(Bon sees you, and also me, and considers us primitive, yet there’s still time for us to figure it out)
So, forgive me for bothering the like 6 people who read this, but I was trying to solve a puzzle.
OK, so I have talked about how I get into these phases where I read a lot, think a lot, then become grumpy.
OK, I”m lying, I was grumpy the whole time.
In any case, this particular time I did that (like, today), I was also done writing for like 5 out of the last 6 days (had to take a night off to see a 90’s cover band, because that’s what you do when you become my age, etc) when I realized that I had forgotten to write down the ideas I had while waiting between bands.
I had dragged my friend out (let’s call him Patrick, because that’s my middle name) because he had had his heart trampled upon 2 weeks earlier, and the dude just needed to scream out some Rage Against The Machine (Fuck you, I won’t do what you told me) like we all do sometimes. In any case, good show. But before they came on, I had a thought. I had been trying to figure out how to sum up, into something simpler, the theme of what I was writing for the last week or so, and it came to me after some No Doubt song (which I sort of like, actually).
And, with no further ramblings, here is essentially what it was, as reconstructed in a hot shower, after the fact:
January 15, 2024
Shower Power Thoughts
Power
Control
Transcendence
*****
In the trauma of our young age, we sought power
Having gained power, we realized we weren’t in control
Having gained Control, we realized it wasn’t ours, so we set it free
*****
It is a hard thing to do, perhaps, but it is the only way for us to transcend into….
We are not in control; without control, whose power are we wielding?
Transcendence won’t make sense to us yet; that’s the only thing I understand about Transcendence.
*****
I abdicate my role in your story, for now.
But remember: Power, Control, and maybe Transcendence.
As one spends more time with much younger people, as I do now in classrooms every day, one begins to realize or remember a few things; none of them shocking or groundbreaking. They should be self-breaking. Self-breaking is, perhaps, the most unorthodox of ideas in a time of grasping a hold of your identity as if it were real.
Ok, let’s take a step back, metaphorically of course, as I know my readers like to take in my profundity while standing near abysses, both figurative and literal. Watch your step here.
It’s obvious to most people, at least, that as we see people around us making mistakes we have made in the past, we see fragments of, perhaps, our past selves. We see that we have grown in understanding, perspective, and also wisdom.
If only you could see, we say to ourselves. We want to reach out, as if to ourselves, and nudge them in some direction or other. We want to fix the problem. And, perhaps, in doing so we overlook an important insight.
Mistakes of the Past
If you are reading this, and even if you are not, you have fucked up. Maybe in small ways, maybe in lots of big ways, but you have. The egregiousness of the offense might add a separate dimension (if not several) to the complexity of my inevitable point, but for right now can we agree, dear (un)reader, that we have all done things which hurt people, caused us to lose a friend, or some consequence which made our subsequent experiences less than ideal.
And yes, I hear you…you optimists and others in the back of the room who insist we should not regert decisions or the varieties of realities which are foisted upon our existential backs…I hear you. Even if we would or should not regret having lived through whatever has happened, the simple fact is that some of our decisions have been bad ones, in terms of optimizing some meaning of well-being.
I know I would make different decisions, if I knew then what I know now. Oh, how I would make different decisions, in some places. And yes, others I would leave un-changed. The interesting part, dear reader, is how to tell these apart. Do I regret having moved into that house with that group of poly people? Do I regret breaking up with that amazing and brilliant woman I loved that (one?) time? Do I regret having quit my job last year?
I’m not here to answer those questions. But weary not, and do calm thyself and rest, assured that I am not sure the answers to whether I might change most of the decisions of my life. And in saying this our narrative course leads us back to my inevitable and central point, from which I perpetually stray in search of tangents which offer me both wisdom and tangential amusement in comparable measure. And in each of those moments of flying off towards a tangent or staying on task, is there not regret in each option? Were there not better words I could have utilized or perhaps better to have stayed more convicted on one side of the continuum of scatterbrained and laser-focused ideals?
I will allow that tangent to go where it will, and not follow it for now.
If I knew then….
It’s such a banal question, at this point, that I almost feel embarrassed using this trope. I wonder, in the moment, if this is a literary tool which I could merely hint at, with a wink, rather than hone in on and follow. This trope is another tangent, one which connects in just the right way for me at this moment, that I find it irresistible. I must follow it.
But if you could go back, let’s say into the body of your past self, carrying your memories to any point in your life (and given my non-dualist stance, this is a problematic philosophical puzzle. And this tangent I shall wink at and keep my trajectory constant towards tired tropes). But to when? Last week? 20 years ago? Perhaps the very beginning of your sentience? So many choices.
I will not be coy; I would absolutely do it in a heart-beat. The question is to what moment in my life would I return? And as I think about at what temporal target I would aim, the problem of my trigger-happy firing myself into my past self begins to become clear. There is a complicated calculus of precisely when everything started to go wrong, isn’t there? Assuming you can only do so once, the choices might become dizzying and cause uncertainties in the whole project.
Is the target that one nightmarish memory, or were there several which are good candidates? Was it that one decision? Perhaps for some it is, but not for me. Whichever moment we might choose, the problem is that there was, in that moment, a certain point of view which we had which led to the thing which we seek to undo. With later perspective carried with us, we annihilate that moment and replace it with a new one, but we don’t annihilate the memory of that lesson, the mistake doesn’t disappear.
Let’s say that I decide to go back to the day I got married. Or maybe to the day I met my (then) future wife, and perhaps not pursue her as I have concluded that the marriage was a mistake. But was it a mistake? At the time it felt right. But also, at the time, I didn’t know what I would know ten years later, so I couldn’t have done otherwise….
Oh, right, free will is an illusion, and all of this is mental masturbation….
Alright, never mind that, we know, we don’t care; we like masturbating. So was that, whatever moment you choose to return to, was that the moment whence your problems started? Had you made a different decision, you wouldn’t be feeling like this, right now. You wouldn’t be regretting your choices, and things would be better.
The bottom line is there probably is no end to that line of questioning. Because if if your one big mistake was the thing that made all the difference, carrying that knowledge back to that moment and doing otherwise will still haunt you as it does right now, because you are still carrying that decision with you, just not the consequencesfor everyone else…until that wound inside you, maybe, keeps haunting you until another action takes the place of the one undone. In other words, once present, the mistake can only be erased by erasing yourself. For example, going back and not carrying your memories and experiences with you would inevitably result in the same actions to happen as they did the first time, the lessons forgotten, and the loop goes round and round, and all that wisdom is lost each time you go back to that moment when you left yourself behind.
To put my point in stark relief, your decision will stick with you so long as you continue to have memories of it. So the only important question is whether you are going back in order to save yourself, or others? Are you trying to save your own life, or the life of those you may have hurt? And, here’s another one to keep you up at night; perhaps you go back, avoid hurting those other people, but as a result of that decision your life is even worse than it was when you chose to undo it all? Did that solve the problem?
One wonders whether Jesus of Nazareth pondered such questions when he walked in the Garden of Gethsemane (metaphorically?) before deciding whether he was going to sacrifice himself (to himself, definitely metaphorically) after having previously sent himself from (metaphorical) eternity in order to place himself in a specific time and place in all of the universe in order to die (metaphorically) for all our sins. I think I see the beginnings of a rather amusing comic about YHWH contemplating making himself into Jesus in Palestine in our year 1 or so, and grappling with the temporal, philosophical, and existential questions contained in this choice. We’ll call it Choises Christ (name is a WIP).
There are reasons such religious myths continue to remain relevant, I think.
Getting back to where we are
Ok, so we fucked up. We see situations from different, and perhaps more wise, perspectives having been in similar situations. We can’t undo the mistake, at least not for ourselves. And some of us think about these little moments in our lives, making us wince, feel loss, or maybe laugh at the anachronistic humor of it all. What of it?
I think that one of the things we forget is to ask ourselves what future us will think of us, right now. And While I know many people do think about this (in some cases too much), perhaps that is the wrong thing to focus on as well. Perhaps, if we shift our focus to the side a bit, another thing becomes clear.
When you made that decision, way back when, there was something you didn’t know. You know it better now, maybe. You can’t blame yourself for all of it, so you move forward. But more importantly, there are things that future you will know, and things that other people, right now, watching you in your moment, right now, who will understand your moment in a different way, of which you are not privy. In short, there are many, perhaps infinite, other perspectives than your own of your now now (yes, that was a Spaceballs reference).
And what you are certain of, whatever lesson you carry with your from your past, might not be wisdom. It may turn out to be another kind of error; another kind of decision which will define your future self in future moments of regret. Thus, the lesson to take from seeing other people exist in moments of error is not to focus on them, but to focus on whatever bit of wisdom you might offer them. Because it may be the case that your wisdom, in the right now, is the folly of both future you and all those looking on, knowingly. That is, sometimes we learn the wrong lessons, or perhaps not the whole lesson, and we attach ourselves to that error, as part of our ongoing identity.
Thus the greatest guide in each moment is the humility that you just might not have the wisdom, answers, or even best perspective in any of your past-self-flagellation or criticism of others. And we can prove this to ourselves by looking at ourselves from the point of view of metaphorical eternity, that is, from all possible yous, all of whom could potentially be wrong.
There is a multiverse of yous with multitudes of views, decisions, and whole philosophical systems of thought which you wouldn’t recognize, and yet to each one of those yous out there, each one feels as natural as yours does to you. Similarly, for every stupid, brainwashed, or ignorant fool you see out in the world, their moment seems as natural as yours does in seeing their error.
I feel as if I am invoking Erasmus, and his Praise of Folly (an outstanding book, which I highly recommend)
The problem with identity
I’m reading Yascha Mounk’s new book The Identity Trap, which I recommend and look forward to finishing (I got distracted reading a bunch of Foucault and others, to gain more perspective on the philosophical background to the points he was making). And while I don’t want to dig too deeply into his central point (with which I generally agree), I want to add a thought, relative to the above.
One of the reasons I have been skeptical and critical of much of the new [woke/identity synthesis/etc] sets of ideas over the years is I sensed, within it, people taking themselves too seriously. I have referred to it as self-righteousness in the past (see here, here, and especially here), but fundamentally it is this blindness, whether it be historical or personal, wherein people fail to realize that the lessons they have learned might be the wrong ones; perhaps their learned life lessons are the cause of the error they are making right now. Their intentions may be good, but in each moment people tend to cling to identities, convictions, and cultural affiliations which only serve as obstacles. And being that these obstacles are of our own making, it amounts to us getting in our own way. We lug around this identity, and the cultural meta-narratives which we build socially with our tribes, and don’t see how this distorts our ability to be, moment-to-moment.
By holding onto this concept of an identity, by making the world about definitions—the thin skin we talk and think onto the unseen noumenal reality we cannot hold onto—we lose the moment and try to put it in a bottle. By creating steadfast classifications of what we are, we lose ourselves to those definitions, and it pulls us away from the moment.
Foucault didn’t want to be classified as a ‘homosexual’ because he thought that the term was too confined, covered in cultural baggage, and essentially he thought that such groupings and categorizations get lost on the miasma of language and society.
Similarly, each of us, in every moment, in clinging to some pride in our identity or social grouping, especially if based on things that are outside of our ability to choose (and if free will isn’t real, that’s everything), are literally losing ourselves in each and every moment we persist in clinging to cultural identities.
We are chaining ourselves, limiting ourselves, with cultural trends which may turn out, in the future, to have been awful fads. There is, most definitely, an element of social contagion to ideas of all kinds; we have always done this. These social contagions are among the forces which push history around, creating dominant narratives which we feel obliged to enforce. It’s how religion creates heathens and nations aliens. It’s one of the most fundamental aspects of culture, and I’m not sure if there is a way to be social and to not do this, except maybe for each individual to take themselves, their identities, and their cultural tribal affiliations less seriously.
Yes, I’m still banging that old gong.
We get carried away by cultural tides, all of us.
And we all forget this, most of the time. We are find ourselves lost in the right now.
At least once a day, just be. Don’t be anything in particular, just be. And if we can all do this, more and more often, we might find that we have been demonizing and canceling others based upon mirages of self, tied to culturo-historical identities and meta-narratives.
Wouldn’t it be tragic if our destructive behaviors were all due to being swept up in absurd cultural fads? Well, that might be exactly what is happening.
How can it be that I am surprised by the banality of our species when I was expecting it for all my adult life? Is the culprit Hope? Did her claws dig into my back, in her ecstasy or reverie I cannot be certain, sufficient to snatch my attention from what was my birthright? Can the boy who imagined a world of disappointment grow into a man who is disappointed in the world he finds himself within? One would think that I would have seen it coming, and yet somehow I’m surprised.
This is a story of sapience obstructed by sentience. It is of the mundane acting as a filter, a lens, or even Maya itself acting as a defense mechanism against the awful reality that stands at the core of whatever heavenly truths lay at our feet. God is dead, for sure, but so is Brahma. We have killed all the deities. And perhaps Nietzsche also saw that in doing so, we have killed our own imagination and creativity. For in being the creators of gods, who so graciously gave us our intellect, creativity, and our very souls, we have given dominion to the rules which we created to preserve the temples to our dead gods.
Has it ever occurred to you that we created laws? Rules too. In fact, all the various guiding stars of our world we put there, ostensibly, to make things better for us all. And, I suppose, there is some truth to this trope of culture. And yet, how often do the majority of us find ourselves bristling against such gilded ceilings. We gaze up at them, marveling at their complexity and staticity (oh but patience! We can change them if we work together! Vote!) and we are distracted by the fact that they hide the sky. I’m sorry; I am instructed to correct myself and say that they protect us from the elements, from nature red in tooth and claw.
This is precisely how I came to be caught pants-less with Hope, in delicto flagrante, hiding from my very own self. I found myself mesmerized by the this thin skin covering reality. The economic necessity of it makes this…error?–That is an open question—it makes this set of circumstances understandable.
