Reading this except reminded me of Edwin Hubble, who is infamous amongst astronomers for his overt racism and sexism. However, he was also one of the leading astronomers of the 1900s. Before he came along, we thought the Milky Way was the entire universe. He was the one who realized that the splotchy “nebulae” in the sky were other galaxies. His data also helped to conclude that the universe was expanding at a uniform rate (the Hubble Constant, still being fine-tuned by astronomers today). And so the Hubble Space Telescope was named after him.
And we don’t mind, because he revolutionized our field and lived in a very different time.
I’m learning a lot from this book. I’m being led to re-examine a lot of my well-intentioned preconceptions (oo oo...John; can I hyphenate preconceptions? So I I get 3 in one sentence? That would be strangely delicious, like Cherry Bubly). I cringe when I think of how patronizing,, infantilizing I’ve been. Thanks
McWhorter: It follows easily that we need to start reconsidering our sense of racial classifications. Namely, if we really believe that race is a fiction, we need to let racially indeterminate people make the case for that, by letting go of the idea that anyone with one peep of non-whiteness in them must “identify” as not white.
You have no idea how brave it is for a black or part-black person to say that in public.
I applaud your irreverence. It was a relief to read. Yours was the old school leftist thought that originally drew me to the left. The idea that love and kindness and open dialogue and bringing forth and sharing knowledge pools that the mainstream considered immaterial was a great way to change the world.
It is heartbreaking to hear that the community that you and others have meticulously spent your lives building (at great sacrifice) is being smashed by hate and self-righteousness and conformity. I can reassure you that not all young people are like this. I have new, young neighbors (early 30s) and I have been pleasantly surprised at their ecumenicism and nuanced thought. So, all is not lost just yet. And maybe, something might be salvaged once the hysteria passes. Hang in there...
thank you for taking the time to write me, i appreciate it immensely. to perhaps alleviate your concern, i make a very strong distinction between the woke mob (The Elect) and other social justice activists. And i applaud what so many of the non religionist activists are doing. there is a feel to the people who have compassion and kindness to their work and their words, however rough they might be. it is our hearts that are able to determine the meaning of things, when the heart feels the touch of the world upon it, it is able to make such distinctions and one of our problems in the west is that our hearts are so very asleep. the mind is easily confused, the heart less so, the best outcomes occur when the heart and mind work as partners. i think that forgetting the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses and relying on the mind alone to determine meaning inevitably causes a loss of moral bearings.
Not just this. But nothing can be truly created without heart. Without heart, it is a chimera and won't last. Things created from heart feed us better than those that are superficial. Remember The Velveteen Rabbit? The battle to inject heart into social constructs was the battle of the 60s - or at least that is the way I understood things. Spiritual evolution demands that we factor heart into our choices, that we stop denying heart. Mind without heart is Ahrimanic - detached, without feeling, monstrous. You can do anything to anyone if you are heartless. Mengele. This is why it is so important and why it is so scary when people dismiss it.
Regarding distinctions in social justice activism: to me it's simple. Is your activism dehumanizing or objectifying others? If so, wrong answer. If not, then I can listen and consider and discuss. Granny Weatherwax said it best: “Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.”
How we treat other species today is surely the best analogy. It’s both particularly fraught and powerful because it implicates so many of us so deeply. There is close to zero justification for what we do to other animals - based on selfishness, willful ignorance and self-deception, and logically specious rationales (often simply “might makes right” - or among a rapidly-diminishing proportion of us “because Genesis says so”) we prop up to keep dissonance and guilt at bay. Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald had an interesting conversation in one of the former’s recent podcasts, about the almost unfathomable cruelty inflicted on countless other animals on our behalf, whom many of us are well aware are at least as intelligent and emotionally sensitive as the dogs and cats and other companion animals we rightly consider family and might risk our lives to protect. We’re used to consuming certain products so we pay badly exploited others who are often traumatized to the point of long-term PTSD, to inflict unspeakable agony and terror out, of sight and hearing of us, so we can continue to pretend “it’s not that bad”; or, “it’s too engrained in society - how can I undo all of these habits?” I find this example particularly compelling because my moral condemnation would foremost be directed against myself: someone who ate staggering amounts of chickens and salmon in particular, until midlife, while knowing in my heart most of that time it wasn’t ok and it was my responsibility to find ways to stop contributing to such horrific and, today, entirely needless cruelty. I’m coming up on being vegan for five years and know I’m not better than anyone else, can’t really judge anyone else, in spite of the clear conviction that how I’m behaving now is unquestionably better - precisely because I did the exact same things not that long ago. Virtually our entire society inculcates using and abusing other animals in horrific ways as not only entirely normal, but something reassuring, comforting, heartwarming and homey. I’m not saying humans are exactly like other animals in every way (and can imagine the extreme offense some would take at the comparison I’m about to make) - though we are surely vastly more similar with so many other species than we like to admit, given our common development, morphology, and behavior. But how we excuse and deny and cover our eyes and ears and build mountains of fallacies to rationalize the mass, institutional, extreme abuse of other animals today is really not so different from how humans not so long ago openly and unapologetically othered and dehumanized other humans. It’s interesting that when people did and do this they so often explicitly compare or literally describe the people they denigrate as various kinds of other animals. When people want to rationalize committing genocide they describe their victims as insects or vermin to be exterminated. When abuse short of extermination is called for, the victims might be described as monkeys, pigs, or dogs. Anyway, a therapist told me recently:we can’t judge our past selves too harshly on the basis of what we know now. That’s not a perfect apology to how we evaluate our historical past today. And yes there are some things we as people should have known and done and that our long-past countrymen should have known and done. But I’m kind of bemused by and and honestly a little impatient with woke crusaders today who so sanctimoniously bully others, engaging in these self-flattering postures of slaying long-vanquished dragons. While going out of their way to try and smear and rule out of bounds movements to end the most excruciatingly cruel in degree, massive in scale and ubiquitous present-day injustices, like our literally tortuous abuse of other species. It’s easy to see why: focusing on such compelling present wrongs steals their thunder and threatens their narcissistic obsession with being continually congratulated for - what? Being really super-performatively opposed to slavery a hundred and fifty some years after the Civil War? More outraged by Jim Crow two generations after affirmative action was introduced? None of this is to say that everything is perfectly just and there are no lingering impacts from those past horrors. But there’s a reason we get treated to a sort of slavery porn; why every policy one objects to has to be a “New Jim Crow” (or Eagle!); why every act of excessive force is a “modern day lynching”. There is a lot of self-aggrandizement at play. Stacey Abrams is not John Lewis. Meanwhile none of these anachronistic freedom fighters or woke elect wants to be implicated - or responsible - for being one more person “living in the world” as AOC says whenever someone calls her on her hypocrisy, who is actually harming innocents or obliviously licensing less fortunate laborers to do so on their behalf, instead of being hero of the social justice fantasies playing in their heads.
