Sep 18, 2023 · writings • free

Review of "The Origins of Woke"

In his book, Hanania gets a lot of things right, while missing the bigger picture

This is despite the fact that the evidence is mounting that the true ultimate cause of wokeness is genetic in nature. Wokeness is highly heritable, has increased generationally, and the woke have older fathers than the non-woke, even though older fathers are as conservative as younger fathers. This suggests a mechanism known as mutational load is at work – wokeists have more de novo mutations inherited from their older fathers. This seems to mess up the functioning of genes relating to the highly heritable binding factor of morality, leading to wokeness. 

Hanania leaves all of this out of the book. Instead, he invites us into the realm of the vague, folkish conceptual boundary between “The Political” and “The Cultural.” Allegedly, wokeness is derived from “The Political” and not “The Cultural.” This is the central claim which motivates the ultimate aim of the book, which is the overturning of 1960s civil rights law. 

The argument that wokeness comes from civil rights law

“While politicians and media figures on the right complain about the cancellation of Dr. Seuss … they have rarely presented realistic solutions to fix what is bothering them.” - Richard Hanania

The argument that wokeness comes from civil rights law is contained almost entirely in the first chapter. It has two central premises. The first is that logical contradictions in woke ideology show that wokeness is more of a result of “The Political,” a complex, somewhat arbitrary process of acquiring votes and satisfying the material desires of special interests, than of “The Cultural,” wherein allegedly important thinkers derive the goodness of woke from the realm of ideas, convincing everyone to try a grand social experiment. On this, Hanania writes, 

In addition to the historical record, there is another reason to doubt that wokeness is the result of deep philosophical currents … we can understand that sex was included in the Civil Rights Act as a protected category for very strange and idiosyncratic reasons, placed in the bill through the machinations of a southern segregationist in the hopes of killing it. Nonetheless, within a few years, feminist activists were pushing for the executive branch to take the prohibition on sex discrimination as seriously as it took discrimination against blacks. Now as then, feminist activists have tended to be disproportionately career-focused, meaning they were the ones who determined the kind of "womanhood" that the law would cultivate and protect. To some, blank-slate notions of gender were appealing, as such ideas validated their own choices and inclinations. The fact that feminist and LGBT dogma contradict each other is a problem for logicians and political phi- losophers but not for the law or the psychology of true believers. Wokeness is rooted in neither a blank-slate view of human nature nor genetic determinism. It can force individuals to adopt one perspective on one issue and the opposite on another.

The ideas associated with wokeness did not win in the marketplace of ideas. In many cases, it almost gives them too much credit to even be considered ideas in the first place. … The whole project of seeking a grand philosophical explanation for wokeness relies on a conceptual mistake. … [Wokeness] should be seen less as a philosophical doctrine with its own impeccable inner logic than as a political program that has emerged from a combination of factors such as interest group lobbying, mass emotional sentiment, and bureaucrats seeking to increase their power.

The second premise is that the historical record clearly shows the arbitrary, political nature of wokeness. 

The federal government has not only interpreted the CRA in ways that Congress could not have foreseen. In some ways, its interpretations have directly contradicted what legislators promised and agreed to. In his opening statement in the debate over the bill, Sen. Hubert Humphrey told fellow legislators that there was no chance that it would lead to reverse discrimination:

That bugaboo has been brought up a dozen times: but it is nonexistent. In fact, the very opposite is true. Title VII prohibits discrimination. In effect, it says that race, religion, and national origin are not to be used as the basis for hiring and firing.

Further emphasizing the point, the future vice president told a skeptical colleague that if he could find "any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color... I will start eating the pages." Yet Congress wasn't satisfied with such assurances. So the following text was also added to the bill:

Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any [employer or labor union] to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist...

The text of the document and the legislative history agree on this point. Yet ultimately none of this would matter, and it would be used to justify proportional hiring by race and sex. In 1968, Clifford Alexander, the director of the EEOC, declared, “Our most valid standard is in numbers... The only accomplishment is when we look at all those numbers and see a vast improvement in the picture." A few years later, a Labor Department official would explain requirements for government contractors by saying that "affirmative action is anything you have to do to get results."

The intent of the law when originally passed was significantly different than what it morphed into under the management of self-serving bureaucrats and noisy pressure groups.  Hanania says this shows that there was no plan derived from the works of Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School – it was all just politics as usual.

The legal history of civil rights

Starting in the second chapter, Hanania begins his detailed history of civil rights law. He provides a good summary in the form of a table: 

The rest of the book is essentially an elaboration on this summary table. He explains the history of each doctrine, and how they can be reversed legally. This part of the book, unlike the case for the origins of wokeness, is highly detailed and precise. Perhaps removing the first chapter and renaming the book to The Legal Basis of Wokeness would have been a more honest approach, considering the lacking quality and quantity of case for the origins of woke. However, it is likely that this would not have sold as well, and, to be charitable, selling more copies is likely to increase the probability that the book’s aim, the destruction of civil rights law, comes to fruition.

Conclusion

Hanania’s history of civil rights law is coherent and thorough, but his explanation of the origins of wokeness is lacking in logic and specificity. No single feature of the book makes this clearer than Hanania’s use of the word culture, a word which is constantly problematic for those who are trying to attain a truly scientific view of the origins of wokeness, and politics in general. Richard says, 

Culture and Politics are Not Separate.

Culture vs. Politics is a false dichotomy.

Breitbart said “politics is downstream of culture.”

What is culture? The closest thing we get to a definition is this:

The state is so intertwined with the rest of life that it makes little sense to treat culture and politics as separate forces in a modern society.

Apparently culture is “the rest of life”. I applaud the attempt at a definition, because we usually don’t even get that. However, “culture” is obviously a vague concept not built for science. I have two suggestions for fixing this problem that I think are better. The first is to define culture as the average of behavior, or in other words, phenotype. This means C = E[P] = E[G] + E[Env]. Then you can see the State will be made up of people who probably are close, on average, to the overall culture. But sometimes there may be selection effects, and these can be researched. If there are selection effects, the State may tend to try to make the populace more like itself through modifying the environment and eugenics (historically, killing and imprisoning people it doesn’t like). Finally, a cultural change may be due to an environmental change or a genetic change.

The second suggestion is to just get rid of the word culture from serious thought. The first suggestion often amounts to forcing a specific definition onto the word, which captures some of the vagueness of the current concept but leaves out other parts. One issue is that culture often is defined to be different things. Sometimes it’s “the rest of life.” Sometimes it’s the set of all knowledge that can be transmitted to others. Sometimes it denotes the set of artistic works. It may be more clear to just taboo the word and use more specific labels for these disparate ideas, such as “mass behavior”, “the infosome”, and “artistic output”. Now it’s clear that the infosome might affect mass behavior and artistic output, whereas before you might say culture affects culture and culture, which is often something people almost do.

Without the murky concept of “culture” to drag it down, Hanania might have written a better explanation for the true origins of wokeness. “Culture” often obscures the biological basis of social reality – if Hanania could not have so easily said “culture”, he might have had to think more deeply about the ultimate causes of social phenomena such as political shifts. This could have led to the realization that the State is a sample of the population at large, and it is the behavior of the population at large that is changing, the State changing with it. The ultimate cause must be something broader than “politics” and more specific than “culture”, such as “mutational load.” But Hanania did not do this, and so he did not really reveal the true origins of woke.