Back to Separate But Equal, and Other Recent Manifestations of Woke Culture

I hate to keep writing about Woke issues, but this ideology increasingly concerns me as the 2020 election approaches.  It is  an issue that mainstream Democrats ignore or downplay, yet the Republicans have recognized it for the cultural cancer that it is.  Woke ideology has successfully entrenched itself deeply into many of our meaning-making institutions and this has positioned it well to spread far, which is unfortunate. Here's a recent example:

Making things worse, far too many Woke advocates are willing to tap into authoritarian tactics.

Andy Ngo's "crime" is that he is reporting on what he is seeing on the streets in Portland, including ongoing attempts to damage or destroy federal property.  The NYT thought this sort of thing was a worthy topic, even when it occurred in a much milder form, when right wing zealots merely occupied federal property for a month in 2016 (see here, for example), but "America's newspaper of record" has barely any interest in Portland or Seattle.  Because of this vacuum, these stories and concerns critical of Woke culture are being covered mostly by conservative media and without sufficient discussion or nuance. As I noted above, it is my concern that these issues are keeping the upcoming election close. This unwillingness by people on the political left to criticize "their own" is unfortunate.  Those relatively few socially brave traditional liberals who are willing to speak out, many of whom consider themselves well-entrenched on the political left, are often being accused of being conservatives/Republicans by others on the political left, merely because they are willing to speak out. This has left many traditional liberals (like me) feeling like we no longer have a political home.

One must usually seek out alternative news sources to find thoughtful discussion about the Woke movement. For those who are trying to get up to speed, consider visiting New Discourses (founded by James Lindsay) and Quillette.

Woke ideology is disproportionately affecting younger adults, people who are increasingly coming into positions of power.  This phenomenon was rather predictable based on The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. For another thoughtful discussion about the correlation of age and receptiveness to Woke ideology, see this Wiki letter exchange between Sarah Haider and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (the following excerpt was written by Sarah Haider):

Wokeism is, perhaps, an anti-ideology—a will to power that can be most concretely identified not by what it values or the future it envisions, but by what it seeks to destroy and the power it demands. This makes it especially disastrous. For, when an existing organizing structure is destroyed with no replacement, a more brutal force can exploit the resulting power vacuum. . . . Once liberal institutions have been delegitimized by the woke, what will replace them?

But while its philosophy is empty, the psychology of wokeism is deeply satisfying to our baser instincts. For the vicious, there is a thrill in playing the righteous inquisitor, in mobbing heretics and demanding deference—brutal tactics that keep the rest of us in line, lest we be targeted next. Meanwhile, the strict social hierarchies of the woke are reassuringly simple to navigate: one always knows one’s place.

By contrast, liberalism flies in the face of human nature. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” is a phrase so often repeated that we have forgotten how deeply counterintuitive it is. We want to punch the Nazi (or gag him), not defend his right to march. Liberalism might ultimately be good, but it doesn’t feel good. And this is why it may find itself vulnerable to public abandonment, especially in times where it is most necessary. . . .

You rightly point out that liberalism has formidable champions in Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and J. K. Rowling. Yet Hitchens is gone and all the others are over fifty. Likewise, this summer, when I co-signed an open letter in defense of free debate, I was disconcerted to see how few of the other signatories were even close to my age.

Bari Weiss recently noted that:

The civil war inside The New York Times between the (mostly young) wokes and the (mostly 40+) liberals is the same one raging inside other publications and companies across the country. The dynamic is always the same. The Old Guard lives by a set of principles we can broadly call civil libertarianism. They assumed they shared that worldview with the young people they hired who called themselves liberals and progressives. But it was an incorrect assumption.

This has been my experience too. Woke adherence can be predicted by generation - where true liberals exist, they exist primarily among the old guard. If the woke have won over the young, they have captured the future.

This ideology manifests in many other ways too.  For instance, insincere and dishonest debate about the unprecedented surge in (mostly) young girls who are being convinced that they were born in the wrong body, leading to permanent body-altering surgery, hormones and other treatments.  You won't find honest discussion about these issues in mainstream media--certainly not in the NYT. Instead of wide-open discussion based on a foundation of biology and medicine, you will only hear discussions where the "factual" foundation is ideology.  This is insane. There is a war going being waged to protect young girls (progress being made in Great Britain), yet many media outlets are afraid to cover the story. To learn young girls are being physically damaged by this ideology, you'll need to go to places like Joe Rogan's podcast. His recent episode featuring Abigail Shrier and her excellent book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, resulted in an attempt by employees of Spotify to muzzle Rogan on this issue and other Woke issues. Refreshingly, Rogan counter-attacked by posting this video on Twitter, suggesting that he has carefully anchored his right to speak freely in his Spotify contract:

