If wokeness becomes a legally recognized religion in the United States, efforts by adherents to secure state patronage and enlist public entities in their struggle would violate constitutionally protected natural rights.
Having wokeness recognized legally as a religion would solve many problems.
If you watch John McWhorter on Firing Line, you will hear views that have influenced my own.
McWorther (2017) celebrates the new religion when it serves his tribal interests:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/07/race-iq-debate-serves-no-purpose/
McWhorter doesn’t think it’s morally repulsive. It just damages his self-esteem to belong to a group that, on average, is the least successful in America.
If McWhorter thought it’s evil to exclude people from “the higher echelons of society” because they’re dumb, then he’d propose affirmative action for low-IQ whites (haha) who outnumber the entire black population. But he doesn’t do that because he can think relatively clearly when his amour propre isn’t threatened.
You raise a valid criticism that McWhorter is kind of black nationlist and cares more about black people than non-block people. BTW, most people probably have some sort of race nationalism, but they usually know not to say that out loud, and they aren’t leading pundits on race.
John McWhorter is overall a good guy, with very useful thoughts on the issues of race, and he’s good at poking holes in dominant left-wing viewpoints. But he has flaws, and your quote shows that.
McWhorter is far from the only person to observe that the progressive left behaves like a religion, but he’s one of the more eloquent voices to say so.
It’s ok to be white.
The last thing we need is another cult with tax exempt status
Woke is a cult more than a religion.
It appears that cults are more leader-oriented; “woke” is still pretty diffuse in that department.
Of course, there’s always Alinsky’s advice:
(13) “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. “
I think the test of McWhorter as a public intellectual on this issue is how he answers the following questions:
1. *Assuming* Charles Murray is right, and that furthermore the etiology of the different racial means is mostly genetic in origin, then what should be done vis a vis racial stratification, beyond merely accepting it as a natural consequence of impersonal factors?
2. What additional evidence would you accept as establishing that it is more likely than not that the above assumption is empirically accurate?
3. If one won’t put cards on the table and provide clear answers to 1 and 2, then how is one to distinguish between their position and the woke position which insists that these questions are intellectually illegitimate because it is *impossible* for the means to be different because of genetics, and that there can exist *no* evidence demonstrating otherwise?
I would guess that his answer to 3 would be, “Bad black culture, something, sometime, because reasons.” Which is the same as the National Review / Mainstream Republican position three decades ago. Which … didn’t pan out. Because it couldn’t. What do they call it when you keep trying to same thing again even after it didn’t work?
Regardless, the wokesters and CRT folks don’t dispute that claim anyway, they just say that to extent a “bad black culture” factor might exist and contribute to average black performance, it simply raises the upstream question of where that bad black culture came from. For which the answer is obviously white supremacist structural racism and/or it is a reasonable reaction of a group ordinary human beings to being hopelessly oppressed in that manner, the rejection of oppressor norms and values being the only way to maintain a sense of dignity, yadda, yadda, yadda.
And thus the answer is not to try and change that culture which is just an inevitable reaction to systemic social injustice, but to eradicate the injustice, at which point these things would resolve automatically on their own. If you try to change the culture without fixing the structural problem that causes and creates it, then the stone you are pushing will just roll back downhill the minute you relax your efforts. Also, yadda, yadda, yadda.
These people have spent 50 years coming up with responses to everything except the truth.
They must be lawyers 🙂
Is your 5th paragraph saying they’ve been trying to fix black culture for 50 years? Because it seems public policy has been doing the opposite the past 50 years. One thing that cannot be said is that this hypothesis has been thoroughly tested; in fact public policy has done almost everything to undermine the prospect of improving black culture since the Johnson admin.
Secondly, even one accepts the bizarre axiom that cultural differences are all borne from oppression, if the injustices are past injustices, they cannot be fixed without a time machine, so fixing present culture is the only thing that makes sense.
I must also reiterate the moral point I’ve made before that none of this justifies racial affirmative action. Being poor because your great great grandparents were slaves is no more unjust than being poor because your dad was a gambling addict. Both are 100% beyond your control. There’s no sound moral reason IMO for treating these scenarios differently. Affirmative action for people in bad situations for reasons beyond their control, we already have. For specific variables it’s redundant.
