that basic idea is sort of undeniable and obviously true. It is almost never the _only_ factor and it is very often not even the most _important_ factor (and not that rarely it is a _trivial_ factor), but it is ~always _a_ factor.
Excluding literal biological facts, I would actually be curious to hear an inequality that was in no way influenced by some at historical misdeed (even if it's only a misdeed by today's standards). Everything is downstream of somebody conquering, raping, pillaging someone else (something that is pretty universally frowned upon these, days, even if was the norm 1000 years ago).
>Excluding literal biological facts, I would actually be curious to hear an inequality that was in no way influenced by some at historical misdeed
I think that's goalpost-moving. Every inequality was "influenced" by historical misdeed in the sense that history is holistic and cause always precedes effect. Lomwad seemed to be making a stronger claim, that present economic inequalities are always directly caused (in whole or in part) by wrongful acts in the past.
But in an effort to answer your question, one trivial example is that, when you look at median American household salary by ethnicity, it does not remotely tally with recent historical examples of who was conquering, raping and pillaging who. Japanese Americans who had all of their possessions stolen from them and were forced into internment camps bounced back within a generation, without any raping or pillaging required (however you interpret that metaphorically). It's no exaggeration to say that the descendants of Japanese Americans who were interned during the war are wealthier than the descendants of the white Americans who interned them. American Jews famously make more money and wield more power and influence than the American average (particularly in specific industries like the film industry), but many of them can only trace their history in the US as far back as the 1930s, arriving there with little more than the shirts on their backs. To a first approximation, they didn't achieve their enviable position in American society by conquering, raping and pillaging - on the contrary, the only reason they came to the US was to ESCAPE from being conquered, raped and pillaged.
Nearly eleven years ago (!), Scott pointed out that, contra the standard progressive narrative, the American states which practiced slavery until the Civil War are generally poorer than the American mean (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/). If you can conquer, rape and pillage for hundreds of years until you are forced to stop doing so by the people who voluntarily stopped doing so several decades prior, and end up not just on parity with them but actually worse off, that ought to prompt some reflection as to how much explanatory power the "economic inequality is always the result of historical misdeeds" theory really holds.
Slave states were poorer than their northern, industrialised cousins already at the time of the Civil War, *that's why they lost the war*. I agree that the general idea that all evil results in wealth is wrong (and in fact is itself pretty dangerous: it suggests zero sum thinking, and once you adopt that mindset, you're left with either "I should sacrifice myself for the sake of others" or "I should hurt others for the sake of myself". The people who push that idea would like you to pick the former... but we know that in practice lots of people, if they internalise that mindset, choose the latter). But obviously there are forms of wealth that could not have been possible without committing certain evil acts.
For example the US' vast territory and natural resources were undeniably conquered at the expenses of other people who previously occupied them. War and genocide were involved. I don't think anyone can be blamed much for bringing smallpox to the Americas - not enough medical knowledge for anyone to do anything about it, even the most peaceful expedition imaginable would have caused the same tragedy - but the various acts of enslavement and genocide are entirely on those who perpetrated them.
That said, I agree we should actually stress that sometimes - more often than one would think, in fact - being an antisocial asshole is not just evil, it's ALSO stupid and simply hurts everyone around. Being a slaver wasn't just evil, it was also counterproductive, it created a class of lazy backwards aristocrats too busy keeping their own slaves from murdering them to do anything else productive with their time, and curtailed the slaves' own potential to contribute to society. Lose-lose. I do think that one big problem with the current leftist thought is this focus on zero sum mindset, which as I said is bad when people buy it. It's like this cultural substrate actually *primes* people to become fascists (which is what you get when a zero sum minded person takes the selfish path to the logical end: I can only survive by murdering and pillaging others, and everything else is just a pretty lie made up to stifle me).
If two people buy the same number of lottery tickets, and only one of them wins the jackpot, the resulting wealth inequality is completely independent of historical misdeeds.
(One could try to argue that the existence of inequality-producing lotteries could itself be a result of historical misdeeds, but as long as the lottery itself is fair, historical misdeeds have absolutely nothing to do with which player wins.)
True, but then who's more likely to better retain and invest the money they won - the person from a relatively affluent family who received a good education and is experienced in the ways of money, or the beggar from a long legacy of beggars who's easily scammed and has no ideas for what to do with money beyond spending it on necessities and luxuries?
Individuals can buck trends, but on large samples, these sort of effects will probably produce a systematic self-reinforcing feedback loop in which money draws in more money.
If you can't figure out the answer to that "obvious rebuttal" faster than you typed it out you haven't really thought about this much. If the rebuttal is obvious the person you're talking to is as capable of coming up with a good answer as you are, so when you haven't bothered it seems both disrespectful and like the prelude to a death-by-a-thousand-questions situation. It feels in bad faith.
If you answer the first 3 to 5 objections you have to an idea for yourself, from the honest, good faith position of people who believe that idea, you'll have more productive, deeper discussions (and understanding), and people like me will feel less like giving you (I admit) lightly condescending advice.
It's an obvious rebuttal to ME. There are plenty of people in the world (including many who comment on Scott's articles) who actively deny that there are any natural inequalities in male and female strength and athletic performance whatsoever, and insist that any allegedly innate disparities are purely the result of socialisation.
To me, the idea that some inequalities are just natural and biological (such as the difference in male and female strength and speed) and hence not the result of some historical misdeed seems so obvious as to hardly require any justification, but apparently there are people who disagree with me. Maybe it's dismissive of me to say that I think it's bonkers to believe otherwise, but there does come a point where you have to be like "if you don't believe this, this is a you problem". Am I obliged to engage with flat earthers in "good faith"? The idea that women would be just as strong as men if not for socialisation seems at least as insane and obviously wrong as the belief that the earth is flat.
You've been incredibly prolific in this comment section, and occasionally I've caught a well-expressed glimpse of my own beliefs in some of what you say, esp. regarding the denialism of biology latent in vocal and extreme trans-related activism.
This being said, I have some lightly patronising advice of my own concerning your contributions:
(i) You do not seem to have sufficient knowledge in biology to be an adequate foil to the biology-deniers who trigger you so.
(ii) You do not seem to engage with non-biology-related challenges to your worldview in good faith. As commenters gave gone to great length to convey to you, it's possible for many of the trans-rights-conveyed points to be correct or have value even as their extreme versions go off the rails and deny reality. Acknowledging these points when you can will go some way towards bolstering your own argumentation.
(iii) Your tone and choice of words consistently suggest that this is a highly personally and/or politically charged topic for you. To put it bluntly, you come across as a hater, or at the very least someone who thinks trans people are in some way ill-intentioned as a group, or collectively harmful.
These collectively mean that, at least to my eyes, you are hurting your own cause, at least in this context.
> current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts or at least first-mover advantage in the distant past and maintained through collective action today
The OPs claim was that inequalities do not *solely* arise from a single clause, so why are you claiming an implicit "ALWAYS"?
>current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts
That seems definitive, without any obvious hedging. If they'd said "current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit, but CAN also..." or "MAY also", it'd be more equivocal and I wouldn't find it as objectionable.
I disagree to the extent that I think the OP's statement includes the possiblity of a contribution approaching zero and we can never be definitive enough about these things to gain certainty, but I see where you're coming from.
I assume that most "viruses" are based on some amount of truth. A truth that doesn't overreach (and so is therefore a net positive) is a reform, while a truth that overreaches (and so is therefore a net negative) is a virus.
I think you're overstating the case. The only undeniable part is the mundane observation that history can sometimes have lingering influences on the present. The rest is debatable. The presumption that we should separate the population into semi-arbitrary groups, and then consider average differences between them on any desirable trait or outcome to be a grave injustice is not obvious.
Yeah, wokeness, much like Marxism, gets at a fundamental truth of the world. They see the problems quite well in many cases, but some of their solutions are bad or impractical. Trying to declare them nothing but left-wing wonk untethered to reality is a denial of reality as sweeping as anything else. It's just a denial that rests on consensus.
The problem is that both tend to think they have identified *the* fundamental truth rather than just *a* fundamental truth, and thus pound every "nail" they see with their hammer (and sickle).