But, if I haven’t made this completely clear, I was thinking about all of this. Decades of reading philosophy, talking people’s ears off about Nietzsche, spending a summer reading Foucault, writing long screeds that almost nobody reads….
All so that I find myself at middle age, surprised in an unexpected way. And my regurgitated thought keeps circling back to the obvious trope; this is what the crisis is. This psychological trauma is not just mine, even insofar as it is all mine at the very same time. This is the human condition. A condition that while universal, isn’t ubiquitous nor always perceivable.
The catalyst?
A couple of weeks ago, an acquaintance of mine from school, Frankie Trataglia, died suddenly. As a person who was pretty well known around town, his memorial was well-attended, and the shock of it was obvious. This led to two separate, but related, things happening to me in particular. The first is the obvious reminder of mortality and its unpredictable timing for all of us. But the second was more impactful to me. You see, I’ve had social anxiety for as long as I can remember. And this led to some rather awkward relationships with the other kids in school. I never felt like I belonged anywhere. I was spacey, shy, and distant from most people, and insofar as the “cool kids” went, I seemed to be able to slide into their lives for brief intervals, and was never sure if the jokes were good-natured or not. My wager is a bit of both.
And seeing these kids, grown into adults with kids of their own, showed me that not much has changed. I still am not sure whether I’m in on the joke or I’m the joke. I was surprised to see that whatever confidence and certainty I can muster in my adult stage of life, I’m instantly thrown into my teenager’s self and soul as soon as I’m back in that world. And I can’t tell if it’s in my head or real. What’s the difference, right? I create the world, don’t I? You’re all just NPCs in my simulation. But what I didn’t and still don’t know is which type of NPC I am in their simulations. I only knew that the world was ugly and we are all stuck in our own simulations. And I also knew that a pretty unique and interesting simulation was gone, and that one day mine will be gone too.
And I knew this when I was 16.
And yet I am surprised.
The Reaction
I resigned from my job. I told my former supervisor, as I walked out of the office, that he’s an idiot. And in a set of (important?) ways, he is an idiot. My friend assures me it’s bad management. I might have been able to save my place there, albeit with some awkwardness, but I knew that it was time to go. So, not knowing what was next, without a plan, and during a time when I was already beleaguered by seasonal depression, I peaced out. It was simultaneously a decision which was absolutely necessary for my mental health and which may have terrifying consequences for the rest of my life. There is no regret, but there is a fair amount of uncertainty and fear, associated with this necessary decision.
When I did the necessary deed, the news of Frankie’s death had already reached me. It hadn’t yet cut into me, but it had a grip on me. It would be some days after leaving the office, the word ‘idiot’ ringing in my head, before the reunion of high school people (wordplay intended) wherein I would revisit old traumas, but the chemical reaction was already initiated. There was no way that I was going to make it out of this intact. Something had to change.
I can’t go back to working for some other corporation, can I? The dehumanization of it, the sterile, static, covering of it. Another Sistine chapel disguising the sky. It’s rules, policies, and culture stifling to creativity or nuance. It’s pay sufficient but uninspiring. It’s HR department never your friend.
And if corporations are people, they make a twisted and grimy culture of individuals, If I were to borrow from certain religious images (as I am apparently wont to do), I would say that Babylon is building its tower even yet, as the Lord descends his hand to destroy it. We have created a world of laws, rules, and institutions which were meant to protect and to guide us. And while ‘failure’ might be too strong a word, I think it’s appropriate to point out the displeasure that so many people have concerning the nature of this human project. The Structures aren’t going to hold as is. And yet we find ourselves mesmerized by the thin skin of this illusion—this Maya—of the protection we are supposedly under.
I don’t believe it. And I knew this when I was 16.
So, why am I so surprised? And, perhaps more importantly, by what specifically am I surprised?
I’m still working it all out, but I think I’m mostly surprised that I wasn’t able to dodge it. It’s not that I thought myself in some way superhuman (was I to expect I was one of the ubermenschen?), but that I thought that being aware of the problem might be enough to avoid at least some significant portion of it. But there is no avoiding it. You see, what I knew at 16 was that the world was awful and that too many awful people were in control. What I don’t think I was willing to admit, until fairly recently, is I don’t think there’s a fix.
There’s no fix because people aren’t evil. There’s no such thing as bad people or good people (although, perhaps there are important gradients), there is just the fact that we are all mesmerized by the skin of the cultures in which our minds were programmed. To solve the problem, we would have to be able to transcend that (I’m reading Rawls’ Theory of Justice, which introduced the idea of the “veil of ignorance”—a theoretical fantasy), and I don’t think anyone can. Not even me.
There is no Justice. Perhaps there can be justices, but there’s no fix. We’re all going to die, we’re going to disagree, condemn, and feel self-righteous at times, but all the tribes are run by people mesmerized by the thin skin of our cultural programmings, and we might as well burn it all down as enjoy our pretty ceilings.
Perhaps this is the depression talking, but I do remember some study demonstrating how depressed people have a more objective perspective. Doesn’t bode well.
I hope everyone is enjoying their gilded ceilings.
One night recently, while having a particularly bad instance of insomnia, a thought occurred to me which did not help towards my goal of attaining my much desired portion of sleep. And in the last couple of weeks or so this thought has stuck with me. And in my malicious sense of obligation to share my thoughts, perhaps I can keep you up at night, as well.
What if it were the case that you knew, or were at least convinced, that the next time you fell asleep you would die. And given this knowledge/belief, you set about thinking about the repercussions of this unfortunate reality.
How long would you stay awake?
Take a moment and consider that, if you like. I’ll wait.
How sure are you about your answer? How terrifying is this to you?
The more I reflected on it, my mind conjured Stephen King-esque kinds of horror. How long could you stay awake? And, perhaps more importantly, for how long would it be worth staying awake?
This is a topic I have dealt with before, and given my proclivities towards existential thought I will likely return to it again. And yet as I write, I wonder to what extent this thought might seem banal to you, or maybe you haven’t lived with this thought experiment playing in your head for some amount of days and haven’t been haunted by it. Or, perhaps, I’m abnormal in being agitated by such a consideration. Perhaps it’s worrying that such a thought not only occurred to me, but that I permitted its continued potency to give life to my awakened anxiety.
It is in my nature that when such chained (chained to me, it so very unhappily seems) specters accompany me through my days, the most effective way to exorcise them is to articulate their form through this very medium. I must write them out. I must explore them more thoroughly, and translate them from the ghastly concepts and shadowy feelings into more stark and shapely words. In so doing, they do not leave my mind, but they do stop screaming. Mostly.
What kinds of imagery do I create when I’m contemplating this ghastly daydream?
Picture yourself awakening on a sunny, warm morning. You feel well rested, you have at your disposal the entire world, potential actions both mundane and ecstatic, and you find yourself utterly convinced that this fresh consciousness is all that you are offered, and that even the briefest nap, the most miniscule of nodding off, will mean that there will be no more awakenings. There may be more mornings, but each successive morning you experience will become daily offerings of decreasing worth. How many mornings until you can no longer even dread the new light of fewer possibilities? How long until you can barely even form a cohesive sense of self, and to no longer even be capable of despair? As sleep deprivation consumes you, you will lose yourself into a zombie-like state of exhaustion as your body gives out on you.
You know that you cannot stay awake forever. But you also won’t merely go about your day and go down with the sun that very first night, content in the day you have lived, would you? You would at least fight through that one tired, sleepless night, and force upon yourself one more adrenaline-fueled day, and refuse to merely and resignedly snooze your way peacefully into that unknown and unknowable forever sleep, right? You would fight to stay awake, you heroic protagonist in this story, and battle against the weight of your eyelids and you would soldier on and stay alive until….
Until when?
I’ve certainly had days where I literally got no sleep the night before. There’s a wooziness and the perception of a lack of being fully present which persists, but it can be done and has been done by many of us, sometimes frequently for some who choose professions which may require it from time to time. But eventually, you must sleep, because sleep deprivation will kill you, eventually.
And so we sleep, eventually. In my experience, there is a strange and somewhat ironic quality of being too tired to fall asleep which then overtakes you as, after such a day, you pull that cover over yourself to finally rest. You know you need the sleep, you are quite exhausted, but sometimes the brain has stimulated itself with its own compounds of sustained attention that they have almost forgotten how to slow down, to sleep, and to do its nightly maintenance. You know, the maintenance required in order to store memories for the potential of a new day.
But what if you push through that second night? Is that third day one where you can find joy, appreciation, or even all of yourself? What of a fourth day? How many days, assuming you can stay awake, until it’s no longer even you? And how obvious is this metaphor becoming?
As the diminishing returns of the quality of your being conscious shamble on, as the lucidity of your striving to remain both awake and alive fades, the inevitable apotheosis towards Somnus, and to the oblivion which he rules, becomes immanent. Our power to fight against the inevitable is one that will be met by personalities which differ; there will be people who will struggle towards the fraying of their mind and memory, and who will have already gone into that dark night even as their eyes are still open and their mouth contests to form words which are barely contrasted from the blackness of deep meditation and the oblivion they refuse to submit to. And there will be those who, as the first sleepiness confronts them, will look into the eye of someone they love and smile in the contentedness of having had the time to love, to appreciate, and to have lived.
And when I meditate on this, feeling both the sadness and the desperation contained within, one concept keeps raising its head, and it becomes increasingly clear that this struggle is not one about the inevitability of sleep or death, but one of control. The question at the heart of this meditation is one of whether we can accept the reality that our power, our freedom, our determined obstinate force of will is ultimately impotent. In the end, the lesson may be that control is an illusion.
I was talking with some people the other night about free will, and a friend of mine said that if you’re riding a roller-coaster, you don’t get to choose where the car goes but you can wave your arms around. This, for him, was his free will. His level of control is, admittedly, limited but godammit he can wave his arms around, and so he is free.
This is unsatisfying to me. Not in the sense that I want to do more than wave or flap my arms around (perhaps in an attempt to fly), but in the sense that I don’t think that this freedom is the kind that I would want. I’m also not convinced that whether I wave my arms, and how hard I wave them, was ever my power to begin with. But I’m allowing the analogy to pull me too far from the track, and I’m getting away from my point….
Control.
How much can I do during my last days, my final awakened session, until I’m no longer me? How much control do I have upon first waking up versus day four or five? And if the quantity of control is definable in the beginning, on that sunny morning, and it approaches zero as the days go on, at what point does our control become an illusion? And what determines our varying personalities which lead to our differing responses to this circumstance? Why does one fight sleep for days while another accepts the inevitable and lays down at the end of a day or two? And, perhaps most interestingly, which of those two has or requires a greater level of control?
Because if it’s granted that both a person who fights through sleepiness for several days and the person who quietly and contentedly accepts the inevitable with greater clarity sooner are in control, is there any sense that one of them is more in control? Did they choose which path they would inevitably take? Compare a person who actively fights, stoically standing their ground against sleep, to one who graciously, and perhaps even epicureanly, accepts that the fight is one that cannot be won; which one is in more control?
This, to me, is a mind fuck. And I see people of varying personalities, all with their relative certainties and different levels of open-mindedness, all also with differing levels of perceived control. And while I understand the distinction between the level of mental control I have each morning I wake up as compared with the state of mind I might have if I stayed awake for 4 days, I’m more interested in the fact that the person who chooses to go to sleep that very night, knowing that they will not wake up, is perhaps just as in control as the person who eventually dies of sleep deprivation. The amount of control, of will, it would take to persevere towards a zombie-like death and the strength of will to calmly, happily, resign to sleep as soon as exhaustion presents itself are both types of control. But the question is whether they are varying types of strengths, or whether instead point to the illusory nature of control altogether.
It seems to me that the illusion of control is among the wiliest of devils. Because if it is an illusion, it is one that is literally the substance of awareness. It coexists with thought, intention, and decision. And as we wave our arms, joyous that we have this freedom, that roller-coaster continues to approach the end of its journey, and we have to ponder whether we ever actually chose to even be on this ride. None of use chose to be born. None us us choose to become exhausted. Continuing to wave our arms, perhaps to keep ourselves awake, isn’t the control I was looking for.
As your days progress, and as you eventually tire, are you what you choose? When will you realize that the decisions you make, whether for success, hedonism, interpersonal connection, or mere continued existence, are of similar potency as those who choose another path? And maybe the perception of control you have is real. But I’m not so sure that you would have, could have, done otherwise.
And then, for me at least, the distinction between my choices now and the inevitability of sleep and death collapse into each other, and I feel most free when I give up that sense of control. But that, too, feels like a choice. When will I finally realize that I’m not really in control?
When does sleep become the warm, cuddly, cold comfort which we all will eventually embrace?
Over the last year or so, two thoughts have occupied my conscious experience pretty often, and have returned as ideas I should write about. More recently, these ideas have started to introduce themselves to each other, flirt, and ultimately they started to have their bodily fluids exchange and an intersectional idea formed.
The first idea is about how we, humans, tend to misapprehend the world in a very specific way; we don’t understand what we are. The second idea is that we get in our own way, a lot. And the more I thought about these things, it started to become clear that these observations intersect in an interesting way, and I want to explore that idea today.
Are we the authority of who/what we are?
In a banal sense, we are obviously the most authoritative source of who we are. Only I have access to my thoughts, feelings, and worldviews. And in a legal, and possibly moral, sense, nobody has authority over what decisions I make or what I believe.
But in another sense, our idea of what we are, the narrative that we are telling, to ourselves about ourselves, is a kind of fiction. And we have multiple blind spots and missing angles of who and what we are which, sometimes, other people can see better than we can. There are times when our friends can see what we’re doing when we cannot. We may be responsible for our decisions (again, legally and morally), but we don’t necessarily have all the information relevant to understanding what we are doing. So, in some sense, we are not the authoritative source to who and what we are.
