Postmodern theorists deny the possibility of a direct, unmediated link between sign (the word "tree", say) and signified (the oak at the bottom of my garden). It is this (developed by Saussure and others) that forms the substrate to the claim that reality is constructed via language. No-one denies the claim that languages are cultural constructs (although all humans do indeed have what Steven Pinker calls "the language instinct"; what we don't have is a reading instinct - reading must be taught explicitly).
This construction point - a weakness in the link between sign and signified - can appear to be what lawyers call "trivially true": if an Australian visualises a tree, he is likely to picture one of the eucalypts; an Englishman on oak or birch, for example. All are trees, however, the link is direct and unmediated.
Further examples of the same thing can be found in the word "liberty" (derived from Latin) and "freedom" (derived from Anglo-Saxon). It's possible to make a trivial "postmodern" point by observing that in the Romance languages, "liberty" and "libertine" share the same root (Latin "liber"), which means the associations are less positive than they are with English freedom.
People have built entire elaborate theories based on what are really very slight insights: the same sort of reasoning underlies Butler's claims about gender as performance, something not rooted in anything other than language.
[My apologies to everyone else on this substack for that lengthy explanation; for my sins, as I say in the Doyle piece, I once had to study this ridiculous guff.]
But not transitory structures to create those reproductive abilities. One of the features of Homo sapiens is how long we live after menopause. (Technically, how long female Homo sapiens live after menopause, but males match it, if they survive to that point.)
We see attributes related to XX or XY even in infants. We assign those attributes to words boy/girl- male/female. Is not sexual identity not formed at birth in spite of an inability to actualize that identity?
Do you say that because Marxism (as a philosophy) requires strong belief and ignoring its negative impacts, or because Marxism (as economics) involves the transfer of resources from workers and producers to those who don't produce?
I say Marxism is religion-like because it grounds its claims to motivating moral authority in a transformational future, and there is no information from the future. So, the future becomes a source of divine authority—authority from a realm from which there is no reliable feedback. As you will see, I argue that it is that template which has been transferred and evolved into “wokery”, rather than the content of Marxism.
Thanks for a beginning. Somehow we arrived at the polarization of an all or nothing state. Countering woke seems to be an ongoing struggle that will take many years. Clearly appeasement doesn't work. Mockery does have limited success. But wokery seems to be in process of self-destruction in that one can never be woke enough leading to an extreme that has to cause dissonance.
Marxists say this, but they are opposed to the norms of free thought that the Enlightenment is all about.
American anti-wokes like DeBoer can get away with equivocating between Marxism and Americanism because nobody ever lets him try to actually make his ideas work. He genuinely believes in free speech, but Marz and Engels knew that Socialist freedom is freedom for the collective, and not the individual.
Fascinating and compelling but I parted company at the point where writer says: "Forager societies systematically repress dominance behaviour: by derision, by gossip, by shunning. If need be, by killing."
We have been in societies based on dominance behaviour for 12,000 years or so, following the move from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society. How did we evolve from forager societies with little dominance behaviour into 'civilisations', where dominance behaviour is rewarded and admired? The quote in full is this:
Such a process of killing off the alpha males has both archaeological evidence (larger males with bashed-in skulls) and anthropological evidence. Forager societies systematically repress dominance behaviour: by derision, by gossip, by shunning. If need be, by killing.
Dominance, top-down status, is the normal form of status in group-living mammals, including our primate cousins. Systematic selection against dominance by killing off alpha males led to the evolution of two other forms of status among us Homo sapiens. One is prestige: status through competence; through demonstrated capacity; through successful risk-taking. Young human males in particular are prone to seek such status.
There is a big difference in the dominance you are pointing out (which absolutely exists) and the dominance of the primate alpha male. While both can have their coalitional aspects to them, the latter rely on a level of social complexity orders of magnitude greater. So, it is very much about the development of states and chiefdoms.
After all, we have a technical name for those Homo sapien males who most exemplify the characteristics of a primate alpha male. We call them serial killers.
For instance, there is quite a difference between the Melanesian “Big Man”, who uses charisma and capacity, and the Polynesian Chief, who sits on top of hereditary authority. The latter is far more dominant, but is so because of precisely the structure of social authority he sits on top of.
Thnks for taking the trouble to reply. I'm a big fan of Human Behavioral Biology as outlined by Robert Sapolsky and I thought the key thing about the primate alpha male is that he avoids fighting unless he has to. For the rest it's about personality and settling disputes among the tearaways, etc. Maybe I need a decent book recommendation on the topic?
