January 2025The word "prig" isn't very common now, but if you look up
the definition, it will sound familiar. Google's isn't bad:
A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if
superior to others.
This sense of the word originated in the 18th century, and
its age is an important clue: it shows that although
wokeness is a comparatively recent phenomenon, it's an
instance of a much older one.There's a certain kind of person who's attracted to a
shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates
his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every
society has these people. All that changes is the rules they
enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In
Stalin's Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the
woke, it's social justice.So if you want to understand wokeness, the question to ask
is not why people behave this way. Every society has prigs.
The question to ask is why our prigs are priggish about
these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to
ask when and where wokeness began.The answer to the first question is the 1980s. Wokeness is a
second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which
started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and
then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally
peaking after the riots of 2020.What was political correctness, exactly? I'm often asked to define
both this term and wokeness by people who think they're meaningless
labels, so I will. They both have the same definition:
An aggressively performative focus on social justice.
In other words, it's people being prigs about social
justice. And that's the real problem — the
performativeness, not the social justice.
[0]Racism, for example, is a genuine problem. Not a problem on
the scale that the woke believe it to be, but a genuine one.
I don't think any reasonable person would deny that. The
problem with political correctness was not that it focused
on marginalized groups, but the shallow, aggressive way in
which it did so. Instead of going out into the world and
quietly helping members of marginalized groups, the
politically correct focused on getting people in trouble for
using the wrong words to talk about them.As for where political correctness began, if you think about
it, you probably already know the answer. Did it begin
outside universities and spread to them from this external
source? Obviously not; it has always been most extreme in
universities. So where in universities did it begin? Did it
begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and
spread from there to the humanities and social sciences?
Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the
humanities and social sciences.Why there? And why then? What happened in the humanities and
social sciences in the 1980s?A successful theory of the origin of political correctness
has to be able to explain why it didn't happen earlier. Why
didn't it happen during the protest movements of the 1960s,
for example? They were concerned with much the same issues.
[1]The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn't lead to
political correctness was precisely that — they were
student movements. They didn't have any real power. The
students may have been talking a lot about women's
liberation and black power, but it was not what they were
being taught in their classes. Not yet.But in the early 1970s the student protestors of the 1960s
began to finish their dissertations and get hired as
professors. At first they were neither powerful nor
numerous. But as more of their peers joined them and the
previous generation of professors started to retire, they
gradually became both.The reason political correctness began in the humanities and
social sciences was that these fields offered more scope for
the injection of politics. A 1960s radical who got a job as
a physics professor could still attend protests, but his
political beliefs wouldn't affect his work. Whereas research
in sociology and modern literature can be made as political
as you like.
[2]I saw political correctness arise. When I started college in
1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if
someone said something they considered sexist, but no one
was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when
I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in
1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade
campus life.What happened? How did protest become punishment? Why were
the late 1980s the point at which protests against male
chauvinism (as it used to be called) morphed into formal
complaints to university authorities about sexism?
Basically, the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the
Establishment they'd protested against two decades before.
Now they were in a position not just to speak out about
their ideas, but to enforce them.A new set of moral rules to enforce was exciting news to a
certain kind of student. What made it particularly exciting
was that they were allowed to attack professors. I remember
noticing that aspect of political correctness at the time.
It wasn't simply a grass-roots student movement. It was
faculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty
members. In that respect it was like the Cultural
Revolution. That wasn't a grass-roots movement either; that
was Mao unleashing the younger generation on his political
opponents. And in fact when Roderick MacFarquhar started
teaching a class on the Cultural Revolution at Harvard in
the late 1980s, many saw it as a comment on current events.
I don't know if it actually was, but people thought it was,
and that means the similarities were obvious.
[3]College students larp. It's their nature. It's usually
harmless. But larping morality turned out to be a poisonous
combination. The result was a kind of moral etiquette,
superficial but very complicated. Imagine having to explain
to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the
phrase "people of color" is considered particularly
enlightened, but saying "colored people" gets you fired. And
why exactly one isn't supposed to use the word "negro" now,
even though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his
speeches. There are no underlying principles. You'd just
have to give him a long list of rules to memorize.