In a very literal sense, the processes that contribute to our behavior, beliefs, and decisions are happening on an unconscious level. I have annoyed friends, and other interlocutors, over the years explaining that not only is free will an illusion but neither our decisions nor beliefs are really “ours” in the sense that we didn’t consciously choose them. Yes it was us making the decision, but not the part of us which is conscious and aware. So are our beliefs, decisions, and actions sentient actions? The essential point here is that there are parts of us we don’t have conscious access to, and so we are only partially, at best, authoritative of who and what we are.
All of this is (perhaps) interesting and relevant in a philosophical sense, but it also has real life consequences when it comes to culture war issues. The concept of identity has become increasingly important in political, ethical, and legal questions in recent years. Many critics of some cultural trends will use terms like “identity politics” when talking about everything from Critical Race Theory (CRT) to gender theory. Whether we are talking about capital-B Black identity or children’s gender, the question is related to ideas of who and what individuals are, whether in an essentialist or political sense, and their rights based upon that identity.
The underlying assumption is that a person would know, better than we would, what they are. It’s not our place to tell them what gender they are, that’s for them to decide/define, not us. Same goes for blackness; perhaps it’s not up to Joe Biden to determine who is Black or not. Some critics of progressive ideas about race and gender have gone as far as to try to declare some objective reality which conflicts with such things, stating that sex is indeed binary (outside of rare intersex conditions) or that racial differences are real (so-called “race realism”).
Now, I’m not a fan of attempts to declare some objective perspective, from which we can impose some TruthTM onto the world. I don’t believe any objective perspective exists (I actually believe it’s an oxymoron). This is not to say that reality is subjective, only that there exists no god-like objective perspective from which to view it. For someone to claim some absolute truth in this way, when our entire language, culture, and worldview is an intersubjective construction based on an interpretation of actual reality is arrogant, at least to some extent. Someone claiming that there are only two sexes as an objective reality seems as if it were trying to point beyond the veil of our phenomenal perception into a noumenal, or to define a thing as absolutely and fundamentally so, as opposed to a taxonomy of a generally dimorphic species. In other words, some of this debate is about ontology, more than it is about laws or politics. Some people think that a creator/nature made us men and women, and this belief in a fundamental truth about the nature of sex/gender is based upon an ontological belief which others do not share.
But, also, I’m not advocating for any post-structuralist or postmodern idea of there being no truth or no reality; thus I reject the simplistic idea that everything is about power, domination, or mere subjective whim. We don’t, neither in some woo-woo spiritual nor Foucault-inspired ways, literally create the world with our various subjective/spiritual perspectives, which then fight for domination through the technê of culture, laws, etc. Insofar as we do literally create the world, the world still is real outside of this construction. I might agree that within the matrix of our culture, power structures, technê, etc have use (in the Wittgensteinian sense of that word), but they are not descriptions of reality behind that veil.
It is true that we, individually, literally construct the world that we understand, including ourselves. But the world itself exists (or so I’m convinced) external to our selves, and that we are left to interpret their reality based on a flawed and incomplete set of senses, language, etc. And in some complicated way, our own bodies are part of that external world, in the sense that we are matter which is somewhat self-reflective in an imperfect, semi-sentient, way.
Semi-sentient? What does that mean? Well, the idea is this; sentience, as the capacity to experience feelings and sensations Including thoughts, which I believe to be a subset of feelings/emotions (not separate from them) is not digital. It’s not on or off, it’s a continuum with many degrees, and whether there is an upper limit to this sentience is an idea I find fascinating and relevant to the idea that we are not authoritative about ourselves.
Imagine that, somewhere in the universe, there were a kind of intelligence/sentient being which was far more able to experience aspects of themselves and the universe than we can. What if they could perceive things like atomic motion, gravity on a large scale, or more forms of radiation? Would they not be more sentient than you or I? Would they not have more understanding of the universe or even their own self? Perhaps, with such sentience, the concept of self itself become grander? Perhaps there are selves that are more intensely self-like, and compared to them we are barely, or maybe just semi-sentient. And if we were to attain such greater sentience, we might better understand ourselves and the world which would make our current ideas about identity, gender, race, etc obsolete, wrong, or merely silly approximations of something even more complicated than we can currently understand. It’s a humbling thought.
Where does that leave us? What does that have to say about our identities, our sense of our own ‘race’ or ‘gender’? These are ideas that we, as a species and many cultures, are struggling with. And I have no idea how we will think about these things in 100 or 1000 years (assuming we are still around). But I have a fair amount of skepticism that what ideas we do have, my fellow progressive, are authoritative. This doesn’t mean that conservatives are right in their criticism, because it’s simply possible that nobody has a grip on these issues, and maybe nobody ever will. I don’t believe these are settled matters, even if I think that some people might be more right in the same sense that some beings might be more sentient. These things exist in gradations, not in digital, black/white, categories.
And yet we often find ourselves, we humans, involved in ideologies, living in subcultures with worldviews and opinions which we defend. We, a bunch of beings who barely understand what we, individually, are, somehow have the correct answers about some specific bits of this or that. And if you disagree, then you need to do the work. Our tendency to form foundations of identity leads us to form tribes, subcultures, and to collect around ideologies which begin to define us individually and communally. As we further attach to these identities, we become blinded by our selves and become stumbling blocks for ourselves. We get in our own way.
Getting in our own way
The other thing I’ve been thinking about is that we become enamored with convictions.
When I was in high school, we had a very good, especially comparatively, education about civil rights, religion, and ideas about progressive values. Among the books I remember reading was one called The Courage of Conviction. The idea is that there are certain people, worthy of reverence because they stuck by their principles, that we should try to emulate in our own lives.
And, at least to some extent, this is true; to not be tied to any principle at all is to be unreliable, untrustworthy, or even to be down-right immoral and bad. Being subject to mere whim, to be cynically opportunistic, or to be morally nihilistic is a recipe for being left aside in business, friendships, or romantic partners. That, or fantastically successful in politics.
But to be inflexibly ethical, to bind oneself to a principle or ideology is, in the Aristotelian sense, excessive as well. to make a rule and to make it absolute is, in my mind, not worthy of reverence any more than being nihilistic. In the alignment sense of lawful v chaotic, they are opposite sides of the same coin, if taken to extremes. Let’s use my value of caring about what is true as an example.
I believe that trying to find the truth is a good thing. I think that, at least in many cases, you can find what is likely to be true. It matters to me if an idea I have is a true idea, and I believe in skepticism (the need for evidence to accept something as likely true) and that we should actively try, at least sometimes, to find faults in our worldview. That is, I’m not epistemologically nihilistic, even if I believe that we can’t even be absolutely certain that anything is true (except, maybe, that at least I exist, even if not as I perceive myself to exist).
In some parts of our contemporary culture, there’s a phrase used by people disparagingly; “fuck your feelings”. The idea is that some people get caught up in sentimentality, cultural ideas, or are just brainwashed, and so one response is to say that one’s feelings are getting in the way of facts; of truth. And, to some extent, this definitely happens to humans. And perhaps one sentimental person, apparently oblivious to some hard fact or “truth” might argue that their interlocutor/pedantic truth-teller is missing the point about what really matters. Or maybe they simply disagree with what their interlocutor thinks of as ‘facts’ or ‘truth.’ But sometimes people do in fact have incorrect ideas due to poor thinking, emotional contagion, etc (I think religious/spiritual people tend to fall into this category).
But sometimes the “fuck your feelings” types are also, well, wrong. Ironically, their own feelings might be getting in the way, and what we might have are multiple perspectives which are all (or maybe most) wrong, and generally clouded by ‘feelings’. The attachment to a truth might be a good, useful, value, but this is a kind of conviction. The “will to truth” (as Nietzsche called it) is related to a cognitive error which humans are all-too-humanly prone to. The conviction to believe true things is not enough, here. As a former ideological mentor often has said, you have to want to believe true things and disbelieve untrue things. The combination is important; merely trying to believe true things won’t weed out the things you might be able to disprove, and the willingness to try to prove your ideas wrong is much more valuable, in terms of actually believing true things. How often do the “fuck your feelings” crowd try to prove their ideas wrong?
Conviction, then, can be an impediment to having good ideas. by attaching ourselves to facts, ideologies, or even whole worldviews is a means to attaching a bunch of claims, opinions, and moral perspectives onto ourselves. In other words, we start to identify with them. And when you mix this with how tribalism, or factions within cultures, causes self-censorship, pragmatic acceptance of ideas because they help maintain group-cohesion (and avoid canceling or ostracism), and other means of social contagions, we end up holding onto deeply-felt, deeply-held ideas which we will fight tooth and nail (whether on twitter, facebook, or truth social) to defend against ideas espoused by the hereticdeplorablelibtard other person with whom we disagree.
Whether we’re simply trying to understand the world or merely a specific idea, achieve a political/legislative goal, or merely get along with people at work, our inability to understand ourselves translates into an inability to see outside of our convictions which leads to nothing but problematic tribal loyalties. The next thing you know, you are chanting “black lives matter” or “Let’s go Brandon” or “trans women are women” or “sex is binary” while giving a side eye to someone within your tribe who isn’t chanting along, or who maybe seems to have some questions about your slogan. They might be your enemy, if they aren’t chanting along.
This leads to a situation where tribes start doing purity tests (AKA “cancel culture”), much like what John McWhorter claims in Woke Racism, where he claims that when people with questions, uncertainties, or quibbles about the catechisms of the group (McWhorter is convinced that the woke worldview is a new religion; I think that it shares many structures of religion, but that what’s actually happening is that tribal units supervene upon a set of behaviors that religion utilizes, but didn’t invent), then a kind of inquisition occurs and people become blasphemers or heretics. One might as well be in another tribe, because you obviously aren’t one of us, right TERF?
There’s a difference between being critical of a simplistic slogan and opposing it unequivocally. There’s a difference between being unsure about what we are or questioning our most sacred values and joining the “other” side. Whether it’s Kmele Foster insisting that race is not real and that he’s not black (or Black, for that matter) or people believing that some level of social contagion is responsible for the increase of children becoming trans, there exist positions which aren’t rejections of an idea, but an attempt to clarify the boundaries of a set of ideas. What stops us from being able to hear them as something other than a -phobia, a heresy, or as hateful or harmful (if not down-right violence) is, I believe, our inability to get out of our own way.
One must learn to dance, otherwise we become stiff, unagile, and unable to step around obstacles which we ourselves create.
What are we? (reprise)
But there is another sense in which we don’t know what we are which I keep thinking about, and this one is bigger, more philosophically grand, and which also has implications for the culture wars and pretty much everything human. I don’t think most people really have any idea what we are literally.
Some people think we are primarily immortal spiritual beings, or at least that we contain some magical part of ourselves which is more than mere matter. I don’t think that people understand that all of our thoughts, language, ideas, and even our culture are literally constructed in a physical, material, way and that we are mere flesh stuck in a milieu of material reality, projecting spirit upon ourselves. Yes, constructed based on something real (probably), but quite literally our perceptions of reality is a thing we create.
I am currently sitting at a desk, at a job, where I’m participating in a complex fiction in order to maintain a “life” which is based on concepts which didn’t exist before people thought of them. Remember, The Matrix (the original, I mean, only movie with that name) was a metaphor for the fact that the world in which we live is a construct. Everything from ideas about freedom, taxes, society, and even our very language is a thing that exists as a thin film on top of a world made up of primates just moving about eating, fucking, sleeping, killing, being confused, and ultimately returning to the oblivion of death. All of our concerns about ethics, egalitarianism, fairness, a strong economy, and eternal damnation are fantasies by which we are guided for the vast majority of our lives, with little to no attention paid to the fact that at bottom we’re just semi-sentient bits of mostly carbon and water here for a little while, distracted by a world of our own fabrication.
Why do we put so much concern into following rules imposed upon us by a historical structure created by people in power mostly for their benefit? (says the Marxist, perhaps). Why do our managers insist that we show up on work on time for a set of tasks which are not strictly necessary, especially between specific artificial slices of “time”? Why not allow me to sleep in a bit more and do the same amount of work in less time but better rested? All of these rules, while based on some rational motivation, are literally imposed by a set of people who created the whole structure of society over millennia in order to build civilization, and yet we seem to be so oblivious to the veil before our eyes, upon which is projected “the world” and “culture” and “identity.”
All of it could change, in an instant, with a different perspective. And when I understand the absurdity of it all, I most definitely feel some ennui, and I wonder why we are all so enthralled by the narrative we write together. If we were better able to see past these constructions, as a group of people, the less power they would have. And the more we could detach from ourselves, our tribes, and the more absurd the culture wars, in fact wars of all kinds, would seem. And even if one were not willing to eschew all of it in favor of a deep nihilism and simply “lie flat”, I think it would benefit us to detach from our selves, our tribes, and our faction in our cultures from time to time. For one, it will help us better understand our opponents (even if they don’t return the favor), but more importantly, it prevents us from getting in our own way, and maybe will help us figure out who we are and how to better resolve various issues.
In a funny twist of fate, maybe the best way to achieve a group’s goals might be to be less attached to the ideals of said group. Maybe the best way to be religious is to be a heretic.
I listen to, and am a patron of, a podcast called The Scathing Atheist. It’s three white dudes, with the usual addition of one of their wives in a segment called ‘This Week in Misogyny’ (TWIM). it often has original, satirical, music, skits based on the Bible, and funny commentary on news and cultural topics. I recommend it. It’s often hilarious, insightful, and I have been a patron for some years now. And I like the people on the podcast, and generally agree with them.
