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American cultural exports | First Toil, then the Grave
(I can't embed the images in a comment, or link to them because of the character limit. Click on the link above for the full experience.)
Seen on the /r/ireland subreddit: Libraries issued with instructions for securing buildings as protesters try to remove LGTBQ+ books for young people. I don’t really have much to say about the article itself: it’s quite even-handed and avoids direct editorialising (although it isn’t hard to deduce which side of the debate the paper takes, given that the article concludes with the cover artwork and synopses of three of the books being targeted). While I have specific misgivings about LGBTQ activism in Ireland, I think that calling the guards on a library because it’s carrying a YA novel featuring a gay couple is a hysterical overreaction. I agree with pretty much everyone that, if you’re concerned about your child being exposed to content you find unseemly or distasteful, the most effective solution is to simply not buy them a smartphone.
What I want to talk about is the comments on the article on Reddit. The commenters are united in the contempt in which they hold these activists, which is hardly surprising, but cast your eye over them and you’ll notice another recurring theme:
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The consensus seems to be that these activists have simply imported their concerns, opinions and tactics from the United States, via American social media. I mean, I don’t disagree - they have. Were it not for the influence of social media, it would never have occurred to any of these activists to set foot in a library hunting for “objectionable” YA books. But this phenomenon is not peculiar to them. One commenter comes a lot closer to the mark:
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I have a simple question: before Facebook was introduced to Ireland (December 11, 2005), did you ever hear of an Irish teenager describing themselves as “non-binary”?
Perhaps you’ll say that there were always non-binary people in Ireland, and access to social media just succeeded in “raising awareness” of a phenomenon which has always existed since the dawn of time. I don’t buy it. When I was in secondary school, there were openly gay, lesbian and bisexual students; there was not a single one who called themselves non-binary. The Enoch Burke saga is rather farcical and something of a storm in a teacup, but amidst all the thousands of column inches expended on journalists wringing their hands about a teacher refusing to address a student by they/them pronouns, very few that I’ve seen have asked the obvious question - why does the student in question want to be addressed by they/them pronouns? How did they arrive at the idea that they would happier being addressed as such?
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To return to some examples from an earlier post: is it just coincidence that, of all the protest-worthy events that occurred outside of Ireland in 2020, the only one which prompted protests in Dublin, Galway and Cork was one which took place in the US (the murder of George Floyd)? This isn’t a “whataboutism” thing - I’m not saying “why are people so incensed about the murder of George Floyd when the Uyghurs are literally having their organs harvested on an industrial scale in Xinjiang?” I’m just asking why, of all the objectionable things that happened around the world in 2020 (and there were no shortage), the only one to spark nationwide protests in Ireland was a murder which took place in the US (and during a nationwide lockdown which many of the protesters enthusiastically supported, no less)? Sure, you can say that support for Black Lives Matter is just “common decency” or “being a good person” - but why did so many people in Ireland happen to unite around this one specific US-centric definition of “common decency”? Aren’t you at all curious about that?
Likewise, is it just a coincidence that George Nkencho’s brother described the police officer who killed his brother as a “fed”? That someone organised a “Not My Taoiseach” protest outside Leinster House? That Trinity College conducted a “privilege walk” on campus? That Sally Rooney’s (a Trinity alumnus) novels are stuffed to the gills with self-flagellating recriminations about her characters’ “unearned cultural privilege of whiteness”?
No one talked like this when I was in primary school, or in secondary school. These concepts and the fashion in which they are discussed were imported wholesale from the US, via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Every Irish person who spends a sufficient amount of time on American social media inevitably ends up adopting the language, concerns and opinions of one or other side of the American culture war.
I’m pleased to have recently encountered hard data to back up my intuition. You may have seen charts like these before, analysing the frequency with which words like “racism”, “sexism” and “transphobia” appear in the New York Times:
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About a month ago, David Rozado published a similar analysis on media outlets outside of the US, conclusively demonstrating that the so-called “Great Awokening” is not confined to the US. And wouldn’t you know it:
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Again, I just have to ask the obvious question. Around 2013-4, American left-leaning journalists became fixated on identity politics, resulting in a massive spike in the rate at which they used words like “racism”, “white supremacy”, “transphobia” and so on. Almost immediately, journalists writing for the Times and the Independent started doing exactly the same thing. Is this a coincidence? Did the “awokening” in US news media cause Irish journalists to view their culture in a different light, making them aware of important issues like racism, sexism and transphobia to which they’d been thitherto ignorant (the interpretation of the woke themselves would presumably endorse)?
Or is it conceivable that, as I’ve repeatedly argued, Irish journalists spend so much time on American social media and consuming American journalism that they’ve subconsciously come to believe that they actually live in the US, or that the issues which are important in the US must by necessity also be important in Ireland? That they’ve simply ported this worldview wholesale from one operating system to another, and are straining mightily to ignore or explain away the bugs and glitches that inevitably result from doing so without iterating on it or conducting any QA testing?