As an apologist for wokeness I disagree with this characterization. Certainly this is how *some* woke people think but for me the reason to look beyond "individual merit" is the factors in society that prevent individual merit from being measured effectively. Such as racism and misogyny that are still with us. While you can look for the roots of these issues in the past, the way they arose has no effect on how I think they should be addressed now.
“Solely” is doing a lot of work here. It’s frankly incredibly disingenuous to pretend that’s what the dispute over wokeness was about, whether inequality was “solely” due to merit. And wokeness also came with a whole host of prescriptions that absolutely do not undeniably follow from this premise.
The "immune system" in academic fields that are estranged from industries has been incredibly weak since the recession. Because of poor funding and rising wages outside of the academy, a comparatively large proportion of people who remain in these fields are making a financial sacrifice for ideological reasons. However, donors are also disproportionately likely to be ideologues: a recent study found that donors were systematically more extreme than party voters. This mirrors the Marxist takeover in the 20th century, where USSR funded academic institutions to ideologically capture them. That would mean not only is the immune system weak and the virus potent, but the patient is living in close quarters with an infected community, to stretch the metaphor.
I would add that I think there is a major reason for weak immune system, linked to how scientific priesthood differ from classic priesthood: It builds theories both predictive and falsifiable about some aspect of the world which can be independently tested, giving an alternative (but royal) entry into priesthood stardom: come with something more predictive than the current best, or falsify the current best, and you will get a fast ticket to cardinal or pope level, regardless of how remote to priesthood you were. It used to work in fields with strong experimental wings, difficult theories but easy falsification and big bonus for being right in the form of new technology. Hard science, especially since industrial revolution. However, since WWii which marked it's peak in term of technological trickling down, there is a clear crisis there, essentially closing the fast path (aka reality check) and I feel that not only hard science is much less immune to crazy ideological derive than it was, but it de-anchored the soft sciences and let them devolve back into classic religion-like priesthood
It seems intuitive to me that the thing that is causing all this chaos is social media. It is the thing that happened right when everything started becoming crazy. Hank Green has a really good video on how humanity is going through a moment because of it. (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8PndpFPL8g) (Are we allowed to link stuff? If not I'm sorry) . It seems like it's causing a lowestcommondenominatorification of everything. Outside priesthoods this looks like advice about eating capybara testicles to cure your cancer. In priesthoods the lowest common denominator ended up being all the woke stuff.
Sorry but why is wokeness bad? Is this term used differently in the US? I can't really think of a reason why it's a problem to address someone the way they want to be addressed?
This seems like a "assumed clear" premise to the whole text but I don't get why that should be clear. Wokeness is as far as I know not defined very well and some parts of it may be bad while some parts are probably good and most are just noise.
Nevermind I asked this question some time ago already and apparently it really IS a different beast in the US and also what Scott seems to fear is for me more in the word "censorship" and not in the word wokeness. Im still assuming getting "canceled" is not as bad as it is told but I'm not from the US and also not someone with opinions that he usually canceled so I'm probably biased.
> what Scott seems to fear is for me more in the word "censorship" and not in the word wokeness.
idk about scott, but I doubt american freedom of speech is going anywhere(an american hillbilly has more freedom to say slurs then the British royal family)
Communism, the death of merit, child genital mutilation are worse.
I think our incoming administration is even more interested in restricting speech than our outgoing administration was, and hope our institutions are robust enough to resist.
.... While Im anti trusting trump and the elon h1b drama was last week; there were just purges of wrong thinkers during 2020 in a historical moment of mass-fear.
Im aware of a few cases of claims of elon removing blue checks, it aint 2020. If trump has *any* power over blueskys banning people Id be positively shocked.
Well, the question of whether trump has the power is really just another version of whether our institutions are robust enough to resist what he wants.
in 2020 there are just emails from the government telling the social medias to censor people and *they did*; its established fact this happened, your being absurd to claim your more worried about it happening now, when it already happened then; even if you believe trump will do it with 99% odds, 99% < 1
Trump could be pure evil, he wont have the same crisis as "biden" did to censor; and I was still speaking the entire time(tho I am unemployable apparently)
I was unaware of this news story but still not 2020; lets not forget how hysterical everyone got and how that horrible line of families breaking down was crossed, jobs were lost.
A politically active person getting politically induced legal threats have always been a flaw with american freedom of speech(hence the slapp laws existing in the first place) this is a return to the norm, maybe a return to a slow tend line of decline if you wish.
Trump sucks in many ways, including wasting time on the lawsuit, but I do not think there's any way he will be worse on free speech than the Biden or theoretical Harris admins.
- Refusing to publish studies that contradict woke premises (eg that immigration might have negative effects, or that anti-police campaigns backfired, or that some problem might not be caused by racism)
- Saying false things because they think it is helpful for activism (eg that anti-lockdown protests would spread COVID, but anti-police-brutality ones wouldn't)
- Doing extreme and controversial things because it supposedly corrects a disparity (eg prioritizing COVID vaccines based on race rather than age, even knowing this would result in thousands of extra deaths)
- Prioritizing identity/activism rather than merit in hiring and promotion decisions, for example basing hiring on "diversity statements".
- Extreme versions of language policing like calling criminals "justice-involved individuals"
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who objects to the above, and of people who object to that, and so on recursively
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who points these things out or gives the public information about them
I'm saying this because Leo had a real question and I want to answer it, but let's try to avoid turning this comments section into one big "wokeness: good or bad" fight.
Ok thanks. As I said afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany and all of this is for me more in the term "censorship" and not wokeness.
In Germany afaik all of this is just fantasy "I'm the real victim here" published by the far-right and nazi people to propagate THEIR censorship as justified.
This make it very confusing when suddenly there are posts like this where I'm not assuming far right ideology and agenda that use these dangers as a real problem to solve when it's not actually a real problem in my region.
There absolutely is stuff like diversity hiring in Germany. I distinctly recall one instance where a postdoc position was advertised for women only, despite this being literally illegal. I didn't go out of my way to seek this out, a friend of mine organically stumbled across it as he was looking for positions (spoiler: he didn't get an interview).
As you said it is illegal. Your friend could have used this to make some money. (It is also illegal to exclude trans people and apparently there is someone who uses this to claim money multiple times because someone forgot to include a "d" in his ad but that's also just a fringe case. Like assholes exist. That doesn't make it a social problem. But maybe I'm biased idk. In my bubble people tend to be sexist and racist and "phobic" against everything not cis-heterosexual and not even called out for it. They DO complain a lot about being called out for it and not "being able to say anything at all anymore" while saying the things they say the can't say anymore without anything happening.)
Wokeness is a frustratingly broad term, and seems to be used about anything to the left of Mussolini that the speaker doesn't like.
I don't doubt that the examples Scott cite are real, and I agree that they are very bad, but 99% of the time I come across someone complaining about wokeness it is someone trying to sell me on the idea that the west has fallen because the latest dumb blockbuster had a black woman in a leading role, or something of similar substance.
This makes it very hard for me to know the extent to which this is a real problem or not outside the US. I'm not American, but I'm willing to take the word of Scott and a few other writers who have presented concrete evidence of 'wokeness' in the sense Scott uses the term being a problem there. Of course there is no shortage of people claiming it's a problem in Europe as well, but it all seems to be the same sort of complaints Leo mentions above (which again, is also on par with 99% of the American complaints), in so far as there is any signal beyond that, it gets lost in the noise.
Disputes over terminology are generally worse than useless, but in this case I think it would be in the best interest of people who want to talk about the real problem Scott is describing here, to come up with another term to help normies distinguish their concerns from the "I'm just mad I can't say the n-word at work anymore" crowd.
> distinguish their concerns from the "I'm just mad I can't say the n-word at work anymore" crowd
...when the concern is woke censorship, aka "X doubled down on saying the n-word at work and ended up leaving their job because they picked this particular hill to die on", how are they to distinguish that from the crowd?
>As I said afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany
>In Germany afaik all of this is just fantasy "I'm the real victim here" published by the far-right and nazi people to propagate THEIR censorship as justified.
