PODCLUB: The Intellectual Roots of Wokeness

Hi everyone, if you are trying to talk to your friends/ family about Woke ideology, you could try them with my cartoon review of the year, " 2020, The Year We Were All Cancelled!" It is an A4, full colour paperback, free speech and anti- authority throughout. It's now available through Amazon, Book Depository, Booksellers.uk, Barnes & Noble and Goodreads, and more outlets soon, just search by the title.
Sometimes cartoons can reach the spot in a way hours of argument cannot!
Here is a very thoughtful review I am so thrilled with, by Maria at PeakTrans. By all means pass this link on to anyone you think might be interested:
www.peaktrans.org/cancelled-cartoonist-has-produced-a-book-2020-the-year-we-were-all-cancelled/

Thanks Queen of knives

The impermeable language doubtless arises from the fact that Queer Theory is the bastard child of poststructuralism, which uses deliberately impermeable, enigmatic discourse and plays games with language. Judith Butler's a champ at writing barely-decipherable jargon. They're rarely the best writer.

I do still rate Foucault, whose theories on the subtle dissemination and manipulation of power through discourse I still find compelling, and more than monolithic accounts of oppression like Marxism which narrows it all down to economics, or even feminism which narrows it down to sex (sorry FWR board!) but sees its manipulation as multiple, shifting and constant.

Some of his work I think is still valuable for feminists, and also enables us to kick against the BS constraints attributable to gender categories. So it's not all bad, despite where some of this area of theory and its later practitioners have led us (right back up the garden path and full circle into 1950s oppression). Thanks for nothing, Butler.

The law of unintended theoretical consequence can be sticky territory, as Darwin for one has proved.

"Woke Folk aim to introduce ideas that are effectively immune from criticism" = ideological purity = the witch-hunts that are propelled by the rocket fuel that is social media = self-censorship in academia which then spills over into every area of social discourse. Hughes and Loury touch on this in their discussion.

If our university academics and researchers do not feel free and safe to examine, dissect, critique and challenge current modes of thought about racism (or sexism or climate change or any other subject), then an entire generation - that of my children, one of whom has just started university (though thank goodness studying a hard science) - will grow up simply unable to see the wood from the trees. It's rather a terrifying prospect.

Off the back of The Problem of Race podcast posted above, this is another good one, in which Coleman Hughes reads his review of Kendi's book "How to be an Anti-Racist". He makes various points which are useful in thinking about CRT and systemic racism.

It also put me in mind of various points made on this thread and the one on Coddling, regarding the seeming impossibility of constructive discussion in the current 'intellectual' climate of sidelining/ignoring data/facts/empiricism/objectivity, in favour of unfalsifiable emotional sweeping statements:

"By pivoting from standards of discourse that are universally and independently accountable to our senses and reason, to standards of discourse in which the conclusions that are rendered are not open to challenge or confrontation from the outside, Woke Folk aim to introduce ideas that are effectively immune from criticism. Under a paradigm that values reason and evidence, an interlocutor is welcomed to challenge ideas in a fashion that allows anyone from any walk of life to evaluate concepts. But under a paradigm in which “Lived Experiences,” which are the subjective interpretations of events from one’s demographically-dependent base of “knowledge,” are held as immutable and not open to discussion or debate, all interlocutors are obligated to listen and believe".

The 'standards of discourse' James Lindsay mentions here are unbelievably low in Kendi's book, according to Coleman's analysis.

Thank you!
Yes it was the Coddling that sent me on this "downward" spiral. Which I'm starting to call now an upwards spiral because I seriously thought I was going crazy with all the gas lighting going on. So having a sense of understanding what is going on has helped me.
What I find useful as well are these discussions as I'm trying to understand them better and want to be able to simplify it a little bit as all of them are very academic and sometimes those ideas don't translate well enough if you don't fully understand it.
I'll listen to the coddling again over the week to participate in the discussion.
There was another podcast with Coleman Hughes and Bret Weinstein which I also really enjoyed. Touched on the issues discussed here but came at them from a little different perspective.
Thank you for setting this up queen

So so very happy to have found these discussions. Imagine "waking up" after a 5 year kid rearing focus. Thinking the world has gone bonkers, where emotional manipulation and guilt tripping is now the current way of communicating.
But digging a little shows that ofcourse they have to communicate like that as there is so little foundation to their knowledge.
Really liked the BB and JL talk, it is just more and more dots connecting together.
I'd also definitely recommend the book "how to have impossible conversations"

I will listen to the James Lindsay one. I am up to the Queer Theory chapter of Cynical Theories, so haven’t got to the part about race yet.

There was also a Netflix documentary about the number of black men in prison. Particularly horrifying was the pressure to plead guilty to get out of jail quickly rather than have to stay in because you couldn’t make bail. Effectively innocent people would end up in prison for longer than guilty ones. It all seemed like something that should be dealt with through a human rights focus.

Did anyone see James Lindsay talking to Benjamin Boyce about critical race theory? They connected up some of these dots too.

I listened to that podcast and thought it was excellent.