And, because all the people involved, including me a listener, are human, it’s inevitable that we’ll disagree. I’m not worried about that, in general. As the culture wars rage on, the makers of the podcast have definitely sided wit the SocJus crowd against the other parts of the atheist/skeptical world which has been somewhat, well, skeptical about the excesses of the Socjus aspects of the movement. None of that is unexpected nor is it the problem, in itself
If you’ve been following me, you know that I’m a bit critical of some of the excesses of the SocJus movement, despite being quite pro-social justice. So when they identified their position in this cultural fracturing, it was inevitable that I would disagree with them from time to time, and some of their jokes fell flat to me because of it. But I kept listening because it’s not a threat to me that I hear views I don’t agree with. I understand their perspective (having once shared it), so I’m more than happy to keep being a patron to a quality product.
Yesterday, a specific factor in our divergence became a little clearer to me when listening to their most recent episode, and it got me thinking. Here’s a quote from Noah Lugeons’ diatribe from the episode on April 29th, 2021, in which he’s ranting about the hypocrisy of the Christian Right, who have been canceling things for decades (at least) complaining about so-called “cancel culture”:
You motherfuckers invented cancel culture. Hell, you’d gotten so good at it that Nintendo pre-cancelled itself, as did virtually every other company in the goddamn country. But you abused your power and now when Million Moms complains about the H E double hockey sticks in a Burger King ad, the shareholders pat the advertisers on the back. Being condemned by Christians is a badge of honor if you’re trying to sell shit to the fifty and under crowd.
Of course, the method was never bad, just the target. And now the very people they were trying to shut up have picked up the weapon that they forged themselves and we’re slowly learning how to wield it. But instead of pointing it at the LGBTQ community, we’ve handed it to the LGBTQ community. We’re handing it back to the very groups that have been marginalized by it for all these years. And the more effective we get at it, the more willing they are to pretend the very concept is egregious.
But don’t let it fool you for a second. The instant the pendulum swung the other way, they’d seize the power back and cancel any cartoon with a wizard in it. They’ve never been against “cancel culture”, they’re against the good guys being so damn much better at it than them.
As soon as I heard this, the point where Noah and I diverge became clear. He says “Of course, the method was never bad, just the target,” and my reaction was to think about the nature of how we disagreed. So, today I want to elucidate why I think this is wrong, and why I think those who talk about “accountability” and “consequences” when defending what is often called “cancel culture” (a term which is not especially good, but identifies what I’m talking about, generally, very efficiently) may be missing something which I think is important.
Experience is the best teacher
I was canceled some years ago, and it was genuinely traumatic and instructive for me, in the long run.
It has been said that the usefulness of being canceled is only affective within one’s own segment of the culture. Being considered problematic, dangerous, or disliked by people who have a different worldview than you is, well, expected. So this is a question about those who are part of your social circle, community, or friends groups deciding you are unwelcome to their events and groups. It would be pointless and absurd for the Catholic Church to cancel me, because I’m not a Catholic and I don’t want to be part of their community. But when the only major local polyamory group decides your a problem, it effects your life.
So, I understand the emotional, psychological, and practical consequences of being canceled. I’m not exaggerating when I say that it was traumatic (it’s a thing I still talk with my therapist about). The truth is that I am, in fact, responsible for some of the things I was canceled for. The irony is that the people who finally managed to convince the levers of power to be pulled to have me banned were the very same people who were abusive towards me, fabricated circulating rumors about me, and who continue, to this day, to thrive in a toxic world where their own mistakes are painted over and ignored. The fact that many of these people are friendly with Eve Rickert, who is credibly (IMHO) accused of abusive and manipulative behavior towards Franklin Veaux (who, admittedly, has his own things to work on) is just icing on that cake. The fact that she’s now revered by a the community as a victim is…a bit much (for those unfamiliar, think of the situation with Amber Heard and Johnny Depp, which is comparable in some respects)
But these aren’t evil people. They aren’t swamp creatures. I don’t want them canceled. I want them to actually be accountable for their actions, the way I have tried to be accountable for my own. In other words, I want them treated the way they should have treated me; with restorative justice and empathy. I just want them to own up to their mistakes, instead of taking up a weapon of banning, excommunicating, or canceling people who fuck up just as they have, but who were on the wrong side of the rift (from the people with their hands on the controls) when drama ensued.
So when I heard Noah’s diatribe yesterday, something clicked; it became clear that for many people concerned with “justice” and “accountability”, they mean something very different than I do, because they believe that, as Noah overtly claimed, that the method (of canceling) was never bad. It was just being leveraged against the wrong people, and now they are leveraging it against the right people.
This is a terrifying and distressing position to take, because it seems to miss that it’s very very easy to get caught on the wrong side of a dispute and lose a significant part of your life, happiness, and community because of interpersonal drama, and have it framed as being deserved justice, repercussions, and comeuppance for bigots. It’s also distressing because even if you actually are guilty, leveraging such a tool only makes the problem worse for everyone in the long run. There are better alternatives.
You may think that the tool is good because you can use it against the Christian bigot, but the problem is that when purity culture starts declaring people as bigots when the truth gets lost in interpersonal drama, then people get the ban hammer unjustly, and those that wielded it still feel righteous as if they just canceled another deserving bigot. Encouraging the use of this tool is irresponsible and will lead to more people being unjustly treated by more people who will see themselves as righteous in doing so. In short, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between actual bigots and people being smeared by interpersonal drama, especially when a small group of people are really good at messaging and controlling narratives. The situation with Jesse Singal is a recent example of this.
Having experienced canceling, I would never (again) leverage this experience on anyone. It traumatized me, I lashed out, and it took me much longer to actually heal, learn, and become a better person than it would have had the people who demonized me actually tried to talk with me, and enact restorative justice. Now it’s too late, because my ability to trust people is irreparably damaged, and I will spend the rest of my life dealing with the trauma and loss. And a lot of it was based on messaging, narratives, and fabrications that many former friends will continue to believe regardless of the truth of what happened and who I am today.
Canceling can be, in many cases, a form of abuse. And the ability to tell the difference between any potential deserved canceling and an unjust canceling is going to rest on people’s ability to be certain that their righteousness is actually just. Personally, I have seen and experienced just how easy it is to be wrong about this, so I think that framing cancelling as fine, so long as the people actually deserve it, is irresponsible.
Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Right
Some have argued that people in positions of influence and power will often wield such a weapon pre-emptively in order to “control the narrative.” Yes, I think this sometimes happens, and is something to keep in mind when you see people with messaging skills talking a lot. I’ve experienced this directly, and I have seen it in the peripheries of my life in subsequent years.
The take-away is that the loudest person telling their story is not always completely trustworthy. It’s not necessarily that they are lying (they often aren’t), it’s that they are convinced that they are on the right side of justice. Eve Rickert seems to believe this now. Wes Fenza obviously believed this years ago. And I believed this when all that drama happened so long ago (and I now realize I wasn’t completely right about all of that). It’s natural that we see ourselves as the righteous victim, when we feel hurt.
So, when Noah Lugeons draws a parallel between how the Christian Right leveraged their cultural power to cancel certain music, video games, etc and how the “Woke” (another term which is inadequate, but makes my point easily) Left are doing so today, the parallel is telling and, ideally, instructional. It tells us that the victim has learned, from one unjust cultural power, how to wield that same power. But what if such a power should rarely, if ever, be used?
Certain parts of the Progressive (“woke”) Left have started to leverage their new cultural power, and it seems they have convinced themselves that they are just using a useful tool/weapon better than the bigots did and obviously they are doing so justly, unlike the bigots. This is the view of Ibram X. Kendi, who talks about learning to leverage cultural and political power in the name of justice, equity, and anti-racism. And while I liked much of Kendi’s book, How to be an Anti-Racist I think he is wrong in the same way that Noah Lugeons is wrong in his diatribe. I think it’s the same mistake, in fact.
This is all-so-familiar; remember #FTBullies? I do. I was on PZ Myers’ side back then, but in subsequent years I began to understand that the problem was more complicated, and while I still occasionally read PZ’s blog, I also have some peripheral exposure to the people he’s vilified, and his version of events is not without error. I don’t think PZ is a bad person, I think he’s convinced that he’s using his leveraged power for good, and I’m not convinced that he’s right.
It’s very easy to convince yourself that you using the weapon is good because you are the “good guy” (reminds me of the “good guy with a gun” trope). It is so easy to convince yourself that your cause is just. People with good intentions and goals make mistakes and leverage power for their cause, and end up having been wrong and do harm despite their intentions. Those Christians in the 80s and 90s believed they were doing the right thing. I think they were wrong, and I think I have good reasons for that, but what I learn from this is that it was the leveraging of their power where the crime happened, so maybe I should be careful about emulating their actions. Beliefs have consequences, right? Well, they have consequences because they compel actions. A bunch of 1980s Christians who believe a game is evil because it has a devil in the game is wrong, but it’s not a problem until such a person cooperates with like-minded people to have such games banned. The leveraging of that power is where the problem occurs.
So, is the lesson to give that lever to a person with a different, perhaps better, opinion? Or is it that this lever is potentially dangerous, and maybe people should not use it?
Turnabout is fair play?
It is true that many marginalized groups, including the LGBTQ+ community, BIPOC, and so forth have had a rough ride in the world. And it’s definitely the case, IMHO, that cultural, political, and legal changes need to be made to improve their access to legal protection and to facilitate cultural growth towards a more just world. But in the same way that when stopping someone from beating another person with a stick you don’t merely hand the stick to the original victim, it’s not wise to encourage the prior and current victims of our culture to be handed the levers of power which were the efficient cause of the problem (Kendi’s argument). It’s all-too-likely that it will lead to a different kind of injustice because people are fallible and will utilize power badly when they get it, especially if they are ideologically-driven, traumatized, and angry.
The people who wield the power need to be as neutral as possible, and former victims are not usually neutral. Just as it was irresponsible for me to lash out at people who hurt me when I was traumatized, it would be unwise to simply hand over a powerful cultural tool, such as what we refer to as “cancelling” to just anyone, even if many of us think they deserve some justice. The framing of Noah’s diatribe didn’t elucidate this important distinction, and I’m afraid it can be heard as a call to legitimize handing a weapon to victims and leave them alone in a room with their former abusers. I think we need to be more careful and considered than that.
The tools of canceling are not necessarily justice. At worst, they are a tool of abuse. At best, they only push people who make mistakes away where they will likely find common cause with your cultural interlocutors (IOW, other tribes in the culture wars). This gives momentum to the viscious cycle of tribalism and makes our cultural rifts worse. I’ve seen it happen to the atheist/skeptic community, the polyamorous community, and to American culture in general. The culture wars are not a neat divide between the good and the bad, they are a tribalistic fight between different worldviews, none of which are right, completely.
Now, I happen to think some factions tends to be more right than others (and I may be wrong). But because each faction demonizes each other and can’t understand their perspective, they see no problem unleashing any cultural weapon against them, which is what Noah Lugeons seems to be arguing for here. This is classic dehumanization, and it’s most definitely not humanism. As a result, wise leaders and influencers need to be cautious about encouraging use of certain tools, such as canceling, because it’s so easy to think your cause is just when it very well might not be. Or, even if it is, it’s possible that cancellation might not be a good tool to begin with, and your cause loses it’s righteousness by utilizing it.
Rationality Rules, a youtuber who has faced the cancellation cannon before and learned from his mistakes (again, IMO), makes a powerful argument as to why the AHA should not have revoked Richard Dawkins’ 1996 Humanist of the Year award. I’m no fan of Dawkins (I find him to be incorrigible, personally), but I think RR is correct in his analysis here. And his points are relevant to this issue because RR’s perspective is consistent with one where we are more cautious about when and where to use the power to cancel.
I agree with RR here
What about the truly awful?
So, I know many of you are thinking, ok, maybe you have a point. But what about the actual bigots, irredeemable assholes, unrepentant abusers, etc?
What about, say David Silverman? Or James Lindsay? Or whomever your personal bogeyman is; what about them?
There is obviously a point at which, in trying to help someone, reason with them, etc you will decide that you no longer want that person in your community. We want safe communities, after all. I’m not saying that this is easy, and I certainly don’t have the answers. But I’m worried because I’m seeing too many situations where people are considered bigots, racists, etc where I just don’t agree that the label fits. And, for many, that’s where I lose them, and now I’ve just condemned myself, to them, as one of the bigots. I don’t know what to do with that, because I don’t think they are right, and I don’t know if I can convince them otherwise. All I ask is don’t take my community away merely on the basis of disagreement.
I think James Lindsay is an interesting example to discuss here, and it’s also relevant because his name has been one of jokes by the same podcast in recent weeks as well. You see, James Lindsay has at least one video of himself with swords which he put online. The video I saw was…ridiculous, and I get why people are laughing at him. Fine, laugh away, I guess. I did, too, if I’m being honest. And if you pay any attention to Lindsay’s social media (which I no longer do), he doesn’t seem to care. Cool.
And many of his political opinions are, IMO, poorly thought out. He’s kind of an asshole. He’s convinced he’s right, he’s arrogant, and I don’t think I would like him much, personally. And yet I read his book (co-authored with Helen Pluckrose, who I like much more, and whose organization Counter Weight the same podcast has laughed at a few times).
Now, I thought the book was interesting. It gave me some more context about the origin of much of the intellectual foundations for so-called ‘woke’ views about equity and racism. I realize that most people who are in favor of equity and anti-racism have little to no awareness of these philosophical underpinnings, and I don’t think most of the worst examples from these postmodernist/poststructuralist writers, included in Cynical Theories, would reflect most actual people’s views who ascribe to these ideas. Thus, while I do agree that some of the philosophical underpinnings of the thought leaders are not especially convincing to me, I am not willing to demonize or throw out the entirety of the Progressive Left’s social justice cause because I’m worried about the fringes and the excesses of that community (although I think it’s important to be able to be critical of them, when they are wrong). And thus, I think James Lindsay is ridiculous, but also not completely wrong.