[4]
The danger of these rules was not just that they created
land mines for the unwary, but that their elaborateness made
them an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society
has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a
substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the
world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than
everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to
bad people.But for it to work as a substitute for virtue, orthodoxy
must be difficult. If all you have to do to be orthodox is
wear some garment or avoid saying some word, everyone knows
to do it, and the only way to seem more virtuous than other
people is to actually be virtuous. The shallow, complicated,
and frequently changing rules of political correctness made
it the perfect substitute for actual virtue. And the result
was a world in which good people who weren't up to date on
current moral fashions were brought down by people whose
characters would make you recoil in horror if you could see
them.One big contributing factor in the rise of political
correctness was the lack of other things to be morally pure
about. Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly
about religion and sex. But among the cultural elite these
were the deadest of dead letters by the 1980s; if you were
religious, or a virgin, this was something you tended to
conceal rather than advertise. So the sort of people who
enjoy being moral enforcers had become starved of things to
enforce. A new set of rules was just what they'd been
waiting for.Curiously enough, the tolerant side of the 1960s left helped
create the conditions in which the intolerant side
prevailed. The relaxed social rules advocated by the old,
easy-going hippy left became the dominant ones, at least
among the elite, and this left nothing for the naturally
intolerant to be intolerant about.Another possibly contributing factor was the fall of the
Soviet empire. Marxism had been a popular focus of moral
purity on the left before political correctness emerged as a
competitor, but the pro-democracy movements in Eastern Bloc
countries took most of the shine off it. Especially the fall
of the Berlin Wall in 1989. You couldn't be on the side of
the Stasi. I remember looking at the moribund Soviet Studies
section of a used bookshop in Cambridge in the late 1980s
and thinking "what will those people go on about now?" As it
turned out the answer was right under my nose.One thing I noticed at the time about the first phase of
political correctness was that it was more popular with
women than men. As many writers (perhaps most eloquently
George Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than
men to the idea of being moral enforcers. But there was
another more specific reason women tended to be the
enforcers of political correctness. There was at this time a
great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were
the point when the definition of sexual harassment was
expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a
"hostile environment." Within universities the classic form
of accusation was for a (female) student to say that a
professor made her "feel uncomfortable." But the vagueness
of this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior
to expand to include talking about heterodox ideas. Those
make people uncomfortable too.
[5]Was it sexist to propose that Darwin's greater male
variability hypothesis might explain some variation in human
performance? Sexist enough to get Larry Summers pushed out
as president of Harvard, apparently. One woman who heard the
talk in which he mentioned this idea said it made her feel
"physically ill" and that she had to leave halfway through.
If the test of a hostile environment is how it makes people
feel, this certainly sounds like one. And yet it does seem
plausible that greater male variability explains some of the
variation in human performance. So which should prevail,
comfort or truth? Surely if truth should prevail anywhere,
it should be in universities; that's supposed to be their
specialty; but for decades starting in the late 1980s the
politically correct tried to pretend this conflict didn't
exist.
[6]Political correctness seemed to burn out in the second half
of the 1990s. One reason, perhaps the main reason, was that
it literally became a joke. It offered rich material for
comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action
upon it. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against
priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless,
can't respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian
prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same
thing to political correctness.Unfortunately this was an illusion. Within universities the
embers of political correctness were still glowing brightly.
After all, the forces that created it were still there. The
professors who started it were now becoming deans and
department heads. And in addition to their departments there
were now a bunch of new ones explicitly focused on social
justice. Students were still hungry for things to be morally
pure about. And there had been an explosion in the number of
university administrators, many of whose jobs involved
enforcing various forms of political correctness.In the early 2010s the embers of political correctness burst
into flame anew. There were several differences between this
new phase and the original one. It was more virulent. It
spread further into the real world, although it still burned
hottest within universities. And it was concerned with a
wider variety of sins. In the first phase of political
correctness there were really only three things people got
accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the
time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between
then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying
to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which
could be made to stick.The second phase was, in multiple senses, political
correctness metastasized. Why did it happen when it did? My
guess is that it was due to the rise of social media,
particularly Tumblr and Twitter, because one of the most
distinctive features of the second wave of political
correctness was the cancel mob: a mob of angry people
uniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired.
