Comment by krosaen
18 days ago
His accounting for what attracts people to wokeness is incomplete. Certainly there are prigs in the mix, but for most, I think it's that wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously. The challenge, then, is how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously without also folding that effort into an ideology with vague expansive definitions that lend themselves to actual prigs.
What attracted me to it is the idea that sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. are forms of bullying that are definitively antisocial. At its core, it should be about stopping bullying at the level of individuals, society, and institutions.
And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.
That’s just how the prigs justify to themselves being prigs.
> wokeness, as he defines it, is often tightly coupled with good things, like sexual harassment being taken more seriously.
I'm not sure that's true. Wokeness doesn't focus on actual harassment; it focuses on accusations of harassment, with a definition of "harassment" that is highly subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate very well with actual harassment.
> how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously
The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
> The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Taking it seriously is a prerequisite for any effective mechanism for reducing sexual harassment.
It’s pretty much orthogonal.
Many of the people most “taking it seriously” do the least to reduce its prevalence. Some are actually harassers.
I'm not so sure. See my response to triceratops.
I feel like when this all started out the problem was really taking it more seriously. People would talk and complain about it and no one would take them seriously. So the group managed to scrounge together enough power to force it to happen.. And then some of that power got misused. It's still better than it was before it started, though.
> It's still better than it was before it started, though.
Is it? To hear wokeness advocates talk, things have gotten worse.
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> The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
Same principle applies.
Politicians claiming to take murder and robbery more seriously don’t necessarily do anything to actually reduce their prevalence.
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Yes. All analogies suck to various extents, but, "murder" and "robbery" are pretty apt analogies.
A lot of problems can only addressed systemically.
Murder? Yes, an excellent start to solving this problem is to not murder anybody. That's really the single most important thing you do.
And yet, history shows, other people are going to do murders and simply not murdering people yourself is not sufficient to deal with this problem. You need to intervene or call for help if you see somebody getting murdered, and we need some sort of system to deal with murderers and protect other people from them, etc.
If murder is too extreme a metaphor for the anti-woke crowd, how about pissing on the bathroom floor? It's great if you are not pissing on the floor, but somebody is and we all have to walk on that floor, so we need to have some kind of community standards around it, and also somebody needs to clean up that piss.
How do we take murder or robbery seriously? We say we do that by making and enforcing laws against murder and robbery. But do we actually do what we say?
How many innocent people get convicted of murder because of our desire to "take murder seriously"? (The Innocence Project has found that the answer is "quite a lot".) Note that every time an innocent person gets convicted, it means a guilty person (the actual murderer) goes free.
How many murderers get released back into society to murder again because our desire to take something else "seriously" has somehow overridden proper enforcement of our laws against murder? (I don't know if any specific study has looked at this, but my personal sense is, again, "quite a lot".)
So no, the lesson of experience appears to be that "taking it more seriously" is not a good way to reduce how often some bad thing happens, with murder just as with sexual harassment.
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Thank you for saying this.
Maybe I could refine it to, what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things. I do think good comes out of it, along with bad. But we can set that aside and refine the point that I don't think the majority of people who initially went along with wokeness were aggressively conventionally minded nor prigs. I think his essay would be more persuasive if he acknowledged that there is an earnest desire to do good mixed in with it, which makes it a thornier issue. Otherwise, people who were or are into wokeness who are not prigs, or merely afraid of running afoul of etiquette, will probably dismiss the essay.
> what motivates many people who are attracted to wokeness is an earnest desire to do good things
While I agree that this is true, I think the point pg makes in his article could be extended to a general rule that, if you find your earnest desire to do good things is leading you to embrace something like wokeness, you need to take a step back. The best way to do good things is to do good things--in other words, to find specific things that you can do that are good, based on your specific knowledge of particular people and particular cases, and do them. Participating in general efforts to micromanage people to make them do good things, or to stop them from doing bad things, which is what wokeness is, is a very poor way to make use of your earnest desire to good things.
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Why do you perceive some sort of conflict or paradox between "taking it more seriously" and coming up with an effective way to prevent it?
I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."
I swear, this whole topic is just an ouroboros of people talking over each other about vaguely defined terms.
You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.
"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.
If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.
But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.