I have, quite absurdly, been thinking and arguing about the excesses of political correctness for virtually my entire adult life (I date my induction into the culture war to the day I read an article in a university magazine arguing that people with good eyesight who wore lensless hipster glasses for fashion purposes were potentially engaging in “ableist” behaviour). Now, many of the people whose views I have spent my career puzzling over seem to be in the process of deciding that perhaps none of it really mattered that much after all. (...)
Obviously, for an influential minority of activists, highly visible on social media, such battles were consumingly important. But most people nodded along with radical new ideas about free speech, race and gender by default rather than out of sincere conviction. (...)
A mistake easily made by the sorts of people who spend their time thinking about ideas is to overrate how interesting those ideas are to everyone else. To some people — and the mere fact that you are reading a newspaper makes it likely you fall into this category — ideas such as “silence is violence” or “white privilege” or “deplatforming” are provoking enough to demand further interrogation. But the impulse is not universal. It is not possible for every idea that passes through the bloodstream of an organisation or a society to be independently interrogated and accepted by every one of its members. The result would be interminable argument.
Quite understandably, new ideas are simply not that interesting to many people. Not everyone can be interested in everything; computer science, numismatics and marine biology are not particularly fascinating to me. But the result, easily missed by ideas obsessives and culture watchers, is that people can vaguely adopt new concepts and theories without having thought about them that much and then lose them just as easily. (...)
Wokeness will surely retain its influence in many parts of our society, especially in environments such as universities, schools and museums, where people really do care about ideas. [ed. and social media). But I suspect the fiery revolutionary phase is over.
by James Marriott, The Times | Read more:
Image: Golden Cosmos via
[ed. Good riddance, if true. I've hated the term since I first heard it. It's important to have a grasp of history and awareness of recurrent themes (the original intent, I believe), but then it quickly devolved into a sort of catch-all for virtue signalling and political correctness, with undertones of condescending superiority: everyone is asleep, except me. Other issues I think people are not particularly invested in or we are likely to see fade soon: trans rights (limited constituency); defunding the police (a stupid reactionary slogan if there ever was one); CRT (critcial race theory); 'manifesting"; 'incels'; Latinx; cancel culture; and, oh yeah... Greenland (lol). DEI as a general concept seems to have been broadly assimilated/institutionalized over a very short time, with more diffuse applications and levels of influence than most single issue trends, so jury's still out on how that one survives or in what form. Same thing with #MeToo.]
