This Is How Wokeness Ends

[maestrob]

May 13, 2021
By David Brooks
Opinion Columnist

My friend Rod Dreher recently had a blog post for The American Conservative called “Why Are Conservatives in Despair?” He explained that conservatives are in despair because a hostile ideology — wokeness or social justice or critical race theory — is sweeping across America the way Bolshevism swept across the Russian Empire before the October Revolution in 1917.

This ideology is creating a “soft totalitarianism” across wide swaths of American society, he writes. In the view of not just Dreher but also many others, it divides the world into good and evil based on crude racial categories. It has no faith in persuasion, or open discourse, but it shames and cancels anybody who challenges the official catechism. It produces fringe absurdities like “ethnomathematics,” which proponents say seeks to challenge the ways that, as one guide for teachers puts it, “math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist and racist views” by dismissing old standards like “getting the ‘right’ answer.”

I’m less alarmed by all of this because I have more confidence than Dreher and many other conservatives in the American establishment’s ability to co-opt and water down every radical progressive ideology. In the 1960s, left-wing radicals wanted to overthrow capitalism. We ended up with Whole Foods. The co-optation of wokeness seems to be happening right now.

The thing we call wokeness contains many elements. At its core is an honest and good-faith effort to grapple with the legacies of racism. In 2021, this element of wokeness has produced more understanding, inclusion and racial progress than we’ve seen in over 50 years. This part of wokeness is great.

But wokeness gets weirder when it’s entangled in the perversities of our meritocracy, when it involves demonstrating one’s enlightenment by using language — “problematize,” “heteronormativity,” “cisgender,” “intersectionality” — inculcated in elite schools or with difficult texts.

In an essay titled “The Language of Privilege,” in Tablet, Nicholas Clairmont argues that the difficulty of the language is the point — to exclude those with less educational capital.

People who engage in this discourse have been enculturated by our best and most expensive schools. If you look at the places where the splashy woke controversies have taken place, they have often been posh prep schools, like Harvard-Westlake or Dalton, or pricey colleges, like Bryn Mawr or Princeton.

The meritocracy at this level is very competitive. Performing the discourse by canceling and shaming becomes a way of establishing your status and power as an enlightened person. It becomes a way of showing — despite your secret self-doubts — that you really belong. It also becomes a way of showing the world that you are anti-elite, even though you work, study and live in circles that are extremely elite.

The meritocracy has one job: to funnel young people into leadership positions in society. It’s very good at doing that. Corporations and other organizations are eager to hire top performers, and one sign of elite credentials is the ability to do the discourse. That’s why the C.I.A. made that widely mocked recruiting video that was like a woke word salad: cisgender, intersectional, patriarchal.

The people at the C.I.A., Disney, Major League Baseball and Coca-Cola aren’t faking it when they perform the acts we now call woke capitalism. They went to the same schools and share the same dominant culture and want the same reputational benefits.

But as the discourse gets more corporatized it’s going to get watered down. The primary ideology in America is success; that ideology has a tendency to absorb all rivals.

We saw this happen between the 1970s and the 1990s. American hippies built a genuinely bohemian counterculture. But as they got older they wanted to succeed. They brought their bohemian values into the market, but year by year those values got thinner and thinner and finally were nonexistent.

Corporations and other establishment organizations co-opt almost unconsciously. They send ambitious young people powerful signals about what level of dissent will be tolerated while embracing dissident values as a form of marketing. By taking what was dangerous and aestheticizing it, they turn it into a product or a brand. Pretty soon key concepts like “privilege” are reduced to empty catchphrases floating everywhere.

The economist and cultural observer Tyler Cowen expects wokeness in this sense won’t disappear. Writing for Bloomberg last week, he predicted it would become something more like the Unitarian Church — “broadly admired but commanding only a modicum of passion and commitment.”

This would be fine with me. As I say, there are (at least) two elements to wokeness. One focuses on concrete benefits for the disadvantaged — reparations, more diverse hiring, more equitable housing and economic policies. The other instigates savage word wars among the highly advantaged. If we can have more of the former and less of the latter, we’ll all be better off.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/opin ... e=Homepage

[Belle]

Coming from the bible of wokeness, the New York Times, this article by Brooks is unconvincing and disingenuous - primarily because he's one of that class of graduate, managerial self-appointed elites which helped promulgate wokeness in the first place or, at the very least, enabled it through silence. No good trying to project the perfidy of wokeness onto conservatives; they didn't start it and want nothing to do with it. They know as I do that the best thing you can do to address inequality is meaningful work and stable families. But there's no victim cachet in personal responsibility.