I think a lot of people both inside and outside Germany would vehemently disagree with both your description of reality and your particular framing on this. I would encourage you to at least entertain the possibility that you might be misfiring here if your stance is that "too much wokeness" as described by Scott is something unique to the Anglosphere.
Sure, probably- I'm going to back out of this conversation as I'm not German and I don't want to overclaim my own knowledge of the situation. All I was trying to say was that the OC felt very confident and my baseline (which I've also adjusted a little) was way off that of Leo.
Hm okay. I really doubt that. Do you have any concrete evidence when people were actually canceled or censored or self-censored for stuff like Scott mentioned in Germany or Europe? I know only of people who complain very loud to an audience of right leaning people that they are being cancelled while making a lot of money with racist and sexist stuff they say and are preaching to that same audience.
Or maybe you have an idea where I can get this problem that is not infested with Nazis? I just can't relate at all to the stuff that Scott is describing. That to me sounds like something to be feared if the far right will get the majority, which is not unlikely to happen soon. Not something I have to be afraid of from the left.
Edit: sorry I misformulated: evidence that this is done systematic and frequent. Not some uniq cases where it happened somewhere once.
Ctrl-F "TM", first result. Unfortunately the news site linked is in Swedish, but if you search for "Kristina Sundquist", you'll find a bunch of RW news sites repeating it.
The first result I saw was the phrase "COVID treatment". If I require a matching case, there's a comment by Bella Marte which contains zero links. What is the Swedish citation?
Lol. I'm French, so I kinda institutionally hate Germany, but if we park the word "woke" for a minute, is it not the case that German elites are so utterly captured by group think that they
1. thought Nordstream was a good idea?
2. Did not blink at welcoming an unprecedented number of mainly unskilled non- German speaking immigrants?
3. Phased out nuclear power when anyone with 2 non-group-think captured neurons to rub together could see that it would make absolutely everything (prices, carbon, energy supply, dependency on Russia) worse?
4. Don't seem to have blinked at the fact that senior politicians actually falsified documents to that end?
5. Don't blink that people can punished _more_ for complaining about rapists than for the actual (as per a valid trial) raping ?
I think that last category is your "victim card" extreme right - if so, don't they have a point??
The last one is certainly woke, and probably the second one (at least if you had the same "this will be GREAT and everyone who disagrees is a Nazi" that we had) but 1, 3, 4 are just the combination of leftism and being unable to see that actions have consequences other than the ones you wish they had (a prerequisite for many forms of leftism)?
Dude, you literally live in a country were a rape victim got a harsher sentence than her rapist for saying mean things about him on social media just because the rapist was from a minority group. Are you arguing in bad faith and playing dumb or are just dumb?
No I'm not. It wasn't "mean things" it was threats. It wasn't because he was from a minority group but because he was a minor. Are YOU arguing in food faith or why are you ignoring this?
Edit: oops wrong post. If you mean me and the case about that one guy that was a minor and the woman who threatened him in his messages it still applies. If not I have to first look up what case you are talking about.
I despise Nazism, but I think Holocaust denial is free speech (as the latter is, in it's pure form, descriptive while the former is normative). And yet the latter is illegal along with the former. That is not related to American "wokeness" but it is a similar problem IMO.
FWIW this same claim was made in the U.S. for a long time before the Overton window shifted. Antone who said this sort of thing was a problem was dismissed as far right.
It could well be the case that you are surrounded by legit racist and people whining and exaggerating as well. Those can both be true at once. These are scary times for everyone and I think that tends to amplify our instinctive tribal responses.
Along these lines, it should be obviously true that in any given bubble the Overton window may be at any given location. Even if the average Overton window lands too high up, for an individual it may be too low. Since many media outlets broadcast to very large areas, their own Overton window may seem bizarrely biased in one direction to one region, while in another its biased in the opposite direction. Then, since an individual just doesn't inhabit the other bubbles, it looks like the media outlet is just a malicious actor.
Here is a concrete case in Germany. The wikipedia article even explicitly talks about the controversy over the media bias. Now you could argue there are good reasons the media was biased, but you can make those arguments with many groups that media outlets selectively decide not to apply this to. I think this is a prime example of what this sub would consider as woke overreach.
Though I do think Germany is less woke than the US right now, because in the US, selective reporting and even highlighting of race doesn't get up roars. It's basically the bog standard.
In fact I was in Germany a year after this incident. I talked with a group of women raising awareness for sexual assault and they mentioned this very incident. They proclaimed to not be aware this was a mostly migrant caused event. Bias is like make up when it's working. You won't notice it, but you will be influenced by it.
Addendum: it can be hard to say whether there is bias for or against something in a society. If you boil it down it can be hard to find where bias is even bad because most biased people claim to have a good reason for it! Almost by definition some must. In the US, there has been a shift where powerful actors (CEOs, politicians, any public figure, and especially universities) absolutely can say and do mean things to right wing groups, but will get absolutely demolished for doing that to left wing groups in any way. And it's not reflective of the public average. This is a problem because these powerful institutions of course have control over others. There are right wing powerful actors, but for the most part they aren't institutions most people have to go through, unlike jobs and universities.
That's... Not a good example. One sentence is due to insult which can be argued that it's to harsh in this case. The other sentence was "nothing" because of age rules that have nothing to do with wokeness. Both a combined to an argument even though they have not much to do with each other. The people you need to address for lowering the general age rules for sentencing are different people than the ones you need to address so people get no sentences for insults. Also she could have insulted him just fine with no consequences if she used slightly different words.
>One sentence is due to insult which can be argued that it's to harsh in this case.
Well yeah, that's exactly what I'm arguing. And I'm arguing that it's "too harsh" because wokeness has arrived in Germany.
I don't know how anyone can sincerely entertain the idea that wokeness hasn't arrived in Germany, while also being cognizant of the fact that one can be literally imprisoned (albeit briefly) for describing a convicted rapist as a "disgusting freak" in a private communication. If that's not what liberal and conservative people are complaining about when they complain about wokeness, what else could it be?
I looked it up. She was sentenced not only for insult but also for threatening. It was direct communication alright, but directly to the one. Also she was one of 140 cases after his contact info had been leaked.
I thought the one about young people is in the constitution but that wasn't right. So the people who could change that are actually the same people. What I meant is that these are very different political goals and campaigns if you want to achieve them and the one about young people being sentenced has not to do much with wokeness in my opinion.
I have a four-year-old Dell laptop that cost 2,000 € at that time and, after the customized comments were taken into use, experience no problems.
In the field of American studies (and the subset African American studies), Henry Louis Gates, Jr. sits both inside the priesthood (in his Harvard professor role) and outside (with his TV work, notably Finding Your Roots). Like GMU economists, he does more than anyone to bring the public into academic conversations (in this case about history and genealogy) that the priesthood largely controls. I once heard a professor lament "I'd write a whole book slamming him [Gates] but my grandmother would kill me."
There are always popular preists who engage with the public in approved ways. You have to walk a fine line of appealing to the masses but not being heretical, so you need to be both in good standing in two communities. The pope is a person. He is the pope of AAS. There are also sometimes lesser popes. Academics who write popular books, but aren't heretics. Still it's risky, I think of Jared Dimond as a popular priest who the lost a battle and is now mostly considered a heretic.
Diamond's sin is writing outside of his field. He's a biochemist writing history. From historians' perspective, he's not a heretic; he's a rando who doesn't know what he's talking about.
I didn't think he was a chemist at all. I thought he studied birds.
He started out in membrane physiology- ornithology was his second career, and anthropology was his third.
Plus, he didn't really know what he was talking about. Or if he did, he purposely presented the supporting data and ignored examples that contradicted his thesis. I go back and on whether he did this on purpose or not.
I wouldn't say that, i think he's a great and very important public intellectual. Like a lot of big thinkers, he gets some big things wrong (some of them were obvious to me immediately on reading, like the idea that Australia has no easily domesticable wild plants), but I think he gets more right in the end.
It's odd, I've often come across references to Diamond being debunked or discredited, but every time I try to dig into the details it's either minor quibbles that don't really contest his core point, or obvious absurdities like trying to claim Europeans never actually conquered most of the world. Is there a source anywhere that actually tackles the question of "Why Europe?" and comes to a substantially different conclusion than Diamond's?
