Wokeness, I Do Try

 Which isn't to say I try at all to be Woke. Nor though do I have much time or energy for the kind of person that if you make any concession even out of civility, like using they/them pronouns, as Wikipedia does but does not use neo-pronouns eg. ze/zer, would then deem Wikipedia, a wiki, "woke".

But I still have time to seek out and understand arguments for wokeness. For context, I still have time to listen to rational arguments for the existence of God, even though we are talking about a very big data set it is true to say that I now pretty much never expect an a) new/novel argument for God to be presented, more or less all of them fit in Wikipedia's shortlist of 13 arguments. b) I have no anxieties that I might actually hear something that would dramatically shift my world view to believing in the supernatural. The closest possibility is that someone will maybe make a compelling argument as to the utility of religion, but even then, these arguments tend to be like "there was more social cohesion in the relatively recent history where the state was secular but people were in the habit of going to Church and there were 4 TV Channels and they hadn't figured out that news could be a profitable entertainment format yet" and gloss over centuries of how shit the world was under religious rule.

Anyway, probably too much context, the point being that there's a learning curve where the gains are made most quickly, and in under a decade "Wokeness" has made it most of the way toward having the same expectations as Theology. With some important differences a) I have little expectation people will even make arguments and if they do, what is already treated as an a priori is way underdetermined, I will get into that later. b) I have lower expectations that I will here an argument for the utility of the nebulous grab bag of ideas that constitute "Wokeness" in this regard Woke ideas like Antiracism, DEI, Intersectionality etc. the natural experiments, and in some cases experiments have been done, and I have as much optimism that the ideas will prove their utility in respect to stated goals as I have fear that leaving a fan on in an enclosed space will result in my suffocation.

I do think it is also prudent to acknowledge that for some people, the social costs of being persuadable on some point is too high for them to be open minded. I think it's a Larry David bit from Curb or something, where someone suggests that he won't try sucking a dick because he's afraid he'll like it, and I can't recall who, but someone pointed out that that fear is actually a rational one, because for most people discovering that late in life that you are bisexual or homosexual would seriously upend your life and relationships, even though we can be reasonably confident that that is not how sexuality works, the premise of "trying" a homosexual act though itself is suspending this understanding of sexuality.

I have friends, close friends, that I basically think have to be woke, still, because the social costs of even entertaining the idea that they may be wrong on some things, make their social life unnavigatable.

But I am not one of those people, I'm in a position where if I flipped tomorrow and thought that 'wokeism' was the good fight, I would pay no social cost, equally, I pay no social cost by not being woke. I have enough evidence now, that all of my closest friends are comfortable confiding in me their views, as I am comfortable with them.

I still try though.

So let's talk my experience of trying briefly. I watch "breadtube" videos, probably the best of which I would say is Contrapoints/Natalie Wynn. Lindsay Ellis is also good, but she has basically retired from Youtube, does some stuff on Nebula, and fundamentally I know her from critiquing culture, specifically the Disney Renaissance of Little Mermaid thru...Lilo and Stitch? Which though interesting, and refreshingly argued I can't accept the premise and think what has happened is that Lindsay has mistaken that while 80s, 90s Disney content was important to her, it is therefore important to society generally.

From there, youtube goes downhill into "Big Joel" "Signified B Sides" and "Tom Nichols" to name just a few, I have stopped consuming their content for similar reasons to my stopping watching any of Bob's Burgers. I can watch whole episodes of Bob's Burgers and not laugh, I don't get that show, it has no jokes. I think we are supposed to just find the general zaniness/kookiness of the cast amusing, like someone took Family Guy and said "what if we removed all the random cultural reference gags?" You get Bob's Burgers.

The aforementioned youtubers, I watch their videos and glean no insight.and I'm serious, I have watched Tom Nichols "why is everybody holding microphones now" videoessay and by the end of it, could not justify it even being made. Big Joel is the worst Signified B Sides his extra channel is vacuous enough that I cannot bring myself to invest in his hour long videos on anything.