I think Claire Lehmann nails it here and is right en pointe in her essay: it's about status envy. It's more intelligent and analytical than the Brooks offering, which predictably offers good intentions as a motivation for cancel culture - which is opposite to the reality. This reading suggests a lack of sophistication and sociological imagination. You might as well argue that Lenin, Mao and Stalin were motivated by the best intentions.

Cancel mob thirst for stolen status, not social justice
CLAIRE LEHMANN
Last month, Edward Livingston, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, raised a question on a podcast that many of us would find reasonable. He questioned the usefulness of the term “structural racism” in describing American society, a term which often carries the implication that all white people are, by definition, racist. “Structural racism is an unfortunate term” he said. “Personally, I think taking racism out of the conversation will help. Many people like myself are offended by the implication that we are somehow racist.”

That editor has since handed in his resignation. And the editor-in-chief of JAMA, Howard Bauchner, has been placed on administrative leave. Why? Because an outrage mob led by Twitter activists and a petition signed by more than 7000 people demanded their heads.

Such episodes are known colloquially as “cancel culture”.

And while cancel culture’s ground zero is the US, America’s cultural power is ensuring this revolution is spreading beyond its borders.

I’m often asked to comment on the phenomenon because the magazine I founded has documented many cases of cancel culture over the past five years — before we even had a term for it. (Our first anthology is called Panics and Persecutions: 20 Quillette Tales of Excommunication in the Digital Age.)

Over the years, the patterns of contemporary excommunication have become clearer and more apparent. The first thing to understand about so-called cancel culture is that it is a fight about prestige and who gets to wield it in contemporary society. Those who instigate these crusades are in search of status and seek to take it from those who already have it.

It’s rare that a cancel culture crusade would target a person in prison, or a patient in a psychiatric institution, or an individual in drug rehabilitation for saying something transphobic, racist or sexist. Those at the bottom of ­society are immune to cancel culture not because they are morally perfect, but because they hold no status for the crusaders to covet.

Because cancel culture is inextricably linked to status and its scarcity, we should expect to see it happening inside the most prestigious institutions, targeting people in the most esteemed roles. And that is exactly what we are seeing. The episode at JAMA is a classic case where an eminent medical journal and its editor-in-chief are targeted by junior medical professionals seeking to (metaphorically) scalp their industry elders.

JK Rowling has faced cancel culture again after a book festival in New Zealand decided to drop a Harry Potter quiz from the event for fear it would offend festival-goers following her heavily criticised comments about transgender people.
The fault line being navigated here is between the liberal meritocracy of the latter half of the 20th century and a new 21st century victimocracy. Cancel culture is the culture of rich Western children who have developed an uncanny ability to manipulate their elders through claims of being “hurt”, “harmed”, “offended” or “distressed”. Claiming victim status is a shortcut when hard work and merit — being unusually talented, skilled, or displaying mastery in a particular area — is considered too onerous a requirement to claim social rank.

This wouldn’t be such a problem and these tactics wouldn’t be so successful if it weren’t for the fact that many institutional leaders, from small private schools to large corporations, are fundamentally ill-equipped to deal with this new cultural reality.

Leaders who have shown weakness in this area are often baby-boomers who went to university before post-structuralism took root in the humanities. They have little exposure or awareness of the nihilism and relativism that passes for scholarship in many academic departments today. They think of the civil rights movements with nostalgia, without being aware that civil rights movements of the 1960s oriented around liberty, not authority, as today’s anti-racist movements do.

Cancel culture strikes in industries when job losses are imminent, such as in the media or academia, or where government grants for artistic programs are few in number and where the ­future for young people, particularly those with degrees, is precarious. Cancel culture strikes when young people feel pessimistic about their future, when opportunities that were available to their parents are closed off to them, often through no fault of their own.

Combating victimocracy at the societal level won’t be easy, but organisations can build cultures that are resilient to political agitation and social media mobs. For example, executives receive training in diversity, equity and inclusion as a matter of course in today’s world. Executives also receive training in crisis management. I do not think that it would be too much to ask organisations to invest in training for leaders to become resilient to politicised social media campaigns and activist mobbings.

