I question whether these adherents could be counted as wise. Consider the 3 Untruths Jonathan Haidt mentions in The Coddling of the American Mind: 1) One must avoid unpleasant experiences at all cost (lest their safety be compromised), 2) Emotions are more important than reason, 3) The world is a black and white battle between good people and evil people, there is no middle ground.
Those principles are the exact opposite of Stoicism. They have major conflicts with the basic principles of Buddhism. Ironic that, Buddhism calls for awakening and Wokeness, its opposite. Haidt argues there are few of the world's wisdom traditions that don't teach the opposite of those principles. Given that, those woke principles arguably make up the definition of foolishness.
The three principles can essentially be shortened to, "There is a moral obligation to be stupid." Woke writings are rife with logical fallacies and oversimplified misrepresentations. Having only a hammer to work with, everything looks like a nail. These are really common on all sides of the political aisle of course, but the woke practically make a language out of it.
I do think they have their wise defenders. People with families and real jobs that can't be troubled to weigh the full evidence, compassionate people who see the woke crying and conclude they are the ones who need help. These people don't subscribe to the 3 Untruths themselves, but they feel compelled to defend the ones who do. I'm not sure what ratio they compose of the pro woke.
Did you read the article in which Ms.Roman was being interviewed? She imitated Marie Kondo, mocking her English. Get your facts straight. It wasn’t just about her criticizing two women of Asian descent.
Being over 50, this seems like a simple replay of Dinesh D'Souza and the "terror campaign of multiculturalism" at universities, by which he and his supporters literally meant that some kids were learning about racism at Yale. That's also what our current moral panic about CRT boils down to - the terror that someone might teach one's precious children that All is Not Perfect here in America, that there are serious issues, that granddaddy was not an immortal god but a flawed man of his time, that we actually have a history. D'Souza never made any sense (then) and he makes even less sense now (if you've read anything he's written lately). He only had a platform because the right wing - who had no idea what anyone on the left was talking about - needed a non-white person to take attack the things they were afraid of. Like history.
I'm not saying there is no problem. If you run in progressive circles, you know there are problems. The left / progressive / social justice / whatever-you-want-to-call-it can be *reductionist*. It can lack *complexity*. It can be *contradictory*! Guilty on all counts! There is a serious problem with having only ONE FRAME to analyze problems - whether that frame is evangelical Christianity, anti-Communism, socialism, animal rights, or racism. But once you leave academia or your underpaid job at some social justice organization, and come into the real world, you realize that inequality is real and that the promise of America (work hard, play fair, achieve, advance) never operated correctly for some people and is no longer operational for a LOT of other people. Once you realize that - once you understand that George W (for example) arrived where he did solely on the merit of his parents money - you don't judge people who want change so harshly. You sympathize with them and their goals, while recognizing that attacking your fellow travelers for using the wrong language is stupid and counterproductive and that our job is not to convince everyone on "the left" to go from 85% agreement to 100% agreement but rather to convince all of the people in the middle to (voluntarily and of their own free and informed will) take two steps towards the good values and ideas that progressives do have to offer.
I like McWhorter. He's thoughtful and genuine and someone has to try to make progressives less annoying. But there is something wrong with pretending that one's goal is to improve liberalism if one's goal is actually to speak at CPAC sometime in the next 5 years. That's classic neoconservative cr*p and look where that got us. Cheaper plane tickets (deregulation) but also millions of Iraqi civilian lives, as our R "intellectuals" tried to redraw the international map of American power to their liking.
Most of the conservatives who like McWhorter are using him for their own aims and their aims are (hate to say it) evil. Some people here may be deeply concerned about NYTimes writers who lose their jobs. I'm much more concerned about second grade teachers reading perfectly great books that happens to have pictures of black kids in them losing their jobs. Most people do not live in New York or teach at an elite university. They live in the suburbs and work as nurses, teachers, police, sales, bus drivers, etc. I have no interest in giving sticks to racist and anti-democratic right-wing politicians who want to ride into power on fear. Highlighting the excesses of the left in the small elite circles where they have power while the right-wing passes illiberal laws that affect entire states full of millions of people? Eyes on the prize, my friend. Eyes on the prize.
This is as detached from reality as Republicans' notions of what Critical Race Theory is. Can you find even one person who would agree with the supposed tenets of Third Wave Antiracism? No, because it isn't meant to describe what people really believe. It's propaganda.
Read DiAngelo or Kendi. Take a look at the DEI training that is going on at major corporations. There are countless Twitter pile-ons that illustrate these nonsensical woke "principles". Listen to Blocked and Reported or the Fifth Column podcasts. There are reliable sources out there that will relate incident after incident of this religiosity.
