Robin:

All right, hello, Agnes, and hello, Werner.

Werner:

Hi, hello, Agnes and Robin. I'll just say briefly, I wrote my Chicago essay about you guys. So I was very happy to be invited. Thank you. I guess if there are any high school seniors in the audience, I can't recommend it. But I did do it. Your essay of what sort? My essay is trying to get into the University of Chicago. An application essay. Yes, yes.

Agnes:

Well, the problem is that they didn't give me your application to read because the very first year that I was on the faculty at the University of Chicago, the admissions committee said to me, would you look at some college applications? And they gave me like 10 of them. And I went through them. And I'm like, guys, all 10 of these people are amazing. You just have to admit all of them. And then they never asked me again after that. But they were. They were all so much better than me. They all had straight A's. It was like a different echelon of student, anyway. So if I had been more critical, then they would keep giving me them, and then maybe I could have gotten yours. But I screwed that up. OK. I think you guys should introduce our topic.

Robin:

So Werner wrote an essay on his blog, Gray Mirror. Well, this isn't my blog.

Werner:

This is the boss's blog, Curtis Yarvin, my former boss. A.K.A. Mencius Moldbug?

Robin:

Okay, and it's about the origin of woke, which is a popular topic these days. Your distinctive position there, that you summarize a bunch of other people's positions, but your distinctive position is focusing on the signaling of pro-sociality, that is generally being, you know, kind and considerate of other people who are different from you and worried about inequality is pro-social and woke is signaling that, And then also the signaling of intelligence and status by the fact that this continues to evolve to be somewhat icky to ordinary people or somewhat hard for ordinary people to embrace. And that's a continuing function of the signaling story. You also distinguish woke, say, from a previous era of Marxism and say it's a similar sort of structure in those two features. But by comparison with Marxism, Marxism was mainly separating people by having this huge literature that you had to read. Few people could master that, which is less about it being icky and more about it being hard to master that way. And also you say that differing kinds of people has become a more salient feature of our world than it was maybe a century ago. So any other distinctive features of your position that I missed here?

Werner:

No, that sounds about right. I think, you know, the two really distinctive things is like, you know, the stuff I just like took from you, the elephant in the brain stuff. And then also, which you talked about a little less, the demographics being the thing that tipped the scales away from Marxism and towards Wokeism.

Robin:

So Agnes and I did some podcasts and discussion about modernism. Yes. And we talked about how initially with modernism, there was this idea that the past was not what we were going to embrace. We knew we were going to have some different stance than the past, but we weren't sure what it was going to be. And there was this era of fumbling and searching in the space of sort of different ways of framing social relations and all sorts of concepts to find another way to be a modern person. And that Agnes suggested, which makes a lot of sense to me, that World War II, the World Wars, was this moment of anchoring when the modern world said, oh, we do know something about morality. You know, the Nazis were wrong and we were right. moral anchor since then, that is analogies to whatever the Nazis had wrong and we had right by comparison of them have become salient anchors for new moral communities and ideologies and religions.

Werner:

And so that you probably know Nick land. He makes this point very eloquently that like, you know, we have an inverted Christian. He says an inverted Christianity with Hitler as like the, you know, the antichrist, but And that's a kind of popular thing in modern discourse.

Robin:

But it's an alternative account of why the switch from, say, econ issues for Marxism and identity issues more recently is that World War II was the breakpoint, and that soon afterwards, the major issue in the US was civil rights with respect to race. And then gender followed on somewhat naturally from that, and then homosexuality and trans, et cetera. That's another story of the switch. Yes.

Agnes:

Can I ask a question about your view? So people who are woke, emotion that I would bring along with that of like the most characteristic manifestations of woke, or at least an important emotion is anger. And like, like, if you're not angry, you're not paying attention. That is like a woke, it's woke, like you're woken up to, to be incited to emotion. And anger is a not pro-social emotion. And it involves like characteristically saying that there's a set of people in our world that I'm not gonna be friendly to. And so that just on the face of it, it looks like wokeism does the opposite of what you're saying that it does.

Werner:

Yeah, there are definitely aspects of openness that are certainly not pro-social. And, you know, I think you know, it's always, I think there are a lot of phenomenon in the world that are rooted in pro-social things like religion, you know, the micro-foundation is pro-social. It's good to, if you believe in a God that will punish you for doing bad things when no one's watching. But then we also have flagellants. We also have these like crazy sects that are certainly not pro-social. And I think woke is, you know, there's the pro-social micro-foundation, but when you get to these crazy sects, they have beliefs that, you know, these beliefs are good for the belief. You know, it's good if you're always animated by this belief, if that's what the belief expects you to do, but it's not, that part isn't pro-social.

Robin:

It seems to me that a more accurate summary would be that all ideologies and religions have to pick some pro-social element to advertise as the reason why those people are good, but they pick quite different ones, and then they also have many behaviors that are contrary to it. So that means this idea of pro-sociality doesn't really pick out from all the vast space of possibilities which particular pro-social thing that a particular community is going to emphasize.

Agnes:

But as an explanation of wokeness, it's not that strong an explanation because you would just say this about any ideology. It exists because it's pro-social and because signaling that you're pro-social is useful. Which that would include, for instance, anti-wokeness as an ideology, you would explain it exactly the same way.

Werner:

Yeah, yeah, I think it's true. Yes, all ideologies are rooted in something pro-social. But I think we should put more emphasis on the pro-social part. A lot of people have written about the origin of woke. It's a kind of in vogue topic. And I think this is generally what people miss, is the pro-social. And there are some concrete predictions you can make by, I think, more thoroughly understanding it that others have not made.

Robin:

Well, if you look at, say, conflicts between, some kinds of feminists and trans people. They're both trying to be pro-social, but in different ways, so clearly we're not going to understand that conflict if we just say they're pro-social.