What we do to animals doesn't require justification, because basic morality is a social construct and ipso facto applies to human-human interactions, unless the shared moral judgment extends it (and, note, it generally has not been extended to animals). You're free to expand on it as you see fit in your own personal moral paradigm, but it isn't an apt analogy because it's an entirely different sphere from conventional morality. Unless, you know, your god tells you otherwise.
Your disturbing lack of moral intuition and blithe dismissal of the *actual* and profound suffering of highly-sentient beings of other species, which is discoverable and testable and measurable and is independent of whatever human constructs you would deign to apply to them, simply on the basis of their not having participated by human means in the establishment of human conventions - or on the basis of some circular justification that we can gratuitously torture them to whatever extent anyone cares to - because a practical consensus of humans hasn’t yet emerged to protect them from this suffering, mostly just demonstrates how willing some people are to tie themselves in knots trying to rationalize and justify what they prefer to do out of callous habit. It’s highly analogous to how humans justified their entirely self-serving then consensus distinctions between what they asserted were higher and lower races of human beings. By your rationale, there would have been nothing inherently morally wrong with this, or with the horrors which were licensed on that basis, until such point a consensus of humans decided to adjust their construct of moral responsibility and expand it to a wider range of humans. People have made these excuses on the basis of not only race, but sex, age, disability, religion, and class. You’d be better off just admitting that you don’t like being made to feel guilty and don’t want to have to change your habits in order to stop licensing and subsidizing the infliction of extreme suffering than playing pedant to try and get yourself off the hook. None of this depends on me or anyone believing or not believing in a god. Choosing to cover eyes, morally speaking, doesn’t mean real harm is not being inflicted. Asserting that that suffering exists outside of some circle of meaning and responsibility because a lot of other people currently share your unwillingness to accept the reality of it doesn’t make it any less real.
"These double standards now predominate. Elite “antiracists” absolve blacks from responsibility for their actions. All crime is the result of racism, if it is even acknowledged. This patronizing attitude is today’s real racism, and it guarantees that the bourgeois behavior gap—the cause of lingering socioeconomic disparities—will continue. No one in a position of elite authority is sending the message that society expects blacks to live by the same standards as other groups. Instead, we are unwinding every objective standard of conduct and achievement—whether it’s the criminal code or academic proficiency requirements for school and employment—if enforcing that standard has a disparate impact on blacks."
"Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican; and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the new gospels." Victor Davis Hanson 4/1/2021
I am not sure I really understand the “end game” of the Elect. As you say they are not dumb so they have got to see this will not end well for our country and thus for 90+ % of the people. Immigrants in the last 30-40 years will have no patience with this eventually and neither will the working class. This will happen even faster as China and India come into their own.
The section on bi-racial identity reminded me of the Seinfeld episode in which Elaine tries to figure out whether her boyfriend is black without asking if he is black, and in which he assumes she is Spanish because her name sounds Spanish and she takes him to Spanish restaurants. Neither is clearly any one thing or another, but each dances around whether the other is an other.
That Seinfeld episode was truly racist because it promoted the myth that one must be "pure" in order to be "white." The boyfriend in question looked more like Trotsky than a "black." I wondered why the Jewish Jerry Seinfeld was promoting a kind of Aryan purity as normal and right. I also wondered why the actors playing Puerto Ricans never showed real signs of African ancestry since Puerto Ricans are essentially a "mulatto" ethnic group. But, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. learned when he denounced the late mixed-white Creole Anatole Broyard as an alleged "black," you have to pretend that Latinos don't exist if you are going to make the "one drop" myth stick.
I can't say that I'm totally following you. I can see that the characters were operating in a default-to-white bias, but I don't see where they were making the case (characters or writers) that one must be pure to be white. But maybe I'm not getting the full context of your post.
The only thing that isn't quite squaring for me with this book is that I have had multiple long conversations with at least four different friends who are professional racial justice activists/educators in which I push back very hard on "the movement." In each case, we are able to have meaningful conversations in which both of us comes to understand the other's point of view.
All of these friends has expressed in one form or another, discomfort with some bit of woke orthodoxy, while at the same time, presenting an unwavering commitment to the general approach to dismantling racism that the current antiracist movement takes.
Is there really no middle ground here, really no space for rational conversation in which those of us who are deeply skeptical of wokeism, don't reject it lock stock and barrel with the same kind of dogmatism we decry? Is this battle of ideas and approaches really zero-sum?
On the one hand, the battle really does feel zero-sum to me when wokeist orthodoxy animates a DEI themed meeting I have to attend in which the facilitators are operating strictly from the woke script in a way that is rote, shallow, uninteresting, and highly discourages any deviation, critical engagement. Or, when I read about the many cases that have surfaced recently of people being canceled for incidents that are unambiguously not racist (like the business professor who referenced the Chinese phrase "ne-ga", and got in big trouble).
On the other hand, when I talk to these woke friends of mine, in private, on walks through the woods on a lovely fall or spring day, we create real human connection and a genuine exchange of ideas. And, some of the work these friends do doesn't seem categorically bad. Some even seems thoughtful, humanizing, and ultimately a net good.
I think the problem is that the woke ideals are super complex, requiring something just short of a PhD to truly understand, and they are getting canned into professional development workshops that are run by people from HR, many with the best of intentions (to be less racist?), but they wind up resulting in shallow understandings of structural racism, and everyone involved runs the risk of walking away feeling shamed and disempowered. With the right people running the trainings, at best they can become something like a way to bond with coworkers, but again we should be asking, is there a better way to bond? And, as someone asked above, what is the measurable goal?
Maybe “nuanced” is a better word. Although, I guess planting thoughts in peoples’ dreams with the result of them making choices when they are unaware of being manipulated might also be a good analogy.
This articles expresses how I have felt my whole life. I am a bit like Thomas Chatterton’s children. I am recognizably Black but not Black in the typical American sense. I was born to upper-middle class immigrant parents who gave us a life of privilege, focused on our academics, and didn’t pass on the same hopeless, depressing American racial narrative that many native Black people drink from. While I was a merely a distant observer to the authentic “Black experience,” I was still constantly put inside the box by well-meaning white and Black people alike who expected all of my interests and attention to center not just on my identity, but THEIR contrived and simplistic version of what they assumed was my identity. For me, this led to identity crises as an adolescent and a larger striving for individuality and my own self. Yes, I am lucky in my life and should not presume to speak
for others, but not for the fact that the Elect would have you believe that others of much more meager upbringings and way less fortunate are somehow privileged over me just because of race, and that all my days are colored by racism and struggle, regardless of my actual carefree and prosperous day-to-day life and circumstances. Luckily, I always placed a premium on reason over emotion (I never stopped seeing our social conventions around race as a construct and most conversations about modern racism to be unproductive), and I was able to convince myself that it was the rest of the world and their fixation on race was not my problem if I didn’t choose it. And I knew that one can support progressive policies that help Black people and poorer non-Black alike without imbibing from the straw of blame, hopelessness, and over-sensitivity.
