What if the purpose of wokeness is not to establish a belief system that lasts, but rather to bring about the demolition of the remnants of the common structures left in a fracturing society? What if the purpose is to trigger an irrevocable collapse, and also to revive racial inequality and racial hierarchy, all in the name of ending white privilege?
The way I read your article, "reason" #1 gave the general context of wokeness fitting within the perennial struggle for civil rights (rightly or wrongly) with the other 19 being the actual reasons why wokeness isn't going away.
In fact, you specifically address the argument here that it is politically unpopular and requires state intervention.
So I don't see this as much of a refutation of your point which I found compelling.
If we say that wokeness is religious superficially - it has its icons (George Floyd), its mantras (#BLM), its taboos (the N-word), its rituals (taking the knee) - then the theory is appealing superficially. But I agree with the article that there's been no test of its longevity, and no genuine, real pushback - and most importantly it's not been abandoned by the elites. Soviet communism was. And, closer to the here and now, COVID was, and here I think we have the best parallel with wokism.
Barring a few holdout areas of the country, COVID is over. It's not over because cases are at some kind of all-time low, nor even especially close to an all-time low. It's not over because the health care curve has been flattened to all-time lows, nor especially close. It's not over because death rates are declining, in fact in many cases it's the exact opposite. It's over because a lot of COVID hysterics got bored with it and moved on, and normal people had already moved on, and above all because elites knew which way the wind was blowing and saw that they were losing the audience.
The same thing will be true of wokeness, I believe. What, are the Democratic Party going to let BLM and the trans lobby dominate their social agenda for the rest of the decade? No. Why would they? If wokism has little to give the average man or woman on the street, it has less to give the culturally dominant political party, given just how unpopular it is. Hence it'll be dropped as soon as it's convenient.
There is a much simpler explanation as to why we've moved on from Covid. Almost everybody who took Covid seriously, especially professionals/elites, is vaxxed and boosted. They see the latest mortality data on vaxxed and unvaxxed with Omicron and believe- rightly or wrongly- that they have little chance of dying or becoming seriously ill. Those same elites see the unvaxxed as obnoxious Trumpy MAGA types, and think: if those folks want to get sick and die, well, give them their Herman Cain award and who cares. Plus, masks are plentiful now, so if you have to be in a public space with . .. those people. . .you can just put on a KN-95 and breathe easy, so to speak.
Of course this doesn't take into account the lower vax rates in some minority communities and I am not endorsing this line of thought at all, but you can't really discuss the changing mores around Covid without considering vaccines and variants and PPE availability. It's just not the same world as April 2020.
I disagree totally. This has been the case for about a year, and even prior to knowing the (limited) efficacy of the vaccines (against certain strains) the elites were cavorting without masks. They knew it wasn't a big deal to them even then. But it all kept going until about a month ago. Now it's over because they know it's a polling drag. It's got little or nothing to do with their own sense of mortality even prior to Omicron.
I think part of the reason is that Omnicron infected so many vaccinated people. It finally became impossible to deny that the vaccines simply don't prevent transmission at the population level, and therefore that they won't end the pandemic (though they do reduce mortality considerably). Few of the COVID-hawk progressives are honest enough to state that openly, but I sense that this development caused them a lot of cognitive dissonance, and they really wanted to move on and not think about it too hard.
The answer you're looking for is the midterms. Everyone who took Covid seriously has been vaxxed since April 2021 or earlier and boosted since Omicron hit in December. We started seeing "Vaxxed and Done" and other bat-signal type articles that were directed at the histrionic laptop class months ago. Outside of getting vaccinated, none of these people are doing anything remotely related to following the data.
"If wokism has little to give the average man or woman on the street, it has less to give the culturally dominant political party, given just how unpopular it is."
Which party has the advantage on racial issues, trans issues, homosexual issues, again?
"Hence it'll be dropped as soon as it's convenient."
1. Like the people who voted on it, I'm not going to read this entire bill. I understand its symbolic value. I also understand that it costs nothing but five minutes for the House to pass it, and that it's not indicative of what the Democratic Congress needs to do to win elections going forward.
2. I didn't say advantage. I said culturally dominant. The Democratic Party is culturally dominant. That doesn't mean they're going to use that dominance especially wisely all the time.
Each successive generation is more woke than the previous one, so for the foreseeable future, the Democratic Party (and eventually, the Republican Party) will keep getting more woke. Sure, occasionally they go a bridge too far, nominate a McGovern before the country is ready, and lose an election, but that doesn't mean they're losing the war.
I'm hoping it amounts to the new new Atheism. Back in the early 2010s, I met most of my college friends at an atheist club. Ten short years later, I can't imagine attending an atheist club any more than attending a "put my right shoe on before my left shoe club." It's culturally irrelevant.
A bit of hope for woke downfall: look up a mainstream media (eg. NY Times) article about standard center-left politics and one about wokeness. For a standard democratic one (pro- healthcare reform, pro-min wage, anti-Wall Street, anti-Russia, etc) you'll see broad approval. For a woke one, you'll see a mixed response. They're preaching to the choir, and most of the choir hates it.
Very bad comparison. Wokeness took over New Atheism very quickly. New Atheism also had next to no cultural dominance, it was just viewed by the media as the lesser of two evils relative to Christian fundamentalism (and not always even that).
I agree new Atheism never captured the media/academia/etc in the way wokeness has now. It's just similar it in frivolity and annoying-ness, which should be its downfall.