Werner:

Yeah, yes, yeah, certainly not. And I, you know, I should, I should maybe spell it out a little bit more, that like, the specific kind of pro-sociality is, it shows that you could cooperate with people who are very different from you. um but not politically different you can't go yes like this is a deep diversity this is a very shallow kind of diversity but that's very important in the modern world in in in the areas like elite people hang out in in in academia these are just like very very culturally and at well you know ethnically and racially mixed places compared to almost any other such places in human history. And I think, you know, it is kind of useful if you know someone can thrive in that kind of environment. It makes you a better employee and a better citizen.

Agnes:

So I think the thing that you're talking about, which is being able to signal that you're able to cooperate with people who are quite different from you, I agree that's super important part of our world. I think, for instance, economists try to do a lot to signal that they're that, without being woke. But they're like Robin. But in general, they love immigrants. They just love people who are different, especially first generation immigrants. Those are the best kind. They generally like places that are far away and people in the places that are far away, but also poor people. So that's another difference. So it seems to me that the The practice of signaling like I'm okay with people who are different from me or like, oh, you're you come from this other place. Cool. You know, they'll be like the cool. Don't tell me more about it. But cool. Like, we're cool with it. It's fine. I guess that just seems like. There's so many other manifestations of that than wokeness. In fact, often, it really does seem to me actually that anti-wokeness is an attempt to signal that, to signal, I'm cool with all kinds of people. And so I agree with the idea there's a new thing we all have to signal. I'm just not sure that the woke have any monopoly on that. That is, in terms of who is doing that the most, I'm not sure it's the woke.

Robin:

Well, I'm willing to presume there's just more of a random element in which pro-social things get focused on. But I'm puzzled by the distinctive features that that are apparently here over a long time period that are maybe different from all past eras or most past eras. So most religions, including Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Confucianism, et cetera, as far as I know, I don't recall a description of them as continually trying to reinvent lots of complicated specifics in order to evade being popular. Yeah. That might be in common with Marxism and woke, but it's different from all the other ideologies and religions in history that I'm aware of. So it seems that stands out for an explanation. Why is that so different? And that's part of the cancel culture thing. In past eras when there was a religious dogma, the people who were canceled were people who were trying to be different from the dogma and have a different religion. Whereas today, you often get people canceled accidentally who can't just manage to keep up with the continuing changes.

Werner:

Though I think I would say, if you looked at the early Christianity, that's a kind of invoked topic. Someone recently published a book on it. Scott Alexander reviewed it. I think that's not a recent book, actually. Oh, OK. So I suppose not that recent. Decades old, yes. Decades old book, never mind.

Robin:

you know there's there's when ideologies are new they're really in flux and and and things change a lot eventually they ossify and maybe maybe you know that's not actually a decent description of the early christian church rapidly changing dogmas that's that so i just read you know this book on the history of christianity which is like uh by actually yeah paul johnson But I also read the other book by Rodney Stark on Christian religion, and Christianity changed a lot over the last 2000 years. That was the most striking thing I learned about things, but it changed on, say, centuries, timescales. every two centuries Christianity would be different, which gives 10 different Christianities over 2,000 years, which is striking, but it wasn't changing on the timescales we're seeing today with Woke, for example.

Werner:

Yeah, so this is much faster, but I think there's a time when things are kind of up to ground. Where is the Pope going to be? Is he going to be in Rome?

Robin:

Is he going to be in... Right, but when it changes over 2,000, when it changes over two centuries, that really isn't an effective way to separate out the people who can't keep up with the changes. It's such a slow change that it's not really doing that social function.

Werner:

It does seem like a pretty new thing. It's true. And do we have a euphemism's treadmill? That's a very obvious example, like when wolf things, they're just changing on the order of years or months. And can we see this in history? Probably not. Maybe it's technological. Maybe it's communications technology.

Agnes:

OK, can I take a really giant step back? And in effect, here's what I want to do. Werner, in your essay, what you're doing is taking a step back from these two, the Kauffmanists and the Rufo. You're saying, I'm going to explain what causes them, and I want to do that to your view.

Werner:

Yes.

Agnes:

Take a step back to it. So I've been recently reading a lot about like the sociology of conversation. And I've been very struck by the fact that there are all these little rules that we don't even notice about how in general, in conversation, you're trying to do something without being explicit about the fact that you're doing it. Not 100%, but like 95% of the time, like it's amazing. So for instance, if I want you to say your name, Most of the time in conversation, I don't say, what's your name? I would say something like, hi, I'm Agnes. And then you would say your name. And so it's like, I'm trying to elicit your name without asking you for your name. Okay, so there's a kind of, and all of these rules, sort of what they add up to is like, we're nice to each other. Like, I'm not gonna make demands on you. Also, I'm not gonna do things where you then can ask me for justifications. um uh we we we uh conversation is very egalitarian uh uh it just by its nature not forget about politically what context you're in it's there's a there's a conceit of equality just in the practice of talking um suppression of status differences um uh an over eagerness to give credit and to avoid blame Okay, so in a conversation, it's like we're, so, you know, the way that sociologists sort of explain this is like, there's like some harsh social reality. One sociologist referred to it as like schoolboy rules. There's a harsh social reality where like, you get credit if you earn credit and you might suck and you might be dumb and we might not like you and whatever. There's a harsh social reality, but in the conversation, we suppress that. And we pretend that we live in a soft, beautiful little world. Little world is one of the phrases that they use. And this is, according to the sociologists, I've read, total human universal, every culture over every time. I don't know if that's true. So you're saying that. All right. So here's the thing that puzzles me about this practice of creating a little world. The bigger world, the world that we're protecting ourselves from, is not actually the external world of reality governed by physical world or physical rules. It's actually another social world. It's the social world that involves things like credit and blame and honor, right? That's also social. So basically here's a weird thing we did, we humans did. We created a social reality, the big social world. Okay, we made it, we made it up. It's fake in a sense, right? It's filled with honor and moral responsibility and blame, et cetera. And then we made another second world where we lie about that first world we made up. Okay. And that second world is like conversation or certain kinds of socializing. Okay. So sociability, Simmel calls it like the world of sociability. Right. So we have the real world that's out there somewhere. Okay. That, you know, we're all having to interact with some of the time. Then we have the big social world, which is social reality, a social world that we constructed. Maybe it includes racism. Maybe it includes some people being honored more than others, et cetera. Then we have the little tiny world of the interaction. It seems to me that a lot of what happens with, sometimes people say, being woke or political correctness is just being polite. I think there's something to that, namely that almost everything that's woke is recognizably the little world. And so this is a very, the whole thing to me is incredibly puzzling. Like, why do we make up this one world? Then we make up a second world to pretend that the first world that we also made up isn't there. But, so we could talk about that. But I guess my thought is like, that it, you know, when you talk about like signaling pro-sociality and like that you're nice to people and whatever, basically what that is is, the space of the little world, and also you're good at pretending like the little world is the big world. And I guess my thought in answer to Robin's question about modernism, is that it's not that the world has more different kinds of people in it than it had in the past. Actually, as Robin has taught me, the world used to have way more different kinds of people in it than it does now. France used to have a whole bunch of different subcultures in it that all got smooshed out by Paris, basically, and different languages. It's not that the world has gotten more different. It's just that the world has gotten more connected. And somehow, that extra amount of connectivity sort of thrown more into relief this issue of the conflict between the little social world and the big social world. And in effect, this conflict and this tension is just more present to us, and our not resolving of it is more present to us. And we're constantly having to resolve the problem of pretending that the little social world really is the big social world. And so we're constantly running up against the fact that it doesn't seem to. And so the euphemism treadmill is like, OK, I'm going to solve it again. I'm going to solve something like that. It's a vague thought.

