Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Robin.

Robin:

I thought we might talk about activism and activists.

Agnes:

Okay, great.

Robin:

And the reasons I'm interested in that are that it looks like they are very influential for culture in the modern era. And they are major cause of rapid cultural change, which is distinctive of the modern era. So I was wondering how distinctive activists were in the modern era. And I did a poll about sort of what's the essence of activism, and a simple model would be activists are just the ones who put more energy and specialize more, say, in trying to influence culture or politics. But it seems like there are other correlates, and one of them is a theme that I've heard you mention before, is this idea that activists are more like warriors or fighters than scholars or persuaders or discussants. And that's an interesting observation, you'd wonder why. And for analogy, I guess, in history, things that were like activists were monks or warriors or, you know, or maybe inspirational leaders of sort. I mean, there's a space of related things there. And so today, I mean, we have biopics that really celebrate activists. Martin Luther King say, you know, there's almost nobody who's rated higher. And they are distinguished from politicians, although we often want to present politicians as influenced by activists, and maybe in partnership with activists, but we want to make this distinction. the pure monk-like activists, which is sort of, it'll be different from the priest or the leader of a religion, like the monk or the saint is only, you know, gets a leadership role if they're forced into it and they're kind of reluctant, because their priority is the pure religion. And then for the activists, I guess, they don't want to compromise so much. And I just, I was interested in culture, the two days ago and so my university has a department of cultural studies so I sat down to listen to an event of theirs and it turned out to be an event where they had alumni trying to recruit new students. And it turned out basically all of these alumni were in activism jobs. which I might think they were, you know, part of foundations or they were part of groups that were funded to write things and push various points of view. And I was surprised that we basically have a department of activism. Maybe we have several, I don't know. But it shows how big activism is that not only do we have a high cultural celebration of it, but there are chunks of academia where they see that as their major thing to produce activists, to be activists themselves. Many people have accused academics maybe of being activists more than scholars, and the shine and the glory of activism often seems to be more attractive to many academics compared to the shine of insight and scholarship. Anyway, so these are reasons why I thought it'd be interesting to talk about activism.

Agnes:

So here's a small piece of the puzzle that just was striking to me. I would describe activists as altruists. That is, they present as altruists, and they typically present as, you know, I'm interested in a group of people who maybe don't have the advantages I have, or who are being unfairly treated, and I'm going to use my privilege to try to benefit those people, or I want to get a group of people together to try to benefit those people. That's a common- Right. Scenario, but here's another common scenario and it's often the same people. Some bad thing happened to me, or to someone I love, and I want to make sure that doesn't happen to anyone else. So, often I might become an activist. In relation to some disease that a family member of mine got, or. I was treated in some. Now I want to make sure other people aren't. And I've recovered, or I'm OK, or whatever. And that always puzzles me, because I'm like, but what about all the other diseases that you didn't get? Like, why do you care so much about the disease you did get? Especially if it's their child died from that disease, let's say. If somebody's child died from that disease, then it seems like, oh, it's pretty likely they're going to become a crusader. They don't want any other children to die from that disease. But only that disease, not the other ones. Hold on. To me, that illustrates that there's something interesting about the personal and the impersonal that goes with activism. That is, there is this personal tie. I experience something and that's why I become passionately invested against it. But then also, what I then turn into is somebody who is quite altruistic and in some way disconnected from my own interests.

Robin:

Right, so many people are identified as being especially altruistic, you know, kind old Aunt Martha who always is welcoming of everybody and helps everybody on Thanksgiving, but she's not an activist. So clearly there's something more to being an activist than merely being altruistic because we have many, and your story about the origin story reminds me of say many preachers who want to tell their personal origin story, how they were once a sinner and you know, fell to the bottom, and then finally they found God, and now that's why they're preaching. You might wonder, well, you know, if somebody else had fallen to the bottom, couldn't you have decided to preach on the basis of that? Why did it have to be you?

Agnes:

Well, I think that's quite different because I think that they are representing falling to the bottom as the worst possible thing that could happen to a person. And so what they're saying is like, I saw the light, namely, I came to like the ultimate truth, and now I want to preach that truth. And that makes sense to me, actually. That doesn't seem super contingent. But if they're just like, well, I got leg cancer or something, and I really care now. But what if you've got an arm cancer? You're not saying leg cancer is the worst thing that there is. You're just saying it's a bad thing. And so I think it's not just being inspirational. It's of course not true that all activists have this kind of origin story. It's just that I think the origin story illustrates something about activism, which is that there's a moment of contingent choice. There's a lot of bad things in the world and you have to pick. And it's not just that you have to pick, you have to get passionately invested. You have to care a lot about a particular bad thing and so you're not in a way you're not caring about like a certain group of people you're you're picking out the thing you care about by way of some kind of affliction or some kind of injustice not like any you're not like just benefiting anyone who's your neighbor or something you're benefiting anyone who suffers from a certain affliction there's something it occurs me that superheroes are somewhat close to activists so the superhero genre is a modern genre of the last century or so yeah

Robin:

And superheroes don't so much have a cause, but they have an origin story and then an unusual urge to help, which goes along with some unusual superpower. But for that superhero, the unusual thing is their power. And then they tend to use it relatively generically, however they could to help people. And then the distinctive thing maybe about the activist is that they are really motivated by a very particular issue.

Agnes:

Right, but there's also there's a sort of conceit in the superhero story that the kind of problem that the superhero can use their power to solve is the only kind of problem that exists in that world. So, like, in the world of Batman, there's just criminals who, like, mistreat people, but there's no, like, I don't know, people in loveless marriages or mental health issues or just people who are very confused about the way the world works.