I went to a magnet school that was 50% Asian, 40% Jewish, 5 white kids, one Hispanic, and one Black. I’m an Irish/Italian half white (sort of) so I get not really being white, and I get not really having your group belong to the top tier.
Can you say with a straight face that some black factory worker in Detroit had it worse than his equivalent in Hiroshima that got the atom split over his head?
Can you claims that someone that experienced Jim Crow…in a the richest country in the world that gave unprcecendent opportunity to everyone no matter how far down the ladder had it worse then someone that experience the century of humiliation, section 731, and Mao had it worse?
Come on. This is bullshit. Stop complaining.
Yes, affirmative action must go. It won’t go until white guilt ends. White guilt will end when we admit we don’t owe black shit. My ancestors escaped 700 years of UK colonialism to get used as attributional fodder by the Union to free people that blame me for their own failure. If the complaining assholes even managed to free themselves what would they have…Haiti.
I don’t expect black to admit they ain’t got much. But the rest of us could admit we don’t owe them anything. We don’t have to theorize what it would look like. It looks like East Asia. It ain’t that bad.
There are always groups that experienced more misery and horror, so no one should complain or get upset about politics. That’s just not how politics work.
asdf, you complain a lot, and you have it better than people who have fallen into vats of acid, so you shouldn’t complain about politics? It doesn’t work that way.
People can complain, but if their complaints aren’t legitimate then the people they are complaining to shouldn’t take their complaints seriously. Blacks complaints about oppression shaping their current state just don’t hold up to scrutiny.
The problem isn’t that black people, 13% of the population with little wealth and power complain. It’s that powerful people outside of that 13% are willing to engage in coercive and extreme actions to satisfy the whines of that 13%.
[personal disputes belong elsewhere–ed.]
[personal disputes belong elsewhere–ed.]
Regarding your first three paragraphs. I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you sure you meant to reply to my comment? Because I don’t see what any of that has to do with anything I wrote, or what you imagine I’m implying. Are you saying that I’m suggesting black Americans have it worse than Chinese under Mao? If that’s so, I don’t know what to tell you, you’ve resolved to see words that aren’t written on the page.
Parallel to Mark’s point, in addition to public policy actively working against black culture, black culture several generations ago appears to have been substantially better than it is today.
Out of wedlock births, for example, were considered alarming at perhaps 1/3rd the current rate back in the 1960s. I’ve heard Thomas Sowell talk about black neighborhoods being safer when he was growing up than they are today. Consider that in 1960, prior to the explosion of crime in subsequent decades, only 1,313 black men in every 100,000 were behind bars, whereas by 2010 that number had increased to 4,347. The murder rate in 1960 was very close to the 2010 rate (which is probably lower than it would be if we only had 1960 medical technology), despite all of those extra criminals in jail. To the degree it is relevant, young men in 1960 also had higher exposure to lead than young men in 2010.
I’d also surmise that economic difficulties for blue collar men without education was an important factor, in that a lot of black men became incapable of bringing home a decent honest living, making them less attractive as husbands.
Now the real question would be could you actually do anything about culture. Realistically, probably nothing.
Any successful solution, as far as I can tell, must be rather patriarchal (though not all aspects of it would be pleasing to men).
Number one, black men (and for that matter, men in general) need to be able to provide in order to be attractive as husbands. As we see in Arnold’s recent post about surplus affluent women, minimum wage jobs aren’t going to do, even if minimum wage rises to $15/hr.
Perhaps there are other solutions, but one option is to create state owned enterprises to fill the gap here. These SOEs would have to actively discriminate in favor of men, and pay men decent salaries, more or less replacing the ability men had back in 1960 to go find well paid and stable blue collar work out of high school. These SOEs could produce products that normally aren’t produced in the US, to help reduce dependencies on international supply chains (which can be problematic in times of pandemic or war). More to the point, these SOEs can provide decent salaries and stability to people in the 75-90 IQ band, while also employing higher IQ people for more technical aspect of the work. As SOEs, these businesses could lose a few hundred billion a year in perpetuity, as their main function would be social efficiency and supply chain resiliency, not economic efficiency.
