Cynical Theories : The Intellectual Roots of Wokeism

 

We lost a giant last month with E.O. Wilson’s passing. A man who stood on Darwin’s shoulders, Wilson had that rare distinction of inspiring a whole discipline in the form of evolutionary psychology.
 
The great sense of loss did not seem to be shared by Scientific American, however, which soon afterwards put out a piece reflecting on the ‘complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas’. Among the ‘problematic’ aspects of Wilson’s work, the author argued, was the ‘descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies’. This was ‘a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued’ because ‘context matters’.
 
Scientific American is not Teen Vogue; it’s a journal dating back to the early Victorian period and as august as they come; former contributors include none other than Albert Einstein, with his hugely influential articles on relativity, the geometry of spacetime and ‘10 Badass Girl Bosses Sciencing the Shit out of 1920’.
 
If Wilson was ‘problematic’, he’s not alone, for it’s a word that has grown enormously in popularity this past decade, part of an expanding vocabulary that has broken out of academia and into the wider world — well-trodden terms such as ‘trigger warning’, ‘white privilege’ and ‘systemic racism’. There’s a whole dictionary to be written on the subject.
 
Among the neologisms we’ve become acquainted with is ‘intersectionality’, which came from a 1989 paper by Kimberlé Crenshaw called ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.’ Perfect bedtime reading — as Bertie Wooster might have put it, when I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Crenshaw's latest.
 
In this hugely influential paper, the law professor examined three legal discrimination cases and used the analogy of a roadway intersection, or crossroads, to show how different forms of prejudice can hit someone in two different ways.
 
“If an accident happens in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any number of directions and, sometimes, from all of them. Similarly, if a Black woman is harmed because she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination.”
 
Her argument was that it is hard to know whether a black woman has been the victim of racism or sexism, or both, yet it's strange that a concept so widely, unquestionably accepted as meaningful stems from possibly the worst analogy of all time. Unless I’m being immensely dense, how often are people hit by two cars as they cross the road, coming from different directions? Has that actually happened, ever, in history?
 
Intersectionality is among the concepts explored in Cynical Theories, written by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and published in 2020, with a ‘remix’ coming out this month, authored by Pluckrose and another collaborator, Rebecca Christensen. Pluckrose and Lindsay are both self-identified liberals, although Lindsay seems to have gazed too long into the Twitter pool since Covid came along (many such cases!), and the book is a defence of liberalism. So, they begin, ‘the main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion.’
 
This is all under threat, they argue, because ‘the progressive left has aligned itself not with Modernity but with postmodernism, which rejects objective truth as a fantasy dreamed up by naïve and/or arrogantly bigoted Enlightenment thinkers who underestimated the collateral consequences of Modernity’s progress.’ These radical progressives deny that any real progress has been made, while liberals think that society is vastly better for minorities or women than it was a half-century ago.
 
The authors’ broad target is critical theory which, unlike traditional academic disciplines, is not so much concerned with understanding the world as changing it, and to do so redefining everything within it; this has been achieved most successfully with the framing of racism, which has evolved from the accepted definition of treating people differently based on their race to ‘a racialized system that permeates all interactions in society yet is largely invisible except to those who experience it or who have been trained in the proper “critical” methods that train them to see it.’ This is a core idea behind the Great Awokening.
 
They are especially critical of postmodernism, which emerged sometime between 1950 and 1970, and is ‘particularly sceptical of science and other culturally dominant ways of legitimising claims as “truths” and of the grand, sweeping explanations that supported them.’ It calls these ‘meta-narratives’ and views them as a kind of cultural mythology. The ‘central themes of postmodernism include doubting that any human truth provides an objective representation of reality, focusing on language and the way societies use it to create their own realities, and denying the universal.’
 
This is not the same as ‘reasonable doubt’ scepticism; it is a ‘radical scepticism’ that says ‘all knowledge is constructed: what is interesting is theorizing about why knowledge got constructed this way’. This has spread throughout the university system, I suspect, partly because it makes quite dim people sound clever, the one neat trick any idea needs to successfully replicate.
 
Taking postmodernism to its natural conclusion, science becomes just another system organised to suit the powerful, ie those pesky white men.
 
“Throughout postmodern Theory runs the overtly left-wing idea that oppressive power structures constrain humanity and are to be deplored. This result in an ethical imperative to deconstruct, challenge, problematize (find and exaggerate the problems within), and resist all ways of thinking that support oppressive structures of power, the categories relevant to power structures, and the language that perpetuates them — thus embedding a value system into what might have been a moderately useful descriptive theory.”
 
This idea of truth being culturally constructed ‘leads to a preoccupation with four main themes: the blurring of boundaries, the power of language, cultural relativism, and the loss of the individual and the universal in favour of group identity.’
 

In 1967 Jacques Derrida introduced the concept of ‘deconstruction’. By this, it is meant that words don’t refer to obvious and straightforward things that relate to the real world, but ‘instead… words refer only to other words and to the ways in which they differ from one another’.
 
Under Derridean analysis, if someone takes offence it’s not that they misinterpreted or misunderstood. ‘The author’s intentions are irrelevant, when those can be known, due to Derrida’s adaptation of Roland Barthes’s concept of “the death of the author”. Consequently, since discourses are believed to create and maintain oppression, they have to be carefully monitored and deconstructed.’
 
Unfortunately, such a way of thinking obviously incentivises people to take offence when none is intended, subsequently creating new forms of censorship and oppression; on top of this, as no one could have known in 1967, social media has empowered highly disagreeable and even dysfunctional individuals to magnify their influence, using ideology and identity as a means to bully and victimise. The result is a sort of maniacracy, or rule by the mad.
 
These ideas act like a mind virus, an analogy the authors use, with postmodernism:
 
“ a kind of fast-evolving virus. Its original and purest form was unsustainable: it tore its hosts apart and destroyed itself. It could not spread from the academy to the general population because it was so difficult to grasp and so seemingly removed from social realities. In its evolved form, it spread, leaping the “species” gap from academics to activists to everyday people, as it became increasingly graspable and actionable and therefore more contagious.”
 
Indeed, they quote a 2016 paper in Generos: Multidisciplinary Journal of Gender Studies, which ‘favourably likened women’s studies to HIV and Ebola, advocating that it spread its version of feminism like an immune-suppressing virus, using students-turned-activists as carriers’. This strikes me as a particularly strange argument — our ideas are like Aids, but in a good way.
 
My own preferred explanation of radicalisation is as a form of competition. Progressivism by its nature must take every idea a step further because it is a struggle among academics to achieve status, and so when postmodernism was eventually criticised, it was only for being insufficiently postmodernist. The writer bell hooks (whose capped down nom de plume pains my order-seeking conservative brain) took things to the next stage by criticising postmodernism, postmodern theory and postmodern feminism for excluding black people, women and the working class.
 
Her 1990 essay ‘Post-modern Blackness’ suggested that this was all ‘problematic’ and ‘given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics.’
 
And people certainly didn’t, the academic promotion of ID politics multiplying ferociously over the next three decades to encompass every combination imaginable. There were even theories ‘in which the disabled and the fat are believed to have their own embodied knowledge of disability and fatness, which is worth more than scientific knowledge’, one result being the advertising industry’s newly-found, weird celebration of obesity, a toxic validation of bad life choices.
 
Then, in the 2010s, ‘a second significant evolutionary mutation in postmodernism occurred’, the focus now on looking for and highlighting ‘ways in which the oppressive problems they assume exist in society manifest themselves, sometimes quite subtly, in order to “make oppression visible.”’ This competitive search for oppression in all its forms has become a core part of social justice activism in the 2010s.
 
We have also seen the birth of bizarre concepts like ‘research justice’ in which scholars ‘preferentially cite women and minorities — and minimize citations of white western men — because empirical research that values knowledge production rooted in evidence and reasoned argument is an unfairly privileged cultural construct of white Westerners. It is therefore, in this view, a moral obligation to share the prestige of rigorous research with “other forms of research”, including superstition, spiritual beliefs, cultural traditions and beliefs, identity-based experiences, and emotional responses.’
 
In the 1980s and 90s postmodernism also fragmented into ‘postcolonial Theory, queer Theory, critical race Theory, intersectional feminism, disability studies, and fat studies’. Among the most influential ideas is queer theory, which derives from postmodernism ‘and is radically sceptical that these categories [of biology] are based in any biological reality… It thus ignores biology nearly completely (or places it downstream of socialization) and focuses upon them as social constructions perpetuated in language. This does little to encourage its accessibility with most people, who rightly see it as being quite mad.’
 
Then there is intersectional feminism, which holds that knowledge is ‘situated’ from one ‘standpoint’ in society, ‘by which they mean one’s membership in intersecting identity groups. This, in turn, renders objective truth unobtainable and ties knowledge to power and both knowledge and power to the discourses that are believed to create, maintain, and legitimize dominance and oppression within society.’
 
Even disability can be seen as something imposed by society. For ‘the self-described autistic, disabled, asexual, and genderqueer activist’ Lydia X.Y. Brown:
 
“Ableism might describe the value system of ablenormativity which privileges the supposedly neurotypical and ablebodied, while disableism might describe the violent oppression targeting people whose bodyminds are deemed deviant and thus disabled. In other words, ableism is to heterosexism what disableism is to queerantagonism.”

 
Another academic, Dan Goodley, argued that it was the ‘neoliberal system’ that forced people to be fully autonomous and that ‘autonomy, independence, and rationality are virtues desired by neoliberal-ableism’, and that ‘modes of ableist cultural production and disabling material conditions can never be divorced from hetero/sexism, racism, homophobia, colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy and capitalism.’
 
Inevitably, these ideas have now spread into other areas. One paper from 2015 proposed that engineers should ‘demonstrate competence in the provision of sociotechnological services that are sensitive to dynamics of difference, power, and privilege among people and cultural groups’ The book Engineering and Social Justice, published by Purdue University Press, suggested ‘getting beyond views of truth as objective and absolute is the most fundamental change we need in engineering education’. The politicisation of respected journals like Scientific American and Natureis part of the process in which no area of life is free from ideology.
 
Today, ‘bias response teams’ exist in 200 US colleges, and in the UK ‘more than 50% of universities restrict speech, especially certain views of religion and trans identity’, but these ideas don’t stay in academia; they become part of the wider culture war and also enter the collective subconscious as a form of anti-wisdom. People just ‘know’ it to be true that bigotry is all-pervasive, and anyone who suggested otherwise would invite knowing sneers.
 
So while many people assumed that students would leave these ideas behind once they’ve graduated, ‘what if they simply take their beliefs out into the professional world and remake that world to suit them?’ For example, in the early 2000s an ascendant view within feminist thought in universities was that men and women were ‘constructions or representations… achieved through discourse, performance, and repetition — rather than “real” entities’. Even talk of men and women was becoming problematic, because what mattered was gender, behaviour and performance. These obscure discussions being held by little-known academics have snowballed into perhaps the biggest debating point in the English-speaking world, the most bitterly-fought theatre of the culture war.
 
Pluckrose and Lindsay conclude with a cri de coeur on behalf of liberalism, arguing that: ‘Although left-leaning liberals tend to favour the underdog, liberalism across the board centers human dignity; Theory focuses on victimhood. Liberalism encourages disagreement and debate as means to getting at the truth.
 
‘Liberalism believes in progress,’ they point out: ‘Theory is radically cynical about the possibility of progress.’ Yet liberalism remains vulnerable because ‘the willingness of liberal systems to accept self-criticism is, in fact, the feature of liberalism that critical methods like postmodern Theory exploit to undermine it.’
 
I’m sceptical as whether this sort of radicalism-divorced-from-reality-or-logic is not just the inevitable result of liberalism. On the one hand, these ideas are products of liberalism’s success, often voiced by people who would have been genuinely marginalised a few decades back. On the other, they are products of liberalism’s failure, in particular its promise of true equality. As that goal has remained ever distant, so critical theory has grown in popularity as an explanation for that failure.
 
“Now that racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace was illegal and homosexuality was decriminalised throughout the West, the main barriers to social equality in the West were lingering prejudices, embodied in attitudes, assumptions, expectations, and language. For those tackling these less tangible problems, Theory, with its focus on systems of power and privilege perpetuated through discourses, might have been an ideal tool — except that, as it was wholly deconstructive, indiscriminately radically sceptical, and unpalatably nihilistic, it was not really fit for any productive purpose.”
 
Not fit for any productive purpose, yet it has grown, spread and flourished because it still conveys status in a precarious and overgrown industry, and is protected by taboo, taboos which insulate these theories from the mockery which has corroded so many absurd ideas before. This brings power and, as the authors argue, radicalism has become ‘a hegemonic ideology: an oppressive dominant discourse that acts in pursuit of power and therefore needs to be deconstructed and countered.’ It has ideological privilege.
 
This post originally appeared on Ed West's 'Wrong Side of History' Substack
 
The Mind Virus Kiling Academia.  By Ed West. The Spectator. January 11, 2022.

 

Blaming French theory for the extremes of the American Left has been a popular line for that last few years. Public intellectual Jordan Peterson has blamed “postmodern neo-Marxism” for the rise of a hypersensitive yet coercive activism, connecting the term to everything from safe spaces, to cultural appropriation, to campus protests.

