Hacker News Reader

Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

I think "wokeness" comes not so much from "safetyism" but from a generation who were educated to be critical of their own society. They were raised and educated by ex-hippies, who had successfully critiqued the post-war US. I think this was a pedagogical crime (raising children to be critical). Every generation is supposed to critique its predecessor but teaching critique to children from a young age robbed them of the opportunity to level a critique from their own, unique perspective.

This is why "wokeness" strikes so many as performative: it's desperately trying to recreate the greatest hits of the 20th century protest movements. An example of this is schools having scheduled protests (say, for gun control). Ironically, in this situation, the only genuine protest is to refuse to attend the protest.

View on HN

This was not my early education experience in an American public school. The history taught to elementary school students circa 2000 was whitewashed to the point of almost being propaganda for American exceptionalism. Yes, later on in my education career I took classes that emphasized critical thinking and deconstructing ideas and texts, and these had a big impact on my worldview. But as a someone on the younger end of the millennial generation, I think collectively we became critical of our society due to the back to back travesties of the Iraq War and the financial crisis (as cliche as that sounds). For me, I have been completely disillusioned to the idea that social progress is inevitable, so I believe it’s well worth learning how to call out regressive ideas and the asymmetrical power structures that exist in our society.

Yes I believe some people take this way too far (and the media capitalizes on this by cherry picking the most egregious examples and using those as a straw man to represent all of left wing thinking), but on the other hand I don’t think we should accept the status quo. On Hackernews, we usually strive to look for better ways to solve problems or to solve problems people didn’t even know they had, so I don’t see why we should accept the organization of society as either a global maximum or as static and immutable. It’s something that should be hacked and improved upon like anything else. As you can tell, my experiences have culminated in my adoption of a liberal worldview (more moderate on a few ideas, radical on a handful) but I can see how different life experiences could lead someone to adopt a different ideology. My biggest frustration currently is the status quo bias of mainstream American thought where we just ignore the existence of inconvenient problems. If you think less government activity will solve a problem, I’m glad to hear you out as long as your argument is in good faith.

> This is why "wokeness" strikes so many as performative

I think part of the reason is many of the talking points I would call "ominous". Take for example the Civil Rights movement or Women's Suffrage. Looking back at them, they had clear goals and clear talking points, you could read their message and see where they were trying to go, what their ultimate goal was.

Wokeness on the other hand does not seem to have the same goals. Take the classic "ending systemic racism" goal. Ok fine, lets end systemic racism, how do we start? Where can we find it? On you see, if you don't know what systemic racism is then you have no hope of solving it. Oh you see, you're white so systemic racism is in you, so it's not a problem that you can solve.

I would say that unlike previous movements, the goal of Wokeness isn't to solve a problem in society, it's a "movement" you join for likes on Instagram, comments on Facebook, and upvotes on Reddit.

It's funny, because when it came to women's suffrage and the later waves of feminism, people would write the exact same thing you did when referring to the patriarchy - willfully misunderstanding, or not even bothering to understand what was being talked about, to ridicule it as "too nebulous" to deal with, or some sort of conspiracy that people were deliberately participating to, in an attempt to dismiss it out of hand as an "attack" - and someone commented as much in this same thread.

I agree that teaching kids to be critical of one sliver of reality, while uncritically absorbing anything from another sliver is a pedagogical crime. What we ought to be teaching is critical thinking.

Kids need to be socialized in the ideas and values that make their civilization successful. Critical thinking is one piece of that, but we focus too much on it in elite environs. We also need to teach kids to tend to the edifice of civilization we’ve built, not just how to tear pieces of it down.

This really struck a chord with me as a parent of two toddlers.

“Tear things down” is practically the toddler core competency!

What does it mean for a civilization to be “successful”? The vast majority of our progress has been made off of exploration, slavery and war. The latter fueling the entire tech industry starting with the code cracking computers of WWII and the nuclear holocaust survivable internet. Who is working the mines for the materials in our iPhones, and under what conditions?

It’s worthwhile to teach children the true history of progress and ask if perhaps there isn’t a better way.

It’s almost as if history and humanity is messy, and doesn’t fit into a tidy little box. There has never been a system that was built from the ground up on flawless, utopian principles. The success of our system can be argued in a myriad ways; likewise the failures. I want my kids to understand the greatness of our civilization while doing their part to correct it’s shortcomings. It’s one of my goals, and I hope they take up the mantle.

I hope you’re teaching them the truth behind the origin of the technology and systems of our world. Otherwise you’re spreading ignorance.

Complaining about “wokeness” is to be willfully stupid. Your kids will find out the truth, even if you try to hide it from them.

> We also need to teach kids to tend to the edifice of civilization we’ve built

The truth of that depends entirely on whether that civilization's "success" is something that either can or should be sustained, and that's the assumption that most "woke" people challenge. Very few seek to tear down any part of it without having carefully considered whether it really contributes to long term success.

I agree with your broad outline, but have a very minor quibble with one word: "hippies". I think that, even in the 60s, there was a bit of a distinction to be made between the "hippies" and the "radicals" -- not that there wasn't overlap. My impression is that the "hippies" were less militantly political, borrowed more (superficially) from Eastern religion, were more relaxed, and came in back-to-the-land varieties. They would have scored high on "agreeableness". Their music would have featured strumming guitars.

Whereas the radicals were more academic, more willing to engage in violence, with a variety of aesthetics that, overall, leaned more towards Black Panther berets (the real Panthers, not the superhero), than toward faux-Hindu paraphernalia. They would very much not have scored high on agreeableness. Their music then would have been funk, in the 90s would have been rap, and now is pop which features, not the relaxed strumming of a guitar, but a marching 4/4 (maybe even a snare).

And, in my imagination, the typical "person on the Right" had a tendency to conflate the two.

If you were watching Scooby-Doo, you'd suspect that Scooby and Shaggy were hippies, Velma was a radical, Fred was a little "Right", and Daphne was just a normcore moderate.

Anyway, the split is still with us today. "Mindfulness" and pop-yoga come from the hippies. Ski-/granola-bro is descended from the hippies. #vanlife borrows a ton from them too, including the VW vans (when they can get them). Permaculture comes from the back-to-the-land branches, and, though mostly "liberal", has even now grown its own somewhat "conservative" branches. And you sense a lot of residual "hippyness" throughout California.

Whereas "woke" stuff -- well, we've been talking about it nonstop for the past five years, so I probably don't need to describe it more. Point is, it's not like the hippy-descended stuff of the last paragraph. It's less Stuart Brand, more Focault and Fanon.

And you know -- I said that "red-state" people couldn't distinguish them. But probably low-tier "blue-state" people can't either. Which might explain some of what's going on.

You may have a point. I’ve always seen it as a desperate attempt to be on the right side of history, but there are so few causes of importance left. Of course, with post-modernism and linguistic relativity added to the mix.

Yeah agree, it’s a need to feel like they are making a change and a desire for moral superiority.

It’s sort of interesting it happened so hard with this generation, there must have been some tipping point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com