I read his book. I tried to take him seriously. I actually paid attention to the content behind the dancing clown with swords, and I think he has a few important things to add to the conversation, even if I find him personally idiotic and ridiculous. Like I said, I much prefer Helen, who I know the Scathing Atheist crew also find absurd and laugh at. Like I said, we differ in some areas. Perhaps The Scathing Atheist crew has actual good intellectual reasons to dismiss Cynical Theories and Counter Weight, and I have not been following them closely enough to know if any of them have been more clear about why they find them so bad, but all I’ve heard, on their podcast, is laughter (it is a comedy podcast, so I am not saying they should have an in-depth critique, only that they do, in fact, point and laugh.). Noah has said, if I remember right, that James Lindsay has asked to be on the show. They refused, Noah joked that he’s be willing to debate him (he seemed to imply it would not be much of a debate, but I am unaware of what his reasons are).
In brief, I don’t think James Lindsay is completely wrong, even if I might find him mostly wrong and an ass. Will I go out of my way to invite him onto any platform? No, I will not. Should people laugh at him? meh, whatever. Would I be willing to use whatever cultural power I have (which is almost none) to convince people to dismiss, de-platform, or demonize him? Nope. Because that’s a tool I don’t think should be used in most situations. I don’t want to add momentum to the cyclone of the vicious cycle of tribalism and enmity causing more misunderstanding, demonization, and general shittiness than it seems to be adding justice.
If you want justice, you absolutely need to give it a strong foundation of authenticity, fairness, and truth. You need to intentionally burst your own cultural bubble. You need to avoid tribalism. Noah Lugeons, who I think is quite smart, funny, and worth paying attention to has an opinion I disagree with, and all I want to do is add to that conversation. There will, undoubtedly, be people who consider his opinion dangerous wokeness gone mad (as Lindsay would probably say). Fine. I think they are wrong too (even if I understand their feeling, underneath their arguments).
I just think that insofar as we are going to use cancellation as a tool in our culture, we need to be more careful with it, and not frame it as the good, morally correct side using a weapon their enemies used, but doing so better and for the side of justice. To paraphrase John McWhorter, I think that’s a bit religious of an attitude.
Conclusions?
I am not sure, honestly. There are truly awful people out there, though they are few. I’m not sure who they are, but I have my biases.
David Silverman is, IMO, odious but I leave open the possibility that he might say something I agree with or maybe eventually grow and change. I will likely have to hear this second-hand because I no longer follow him. Does this mean I’ve canceled him, at least from my own life? Perhaps. Do I think people who will never take him seriously again are wrong and being trigger-happy with their willingness to cancel? Maybe. Do I think he’s necessarily an evil bigot who has written himself off from good society forever, as some seem to have done?
*sigh*
No, I don’t.
Who should be canceled? This is a thing I am still thinking about. I don’t have any certainty here. I’m just worried that some people have taken on a self-view as being righteous, and I’m skeptical of anyone who sees themselves, or their cause, that way. I’ve seen too many people overplay their hands and end up overcompensating, getting caught up in power, etc to trust anyone with any powerful tool, such as “cancellation.” Therefore, I’m opposed to what we call “cancel culture,” even where I might think I’m right and the person I might seek to cancel is obviously a bigot.
I’m merely suggesting more caution at very least. But otherwise, Noah’s diatribes are great (I have volumes of them at home on my bookshelf), and I encourage you all to give them a listen. He’s great with language and has made me chuckle many times. So no, I’m not cancelling Noah Lugeons.
I cannot be the only person who, when in moments of mental turmoil, fantasizes about leveling some ideological opponent with a brilliant quip which shuts them up. I believe this experience is somewhat common among humans.
But lately this unhealthy exercise has become less satisfying, and I think it might be worthwhile to deconstruct why; mostly for my own sake, but perhaps, dear reader, you might glean some understanding (whether of me, yourself, or some potential universal humanity).
The more righteous I feel, the more devastating such quips, which never seem to come at the time they are needed, tend to be. But as I continue to grow as a thinker, the more I am certain that certainty isn’t all that laudable a goal. And in recent months, I have noticed that I catch myself, while formulating some quip, retorting back at myself in the process. It softens my emotional satisfaction, and robs me of the catharsis of which such ruminations are capable.
That is, I have begun to value my ability to see myself from the point of view of my interlocutor and see how the devastating verbal barrage of truth was blunter (double entendre intended) than I anticipated. The next thing I know I’ve discovered nuances and depths of uncertainty I wasn’t able to see in the blinding light of certainty.
It’s not completely unlike the experience of realizing, mid-argument, that your significant other is actually right. In the moment, you are too taken-aback and still too emotional to admit it, and perhaps you dig in because of this, but it changes the experience nonetheless. Anyone who frequents Twitter might have some understanding of this phenomenon, as well.
Idealism and certainty
Back in the halcyon days of 2012 or so, back when I was idealistic and more certain, I found myself in the lap of the burgeoning movement we now think of as the woke mentality. I saw it as progress, and even recognized it as a form of the same PC culture I saw in the 1990s. I saw it as the world finally waking up to certain realities and I saw it as a good thing. I became woke (even if a lot of it wasn’t really new to me) before the term fully took hold.
I was endlessly amused by memes which excoriated the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t see The TruthTM, and enjoyed those in my orbit lambasting those who tried to resist with their own biting criticisms. When blogs I read wouldn’t follow along, I often left them behind and enjoyed seeing other blogs mocking them. Nothing like a good dunk, to use a current phrase.
An example of this would be Jerry Coyne’s Why Evolution is True, which I used to read regularly until he started to chafe at some of what was called, at the time, 3rd Wave Feminism, Feminatzis, etc. While I agreed with Coyne’s view of science in the face of anti-science rhetoric from evolution-skeptics and so forth, I found his anti-feminism sometimes to be off-putting, and sided, at the time, with PZ Myers in those blog wars. There was even a time when I had drinks with PZ, Amanda Marcotte, and other like-minded people (in PZ’s hotel room, no less) at a convention during these times. I was part of a movement, it felt like, and it felt good. For someone with seriously debilitating insecurity, it was tremendously validating.
This was after the days of Elevatorgate, where the rift within the atheist/skeptic community foreshadowed the coming larger cultural, political, and ideological divides which came to dominate much of everything. I saw my side, the side of the coming liberal utopia of awakened skeptics, as being attacked by dim-witted, privileged, and clueless gobshites who were simply too dense or self-interested to hop on the truth train. I saw the red pill movement, which took shape not long after all of this, as angry, resentful, and hateful people who were very obviously wrong. It felt good to be on the right side of justice, and to have a set of smart, clever, and devastatingly witty compatriots ready and willing to throw a quip towards our enemies.
And we felt superior.
An Inception of Awakenings
In the next few years, I went through (metaphorical, of course) Hell. Much of it was my own doing, but what wasn’t mine was a trauma which came from realizing that what I thought were wise friends and allies were, in many cases, toxic, abusive, and dishonest fanatics for a cause which I no longer could support.1
But, as I have said previously, I wasn’t red-pilled. I reject their movement as well and I’m not going to be joining the likes of David Silverman2 anytime soon. And if, after reading this, you think that he and I are of a similar ilk, then you will have failed to understand my larger point here, and have mistook me leaving one set of toxic ideas for joining another. This cultural war doesn’t have merely two sides, and I don’t think any major faction is always wrong (no, not even David Silverman and those who side with him are always wrong, even when they are making asses of themselves).
But it does feel like, in some sense, that I woke up more than once, as if I’m rising through layers of bad dreams, never sure if this, right now, is finally reality. I’m not sure if the top is still spinning.
And in a sense I do realize that this reality, this set of perceptions, beliefs, etc to which I ascribe some level of objective truth, is still a Kantian dream from which I may never wake. Because if our view of the world, viewing ourselves as entities which see ourselves as entities because we have an entity category built into our minds, then it is the case that we are all trapped within an inescapable box completely separated from actual reality, and then there is no waking up. There is no being right or having the truth, there is just an endless process of wittling away nonsense with better questions and methodologies for separating nonsense from tentative objective reality.
Which would mean that thinking of yourself as woke is just, indeed, a kind of spiritualism or religion; just another idea of another world beyond ours. Just another form of being asleep, as it were, but believing, just like every other ideology, that you have the truth. It’s undeserved righteousness, just like everyone else.
In the vein of seeing this in religious terms, I’m looking forward to John McWhorter’s upcoming book, where he promises to explore the idea of wokeism as a new cult, religion, or something of the like (it hasn’t been published yet, but his thoughts on the subject to date seem consistent with such ideas). As a student of religion, culture, and someone who has shifted ideological frameworks myself, it seems clear to me that most ideologies behave in similar ways to religions, insofar as they create pious followers who see their enlightenment in relation to others’ obfuscated perspectives. In other words, all true believers see themselves as woke relative to those uninitiated. Par for the course, in terms of people.
The New Meta-Narrative
To clarify what all that jargon above was about; I’m skeptical that any of us have the truth, but I think there is a truth; it’s just that we may never know what all of it is. So, if anyone is claiming to have the truth they are delusional, wrong, or lying to some degree. And what bothers me about the woke isn’t their worldview. In fact, I largely agree with their goals, some of their beliefs, and don’t think most of them are acting in bad faith. What worries me is their tendency towards an un-willingness to hear criticism without responding with some version of a “Kafka Trap,” which is to say that any criticism is treated as evidence of that which the criticism is aimed.
The most notorious example of this is the idea, and the book of the same name, of White Fragility. This is an idea which essentially states that any push-back against the claim that I (for example), as a white person, am racist (or at least contribute to the support of systemic racism) is evidence of some fragility within myself. It is a claim which the true believers believe has no valid counter. In other words, it’s an assertion, and it is believed with a kind of faith, and to reject it is to deny The Truth.TM In other words, heresy.
It is akin to being told that there is an original sin (racism, in this case) of which we are all subject in one way or another, and we need to repent. But there is no ridding oneself of this sin, but only to keep “doing the work”, perpetually. We light-skinned humans exist in sin, or as a racist and we must confess our sin and seek forgiveness (which will never come). It’s right out of the playbook of religion, so perhaps it takes an atheist contrarian to see it clearly.
This is not to say that the existence of systemic racism has no merit; I, in fact, do think that there are systemically racist policies, cultural norms, etc which are a significant problem which must be addressed. However, the claim that such racism is ubiquitous and inescapable is a claim with a different level of scope than the fact that it exists at all. Further, conflating the criticism of the ubiquity of systemic racism with it’s nonexistence3 is a very common ploy used in the back-and-forth between interlocutors of the cultural conversation going on these days.
And considering my history with insecurity and depression, feeling guilty is sort of my go-to feeling. It took some amount of therapy and perhaps even wisdom to learn that this is a manipulation, and one that is all too easily inculcated onto Left-leaning white people who are currently willing to accept this as the truth about racism in our culture, whether out of fear, guilt, or cynical playing along to not get on the wrong side of the woke police. And I also understand that the recognition that one is being manipulated is one which causes reactionary and defensive behavior. Many people’s reactions against this idea are overkill, such as James Lindsay’s decision to vote for Trump because he fears the woke takeover of the Democratic party, which he sees worst than the threat of a second term for Trump. I find this an unreasonable conclusion, but one that at least makes sense to me because I have a similar reaction to being manipulated. I, however, am not ready to jettison the entire Left, including the current Democratic party, for the sake of a fear of it being led by authoritarian Woke Leftists with some bad ideas.
That is, many people who react to the woke with an overcompensation (support for Trump, intentionally trying to trigger woke people, etc) believe they are seeing wokeism as a new meta-narrative to replace the meta-narratives of the patriarchal, hierarchical, sexist, racist, etc world in which the woke say that we live. The irony of this is (as Cynical Theories points out) that wokeism grew out of a set of Postmodernist philosophical ideas which sought to deconstruct, transcend, or expose meta-narratives, only to later be used to create a new one out of a goal to achieve social justice.
But if the current SocJus movement it’s based on some bad ideas, then if it succeeds in its goals then all it will do is replace it with a new form of injustice, ultimately. At least that’s what many who are critical of the woke mentality believe, and why they oppose people like Robin D’Angelo, Ibram X. Kendi, and their allies in the attempt to create new policies based on woke ideas. Such critics of SocJus wokeism believe that their methods and ideas won’t succeed in creating social justice at all. I think they have a point; it will solve some things, perhaps, but it creates new problems. And the unwillingness of the woke to hear criticism, while understandable as a human response, will be the factor that will make it a new orthodoxy to be opposed once it actually has real power. If the woke would allow skepticism into their ranks, this could be avoided. But they treat criticism as evidence of people being racist, sexist, etc and worthy of being ostracized, ignored, and considered problematic. Therefore, many people are legitimately worried about this phenomenon.
Thus there are so many people quipping at each other, and the most vociferous quippers are the ones least likely to consider that their side is in error. And it reminds me of what it felt like to be surrounded by such a righteous, witty, and insular tribe. I felt like I was part of something, but what I didn’t realize until later was that I was surrounded by many toxic people. The point is that being part of a toxic culture doesn’t feel toxic because even abusive, toxic, and hateful people are capable of great affection, kindness, and loyalty to those inside their tribe.
And this is why I’m now suspicious of any tribe which does not actively seek skepticism, criticism, and ideological challenge from inside or outside that community, which is to say the overwhelmingly vast majority of human groups.
Seeking ideological purity creates an insular bubble where ideas are never challenged, which then creates the very meta-narrarive which the Theories which are the basis of their woke ideologies were originally supposed to correct for. They are, essentially, shooting themselves in the foot because they remove anyone who doesn’t bend the knee. So it’s understandable that even those on the Left who don’t fully agree stay quiet out of fear of losing friends, social connections, or even their jobs. I’m lucky to be in a position where I will, at most, lose a few acquaintances (already have) but my livelihood is not in jeopardy.
