Two Tweets that capture the essence of Wokeness:
[Supp Jan 17, 2025]
Wokeness is a hyper-vigilance toward any real or imagined transgressions against identity-based human dignity, resulting in exaggerated perceptions of harm, rigid systems of thinking, a need for purification, and a desire to disengage from and punish transgressors.
“Woke” is when you:
1. Reduce individuals to group identities
2. Reduce these group identities to “victims” and “oppressors”
3. Reduce any disagreement with these reductions to “oppression” or “bigotry”
Steve Stewart-Williams offers 10 new findings on Wokeness, including this survey showing that women are more woke than men:
His other findings:
- Younger Generations Are More Censorious
- Declaring Pronouns Wins Favor in Academia
- Pronouns Are on the Wane
- Content Warnings Make Art Less Enjoyable
- Diversity Officers Don’t Increase Diversity
- Activism Attracts Narcissists
- Racial Bigotry Isn’t Confined to White People
- Many People Agree with Doctored Hitler Quotes
- The Transgender Boom: Acceptance or Social Contagion? (It’s the latter)
I am a paid subscriber to Stewart-Williams Substack. He consistently offers high quality science-based content. I highly recommend his work.
[Supp Jan 22, 2025]
Steve Stewart-Williams continues his deep dive into Wokeness in “Where Did Wokeness Come From? On the origins of wokeness by means of political correctness.”
Excerpt:
1. Wokeness is the latest manifestation of a common trend in human nature, namely moral priggishness.
There’s a certain kind of person who’s attracted to a shallow, exacting kind of moral purity, and who demonstrates his purity by attacking anyone who breaks the rules. Every society has these people. All that changes is the rules they enforce. In Victorian England it was Christian virtue. In Stalin’s Russia it was orthodox Marxism-Leninism. For the woke, it’s social justice.
A bit more:
7. One important contributor to the rise of wokeness is that the things moralizers traditionally moralized about were no longer considered taboo.
Previous generations of prigs had been prigs mostly about religion and sex. But among the cultural elite these were the deadest of dead letters by the 1980s… So the sort of people who enjoy being moral enforcers had become starved of things to enforce. A new set of rules was just what they’d been waiting for.
8. Wokeness is more popular with women than men.
