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 -
How do wokes/social constructionists/etc reconcile their views with the actual state of scientific knowledge or even basic logic? It seems clear to me that if one accepts genetics and evolutionary principles, it necessarily implies that 1: humans have a nature that is determined in large part by our genetics and 2: humans and human societies undergo selection on both an individual and group level. We've known for a long time now that intelligence, mental health and a whole bunch of other traits relating to ability and personality are very heavily influenced by genetics, and it's perfectly logical this could lead to differences in outcomes on an individual as well as population level.
However this gets dismissed away with a lot of spurious reasoning (which is usually presented with a huge amount of nose-thumbing and "Scientists say..." type wording in order to scare the reader into not questioning it). As an example, the whole "races can't be easily delineated, there's no gene specific to any race, and there's more variation within races than between them" argument seems to be a poor attempt at deflection and simply doesn't hold up as a method of dismissing population-level differences. Just because races can't be easily delineated does not mean that race is a "social construct" - race might not be discrete, but it is a real physical entity with roots in biology and just because there's no clear dividing lines which can be drawn doesn't exclude the fact that if you do decide to draw these lines it's entirely possible you'd find differences which exist. None of what's said is inconsistent with the idea of innate variations in intelligence and ability that roughly correlate with observable phenotypic traits. All it takes is for the frequency of specific alleles which code for these traits to be unequally distributed, and you'll find aggregate differences. But the way it's presented exists to mislead people into thinking that the continuum-like nature of genetic differences means that these differences or even the concept of race itself as a biological entity is not something that one should even entertain.
There is also another level to this denial of evolutionary principles that extends far beyond genetics, however. Many of these people also seem to think that social norms themselves are arbitrary vagaries of specific historical circumstances, rather than being adaptive practices which were selected for through the process of survival-of-the-fittest. This view fails to account for many commonalities among civilisations, one of the clear ones being religion (one of the favourite woke whipping horses out there). Not only is religion completely ubiquitous in pre-modern society, you can generally see a shift from animist-type religions in tribal societies to the more developed and organised forms of religion mostly predominant in societies that achieve "civilisation" status. This clearly seems to suggest that religious dictates don't simply arbitrarily drop out of the sky - it indicates that some form of selection was occurring and that societies that adopted certain religions had an advantage. Even more than this, these "successful" religions that are common in civilisations share quite a few similarities in their dictates - selflessness, self-discipline, abstinence, etc.
I'm no religious nut - I'm quite atheist, but religion is a social technology that exists so that large-scale societies can remain cohesive and retain a shared moral foundation, and I would call it a good thing overall (and yes, my perspective often pisses off both religious people and atheists). However this is never properly engaged with by the orthodoxy outside of "yeah people facing hardship make up bullshit to make sense of the world, it's got no validity or use outside of that". Such stock explanations that handwave away traditional social norms (at least, those which contradict the woke moral system and outlook) as being functionless at best and damaging at worst are painfully common, despite many of these social norms being absolutely everywhere up until recently.
Among the supposedly educated any discussion of these topics through these non-approved lenses tends to invoke accusations of "social Darwinism" with the implication that applying any kind of evolutionary logic to humans and human societies is invalid because it could be used to justify Bad Things. This is all consequentialist reasoning which has no bearing on the truth of the claim itself, and lumping in all kinds of belief systems under the same category is a very clear composition fallacy which is clearly done to tar every single idea contained within its bounds with the same brush.
More than this, despite these people being very intent on portraying themselves as secular, scientific people, their viewpoints clearly are in conflict with any kind of scientific understanding and come off to me as being borderline superstitious. In order to strongly believe that insights from genetics and evolution can't be applied to human behaviour and that humans do not come programmed with specific predispositions that depend on what you've inherited, you have to believe in metaphysical, dualist ideas of the mind which are essentially detached from anything physical that could be affected by genetics. Once you adopt a view of the human mind as a physical entity the shape of which is determined by the specifications of genetic instructions, it opens up that whole Darwinian can of worms and everything that stems from it, and many wokes simply do not want to acknowledge the possibility that it could have any amount of validity. Unless they're able to maintain an absolutely unreal amount of cognitive dissonance, I'm unsure how their ideas can be anything but superstitious.