Robin:

Or medical problems.

Agnes:

Medical problems, right, where like Batman can't help you with those things.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And like, at least those things are not made salient. Because if they were, then it's like Batman would have to make a choice. Like, which of these problems do I solve? And, you know, I mean, maybe in the case of Batman, that question would be answered by the fact like, well, I have the power to solve this one. But in the case of the activist, it's not obvious that anything parallel obtains. Like, you know, why do you have the power to fight for the awareness of this kind of cancer rather than other kinds of cancer?

Robin:

So certainly another distinctive feature of activism in the last century is it isn't typically just so much an individual person who had an individual experience and then becomes a certain type. And that's more the saint story in history. Saints have some particular history and then they become a certain kind of saint, but activists tend to be part of movements.

Agnes:

Right. So there's still the origin story and then there's still this individual. Each person will have their own story of sort of what drives them to the movement. But you're right that Then the power comes from the kind of collective. Um, but I wanted to go back to the super maybe the Batman thing isn't such a bad analogy because maybe the point is that. Um, there's something we like the thought of turning. Our our misfortunes. into superpower or something. And so maybe the thought is, well, I suffered this thing, but now I'm going to do something good with that. And that's my superpower. And my superpower, I got this kind of cancer or my child got this kind of cancer. And so that's my superpower is caring about this kind of thing, the kind of bad thing that happened to me. Then we still need to add your component of, I need to organize into a group to do that.

Robin:

So if I look, I was trying to look at like, when did activism arise in history, exactly? And what can I see? And if I look farther back, say, you know, 500 or 700 years ago, what I see are religious movements. And so that you have activists who are pushing a religious movement. So that's fully within the religious sphere. And then in the last century or two, you mostly have relatively secular movements. I mean, they tend to have religious support and religious allies, but like say abolition, it's not directly a religious thing. It's supported. I mean, many people were religious and that was their motivation, but the idea was that the cause that you invited people to join was abolition. You didn't have to join their religion to join that. And so there was somewhat of a switch over time from religiously dominated movements with very passionate people and saints and warriors even, and then to activism. And I guess I don't know enough history to know what before abolition was a good example of a secular social movement. Maybe I guess the French Revolution as a

Agnes:

About like banning alcohol, what's that called?

Robin:

Right, I think that was, well, yeah, right. I think it was about the same time though as abolition, maybe.

Agnes:

Okay, that would be it.

Robin:

But still, yeah, right. And so you're a classicist, is there much in the ancient world of social movements, i.e. not a religious or military or political group, but just someone with a social cause?

Agnes:

I don't know. I find it hard to answer. Like there were, for instance, there were gets discussed in a lot of the texts I read is that there were these itinerant intellectuals, sophists, who went around sort of selling their intellectual wares, which were teaching young men how to speak well, how to win friends and influence people, basically. And then there were people who were very angry about this. And basically, the aristocracy did not like this because it was a kind of form of upward mobility. And so there was a bit of a crusade against these people. But I don't know. I mean, and some of them were put on trial for their lives. And in fact, Socrates' trial is plausibly understood as part of that general. you know, movement or something. So maybe that counts, but it's hard for me to answer the question how exactly the organizing happened or even whether it happened.

Robin:

It seems an example of maybe a more conservative or reactionary movement, which sounds more plausible through history. That is, you have a stable culture and people like the way things were, and then something comes in and changes things, and then maybe you'd have a social movement to react to try to overcome that. It could even be, say, foreigners, you know, populating our town and we're upset about that. Say, Jews at some point. More Jews in medieval history. There could be movements

Agnes:

upset about the Jews coming in. Against novels, like people thought novels were going to corrupt people and so you might like have a movement against not allowing the reading.

Robin:

Right, but certainly in the last century we overwhelmingly celebrate social movements that are trying to initiate more of a change rather than return to a previous condition and that's a distinctive modern phenomena.

Agnes:

Yeah, I mean a lot of movements Like, sometimes it's hard to tell which of those we're doing. Like, take environmentalism. Is it trying to initiate a change or a return? Take like a lot of just anti-capitalism, degrowth stuff. Is it initiating or is it going backwards? Take stuff about social justice. I'm actually not sure.

Robin:

Say gender equality or trans rights or homosexuality or abolition. Those are more changes, clearly.

Agnes:

Right, right, right, that's right. So some of them are, but I don't feel like there's this big divide. There's this big rhetorical divide where somehow the, you know, gender equality is like perceived as being really, really different from say environmentalism or something, because the one is going backwards and the other one's going forwards.

Robin:

But a distinctive part is that we tell our history often in terms of these, activist movements and the heroes of them, like Martin Luther King. And when the ancients told their histories, I read Herodotus, at least a lot of it, and I don't remember much examples of social activists being the heroes of history.

Agnes:

Because it would be people who started wars. Those would be the heroes.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So you might just think, well, there were more wars And people were really proud of their success in wars. And those are the stories that they would tell. And that nowadays, maybe there are fewer wars. I feel like that's a contested claim. But even if we have, in some sense, just as many wars, people are less proud about fighting wars and even winning wars than they used to be. So we got to be proud of something else.

