Posts Tagged ‘inequality’
Vive les bonobos: what is woke?
wokewash?
So the term ‘woke’, which appears to come from the USA, or has gained much of its popularity there, is a bit of a mystery to me. It seems to be a four-letter version of ‘politically correct’ or PC, if perhaps more extreme. I know that the term PC was much in vogue in the 90s, and I recall reading Pinker, in The better angels of our nature, making the reasonable enough claim that political correctness is the small price we may have to pay for living in a civil society. So, taking that on board, I’m prepared to be accepting of wokeness…
So here’s how Wikipedia puts it:
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) meaning “alert to racial prejudice and discrimination”. Beginning in the 2010s, it came to encompass a broader awareness of social inequalities such as sexism, and has also been used as shorthand for American Left ideas involving identity politics and social justice, such as the notion of white privilege and slavery reparations for African Americans.
So given this explanation, and its association with the political left in the USA, it’s no surprise, given the extreme ideological divides there, and to some degree here in Australia, that it has become the right’s new dirtiest word. Criticism of the term has also come from the other side, as some in the African-American community have complained of cultural appropriation. I do find such complaints, which occur not only in regard to language, but also dress, music, cuisine etc, a bit tedious myself. Language, music, food habits and so on tend to spread, adapt and change. They don’t have borders, thankfully.
Wikipedia presents a rich, and quite moving (to me at least) account of the term’s proud history, featuring Leadbelly, the race horrors of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and its wider usage in recent times. It seems to me that this widening usage, and the slangy tone of the word, helps to unite people in being alert to every kind of oppression everywhere, in terms of race, class, gender and lifestyle. A kind of monitory democracy (see previous post) emanating from the underclass, for the most part. And its allies, sometimes mocked, or self-mocked, as ‘social justice warriors’. The moderately conservative socio-political commentator David Brooks wrote that “to be woke is to be radically aware and justifiably paranoid. It is to be cognizant of the rot pervading the power structures”.
So I need to adjust my understanding. it’s not so much about ‘political correctness’, or ‘ideological soundness’, an older term. It’s not so much about watching our own language and ideology and eliminating its elements of prejudice, dismissiveness and mockery. Or about the elite being aware of their privileged status and trying to be more inclusive and ‘generous’. It’s a term born of and owned by the underclass and spreading out to its sympathisers and fellow-travellers.
It’s also a more divisive term than ‘political correctness’, mocked more or less gently by the likes of John Howard in the 90s. That’s because politics itself has become more divisive, not to say toxic, in the USA, the birthplace of the ‘woke’ meme. To the point that legislation is invoked in conservative states to prevent the woke critiques of elitist institutions and practices from gaining traction within the education system and society in general.
One important element of the woke mission, to me, is its critique of ‘American exceptionalism’, about which I’ve written from time to time. The complaint list bears some comparison to the Australian situation, but there are obvious differences. Here are its main issues in regard to race:
a belief that the United States has never been a true democracy; that people of color suffer from systemic and institutional racism; that white Americans experience white privilege; that African Americans deserve reparations for slavery and post-enslavement discrimination; that disparities among racial groups, for instance in certain professions or industries, are automatic evidence of discrimination; that U.S. law enforcement agencies are designed to discriminate against people of color and so should be defunded, disbanded, or heavily reformed…
In Australia, of course, the ‘people of colour’ are also the original inhabitants, with up to 60,000 years’ knowledge of how to survive and thrive on one of the world’s most inhospitable continents. For many decades before the 1960s there was an active governmental policy of ‘soothing the dying pillow’, a concept still seriously advocated by the likes of Shiva Naipaul on visiting the country in the 1980s, but by then attitudes were changing, and more and more articulate indigenous voices were being heard. Currently, an Aboriginal voice to Federal and State Parliaments through the Australian Constitution is being mooted, and a referendum on the matter will be held later this year. It is more than likely to succeed, which will further enhance the status of our indigenous people. As the Indigenous Desert Alliance puts it:
The Voice will enable Indigenous communities to have a direct line of communication with Government, allowing us to offer practical solutions to the unique challenges we face. This is vital for the voices of Indigenous people living in Australia’s desert regions who represent less than one percent of the Australian population but are looking after one third of the Australian land mass.