Indeed this second wave of political correctness was
originally called "cancel culture"; it didn't start to be
called "wokeness" till the 2020s.One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at
first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like
being outraged. We're so used to this idea now that we take
it for granted, but really it's pretty strange. Being
outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect
people to seek it out. But they do. And above all, they want
to share it. I happened to be running a forum from 2007 to
2014, so I can actually quantify how much they want to share
it: our users were about three times more likely to upvote
something if it outraged them.This tilt toward outrage wasn't due to wokeness. It's an
inherent feature of social media, or at least this
generation of it. But it did make social media the perfect
mechanism for fanning the flames of wokeness.
[7]It wasn't just public social networks that drove the rise of
wokeness though. Group chat apps were also critical,
especially in the final step, cancellation. Imagine if a
group of employees trying to get someone fired had to do it
using only email. It would be hard to organize a mob. But
once you have group chat, mobs form naturally.Another contributing factor in this second wave of political
correctness was the dramatic increase in the polarization of
the press. In the print era, newspapers were constrained to
be, or at least seem, politically neutral. The department
stores that ran ads in the New York Times wanted to reach
everyone in the region, both liberal and conservative, so
the Times had to serve both. But the Times didn't regard
this neutrality as something forced upon them. They embraced
it as their duty as a paper of record — as one of the big
newspapers that aimed to be chronicles of their times,
reporting every sufficiently important story from a neutral
point of view.When I grew up the papers of record seemed timeless, almost
sacred institutions. Papers like the New York Times and
Washington Post had immense prestige, partly because other
sources of news were limited, but also because they did make
some effort to be neutral.Unfortunately it turned out that the paper of record was
mostly an artifact of the constraints imposed by print.
[8]
When your market was determined by geography, you had
to be neutral. But publishing online enabled — in fact
probably forced — newspapers to switch to serving markets
defined by ideology instead of geography. Most that remained
in business fell in the direction they'd already been
leaning: left. On October 11, 2020 the New York Times
announced that "The paper is in the midst of an evolution
from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of
great narratives."
[9]
Meanwhile journalists, of a sort,
had arisen to serve the right as well. And so journalism,
which in the previous era had been one of the great
centralizing forces, now became one of the great polarizing
ones.The rise of social media and the increasing polarization of
journalism reinforced one another. In fact there arose a new
variety of journalism involving a loop through social media.
Someone would say something controversial on social media.
Within hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers
would then post links to the story on social media, driving
further arguments online. It was the cheapest source of
clicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news
bureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to
do was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost
them on your site, with some additional comments to inflame
readers further.For the press there was money in wokeness. But they weren't
the only ones. That was one of the biggest differences
between the two waves of political correctness: the first
was driven almost entirely by amateurs, but the second was
often driven by professionals. For some it was their whole
job. By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose
job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role
similar to that of the political commissars who got attached
to military and industrial organizations in the USSR: they
weren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but
watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper
happened in the doing of it. These new administrators could
often be recognized by the word "inclusion" in their titles.
Within institutions this was the preferred euphemism for
wokeness; a new list of banned words, for example, would
usually be called an "inclusive language guide."
[10]This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if
their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire
people to keep watch for a particular type of problem,
they're going to find it, because otherwise there's no
justification for their existence.
[11]
But these
bureaucrats also represented a second and possibly even
greater danger. Many were involved in hiring, and when
possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only
people who shared their political beliefs. The most
egregious cases were the new "DEI statements" that some
universities started to require from faculty candidates,
proving their commitment to wokeness. Some universities used
these statements as the initial filter and only even
considered candidates who scored high enough on them. You're
not hiring Einstein that way; imagine what you get instead.Another factor in the rise of wokeness was the Black Lives
Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was
acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida. But
this didn't launch wokeness; it was well underway by 2013.Similarly for the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017
after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's
history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness, but didn't
play the same role in launching it that the 80s version did
in launching political correctness.The election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated
wokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant
traffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money:
headlines during his first administration mentioned his name
at about four times the rate of previous presidents.In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white
police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this
point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent
protests broke out across America. But in retrospect this
turned out to be peak woke, or close to it. By every measure
I've seen, wokeness peaked in 2020 or 2021.Wokeness is sometimes described as a mind-virus. What makes
it viral is that it defines new types of impropriety. Most
people are afraid of impropriety; they're never exactly sure
what the social rules are or which ones they might be
breaking. Especially if the rules change rapidly. And since
most people already worry that they might be breaking rules
they don't know about, if you tell them they're breaking a
rule, their default reaction is to believe you. Especially
if multiple people tell them. Which in turn is a recipe for
exponential growth. Zealots invent some new impropriety to
avoid. The first people to adopt it are fellow zealots,
eager for new ways to signal their virtue. If there are
enough of these, the initial group of zealots is followed by
a much larger group, motivated by fear. They're not trying
to signal virtue; they're just trying to avoid getting in
trouble. At this point the new impropriety is now firmly
established. Plus its success has increased the rate of
change in social rules, which, remember, is one of the
reasons people are nervous about which rules they might be
breaking. So the cycle accelerates.