Ta Nahesi Coates is the only woke public intellectual I have come across who even generates interesting ideas. From him, it falls off into almost pure grift of Robin DeAngelo and Ibram X Kendi. Kimberly Krenshaw is not stupid, but her Ted talk is terrible, and also Coleman Hughes goes through one of her essays where she cites nothing to substantiate her claim that White Woman are the major beneficiaries of affirmative action. 

The overwhelming thing though, that I would describe as Wokeism or Wokeness, is that they just don't argue. It's 100% assertions and memes. If Wokeism is anything, it is a movement of sensitivity, trying to create environments where you a) assume you are right, b) make it uncomfortable for anyone not to ape/parrot you. 

Of particular concern is a specific meme with rhetorical utility: "It's not my job to educate you." and it's derivatives. My basic understanding of the argument, is that if you are a woman, whose every waking moment is an experience of oppression under the patriarchy, for men to constantly hit you with "I don't understand could you explain that to me." is more impression, because the task of educating is a cost in the form of time and energy.

Be that as it may, this meme is also rhetorically useful for someone who cannot explain something because they do not understand it themselves. In fact, it serves as an excuse to maintain beliefs that are unjustifiable. 

I personally feel, that the grab-bag that is wokeism, is approaching an objective disaster. Almost entirely counterproductive by all conceivable metrics. I feel the good fight is addressing the systemic problem that is growing wealth inequality by educating people as to the economy. 

I absolutely do not expect people to understand the economy, and I fully assume my responsibility to educate where I am capable of doing so, and refer to educational resources where I am incompetent. It is not just my job, but my moral duty to educate where I can, and disclose what I do not understand.

Now you can argue that that is my privilege, because I am not burdened by suffering under say, the male gaze, while being asked constantly to educate male peers about the male gaze because they do not understand. But pretty much nobody understands the economy, and among many economists, there are too many that have no interest in the possibility that economics as a field might have many problems.

And the chief problem with economics, is that it is at least the number 2 system effecting pretty much every issue you can name, after only the solar system, and the key issue is the lack of criticism and scrutiny economics receives.

So with that particularly nasty rhetorical meme addressed, I am going to turn toward the case study of this post - a video essayist who wishes to defend Wokeism and sees the Woke mission as one of educating.

I am totally down for getting educated, and I have tried to educate myself. Wokeness has been a bounty of bizarre and disorienting ideas that are counter to both my intuitions and everything I learned. From the very beginnings of my exposure in the form of Trigger Warnings on facebook posts, to my first friend to declare her opposition to Evolutionary Psychology on the grounds that it is condescending to women, my mind has been blown again and again by these memes and I have investigated to extend to them the benefit of the doubt, that it is not just the Emperor's New Clothes, and pretty much everything comes up short.

Let me break down the general presentation of wokeism:

1. Racism is bad
2. Sexism is bad
3. Discrimination against LGBTIQ+ is bad.

Then you append to these:

1. Therefore quotas, acknowledgement of country, defund police etc.
2. Therefore believe women, #metoo, #timesup, equal pay for WNBA, LatinX etc.
3. Therefore punch a terf, neo-pronouns, LatinX, gender affirming care.
4. and Therefore intersectionality.

These are fait accomplis. These are (like everyone) attempts to colonize the future, but some of the most brazen attempts to do so. Much of the content I have consumed so far, assumes the audience is already onboard, and I suspect this is not an assumption based on the easily available educational resources with which someone can get up to speed, but a kind of social pressure that likely was not designed but evolved where audiences go along because the atmosphere is created where one naturally assumes they should know and understand complicated ideas like intersectionality, privilege preserving epistemic pushback, standpoint theory, performativity and deconstruction.

