From portland to princeton: why is wokery an anglophone phenomenon? | thearticle

The moral panic about “wokery” shows no sign of abating — especially in the English-speaking world. It doesn’t seem to matter whether the government is liberal, as in the US, New Zealand and

Canada, or conservative, as in the UK and Australia. The culture wars rage on regardless. Here in Britain, not a day passes without news of battles being fought over what Norman Podhoretz

once called the “bloody crossroads”, where politics and literature, or culture in the widest sense, meet. Even business is not immune from wokery and its consequences. The huge City firm of

KPMG has just announced that in future it will have a quota of 29 per cent of its partners and directors to be recruited from working-class backgrounds. Reasonable enough, you may say, given

that “working class” is defined as “routine or manual” jobs and that more than 20 per cent of KPMG executives already come from these groups. But part of the package is a huge training

programme on “invisible barriers” to diversity for all 16,000 staff. This follows the resignation of the firm’s chairman, Bill Michael, after he dismissed “unconscious bias” as “complete and

utter crap” on a Zoom call to staff, telling them to “stop moaning” about the pandemic. His successor, Bina Mehta, comes from a working-class background and says: “I’m a passionate believer

that greater diversity improves business performance.” No doubt it does, but endless training and retraining probably does not. Nobody should be unaccountable, including those who parrot

wokery. And the line between training and indoctrination is a vague one. Meritocracy depends on objective standards and transparent criteria. Once jobs are awarded on the basis of a person’s

background or affiliation, rather than their own qualities and achievements, employers are on the slippery slope from meritocracy to mediocrity. Ms Mehta may be right that diversity is good

for business, but if staff are being made to focus on wokery rather than productivity and those who speak up fear for their jobs, the result may be a dull uniformity rather than the

dynamism she is presumably trying to achieve. In a competitive market, a culture of conformism comes at a cost. This is even more true of the academic world, where scholarly criteria are

apparently being subverted in favour of ideological ones. In the United States, distinguished professors are subjected to intolerable pressure merely for speaking their minds. Peter

Boghossian, a philosopher at Portland State University in Oregon, has resigned after claiming that the institution has become “a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender

and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division”. In his resignation letter Professor Boghossian complains that colleagues warned students to avoid his classes, because he

had a reputation as a whistleblower who exposed the excesses of wokery by sending spoof papers to social science journals. The more outrageous the hoax, the more likely they were to fall for

it. One that was actually published by _Cogent Social Sciences _argued that penises were not physical but products of the human mind. The male member was also to blame for climate change.

Another paper took a chapter from _Mein Kampf _and, merely by inserting a few buzzwords from radical feminist theory, had it accepted for publication. The latter proved to be a step too far:

the professor found his name scrawled on the walls of public lavatories with swastikas. Not everyone got the joke. The university authorities at Portland State have refused to comment but

it is clear that nonconformist academics are being marginalised, or worse. At Princeton, one of the most prestigious universities in the world, the classicist Joshua Katz, has been

ostracised for his refusal to go along with demands by his colleagues for special privileges for “faculty of color”. Professor Katz, who is black, also rejected demands from woke professors

that the university should apologise to the “Black Justice League”, which he describes as “a small local terrorist organisation” that was active on campus from 2014-16. He describes a

“struggle session” by the League shown on Instagram as “one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed”. As punishment for the offence supposedly caused by his “Declaration of

Independence”, Professor Katz has been featured on an official Princeton website, aimed at new undergraduates, as an example of racism. His department condemned his views as “fundamentally

incompatible with our mission and values”. Katz has been denounced by his former pupil, Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who claims that classics is responsible for the invention of

“whiteness” and that he hopes that the field, as it has been studied hitherto, “dies as swiftly as possible”. Professors like Padilla Peralta want to dismantle Western civilisation. The

stakes could hardly be higher. But surely other academics are speaking up for free speech on campus? Not necessarily. One new book, by a senior lecturer at Maynooth University in Ireland

argues that it is dangerous to allow racism to be debated. Gavan Titley’s _Is Free Speech Racist? _(Polity Press, £9.99) argues that the far-Right exploits free speech to promote its brand

of divisive politics. This is a serious point, as the Cambridge academic Arif Ahmed concedes in his review of the book for the _Times Literary Supplement _(behind a paywall). But that risk

does not justify Titley’s claim that free speech reduces “the experience of racism” to “just another opinion”, nor that permitting satirical attacks on Islam is merely a form of

discrimination against Muslim immigrants. On the contrary, it is only in a liberal society where open debate is protected and individuals can speak freely that racial, religious or class

prejudice can be defeated. It is an interesting question why these culture wars around wokery are so much more vehement in the Anglosphere than elsewhere. Continental Europe seems largely

indifferent to these battles, whether on campus or elsewhere. On the other hand, free speech and the right to be different are perhaps more vigorously defended in the more individualistic

societies that have emerged from the English-speaking diaspora. The difference between the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment and its American offshoot, on the one hand, and the French and other

European Enlightenments on the other, has continued to influence our respective intellectual histories ever since. The late Gertrude Himmelfarb traced this divergence brilliantly in her 2004

book _The Roads to Modernity: The British, French and American Enlightenments. _The present conflicts over the balance between freedom of expression and “hate speech”, over “decolonisation”

and “cancel culture” — the entire debate about wokery, in fact — derived from a deeply rooted, though fiercely contested, tradition of intellectual nonconformity and freedom of the press.

The greatest threat to this tradition is not wokery as such, but the online echo chambers that have polarised opinion to a dangerous degree on both sides of the Atlantic. _TheArticle _is

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