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Love of All Wisdom

~ Philosophy through multiple traditions

Love of All Wisdom

Tag Archives: 21st century

Where race and gender overrode everything

11 Sunday May 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics, Work

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

21st century, academia, Adam Rubenstein, Adolph Reed, Boston University, Democratic Socialists of America, gender, Google, Ibram X. Kendi, John Lansing, New York Times, NPR, race, technology, United States, Uri Berliner

A while ago I identified what I considered the Social Justice movement‘s first tenet: that the most urgent issue facing the world in the 21st century is inequalities of race and gender (including sexual orientation and gender identity). I stand by that description. I think that that view is implicit in Ibram X. Kendi’s most widely quoted idea: that neutrality is a mask for racism, that anyone who isn’t actively antiracist is racist. Because that idea directly implies that one must prioritize racism over other issues, that neutrality might be acceptable on other issues but not on this one.

There’s plenty more evidence that a wide swath of influential people treated race and gender as the most urgent issues of all. Let’s turn first to National Public Radio (NPR), the US’s major public audio broadcaster – its audio equivalent to the BBC or CBC. An exposé of NPR delivered by its veteran ex-editor Uri Berliner makes it clear: CEO John Lansing

declared that diversity—on our staff and in our audience—was the overriding mission, the “North Star” of the organization. Phrases like “that’s part of the North Star” became part of meetings and more casual conversation.

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Yes, there is a movement

27 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Philosophy of Language, Politics

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

21st century, Afua Hirsch, gender, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Peggy McIntosh, race

A few years ago I attempted to depict the new race/gender movement of the 2010s in a way as neutral, bland, and inoffensive as possible. I got strong pushback even on that much, with a denial that the movement even exists.

I knew that the movement I’m describing is highly resistant to being named. What I hadn’t expected was that even the acknowledgement of its existence is controversial. But I suppose that that controversy, at its heart, is tied to its resistance to being named: the movement tends to present its ideas as if they are just the common sense that everyone already believes, while at the same time demanding drastic and radical changes (open borders, “defund the police”).

Thus Afua Hirsch in the Guardian claims that the anti-woke “define themselves in opposition to an identity that doesn’t actually exist. They are anti-woke, even though there is no ‘woke’.” Some go so far as to claim that “woke” is a racial slur.

So, let’s get down to establishing a basic point: yes, whatever you call it or don’t call it, starting in the mid-2010s there has been a major radical movement around race and gender (including gender identity and sexual orientation), one which worked at length to limit public disagreement with it. You can support this movement or oppose it (or better yet support some parts of it and not others, as I do). But in the places where it has been influential (like North American universities or other educated urban enclaves), it has been such a powerful force that it makes no sense to deny its existence. You could more reasonably say it’s not one movement but a set of (real, existing) smaller ones – but I think there are good reasons to speak of it as one.

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Checks and balances are only as good as their enforcers

13 Sunday Apr 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Confucianism, Courage, Economics, Leadership, Morality, Politics, Virtue

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

21st century, democracy, Donald Trump, Han Feizi, Korea, law, Liz Truss, Republican Party, Thomas Hobbes, Tim Wu, United States, Yoon-Suk Yeol

When the head of state or government goes rogue, what happens next?

Consider the recent experiences of three countries where the top leader pursued an agenda far more radical than they had campaigned on, in a way that caused widespread panic. In South Korea, Yoon-Suk Yeol attempted to impose martial law, marking an attempted return to something like the country’s past military dictatorship. In the UK, Liz Truss attempted tax cuts so radical that even the business community hated them. In the US, Donald Trump is now attempting something like both: after having been blatantly caught trying to sabotage the election and encouraging a riot that sought to prevent a peaceful transfer of power, now he is not only claiming to be move toward an unconstitutional third term in office, he has also engaged in tariffs so drastic that the market’s reaction to them was even worse than to Truss’s cuts. (Trump is taking as much from the rich as much as Bernie Sanders would – just without giving any of it to the poor.)