I don’t think that’s how the majority of people process it, as the contemporary tendency is to embrace an ever more essentialist mindset, like a modern Marxism in which everyone is labor or proletariat, with individual strivings buried into blurry abstracts. Perhaps it is because the human yearning for identity and group-belonging is strong and irrepressible and has calcified around our current categories. Who knows? Maybe we will never get over it. What I hope is that current fashions will one day shift to provide more room
for racial minorities - especially Black people - to see themselves as individuals, and forget their race even for a second, especially when entirely irrelevant. Currently liberals are unfortunately as just as bad on this token as conservatives, and while I am not a political conservative by any means, I feel there is no political home to really seek refuge from this dynamic.
I had to fight out of a box that well-meaning people tried to put me in as well. I understand your journey. I, too, hope that we evolve toward making more room for all of the wondrous and varied individuals on this planet to bloom into their own fullness, their own potential, their own choice of beingness. What a wonderful world that would be!
The notion of “identity” was coined by Erik Erikson in the 1950’s. He used it to discuss the way selves develop, though stages of the life-course, facing distinct challenges at each stage.
Though they drew on earlier work (such as Erikson, and Piaget; not forgetting Sartre) Berger and Luckmann codified the concept of “social construction” in the mid-1960’s. Identity construction was part of this. When I first read their work, as an undergraduate, the message I took away was: identity is a choice. One is radically free to construct it. The conventional wisdom condemns homosexuality as inversion, deformation, illness as set forth in the DSM? But if one wants to move from polymorphous eroticism to choosing a specifically gay identity and to build it, this is perfectly feasible. Likewise there is nothing “natural” (in the sense of compelling) about defining femininity as this idea is conveyed in what Barbara Welter named “the Cult of True Womanhood.” Anatomy is not destiny. Destiny is not destiny, if one chooses not to make it so.
That is a far cry from the way people talk today about “identity,” as in “identity politics.” Identity is no longer the realm of individual freedom; anatomy may no longer be destiny, but birth is. There is a “true self” (as Ralph Turner described it) and it is one’s duty to uncover it, get in touch with it, live out its constraints and possibilities. If one is Black, life’s task is to get in touch with one’s Natural self. If one is gay, this is not chosen; one was born that way (such that wanting to become bi-sexual is a deep self-betrayal). The same is true for trans-sexuals: the only permissible narrative is that if one finds oneself so inclined, this can only be because one has a true sexual essence accidentally imprisoned from birth in a wrongly-matched body. (Discussing developmental challenges, thinking about life choices, are all now beside the point.)
There is, thus, a great gulf fixed between the way people tended to think of identity in the late 20th c., and how we have come to think of it in the early 21st.
Not just among the racial Elect as McWhorter describes them; but also in discussions of sexuality, and of the self in general, now runs a deep vein of determinism. This is quite striking; particularly so in light of the thesis (Pluckrose and Lindsay, for instance) that Wokeness is a matter of the 60’s chickens coming home to roost, the triumph of the Long March Through The Institutions. In the ‘60’s I was free not to grow up as just one more Man in The Grey Flannel Suit. In the ‘20’s, I must grow into a destiny, innately determined. (In cargo shorts, perhaps, rather than suits.) Now birth is destiny, in a very deep manner.
In the ‘60s, Marcuse wrote a book called One-Dimensional Man -- in which a flattening of possibility was held to grow out of the structural weakness of late capitalism. I think to the extent that this book may have struck a chord back then, this was due precisely to the sense that possibilities were open not closed. Yet what has the Long March given us except the sort of one-dimensionality McWhorter describes in this installment -- in which the only interesting thing about a guy like Appiah is the (one) way he is like George Floyd. (Bor-ing.)
It is also a kind of one-dimensionality in which there is (because there can be) no politics. If everybody is just an avatar of their eternal essential group “identity,” what kind of negotiation is ever possible? What sort of compromise? What sort of change? It’s all just zero-sum power struggle -- in which outcome is equally eternal and unchanging. Which is of course McWhorter’s point of departure in this installment: “is there any degree of saturation that slavery could reach into the American consciousness that would satisfy The Elect, such that they would allow that a battle had been won?”
In the ‘60’s people could still sing: “til victory is won;” but then they began to say instead “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” Forward -- but, always and forever. This is not politics. “Identity politics” is not politics. It is, rather, millenarianism. (Perhaps also, “racial Trotskyism.”)
And thus “Elect philosophy teaches black people to live obsessed with just how someone maybe doesn’t quite fully like them, and then die unappeased.” As a number of people have observed, if this is a religion, it is a religion peculiarly devoid of a description of what salvation looks like.
Nice response essay. My thoughts have been along the same lines as I've remembered the way we reformulated our identities and roles during the feminist movements of the 60s and 70s. Perhaps this is why Boomers (some of us, anyway) are so thoughtfully resistant to any attempts to force society into new "woke" social norms.
Thank you. Would that I could share your optimism about Boomers' common sense; I suspect, rather, that susceptibility to Elect norms has a history that is long, and deep (such that, e.g., "the personal is the political" is more the problem than the solution). (I say "Elect," rather than "Woke;" wokeness is a legit goal, from Plato through Bacon, Hume, Kant, Marx etc.; and today's "progressives" soi-disant hardly have a claim upon it, much less a monopoly.) In a sense Boomers gave up on actual wokeness as soon as they came to think of the MLA as the vanguard party.
"salvation" is the place you're allowed to exist in when you learn how to perform and mouth the correct obeisance to the Elect. Such individuals are permitted to exist in social media without being denigrated, censored and cancelled. Being woke is the sainthood millenariums strive for.
I am a big fan of yours, Professor McWhorter, and agree with you on many issues, so this suggestion comes from a place of love and wanting The Elect to be as persuasive as possible.
I agree that it is wrong to hold people in the past to contemporary values. However, I urge you to find another issue than abortion to make this point. It’s unnecessarily divisive. I was so put off by it that I almost stopped reading. Please choose another illustration. It should be something that many people today actively participate in but that we also suspect, somewhere deep down, is problematic, yet we keep doing it anyway. You will alienate half of your readership by imagining an enlightened future where a woman's right to control her body is that.
I’ve often tried to imagine what people in the future might find unacceptable in attitudes that are common today. Here are a couple that make sense to me:
In the future, people may be appalled that we ate meat from factory farmed animals. Even bacon lovers (I confess to being one) find pictures of pigs at CAFOs deeply disturbing. Even those who love omelettes (again, me) are sickened by the miserable details of factory chickens’ hateful, brief lives. In our hearts, we know something is wrong here, but we willfully ignore it because, well, we like inexpensive meat and eggs. Future generations will not judge this kindly.
