Did you know that there are people who think the era of big wars is ending, or has already gone? I find more people criticizing this position than holding it, but it does exist. Stephen Pinker does a heroic amount of hedging in Better Angels of Our Nature
Thanks Freddie. I needed that. I'm alienated as hell by social justice politics too, but it is helpful to take a step or two back and look at the wider scope and how trends emerge, run their course, and die.
Regarding art, Quentin Tarantino appeared on Bill Maher's show recently, and he reminded us that Hollywood has gone through periods of stifling moralizing before, only for it to eventually collapse under its own weight. So the Woke stuff will burn out too. Don't know when, but it will.
I keep thinking of visiting East Berlin in July 1989 thinking, "This is gonna take decades to change"... And yet. Sometimes big change is like bankruptcy. It happens slowly and then all at once and in hindsight.... "Yeah, of course. It makes sense"
Does anyone have any links to past Freddie posts where he discusses his belief in communism? I only discovered his writing last year through the Scott Alexander community and I feel so much kinship in everything he writes, but my beliefs have never made the leap from pro Scandinavian-esque socialism to communism. Maybe he can convince me.
By the way Freddie, the post "Things I Read" was the post that finally convinced me to pay for a subscription. I need more of that in my life. Thank you.
Check out Wes Yang's just launched substack for the opposing view that these changes are poised to take over for a long time to come. He cites a number of concerning examples. I tend to agree with your general perspective on this, but I'd be curious to see you two exchange arguments (or discuss or whatever).
While I don't have the Pinker in front of me, I recall the details of the hedges significantly mattering. I'd be surprised if he really assigns probability approaching certainty that there will never be a single major war again. It's more that we can have modest confidence that trends will continue as they have (note that this one graph is a small fraction of the graphs and other evidence he provides) with a strong awareness that everything could turn south in a flash.
One of the main lessons to take from Pinker which I find people constantly ignoring is that they personally have no good evidence that wars and violence are at their worst in history, and that the strong feeling they have otherwise is due to a lifetime of sensationalist media and other pessimistic inclinations.
This is an excellent essay on a subject to which I have been giving a lot of thought lately (though of course I couldn't begin to articulate it as well). I'm old enough to have lived through the "Reagan Revolution," the cultural transition from the seventies to the eighties, which in the US was far more than a political revolution. It was a very dramatic change, an obvious reaction to the cultural excesses of the seventies, when millions of middle-class Americans sort of sheepishly looked at each other and muttered, "Whew, that got a little out of hand, didn't it?" (a visual reminder of these excesses can be found in old interior decoration manuals: http://lileks.com/institute/interiors/index.html ).
As I watch the social justice virtue signal canceling movement gradually eat its own, it's clear to me another revolution or reaction is in the cards. As you suggest, there's no telling what it will finally morph into, and of course I have no idea when it will happen, how long the current madness will last. My own response is to invest in ten or forty acres in the mountains near here and to plan the construction of a home and a shop, to which I can withdraw, feeding the quail and watering the wild horses, awaiting the return to cultural sanity, should it occur during my lifetime, which it may well won't.
The political or social zeitgeist will pass, but for the first time the wallowers in the extreme will carry around the cattle brand forever. I'm not sure when people will realize that everything they post on social media will be around the rest of their lives and a long time after. Unless the electronic storage is physically destroyed, it is impossible to 'erase' a file permanently. A ghost image always remains, even if the space is written over. Those that believe they can get by with extreme opinions and come out the other end not damaged are in for a rude shock. Many prospective employers are trolling through that information - not for the McDonald's jobs, but for anything with an income one can live from.
Those calling for moderation like FdB does here will be considered too boring to investigate.
I don't view the big challenge to existence is the political or social, but instead the financial. How do you like that 14% inflation? (as calculated on the Shadowstats website, less lying by methodology in use until 1980). More personal destruction in that than all the wars of the last 100 years. Whatever your income, it buys only 86% of what it bought 12 months ago.
The varying definitions of freedom, including those living under repressive regimes? People will live under terrible repression and cruelty without rising up... until the food runs out. Happening now in Cuba, South Africa, etc, just as it happened during the Arab Spring 10 years ago. Othere ostensible reasons are given for the uprising, but they are often just the match that lit the vapor from the gas can. You can live under a tarp or a bridge, but you cannot do without food and water.