So, what I mean to say is that the metaphor of “woke” is especially bad and problematic (I’m taking the word back), because it is self-righteous and entitled especially because it considers criticism to be evidence for their worldview. And this was the basis for how and why I no longer considered myself one of the woke.
The key for them to understand is that I didn’t then join the opposition, because they are also largely toxic. I merely found myself in the no-man’s land between trenches, and have discovered that neither trench looks inviting as a safe space.
A Book Recommendation
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay deal with these concepts, related to wokeness, Critical Theory, and the history of these ideas, in their recent book, and corresponding website, Cynical Theories. I’m recommending these resources not because I agree with all of their conclusions, but because they expose many of the problems with the philosophical underpinnings of “Theory,” upon which much of the current woke mentality is based. Also, I do so despite the fact that I find much of Lindsay’s tone and conclusions (outside of the book, primarily) off-putting and often incorrect themselves. Pluckrose I tend to agree with much more often, in terms of her public pronouncements, but regardless of their differing political opinions, their criticism of Critical Theory is important to be aware of.
The gist of the problem is that the philosophical ancestors of woke ideologies are largely anti-science, anti-rational, and are most-definitely anti-liberal (in the philosophical sense not necessarily the political one, though it can be that too). Things such as evidence, logic, skepticism, and other important tools of criticism are denounced and replaced with power dynamics which seem to be cynically utilized for the sake of control and political expediency, which is the very problem I think we should be concerned with, not emulating.
And with the recent rise of woke ideas taking over much of academia, the corporate world, and other parts of society and culture, there is a sense that you are either on-board with justice or you are deplorable; you are with them or against them. It’s too simplistic a dichotomy and it ignores those who are for social justice but not in the way that many of the Woke Left are trying to achieve it. The problem is that most people don’t know that there is such a distinction, and so they conflate people like me, who are critical of much of their methods, with the red-pilled/Alt-Right/Trump-supporting/NAZI-sympathizing/socialist-hating and actually racist and sexist part of our culture which opposes the woke for equally bad reasons as those who support it. I am not Ben Shapiro.
I, and many others out there, don’t have a political or cultural home among the two major sides of this conflict, and we see ourselves pilloried from both ends as being on the other. People who I listen to, read, or both (whether it be the Fifth Column podcast, Andrew Sullivan, Blocked and Reported (Jesse Singal and the “transphobe” Katie Herzog), Coleman Hughes, or the aforementioned John McWhorter) are hated by both sides of this tribal cultural war because they don’t bend the knee to any orthodoxy. I don’t always agree with these people (I don’t always agree with myself), but I appreciate people who are willing to say what they think and challenge orthodoxies on all fronts. And somehow that’s bad, because one is either racist or anti-racist (says Kendi), with no possibility of being neither. That’s ridiculous.
Dreaming of Being Awake, but Still Snoring
The woke ideology is not enlightened, even where it makes good points and is right. They take good ideas and goals and wrap them in emotion to sell them to well-meaning people who want the world to be better than it is. And if you criticize them, you are considered a heretic and labeled as problematic. The whole cancel culture thing is really about how people are afraid to speak up when they disagree, because they know the potential interpersonal, social, and professional costs. The wars going on in many media outlets, between the woke and those who disagree, is going to be an ongoing conflict for years to come.
The point is that I believe that much of the woke world uses ideas such as standpoint theory (which is an interesting, and I think valid, set of ideas worthy of study in general) incorrectly; that is to say too broadly. All ideas have to be subject to scrutiny by any person who is able to parse the logical, rational, or empirical factors related to it. And no (again), this isn’t a form of supporting white, western, supremacy itself.
Postmodern/poststructural/woke ideas are not automatically and universally bad, but they are, I think, used too broadly or liberally (lol) than I think they have epistemologically earned. I frankly don’t think that most of the people policing ideas out there in the Left are sufficiently trained or (frankly) interested in logic, skepticism, and science to wield such a weapon correctly, and so we end up with a loud minority of people seeking justice but creating different forms of, probably unintentionally, injustice. Good intentions, bad execution.
And they do it for a quite human reason; they are caught up in the emotion of the movement. They feel empowered and important, being a part of a set of ideas which could make the world better. That is, their goals are laudable. They aren’t bad people, they are just people with ideas which don’t always survive scrutiny, and like many ideological movements before them, they are overzealous and undeservedly self-righteous.
I understand it because I experience this same set of feelings, thoughts, and a sense of belonging as they do when I come up with those zingers in the shower, on a walk, or unable to sleep. This is a fairly universal human experience, but the difference is that the ideas we want to defend, criticize, or even to expand upon are ideas that are stuck in a whirlwind of historical, cultural, and ideological chaos which is really difficult, if not impossible, to pin down. At different times ideas, even within small pockets of culture, have relative power. Right now, there is a set of ideas about social justice, those that we refer to as wokeness, which are on the rise in terms of influence and power in our culture. And the irony is that the ideology of anti-oppression is now in a role where, at least on small scales, is acting much like an oppressive force upon groups and individuals.
Sure, on a large scale, they are still punching up, but in small ways, in small interactions, it occasionally punches down. Ibram X. Kendi describes this, in his book How to be and Anti-Racist, as the future discrimination that we need:
The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination
Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist
Kendi views this as righting an historical wrong; a continuous punching-up until the scales are even. But, that’s the thing about policy, cultural mores, and ideologies; they take on a life of their own and become the new mores. A goal of equity is one thing, but if the method one utilizes to attain it becomes the new normal, it won’t stop once the goal is attained, but it will still operate, as if through mere momentum, to punch in the same direction once equity is attained.
The problem with discrimination, oppression, and injustice in general is not who it’s being done to, but that it’s being done. And I don’t trust any potential amendment, policy, or moral idea to right a wrong by use of the very same tools which created the problem in the first place; stopping an attacker with a bat isn’t made better by taking the bat and handing it to the original victim. That’s mere revenge porn. Again, an understandable and very human reaction, but not a just one.
Here’s the point. People in control now believe they are right. People fighting them think they are right. People think they are right. But they can’t all be right, and in fact it’s quite likely that none of them are fully right. So, shouldn’t our highest values as carriers of ideologies, rather than to defensively parry criticism, be to actively self-criticize? Not that we have to accept criticism from any idiot on Twitter or Facebook comment section, but to already be doing it yourself? To do so, you need to take your serious critics seriously.
Shouldn’t we be questioning our most sacred beliefs and values, and find the weaknesses of our arguments, before some clueless bro points it out to you? It’s our instinct to defend our tribes, of course. But we need to, if we’re going to survive this infancy as a species, find a way to stop grouping ourselves based upon ideology/orthodoxy if we want to find truth, justice, or any solutions which will actually work in the long run. It’s too easy to get caught up in interpersonal fights where we defend our friends and attack our enemies regardless of the strength of our arguments. We need to do better, collectively.
I yearn for a day where open criticism will not result in ostracism from communities and then be thought of as merely removing problematic people. The freedom to criticize exists, and of course nobody has to pay attention, but dismissing criticism which points to your ideological foundations as invalid or a source of the problem merely makes your beliefs sacrosanct, which no idea should be. The good ideas keep surviving criticism for a reason, and don’t need your defense by removing critics from your club.
Because actual skepticism, rationality, logic, and critical thinking has never been the dominant meta-narrative of any system which has power, despite what some have said; the colonial, Western, white world is not one based in rationality and logic any more than any other group (yes, this is a claim which derives from Theory). Those things are available to all groups but rarely applied universally. Such tools are usually used as a means to reinforce our biases and destroy our foes (say, with witty quips), but rarely to question the strength of our own ideological foundations.
It’s sort of like how the strongest criticisms of any religion comes from other religions, but it takes an atheist to point at them all and say, “hey, you are all incorrect here.” So, while it might take a deplorable Trumpster to point out issues with wokeism, it takes those of us yeeted out of the Left to point to both said Trumpster and Woke Cultist and say “y’all are all wrong, so let’s actually start listening to each other and then maybe we can figure this shit out, finally,” while being quite aware that both of them will dunk on us with a witty quip, and continue to dismiss us and each other.
Question even your most sacred values and beliefs, and not just those of your ideological enemies.
Notes:
[1] I will clarify, here, that the hurt I also caused them, and our subsequent enmity, was not the reason I ended up on another side of ideological rifts, but being separate from them did finally allow me to reflect more clearly on ideas I previously cleaved to from an emotional distance; a process which took some years.
[2] If you haven’t been following the ravings of David since his various ousters, exposure of his awful behavior, and subsequent leaving of the Left, suffice it to say he’s become anti-woke in a way I will not endorse. That is to say that it’s possible to be critical of wokeness without becoming a snarling, angry, resentful idiot.
[3] And yes, there are woke critics who go this far in their critique. I disagree with such critics.
There is a newish metaphor in our culture, appropriated from a movie which is now old enough to drink alcohol, legally, in the US.
In a world where a dominant power has taken hold, there is need for a resistance. Of course, it’s technically possible to live in such a world and not see, or perhaps not agree, that such a resistance is necessary. Also, depending on your role in such a world, you might be the rational voice against radical insanity or you could be a “literal NAZI”.
Also, we may disagree about which power has taken hold. And we may both be…right? We may all have solid arguments, at least. The truth is further away.
Such are the interesting times in which we live.
Ok, so I’m obviously making a reference to The Matrix, and the newish metaphor is red-pilling, but what’s my point?
Well, that’s complicated. Which means it’s too long for even a tweet thread. Which means I’m totes using antiquated technology here to influence anyone. I gave up influencing anyone years ago, so this is mostly for me, the few who still bother reading, and perhaps for a future that might survive this historical period (and given last night’s presidential debate, the likelihood of “history” surviving the present is decomposing).
Let’s start here. I have not been red-pilled.
In fact, I have watched the various red-pilling of people over the last several years with a combination of curiosity, horror, and amusment. It’s not that they are completely wrong, it’s that they have fallen for one of the most common human failings; binary thinking. And despite what Eve Sedgwick might have you think, the concept of binary thinking is not a creation of recent history, related to homosexual discrimination. In fact, binary thinking might be one of the fundamental physiological constructs of how we perceive the world.
Those who have been red-pilled are, in many cases, people who fail to understand that because one side makes a mistake, it doesn’t mean its antithesis is right. Haven’t y’all read your Hegel? Or even Marx, for that matter?
So, I started thinking. What if, instead of red-pilling, I were to start talking about “purple-pilling”? But that’s crass, and still folds into our analysis the problematic 2-party system of intellectual thought. OK, so “black-pilling”? Well, that opens up way too many cans of worms, so no. White-pilling is right out.
And then it came to me; fuck all the pills. Stop taking fucking pills. Stop adhering to parties, ideologies, and tribes. Because all that happens is that we end up pilloring each other. And that leaves us, metaphorically of course, bloody red.
I’ve been reading about things like Critical Race Theory. I’ve been reading about the rise of Christian Nationalism with the Trump administration. I’ve been re-reading Kendi’s How to be and Anti-Racist. I’ve also been reading science fiction, but that falls outside of this, so nevermind. I have too many thoughts, conflicting thoughts, and I have no answers.
I’ve been listening. But perhaps the problem is that I have been listening to the wrong people? But, again, which are the wrong people?
If I were to travel to the future (and this is where I pull in my sci-fi reading) and seek out which of the cultural meta-narratives won, would that help me resolve my dilemma about truth?
Oh, wait, I missed a step. I still think that truth is a thing which is real. I’m not sure it’s attainable, but I still think it’s real, so perhaps I’m biased by the fact that I’m still attached to a “Western” and “Colonial” meta-narrative of objective (I would call it inter-subjective) scientific truth. It’s, of course, probabilistic and not absolute, but it’s still truthy science. #RealTruthScienceBitches
Ok, so if I traveled to the future I would probably be able to determine who “won” the culture wars, but just like a person who traveled from, say, 100AD to 1200 AD, the fact that Christianity (or some severely altered version of it) “won” wouldn’t address the truthfulness of it as a philosophical position.
What I’m saying is that I still care about truth, and I’m not convinced that any of us, on the various sides of the culture wars, have it. And I’m afraid that we are setting aside, for cynical reasons, the methodologies we use to differentiate between truth and not-truth.
And I think that we all need to step back from ourselves and ask whether 1) we care and 2) if we cared it would matter in this media environment.
So, apparently the big online bruhaha is about math.
I ran into this on twitter today:
1/ This is a screenshot of people saying 2+2=5. You read that right…2+2=5.
Among them are teachers, educators, and professors who plan on teaching this stuff to your children. So let's talk about what's going on here, why they're doing this, and how we can stop it.
I’m not a mathematician, but I did take some advanced mathematics while in high school, and have a sufficient understanding of math to understand what, I think, is happening here.
What I think is happening here is two separate things. The first is a subtle point about the fact that we use a standardized mathematics which is somewhat arbitrary, and we could use a different kind of mathematics if we chose to. The idea is that the standard mathematics is often smuggled in as a part of a larger cultural program attached to a system of “Western” oppression. We’ll get to that later.
The 2nd thing is that some people on the Left/Progressive side of things, the super-woke, are picking a fight with logic and truth, as we can hear here:
14/ This "I don't care about truth" view is common in social justice circles. For example, Kevin Bird @itsbirdemic (who mocked @conceptualjames and his followers for pushing back at people saying 2+2=5) admits here that he doesn't care about what the truth is when he does science pic.twitter.com/ewsBltKElf
Now, I don’t feel a need to address this because those who don’t understand that logic, rational thinking, and skepticism are the best tools we have to discern truth from untruth are not those who I feel like I’m ever going to reach. Because I’m not sure what other tool we could use to make distinctions between ideas, and make sense. If you don’t think that’s possible, then we have nothing left to talk about. If you straight up don’t care about truth, well….
