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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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I think there are many possible definitions that are equally good, because the term really represents a cluster of beliefs that are strongly correlated (in the sense that a big fraction of the people who believe in any one of them believe in any given other one). One possible definition that is perfectly serviceable is: the belief that

(1) there are various ways to partition society into groups of people, including but not necessary limited to "race" (as understood by Americans: "white, black, Asian, Hispanic, ..."), sex and/or gender (male, female, self-identifications that are taken by those who hold them to be of the same type such as nonbinary, ...) and sexual orientation, and the groups under each of these partitionings can be ranked by a quantity denoted as privilege (so you can identify the more and less privileged race, gender etc.), and

(2) there are certain important outcomes (income, incarceration or lack there of, occupation of high-status professions, representation in high-status media...), such that it is (a) it is normally the case that more privileged groups attain them at higher rates than the less privileged ones, (b) morally bad when/that this is the case, and (c) when this happens, the responsibility/guilt, and hence the burden of redress (by reparations, punishment or active redistribution of the object of the outcomes), lies with the respective most privileged groups.

Optional but extremely typical components include, firstly, that (2a) must not inform (1) - the ranking by privilege is predetermined and fixed (e.g. in particular white>Asian) and outcome orderings that disagree with it are considered irrelevant non-examples rather than counterexamples, and secondly the notion of "intersectionality", which basically says that you should intersect the partitions to assign blame and responsibility more narrowly (with the notorious intersection of "cis white males" at the top, and "trans women, particularly trans women of color" at the bottom).

I think this does a reasonable job of capturing the core, or at least a necessary assumption, of any belief or policy that is commonly labelled as "woke"; to the extent there are things that get labelled as woke without an obvious connection (ex: COVID policy, environmentalism), it is because they have high correlation with the above beliefs. This is not unusual: for a mirror image, consider for example how rejecting modernist government buildings is taken to be "right-wing" or even "fascist" (In fact I dare any progressive to define "fascism"!), or similar assessment about opposition to vaccines.

The load-bearing part of the definition lies in the deontological moral judgement and imposition of obligation of (2bc) more than it lies in the categorisation of society in (1) and (2a) that you could perhaps call being "socially conscious" if you are sympathetic to it. Modern American alt-righters largely agree with the typical Democrat on (1~2a), and thus would arguably be equally "woke" if "woke" were about the "consciousness" part of it. You would not even be woke if you thought that black people are never depicted in a positive way in movies and were tremendously sad about this, but felt that it is immoral to compel or pressure white people to change anything about that. Someone who spends all day seething about the Pakistani rape gangs of Rotherham is, by all accounts, using a similar group analysis, and highly concerned with social issues that arise between the very same groups, but under a normal analysis they would not be "woke", as the moral obligation they want to impose is not on the group that they consider to do well on "important outcomes". (One may in fact count as woke if the beef is actually about making access to underage sex slaves more equitable.)

Given how frequently this question gets asked, I want to lob a question back at you: What gave you the impression that "woke" is nebulous or not readily defined, or that it has a meaning that is hard to distinguish from "socially conscious"?

Edit: Thinking some more about the correlate beliefs such as environmentalism, the easiest common thread to identify is probably something like a general sense that the more fortunate are morally obliged to make sacrifices for the less fortunate - affluent first-world industrialists should sacrifice for poor third-worlders who have to live off the land and are exposed to the weather, and healthy young people should sacrifice for the sick and elderly. This looks like a classical leftist sentiment; and because classical leftism has been so thoroughly taken over by the woke, it is unfortunate that the distinction between the two has become blurred in the eyes of its opposition. You can still identify distinct elements that makes some components of environmentalism, COVID policy and so on appear more "woke" than others, which is whenever the calculus of fortune and obligation is applied more at the level of (1)-like groups than at the individual, and whenever some kind of outcome score-keeping takes precedence over straight up redistribution. Carbon taxes, which hamper industry to fill social programme coffers, seem less "woke" than plastic straw bans, where the main feature seems to be to bring inconvenience to first-worlders in some vaguely climate-related way.