How about “cancel culture?” (Another term I don’t love…) Is that a meaningful term to you?
I can understand (but can’t relate to) how people can support the cluster of ideas and behaviors that others label as “woke” or “cancel culture”.
And I can understand (and do relate to) how one might think they’re crappy terms because they’re only good for derailing conversations or preaching to the choir.
But I’m having trouble understanding how you don’t see what people who use the terms are talking about.
Maybe this is a signal vs corrective issue…. With each of us subscribing to non-overlapping narratives and dismissing different parts of the internet as insignificant.
“From the inside, when you subscribe to a narrative, when you believe in it, it feels like you’ve stripped away all irrelevant noise and only the essence, The Underlying Principle, is left — the signal, in the language of information theory. However, that noise you just dismissed as irrelevant has other signals in it and sometimes people will consider them stronger, truer and more important.”
And
“Our intuition has problems with the idea that the same set of facts can have different “signals” behind them and none is The Single Underlying Truth. In particular it’s hard to grasp that this allows multiple narratives to coexist, even if they appear to contradict each other. Why? Well, narratives contradicting each other means that they simplify and generalize in different ways and assign goodness and badness to things in opposite directions. While that might look like contradiction it isn’t, because generalizations and value judgments aren’t strictly facts about the world. As a consequence, the more abstracted and value-laden narratives get the more they can contradict each other without any of them being “wrong”.”
I'm not sure if I'm understanding those quotes correctly, but they seem to be defining the problem. If a term like "the left" or "woke" is never specified, it's very difficult, if not impossible, for someone not within the narrative to understand it, much less believe in it. I don't dismiss them as insignificant--my governor's loose use of those exact words to dismiss any progressive arguments for or against legislation has been extremely effective!--but have been trying for years to see some sort of shape around them that never coalesces. It often seems like they're more useful as murky ideas than as specifics. What is "the left"?! Unless it's Ezra Klein and The Nation and some other specific voices, I have no idea, and if it *is* those specific voices, then wouldn't it be more useful to name them individually?
"Cancel culture" I feel like I have a slightly better understanding of, but I'm not sure if it means what people imply it means. There are a lot of shifts in Western society that people are trying to start coming to terms with about what we value and what we care about, and, as often happens, people with louder voices tend to get heard first, and as also often happens, people with the power to react often do so in hamfisted ways, responding to their own fear of being judged rather than trying to think deeply about what their actions mean. That's always going to happen. The problem, as I see it, is the deeper one of what Robert has called cognitive empathy, and maybe what I call lack of imagination, not a specific left or right issue.
I try very hard not to accept large media narratives about what is going on in society, from any direction. It can be difficult to question, especially when it agrees with my own biases, but it's easier to see when media gets something I know well very wrong. Then I can more easily accept that they might also get things wrong that I don't know much about. (Isn't there a term for this? I feel like I heard it recently.)
Don't know if that really answered the question. A good comparison might be a dismissive catch-all term I'm more familiar with, which is "green decoy." Ryan Zinke started using this term to categorize certain conservation-oriented groups as basically fake (fake people, fake interests, fake activities) when they started speaking up against some of his actions when he was Interior Secretary. Backcountry Hunters & Anglers in particular, which has a lot of influence and supported his nomination but then didn't support a lot of his actions (I should caveat that I'm an active member of BHA). Someone coined "green decoy" to paint groups like that as fake (fake hunters, fake active outdoors-y people, etc.). It feels similar to me, a way to say "this thing/group/person is not real, or at least has no valid interest in the things we are talking about." An erasure.
The "woke" have adopted critical race theory, which claims that the system itself is inherently always racist and that anyone who has "privilege" is inherently (but perhaps unconsciously) racist. Like any religion, this secular "awakening" has a small but vocal orthodoxy (mainly on Twitter and mainly Left-leaning "elites") whose focus is punishing those who are perceived to not be suitably "woke" enough. This "canceling" is designed to shun those who challenge the woke orthodoxy.
Therefore, "Enlightenment" values (free speech, equitable debate, intention as well as outcome) are condemned by the extreme "woke" because those values are perceived to be tools to promote this systemic racism. This is Orwellian in its conclusion and why the conflation with explanation/justification that Bob highlights is so pernicious.
I grew up in a cult and when I left I read everything I could on cult mind control and how it worked. I was amazed at how susceptible the human mind is to manipulation, circular reasoning, and straw man arguments. Enlightenment values were a reaction to religious dogmatism and witch hunts, and so here today we have push back against those values from a new kind of secular religion rather then the usual "moral majority" of the old Right.
I’m afraid the old Right is alive and well and gaining a lot of power in areas like mine. I don’t doubt that many believe the threat of all these other ideas is real, although the specifics are still too loosely defined for me to buy the thesis, but where I live the reality is that any threats to Enlightenment values are coming either from Republicans (I’m not saying all Republicans are like, just that most of the ones here are showing that tendency) or white nationalists, and some Christian groups. To my mind the issue is about power and control over people, and keeping them distracted from real issues, and it can take many forms.
How about “cancel culture?” (Another term I don’t love…) Is that a meaningful term to you?