Robin:

But it seems to me that in this framework you gave, which makes sense, say the rise of woke is a rise of a change in the definition of what the outside world seems like from the inside world and what about the outside world is threatening to the inside world. So for example, in the woke stereotype, Just acknowledging any differences by which women are worse than men would be seen as threatening and not something you're allowed to acknowledge in the inside world. But any ways in which women are better than men is fine.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

That's a new definition of what the outside world was that didn't exist before.

Agnes:

Right. So what I think the difference is, is in the degree of coordination across different conversations, different times and places about which aspects of the outer world we recognize from the inner world. So the way that I'm imagining it, this conflict has always been present. And it's always been the case that inside of a conversation, we observe social niceties, which is to say there are features of the bigger social world that we don't acknowledge. But they're different in different conversations. If I'm with a group of, if I'm a man and I'm with a group of men, like we're gonna say some stuff about women, and there's some awkward stuff about men we're not gonna say. If I'm a woman, you know, and there's just, you know, there's just stuff you can say depending on the group that you're in, but the advent of like, really, really good technology for communication means that there's just this attempt at coordination, that there's just a standardized set of things, a standardized way that the outer world has to look from the inner world in every context. Like even in my home, since we're talking, and in Ticket to Ride, sometimes we call the, do you know Ticket to Ride? Okay, well, Antiquated to Ride, it's a game and we play it and there's one of the trains is rainbow. It's like, there's red and blue, and there's a rainbow one. And sometimes we call it the gay train. And my kids will be like, oh, we're gonna cancel you. And like, but there's almost this threat of like, well, maybe cancel culture will happen inside of our gameplay. Because even in that world, actually, even in the home, even inside of a game, we can feel the presence of this drive to coordinate how the outside world looks like to the inside world.

Robin:

Except the drive to coordinate and then presumably also to coordinate to exclude people who can't keep up with the rapid changes in the coordination. So it's a coordination at the expense of others. Yeah.

Agnes:

So that's just always gonna be true, that part's universal, right? So like when I'm with men in the past, okay, maybe it's true for men now, I don't know, like a bunch of men getting together, what they're doing is coordinating to exclude women. And they're like, yeah, those women, whenever they say bad things about them, that's just always been true. But of course, you're right, that the exclusion is gonna hurt a little more if you're now excluded from every context. But it's not different in that it's excluding. It's just different in that it's coordinated.

Werner:

Yeah. I mean, could you do cultural economics work to just actually see if people, if it seems like conversation is more homogenous across these different contexts? Maybe. I don't know. It sounds hard.

Robin:

I mean, it just seems completely obvious that one of the major features of the modern world over centuries is this increasing degree of communication and contact and increasing integration of cultures around the world. And that's just been a steady trend for the last century.

Werner:

So that would certainly be true. And obviously, around identity issues, we could just see that absolutely, things are getting more homogenous. Maybe 50 years ago, you would use slurs privately. Now, it's an aftermath.

Agnes:

Right, so my point was to say, to take, so Robin had a question. Why is this happening now? Why are these changes happening more quickly now? And what I'm saying is, I tried to find a way to take another data point, namely the rapid increases in technology of communication and use it to explain, to answer Robin's question, except I had to go way out to the sociological predicament in order to make that work.

Robin:

But we have to postulate that a larger world and more communication naturally evolves these things faster than that might be true, but it does require some other argument that implies that.

Agnes:

Right. I guess my hope. Yes. Okay, good. You're right. So my thought was something like The I think you need two things. So one thing is you need to the thought that the more communication means more coordination across these different communicative scenarios on the question of which aspects of the outer world are permitted to be visible from the inner world.

Werner:

There's more discussion of this specific thing.

Agnes:

No, no, just just that, like, everybody agrees that we can't be sexist to women, but we can be sexist to men, say. as opposed to an earlier world where in some contexts you could be sexist, in other contexts you'd be sexist. So it's just a homogenization of the conversation. So that's the first point. And then the second point is why would the homogenization cause the rapid, like the euphemism treadmill, right? And that, so there's still explanatory lacuna there. And I guess my thought is that actually this, This thing where we made a bunch of stuff up and then we made another bunch of stuff up to pretend that we didn't make up, that the first thing isn't there, it's not very stable. That's already unstable because we can tell, we can see the problem. I guess my thought is, I think that this tissue of lies is starting to break, basically, that this whole scenario, is not working for us, partly because of this coordination. And so we're constantly having to fix it. So my thought is, so this is an alternative explanation for the euphemism treadmill. You know, your explanation is, oh, we're trying to like, keep people out. And so we have to keep coming up with a new word so that the people who are in know that they can't.

