Where Does Woke Ideology Come From?
Let's ask Michael Huemer.
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 22 of Michael Huemer’s new book, Progressive Myths. Though I’ve included much of the chapter below, I’ve left out some of the best parts - designated by […].1
22 The Roots of Wokism
I named this book "Progressive Myths" because "progressive" seemed like the best brief name for a perspective that includes all the myths in the previous chapters. I didn't call it "Woke Myths" because that leaves out the myths of Parts V-VI. Nevertheless, most of our myths have been woke myths. So it is interesting to ask where woke ideology came from.
A. Origins of the Civil Rights Movement
In 1960's America, there were two looming political issues that concerned liberal people: the war in Vietnam and civil rights. Many faculty and especially students on college campuses were strongly opposed to the Vietnam War. More importantly for our story, they were strongly opposed to the rampant racism in American society.
The civil rights leaders were not worried about microaggressions or unconscious biases; indeed, they would surely have laughed at the sort of concerns raised by contemporary progressives. Before the Civil Rights Movement, no one needed academic training or special sensitivity to find racism;
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The movement was particularly successful with intellectuals, particularly on college campuses, due to the actual serious injustices it opposed. The movement quickly brought enormous progress toward equality and respect for the rights of all individuals in America. Segregation was repealed, and racial discrimination (along with discrimination based on sex, nationality, and religion) was banned by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Over the next few decades, attitudes of average Americans shifted radically away from racism…
B. The Drive to Keep the Movement Alive
Overall, the success of the Civil Rights Movement was an enormous win for American values. But a side effect of the movement was the politicization of college campuses, where many of the protests against racism and the Vietnam War had occurred. That established in people's minds the idea that activism and taking stances on current political issues were major parts of the business of a college student or professor. Many of the left-wing student activists of the 1960's would become professors by the 1970’s.
It is also crucial to understand the emotional significance of these movements for their participants. Human beings have a powerful need for a sense of meaning and a sense of community, both of which have eroded in modern times. Religion has historically provided those things, but religion has been on the wane for decades. Political ideology has arisen as a secular substitute for religion. Participation in a movement for social justice feels deeply meaningful, and it gives one a community centered around a common goal. An ideology may also give one a satisfyingly simple way of dividing the world into "good" people and "bad" people. Thus, the protestors of the 1960's were not merely improving society; they were also satisfying profound needs of their own psyches.
Suppose that what I have said is true, and imagine for a moment that the political movements in question were to succeed. What if they actually changed society in exactly the ways they wanted to? If they were to recognize that that had happened, they would presumably have to end the movement. Given the importance of the movement in their lives, all the incentives would be for them not to recognize that. So as the supply of injustices dwindles, the demand for "injustices" grows increasingly desperate.
In the case of the Vietnam War, it would be pretty hard to refuse to recognize that the war is over. But the case of racism is another story. Racism did not end decisively at a discrete time, as the Vietnam War did. There were landmark events, such as the passage of the Civil Rights Act, but they left behind some racism that one could reasonably continue to oppose. The racism in American attitudes only gradually declined over a period of decades. This gave activists and theorists on the left plenty of time to adjust.
What they did was to gradually move the goalposts. They ramped up their demands, and they developed increasingly sensitive racism detectors and increasingly sophisticated accounts of how one facet or another of American life that seemed innocuous to the hoi polloi was really a form of "white supremacy" or other bigotry. After working on this project for the last half century, academics have arrived at positions unrecognizable to the original civil rights protestors. No longer content with ending discrimination against women and blacks, for example, they now demand increasingly extreme discrimination in favor of women and blacks. Not content with saying that blacks are equal to whites and women equal to men, they now argue in essence that blacks are morally better than whites and women morally better than men.
Aside: If you talk to a woke person, they will no doubt deny that they are anti-white or anti-male. Here is a thought experiment to gauge how you should receive that denial. Imagine you have a professor whose lessons always seem to have something to do with wrongs committed by Jews. The historical events he is interested in all seem to be times that Jews exploited or oppressed gentiles. His take on any contemporary issue always seems to somehow connect it to evils committed by Jews. Yet he swears, hand on his heart, that he is no anti-Semite; he is just very committed to protecting the rights of gentiles. What would you think of this?
I hope you would agree that the guy is an obvious anti-Semite; he's only denying it because he knows that it is socially bad to be labeled an "anti-Semite", and he's hoping that a bare denial will fool you.
If the anti-Semite's denial wouldn't fool you, you shouldn't be fooled by woke ideologues either. They are obviously anti-white, anti-male, anti-American, etc., bigots. Everything about their ideology telegraphs this constantly, and everyone but them can see it.
In 2018, by the way, a group of academics was able to get a paper titled "Our Struggle Is My Struggle" accepted for publication in the feminist social work journal Affilia. The paper contained a rewritten version of a 3600-word passage from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf, with modifications to make the passage about "feminism" and "privilege" instead of "National Socialism" and "Jews". With these changes, it apparently fit right into the woke academic discourse.