Robin:

And there does seem to have been this trend toward more ideological slash religious wars over time. And so that can be sort of a gradual switching. You know, so certainly in the Protestant Revolution, and for a few centuries afterwards, we have a lot of wars, but we have wars framed as holy causes, more so than most ancient wars, I think. And then we're celebrating the heroes of those wars who might be warriors or other things and then with religion declines and war declines but we've replaced that with social activism. And in some sense. Part of it is, you know, puzzling over what exactly is an activist, because we see, obviously they are more directly just someone who spends more time and energy and specializes more in trying to cause social change, but there seem to be other correlates. And one way to describe the other correlates, I think, is maybe to think of the warrior monk as the activist sort of combining those roles there. They are both seen as warriors. You can call them culture warriors today. And they are also seen as monks or especially altruistic saint-like people.

Agnes:

So there's a phenomenon that I see a lot of, let's say, on Twitter. Maybe it's even more prevalent on Instagram, which I'm on more rarely, which I think of as micro activism. It's like somebody has some way of living their life. Maybe it's that they don't live in a city or something. Or maybe it's that they make their own sourdough bread or whatever. And they're kind of encouraging, they're kind of like, look how great it is and encouraging other people to do it their way. And like fertility is a big one where people are like, want to nudge people and like, look, I have a lot of kids, you should have a lot of kids too. It feels like micro activism, like it's slightly different to me, that is there, maybe they want to be maybe maybe I'm not sure how to characterize the difference like maybe it's that they want to be one of the first people to join the cause rather than a later joiner and right that big yet. Or maybe they feel like it's just a very gentle nudge rather than the more violent activist push. I don't know what the difference is, but it almost makes me think, well, maybe activism is everywhere. And it's just a question of these other differences in terms of how we pick it out.

Robin:

So I might suggest that it didn't used to be everywhere, but that as we've come to celebrate activists more, then more people have tried to make activism part of their role in the world. And so academics, for example, are now much more trying to be activists. I don't think 1910 academics were trying especially to be activists, but today a lot of academics are wanting to be activists as part of their role. They want somehow that to be research and many say musicians and artists of many sorts often aspire to include activism within their art. And so then you might think we just generally approve of people trying to include some degree of activism in everything they do.

Agnes:

And maybe it's like generally approve of is too weak. Like it might just be almost just the language that we speak to such an extent that we can't even understand people unless they're doing that. So I was thinking about a piece I wrote over the summer, and the editor really trying to nudge me to a moral of the story where it's like, this shows the wisdom of the teenage girl or something like that. It was like, she's like, what are you saying? I.e., what cause are you pushing in this piece? And it wasn't her personally. What she was doing was channeling my reader, right? And she's presumably good at that. So she's channeling the reader's expectation. And so clearly, she's probably right that what the reader is expecting is that at the end of this piece, they're going to learn what I'm fighting for, what I'm crusading for. And if I don't give them that, then they don't even know why they read this essay.

Robin:

Right, so one way to think about culture and morals is that our stories give us prototypes of lives to live and characters to be, and that they have heroes and villains. And so we are trying to live our lives in such a way as to be somewhat like the heroes of the stories we like and, you know, feel strongly. And that most of our heroes these days are in some way an activist, I mean, even like a crime drama or even a doctor drama, often we're gonna present our hero crime investigator or doctor as someone who's unusually motivated and trying especially hard to discover the criminal, willing to make personal sacrifices, even disobeying their boss, whatever it takes to achieve their crime-finding goals, but we're almost trying to make them an activist hero.

Agnes:

I think that there's a little bit more that activism requires that is if you really cared about, you know, crime fighting, you might not yet be an activist. I think if you, let's say you had a childhood history of sexual abuse. and therefore you wanted to make sure the kind of sexual abuse that you suffered is penalized and also deterred and prevented, right? That's more like activism. And so I think it's characteristic of activism that it directs our attention to some group, some group of people where the group of people is picked out by a form of misfortune or injustice. That is, that's the kind of person we're talking about is the kind that suffered a certain kind of misfortune or injustice. And, and we're then invited to attend to that group. where there's not necessarily any claim being made that this is the worst misfortune or the worst injustice. The fact that teenage girls have their wisdom underestimated would in no way be, it would not, if I wrote this, if this essay came with that moral, it wouldn't imply that's the worst thing in the world. It would just be like, attend to this group of people and this injustice that they are experiencing. That seems crucial to me. It's not just that there's a hero and that they care about other people, it's that form of caring.

Robin:

So I think there's a complicated zoo here of different characters that have different relationships to each other. I certainly think that the person who has a personal origin story that drives them to this activism is seen as higher status and more legitimate. But if we think of all the academics who are trying to be activisms about say racism or sexism, most of them don't actually have a personal story about why that went so wrong for them in their past, but they're still eager to be activists about these things and they're counted.

Agnes:

I think that you'll see a strong correlation with the race and gender of the person and the issue. It's not going to be 100%. It's not even going to be 90%. But there will be a correlation.

Robin:

No doubt the correlation. But there is this idea that if you work hard enough against racism, you're allowed to be seen as an activist for that, even if you don't have a personal origin story.

Agnes:

It's not a necessary condition. That's true. But right, so I agree. I don't think the origin story is a necessary condition. I just think that it shows us something about activism. I think the necessary condition is just the thing that I just said, namely, there have to be some group of people to which our attention is being directed, where that group is picked out by the misfortune or injustice that they have suffered.

Robin:

I think that- Although, that's a modern thing in the sense that you could have an act, I mean, for example, environmental activists aren't trying to protect any particular people, maybe it's the animals they're protecting or the plants, but there are kinds of activism in history where it wasn't oriented around a particular group of people you were protecting, but that is much more the modern model, I'll grant.