Robin:

I think this is like a minor part of the Well, it's a major phenomena. So any explanation is a major important point.

Werner:

I think information isn't the main thing, but it's like keeping non-wokes out of the signaling.

Robin:

Well, it's also the time it takes to get used over the ick, right? So part of your story is we pick a new ick, and other people go ick, and then it takes the time to adapt to that rather than just the information.

Werner:

I think it's ick over information. I think the information goes fairly quickly. But it's still a keeping people out phenomena. Yes.

Agnes:

Right. So I guess, here's my thought. Say we have a word for a group of people and that word accurately reflects the bigger social reality of how we think about those people. Namely, they're not as good as the rest of us. Let's say the word is crazy. So there's some people and they're just crazy. And so then inside of our conversation, we're now talking, and maybe we don't want that in our conversation, because maybe one of you is crazy. I won't say which. And so I want to be like, oh, maybe I'll say different instead. And so now we've moved from crazy, which is the way that we talk about that phenomenon from the point of view of the outer world, in the outer world, of its place in the outer world. Inside our conversation, to soften things up, we're gonna say different. When we say different, that move from crazy to different is really similar to the move from what's your name to hi, I'm Agnes, right? It's just, it softens it a little bit. It's like, it's not any more or less a lie than that, right? And we're doing all these things all the time. And there's something very selective about being anti-woke. That is, you just happen to notice the few of these things that really irritate you instead of the giant pervasive web of them that we're all trapped in. Anyway, so when I say different, it feels softer. But now when we keep saying different, over time, we start to realize, well, different just means crazy. And different starts to be weighted, be freighted with. the truth of the social reality of like how we think about crazy people, which is that they're worse than us. And so now we just need to do it again. We now, you know, special. Okay, now we move to special. And in fact, then there's a next move. There's another level of this where it's like, you know, me saying, I'm like, you know, people sometimes call me special, but I know that what they really think is that I'm crazy. Let's just, you know, let's just say it. Let's just say it out loud. I'll identify as crazy. I'm going to appropriate it. And now I'm going to soften it in this funny, like reverse twisted backwards way where it's like, I'm actually proud.

Werner:

A counter signal, I suppose. That's one way of reading it.

Agnes:

So, but my point is, like, this progress that happened, it wasn't because we wanted to keep anyone out. It wasn't because we wanted to show that we were better than the other people. It's because the thing starts to break down of its own because we notice that we're just making up a story about another story.

Robin:

Right, but you still need a reason why this process is happening much faster now than it used to. Right.

Agnes:

So my hope was the communicative technology was going to give us the answer to that. That is that we're just somehow doing it so much across so many different contexts and we're coordinating across those contexts. And that's making us notice, like bringing it to consciousness.

Robin:

Let me offer an alternative process, which is this idea that we in the modern world have come to see ourselves as purposefully consciously trying to make changes. that is part of our ideal of ourselves, is that we are wanting to and achieving change. And that wasn't part of the self-consciousness of people centuries ago so much. Usually, sometimes it was. But when you have a community that sees itself as purposely trying to achieve change, and maybe even we are trying to help cause change in a larger world, then these rates of change make more sense in that sense that people will eagerly jump on a change as a way to show that they are causing change and up with the change that they are trying to cause in a way that wasn't there centuries ago.

Werner:

And to try to get more of where you're going with this, this you see as a side effect of cultural drift. This is a symptom of our drift.

Robin:

Well, the fact that it can happen is a symptom of the drift. That is, in past eras, people may well have initiated such things. But then, when it went off the rails, they were punished and disciplined more quickly. And in the modern world, there isn't that discipline. So that would be the cultural drift framing of it.

Werner:

And it's in your individual interest to cause change for different reasons, but it's bad for the group. Or it could be bad for the group because it will change the culture.

Robin:

All through history, presumably, you know, little groups initiated changes in the sense that they created little cults and they had little factions and groups of heretics that they would have different concepts and they would change their concept of many things including marriage and work and property all sorts of things but typically it would just quickly go off the rails in such a way as that those people would just be punished for that and that's why what limited in the past that would be the cultural drift story and that in our rich world we aren't so quickly punished for such things and so they can continue longer than they would have in the past but the key idea is that you have rapid change very commonly when you have a small group of passionate people who see themselves as different and see themselves as trying to cause change And then their change of language over a short time, or change of behaviors, or moving to different locations can then be seen as a validation of their trajectory, which is part of their self-concept. We are on a trajectory, and we are trying to be on a trajectory. And the changes we can point to would then be proof that we have achieved something of a trajectory.

Agnes:

I think our theories are not that different, Robin. And I can't believe I'm the one saying that, because you're always the one saying that. But I think there's just a question, yeah, OK, why are we trying suddenly to make changes? And I give an explanation of that, which is sometime around 1900, humanity woke up. Sociology basically comes, it's then, right? Simmel, that's when Simmel is writing, around 1900. Goffman's going to be a little later than that. But all these novelists are writing around that time. What did they wake up to? I think the answer is, well, the little social world and the big social world. That is, hey, we made a bunch of stuff up. Is it the best stuff? Could we make it up better? First and foremost, it's actually the big social world. The idea that it's constructed, the idea that it could be constructed differently. I don't think that that's something that people have always been aware of. I think it's something that they come to an awareness of. So I think there's an intellectual change. There's an intellectual, like a light bulb turns on. And I mean, you can see it turn on in all these novels across, all these different novels across Europe, many of whom are not in communication with each other, writing like the same novel. of being like, ah, what's valuable? I don't even understand anymore. And that's what, you know, modernism, that's what we've been talking about, Robin. And I guess my thought is that it's at that point that the idea of change starts to make sense, right? It's like, well, look, if we made it up, maybe we can make it different. And so then there's this project of doing it better and of wanting to do it better, basically not taking social reality for granted as a given. And I think, so, okay, one more step in my, I mean, I can't believe you said this was plausible, Robin, because like I made this up an hour ago. So that's a really good sign. I'm often telling Robin like ideas. And then he like, you know, recently he's like, that's plausible. And I'm like, you could have said something nicer than that. He's like, that's my highest compliment. So now I know that's Robin's highest compliment is that something is plausible. Okay, so thank you for that compliment. But here's the next step. Okay, it's very, very weird that we would make up a social reality and then make up a second social reality about how that first one's not there. Why would we do that? Why would we have been doing that for like, you know, across every culture for all of human history? Very weird practice. Well, maybe we need a social reality to live in. That is human beings need to live together in a certain way where they need like rules for like, what's our thing that we're doing? That's the first step. And then second, like they often don't like, they also need to think that it's better than it is or something like that. They need to think that the social reality in which they live is like somehow perfect or really good or whatever. They don't want to think we made one up and it's like, it's just sort of okay. Like, you know, if the way we look at like human sacrifice societies, we're just like, Whoa, you guys, you guys have really bad social reality over there. If you were in that society, you would have to think, no, it's actually warm and cozy. And you'd have the second S, the little world is the world in which you tell yourself that the bigger social reality is a really good social reality. Okay. So we're now in the situation where we're like trying to change and we're seeing ourselves as having agency in relation to the bigger social reality. And that just does funny things to the relationship between the bigger social reality and the little one that tells us that the big one is good. We're suddenly much, much more able to see that we're like lying about it. So people are able to write books like the elephant in the brain where they just see a bunch of stuff about like the lies that we tell. The lies that we tell have now become visible to someone like Robin. Someone like Robin a thousand years ago just wouldn't see any of it.

Werner:

Well, I think you know maybe more about the sociology religion than I do. I don't know if you've done work on this, but I guess you could find some antecedent to this in Confucianism, reification of names. We'll take the names that we use in the small social world and make them more consistent with the ones in the real social world. And so maybe you can find isolated examples of this. I'm not sure where that would fit into the model.

Robin:

So, I mean, religions have certainly had this ideal world that they see themselves as trying to achieve and that they are closer to in their religious communication with each other and the religious events and interactions, right? So certainly a standard concept of religion is when we together are being religious, we are closer to this ideal world that we are trying to achieve than when we are ordinarily at work or having sex or things like that. That's definitely a common concept of religion. And then often religions have had this idea and we want to spread this religion to others. And so we have this project of spreading it and then maybe we are trying to get closer to our religion we see ourselves as not having gotten as close as we could and we are trying to be closer. But even then, I mean, except in small sects that are rapidly growing or things like that, we don't tend to see such rapid social changes we're seeing in our world today in terms of our concept of ourselves and what we see as acceptable and things like that. So that's still a distinctive recent feature to think about how to explain. But so I would just, I mean, I would go back to this, you know, say World War II telling us that we did have some values and what were those values? Well, those values are, well, there's bad people and we're supposed to be opposing them. And that we can tell what they are from us from these key values of equality across ethnicities and other sorts of added on categories. And that we are seeing ourselves as activists trying to do that, not just via war, but via other political pushes and social pushes, and that they have become, in some sense, the heroes of the modern world. The most celebrated people are activists who are seen as consciously trying to change culture, and we want to be associated with them, and they are trying to do things often. Changing vocabulary is a thing they explicitly say. They are trying to do in the service of their activism campaign.

Agnes:

You took a different moral of the story away from that conversation than I did, Robin, in particular, away from my point about World War II, which is my point was not it all started in World War II. My point is World War II has distracted us from the real thing, which happened around 1900. There was a thing that happened, which is in effect, sorry, Robin, about precedence, but we realized cultural drift. That is, we discovered cultural drift at this point in time, and then Robin rediscovered it later. Why did it have to be rediscovered later? Well, because of World War II, got us all distracted about objective morality and stuff. And in fact, there was just this crisis about how we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to live and the thought that our cultures are just arbitrary frameworks that are thrown upon us through the accident of birth, and that maybe we could have better versions of them. I think that maybe what World War II did was something like make that look like a pretty straightforward project. Oh, just find the bad guys and get rid of the bad guys for at least a little while. And then civil rights continued like, okay, we can make the right culture. by fighting the bad guys. But where we are now is a lot closer to where we were in 1900, I think, where it's just less clear who the bad guys are. It's less clear that, I mean, we've been fighting racism and sexism for quite some time. You know, with the Nazis, I mean, we fought them for a little while and then we got rid of them, mostly, right? kind of worked out in one logic but it's not working the same with sexism and racism and even homophobia and trans like it looks like something else is going on something that's more like the Morax that people felt like they were in in 1900.

Robin:

Well, the question is how many people in our world see it that way. So I agree that I mean actually not that many people ever read any modernist literature or read sociology at all so that a range of people who had these doubts were pretty small range of the world in 1900. And then it might have gotten less and is more now compared to, say, 1950. But it's still a pretty small fraction of the world. That is, most people do think they are onto some right morality and are eager for something like that. And the customers for Woke are people who are looking for something like that. And it's offered to them there. That is, it gives them this absolute moral framework and who the good guys and bad guys are and their place in it and how they're pushing for good things. And there's a big demand for that.

