Monday, January 13, 2025

Paul Graham's Problem With Woke





The Origins Of Wokeness by Paul Graham .... you know, that Paul Graham The word "prig" ..... A self-righteously moralistic person who behaves as if superior to others. ......... In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin's Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it's social justice. .......... why our prigs are priggish about these ideas, at this moment. And to answer that we have to ask when and where wokeness began. .......... Wokeness is a second, more aggressive wave of political correctness, which started in the late 1980s, died down in the late 1990s, and then returned with a vengeance in the early 2010s, finally peaking after the riots of 2020......... An aggressively performative focus on social justice. ........ And that's the real problem — the performativeness, not the social justice. ......... What happened in the humanities and social sciences in the 1980s? ........ 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. The students may have been talking a lot about women's liberation and black power, but it was not what they were being taught in their classes. Not yet. ........ A 1960s radical who got a job as a physics professor could still attend protests, but his political beliefs wouldn't affect his work. Whereas research in sociology and modern literature can be made as political as you like. ......... When I started college in 1982 it was not yet a thing. Female students might object if someone said something they considered sexist, but no one was getting reported for it. It was still not a thing when I started grad school in 1986. It was definitely a thing in 1988 though, and by the early 1990s it seemed to pervade campus life. ............ the 1960s radicals got tenure. They became the Establishment they'd protested against two decades before. Now they were in a position not just to speak out about their ideas, but to enforce them. ........... It wasn't simply a grass-roots student movement. It was faculty members encouraging students to attack other faculty members. In that respect it was like the Cultural Revolution. ............ 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. .............. their elaborateness made them an effective substitute for virtue. Whenever a society has a concept of heresy and orthodoxy, orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people. ............. the result was a world in which good people who weren't up to date on current moral fashions were brought down by people whose characters would make you recoil in horror if you could see them. ............ 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; if you were religious, or a virgin, this was something you tended to conceal rather than advertise. 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. .............. One thing I noticed at the time about the first phase of political correctness was that it was 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. But there was another more specific reason women tended to be the enforcers of political correctness. There was at this time a great backlash against sexual harassment; the mid 1980s were the point when the definition of sexual harassment was expanded from explicit sexual advances to creating a "hostile environment." Within universities the classic form of accusation was for a (female) student to say that a professor made her "feel uncomfortable." But the vagueness of this accusation allowed the radius of forbidden behavior to expand to include talking about heterodox ideas. Those make people uncomfortable too. ............ 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. ................. 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............. And there had been an explosion in the number of university administrators, many of whose jobs involved enforcing various forms of political correctness. ........... In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which could be made to stick. ............. 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. Indeed this second wave of political correctness was originally called "cancel culture"; it didn't start to be called "wokeness" till the 2020s. ............... One aspect of social media that surprised almost everyone at first was the popularity of outrage. Users seemed to like being outraged. We're so used to this idea now that we take it for granted, but really it's pretty strange. Being outraged is not a pleasant feeling. You wouldn't expect people to seek it out. But they do. ........... This tilt toward outrage wasn't due to wokeness. It's an inherent feature of social media, or at least this generation of it. But it did make social media the perfect mechanism for fanning the flames of wokeness. .......... Group chat apps were also critical, especially in the final step, cancellation. Imagine if a group of employees trying to get someone fired had to do it using only email. It would be hard to organize a mob. But

once you have group chat, mobs form naturally

. ............. When I grew up the papers of record seemed timeless, almost sacred institutions. Papers like the New York Times and Washington Post had immense prestige, partly because other sources of news were limited, but also because they did make some effort to be neutral. ............... Unfortunately it turned out that the paper of record was mostly an artifact of the constraints imposed by print. [8] 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. On October 11, 2020 the New York Times announced that "The paper is in the midst of an evolution from the stodgy paper of record into a juicy collection of great narratives." 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. ................... there arose a new variety of journalism involving a loop through social media. Someone would say something controversial on social media. Within hours it would become a news story. Outraged readers would then post links to the story on social media, driving further arguments online. It was the cheapest source of clicks imaginable. You didn't have to maintain overseas news bureaus or pay for month-long investigations. All you had to do was watch Twitter for controversial remarks and repost them on your site, with some additional comments to inflame readers further. ................. 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: they weren't directly in the flow of the organization's work, but watched from the side to ensure that nothing improper happened in the doing of it. .............. 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. ............ the Black Lives Matter movement, which started in 2013 when a white man was acquitted after killing a black teenager in Florida. But this didn't launch wokeness; it was well underway by 2013. ............... the Me Too Movement, which took off in 2017 after the first news stories about Harvey Weinstein's history of raping women. It accelerated wokeness, but didn't play the same role in launching it that the 80s version did in launching political correctness. .............. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 also accelerated wokeness, particularly in the press, where outrage now meant traffic. Trump made the New York Times a lot of money: headlines during his first administration mentioned his name at about four times the rate of previous presidents. ...............

