Woke ideologies have infested every element of our day-to-day lives, swamping institutions from universities and charities to businesses and sports teams. Those who dissent from the orthodoxy have been sacked, cancelled and ostracised, punished for daring to critique ideas that most people regard as being somewhere between absurd and sinister.
The range of woke themes today is broad, stretching from Critical Race Theory - the absurd and offensive idea that relative levels of "privilege" can be decided solely by skin colour - to radical understandings of gender identity. Recognising there's no universal umbrella term for these various causes, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsey of the New Discourses project coined the term "Critical Social Justice", which could indeed become useful terminology if it enters the public lexicon.
Pluckrose and Lindsay rose to fame in 2018 when they pranked academics with hoax studies on gender, feminism, race and sexuality, among other social justice issues. Known as the "grievance studies affair", James and Helen set out to highlight the poor scholarship in academic disciplines that had been taken over by the woke agenda. They submitted fake papers to journals, many of which flew through peer reviews and were published. Their fake papers included the idea that men should anally penetrate themselves with sex toys to reduce their transphobia, and quotes from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf re-worded with feminist terminology. That these clearly ridiculous suggestions could get published uncritically might be considered hilarious to some, but it is also incredibly worrying.
What the affair demonstrated was how, in broad areas of academia, adhering to a certain set of orthodox beliefs has become more important than attempting to uncover objective truth. Research that supports a fashionable political agenda is no longer critically assessed or challenged. So long as scientists support the Left-liberal avant-garde woke worldview, their papers are waved through even if they are nonsense.
This is troubling because if academics are no longer engaging in genuine, fact-based debate about our approach to gender issues or racial inequality then academia itself is falling into groupthink, which leads to indoctrination. Pluckrose and Lindsay converted their findings into a book discussing these issues in 2020, entitled Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity — and Why This Harms Everybody.
Having done so much to expose the shoddy scientific basis of Critical Social Justice, Helen Pluckrose is now hoping to take that realisation out into the rest of society. She has created a new crowdfunded institution to help people cling on to their own belief systems in a social environment determined on producing woke echo-chambers.
Counterweight, a sort of Citizens' Advice Bureau for woke issues, intends to "provide you with practical information and expert guidance to resist the imposition of the ideology that calls itself 'Critical Social Justice' on your day-to-day life". Whether that be in school, at university or work, Counterweight looks to enable people to maintain their own "ethical frameworks for opposing prejudice and discrimination" without being urged to subscribe to the woke ideas prescribed by an educational institution or employer.
Having worked with Helen on the Don't Divide Us campaign, which was also assembled out of a necessity to fight back against the infestation of CRT in education, I understand her drive to provide an alternative perspective. She says that the idea behind Counterweight is: "The effort to keep diversity open, to keep freedom of belief open, and for people to be able to oppose bigotry and discrimination from their own ethical values."
What is perhaps most interesting is that, as a Left-leaning liberal, she comes at this debate from an entirely different angle from many of the most vocal media supporters of free speech who tend to be on the political Right. This is heartening because it is extremely important that the Left reconnects with the importance of defending freedom of speech. There is clearly a problem on this front, as was demonstrated by Big Tech recently, when the Left celebrated the censorious removal of President Donald Trump from Twitter, but was in uproar when the Socialist Workers Party was removed from Facebook.
Advocates like Helen can helpfully help the woke Left wake up to their double standards before it's too late. After all, if we don't protect the freedom of speech of those we disagree with, it'll only be a matter of time before our own thoughts and words are considered unfashionable, too.
I don't think it's too late.
So what if I'm chained and blind?
My hair will grow back.
signed,
Samson