 
The same move is made by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay in their book Cynical Theories. They argue that the adoption of French theory — particularly the work of Michel Foucault — has given rise to bizarre, grievance-filled academic specialties which threaten all claims to knowledge.
 
Peterson, Lindsay, and Pluckrose are wrong, and perhaps even guilty of Francophobia. Contrary to their claims, French theory is not the original sin from which our current woes sprang. What’s missed in their analysis are the distinctly American cultural influences driving a political culture of cancellations, violent protests and hypersensitivity.
 
Let’s focus on the ultimate fall guy for ‘wokeism’, the French philosopher Michel Foucault. If you were to read anti-woke commentary about Foucault, you would be under the impression that his main insights are: nothing is true, all truth is power and all claims to truth are oppressive. This is a deliberately misleading.
 
Despite what you’ve been told, Foucault was not a rabid ‘activist’ bent on tearing down scientific institutions, but a historian of ideas. His work documents how knowledge changes over time, how some ideas become valorised whilst others get pushed to the margins, and how expertise shifts as a result of cultural and historical change.
 
He was not denying truth, but helping to place it within a broader historical context. Truth could not help being “a thing of this world”, he wrote. Every society had a regime of truth, and a “general politics” of truth. These are simply types of discourse which society “accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true and false statements, the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true.”
 
Foucault focused on the history of the “self” noting the scientific quest to understand phenomena such as madness, criminality and sexual deviancy. He frequently refers to “power” in his explanations, but his definition of power is not what you think. It describes a “a mode of action upon the action of others”. There is no moral connotation to Foucault’s use of “power”; it can have both positive and negative effects. His most useful insight is that power can be “constructive” – generating subjectivities that hadn’t previously existed.
 
In The History of Sexuality, Foucault challenged the “repressive hypothesis” that Western society, beginning in the 17th century right up until the mid-20th century, gradually became more prudish and repressed. Instead, Foucault’s work demonstrates that all societies have had elaborate taboos on sexuality and that they stem from differing understandings of the self. Moreover, the so-called “prudish Victorians” actually led to the proliferation of thought regarding sexual habits that created, rather than repressed, new ways of viewing ones desires. Because of those prudes, the modern “homosexual” was born.
 
These insights are useful, they show us that our understanding of what makes a human being is often subject to significant change. What Foucault is calling for isn’t activism. It’s humility in the face of history.
 
Attempts to connect Foucault to the excesses of woke politics have to take some significant conceptual leaps. In Cynical Theories, the authors do this by separating out postmodernism proper from the “applied postmodernism” of activist circles. But this involves turning the descriptive work of scholars like Foucault into a prescriptive model for political action. This isn’t just nit-picking about historical narratives, but crucial to understanding French theory itself.
 
Foucault was heavily influenced by the work of German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche. His approach to ideas is directly inspired by Nietzsche’s Of The Genealogy of Morality, a work charting the evolution of moral concepts over time. Foucault, like Nietzsche, was highly sceptical of claims of absolute morality, seeing life as a chaotic unfolding of a blind will to power. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche writes:
 
“Even the body within which individuals treat each other as equals … will have to be an incarnate will to power, it will strive to grow, spread, seize, become predominant — not from any morality or immorality but because it is living and because life simply is will to power.”
 
The sheer moral certainty one sees in the American Left — that they are “on the right side of history” as Barack Obama often put it  — doesn’t reflect this more contemplative and historical perspective on the nature of morality. In fact, one valid criticism of many 20th century French intellectuals from Foucault to Derrida to Baudrillard is that they weren’t moral enough. If anything, they frequently circled the drain of nihilism. They stared too deeply into the abyss.
 
It’s important, then, to note that the emergence of queer, post-colonial, broadly anti-Racist and fat activist movements within the United States have their own local histories. These movements (often labelled “identity politics”) have distinctly American scholarly influences: from Peggy McIntosh’s descriptions of white privilege in “Unpacking The Invisible Knapsack” to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectional approach to anti-discrimination.

 
Contrary to certain popular accounts, “standpoint theory” which seeks to prioritise personal knowledge and perspectives as a means to objectivity, is not a position advocated for by Foucault, but, instead, by American philosopher Sandra Harding. Foucault never had the view that marginalised individuals held a unique, more authoritative perspective, on the world.
 
And he always maintained the scholarly virtue of disinterestedness in his work: “I do in fact seek to place myself outside the culture to which we belong, to analyse its formal conditions in order to make a critique of it, not in the sense of reducing its values, but in order to see how it was actually constituted.”
 
What’s commonly called identity politics emerged out of broader counter-cultural trends of the 1960s. These movements were influenced by American ideas of freedom, and were heavily focused on individual liberation and smashing stuffy bourgeois sentiments. This led to the development of humanist psychologies that promised to maximise individual self-actualisation. The nexus of social justice activism and psychology is still seen today in discussions of “toxic masculinity” and  “implicit bias” as well as the heavy focus on “trauma” and “minority stress”.
 
Identity politics has never been well received by French thinkers, or even President Macron, either because it is seen as a divisive force — prioritising the personal over the Republic — or it treats historically contingent subjectivities as essentialist. Foucault, who was homosexual, always had an ambivalence to American attempts to categorise desire for the sake of political action. In an interview for the American LGBT magazine The Advocate, he noted his wariness over identity. If it became “the problem of sexual existence” then identity would “become the law, the principle” of people’s existence. Identity then becomes another way of controlling people.
 
Whilst it’s true American progressives will often cite Foucault and other French theorists as influences, they tend to fragment their work in ways that serve particular purposes. So, The History of Sexuality will be cited to praise a queer liberationist future of a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” — but fail to mention Foucault’s silence as to whether this will be better than the status quo or his critique of identity.
 
This co-option also tends to downplay the old Left political sympathies of French scholars, many of whom were self-avowed communists (although Foucault’s political leanings were more obscure). There’s also a shift from the contemplative demeanour of French philosophy toward an individualistic emphasis on confrontation, shock and transgression.
 
François Cusset, in his excellent book “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida & Co Transformed The Intellectual Life Of The United States” succinctly describes the strange way that French theory was adopted by American universities in the 1980s. American scholars did not study French theory, nor advance it in a meaningful direction. Rather, they co-opted it, and removed so much of its context that it no longer made sense. For Cusset this co-option of French theory in pursuit of American cultural politics was a “structural misunderstanding”.
 
Rather than blame the French, and Foucault, for current trends in American activism — which are quickly spreading across the globe — it’s crucial to re-evaluate some of values and claims to truth which underpin this activism. I’ve got just the philosopher for the task.
 
In defence of Michel Foucault. By Jarred Bartle. Unherd, January 27, 2022. 

In 2017, when a biology professor in a state college in Washington protested against a proposed day-long ban on the presence of white students on campus, radical students shut the campus down.

 
The ban was part of a yearly college event designed to give black and minority students and staff a separate space in which to discuss the issues they face. Tensions were high that year. White nationalist groups had invaded the campus, targeting black students and members of staff.
The comments by the professor, Bret Weinstein, and his opposition to the colllege’s equity programs, led to campus protests against him. In protest against the failure of the college administration to quell the students, he resigned from his job.
 
Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the authors of the new book Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody regard Weinstein as a victim of an ideology they call Social Justice Theory.
They hold humanities departments responsible for bringing it into existence, and their aim is to explain why it is so pernicious.
 
Social Justice Theory
 
Pluckrose, a US magazine editor who describes herself as an exile from the humanities, and Lindsay, a mathematician and writer on politics and religion, were participants in the controversial 2018 Grievance Studies project, which aimed to discredit gender and race studies by submitting hoax articles to academic journals.
By getting articles on bogus topics through the reviewing processes of respected journals and into print, the authors believed they were proving that studies focusing on identity issues are “corrupt” and unscientific.
One hoax article, published in a journal of “feminist geography” looked at “human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity” at dog parks in Portland, Oregon; another purported to be a two-year study involving “thematic analysis of table dialogue” to explore why heterosexual men like to eat at Hooters.
 
Critics of their hoax quickly pointed out there was no scientific evidence to suggest that journals in fields focusing on identity are corrupt — indeed such hoaxes had happened in other areas of study too.
Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book, which grew out of the 2018 project, traces the evolution and growing influence during the late 20th century of theories about how the language we use to think and talk about the world structures our relationships.
The book takes aim at postmodern and post-structuralist thinkers, particularly the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. The authors blame him for propagating the view that all discourses, including science, create relations of power and subordination.
 
In the new millennium, these postmodernist and deconstructionist projects morphed — according to Pluckrose and Lindsay — into the political weapon they call Social Justice Theory, or simply Theory.
In Cynical Theories, the pair trace the march of Theory as a political ideology through post-colonial studies, queer theory, feminism, and studies of race, disability and body size.
 
In their view, Theory is a harmful, anti-scientific ideology. It divides society into the oppressed — whose subordinate identities are constructed by hierarchies of power — and the oppressors who, wittingly or not, maintain oppressive relationships through their participation in political and social discourses and institutions.
 
Constructed identities
 
This Theory is cynical, according to the authors, because it finds oppression everywhere — even in the best intentions of progressive people and their movements of reform.
 
And it is bad for everyone, including disadvantaged groups, they say, because it gets in the way of an empirical approach to understanding and correcting social ills.

 
One aim of Pluckrose and Lindsay is to defend the central liberal value of freedom of inquiry against what they regard as an attack on free speech by the rise of identity politics — spawned by Theory.
 
The application of Theory is also harmful, they say, because it provokes a backlash from people who cannot understand why being white or male puts them into the camp of racists or sexists.
 
The result, they argue, is a racial politics that becomes increasingly fraught. We hear that:
 
“racism is embedded in culture and that we cannot escape it. We hear that white people are inherently racist. We are told that only white people can be racist. […] Adherents actively search for hidden and overt racial offences until they find them.”
 
According to the authors, these categories — race, sex, gender, being gay or straight, abled or disabled, fat or of normal body size — are forced onto individuals by the organising power of dominant discourses in politics, social life and science.
 
Adherents of Theory, they say, then argue these constructed identities are, nevertheless, real and inescapable experiences. For Theory, identity determines how a person thinks, acts and what she knows. A black person is not an individual who happens to be black. Blackness is central to who he is. Being black makes him into a victim of discourses that privilege whites.
 
Respecting the standpoint of those who have a subordinate position in hierarchies created by the ways we speak and act — blacks, women, people with minority sexual identities, victims of colonial power, the disabled and the fat — is a key political demand for activists influenced by Theory.
 
No truth, only discourse
 
Social hierarchies exist. Prejudice can be perpetuated by the unthinking behaviour of individuals. Discriminatory treatment of women and black people is sometimes embedded in institutions.
Pluckrose and Lindsay do not deny this.
 
They admit legal reforms have not eliminated racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. They recognise discriminatory treatment and prejudice can blight the lives of victims and undermine their ability to access the opportunities of their society.
 
What, then, is wrong with what they call Social Justice Theory?
 
The authors’ main contention is that Theory is relativist and unscientific. For its theorists, there is no objective truth — only the perspectives of people with different identities. And they demand the same respect for the standpoint of an oppressed group as for the views of scientists.
 
Pluckrose and Lindsay write:
 
‘’It is no exaggeration to observe that Social Justice Theories have created a new religion, a tradition of faith that is actively hostile to reason, falsification, disconfirmation and disagreement of any kind.’’
 
Because Theory is a faith, it can insulate itself from criticism, say the authors.
It can dismiss dissenters, like the aforementioned biology professor, as the purveyors of an oppressive discourse.
 
‘Cancel culture’
 
Is Social Justice Theory as pernicious as Pluckrose and Lindsay want us to believe? Their criticism gets most of its plausibility from applications of Theory that do seem harmful and even absurd.
Disability, for instance, is not merely a social construction. Treating it as such may prevent the use of treatments that could make the lives of people better.
When doctors tell obese people they should lose weight they are not engaging in an act of oppression, but in healthcare.
 
Pluckrose and Lindsay are right to point out that campaigns to expose oppressive speech and behaviour can cause unjustified harm to individuals who are called out and “cancelled” for minor misdemeanours, or for stating a view that identity activists deem unacceptable.

 
The abuse heaped on J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, for saying that sexual differences are real and not constructed by discourse is an example.
 
In my opinion, however, the authors overstate both the illiberal tendencies of Theory and its influence on culture.
You do not have to be a relativist to think the opinions and feelings of people from minority groups ought to be respected. You are not anti-science if you think scientific research sometimes ignores the needs and perspectives of women and minorities.
Advocates of Theory aim to make institutions more inclusive and respectful of differences. Liberals — as advocates of critical engagement — should be open to the possibility that Theory, despite faults, has detected forms of prejudice our society tends to overlook.
 
The question of universities
 
The most problematic aspect of Pluckrose and Lindsay’s book is the blame it heaps on humanities departments of universities for stirring up a cancel culture and the culture wars.
This gives ammunition to those who want to defund humanities and discourage students from taking humanities courses.
It gives support to the position of the Australian Federal Education Minister, Dan Tehan, who thinks that Australian universities have succumbed to a left-wing culture that “cancels” conservatives and their opinions.
 