Storr’s The Status Game. Anything by Richard Wrangham. (I haven’t read his books, but I have read many of his scholarly articles.) The article in the references is a good place to start.
He was on Jordan B Peterson Podcast - Primatologist Explains the 1% Difference Between Humans & Apes | Richard Wrangham | EP 249 - September 2021. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAifu7lu8TU&t=328
The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It by Will Storr
Beta males systematically killed off the alpha males. They used proactive aggression to systematically kill off the most reactively aggressive. Proactive and reactive aggression use different brain circuits, so the selection process was intense. Creating Homo sapiens, the most gracile of the humans.
We are the primate that murdered its way into being nicer. Homo sapiens in a nutshell.
I've been meaning to give this a close look for a while, and I didn't have time until now. If this is the start of the book, it will need to be tightly edited; with that in mind, here are my suggestions, marked out with *asterisks*:
___________
Homo sapiens are the most cooperative of primates.
We evolved cooperative subsistence strategies because we became predators without rending claws or killing jaws. We became apex predators through *the development of* tools and cooperation.
We started down this path before we became human. Our Australopithecine ancestors used stones to smash open bones to extract their marrow and skulls to scoop out the brains. Bones and skulls leftover from the kills of African predators. (Pause for image of our Australopithecine ancestors staggering across the savannah in search of “brains! brains!”.) We moved on to doing our own kills and cooking them around shared fires. *I'd rework this; it feels too early for the joke, and exclamation points come off as very informal in this hemisphere, which feels jarring next to the formal language in the next paragraph*
Our Neanderthal cousins (who are also, to a small extent, our ancestors) were as carnivorous as wolves, hyenas and lions while also, like all humans, being highly adaptable in their dietary strategies. Neanderthal carnivory may be somewhat over-stated by the level of stable isotopes in their collagen, as they also ate carnivores. Still, cooperative tool-making and use was crucial to their subsistence strategy, as it was for all human ancestors.
We humans also evolved cooperative reproduction strategies. It takes almost 20 years for a human forager child to attain the skills to forage as many calories as it consumes. *This is not true. In the jungles, rainforests, and eastern areas of the continents where rainfall is abundant year round, food is plentiful and easily obtained even by neonates: "children can be independent foragers well before maturity, given the right socioecological conditions." See https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn9889 for more.
It became evolutionarily advantageous for a mother to survive for around 15-20 years after the birth of her last surviving child, creating lengthy post-menopausal survival. Such survival allowed her to invest effort in her children’s children.
The evolutionary pressure to produce bipedal pelvises *better: pelvises adapted to bipedality* structured for energy-efficient, long-distance running to run down prey to exhaustion interacted with the evolutionary pressure for larger brains, creating unusually risky childbirth and unusually helpless infants. We evolved so that much of our brain growth was postponed until after birth. Brain size was not confined to what could pass through a bipedal pelvis.
Human babies spend about 40 per cent of their calories feeding their growing brains. They are helpless brain casings with attached feeding and elimination mechanisms.
Long childhoods meant that birthing another child could not be delayed until the previous child was a juvenile, as other primates do. Otherwise, the gap between children would be far too long for a viable reproduction strategy. A human mother came to care for children of different ages at the same time.
Such vulnerable late pregnancies, helpless infants, long childhoods and “stacked” children meant that risks had to be transferred away from child-rearing. Successful human child-raising became a cooperative, risk-transferring, strategy. *This is* Something that not only all human societies do, but is, in all cases, one of their fundamental features.
Beginning this article (and thus series) with a discussion of evolutionary biology has certainly piqued my interest...
I've always been a proponent of breaking the chains of myopic, Western-centric thinking, and one of the easiest ways to do this is utilizing the tactic you've done here which is going straight to the biological and evolutionary context.
That helps cut away the "everyone thinks like us" blindspot so many Westerners have.
That said, while many responses to this article on "wokeism" debate its relationship to Marxism or the religious aspects of woke ideology, I find these debates have been covered for years, and at this point can only bear so much 'new fruit'.
For me, a more enjoyable recent focus would be on the composition of the ethnic and economic coalitions that form the backbone of woke ideology.
In an attempt to explicate this, I'll mention three or perhaps four main factions driving wokeism in the West.
The first faction consists of affluent, highly educated women.
This demographic is the springboard for movements like MeToo and is a major source of anti-white male rhetoric, particularly as it relates to their perceived indiscretions on reaching gender parity in the socioeconomic sphere. This 'wing' of the Woke Faction has particular strength in places like education - school teachers, professors, authors - and forms the cultural indoctrination arm of the movement.