I am coming to hate Peter Boghossian but his video "Confrontation at Portland State University" provides a good example of someone attempting to explain Gender-as-a-social-construct as just a sequence of assertions even after Peter claims to be a Gender Studies Scholar. It's an uncomfortable watch because it is a confrontation, where everyone is on edge, in such disorganized disarray it's also unreasonable to expect people to put together cogent coherent arguments, but almost everything "Woke" that I expose myself to when vetted for content consists of little more than truisms coupled with fait accompli assertions. 

Truism: Anything intelligible is expressed in language and all language is a social construct, therefore non-binary is a useful improvement to our socially constructed schema. This is my near universal experience of Wokeism/Wokeness. 

Another hopefully simple and illustrative example might be: Truism: People experience discrimination based on race. asserted fait-accompli: Antiracism.

What is obfuscated is everything between a simple truism and a very specific set of memes captured in Antiracism.

It is incredibly hard to find something as simply argued as: People experience discrimination based on race. This is bad because race is based on appearances, usually immutable qualities like skin pigmentation and other features like eyelids etc. group identities like race may even be descriptive of larger populations eg. Latinos are usually Catholic, but they are not predictive of individuals. Therefore, we can redress the problem of racial discrimination through a humanist approach like MLK Jr. and judge people by the content of their character, or through an Antiracist approach like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi where the salience of race is raised to saturate absolutely everything between dreams and work, fighting racism by having people look for it everywhere all the time by everybody.

And I strongly suspect the reason efforts to understand Wokeness through questions that solicit arguments is often met with such hostility and results in tense confrontations rather than chill conversations, is because most of the Woke memes cannot be justified. 

a) because the memes foundation is based on heavy heavy counterintuitive theory that is out of reach of most people's cognitive faculties, like my limitations in understanding General and Special relativity in Physics.

b) because they are not justified, as suggested by the heavy mental gymnastics and impenetrable postmodern speak of the foundational theories invoked to justify most often, motivated double standards (usually an invocation of "power") that just do not hold water.

And despite the many many hours I have invested in trying to see if the emperor has any clothes at all, and him coming up naked every single time, I am still open to the possibility of persuasion as implausible as it increasingly seems.

So when I see a video entitled "In Defence of Wokism" I'm going to check it out. 

Not only did I check it out, I got the whole way through, which is not something I could say of the even more fascinatingly implausible "Case against Democracy" made by Curtis Yarvin on Triggernometry. Which is if you are making a case against Democracy, and in the first 13 minutes you have invoked the conspiracy theory that William Shakespeare didn't write his portfolio of plays or sonnets and whatever and you have the gumption to assert that "most intelligent people" subscribe to a theory that some guy we only know through the plays he wrote did not in fact write those plays but it was instead written by some other guy, that if true would become the most significant thing we know about the other guy and you think an intelligent person deems such triviality a good investment of anyone's time, then yeah, I can reasonably infer that you are willing to waste my time if I keep watching.

Now Triggernometry has 1.24M subscribers, but it took a long time to get there, Triggernometry reached 500k after 5 years in 2023, Alice Cappelle is up to 473k subscribers in 4 years, with less videos produced, and she is a one-woman video essayist doing it in her second language.

Go ahead and subscribe to Alice's channel because at the very least, she is interesting. I haven't been interested in anything Triggernometry has done since Konstantin Kissin started releasing "explainer" videos as though he has expertise on anything beyond the subjective experience of being Konstantin Kissin. 

So having done my part to prop up Alice Cappelle's channel and content, allow me to proceed to not tear it down.

I have featured her before, and recently, for the first and other of her videos I saw "How feminism turns into f*scism" which gave me the expectation that her defence of wokeism would be a poor one, based on how terribly she opened and then argued against women being free to join male dominated right-wing nationalist youth groups or anything else women may choose to do.

This one does not open so terribly, but if someone said to me "I'm going to defend wokism" I could say - here is what needs defending: Not that interaction effects (the basis of intersectionality) exist, but that intersectionality results in justice (social or otherwise), not that racism is bad but that Antiracism is more effective than humanism at achieving justice, that identity is not negotiated socially, that gender dysphoria can be diagnosed with high enough confidence in pre-pubescent juveniles, that media effects are strong etc. etc.

