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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Even if this is true, I think there's two further questions to be answered:

  1. Even if wokeism as a mode of explicit political behavior (with its cancelations, DEI rituals, and such) declines, will many/most of the social norms (decoupling gender roles from sex, conceiving of certain types of expression as violence, increases in matriarchal and gynocentric behavior, etc.) it promulgated equally decline, or will they be subsumed into the neutral social default and persist in a fashion not explicitly woke-coded? (You saw this with the "sexual revolution" of the 60s/70s. People eventually got sick of the hippies who were often seen as overly self-righteous (comparable to modern woke types), but they for the most part kept their drugs and promiscuity. If anything those only grew in reach after the hippies' decline.)

  2. When will it happen again (or, if you are inclined to think of it as bad as I am, how can it be stopped from happening again)? There have been plenty of proto-wokeisms (that in some cases arguably had as much reach) in the past, from the 60s/70s hippiedom to the "political correctness" of the early 90s. Defeating those (or letting them burn themselves out) sure didn't seem to ever stop variations of them from continuing to crop up again at some later point. If desirable (as I believe it is), how can society be inoculated fully against the continuous recurrence of this phenomenon? In a secular age, is it perhaps just the replacement for the occasional outbreak of religious fervor, man's natural instinct to bring about an occasional reckoning of repentance?

I like how these questions make you think.

I'll put on my sci-fi hat and do some guessing:

  1. The social norms will stay but will lose power. It's like having that one vegan friend that's into freecycling. Fun to invite sometimes, maybe even cook a meat- and dairy-free dish for, but they know that if they act up too much, they'll get axed from the social circle. It's like with all the boomers who thought they could keep the summer of love going forever, but instead grew up, got jobs, kids, mortgages and now just want stable living. Youngsters will roll their eyes when their parents will recount for the 12th time how they were fighting for racial justice--because youngsters will be well aware that, well, nothing really changed, so all this SJW stuff is just the same old crap you see in old movies.

  2. I would guess that we should see another woke cycle in 20 years. I'm basing this on my own fairly short timeframe of observation that only goes back to the early 90's, and a bunch of history I've learned, second hand, about the 70's and 80's. I don't think it can be stopped, though I hold onto some hope on that a great refragmentation is happening that will make purity-based movements like woke much less likely to spread. As for full inoculation against religious fervor, I suspect we're biologically programmed to engage in tribal behaviors whose symptoms include religious and political fervor, so we'd need a massive change to take place, something like artificial wombs or gay space communism, that would completely change the fabric of society to the point where tribal games would be severely punished. Short of that, I suspect it'll be some thousands of years before these genes are weakened enough to make this type of social behavior stop popping up like cockroaches in a bad NYC neighborhood.

But what are your thoughts on these questions?