2020

medieval weekend

Ex-Nomads’ Weekend

In his book The Gifts of the Jews, historian Thomas Cahill mentions the day of rest only in passing. If this author thinks that a weekend for laborers deserves only passing mention, perhaps he’s a man more of words than of labor, and he doesn’t fully appreciate what a gift the weekend has been down through the ages. About three thousand years ago, Mediterranean Bronze Age civilization collapsed, and the Hebrews abruptly switched from nomadic herding to sedentary farming. They had no aristocracy to despise physical labor and write the rules accordingly, and these former nomads invented for themselves a day off from “civilization”. On the day of rest, even wives, slaves, and draft animals got the day off. The other nations had laws written by their ruling classes, and they preferred that laborers labor with no weekly break. Christianity and Islam both picked up the practice of the day of rest, and they spread it wide. Modern labor unions took up the cause, and now the weekend is an expected part of secular society. 

These days, ancient Hebrews catch a lot of grief for their genocidal fantasies and other indicators of unacceptable, Bronze Age bigotry. Still, it pays to also understand what they got right.

See also: Evolutionary psychology and the Fall of Genesis

2020

We wrote these rules in 2nd person
to avoid sexist pronouns (1987)

RPGs and Gender Differences 

A friend asked me to comment on a screen cap that’s going around Twitter, so here’s the comment. The screen cap is an insensitive post I made in 2008 about women and roleplaying tropes. It appears side by side with a quote by Gary Gygax in 2002 saying that there’s no sense trying to make a game that “will attract females”. The implication seems to be that I think the same way Gygax did, but in fact his quote serves as a useful counterpoint to my own views. He thought that men and women are naturally different and didn’t want RPGs to change. I think that in order to change RPGs to make them more appealing to women we need to understand both how men and women are the same and how we’re different. RPG designers have made real progress, and happily today’s RPGs are more inviting to women and less male-oriented than they were when I joined the hobby. This social-media incident also serves as an opportunity for me to make a number of related points.

A disturbing feature of controversies like this is that they hurt the very women that the accusers are trying to help. In 2014, Nobel laureate Tim Hunt made a bad joke about women in the lab. He used an ironic voice to let his audience know that he was joking, but his words were written down and shared across the internet without tone of voice. People thought he was serious and spread the quotes to shame him. A friend of mine said that Hunt’s words had a chilling effect on women considering whether to enter STEM. OK, but the only way those words had a chilling effect was by their being spread as misinformation. In 2018, University of Washington computer-science lecturer Stuart Reges suggested a way to get more women into computer science and referenced studies showing that girls tend to do better at verbal skills than math. The opposite is true for boys. A reporter from the Seattle Times garbled this reference and accused Reges of making a false claim: that boys are better at math than girls. The reporter ignored Reges’s proposal to expose more women to computing by making a computing class mandatory, and again women got misinformation about a prominent man in STEM looking down on them. Did the reporter help more women feel good about possible careers computing? No. In the current case with me, someone is implying that I have the same disdainful attitude toward women in gaming as Gary Gygax did. The people spreading the post feel like they’re helping women, but surely it doesn’t help to make the field seem more sexist than it is. Personally, it hurts to have people talking about me, but the real damage is to the many gamers who don’t know my true history and who are tricked into thinking that the lead designer on D&D 3E was a hostile to women in gaming. 

Another disturbing thing about this post is the implication that it’s sexist to take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls. Common sense tells us that the differences we see result from a combination of inborn differences and social learning, and the science bears this out. In my career, I’ve worked repeatedly to raise the profile of women in characters, art, pronouns, and the workplace. Do I get disqualified from being a feminist because I take seriously the inborn differences between boys and girls? I don’t think so. In fact, it seems to me that we can do a better job of advancing women’s interests if we understand how women and men are different as well as how we’re the same. If you want to hear about inborn differences, listen to parents. And if you disagree with me, does that disagreement mean that we can’t work together to make a better tomorrow? Enough with the left’s circular firing squad already. My focus is on a Blue November, and I hope you’ll join me.