The second cornerstone of woke ideology is comprised of aggrieved minorities, led most notably by Black folks.
The influence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) here is significant, and it is by far the most well-known and influential organization in 'Classical 21st Century Wokeism'... its reach extends to all other racial and ethnic groups adopting similar anti-white rhetoric.
For example, using a similar BLM "protect Black bodies" or "Black representations matter" framing, South Asians have peppered radioactive discourse in the UK by simply replacing 'Black' with the relatively new shorthand "Brown". Consider the pronouncements of Scotland's current first minister, Humza Yousaf, or London's mayor, Sadiq Khan. Both echo sentiments similar to black liberation movements but framed within their own ethnic contexts.
The third faction is the LGBTQ community, which until recently has been predominantly an affluent, white Western phenomenon.
If anything, countries in sub-Saharan Africa (see: Uganda) and the Middle East (see: Qatar World Cup controversy) are actually ramping UP their positions against this faction.
This identity-focused rhetoric is pervasive, especially among younger people in the U.S. who 'need' to be part of the mainstream Woke movement and thus they can simply 'identify' as something new, and they're part of the in-group.
The last faction, albeit not as overt but equally (if not more) powerful, consists of the wealthy elite advocating for forced diversity initiatives, often divorced from real-world implications for the "commoners."
This seems to be much of the group discussed in this article.
Given the complexity of these factions and their interrelations, a more detailed exploration is not just a luxury but a necessity... I'll probably write something else up myself on all of this as well.
I'll be awaiting your next piece with keen interest.
As always, thank you for sharing your insights; they're invaluable for readers like me who are still navigating these intricate social dynamics.
Wokeness bears all the hallmarks of fundamentalist religion...which, of course, it is.
Postmodern theorists deny the possibility of a direct, unmediated link between sign (the word "tree", say) and signified (the oak at the bottom of my garden). It is this (developed by Saussure and others) that forms the substrate to the claim that reality is constructed via language. No-one denies the claim that languages are cultural constructs (although all humans do indeed have what Steven Pinker calls "the language instinct"; what we don't have is a reading instinct - reading must be taught explicitly).
This construction point - a weakness in the link between sign and signified - can appear to be what lawyers call "trivially true": if an Australian visualises a tree, he is likely to picture one of the eucalypts; an Englishman on oak or birch, for example. All are trees, however, the link is direct and unmediated.
Further examples of the same thing can be found in the word "liberty" (derived from Latin) and "freedom" (derived from Anglo-Saxon). It's possible to make a trivial "postmodern" point by observing that in the Romance languages, "liberty" and "libertine" share the same root (Latin "liber"), which means the associations are less positive than they are with English freedom.
People have built entire elaborate theories based on what are really very slight insights: the same sort of reasoning underlies Butler's claims about gender as performance, something not rooted in anything other than language.
[My apologies to everyone else on this substack for that lengthy explanation; for my sins, as I say in the Doyle piece, I once had to study this ridiculous guff.]
But not transitory structures to create those reproductive abilities. One of the features of Homo sapiens is how long we live after menopause. (Technically, how long female Homo sapiens live after menopause, but males match it, if they survive to that point.)
We see attributes related to XX or XY even in infants. We assign those attributes to words boy/girl- male/female. Is not sexual identity not formed at birth in spite of an inability to actualize that identity?
I call it creating mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth.
Wokeness is the current incarnation of Marxism, which is the most successful branch of atheism.
Do you say that because Marxism (as a philosophy) requires strong belief and ignoring its negative impacts, or because Marxism (as economics) involves the transfer of resources from workers and producers to those who don't produce?
I say Marxism is religion-like because it grounds its claims to motivating moral authority in a transformational future, and there is no information from the future. So, the future becomes a source of divine authority—authority from a realm from which there is no reliable feedback. As you will see, I argue that it is that template which has been transferred and evolved into “wokery”, rather than the content of Marxism.
Fantastic opening salvo, you two. So looking forward to the next.
Happy New Year,
Me
The discussion of hominid evolution at the beginning of this is so fascinating.
26 part? That's a book!
Thanks for a beginning. Somehow we arrived at the polarization of an all or nothing state. Countering woke seems to be an ongoing struggle that will take many years. Clearly appeasement doesn't work. Mockery does have limited success. But wokery seems to be in process of self-destruction in that one can never be woke enough leading to an extreme that has to cause dissonance.
Which may simply mean that more strategically effective versions of it will be socially selected for.
I suppose some will buy the refinements. But still the nihilism can't persist, I hope.
