[Originally published 6/10/2020. See Substack version here.]
From the mid-2010's on, the social justice movement has become less interested in rebutting its opponents and more in deplatforming, expelling, terminating, and canceling them. Its response to good-faith argument is to pronounce a summary moral verdict and switch immediately to the sentencing phase. But plenty of knee-jerk opponents of this movement behave, in responding to it, exactly the same way. Indulging that urge, however, does not help us to deal with the social upheaval it is producing. This is a complex phenomenon, with psychological and intellectual dimensions, that needs first to be understood scientifically.
Woke activism arose as one strand within the larger progressive movement. But today it seems discontinuous with the culture of Imagine. When and how did the break occur? “Progressive” and “conservative” don’t mean what they used to. And there's a parallel here with what's happened to conservatism as well. So let's start at the beginning of these two movements.
Progressivism and conservatism themselves can be traced back to two strands within the Enlightenment heritage, epitomized by Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke respectively. Both of these thinkers accepted the Enlightenment ideal of cultural progress through the application of human reason, tempered by historical experience. There was, however, a crucial difference in emphasis.
Paine emphasized the progressive potential of individual rationality — an innovative mind breaking free from the vagaries of tradition. While Burke emphasized the need to conserve the fruits of collective rationality — the hard-won knowledge embedded within tradition, having emerged through incremental improvement of existing norms, generation by generation, and stood the test of time.
This set the terms for American ideological splits from the founding on. Political power has oscillated back and forth for over two centuries, but the revolutionary vs. evolutionary conception of reason continued to differentiate these two camps. It was not a narrowly political, or even ideological, distinction. Both movements were becoming more important for Americans on an individual, psychological level as well. With religion slowly receding as a source of personal identity, secular systems have been rising to replace it.
Ideology and Personality
Social psychologists try to study this in terms of broader personality traits that show correlations with political views. One well-known result based on analysis of survey data is the association of the “authoritarian” (i.e., intolerant, dogmatic) personality type with conservatism. Insofar as Burkean traditionalism has more esteem for commonly understood sources of authority, this does seem plausible. It became one plank of what is a ubiquitous folk theory in which progressives, by contrast, are associated with openness and free-thinking. Some more recent research has pushed back on this, however, arguing that less biased survey methodologies are able to reveal similar levels of dogmatism and intolerance among progressives.
An even more ambitious research program on so-called “moral foundations” has sought to comprehensively explain political orientation in terms of a core set of five or six foundational values. The result of this work is two moral-psychological profiles, typifying progressives and conservatives respectively. We can speak of an individual being a psychological progressive or psychological conservative independent of his actual political affiliation.
How do these profiles stack up against the folk theory? Let’s first consider how this question may be somewhat ill-defined.
A critical assumption in this empirical work, especially when inferring something about people today from results going as far back as the 1960’s, is the stability of progressivism and conservatism as ideological categories. If the ideologies themselves are changing on decadal timescales, then psychological profiles defined by those ideologies are not stable analytical tools. But the whole point of these profiles is to identify something relatively constant in human nature that can explain how particular individuals wind up in different ideological camps.
Ideally we would have time series data for the kind of surveys used in moral foundations and we could see how the mapping between fixed personality variables and ideologies has been changing year by year. Unfortunately such data does not stretch back far enough into the past for this.
The single most informative historical moment to probe in this way has got to be when the two rival ideologies were, in some sense, most separated from each other. A good candidate for that moment would be at the emergence of the hippy “New Left” in the 1960’s. This marked the advent of the sexual revolution as well as the civil rights movement, both defining aspects of mature progressivism.
Indeed the folk theory of progressive vs. conservative psychological types, apart from the implicit value-slant, probably does get at real facts about people around that time — creative, open-minded progressives vs. conservative protectors of social order. At a certain level, this folk theory is broadly applicable to cultural change: Protestants vs. Catholics during the Reformation, Enlightenment thinkers vs. the ancien regime of kings and priests, etc. And it seems related to two basic cognitive orientations we all have direct introspective access to, what we can call the dual drives for creativity and for order.
