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Notes -
Paul Graham is out today with an essay about the origins of woke. There's nothing in the essay that's particularly new. Did he know about Richard Hanania's book? Did Hanania know that perhaps his book would be better as an essay?
In any case, I think the better topic would be this:
How did wokeness die?
Of course, wokeness isn't dead. Far from it. But the vibe shift is real, and I think it's pretty fair to say that wokeness did peak in 2020/21 and is in serious retreat now. Paul Graham kinda glosses over the reason for its decline, saying:
But I'm not sure this really explains it. As the social movement known as wokeness gained power, it was able to get more and more people placed into high-ranking positions. Governments, universities, and big corporations all have what are essentially commissars who are given high-paying jobs to enforce orthodoxy. At first, wokeness was just true believers. But pretty soon it gained adherents who did it for practical reasons – they put their pronouns in their bios because their jobs literally depended on it. It seems like a self-reinforcing cycle. Once woke people get more power, they make demands which include hiring even more woke people, giving them more power, etc... Anyone who speaks out is banished from the organization.
There's no limiting principle here. Other social movements, like Christianity, grew and grew until they took over essentially all institutions. Why couldn't wokeness do the same?
Here's my attempt at an explanation.
Wokeness is ultimately like cancer. It grows but it can not thrive because it destroys the institutions it corrupts. Scott talked about how whales should in theory get cancer more readily than smaller animals. A blue whale has 3,000 times as many cells as a human. Each one could theoretically become cancerous. So why aren't blue whales riddled with cancer at a rate 3,000 times that of humans?
Scott's theory: cancer cells are unstable, and the cancer cells themselves get cancer, preventing the malignancy from growing. It's a rare cancer that grows quickly but is stable enough to not implode.
I can't comment on the accuracy of this biological model, but as an analogy for social movements it works well. Early Christianity grew without limit because it was fruitful. Wokeness died because it was toxic. Today, the left is famous for its circular firing squads in which people are excommunicated for the smallest breaches of orthodoxy. Ultimately, this was its fatal flaw. It couldn't coordinate action against its enemies because it was so obsessed with killing its own.
What is wokeness, specifically?
This isn’t actually a meaningful response. Firstly because it just kicks the can one step up — how you define “social justice”? Secondly, because “performativity” is neither exclusive to wokeness — God knows I’ve seen plenty of conservatives wearing in-your-face Trump memorabilia, putting American flag and/or Thin Blue Line stickers on their trucks, etc. — nor actually the primary issue with wokeness; there are tons of woke NGOs and anonymous woke bureaucrats doing plenty behind the scenes, unheralded, to advance specific causes and to cause material legal and political change. Focusing only on the “performative” stuff actually misses the point and allows those less “performative” actors to continue their work unnoticed and unimpeded.
A set of interlocking theories emerging from the academic field of Sociology that share in common an understanding of society as dominated by oppressor/oppressed dynamics: Feminism (Men/Women), "anti-racism" (whites/non-whites), Queer/QUILTBAG (Heteros/Queers), Labor (workers vs bosses), etc. These theories coordinate support between their adherents and collectively demand a revolutionary otherthrow of existing social structures to achieve "justice". They also consistently fail to achieve any positive end, and then explain away this failure as due to them not having been granted sufficient power and control over Society.
...I'm skeptical that anyone thoughtful, at this late stage, actually believes that "social justice" is a nebulous or poorly-defined concept. It appears to me that the concept is well-defined, and the large majority of the remaining confusion comes from its adherents who perceive legibility to be contrary to their ideological interests, and so actively fight against any attempt to accurately label or describe their actions or organizations.
Unheralded to who? It seems to me that they herald themselves quite a bit to their fellow NGOs and bureaucrats, just not the public at large. They make Powerpoints, and present them. They hold conferences and publish papers and manifestos. They organize and coordinate around the ideology collectively, they capture policy and process, they manipulate procedural outcomes. All of these are social acts, thus prone to performance.
This action is "performative" because it so evidently degenerates into assessment by consensus, not real-world results. The proper practice of anti-racism means securing the approval of the anti-racist community, not the actual reduction of racism in any objectively defined or measured sense. Victory is nothing less or more than the approval of one's peers, and real-world results are entirely ignored.
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