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

11 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Dialectic, German Tradition, Politics

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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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Our home and native land

04 Sunday Aug 2024

Posted by in Death, Family, French Tradition, Indigenous American Thought, Place, Politics

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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending a workshop on Native American philosophy – hosted by the Northeastern Ethics Institute, which I’m now Associate Director of. One of the main presenters was Joseph (Joey) Miller, a University of Washington professor of Muscogee ancestry.

Miller’s intriguing ideas focused on the importance of land in Native American thought – specifically North American, I might add, as opposed to Mesoamerican. In my limited studies of Aztec and Maya thought so far, I’ve seen no comparable emphasis placed on land and place. Miller cited the Apache philosopher Viola Cordova to the effect that “people come out of a specific place; we’re not all one race with one story.” And he spoke of a “land-based pedagogy” for his students. That is, he would have his students reflect on land and how it’s important to them: their land of origin, its future place in the world.

Photo of Buck Lake by Wikipedia user P199, CC BY-SA 4.0

I kept thinking back to Miller’s talk a couple weeks later, when I travelled to Buck Lake in Ontario for a memorial service for a beloved aunt. Buck Lake was where my grandfather had a cottage for most of the time I was alive; my cousins scattered their mother’s ashes over the lake, which she had loved. As far back as I could remember, my parents had their own cottage on Milk Lake, the smaller lake beside it (where, because they were the first to build on it, there is now a road called Lele Lane). Everyone who knows me knows I’m a city person through and through; I didn’t particularly like going up to Milk Lake every weekend as a child. But going back there for the first time in years, I felt a powerful connection to that land and realized how much I missed it. I found myself excited to hear the distinctive call of the whippoorwill, which I’d heard so many times long ago but is missing from my adopted home of New England.

I’ve also been thinking back to Miller’s talk in watching the reaction to J.D. Vance’s nomination speech. In his remarks accepting the Republican nomination for vice-president, Vance said this:

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Finding mysticism in unexpected places

28 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Consciousness, Daoism, Epistemology, Mahāyāna, Meditation, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Serenity

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When I was in grad school, a big academic fashion was to heap scorn on the idea that mystical experience could be something cross-cultural: everything was reducible to social context, and the similarities of experience didn’t really matter, as I had once argued myself. But the roots of that idea were often more asserted than argued: the famous article by Steven Katz, which inaugurated the approach, didn’t bother to justify its assumption that “There are NO pure (unmediated) experiences“, assuming perhaps that italics and capital letters were the only support necessary.

A little while ago I noted how Robert Forman’s collection of essays illustrate “cool” mystical experiences, where distinctions of senses and self drop away and the mind ceases to fluctuate, in sources as varied as the Indian Yoga Sūtras, the Ukrainian Hasidic Dov Baer and the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Something similar seems to be going on in the Sri Lankan systematizer Buddhaghosa and the medieval English Cloud of Unknowing, which both involve, in Ninan Smart’s terms, a “systematic effort to blot out sense perception, memories, and imaginings of the world of our sensory environment and of corresponding inner states.” And it turns out that once your mind is no longer prejudged to deny any cross-cultural similarity, you start noticing it in a lot of other places.

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George Grant, Daoist

21 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Action, Daoism, Flourishing, Metaphysics, Protestantism, Serenity

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I think George Grant is in many respects a Daoist. I don’t think he thought of himself as a Daoist. But key parts of his viewpoint seem very Daoist to me.

For those who don’t know Grant: he was a 20th-century Canadian philosopher best known for his Lament for a Nation, a book which claimed that the idea of Canada was to remain an outpost of the British Empire in North America, and thereby resist the influence of the United States – an idea which he thought had been lost. (In those ideas he was taking cues from John Watson, in the stream of Canadian Hegelianism.) I have little love for that view of Canada, so it’s not my favourite part of Grant’s thought. But there’s a lot more to Grant that I find much more exciting.

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When marginalized people don’t say what we think they should

14 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Deity, Hermeneutics, Islam, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Morality, Politics, Social Science

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The late Saba Mahmood’s 2004 The Politics of Piety is a brilliant example of how to do philosophical ethnography. The book’s one flaw is its dense prose style, but even that may have been necessary in order to persuade its target audience: 2000s-era postmodern feminists, who tended to take six-syllable words as a sign of profundity. And while the typical vocabulary has changed significantly in the decades since she wrote it – from “resistance” and “agency” to “privilege” and “marginalization” – the kinds of views she is critiquing remain very widespread, and her critique has lost none of its power.

