You importantly point out that it is not enough to criticize the other side but to recognize, apologize and make amends for your own side's harm and complicity in outcomes. Otherwise, the seeds of ideology may lay dormant but will surely grow again given the environment. A scaled down example is when a husband and wife have an argument. Until each person owns up to their part in the fight, they may call a truce but inwardly resent and mistrust the other. In that environment, you can bet they will carry that resentment and mistrust over into the next fight.
OMG this! I am really struggling with being told ‘it’s over now, move on’ and by the very people who were the least impacted/ most able to withstand it. I desperately want to move on but i am horribly angry and my work and self esteem is left in tatters. I drafted something on it but it is basically a tirade and so probably best kept locked up!
Thank you. A really helpful paper for politically homeless feminists like me who consider ourselves to be on the liberal left who find ourselves allying with people whose illiberalism appals us.
I find your idea that neither liberalism nor 'wokeness' can be defined by specific content. but rather reflect questions of epistemology (and thus one's stance towards the Enlightenment) fascinating and very convincing. Thank you.
My thought: No, wokeness is not dead. As you say, it still reigns supreme in the institutions of knowledge production, and for that alone it is still a major problem. Also, we can see the signs practically everywhere, including the judicial branch, all throughout the government, NGO's, all levels of politics where ideology becomes more important than supporting your country and voter base.
You are right that it would have made a big difference if liberals had put up some fight against wokeism (the opportunities presented themselves for 6 decades). And similarly conservatives should resist against identity based post-modern ideology on the right. My worry is that ultimately politics is about power (elite theory), and that classic liberalism just masks and obfuscates this fundamental. If so, it's not clear to me how the 'liberal' approach you are championing will be successful - though it's a nice vision (dream?).
For me, I can't think purely about wokeism anymore without also contemplating globalism. They are different ideologies, but imo they share common origins. They both are founded on anti-western philosophy. The 'post war consensus' and 'open society' were results of the devastating effects of the 20th century world wars, as was the development of critical theory and post-modernism.
And when you add to the mix the monetary globalist system the world has been operating in for quite a while, which extracts wealth from the common people of nation states to the global financial elites. This generates inequality which then feeds into the frenzy, since egalitarian desires will also push people away from 'the west' (it feeds into the ever present socialistic, Marxist utopian worldview).
So you currently have wokeism and globalism working hand in hand to destroy western civilization. So what's the solution?
It seems like the solution, which could be favored by everyone except the true globalists, is to go with economic nationalism. This promotes the working class, getting industry and manufacturing jobs back to countries of the west. I don't see why woke activists (leftists or far-right folks) would be against this. It seems like the best way forward for peace, prosperity, and sovereignty. And this approach can work for all nations. Obviously, much more can be said about this ...
By the way, thanks for the thoughtful post on wokeness!
No, Woke isn't dead. Wokeism is pervasive and has metastasised: the shock of the early diagnosis for most came during BLM, where they couldn't believe that feral criminality was getting excused, on behalf of a serial criminal, and people were getting sacked for pointing it out. Since then, there has been a fleeting losing fight, and we are now on a pathway of a slow quiet death as it destroys the healthy cells of our society.
Wokeism is, at its heart, the attribution of poorer outcomes of some minority groups to "The West": institutions, culture, history, norms, values, people etc.
Woke arguments are generally at the heart of a myriad of policies, investments and programmes:
The Equality Act basically affords minorities the "right" to scapegoat the west for their dysfunctions and failures, while being legally protected from counter criticisms. It led, in turn, to the NCHIs, the subversion of many principles of justice, whereby more than 130k were put on a government database, with their job chances harmed, without trials or the opportunity for making a defence. 12k have been arrested for online speech crimes in the last 12mths and basically half the population fear speaking openly.
Wokeism is embedded in education. it is embedded in the slavery museum (which depicts slavery as an invention from about 1680, committed entirely by Britain and the West); across the arts and in the media - where ethnic minorities are routinely afforded opportunities due to skin colour or identity. Wokeism is embedded in the rationale for ESG, and EDI expansion in workplaces; in the adoption of the UN's sustainable development goals in strategies, which govern most corporations, along with the B-Corp accreditation. All lead to promotion and programmes for minorities due to their identity, distorting workplaces, contributing to economic inactivity of older workers and lags on profit and growth.
Wokeism sits at the heart of our two tier laws and policing, leading to everything from the rape gangs to the recent murders at Southport and of Henry Novack: the views that policing should subsume a role to correct past "injustices", meaning it ignored minority crimes.