There's plenty of bait-and-switch here, so let me just debunk one: you imply that Twitter pile-ons support McWhorter's claims rather than being an unrelated phenomenon. I've seen right-wing pile-ons more often then leftist ones, but because they've shaped the discourse in such a way that right-wingers can't be "woke" "SJWs," they can fool people into believing that only the left does it. Here's an example, which led to a community manager quitting her role because she was trying to reduce online harassment of transgender gamers: https://kotaku.com/twitchs-safety-advisory-council-rollout-has-been-a-disa-1843548003 . Among other things, reactionaries took offense because she said that a lot of gamers are white supremacists. That is a fact. A lot of people in general are white supremacists, and gamers aren't exceptional.
So, Twitter pile-ons are not evidence that the woke left is real, and the nastiest ones anyone has been able to show me have been right-wing harassment campaigns.
I expect that the rest is similar: flimsy inferences from cherry-picked evidence that you're not confident enough to repeat because you know how easy it is to debunk.
Short version of your post; you saw something bad on Twitter so all of the examples of woke fanaticism are false. I suggested you read the source material for a lot of the woke principles. Why was the Harper's letter written? What have McWhorter and Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes and Kmele Foster and Adolph Reed and other black academics and thinkers been saying about the woke? Read Bari Weiss's letter resigning from the NYT. Flimsy and cherry picked? Defund the police is working well, huh? As McWhorter says, your religious thought is not going to be changed by an honest argument. Just be aware that you are defending illiberal, anti-intellectual forces in our society. The backlash at the polls this year will be stunning, and I have voted Democrat all my life.
You provide no evidence; that's a sign of religious thinking. You are easily proven wrong -- I, for one, agree that McWhorter's list is accurate, and I have spent about six months full-time studying this new religion. Also, I've never voted Republican and have been part of the non-doctrinaire far-left since before I was arrested 50+ years ago for putting up posters inviting people to Black Panther Bobby Hutton's funeral. So I know the far left quite well, and it has always had a very religious side. So there is "even one person" and I know quite a few more. You are simply wrong.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and in over 3000 words on this page McWhorter has not cited any evidence for those tenets. Oh, McWhorter's evidence is something or other in Coates's book, and Kendi's book, you don't need to know what they said, just trust me. This is the same thing that antivaxers, stop-the-steal election conspiracists, and religious zealots do: you rely on "evidence" that you don't dare bring out, because none of it really supports your claims when it's examined.
This is not new. McCarthyism, satanic panic, anti-political-correctness, anti-CRT, they're all iterations of the same moral panic phenomenon.
Fortunately, you don't have to worry about the lack of evidence if you attack everyone else loudly and confidently enough to keep them out of your bubble.
To answer your question: yes. There are plenty of online personalities or media pundits that frequently announce these ideals in order to promote the image that they are making a difference. The real world consequence for their actions does little in advancing the status of those who need it. However it does create intensive division between average upstanding citizens... So there's that.
It feels like "inquisition" would be a better word in your title and analysis than "religion." People think of religion in terms of belonging, spirituality, and/or a guiding philosophy. You're discussing how a "gotcha" witch-hunt approach is cloaking itself in moral claims. Isn't that what show trials and persecutions always do? That's the modus operandi.
Surely third wave anti-Racism has serious intellectual products of its own. Your serious argument would be more convincing if you discussed major works of critical race theory rather than media anecdotes and statements attributed to nobody.
Interesting that you list not one "major work" or even a minor one. In fact, I have made quite a study of critical race theory, and the closest you can come to such a work is Derrick Bell's comment in the Harvard Law review, which attempts to prove Stokely Carmichael's claim the "every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.” Stokely was just saying that to attack MLK, and he went so far as to call the Civil Rights Movement "white supremacist." And Bell's article, while it contains interesting information, fails to prove his case.
In fact, woke racism does make a few general points that are correct, but they are all things that have long been known. I find no original contributions that are other than unhelpful.
Its rather striking, Dr. John, that you don't (unless I've missed it) talk about the cultural influence of evangelical protestantism on 'electism.' Its all there: the guilt, the rituals of groveling self abasement, the constant need to display virtue to prove oneself one of the elect, the fundamentalist obsession with the supposed intrinsic meaning of words and symbols, the hysterical intolerance of dissent. And of course the tremendous arrogance under the ostentatious mock humility. Its Calvinism without Calvin.
There are some common feedback loops operating at the heart of this, pushing the Overton window ever further: the more firm you are in your belief and the more extreme are your views, the more faithful you are deemed – as in, pious, and also faithful as in loyal to the cause. This means the more extreme views get you more prestige, and these views are thus cascaded downwards and adopted by all who wish to climb up this hierarchy. As more extreme views also tend to be more terrible than the more nuanced, the ideology drifts towards more and more contradiction with reality.
