- What ‘woke’ means, to different people;
- How the ancients overcame biases in understanding the world, in order to discover and navigate the world;
- How moderns have tried to overcome cognitive biases through constitutions and “political correctness” and being “woke,” and have been bitterly opposed by conservatives, who prefer tribal morality, to this day;
- And so the insight: the ancients overcame human psychological biases about the shape of the world, because they had economic incentives for doing so; yet despite their success, millennia later there are still flat-earthers. While attempts to overcome tribalist human nature has led to grand movements like the US Constitution, yet most people to this day prefer tribalist mindsets: see conservatives.
- And so: human nature is inescapable. The dreams of utopias are likely only dreams.
This item on Jerry Coyne’s site today — combined with following the implications of thought in yesterday’s blog post — suggested to me a new fundamental insight.
Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True, Are we past peak woke in America?
Jerry discusses essays in two different British venues, the Sunday Times of London and The Economist, and how they reach different conclusions. This begs the question, of course, of what is meant by ‘woke’? We recently saw an example of some MAGA lady who claimed that ‘woke’ meant ‘judgmental,’ which strikes me as backward. Woke, to those of us who don’t knee-jerkingly reject it because it’s non-conservative, is simply about being aware — aware of how other people are different from us yet are nevertheless worthy of respect; aware of past injustices (in America, against virtually everyone but the white male Christian population); and how those injustices might be ameliorated. For the simpletons, it means not using racist language, or demeaning anyone who’s not a white male Christian. Yet in current politics, we see many people who are perfectly happy to demean others, and use racist language, including some prominent politicians. These people are, of course, ‘conservatives.’
Coyne’s view of ‘wokeness’ is quite different from mine or that MAGA lady’s; from his academic point of view (he’s a retired professor at University of Chicago), he’s against it. But he’s reacting against the extreme overcompensation of a certain flavor of ‘woke’ philosophy. Here’s the closing of his article today. Note the examples he gives.
My take: I am not sure if wokeness is on the wane. Certain aspects of it are, like the willingness to allow men identified as women to enter women’s spaces, but other aspects are on the rise, most visibly (to me) the incursion of wokeness into science journals and magazines. But the important conclusion is that wokeness is here and ubiquitous, and seems entrenched in many areas. But whether or not it’s increasing, it needs to be fought at every turn. And that means that those of us who object to the invidious side of Social Justice—of course “social justice” is not all bad; I’m referring to the ca[ota;ozed [sic; he must have mistyped] performative and non-effective pretense of fixing society by changing words, bird names, and monitoring speech and behavior—must stand up and call out this nonsense when we see it, It’s not pleasant, as you’ll be ostracized and demonized, if not fired, but since when was society ever improved without people taking flak from those who wrongly see themselves as the pinnacle of morality?
His views roughly echo complaints about campus cancel culture that we’ve read about in Haidt and elsewhere; which is to say, severe overreactions to anything the least bit objectionable to anyone. That’s a problem too. But that’s a different problem from the anti-woke rants from the racists and those who really do wish to discriminate.
But this isn’t my topic for today; let’s set Coyne’s topic aside. I mention it because it triggered some further thinking about yesterday’s post.
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I’m reading Timothy Ferris’ COMING OF AGE IN THE MILKY WAY, from 1988. It’s a history of humanity’s understanding of the size and extent of the universe, despite tradition and religious preconceptions.
Yesterday I made a comparison between two things. First, how evolutionary psychology has, in the past three decades or so, identified numerous cognitive biases in human nature, built into us by evolution because they helped us survive in the ancestral environment. These include not only the intuitive physics (heavy things fall faster than light things) and metaphysics (the mind can affect things at a distance), but also patterns of thought like motivated thinking. These things helped us survive because they work in the short and local range; but they are not, in the long and cosmic range, true.
Second, how via the Ferris book the ancient Greek philosophers made simplistic assumptions about the Earth and the cosmos, based on scant if any evidence, because those assumptions felt right. They ‘made sense’ in the same way those psychological biases did. Thus: surely the Earth lies at the center of the universe, because that’s where we, people, live; the heavens are unchanging because they are the face of God, who surely is perfect, and anyway, we never see the heavens change; and that the orbits of the planets must be circular (whether around the Sun or the Earth) because the circle is the most perfect shape.
All of those assumptions turned out to be wrong. All of those cognitive biases are wrong, outside their limited context. There’s an analogy there.
In physics and astronomy, scientists (well, they weren’t called that then) had motivations to correct those wrong assumptions. They wanted to navigate the oceans, to explore far-away places and bring back wealth, whether spices or gold. Not to mention slaves. To do that they needed to learn about the actual size of the Earth (Columbus, something of a religious zealot, placed more “faith” in a passage from Isaiah than he did in the accumulated wisdom of a couple thousand years of study about the actual size of the Earth; Columbus ‘succeeded’ by accident, and died thinking he’d actually reached India). And they needed to learn how to navigate, which entailed learning about the stars. The ‘scientists’ of the day succeeded.
The modern developments of evolutionary psychology have philosophical precedents; poets and novelists and philosophers have long understood the intricacies, and base motivations, of human nature. But it’s worth wondering, as these became known over thousands of years, and more specifically in recent decades, has anything been done to correct them?
Today’s thoughts. Yes. First, on the very broadest level, that of rote tribalism, idealists over thousands of years have experimented with democracy, especially in the revolutions that resulted from the Age of Enlightenment. The American Revolution, with its idealized Constitution; and then the French, with its Liberté, égalité, fraternité. These were, in my view, attempts to reign in tribal morality and create a moral equable society.
Second, and speaking here only about the US, the various “rights” movements, including civil and voting, and more recently the social movements about “political correctness” and now “woke.” These were movements to try to overcome tribal morality, in particular racism, to speak to the ideals of the Constitution, for example. And so it’s extremely telling that the conservatives, acting like tribalists, resent and resist any and everything “woke” (and a relentless core of them work to undo civil and voting rights, too). They cannot escape their tribal mentalities, just as some of the ancients were beholden to their notions of perfect spheres. Conservatives pretend to venerate the Constitution, but in their actions, they do not.
We can extend this analogy further. The conservative mindset is that which refuses to accept evidence and instead falls back on local, notional intuitions, and “common sense”. For many, the world is flat. Space is a hoax. The Moon landing was staged.
Finally, to return to Coyne’s post: what would it mean to be “past peak woke”? To give up, understand that racists, and flat earthers, will always be with us? I’m beginning to suspect so.
