Michael Shermer has been exposing the dangerous idiocies of the left since the early 1990s. He is the publisher of Skeptic Magazine, a journal that brutally critiques modern science and its woke practitioners, and the host of "The Michael Shermer Show."
Shermer highlights some of the more hilarious woke science on his podcast and in Skeptic Magazine.
A respected physics journal published a paper that identifies whiteboards as being complicit “with white organizational cultures, where ideas and experiences gain value (become more central) when written down.” Unreal.
Shermer spent 214 consecutive months debunking all sorts of pseudo-scientific "flapdoodle," in Scientific American, including, “[i]nequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.”
Shermer points out that these are normally rational, intelligent, insightful scientists making these idiotic claims. What gives?
One cause is the simple fact that most of society's serious ills have been addressed by previous generations. Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal rights, and even the right of future generations to live on a habitable planet have all been addressed. There are simply no more mountains to climb.
Naturally, this means that mountains must be constructed, enemies created, and wars declared so that this generation can experience the thrill of moral triumph.
Instead of Selma or Stonewall, we've got make-believe "safe spaces" and "trigger warnings" and protests over "microaggressions" and misgendering trans people.
These days, if you're a woke leftist, you gotta take what you can get.
Unlike civil rights and even gay rights, where large pluralities of Americans supported some or all of the activists' agenda, the number of people who actually agree with the woke activists today is tiny.
In his magisterial overview of this movement, The End of Woke, Andrew Doyle documents that most of the claims made by far-left progressives are endorsed by a slim margin of people—only around 8% of the population of both the UK and the United States, according to a poll conducted by the organization More in Common. More specifically, a New York Times/Ipsos poll found that 79% of all Americans object to transwomen (men) competing in women’s sports, and that even two thirds (67%) of Democrats support keeping men out of female-only sports.
Why, then, do so many people think that so many other people endorse this ideology? The specific and recent phenomena of cancel culture generates accusations of bigotry and transphobia that lead people to keep their mouths shut, itself an example of a deeper common knowledge problem found in the psychological phenomenon of pluralistic ignorance, or the spiral of silence, in which each individual is under the illusion that everyone else believes something, even though most people do not believe it. Woke has a great deal of visibility to it, and has a way of hoovering up the spotlight, creating the impression that far more people subscribe to it than actually do.
Related: Well Meaning but Delusional Democratic Moderates Gather in D.C. to Pick a Fight With the Left
Cancel culture is a proximate cause of the failure of the "woke" movement to adequately address the ills of modern society (one could argue that it is exacerbating those ills). To understand the ultimate causes of woke's failure, we must examine the history of the last 75 years and analyze how the disease evolved and spread.
One such historical trend was the slow degeneration of viewpoint diversity in the academy from the 1960s to the present day. The painful adjustment we're seeing today, as Trump has put the full force and power of the federal government behind the effort to force schools to live up to their charters to promote "intellectual diversity," demonstrates that it may be possible to reverse this trend.
Perhaps no more important trend contributed to wokism's growth than the idea that the needs and rights of the individual must always be subsumed to the "greater good."
The liberal tradition that evolved out of the Enlightenment is grounded in individual autonomy. It is the individual who is the primary moral agent because it is the individual who survives and flourishes, or who suffers and dies. It is individual sentient beings who perceive, emote, respond, love, feel, and suffer—not populations, races, genders, groups, or nations. Historically, immoral abuses have been most rampant, and body counts have run the highest, when the individual is sacrificed for the good of the group.
Collectivism's belief that the individual is expendable inevitably leads to the idea that "individual identity is lost to what Andrew Doyle calls identitarian collectivism," notes Shermer.
Finally, woke failed because it was simply based on a flawed understanding of human nature. This is a waste product of collectivist ideologies that misidentify and misinterpret the most basic human behaviors. Think of communism's magnificent stupidity in believing that people behave according to the dictates of their class. Any high school student taking Econ 101 could have taught Marx the error of his ways.
Ultimately, that's why woke failed. Intellectual and supposed moral superiority masked a degenerate worldview that has led so many astray. Unfortunately, wokeness isn't dead. It's hibernating, waiting for a chance to rise again and afflict rational, thinking humans with more nonsensical flapdoodle.
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