Another death spiral like that is the mechanism by which ideologies try to preserve themselves by building walls around them. Critique from the outside is not to be listened to. In theory, only critique that is allowed, is one originating from the inside. The problem is however, that you’d be acting against the logic described above, and also by raising critique from the inside, you’d find yourself immediately on the outside. This is also in part what prevents you from listening to outside views: if you we’re to listen, you might be convinced by some of those views, and you’d thus have to face the grim possibility of a future where you’d be treated like you and the community have been treating other heretics all along.
To me there seems to be very little to remedy this. These group dynamics around an ideology are probably older than written history. There are however some antidotes that counter these tendencies, but unfortunately it seems they’d have to be baked in from the beginning. E.g. to me it seems the Scientific method and much of Buddhism place intrinsic value on the efforts of doubting your presumptions and trying to prove yourself wrong. But even then, as we know, it takes only so much pressure from the rising group ideologies (such as nationalism) to render them defunct, now only lending to a heightened false sense of objectivity.
What is new this time is the scale and breadth. The ideological bubbles of before were very much confined geographically. The online bubbles of present my be as distinct (and actually much more so than before) as the bubbles before, but geographically the picture is containing the whole globe and is more spotted than ever, arguably translating into more inter-ideological conflict.
Also what I find distinct, interesting, and truthfully, quite infuriating this time, is that many of the tenets of the ideology are thought to be derived from a common knowledge base.
To me it seems that the schisms between different religions, or between secularity and theism, always had the element of private revelation to them. There would always be an impassable curtain of faith, behind which one could stay confident in one’s belief, knowing the heretic just doesn’t have the same information as you do. And usually that would render the conflict into a kind of trench warfare, which would soon wane out when everyone gets bored.
Now however, the ideology of today prides itself in it’s intellectualism. Up until recently, the tenets are thought to have been derived from making rational conclusions from shared reality, and the arguments defending those conclusions are thought to be objectively stronger than whatever is thrown against them. In reality those arguments are never really challenged, but only occasionally padded with more traps and other defences, compensating the quality for quantity.
But were any of the self-contradictory tenets or arguments somehow fall under scrutiny, one nowadays has the possibility to retreat any time to the “bailey” – behind that curtain of private revelation. Before, ad hominem was more of a trick move one could sneak in and get away with, but nowadays it is completely stripped of any sense of illegitimacy. It gives total immunity and total power – it has become the true One Ring to rule them all.
It really is quite ingenious and would be something to admire, if it weren’t so utterly terrible.
I am writing this “from the inside”, closeted. I am very anxious and fear I would lose my loved ones if I were to speak any of this out loud. I think all my actions and the way I have proved myself as a loving human would spare me of the consequences, but I have a hard time trusting that, as these things seem to follow no logic. These feelings and ideas are taking more and more time of my day, often being the first and last thoughts of the day. To say anything would be “selfish” and “making it about yourself”, so I’m tempted to keep my feelings inside.
Dismissing or straight up ridiculing the negative experiences of people would normally be considered victim-blaming, but of course it isn’t so if you have decided beforehand who can and cannot claim victimhood.
Anyway, writing about this is helping a little bit and making things clearer for myself.
This post is extremely insightful. Religions have someone (a Messanger, prophet, Son of God, etc.) with an allegedly special pipeline to the Divine that cannot be refuted by adherents. The goal is ultimately conversion and not toleration unless forced to--consider the bloody religious wars within Europe.
By contrast, many secular ideologies seem to allegedly have discovered some secular or historical truth or path to a better world by human reasoning or insights (consider the secular ideological battles in the 1900s with fascism, communism, nationalism, etc.).
Now the neo-racist movement seems to be a hybrid because the movement is secular but with semi-divine revelations. The pipeline isn't to the Divine per se but rather to some higher moral Justice for society that all whites can allegedly never fully understand, given their sins or sins of their ancestors. Therefore, whites must--or are supposed to--rely on the pipeline to this knowledge of historical Justice that only the African American prophets of the movement have access. Why African Americans? I don't know. Is it because they've allegedly suffered the most through slavery and modern day White Supremacy?
There is also the classic rejection of disconfirming social science research, debate, inconvenient realities in addition to purity tests, punishments for heresy, and many other aspects of religion that you mentioned. It is quite genius. I agree.
Sexism is also a very real issue as is classism (from my experience, many of the poor of all races are invisible and often viewed as disposable).
Great chapter, but don't love the comparison to Mormonism. Mormons don't treat people who disagree with their religion in nearly the same way as adherents of the religion of antiracism do. It's not even comparable.
