Tuesday, November 29, 2022

Woke, Fragility, and What Is Necessary to Make a Real Difference

tl;dr: The goal is to be antifragile and thus able to thrive and make a difference.


Several notes as preface:

In one of his books, Nick Offerman notes that he doesn’t understand why “woke” is an insult. Would you rather be asleep? Especially when there are real structural issues even today? (Just one example.)

I know I’m a straight white middle-class American dude. But that doesn’t make my opinion worthless. Opinions are worth considering regardless of the person’s race, gender, or sexual orientation.

If only people who agree with you are allowed to have an opinion, how strong can your argument really be? Isn’t that like election-denying Republicans, “I’ll accept the results of the election if I win”?

Finally, I’d like to note: I only want happiness for everyone. </preface>


A story as I remember it:

Anne and I were at the commencement of a top-rated (and extremely well-endowed) liberal arts school. One of the speakers was a graduating senior who was the first in her family to go to college. She told the story of how happy she was to be able to go to this magical place on a full scholarship – beautiful grounds, great programs, a supportive system, and the full resources of five of the best schools in the entire country. It wasn’t a dream come true, because it was more than she had ever dreamt.

It didn’t last. Relatively soon, she “learned” how everyone is racist, how she and her family had been discriminated against and exploited, and how students, faculty, and staff  were assaulting her with “microaggressions.” She raged for much of her speech.

Now, after four years at the best school in the country, she had gone from ecstatic, excited, and enthusiastic to anxious, angry, and accusatory.

Here was a young woman who had a rare chance to be in a far better position than the vast majority of people in the world. She could have left with the education, credentials, understanding, and contacts to succeed beyond her wildest dreams as a 16-year-old. 


Instead, elements at this school had taken this passionate and joyful young person and broken her. I can’t help but think she would have been better off going to UCLA or even the University of Arizona.

And at this country’s elite schools, this is not an isolated incident.

Of course our society (and humanity as a whole) is racist, sexist, transphobic, classist, etc. This is why we need to strengthen our children to be able to deal with the world as it is. We have the understanding and ability to help young people become antifragile. That will allow them to thrive in an unfair world and help change it for those truly suffering.  

Instead of building up our best and brightest, some choose to beat them down with a steady water torture of the world’s horrors, until they have been programmed to think everything is irredeemably horrible – even when their own situation is awesome.

This is also the point of the Greta Thunberg chapter in Losing My Religions.

PS: I see imperfect parallels with animal advocacy. As Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer noted, “In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.”

The world is objectively hell for non-human animals. I have seen this overwhelming, unnecessary, and intentional cruelty break many sensitive, empathetic souls. This reaction is entirely understandable.

But only dwelling in the horrors – which I did for many years – does not help. As I talk about in the chapter “The End of Veganism” in Losing My Religions, only documenting and “bearing witness” to brutality actively hurts animals.

I’ll conclude with what I have said and written many times – but only because it was one of the hardest lessons of my life. I believe it applies to anyone who wants to make the world better:


It is not enough to be righteous, or even a dedicated, knowledgeable advocate. The animals don’t need us to be right, they need us to be effective. In other words, we don’t want to simply “win an argument with a meat eater.” It isn’t about winning. Instead, we want to open people’s hearts and minds to making compassionate choices.


To do this, we must be admirable. Regardless of the sorrow and outrage we rightly feel at the cruelties animals suffer, we must strive to be what others want to be: joyful individuals with fulfilling lives. Only then can we do our best to really make a real difference.


Can't get enough plant-based chicken!


2 comments:

WolfKenobi said...

Yeah, someone who is successful enough at Pomona to be a graduation speaker *totally* sounds like someone who's broken and fragile. *Definitely* not someone who's thriving in an unfair world and who did extra work to gain a platform where they can speak about issues that cause suffering and the work that has been and can continue to be done to forward change. She'd be better off if she'd just sit down, shut up, and was thankful it's not worse, instead of daring to take that platform to talk about acknowledging privilege and the importance of community and community love and thank her fellow students for the hard work and action that they took to make the campus better for students to come. Sitting down and shutting up and simply being grateful things aren't worse is always a great way to make things better. The problem was definitely that this person had the chance to find words to talk about their experience, and not the actual experiences they had. Using microaggressions in scare quotes to talk about the administration shutting down people speaking out and protesting anti-Black police brutality is definitely a good way to show you take this seriously. I'm sure you have a totally accurate picture of someone's life from your narrow interpretation of a graduation speech, and this very definitely broken student for sure didn't have any success or benefit from attending Pomona.

No wait, sorry. Ashley Land took her Media Studies degree and now works at Bad Robot Productions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaj5DxPTkZ4
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashley-land-46503873/
20 seconds of googling.

Are you serious with this?!?

Anonymous said...

Yeah, obviously he's serious. Going to a place like Pomona on scholarship and emerging as a victim--or at least focusing on your victimhood in a graduation speech--rightly reads as bullshit. Whether you like it or not, that's just a pretty basic and simple truth to anyone with any perspective about the world.