I know, wokeism – but bare with me – because as I’ve commented on this in the past, and because apparently it’s over, and because it does touch on important issues I care about – free speech, censorship, progressivism, ethics, the media – and because I think there’s a lot of confusion on this topic still, well – let’s think about whether wokeism is really over.
Woke
Anyone who tries to think seriously about this topic will quickly get a headache because, I’ve realised – ‘woke’ means too many different things. For example, Critical Race Theory and outrage culture on Twitter, say, are two completely different things. But there are many that would identify something about both as ‘woke’.
I think that thing at its core is censoriousness – directed by or culminating around university campus talks, newspaper editorial boards, social media moderators, public shaming by the online mob, the pressure to sanitize or modify language, to ban books or harshly criticised films – all of this is the core of wokeism – the censorious impulse.
I want to take that impulse seriously. Because it sounds immediately negative, Orwellian, Fascist, Propagandistic – which it obviously often is – but its also something we all do all the time – we have rules in classrooms, cut off meetings, moderate social media scams, harassment, pornography, self-censor in polite company, and so on. So some level of censorship is the norm.
But calling wokeism censoriousness doesn’t explain the novelty of this current moment. Political correctness is perennial – from the Reformation to Mao to the McCarthey Era to Victorian morality. Public shaming is certainly nothing new – every period has had its pillory.
But here’s the thing – we assume we’ve gotten more tolerant over time, and that public shaming rituals and practices – for being a communist or for being a heretic or for being gay – have decreased over the time. But for many critics of wokeism, this moment is getting worse again. The woke mind virus, the new puritans, the cancelling of the American mind. To many, the woke mob represent a force that is in some sense new and in some ways worse than the kind of censorship or repression seen in the past.
Take Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s book The Cancelling of the American Mind. Lukianoff is the President of FIRE – The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression – an organisation whose ‘mission is to defend and sustain the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought.’
They defend, often in court, the rights of professors or students who have had their first amendment right to free speech violated on campuses across America. And this is key to it all - Lukianoff make the very specific claim that ‘more professors have been terminated during the era of Cancel Culture than in the era of McCarthyism’ and that ‘Cancel Culture is happening at such a scale that historians will be studying it in fifty to a hundred years, much like we study the Red Scare and the Alien and Sedition Acts.’
From the FIRE database of cases, Lukianoff points to almost 200 professor terminations in the cancel culture period, and that ‘that exceeds even the estimated 100 to 150 professors terminated in the second Red Scare’
He also makes the claim that 91% of professor said in a poll they self-censor, compared with 9% during McCarthyism. And the book includes this graph, showing a notable uptick in cancellations in around 2018-2020.
So this is a new type of censoriousness, which Lukianoff and Schlott define as an ‘uptick beginning around 2014, and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is—or would be—protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.’
Lukianoff and Schlott say both the left and the right do it, and that ‘Cancel Culture arose when social media enabled the almost instantaneous creation of outrage mobs.’
They go on to discuss some of the cases as evidence. In one case, for example, Gordon Klein was suspended by UCLA for an email responding to a suggestion that black students be given special treatment during Geroge Floyd protests. Klien cited MLK on not judging based on the colour of skin, asked where to draw the line on mixed parentage, and was uncomfortable sorting white from black students when classes had been online only.
You might disagree with it but it’s not an unreasonable email by any stretch of the imagination. You can read the email, it’s linked below. Despite this, Klein was suspended after a petition with over 75,000 signatures. He was later reinstated after FIRE intervened.
Or take this case in the UK in which police had to apologise for having a billboard that said ‘being offensive is an offense’. Or the story of a Hamline art professor who was fired after showing an image of Muhamed in art class after giving plenty of warning. Students complained and kicked off a ‘firestorm’.
Cases like this are pointed to as evidence that cancel culture is so bad its worse than McCarthyism. And it’s a convincing case – I think being fired for any of these is wrong. Commentators like Sam Harris agreed. And so, apparently, do the public. Most people agree that cancel culture has become a problem – 82% in one survey. And in 2022, the NYT admitted cancel culture is real saying ‘America has a Free Speech Problem.’
But going through this book, and books like it – Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans, for example – I couldn’t help notice that on case after case, things were never quite as they seemed.
Exaggerating Wokeism
In FIRE’s database of cancellations, there are almost 1400 entries. Lukianoff and Schlott write ‘Of these, nearly two thirds resulted in the professors’ getting sanctioned, and one fifth losing their jobs.’
From the public perception of cancel culture and wokeness you might have some vague idea that these were forced out for refusing to call trans women women, for a poorly timed gag about the gays, for the sin of uttering an outdated turn of phrase, for refusing to bend the knee, and so on.