Agnes:

Right, and it's going to be, I mean, I think it's relevant that it's typically not going to be, like, there's some other characteristics of people where you might have thought that it matters that they, like, live near you, or you know them, or whatever. The act of incarceration has to cut across all of those kind of boundary lines. It's anyone with this sort of cancer. And, but, sorry, wait, I want to add another thing, which is that it isn't always necessarily that crucial to activism that you end up doing anything at all about the problem. To me, the crucial bit is the thing I said, which is the attention. That is, there's some group of people, they have some form of misfortune or injustice, they're picked out in no other way but that, and you're supposed to attend to that. Now, presumably there's some idea that if you do attend, be in some way good for these people. But that part is often quite kind of wavy. Like, I wouldn't have had to specify any way in which my piece was going to improve the situation for teenage girls. It would be suffice if I just called attention. So calling attention is a very important moment in activism.

Robin:

So let's try to take an intermediate case. Say there's a town and there's a dump part of the town and there's lots of trash or litter there and maybe dangerous things that a group of people gets together. Let's clean up the dump. Let's clean up this part of town. Now that's the sort of thing that often happens in small town organizing. And I think it's in sort of an intermediate case because even though they're passionate and they're doing something, we're not quite sure we wanna call them activists. Because there isn't enough of, I think of a moral color

Agnes:

It's not altruistic enough.

Robin:

Well, it might be. They're not next to that part of town. Maybe it's somewhere else. Maybe poor people are next to this dump. They're cleaning up, so they're trying to help them.

Agnes:

I think it's more like activism if the dump is far away and it's near the poor people. And it's the rich people. Now it starts to sound like that.

Robin:

OK, right. So now we're getting some altruism. But I also think that merely being altruism isn't quite enough to get the highest tier of activism. I think you need some sort of moral indignation, sort of like there are enemies that you're fighting against people who have the wrong opposite view and it's part of the warrior part of activism that you are fighting those other people. Maybe there's a factory next to the dump and they're resisting the cleanup and now you've got an enemy and now it looks more like an activism because you're fighting someone.

Agnes:

Yeah, and maybe that's part of why the attention is such a common framing for act to pay attention because there's a natural zero sum battle aspect built into attention. That is there are a lot of different demands on your attention. And so I say pay attention to the way in which teenage girls are underestimated. I'm implicitly saying, don't like take your attention away from all the other things that you were thinking about that are, you know, maybe not as important as this thing.

Robin:

But we don't usually want to highlight the conflict between different activists pushing you in different directions. We usually want to highlight the activist versus the villain opponent of the activist.

Agnes:

But it might be enough to highlight the activist versus non-activist mentality. That is, you are just going through your day, doing your own stuff, being selfish, not thinking about the plight of the less fortunate and those treated unjustly. And what I'm going to do is pull you out of that. I'm fighting your egoism and saying, look, pay attention to this. I think that there's a kind of minimal warrior thing built into that moment.

Robin:

I agree. So I definitely think there's both the fight against indifference and the fight against the villains, and both of them energize the activism and the movement, and they make them more of a saint. You know, a saint is not just someone who opposes the devil, they also are someone who rose above indifference and neglect and laziness to do something.

Agnes:

I think it's very, very different from saints because I think part of the idea of a saint is Someone who's above us in a way where our appreciation of them isn't much going to matter to them. That may not be true, but that's the conceit of calling them to be a saint. People tend to be nominated as saints after they die. I think with the activist, and it may be that someone like Martin Luther King is like moving over into saint territory, but a standard issue activist is not Martin Luther King. And the standard issue activist, I think it's a pretty important part of activists that there's a lot of mutual reinforcement and appreciation and approval. That is, although activism involves a fight at one end, against the evil or the indifference. There's like a party at the other end, which is like all the activists patting each other on the back and saying, you're a really good person, where that's not like saying you're a saint. It's like saying you're one of us and we're the good people.

Robin:

Well, I have at times looked at the list of saints that the Catholic Church issues. They issued another dozen in the last month or something. And you can go through their names. They look like they're mostly activists. So today, saints are primarily activists.

Agnes:

Sure, but most activists aren't saints, and being a saint doesn't give you a good grip on the appeal of activism for most people. That is, we're saying, we live in a world where lots and lots of people, maybe everyone is kind of an activist. Not everyone is a saint. Not everyone is even in the running for being anything like a saint. So I just think the appeal of activism isn't, you're not gonna cash it out very well if you think about saints.

Robin:

So the question I'd like to call attention to is, you know, basically the question of why is our world so much more obsessed with activism and activists and giving it so much more prestige? What caused that? And then what are the causes of that? How is our world different because of such celebration and eagerness to be activists in most all roles in life? That is, almost everybody is trying to find themselves some way to see themselves in part as an activist. doing the other things they're doing.

Agnes:

Right. Well, maybe one thing you could do is try to use, this is your least favorite method, introspection. So you're a bit of an activist about fertility. I noticed you retweeted it. I know you said you make that face, but that's my point. That's what you're going to be able to introspect here. that you retweeted a bunch of stuff like it's a really bad problem or like you're a bit of an activist about cultural drift or something like you want people to get worried you want you know you want to and and and this is your like in terms of your bid to show other people how you matter it's as an activist you're in favor of trying to fight the decline in fertility and you're in favor of taking cultural drift seriously and you are going to retweet stuff and promote stuff that you know right part of your cause and you'll maybe join together with some other people who have the same cause so that that so so think about why you're doing that

Robin:

So we discussed modernism in a previous podcast. And one of the distinctive features of modernism was this eagerness for and celebration of innovation in the arts, in literature and painting, et cetera. And this idea that nothing was really good unless it was causing something new. Merely being excellent in an old artistic style was just not worthy of the highest praise in modernism. And it seems like we've done that with culture to some extent as well. That is, it's not good enough just to be an exemplar of past culture achieving its highest ideals. In some sense, we reserve our highest status for the people who seem to be trying to and successfully changing culture.

