Origins of Woke

 A thoughtful article, worth reading in full, so I am quoting only a little:

A research proposal on cosmic inflation from an acclaimed German quantum physicist is rejected because she did not address the relevance of her findings to “sex, gender, and diversity.” Could it be because… there is none?

A respected peer-reviewed physics journal publishes a paper on introductory physics courses that identifies whiteboards as complicit “with white organizational cultures, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.” No mention of blackboards.

A collection of 67 papers published in the Journal of Chemical Education includes “Decolonizing the Undergraduate Chemistry Curriculum” and “Integrating Antiracism, Social Justice and Equity Themes in a Biochemistry Class.” What’s next—the Periodic Table of Intersectional Elements?

Rice University offers a course on “Afrochemistry: The Study of Black-Life Matter.” BLM, get it?...

We have made so much moral progress since the Enlightenment—particularly since the civil rights and women’s rights movements that launched the modern campus protest movement in the first place—that our standards of what is intolerable have been ratcheted ever upward to the point where many people are hypersensitive to things that, by comparison, didn’t even appear on the cultural radar half a century ago. Thus it is that modern moral crusaders have forgotten how far we’ve come since the abolition of slavery, the elimination of the death penalty in most countries, the franchise for all adult citizens, children’s rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal rights, and even the rights of future generations to inhabit a livable planet. In other words, most of the big moral movements have been fought and won, leaving today’s moral crusaders with comparatively smaller causes to promote and evils to protest, resulting in demands for safe spaces and trigger warnings, and paroxysms thrown over microaggressions and misgendering trans people. 

When I was young, there were certain assumptions made by lots of adults (not all by any means).  Blacks were intellectually inferior.  Women lacked the intelligence and ambition of men; that is why their place was home raising children. 

Today, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who would publicly admit such beliefs outside a neo-Nazi rally.  Not just publicly:  I know only a few people even in private who even scurry up to the edge of such ideas. (Even supporters of traditional sex roles know better than to assert female inferiority.  Raising children and being in charge of home schooling is not a job for the dumb and lazy.)

If you desperately need some way to distinguish yourself from your moral inferiors, you need to find some cause to which to attach yourself beyond equal opportunity, regardless of race or sex.  Something that makes you stand out.  It is way easier to imagine a society awash in racism than to ask harder questions as to why blacks in America remain poor in spite of enormous efforts to provide opportunities.

In our search for the ultimate causes of this tragic period in history we could consider a number of historical trends, starting with the lack of viewpoint diversity that took hold in the academy in the 1990s and accelerated into a massive shift in the professoriate and student body to the point of there being next to no conservative voices anywhere to be found by the 2010s and 2020s. And certainly the science wars of the 1990s, following on from the postmodernism movements in the humanities of the 1970s and 1980s, which challenged the view that there is a reality and that it can be known through reason and the methods of science. And those threads can be pulled back to the anti-Western, post-colonial, post-capitalist Marxist liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s, themselves reflecting the anti-Enlightenment Romantic movements of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. But underlying these historical trends are deeper themes rooted in the interpretation of human nature.

This is also important.  The left's insistence that there are no absolute truths (F=ma; x=1/2at^2; metals reflect light better than non-metals) and the abandonment of reason are part of the problem.  Oh yes, I forgot: the wokerati have found one absolute truth: America is a nasty, hate-filled, racist society.  If you disagree, you are a mouth-breathing savage.  (And why is that intrinsically bad? :-)