But I ran the dataset through ChatGPT and asked it to return the cases that ‘resulted in termination, firing, or forced resignation’. ChatGPT listed 151. This is an imperfect method and ChatGPT might be a bit inaccurate here but remember, from the same data, Lukianoff says that there have been almost 200 professor terminations in the cancel culture period, and that ‘That exceeds even the estimated 100 to 150 professors terminated in the second Red Scare’ So 150 is a reasonable representation of the data.
Many of them do conform to the public perception of ‘woke’ cancel culture. For example, Jewish professor Channa Newman won a court case back from 2018 in which she claimed she was forced out of Point Park university for her views on Zionism and for an ‘alleged’ comment she made about MeToo. Classic woke cancel culture.
But scrolling through, many – if not most – aren’t really about woke stuff at all. Many of the terminations are because of what seem like pretty controversial conduct. One says ‘Greer was forced to resign in 2001 for creating hostile learning environments and not preparing syllabuses. One was let go for their past links with the Ku Klux Klan and for violently resisting arrest. Some were fired for viewing pornography, for bad performance over years. One was fired for quote ‘terminated after she was recorded telling an Asian-American family to go back to their home countries.’
Or take this case, of someone who says they were fired for using a ‘phallic prop in a school play’. The truth according to university officials at the private Catholic University, was that he wasn’t rehired after accusations of sexual harassment, saying "The university can confirm that the claims were unrelated to the content or props of the play."
Some of the cases seem like unreasonable firings at first glance. One professor was fired for confusing the names of two black students. That’s all it says in FIRE’s dataset. But again, a bit of Googling reveals that he was actually dismissed for a series of emails – one of them nine pages long – to his students about why he did it. Now, maybe the dismissal was still unreasonable, but it’s hard to know without knowing the content of the emails and what was discussed. The point is, he was dismissed not for the confusing of the names, but for those emails.
Or take a case in the UK, pointed to by Andrew Doyle. He says in the New Puritans that ‘The Reverend Dr Bernard Randall, a school chaplain at Trent College in Derbyshire, told me about training sessions in which staff were instructed to chant ‘smash heteronormativity’, and when he delivered a sermon about the importance of respectfully challenging such ideological viewpoints he was reported to Prevent, the government’s anti-terrorism programme.’ He was then dismissed by the college.
Again, this conforms to the public perception of woke hysteria, but Doyle leaves a few inconvenient details out. A bit more research reveals that Randall actually went to court over the unfair dismissal and the court rejected it.
The case report reads that ‘His first sermon strongly implied that it is sinful to alter the body given by God, implied that marriage can only be between a man and a woman and that family works best when a woman, with her tone of voice, looks after the children. The School received complaints from pupils and staff who were upset by the underlying message that it is a sin to be gay.’ The sermon included the following quote from Leviticus: “if a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them” This was his message to school kids.
Take another case. In 2021, Richard Taylor was let go from St John’s University for asking students whether the positives of slavery justify the negatives. Lukianoff and Schlott present Taylor’s debate inducing question as a well-meaning lesson about the effects of slavery on trade and biodiversity, saying ‘While both slavery and the abuse of indigenous populations were mentioned on several slides, they were not the focus of the lesson. In fact, it would take an extraordinarily unnatural reading of the question to intuit that the ultimate discussion question of a forty-six-slide lesson was directed at the seven slides that referenced slavery.’ Lukianoff and Schlott mention an Instagram post from students claiming he ‘poses a threat to the education of our student body’, and that Taylor was targeted for ‘for his status as a former NYPD officer and marine’. Plus that there were three hundred bias complaints. Wokeness gone mad.
With this evidence presented to you, you might suspect, as I did, that Taylor might have made some unfortunate comparisons, but that firing him goes too far. But Lukianoff and Schlott don’t mention – I have to assume purposefully omit - multiple reports about Taylor before the incident, including from faculty members, and that students had only raised his status as NYPD officer because he’d had complaints about him as an officer, too. Taylor had also told black students who complained about having to discuss the positives of slavery that ‘they wouldn’t be here without slavery.’
Or take both Lukianoff, Schlott, and Doyle’s discussion of book banning.
Lukianoff writes that ‘According to a report from the American Library Association, 2021 saw the largest number of banning attempts recorded in their twenty-year history. The group recorded 729 individual challenges to 1,597 book titles—up from just 273 in 2020 and 377 in 2019.’
Doyle points to a case in ‘the Waterloo Region District School Board in Canada’ which identified and removed books that were considered ‘harmful to staff and students. HE says ‘other school libraries ‘did away with’ copies of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), following complaints about ‘racist, homophobic, or misogynistic language and themes’.
‘Did away with?!’ – Sounds Orwellian. He compares it to book burning. Of course, the truth is a bit different. If this is the case he’s talking about then the school board didn’t ‘do away with’ books, it changed the curriculum so that To Kill a Mockingbird was no longer required reading. The Independent reported ‘Teachers will still be allowed to use the book in optional lesson plans.