It's even worse when it comes to their idea of social norms as something that just drop out of the sky and persist and propagate over the long term regardless of the adaptiveness of these norms, since there is clearly nothing controversial about the idea that societies compete against each other, and this will tend to select for those norms that promote functioning (which is why you find common threads). But you still come across this type of knee-jerk denial nevertheless. Regardless of how well-read they may be, their reasoning remains fundamentally sloppy, and I'm unsure how they manage to square this circle.
First of all, I do think this post is pretty much just "why is my idiotic outgroup so idiotic as to believe in idiotic things?" and not the kind of thing I like seeing here, personally.
Second, I think the things you describe about biology-denial is common not just in "wokes" but in much of the general population as well. The wokes certainly are the most fervent believers in it and also one of the primary driving forces that push it onto the general populace, but they're by far not the only ones to buy into the denialism hook-line-sinker.
Third, I think the answer to your question is just that most people don't actually care to do the research into this stuff. Most people, wokes included, follow a sort of cargo-cult version of principles that happen to be convenient for them in the moment, not principles themselves. An example that comes to mind - because it was one of the first I noticed back in my SJW days - was wokes (perhaps proto-wokes? "Woke" wasn't nearly as common a term back then as it is now, and they were usually called SJWs) calling opinions they disagreed with "gross" as a way to denigrate them. It came as a shock to me, because those same individuals had spent the past decade denigrating the notion of objecting to something on the basis of personal disgust in the fight for gay rights and gay marriage. Yet there they were, objecting to something on the basis of personal disgust. It made me realize that they mistakenly believed they were principled; it wasn't that they believed in the principle of non-judgment on the basis of disgust while their conservative opponents didn't, it was that they just didn't find gay marriage disgusting and so had no issue with using such a principle as a convenient momentary tool with which to beat down their conservative opponents.
So when it comes to science and specifically the evolution of the human brain and human societies, they don't actually follow the principles of science to do the research into figuring out truths about the universe, they just think cheering really loudly for the banner that says "science" on it while pushing all the same ideas they already believe in is what it takes for them to be pro-science.
I don't think this is unique to wokes. It's perhaps particularly worse in them than many other ideologies, because woke-ism specifically has concepts designed to turn off critical thinking. But then again, that's not exactly unique to woke-ism either. It just happens to be the one that is acceptable to people who consider themselves pro-science through optimizing itself to have the most convincing, shiniest pseudo-academic/pseudoscientific veneer that hides the fact that it's all made of cardboard.
What do you mean by this? Do you have any examples?
The concept of "lived experience" being that, when someone belonging to a demographic group that has been deemed oppressed claims something, it is to be believed without skepticism. Any sort of good-faith questioning or checking is deemed to be a form of oppression. This concept is repeated in many places, such as the "microaggression," which is, by definition, a behavior that the "microaggressor" doesn't perceive as being an aggression and is entirely up to the judgment of the "microaggressed upon" but which is still something that the potential "microaggressor" has the responsibility to avoid doing. There's also "believe women" and "believe all women," which are slogans designed specifically to push people away from applying basic good-faith skepticism to claims of fact when women make claims of specific sexual assault against individuals.
Of course, in practice it's impossible to apply this sort of thing in a consistent manner; if 2 different black people claim contradictory things to each other, then what do you do? In practice, it just means you have license to believe whoever is more convenient for your own social status and comfort while dismissing the other through various means (e.g. "internalized white supremacy"). And this sort of thing can lead to self-reinforcement, because by believing the right people, you can lead yourself to the conclusion that concepts like logical consistency and empirical science are themselves merely tools of the white supremacist patriarchy designed for the purpose of oppressing minorities; and it doesn't get much more anti-critical thinking than that.
There's also the attacking of free speech as a principle, the mockery of "Well Akshually", the attacking of "just asking questions" or playing devils advocate (you're derailing!). So there's a whole bunch of anti-heresy mechanisms in place.
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