It's amazing that you hope that I'm right because my theory is dependent on the cynicism and moral apathy of a big chunk of American society! I think you are correct that when/if the next variant spikes, as we are seeing in some part of Europe and Asia, there may be mask mandates in public places- but lockdowns and school closings? I really doubt it, unless things get freakishly bad. I work in a hospital and while we had huge numbers of Omicron patients in January, there weren't nearly as many deaths as in spring 2020, and almost all the deaths were among the unvaxxed. Not entirely, but almost. I think it changes the calculus of what Freddie deBoer calls the NPR tote-bag set.
Sure, the mandates have been rolled back, but there was no shortage of kicking and screaming on the way there. The thing is, inside deep blue areas = almost half the US population. Not saying this to bust your balls, but a lot of the angst comes from parents whose kids have been so traumatized that they are afraid to NOT wear masks in school.
Fair point. It won't just disappear overnight like Covid. (And Covid will reappear when it's convenient.) And there are certainly among the elites a mix of true believers, go-along-to-get-alongers, and cynics who just use it for their own ends.
More extreme political ideologies that stand out within their societies seem much weaker than religion, but I think you're ignoring the really dominant political ideologies (perhaps for the same reason fish rarely notice water; we don't even think of them as ideologies, just facts). Liberal democracy, for example, or egalitarianism, seem as durable as Christianity. They've survived for centuries and their replacement with something else in the foreseeable future seems as unlikely as a societal change of religion. We can probably be reasonably confident our great grandchildren will be liberal democrats and support the notion of political equality.
Is doesn't strike me as so implausible that after wokeness becomes dominant, its beliefs will become political facts like those of liberal democracy, and ideas like moral individualism and race/gender neutrality will seem as absurd and unjust forever thereafter as the idea of monarchy or aristocracy seem to us today.
I'm gonna come down on the "Woke is stronger than you think" side of this because it is a sturdy synthesis of both the political religion of Marxism (with of course the proletariat swapped out for Marcuse's coalition of the marginalized) while also being a new branch of American Protestantism (with Whiteness replacing Original Sin, and with the Victim class playing the roles of the Elect, Jesus (they do suffer for our sins!) and the meek who shall inherit the earth).
It really covers all the bases in a totalizing way--political program, spiritual crusade, status marker, jobs program, therapeutic succor, a new clerisy a la the Nobles of the Robe, cheap and easy virtue and moral superiority, plus the unbeatable social glue of having a shared Satan: the evil white man and his history of oppression.
And, last but not least, it gives the same sheen of moral legitimacy to the globalist class that Christianity provided to various prior plunderers like the conquistadors (Give me all your gold--and I will give you this wooden cross!)
Also, I don't know how much time any of you spend with the young creatives of NY/LA/SF but this is their fundamentalist religion (they are all Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Phone) and they are making sure to spread the good news in any and every book, movie, play, show, etc, so they have the propaganda angle locked down.
Either way, whether they enjoy a 1000-yr reign or die off like the Hittites, much wreckage will be left in the wake.
"Wokeness" is sort of a vague term which encompasses a number of ideas that became more popular during the 2010s, and who I think vary in their capacity for staying power. In particular, I think the racial justice aspect of wokeness probably *doesn't* have very much staying power: we can see that historically in the US racial justice comes in waves which then recede, and also in a world where memes compete globally a focus on US racial issues, which are different from those of other countries, is simply uncompetitive.
The aspects regarding sexuality seem different and more vigorous to me. They're much newer -- nobody ever even conceived of gay marriage before the 1970s -- and have very quickly spread to become law in a whole array of cultures, with polling showing more and more people sympathetic to these ideas even in places where they're heavily suppressed, like the Islamic world or China. (Russia in my understanding is alone in bucking the trend). This aspect feels much more like a religion, with it (for example) convincing parents to castrate children and whatever else, or used to paint foreign groups as barbarous.
Why this might be the case deserves further study. I've heard it suggested that people are now literally gayer (because of pollutants or something); I'm not sure there's actually evidence for this from polling but that would provide a powerful explanation for the trend. We continue to have no idea at all where homosexuality comes from, apart from the details of very low identical-twin concordance (so probably not genetic) and no syndromic homosexuality (so probably not caused by any pathogen we know of).
Stripping away government power from Wokeness is worth doing. If Wokeness survives anyway, it will be weaker and less of a threat. That would be a big gain.
"Wokeness, unlike religion, does not appear to be able to motivate its adherents to make the extreme kinds of sacrifices that are the hallmark of true religious faith. It can’t even convince liberals to keep their kids in inner city public schools."
Wokeness has managed convince liberals to castrate their children. That's a pretty big sacrifice!
"One secret to the success of religion, however, is that it offers something to both sexes, which allows for family formation, intergenerational transfers of faith, and ultimately the building of communities."
The past environment favored mitochondrial transmission of memes from parent to child or generation to generation, so Progressivism would not have been able to survive then (and indeed, various proto-Progressive Christian heresies, like the Cathars or the Diggers/Levellers, showed up in premodern Europe but didn't make it very far). Current communications technology (particularly the Internet and social media) very strongly favors horizontal transmission, from peer to peer, so an ideology no longer needs to allow for the formation of families and communities to survive. It can steal the families and children of the less susceptible. Secular liberals have been doing this to religious conservatives for centuries, and now the process is massively sped up. Look at the social beliefs of Zoomers, or even all the various anecdotes from various conservative politician's kids signaling how progressive they are (like Mitch McConnell's daughter talking about the need to pass the Voting Rights Act).
