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The Great Awokening as a Global Phenomenon (PDF warning!)
I'm never entirely sure what to make of linguistic analysis--partly because it is very much outside my expertise. But it seems worth noticing when quantitative research is conducted on issues many of us take for granted. For one thing, there have been a couple of highly publicized "you can't even define woke!" takes injected into popular discourse recently, but the author of this study doesn't seem to have encountered any serious difficulty with the definition (though presumably not everyone will agree with the definition on offer, it strikes me as at least plausible).
For another, the timing and differences across cultures is interesting to me. I have always kind of assumed that the Great Awokening was something that happened in the U.S. and then caught on elsewhere, to varying degrees, but while that may in fact be true, it doesn't seem to show up strongly in this data. I guess one question might be whether this just shows that the Internet has really flattened the world in surprisingly strong ways.
Relatedly, the author's questions re: causation also seem important, though I have no idea where to even begin answering that. I do regard the Great Awokening as mostly just a re-re-rebranding of Marxism, focused on social relations instead of economic status, in much the way that so-called "cultural Marxism" did in the late 20th century. But then, why has it caught on now? If it's because of the long march through the institutions, shouldn't we see less of an effect in non-Anglophone nations with dramatically different political histories? Or is this again just the Internet working its dark magic?
I believe he must be lying for some reason. He can't be that blind.
Where causation flows from is rather easy to understand if you're multilingual like me and you read Steve Sailer skewering latest NYT bullshit, and then open your mom's weekly magazine next week and there it is: NYT's bullshit, packaged differently.
I even pointed this out on twitter to one of the provincial magazine editors, and I got a like for it from the editor.
"Respekt magazine is great when you want to read what WaPo or NYT wrote last week".
As an aside, how many Czech speakers do we have on here? I think I've seen two others back on Reddit, plus myself (though I've hardly used it in the last decade)
No clue. I think I've seen one or two, but mostly I've noticed georgioz who's Slovak.
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In my mind the defining moment when woke burst on to the scene was Occupy Wall Street when the likes of Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver still made fun of the woke ideas that were implemented there. And if you look at those three, they are beholden to ESG ratings of their paymasters and they aren't making fun of it anymore. Just a little anecdote there to do a comparison to the paper!
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The internet has made culture so global and instant that 'wokeness' emerging globally in a lot of countries at similar times is entirely expected. That the US lagged other countries is, at a guess, just noise from the measurement process. 'Wokeness' (hate the term. progressivism!) is culturally american ... but american culture is global. Analyses based on word frequencies aren't ever useful imo.
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Even before the internet, there would have been conferences, books, publications, movies, etc. It shouldn't be forgotten that people have and will travel to the colleges of powerful nations because it's a fairly good path to doing better paying work. Basically, the Great Awokening was when it burst into the mainstream, but the ideas had existed for decades before that. Sensitivity and DEI training in the private sector has research papers from as early as the 1980s.
We should really be asking why it took until 2014 for it to happen since this began in the 1960s.
I can't say exactly why it appeared then, but I suspect it may have simply been inevitable. Basically, there had to be some point where what people were teaching in colleges was going to set the political agenda of millions of people, and 2014 ended up as that time period. The internet probably played some role, however, since social media facilitated a very fast way to organize with one's digital identity.
While I appreciate such papers, I kind of have to wonder how much it matters. Most discussions about wokeness aren't over whether it has or has not spread to the rest of the world, everyone just takes this for granted.
The straightfoward and proximate answer is that it took three to four generations of academics indoctrinated with this ideology to spread sufficiently enough to reach critical mass and break into the mainstream.
This all started with radicals ending the academy in the early 70s with these newly established women's and cultural studies and other departments which were basically just set up to be progressive PR for post-civil rights era, with little actual utility. But turns out if you give a bunch of radical ideologues positions in the academy and make them untouchable by virtue of their identity and politics, they will abuse that to high hell. The students of these idealogues would go on to enter the academy themselves, growing in numbers and spreading to other departments. And then the students of those students-now-teachers. And then eventually to civil society, and eventually the public conciousness.
2014 (if we're marking it as the critical point) seem like it would be naturally be the right time if we assume a start date of the early 1970, and then a few generations of unchecked growth.
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I heard the sex/gender distinction in West Africa like...13 years ago from a high school English teacher who'd studied psychology.
Keep in mind: there is absolutely no sex/gender distinction in our local language, and we don't use gender specific pronouns. A lot of the word games played in English are just utterly non-viable.
But she just repeated the dogmas ("gender is totally distinct from sex") like fact to a bunch of schoolkids whose parents would probably be outraged - if they understood the implications.
And I don't recall being particularly skeptical either - why would I be? Our entire education system was based on the English GCSE. We used English textbooks to learn "social issues" and we had a module on the Suffragettes but no such course on our own history. The English (and Americans) obviously knew better.
Western cultural hegemony is a helluva drug. The only reason I wouldn't say it's inevitable is cause, absent a lot of the structures in the US, there is a good chance of a reactionary backlash that'll crush woke activists.
I'll bet the median American would agree about the English language.
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There is barely one in English either, to be honest. It seems to have been shoehorned retroactively because the sex descriptors are adjectives -- "female" as a noun is, er, quite objectifying as used, and I can see why it upsets some feminists -- and the gender descriptors are nouns: "woman [career]" is awkward too.
English doesn't seem to gender its nouns anyways though? French does it, but English doesn't seem to. The only ones that come to mind are referring to ships or countries as "she".
