I would like to push back a bit, however, on the opening line: “ The central aim of contemporary left-progressive politics is to insert the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible and then to defend and extend such insertion through control of public discourse legitimacy.”
I agree that this is often the result, but it is not the central aim.
I think that one of your concluding sentences is more accurate: “ Wokery” is the ever more elaborate search for malevolent reasons—i.e., invisible sociological gremlins—why such equality isn’t being achieved.”
I think the central aim of the Woke and the Left in general is trying to overcome the central moral dilemma of their strong moral stand against Inequality and the reality of rampant inequality that still exists in all societies despite over 200 years of the Left trying to overcome it.
The Left really does want to get rid of Inequality for moral reasons. The growth of the state and the professional-managerial class is just the means to do so.
In other words, Wokery is not a cynical ploy by the professional-managerial class to expand their power. It is based on sincere moral convictions that conflict with material reality.
I disagree. That is likely true for some, but not most college-educated supporters of the Left.
I think it is an egalitarian moral imperative that they sincerely believe in. It is also not clear that they will (or do) materially benefit from their own policies. Many, if not most, members of professional class are highly productive entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, etc.. At the very least higher tax rates on upper-income earners clearly contradicts their material interests.
The problem is that their ideals conflict with reality, not that they are self-interested. The fact that their behavior (education, hard work, marriage, etc) contradicts their professed ideals show that they know that their interests conflict with their ideals.
The problem is that they do not preach what they practice. Most of them live the traditional bourgeois life while professing bohemian values.
"I think it is an egalitarian moral imperative that they sincerely believe in."
True to a greater and lesser extent for most.
"It is also not clear that they will (or do) materially benefit from their own policies."
Of course they do. Humans are social creatures. They survive and prosper within social groups governed by social and moral norms. Their continued economic interests are not separate from the social norms of the groups they belong to, but rather intertwined.
"At the very least higher tax rates on upper-income earners clearly contradicts their material interests."
This only explains part of their material interests. Having a job and paying higher taxes may not be ideal but it is much better than not having a job at all. Witness James Damore.
I do not disagree that "economic interests and social norms of a group are intertwined." That is very different from the original claim that "the central aim of contemporary left-progressive politics is to insert the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible."
Marx was wrong. People vote against their material class interest all the time. Indeed, it is the norm. Most college-educated professionals are not worried about "not having a job at all."
There is an issue with quality of jobs rather unemployment per se.
People vote against their material interests much less than claimed: such claims often rely on rather narrow conceptions of material interests. They very rarely vote against their status interests.
On reflection, ‘aim’ was perhaps the wrong word. Something can function in a particular way without it being a conscious aim.
Yes, I agree with the main thrust of your article, and a small edit of the opening sentence would be more accurate. I also agree that “something can function in a particular way without it being a conscious aim.” That is the case very often.
What is your evidence for “People vote against their material interests much less than claimed: such claims often rely on rather narrow conceptions of material interests?”
Status is not a material interest, though high status can be leveraged into material gain.
More relevant to the topic your article, I think the shift to the Left of college-educated professionals in the West over the last 60 years is a massive vote AGAINST their own material interest (and one that conflicts greatly with the behavior of previous upper classes outside of Communist societies). It is more about a pleasant-sounding yet dysfunctional ideology enticing people to go against their own self-interest and group interest.
I agree that status plays a big role in the ideological shift, but that does not explain how ideologies of the Left became associated with high status in the 21st century whereas it was associated with low status in previous generations.
I am not convinced that Leftist ideology enhances the “ quality of jobs” for college-educated professionals. I think that it does the opposite for most of them, except those who directly benefit from DEI. Those people clearly benefit materially, but I would argue that this is a small part of the coalition. The rest suffer from a demoralizing workplace.
Even Bakunin gets the nature of equality and liberty wrong. They are conflicting Enlightenment values yet they are yoked together; you can't appreciate either without understanding the other. Yes, the Left would destroy all liberty for the sake of equality - right to the point of Harrison Bergeron. Big-L libertarians would destroy all equality for the sake of liberty - right into nihilism.
