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Mar 24, 2022Liked by Richard Hanania

I sure hope you're right! Though I also hope it will take less time to collapse than the USSR or CCP.

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Mar 24, 2022Liked by Richard Hanania

If we say that wokeness is religious superficially - it has its icons (George Floyd), its mantras (#BLM), its taboos (the N-word), its rituals (taking the knee) - then the theory is appealing superficially. But I agree with the article that there's been no test of its longevity, and no genuine, real pushback - and most importantly it's not been abandoned by the elites. Soviet communism was. And, closer to the here and now, COVID was, and here I think we have the best parallel with wokism.

Barring a few holdout areas of the country, COVID is over. It's not over because cases are at some kind of all-time low, nor even especially close to an all-time low. It's not over because the health care curve has been flattened to all-time lows, nor especially close. It's not over because death rates are declining, in fact in many cases it's the exact opposite. It's over because a lot of COVID hysterics got bored with it and moved on, and normal people had already moved on, and above all because elites knew which way the wind was blowing and saw that they were losing the audience.

The same thing will be true of wokeness, I believe. What, are the Democratic Party going to let BLM and the trans lobby dominate their social agenda for the rest of the decade? No. Why would they? If wokism has little to give the average man or woman on the street, it has less to give the culturally dominant political party, given just how unpopular it is. Hence it'll be dropped as soon as it's convenient.

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Mar 25, 2022Liked by Richard Hanania

More extreme political ideologies that stand out within their societies seem much weaker than religion, but I think you're ignoring the really dominant political ideologies (perhaps for the same reason fish rarely notice water; we don't even think of them as ideologies, just facts). Liberal democracy, for example, or egalitarianism, seem as durable as Christianity. They've survived for centuries and their replacement with something else in the foreseeable future seems as unlikely as a societal change of religion. We can probably be reasonably confident our great grandchildren will be liberal democrats and support the notion of political equality.

Is doesn't strike me as so implausible that after wokeness becomes dominant, its beliefs will become political facts like those of liberal democracy, and ideas like moral individualism and race/gender neutrality will seem as absurd and unjust forever thereafter as the idea of monarchy or aristocracy seem to us today.

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I'm gonna come down on the "Woke is stronger than you think" side of this because it is a sturdy synthesis of both the political religion of Marxism (with of course the proletariat swapped out for Marcuse's coalition of the marginalized) while also being a new branch of American Protestantism (with Whiteness replacing Original Sin, and with the Victim class playing the roles of the Elect, Jesus (they do suffer for our sins!) and the meek who shall inherit the earth).

It really covers all the bases in a totalizing way--political program, spiritual crusade, status marker, jobs program, therapeutic succor, a new clerisy a la the Nobles of the Robe, cheap and easy virtue and moral superiority, plus the unbeatable social glue of having a shared Satan: the evil white man and his history of oppression.

And, last but not least, it gives the same sheen of moral legitimacy to the globalist class that Christianity provided to various prior plunderers like the conquistadors (Give me all your gold--and I will give you this wooden cross!)

Also, I don't know how much time any of you spend with the young creatives of NY/LA/SF but this is their fundamentalist religion (they are all Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Phone) and they are making sure to spread the good news in any and every book, movie, play, show, etc, so they have the propaganda angle locked down.

Either way, whether they enjoy a 1000-yr reign or die off like the Hittites, much wreckage will be left in the wake.

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Mar 24, 2022Liked by Richard Hanania

"Wokeness" is sort of a vague term which encompasses a number of ideas that became more popular during the 2010s, and who I think vary in their capacity for staying power. In particular, I think the racial justice aspect of wokeness probably *doesn't* have very much staying power: we can see that historically in the US racial justice comes in waves which then recede, and also in a world where memes compete globally a focus on US racial issues, which are different from those of other countries, is simply uncompetitive.

The aspects regarding sexuality seem different and more vigorous to me. They're much newer -- nobody ever even conceived of gay marriage before the 1970s -- and have very quickly spread to become law in a whole array of cultures, with polling showing more and more people sympathetic to these ideas even in places where they're heavily suppressed, like the Islamic world or China. (Russia in my understanding is alone in bucking the trend). This aspect feels much more like a religion, with it (for example) convincing parents to castrate children and whatever else, or used to paint foreign groups as barbarous.