Same. There's even an entire book claiming to refute one of Diamond's books, and does nothing of the sort. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/0521733669/ref=acr_dp_hist_1?ie=UTF8&filterByStar=one_star&reviewerType=all_reviews#reviews-filter-bar
I've also searched for criticisms of him on r/askhistorians, and I just saw people getting upset that he took on a bigger project than "here's what we learned from digging into this one tomb."
I took a history class freshman year on this exact issue, and my professor's argument was that one of the biggest reasons why the New World was less advanced in terms of military technology was that iron and coal deposits were so far away from each other that it would have been almost impossible to coincidentally make steel, which was almost inevitable in the Old World where such deposits overlapped.
As far as major inaccuracies, iirc one of the biggest was that Diamond had this whole argument about sedentary food production being easier in the Old World leading to more stratified and complex societies leading to military superiority, but the Inca Empire was in fact massive, sedentary/farming-based, and highly stratified. The lack of horses was a major factor in their defeat, but they weren't helpless in the way Diamond describes; they actually persisted fighting the settlers in some capacity for decades, including one point at which they did massive damage to the settler groups by organizing massive groups of people to drop boulders on them.
This is disorganized and I could look for/think of more if you'd like but these were some of the big complaints he had.
Is it a coincidence that both of the individuals supporting Diamond's thesis have typically Jewish names?
This is my experience as well. Anything i read debunking him smells desperation and cope. They are quibbles about the story at the introduction, which is a dumb story and it's wrong, but wasn't the point of the book. The basic point that Eurasia is big east to west, so things moved quickly between different parts, and that mostly explains it, and no one refutes that. They just don't like big thinking and have a priestly visceral reaction to his work. It's kind of shameful. Like I keep waiting for the debunkers to you know get to a point and debunk, but they got nothing.
I came back and edited this...
My main problem with Diamond is he puts theory first and then selectively collects facts to support his theory rather than working from facts to develop a theory. Worse yet, many of his facts are just plain wrong, and he ignores the facts that don't support his theory. The so-called "big thinkers" like Diamond, who like to make grand simplifications while not bothering to dig into the actual data, are really small thinkers who distort our understanding of the world.
Most diseases do not transfer to humans from domesticates, is the most obvious one. Smallpox, ebola, covid, etc, do not come from domesticates. This is a core part of his explanation of the disease gradient between the Americas and the Old World - and the disease gradient is the single biggest factor in the ultimate crushing victory of the Old World - and is actively wrong.
Additionally, the disease gradient worked the opposite way, in Africa's favor, despite the fact that many of the most important domesticates (horses, cows) basically die on contact with Sub-Sahelian African environs due to sleeping sickness.
Okay that actually is an interesting criticism that makes sense, thanks.
I haven't read that book, but as far as I can tell, it argues for the geographic superiority of Eurasia, even including North Africa, over the rest of the world.
Anyone who sums it up as "this is why Europe triumphed" is cheating.
Why Western Europe and not India, the Middle East, or China?
You're not wrong, but answering the sub-question of "why not America, Sub-Saharan Africa, or Oceania" is at least a lot closer to addressing the "Why Europe" question than anything I've seen from his critics.
And don't forget that most of the game-changing inventions that changed the historical dynamics in Europe came from China. Paper and printing, iron and steel production, gunpowder, the compass, mechanical clocks, wheelbarrows, etc. One theory is that the reason China didn't exploit these inventions to dominate the world, is they had a relatively centralized empire most of the time. While Europeans were divided into feuding states that needed to exploit things like gunpowder to gain an advantage of their competitors. Note: I don't buy into this theory.
The short answer is that it wasn't just geographical, although geography played a role- especially in relation to coal sources transportable by waterways.
There was an epistemic layer. The monarch/sovereign state needed to lose it's absolute monopoly on property- in English Common Law the sovereign is also subject to the law. More importantly, religion/the state need to lose its absolute monopoly on truth.
There are other reasons. Guilt/forgiveness cultures are rare- honor/shame far more common. Both the scientific and entrepreneurial industrial revolution required a culture in which the consequences for mistakes and failures could be overcome. Japan has a suicide forest. A campaigner tried to have this changed. The authorities response was 'why would we want to that?'
As a central cultural archetypal figure. Jesus was absolutely essential for the global revolution which raised roughly 85% - 90% of the world's population up out of the types of poverty which most modern Westerners cannot even imagine.
> Is there a source anywhere that actually tackles the question of "Why Europe?" and comes to a substantially different conclusion than Diamond's?
I feel that you're asking a question as if you had looked long and hard, but... if you had looked long and hard surely you would have come across some other explanations.
I suggest two books to get you started:
Escape from Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
By: Walter Scheidel
The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous
By: Joseph Henrich
Both are excellent, in fact far better than GG&S.
As far as "debunking" Diamond, well it depends on the specific argument. The idea that domesticable plants were more available in the fertile crescent has been attacked. I don't know enough to talk about it. Domesticable animals too, for example Zebra can be domesticated. The idea that Europeans were resistant to germs because the lived with domesticated animals seems false too as most germs didn't come through that route. The idea that length of shoreline lead to fragmentation is very tenuous in itself (lots of places with this feature), there are much better explanations.
And so on, and so on.
I like the idea that seasons and agriculture lead to selection for consciousness and intelligence (seemed like a direct consequence of the ideas in GG&S), but Diamond precisely told us that actually Europeans were dumber than Papuans for genetic reasons and because they watch too much TV.
It's less "as if I've looked long and hard" and more that it seems odd to me that people criticizing GG&S never seem to bring up alternate approaches to the question it's addressing. If people think Diamond addressed the question poorly, I would think the natural reaction would be to point to someone they think did it better, but in my experience it seems more common to act offended that he raised the question at all.
And I appreciate the book recommendations, although TBH I'm pretty unlikely to devote the time to read a full book on the subject any time soon.
Diamond,Jared, _Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies_, in the prologue:
"[...] natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies."
Funny how Diamond earlier had mentioned how despicable genetic explanations are, to suddenly come up with a genetic explanation of why Papuans can keep track of plants and animals better than Europeans.
Also, it never occurs to him that once agriculture started it may have created the conditions for the genetic selection of smarter more conscientious people. And yet, he believes that selection did happen, but only for resistance to some diseases.
In short, Diamond suffered very strongly of confirmation bias.
I think Diamond was quite open in the intro to his book that he did it on purpose.
There is a tendency among Jews to want to downplay racial differences because the Jewish religion treats ethnic competition as a matter of kill-or-be-killed (at least at pertains to Jews vs. non-Jews), and this naturally leads them to be fearful of the consequences if people were to believe race is real.
Or maybe they have a millenia-long history of people wanting to eradicate them down to the last child, with one of the latest and closest-to-successful incarnations very much on racial grounds?
What you are describing is Jewish religious teaching, which is not at all the same as history.
Anyone who behaved as the Jews behave, would have caused people to want to kill them. But the Jews behave this way largely because of their belief that others just innately want to kill them.
I’m not sure that “American Studies” counts as a priesthood. I think a priesthood has to have a few things
1. A specialized body of interconnected knowledge. I can’t form a priesthood around knowing ten random facts which any normie could learn if they so wished, the knowledge has to be such that it must be learned sequentially— that is, require a series of inferential steps to acquire. Otherwise, a lay person could learn the subject piecewise, studying whatever parts were relavant to the particular issue without being meaningfully impaired by not knowing the rest of the subject matter.
2. It must be professional: its members must rely on it for a significant portion of their livelyhood. Otherwise the incentives against coruption which Scott discusses don’t work nearly as well. Also, this is the requirement which keeps fandoms from being classified as a priesthood.
3. It has to have public relavance. We care what doctors and lawyers and scientists think becuase we have questions about health or the law of the natural world whose answers the priesthood is better positioned to discover. And we actually care about the answers to these questions, which is from whence the priesthood ultimately derives its power over us.
