The deep craziness of the woke and woke ideology is well known. (Here are a couple of recent examples, laid waste by Andrew Sullivan.) What’s less well known is why otherwise sane, sometimes intelligent, often well-educated people indulge in the type of fantastic thinking that characterizes woke ideology.
I think I know.
I think they do that in order to differentiate themselves from the rest of us. By adopting untenable and frankly weird ideas, they keep forever a step “ahead” of- and removed from- the dreaded Others and thereby firm up their status as members of an elite class. Like the key to the executive washroom, it’s a way of identifying oneself as a member of an exclusive club. Plus, the goal posts can always be moved. The preferred belief on Monday can be changed on Tuesday so the hoi polloi can always be kept guessing and at arm’s length.
Rob Henderson’s excellent book, Troubled, touches on the point. Henderson grew up poor and disadvantaged, but, the quintessential outsider, he eventually gained admission to Yale. From that lofty perch, he makes some trenchant observations about the habits (mental and behavioral) of the woke on one of the wokest campuses on the planet.
For example, Henderson had never attended a Broadway musical, so, when his classmates enthused about Hamilton, he thought he’d go, but tickets cost $400 each, well out of his price range. Not long afterward, he discovered both the musical on Disney+ and something else – a marked change in attitudes among his classmates:
It’s not a coincidence that when Hamilton tickets were prohibitively expensive, affluent people loved it, and now that it can be viewed by ordinary Americans, they ridicule it. Once something becomes too popular, the elites update their tastes to distinguish themselves from ordinary people…
The affluent relentlessly search for signals that distinguish them from the masses.
Bingo.
It’s my contention that the same process created and maintains the current woke mania. After all, we the Great Unwashed have, over the decades, made considerable changes in our attitudes that have generally followed elite opinion-making. In the 1950s, open anti-black racism was common among elites and Americans generally and Jim Crow was the order of the day. Then, educated elites changed their minds, many laws, customs and practices and everyday Americans followed suit, so that, 40+ years later, the country twice elected a black president and embraces both racial equality and interracial marriage. Much the same occurred with women’s rights, gay rights, ecological awareness, etc. Elites led the way and everyday Americans followed.
But, far from appreciating the beneficial effects of those changes, elites seem to have taken umbrage, considering it more important to avoid association with the likes of us in matters of intellectual taste. So, in short order, they moved from racial equality to affirmative action, from affirmative action to “America is racist root and branch,” from gender equality to a virulent hatred of men and masculinity, from an acceptance of same-sex relationships and marriage to the trans movement, from a healthy concern about air and water pollution to the mad claim that global warming is an “existential threat” to the species.
And, to the relief of woke elites, this time, the rest of us refuse to follow. The very craziness of woke ideology is perhaps its most important point – to open a chasm between believers and nonbelievers.
Charles Murray’s important book Coming Apart, offers much the same in greater detail. He shows that the distinctions between the affluent and well-educated and everyday Americans, while partly about money, are mostly cultural. In everything from the cars they drive to the clothes they wear to the vacations they take to their parenting behavior to the type of alcohol they drink to the amount and type of television they watch to their obsession with health and fitness and on and on, affluent cultural elites behave differently from the rest of us, and consciously so. That behavior is mostly performative, having little to do with necessity. And the point of the play is to make sure that everyone – perhaps most importantly those elite actors themselves – sees the differences between the two groups.
They wouldn’t be caught dead taking their kids to the Disney World that is, to woke elites, the intellectual analogue of all those left-behind values, like that of a “colorblind” society.
As Henderson noticed at Yale, the oft-commented-on hypocrisy of woke elites simply underlines the point. They take private jets to conferences from which they instruct the rest of us on the need to end the use of fossil fuels. Could they have met via Zoom? Sure, but they don’t, not them. Do they live in outsized houses that require prodigious amounts of fossil fuels to heat and cool? They do; after all, they’re different from the rest of us.
Do they claim the police to be unnecessary to a safe and secure society? Yes, they live in the essentially crime-free communities. Isolating oneself to avoid COVID-19 is absolutely necessary for most folks, but not for them.
At Yale, intact families were considered odd remnants of a less enlightened and certainly patriarchic past, but Henderson’s classmates abjured with horror the idea that they might have children outside of marriage. No, that’s for others. Pointing out the many health problems of obesity constitutes “fat shaming,” something no intellectual elite would ever do, but Yale students are obsessed with fitness and the best possible diet.
The point is clear: elites’ attitudes serve mostly to differentiate themselves from the rest of us. Imagine a person living in a high-crime area arguing to defund the police! He/she would have to be crazy. Exactly.
As Steven Pinker said in The Better Angels of our Nature, “In hermetic isolation, all kinds of bizarre and toxic ideas can fester.” Woke elites wouldn’t have it any other way.
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