Agnes:

You have probably taught fewer introduction to philosophy classes than I have, so I'll tell you that on day one of an introduction to philosophy class, what you get as a teacher when you sort of introduce like ethical questions and stuff, it's like you're at a firing squad of We don't teach philosophy in high school, but what we do teach in every part of life is how to avoid philosophy. And you get that back at you. So who's to say what's right and wrong? Isn't everything relative? Isn't this just a matter of how we use words? It's all just subjective. Different cultures think different things. It's like every tool in their toolkit to make this philosophy stuff stop. are like, these are first year undergraduates, okay? So they're not, they're, you know, they just finished high school. they don't have an incredibly high level of intellectual sophistication. They mostly have not read modernist literature or sociology, but they have absorbed what they've absorbed from their culture. And what they've absorbed is something about the fruitlessness of the moral project. And it is me who has to bring up the Nazis. I'm like, guys, aren't you at least against Nazis or something? I mean, do I have anything to work with here? Have you ever been angry at anyone in your life? And when you were angry, did you think, who's to say what's right and wrong? Or did you think I'm to say, because I'm angry at you and you did something wrong. I got to do that work for them because they do not want to say that there's anything like any objective morality.

Robin:

So almost everybody agrees about, say, the origins and strength of woke because it's primarily seated within and coming from prestigious academia.

Agnes:

I'm teaching them to be worth by teaching them that moral questions have answers.

Robin:

Maybe you're countering other teaching elsewhere, but the net effect is there's a lot.

Agnes:

I wasn't saying that by way of saying it's obviously false. I'm just, I was just clarifying.

Robin:

there is these, we can identify these two tendencies, one of which is to be, to have doubts and wonder, you're like, where, where could you find a place to stand to talk about moral questions? And there's this other tendency of people who think they very much have the answers and are pushing them and are even punishing people who question their point of view. And woke is clearly more like the second than the first. I think we can agree.

Agnes:

Wait, tell me the two things again.

Robin:

One is this generic doubt, the modernist doubt of how, well, now that we understand that our morals and our society is socially constructed, how do we have any principled way to judge? And the other is maybe the World War II inspired path of we do know the right answer. And here it is. It's about equality and anti-racism, anti-sexism, et cetera.

Agnes:

I think they're not separate. So that was my point about your moral is different from mine because my story starts earlier. The World War II thing is like an answer to something. And it's that doubt that makes you want to have an answer. But this is maybe an argument a little bit in favor of, I think it was Rufo, uh the critical theory thing right um the like uh so you might think look most people do not read and did not read modernist literature it's hard to read right um among other things i mean most people don't read literature or novels and these are like the hardest novels to read and maybe most people don't like you know read sociology or you know whatever and around philosophy all that But they didn't used to. But then slowly everybody goes to college. We changed our world in which now so much of the world really does pass through educational institutions. A lot of those institutions have requirements. At the University of Chicago, you have to take a humanities class. So it won't necessarily be a philosophy class, but it's going to be something in this flavor of, um uh it's like the humanities side of the humanity the culture the two cultures right you're going to get some of that and what what that could be is inculcating people both in the doubt that is exposing them to modernist doubt again as i say to some degree they're already exposing the culture but and to this kind of panic need to grasp onto a moral system that will solve the problem that that doubt creates.

Robin:

I do think that a lot of the power of ideology and religions has long been highlighting within you your temptation to do the opposite of what it suggests. Christianity got huge mileage out of telling people, aren't you tempted to sin? Can't you see that inside yourself? And aren't you, you know, shouldn't you acknowledge just how sinful and base you are? And that was very effective at producing enormous emotional energy in Christianity because people are fighting it in themselves as well as outside of themselves. And that's part of modern religions and ideologies to see that temptation. So say the Marxism. Marxists see inside themselves the temptation to enjoy being rich and enjoying the fruits of capitalism and enjoying their dominance over other people. And you're making people feel guilty, high status, relatively rich people, in Marxism, by showing them this temptation in themselves and asking them to be repelled by it and to try to fight against it. And then you've got this strong, and of course, racism and sexism are similar sorts of things. You show people how tempted you are to be racist or sexist, and to be horrified by that inside yourself, and now that gives you the energy to be trying to fight it in yourself and to believe that it's elsewhere. If you see it yourself, you can fight it very plausible that it's all over the place elsewhere, and other people aren't fighting it nearly as much as you are.

Werner:

And this is a very interesting phenomenon, I'd love to see this spelled out more, like, is there a connection to, like, Waluigi effect, the famous thing in AI, perhaps.

Agnes:

What is that?

Werner:

What is that? That, you know, if you try to align AI to do a certain thing, it makes it very easy to also make it do the opposite. Why? It's like not really well understood.

Robin:

You're making the axis salient.

Werner:

Yeah.

Robin:

Right? Yeah. You tell me, never, never do a mass murder. Never mass murder. See, all these mass murder people should never want to do that. Now, when I'm really mad, it's one of the options in my head. Oh, mass murder. Maybe I could do that.

Werner:

Yeah. I mean, sounds like Hegel, right?

Agnes:

Right, so I guess I think that one way to explain that kind of effect and even the stuff about the temptation is that if we think that there are specific things in the bigger social world that the smaller social world is trying to insulate us from, Um, so, um, let's say just, um, you know, it could be racism. It could be, um. You know, the way in which wealth gives you status, right? Um. And, um, I mean, there's always going to be some, like, whenever we're protected, we're protected from something. And so in protecting you from that thing, I think it's going to be like just a side effect of it that it can draw attention to that same thing. Because that's the thing that you're always not supposed to be thinking about. And maybe somehow that effect has gotten stronger. I believe that. I believe that that effect has gotten stronger all the time. That is, I think even it's surprising how woke we are, but it's also, it's actually just as surprising how anti-woke we are. Like anti-woke-ism, the power and the intensity of anti-woke-ism is very surprising. And it grows up so quickly and then it's so like, it's a big force. You can, you'll kind of immediately encounter it. It immediately organizes people like, and, And maybe it's like, well, I keep thinking of all the things I'm not supposed to say. And maybe even more so than in earlier times. When Christianity dominates, it's like, don't think about sex. Maybe that just kind of worked a bit and people just didn't think about sex as much. But we're now at a time where when you tell people don't think about X, that move just doesn't work. So that's me saying the tissue of social construction is getting thinner.

