What’s Wrong with Attacking Our Own Society?
Why Are We Ethnocentric?
Almost all societies have been highly ethnocentric. They teach their members that their own society is the best in the world. That their values, their institutions, and their traditions are the morally correct ones, and better than those of any other society.
Of course, these beliefs are in general false – most societies are not the best. In fact, most have incredibly awful values and practices – throwing virgins into volcanos, attacking neighboring tribes for fun, enslaving people, etc. So why is it that they all seem to be convinced that they are great?
Maybe it’s because cultures that do not strongly endorse themselves are not stable. If people don’t believe their culture is good, they aren’t loyal to the society. They won’t act to preserve it, and they won’t sacrifice their interests to follow the social rules. Maybe those societies fall apart, get taken over by other societies, or just keep changing until they reach a stable, self-endorsing culture. That would explain why we don’t see a lot of highly self-critical human cultures.
How to Undermine Norms
Remember the last post in which I complained about the erosion of norms in our society (https://fakenous.net/?p=2134)? I said norms are eroded by visible and visibly-tolerated norm-violations. Like some of the stuff the last President was doing.
Here is another plausible way of eroding norms: directly, verbally attacking the foundations of one’s own society. Preaching that the society is founded on fundamentally evil values, that large parts of that society have no reason to be loyal to the whole, that its institutions are fundamentally just a sham designed to take advantage of most of its members. One can at the same time sow division by teaching that a certain group or groups in that society are viciously abusing other groups and are the cause of most of the latter groups’ problems.
Why Not Undermine Norms?
Why shouldn’t we undermine the norms and institutions of our society? Briefly, because we, here and now, are living in about the best situation that human beings have ever experienced in the history of our species. Almost all other societies have been violent, impoverished, and generally awful. We (the U.S., Western Europe, and similar nations) enjoy peace, prosperity, freedom, long lives, and opportunity undreamt of by most humans throughout history. (For more, see Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature.) If we tear down our norms and institutions, the most likely result is regression to the mean – that is, a return to the average situation of human societies.
Who Would Do Such a Thing?
There aren’t any prominent elites in our society who are busy undermining our norms and institutions in the way I just described, are there?
Of course there are. Maybe most of the elites, in fact. Think about the 1619 Project. Its point is not simply to combat contemporary racism. Its point is to destroy the image of America for Americans – to convince us that our nation was always evil to its core. We used to teach students that our nation was founded on ideals of freedom and democracy; now we say that injustice and oppression are the foundation of our society.
The 1619 Project isn’t an isolated case. It is in line with the “Woke” narrative about America. It’s just one more example of their story that America is fundamentally evil.
Effects
What effect does this have on Americans? We don’t really know. But it’s plausible that it might have the effect of undermining respect for our norms and institutions. Some people explicitly take America’s allegedly oppressive and evil nature as a justification for rioting and looting. It doesn’t matter that this isn’t a good reason for rioting, etc., because much of human behavior is not terribly rational. After you hear enough messages about how the social system you live in is unjust and doesn’t deserve your loyalty, maybe you start to feel less loyalty to society in general, less respect for social norms in general. That’s especially true if what you’re told is that the society is founded on oppression of your group. So one can expect the Woke narrative to especially undermine respect for our norms and institutions among minorities.
What about conservatives and white people? What effect does the Woke narrative have on them? First, when they see disorder on the part of other groups, that probably encourages them to engage in similar behavior. If leftists are rioting, rightists will soon start rioting, and vice versa. Second, when they hear that their nation’s supposed noble ideals – freedom, democracy, equality, etc. – are all just a sham, that might cause them to revert to some much less idealistic values, like pure tribal loyalty. For most ordinary human beings, turning against their own group is not a live option. If they are told “Your group is inherently racist,” and they believe it, they will sooner embrace racism than renounce their own group. Tribal loyalty is ingrained in the human mind more deeply than loyalty to objective moral values.