It’s a real “fish don’t notice the water they swim in” situation. Left-leaning Irish urbanites (including journalists) are so steeped in the modern culture war that they don’t realise their progressive opinions are just as much of an American cultural export as the conservative reactions to those opinions.
And look: this isn’t to say that the woke worldview is wrong - the fact that it originated in the US and was imported into Ireland has no bearing on whether or not it’s true or ethically sound. It will come as no surprise to you that I think it’s fundamentally flawed in many aspects both descriptive and normative, but I welcome disagreement on this point. I would hope that Irish people who are themselves woke might at least grudgingly concede that the woke worldview was invented in a specific country with a specific culture and history, and hence can’t be assumed to be equally relevant or applicable in other countries with different cultures and histories.
But please: at least have the self-awareness to recognise that, while the Irish people harassing librarians about “grooming” did not arrive at their anti-woke worldview entirely independently, neither did you. You absorbed it through cultural osmosis: by spending time on social media networks which have an obvious American slant (by virtue of having been founded there); by consuming American films, TV shows and journalism; by working for US-based multinationals like Facebook, Pfizer or JP Morgan, for whom the culture and worldview of the upper management is bound to trickle down to their overseas outposts; by completing woke-influenced Arts courses in UCD or TCD (this stuff started in the academe before spreading out into the wider world). Your thoughts, beliefs, opinions, even vocabulary are not entirely your own. (Nor are mine, obviously.)
“Pfft, those right-wingers get all their opinions from Americans on Twitter!” scoffs the “aromantic genderfluid” Redditor who has their pronouns in their email signature, shares black squares on Instagram and complains about how “toxic” and “problematic” their parents are.
Physician, heal thyself!
This seems like an anti-American take dressed up in anti-woke trenchcoat. "Don't like modern wokism? Well guess what! It's all America's fault!!!"
This piece does a lot of finger-pointing showing how European leftists occasionally say stuff that only makes sense in America, but a lot less thorough of an examination of how wokism is a uniquely American product... because it isn't. The source theory of modern identity politics is European. A lot of the left-leaning economic critiques of the US come directly from Europe as well, comparing the country unfavorably to places like Denmark.
America takes up a huge amount of the mindshare of the collective West since it has the biggest population of any Western country by a significant amount. Americans mix their opinions with Europeans over the Internet constantly so there's going to be a ton of cross-contamination no matter what topic is looked at. American might be the first place you notice particular trends manifesting since America is inherently signal-boosted, but calling those trends themselves "American cultural exports" is disingenuous. Only BLM stuff is uniquely American since no European countries have >10% of their populations being black like the US does, but other things like idpol feminism (which crested before BLM happened, mind you) was sourced from both sides of the Atlantic, as was LGBT stuff, and stuff like Islamophobia has more of a European tint to it.
Counterargument: Before Spotify was introduced to the USA, did you ever hear of an American teenager describe themselves as "non-binary"?
You could make some objections to this comparison, but I would contend that both arguments are nonsense. Europe has fewer multinational companies (especially tech ones) because Europe is a free-rider continent that has lower rates of business innovation than America. But in any case, companies don't take on left-leaning culture out of nowhere; it happens as a bottom-up process as motivated employees push their agenda with nobody willing enough to stop them for fear of reprisal. Those employees got their opinions from broader society, forged from both American and European arguments interchangeably.
As I explicitly stated in the article, the fact that I believe wokeness originated in the US (and perhaps some components originated elsewhere) has nothing to do with the object-level question of whether wokeness is factually or normatively true. In the counterfactual universe where wokeness was indigenous to Ireland, I would find it exactly as distasteful as I do in this universe.
That being said, I do think many components of wokeness did originate in the US rather than Europe. The term "intersectionality" was coined by Kimberle Crenshaw, an American academic. Modern queer theory draws hugely on the writings of Judith Butler, an American academic (last semester my girlfriend did a "gender justice" module in an Irish university and had to read Butler). Radical feminism draws heavily on Andrea Dworkin. The whole concept of the "progressive stack" came from the Occupy Wall St protests.
And more than ideology, the language Irish people use betrays its origins, like George Nkencho's brother demanding that the "fed" that shot George be "terminated". If it was Europe that dominated the cultural hegemony, he could have demanded that the "gendarme" or "bobby" be terminated, either of which would have been just as inaccurate as calling him a "fed" - but he didn't.
In any case you concede the point that, whatever the origins of wokeness, it isn't indigenous to Ireland, so it is hypocritical for Irish progressives to mock Irish conservatives for importing their values and tactics from overseas.