In terms of how this current wave of PC culture ends I would argue that the guy most responsible for killing off the last wave was Bill Clinton. And Sista Souljah and Ricky Ray Rector.
Wokeism is the latest fad diet of the mind. "Only a sudden, all-encompassing revolution will mold us into the shape we want!" And then a year later you're back to eating bread, because the most sustainable way to change is small but consistently practiced positive habits, not an ultra-restrictive menu of bacon, butter, and starfruit.
I think what will matter from our current moment moving forward into the future are the huge changes taking place in how our culture interacts with LGBT issues. There is an explosion going on in young people adopting new sexual and gender identities, and while I'm sure the pendulum will eventually start to swing the other way, I think that a lot of what's going on in that space right now is going to stick.
I think especially the embrace of somewhat complicated nonbinary identities and the use of they/them as gender neutral pronouns are likely to stick around in some form or another (though I expect there will be an eventual move to formalize things a little bit more, which will have complicated effects). Trans people in general are IMO going to be a lot more visible for the foreseeable future, and I think this will stick even as other culture war issues start to fade away.
I think it's really interesting watching how divergent the Woke Analysis Bloggers have become on where they think the thing is going. Lindsay and the IDW kids seem to think that Woke is on the verge of establishing permanent dominance. Wesley Yang (just launched a new substack Year Zero) goes a step further and makes the claim that Woke has already won, coins the term "Successor Ideology" for it, and states that we are undeniably moving into a new paradigm of Permanent Woke.
Then Freddie here, rightfully I think, predicts that 2021 and 2022 are going to be years of the "Great Wokelash" (great phrase btw). I agree with this in principle. The Woke way overplayed their hand in 2020 when they went after workplaces and elementary schools. They attempted a kind of ideological blitzkrieg, taking up as much Culture War Territory as they could take, but they way oustripped their supply lines and didn't expect the sort of resistance they'd get from normal people, actual immigrants, Asian dragon lady moms in schoolboard meetings, and such. I definitely think the rubber band is going to snap back on the Woke this year and the next, and the Ds in general are going to take it on the chin from that, but I don't think Woke is going away. It might get rebranded.
The reason it's not going away is that it updates itself on the feed. It's a crowdsourced, evolving ideology that flows like water and gets into cracks and cannot be punched because it's built off the words of the nameless social media masses. It's an emergent ideology not tied to a book, which makes it antifragile. It's impossible to attack at the source because it's sourceless.
I think the bit about big wars and civilization is important. I see so many claims about human nature that weirdly don't take into account the ~200k years that anatomically modern humans existed *before* what we could call civilization arose. Taking the last couple thousand years as representative of what humans are like is just blitheringly stupid, but that's all I see. In my experience, looking at things with pre-history in mind clarifies my thinking and inspires me take more control of my own life
If you have never been to a strip club a common prop is a shower on the dance floor. The strippers climb in and get doused while dancing around and being showered with tips.
A while back one of these clubs got their shower shut down by a government enforcement agency. The complaint? The shower wasn't handicapped accessible, meaning that any strippers who were confined to wheelchairs would be unable to use it.
Here's the thing though: that story is from the 1990's. Everything we are seeing now is just a replay of the last PC wave. And if we are curious as to how this one will end we should probably examine how that one sputtered out.
"If Biden’s child credit were to somehow be made permanent, it would change the country more than every expression of social justice politics ever made. Yet no one within that movement seems even to think in these terms."
In my more sanguine moments I think this is how the more materialist left can take advantage of the Woke moment. The right sees (accurately) that the most vocal and visible elements of the left are motivated by symbolic fights over wokeness or whatever. They also understand (accurately) that their own constituents on the right are primarily motivated by owning the libs in those largely symbolic fights. So both sides engage in the symbolic battle over meaningless bullshit like Neera Tanden's nomination and critical race theory, while a hugely important benefit for children gets slipped into the ARP with surprisingly little publicity or controversy.
What I'm saying is, it's a nice time to have Bernie as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
I'm more interested in the opportunity cost of all this. How many great minds are being wasted on what will amount to very little? Of course this will pass. But each bright 17 year-old needs to choose between publishing research on Alzheimers treatments, and Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon. I think it's worth getting bit upset when they choose the later.
