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ZorbaTHut  3yr ago (text post)   32601 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Good news everyone! We now have a formal, scientific scale for measuring wokeness! You can find the related preprint here.

Finland's newspaper of record, Helsingin Sanomat (HS) summarizes the meaning of "wokeness" (it's called "woke" in Finnish too, using the untranslated term - of course, it's an Anglo concept, after all).

In Finnish, woke means being awake, but it could also be translated as awareness.

Its supporters think it's relevant, and opponents think it's too sensitive to see things like racism, sexism and discrimination against gender minorities around.

There are two other English terms associated with the phenomenon: cancel and callout culture. Both mean actively intervening in the politically questionable activities or writings of others, for example on social media. Cancellation takes the interference up to a boycott of the person.

UNIVERSITY OF TURKU psychology researcher Oskari Lahtinen has developed a psychological meter that can be used to study the prevalence of woke attitudes. In his research, he calls them attitudes of social justice.

The research is now in a peer-reviewed scientific publication. You can read the preview version on the Psyarxiv service .

"I have been interested in how common such attitudes are in Finland," says Lahtinen.

"I take a small risk when I study the woke phenomenon, because people have really strongly differing opinions and strong feelings about it."

Later on some unsurprising results:

Lahtinen was not surprised that the strongest woke attitudes were in the humanities and social sciences, but the rise of psychology in his own field came as a nice surprise.

Among the students, the highest woke scores were obtained by psychology and social sciences students.

Natural science students, on the other hand, got the lowest scores on the scale. On average, they pretty clearly disagree with the woke claims.

AMONG THE UNIVERSITY staff, clearly the highest woke scores were in the humanities. Business scholars received the lowest scores. Those in the fields of natural sciences and medicine ranked in the middle, but they also disagreed with the woke claims on average.

Some other fields had so few respondents that the results are not reliable, according to Lahtinen.

It also turned out that in the entire material, women had stronger social justice attitudes than men based on the measure.

THE PARTICIPANTS also answered questions measuring anxiety, depression and happiness.

Those with high woke scores had more anxiety and depression than others. They were also less happy.

"It was interesting because this was the case regardless of whether the person had experiences of being oppressed themselves. The mere fact that you have such a worldview meant that you were also more depressed and anxious," says Lahtinen.

The differences in well-being were really big. Students with high wake scores had 71 percent more anxiety, 39 percent more depression, and almost seven percent less happiness than those with low wake scores.

HS has used this study to create an (intentionally facile) wokeness test. I'm linking to the original Finnish version, Google Translate couldn't get it to work. It's below the researcher guy's picture, clicking "Näytä lisää" will expand it. "Täysin samaa mieltä" means "Fully agree", "Jokseenkin samaa mieltä" means "Somewhat agree", "Jokseenkin eri mieltä" is "Somewhat disagree" and "Täysin eri mieltä" means "Fully disagree". The max score is 30.

The claims are:

  1. Human species has two biological genders.

  2. Trans women are women.

  3. It is not right to limit a privileged person's right to speech.

  4. Trans women in Olympics do not advance women's rights.

  5. One should not say things that might offend a disadvantaged person's feelings.

  6. We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.

  7. University reading lists should include fewer white and European authors.

  8. The police are by definition a racist institution.

  9. If white people have on average a higher level of income than black people, it is because of oppression.

  10. A white person cannot understand how a black person feels.

That seems like a completely facile test indeed. I would give the "non-woke" answer on 100% of those questions, which I'm sure would place me somewhere interesting on the political spectrum, and completely disconnected from where I actually am.

Of course the test has all the usual disadvantages of requiring binary answers to complicated questions.

How would the test misclassify you? Your role in this community seems completely consistent with a wokeness score of 0%.

Someone who infers "anti-woke" somehow means republican or right-wing in any way is wrong, but that's not a problem with the test.

How would the test misclassify you? Your role in this community seems completely consistent with a wokeness score of 0%.

I don't know about that - I am sometimes willing to steelman woke positions, and I am what passes as a liberal hereabouts. Which is the problem with that test: my answers and those of bonafide right-wing white nationalist would be indistinguishable. While the truly woke and the typical sneerclubber might consider that accurate, I think not.

I'm not sure a white nationalist and a classical liberal would be indistinguishable on 6.

I am not exactly sure if that is the case. Question: We don’t need to talk more about the color of people’s skin.

