It's creepy, but admittedly convenient (which is a big part of why it's creepy) how good our content providers are at interacting with one another to suggest things we might want to consume. Every time I go to YouTube there is a seemingly endless scrawl of clips I did not ask for, but which all look legitimately interesting nevertheless, and it's often related to something I was consuming on a different platform.
For example, I recently listened to an episode of The Weeds podcast -- a one-on-one with host Matthew Yglesias and the linguist John McWhorter ("The Great Awokening") -- and then next thing I know, YouTube is suggesting I check out a clip of a discussion between Ta-Nehisi Coates and John McWhorter. I think what happened is I Googled McWhorter, because I wasn't super familiar with him, and then since Google owns YouTube it thought I might be interested in more material on him.
Indeed I was. Well played, Big Brother. I found his discussion with Coates very thought-provoking. It's actually quite old -- I think it occurred in the lead-up to the 2008 election -- and it's probably a good thing I didn't know that going into it or I probably would not have watched it. It's mostly about hip-hop music, a subject on which I don't have particularly strong feelings, but I enjoy listening to McWhorter's arguments. In a lot of ways he thinks how I like to think I think. He's very logical, empirical, and solution-oriented -- sometimes to a fault.
For the most part, it was a very amicable debate, but there was one exchange that got slightly contentious, and it reminded me of the type of pointless argument I have all too frequently with my wife. McWhorter was defending a quote by Geraldine Ferraro, a Clinton supporter (the 2008 Democratic Primary, remember): "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," the position being one of a legitimate contender for the nomination. Coates was having none of it and seemed to find the quote demeaning to Obama and to black men, in general. But McWhorter pushed back, not really on what the quote conveyed, but it's technical accuracy. He felt the fact that Obama (whom he very much likes and supported) is black did help raise his profile from single-term senator to presidential front-runner. Coates argued, basically, that it was offensive to single out race, when there are so many other factors to it. And it really reminded me of S getting frustrated with me for taking issue with a single detail of something she says when she's trying to make a broader point. It was kinda funny.
(For the record, I mostly agree with McWhorter, but the retort is "yeah, so." People are helped all the time in life by things outside their control. Innate attributes and situations into which we are born largely determine who we are. Meritocracies don't actually exist. I mean, you could say LeBron James wouldn't be the best basketball player of this generation if he wasn't abnormally tall (6' 9"). It's probably true, but it's a meaningless point. That's how I feel about the Ferraro quote.)
More recently, McWhorter has been in the news, so to speak, because of his contention that 21st-century, "woke" antiracism is in effect a religion. Although I don't agree with everything he writes in the article, I think the general framework he lays out is accurate and very clever. It's one of those "I wish I had thought of that" things. It provides a unifying model for a lot of disparate thoughts I've had on wokeness over the past decade or so. McWhorter has led me, ironically, to an awaking about wokeness. You can read his article or read this one (a critique of Robin DiAngelo's best-seller White Fragility) or listen to him on the podcast mentioned above or talking with Jane Coaston here, if you like. If you don't like, I'll give my own thoughts below, and you can just read those.
One thing I've found frustrating about certain voices on the Left is the belief that there is some sort of greater moral purpose to the advancement of their preferred ideas and policies beyond just helping the people they want to help. It really is analogous to religious enlightenment or redemption or salvation. The reason I don't like this is, well, for one, I think it's annoyingly sanctimonious, but for another, it is often used to justify dishonesty and deny objective reality. We can see this in AOC's famous quote about criticism she received for possibly misrepresenting some budgetary numbers: "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." That's religious talk right there. She also recently said an uptick in crime in New York City could be explained by unemployed people shoplifting bread to feed their families. Again, she's saying something that is clearly not true literally to convey a greater moral message about the plight of poor people in our society. You could almost argue she was being metaphorical, but I don't think she was.
The thing is, I understand and mostly share AOC's moral beliefs (just as I mostly share the moral beliefs of, say, Christianity), but I can't get behind her wokeness, because I simply don't believe in it, and also because I think it can be counterproductive. In the case of budgets numbers, they are important because they provide the basis for the actual, real-life resources that will or will not be allocated to people. If things don't add up and people in need don't get the services they rely on because of it, AOC's moral rectitude isn't going to mean shit.
In the case of rising crime, by attributing it solely to righteous behavior by desperate people, you are destroying your credibility on the issue, infantilizing your audience, and nullifying a very real trade-off we need to consider between a potential increase in crime and a reduction of heavy-handed policing. If the message of people who want to defund or radically change policing is "we can do it in a way that will not lead to any increase in crime whatsoever, even a small one, even temporarily" then we are setting ourselves up for failure from the get-go. The correct message about an uptick in crime, in my opinion, is something to the effect of, "We are in a time of social and political upheaval. Many people are unemployed; many people are anxious because of the coronavirus; many people are rethinking the role of the police in society. When you put all that together, you are probably going to get an uptick in crime -- some of it is political in nature; some of it is a result of stressed-out people making irrationally bad decisions; some of it is total desperation; some of it is amoral, opportunistic looting; some of it is the police sitting back because they feel underappreciated and are trying to make a misguided point. Once we start to solve these things, crime will start to drop again." That, I think, is the correct message, but it's not the woke one, because one of the tenets of wokeness, in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder and the protests, is that you can't attribute any of the peripheral crimes to the people actually committing them, even in a heavily qualified manner.
Another way in which wokeness is like religion is because it requires its adherents to believe two contradictory things simultaneously. It's like the joke on The Simpsons:
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