Curriculums change all the time. That’s not book banning. And its an interesting discussion. I could well-imagine myself defending the inclusion of a classic, but would be predisposed to listening to the arguments against too.
Doyle doubles down though. He says ‘the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board removed copies of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) on the grounds that the themes of the book ‘were outdated and too focused on white, male power structures’.
But again Doyle uses dishonest language – he literally says ‘removed copies’ when instead, once again, the truth is that , as BoingBoing reported ‘Ottawa-Carleton District School Board removed William Golding's classic Lord of the Flies from its curriculum’
Over and over, these cases are presented as unreasonable attempts to silence, ban, censor, and cancel, when the truth is that they’re either based on genuinely controversial conduct or are the result of reasonable discussions about syllabuses and teaching. You might agree or disagree with the outcome of each case, but what they’re not is the product of a new woke mind virus, a new cultish religious puritanism. What frustrates me, is that in an otherwise good book about free expression, Lukianoff and Schlott repeatedly omit details that would risk empathising with those making the complaints, and consistently say this is worse than McCarthyism. This completely muddies the waters.
Comparing cancel culture to the McCarthy era is, I don’t want to say ridiculous – but a very bad comparison. Remember, it’s based on the claim that the 200 or so terminations of professors in the FIRE database ‘exceeds even the estimated 100 to 150 professors terminated in the second Red Scare’.
But first, as we’ve already seen some of those ‘200’ firings were for things like watching porn in the office, or in another case for not working productively with another department, or in another case for ‘performance over the years’ – in other words bureaucratic stuff. So not really comparable to political repression. And the number of 100-150 professors terminated during the Red Scare comes from one single article. The impression given is that the Red Scare was limited to this and a Hollywood Blacklist of 300 people in the movie industry.
But In his book on political repression in America, political scientist Robert Justin Goldstein writes that "Overall, approximately eleven thousand people were fired as a result of government and private loyalty programs" and that "The federal loyalty program alone dismissed approximately thirty-nine hundred government employees and fifty-four hundred employees from private employers" and that "Hundreds of public school and college teachers were fired by numerous institutions during this period, generally on grounds of admitted or suspected CP membership or for exercising their Fifth Amendment rights".”
So Lukianoff and Schlott play a pretty dishonest trick. They omit everywhere to balance the scales in the way they want. McCarthyism numbers are deflated and Cancel Culture figures are inflated by omitting certain details about both.
They imply that self-censorship is worse today that the famously conformist fifties. Do you really think that’s true? Am I missing something? Take a look online, take a look at the stream of cancelled celebrities in mainstream newspapers or on popular podcasts claiming they’ve been cancelled. Take a look at twitter and abundance of information. Take a walk around any number of demonstrations from the left or the right across Europe and America – do you really think self-censorship is worse than the fifties? I’m not sure right-wing professors are hiding books of Thomas Sowell from FBI informants.
Eternally WOKE
You might ask, why does it matter whether it’s worse or different or new? What matters is free speech, toleration, and fairness now. But there’s a reason why people who argue against cancel culture and wokeism have to say it’s new. You see it often – if it’s new, it’s usually then blamed on some radical form of leftist thought – postmodernism or CRT or discourse analysis or Maoist political correctness. And I do think it’s often true that there’s something new here – there is a postmodern emphasis on discourse and language, there is a liberal bias in institutions and universities, and there is group think and outrage culture whipped up by social media – but there’s also a sense of many of the cases in the FIRE dataset being as old as the hills, the timeless results of faculty politics and bureaucratic dog fights.
IN 1974 coal miners in Kanawha led a walk out in protest of school textbooks which included more multiracial content, including about Alan Ginsberg, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, and Freud amongst others. This caused such a backlash that eleven mines were shut and thousands picketed outside schools with signs like ‘I have a bible I don’t need those dirty books.’
protestor sung a song that said ‘Till they came for the souls of our precious ones, and now we’re gonna resist. Now they come for our kids with their dirty books and their one-world plan, But they got a surprise from us mountain folk, because now the Lord said stand?’
Now I sit and read quite a bit of history and my point is this – stuff like this comes up all of the time – stuff that could quite easily be described as woke.
Take your pick – the Red Scare, the Reformation, the French Revolutionary focus on sentimentalism, strict Victorian moral codes, the list goes on of the most obvious, but it’s really just a constant through history – as is call-out culture, public shaming, strict enforcement of repressive norms, group think, conformity, and social ostracism. These things aren’t novel in wokeness.