The broad theme being, pick an idea, any idea and argue for it.

I couldn't find the video I was thinking of, which was a response to the UK's Cass Review Report, that found insufficient evidence to support the use of puberty blockers to treat minors with gender dysphoria, but I found arguably a better example of someone making arguments against the Cass Review on GB news (a polite British analogue of Fox News) Barrister Robin Moira does really well, exhibiting grace under fire, even though I think Andrew Doyle is a) not a conservative in the broad sense and b) not remotely like a Fox News idealogue.

I am not personally persuaded by the case Robin makes, I think the Saudi Arabia conference on Women's Rights is a false one, a better analogy being an absence of public servants or industry lobbyists on an independent commission.

Now of course, perhaps one of the ideas in the grab bag of wokeness, is that arguing your case is bad. But I would at least hear that argument.

So let me summarize my subjective experience of Alice's defense of wokism.

1. Alice states that the video is about political strategy.

2. The first substantive point Alice makes is that she is from French Flanders (the North of France) a de-industrialized, poorer region that had a carbon based economy. That when she was young she moved from Lille to the country side. Basically as I subjectively understand it she makes the case that she is from a French analogue to the United States "Rust belt" and that it is known in France as "The Lab of the Far Right" this is all in service of debunking a left-wing stereotype that people outside of city-centres are "deplorables" as per Alice's referencing Hillary Clinton's "Trump's basket of deplorables" quote.

3. She then ties this to electoral maps, and the emerging political strategy on the left to not discuss issues that do not appeal to rural voters/make them upset. 

At which point, I should probably note that as I'm experiencing this defence of Wokism, it has departed from anything I would expect as a defence. Alice has structured this video (so far) as debunking three assumptions about rural electorates that have switched from socialist to far-right. As I understand it, but it is unsaid, her defence is actually addressing a criticism of the Left that typically is expressed as "the Left have abandoned the working class" which is to say, the real abandonment was dropping the labour rights policy focus for what is broadly described as Neoliberalism, and now have adopted identity politics or "wokeism." 

4. Alice lays out an agenda to debunk three concepts of far right voters - "depressed" "uneducated" and "racist"

5. Alice makes an argument that rural people are not psychologically or emotionally depressed, a valid point consistent with "the illusion of superiority" that people who live in cities don't have much insight into people who don't, but that is about as charitable as I can be. She argues quite effectively against the case that people are not economically depressed, sighting the ageing demographics, the closure of public services etc.

6. When addressing "uneducated" this section is hard to follow. Her first takeaway is that far right voters are not homogenous, citing a sociologist who claims disengagement due to resignation from young-people and the working class. This point in itself works against any defence of Wokism because it is an argument, at least with this superficial citation, that the Left have abandoned the working-class. Then there's stuff about an imitation vote and demographics of Trump v Harris, nothing really about education until Alice talks about her personal experience of canvassing in French Flanders, at which point I think I understand that Alice is using a definition of "uneducated" as "not aware of the facts" not as I understand it to usually be used in a demographic context which means "having not completed secondary school and/or not going on to tertiary studies" Alice asks her audience, including me at this point to "just trust her on this" that when presented with facts debunking claims about immigration people still say they will vote far-right. To employ my earlier analogy, this is like confronting a Christian with archaeological facts about the Exodus story that debunk the book of Exodus and then being surprised that they state they are still Christian.

7. The "racist" debunking first cites far right tactics, like appealing to women by stating they will protect them from dangerous migrants, and to People of Colour (POC) by stating they will protect the hard working assimilated from recent immigrant "welfare queens". Alice characterizes this as "fake progressivism" and cites it as evidence that the far right are being met with resistance. Alice then makes an argument from personal experience that the far right has to adopt tactics to overcome resistance to outright racism, classism, sexism etc. is because of people like her. This is the first real actual defense of wokism, but it is underdetermined because she said the video was about political strategy, and as such she needs to make an argument in this case that the resistance is an effect of wokism and not progress in general since say 1918.