I maintain that American Studies, as an academic discipline, is not a priesthood, because it fails point 1. If you nuked the discipline from orbit, there is no relavant question which the public would be thereby unable to answer. Certainly, there are interesting questions which a priest could answer better than a random person, but these could be answered by an economist, a historian, or a sociologist just as easily, without the economist, historian, or sociologist knowing the whole basics of American studies, or indeed anything outside their field.
African American Studies is a priesthood.
By Scott's definition of a priesthood, I would argue that it is not -- the definition of a priesthood implies that in normal times, they have an epistemic advantage over the public society.
Academic grievance studies are more like a cult masquerading as a priesthood.
An ephemeral priesthood? Aren't they all?
Lawyers have been a functioning profession for a very long time. Not ephemeral at all on the scale of human societies. Unless you mean a geologic time scale, in which case who cares.
"Law" has. A given type of lawyer has not. Same with "religion" and "medicine." That's not what we're talking about here. Those aren't priesthoods. The group of individuals who have passed the American bar exam and currently practice law is a priesthood.
> 1. A specialized body of interconnected knowledge. I can’t form a priesthood around knowing ten random facts which any normie could learn if they so wished, the knowledge has to be such that it must be learned sequentially— that is, require a series of inferential steps to acquire. Otherwise, a lay person could learn the subject piecewise, studying whatever parts were relavant to the particular issue without being meaningfully impaired by not knowing the rest of the subject matter.
I would dispute that. Medical textbooks are available in any decent library. Any amateur can read up the literature on any medical specialty, it takes some time and smarts, but is quite possible. Case in point: our host has offered literally hundreds of articles on all kinds of topics a mile removed from his medical specialty (e.g. on economics, or literature, or philosophy) and seems rarely be hampered by not knowing the secrets of any particular priesthood.
Your medicine skill level is not what makes you a part of the physicians priesthood any more than a PhD in theology makes you a Catholic priest. It does not matter how much you know about medicine, if you operate on people without being ordained as a priest, you will go to jail, just like any bishop would excommunicate any layperson who decided that they know enough theology to celebrate the Eucharist.
These priesthoods which enjoy a state-sponsored monopoly (Lawyers are another one) are generally the the tightest knit communities: if you are kicked out of your profession, you are just an unemployed person with a maxed skill which is about as professionally useful to you as if you had spend a decade leveling up your Star Trek lore.
My own field is STEM academics, which is a little more porous. Sure, nobody will publish you without a STEM-adjacent degree (and preferably a PhD degree and an important professor co-author), but at least you can move between subfields. The phrase "Go back to your outer electron orbitals and do not sully this room with your presence, chemist!" is rarely if ever spoken.
"and seems rarely be hampered by not knowing the secrets of any particular priesthood"
I'd say he is often hampered by lack of field-specific expertise but does an admirable job of compensating for it through general smarts, extensive research, and interaction with his readership that includes experts in many of those topics. Still, he says lots of things that end up needing correction or clarification, and would be absolutely silly to try to publish in a journal of that field.
Likewise in medicine, you can read up on a specific problem and often learn details that most doctors wouldn't know off hand, but if you tried to put that knowledge into practice without consulting a doctor first you'd be likely to screw up in important ways.
...is this analogous to Stephen Jay Gould or John Kenneth Galbraith? (See: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/evolute.html
> Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is bevolved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there.
)
Steven pinker is another example of this, with his popular writing and Harvard psychology professorship.
Accepting the premise that this "infection" was worse than previous infections -- it could be that this "virus" (wokeness) was more virulent than other viruses OR that the immune system of the priesthood was weaker than for previous infections.
You seem to favor the former explanation, but I think the latter is far more likely. We are literally in the middle of the largest revolution in communication technology in human history; the barrier between inside and outside the priesthood is radically different than it was before.
Now, I think that academics have done a *particularly poor job* of adapting to the reality of communication today. I study social media and politics, and I think that the way academic twitter evolved was a disaster: mixing our professional communication with our political beliefs in an open, activist-heavy platform was an immunological nightmare. I think you and I agree about this. But I think it means that the success of "wokeness" is epiphenomenal to the specific tenets of it.
I wrote about this recently -- "Musk Bad" is a strategically useful frame to get academics to stop using Twitter, but really the problem is "Twitter Bad for Priesthood"
https://www.chronicle.com/article/universities-should-abandon-x
Wokeness is powerful because the fundamental idea that it is based on, current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts or at least first-mover advantage in the distant past and maintained through collective action today, is undeniably true and important. Wokeness overreached by doing things like cancel culture and various clownish claims, but it was a vessel for this underlying idea.
I disagree with your implied claim that current inequalities ALWAYS reflect group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts in the distant past. There's the obvious rebuttal (which inequalities? does the fact that men are stronger than women indicate that men as a sex committed wrongful acts in the past to bring about this state of affairs? or that Norwegians are taller than Japanese?), but even if you're limiting yourself to economic inequality, there are innumerable counter-examples.
Well, as in many things, the concept itself is an important tool to admit within your model of the world. Much better to be able to grasp that than to live in some delusional Just World in which you're convinced that everyone only gets precisely what they deserve by rights of their own skill and effort. But as in many things, it being an important tool does not mean it can then be applied indiscriminately to ANY problem and produce equally useful results. Don't use a hammer to drive in screws.
I don't think this is the fundamental idea that wokeness is based on; I don't think it's original to wokeness; I don't think woke people are the only ones who believe it (many or most conservatives acknowledge the reality of intergenerational wealth and privilege); and many ideas or beliefs that people consider "woke" are obviously wholly disconnected from this idea (e.g. most apologists for wokeness in this thread are invoking the idea that respecting people's preferred pronouns is just "being a decent person", and gender ideology obviously does not derive from the idea that "current inequalities... reflect group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts").
It's not the only idea that's foundational to wokeness but most of the others are equally reasonable at their core. For instance gender ideology grows from the basic liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone.
That's such a bizarre gloss of the connection between the two beliefs that I'm rather flabbergasted. In no particular order:
1) The NORMATIVE belief that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone does not in anyway imply the FACTUAL claim that everyone has an intrinsic, ineffable "gender identity" knowable only to themselves.
2) Many liberals (e.g. JK Rowling) are more than willing to meet trans people halfway and say that how they choose to live their lives is their business. Proponents of gender ideology do not accept this and demand nothing less than absolute fealty to their worldview, and openly call for violence against people who do not recognise that trans women are literally women.
3) Most active proponents of gender ideology either do not recognise the "active harms" caused by their worldview (e.g. women convicts being raped in prison by "trans women" with fully intact male genitalia; children who have been permanently sterilised because they erroneously believed that medical transition is the only route to happiness and flourishing
4) If gender ideology flows logically from the liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone else, you would expect trans activists to be rather live and let live politically. I think it's fair to say that this is not remotely the case.
5) If gender ideology flows logically from the liberal principle that people should be able to live their lives however they want unless it's actively harming someone else, why are trans activists not ardent supporters of transracial people? If all trans people are demanding is the right to live their lives in peace in a way that makes them happy, why don't they extend the same courtesy to transracial people?
I believe randomness exists, which doesn't fit a Just World, but it also has nothing to do with wokeness.
Randomness obviously exists - either in the form of literal quantum randomness, or pseudo-randomness arisen from complex causal chains too long and entangled for us to interpret them as more than background noise. That is also obviously a factor. But if you see some kind of difference between two groups that has statistical significance then obviously that can not easily be written off as mere coincidence, and that's where having more articulate explanations than just "everyone gets what they deserves" comes in play.
Again, I don't think this should be applied bluntly to answer EVERY question. I agree some people go to ridiculous extremes to deny any contribution of individual merit or luck just like some people go to ridiculous extremes to deny any systemic biases. All of these are real effects that play off each other. Which produces which result is an empirical question that should be studied as such, not by starting with an answer and then working out the rationalisations for it.
I'm not talking about differences between groups, but between individuals.
I think you are straw-manning what they said. I think it's true that current inequalities are always _partially_ downstream of past acts, but in the sort of trivial sense that in a complicated world, _everything_ is partially downstream of things in the distant pass (and yes, I think limiting this discussion to social/cultural/economic inequalities is what was meant/intended in the first comment).
