This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Past peak woke? Don't count on it
(c) J. Nelson Rushton. Jan 20, 2025.
This is an essay on the long-term state of the culture war, written as a post for TheMotte.
1. The culture war
In December 2021, engineer-entrepreneur Elon Musk made the following enigmatic tweet: "traceroute woke_mind_virus". The term "traceroute" is an inside joke for fellow computer geeks; basically, it is a request for information about where something came from and how it got here. The phrase "woke mind virus" refers to the woke movement, aka social justice movement, aka political correctness. I define wokeness -- or, as Tom Klingenstein has called it, woke communism -- as an ideology incorporating the following elements:
America, and, with it, all of Western civilization, is now embroiled in a culture war. This war is often portrayed as left vs. right; indeed, pundits on both sides of the corporate media make their living peddling the left vs. right drama in the style of a pro-wrestling production. But the reality is that, in a sane world, conservatives and progressives are not natural enemies. They are people of different temperaments, who tend to have different blind spots, and therefore tend to make different sorts of mistakes -- and who need each other's input to see into those blind spots and to temper those mistakes. Of course, conservatives and progressives often hold different opinions about how to achieve their common objectives, but that is not what makes people enemies. My wife and I often hold different opinions about how to achieve our common objectives, but that certainly doesn't make us enemies. At the end of the day it makes us a better team, when we can put our egos aside and work together.
In the long run, the real culture war is a war against fundamentalism -- aka radicalism, extremism, or supremacy movements. As Solzhenitsyn wrote, the line between good and evil is not a line between nations, classes, or political parties, but a line that passes through every human heart. Fundamentalists are people who have worked themselves into a sustained frenzy, in which they've redrawn the line between good and evil to lie between their people and certain other people. Fundamentalism, thus defined, has two broad consequences. First, because fundamentalists vest ultimate moral authority in people rather than principles, they tend to actually abandon the precepts of the ideology from which their sect sprang up. For example, the woke movement has abandoned liberal principles like free speech and equal treatment under law -- just as Christian fundamentalists often abandon Biblical principles like grace, charity, and loving their enemies. Second, fundamentalists often feel entitled to suppress the speech of their ideological adversaries -- the bad people -- as well as to forcibly control their behavior, seize their property, and target them for oppression of any sort they can get away with. These oppressive sanctions are administered by the fundamentalist regime, not as punishment for any crime the target has committed as an individual, but simply for being a member of the targeted class -- whether that class consists of the Jews, the "bourgeoisie", the Tutsis, infidels and heretics, straight white males, or the unvaccinated.
Any ideology or identity -- from progressivism, to conservatism, to Islam, to Christianity, to being black, to being white, to being German, etc. -- can spawn a degenerate, fundamentalist strain. Wokeness is such a degenerate strain. Wokeness is not progressivism, or even "extreme" progressivism, and it is certainly not liberalism. Essentially, wokeness is a fundamentalist leftist cult masking itself as compassionate progressivism. Wokeness is not too much of a good thing, or even too much of a decent thing; it is a warlike tyranny that has infected the progressive political parties of the West and begun to transform them into something unrecognizable to their well-meaning forebears.
Unfortunately, many progressives today have cozied up to the woke vampire, holding their tongues about its obvious dark tendencies for the sake of forming a political coalition. I assume they believe this is a price worth paying to accomplish otherwise laudable aims, and that the insanity can only go so far. I believe they are woefully mistaken.
2. The (probably growing) danger of woke communism
It is human nature to assume that our children's future, and their children's future, will be fundamentally like the past we grew up with -- even when we have good reasons to believe otherwise. For example, it would have seemed alarmist to most Russians in 1900 to talk of omnipresent secret police, mass torture, and death camps on the horizon in their country. Yet, these developments, though they may have seemed far-fetched at the time, were in fact less than twenty years away under the grip of the Bolshevik communist ideology -- which at the time appeared to be nothing more than a fringe movement. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would later write,
I believe that wokeness represents a grave and growing threat to Western civilization. I am not saying that we are going to have death camps in the United States in a generation or two. I am saying that, if we continue down the path we have been on, America's future is going to be considerably less safe, less comfortable, and less free than its past, as a result of the influence of woke communism.
Since the victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 US Presidential election, there is speculation that the worst of wokeness might now be behind us. History suggests otherwise. Tyrannical ideologies often endure political setbacks, even seemingly crippling setbacks, only to later reemerge with renewed strength. Soviet communism seemed all but dead when its leaders were exiled in the 1890's. Nazism took a direct hit when an attempted Nazi coup d'etat was thwarted in 1923 and the party leader, Adolf Hitler, was sentenced to prison. Shia fundamentalism ebbed for a time in Iran when its leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, was exiled in 1964. But each of these movements came back with renewed strength within a generation -- because the culture was invisibly moving in a direction that was susceptible to their influence, even while their leaders were temporarily out of the picture.
Most Americans are not actively advancing the woke agenda. In 2018, around eighty percent of Americans, including a majority of Democratic voters, affirmed the statement that "political correctness has gone too far" [source]. But this matters less than it might appear. The vast majority of Russians were not communists in 1917, and most probably thought communism had gone too far, when the October Revolution swept away democratic governance in Russia. Most Germans were not Nazis in 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, and most never became Nazis -- but World War II and the Holocaust happened all the same. Most Iranians were not Islamic extremists in 1979 when the Ayatollah came to power in the Iranian revolution. Only 2% of Vietnamese are members of the communist party today -- and yet the party rules that country with an iron fist. Tyranny grows from the seeds of a militant and vocal minority, in the soil of a fearful and silent majority. As long as the majority remains fearful and silent, it is naive to expect a tyrannical ideology to fade away just because its leaders have been removed from power for a time.
Though its devoted constituents were a minority of the population, the hydra of political correctness -- or social-justice, or wokeness, or whatever you want to call it -- got its way more and more in the period from 1990 to 2020. For a thumbnail sketch of the cultural shift that occurred over that period, consider the following public statements by leading American politicians in 1987, 2012, and 2020:
Each of the last two statements might have been considered unthinkable for a national leader in America just a generation before it was made. Yet, wokeness kept gaining ground over the American mind -- even while most Americans believed it had already gone too far. And, of course, the cultural shift toward woke insanity was not just talk. As Richard Weaver famously wrote, ideas have consequences -- and crazy ideas have crazy consequences. If you once believed, as I did, that woke bureaucrats would never allow DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) to override meritocracy in safety-critical professions such as those of physician and airline pilot, you'd have been wrong. If you once thought they would never defund and demoralize the police to let criminals rampage against law-abiding citizens in broad daylight, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they wouldn't open the Southern border of the United States to invite millions upon millions of illegal aliens into the country with no immigration enforcement whatsoever, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never push aggressively for biological males to compete in women's sports, or house male sex offenders in women's prisons because the convicts claim to have gender dysphoria, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never arrest hundreds of people each year in a Western democracy [the UK] for political speech posted on social media, you'd have been wrong again. If you once thought they would never advocate rationing lifesaving medicine based on race (whites to the back of the line), you'd be wrong yet again. If you thought they would never let immigrant gangs rape tens of thousands of young girls, while police deliberately ignored the situation on the grounds that it would be "Islamophobic" to intervene, you'd have been wrong yet again. As Sam Harris has asked, if we will allow our daughters to be raped in the name of diversity and inclusion, what won't we allow? And if the rapists' woke government benefactors give them high cover for their crimes, what won't they do if we allow them? Can you look in the mirror and say out loud what you still think they'll never be willing to do? or what they will never be able to get away with -- even if most people know it's wrong, and secretly, silently oppose it?
Since the election of Donald Trump, there have been some encouraging signs in the struggle against woke communism. Several advertisers have come back to Twitter/X, who had previously boycotted the platform because it refused to censor what they call "hate speech" (broadly defined to include a great deal of right-leaning political speech). Many corporations, including Facebook/Meta, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson, have dismantled their DEI (diversity-equity-inclusion) programs, and so have several universities. Even Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has removed her pronouns (she/her) from her Twitter bio! But recall -- or be informed, if you are not old enough to remember -- that when Ronald Reagan left office in 1988, no advertisers were boycotting anyone for refusing to censor anything; few if any corporations or universities had active DEI departments, and no one of either party had pronouns in their bio. Yet, somehow, in thirty years or so we got from "Tear down this wall" [Reagan, 1987] to "You didn't build that" [Obama, 2012], to "Defund the police" [Kamala Harris, 2020]. On a crazy-scale from 1 to 10, if we seemed to be at 3 in 1987, and a 7 in 2020, we have perhaps now clawed our way back to a 5 or 6. And if long term momentum was in the wrong direction in 1988, after eight years of Reagan presidency, why would it be in the right direction now? In my opinion, wokeness isn't going anywhere -- at least not if our culture continues down the path of business as usual.
3. The constitution of the people
So how did we go from "tear down this wall" to "defund the Police" in just thirty years? I submit the root of the problem isn't wokeness itself, but the moral rot that gave wokeness room to breathe in the first place. Honest men and women, even honest men and women who lean left politically, do not become woke "social justice warriors", or indulge the woke's illiberal schemes in silent complicity for political or personal gain. Nor do brave men and women, of any political leaning, cower down and keep silent in the face of "cancel culture". If we had more honest men on the left like Michael Shellenberger, and more brave women on the right like Riley Gaines, we would never have been dragged into the swamp of wokeism in the first place. But we have too few, and I submit that is the heart of the problem. This condition of moral rot -- the soil in which tyranny grows -- does not change when the leaders of an extremist movement are exiled or imprisoned, let alone defeated in a single election.
In every nation, at all times, the militant, tyrannical minority is there lurking in the shadows, ready to pounce upon weakness. That is an eternal given. What matters is what the rest of us do. Tyranny requires tyrants, of course -- but, more importantly, it requires a meek and passive populace, minding its own business while the tyrant and his minions eat away at the roots of their civilization. What arrests and beats back tyranny is not a policy written on paper, but the moral character of the nation. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government, that the crown is not as oppressive in England as in Turkey [Common Sense].
Our forebears, the first Americans, left their families and farms to go to war against the greatest military power then in the world. They did this not knowing whether they would die in battle, not knowing whether they would be hanged as traitors, and often not knowing whether they would even be paid for their service. None of them were conscripted; every one was free to let someone else bear the brunt of risk and sacrifice, while fully sharing in the liberty the Revolution would bring if it was successful. The continental soldiers risked all they had -- not for their personal gain, but to defend the natural rights of their countrymen and their posterity.