"Even Bakunin gets the nature of equality and liberty wrong. They are conflicting Enlightenment values".
Disagree. They are Christian values that Enlightenment thinkers unconsciously adopted. Much of Nietzsche's critique is a critique of atheists unconscious acceptance of those values - "We are unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge" Genealogy Of Morals, Preface 1.
I probably shouldn't have said values, but ideas instead.
They are Protestant values, not Catholic or Orthodox (or Judaic) - a product of the intellectual ferment from the Renaissance that culminated in the Enlightenment. Nietzsche's criticism went much deeper, and it was the Enlightenment that exposed the hollowness of the traditional values without the faith that reason had eroded. Rousseau believed that all human hierarchy was false, that natural man was purely equal. Needless to say, Rousseau's religious values were 'flexible'.
Calvin had posited that humanity was equal because we were all equally depraved, not because we deserved to be respected as equals in our human-ness. The equality we bathe in today is hardly that.
I do thing the Progressive Left is sincere, just that it has created an agglomeration of ideas and principles that seem to not have a consistent moral theme running through them. I'm not ripping on the inconsistencies--this kind of consistency is hard as hell--but, rather, the moral certitude that leads to shutting down debates as to what would be morally right and when and under what circumstances*. The end result is a cause that refuses to be pressure-tested and comes up with contortionist explanations for when things don't work right.
This is why I prefer the term "Omnicause" to "woke", which unfortunately has become tremendously loaded.
The real question is whether the accumulation of power is a bug or a feature.
*There is a tangent here about Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations and progressives leaning too hard on care/harm and fairness to the exclusion of other dimensions, leading to one- or two-note-Charlie solutions that don't address important factors, but that's another topic for another day.
I agree with much of what you say but I think the moral goal of Equality and the conviction that the government should end or at least radically reduce Inequality is central to almost all Left-of-Center ideologies. Most of their other convictions stem from those two moral convictions. I believe the inconsistencies largely come from an inability to achieve that prime goal.
You would enjoy this book. It's a great primer on the history of liberalism, and how it has evolved over time, at least through the New Deal/Great Society era. While it explicitly doesn't try to do this, it does a good job explaining the differences between liberalism--not just classical liberalism but also modern welfare-state liberalism--and the Left generally. https://www.amazon.com/Liberalism-Life-Second-Edmund-Fawcett/dp/0691180385/
You are generous. I would suggest that while there are some true believers in the movement, most are parasites using whatever is at hand as a pretext to finding a soft spot from which to extract money and power. Power being merely the means to more money. BLM being a recent example.
A lot of rephrasing of the same core ideas, but I really liked this set:
"Part of the process is generating credentials that provide leverage without earned respect. Bean-counting bureaucracy loves credentials—and other tick-boxes—as they are easy markers of who is, or is not, allowed to do what. Alas, precisely because the reality-feedbacks within so much of academe are so broken, it’s easy to generate credentials that provide much less expertise than what they say on the tin. "
So our pushback has to focus on the quality of the background for the claimed credentials; the quality of the "accreditors" claiming to confirm the validity of those credentials; and the actual responses in the marketplace to just how valued the end product finally really is. Reputation can take decades to generations to establish for a "prime" university, and that reputation can be lost in a decade or two when markets find the output result is not as promised.
Sounds like there are plenty of opportunities for educational innovators to create alternatives that pass muster within the market, identifying applicable metrics and demonstration measures, and at potentially much lower net cost in time and money. A wise application of AI may well be a part of this?
The thing is, the claim that the professional-managerial class are superior deciders and therefore should rule in itself endorses a massive inequality. So the Woke, by pushing that claim, are working against their "strong moral stand" against Inequality. Indeed, in other contexts - say, when a genuine expert publicly opposes the technocratic project because his deep knowledge of his field shows it's a bad idea - the Woke have no problem denigrating claimed expertise as a tool of oppression.
I seriously doubt that left-progressive politics is dominated by stupid people who can't think through the consequences of their stated moral principles. But because that politics is self-contradictory, the people seriously pushing it must be cynics.