The original post from 2008 was a conversation starter, and it’s being shared as if it were a conclusion. The wording was needlessly provocative, and I’m sorry to everyone I hurt with it. That was the year my wife died, and I wasn’t at my best. The post was provocative, and what it provoked was a bunch of stories from women about how they’d been excluded from roleplaying games by all-boy groups. I learned that my post had been ill-informed. Sometimes I say things that are wrong, and then I get better information that I didn’t even know I needed. It’s all part of the process. 

The other thing I’ve learned since 2008 is that I’m on the autism spectrum. That explains why people sometimes react to what I say in ways that I hadn’t predicted—because they’re neurotypical. Looking back, it was pretty ignorant for me to talk about the gender skew in gaming without referencing autistic traits (“engineer brain”) and their role in games and game styles. Over the decades, roleplaying games have become less “engineer-oriented” and more story oriented, and that’s great. 

For me the big issue is the prevalence of misinformation on social media. I’ve been taken in repeatedly by misinformation myself, I’ve heard misinformation from my friends, and well-meaning people have spread misinformation about me. It’s a mess, and I don’t know what to do about it. 

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Family Climate Action Event

Kids made art and letters

A bunch of kids in my UU congregation decided that climate change is their biggest concern, so they contacted the climate action team, where I’m a co-chair. Together we came up with this plan for engaging several families in what we called the Family Climate Action Event. The main purpose of the program was to have the kids work together to take collective action and then to learn what more they can do. In addition, it helped families get to know each other and stay in touch during the pandemic. During the first of two zoom meetings, the families talked about environmentalism, and the kids made art and wrote letters for policy-makers. For the concluding meeting, a climate-oriented policy-maker met with the families to explain the current political scene. If intergenerational climate action is your thing, a Family Climate Action Event is easy to pull off. Here’s how it worked for us. 

First Meeting, Art and Letters

This meeting launches the project, it connects the kids’ actions to the community, and it helps families get to know each other. We had a couple climate-action folks from the congregation drop in, too. 

Welcome, Chalice Lighting, and Introductions: For Introductions, people took a minute to find something that reminded them of the interconnected web of existence and bring it back. When each family introduced themselves, they also showed their item and talked about it. 

Artwork: Got kids started on their art. The church provided blank postcards for the kids to put art on. 

Adult Fishbowl: Each adult recounted a personal experience with the environment, pollution, climate change, etc. Kids pretended they weren’t there. (5 min) 

Kids’ Fishbowl: Each kid said something about the environment. Grownups pretended they weren’t there. (5 min)

The 70s looked dire.

Speaker: I talked about my lifelong experience with environmentalism and how experiences at church have brought me to focus on collective action. The conclusion I shared is that personal behavior change is good but collective action is where the main action is. (5 min)

Letter Writing and Art: Kids started wirting letters or kept working on their art, and they chatted. The leaders provided names and addresses of policy makers that they could write to, including the policy maker they were scheduled to talk to. 

Screen Grab: Kids held up their art for a screen grab. Ideally you get an image that’s fun and safe to share. 

Closing 

Second Meeting, Policy Maker

For our Washington state congregation, we chose Rep Joe Fitzgibbon, who chairs the House Environment & Energy Committee. We arranged a half-hour block where he could meet with our families remotely. He spoke about his own passion for addressing climate change, and he answered questions prepared in advance by the families. As it turned out, he touched on some points that had come up earlier in the Art & Letters meeting, such as beef and acid rain. The families all changed their names on zoom so we could take a screen shot and not identify anyone. 

The families met for half an hour before the meeting with Joe and for half an hour afterwards. That was more than enough time, and the extra space led to a valuable converation about get out the vote efforts and the election. 

Rep Joe Fitzgibbon talked to us about his
passion for fighting climate change

Other Unitarian-themed posts: jonathan-tweet.blogspot.com/search/label/Unitarian

2020

Unitarian University Church, Seattle

Virtual Church Gatherings

Last Sunday, my girlfriend and I attended a virtual church service and coffee hour. Churches across the nation are going virtual. They’re streaming sermons and music, and they’re hosting virtual meet ups. If you’re quarantined and looking for company, now would be a good time to check out local churches. Lots of people derive value and encouragement from the connection, and you might be one of them. 