Today, by contrast, many of us -- that aforementioned posterity -- will not dare to speak the plain truth before our eyes if it means we might be passed over for a promotion at work, or be made to feel socially uncomfortable. In that respect, we are not living lives worthy of the sacrifice our forebears made for us, let alone living up to the example they set. Can such a nation dodge the bullet of tyranny for long? I doubt it. That is not how the world works, or ever has worked. As economist Walter Williams noted, the freedom of individuals from compulsion or coercion never was, and is not now, the normal state of human affairs; the normal state for the ordinary person is tyranny, arbitrary control and abuse. Why should the United States be any different, if it ceases to be the home of the brave?
To be clear (since this is the Motte), the cultural shortcoming that let wokeness wedge its foot in the door is not intellectual, but moral in nature. Tyranny does not gain ground with logic, and logic is not the weapon that beats it back. The vast majority of Americans already know that wokeness is wrong. What people need to stand up against wokeness is not a higher IQ, or a seminar on rationality, but the courage to say out loud, in public, what they already know to be right. If men do not stand up and speak the truth when it is uncomfortable, it will become expensive. If we do not stand up and speak the truth when it is expensive, it will become dangerous. If we then do not stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous, only God can help us. If we are not willing to speak the truth and we do not believe in God, we will certainly believe in Hell -- because it is coming to us.
Broadly the biggest issue with wokeness is the introduction of thought terminating cliches that only require self-invocation to exercise, as opposed to collective consensus. Terms have been assigned significant valence without need for review, and at peak wokeness it was necessary to grovel in advance at the mere prospect of a new term being theoretically introduced at an unspecified future date, leading to pre-emptive self-abasement and outgroup preference signalling to convey ideological purity. The keystone logic allowing this subversion of logical order is the attribution of all disparate outcomes to external factors, placing the burden of responsibility on others who are presumed able to exercise power. This incentivizes weakening of self to force others to exercise their power and resources for yourself, and this is the defining presentation of wokeness.
Wokeness required coopting existing high-valence terms and applying it without necessary scrutiny. Genocide is thrown about casually by wokists because genocide is understood to be a Bad Thing. But what if there is no actual genocide? Then just change definitions! Trans genocide is because trans people commit suicide at higher rates, and the lack of trans health care is what causes suicides, so trans health care MUST be mandated to prevent genocide. To effect this, suicide must be redefined as solely due to the trans experience or lack thereof instead of considering other psychological or temporal events, health care must be expanded to include puberty blockers for minors so as to prevent even the possibility of suicide, and trans people must now encompass the entirety of nonconforming presentations so as to ensure everything gets redirected to trans advocacy instead of considering crossdressers or tomboys or autogynephiliacs. With social justice language employing the progressive stack to artificially inflate the moral value of the disempowered, it was inevitable that actors would seek to performatively disempower themselves to exploit the social meta.
Accepting this unreality was acceptable only when indulging it had manageable consequences. ZIRP facilitates economic unaccountability, allowing all manner of sinecure and commisars to be present because scalping a few sacrifices was preferable to having mass revolts from employees more scared of peer social sanction. But as economic and social reality ground its way back to the forefront, it became impossible to continue hiding behind social justice language. Crime is real, even when committed by blacks. Mass child rape of white girls by muslims did happen, despite frenzied attempts to abuse statistics. Migrants did surge over the US border, bringing crime instead of good vibes. Transwomen are actually stronger than natal women, because men are THAT much stronger and transwomen being 30% weaker than men matters little when men are 70% stronger than women. DEI hiring did not increase corporate bottom lines and instead brought increased dysfunction. And with each turning of realities screws, it became more and more difficult for wokeness to assert the value of its foundational presentation. Given the speed of the vibe shift, it just transpired that the screws were much shallower than even skeptics may have dared realize.
More options
Context Copy link
As someone who has kept an eye on this forum for a long time now - ever since it was launched in the SSC days - but never cared to register, it may interest you that your appeal to the "courage (…) to stand up and speak the truth when it is dangerous" got me to register so I could post this reply. You… may not care for it. But it is meant in good faith, and I would be interested in your reply to the question at the heart of that reply.
You write:
My question is this. How, according to you, should a genuine radical progressive behave, if he does not wish to behave as a woke fundamentalist?
The problem is nothing new; I suppose the question is analogous to "what to do if you are a genuine socialist and find yourself in Soviet Russia". I would not have been a Stalinist, but neither could I ever see myself taking up the banner of a czarist White Russian; that would be akin to asking me to inject myself with the plague as a protection against cholera. There are many more evil positions than good ones, and too often seeking the converse of the evil ideology du jour will simply land you in a different quadrant of evil.
A haven for dissident right-wingers should be sympathetic to this point, I would have thought, as unless they are themselves ethical monsters they must often dwell on the precariousness of their own position, insisting, as they must, on the individual intellectual merits of positions which their opponents ceaselessly remind them were most famously endorsed by Nazis and slavers. And yet… and yet, banal as the sentiment is, it always comes back to the forefront of my mind when I read an articulate tirade against "wokeness". No matter how much sense the writer is making, there nearly always comes a point when they inch out of the motte and into the bailey.
So when you say: the problem of "wokeness", what makes it a "mind virus" and not simply a political paradigm you don't agree with, is not what it claims to stand for, but the underhanded tactics which have been used to advance them, and the moral cowardice which have allowed these tactics to proceed — I can agree, to a point. I think opponents of a given political view are biased towards see only the worst in their adversaries' behavior, but certainly you'd have to be blind, mad, or a liar to deny that bullying tactics, and worse, are routinely deployed by the modern Left, particularly online. Sure.
But suddenly it's no longer the medium being attacked; suddenly it's the message.
Here we come to the problem. I do, as a matter of fact, believe in the objective reality of human-caused climate change and the effectiveness of most vaccines. I believe - as a non-exhaustive list, presented in no particular order - in the moral abhorrence of racism, in every human being's inalienable right to shelter and healthcare, and in the moral imperative of LGBTQ rights and acceptance.
I don't see that any of the above means I have to endorse underhanded tactics, censorship, and witch-hunts if they happen to be in pursuit of goals adjacent to those - any more than a nationalist has to endorse Mein Kampf. And as a matter of fact, I don't. Surely I'm not alone. Surely it should be possible to find great treasures of anti-political-correctness manifestos written by people like me, who believe in all the fundamental values "wokeness" espouses, but rejects, absolutely, the defilement which is brought upon them by the use of unacceptable tactics, and denounces the moral cowardice of those who turn a blind eye to such abuse because they agree in principle with the perpetrators.
If such a movement - "Reform Progressivism"? - existed, I would be a card-carrying member. It doesn't yet. But it can, and it must. How would you treat it, if it did? Would you and your ilk accept us as respectable fellow-travellers in the fight for intellectual honesty and freedom of speech? I would like to think so. If you, personally say yes, I will unreservedly welcome that hypothetical support. But if that is so, I would ask that you keep your arguments straight, and refrain from randomly kicking the message when you have decided to fight the medium. If there is one key reason Reform Progressivism has not yet come into being as a coherent movement, it must surely be this worrying trend I see in exposes like yours, whereby it is taken for granted that what wokeness stands for is in and of itself unacceptable, quite apart from disagreement with its methods.
And perhaps that's how you really feel. Perhaps what anti-woke rightists hate most are still diversity, homosexuality, etc. in and of themselves, and they only take issue with the means because they hate the ends. I don't want to believe that, because I don't like to believe that those who rail against the other side's hypocrisy could be so totally hypocritical themselves, even in places like this. But be aware that this is certainly what most of us progressives tell ourselves as we ignore and defund and delete your anti-wokeness tirades, quite unread. If you want to prove that wrong, then you know what (not) to do.
Otherwise - by all means feel free to simultaneously attack cancel culture and trans rights, but don't bother to claim that you're fighting wokeness as opposed to extreme progressivism.
My parents were/are liberals/progressives. I was raised that the most important part of that was freedom of speech; that "We on the left do not blacklist" (the implication behind that statement, the specter of McCarthyism, was felt to go without saying).
OTOH, my grandparents were Rockefeller Republicans who referred to FDR as "that man in the White House."
As for me, I "turned FDR's picture to the wall" in 2016, and I was literally (for the literal meaning of literally) shaking when I did so. (Suggested that vote to my husband too, but who knows if he did it of course, ballots are and should remain secret.)
So hey I followed my family's tradition of switching "sides" I guess? :D
But also: You can see why.
In my (sub)culture, "the culture of freedom of speech" includes the idea that it's every citizen's right and duty to express their sincere opinion so that the marketplace of ideas can include it. "We" (as a society and polity) can't do our best if we aren't aware of all possible perspectives and ideas! (So I agree with the OP there, and I'm glad to see yo uinspired by the same sentiment.) Similarly, in my subculture it's every citizen's right and duty to improve on ("steelman") ideas they find in said marketplace, if they see ways to do so. It's also every citizen's right and duty to meet argument with argument rather than silencing tactic, because if you allow silencing tactics (or other "debaters' tricks" for that matter) then the marketplace of ideas no longer selects for truth. After all, in "the culture of freedom of speech" (inherited from the British Parliament, after all), the point of freedom of speech is to have an effective marketplace of ideas to guide the government. It's just that in the USA the government is [supposed to be] the people (rather than the monarch).
But also I react to the OP with, "Where have you been? It's already expensive to dangerous." I was first defenestrated 15 years ago (in what in retrospect was an aftershock of Racefail '09). Lost my online home, had people threatening to track me down and physically attack me, no one did and I can never know if my opsec was good enough or if they just didn't try very hard...that time. More recently, people have been arrested for defending their homes from riots. (The process should not be the punishment, but these days, it is.)
But also
Well, now I have offspring. And many of both my family and my in-laws tend toward the "socially awkward nerd" type. So any daughter of ours would seem to have especial vulnerability to ROGD, based on how those who seem to have experienced it tend to describe it. A relative of mine married someone whose kids from their first marriage included a natal female who seems to have fit the ROGD profile and who no longer speaks with them. Another relative seemed to flirt with ROGD for a while before returning to a more liberal-feminist, "Why are there so few girls in [insert one of her interests here]?" perspective. (Must ask her parents how they did it! :/) And another married someone who later appeared to fit the AGP profile (complete with military background), and who, when their wife died, transitioned and abandoned their minor children. (I came along on a visit to them once. They spent most of the visit droning on about their many different guns.) So yeah right now actually...well, it's something I'd have to think about.