In 2100, our great-grandchildren will want to cancel us for driving gasoline-powered cars, especially those of us who worry that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change. An environmental activist today who participates in any number of common activities (living in a single-family home, flying) will be metaphorically burned at the stake by our carbon-neutral descendants. (Presumably they will accomplish this using a metaphorical giant magnifying glass rather than wood).
Please rethink including the abortion argument. It will be emphatically unpersuasive to a great many otherwise sympathetic readers.
How interesting that you find the fates of chickens and pigs more compelling than that of unborn children. The fact that “a great many otherwise sympathetic readers” would CURRENTLY reject this argument is precisely McWhorter’s point.
I have always seen vegetarianism as (quite possibly) extremely analogous to abolitionism around 200 years ago. I say this as a meat-eater who suspects that the meat industry is unethical on a *massive* scale yet finds it a struggle to go so far against the grain of how current society is set up. People like me may be very cancellable in a couple of centuries or so, when we find ourselves in a good enough position with human rights to start making animal rights a major focus.
If I may contribute -- I wonder if Prof. McWhorter chose abortion/pro-choice his the illustrative example precisely because the set of people who subscribe to Elect ideology are more likely to be pro-choice themselves. By choosing pro-choice as the hypothetical 'backwards' idea, I think he is trying to emphasise that the issue at hand is not about correctly predicting the course of history, but more about how that's a fool's errand. "Here is a belief that is self-evidently correct: how could it ever be that it will be seen as immoral in the future?"
So while I do agree that the example can be distasteful, I think its power might be diminished if he were to choose an example that reinforced the reader's sense that they are beating history at it's own game.
For what it is worth, I am a woman also who does not think abortion should be outlawed or needlessly penalised. Because of the context -- because based on the chapters that Prof. McWhorter has released -- I didn't think that he was in fact encouraging readers to dream of a future where abortion was banned to the detriment of women.
The cynical part of me says -- we may end up in a Gilead-like world anyway, and should be prepared to fight that eventuality. The optimist in me says -- perhaps there's a wild sci-fi future millennia from now where stem cell technology, or something, means that humans are birthed in vats rendering the question of abortion entirely superfluous, so that abortion as we understand it seems distasteful. The point is, we do not know. And the example as it stands does an effective job of driving that home.
"Yet for arguing this in the public sphere, Williams is often roasted as a race traitor by people sincerely thinking of themselves as bearers of a progressive message. Ladies and gentlemen, this is The Elect."
It never fails to strike me that while a lot of "white" people (whatever "white" may mean today) get their butts dusted for falling foul of the latest wokeist rules, there is a very special sense of glee that the wokeists have in cancelling other people of color for falling foul of the rules. It reminds me of the way that many "intersectional feminists" seem to salivate over nothing so much as cancelling another woman. Men like to talk about how feminism is a bunch of manhating, but that is NOTHING on their hatred for other women, trust me.
And the race-wokeists will hate a person of color for questioning them or even just floating a question in a way that doesn't lead only to a certified wokeist conclusion. We're at the point where we can't even ask questions in a way that might lead to new ideas, and how the hell can we solve these problems without that sense of "no suggestion is off limits" that comes with a good brainstorming session?
I've come to the conclusion that the whackos on both sides of the spectrum -- the qanon trumpsters and the wokeists both -- are consciously attempting to kill off any line of inquiry that might result in measurable progress. They descend on actual strategic inquiry too predictably. There is no difference between them; they're both allergic to facts. (The only difference is that the right wing puts physicists in front of a firing squad, the left wing biologists.)
And as far as Washington and Wilson and all those are concerned, I can't understand how it does anyone any good to cancel examples that show that you can be enormously imperfect and still achieve something worthwhile. No, they didn't achieve EVERYTHING. No one can. But the fact that you can be a shit about one thing and still get something decent done is inspiring, to me. And it's not just happening in history; it's happening now. I'm sick to my stomach at how Alexey Navalny has been abandoned by the wokeists -- is he an asshole? Yes. Is he also a prisoner of conscience whose death will be a disaster? Yes. One can be both a dickhead and a prisoner of conscience. Human rights are not only for the ideologically perfect.
At the turn of the 19th century, one had to be a white male to have civil rights. Now, one must be perfect. This is a far narrower slice of the population. We're headed in the wrong direction on this.
Social media is simultaneously a terrible place for debate, yet it is the only place it is happening in global north modernity. The debate of ideas used to happen mainly in academia until the turn of the century. Academics realized discourse had to be restrained with commonly understood rules that all complied with unless things would quickly turn into a bloodbath of rage. Everybody wants the moral superiority of being “right” and the quickest way to assert that is to shout the loudest, understanding if the assertion is repeated 7x it magically transmogrifies into a truth. Meantime you keep your echo chamber for the pure by constantly monitoring it for dissent and keeping out the uneducated trash.
I think part of the problem is also the brevity of social media. Twitter especially is to blame for this; to make a really good argument, or just to put forth an idea, takes way more than 140 characters. When Twitter first came into existence and friends of mine were all excited about how "cool" it was, all I could think was, "What the hell can be said in only 140 characters that is even worth saying or reading?" It narrowed debate into 140-charcter long drive-by comments, and all that medium supports is one tossed-off snark bomb after another, like verbal molotov cocktails.
In the meantime the brevity of twitter seems to be overcompensated for by blog posts where writers (being coy?) don't bother to say what their point is at the beginning, go on and on in a kind of stream-of-conscience, and have never heard of the writing/editing advice "kill your darlings"
I'm not sure I understand; what other word might one use here? I meant wiki in the dictionary definition: "a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users." As in Wikipedia, for example. The virtue of Wikipedia is: no editors, no filters. The vice of Wikipedia is: no editors, no filters. In Wikipedia I can read up on so many more topics than in Britannica; at the same time I can read up on lots of stuff that just ain't so. But it seems to me Twitter is like that too: another wiki platform, no?
Sound bites usually came from longer discourses, though. The thing about Twitter is that it supports nothing BUT sound bites. It's really a worthless medium, like a newspaper with nothing but headlines and no articles.
all headlines, no body; point well taken. But might soundbites not be considered a gateway drug toward full Twitter addiction? Aren't they just degrees of the same problem on the supply-side of media: six o'clock Eye'm Witless News dumbing-down from a fuller report (if one wished to read beyond the headlines, one always might) to a slogan; a dumbing-down which Twitter then just amps up a bit?
Reading this except reminded me of Edwin Hubble, who is infamous amongst astronomers for his overt racism and sexism. However, he was also one of the leading astronomers of the 1900s. Before he came along, we thought the Milky Way was the entire universe. He was the one who realized that the splotchy “nebulae” in the sky were other galaxies. His data also helped to conclude that the universe was expanding at a uniform rate (the Hubble Constant, still being fine-tuned by astronomers today). And so the Hubble Space Telescope was named after him.
And we don’t mind, because he revolutionized our field and lived in a very different time.
That’s my take on it, at least.