Critics might respond that well yes but we’re meant to have become more tolerant, and now we have an uptick of public shaming, again. And I’ll be honest, I don’t know how I feel about this – because, on the one hand, I agree, while on the other, it’s clearly been exaggerated, and that there has also been a reasonable focus on say the experience of women in the workplace since MeToo
On top of this, you have the tabloids, Fox News, GB News, twitter reactionaries amplifying edge cases and calling everything woke, leading to what some rightly call a moral panic. I mean, Exhibit A. Is it any wonder that 82% think it’s a problem when the most rare but extreme examples are trotted out by mainstream commentators and tabloid pundits as examples of the world going mad?
Or take the differences in these data points. To prove the argument that we’re cancelling ourselves to head, Lukianoff and Schlott write of students that: ‘More than 80 percent said they have self-censored their beliefs. Eighty-one percent said that they feel pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes. And almost two-thirds of students are worried about damaging their reputation because someone misunderstands something they have said or done.’
Now, I think that’s bad but in what world do the majority of eighteen-year-olds on campus for the first time not self-censor a bit? Not worry about everything they’ve said? Does he remember what it’s like to be a school kid? This statistic doesn’t surprise me.
And compare it to this 2023 study of 2500 scholars , that concludes that ‘the plurality view suggesting no change in the quality of open debate over time. In total, almost as many political scientists reported on the basis of their own experience that open debate had improved as that it had worsened’ but that ‘rightwing faculty were slightly more likely to believe on the basis of their own experience that open debate has got a lot worse over time’
On the question of ‘Experience of pressures to be politically correct’ it conludes ‘the largest plurality of respondents (39%) reported that in their own experience there had been no change over time. But that one third reported that these pressures had worsened ‘somewhat/a lot’ (36%) in their experience, clearly outweighed the proportion feeling more positively that these pressures had got ‘somewhat/a lot’ better (15%)’.
So the majority think no change over time, but a large minority on the right believe there has been a change. This aligns with this study which concludes that ‘in the United States, and in 23 comparable post-industrial societies, self-identified rightwing political scientists were most likely to report personal experience of a worsening cancel culture’.
Which okay, that’s pretty good evidence of a significant change, but oddly doesn’t align with the rest of FIRE’s data which, out of those one hundred fifty job terminations in the FIRE database since 2000 (that’s six per year across America), the majority are classed as pressure to terminate from the right. 57 are from the left. 66 from the right. If you want to know about that, there’s a really good video from Brendan Miller on all this – go sub, Brendan does great political explainers.
And all of this aligns with an Open Syllabus study of 5.5 million syllabi from 4000 universities and found that so-called woke terms like critical race theory, structural racism, and transgender, appear just 0.08% of the time and terms like race and gender have been consistent over time and even falling since 2017, backing up the arguing that the only real change has been the media, particularly the shock-jock tabloid focus on all of it.
Ok, so things are pretty messy. But I think I have a good way to think about all of this. Think about different speech settings – the classroom, the street corner, a newspaper, a social media platform, an office meeting. Some of them are more limited or zero sum than others. What I post on social media doesn’t take away from you posting what you want. But a university syllabus? The pages of a national newspaper? An office? They are much more zero sum – in other words, there will be debate and policy around what the values are, what the direction is, what should be taught or not, what acceptable conduct us. Obviously the differences between positive sum and zero sum speech settings matters in discussions about free speech. In positive sum speech settings free speech should be maximalist, but in zero sum, there will be cut off points, decisions made, hirings, firings, changes in values – and my point is that in those speech settings what we’ve been calling ‘woke’ or censoriousness will continue as it has always done.
None of this is to say that the values and practices of free speech, toleration, open discussion aren’t important in both settings. Nor that this isn’t a really good book on thinking about freedom of speech and it’s really made me think about how difficult it is to stand by. I think the internet has fostered an uptick in public shaming that’s made institutions quick to suspend or fire over anything that could become controversial.
And I agree with Lukianoff and Schlott that institutions should establish stronger norms and codes for freedom of speech, toleration, some sense of second chances, and openness to opposing viewpoints. The internet has in many ways brough out the worst of our scapegoating, groupthink, and bandwagon tendencies on all sides.
But we should also remember that, in those zero-sum settings, choosing one book over another isn’t book burning, firing and not rehiring happens, discussions about race, gender, representation, values are inevitable, and that reactionaries love all this stuff as a distraction. Because none of it is good for politics. I’ve always thought those debates are for anywhere but politics.
But if I’m right that the wokeism complaint is, at its core, about censoriousness, and that what’s being called ‘censorship’ is actually often exaggerated and more quotidian than those critics want to admit, then what’s been called woke will continue. But what I’d also say is look at those cases we looked at, look at the FIRE database yourself, think about DEI, CRT, Postmodernism, cancel culture, and identity, and if you think it’s all good or all bad, then you’re probably not doing much thinking at all.