It surprises lots of people that an atheist like me would recommend that people try out a church, but churches in the US are unusually practical as houses of worship go. Here, they serve as intergenerational community centers. In most other places in the world, places of worship occur in communities, ethnic groups, or nations that are predominantly one religion. As a result, the people who worship there don’t necessarily have a special relationship to each other. In the States, there are countless competing traditions, and one’s congregation represents a shared identity, turning it into a social hub of like-hearted individuals. Among liberal religious traditions, these social centers serve especially for Sunday school and political organizing. My childhood congregation was constantly working on issues like clean water, immigrant rights, and the Nestle boycott. 

Predictably, I might suggest that you consider a Unitarian Universalist congregation. An ex-girlfriend used to say that the UU tradition is “like religion, but only the good parts”. The UU congregation that I’ve attended for 20 years is a lot like the Lutheran congregation I was raised in, except that no supernatural beliefs are expected or taught. 

Every congregation is different, but in general there’s a real inclination toward science and away from physics-defying miracles. In last Sunday’s virtual service, the ministers addressed the topic of COVID-19 in a naturalistic way, with a bonus etymological reference to why the pandemic of 1918 was called “influenza”. Some UU congregations will doubtless feature relatively vague prayers for people to be safe, but none of our ministers are going to heal the disease over the Internet. We’re also not going to rely on supernatural protection to justify meeting in person. We like science, and we treat pandemics the way scientists tell us to treat them. Speakers in some congregations are bound to talk in more-or-less New-Agey terms about God, meaning, challenges, visualizations, mysterious workings, or everything happening for a reason. We don’t have a pope to tell everyone to think or say the same things, so each congregation is its own thing. 

And of course if you find value in a community where you share supernatural beliefs that I don’t share, more power to you.

If the idea of connecting to a “church” makes you choke the way it used to make me choke, you can find UU “fellowships”. These are often congregations whose founders didn’t want to call their communities “churches”. Alternatively, you can think of the church as an “assembly”, which is the word used by ancient Jews, including early Christians. 

Churches also do online activities for kids. I’ve taught church school on and off for years, and there’s good stuff there, so I would bet that UU churches will have worthwhile stuff for kids to do. When I teach church school, I don’t usually know which of the kids believe in the supernatural and which don’t. A lot of them don’t really know themselves. 

You can find my church’s online programs on their web site, and you can readily find others by searching online.

click here

Review of The Human Swarm by Mark W Moffett

The book I didn’t know I needed.

The Human Swarm by Mark W Moffett is the book I didn’t know I needed. It covers a topic that’s been missing from the discussion of human society, and the perspective it offers fills gaps in what I’ve learned from other books. Moffett covers the topic of anonymous societies—animal groups in which other animals are identified as “members” even by individuals that don’t know them personally. An Argentine ant, for example, can be accepted by other Argentine ants of its super-colony even hundreds of miles away from its origin, using scent as a marker of belonging. Likewise, Mohawk Indians were able to identify and welcome each other even when they didn’t know each other, thanks to their distinctive hairstyles. Moffett identifies a sort of social organization that is highly unusual in the animal kingdom. A more common arrangement is a flock, herd, or nesting colony, where individuals that don’t know each other get along, and that’s because no individuals are excluded. In intimate bands or families, by contrast, only individuals who know each other are welcome. For a small number of animal species, however, a society consists of individuals that can identify each other as “compatriots” without knowing each other personally. This social organization is found among Argentine ants, scrub jays, and humans.

It’s no coincidence that Moffett’s mentor was E O Wilson, the ant expert who revolutionized our understanding of human nature with his book Sociobiology (1975). It’s humbling and exhilarating how much we can learn about human society by comparing and contrasting ourselves to ants. For my purposes, Moffett’s description of Argentine ants was worth the price of the book. Unlike other ant species, Argentine ants form super-colonies with multiple queens. In Argentina, these super-colonies are kept in check by only one thing: other super-colonies of Argentine ants. In California, where the Argentines are an invasive species, they spread almost without limit. Again, their only limit is another super-colony, which is invasive itself. The comparison to humans is elementary.