I know several people who grew up in the Mormon church and were absolutely treated terribly due to the strict, fatih-based morals upheld by the church. Pure excommunication is common in the LDS. I don't quite understand where you are getting the idea that Mormonism is a religion that has not been used to harm others.
As a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), I'm reading this exchange with interest. Of course there are people who have had painful, difficult experiences in my church, as in any other church or organization. Of course, we don't know the ins and outs of what happened in the cases of the people, or any other people, for that matter. Certainly people, regardless of faith or no faith, hurt people, often unintentionally and hopefully less often, intentionally. Regarding excommunication, I understand the motivations behind this practice, as different than that of those who "cancel" and humiliate those who don't adequately signal their "wokeness." I work in an institution where this is happening constantly. It's poisonous.
So, while I don't love McWhorter's choice to single out one faith, I'm looking past it. That said, my faith is an easy one for people to target, which is unfair. I understand that McWhorter likely has little understanding of this faith tradition. I don't think he has bad intent. And we know that intent actually does matter. So, I choose to read this important work and put my irritation aside.
John, I love your explication of this phenomenon. Most of the my departmental co-workers have willingly become members of the Elect. I suspect there are a few, who like me cower in fear of being discovered as unbelievers. Fearing exposing myself to the Elect among them, I have been unable to figure out a way to seek out those others like me and establish common ground. This may be a somewhat unique case in which there is no safety in numbers, even though if we don’t hang together, we’ll all hang separately (Benjamin Franklin). After George Floyd’s death they all decided we had to become woke and with departmental approval instituted what I considered to be struggle sessions. In reality we were divided into groups of four or five and we all watched a Don Lemon podcast series about whiteness at least that’s how it was billed, but didn’t seem to have any connection to him or CNN.
Kendi was predominantly cited as the expert about all of this. Having been a fan of yours and Glen Loury for a long time, I pushed back within my group telling them are black Americans who have a decidedly different viewpoint about this than what was being presented and clearly was to be accepted as THE TRUTH, with no questions asked. I work in a science museum, and all of the people in my group had formal backgrounds in science, but the lack of any curiosity about alternative viewpoints was astounding. Fortunately, The head our department had made it clear from the start that participation in this program was completely voluntary. After two sessions of having to listen to revisionist history and being expected to parrot back what was said in these podcasts, I decided to pull the rip cord and no longer volunteer to attend.
I look forward to reading all of the installments of The Elect and spreading the word about the book when it is finally published, which I hope deeply that it is. Thank you.
not a comment about your post, which is good but you are the first person I have seen outside my relatives with the same last name 'Kopczak'. I dont know if there is any relation my name is Michael Kopczak and I am originally from Chicago with my relatives being from Ukraine.
John, love your work and the new Elite book. I have a picky suggestion for volume one. You say “in the sites of a zealous brand of inquisition.” I am pretty sure you mean “sights.”
oh dear now i have to rewrite what just disappeared when i went to read "more comments" before posting mine. sigh. umm -- i think i said that my first response was the same, but now i like the sense of "sites" (loci) as much as "sights". It fits what i have recently consciously sensed as in "aha", as a Canadian living in the US for many years: that the way to really fit in here as a 'good American' would be to be racist, and to adopt the religion of understanding humanity as fundamentally a skin-tone song. This is hard to do as a person who grew up in communities of a) holocaust survivors in which lived both inmates (majority) and commandants of concentration camps; b) Anishinaabeg people whose territory had wrongly been assigned to whites; and then married a Chinese person (with all its old and recent history). Recently i am more than ever frustrated by what feels as clunkiness and non-specificity in the English language and relish and aim to learn from John's luscious, erotic (in the sense of deeply grounded) swimming in, dancing in, that language.
I hate it when that happens. I’ve done it many times. I always forget our phones done work the same as computers. Assuming you were doing this in your phone, rather than a computer.
I am thankful for writers like you, John. The clarity you bring to convoluted issues is a gift and provides much-needed perspective. I fully agree that we cannot, nor should we try to, convert any of the antiracist zealots. It would be a waste of time. We should arm those that are vulnerable to cult-like possession with the tools to defend themselves. Jorden Peterson speaks extensively about 'defense from ideological possession' in much the same vein.
I have been enjoying John and Glenn, or Glenn and John for a number of months and following John's shameless declaration that he was "selling out and going commercial," here I am. Enjoyed Section One and will be binge reading to catch up.
I question whether these adherents could be counted as wise. Consider the 3 Untruths Jonathan Haidt mentions in The Coddling of the American Mind: 1) One must avoid unpleasant experiences at all cost (lest their safety be compromised), 2) Emotions are more important than reason, 3) The world is a black and white battle between good people and evil people, there is no middle ground.
