Where Did Wokeness Come From?
On the origins of wokeness by means of political correctness
The entrepreneur and essayist Paul Graham has a fantastic new essay on the origins and evolution of wokeness. Below is my summary of the key points, along with a selection of excerpts. It’s only the bird’s-eye view, though, so I’d strongly encourage you to read the essay in full - almost every sentence is informative and insightful. When you’re done with that, if you haven’t seen it already, check out my recent post exploring Ten New Findings on Wokeness.
1. Wokeness is the latest manifestation of a common trend in human nature, namely moral priggishness.
There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.
2. Wokeness is political correctness on steroids. It began in the late 1980s, was in retreat by the late 1990s, then sprang back to life in the 2010s.
3. Political correctness began in the universities.
[W]here in universities did it begin? Did it begin in math, or the hard sciences, or engineering, and spread from there to the humanities and social sciences? Those are amusing images, but no, obviously it began in the humanities and social sciences.
4. The humanities and social sciences were the petri dish in which political correctness grew, for the simple reason that it’s easier to inject politics into those fields than into fields like physics or chemistry.
5. The ideas animating political correctness first arose in the 1960s, but didn’t take root till their adherents gained political power several decades later.
The reason the student protests of the 1960s didn’t lead to political correctness was precisely that — they were student movements. They didn’t have any real power…
But in the early 1970s the student protestors of the 1960s began to finish their dissertations and get hired as professors. At first they were neither powerful nor numerous. But as more of their peers joined them and the previous generation of professors started to retire, they gradually became both.
6. Wokeness involves arcane rules with little in the way of underlying principles.
Imagine having to explain to a well-meaning visitor from another planet why using the phrase “people of color” is considered particularly enlightened, but saying “colored people” gets you fired. And why exactly one isn’t supposed to use the word “negro” now, even though Martin Luther King used it constantly in his speeches. There are no underlying principles. You’d just have to give him a long list of rules to memorize.
7. One important contributor to the rise of wokeness is that the things moralizers traditionally moralized about were no longer considered taboo.
Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex. But among the cultural elite these were the deadest of dead letters by the 1980s... So the sort of people who enjoy being moral enforcers had become starved of things to enforce. A new set of rules was just what they’d been waiting for.
8. Wokeness is more popular with women than men.
As many writers (perhaps most eloquently George Orwell) have observed, women seem more attracted than men to the idea of being moral enforcers.
9. With the broadening of the concept of sexual harassment, unwelcome ideas starting getting censored on the grounds that they created a hostile environment.
Was it sexist to propose that Darwin’s greater male variability hypothesis might explain some variation in human performance? Sexist enough to get Larry Summers pushed out as president of Harvard, apparently. One woman who heard the talk in which he mentioned this idea said it made her feel “physically ill” and that she had to leave halfway through... And yet it does seem plausible that greater male variability explains some of the variation in human performance. So which should prevail, comfort or truth? Surely if truth should prevail anywhere, it should be in universities… but for decades starting in the late 1980s the politically correct tried to pretend this conflict didn’t exist.
10. The political correctness of the 1990s eventually petered out, in part because people started ridiculing it.
Political correctness... offered rich material for comedians, who performed their usual disinfectant action upon it. Humor is one of the most powerful weapons against priggishness of any sort, because prigs, being humorless, can’t respond in kind. Humor was what defeated Victorian prudishness, and by 2000 it seemed to have done the same thing to political correctness.
11. But it didn’t last. A much more virulent strain of political correctness arose in the 2010s, in what Matthew Yglesias dubbed the Great Awokening.
Why did it happen when it did? My guess is that it was due to the rise of social media, particularly Tumblr and Twitter, because one of the most distinctive features of the second wave of political correctness was the cancel mob: a mob of angry people uniting on social media to get someone ostracized or fired…
One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged.
12. Another contributor to the Great Awokening was the increasing polarization of the media.
When your market was determined by geography, you had to be neutral. But 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… Meanwhile journalists, of a sort, had arisen to serve the right as well. And so journalism, which in the previous era had been one of the great centralizing forces, now became one of the great polarizing ones.
13. Unlike the original political correctness, the new version - Political Correctness 2.0 or wokeness - was often driven and enforced by professionals.
