WOKE WARRIORS/WORRIERS...

Tracing the dangerous rise and rise of woke warriors
Paul Kelly
12:00AM September 12, 2020

At last comes an attempt to explain the extraordinary origins of the cultural revolution of our times — the onslaught against the liberal order by woke crusaders waging a zero-sum struggle in the cause of racial, sexual, gender, disability and other identities across our institutions.

For many Australians the new culture seems to have erupted from outside their experience — almost from another planet — yet its momentum is immense and it is winning acceptance among leaders, public servants, corporations, schools, not-for-profits and most notably in our universities.

What is the meaning of this cultural revolution? Where did it come from?
Like all revolutions it began with a body of ideas that fermented over decades, but there is no doubting the purpose of these ideas — the dismantling of universal liberalism based on respect for each person regardless of identity. On display in Australia, North America and Britain is a common occurrence in history, where in good faith influential leaders and institutional decision-makers are implementing policies without understanding their origins or ultimate purpose as propounded by their intellectual originators.

This is where Helen Pluckrose, a liberal political and cultural writer living in England, and James A. Lindsay, a mathematician and founder of New Discourses, based in Tennessee, come into the picture. They were two of three authors of the Grievance Studies Hoax from 2017 where they submitted bogus and absurd papers to academic journals and were published. Their aim was to expose the intellectual bankruptcy underpinning the cultural revolution and how far its woke crusaders had departed from science, reason and genuine scholarship. This now becomes a bigger, more serious project, with their book Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody, published in the US and released in Australia next week.

“The progressive left has aligned itself not with Modernity but with postmodernism which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naive and/or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers,” they argue. “Postmodernism has, depending upon your view, either become or given rise to one of the least tolerant and most authoritarian ideologies that the world has had to deal with since the widespread decline of communism and the collapse of white supremacy and colonialism.”

Harvard University’s Steven Pinker, psychologist and public intellectual, said of the book that it “exposes the surprisingly shallow intellectual roots of the movements that appear to be engulfing our culture”. This book is not for the faint-hearted. It seeks to explain where these ideas came from. It should be read by every institutional leader and executive so they understand the ideological goals that lie beneath the policies they are implementing.

The authors trace the academic origins and evolution of each element in the intellectual revolution: postcolonial theory, queer theory, critical race theory and intersectionality, disability and fat studies, and social justice scholarship and thought. The central organising principle of the revolution assumes that humans are defined by a series of identities and that “every interaction, utterance and cultural artefact” slots into a power dynamic where everybody is the oppressed or an oppressor.

Their thesis is the revolution has its origins in postmodernism from the 1960s that saw the individual as a product of culturally constructed knowledge. From this point, there were two leaps forward — the second phase (roughly 1990 to 2010) when the ideas began to be applied and the decisive third phase (from 2010) when Social Justice Theory was asserted as a body of fundamental truth.

The authors say: “Theory has become increasingly confident and clear about its beliefs and goals. We can see its impact on the world in their attacks on science and reason.” The result is a “complete conviction that knowledge is constructed in the service of power which is rooted in identity”.

They write: “Therefore, in Social Justice scholarship, we continually read that patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, cisnormativity, heteronormativity, ableism and fatphobia are literally structuring society and infecting everything. They exist in a state of immanence — present always and everywhere, just beneath a nicer-seeming surface that can’t quite contain them.”

Society is seen as simplistically divided into dominant and marginalised identities. But there is one identity largely missing — economic class. It is barely mentioned unless tied into another identity or “intersectionality”. It is, therefore, the authors say, “no surprise that many working class and poor people often feel profoundly alienated from today’s left”.

The cultural revolution is seen by many old-fashioned Marxists as a bourgeois idea. There is one certainty — the more progressives accept this identity-based revolution driven by upper-middle-class scholars and activists, the more the centre-left of politics will splinter.

The foundation of Social Justice scholarship is concern “with what is said, what is believed, what is assumed, what is taught, what is conveyed and what biases are imported”. This means the lived experiences, the emotions and cultural traditions of minority groups must be recognised as “knowledges” and gain status or superiority over reason and evidence-based knowledge.

The authors say: “We find ourselves faced with the continuing dismantlement of categories like knowledge and belief, reason and emotion, and men and women, and with increasing pressures to censor our language in accordance with The Truth According to Social Justice.”

Their chapter on race captures the dilemma. Through the work of many academics Critical Race Theory has developed, arising from the idea of “positionality” — that one’s position in society as determined by group identity dictates how one understands the world and is understood by the world. Hence the dictum that “racism is ordinary, not aberrational” and is the “everyday experience of people of colour” and that “racism is present everywhere and always”.

**Pluckrose and Lindsay write of the consequences of Critical Race Theory: “We are told that racism is embedded in culture and that we cannot escape it. We hear that white people are inherently racist. We are told that racism is ‘prejudice plus power’, therefore, only white people can be racist. We are informed that only people of colour can talk about racism, that white people need to just listen.

“We hear that not seeing people in terms of their race (being colour-blind) is, in fact, racist and an attempt to ignore the pervasive racism that dominates society and perpetuates white privilege.”

The influential reader Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic says the Theory “tries not only to understand our social situation but to change it”. The scholarship has its mission of social transformation. Racism, of course, does exist. Where it exists, it is a scourge on society.