"Counter-Enlightenment Progressivism" is an excellent coinage. But it's broad enough to include old+school Marxism.
From the topic of your next essayl, can I guess that is intentional?
Marxism is an Enlightenment project. That is why various Marxists (e.g. Hobsbawn, Eagelton, DeBoer), despise “wokery”, PoMo and identity politics.
Marxists say this, but they are opposed to the norms of free thought that the Enlightenment is all about.
American anti-wokes like DeBoer can get away with equivocating between Marxism and Americanism because nobody ever lets him try to actually make his ideas work. He genuinely believes in free speech, but Marz and Engels knew that Socialist freedom is freedom for the collective, and not the individual.
Correct. Marxism is inherently totalitarian. And it creates a template that has since been adopted and adapted for different sets of doctrines.
Fascinating and compelling but I parted company at the point where writer says: "Forager societies systematically repress dominance behaviour: by derision, by gossip, by shunning. If need be, by killing."
We have been in societies based on dominance behaviour for 12,000 years or so, following the move from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society. How did we evolve from forager societies with little dominance behaviour into 'civilisations', where dominance behaviour is rewarded and admired? The quote in full is this:
Such a process of killing off the alpha males has both archaeological evidence (larger males with bashed-in skulls) and anthropological evidence. Forager societies systematically repress dominance behaviour: by derision, by gossip, by shunning. If need be, by killing.
Dominance, top-down status, is the normal form of status in group-living mammals, including our primate cousins. Systematic selection against dominance by killing off alpha males led to the evolution of two other forms of status among us Homo sapiens. One is prestige: status through competence; through demonstrated capacity; through successful risk-taking. Young human males in particular are prone to seek such status.
There is a big difference in the dominance you are pointing out (which absolutely exists) and the dominance of the primate alpha male. While both can have their coalitional aspects to them, the latter rely on a level of social complexity orders of magnitude greater. So, it is very much about the development of states and chiefdoms.
After all, we have a technical name for those Homo sapien males who most exemplify the characteristics of a primate alpha male. We call them serial killers.
For instance, there is quite a difference between the Melanesian “Big Man”, who uses charisma and capacity, and the Polynesian Chief, who sits on top of hereditary authority. The latter is far more dominant, but is so because of precisely the structure of social authority he sits on top of.
Thnks for taking the trouble to reply. I'm a big fan of Human Behavioral Biology as outlined by Robert Sapolsky and I thought the key thing about the primate alpha male is that he avoids fighting unless he has to. For the rest it's about personality and settling disputes among the tearaways, etc. Maybe I need a decent book recommendation on the topic?
Storr’s The Status Game. Anything by Richard Wrangham. (I haven’t read his books, but I have read many of his scholarly articles.) The article in the references is a good place to start.
Thanks: those refs are helpful. Here are some more that I've found.
The paper you ref is here: Two types of aggression in human evolution by Richard Wrangham www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1713611115
He was on Jordan B Peterson Podcast - Primatologist Explains the 1% Difference Between Humans & Apes | Richard Wrangham | EP 249 - September 2021. www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAifu7lu8TU&t=328
The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It by Will Storr
www.goodreads.com/book/show/58642436-the-status-game
The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham
Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence by Richard Wrangham, Dale Peterson
Beta males systematically killed off the alpha males. They used proactive aggression to systematically kill off the most reactively aggressive. Proactive and reactive aggression use different brain circuits, so the selection process was intense. Creating Homo sapiens, the most gracile of the humans.
We are the primate that murdered its way into being nicer. Homo sapiens in a nutshell.
I've been meaning to give this a close look for a while, and I didn't have time until now. If this is the start of the book, it will need to be tightly edited; with that in mind, here are my suggestions, marked out with *asterisks*:
___________
Homo sapiens are the most cooperative of primates.
We evolved cooperative subsistence strategies because we became predators without rending claws or killing jaws. We became apex predators through *the development of* tools and cooperation.
We started down this path before we became human. Our Australopithecine ancestors used stones to smash open bones to extract their marrow and skulls to scoop out the brains. Bones and skulls leftover from the kills of African predators. (Pause for image of our Australopithecine ancestors staggering across the savannah in search of “brains! brains!”.) We moved on to doing our own kills and cooking them around shared fires. *I'd rework this; it feels too early for the joke, and exclamation points come off as very informal in this hemisphere, which feels jarring next to the formal language in the next paragraph*
Our Neanderthal cousins (who are also, to a small extent, our ancestors) were as carnivorous as wolves, hyenas and lions while also, like all humans, being highly adaptable in their dietary strategies. Neanderthal carnivory may be somewhat over-stated by the level of stable isotopes in their collagen, as they also ate carnivores. Still, cooperative tool-making and use was crucial to their subsistence strategy, as it was for all human ancestors.