The Emancipation Sequence is the diffusion of power, ultimately as broadly as possible. Critical theory/progressive activism is the accumulation of power, ultimately in as few hands as possible.
We know why the Left wants it, and that's not new. Concerning is that now the Right wants it too, for the same reasons, just in the opposite direction. It's hard to tell if the reason for this is to countervail against the Left, or if it's to pursue right-wing ends irrespective of countervailing forces.
Interesting, in a comment to your note a week ago I also used the term 'spurious expertise', but I had a more benign take on it as defective knowledge that becomes 'established science'. I just read this here post yesterday.
Your broadening the term to include maliciously concocted 'expertise' is certainly a reflection of woke realities, and it makes good sense to describe it this way. Though, looking further back, faulty 'expertise' of knowing thing wrongly almost always had group dynamics of self-separating believers in 'truth' from rogue miscreants, with similar shunning and ostracism. Majority of us humans were always incorrigible this way, and it became way worse and more spurious and yet systematic with 'elites' embracing postmodern Marxism.
Yes. Realising that the entire history of Communism displayed how toxic untruth could be a great motivator and coordinator was clarifying.
Religion has somewhat similar dynamics, though long-lasting religions typically have an element of “literally false but metaphorically true”. That is, they do actually add to the coherence and resilience of communities.
But thinking about how DEI officers, sensitivity readers, intimacy consultants, bias response teams worked led to a wider notion of spurious expertise leap out at me. The complication, which I need to wrestle with, is expertise that becomes spurious by taking what may be reasonable understanding in one domain and extending to some adjacent domain where it no longer works. Most economists on migration being a case in point.
Excellent essay.
I would like to push back a bit, however, on the opening line: “ The central aim of contemporary left-progressive politics is to insert the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible and then to defend and extend such insertion through control of public discourse legitimacy.”
I agree that this is often the result, but it is not the central aim.
I think that one of your concluding sentences is more accurate: “ Wokery” is the ever more elaborate search for malevolent reasons—i.e., invisible sociological gremlins—why such equality isn’t being achieved.”
I think the central aim of the Woke and the Left in general is trying to overcome the central moral dilemma of their strong moral stand against Inequality and the reality of rampant inequality that still exists in all societies despite over 200 years of the Left trying to overcome it.
The Left really does want to get rid of Inequality for moral reasons. The growth of the state and the professional-managerial class is just the means to do so.
In other words, Wokery is not a cynical ploy by the professional-managerial class to expand their power. It is based on sincere moral convictions that conflict with material reality.
I write more about this topic here:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-central-moral-dilemma-of-the
they sincerely believe that they'll be the ones lifted up by the attack on inequality, since most of them aren't very productive
I disagree. That is likely true for some, but not most college-educated supporters of the Left.
I think it is an egalitarian moral imperative that they sincerely believe in. It is also not clear that they will (or do) materially benefit from their own policies. Many, if not most, members of professional class are highly productive entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists, etc.. At the very least higher tax rates on upper-income earners clearly contradicts their material interests.
The problem is that their ideals conflict with reality, not that they are self-interested. The fact that their behavior (education, hard work, marriage, etc) contradicts their professed ideals show that they know that their interests conflict with their ideals.
The problem is that they do not preach what they practice. Most of them live the traditional bourgeois life while professing bohemian values.
"I think it is an egalitarian moral imperative that they sincerely believe in."
True to a greater and lesser extent for most.
"It is also not clear that they will (or do) materially benefit from their own policies."
Of course they do. Humans are social creatures. They survive and prosper within social groups governed by social and moral norms. Their continued economic interests are not separate from the social norms of the groups they belong to, but rather intertwined.
"At the very least higher tax rates on upper-income earners clearly contradicts their material interests."
This only explains part of their material interests. Having a job and paying higher taxes may not be ideal but it is much better than not having a job at all. Witness James Damore.
I do not disagree that "economic interests and social norms of a group are intertwined." That is very different from the original claim that "the central aim of contemporary left-progressive politics is to insert the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible."
