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Some time ago, I posted about how it feels like wokeism is getting less popular. I didn't have much to back it up, except some observations about a popular techie watering hole called HackerNews, so the whole exercise left me with more questions than answers.
Well, today I chanced upon "The Great Awokening Is Winding Down" by Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist from Columbia University that focuses on "how we think about, talk about, and produce knowledge about social phenomena including race, inequality, social movements, extremism, policing, national security, foreign policy and domestic U.S. political contests." (With that broad a scope of inquiry, I wouldn't be surprised if he wasn't a fellow mottizen). Al-Gharbi puts together a compelling story: there are fewer woke-related cancellation events, fewer research papers are published related to woke ideology, newspapers are writing less often about race/racism/racists, and companies--including media companies--are not only pushing back more strongly against the demands of social justice warriors, but also closing their purses and defunding both internal DEI departments as well as financial pledges they made to the bankrupt ideals of equity just a few years ago.
While this type of news warms my heart, most of the evidence al-Gharbi provides is composed of disparate op-ed columns from American newspapers. Throughout the last ten years, there have always been dissenting voices that managed, somehow, to walk the thin line between criticizing woke ideology and not falling victim to it. So I don't see why al-Gharbi puts any trust in these pieces, even one as monumental as the Times' recent response to GLAAD.
That said, al-Gharbi's analysis provides some value when he describes the recent behavior of companies and when he provides some numbers to back up his claims. The numbers he shares seem to confirm that the public is losing both interest and tolerance for wokeish puritanism. But the numbers themselves are so remote as to heavily dilute their meaning. For example, there is the fall in the frequency of terms like "race", "racists", and "racism" in papers like NYT, LAT, WSJ, and WP. Or the falling number of scholarly articles about identity-based biases. Al-Gharbi chooses to interpret these as evidence for this theory, but doesn't take into account other factors that could be responsible for this behavior. Like, maybe papers are using fewer words like "racists", and instead using some new fangled euphemism (like homeless -> unhoused)? Or perhaps, in the scholarly article case, these topics have moved to other forums, like described in Scott's recent "Links for February" post:
The arguments that convince me the most are when al-Gharbi talks about the changes in company behavior. These are hard, reality-based events that are orchestrated by smooth talking servants of the Invisible Hand (praise thy golden touch!). You can't argue with a company that not only doesn't pander to internal activist pressure, but goes onto punish them by expelling them from its belly. This mirrors my own experience working in the corporate world where more and more people roll their eyes at DEI-sponsored programming, finding convenient excuses to skip out. Even leadership's support, once crisp and vocal, has died down in volume to a DEI-themed zoom background or a quick few words mechanically tacked on somewhere.
Emotionally, the most salient point and the one I hang my hopes on is how Gen-Z seems to be rebelling against the enforced work puritanism. It's probably my nostalgia, but as a child of the 90s, I can't help but see in this behavior the reflection of my childhood. You had gory movies like Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill. You had gory games, probably led by id titles like Doom and Quake--titles which introduced hundreds of thousands of people to online deathmatching. You had dirty grunge, whose raw scream was quickly adapted and made into Billboard Top 100 records. But you also had plenty of metal and industrial sub-genres spin off and avoid total commercialization. Let's not forget the two movies that closed out the decade, both quite clear in their anti-puritanical message: Fight Club and The Matrix.
While later on all of this was sublimated into the cheery smiles and pastel colors of the aughts, if today's teenagers feel a similar sort of anger and distrust of righty and lefty moralists, I can rest easy--the world will not end, at least not for another decade or two.
To be blunt, wokeism is an efflorescence of booming economic times, when companies can afford to waste money on pastel-haired persons of diverse pronouns and genders as an advertisement of their civic virtue.
Now there's a downturn, and the fat is being trimmed, and that means all the DEI stuff which doesn't make money and where boycotts won't really have an effect since people are pulling in their spending anyway, and now their decisions are not being made on "is the pasta rainbow hues?" but "is this value for money?"
I think there is a definite turn against the excesses which became very excessive, but the major engine of change is turning off the money tap.