[12]What's true of individuals is even more true of
organizations. Especially organizations without a powerful
leader. Such organizations do everything based on "best
practices." There's no higher authority; if some new "best
practice" achieves critical mass, they must adopt it. And
in this case the organization can't do what it usually does
when it's uncertain: delay. It might be committing
improprieties right now! So it's surprisingly easy for a
small group of zealots to capture this type of organization
by describing new improprieties it might be guilty of.
[13]How does this kind of cycle ever end? Eventually it leads to
disaster, and people start to say enough is enough. The
excesses of 2020 made a lot of people say that.Since then wokeness has been in gradual but continual
retreat. Corporate CEOs, starting with Brian Armstrong, have
openly rejected it. Universities, led by the University of
Chicago and MIT, have explicitly confirmed their commitment
to free speech. Twitter, which was arguably the hub of
wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it,
and he seems to have succeeded — and not, incidentally, by
censoring left-wing users the way Twitter used to censor
right-wing ones, but without censoring either.
[14]
Consumers have emphatically rejected brands that ventured
too far into wokeness. The Bud Light brand may have been
permanently damaged by it. I'm not going to claim Trump's
second victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think
he won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was
more charismatic; but voters'
disgust with wokeness must have helped.So what do we do now? Wokeness is already in retreat.
Obviously we should help it along. What's the best way to do
that? And more importantly, how do we avoid a third
outbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came
back worse than ever.In fact there's an even more ambitious goal: is there a way
to prevent any similar outbreak of aggressively performative
moralism in the future — not just a third outbreak of
political correctness, but the next thing like it? Because
there will be a next thing. Prigs are prigs by nature. They
need rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut
off their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly
hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them
halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll
see the same phenomenon again.Let's start with the easier problem. Is there a simple,
principled way to deal with wokeness? I think there is: to
use the customs we already have for dealing with religion.
Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced
by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of
this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by
the masses.
[15]
And we already have well-established
customs for dealing with religion within organizations. You
can express your own religious identity and explain your
beliefs, but you can't call your coworkers infidels if they
disagree, or try to ban them from saying things that
contradict its doctrines, or insist that the organization
adopt yours as its official religion.If we're not sure what to do about any particular
manifestation of wokeness, imagine we were dealing with some
other religion, like Christianity. Should we have people
within organizations whose jobs are to enforce woke
orthodoxy? No, because we wouldn't have people whose jobs
were to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Should we censor
writers or
scientists whose work contradicts woke doctrines?
No, because we wouldn't do this to people whose work
contradicted Christian teachings. Should job candidates be
required to write DEI statements? Of course not; imagine an
employer requiring proof of one's religious beliefs. Should
students and employees have to participate in woke
indoctrination sessions in which they're required to answer
questions about their beliefs to ensure compliance? No,
because we wouldn't dream of catechizing people in this way
about their religion.
[16]One shouldn't feel bad about not wanting to watch woke
movies any more than one would feel bad about not wanting to
listen to Christian rock. In my twenties I drove across
America several times, listening to local radio stations.
Occasionally I'd turn the dial and hear some new song. But
the moment anyone mentioned Jesus I'd turn the dial again.
Even the tiniest bit of being preached to was enough to make
me lose interest.But by the same token we should not automatically reject
everything the woke believe. I'm not a Christian, but I can
see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would
be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't
share the religion that espoused them. It would be the sort
of thing a religious zealot would do.If we have genuine pluralism, I think we'll be safe from
future outbreaks of woke intolerance. Wokeness itself won't
go away. There will for the foreseeable future continue to
be pockets of woke zealots inventing new moral fashions. The
key is not to let them treat their fashions as normative.