> Wokeness has managed convince liberals to castrate their children. That's a pretty big sacrifice!
Only by portraying a physical sex change as beneficial, and only for children who are transgender, i.e. have gender dysphoria, i.e. actually want to change sex. So these liberals don't actually think of it as a sacrifice, & I don't think it proves anything about their willingness to make actual, obvious sacrifices.
Thats a great point, the sex change thing proves THEY REALLY believe in it, at least the sexual aspects. I don't see white liberals moving into black neighborhoods but they have this difficult to understand belief in segregation now.
Wokeness is cant not just in America, but in Taiwan and mainland China, as well. It's not cant in Russia, yet... but for how long? Wokeness over the past eleven years has, in my view, proven to be a virtually unstoppable juggernaut, requiring not just lack of active state promotion, but active state suppression. Luckily, Russia is doing a bit of that -though not nearly enough.
Do you remember Elevatorgate? Bunnygate? How was any of that due to state support?
"Wokeness remains mostly a political loser for the left"
Is it? What poll shows the Republicans doing better than the Democrats on race, trans, gay issues? Sure, issue by issue wokeness might not be popular, but, so far, it has not been a shackle on the electoral fortunes of the Democrats.
The EU isn't full of government supported feminist and LGBT NGOs? They don't have ministries for gender equality? Hate speech codes? The whole continent is full of this stuff. As for China and Taiwan, the latter just mandated gay marriage through the courts by overturning the will of the voters. Seems to be top-down thing. China I don't think has much of it.
China's got trans clinics and is constantly making noise about how anti-racist they are. But they're largely resistant to Progressivism by virtue of massive top-down state opposition, an isolated internet, and low English proficiency. Look at how woke Latin America's getting (compare to even 20 years ago when LA was extremely socially conservative). Or how absurdly quickly wokeness won out in Ireland.
Ireland is a really strange example. I was there in 2006. It seemed there were truth, justice and a nice white country. Order and traditions deemed blasphemous in the rest of the west was still enforced law. No mass migration.
Then The Great Satan's disciples arrived on that poor Island cloaked as businessmen representing large S&P 500 companies offering glass beads and other trinkets (Economic prosperity).
16 years later Irishmen have to watch the injustice of black people subsuming their identity with the greatest humiliation having a prime minister (who recently wore a kilt) brown as the dirt of the ground, imported from India and full of moral rightousness when proselytizing for late liberalism, which is the ideology of American Hegemony.
The basic problem with this article is that it assumes that wokeness is new, but wokeness is not new. The very fact that "its fundamental tenets have been law in the United States for over half a century" should tell you it is not new, but actually it is quite a bit older than that too. See here for more details. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/persuasion-and-the-mensheviks?s=r
The chief strength of this article is that it correctly cuts through all the b.s. and recognises that wokeness is a 'mystery cult of power'. Problem is that you are not actually going to 'undo the excesses of civil rights law' now or ever, and while the system of government that produces wokeness appears to be totally dysfunctional and begging to be put out of its misery, it has looked that way for some time, and it always pulls through. Here is the real black pill: in inter-state conflict mendacious insanity is adaptive.
1) I always cringe a bit at people calling things religions. Because in a mostly secular age it's a lazy and indirect way of calling a group of people crazy. (deserved or not) You're probably right that it's not really worthwhile to prove that wokeness comes from a particular type of christianity. It's worth noting that most all belief systems have adjacency to other belief systems.
2) We can decompose historic religions into a few components:
Class A. "IS" Statements about the world of a metaphysical or supernatural nature (whether gods exist, how many, how, where, origin stories, afterlife, etc.)
B. "Ought" statements, i.e. moral prescriptions (what constitutes the good, what a person should and should not do etc.)
C. General description of collective behavior (traditions/rituals/etc. or how people behave in practice or how they want other people to think they behave)
In practice there is no way that a society can actually operate with any of these 3 things being left "Blank" -- any so the only thing that distinguishes traditional "religious religions" from what we have now (ideologies? civic religions? political religions? political formulas? belief system?) is that the metaphysical component usually includes the divine or the afterlife. I kind of prefer belief system because it is extremely neutral.
2.5) The word 'Ideology' is usually used derrogatorially when one person notices that another has an A-C which is noticably different from the background. For example: In a communist state a classical liberal is an ideologue and visa versa. This is true insofar as one can choose to not have an opinion, but not thinking that something is morally important is as much a 'position' as thinking that something is morally important. And in the modern era someone who doesn't find the ideals of civil rights and human rights as morally salient will be seen as an ideologue and a deviant.
3) If the 20th century has any lesson to teach it's that a society can have a metaphysical doctrine which is almost entirely naturalistic but still issue moral prescriptions that are more impractical and at odds with humans as biological creatures then any historic religion imposed aside from a handful of short-lived cults.
4) While calling wokeness a religion is a waste of time, I do think it's useful to think of it as a fundamentalist branch of the belief system that is more or less universal in the west. Namely the idea that all humans are born equal and should be "free" in some sense. The fundamentalism comes from demanding this idea (which is accepted by everyone except for reactionary deviants) be *practically implemented*.
To draw a paralell, even in Islamic countries there's a distinction between the parts of Sharia law that are common between islamic societies and the kind that are only imposed by the most vicious of salafists.
5) While it's possible to limit the harmful effects of wokeness on people by changing laws. I am skeptical about actually innoculating the population from woke beliefs.
