Friday 17 June 2022
Peak Woke
Kurt Mahlburg has a piece in Mercatornet which asks an interesting question.
Peak woke: are we there yet?
No balloon can stay aloft for ever.
The other day I suggested to a friend that we may be close to reaching “peak woke”. He sagely responded that the notion of peak woke is like housing prices in Sydney: ever promising to stop climbing but never relenting.
Even so, there are several good reasons to entertain the question. This year’s “Pride Month” has pandered to the in-crowd, but online cynicism is at record highs. In recent weeks, I have lost count of how many times I’ve seen a corporation’s virtue-signalling tweet get painfully “ratioed” — meaning the tweet received more replies or retweets than likes, evidencing its lack of popularity.
Could be misplaced optimism of course, but even virtue-signalling requires behaviour which can be sold to the faithful as virtue. Some woke behaviour doesn't even get that far and the uneasy faithful seem to have noticed.
The New York Times even noted that the editor of British medical journal The Lancet was forced to apologise last year for a cover that referred to “bodies with vaginas” rather than women.
In our rush to de-stigmatise the exception, we’ve stigmatised the rule. Inviting every man and his dog into the tent once known as “women” has seen women disappear entirely from many conversations where their identity deserves to be front and centre.
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3 comments:
Good article. The image he gives is of a slow receding, where individuals realise the truth and gradually a critical mass builds. That's probably true, but I'd like to see a dramatic event which confronts wokies with the absolutely ridiculous nature of what they think and say, and forces them into a shocked and painful recantation.
I don't want them to get off the hook so easily. I don't want it to be like Germany in the late 1940s, where everyone knew what had happened and all could claim they personally had never believed it; it was all done by someone else.
Although I don't believe Wokeism has ever been widely popular in England there are still the picnic areas alongside the long march through the institutions that need tidying up less they provide staging areas for new marchers.
So, the Government should prevent any more diversity officers being appointed or replaced in the places where the Government has influence. Any QUANGOs that support Wokeist thought need to be wound up in a timely fashion. University lecturers who major on Critical Theory should not be invited to contribute to Government committees etc. Gender re-assignment should not be offered on the NHS for anybody who is not yet an adult.
Once there are no 'career' opportunities in being Woke then the madness will gradually reduce. A slow, gentle, reversal is likely to work better in the long term as it will generate less resistance. Except for the BBC which should be defunded immediately.
Sam - I feel the same, but if the awakening happens it is likely to be much like Germany in the late 1940s. It will probably be sold as a set of worthy ideals we aren't quite ready to adopt.
DJ - if it happens, a gentle reversal is more likely than a sudden change of direction. It may only go as far as it needs to go in order to weed out the more obvious absurdities and that may be all we can hope for.
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