Thanks Freddie. I needed that. I'm alienated as hell by social justice politics too, but it is helpful to take a step or two back and look at the wider scope and how trends emerge, run their course, and die.
Regarding art, Quentin Tarantino appeared on Bill Maher's show recently, and he reminded us that Hollywood has gone through periods of stifling moralizing before, only for it to eventually collapse under its own weight. So the Woke stuff will burn out too. Don't know when, but it will.
*abolition
Great article, analysis like this is why I subscribed.
I keep thinking of visiting East Berlin in July 1989 thinking, "This is gonna take decades to change"... And yet. Sometimes big change is like bankruptcy. It happens slowly and then all at once and in hindsight.... "Yeah, of course. It makes sense"
Does anyone have any links to past Freddie posts where he discusses his belief in communism? I only discovered his writing last year through the Scott Alexander community and I feel so much kinship in everything he writes, but my beliefs have never made the leap from pro Scandinavian-esque socialism to communism. Maybe he can convince me.
By the way Freddie, the post "Things I Read" was the post that finally convinced me to pay for a subscription. I need more of that in my life. Thank you.
Check out Wes Yang's just launched substack for the opposing view that these changes are poised to take over for a long time to come. He cites a number of concerning examples. I tend to agree with your general perspective on this, but I'd be curious to see you two exchange arguments (or discuss or whatever).
While I don't have the Pinker in front of me, I recall the details of the hedges significantly mattering. I'd be surprised if he really assigns probability approaching certainty that there will never be a single major war again. It's more that we can have modest confidence that trends will continue as they have (note that this one graph is a small fraction of the graphs and other evidence he provides) with a strong awareness that everything could turn south in a flash.
One of the main lessons to take from Pinker which I find people constantly ignoring is that they personally have no good evidence that wars and violence are at their worst in history, and that the strong feeling they have otherwise is due to a lifetime of sensationalist media and other pessimistic inclinations.
This is an excellent essay on a subject to which I have been giving a lot of thought lately (though of course I couldn't begin to articulate it as well). I'm old enough to have lived through the "Reagan Revolution," the cultural transition from the seventies to the eighties, which in the US was far more than a political revolution. It was a very dramatic change, an obvious reaction to the cultural excesses of the seventies, when millions of middle-class Americans sort of sheepishly looked at each other and muttered, "Whew, that got a little out of hand, didn't it?" (a visual reminder of these excesses can be found in old interior decoration manuals: http://lileks.com/institute/interiors/index.html ).
As I watch the social justice virtue signal canceling movement gradually eat its own, it's clear to me another revolution or reaction is in the cards. As you suggest, there's no telling what it will finally morph into, and of course I have no idea when it will happen, how long the current madness will last. My own response is to invest in ten or forty acres in the mountains near here and to plan the construction of a home and a shop, to which I can withdraw, feeding the quail and watering the wild horses, awaiting the return to cultural sanity, should it occur during my lifetime, which it may well won't.
The political or social zeitgeist will pass, but for the first time the wallowers in the extreme will carry around the cattle brand forever. I'm not sure when people will realize that everything they post on social media will be around the rest of their lives and a long time after. Unless the electronic storage is physically destroyed, it is impossible to 'erase' a file permanently. A ghost image always remains, even if the space is written over. Those that believe they can get by with extreme opinions and come out the other end not damaged are in for a rude shock. Many prospective employers are trolling through that information - not for the McDonald's jobs, but for anything with an income one can live from.
Those calling for moderation like FdB does here will be considered too boring to investigate.
I don't view the big challenge to existence is the political or social, but instead the financial. How do you like that 14% inflation? (as calculated on the Shadowstats website, less lying by methodology in use until 1980). More personal destruction in that than all the wars of the last 100 years. Whatever your income, it buys only 86% of what it bought 12 months ago.
The varying definitions of freedom, including those living under repressive regimes? People will live under terrible repression and cruelty without rising up... until the food runs out. Happening now in Cuba, South Africa, etc, just as it happened during the Arab Spring 10 years ago. Othere ostensible reasons are given for the uprising, but they are often just the match that lit the vapor from the gas can. You can live under a tarp or a bridge, but you cannot do without food and water.