Why this might be the case deserves further study. I've heard it suggested that people are now literally gayer (because of pollutants or something); I'm not sure there's actually evidence for this from polling but that would provide a powerful explanation for the trend. We continue to have no idea at all where homosexuality comes from, apart from the details of very low identical-twin concordance (so probably not genetic) and no syndromic homosexuality (so probably not caused by any pathogen we know of).

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Stripping away government power from Wokeness is worth doing. If Wokeness survives anyway, it will be weaker and less of a threat. That would be a big gain.

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Mar 24, 2022Liked by Richard Hanania

Christianity makes some assertions about the world which can be falsified or confirmed. For example, we can get evidence that suggests that humans have been on earth for longer than 6,000 years and evidence that we evolved from non-human ancestors. The evidence has become overwhelming, and so the doctrine of Christianity has modified itself to incorporate these ideas into it's theory -- if we treat radical fundamental Christianity as a hypothesis, it would be nearly falsified due to the evidence, but it morphs into something else--a more science incorporating Christianity.

A lot of theology has to do with the nature of God and the history of certain actions which are difficult to verify. Christianity and science make predictions which contradict but Christianity in some form can persist because it involves a lot of metaphysical not-so-easily-disproved claims bolstered with a concept of "faith"--which seems to mean just leap over the probabilities.

One issue with critical social justice advocacy is that it makes a lot of empirical claims about the world even if they are not particularly well-defined or measured. Some claims are immediately preposterous. I think that people can see clearly there is a physical advantage to being male and that men and women have different psychological profiles. But a lot of thinking on current issues acts as if that is not the case.

Just imagine asking critical social justice advocates questions about human psychology: are some people smarter than others?; are some people naturally harder working?; are some people pre-disposed toward aggression or criminality? why do women like children more than men?; do you think young boys might have a natural non-socially constructed impulse to like fighting, machinery, action figures, etc.? You can look into research into this! One of the most replicated findings among behavioral geneticists is that all behavioral traits are heritable. This is also just clearly obvious. Women are smaller and less strong than men, then is obvious and the data backs it up.

Christianity can continue to function without aggressiveness. I think that because critical social justice is so clearly false in so many domains--in ways that are so obvious that you don't have to investigate the research--it must suppress dissent. It must have a focus on platforming. It must snitch on people and enforce it's will. It's advocates have to use their neuroticism and cancellation threats as a disincentive from engaging with them. There are true believers but there are a lot of people who resent the current state of affairs and keep their mouth shut. I don't think it's so sustainable.

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"Wokeness has no history of surviving without state support."

Nonsense. What "state support" is there for wokeness in... Italy? Portugal? Finland?

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/6/7/mapping-anti-racism-solidarity-protests-around-the-world

Wokeness is cant not just in America, but in Taiwan and mainland China, as well. It's not cant in Russia, yet... but for how long? Wokeness over the past eleven years has, in my view, proven to be a virtually unstoppable juggernaut, requiring not just lack of active state promotion, but active state suppression. Luckily, Russia is doing a bit of that -though not nearly enough.

Do you remember Elevatorgate? Bunnygate? How was any of that due to state support?

"Wokeness remains mostly a political loser for the left"

Is it? What poll shows the Republicans doing better than the Democrats on race, trans, gay issues? Sure, issue by issue wokeness might not be popular, but, so far, it has not been a shackle on the electoral fortunes of the Democrats.

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"Wokeness, unlike religion, does not appear to be able to motivate its adherents to make the extreme kinds of sacrifices that are the hallmark of true religious faith. It can’t even convince liberals to keep their kids in inner city public schools."

Wokeness has managed convince liberals to castrate their children. That's a pretty big sacrifice!

"One secret to the success of religion, however, is that it offers something to both sexes, which allows for family formation, intergenerational transfers of faith, and ultimately the building of communities."

