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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 29, 2023

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The Supreme Court is expected to rule in June on Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and is expected to strike down racial preferences in college admissions. The looming decision is starting to worry people in the DEI industry.

This Supreme Court case could spell the beginning of the end for affirmative action. It’s a looming crisis for corporate America (use reader mode to unmask the article. Paywalled version here).

Gillard and her colleagues in DEI are bracing for a crisis. Gillard created Factuality, a 90-minute interactive game and “crash course” in structural inequality that has been used as an employee-training tool at companies such as Google, Nike, and American Express, as well as at Yale University, among others. Factuality has seen an uptick in demand in recent years, but Gillard is under no illusions about why companies hire her: “I really feel that there are people who participate in these programs and initiatives because it’s required and mandatory,” she tells Fortune, “and that with this decision they’re just emboldened to stop.”

There's some funny stuff in the article too, for anyone who's wise enough to not bring up politics or religion at work:

It’s crucial, too, for companies to diligently vet public statements related to diversity initiatives. For example, in today’s climate, making public promises that a company’s board will be 25% female could create a legal vulnerability, Bryant, the McGlinchey Stafford lawyer, says. “Sometimes messages that are very well intended can get an organization in hot water if it’s not necessarily done and crafted in the right way.”

That’s a lesson several of Carter’s clients learned last year after announcing plans to pay for employees’ travel costs if they have to cross state lines to get abortions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Instead of just applause, they faced controversy and complaints.

“There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”

If the legal landscape does change, this is a chance to empirically test Richard Hanania's thesis that Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. If the majority of woke supporters (at least within institutions) are supporters only because of civil rights law, then support for wokeness could turn pretty quickly.

I would be happy to let corporations discriminate at will, as long as there's no law requiring them to discriminate in a particular direction. Let woke capital duke it out with meritocratic techbros and see which kind of company performs better. There's a lot of iffy research out there claiming that diversity has benefits for team performance etc. but this would be the true test. I'd expect the equilibrium to be a diversity of companies with different hiring policies based on their company goals and the purpose of each job role. Maybe for engineers and accountants meritocracy is best, while for public-facing roles the workers should be chosen by their appeal to customers, including by matching customers' race and other currently-protected characteristics.

” There were employees who said, ‘This goes against my values, and I am upset that you would be seen as a company supporting abortion,’ ” Carter says. “A lot of clients said, ‘We thought we did the right thing. But now these people are upset.’ ”

I just want to highlight this, because it’s possibly a (partial)datapoint against the Hanania thesis that woke is just civil rights law.

The people pushing this stuff literally thought they were doing something broadly popular and were shocked when there were people upset with it. That bears repeating, because lots of us here seem to be cynical about it. This pushes towards corporate progressive platitudes originating with true believers, who might intellectually know that not everyone agrees with them but are shocked when they run into it irl.

Now obviously Hanania falls into the group of people who broadly hold progressive stances on cultural issues, he just doesn’t agree with woke, so it’s understandable that he tends towards an explanation of wokeness as realpolitik. After all, these people are his neargroup, so they must have logical reasons for doing things he disagrees with. But I think we underweight the idea that lots of corporate admin really believes in something in the general direction of this crap, doesn’t quite grok that it’s unpopular among people who aren’t literal cave trolls, and that it isn’t about a practical purpose at all.

After lurking here, I find myself relatively confused. You're the first person I've seen attempt to disambiguate between progressivism and wokeness. What is the difference between wokeness and progressivism, in your mind?

Categories in politics tend to be very ambiguous with very loose boundaries, so this is definitely tough to disambiguate. I don't blame anyone for just using "progressive" and "woke" as shorthands for each other. I personally do try to disambiguate, as someone who considers himself a progressive but who is also very much anti-woke, and not in the "they're just taking good ideas too far" sense but rather in the "their ideas are fundamentally broken and few costs are too high to stop them" sense.

I'd say it comes down to what I consider to be the core of "progressivism," which is, pithily and too reductively, the drive for "progress." Which obviously means different things for different people in different contexts, but I think most people would agree that it means moving forward, not just moving in some direction. But it's also incredibly easy to accidentally, despite all of one's best well-meaning good faith efforts, to move in some direction one finds convenient or attractive for whatever reason, and then just convince oneself that it's "forward." History is littered with examples of people causing immense amounts of pain, suffering, and misery while doing just that.

So for progressivism to actually live up to its name and not cause disaster as has been seen throughout history by many movements, it has to have and encourage the use of tools and methods and such to help reorient itself constantly, making sure that the direction we're pushing for is actually "forward" in some meaningful sense. Given what we've learned through science throughout human history and especially the past few centuries, it seems obvious to me that one of the most important tools for accomplishing this is open dialogue with oppositional forces - encouraging the people who hate my ideas to do their darndest to actually counter them using the strongest tools at their disposal. And to always emphasize my own skepticism when I find myself convinced that those people's ideas are evil or stupid or have been debunked, because I'm susceptible to biases as much as everyone else, and that bias is basically the easiest one to fall into. Only then, can we see what remains standing as the ideas and direction we can go to while being at the very least not completely unconfident (actual confidence is possibly always out of reach in this context) that we're moving "forward."

"Wokeness" goes directly counter to such tools, not just not encouraging them, but often actively suppressing them, deeming such speech as "harmful" and both pre-emptively shutting down such speech and retroactively punishing people who have engaged in such speech. In my mind, one cannot achieve meaningful progress through such methods except by dumb luck, and the odds of achieving meaningful progress through dumb luck seem very low.