In 2020 we saw the biggest accelerant of all, after a white police officer asphyxiated a black suspect on video. At this point the metaphorical fire became a literal one, as violent protests broke out across America. But in retrospect this turned out to be peak woke, or close to it. By every measure I've seen, wokeness peaked in 2020 or 2021.

................ Wokeness is sometimes described as a mind-virus. ......... What's true of individuals is even more true of organizations. Especially organizations without a powerful leader. Such organizations do everything based on "best practices." There's no higher authority; if some new "best practice" achieves critical mass, they must adopt it. And in this case the organization can't do what it usually does when it's uncertain: delay. It might be committing improprieties right now! So it's surprisingly easy for a small group of zealots to capture this type of organization by describing new improprieties it might be guilty of. ............. 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. ............ Corporate CEOs, starting with Brian Armstrong, have openly rejected it. Universities, led by the University of Chicago and MIT, have explicitly confirmed their commitment to free speech. Twitter, which was arguably the hub of wokeness, was bought by Elon Musk in order to neutralize it, and he seems to have succeeded ............. I'm not going to claim Trump's second victory in 2024 was a referendum on wokeness; I think he won, as presidential candidates always do, because he was more charismatic; but voters' disgust with wokeness must have helped. ................. And more importantly, how do we avoid a third outbreak? After all, it seemed to be dead once, but came back worse than ever. .......... Prigs are prigs by nature. They need rules to obey and enforce, and now that Darwin has cut off their traditional supply of rules, they're constantly hungry for new ones. All they need is someone to meet them halfway by defining a new way to be morally pure, and we'll see the same phenomenon again. ............. Wokeness is effectively a religion, just with God replaced by protected classes. It's not even the first religion of this kind; Marxism had a similar form, with God replaced by the masses. .......... And we already have well-established customs for dealing with religion within organizations. 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................. 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. In my twenties I drove across America several times, listening to local radio stations. Occasionally I'd turn the dial and hear some new song. But the moment anyone mentioned Jesus I'd turn the dial again. Even the tiniest bit of being preached to was enough to make me lose interest. ............. I'm not a Christian, but I can see that many Christian principles are good ones. It would be a mistake to discard them all just because one didn't share the religion that espoused them. ............ Here we're up against human nature. There will always be prigs. And in particular there will always be the enforcers among them, the aggressively conventional-minded. These people are born that way. Every society has them. So the best we can do is to keep them bottled up. ........... Fortunately when 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. ........... The woke ideology's conspicuous lack of interest in the working class is the tell-tale sign. Such fragments as are, er, left of the old left are anti-woke, and meanwhile the actual working class shifted to the populist right and gave us Trump. Trump and wokeness are cousins. ................. The middle-class origins of wokeness smoothed its way through the institutions because it had no interest in "seizing the means of production" (how quaint such phrases seem now), which would quickly have run up against hard state and corporate power. The fact that wokeness only expressed interest in other kinds of class (race, sex, etc) signalled compromise with existing power: give us power within your system and we'll bestow the resource we control — moral rectitude — upon you. As an ideological stalking horse for gaining control over discourse and institutions, this succeeded where a more ambitious revolutionary program would not have. ................ If a political movement had to start with physics students, it could never get off the ground; there would be too few of them, and they wouldn't have the time to spare. ........... The woke sometimes claim that wokeness is simply treating people with respect. But if it were, that would be the only rule you'd have to remember, and this is comically far from being the case. My younger son likes to imitate voices, and at one point when he was about seven I had to explain which accents it was currently safe to imitate publicly and which not. It took about ten minutes, and I still hadn't covered all the cases. .............. In 1986 the Supreme Court ruled that creating a hostile work environment could constitute sex discrimination, which in turn affected universities via Title IX. The court specified that the test of a hostile environment was whether it would bother a reasonable person, but since for a professor merely being the subject of a sexual harassment complaint would be a disaster whether the complainant was reasonable or not, in practice any joke or remark remotely connected with sex was now effectively forbidden. Which meant we'd now come full circle to Victorian codes of behavior, when there was a large class of things that might not be said "with ladies present." ........................ I'm fairly confident that it would be possible to create new social media apps that were less driven by outrage, and an app of this type would have a good chance of stealing users from existing ones, because the smartest people would tend to migrate to it. .............. I have hopes that journalistic neutrality will return in some form. There is some market for unbiased news, and while it may be small, it's valuable. The rich and powerful want to know what's really going on; that's how they became rich and powerful. ............ As the acronym DEI goes out of fashion, many of these bureaucrats will try to go underground by changing their titles. It looks like "belonging" will be a popular option. .......... This is particularly annoying to me as a writer, because the new names are always worse. Any religious observance has to be inconvenient and slightly absurd; otherwise gentiles would do it too. So "slaves" becomes "enslaved individuals." But web search can show us the leading edge of moral growth in real time: if you search for "individuals experiencing slavery" you will as of this writing find five legit attempts to use the phrase, and you'll even find two for "individuals experiencing enslavement." .................. Organizations that do dubious things are particularly concerned with propriety, which is how you end up with absurdities like tobacco and oil companies having higher ESG ratings than Tesla. .................... Elon did something else that tilted Twitter rightward though: he gave more visibility to paying users. Paying users lean right on average, because people on the far left dislike Elon and don't want to give him money. Elon presumably knew this would happen. On the other hand, the people on the far left have only themselves to blame; they could tilt Twitter back to the left tomorrow if they wanted to. ............ a concept of original sin: privilege. Which means unlike Christianity's egalitarian version, people have varying degrees of it. An able-bodied straight white American male is born with such a load of sin that only by the most abject repentance can he be saved. .................. Wokeness also shares something rather funny with many actual versions of Christianity: like God, the people for whose sake wokeness purports to act are often revolted by the things done in their name. ......... I don't want to give the impression that it will be simple to roll back wokeness. There will be places where the fight inevitably gets messy — particularly within universities, which everyone has to share, yet which are are currently the most pervaded by wokeness of any institutions............. You can however get rid of aggressively conventional-minded people within an organization, and in many if not most organizations this would be an excellent idea. Even a handful of them can do a lot of damage. I bet you'd feel a noticeable improvement going from a handful to none.