If your whole project is that everything is about power dynamics (because “truth” is a Western lie), then you are just using the same tool that those “oppressors” have used which makes you no better than them. The key here is that those in power only utilize truth as a means, not as an end in itself. But if you don’t use it at all, then you will lose. So if you reject logic and the truth, and only seek to utilize the levers of persuasion, deception, compulsion etc to gain power, then you have become the monster you were fighting.
Because if and when your narrative becomes the dominant narrative or political source of power, you will be the same as they are now. Flipping who has the reigns of cynical power doesn’t make it any less cynical nor oppressive, it just switches who is the one in control. And if you claim that your narrative won’t be oppressive, then I suggest you learn some history, because I don’t believe you.
Some of you are already oppressive before the coup is complete, after all. If you actually gain real power, you don’t think this won’t get worse? Again, I don’t believe you. Have you read about the reign of Terror or the Cultural Revolution in China? Revolutions against entrenched power rarely avoid being the oppressor themselves. Hi, there, Polydelphia.
I’m interested in breaking that cycle of power and oppression, not handing the controls to someone else. If you don’t care about truth, then I don’t care if you are on the Left or the Right; we are at odds, and I will fight you (philosophically, ideally). The enemy here is authoritarianism, not whether you are woke or deplorable.
Code Switching
If you don’t know what code switching is, well, go read about it. The gist is that different dialects and cultural groups use different rules for language, and people who move in and out of different communities get used to speaking in different ways to different groups. A mild example is how a teacher might speak to their students in a different way than how they speak to their friends at the bar.
A more common, American, example is from this fantastic movie, Sorry to Bother You. Many Black Americans quite commonly switch between modes of speech depending upon who their interlocutors are. Here’s a clip for context:
You get it.
But what the hell does this have to do with math? Well, allow me to, once again, talk about Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ol’ Witty, as I call him in my head, was among the most important thinkers of the 20th century, and added a number of important ideas to philosophy, linguistics, and to the proper uses of fireplace pokers.
Among his more important ideas was that of language-games (also, see this). This is particularly important here because the concept of the language-game was created as part of a self-criticism of Wittgenstein’s earlier attempt to make language precise and purely logical, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), of which his later Philosophical Investigations (1953, posthumously) was a criticism. The Philosophical Investigations includes the introduction of the concept of a language-game, which was a brilliant criticism of his earlier attempt to perfect language into a precise, logical, system.
In other words, Wittgenstein was so brilliant that he not only helped start a philosophical movement with hist first book (Logical Positivism, through inspiration of the so-called ‘Vienna Circle’), but he refuted it himself later with a better piece of literature, revolutionizing the philosophy of language in the process.
In short, the idea of a language-game is that when we use language, we are not building a logical structure but rather we are indicating things with sounds, symbols, gestures, etc and defining meaning through use. Words don’t literally represent reality in a precise logical way, it merely indicates things and we are able to do this in a number of ways which are sensible insofar as they are effective. Thus, there are different ways to indicate a thought, intention, etc which vary according to what rules we come up with. Those rules are somewhat arbitrary (although probably not infinitely so) and differ from language to language, group to group.
Language doesn’t require mathematical or formal-logical precision to function, and the attempt to create a language which is logically precise (or the similar goal of Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead around the turn of the 20th century, to perfect mathematics; Russell of course mentored Wittgenstein at the latter parts of WWI) is a fool’s errand, as Wittgenstein demonstrates after first attempting to do precisely that in his first work, the Tractatus.
But mathematics needs some level of precision to be meaningful. When I say that 2+2=4, I am assuming a set of meanings to each of the symbols in that string. Depending on what meanings they all have, that statement is either true, false, or meaningless. So we humans came up with a standardized set of meanings and functions for those symbols in order to have a shared mathematics which we can use to figure out problems related to physics, engineering, etc.
And if you have different arbitrary standards of math, it’s quite possible to code switch between them, if you wanted to. But what if you reject the premise altogether?
Different ways of knowing?
And this is where the people saying 2+2=5 come in, and say things like ‘if we had different meanings for those terms, 2+2=5 could be true.’ Sure it could. So what? ‘Well,’ they may say, ‘why is the dominant standard the standard?’
Why can’t we use different, non-Western and colonial ways of knowing?
What other ways? If you had another way of knowing, how would you compare it? what criteria would you use to compare them against one-another? Wouldn’t, say, practical knowledge, technology, and evidence be useful here? What if you also reject those?
Have you seen this?
This may be the fringe, but it is not that rare of a perspective. I run into worldviews such as this on occasion where I live. A rejection of skepticism, science, rationality, and logic are fairly common among those who are criticizing the Western/colonial system of oppression. We have to contend that this is part of the narrative being promulgated alongside anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-capitalist ideology (all of which I support in themselves). This is what I’m fighting against in the Left/Progressive world currently. This is why I still identify as a liberal, and am worried about some of the “woke” Left.
But, of course, not all of the Left agrees with this. Sometimes, Lefties are just trying to expand our worldviews about perspective, meaning, etc without actually throwing away logic and truth altogether. Sometimes there is just a point about how math is complicated and often can have different rules.
Listen, you are free to use whatever meanings, standards, or rules for whatever math you desire. You are free to use different “contexts” if you like. But what do you mean by different contexts? Do you mean that you are merely redefining the terms, or maybe just one of them? OK, feel free, but then you are just switching the code you are using to communicate. You don’t have to use the standard meanings, but then you are just sewing confusion by switching mathematical systems without declaring so.
The standards don’t exist to oppress you, they exist so we can share a common set of meanings so we know what other people are talking about. It’s merely a means to make communication possible. Switching the rules is not giving a finger to “the man”, it’s merely going to make you misunderstood. Further, the oppressor (what we used to call “the man”) isn’t oppressing you with logic; they are oppressing you with cynical levers of power and using logic as a tool because logic works at achieving goals because its logical. The goal for power is the source of oppression, not its efficient cause of rational thinking.
As I said above, language does not always require precision. If I’m hanging with my friends around my neighborhood, on the porch or otherwise, and they code switch into a different set of syntax or grammar, I can follow along because doing so becomes obvious in context. I can literally hear the difference in the language and grok the meaning in a number of ways they express it. But if they suddenly decided, in their head, that “tree” meant “trolley,” this is more than code-switching; it is arbitrarily swapping usual meanings to no purpose but to confuse.
If we all decided, perhaps as a private joke, that when I say “tree” I mean trolley, then this is our private code, our private language-game. Perhaps it has an origin in a joke or something that means something to us. To us, in such a circumstance, this would then makes sense and would be clear communication. But it has to arise in a context which this meaning becomes clear through use, not mere unstated fiat. That is, it has to arise organically from context, use, and agreement before its meaningful.
Similarly, if someone simply types “2+2=5” without any context, there is no attempt to indicate the code switch or standard alteration here. I have no way of knowing that you have switched to some alternate or non-standard mathematical system. If, hypothetically, this was a reference to some private joke, in-group code switch, or some obscure non base-10 mathematics we use together, then we’re fine because we understand what was meant.
Again, you are free to use whatever terms in whatever way you want, and utilize whatever mathematics, symbols, etc which you like. However, if your point is that we shouldn’t have to accept the dominant standardization, the dominant code, because that code is part of the western system of cultural oppression, well….
Then we need to have a conversation about that.
But before I do that, I want to make something clear; if the point in saying 2+2=5 is merely to draw attention to the fact that some standard exists and that it is arbitrary, and that it’s possible to see the world using different meanings and perspectives, then fine. I find that impractical, but there is not (necessarily) any philosophical or logical error happening in doing so.
Unless, of course, you just reject logic or truth altogether, as I made reference to above. In that case, we have nothing to talk about.
So, what might we have to talk about?
The West, oppression, and rational thinking
There is no doubt that “The West” has committed atrocities of many scales upon the world. This set of cultures does not have the monopoly on such atrocities, but perhaps it is leading the world in this category. Everything from colonialism to the slave trade has been written on the ledger of Western history and culture, among their many other crimes of history. I am aware of much of this history, and I think that this context must be kept in mind.
Yet this is too simplistic.
The West also has philosophers, scientists, and other intellectuals who opposed–with speeches, literature, revolutions, and other means of resisting–the political, cultural, religious, etc methods of oppressing, enslaving, and otherwise being dicks to people of many regions of the world, including its own people. Also, many other sets of cultures have also committed many atrocities of their own.
The West also doesn’t have a monopoly on such philosophies, literature, and efforts of resistance. No culture has a monopoly on any human behavior. So even if “The West” is winning in the category of awful, and currently holds the reigns of power and oppression, they didn’t invent it nor are they solely liable. But if the point is that “The West” is currently holding the reigns and is primarily responsible for the current awful, then we are largely in agreement.
But let’s assume, for a moment, that “The West” was solely responsible for the general awful, for argument’s sake.
That is, even if “The West” did hold a monopoly on all the colonialism, wage/actual slavery, genocide, environmental ruin, political corruption, etc, and all other times, places, and people were innocent victims of “The West,” this still wouldn’t address the fact that much of the philosophical history of the “The West” are not the foundation of this oppression and historical crime.
Remember, the people holding the reigns also oppress and dominate its own citizens. Hell, my ancestors (primarily Irish) were under the boot of the English for hundreds of years, and while certainly not ideal in themselves, the Irish were rarely if ever in positions of any power with which to oppress anyone. Yes, my skin color offers me advantages in many cases in the world, but much of the historical oppression has landed upon my ancestors as well, even if to a lesser degree than it did to some others. I can still be racist as Irish, but the oppression is not coming from me. (Whether I’m responsible if I don’t resist it and speak out againt such oppression is another question).
But further, there is a tradition of resistance to the oppression, corruption, and dominance from those in charge within “The West” as well. Giordano Bruno? The Enlightenment? Abolitionists? Such individuals, movements, and ideologies were opposed to the sources of power within “The West” itself. And they had to use the tools of logic, rationalism, skepticism, etc in criticizing its own set of cultures. It is part of the “Western” tradition to criticize itself, it’s just that such critics rarely had sufficient power to make change. And when they did manage to achieve change in power, the results were often mixed, if not downright awful. The same is true in the East.
Criticism, resistance, and revolutions against the crimes of “The West” have tried, using rational and martial tools, to stand up to such crimes, usually failing in the attempt. The tools of oppression are not logic, rational thinking, skepticism etc, even insofar as those tools are used for them (because you need to use these tools to do anything well).
And that is the crux, here. To practically achieve any goal, whether oppression, liberation, or mere theory you must use, to some extent, rational thinking. It is merely a tool to be used for building or destroying; harming or helping; killing or healing. To irrationally conflate logic and rationality with oppression is to misunderstand the role that such tools have played throughout history, and is a failure to understand their power and importance as tools to resist and stand up to power.
The foundations of oppression are not logic nor truth. Fear, tribalism, greed, and other human flaws are the source of these things, and because logic, rational thinking, etc work in finding ways to achieve the ends of such ignoble flaws, they are necessarily part of the recipe. But remove greed, fear, and all the rest of those things which drive us apart, and you have no ideology at all; merely helpful tools which are impotent in themselves. That is, if you seek to resist oppression and win, you need to use the tools of rational thinking or you will almost certainly lose.
Yes, the systems of oppression, whatever they are, cynically utilize logic in the greedy grab for power, influence, deception, and ultimately control. But to reject one of the tools it uses, merely because it uses it; to employ resistance against such cynical control while rejecting its most powerful tools–logic, rationalism, and skepticism–is to make the exact mistake they are hoping you will make; you are falling into their trap. They see you rejecting truth, logic, and rationality and don’t have to say or do anything, because that’s how they gained that control to begin with. They denied you education, knowledge, and understanding and so they took power from you. When you reject it on your own you are scoring an own-goal. You are helping them dominate you.
You are not punching up, you are punching yourself in the face.
Power wants you weakened, confused, and impotent. It wants you screaming, irrational, and fueled by blind rage. This is how it manipulates you.
If you really want freedom of oppression, you need the strongest tools at your disposal. Those tools are clear, rational, logical, powerful thinking.
It means breaking your chains of tribalism that take the form of traditions, in-groups, nations, religions, racial identities, and even viewing love and sex in terms of property (which has been one of the intentions of this blog, over the years). The more you insist upon the boxes that are placed upon us as defining us, from the outside, the less free you are. If you really want to break free from oppression, you need to reject the limitations placed upon you; you need to deconstruct and possibly reject the framing of who we are, as humans, according to them.
But this doesn’t mean rejecting humanity’s greatest tools. So-called “Western” logic is not Western. It is a universal set of ideas discovered and improved by many cultures, throughout history, which have allowed us to build greater things, envision better ideas, and overcome previous mistakes. Just because most of us, in the West, talk more about Plato and Aristotle rather than Confucius, Averroes, or Avicenna is more of an historical accident than anything else.
In fact, the reason that we are talking about Aristotle at all has a lot to do with the fact that during the “dark ages” of European history, The Islamic cultures and empires carried the torch of intellectual history, expanded upon it, and gave us those very mathematical symbols we use now.
Remember, 2, 4, and 5 are Arabic numerals, ultimately derived from much older Indian symbols. 2+2=4 isn’t Western; it’s a set of symbols that are influenced from many contributions from many cultures, and have existed for hundreds of years before “The West” even had fever dreams about colonizing anyone except itself.
When the European powers colonized, invaded, and committed genocide with the help of gunpowder, remember that the West didn’t invent gunpowder. The fact that the West uses gunpowder doesn’t necessarily mean that we shouldn’t ever use it to resist further oppression, does it?
