24 Comments
Jun 24, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

I think there's a lot of interesting things going on in the merging of corporate culture and woke culture, especially as an 'etiquette' for the professional class – I think a lot of the harm of woke excess comes from that merger. Even before the woke movement, corporate trainings were creepy and humiliating, and the current language policing really reminds me of having to say 'challenges' instead of 'problems' and generally contort my speech in a professional context.

I think a lot of this is out of a corporate desire to ensure obedience in employees to minimise risk for the company, and adding wokeness to it gives it a moral underpinning that is harder to rebel against. I always went for a 'cigarette break' (I don't smoke) during energisers at conferences, but you can't do that at a DEI training. Students protesting professors for ridiculous reasons is nothing new; the dominance of HR risk-aversion in university administrations causes those protests to be threatening.

This kind of corporate-approved woke behaviour is becoming a class marker for professionals, and since upper class markers by definition need to exclude the lower classes, I worry that the excesses will become stronger to keep the class barriers high.

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Jun 24, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Excellent post, as always. My one piece of criticism, though, is about the ACLU bit. Yes, they have had some internal debate about the way forward in an era of wokeness. It’s surely true that “Prominent figures within the organization have argued that the First Amendment is a tool of oppression, since it’s more easily used by the powerful than by the oppressed.” But also, the ACLU literally won the biggest Supreme Court First Amendment case in years yesterday, less than 24 hours before you posted this. Criticisms of the ACLU for going too woke often fail to acknowledge that they are still out there doing great work on the First Amendment every day. That they’re having debate over the scope of their work shouldn’t let us lose sight of the fact that they’re still the most effective defenders of the First Amendment in the courts that we have.

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I would add a couple more to your list of sources of effective, constructive anti-overreach pushback:

1. John McWhorter. He seems at times much closer to e.g. IDW types than the folks you name, but I think is clear and fair enough in his thinking to draw good distinctions.

2. Heterodox Academy and FIRE. Each in their own way helps promote liberal ideals in academe, which is disproportionately prone to illiberal overreach.

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Jun 24, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Good article on an issue it’s hard to write a nuanced article on.

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Joseph Heath has an interesting analysis of a specific illiberal woke tactic: making the claim that certain speech causes harm to my mental health, and should therefore be suppressed.

"It’s not a 'culture of victimhood,' on the contrary, it is more often an act of social aggression, since these performances of injury are typically carried out, not to attract sympathy, but rather punish and control others."

https://theline.substack.com/p/joseph-heath-woke-tactics-are-as

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I'm part of the resistance to the excesses of wokeness, and our side is being mischaracterized and stereotyped as Trump-supporting racists and the Fox News crowd. We aren't. We are truly diverse and heterodox, from all backgrounds and political orientations. We have questions, confusions and criticisms that are legitimate to us, and I want to correct the impression that we are all R's and MAGAs. Great article!

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MAGA/wokeness are both basically an alternate reality so it's scary when people believe them as they do. For example, we are teaching kids to believe there are more than two sexes now so they need extra pronouns. That is completely insane. This probably won't end well!

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I want to share this article, but… paywall. Please could we get a way to share paywalled articles? Perhaps a “pay per share” feature?

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I hadn't heard that about James Lindsay. It seems two of the most strident and high-profile anti-woke/IDW activists have gone nuts recently--Bret Weinstein has been spewing COVID conspiracy theories of late. And of course Peterson was never exactly sane. When pushing back is such a social taboo, you're going to get a disproportionate number of disturbing deviants among those who do push back. Pretty sad.

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Under #9, I was surprised you didn't mention a far more egregious case of explicit discrimination that happened in the Seattle area: the restriction of vaccine availability by race.

I hope you are right that the overreach can be reined in at the level of mainstream culture, which is finally where that battle is being fought. Unfortunately it's been fought and lost already in a huge number of subcultures, especially online ones. Science fiction and fantasy fandom has been a hardcore woke police state for a decade now (except for a small, and even far more unethical, contingent of alt-right insurgent fans).

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"I drew a connection between wokeness and Protestant Christianity, especially the Congregationalist abolitionism of the early 1800s. Seen from this perspective — which others are now picking up on " people have been making this take basically forever! I head it for years! Are you really taking credit for the observation that wokeness is just secularized christianity?

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I'm sympathetic to a number of the examples here, but two in particular seem poorly-chosen:

#6: The ACLU. As a card-carrying member, I LIKE that they occasionally go out of their way to defend a soft target of the left, out of a belief that the politically-neutral principles of civil liberties in one case are what are important to defend, rather than following the ever-shifting sands of political fashions. That goes back to Skokie v Illinois, and probably earlier. They do ALL SORTS of important litigation in women's rights, racial discrimination, everything up and down the politically-charged spectrum from abortion to the "license raj". Forgive me if a quick-hit take by the NYT does not persuade me as much as it persuades you - I actually follow them, because my money goes there. I am as unconcerned about their strategic direction as I was when I first started giving them money as a (poor) college student.

#10: Racial sensitivity training. Merely being asked to read a bestselling book explaining some of the emotional drivers behind some of the ongoing cultural forces preserving white supremacy seems like an extremely reasonable way to use the opportunity of a training course. Such courses are not a place to just feel warm and fuzzy and avoid having your preconceived notions challenged. "They made white people feel awkward!" is not a critique; if anything, it's an argument in favor. It may not be an *optimal* course design, but if every white person in America read some (say) Ta-Nehisi Coates, we'd all be better off.

Moreover, including Jews is arguable both ways, and if the goal is to bring an understanding to everyone about cultural forces we all have a default blindness about, it seems reasonable. To quote a recent JWeekly article from Noah's neck of the woods,

“When we, as Jews, only see ourselves (or Israel) as exclusively powerful, we belittle Israel’s security concerns and disregard the real ways antisemitism manifests across the U.S. political spectrum. And when we see ourselves only as vulnerable, we are blind to the significant ways Jews wield real power both in Israel and the United States, translating into policies that cause real suffering.”

https://www.jweekly.com/2021/06/21/berkeleys-housing-crisis-has-nothing-to-do-with-israel/

Sensitivity trainings can find this balance without being bad-faith or antisemitic a la James Lindsay. Seems like a poorly-chosen item to make your case with.

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