Marx was wrong. People vote against their material class interest all the time. Indeed, it is the norm. Most college-educated professionals are not worried about "not having a job at all."
No idea who James Damore is...
James Damore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Chamber
There is an issue with quality of jobs rather unemployment per se.
People vote against their material interests much less than claimed: such claims often rely on rather narrow conceptions of material interests. They very rarely vote against their status interests.
On reflection, ‘aim’ was perhaps the wrong word. Something can function in a particular way without it being a conscious aim.
Yes, I agree with the main thrust of your article, and a small edit of the opening sentence would be more accurate. I also agree that “something can function in a particular way without it being a conscious aim.” That is the case very often.
What is your evidence for “People vote against their material interests much less than claimed: such claims often rely on rather narrow conceptions of material interests?”
Status is not a material interest, though high status can be leveraged into material gain.
More relevant to the topic your article, I think the shift to the Left of college-educated professionals in the West over the last 60 years is a massive vote AGAINST their own material interest (and one that conflicts greatly with the behavior of previous upper classes outside of Communist societies). It is more about a pleasant-sounding yet dysfunctional ideology enticing people to go against their own self-interest and group interest.
I agree that status plays a big role in the ideological shift, but that does not explain how ideologies of the Left became associated with high status in the 21st century whereas it was associated with low status in previous generations.
I am not convinced that Leftist ideology enhances the “ quality of jobs” for college-educated professionals. I think that it does the opposite for most of them, except those who directly benefit from DEI. Those people clearly benefit materially, but I would argue that this is a small part of the coalition. The rest suffer from a demoralizing workplace.
Even Bakunin gets the nature of equality and liberty wrong. They are conflicting Enlightenment values yet they are yoked together; you can't appreciate either without understanding the other. Yes, the Left would destroy all liberty for the sake of equality - right to the point of Harrison Bergeron. Big-L libertarians would destroy all equality for the sake of liberty - right into nihilism.
"Even Bakunin gets the nature of equality and liberty wrong. They are conflicting Enlightenment values".
Disagree. They are Christian values that Enlightenment thinkers unconsciously adopted. Much of Nietzsche's critique is a critique of atheists unconscious acceptance of those values - "We are unknown to ourselves, we seekers after knowledge" Genealogy Of Morals, Preface 1.
I probably shouldn't have said values, but ideas instead.
They are Protestant values, not Catholic or Orthodox (or Judaic) - a product of the intellectual ferment from the Renaissance that culminated in the Enlightenment. Nietzsche's criticism went much deeper, and it was the Enlightenment that exposed the hollowness of the traditional values without the faith that reason had eroded. Rousseau believed that all human hierarchy was false, that natural man was purely equal. Needless to say, Rousseau's religious values were 'flexible'.
Calvin had posited that humanity was equal because we were all equally depraved, not because we deserved to be respected as equals in our human-ness. The equality we bathe in today is hardly that.
I do thing the Progressive Left is sincere, just that it has created an agglomeration of ideas and principles that seem to not have a consistent moral theme running through them. I'm not ripping on the inconsistencies--this kind of consistency is hard as hell--but, rather, the moral certitude that leads to shutting down debates as to what would be morally right and when and under what circumstances*. The end result is a cause that refuses to be pressure-tested and comes up with contortionist explanations for when things don't work right.
This is why I prefer the term "Omnicause" to "woke", which unfortunately has become tremendously loaded.
The real question is whether the accumulation of power is a bug or a feature.
*There is a tangent here about Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations and progressives leaning too hard on care/harm and fairness to the exclusion of other dimensions, leading to one- or two-note-Charlie solutions that don't address important factors, but that's another topic for another day.
I agree with much of what you say but I think the moral goal of Equality and the conviction that the government should end or at least radically reduce Inequality is central to almost all Left-of-Center ideologies. Most of their other convictions stem from those two moral convictions. I believe the inconsistencies largely come from an inability to achieve that prime goal.