This accusation, also made by conservative groups like the Institute of Public Affairs, is the reason why critics of universities want to force them to sign up to a free speech code.
But according to Glyn Davis, Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University, there is no evidence of a meaningful or growing threat to free speech in Australian universities.
 
Those who emphasise the dangers of a cancel culture often ignore more serious threats to universities and an open society. The students at the Washington college were reacting to the presence of groups that threatened the safety of black students.
 
They were responding to a real threat.
 
Combatants in the war
 
Pluckrose and Lindsay agree that threats to free speech can come from the right as well as the left, but their preoccupation with the latter indicates where they want to put most of the blame.
 
Cynical Theories is, on one hand, a scholarly book. Pluckrose and Lindsay are well versed in the literature they criticise, as their participation in the Grievance Studies hoax indicates.
 
Their book provides an in depth discussion of the works they want to criticise. Their critique of what they call Social Justice Theory deserves to be taken seriously. But by overstating their case and aiming their weapons at humanities and universities they cannot pass themselves off as objective contributors to a search for truth.
 
They are combatants in the culture wars.
 
Friday essay: a new front in the culture wars, Cynical Theories takes unfair aim at the humanities. By janna Thompson. The Conversation, November 5, 2020.

 

  
It would be little exaggeration to say that America is exhibiting symptoms of mass hysteria. Rioters have tried—in the name of opposing racism—to tear down statues of Abraham Lincoln and John Greenleaf Whittier; “transgender activists” have urged people to burn J. K. Rowling’s novels because her latest book features a character who is a transvestite and a serial killer; and white entrepreneurs who serve burritos, white students who wear dreadlocks or braids, and black fashion students who design Asian-patterned bikinis are condemned, or even physically attacked, for “cultural appropriation.” Criticizing this madness is itself considered grounds for expulsion from school. Even using the word “madness” risks reprisal on the premise that it’s supposedly “ableist”—meaning it implicitly denigrates people who suffer from mental disorders.

 Making sense of the bizarre rage often called “wokeness” has become a small industry, and works such as Robby Soave’s Panic Attack and Noah Rothman’s Unjust have helped explain the psychological and political dynamics at work. But in Cynical Theories, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay go a step further, exploring the connections between such phenomena as “shoutdowns,” “canceling,” and identity politics on the one hand and the philosophical doctrines taught in America’s universities on the other—doctrines they call simply “Theory.”
 
Theory, they argue, represents the latest wave of postmodernist thinking that began in the 1960s with the work of Michel Foucault. He and his allies argued that there’s no such thing as objective truth, or if there is, it’s inaccessible to us, because our knowledge consists of mere “narratives”—stories we tell each other and use in subtle ways, often unconsciously, to gain and keep “power.” Accompanying these two basic principles are four “attitudes” or methods: the blurring of boundaries between intellectual or social categories that are typically taken for granted (which can mean anything from men wearing dresses to scientists relying on anecdotal evidence); an emphasis on language as the tool that controls every aspect of life; cultural relativism—not only in terms of morality but even in epistemology; and the erasure of the significance of both the individual and the universal. This last item means that “truths” (a term postmodernists insist on using in the plural) have meaning only for groups: Nothing is true for a single person or for all mankind.
 
It’s sometimes hard to say what these ideas mean in practice, because postmodernists revel in bizarre jargon and general incoherence. That is to be expected: If there’s no objective truth, and “logic” is, at best, just one of many “ways of knowing”—one inherently tainted by racial, sexual, or class biases—then there’s no way, and no need, to express oneself clearly or give specific, empirically verifiable proof of one’s assertions. Indeed, to the postmodernist, lucidity is itself a kind of oppression. This accounts for the bewildering lingo many such writers use. Pluckrose and Lindsay quote an example from Columbia University Professor Gayatri Spivak:
 
“I find [Derrida’s] morphology much more painstaking and useful than Foucault’s and Deleuze’s immediate, substantive involvement with more “political” issues—the latter’s invitation to “become woman”—which can make their influence more dangerous for the U.S. academic as enthusiastic radical. Derrida marks radical critique with the danger of appropriating the other by assimilation. He reads catachresis at the origin. “

 

As long ago as 1996, physicist Alan Sokal demonstrated the vacuousness of such jargon by getting a fake scholarly paper, composed entirely of gibberish, accepted by a postmodernist philosophy journal. Pluckrose and Lindsay repeated the stunt in 2018, this time with more than a dozen nonsense papers, including one that rephrased Mein Kampf in feminist mumbo jumbo.
 
Cynical Theories argues that postmodernism was relatively harmless until the late 1980s. Its practitioners, denying truth and employing an incomprehensible language, could not even articulate a dogma, and they therefore made little effort to implement widespread cultural or political change. But they shifted gears in the 1990s. Retaining the two principles and four themes, they fashioned a menu of theories—“postcolonial,” “feminist,” “queer,” “critical race theory,” and so forth—aimed at “deconstructing” long-held beliefs to show that they aren’t really true but are just mechanisms of “power” that society uses to oppress minorities. “Disability and fat studies,” for example, asserts that ideas about physical health have no objective validity but are just ways culture subjugates people with “different” body types. According to this argument, even deaf or paralyzed people don’t suffer from their deafness or paralysis but are victims of prejudice—held down by the network of power relations in society. This has even led some activists to argue that disabilities are a type of “identity,” that it’s exploitative to try to alleviate these conditions—and that deaf or paralyzed people who ask for help are “internalizing” their own “oppression.”
 
According to Pluckrose and Lindsay, these various theories coalesced into Theory around 2010, when practitioners mixed collectivism with postmodernism’s earlier rejection of objectivity and embraced “standpoint theory”: There’s no true truth, but there are different truths for different categories of people. “Having oppressed identities,” Pluckrose and Lindsay explain, supposedly “gives the oppressed a richer, more accurate view of reality—hence we should listen to and believe their accounts of it”. The dominant society—meaning, of course, white male society—commits “injustice” against these groups when it fails to affirm their beliefs.
 
In short, Theory inverts the old Marxist claim that workers in capitalist societies suffer from “false consciousness”—meaning that capitalism blinds them to their own oppression—and instead holds that “it is the oppressors who suffer from false consciousness, due to their socialization into a system of knowledge that benefits them” .
 
The premise that language effectively constitutes reality—and that it blinds the majority to the fact that they use language to oppress minorities—deserves emphasis because it accounts for one of Theory’s most pernicious aspects: the way its practitioners simultaneously insist upon orthodoxy and disclaim their own efforts to enforce it. Consider one widely circulated review of Cynical Theories that criticized the authors for misrepresenting the opinions of Syracuse University professor Barbara Applebaum. Pluckrose and Lindsay write that Applebaum’s book Being White, Being Good “advocates shutting down . . . student disagreement” with theories of “social justice” during classroom discussions, but the reviewer objected that this is not what Applebaum actually wrote. And that is true: She expressly denies that she advocates forbidding disagreement—which, she says, “would not promote social justice”—and contends instead that “whites [should] genuinely [listen] to what people of color are trying to tell them.”

 
But a closer reading reveals that, notwithstanding her denial, Applebaum does, in fact, advocate silencing dissent. She just calls it something else. Quoting Theory proponent Judith Butler, she characterizes disagreement as “normative violence,” which is conveniently “invisible” and which leads to “the dehumanization of the excluded and delegitimated.” This equation of speech with violence is no accident; according to Theory, conversations are not about reality—they are reality. Any difference of opinion creates a “power” imbalance that threatens to “erase” a person’s only source of metaphysical significance, which consists of others’ “affirmation” of his or her “lived experience.” To “genuinely listen,” therefore, refers not merely to politely hearing, but to actually affirming. Thus, Theory inherently classifies disagreement or criticism as forms of injustice, and its practitioners are led, whatever their protestations to the contrary, to silence dissent as a way to get “whites” to “genuinely listen.” No wonder Applebaum admits that students “often complain in teacher evaluations that they have not been allowed to disagree.”
 
All of this might be laughable if it weren’t so eerily similar to the dystopian future of George Orwell’s 1984. In that book, written decades before Theory metastasized, Orwell imagined a world in which the proponents of the idea that reality is just a social construct took it to its ultimate conclusion. The individual’s ability to apprehend truth and articulate a judgment about it, Orwell thought, is what makes freedom not merely a political preference but a requirement of human life. This is why Winston Smith writes in his diary that “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Big Brother, however, holds that reality is made up of “power” and consequently seeks to control language so as to sever the individual’s grasp of reality. That is why, when Winston is tortured at the novel’s climax, he is forced not only to recant, but to actually believe that two plus two equals five, if Big Brother so decrees.
 
The connection between Theory and Orwell’s warning became undeniable just three weeks before Cynical Theories was published, when a group of Theory advocates attacked Lindsay online, insisting that “the idea of 2+2 equaling 4 is cultural” and that “because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.” Lindsay—who happens to be a mathematician—aptly replied that this was yet more proof that Theory “is a direct assault on reason itself by means of destabilizing the meaning of meaning.”
 
Although Pluckrose and Lindsay correctly identify Theory’s rejection of objectivity as its most fundamental absurdity, they don’t address its essential political failing: its presumption that any deviation from “equality” is by definition unjust. Just as Theory defines dissent as aggression, so it asserts—without ever bothering to prove—that if more physicians, physicists, or pharmacists are male than female, that’s proof of “structural” injustice, which must be remedied through government policies that inflict actual injustices on innocent people—such as giving preferential treatment to members of minority groups at the expense of others who are deemed “overrepresented.” Theory, in short, mandates government redistribution of both wealth and opportunities. Many of its practitioners even abandon the word “equality,” preferring “equity” because it avoids the implication that they believe in equal legal treatment. By omitting discussion of this essential error in Theory, Cynical Theories overlooks one of the most insidious fallacies of today’s “social justice” movement.
 
Pluckrose and Lindsay nevertheless do an admirable job of summarizing in accessible terms the stew of often purposely incoherent ideas that constitute Theory. And their patience in doing so is laudable for another reason: Given the utter irrationality of many highly publicized clashes in recent years over “social justice,” it’s easy to dismiss the entire subject as unworthy of attention. But some aspects of these disputes—and some of the questions raised by Theory’s spokesmen—deserve serious consideration. It is true, for example, that epistemology has ethical and political consequences and often is exploited for that purpose: Witness the way churches and their allies use faith (and peer pressure) to shield doctrines such as self-sacrifice against rational criticism, with the consequence that many people who otherwise might have led fulfilling and joyful lives never realize the opportunities before them.
 
It’s also true that legal and cultural institutions often embody assumptions that make minorities, at best, uncomfortable, and at worst vulnerable to the unequal consequences of laws. From advertising campaigns that thoughtlessly make minority members feel unwelcome, to licensing laws that require African hair braiders to spend thousands of hours learning to do hairstyles that can’t be physically performed on the hair of black customers—even though hair braiders do not cut hair—to arbitrary Drug War policies that exacerbate racial prejudices and increase violence in inner cities, our society often does disproportionately harm minorities.
 
Given how thoroughly wrong Theory is, it’s sometimes tempting to dismiss these concerns as merely manufactured grievances. But as Pluckrose and Lindsay conclude, it’s important to recognize that “each of the postmodern principles and themes has a kernel of truth and points to a problem that needs to be dealt with”—only, dealt with in a better way . Culture’s influences and consequences can be subtle and hard to recognize or articulate—and can stifle individualism and freedom. But in the end, only a society that celebrates objectivity, reason, and individualism can make the world a safer, freer place.
 
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay. By Timothy Sandefur. The Objective Standard, October 2, 2020. 

 

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes.
 
Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it. And for many of us regular readers, we’ve just gotten used to brand new words popping up suddenly to re-describe something we thought we knew already. We notice a new word, make a brief mental check, and move on with our lives.
 
But we need to do more than that. We need to understand that all these words have one thing in common: they are products of an esoteric, academic discipline called critical theory, which has gained extraordinary popularity in elite education in the past few decades, and appears to have reached a cultural tipping point in the middle of the 2010s. Most normal people have never heard of this theory—or rather an interlocking web of theories—that is nonetheless changing the very words we speak and write and the very rationale of the institutions integral to liberal democracy.
 
What we have long needed is an intelligible, intelligent description of this theory which most people can grasp. And we’ve just gotten one: “Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender and Identity,” by former math prof James Lindsay and British academic, Helen Pluckrose. It’s as deep a dive into this often impenetrable philosophy as anyone would want to attempt. But it’s well worth grappling with.
 
What the book helps the layperson to understand is the evolution of postmodern thought since the 1960s until it became the doctrine of Social Justice today. Beginning as a critique of all grand theories of meaning—from Christianity to Marxism—postmodernism is a project to subvert the intellectual foundations of western culture. The entire concept of reason—whether the Enlightenment version or  even the ancient Socratic understanding—is a myth designed to serve the interests of those in power, and therefore deserves to be undermined and “problematized” whenever possible. Postmodern theory does so mischievously and irreverently—even as it leaves nothing in reason’s place. The idea of objective truth—even if it is viewed as always somewhat beyond our reach—is abandoned. All we have are narratives, stories, whose meaning is entirely provisional, and can in turn be subverted or problematized.
 