It feels to me like I might have managed to skip the whole debate. And it has been a raging debate, obviously.

This feels like what Marxists might call a counter-revolution to the Black Lives Matter movement. Except there was no revolution. And this is not exactly a counter-revolution. But that a guy like Paul Graham should be oh so primmed about it, that tells me this defensiveness is no small matter. For the longest time I have thought of Paul Graham as a genuine innovator. He has merit. He was a starving artist. Then he build the iconic tech incubator. Hats off. Except, it seems, it is really, really foundational to him that he is a white male. That collective identity is so, so important to him. He might even be a "liberal" on social values. I once watched a YouTube video of him giving a talk at Stanford, where he made a joke about Sam Altman, which was meant to prove the point that Graham is not homophobic, at all, at all, at all.

One class I took at college taught me about the structure of sexism. One example. The objective data is, men do much of the talking. They suck up the oxygen in the room. But the joke is, you can't get women to close their mouth. This is so pervasive. It is everywhere. It is like social gravity.

You thank gravity. You can walk, you can stand. It is still you walking. But gravity makes it possible. For a lot of white men, structural racism and sexism seems to be that gravity. They can't imagine life without it.

Social justice is not the problem. But you are being too aggressive about it. Women talk too much.

Paul Graham is part of the backlash.

I think Paul Graham wants many, many more people to drop out of college. It would help his business. That seems to be his hidden agenda.



Note: I have been looking for a "definitive" article on wokeness by someone offended by it. Thank you Paul Graham for sharing. And to think this might end up in the pantheons of the tech startup world like many of his other essays. Now THAT is woke. Woke is supposed to mean "enlightened," not in the spiritual sense, but enlighhtened still.

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