The woke-vaccine (so to speak) is going to be a set of beliefs and assumptions about the world which are easy to verify, hard to disprove once the person believes in them, and are mutually incompatible with wokeness. In truth, this vaccine has existed in a reasonably scientific form for decades and in a simpler form for far longer (about as long as animal husbandry); namely the idea that human behavior is influenced by genetics and that evolution did not stop at the neck. There is no reason to expect equality of outcome when the default state of affairs is biologically induced differences in behavior.
The evidence *in favor* of this "vaccine" has only increased over time but the resistance against it has only grown stronger. Many people who oppose wokeness still believe in the blank slate. Several others openly stated that they didn't believe in the blank slate but thought that teaching the alternative was more of a threat to society.
Even when people get over the notion that humans not being blank slates doesn't justify slavery or ethnic cleansing the idea that no one is "superior" than anyone else is always going to appeal to people with a deep inferiority complex.
6) The chinese are well situated to be immune from this kind of thinking since culturally they can claim no guilt for slavery or the holocaust, and at the same time it will be easy for them to endorse a theory that says that East asians are [one of] the smartest human subpopulations. One way wokeism might decline is if china becomes the definitive geopolitical superior to the united states, young elites from other countries will likely gravitate towards chinese education and chinese institutions. Most young elites are conformist midwits that use the formula: prestige = truth.
I am concerned that wokeness drives a wedge between the sexes. Men with any self-respect will dislike professional middle-class institutions that seek to degrade them; these institutions will be increasingly female-dominated. As the sexes become polarized along middle-class v. untouchable/outer-class/online troll lines, the capacity for men to meet women and form families will diminish.
Wokeness may very well be a paper tiger that folds in the face of halfway competent opposition. There are some signs of hope: Defund the police utterly failed. Progressive DA's have started to be defeated even in deep blue areas. The Texas Heartbeat Act caused a lot of people to freak out, SCOTUS kind of shrugged, and then everyone got distracted by Omicron and then the Ukraine war as the latest things, and we never really got back to it. But it's still being enforced, and though it'll probably fall eventually due to its bizarre structure, in the meantime it's reduced abortions by more than half in one of the largest states in the country. That's significant!
On the other coast, Ron DeSantis seems to be making a career out of trolling the woke with substantively normie bills that the media hypes up as the end of everything, and yet no one has really been able to do much about it. It will be interesting to see if he's able to continue and what happens if he runs for president in 2024.
On the other hand, until we see that stress test, we just don't know if wokeness will collapse or if it will harden and adapt into something much stronger. It doesn't have to be a religion per se to be highly adaptable. I think there's a real risk that will happen, even if I don't think it's probable.
I think it would be a useful exercise to actually define what we mean by "wokeness" and by what criteria we could say that it has failed or not, over a given timeframe. Otherwise it's difficult to even make meaningful predictions.
The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted
-Eric Hoffer
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
You came close to touching on this but a successful religion- or ANY successful idea- is one that causes its adherents to be reproductively successful. Woke people have few children and rely on indoctrinating the children of conservatives.
If Americans total fertility rate (TFR) is 1.6, I guess the Woke Fertility Rate (WFR) is closer to 1. Its a declining group of people and even if they indoctrinate everyone in America, that's also a declining group. Thats why wokeness won't survive long term but Islam will.
They convert Muslims too. For two hundred years ideologies with lower fertility rates - like secularism - have been trouncing higher fertility ones by sheer conversion; I don’t understand how people still make predictions like this after all the evidence we’ve seen. The Middle East is already secularising fast. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/middle-east-are-people-losing-their-religion/a-56442163.
"Whenever people make arguments like this – holding that there is some deep philosophical reason behind some modern phenomenon – I find myself unable to even think of the kind of empirical evidence that would either confirm or falsify it. Theories that say “Wokeness is just Protestantism/Catholicism/Gnosticism” strike me as untestable, and therefore unscientific."
You are right of course that such analysis cannot be done in a strictly empirical manner, certainly not a statistical one, but that doesn't mean there is no scientific or predictive value to it.
As you argue, American foreign policy is motivated more by domestic ideological views than rational interest. Lyons's line of inquiry - theological, philosophical, literary, historical etc. - seeks to investigate where such an intellectual movement comes from, which is surely an important precondition for understanding how its adherents think.
At a very basic level: ideas and culture motivate people to act in certain ways, so if you understand the ideas, especially the psychology and deep beliefs behind them, it helps to predict and explain how people act.
My pet theory is that wokeness and critical race theory are simply a product of affluence. American society has become wealthy enough that material concerns no longer occupy much of our mental energy. We've progressed up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the more emotional levels, with people forming coalitions on the basis of shared identity to compete for status and esteem. Different groups have differential success rates, and ergo have earned different levels of status and esteem, and wokeness emerged as an attempt to force a redistribution of status and the resources attendant to it.
I sure hope you're right! Though I also hope it will take less time to collapse than the USSR or CCP.
Likewise.
What if the purpose of wokeness is not to establish a belief system that lasts, but rather to bring about the demolition of the remnants of the common structures left in a fracturing society? What if the purpose is to trigger an irrevocable collapse, and also to revive racial inequality and racial hierarchy, all in the name of ending white privilege?
Still lots of organized opposition to it in the USA, though it has momentum and much of the high ground. Much drama yet to come.
The way I read your article, "reason" #1 gave the general context of wokeness fitting within the perennial struggle for civil rights (rightly or wrongly) with the other 19 being the actual reasons why wokeness isn't going away.
In fact, you specifically address the argument here that it is politically unpopular and requires state intervention.