But what they actually said was that the idea that acts in the distant past impact current inequalities is true and important. I do think that that basic idea is sort of undeniable and obviously true. It is almost never the _only_ factor and it is very often not even the most _important_ factor (and not that rarely it is a _trivial_ factor), but it is ~always _a_ factor.
Excluding literal biological facts, I would actually be curious to hear an inequality that was in no way influenced by some at historical misdeed (even if it's only a misdeed by today's standards). Everything is downstream of somebody conquering, raping, pillaging someone else (something that is pretty universally frowned upon these, days, even if was the norm 1000 years ago).
>Excluding literal biological facts, I would actually be curious to hear an inequality that was in no way influenced by some at historical misdeed
I think that's goalpost-moving. Every inequality was "influenced" by historical misdeed in the sense that history is holistic and cause always precedes effect. Lomwad seemed to be making a stronger claim, that present economic inequalities are always directly caused (in whole or in part) by wrongful acts in the past.
But in an effort to answer your question, one trivial example is that, when you look at median American household salary by ethnicity, it does not remotely tally with recent historical examples of who was conquering, raping and pillaging who. Japanese Americans who had all of their possessions stolen from them and were forced into internment camps bounced back within a generation, without any raping or pillaging required (however you interpret that metaphorically). It's no exaggeration to say that the descendants of Japanese Americans who were interned during the war are wealthier than the descendants of the white Americans who interned them. American Jews famously make more money and wield more power and influence than the American average (particularly in specific industries like the film industry), but many of them can only trace their history in the US as far back as the 1930s, arriving there with little more than the shirts on their backs. To a first approximation, they didn't achieve their enviable position in American society by conquering, raping and pillaging - on the contrary, the only reason they came to the US was to ESCAPE from being conquered, raped and pillaged.
Nearly eleven years ago (!), Scott pointed out that, contra the standard progressive narrative, the American states which practiced slavery until the Civil War are generally poorer than the American mean (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/26/compound-interest-is-the-least-powerful-force-in-the-universe/). If you can conquer, rape and pillage for hundreds of years until you are forced to stop doing so by the people who voluntarily stopped doing so several decades prior, and end up not just on parity with them but actually worse off, that ought to prompt some reflection as to how much explanatory power the "economic inequality is always the result of historical misdeeds" theory really holds.
Slave states were poorer than their northern, industrialised cousins already at the time of the Civil War, *that's why they lost the war*. I agree that the general idea that all evil results in wealth is wrong (and in fact is itself pretty dangerous: it suggests zero sum thinking, and once you adopt that mindset, you're left with either "I should sacrifice myself for the sake of others" or "I should hurt others for the sake of myself". The people who push that idea would like you to pick the former... but we know that in practice lots of people, if they internalise that mindset, choose the latter). But obviously there are forms of wealth that could not have been possible without committing certain evil acts.
For example the US' vast territory and natural resources were undeniably conquered at the expenses of other people who previously occupied them. War and genocide were involved. I don't think anyone can be blamed much for bringing smallpox to the Americas - not enough medical knowledge for anyone to do anything about it, even the most peaceful expedition imaginable would have caused the same tragedy - but the various acts of enslavement and genocide are entirely on those who perpetrated them.
That said, I agree we should actually stress that sometimes - more often than one would think, in fact - being an antisocial asshole is not just evil, it's ALSO stupid and simply hurts everyone around. Being a slaver wasn't just evil, it was also counterproductive, it created a class of lazy backwards aristocrats too busy keeping their own slaves from murdering them to do anything else productive with their time, and curtailed the slaves' own potential to contribute to society. Lose-lose. I do think that one big problem with the current leftist thought is this focus on zero sum mindset, which as I said is bad when people buy it. It's like this cultural substrate actually *primes* people to become fascists (which is what you get when a zero sum minded person takes the selfish path to the logical end: I can only survive by murdering and pillaging others, and everything else is just a pretty lie made up to stifle me).
I agree entirely with all of the above.
> Excluding literal biological facts,
This assumes that there are such things as innate biological facts, a position with which certain elements of woke dogma seem to disagree.
If two people buy the same number of lottery tickets, and only one of them wins the jackpot, the resulting wealth inequality is completely independent of historical misdeeds.
(One could try to argue that the existence of inequality-producing lotteries could itself be a result of historical misdeeds, but as long as the lottery itself is fair, historical misdeeds have absolutely nothing to do with which player wins.)
True, but then who's more likely to better retain and invest the money they won - the person from a relatively affluent family who received a good education and is experienced in the ways of money, or the beggar from a long legacy of beggars who's easily scammed and has no ideas for what to do with money beyond spending it on necessities and luxuries?
Individuals can buck trends, but on large samples, these sort of effects will probably produce a systematic self-reinforcing feedback loop in which money draws in more money.
If you can't figure out the answer to that "obvious rebuttal" faster than you typed it out you haven't really thought about this much. If the rebuttal is obvious the person you're talking to is as capable of coming up with a good answer as you are, so when you haven't bothered it seems both disrespectful and like the prelude to a death-by-a-thousand-questions situation. It feels in bad faith.
If you answer the first 3 to 5 objections you have to an idea for yourself, from the honest, good faith position of people who believe that idea, you'll have more productive, deeper discussions (and understanding), and people like me will feel less like giving you (I admit) lightly condescending advice.
It's an obvious rebuttal to ME. There are plenty of people in the world (including many who comment on Scott's articles) who actively deny that there are any natural inequalities in male and female strength and athletic performance whatsoever, and insist that any allegedly innate disparities are purely the result of socialisation.
To me, the idea that some inequalities are just natural and biological (such as the difference in male and female strength and speed) and hence not the result of some historical misdeed seems so obvious as to hardly require any justification, but apparently there are people who disagree with me. Maybe it's dismissive of me to say that I think it's bonkers to believe otherwise, but there does come a point where you have to be like "if you don't believe this, this is a you problem". Am I obliged to engage with flat earthers in "good faith"? The idea that women would be just as strong as men if not for socialisation seems at least as insane and obviously wrong as the belief that the earth is flat.
You've been incredibly prolific in this comment section, and occasionally I've caught a well-expressed glimpse of my own beliefs in some of what you say, esp. regarding the denialism of biology latent in vocal and extreme trans-related activism.
This being said, I have some lightly patronising advice of my own concerning your contributions:
(i) You do not seem to have sufficient knowledge in biology to be an adequate foil to the biology-deniers who trigger you so.
(ii) You do not seem to engage with non-biology-related challenges to your worldview in good faith. As commenters gave gone to great length to convey to you, it's possible for many of the trans-rights-conveyed points to be correct or have value even as their extreme versions go off the rails and deny reality. Acknowledging these points when you can will go some way towards bolstering your own argumentation.
(iii) Your tone and choice of words consistently suggest that this is a highly personally and/or politically charged topic for you. To put it bluntly, you come across as a hater, or at the very least someone who thinks trans people are in some way ill-intentioned as a group, or collectively harmful.
These collectively mean that, at least to my eyes, you are hurting your own cause, at least in this context.
In this comments section, have any of the assertions I've made regarding biology been factually inaccurate?
> current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts or at least first-mover advantage in the distant past and maintained through collective action today
The OPs claim was that inequalities do not *solely* arise from a single clause, so why are you claiming an implicit "ALWAYS"?
What the OP said:
>current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit but also group advantages accumulated through wrongful acts
That seems definitive, without any obvious hedging. If they'd said "current inequalities do not solely reflect individual merit, but CAN also..." or "MAY also", it'd be more equivocal and I wouldn't find it as objectionable.
I disagree to the extent that I think the OP's statement includes the possiblity of a contribution approaching zero and we can never be definitive enough about these things to gain certainty, but I see where you're coming from.
I assume that most "viruses" are based on some amount of truth. A truth that doesn't overreach (and so is therefore a net positive) is a reform, while a truth that overreaches (and so is therefore a net negative) is a virus.
"The closer to the truth, the better the lie, and the truth itself, when it can be used, is the best lie."
— Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov
I think you're overstating the case. The only undeniable part is the mundane observation that history can sometimes have lingering influences on the present. The rest is debatable. The presumption that we should separate the population into semi-arbitrary groups, and then consider average differences between them on any desirable trait or outcome to be a grave injustice is not obvious.