Those principles are the exact opposite of Stoicism. They have major conflicts with the basic principles of Buddhism. Ironic that, Buddhism calls for awakening and Wokeness, its opposite. Haidt argues there are few of the world's wisdom traditions that don't teach the opposite of those principles. Given that, those woke principles arguably make up the definition of foolishness.
The three principles can essentially be shortened to, "There is a moral obligation to be stupid." Woke writings are rife with logical fallacies and oversimplified misrepresentations. Having only a hammer to work with, everything looks like a nail. These are really common on all sides of the political aisle of course, but the woke practically make a language out of it.
I do think they have their wise defenders. People with families and real jobs that can't be troubled to weigh the full evidence, compassionate people who see the woke crying and conclude they are the ones who need help. These people don't subscribe to the 3 Untruths themselves, but they feel compelled to defend the ones who do. I'm not sure what ratio they compose of the pro woke.
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Did you read the article in which Ms.Roman was being interviewed? She imitated Marie Kondo, mocking her English. Get your facts straight. It wasn’t just about her criticizing two women of Asian descent.
Being over 50, this seems like a simple replay of Dinesh D'Souza and the "terror campaign of multiculturalism" at universities, by which he and his supporters literally meant that some kids were learning about racism at Yale. That's also what our current moral panic about CRT boils down to - the terror that someone might teach one's precious children that All is Not Perfect here in America, that there are serious issues, that granddaddy was not an immortal god but a flawed man of his time, that we actually have a history. D'Souza never made any sense (then) and he makes even less sense now (if you've read anything he's written lately). He only had a platform because the right wing - who had no idea what anyone on the left was talking about - needed a non-white person to take attack the things they were afraid of. Like history.
I'm not saying there is no problem. If you run in progressive circles, you know there are problems. The left / progressive / social justice / whatever-you-want-to-call-it can be *reductionist*. It can lack *complexity*. It can be *contradictory*! Guilty on all counts! There is a serious problem with having only ONE FRAME to analyze problems - whether that frame is evangelical Christianity, anti-Communism, socialism, animal rights, or racism. But once you leave academia or your underpaid job at some social justice organization, and come into the real world, you realize that inequality is real and that the promise of America (work hard, play fair, achieve, advance) never operated correctly for some people and is no longer operational for a LOT of other people. Once you realize that - once you understand that George W (for example) arrived where he did solely on the merit of his parents money - you don't judge people who want change so harshly. You sympathize with them and their goals, while recognizing that attacking your fellow travelers for using the wrong language is stupid and counterproductive and that our job is not to convince everyone on "the left" to go from 85% agreement to 100% agreement but rather to convince all of the people in the middle to (voluntarily and of their own free and informed will) take two steps towards the good values and ideas that progressives do have to offer.
I like McWhorter. He's thoughtful and genuine and someone has to try to make progressives less annoying. But there is something wrong with pretending that one's goal is to improve liberalism if one's goal is actually to speak at CPAC sometime in the next 5 years. That's classic neoconservative cr*p and look where that got us. Cheaper plane tickets (deregulation) but also millions of Iraqi civilian lives, as our R "intellectuals" tried to redraw the international map of American power to their liking.
Most of the conservatives who like McWhorter are using him for their own aims and their aims are (hate to say it) evil. Some people here may be deeply concerned about NYTimes writers who lose their jobs. I'm much more concerned about second grade teachers reading perfectly great books that happens to have pictures of black kids in them losing their jobs. Most people do not live in New York or teach at an elite university. They live in the suburbs and work as nurses, teachers, police, sales, bus drivers, etc. I have no interest in giving sticks to racist and anti-democratic right-wing politicians who want to ride into power on fear. Highlighting the excesses of the left in the small elite circles where they have power while the right-wing passes illiberal laws that affect entire states full of millions of people? Eyes on the prize, my friend. Eyes on the prize.
But they are not "excesses". They're infiltrations by right-wing fascist creep. The so-called Social Justice Warriors are right-wing plants.
And there are no "small elite circles" anymore. Everyone is connected online.
This is as detached from reality as Republicans' notions of what Critical Race Theory is. Can you find even one person who would agree with the supposed tenets of Third Wave Antiracism? No, because it isn't meant to describe what people really believe. It's propaganda.
Read DiAngelo or Kendi. Take a look at the DEI training that is going on at major corporations. There are countless Twitter pile-ons that illustrate these nonsensical woke "principles". Listen to Blocked and Reported or the Fifth Column podcasts. There are reliable sources out there that will relate incident after incident of this religiosity.