During the 1980s and 1990s, this somewhat aimless critique of everything hardened into a plan for action. Analyzing how truth was a mere function of power, and then seeing that power used against distinct and oppressed identity groups, led to an understandable desire to do something about it, and to turn this critique into a form of activism. Lindsay and Pluckrose call this “applied postmodernism”, which, in turn, hardened into what we now know as Social Justice. 
 
You can see the rationale. After all, the core truth of our condition, this theory argues, is that we live in a system of interlocking oppressions that penalize various identity groups in a society. And all power is zero-sum: you either have power over others or they have power over you. To the extent that men exercise power, for example, women don’t; in so far as straight people wield power, gays don’t; and so on. There is no mutually beneficial, non-zero-sum advancement in this worldview. All power is gained only through some other group’s loss. And so the point became not simply to interpret the world, but to change it, to coin a phrase, an imperative which explains why some critics call this theory a form of neo-Marxism.
 
The “neo” comes from switching out Marxism’s focus on materialism and class in favor of various oppressed group identities, who are constantly in conflict the way classes were always in conflict. And in this worldview, individuals only exist at all as a place where these group identities intersect. You have no independent existence outside these power dynamics. I am never just me. I’m a point where the intersecting identities of white, gay, male, Catholic, immigrant, HIV-positive, cis, and English all somehow collide. You can hear this echoed in the famous words of Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice. We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.” An assertion of individuality is, in fact, an attack upon the group and an enabling of oppression.

 
Just as this theory denies the individual, it also denies the universal. There are no universal truths, no objective reality, just narratives that are expressed in discourses and language that reflect one group’s power over another. There is no distinction between objective truth and subjective experience, because the former is an illusion created by the latter. So instead of an argument, you merely have an identity showdown, in which the more oppressed always wins, because that subverts the hierarchy. These discourses of power, moreover, never end; there is no progress as such, no incremental inclusion of more and more identities into a pluralist, liberal unified project; there is the permanent reality of the oppressors and the oppressed. And all that we can do is constantly expose and eternally resist these power-structures on behalf of the oppressed.
 
Truth is always and only a function of power. So, for example, science has no claim on objective truth, because science itself is a cultural construct, created out of power differentials, set up by white cis straight males. And the systems of thought that white cis straight men have historically set up—like liberalism itself—perpetuate themselves, and are passed along unwittingly by people who simply respond to the incentives and traditions of thought that make up the entire power-system, without being aware of it. There’s no conspiracy: we all act unknowingly in perpetuating systems of thought that oppress other groups. To be “woke” is to be “awake” to these invisible, self-reinforcing discourses, and to seek to dismantle them—in ourselves and others.
 
There is no such thing as persuasion in this paradigm, because persuasion assumes an equal relationship between two people based on reason. And there is no reason and no equality. There is only power. This is the point of telling students, for example, to “check their privilege” before opening their mouths on campus. You have to measure the power dynamic between you and the other person first of all; you do this by quickly noting your interlocutor’s place in the system of oppression, and your own, before any dialogue can occur. And if your interlocutor is lower down in the matrix of identity, your job is to defer and to listen. That’s partly why diversity at the New York Times, say, has nothing to do with a diversity of ideas. Within critical theory, the very concept of a “diversity of ideas” is a function of oppression. What matters is a diversity of identities that can all express the same idea: that liberalism is a con-job. Which is why almost every NYT op-ed now and almost every left-leaning magazine reads exactly alike.
 
Language is vital for critical theory—not as a means of persuasion but of resistance to oppressive discourses. So take the words I started with. “Non-binary” is a term for someone who subjectively feels neither male nor female. Since there is no objective truth, and since any criticism of that person’s “lived experience” is a form of traumatizing violence, that individual’s feelings are the actual fact. To subject such an idea to, say, the scrutiny of science is therefore a denial of that person’s humanity and existence. To inquire what it means to “feel like a man,” is also unacceptable. An oppressed person’s word is always the last one. To question this reality, even to ask questions about it, is a form of oppression itself. In the rhetoric of social justice, it is a form of linguistic violence. Whereas using the term nonbinary is a form of resistance to cis heteronormativity. One is evil; the other good.

 
Becoming “woke” to these power dynamics alters your perspective of reality. And so our unprecedentedly multicultural, and multiracial democracy is now described as a mere front for “white supremacy.” This is the reality of our world, the critical theorists argue, even if we cannot see it. A gay person is not an individual who makes her own mind up about the world and can have any politics or religion she wants; she is “queer,” part of an identity that interrogates and subverts heteronormativity. A man explaining something is actually “mansplaining” it—because his authority is entirely wrapped up in his toxic identity. Questioning whether a trans woman is entirely interchangeable with a woman—or bringing up biology to distinguish between men and women—is not a mode of inquiry. It is itself a form of “transphobia”, of fear and loathing of an entire group of people and a desire to exterminate them. It’s an assault.
 
My view is that there is nothing wrong with exploring these ideas. They’re almost interesting if you can get past the hideous prose. And I can say this because liberalism can include critical theory as one view of the world worth interrogating. But critical theory cannot include liberalism, because it views liberalism itself as a mode of white supremacy that acts against the imperative of social and racial justice. That’s why liberalism is supple enough to sustain countless theories and ideas and arguments, and is always widening the field of debate; and why institutions under the sway of Social Justice necessarily must constrain avenues of thought and ideas. That’s why liberalism is dedicated to allowing Ibram X. Kendi to speak and write, but Ibram X. Kendi would create an unelected tribunal to police anyone and any institution from perpetuating what he regards as white supremacy—which is any racial balance not exactly representative of the population as a whole.
 
For me, these theorists do something less forgivable than abuse the English language. They claim that their worldview is the only way to advance social progress, especially the rights of minorities, and that liberalism fails to do so. This, it seems to me, is profoundly untrue. A moral giant like John Lewis advanced this country not by intimidation, or re-ordering the language, or seeing the advancement of black people as some kind of reversal for white people. He engaged the liberal system with non-violence and persuasion, he emphasized the unifying force of love and forgiveness, he saw black people as having agency utterly independent of white people, and changed America with that fundamentally liberal perspective.
 
The gay rights movement, the most successful of the 21st century, succeeded in the past through showing what straights and gays have in common, rather than seeing the two as in a zero-sum conflict, resolved by prosecuting homophobia or “queering” heterosexuality. The women’s rights movement has transformed the role of women in society in the past without demonizing all men, or seeing misogyny as somehow embedded in “white supremacy”. As we have just seen, civil rights protections for transgender people—just decided by a conservative Supreme Court—have been achieved not by seeing people as groups in constant warfare, but by seeing the dignity of the unique individual in pursuing their own happiness without the obstacle of prejudice.
 
In fact, I suspect it is the success of liberalism in bringing this kind of non-zero-sum pluralism into being that rattles the critical theorists the most. Because it suggests that reform is always better than revolution, that empirical truth is on the side of the genuinely oppressed and we should never fear understanding things better, that progress is both possible in a liberal democracy, and more securely rooted than in other systems, because it springs from a lively, informed debate, and isn’t foisted on society by ideologues.
 
The rhetorical trap of critical theory is that it has coopted the cause of inclusion and forced liberals onto the defensive. But liberals have nothing to be defensive about. What’s so encouraging about this book is that it has confidence in its own arguments, and is as dedicated to actual social justice, achieved through liberal means, as it is scornful of the postmodern ideologues who have coopted and corrupted otherwise noble causes.
 
This is very good news—even better to see it as the Number 1 Amazon best-seller in philosophy long before its publication date later in August. The intellectual fight back against wokeness has now begun in earnest. Let’s do this.
 
The Roots Of Wokeness :  It's time we looked more closely at the philosophy behind the movement. By Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan Substack, July 31, 2020

The Ideological Roots of Wokeness, with Helen Pluckrose and Helen Joyce
 
In this Thursday's video podcast,  Helen Pluckrose documents the evolution of the ideas that inform today's social justice activism, from its origins in French postmodernism to its refinement within activist academic fields. As Pluckrose argues in her new book Cynical Theories, this dogma is recognisable as much by its real-world manifestations, such as cancel culture and social-media feeding frenzies, as by its tenets, which are all too often embraced as axiomatic in mainstream media: namely, that knowledge is a social construct; science and reason are tools of oppression; all human interactions are sites of oppressive power play; and language is dangerous.
 
Pluckrose claims that the unchecked proliferation of these anti-Enlightenment beliefs presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but also to modernity itself. The podcast was hosted by the writer and journalist Helen Joyce
 
 Intelligence Squared, October 15, 2020. 

Cynical Theories

Carl Rhodes on Woke Capitalism, Turning Virtue Into Profit and Endangering Democracy

 

In early 2020, bushfires raged across Australia. More than 3,000 homes were destroyed, reduced to ash and rubble by the unrelenting onslaught of flames. Tragically, 34 people died in the fires themselves, with an estimated 445 more dying as a result of smoke inhalation. More than 16m hectares of land burned, destroying wildlife and natural habitats. Nearly 3 billion animals were affected. So massive were the fires that the smoke was visible over Chile, 11,000km away. The record-breaking inferno that engulfed Australia was described as a “global catastrophe, and a global spectacle”. As reported in the New Statesman, Australia had come to symbolise “the extreme edge of a future awaiting us all” as a result of the climate crisis. The Australian government’s inquiry into the bushfires unequivocally reported that “it is clear that we should expect fire seasons like 2019–20, or potentially worse, to happen again”.
 
If we turn the clock back to less than a year earlier, 15 March 2019 marked the day that 1.4 million children turned out at locations around the world, on “strike” from school in support of action against the climate crisis. In Australia, the strikes were especially targeted at the government’s dismal record of inaction, with many politicians being climate-change deniers. The Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, was vocal in his criticism of the strikes. He wanted students to stay in school instead of engaging in democratic protest. His public statement said: “I want children growing up in Australia to feel positive about their future, and I think it is important we give them that confidence that they will not only have a wonderful country and pristine environment to live in, that they will also have an economy to live in as well. I don’t want our children to have anxieties about these issues.”
 
In Australia, coal is a primary export, peaking at A$69.6bn in 2019. Morrison is remembered by many for holding up a piece of coal in parliament in 2017 as a protest against those politicians campaigning for renewable energy. “Don’t be afraid, don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you. It’s coal,” Morrison jibed as his tittering colleagues passed the black lump between them. But as the harsh smell of smoke filtered into houses and offices in Sydney during last year’s fires, no one was laughing. Many wondered what kinds of anxieties the youth of Australia must have been feeling as they watched the blaze’s devastating sweep across the country, leaving destruction and death in its wake.
 
At the time of the fires, the Australian government had long worked hard to downplay or even deny the climate crisis, and many corporations supported this. Gina Rinehart, the billionaire mining magnate and executive chairman of Hancock Prospecting, had not long earlier been revealed as a multimillion-dollar funder of the Institute of Public Affairs, a rightwing thinktank that denies the climate crisis has humanmade causes. But other organisations sensed the global mood had changed, and called on Australia to fight the climate crisis. Another Australian mining billionaire, Fortescue Metals’ Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, promised a donation of A$70m to bushfire relief. While not explicitly linking the fires to the climate crisis, he did say in a statement: “I would like to say, unequivocally, in my view climate change is real. I accept that the warming of our planet is a primary cause of the catastrophic events we have been experiencing.”
 
But this grand gesture was not all it seemed. Of the $70m, $10m went directly to bushfire victims, and the same amount was given to mobilising hundreds of specialist volunteers who would play a part in the recovery. The remaining $50m went to research in “fire mitigation”, to be led by Forrest’s own Minderoo Foundation, raising questions about whether the findings would need to align with their boss’s interests. All of a sudden, the donation looked more like an investment.
 
Since the late 2010s, there has been an increasingly observable trend of corporations, especially global ones, taking a progressive turn. The political causes that such corporations have backed include marriage equality, addressing domestic violence, combating sexual harassment, ensuring rights for LGBTQ+ people, promoting equality for people with disabilities, raising awareness about mental illness, and action against climate emergency. As demonstrations took place all over the US in support of Black Lives Matter, companies came out publicly in the fight against racism. A Pepsi ad featured the celebrity Kendall Jenner handing out cold cans of cola to police officers during a BLM protest. In June 2020, the Walmart CEO Doug McMillon pledged $100m of his company’s money to support racial equity.

 
Corporations have always interfered in politics, but what is different now is that they are publicly supporting “progressive” political causes. These apparently left-leaning businesses have been derided as “woke capitalists” by conservative media commentators who believe that businesses have capitulated under pressure from the left instead of staying steadfast to their mission of serving shareholders.
 
The criticism that corporations are either appealing to progressive customers, or responding to pressure from leftwing cultural warriors, is a spurious explanation of what is going on. It is true that at their most benign, corporate gestures in support of progressive causes are simply marketing initiatives to take advantage of changing public sentiments. At its most dangerous, however, we are witnessing corporations muscling in to take over political power that was once the exclusive domain of the state – not just by lobbying government and influencing policy, but by directly funding political initiatives and engaging with citizens on matters of public concern.
 
