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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?
Inspired by in part by Michael Huemer's definition I would rephrase it somewhat more generic along the lines of: all discrepancies of outcome are due to pervasive, systemic biases rooted in unchanging, historically-defined oppressor/oppressed dynamics, and such dynamics outweigh most or all other concerns.
More cynically, "wokeness" is the logical outcome of trying to apply intersectionality to the real world and the result of Christianity-influenced universalist ethics stripped of the supernatural elements, combined with certain common social trends, resulting in acceptably-demonized populations and sanctified, above-reproach populations.
For some examples of your later question of "aggressively performative," land acknowledgements as secular prayers come to mind. Surely the people saying them don't have any faith that they do anything beyond some vague 'raising of awareness' that doesn't actually... you know, repatriate the land or anything.
Anything involving people like Robin Diangelo, Ibram Kendi, Tema Okun, Nicole Hannah-Jones, etc: aggressively performative, actively making the world worse if one attempts anything they say. One would do less damage to the world by simply burning their money in a ritualistic sacrifice. I kind of think that's why audits of BLM vanished from the news cycle so quickly- people did want to treat sending money to scam artists as ritualistic sacrifice, they made a payment on their sin-debt and just wanted to move on.
I fear I am succumbing to a temptation to label anything bad as woke, and related yet good ideas as something else. But that is pretty much my stance on the word: while there are positive contributions to be made to the world in the name of social justice, much of what has happened in the last 10 years has been major, predictable failure modes instead, and that collection of failure modes is "wokeness."
Well, if you are succumbing to labeling anything you consider bad as woke and everything else as something else...I don't know how to argue on that except...don't?
If the question is "wokeness is receding", and you define wokeness as "all discrepancies of outcome are due to pervasive, systemic biases rooted in unchanging, historically-defined oppressor/oppressed dynamics, and such dynamics outweigh most or all other concerns", I struggle to see where claims that a discrepancy is due to biased dyanmics and not merit are, in general, going down. Mark Zuckerburg just claimed that the bias he struggles with in his business is because of the overabundance of "feminine energy"; I hardly see that as symptoms of a decline.
LOL at your new flair.
Well, it's a phenomenon that seemingly a large number of people agree exists and is meaningful, but refuses to name itself, works the euphemism treadmill in an attempt that no name sticks for long, every blowhard commentator comes up with a new name to sell their book, etc.
Since I've been told that nobody calls themselves woke anymore since it got treadmilled by the right, I don't think it's such a bad thing to save it as a negative descriptor and hope that a positive descriptor comes along that sticks for more than five minutes for the parts that aren't terrible. It's not an ideal situation, I agree.
I was addressing your question of attempting to define it, not addressing OP's question at all.
I don't think it particularly is receding. Even though it's ebbed from the pandemic-induced mass psychosis a lot of the attitudes are sticking around, and we as a society (and even worse, as The West) are not really wrestling with what it actually means to be multicultural, multiethnic liberal democracy.
Yeah, that's what I didn't like about Huemer's definition. Many people have entrenched ideas about what "racist" and "sexist" means, and even when presented with examples of anti-white (or "politically white" like Asians in school admission cases) racism or anti-male sexism, they'll say that it's justified on historic grounds (regardless of the actual people affected).
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