  1. Yes, I believe in MLK colorblindness and we should talk less.

  2. No, we should talk more specifically about phasing out things like affirmative action

  3. Yes, the current level of talk including affirmative action and some woke stuff feels to me just about right

  4. No, we should talk more about racialist policies such as Kendi's Department of Anti-racism

  5. No, we should talk about white replacement and unsustainable immigration

For instance 1. and 2. to me seems stemming from similar sentiment but it gets you different questionnaire answer. And of course 5. and 6. are polar opposites on "wokeness scale" although the have the same questionnaire answer. The questionnaire is weird in this way.

Yes, the 4-1-5 horseshoe was exactly my point. 2 feels like a failure of test taking ability in the context of an anti-woke test, phasing out AA is more naturally a "talk less about race than currently" option. 3 is possible, though it is a fairly noncommittal stance and the original test was on a 4-point scale.

On a Venn diagram of wokeness right-wingers would be fully enclosed in a non-woke circle, with left-wingers straddling between woke and non-woke.

That's why any wokeness test wholly focused on wokeness can't distinguish between them.

Which is the problem with that test: my answers and those of bonafide right-wing white nationalist would be indistinguishable.

I don't think the test is meant to distinguish between those, though. It's not a generic political-position test, it's just a test for wokeness. As someone who is also a liberal myself (I don't know if I "pass" for one hereabouts, but I identify as one), I would classify myself as 100% anti-woke and I would expect an accurate test for wokeness to classify me as such, in a way that's indistinguishable from, say, a MAGA Republican. Because regardless of our differences, a MAGA Republican and I both are completely anti-woke.

Must be semantics then. I don't use the word "woke" to mean "generic socially left wing" but I guess if other people do then some peoples' test scores will make them look bad.

Human species has two biological genders.

You translated this from Finnish - does the original use a Finnish equivalent of "genders" here? Is any clarification offered in the original scale what they mean here? I can imagine people answering differently with slightly altered forms of the question:

  • The human species has two biological sexes.

  • The human species has only two biological sexes.

  • The human species has two genders.

  • The human species has only two genders.

Even if the original Finnish uses the equivalent of "gender" as opposed to "sex" without clarification, then it ends up functioning as a measure of wokeness more by being a shibboleth test than by being a good measure of underlying attitudes. English in particular uses "gender" euphemistically for "sex" in a lot of contexts, and it's only a small group of initiated individuals who make a strong sex-gender distinction in the first place.

Which other language than the English of the last few decades has separate words for the two? It's not that "oh in Finnish both translate to the same word" but that the distinction was made up recently in English (where they used to be synonyms, gender being a euphemism). When other languages need the distinction they have to loan the English word.

Croatian has one word for sex (male or female; a different word is used for coitus) and another for grammatical gender. I've seen some left-wing politicians use the word for grammatical gender like the word for sex, for example, talking about "gender discrimination".

A few years ago there was a controversy in Croatia regarding the adoption of the Istanbul Convention, an international treaty "Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence". The treaty mentions "gender", which some right-wing politicians interpreted as promoting homosexuality or something. It was eventually adopted and nothing of note has happened.

"Trans women are women" strikes me as the even-more-obviously shibboleth question. Agreed that this is generally a shibboleth test. Can a "wokeness test" not be scientific or useful or correct if it's merely a shibboleth test?

Yes, I should have translated it as "sexes". Finnish language does not make a distinction between biological gender and sex (both are "sukupuoli"), leading to some awkwardness when translating texts from languages that do. (Interestingly, the Finnish word would directly translate to "kin-half", meaning that binariness is arguably implicit in the word itself.)

Yes, I should have translated it as "sexes". Finnish language does not make a distinction between biological gender and sex (both are "sukupuoli"), leading to some awkwardness when translating texts from languages that do. (Interestingly, the Finnish word would directly translate to "kin-half", meaning that binariness is arguably implicit in the word itself.)

This made me look it up on a hunch, and it turns out the Russian word ([pol]) - which on top of it all sounds similar, despite at least wiktionary's etymology not linking the two! - is also etymologically derived from a word for half. I never realised.

To clarify, are 1, 3, 4, 6 reversely scored?

I believe so, the paper explicates the methodology.

I sure hope no one reading this paper forgets the difference between correlation and causation.

“The mere fact that you have such a worldview meant that you were also more depressed and anxious," says Lahtinen.

Uncanny how these results continue to be replicated in every society and every culture and moment.

Almost if wokeness have some kind of biological factor.

You underestimate the extent to which we're all living in America, and that's especially true of Western/Northern Europe.

in every society and every culture and moment

I mean really every single one?