Agnes:

Yeah, I was sitting in on a class a colleague of mine is teaching on Foucault yesterday. And she was paraphrasing this woman, Nancy Fraser, talking about Foucault. And this is the sentence that I wrote down that she said, there's nothing more modern than finding the most fundamental principle of your age and then attacking that in the name of something new. That is, there's nothing more modern than rejecting the modern.

Robin:

or the past previous modern and making a new one.

Agnes:

Well, but the point is, it's now the modern. You always need to be moving on. Right. And her, Fraser's point in saying this, I mean, this is not a quote from Fraser. This is a point, this is a quote by a person who was teaching a class, but she's paraphrasing Fraser. The point is that Foucault thinks of himself as opposing this modern order, but in opposing it, Fraser's saying, no, he's just perfectly instantiating it. This is what it is to be modern. He's perfectly conforming to the norm of modernity, which is self-undermining in this way.

Robin:

And this use of the word modernity that you're favoring and I favor with you is basically saying we're still very modern, and we haven't escaped modernism at all.

Agnes:

Right. It's saying postmodernism is just more modernism. This is a way of explaining that point, right? The reason why postmodernism is just modernism is that modernism was already from the beginning.

Robin:

Right. Since postmodernism is now 70 years old, surely you wouldn't be happy with the label postmodernism anyway by now, right?

Agnes:

We're going to need post-postmodernism. But it'll just still be the same thing. That is, we're stuck in an interesting way. Because the thing we fastened onto was a thing where it seems like the formal principle is a kind of repetitive one.

Robin:

So this is to me puzzling, and I'm just going to keep reflecting on it for the coming months, and you won't be able to solve it here. But to me, it's just intrinsically puzzling that you have people in a culture with some mix of cultural symbols and things like that, and they have the way things are, that the puzzle is, how is it that we have an energy to change something that we have, that we somehow want it to be different, But somehow the different thing has to meet some standards of the kind of change we want. So what are these standards of changes that are good? How are we evaluating? There's all these people pitching various changes. Most of them are going to fail. Only some activist bids are going to succeed. And we have to, therefore, have standards. Which ones energize us? Which ones do we want to get behind? Which ones are we going to push forward and then allow to succeed and then celebrate? How do we decide which changes we want or will embrace? Seems like it's fundamentally like it has to be some standards. Otherwise, everything would be equally available to change. But then these standards must then have to be constant over time. And so we're not challenging those standards.

Agnes:

Well, I gave you one answer, namely, I got the leg cancer. I didn't get the arm cancer. And there's going to be a bunch of other people to whom that also happened. And then we, like, so there's just contingent stuff that happens to you.

Robin:

But the bid is for a larger world to agree and accept your new bid. That is, activists are often trying to get the larger world to see something different. It's not just the people, you know, basically, say breast cancer. Some people had breast cancer in the past, and then breast cancer people saying, no, the rest of the world needs to appreciate the problem of breast cancer, and they need to have pink ribbons, et cetera, in order to persuade everybody else to care more about it. That's the bid.

Agnes:

Right. And I guess I think it kind of just works for most things that we haven't paid attention to before. It's almost like everything, and it will get us again too, like it'll set the plan. But it'll be a function of, again, a bunch of contingent stuff, like how charismatic or the, like, you know, what's her name? Greta Thunberg, right? She was kind of charismatic and a bit unusual and a bit surprising. And that made a big difference. So there's just, I think there's just going to be like a lot of contingent or accidental stuff that factors into like who is successful in kind of galvanizing a group together and also in putting the right kind of, you know, making that group's message somewhat compelling to people outside the group.

Robin:

But the words you used to describe Greta suggest some more constant standards. That is, those same standards might have been applicable 50 years ago, 100 years ago, or who won their cultural bids for activism. So we might think, more fundamentally, someone who's young, articulate, energetic, has good connections, is interesting compared to boring. Maybe those are pretty constant standards.

Agnes:

Some of them, I think, are. So if we think about the ancient sophists, some of that's going to be true of them. Certainly, articulacy is an important one. But I think the fact that Greta Thunberg is autistic was probably an advantage in the time when she was coming up, but would, at most times, probably not have been an advantage in terms of galvanizing a group of people. And so there are going to be changes in her youth, like at some times that's going to be an advantage and other times it's going to be a disadvantage. So I still, it still seems to me like there's a lot of contingency, even in the question of which factors count as pros versus cons.

Robin:

And there must also be some sort of parameter of just how eager for or reluctant are we from change. So my understanding is the ancient world until a few centuries ago, these sorts of bids would just typically fall flat no matter how charismatic or pretty or articulate were because the world was just not very interested in making big changes. And now we are not only interested, we're expecting with fashion that if it's been a while and we haven't seen a big change, we're ready for a big one. And where is it? It's due.

Agnes:

Right, so maybe like there's a thing where maybe there's just an independent parameter, like how much change do you want? And for any proposed change, you might be like, but how do we decide whether or not to accept it? And maybe the answer is like, our default now is accept it. Accept it unless you can come up with a really good reason why that change would be incredibly destructive.

