Is Wokeness on the Way Out?

James Bennet, the former editor of the Opinion section at the New York Times, just published a long essay in which he revisits the events that led to his dismissal and more broadly reflects on the cultural revolution that has taken place in American journalism in recent years. The essay is definitely worth reading, but at the end of the day, the basic story should be familiar to anyone who has been following the progress of what for lack of a better term I will call “wokeness”. Here is the paragraph that basically summarizes what happened at the New York Times:

More than 30 years ago, a young political reporter named Todd Purdum tremulously asked an all-staff meeting what would be done about the “climate of fear” within the newsroom in which reporters felt intimidated by their bosses? The moment immediately entered Times lore. There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors like Boyd could strike terror in young reporters like me and Purdum. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns. “I miss the old climate of fear,” Baquet used to say with a smile, in another of his barbed jokes.

If you are or have been in academia, the nonprofit world, journalism and more generally any profession which disproportionately employs college graduates from elite universities, this kind of revolution from below should be familiar to you.

Again, I think it’s more or less the same story everywhere, but I’m not sure people really understand the underlying mechanism. Basically, organizations in those fields recruit from a pool of applicants that are increasingly woke, because young people and particularly college-educated people are increasingly woke. As more people who have been socialized into this ideology enter their workforce, they engage in staff activism and pressure the management to adopt their values, even at the expense of the organization’s mission. Management usually ends up yielding to the pressure, which may seem surprising because they’re supposed to be in charge, but when you think about it and have a realistic model of human psychology I don’t think it’s surprising at all. Nobody likes to be constantly vilified by people they’re close to such as friends or colleagues and most people are pretty low on disagreeableness, so in the end they just cave rather than be the asshole and have to deal with emotional blackmail and shrill mobs all the time. If you don’t understand that, you’re either very high on disagreeableness or you have never experienced nonstop vilification by people who are part of your social circle, but I wouldn’t bet on the former.

There is also the fact that in many places, junior staff can now leverage social media to improve their standing inside the organization where they work, because it gives them some influence that is not strictly dependent on their position within that organization and they can whip up mobs on social media to influence the outcome of internal debates in their favor. But this just speeds up the process and for the most part the mechanism is that most people are cowards, so they won’t speak up and face down a mob even if they know that a silent majority is on their side. In fact, not only do people rarely confront the mob, but they often end up talking themselves into embracing the mob’s ideology, because psychologically it’s much easier to tell yourself that you don’t speak up against a mob because you agree with it than to admit the truth, which is that you’re a coward. In his essay, Bennet talks about how at times even he engaged in that sort of rationalization, but at least he has the lucidity to admit that it’s what he was doing.

I talked about the role played by the fact that junior staff in the relevant fields are disproportionately recruited among college graduates, but this shouldn’t be misinterpreted. It’s true that young people who went to university are more likely to be woke, and I also think it’s partly causal and not just selection, but this doesn’t mean that university professors are indoctrinating students into wokeness. A lot of people who oppose wokeness and understand what I just explained about how the entry of young college graduates into the workforce of organizations that disproportionately rely on them seem to believe that, which is why they think that if we can stop indoctrination at universities by pressuring their leadership into cracking down on that stuff, we’ll solve the problem. But what they don’t understand is that, if universities have gone woke, it’s for the same reason that tech companies, nonprofits, media, etc. have gone woke. In other words, students aren’t indoctrinated by their professors as much as they indoctrinate each other, because when you put a lot of people who are selected on wokeness together they wokify each other even more. In turn, this creates pressure on university professors and administrators to become woker, for exactly the same reasons that newsrooms, companies, etc. become woker as a result of the influx of woke young people into their workforce.

I have seen that with my own eyes at Cornell and my department is far from the worst. As new grad students arrived who had gone through college after or during the Great Awokening, they started to change the department simply because they were extremely vocal on those issues and they bullied everyone else into submission, even though grad students are at the bottom of the academic hierarchy and one might have thought they wouldn’t have the power to change the culture in that way. But they did, because again most people are very susceptible to shaming and emotional blackmail, so previously sane people who nominally were in charge started to get on board with the program and even became true believers to some extent. Thus, to the extent that someone is being indoctrinated, it’s senior professors and administrators who are being indoctrinated by students and junior faculty and administrators. If the causation primarily went the other way, the kind of excesses associated with wokeness would have already been happening in universities a long time ago since most faculty and administrators have been in place for a long time, but that is not what happened. People fail to understand that because they think that ultimately wokenesss can be traced back to stuff that some obscure academics have written several decades ago, which I do not deny, but this doesn’t really tell you anything about the mechanism that results in the wokification of universities and more generally organizations that disproportionately employ college-educated people.

Once you understand that it’s a bottom-up process even at universities, it becomes hard to share the optimism of people who think the current hysteria about antisemitism on campuses is the beginning of the end for wokeness, because it means that even if the leadership of universities started cracking down on that stuff it would probably not prevent young college graduates from being woke since they are not being indoctrinated by professors for the most part and it’s dubious that professors could indoctrinate them into not being woke. But I don’t even think that is going to happen anyway, because faculty themselves are increasingly woke as a result of generational change and even those who are not are very unlikely to really crack down on that stuff. Indeed, not only are they very left-wing even when they’re not woke and thus particularly susceptible to being shamed into submission because that makes the cost of being called racist, transphobic or whatnot even higher, but despite what they like to think academics are very conformist and therefore unlikely to resist mobs even independently of their ideological preferences. So I think young people, especially those who went to college, are not going to stop being woke and they’re going to continue to wokify the organizations that disproportionately rely on a college-educated workforce. In other words, to channel Mark Twain’s famous quip, the reports of wokeness’s impending demise are greatly exaggerated.