waitbutwhy.com has long been my favourite blog. Tim Urban engages readers like me with his logical arguments, common sense analogies, simplistic illustrations, and the perfect amount of humour sprinkled in. That he can write an article of any length and about any topic while retaining my attention the entire time shows how captivating his writing is. I aspire to one day be as effective of a communicator as him.
So you can imagine my excitement upon finding out he wrote a book. It did not disappoint. Urban stuck to his secret formula and the book read like a very long blog post, which I have no complaints about. He begins by noting that
If we accept these points as true, then we face the following problems:
The antidote that Urban proposes is that we should focus less on a person’s opinion and more on how they arrived at said opinion. In the first half of the book, he provides a framework of thinking in this manner (called ‘the Ladder’) and explains how our society has become so polarized. The second half of the book is much more controversial, as he uses the Ladder to critique “Social Justice Fundamentalism” (SJF, a.k.a. wokeness) for having taken over society for the worse.
I think many of my peers and I believe the notion of intersectionality (placing everyone on a 'hierarchy of oppression' based on gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.) to be rather nonsensical. Urban explains that the origins of this theory come from genuine social justice activism. In the 1976 lawsuit DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, five women of colour sued GM for discriminatory hiring and lost after GM showed that both women and people of colour were being equally represented. Then in 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex, pointing out that the women GM hired were predominantly white, and the people of colour predominantly male. Failing to treat the intersection of women and people of colour as a distinct group allows discrimination to continue to occur undetected.
Intersectionality in this context makes total sense to me. I just wish Tim would have spent more time explaining how/why these SJF concepts have become distorted over time rather than focusing on the threats that SJF poses to society today. Nevertheless, his arguments are rational and nuanced, and it was interesting to hear a criticism of the “woke agenda” coming from someone other than a conservative politician.
Some other cool things I learned:
Favourite line: “No matter how many written rules there are, it is the citizens’ ability to uphold liberal norms that determines the fate of the country. This is why American history is, above all, the story of a nation’s struggle against itself. The eternal tug-of-war that goes on in our heads and in our communities also rages in the mind of the big American giant.”
IRL Update (03/22/2023): March is going by very quickly, just like February. Tomorrow, I’m flying out to Shanghai for 2 weeks to visit some family (grandparents not doing too well). Will be bringing plenty of books for my journey.