There's plenty of bait-and-switch here, so let me just debunk one: you imply that Twitter pile-ons support McWhorter's claims rather than being an unrelated phenomenon. I've seen right-wing pile-ons more often then leftist ones, but because they've shaped the discourse in such a way that right-wingers can't be "woke" "SJWs," they can fool people into believing that only the left does it. Here's an example, which led to a community manager quitting her role because she was trying to reduce online harassment of transgender gamers: https://kotaku.com/twitchs-safety-advisory-council-rollout-has-been-a-disa-1843548003 . Among other things, reactionaries took offense because she said that a lot of gamers are white supremacists. That is a fact. A lot of people in general are white supremacists, and gamers aren't exceptional.
So, Twitter pile-ons are not evidence that the woke left is real, and the nastiest ones anyone has been able to show me have been right-wing harassment campaigns.
I expect that the rest is similar: flimsy inferences from cherry-picked evidence that you're not confident enough to repeat because you know how easy it is to debunk.
Short version of your post; you saw something bad on Twitter so all of the examples of woke fanaticism are false. I suggested you read the source material for a lot of the woke principles. Why was the Harper's letter written? What have McWhorter and Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes and Kmele Foster and Adolph Reed and other black academics and thinkers been saying about the woke? Read Bari Weiss's letter resigning from the NYT. Flimsy and cherry picked? Defund the police is working well, huh? As McWhorter says, your religious thought is not going to be changed by an honest argument. Just be aware that you are defending illiberal, anti-intellectual forces in our society. The backlash at the polls this year will be stunning, and I have voted Democrat all my life.
You provide no evidence; that's a sign of religious thinking. You are easily proven wrong -- I, for one, agree that McWhorter's list is accurate, and I have spent about six months full-time studying this new religion. Also, I've never voted Republican and have been part of the non-doctrinaire far-left since before I was arrested 50+ years ago for putting up posters inviting people to Black Panther Bobby Hutton's funeral. So I know the far left quite well, and it has always had a very religious side. So there is "even one person" and I know quite a few more. You are simply wrong.
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, and in over 3000 words on this page McWhorter has not cited any evidence for those tenets. Oh, McWhorter's evidence is something or other in Coates's book, and Kendi's book, you don't need to know what they said, just trust me. This is the same thing that antivaxers, stop-the-steal election conspiracists, and religious zealots do: you rely on "evidence" that you don't dare bring out, because none of it really supports your claims when it's examined.
This is not new. McCarthyism, satanic panic, anti-political-correctness, anti-CRT, they're all iterations of the same moral panic phenomenon.
Fortunately, you don't have to worry about the lack of evidence if you attack everyone else loudly and confidently enough to keep them out of your bubble.
To answer your question: yes. There are plenty of online personalities or media pundits that frequently announce these ideals in order to promote the image that they are making a difference. The real world consequence for their actions does little in advancing the status of those who need it. However it does create intensive division between average upstanding citizens... So there's that.
It feels like "inquisition" would be a better word in your title and analysis than "religion." People think of religion in terms of belonging, spirituality, and/or a guiding philosophy. You're discussing how a "gotcha" witch-hunt approach is cloaking itself in moral claims. Isn't that what show trials and persecutions always do? That's the modus operandi.
Surely third wave anti-Racism has serious intellectual products of its own. Your serious argument would be more convincing if you discussed major works of critical race theory rather than media anecdotes and statements attributed to nobody.
Interesting that you list not one "major work" or even a minor one. In fact, I have made quite a study of critical race theory, and the closest you can come to such a work is Derrick Bell's comment in the Harvard Law review, which attempts to prove Stokely Carmichael's claim the "every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.” Stokely was just saying that to attack MLK, and he went so far as to call the Civil Rights Movement "white supremacist." And Bell's article, while it contains interesting information, fails to prove his case.
In fact, woke racism does make a few general points that are correct, but they are all things that have long been known. I find no original contributions that are other than unhelpful.
Its rather striking, Dr. John, that you don't (unless I've missed it) talk about the cultural influence of evangelical protestantism on 'electism.' Its all there: the guilt, the rituals of groveling self abasement, the constant need to display virtue to prove oneself one of the elect, the fundamentalist obsession with the supposed intrinsic meaning of words and symbols, the hysterical intolerance of dissent. And of course the tremendous arrogance under the ostentatious mock humility. Its Calvinism without Calvin.
Yes I've read all the pieces.
There are some common feedback loops operating at the heart of this, pushing the Overton window ever further: the more firm you are in your belief and the more extreme are your views, the more faithful you are deemed – as in, pious, and also faithful as in loyal to the cause. This means the more extreme views get you more prestige, and these views are thus cascaded downwards and adopted by all who wish to climb up this hierarchy. As more extreme views also tend to be more terrible than the more nuanced, the ideology drifts towards more and more contradiction with reality.