The drive — or perhaps the “mental module” — for creativity seeks to build useful things from the raw materials provided by nature. It is a drive to create order, connected with our evolutionary niche as intelligent tinkerers and builders. Thermodynamics dictates, however, that order once created cannot be expected to simply persist. Hence the necessity of a drive aimed at preserving order.
While complementary in many ways, these two drives can easily come in conflict. When a given form of order — let’s say a social system — is found to be inadequate at achieving some aspect of human well being, the creative drive kicks in to conceive a new, better order. Trying it out generally requires an initial stage of disassembling the current order before one can prop up the new one. You have to, say, revolt against the monarchy before you can form a constitutional republic. The prospect of a complete failure to maintain the present social system puts your drive for order in conflict with your drive for creativity. This will be resolved internally according to the facts of the situation and your own psychological make-up, resulting in either a net preference for creativity (revolution) or for order (preserving the current system) in that case.
This cognocentric version of the folk theory is of course not an empirical finding as understood by social psychology today. I take it as a strong “Bayesian prior,” in other words a well-motivated default framework that ought to be discarded only to extent empirical counter-evidence disconfirms it.
But this prior is not just arbitrary. I submit that it's amply supported at an introspective level by tons of experiences involving order-creative and order-preserving activities — from simple childhood games, to feats of mathematical abstraction, to political deal-making. And to the extent that the replication crisis within social psychology leads us to be more skeptical of empirical claims, it is a mathematical inevitability that extra weight must be shifted onto our priors.
One prominent result from empirical work on moral foundations does bear on this cognocentric model. The distinctive feature of psychological progressives is that they tend to focus on a single one of the foundational values — the value of “care,” which refers broadly to concern for well-being. There is something notably more derivative or instrumental about the other five values studied in this framework — fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. They are all aspects of the social order that work to preserve that order. Perhaps they are important just because of how crucial the social order is to human well-being in general. Well-being itself ( “care” ) is, on the other hand, prior to the social order. Indeed it is the only one of these values that applies to someone on a desert island, in the sense that concern for others' well-being is connected in a deep biological way to concern for one's own well-being.
In cognocentric terms, someone dominated by the drive for creativity — i.e., a psychological progressive—will be more open to questioning derivative aspects of the social order, at least temporarily, for the sake of ultimate gains to human well-being that could be achieved in a re-ordered society. The simpler two-factor cognocentric model can thus explain why there would always tend to be two ideological poles, one of which focuses mainly on “care,” while the other is more evenly weighted across the whole set of values.
If these two cognitive profiles associated with drives for creativity and order do in fact reflect progressivism and conservatism, respectively, as of the late 1960’s, then how have things changed since then?
The conservative renaissance climaxing with Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 faded into about a quarter century of bipartisan consensus around stopping, or at least slowing, the growth of government’s role in the economy, while at the same time consolidating the move toward equal rights for women and racial minorities. This compromise heralded a new establishment involving two factions — the Reaganite Republicans and Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats” — that would argue about policy on the margin but, in retrospect, appear pretty close to each other within the landscape of ideological possibilities. Progressive liberal social policy and classical liberal economic policy — in essence, cosmopolitan tolerance and open commerce — constituted the new liberal consensus, albeit with progressives pushing the social side and conservatives pushing the economic side when trade-offs came up.
Well consolidated establishments cry out for rivals. And waiting in the wings was a listless civil rights movement on the left, coming off perhaps the most galvanizing ideological victory seen in post-war America. It achieved this mainly through gradual cultural change rather than any dramatic policy revolution. But the excitement of righteous outrage among a vanguard of comrades left its mark.