I can understand (but can’t relate to) how people can support the cluster of ideas and behaviors that others label as “woke” or “cancel culture”.
And I can understand (and do relate to) how one might think they’re crappy terms because they’re only good for derailing conversations or preaching to the choir.
But I’m having trouble understanding how you don’t see what people who use the terms are talking about.
Maybe this is a signal vs corrective issue…. With each of us subscribing to non-overlapping narratives and dismissing different parts of the internet as insignificant.
“From the inside, when you subscribe to a narrative, when you believe in it, it feels like you’ve stripped away all irrelevant noise and only the essence, The Underlying Principle, is left — the signal, in the language of information theory. However, that noise you just dismissed as irrelevant has other signals in it and sometimes people will consider them stronger, truer and more important.”
And
“Our intuition has problems with the idea that the same set of facts can have different “signals” behind them and none is The Single Underlying Truth. In particular it’s hard to grasp that this allows multiple narratives to coexist, even if they appear to contradict each other. Why? Well, narratives contradicting each other means that they simplify and generalize in different ways and assign goodness and badness to things in opposite directions. While that might look like contradiction it isn’t, because generalizations and value judgments aren’t strictly facts about the world. As a consequence, the more abstracted and value-laden narratives get the more they can contradict each other without any of them being “wrong”.”
-John Nerst
From: https://everythingstudies.com/2017/12/19/the-signal-and-the-corrective/
I'm not sure if I'm understanding those quotes correctly, but they seem to be defining the problem. If a term like "the left" or "woke" is never specified, it's very difficult, if not impossible, for someone not within the narrative to understand it, much less believe in it. I don't dismiss them as insignificant--my governor's loose use of those exact words to dismiss any progressive arguments for or against legislation has been extremely effective!--but have been trying for years to see some sort of shape around them that never coalesces. It often seems like they're more useful as murky ideas than as specifics. What is "the left"?! Unless it's Ezra Klein and The Nation and some other specific voices, I have no idea, and if it *is* those specific voices, then wouldn't it be more useful to name them individually?
"Cancel culture" I feel like I have a slightly better understanding of, but I'm not sure if it means what people imply it means. There are a lot of shifts in Western society that people are trying to start coming to terms with about what we value and what we care about, and, as often happens, people with louder voices tend to get heard first, and as also often happens, people with the power to react often do so in hamfisted ways, responding to their own fear of being judged rather than trying to think deeply about what their actions mean. That's always going to happen. The problem, as I see it, is the deeper one of what Robert has called cognitive empathy, and maybe what I call lack of imagination, not a specific left or right issue.
I try very hard not to accept large media narratives about what is going on in society, from any direction. It can be difficult to question, especially when it agrees with my own biases, but it's easier to see when media gets something I know well very wrong. Then I can more easily accept that they might also get things wrong that I don't know much about. (Isn't there a term for this? I feel like I heard it recently.)
Don't know if that really answered the question. A good comparison might be a dismissive catch-all term I'm more familiar with, which is "green decoy." Ryan Zinke started using this term to categorize certain conservation-oriented groups as basically fake (fake people, fake interests, fake activities) when they started speaking up against some of his actions when he was Interior Secretary. Backcountry Hunters & Anglers in particular, which has a lot of influence and supported his nomination but then didn't support a lot of his actions (I should caveat that I'm an active member of BHA). Someone coined "green decoy" to paint groups like that as fake (fake hunters, fake active outdoors-y people, etc.). It feels similar to me, a way to say "this thing/group/person is not real, or at least has no valid interest in the things we are talking about." An erasure.
The "woke" have adopted critical race theory, which claims that the system itself is inherently always racist and that anyone who has "privilege" is inherently (but perhaps unconsciously) racist. Like any religion, this secular "awakening" has a small but vocal orthodoxy (mainly on Twitter and mainly Left-leaning "elites") whose focus is punishing those who are perceived to not be suitably "woke" enough. This "canceling" is designed to shun those who challenge the woke orthodoxy.
Therefore, "Enlightenment" values (free speech, equitable debate, intention as well as outcome) are condemned by the extreme "woke" because those values are perceived to be tools to promote this systemic racism. This is Orwellian in its conclusion and why the conflation with explanation/justification that Bob highlights is so pernicious.
I grew up in a cult and when I left I read everything I could on cult mind control and how it worked. I was amazed at how susceptible the human mind is to manipulation, circular reasoning, and straw man arguments. Enlightenment values were a reaction to religious dogmatism and witch hunts, and so here today we have push back against those values from a new kind of secular religion rather then the usual "moral majority" of the old Right.
I’m afraid the old Right is alive and well and gaining a lot of power in areas like mine. I don’t doubt that many believe the threat of all these other ideas is real, although the specifics are still too loosely defined for me to buy the thesis, but where I live the reality is that any threats to Enlightenment values are coming either from Republicans (I’m not saying all Republicans are like, just that most of the ones here are showing that tendency) or white nationalists, and some Christian groups. To my mind the issue is about power and control over people, and keeping them distracted from real issues, and it can take many forms.