We humans also evolved cooperative reproduction strategies. It takes almost 20 years for a human forager child to attain the skills to forage as many calories as it consumes. *This is not true. In the jungles, rainforests, and eastern areas of the continents where rainfall is abundant year round, food is plentiful and easily obtained even by neonates: "children can be independent foragers well before maturity, given the right socioecological conditions." See https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abn9889 for more.
It became evolutionarily advantageous for a mother to survive for around 15-20 years after the birth of her last surviving child, creating lengthy post-menopausal survival. Such survival allowed her to invest effort in her children’s children.
The evolutionary pressure to produce bipedal pelvises *better: pelvises adapted to bipedality* structured for energy-efficient, long-distance running to run down prey to exhaustion interacted with the evolutionary pressure for larger brains, creating unusually risky childbirth and unusually helpless infants. We evolved so that much of our brain growth was postponed until after birth. Brain size was not confined to what could pass through a bipedal pelvis.
Human babies spend about 40 per cent of their calories feeding their growing brains. They are helpless brain casings with attached feeding and elimination mechanisms.
Long childhoods meant that birthing another child could not be delayed until the previous child was a juvenile, as other primates do. Otherwise, the gap between children would be far too long for a viable reproduction strategy. A human mother came to care for children of different ages at the same time.
Such vulnerable late pregnancies, helpless infants, long childhoods and “stacked” children meant that risks had to be transferred away from child-rearing. Successful human child-raising became a cooperative, risk-transferring, strategy. *This is* Something that not only all human societies do, but is, in all cases, one of their fundamental features.
Beginning this article (and thus series) with a discussion of evolutionary biology has certainly piqued my interest...
I've always been a proponent of breaking the chains of myopic, Western-centric thinking, and one of the easiest ways to do this is utilizing the tactic you've done here which is going straight to the biological and evolutionary context.
That helps cut away the "everyone thinks like us" blindspot so many Westerners have.
That said, while many responses to this article on "wokeism" debate its relationship to Marxism or the religious aspects of woke ideology, I find these debates have been covered for years, and at this point can only bear so much 'new fruit'.
For me, a more enjoyable recent focus would be on the composition of the ethnic and economic coalitions that form the backbone of woke ideology.
In an attempt to explicate this, I'll mention three or perhaps four main factions driving wokeism in the West.
The first faction consists of affluent, highly educated women.
This demographic is the springboard for movements like MeToo and is a major source of anti-white male rhetoric, particularly as it relates to their perceived indiscretions on reaching gender parity in the socioeconomic sphere. This 'wing' of the Woke Faction has particular strength in places like education - school teachers, professors, authors - and forms the cultural indoctrination arm of the movement.
The second cornerstone of woke ideology is comprised of aggrieved minorities, led most notably by Black folks.
The influence of Black Lives Matter (BLM) here is significant, and it is by far the most well-known and influential organization in 'Classical 21st Century Wokeism'... its reach extends to all other racial and ethnic groups adopting similar anti-white rhetoric.
For example, using a similar BLM "protect Black bodies" or "Black representations matter" framing, South Asians have peppered radioactive discourse in the UK by simply replacing 'Black' with the relatively new shorthand "Brown". Consider the pronouncements of Scotland's current first minister, Humza Yousaf, or London's mayor, Sadiq Khan. Both echo sentiments similar to black liberation movements but framed within their own ethnic contexts.
The third faction is the LGBTQ community, which until recently has been predominantly an affluent, white Western phenomenon.
If anything, countries in sub-Saharan Africa (see: Uganda) and the Middle East (see: Qatar World Cup controversy) are actually ramping UP their positions against this faction.
This identity-focused rhetoric is pervasive, especially among younger people in the U.S. who 'need' to be part of the mainstream Woke movement and thus they can simply 'identify' as something new, and they're part of the in-group.
The last faction, albeit not as overt but equally (if not more) powerful, consists of the wealthy elite advocating for forced diversity initiatives, often divorced from real-world implications for the "commoners."
This seems to be much of the group discussed in this article.
Given the complexity of these factions and their interrelations, a more detailed exploration is not just a luxury but a necessity... I'll probably write something else up myself on all of this as well.
I'll be awaiting your next piece with keen interest.
As always, thank you for sharing your insights; they're invaluable for readers like me who are still navigating these intricate social dynamics.