In the USA, where woke has gone to die, if the alt-right (and not just them) have their way, the First Nations people have also had a rough time of it from the European colonists of the past few hundred years. The warfare, slaughter and dispossession started early, culminating in the Indian Removal Act of 1830. I recall as a young boy reading a history of ‘the wild west’ I received as a Christmas present, and shedding tears at the carnage and betrayal these people experienced over many decades. I was still ignorant at that time about the treatment of Australia’s indigenous peoples.
Needless to say, then, I’m not impressed with the way many people have apparently declared war on ‘woke’ for political purposes. Staying with the USA, a nation that incarcerates more of its own people, per capita, than any other democratic nation, and by a long way, a nation that has the most absurdly lax gun laws in the world, a minimum wage that is less than half that of Australia’s, and considerably greater wealth inequality, as well as a political system screaming out for reform, as I’ve pointed out in many previous posts – that the USA’s conservatives feel that fighting ‘wokism’ is the ‘real issue’ to focus on, is one of many indications of that nation’s apparently permanent ill-health. That’s to say, in the USA there’s plenty to be woke about, but the state of wokeness is probably a sign of good health everywhere. Reading about the history and development of the term, and of the call to Stay Woke, it strikes me as a proud and moving call to recognise injustice and structural inequality, especially in those who suffer from it. So why the negative reaction?
One of the claims of conservatives is that much wokism is mere ‘performative activism’, presumably insincere and self-serving, unless practiced by true sufferers. This would suggest that only victims have the right, or the moral authority, to complain, and not their associates. It’s essentially an ad feminam/hominem argument, and so fails, as it ignores the injustice an sich. Another more general criticism is that of self-righteousness or holier-than-thouism. Again this tends to distract from taking woke criticisms seriously, when in fact structural inequality is everywhere, though the structures may change over time from, say, landed aristocracies and their semi-enslaved tenants, to scions of business heavyweights in their hilltop gated communities and the great unwashed down below.
The USA’s anti-woke movement, which unsurprisingly holds sway among the wealthy and established elites, is seeking to take legislative action against such developments as ‘critical race theory’, which presumably seeks to enlighten young students on the slave trade and other injustices, in the way that my ‘Wild West’ book enlightened me about the dispossession of native Americans and the attempted suppression of their culture. Their idea, in keeping with US jingoism, is that everything has turned out for the better in the best nation ever to have existed in the multiverse.
However, having said that, I do bristle against some of the more extreme examples of wokeness. I’ve written previously about the obsession with the ‘horrors’ of blackface – a person darkening/blackening their skin to impersonate someone, perhaps a hero of theirs, with different levels of melanin and tyrosinase (see below). I’ve also been taken to task by a very woke-to-woke teenager for using the word ‘nigger’ in a second order way, and many years ago I was told that, as a male, I couldn’t be a feminist. Perhaps some females still think that way. To me, these are minor aberrations that I refuse to take seriously. More disturbing, of course, is the hypocrisy of various capitalist enterprises using woke ‘virtue signalling’ while continuing with exploitative practices to maximise shareholder profits. What needs to be highlighted in criticising these enterprises is their practises rather than their signalling.
Unfortunately, anti-wokeism seems to be eclipsing wokeism in the popularity stakes at present. We need to recognise that issues around political correctness are far less important than issues of real disadvantage, exploitation and ethnic discrimination. That makes woke a favourite four-letter word for me, going into the future.
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woke
https://ussromantics.com/category/us-exceptionalism/
https://www.bridgew.edu/stories/2023/united-states-treatment-native-americans
some thoughts on blackface, racism and (maybe) cultural appropriation
a bonobo world? 8 – hunter-gatherers, the agricultural revolution, capitalism and science
We can see that human society, various though it is, has much in common with chimp society. Throughout human history, males have dominated females to an overwhelming degree, and large groups of males have fought to the death over territory, or over which dominant male should vanquish and control the territory of the other. Edward Gibbon’s monumental Decline and fall of the Roman Empire is a tale of 500 years of political intrigue, betrayal and murder in a system where succession was never based on inheritance but only on political power and skill, with the military always prominent.