E O Wilson hugging Grandmother Fish
h/t Greg Epstein

One of the revolutionary findings of contemporary psychology is that humans are “groupish”, as Jonathan Haidt puts it in his seminal book The Righteous Mind (2012). Freud taught that humans are inherently selfish, but intellectuals of his day had no clear understanding of human evolution or prehistory. Now we understand that humans are innately social, a trait that we can trace back tens of millions of years to our early simian ancestors. Morality, as modern researchers contend, is an adaptation that helps us get along in groups of our peers. Moffett’s insights help us see this “tribalism” on the scale of anonymous societies. Sure, it’s easy to understand why people prefer their friends and kin over strangers, but this book illuminates the human practice of preferring people we don’t know provided they have the right hair styles, modes of dress, manner of speech, or other societal markers. This book unifies Haidt’s modern-day insights, the globe-spanning analysis of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order (2011), and other big-picture books about the nature of human society and the human animal.

The Human Swarm does an admirable job of surveying the topic on all levels: ants that are more or less specialized, spiders that impersonate ants to predate them, chimpanzee bands with their distinctive pant-hoots, bands of humans who know each other as kin, groups of human bands that cooperate across societal boundaries, groups of human bands that split to create new boundaries, and today’s bewildering mix of human populations. This book is worth your time just for the information about whales and scrub jays. Moffett knows that he is filling in the blanks left by previous ethologists and anthropologists, and this book is a treasury of both big ideas and delightful details. Perhaps the most important information for understanding human societies is the material on non-state societies and the bands that compose them. Here we see the many ways that humans have marked membership in their societies and the xenophobia toward outsiders that was the default perspective.

Disclosure: E O Wilson is a fan of my children’s book, Grandmother Fish, so any friend of his is a friend of mine.

Not "Race" but Ancestry

Modern genetics says there are no
homogeneous, essential “races”

tl;dr I used to think that “race” meant nothing, biologically speaking. Now I think it means not much.

In the 80s, I studied race as part of my BA in sociology, and I was proud to learn views that represented the best science. Experts such as Richard Lewontin and Stephen J Gould taught that what we think of as “race” does not correspond with human ancestry or meaningful biological differences among groups. Gould, perhaps the most storied popularizer of evolutionary thinking the 20th century, said, “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years”. Cultural change had taken over, the experts said, and biological change had ended. Based on that scientific understanding, it was impossible that people of different “races” could be biologically distinct in any way. Learning this view, I considered “race” to be as irrelevant to biology as astrological signs are. That was the 80s. Since then, two things have happened that led me to adjust my views, albeit not to reverse them. Personally, I married a black woman, and we raised a biracial daughter together. Scientifically, geneticists mapped the human genome. Based on new evidence, I now see differences in continental ancestry as biologically real but still mostly insignificant. That position contradicts today’s racists, who want us to believe that “racial” differences are telling and definitive. It also angers people who either still believe what Gould and Lewontin taught in the 80s or who think that we shouldn’t talk about the new evidence because it’s too problematic. A recent study suggests that teaching students the facts of human genetic variation leads to a significant reduction in prejudice, and that sounds great to me. The alternative—not talking about the new findings—means that racists can tell potential recruits that we egalitarians are hiding scientific information. If we act like we’re afraid of these findings, it helps racists spread the lie that the new findings are a threat to our egalitarian ideals. Our society has a problem with the return of racist pseudoscience. My view is that the best way to counter pseudoscience is to use good science.

Sometimes when people hear me talking about differences among “races”, they jump to the conclusion that I endorse all the claims people make about such differences, such as alleged innate differences in IQ. Let me clarify in advance that my point is just the opposite, that we should distinguish the claims that have scientific support from those that don’t. Here for example, is a study that distinguishes between certain medically-relevant differences (supported by the evidence) and cognitive differences (what the racists want you to believe). The racists want people to consider all these claims as equally valid—all good. Certain of my fellow progressives agree with the racists to the extent that we should consider all these claims to be equally valid, although with the idea that they should all be rejected. Treating all these claims as alike in their value seems to be a mistake because it puts racist pseudoscience on the same footing as research you can find on PubMed. 