Corporations are not just trying to influence politics, they appear to be trying to take the place of politicians. Either way, the self-interest of the corporation remains paramount. They are unlikely to take a risk when supporting a progressive cause. When corporations do take a political position, they are generally the followers, not the leaders. It is real activists who do the long, often unrewarding hard work of opening public debate to important and controversial topics. Corporations follow, generally once public opinion has already made up its mind and they can ride its wave.
 
On 11 January 2020, the luxury jewellery company Tiffany & Co placed full-page advertisements in leading Australian newspapers. Suddenly Tiffany had started to behave like a climate activist. The ads demanded action from prime minister Scott Morrison on the climate crisis. The statement said:
 
''WE STAND WITH AUSTRALIA
 
Dear Prime Minister Morrison,
 
As the brave people of Australia continue to battle bushfires that are devastating communities and wildlife, now is the time for bold and decisive climate action. This disaster of climate change is too real, and the threat to our planet and to our children is too great.
 
TIFFANY AND CO.''
 
Tiffany’s gesture seems a prime example of corporate generosity going hand-in-hand with the pursuit of self-interest. Head of Tiffany & Co’s Australian operations, Glen Schlehuber, said: “I feel very proud to work for an organization willing to stand up and take action on climate change.”
 
It would appear that, to the Tiffany execs, redirecting the company’s advertising spend to a climate-related ad constituted positive action. It is easy to dismiss this ad as nothing more than a stunt designed to bolster the brand, and Tiffany received plenty of criticism for it. Rightwing Australian tabloid the Daily Telegraph ran the headline “Posh mineral retailer goes woke”. Elsewhere, the Australian media claimed that Tiffany and Co’s ad used “the pain and hardship of bushfire victims to sell itself to Australians”.
 
But there is more going on here. What is interesting is that Tiffany & Co appeared entirely comfortable, if not self-righteous, about weighing in on political debates unrelated to their commercial activity. The rhetoric that they used positioned them not as an interested party, but as representatives of the people. When well-resourced and self-interested corporations don the cloak of civic minded political disinterestedness, we have to ask whether the line between private and public interests has been crossed. At the same time, the engine of capitalism – the cause of the industrial processes whose results were creating such suffering – kept on turning. The fires kept on burning.
 
Australia burning was a result of gross political inadequacy. Lack of satisfactory action to combat climate change over decades had made Australia prone to more and bigger fires. When the fires did arrive, corporations stepped in. Major banks offered grants to customers who had lost their homes, supermarkets delivered water and food to evacuation centres, and phone companies took care of the mobile phone bills of firefighters.
 
The Australian tech entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder of the software company Atlassian, criticised the government for climate inaction. He also slated those Australian businesses who argued that measures to address climate crisis would be “economy wrecking”. Australian mining company Rio Tinto divested itself of its coal-mining activities in 2019, and last year publicly pressurised industry association the Business Council of Australia to take a positive stand on climate change advocacy. Shareholders, while holding on to their interest in iron ore, aluminium and copper mines, were getting ahead of public opinion on climate.
 
On one hand, corporations stepping up to address the effects of climate disasters such as the Australian fires can appear as something to be welcomed, in the spirit of solidarity and charity bequeathed by corporations and billionaire business owners. On the other hand, we need to ask what are the long-term effects on our political system. There was a time when corporations were inextricably associated with rightwing conservatism, and focused narrowly on the bottom line. Now corporations are touting themselves as progressive and politically active, often with a billionaire CEO as the conspicuous spokesperson cum (political) action hero.
 
After the Australian fires, major corporations began bankrolling activities that many would have expected to be funded by the state. The situation we have arrived at is one where the failure of the state is enabling a corporate and managerial overclass to shift their power base to include not only the economic realm but also the political one. In one sense, we have come a long way from the old mantra that the true purpose of business is to pursue profits within the confines of the law. But that does not mean any fundamental change has taken place to the economic system. The corporate espousal of progressive causes is not a reversal of the self-interest that underpins capitalism, but a marked extension of it.
 
“Capitalism must be modified to do a better job of creating a healthier society, one that is more inclusive and creates more opportunity for more people,” said Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase. In order to protect capitalism, was the message, we must change.

 
On 17 February 2020, Jeff Bezos, founder and then CEO of Amazon, announced on Instagram the launch of the Bezos Earth Fund. He made a staggering US$10bn commitment to the fund, with the stated aim of working “alongside others to amplify known ways and to explore new ways of fighting the devastating impact of climate change on this planet we all share”. Riding the wave of public opinion, Bezos’s multibillion-dollar gesture came just after what had been described by German state broadcaster Deutsche Welle as the “year of climate consciousness”. Making an investment to influence the climate change agenda is a smart decision, and in the interests of a business such as Amazon that relies on transport, and unceasing consumerism, for its success.
 
While the fires were still burning in Australia, on 21 January 2020 the world’s elite gathered in the Swiss Alpine resort town of Davos. Politicians from around the globe mingled with business moguls and high-minded celebrities. Their stated goal was to “shape the global, regional and industry agenda”. So, what shape were they promoting? They spruiked the importance of “stakeholders for a cohesive and sustainable world”. According to the New York Times, “Woke capitalism […] was the dominant motif at Davos 2020”.
 
The talk at Davos was all about the way big business should step up to address the grand challenges facing the world today, whether that be climate change, inequality, populism or the abuse of big data. Davos is the kind of forum where it is abundantly clear that big business and their billionaire owners think they have the right to define the world’s moral and political agenda, and to address the world’s problems. William Burke-White from US thinktank the Brookings Institution summed it up when he said: “Since governments seem unwilling or unable to address the challenges we face without corporate leadership, power and wealth must be united to drive the changes on which our collective future depends.”
 
Little did we know, at the time of the Davos meeting, of the global disaster that was on its way with the outbreak of Covid-19. What the bushfires showed in Australia was magnified to monstrous proportions by the pandemic. The world mourned as millions of people lost their lives to the virus, and it became clear that the idea that humanity can dominate and control nature was delusional. Davos acolytes and enthusiasts had told us that corporations would back progressive political causes out of genuine concern for others. They would take over where governments left off in the provision of public goods, we were promised. So where were these corporations when Covid-19 hit? Were they eager to step up to meet their promised dedication to their stakeholders? With the devastation brought on by Covid-19, the promises made at Davos about a “better capitalism” appeared laughable.
 

Take the multinational investment company BlackRock. During the first outbreak of Covid-19, BlackRock’s contribution was to fork out $50m of relief for those affected. Whoever benefitted from that would be undoubtedly grateful. Still, it was a financial drop in the ocean for the multitrillion-dollar firm and its billionaire boss, CEO Larry Fink. By mid-2020 BlackRock’s stock price was up 14% from the beginning of the year, as a result mainly of multibillion-dollar government injections into the US securities market. Already a billionaire, his annual remuneration rose to $25.3m.
 
In the lead-up to Davos 2020, rightwing commentators had been decrying what they perceived as corporate capitulation to the left. “Woke capitalism is our enemy,” ran a headline in The American Conservative. The conservative media vilified corporations for practising what Fox News condemned as “corporate socialism”. The view was that business people should stay focused on the direct pursuit of commercial goals. Conspiracy theorists asserted that an “agenda of the left” had hijacked the corporate world. Others said that corporations had been “succumbing to progressive ideologies”.
 
If it wasn’t clear before, 2020 showed that the reactionary pundits had nothing to fear. Feelgood corporate self-righteousness did nothing to make any real changes to the heart of capitalism’s agenda; if anything, it strengthened it. The agenda remained corralling wealth in the direction of the owners of capital.
 
The role of politics in sport has long been a source of public debate, and the part played by big business even more so. Nike courted controversy in 2018 when it released an ad campaign featuring Colin Kaepernick, the American football player effectively excluded by the professional league for protesting against police killings of African Americans by taking the knee. The ad had an important impact in stimulating public debate about racism and police brutality in the US and around the world. It also bolstered Nike’s brand and presaged a $6bn increase in the company’s market value.
 
By comparison, Nike’s contribution of $25m in response to Covid-19 in 2020 was pathetic. The list of other global corporate giants making token contributions was long. Amazon committed £3.2m in the UK in March 2020. As the pandemic took hold, the Gates Foundation and Netflix pledged $100m each. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, threw in $25m to develop treatments for the virus. Such amounts are chump change in the vastness of corporate wealth. Nike shares soared in price during the pandemic, increasing its market capitalisation by 37% to $215.5bn by the end of 2020. From the beginning of the pandemic to the end of 2020, Mark Zuckerberg’s personal wealth had increased by $25bn.
 
In any case, corporate contributions were tiny compared to what was needed to address the health and economic effects of Covid-19. Early analysis estimated that the bill would be at least $5tn in the US alone. There is more to it than that. As equality activist Luke Hildyard said at the time, the types of donations that were being made could also serve to overestimate the generosity of the givers: “Very generous individual grants can obscure the fact that on the whole, wealthy people’s charitable giving is pretty minimal. Indeed, studies show that poor people donate more than rich, as a proportion of their income.”

 
Covid-19 turned out to be a boon for the billionaire class. While workers suffered job losses, employment insecurity and wage stagnation, the wealthiest increased their wealth. Naomi Klein has defined it as “disaster capitalism”, while Oxfam calls it “pandemic profiteering”. In a July 2020 report, the charity said: “As we face our deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, a subset of companies is experiencing dramatic, windfall profits. […] Covid-19 presents us with a choice as a society: Do we want to continue distributing our economic resources to the already wealthy and well connected, or shall we choose to redeploy this money into the once-in-a-century fight against Covid-19 and the inequalities it brings in its wake?”
 
The US’s billionaires increased their wealth by $2.1tn during the pandemic. That’s up by about 70% to a staggering $5tn. Internationally the number of billionaires in the world increased by 660 to 2,755, as their collective wealth rose from $8tn to $13.1tn. Meanwhile, across the world inequality widened as working people took on more and more debt.
 
What the rightwing press called “woke capitalists” are not the socialists in disguise that reactionary conservatives accuse them of being. Instead, they represent a very real and dangerous side of contemporary capitalism. Making a gesture towards progressive causes has become a substitute for action. As their wealth increases in a world beset by inequality and income insecurity, the CEO billionaires stand proud as they profess caring, progressive values. Central to the devastation of Covid-19 was the sudden unemployment that affected so many working people the world over. How did the big corporations address the financial catastrophe that so many people experienced? Where were they in building new forms of employment to put people back to work? Nowhere. Much easier to issue feelgood platitudes and make a few tokenistic donations.
 
That large corporations and their billionaire owners and CEOs achieve massive financial gain from their endeavours while espousing a social justice agenda might seem incongruous. But look a little deeper and there is no contradiction.
 
Populist capitalism appeals to people’s anxieties – in this case, the anxiety that selfish and greedy corporate elites will hoard the world’s wealth, pillaging a burning planet along the way. The irony is that this appeal is actually helping them get away with it. Talk of inclusion and shared values are a distraction from inequality and injustice.
 
In 2019, the Business Roundtable (the US club for big-time CEOs) felt it reasonable to proclaim that the purpose of business had fundamentally changed. No longer beholden to shareholder primacy, CEOs were now dedicated radically to all “stakeholders”, which they defined as “customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders”. OK, but when Covid hit the world economy in 2020, corporations the world over were expecting taxpayer-funded government bailouts (even though, when it came to corporate regulation, they had been lobbying hard for small government).
 
What 2020 demonstrated was that so-called “woke capitalism” is a trend that poses a threat to democracy. We need to ask what the real effects are of businesses and billionaires asserting that they should direct the moral and political life of citizens. It is possible that we are being asked to trade the democratic right to self-governance in return for handouts from the fickle hand of corporate benevolence, and the price is too high.
 
In the midst of the crisis, we saw the return of elected governments in setting the conditions for the future welfare of citizens. The lesson from Covid-19 is that we need to get back to building a future that restores a socially driven democracy. In the dark heart of the pandemic, there arose a need to restore hope in mutuality and shared prosperity.
 
This is an edited extract from Woke Capitalism: How Corporate Morality is Sabotaging Democracy by Carl Rhodes, published by Bristol University Press on 9 November. To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
 
 This article was amended on 2 November 2021 to clarify that the Minderoo Foundation will be leading the research into fire mitigation, not carrying it out by itself as an earlier version suggested.
 
 Why progressive gestures from big business aren’t just useless – they’re dangerous. By Carl Rhodes. The Guardian, October 28, 2021.

Woke capitalism has becomes a catchphrase for reactionary pundits who want to condemn businesses who are increasingly taking a stand on political causes and toying with a new form of ‘elevated economics’.

 
Whether it be Nike’s support for Colin Kaepernick’s Black Lives Matter anti-racist politics or Gillette’s engagement with the toxic masculinity debate that emerged from the #MeToo movement, corporations have been pilloried for buying into traditionally progressive political issues.
 
The main reproach has been that corporations have no business meddling in social issues and should instead ‘stick to their knitting’ of running effective profit making enterprises. Advocates for the purity of the free market see woke capitalism as ‘communism in disguise’.
 