It’s generally accepted that the ancestors of modern human apes engaged in a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle from at least 2 million years ago. This very successful lifestyle was dominant until the development of agriculture a mere 12,000 years ago. While there’s much debate on the structure of hunter-gatherer societies, the dominant view is that they were more egalitarian than post-agricultural societies, and also chimp societies. Recent research also suggests that the success of the hunter-gatherer system, with its sexual division of labour, enabled Homo sapiens to outcompete Homo neanderthalensis as they spread across the globe. However, it’s unlikely that this lifestyle and social system was invariant across regions or time, and evidence found about one group will not stand for all. Technologies varied, as did diet and climatic conditions. In some of these societies, women joined the hunt, or hunted with other women, depending on the type of quarry being hunted and how the hunt was carried out. Kinship relationships in these early societies tended to be matrilineal, that is, descent through the female line is generally acknowledged, though this had little effect on inheritance among hunter-gatherers, as there is virtually nothing to inherit, except, perhaps, reputation. However, the gradual transition to a settled, agricultural lifestyle created a more routinised existence of digging, sowing, reaping, building and defending territory. Research has found that, in women as well as men, bones became bigger and harder during the early agricultural period. It could in many ways be described as a disastrous change in the short term, as workloads increased and diets became less varied. It certainly spelt long-term danger to other species, with deforestation, land degradation and the diversion of natural water-courses becoming increasingly widespread. The reliability of seasonal rains and sunshine became a focus, which led to the growth of religious rites and ceremonies, and to a class of religious intermediaries. As to gender roles, with the development of fixed dwellings, the males tended to do more of the field-work and the women became more home-bound, engaged in child-rearing, cereal processing and other food preparation. And naturally, with land itself becoming increasingly central, territorial conflicts and ownership hierarchies developed. The domestication of animals, together with the cultivation of fields, made these hierarchies more visible. If you laid claim to more land, you could produce more food, making others in the village more dependent upon you. We think today of wealthy people with more capital to invest or otherwise utilise, and interestingly, the word capital comes from the same Indo-European root as cattle, the first animals to be domesticated in large numbers. You might make this increase in your capital more tangible with a bigger dwelling and perhaps more ‘wives’ and dependents under your keeping.
It certainly seems likely that the development of a sedentary, agricultural lifestyle created a more patriarchal, and unequal, human society. Women spent more time ‘at home’ than they did in hunter-gathering times, and had more children. Recent research has also found that the regions which have had the longest history of an agricultural lifestyle have the most deep-rooted patriarchal attitudes.
In modern capitalist counties, inequality is obviously increasing, especially if you judge by that most capitalist of nations, the USA, which currently has the greatest income inequality in its history, and the greatest income inequality of all the G7 nations. The gap between the super-rich and the merely rich in the USA has widened spectacularly over the past twenty-five years, and If we examine US wealth from a gender perspective we find that women own 32c for every dollar owned by men. Whether or not the gap between women and men’s wealth increases, I cannot envisage anything but an increasing gap between rich and poor in the US, as it is far more wedded to libertarian mythology than any other nation.
It’s my belief, though, or maybe it’s a mere hope, that less atomistic societies, such as we find in Asia, may ultimately lead us to the way of the bonobo – a society with less internal strife, less rigid hierarchies and inequalities, a greater sense of togetherness and mutual concern, and even more relaxation and play.
Science
Some years ago the philosopher A C Grayling gave a talk in Australia, which I heard on Radio National. He spoke of two visits he made in the region of Geneva, to the headquarters of the United Nations, and to CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider. He was stuck by the contrast between the genial, collaborative atmosphere at CERN, featuring scientists from over 100 nations, and the testy, zero-sum nature of negotiations at the UN.
Science has become more collaborative over time, and far less patriarchal over the last century, though there’s still some way to go. Venki Ramakrishnan, who won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to decoding the structure of the ribosome, made many interesting points about the famous prize in his book Gene Machine. He notes the increasingly collaborative nature of science, and doesn’t subscribe to the heroic narrative of science. Many people and groups in recent years have been given the prize – which is always life-transforming because it brings their name to the generally non-scientific public in one fell swoop – for simply being the first to solve a puzzle or make a discovery that many groups or persons were on the verge of making, within an atmosphere of generally collegial competition. It’s also noteworthy that, while the early Nobel Prizes in the sciences were awarded to individuals, this has become increasingly rare. I rather enjoy the fact that, as the twentieth century progressed, and on into the twenty-first, both the collective nature of science and the female contribution to it have become increasingly recognised. I would like to think that the connection between collectivity and female participation is not coincidental.
Of course, many early breakthroughs in science and technology are anonymous, and as such, seen as collective. Who invented the plow? The Sumerians maybe, or some other Mesopotamian or Indus Valley culture. Writing? Mesopotamia again, or maybe the Indus Valley or China, or separately by different cultures, possibly even in Rapa Nui. But nowadays, we’re keen to give individual recognition for any technological or scientific developments.
References
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44113711?seq=1