In 1992, I married a black woman secure in the knowledge that humans from all over the world are basically the same, and nothing I’ve learned since then has changed my mind about that. Despite whatever genetic differences there may be from one group to another, a man and a woman from any two places can have healthy, normal children together. The large differences among the “races” are socially constructed differences, while the biological differences are minor. My wife passed away in 2008.

In 1994 when our daughter was born, a nurse told me that she was physically advanced. I made some joke about my good genes, and the nurse responded by telling me that black newborns tend to be advanced compared to white babies. That response came as a shock to me because it violated expert opinion as I’d learned it. Since this observation contradicted my deeply held beliefs about “race”, I compartmentalized it. Despite the contrary evidence, I still believed that “races” were not just merely social constructs but in fact constructed out of nothing. Thanks to this compartmentalization, it took multiple lines of evidence from different sources and years of mental adjustment before I could see that Gould and Lewontin had simply been wrong. If some of my fellow progressives are angry at me for my views about genetics and human variation, I can sympathize with them because they are the views that would have infuriated me when I was in my 20s.

The other lines of evidence came from genetics and medicine. In medical research, doctors need to know what the biological facts are, regardless of politics. They have found real differences among different populations, although they’re not the sort of differences that racists wish they had found. For example, if you’re looking for a compatible donor for a bone marrow transplant, your continental ancestry* makes a difference. European-Americans are more likely to find a compatible donor among the pool of other European-Americans, and you can say the same thing for other groups. Researchers studying obesity have also found that people of different ancestries tend to carry fat on different parts of their bodies, so an overweight person of East Asian ancestry is likely to suffer ill effects at a lower proportion of body fat than someone of sub-Saharan ancestry.

Another line of evidence comes from genetics. With a sample of someone’s DNA, scientists can determine which continent or continents the person’s ancestry derives from. Personally, I’m northern European. In the 80s, I had been led to believe that human genetics was such a blur that we’d never be able to pinpoint someone’s “race” from their DNA (see “cline”). Now that we’ve mapped our genome, geneticists can identify not only someone’s continental/global ancestry but also which smaller ethnic group they belong to and in some cases which valley their ancestors lived in. For certain ethnic groups, such as East Africans, Uighurs, or Hazaras, geneticists can measure how much of their DNA comes from one continent and how much from another. East Africans represent an admixture of West Eurasian (“Caucasian”) DNA and sub-Saharan African DNA. Uighurs and Hazaras represent admixtures of West Eurasian and East Asian DNA. A close look at the features of people from these ethnic groups seems to confirm these ancestries.

As for Gould’s claim that there has been no biological change for tens of thousands of years, just the opposite is true. Cultural evolution has not replaced biological evolution but instead accelerated it. Domesticating milk-producing animals, for example, has led several human groups to independently evolve adaptations that allow them to digest milk sugar (lactose) in adulthood. Scientists have also identified an adaptation among Tibetans for living at high altitudes and an adaptation for diving among the indigenous Bajau of Indonesia. Gould’s outdated argument against the importance of “race” was that natural selection hasn’t operated fast enough to differentiate people of different continental populations. In fact, natural selection has operated so fast that there’s a new argument against the importance of “race”. Evolution has led to regional differences within each continent, contradicting the idea that continental populations (“races”) are homogeneous. Racists might want to talk about a single “white race”, but Europeans represent an admixture of three “races”: indigenous hunter-gatherers, Anatolian farmers, and finally cattle-herders from the steppe. Sprinkle in a little Neanderthal DNA, and obviously it’s impossible for any white person to be “purely” white. The same goes with any other “race”: they’re all amalgams. These amalgam genomes vary from one valley to the next, so continental gene pools play out as countless variations at the local level. No one of these variations is the “real” genotype or phenotype of that gene pool. 