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins describes how processes within social movements often resemble the well-known mechanics of natural selection. Ideas that succeed at arousing feelings of excitement, like those that motivated the movement in the first place, tend to be replicated and displace ideas that don’t do that. It’s exciting for activists to think that, despite a general self-satisfaction among the public with its own newfound tolerance, it’s really just a lie — that the same ugly beasts of sexism and racism still lurk but now in some secret compartment of people’s minds — and that the old movement is still needed to root out these beasts and to expunge them once and for all by new, more radical means.
Of course this was a hard sell to critics. Where was the evidence that oppression remained omnipresent, rather than occasional and in decline, when people could tell from their own experience that dramatic social shifts had taken place? Women, particularly married women, were moving through academia and into the professions en masse alongside big increases in social acceptance of women in the work force. Attitudes toward racial minorities were changing and it was clear in the statistics — e.g., massive reductions in the frequency of blacks being killed by police between the 1960’s and 1980’s, and an underrepresentation of blacks shot by police among those subject to police encounters.
More broadly, what we need when taking up these questions is a scientific approach as against that of the partisan looking to confirm a sacred moral-political thesis. When we take a big-picture, systematic look at explaining how humans naturally tend to sort and associate, accounting for individual and cultural differences, the mono-causal theory of systemic oppression simply doesn't do the job. Racism and sexism still exist and merit attention, but an empirical case that they silently control the destinies of blacks and women in America today is non-existent.
A Disturbance in the Field
If the conspiratorial nature of these newer theories of oppression ran against the progressive ethos of scientific rigor and clarity, conveniently there was a new ethos on offer. A similar predicament had plagued the anti-capitalist movement, starting in the 1950’s. Evidence about the horrors of Soviet communism became increasingly hard to deny. And the collapse of the Soviet Union, together with robust cross-sectional economic data from around the world, drove a consensus across the economics profession by the 1990’s that, as a general rule, socialism and central planning simply didn’t work.
The anti-capitalist movement’s response over this period was to rethink its basic orientation about things like scientific rigor and clarity. It started becoming popular to dismiss these as the tools of a corrupt Eurocentric “meta-narrative,” which itself was just a rationalization for the West’s continued oppression of the “other.” It was easy for the anti-racism movement to pick up this same approach in order to neutralize any data-driven argument about improving race and sex relations. This postmodern turn characterized anti-racism as a niche academic enterprise by the late 1980’s, which proceeded to spread out into activist circles and other humanities departments.
Within a generation, postmodern anti-racism was ready to jump the cultural barrier from academia into schools, news media, blockbuster films, regulatory agencies, corporate bureaucracies. And the new technology of social media provided a mechanism for massive continued engagement among recent graduates infused with its doctrine. Social justice as a large-scale movement — wokism — was on the rise.
But how exactly is wokism so different from liberal progressivism? If it is only a matter of which rhetorical maneuver is used in some academic debate to justify the same kind of anti-racist civil rights policies, doesn’t that leave the two ideologies essentially similar?
The problem is that the intellectual foundations of a movement have a nasty way of shaping more than just academic minutiae. The foundations encode the movement’s basic values and how people within it interpret those values.
Perhaps the most central Enlightenment value is free speech or, more broadly, free thought. This does not just refer to a narrow legal principle; that is only one manifestation of it. Rather it is about the sacredness of seeking truth through reason and sharing the fruits of your search, acts that require and deserve the utmost protection from cultural institutions. By contrast, postmodern wokism denigrates the search for objective truth as a Western pretension, so accords no special status to speech or rational inquiry. Indeed, for it, speech is often seen as a form of violence.
A microcosm of the conflict between woke and non-woke progressives is currently unfolding within that vital organ of progressivism, the New York Times. In the latest installment of this drama the opinion editor, a non-woke progressive, had green-lighted a controversial op-ed written by a conservative member of the U.S. Senate. The younger, woker generation of Times staffers disagreed with this op-ed. They were not satisfied merely with column space to rebut it. They asserted, characteristically, that this sequence of words on a printed sheet jeopardized their safety. So the editor was pushed out.