But what does this all mean for business education? Should business schools hold on to the tradition of pursuing a vanilla curriculum focussed on functional business skills and the moral imperative of profit maximisation? Or should we take seriously the recent turn to shareholder capitalism and corporate purpose?
 
Mainstreaming the Reactionary Right?
 
While initiatives such as the United Nations Principles of Responsible Management Education have effectively sought for business schools to educate their students for responsible leadership, popular opinion has nurtured a much less sanguine view of how universities engage with matters of moral responsibility.
 
Universities are shouldering a good deal of the blame for the spread of ‘wokeism’. Detractors say that it is all down to the irresponsible, if not illiberal, actions of “esoteric academics” and “left-leaning Americans” nurtured by “humanities departments of universities (elite ones in particular)”. This over-generalised condemnation of the “the new social-justice mindset”  isn’t coming from the trumped up populist extreme right – it is from the pages of The Economist.
 
The view that corporations are victims of the cultural indoctrination spawned by leftist intellectuals has also entered the mainstream. According to entrepreneur turned author Vivek Ramaswamy, wokeness is an ‘invisible force’ that leads corporations to rob you of your money and for politicians to “rob you of your vote in our democracy”.
 
Even business schools, long thought to be fervent cheerleaders of shareholder primacy are now being accused of being part and parcel of the tyranny of woke capitalism. Amidst the hand-wringing we are led to believe that there is a new woke business school emerging that is hell bent on a curriculum derived from the unholy marriage of  political correctness and conscious capitalism.
 
More than Two Sides
 
The received wisdom from the arm waving critics of woke capitalism is that there are two side to choose from. Such is the divisive and unimaginative political polarization of our times.
 
On the woke side you can be co-opted into the politically correct and illiberal world of identity politics, and liberally expound right-on platitudes about everything from climate change to inequality. On the anti-woke side you champion the virtues of freedom, capitalism and meritocracy. Even better, the enterprising spirit of free markets will contribute to drive the economic progress we have enjoyed since the industrial age.
 
This not just a false dichotomy, it is also a fatal distraction from the very real problems facing the world today. To apply such a logic to business education would suggest that business schools have a simple choice. They continue on the track of preparing students for successful careers in business by teaching them the functional skills and conservative political ideologies deemed required for those careers. Alternatively, they embrace a woke agenda and fill the curriculum with pre-digestated politically correct content based on a fundamentally illiberal agenda – ignorantly labelled by some as ‘communism in disguise.’
 
Educating the Professional Managerial Class
 
This idea that of there being two opposed positions is simplistic, if not feeble-minded. Even worse, it is a form of dangerous rabble rousing that fails to account for the significant developments and new possibilities that are emerging in business school education.
 
Against accusations of pro-market intellectual fraudism, there is a growing movement in business school education that favours a re-engagement with the public and democratic function of the University. This function is one where business education would develop students’ ability to understand the broader position of business in society, and to make informed and responsible choices.
 
By and large, business schools are responsible for educating the ‘professional managerial class’ – that social group, as Catherine Liu explains, has been taught to identify with the values of the prevailing neoliberal order while at the same time positing themselves as liberal and progressive.
 
We have failed if business education ends up supporting ‘virtue hoarding’ that engages in feel-good political positions that do little to shift the status quo.
 
A belief in democratic education in business schools does not mean waving the woke flag. It means educating citizens to be the leaders and professionals who can not only perform the functions of business, but also that have a broader social and political understanding of the role of business and management in creating a better and more equal society on a global level.
 
A polarizing politics that divides the world into two camps – woke warriors vs. capitalist exploiters – is no route to progress. What we need is an enhanced capacity to understand, debate and practice in a world beset by fundamental problems of inequality, climate disaster and populism.
 
A New Type of Business School
 
Out of the wreckage of dumbed down debates about woke capitalism emerges the need for a new kind of business school that embraces a leadership role in shaping the future for the public good. There is a growing movement that wants to do just that.
 
As Martin Kitchener and Rick Delbridge have recently argued, business schools have a unique opportunity to redirect their work towards an explicit mission of delivering on the ‘public good’ out of a “moral commitment to human betterment”. Our institutions have, to date, largely failed in this by wilfully avoiding the significant political, economic and environmental challenges faced by society.
 
The prevailing economic and political system, that of which business schools are a part, has failed us. At worst, as Harvard Business School graduate Sam Long has elaborated, business schools have fuelled a system “dominated by financiers and their squires, presiding over a disordered economy gutted of both its productive energy and the ability to generate mass prosperity”.
 
It is time to change, and to imagine a new type of business school dedicated to education and research to shared prosperity and public value. Suggesting that the choices for business, and business education, are simply between hard-nosed business and fashionable wokeness is misleading and dangerous.
 
Business schools have the opportunity to embrace their democratic responsibility to provide education and research that leads business to provide better outcomes for the whole of society – to support public rather than private interests. The seeds of this change are sprouting, and it is now time for business school leaders to ensure that they flourish.
 
The woke business school. By Carl Rhodes. The PRME Blog, October 1, 2021. 

For a previous generation it would be unimaginable. The chief executives of America's largest corporations are being publicly vilified for their politics. This time it's not anti-globalisation protestors or Occupy Wall Streeters of the past who've got beef.
 
The captains of industry are being condemned for being part of a "neo-Marxist consensus." They are embroiled in "corporate-run communism," active and willing to "do the bidding of the far left."
 
Those who fear this C-suite red peril are taking decisive action! Citizens of the North Carolina's Surry County were so affronted by the Coca-Cola company's political position on voting laws that local government officials banned Coke vending machines in their offices.
 
Surely that will teach those carbonated commie rabble rousers. No wonder Coke's logo is red!
 
A Victory for the Left!
 
The far-left's takeover of the corporate world has been dubbed 'woke capitalism.' Exported from the United States to the liberal democratic world, riled-up reactionaries from Australia, France, and Britain are bemoaning the leftist turn by corporations.
 
 
Namby-pamby CEOs are accused of surrendering to "to hard-left wokeness." Just last month U.S. advocacy group Consumers' Research led the charge. They launched a "name and shame campaign" against corporations who "put woke politics over consumer interests."
 
The group coughed up at least a million dollars on a series of ads targeting American Airlines, Coca-Cola and Nike and their CEOs. They accused these companies of trying to "curry favor with woke politicians" at the expense of their customers.
 
A little more than a week later the same debate was aired all the way up in the U.S. Senate. The heads of six of the Unites States' biggest businesses were hauled over the coals. Republican Senator Pat Toomey accused them of "wokeism" and "attacks on capitalism" for speaking up against voting laws.
 
"Woke capitalism is running amok" claimed Republican Senator Tim Scott. Others worried that this left lunacy might get so out of hand that the banks would stop financing the natural gas and fossil fuel industries in order to protect their credentials.
 
The Left's Evil Magic
 
The conservatives at the National Center for Public Policy Research brand them as "far-left CEOs." The Free Enterprise Project damn the whole shebang as "the left […] rapidly working its evil magic" on all spheres of life.
 
Even the most casual knowledge of socialism would alert would-be conspiracy theorists that one of its critical features is the social ownership of the means of production. Most socialists do not go quite that far today, settling instead for a program of wealth distribution that reverse the hardships caused by inequality—hardships that divide the world across class, gender, racial and geo-political lines.
 
So where are the better-red-that-dead CEOs when it comes to economic justice and wealth redistribution? Despite the devastation that COVID-19 brought to economies around the world, in 2020 America's top bosses took home an average of $13.7 million. That's up almost a million dollars from the year before.
 
For billionaires, COVID was even more lucrative. According to Forbes there were 2,755 billionaires in 2021, 660 more than the previous year. Collectively they are worth $13.1 trillion. That's a mind-boggling $6.1 trillion increase since 2020.
 
What Has Woke Capitalism Achieved?
 
If we agree that economic justice is a defining issue for socialism, then complaining that CEOs and business owners have made an abrupt left-turn is patently ludicrous. No amount of arguing over identity politics is going to change that.
 
If woke capitalism has achieved anything it has been to break the yoke between the social and economic politics that have traditionally united the right. This means that corporations can support social justice without having to worry about its inexorable relation to economic justice.
 
If CEOs want to embrace progressive politics, they need to also start campaigning to increase the minimum wage, implement universal basic income, redistribute income by higher taxes on the rich, and ensure workers' rights through trade unionism.
 
The worst part is that when woke CEOs are condemned for being left-wing nut jobs, CEO political activism effectively draws attention away from the core political issue of economic inequality; the very inequality that too many CEOs represent.
 
Are Crazed Commies Running American Corporations? By Carl Rhodes. Commons Dreams, June 10, 2021. 

It was a remarkable day in politics when assistant attorney general Amanda Stoker, personally intervened to have ‘anti-racism’ removed from an Australian Human Rights Commission tender.  She worried the term was associated with Critical Race Theory.

 
Stoker had no beef with the idea that racism is something Australians should be against.  So why oppose a theory that seeks to understand and address racism at a systemic level? The problem appeared to be that this theory is beholden to the bogeyman of the ‘woke revolution’.
 
This incident reflects a growing political engagement in a ‘war on woke’ in Australia.  The call to arms is issued from the bastions of right-wing conservatism.  Sky News leads the way in claiming that every progressive cause, from climate action to anti-racism to feminism, signals a capitulation to woke ‘lefty lunacy’.
 
Scott Morrison was not far behind when he attacked identity politics. All of this malarkey about gender, race and sexuality undermines morality, freedom and the Australian way, he proselytized.
 
Both Stoker and Morrison expound the conventional conservative position that wokeness has infiltrated Australian culture, and we are worse off for it. The wokerati are caricatured, even by Prime Minister Scott Morrison, as out-of-touch elites who waste their time in “the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities”.
 
Andrew Bolt, never one to shy away from reactionary fear-mongering, cautions that “we have evidence that woke politics is making the West desperately weak”.  One might expect that such tirades against ‘political correctness gone mad’ are aimed at some group of revolutionary leftist agitators determined to destroy the country with the wave of a red flag. Not so.
 
In a bizarre twist, it is large business corporations who are pilloried as being at the vanguard of wokeness. As Mark Latham recently lamented, Australian corporations should back off from woke politics. If they would keep their noses out of politics, then “the shareholders are better off, the customers are better off, the nation is better off”, he said.
 
It is corporations, the woke-bashers argue, that have given a public platform to the worst excesses of the left. The problem, as Peta Credlin sees it, is “that CEOs blindly follow these trends like a mob of sheep”, having lost their way from their  true mission to “deliver market value to their shareholders.”
 
This is where the radical right has entirely got it wrong.  Corporate wokeness is not a capitulation to the left at the expense of commercial objectives.  It is an adoption of progressive politics precisely because that political position enhances the ability of corporations to achieve those goals.
 
When Qantas boss Alan Jones campaigned for marriage equality, he did not do it at the expense of his corporate interests. Quite the contrary, he was explicit that his politics was justified by a ‘business case’ that would yield commercial benefits for Qantas.
 
It is the same thing when Australian businesses back climate change action, as we saw, for example, in the wake of last year’s bush fires. When Tiffany and Co used its advertising budget to reprimand Scott Morrison for not taking ‘bold and decisive climate action’ one doesn’t have to be a hardened cynic to smell public relations opportunism.
 
The simple fact is that when a corporation backs political causes, their brand image and commercial viability is always front of mind.
 
All of this reveals that the so-called ‘war on woke’ is not much of a war at all, at least not when it comes down to any contestation over the more fundamental political issues of social and economic inequality.
 
In this ‘war’, we have the right-wing fundamentalists on one side who claim that left-wing ideas are destroying the fabric of our society at the hands of urban elites.  On the other hand, we have CEOs and corporations who are increasingly adopting woke politics.
 
The problem is that whoever ‘wins’ this pseudo-war, the real losers are the socially and economically disadvantaged.  If the right fundamentalists are the victors, then we retain a system based on the reproduction of a dominant white elite – the kind of politics that Pauline Hanson has been parading for decades.
 
If the woke corporations triumph, then corporate agendas, at least the economic agendas, remain largely intact. Again, the result is a preservation of the economic status quo.
 
When it comes down to it, the ‘war on woke’ is a distraction from the real social and political problems that Australia needs to grapple with.  These issues concern how inequalities divided along gender, race and class lines are becoming more deeply entrenched.
 
Enhancing shareholder value through corporate alignment with progressive social causes will not solve this.  Neither will desperately hanging on to a hackneyed political ideology that unimaginatively dismisses calls for equality as woke.
 
Whoever wins the war on woke, the possibilities of the resurgence of a democracy based on ideals of equality and shared prosperity will lose. It is towards that democratic promise that our political attention needs to turn if true progress is to be pursued.
 
The ‘war on woke’ pits corporate elites against conservatives. So who will win? By Carl Rhodes. The New Daily, May 9, 2021. 

Prince Harry has copped a pasting in the British media for his new job as “chief impact officer” with Silicon Valley startup BetterUp.
 
His role, and the company’s business model, has been called the “latest expression of woke capitalism” in venerable conservative magazine The Spectator. Other critics have chimed in, deriding the “Prince of Woke Capital” for “surfing a wave of wokery towards an economic abyss”.
 