In addition to changing my scientific view of genetics as new evidence became available, I have also personally become more matter-of-fact about “race”. The views I hold today, as innocuous as they seem to me, would have angered the Jonathan Tweet of 1994, and I’m not surprised that they anger some folks today. So should we talk about the differences that researchers have identified? Maybe I’m wrong, but it looks like avoiding these findings doesn’t work. My daughter and I do not want to see racist pseudoscience gain any more ground, and the practice of avoiding the new evidence has evidently failed to keep the pseudoscience in check. If avoiding the evidence hasn’t worked, what can we do? 

When I spoke at Seattle’s first March of Science, I said that evidence can bring us together. Charles Darwin looked at the evidence and concluded that humans all over the world are the same species, not separately created kinds as certain creationists had concluded. In my children’s book, Grandmother Fish, I coach parents to explain to their kids that we are one human race, all the descendants of “Grandmother Human” (see below). I’m heartened to learn that antiracist researchers have confirmed that teaching the facts of human variation can reduce prejudice. Certainly, some people who share my egalitarian ideals take exception to my approach to human biology, but I don’t bear them ill will. Their motivations are positive even if the way they treat me is negative. Twenty-five years ago, I would have agreed with their criticisms, and that perspective makes it easier for me to be charitable toward them than it is for them to be charitable toward me. My hope is that over the next few decades the power of evidence will lead us to greater agreement.

“If, as scientists, we fully abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing human differences, we will leave a vacuum that will be filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly.” 

—David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here (2018)

* AKA “global ancestry”

Links

“Can Biology Class Reduce Racism?” by Amy Harmon. Experimental curriculum uses science to head off students’ racist intuitions.

‘The Native American/East Asian "race"’, using modern genetic science to debunk 19th-century racial categories.

 * * *

“Race”: I put “race” in scare quotes because it doesn’t really exist according to its traditional understanding but there’s no widely recognized replacement term for groups that share continental ancestry. [EDIT: I asked around, and “ancestry” or “genetic ancestry” look like good terms. Link.] [EDIT: Also, “global ancestry”.]

Being Wrong: What it was like for me to be wrong about big ideas.

Speech at March for Science Seattle: Evidence can unite us.

Diversity in D&D: Gender and human “races” in D&D Third Edition (EN World).

Social Media and our Failures

Jonathan Haidt speaking in Seattle

Earlier this year, Jonathan Haidt came to Seattle and spoke about the rise in polarization that he and others have noted since around 2013. What has changed? he asked us to wonder. His answer is social media. As the 2016 election taught us, social media are fertile ground for lies, half-truths, and outrage. Outrage generates clicks, and now even newspapers play the outrage game so that their online articles can get the clicks, too. Haidt’s comments got me to think some more about the lamentable failure of leftist movements over the past several years. It seems as though, just when the calls for change have gotten loudest, we have failed the hardest. Let’s review what’s going wrong, and right, over the last several years.

Successes pre-2013

One reason I love being a lefty is that we just win and win and win. Look at the last 100 years, and our forward-thinking reforms have been vindicated over and over. Consider women’s suffrage, defendants’ rights, Social Security, minority rights, Civil Rights, reproductive freedom, affirmative action, gay rights, disability rights, and more. In the ten years before 2013, we were still doing well. We landed a black man in the White House, something that would have been impossible earlier in my own lifetime. We expanded health insurance coverage. The gay-marriage campaign swept the nation with its appeal to love and fairness. The Obama administration got the abortion pill, RU 486, tested and approved. We even got our black president re-elected when pundits said that the unemployment rate was too high for any incumbent president to win. Yes, there was conservative resistance to all this progress, but that’s been the case for as long as we progressives have made progress. But then what happened? 

Zimmerman verdict

In 2013, outraged citizens on social media demanded that George Zimmerman be tried for the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The governor of Florida dutifully overrode the local authorities to have Zimmerman put on trial, and the prosecution lost. Zimmerman should have listened to the 911 dispatcher who told him to stay put and not go follow the stranger he saw walking through his neighborhood. Being a belligerent shithead, however, is not a crime, and the facts of the case did not support the charges that the state brought against him. After the fact, plenty of people have said that the prosecutor should have charged Zimmerman with a lesser crime that could have stuck, but it’s easy to imagine how much pressure the newly installed authorities were under to throw the book at him. Like many other left-leaning Americans, I thought that a guilty verdict was all but assured, and the loss came as a blow to morale.  