There are some bright spots--some well-placed people calling out Woke ideology for the illiberal, dysfunctional and mostly dishonest cult that it is. For instance, check out this recent discussion between Sam Harris and John McWhorter. That said, for each of these well-placed people willing to speak out, there are many other people who believe in a vigorous and open discussion, a willingness to consider dissenting speech and a dispassionate determination of the facts as the basis for conversation. Unfortunately, most of these people are lesser known than Joe Rogan (and J.K. Rowling) and more vulnerable to cancellation (see the comments here).

I could go on, but I won't do that here.  I'll try to move on to other topics for awhile . . .

Continue ReadingBack to Separate But Equal, and Other Recent Manifestations of Woke Culture

We Love it That Two (Count’em) Two Cartoon Dimensions Pretend to Describe Complex Political, Racial and Economic Systems

When you last purchased a car or a phone, it was probably an important purchase for you, so you considered many aspects of the product, including cost, function, aesthetics, performance and many other things. When we deal with complex things, we are rightfully motivated to carefully consider many such dimensions. Most of us dig deep into these many factors before making such purchases. The same thing occurs when considering a long-term romantic partner. Most of us will consider dozens of factors before settling into such a relationship. In fact, if we failed to do such a careful analysis, our friends and family would consider us to be reckless. Complex issues demand complex and nuanced analyses.

We don’t use this same degree of care when it comes to evaluating the types of politics. Instead, we jam all the possibilities onto a one-dimension line containing endpoints of “left” and “right.” We do this despite the fact that people are complex and they fall into many dimensions of political attitudes. If you were to gather 100 random self-declared “Conservatives” into one room (or 100 “Liberals” or 100 “Libertarians”), you will have a rich diversity of thought, and you’d starkly see this, if only you take the time to get to know these people. For some reason, however, we are willing posit a simplistic binary single-line political analysis, despite the rich multi-dimensional complexity of political thought in the U.S. This lazy shortcut invites us to talk in cartoons. It invites us to talk about “those Conservatives” or “those Liberals” with hubris.

David Nolan is one of the many people who sensed a big problem with this left-right way of thinking. He offered a two-dimension chart that capture much more complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart Many others have offered more nuanced (and I would argue, more accurate) ways to characterize political outlooks of our 300+ citizens, but the traditional and highly inaccurate one-dimensional (Left-Right) still dominates the political and journalistic landscape. We seem to prefer simplistic over accurate.

We’ve got the same problem with many other categorizations we blithely make. I resist categorizing people in terms of “race,” because long experience has proven to me that the way a person looks has very little to do with who they are. Using immutable physical traits as a proxy for one’s a stereotyped content of character often wildly inaccurate. When I evaluate a person for character, I consider many factors, dozens of dimensions, such as the “Big Five”:

• openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious) • conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless) • extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved) • agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/callous) • neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident)

I consider manny other dimensions, including creativity, credibility, grit, acts of altruism, credibility and intelligence, and intelligence can be broken into many sub-categories. For instance, Psychologist Howard Gardner argues that there are multiple types of intelligence, such as:

  • Musical-rhythmic and harmonic
  • Visual-spatial
  • Verbal-linguistic
  • Logical-mathematical
  • Bodily-kinesthetic
  • Interpersonal
  • Intrapersonal
  • Naturalistic
  • Existential

Gardner’s declaration that these are separate intelligences is controversy in psychological circles. That said, these traits that he describes are some of the things I consider when evaluating another person, regardless of any “race.”

There are dozens of other dimensions I might use when evaluating any other person, but many people are willing to divide other people into “white” and “Black,” as though this is a meaningful way to evaluate another person. Making these “racial” distinctions is as absurd as embracing astrology--using a person’s birthdate as a proxy that persons personal character. To me, it seems bizarre and absurd to divide people into colors. That said, I live in a country where far too many people are enthusiastically willing to judge each other on this single simplistic dimension of “white” verses “Black,” despite the fact that this binary is an even cruder measure than the American political spectrum because it’s not a spectrum at all. It is a switch that is flipped from “white” to “Black,” with nothing in between, even though millions of “inter-racial” people exist. What a bizarre stilted binary, on so many levels! How is it possible that this racialized way of dividing people has any intellectual or political traction in modern times?

