Having Ridiculous Ideas Doesn't Make You a Bad Person
What a PhD thesis on smell teaches us about the madness of crowds.
It was one of those Internet controversies that was common back in the day, and mercifully no longer is. That’s why it stood out this time.
The controversy would usually go something like this. A young man or woman would post something on social media that was either absurd or un-self-aware or both. One person would attack, then another, the algorithm would lock in. The original post would spread like a virus. The mob, smelling blood, would gather around, mocking the poor man or woman. If it was a woman, there would be an undercurrent of sexism. Sometimes, the express goal was to “cancel” the person. But often it wasn’t so deliberate. In a mob, because everyone is guilty, no one is. (This is also the idea behind firing squads, you can never know for sure who killed the victim).
And so it happened yesterday. It was an innocent post. Ally Louks, a PhD student, had gotten her PhD. She was presumably happy, and she wanted to share that with people.
Of course, it’s easy to see what the “problem” is here. She’s written a thesis on the oppressive nature of smell and how that shows up in contemporary prose, which sounds a bit silly. The post went viral, garnering over 70 million views. She’s (in)famous. She then shared the abstract, which made it sound sillier. Here’s a highlight: “The broad aim of this thesis is to offer an intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures. I focus largely on prose fiction from the modern and contemporary periods so as to trace the legacy of olfactory prejudice into today and situate its contemporary relevance.” And on it goes in this vein.
When people ask me what “wokeness” is, I want to say that it’s like porn: you know it when you see it. At the most basic level, to be “woke” is to view social relations primarily as a struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed with very little gray in between. Wokeness reifies victimhood, making it into a totem of moral superiority. Victims become blameless. They lose their agency. They are at the mercy of structural forces beyond their control — worldwide conspiracies, white supremacy, and so forth.
Yet as sociologist (and WoC podcast guest)
writes in his excellent new book We Have Never Been Woke, there’s an irony here. The people who tend to be woke tend to be quite privileged themselves:What is often referred to as “wokeness” can be fruitfully understood as the ruling ideology of this increasingly dominant elite formation. The genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged in society are not the folks who tend to embrace and propagate these ideas and frameworks.
Okay, returning to Ally Louks and her interest in olfactory oppression: So what? It’s silly. A lot of things are silly. That doesn’t mean you attack, mock or otherwise make fun of someone who’s accomplished something important (to them) and is happy about it and simply wants to share it with their relatively small number of followers.
Louks became the Internet’s “main character” for at least a day. But what’s interesting is how the identity of the mob and the “victim” have shifted ever since Twitter/X became more right-leaning under the stewardship of Elon Musk. In the pre-Musk era, the mobs tended to be left-leaning and they would target people who they believed were insufficiently liberal on cultural issues or who weren’t playing their dutiful role opposing Trump. Anyone — oddly enough, often minorities — who diverged from the consensus could find themselves swarmed.
People would rightly complain about the “woke mob.” Now the mob, it seems, is anti-woke. We’re all the same in the end. We come to know ourselves by knowing, first, who to oppose. In this sense, all power relations are, well, relational. They depend on contrasts, the starker the better. What the French philosopher René Girard called the “scapegoat mechanism” is always operating.
in his study of Girard’s thought defines it as follows:The scapegoat mechanism … found, turns a war of all against all into a war of all against one. It brings temporary peace as people forget their mimetic conflicts for a while, having just discharged all of their anger onto a scapegoat.
This process, Girard believed, was the foundation of all culture. The institutions and cultural norms that we find around us, especially sacred rituals like elections and capital punishment, as well as many taboos, are mechanisms that were developed to contain violence.
The problem, though, with what
calls “main character syndrome” is that “not everyone wants to be the main character.”The woke/ anti-woke dichotomy has largely crumbled. Wokeness isn’t what it used to be. Also, the Gaza war scrambled political and ideological alliances, something that we debated with
on the pod.
But there’s something else. It’s okay for people to have ridiculous ideas! Why should that bother us so much? One of my past relationships was with someone who was very woke. I remember on our first date she referred to the police as a “terrorist organization.” I thought this was absurd, but I also didn’t think that it made her a bad person. You can love someone who has 1 to 3 terrible opinions, as I argued here. I think she’s a wonderful person. She’s animated by a strong moral impulse, she just expressed them in ways that were foreign to me.
Presumably, it’s something we could have debated. And we did. But she wasn’t as willing to give me grace as I was for her. There was an imbalance. Because I thought that having a police presence during a DC crime wave was, on balance, a good thing, she thought I was morally suspect. Because I supported a two-state rather than a one-state solution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she questioned whether I was in some sense morally corrupted. This was an unfortunate situation, and our relationship ended at least in part because of our very different conceptions of moral culpability.
A failed relationship isn’t exactly a stand-in for our democratic predicament, but I think there are, if you’ll indulge me, some interesting parallels. In divided societies, there is no credible arbiter of what constitutes a wrong or right choice. This reality entails taking seriously what the philosopher
calls the illusion of culpable dissent, or “the false belief that others disagree with our moral, religious, and political viewpoints solely because of some cognitive or moral vice.”Not everything is a moral question. And not all of our beliefs are reflections of some supposed moral corruption. In other words, Ally Louks might be a good person with a few silly ideas, just like most of us.
This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.
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Call me woke, but I didn’t find that abstract absurd at all. Translating out of academese, I’d summarise it as:
People use smell as a way of indicating how we ought to see a person. Most obviously, smell can be used to evoke disgust. For example, one way to intensify lower-class depiction can be to say that someone smells dirty. A bit less obviously, smell can be used to indicate desire, including in ways that aren’t actually flattering. Because smell is so visceral, it might even be a particularly effective way of doing this. Accordingly, let’s analyse these dynamics in literature and see how they could affect how we see other people.
Seems reasonable to me. I suspect a lot of people’s reactions are based in a disconnect between the high academic language and the low — indeed, visceral — connotations that smell does indeed have. But, as much as I’d love to dispense with the entire set of expectations that require academics across every discipline to talk so impenetrably, I can’t fault a PhD student for adhering to convention, especially when we’re talking about her thesis abstract, of all things.
The “woke mobs” and “anti-woke mobs” are not all that analogous.
Ally Louks will be just fine. She’s shown that she’s capable of propagating ridiculous ideas, and since she lives and works in an academic ecosystem that rewards the adherence to and propagation of ridiculous ideas, there is not much that her online detractors can do to her except call out her ridiculousness.
It’s worth noting that “intersectionality” is not a “ridiculous idea” in the sense that, say, believing in Tarot cards is a ridiculous idea. The whole point of Louks’ thesis is to contribute to an intellectual project with the express purpose of deconstructing and subverting norms and institutions which most people value and wish to preserve. Some measure of anger towards those who participate in that project (to the point that it becomes their career) seems justifiable, at least.
Justine Sacco got fired while she was on a plane and completely unaware of her predicament. All this happened, not because she was part of an ecosystem that huge numbers of people rightly view as deleterious to the things they value, but because she tweeted a Jimmy Carr-type joke that did not land.
Do I want any harm to come to Louks? No of course not. But after the past twelve years of leftist nonsense – the sort of nonsense that dissertations such as Louks’ bolsters – I can’t find a violin tiny enough to play.