Still, I don't expect to ever give up my culturally ingrained support for freedom of speech, so I'm happy to make common cause with whoever else supports freedom of speech, regardless of our object-level political positions. Hi there comrade! :)
But I wonder about the viability of this movement. I mean, that's what "we" used to be. "We" got defeated by "the woke movement" so...how will "Reform Progressivism" be different?
The thing, here, is that I disagree with the framing that being trans is undesirable (in an ideal environment, anyway; obviously, in a right-wing dystopia where it gets you fired from your job and alienates you from your prejudiced family, it's less likely to come out net-positive on life satisfaction).
For most trans people I know, transitioning has been a joyous and fulfilling experience. Actual trans subreddits, Discord servers, etc. are full of trans people actively delighting in their transness, not dens of wallowing and self-pity. I think the over-medicalization of what is at heart a lifestyle choice has done the whole thing a great disservice; in my book the "oh woe, gender dysphoria is soo bad, you have to let people transition" thing was another one of those well-intended white lies from 'my side' that I cannot abide, because what they've done is muddled what should be a moral slam-dunk to anyone truly concerned with liberty by trying to hitch it to a murky question of fact. I support people's right to transition whether or not they have such a thing as medically-defined "gender dysphoria". It's not a medical question, it's a moral question about autonomy, about freedom and self-determination. I support trans people in exactly the same way that I support people's right to have plastic surgery or change their name or dye their hair or dress up as anthropomorphic dogs - and for the same reason that I will support people's rights to become all kinds of cyborgs if that sort of technology ever becomes something more than one of Elon's pies-in-the-sky.
Now, with that cleared up… I don't want to come across as if I'm totally unsympathetic to parental concerns in those cases. Of course it would hurt for your child to reject the name you gave them. I understand that. But moody teenagers, and indeed grown adults, have gone "oh my god, mom, stooop, everyone at school calls me Jay, 'Jeremiah' sucks" since the dawn of time. It didn't use to tear families apart. And sure, if your kid were to be the kind of trans who wants actual surgery and not just a change of wardrobe (remember, that's by no means everyone!), you can be concerned about the mild but real risk of health complication. But again… kids get into dangerous hobbies their parents are queasy about all the time. In my view, you shouldn't be more concerned about a daughter of yours wanting top surgery than about a child of either gender getting really into biking, or rock-climbing, or, really, any high-level competitive sport. Call me when there's a moral panic about high school football.
(Whether young children are competent to make such a big lifestyle choice is a whole other discussion, but has no bearing on whether it's okay to let them experiment with a cross-gender name if they want. We don't let nine-year-olds get into cave-diving, and by my own analogy it's sensible to heavily frown on underage gender surgery; but that's no reason to bar them from dressing up in a cool plastic helmet and exploring dark corners of the playground with a flashlight.)
The practical argument is that, as Nelson outlined in the OP, there are a lot more sincere progressives than cancel-happy sadists. All pro-free-speech conservatives + all pro-free-speech progressives = winning coalition. My hope is that it's just one of Scott's coordination problems, and Reform Progressivism only needs to achieve escape velocity to win the teeming masses over from the witch-hunters.
The more idealistic argument is that, you know, I think I'm right. I think I am putting forward the banner of "good ends, achieved via good means"; and I am optimistic enough about human nature to hope that, so long as the idea gets out there at all, this will be naturally attractive to people who had hitherto had no choice but "good ends, achieved via evil means" or "evil ends, achieved via whatever means". (No offense.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This is a valuable and clarifying comment. I’m by no means even close to the most right-wing person on this forum; I’m sympathetic to progressives, because I used to be one, and one of the drums I’ve beaten most consistently (both here and elsewhere) is that progressives are mostly good people, and that their terrible ideas should not be taken as reflecting any poor character on their part.
That being said, I do genuinely think your stated positions are very bad. Thinking that “racism is morally abhorrent” is a genuinely wrong-headed, delusional viewpoint, given the tirelessly-documented and scientifically valid evidence of wide disparities in intellect between broad racial groups. Pathologizing and anathematizing people who are simply trying to respond rationally to this reality is a recipe for cultivating a society built upon a foundation of clouds.
Believing that “every human being has an inalienable right to shelter and healthcare” creates a bottomless obligation on the productive and normal members of society to subsidize the self-destructive (and socially corrosive) behavior of the most dysfunctional, mentally-unsalvageable individuals among us. It is a blank check for parasites who either cannot, by nature, contribute productively to civilization, or who otherwise elect not to. It’s a nice-sounding truism, sustained only by the fact that the people advocating it will, by and large, not be held directly and personally responsible for providing the relevant shelter and healthcare to the individuals demanding it.
“The moral imperative of LBGTQ right and acceptance” is simply a poorly-defined applause light. It could mean anything. Some plausible interpretations are fairly uncontroversial, while others are clearly extremely tendentious and enjoy close to zero popular support, which is why it’s necessary to fold them all under a superficially-anodyne umbrella statement.
Now, I also believe that the praxis of so-called “wokeness” consists of behaviors and tactics which are bad, independent of the ideological positions they’re being used to advance: coordinated bullying mobs; censorship of true but politically-inconvenient information; the use of weasel words and strategic equivocation (AKA the “motte-and-bailey” approach) wherein public statements are tailored to create a certain impression of the speaker’s meaning/intent, while in reality the speaker knows that his or her actual intent is quite different from that surface-level impression, and that the esoteric will be correctly understood by politically-subversive behind-the-scenes actors. These would all be morally-blameworthy tactics even if employed by people whose political positions I share. To the extent that right-wingers do these things, it reflects very poorly on them.
In a better, more functional, less divided country, progressives would have to compete on equal footing with every other ideological faction; I would oppose most of what they’re attempting to achieve (because their ideas produce bad outcomes, and because their analysis of the world is based on false premises) but I would recognize them as a valuable counterweight and as a complement to other factions within an ideological spectrum. I wouldn’t want them ostracized or imprisoned (even in the fanciest and most comfortable crystals) because many of them are great people who contribute immeasurably to society, independent of their political beliefs. They’re my friends, my family members, my coworkers, the men and women who create the art I consume and the products I buy. I would simply have to coordinate, to the most effective extent possible, to thwart their efforts at political change, and to demonstrate to them the profound error of their ways. (As the error of my ways was persuasively demonstrated to me, which is why I no longer hold the beliefs I used to hold.)
This will, necessarily, involve the use of political power to not only reverse the effects of progressive governance, but also in some cases the disempowerment of progressive organizations before they’re able to achieve their stated ends. This will probably appear hypocritical to you — “I thought you guys said you just wanted to grill! I thought cancelling people was bad! I thought you don’t hate black people, or gays, or women, and that you just wanted everyone to live and let live!” — and to a certain extent you’ll be correct, because there are a lot of people who haven’t fully thought through their actual core disagreements with “wokeness”. People who barely understand what “wokeness” is. People who think the Civil Rights movement was the greatest thing to ever happen to America, but that somewhere along the way people just “took it too far”. (Or, amusingly, that modern black activists have “betrayed the vision of Martin Luther King”, not realizing that King was a socialist and that his speeches were ghostwritten by a literal member of the Communist Party.) For those of us who are actually committed to opposing the ends of progressivism — rather than just whatever means Fox News and Right-Wing Twitter are able to meme into the news cycle this week — I agree that it’s important not to get distracted by chopping at the branches instead of the roots.
You ask what you should do, as a committed progressive who wants your side to win, but to win fair-and-square without any underhanded tactics. My only answer to you is: stop being a committed progressive! Stop believing in ideas that are bad, and that have bad outcomes. Channel your pro-social impulses — which I believe are real and valuable — toward ends which are actually conducive to the flourishing of civilization. Keep your eye on the prize of climate change and vaccines, and you’ll have no conflict with me. Tinker around the edges of government policy, and find avenues to expand the safety net for the people in our society who are actually equipped to be able to create a return on that investment, rather than wasting your efforts (and other people’s money and safety) on worthless schizophrenic bums who will never appreciate nor reciprocate the compassion you’re trying to extend to them. Extend personal warmth and friendship to whomever you wish, but do not demand that equitable outcomes redound to populations with severely inequitable distributions of traits. (Or, alternately, join me in supporting non-coercive eugenic policies which will actually ameliorate those unequal distributions of intelligence and aptitude.)
I hope you stick around and keep posting here. We could use a lot more intelligent progressive voices here. (And, hopefully, over time your mind will be changed, as mine was, and you will be persuaded out of your progressive commitments.)
Well, yes. Obviously what any committed conservative will want me to do is stop being a progressive, ultimately, just as I wish for the reverse. But I was replying to NelsonRushton, whose opening post explicitly cast his position as that of one who thought we should table the regular right-vs-left fight on the object-level questions, and focus on fighting wokeness considered as a "degenerate" form of progressivism that can and should be distinguished from mere "extreme progressivism". I am not so naive as to be asking you guys to start agreeing with me on everything; I am asking you ("you" as in "people like Nelson"; you, Hoffmeister, may not be included) to make a serious commitment to put these disagreements to one side if you're really serious about wanting to end the cancel-mobs more urgently than you want to defeat progressivism at the object-level.
As such, I don't want to get bogged down too much in arguing about the object-level beliefs in question, because whether or not you guys agree with me on there really wasn't my point. My point was "if your problem with wokeness/cancel culture really isn't reducible to disagreeing with me on these object-level points, and you hate wokeness much more than progressive beliefs in and of themselves, then perhaps we could cooperate to get rid of cancel culture, which we both dislike".
But I do want to address this:
It's hardly your fault for assuming, given it's my 'spiciest' position relative to orthodox progressives; and I suppose it's partly on me besides, for using a term with as many different competing definitions as "racism". But I am not, in fact, a blank-slatist. "Dan" in the first section of Scott's Against Murderdism describes me pretty well. When I say that I find racism abhorrent, I mean racism as a value system; not what its opponents tend to call "scientific racism".
What I find morally abhorrent is to treat thinking, feeling human beings differently because of their race; to make them feel that they are somehow lesser, less deserving of happiness or respect, because of inborn characteristics beyond their control and which constitute part of their very identity. I am perfectly willing to believe that there are statistically significant cognitive differences between ethnic groups. I don't entirely trust the existing science in its specifics, but I would still be against racism if the Bell Curve-type science was completely convincing on all questions of fact. I oppose discrimination against neurodivergence as it is, and there the whole point is that I recognize the material existence of inborn mental differences between e.g. autistics and allistics.