The past environment favored mitochondrial transmission of memes from parent to child or generation to generation, so Progressivism would not have been able to survive then (and indeed, various proto-Progressive Christian heresies, like the Cathars or the Diggers/Levellers, showed up in premodern Europe but didn't make it very far). Current communications technology (particularly the Internet and social media) very strongly favors horizontal transmission, from peer to peer, so an ideology no longer needs to allow for the formation of families and communities to survive. It can steal the families and children of the less susceptible. Secular liberals have been doing this to religious conservatives for centuries, and now the process is massively sped up. Look at the social beliefs of Zoomers, or even all the various anecdotes from various conservative politician's kids signaling how progressive they are (like Mitch McConnell's daughter talking about the need to pass the Voting Rights Act).

I make this case in longer form here: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/memetic-evolution-and-progressivism?

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The basic problem with this article is that it assumes that wokeness is new, but wokeness is not new. The very fact that "its fundamental tenets have been law in the United States for over half a century" should tell you it is not new, but actually it is quite a bit older than that too. See here for more details. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/persuasion-and-the-mensheviks?s=r

The chief strength of this article is that it correctly cuts through all the b.s. and recognises that wokeness is a 'mystery cult of power'. Problem is that you are not actually going to 'undo the excesses of civil rights law' now or ever, and while the system of government that produces wokeness appears to be totally dysfunctional and begging to be put out of its misery, it has looked that way for some time, and it always pulls through. Here is the real black pill: in inter-state conflict mendacious insanity is adaptive.

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Mar 24, 2022·edited Mar 24, 2022

You came close to touching on this but a successful religion- or ANY successful idea- is one that causes its adherents to be reproductively successful. Woke people have few children and rely on indoctrinating the children of conservatives.

If Americans total fertility rate (TFR) is 1.6, I guess the Woke Fertility Rate (WFR) is closer to 1. Its a declining group of people and even if they indoctrinate everyone in America, that's also a declining group. Thats why wokeness won't survive long term but Islam will.

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1) I always cringe a bit at people calling things religions. Because in a mostly secular age it's a lazy and indirect way of calling a group of people crazy. (deserved or not) You're probably right that it's not really worthwhile to prove that wokeness comes from a particular type of christianity. It's worth noting that most all belief systems have adjacency to other belief systems.

2) We can decompose historic religions into a few components:

Class A. "IS" Statements about the world of a metaphysical or supernatural nature (whether gods exist, how many, how, where, origin stories, afterlife, etc.)

B. "Ought" statements, i.e. moral prescriptions (what constitutes the good, what a person should and should not do etc.)

C. General description of collective behavior (traditions/rituals/etc. or how people behave in practice or how they want other people to think they behave)

In practice there is no way that a society can actually operate with any of these 3 things being left "Blank" -- any so the only thing that distinguishes traditional "religious religions" from what we have now (ideologies? civic religions? political religions? political formulas? belief system?) is that the metaphysical component usually includes the divine or the afterlife. I kind of prefer belief system because it is extremely neutral.

2.5) The word 'Ideology' is usually used derrogatorially when one person notices that another has an A-C which is noticably different from the background. For example: In a communist state a classical liberal is an ideologue and visa versa. This is true insofar as one can choose to not have an opinion, but not thinking that something is morally important is as much a 'position' as thinking that something is morally important. And in the modern era someone who doesn't find the ideals of civil rights and human rights as morally salient will be seen as an ideologue and a deviant.

3) If the 20th century has any lesson to teach it's that a society can have a metaphysical doctrine which is almost entirely naturalistic but still issue moral prescriptions that are more impractical and at odds with humans as biological creatures then any historic religion imposed aside from a handful of short-lived cults.

4) While calling wokeness a religion is a waste of time, I do think it's useful to think of it as a fundamentalist branch of the belief system that is more or less universal in the west. Namely the idea that all humans are born equal and should be "free" in some sense. The fundamentalism comes from demanding this idea (which is accepted by everyone except for reactionary deviants) be *practically implemented*.

To draw a paralell, even in Islamic countries there's a distinction between the parts of Sharia law that are common between islamic societies and the kind that are only imposed by the most vicious of salafists.

5) While it's possible to limit the harmful effects of wokeness on people by changing laws. I am skeptical about actually innoculating the population from woke beliefs.