Another death spiral like that is the mechanism by which ideologies try to preserve themselves by building walls around them. Critique from the outside is not to be listened to. In theory, only critique that is allowed, is one originating from the inside. The problem is however, that you’d be acting against the logic described above, and also by raising critique from the inside, you’d find yourself immediately on the outside. This is also in part what prevents you from listening to outside views: if you we’re to listen, you might be convinced by some of those views, and you’d thus have to face the grim possibility of a future where you’d be treated like you and the community have been treating other heretics all along.
To me there seems to be very little to remedy this. These group dynamics around an ideology are probably older than written history. There are however some antidotes that counter these tendencies, but unfortunately it seems they’d have to be baked in from the beginning. E.g. to me it seems the Scientific method and much of Buddhism place intrinsic value on the efforts of doubting your presumptions and trying to prove yourself wrong. But even then, as we know, it takes only so much pressure from the rising group ideologies (such as nationalism) to render them defunct, now only lending to a heightened false sense of objectivity.
What is new this time is the scale and breadth. The ideological bubbles of before were very much confined geographically. The online bubbles of present my be as distinct (and actually much more so than before) as the bubbles before, but geographically the picture is containing the whole globe and is more spotted than ever, arguably translating into more inter-ideological conflict.
Also what I find distinct, interesting, and truthfully, quite infuriating this time, is that many of the tenets of the ideology are thought to be derived from a common knowledge base.
To me it seems that the schisms between different religions, or between secularity and theism, always had the element of private revelation to them. There would always be an impassable curtain of faith, behind which one could stay confident in one’s belief, knowing the heretic just doesn’t have the same information as you do. And usually that would render the conflict into a kind of trench warfare, which would soon wane out when everyone gets bored.
Now however, the ideology of today prides itself in it’s intellectualism. Up until recently, the tenets are thought to have been derived from making rational conclusions from shared reality, and the arguments defending those conclusions are thought to be objectively stronger than whatever is thrown against them. In reality those arguments are never really challenged, but only occasionally padded with more traps and other defences, compensating the quality for quantity.
But were any of the self-contradictory tenets or arguments somehow fall under scrutiny, one nowadays has the possibility to retreat any time to the “bailey” – behind that curtain of private revelation. Before, ad hominem was more of a trick move one could sneak in and get away with, but nowadays it is completely stripped of any sense of illegitimacy. It gives total immunity and total power – it has become the true One Ring to rule them all.
It really is quite ingenious and would be something to admire, if it weren’t so utterly terrible.
I am writing this “from the inside”, closeted. I am very anxious and fear I would lose my loved ones if I were to speak any of this out loud. I think all my actions and the way I have proved myself as a loving human would spare me of the consequences, but I have a hard time trusting that, as these things seem to follow no logic. These feelings and ideas are taking more and more time of my day, often being the first and last thoughts of the day. To say anything would be “selfish” and “making it about yourself”, so I’m tempted to keep my feelings inside.
Dismissing or straight up ridiculing the negative experiences of people would normally be considered victim-blaming, but of course it isn’t so if you have decided beforehand who can and cannot claim victimhood.
Anyway, writing about this is helping a little bit and making things clearer for myself.
I wish everyone all the best.
This post is extremely insightful. Religions have someone (a Messanger, prophet, Son of God, etc.) with an allegedly special pipeline to the Divine that cannot be refuted by adherents. The goal is ultimately conversion and not toleration unless forced to--consider the bloody religious wars within Europe.
By contrast, many secular ideologies seem to allegedly have discovered some secular or historical truth or path to a better world by human reasoning or insights (consider the secular ideological battles in the 1900s with fascism, communism, nationalism, etc.).
Now the neo-racist movement seems to be a hybrid because the movement is secular but with semi-divine revelations. The pipeline isn't to the Divine per se but rather to some higher moral Justice for society that all whites can allegedly never fully understand, given their sins or sins of their ancestors. Therefore, whites must--or are supposed to--rely on the pipeline to this knowledge of historical Justice that only the African American prophets of the movement have access. Why African Americans? I don't know. Is it because they've allegedly suffered the most through slavery and modern day White Supremacy?
There is also the classic rejection of disconfirming social science research, debate, inconvenient realities in addition to purity tests, punishments for heresy, and many other aspects of religion that you mentioned. It is quite genius. I agree.
Sexism is also a very real issue as is classism (from my experience, many of the poor of all races are invisible and often viewed as disposable).
Thanks for that post.
Thank you for your kind words. But please also see Scott Alexander – Is Everything a Religion? from 2015 https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/25/is-everything-a-religion/
Great chapter, but don't love the comparison to Mormonism. Mormons don't treat people who disagree with their religion in nearly the same way as adherents of the religion of antiracism do. It's not even comparable.
