The Origins of Wokeness

I mean, I kind of understand: The discussion is going to turn into the kind of thing that HN tries to avoid. And yet, "moralities" driving things we can't talk about is the point of the essay, so it's really ironic to have it flag killed here.

Off topic: We used to be able to vouch for flagged posts, and we can't seem to do that any more. That means that flag killing is uncorrectable - if users decide that it's inappropriate, their only recourse is to email dang. That seems to me to be a step backward - let the user base correct the overreach of others in the user base.

> 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. 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.

…

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.

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.‘“

I’m linking two thoughts the essay doesn’t explicitly connect, but which I think is important to the thesis of why 2010-era cancel culture didn’t get cancelled itself, and that’s its almost autoimmune capacity to cancel comedians.

That said, Graham elides over how cancel culture was renamed “woke.” Was it the left or the right who did this? I suspect the latter, at which point we have to contend with the existence of two mind viruses, the cancel-culture/woke one and the anti-woke totem of the left.

Also, this requires more thought: “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.”

Why? And why have right-wing publications failed to gain comparable traction?