Why woke failed
Michael Shermer at Persuasion writes:
A research proposal on cosmic inflation from an acclaimed German quantum physicist is rejected because she did not address the relevance of her findings to “sex, gender, and diversity.” Could it be because… there is none?
A respected peer-reviewed physics journal publishes a paper on introductory physics courses that identifies whiteboards as complicit “with white organizational cultures, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.” No mention of blackboards.
A collection of 67 papers published in the Journal of Chemical Education includes “Decolonizing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum” and “Integrating Antiracism, Social Justice and Equity Themes in a Biochemistry Class.” What’s next—the Periodic Table of Intersectional Elements?
And we wonder why faith in institutions is falling.
We have made so much moral progress since the Enlightenment—particularly since the civil rights and women’s rights movements that launched the modern campus protest movement in the first place—that our standards of what is intolerable have been ratcheted ever upward to the point where many people are hypersensitive to things that, by comparison, didn’t even appear on the cultural radar half a century ago. Thus it is that modern moral crusaders have forgotten how far we’ve come since the abolition of slavery, the elimination of the death penalty in most countries, the franchise for all adult citizens, children’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, and even the rights of future generations to inhabit a livable planet. In other words, most of the big moral movements have been fought and won, leaving today’s moral crusaders with comparatively smaller causes to promote and evils to protest, resulting in demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings, and paroxysms thrown over microaggressions and misgendering trans people.
The fight for mandatory trigger warnings!
In his magisterial overview of this movement, The End of Woke, Andrew Doyle documents that most of the claims made by far-left progressives are endorsed by a slim margin of people—only around 8% of the population of both the UK and the United States, according to a poll conducted by the organization More in Common.
But they get backed by a complaint or scared media, and kowtowing corporates.
The liberal tradition that evolved out of the Enlightenment is grounded in individual autonomy. It is the individual who is the primary moral agent because it is the individual who survives and flourishes, or who suffers and dies. It is individual sentient beings who perceive, emote, respond, love, feel, and suffer—not populations, races, genders, groups, or nations. Historically, immoral abuses have been most rampant, and body counts have run the highest, when the individual is sacrificed for the good of the group. Rights protect individuals, not groups; in fact, most rights (such as those enumerated in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution) protect individuals from being discriminated against as members of a group, such as by race, creed, color, gender, and sexual orientation.
Contrary to this liberal tradition, collectivism holds that individuals are expendable parts of a larger whole: the band, tribe, state, nation, religion, class, race, ethnicity, gender, and countless intersectional variations on these collective cohorts. As such, individual identity is lost to what Andrew Doyle calls identitarian collectivism, for which “the illiberal left and the authoritarian right both share this habitual inclination towards collective thinking.”
Spot on.