By 2010 a new class of administrators had arisen whose job was basically to enforce wokeness. They played a role similar to that of the political commissars who got attached to military and industrial organizations in the USSR…
This new class of bureaucrats pursued a woke agenda as if their jobs depended on it, because they did. If you hire people to keep watch for a particular type of problem, they’re going to find it, because otherwise there’s no justification for their existence… Many were involved in hiring, and when possible they tried to ensure their employers hired only people who shared their political beliefs. The most egregious cases were the new “DEI statements” that some universities started to require from faculty candidates, proving their commitment to wokeness.
14. Wokeness peaked in 2020, in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder. It’s now once again receding.
How does this kind of cycle ever end? Eventually it leads to disaster, and people start to say enough is enough. The excesses of 2020 made a lot of people say that…
[I]n retrospect this turned out to be peak woke, or close to it. By every measure I’ve seen, wokeness peaked in 2020 or 2021.
15. How should we deal with wokeness? One important practice would be to treat it as we treat religion.
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…
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.
One shouldn’t feel bad about not wanting to watch woke movies any more than one would feel bad about not wanting to listen to Christian rock.
For criticisms of this approach, see item 42 of this post by Astral Codex Ten.
16. To prevent future outbreaks of aggressive moralism, we should have a very high bar for accepting that any widespread practice or idea should suddenly be off limits.
[W]hen the aggressively conventional-minded go on the rampage they always do one thing that gives them away: they define new heresies to punish people for. So the best way to protect ourselves from future outbreaks of things like wokeness is to have powerful antibodies against the concept of heresy.
We should have a conscious bias against defining new forms of heresy. Whenever anyone tries to ban saying something that we’d previously been able to say, our initial assumption should be that they’re wrong… [T]he burden of proof is on them. In liberal democracies, people trying to prevent something from being said will usually claim they’re not merely engaging in censorship, but trying to prevent some form of “harm”. And maybe they’re right. But once again, the burden of proof is on them. It’s not enough to claim harm; they have to prove it.
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My real issue with Graham’s post is that he removed his left blinder and kept the right one firmly in place, failing to discuss wokeness as a problem on both sides of the political spectrum. There are prigs on the left (wokegressives) and prigs on the right (wokeservatives). I don't disagree with many of Graham's points about prigs and the harm they can do, but he only applied them to the prigs his half-blinders allowed him to see.
Graham could have done better by pointing out that prigs have emerged from both sides of the spectrum. Some examples:
Graham rightly calls out DEI statements as wokegressive loyalty tests, but overlooks the wokeservative's loyalty test: Did Donald Trump win the 2020 election? The only difference is the right's test is oral, not written. Points for efficiency.
He correctly calls out wokegressives for censoring writers and scientists but doesn't address wokeservative's efforts to pull books from library shelves, boycott retailers, or censor classroom curricula that don't align with its own ideology - often based on Christian beliefs.
He accurately points out the danger of prig mobs becoming aligned on an ideology but doesn't mention Project 2025, the self-proclaimed wokeservative manifesto and political blueprint for the current administration that rallies its troops around the same themes as the wokegressive movement:
Theme 1: You are victims of an oppressive system, rigged against you, and run by powerful elites.
"America’s corporate and political elites do not believe in the ideals to which our nation is dedicated...Instead, they believe in a kind of 21st century Wilsonian order in which the “enlightened,” highly educated managerial elite runs things rather than the humble, patriotic working families who make up the majority of what the elites contemptuously call “fly-over country."
Theme 2: We who hold the truth must become socially and politically active to first destroy the system, then rebuild it to bring it in line with how we think it should work.
"Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives
to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State."
Wokeservatives, like wokegressives, define truth, claim ownership of the only acceptable values, then prescribe consequences for the heretics. Consider this excerpt:
"Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered."
Regardless of your thoughts about porn (I'm not a fan), that's some next-level cancelation. Wokegressives block your presentation, cancel your professorship, and shame you off social media. Wokeservatives throw you in jail, legally label you for life, and close your business.
Graham's intentions are good, but he's mistaken to present wokeness as only a wokegressive problem. He’s even more mistaken to assume that wokeness is now in check since wokegressives have been put in their place.
Although Graham is correct to encourage us to be vigilant in spotting and stopping the next wave of wokeness, his remaining blinder keeps him from seeing that that ship has already sailed, and this time it's turning right.
In a hyper polarized world, fueled by identity politics and algorithm-driven outrage, it's important to remember that blinders - ours and everyone else's - come in sets. Removing half the set allows you to solve only half the problem. Best to remove the whole set and solve the whole prig problem.