8. The structure becomes less clear now that there aren't three words to debunk. Alice moves to a question of "where racism comes from" and cites sociologist Vincent Tiberj who wrote a book that states that it is top-down. So this is in line with a common thread I perceive in "Wokeism" which is that media effects are a priori (an assumed fact) strong. This means, and in Alice's example, you see politicians given air time to state immigrants are taking your jobs, and this makes people racist. 

At which point it is worth taking another pause, for me to point out I would expect a defence of Wokeism to defend an interpretation of media effects as strong. I guess "some guy says they are" is an argument, an appeal to authority, as such it is a terrible argument where one should actually use the argument the authority figure makes to justify their authority. 

9. Alice gives an exposition of media effects that is some combination of the Powerful effects period, Chomsky's 5 filters and social constructivism. These arguments establish that Alice is "woke" but are not in any way a defence of wokeness itself. Alice wraps up this section on racism saying her arguments are based on her personal experience and the most recent sociological book published on the subject which is Vincent Tiberj's book from April last year.

10. Alice recaps the electoral map, and alludes to the aforementioned discourse that the left need to move away from identity politics. "Shut up the Wokes Mouth" and this is depressing, moving onto her question "When did woke become a weakness?" she then gives a brief history of "Woke" etymology. She states her position that the left retreating from wokeness, anti-racism, intersectionality, LGBTQ+ etc. is a form of surrender. 

11. Alice now defines the role of the left as politicizing people through education or entertainment. From the 1960's "The personal is political" brings this left mission into the domain of identity politics (feminism, civil rights (addressing racism), Queer rights) and asserts that I guess identity politics has "brought millions of votes" which is an assertion that in my own efforts, I would really like clarity on and maybe a citation, in order to have a meaningful discussion about political strategy on, that includes a defence of wokeism. 

12. Alice concludes this point by stating something again I subjectively take to be treating Woke as synonymous with being the left, and basically not to get psyched out by electoral maps and continue with the mission of "educating" through activism, infographics, books, essays, video essays, commentary videos, music, film, sports etc. These links giving me a chance to give a broad selection of woke content that consists of pure assertions and no arguments.

13. Alice then asserts that the aforementioned materials that are part of the left/the woke's mission to educate are helpful for people in far-right territories, tying it back to her personal experience in French Flanders, defining herself as a rural science girl turned left-wing influencer.

At this point, for someone like me, who you can label as far right, indicating under the Freudian heuristic "He who does not believe, does not live in accordance with his beliefs" that identity is not subjectively autonomous, but socially negotiated because I will state now that I am not far right, nor even gross-right. I am not woke though, and I do not share the conceit that woke is a synonym for left, a "you're either with us or against us." 

My conception of left is a relative one, drawn from the historical context of those opposing the regime anciens in the French Revolution. To be left means to me, to be critical of the institutions to which you belong. My impression of Alice is that she regards the left as a conceptual territory that has been successfully colonized since the 1960s by identity politics, that have now evolved into a nativist-conservative one party state of Wokeism, the left is their country and they will make it great again.

The absence of any argument in defence of the contents of wokeism, my summarization, commentary tend toward ridicule. Alice's defence I understand to be simply a doubling down, a kind of "Hitler declares total war in the face of certain defeat." And a very depressing example of what I have come to expect from all ideologues, which is when confronted with failure, take the infinite recourse to a lack of commitment sooner than admit any mistake, hubris etc. 

What arguments/assertions she makes has mostly substantiated the Left's abandonment of the working class and parasitism of the left by wokeness, literally taking over left wing labour movements and replacing any representation of the working class with identity politics. 