I believe that my fellow progressives initially started suppressing racial science because they thought it would be an easier line to argue, than to fight the trend of sloppy, amoral thinking that draws a line from "blacks may be tend to be less good at math than whites" to "therefore slavery was okay all along". "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" being as far outside the Overton window as it is for either side is at once the result of that cowardly dereliction of moral duty, and the reason it has not yet been rectified.
Me, however, I reject g-supremacism as an ethical position. Certainly I.Q./g (yes, I know they don't exactly correlate, whatever) is instrumentally useful in certain tasks, and we want to hire high-I.Q. people to be jet pilots for the same reason we want to hire strong people to be firefighters, tall people to be basketball player, and red-haired children to play Ron Weasley. But even if we boil down all dimensions of intelligence into a smart/dumb binary, I reject absolutely the idea that, all else being equal, it is "better" to be smart than dumb; that the life of a smart human is somehow more worth living, or worth preserving, than the life of a dumb human. If a linearly-I.Q.-boosting pill existed I wouldn't particularly want to take it, any more than I especially want to be ten inches taller.
(Granted it might be instrumentally better for society as a whole if there were more high-I.Q. people around. But it would also be better for society if I ate gray slop and worked ten hours a day with precisely no more breaks than required for my bodily health. However, none of this is society's business and running a government any other way is an inhuman abomination.)
And from where I'm standing, the sooner right-wingers forsake any hint of bigotry in that sense, the sooner the saner people on my side will be able to prevail and break the scientific deadlock, secure in the knowledge that the research will no longer risk being used as ammunition for a position which I find, yes, viscerally abhorrent.
I don’t think you’ve really thought through the practical implications of your stance on race. "HBD is probably broadly- correct, but even if it is, that should have no long-term political implications whatsoever" is incoherent. That’s why it’s so far outside of the Overton window. How could it possibly not have political implications?
You acknowledge in one sentence that it is perfectly reasonable and salutary for businesses to preferentially hire applicants who have the requisite skills, traits, etc. You even acknowledge that many of those traits are inborn — that the NBA can and should discriminate based on height, which, outside of desperately poor and malnourished circumstances, is nearly entirely genetically-determined.
By implication, you acknowledge that many traits along which it’s justified for at least some businesses to discriminate are unequally distributed between population groups. Perhaps the least controversial would be that if you’re looking to hire an actor to play Ron Weasley, you’re only going to be auditioning male actors of Northwestern European descent. (Or, I suppose, Udmurts, a small Russian ethnic group who also have a lot of redheads. Although good luck finding one who speaks English as well as Rupert Grint does.) This is probably somewhat hurtful if you’re an actor who is a huge Harry Potter fan, and Ron is your favorite character, but you’re black, or female, or just have jet-black hair. Although there has been, as of late, a move toward “race-blind casting” in order to prevent precisely this (supposedly unfair) outcome, most people, even progressives, appear to agree that this is silly and wrong-headed. Film studios and theater companies are making reasonable and practically-justified decisions, and the disparate impact of those decisions is an acceptable byproduct of those decisions.
Only slightly less uncontroversially, the NBA has very few players with significant Amerindian descent; while part of that is cultural — people from Latin American countries generally prefer soccer to basketball — it’s primarily a function of average differences in height between population groups. (The NBA has only had the number of Chinese players it’s had because the Chinese government decided to eugenically breed exceptionally-tall individuals to play basketball. Otherwise the number of Asian NBA players would asymptotically approach zero, Jeremy Lin notwithstanding.) We can acknowledge that this might make aspiring Asian and Latino basketball players feel discouraged and underrepresented, but we recognize this as an acceptable byproduct of NBA teams making sensible business decisions instead of using affirmative action to reserve roster spots for short guys to make them feel included.
Moving up the controversy ladder, the strong preference for physical strength is going to result in fire-fighting being a heavily male profession; female firefighters are few and far between, and the reality is that they tend to be worse at their job on average than their male coworkers. Again, this is probably discouraging for young girls who dream of fighting fires. However, because affirmative action would require putting a thumb on the scale to force the employment of less-qualified applicants into a high-stakes profession whose performance has momentous important consequences, most people are willing to let firefighters keep being overwhelmingly male, even if that makes some women sad.
And I’m sure you would agree that there are a great many professions for which mental and personality traits are also extremely relevant. Doctors, engineers, astrophysicists, quantitative analysts, take your pick. And it’s not just intelligence; traits such as diligence, selflessness, punctuality, and empathy are all very important across a wide range of occupations. In fact it’s difficult to imagine many professions wherein an employer would not have a strong preference for employees who display more of those traits, rather than less.
And if you take seriously the available psychometric evidence about racial groups, you can see that there are differences between racial groups which go beyond simple mental computational capacity. It’s not just “black people are likely to be a bit worse at math on average than Asian people are.” It’s also “black people are likely to be less fluent at written communication.” It’s “black people are likely to have poorer ability to regulate emotional impulses.” And when you start taking this seriously, you realize the likely ramifications of this: black people are likely to end up highly underrepresented in a wide range of prestigious and remunerative occupations, because those occupations justifiably select for traits (many of them substantially mediated by heritable genetic potential) which black people have less of on average.
And black people are going to notice this. Why wouldn’t they? It’s going to result in them being poorer on average, since they are going to be underrepresented in professions which pay well. They’re going to feel less empowered, less valuable to the society around them in general, because they are underrepresented in professions which provide the capacity to significantly impact political and cultural trends within society. You and I might privately understand that these inequitable outcomes are the (inevitable, barring corrective measures) of an unequal distribution of valued traits. But there will be — there already is, and has been for over a century — important policy questions raised by this state of affairs which will demand answers. Will affirmative action be imposed in order to artificially balance out these outcomes? Are the potentially negative impacts on the overall performance of the affected industries a worthwhile tradeoff? If not, and if colorblind meritocracy is a non-negotiable end goal, how do we deal with the massive cultural and political fallout resulting from entrenched, generational resentment and low performance among a large, culturally-distinct, politically-unified, and visually-identifiable segment of the population?
All of these questions have obvious and unavoidable political implications. There has to be some answer to these questions, and if you believe HBD is true, I don’t understand how you can advocate for a solution that isn’t informed in some level by what you actually believe is true. Saying “it’s wrong to discriminate, unless the qualities for which you’re selecting are important to the job” has the same functional outcome as “it’s okay to discriminate based on inborn characteristics”, precisely because different groups have different characteristics on average! A “colorblind meritocracy” has the same end result as a “systemically racist” regime, assuming that psychometric differences are real and large.
It appears you’re trying to retreat to a position of “Actually, employers shouldn’t have a strong preference for smarter employees.” I suppose that’s one way of getting equitable results. Just decide that the unequally-distributed traits on which we’ve been filtering are actually not particularly valuable or desirable. An employee with an IQ of 120 isn’t likely to be any better at a randomly-selected job than an employee with an IQ of 90! If employers stopped caring about the qualities white people and Asians have more of than black people, we wouldn’t end up with more whites and Asian getting hired than black people!
This is utterly doomed to fail, though, because those qualities do matter quite a bit. Sure, pure cognitive acuity might not give one a decisive advantage as, say, a Jamba Juice employee. (Things like “reliably showing up on time” and “not ending up getting into trouble with the law and needing to miss work because of it” are, though, and those things are also directly correlated with intelligence and impulse control.) If your concern with “racism” is only about people not calling black people racial slurs, then you’ve already won; almost nobody does that. But that’s not what anyone actually cares about when it comes to the “racism” discussion. They care about unequal life outcomes, and those aren’t going away until the unequal capabilities go away. (Again, my proposal to make them go away is eugenics; what’s your proposal?)
You've dropped the "long-term". Obviously it would have immediate political implications, of the variety "we need to get rid of misguided disparate-impact legislation and the like". But once that paradigm has been abandoned, the word "race" should have no further impact on policy decisions. If specific metrics which happen to differ between racial groups are relevant, talk about the metrics directly. My concern is that accepting the objective reality of HBD should not entail giving the ethno-nationalists anything.
Well… in the truly long term… luxury space communism? But in the shorter term, and without making any controversial predictions about future technology, I think a just society would decouple the property of "prestigious and remunerative" from "best reserved for those with a high I.Q." in how it thinks about jobs. Think of Scott's musings in The Parable of the Talents.
Regarding "prestigious", if a just society has zero-sum social status at all, it should be given to those who virtuously turn whatever talents they do possess to particularly pro-social ends - whether that's a musclebound hulk who becomes a fireman instead of a pro wrestler, or a dexterous polymath who becomes a brilliant, life-saving surgeon instead of sitting around at home speedrunning video games. (I stress that this wouldn't be some sort of Stalinist nightmare enforcing "from each according to his ability" at gunpoint - doing the prosocial thing should be incentivized, but supererogatory.) I don't think this is a particularly unrealistic wish; if anything it's almost reactionary of me. It used to be that you didn't have to be a genius to be a fulfilled, well-liked pillar-of-the-community type; it used to be the way the world worked in civilized countries, that firemen and nurses and farmers could count on the respect of their peers if they went conscientiously and honestly about the business of doing useful jobs, just as much as the doctor or the mayor.
Maybe part of the problem is that our communities nowadays are too damn big… Every day I'm a little more hostile to 'big cities' as a concept.And regarding "remunerative", if nothing else I am strongly inclined to think that a large part of the anxiety around wealth disparity is a negative desire to avoid poverty, not "greed" in the conventional sense. Hence, my preferred policies of universal healthcare, zero homelessness, a strong UBI, etc. should mitigate the sting of unequal life outcomes. I am not so naive as to think it would eliminate economic resentment completely; greed exists, jealousy exists. But would we get race riots if the difference in outcomes was "fewer blacks can afford second homes and pools" rather than "fewer blacks can afford life-saving surgery"? I think a strong welfare state makes biting the bullet of unequal economic outcomes viable in a way it isn't without one. It seems worth a try.