All of this is terrible for America. It’s also especially bad for minorities. Success in any society does not flow from rejecting the norms or hating the majority. Those things are pretty sure paths to remaining marginalized and impoverished. That’s why Woke ideology is one of the worst things you could teach to minorities.
Examples
No doubt some people are going to say that they don’t know what I’m talking about, that they’ve never seen any divisive discourse from the left, and that SJW’s have no hostility for the majority of their society. So here are some actual quotations that illustrate what I'm talking about:
“Dumbass f***ing white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
“The world could get by just fine with zero white people.”
--Sarah Jeong, NYT columnist (https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/12/18/acceptable-racism)
"OK, officially, I now hate white people."
--James Livingston, Rutgers University professor (https://dailycaller.com/2018/06/01/rutgers-prof-officially-hate-white-people/)
“All I want for Christmas is white genocide.”
George Ciccariello, Drexel University professor (https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/26/health/drexel-professor-white-genocide-trnd/index.html)
“Some white people may have to die for black communities to be made whole.”
--Irami Osei-Frimpong, University of Georgia grad student TA (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/02/04/u-georgia-grad-student-says-hes-under-investigation-his-comments-about-race-now)
This sort of thing does not bode well for our society, nor for the individuals who pick up those attitudes from the woke elites. You may get by with those attitudes if you're in academia, but they won't serve you well in the wider society, to say nothing of the harmful effects you're likely to have on people around you.
But What if We Are Really Evil?
Surely the right thing isn’t to whitewash history, is it? We can’t lie to students, or pretend that there were never slaves in America. We can’t just forget to mention such a large feature of our history. And what about all the contemporary racism? Surely we have to call it out in order to combat it and thus build a better society?
We can’t lie about the darker parts of our history. But we don’t have to seize every opportunity for self-flagellation either. We could portray ourselves as a nation founded on great ideals, though marred by some terrible inconsistencies. We could say that over the generations, we have worked hard to achieve our ideals, that we have made great progress, and that today we are better at realizing those ideals than the overwhelming majority of societies throughout human history. We could say all that because that’s the actual truth.
Political extremists from both sides would disagree with that; they insist that the country is doing terribly and getting worse. But they basically just think that because they want to. They don’t give our society a fair trial; they go out looking for anything to accuse our society of. They distort facts, cherry pick the worst bits about America, and periodically make up stuff, all to justify outrage, because it is fun to hate on your society. It feels meaningful; it makes you feel like a righteous crusader.
How to Promote Progress
I said our current situation is better than the overwhelming majority of human societies in history. But it still has serious flaws. Some day, hopefully, human beings will look back at us in something like the way we look back at the middle ages – they’ll thank fortune for all the vast progress they’ll have made since our time.
To make that progress, we have to be prepared to criticize our current practices, institutions, and values. How can one do this without undermining social order?
Until recently, I didn’t think about that question. I assumed that one should just frankly describe all the problems one sees. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure what the answer is. I suppose that part of the answer lies in resisting the urge to exaggerate your society’s flaws for the sake of scoring outrage points. Part of it lies in making constructive criticisms – criticizing a specific practice by promoting a feasible alternative that would work better. And part of the answer lies in making clear that one is criticizing society’s flaws from the standpoint of the more fundamental values that we hopefully share.
For instance, when we see 1100 police shootings occurring every year, we shouldn’t say, “See, this just proves that America is horrible, police are horrible, and black people have no chance in America.” We should first stop falsely portraying it as a problem about race or racism (https://fakenous.net/?p=1676).
We should focus on potential solutions, rather than self-hatred, hatred of cops, etc. We have more police shootings than necessary, so here’s something we could try . . . maybe outsource most policing to private security guards? Maybe end qualified immunity? Maybe have body cameras on all officers?
My last suggestion would be this: Our proposals for how to address injustices in our society should not themselves be unjust or chaotic. They should not, e.g., include harming random people or engaging in random acts of violence. I address this to extremists of both the left and the right. Random destruction is extremely unlikely to fix any specific problems that our society has. It just moves us toward chaos.