Synonym fantastical
Just how did these theories spread so effectively? Yang and Lindsay are likely right-a complicated convergence of activism, policy, and economic changes led to a shift in our culture, the seeds of which were planted far before the Obama administration. The changes we’ve seen have been so vast and, in some cases, so radical that to pinpoint one cause (the university, feminism, the economy) seems like a fool’s errand.Īlthough it’s too early to tell with Yang’s work, as he’s still in the process of publishing it, others in the field of anti-woke criticism seem to miss an important element of the story. Yang’s thesis seems more reasonable, as it appreciates just how complicated our current moral landscape is. Perhaps there is no single antagonist instead, we were brought to our current moment by a number of factors, that, paradoxically, are contradictory. In his inaugural post, Yang alludes to successor ideology being a culmination of aspects of several important historical movements and events, including the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, the New Left, and the social movements these things spawned. The journalist Wesley Yang’s “successor ideology,” his term for “wokeness” (or neoliberalism, political correctness, social justice, et al.) follows a similar trail, and his Substack Year Zero sets out to chronicle the history and rise of our new cultural and political landscape, or as he once framed it, our “ bourgeois moral revolution.” One could argue that the explosion of wokeness colonized universities from the outside, and not the other way around. Lindsay and his cohort eventually realized there were blind spots in their “University lab leak” theory, and instead began to point to a complicated stew of activism, social movements, and Obama-era legislation as historical flash points. Lindsay himself, at one point, published a figure that suggested only 2 percent of students graduated in fields where they would have interfaced with these ideas.
Up until fairly recently, you could go four years at any major university without ever encountering these ideas, which hitherto were confined to some advanced and graduate-level coursework in very specific fields. The second is that it presupposes that universities were labyrinths of Marxism, Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Feminist Theory in the first place. If anything, thinkers like Adorno offer explanations for how the culture wars have been reshaped, as opposed to galvanizing these changes themselves. For example, there is no reason to believe that Starbucks mandating that their employees share their preferred pronouns is the product of too many acolytes of Adorno and Horkheimer, or even just Marx, in the corporate world. On the most superficial level, most of those actors understood as implementing the Great Awokening simply didn’t engage with these ideas as they’re presently understood. People might credit movements like the Frankfurt School as origin points, but that’s also a mistake. The first error is that it doesn’t appreciate just how obscure some of the intellectual leaders of domains like Queer Theory are. This theory makes two major mistakes off the bat. The reason that the “lab leak” didn’t happen earlier is because we didn’t reach critical mass until millennials completed their undergraduate and graduate educations. More undergrads, more grad students, greater surface area for once-obscure ideas. Put two and two together, it’s just simple math.
Millennials are the most credentialed (and overcredentialed) generation in history. The foundational texts for our new understandings of everything from gender to race to the very structure of oppression sprang from either academia or activist circles and, often, the interplay between the two. Much has been written about the rise of these new identity politics, colloquially termed “wokeness.” Early in the conversation about “the Great Awokening,” academics-cum-media-personalities such as James Lindsay posited that there was a clear “ university-to-culture pipeline.” To summarize the argument, it’s not all that different from what your Silent Generation mother or grandmother might put forth: “We sent you to that college, and look at you now!” What was once a digital sideshow attraction is now serious business. There’s a piece of wisdom circulating online that says for every strange (or even just unfamiliar) proclamation about identity-whether it’s the claim that humans aren’t sexually dimorphic or the introduction of the more inclusive “latinx” into political discourse-there’s a Tumblr post from the early 2010s introducing the concept.