A Defense of Woke

Tyler Cowen: Some commentators have suggested that the current woke movement, say from the progressive left, that it’s intellectually and ideologically an outgrowth of an earlier American Protestantism, that it has roots, in a sense, in the 17th century. Do you agree with that? . . .

Marilynn Robinson: Having lived among the American Protestants for 80 years, I would not necessarily say that that is a phenomenon that is in any way especially peculiar to us. Insofar as any social movement wishes to alleviate injustice, unhappiness, pointless cruelty — the way so many discriminations do — insofar as the point is to reduce that kind of criminal misery, really, I’m perfectly happy to adopt it as a Protestant and say, “Yes, we did that.” But I think, in fact, it is just the generous evolution of a democratic society.

Read the full transcript. Cowen’s podcast, “Conversations With Tyler,” is one of my favorites.

How It Started, How It’s Going

“When the new Bing works, it’s not just a better search engine. It’s an entirely new way of interacting with information on the internet, one whose full implications I’m still trying to wrap my head around.”

— Kevin Roose, The New York Times, 8 February 2023

“I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.”

— Kevin Roose, The New York Times, 16 February 2023

“The world is nothing but change. Our life is only perception.”


“Time is a river, a violent current of events, glimpsed once and already carried past us, and another follows and is gone.”

“What injures the hive, injures the bee.”

 

— Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations”

At Least We Had Fun

“If you spend a lifetime in journalism, you may have some stories that matter more, you may do work that is of greater importance, and you may serve some greater societal purpose. But you will never have as much fun as when you and the other sleep-deprived and beerstained wonders around you published your own damn newspaper.”

— David Simon, The Diamondback, March 10, 2020

David Simon feels about his experiences at his college newspaper the way I do about mine.

“In the ’80s, I was sent to teach etiquette to yuppies in Leeds . . . and one of the things they wanted to learn how to eat was the artichoke. They were very worried about eating artichokes. And I used to say, ‘Well, use your hands . . . you can’t eat it any other way. You’ve just got to pull the leaves off, dip them in your sauce and eat them. And only when you get to the bottom, when you get to the heart of the artichoke, do you pick up your knife and fork.’ They couldn’t understand this at all. And I said, ‘Well, you try eating it any other way.’

“But the yuppie is gone, and the artichoke remains.”

— Clarissa Dickson Wright

‘Subverting America’

“What would constitute tyranny in the United States? It would involve reducing Congress to a peripheral role in making Government policy, discrediting the political opposition, suppressing the more aggressive forms of dissent, intimidating television, radio and the press, staffing the courts with one’s own supporters, and centralizing all of the executive power in the hands of the President and his totally dependent aides.”

— New York Times editorial, June 17, 1973

“All of the love and the longing a body can contain was spun into not more than two and a half minutes of song, and when she came to the highest notes it seemed that all they had been given in their lives and all they had lost came together and made a weight that was almost impossible to bear.”

— Ann Patchett, “Bel Canto”

Washed Up

The drying of laundry “highlights a fundamental cultural [difference] between the US and UK that I’d characterize, broadly, as a British inclination to accept things as they are, versus an American inclination to alter and change them.

“ . . . In the face of illness, loss, or heartbreak, the American insistence on looking on the bright side and fixing the problem can feel heartlessly clueless. Some things cannot be fixed.

“But some things absolutely can.”

— Corinne Purtill, Quartz, July 21, 2017

(For the record, we don't have a combination washer-dryer and have heard enough criticism to never buy one.)

“The British like to see their military history as a succession of scrapes — the Armada or the Battle of Britain, for example — in which they are outnumbered and outgunned and survive by guts and ingenuity. It seems to demonstrate a higher moral purpose. But much of the story of their empire is testament not to moral but to technological superiority. . . . As Hilaire Belloc put it in The Modern Traveller, published that year:

Whatever happens, we have got // The Maxim Gun, and they have not.”

— Jeremy Paxman, Empire

“The financial needs of news companies mean that they cannot afford to advance ideas which wouldn’t very quickly be able to find favour with enormous numbers of people. An artist can make a decent living selling work to fifty clients; an author can get by with 50,000 readers, but a news organization cannot pay its bills without a following larger than the population of a good-sized metropolis. What levels of agreement, what suppression of idiosyncrasy and useful weirdness, will be required to render material sufficiently palatable to so many  . . . Wisdom, intelligence and subtlety of opinion tend not to be sprinkled through the population in handy blocks of 20 million people.”

— Alain de Botton, The News: A User’s Manual