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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   27717 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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The Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. To be woke, by that definition, is to be a noble thing indeed: a defender of the oppressed and downtrodden. This is the ethos of a fairy tale hero like Robin Hood, or Prince Charming, or the valiant huntsman who vanquishes the big bad wolf and saves Little Red Riding Hood and her sick, old grandma. Not coincidentally, it has also been the stated agenda of every mass murdering tyrant in modern history.

There are some possible interpretations of this paragraph:

  • A. Woke implies an agenda of defending the oppressed, mass murdering tyrant also implies an agenda of defending the oppressed. In this case, there is very little to link wokes to tyrants -- if we observe that Nazis frequently wear uniforms, and postmen frequently wear uniforms that tells us very little if there is any unexpected overlap between Nazis and postmen -- anything from 'postmen and Nazis are exactly the same group' to 'there is no postman who is also a Nazi' remains possible.
  • B. 'Every mass murdering tyrant in modern history had a stated agenda which was woke'. This is a much stronger statement. Unfortunately, even if I were to not dispute that every left-wing or communist regime from the Republican side of the Spanish civil war to the Khmer Rouge qualifies as woke there are a few counterexamples -- for example the Nazis, Imperial Japan, Saddam Hussein, the Ayatollah or the Young Turks all committed their worst atrocities for explicitly racist or religious reasons. (WP List) For convenience and tradition, let us focus on the Holocaust. If you prefer interpretation B, what is your explanation? Does Hitler not qualify as a tyrant? Was the Shoah the product of an anti-racist agenda? Do we start with our weekly epistemic discussion about the Holocaust?

That being said, I think your overall point is not wrong. Left wing ideologies could be classified on a splintered-dogmatic axis. The splintered left might agree on hating fascism and strongly disliking capitalism, but have a multitude of opinions on what kind (if any) of state they want, if feminism was a distraction from the class struggle or an essential problem to be solved first and so on. The central example of the dogmatic left would be the communist parties. I am not sure how the ratio of contrarians to dogmatists was at the best of times (say Western students in the 1960ies), but I think there were some genuine object level discussions not entirely unlike in the ratsphere. I was not born back then, so I can not say for sure.

Of course, the big atrocities of the left have mostly been committed by the dogmatists following the party line with a comical overconfidence that what they did was right.

I find social justice progressivism firmly on the dogmatic side. Where 20 years ago the Israel-Palestine conflict would have ripped apart leftist groups in the middle, today the consensus of SJP seems to be that Israel are the 'white' colonizers and therefore in the wrong, end of story.

And unlike my own Grey Tribe, the left (especially the dogmatic left) has never been very great at noticing the skulls.

There are two definitions of woke on the table; there is the dictionary definition and there is what people refer to in practice as "woke". These are not the same and I am referring explicitly to the Oxford dictionary definition, which does not reference leftism in any way. Hitler definitely espoused a message of wokeness in the dictionary sense, casting the Jews, Slavs, industrialists as historical class exploiters and using this as a pretext for seizing various assets on behalf of the Volk (folks; people). A case can be made that the Ayatollahs were/are woke as well. I don't consider Hirohito a "mass murdering tyrant" because he was beloved by his people and didn't directly kill them.

Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup. If we apply that standard, then virtually qualifies as woke. Hamas? Woke. Fundamentalist Israeli settlers? Woke. Third gen feminist? Woke. MRA? Woke. A medieval knight following an honor code of protecting the weak from oppression? Woke.

MAGA contains the narrative that the US was taken over by the coastal elites with their pronouns who are completely out of touch with the hardworking, down-to-earth (possibly white) Americans who are actually the backbone of the country, with DJT as a hero of these downtrodden draining the swamp and making the world right again. By your definition, this makes Trump about as woke as Biden.