You would enjoy this book. It's a great primer on the history of liberalism, and how it has evolved over time, at least through the New Deal/Great Society era. While it explicitly doesn't try to do this, it does a good job explaining the differences between liberalism--not just classical liberalism but also modern welfare-state liberalism--and the Left generally. https://www.amazon.com/Liberalism-Life-Second-Edmund-Fawcett/dp/0691180385/
You are generous. I would suggest that while there are some true believers in the movement, most are parasites using whatever is at hand as a pretext to finding a soft spot from which to extract money and power. Power being merely the means to more money. BLM being a recent example.
supporters of these ideas are always generous...with other people's hard earned things.
You've traced some points Sowell works deeply - have you ever read Knowledge and Decisions?
Alas no.
I recommend it, and I'm near certain you would enjoy it. It takes Hayek's essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society" as a starting point.
A lot of rephrasing of the same core ideas, but I really liked this set:
"Part of the process is generating credentials that provide leverage without earned respect. Bean-counting bureaucracy loves credentials—and other tick-boxes—as they are easy markers of who is, or is not, allowed to do what. Alas, precisely because the reality-feedbacks within so much of academe are so broken, it’s easy to generate credentials that provide much less expertise than what they say on the tin. "
So our pushback has to focus on the quality of the background for the claimed credentials; the quality of the "accreditors" claiming to confirm the validity of those credentials; and the actual responses in the marketplace to just how valued the end product finally really is. Reputation can take decades to generations to establish for a "prime" university, and that reputation can be lost in a decade or two when markets find the output result is not as promised.
Sounds like there are plenty of opportunities for educational innovators to create alternatives that pass muster within the market, identifying applicable metrics and demonstration measures, and at potentially much lower net cost in time and money. A wise application of AI may well be a part of this?
And just for fun:
"So you need to include the racists along with the non-racists in your group to be inclusive."
"You need to ensure your group actually includes racists and non-racists to be truly diverse."
"Achieving true equality means making the racists equal in every meaningful way with the non-racists."
Same for the other identity groups. :-)
The thing is, the claim that the professional-managerial class are superior deciders and therefore should rule in itself endorses a massive inequality. So the Woke, by pushing that claim, are working against their "strong moral stand" against Inequality. Indeed, in other contexts - say, when a genuine expert publicly opposes the technocratic project because his deep knowledge of his field shows it's a bad idea - the Woke have no problem denigrating claimed expertise as a tool of oppression.
I seriously doubt that left-progressive politics is dominated by stupid people who can't think through the consequences of their stated moral principles. But because that politics is self-contradictory, the people seriously pushing it must be cynics.
Well said - thank you.
The Emancipation Sequence is the diffusion of power, ultimately as broadly as possible. Critical theory/progressive activism is the accumulation of power, ultimately in as few hands as possible.
We know why the Left wants it, and that's not new. Concerning is that now the Right wants it too, for the same reasons, just in the opposite direction. It's hard to tell if the reason for this is to countervail against the Left, or if it's to pursue right-wing ends irrespective of countervailing forces.
Interesting, in a comment to your note a week ago I also used the term 'spurious expertise', but I had a more benign take on it as defective knowledge that becomes 'established science'. I just read this here post yesterday.
Your broadening the term to include maliciously concocted 'expertise' is certainly a reflection of woke realities, and it makes good sense to describe it this way. Though, looking further back, faulty 'expertise' of knowing thing wrongly almost always had group dynamics of self-separating believers in 'truth' from rogue miscreants, with similar shunning and ostracism. Majority of us humans were always incorrigible this way, and it became way worse and more spurious and yet systematic with 'elites' embracing postmodern Marxism.
Yes. Realising that the entire history of Communism displayed how toxic untruth could be a great motivator and coordinator was clarifying.
Religion has somewhat similar dynamics, though long-lasting religions typically have an element of “literally false but metaphorically true”. That is, they do actually add to the coherence and resilience of communities.
But thinking about how DEI officers, sensitivity readers, intimacy consultants, bias response teams worked led to a wider notion of spurious expertise leap out at me. The complication, which I need to wrestle with, is expertise that becomes spurious by taking what may be reasonable understanding in one domain and extending to some adjacent domain where it no longer works. Most economists on migration being a case in point.