In this shortish (23-minute) video, Sam Harris and John McWhorter discuss whether wokeness is finally dead. The short answer is “nope.” It may have lain down, but it refuses to die.
The YouTube notes (there’s a transcript you can see as well):
Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about language, ideology, and moral certainty. They discuss the rise and persistence of “wokeness” and DEI, the legacy of George Floyd’s death, the role of social media in amplifying moral panic, how identity shapes perceptions of Israel-Palestine, the linguistics of Donald Trump, the rise of casual speech, conspiracy thinking, positions McWhorter has reconsidered, and other topics.
John McWhorter teaches linguistics at Columbia University and writes a column for the New York Times. He earned a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University and is the author of several books, including The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Word on the Street, and, most recently, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. He is also the host of the language podcast Lexicon Valley.
When asked whether the damage of wokeness is unfixable, McWhorter (who wrote Woke Racism ) notes that academics continue to pass on wokeness—not mainly to undergraduates but to graduate students. This ensures, he thinks, that woke ideology will be perpetuated because in that way it gets imbued in future professors as well as in academia as a whole. McWhorter cannot imagine anything will change this pathway. Asked by Harris whether Trump isn’t uprooting DEI from schools, McWhorter suggests that DEI isn’t really disappearing, but simply going underground, branded with a new name. (I agree; that is happening everywhere, including my own school.)
McWhorter teaches music appreciation at Columbia, and discusses a claim by Philip Ewell that music theory is inherently racist, a view that McWhorter considers absurd, and yet Ewell is greatly lionized. In response, Harris muses about whether the defeat of the woke Kamala Harris was the “high water mark” of the ideology. McWhorter responds that while “high woke” has indeed has peaked (McWhorter means by that “an eternal and punitive battle against whiteness”), the same fury and lack of reason has shifted, and can be seen in the pervasive support for Hamas among progressives as well as in “trans issues, especially surgery and sports”. Ergo, the old woke ideology is being applied to new issues, but with the same concentration on power issues.
How to solve it? McWhorter’s own solution is simply to call attention to this stuff over and over again, but in writing rather than via podcasts—though he finds that tedious given the variety of his interests.
At the end, Harris asks McWhorter what the elites, the intelligentsia, and the MSM “got wrong” in response to the tsunami of emotion and ideology that followed the death of George Floyd. I’ll let you hear his answer in the last five minutes. Thrown in at the end is a description of a rupture that McWhorter had with his erstwhile podcast pal, Glenn Loury.
McWhorter and Harris pretty much agree that, for the nonce, wokeness is here to stay. Though it may manifest itself in new ways, the underlying ideology (derived from postmodernism) of power differentials and “personal truths”, most notably in emphasizing inequities between blacks and whites, shows no signs of disappearing.
So it goes.
h/t: Bat
Woke Racism scratched the surface – soooo accurately, and without having to go off the deep end into any piece of literature on anything remotely religious at any time in history.
Because hoo boy, it is the deep end – as in, risk-of-drowning-deep.
The shift from wokeness to Hamas is indicative that they are both offshoots of the same neo-Marxist ideology. If Hamas were to disappear tomorrow, the NM would find a new wedge to use. That said, perhaps the most important result of Trump’s election is that it created an environment where it was safe(r) to challenge woke ideology. Under Biden the government, the media, and the press were all in. Now businesses see that they can go against woke. The same could be said for the climate extremism.
Climate extremisms. The horseshoe model seems applicable here. There’s no good outcome in a contest between “ban all fossil fuels now” and “climate change is not a real problem”.
Woke has certainly not peaked at my own cozy university. Canada has always been a few years behind our American friends so possibly the wave will crest here too. But even if it does I think McWhorter is right: nothing will stop woke entrenchment. My STEM department is holding its first racially segregated social event next week, and my university recently committed to “institutionalizing trans equity directly into [the university’s] mission.” I think the only thing that has changed is that those who disagree with these events or initiatives may sometimes express doubt without bringing down angry condemnation on their own heads.