C. How the Academy Works
(1) The importance of peer approval
The academy is the original source of the ideas of wokism. To understand how the movement for civil rights evolved into wokism, one must understand a few things about how the academic world works. In the academy, the humanities and social sciences are filled with high-IQ people who are accountable mainly to each other, not to objective reality. That is, their success depends almost entirely on their ability to impress each other with their complex ideas, verbal gymnastics, and displays of loyalty, not on their ability to achieve practical results in the outside world. This is the ideal sort of person to devise rationalizations to keep a political movement alive. If you have decades to work on it and you put thousands of people with PhD's on the task, you can come up with a way that anything is racist especially if you're ready to play fast and loose with empirical facts.
Aside: Why are the natural sciences different from the humanities and social sciences? Mainly because the natural sciences have more decisive ways of finding things out; practitioners' reputations are thus influenced more by whether they actually get things right. The humanities and social sciences have some ways of figuring things out, but they are less reliable and more dependent on subjective judgment, making it relatively more important to know how to impress people and less important to be objectively correct. In addition, the natural sciences deal far less often with politically charged questions; thus, there is less opportunity for political bias to influence decisions (though as we have seen in the last few chapters, there are times when natural science becomes politicized, to its detriment).
So the left-wing professors after the 1960's have kept the movement for "social justice" alive. Each generation of professors teaches the next generation the current theories of how America is horrifyingly oppressive. The new crop of academics then compete with each other to take the radical theorizing to greater extremes. Though academics like to style ourselves as bold innovators always open to new ideas, the truth is that our profession rewards timid people who swallow their field's intellectual orthodoxy so completely that the only sort of "challenge" they can contemplate is to take the orthodoxy's assumptions to an even greater extreme.
One reason why this is true is the sheer amount of peer evaluation involved in being an academic. Whenever one tries to publish a paper (which one must do periodically to keep one's job as an academic researcher), that paper will be reviewed by one or two peer reviewers in addition to the editor. Because journals get a lot more submissions than they have space to publish, the editor is looking for a reason to reject your paper. If a reviewer disagrees with your viewpoint, that is very likely to lead to some negative comments from the reviewer, which will lead to a rejection. Knowing this, you have every incentive to try to conform to your field's orthodoxy, to the extent that it has one. The theory behind peer review is that it maintains intellectual quality, and that is indeed part of what it does certain kinds of incompetence are screened out. But it also helps to enforce intellectual orthodoxy.
This dynamic does not just operate in academic publishing. Virtually all advancement for a young academic requires getting recommendations from established academics—and hence requires young academics to curry favor with the old guard. Every time an academic is reviewed for tenure, their school will solicit evaluations from several well-known academics in their field (at my school, a minimum of six letters from outside reviewers are required, and we usually have more). If the field has an orthodoxy, these well-known academics will typically be among the developers and advocates of that orthodoxy. Therefore, again, it behooves a young academic to conform.
The same process occurs whenever an academic is considered for a prize, for a promotion, or for a job at another university (all things to which many academics aspire).
(2) Data on ideological discrimination
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(3) Anecdotes of ideological discrimination
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(4) The pinnacle of discrimination: the diversity statement
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(5) A little discrimination goes a long way
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(6) The failure of tenure
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(7) Groupthink
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23 How Myths Thrive
In the last chapter, we saw some of why contemporary progressive ideology has the content that it has. Let us now try to understand why political myths are so widespread in modern times. Most of what I say here will apply to the myths spread by all political ideologies, not just progressivism.
A. Motivated Reasoning
When people think about politics, they are rarely just trying to figure out the truth. Rather, they have certain positions that they want to hold for various reasons that are independent of the truth of those positions.
(1) Self-image construction
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(2) Tribal signaling
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(3) Police beliefs are not normal beliefs
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(4) How to tell what activists really want
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B. The Role of the Internet
(1) The free media business model
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(2) The internet exacerbates the problems of modern media
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(3) Political myths win
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C. Ideological Defense Systems
Chapter 23 is even better than Chapter 22.
I haven’t read chapters 1-21 yet, but these two chapters alone were worth the price of the book. For a more thorough review of Prof. Huemer’s book, check out Bryan Caplan’s review.
Including all of the excellent footnotes.
"Political ideology has arisen as a secular substitute for religion."
I think it is Jordan Peterson that explains spirituality as a human need that science cannot satiate because there are and always will be too many unexplained things about human life and the natural environment, and there is this thing called death that humans can contemplate... and it happens relatively soon in their lifespan which is really tiny compared the timespan of the universe.
Peterson says something like... since we can contemplate our own looming death, if we don't have some calming belief system to subscribe to, we will become neurotic and anxious and look for placebos for our discomfort.
I'd like to hear more about your idea of the "rampant racism in American society," as it sounds as if you've bought into one of the most harmful Woke myths by asserting that that racism exists.
As far as I'm concerned, show me a BIPOC person who complains of discrimination, and I'll show you a bigot who believes he is above all criticism and entitled to special treatment just because he is BIPOC. He is almost certainly an economic failure, and the real reason is the huge and visible chip that he carries around on his shoulder day after day. But he's too self-righteous to dump it.