Yeah, wokeness, much like Marxism, gets at a fundamental truth of the world. They see the problems quite well in many cases, but some of their solutions are bad or impractical. Trying to declare them nothing but left-wing wonk untethered to reality is a denial of reality as sweeping as anything else. It's just a denial that rests on consensus.
The problem is that both tend to think they have identified *the* fundamental truth rather than just *a* fundamental truth, and thus pound every "nail" they see with their hammer (and sickle).
As an apologist for wokeness I disagree with this characterization. Certainly this is how *some* woke people think but for me the reason to look beyond "individual merit" is the factors in society that prevent individual merit from being measured effectively. Such as racism and misogyny that are still with us. While you can look for the roots of these issues in the past, the way they arose has no effect on how I think they should be addressed now.
So when the woke use "white male" as a slur, as I have encountered many times, does that count as racism and misandry? If not, why not?
“Solely” is doing a lot of work here. It’s frankly incredibly disingenuous to pretend that’s what the dispute over wokeness was about, whether inequality was “solely” due to merit. And wokeness also came with a whole host of prescriptions that absolutely do not undeniably follow from this premise.
The "immune system" in academic fields that are estranged from industries has been incredibly weak since the recession. Because of poor funding and rising wages outside of the academy, a comparatively large proportion of people who remain in these fields are making a financial sacrifice for ideological reasons. However, donors are also disproportionately likely to be ideologues: a recent study found that donors were systematically more extreme than party voters. This mirrors the Marxist takeover in the 20th century, where USSR funded academic institutions to ideologically capture them. That would mean not only is the immune system weak and the virus potent, but the patient is living in close quarters with an infected community, to stretch the metaphor.
I would add that I think there is a major reason for weak immune system, linked to how scientific priesthood differ from classic priesthood: It builds theories both predictive and falsifiable about some aspect of the world which can be independently tested, giving an alternative (but royal) entry into priesthood stardom: come with something more predictive than the current best, or falsify the current best, and you will get a fast ticket to cardinal or pope level, regardless of how remote to priesthood you were. It used to work in fields with strong experimental wings, difficult theories but easy falsification and big bonus for being right in the form of new technology. Hard science, especially since industrial revolution. However, since WWii which marked it's peak in term of technological trickling down, there is a clear crisis there, essentially closing the fast path (aka reality check) and I feel that not only hard science is much less immune to crazy ideological derive than it was, but it de-anchored the soft sciences and let them devolve back into classic religion-like priesthood
It seems intuitive to me that the thing that is causing all this chaos is social media. It is the thing that happened right when everything started becoming crazy. Hank Green has a really good video on how humanity is going through a moment because of it. (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8PndpFPL8g) (Are we allowed to link stuff? If not I'm sorry) . It seems like it's causing a lowestcommondenominatorification of everything. Outside priesthoods this looks like advice about eating capybara testicles to cure your cancer. In priesthoods the lowest common denominator ended up being all the woke stuff.
Sorry but why is wokeness bad? Is this term used differently in the US? I can't really think of a reason why it's a problem to address someone the way they want to be addressed?
This seems like a "assumed clear" premise to the whole text but I don't get why that should be clear. Wokeness is as far as I know not defined very well and some parts of it may be bad while some parts are probably good and most are just noise.
Nevermind I asked this question some time ago already and apparently it really IS a different beast in the US and also what Scott seems to fear is for me more in the word "censorship" and not in the word wokeness. Im still assuming getting "canceled" is not as bad as it is told but I'm not from the US and also not someone with opinions that he usually canceled so I'm probably biased.
> what Scott seems to fear is for me more in the word "censorship" and not in the word wokeness.
idk about scott, but I doubt american freedom of speech is going anywhere(an american hillbilly has more freedom to say slurs then the British royal family)
Communism, the death of merit, child genital mutilation are worse.
I think our incoming administration is even more interested in restricting speech than our outgoing administration was, and hope our institutions are robust enough to resist.
.... While Im anti trusting trump and the elon h1b drama was last week; there were just purges of wrong thinkers during 2020 in a historical moment of mass-fear.
Im aware of a few cases of claims of elon removing blue checks, it aint 2020. If trump has *any* power over blueskys banning people Id be positively shocked.
Well, the question of whether trump has the power is really just another version of whether our institutions are robust enough to resist what he wants.
in 2020 there are just emails from the government telling the social medias to censor people and *they did*; its established fact this happened, your being absurd to claim your more worried about it happening now, when it already happened then; even if you believe trump will do it with 99% odds, 99% < 1
Trump could be pure evil, he wont have the same crisis as "biden" did to censor; and I was still speaking the entire time(tho I am unemployable apparently)
bro he's literally suing Ann Selzer for putting out a poll he didn't like right now.
I was unaware of this news story but still not 2020; lets not forget how hysterical everyone got and how that horrible line of families breaking down was crossed, jobs were lost.
A politically active person getting politically induced legal threats have always been a flaw with american freedom of speech(hence the slapp laws existing in the first place) this is a return to the norm, maybe a return to a slow tend line of decline if you wish.
His lawsuit will almost certainly fail, he hasn't proposed any "disinformation czars," he hasn't said "There's No Guarantee to Free Speech on Misinformation or Hate Speech, and Especially Around Our Democracy" (https://reason.com/volokh/2024/08/08/vp-candidate-tim-walz-on-theres-no-guarantee-to-free-speech-on-misinformation-or-hate-speech-and-especially-around-our-democracy/).
Trump sucks in many ways, including wasting time on the lawsuit, but I do not think there's any way he will be worse on free speech than the Biden or theoretical Harris admins.
I'm referring to things like:
- Refusing to publish studies that contradict woke premises (eg that immigration might have negative effects, or that anti-police campaigns backfired, or that some problem might not be caused by racism)
- Saying false things because they think it is helpful for activism (eg that anti-lockdown protests would spread COVID, but anti-police-brutality ones wouldn't)
- Doing extreme and controversial things because it supposedly corrects a disparity (eg prioritizing COVID vaccines based on race rather than age, even knowing this would result in thousands of extra deaths)
- Prioritizing identity/activism rather than merit in hiring and promotion decisions, for example basing hiring on "diversity statements".
- Extreme versions of language policing like calling criminals "justice-involved individuals"
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who objects to the above, and of people who object to that, and so on recursively
- Trying to destroy the careers of anyone who points these things out or gives the public information about them
I'm saying this because Leo had a real question and I want to answer it, but let's try to avoid turning this comments section into one big "wokeness: good or bad" fight.
Ok thanks. As I said afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany and all of this is for me more in the term "censorship" and not wokeness.
In Germany afaik all of this is just fantasy "I'm the real victim here" published by the far-right and nazi people to propagate THEIR censorship as justified.
This make it very confusing when suddenly there are posts like this where I'm not assuming far right ideology and agenda that use these dangers as a real problem to solve when it's not actually a real problem in my region.
There absolutely is stuff like diversity hiring in Germany. I distinctly recall one instance where a postdoc position was advertised for women only, despite this being literally illegal. I didn't go out of my way to seek this out, a friend of mine organically stumbled across it as he was looking for positions (spoiler: he didn't get an interview).
As you said it is illegal. Your friend could have used this to make some money. (It is also illegal to exclude trans people and apparently there is someone who uses this to claim money multiple times because someone forgot to include a "d" in his ad but that's also just a fringe case. Like assholes exist. That doesn't make it a social problem. But maybe I'm biased idk. In my bubble people tend to be sexist and racist and "phobic" against everything not cis-heterosexual and not even called out for it. They DO complain a lot about being called out for it and not "being able to say anything at all anymore" while saying the things they say the can't say anymore without anything happening.)
Wokeness is a frustratingly broad term, and seems to be used about anything to the left of Mussolini that the speaker doesn't like.
I don't doubt that the examples Scott cite are real, and I agree that they are very bad, but 99% of the time I come across someone complaining about wokeness it is someone trying to sell me on the idea that the west has fallen because the latest dumb blockbuster had a black woman in a leading role, or something of similar substance.
