Critical Social Justice (CSJ) operates to maintain a single explanation for disparity in outcomes and suchlike in our societies. It asserts that the only reason fit for public discussion – as to why some groups in society have more power, resources or education than other groups – is a rigged structure favoring certain groups and disfavoring others.

Proponents of CSJ want to prevent any other explanation from gaining ground in the discourse, especially cultural explanations. They maintain this monopoly of acceptable explanation by cancelling people who dare to offer alternatives — calling them racists and so on —  thus deterring others from doing the same. But most of us know intuitively that culture and systemic factors play a role in producing disparities among groups.

Here are four fallacies that CSJ is committing in its prohibition against cultural explanations:

1. The Fallacy of Cultural Inadequacy: denying that culture is an explanatory factor in differentiation when it is such an obvious force on how groups behave. The prohibition on cultural explanations must be counterintuitive to nearly everyone. I imagine that even the most ardent CSJ ideologue would, if they took a truth serum, admit to the influence of culture. You mean to tell me that people all over the world or in a given Western country who live differently, view the world differently, speak differently, approach life and work differently, experienced history differently, and think differently about gender and sex—that none of this boundless variation—has any bearing on why certain societies are richer and poorer or why certain subgroups are more or less successful in a given society? The argument is absurd on the face of it.
2. The Fallacy of the Dominant Culture: that it is absurd to argue that culture is a factor in explaining one group’s behavior but not another. Woke ideology treats all culture as irrelevant except that of the dominant culture. Structure cannot explain the behavior of the dominant class because the dominant class is at the top of the food chain. The only other explanation for how the dominant class behaves is culture. The woke do think it’s perfectly legitimate and even imperative to criticize the culture of the oppressor. It’s fine, for example, to talk about “white fragility” or “toxic masculinity”—the machismo culture of cis-men—or “rape culture.” But how can culture not be a factor at all for marginalized groups but be the sole factor for dominant groups? Do they believe that the dominant class fully set the culture of all subordinate groups to their liking? Are they really saying when structure comes to play culture goes away?
3. The Fallacy of Selective Agency: that it is inconsistent to insist one aspect of a culture is fully determined by structural factors and not another. If structure really is an all-encompassing force, shouldn’t it also explain the vitality of the black community? As Thomas Burgess wrote in Quillette, “if whiteness is responsible for black vices, isn’t it also responsible for black virtues? Wouldn’t all culture be its creation, and not just the undesirable parts? This is the logical conclusion of this kind of thinking, and it is what happens when you cede omnipotence to the oppressor. When you create a puppet master, you create puppets missing some of the most basic attributes of being human.”
4. The Fallacy of Differential Outcomes: that if differential outcomes among groups were really solely dictated by racism and white supremacy, one would expect whites to be on top of the society on all key metrics. But they are not. If “white supremacy” is truly the all-powerful force woke ideologues make it out to be, why do so many other ethnic populations substantially outperform whites? One would think that in a white supremacist society whites would be allotted such advantages as higher average incomes and higher levels of educational achievement than other groups. Many White Americans are, however, on average, not faring nearly as well as numerous non-white populations. In addition, some African immigrant groups that came to the U.S. under disadvantageous conditions have on average done better than American blacks and segments of the Hispanic population. Wouldn’t a white supremacist system subjugate African immigrants too?

Pointing out and dismantling these four fallacies can help make room for cultural arguments. Indeed it will help make room for argumentation itself to again reign free, rather than unquestioned dogmas. We just need to take the first step.

David Bernstein is a freelance writer and nonprofit executive. Follow him on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/Blogunwoke.

Ten Ways Woke Ideas Spread and Stick

I’ve long been fascinated by the varied explanations of why woke ideas spread. Here are the ten that I find most compelling. There are three kinds of explanations among the ten: one looks at the contagiousness of the woke ideas themselves; a second looks at the underlying cultural conditions that explain the receptivity to woke ideas; and the third looks at how these ideas become established and canonized. 

While I do not consider each explanation equally illuminating, I also don’t view any one or two of them as definitive. Rather, taken together, I believe they give us a picture as to how wokeness has gained so much cultural currency. Knowing how these ideas wedge themselves into the popular discourse helps us devise strategies to contain and dislodge them. 

1. Anti-rational memes. The physicist and philosopher David Deutsch wrote about how “memes”—idea viruses—spread in society. Rational memes vary and replicate because they are true and improve people’s lives. Anti-rational memes, however, spread by disarming their host’s critical faculties. The anti-rational woke meme states: if you criticize me you are racist or fragile. It short circuits the critical process that rational memes are subjected to and spreads because people don’t fully analyze the meme and feel compelled to share it. Cancel culture, of course, is one of the anti-rational meme’s most potent weapons: to further deter critical analysis, the anti-rational meme tries to sideline anyone attempting to criticize it.
   
   
2. Trojan horses. Anti-rational woke ideas also spread by latching on to recognizable concepts deeply embedded in our collective consciousness. Bad woke ideas ride the coattails of familiar good ideas into popular acceptance. Opposing discrimination on the basis of race is a good idea; labeling all of Western society as racist is a bad idea. People are lured in by these radical woke ideas because they strike a familiar note and tug at our conscience. We all likely support equality and civil rights, for example. The woke use these very same concepts and the language around them to push for a highly radical agenda that has little to do with and may even be inimical to equality or civil rights. Unfortunately, many well-meaning people take the bait. 
   