Robin:

Well, we must have a larger default, but so another thing to notice here is that. Businesses are all the time trying to frame their product or service in a more activist way so that you will jump on the bandwagon of their product or service. Right. And clearly we can't accept all of those bids. So most of those bids are failing where somebody, you know, tries to make a new kind of, I don't know, potato chips or whatever, and tries to make it seem like it's an activist potato chip. Right, and connects it to a cause and most of those are going to fail so clearly we can't just have a default for acceptance for that category of things.

Agnes:

Right, right. So, but like, I think the issue is just that. um like the activist potato chip like it's just probably not going to sound that different from a bunch of other bids so that it actually doesn't seem like when they came out with the dyson vacuum and stuff and he was like i just want things to work properly and like that that was a kind of activism where where this guy's like right you know people are not vacuuming in the right way and like i thought about the science of vacuuming and i'm doing a whole new thing in vacuuming And this kind of aw shucks, anti-elite, there's a certain persona that was very compelling where you really thought, this is a new kind of vacuuming that I'm going to be doing if I buy this vacuum. And so it's not so easy to do that, to sell it as something really new. I suspect that most of the ways in which you make the activist potato chip, we're just going to be like, nah, I've seen that before. That's not really new.

Robin:

Right, so then we have some standards of not just how long has it been since we've had a change, but maybe how big. We're looking for novelty in certain ways, not just change.

Agnes:

Yeah, it's like most forms of activism are by now pretty passe, right? So you got to impress us. We're a little hard to impress at this point. So if you're just like, my potato chip fights racism, it's like, well, how? I've seen a lot of claims of that kind, like do a little more to make me think that there's something special going on here.

Robin:

So when is there, so in some kinds of fashion, say length of hemlines or hair, there's a cycle, you know, long hair, short hair, long hair, short hair, etc. But for other kinds of more activism fashion, it looks like anything that's been around for 300 years that we can remember that doesn't count for new. We're reluctant to go back to things from 300 years ago in sort of moral, social change fashion, it looks like we're sort of determined to make sure we go somewhere that hasn't been seen for a very long time, if ever.

Agnes:

No, no, no, I just, there's this whole trad movement online of people who are like, We need to just, you know, go back to making things inside your home and baking your own bread and like new screens. And it's definitely a form of activism. And it's saying that we should go back like a hundred years or so.

Robin:

Well, I guess maybe I just say it's a distinctive thing that we treat differently. Somebody whose bid is to have us go back is sort of a different kind of bid than a bid to go somewhere new. And maybe we're open to both kinds of bids, but we will definitely think about them differently.

Agnes:

Right, and I guess I think that, so just like I was saying that it's not actually so clear how to draw these lines, like the environmentalist, in a way they're saying go back, but they don't feel retrograde. I think that if the, like, the trad person, it's easy, depending on, they might emphasize, say, traditional gender roles or something, then that'll be like their thing. But they might just emphasize, like, making stuff with your hands or something. Lots of progressives can get on board with that. Um, and, uh, you know, in that, that will, that, that might get charged morally quite a lot of like, we live in this terrible world where we're enslaved to our phones and computers all the time. And like, there's this better life that's possible for us where it's not so much perceived as going back, but as superseding or overcoming the challenge, a certain challenge in modern life and therefore as moving forward.

Robin:

Right, so I'm interested in that choice of framing, because often people in the past have sort of made left versus right. Left wants to change things. Right wants to return to the past. But say, if you think about cell phones or social media, it's a pretty left position now at the moment to want to have less screen time, use phones less maybe, less social media time. And that's seen as a progressive sort of movement. but how does, when does it seen as conservative or when is it seen as progressive if you're trying to go back to something previous?

Agnes:

I think there's just a question of is it framed as back and maybe progressives, just like progressives are not gonna see, they're probably not gonna frame environmentalism as let's go back to the past. Even though you could frame it that way, right? Right. But they're going to frame it as like, let's overcome the horrors of late capitalism or something. Let's triumph over them. And maybe there is some amount of let's romanticize peasant life or something. There probably is. But I guess I feel like there's, I'm not sure how to, I'm not sure that the framing of backwards and forwards tracks that much.

Robin:

Right, but it might still be a salient framing for people. Here's another meta question. In this world where we're so eager for change of these sorts, could we ever find a good cultural place and stay there?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Or is this permanent wandering? Are we set to be wanderers? In a lot of literature and music, there's this distinction between a wanderer and a settled person. We often celebrate the wanderer. But then part of many stories is you finally found someone who would make you settle down because they were so special, right? Will we ever find something so special? Could we ever find something so special to make us stop wandering?

Agnes:

Yeah, so I think that's a great question. And you might think cultures have always wandered. They've been somewhat tempered by selection pressures, but not completely. And they've wandered way slower than we're on. They've always wandered. And the wandering has always been incompletely tempered by selection pressures, just in the sense of think about different languages or something. They haven't converged.

Robin:

Sure. But they've been functional. You can say languages have been adaptive. And so they didn't move too far away from being adaptive languages, even if they weren't converging to the same language.