But if that doesn't work, if nothing else works, I will bite the bullet of "well, we need (something a lot like) communism, with wealth caps and redistribution", centuries sooner than I will bite the bullet of eugenics. What you propose horrifies me, all the moreso if it's clear that we're talking about a much broader spectrum of traits than just a linear I.Q. graph. Isn't the point of "biodiversity" that it is an inherently beautiful thing that should be preserved? I already don't think we should allow rare species of dull-as-brick newts to go extinct just because it's economically expedient; I'm sure as hell not gonna accept erasing whole human phenotypes, whole ways of seeing the world, just to make society run more smoothly. Society is meant to facilitate human flourishing, not the other way around.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
In what sense do you consider yourself radical while at the same time rejecting woke tactics?
Because my goals sit far left of the Overton window on many issues (e.g. queer rights, universal healthcare). I thought the post outlined that much clearly enough. For a simplified example, I'm not precisely a communist, but surely you can see how someone whose position was "we should abolish capitalism in America completely, but this should only be done through free elections within the boundaries of the Constitution after convincing a majority of the population that Marx was right about everything in an open marketplace of ideas" would be a radical.
There is a simple(ish) solution to your dilemma then. You basically act in the opposite fashion that mainstream Democrats acted during the George Floyd era. If there is a policy position you are favorable to and the groups start acting like mobs with street violence, intimidation, etc you just immediately pull support from those groups and any politician that doesn't act the same as you. In other words, you are actively policing your own side the way Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy would routinely police fringe Republicans. They would primary people in red states even if they were short of crazy. They would certainly intentionally lose winnable elections in swing states just to make a point. You on the left can do this too. You don't have to wait for suburban women to have buyer's remorse about 2020 and realizing their kid's school now had more Hamas and Pride flags than American flags on display. You can help those people not have remorse.
And the great thing about doing this if you are on the left is you have so many built in demographic and other advantages that you can easily win by simply abandoning the terrorist wings of the big tent and focusing on doable things that don't make people cringe in the polling booth.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Not to pull an Uno Reverso, but the Golden Rule is usually a good first step in these kinds of questions - how would you want the radical right to behave?
My wishlist is pretty basic:
I always said I wouldn't mind losing to progressives if the fight was fair. The problem seems to be that progressives tend to believe that the ends justify the means, and anything is allowed to prevent defeat, because defeat means fascism, so there's no such thing as an unfair fight.
I would add "don't dox" to that, including technically-not-doxing doxing.
Also, don't support lawfare.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for the thoughtful reply.
Awesome! I'm flattered.
To be frank with you, I think most of these are truisms, behind which thornier propositions are hiding. The thorny propositions mostly involve the use of violence or threats of violence against our neighbors, to compel them to behave ways that we believe are beneficial. You and I do not necessarily disagree about what is beneficial. What I suspect we disagree about is the intrinsic harm in using threats of force, including government force, against fellow human beings. For example,
I'm not attacking anyone at the moment. I disagree with progressivism, while I have disdain and enmity for wokeness. For example, I probably disagree with your position on "trans rights", and on most of the topics you mentioned -- but I presume you hold those positions with an eye toward the benefit of humanity at large, that you are open to changing your mind, and that you are interested in calmly listening to counterarguments. I also presume you hold those positions in good faith, and would continue to hold them even if it cost you something.
I do not make those same presumptions about people who have shown themselves to be woke authoritarians. What distinguishes them is a feeling of being entitled to be agreed with and obeyed, concomitant resistance to dialog, and a penchant for obsequious, opportunistic bandwagoning for social and material gain.
Thank you in turn for this reply.
As I've now told others in this thread, my intent with this comment was not to launch into object-level debates on the progressive 'articles of faith' I listed. It's certainly not to rehash the Root Question of Libertarianism, interesting though I find it. It was specifically to hash out whether you genuinely thought extreme progressivism could be separated from wokeness, and whether you genuinely thought the latter a more pressing enemy to defeat than the former - in which case, again, I would recommend making sure to distinguish the ends and the means more carefully than you had done in the OP. Your last two paragraphs lay it out quite nicely.
That being said, wading into a few of these questions without quite diving head-first into them, I also doubt that my disagreements with most conservatives boil down to my being less of a libertarian than they are. Some sort of Rand-by-way-of-Kant view that climate change may very plausibly cause human extinction within a few decades; but that's still no excuse to resort to forced taxation, and if we die because the funds couldn't be raised any other way, so be it,…… is not a take I've very often encountered in the wild, I'll say that much.
And indeed, with regards to policy hot-takes on trans rights, my leeriness of state violence is essential to one of the "controversial status quo policy [I] endorse": i.e. I think trans women criminals should, in fact, go to women's prisons if they want, if we are to have gender-segregated prisons at all. "We can't do that," you cry: "they'll rape the cis female inmates". The common riposte from trans advocates is "how dare you suggest a trans woman could be a rapist", of course, but I think that misses the point by a country mile.
No - I regard the prevalence of that objection as a scathing indictment of the entire American prison system, one which calls into question its very legitimacy as an arm of the justice system. If the State is going to commit such a direct violation of the personal freedom of its citizens as "locking them in little grey rooms for years at a time", I consider "guaranteeing that more vulnerable inmates will not be raped while in custody" to be a pretty low bar to clear before I'll even entertain the possibility that such actions are morally justifiable for the greater good of society. If female prisoners truly are so totally at the mercy of a trans inmate, then they are also at the mercy of a lesbian rapist who works out, and that is flatly unacceptable. Society should fix that. Imperatively. And once it is fixed, the objection against putting trans prisoners where they want to go dissolves.
To round back to my original point, as you can see, I hold this position very strongly, and I hold it as an extension of underlying moral principles on which it seems you can find common ground. So you can probably imagine how jarring it was to see it listed quite casually in a list of "crazy ideas" which no non-mind-virus-infected progressive could possibly hold in good faith.
Sorry I haven't had time to respond to this thoroughly yet. However, I have rewritten my private copy of the original post, with your feedback in mind, and I think it is clearer in the new draft that my fight is not with progressivism/liberalism/leftism (though I don't want to heavily edit the original draft on the Motte, because that would make it less clear what people are responding to in some cases). Here are the relevant excerpts from the latest draft:
Below is a link to the updated draft in my Google docs. If you have time to look it over, I would welcome further comments.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_d0pip_lYB5utNiyHA3mJfmQWo8isSUzBECjyf1FyxU/edit?usp=sharing
NR
Ah, this is an unexpected and welcome surprise! I will try to review this over the week-end. Thanks for letting me know.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I accept it is plausible that climate change will cause human extinction within a few decades. The same is plausible for nuclear war, an asteroid impact, a superbug, a super-volcano, renegade AI, et. al. If there were a policy on the table, with good evidence suggested would mitigate one of those, at reasonable cost, without being liable to cause greater harm of some sort, I would be all ears. Do you know of one? Absent that, I don't think this is relevant unless it is just a thought experiment. If it is a thought experiment, and you are asking hypothetically what I'd say if there were such a policy, I might be open to it -- but everything depends on the details, costs, and consequences, because...
We can't spend 20% of GDP mitigating climate change, 20% mitigating nuclear war, 20% mitigating an asteroid impact, 20% mitigating superbugs, 20% mitigating super-volcanoes, and 20% mitigating runaway AI -- because that adds up to 120%. Would you spend 10% on each one? I bet I can name four more plausible humanity-ending disasters before you post your answer. There is an interminable list of national and global disasters that are plausible within a few decades, and from that I infer that paying heavy costs to mitigate merely-plausible disasters is bad for our health and welfare -- unless some particular disaster is particularly plausible, and some particular plan can be shown to mitigate it without doing more harm than good.
To the object-level point, if we had a crystal ball and a magic genie, we could house all inmates safely and humanely... No, wait, there wouldn't be any inmates, because there wouldn't be any crime, because we'd all be drinking free soda pop and eating rainbow stew for every meal. But, since we don't have a crystal ball or a magic genie, some things can be achieved in a shorter time frame than others. The policy of (1) not housing trans women sex offenders in women's prisons is an issue of living debate which is short-term achievable, while the policy of (2) having a humane prison system is not. If you push for (1) before you can achieve (2), then in the real world you are advocating for what you know, or ought to know, will make prison more dangerous for women. Sometimes you have to break some eggs to make an omelet, but that's not an egg I'm willing to break.
To the meta-level point, I don't have data for the US, but in the UK only about 15% of people firmly believe that trans women sex offenders with penises should be housed in women's prisons [source]. That is about the same as the percentage of Americans who believed that Elvis might still be alive in 2017 [source]. I don't have anything against either the trans-women-are-women crowd or the Elvis-is-alive crowd, but I also don't think I am obliged to consider their beliefs morally tenable or epistemically plausible. If I am talking directly with someone who believes a certain thing, I would politely entertain that thing -- but I can't entertain everything all the time just because somebody somewhere believes it. Some of my beliefs are out of the picture for other people, and vice versa, and I am OK with that. What I'm saying is that some charity is warranted here -- and I think your life would be better if you relax and stop being jarred when people, who are not speaking to you directly, are dismissive of things you believe, especially when you know to be on the fringe. Maybe you're right, even though almost everyone laughs off your theory, like Nikola Tesla or Alfred Wegener -- but even if you're right, it doesn't pay to get wound up about it.
It was a thought experiment, yes. I'm not particularly concerned about short-term human extinction from climate change myself - my irritation with right-wingers' tendency to hedge and obfuscate on whether it's real at all has more in common with HBD types' very understandable annoyance with progressives who try to change the subject or discredit the science, rather than bite the bullet of "yes, the science says what you think it says, but your idea of what to do about it is still bad". My position on climate change, roughly expressed, is that it is obviously real bad, and obviously a very worrying crisis even in cautious estimates of how bad it will get; but, equally obviously, that private individuals' behavior, especially in the West, is a drop in the bucket, to the extent that it is a waste of energy - pun surprisingly not intended - to guilt-trip them about their personal carbon footprint or whatever. I would like more right-wingers to say this head-on and stop with the bullshit about "well, maybe it isn't completely human-caused, who's to say". It's not the point. I'm not accusing you of that particular epistemological sin but I see it a lot, and conversely I see a lot of, to my mind, completely unwarranted "har, har, woke buzzword, brainwashed morons" sneering whenever someone acknowledges man-made climate change as A Bad, Obviously Real Thing That Is Happening, whatever policies they recommend.
But as for everything after your "but", well… insert the Winston Churchill joke about haggling and prostitution. It seems there are crises of sufficient urgency that you are willing to entertain the validity of government action funded by taxation, provided the policy looks promising. Why is the death of humanity by hypothetical runaway climate change on that list, but not the preventable deaths of thousands of private citizens for lack of affordable healthcare? And either way, haven't we already gotten rather afield from a clean position where our disagreement is not on the facts, but on what it is morally acceptable for the government to do about the facts? There seem to be several points of confusion here.