No matter how a movement comes to alter its epistemology — its basic approach to seeking knowledge about the world, hence what shapes all its views — such an alteration has great power. It becomes part of the basic DNA of the movement. What looks like a minute, technical change, can transform the whole entity into a perverse mutant.
Progressives and conservatives during the liberal consensus, despite what seemed in the moment to be grave differences in world-view, at least spoke the same language. They largely submitted to the same analytical standard, the one bestowed by their common Enlightenment heritage: rational argument from observed facts.
This agreement did not mean they agreed on what lessons to draw from any given set of facts — nor always on what counted as facts, due especially to the presence of a faction within the conservative movement that is not only religious but fully counter-Enlightenment. Still, and notwithstanding a surge in the 1980’s, this faction was being sidelined by leaders on the right as the liberal consensus jelled. Consider a tale of two chipper, right-wing wunderkinds both gaining prominence in the 1990's. Largely secular libertarian Paul Ryan rose to Speaker of the House and de facto mascot of the Republican party. Leader of the Christian Coalition, faith-advocate Ralph Reed lost in the primaries for Lieutenant Governor of Georgia.
Liberal progressives and wokists, on the other hand, do not speak the same language. The concept of anti-racism means something different to them. For the liberal progressive it means moving society toward — in the direction of — an ideal state in which race is not part of how we evaluate anyone morally or intellectually. For the wokist it means virtually the opposite: that such an ideal is itself a chimera — in fact, a malicious ruse whose purpose is to obfuscate white supremacy.
The deeper distinction now is not between wokists and liberal progressives. Wokism is at odds with both sides of the liberal consensus. Fundamentally it’s wokism vs. liberalism.
How is this rivalry going? Survey data from universities indicates lower levels of support among the woke generation (“Gen Z”) for allowing controversial viewpoints on campus. While the significance of this data has been contested, a prominent critic appears to have just recanted on the strength of woke intolerance he observed directly but was unwilling to publicly describe — shortly before deleting his entire twitter history. Also woke phrase counts at major publications reveal exponential growth turning a corner around 2013, a statistical signal I will refer to as the Mark of Zorro.
The first phase of wokism involved seizing control of the left's power-centers within academia and displacing liberal progressives. The next phase involved spreading into and consolidating control of the broader culture. But the kind of orthodoxy it is developing into differs from that of previous iterations on the left. Having deactivated Enlightenment defenses against dogmatism and intolerance, wokism is beginning to attract a distinctly conservative personality type — the rule enforcer, the outcast shunner, the person who refuses to acknowledge the existence of other viewpoints.
Woke intolerance is rooted in a postmodern tendency to attack the legitimacy of their critics as interlocutors rather than addressing the substance of the criticism. Of course when there is no objective reality to adjudicate disagreements, and all that’s left is power relations, why privilege evidence and data? The practical result of this, as institutions become woke, is that good-faith disagreement is met not with open counterargument but with personal attacks and behind-the-scenes chicanery — misconduct charges, investigations, administrative sanctions, termination, expulsion from scholarly and professional associations.
The full-blown woke are currently a minority even on the left, at least in terms of a simple head-count, so it may be difficult to isolate a woke (i.e., intolerant progressive) signal in the moral foundations survey data. But that recent work mentioned above, about authoritarian psychological tendencies within the left, is likely picking up a more recent phenomenon. Perhaps rigorous techniques applied to this kind of data will uncover another Mark of Zorro.