Look across the social science research / literature in whatever field you like: education, law, sociology, psychology. How many papers attribute the reasons for discrepancies in outcomes to cultural development, cultural values, norms and attitudes, family background, or the capabilities to contribute value to the lives of fellow citizens? (About zero). How many papers attribute the discrepancies to systematic racism, "barriers", or exclusion? (Pretty much all of them!).
How many papers have quantified the costs of Wokeism? Mass immigration from areas of the world with dangerous and hostile belief systems has been predicated on Woke ideals: creating costs, deflating wages, increasing welfare, costs of services and infrastructure and taxes, likely to the tune of hundreds of billions over the last decade when considering opportunity costs. Children are far more depressed and less hopeful, society has retreated from discourse, areas of cities have become segregated.... (Answer: v few/ none)
Wokeism has won - for now at least. It exists in the silence, as much as the noise: the silence is where arguments should be to defend superior ideas, reason, facts, logic and true ethical proposals for helping poorer members of society.
It's rather like dark matter: you don't see it, just its effects. You can tell Wokeism is still pervasive by the decay, debt, decline and degeneracy of society that results from blaming and subverting superior systems and elevating grievance conspiracies as wisdom, and narcissistic virtue signalling as leadership.
Well said! And any nations which are able to withstand and defeat this ideology will be greatly weakened, as there will remain many in the population which will retain these corrosive beliefs.
As I joked to my husband when I saw this post arrive earlier, I feel like I’m Patricia from Widow’s Bay pointing the loaded shotgun at the cremator that’s actively incinerating the slasher villain when it comes to wokeness.
A thoughtful, thorough piece -- a bit much, perhaps with all the references but I expect they are needed to buttress your argument. I have not checked to see if they are paywalled. There a lot of quotable bits, and here's one that struck me"
"This is why the most important fault line is not between woke and anti-woke. It is between liberalism and authoritarianism."
Further in the analysis os the point that liberalism: essentially Enlightenment values and the tolerance of principled disagreements was bipartisan, a good example being the public health infrastructure, including robust support for the NIH, NSF, CDC, vaccination initiatives, and related programs.
The mention of tribalism as a fundamental human reaction is important.
Is Wokeness dead? Not around here (Oregon) and it is still dominant in some institutions. It may be perceived to be in decline but it continues to hobble the Democratic Party, thus opening the way for ghastly scenarios -- call it woke-right or free play for narcissistic goons. When I first encountered sharp liberal criticism of 'left wing" or "progressive" woke, my reaction was: oh no, you're enabling tRump, But the more I learned, I changed my mind. "Left" woke" -- not dead, keep kicking; "Right woke -- always there, on the ascendant, buckle up folks, it'll be tough. In the meantime morbidity & mortality from infectious disease will continue to increase and host of other ills as well.
I’m afraid that woke, which essentially was intersectional feminism (a rather dishonest way to keep a middle class movement relevant in a complex world), now that it turned out even more repulsive to the average American (or European for that matter) than rightist populism, has fallen back to its core business, in a more venomous form than ever: radical feminism and essentially misandry. Where for years the woke on social media never stopped virtue signalling about POC and trans people (pushing women and gays rather to the background) now they’re ranting about men all the time, especially about male (domestic and sexual) violence.
Suggesting that forms of violence which actually concern a minuscule percentage of the population are omnipresent, and denying the same violence about women against men, even using ‘it’s not always men but it’s always men’ as a slogan, they try and too often manage to make misandry an almost a-political issue for women of all denominations. Sometimes I yearn back to the vague, rather meaningless wokeism of around 2020, harmful though that already was.(So maybe my view of how wokeism changed is connected to the umpteenth opinion of where it essentially came from.)
"What is less clear is whether the epistemological and ethical assumptions that underpinned it have declined as well. "
You hit the nail on the head. The symptoms have been receding but the root of the disease has not been touched yet.
Should progressives back off? I would say yes, if I had seen any evidence that progressives have rued the bullshit they unleashed upon the world and repented. :-D
In my experience, CSJ is alive and well in the arts. I wrote an essay about it that was published last February—I quoted your definition of CSJ in it. https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-inflating-cost-of-artistic-freedom/
Kevin, agreed. It has completely taken over the arts.