This experience is really frustrating for me, and Alice reflects the rhetorical disposition of people I know out there in the real world. They do the same thing, they don't make arguments, they just assert. Admittedly, I have not consumed a sufficient amount of Alice's videos to know if she ever condescends to do educating on her channel, even with videos whose first word in the title is "how..." like "how feminism becomes f*scism."

I Offer An Alternative

This is a response to Alice's thesis. Firstly I will defer to Jonathan Rauch an impressive thinker who wrote "The Constitution of Knowledge" and more recently "Cross Purposes" for which he did an interview on the Michael Shermer Show and specifically at the 1:27 mark Rauch points out that the 2024 US Presidential election was an ordinary one.

I'm with those who say actually it was a quite ordinary election featuring two extraordinary candidates for different reasons but it's the third election in a row where the voters turned out the incumbent party, and that's happened everywhere in the world in 2024. Incumbents were turned out everywhere if you compare the exit polls of 2024 to 2020 at looks like a big shift toward Trump. Try comparing the exit polls of 2024 to 2016 the last time Trump ran against an incumbent an unpopular, essentially incumbent, party candidate: almost identical. The only exception is a continuing realignment of Hispanics toward bipartisanship that's been going on for years that's healthy um that's a natural diversification.

So firstly I would point out that the above passage contains actual arguments, citing objective facts that can be checked. To the Hispanics trending to bipartisanship, I'm not inclined to check it because this assertion makes natural sense, it resonates with the rise in profile of Gay men as conservative commentators, post marriage equality in the UK and US. As Hispanics become deminoritized they are becoming more receptive to being "protected from welfare queens" not by the far right, but any right wing party. However rather than citing a single sociologist, this assertion could be checked against a consensus by political sciences as a historical claim.

Now, like two or three posts ago, I already shared a map produced by MIT of job-losses in the US from decarbonization. So this is the ice-skating-uphill part of defending wokeism. Okay, it's the end of the Yuan dynasty, do to environmental events like drought and governmental ineptitude there is wide spread famine and starvation. Alice seems to be of the opinion, that the left's mission would be to educate starving peasants, watching their children die of malnutrition as to the oppressive nature of Patriarchy. And if this is losing out to the Red Turban Rebellions, where peasants revolt against the Yuan empire, then the "left" need to just double down and not be discouraged.

I present this as an alternative to maybe the situation in French Flanders, if it is analogous to what is happening in the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil, Sweden even, where wealth inequality is growing, and continues to grow, the middle class are shrinking, wages are stagnating if not going backwards, housing is becoming unaffordable because the rich are using it for investment purposes, asset prices are reaching record highs, the Left are preserving neoliberal economic policies that ended the post war period under Reagan and Thatcher while embracing Wokeism as their chief left-wing credential, electorates are calling out for change and the only people offering something different are far right parties who are attributing everything to immigration.

I defer to Jonathan Haidt who I think is drawing inspiration from Ancient Greece's "Elephant and the rider" analogy, but more modernly "our conscious mind thinks it is the oval office, when in fact it is the press secretary." There is a lot of evidence to suggest that while many people voting far right think they care about immigrants and grooming gangs and DEI and trans issues, a better predictor of their vote is if they live in a Carbon based economy, if they have experienced inflation under any incumbent government etc. 

On that front, while I don't think the US election was lost in 2024 by the democrats because of DEI and Wokeism, it does play a role in giving them a cheap alternative to making the changes an electorate has been calling for since the Global Financial Crisis. Consider, that people really thought Obama would change things, that it meant something to have a black President. 

The Democrats have been ignoring the call for change since Obama's winning of the primaries, where the party rejected Hillary. 

Based on the crappiness of Alice's defense, I implore you to abandon wokeism, and would direct you to Gary's Economics because you are using up the oxygen when we need to come back from the brink. 

See also Mark Blyth, Yanis Varafoukis and spend time there before re-entering culture wars. And I'm sorry my list of economists fighting the good fight is not more diverse, but these dicks and balls are competent communicators and critics.