Ridiculing people and corporations for being “woke” is, of course, a relatively easy sport for pundits on the right of the political spectrum. Harry’s critics have a point that woke capitalism involves vapid political correctness, even if they are missing its more serious ramifications for social and economic inequality.
 
The origin of woke
 
First, let’s recap the meaning of “woke” and “woke capitalism”. The use of the term “woke” by African Americans has been traced back at least to the 1920s, though Oxford English Dictionary researchers say its meaning as being alert to systemic issues of injustice and discrimination emerged from the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.
 
It became more widely known with the advent of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 (following the acquittal of Florida man George Zimmerman for shooting dead African-American teen Trayvon Martin).
 
As academics Elaine Richardson and Alice Ragland explain in a 2018 article, BLM activists used the hashtag #staywoke to urge fellow African Americans “to remain aware of what is going on around you and in society, more specifically, to remain politically aware or conscious”.
 
It didn’t take long for “woke” to enter mainstream culture. In 2016 the American Dialect Society declared it the slang word of the year. They defined “woke” as being “conscious, aware or enlightened, especially with regards to matters of social justice and racial inequity”.
 
Capitalising woke
 
In entering the mainstream, though, the meaning of “woke” was soon distorted. Those on the right of politics co-opted it as a term of derision – akin to “social justice warrior” – for people (especially white people) who bragged about their self-righteous positions on political issues.
 
What started as a serious call to political consciousness was manipulated to become a way of dismissing anyone who professed vaguely progressive views.
 
This wasn’t limited to individuals. Corporations too could be chastised for being woke.
 
In 2018, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat wrote about the trend of corporations and chief executives aligning themselves to progressive social concerns, such as immigration and gay and transgender rights, while they continued to push their own economic “self-interest on tax policy and corporate stinginess in paychecks”.
 
The term “woke capitalism” soon came to express the approach of companies who claim a “social licence to operate” through their public advocacy on social issues, without affecting the economic status quo.
 
Harry gets appy
 
What has all of this got to do with Prince Harry and BetterUp?
 
Let’s clarify what BetterUp is.
 
Media reports have described the San Francisco-based company as a startup “that provides employee coaching and mental health assistance”.
 
The company itself describes its business as being about “changing the world by bringing the power of transformation to each and every person”. Announcing the prince’s appointment, chief executive Alexi Robichaux declared:
 
“Prince Harry will expand on the work he’s been doing for years, as he educates and inspires our community and champions the importance of focusing on preventative mental fitness and human potential worldwide.”
 
The title of chief impact officer – or “chimpo” – comes from the not-profit sector. There’s no one accepted job decription, but such roles generally involve working to ensure an organisation is actually achieving its stated vision and mission.
 
How does this apply to BetterUp? That’s unclear.
 
Remove all the marketing babble and this is a company that exists to make a profit. Its core business appears to be an app selling professional coaching services. Its promise is to make people more “positive, engaged, and connected to every part of their lives”, both personal and professional.
 
In reality, the chief impact the prince is likely to have is attracting publicity for the app – helping BetterUp’s bottom line, and Harry’s bank balance.
 
Everyone’s a winner?
 
The way in which BetterUp has wrapped its reality in the language of social concern and human progress bears all the worst hallmarks of “woke capitalism”.
 
Its business model is all about individual empowerment. This shows no apparent awareness of the need to address systemic social and economic inequities. It would also have us believe we can all “make it” in that world, if we just get the right mental attitude.
 
Yet the connection between entrenched economic inequalities and myriad social problems including mental illness are well-documented. As the World Health Organization concludes, mental disorders are shaped by social and economic factors, with inequality being chief among them.
 
Over the past 30 years, according to the United Nations World Social Report for 2020, income inequality has become worse in most developed countries.
 
The irony is that Harry epitomises this inequality, and the limitations of meritocracy. He is the very embodiment of unearned wealth and privilege. Would he have gotten this job except for the family he was born into? Unlikely. How much is he being paid to push the idea that anyone can achieve success? BetterUp isn’t saying. Nor is he.
 
So while it easy to agree with criticisms of Prince Harry’s new “job” as an expression of woke capitalism, this cannot simply be dismissed as misplaced political correctness.
 
Inequality is the problem. Woke capitalism is not the solution.
 
Prince Harry’s critics have a point: woke capitalism is no solution. By Carl Rhodes. The Conversation, March 31, 2021. 

 

The Bristol University Press

Facebook’s rebranding as Meta has been seen by many as the company’s latest attempt at corporate crisis control. The social media giant has been publicly attacked for creating an environment that fosters far-right extremism and violating individuals’ data privacy.

 
Yet it also represents an attempt to rebrand the growing power of tech monopolies to shape all areas of our lives through social expansion. It points to a troubling new era of “metacapitalism” – or “capitalism on steroids” as Forbes called it in 2000. It reflects a disturbing trend of massively expanding tech conglomerates and the dangerous privatisation of technological knowledge.
 
Rebranding tech monopolies
 
Technology is rapidly transforming our world – from instantaneous digital communication to AI decision-making to virtual and augmented reality. The driving force behind these changes has been private technology firms, whether global start-ups or famous Silicon Valley conglomerates. But this combination of massive corporate profits and exciting technological innovation is the biggest myth of 21st-century progress.
 
The truth is much more complicated. Huge technology firms such as Google and Facebook are increasingly criticised for unethical data collection and the use of algorithms which encourage hateful beliefs and viral misinformation.
 
Their technology has also encouraged unjust labour practices including hi-tech digital surveillance to monitor workers, as happened in Amazon warehouses, and facilitated digital platforms such as Uber, which refuse to provide basic worker rights.
 
Longer term, the mining of rare earth metals and the massive amounts of energy required for data processing are major contributors to climate change.
 
These problems point to the threat of capitalist tech monopolies where, according to theorist Neil Postman, the culture “seeks its authorisation in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology”. Microsoft and Google have already been accused of monopolistic practices.
 
These “bit tyrants” are troubling “technopolies” which actually use their power and influence to stifle innovation and competition using – ironically – traditional practices of the old economy.
 
Perhaps even more troubling is how these companies channel innovation away from its potential for social good. Beneath the myth of Silicon Valley prosperity are big tech’s seeming attempts to promote corporate oligarchies and even authoritarian regimes to extend their economic reach and political power.
 
The highly publicised renaming of these conglomerates is part of a wider rebranding of this technopoly. As one commentator recently observed, “Facebook’s new name is ‘Meta’, and its new mission is to invent a ‘metaverse’ that will make us all forget what it’s done to our existing reality.” It may be a different name, but it is the same economic, political and social corporate threat.
 
The spread of metacapitalism
 
In his video announcement, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed this dawning of the metaverse as signalling a new technological age, providing viewers with a glimpse of it in a virtual world where people could use avatars to live out their wildest imagination in real-time with others around the world.
 
The backlash has ranged from moral outrage over Facebook itself, to ridiculing Zuckerberg’s new vision for technology. What is overlooked is how this represents the desire to create metacapitalism – which uses technology to shape, exploit and profit from human interaction. It is a completely marketised virtual reality world fuelled by the unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, unjust global working conditions and the constant invasion of users’ data privacy for private financial gain.
 
Corporate and social rebranding are fundamental to the spread of metacapitalism. Google’s 2015 name change to “Alphabet” reflected its desire to be more than just a search engine and expand into other areas such as driverless cars, medical devices, smart home appliances and drone delivery. Introducing the metaverse, Zuckerberg said:
 
  “Think about how many physical things you have today that could just be holograms in the future. Your TV, your perfect work set-up with multiple monitors, your board games and more – instead of physical things assembled in factories, they’ll be holograms designed by creators around the world.”
 
He insisted, once again, that “we don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services”.
 
These moves play into a broader strategy to socially rebrand metacapitalism positively. The introduction of the metaverse is part of a new trend of what business ethics academic Carl Rhodes has referred to it as “woke capitalism”, noting in a recent article that “progressive gestures from big business aren’t just useless – they’re dangerous”.
 
Whether it is the Gates Foundation initially opposing the spread of global vaccines in order to protect patent rights, or Elon Musk promising to create an “multi-planet civilisation” – while avoiding paying much-needed taxes here on Earth – corporations are now increasingly using philanthropy and utopian visions to hide their present day misdeeds.
 
A force for good
 
The irony is that technology could actually become a real force for radical social and economic transformation if it was freed from the narrow limits imposed on it by metacapitalism.
 
Digital platforms are already enabling greater cooperative ownership and direct democratic participation. Big data could be deployed to allow for efficient energy use through better tracking of energy consumption. It also allows for the community ownership of our information and the economy generally. 3D printers have the potential to revolutionise manufacturing so that we can easily and sustainably produce all that we require.
 
Crucially, open-source technologies which allow for their information to be freely available to use, modify and redistribute, could foster international collaboration and innovation on a scale previously unimaginable. They point to a realistic and utopian “post-capitalist” future that could transcend the need for exploitation based on principles of shared development and collective prosperity.
 
The rebranding of technology companies is not merely cosmetic, it represents a dangerous attempt to monopolise all forms of technology development linked to a metaverse and the spread of metacapitalism. What is needed instead is a real discussion about fostering open-source culture, data rights and ownership, and the use of technology for positive social transformation – not simply selling more products.
 
Metaverse: how Facebook rebrand reflects a dangerous trend in growing power of tech monopolies. By Peter Boom. The Conversation, November 4, 2021. 

On the morning of 7 April this year, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of  JPMorgan Chase, published his annual letter to shareholders. The head of America’s largest bank reflected on “the brutal murder of George Floyd and the racial unrest that followed” (the week after Floyd’s murder in May 2020, Dimon was among the first CEOs publicly to take the knee, while visiting a branch in New York) and described how the bank was “fully engaged in trying to solve some of the world’s biggest issues – climate change, poverty, economic development and racial inequality”.
 
Later that day, Dimon and the board of JPMorgan Chase published another document, their proxy statement to the bank’s annual shareholder meeting. In it, Dimon and his board recommended voting against proposals aimed at helping make the changes he had claimed to support. One called for the bank to undertake a racial equity audit; another asked that it review its practices on political lobbying. Neither proposal was passed. The statement also revealed that Dimon – whose letter had opined, a few hours earlier, that the “fault line” in his fractured country “is inequality” – is paid 758 times the median American income.
 
For a company to say one thing and do another is hardly new. But in the past year, the contrast between the virtues espoused by businesses and the real activity from which they make their money has become so stark that it has reached a kind of breaking point.
 
The workplace has become politicised as never before. On the work-focused social network LinkedIn, 188,000 people describe their job as “activist”. There are more activists than there are midwives, historians, orthodontists or scriptwriters. In the past year employees at Apple, the world’s most profitable company, have broken their strict code of silence with letters that demanded the sacking of an employee who had written a novel they considered sexist, requesting a public statement in support of the people of Palestine, and protesting a policy asking that they return to office working. Google – a company founded with the motto “Don’t be evil” – is now engaged in a legal battle with workers who say they were sacked for protesting against its work with US border control.
 
To ask for ethics from a corporation is like expecting a scalpel to have a sense of humour: it is a mindless tool, the design of which is wholly at odds with such expectations. But it would not be fair to say that the workers of Apple or Google were naive. People have not suddenly become more sensitive or more gullible. But they have, for decades, been told by the managerial class that the companies to which they give their time, their energy, their ideas and their money exist for a higher purpose than simply making a profit.
 
In many organisations, this is affirmed at board level by a chief impact officer or “impact partner” (Harry, the Duke of Sussex, holds both titles, for the coaching company BetterUp and the asset manager Ethic). Such moral agency must also be communicated to consumers; the PR company Edelman identifies “cause marketing” – taking a position on an issue wholly unrelated to your business – as one of the more effective ways to shift units.
 
For some, this is as a corruption of capitalism’s true purpose. When Dimon and other Wall Street CEOs were called before the Senate Banking Committee in May, the Republican Tim Scott complained that banks were taking political positions on issues such as Georgia’s new voting laws, opponents of which say restrict the voting rights of people of colour. “Woke capitalism,” Scott said, “seems to be running amok throughout the financial institutions of our country.” In the same week, the group Consumers’ Research launched a seven-figure advertising campaign that targeted the CEOs of Coca-Cola, Nike and American Airlines for “putting woke politics over consumer interests”.
 
But arguing that capitalism should be unfettered and amoral is itself a political position. No business is without its ideals in the new “emoticonomy”. This is not a circumstance created accidentally by political parties, activists or workers, but deliberately, by businesses. It has been going on for some time.
 
After the end of the Second World War, companies in the US and Europe made use of low interest rates to launch a long period of acquisition, using cheap debt to make offers other companies’ shareholders couldn’t refuse. This allowed some companies, especially in the US, to grow rapidly into large conglomerates. But because antitrust legislation prevented such businesses from buying up their competitors, these conglomerates were strange, many-tentacled beasts; the telecommunications company ITT bought hundreds of companies in the 1960s, diversifying into hotels, schools, houses, timber, bread and make-up.
 
