The new Test Acts
It is two centuries since this country abolished the Test Acts under which people were required to make a pledge of religious observance to qualify for public office or the civil service. But once again employees are being required to sign up to statements of belief or face denunciation, demotion and dismissal. Arcane arguments about white privilege and Pythonesque disputes about whether men can be women are no longer confined to warring left-wing sects or social media; they are eating away at the heart of leading institutions, corporations and government itself.
“Say that men can be women or you’re fired.”
Much of this turmoil began with the best of intentions: a long overdue focus on ethical behaviour in corporate and public life. In 2018 more corporate chief executives lost their jobs for misconduct than were fired for poor performance; the #MeToo movement has left its mark. But the drive for decency is steadily being hijacked by extremists, bringing a dark edge of censoriousness to the quest for better workplace behaviour. JK Rowling, infamously, has been threatened with “cancellation” for sardonically pointing out that there is such a thing as a woman. Kevin Price, a Labour councillor, resigned from Cambridge city council and faced pressure to leave his post as a porter at the university because he refused to sign a statement that “trans women are women”.
See also: fish are not chairs, tomatoes are not buses, owls are not bars of soap, planets are not cigarettes.
The intolerant aspect of wokeism has become plainer than ever. Its strictures against “offensive” language brought some of its adherents close to apologising for the massacre at Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, suggesting that the journalists bore some responsibility for the Islamist attack by declining to censor themselves.
Remember the long exhausting war over that? I sure do. All those woke novelists trying to get PEN to decide not to honor Charlie Hebdo after all…when the bodies were barely cold.
Serious people on both sides of the Atlantic are drinking deep at the well of racial self-abasement. A much-lauded course at the prestigious Duke University in the US teaches that there are 15 characteristics to white supremacy culture, including perfectionism, a sense of urgency, worship of the written word and, amazingly, objectivity, all of which, it is argued, need to be jettisoned.
Yes let’s throw out the written word and objectivity, that would usher in utopia in a heartbeat.
The greatest tragedy in all of this is that the gurus of wokedom have persuaded thousands of idealistic young people who rightly want to change the world into supporting what is actually a deeply reactionary movement. The trans activists can only realise their aim of being able to enter spaces reserved for women by erasing the female sex. Critical race theory remains credible only so long as black and brown people continue to fail. In the end, the woke movement is turning into an echo of the very oppressors it claims to be combating. After all the statues come down, and women’s prisons are opened to all and sundry, the celebrities and social media warriors will move on to the next fashionable cause — and minorities will still be less likely to win the top jobs, and women will still be the victims of violence. The only thing that will have changed is the bitterness of a generation whose idealism was betrayed.
He’s not wrong.
It may or may not have been the Duke University that I read about recently, but there was a report about an American university that held a virtual conference on race issues, and every participant that was not of colour had to introduce themselves with an admission of being a racist and a promise to do better, as in ‘My name is (name) and I am a racist and a gatekeeper of our white colonial society. I will strive to educate myself to become a better ally to people of colour’ or similar.
I almost had to pick my jaw up from the floor.
This is, ironically, something boomers also felt; the woke youngsters would do a lot better to recognize that. When the boomers were their age, there was a lot of “the world will be more tolerant, less racist, less sexist….etc” when the boomers are in charge. See what happened? It isn’t the woke that rise to the top, it is the conservative scum. They spend their time getting MBAs while the rest of us are trying to fix the world, and the people who hold the reins of power in the earlier generation promote them, while arresting the activists.
The thing is, today the activists appear to be getting their way, at least in the issue of trans. And when they get tht, they will discover that the world is less tolerant, more sexist, and probably not any less racist than now.
In many ways, it’s a new and popular religion.
It lacks a deity, but it has a conceptual soul based in Cartesian dualism: gender identity.
I’m going to be expressing some skepticism, here. There’s a long, long history of people deliberately misinterpreting the descriptions of college courses in order to make the argument that “The Left” is too extreme or silly.
And I’ve certainly railed about ‘objectivity’, as it is usually practiced by the modern mass media, in which you don’t actually ever suggest that one side or another might ostensibly be correct about something, but instead have a couple of talking heads shout at each other (or, even more bizarrely, have your own talking heads blandly describing what each side is saying, and then letting the audience weigh it for themselves, without ever pointing out that one of the sides is full of shit. “Objectivity”, practiced in this fashion, is why so few media have ever used the word “lie” in reference to Donald Trump.
I suspect that there are similar discussions in the course about the other phrases Mr. Phillips ticks off with such pearl-clutching; I’ve got pretty good ideas on what the segments on “sense of urgency” and “worship of the written word” go into, and there’s solid points to be made on both.
And to be blunt, passages like this:
… could get you a guest speaker gig on FOX News.
He’s not wrong about everything–in particular, he hits strong notes on the trans issue, which I assume is how he ended up being linked here–but there’s enough centrist waffling on race in that article to set off alarm bells in my brain. And no, the color of his skin doesn’t make him the authority on all things racial (particularly in the US, where the legacy of slavery does, indeed, matter a great deal), any more than Amy Barrett’s vagina gives her a pass on being able to spout bullshit against women’s liberation.
The author is being a bit disingenuous here–I’m going to concur with Freemage overall but make a few different points.
‘worship of the written word’–I would have thought we’d seen enough of the Freemen on the Land nonsense about writing your name in capital letters and Admiralty courts and whatever to appreciate that ‘worship of the written word’ is bizarre. Not to mention ‘it says so in the dictionary’ and ‘it’s clear what the Bible says’ or ‘according to the Founding Fathers’. We know better.
