On the boringness of the word Woke
… I mean, right? Here is a list of headlines from Unherd, an organ I esteem:
The Woke don’t want to save the world.
The end of Woke is nigh.
The phoney war on Woke.
In defence of the Woke Left.
Woke movements have no vision of the future.
The terrible threat of Wokenomics.
The trouble with Woke Etonians.
5 ways to know if your dog is Woke.
OK, I made the last one up.1
So woke people on Twitter are bores, and headline-writers about wokeness are extreme bores, and it’s tempting to leave it at that: woke is a distraction from real politics, a stupidity vortex, a circus sideshow where the acts have gone stale. But everything has a reason, so why does the sideshow have customers?
Diversity is nearly a sacred value in Western democracies. Even conservatives demand “viewpoint diversity”. The word is becoming an empty signifier: everyone wants it. It is my duty as a social scientist to inform you of a large body of evidence that diversity isn’t great. Ethnically fragmented states in Africa have “low schooling, political instability, underdeveloped financial systems, distorted foreign exchange markets, high government deficits, and insufficient infrastructure.” The pattern holds in the US also: ethnically diverse places have lower government spending on useful things (education, roads, sewers) even though they spend more in total. There’s a bustling literature on this topic, often using “fragmentation” or “heterogeneity” as a euphemism for diversity.2
Here is a plausible story about why. In ethnically diverse places, political entrepreneurs persuade different groups that they deserve more. More spending on the services they need, lower taxes, an end to discrimination, whatever. These demands are not couched in selfish or greedy terms — that wouldn’t rally people. Instead, they use the language of justice and equality. But since people’s ideas of justice and equality are biased towards themselves, the demands of all the different groups can never simultaneously be satisfied. Your fairness is my injustice. The result is a sad political equilibrium where government money is carved up among the groups and spent in inefficient ways, nobody is satisfied, but nobody is prepared to let any other group do better.
The basic woke demand is for justice and equality for women, ethnic minorities and sexual minorities. It has been made passionately, loudly and effectively. It tackles symbolic issues, statues and shared toilets, because symbols are powerful rallying calls. But of course it wants more than symbolic change.
Straights, whites, men and straight white men — some, obviously — think that the process has gone too far. They think women, ethnic minorities and sexual minorities have too many special privileges, and that’s why they don’t like woke.
Oh, you think they’re wrong? You want to adjudicate this argument objectively? Heh, good luck. Social science research on inequality and discrimination can’t halt the political process of demand and counterdemand: it’s part of that process. Groups have their slogans, and they also have their literatures. That can be true even if the science is impeccable, because the world is complex and different studies get different results.3
The current UK government is weaponizing wokeness, and this strategy is working. This isn’t a clever distraction from the real issues: it is the issue. The Conservatives have half-consciously realized that men and heterosexuals, and especially the white ethnic majority, are an underserved market in terms of claims for them to have more. Anti-wokeness is of a piece with government reports on white working class children doing badly in school (recommendation: “Disadvantaged White families must have access to strong early years support and Family Hubs”) or questioning institutional racism. Where the reports come, the demands will follow. Our politics is moving closer to the diverse equilibrium. Sure, woke is boring! But if you think so, you’re not the target market.
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Note for fans: the dog’s not woke.
Exogeneity nerds might like this paper, which uses random allocations to French housing blocks to examine the topic.
Of course, the real science isn’t impeccable but fairly wonky, stretching from rigorous resumé experiments to the controversy over implicit racism to entire bullshit subdisciplines which exist as fan-service for one or another group.