So I don't see this as much of a refutation of your point which I found compelling.
If we say that wokeness is religious superficially - it has its icons (George Floyd), its mantras (#BLM), its taboos (the N-word), its rituals (taking the knee) - then the theory is appealing superficially. But I agree with the article that there's been no test of its longevity, and no genuine, real pushback - and most importantly it's not been abandoned by the elites. Soviet communism was. And, closer to the here and now, COVID was, and here I think we have the best parallel with wokism.
Barring a few holdout areas of the country, COVID is over. It's not over because cases are at some kind of all-time low, nor even especially close to an all-time low. It's not over because the health care curve has been flattened to all-time lows, nor especially close. It's not over because death rates are declining, in fact in many cases it's the exact opposite. It's over because a lot of COVID hysterics got bored with it and moved on, and normal people had already moved on, and above all because elites knew which way the wind was blowing and saw that they were losing the audience.
The same thing will be true of wokeness, I believe. What, are the Democratic Party going to let BLM and the trans lobby dominate their social agenda for the rest of the decade? No. Why would they? If wokism has little to give the average man or woman on the street, it has less to give the culturally dominant political party, given just how unpopular it is. Hence it'll be dropped as soon as it's convenient.
There is a much simpler explanation as to why we've moved on from Covid. Almost everybody who took Covid seriously, especially professionals/elites, is vaxxed and boosted. They see the latest mortality data on vaxxed and unvaxxed with Omicron and believe- rightly or wrongly- that they have little chance of dying or becoming seriously ill. Those same elites see the unvaxxed as obnoxious Trumpy MAGA types, and think: if those folks want to get sick and die, well, give them their Herman Cain award and who cares. Plus, masks are plentiful now, so if you have to be in a public space with . .. those people. . .you can just put on a KN-95 and breathe easy, so to speak.
Of course this doesn't take into account the lower vax rates in some minority communities and I am not endorsing this line of thought at all, but you can't really discuss the changing mores around Covid without considering vaccines and variants and PPE availability. It's just not the same world as April 2020.
I disagree totally. This has been the case for about a year, and even prior to knowing the (limited) efficacy of the vaccines (against certain strains) the elites were cavorting without masks. They knew it wasn't a big deal to them even then. But it all kept going until about a month ago. Now it's over because they know it's a polling drag. It's got little or nothing to do with their own sense of mortality even prior to Omicron.
I think part of the reason is that Omnicron infected so many vaccinated people. It finally became impossible to deny that the vaccines simply don't prevent transmission at the population level, and therefore that they won't end the pandemic (though they do reduce mortality considerably). Few of the COVID-hawk progressives are honest enough to state that openly, but I sense that this development caused them a lot of cognitive dissonance, and they really wanted to move on and not think about it too hard.
The answer you're looking for is the midterms. Everyone who took Covid seriously has been vaxxed since April 2021 or earlier and boosted since Omicron hit in December. We started seeing "Vaxxed and Done" and other bat-signal type articles that were directed at the histrionic laptop class months ago. Outside of getting vaccinated, none of these people are doing anything remotely related to following the data.
I'd submit that the genuine "histrionic laptop class" is still all in on COVID hysteria. See, e.g., https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/?s=covid
"What, are the Democratic Party going to let BLM and the trans lobby dominate their social agenda for the rest of the decade? No."
The question is, why wouldn't they? 70% of NPR content consists of gamer words.
Here's the latest bill that just passed the House:
https://clerk.house.gov/evs/2022/roll082.xml
"If wokism has little to give the average man or woman on the street, it has less to give the culturally dominant political party, given just how unpopular it is."
Which party has the advantage on racial issues, trans issues, homosexual issues, again?
"Hence it'll be dropped as soon as it's convenient."
It will be dropped when Russia leaves Mariupol.
1. Like the people who voted on it, I'm not going to read this entire bill. I understand its symbolic value. I also understand that it costs nothing but five minutes for the House to pass it, and that it's not indicative of what the Democratic Congress needs to do to win elections going forward.
2. I didn't say advantage. I said culturally dominant. The Democratic Party is culturally dominant. That doesn't mean they're going to use that dominance especially wisely all the time.
3. Perhaps!
Each successive generation is more woke than the previous one, so for the foreseeable future, the Democratic Party (and eventually, the Republican Party) will keep getting more woke. Sure, occasionally they go a bridge too far, nominate a McGovern before the country is ready, and lose an election, but that doesn't mean they're losing the war.
I'm hoping it amounts to the new new Atheism. Back in the early 2010s, I met most of my college friends at an atheist club. Ten short years later, I can't imagine attending an atheist club any more than attending a "put my right shoe on before my left shoe club." It's culturally irrelevant.
A bit of hope for woke downfall: look up a mainstream media (eg. NY Times) article about standard center-left politics and one about wokeness. For a standard democratic one (pro- healthcare reform, pro-min wage, anti-Wall Street, anti-Russia, etc) you'll see broad approval. For a woke one, you'll see a mixed response. They're preaching to the choir, and most of the choir hates it.
Very bad comparison. Wokeness took over New Atheism very quickly. New Atheism also had next to no cultural dominance, it was just viewed by the media as the lesser of two evils relative to Christian fundamentalism (and not always even that).
I agree new Atheism never captured the media/academia/etc in the way wokeness has now. It's just similar it in frivolity and annoying-ness, which should be its downfall.
God I hope you are right, but I think they will bring COVID restrictions back in the fall or whenever there's a seasonal "surge".