If you agree with my rhetorical point, then you should also agree that we need to utilize logic, rational thinking, etc. And if we’re going to insist upon 2+2=5, utilizing other “contexts,” then we are merely going to divide ourselves into more tribes, and soon we will not be able to communicate, let alone resist oppression. Like the story of the Tower of Babylon in the old Hebrew Bible, we will be cast in different directions, speaking with different kinds of mathematics and contexts of logic, and the oppressors will have no meaningful resistance against them because we can’t coalesce around the powerful tools which many have rejected because they saw them as “Western.”
Even the most evil, most corrupt, and most problematic oppressors use the best tools because the best tools work. To reject their tools is to reject your own power to resist their power.
That is precisely what those in power want us to do. Freedom requires using the best tools we have, and 2+2=4 is the basis for that power.
For a few years, several years ago, I played a lot of a game called Ingress. The details don’t matter here, but it’s essentially a game played on smartphones/tablets which is GPS-based and involves two factions–the Resistance (blue) and the Enlightened (green)–which compete for territory via the game mechanics. If you’ve played Pokemon Go, Ingress was sort of a basis for that, technologically. The game is played all over the world, and has a fairly complex story/lore involved which is similar to a lot of sci-fi, and over time (if you followed the lore) it becomes clear that neither faction is right nor are they wrong. One could make a rational argument for either side’s philosophy, goals, and actions throughout the games history.
But I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that people on both sides of the game really hated the other side, and found ways to demonize other player based the fictitious lore and philosophy behind it. It led to real-life confrontations (including me being personally, physically, threatened by someone from the opposite faction which led to a police report being filed), enmity, and people switching factions purely based on in-fighting etc.
I have not played the game in a couple of years now, and while I enjoyed much about the game, I could have very well chosen the opposite faction and had a very similar experience, different friends, and a different narrative about the fights. Real fights, hatred, and silliness.
Over a game.
One of my favorite TV series of all time is Babylon 5. This show is about many things, and is even prophetic in that it essentially predicts Fox News (in the presentation of ISN, the Interstellar Network News during one of the story arcs). I won’t spoil the details, but the show is largely about factions, wars, and narratives/propaganda, and there is one episode in particular–The Geometry of Shadows–which focuses on a one-off story which makes a point about factionalism exceptionally clearly and in a very amusing way.
Green versus Purple.
That’s it. No philosophical differences, no historical grievances, and no pre-existing political parties. Just randomly drawn colors which divides two teams who end up killing each other based upon what color they drew from a container. That was enough to create tribes.
So imagine what happens when the tribes do have actual, real, historical and philosophical disputes. Imagine how ingrained the enmity and desire to destroy the other team becomes when the stakes actually matter.
And then remember that no group, political party, philosophical school, religion, or organization has ever been completely right.
Further, throughout history, people outside of our in-groups have, of course, always been treated well and listened to. (That was sarcasm).
It’s ridiculous because no matter how just your cause, how right your ideas, and how good your people, there will always be valid criticisms from people outside your group. And many of those people are outside your group because of disagreements and because you push them away because of those disagreements. And if you view the world in terms of with us or against us, then any criticism makes you the enemy in some sense.
It is our human, all-too-human, unwillingness to hear criticism that prevents critics, in many cases, from being part of your group. In many cases, especially because we tend to think tribally, this will push people to other teams when they would have otherwise been allies.
All over idiological (sic) purity.
Letters and Entitlement.
The other day, a group of people, some who are considered problematic (and many of them I don’t personally always respect nor agree with), signed a letter. Here’s the text:
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
Beautiful. And yet, somehow, people disagree. How? Why? Well, for allsorts of reasons.
Here’s Alexaxandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tweet which seems to be, at least in part, a response to that letter and the underlying point:
I have an entire TV network dedicated to stoking hatred of me. A white supremacist w/ a popular network show regularly distorts me in dangerous ways, & it’s a normal part of my existence to get death threats from their audience.
In general, I really like AOC, and want more people like her in positions of power, but I disagree with her here. The irony here is that she is distorting, probably unintentionally, the complaints about cancel culture and why a bunch of intellectuals, writers, etc would sign such a letter. She has been distorted by many political enemies in many unfair and often disgusting ways, but she, being human, is doing something similar.
In fact, the overwhelming number of responses from people responding to the letter have misrepresented the point of the letter, as if it’s about being silenced or ignored only (because that happens too). I don’t think they understand the point being made.
I think there is a miscommunication happening here.
And before we continue, I want to draw attention to what I just did there. I am disagreeing with AOC. I still like her, and I definitely still want her in her congressional seat. If I were able to, I would happily vote for her (I can’t because she’s not my representative). But I am now being critical of a point of view that she has, and I’m about to explain why. That’s all the letter is asking for; I disagree, I say why. You don’t have to read this, you don’t have to agree, but this criticism should be viewed as part of a healthy conversation. It should be welcome, even if it is ignored.
A lot of people don’t feel safe to voice disagreement openly, because of bullying tactics by people who self-righteously think they already have the right answer and are not open to criticism.
Let’s break apart AOC’s tweet, and see where we diverge.
The term “cancel culture” comes from entitlement – as though the person complaining has the right to a large, captive audience,& one is a victim if people choose to tune them out.
Disagree. This is not about entitlement. I’m not entitled to be listened to. Anyone may ignore me so long as they like. AOC is simply missing the point here by misrepresenting/misunderstanding the point of the letter. It’s not about being heard, and except in a few extreme cases, nobody is literally being silenced. People are definitely being put in a place to fear saying what they think, however. The issue is that people who may criticize or disagree with even a small part of some ideologies are being associated with their enemies, when in fact we just want the idea to be a valid target for criticism. And so many people are keeping quiet out of fear. The 150 or so people spoke up because so many people have been made afraid, by ideological bullies who might threaten their livelihood or standing in a community merely for voicing disagreement.
In what universe should it be acceptable to react to mere dissent with anything except curiosity, disinterest, or disagreement without consequence to group-standing?
Many are being labeled as a racist, a misogynist, etc if we don’t agree with every facet of a narrative of theories about racism, sexism, etc. When we look at what racism is supposed to be according to Ta-Nehasi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, etc and someone enumerates a set of flaws in their definition or solution, such people are shunted off to the same section of the universe as Stephen Miller or Richard Spencer, and people are being bullied, losing their jobs, or being vilified as an enemy rather than as a person who is also concerned with racism but who might have a legitimate criticism and are dismissed as problematic or told we need to account for our errors.
But they think that you are the one in error, and they are trying to explain why. What if they are right? What if you are wrong? What if neither of you is right? How would you find out?
The point is that dissent not only should be acceptable, but that it is essential for the strength of the group trying to solve cultural problems such as racism, sexism, etc. Such dissent, so long as it is in good faith, should be welcome. It’s not about being silenced, it’s about not being welcomed due to criticizing an idea. The fact that so many people think it’s good to label someone as problematic or even bad because they disagree with some part of your ideology is the problem.
AOC continues:
Odds are you’re not actually cancelled, you’re just being challenged, held accountable, or unliked.
Maybe in some cases, this is precisely what’s happening. But if you treat people with legit questions and concerns the same way you treat actual bigots or people arguing in bad faith, you are effectively shutting down criticism. You are making your ideology sacrosanct in practice, even if not in theory. You may not think of your theoretical idea as sacrosanct, but if you treat those who disagree as problematic, you are doing something functionally equivalent.
And this is the issue that is being missed, here, By AOC. It’s not that we are saying you must listen to anyone, we’re saying that if you see what we say, don’t like what we said, and cannot treat criticism or disagreement any different than you treat actual bigots, then all you’re doing is chasing people who are trying to apply critical thinking to your worldview away from your in-group, and all that will remain are ideologues who agree with you, or who at least are willing to nod along with you while they might harbor some qualms but who will not speak them out loud. So-called yes-men (I suppose yes-people is better)
Isn’t that precisely the problem with the Trump Administration? All the people who openly disagree are pushed out. The only people left are the boot-lickers. And whetehr you like the comparison or not, that’s what your effort, in pushing people out for needing to be “accountable” or “likable,” is doing to your very tribe. The cronyism and corrupt people around Trump is the result of a similar process of you making people accountable.
You can make people accountable without dismissing or ostracizing them, let alone by threatening their job or making them feel unwelcome wuthin your group. It’s childish behavior and your rationalizing it as making people accountable does not come across as good faith. This is puritanism, whether done intentionally or by accident, and you need to be held accountable for it. The difference is that I’m not saying anyone is bad or needs to lose their job over it, I’m saying they also need to listen.
Because, again,you might be wrong, even if only a little bit.Your worldview might be mostly right, but maybe not all-the-way right. And if you dismiss, block, and demean those who are willing to challenge you, then all you are doing is making your echo-chamber more and more insulated and homogeneous. Is that your goal? Because if it’s not, that’s going to be the effect by this behavior.
The goal should not be agreement or ideological homogeneity, but a culture of accepting critics. You might frame it in terms of making sure that there are no bigots or dangerous people in your midst, but in practice all you are doing is demanding ideological purity in practice.
And I really don’t think that’s your goal. And if it is, then maybe you actually are the problem. Wouldn’t that be ironic.
A conflation
Sometimes, I’m on Twitter….
There is a conflation happening;
1. Actual awful people being called to account for actual bigotry
2. Nuance/opinions in grey areas being seen as equivalent to actual awfulness
Disagreement in an environment of tribalism always paints you as the enemy, usually of both "sides"
There are people who do have really bad ideas. How do we know they are bad? Well, we have used argumentation to identify actually bad ideas and those which are debatable. Of course, where we draw the line seems to be what’s at issue here.
It’s like the Overton Window, except where the edge is differs from person to person. For one person, acceptable criticism might be further afield than for someone else, and when we have a person, such as myself, who feels very strongly for social justice issues but might have some issues and disagreements with some of anti-racist theory, is my criticism, as a white man, valid?
To many, the answer is no. They think my criticism as a white man is not welcome, relevant, not appropriate under any (or perhaps they might say most) circumstance. To others, the answer might be yes. They would say that I have a right to be critical of a theory about race.
The problem of conflation arises when we start to identify different types of people who might argue that I have this right. Some of those who say yes will do so because they are actual racists themselves. But others who say yes, I do in fact have a right to be critical of some ideas about race, think so because they (for example) disagree with critical theory in general, and have a different approach to solving the cultural phenomenon of racism in the world. Both of these types of people will be dismissed, labeled as problematic, and ultimately conflated to the racist camp, when the basis for their opinions are vastly different. Both will be cancelled without much noise about how one of those groups is definitely on board with solving racism while the other definitely is not.
If you dismiss Coleman Hughes or Thomas Chatterton Williams (the man who spear-headed the Harper’s letter) in the same way you dismiss Tucker Carlson or Richard Spencer, then I’m afraid you have lost me. If you cannot distinguish between Sam Harris (who I have some personal disagreements with) and Ben Shapiro (I’m looking at you, Cody. Also, I actually really like Cody, so there’s that too….), then I think you are having trouble distinguishing between significant differences in criticism and worldviews. Theirs are not equivalent perspectives on the relevant issues, yet your dismissing of their criticism is functionally the same.
Coleman Hughes’ arguments against Black Lives Matter and anti-racism theories based in critical theory are not racist criticisms. Richard Spencer’s arguments are most definitely racist. Yet both are dismissed by those within the people who tend to do the canceling, and almost never even acknowledge that there is a difference between their disagreements.
We have to be able to recognize, by being fair, charitable, and steel-manning interlocutors’ arguments, the difference between an actual philosophical opponent to a potential ally that has some tough questions to challenge your worldview. And with few exceptions, that’s not what I’m seeing in the world.
We must do better, lest we be reminded of Nietzsche:
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
Nietzsche
I’ve already been cancelled, so….
I’m an atheist, socialist, nonmonogamous, philosophocally-inclined, social justice-desiring, freedom-of-expression supporting, liberal, hedonist. And yet even I have to be quiet around many people in my life if I have a criticism of some of the Black Lives Matter ideology, because to do so is to be labelled a racist. It doesn’t matter that I think that the BLM movement is overall a very good thing, in terms of what it might be accomplishing and in terms of its ideology. I am genuinely afraid to voice criticisms in certain circles, because I value the relationships I have with many people (I’m guessing most of them don’t read my blog, but if they do….well, here we are).
No ideology should be beyond criticism. And this is what the letter in Harper’s is all about; we need to be able to criticize a movement based on the content of its ideas. No idea should ever be so sacrosanct as to be beyond criticism.
And while I have already named some people of color (and could name more) who are critical of some of the theories about race predominating news and books (especially of White Fragility, which I have found to be really really bad writing and logic), the fact that I would have to make this move is precisely the problem some of those writers, philosophers, etc have with the foundations of the idea of anti-racism at the ideological foundation of the movement. An idea is either flawed or it isn’t, and the fact that a person of color can criticize an idea about racism but I cannot is a flaw in the idea. If I’m capable of understanding an idea as being flawed, and my argument makes sense, why should it matter what the shade of my skin is?
I know I know…I’m expressing my white fragility….
I dream of a day when ideas will be judged not by the color of the advocate’s skin but by the strength of the content of their arguments. And this is one of the many reasons why this letter is important. Ideological purity is a dangerous foundation for a cultural movement, because any idea will be carried by a wave of tribalistic enmity of partisans, so if you start with purity as the foundation you have nowhere to go but authoritarianism.
Any authoritarianism, whether right, left, center, up, down, blue, yellow, small, grande, or whatever simply is a bad place to start.
For the 1/1000th time, Stop treating your beliefs as sacred. Nothing should be sacred.
And if I’m wrong, and you think me bigoted, racist, or whatever, then I suppose you can ignore me. But if you want to convince the world to change, then you’re going to do better than ignore dissent. You’re going to have to grapple with disagreement or be happy within your echo-chamber which will only change those who already agree with you, which seems like an ineffective way to achieve meaningful social justice.
Skepticism, Properly Applied 