Explaining Wokism: State of the Art
The "equality thesis" and other bad or incomplete explanations don't appreciate the causal power of ideas in society.
Wokism is a thing. We knew it first as “cancel culture,” stuff like a guy getting fired from his job as a public utility worker for inadvertently forming an OK sign—White Power!—with his fingers. These events started multiplying in the mid 2010’s. There was a big, rapid change going on in the culture.
But the cancellers didn’t just come out and say all this change was good and, therefore, anyone who objected to it was wrong and bad. That would have at least set the stage for a productive debate. They denied there was any systemic change going on at all. (“What does ‘woke’ even mean?”) Wokism was the Fight Club of movements: an aggressive, activist project whose first and foremost rule was to disavow its own existence.
As a result, critics of wokism have constantly disagreed about how to define it. Many see such debates as overly theoretical and beside the point. We all know who the wokist bad guys are. Let’s not waste time theorizing. Let’s fight them. But this approach forgets what's bad about wokism in the first place—what we're trying to stop it from doing.
Wokism is bad because it is an attack on the Enlightenment core of modernity: rationality, science, progress, and all the institutions we have built up to foster these core values. We advance as a civilization first by understanding, not just by marking our enemies and declaring holy war. It is wokism that views the realm of ideas as no more than a tribal power struggle. If you disagree with that, you should have a basic curiosity about the nature of this new cluster of ideas.
One view of wokism, recently outlined by the philosopher Nathan Cofnas, is that it's rooted in a single, analytical error: the idea that all races are inherently equal in terms of their inborn abilities and tendencies. So whatever statistical IQ and personality differences we might measure must be the result of how different groups have been mistreated and left behind. And there's something to this explanation. Clearly, the equality thesis is an idea that wokists often fall back on.
But it also leaves a lot unexplained. Wokism is not a single theory. It’s built on a couple of different theories, united by some underlying sameness in approach. There’s critical race theory, which is about how Enlightenment rationality, with its proceduralist liberal order, is inadequate to address the matrix of racism that still lurks under the surface of American society. There’s postcolonial theory, the most prominent example of which today is anti-Zionism, which says that modern, liberal Israel’s real mission is to genocide the Palestinians, while Palestinian violence is to be understood as a desperate struggle for liberation and peaceful coexistence. And then there’s queer theory, which says that your own felt “gender identity” ought to trump any kind of genetic or morphological concept of “sex” in terms of how society is ordered.
These are the three biggest arrows in the woke quiver today. And it’s pretty clear that the equality thesis explanation only even applies to one of them, critical race theory. So Cofnas must believe that it’s just a coincidence these other ones emerged around the same time, from the same type of academic backwaters, and fomented the same type of irrationalist activism. That’s a bad explanation.
To explain wokism you need to understand where these three similar theories came from and what, fundamentally, they have in common. The first comprehensive account of this was given by the godfather of wokism studies, Stephen Hicks. His book Explaining Postmodernism, which predates the emergence of wokism itself, has a predictive quality to it. Written in the late 1990’s and published in 2004, it describes a shift in the intellectual world going back to the 1960’s that is now pretty clear as the common source of woke ideas. The first generation of postmodernists—Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, etc.—made an explicit break with the Enlightenment view of how the mind works and what that means for how we understand society.
As I pointed out at the time in a Quillette piece relying on Hicks’ account of these thinkers, both wokism and what I would now call “right wing populism” are postmodern movements. But there was a gap in this analysis of the origins of wokism. How did these nihilistic ideas spread and morph within modern academia into something that was capable of breaking out across popular culture?
and James Lindsay filled this gap, tracing specific channels of influence from the original postmodernists through an expanding network of tributaries that fed into the cultural activism of the 2010’s. Their key insight was that Foucault’s broad skepticism about objectivity had mutated through later generations—the critical race, postcolonial, and queer theorists—into a distinct philosophical creature.Foucault had said that Enlightenment rationality is just a mask used to cover up the power-lust of Western elites. And with rationality deposed, then anything goes! Be cool man, don’t judge people. But if, even after this revelation, a bunch of cis white men persist in judging everyone else, then what? Should you just go on letting that happen, letting the oppression continue? Obviously not. Condemn the oppression. Fight the oppressors. Reasoning with them won't do any good, because reason is just a mask. So if the oppressors want to spread their lies in public speeches, deplatform them. If they want to scurry back toward the bosom of their corporate enablers, get them fired.
Together with Hicks’ understanding of the origins of postmodernism itself, this provides a larger framework to explain many facets of woke irrationalism we observe today. And it brings out the two intellectual pillars supporting all their ahistorical, anti-scientific claims: (i) postmodern skepticism of reason as our means of gaining knowledge, coupled with (ii) total certainty in the knowledge—gained through other, non-rational means—that modern society is founded on the drive to oppress various identity groups.