Werner:

But I think there's also an effect that if you have an ideology, you want there to be really hard. An ideology thrives when there are very hard boundaries between the people who support it and oppose it, generally.

Robin:

Or at least that's a model that kind of works. But most religions and histories dominated in a particular area. And most of the people in that area were in favor of it. And the people against it were faraway people. They never met much, right? That's a change in the modern world then. We're so eager to see the opponents and have them around us.

Werner:

You could definitely think of some examples of moral panics around heretics and things.

Robin:

We make up witches around us in order to have somebody to be against, but that seems to be somewhat different than just knowing that they're all around you, I guess.

Werner:

I don't know. I think if there's ever a situation where you have to even invent opponents, having real opponents you would think would be better than that. I think this is a model that can kind of work for ideology.

Robin:

I mean, although strikingly, in some sense, you know, the woke scenario is where they're really looking to find racists and almost nobody will claim to be a racist. And it's hard to find anybody who will claim to be racist. Even sexist, it's hard to find anybody. So most of the anti-woke is saying, you just, we agree with you on the basics, but you've gone way too far in all these performative, you know, things. And that's the woke, anti-woke conflict as we see it, which isn't so much people revealing themselves to be the people that woke people say they're fighting.

Agnes:

Yeah, it almost feels to me like ideology is this thing that came into existence around the same time as the term ideology came into existence. Of course, in some sense, there have been beliefs that people held about social reality, and we can call all of those ideology. but but the thing where one group of people is accusing another group of people like even in in the ancient world where they'd be like okay you have your gods and we have our gods like there wasn't some big thing of like well yours are fake ones that you just made up it'd be like you know no like okay we can we can even agree on some of them or we can we can incorporate or you call it by a different name or there there just wasn't this sense of like battling theories um and um I guess there must have been something like that around the advent of Christianity, something in that family, but it still feels like the modern phenomenon of this kind of equilibrium that we kind of have like this, this, this, this equity is we're like, in a way, the stronger will gets the stronger anti will gets that feels like something new to me.

Robin:

I'm not sure how exactly is relevant, but the anecdote just came to mind. I just recently visited Cuba. And my wife was hoping to like go there and get some Catholic icons because she likes to collect those things. And they just weren't for sale because there's just hardly any Catholics in Cuba. Even though every town has a Catholic church in the central square, maybe apparently only 15% of Cubans are Catholic and 15% are atheists. And the other 70% are people who sort of have various African religions mixed in with Christian symbolism. So they've merged various, Christian saints with various African deities in a mixed idea where they, you know, they, so they all get baptized because they all accept the Christian symbols as being symbols of something powerful that they also have African names for. But in fact, you know, and it's striking how I read this book called Montague a while ago about sort of year 1400 Europe, France, where basically they accepted various Catholic symbols, but in fact, they didn't really understand Catholic dogma. A lot of their behavior was quite at odds with Catholic dogma, but they didn't understand that. And so there is this phenomenon where people sort of embrace some abstract symbols, but they don't really agree on what they mean. And then they have an identity based around various rituals and symbols. And there's a fair bit of that with folk in some sense. We do the land acknowledgements ritual, but we're not exactly sure how that's being anti-racist exactly. But we collect these practices, right? Maybe acknowledging pronouns and using pronouns. And there's a sense in which a lot of religion through history has been via rituals. and names for things, and symbols of things. And it's actually unusual to have coherent dogmas and whole ideologies, because most people don't understand those and can't really assimilate them. What they can get is a bunch of concrete symbols.

Werner:

Yeah, and the syntheism phenomenon seems a lot stronger in religion, though, than our modern stuff. And why? I don't know. It's complicated.

Agnes:

It seems to me what's distinctive about us is that we are going to complain if we don't see why the land acknowledgement actually fights racism or how the pronouns actually help anyone. That is, in the previous time they would just go, yeah, okay, we do a land acknowledgement. But now we got this whole group of people who's like, what is this land acknowledgement all about and like cynical about it and want to expose it. that and so that that's the tissue it's like we can't just it's just we can't just have our rituals anymore right um um we somehow now need to have people like robin hansen writing books about how these are just rituals and we're lying to ourselves and that like you can't that that that world does not sustain itself is what i'm saying like and i say i don't blame you because i blame these people in 1900 but It's that we can't keep having a set of lies piled on another set of lies and also have an entire industry of people whose job it is to expose those lies. That system is not sustainable, I think. That's basically my explanation.

Werner:

Could I propose a rudimentary model, just ideas that obligate you to spread them do better, in short, tend to do better? Ideas that weren't obligated to be spread have done, like, you know, in the last, like, 2,000 years, kind of been displaced by one.

Robin:

But obligating to spread an idea that's too complicated to actually spread, like, say, Marxist theology, is also a problem, right?

Werner:

That's true, yes. But is it so crazy that, like, the ideas that seem to really dominate, like, Christianity and Islam with, like, billions of people, they're not that complicated, but they're really, really obligated to be spread. And it's like, yeah, of course we have a world that's, like, dominated by that.

Agnes:

So, what I've been saying is the principle ideas that obligate you to spread them do better. The operation of that principle is not going to be unaffected by people's realization that it is an operation. There is an economics word for this. It's the something effect. I'm not remembering it. It's one of the things Tyler sometimes brings up on his blog. But that your theory had better take into account the potential effect of the understanding of this theory. And I think people are often not doing that. And so they're not seeing that if you're anti-woke, you're spreading woke for this reason and vice versa.

Werner:

Yeah, can it be unaffected?

