Whence Wokeness?
The origin story that’s never been told.
The following passage is excerpted from a longer piece I am currently writing, in which I trace the genesis of wokeness/political correctness to the year 1990, the same year which saw the fall of Soviet Communism, ushering in what writer Francis Fukuyama called “the end of history.”
It is my thesis that the start of the plague of ‘PC’ and the end of the Cold War are concomitant events, with a causal connection.
Opposition to “media bias” is not wrong, it just doesn’t take the critique nearly far enough.
Instead, those who focus on media bias tend to be relentlessly reactive, paying inordinate attention to the latest “current thing” while never taking a wider perspective on the accumulated controversies of the last 35 years, and asking, “When did all of this relentless propagandizing on behalf of causes subversive of all things decent, normal, and reasonable begin, and why?”
Decriers of media bias are forever noting how the majority of people are declaring that, “This whole political correctness/SJW-ism/wokeism thing has gone too far,” but never asking why, given its perennial unpopularity, this “thing” never seems to go away. The critiquers of wokeness mostly seem content with expressing outrage over each new iteration of this generally hated trend, as if each new culture war skirmish were completely divorced from the innumerable deary controversies which preceded it. In many cases, this is probably due to the fact that anti-wokeness is a workable business model, one which relies upon the persistence of its counterpart in order to survive as a reliable generator of wealth.
It wouldn’t be fair, however, to carelessly or promiscuously accuse antiwoke individuals and organizations as “grifters,” an already heavily overused and unimaginative epithet flung around all too carelessly whenever chronically online people indulge in invective. Many commentators simply lack the capacity or the inclination to focus on “root” causes.
Others do so, but are woefully obtuse in their analysis, invariably landing on something like, “Wokeism is just Communism dressed up in a slightly different guise.” The Communism comparison is, I’m afraid, just lazy, and also largely wrong.
It is true that the Communist mentality was totalitarian and nefarious in orientation, much like wokeism. But Communism always deferred to an authority (the “Party”), which saw fit to alter itself at will, depending on circumstances. The Party would switch from one position to its exact opposite literally overnight, like when, following the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact in 1939, Hitler suddenly went from Enemy to Ally.
While wokeness alters in form over time in certain respects, mostly with regard to the issues it emphasizes at a given juncture, it doesn’t defer to a central authority analogous to “the Party,” even though (like Communism) it values complete ideological uniformity at all times. That, in fact, may be its most striking feature. A person might hold to nearly every tenet of that is deemed to be “woke,” but if he dissents on even one thing he is treated as if he were a traitor to the cause (see so-called TERFs, the most prominent being JK Rowling, who has assumed the aura of a dissident from wokedom, even though she agrees with just about all of it save the notion that men can be women).
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Wokeness has been mocked often, and this is understandable, since its claims are absurd and its adherents are very often utterly humorless. Most people find it irritating or perhaps even appalling, not because they necessarily aren’t supportive of at least some of the causes it champions, but because wokeness demands fealty and punishes dissent through such heavy-handed tactics as doxxing, de-banking, and generally seeking the ruination of those identified as ideologically unfit. In many Western nations today, wokeness has taken hold to such a degree that even saying the “wrong” thing can get a person fined or even jailed.
The question of how wokeness has seized both hearts and minds as well as numerous power citadels is one I took up in an earlier book, now out of print, called The Psychology of Liberalism (2002).
That book, though admittedly dated, gets to the heart of the matter, but so does another essential, albeit even more dated, work on this subject, Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed (1995). Sowell remarks that those who have the perspective that is today called “woke”— at the time he wrote it was called “political correctness” or “PC”— tend to view themselves as more exalted beings than their fellow humans; they obtain a self-congratulatory boost from being, as they view it, “on the right side of history.” Thus, they feel themselves to be “anointed” in a special way, which relieved them of having to abide by traditional notions of right and wrong: the anointed ones possessed such an abundance of gnosis, in fact, simply from their choice to embrace the ideology which put them “on the right side of history,” that they gave themselves permission to do whatever was necessary to remake society in the manner that suited them: the ends justify the means.
But the question of what accounts for the psychological appeal of embracing wokeness, especially amongst the wealthy, educated, and privileged, where it is especially prevalent, isn’t the focus of this extended essay.
My aim here isn’t to investigate the mindset of those who choose to promote these notions, a subject that I believe that both myself and other writers including Sowell have exhaustively scrutinized.
What I instead hope to address is something far less often discussed, but of immense importance: namely, how political correctness/wokeness became the defining ideology of the West, adopted by opinion-shapers far and wide, funded by GMOs, institutions of higher learning, and corporations to the point where opposing its claims marks a person as sort of modern-day “heretic,” an embattled dissident who not infrequently finds himself socially ostracized and financially imperiled, if not actually fined and/or imprisoned, all for not hewing to the prescribed ideology of the age.