If you like.
I don't think you actually need a magic genie to prevent 99% of prison rapes.
You may or may not need a kind of a crystal ball, but it's a kind we know how to make!It's not a uniquely hard problem - it is a problem that there has been very little political will to solve because a lot of people not-so-secretly want prisoners to suffer above and beyond being deprived of their liberty, and a lot more people don't really care about prisoners' welfare very much compared to other issues even if they'd marginally support improvements to their condition. I don't think it's remotely fair to compare the problem of "stop prison rape" to the problem of "stop all crime everywhere": the whole point of prison is that it is a controlled, tightly-monitored closed-system.Yes, creating "a humane prison system" in all respects is a taller order, but rapes are the one thing that the presence or absence of trans inmates has an influence on. I would be happy with first solving the narrow problem of stopping the rapes, then allowing trans women into female prisons, then going back to the drawing board to draft a more ambitious, wholesale prison reform. And I reckon you could achieve the first two simultaneously, as two clauses of the same bill. Hell, if you wanted to be really kludgy about it, you could even set up special security measures for trans women inmates, without yet tackling the broader problem of prison rape, to guarantee that the addition of the trans women doesn't move the needle. Why not?
But also… even if you couldn't - even if it turns out that, in terms of practical implementation, the only sane way to get trans women in prison to work is ten years down the line after we complete wholesale prison reform - surely I'm allowed to state what my endgame is? When I say everyone should have guaranteed healthcare, I don't expect to snap my fingers and make it happen overnight. All sorts of things need to be thought through and organized, all sorts of sub-reforms and necessary steps introduced into law, before we get where we're going. I understand that, you understand that I understand that. I'm still allowed to say I "support universal healthcare". Why shouldn't I say, in general terms, that I "support trans women being allowed into women's prisons" even if I acknowledge, or acknowledge the possibility, that this aim can only be reached after other reforms I also want go through?
EDIT: this has no bearing on the meta argument(s) but I also remembered that there is another prong to the ethical cost-benefit analysis here, which I elided in my first message on the topic because unlike the "the state shouldn't be throwing its hands up and saying 'rapists gonna rape' in the first place" thing, it has nothing to do with my feelings on the government's right to inflict violence on its citizens. Namely: aren't trans women - commonly regarded as highly effeminate men - very likely to be raped themselves in men's prisons? Doesn't it at least seem worth investigating that, in expectation, all else being equal, putting a trans woman in a men's prison might be more likely to result in rape than putting her in a women's prison - because the trans woman in the women's prison may or may not be interested in raping women, but it is all but guaranteed that at least one man in the men's prison will be interested in raping a sissy?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Thanks for this comment...its good to hear these perspectives.
You make a distinction between the medium and the message...but isn't the medium the message? Whether it be BLM and LGBT in 2010-2022 USA, the "woman question" and "serf's rights" in 1870s Russia, or the Jacobins in 1770s France; the superficial message may change, but the medium stays the same: the attainment of power through societal disruption, revolution, and chaos. It usually begins and ends in blood. In Dostoyevsky's Idiot and Demons there are conversations and confrontations in those books that could be ripped straight out of a 2020 struggle session.
But, if you must make a distinction between the two (and acknowledging that I am not the OP and he/she may have a different take): yes; I dislike both the medium and the message. I think racism is sub-optimal and is a "lesser" sin of envy, but not "abhorrent". Humans cannot have an inalienable right to shelter and healthcare because these things depend on other humans. Did Robinson Crusoe have a right to shelter and healthcare? (He did, as an aside, have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness). I think it is a moral imperative to restrict LGBTQ rights and acceptance (uh oh, there goes our shot at a pluralistic society).
In short, I fight both wokeness and extreme progressivism, if it is even possible to disambiguate the two.
To be more exact, NelsonRushton made that distinction, or in any case, affected to make it. I was questioning whether he really believed in it.
But if we define "wokeness" as the cancel-culture apparatus and associated phenomena, then it seems clear to me that they can be "disambiguated". Here I stand, living proof. The temptation of blood-soaked revolutions is one of mankind's greatest ethical pitfalls, but reducing all ideologies used by power-hungry revolutionaries to superficial excuses seems absurd. Taking the French Revolution, surely a majority of Americans would describe themselves as anti-monarchists, and that doesn't inevitably make them Robespierre's useful idiots.
My view is that any violent revolution can be hijacked by power-hungry sociopaths. This is a very good reason not to start violent revolutions, no matter how right you feel. But it is not a reason to unilaterally condemn or ignore any political or moral position that some people, at some point in history, have been tempted to start a revolution about. I should hope that things like the abolition of hereditary monarchies and the abolition of feudal serfdom are recognized by a majority of Americans today - indeed, by a majority of the developed world - as morally-justified causes. Their righteousness is precisely why they were able to generate mass popular support the nearest charismatic sociopaths found themselves motivated to redirect for their own ends. It has no bearing on the underlying question of right and wrong.
That, I never doubted. That is why you are in fact a right-winger. As a true liberal I do not begrudge you - or indeed Nelson! - the right to that opinion.
However, Nelson's rhetoric implied that he had special animus for the medium in and of itself, distinct from his dislike for progressives qua progressives. He wrote wrote of wokeness as a specific phenomenon which it was urgent to quell, while he is happy to live-and-let-live with non-'woke' progressives (who he explicitly believes needn't be "natural enemies" to conservatives "in a sane world").
The impetus of my post was as follows. If this truly represents Nelson's beliefs and priorities, then it seems to me that he could and should, for his own side's interest, enter into an alliance of convenience with principled progressives like myself in the war against runaway political-correctness/cancel-culture/"wokeness". Then we can slay the dread beast and go back to fighting each other civilly on the object-level questions of policy and morality. This is self-evidently the rational thing for both of us to do, particularly if, as Nelson also argued in the OP, most progressives aren't actually pro-"woke" but are just going along with it out of apathy and fear.
And yet - I observed - Nelson, and people like Nelson, seemingly can't stop themselves from letting their object-level disagreements with progressivism into arguments which they profess are only about the meta-level. Conclusion from this progressive: either
1- for the sake of a few incidental jabs which have no bearing on his overall argument, Nelson is stupidly discouraging us progressives from entering into an alliance that would be mutually satisfactory
or
2- he isn't really serious about this business of reserving special hatred for cancel culture and being willing to play fair with progressives who play fair in return.
If it's #1, people like Nelson should reconsider their argumentative strategy; if it's #2, they should stop lying. It's wrong. And serves no purpose in a place like the Motte where they would face no backlash for stating that they just hate progressivism itself, as you have done.
It seems that you consider fighting radical progressive ideas ("the message") to be as high a priority as fighting cancel culture etc. ("the medium"), meaning you have no incentive to enter into an alliance with a Reform Progressive. If you admit as much then I don't have any intellectual disagreement with you on how you're conducting yourself - only the ordinary object-level disagreements about the nature of good and evil and all those superficial little details.
Morally: yes. Whether he had any chance of getting it or not in practice. I'm genuinely not sure what that observation is supposed to prove and would appreciate some elaboration. Surely a man who, by force of circumstances, is about to be lethally hit by - say - an unavoidable tidal wave, still has a "right to life" in all morally and politically relevant senses. The unfortunate nature of his circumstances has no bearing on that principle.
But that brings me to my more politically-relevant point, which is that I don't recognize a difference between the right to life and the right to healthcare; one is the implementation of the other.
There is, of course, an enduring moral question of action-vs-inaction. Granting that I have a moral obligation not to drown my fellow man, do I also have an obligation to save him from accidental drowning if I happen to be passing by? But I think the "good Samaritan" question doesn't apply in the case of the State which has actively pledged to proactively protect its citizens' lives. I, personally, may or may not have a duty to intervene to save a random stranger from drowning; but then, I am not generally regarded as having a moral obligation to save random strangers from being mugged at gunpoint, either. The State has pledged to safeguard my life, and already takes measures to proactively save me from being shot or battered or strangled. In my book, that should extend to proactively saving me from disease, starvation, and exposure.
It's about you committing a category error. Nobody would think that saving Crusoe would be bad. However, society-granted rights are about the most basic imaginable, things that a society can always grant no matter how poor it currently is. "Right to life" has never entailed immortality, it merely means that society should not take or needlessly risk your life. If you're alone, there is no society to threaten you (I guess you can kill yourself). If there's two, the "right to life" principle merely states that neither of you should (lightly) take actions that threaten the other's life.
Once you have some fuzzy number n and you need a leader or a group of leaders (called government), it means that those leaders shouldn't take actions against your life, and protect you from deathly threats from the other members of your society (ideally also other societies, but that is not always feasible given size differences, so again not really a right). A society can always protect its members from itself, if someone can take your life with a gun they can necessarily also protect you with the same gun. It's merely about whether they elect to do so. Yes you can confuse this by dividing a society strictly into government and non-government, but this is mostly evidence of a failed society; In a functioning one, the relevant parts of a government can always be extended or reduced (though this process may take some time).
The obvious retort here may be, but what if you have subsistence farmers so busy that they can't even organize the most basic militia to protect themselves from each other? But the answer is equally obvious, namely that if you spend all your time on your farm and can't spare any time outside of it in a militia, you also have no time forming a society in the first place; in which case you're, again, only a society with yourself, the other farmers merely geographically close but not part of the same society, similar to how irl tribes can be quite close without having any (positive) interactions whatsoever.
So in short, it's about how a society ought not being in the way of each other's life, liberty and happiness. Outright helping each other achieve it is of course desirable, and almost all societies try! But the degree to which it is attainable is dependent on many outside factors, so it makes no sense to construe it as a right, and the way progressives try to pretend they're special by doing so is simply presumptuous & arrogant.
And this distinction is still critical nowadays, since in particular healthcare is a black hole capable of eating arbitrary amounts of money. Ironically, the primary difference between America and other western countries isn't that Americans have worse healthcare outcomes (let alone "thousands dying due to unavailable treatment") - in fact, if you compare like-for-like, such as, say, japanese in America vs japanese in Japan (and most other groups), then Americans actually have significantly better healthcare outcomes then most others. It's merely that they spend excessively more compared to modest improvements; But this is simply a function of the fact that healthcare has starkly diminishing returns, the same can be seen for rich vs poor people.
