Comment by hhackity
6 days ago
A well-considered essay from PG. I thought this part, discussing a practical approach to dealing with disagreement of beliefs, was particularly insightful:
> Is there a simple, principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to use the customs we already have for dealing with religion. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You can express your own religious identity and explain your beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization adopt yours as its official religion.
> If we're not sure what to do about any particular manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor writers or scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines? No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should students and employees have to participate in woke indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No, because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way about their religion.
For better or worse, I don't think much practical possibility stems from this insight, and I wish PG had considered the possibility that the enforcement of some orthodoxy is unavoidable, and that the liberal environment he's describing is a vacuum into which some orthodoxy will inevitably insert itself.
This is great and the spiciest take buried within what you mention is the following (Christian) POV:
People inherently need meaning to function and if a postmodern society insists that there is none, life is a tabula rasa, and religion is basically the projection of the mind, then people will begin building new religions and even “a-religious” religions to substitute for this lack.
Personally, I disagree with the overall tack that leftism is always and inherently religious but the elements which are come from exactly the void you’ve described, just blown up to the level of society.
Business leaders would be wise to set a vision for their companies that creates meaning and even, yes, acknowledges the transcendent in how they do that. People seem wired to want this and pretending we are all too reasonable to need meaning isn’t getting us anywhere.
I guess pg might have power to implement this by dictating to his companies' HR leadership through the CEOs/boards. As for the rest of us...
It's interesting that pg doesn't connect the type of thinking and indoctrination he sees in wokeness with similar types of thinking and indoctrination we currently see in followers of Trump. Crowds of people holding up "mass deportation now" signs, the governor of Texas ordering flags at full mast for the inauguration in the middle of a period of mourning [1], Republican politicians refusing to say whether or not Trump lost the 2020 election [2], Republican state legislatures trying to minimize mentions of LGBTQ topics in the classroom. Not only is much of it performative, as he complains about in the essay, but it has the feel of religion more than just a political movement. It almost seems like one could rewrite this essay with the focus on Trump instead of wokeness.
This part in particular seems misguided if only because pg fails to recognize that "the next thing" is already here and wearing a red MAGA hat.
> In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because there will be a next thing.
[1] https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-orders-flags...
[2] https://www.yahoo.com/news/republicans-still-t-trump-lost-17...
Interesting. But that shouldn't surprise us. "Performative" means you're doing something to be seen, not because it's really "you". Well, when the power shifts, then who it's worth being performative for also shifts. I wonder if that's what we've been seeing in the shifts since November.