Prof. Andrew Koppelman on “The Cultural Contradictions of Wokeness—and Anti-Wokeness”
My sense of Koppelman is that he’s very much a man of the center-left, but I’ve found his work to be insightful. Here’s an excerpt of his latest column in The Hill, which builds on Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite:
American elites need to do a better job of making themselves useful…. The cluster of political positions and communicative moves called “wokeness” is often alien to the people it claims to represent—most black Americans don’t want to defund the police, and almost no Hispanics identify themselves as “Latinx.” …
[I]nequality is inevitable in a capitalist economy. The interesting question is under what circumstances it can be justified. Here the philosopher John Rawls offers a crucial insight: inequalities are justified to everyone in society if they operate to the benefit of the least advantaged. This is one important justification for capitalism, which has nearly eradicated world poverty…. The medical profession is [another] example: it is a path to wealth, but it has also prolonged everyone’s life, including the poorest people in the poorest countries….
[Symbolic capitalist professional elites are worth what they are paid]—but only if they do their jobs. Here is the real problem with wokeness: It is impairing the capacity of professional class institutions to do what they are paid to do….
[W]okeness is not about results—it is a collection of performative gestures, and the gestures are blunting the useful skills. Universities have become left-wing monocultures. Mainstream journalists are more inclined to spin the news in a way that conforms to progressive priors. Even science and medicine are now self-censoring to prevent the dissemination of facts inconsistent with dominant left narratives. One leading publisher of scientific journals has announced that its publication decisions would be based on whether the editors think the research would cause harm to disadvantaged populations.
The performative virtue-signaling al-Gharbi identifies is not exclusively a phenomenon of the left—the right has its own varieties of destructive symbolism…. [T]oday’s right has propositions that the tribe demands that you publicly endorse, and even persuade yourself of, even though any competent analysis shows them to be nonsense …. [T]he Republicans will blow their chance if all they offer is their own variety of performativity….
The whole thing is much worth reading.
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