Construing healthcare as a right, on top, has terrible incentives. It means that the moment a new technology to save lifes is developed, it needs to be used on everyone who needs it, costs be damned. In other words, developing new technology becomes negative sum for a society. Modern western countries have somewhat found a way out of this conundrum by labeling all new technologies unsafe and unusable by default (usually even for those who can privately afford it!), and only if you can prove it is safe by running a large-scale study (which incidentally is only really feasible with somewhat cost-effective treatments) it is allowed to be used.
But it's no accident that the overwhelming majority of new treatments is developed in America, since the incentives are much better aligned if you can develop a new treatment, let it be used by everyone who can afford it, it then gets improved (or discarded) depending on performance, and then the masses get access. Ironically, it de-facto also turns the richest into (willing, at least) guinea pigs. But of course, this is then easy to present as some sort of evil rich people conspiracy, keeping the good treatment from the regular people and letting them die. But in the rest of the western world, the people also don't get the good treatment (in fact they get it later or it doesn't even get developed in the first place), it's merely more equal by keeping it from the rich as well. This should be considered an abhorrent outcome - literally everything is worse for everyone - under most reasonable ethical systems. But the superficial optics are better, so it's favored by the easily swayed.
I think we were talking about different things. I was talking about moral rights - natural rights - inalienable rights. You know, the one imbued into Man by his Creator, if there is such a being (but He is, in this context, a convenient philosophical abstraction whether one materially believes in Him or not, provided you are some manner of moral realist). These are famously distinct from legal rights. So when I said that human beings had a right to healthcare, I meant that it is prima facie morally wrong to withhold it from them; that they ought to have it. What moral rights the state turns into legal rights, by pledging to proactively safeguard and guarantee them, is a very different question, and involves plenty of trade-offs and choosing the lesser evil.
I view the Declaration of Independence's "life, liberty and the pursuit of happines"" as acknowledging three of these natural rights and writing them into law as a pledge on the part of the US government to protect these rights as best it can. For all the reasons you outlined, "as best it can" doesn't mean it can actually keep you alive forever, or even really guarantee that you'll only die of old age. Sure. So if you want to argue something like: yes, if the US government had infinite money and we had infinite medicine, it would have a duty to distribute that medicine to everyone, but resources are scarce, and it's just not an effective use of the limited resources to die on the hill of universal healthcare - that's an object-level conversation we can have. I'm not intractable; So - I don't oppose triage in an imperfect world. Actually, triage is probably the hardest and most important job of any government.
What I do want, however, is for everyone to be on the same page with regards to the moral truth that in an ideal society, everyone would have access to healthcare. I would like everyone to agree that this is what we're working towards in the long term, whatever the current state of affairs permits. The right-wing position I was reacting against (by which of course I mean a position that is comparatively common on the right, not universal) is the denial of that moral right to healthcare; the sentiment that healthcare is simply a luxury good. Something you or I can quite naturally desire, perhaps; but not something which adds a black mark in the book of Mankind for every day that goes by where someone is deprived of it.
I notice this is similar to one of the places the race subthread ended up, and I think it's a crux of my biggest meta-issues with the right: where the progressive position is "X is desirable, so we should do X", the right-wing will be a coalition behind the banner of "not-X" that lumps together people who think X is desirable, but impractical at present; and people who think X isn't desirable. I can never shake the sense that despite appearances, the "not-X because we can't" people's natural allies are the "yes-X"ites much moreso than the "not-X because we shouldn't" people. After all, there's only object-level uncertainty separating the "yes-X"s and the "not-X(1)"s, whereas the "not-X(1)" and "not-X(2)" seem to have much more fundamental value differences. Whenever I get into an intelligent conversation with a not-X(1)-ite like yourself, I just mourn that I can't full-throatedly collaborate with their bloc because I suspect it to be full of not-X(2)s.
I believe in a Creator but I do not see how He could have endowned mankind with an inalienable right to healthcare given that we haven’t had any for 99.99999% of our existence.
The same works from the philosophical perspective IMO: if you start from the position that ‘healthcare’ is a marvellous thing that we only invented very recently, then people aren’t being deprived of it but instead they simply don’t have it.
I know you say that you are merely arguing that it would be immoral to deny people ‘healthcare’ in a world where that was practically achievable, but I think that talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it. For example, I think that it would be poor form to actively deny air conditioning to everybody if the alternative is practically achievable but I would find it very odd to say that ‘mankind has an inalianble right to air conditioning’.
In general, you are also confusing the issue a lot by using the term ‘access to healthcare’ as if it were a singular thing with an agreed-upon definition. Are we talking about setting broken bones? Antibiotics for sepsis? Polio vaccines? Talk therapy? Hair loss treatment? In our perfect society, do I have an inalienable right to a team of doctors dedicated to optimising my biochemistry for maximum happiness and performance on a moment to moment basis, and who is going to be made to do that for me? These aren’t rhetorical questions, I think you need to clarify your position, because in my opinion it would be immoral to deny some of these and not others.
I think this line of thinking proves way, way too much. 99.9999% of human history consisted of brutes braining one another with carved rocks. Does this disprove the right to not be murdered? No, it just proves that immorality is rampant/the material world doesn't care about what hairless apes believe to be the moral law. I find this point obvious both from an atheistic (there is no external source of morality outwith ourselves; the world isn't inherently just) and Christian (the terrestrial world is imperfect; the whole point of human life is the struggle to do right by your fellow man despite the odds) perspective.
Again, I regard healthcare as a necessary part of the the practical implementation of the right to life first and foremost, and of other rights in a secondary capacity - after all, it is difficult to describe an unaided paralytic, or indeed an unmedicated madman lost in delusions, as possessing anything that could fairly be called freedom, and either situation makes the pursuit of happiness a tricky proposition. Granted, it is not impossible to be free and happy in your own mind no matter how wretched your circumstance, but at that level of pedantry, it becomes meaningless for the State to pledge to protect these rights, since one starts to wonder what infringing on them could even look like. Hence the forms of healthcare you list are the right of any human being to the extent that they are necessary to preserve that person's life, agency, and capacity for happiness. Not maximize them - preserve them. Broken bones, antibiotics, vaccines: yes. Therapy: it depends. Hair loss treatment: nah. (I mean, you can imagine some mentally ill person for whom, for whatever reason it would make such a difference in quality-of-life that it'd be worth it. But that would have to be vouched for by a psychiatrist and fall under psychiatric treatment.)
Still, if you think "talking about inalienable rights is confusing the issue rather than clarifying it", I don't want to get hung up on a turn of phrase. "I believe giving everyone access to healthcare is the moral duty of the state"? "I believe we should institute universal healthcare if at all possible, because it's the right thing to do"? Put it how you like; I don't really see how this would make you less confused about what I'm advocating.
Oh, but by the way -
…this seems to be refusing to take the premise of the thought experiment at its word. The perfect society is defined as one in which things like medical staff shortage are handwaved away, spherical-cows-style. I don't know if this perfect society has foolproof robot doctors, if it's got money to throw on incentivizing promising students to join the medical profession, if it has really inspiring educational programs that get doctors and nurses to work for a song and the satisfaction of helping their fellow man - whatever. Unless you outright believe it is literally impossible without actual magic to get everyone in the country healthcare, ever, making the thought experiment void, then the specifics of the thought experiment are besides the point.
You make this distinction as if it's obvious, but I'm not sure it is. If an 80 year old is blind, deaf, arthritic, has a gimpy knee, and then breaks his leg, what healthcare is he owed in our perfect society? Are we just going to fix his leg, and tell him, 'Rejoice! We have preserved your miniscule ability to pursue happiness'? Do we fix him back to the physical and mental condition of an athletic 18 year old as a kind of human baseline? Do we immediately fix any negative physical/mental damage as he's growing up, preventing him from becoming old and blind, but ignore the fact that he's genetically stupid and inclined to depressive melancholy?
That's exactly what I'm getting at. Whether your demands require actual magic or not depends strongly on exactly how you're going to define healthcare. If your proposition is 'in an ideal world, we should not refuse to fix people's obvious ailments as long as it doesn't cost us any meaningful amount of money or time to do so' then I'm right there with you, but you seemed to be aiming at a much more far-reaching proposal. I suppose even this limited proposal rules out darwinian 'the weak should perish to strengthen society' philosophies, if that's what you're going for?
I have quarantined this in a separate section because it would derail the conversation:
Quite so. How can we have an inalienable right (an absolute moral guarantee) not to be murdered if it happens all the time? Say that murdering people is immoral all you like, and I will agree with you. But I think lots of things are immoral: do I have an inalienable right not to be cheated on by my wife? To not have my colleagues speak languages I don't understand in the office? Is a black mark placed in the book of Mankind every time these things happen? From where I'm standing, you're using grandiose moral claims about the nature of the universe to back up your personal preference about how much it should cost to go to the doctor. This is exactly why the concept of 'rights' in last half-century has become so fraught: because everyone asserts their personal moral code as if it is an inalienable fact of the universe that never has to be compromised upon (how 'rights' is usually used in conversation and rhetoric).
As far as I'm concerned, the Declaration of Independence was written by revolutionaries high on their own supply: a fairly transparent attempt to claim that not wanting to repay the Crown for the money that was spent protecting them from hostile nations was a grand moral project, as if nobody else had ever thought that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness were pretty nice as long as they didn't get in the way of anything more important. And indeed I note that the US government is quite happy to kill people, imprison them, or otherwise inhibit their pursuit of happiness in order to achieve goals that it thinks are more important.
Addendum: For example, even the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are not obviously without complexity. If you believe, as I do, that what people (those flawed beings) do with their time is not necessarily what will make them happy in the long term, it seems entirely possible to deprive them of some of their liberty to ensure their right to pursue happiness. So I find it hard to see these three things as inalienable gifts I have been given by my creator. I am much more comfortable with the inalienable duty to Do Your Best, Do What I Told You To Do, and Don't Fuck It Up.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the root of the woke mind virus (and a lot of other mind virii that are in the mix as well) is that we’re essentially an immunocompromised society. There’s no lines in the sand that can’t be crossed. The evils always exist, but we’re the polite people who refuse, on the grounds of “being nice” to say anything about them. The urge to cancel people has always existed, we just don’t stand up to them anymore. There were probably always perverts who want access to children. Now we’ve lost the ability to say “we don’t do that here”. There was always a push to try to get sinecures for our own ethnic, religious, or sexuality tribes, but again, there wasn’t any sense that the rest of us wouldn’t push back. And radical Islam has been pushing through the same gap. They want to impose on us, we more or less don’t want to be rude by saying “no, you cannot do that.” They want to impose their view of the world on us, or to be allowed access to children. They want every child to be taught about Islam, but pushing back is rude. And I think until the West regrows it’s spine and decides that it’s ideas are pretty good and it has every right, not only to teach its own religion, culture, and legal theory in its own country, but the right to insist that people who choose to live here abide those beliefs and systems. No, you may not rape 12 year olds. No, you don’t get to throw people out of work for offending you. No, men don’t get to go into women’s private spaces, especially changing areas. No, you don’t get to trans kids in schools.
