How the Woke Virus Infects Academia and our Covid-19 Response

The New Discourses Podcast with James Lindsay, Episode 4

Critical Social Justice operates like a virus. I’ve said it about them; they say it about themselves; we’re all in agreement. It infects liberal institutions and liberal-minded people (philosophically speaking, whether on the left, right, or center), perverts “critical” as in “critical thinking” into “critical” as in “critical theory,” which means something completely different. It then turns those institutions and individuals into woke cells that produce more Critical Social Justice and spread it to others, hollowing out the institutions and organizations it infects as it goes.

It does this in easily describable ways in various contexts. Because these dynamics are easily described, the outcomes they produce and progression they follow is predictable. Within communities, it creates something like a divisive standoff, where everyone has to take (moral) sides on Critical Social Justice issues until the infighting conquers the institution. This is part of a bigger pattern of infection and takeover, though, that is particularly poignant in our academic environments, where Critical Social Justice was engineered, incubated, and thus still maintains overwhelmingly the most sway. I wrote this pattern down some months ago, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it as it pertains mostly to academia, which might as well be in Narnia for all anyone cares about it unless they work or study there.

Recently, I noticed the same pattern is playing out in a very rapid fashion with the mounting response to the global Covid-19 pandemic. In academia, this process can take years, maybe even a decade or more, to really start having a significant impact—and make no mistake, it can start having this impact in any field, not just the humanities and social sciences, but also the “hard sciences,” including math, physics, and astronomy. For example, as was recently published, among many similar pieces and a nasty controversy about compelled diversity statements in mathematics professorships, in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society: “This small sampling suggests a handful of possibilities for mathematics as, say, an intersectional, anti-racist, and class-consciously feminist enterprise. In any case, if we can agree that mathematics can operate as whiteness, then we have a moral duty to ask how mathematics might be otherwise,” by Tian An.

Below, I am presenting a “genome map” to the Critical Social Justice virus as it infects academic disciplines and our response to the Covid-19 pandemic, attempting to turn these things toward its agendas and to distract focus from what matters because in critical theories, all that matters is spreading critical consciousness, and in Critical Social Justice, all that matters is making everything about what it calls “Social Justice” from a critical theoretical perspective. It will therefore take over and corrupt our pandemic response to its purposes just as it has done with so much of academia, if we let it (which mostly happens by failing to understand it and how it works).

To explain this map and its relevance, I have recorded a podcast, embedded here, to discuss the issue in depth and make clear that Critical Social Justice really is a virus and really does operate as one. As critical theories are emphatically not equipped to get us through a real-world crisis, this necessitates us developing not one vaccine, for Sars-CoV-2, but two, the other being against Critical Social Justice.

How to Insert Wokeness into Any Field of Study in Three Straightforward Steps 

A Genome Map of the Critical Social Justice Virus in Academia and Beyond 

Step 1: Turn the field of study at hand into the sociology and cultural anthropology of that field, including in the education of that field

• Focus on the sociological issues around the field (Foucauldian and Neo-Marxist critique)
• Point out problems in representation or behavior in departments, conferences, etc., or in the education of that field 
• Talk about the history of the way the field was studied with an eye to problematics (cultural anthropology, Foucauldian genealogy) 
• Say “implicit bias” a lot and point out any disparate outcomes as proof of systemic bigotry
• Generate parallel conferences specifically meant to investigate the sociology of the field 
• Start giving credentialing awards to bolster careers of critical scholars 
• Create parallel disciplines—“(critical) study of {field of study}” or “(critical) {field of study} studies”—with journals, books, depts., etc. (e.g., “critical nutrition studies” or “critical studies of science and technology”)
• Leverage these for apparent legitimacy 
• Leverage the exclusion of critical methods from the field (which is justified, as they’re not the field) to claim an unjust power dynamic that proves a need of critical methods (i.e., say critical studies of the field are only excluded because the powerful in the field refuse to reckon with their problematics) 
• Continue, continue, continue until “legitimacy” of parallel field is established
• Then constantly morally compare the “justice-oriented” critical discipline and the (chauvinist or racist) traditional discipline

Step 2: Claim that the systemic problems in the field manifest from the nature of the field itself

• Distill and name the problematics within the sociology/anthropology of the field 
• Insist the field was designed within the knowledge system and biases that benefit from those problematic power dynamics 
• Claim that those power dynamics and problematics are therefore part of the field itself 
• Insist that the power dynamic is self-sustaining and that privileged position within it, or even one that benefits from it, blinds one to understanding the problematics and creates resistance to changing it 
• Leverage the above to point out that the system is in even more need of change 
• Call for retraction and destruction of any sufficiently “problematic” scholarship and the scholars who produced it (purge problematic information and voices)

Step 3: Call to remake the field itself as a critical theory

• Insist the original field of study and the culture it has created are fundamentally corrupt 
• Demand not just change but revolution in how the field is done (centering critical methods and justice-orientation) 
• Continue to prioritize relevance of sociology/anthropology of the field Insist upon the need for critical and subjective epistemologies 
• Insist upon hiring more critically-oriented faculty members, sources, etc. by calling for “diversity, equity, and inclusion“
• Insist upon source material from critically-oriented “professionals” (research justice, decolonizing the curriculum)

And note: Not a single expert in the field is needed to do any of this, and the most likely people to do it reside among the ranks of failed experts in the field.

Español

Subscribe to this podcast on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, or by RSS.

Previous episodes of this podcast are available here.