   
3. Idea laundering. Philosopher Peter Boghossian explains that “idea laundering is the mechanism for how people in the academy discharge their moral impulses” and canonize woke ideas. It often starts with a professor creating an academic journal with like minded peers. Other scholars publish in the journal or a similar journal, quoting each other in an echo chamber. It goes in one side as an idea and comes out the other as “knowledge.” Woke activists can then point to the series of scholarly articles in the ideologically homogeneous journals as justification for their radical activism. Students take college classes in these areas, further spreading the “laundered” ideas.
   
   
4. Bureaucratic risk. Eric Weinstein argues that over the past 50 years our institutions have become predisposed to rooting out independent thought and creativity. He states that they “select specifically for hierarchical game playing and intrigue and against anyone who thinks from first principles and is willing to stand up for something she/he believes in to the point of self-sacrifice.” Such an institutional environment is fertile ground for a woke-diversity orientation, which serves to mitigate institutional risk by protecting against lawsuits from disaffected employees or smear campaigns from woke activists. “What we have now,” argues Weinstein, “is an institutional culture that is uniformly, to a leader, hostile to letting subject matter choose our experts and leaders for us and reward them with deep academic freedom and protection from targeted harassment by administrators and the bureaucratic class.”
   
   
5. Generational gaming. This is one of the most novel takes I’ve heard on dissemination of wokeness. Jordan Hall argues that Millennials, the generation most associated with the ascendancy of woke ideology, have come of age in an environment with a much higher presence of authority than previous generations. Boomers, their parents and grandparents, have maintained power longer and more ubiquitously than previous generations and coddled their children in ways that would have been unthinkable to previous generations. In this cultural milieu, millennials developed a felt sense of lack of agency. They learned to influence reality not through their own labor and creativity but by manipulating boomer authority. Their center of agency is in their capacity to influence authority figures and they became experts at exploiting boomer power structures. They’ve figured out that one way to get boomers, who are particularly susceptible to charges of discrimination and bigotry, to accede to their demands and to cede power is by ramping up woke claims.
   
   
6. Crisis of meaning. Coleman Hughes speaks of the innate appeal of woke ideology for a younger generation who have eschewed traditional religion and possess no other grand meta-narrative. They are hungry for a system of meaning to help make sense of the world, a vacuum that woke ideology eagerly filled. At his time at Columbia University, Hughes says that “intersectional politics was the primary way people built a sense of self.” Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi explains “Unmoored from religious tradition, many reach for political fundamentalism to provide a sense of identity and purpose for their lives, and pursue political activism as a means of engaging in fellowship with like-minded believers.”
   
   
7. Academic careerism. One way woke ideas get amplified in academic circles, and then spread to students, is through academic competition and careerism. Academia has become a subculture of intersectional positionality. In order to curry favor and advance their careers in an environment dominated by CSJ  discourse, academics one up each other by slamming their fellow academics for being insufficiently woke, and thus create ever more radical iterations of CSJ ideas. In the words of evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, “CRT [Critical Race Theory]  is a self-flagellation cult for cynical opportunists seeking a virtue-signaling edge in their careers.”
   
   
8. Power structure replication. James Lindsey argues that woke forces within institutions seek to gain control by recruiting more people like themselves. He argues that woke forces specifically target women and people of color to be “agents of change” who “remake the system.” In other words, the woke established themselves in the power structure by recruiting “party activists” into key roles, who serve to perpetuate and grow the increasingly totalitarian system.
   
   
9. Educating educators. One key vector of transmission of woke ideas are colleges of education.  Lyell Asher argues that while these colleges have long inculcated leftist ideas to teachers of K-12 education, in recent decades they have also trained the administrative bureaucracy in higher education. He asserts that “this influx of ed school trained bureaucrats has played a decisive role in pushing an already left-leaning academy so far in the direction of ideological fundamentalism that even liberal progressives are sounding the alarm.” Faculty at most of these schools teach a particular ideology—that traditional knowledge is repressive by its very nature—“without directing their students to any substantial readings that question the educational implications of this view.” The growing ranks of the university administrators coming out of education schools reinforce the academic monoculture where wokeness lives and spreads.
   
   
10. Hunting-in-packs. Toby Young argues that the woke “hunt in packs and we don’t.” Unwieldy rationalists, blessed and cursed with nuance and independent thought, behave very differently than a woke mob hungry to de-platform the latest heretic. Hunting in packs sends shock waves into institutions, generating the exaggerated sense of being inundated by angry customers or stakeholders and raising apprehensions of what might happen if they refuse the pack’s demands. The institutions frequently accede to the demands, emboldening the woke mob to move on to its next target. I hope this helps people better understand how and why woke ideas spread and gain power. Understanding this is a first step towards combating their entrenchment.

David Bernstein is a freelance writer and nonprofit executive. Follow him on Twitter @Blogunwoke.