#BlackLivesMatter

I wish this movement had been half as effective as it was popular. It achieved a high profile but few results. How can a phrase like “black lives matter” fail? Of course black lives matter. Racial disparities are an ongoing problem in the States, so serious that the entire nation is dragged down by the problems that plague the black community. The US Army has managed to integrate its officer corps, creating perhaps the best integrated managerial body anywhere in the world, but their success hasn’t been replicated anywhere else in the nation. The increase in economic inequality that we’ve seen since the 80s has naturally hit the black population harder than it’s hit whites. With all that background, here was a movement that had real potential.

The BLM movement succeeded in the first steps toward progress. It raised the profile of the fraught relationship between the black population and the police, and it helped expose predatory policing practices, such as those in Ferguson. It offered a ten-point plan to reform policing across the nation. BLM representatives got all the way to the Oval Office to meet with President Obama.

Once they got the attention of the nation and the president, what did BLM activists achieve? In terms of concrete progress, there hasn’t been much to show. The use of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag dropped off on in the summer of 2016, possibly in response to the killing of five police officers in Dallas and then three more in Baton Rouge.

In 2016, Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King announced a nationwide Injustice Boycott, meant to punish cities, such as New York City, accused of state violence toward the black population. It seems to have gone nowhere. 

2016 election

The left’s approach to the presidential election of 2016 was more about being outraged at Trump than at promoting Hillary. Unlike Bernie, Hillary was a centrist Democrat who seemed to represent the status quo. I like the status quo because for a hundred years the status quo has generally meant liberal progress, but 2016 wasn’t a year for the status quo. Especially on social media, leftists wanted a cause more emotionally driven than Hillary’s practical, realistic approach to progress. Looking for emotions, the left dumped vitriol on Trump, all of which he deserved. What was the net result? He won. The vitriol kept his brand name alive, and it proved to his supporters that he was the man who could really stick his finger in the eye of us leftists. At the last minute, seeing that Trump had a real chance to win, game professional friends and I ginned up a pro-Hillary stunt, but efforts like ours were too little too late.

Hillary handily won the popular vote. She earned more votes than any white man in the history of the US, but it wasn’t enough. Trump is roundly and rightly considered unfit for the presidency, morally bankrupt, and just plain crooked. The left, however, couldn’t rally itself enough even to keep this monster out of the White House. We’ll be paying for this loss for years, probably decades. The loss was deeply demoralizing to the left, myself and my daughter included.

After the election, the nation learned the Russia had spread division and disinformation on social media. Remember, our enemy wants us to be outraged and divided, and they found social media to be useful in achieving that goal. 

#NoDAPL

In the fall of 2016, leftists found an appealing cause in protecting sacred Native American land from a planned oil pipeline. The #blacklivesmatter hashtag had dropped in popularity that summer, and Hillary’s campaign for president didn’t inspire people. Filling the void was #NoDAPL. Opposition to the pipeline had begun in the spring and had grown in the summer, peaking in the fall. It’s hard to imagine a social-justice confrontation that could be more appealing to leftist ideals. On one side was the filthy petrochemical industry, and on the other were Native Americans protecting the integrity of their sacred lands and the purity of their water. Support poured in from across the nation and the world, inspiring left-leaning people everywhere. In December, following President Obama’s intent, the Corps of Engineers denied an easement to the pipeline so that it couldn’t pass under the Missouri River. The activists joyously declared victory, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Then Trump took office, and soon enough the situation reversed. Dispirited activists largely abandoned Standing Rock, and soon enough the encampment was cleared away and oil started flowing through the pipeline. Again, this loss was a hard blow to the morale of the left. A local professional activist who had spent time at Standing Rock recounted how, after the loss, he had to take a long break from activism to recover his mental health. Today you might hear leftists saying that the protests at Standing Rock were a victory because it launched a movement, but that’s not the victory that protestors had their hearts set on.