Very few political parties have the slogan "things are swell right now, let's keep everything exactly as it is", because this does not mobilize voters much. The very least one needs is "keep us in power or you will become the oppressed", which makes one the champion of the people who would otherwise be oppressed in the future, which is also a big part of the classic hero of the downtrodden movement.

I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage. It would be like defining 'porn' wide enough that it includes the Muppet Show (furries!), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'porn' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing onlyfans to do age verification.

I think a definition of woke which includes practically every political movement ever is not a very useful definition and flies in the face of common usage.

This, partly, was my point. The definition of wokeness I was applying, taken from the Oxford dictionary (explicitly, using the phrase "in the dictionary sense"), does not reflect the common use of the word. If you read carefully, I never said Hitler, Stalin, etc. were woke. I said (1) their propaganda was rife with woke sounding platitudes, and that (2) their stated agendas fit the dictionary definition (but not the actual meaning in common sense) of wokeness.

But the reader shouldn't have to read that carefully to get the message, so I edited the first paragraph as follows to clarify that the dictionary definition of "woke" that I am using here does not reflect the common use of the word:

As of this writing, the Oxford English Dictionary defines wokeness as being alert to injustice and discrimination in society, especially racism. The dictionary entry doesn't mention radical progressivism, censorship, collective punishment, or selective enforcement of criminal laws. Indeed, the Oxford definition does not mention, or even suggest, anything actually associated with wokeness, as opposed to non-wokeness, in the sense that the word is actually used. I submit this is because the dictionary's authors are woke (or else pretending to be, in order to avoid censorship and collective punishment).

It would be like defining 'violent video games' wide enough that it includes Pong (there's a winner and a loser), then arguing that most school shooters were exposed to 'violent video games' in their childhood and that therefore we need to do more to keep porn (see what I did there) from kids by forcing GameStop to do age verification.

Newspeak (like "porn", "violent video games", and "woke") is useful because it prevents your opponents from putting a name to your face.
It has no downsides that are recognizable by the people who practice this kind of politics.

Virtually everyone sees their ingroup as a victim who is treated unjustly by their outgroup.

I think this covers up an important truth. There is an important difference in this respect between "virtually everyone" on the one hand, and, on the other hand, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their ilk. It is one thing to feel like your clan has gotten the short end of some particular stick, but it is another thing to feel like that justifies negating the human rights of your countrymen in the entire offending class. Of course you can find, to some degree, talking heads of any class talking about how their group has been treated unfairly, but when that rises to a certain pitch and tone, you'd best keep your rifle clean.

A. Woke implies an agenda of defending the oppressed, mass murdering tyrant also implies an agenda of defending the oppressed. In this case, there is very little to link wokes to tyrants -- if we observe that Nazis frequently wear uniforms, and postmen frequently wear uniforms that tells us very little if there is any unexpected overlap between Nazis and postmen

To be fair, "defending the oppressed" inspires and excuses actions. Uniforms do not.

Originally I picked uniforms kind of at random, but thinking more about it, it seems like a fun hill to die on.

Uniforms have been part of most armies for centuries. Kind of weird as a fashion choice? I think that the reason is that uniforms serve a useful purpose in the military: they erase differences in class and culture between the troops, and emphasize the difference between the troops and the enemy or civilians. This increases group cohesion: instead of seeing Bob the bully lying bleeding in the barbed wires in their stupid blue sweater, you see a fellow brother in arms. This unit cohesion and the sublimation of individual responsibility to the chain of command are then useful for military operations such as winning a battle or murdering a village.

"beliefs they are fighting for the oppressed" and "wears uniforms" are both Bayesian evidence for someone being more likely to drag you from your home and murdering you. Of course, there are some important difference in details between the postmen and the Einsatzgruppen, but there are also some important differences in details between the Stalinists and campus protesters.

People literally say "I am planting this bomb to fight for the oppressed". They don't say "I am planting this bomb to get cool uniforms". There's a big difference in how direct the connection is, even if both of them can be classified as increases in Bayseian probability.

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