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Some Musings On ‘Wokeness’
For some time I have been trying to get my head around 'wokeness'. It seems to be a typically 'liberal' U.S. phenomenon that has not (yet) been picked up elsewhere. I find it to be an illiberal doctrine that attempts to prescribe how one has to think and talk about certain issues.
What the 'issues of the day' are one has to be 'woke' about seems to change every few weeks. Before the last U.S. election it was 'bend your knee' and 'defund the police' which predictably ended with higher police budgets as soon as the liberals had won the elections.
Currently some U.S. media are enraged about Dave Chappelle, a standup comedian who made jokes about people during a Netflix special. I had guessed that is something one should expect from a comedian. But some of Chappelle jokes were about transgender people which is somehow supposed to be bad. (Why?) At least that is the point the people who now want to cancel his show are trying to make.
I am bit suspicious about this reason as during his show Chappelle also made a good point about UFOs and how many thousand years ago people flew off from this planet to another one. They screwed it up over there and then decided to come back to now make a claim on this one. Chappelle calls them 'space Jews' (video).
What a wonderful aphorism for Zionism. I had a hearty laugh when he made that joke though the audience in the studio seemed awfully quiet.
Now a handful of Netflix workers publicly demand to cancel Chappelle's show allegedly because he made jokes about transgender people and, more generally, about the fuss some of them make. But I wonder what is really happening behind the scenes with this. Who is really pulling the strings here? Who really wants to cancel Chappelle? Space Jews?
A more serious danger of 'wokeness' and 'cancel culture' is its invasion of science:
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology invited the geophysicist Dorian Abbot to give a prestigious public lecture this autumn. He seemed a natural choice, a scientific star who studies climate change and whether planets in distant solar systems might harbor atmospheres conducive to life.
Then a swell of angry resistance arose. Some faculty members and graduate students argued that Dr. Abbot, a professor at the University of Chicago, had created harm by speaking out against aspects of affirmative action and diversity programs. In videos and opinion pieces, Dr. Abbot, who is white, has asserted that such programs treat “people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century.” He said that he favored a diverse pool of applicants selected on merit.
He said that his planned lecture at M.I.T. would have made no mention of his views on affirmative action. But his opponents in the sciences argued he represented an “infuriating,” “inappropriate” and oppressive choice.
On Sept. 30, M.I.T. reversed course.
M.I.T. canceled a scientific lecture because the lecturer has opinions on other issues. What has happened to academic freedom of speech?
They canceled a lecture because some nitwits are hyping the 'woke' issue of affirmative action. These people are willing to accept less than the best qualified scientists because the lesser qualified person may have certain not science related attributes. Well folks – I agree with Dr. Abbot. That's not how academia is supposed or can work.
Luckily Princeton jumped in and Dr. Abbot's lecture will be held there.
The craziness behind of all of this is exposed further down in the NYT's reporting of the issue:
Phoebe A. Cohen is a geosciences professor and department chair at Williams College and one of many who expressed anger on Twitter at M.I.T.’s decision to invite Dr. Abbot to speak, given that he has spoken against affirmative action in the past. Dr. Cohen agreed that Dr. Abbot’s views reflect a broad current in American society. Ideally, she said, a university should not invite speakers who do not share its values on diversity and affirmative action.
…
What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate? Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?
“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.
Whoa. What a catastrophic non-answer. That woman is supposed to do science?
How would science happen if we stop to use intellectual debate and rigor? What shall decide the veracity of a theory, the rightness of a formula or the correctness of a scientific fact? The height, color or gender of the person who utters it? The emotions of those who hear of it?
Where is this supposed to end?
I had guessed that is something one should expect from a comedian. But some of Chappelle jokes were about transgender people which is somehow supposed to be bad. (Why?)
The good faith argument, which is hard to disagree with when one looks at hate crime statistics and the disproportionate susceptibility of the group to murder and ostracism, is that these jokes reinforce negative stereotypes as well as promote the social exclusion of transgender people. Whether or not Chappelle’s jokes really did that (for example, he was good friends with one transgender woman whose death – as comedians do – he made some light of) is up for debate, but transgender people – who are for the first time being given explicit recognition in the national consciousness for their situation – are worried that the marginal improvements that have been made toward their situation could be lost. In that way, transgender people who dwell on the Netflix special are acting from a conservative impulse, but an understandable one. When dead comedian Norm McDonald made jokes in the 90s about the murder of transgender people, did it not contribute to the marginalization of transgender people? Was him wishing for the murder of transgender people on television not, to those with a conformist mindset (which is most Americans), unconsciously train people to see transgender lives as expendable?
I’m not worried about the “invasion” of “wokeness” in science. Science is a political enterprise and always has been. The vast majority of scientific output is also necessarily false, as is implied by the very notion of scientific progress. The polycentric and essentially anarchist nature of science means that dissenting voices will always find or make themselves a home, unless political authorities intervene to stop them altogether (as sometimes they should). Free association in science also implies the right of those who manage and use an institution to exclude others whose ideas or ideologies are antithetical to the institution’s intended project. This is why there are only a handful of heterodox, let alone Marxist, economics departments in the United States: the economics professors who make up and run these institutions will not let you into their cliques unless you agree with their fundamental principles. So Marxists go elsewhere, or start their own institutions which vie for legitimacy. Science, as the outcome of a decentralized network of scientists all practicing science in their own way, isn’t threatened by certain scientists acting in an exclusionary way. Chomskyan linguistics, which I have nothing but respect for, has maintained its stature partly because of the exclusionary behavior of Chomskyan linguists. Ditto for the whole “science” of psychology. There is a reason why scientists say that science progresses one death at a time.
The institutional power of the wokescolds is much overstated in the first place. Your average worker isn’t subject to it in a way that materially affects them (notable examples aside – on the aggregate, your average working stiff can be about as racist as they like on and off the clock), and even in places where it does reflect a kind of dominant ideology, the only people subject to it are people who are violating social mores that aren’t really that bad in and of themselves, and certainly superior to ones which came before them, making this fear reflect a kind of primal fear of punishment or shame that individuals in our narcissistic society can’t tolerate (admittedly, the possibility of redemption is lacking in almost all sectors of American society, besides Christian cults which demand total conformity upon being “saved”). The fear of wokescolds is also deeply rooted in certain material facts from American history and their modern perseverance, such as (in living memory) the racialized drug war and racial segregation. There’s a fear in white society of the bottom rail being on top, and that white people are going to be subject to what white society made its historical and present victims subject to. The fear is that the dominance of “woke” ideology means the inversion of the racial order, rather than the racial order’s abolition. Hysterical liberal media freaks and marginal Black nationalist tendencies certainly don’t make this impression any better, but “woke” ideology is reacting to the very real racism that permeates American society to this day, and most “marginalized people” just want to stop being treated so differently by society’s institutions. In the final analysis, the most important political arm of society, that which is responsible for the actual enforcement of the laws, does demonstrably treat Black populations differently than white ones. Denial of this forms a key component of even “respectable” modern American conservatism, but conservatives are people who live in denial and make a virtue of that fact.
As a final aside, it’s interesting that the conservative media complex has decided to rail against being “woke,” making this their rallying cry for their return to power in 2022 and 2024. What’s the opposite of woke, exactly? Well, being asleep. Cue the They Live references.
Posted by: fnord | Oct 21 2021 18:52 utc | 9
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