It's amazing that you hope that I'm right because my theory is dependent on the cynicism and moral apathy of a big chunk of American society! I think you are correct that when/if the next variant spikes, as we are seeing in some part of Europe and Asia, there may be mask mandates in public places- but lockdowns and school closings? I really doubt it, unless things get freakishly bad. I work in a hospital and while we had huge numbers of Omicron patients in January, there weren't nearly as many deaths as in spring 2020, and almost all the deaths were among the unvaxxed. Not entirely, but almost. I think it changes the calculus of what Freddie deBoer calls the NPR tote-bag set.
Oh, it's gonna be enforced alright. You're forgetting about the most absurd places where these mandates are still enforced...schools.
Sure, the mandates have been rolled back, but there was no shortage of kicking and screaming on the way there. The thing is, inside deep blue areas = almost half the US population. Not saying this to bust your balls, but a lot of the angst comes from parents whose kids have been so traumatized that they are afraid to NOT wear masks in school.
Fair point. It won't just disappear overnight like Covid. (And Covid will reappear when it's convenient.) And there are certainly among the elites a mix of true believers, go-along-to-get-alongers, and cynics who just use it for their own ends.
More extreme political ideologies that stand out within their societies seem much weaker than religion, but I think you're ignoring the really dominant political ideologies (perhaps for the same reason fish rarely notice water; we don't even think of them as ideologies, just facts). Liberal democracy, for example, or egalitarianism, seem as durable as Christianity. They've survived for centuries and their replacement with something else in the foreseeable future seems as unlikely as a societal change of religion. We can probably be reasonably confident our great grandchildren will be liberal democrats and support the notion of political equality.
Is doesn't strike me as so implausible that after wokeness becomes dominant, its beliefs will become political facts like those of liberal democracy, and ideas like moral individualism and race/gender neutrality will seem as absurd and unjust forever thereafter as the idea of monarchy or aristocracy seem to us today.
That is a really good point and a scary thought.
Thanks. I agree.
I'm gonna come down on the "Woke is stronger than you think" side of this because it is a sturdy synthesis of both the political religion of Marxism (with of course the proletariat swapped out for Marcuse's coalition of the marginalized) while also being a new branch of American Protestantism (with Whiteness replacing Original Sin, and with the Victim class playing the roles of the Elect, Jesus (they do suffer for our sins!) and the meek who shall inherit the earth).
It really covers all the bases in a totalizing way--political program, spiritual crusade, status marker, jobs program, therapeutic succor, a new clerisy a la the Nobles of the Robe, cheap and easy virtue and moral superiority, plus the unbeatable social glue of having a shared Satan: the evil white man and his history of oppression.
And, last but not least, it gives the same sheen of moral legitimacy to the globalist class that Christianity provided to various prior plunderers like the conquistadors (Give me all your gold--and I will give you this wooden cross!)
Also, I don't know how much time any of you spend with the young creatives of NY/LA/SF but this is their fundamentalist religion (they are all Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Phone) and they are making sure to spread the good news in any and every book, movie, play, show, etc, so they have the propaganda angle locked down.
Either way, whether they enjoy a 1000-yr reign or die off like the Hittites, much wreckage will be left in the wake.
"Wokeness" is sort of a vague term which encompasses a number of ideas that became more popular during the 2010s, and who I think vary in their capacity for staying power. In particular, I think the racial justice aspect of wokeness probably *doesn't* have very much staying power: we can see that historically in the US racial justice comes in waves which then recede, and also in a world where memes compete globally a focus on US racial issues, which are different from those of other countries, is simply uncompetitive.
The aspects regarding sexuality seem different and more vigorous to me. They're much newer -- nobody ever even conceived of gay marriage before the 1970s -- and have very quickly spread to become law in a whole array of cultures, with polling showing more and more people sympathetic to these ideas even in places where they're heavily suppressed, like the Islamic world or China. (Russia in my understanding is alone in bucking the trend). This aspect feels much more like a religion, with it (for example) convincing parents to castrate children and whatever else, or used to paint foreign groups as barbarous.
Why this might be the case deserves further study. I've heard it suggested that people are now literally gayer (because of pollutants or something); I'm not sure there's actually evidence for this from polling but that would provide a powerful explanation for the trend. We continue to have no idea at all where homosexuality comes from, apart from the details of very low identical-twin concordance (so probably not genetic) and no syndromic homosexuality (so probably not caused by any pathogen we know of).
Stripping away government power from Wokeness is worth doing. If Wokeness survives anyway, it will be weaker and less of a threat. That would be a big gain.
"Wokeness, unlike religion, does not appear to be able to motivate its adherents to make the extreme kinds of sacrifices that are the hallmark of true religious faith. It can’t even convince liberals to keep their kids in inner city public schools."
Wokeness has managed convince liberals to castrate their children. That's a pretty big sacrifice!
"One secret to the success of religion, however, is that it offers something to both sexes, which allows for family formation, intergenerational transfers of faith, and ultimately the building of communities."
The past environment favored mitochondrial transmission of memes from parent to child or generation to generation, so Progressivism would not have been able to survive then (and indeed, various proto-Progressive Christian heresies, like the Cathars or the Diggers/Levellers, showed up in premodern Europe but didn't make it very far). Current communications technology (particularly the Internet and social media) very strongly favors horizontal transmission, from peer to peer, so an ideology no longer needs to allow for the formation of families and communities to survive. It can steal the families and children of the less susceptible. Secular liberals have been doing this to religious conservatives for centuries, and now the process is massively sped up. Look at the social beliefs of Zoomers, or even all the various anecdotes from various conservative politician's kids signaling how progressive they are (like Mitch McConnell's daughter talking about the need to pass the Voting Rights Act).