But to the extent that Critical Race Theory prevails — to the extent that universities, bureaucracies, institutions and decision-makers accept this doctrine — then examples of racism will expand indefinitely since this is what the Theory dictates. The Theory asks not “Did racism occur?” but rather “How did racism manifest in that situation?” Once this becomes the question, then all organisations are vulnerable to racism accusations.

Because racism is everywhere — from football to business to the arts — Theory demands the task is to reveal its endless forms, and a new layer of managers and inclusion officials are appointed to institutions around the country to do just that.

The upshot is obvious: Australia along with other nations is seen as a more racist country. As Critical Race Theory takes hold, this trend will only intensify. Any individual who fights against the Theory is deemed by the Theory to be racist anyway and will be condemned as racist by activists or the diversity police.

Social Justice Theory, therefore, in the contemporary sense has broken decisively from the various human rights and civil rights campaigns of the 1960s whose aim was to remove discrimination and bigotry and seek to enshrine all individuals in the liberal order. It is easy to assert the failure of this goal but equally easy to overlook the progress that has been made.

Central to the authors’ thesis is the pivotal distinction between Social Justice Theory and genuine social justice as a legitimate philosophy seeking a fairer social order. Many well-intentioned people give up resisting Social Justice Theory fearing they will be branded and punished since it is not easy to defend universal liberal respect for all individuals against those pressing identity politics and claiming to represent social justice. Many liberals, having never before faced these arguments, are incapable of resisting the tide.

The authors examine the impact of Kimberle Crenshaw, the prime architect of intersectionality, the idea that people can be marginalised in multiple ways — by gender, race, sex and other dimensions — seeing her 1991 essay Mapping the Margins as a turning point in elevating identity politics over liberal universalism.

Writing nearly 30 years ago, Crenshaw saw identity politics “as a source of strength” for African-Americans, gays and lesbians but recognised it was “in tension with dominant conceptions of social justice”. The authors see intersectionality as “the seed that would germinate as Social Justice scholarship some 20 years later”.

They say it “does the same thing over and over again: look for the power imbalances, bigotry and biases that it assumes must be present” and assumes that, in every situation, some form of theoretical prejudice exists. In this sense liberal individualism — treating people the same regardless of identity — is seen as “at best, a naivety about the reality of a deeply prejudiced society and at worst, a wilful refusal to acknowledge that we live in that kind of society”.

One of the myths the authors tackle is the frequent claim that individuals who lose their jobs or standing because of woke doctrines represent only a minor problem for society. Many people ask: it’s no big deal, why are we getting so excited? The answer, the authors point out, is that while less than 10 per cent of the population probably espouse these theories, such ideas are becoming dominant across institutions. People leave universities as believers in Social Justice Theory and move into the public and private sectors becoming part of the mission statements of institutions pledging to change their organisational culture. Referring to the situation in Britain, the authors say equity, diversity and inclusion officers are spreading nearly everywhere — schools and universities, the police, large private sector companies, the civil service and local authorities. In Britain “more than 50 per cent of universities restrict speech especially certain views of religion and trans identity”.

Indeed, once universities open the door to Social Justice scholarship and ethics they “completely displace reliable and rigorous scholarship into issues of social justice by condemning all other approaches as complicit with systemic bigotry and thus unthinkable — or, in practice, unpublishable and punishable”.

In a remark relevant to Australia the authors made the general comment: “It is perhaps not surprising that large corporations have caved in so easily to Social Justice pressure. Their overriding goal is, after all, to make money, not to uphold liberal values.” Since most consumers and voters in Western countries support the general idea of social justice — and don’t know the difference between social justice and Social Justice Theory — submission is the easier route.

Meanwhile social justice activists are astute in targeting cultural opinion leaders, often from the left, seeking their compliance; witness incidents involving Ellen DeGeneres, Kevin Hart, Matt Damon, Martina Navratilova and J K Rowling.

The future is already here: jobs being filled on the basis of identity, indeed, even being advertised on the basis of identity; demands that actors play characters only from their own identity group; writers being forbidden to “speak into” the oppression of others; and just this week, from Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts defined content rules for films — story content must reflect and feature under-represented groups based on identity politics — so expect more pressure on books, movies, plays and paintings.

The authors, aware they will face a ferocious backlash, make clear they believe in gender, racial and LGBT equality. Nor do they seek to attack universities and scholarship in general. But they offer a devastating indictment of Social Justice Theory.

Indeed, it is guaranteed to accentuate a backlash from right-wing populists. The Theory is getting traction now when times are tough, when liberalism and democracy seem tired — and there is truth enough in this. The power of Social Justice Theory is that it derives from an interpretation of human nature and a theory of society. Radical new ideas appeal, that’s part of the human condition. They always have, but as the authors say, the perfect is the enemy of the good.

Humans are susceptible to utopianism, a big theory that looks good on paper, even if it is authoritarian, fundamentalist and hostile to human nature. The authors say bad theories look good on paper and terrible in practice, witness communism. Yet the journey to such realisation is often decades long. The authors call Social Justice “a nice-looking Theory that, once put into practice, will fail and which could do tremendous damage in the process”. Their central message shines through the book: “Postmodern Theory and liberalism do not merely exist in tension: they are almost directly at odds with one another.”

How long before this central truth is recognised?