Robin:

I think it's mostly unaffected, though, right? So it seems like a really central issue here, and it must have been an issue in the past, is the difference between intellectuals, professors, and college students, and the kinds of concepts they can understand and engage, and that counter arguments that will be relevant for them. And then mass culture, and ideology, and religion, which has to be much simpler. And so you've described part of the process of Say Woke as evolving towards stances that give ordinary people the ick exactly to make a separation between. But that is a novel new thing. So part of the novel new world of ideology slash religion is this desire to have a distinctive elite religion. or ideology that can show that you are elite by separating you from them. And then that induces rates of change in them that are historically unusual. And the question is, but like you say, woke is more popular than say Marxism was exactly because it's more accessible. So.

Agnes:

That kind of makes the elite part of the argument go away. I also think the first part of the argument about how.

Werner:

It's certainly less elite.

Agnes:

Right. How intellectuals live in a different world from everybody else, that's just less true when everyone goes to college.

Robin:

Yeah. And it's still actually less than half of people going to college, at least graduating.

Agnes:

Okay, fine, but like a third is a lot.

Werner:

Although I'll note, this probably changed college a lot more than it changed like everyone into elites, but there are two competing effects.

Robin:

I mean, woke is actually not a thing at the bottom two thirds of colleges either. Yeah. So I mean, you know, the woke activism is primarily a feature of the most elite colleges.

Agnes:

But I'm not just talking about activism. I'm talking about people like being exposed to, I don't know, I have a friend who teaches at like a community college that would be like close to the bottom, you know, in a bottom tier and like his philosophy classes are pretty similar to mine. I've talked to him about like what he teaches and I've also, I've gone and done Zoom sessions and talked to his students and like They don't seem like some other kind of human to me. They, they respond to me intellectually in pretty similar ways to the ways that my students respond to me. So, uh, I think in a lot of, I think it does make a big difference that. Everyone is like, where's my parents who didn't go to college. because where they're from, there's no like liberal arts, you just go and like go to your profession after high school. They actually find a lot of this like conceptual space just incredibly confusing. And they're like, they really, really struggled to keep up with like the new thing. You know, it took them really, took like my dad super long to get on board with the gay thing and now like he's finally there and now with trans, he's just like, You're just confused as to what's going on. But I think that people who have picked up this kind of consensual architecture of human rights and stuff to a greater degree than my parents have, find all this stuff less difficult. And it's harder to separate by way of an elite.

Werner:

Elite over production, huh?

Robin:

Well, we're nearing end of time, but one obvious question that is the thing everybody talks about when they talk about woke is, is it over? So focus, you know, your essay suggests, if you're looking at fundamental processes, these haven't changed, so you shouldn't expect this to be over. But a lot of people we know are celebrating that with the election of Trump, woke people seem to have shut up for a little while, they're discouraged and backed off, and therefore they're saying, and it's all over, phew, what do we think?

Werner:

I think, you know, woke has kind of, I think has kind of changed. I noticed, on the internet, in my daily life, I think the median elite American is definitely to the right of what they were seven years ago, 10 years ago.

Robin:

How does that fit with any of this theory that you've given us? I don't know if any of these accounts make sense of that.

Werner:

I think Wilk has changed a little bit. I think it's less negative. And we're still going to be signaling that we're good at cooperating with people who are very different than us, racially and in other ways. But we might do this in a kind of less invidious way. But yeah, I think you need hard social science to really assess this kind of question.

Agnes:

I guess one thing is that it seems to me that claims of is woke over or not are often the province of one group really wants to claim victory. Another group really wants to say, I'm still a potential victim of cancellation. And so there's that whole dynamic going on, like, no, I still have reason to be really afraid, or we're finally winning. And so that obscures what's actually happening. So I agree with Werner about, in effect, the objection that I first raised to you, which is like, but it kind of doesn't seem very pro-social, is I think actually the objection that it's like, there's like all these people, I don't know, some like elite people in publishing or whatever. they don't want to be not publishing books because these people, they want to publish the books that will make them money. And so they want, they want to go back to like, let's kind of try to be nice to more people so that things can work. And so it's the pro-social, it's the anti-sociality of wokeism is causing problems for wokeism. And so it's in a way self-destructing on its own principle of pro-sociality. But what that might just mean that it changes to, now our new consensus on what it is to be pro-social, maybe that's gonna be more like, oh, it's being pro-free speech, that's being pro-social. That probably won't be very stable either. So my prediction is it is gonna end eventually, okay, when we clear up this giant mess that we've made by constructing a pile of lies on a second pile of lies. And we are clearly unhappy with the situation. We're clearly wanting to see through it, but the incentives are complicated. And as soon as we start seeing through it even a little bit, what we start to do is form a group of like-minded people who will pat each other on the back for having seen a little tiny bit through it and call ourselves smarter than other people and just get dumber by means of associating by means of that group. And so the progress is slow because these same social dynamics get in the way of the intellectual progress. But I almost have this hope that maybe it'll speed up as we start to take off from the sociological goo that we're trapped in intellectually. It will get easier and easier to free ourselves from it. And then eventually, it'll all be over and humanity will just happily philosophize together in my utopia.

Robin:

I grant that Agnes' large, dramatic, long-term resolution is possible and maybe even desirable, but I'm not going to bet on it in the next 10 or 20 years. That seems pretty unlikely. So I'd say we've had a long period here where the world wants a substitute for religion. When religion is on the decline, people want ideologies. They feel a passionate need to have some meaning in life and a cause they're behind and a sense of progress that they are contributing to. And the long string from, you know, anti-Hitler, civil rights, you know, feminism, pro-homosexual, pro-trans is such a long trend. with such a coherence to it and such a huge inertia to it that I just find it hard to believe that's over. I could see it taking a different direction a bit, but I think whatever different direction that is, it will make sense within that long history of being something like, you know, the path that led up to it. So that's the question of what new moves can be there in that space. I do think there's a sense of overreach and maybe defeat along the recent path, but it's hard to see how people will interpret that as the whole thing being a mistake. That seems just implausible in the short term, although in the longer term, more believable. But I guess that's it for us today.

Agnes:

OK.

Robin:

Thanks for joining us, Werner. Thank you.