I’m learning a lot from this book. I’m being led to re-examine a lot of my well-intentioned preconceptions (oo oo...John; can I hyphenate preconceptions? So I I get 3 in one sentence? That would be strangely delicious, like Cherry Bubly). I cringe when I think of how patronizing,, infantilizing I’ve been. Thanks
Really appreciated this chapter of the book
McWhorter: It follows easily that we need to start reconsidering our sense of racial classifications. Namely, if we really believe that race is a fiction, we need to let racially indeterminate people make the case for that, by letting go of the idea that anyone with one peep of non-whiteness in them must “identify” as not white.
You have no idea how brave it is for a black or part-black person to say that in public.
thank you for this, it simulated me to finally post something more directly about all this on my blog, though mine does include quite a bit of profanity. https://www.stephenharrodbuhner.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/THE-DAY-THE-WOKE-MOB-CAME-FOR-THE-HERBALISTSStephen-Harrod-BuhnerIt.pdf
I applaud your irreverence. It was a relief to read. Yours was the old school leftist thought that originally drew me to the left. The idea that love and kindness and open dialogue and bringing forth and sharing knowledge pools that the mainstream considered immaterial was a great way to change the world.
It is heartbreaking to hear that the community that you and others have meticulously spent your lives building (at great sacrifice) is being smashed by hate and self-righteousness and conformity. I can reassure you that not all young people are like this. I have new, young neighbors (early 30s) and I have been pleasantly surprised at their ecumenicism and nuanced thought. So, all is not lost just yet. And maybe, something might be salvaged once the hysteria passes. Hang in there...
thank you for taking the time to write me, i appreciate it immensely. to perhaps alleviate your concern, i make a very strong distinction between the woke mob (The Elect) and other social justice activists. And i applaud what so many of the non religionist activists are doing. there is a feel to the people who have compassion and kindness to their work and their words, however rough they might be. it is our hearts that are able to determine the meaning of things, when the heart feels the touch of the world upon it, it is able to make such distinctions and one of our problems in the west is that our hearts are so very asleep. the mind is easily confused, the heart less so, the best outcomes occur when the heart and mind work as partners. i think that forgetting the response of the heart to what is presented to the senses and relying on the mind alone to determine meaning inevitably causes a loss of moral bearings.
Not just this. But nothing can be truly created without heart. Without heart, it is a chimera and won't last. Things created from heart feed us better than those that are superficial. Remember The Velveteen Rabbit? The battle to inject heart into social constructs was the battle of the 60s - or at least that is the way I understood things. Spiritual evolution demands that we factor heart into our choices, that we stop denying heart. Mind without heart is Ahrimanic - detached, without feeling, monstrous. You can do anything to anyone if you are heartless. Mengele. This is why it is so important and why it is so scary when people dismiss it.
Regarding distinctions in social justice activism: to me it's simple. Is your activism dehumanizing or objectifying others? If so, wrong answer. If not, then I can listen and consider and discuss. Granny Weatherwax said it best: “Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is.”
How we treat other species today is surely the best analogy. It’s both particularly fraught and powerful because it implicates so many of us so deeply. There is close to zero justification for what we do to other animals - based on selfishness, willful ignorance and self-deception, and logically specious rationales (often simply “might makes right” - or among a rapidly-diminishing proportion of us “because Genesis says so”) we prop up to keep dissonance and guilt at bay. Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald had an interesting conversation in one of the former’s recent podcasts, about the almost unfathomable cruelty inflicted on countless other animals on our behalf, whom many of us are well aware are at least as intelligent and emotionally sensitive as the dogs and cats and other companion animals we rightly consider family and might risk our lives to protect. We’re used to consuming certain products so we pay badly exploited others who are often traumatized to the point of long-term PTSD, to inflict unspeakable agony and terror out, of sight and hearing of us, so we can continue to pretend “it’s not that bad”; or, “it’s too engrained in society - how can I undo all of these habits?” I find this example particularly compelling because my moral condemnation would foremost be directed against myself: someone who ate staggering amounts of chickens and salmon in particular, until midlife, while knowing in my heart most of that time it wasn’t ok and it was my responsibility to find ways to stop contributing to such horrific and, today, entirely needless cruelty. I’m coming up on being vegan for five years and know I’m not better than anyone else, can’t really judge anyone else, in spite of the clear conviction that how I’m behaving now is unquestionably better - precisely because I did the exact same things not that long ago. Virtually our entire society inculcates using and abusing other animals in horrific ways as not only entirely normal, but something reassuring, comforting, heartwarming and homey. I’m not saying humans are exactly like other animals in every way (and can imagine the extreme offense some would take at the comparison I’m about to make) - though we are surely vastly more similar with so many other species than we like to admit, given our common development, morphology, and behavior. But how we excuse and deny and cover our eyes and ears and build mountains of fallacies to rationalize the mass, institutional, extreme abuse of other animals today is really not so different from how humans not so long ago openly and unapologetically othered and dehumanized other humans. It’s interesting that when people did and do this they so often explicitly compare or literally describe the people they denigrate as various kinds of other animals. When people want to rationalize committing genocide they describe their victims as insects or vermin to be exterminated. When abuse short of extermination is called for, the victims might be described as monkeys, pigs, or dogs. Anyway, a therapist told me recently:we can’t judge our past selves too harshly on the basis of what we know now. That’s not a perfect apology to how we evaluate our historical past today. And yes there are some things we as people should have known and done and that our long-past countrymen should have known and done. But I’m kind of bemused by and and honestly a little impatient with woke crusaders today who so sanctimoniously bully others, engaging in these self-flattering postures of slaying long-vanquished dragons. While going out of their way to try and smear and rule out of bounds movements to end the most excruciatingly cruel in degree, massive in scale and ubiquitous present-day injustices, like our literally tortuous abuse of other species. It’s easy to see why: focusing on such compelling present wrongs steals their thunder and threatens their narcissistic obsession with being continually congratulated for - what? Being really super-performatively opposed to slavery a hundred and fifty some years after the Civil War? More outraged by Jim Crow two generations after affirmative action was introduced? None of this is to say that everything is perfectly just and there are no lingering impacts from those past horrors. But there’s a reason we get treated to a sort of slavery porn; why every policy one objects to has to be a “New Jim Crow” (or Eagle!); why every act of excessive force is a “modern day lynching”. There is a lot of self-aggrandizement at play. Stacey Abrams is not John Lewis. Meanwhile none of these anachronistic freedom fighters or woke elect wants to be implicated - or responsible - for being one more person “living in the world” as AOC says whenever someone calls her on her hypocrisy, who is actually harming innocents or obliviously licensing less fortunate laborers to do so on their behalf, instead of being hero of the social justice fantasies playing in their heads.
What we do to animals doesn't require justification, because basic morality is a social construct and ipso facto applies to human-human interactions, unless the shared moral judgment extends it (and, note, it generally has not been extended to animals). You're free to expand on it as you see fit in your own personal moral paradigm, but it isn't an apt analogy because it's an entirely different sphere from conventional morality. Unless, you know, your god tells you otherwise.