This set of ideas is the core of wokism. Right off the bat, it explains that Fight Club thing where wokists refuse to acknowledge their movement even exists, having an allergic reaction to any term (like "wokism") used to describe it. Such an acknowledgement, for them, would be frightfully close to offering their own “grand narrative”—their own rational scheme for understanding the evolution of ideas through history. And that is a big pomo no-no.
Moreover, this framework explains how wokists can champion the equality thesis, despite all the empirical evidence against it. But it also explains other anti-rational ideas advocated by wokists, like “gender identity” and Hamas as a liberatory project. The equality thesis itself has nothing to say about those other ideas. It is an effect, not a basic cause, within the phenomenon of wokism.
There are others who have offered explanations of wokism that, like Cofnas’, fail to get at its essential nature. Richard Hanania argues that the real force behind it was a set of laws and government policies. Laws certainly played a role. But the creation of laws is not an irreducible event in society. And it is not irreversible, if people were to start noticing and regret the consequences. Laws are downstream of ideas and of the formation of cultural values.
Another incomplete explanation can be found in Musa al-Gharbi’s analysis of the competition between different elite factions for academic and cultural dominance. Again, this an important dimension of wokism as a social phenomenon, but it doesn’t get at the core explanatory factors. Intra-elite competition has always existed within the liberal order (and every other order). But what explains the discontinuity in our culture that any clear-eyed observer could see in the mid 2010’s? Why was the new ideological hotness so impervious to rational criticism and so cancel-happy in how it replied to the critics?
Amusingly, if you imagine what the original postmodernists would say about their own woke descendants, what you get is something like al-Gharbi's account. And indeed this critique is insightful, because there are kernels of analytical power within postmodernism. But al-Gharbi suffers from the same defect as the postmodernists: their cynical assumption that any clash of ideas is always, and at root, just a power struggle.
This is not to say that the Hicks-Pluckrose account is the last word on explaining wokism. I think it’s clearly the best such account available today. But there’s an important question it doesn’t answer—a question that arises just because of how flimsy, and easy to refute, wokism is as a social scientific theory.
Observe that proto-wokist ideas had strident opponents within academia before these ideas went on to dominate the humanities, much of the social sciences, and university bureaucracies. The Sokal Hoax, perpetrated by one such opponent, became fairly well known outside of academia in the mid 1990’s. I assume that many competent academics saw at the time exactly how hollow the woke theory of society was. And some of them clearly fought back. But they were flattened, like Wile E. Coyete, under the unstoppable, runaway locomotive of wokism. Why?
Hicks’ analysis points us toward an answer. He describes postmodernism itself as the endpoint of a long series of problematic developments within Western thought, going back to Kant. While not overtly anti-rational, these developments had their own kind of internal logic that was driving toward really out-there conclusions about the impotence of reason.
Of course, the clearest refutation of postmodernism was never about the internal logic of post-Kantian philosophy. It was about the fact that humans once lived in caves and now we live in skyscrapers, that we have invented devices to talk to each other in real-time across the planet, that we went to the Moon. The most obvious features of modernity are inexplicable within the anti-rational worldview of postmodernism. And still, the sharpest scientific thinkers, despite having thorough knowledge of all the technical progress that got us to where we are, were flattened by the pomo-locomotive.
Whatever was going on within academia that led up to this climax in the 1990’s, it somehow undermined science itself as an intellectual force. That big a change doesn’t seem like it could have been caused, out of the blue, by Foucauldian tirades about the repression of adolescent sexuality.
The capitulation of the West to postmodernism was like a man, still young and vigorous just a few years prior, coming down with pneumonia and perishing within days. The real question is not about what weird strain of pneumonia he must have contracted. It’s about what was wrong with the guy’s immune system beforehand. There was a deeper, underlying problem. He had AIDS.
Postmodernism was just the pneumonia—the final blow. But the underlying condition was a gradual deterioration of the West’s confidence in science and, ultimately, in reason itself. A series of intellectual surprises had started to accumulate in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, seeming to poke hole after hole in the ability of science to tell us the true nature of reality. This is what dispirited the heirs of the Enlightenment and made them vulnerable to that final blow.
It’s a long story, touching on various controversial issues within science and philosophy, going back decades. But I think this story is key to understanding why pro-reason thinkers were unable to keep postmodernism contained within its academic cocoon, which is what set the stage for the woke upheaval in subsequent years. I’ll go deeper into this story in future posts.