About Being a Liberal

What does it mean to be a "Liberal"?

What follows is an excerpt from Peter Weiner's article in The Atlantic: "Jonathan Haidt Is Trying to Heal America’s Divisions: The psychologist shares his thoughts on the pandemic, polarization, and politics."

Haidt says, “we’ve messed up the word liberal and we’ve used it to just mean ‘left.’ I’ve always thought of myself as a liberal, in the John Stuart Mill sense. I believe in a society that is structured to give individuals the maximum freedom to construct lives that they want to live. We use a minimum of constraint, we value openness, creativity, individual rights. We try hard to maximize religious liberty, economic liberty, liberty of conscience, freedom of speech. That’s my ideal of a society, and that’s why I call myself a liberal.”

But on the left, Haidt said, “there’s been a movement that has made something else sacred, that has not focused on liberty, but that is focused instead on oppression and victimhood and victimization. And once you get into a framework of seeing your fellow citizens as good versus evil based on their group, it’s kind of a mirror image of the authoritarian populism on the right. Any movement that is assigning moral value to people just by looking at them is a movement I want no part of.”

Haidt went on: “I think this is a very important point for us to all keep in mind, that left and right in this country are not necessarily liberal and conservative anymore. On the left, it’s really clear that there are elements that many of us consider to be very illiberal; and on the right, it’s hard to see how Trump and many of his supporters are conservatives who have any link whatsoever to Edmund Burke. It’s very hard for me to see that. You know, I would love to live in a country with true liberals and true conservatives that engage with each other. That, I think, is a very productive disagreement. But it’s the illiberalism on each side that is making our politics so ugly, I believe.”

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What Does “Woke” Mean?

What does "Woke" mean? Here are two recent posts worth considering. First, Matt Orfalea posed the question on Twitter, which launched a worthy thread:

Here are a few of the offerings, among the many in the thread:

Excessive, shallow and myopic focus on social justice

Woke people are special, they feel they are above constitutional principles like equality and free speech.

A toolbox full of identity-based attacks you can use to target people you already don't like

Second, Freddie deBoer offered a detailed description of the meaning of "woke" in his article, "Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means: I'd rather use any other term at this point, but can we get real please? Here's the basic definition:

The conceit is that “woke” has even shaggier or vaguer boundaries than “liberal,” “fascist,” “conservative,” or “moderate.” And I just don’t think that’s true.

“Woke” or “wokeness” refers to a school of social and cultural liberalism that has become the dominant discourse in left-of-center spaces in American intellectual life. It reflects trends and fashions that emerged over time from left activist and academic spaces and became mainstream, indeed hegemonic, among American progressives in the 2010s. “Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people. Persuasion and compromise are contrary to this vision of moral hygiene and thus are deprecated. Correct thoughts are enforced through a system of mutual surveillance, one which takes advantage of the affordances of internet technology to surveil and then punish. Since politics is not a matter of arriving at the least-bad alternative through an adversarial process but rather a matter of understanding and inhabiting an elevated moral station, there are no crises of conscience or necessary evils.

DeBoer then offered a list of attributes:

Academic - the terminology of woke politics is an academic terminology, which is unsurprising given its origins in humanities departments of elite universities...

Immaterial - woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real...

Structural in analysis, individual in action - the woke perspective is one that tends to see the world’s problems as structural in nature rather than the product of individual actors or actions...

Emotionalist - “emotionalist” rather than emotional, meaning not necessarily inappropriately emotional but concerned fundamentally with emotions as the currency of politics...

Fatalistic - woke politics tend towards extreme fatalism regarding solutions and the possibility of gradual positive political change...

Insistent that all political questions are easy - woke people speak and act as though there are no hard political questions and no such thing as a moral dilemma...

Possessed of belief in the superior virtue of the oppressed - what was assumed by Bertrand Russel to be obviously misguided is now assumed to be true without evaluation: virtue is not just common among the oppressed, virtue is a function of oppression...

Enabling people who aren’t Black or Southern to say “y’all” - this one is unforgivable...

I could go on. And some will disagree with this or that...

This is an excellent read and I would urge those interested to read Freddie's entire article.

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Canadian Language Police Legislate How We Talk

An excerpt from Heather Heying article today:

This week, the Canadian province of British Columbia announced its fealty to a naked emperor, when it introduced new modernizing legislation to correct outdated language by amending more than 2,300 instances of outdated gendered and binary terms from 21 ministries across 210 provincial statutes.

The reason for this is that:

Trans and non-binary people, particularly youth, can be erased by laws that use only he and she…[and] this change signals to those people that they are important, and that they are included and protected by the law.

Nope. In fact, this legislative change signals to women that we shall continue to lose protections under the law, to children that the adults are missing in action, and to everyone that the government has utterly lost the plot.

Sex is binary and fixed, “non-binary” is a fiction that serves nobody, and claiming that “he and she” are outdated terms reveals deep confusion about reality. Rigid adherence to these new rules and causes comes hand-in-hand with the belief that this is the newest civil rights crusade, and that if you don’t follow along you have outed yourself as being one of them—one of those people who are neither fundamentally decent nor caring.

This misses the point, or rather several points, among them:

- Pronouns are about sex, not gender.

- It is neither kind nor respectful to cater to the fantasies of the very young or very confused.

- Language doesn’t change by brute force.

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