I make this case in longer form here: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/memetic-evolution-and-progressivism?
> Wokeness has managed convince liberals to castrate their children. That's a pretty big sacrifice!
Only by portraying a physical sex change as beneficial, and only for children who are transgender, i.e. have gender dysphoria, i.e. actually want to change sex. So these liberals don't actually think of it as a sacrifice, & I don't think it proves anything about their willingness to make actual, obvious sacrifices.
Thats a great point, the sex change thing proves THEY REALLY believe in it, at least the sexual aspects. I don't see white liberals moving into black neighborhoods but they have this difficult to understand belief in segregation now.
"Wokeness has no history of surviving without state support."
Nonsense. What "state support" is there for wokeness in... Italy? Portugal? Finland?
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/7/mapping-anti-racism-solidarity-protests-around-the-world
Wokeness is cant not just in America, but in Taiwan and mainland China, as well. It's not cant in Russia, yet... but for how long? Wokeness over the past eleven years has, in my view, proven to be a virtually unstoppable juggernaut, requiring not just lack of active state promotion, but active state suppression. Luckily, Russia is doing a bit of that -though not nearly enough.
Do you remember Elevatorgate? Bunnygate? How was any of that due to state support?
"Wokeness remains mostly a political loser for the left"
Is it? What poll shows the Republicans doing better than the Democrats on race, trans, gay issues? Sure, issue by issue wokeness might not be popular, but, so far, it has not been a shackle on the electoral fortunes of the Democrats.
The EU isn't full of government supported feminist and LGBT NGOs? They don't have ministries for gender equality? Hate speech codes? The whole continent is full of this stuff. As for China and Taiwan, the latter just mandated gay marriage through the courts by overturning the will of the voters. Seems to be top-down thing. China I don't think has much of it.
China's got trans clinics and is constantly making noise about how anti-racist they are. But they're largely resistant to Progressivism by virtue of massive top-down state opposition, an isolated internet, and low English proficiency. Look at how woke Latin America's getting (compare to even 20 years ago when LA was extremely socially conservative). Or how absurdly quickly wokeness won out in Ireland.
Ireland is a really strange example. I was there in 2006. It seemed there were truth, justice and a nice white country. Order and traditions deemed blasphemous in the rest of the west was still enforced law. No mass migration.
Then The Great Satan's disciples arrived on that poor Island cloaked as businessmen representing large S&P 500 companies offering glass beads and other trinkets (Economic prosperity).
16 years later Irishmen have to watch the injustice of black people subsuming their identity with the greatest humiliation having a prime minister (who recently wore a kilt) brown as the dirt of the ground, imported from India and full of moral rightousness when proselytizing for late liberalism, which is the ideology of American Hegemony.
The basic problem with this article is that it assumes that wokeness is new, but wokeness is not new. The very fact that "its fundamental tenets have been law in the United States for over half a century" should tell you it is not new, but actually it is quite a bit older than that too. See here for more details. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/persuasion-and-the-mensheviks?s=r
The chief strength of this article is that it correctly cuts through all the b.s. and recognises that wokeness is a 'mystery cult of power'. Problem is that you are not actually going to 'undo the excesses of civil rights law' now or ever, and while the system of government that produces wokeness appears to be totally dysfunctional and begging to be put out of its misery, it has looked that way for some time, and it always pulls through. Here is the real black pill: in inter-state conflict mendacious insanity is adaptive.
1) I always cringe a bit at people calling things religions. Because in a mostly secular age it's a lazy and indirect way of calling a group of people crazy. (deserved or not) You're probably right that it's not really worthwhile to prove that wokeness comes from a particular type of christianity. It's worth noting that most all belief systems have adjacency to other belief systems.
2) We can decompose historic religions into a few components:
Class A. "IS" Statements about the world of a metaphysical or supernatural nature (whether gods exist, how many, how, where, origin stories, afterlife, etc.)
B. "Ought" statements, i.e. moral prescriptions (what constitutes the good, what a person should and should not do etc.)
C. General description of collective behavior (traditions/rituals/etc. or how people behave in practice or how they want other people to think they behave)
In practice there is no way that a society can actually operate with any of these 3 things being left "Blank" -- any so the only thing that distinguishes traditional "religious religions" from what we have now (ideologies? civic religions? political religions? political formulas? belief system?) is that the metaphysical component usually includes the divine or the afterlife. I kind of prefer belief system because it is extremely neutral.
2.5) The word 'Ideology' is usually used derrogatorially when one person notices that another has an A-C which is noticably different from the background. For example: In a communist state a classical liberal is an ideologue and visa versa. This is true insofar as one can choose to not have an opinion, but not thinking that something is morally important is as much a 'position' as thinking that something is morally important. And in the modern era someone who doesn't find the ideals of civil rights and human rights as morally salient will be seen as an ideologue and a deviant.
3) If the 20th century has any lesson to teach it's that a society can have a metaphysical doctrine which is almost entirely naturalistic but still issue moral prescriptions that are more impractical and at odds with humans as biological creatures then any historic religion imposed aside from a handful of short-lived cults.
4) While calling wokeness a religion is a waste of time, I do think it's useful to think of it as a fundamentalist branch of the belief system that is more or less universal in the west. Namely the idea that all humans are born equal and should be "free" in some sense. The fundamentalism comes from demanding this idea (which is accepted by everyone except for reactionary deviants) be *practically implemented*.
