In 2020, I wrote a column about wokeness, the view that group inequalities are intolerable evils, caused solely by institutionalized bigotry, that must urgently be extirpated. I said that its ambition and moralism allow no independent authorities or standards, and that made it a danger to the Church and Faith.
Since then, things appear to have moderated. The Trump administration has moved against DEI requirements. The Supreme Court has come out against a basic pillar of academic affirmative action programs, the use of race as a criterion in admissions. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez now says that “Woke 1 was crazy.”
But have things really changed? The recent Jason Arday affair, which displays the continuing power of woke considerations in elite British academia—that is, among recognized custodians of the West’s highest intellectual aspirations—suggests that ultimately things have not changed much at all.
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