But there is an obvious difference between the three cases: Yoon and Truss were removed from power within a few months after their drastic measures, while there is not the slightest sign of any such thing happening to Trump. And that should lead us to ask: why this difference?

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Disengaged Buddhism in the second era of Trump

16 Sunday Mar 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Despair, Early and Theravāda, Hope, Politics, Serenity

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

21st century, Disengaged Buddhism, Donald Trump, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Pali suttas, Siddhattha Gotama (Buddha), United States

Early in the first Trump administration, I preached the importance of disengaged Buddhists’ lessons: to refrain from anger, to remind ourselves that some things are more important than politics. I think that that was easier to do the first time round. For in the end, the main thing that distinguished the Trump administration from previous Republican administrations – until the various self-coup attempts at the end of his reign – was its hostile rhetoric. On policy, on running the government, Trump 1.0 was not all that different from a standard garden-variety Republican: the only major controversial piece of legislation he passed was to borrow money and hand it to the rich, just as Reagan and George W. Bush had done before him. Some of the policies that drew the biggest outrage – like putting children in cages – turned out to be the work of previous administrations, including Obama. While Trump’s bark did make the United States a more hostile place for everyone, it nevertheless remained far worse than his bite. That made it a lot easier to preach taking a chill pill.

I don’t think any of that is true this time around. After the election, my hope had been for a second Trump term mostly like the first, probably a little worse. But nothing of the sort has happened. As far as I can tell, Trump has done far more damage in the first month of his second term than he did in three and a half years of his first. The actions of Trump, and his unelected viceroy Elon Musk, have already killed thousands of African recipients denied aid, and wreaked havoc on the world from Ukraine through Canada to here in metropolitan Boston, where nearly everyone I know has had their job redefined – if not lost – as a result of cuts and freezes to science funding.

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Globalization was never inevitable

26 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Globalization was never inevitable

Tags

20th century, 21st century, Brian Mulroney, Canada, COVID-19, democracy, Donald Trump, Economist, European Union, George W. Bush, Jane Jacobs, Kofi Annan, Margaret Thatcher, Russia, Tony Blair, Ukraine, United States, war

Younger readers may not remember just what an aura of inevitability surrounded the idea of globalizing capitalism in the late 20th century. Former UN secretary-general Kofi Annan, in a 2002 award acceptance speech, proclaimed: “It has been said that arguing against globalization is like arguing against the law of gravity.” And he did not dispute this thing that “has been said”. Margaret Thatcher’s frequent slogan was “there is no alternative“. Tony Blair went so far as to say “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation. You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”

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Trump is a BJP-wala

19 Sunday Jan 2025

Posted by Amod Lele in Islam, Modern Hinduism, Modernized Buddhism, Politics, Protestantism, South Asia

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

20th century, 21st century, BJP, Donald Trump, fundamentalism, George W. Bush, identity, Martin Luther King Jr., religion, Tim Alberta, United States

When Donald Trump first rose to rapid popularity in American politics, many people were shocked and had no explanation. I was not among those people, for a couple of reasons. Among them: one way to make a new phenomenon comprehensible is analogy. And having watched Indian politics for a couple decades, I found it easy to say: Trump is a BJP-wala.

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Happiness from politics, or, mourning in America (again)

10 Sunday Nov 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Anger, Attachment and Craving, Compassion, Despair, Gratitude, Grief, Happiness, Mahāyāna, Patient Endurance, Politics, Serenity

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

21st century, Donald Trump, early writings, George W. Bush, Martha Nussbaum, Prabhupada, Śāntideva, Treya Killam Wilber, United States

This is the first time I’ve ever reposted an old Love of All Wisdom post, because, despite its being nearly twenty years old now, I think it’s timelier than ever.