You importantly point out that it is not enough to criticize the other side but to recognize, apologize and make amends for your own side's harm and complicity in outcomes. Otherwise, the seeds of ideology may lay dormant but will surely grow again given the environment. A scaled down example is when a husband and wife have an argument. Until each person owns up to their part in the fight, they may call a truce but inwardly resent and mistrust the other. In that environment, you can bet they will carry that resentment and mistrust over into the next fight.
OMG this! I am really struggling with being told ‘it’s over now, move on’ and by the very people who were the least impacted/ most able to withstand it. I desperately want to move on but i am horribly angry and my work and self esteem is left in tatters. I drafted something on it but it is basically a tirade and so probably best kept locked up!
Thank you. A really helpful paper for politically homeless feminists like me who consider ourselves to be on the liberal left who find ourselves allying with people whose illiberalism appals us.
I find your idea that neither liberalism nor 'wokeness' can be defined by specific content. but rather reflect questions of epistemology (and thus one's stance towards the Enlightenment) fascinating and very convincing. Thank you.
I suggest that rather trying to define flavors of illiberal symptoms, we focus on the disease: megalomania combined with hubris multiplied by charisma. See: https://jonathanblake.substack.com/p/how-should-we-define-homo-politicus
My thought: No, wokeness is not dead. As you say, it still reigns supreme in the institutions of knowledge production, and for that alone it is still a major problem. Also, we can see the signs practically everywhere, including the judicial branch, all throughout the government, NGO's, all levels of politics where ideology becomes more important than supporting your country and voter base.
You are right that it would have made a big difference if liberals had put up some fight against wokeism (the opportunities presented themselves for 6 decades). And similarly conservatives should resist against identity based post-modern ideology on the right. My worry is that ultimately politics is about power (elite theory), and that classic liberalism just masks and obfuscates this fundamental. If so, it's not clear to me how the 'liberal' approach you are championing will be successful - though it's a nice vision (dream?).
For me, I can't think purely about wokeism anymore without also contemplating globalism. They are different ideologies, but imo they share common origins. They both are founded on anti-western philosophy. The 'post war consensus' and 'open society' were results of the devastating effects of the 20th century world wars, as was the development of critical theory and post-modernism.
And when you add to the mix the monetary globalist system the world has been operating in for quite a while, which extracts wealth from the common people of nation states to the global financial elites. This generates inequality which then feeds into the frenzy, since egalitarian desires will also push people away from 'the west' (it feeds into the ever present socialistic, Marxist utopian worldview).
So you currently have wokeism and globalism working hand in hand to destroy western civilization. So what's the solution?
It seems like the solution, which could be favored by everyone except the true globalists, is to go with economic nationalism. This promotes the working class, getting industry and manufacturing jobs back to countries of the west. I don't see why woke activists (leftists or far-right folks) would be against this. It seems like the best way forward for peace, prosperity, and sovereignty. And this approach can work for all nations. Obviously, much more can be said about this ...
By the way, thanks for the thoughtful post on wokeness!
Excellent piece.
Helen Pluckrose I absolutely love you!
No, Woke isn't dead. Wokeism is pervasive and has metastasised: the shock of the early diagnosis for most came during BLM, where they couldn't believe that feral criminality was getting excused, on behalf of a serial criminal, and people were getting sacked for pointing it out. Since then, there has been a fleeting losing fight, and we are now on a pathway of a slow quiet death as it destroys the healthy cells of our society.
Wokeism is, at its heart, the attribution of poorer outcomes of some minority groups to "The West": institutions, culture, history, norms, values, people etc.
Woke arguments are generally at the heart of a myriad of policies, investments and programmes:
The Equality Act basically affords minorities the "right" to scapegoat the west for their dysfunctions and failures, while being legally protected from counter criticisms. It led, in turn, to the NCHIs, the subversion of many principles of justice, whereby more than 130k were put on a government database, with their job chances harmed, without trials or the opportunity for making a defence. 12k have been arrested for online speech crimes in the last 12mths and basically half the population fear speaking openly.
Wokeism is embedded in education. it is embedded in the slavery museum (which depicts slavery as an invention from about 1680, committed entirely by Britain and the West); across the arts and in the media - where ethnic minorities are routinely afforded opportunities due to skin colour or identity. Wokeism is embedded in the rationale for ESG, and EDI expansion in workplaces; in the adoption of the UN's sustainable development goals in strategies, which govern most corporations, along with the B-Corp accreditation. All lead to promotion and programmes for minorities due to their identity, distorting workplaces, contributing to economic inactivity of older workers and lags on profit and growth.