Your disturbing lack of moral intuition and blithe dismissal of the *actual* and profound suffering of highly-sentient beings of other species, which is discoverable and testable and measurable and is independent of whatever human constructs you would deign to apply to them, simply on the basis of their not having participated by human means in the establishment of human conventions - or on the basis of some circular justification that we can gratuitously torture them to whatever extent anyone cares to - because a practical consensus of humans hasn’t yet emerged to protect them from this suffering, mostly just demonstrates how willing some people are to tie themselves in knots trying to rationalize and justify what they prefer to do out of callous habit. It’s highly analogous to how humans justified their entirely self-serving then consensus distinctions between what they asserted were higher and lower races of human beings. By your rationale, there would have been nothing inherently morally wrong with this, or with the horrors which were licensed on that basis, until such point a consensus of humans decided to adjust their construct of moral responsibility and expand it to a wider range of humans. People have made these excuses on the basis of not only race, but sex, age, disability, religion, and class. You’d be better off just admitting that you don’t like being made to feel guilty and don’t want to have to change your habits in order to stop licensing and subsidizing the infliction of extreme suffering than playing pedant to try and get yourself off the hook. None of this depends on me or anyone believing or not believing in a god. Choosing to cover eyes, morally speaking, doesn’t mean real harm is not being inflicted. Asserting that that suffering exists outside of some circle of meaning and responsibility because a lot of other people currently share your unwillingness to accept the reality of it doesn’t make it any less real.
https://www.city-journal.org/new-york-times-turns-blind-eye-to-violence-in-miami
"These double standards now predominate. Elite “antiracists” absolve blacks from responsibility for their actions. All crime is the result of racism, if it is even acknowledged. This patronizing attitude is today’s real racism, and it guarantees that the bourgeois behavior gap—the cause of lingering socioeconomic disparities—will continue. No one in a position of elite authority is sending the message that society expects blacks to live by the same standards as other groups. Instead, we are unwinding every objective standard of conduct and achievement—whether it’s the criminal code or academic proficiency requirements for school and employment—if enforcing that standard has a disparate impact on blacks."
Heather MacDonald 4/1/2021
"Wokeness is the new religion, growing faster and larger than Christianity. Its priesthood outnumbers the clergy and exercises far more power. Silicon Valley is the new Vatican; and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter are the new gospels." Victor Davis Hanson 4/1/2021
I am not sure I really understand the “end game” of the Elect. As you say they are not dumb so they have got to see this will not end well for our country and thus for 90+ % of the people. Immigrants in the last 30-40 years will have no patience with this eventually and neither will the working class. This will happen even faster as China and India come into their own.
The section on bi-racial identity reminded me of the Seinfeld episode in which Elaine tries to figure out whether her boyfriend is black without asking if he is black, and in which he assumes she is Spanish because her name sounds Spanish and she takes him to Spanish restaurants. Neither is clearly any one thing or another, but each dances around whether the other is an other.
That Seinfeld episode was truly racist because it promoted the myth that one must be "pure" in order to be "white." The boyfriend in question looked more like Trotsky than a "black." I wondered why the Jewish Jerry Seinfeld was promoting a kind of Aryan purity as normal and right. I also wondered why the actors playing Puerto Ricans never showed real signs of African ancestry since Puerto Ricans are essentially a "mulatto" ethnic group. But, as Henry Louis Gates Jr. learned when he denounced the late mixed-white Creole Anatole Broyard as an alleged "black," you have to pretend that Latinos don't exist if you are going to make the "one drop" myth stick.
I can't say that I'm totally following you. I can see that the characters were operating in a default-to-white bias, but I don't see where they were making the case (characters or writers) that one must be pure to be white. But maybe I'm not getting the full context of your post.
The boyfriend character in question was just a white guy with curly hair. WHY did Jerry Seinfeld describe him as "black" to Elaine?
Writing doesn’t get sharper than that, folks. Drink it in.
The only thing that isn't quite squaring for me with this book is that I have had multiple long conversations with at least four different friends who are professional racial justice activists/educators in which I push back very hard on "the movement." In each case, we are able to have meaningful conversations in which both of us comes to understand the other's point of view.
All of these friends has expressed in one form or another, discomfort with some bit of woke orthodoxy, while at the same time, presenting an unwavering commitment to the general approach to dismantling racism that the current antiracist movement takes.
Is there really no middle ground here, really no space for rational conversation in which those of us who are deeply skeptical of wokeism, don't reject it lock stock and barrel with the same kind of dogmatism we decry? Is this battle of ideas and approaches really zero-sum?
On the one hand, the battle really does feel zero-sum to me when wokeist orthodoxy animates a DEI themed meeting I have to attend in which the facilitators are operating strictly from the woke script in a way that is rote, shallow, uninteresting, and highly discourages any deviation, critical engagement. Or, when I read about the many cases that have surfaced recently of people being canceled for incidents that are unambiguously not racist (like the business professor who referenced the Chinese phrase "ne-ga", and got in big trouble).
On the other hand, when I talk to these woke friends of mine, in private, on walks through the woods on a lovely fall or spring day, we create real human connection and a genuine exchange of ideas. And, some of the work these friends do doesn't seem categorically bad. Some even seems thoughtful, humanizing, and ultimately a net good.
I think the problem is that the woke ideals are super complex, requiring something just short of a PhD to truly understand, and they are getting canned into professional development workshops that are run by people from HR, many with the best of intentions (to be less racist?), but they wind up resulting in shallow understandings of structural racism, and everyone involved runs the risk of walking away feeling shamed and disempowered. With the right people running the trainings, at best they can become something like a way to bond with coworkers, but again we should be asking, is there a better way to bond? And, as someone asked above, what is the measurable goal?
Really complex? Like Inception, right?
Maybe “nuanced” is a better word. Although, I guess planting thoughts in peoples’ dreams with the result of them making choices when they are unaware of being manipulated might also be a good analogy.
This articles expresses how I have felt my whole life. I am a bit like Thomas Chatterton’s children. I am recognizably Black but not Black in the typical American sense. I was born to upper-middle class immigrant parents who gave us a life of privilege, focused on our academics, and didn’t pass on the same hopeless, depressing American racial narrative that many native Black people drink from. While I was a merely a distant observer to the authentic “Black experience,” I was still constantly put inside the box by well-meaning white and Black people alike who expected all of my interests and attention to center not just on my identity, but THEIR contrived and simplistic version of what they assumed was my identity. For me, this led to identity crises as an adolescent and a larger striving for individuality and my own self. Yes, I am lucky in my life and should not presume to speak
for others, but not for the fact that the Elect would have you believe that others of much more meager upbringings and way less fortunate are somehow privileged over me just because of race, and that all my days are colored by racism and struggle, regardless of my actual carefree and prosperous day-to-day life and circumstances. Luckily, I always placed a premium on reason over emotion (I never stopped seeing our social conventions around race as a construct and most conversations about modern racism to be unproductive), and I was able to convince myself that it was the rest of the world and their fixation on race was not my problem if I didn’t choose it. And I knew that one can support progressive policies that help Black people and poorer non-Black alike without imbibing from the straw of blame, hopelessness, and over-sensitivity.