The woke-vaccine (so to speak) is going to be a set of beliefs and assumptions about the world which are easy to verify, hard to disprove once the person believes in them, and are mutually incompatible with wokeness. In truth, this vaccine has existed in a reasonably scientific form for decades and in a simpler form for far longer (about as long as animal husbandry); namely the idea that human behavior is influenced by genetics and that evolution did not stop at the neck. There is no reason to expect equality of outcome when the default state of affairs is biologically induced differences in behavior.

The evidence *in favor* of this "vaccine" has only increased over time but the resistance against it has only grown stronger. Many people who oppose wokeness still believe in the blank slate. Several others openly stated that they didn't believe in the blank slate but thought that teaching the alternative was more of a threat to society.

Even when people get over the notion that humans not being blank slates doesn't justify slavery or ethnic cleansing the idea that no one is "superior" than anyone else is always going to appeal to people with a deep inferiority complex.

6) The chinese are well situated to be immune from this kind of thinking since culturally they can claim no guilt for slavery or the holocaust, and at the same time it will be easy for them to endorse a theory that says that East asians are [one of] the smartest human subpopulations. One way wokeism might decline is if china becomes the definitive geopolitical superior to the united states, young elites from other countries will likely gravitate towards chinese education and chinese institutions. Most young elites are conformist midwits that use the formula: prestige = truth.

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Wokeness may very well be a paper tiger that folds in the face of halfway competent opposition. There are some signs of hope: Defund the police utterly failed. Progressive DA's have started to be defeated even in deep blue areas. The Texas Heartbeat Act caused a lot of people to freak out, SCOTUS kind of shrugged, and then everyone got distracted by Omicron and then the Ukraine war as the latest things, and we never really got back to it. But it's still being enforced, and though it'll probably fall eventually due to its bizarre structure, in the meantime it's reduced abortions by more than half in one of the largest states in the country. That's significant!

On the other coast, Ron DeSantis seems to be making a career out of trolling the woke with substantively normie bills that the media hypes up as the end of everything, and yet no one has really been able to do much about it. It will be interesting to see if he's able to continue and what happens if he runs for president in 2024.

On the other hand, until we see that stress test, we just don't know if wokeness will collapse or if it will harden and adapt into something much stronger. It doesn't have to be a religion per se to be highly adaptable. I think there's a real risk that will happen, even if I don't think it's probable.

I think it would be a useful exercise to actually define what we mean by "wokeness" and by what criteria we could say that it has failed or not, over a given timeframe. Otherwise it's difficult to even make meaningful predictions.

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"Whenever people make arguments like this – holding that there is some deep philosophical reason behind some modern phenomenon – I find myself unable to even think of the kind of empirical evidence that would either confirm or falsify it. Theories that say “Wokeness is just Protestantism/Catholicism/Gnosticism” strike me as untestable, and therefore unscientific."

You are right of course that such analysis cannot be done in a strictly empirical manner, certainly not a statistical one, but that doesn't mean there is no scientific or predictive value to it.

As you argue, American foreign policy is motivated more by domestic ideological views than rational interest. Lyons's line of inquiry - theological, philosophical, literary, historical etc. - seeks to investigate where such an intellectual movement comes from, which is surely an important precondition for understanding how its adherents think.

At a very basic level: ideas and culture motivate people to act in certain ways, so if you understand the ideas, especially the psychology and deep beliefs behind them, it helps to predict and explain how people act.

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My pet theory is that wokeness and critical race theory are simply a product of affluence. American society has become wealthy enough that material concerns no longer occupy much of our mental energy. We've progressed up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the more emotional levels, with people forming coalitions on the basis of shared identity to compete for status and esteem. Different groups have differential success rates, and ergo have earned different levels of status and esteem, and wokeness emerged as an attempt to force a redistribution of status and the resources attendant to it.

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I think there are two ways to view wokeness as a phenomenon:

1. The specific movement in the present centered around race and gender

2. A type of constructor which takes in an infinite array of neuroses (race and gender being the first) and outputs a state+bureaucracy that elevates social fantasies over competence and reality

I am almost certain the first won't outlast my lifetime, I would give the second >50% chance of overlooking the decline of the US to a state similar to present-day Russia.

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