Without a doubt there are serious issues in the American criminal justice system, particularly when it comes to access to defence. I’ve watched many Louis Theroux documentaries over the years that are horrific, as was Making a Murderer on Netflix. I don’t understand exactly how the system works, but it seems really clear that anyone unable to pay for decent legal defence is left with totally inadequate provision. Given the fact that there is a provable and real wealth gap between African Americans and other racial groups, it would be very surprising if there wasn’t an unequal outcome of any system whose outcomes are determined by the wealth of the individual accessing it.

How to solve the problem is the big question, and there are no quick fixes.

We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.

C S Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

We are building this vision whilst thinking we are building a more tolerant world.

One reason I feel very cynical when I hear the word ‘system racism’ brought up is that I get the impression that those most keen to use the term have the least interest in actually solving the problems that lead to unequal outcomes. The term is always used by those with a political agenda to bring about revolutionary change of a political level and never by those wishing to improve the system we currently have.

Take, for example, the criminal justice system. We know that there are fundamental problems with the system that lead to unequal outcomes. It is clear that there are problems within the system itself, but also fundamental problems in communities that feed into the criminal justice system (illiteracy, drug use, domestic abuse, mental health). These are massive issues that need to be addressed. However, the solution that seems to be being offered up by CRT ‘activists’ is to abolish prisons or decriminalise certain offences. The former is a particularly stupid idea which should be called out as such by anyone who wishes to be taken seriously. The latter may initially appear to be more ‘equitable’ as certain ethnic groups are much more likely to be incarcerated than others, but in reality does little to solve problems within the communities themselves.

Anyone who thinks this is a good idea should really spend some time in San Francisco. A superficially beautiful city is a shithole where petty crime is just..... tolerated. The ‘progressive’ politicians and academics responsible for the mess don’t have to live in the communities they help to destroy.

queen
Yes, it's interesting that Vaclev Havel is often cited. I think this snippet from a James Lindsay link is also relevant:

By pivoting from standards of discourse that are universally and independently accountable to our senses and reason, to standards of discourse in which the conclusions that are rendered are not open to challenge or confrontation from the outside, Woke Folk aim to introduce ideas that are effectively immune from criticism. Under a paradigm that values reason and evidence, an interlocutor is welcomed to challenge ideas in a fashion that allows anyone from any walk of life to evaluate concepts. But under a paradigm in which “Lived Experiences,” which are the subjective interpretations of events from one’s demographically-dependent base of “knowledge,” are held as immutable and not open to discussion or debate, all interlocutors are obligated to listen and believe

not comparing

Glenn Loury discusses 'living within the lie' during Soviet hegemony.

The party lies constantly, the official ideology of the state is bankrupt, yet this goes on for decades of people reproducing and reinforcing the idea. Some intellectuals see the imperative of living within the truth and this is a kind of heroism, some of these people paid with their lives

He says that he is not comparison the totalitarian state of 1960s Soviet satellites with the US, but that the cancel culture of this time encourages silence, collusion in the lie:

the personal challenge of do I adhere to my convictions and live within the truth or do I by degree submit myself to a kind of tyrannical domination?

queen
Thank you for the podcast recommendation, another superb listen. I particularly liked Glenn Loury's response to how to respond to the current intolerant age and he advised looking at comparable periods in history.

Great posts on this thread! James Lindsay has written about the move to abolish tests:

We have this movement in education right now to get rid of standardised tests for college or graduate school admission. This is a terrible idea. You want to have more objective standards and fewer subjective standards because subjective standards lead to disputes that can't be resolved

In terms of 'disputes that can't be resolved ' I wonder if this is the aim of the extremists in the identity politics faction. That and increased polarisation is an inevitable consequence of some of their policy suggestions.

Yet this basically ignores how examinations have historically been a tool for liberation. The starting point for the full participation of girls in education in England was, after all, their performance in the College of Preceptors exams in the 1860s; and similar patterns can be seen across other disadvantaged groups, from working-class boys winning scholarships in Victorian England, to the entry of Jewish men into the Anglo-American university system in the 1920s and 1930s, to the successes of the children of Asian immigrants in late twentieth century school systems. The use of education as a way to escape disadvantage has been a constant for nearly two-hundred years.

Part of the reason for this, of course, the fact that examinations have at least some inbound notion of objectivity. They allow the person’s abilities to be compared with the abilities of others. It’s hard to argue that someone is intellectually inferior when they score just as well as you in a set of exams.

But examinations rely on a notion that you both can aspire towards some notion of objectivity, and also have this as a goal in mind. Examinations make it harder to get away with performing competence, and reward work over merely having the right opinions. No wonder the woke dislike examinations.

The tragedy is that most changes in education over the last 35 years have rewarded the privileged over the disadvantaged. Having, for instance, universities as finishing schools for the woke doesn’t help the people who are interested in intellectual development, whilst benefiting those who use higher education as a means of bolstering their political positions. The latter group don’t really want to learn, anyway, so it doesn’t matter to them what goes on in the lecture room. But they don’t like exams, so will fight against them, regardless of the consequences.

Not heard the thing but I thought the intellectual roots of “wokeness” were Hegelian? And then Marx carried it on with the idea of class consciousness? Like ‘waking up’ to realise that you are a part of a greater whole.

Ah yes, everyone has equal access to the rubble that was once the house.