Wokeness And Climate Change

This is going to be my most centrist view

Who are you? Who am I to you?
I am the antichrist to you
Fallen from the sky with grace
Into your arms race

—I Am The Antichrist To You, Kishi Bashi.

Centrists are often chided for being wishy-washy and in the middle, unable to realize that the things done by side X—where that’s the side the speaker likes—are, while imperfect, infinitely better than the things done by side Y—those ghouls on the other side. In that spirit, I’d like to compare wokeness and climate change.

Climate change is bad. It will kill many people. Sophisticated-sounding economists who don’t wear lab coats and environmental scientists who also generally don’t wear lab coats but hang out with the guys that do generally predict it will shave several points off the global GDP and will kill millions of people. This was roughly the prediction of the most sophisticated report every commissioned on the topic of climate change and essential risks.

Still, there are a lot of people who are very afraid of climate change killing everyone. They worry that their urban paradise will turn into a mad max movie because of a few-point increase in global temperatures, that the seas will emulate Cthulu—rising and devouring all. AOC once boldly predicted that climate change would kill everyone in 12 years (strangely though, it doesn’t seem to be more important than healthcare). Apparently, around half of Americans think that climate change will destroy the planet, yet most don’t consider it a top political issue, being less important than inflation, which I find very funny. Imagine thinking “oh yes, climate change will KILL EVERYONE ON EARTH, but the real thing I’m concerned about is inflation!” Reminds me of Senator Blumenthal’s amusing remark to Sam Altman:

I think you have said, and I quote: "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity" You may have had in mind the effect on jobs, which is really my biggest nightmare in the long term.

I think this is loony alarmism. One should be wary about doomsday prognostications, as everyone else who has predicted that we were doomed has been wrong. The evidence we have, in fact, points away from climate change ending the world.

Nevertheless, I think something should be done about climate change. Perhaps a carbon tax should be imposed—it certainly seems to be popular among economists for the standard reasons that one learns about in an econ class. It’s unclear exactly how high the carbon taxe should be—I leave that to nerds with names like Nordhaus—but nonetheless, common sense dictates some tax of some sort.

Similarly, I think wokeness is bad. It causes lots of misery, as people feel bad about all the world’s injustice that their failure to do anything about makes them complicit in. It wastes huge amounts of time and money and makes people even more racist. It causes Hanania to write a book about it, that could be better spent hilariously trolling on Twitter. It chills speech, making it hard for interesting and heterodox people to get jobs—particularly in academia. Furthermore, it gets Republicans elected who do all sorts of bad things like randomly banning alternatives to torturing animals because they find them gross and the world economic forum once said something good about them.

That said, it’s not the world’s most important problem—not by a long shot. Compared to the badness of 10x the world’s population worth of animals being tortured and slaughtered every year, wokeness is a nonentity. Compared to foreign policy, wokeness is relatively unimportant. While it’s particularly annoying—uniquely good for allowing one to get annoyed at the other some—as far as global issues go, I don’t think it ranks that highly.

A lot of people think it does, however. I remember watching James Lindsey dementedly ranting about how he’d support Trump because of wokeness and Biden’s’ alleged status as some sort of woke figure—even as the woke chided Biden for being a racist, out-of-touch geriatric centenarian. As I watched it, I thought to myself “I’m antiwoke, but definitely not on this guy’s team.” Voting for Trump because you don’t like wokeness is, in my estimation, deeply crazy.

I don’t know exactly what should be done about wokeness. Maybe, like with climate change, it should be taxed. Every time a person says something crazy about it being okay to throw eggs at white people because of something about systemic racism, they should have to pay 10 dollars—a bit like the adult version of a swear jar. If wokeness imposes negative externalities, well, economists have known for a while how to deal with negative externalities.

Apparently Richard Hanania has a 15 million point plan to defeat wokeness. I don’t really know the details of it, but I’m on board with defeating wokeness. But it’s just not the kind of thing that tops my list of priorities. Like climate change, while it’s bad and will cause a bunch of misery, it won’t unravel Western civilization or lead to any catastrophe. If we measure bad things in terms of numbers of factory farming they are—factory farming is one factory farming (FF) worth of badness, everyone in the world being eaten by a big shark would be .5 FF’s worth of badness—wokeness rounds down to zero. So does climate change, though it’s quite a bit more severe than wokeness.

Richard Hanania hates pronouns more than genocide. I find this attitude crazy, of letting what one finds personally annoying to dictate one’s views about the world. Those hyperventilating about wokeness and climate change, those whose worldviews revolve in large part around their horrors, should chill out. Both are bad, but neither will usher in the apocalypse, where the multiheaded antichrist will be cast into the pit of fire.