The Woke & Conservatives Agree & I'm Going to Show You How

My close friends know that I love to DJ. I find that DJing is an incredibly meditative practice that requires me to be somewhat in sync with the music, the energy of the participants who are dancing, and myself. Doing is a skill, which if done right, can teach you about how to synthesize between human beings of different backgrounds, and bring harmony to a room. 

Perhaps I’m a synthesizer by nature, due in part to the fact that I grew up in a Christian home that observed Jewish holidays. Synthesis was constantly a topic of conversation and it’s one of those things where once you see it, you can’t unsee it. 

So now when I’m on social media, especially Twitter, I’m constantly looking for overlap between seemingly disparate viewpoints like, say, woke liberals and staunch conservatives (or even classic liberals these days.) And recently I stumbled upon a tweet posted by Wesley Yang that inspired me to find just that. Here’s a link to the tweet. 

Now as I read this tweet, it dawned on me that “the woke” is partially right and wrong on this issue. And they're right for astoundingly conservative reasons, and by conservative, I mean wanting to preserve and transmit the sacred aspects of Western culture to future generations. 

I agree with Wesley that Crystal is wrong about the pressure to read everything being about capitalism. But Crystal is touching on something that Socrates, that great forefather of Western civilization himself pointed out about writing, namely that it wasn't the most effective means of communication. (the irony, I know). 

Keep in mind that Socrates believed in dialog as a means of communication over all other forms. Dialog was oral, it was alive, and it wad dynamic in a way that the written word was not.

In a dialogue that one of his pupils (probably Plato) wrote down, Socrate says the following:

“You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.

Go back and read Crystal’s point about how "reading isn’t just about absorbing as many words on as many pages as quickly as possible.” There is, dare I say it, a synergy here, hehe. There is overlap between what she is saying and what Socrates is pointing out about the written word. 

The written word can be incredibly deceptive. People can confuse words for "the thing itself" like confusing a map for the territory, (which I think is exactly what’s happening with accusations of being “ableist.")

Historically speaking, the act of reading something in isolation is a very recent thing. Communities used to be far more embodied in their relationship with words, and in storytelling in general. Communities had oral traditions and these were part and parcel of the development of Western civilization.

Think about Homer's The Odyssey. Stories like those were not traditionally read from a book but performed. A bard would come and actually sing these stories and people would sit around a kind of campfire and listen or even actively participate in the telling of the story.

While much of these traditions exist in non WEIRD cultures (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.) they very much used to exist in the West and are part of our rich heritage. 

I believe it is imperative to revive those traditions.

Now obviously there are several misfires in Crystal's tweet. We can't revivify these traditions without treating certain aspects of the West as sacred, and without knowing those aspects of history in the first place. If we do, we'll actually just cannibalize and get stuck in culture wars. But there are also several kernels of truth in what Crystal says.

I just had this conversation with my brother from another mother Idahosa Ness

(pod out soon) about how the hyper technological ways of being in the West are atrophying our capacity to be in community with each other and how, yes that includes being able to read & respond to each other effectively as human beings.

I think this is a failure to become consummate with reality itself. There are people in the tech world who recognize this too, like Jordan Hall and Game B folks and even some people working on DAOs and crypto. They also sense something is amiss.

The Disney film Wall-E actually predicted this atrophying. It depicted a world in which human beings just became glued to their screens and are (literally) out of touch with reality. This is antithetical to what humans were designed to be able to do: call and respond.

You can think of “call and response” as a musical modality that is present within all human beings. When I think of it, I think about the African-American Baptist Tradition, where a preacher might say something and the church is moved to respond, spontaneously and organically. (If you listen to some of Dr. King’s sermons you'll hear this dynamic going on in the recordings.)

I also think of “call and response” as what is necessary when you want to learn any kind of craft that requires your whole being.

Acting on stage requires this. Learning how to ride a motorcycle requires this. Playing an instrument well requires this. Getting in right relationship with reality itself so you can respond to the unknown, an ever present fact of reality, the very Mystery at the heart of Being, requires this. 

But because we have become fixated on predictability and absolute order, we have started foreclosing our "responsibility" -- which is quite literally the ability to respond. Isn't it funny that ‘responsibility,’ which is a conservative value is precisely what’s being called for by folks like Crystal and others who might consider themselves pretty deeply anti conservative?  Maybe there  is understanding between the woke and conservatism after all!

In conclusion, I think there is actually a nexus of ideas that conservatives & people who identify as woke  actually have in common and its a) a matter of synthesizing them and b) deliberately entering into communities of practice so we can embody these ideas, mind body and spirit.

I don’t think we can act responsibly if the value system we deem worthy is one that says, "actually the only thing I want to be responsive to any and everything in my reality is technology." That's not going to work.

But I suspect that Crystal & others like her are grappling with how the Cartesian mind/body split as developed by René Descartes has resulted in deep alienation in WEIRD cultures. Those ideas came out of the Enlightenment (which also produced good things) & conservatives who take the West seriously must confront that.

We don't want the dystopia portrayed in Wall E. We want Spirit, which is a dynamical system that helps put us in touch with the world. We want connection, and the re-enchantment (hehe) of the world. We desperately crave and need it. Now, more than ever.