Q: What is the best way to help save Western Civilization?
A: Buy Mike Huemer’s new book, Progressive Myths. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DFCK4WWB, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1146220600) See tomorrow’s post (in the “Books” section) for more details.
Q: That sounds a bit dramatic. Are you sure that’s really true?
A: The only way to find out is to buy the book.
Q: What is threatening Western civilization? Is it nuclear war? Misaligned AI? Global warming?
A: Meh. I mean, sure, nuclear war could be bad. But the real problem is contemporary woke, progressive ideology.
Q: Wow. What is this ideology?
A: Basically, Wokism views America and the West as deeply unjust, oppressive, racist, sexist, etc. It blames “cis-het” (cisgender, heterosexual) white men for this evil. It is also the source of cancel culture, a phenomenon in which hysterical, ignorant mobs try to ruin the lives of people who harbor forbidden thoughts.
Progressivism is a broader set of views, which includes wokeness but also includes some other left-wing ideas, such as climate alarmism and opposition to capitalism.
Q: Sounds silly. But how is it a threat to Western civilization?
A: A few things. (i) It sows discord by teaching people that their true “identity” is some particular group within society (based on race, gender, etc.), and that some other group within society is their group’s enemy. (ii) It undermines loyalty and trust in Western civilization by teaching that the foundation of Western civilization is oppression and evil. (iii) It attacks the norms of free expression that are essential to the pursuit of truth as well as the peaceful resolution of disputes. (iv) It attacks the norms of meritocracy and individualism that are essential to the prosperity of our society.
Q: Wow, that sounds bad. But isn’t Wokism just a fringe view of a few inconsequential crazies in the universities? Surely it doesn’t have any real influence on our society.
A: That’s what moderate, old-school Democrats would like to think. They don’t want to have to criticize anyone on “their side”, so they try to make excuses and minimize the problem. In Progressive Myths, you’ll see many quotations indicating how prominent, influential sources spread false, woke propaganda. You’ll see mainstream news sources making factually false reports to support the woke narrative about a given story. You’ll see public officials, up to and including the President, helping to spread these false narratives. You’ll see academic researchers mischaracterizing academic research or suppressing information to support progressive narratives.
Woke progressivism has taken over huge swaths of the nation’s educational system, its media, and its entertainment industries. This ideology has been dictating what normal people learn about our society, and woke people have zero concern for objectivity; they have no problem whatsoever with blatant propaganda, suppression of dissent, and deception.
Here’s a news item that didn’t make it into the book (from the center-left source, Bloomberg news):
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/
In 2021, the year after the George Floyd protests, the S&P 100 companies hired >300,000 new employees. (These are 100 huge companies that appear in the S&P 100 stock market index. They include the likes of Apple, Amazon, Bank of America, Chevron, etc.) Of these new employees, just 6% were white; the other 94% were “POC”s (“people of color”, as the woke refer to non-white people). Bear in mind that about 60% of the country are white. This is obvious and extreme racial discrimination, and it’s obviously driven by the Woke scapegoating of white people.*
[[ *Update: Apparently, the Bloomberg article is very misleading. They didn’t mean that 94% of new hires were minorities; they don’t know how many new people were hired or how many people left. They only know the net change in # of employees. The 94% is just the net increase in POC employees divided by the total net increase in employees. If a lot of white people left and were replaced by a representative mix of white and minority employees, that could lead to a very high % figure here. ]]
Of course, this is blatantly illegal under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the woke progressives don’t care. They reject the Civil Rights Act; they think racial discrimination is great, as long as it targets the right group. And they have no fear of anyone actually enforcing the law against them, because the people whose job is to enforce that law are themselves woke ideologues, who will only enforce the law against “the other side”, not against their own side.
Btw, Republicans hold roughly half of elected offices in the U.S., but the bureaucracy is mainly leftists, and leftists, as a rule, will not do anything against other leftists. Even moderates who privately know that the wokists are insane will generally not speak up, and they certainly won’t (if they are in a position to do so) do something so rash as trying to take legal action against woke causes. The Woke now control most of the government and most of our large companies, in addition to almost all of our information-producing institutions.
Q: I dunno, what’s so great about Western civilization? Why not burn it down?
A: Our current society is vastly better than the situation of almost all people throughout human history, on almost all dimensions of human well-being. I won’t go into detail here, but this is discussed more in the book. For now, let’s just say that most people in history lived lives of constant hardship, danger, physical suffering, oppression, and fear of violence. Contemporary America is a Shangri-La of which people in most of the world and almost all of history could not even dream. The progressives living in this paradise are so thoroughly sheltered that they cannot even comprehend what actual hardship is. If they had to experience a day of life in the Middle Ages, or North Korea today, they’d probably die.
And this is relevant, because if we disrupt our current society in a large way, the most likely result is “regression to the mean”; that is, a move back toward the normal state of humanity, which is state of abject misery.
The minimum “social science” education of every Westerner should include this knowledge, so that everyone appreciates what we currently have and is not eager to throw it away. But discussion of the greatness of our civilization is anathema to the woke progressives.