And until that part is fixed, until there’s enough spine in the west to be willing to impose its will in its own territories, and do so no matter how many ways the carriers of mind viruses try to brand us as crime thinkers, I don’t see it stopping. I think the west made a mistake in removing Christianity from government entirely. Yes it can be annoying, but if my options are “we’ll arrest you for protecting your children from rape, while teaching them to salute th3 gay flag” or “were all Presbyterians now, and if someone wants to hold office they have to be a confessional Christian,” im signing up on the second one. At least they can tell people to stop stealing, raping, and say no to teaching kids to switch genders while hiding it from parents. At least there’s no reason to think that such a society would go woke out of politeness.
I agree with this as far as it goes. Any thoughts on how to thread the needle between an "immunocompromised society" and a despotic theocracy (like Iran)? IMO, Israel kind of does that, but what's the secret sauce?
The secret sauce in Israel is that the pro-establishment left (in Israel's case, the historically Labour-voting secular Ashkenazi elite) are fiercely patriotic in a way that the pro-establishment left is not in most other Western countries, either because of woke, because of American cultural capture, or (in the case of the UK) both. That, in turn, is probably due to the role of the Holocaust as part of the Israeli founding myth. The pro-establishment right tends patriotic everywhere, and the anti-establishment right almost everywhere, but you need patriotic factions on both sides of the aisle if you want to ensure generally patriotic government.
Israel is in danger of losing its secret sauce because the pro-establishment right (i.e. Netanyahu) is increasingly dependent on the votes of the Haredim (who are functionally unpatriotic because they see the Israeli state as a food animal).
Thanks. This explanation is new to me, at least regarding Israel specifically, and feels plausible.
On the other hand, we can't deliberately subject our nation to decimating attacks by outsiders as a means of forging a shared national identity. Any ideas on how to recreate the effect without the cause?
To be fair, I think the Palestinians help as well. It’s very hard to get a Woke mind virus when you’re surrounded by people who want you dead. The two almost need each other as they’re defying themselves against each other an an enemy unites tribes.
Agreed. Jonothan Haidt said that historically, shared identity typically springs from some combination of shared blood, shared gods, and shared enemies. The more I thought about it, the truer it seemed, but shared enemies may be the most important of the three. Even with shared blood and nominally shared gods, large societies often fracture and fall into civil war without a shared external enemy. As a famous example, the decline of Rome from a republic to an autocracy in the context of a class war (plebians vs. patricians) was rapid and almost linear over the 100-year period from found 150 BC to 44BC, following what seemed like Rome's greatest triumph: the total, permanent defeat of its archrival, Carthage, in a struggle between two global superpowers. (Sound familiar?)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Being one of the progressive stack's sacred cows probably gave them a layer of insulation. It seems to be wearing thin, but it's there.
Not really. The kind of person who talks about the "progressive stack" unironically has hated Israel since before they knew what the "progressive stack" was.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I disagree about the lack of an immune response, the issue is that wokeness thrives off that immune response. The reason classical liberalism didn't take off virally is the absense of the religious purity culture component. Classical liberalism says "let's all be equal and respect each other and let everyone do what they want." Which is too inoffensive of a message. Wokeness says "you're privileged and inherently a bigot, now pay me for my emotional labor." That's a message that provokes a response. Either you convert, apologize for your original privilege, and accept equity as your lord and savior, or you become an uncouth MRA chud who supplies exactly the examples of oppression that can be used to justify future wokeness.
I don't want to put words in MaiqTheTrue's mouth, but, speaking for myself on behalf of his basic thesis, the problem isn't a general lack of thymos [Greek: spirit; cf. Plato's chariot allegory], but a lack of thymos among the non-woke majority. The woke brigades have plenty of it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Presbyterians have totally gone woke out of politeness. So have Episcopalians, Methodists, and mainstream Lutherans.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm rather sure that Trump's victory last year is by far not the first setback of wokeness in the US, and arguably not the biggest either. I recall reading the argument from Walt Bismarck and maybe other rightist bloggers as well that the period between Nixon's reelection and the LA riots of 1992 can be interpreted as two decades of racial detente, for example.
I'm curious what your top three candidates would be.
1990's political correctness becoming a laughing stock.
That set wokeness back 20 years. I don't know what the mechanism was because I was too young to be paying attention, and both sides of the culture war agreed to airbrush it out of history because the woke wanted to make their victory look more inevitable and the antiwoke wanted an excuse for losing.
PC at the time failed to achieve critical mass for a variety of reasons. I think the largest reason, compared to 2010s version, is that culture was still top-down. Music was what the big record companies approved. News came through the TV or paper. Comedians could mock PC as blue-nosed university primping and get rewarded for it.
The breaking of the top-down cultural monopoly in the 2000s weakened the gatekeepers who (probably not intentionally) kept PC quarantined to the university humanities departments.
This seems correct to me, with two addenda.
First, there's been an explosion of oppressed identities accessible to the majority, in the form of disabilities, queerness, plus esoteric sexualities and genders. This vastly increased the surface of potentially receptive people that would have previously considered themselves targets.
Second, the development of social media, especially Tumblr (as Katherine Dee has documented) provided a vector for the reemergence of political correctness as wokeness.
Link got cocked up appending the motte url, don't know why that happens. Clean one:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/tumblr-transformed-american-politics/
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I started graduate school in 1990, and I got a glimpse ahead of the woke curve because my girlfriend was in a humanities department. They were in the ballpark of as crazy then as they are now, but the movement didn't have fangs yet, outside certain small and isolated spheres of dominion (such as, evidently, clinical psych departments, even in the Southern United States).
In my observation, there was never an inflection point from 1990 to 2020 -- just a steadily accelerating creep, into more and more places, to ever increasing effect, of identity politics and leftist authoritarianism.
Could you talk more about this?
Sure. For example, in the office my girlfriend shared with some other students, there was a map on the wall that was an equal area projection with Africa in the middle. The title was something like, "Socially Just Map of the World", and the heading under that said that usual projections of the globe onto a map "disadvantage Africa and South America, and Asia" (their words) by making them look smaller than they are by land-area comparison, and by placing them at the edge of the map, either horizontally or vertically. This level of pettiness over race was then new to me, and I chuckled and asked how anyone was "disadvantaged" by having a smaller land area on someone else's map halfway around the world. My girlfriend looked at me like I had blasphemed in front of a Bishop. She wasn't surprised that I had the thought (which was roughly as obvious to her as it was to me); she was appalled that I broke the taboo of questioning a bit of PC craziness in front of her classmates, and that she might be implicated by association ("Do you let him say things like that at home?"). This was in 1990, in the clinical psychology department at the University of Georgia, and it was the water they swam in every day.
I would emphasize that, at the time, she knew almost as well as I did that this stuff was silly, but lived in a state of ketman every day for fear of cancel culture. She gradually became more woke on the inside, though. If you think you can pretend to be something for long without becoming that thing, talk to a man who's been through a mock POW camp in SEER school (or else read "The Lucifer Effect" by Philip Zimbardo).
The leftist fundamentalists in the psych department in 1990 felt the same sense of entitlement to control other people as they probably do now, as long as they were in their element. We were going out to dinner with a group once, and one female grad student said, "If anyone orders veal, I am going to have a real problem with that." If veal had been on the menu, I'd have ordered it to find out the exact nature of the problem she was going to have -- but I suspect in my absence that would have been considered General's Orders. Another time, another girl said she had a problem with anyone who hunted. I asked if she was a vegetarian, and she said 'no', looking (1) guilty and (2) surprised, as if to say "you're not supposed to ask such things".
I only observed this directly for one semester, because my girlfriend -- who I had had a long-distance relationship with for four years of college -- broke up with me 3 months after we moved in together for grad school. There were several reasons for it, but I think one of them was that, while I was not particularly conservative at the time, my indefatigable Gomer-Pyle common sense (as I came from the math department were none of this was going on yet) was not only an embarrassment to her, but a danger to her career by way of voluntary association.
This sounds similar to that one scene at the beginning of Cryptonomicon (granted it's been a few years since I read it).
I think even at the time people knew what was up if they wanted to.
You mean the scene where Randy the Dwarf gets into it G E B Kistivik the Hobbit over the Information Superhighway being a stupid metaphor? I freaking loved that scene, one of many that I freaking loved throughout the book!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The reelection victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush Jr. GOP midterm election victories in 1994 and 2010.
I wouldn't count that because the left was around, but modern wokeness wasn't.
At what point did modern wokeness become modern then?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Nixons silent majority, and Clintons Sister Souljah could only have come about because of progressive overreach. Turns out Weathermen college kids did not have a large corpus of auto workers eager to join the cause of socialism, and whites were not willing to lie down and die to sate black bloodlust.
It is telling that progressivism has reverted to black issues once again despite decades of demographic progression. ADOS remain an intractable feature of US cultural dissonance, and the (bad) intellectual arguments used to externalize self responsibility for their poor state has been more deftly coopted by intellectual superiors such as sexual paraphiliacs, islamists and Indians.As more are included in the umbrella of 'other people are responsible for why we are so shit', the umbrella shields less and less. Eventually everyone just loses, and the next phase of wokeness might be the scramble to see who gets to remain under the remnants of this intellectual umbrella.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think the question is, what will be the synthesis to the thesis/anti-thesis you have pointed at. People will eventually realize they can speak up but someone needs to do the work to fill in what comes next.
I don't think we will go forward to the world that the woke want. Neither do I think we're going back to the 80s. The only way forward is through.
I believe in a synthesis of conservatism and progressivism, but not a synthesis of any honest, well-meaning worldview with wokeness. "For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?" [2 Corinthians 6:14]
It won't end until someone synthesizes with it.
Funny that you quote Corinthians, because as soon as early Christianity was over, Christians became amenable to absorbing the beliefs they once fought against.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link