When To Kill a Mockingbird is on the American Library Association's list of the top ten books that are being challenged or banned in the United States, it tells you a lot about the dysfunctional Woke ideology that is spreading across our schools, legacy media and other sense-making institutions.
The overall theme in this video is that we are not going to be able to solve problem if we are not willing to look squarely at the problem. The horrific problem we face in the U.S. is that a large percentage of black children are not fairing well in American schools. In 2019, only 20% of black children were proficient at math (compared to 52% of whites, 28% of Hispanic and 66% of Asian children). We never get to why this is happening or how to fix the problem if we deny that there is a problem. Wokeness/Critical Race Theory "fixes" the problem by pretending that mathematics is racist, in order words, by disparaging math as "white" and attempting to lower the standards. As Glenn Loury passionately points out, this is a racist move, a backhanded way of suggesting that black kids can't cut it, even though most other children all over the world can. This following video is a 15 minute excerpt of a longer discussion that one can view at Glenn Loury's Patreon Website.
Note: I hold that the term "race" is scientifically incoherent and socially divisive. Taking the view that there are "races" is the first step on the slippery slope toward racism. Categorizing complex humans as colors is grotesque, simplistic, dysfunctional and destructive. To see another person as a color is as ridiculous as believing that one can tell character by one's birthday (astrology) or by the shape of one's head (phrenology). In this article, I reluctantly refer to "races" given the current social landscape, with the hope and dream that, someday, "race" will be generally recognized to be the least interesting aspect of any human being, as uninteresting as the shape of their third toe on their left foot.
For my first 18 years of life, religion was shoved down my throat. My father was the well-intentioned aggressor. He wanted to protect me from the hot fires of hell and he repeatedly expressed disappointment in me for questioning such things as virgin birth and dead people who later became alive. Based on many discussions with my father (and many others) over the years, I learned to recognize religion whenever I saw it. I became an atheist because I took the time to read the Bible and because I listened carefully and with an open mind to religious apologists as they put their best feet forward.
One of the first things I notice about religions is that it is inappropriate (sometimes blasphemous) to ask certain questions, even obvious questions. Another thing that shouts "Religion" is that one is asked to believe things that don't make any sense. Here's my favorite. According to many religious folks, "everything has to have a cause." Most importantly, they will tell you, the universe had to have a cause, and thus (ergo, therefore) the cause of the universe was "God." They tell you that this principle of First Cause "proves" the existence of "God." When you ask what caused "God" (a question that would instantly occur to any half-alert 8 year old), believers tell you that God does not need to have a cause. This is the sort of thing that religion does to brains. It allows you to violate all of your most important principles in good conscience. It also attacks science whenever science becomes inconvenient. It excuses the use of undefined and ill-defined concepts, even foundational concepts. Religion excels at cherry picking, avoiding the discussion of the parts of the Bible where "God" commits mass killings. Believers will believe, no matter what the evidence is. Theology is "tennis without a net, as Sam Harris says at min 5 in this video:
As Harris says (Min 8):
This to me is is the true horror: Perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.
Wokeness is also tennis without a net. Wokeness apologists engage in the same shoddy thinking as many theologians and ordinary believers. Yet it is spreading through society like wildfire, ruining careers and celebrating censorship and setting fire to Enlightenment values whenever those become inconvenient to the cause.
I support Andrew Sullivan at Substack. I consider him wise, good-hearted and highly articulate. He is also a gay man who is religious. In this recent article, "Religion and the Decline of Democracy," Sullivan announces that he is about to start attending Catholic Mass again, and he is going despite many strong reasons for not going. The Catholic Church has been unkind, even cruel, to Sullivan (and many others, including innocent children), yet so powerful is the pull of the church that Sullivan is about to march back to his religious tribe where it might reasonably be expected that he will receive even more abuse. As he sees it, he has stayed with the church because of his "need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose." Again, that is how powerful tribes can be despite intellectual, factual, scientific and social incoherence.
Today's irony is that this article by Sullivan expresses his grave concern about Wokeness. In this, he and I agree completely. The Woke are a tribe with a "need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose." Â The Woke are a tribe that proudly acts like a mob, like a religion that will stop at nothing to "save" the rest of us.
I will end with Sullivan's description of the Woke mob:
The transcendent has been banished in favor of a profoundly atheist view of the world as merely the arrangement of power structures. But the zeal of religious faith propels the ideology. It is Manichean — seeing the world only as good or evil, antiracist or racist, with virtue attached, horrifyingly, to skin color or gender. It can brook no compromise. It denies the individual soul. It seeks to punish and banish sinners as zealously as it insists on a total psychological re-birth for everyone who joins up. It demands confessions of sin; it requires the renunciation of the self in favor of the identity group; it urges, as so many sermons do, that people “do the work†every day to bring about the Kingdom of Anti-Racism. These pseudo-religions will fail. They are too worldly, too rooted in contemporary culture wars, too baldly tribal, and too shallow in their understanding of the world to have much staying power. But they can do immense damage to souls and our society in the meantime.
Brandolini's law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, is an internet adage which emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."