They can change what their coreligionists are allowed to say
every few months if they like, but they mustn't be allowed
to change what we're allowed to say.
[17]The more general problem — how to prevent similar outbreaks
of aggressively performative moralism — is of course
harder. Here we're up against human nature. There will
always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the
enforcers among them, the
aggressively conventional-minded.
These people are born that way. Every society has them. So
the best we can do is to keep them bottled up.The aggressively conventional-minded aren't always on the
rampage. Usually they just enforce whatever random rules are
nearest to hand. They only become dangerous when some new
ideology gets a lot of them pointed in the same direction at
once. That's what happened during the Cultural Revolution,
and to a lesser extent (thank God) in the two waves of
political correctness we've experienced.We can't get rid of the aggressively conventional-minded.
[18]
And we couldn't prevent people from creating new
ideologies that appealed to them even if we wanted to. So if
we want to keep them bottled up, we have to do it one step
downstream. Fortunately when the aggressively
conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one
thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to
punish people for. So the best way to protect ourselves from
future outbreaks of things like wokeness is to have powerful
antibodies against the concept of heresy.We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms
of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something
that we'd previously been able to say, our initial
assumption should be that they're wrong. Only our initial
assumption of course. If they can prove we should stop
saying it, then we should. But the burden of proof is on
them. In liberal democracies, people trying to prevent
something from being said will usually claim they're not
merely engaging in censorship, but trying to prevent some
form of "harm". And maybe they're right. But once again, the
burden of proof is on them. It's not enough to claim harm;
they have to prove it.As long as the aggressively conventional-minded continue to
give themselves away by banning heresies, we'll always be
able to notice when they become aligned behind some new
ideology. And if we always fight back at that point, with
any luck we can stop them in their tracks.The number of true things we can't say
should not increase. If it does, something is wrong.Notes[0]
This was not the original meaning of "woke," but it's rarely
used in the original sense now. Now the pejorative sense is
the dominant one.[1]
Why did 1960s radicals focus on the causes they did?
One of the people who reviewed drafts of this essay
explained this so well that I asked if I could quote him:
The middle-class student protestors of the New Left
rejected the socialist/Marxist left as unhip. They were
interested in sexier forms of oppression uncovered by
cultural analysis (Marcuse) and abstruse "Theory". Labor
politics became stodgy and old-fashioned. This took a
couple generations to work through. The woke ideology's
conspicuous lack of interest in the working class is the
tell-tale sign. Such fragments as are, er, left of the old
left are anti-woke, and meanwhile the actual working class
shifted to the populist right and gave us Trump. Trump and
wokeness are cousins.The middle-class origins of wokeness smoothed its way
through the institutions because it had no interest in
"seizing the means of production" (how quaint such phrases
seem now), which would quickly have run up against hard
state and corporate power. The fact that wokeness only
expressed interest in other kinds of class (race, sex,
etc) signalled compromise with existing power: give us
power within your system and we'll bestow the resource we
control — moral rectitude — upon you. As an ideological
stalking horse for gaining control over discourse and
institutions, this succeeded where a more ambitious
revolutionary program would not have.
[2]
It helped that the humanities and social sciences also
included some of the biggest and easiest undergrad majors.
