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 -
deleted
You know how sometimes some Robin DiAngelo type will ignorantly claim "White people have no culture"? When in reality, they are just totally oblivious, in all the worst ways, to the absolute cornucopia of white culture around them? That all the books written by white people are white culture? And all the movies. And all the music. And all the games. And all the architecture. If it was made by a white person, with whatever magic sauce every person's unique cultural heritage brings to the table, then it's white culture. But to a subset of people, this simply does not exist. How they can not see it is beyond me. But lately I notice people cognitively mutilated in ways Orwell wouldn't have thought up in his wildest dreams. So it is what it is.
Or worse, they view the existence of white culture, or anything at all that white men can enjoy and see themselves represented in and valorized in, as innately harmful to everyone else. And it must be destroyed. I'm sorry, I mean "fixed".
This hypothetical ur-racist is the exact sort of person utterly incapable of perceiving wokeness. It's just normal to them. "Being a decent person". No amount of pointing out their hatreds will make a remote impact on them. It's only wrong to hate people, and white men aren't people. They demonstrate how they've dehumanized white men every time they open their mouth. It's compulsive.
deleted
Like arjin_ferman wrote, we noticed, and there were plenty of fairly high profile fights around it. Possibly the most famous of which is the affair of reproductibly viable worker ants, aka Gamergate, which still gets referenced to this day 9 years later to be blamed for the rise of Trump and the alt-right and fascism and whatnot.
But in terms of how "wokism" became the force it is today, being so ubiquitous and invisible as to be water to a fish by many people (one could also make the analogy to white privilege to white people if one wants to be meta about it), I think one significant factor is the education system being infused with this stuff, and infused for several generations. It's fairly well known that much/all of the academic basis of what we call "wokism" started at least 50 years ago. The famous and influential paper White Privilage: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack was published in 1989, and from what I understand, this wasn't breaking particularly new ground in the "field."
In that half a century plus of this ideology being developed and taught, teachers have been taught to teach this stuff to kids, who in turn have grown up to be teachers who teach more of this stuff to kids. When you're taught only this as the only correct ideology as a kid, then as a teacher you're simply going to be unable to teach the next generation of kids to consider anything else as possibly correct. This process is leaky and imperfect, but at some point it reached critical mass. It also has some very strong defense mechanisms; it hijacks the common youthful impulse to rebel by always positioning itself as the ideology of the weak underdog against the powerful man, and it also has its own explicitly anti-rational/anti-empirical methods of epistemology that places barriers in people's ability even to study other ideologies, much less adopt them.
I think there are other extrinsic forces at play that helped it along as well, such as the fact that this time period was very closely after the US civil rights movement which is generally agreed upon as having been righteous and heroic, but which inevitably left fewer battles to win for people who wanted to follow their heroes. If you're a progressive, you have to progress beyond the prior generations' progressive victories, in order to find any meaning as a progressive. Thus compelling people to create new and improved versions of racial justice, leading to things like denigrating colorblindness in favor of explicit racial profiling. I also think the well known echo chamber effect in social media in the past 15 years played a factor on all sides, but with "wokeness" in particular, the aforementioned anti-rational thinking made its effect even stronger (I would guess similar things happened in traditional religious circles and other conspiracy theory circles, though I would also guess that the former group there wasn't as influenced by social media just due to not using it as much).
All this (and more, I'm sure), and we're seeing the results play out. It was clear to me as early as 2015 that we were seeing a new religion in action, one whose great innovation, in this unusually secular era, was convincing its adherents that it wasn't a faith-based religion at all. I think this is somewhat analogous to Christians (and likely followers of other religions, though Christians are the only ones I've personally encountered) who say that Christianity isn't a religion, unlike those other things like Judaism, Buddhism, or even atheism.
More options
Context Copy link
Of course they noticed, there were several massive ideological fights about it. People tried warning against it, and organized to oppose it.
This is one of the things that opened me to conspiracism. You wouldn't get so many people pretending nothing happened, if this was just a new ideology becoming popular.
More options
Context Copy link
The noted reluctance of social justice advocates to name themselves (and here's a new article from de Boer on the subject, even!) does remind me a little of something like the Mortal Name from Unsong, or how, in Warhammer Fantasy, actually saying the name of any of the Chaos Gods as a Chaos worshipper can get you turned into a mutant, but I suspect the real reason why is something more complex: to admit the boundaries of the group or category you belong to may actually be to surrender the ability to set those boundaries yourself.
Granted, social justice advocates more tend to position themselves as being in the moral spotlight, but I think there is a similar phenomenon here, where they can't let themselves be pigeonholed as being a distinct subset of the left wing. After all, if they organized into their own political party, they'd have to actually fight in elections and such--too risky, perhaps.
I mean, SJ names itself all the time. It's just that the words it uses are words which already mean other things - "moral", "decent", "compassionate", "sane".
I think they've grasped something that even Blair missed; if you don't even have a word for "Ingsoc" separate from the word for "good", it becomes impossible to even utter the crudest of blasphemies "Ingsoc is ungood" in a comprehensible fashion. All you can say is the meaningless "Good is ungood". Yudkowsky, though, did not miss it:
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