Wokeism sits at the heart of our two tier laws and policing, leading to everything from the rape gangs to the recent murders at Southport and of Henry Novack: the views that policing should subsume a role to correct past "injustices", meaning it ignored minority crimes.
Look across the social science research / literature in whatever field you like: education, law, sociology, psychology. How many papers attribute the reasons for discrepancies in outcomes to cultural development, cultural values, norms and attitudes, family background, or the capabilities to contribute value to the lives of fellow citizens? (About zero). How many papers attribute the discrepancies to systematic racism, "barriers", or exclusion? (Pretty much all of them!).
How many papers have quantified the costs of Wokeism? Mass immigration from areas of the world with dangerous and hostile belief systems has been predicated on Woke ideals: creating costs, deflating wages, increasing welfare, costs of services and infrastructure and taxes, likely to the tune of hundreds of billions over the last decade when considering opportunity costs. Children are far more depressed and less hopeful, society has retreated from discourse, areas of cities have become segregated.... (Answer: v few/ none)
Wokeism has won - for now at least. It exists in the silence, as much as the noise: the silence is where arguments should be to defend superior ideas, reason, facts, logic and true ethical proposals for helping poorer members of society.
It's rather like dark matter: you don't see it, just its effects. You can tell Wokeism is still pervasive by the decay, debt, decline and degeneracy of society that results from blaming and subverting superior systems and elevating grievance conspiracies as wisdom, and narcissistic virtue signalling as leadership.
Well said! And any nations which are able to withstand and defeat this ideology will be greatly weakened, as there will remain many in the population which will retain these corrosive beliefs.
Another beautiful, rational essay by Helen Pluckrose.
So many worthy excerpts that the whole thing is excerptable.
Have restacked the hell out of it.
Thank you. I really appreciate this explanation and timing.
No it isn’t obviously
To the latter question, I'll say "no". We want to make sure it stays dead. We have to be sure.
As I joked to my husband when I saw this post arrive earlier, I feel like I’m Patricia from Widow’s Bay pointing the loaded shotgun at the cremator that’s actively incinerating the slasher villain when it comes to wokeness.
Great show by the way!
A thoughtful, thorough piece -- a bit much, perhaps with all the references but I expect they are needed to buttress your argument. I have not checked to see if they are paywalled. There a lot of quotable bits, and here's one that struck me"
"This is why the most important fault line is not between woke and anti-woke. It is between liberalism and authoritarianism."
Further in the analysis os the point that liberalism: essentially Enlightenment values and the tolerance of principled disagreements was bipartisan, a good example being the public health infrastructure, including robust support for the NIH, NSF, CDC, vaccination initiatives, and related programs.
The mention of tribalism as a fundamental human reaction is important.
Is Wokeness dead? Not around here (Oregon) and it is still dominant in some institutions. It may be perceived to be in decline but it continues to hobble the Democratic Party, thus opening the way for ghastly scenarios -- call it woke-right or free play for narcissistic goons. When I first encountered sharp liberal criticism of 'left wing" or "progressive" woke, my reaction was: oh no, you're enabling tRump, But the more I learned, I changed my mind. "Left" woke" -- not dead, keep kicking; "Right woke -- always there, on the ascendant, buckle up folks, it'll be tough. In the meantime morbidity & mortality from infectious disease will continue to increase and host of other ills as well.
I’m afraid that woke, which essentially was intersectional feminism (a rather dishonest way to keep a middle class movement relevant in a complex world), now that it turned out even more repulsive to the average American (or European for that matter) than rightist populism, has fallen back to its core business, in a more venomous form than ever: radical feminism and essentially misandry. Where for years the woke on social media never stopped virtue signalling about POC and trans people (pushing women and gays rather to the background) now they’re ranting about men all the time, especially about male (domestic and sexual) violence.
Suggesting that forms of violence which actually concern a minuscule percentage of the population are omnipresent, and denying the same violence about women against men, even using ‘it’s not always men but it’s always men’ as a slogan, they try and too often manage to make misandry an almost a-political issue for women of all denominations. Sometimes I yearn back to the vague, rather meaningless wokeism of around 2020, harmful though that already was.(So maybe my view of how wokeism changed is connected to the umpteenth opinion of where it essentially came from.)
"What is less clear is whether the epistemological and ethical assumptions that underpinned it have declined as well. "
You hit the nail on the head. The symptoms have been receding but the root of the disease has not been touched yet.
Should progressives back off? I would say yes, if I had seen any evidence that progressives have rued the bullshit they unleashed upon the world and repented. :-D
I have seen no such evidence. Alas.