I don’t think that’s how the majority of people process it, as the contemporary tendency is to embrace an ever more essentialist mindset, like a modern Marxism in which everyone is labor or proletariat, with individual strivings buried into blurry abstracts. Perhaps it is because the human yearning for identity and group-belonging is strong and irrepressible and has calcified around our current categories. Who knows? Maybe we will never get over it. What I hope is that current fashions will one day shift to provide more room
for racial minorities - especially Black people - to see themselves as individuals, and forget their race even for a second, especially when entirely irrelevant. Currently liberals are unfortunately as just as bad on this token as conservatives, and while I am not a political conservative by any means, I feel there is no political home to really seek refuge from this dynamic.
I had to fight out of a box that well-meaning people tried to put me in as well. I understand your journey. I, too, hope that we evolve toward making more room for all of the wondrous and varied individuals on this planet to bloom into their own fullness, their own potential, their own choice of beingness. What a wonderful world that would be!
The notion of “identity” was coined by Erik Erikson in the 1950’s. He used it to discuss the way selves develop, though stages of the life-course, facing distinct challenges at each stage.
Though they drew on earlier work (such as Erikson, and Piaget; not forgetting Sartre) Berger and Luckmann codified the concept of “social construction” in the mid-1960’s. Identity construction was part of this. When I first read their work, as an undergraduate, the message I took away was: identity is a choice. One is radically free to construct it. The conventional wisdom condemns homosexuality as inversion, deformation, illness as set forth in the DSM? But if one wants to move from polymorphous eroticism to choosing a specifically gay identity and to build it, this is perfectly feasible. Likewise there is nothing “natural” (in the sense of compelling) about defining femininity as this idea is conveyed in what Barbara Welter named “the Cult of True Womanhood.” Anatomy is not destiny. Destiny is not destiny, if one chooses not to make it so.
That is a far cry from the way people talk today about “identity,” as in “identity politics.” Identity is no longer the realm of individual freedom; anatomy may no longer be destiny, but birth is. There is a “true self” (as Ralph Turner described it) and it is one’s duty to uncover it, get in touch with it, live out its constraints and possibilities. If one is Black, life’s task is to get in touch with one’s Natural self. If one is gay, this is not chosen; one was born that way (such that wanting to become bi-sexual is a deep self-betrayal). The same is true for trans-sexuals: the only permissible narrative is that if one finds oneself so inclined, this can only be because one has a true sexual essence accidentally imprisoned from birth in a wrongly-matched body. (Discussing developmental challenges, thinking about life choices, are all now beside the point.)
There is, thus, a great gulf fixed between the way people tended to think of identity in the late 20th c., and how we have come to think of it in the early 21st.
Not just among the racial Elect as McWhorter describes them; but also in discussions of sexuality, and of the self in general, now runs a deep vein of determinism. This is quite striking; particularly so in light of the thesis (Pluckrose and Lindsay, for instance) that Wokeness is a matter of the 60’s chickens coming home to roost, the triumph of the Long March Through The Institutions. In the ‘60’s I was free not to grow up as just one more Man in The Grey Flannel Suit. In the ‘20’s, I must grow into a destiny, innately determined. (In cargo shorts, perhaps, rather than suits.) Now birth is destiny, in a very deep manner.
In the ‘60s, Marcuse wrote a book called One-Dimensional Man -- in which a flattening of possibility was held to grow out of the structural weakness of late capitalism. I think to the extent that this book may have struck a chord back then, this was due precisely to the sense that possibilities were open not closed. Yet what has the Long March given us except the sort of one-dimensionality McWhorter describes in this installment -- in which the only interesting thing about a guy like Appiah is the (one) way he is like George Floyd. (Bor-ing.)
It is also a kind of one-dimensionality in which there is (because there can be) no politics. If everybody is just an avatar of their eternal essential group “identity,” what kind of negotiation is ever possible? What sort of compromise? What sort of change? It’s all just zero-sum power struggle -- in which outcome is equally eternal and unchanging. Which is of course McWhorter’s point of departure in this installment: “is there any degree of saturation that slavery could reach into the American consciousness that would satisfy The Elect, such that they would allow that a battle had been won?”
In the ‘60’s people could still sing: “til victory is won;” but then they began to say instead “¡Hasta la victoria siempre!” Forward -- but, always and forever. This is not politics. “Identity politics” is not politics. It is, rather, millenarianism. (Perhaps also, “racial Trotskyism.”)
And thus “Elect philosophy teaches black people to live obsessed with just how someone maybe doesn’t quite fully like them, and then die unappeased.” As a number of people have observed, if this is a religion, it is a religion peculiarly devoid of a description of what salvation looks like.
Nice response essay. My thoughts have been along the same lines as I've remembered the way we reformulated our identities and roles during the feminist movements of the 60s and 70s. Perhaps this is why Boomers (some of us, anyway) are so thoughtfully resistant to any attempts to force society into new "woke" social norms.
Thank you. Would that I could share your optimism about Boomers' common sense; I suspect, rather, that susceptibility to Elect norms has a history that is long, and deep (such that, e.g., "the personal is the political" is more the problem than the solution). (I say "Elect," rather than "Woke;" wokeness is a legit goal, from Plato through Bacon, Hume, Kant, Marx etc.; and today's "progressives" soi-disant hardly have a claim upon it, much less a monopoly.) In a sense Boomers gave up on actual wokeness as soon as they came to think of the MLA as the vanguard party.
"salvation" is the place you're allowed to exist in when you learn how to perform and mouth the correct obeisance to the Elect. Such individuals are permitted to exist in social media without being denigrated, censored and cancelled. Being woke is the sainthood millenariums strive for.
I am a big fan of yours, Professor McWhorter, and agree with you on many issues, so this suggestion comes from a place of love and wanting The Elect to be as persuasive as possible.
I agree that it is wrong to hold people in the past to contemporary values. However, I urge you to find another issue than abortion to make this point. It’s unnecessarily divisive. I was so put off by it that I almost stopped reading. Please choose another illustration. It should be something that many people today actively participate in but that we also suspect, somewhere deep down, is problematic, yet we keep doing it anyway. You will alienate half of your readership by imagining an enlightened future where a woman's right to control her body is that.