Worth keeping in mind, I think, that the grammatical gender of nouns in Romance languages is essentially arbitrary and has no relation with sex or socio-sexual gender. In Italian, knives (coltelli) and spoons (cucchiai) are masculine, while forks (forchette) are feminine; a table is masculine when you are working on it (tavolo) and feminine when you are eating on it (tavola); one egg (uovo) is masculine, but two eggs (uova) are feminine; bones may be masculine if they are scattered (ossi) but are always feminine if they are part of a set (ossa); female bumblebees are masculine (bombi), while male giraffes (giraffe) are feminine; and so on. As far as I know, that's the case for other Romance languages as well.
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There was a comment pointing out a few weeks ago about French's gendered nouns being 'neutral' and 'feminine' so I feel obligated to point it out even though I can't find it at the moment.
It does when you want to use an indefinite article, but nobody calls it gender even though it serves the same linguistic purpose.
English's indefinite articles are not gendered (a, an). Pronouns have something you could call "gender" (though I think it is not), and nouns have that thing too (in that there's a pronoun that agrees with them) but no gender markers (aside from borrowings, mostly from French). And in general the English vestigal "gender" is only used to match with biological sex, except things like ships and (sometimes) countries.
The fact that there are two of them serves the same linguistic purpose.
The a/an distinction is exactly like the le/la or un/une distinction in that it's fundamentally a smoothing tool to make the language sound correct when spoken, and is something you just end up getting a feel for after a while because you know by the character of the language which category you're in. (And "gender" is... kind of an ideal way to describe that.)
If we didn't have an in addition to a we would have a glottal stop instead, which isn't really natural in English outside of a few regional dialects.
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"Make the language sound correct" is absolutely not the reason why nouns have gender in Romance languages. They just have it because Latin did. That's it.
And as a native speaker of a Romance language, I can assure you that in my mind, inanimate objects "are" the gender of they word in my language. Same for most speakers of Romance languages, AFAICT.
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In English it's not about "sounding correct" it's about it being easier to pronounce.
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My pet theory is that it just took that long for enough true believers to filter into roles of power and authority. When it was still cutting edge in the 60s and 70s, perhaps you had some or many educators pushing it, but students still had plenty of exposure and access to other views, and the educators themselves had never been taught it as dogma when they were students. As those students grew up to be educators themselves, the proportion of believers became higher, but still they weren't true true believers, since when they were students, they had been sullied by exposure to other viewpoints. But when the next generation of educators came around, they had only ever been taught by believers who themselves had been taught to believe since a young age, giving them a truly pure and immaculate belief in the ideology. I think a little bit after that was when this stuff finally did explode out into the mainstream, and now we're seeing the next generation of students - who had only been taught by believer teachers who had also only been taught by believers - age up to positions of power and authority.
Obviously this is a very simplified model, and there's been plenty of leakage and counterforces along the way, but I think it's the general outline of why it took so long.
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Sweden's pioneering, especially of feminist stuff, used to be much remarked-upon.
I have a memory of a news article from somewhere in the area of five to ten years ago about a Swedish couple raising their children with no reference to gender or preference for gender appropriate toys/clothes/etc. I remember everyone laughing about how ridiculous the Swedes are on this kind of thing, with the implicit understanding that no one would be that insane here.
I heard about a couple that my professor in California knew who were doing the same more than 10 years ago. That professor found it ridiculous, but not particularly remarkable for people in her social class. This was at a community college not some place like UC Berkeley.
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I wonder whether Sweden Yes/Captain Sweden played some quietly significant role in the birth of the Alt-Right as a viral internet phenomenon.
Obviously racist memes have been around forever, but my sense (perhaps naively) was that people who posted eg. A Wyatt Mann cartoons mostly did it as edgelord humor without really buying into it. As crazy artifacts, at a level of remove. I don't think that was the case with Sweden Yes/Captain Sweden. I don't think anybody posted it who didn't mostly believe in it, and I don't think anybody who found it funny didn't end up a little bit more convinced, and I can't think of a meme prior to it that was similar.
That comic was the first thing that Nybbler's comment brought to mind for me. Looking back it seems like an early attempt to describe what would end up being called "globohomo."
It probably didn't hurt that the direct target was something that people whose self-perception was still as Stewart/Colbert liberals wouldn't hit a mental tripwire about, allowing it to break through to the second level where some suppressed thoughts might still linger. Strangely enough, I bet a Robin DiAngelo type would actually have something interesting to say on the matter.
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This is scaled to the minimum/maximum of woke terms being published in each country for it's town period, right? Would that show the spread from one country to others? I'll take a wild guess and say that these words appeared more often in American media in the year 2000 than they did Pakistan, even though the chart shows them at roughly the same level, and could even be higher than Pakistan's maximum level in 2021.
I also take issue in including Israel in the "anti-semitism" chart, and Arabic countries in the "Islamophobia" chart. This isn't wokeness, this is just pushing for your own interest.
I wondered about that, too, but then--how is that any different from feminist reporters writing about sexism? Is Ibram Kendi "woke," or is he just pushing for his own interest?
It's maybe a bit weird for a genuinely sharia-dominated nation to worry about "islamophobia" internally, but to my mind what makes a view "woke" is not the noticing or even the opposing of prejudice, but the totalizing way that prejudice is perceived. If you notice that your friend Bob never takes women seriously, maybe you think he's sexist, but that's not woke. If you see sexism lurking in every interaction between men and women, that's woke. To whatever extent that is a mistaken view (personally, I think it's a great extent, but even if I'm wrong about that), it fits the contemporary standard of a conspiracy theory, or maybe a prospiracy theory.
Sure, but Israelis or Muslim leaders worrying about antisemitism or Islamophobia is a very different kind of conspiracy theory than the one the wokes are peddling.
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