This same article quotes Mark Twain (from his 1906 autobiography:
The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. … How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!
The super-charged version of this phenomenon is the Gish Gallop:
The Gish gallop is a term for an eristic technique in which a debater attempts to overwhelm an opponent by excessive number of arguments, without regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments. The term was coined by Eugenie Scott; it is named after the creationist Duane Gish, who used the technique frequently against proponents of evolution.[1][2] It is similar to a method used in formal debate called spreading.
Some of my posts are simply to record an idea so that I have a quick way to track it down later. This is one of those posts.
I didn't want to be spending so much time writing about Wokeness, but it has become clear to me that this is an ideology that reverses many of the hard-earned gains we have made through the Civil Rights Movement and that Wokeness ideology leads to endless societal dysfunction. Because human flourishing important to me, I have no choice but to speak out, at a time where many of my friends and acquaintances have the exact same concerns I do, but are afraid to speak out. Their fears is are based on these things:
1. They don't want to get into yelling matches with activists, which they see as inevitable;
2. They fear being called names like "racist" for things that are not racist.
3. They fear mobs of people following them, threatening them and their families or damaging their property;
4. They fear loss of their reputations based on false accusations by mobs, and
5. They fear the loss of their jobs and/or careers based upon mass-cancellation techniques.
I realize this all sounds hyperbolic, but my conclusions are based on the many dozens of occurrences on which I have written about at this website, as well as many other articles by many other writers. Common responses to my writings have been A) ad hominem attacks, B) scoldings that I have no right to discuss certain topics, as though only certain people have the right to talk about certain things, and C) Whataboutism - Why am I not writing about something else that they would rather I write about, e.g., white supremacist groups? In response to this last point, I already see widespread ridicule over white supremacy. It is not taking root in any of our sense-making institutions such as schools (including prestigious colleges), media outlets (including STEM journals and magazines) and government offices.
I see the opposite happening with Wokeness, and it seems to be spreading logarithmically with only scattered voices having the courage to stand up and cry out, "Emperor Has No Clothes." Those voices include Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Seerut K. Chawla, Glenn Greenwald, Brett Weinstein, Heather Heying, Eric Weinstein, Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Jesse Singal, Jordan Peterson, Jonathan Haidt, Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay, Benjamin Boyce, Jonathan Kay, Claire Lehman, John McWorther, Glenn Loury, Caitlin Flanagan, Heterodox Academy, Colin Wright, Joe Rogan, Buck Angel, Peter Boghossian, Coleman Hughes, Bill Maher, Peter Rufo, The 40 Black Intellectuals who recently spoke out against the racism by Smith College, and the plucky crew at Quillette Magazine. There are others out there and I am not excluding any of them intentionally. Most of these people lean significantly to the left on many social issues, yet Woke advocates commonly call them "conservatives," which is a modern version of an attempted ad hominem attack.
I want to give special attention to James Lindsay's excellent Woke Encyclopedia at New Discourses, so very helpful in that the Woke onslaught always involves long streams of highly suspect terminology.
What provoked this article? I just finished watching several episodes of "The Complete Evergreen Story," by Benjamin Boyce. As described by James Lindsay,
Benjamin Boyce was a student at The Evergreen State College as it melted down, thanks to the applications of critical race Theory on campus. There, not only did he have a first-person view of the mayhem the campus descended into as it happened, he was responsible for filming and documenting a great deal of the footage that has since come to light and found a home in documentaries. Ever since, he has been on a quest to further understand what happened at Evergreen and to document it in full, not to mention similar issues as they crop up in the surrounding Washington state communities.
Boyce has presented this Evergreen tragedy in 23 chapters. His story covers the destruction of what was, and what could still be, an excellent college. What happened in 2017, however, left Evergreen in intellectual and social shambles and resulted in dramatic reductions in the number of students attending Evergreen.
It turns out that students aren’t clamoring for the privilege of paying for an education in such a hostile environment. Evergreen accepts 97% of applications, but enrollment dropped to 2,854 full-time students last fall, compared to 3,810 the semester of the protests. Enrollment increased over the same period at other Washington universities.
The story of Evergreen College was entirely ignored by most left leaning media powerhouses. The New York Times has yet to write a single word about the 2017 Woke-triggered implosion at Evergreen College.
I am writing this article to provide the above links to the writers I have found most informative and instructive about the Woke movement. I am linking to these writers with the hope that those who are fearful of speaking out can read these works as an aid to finding their own voice. I am also writing this article as a warning and a prophecy that Evergreen State College was not simply an occurrence but a vision for where we are headed unless we all find the spine to stand up and draw a line in the sand. Unless we do these things together, everything will become Evergreen State.
Here are episodes 1, 2 and 3 of Benjamin Boyce's comprehensive documentary regarding Evergreen State.
I'll end with some deep pessimism. I fear that conversation is no longer productive with the Woke. This is clear in many places today as I have documented at this website. it is abundantly clear in the Evergreen videos, as numerous students demonstrated that they are incapable of having a meaningful conversation with the clear-headed, patient, politically liberal Evergreen College biology professor, Brett Weinstein.