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Notes -
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?
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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