Here’s another popular binary: socialism versus capitalism. Many people are content to jam complex economies into one of these two boxes despite the overwhelming complexities and nuances of all existing economies. As though libraries are not filled to the brim discussions of the complexities of every economic system, where not a single real life system is declared to be purely socialist or purely capitalist.

I’ve been thinking about these false and limited ways of thinking for a long time. I was reminded of this issue when listening to The Portal, Eric Weinstein’s excellent podcast on Schrodinger’s Cat and the false-binary ways the many people find acceptable for discussing numerous social issues.

Why are we so willing to self-limit the way we think about obviously complex issues? Is it laziness? Gullibility? Social Pressure? We urgently need to reconsider our willingness of categorizing these complex issues, because our one-dimension cartoons are poisoning our ability to talk with one another.  This cartoon-talk is destroying our democracy.

Our willingness to think in terms of these cartoons would seem like an obvious problem for anyone willing to stop and think for even a few minutes, but many of us continue to embrace these cartoonish ways of thinking unabated, perhaps following the lead of our news media, social media and politicians. How can we convince people to stop and smell the nuance? How does one effectively declare that The Emperor has no Clothes in such an intransigent social environment?

Continue ReadingWe Love it That Two (Count’em) Two Cartoon Dimensions Pretend to Describe Complex Political, Racial and Economic Systems

Self-Muzzled Speech Permeates U.S. Universities

Universities should be places where students freely explore ideas. Universities should not be places where students muzzle themselves because they worry about what other people might think about their sincere ideas, concerns and criticisms. A recent survey by FIRE unveils massive dysfunction in the classroom. It appears that many colleges are training students to be social media tribe members rather than independent thinkers upon whom we can depend to challenge prevailing norms and improve our communities.

Fully 60% of students reported feeling that they could not express an opinion because of how students, a professor, or their administration would respond. This number is highest among “strong Republicans” (73%) and lowest among “strong Democrats” (52%). Black students are most likely to report an instance where they censored themselves (63%). Just 15% of students reported feeling very comfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial topic. Only 11% of female students reported this, compared to 19% of male students.

Continue ReadingSelf-Muzzled Speech Permeates U.S. Universities

Pandemic #2: Divisiveness Caused by Social Media

For the first step in defeating Pandemic #2, please watch the new documentary, "The Social Dilemma." (You'll find it on Netflix).

As you use social media, try to cruise at 10,000 feet like a disinterested anthropologist and then ask yourself whether kind-hearted intelligent people should be talking at each other like much of what you will see.

Pandemic #2 is invisible, just like Pandemic #1, and you'll feel like you are in charge of your thoughts the entire time. Pandemic #2 quietly invades our minds, then erects filter bubbles around us that destroy the possibility of civil discourse on the most important issues facing us. Pandemic #2 destroys the possibility of e pluribus unum. We need to take action now, because huge misplaced financial incentives guarantee that Big Tech is not going to rescue us.

Continue ReadingPandemic #2: Divisiveness Caused by Social Media

Ford Foundation President Worries More about the Phrase “Tone Deaf” than Woke-Censoring World Class Art

This opinion piece by Sebastian Smee of WaPo takes aim at the cultural sickness of that is rapidly spreading through our institutions. Spot on. One might think that an art gatekeeper like Darren Walker (President of the Ford Foundation) would understand the societal value of art. And BTW, I will continue to use the term "tone deaf," literally and metaphorically without apology. It's so sad to watch people in high places peeing all over themselves to accommodate pernicious Woke ideology.

Which aspect of Walker’s statement in support of postponing the Guston show might have caused more upset? Was it the part where he used a term for having problems discerning pitch, which some deaf people might have mistakenly construed as a reference to them? Or was it the part where he offered his support for censoring one of America’s most influential artists, in the process disappointing art lovers around the world, putting freedom of artistic expression in jeopardy, and sending a chilling signal to artists about what will be permissible and what won’t?

We live in a democracy, and it’s okay to have different opinions about Philip Guston and his imagery. Even though he was an avowed anti-racist who has influenced some of today’s most brilliant and politically engaged Black artists, some people are not going to like some of his imagery.

But that goes for a lot of art, and even a lot of great art. What you do, if you’re running a museum and have decided this artist deserves such a show, is what museums are supposed to do: You educate. You inform. You honor the nuance. You don’t just accept, you commit to complexity. Not later, in 2024, but precisely now, when nuance and complexity are being violently expunged from the public sphere . . .

Continue ReadingFord Foundation President Worries More about the Phrase “Tone Deaf” than Woke-Censoring World Class Art