#MeToo

In the fall of 2017, actress Alyssa Milano publicly accused Harvey Weinstein of sexual-predator behavior and encouraged the use of the #MeToo hashtag. It took off, leading to greater awareness of sexual harassment in general and to damning accusations leveled at many well-known men. Of the many social-media-powered movements of the last several years, this one seems the most successful. Why did it succeed where other movements failed? If we could figure that out, maybe we could find ways to make other online movements successful, too.

Perhaps the peak of the #MeToo movement came in 2018 with the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, although this was the peak of its salience on the national stage, not a success. For a while it looked as though the pressure against Kavanaugh would win out. His accuser was competent and believable. Kavanaugh was angry and pathetic (“I like beer”?). Again, however, we on the left suffered a demoralizing loss.  

2018 midterm elections

One concrete success that we on the left have enjoyed recently is our strong showing in the 2018 midterms. Thank god. Democrats gained governorships and took control of the House of Representatives. The Republicans made gains in the Senate, but not because they got more votes. Most of those Senate races came six years after the Democrats had an unusually strong showing in the Senate, riding along President Obama’s re-election victory. It’s natural that some of the seats gained in 2012 would shift back to the Republicans in 2018. Dems won most of the contested Senate seats; they just didn’t win enough seats to hold onto their big advantage from six years earlier.

Our electoral victory was not powered by social media. There were no national elections, which are especially attractive to social media campaigns. Trump wasn’t running, so he didn’t lure activists into piling on him the way he did in the presidential election two years earlier. If the midterms had gone against the Dems, I would have been strongly tempted to give up hope. 

Shame mobs

One thing social media have been good at is targeting individuals, although even these successes have uncertain results. One famous case was that of Tim Hunt, a British biochemist, molecular physiologist, and Nobel laureate. In 2015 during a talk about women in STEM, he made ironic comments in a tone of voice that indicated he wasn’t serious. These comments were transcribed and shared around the Internet, lacking tone of voice, and there was an international outcry. A concerned, liberal friend of mine said that Hunt’s comments were damaging because they dissuaded women from entering STEM fields. I totally agree. Those comments, shared around the world, gave women the impression that many experts would not welcome them in STEM fields. But how much damage would those comments have done if they hadn’t been taken out of context and hadn’t been disseminated on social media? Was the net effect of the shame mob to make women more likely to choose STEM careers or less?

Or consider the case of James Damore’s Google memo of 2017. Yes, it offended people with its reference to inborn differences between men and women, but outraged people on social media exaggerated and misrepresented what Damore had said. By making his memo sound worse than it was, they made programming seem less attractive to young women. 

An analogous event took place here in Seattle in 2018, when controversy erupted over Stuart Reges’s article in Quillette about the gender gap in computer science and what we can do about it. Based on his years of experience teaching, he recommended making it mandatory for students to take a coding class, which would expose more female students to coding. That recommendation was ignored, and instead his critics shamed him for his comments about gender and academic achievement. In the article, he pointed to evidence that boys are more likely to do better in math than in reading, while girls are more likely to do better in reading than math. The Seattle Times reporter garbled this position into something different and false: that boys are better than girls at math. As a result, people got a false impression about Reges and, by extension, about how welcome women are in STEM fields. When shame mobs make things out to be worse than they are, they hurt the very people they are trying to help.

How to overcome outrage

If outrage on social media hurts our cause and plays into Russia’s hands, we should stop it. Currently there are groups working to overcome divisions, and we can join up with them. Jonathan Haidt and his crew have the OpenMind program for organizations that want to hold discussions that are productive instead of destructive. It features a self-study segment that is eye-opening even if you never use their templates for group discussions. Better Angels is trying to depolarize America with conversations. The group More in Common is also working to overcome polarization, with their Hidden Tribes program as their major contribution that effort. The left’s pattern of letting outrage guide us has failed repeatedly, and we need to do better.

OpenMind: https://openmindplatform.org

Better Angels: https://www.better-angels.org

Hidden Tribes from More in Common: https://hiddentribes.us

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Calls to Liberal Action: Another post about how the left needs to do better.