This makes it very hard for me to know the extent to which this is a real problem or not outside the US. I'm not American, but I'm willing to take the word of Scott and a few other writers who have presented concrete evidence of 'wokeness' in the sense Scott uses the term being a problem there. Of course there is no shortage of people claiming it's a problem in Europe as well, but it all seems to be the same sort of complaints Leo mentions above (which again, is also on par with 99% of the American complaints), in so far as there is any signal beyond that, it gets lost in the noise.
Disputes over terminology are generally worse than useless, but in this case I think it would be in the best interest of people who want to talk about the real problem Scott is describing here, to come up with another term to help normies distinguish their concerns from the "I'm just mad I can't say the n-word at work anymore" crowd.
> distinguish their concerns from the "I'm just mad I can't say the n-word at work anymore" crowd
...when the concern is woke censorship, aka "X doubled down on saying the n-word at work and ended up leaving their job because they picked this particular hill to die on", how are they to distinguish that from the crowd?
>As I said afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany
>In Germany afaik all of this is just fantasy "I'm the real victim here" published by the far-right and nazi people to propagate THEIR censorship as justified.
I think a lot of people both inside and outside Germany would vehemently disagree with both your description of reality and your particular framing on this. I would encourage you to at least entertain the possibility that you might be misfiring here if your stance is that "too much wokeness" as described by Scott is something unique to the Anglosphere.
Which is not to say that nazis *don't* use it as an excuse.
Sure, probably- I'm going to back out of this conversation as I'm not German and I don't want to overclaim my own knowledge of the situation. All I was trying to say was that the OC felt very confident and my baseline (which I've also adjusted a little) was way off that of Leo.
Hm okay. I really doubt that. Do you have any concrete evidence when people were actually canceled or censored or self-censored for stuff like Scott mentioned in Germany or Europe? I know only of people who complain very loud to an audience of right leaning people that they are being cancelled while making a lot of money with racist and sexist stuff they say and are preaching to that same audience.
Or maybe you have an idea where I can get this problem that is not infested with Nazis? I just can't relate at all to the stuff that Scott is describing. That to me sounds like something to be feared if the far right will get the majority, which is not unlikely to happen soon. Not something I have to be afraid of from the left.
Edit: sorry I misformulated: evidence that this is done systematic and frequent. Not some uniq cases where it happened somewhere once.
https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/02/03/on-bounded-distrust/
Ctrl-F "TM", first result. Unfortunately the news site linked is in Swedish, but if you search for "Kristina Sundquist", you'll find a bunch of RW news sites repeating it.
The first result I saw was the phrase "COVID treatment". If I require a matching case, there's a comment by Bella Marte which contains zero links. What is the Swedish citation?
Lol. I'm French, so I kinda institutionally hate Germany, but if we park the word "woke" for a minute, is it not the case that German elites are so utterly captured by group think that they
1. thought Nordstream was a good idea?
2. Did not blink at welcoming an unprecedented number of mainly unskilled non- German speaking immigrants?
3. Phased out nuclear power when anyone with 2 non-group-think captured neurons to rub together could see that it would make absolutely everything (prices, carbon, energy supply, dependency on Russia) worse?
4. Don't seem to have blinked at the fact that senior politicians actually falsified documents to that end?
5. Don't blink that people can punished _more_ for complaining about rapists than for the actual (as per a valid trial) raping ?
I think that last category is your "victim card" extreme right - if so, don't they have a point??
The last one is certainly woke, and probably the second one (at least if you had the same "this will be GREAT and everyone who disagrees is a Nazi" that we had) but 1, 3, 4 are just the combination of leftism and being unable to see that actions have consequences other than the ones you wish they had (a prerequisite for many forms of leftism)?
Dude, you literally live in a country were a rape victim got a harsher sentence than her rapist for saying mean things about him on social media just because the rapist was from a minority group. Are you arguing in bad faith and playing dumb or are just dumb?
No I'm not. It wasn't "mean things" it was threats. It wasn't because he was from a minority group but because he was a minor. Are YOU arguing in food faith or why are you ignoring this?
Edit: oops wrong post. If you mean me and the case about that one guy that was a minor and the woman who threatened him in his messages it still applies. If not I have to first look up what case you are talking about.
I despise Nazism, but I think Holocaust denial is free speech (as the latter is, in it's pure form, descriptive while the former is normative). And yet the latter is illegal along with the former. That is not related to American "wokeness" but it is a similar problem IMO.
FWIW this same claim was made in the U.S. for a long time before the Overton window shifted. Antone who said this sort of thing was a problem was dismissed as far right.
Hm okay. Might be that it will get there in Germany. Can't see it atm for several reasons. I'll try to have an eye open for stuff like this.
It could well be the case that you are surrounded by legit racist and people whining and exaggerating as well. Those can both be true at once. These are scary times for everyone and I think that tends to amplify our instinctive tribal responses.
Alright. I'll look out for the other side.
Along these lines, it should be obviously true that in any given bubble the Overton window may be at any given location. Even if the average Overton window lands too high up, for an individual it may be too low. Since many media outlets broadcast to very large areas, their own Overton window may seem bizarrely biased in one direction to one region, while in another its biased in the opposite direction. Then, since an individual just doesn't inhabit the other bubbles, it looks like the media outlet is just a malicious actor.
Here is a concrete case in Germany. The wikipedia article even explicitly talks about the controversy over the media bias. Now you could argue there are good reasons the media was biased, but you can make those arguments with many groups that media outlets selectively decide not to apply this to. I think this is a prime example of what this sub would consider as woke overreach.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015%E2%80%9316_New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany#Criticism_of_media_and_government_coverage
Though I do think Germany is less woke than the US right now, because in the US, selective reporting and even highlighting of race doesn't get up roars. It's basically the bog standard.
In fact I was in Germany a year after this incident. I talked with a group of women raising awareness for sexual assault and they mentioned this very incident. They proclaimed to not be aware this was a mostly migrant caused event. Bias is like make up when it's working. You won't notice it, but you will be influenced by it.
Addendum: it can be hard to say whether there is bias for or against something in a society. If you boil it down it can be hard to find where bias is even bad because most biased people claim to have a good reason for it! Almost by definition some must. In the US, there has been a shift where powerful actors (CEOs, politicians, any public figure, and especially universities) absolutely can say and do mean things to right wing groups, but will get absolutely demolished for doing that to left wing groups in any way. And it's not reflective of the public average. This is a problem because these powerful institutions of course have control over others. There are right wing powerful actors, but for the most part they aren't institutions most people have to go through, unlike jobs and universities.
"Bias is like make up when it's working. You won't notice it, but you will be influenced by it."
Oh, that is lovely.
>afaik this stuff just doesn't exist in Germany
It does: https://web.archive.org/web/20240628155933/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/28/german-woman-given-harsher-sentence-than-rapist-for-calling/
That's... Not a good example. One sentence is due to insult which can be argued that it's to harsh in this case. The other sentence was "nothing" because of age rules that have nothing to do with wokeness. Both a combined to an argument even though they have not much to do with each other. The people you need to address for lowering the general age rules for sentencing are different people than the ones you need to address so people get no sentences for insults. Also she could have insulted him just fine with no consequences if she used slightly different words.
>One sentence is due to insult which can be argued that it's to harsh in this case.
Well yeah, that's exactly what I'm arguing. And I'm arguing that it's "too harsh" because wokeness has arrived in Germany.
I don't know how anyone can sincerely entertain the idea that wokeness hasn't arrived in Germany, while also being cognizant of the fact that one can be literally imprisoned (albeit briefly) for describing a convicted rapist as a "disgusting freak" in a private communication. If that's not what liberal and conservative people are complaining about when they complain about wokeness, what else could it be?
I looked it up. She was sentenced not only for insult but also for threatening. It was direct communication alright, but directly to the one. Also she was one of 140 cases after his contact info had been leaked.
Imagine if this had been the wrong contact info.
Who are the different people who determine young people can't be sentenced vs insulters can be?
I thought the one about young people is in the constitution but that wasn't right. So the people who could change that are actually the same people. What I meant is that these are very different political goals and campaigns if you want to achieve them and the one about young people being sentenced has not to do much with wokeness in my opinion.