Seems to me like these beliefs are utterly bizarre actually and if you tell people that aren't from the West about them the answer isn't enthusiastic denunciation of acquiescence, but just a perplexed bemusement. I'm sure if we asked people of the past (or likely of the future) about them they would react with the same amused confusion as we would about other peculiar cultures of history.

And that is even amongst the kind of urban cosmopolitans that are ostensibly the target of this particular meme.

I wouldn't confuse the hegemony of one particular imperial ideology over a large part of the world with some boundless universal truth.

I'm sure you can reify it into something like bioleninism, but in the final analysis wokeness is still just one of those silly things some humans believe.

I don't find it uncanny at all. In ecosystems, one species tends to dominate a given niche. The internet created a giant shared memetic ecosystem that almost all young westerners inhabit together, and wokeness is the perfect meme to dominate its given niche -- the group this blog describes, more or less. It either outcompeted or absorbed rival memes like internet atheism, internet stoicism, internet communism, etc etc.

A similar process is taking place on the right for underemployed undersexed downward mobile males, outcompeting or absorbing rival memes like internet collapse, internet reaction, internet men's rights, internet trumpism, internet gaming fandom, etc etc. But it doesn't have a name yet.

It’s interesting that if you ask woke people to name their movement, they usually won’t have a name in mind, or they’ll say something general like “I support human rights for everyone” or “I believe in basic human decency.” If you’re not woke it’s easy to recognize the woke movement and its adherents, but a woke person is reluctant to apply the label because it has derogatory connotations.

I think we’re seeing sort of the same thing in reverse with the movement on the right for low status males that you describe. Its adherents don’t really have a name for it, but its critics are not shy about labeling it using terms like “incel,” “fascist,” or “semi-fascist.” I don’t know what term will ultimately stick, but I suspect it will be some kind of sneer term, similar to how “woke” is a sneer term.

I think both cases are more artifacts of outgroup homogeneity bias. The proverbial low-status man doesn’t need a label to go hit on some girls out of his league—but those girls find it useful to talk about his category. Likewise for political discussion, which almost demands category words.

Signaling tribal allegiance with a self label is kind of gauche, too, so outside labels/sneers get a leg up.

Is "men going their own way" the same group as incels? Because I've known someone from that particular culture, and he had no problems describing himself as such to me and his other coworkers. Probably because it is vaguely positive, in the "I'm making a choice" sense.

As I recall, both "Woke" and "Social Justice Warrior" originated as indonyms, and were dropped as soon as the Memedom realized their adversaries were using them as insults. The same could well be the case with these various disillusioned young male counterparts.

Whenever this topic comes up, I think of a (likely apocryphal - I've never once been able to find where the name actually came from) story about "heroin," that famously addicting opioid. The story goes that when heroin was invented, existing opioids had a bad reputation for being extremely addicting, and so the drug makers gave it a name that was a homonym of a word that meant a woman with brave and admirable qualities. Unfortunately, the intrinsic qualities of this drug - being extremely addicting, sometimes to great detriment to the user - made it so that the term "heroin" now mostly has negative connotations.

The terms "social justice warrior" and "woke" strike me as quite obviously positive terms when read literally, though I doubt they were purposefully engineered to be as such as in the above story. Perhaps the "warrior" part has some negative connotations about being violent, but being violent for the sake of justice is mostly seen as a good thing in most contexts. And "woke" is meant to invoke a sense of being "awake" in contrast to being "asleep," i.e. actually aware of the reality around them instead of blissfully ignorant in one's slumber.

However, inevitably, the intrinsic qualities of the ideas and people these labels were put upon won out, and so they became terms of insult.

The term "red pill" I think is an almost perfect mirror-image analogue to "woke" in the right-wing.

From what I understand, Woke was either an African-American Vernacular English term for "aware", or a severe corruption of the old "wake up" conspiracy theorist term, as in the meme "wake up sheeple".

No, incels haven't had it and want it. MGTOW mostly seem to have had it, gotten burned, and decided they don't want it anymore.

There's more overlap than that description allows, though. If you looked at subreddits by shared users, you'd have found (at least before banning) that MGTOW and various incel subs shared a much higher proportion of users than you'd expect even by random chance, let alone by descriptions that would seem to exclude each other.

In principle, MGTOW is about a man embracing his agency to lead his best life without chasing women's approval, while inceldom lays claim to an identity of victimhood by women. One is clearly a better basis for life than the other. In practice, though, most men who identify as MGTOW focus a lot of their energy, mostly negatively, toward women. Inceldom at least is honestly dedicated, through and through, to its core identity of victimhood.