Two, there needs to be an economic penalty for men for children born out of wedlock, but it shouldn’t be child support. Rather, we would use a head tax which bypasses mom and goes straight to the government. Let’s say the tax will be $3,000 for every biological child under 18 that doesn’t live under your roof. Supplementing this would be the end of no fault divorce and legal abortion. Sleeping around and having children with 4 different women out of wedlock would no longer be celebrated as something players do, it’s what suckers do who will now lose $12,000/yr to a blackhole for about 2 decades.
Three, all transfer payments aside from Social Security and health care are now made only via the provision of what Robin Hanson calls universal basic dorms. A woman with three kids from three different baby daddies doesn’t get child support and TANF and food stamps: she can go live with her children in a spartan yet clean low status dorm which is monitored and maintained by professional staff. She eats from a buffet menu and shares a bathroom with other residents. She doesn’t have the latest iPhone, she is given a refurbished version of the cheapest smartphone known to man with 1G of data per month. There is no child care benefit – she lives in the dorm with her children and raises them. She has to be indoors by 11PM each night or else the doors to the dorms lock and she has to sleep in a common area that night.
As I said at the start, there’s pretty much no realistic path to this, but I can’t imagine something less achieving similar results.
Nice proposals but they will all be hacked by the usual factors (court!) and become more bastions of Wokeness.
“if the injustices are past injustices, they cannot be fixed without a time machine, so fixing present culture is the only thing that makes sense.”
But the Woke actually have another solution, tho they’ll only sometimes admit it: white dispossession, or eventual extinction.
Given that most of the people opposing wokeness are religious, and they cite their religion in opposing wokeness, I don’t see this as a useful strategy. Currently, the teacher standing up with transgender wokeness cites his Christian faith as why he can’t comply with telling kids lies about what gender they are. It’s not clear that calling wokeness a religion helps matters here. Most people like religion, religion provides lots of reasons to stand up to a powerful heresy even at the expense of ones earthly interests, and the kind of anti-woke leftist this would appeal to don’t have much of a track record of accomplishing much to fight woke.
Beyond that, traditional religion took a big hit when it became possible to empirically disprove some of its assertions. Sure, religious authorities would later claim those specific empirical claims weren’t all that central to the faith, but it sure did seem to matter to a lot of people.
Most religion these days, stung by this empirical disproving, tries really hard to stick to non-falsifiable claims. Much safer to not get contradicted one day by science. Every homily I hear has a lot of “maybe this, maybe that” in it.
Now, wokeness can be proven wrong empirically…see Handle above…but that’s precisely the area where it provides maximum heretic burning resources. Especially in terms of allowing such facts to mainstream rather then be in obscure books most people don’t read.
Having eliminated any possibility to empirically disproving wokeness, all you’re left with is a bunch of vague assertions. To quote The Dude, “well that’s just like, your opinion, man.” And in a contest of opinions, and people in charge of the opinion making apparatus are at least going to get enough buy in from the people that matter to make the faith work.
I think the point is that, if wokeness were officially a religion, it could not be imposed on us all because the constitution doesn’t allow the government to have an established religion. However, I don’t think you need to worry about this happening. The wokesters would of course argue that they have the truth, not a religion, and the people in charge of adjudicating the matter are more likely to be on the woke side. And, anyway, we can all see where freedom of speech and freedom of religion are going…
Right, you’re either attacking their truth claim or you’re not. And if “attacking their truth claim” means “kind of agreeing to their main premise and not offering any concrete and measurable reason to downplay or disagree with their preference beyond mere opinion or sentiment” you’ve got nothing.
This is a good idea; not a new idea, but a good one.
This wouldn’t be easy to implement. The political left dominates institutions right now, and they would fight this.
But this gives the right a moral high ground to fight on. They should push in this direction: brand Wokism as a religion and request freedom of association on religious grounds.
It’s like a religion in many ways that plenty of people have gone through, I think of it more as a new moral paradigm. The west accepted the Christian moral paradigm for quite a while but gradually over the second half of the 20th century it was discarded and there were a few decades of regular liberalism as the moral framework up to 2010-ish, but that led to wokeness rising up in the 2010s and now that’s the new dominant morality, you can try to frame things in other ways but no one will accept your premises. If you try and step outside woke framing you will be ostracized.
I don’t mean to be snarky but what was the “Christian moral paradigm” and what was the “regular liberalism … moral framework” that replaced it?