I know several people who grew up in the Mormon church and were absolutely treated terribly due to the strict, fatih-based morals upheld by the church. Pure excommunication is common in the LDS. I don't quite understand where you are getting the idea that Mormonism is a religion that has not been used to harm others.
As a practicing member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), I'm reading this exchange with interest. Of course there are people who have had painful, difficult experiences in my church, as in any other church or organization. Of course, we don't know the ins and outs of what happened in the cases of the people, or any other people, for that matter. Certainly people, regardless of faith or no faith, hurt people, often unintentionally and hopefully less often, intentionally. Regarding excommunication, I understand the motivations behind this practice, as different than that of those who "cancel" and humiliate those who don't adequately signal their "wokeness." I work in an institution where this is happening constantly. It's poisonous.
So, while I don't love McWhorter's choice to single out one faith, I'm looking past it. That said, my faith is an easy one for people to target, which is unfair. I understand that McWhorter likely has little understanding of this faith tradition. I don't think he has bad intent. And we know that intent actually does matter. So, I choose to read this important work and put my irritation aside.
John, I love your explication of this phenomenon. Most of the my departmental co-workers have willingly become members of the Elect. I suspect there are a few, who like me cower in fear of being discovered as unbelievers. Fearing exposing myself to the Elect among them, I have been unable to figure out a way to seek out those others like me and establish common ground. This may be a somewhat unique case in which there is no safety in numbers, even though if we don’t hang together, we’ll all hang separately (Benjamin Franklin). After George Floyd’s death they all decided we had to become woke and with departmental approval instituted what I considered to be struggle sessions. In reality we were divided into groups of four or five and we all watched a Don Lemon podcast series about whiteness at least that’s how it was billed, but didn’t seem to have any connection to him or CNN.
Kendi was predominantly cited as the expert about all of this. Having been a fan of yours and Glen Loury for a long time, I pushed back within my group telling them are black Americans who have a decidedly different viewpoint about this than what was being presented and clearly was to be accepted as THE TRUTH, with no questions asked. I work in a science museum, and all of the people in my group had formal backgrounds in science, but the lack of any curiosity about alternative viewpoints was astounding. Fortunately, The head our department had made it clear from the start that participation in this program was completely voluntary. After two sessions of having to listen to revisionist history and being expected to parrot back what was said in these podcasts, I decided to pull the rip cord and no longer volunteer to attend.
I look forward to reading all of the installments of The Elect and spreading the word about the book when it is finally published, which I hope deeply that it is. Thank you.
not a comment about your post, which is good but you are the first person I have seen outside my relatives with the same last name 'Kopczak'. I dont know if there is any relation my name is Michael Kopczak and I am originally from Chicago with my relatives being from Ukraine.
John, love your work and the new Elite book. I have a picky suggestion for volume one. You say “in the sites of a zealous brand of inquisition.” I am pretty sure you mean “sights.”
oh dear now i have to rewrite what just disappeared when i went to read "more comments" before posting mine. sigh. umm -- i think i said that my first response was the same, but now i like the sense of "sites" (loci) as much as "sights". It fits what i have recently consciously sensed as in "aha", as a Canadian living in the US for many years: that the way to really fit in here as a 'good American' would be to be racist, and to adopt the religion of understanding humanity as fundamentally a skin-tone song. This is hard to do as a person who grew up in communities of a) holocaust survivors in which lived both inmates (majority) and commandants of concentration camps; b) Anishinaabeg people whose territory had wrongly been assigned to whites; and then married a Chinese person (with all its old and recent history). Recently i am more than ever frustrated by what feels as clunkiness and non-specificity in the English language and relish and aim to learn from John's luscious, erotic (in the sense of deeply grounded) swimming in, dancing in, that language.
Re ‘sites’ or ‘sights’, if sites is correct, should it be ‘on sites’ rather than ‘in sites’?
I hate it when that happens. I’ve done it many times. I always forget our phones done work the same as computers. Assuming you were doing this in your phone, rather than a computer.
I would still like to buy the book.
Looks like a typo in there - you refer to the fired nurse as Leslie in most instances, but Louise once.
I am thankful for writers like you, John. The clarity you bring to convoluted issues is a gift and provides much-needed perspective. I fully agree that we cannot, nor should we try to, convert any of the antiracist zealots. It would be a waste of time. We should arm those that are vulnerable to cult-like possession with the tools to defend themselves. Jorden Peterson speaks extensively about 'defense from ideological possession' in much the same vein.
I have been enjoying John and Glenn, or Glenn and John for a number of months and following John's shameless declaration that he was "selling out and going commercial," here I am. Enjoyed Section One and will be binge reading to catch up.
Quick correction: "winding up in the sites of a zealous brand of inquisition..." If the metaphor is a gun, the spelling is "sight".