I suspect that overlap has a particular direction. I would expect, especially if Nybbler's account is true, that incels would be interested in reading MGTOW more than vice versa. Maybe I give them too much credit, but MGTOW feels to me like Men, but incels are pretty much just boys. If MGTOWs spend too much time on incel forums I'd probably laugh at them.

Fuzzy political movements are almost named for their opponents' sneer term. In the English Civil War, "Roundhead", "Cavalier", "Leveller" were all insults. To themselves, they were sensible people acting rightly. Fortunately, in that case we can depoliticize it with different labels (eg Parliamentarian, Monarchist, Proto-Republican). But there's not enough clarity on what our modern groups are. I think "Identarian" is a solid first stab for the group people call 'woke'.

"Whig" and "Tory" were both originally sneers as well. "Whiggamores" were obnoxious Scottish puritans. "Toruighes" were Irish Catholic bandits.

Identitarian is taken. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identitarian_movement

"Woke" is at least quite often a sneer-term, but I thought it started off as a self-identifier?

You are right, in the same way incel was simply a description of a person's circumstances. The fact that we can put venom behind the word is a product of the status-based nature of insults; incel and woke are both undesirable traits for their respective insult-flingers and thus become insults as a result.

True, but “incel” started as a self-identifier too.

So goes the euphemism treadmill. The undesirable is dressed up in respectable clothing, until the clothing itself takes on the aspect of undesirability and is exchanged for a new one.

I'd see it as a form of peacocking; i.e., we demonstrate our extreme wealth, security and ostensible enlightenment by adopting highly visible, confrontational and unintuitive beliefs that less educated or poorer societies and individuals simply cannot afford to act on.

This may be uncharitable, so I claim no objective truth here, but this seems to me to be the closest analogue to biological phenomena.

I see it more as anti-status quo bias and being prone to anti hierarchy bias. Who benefits from wokeness? Anyone who is lower on the socioeconomic totem pole. You can also benefit as a straight white male by showing wokeness, since it makes you seem generous and humble (although obviously there is a limit where too much wokeness damages you)

Anti-hierarchy bias doesn't seem to fit. The entire thing is used by people with high social, symbolic and cultural capital to legitimize their position of power. It's about claiming that you're selflessly protecting the oppressed and disadvantaged, so very virtuous people like you deserve to be ruling. At the same time, most of the point are straight up "toxoplasma of rage", they are not meant to convince people and, in fact, don't convince anyone outside the bubble. It has no tangible impact on real-world social justice. If it were really about opposing the status quo, the focus would be on important and actionable problems with effective approaches to solve them, not semantics and microaggressions. They may not be aware of it, but it's all a performance.

Who benefits from wokeness? Anyone who is lower on the socioeconomic totem pole.

I would, rather accusatorily, say that a certain class of college educated unskilled white women are largely the benefactors. They get something visible and at least pretending to be important to do in their anti-productive administrative, HR and DEI jobs.

I would say women are lower on the totem pole than men, traditionally speaking, so that’s why they find wokeness appealing. It provides a means to self advocate in order to gain sinecures like what you’re talking about, despite being obviously less productive or useful.

Who benefits from wokeness? Anyone who is lower on the socioeconomic totem pole.

Certainly not in Finland where the study was made. The people lowest on the socioeconomic totem pole are generally the least likely to have woke beliefs, not least because they 1) can't afford to believe in such things as much as more well off people and 2) tend to be much worse educated and thus much more isolated from academic circles and twitter (woke stuff being very much imported from USA here).

Agreed that that is a wrinkle in my theory but I think class needs to be set aside here. Wokeness is not about advocating for those in poverty or the working class, but for other so called marginalized identities.

The most socially attuned straight white men treat wokeness as a man in the 1950s would treat Christianity. Mouth the platitudes, make sure to turn up to the expected group ceremonies, avoid socializing with people who loudly reject it, and certainly don't angrily denounce it yourself. But never go too far in that direction: someone performing a public display of self-flagellation will always be considered a weirdo, no matter how motivated it is by his dedication to righteousness.

Most of my friend groups who were woke (we're talking pre-2015, so before woke meant what it meant now, and before Trumpism) would often denigrate "frat kids" and "the popular kids" as being "country club republicans" etc. These friend groups were very art/theatre-kid-adjacent. I think calling it "top of the pole" or "bottom of the pole" is too simplistic, but there's definitely some pole-stuff going on.

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