Facing Wokism in Britain Today

Matthew Said, whose title in The Sunday Times reads “If you think we’re past peak woke, we may not even be halfway up that hill” …. with highlighting imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi

Unconscious bias training and cancellation are mainstream for the young. Just wait until they’re in charge.

Here’s what ‘woke’ means and how to respond to it

In the Second World War, the Allied bomber command had a problem. Aircraft were flying missions over Germany and being shot down in ever greater numbers. The top brass decided that they needed additional protection in the most vulnerable areas (it would be impossible to cover the entire aircraft, as it would be too heavy to take off). But where to place the armour? The good news is that they had plenty of data from craft that had returned to base, and they showed a clear pattern: there were lots of bullet holes in the wings and fuselage, but not so many on the cockpit and tail. The answer seemed obvious: put armour on the wings and fuselage.

Thankfully, a brilliant mathematician called Abraham Wald demurred. He realised that high command was looking only at the “visible” data. It was studying the bullet holes in the aircraft that had successfully returned, but had not seen the holes in the ones that had not returned, since those had crashed. And that is why they’d drawn precisely the wrong conclusion. The holes in the returning aircraft showed where planes could take fire and still get home safely. They survived because they had not been hit in the cockpit and the tail.

Last week The Economist published an exhaustive analysis of the rise and apparent fall of wokeism. The magazine defined woke — I think rightly — as a term that has morphed over the decades from denoting an awareness of racism to a spectrum of views encompassing structural racism, radical trans rights, cancellation and the like. I won’t waste time pinning down definitions since, as with pornography, I suspect most of us know wokeism when we see it (although perhaps that is now a view that could get me cancelled).

The Economist looked at a variety of trends: how often terms like “intersectionality” and “white privilege” are used in print media (it examined millions of articles); how often they are used in TV programmes (it analysed thousands of transcripts); how often they are used in scientific papers; how often they feature in companies’ financial reports; how often calls are made for academics to be disciplined; and so on. As I say, the data was exhaustive and, I would add, superbly assembled.

But it was the way The Economist interpreted the data that troubled me. It noted that trends, by almost all these measures, particularly in America, were falling back after a high point roughly around the aftermath of the George Floyd riots. It concluded that the phenomenon was on the decline. We are, it said, almost audibly breathing a sigh of relief, “past peak woke”.

I disagree. I say this because, while the visible data reveals a clear pattern, I find myself asking: what about the invisible data? What about the cancellations that have become so normalised they are no longer reported? What about the initiatives (like mandatory unconscious bias training, which has never had evidence to support it) that are no longer mentioned in quarterly reports because they have become routine? What about the conservatives who self-censor out of fear of cancellation? When you take a step back, the data shows that woke is not past its peak but has moved from the wallpaper and into the brickwork.

Consider that Auckland University has now started requiring all students to take a course that is “effectively indoctrination in the coloniser/indigeneity hierarchy”, according to the decorated academic Jerry Coyne. This was scarcely reported. The list of cancellations in western universities grows daily, but is no longer newsworthy.

Or take a blog post from ten days ago revealing the scale of censorship in publishing, none of which shows up in datasets because the books are not, well, published (the subhead was: “Widespread censorship is killing writers’ careers before they begin”). I know authors who have had to edit out words like “stupid” and “mad” because they are considered “ableist”; who have deleted references to drinking through straws as they might prove offensive to people with disabilities who can’t use a straw; who have referred to the moon as “a small white rock orbiting the Earth” and had to remove “white” because it was racially sensitive. And I haven’t even mentioned how difficult it is to publish anything that hints at benign aspects of the British empire.

I could go on, because, from the Sewell report, which was stillborn because it challenged the notion of institutional racism, to some of the surreal court judgments emanating from the Equality Act, the pro-Palestine marchers, many of them inspired by the perception of Israel as a colonial oppressor, the testimony to Congress from university leaders who struggled to condemn calls for the genocide of Jews and the denigration of British history — a near-universal tendency among academics influencing the next generation, but emphatically not the general public — the wind remains in the sails of radical wokeism.

And it is, I think, this last point that is most significant. When we think of “the long march through the institutions”, too often we forget the key word: “long”. Forgive a crude generalisation, but those on the right tend to go into finance and business because they are motivated by money. Those on the left tend to go into museums, charities and academia because they are willing to play a longer game. That is why cultural institutions trend left and Marxists console themselves with the thought that, while they live in smaller houses, they have the greater — if subtler — influence.

And this, I fear, is the other fallacy in The Economist’s analysis. It’s true that a fightback against wokeism has begun, largely driven by older liberals who — after cowering rather pathetically out of fear of cancellation — started to stand up for free speech, due process and the reality of biological sex. But you can glimpse its grip on our cultural institutions in the fact that much of Gen Z, which will soon replace the present generation in positions of political, cultural and corporate power — has markedly different views. And that is why it is in a decade or so that the rubber will hit the road: on women’s rights, single-sex spaces, free speech, the West’s relationship with Israel, our understanding of history, indeed our very sense of self.

I should perhaps say that I wholeheartedly endorse the rational aspects of the progressive agenda. I supported the fight against racism and the opening of doors to talented people from minority backgrounds. Hell, I even wrote a book on how diversity, properly understood, improves teams and societies, a thesis with which most conservatives and liberals agree. But I have long feared radical wokeism, a strangely transmissible virus that could yet prove lethal to our future, and that has inspired a mirror version on the populist right, which seems just as keen to denigrate our history, the memory of Churchill and Nato.

That is why epitaphs for wokeism are not just premature but dangerous. Indeed, when you look at the invisible data, you’ll see that the fightback has only just begun.

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NOTE  …. 

This item was sent to me by Tommy Fernando, my old Aloysian pal from Galle days in the 1950s. Tommy  has been living and working in Britain for quite a while. 

Also see ... https://theconversation.com/heres-what-woke-means-and-how-to-respond-to-it-219588