Long time reader Roger Sweeny emails.

I recently read Daniel M. Wegner’ and Kurt Gray’s The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters (Viking, 2016), a book that has nothing explicitly to do with politics or wokeness. . . .

I will copy the full email below. But for now, I have to say that this book presents a very powerful model of how people frame moral issues. I have a learned a lot just from reading a few pages.

The book argues, based on empirical analysis, for a moral dyad theory, based on the extent to which an entity is viewed as having experience (being able to feel pain or joy) and/or having agency (having the ability to change outcomes). Consider this matrix.

Sweeny wants to apply this moral dyad theory to the social justice movement. Suppose that the social justice advocates see whites as privileged, i.e., having “a large capacity to act and a small capacity to suffer,” like the robot in the matrix, while blacks occupy the opposite pole, like the baby.

Note that John McWhorter and other black intellectuals who deplore the social justice movement are most angry at the way that it denies agency to blacks. It treats them as if they were nothing more than dogs helplessly beaten.

Most people see George Floyd as comparable to the baby and Derek Chauvin as comparable to the robot. That is, Floyd could suffer, but he could do nothing about his suffering. Chauvin was making conscious decisions, but he has no feelings..

But one could tell the story the other way. Floyd chose to resist arrest. Chauvin was reacting to the situation in response to his fears and those of the other policemen. I am not saying that this is the right framing, just that it leads to a different moral assessment.

The authors point out that people see corporations as being akin to robots–having no feelings but having powerful capabilities. There is much more to be said about how the moral dyad relates to political economy, but I will save that for when I have finished the book.

Note that fans of Girard talk of a scapegoat mechanism, which also addresses how people assign moral rights and responsibilities. I like the moral dyad better. It is better defined and apparently more empirically grounded. Here is what Sweeny wrote:

I recently read Daniel M. Wegner’ and Kurt Gray’s The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters (Viking, 2016), a book that has nothing explicitly to do with politics or wokeness. They ask the question, “Who (and what) do people believe has a mind?” A fetus? A dog? A robot? Google? God? They crunch some numbers and find that people seem to have two groups of characteristics of mindness. One is the ability to experience sensations and emotions. The other is the ability to act, to decide and do.

They tell us that entities that can feel but can’t act turn on our moral senses. Outrage at a man beating a dog. Pity for those in the hospital dying. Moreover, something in us wants to believe that those who are suffering are blameless. But we also want to find moral causes. We want to find something to blame. Best if it is something with a large capacity to act and a small capacity to suffer. Almost always, they say, there is a moral dyad. In fact, whenever there is something with a large capacity to act and a small capacity to suffer, we want to find the other half of the dyad, something relatively powerless and suffering. (This is largely from chapter 4, “The Patient”.)

As far as I can tell, the energy behind wokeness begins with the story of black people in America. Slavery, Jim Crow, etc., etc. A lot of bad stuff by more powerful white people. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is now 57 years ago and the Voting Rights Act is 56. White people are much less overtly racist than in the past. Quite the opposite, most are overtly anti-racist. Yet “the gap” between black and white in terms of income, school, etc. hasn’t narrowed much. So what’s going on?

Thomas Sowell, and many of the serious neo-conservatives of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s would say that many black people have been doing the wrong things. Having Jerry Springer families. Not pushing education, hard work, all the “middle class values” that brought generations of immigrants up from poverty. But that makes black people “suffering but with capacity to act”. It takes away their blamelessness. Our brains find this hard. (Which also helps explain why people don’t want to consider Glenn Loury’s “development narrative”, cited in your November 17 “Two Racial Narratives”.)

Our brains want a moral dyad with something “powerful and not suffering” to blame. Thus, “white privilege” or “the system of white privilege”. The idea of “the system of white privilege” also has the political advantage that it doesn’t call white people sh*theads. It does something even better. It says that even if you are a good white person, you are automatically taking advantage of a system that keeps black people down and that if you don’t actively oppose it, you are effectively an anti-black racist. “Silence is violence.”

Having established a belief in the moral dyad, new ideas are developed to keep it alive. So, seemingly innocent remarks by white people can be “micro-aggressions”. To say, “All lives matter” is not to express the unity of humanity but to discount black lives. Such microaggressions hurt the suffering victims and perpetuate the power of the bad system. Thus, all the “what you said makes me feel bad/unwelcome/in danger”–and you should apologize and shut up. And the attacks on things that don’t seem to have much direct effect on how well a black person does, like statues or the names of military bases. Since black people are “down”, something powerful must be keeping them down and even a seemingly insignificant thing must be destroyed to destroy the powerful oppressor.

The moral dyad idea helps explain why AIDS helped the image of gay people and increased their political power. One might think it would hurt. Almost all American AIDS was spread from unprotected anal sex and sharing needles. That suggests that “they did it to themselves” and maybe even “they’re a bunch of perverts.” But the fact of suffering made a lot of people want to see the sufferers as blameless and to find a powerful unfeeling cause outside gay people. So it was actually discrimination against gays that was killing people with AIDS. For some theorists, it was more, a whole system of “heteronormativity”.

The same structure of moral feelings–the unfeeling powerful hurting the suffering powerless–gives us women suffering from “the patriarchy”. Put it all together and you have “intersectionality”. Much of “victim studies” is about shoring up these moral feelings: finding more and more examples of things that can be said to hurt victims, linking those things to a system that is powerful and unfeeling, developing arguments that victims are not to blame, that “blaming the victim” is empirically and morally wrong.