I find the the world's most bizzare phenomenon to be the existence of fundamentalists who can't understand the idea of religious-like devotion. All the moral commitments of their enemies must be cynical ploys or trivial aspects of their character; they could never be a driving force stronger than material concerns.
I wonder how long this has been the case. It's fascinating to realize that the descendants of crusaders were brutally crushed in an openly atheistic revolt back in 1790s France, then in 1917 Russia. Then when the threat of depravity (See Weimar's trans-mania) and communism threatened the 1930s German petit-Burgeois, these immediately understood that their only hope was not in the church but in viking Larpers who it turns out were not larping at all. Now the most ostensibly religious country in the West is the exporter of woke culture to ostensibly irreligious Europe, having previously broken records in unrestricted abortion, appalling divorce and child custody policies...
At some point, you've got to wonder what it says about Christians that the the morbidly obese gender-fluid idols of the left inspire in their followers, a greater will to power, than the rock of ages.
I'll have you know that Hitler explicitly hated Viking larpers.
Nothing dies unless it is moribund, I agree with that. Christianity is finished, there are new ideas that inspire greater fervor.
Christianity is alive and thriving with greater fervor than ever before.
Note that it is Christianity explicitly devoid of intellectual content and rational thought.
True, I saw a graph of church attendance in the UK and all the traditional churches were shrinking year on year, all but one of the evangelicals were growing. But this was in the context of the Anglican church of Uganda splitting from the English church over some compromise they were doing with gay rights: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/church-of-england-crack-up/
The key thing is getting tangible results. Christianity is not pulling in its own direction, it's getting pulled in other directions. The strongest, richest and most important parts of the world aren't getting more Christian, they're getting less Christian.
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None of what you quoted claims that. "There are X adherents" where X is a large sounding number doesn't imply growth at all. And "Pentecostalism is believed to be the fastest-growing religious movement in the world" neither says that Christianity is growing, nor does it even say that Pentecostalism is growing fast. ("Fastest growth rate" doesn't imply "fast growth rate".)
Be very careful not to interpret Wikipedia articles as saying more than what they literally claim, because writers phrase them to imply things that they don't have evidence for while being literally truthful. (Wikipedia is similar to the media in this way.)
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Do you have to wonder? Nietschze spent quite some time arguing that Christianity, as slave morality, was inconsistent in terms of will to power.
This is a strong argument but it's not exactly consistent with the behaviour of Christians before the enlightenment. I think the defining shift happened when God died in the souls of the tiny proportion of people who are capable of embracing an idea fully, and going to war for it. These, then went for other ideas that could still capture them, and everyone else was at most a trivial inconvenience in their way.
Okay, then what caused them to turn their backs on God?
Actually, who were these few people? I think it’s a mistake to read the greatest and most venerated of historical figures as categorically different from the masses. The existence of a warrior nobility was no guarantee of success, and it was specifically the transition to professional militaries which put Catholic Spain in charge of the western hemisphere for a few decades. But the Protestant nations of the 17th and 18th centuries clearly met success after the Enlightenment. It’s the incentives and the technology afforded to common men which drive history.
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A traditional cycle: The older generation promote strict social mores but fails to follow them, the younger generation observes the hypocrisy of the older and is disgusted and so loosens up, the next generation observes their libertine elders and is disgusted and so tightens up, on into infinity.
I bet that gen Z (or the gen after it) will be more conservative in some ways than the millennials (although not on lgbtq stuff, that is locked in forever once the boomers stop taking up all the cultural space);
The TQ stuff is likely to blow up in a spectacular way once all the sterilised kids grow up and huge chunks of them decide they were failed by the system (and the rest of the probability space mostly looks like "AI killed us" or "we get fertility-restoration tech"). It's exactly the sort of thing that makes a society decide Never Again once everyone's had time to stand back and process.
There's also the issue that nuclear war is pretty likely in the near future and I think that most SJers literally dying in a fire would lead to the few who survived getting removed from power; SJ's hold on the countryside is tenuous.
And, y'know, the stats of millennials/zoomers who reproduce are immensely different from the rest along this axis.
Not obvious how fast Thermidor will come or how far it will go, but I wouldn't count it out just yet.
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