The apparently rapid growth of these new corporate giants was attributed to the genius of the captains of industry who oversaw them, men such as James Ling and Harold Geenen. But this scale was bought with bonds and debentures – with debt – and this debt demanded efficiency. The great conglomerates faced the problem of persuading tens of thousands of people to be loyal, hard-working employees of a giant, faceless holding corporation.
 
  
The solution was found in work that had begun in the 1920s at Harvard’s School of Human Relations. As Gillian Tett explains in her recent book Anthro Vision, companies such as Western Electric had begun employing anthropologists to listen to their employees and understand their working culture and social relations. Building on the theory of “scientific management” developed before the war by the engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor and the growing field of industrial-organisational psychology, corporations realised there was money to be made in understanding how their employees felt.
 
In 1953, the American economist Howard R Bowen published Social Responsibilities of the Businessman, in which he introduced the idea of corporate social responsibility – the need not only to respect the rights of those inside the business, but also to avoid causing harm in the wider world. This idea was controversial at first – to Bowen’s colleagues at the University of Illinois, it reeked of socialism, and he was forced to resign in 1950 – but it proved useful to the new corporate titans. Employees of huge conglomerates could now be united by popular values, such as patriotism and a sense of contributing to wider socio-economic progress.

 These ideas were spread by the growing class of professional managers. From a handful of students at the Wharton School in Pennsylvania in 1908, the “Master of Business Administration” (MBA) programme spread across American, European and Asian universities in the second half of the 20th century, until by 2008 more than 100,000 MBA graduates were entering the workplace each year.
 
At the same time that moral managerialism was taking over the world, the political parties to which people had once looked for moral guidance were gradually running out of credibility. In the 1960s, half of British voters knew immediately which side they’d take in a general election. By 2018, just 9 per cent of the electorate identified as strong supporters of any political party, according to a report published by King’s College London’s Policy Institute. But people had not become uninterested in politics itself: issues, causes and projects were now their focus.
 
In his short film Oh Dearism, the film- maker Adam Curtis traces the rise of issue-based politics back to the 1967-1970 Biafran War and the charitable appeals that followed. TV news and events such as Live Aid, he argues, simplified complex crises such as famines and civil wars, removing their political context and presenting them as little more than natural disasters. But while political parties vacillated, unable to respond in equally simple terms, businesses began to claim the moral high ground. No sector was more committed to this transfer than the rapidly growing companies of Silicon Valley.

 
In 1983, John Sculley gave up his job as the youngest ever president of Pepsi when a 28-year-old Steve Jobs asked him: “Do you want to sell sugar-water the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?” When Sculley repeated this anecdote to me, 30 years later – he has repeated it many times – the excitement in his voice was still audible.
 
What Jobs had offered Sculley was something no benefits package or equity share could ever match: a sense of purpose. In the decades since, Apple has hired thousands of the world’s most talented workers with some version of this promise.
 
In September 2009, the British advertising executive Simon Sinek spoke at an event in a ballroom in a suburb of Seattle. He began by asking the audience why Apple was so successful, how Martin Luther King came to lead the civil rights movement and why the Wright brothers were first into the air (as if these were all comparable achievements, made by similar people).
 
“I made a discovery,” Sinek said. “There’s a pattern. All the great, inspiring leaders and organisations in the world, whether it’s Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way.” On a flip chart, Sinek then drew a circle – “the golden circle” – and in the middle he wrote the word “Why”. The secret to success was not efficiency or inventiveness but vision: “What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief?”
 
Sinek’s talk has been watched more than 50 million times. The reason for its popularity is not that it’s true – it is the magical bullshit of the professional speaking industry – but because it tells the managerial class that it can (like Steve Jobs!) summon the vision necessary to propel companies to greatness. It will be that vision, not the people in the factory, on the sales floor or in the delivery vans, that is the difference between failure and glory.
 
This idea is fundamental to Apple, Google, Facebook and the other companies of Silicon Valley, which are built on the idea that “one can, in principle, master all things by calculation”, as the 20th-century sociologist Max Weber put it. Such companies see social, environmental and political issues, from climate change to racial inequality, as equations to be solved by the genius of a gifted few. Google’s “moonshot division”, Google X, says it aims to use technologies such as machine learning and robotics “to solve some of the world’s hardest problems” and “improve the lives of millions, even billions, of people”. (It also happens to generate thousands of valuable patents per year.)
 
The billionaire CEOs of these companies are presented as saviours of the human race. Mark Zuckerberg wants to “cure all disease”; Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates want to address the climate crisis; Elon Musk wants to establish human colonies on Mars in case Jeff and Bill’s plan doesn’t work. The former CEO of WeWork, Adam Neumann, claimed that the purpose of WeWork was not to sublet office space, but to end world hunger, to “elevate the world’s consciousness” and to give all 150 million of the world’s orphans a family.
 
These people are not scientists, doctors or aid workers. They are MBA graduates,  selling targeted advertising, web hosting  and office space. But as Sinek made clear, there was no longer any need for a business’s real activities to have any connection to  its mission.
 
This mindset allowed Andrew Bosworth, a vice-president at Facebook and creator of the social network’s News Feed, to tell the “ugly truth” about his company to his colleagues in a 2016 memo. “All the work we do in growth is justified… the subtle language that helps people stay searchable… the work we will likely have to do in China,” he wrote. “Anything that allows us to connect more people more often is *de facto* good.”
 
As Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang described in their book on Facebook, An Ugly Truth, this view allowed senior Facebook employees to ignore the crises their company was creating. The managers of Silicon Valley do not need to think about what their companies are doing now; to do so would be a distraction from their real business of changing the world. Any technological (and financial) advancement is to them inherently right because it represents progress.
 
The Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has expanded this position over several books, including Compassionate Capitalism (2004), The Business of Changing the World (2006) and Trailblazer: The Power of Business as the Greatest Platform for Change (2019). He has campaigned against discriminatory legislation in Indiana and Georgia, and for greater support for homeless people in San Francisco. At the same time, Benioff has amassed a personal wealth more than 80,000 times the American median, and Salesforce has used legal measures to minimise its tax payments: over the last three years, the company has made $4.1bn in the US and paid no US federal tax whatsoever.
 
Executive megalomania extends, in subtler forms, across the whole managerial class. People who once saw themselves as selling trainers, beer or IT services now consider themselves the leaders of “mission-driven” companies, solving the world’s problems.
 
In recent years the idea has spread that moral authority can be assumed not only by a company or its C-suite, but by capital itself. This idea was codified in a letter sent to hundreds of business leaders by Larry Fink, the co-founder and CEO of the US  investment firm BlackRock, in 2018.
 
BlackRock invests more than $9tn of other people’s money, and its risk-management platform, Aladdin, is used to manage a further $25tn. It is the largest shareholder in many of the world’s companies. After reminding the CEOs that BlackRock’s clients “are the true owners of your company”, Fink explained in his letter that governments were “failing to prepare for the future”, and that “society increasingly is turning to the private sector and asking that companies respond to broader societal challenges”.
 
Carl Rhodes, a professor of organisational studies and author of Woke Capitalism (due to be published in November), says Fink’s letter was a turning point: “He’s not talking about their core business activities. He’s saying this is an additional responsibility, which exists above and beyond that.” Fink, arguably the world’s most powerful CEO, was instructing companies that the sense of purpose essential to modern managerialism had now spread to capital markets. Securities would be priced against virtue.
 
But the growth of investments rated against environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria does not actually entail the “real commitment to green growth” Rishi Sunak said was needed in his Budget speech in March, any more than buying a Tesla will propel humanity to other worlds. Governments, for all their talk about a “green industrial revolution” (Sunak again), have left it to banks to make rules on what counts as ESG.
 
The result is, to pick one product, the $244m GIF Global Lower Carbon Equity fund, which states its mission as “reducing carbon exposure” but invests, according to its most recent filings, in coal mines and coal-fired power stations (through AGL Energy and Origin Energy), oil and gas drilling services (through Maersk), and mining (Barrick Gold, Rio Tinto). Its biggest holdings include Microsoft, Amazon and Google, all of which are decarbonising their own companies while supplying billions of dollars’ worth of cloud computing and machine learning services to the oil and gas industry, helping companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell increase production and unlock new deposits.
 
Many other ESG funds contain investments in BP, which in 2018 claimed to be drilling the Arctic “to support the global energy transition” (it has since sold its Alaskan assets), and Altria (owner of Philip Morris), a “tobacco harm reduction company” that sells more than 200 billion cigarettes per year.
 
Again, this is about progress. Just as  Silicon Valley’s sense of mission persuaded the world that mass surveillance, limitless consumerism and the monetisation of private space were progressive innovations, the moral capital flowing into oil and tobacco companies allows them to argue (with straight faces!) that they are the ones best placed to fix the crises they created.
 
In the last ten years, Google searches for the term “imposter syndrome” have soared as millennials have ascended to the managerial class and exchanged work that has directly observable results for administration and strategy. In the US and UK, managerial and administrative jobs have grown faster than other areas of the economy. As the late anthropologist David Graeber wrote in his 2013 tirade against the make-work of the modern economy, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs”, “it’s as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working”.
 
This sense of corporate uselessness is pervasive. In 2019, a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development found that almost a quarter of the UK workforce thought their job made no useful contribution to society. Seven million people in this country see no point in going to work, other than to make money.
 
At the same time, the cost of entering the white-collar workplace has risen precipitously. In 15 years the average level of student debt (at the point of repayment) has more than quadrupled, from under £10,000 to over £40,000. Apprentices, too, pay heavily for their training: the minimum wage for an apprentice is £4.30 an hour. Entry-level workers must contend with much higher costs of living, stagnant wages and competition from others who can afford unpaid internships.
 
Despite these challenges, Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, says it is not the case that an angry new cohort of woke youngsters has arrived to disrupt the workplace. Duffy says there is “not massive evidence that social purpose is a particularly strong, or new, driver for current younger generations… in terms of what they want from employers. There’s interest in social purpose from all generations.”
 
What has changed, says Duffy, is the  attention paid by businesses to social issues, and with it, the emergence of an “industry of lots of consultants and trainers who focus on micro-differences between generations, devoted to pretending that major generational divisions exist in the workplace”. It  is not so much that younger generations  demand more from the workplace, but that the visionaries of the managerial class must be seen to understand the future. In the absence of unions, which now represent less than 14 per cent of private-sector workers, it has become much easier for a company to make disputes appear the fault of restive young snowflakes.
 
“You don’t see corporations arguing for an increase in the minimum wage,” says Carl Rhodes. “You don’t see corporations arguing for an increase in corporate taxation, so that society can provide better schools and hospitals.” There may be limited demand for wokery from employees, but for companies, says Rhodes: “It shifts attention away from economic differences… and works to sever the connection between the political and economic.”
 
What does woke capitalism want? Beyond the brand value generated by what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls the “passionate performance of virtue”, there is a greater prize at stake.
 
Last month, five of America’s largest financial institutions, including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, announced plans to use a new questionnaire when buying municipal bonds – the securities issued by states and local governments to raise money for public hospitals, policing, libraries and transport infrastructure. The questionnaire asks whether elected representatives are “willing… to engage with investors on issues regarding racial equity… on an ongoing basis”, and requests data on police officers’ behaviour.
 
This programme is still being developed, but it could lead to a situation in which financial institutions decide which cities or states can raise money for public works based on their politics. Executives will decide if a population is morally deserving of new school buildings and water systems. 
 
For such power to be handed over, something essential needs to change, and there is evidence that this is happening. Every year since 2000, Edelman has released its “Trust Barometer”, a global report on attitudes to government, business, NGOs, charities and the media. The 2021 report, which surveyed more than 33,000 people in 28 countries, found that in a year in which governments have raised trillions to fight a global pandemic, it is businesses that have gained credibility. Respondents were more likely to believe a statement from their employer than their government, and when asked which group they trusted “to do what is right”, respondents chose CEOs over journalists, religious leaders or those in government. Business is the “only institution seen as both competent and ethical”, the report states, and the “only trusted institution”.

 
The final section of Jamie Dimon’s letter to his shareholders is a 19-page section on “public policy” – not the specific policy that regulates the banking sector, but the whole of government. It is a presidential address, Dimon’s vision for his country – a country that has for too long been run by politicians. “Frankly, we punted too much of the responsibility to our government,” he writes. “Few of our institutions are blameless.”
 
The embarrassing mismanagement of the world around us – the Brexit shambles, the Trump years, the failure to act upon the climate crisis – presents a moment for business to take on the moral agency of government itself: and the power that comes with it. For companies that already straddle the globe, this is where further expansion lies, because they are still, for the moment, much smaller than the states they inhabit.
 
When Jeff Bezos, then the world’s richest man, took the first commercial passenger flight beyond the Kármán line and into space this year, he did so in safety and luxury, to widespread disdain. Six decades earlier, Alan Shepard made the same trip, in discomfort and the knowledge that his rocket stood a good chance of exploding; he returned a national hero. That 60-year gap, and the risk Shepard was prepared to take, is the difference between the state and private enterprise, between being transacted with as a company and being loved as a nation. And that is the real objective of woke capitalism: faith, and the authority it confers.
 
 
The goodness business: how woke capitalism turned virtue into profit. By Will Dunn.  The New Statesman, October 20, 2021.