There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen
In terms of how this current wave of PC culture ends I would argue that the guy most responsible for killing off the last wave was Bill Clinton. And Sista Souljah and Ricky Ray Rector.
Wokeism is the latest fad diet of the mind. "Only a sudden, all-encompassing revolution will mold us into the shape we want!" And then a year later you're back to eating bread, because the most sustainable way to change is small but consistently practiced positive habits, not an ultra-restrictive menu of bacon, butter, and starfruit.
I think what will matter from our current moment moving forward into the future are the huge changes taking place in how our culture interacts with LGBT issues. There is an explosion going on in young people adopting new sexual and gender identities, and while I'm sure the pendulum will eventually start to swing the other way, I think that a lot of what's going on in that space right now is going to stick.
I think especially the embrace of somewhat complicated nonbinary identities and the use of they/them as gender neutral pronouns are likely to stick around in some form or another (though I expect there will be an eventual move to formalize things a little bit more, which will have complicated effects). Trans people in general are IMO going to be a lot more visible for the foreseeable future, and I think this will stick even as other culture war issues start to fade away.
I think it's really interesting watching how divergent the Woke Analysis Bloggers have become on where they think the thing is going. Lindsay and the IDW kids seem to think that Woke is on the verge of establishing permanent dominance. Wesley Yang (just launched a new substack Year Zero) goes a step further and makes the claim that Woke has already won, coins the term "Successor Ideology" for it, and states that we are undeniably moving into a new paradigm of Permanent Woke.
Then Freddie here, rightfully I think, predicts that 2021 and 2022 are going to be years of the "Great Wokelash" (great phrase btw). I agree with this in principle. The Woke way overplayed their hand in 2020 when they went after workplaces and elementary schools. They attempted a kind of ideological blitzkrieg, taking up as much Culture War Territory as they could take, but they way oustripped their supply lines and didn't expect the sort of resistance they'd get from normal people, actual immigrants, Asian dragon lady moms in schoolboard meetings, and such. I definitely think the rubber band is going to snap back on the Woke this year and the next, and the Ds in general are going to take it on the chin from that, but I don't think Woke is going away. It might get rebranded.
The reason it's not going away is that it updates itself on the feed. It's a crowdsourced, evolving ideology that flows like water and gets into cracks and cannot be punched because it's built off the words of the nameless social media masses. It's an emergent ideology not tied to a book, which makes it antifragile. It's impossible to attack at the source because it's sourceless.
I think the bit about big wars and civilization is important. I see so many claims about human nature that weirdly don't take into account the ~200k years that anatomically modern humans existed *before* what we could call civilization arose. Taking the last couple thousand years as representative of what humans are like is just blitheringly stupid, but that's all I see. In my experience, looking at things with pre-history in mind clarifies my thinking and inspires me take more control of my own life
If you have never been to a strip club a common prop is a shower on the dance floor. The strippers climb in and get doused while dancing around and being showered with tips.
A while back one of these clubs got their shower shut down by a government enforcement agency. The complaint? The shower wasn't handicapped accessible, meaning that any strippers who were confined to wheelchairs would be unable to use it.
Here's the thing though: that story is from the 1990's. Everything we are seeing now is just a replay of the last PC wave. And if we are curious as to how this one will end we should probably examine how that one sputtered out.
"If Biden’s child credit were to somehow be made permanent, it would change the country more than every expression of social justice politics ever made. Yet no one within that movement seems even to think in these terms."
In my more sanguine moments I think this is how the more materialist left can take advantage of the Woke moment. The right sees (accurately) that the most vocal and visible elements of the left are motivated by symbolic fights over wokeness or whatever. They also understand (accurately) that their own constituents on the right are primarily motivated by owning the libs in those largely symbolic fights. So both sides engage in the symbolic battle over meaningless bullshit like Neera Tanden's nomination and critical race theory, while a hugely important benefit for children gets slipped into the ARP with surprisingly little publicity or controversy.
What I'm saying is, it's a nice time to have Bernie as the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee.
I'm more interested in the opportunity cost of all this. How many great minds are being wasted on what will amount to very little? Of course this will pass. But each bright 17 year-old needs to choose between publishing research on Alzheimers treatments, and Human Reaction to Rape Culture and Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks in Portland, Oregon. I think it's worth getting bit upset when they choose the later.