Sadly in Canada the indigenous issue has, through various court rulings, embedded wokery at a structural, constitutional level. It’s going to be very hard to winkle out, though the recent Cowichan land ruling may (if it ever gets widely reported) shock so many of the people who would otherwise support the general project (because it threatens a fundamental cornerstone of their own lives, i.e. ownership of their single largest asset) that it will cause some fundamental reassessment.
The land use case is one of the most outrageous pieces of jurisprudence I have ever seen. What are you dear cousins playing at up there?
best
D.A.
NYC
I saw a report on it in the country I live in and it gave the impression that neither the native peoples, nor the private landowners were particularly happy with the outcome.
Perhaps it is time to create a new credentialing model that gives people an opportunity to gain and demonstrate the skills needed to be successful in different commerce, industry, culture, the hard sciences and governmental careers. Institutions and credentialing methods that discriminate in one of two ways should immediately lose access to all public funding. If they discriminate against or elevate anyone for belonging to a particular group or for immutable characteristics unrelated to the ability to be successful in one of the covered careers, say goodby to taxpayer support.
I am a white retired jazz professor, Ewell’s comment that music theory is inherently racist – if he used that exact phrasing – is largely true on the reading of “music theory” as how the discipline has been conceived traditionally, as well as currently practiced in fundamental ways, and not something inherent to how structures or elements in music are understood (assuming that can be said to be the goal of music theory).
The foundation of the discipline of music theory has long been the music of the common practice period, 1600-1900 in Europe (dead white guys). While many inroads have been made (for instance, my entire research career, as modest as it is, is not based on that foundation), its influence is still substantial. Undoing that influence is not a small matter, and will take decades more to accomplish in practical terms, even assuming every music theorist shares the goal to do so. In purely intellectual terms, it leads pretty quickly and firmly to an ethnomusicological approach to music theory (studying the theory of all musics of the world and history), which is an enormous undertaking.
Disclaimer: I have not listened to the Harris/McWhorter discussion.
Iron Law of Woke Projection never misses.
I don’t understand how you can say that music theory is racist, but perhaps we understand different things by that term. What I understand by music theory is what, for instance, the Associated Board music theory exams test, i.e. the system of functional harmony in an equal-tempered system that defines diatonic keys; their relationship to each other at intervals of a fifth; the methods of modulating from one key to another; transposition and enharmonic relationships; the function of triads at different degrees of the scale in resolving dissonance when moving towards a cadence, and so on. All of it based on the fundamental discovery by Pathogoras and others of the ratio of pitches to the length of a string, which in modern parlance is a physical manifestation of the overtone series that is a universal characteristic of all sound, i.e. the vibration of molecules in the air, which is the same not only in every human culture but in all possible atmospheres in which sound can exist in our universe.
Beyond the fact that the detailed working out of this structure of sound organization happened in the West (largely because of the development of notation), nothing about any of this could remotely be described as racial, let alone racist — a fact implicitly recognized by your own field of jazz, which until the late 1950s was (just like all other branches of black American music) entirely based on this theoretical foundation. If you wanted to find something that was truly unlike this you would have to look, not to another culture, but to the development of serialism in the West (which has its parallel in jazz too). That is a theoretical development of a new system not based on natural ratios, not a new system based on a racially defined culture.
Perhaps the accusation could be changed from racism to culturism, if I can coin that phrase (but see my last paragraph below). To wit:
The equal-tempered is not culture-free, even considering the Pythagorean math behind it. First of all, the pure Pythagorean ratios of musical intervals is not maintained in the equal-tempered system. Those ratios (with very few exceptions) must be fudged to get E-T to work. More importantly, though, is even prioritizing harmony to begin with (keys, those ratios, modulation, etc.) when much music does not prioritize harmony. The incredible polyrhythmic music of sub-Saharan Africa demonstrates that as well as anything.
Why is Western theory and harmony prioritized? Obviously, because music theory in the West comes from Western culture, and there’s nothing wrong with that as far as that goes, but we can’t pretend that the basic of Western music is the basis of music. I’m not saying you think that.
Only jazz harmony was based on – but was not equivalent to – Western harmony until the 60s. If harmony is not prioritized, the syncopation and polyrhythm-without-strict-polyrhythm comes straight out of African music and has little to do with Western music otherwise.
