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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29321 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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I don't mind answering these questions, but before we go on, can we acknowledge that wokeness is a solid concept, no worse that literally anything else that we've come up with to discuss political issues?

I've noticed these kinds of questions are often asked in order to imply wokeness is nebulous, but we've veered so deep into edge cases that I don't think it has any impact on the integrity of the core concept. Literally anything could be deconstructed by asking questions like that, and literally everything outside the world of pure mathematics would fall a apart under the pressure.

I could probably successfully argue that the concept of "chair" is nebulous, because you can't point to the exact limit between chairs and cars.

Would it be woke for a private individual to create a college scholarship and limit it to black people in this environment? Even if it was woke, do you think it would be a morally justifiable form of wokeness given the larger cultural situation in this hypothetical scenario?

Yes, and yes.

Edit: Actually, sorry. The first answer also depends on motivation. In could be woke, or not.

Was Ghandi woke for only advocating on behalf of oppressed Indians in South Africa, and ignoring the plight of Black South Africans?

Did he explicitly advocate against Black South Africans?

Would it be woke for someone to spend all of their charity money in third world countries, and not to spend a single dime in the United States?

Depends on their motivation.

Is it ever okay to discriminate against/ignore one group, while trying to better the station of another?

Ignoring is not the same as discrimination, and both can be ok. The circumstances have to be pretty extreme to justify the latter, though.

I don't mind answering these questions, but before we go on, can we acknowledge that wokeness is a solid concept, no worse that literally anything else that we've come up with to discuss political issues?

Well, I don't conceive of wokeness in the same terms you do, but I do acknowledge something like it is happening.

I consider wokeness to be a constellation of progressive tactics and policies that edge into anti-liberal territory. But in my conception, I have had trouble drawing the boundaries around it, which is why I am curious about your conception of it. Some things like politically correct speech, cancel culture for ordinary citizens, and safetyism all seem like parts of the constellation, but I don't have a good definition of what definitely isn't wokeness, and I was curious about your defintion.

I normally wouldn't consider affirmative action to be automatically "woke", for example. Something can be a bad or inadvisable policy without being "woke", as I see it. And I do think one could possibly justify certain formulations affirmative action on the grounds that it makes pluralistic liberalism function better, and not on any other basis.

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