If a political movement had to start with physics students,
it could never get off the ground; there would be too few of
them, and they wouldn't have the time to spare.At the top universities these majors are not as big as they
used to be, though. A
2022 survey found that only 7% of
Harvard undergrads plan to major in the humanities, vs
nearly 30% during the 1970s. I expect wokeness is at least
part of the reason; when undergrads consider majoring in
English, it's presumably because they love the written word
and not because they want to listen to lectures about
racism.[3]
The puppet-master-and-puppet character of political
correctness became clearly visible when a bakery near
Oberlin College was falsely accused of race discrimination
in 2016. In the subsequent civil trial, lawyers for the
bakery produced a text message from Oberlin Dean of Students
Meredith Raimondo that read "I'd say unleash the students if
I wasn't convinced this needs to be put behind us."[4]
The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply
treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be
the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically
far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate
voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to
explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate
publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I
still hadn't covered all the cases.[5]
In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a
hostile work environment could constitute sex
discrimination, which in turn affected universities via
Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile
environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person,
but since for a professor merely being the subject of a
sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the
complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or
remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively
forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to
Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of
things that might not be said "with ladies present."[6]
Much as they tried to pretend there was no conflict
between diversity and quality. But you can't simultaneously
optimize for two things that aren't identical. What
diversity actually means, judging from the way the term is
used, is proportional representation, and unless you're
selecting a group whose purpose is to be representative,
like poll respondents, optimizing for proportional
representation has to come at the expense of quality. This
is not because of anything about representation; it's the
nature of optimization; optimizing for x has to come at the
expense of y unless x and y are identical.[7]
Maybe societies will eventually develop antibodies to
viral outrage. Maybe we were just the first to be exposed to
it, so it tore through us like an epidemic through a
previously isolated population. I'm fairly confident that it
would be possible to create new social media apps that were
less driven by outrage, and an app of this type would have a
good chance of stealing users from existing ones, because
the smartest people would tend to migrate to it.[8]
I say "mostly" because I have hopes that journalistic
neutrality will return in some form. There is some market
for unbiased news, and while it may be small, it's valuable.
The rich and powerful want to know what's really going on;
that's how they became rich and powerful.[9]
The Times made this momentous announcement very
informally, in passing in the middle of an
article about a
Times reporter who'd been criticized for inaccuracy. It's
quite possible no senior editor even approved it. But it's
somehow appropriate that this particular universe ended with
a whimper rather than a bang.[10]
As the acronym DEI goes out of fashion, many of these
bureaucrats will try to go underground by changing their
titles. It looks like "belonging" will be a popular option.[11]
If you've ever wondered why our legal system includes
protections like the separation of prosecutor, judge, and
jury, the right to examine evidence and cross-examine
witnesses, and the right to be represented by legal counsel,
the de facto
parallel legal system
established by Title IX
makes that all too clear.[12]
The invention of new improprieties is most visible in
the rapid evolution of woke nomenclature. This is
particularly annoying to me as a writer, because the new
names are always worse. Any religious observance has to be
inconvenient and slightly absurd; otherwise gentiles would
do it too. So "slaves" becomes "enslaved individuals." But
web search can show us the leading edge of moral growth in
real time: if you search for "individuals experiencing
slavery" you will as of this writing find five legit
attempts to use the phrase, and you'll even find two for
"individuals experiencing enslavement."[13]
Organizations that do dubious things are particularly
concerned with propriety, which is how you end up with
absurdities like tobacco and oil companies having higher ESG
ratings than Tesla.[14]
Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward
though: he gave more visibility to paying users. Paying
users lean right on average, because people on the far left
dislike Elon and don't want to give him money. Elon
presumably knew this would happen. On the other hand, the
people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they
could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted
to.[15]
It even, as James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian
pointed out, has a concept of original sin: privilege. Which
means unlike Christianity's egalitarian version, people have varying
degrees of it. An able-bodied straight white
American male is born with such a load of sin that only by
the most abject repentance can he be saved.Wokeness also shares something rather funny with many actual
versions of Christianity: like God, the people for whose
sake wokeness purports to act are often revolted by the
things done in their name.[16]
There is one exception to most of these rules: actual
religious organizations. It's reasonable for them to insist
on orthodoxy. But they in turn should declare that they're
religious organizations. It's rightly considered shady
when something that appears to be an ordinary business or
publication turns out to be a religious organization.[17]
I don't want to give the impression that it will be
simple to roll back wokeness. There will be places where the
fight inevitably gets messy — particularly within
universities, which everyone has to share, yet which are
currently the most pervaded by wokeness of any institutions.[18]
You can however get rid of aggressively
conventional-minded people within an organization, and in
many if not most organizations this would be an excellent
idea. Even a handful of them can do a lot of damage. I bet
you'd feel a noticeable improvement going from a handful to
none.Thanks to Sam Altman,
Ben Miller, Daniel Gackle, Robin Hanson, Jessica
Livingston, Greg Lukianoff, Harj Taggar, Garry Tan, and Tim
Urban for reading drafts of this.