Agnes:

Well, I think the question of adaptive, I don't want to grant that because I'm just not sure we know what adaptive means. That is, if what it means is everybody didn't die, yes. But if what we mean by adaptive is like they led to genuine flourishing, then we needed a sense of what flourishing is. But the thing I wanted to say was that if we just think about they were wandering and we're wandering, but they were wandering slow, we're wandering fast. And it's the same question for the two groups. It's just, it's just that more urgent for the faster one. Exactly. Right. And, and I feel like that's the big thing we're going to find out right so like if you imagine that maybe there really is some good cultural place, then we're going to be the ones to know that we found it because it will be so remarkable that we stopped anywhere that that must be the good thing. It's a little bit like talking to you versus talking to most other people. So when I talk to most people, they say to me, Oh, that's a good point or great thought, Agnes. You're so smart. You're a deeper, interesting philosopher, whatever. Whereas you dismiss or ignore most of the things I say. So it's like a lot of rejection, rejection, rejection. But if I ever say something where you're like, that seems like a good point, I'm like, wow, that must have been a really great point. And so we're at that stage of the history of civilization where should we stop on anything, that must be a great point.

Robin:

But do we know what we would be looking for to stop? I mean, that was part of, say, the modernist literature scenario. We had these characters who were eager to change things, but they didn't really have a way to evaluate changes for being good or bad. It seemed like they didn't, they couldn't tell.

Agnes:

It all seemed uniformly- I'm not talking about what you're looking for. Like, do I have some kind of theory of what you're gonna take to be a good point? No. Still, there's such a thing as a stopping point. So we might just notice that we stop. you may not need a theory of what you're looking for in order to stop. Like, if you're like, you're tasting a bunch of flavors of ice cream, right? And then you get to one, you're like, wow, it's amazing. Do you have a theory of why you like that one? Maybe not. I prefer theory, but I'm just saying.

Robin:

Part of the problem is that we often have this theory that there are these nefarious forces trying to prevent change. And if we don't suppress them, then they will stop change. And so we are opposing those forces in order to be courageous activists looking for change. So we might stop, slow down, and then think, oh, it's those nefarious slowdowners who are causing this.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, it's basically the. I feel like the deeper problem is that we're. We're so used to a kind of adversarial position where if somebody else is pushing some change, you have to push back against it, that we might not given enough credit of like... I have an example here.

Robin:

So, you know, I grew up in the 60s as young, you know, I'm a teenager in the 70s. And at that point, young people were very proud that their music was a rebellion against the previous generation's music. And that, in some sense, legitimized in their minds the fact that they were new and trying to do things new, is that they had a different music. And then I read something recently about how maybe the last generation kids don't mind listening to their parents' music from the 90s. Many of them are okay with 90s music, even though it's, you know, 25 years later. And then I think, oh, well, have they lost the revolutionary impulse? These young folk are, you know, should they feel a little ashamed of themselves that they're not rebelling against their parents' music? I mean, that's, you know, because of the standards I have from when I was young, that's a suspicion that rises in my mind.

Agnes:

Right, exactly. As opposed to just like, you know.

Robin:

Maybe they found better music. Maybe 90s music was better than 50s music.

Agnes:

We should all be listening to them. Right. So I think that that's right. And like an even clearer to me example is just like, We now, like, let's say movies, there are a lot of franchises and a lot of also reboots and whatever. And like, most people see that as a bad thing, as like decay or what's that word? Stagnation, right? Right. And there is a like, I think there's a kind of confounder here, which is that if you have a longer time horizon, it makes more sense to explore rather than exploit, right? So if you're at the end of your culture in some sense, you should just be exploiting, you should just have your repeat series, whatever. And so the repetition gives off the vibe of like end of history. And so that's gonna be a huge confounder for no, maybe we found the good thing. Yeah, I think that's a really big problem.

Robin:

we might reject a good thing because we think, no, we're explorers.

Agnes:

We're- We're still on a long journey ahead of us.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

We romanticize the journey to the point where we reject a perfectly good destination.

Robin:

I feel like there must have been Western stories like that of the wanderer who should have stopped somewhere, but kept wandering and regrets it later. As many five towns later, he says, I should have stayed back there. What am I doing out here?

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

but now it's too late or something, and it's a sad tragedy story.

Agnes:

Right, right, right. It's like a really large-scale version of an optimal stopping problem, like the secretary problem, where, as an entire civilization, we've got to decide When is something good enough? When have we tried enough things that were the best?

Robin:

And I mean, there are some things in our society where we, you know, we made a lot more changes early on. We have like cars, for example, right?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

For the last decade or so, cars have been pretty much the same. And in the early days of cars, they had all this varieties of shapes and sizes and, you know, arrangements. And now we're all agreed on the right car. And then roads, even we've pretty much agreed on what roads should look like. we have relatively limited numbers of road innovations. And you might think, well, is that us being less creative and innovative, or is that because we found a thing that works and we're going to stick with it?

Agnes:

Right. I think one of the big problems is that it's really, really hard to tell those things apart. So with cars, I think it's plausible that the shape of the car is just a pretty good shape for cars to have in terms of the various trade-offs of being aerodynamic and fitting stuff inside of it and whatever. But is it plausible that it's better for cars to be just black, white, and gray as opposed to all the different colors? To me, that's less so. And so it seems like we've gravitated towards fewer colors of cars. And I'm just skeptical that that's because that's the better place for us to be. And so the shape of the car versus the color of the car, one of them might be optimal, one of them is not optimal, and then everything might be mixed up in that way.

Robin:

So I think we're actually getting at a really key issue for society and that you and I have disagreed about because, you know, I'm from STEM more and in STEM we have these standard criteria for evaluation of a bridge or an engine or things like that and we design and improve things to, you know, meet, improve on those metrics. And then in humanities or values. it can just be hard to know whether a new aesthetic, a new vibe, a new style, a set of values or norms are actually better because often it kind of evaluates itself or somehow you use, you know, nearby standards to evaluate something and then how would you know if in fact the whole trajectory was getting better off. I think that's kind of In some sense, the cause of cultural drift is that we don't actually have such standards much. And that's why we just keep wandering in the culture space because we have this, the one thing we think we know from Musel is that things should change. That's the one confident thing we have is that this can't be right. We should be looking for something new. And if that's the only one thing that you feel very confident that you can judge about new things is that you want new things. Well, you're just destined to keep changing forever.