All organisations, companies, corporations and educational institutions should have clear mission statements, and leaders should be expected to defend their own company’s stated mission, even when (or especially when) under pressure. If a company’s mission is apolitical, leaders should be expected to withstand agitators seeking to disrupt the equilibrium of a workplace for political purposes.

Leaders should also be aware that those behind cancel culture crusades are small in number, and most people — whether they are students, employees or the general public — are much more moderate in their political and ideological beliefs than those ­activists who whip up outrage ­online or in the streets.

Thanks to the magnifying impact of social media, cancel culture crusaders have effectively convinced the public that they are larger in number than they really are. But it is always worth remembering that the opinions of crusaders are not representative of the public in general.

Wise leaders keep this in mind, and act accordingly.

(Claire Lehmann is founding editor of Quillette.)

These two have intelligent observations to make about "woke-dom".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkxjcuDYzWA

[Rach3]

As usual, the Right attacks “wokeness” as an affliction of , and weapon used by , a highly advantaged Left to oppress a highly advantaged Right. Absent from the Right’s attack is any concern for the disadvantaged, a concern Brooks notes does exist in sincere abundance among the “woke”.

[maestrob]

As usual, the Right attacks “wokeness” as an affliction of , and weapon used by , a highly advantaged Left to oppress a highly advantaged Right. Absent from the Right’s attack is any concern for the disadvantaged, a concern Brooks notes does exist in sincere abundance among the “woke”.

Bingo!

I guess all the advantages of "success" (Belle's favorite word) totally slipped her mind.

[jserraglio]

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

[David Brooks is] one of that class of graduate, managerial self-appointed elites which helped promulgate wokeness in the first place or, at the very least, enabled it through silence.

I admire David Brooks from seeing him on "The News Hour" with Mark Shields.

[maestrob]

Great catch, Joe!

[jserraglio]

Great catch, Joe!

Paraphrasing Robert Bolt, We can only pray that when her head's finished turning, her face is to the front again.

[maestrob]

Great catch, Joe!

"We must just pray that when her head's finished turning, her face is to the front again."

You also have a great memory for quotes, don't you?

Paul Scofield was one of the greatest actors ever, and Thomas More was one of his greatest roles.

I watch that movie every year.

[jserraglio]

Paul Scofield was one of the greatest actors ever, and Cromwell was one of his greatest roles.

Agreed. I think you meant to say More. Cromwell was pre-Maganderthalish.

[maestrob]

Paul Scofield was one of the greatest actors ever, and Cromwell was one of his greatest roles.

Agreed. I think you meant to say More. Cromwell was pre-Maganderthalish.

Yikes! Senior moment!

We are watching "The Tudors" on DVD, and saw the episode last night where Cromwell was executed. I guess that left an impression.

[jserraglio]

We are watching "The Tudors" on DVD, and saw the episode last night where Cromwell was executed. I guess that left an impression.

Hmm. Sir Thomas Cromwell reminds me of somebody we know. The Former Guy.

Two insecure parvenus. White-knuckled grasp on power. Cromwell, though, ran a competent administration.

[Rach3]

Paul Scofield was one of the greatest actors ever, and Thomas More was one of his greatest roles.

I still vividly recall seeing Scofield live, with Alec McGowan I believe, in the blind scene on the heath , no scenery at all, bare stage, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “King Lear” , at the New York State Theatre in Lincoln Center ca. 1964 , when I was 16.

[jserraglio]

Paul Scofield was one of the greatest actors ever, and Thomas More was one of his greatest roles.

I still vividly recall seeing Scofield live, with Alec McGowan I believe, in the blind scene on the heath , no scenery at all, bare stage, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “King Lear” , at the New York State Theatre in Lincoln Center ca. 1964 , when I was 16.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tZHs_G8qMU

[barney]

Well I have quite a lot of sympathy for what Claire Lehmann says, though Steve's point is very strong.

And in answer to Belle, yes, I do think Hitler, Stalin and Mao all believed of themselves that they had good intentions - to restore Germany, to rescue the proletariat, to build a better China. And we know what the road to hell is paved with.

I also had the great good fortune to see Paul Scofield live in Amadeus in London in 1981. Marvellous.