The analogy doesn't work. Facebook was founded by Americans and was first made available in elite American universities; it retained remnants of the culture of elite American universities long after expanding into the wider world. In December 2020, about one-third of their staff were still based in the US. While Spotify was founded in Sweden, it's not like they started off exclusively hosting Swedish artists and podcasters before expanding into international artists - Anglophone music and podcasts have been their bread and butter since day one. Look at their most-streamed artists by year (and streaming stats follow a power law distribution, so the most popular artists actually accrue a huge majority of total streams): there's exactly one Swedish artist in the top 5 of any given year (Avicii, and his lyrics are exclusively in English) and only five artists from non-Anglophone nations (Avicii [lyrics in English], Daft Punk [lyrics in English], J Balvin, Bad Bunny, BTS). The rest are artists from Anglophone nations, chiefly the US. I can't find comparable stats for podcasting, but their most popular podcast is The Joe Rogan Experience. I also can't remember a single instance in which Spotify waded into a Sweden-specific culture war (though I'm open to correction), but they loudly and conspicuously waded into several American ones. Hell, most of their employees are based in the US, more than twice as many as are based in Sweden.
To the extent that Spotify influences the broader political and social climate at all, it's just a really efficient delivery mechanism for Anglophone (chiefly the US, Canada and the UK to a lesser extent) culture, which incidentally happened to have been founded in Sweden. It is not chiefly (and never has been) a delivery mechanism for Swedish culture, or non-Anglo European culture.
This is a classic Motte and Bailey. In the original post, wokeness was described as an "American cultural export", or that it was "imported wholesale". Now it's drawn down to "many components of wokeness originated in the US", which I wouldn't disagree with. Looking at the wiki pages for many woke topics like radical feminism will indeed show many Americans, but it will also show people like Julie Bindel, Monique Wittig, and Germaine Greer. Again, almost all of critical theory traces its roots to the Frankfurt School and people like Foucalt. I'm not countering by saying that wokeness is uniquely European, rather I'm saying its a joint venture between both sides of the Atlantic. For a more nuanced take, I'd say that the general groundwork skews German, while the modern implementation of wokeness skews to the Anglosphere. Fundamentally, it's just wrong to describe wokeness as uniquely American, or even disproportionately American when accounting for population levels and scholarly output.
I wasn't using Spotify as a genuine example, I was using it to show "correlation doesn't imply causation", specific to examples you used like Pfizer somehow being a critical component of wokeness advancing in Europe.
Well, you absolutely agreed with me that BLM is as American as apple pie, and has no European antecedents. Likewise the term "intersectionality", coined by an American academic. I do think most of modern gender ideology can be traced directly to Judith Butler. When I talk about wokeness in Ireland, I'm primarily talking about BLM, the concept of white privilege, gender ideology, and the nomenclature associated with the ideology. I think it's reasonable to say that, to the extent that wokeness has caught on in Ireland, concepts and paradigms which were invented in the US have had an outsized influence. Maybe it was hyperbolic to say that wokeness was "imported wholesale" from the US, but not extremely so.
Sure, but wokeness didn't actually catch on in Ireland during the lifetime of Foucault or members of the Frankfurt school - it caught on in 2013-4. Maybe American critical theorists were just rephrasing concepts which originated with the Frankfurt school, but I still think they deserve a significant amount of credit for translating it in a way that made it palatable to a young and international audience. Elvis Presley may have been heavily inspired by Chuck Berry, but that doesn't change the fact that it was Elvis who became the King of rock n roll.
That is to say, non-Americans may have significantly contributed to woke ideology, but I think the specific flavour of woke ideology which caught on in Ireland retains a specifically American flavour, even in cases where this makes no obvious sense. Woke people are pretty good at adapting the overarching tenets of the ideology to local parochial concerns (e.g. land acknowledgements for aboriginals in Oz and NZ) but that really hasn't happened here: Irish progressives get far more bent out of shape about alleged racist incidents against Ireland's vanishingly small black population than they do about discrimination against Irish Travellers.
I think Julie Bindel and Germaine Greer are uniquely bad examples to illustrate how non-Americans contributed to the rise of wokeness, given that woke people despise these two women for their TERF opinions. In fact, Greer was enormously popular with the second wave of feminists in Ireland and the UK in the 1980s: the rise of wokeness caused a steep decline in her popularity to the point that she's effectively persona non grata in many British universities. Bindel writes for Unherd, for Christ's sake.
True, I can only prove that the cultural dominance of wokeness coincided with the rise of social media, I can't prove a causation. But I do think that social media played a significant role in disseminating and popularizing woke paradigms and concepts. I don't think it's a coincidence that Facebook was originally only accessible on American college campuses, quickly became the biggest social media platform in the world, and shortly afterwards an ideology which was invented (or refined, or perfected, whatever) on American college campuses became culturally dominant in the Anglophone world.
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