Agnes:

Right, and I guess I think, it seems to me that there's a difference between how you present the novelty. Suppose that, let's say you were looking for something very specific in a secretary, right? A very specific set of skills. You keep trying out new secretaries and you're like, this was not good. And this was not good. And this one's not good. But you can. But you can say, okay, but this is what I want. Like I want one who can type at this speed or whatever. A bit of an outdated example. And so we're like that, that is culturally, we're like keeping on trying out new things, right? But except we don't have the sense of what is it that we want the culture, we can't articulate it. And so you might think, well, let's say you had the person who kept trying out new secretaries, and he claims that he has a really specific sense of what he wants from the secretary. But every time you ask him to say it, it's kind of gobbledygook. And he just keeps trying out new ones. And you might think the one kind of change, I mean, one thing you might propose is, look, just find one and just be happy with it. But suppose he can't. Then you might say, well, you should have a different attitude. to this whole process, you should just kind of have more of a curious and inquisitive attitude where you are sort of saying, look, I don't know what it is that I want. And I have to sort of live that way and be trying things out and be figuring them out. And I have to have just a very different ethos from the ethos of the boss who's like, I need 175 words an hour. a minute or whatever. And maybe the situation that we're in is we're at this transition, optimistically, we're at this transition point where we still have the face and the bearing of, I just need someone who can type this many words a minute, But we can't say anything to that effect, and we just keep firing secretaries. And that one possible transition would be to become the kind of boss who starts to realize that they're going to learn from the performance of each secretary what they might want, and they're not going to know how to say that. And they're just going to have to be a lot more humble about what it is that they're doing.

Robin:

So, I mean, if you look at say the Amish or Heretim or something, we have these subgroups and they think they've found something and they're going to stick with it. And they're not so much searching in a vast space of alternatives.

Agnes:

They're like, I just want 170 words a minute. I found that we're just going to keep hiring people that can do that. Right. So that's one option. And so at a meta level, you like variety. Right. And so it's going to be got people who are doing that thing. And then those are doing a different thing. And you know, one of them will turn out to be the better way to do things. And the nice part is the better one is guaranteed to win. So because it'll be, I mean, on your definition of adaptive, right? And so maybe it will turn out that just deciding you're good with 170 words per minute and just sticking with that is the way to go. Or maybe You know, having this other attitude where you don't actually know what you want from a secretary and you're going to kind of keep hiring them and firing them and hoping that somewhere along the way you figure it out. That that's the other approach.

Robin:

So if I'm right in my guess that over the coming centuries, our civilization will have a decline, that's more analogous to these stories of the wanderers who had a very exciting young life as a wanderer, and then they're older and more infirm and in less nice territory where they're wandering. And at some point they should decide maybe it's time to stop wandering. And so maybe as our civilization declines, it'll seem more salient, this idea that maybe we've been wandering too long. And maybe we should stop wandering so much and pick something and stick with it.

Agnes:

Maybe, but that rhetoric is going to, if you push it too early, it's just going to be easily conflated with the anti-change people. Like, oh, you're one of those bad guys who, one of those nefarious forces that are trying to prevent change, right?

Robin:

Right. I mean, your larger framing is this idea that, you know, your explore-exploit is that, well, we should have a period of exploration, and then we should pick stuff. But in some sense, we aren't really able to sort of organize a plan on that scale of civilization. At each time, we have sort of a set of norms, and they just have the momentum of continuing. I don't know if we could switch. Given that we've decided that we are definitely exploring people and we want to resist these stoppers, then we're just going to maybe have a momentum that just keeps taking us much longer. I guess an analogous thing is when people are trying to be an actor or a musician or athlete early in life, and at some point, most of them have to quit. And it's kind of unpleasant to quit, right? You have these great aspirations, and they aren't working out. Many academics are like this too, right, or early wannabe academics. And there's a point at which you sort of need clear enough signals that people say, you know, you're not, those people are successful, you're not, you need to like go do something else. And I guess the question is, will humanity ever get those signals so clear? Because we don't have all these comparisons, right? So at least if you're a young dancer and you see this, people in your dancing cohort and a few of them have gone on to success and the rest of you are failing and you can say, okay, I guess I'm one of the failures, but even that's a potential framing. You see, we think that we might well interpret stopping us admitting failure. We have these higher aspirations and we're not going to continue after them. We're going to accept this lower thing in our hand as our resting spot.

Agnes:

Right. Right. It's just worth noting that, um, like. That's one kind of danger. And the other kind of danger is the opposition to innovation and giving up on it.

Robin:

Yes, a standard story is that young people aren't very invested in the standard way of things, but old people are. So old people resist change because they'd lose their investments in the way things are if things changed. So the standard story is young people year for change, old people resisting change. And I think that'll just always be true.

Agnes:

But also like, let's say there's a kind of tech ethos of like, Elon Musk, let's go to Mars, whatever, all of that. And there's a lot of people who are like, no, that's all stupid. Like what we have here is really good. And so far as I'm trying to get you into sympathy for the pro-innovation side, which is weird that I have to. There's just the opposite. That's the problem is that we're in a situation where both of those arguments can be appealing at different times. But we should stop because we're over.

Robin:

We should. All right, thanks for talking.