‘objectivity’–I always used to ask my students to find me one single objective source. None of us is objective, and the more explicitly we express our position the better others are able to evaluate our arguments. I wish I could describe the introductory unit of the history class I used to teach (I won’t take credit for inventing it; it was developed before I started teaching this particular class)–it started out by introducing students to the most ‘objective’ source imaginable about a particular historic incident, then gradually revealing why it might not be as foolproof as we’d always been led to believe.
‘Critical race theory remains credible only so long as black and brown people continue to fail.’ It’s an interesting point, but not really accurate–marginalised people will continue, I hope, to succeed at even greater and greater rates as a) we as a society continue to reduce or remove barriers to their success and b) the additional work and effort involved for marginalised people to succeed is more and more acknowledged. Weirdly, though, the syndrome the author suggests may have actually affected the gay rights movement–which is why they’ve turned to trans for a new oppressed group and a new cause.
I liked this column. I thought Philips made many good points. The central theme is practically Biblical: judge a tree by its fruits.
All this fancy Woke gibberish does what for women and minorities again? Not much.
At the end of the day, the very earnest young white people can fold up their BLM signs and go happily back home, to vote against adding more low-income housing in their neighborhoods.
It reminds me of confession: wipe the slate clean once a week, then go forth and rack up the tally again.
I liked the column very much, and found it echoed a lot of points raised in “Cynical Theories” by Helen Pluckrose. (Again thanks to whoever recommended it here; great book.) Pluckrose addresses quite well the view that these weird “woke” ideas are just some isolated cranks in academia.
I can’t share Freemage’s skepticism; I wish I could, but I am deeply involved in academia, and have been told similar things to the things mentioned above. This has worked its way all the way to administration. We (even in science) are being told to remake our courses around what the students think is real, not the legitimate content of our courses. To be fair, many academics, particularly those in the sciences, are resisting and even fighting back, but many, especially in the liberal arts, have either given in or wholeheartedly swallowed the nonsense. We were having a discussion in our last science division meeting whether we would be allowed to teach in Biology that male and female were determined by the presence of X and Y chromosomes; most of us are worried that is not going to be allowed long. We will be required to teach Biology around ideology, not science,
The day I was told the students should be allowed to choose exactly how they are assessed, because they are the experts on them (no, they aren’t, anymore than I am “the” expert on me), and that we should include interpretive dance as one of the ways in which we test them, the exact example being using interpretive dance to demonstrate their knowledge of mitosis, I knew it had fallen away and we were inside the looking glass. I can see an interpretive dance of mitosis being interesting, beautiful, and even sublime if done right; I do not see it as a means of testing, since it is, by its very nature, interpretive. If I count them off for forgetting the formation of the spindle fibers, they just tell me this little, barely perceptible wave of the hand was the formation of the spindle fibers. They could say anything.
And…I have read too many books on gender theory in theatre to believe this is over stated. “Women need a theatre that is uniquely theirs, based around the concept of the mother goddess and celebrating their essential nature as nurturers.” Gag. Also, in my doctoral program in the early years of this century, I was astonished by the number of people who informed me that science was a western construct, and deeply tied in with male dominance, and therefore, no one should do science. No one? So if it’s a guy thing, even guys aren’t allowed to do it? Wow. That’s…harsh. And as we know here, science is not a “guy thing”, and people in eastern cultures do science much the same way we do. And are often just as scornful of these wokesters. Of course, the woke simply say that women and people from other cultures have sold out to western imperialism, and go about their smug way.
So, yeah, I wish I could be as doubtful about this as Freemage, but my experiences make that impossible.
Somewhat related: a short column about “political correctness” and people who hide their political views, notably in academia, for fear of repercussions. The author suggests this may affect polling. Notes the article, “Republicans with the most education are most worried their political views could harm them at work.”
https://unherd.com/2020/11/meet-the-shy-trumpers/
But of course! After all, those items are merely western traditions, and it would be colonialist to try to maintain them as standards of knowledge in the face of other forms, such as self-knowing.
/s, but people have actually said that in different words.
Skepticism with respect to the nature of Woke doctrine strikes me as eerily similar to the skepticism expressed by “moderate” Christians regarding fundamentalism. Like, “No one actually believes that there’s a literal Hell or that Noah literally collected a pair of every sort of animal.” Or, “No one means that phrase the crazy way—obviously they mean something anodyne.”
Except that fundies actually do believe that the Earth is young, that Noah was on a boat through a worldwide flood, and that a talking snake tricked a woman into eating a magic apple from a magic tree in a magic garden. When fundies say talk about Hell, they aren’t using it as banal allegory. They tell us what they believe all the time. The woke are no different. They actually do believe what they say they believe, and what they say they believe is absurd. (As with Christians, however, the woke literature predicts that non-believers—i.e., those who lack critical consciousness—will ridicule them, and the correctness of this prediction is taken as verification of the whole.)
For instance, the literature is quite transparent about the distinction between critical thinking and critical theory:
Nullius, whom are you quoting?
Richard Dawkins has retweeted Phillips’s article.
I know, that’s where I saw it – someone thanking him for retweeting it. (I don’t remember which someone.)
Lady Mondegreen @ 12: That was Alison Bailey article “Tracking Privilege‐Preserving Epistemic Pushback in Feminist and Critical Race Philosophy Classes” in Hypatia Volume 32, Issue 4, Fall 2017, pages 876-892.
Honestly, Hypatia is kind of a gold mine—if your idea of gold is a sort of inane, ponderously pretentious babbling. You can find articles on the importance of contemporary feminist cellular biology, the feminist potential of trans bodhisattvas, discursive colonialism and Indian surrogacy, the link between ethical vegetarianism and white racism, the benefits of feminist epistemology for surgery, the need to put emotion on the same footing as reason, and much more. All for the low, low price of institutional journal access!
Just skimming the abstracts is painful—I mean wonderful! Yeah, that’s the ticket.