Mahmood is studying the da’wah piety movement among Egyptian Muslim women, including practices like wearing the veil. Other feminist scholars had studied such women before. But those scholars had insisted in defining their informants’ actions in the scholars’ terms rather than the informants’:

Some of these studies offer functionalist explanations, citing a variety of reasons why women take on the veil voluntarily (for example, the veil makes it easy for women to avoid sexual harassment on public transportation, lowers the cost of attire for working women, and so on). Other studies identify the veil as a symbol of resistance to the commodification of women’s bodies in the media, and more generally to the hegemony of Western values. While these studies have made important contributions, it is surprising that their authors have paid so little attention to Islamic virtues of female modesty or piety, especially given that many of the women who have taken up the veil frame their decision precisely in these terms. Instead, analysts often explain the motivations of veiled women in terms of standard models of sociological causality (such as social protest, economic necessity, anomie, or utilitarian strategy), while terms like morality, divinity, and virtue are accorded the status of the phantom imaginings of the hegemonized. (16)

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Moral regress is annoying too

07 Sunday Jul 2024

Posted by in Morality, Politics, Psychology, Social Science, Work

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Daniel Kelly and Evan Westra recently wrote a widely circulated Aeon article entitled “Moral progress is annoying”. It would have been more convincing – but also go against their agenda – if they added: “and so is moral regress.”

The article notes that when faced with changes in social norms, like declaring a certain term offensive or being expected to share pronouns, it is common for us to react with annoyance and irritation, most visibly expressed in the physical gesture of rolling our eyes. Kelly and Westra argue that this reaction is inappropriate:

we think that the eyeroll heuristic is a serious obstacle to moral progress. Many genuinely good arguments for moral change will be initially experienced as annoying. Moreover, the emotional responses that people feel in these situations are not typically produced by psychological processes that are closely tracking argument structure or responding directly to moral reasons. Instead, they stem from psychological mechanisms that enable people to adapt to local norms – what’s called our norm psychology.

Specifically, they claim that the annoyed eyeroll represents what they call affective friction:

When a person’s norm psychology is misaligned with the rules and customs around her, norms make their presence acutely felt…. Instead of fluency, we have disfluency, which can be stressful, frustrating and exhausting – just ask any North American tourist who has been cursed at by a Berlin cyclist after wandering into a bike lane, or been panicked by their first encounter with a squat toilet. Call this affective friction.

Because it is affective friction, they argue, the eyeroll is not really a rational response: “As tempting as it can be to interpret the unpleasant feelings as your moral compass ringing alarm bells, your annoyance is just a feature of your norm psychology becoming misaligned and reacting to the unfamiliar.”

Now Kelly and Westra are right that the annoyed eyeroll is a gut reaction rather than a rationally considered one. But the eyeroll is not unusual in that regard. Most of our actions, in a moral domain or any other, aren’t based on considered rationality. Crucially, that is just as true of the eyeroll’s opposite: namely bandwagon-jumping, the enthusiastic adoption of a new norm because it is a new norm, irrespective of whether that new norm actually benefits those it is supposed to help.

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How can we return to techno-optimism?

30 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Economics, Politics

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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 in Politics, Work

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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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Embrace culture, not race

02 Sunday Jun 2024

Posted by in Biology, Politics

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Glenn Loury – who is not exactly a fan of the woke racial agenda – nevertheless hesitates on the idea of racial abolition, for understandable reasons. In a 2022 dialogue with racial abolitionist Kmele Foster, Loury asks for a “sense of racial identity… on behalf of blackness”, on these reasonable grounds:

I don’t just mean dark skin. I mean, descent from enslaved persons in the United States who migrated up the Illinois Central Railroad from Mississippi and Alabama to places like Chicago and Detroit, who fought first to be citizens, then to be equal citizens against travail, and so on. Those stories imparted to one’s children. You descend from people of this sort, you embody the aspirations of prior generations who labored so that you could have this opportunity. The food you eat, the music that you listen to, the style, the way you carry yourself, the musical form that you can create, and art and the literature that I read of people who have struggled with the conditions of blacks in the history of the United States, producing great works of profound human interest but rooted in the African American [experience].

So why eschew all of that? I agree that the racial coloration is itself meaningless, but that experience, those stories, that narrative, that history is not meaningless. It’s something around which a sense of identity could be built. And why would I throw all of that out on behalf of a race abolition program, Kmele?

My response, not far from Foster’s, is: you don’t have to throw out those stories to abolish race. Because those stories do not constitute a people’s race, but rather their culture.

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Abolish race… eventually

19 Sunday May 2024

Posted by in Politics, Social Science

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Many people around the world still have implicit bias, and discrimination on the basis of race, unconscious or otherwise, remains stubbornly real. We’re not going to get rid of that bias and discrimination by ignoring it, as John Roberts advocates; we need to take measures to fix the problems of racism, however difficult it might be to figure out what those measures should be.

But the eventual goal of all those measures should be to end the misleading colonialist social construct of race. It should never have been there.

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