Many opponents of wokeness have argued that it “denies agency” to the designated victims, that it treats them as powerless children. So far at least, that charge has not weakened the support for wokeness. Right now the choice between believing “victims are powerless/blameless” and “victims have power/have blame” almost always gets made for the first. Though I suppose the true believing woke would say the victims are powerful and adult in their own way but are just crushed by the overwhelming power of the system. Perhaps, to be cynical, they are powerful when they agree with highly-educated elites and come together under that leadership. “The people united will never be defeated.”

(That sounds a lot like the traditional leftist narrative: powerful, uncaring Capital exploiting powerless, suffering Labor. But Labor can triumph with solidarity, and maybe the leadership of a vanguard party, which takes ideas from an intellectual vanguard. One difference, this millennium’s demon verb is oppress, not exploit)

Chapter 5, “The Enemy”, introduces a complication. “People have a deep need to see the world as fair and just, and so they believe that people have gotten what they deserve, even when the harm is fundamentally undeserved. They want to know that terrible things won’t happen to them, that there is method in the world’s madness. With torture, a just world entails that victims deserve their suffering, and so we look for reasons to blame the victim.” (p. 149) Or perhaps to argue that the victims are actually better off being treated the way they are. The authors square the circle by saying that the closer you are to being the metaphorical torturer, the more you think of the (metaphorical) torture as deserved. So, a great irony (my idea, not their’s): The less white people participate in overt acts of anti-black racism, the less likely white people are to think, “they are to blame” and the more likely they are to think, “oh, poor victims”.

Chapter 7, “The Group”, names “the concept of moral typecasting. Moral typecasting suggests that we see others as either blameworthy moral agents or innocent moral patients–explaining why it pays to play the victim card in court.” Whenever I say that George Floyd would be alive today if he hadn’t violently resisted arrest, I am looked upon as a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad person. To say that he has some blame is to say that racism, white privilege, etc. doesn’t have as much blame, which further slides into “you must think racism and killing black people is good.”

Chapter 9, “God”, brings up the idea of a “hyper-active agency detection device.” We have a hard-wired tendency to think that if something happens, something with agency is causing it. A rustling in the grass on the savannah might be a tiger; that touch on your face might be a spider, that lightning might be an angry god. We can see abstractions as agents, like “the system of white privilege” which is a doer hurting a feeler. “As we have seen many times throughout this book, our cognitive template of good and evil includes two minds, a moral agent and a moral patient.” (p.281)

Most people who have negative feelings about capitalism tend to see it as something that forces people to do bad things and make bad things happen. Whereas people with positive feelings about capitalism generally see it as simply a stage on which people can act out their preferences.

“The concept of moral typecasting” might help explain why sociology is the way it is. Sociology is all about systems. Systems are the unseen realities behind everyday acts. Systems make people do X,Y, and Z; want A,B, and C; maybe even be P, Q, and R. And if systems are making people do things, well then the hyper-active agency detector can’t help feeling like they are agents. They are unfeeling doers with power and thus bad, causing suffering to the acted-on feelers.

One last long paragraph from the book:

“We replicated the link between perceived suffering and religious belief in another study in which people read fictional scenarios about the Millers, a family who decide to hike down to a canyon floor for a weekend picnic. In the story the Millers are eating their lunch when the water level of the canyon rises suddenly and all either die (in one version) or escape to the parking lot to finish their soggy sandwiches (in another version). We also manipulated whether there was a clear human agent behind the flood, saying either it was caused by a malevolent damn [sic!] worker upstream of the canyon (in one version) or for some unknown reason (in another version). We then asked how much the events of the story were part of “God’s plan.” Just as we had predicted, people saw God’s handiwork only in one specific situation–when the cause of the flood was unknown and the Millers all died. When the family died, people needed to find an agent to blame for their suffering but looked to God only when there wasn’t an easy human agent to blame. In other words, people saw God in the “moral gaps” when blame was otherwise unaccounted.”

There are no more Orville Faubuses and Bull Conners so there needs to be something god-like to explain black suffering. The less there is overt racial discrimination, the more there is a need to believe in a malevolent system. That may seem counter-intuitive, but so is the reality that revolutions do not occur when things are getting worse but when things are (generally) getting better.

The search for a “moral dyad” combined with a decline of religion may create a demand for a secular oppressor/victim narrative. Previously, one could blame God for bad things but take comfort that it must somehow be good because God was good by definition. If you don’t believe God is personally directing things, that’s no longer an option.

This is all rather scattered, and it doesn’t answer the question, “if human nature hasn’t changed, why would “wokeness” have seemed so wrong to so many people till relatively recently?” Why, for example, did people in the 19th (and a good deal of the 20th) century seem to have a conception of victims who are innocent and victims who are not (e.g., the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor”) and feel very differently about each? There are some hints above but I can’t put them together in some general theory.

I also realize it’s more about why “wokeness” would become popular than where it came from. My tentative answer is that it was percolating in academia for a long time. A while ago, I finally read Uncommon Ground, papers presented at “an interdisciplinary seminar on the theme ‘Reinventing Nature’ held at the University of California’s Humanities Research Institute (HRI) in Irvine during the spring of 1994” (p13). The introduction and first paper, by the organizer William Cronon, are excellent, like most of his stuff is. But I was struck by how much of the rest was what I would uncharitably call woke crap–in things that were written almost three decades ago!

(Similarly, many of the ideas associated with “the sixties” came from academia of the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s, which were picked up by students in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s.)

Perhaps intellectual “wokeness” is an attempt to revivify leftist tradition, which had lost most of its emotional appeal, as American labor became increasingly bourgeois.

The great unanswered question: what might lead to a decrease in wokeness? Seeing “victims” as not innocent? Not seeing the world as full of powerful, unfeeling systems? But how would that happen?

And lest I be misunderstood, the book has nothing explicitly to do with politics or wokeness. This is me riffing on their ideas.