I'm not sure that's true. Wokeness doesn't focus on actual harassment; it focuses on accusations of harassment, with a definition of "harassment" that is highly subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate very well with actual harassment.
> how we can do things like take sexual harassment more seriously
The problem is not that we need to take, for example, sexual harassment "more seriously". The problem is how to reduce how often actual sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more seriously" is a very vague and ineffective way to do that.
Taking it seriously is a prerequisite for any effective mechanism for reducing sexual harassment.
Try replacing "sexual harassment" with "murder" or "robbery" and see if it still makes sense.
While I agree that this is true, I think the point pg makes in his article could be extended to a general rule that, if you find your earnest desire to do good things is leading you to embrace something like wokeness, you need to take a step back. The best way to do good things is to do good things--in other words, to find specific things that you can do that are good, based on your specific knowledge of particular people and particular cases, and do them. Participating in general efforts to micromanage people to make them do good things, or to stop them from doing bad things, which is what wokeness is, is a very poor way to make use of your earnest desire to good things.
How many innocent people get convicted of murder because of our desire to "take murder seriously"? (The Innocence Project has found that the answer is "quite a lot".) Note that every time an innocent person gets convicted, it means a guilty person (the actual murderer) goes free.
How many murderers get released back into society to murder again because our desire to take something else "seriously" has somehow overridden proper enforcement of our laws against murder? (I don't know if any specific study has looked at this, but my personal sense is, again, "quite a lot".)
So no, the lesson of experience appears to be that "taking it more seriously" is not a good way to reduce how often some bad thing happens, with murder just as with sexual harassment.
Is it? To hear wokeness advocates talk, things have gotten worse.
A lot of problems can only addressed systemically.
Murder? Yes, an excellent start to solving this problem is to not murder anybody. That's really the single most important thing you do.
And yet, history shows, other people are going to do murders and simply not murdering people yourself is not sufficient to deal with this problem. You need to intervene or call for help if you see somebody getting murdered, and we need some sort of system to deal with murderers and protect other people from them, etc.
If murder is too extreme a metaphor for the anti-woke crowd, how about pissing on the bathroom floor? It's great if you are not pissing on the floor, but somebody is and we all have to walk on that floor, so we need to have some kind of community standards around it, and also somebody needs to clean up that piss.
"How seriously we take a thing" and "how good a job are we are doing."
In the case of murder in America, I would say the answers are "extremely seriously" and "we are doing a very imperfect job."
We should certainly do a better job of it, but I don't think the answer is to be less serious about murder. And -- clearly, I'd hope -- the point of the analogy is that some (many? most?) problems are societal.
Simply choosing to not murder people yourself is a great start, but it is a society-wide issue that can't be completely addressed by people simply choosing to do the right things on an individual basis.
The problem is how to reduce how often actual
sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more
seriously" is a very vague and ineffective
way to do that.
I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."
a definition of "harassment" that is highly
subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate
very well with actual harassment.
You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.
"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.
If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.
But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.
And, despite being "pro woke" or whatever it should be called, I had my own lessons to learn: I had to learn to stop interrupting women. I had to learn that interrupting them was wrong and that it was a form of sexism that I needed to address.
Many of the people most “taking it seriously” do the least to reduce its prevalence. Some are actually harassers.
Politicians claiming to take murder and robbery more seriously don’t necessarily do anything to actually reduce their prevalence.
I read woke/social justice stuff to shape my own understanding of the world and then use that to act to help people in substantive ways, but I don’t really believe in proselytizing. This way of thinking is not for everyone, nor should it be.
Conceptually, yes, these two things are separate. However, that does not mean these two things are independent of each other.
As you note, we take murder extremely seriously, but we do a poor job of reducing the number of murders. I think that is because we think, hey, we're taking murder really seriously, so we must be reducing the number of murders. In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously" will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing. But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite. Maybe if we paid less attention to how "seriously" we are taking murder, and more attention to actually reducing the number of murders, even if many of the things we ended up doing to accomplish that had no obvious relationship to murder and didn't look at all like "taking murder seriously", we might do a better job.
In the case of sexual harassment, similarly, "taking it seriously" does not seem to have helped in reducing its frequency; it might even have done the opposite (at least one commenter elsewhere in this thread has said they believe things have gotten worse).
> it is a society-wide issue
There is a very general society-wide issue that the things we are discussing are special cases of: how should a society deal with the fact that there will always be some proportion of people who, for a variety of reasons, don't want to behave as good members of society?
Because this issue is very general, it requires very general solutions (or maybe "mitigations" would be a better term--you can't "solve" the issue in the sense of just making such people not exist any more). But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment, does not help in finding a very general solution to the very general issue. It often hinders it, by inducing people to mistake symptoms for the root cause. The root cause is not "too many people like to murder" or "too many people like to sexually harass others". The root cause is the very general one I gave above: some people just don't want to be good members of society. Society's method of dealing with this should be similarly general. Specific applications might vary in the details, but the general principle is still the same.
It's interesting that you bring this up, because I know quite a few people who are not religious (agnostic or atheist), one of whom is myself, who still believe that abortion is, if not actual murder, at least tantamount to it, and should not be done except in extreme cases (what exactly counts as an "extreme case" can vary, but the point is that "getting pregnant because of consensual sex that unexpectedly resulted in a pregnancy, and having an abortion to avoid the inconvenience of a pregnancy and then putting the child up for adoption" is not an extreme case). I can't speak to other people's detailed grounds for this belief, but in my own case, I believe that, at some point fairly early in the development of an embryo/fetus (in an online discussion on another forum some years ago I argued that that point was implantation; another such point that was argued by, IIRC, Carl Sagan, is when the fetus first shows brain activity), the embryo/fetus has interests that deserve protection in much the same way that the interests of a very young child who can't yet recognize their own interests or take action to protect them on their own deserve protection.
In other words, I don't buy the argument made by at least a fair number of pro-abortion people that it's all about the woman's control over her own body and no other interest deserves to be weighed. I think there are reasons that even a rationalist humanist should accept, or at least give strong consideration to, for rejecting such an argument.
I'm not trying to argue for such a point of view here; I'm simply describing it to illustrate that I don't think all such disagreements can be boiled down to religious belief. There can be arguments based on considerations that are much more general, to the point where they at least have a claim to be considered by anyone who wants to be a good member of a civil society.
In other words, people believe that "taking it seriously"
will automatically reduce the frequency of a bad thing.
But in fact it doesn't--it might well do the opposite
I agree, though, that America proves that taking it seriously certainly isn't enough to prevent it.
(It's also worth noting that per capita violent crime in America has plummeted since the 90s, with no major changes in the way we handle such things...)
But "taking seriously" particular manifestations of
this general issue, like murder or sexual harassment
For example: focusing on overly rigid standards of speech to the point where nobody wants to say anything at all, a focus on overly harsh punishment instead of education/remediation, etc.
I will also share that I, personally, have seen the devastation that a provably false #metoo accusation can wreak.
Still, I strongly object to the idea that the efforts of organizations to address the "social justice" causes lumped into the category of "wokeness" are automatically bad. I don't think that's a useful discussion. It is a thing to discuss one policy at a time.
The comment I replied to said "taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless, not "talking about taking sexual harassment seriously" was pointless. I agree with the latter, not the former.