[[ Digression
Q: You sound like a MAGA Republican. Trump hates Wokism, and you hate Wokism, so you must be allies, right?
A: God, no.
Q: What? What don’t you love about Trump??
A: I’m for preserving America and Western civilization, not disrupting them. Trump and the Woke left are both for disrupting our society and undermining its core institutions. Both are sowing discord and undermining social trust in their own ways. ]]
Q: Okay, let’s say woke progressivism is a threat. How can we combat it?
A: Buy my book. (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DFCK4WWB, https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/1146220600)
Q: Right, of course. But how does your book combat woke progressivism?
A: I expose some of the myths that progressives have been using to spread their ideology.
Q: Like what?
A: Like the myth that unarmed black people are frequently murdered by white people out of pure racism. That women get paid 30% less than men for the same work due to sexism. That global warming is shortly going to destroy human civilization. That most rich people get rich by inheritance, and that it’s almost impossible to get ahead in America once you’re born poor.
Q: I guess that seems kind of useful. But that doesn’t prove in general that America and the West aren’t oppressive. Won’t woke people just say that there are some other ways in which we’re horrible, or some other evidence of our racism and sexism?
A: Yes, they definitely will. Wokists are almost impervious to evidence. If you rebut one of their examples, they’ll just shift to some other alleged example, without at all diminishing their confidence in their general claims about how horrible our society is.
Q: So you have to refute all of their examples of how our society is evil?
A: No, that would be impossible. The underlying ideological claim is too broad, and there is an unlimited range of things that someone might say in support of such a broad claim.
Q: So then how can you deprogram the Wokists?
A: I think there’s probably no way to do it.
Q: Well, then what good can your stupid book possibly do?
A: I hope that there are some open-minded people who will read it, and it will stop them from becoming woke ideologues.
Q: But since you can’t refute every alleged piece of evidence for Wokism, how can it do that?
A: Once you see 20 examples of progressive deceptions, you should notice the pattern and know not to trust information that people give you to support progressive ideas. Basically, after reading the book, the next time someone tells you some new piece of evidence that supports progressive ideology, your reaction, if you’re rational, should be “I bet that’s BS.” After reading about what actually happened to Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, the next time you hear about an innocent, unarmed black man being murdered by a white racist, your initial thought should be, “Yeah, I bet that’s not what happened.” Of course, initial media reports might turn out to be accurate, so don’t completely rule that out. But more likely they aren’t.
Q: I guess that makes sense. Then why won’t that work on people who are already Woke?
A: Basically because most of them have already adopted certain belief-system defenses that prevent them from revising their belief system. For example, they actually believe that it is morally wrong to question the woke worldview. And you can’t argue them out of that belief either, because they think it would be immoral for them to seriously entertain your arguments.
Q: Okay, I’ll read your book. What do I do after I that?
A: Give it to someone else to read.
Q: Okay, cool. And then what?
A: Give it to a third person.
Q: Okay, and what do I do after I’ve already given it to everyone I know who might benefit from it?
A: I don’t know. That’s as far as I’ve gotten in my plan. Someone else will have to take it from there.
I think you are misrepresenting the statistic in the Bloomberg article, although that's partly the fault of the author of the article. The 6% statistic refers to the fractional net change in employees rather than the fraction of those that were hired. There was a net change of 320k employees, that is 320k more people were hired than who quit or were fired. Simultaneously, there was a net change of 20k for non-hispanic white employees. You can see they are talking about net change rather than new hires by looking at their breakout on change by level of employee, which includes saying there are 19k fewer non-hispanic white employees in less-senior roles.
The main thing this statistic shows is that people hired in 2021 were less often non-hispanic white than the people who quit or were fired. How much less? By a rough estimate about 52% of people who left and 48% of people who were hired were non-hispanic white. I list the details of my estimate below:
The Bloomberg article says that there were 9 million people working at Fortune 100 companies in their dataset. Let's assume 1/3 of them, or 3 million employees, left in 2021, and x% of those who left were non-hispanic white. There is a chart in the article that shows the current racial breakdown by job type. Eyeballing it, it looks like ~52% of current employees are non-hispanic white. I'll assume that the racial breakdown of employees leaving the company matches their current composition, and so x = 52. Since the companies grew by a net of 320k employees, they hired 3 million + 320k = 3.32 million employees in 2021, of which y% were white. We can solve for y using the equation 3.32y - 3*.52 = .02. Solving, we get y = 48.
In your book Ethical Intuitionism, you argue the following against Subjectivism: "Its main problem is one of circularity: to know what it is for something to be believed to be F, we must first know what F is. A related problem is the infinite regress: if [x is good] = [I believe x is good], then [I believe x is good] = [I believe (I believe x is good)], and so on.
In general, it is incoherent to postulate a proposition whose truth would consist solely in your believing it. The same point applies to the view that to be good is to be believed to be good by society, or by God, or by anyone else, and the same applies if we substitute 'perceived', 'known', 'asserted', or any other verb for 'believed'. The word 'good' should not appear within the explanation of what it is for x to be good." Do you agree these objections are relevant to some of the concepts of what it is to be a woman in trans-inclusive feminist philosophy?