To draw a paralell, even in Islamic countries there's a distinction between the parts of Sharia law that are common between islamic societies and the kind that are only imposed by the most vicious of salafists.
5) While it's possible to limit the harmful effects of wokeness on people by changing laws. I am skeptical about actually innoculating the population from woke beliefs.
The woke-vaccine (so to speak) is going to be a set of beliefs and assumptions about the world which are easy to verify, hard to disprove once the person believes in them, and are mutually incompatible with wokeness. In truth, this vaccine has existed in a reasonably scientific form for decades and in a simpler form for far longer (about as long as animal husbandry); namely the idea that human behavior is influenced by genetics and that evolution did not stop at the neck. There is no reason to expect equality of outcome when the default state of affairs is biologically induced differences in behavior.
The evidence *in favor* of this "vaccine" has only increased over time but the resistance against it has only grown stronger. Many people who oppose wokeness still believe in the blank slate. Several others openly stated that they didn't believe in the blank slate but thought that teaching the alternative was more of a threat to society.
Even when people get over the notion that humans not being blank slates doesn't justify slavery or ethnic cleansing the idea that no one is "superior" than anyone else is always going to appeal to people with a deep inferiority complex.
6) The chinese are well situated to be immune from this kind of thinking since culturally they can claim no guilt for slavery or the holocaust, and at the same time it will be easy for them to endorse a theory that says that East asians are [one of] the smartest human subpopulations. One way wokeism might decline is if china becomes the definitive geopolitical superior to the united states, young elites from other countries will likely gravitate towards chinese education and chinese institutions. Most young elites are conformist midwits that use the formula: prestige = truth.
I am concerned that wokeness drives a wedge between the sexes. Men with any self-respect will dislike professional middle-class institutions that seek to degrade them; these institutions will be increasingly female-dominated. As the sexes become polarized along middle-class v. untouchable/outer-class/online troll lines, the capacity for men to meet women and form families will diminish.
Wokeness may very well be a paper tiger that folds in the face of halfway competent opposition. There are some signs of hope: Defund the police utterly failed. Progressive DA's have started to be defeated even in deep blue areas. The Texas Heartbeat Act caused a lot of people to freak out, SCOTUS kind of shrugged, and then everyone got distracted by Omicron and then the Ukraine war as the latest things, and we never really got back to it. But it's still being enforced, and though it'll probably fall eventually due to its bizarre structure, in the meantime it's reduced abortions by more than half in one of the largest states in the country. That's significant!
On the other coast, Ron DeSantis seems to be making a career out of trolling the woke with substantively normie bills that the media hypes up as the end of everything, and yet no one has really been able to do much about it. It will be interesting to see if he's able to continue and what happens if he runs for president in 2024.
On the other hand, until we see that stress test, we just don't know if wokeness will collapse or if it will harden and adapt into something much stronger. It doesn't have to be a religion per se to be highly adaptable. I think there's a real risk that will happen, even if I don't think it's probable.
I think it would be a useful exercise to actually define what we mean by "wokeness" and by what criteria we could say that it has failed or not, over a given timeframe. Otherwise it's difficult to even make meaningful predictions.
The fanatic cannot be weaned away from his cause by an appeal to his reason or moral sense. He fears compromise and cannot be persuaded to qualify the certitude and righteousness of his holy cause. But he finds no difficulty in swinging suddenly and wildly from one holy cause to another. He cannot be convinced but only converted
-Eric Hoffer
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
-David Foster Wallace
You came close to touching on this but a successful religion- or ANY successful idea- is one that causes its adherents to be reproductively successful. Woke people have few children and rely on indoctrinating the children of conservatives.
If Americans total fertility rate (TFR) is 1.6, I guess the Woke Fertility Rate (WFR) is closer to 1. Its a declining group of people and even if they indoctrinate everyone in America, that's also a declining group. Thats why wokeness won't survive long term but Islam will.
They convert Muslims too. For two hundred years ideologies with lower fertility rates - like secularism - have been trouncing higher fertility ones by sheer conversion; I don’t understand how people still make predictions like this after all the evidence we’ve seen. The Middle East is already secularising fast. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.dw.com/en/middle-east-are-people-losing-their-religion/a-56442163.
"Whenever people make arguments like this – holding that there is some deep philosophical reason behind some modern phenomenon – I find myself unable to even think of the kind of empirical evidence that would either confirm or falsify it. Theories that say “Wokeness is just Protestantism/Catholicism/Gnosticism” strike me as untestable, and therefore unscientific."
You are right of course that such analysis cannot be done in a strictly empirical manner, certainly not a statistical one, but that doesn't mean there is no scientific or predictive value to it.
As you argue, American foreign policy is motivated more by domestic ideological views than rational interest. Lyons's line of inquiry - theological, philosophical, literary, historical etc. - seeks to investigate where such an intellectual movement comes from, which is surely an important precondition for understanding how its adherents think.
At a very basic level: ideas and culture motivate people to act in certain ways, so if you understand the ideas, especially the psychology and deep beliefs behind them, it helps to predict and explain how people act.
My pet theory is that wokeness and critical race theory are simply a product of affluence. American society has become wealthy enough that material concerns no longer occupy much of our mental energy. We've progressed up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the more emotional levels, with people forming coalitions on the basis of shared identity to compete for status and esteem. Different groups have differential success rates, and ergo have earned different levels of status and esteem, and wokeness emerged as an attempt to force a redistribution of status and the resources attendant to it.