I first posted the following piece in 2016 when Trump won the first time – but I wrote it in 2005, after George W. Bush won the second time. I had been furious at Bush’s endorsement of torture and devastation of the climate throughout his first term I had been able to comfort myself with the thought that he didn’t really win: after all, even leaving aside all the voting irregularities, his opponent had also got more votes than he did. But in 2004 no such comfort was available to me; that disaster of a president had won a decisive victory including even the popular vote, and I had to find some way of coming to terms with the awful world he was going to keep building. I wrote this piece in my personal journal, for myself, and I have kept its original stream-of-consciousness style, reflecting my raw thought process as I processed.

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What Hegelian e-girls understand and Ken Wilber doesn’t

11 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Dialectic, German Tradition, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

20th century, 21st century, anna kw, Bill Clinton, G.W.F. Hegel, Iraq, Ken Wilber, Margaret Thatcher, New York City, Nicholas Thorne, Nikki the Hegelian, Plato, Ronald Reagan, Thrasymachus, Tony Blair, war

My fortysomething self is trying to come to grips with the apparent phenomenon of Hegelian e-girls (scroll down a bit on the linked page for details). I have still not really figured out exactly what an e-girl is in general: it often seems to involve having an anime-based appearance or aesthetic, like pink pigtails, but the girls in question here don’t look very anime to me.

anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian, from their Twitter feeds.

Specifically, the leading Hegelian e-girls appear to be two young New Yorkers on Twitter who go by anna kw and Nikki the Hegelian. There’s nothing particularly startling about two people combining a feminine online aesthetic with Hegelian philosophy on their own; the Internet is full of people who make a niche by combining one thing with another thing. What’s more striking is their apparent popularity: it appears that these two held a Hegelian e-girl event and 700 people RSVPed.

I don’t think that any of this is a joke. On the internet it is always so hard to tell who is being ironic or trolling. But as far as I can tell, anna and Nikki are serious about being Hegelian philosophers and are not making up the popularity of their event. If so, it feels to me like a really pleasant surprise. I’ve been hoping more young people would discover the continuing relevance of philosophy, but despite my own love for Hegel I would never have expected it would be him – not given the notorious difficulty of his work.

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How can we return to techno-optimism?

30 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Economics, Politics

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

20th century, 21st century, Apple, European Union, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Google, Lina Khan, Nick Bostrom, technology, Ted Gioia

The technological innovations of the last fifteen years, from advertising enshittifcation to AI cheating, have largely been a disaster. We are sadly at the point where, as Ted Gioia says, “most so-called innovations are now anti-progress by any honest definition.” I dare say that if we could revert all digital technology to where it was in 2009 – before the invention of the retweet – we’d all be better off.

I am not a hard techno-pessimist; I don’t think I could be. I love technology too much. I remember eras where technology was making our lives better; that was most of my life, the ’80s, the ’90s, and especially the ’00s. There’s no iron law that says technology has to make things worse, things have to enshittify. It’s just that they are currently doing so, have been doing so for over a decade. The question is how we change things back – not reverting back to old technology, but reverting back to a state where new technology serves rather than opposes human interests, where it is progress and not regress.

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The reluctant techno-pessimist

16 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by Amod Lele in Politics, Work

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

21st century, Amazon, Anant Agarwal, Apple, autobiography, Boston University, Cory Doctorow, edX, Facebook, Martin Hägglund, technology, Turnitin, Zoom

I’ve loved digital technology as long as I’ve been alive. Growing up in the analog world of the 1980s, I was excited by every bright light and new world opened up by a digital display. I was so excited by what computers could do that, before my family owned a computer, I wrote out the code for a text-based computer game on an electric typewriter. Circa 2000 I would physically go to the Apple Store to watch the live-streamed Steve Jobs keynote introducing new Apple products, even when I wasn’t planning on buying one soon. At a family Christmas event in 2011, I became clear that educational technology was the right non-faculty career choice for me, when I realized everyone else had left the room while my wife’s uncle and I had a heated discussion about operating systems. After all that I doubled down and got a master’s in computer science.

That’s why it pains me deeply to say: I’ve become a techno-pessimist.

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