A Pox on the Culture War

Against both wokeism and anti-wokeism

I think there’s a lot to be said for a moderate, middle-ground view on social justice.

The social-justice moderate (as I use the term) thinks that “anti-woke” conservatives mistakenly downplay important social injustices (racism, sexism, mistreatment of trans people, etc.), while “woke” progressives may both exaggerate the scope of the problem, at least relative to other priorities, and also respond inappropriately. In criticizing the latter mistakes, we wouldn’t want to inadvertently bolster the former mistake, so it’s worth caveating moderate criticisms of woke excesses with acknowledgment that there are real social problems that the advocates are (correctly!) concerned about addressing. But their methods are disproportionate, and come with significant opportunity costs, so it’s worth avoiding those mistakes.

Unlike some,¹ I think there’s room for reasonable and well-meaning people to wonder precisely how severe social injustice in contemporary American society really is. The social justice movement is so notoriously epistemically toxic that (for familiar Millian reasons) you can’t have much confidence in their empirical claims: they’d repeat all the same “dead dogmas”, cherry-picking and suppressing opposing evidence, even if conservatives were actually right. It’s unfortunate! I’m a moderate, so I expect conservatives are (usually) wrong in their empirical assumptions about the explanation of demographic disparities. But I’m bothered that we can’t be very confident of that, thanks to progressive academia’s lousy epistemics and groupthink.

By contrast, I think it’s much more obvious that global poverty, animal suffering, and global catastrophic risks are massive problems that belong toward the top our list of moral priorities. I don’t really see how anyone could (decently) deny that. There are questions to ask around demandingness—the general question of how much we must care about doing good for others vs looking out for our own parochial concerns and interests. But I take it there’s no serious question that these are in fact important priorities, which ~everyone is currently unduly neglecting. (The MAGA right does deny this, of course, but in a way that seems downstream of their utter disinterest in ethics or anything in the vicinity of moral justification.)

Three upshots

(1) For the most part, it would seem desirable to simply give less attention to “culture war” issues, and more attention to more important issues. (Though one such important issue is precisely this “meta-issue” of attentional allocation.)

(2) For those who think social justice issues are properly a higher priority than I’m inclined to think, I’d love to see some quantitative analysis (even just a very rough “back-of-the-envelope” calculation estimating the scales of various harms and proposed remedies) to back this up. As I wrote in Why Not Effective Altruism?, I don’t see any in principle barrier to giving an “expected value” analysis of social justice priorities and interventions. But much depends on how you judge it most reasonable to distribute your credence across the range of empirical possibilities. (I would guess that no plausible numbers would actually support making it a major priority, but presumably some people out there must think that I’m wrong about that?)

(3) Insofar as it turns out to be good and worthwhile to prioritize addressing social justice issues to some degree, it’s important not to conflate that with endorsement of the toxic epistemic and dialectical practices characteristic of “woke” intellectual culture (cancellation, guilt-by-association tactics, extreme hostility towards anyone who dares to openly question their assumptions, etc.). The latter practices are simply awful, and need to stop.

It’s not good for a cause for its intellectual culture to be so epistemically vicious. (Because most people within any given ideology are still seriously wrong about a lot of important things, perhaps the single most important trait for any ideology to have is to promote critical inquiry, so as to allow itself to be improved upon. But woke culture sharply delimits, in advance of inquiry, which questions it allows to be asked. That’s messed up.) I expect that a more traditionally “liberal” approach to social justice—more Obama, less Kendi—would do far more good.

1. I anticipate that many academic colleagues would wish to yell at me or otherwise respond with immense hostility for my writing such a moderate sentence as the one in which this note appears. I take this to further illustrate the deep ideological rot at the heart of woke intellectual culture. How can you call yourself an intellectual if you won’t tolerate honest, good-faith questions from colleagues who question your assumptions? (Or if you can’t even recognize that such questions could be asked with honest good faith in the first place?)