I’ve often tried to imagine what people in the future might find unacceptable in attitudes that are common today. Here are a couple that make sense to me:
In the future, people may be appalled that we ate meat from factory farmed animals. Even bacon lovers (I confess to being one) find pictures of pigs at CAFOs deeply disturbing. Even those who love omelettes (again, me) are sickened by the miserable details of factory chickens’ hateful, brief lives. In our hearts, we know something is wrong here, but we willfully ignore it because, well, we like inexpensive meat and eggs. Future generations will not judge this kindly.
In 2100, our great-grandchildren will want to cancel us for driving gasoline-powered cars, especially those of us who worry that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change. An environmental activist today who participates in any number of common activities (living in a single-family home, flying) will be metaphorically burned at the stake by our carbon-neutral descendants. (Presumably they will accomplish this using a metaphorical giant magnifying glass rather than wood).
Please rethink including the abortion argument. It will be emphatically unpersuasive to a great many otherwise sympathetic readers.
How interesting that you find the fates of chickens and pigs more compelling than that of unborn children. The fact that “a great many otherwise sympathetic readers” would CURRENTLY reject this argument is precisely McWhorter’s point.
I have always seen vegetarianism as (quite possibly) extremely analogous to abolitionism around 200 years ago. I say this as a meat-eater who suspects that the meat industry is unethical on a *massive* scale yet finds it a struggle to go so far against the grain of how current society is set up. People like me may be very cancellable in a couple of centuries or so, when we find ourselves in a good enough position with human rights to start making animal rights a major focus.
If I may contribute -- I wonder if Prof. McWhorter chose abortion/pro-choice his the illustrative example precisely because the set of people who subscribe to Elect ideology are more likely to be pro-choice themselves. By choosing pro-choice as the hypothetical 'backwards' idea, I think he is trying to emphasise that the issue at hand is not about correctly predicting the course of history, but more about how that's a fool's errand. "Here is a belief that is self-evidently correct: how could it ever be that it will be seen as immoral in the future?"
So while I do agree that the example can be distasteful, I think its power might be diminished if he were to choose an example that reinforced the reader's sense that they are beating history at it's own game.
For what it is worth, I am a woman also who does not think abortion should be outlawed or needlessly penalised. Because of the context -- because based on the chapters that Prof. McWhorter has released -- I didn't think that he was in fact encouraging readers to dream of a future where abortion was banned to the detriment of women.
The cynical part of me says -- we may end up in a Gilead-like world anyway, and should be prepared to fight that eventuality. The optimist in me says -- perhaps there's a wild sci-fi future millennia from now where stem cell technology, or something, means that humans are birthed in vats rendering the question of abortion entirely superfluous, so that abortion as we understand it seems distasteful. The point is, we do not know. And the example as it stands does an effective job of driving that home.
"Yet for arguing this in the public sphere, Williams is often roasted as a race traitor by people sincerely thinking of themselves as bearers of a progressive message. Ladies and gentlemen, this is The Elect."
It never fails to strike me that while a lot of "white" people (whatever "white" may mean today) get their butts dusted for falling foul of the latest wokeist rules, there is a very special sense of glee that the wokeists have in cancelling other people of color for falling foul of the rules. It reminds me of the way that many "intersectional feminists" seem to salivate over nothing so much as cancelling another woman. Men like to talk about how feminism is a bunch of manhating, but that is NOTHING on their hatred for other women, trust me.
And the race-wokeists will hate a person of color for questioning them or even just floating a question in a way that doesn't lead only to a certified wokeist conclusion. We're at the point where we can't even ask questions in a way that might lead to new ideas, and how the hell can we solve these problems without that sense of "no suggestion is off limits" that comes with a good brainstorming session?
I've come to the conclusion that the whackos on both sides of the spectrum -- the qanon trumpsters and the wokeists both -- are consciously attempting to kill off any line of inquiry that might result in measurable progress. They descend on actual strategic inquiry too predictably. There is no difference between them; they're both allergic to facts. (The only difference is that the right wing puts physicists in front of a firing squad, the left wing biologists.)
And as far as Washington and Wilson and all those are concerned, I can't understand how it does anyone any good to cancel examples that show that you can be enormously imperfect and still achieve something worthwhile. No, they didn't achieve EVERYTHING. No one can. But the fact that you can be a shit about one thing and still get something decent done is inspiring, to me. And it's not just happening in history; it's happening now. I'm sick to my stomach at how Alexey Navalny has been abandoned by the wokeists -- is he an asshole? Yes. Is he also a prisoner of conscience whose death will be a disaster? Yes. One can be both a dickhead and a prisoner of conscience. Human rights are not only for the ideologically perfect.
At the turn of the 19th century, one had to be a white male to have civil rights. Now, one must be perfect. This is a far narrower slice of the population. We're headed in the wrong direction on this.
Social media is simultaneously a terrible place for debate, yet it is the only place it is happening in global north modernity. The debate of ideas used to happen mainly in academia until the turn of the century. Academics realized discourse had to be restrained with commonly understood rules that all complied with unless things would quickly turn into a bloodbath of rage. Everybody wants the moral superiority of being “right” and the quickest way to assert that is to shout the loudest, understanding if the assertion is repeated 7x it magically transmogrifies into a truth. Meantime you keep your echo chamber for the pure by constantly monitoring it for dissent and keeping out the uneducated trash.
I think part of the problem is also the brevity of social media. Twitter especially is to blame for this; to make a really good argument, or just to put forth an idea, takes way more than 140 characters. When Twitter first came into existence and friends of mine were all excited about how "cool" it was, all I could think was, "What the hell can be said in only 140 characters that is even worth saying or reading?" It narrowed debate into 140-charcter long drive-by comments, and all that medium supports is one tossed-off snark bomb after another, like verbal molotov cocktails.
In the meantime the brevity of twitter seems to be overcompensated for by blog posts where writers (being coy?) don't bother to say what their point is at the beginning, go on and on in a kind of stream-of-conscience, and have never heard of the writing/editing advice "kill your darlings"
The virtue of Wiki is: no editors, no filters. The vice of Wiki: no editors, no filters.
You must have meant to use some word other than "wiki".
I'm not sure I understand; what other word might one use here? I meant wiki in the dictionary definition: "a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users." As in Wikipedia, for example. The virtue of Wikipedia is: no editors, no filters. The vice of Wikipedia is: no editors, no filters. In Wikipedia I can read up on so many more topics than in Britannica; at the same time I can read up on lots of stuff that just ain't so. But it seems to me Twitter is like that too: another wiki platform, no?
Sound-bites predate Twitter. What is it that promotes short attention spans in the first place?
Sound bites usually came from longer discourses, though. The thing about Twitter is that it supports nothing BUT sound bites. It's really a worthless medium, like a newspaper with nothing but headlines and no articles.
all headlines, no body; point well taken. But might soundbites not be considered a gateway drug toward full Twitter addiction? Aren't they just degrees of the same problem on the supply-side of media: six o'clock Eye'm Witless News dumbing-down from a fuller report (if one wished to read beyond the headlines, one always might) to a slogan; a dumbing-down which Twitter then just amps up a bit?