Psychomagnetic Reversal
Igneous rock has little bits of iron-bearing mineral in it that get aligned with the magnetic field of the Earth at the time the rock first solidifies from molten lava. The geophysicist Motonori Matuyama used this, looking at older and older rocks, to make a surprising discovery: an event occurred 780,000 years ago in which the North and South magnetic poles of the Earth spontaneously switched places. Indeed this tends to happen every couple hundred thousand years, in a random looking pattern. It’s not that the Earth actually flips upside-down — it’s just that the electrically charged rivers of molten metal in the Earth’s core all of a sudden reverse their flow, causing what was the magnetic South pole to suddenly diverge from the geographic South pole and rise up into alignment with the geographic North pole. The Earth's magnetic field flips; the geographic poles remain fixed in space. This bizarre phenomenon is called a geomagnetic reversal.
A similar phenomenon has occurred with the relationship between (i) the ideological poles of progressivism vs. conservatism defined by the historical lineages of these two movements, respectively, and (ii) the psychological poles of progressivism vs. conservatism defined by measurable personality traits likely connected to the drives for creativity and order discussed above.
How does this work? First the liquid metal of epistemology, at the core of Western culture, all of a sudden reverses its flow in a postmodern direction. This repels the magnetic pole of progressive ideology away from its ancestral home at the Southern garden of free-thinking and psychological openness, pulling it toward the Northern bunker of dogmatism and intolerance. What we are witnessing in this epoch is a psychomagnetic reversal.
This would suggest that the opposite ideological pole has also been transformed in some way and is now occupying that garden of free-thinking. Indeed, in response to the rise of the woke, a new force has seized and transformed the right: the equally conspiracy-minded, nativist, anti-Enlightenment alt-right. Well, cancel the garden party, it seems the model is breaking down. Except that the alt-right is neither a psychological nor an intellectual opposite of wokism. It is a postmodern incarnation of the right — an intense magnetic field source that is in fact well aligned with wokism on a deeper intellectual level. Those elements that do belong in the free-thinking garden are having to break off from both the left and right and may be nucleating a third movement. But this is another story.
Most of corporate America was able to remain calm and neutral without much trouble over decades when it was simply progressivism vs. conservatism. Wokism just arrived, and corporate America’s hair is already on fire with it. The reader is by now likely familiar with woke intolerance from his own direct experience. You know which company-wide emails you may not raise any questions about. You know that when colleagues preface their comments at meetings with woke boilerplate, it doesn’t mean they actually believe it. You know which investment strategies you may not make a case against. You know which employees take five times the normal effort to fire because of implicit company policies that may never be spoken.
The cancellations that are now common knowledge have put all of us on blast about what could happen if you slip up in a particularly poignant and recordable way. Whatever you thought you meant, it doesn’t matter. Waves of danger emanate out from your transgression toward the antennae of woke snitches, channeling up through their departments or separate institutions or social media accounts, until a collective shift occurs to neutralize the disturbance — you. And here you face the risk of the incident becoming sufficiently public that only one course of action is tenable for your employer. You are then free to seek any other opportunity in the world that you fancy — so long as it is not at any publicly traded or otherwise vulnerable company, university, non-profit organization, or any other institution that cares about its reputation.
Indeed the mere plausibility of such a scenario, given the risk-reward for your career, has fundamentally altered the speech environment across our culture. The woke-liberal rivalry ended a moment after we even noticed it was a thing. Progressivism and conservatism were ideologies that evolved to spread their influence in an Enlightenment-ridden world connected by the printing press. In retrospect neither could be expected to stand a chance once a digital-optimized ideology was booted up and loaded with postmodern admin tools.
This recalls the AI-catastrophists’ scenario of some new rogue artificial intelligence jumping the air gap onto the internet and us all waking up the next morning to begin our new lives as abject slaves to the dystopia machine. By any rational measure, this is a remote prospect. But what if a figurative version of this scenario is playing out right now?
The AI monster, it turns out, is already here. It is just much simpler than we thought it would be, encoded in a genetic algorithm we already know is running on the cloud that is our culture. And the way it enslaves humanity is by ideologically reprogramming enough of us to adopt — to sacralize — a strange set of objectives disconnected from human well-being. All it ever has to do is earnestly implore us to please… bEcOmE a StRoNg AIly.