But in addition to culturism, we also have to add in the influence of racism from the Atlantic slave trade ,which included devaluing the music of those Africans in clearly racist terms, which continued in some form at least into the development of jazz. That devaluing made impossible the study of African-American music in the academy for a long time. To that extent, I think the charge of racism still applies.
Thanks for the clarification — and of course Western music also encompasses other tuning systems. What you’re describing as the cause of aggrievement is clearly not music theory in itself, but the felt need for a widening of the curriculum in other areas (music history, performance studies etc.) to encompass the music of non-Western cultures (and perhaps particularly those in which harmony is not important, since it is the aspect in which Western influence is unavoidable).
That’s a perfectly fair aspiration, though difficult to accomplish in a way that makes it feel as if all the traditions studied are equal, since the thousand-year time-depth that we have for Western music because of notation is simply not available for non-notated musics (which is to say, all of them). Only for the era of sound-recording (let’s say, for recordings in the field, since the advent of the magnetic tape recorder some eighty years ago) can all traditions be studied with approximately the same level of granularity. But Western music has an extra 900 years of repertoire before that, which can be studied in a way, and with a level of detail, that none of the other traditions can be, so the effort to equalize them can only be achieved by artificially ignoring the vast majority of the Western repertoire.
I also don’t see why advanced educational institutions in the West should feel they ought to be according equal weight to the music production of all cultures. You can be sure that musical academies in non-Western countries with sophisticated musical traditions, such as India or Indonesia, pay scant (if any) attention to studying Western music, let alone the music of Africa or South America, and I for one don’t feel aggrieved about that in the slightest. They have their own traditions that take a lifetime to master even when studying nothing else. Since Western music has a notated repertoire that would take a thousand lifetimes simply to become acquainted with, I don’t see anything to be even slightly embarrassed about in the idea of music courses at Western universities and music academies focusing heavily on that.
Part of this hinges on whether music in the academy has the goal of producing musicians (performers, composers, etc.) or has the goal of the intellectual exploration of an art form. For the former, one person usually can barely master a single musical tradition, but several traditions might be offered within one department, or different departments focus on different traditions. For the latter, compare art history, which is becoming globalized. That’s the best direct comparison, as literature and theater have the language translation issue.
Certainly balancing the study of all transitions is incredibly difficult, but having that as the goal and coming up inevitably short is different from rejecting the goal altogether. Much of that will depend on whether the ultimate goal is intellectual exploration or producing musicians.
I’m not sure the presence of notation per se has much to do with it. The amount of Western music available for study is vast, given its notation, but the amount is just one other factor to balance with everything else if such balance, or anything close to it, is a goal.
the far left took marx, got rid of his economics as the determining factor in social inequalities, but kept his analytical method. Just draw two boxes. In the top box write down who the oppressor is. In the bottom box write down who the oppressed is. Then explain how everything in that society consists of the oppressor oppressing the oppressed. Capitalist – Worker. Man – Woman. White – POC. Straight – Queer. Tie all of the different Oppressor-Oppressed analyses together with Intersectionalism and that’s it. If it passes peer review (the academic jerk circle), collect your PhD. Go infect some students.
You left out an important one:
Infidel – Muslim
A “rupture” seems too strong a word for the disagreement Glenn and John have, mostly about Israel, which appears to be really a difference in emphasis, not so much in kind.
Peak ‘woke’ was probably 2021-23. The Bud Light fiasco shows that the public rejects ‘woke’. ‘Woke’ goes way back. In 2014, BLM went crazy over Michael Brown. The L. Summers affair is from 2005 (did it matter than L. Summers was correct? Of course not). Pinker wrote “The Blank Slate” back in 2002.
Wokeness is here to stay–and all its flimsy qualitative research. It is rare these days for me to read anything without guessing (correctly) what the author will say. Virtually all disciplines have evolved over the past 25 years into Lightweight Studies. Lightweight scholars then cite and praise each other to create a perfect circle of mediocrity. Academia, particularly in the Arts, has become truly depressing. Unoriginality rules the day.